The great unveiling

I swing into one of the stuffy rooms at the Orthopedics department on my crutches, faithful husband in tow with a walking boot that's been stashed in our closet since surgery five weeks ago.  The medical assistant follows us in, "You're ready for the boot, are you?  Did your daughter decorate that for you?"  


"Uh, no," I flash a private smirk to Ricardo, "My friends did."  She wouldn't get it, of course - the stickers of goats and hearts framed with "Ito y Ita," nicknames Ricardo and I use for each other - how they decorated it with their characteristic love and humor, just one day before the wedding.  If I had to go down the aisle in a robotic boot, it may as well be fun, they said.  Even in my drug-induced state, this elicited a grateful smile.


I swing my flaming orange cast up on the paper-covered table that patients sit on, awkwardly waiting.  It's not long before Eddy the Incredible Cast Man comes in wheeling a "Cast Vac" and pulls out a mini saw.  Another orthopedic doctor trails in behind, and I have a vague remembrance of him from surgery day.  Remarkably, I'm less nervous about this method of cast removal, much preferring it to the giant, dull scissors shoved down my post-op cast the last visit, the poor assistant sweating to crack it and free my leg from its crude imprisonment, instructing me to let her know if the scissors "got" me.  But I trust Eddy.  He wields the saw like a pro, splicing down both sides of the cast he constructed, gently peeling the top from the rest of the plaster.  I wait with a twinge of nervousness for the unveiling.


I see a swath of dark hair.  Everyone assumes because I'm blonde that my leg hair will be nice and fair, but it's unfortunately not true.  Ricardo chuckles and I jokingly apologize for the display to the two other men in the room.  The rest of my leg is as I imagined, though more unnerving in person than in my imagination.  All I can see of my "calf" is a hunk of flesh barely larger than the bone it covers.  The skin beneath all the hair is rough and dry, and halfway down my calf a red rash covers like a scaly sock.  The scar is black and still partially covered with surgical tape.  My toes are purple, my foot like a glass of wine.  At my touch, I leave a white fingerprint on the top. 

 
The leg is free, but I'm afraid to move my foot.  Not that it moves much on its own.  It still seems strangely disconnected from the rest of my body, more stiff and tender than anything else.  It feels vulnerable dangling there.  Part of me wants it back in the cast so it doesn't have to face the real world, and part of me is eager to advance to the hard work of building it back up.  And then, the doctor delivers the news I wasn't expecting, which has been typical of this journey thus far: I am not to bear any weight on this leg for another four weeks.  Here I am, thrilled to think I'm leaving my crutches at the office today, yet again, naive of this whole process.  Funny that I never once thought of my achilles tendon before rupturing it.  Oh, I'd had a few episodes of worrying I would one day tear my ACL, but the achilles wasn't on my radar - not until I couldn't walk.  


How little I knew.  How little I still know.


The doctor tells me little, unless I ask.  And even then, I somehow feel a little stupid for my questions, as if I'm insulting professional intelligence, though that may be my own insecurity, as he appears to be a competent and nice enough fellow.  I've read so many conflicting things about a time frame and recovery "protocol" for ruptured achilles.   Some say you can resume running six months after surgery. Most say it takes more like ten or twelve.  Some people begin physical therapy right out of the cast.  Others, like me, won't be referred to physical therapy until one month after the cast.  General consensus says it's a long, rough recovery, working hard with atrophied muscle and a shortened tendon, making progress one micro-movement at a time.  The good news is, most people make a full recovery without re-rupture, though it's always a possibility, even with a fiberoptic wire in my heel that's stronger than steel. 


He puts a double heel lift in my boot to keep my foot at an angle, tells me he'll see me again in four weeks.  I'm not to take the boot off, except to bathe, as even the involuntary leg twitches in my sleep could do enough damage to require another surgery.  I think about the four times I fell during the month I had the cast on, how the layers of plaster protected my leg from injury when I didn't manage to fall on my uninjured side.  I think of the time I stumbled forward and caught myself with the toes sticking out of my cast, how even that bending of the toes could have reinjured my heel and I laid in bed with my heart racing until the pain subsided.  How in the world will my leg survive in a boot on crutches?  Will I forget not to put pressure on it while it's resting on the ground, taunting me to stand on two legs?  


I'm quiet heading back in the elevator, down the hall, through the parking garage to our car.  This is not what I had in mind, and I have to readjust my expectations again.  I envisioned going home and setting to work on the pile of dishes in the kitchen - on two legs.  Instead, when we get home I go straight to bed.  I lay with my leg propped on a tower of pillows, dazed and spent.  When I get up the nerve to shower, I unwrap my leg from the boot and my sock, and I sit on the edge of the tub, staring at it like it's a foreign object.  And I feel a little ashamed of myself as warm tears fall on my leg while I continue staring, cradling it gingerly, aware of its fragility.  I don't have a terminal illness.  I will walk and run again.  One year and this will be a memory, so why spill tears over it now?  It feels so ungrateful, but I can't fight it today.  So I let them fall, then I turn on the faucet, swing on my one good leg into the shower and stand up.  My first shower without a cast.  That in itself is a milestone.


I keep telling myself this is training my character.  The same painstaking process as physical rehabilitation refines the character and restores the soul to a state of dependency on God.  I'm not in control and I don't have this down.  I'm like a little baby, learning to walk, reaching out to take Daddy's hands.  It's humbling, an affront to my adultness, my independence, my sense of security - and right where I need to be.  I may have dreams in the night of running and dancing and biking; I may whisper prayers in the day of trusting God more deeply, growing in patience, enduring through pain.  But all of these come through discipline, with time and persistence and faith.   No, these things cannot be rushed. 


And so I search for words to say thank you, here in these moments.

A reform-ing vegetarian

As a vegetarian the past year and a half, I never realized how I take in the blood of animals with my diet of fruits and vegetables, soy and grains.  I thought the matter was almost as deceptively simple as eating meat vs. not eating meat.  Respecting and caring for the livelihood of animals vs. treating them as mere objects.  Flesh to be consumed, instead of living beings that deserved to exist apart from my self-interest.   Turns out, as with much of life, it's just not that simple.


In yet another book I coincidentally picked up, The mindful carnivore (Tovar Cerulli), my eyes are pried open a bit wider, my conscience again challenged.  This time, not to think so dichotomously.  I read things that take me past the brink of no return, that sense of responsibility that comes with the gaining of knowledge.  Ignorance is bliss, indeed, but if I'm no longer ignorant, what will I do with what I now know?  


Which brings me back to the subject of deer.  These beautiful, elegant creatures love most of the foods I consume regularly and feast on most everything a farmer can grow.  In agricultural parts of the state and country, deer can cause from tens of thousands to tens of millions of dollars in damage to farmers' crops.  The farmers then have to make a decision between bankruptcy and killing, feeding deer or feeding their families.  When I sit down to a bowl of stir fried organic veggies and tofu, there's more involved than I thought with my vegetarian meal.  Richard Nelson, author of Heart and blood: Living with deer in America, offers this jarring summary:


     Whenever any of us sit down for breakfast, lunch, dinner, or a snack, it's likely that deer were killed to protect some of the food we eat and the beverages we drink... Everyone in modern North America who lives each day on agricultural foods belongs to an ecological network that necessarily involves deer hunting... In this sense, the blood of deer runs through our veins as surely as we take bread and wine at our table.


Here I thought I wasn't a hunter.  Turns out, I'm one of the many farming out the dirty work to organic Farmer Joe down the road or across the state.


This information stops me in my tracks.  Instead of disgusting me, I feel something else.  Something sobering and more grown-up.  This issue is much bigger than I thought, with few clear answers.


At the time, I honestly felt becoming a vegetarian was the only appropriate response for me with the knowledge I gained of factory farms and their destructive impact on the environment, the well-being of animals, and in the long run, the health and well-being of humans.  While still holding a respect for meat-eaters, I think I secretly also held the belief that, if everyone was really mindful of - if they really cared about - the severity of the situation, they would rethink eating most meat.  And eating meat is done mindlessly by the masses, without any connection to the life or death of the animal that is on the plate.  There is a sense of not wanting to know, of wanting to be sheltered from the gory details and the mess of it all.  Hence, the clean plastic packaging at the grocery stores, the marketing of meat removed from the life of the animal.  We - and I'm talking me, first - don't want to be reminded of the cost, the life, that is behind every package of "meat" we purchase or consume.  And perhaps that's one other, previously subconscious reason, I became a vegetarian.  I didn't want to deal with the gory reality; I couldn't reconcile it in my head or in my conscience, so I removed myself from the quandary altogether.


Well, almost.


So I arrive at another crossroad: What now?  I recently thought the ideal solution would be to start my own garden, grow my own food, raise my own chickens and the like.  I still hope to do this one day, but not as the "solution" to this problem.  Because, inevitably, I would be faced with the same dilemma as every other grower of food: how far will I go to protect my food from insects or animals?  If I won't use chemicals to combat insects, what will I do if beetles consume much of my leafy greens?  What about little rodents and birds and critters that help themselves to the feast?  Maybe my problem would fall on the smaller end of the scale in the farming world, but the dilemma remains the same.  Would I kill a raccoon to protect my chickens?  How far am I willing to go with this living-in-harmony-with-all-living-things and how realistic are my ideals?


Because the truth is not harmonious.  The nitty gritty reality is that nature doesn't give a hoot for my vegetarian ideals and life and death in the natural world goes on around me each day in a web of struggle and conflict.


I will sit with these questions until I think I can live with the answers.  Inside me grows a deeper, reverent respect for animals - in their living and in their dying to give life (sustenance) to others - the conviction that they deserve to be treated well in life and owed a swift, compassionate death if food is their end.  In respect, don't we owe that to them?  Philosopher Jeremy Bentham once articulated, "The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?" And, as one professor and farmer, George Wallace, soberly reflects, "If elk would scream, the woods would have fewer hunters." Animals can indeed suffer.  That doesn't mean we shouldn't kill for food; but it does necessitate respect, careful calculation and compassion in the taking of their lives.   


And now, more palpable than the question of what I eat (carnivore vs. vegetarian) is the question of how the food gets to my plate.  Tovar Cerulli writes in his book of this shift in his thinking, from  devoted vegan to mindful carnivore: "The question now wasn't whether my eating inflicted harm, but what kind of harm."  A part of me feels that, if I cannot look an animal in the eyes and kill it myself, I don't deserve to eat meat.  The reality is, I couldn't stomach it.  Not the killing, but more so, not the gutting or the cleaning.  What I aim for, then, is a mindfulness if I choose to eat the flesh of animals and a thankfulness for that life, which informs my purchases and choices of food and where my money lends support.


Eating, it turns out, is no simple affair.

Lessons in racing

I'm seventeen, curled up in a blue vinyl bus seat with a walkman, headphones and a bowling ball of nerves sitting in my stomach.   The track, "I Believe I Can Fly,"saturates my ears and the song's almost cheesy in these late 90s days but perfect for a pre-cross country meet visualization.  This is before the word yoga has ever reached my ears.  I breathe long and deep in.  Hold.  Breathe out slow.  I pray.  The bowling ball shrinks, bit by bit, to a tennis ball.   The bus pulls into the stadium.


I love to race, and I dread it with all the nerves in my body.  It's not until the gun fires and there's nothing more but me and a pack of pumping arms and speedy legs, the occasional elbow flying, that I cease to dread and the chase begins.  Three point one miles of chase.  At this stage, I can do nothing about my level of training; it is what it is.  The real battle is in my mind, a more grueling fight than my lungs or legs face.  I cannot doubt I can do this race, come near-debilitating side ache, legs heavy as boulders, a slip and fall in the mud, or opponent breathing down my neck.  No more walkman, the soundtrack of my mind plays a continuous loop of one prayer: I can do all things through Christ, who infuses inner strength into me.  


It's often not until halfway through that I fall into a relaxed rhythm around six and a half minute miles, after I've lost sight of my two friends, the top female runners on our team, and I'm on my own.  My eyes fix on the next girl, I pray for strength, and my body dials up a notch, if it can, or I hold steady.  I can do all things through Christ, who infuses inner strength into me.  I gain ground, pull closer to the body in front of me, until I hear her breaths strong and sense her eyes straining to look over her shoulder and pretend I'm not there at the same time.  These are vital moments, when me or her will inevitably weaken because side-by-side is too mentally taxing to maintain, and I ask myself, do I dare push a little harder?  The blow to the mind is great when attempting to pass someone and failing, and so I push.  She fights back, for a few seconds, and then, concedes.  I'm off to the next. 


I'm approaching mile three, and ready or not, it's time to gear up for the final push.  The one hundred sixty-one meter sprint where eyes hone in on final bodies to pass, but my mind is my final opponent.  Coaches and parents scream and cheer with stop watches racing, and all I strain to hear, one last time, is I can do all things through Christ, who infuses inner strength into me.  


Arms pump hard, legs pound the grass, lungs strain, and I nearly collapse across the finish line.  Exhaustion and instant relief ensue.  A few minutes pass, and I'm smiling again.  The same race that, moments before felt like it completely siphoned my energy, now finished, fills me with strength and builds my confidence.  

And who knows, at seventeen, that this physical training is really preparation for life?  For those weeks and months, at thirty-one, when running isn't possible and muscles atrophy, but the race is still on and this time it's the heart straining not to grow weary.  When I'd remember the prayer through gritted teeth and know in my heart that the toughest opponent looming today is not a person or even a set of circumstances, but my own thoughts.  And what will I feed my mind today, if not a steady diet of trust and thankfulness?  


Don't. Give. Up.  I can do all things through Christ, who infuses inner strength into me (Philippians 4:13).  

Where the germans are

We're in the bathroom, me and my husband of one month, brushing our teeth.  It's still so new, this experience of sharing a home and life with him, and even this menial act of cepillado los dientes is fascinating.  So I watch him in the mirror that stretches across one whole wall of our walk-in closet sized bathroom, a look of deep concentration furrowed in his brow.  And then, he says to me, "Don't forget to brush your tongue."


I smile back at him in the mirror with my mouth full of vibrating Sonicare brush.   


He persists with intense sincerity, "I'm serious," inserts a pause for effect. "That's where all the germans are."  


He says it so innocently, with a hint of the conspiratorial.  I spit toothpaste and barely contained laughter.  "Really?  All the germans, huh?"  He stares at me with a tentative smile, the growing realization that what he said didn't come out quite as he intended.  "Yes, the germans," now fixing me with a fake frown and sticking out his tongue in the mirror.   


And I love him all the more.  


One day, if we're given the opportunity to live in Mexico, I know he'll be blessed by similar experiences in reverse.  Me, spitting out Spanish with a flair of my own grammar.  These moments add such flavor to life together - this daily blending of cultures and languages and grammar - some humorous, others more serious, all full and rich and ripe for the learning.   We are each other's teacher and student, and this, I see, is one of the most precious and self-challenging aspects of marriage.  


We lay in bed and it is hot.  Literally.   The box fan we bought at a local flea market for five dollars is purring below the open window, and the bed is a tangled web of rejected comforter, sheets, and pillow for my cast to rest on.  Me, the one perpetually cold, now fluctuating between sweat and chill, while Ricardo the Perpetual Furnace wraps himself in a red fleecy blanket atop our covers in attempt to keep warm.  This cast of mine raises my body temperature at least five degrees, and each night I fight in half- wakefulness the demon covers and various sleeping positions in attempt to find rest.  


This night, in particular, I add a soundtrack to my fighting and fussing.  Grunts and groans and whimpers and moans.  An all-out- middle-of-the-night-sleep-tantrum.  Throwing off blankets, kicking off sheet, tossing foot pillow onto the floor, flipping left to right in a bouncing rage.  Unbeknownst to me, Ricardo lays still beside me, curled up in silence, biting back laughter.  When a few minutes of calm and stillness have passed on my side of the bed, he gently and bravely inches toward me, reaches a hand to my back and rubs.  The next morning, he asks, "Were you like this in your sleep as a child?" 


"No," I grimace.  "I'm pretty sure I was more mature then."


We laugh hard.

A hunger for joy

I'm laying on my stomach on the bed, staring out through open blinds at spindly tree shadows projected on the brick apartment building across the way.  The breeze blows with cool breath through the window and I pause to acknowledge it on my skin, receive its refreshing touch.  I need it.


Just today I finally pick up a book, filled with sentences already underlined in my uneven marks.  A book with words so real and fresh and true that, one year ago, came close like a dear friend and led me down a path I  didn't see before.  The path of giving thanks every day, in everything, opening up my eyes to see and filling my life more full of grace.  The book is One thousand gifts, by Ann Voskamp.  Here I thought I was doing so well, seeing through hard and ugly and unwanted things to the beauty.  Seeing God in these places.  Turns out, I merely reached a fork in the road of an unending life journey and new circumstances to test my newfound way of being.


Life is funny like that.  


The truth is, my eyes are often too blinded to see the silver lining in the clouds - at least lately.  I squint and I sweat and I strain, and some days, I just pull the covers over my head and say I'll try again tomorrow.  Feelings of depression and discouragement pound the door like some unrelenting collections officer.  Some days, I throw off the covers, climb out of bed and answer the door, telling them to get lost, that my debt's already been paid.  And other, less glorious days, I sit in the dark room, paralyzed as they continue to knock.  This is the ugly, un-edited, un-airbrushed truth.  Yes, I struggle hard.  


I need to learn to see, still.   I need it to live more fully than this.  Ann reminds me in her unique and compelling prose that the depth of my joy runs only as deep as the depth of my gratitude.  When gratitude runs on empty, so does joy.  So simple, it seems.  So attainable, it can be.  So much work it is to harness the will into practice.  At least in the beginning.  But this I know, that gratitude is a fire that must continually be fed, or it will diminish to glowing embers, and then, disappear into darkness.  


So I pick up the book and return to press on in the journey, to uncover yet another layer of this life of grace in giving thanks.  For my soul hungers for joy - and there is much joy to be had.  

Some better gifts

Each day that passes, there will be some invisible storm and invisible miracle 

waiting to reveal themselves. 

Some days both may appear at once, in one. 

The world lets itself in, without invitation. 

I am still learning to accept, to feed myself in every sense, 

always imperfect, but eyes open, hungry for the color everywhere.

~ Amy Grace, A Beautiful Life Photo

I've been getting a lot of the "How's married life?" question, understandably, and for a moment, it trips me up on how to respond.   Only because there are so many layers to that answer, and I mentally calculate with each questioner - based on the intimacy of our relationship, the context we're in, how the question was asked, how much time we have - how many layers I will divulge.  My blog, however, is a whole other story.  Here I am free to practice authenticity - with discretion and taste, vulnerability and transparency - regardless of the audience.  Long ago I chose to be this type of writer, figuring my readers could discern for themselves how much they'd like to read.  


Returning to the original question on married life, my hesitation has nothing to do with a desire to reveal  private details about my marriage or whether or not I'm happily married for that matter.   No, it's a larger, more spiritual struggle, and one I'm well acquainted with: What to do when my life story doesn't pan out according to my expectations.  Boiled down to it's simplest form - Do I trust God to orchestrate my life better than I could?  In theory, the answer is yes.  In practice, it's exceedingly more difficult.


Hmmm, so how's married life?  Well, for starters, I adore my husband and I enjoying learning new things about him each day.  I'm trying to relax and appreciate this unique opportunity to be doted on.  Really, waited on hand and foot.  You'd think I'd be basking in this luxury (and I'm told this especially by my mother friends with some envy in their voices), but it's quite the opposite.  I'm still a do-er.  I like to relax when it's within my control and under my own conditions; forced relaxation, however, is not so easy.  While Ricardo brings me breakfast, often lunch, and dinner, fetches my water, cleans the kitchen, does the laundry, chauffeurs me around, carries my things, and if he has any time left in the day, attempts to sort through the wreck that is our apartment, I sit restlessly in bed, trying to contain my frustration that I can't help out.  At least now I can bathe myself, quite well actually.  For the first few days after surgery, I couldn't even get out of bed on my own without crying in pain.  I can hop around on one leg for awhile, cleaning the kitchen, carrying a few items to and fro, doing laundry and such - but only until my toes turn purple.  Then it's back to elevating in bed.  


That's one level of expectation that is not what I had in mind.  And then, there's one a bit messier.  Our "honeymoon" period, loosely speaking, has not been what I bargained for.  Instead of romantic swims on the beaches of Kauai, suntanned and beachy beautiful, enjoying our cozy cottage just feet from the water, we've gotten a good taste of marriage when it's not romantic and fun.  After just two week of marriage, my husband has seen me through surgery, on major painkillers, on the floor of the bathroom vomiting, unshowered for days and unable to do my hair, crying from pain, crying from discouragement, sick in my whole body, and all the emotional and relational side effects that come with that.  


For better or for worse.  In sickness and in health.  


My emotions protest and whine, this is not fun, wrestling negative thoughts.  But below my emotions, my heart knows better.  There are some precious gifts here, if we accept them.  The gift of being known more fully in the unattractive muck of life circumstances, and still being loved and adored.  The gift of really needing my husband, practically speaking, of seeing him take care of me without complaint, without resentment.  The gift of learning, from the get-go, how to go to God together in prayer and rely on him to take care of us.  We're both realizing how much we need him just to get through each day, how we must depend on him to show us how to really love each other, not in our own strength, but out of his reserves.  Which never empty.  We're learning to trust that he knows how to take care of us financially, when much of our previous "security net"just won't cut it.  I didn't expect to start marriage off feeling financially overwhelmed - not only by the costs of a wedding, but now, the costs of an urgent care trip, specialist visits, medications, surgery, physical therapy, and being out of work for an undetermined period of time.  Two months at the least - most likely three.  Yep, not exactly what either of us had prepared for.


But God knew.  And my faith continues to return me to this point.  None of this catches God by surprise or overwhelms him, and believing that God really does have good plans for us (not harm), there's something we can't see yet that is playing out here.  And haven't I been learning, through death and through life, that so often it's hard to "see" where God is in the moment, when the rubble kicks up dust all around and my spiritual eyesight is impaired by what is swirling around me?  But if I just wait for it, wait patiently in the storm, as the skies clear and time passes, I can look back and see God.   And he is unfailingly magnificent in beauty and power.  

So I am choosing, today, to enjoy these unique gifts of starting off on a new journey with Ricardo - and continuing the adventure that is following God.  It's not always a happy one, but there is always joy to be had.

A Monday morning dose of sweetness

Monday is here, just one week until this wretched cast comes off (HALLELUJAH!) and we're onto the next step of recovery.  I thought I'd pause at the beginning of this week and savor some of the good things thus far...


1.  I can now make it to the bathroom on my own on crutches, without cursing or yelling.


2.  I'm getting quite good at regulating my meds by alarms on my cell phone.


3.  Ricardo successfully made his first waffles and pot of coffee yesterday under my direction, and he was beaming so proudly.


4.  I've gotten my trips to the bathroom down to a multitasking art: brushing teeth, washing face and shaving legs with lotion, all while remaining seated.


5.  By the time this cast comes off, I'll have one heck of a toned left thigh.


6.  From my perch in bed, I have a view of the mountains and peeps of blue sky.


7.  I've got the time now to thoughtfully reply to emails and facebook messages, and finally write those notes to friends I haven't seen or spoken to in years. 


8.  Before Ricardo takes off in the morning, we can lie in bed and start the day off together in prayer - truly the sweetest thing.


What about you?  Any Monday morning doses of goodness you'd like to share?  I hope you all can savor your own dose of goodness at the start of this week, and as the week progresses, we can remind each other of the gifts in each day.