I don’t know when things started to change for me, it seemed as though things were going well with the out patient therapy. At first, I would get a ride to the Hospital and after a while, I began to wheel myself down there a couple times a week. Somewhere in the midst of getting to know my family again and learning that, some limitations were more like innovative challenges I began to adjust to this new life style that had been superimposed on my life. It is true that I began to adjust to the wheelchair and those other things that accompanied the paralysis but there was still a large part of me not adjusting. Thinking back, I suppose being a teenager at that time probably didn’t help the emotions I was feeling. It feels, now, as if I was alienated from everyone I knew. I am not sure this is the best explanation for the moods and daunting feelings that started so long ago and the feelings I used to keep me from God and keeping me from healing.
At first, it was little things like tossing a bowl of sliced pears on my then little brother (now just younger) for reasons I have long forgotten or getting into yelling matches with my mom and roaming the city until late in the evening just to keep me away from everyone.
I got so tired of people telling me how well I seemed to be handling “it”, whatever “it” was. I don’t think I ever told anyone that the smile that was on my face and the kind teenager everyone liked to talk about was nothing but a facade. It was nothing other than what I thought people wanted to see. I hid the fear and anguish for months but no matter how hard I tried to keep it in, it found its way out and unfortunately my family got the blunt end of all my emotions.
In addition, to make it worst, I began to get muscle spasms in my legs and stomach and of course, the typical response for such things was to medicate. The started me on a prescription of muscle relaxants, which just happened to be mood enhancers making it very difficult for anyone to want to stay around me for too long.
We stayed in Bangor until the next spring until a small insurance settlement was finally decided. There was thirty thousand dollars total, Ten went to the Lawyers Ten to the hospitals and Ten was given to my mom in guardianship. We took that money, put a down payment on a hunting cabin, and bought a large wood stove to heat with in cold weather. I don’t remember how we ended up back in the woods but we did. All I remember is when we went to look at it; it reminded me of our farm we had left behind. I remember the smell of the fir trees and the apple blossoms and something that could only be described as comfort. The comfort from being back in the woods. A feeling that was only a memory in my mind since before all this began. Things that could never be found among the concrete and blacktop of city life.
Finally, I thought! Back where I belonged! Sure, it wasn’t our farm and there were seven acres and not one hundred but there was enough room to live again.
So here, we were hauling water by the buckets again and using kerosene lanterns to light the cabin with again but the different was I wasn’t the one doing it. There was no cutting wood or hauling water for the obvious reasons. I just couldn’t do these things anymore. I tried to tell myself it didn’t matter, I tried to get out and do what I could, I tried, but something just was not there anymore.
I thought I had found a way to re-bury those emotions that had been terrorizing me for the last months before we moved out here. I thought if I could just live, they would go away.
How often do we think if we could just show our good side and never let anyone know what we are truly feeling, that with enough time those thoughts, problems, or situations will simply go away? That’s the trap! (I’m not talking about dwelling on the past what I am talking about those things that we carry around with us like old, torn, banged up luggage bags). How often in the New Testament, is it recorded that Jesus knew their real thoughts? When we hide those thoughts and don’t work out our emotional problems we lie both to ourselves and to the One who knows all our thoughts. The problem can originate years age but it is what we are feeling now that needs to be dealt with.
It seems that after enough time passes and the anger that accompanies these old feelings builds large enough within us we tend to see all the negative things about the people around us. Because that is all we see in ourselves, especially in our Christian friends.
Eighteen years would go by before I would allow God to help me sort though those things.
