Every Snowflake Counts

"Whooopeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!" I would hear as the door banged and her kitbag hit the floor. 

Then the door would bang and she would be off playing until supper, charging her emotional battery with social contact with everyone in the neighbourhood. 

She was "more."  More sensitive, more demanding, more fun, more intuitive, more compassionate, more comical, more ... everything. Many were the times she cried when someone else cried because it hurt her to see people sad. She could laugh longer and louder and harder than anyone I have ever known, and you'd find yourself laughing in spite of yourself, wondering what the joke even was. 

When she was about six years old, after a few snowfalls where her dad had gone out to shovel yet another foot of "partially cloudy" off the driveway, she decided to get dressed and go out to help him. She got me to help her on with her snowsuit, shoved her boots and mitts on, and with all those extra layers toddled down the stairs like some pink Michelin-tire man on his way to a rescue mission. Her dad handed her the lightest shovel and she worked beside him until she was out of wind, her face beet-red under her scarf. The little muscles were so sore and she was so tired and sweaty that she had to give up. In frustration, she started to cry. When her father asked her why, she replied, "Because I wanted to HELP you!!" 

"That's okay, honey," he said to her. "You DID help me. You really did. The snow you shoveled, every single bit of work you did, is less snow that I need to shovel. I appreciate everything you did. Because every snowflake counts."  

She burst into tears and fled into the house. 

What he didn't know was why she cried. She told me because I asked her, and she told me with tears streaming down her face!! It meant so much to her for him to say that. She never forgot it, and from then on, it became her motto. 

Someone would be frustrated with doing homework. Or trying to help with dishes, or baking, or raking leaves. Or trying to make someone understand. Or whatever. 

"Every snowflake counts," she would say to them. 

This past June, after many failed attempts to make a life for herself here, she decided to go to Alberta, to the 'land of opportunity' - or so the myth goes. It's great for someone with a high school education and someone out there with whom to stay while they got on their feet. She had neither. 

The only things she had were the clothes and supplies she took with her, a few hundred dollars from her parents to pay for gasoline, her computer, and her phone. That phone would be a lifeline between her and home, an anchor when times got rough - for her and for us. 

We texted. A LOT. Every day, several times a day. I footed the bill for her to get a 2nd hand car. At least she had transportation, and for a time, a job.

There is more to her story; I don't need to tell it all here. (Other parts are found on my other blog, http://idol-smashing.blogspot.com ) All you need to know is that on September 19, a little over a month ago, she was evicted from the place she was staying after her landlady kicked her out for breaking house rules. She found herself out on the street that night, living in her car. 

For a month she was homeless. She kept in touch with us, charging her phone in her car, living hand to mouth, with regular influx of cash from me to keep the car gassed up in order to survive and be somewhat safe. So many tried to help her; she was afraid to get help thinking that she would have her phone stolen, or someone would hurt her or try to separate her from her boyfriend whom she met up there. 

Two nights ago, she had run out of funds again. I'd given her some money Sunday night to get herself a cheap motel room. She had felt so refreshed the following day and yet had to sleep in her car again Monday night. So Tuesday evening she asked me for money so she could have a motel for the night again. She had an apartment viewing the following morning and wanted to be rested for it, showered, looking her best. 

I sent it to her.

She was so pleased, so relieved. She thanked me profusely. In the short text conversation that followed, she told me, "I'm so tired of this life (she meant lifestyle) Mom. I just want a home."

She had claimed the funds and was on her way driving to a suburb of Edmonton that night (for a cheaper rate in motels) when she swerved suddenly away from the side of the road and crossing the center line. Her fender clipped the fender of a pickup truck, knocking him off the road (the driver was fine). But there was a van right behind him - and they never saw her until it was too late. 

She was killed instantly on impact. 

Her boyfriend escaped - miraculously - with his life. He had a busted ankle and a compound fracture of the lower leg. Of the three people in the van that her car hit, only one had serious injuries - but thankfully was not paralyzed. 

The police came to our door yesterday around 1 pm with the news. When they had left, my husband called me.

What happened next was a flurry of activity. I was aware of people standing around me as I cried out loud. Kind hands led me to my manager's office. Someone made a phone call for me. Someone else met my husband at the door and people drove us home. We were held, hugged, supported, loved. And fed. Even though we didn't feel like eating. We still don't. Still the food comes, and with it, expressions of concern, caring, loving concern.

It all heals. All of it. 

Before I say what I have to say next, let me say this. I've heard people say to me that God took Arielle. 

THAT IS NOT TRUE. God DIDN'T take her. He would not be so cruel as to TAKE her away from us.

He welcomed her. He welcomed her HOME. Not the home she was expecting of course. Not the home ANY of us were expecting.

But BETTER. Safer. More permanent. 

Last spring, before she left for Alberta.
At breakfast - on Saturday morning.
Arielle. My belle.
1992-07-16 to 2013-10-22

I have two more things to say. Two things only. 

The first is that a day and a half before she was evicted, our little girl had a personal encounter with God - so real and so powerful that it transformed her heart and made her not feel lonely or alone, for the first time in her life. She was that excited about it!!  She couldn't wait to tell us about it. She told her story to me, then to her father, and then to our dear friend Dorothy, who had been her babysitter and a second mom to her when she was growing up. And it was REAL. We could tell. This was no passing fancy. This was whole. True. Pure. 

I can't say it changed her, not in a way that denied who she was.  But it was MORE. It burned away the impurities. It refined her, strengthened her faith, and turned the direction of her life around. Something that had only been a glimmer or a spark in her growing up burst into flame and became a luminous beacon that sustained her (and, truth be told, US) throughout that last month or so of her life. She got a job. She was on the upswing in her life.

The second thing I have to say is this. You may feel that what you are saying or doing to support us, the seemingly feeble and trite words that you think you are offering, do very little to help. You may feel helpless, powerless in the face of such tragedy. I know because I've felt those same feelings in my life when having to comfort someone who has known similar circumstances. 

And now I'm on the other side of the equation.  
And I am telling you THIS.

You have no idea the power that those little actions, those little words, those inbox messages, those Facebook comments, those hugs and well-wishes, what they all mean. You have simply no idea unless you've been there. But even if you don't have that experience (and I would not wish it on my worst enemy!!) YOU NEED to hear my words and know this deep in your hearts.

What she said to us, I now say to you.

Every. Snowflake. Counts.

More

For a long time now, I've likened my own recovery to a journey. I still believe that it is a journey ... only not in the way one might think.

A journey metaphor implies a beginning, a middle and an end. It's a place of departure and a destination at which one arrives triumphant. But recovery, I'm discovering, is not like that. 

It's a journey all right. But it doesn't go in a straight line. And you NEVER arrive. NEVER. 

The journey I mean is not one toward a goal that can be measured, some sort of award you can place on your wall and point to and say, "There. I did that."  Rather, it's an excursion into the self, drilling and chipping past layer upon layer of sediment: hard-packed rock built up over years and years of pain, trying to find that elusive commodity that got buried all those years ago - the true self that dares not show itself lest it be trampled. Again. 

Photo "Whole And Halved Onion" courtesy of
bplanet at the site
www.freedigitalphotos.net

Sometimes, after getting through one layer and seeing some progress, the tendency is to think that I've arrived ... to want to share that knowledge with the rest of the world ... and all that succeeds in doing is that it alienates those who care about me. And it isolates me. 

Getting past those layers (which have to be handled one at a time) is like peeling an onion. Each layer involves ripping ... pain ... and tears. Lots of tears shed.

The missing ingredient to all this - is the other entity that tries to escape detection: the person I had to become very early in my life in order to survive, the person in me that I hate. That is the monster that disguises itself as the victim, the martyr, the watchdog, the warrior, and any number of other things that SEEM to be justified. It's there just beneath the surface, seething in anger, trembling in fear, waiting for an opportunity to rise up and take over my life and regain control over others. It's the old me, the one who wraps herself in graveclothes and then puts on a mantle of respectability. 

Until it's exposed. Until someone pins it down and calls it what it is. 

Someone I care about a lot, someone who was very hurt by that monster as recently as yesterday (and for many years prior), finally decided to stand up to it. And that person exposed it for what it was, in all of the stench of decomposition that clung to it. That old me didn't like being exposed. It fought. It lashed out. It squirmed. But the new me - the one who is just barely beginning to be made known - along with the help of this loved one, realized that this whole thing was another manifestation, another mask, for that monster. And that it was something that needed to be addressed ... and NOW.  

So I had to do a few things that were very uncomfortable. 

1. I had to admit that I was wrong, that the monster existed and had hurt my loved ones. 
2. I had to root out the source of the underlying attitudes that were wrong.
3. I had to reject those attitudes and agree not to adopt them anymore.
4. I had to admit them to myself, to God and to the person I had wronged, as well as to those who were witnesses to that behavior and who were affected by it.
5. I had to ask those people to keep me honest with myself.

Before I go any further, let me first say that it is totally impossible for me to do all of that on my own. I need to be empowered to do those things; I usually find such empowerment from my reliance on and relationship with God. 

I am grateful to that loved one for pushing past the fear and confronting the monster in me. At the time, it was (shall we say) NOT pleasant. AT ALL. But it needed to be confronted.

I'm not as cock-sure as I was before; my arrogance about "recovery" was pretty off-putting to a lot of people, I'm sure. I know that this angry, fearful Thing is likely to resurface in another area; that is the major take-away from this experience. There is always going to be more. More layers, more hiding, more excavation to do. It's very humbling ... and that's likely a good sign. 

And as I go through more layers - painful as that process is - there is one more side-effect. A positive one. I get closer and closer to the real me - that one who's trapped beneath the surface. At least now I can hear her voice ... even through the bedrock.

Stopped at the border

Several months back, one of my kids decided to take a trip with her (then) boyfriend to visit his parents in the States. She had just gotten her passport, and she was excited about meeting his folks. Everything was fine ... until they reached the border. 

The standard questions revealed that she had no job or schooling to come back to ... and the border guards promptly kept her on the Canadian side of the border while allowing her boyfriend through ... and they wouldn't let him come back to Canada. They told him to go home. 

In five minutes, her plans were foiled in spite of both of their protests. The rules were the rules; she was a risk of immigration fraud and they were sending her back home. She called us from the border ... and we hopped in the vehicle and traveled the 7 hours to get there and pick her up, and the 7 hours back were spent in pretty much total silence. It took her weeks to get over that incident.

Rejection. No matter what the source is, it hurts. 

It hurts even worse when the rejection (or even a perceived rejection) comes from someone who is close to you: a family member, close friend, or respected leader. 

Sometimes, though, the rejection isn't really a rejection at all; it's simply a border. A boundary. 

I've been learning about boundaries the last four years or so; before that, I wasn't even aware they existed and was extremely offended if someone prohibited me from entering a certain portion of his or her life. After all, I let the people I love to walk uninvited into my life, so they should do the same, right?

Wrong. I was wrong to not set up boundaries and protect my own space, and it was wrong of me to assume that they should be as dysfunctional as I. 

I'm still learning - learning to set limits with people, and learning to respect their limits as well. Someone expresses a need for me to change something about the way I do things, and in most cases if I know the reason, I will usually accommodate. 

Sometimes, though, that learning has a few speed bumps. Like last night, in a discussion with a family member, there was something that she asked me to change about my cooking, and I reacted. BADLY. I felt personally attacked and rejected and I lashed out! Then she decided to rub salt in the wound by telling me that I had hurt HER feelings, that my insensitivity (MY insensitivity??) had disappointed her, and then by proceeding to tell me what my reaction was going to be to her assessment of my character as well. 

And she was right. I was furious! 

After she left, I started examining my reactions. They'd been so intense - and what we were discussing was nothing to be that intense about - so I had to wonder what was behind them. In essence, I was looking for the deeper meaning underlying why I was so upset. There had to be more to it than just the surface issue.

Photo, "Businesswoman Asking To Stop"
courtesy of imagerymagic at
www.freedigitalphotos.net

It took me a while to find it. What I discovered was a whole belief system surrounding food, what it meant, (not just sustenance, but love), how I believed family members were supposed to react to something someone prepared for them to eat, and about a tremendous load of what psychologists call "performance anxiety." I had compartmentalized it; I'd found ways around it, like cooking two separate meals for the people in the house or taking things out of the bowl or pot for her use before adding other ingredients that she either didn't like or couldn't have. But this - this was the last straw.

At the heart of it, I felt rejected. I'd already made so many changes to what I cooked, how I cooked it, and even WHERE I cooked it, to accommodate this one person's needs. And now this. It was the tip of an iceberg of accumulated perceived rejections, the existence of which I'd not even been aware. So, naturally, my reaction was not just about the tip of that iceberg, but about the whole thing (even though I wasn't consciously aware of it).

To me, it was the same thing as having my love rejected. And as the saying goes, "Hell hath no fury...." 

To her, it was "only one thing." She didn't understand my reaction and was hurt by it. To me, it was "every last thing." I was wrong to react the way I did, lashing out like that. Human behavior sometimes baffles me - especially my own - but it proves I'm human!

And sometime today, I'll have a talk with her, tell her I'm sorry for lashing out, and explain what I was thinking. 

As for my belief system about food ... hmmm. It's tied into how I was raised, and into my own brain systems surrounding reward and punishment. It took a long time for me to develop these beliefs.

That will take a little longer to fix. But at least now I am aware of it. That's progress.