Like chewing off the corner of a miracle…..

This story.
I’ve been painting it slow.  Traffic jam slow.  I appreciate your patience with my telling.
The pokey process of coming home to parts of myself long discarded
has made sharing the things like snatching up the wind.
Always in the past when I’ve tugged open a closet door and pulled out the contents,
it’s been life to me to examine and edit and organize it back in some meaningful way.
But what I thought was dark closet to clear turned out to be winding passageways
into places that called to my deepest-most deep, like a dream being dreamed.
It’s been rich with grace and pressure
(maybe the pressure is also grace)
and the content won’t be stacked neat into display for this venue
no matter how hard I wrangle.
My blog won’t hold the weight;
I need to build another thing.

But I won’t leave you hanging as to why it’s asking now to be told.

How the need to tell this story even sprang up in the first place
seems like such a crazy fluke……like accidentally chewing the corner off of a miracle.
It’s weird, really, how I came to feel compelled to finally talk
about the long-ago breast implants and how they’d ignited slow-crawling storms in my body.
Storms that came thundering again to swamp my boat just this year as Winter turned to Spring.
I was looking for solution for my unhappy sinuses.
“Take serrapeptase,” someone said.  “It breaks down scar tissue
and will clear and open your face like nothing else.”
I did,  gratefully.  Hungrily.  So eager for something to help ease
the chronic sinus infection I’d come to keep.
And with quick precision my sinuses began to clear until there came also a low thundering pain
in my arm and chest and I got wildly, stupidly sick.
Ahhhhhh,  scar tissue.  The enzyme I took does break it down beautifully
and in most cases this is a win.
Unless scar tissue has walled off marauding silicone in your chest wall and shoulder.

My body seemed enraged as it attacked the newly released substance
and it hated the antibiotics I had to throw down to calm the infection.
Once again I was sick from silicone.
(stopping the enzyme allowed the scar tissue again to form and protect me from the intruder
but until it grew back I felt all kinds of terrible)

When the radiologist told me what was on the scan,  I asked him to let me see.
Show me the silicone like torn white cotton weaved throughout my gray.
Yeah, there it was.  Still.
After all those years of not going there. Of not saying.
And maybe of not honoring what the pain needed to tell.
I sat alone with the scan in the darkened room
and for the first time in these long years of apologizing for the trouble,
I felt no guilt.  No anger at myself.  Something new bubbled up from down inside.
Like the first crocus poking up through dirty snow,
there came compassion.
For the me I once was.
For the me I now am.

It was nobody’s fault.
Nobody to blame.
No one person I could point to,  not even myself,  to absorb the anger
and helplessness I’d felt at not being enough,
at being too much,
and at getting hurt trying to work out a fix.
Nothing needed fixing.
Just loving acceptance and support.
My childhood was rich and it’s not a stretch to say I was cherished.
Loved by good people who cared deeply.
So how did I come to wander so far from myself and take such a long road home?

Well it’s a story I’m braving to tug free but I can no longer
bit and piece it here on my blog
It just doesn’t work.
I need instead to let it tumble out,  chapter by chapter,
and it will, I’m determined.
I’ll let you know when there’s a book to read:)
Meanwhile I’ll come back out to rock on this porch,  protect the poetry,
and settle again into the rhythm of this bloggerly neighborhood.
I hope you join me sometimes.
I’ll be here more often
in the easy way I’ve missed and loved.

“You’ll know you’re healed when the
catalyst that broke you, eventually gets
your internal thank you.”
– Tess Guinery

If you can even remember the start of this series months and months back
(I’ll tell you about those months somehow, some day.)
I aimed to tell a story weekly until it was told.
Great plan:)
But life.
Turns out I’ll need a book for that one
but I’m so very, very grateful for the storm that dumped me on this beach
because there is healing here and, yes oh yes, a very large joy.

Thank you,  Eva Phillips,  for your comment last post
I drew your name and am tickled to send you a book.