learning not to speak

I stood.  I lingered.  Rocking back and forth on the words trying to find enough air to travel on.  She is sixteen, I reminded myself.

Sixteen, but still.

I wavered a moment more. Then I walked to my car. I waved at the parents and a few squares of concrete down the block I waved at the girls.

The two of them together side by side. One a billowing white ghost, the other a black and white convict. One trying making her way while still being invisible; the other bursting, trying to escape her cage.

 I didn't say she is totally night blind and may need help in the dark...

But she is sixteen.  

And this is a new friendship in a new place. 

 I didn't want to ruin it. 

Alone in my car driving down St. Mary's drive, I dropped the work of a decade of Halloweens spent guiding and protecting her while pretending she was doing it all on her.

I know it seems ridiculous.  A Level 10 gymnast with titles on the national stage, a skilled artist, and an award-winning photographer but the kid is legally blind in one eye and low sighted in the other.  For me, this was truly the first time I was letting her go into a world without mother strings attached- without history or a label.

The sunset was a burning jack-o-lantern slipping into the salt of the western horizon. I thought about the time she walked off a 4-foot ledge and tore her costume, skinned her knees and split open her lip.  The countless number of times she tripped or was knocked over by children she didn't see coming.  The painful way she teetered off porches and stumbled down steps. How it seemed every crack in the sidewalk was out to get her.

When I returned a few hours later she was safe inside the home of her new friend.  Sitting at a table with candy carefully sorted in piles, ready to trade. I didn't ask her if she had trouble in the dark.

And the next morning I didn't say a word as I closed the extra spaces in her 5 pages of typed notes on the conditioning program the head coach asked her to write for him.

I am learning how to let go of her disability. 

Perhaps one day, I will catch up to where she stands.

  

beautiful November

I remember the moment: the tip of his white tail flashing through the tall, still grass.  Behind me a small village of pine trees, before me a divided army of Aspens.  

My life is beautiful.

Standing miles away from where most of it is lived I could look back at it and smile.  

How dangerous to be this content, I thought.  How grateful to have this moment.  The edge of Autumn slipping into winter.  The mountains closing into white corners.  The valley about to be shushed. 

I had stolen the time from other places to be there.  To slip away one more time before the snow gate dropped just to see the dogs running free in the mountains.  To watch Juneau crisscrossing the trail.  No one telling him he's wrong.

The air and the ground were cold but the trees held the light so carefully.  I stood in the meadow breathing the smell of the woods.  I had everything I needed on my back. 

Yes, my life is beautiful.

November is calling.  The orange lights of Halloween have burned out. It is time to call all the children home.  

Time to set the table for the next season that is already falling around us.

Home-baked bread, board games, thick books, and piles of blankets. 

I love winter.  I love the snow. I miss nothing of summer and the way it suffocates the city.  

Spring; heavy with mud and false hope.  Autumn; short and sweet.  

Winter stretches long and quiet. 

Dark draws us all home down roads lit by street lights dancing with falling snow, headlights bursting in the slush, frost bleeding with the salt of dining room chandeliers left on.

Winter makes space.  It gives room for change to happen.

November is deep. 

It is sharp and blue and quite possibly the most beautiful part of the whole year. The best part is it starts now.

checking boxes

It's quiet in the woods alone.  The world is silent beneath the trees.  The light tip-toes between the branches.  The wind stays low.

But sitting at the front desk of the gym that is silence is simply a memory.  The gym is packed.  The first week of winter session creeping down the calendar.  The threat of valley snow and hard freezes crawling to meet the fast end of October.

It is time to decide.

Time to decode the meaning of the lingering pain in her back. The pain that is keeping Beach from returning full force to gymnastics.  Time to see if we are at the end or simply back at the beginning.

Like the woods this spot is quiet.  It's lonely and far away.  No one is calling her name.  I can't help but wonder exactly where we really are; is she done?

Beach's team and head coach hugging her over the ropes after she competed
her final event at the 2018 Western's Championships in SLC

The hard part is the slope.  I know she isn't ready to be done. She is fighting to hang on.  Fingers crossed for a good appointment with the Spine Clinic.  Something reassuring that the pain is normal, expected, and not causing harm. May it be soon and simple.

Beach standing alone after vaulting in the
2019 Western Championships in Spokane, WA

May it give her the confidence she needs to fight on.

driving in traffic

The road is slow.  It twists like a shirking shoulder. The cars seem to float; tiny pretend boats with bells in a water trough.  And although the cars are moving slowly, about 50 mph, the thoughts in my mind are racing. 

The thoughts stomp like giants.  They twist like tornadoes. They bash and crash and wiz by.  Be here, get there, do this, do that, then get there, and be here again, do that, do that again, don't forget this or that, oh god don't forget that...

And a little voice from deep within my head whispers, what is the point of any of this? 

That is the voice I react to. No, no, no, nooooo! Don't ask that question when we are doing so well! 

My house is spotless.  Our meals are all shopped for and planned.  The dogs are walked.  The children are happy.  I am dressed, all organized and going on as planned.

But it is a good question.

Why are any of us doing anything?

Two by two, the cars roll down the shrugging shoulder of the interstate.  The road straightens out their speed increases.  The mountains in their winter coats rise into view. 

The breath of Autumn breathes down on the valley and the air is so clear... but I don't know what the point is.  I never have known.  Perhaps that's what makes me me.   

When the days are fast I forget that I don't know.  I forget that I don't see the cathedral we are building only the rules of the blueprints.  I am one of those chosen to live in life in doubt.

I have moments when I think I know.  Standing in the center of a dead dirt road watching Juneau's tail flash through the golden grasses as he breaks across the openness.  Flashes of red and white in the mountain meadow.  The smell of pine needles bedded in the cooling ground.  This is why; to heal a broken dog.

People aren't so simple to help.  Like Beach and gymnastics...it's hard to see the point when it is stabbing you in the gut.

I drive in the traffic as it thins.  Don't forget this, and do that, pick up this, make that. go there, be back by then, do it again...

I pass the exits I have been taking and not taking my whole life.  I am ready to move on from here.  Ready to follow BC somewhere quieter, somewhere older.  Towards a larger sky and a new history.

The cars float on and off the interstate.  I drive.  The giants stomp.  The tornadoes whirl.  They bash and they crash.  I take my exit and I go on.

the unknown variable

Looking for answers &/or support I am not getting from our gym I joined a facebook group for parents of upper-level gymnasts. 

For over a month now I have been reading through the questions and comments.  I made a few new friends and learned a couple of things. 

Then like throwing a penny in a wishwell I posted my own question about injuries. It bounced around a bit, made a good splash at the bottom, that was about it. 

Everyone in the group seems nice but the "something" I was looking for is not there. In fact, the group makes me feel like a preschooler in the world of gymnastics 'momming'. They talk about start values, skill values, routine composition, and recruiting. And I am over here texting the head coach questions like, "Hey some head coach in NJ is asking questions about Beach should I answer him?" 

At this point, I feel pretty stupid. I keep asking the same questions, requesting the same support, and I get nothing. 

I ask Beach how she is doing but she does not report pain well. She doesn't read the signals and can't self-report. The thin line between pain and fear is unreadable. 

I have even asked myself for the answers. I have a pile of dead drafts about injuries and recovery.  Drafts with opening lines and middles but no endings. 

I watch my daughter wander.  

She goes to Gym every day for the full practice. She conditions. Carefully calculating her return on an unseen equation creating a mystery out there on the floor. 

She has returned to vault with timers.  On beam, she has a leap pass and 3 ways to get off the beam- none on a hard surface. She tumbles on the tramp into the pit or a plie of landing mats. She flips on the tramp. On bars, she turns giants.  On the floor, she does dance throughs. 

She is entered in meets for the 2020 season. She has a new beam routine, a new floor routine, the money spent, labeled a Level 10 she is moving forward and to me, her mom, it like she is walking right off the edge of a flat earth.  

I am still looking for answers at 65 mph. Or maybe it's just me and the way I see things but shouldn't she be the most important variable here? Shouldn't she be the best-known quantity? Shouldn't we know where she is before taking off?

Maybe the answer is there is no answer until there is no longer a question and there is no end until it's over. 

Misty Brown

September 11 at 5:06 PM

This is my daughter Beach vaulting at Region One Regionals this past spring. Turns out she competed all season with 2 compression fractures in her lower back. Since Westerns (middle of May), she stopped all skills requiring pounding and arching. She goes to Gym 5 days a week mostly doing conditioning some tramp work. When she does try skills she still reports pain in forward landing and hard punching. Anyone have a happy ending story with this type of injury?

the gravity of ghost people

There is a pause to my house when I walk in at 8:39 PM.

"There is a light on in the basement," BC states. Beach nods agreeing, pushing the mashed potatoes around on her plate.

His words sink like stones between the three of us. Slipping beneath the waves of icy water lapping around my throat.

The events of the week have stirred up so many unsettled topics. I am treading lightly across the wooden skeleton of an old harbor.

I set down my bag.

For a week we have been running in circles taking care of other people's animals. It started with Beach watching 2 cats for a coworker from the gym. It's a good job for her. It requires me to drive her 2-3 times a day into Sugar House. For the most part, it falls easily into our days of running her to her job, me to my job, her to Gym, taking care of our own dogs, her school work, and household errands.

Then a phone call came in from a neighbor asking if Beach could watch her 4 dogs.

I agreed Beach could take the second job because she could walk down there and it didn't require anything from me. I couldn't have been more wrong.

The first morning she walked down I got a phone call right away. Once I got down there and saw the situation BC got a phone call.  I'm not trying to be mean or hurtful but the house, OMG the house.

The story we were told was her dog sitter flaked. After seeing the state of the house and the dogs we see that probably isn't the exact truth of it.

We cleaned for 2 hours while Beach stood in the yard with the severely neglected dogs.

It was quickly decided Beach could not go to the house alone. And above the obvious reasons, there was something very not right going on- I just didn't know what. We didn't want her in the house at all.

 It was so bad we went home and all stripped down in the mudroom. Ten minutes after being home I had an asthma attack- the first one in over 16 years!

So 4 times a day between driving 3 times a day to Sugar House and to Gym/work I have been walking down the street and taking care of these dogs... usually alone. Always trying to get there for the last time before dark. Always leaving feeling like I have done nothing for them. They live as patients on life support; like old people eating canned soup and rotting in their apartments in front of the TV.

The cats are so well-loved and cared for and my own dogs so spoiled! It's an impossible divide to accept. Imaginary divides created by real fences.

Knowing I would be at work until way after dark I had asked BC to do the nightly check-in and lock up for me. He had picked Beach up from the gym at 7PM to go see the cats and then to the dogs. It was the only night it wasn't my job.

The feeling I get inside the house the rock in my stomach about being in the kitchen, about being near the basement door suddenly makes too much sense.

"Mom," Beach grasps for a lie, "When you go down there at night is there a light on?"

She knows the answer is no. NO: A word I really should make better friends with.

"I think someone is living down there," he says.

"What do I do?" I ask.

"Pretend you don't know... and don't go in the kitchen."

The problem with ghost people is they live among us but we don't know they are there until it's too late.

the day

In the dark, I wait for the day to start.  

I wait for the thoughts to settle to the bottom of the bottle. 

Outside the sky crests.  A bowl of blues and grays with the rain leaking over the edges. 

What day is this? 

The summer has been a rabid dog hot and relentless.  So the coolness and the darkness of this morning feel like a lie. 

It seems summer will never end.  The fires have started.  Smoke fills the valley.  The sun turns red and the hillsides become charcoal.  Summer does not exit the west gracefully.

The day stretches.

Ahead of me, there is a lot to do coupled with the time if not the space to do it in.  There is no order to it.  I would even say it is all part of a long list I haven't sat down to write yet.  And I do, I want to write it before it is gone.- before the days write themselves.

I swear I can almost smell snow.  I can almost feel the cold of the desert wind wrapping around me.  Camp coffee and a field of juniper and sage. 

Silence.
Wind.
Trucks on a dirt road.

I am ready and so is the sky.