remembering her

I'm hitting a wall.

I've been working on my book proposal and I'm hitting a wall, but it's not what you might think. The words come freely and prolifically, except for when I try to remember her. I'm trying to plough full steam ahead and find myself bumping up against a wall of forgetting whenever I try to write about her.

Maybe that's the problem: I'm writing about her. I'm not thinking of writing about me, the thirteen-year-old who learned to cope by building walls. Disconnecting. Responding to her body's perceived betrayal by treating it like her enemy. She turned away from the body she lived in, putting up heavy barriers in the roadway of communication between herself and her flesh. At some point she said, Okay, Body. If this is how you're going to be, we're not talking anymore.

I can write freely of the ensuing bout with anorexia, about the numbness I allowed following the car accident, about the arrhythmia that held me prisoner for a time during my senior year in college. But I can't remember her. She made a deal with herself to choke off any pathways of remembering, to burn the bridges that might lead back to those painful places of being burdened with a body. I trust innately that I cannot sidestep these places or take a detour; without fully understanding why, I know that there are not any shortcuts to take if I'm going to be faithful to the story God wants to write, a story that I believe He intends to direct to a destination beyond my imagining, a place I can only describe as claiming His grace in and for the body. My body.

I remember learning a great deal about the nervous system following my car accident in 1996. I would frequently experience numbness in my face, tingling in my limbs. My neurologist explained to me that when the nerves are overstimulated, they begin to shut down, to turn themselves off. When the signals and stimulus gets to be more than they can handle, the flesh stops feeling altogether. The brain refuses to process the signals from overloaded circuits. Numbness is the result.

I think that's what I'm contending with here: a thirteen-year-old who was overloaded, ill-equipped to manage all the changes thrown at her, both from inside and from outside her body; she disconnected from those things she could not reckon with at the time. These are the very things I need help to remember.

I called my Mom this afternoon and asked her for what she remembers from that time. And that helped; I remember far more now than I did before I spoke with her. And some of her memories of that time brought fresh tears to my eyes; those numb, cold places are starting to tingle with feeling. They're waking up and for the first time in seventeen years, I'm taking notice of those sharp slivers still embedded deep in my flesh. I'm afraid to feel those things fully, to allow myself the space to fling open wide the gates to those memories.

I have a compass now, a direction; hearing these things from her helped me to get my bearings. I can begin to remember now, to take stock of my surroundings, and to continue walking, learning to trust in the grace that is now with me, and in the grace that is waiting for me in the hidden and forgotten places.

kirsten, circa 1990 {taken by dad}