New worlds…

I remember staring off in middle space on warm afternoons, chin in hands on a high school bleacher. My friends scrambled for the football below, thick with sweat, working towards unseen goals, games to win or lose. I tried on different futures those hazy afternoons- What if I became an artist? What if I travelled the world? What if I never got married? What if I did? I would glance down at my friends’ muddied faces, marveling at their perseverance, and then escape back into my thoughts. I never considered that I could do what they were doing- that I could fix my eyes and fight for every inch and make a mark. I know my school girl self. I thought I had faced hard things. Maybe I had. But I was untested in the arena of life, and I couldn’t fathom that I’d have to face storms so wide and deep that I’d swear I was drowning. In some distant way, though, my school girl self wondered what it would like, facing storms. Would it all change overnight? Would it be a slow burn? The heartbeat of the question underlying all those school girl wonderings- will I be able to handle it? Will I be enough? Will the world fall down?

—

Dear younger self,

  I know you have a lot of questions, but all I’ve got for you is Doctor Who quotes. You haven’t heard of the show yet, but it’s worth it. Don’t skip Nine. (Trust me, it’ll make sense when you get there.) But anyways. Here ya go.

“When you’re a kid, they tell you it’s all… Grow up, get a job, get married, get a house, have a kid, and that’s it. But the truth is, the world is so much stranger than that. It’s so much darker. And so much madder. And so much better.”

“The way I see it, every life is a pile of good things and bad things. The good things don’t always soften the bad things, but vice versa, the bad things don’t always spoil the good things and make them unimportant.”

Life is going to be so much more than you ever expected. Keep your head up. And when a handsome country boy asks you on a date, say yes the first time.

Love, ME

—

The truth is, you can only write about it using conjunctive phrases. Youth makes you think that every answer will be exact. Life teaches you that everything is a both/and, and rarely an either/or. The storms will take your breath away and put wind in your sails in the same sentence. Push and pull. Ironies and contradictions. Very, very few absolutes. I can’t help thinking about the Doctor’s wise words lately.

—

Simply put, we returned to UVA. We had to leave in the middle of night to get to the appointment on time. Waiting for us was the elusive diagnosis that has been lurking in the background for two years, frustrating her doctors, making treatments harder:

Hyperimmunoglobulin D syndrome (HIDS), [Mevalonate Kinase Associated Periodic Fever Syndrome]

—

Your life changes all at once and not at all. That’s what storms do. You finally know what haunts your girl. She doesn’t act any different. She has the longest stretch of good days she’s had in months, while the Vacutainers line the counter in the lab, her life force distilled into numbers and titers. Life gets insane for days on end with the back and forth, and she stands there giggling, looking for all the world like a healthy kiddo. She plays in the water like her whole life hasn’t changed.

I wouldn’t have it any other way.

It’s our new world.

A new world in which she has not one, but two, chronic life-long autoimmune diseases. A reality that means that she will never have a normal functioning immune system, that she will always be more susceptible to illness, and that her anemia will most likely also be a life-long fight, a specter always in the background. Two auto-immune diseases that have no cure. You can add all the math and the answer will always be less than you want it to be.

But it’s our life. Her life. Our new world.

The last two weeks have been ridiculously intense in ways I can’t even describe. There is no such thing as a good mail day anymore. James and I have faced levels of exhaustion we didn’t think were even possible anymore. It’s our life.

The same two weeks, friends slipped in and took care of things we couldn’t. They dragged me away to quiet harbor, they made sure that my children’s curriculum will be taken care of for next year, they made me laugh, they made me think, they made me remember that there is a much larger world outside of this intense storm and that land is close.  Our new world.

I see green on the horizon.