My son broke his ankle the other day. Not that long ago, in 2012, I broke my heel, and had to spend 3 months with it elevated. To say it was traumatic takes it into a distance not available at the time. This was an unknowable, severe setback to my mobility and life, but of course as is my way, I spent a lot of energy in ignorance and denial and it took many of the weeks to understand the limitations and the most effective responses and adaptations. And I was lucky.
For a combination of reasons, I feel traumatized in the same way, responding in some of the same ways. My delayed response is typical for me...today I am in tears much more than last week or any time since the election. Only now am I feeling some of the deeper terrors and anxieties of that time. I read up online and see how rare my injury was, how debilitating, and I guess I'm glad I didn't know. It took me an entire month and the help of a dedicated friend to work up a plan for taking a bath...all I have is a clawfoot, a deep one. I was so unstable on crutches and painkillers I got a walker, which helped a lot but made me an instantly old lady. I was so emotionally vulnerable I emailed my whole family and lots of my friends with a series of TMI descriptions and details that did not gain me peace of mind but made me more vulnerable. Not that they didn't help me...I got lots of help, way more than I have given in return before or since. It is not an easy thing to see your people when they are compromised and need your patience and support, but my friends came through for me repeatedly and I am very grateful.
And of course with your child the emotional morass is deep and wide. He's an adult with a wife...he doesn't need his mom to sweep in with all my advice and the remains of my damage...this is not the same pain and not the same situation. I'd feel lucky if he follows a small portion of my advice. It's his ankle, his life, and he will have to learn the same hard lessons I learned, about asking for help, understanding what you don't know and how to operate within that. But I'm his Mom, and there is no terror as deep for me as thinking about damage to my child.
Because clearly with medical and physical issues, you don't know so much, and neither do the medical professionals you'd like to depend on. Everyone is constrained by their positions and worldviews...to the urgent care folks in the ice world of the PNW he was an ordinary client...tons of people fell down and hurt themselves. In my case you couldn't see the break in ordinary x-rays, as it was hidden in the complex structure of the foot. Fortunately there was one highly skilled doctor at Urgent Care who got out the book and persisted in training the technician on angles and anatomy until they could find the break. But no one thought to tell me how to ice it, how to proceed with the next step, how to imagine surgery and its effects, how to take care of the rest of my body. At my age it was assumed I knew a lot more than I did. It was my first broken bone, at 62. I didn't google enough, didn't ask the right questions of the right people, and made a lot of wrong assumptions that made the situation worse. I'll spare you the details, but living alone, I crawled around doing dozens of things before the surgery, thinking I wouldn't be able to do them after it, not realizing I wasn't able to do them then either. It took me a long time to learn that I didn't know anything, and all that time I felt a level of helplessness.
So I do have some cogent advice and I sent money right away. I know he thought he'd be in a walking cast and back to work the following week...ah, no. Google it. It seems easy to get around on crutches, as you see plenty of people doing it. What you don't think about is how do you carry a cup of coffee to your place on the couch? How do you get yourself up and down stairs? I developed a whole array of adaptive behaviors, using tote bags, well-placed furniture for support and flat places, and worked it out, but not without a lot of people helping me and not without a lot of resistance and insistence on my part that I was fine. And it was hard to sleep with all of that anxiety.
I was traumatized. I didn't know as much about it then, so my foot was my teacher for that year. After three months of elevation, I couldn't walk normally, and I still can't run. I still can't stand on concrete all day without a lot of pain. I had no idea what arthritis was and that it would be coming...I'm so stuck in that experiential learning space. I've put a lot together since then, and he will too, and because fortunately I did not transmit trauma and my damage to him when he was a child, at least not overtly, he will have an easier time of things (I hope, I hope) and he will recover and be fine. But it's not like I'm not worried every damn minute.
And as you know if you have read here before I am a bit of a political radical. I've been quiet...I truly thought my values were good solid human values that were on the rise, and couldn't be compromised, so I got struck by the shock and awe. I can see now how thoroughly the set-up was prepared for the surge of patriarchal, authoritarian values, but I had a lot of assumptions about how things would actually go. I "misunderestimated" the thinking skills of my nation. And well, the election was hacked, so there's that. It was the long hack, of the gerrymandering and the voter IDs, and I knew about it, but it added up differently than I expected, with betrayal by the FBI and the Russians. Silly me.
So yeah, traumatized. I walked downtown the other day and halfway there realized I didn't have my keys. I had left them in the door, on the outside. Pretty much offering my entire life of possessions to anyone who happened by: my car, shed, shop, house, identity, all of it. Did not mean to do that. Feeling triggered and vulnerable makes me put all of my awareness on the wrong things. I had decided to wear a pussy hat downtown...this was Friday. I was mailing a contribution to a social change organization, thinking about that. I was putting together a care package for my son, thinking about that. I was not thinking about my own survival and safety on the planet.
So I had to skip the march. I'm so proud of the 15,000 of my neighbors and friends who went, in the rain, in their anxiety. I had to remember what triggers me, and why, and what kinds of things I have to look out for, the subtle signs that I'm not thinking well, the obvious ways my body is trying to call my attention to my adrenal glands, and I have to choose self-care. Most of the time I find myself having to do this, and most of the last year, as the Trumpism ramped up, I have been in this state. Many people are.
But I don't want to write about that, I don't want to confess my weaknesses in "public," no matter how many brave writers tell me I have to, how many readers I feel waiting for some kind of companionship here with me. I did feel that for many it was important to experience the march and feel the strength of our community and how powerful we are, and am grateful that I know what that feels like and do trust it. I have gotten that from the photos, and don't feel like I've missed a lot. I was in DC in my twenties for the moratoriums, and did my part to end the Vietnam war and to begin to liberate myself and others in the liberation movements. I know what it feels like to experience the angels of the common good.
Part of my trauma comes from there, being 2o in DC, of course. I feel that a lot of it is centered on authoritarianism. I think that one of the central issues that we are struggling with here is that between the strongman and the egalitarian. We, the dominant culture, the American majority, we have evolved a notch toward egalitarianism. We don't want Dad in charge of us anymore. We like the Mom/Dad team, or the strong independent kid, or the collaborative small group, or any number of structures that don't model the God at the top. We thought our conviction of the present being more like that, than the 50's, was more solid than it apparently was. Add in the "alternative facts" universe and we got taken to the floor. For a minute.
But as you can see women won't go back as far as it would take to make those changes in our culture that the GOP et al want to see. Apparently a lot might, if they are lulled and fooled enough to believe that any change is good change, or whatever else they were led to believe, but I still have a lot of faith in the real dominance of a more caring set of values than the trumpians espouse. We don't actually value getting yours at the expense of everyone else. We don't actually espouse tough love on the streets that allows people to die from preventable conditions. We don't actually believe that God chooses whether or not to rain on our parade.
And we're not going to keep quiet, and we recognize what causes our fears and what we want to fight against. We don't like bullies and we won't live in fear of them. We do know how to fight back against our wish to cower in the corner, to normalize what we are going through. We will keep working to overturn this electoral mistake and get back to valuing the common good and devaluing the power of the selfish and greedy. It is a setback, but it is also different from other times, other setbacks.
I see trauma because I live in it still. Other people don't see it, don't have to, and they are so brave and inspiring and tireless, and they're doing it. There is plenty I can do and am doing and will do, and it isn't all on me, so we'll be okay. It's not quiet out there. It's not exactly safe, but it's safer than I thought. Now when people bully others, they get called on it, sometimes by three-year-olds. Life is better now. People are kinder and gentler (and not in the Poppy Bush way) and people are seeing through the dissembling and the lies and calling them lies. Our bubbles are connecting and there is a lot of strong inspiration out there, lots of solutions, lots of help.
And, the sun is out, and soon spring will be here. The wonderful world of Jell-O-Art has opened for the season and we will be taking our bruised and unbroken hearts and making them into art. It will help. There will be lots of help. And I don't have a broken foot. This is now. Monday morning. A good time to file a lawsuit. Or even do laundry, which is so much easier now that I don't have to hang up the clothes on crutches.
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