My Mountain: Beginning the Writing Journey

 

When I was young, I had asthma.  

Really bad asthma.  

Like couldn't breath and had to lay on the couch for days gasping for breath.  My parents were going through a holistic stage and didn't believe in medicine.  So I drank tinctures (still can't stand the smell of wet sage) and herbal mixtures and cayenne pepper and fresh squeeze grape juice in hopes I'd breath better.

I didn't work.  Bless their hearts.

So for the days I was in the midst of an asthma episode, I'd lie on the couch and dream of the days when I would be strong enough to stand and walk around again.  I was scared of running because it triggered my asthma.  I'd lie there as my siblings ran off to play or hike or run.  I lay there as they laughed and talked around me.  Of my eight siblings, I was the only one who had these episodes. They tried to be nice, but I heard them, especially my sister Jayne, talking about how I was so sickly I would surely die young (ah, the things siblings say--I have novels full of stories).  On particularly bad days, I believed them. 

Mary was sickly.

Mary was weak.

Mary was always whining.

Mary couldn't play tag or hide and seek or she'd get sick.

Mary needed to stay calm.

I believed them and I hated that I did.  And so, when I was well, I was horrid.  I screamed and yelled and had massive temper tantrums.  I remember clearly sitting on the steps going downstairs to the basement screaming for what seemed like hours, howling and howling, refusing to be comforted by anyone (and my older sisters did try--my brothers, not even).  Sometimes these tantrums would send me spiraling right back into the arms of another asthmatic attack.  

My mother had asthma and would try to sympathize but she also had seven other children and so her sympathy had a definite timeline.  When she would grow sick of me, literally, my father would take over.  It happened very rarely because he was often working two jobs to support us, but he'd lay on the floor beside me on the couch, jumping up to hold the bowl for me as I threw up and then falling back to sleep before he even lay back down.  

I am not sure if this was a fevered dream or something real, but I remember him telling me that as I grew older, I would be the strongest of my siblings.  I'm sure I was too sick to laugh, but I'm sure I would have. They each were athletes and strong and fast and fierce; their limbs all full of muscles and sinew and endurance.  I tired just walking up my hill (which, granted, was quite steep).  My grandmother, who lived in a tiny, white house down the hill from us, when she'd make her way up, would whisper the same thing to me.

This was impossible, of course, but inside me, a little seed of hope was planted.  I nurtured it as I lay in bed they'd make for me on the porch on hot summer days so I could hear the other children run and play.  It was torture to hear them laugh and tease and be full of health.  I wished for the strength to go back into the darkness but I didn't have it and so had to lay for hours on that porch listening to their joy.

I am not sure how old I was, perhaps nine or ten, but I remember my mother, as I was complaining of some ache or pain or hurt I was feeling, telling me to JUST STOP.  She was sick of me complaining.  She turned away from me.  I'm sure she had had a dreadful day and was tired (being a mama, I know exactly how this feels and understand her completely) but I was young and did not understand this.  What I did understand was that I was a bother.  I was everything and more that everyone had whispered about me for years.

I realized I was sick of me, too.  

So I shut up.  I stopped.  I stopped telling anyone how I felt.  I stopped complaining--as best as a nine year old could.  I determined to be stronger.  I don't remember much of the next years, but I remember every time I felt ill, I tried really really hard to not actually be ill.  I think I was still horrid, but maybe not so horrid.

My mother read me The Secret Garden and I read about sickly Mary Lennox who was healed by the good Yorkshire air and forced exercise.  I ate up every word.  Not only was Mary made whole, but so was her cousin Collin.  He was an invalid who not only learned to walk, but to run.  

Could that be me?

I didn't have Yorkshire air, but I had good old Connecticut air.  I didn't have the moor, but I had the forests behind my house.

So I began taking walks behind my house, in the rolling hills.  I started climbing one and then two of the hills behind my house.  The third one lead to a loop that my father or uncle had bulldozed and cut through the thick forest.  On top of that hill was a big tree.  The climbing tree that my brothers and sisters climbed.  

As the days went by and then weeks and months, it became easier and easer.  I asked my father to take me to the climbing tree.  He did and then, with his help, he boosted me up and helped me climb to the very top.  It was a big hemlock tree with great big limbs that seemed to hug you and you had to weave in and out of.  On top, you could see for miles.  I'm not sure it was true, but I swear I could see the Connecticut river.  My father leaned back on the limb and told me to shut my eyes and feel the sway of the wind moving the tree beneath us.  He told me how his favorite time to climb the tree was when the wind was fierce and the tree would dance back and forth--almost like a carnival ride.

From then on, when I wandered the woods by myself, I would climb that tree by myself.  I loved to sit on the top and listen to the wind whisper through the boughs and needles.  I would hug the tree, probably twenty or thirty feet high in the air, and let it rock me back and forth.  I loved the windy days too.  On one very blustery day, I felt like it whipped me back and forth, my hair flying around me face.

I came home stained with sap on my hands and shirt and beaming told my father I finally understood what he meant.  I loved riding the trees on windy days.

He turned to me, his face pale, and holding me by the shoulders, asked, "Have you been climbing the tree by yourself?"

"Yes, almost everyday," I said proudly.

"Mary, you must promise me you will never ever do that again.  You could fall and get hurt and no one would know for hours.  You must never climb alone.  Ever."

He turned to my mother and I think they might have gotten into a little disagreement about how much freedom I had.  I remember my mother looking at me and shaking her head, not at all believing that I could much less walk the mile up to the tree, let alone climb it.  

It was not the first time I surprised her.  

I, of course, was given rules of where I could and couldn't wander which I promptly forgot and or ignored.  I never did climb the tree alone, that I did listen to.  But I owned the woods, the bogs, the meadows and magical large boulders that dotted the hills behind my house.  I would be gone hours.  I remember coming home and looking at myself in the mirror.  Instead of pale, sickly skin . . . pallor as Mary Lennox had . . . I saw rosy cheeks and pink lips and big green eyes.  My hair had a big of shine and curl.  

Great heavens, I looked healthy.

There were lots of set backs.  I still got sick more easily than anyone else, but those bouts with sickness grew farther and farther apart.  When we divided into teams, I was still the last to get picked and the first out, but I could run a little farther and farther each time.

I began chanting in my head, when they would laugh at me and tease me about being so weak, I will show them. I will show them.

When I was twelve, I found an ancient pair of Nike running shoes, probably from the 1980s.  I asked everyone if they were theirs, no one claimed them, so I did.  I remember putting them on, and heading out the door saying I was going for a run.  My mother shook her head and looked at me puzzled.

"You can't run."

"I can try," I said as I ran out the door.

I made it half mile.  The next day, a mile.  The day after two.  I had three running routes that were between two and four miles that I ran almost daily after that.  I don't know if I was slow or not, but when I ran, I felt free and strong.  

It was like finding myself.

I took ballet for during most of my childhood years.  I was the worst in the class.  My teacher had long ago given up on me.  I remember her stopping me one day and saying, "What are you doing?  You look . . . good. . . dancing?"

"I'm running," I told her as I pulled my ballet shoes off.

"Oh, you're not supposed to do that.  It grows all the bulky wrong muscles for ballet."

I looked up at her and her perfect tiny frame that danced for Balanchine himeself.  I wanted to look like her, not a bulky runner.

So I listened to her for about a day.  I realized that I was a crap ballerina, but I loved running.  Even if that meant the wrong muscles, I was going to run.

When she retired, after her second child was born, she took me aside and told me that I did not have a ballerina's body, but I moved beautifully--modern dance was what she would suggest.  I didn't listen to her.  I danced ballet for years more, but ran even more often, much to all my teachers frustration.  

One would come up to me and ask, "Did you run this weekend?"

I would look at her guilty and wonder how on earth she knew.  She always would.

But none of them stopped me.

As the years rolled on, I stopped being sick.  Other than a bad case of bronchitis when I was a sophomore in high school, I was almost never sick.

I ran or biked everywhere.

I was healthy.  I was strong.  I played soccer and was the fastest one on the tea-- by a lot.  I ran track and won--a lot.  I was from a small school, so the competition wasn't that fierce, but one of the universities I looked into, they called me about running cross country for them.

It hasn't stopped.

I am 45 years old and I move more than I am still.  I love to feel the wind in my hair.  I think best when I am running.  Some days are hard, almost impossible, but I still get up and get out.  

My siblings are all healthy and strong, but I am just as strong--and in somethings, possibly even stronger.  I have learned that I can push through almost anything.  My father and grandmother, rest her soul, saw something inside me I couldn't see.  They saw a fierce fighter, determined and undaunted by the sickness, who could overcome anything.  And they let me see their vision.  Their belief in me gave me the strength to begin to believe.

And I think all those years of sickness and missing out made me hungrier than any of my siblings to be whole and make myself strong.  It wasn't easy.  It took years.  But I was determined.  I was fierce.  I refused to be what people told me I was.  When I began to see myself as strong, I became strong.

I have fought with my hypochondria and anxiety fiercely through the years.  There are and will be set backs, but each time I have them, I go back to that rather weak sick girl who found running shoes and was brave enough to put them on and go out the door.  I did not need to be the fastest or run the farthest, I just needed to try.

That is what I'm doing now with my writing.  

I am resurrecting my words and stories and thoughts and writing them again.  I've dusted them off and put them on and I am feeling that same sense of freedom and joy I felt when I run.

Here, on this blog, I am trying to post a few chapters in the first book of a series I'm writing--a YA magical realism novel.  It has a little magic, a little love, and a lot of discovery.  

I will also post about the writing process and how I am balance ( or trying to) my love of writing with my love of my children and adventures--for me, it is VERY hard to find that balance.  We will hopefully learn together.  I'll also post about my writing group and what other things really help me and what really DOESN'T help me.

I am quite frankly a very lazy writer, but I am determined to get better.  I will channel Collin Graven and get myself out of my wheelchair and get this story running.  I hope . . . 

It's a great big mountain I'm trying to climb, finishing and polishing a novel and starting a series.  So many start with great intentions, but often don't make it very far.  No judgment.  Probably weren't ready, try again later.  Let see, together, if we can do it.  Fingers crossed.