Muchness and Light

The fates are vicious, and they're cruel.

I’ve spent most of the last week recovering from a surgical repair to my left Achilles tendon. It had been bothering me all year, but I’d put off seeing ortho about it, thinking it would get better eventually. I was already battling cervical and lumbar spine pain. I was back and forth to Alabama to see and care for Bumblebee while he was undergoing chemo and then surgery and then radiation. I was starting grad school. I was still raising two teenage sons and working a full-time job.

But after a ten-day study abroad in Berlin, I came home limping. The sixty miles I walked during that trip were invigorating in so many ways. They also gave a nasty bone spur in my heel the opportunity to lacerate the tendon. There was no option but to remove it, which happened this past week.

I’ll spend two weeks in a splint, then several weeks in a boot. I have at least four weeks on crutches or a knee scooter. Physical therapy won’t begin for at least four weeks, and I’m told to expect a year for full recovery.

I can’t do most of what I normally do around the house, like laundry or cleaning. I can’t reach some of the cabinets to put away the dishes. Cooking is awkward. Showering is a convoluted chore. The boys have been somewhat helpful. Friends have brought food. Pandy and Cookie came to help get some things situated for us this weekend. Max is old enough to make a run to the grocery store for me. (Delivery isn’t terribly helpful, as I can’t really put a lot of the groceries away.)

Elevating my foot is key to healing during the first few weeks. I have spent days in bed or on the couch, binge watching television. My eyes have been too blurry from the pain meds to try to read.

In the midst of it all, I am still dealing with the emotional aftermath of this fucking breakup.

I am forced to be still in ways I hate. For years, I have walked to clear my head, and the exercise is incredibly helpful at dealing with my anxiety and depression. But physical limitations this year have made me far less active. I’ve lost muscle tone and gained some weight back, and that is going to worsen over the next few months before it gets better.

All of this makes for a perfect storm of self-recrimination and frustration and anger.

I find myself journaling the same things over and over—hurt and anger and confusion at how the hell I ended up in this place again, how anyone could be so consciously and callously hurtful of someone they professed to love. Then I think about the times I have hurt others, and I question at what point I stop paying some karmic price for damage I’ve inflicted.

When will I have worked hard enough and atoned enough that other people stop fucking hurting me as some kind of cosmic penance? Why am I the one left holding the hurt and carrying the blame for anyone else? Why does there seem to be no consequence for their actions, except what I am left to deal with?

I don’t know how to get past what I don’t understand.

Moonshine admonished me not to lie in bed crying over this and not to let it define who I am, to look at the good in my life and not get mired in the bad. “I really believe that everything happens for a reason, but sometimes we can’t/don’t or won’t see the reason. I think the reason for this is that you needed to see how string you can be.”

I don’t want to have to be stronger right now. I don’t want another Nietzschean lesson in my own resiliency. I am fully aware of my tenacity and my capacity. The one thing I wanted was a partner to carry some of that for me, sometimes when I needed it most, so I didn’t have to keep breaking my back to do every fucking thing by myself.

He told me he would do that. I trusted him and believed him and gave him the opportunity to be taken at his word, and he shrugged and dropped it all back at my feet when I was least prepared to pick it back up.

And he told me it was for my own good.

I am viscerally offended by the cowardice. I am hurt in ways I have rarely been—after having been as open and honest and brave as I could be to even engage in that relationship with him. I am now literally trapped inside my own head with no physical outlet for it, and I want to crawl out of my own fucking skin.

But I refuse to compartmentalize it away. I refuse to pretend it didn’t happen or that it doesn’t matter, because to do so it to traumatize myself in the exact ways others have hurt me. It won’t define me, but it will be another marker on my journey, another cautionary tale of another person who made me carry their shame and who dismissed me with little thought in order to justify their cowardice.

Another on top of another on top of another on top of another….

Except this one promised me he wouldn’t do exactly this, just so I would never have to feel this again.

I’m not grieving him. I am mourning the loss of trust and love and faith—and at a time when I need it most. Hope feels dangerous and is not allowed right now. I am lamenting the death of my own passion, again, at the hands of a man who will never face me to apologize for the catastrophe he created.

And I’m doing it all from forced confinement.

The timing is ironic. Maybe it’s the universe’s way of forcing me to slow down and deal with it now. Maybe there’s something coming that will need my attention and focus, so that I need to be free of this bullshit to deal with that.

Maybe it’s just coincidental assholery.

Maybe none of it means a damn thing.

 

 

A couple more for breakfast, a little more tea, just to take the edge off.

I'm hurting right now.  A lot.

A couple of weeks ago, I had to get ready for a visit from Hammer.  I hadn't seen him in well over a year, and we were gearing up for a couple of days in Atlanta, then a couple of days in Mobile for Mardi Gras, then another day in Atlanta before he flew home.  The boys and I spent that Sunday cleaning up the rec (wreck) room, making space for our friend to sleep and be comfortable in our home. 

The next day, I went to the gym for the first time in a couple of months.  With everything happening with the divorce and kid illnesses, I hadn't been making the time for working out, and I could feel it.  I knew better than to push too hard, so I was (I thought) very careful about using less weight, adding a few more reps, and not overdoing my cardio. 

I felt pretty good.  For a day. 

By Wednesday morning, I knew my neck was a little out of whack.  My left shoulder was hurting, and there were spasms in the left rhomboid muscle.  I'd been through this before—as recently as July 2012—and knew it was one of the damaged discs in my neck.  I hit an anti-inflammatory and a muscle relaxer and went on about my day, as carefully as I could.  The boys and I picked up Hammer and brought him home.  I hoped everything would be better the next day. 

When things didn't feel better on Thursday, I called my orthopedist.  She's the non-invasive spine specialist who's treated me through two bouts of cervical disc problems beginning in 2008, as well as the horrendous lumbar disc debacle of 2010.  She shot me in the neck with five shots of steroid and scheduled my seventh epidural injection for the following Wednesday.

I felt pretty good.  For that day. 

Hammer and I went out with Growler and Big Cexy, cavorting through Atlanta until the wee hours of the morning.  I was smiling and laughing and mostly behaving myself, though at times I knew it was obvious that I didn't feel well.  By the time Hammer and I got to Mobile the next evening, I was miserable.  But it didn't matter what I did or didn't do, within reason; I was going to hurt no matter what, so I kept pushing forward.  When we went to see Galactic at Soul Kitchen, I alternated between sitting and standing.  I didn't dance.  But I still went and enjoyed it as best I could.  Same for the Mystics of Time parade the next night.  I had research to do for the next Junkture book, and it could only be done at Mardi Gras in Mobile.  I stayed sober and found what I needed to find. 

Jump ahead a few days, and I'm waiting patiently for epidural number eight, scheduled for next week.  The seventh one a week ago helped, though not nearly as much as I would have hoped.  She'll go in at a slightly different position this time in the hope that it will provide better relief.  I'm living on muscle relaxers and pain killers and anti-inflammatories, and it sucks. 

The pain never stops.  It never quite goes away.  There's muscular pain from the spasms, which is what will generally wake me after no more than four hours of sleep.  But there's also constant, nagging nerve pain that runs constantly from the bottom of my neck into my left shoulder, through my elbow and into my thumb, which is almost always numb.  Pain killers don't really touch that.  The best to hope for is that they take the edge off, but that ends as soon as the drugs wear off, which starts a whole new cycle of wanting or needing medication. 

After spending half an hour finding the most comfortable position in bed, which is on my back right now, I'll tumble into foggy sleep.  Usually my left arm is over my head, to take some of the pressure off the nerve, but then I wake a few hours later because the entire arm is throbbing in process of falling asleep.  I move it, which is excruciating to both my arm and my neck, and then shift again in my sleep—which usually triggers another spasm.  I try to turn on my side (how I usually sleep), but I can't take the pressure on the right or the left as my spine curves to adjust.  For the thousandth time, I think I'll try it on my stomach, but that means turning my head one way or the other, starting a whole new sting of torture.  So I go back to my back. 

It's a horrid little dance that goes on all damn night.

What scares me the most is that this is exactly how I was in the summer of 2010, when my lower back was so screwed up that I couldn't feel my left leg most of the time.  I was in constant agony for three months.  I'm only two weeks into this now.  I can't imagine having to do this for many more weeks.

I try to keep going.  I still hang with my friends or go to the grocery store or cook dinner.  I have to; I don't have a choice.  But being Mom right now usually involves some irritability and constant discomfort.  I'm also hypersensitive to the steroids, which screw with my hormones and make me angry and sad and sometimes feeling a little psychotic.  For more than a couple of nights, I've found myself stuffing all of my emotions into my mouth. 

All of this feels so damn familiar, just like it did two-and-a-half years ago, right before I hit my breaking point and shifted my entire life so dramatically.  Except now there's no DH roaming the house to help take care of me.  I'm mostly on my own with this. 

Cue the cycle of self-recrimination and fear. 

Maybe it's my body's way of telling me to dial it back a little bit, to take a break from living my hard-fought lessons and just be still again.  My body's memory of everything that came before is screaming at me, though, reminding me that I have to fight against this pain, to keep the damage at bay so it doesn't run amuck again.  My body is afraid of going back. 

The middle-of-the-night panic is the worst, when I wake in a cold sweat, momentarily paralyzed from the pain.  Instinctively, I feel for DH on the other side of the bed, and I remember he's just not there anymore.  So the crying starts again, and I find myself roaming the dark house, circling in a slow, awkward dance with all of these ghosts.  Waiting impatiently for the pain to abate. 

"That's what you promised to do," one whispers in his voice, "to be there for the other one when you couldn't take care of yourselves."

"You could've had him here if you hadn't made those choices," I hear in my own ephemeral voice. 

I rage at the voices, and at myself, until the medicine kicks in and slows the spasms, dulling the pre-dawn pain for just a few more hours. 

They're right.  And they're wrong. 

Yes, that was part of our contract.  Yes, it could've been different.  But my own choices would not have changed his, no matter how hard I tried.  He won't be there when I'm 80 and frail, but in a lot of ways he wasn't there when I was 38 and frail.  Should I have been willing to trade 40 years of ignorance and discomfort for the promise of elder care?  To keep myself from feeling afraid of dying alone? 

There was never going to be a win-win, no matter how hard we wanted it. 

So I'll stick to my doctor's plan of action, aggressively but pragmatically treating this latest bout of damage.  It will get better eventually, though it's frustrating not to know when that may be.  And no matter how hard it was, or how hard it will be, I still know I made the right choice.  Even if it still makes me cry. 

I'm on the road of least resistance. I'd rather give up than give into this.

DH and I were recently discussing promises.  He stands firmly behind the premise that promises are made to be broken.  Not that it's a relative juxtaposition or anything, just that there's an implication of potential breakage when any promise is made; the swearee knows the swearor will, in fact, not follow through if given enough time.  Just as staunchly, I believe that you don't make a promise unless you intend to defend it, to do whatever it takes to make the promise of the promise come to fruition—fully recognizing that shit happens and sometimes you just can't help it when things go awry. 

 I try really hard not to offer things I can't deliver, whether an actual thing or an act or a non-act, as in, "I promise not to do such-and-such."  It's kind of surprising, really, because I'm a very selfish, very determined girl, who will generally do whatever it takes to get what she wants.  I can be dogged when it comes to fulfilling my own heart's desire.  Sometimes it borders on being a bit obsessive.  (Bite it, Absolem.)  But I just can't get behind making an empty promise only to make someone else happy.

There's something about intentionally promising to do something that I know damn well I have no intention of ever doing... it's innately deceptive.  Believe me, I've been known to lie, cheat, and steal to get the things I want, but there's always some weird sense of moral truth to those desires, like I deserve to have those things, like they're destined, so it's okay to do whatever it takes to get them.  Promising something to someone else, for no other reason than to make them momentarily appeased, seems wrong to me.  It's a blatant lie with no greater purpose, and I have a hard time wrapping my heart around that. 

So if DH is right and there's an underlying fracture in a promise, is there a reason to keep it?  Is there something sacred in the vow, even if it's inherently imperfect?

Yeah, I think there is.  A real promise, as a compact between two people, is made in confidence, both in the sense of trust and in the sense of secrecy.  Only the hearts of the avowed know the depth of the oath.  The circumstances of that connection are worth defending, are worth trying to protect, even in the face of extreme internal and external adversities.  The selfless intimacy that gave birth to such a promise is what makes it sacrosanct and that's what gives the promise its own inherent value. 

And what if a promise is broken?  What happens when one party digs their fingers into the minutest cracks of the covenant and rips open the facade? 

It doesn't make the occasion of the promising any less inviolable.  If the hearts and souls of the swearee and the swearor were truly as one when the pact was made, the circumstance of the emotional communion is in-and-of itself a thing of undeniable beauty, worthy of exaltation even if the fruits of that labor have spoiled. 

Maybe I agree with DH more than I realize.  Maybe, deep down, I assume all promises will indeed be broken, ushering in an inexorable amount of drama and possible trauma.  I certainly have historical reason to assume I will be disappointed.  Perhaps, as I'm prone to do, I weigh the potential consequence of my actions, of breaking a promise (intentionally or not), and choose to avoid the difficult burden of yet again examining my own motives and culpability when I fail. 

Often my refusal to make promises I think I can't keep is perhaps for selfish reasons, a way to protect myself from my own disappointment.  I'd like to think my lofty (if seemingly random) ideals push me toward making the honorable choice, but I think it's really more a matter of lowered expectations: if I don't climb very high, the fall will hurt a hell of a lot less. 

But I'm still enamored of the experience, of the extant intimacy that led to the communion.  I'm enthralled by those dark, quiet moments that happen between two people, two of billions, and the intensity of the emotion surrounding that connection.  That is the kind of stepping stone I'm looking for, laying my path and edging ever closer to the ultimate destination of Me. 

Even if the promise will eventually be broken—even if there will inevitably be shards of trust lying about, ready to slice my fallen knees—there's still something virtuous about the bare hearts bursting with their own affiance.  It's tender and fragile and budding, and that is worthwhile, simply because it ever existed at all.