a fierce mind

I wake to the sound of “Breakdown” by Tom Petty.

Ironic, I think.

I open my eyes and watch the ceiling fan spin and spin and spin. Desperately wishing my body felt as such one fluid being within continuous movement.

I snap out of it and begin the process of opening my hands. One frozen, painful, useless knuckle at a time. Quickly realizing I need back up, I give myself a brief pep talk and will myself to roll over and reach for the heating pad. I’ll figure out how to grab it with these worthless nubs when I get there.

After three tries, I bite my lip and ignore the excruciating pain radiating from my neck, to my shoulder, to my elbow and landing at a jolting shock down into my wrist. I manage to nudge the heating pad down to my stomach and wrap it around my hands.

After thirty minutes of determination and mind over matter, I’ve managed to get my hands at least resembling flat. I will myself to sit up even though my knees feel like cracked porcelain. When I stand I realize my ankles are far worse off.

An epsom salt bath is clearly my only shot at making it into the real world today.

Off I hobble, to the bath where I stare at the faucet. Turning it looks like an impossible feat, but it must be done. I will myself to do so which suddenly feels comparable to placing my hands in a blender.

Got it. Thank God, I hear myself say aloud.

I turn to get the epsom salt. I decide not to give my mind enough time to evaluate the situation. I spontaneously go in for the kill as if I can beat my mind to the task before it has a chance to set all of my internal alarms off.

My body laughs in my face. My mind taunts me.

No matter how hard I try, the ziplock seal is far too strong for such a meek grip.

Hot water itself will have to do.

Two hours later, bathed, dressed, as ready as I’ll ever be for the day, I enter the real world.

“Hello, how are you this morning?”, she asks.

I force a smile. “I’m great, how are you?”

---

Rheumatoid Arthritis is what you’d find at the top of my medical charts. Diagnosed at 22 years old after about a year of ignoring all of the signs and symptoms.

Now, nearly a decade of battling everything that comes with it; the shocking, depressing, daunting diagnosis. The daily struggles of finding the courage, strength, and mental toughness to push through every day life, engulfed in chronic pain. A rapidly deteriorating body. Attempting to maintain a positive outlook… has been trying to say the least.

Day in and day out, I do it. For my amazing husband who supports me and loves me and cares for me unconditionally. For my  little girl who I expect to take life by the horns. To never back down no matter what life throws at her. She’ll know it’s always possible to overcome, because I do. For my mom, now that I’m blessed with the understanding of how so very much a mother feels her child’s pain. And because my siblings are the kind of people who are worth fighting for.

RA is humbling. It makes you appreciate small feats and realize, ironically… things could always be worse.

It forces even the most independent to ask for help.

To those of you who battle with maintaining a healthy body and mind: I think of you often. I pray for you daily. You are not alone. Focus on what you do have… it’s the only way to beat the unrelenting reminders of what you don’t.

We walk in like we own the place, because at 21 we figure we spend enough time here to call it home. The owner promised free drinks if we fill his place up with girls so we belly up to the bar and order a round of vodka crans.

As we sit and gossip and contemplate our next move, a group of guys walks in with some older women. I recognize most of their faces. Growing up in a small town, there isn’t a whole lot of people who live here I haven’t seen at some point, even if it was just in line at the local grocery store.

One face, though, catches my eye instantly. I know his name, but we’ve never met. I’ve heard he’s The Most Eligible Bachelor in town… which probably means he’s full of himself. Good thing my girls and I have made a pact to stay single all summer, because he’s cute, really cute, but he’s older and, like I said, probably full of himself.

So, I decide to play coy for now. We order another few free rounds and catch up with a couple of the guys in the group who we play volleyball with on Sundays.

“Is Joe single?” I hear my friend ask one of his friends.

Damn it, she’s interested in him too.

Oh well, probably for the best… he looks like trouble. “Let’s go introduce ourselves…” she says with a wry smile and a side eye shot in his direction.

“Let’s do it.” I hear myself say as I realize I’m already to my feet.

As we push through the flock of older women to get to the two guys in the middle I suddenly realize I’m experiencing a rush of victory as if I’ve just captured the flag. The feeling quickly vanishes when I realize her beauty has caught his eye… as well as his friend’s.

Guess that settles that.

We convince them to go bar hopping with us, albeit we have a whopping three bars here.

As the night goes on I slowly realize his eyes have drifted from hers to mine. Seems he’s also noticed we have a lot in common. I decide to keep pushing the feelings of instant connection back. He’s a player, I think to myself. Don’t fall for it, I tell myself.

And suddenly, I’ve been pulled into the ally, wrapped in a man’s arms, lips locked.

As we walk out of the ally, laughing, he grabs my hand. The minute our palms touch, I know. This is different. A feeling so powerful I can’t convince myself otherwise no matter how hard I try.

It’s like I’ve come home.

---

I met my husband when I was 21 years old… he was 36.

I know what you’re thinking, because I would have thought the same thing. So, I don’t blame you for thinking it.

But, if you’ve read the entries of this blog leading up to this one, you know that by the young age of 21, I’d already experienced a lot of life.

I didn’t intend on falling in love that summer. Quite the contrary actually, but isn’t that the funny thing about love… seems to find you when you’re least expecting it.

And, while I try to convince you of believing in such unusual, unbelievable things… I can promise you; the moment we touched hands, I knew. He was made for me and I for him. I knew it was crazy… but I knew it was true.

Our relationship developed slowly that summer. As I was still trying my best to honor a pact I made with my friends. A pact intended to keep us from falling in love any time soon… so I honored the pact and didn’t admit to myself, or anyone else, that I was in love with him until Fall came.

The next Fall brought marriage.

Suddenly I hear the heart rate on the monitor drop. Oh my god, what is happening? The nurses rush in and have me flip onto my hands and knees. I see the surprise in their eyes when I can actually manage it by myself considering I have had an epidural. They’re all speaking amongst each other using terms I find completely foreign. I’m not sure if that’s because all I can focus on is the pace of the heart monitor’s beep or if they’re actually using a different language, but I do know I heard “emergency c-section”.

This term doesn’t worry me due to the potentially dangerous situation it puts me in, but because of the clearly dire situation my unborn child is in.

Wait, I think the heart rate is leveling back out. It is. The nurses say it is too. Thank God.

I manage to return to my back, slowly, as not to disrupt the heart beat again. The nurses feel comfortable leaving me and assure me nothing will progress until tomorrow. Try to get some rest, they say.

I lie there, trying to sleep, but the pain and obsession over that heart monitor make it nearly impossible.

I finally start to doze off from the unrelenting exhaustion when I realize the intermittent pains are becoming less intermittent. My mom recognizes the situation and rushes for the nurse. When they return I know it’s time.

After just 15 minutes of pushing, at 10:57 p.m. I hear your cry and I hear you, my sweet angel, are a girl.  The pain is instantly gone.

As you’re placed on my chest I can’t help but be overwhelmed with the kind of joy only a mother holding her newborn child could ever possibly experience. Our connection is instant. You look straight up at me and I can see my love for you is returned tenfold.

I have never felt so whole, so important, so at peace, so proud or so loved in my entire life.

I finally manage to peel my eyes off of you and see your daddy, your grandma, and the words 19 inches, 5 pounds, 5 ounces on the incubator at the foot of my bed.

A miracle.

---

On July 25, 2012 my daughter, Siena Brynn, was born.

Over a year of countless miscarriages, obstacles, and disappointments finally brought us our blessing.  A positive pregnancy test on my husband’s birthday. And, it actually stuck.

She came three weeks early, more beautiful than I could have ever imagined. Exuding sweetness, a calm demeanor, and perfectly healthy everything.

At around 7 a.m. I woke to my broken water and struggled through contractions and complications with my epidural as the day progressed. After 12 hours of a lack of fluid in her environment she began getting twisted up in her umbilical cord. Causing petrifying periodic drops in her heart rate.

I’ve battled Rheumatoid Arthritis for nearly my entire adult life. And, complications RA causes ensued acceptance that birthing my own child was not going to ever happen for me.

Siena and I beat the odds together. I hope our story gives women everywhere hope. Because, miracles really do come true.

P.S.

My late father was born in 1955 and I was a daddy’s girl. Because of our bond, I know he would not have missed the most important day of my life for anything, not even heaven. And when I looked up at the incubator in front of me and saw her length and weight. I knew, he helped make it all happen and I’ve rarely experienced such magical moments in my life.

So, thanks Dad. Because I noticed and, because, I appreciate you.

I’m awakened out of a dead sleep. Disoriented by the realization I am not in my own bedroom. Through the near pitch-black darkness I recognize the backrest of the love-seat as my ceiling, the emptied seat of the couch as the wall to my left and the propped couch cushions making up the wall to my right.

Lying there in my own section of the fort my cousins, step brother, and I built, I wonder why my heart and arm hairs are equally electrified by nervous energy within the safety of my own living room.

My mind searches for any trace of a nightmare that could have caused such panic, but comes up short. I try to calm my breathing and my thoughts… but my internal alarm is only getting louder.

Suddenly I realize why.

I see a male figure crawling through the sliver of an opening in the hanging blankets that are my makeshift doorway. I can hear my step brother’s sleepy breathing through the cushion to my right so I know it is not him.

My mind starts racing through all of the other possibilities.

When he is less than half way into what was once my own little safe-haven turned hell in an instant… I recognize his distinct smell… like stale saliva on a thumb.

I know him. And in the moment I make a last ditch, desperate effort to assure myself there’s no reason to panic… but truth be told, my instincts clearly know better.

Remaining optimistic I ignore my intuition and fight the urge to call out. Instead, I play dead. I decide to lie there, stiff as a board, legs clenched tightly together, discreetly trying to elbow my step brother through the cushions between us. I beg, silently, over and over and over for him to please, please, please wake up and make his conscious mind be known.

He does not.

In that same moment I realize my tiny child legs are much too weak for the ravish of a beast. So I move to Plan B.

I try to roll to my side, now clawing at anything surrounding me that I can gain leverage from. I am repetitively forced to accept that I am the prey and am far too small to win this battle.

Suddenly, I begin to feel something my nine year old brain concludes to be a foot between my legs. As I’m wondering why someone would want to forcefully shove their foot into my privates I hear my teenage brother come home to his seemingly warm, safe, sleepy house.

My relief is almost instantly demolished when the aggressive intermittent rocking continues. My mind escapes to a beach where I am trapped in the surf trying to break free of the powerful crashing waves against my tiny body. I am so entrenched in this vision I have lost my breath as if I’m really drowning, the sand seems to be scraping away at my insides, and I feel an overwhelming sense of doom like something within me is dying.

I snap out of it from the excruciating pain.

Within the transition, I muster the courage to scream. I can feel my face strain, my mouth open… but nothing comes out.

Finally, after what seems like days and fleeting seconds all at once… he’s gone.

I lie there wondering if this is somehow the nightmare I woke to just moments ago. Was it real? I reach down… it was real.

I wait for any sign that it’s safe to escape, becoming more and more exhausted by the tense body I find myself sitting in. Finally, I believe he’s fallen asleep.

I inch my way out of the fort until my body is half way free. I decide to make a run for it. Across the room, up the stairs to the safety of my big brother’s arms.

Before I can even finish telling him what happened he is at my mom’s locked bedroom door banging and banging and banging and banging for what feels like a lifetime as I sit across the hall in my bedroom wishing I’d just slept in my own bed.

Finally she opens the door and listens to my brother’s retelling of what is now a pivotal part of My Story.

---

I was nine years old when my cousin raped me in my own home with four other family members sleeping within feet of me. Ensuing years feeling guilty for letting it happen, for giving him the impression he would get away with it, and for whatever I did that made him want to do it to me in the first place. I also went through periods of not only being angry at myself for not killing him, but being angry at those around me for not killing him either… or, at the very least, recognizing they needed to protect me from him.

Looking back over the past 20 years since that evening, I can pinpoint specific life decisions, boughts of depression, and whatever it is that makes a victim be known to other predators due solely from this monumental life-altering experience.

Now that I am a mother of a precious, vulnerable, innocent little girl I’ve regained my strength. I’ve nurtured my dignity and self worth. I’ve realized none of it was ever my fault or anyone else who loved me for that matter.

I had to learn a very hard lesson at a much too young age. But, because of my experience my daughter has someone that much more equipped to protect her. And for that, I will forever be grateful.

For all the women and mothers out there; trust your instincts. Anyone offended by your protective and preventative measures… well, you were probably right to take those actions.

For anyone reading this who has gone through anything similar; you are not a victim. You are a survivor. Whoever harmed you took enough away from you, don’t let them take anything more.

My eyes snap open with the excitement only a purely innocent, carefree child can experience. All I can see out of my bedroom window from where my head lie on my pillow is the bare tree tops engulfed by the foggy November sky, so cold its bright white essence is nearly blinding to my unadjusted morning eyes.

I kick off the covers and leap to my feet in one fell swoop. I give the mattress two excited jumps before I hop to the ground and grab socks for my cold feet. I double check the calendar near my bedroom door… Yes! Just four more days, I’m so excit…wait… I hear voices. That’s odd, I’m usually one of the first to wake. Oh well, more people to share my countdown with!

I swing my bedroom door open and bound down the hallway when suddenly I’m hit with the unexpected, blunt force of a night train.

Somehow I just know.

I gather my bearings enough to understand the crying faces in my living room are all familiar, but the situation is foreign. Suddenly I realize I’m praying to a God I’ve never prayed to before. Begging is more accurate.

As I take role in my head for the third time desperate for Daddy to appear I see Mommy coming towards me. She swoops me up and sits me on the couch between her and my distraught brothers. I can see she’s trying to tell me something, but I can’t hear her words over my own desperate internal screaming. Please, please, please walk through the front door, Daddy. So everyone can stop crying and we can tell them it’s only four more days until my birthday.

“Daddy isn’t ever coming home again is he, Mommy?” I hear myself say. She shakes her head and all I can hear is my heart breaking.

---

On November 5, 1994 Joel C. Garrett II passed out at the wheel in the wee hours of the morning. Thinking he’d slept off a night of drinking with his boss. He left behind a wife and four children; three teenage boys and one baby girl.

As we all know, whether it be positive or negative, daddy’s have an influential role in every little girl’s life, especially daddy’s little girls. I was four days shy of my seventh birthday and instantly a lifetime short of a daddy. And, although, I only have a handful of memories with him, I can say with complete confidence he is a huge part of who I am today. Because, he instilled the value of hard work, the importance of loyalty, unconditional love. I spent the first seven years of my life feeling like the most beautiful, special girl in the entire world. He not only told me those thing, but showed me every day.

This was the first of many sledgehammer blows to my innocence yet to come.

My heart is racing. I can hardly catch my breath. The rush of adrenaline is nearly explosive. I manage to muster the courage to peek over the log and instantly hear “WHAP”! Suddenly all I can see is red. I swipe my eyes and look down at my tiny hand. Why am I bleeding? And why is there so much blood?

I look back up from my hand and realize both of my brothers are racing toward me. They have an alarming amount of fear in their eyes. I’m so shocked and confused I can’t even cry. One of them swoops me up and now we’re running. I’m bouncing around in his arms like a rag doll and, finally, the tears come.

We don’t even get across the bridge connecting the woods to our backyard when I hear my dad running toward us. I suddenly realize I’ve been screaming.

He demands to know what happened to my face, where the blood is coming from. My brothers are trying to tell him the neighbor hit me with a rock while he’s frantically trying to clean me up enough to find the source. As he wipes the blood from my vision I can see his fear turning to rage.

Once I’ve been bandaged Dad piles us in the truck. He puts me in the middle right next to him straddling the stick shift even though my brothers have jumped in the bed of the truck leaving the passenger seat vacant. Gravel and dust surround us as Dad hammers the gas peddle in reverse out of the driveway. I realize he’s going to make even with the neighbor. My little brain also wonders why driving there is remarkably longer than walking through the woods. Dad says something about a flying crow, which confuses me even more, but suddenly we hit gravel again.

Everyone is already out of the house. They must have heard Dad’s rage getting closer.

The truck stops abruptly and dad jumps out ordering me to stay in the truck. I see my brothers hop out and follow his lead straight to the man of the house.

I’m distracted by whimpering and realize there’s a boy my brother’s age crying. He looks like he’s been hit. I recognize him. He’s the last thing I saw before the red.

Dad is yelling at the neighbor man demanding whoever hit me with the rock be disciplined. Then, I watch dad notice the whimpering kid too. He sees what I see… an eye for an eye.

Next thing I know Dad appears to be calmly walking toward the man. “WHAP”, again, all I see is red, but this time it’s not running down my face.

Dad turns around and calmly walks back to the truck. On the drive home all I can think is how mad Mom will be that Dad did that. He must have heard my thoughts, because he looked down at me, straight in the eyes and said, “Don’t tell Mom.”

---

I must have been four or five years old when this happened. It’s my first memory of feeling protected, safe, adored, important, loved… albeit amidst pain, fear, & chaos.

30 years of life has reminded me over and over again how thoroughly soul changing and heart altering this moment was. It happened in an instant and lasted a lifetime.

My dad passed away just a couple short years after this. Due to a lack of years with him, I took this memory with me and used it as a foundation. Like what “protection” and “love” meant to me. Valuing loyalty above all else, protecting your family at any cost. I also spent many years believing most of the greatest acts of love are encompassed by chaos. But in the deepest depths of this memory, I believe my heart learned what it is to be kind, to do the right thing even when you have to put your own feelings aside, to be compassionate.

I still have the scar on my brow. To the boy who hit me that day, I forgave you the moment I saw you crying. I hope your childhood was better than what I imagine it to be. And, if not, I hope you found your way out to bigger and better places.