It’s almost as if a forgiving and loving hand of God rests on my shoulder as I hunch over one grave at a time. Touching each little body of clothing, I thank that child for being selfless in the face of my overwhelming challenges and struggles. I apologize and watch as tears drop onto each tiny outfit, then sweep dirt on top of the clothing and pack the ground. Taking Sharon’s flowers, I place some beauty, color, and fragrance on one gravesite at a time.
Standing up, I brush the fresh dirt and grass off my knees. Stretching out my five fingers again, I turn my hand and look at my soiled palm, at each finger and fingernail caked with dirt. Sister Antoinette once told me it doesn’t matter the order of how we learn things, it just matters that we learn. Amidst my sadness, I feel seeds of strength.
I let my head fall back and look up at a clear blue sky, as a pervasive warmth from the late afternoon sun seeps clear through my body.
MAGIC IN A BOTTLE
1996 (age 44)—Cleburne, Texas
“Oh, you brought a bottle of wine! I’ll get some glasses,” Mom offers
“You have wine glasses?” I ask in disbelief. I’ve never seen my parents drink. This is a really nice bottle I brought to last me the two nights while I am here visiting. I have rented a little cabin about fifteen minutes away from my parents’ home. We are still new to being in touch again after almost five years of estrangement. They never recanted their denials, and I never recanted my accusation. Sharing meals and short visits feels more comfortable for all of us rather than my being a houseguest.
“We have these pretty blue glasses Dad got at a USS Enterprise reunion. See?” Mom holds up two attractive, pale blue wine glasses engraved with the name of the aircraft carrier Dad had served on during World War II, along with the date of that reunion.
Dinner is ready. Another over-salted meal of hard-to-chew pork, overcooked and indistinguishable vegetables, bread and butter, iceberg lettuce salad with a cherry tomato, and most assuredly a deathly sweet dessert to follow. Mom loves salt and sugar. Even during her Weight Watchers years, she kept fancy containers of candy strategically positioned around the house. During high school, I preferred seeing her stuff candy in her mouth more than watching her sit in the same chair for hours in a depressed daze.
I pour everyone some wine, my tiny juice glass looking pathetic next to their elegant, long-stemmed glasses.
As Mom says a perfunctory prayer, I look at both of my parents and have doubts whether they pray when alone. I have heard how difficult the last five years have been since I voiced my memories. First, they moved two hours south from their neighborhood in Plano, Texas, to this remote twenty-five acres near Cleburne, where Dad, at sixty-five, constructed his dream home by himself. Mom, never a nature girl, left what little social life she enjoyed in Plano and moved to this isolated, fenced-in property surrounded by thick woods.
Soon after, Dad began experiencing a series of infections that doctors thought may have occurred from injuries resulting from setting posts or pulling barbed wire. Antibiotics didn’t work or worked too slowly. He was hospitalized several times with high fevers and gaping infected wounds.
Dad eventually returned home from the hospital with an IV stand. Not long after, Mom told me they were arguing while she was attempting some necessary nurse-like assistance, and Dad grabbed and tried to strangle her. She packed her bags and left—for a week.
Mom has never been able to stay away for long. She always comes back, and nothing they argue about is ever resolved, as far as I know. Bedroom doors and cupboard doors are slammed for a week or more amidst a steamy silence, and then one of them will ask a question and it will be answered. Hence, the end of that fight.
That’s about all the talk I ever heard from my parents—questions and answers, accusations or demands, or relaying some information like, “The faucet is dripping” or “All my clothes are dirty.”
But at this dinner, our first alone in many years, Mom and Dad are engaged in conversation with each other and with me. Their wine glasses empty, and I refill them and my scrawny juice glass.
Dad tells me about people he met at the Enterprise reunion. Mom talks about their collection of stray dogs, and Dad chimes in to add details. They look at each other. Occasionally they laugh. Mom reaches for the bottle and pours what is left into each of their glasses. Mine is still full. I am too befuddled by the scene unfolding before me to drink my wine. These two people appear to care for each other. This is the most conversation I have ever heard my parents have, the only time I have seen them enjoy being together, and the first time I have ever seen them drink together. Maybe I should have offered a bottle of wine years earlier. As I sit and listen and watch my parents, a saying I wrote on an index card hanging on my bathroom mirror at home comes to mind: “Look at all beings with eyes of compassion,” says Thich Nat Hahn, a Vietnamese monk. I feel relief, tenderness, affection, and an understanding tinged with forgiveness.
I have never hated either of my parents, nor have I ever wished them misery. We get it, or we don’t, or we just get parts of it, until finally the entire jigsaw puzzle comes together, and we stand in awe at the intricate picture comprised of a thousand pieces, even if some of the pieces are missing.
Suddenly I can imagine them in their younger days, my somber but earnest and dashing dad, and my outgoing and strikingly beautiful mom. There must have been an electricity between them, despite their different backgrounds—Dad from an abusive and fractured home, and Mom, who adored her easy-going and loving father, who was best friends with her sister, and who got along well with her mother and brother.
Something has kept my mom and dad together. They are still married, after all. I have been twice divorced. Except for this evening, thus far in my lifetime I could never understand why they stayed together, except out of sheer habit, or Mom believing Dad’s threats that she would be destitute if she left him.
We don’t always come to understand why something happened, or didn’t happen, like why a father would have sex with his daughter, and why a mother would ignore such behavior. Glimpses of my parents’ backgrounds, struggles, and challenges play behind this casual scene of them sipping wine, appearing to enjoy each other and, surprisingly, even me.
THE CANYON TAKES ME IN
1997 (age 44)—Chinle, Arizona
“Plant your feet in the sand. Take a deep breath down to your gut. Then tell the canyon Ho!”
Aft er carefully descending into the canyon’s bottom before dawn via ancient Anasazi hand and foot holds, we’ve watched the morning light slowly fill this sacred space. We’re standing in the middle of the Chinle wash that runs between the steep, dramatic walls of Canyon de Chelly.12 Tsela, my Navajo guide, has found a place in the wash where we don’t sink too fast into the sucking sand. Holding my shoes and socks in hand, I throw my head back and bellow directly at the place where the canyon forks. Tsela frowns.
“Listen,” Tsela models as he puts forth a resounding Ho that reverberates between the orange-red cliffs that flank the fast running wash during this season. “Ho! … Ho! … Ho!”
My chest juts out and my head falls back as I try again, offering a full presence with a solid, resonant Ho. A bright sound fills the canyon and surrounds us. My own booming echoes snake down the canyon between these ancient rock walls that split like curtains with dark vertical designs running down the lengths of their thousand-foot swaths.
“That’s it,” Tsela announces. “The canyon has taken you in.”
We move on, quietly, sloshing through the river-like wash to a place where we stop and put our shoes back on. The still quiet provides the perfect place for the river to chatter, birds to call distinctly, and breezes to whisper. The canyon cradles it all.
Tsela guides with gestures of the hand and eye. Occasionally he offers snippets of information on the history of this ancestral place where he herded sheep as a boy. As a young man he took off for the Gulf War, then returned to the area to offer night hikes to tourists, or day trips like this. I met him l
ast night when my fellow travelers and I gathered with about ten others at dusk to descend the canyon and view pictographs highlighted by the setting sun against the startling red rock walls. As the group stood quietly taking in the stories drawn by ancient civilizations, Leah, the seven-year-old daughter of my close friend Nancy, was apparently taking in my own etched stories.
“Look at all the lines on your face!” she announced. Her tiny voice bounced off canyon walls.
The entire group turned to survey her observation. In the surprise and innocence of the moment, I felt a spontaneous belly laugh arise that was soon joined by everyone present. Laughter rippled over rocks and seeped into the promise of a darkening sky. Leah appeared delighted.
The rest of the evening’s hike was magical, laughter followed by Tsela playing his flute, just as the Hale-Bopp comet slid brightly along the canyon rim in the pre-moon sky amidst our gasps and sighs. We climbed back up to the canyon’s rim by the light of a fat and jolly full moon.
At the end of the night hike, upon overhearing my interest to explore more of the canyon, Tsela offered me the normal one hundred dollar private tour today at no cost. He’s no stranger to the area, and my friends will know where I am. Trusting my gut feelings, I decided to accept the invitation.
This morning Tsela tells stories of Navajo tribal life in the canyon over hundreds of years. He shares that his name means “stars lying down”—like stars resting on the edge of a canyon—and he shows me where his parents’ families own land and still farm, the Navajo Nation maintaining ownership of this geologic wonderland. Access to the canyon floor is restricted unless one is with a park ranger or an authorized Navajo guide, such as Tsela.
Besides the geologic masterpieces, remnants of people from as far back as five thousand years mark this spiritual landscape. Tsela doesn’t romanticize the life and plight of American Indians, present or past, and over our picnic lunch he recounts stories of teenage gangs and economic difficulties that now characterize life on the reservation.
Amidst his stories and details, Tsela pulls out a large handgun from his backpack. I almost choke on my sandwich.
“You never know what you might run into here in the canyon,” he justifies, laying the weapon on a red bandana he carefully unfolds. “I prefer to be prepared.”
So much of my life has been learning to react paradoxically to fear: I know how to disassociate from potential danger. But I consider Tsela’s explanation and the five or six hours we’ve comfortably shared together by this point, and I decide to not feel fearful about being in the middle of nowhere with a large man and a big gun. What else can I do at this point? I swallow my bite of sandwich and continue eating.
I share some of my experiences as an urban high school teacher with Tsela, how in Houston my students come from over forty countries, and how it’s interesting and important to me to understand how people everywhere, especially in my own country, are coping with and handling adversity.
How do we manage to navigate those tumultuous teen years and the difficult challenges that besiege so many of us as we forge our paths to maturity and beyond? While we adult tourists stood in awe of ancestors’ stories scraped on canyon walls, my friend’s seven-year-old daughter observed the forty-five years of life-lines etched in my own facial features from years of living. Geology doesn’t lie, though it often needs interpretation to explain the crevasses, shifts, and scars left after faults, upheavals, and formations.
I listen attentively as Tsela continues to describe the lives of those in and around Canyon de Chelly. His stories trickle deeper into my core, a more spacious core at this point, one that can shout Ho fully while simultaneously trusting this cautious stranger packing heat in the middle of his native lands.
ALL CLEARED OUT
1997 (age 45)—Houston, Texas
A quick twist and step back to return a fast serve sent a shock-wave through my body. What the hell was that? Not only did I miss the serve, now I can hardly walk! I raise my hand to signal that something is awry. The friend I’m playing with walks to the net.
“I think I’ve hurt my back,” I explain, stunned by the pain shooting through my body when I move. “Looks like that’s all the tennis I’ll be doing today.” Damn. It’s a beautiful early Sunday morning, and I was enjoying the challenge of my friend’s tennis skills and strong serves. Plus, I needed a break from pages of graduate school textbooks I have been plowing through. Sundays are much too short.
Monday’s X-rays reveal a large mass bulging in or near my uterus, apparently pressing on spinal nerves in my lower back, especially when my body makes a quick move like I did when returning a powerful tennis serve. “Probably a subserosal fibroid tumor, perhaps pedunculated, which means it’s connected to the uterus by means of a long stalk. These can twist and cause acute pain,” the gynecologist explains perfunctorily. “We won’t know until I perform surgery. I recommend a complete hysterectomy, considering your history of bleeding and complications.” Dr. Loft is convinced my quality of life will change with a complete hysterectomy since I’ve been experiencing heavy bleeding and extreme discomfort during my periods for years, as well as persistent ongoing migraines that, he points out, may be from out-of-whack hormonal levels. I’ve tried everything in my power to make the migraines go away, but nothing—not addressing sexual abuse, medications, counseling, symbolically birthing babies, or burying baby clothes—has worked yet.
The doc flips through the pages I filled out in the waiting room, sizing up my past in sixty seconds. I never bring up my history of sexual abuse with docs. There’s no box to check for that on their forms.
Besides being in pain, I’m befuddled with the unfamiliar words being tossed around. Subserosal and pedunculated sound like descriptions out of a Dr. Seuss story. My friend Kelly offered to come with me, both because I can’t drive in this pain and because I know how disconnected I can become from anything gynecological. After Kelly pushes for some discussion about abdominal hysterectomies and whether to take or leave my ovaries, Dr. Loft coolly recommends surgery day after tomorrow.
“I recommend this Wednesday, because of your obvious physical discomfort, and also because I am leaving on vacation on Thursday for a week.” This guy is all business. I remind myself that he was highly recommended plus, with this severity of pain, I don’t have the luxury of shopping around. He stands up, and we get the feeling we’re taking up his time. With an impending vacation, there must be a tight schedule, and he seems to be making it clear he’s done me a favor squeezing me in today and by offering a Wednesday surgery.
Wednesday is my forty-fifth birthday.
Dr. Loft moves on to his next patient as his nurse comes in to go over hospital and surgery details. I comment how he sure doesn’t get the blue ribbon for bedside manners, and she actually agrees, but adds that he’s an excellent surgeon. That’s got to count for something. On the way out, I peruse the universities he attended in his lineup of gold-framed diplomas, and I am reminded of my own medical school ambitions, which seem pretty farfetched to me right now.
So, I have a large, meddling fibroid. I guess my uterus wanted to grow something.
Kelly is giving me a rundown of the visit. She lays out these details while driving like a cabbie, unfazed by the congested Houston traffic. This is one of the many things I appreciate about my friend: she gets things handled with a no-nonsense approach.
Given that I’ve had recurrent pre-cancer of the cervix and the several recommended cryosurgeries, and those as well as other minimally invasive surgical techniques haven’t alleviated such issues, the doc thinks the cervix should go as well. On top of all that, he strongly suggested removing the ovaries and tubes while “in there,” to avoid any future possibilities of ovarian cancer since, he insisted, that is so difficult to detect and cure. Apparently, I surfaced at this point in the proposed demolition run-down to request that he please leave this part of my weary reproductive system if my ovaries happen to look healthy and clear of the “bothersome” endometr
ial tissue he described earlier.
The approach that this is my body and my life and that I might be curious to understand whatever I can about whatever options are available seemed to grate on this guy’s nerves. I can hear Kelly as she explains it all to me now, but the way the doc impatiently ran through this information made me shut down. Little does he realize I’ve come a long way to develop an awareness and concern about my body and my sexuality. I suspect that he, like other doctors who have heard my history of pregnancies and abortions, doesn’t have much respect or worry for a reproductive system that hasn’t appeared to hold much value for its owner.
I wonder whether he knows if he has any children that were not carried full term out there, or if he’s aware of any pregnancies that resulted from any possible dalliances? I have come to ask this frequently of the men in my life, and often hear some of the most honest admit they are not sure. Two of my male friends have even been contacted by grown children—one in his late teens and one in her early thirties—who informed these men that women they had long ago forgotten about had become pregnant and birthed children without the men knowing they had become fathers. Surprise!
I come out of my medicated haze in the recovery room late on the afternoon of my birthday and ask the nurse if my ovaries are intact. Nope, the wise doc deemed them potential troublemakers.
“You’re all cleared out!” she cheerily informs me, like this is the best news I could ever get. Maybe it is. Maybe I should get a lobotomy next.
An hour later, I find myself being wheeled onto the obstetrics’ floor, past the newborn nursery and rooms where either women or babies are crying out in surprise or pain. An ache pierces where my womb once sat. I want to scream out with the other women and babies, announcing my own surprise at life’s pain and cruelty. Suddenly I feel the immensity of everything my womb has endured, and its raw emptiness feels as tender as a newborn.
Being Mean Page 18