When I was 16, I went to Europe on a school trip. I got my first job at 15 to pay for this trip, so badly I wanted to go. One of the events on our trip was a visit to Dachau--an event that I looked forward to, in a weird sort of way.

I remember this day so vividly. It was a grey, overcast sky with a chill in the air. The perfect weather for something so somber. I remember the way the gravel crunched beneath my feet as we walked around. It wasn't a guided tour, we just walked and looked at everything. The barracks, the piles of shoes, the crematoriums still with soot marks on the bricks, the THOUGHT that those soot marks were once human so hard to comprehend all these decades later. To imagine the atrocities that went on in the very place where we now stood. The mass graves, the barbed wire, the sign that claimed that work was freedom. It was and still is one of the more poignant events of my life.

Today a Holocaust survivor came to speak to my students. I've been trying to arrange this for years, because my students struggle with understanding that these were real people, people just like them with hopes and dreams. She is so tiny. 90 years old with wispy white hair. I asked if she wanted to sit, she said, "No. I MARCH, so they listen to me." And listen they did. She told of the Germans coming silently, like thiefs in the night. How they took the religious men first, then they took the teachers. She told them that history always attacks the teachers first, because the teachers make you think and make you aware. She told of how all the teachers had to dig a hole and then one by one, the Germans shot them and buried them in the very grave they dug. She told of how she was arrested. A German soldier lifted up her skirt with a bayonet, and she smacked it away. She was beaten for that. How her brother was killed in a concentration camp. How her mother died from the operations done on her in a concentration camp. Of being placed in closed trucks and starved and afraid for her life and of working in a German military hospital because she could speak German. She talked of the Americans liberating and how all the German soldiers, the ones who weren't wounded, disappeared again like thieves in the night. How when she learned of liberation, she ran up and down the hall shouting and banging on things and celebrating and you could see it, this 90 year old woman, you could see it in her eyes how it must have been.

She spoke of so much that I can't even really put into words, not quite, how deeply moved I am, how my eyes clouded with tears at the pain and somehow, beauty of it. She told my students, "You might say, this couldn't happen to me. I said that once, too."
My students didn't want to leave the room even when I told them it was okay to go. This never happened. They lingered, some staying behind to hug her and say thank you. She asked each one their full name and delighted at the Polish last names.

We hugged tightly before she left. I gave her the cookies I made and said, "I know this isn't much of a thank you, but I hope you like them." She clasped my hands in her and told me she would enjoy them so much, that she loves cookies. My hands smell like her soft, powdery perfume as I type this. I can't quite tell you the strength and power held within that moment, sixty years between us--her surviving untold atrocities, me this morning, worrying about how my students would behave for her--yet somehow connecting in that single handheld moment over a plate of chocolate chip cookies.

linking up with Just Write

When I was little, Alice in Wonderland was my favorite Disney cartoon. I was never much for princesses, but Alice. I loved Alice in her pretty blue dress and her blonde hair and her confused, yet tenacious attitude in Wonderland as she chases the elusive white rabbit. As I grew older, it surprised me to find that everyone didn't love Alice as much as I did. That some people found it scary. Others found it weird. Even more wondered if the Disney producers were on acid (okay, we've all wondered that) at the time of production.


I still love Alice in Wonderland and as I grow ever older, it seems so much like the life we live is in wonderland. The number of times I've felt so very small or the number of times I've cried enough tears that it seems that surely there must be enough of them to fill an ocean. The days the beautiful flowers I once admired turned ugly and mean and made me feel like a weed and people's faces shifted into unrecognizable masks and they disappeared from my life. The growing pains between childhood and adulthood (and wondering why I'm 29 and still feel those growing pains somedays).


So maybe I love it because I identify with Alice and sometimes I spend days wondering if this is a dream or if this is real life. If I'm asleep on a river bank somewhere and just dreaming the hard days, if I'll awake in a start and walk off to afternoon tea shaking my head at the silliness of it all or if I really did fall down a rabbit hole and if I did, how do I get out?


Tonight I'm not Alice. I set out my clothes for work tomorrow. I won't be wearing a blue dress with a perfectly fashioned white apron; instead, a long grey skirt with a purple top and a black shirt to layer beneath because it's always so cold at work. I peeled a sucker off the carpet and no one was around to hear me wonder how it got there. I made the coffee for tomorrow morning. I took a long bath and fell into a good book instead of a rabbit hole and this isn't Wonderland, there is no caterpillar smoking a hookah to offer me sage advice, but tonight before bedtime, we galloped around and around and through the kitchen and living room each of us with a laughing, shrieking boy on our backs having our very own caucus race and it was more magical than any river bank dream could ever be.


linking with Heather of the EO's Just Write

I hate being repetitive. Thematic. I tell my students, Vary your writing. Don’t get stuck on one topic. Don’t be afraid to explore.
Yet here I am, stuck on one topic. Predictable. Boring. Thematic. Blogging about seizures again. Still, epilepsy in its nature is not predictable and maybe that’s what makes it so hard. That a child can be just fine one second, playing with a ridiculously huge collection of Thomas trains and in the blink of eye that same child can fall and start seizing in the middle of his trains.

Because of course, this was my evening last night. The same as other evenings. Did you know that his seizures almost always happen at the exact same time of night? We could set a clock to them. But different, because it’d been so long since he’d had a true grand mal seizure that those little seeds of hope starting to sprout.

Last night was more painful than other nights because Luke was the one who found Tommy seizing. Shane and I were in the kitchen. Luke was on the couch with his Leapster, Tommy on the floor with his trains. A four year old can be often dramatic, yelling and hollering like his hair is on fire when really he only wants to get my attention to ask me why clouds are white. But last night, as he came running into the kitchen, shouting my name, I knew. The fear in his voice was so real, so tangible, so much more than I ever wanted to hear in my four year old’s voice. He drug me into the living room and I had that horrible moment that always happens during seizures, where my brain forgets itself for just a split second and I feel like I’m above my body and I think, What is happening? Why is his face like that? Why are his arms twisted and his lips blue? And then I zoom back into my body, scoop him up, and talk to him. Tell Shane to look at the clock. Comfort Luke. Praise Luke. Calm myself internally. Hold my shaking child, exhale when the tremors stop, when he sighs, his eyes flutter open, then close and he drifts into that post-seizure state of unconscious, pale-faced sleep.

He’s so verbal these days, so aware of what words mean and how to answer questions. Last night I held him and said, Were you scared?

He nodded his head two times. Yes. Yes, mama.


linking with Just Write

On Luke's first day of preschool, I wrote a note and put it in his lunch bag. Feeling sad that unlike some kids, he'd have to stay four hours after preschool, I wrote a note on an index card telling him how I loved him and how I couldn't wait to hear all about his big day.

He can't read, of course. I was worried that he'd be too shy to ask someone to read it for him, but I was wrong. In the car that afternoon, he told me that he asked his teacher to read it and she did.

I kept sending him notes, but somedays, I'd be in a rush and forget. Somedays I'd be too tired at the end of the night to even think about it. One day, I picked him up early after a doctor's appointment and his extended care teacher told me how the notes I send are so sweet. She said every day after washing his hands, he retrieves his lunch bag and very shyly brings the note to her. She told me she reads it to him and he smiles. She said often times, he puts it in his pocket, then removes it during quiet time and looks at it. Once, she said, he kissed it and laid it next to his head. She said, "You can tell he really loves you."

I haven't missed a note since then. The other night, I asked Luke what he wanted me to pack in his lunch. He said, "A turkey and cheese sandwich, carrot sticks, and a note."

Always, buddy.

Linking up with Just Write

I don't remember what I had for dinner two nights ago. I might be able to tell you what I wore two nights ago, but only if I dig through the laundry pile. Even then, it's iffy.

But I can tell you what I ate a year ago. I can tell you what I wore a year ago. I was wearing black yoga pants, an orange top, and a black sports bra. My customary post-work comfy clothes. We had spaghetti for dinner. We ate the spaghetti on yellow plates. Vividly, I remember this, yoga pants, uneaten spaghetti, yellow plates. The way the fork scraped across the plate as I cleared the remainders of dinner from the yellow plates into the garbage. The weather, eerily like today. Indian summer, blue skies, changing leaves and sunshine. Those stunning moments of clarity, broken by my husband shouting my name from the other room.

In six years of marriage and two kids, we don't use each other's names as much as we should. Him shouting my name should have been the tip off that something was wrong. My even-keeled husband raising his voice. I'm the shouter, the one who gasps with excitement, yells when startled, when I see a big spider. That's me, not him. Then there was the sound of his voice. Fear. And beneath it, an undercurrent of grief, of helplessness.

I froze for a minute, blinking like it was a dream. "I think he's choking!" And on the floor, a silent child with closed eyes, blue lips, and a pale face. On the floor, the scariest sight I've ever seen. Holding him, yelling for my husband to please call 911. Holding him, looking out the window like help would come dashing through at that minute. Holding him, in that one terrible moment actually thinking he was dying and wondering, wondering how on earth I could possibly go on. Then as teeth clamp down on my shaking finger, my finger trying to clear an already clear airway, the sudden smashing flashback to a red class cross, the instructor saying, "Never put your finger in the mouth of someone having a seizure. They'll snap their mouth shut on you." The purple-red angry teeth marks on my finger as I pried it out, "I think he's having a seizure, he's breathing, he's breathing, thank God, stay with me."

And he keeps breathing. Sometimes seizing. Mostly untroubled by being an epileptic two and a half year old. He'll never remember that night. Still, our lives changed, maybe just because we've never been so scared. Maybe we'll tell him about it. Maybe he'll outgrow all of this and we'll never have to tell him. But in my heart, I know that no matter how old I am, no matter how many troubles and losses I live, I'll never forget spaghetti on yellow plates.

Linked with Heather of the EO's Just Write

Once I went to a candlelight vigil for survivors of rape, sexual abuse, and domestic violence. It was powerful in ways that I can't put into words, men and women holding white candles sharing stories and tears. Only four months gone from from my own hurt, still needing pills to make it through the daily heart squeezing panic attacks, I sobbed with my head on a friend's shoulder.

Somehow something overtook me and I shared my own story. Or I tried. I mostly choked words out through sobs and said how it'd only been four months and how I was so scared all of the time, scared of the dark, of men, of my own shadow, but everyone's stories gave me such strength.

The vigil finished and a girl came up to me. She told me that she was a rape survivor, too, and she'd never told anyone. She thanked me for my bravery, for showing her that it was okay to speak. And then, we held each other and cried on the shoulder of a stranger. It was only a few minutes. I didn't ask her name, she didn't ask mine. We never saw each other again, but in those few minutes, we shared a moment more intimate than most of will ever share with best of friends. Every so often, she crosses my mind and I pray that she made it through the pain.

This is the intense power of the human spirit, made of thin glass and bordering on fragility. We can be hurt. We can be broken, badly. We can be violated in the worst ways imaginable, bruised and left feeling so dirty that all the scalding hot water in the world will never fix us. But somewhere in the deepest corners of our hearts and spirits, we cannot be broken beyond repair.

Linking again to Heather of the EO's Just Write. Take a moment to read her words. You won't regret it.