Happy Mother’s Day, 2013

I think there’s a quote out there somewhere like this but I’ve often thought this myself.   I wonder if mothers sometimes think to themselves, “I had all these plans for my kids.  I bore them and raised them and sacrificed for them so they could grow up to be this and that and to make all these fabulous dreams come true…and then they go mess everything up by living their own lives.”  Ha.

We are often both our mother’s worst fear and greatest hope at the same time.  We hate to fail, to hurt, to stumble… because our mothers are so close to us and in us that we cause them our pain.

No easy gig, being a mom.  It’s hard to tame the Spring breeze, to quiet the magic of the morning sun rising…It’s hard to take the broadest night sky full of the countless stars and planets….and get it to sit still for one blasted minute while you get its arms through the arm holes and get its hair combed.

To every true mother, their child is every ounce of who they are topped with every grand imagination of who they once might have been.  Their kids are living, breathing legacies which echo back with soft comfort for the million and one dinners of scraps on abandoned plates, the sore backs from unforgiving bleachers, the socks on the floor and the homework reminders.  

Their kids are miracles with dirty ankles.  Validation of every sacrifice they never fussed to count. 

Being a mother is a tough job.  There are no raises.  No promotions except maybe to “Grand” mother one day.  The “Grand” mother promotion seems to get you the same love and enjoyment with fewer frustrations and heartbreaks. 

But being a Mother is a job.   A tough one.  Though some enter lightly, no good ones ever emerge without some battle scars along the way.   Too often kids don’t mature quickly enough.  They don’t realize right away.  They don’t stop long enough to even consider.

My hope for you this Mother’s Day is that you will enjoy your child’s awakening-whether they are young enough still to watch them so sweetly sleep or they are old enough for it to dawn on them just what a fabulous woman you are….

May you be gifted with a child’s awakening, after you sleep in for once.   

Have a great weekend, Moms.

 

Allow The Dream To Change

A good ten years ago or so, I was really hooked on this dream of building a log cabin in the woods somewhere.  Maybe in the beautiful Upper Peninsula of Michigan.  With a lake in the front yard and a fire pit outside and a big stone fireplace inside.  I’d have dogs and cats and I’d spend my time writing fabulous novels…

I just bought a condo in a residential section of a typical American city and there’s not a log or a fire pit or a stone fireplace.  No dogs, logs, frogs, nothing.  The cats are coming Friday.

And I caught myself thanking God that my dream had come true.   I was surprised.   I hadn’t realized.

The dream had changed.

I still get emails from the companies that I had contacted ten years ago.   They advertise deals on all sorts of beautiful log homes.  They can design them and bring them and build them.  Heck, I can even build my own.

But I am home now.  I am entirely happy.  Delighted and grateful.

The dream has changed.

I look at my life, now inching toward fifty (inching, not leaping), and I realize that each decade has been a life of its own.  There was the school and partying and coaching and working in my twenties.  There was the brain injury and writing my book and traveling to give speeches and starting to take care of my parents in my thirties.  There has been the goodbyes to my caregiving years and new love and a niece and a nephew and new jobs and a move in my forties….

As we change, so do our dreams.  We have to anticipate that and welcome it and embrace it.    New dreams mean the anticipation and expectation of new life and new adventures.

Allow the dream to change.

I can think of a handful of people I know who continue to chase a years-old dream long after it appears to have voted itself invalid, obsolete, awkward…

There is a fine line between respecting someone for continuing to hold onto a dream and hoping they come to realize that maybe they are ripe for a new dream.

I am not smart enough to know everyone’s place.  Nor is it my place to judge anyone’s dreams.

But I think it’s important to give ourselves permission to go in another direction without having to brow-beat ourselves as failures.   I think it’s important to say, “I have a new dream” and to enjoy the excitement that chasing it can provide.

Life is all about changing course, plotting new courses, meeting new people and opportunities, revealing and developing new facets to our shiny selves.

New dreams don’t mean old failures.  New dreams mean the open door to new successes.

“All he ever wanted to do….”

I’ve heard that phrase hundreds of times and, when that dream is realized, it’s a wonderful celebration of a sizeable investment.

But when the dream doesn’t work out….

There is something very true about the saying, “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.”

People who “fail” to realize that one great dream have often suffered personally in ways that are frightening and even dangerous.

Allow the dream to change or, at the very least, set that big one aside and give it a rest for a while.  Come back to it in a year and see if it still glows.

Even better yet, dream more than one dream.

I still dream of writing marvelous novels from a glorious log home in Michigan’s U.P.

But now it is going to be my second home. 

We have to give tomorrow credit.  Yes, yesterday has her street cred because we’ve known her and we’ve gotten to a place where we depend on her for a lot of things.   Fond memories, experience, perspective….

But yesterday also can bring her baggage.  She can bring the weight of expectations and the memory of bad outcomes, regrets and poor decisions.  She can remind us of disappointments and heartbreaks which can make us gun-shy when it comes to dreaming of new love and new jobs and new friends and new adventures and new dreams.

Tomorrow is trigger-happy.  She is coming out guns-a-blazin’ and she is cocky and confident and fearless.

Get to know her too.

When I ask people how they are doing and they respond, “Living the dream,” we both kind of chuckle and it is understood that they are working to pay bills and meeting their obligations and doing what they need to do to stay afloat.

Are you living the dream?

I almost giggle when I say it or write it or think it to myself:

I AM!!!

I am living in a condo that nobody would confuse as a palace or a log home on the lake.  I am driving a car that is now 16 years old.   One of my jobs pays 8 dollars an hour.  I don’t talk right all the time.  I don’t remember right all the time.  I don’t walk right all the time.   And I won’t even tell you what size I’m wearing these days.

But I am talking and walking and remembering and working and driving and I have a home and clothes, regardless of the size.   I am loving and laughing and figuring and dancing and choosing and enjoying all the gifts around me shared by God and by talented people and beautiful animals.

I am living the dream.

Please allow the dream to change.  Please set a place at the table for tomorrow.   Don’t let yesterday take up all the space and eat all the rolls and desserts.

If you have 60 years to live, seventy, eighty….How many dreams can you dream?  There’s gotta be more room than just for one.

Allow the dream to change.   Allow yourself to dare dream a different tomorrow.   Maybe just for fun.  Maybe for all the fun in the world.

Hang the dream catchers by the dozens and choose to rock THIS life.   THIS day.  THIS tomorrow.

You know I am cheering for you guys!!!!!

What Does It Mean To Survive?

We hear the word all the time.  In this brain injury community, especially, we toss it around and heap it and don it.    Survive.  Survivors.  TBI survivors….

I was wondering how it is that so many of us feel so blessed and gifted of this life after injury while so many feel so cursed and struck down.

Is it simply a matter of severity of injury?

I think part of it, at least, has to do with how we view what it means to survive.  What our own definition of it is and how that evolves over time.

Think of your own situation…What words and phrases come to mind when you think about surviving TBI?

I hear from so many survivors and, for many, the term “survived” is personalized, surrounded by and thrust into a tangled mess of phrases that include, “Got stuck with,” “End up dealing with,” “I lost…,” “I can no longer….,”  “I don’t have…..,”

Perhaps it is our personalized definition of the word which plants the seeds for our recoveries, successful or not.   Perhaps it is how we define what has happened to us that sets the tone for how the rest of our lives will be.

I think two things are important regarding this:   One, it’s knowing and searching and being aware of how we have defined our survival.   And two, it’s seeking to redefine it and to help sculpt its meaning over time.

A definition, by its very nature, is the answer to the simple question, “What is it?”

I’m sure most of us have a similar definition of brain injury at the beginning.  What is it?  It is scary.  It is painful.  It is life-changing.  It is horrific.  It is unfair.  It is all-consuming.  It is confusing.  It is and it is and it is, a thousand times over.

But what is it now?

What is it six months later?  A year later?  Five?

How does your definition of surviving change and how have you sought to change it?

I close my eyes and picture the word “survive.”  While I can recall the words I first associated with my injury, I no longer feel the emotions attached to those words.

Instead, the words and feelings and phrases which come to me now are:

To emerge.

To shed.

To transform.

To blossom.

To change.

To reach.

To improve.

To prioritize.

To sift.

To reveal.

To love clearly.

For me, to have survived, is to have been given a gift greater than any I could have imagined before I brushed past Death.

I don’t simply wear “Survivor” around my neck like the anchor of some unjust sentence.

I celebrate it.  I dance with it.  I giggle with it.   I drink umbrella drinks with it.  I pull it near and hold it close.  I dust it and clean it and polish it.

What do you do with your survival?

I’ve had seventeen years to practice and, granted, to survive does not mean to recover from all of our symptoms.

Recover.  Heal.

We can enjoy those things, even with symptoms that refuse to leave.  Refuse to flee.

Today my legs started doing their silly “I have no bones” thing around 2 o’ clock.   I came home and napped.  I gave the napping no permission.  I did not invite it.

It came and swallowed me up and sat on me.

I napped.

But I don’t require all the symptoms to heal in order to define myself as recovered.

It is the changing definition of survival.  Of recovering.  Of living.

I have survived many things.   I survived a serious carbon monoxide scare as a kid.  Sexual abuse.  My parents’ many strokes and their deaths.  Losing my house and my perfect credit.  My catering career.

There was that drunk driver who rear-ended me and that breast mass and that near-miss in the intersection on vacation.

There was that abusive relationship and that statistics class in college and that horrible bout with food poisoning.  There was the bad hair of the 80s.  Double pneumonia.  That adrenal gland tumor and every time Michigan loses to Michigan State or Ohio State or Notre Dame.

I survived them all.

What have you survived?  Brain injury.  Divorce, perhaps.  A medical scare.  A lost job.  A car accident.  An abusive spouse.  A felony conviction.  A hazing.  Bullying.  Lonliness.  Desperation.   Depression.  A broken heart.

Life and living is the very definition of surviving.  It is what the living do.

We survive.

In the absence of survival comes our death and so, when we survive, it is not the dreaded anchor around our necks.  It is not some awful curse and sentence.

It is the opportunity to live.   And to live better.

To put a day or seventeen years between us and the things that we survive.

To embrace the emergence of transformed selves.

To come through.

To come out of.

To emerge.

Definitions reflect that particular moment when something is described and characterized.

Definitions are meant to change.  Able to change.

For the brain injured, begging to change.

What does it mean to you to have survived?

Recognize The Symptoms

I recently moved.  I was in the moving process from Thanksgiving to my birthday in January.   Through Thanksgiving and Christmas and over New Years and until the movers showed up on the morning of my birthday.

It’s been quite a process.

Those of you with brain injuries will understand just how much of a mental circus moving is when you aren’t cognitively firing on all cylindars.  When you remove the very things that keep us efficient (routines and familiar confines), it’s not a huge leap to unglued.

Closing and packing and ordering up utilties and new insurances….changing addresses and mailing in and mailing out….scheduling helpful friends who paint and fix walls and plumbing and cut access panels…replacing locks and waiting on deliveries and inspections and making lists and amending lists and losing lists and starting new lists….

For six weeks I lived between two places.  For the brain injured, a lovely invitation to disaster….

My purse soon proved ridiculously ill-equipped for the task of keeping paperwork and more paperwork and two sets of everything from medicines and tooth brushes and forms to fill out and forms to mail.

I started carrying some of it in a bag.  Just a normal grocery bag.  Now I had a purse and a bag.

Well, the bag then only held the stuff from the old house and not the new house so I started carrying another bag to keep all the paperwork from the closing, home warranty info, etc.   Now I had a purse and two bags.

My friend Linda lives just nearby so I started keeping some things there.  Nice things that I needed for occasions between the move.   I started puttiing my jewelry and watches and some odds and ends into the bag for her house.

Now I had a purse and three bags.  When that became too much, I gave up the purse.  Now I had three bags.

Crazy as I felt and overwhelmed and out of sorts with all the details and demands, it never even raised an eyebrow when, one day, a small box occurred to me.  It was a nice sturdy box and the weather was lousy so I put some of my things in the box.

Three bags and a box.

By the next week the box was too small and so I got a slightly bigger box.

Three bags and two boxes.

Now mind you, I’m carrying these from house to house to Linda’s and to work and back and forth and inside and out.

Linda saw that I was inching ever closer to undone and so she bought me a tote.  She told me I could empty all of my things into this nice new tote.

Now I carried my two boxes and three bags in a tote.

One morning she was going to drive me to my niece’s birthday party.  I needed a bag again for my outfit and of course my tote with the two boxes and three bags.  I stood in her doorway with my tote with three bags and two boxes and my new bag with my better outfit in it and I held up my one boot and dumped it upside down.  Out came my jewelry.

Three bags and two boxes in my tote bag plus my outfit bag and now my boot bag.

Recognize the symptoms….

She gave me a hug and I cried.

Too often when we, as brain injured, dare to leap….dare to branch out…dare to dip our toes in the pool of “normal”, we end up with a tote, four bags, two boxes and a boot bag that holds our jewelry.

Change can be overwhelming.   Paralyzing.  New and unfamiliar come at us like asteroids and we flail at the flurry.

Sometimes it takes a while to realize that six bags, two boxes and a boot aren’t really the way to go.

When I started writing this blog, “Recognize The Symptoms” was going to be about recognizing when our lives, activities and situations trigger our brain injury symptoms.  To be aware of when we are getting out of our comfort zone and straying too far from where we know we are able.  But what I realized is that it’s more than that.

Thank God.

What feels more true to me, right now, is that maybe we need to recognize the symptoms of living too.  Of reaching.  Of growing.   Too.

Not just the symptoms which automatically tell us to stop right there and start retreating.  But maybe the symtoms which tell us, Ok, this might be new territory so be careful but it’s OK.  Keep going!!!!

Maybe we spend so much time being so keenly aware of when we are inching too close to “too much”  that we don’t allow ourselves some times to realize that we have grown enough to manage more, go further, reach higher….

Maybe six bags, two boxes and a boot are OK, after all.

Maybe we all need to accept, maybe better, INVITE our growing pains.  Maybe we need to welcome safe new steps out of the shelters that have kept our wits about us.

Maybe some times it’s OK if our wits get away. 

I now say with pride that moving is chaotic and stressful for any and every one.   Brain injury or not.  I moved.

The holidays can be chaotic and stressful for any and every one.  Brain injury or not.  I moved throughout three holidays.

Winter can be difficult and challenging for any and every one.  Brain injury or not.  I moved throughout three holidays and in the middle of winter.

It’s a wonder I was only carrying six bags and two boxes and a boot.   I’m surprised I didn’t show up with garment bags and bowling bags and sleeping bags and vacuum bags.

Recognize the symptoms.

Recognize the symptoms of life and of living.

I made it through because I knew Linda and others kept an eye out for me.  They were making sure I was safe.  And that’s the key.

Stretching our wings and taking new strides will always be great victories for those of us with brain injury.   As long as we have people around us who can recognize the symptoms too.

It’s a great feeling, writing to you in my new home.  I made it.  Bags and boxes and all.  I feel accomplished.  I feel rewarded.  I feel satisfied.  I feel flippin’ exhausted.  Ha.

I can look back and know that I did something that, for a long time, never even occurred to me as something I might try.  Something I might figure out and manage and devise and execute.

The house I left has a door in the kitchen.  On the inside of the door are marks which noted how tall my brothers and I were growing.

We need to remind ourselves that we keep growing.

That we might just be able to accomplish something that seemed impossible just a handful of wits ago.

Let’s keep testing our wings.  Those same wings that failed.  Those same wings that bent and broke and twisted.

Let’s keep checking to see if maybe those wings aren’t ready now to fly.  

The Mayans, Two Simple Words, Brain Injuries and Life

For many years, the date of December 21, 2012 hung there in the back of our collective consciousness.  Like gray hair and wrinkles and dreaded diseases and death itself, it reminded us that there is an end waiting.   Many of us worry over when we will die so it was kind of the Mayans to take away all the hand-wringing and just tell us when it would all be over.

I never believed that the world would end on December 21st.  I came across a show while channel surfing one night on the folks who take end-of-the-world or, at least, end-of-life-as-we-know-it threats to a whole new level.  As I watched them plan walking exits from their cities and rehearse family emergency strategies to survive natural disaster or man-made disaster, I was a little nervous…not knowing if they were the crazy ones or was I.  They have six months or even a year’s worth of food and bottled water and supplies to survive on.  I look around here and wonder if Tim Horton’s would still have power so I could get a hot cup of coffee in the wake of a disaster…

I thought of we brain injured that night when the world was supposed to end.   We bring to each event in our lives the only things we have:  perspective, experience, our own capacity and desire to learn, our support circle or lack thereof. 

When you suffer a brain injury, you are surrounded by a usual lack of experience.  A whole mountain of fear.   A lot of vague prognosis.  And, if you are like me, you have a whole bunch of people looking at you with wide eyes and saying, “Oh man, Kara, you’re f*cked.”

But, as is the case with everyone who woke up the day after the world was supposed to come to an end December 21st, you realize that you woke up.  The world didn’t end.

And neither did you.

Many lifetimes in one….

It’s been more than twenty years now since I heard my Mom’s voice.  A whole lifetime ago,  I often say.  I’m coming up on seventeen years ago since I was a caterer.   Thirty years ago since  I was in high school….

Lifetimes ago.

And so, when I get to that week after Christmas when the excitement and anticipation of the season has gone but the new year is not yet upon us, I find myself in that weird transition between chapters.

Some find that that week between Christmas and New Year’s last for years.  For a fist-full of reasons, we each write our own chapters and they are longer and they are shorter.

They are ours, after all.

I think one of our biggest problems is when we allow ourselves to believe that it’s all supposed to look the same, year after year.  We are lulled by our Christmastimes, granted.  We eat the same foods and shop for the same people and send out the same cards and heck, I even wear the same sweater.  Year after year.

So we’re tucked so warmly, comforted by familiarity, greeting the new year with a false sense of confidence and welcome. 

And then we’re just shocked and thrown sideways when that new year turns a page and we start reading and we can’t believe what is happening.  We didn’t want that person to die.  We didn’t want that partner to leave.  We didn’t want that job to end.  We didn’t want that law to pass.  We didn’t want that diagnosis.  We didn’t want those wrinkles or gray hairs or soft middles or bad credit or broken water pump or favorite TV show cancellation…

The Mayans didn’t have it wrong because they said our world would end on December 21st.  They had it wrong because our worlds, as we know them, end every day.

And THAT’S the hard part.  That’s the one that stings.

Because it means admitting that we don’t have power over near what we’d like to think we do.  Ask the parents in Connecticut with presents that never got opened.  Ask the families on the East Coast with no home to even return to. 

There is evidence everywhere.  All around us.  It’s not some new gimmick.  It’s not some exception.

It is life.

And so, as we embark on this fabulous New Year, this new chapter, this new adventure, the key word is new.   None of us can imagine exactly what 2013 has in store for us. 

We can plan and we can control and we can protect ourselves and we can pray….

But life gets in.   Life, with all her sharp elbows and trick plays.  All her faked punts and last-second shots to beat the buzzer. 

Life will take your father and gift you a daughter, all in the same week.  She will give you everything you dreamed of having, only to find out none of those things mattered by the time you acquired them.

Life will take and take and steal and grab and pinch and be cruel and painful and unfair.

And you’ll lament how quickly she flies by, wishing there was more of her to live.

At the end of the day, it’s more about…not how we squeeze to control and fight against her and all the events and circumstances she creates around us….But more about how we react and go on.  How we accept and adjust.  How we cling to and choose to be hopeful.  To transition from the warm comforts of Christmas to the cold, bright glare of a mysterious journey which promises nothing.

We didn’t all die on December 21st.  We didn’t all die the day we suffered our brain injuries.  We didn’t all die after all the surprising and heart-breaking things that have filled our lives.

We lived. 

And the impact of those two words…The reaction to those words…The size of them and the feel of them and the power of them….

Will color every New Year, every new day, every new breath that Life gifts us.  It will determine when we end chapters and start them and who we will choose to share them with.  It will empower us and feed us, enriching and lavishing upon us.

Or it will steal and deflate.  It will sap the color and extinguish the flames…

Thankfully, each one of us gets to decide.

Happy New Year, everyone.  I pray you will all find your own version of success and happiness and that you will know good health each step before you.  

 

 

Count The Moments Since

My Dad died right on Thanksgiving Day.   That’s just how it is.  We woke him up from a nap in order to get him changed.  We were excited because it was time for Thanksgiving dinner and we got him up to enjoy the pumpkin pie and mashed potatoes and turkey and stuffing.

But, as soon as we woke him, we knew his condition, just from breakfast, had deteriorated so rapidly that we had to rush him right to the hospital where he died hours later.

We can’t help but count the years since.  There have been five.

I’m a dates and numbers and anniversaries kind of gal.   Every December 13th I think of that first boy I dared kiss behind the curtains after our sixth grade choir concert.   I mark the days my brother and sister-in-law headed to Russia to pick up my nephew, and then my niece.   I recall the day I stood up in Patti and Ken’s wedding, the day my Mom showed my entire family my first bra…

Handfuls and handfuls of dates.

It’s the seventeenth anniversary of this and the fifth anniversary since that.  It’s twelve years here and twenty-four years there and seven months over there.

People have found me quirky.  Ha.

But what I’ve learned from all my counting and re-counting and re-visiting and recurring….all those moments and times and dates and years and events…

It is to count the moments since.

Not just the ones before.   Those are the easy ones.  We can remember how it was better before this happened or before this dear person had to pass.   Better before I lost my parents, lost dogs and cats, lost loves, lost my house, lost abilities to brain injury, lost all my finances, lost and lost and lost and lost….

The moments since have to be counted as well.  They have to be heard.  They represent an equal voice in the challenge to balance our lives.  To balance all that came before and after each event that changed us.   Each event that has written the chapters of our lives.

To tally the gains.

The moments before loss and before horrific change are there to boost us and warm us.  Sometimes taunt and poke us, too.  But they are more easily accessible because we tend to them with such great care.  We nurture them and protect them and cherish them.  We hold pictures of them.   We tell their stories.

We have to take as great a care for the moments since.

That is where Thanksgiving waits.

In perspective, in reflection, in the ways in which we choose to count the moments since.

It’s hard.   There’s no way around that.  I think of the people on the East Coast who suffered Super Storm Sandy and how much was lost.  How many without food and water and heat and the shelter that they had called home.

People died in that storm and the moments since have been filled with tears of devastation.   Fear, desperation, hopelessness.

My heart aches for them.

I was watching a documentary the other night on the Dust Bowl and the “Dirty Thirties.”   It was about the decade of severe drought in parts of the central plains in the U.S. that saw people battle Mother Nature in a way I don’t think any of us can really imagine.

It was the Great Depression.   People were suffering in the best of circumstances, anyhow.   And then along comes this perfect storm of fluke and chance and circumstance to create a ten-year stretch of unbelievable suffering.

They lost their crops, their savings, their belongings, their food supplies.  A hundred sand storms a year would drop literally feet of sand on their properties, covering everything and killing everything.   Some have said it was like living in the Sahara desert for ten years.

People died from breathing in all that sand.  Families lost their homes when they could not make any money to keep food in their kids’ bellies.  There was one family with ten kids who ended up living in a chicken coop after losing everything.

Families would be facing the winters coming with no money and no food and no idea of how they were going to survive.

Year after year.

One personal story about that time came from a woman, so much older now, sitting in a beautiful outfit and speaking to the camera.   She told of her little brother who had eaten two dimes and their family was so desperate that her mother waited for the brother to poop out those dimes so she could reclaim them and buy bread.

I was struck by the woman herself, dressed in clothes she could not afford, could not even dream of, then.  Her hair all done up and makeup on.  Colors vibrant against the brown landscape of her youth.

The moments since.

Thanksgiving lies in one sentence.   One small, seemingly modest change to the language of our perspective.

It goes from, “It’s been sixteen years since I lost everything to brain injury….”  to, “It’s been sixteen years since I survived a brain injury that very easily could have killed me.”

And there is Thanksgiving.

The ”moments since” will never be the same for those who have lost dear loved ones.  There is no “time heals all wounds” thing.

But, when we count the moments since, it gifts us a bounty.   Sometimes it inspires us to pick up again, to rejoin, to re-engage, because there have been so many moments since.   Sometimes it allows the pain to fall back, the sharpness of it to dull back in our minds and hearts.   Sometimes it allows us to move in some direction, putting time and space between us and the events which have staggered us.

They matter, the moments since.

I don’t believe, for a second, they are simply to suffer and endure and to await the end of our time here.  The end of our moments.  I think they have more in store than that.

Thanksgiving is not just a day.   It is not just a turkey dinner.   Not just a football game or a bad sweater or an afternoon with relatives or a nap after three helpings of stuffing.

Thanksgiving is the breath of life.  The music that eventually fills the quiet of desperation.  It is the colorful outfit on a woman who only knew the lifeless brown of blowing sand on everything and in everything, all during her childhood.

It is in counting the moments since we survived.  Since we made it through.  Since we started a new chapter.  Since we changed paths.  Since we learned something.  Since we experienced love or the feeling of “having.”

It has been five years on Thanksgiving since my Dad died.   Five years now and I look around and now this moment tells me it is time to finally close that chapter and leave this house.  This house where I grew up.  This house where I returned again and again, in celebration and desperation.  This house where I lost my parents, where I spent so many years trying to hang onto something I didn’t realize had already gone.

The moments before cannot be changed.   They cannot be fixed or bettered or replaced.  They are frozen in the past.  They are unmoving and still.

But the moments since are full of life.  They are the ones with the chance.  The possibilities.  The fluidity of option and choice.   They are the ones that still breathe, still affect, still imprint.  They are not locked down with unchangeable sadness or guilt or regret.   They are the moments that we can use to embrace new, to appreciate the time we had with those lost, to recall starts and turns, to remember our lives before.

They are the pen in our hand.  They are the open door.  They are the keys to the locks.

Thanksgiving is a whole year.   A life time.   It is a language.  A choice.   A style.  A path.   A salve.

I wish us all Thanksgiving. Not because it comes every year anyway.  But because we invited it.  Because we sought it.  Because we chose it.

Because we made it come.

When Nothing Will Ever Be The Same

Sandy, you bitch!

I have been brought to tears on several occasions by the breath-taking coverage of Hurricane/Superstorm/Frankenstorm/Blizzard/Cyclone/N’Oereaster Sandy.   Whatever her name, she has left her mark and one that won’t be forgotten by an entire generation.

My heart aches for those, like too many before them, who awaken to a new normal that feels like a punch to the soul.

I was listening to one of the mayors plead for more of everything.  Her people don’t have enough fuel, enough food, enough water, enough sleep, enough warmth, enough assurance, enough dry footing, enough safety…..

Their world, as they knew it, has changed for good.   From the moments the rain started Monday evening, life would forever be referred to as before Sandy and after.

I find the timing of this horrendous crisis so compelling, a week out from our election.

Our country has been so divisive, so hateful.   So many of our people a driven, determined, defiant side to the same coin.   Relentless commercials, one after another, each the polar opposite of the one before it.  Each promising what the one before it screamed wrong, impossible, immoral or criminal.

And then along comes Sandy.

I couldn’t help but wonder if that family on the top of their roof, freezing and wet and desperate, asked the first-responders paddling down their street to save them, what political party they belong to.

I wonder if, when that pregnant woman who was in labor and  was being Med- Sledded down 7 floors of stairs in the dark having contractions thirty seconds apart, she politely refused the help of those not of her political preference.

I wonder if the parents, now relieved and horrified to be accepting donated clothes for their children because their house and their whole neighborhood burned down, made sure the clothes did not come from a kid of a different color, tax bracket, sexual orientation or religion as their own…

Why does it take a monster to reveal angels?  I guess it’s true that you need darkness in order to recognize what light is.

Why is it that our divisive governing bodies, who would disagree with the other side of the aisle over the color of the lawn, now are working together to ensure that the East Coast gets the help they need without red tape and tanglements?

Coming from one with such lousy memory capabilities, I’m looking around and realizing I’m not nearly the only one who can’t seem to recall things….

We’ve been in this moment before.

Why does it take such extreme circumstance for people to lay down their weapons against each other and, instead, extend their hands to whomever is in need?   Why does it take the blackness of night, the swell of a dark ocean, for us to help without first checking to read the labels?

When I donate money this week to the Red Cross, I’m not going to label it or earmark it for someone on the East Coast who shares my religious, moral or political beliefs.    I’m sending it with prayers and hope that it helps maybe buy a sandwich for someone now hungry, sitting with a blanket on in the ruins of their home.

Shame on us for not integrating the feelings and the lessons of those crisis that have come before this.  That, each time, we eventually return to the battling, hateful, bickering idiots on each side of the aisle of nonsense.

What Sandy reminds us is that at the end of the day, any day, there is nothing more important, more precious, than the opportunity to rise up.   Out of the water, out of the darkness, out of the cold, out of the snow, out of the ashes….

Just to survive.  Just to pull your family and pets and friends close again.   To feel their hearts beat warm against the chill.

To be alive.  To have shelter.  To enjoy food and clean water.  Warmth….

The rest of it simply piles up in splinters, in twisted unimaginable versions of yesterday.

And so then, when all seems lost…   When where we called home is gone.  Where we ate.  Where we slept.  Where we visited.  Where we returned.  Where we gathered.  Where we created families.  Where we worked.  Where we vacationed.  Where we felt safe….

When all that is gone…When good and right and light and warm seem a thousand miles away, both literally and figuratively…

We survive.  We help others survive.  We accept help and we give help.  We look around and see where there is need and we are good and willing family members, neighbors and members of society.  We do what we can with what we’ve got.  We try to make things better.  We help humans without condition.  We join hands, we open hearts, we start over, we start somewhere, we move forward, and we thank God for the simple chance…..

For all of you on the East Coast, feel the warmth of countless prayers.   From a nation, a world, humbled by your now.  Your new.

Thank you.   For amidst your unimaginable predicament, you have managed to inspire a nation to stop and recall what is right and what is light.

Real and generous and right and good and kind do not need the labels of the divisive.   They are too good for that.  They rise above such pettiness.   Let’s pray we all do.

For everyone there, my favorite quote:

Fight on, my merry men all, I’m a little wounded, but I am not slain; I will lay me down for to bleed a while.  Then I’ll rise and fight with you again.
- John Dryden

When nothing will ever be the same, maybe that is the moment when miracles happen….

Let’s Get That Ball Back (Clap, Clap, Clap, Clap, Clap, Clap)

It’s been thirty years since I played volleyball but I can still hear the fans in the stands during matches yelling, “Let’s get that ball back!” followed by six claps.   Makes me smile.

If you are a fan of American football, there is nothing worse than being tied or behind in the waning minutes of a game and the other team is marching down the field.  Your defense keeps giving up first downs and the clock keeps ticking.

You keep thinking to yourself, “Just get that ball back.”

You just want to have some hope.   You just want a chance.

I believe with all my heart that, when we survived our traumatic brain injuries, the hope was given, not taken.

We didn’t lose hope.  We got the ball back.

With a month before our Presidential election in the United States, much is made about jobs and joblessness, unemployment rates and stories of people out of work for months, even years.

It’s time to get the ball back.

I saw a commercial last night that said there are more than three million available jobs in the U.S. and yet the unemployment numbers continue to soar.   Why?

Because we need different skills.

There is such a clear parallel to me between the brain injured and long-unemployed in terms of how our perspectives affect us going forward.   Or not going forward, often.   We are so used to one thing.  One skill set.  One category.  One label.   When there are no jobs in our field or when we can no longer do what we once did, we consider ourselves on the sidelines hoping to get another chance.

We already have it.

We already have the ball.

I watched a movie the other night where the husband had been out of work for a year and they were barely hanging on.   A job opening came up and he refused to pursue it because he considered it beneath him.   Because the skill set was rusty and packed away since college.  Because he was used to a certain level of income, respect, status.

He refused to see that his wife was working two jobs that were “below” her level of education.   He refused to see that a little help, any help, would be better than nothing at all.

He refused to see that the ball was in his hands.

Already.

In order for a car to operate, the ignition has to work and the engine has to work and the tires have to work and the steering wheel has to work.

It doesn’t matter if you are the prettiest serpintine belt on a car sitting rusting in the junk yard.

The bottom line is that everything has to get done and, if we believe that and understand that and embrace that, there are no jobs beneath anyone.

In an economy where so many are struggling, why are there three million jobs unfilled?   If all this election noise and buzz and promise and accusation are about the lack of jobs, how can there be 3 million jobs available?

Someone once taught me that, if I keep banging my head against the same wall, I have to change direction.   Simple as that.

Whether we are brain injured or unemployed, what good is a job that we cannot do any longer?  What good is a job that does no longer exist?

At last count, I’ve had five jobs this year.  Each different.  Each designed around my unique circumstances, abilities and interests.

They all serve me.  They all benefit me.  They all need to get done.  They all validate me.  They all reward me.

If ever there was a moment in our lifetimes, it is now that we must understand that there is nothing and no one below us.  There is nothing too meager or dismal, petty or menial to do.

When we understand that everything must get done in order for a world, a nation, a society, a community, a neighborhood, a family…to succeed, then we have the ability to accept gratefully the hope that surviving our injuries and getting up each morning provides.

We have the ball back.

It’s up to us to score.

When everything must get done, let us be grateful for any part of it that we can do.   For any contribution that we can make to our families, our communities, this world we live in.

Let’s awaken our brains and flex our muscles and delight our families and surprise our friends.  Let’s fill those three million job vacancies.    Let’s fill them with skills we have the ability to learn.  Let’s fill them with the open minds and welcoming hearts of the hungry.   The hungry for meaning and fulfillment and the feeling of importance.

At some point we have to stop waiting to be saved.  Waiting to be healed.  Waiting to be taken care of.  Waiting to be given to.  Waiting to return to better times.

The months keep flying by.

My niece and nephew are playing soccer and baseball now.  They have also played football and gymnastics and swimming and dance.

Like my five jobs, they may continue to try everything.  Do everything.   Join everything.

Or they might find something they are particularly good at and stick with that.

The point is, they have the ball.   They are embracing new and trying new and they are a lesson for all of us to remember when we were willing to be pliable, amenable and willing.

Every morning we wake up we get that ball back.  Every morning.  It’s up to us to find a way to march down the field.   We can run, we can pass, we can kick…there are a lot of ways to score.  But we have to realize we ARE the offense.  We ARE the ones who make the calls and no one else can score for us.

Let’s get that ball back, clap clap clap clap clap clap.   Time to put on the helmet and snap that chin strap.

See you in the morning.

Bring On The Steeple Chase!!!

As the Olympic Games in London begin to close, we relish the two weeks enjoyed of wonderful personal stories, fabulous performances, breath-taking finishes and heart-warming displays of sportsmanship.

These last two weeks we have found ourselves watching events uncommon to us, cheering for handball or trampoline or water polo or archery.   We’ve dragged ourselves away from our normal routines of baseball, football, hockey and basketball and, for the last two weeks, we have learned the languages of sports we’ve never before enjoyed.

Let’s not stop.

For the brain injured, for anyone needing to restart their lives after all of their normal has been stripped, the Olympics provide a serious, wonderful, hopeful dose of what is possible in each of us.

There have been countless stories of personal hardship and tragedy overcome in these games.  Athletes so determined to take their natural gifts and hone them, test them, improve them and celebrate them.

Life is no different.

You don’t see any members of the U.S. Women’s Gymnastics team setting in a volleyball match.   They aren’t riding any horses or throwing the discus.

You don’t see Michael Phelps jumping on the trampoline or rowing in the men’s 8 boating crew competition.

These athletes, like all of us need to do, found what they are good at and put their efforts and energies into that.  They built dreams around what they can do.  What they can succeed in.

Not what they can’t.

As we have proven to ourselves, these last two weeks, we CAN enjoy new things.  We CAN get excited about unfamiliar and uncommon events and interests.

We aren’t chained only to what was lost in our lives and what we can no longer do.

Bring on the Steeple Chase!

Let’s take the lessons offered by the Olympic Games and not wait another two years or four years to enjoy them again.

Let’s enjoy them every day.

Some of the most enjoyable moments in life are when we dream a dream, set a goal, work hard towards it, stand ourselves against others to see how we match up, compete and then shake the hands and congratulate the winners, whomever they are.

These last two weeks I cheered for a man with no legs who competed in the sprints.  I cheered for a man who came in last in rowing.  I cheered for a woman who held the hope of a needful nation on her shoulders.  I cheered for a woman who got injured before the Games and could not compete and chase her dream.

It doesn’t matter the country they were from.   Joy and heartbreak don’t wear colors.  When we recognize and identify with someone’s challenges, they become more like us, no matter where they are from.

What an outstanding world if we all fought fair.  If we worked hard with honor and respect and tried our best and looked into the eyes of winners, even those who have beaten us, and said, “Well done!”

And for the brain injured? For those of us, any of us, struggling to restart our lives….

That sprinter with no legs didn’t simply concede the Olympics and run in the Paralympics.   He refused to be constricted by his missing legs.  By others’ expectations or lack thereof.

He is living proof that the disabled, or differently-abled, can succeed against the “normal.”  Just as those athletes in the Paralympic Games are better athletes than 90 percent of “normal” people in any country and in any sport.  Only we define ourselves.  Only we build the bars on our windows.  Only we give away the keys to our cages.

Try the hurdles.  Try rowing.  Try beach volleyball.  Try to stand on a balance beam.

Every attempt to embrace and welcome different and uncommon is an opportunity for us to win medals in the games of our lives.

When we choose to pursue new….When we decide to pick up different….When we determine to attempt unusual, we are turning on the lights in our brains, we are filling our hearts and we are unleashing our souls-allowing them to soar.

Let’s cheer for each other, regardless of the uniform.  Let’s cheer those who do it right, who try their best, who work their tails off…

Let’s cheer good.   Let’s shake the hands of the winners, regardless of the colors they wear.   Let’s honor their accomplishments and celebrate their personal achievements.

Whether it’s on the high school ball field or at our offices or in our families, let’s stand as tall even without the podium. Let’s raise US.  Let’s raise our spirit and sense of sportsmanship.

Let’s get in the game!  Any game.  Let’s remember these athletes who work their whole lives for a ten-second race.  For a two-minute race.  For a three-hour match.

And let’s then dream for that ten seconds.  For that two minutes.  For that three hours.  Let’s dream ourselves.  Let’s imagine a better us.  A better life.  A life that sees us celebrating our personal victories.  Let’s dare to dream of great things.

At the end of our lives, and perhaps after we have passed them, we will look back and realize that the anchors we held still against were those we, ourselves, toseed over our sailing ship, stilling them.   That most of the battles we lost, or chose not to even dare fight, were first lost in our minds.  In our doubts and fears.

I thank you, Olympic Games, for another dear reminder of what I can be.  How I am becoming.  How I can change.

I’m going to work to keep the Olympics alive in my everyday.  In my heart.  In my mind.

Bring on the Steeple Chase!   You in?

What Is Your It?

We’ve all heard someone tell us, “Give it your best shot!” or, “Give it your best!” likely many times in our lives.   Common phrase.   Simple as such.   “It” represents whatever the conversation is about.  Whatever the specific moments invite.

I was watching a movie the other night on the life of Ayn Rand.   Because I have such a ridiculously-poor memory, I can’t remember if it was a phrase near the end or part of a closing song as they ran the credits….Whatever it was, there was a line where the woman stated that, “Love is not to be kept.  It is to be given away.”   I loved that.

I’m going to suggest that most of the best is given in a lifetime, not taken.   Love, effort, praise, forgiveness, intimacy, trust, respect, hugs, recipes, advice, traditions….

Perhaps it is not a question of how important the things we give.  But perhaps, more importantly, is the designation of the “it”.  It is the recipient of all of your best.   What is the target?  Where are you aiming?

What is your it?

I believe that, at the end of our lives,  those who know us will know, too, what our “it” was.   Our legacy, the things we affected, the people we touched…Our chapters will reveal what we chose.  What we prioritized.  What we gave our best to, whatever our best was then.

Maybe the most important thing to remember throughout our lives is to check the “it”.   Reassess the “it”.   Refresh the “it”.

If we look back ten years, twenty, maybe…We can see what the “it” was.   We can see, sometimes with sheepish regret, what we made our priority.  The recipient of our best shot, our best effort.

I think that some of life’s most difficult moments are when the “it” changes without our consent.  Without our choice.  Without our blessing.

Our lives are the story of what we designated the “it”.   After brain injury, too often we have to redefine our “it” because our whole blueprint has had coffee spilled on it.   Someone knocked the half-done puzzle onto the floor.   Pieces everywhere.

For those of us who have suffered traumatic brain injury, it may seem cruel of me to ask us for more.  We have lost a lot, after all.  There is so much missing now, for sure.

But the livers of lives have the opportunity to meet the demands of those we prioritize.  Those we seek.  Those we love.

What we must understand now is that the “it” can be anything we choose it to be, as long as “it” is not the life that no longer exists.

Most of us can give away things that brain trauma cannot touch, cannot damage, cannot take:  We can give love.  We can give hope.  We can give praise.  We can give effort.  We can give compassion.  We can give forgiveness.  We can give advice.  We can give time.

What else is there, really?

It’s up to us to choose now what the “it” is.  What the “its” are.   They may not be what we chose of them before we were hurt.  In many cases, that is a good thing.   But, if we choose carefully and thoughtfully, there is not a brain injury that is powerful enough to hold us.

What is your “it”?   To what now will you choose to give your best shot?

We can give everything to regret, to anger, to bitterness.  We can give everything to people who no longer exist in our lives, to jobs we no longer hold.   We can give all of our best to a life that no longer lives as it did.   And, in that case, we are cheating the one that breathes now, waiting.

What is your “it”?