JOURNAL, Thursday, Jan. 24th

I could stand in this tunnel,
Waiting for the roaring train.
(“Incandescent Blue”, Bruce Cockburn)


Well, here I sit bundled up with blankets and the cat on the new couch, in the middle of the afternoon, bored with daytime T.V. and feeling like my throat is on fire.

Generally I have no patience with being sick. I find it a waste of time and I’m always anxious to get back to the work I have to do. But this time is different. There are so many new things entering my life that I have to juggle; I was feeling that I didn’t have the energy to deal with all of them at once. I’m actually glad to have this little break to let my life just settle around me a bit, to deal with those nagging little fears that I still have about Danny moving in this weekend, and to gather some strength to continue with my letters to Claire and with the next phase of my life that they will represent.

I needed some time – so it appears that my body’s answer to this need is to give me a break by welcoming these bacteria that have turned my throat into a “no passage” zone.

My body and I don’t always get on very well. By necessity we share an existence but it’s not an arrangement that I’ve ever been comfortable with. I’ve come to predict with relative accuracy its responses to most situations, but I still resent the weakness that it displays in how it reacts so slowly in times of crisis, in how it insists on throwing up at times of great stress, in how it squeezes the air from my lungs and leaves me quivering and panicky in the wake of an asthma attack long after the Ventolin has opened my airways and allowed me to breathe again.


My body is a coward and a bully. I’ve noticed that when I wake up in the morning, before I’m fully conscious or before I know any better, I feel a weight just below my chest that is my body telling my brain that I’m terribly afraid. This weight sits there like a stone, pinning me down. It tries to convince me that It’s helping me, that It’s keeping me anchored to a necessary level of benign cautious panic, and that It’s alerting me to dangers that are surely lurking, waiting to do me great harm. The sneering voice from its condescending presence insists that I would have forgotten about these dangers overnight if It weren’t there to remind me.

When I wake fully I tremble, sometimes I wretch – dry, comforting spasms that help to loosen the weight. I tell myself that there’s nothing to be afraid of. I go through a long litany of possible scenarios that could justify these symptoms of panic that my body sends me. I dismantle each one, piece by piece, calculating the odds of something dreadful happening. I examine, rebut and discard each terror – only they aren’t really discarded, just filed away until the next time when I wake up with another weighty message from my body sitting on my chest.

It helps when Danny is with me in the morning; it’s like my subconscious can be distracted by pleasant sensations of warmth and closeness. In fact when Danny is near, my body and I seem to get along better; we work together to enjoy the pleasure of his presence.

I really am looking forward to this weekend when Danny moves in, before he starts work on Monday. Maybe this flu is a reminder that I need someone with me. I look forward to having someone who would bring me my hot lemon and honey drinks when I’m sick, or to warm the sheets before going to bed at night, or to draw a bath for me after a hard day at work.

Listen to me – I sound as if I’m hiring a maid instead of welcoming a lover.

Karen, at school, believes that any illness or physical accident is a manifestation of a specific message of great wisdom sent from the body to teach us. I wonder if this throat infection is my body’s way of reacting to where I’m going with my letters to Claire. I am nervous about where the story is headed. Karen would say that my body is picking up on these sensations, and that it’s frightened by the power of the words and is trying to prevent them from coming out. (If that’s the case, I wonder why I didn’t sprain my wrist so I wouldn’t be able to write?)

I sit here in the silence of this heavy winter afternoon, looking out at the fluttering snowflakes almost imperceptible against the smoky grey sky, strangely appreciative of this imposed rest and exile, listening to my body and what else it might be trying to tell me.

I’m glad that Danny will be here as I go into the next phase of my story. I don’t want to burden him with all of it but I know that it’s going to be difficult. It’s comforting to know that when I stop writing each day, I’ll have someone here besides Pussywillow to remind me that that was then – and this is now.

I’ve spent so much of my life ignoring what happened to me, that I came to believe that it really wasn’t all that important. It was an easy sell, especially when I compare my life to what some of my students have had to live with. But in writing about the day that mom and Ariel showed up at Sophie’s, in bringing that story into the real world of words and into the present, I’ve been surprised at how powerful the story is for me, and how I become such a vulnerable little girl again in its telling.

I remember when I first spoke with Jean I said that I couldn’t understand why I was suddenly relating in such a personal way to the traumatized kids that I work with. I guess I’m starting to make some sense of it now.

I’m never surprised however, when I see elements of Claire in the pain that these children display. How did we end up so different, Claire and I? Was it that I was so much older? Was it her illness and the hospital experience? Was it the hearing loss that made it more likely that Claire would be the one to disconnect from the world? I would have given my soul to change places with her; how I envied her ability to deflect the pain by removing herself to her other world.

I’ve been working with Shane at school these past few weeks. His father abandoned the family about 5 years ago and hasn’t been heard from since. Shane and his twin sister Emily were six years old at the time. Shane accepts responsibility for nothing: his poor grades, the pain he inflicts on the kids he bullies, his lack of ability to read or get along with others are all someone else’s fault. Emily, on the other hand is a bright, happy, vibrant little girl who has lots of friends and defends her brother at all times. Could gender make such a difference? What else is there in an individual’s make up that dictates how they will deal with pain?

Power and control…I’m beginning to think that these are the keys: how we perceive the power that’s exerted over us by life – and the sense of control that we can maintain through the hard times.

What real control do kids have over their lives? The best they can do is to learn to play the game so that the outcomes are to their advantage. But learning to pander to the powerful is a hard lesson and a skill that some kids never manage to acquire.

I have a feeling that it’s through our individual perception of life’s power over us that we define adversity in one of two ways: it can be either a hill to climb, or a wall that looms before us, blocking our way. Those who feel that they have some control over what’s happening around them are usually able to climb the hill, however high it may be, and get on with life. But those who see themselves as victims will view adversity as a wall that stands in their way, where they build up an arsenal of sad or vicious weapons that can stay with them , beside their wall, through the rest of their lives.

I think that Claire and I met a wall, but each in our own way we chose to ignore the wall that was put up in front of us. Claire turned away from it, blocking its presence from her view. There she sat with her back to the wall, clinging to her weapons of silence and distance, looking into her other world that lay before her.

I chose to turn when I reached my wall, not to scale it or acknowledge it but to walk beside it – trying my damnedest to build a good life on this side without having the strength to look over it, to see what I might be missing that was there on the other side.

My wall… The other day, I literally ran into the most haunting image of my wall and its power over me on a trip through the grocery store. I was running to pick up a head of lettuce, hurrying to get home as I was expecting some people for dinner. As I flew around the aisle end display of canned ravioli, heading to the produce section, focused on the lettuce, my brain already at the check out counter … I looked up and abruptly pulled back to keep from running into a woman. Her presence stopped me cold; she looked as tall as a column of ebony and she was covered, head to toe, in a black drape of woolen material that seemed to have been poured over her – like heavy tar, restricting her movements. Only her exquisite dark eyes, hauntingly vacant, showed through the oval opening in the fabric.

She stood still and lifeless, her black gloved hand resting on the shopping cart that her husband was leisurely filling. Her two beautiful little girls were playing with the bird feeders under the onion counter. The Musak kept playing over the sound system and the other shoppers glided past us.

Our eyes never met but I was mesmerized. I tried to look away but I kept stealing glances – a voyeur, a witness to a scene of unimaginable starkness. In those few moments in the wake of an averted collision in the grocery store, she embodied for me all the power and darkness that bind the jailer and the jailed, the powerful and the submissive.

I’ve no way of knowing about the tradition or life occurrences that demanded she wear this mantle that separated her from the world. I was embarrassed by my horrified and judgmental response to it, but I felt an almost visceral connection between us in our mutual submission to the power that the circumstances of life had exerted over us.

I finally recognized in myself that sense of violation that keeps a very large part of me cloaked and separate from the world.

I had a hard time with the Caesar salad that night.

Copyright 2003