Fetal Positions

It's Friday. Don't you just shake your head when you read such a silly sentence as if you don't know what day of the week it is? It's more for my benefit than anyone else's. I'm still really tired. I've been battling nausea on a daily basis for quite a while now. Also an increasingly painful area in my abdomen. On Monday I'm having a medical procedure to see if they can find the cause. Let's hope they don't. Let's hope they do. Does that make sense?

Before I write anything more please know how grateful I am for your prayers while I was gone. The week could not have turned out like it did on simple human willpower. Something bigger than all of us was at work. Well, doesn't that sound so trite. Something bigger than all of us is at work always. Last week I was simply very aware of it.

My trip to finish up the radio documentary was both grueling and good. My parents met me more than halfway. My mom softened instead of getting defensive when I spoke of the abuse. I don't think I'll ever wrap my head around that. And while it was an uncomfortable conversation - the producer told me later I sounded like I was hyperventilating the whole way through - we all got through it with our relationship intact.

In the radio studio I relived on tape an incident from my childhood. It set off every alarm bell within me that I was really crossing the line. As a child I was told point-blank-to-my-face by my mom that I was never to talk about what happened in our home. [Let alone do that on national radio.] My older sister consoled me by saying if I tell my dad when the program airs he will forget and miss it and my mom will never listen to it anyway. Small mercies of the aging process. After a 2 hour taping session I left for an AA meeting. Later that evening I was trying to cryptically tell my older sister - my parents were sitting right there - how intense the taping session had been. Eventually she came and stood in front of me and told me she could tell it had been intense because I looked about 12 years old to her.

The last day of taping the producer and I drove to the land hoping to tape me finding some closure. I had no idea if that would happen. I don't remember what he asked me but all of a sudden the little girl in me was standing within my body. I saw her step into me with her feet in my footsteps. It was as if we were one except the top of her head only reached my knees. Then she started to grow and she grew until she fit my adult body. Her arms grew and touched to my fingertips. Her head reached the top of my own. At that point I started to cry and talk. That any kind of closure happened was a bonus. That it happend on tape - I feel a bit pissed about that because it was so private. But that's what I signed up for and I'll work through it yet. The producer was sensitive and left me alone after that. He walked back to the vehicle while I slid down the hill and had the moment I wrote about previously.

Later on I went back to the land with the buyer and his family. The most poignant moment in that conversation happened when he yelled out to one of the kids asking what he saw as he crested a hill. The little boy held up his arms as if he was a body builder posing and yelled, "Mother Nature." I was quite teary while I watched the buyer's kids and their friends explore the land with all the exuberance that childhood can hold. It felt right. I chose to walk across country to get back to my parents' house. I followed old cattle trails until I saw landmarks I recognized. I stopped at my sister's house to share my afternoon with her. My pocket held some prairie sage and a crocus. That little crocus dried in a fetal position which is ironic because I finally feel like I'm no longer frozen in that position.