There are stories that I carry with me, some I proudly unfurl like a flag, a banner I’m thrilled to carry– stories of my grandmother, tales from my mom.  Others I’ve stuffed down deep into my cells, hoping that the deeper I keep them, the less true they’ll become.  Some I carry without even being aware that they are part of my narrative.  Stories so true and encompassing, they seem to be the fabric of life, rather than a thread running through it. 

Today I’ve uncovered a story, one stuffed deep into my cells.  One I’ve edited in my memory and recently have come to face more of its truth.  

I thought stuffing it down so deep would hide it from daylight, starving it until it ceased to be true.  I didn’t know that holding it so close would bring it into my bones and into my body.  My body carries memories my brain isn’t brave enough to see.  

But my body isn’t going to keep this story secret any longer.  It’s been screaming at me, begging me to face it, to see it, to claim it and repair as much as I can.  I’ve turned up the volume around me in an attempt to drown it out.  But like a smoke alarm that will not cease, my body kept hollering at me, demanding attention.  Rather than addressing the issue, I chose to remove the battery.

So the smoke detector in my body has been going off for decades, silently warning me, but I could not be bothered.  And I knew better than to put a fresh battery in, I didn’t want to be screamed at again. 

It’s funny when we finally face the things we’ve been avoiding, it’s not as awful as we’d imagine.  That dealing with the thing isn’t as exhausting as running from the thing.  But how could we know that?

25 years ago I was assaulted in school.  

Some of you have heard this story.  I’ve been dealing with it in bite size pieces.

I was in 7^th grade, so either 12 or 13 years old.

It was PE class and we were playing softball.

I tagged a boy out on third base.

A few innings later I tagged the same boy out on third base.

He charged me.  He pick me up and whipped me around like a rag doll.  He had about half a foot on me.  

These memories are not new.  The parts I remember:  the disorientation, the popping, the horror on my teacher’s face, running away from the field, down the stairs and into the girls locker room.  I remember sitting at the kitchen table with my parents, them fighting my suspension and telling me I would be allowed to attend Sports Night on campus that weekend.

Recently I realized that while I know I was in 7^th grade, I didn’t recognize just how young that is.  

In my memory I was practically grown, I’m the same height and it’s easy to pretend.   I’d rather pretend like I was a scrappy fighter than the aching, separated body I was.  

I see my niece and realize I was younger than she is now.

I see your 12 year old daughters and their fierceness and vulnerability.

I can release this story from my bones.

I can see the senseless violence and offer myself grace instead of judgement or defensive justification. 

I can finally see myself. 

 A tall, skinny, pimply girl in glasses, who beat the biggest guy in the grade at softball, and then he tore her apart in front of their classmates and teacher who were all powerless to stop him.

I don’t carry it like a banner, but I will no longer keep it in my cells.  

That experience shaped more of my adolescence and student years than I am able to articulate.  The tension in my body, the fear and vulnerability, the recognition that I am powerless in so many ways, the arrogant and desperate hope that I might still have a bigger influence than I have.  The constant red alert.  

Because, yes, I removed the battery from the smoke detector all those years ago.  I had to in order to function, in order to survive.  I couldn’t listen to that blaring noise and get anything done, so I yanked out the wires.  But the alarm continued to sound, silently blaring.   And while my ears were spared the noise, like a florescent light bulb flickering too quickly for the eyes to register it, my brain still recorded the message, the danger, and my cells lived in a state of constant alarm.

But now I’m plugging back in.  And the noise isn’t as overwhelming as it once was, I feel like I can actually take a look and hear what’s going on.  It’s the right kind of hard. And we can do hard things.

I have a square teapot.  It isn’t super practical but it’s pretty cool looking.  It has a bamboo handle.  

For years it sat on top of my refrigerator.

“That teapot was my grandmother’s,” I’d say.  “It’s kind of hard to clean,” I’d think.

One day I noticed a sticker on the bottom.  Target Global.  2005.  And beneath the sticker, printed on the ceramic:  Dishwasher safe.

“This was my grandmother’s.  She bought it at Target because she thought it was cool.  It can go in the dishwasher.”

I use it all the time. 

It was my grandmother’s.  It was also from Target.  It can be both.  

Well my body just reminded me who’s in charge around here (spoiler alert: it isn’t me). Because I was slumped on the couch and I coughed and now my back is in charge for the rest of the day.

My body is in charge. My body is the boss.

It’s really easy to get trapped in my head. For years I heard “mind over matter” and I believed it, “intellect over instinct,” and I internalized it. It’s easy to forget that I have multiple systems all working together and that I am more than my brain. I am all my cells and my cells are in me.

Every single cell. I am in my hair follicles and my stomach lining, I am my blood and marrow, I am my muscles and tears and fat cells and mitochondria, baby. I am every part of me and I live in every single cell.

Exhale. Yup. Even my shitty lungs and my faulty eyeballs and my deceptive freckles. I am all of me. And today, my lower back is telling me. to slow down and remember that. To stand up straight. To move as much as I can. To exhale as I bend my knees. To rest my weight. To use the assist. And to keep breathing.

Use the assist. Keep breathing y’all.

I was introduced to the term “active recovery” in the fitness realm, in a cycling studio, actually, where I can be found approximately three times per decade. I even got my cycle certification, because I like learning, but it turns out I don’t love cycling, which I kind of knew going in, but that’s another story for another time.

“Active recovery” in cycle class is when you keep moving but at a much lower intensity or speed. You see it occur after a sprinter slows to a trot or a dancer stretches between combinations. It’s a dynamic alternative to stopping, and I just love that.

As someone in recovery from an eating disorder (and other human things), I really appreciate the phrase “active recovery,” because the healing and recovery is ongoing. It’s not like a cut, that heals once and is fine from there on out. It’s more like a soft tissue injury, that requires ongoing therapy treatments, exercises and stretching in order to maintain the healing. I encounter my eating disorder every day, even though I am no longer active with it. Unlike drugs or alcohol, this isn’t something I can fully extract from my life, I have to face it multiple times a day. Every meal is another potential for sabotage. This kind of healing isn’t a “cross the threshold and then you’re there” kind of thing, it’s more of a staircase that I continue to build and climb in order to escape this toxic sludge that’s trying to swallow me.

Too much?

See, it’s not enough that I started eating or that I started digesting my food, which were obviously important components, but the internal conversation had to shift too. There are so many layers to recovery, you peel one back only to discover four more. It’s fair to say I escaped the clutches of my eating disorders but then was trapped in the world disordered eating for a solid period of time. It’s so easy to slip back into disordered thinking. Recovery takes constant vigilance. Or it did at first and it still does, I cannot speak for the future, maybe one day there will be total freedom.

It feels like liberation, but with a clause, a parole of sorts. You escape the pit of the eating disorder, wander the halls of disordered eating, climb out of that, but carrying around this little monster in your brain who always whispers and sometimes shouts at you, trying to get you back to the pit.

My little brain monster, who feeds me lies and feeds off my doubts, she has not been vanquished. I still carry her with me and she is fed by everything I hear, everything around me, everything that I breathe in. I have to call it out to keep her quiet. Even now, years into my recovery, I can find myself back in the halls of disordered eating, like I’m walking around, just fine, and then POOF! Sunken back into the halls, they just pop up!

Disordered eating is so prevalent that I can participate in it, in front of people, and raise no flags. Because you can’t hear what it’s like in my head. Because we don’t know what it’s like in other people’s bodies.

I feel like every day I have to dig in a bit more and pull more out, extracting all the doubts and unhealthy expectations within me, the internalized disappointment and just say ENOUGH. Day after day after day. I have to tell myself that I AM enough, that I have HAD enough, and that I have wasted ENOUGH of my energy and life fighting this.

And yes, that little brain monster is still there. I face her every day and every time that I do I’m a little bit stronger. As I get stronger, she gets quieter. My recovery must be as relentless as she is, so I am actively in recovery because recovery IS ACTIVE.

Active recovery, y’all. It’s not just for cycle class.

Whenever I do laundry, I think back to the lessons I learned in the laundromats. The lessons gifted me by Black women.

They taught me to shake out my towels and jeans. (You do want your clothes to dry, don’t you, honey?)

And to keep an eye out for recently vacated dryers. (Use their heat when you can!)

There was no reason for them to help me, but they did. And every time I do a load, even now that I’m lucky enough to be able to do them at home, I think of them and their kindnesses. The debts I owe Black women, both big and small, both seen and unseen. I’m grateful they chose to help me, to share their wisdom with an awkward white girl, new to the neighborhood, new to the struggle, new to the fight.

My mother is one of the most beautiful humans I know. And yes, I am 100% biased, but I’d bet honest money that there are those who are not biologically obligated, who would agree. My mother is stunning.

It’s mostly her smile, which takes up her whole face. Her high cheekbones and clear blue eyes certainly contribute, as do the angles of her face– that geometrically resemble those of Julie Andrews, that’s not opinion, that’s just MATH.

But I’ve noticed lately, that her smile really does take up her whole face– and with the passing years, the ripples of her smile extend ever more. The smile lines from her eyes meet the ripples of her smile, creating a symphonic smile, in stereo.

I dab cream in the corners of my eyes and smear oil on my face and neck. Decades of emotions leave their mark, each experience etched in evidence, and I remember my grandmother’s hands… spotted with age, bubbling veins betraying decades of stress, nails well kept, skin soft. I hear her saying “You don’t feel old, you feel the same, and then you look down and see your hands and wonder… how did this all happen so quickly?”

My nails remain unpolished, my hands sporadically moisturized. My grandmother’s reality still generations away. My mother’s life comes ever closer to my grasp. Not quite, never really. Owing a home? AYFKM? Not gonna happen. Three kids to college? Girl, I can’t send one kid to daycare. But the daily frustrations and requirements and impossible standards (that you somehow meet), those are familiar. I remember observing them from afar, a long, long time ago.

This is just to say.
I have loved the mother I screamed at,
That you knew deserved kinder than she got.

Forgive me. I didn’t know.
It seemed so equal. And reasonable.

Those of you who know me from Before, know how important my grandmother is to me, was to me. Is to me. For though she is gone, and has been for quite some time, her memory is so strong within me, her legacy so thick, that while she may no longer breathe, she continues to influence.

My grandmother, Gramma, my mother’s mother, my Gram, the grandmother I got to keep— she was really something.

My other grandmothers were as well, one I lost at age five, my father’s mother, Darlene, a performer. She had my dad as an unmarried teenager, a drop out from Hollywood High. She sang and danced (ballet and tap), from a very young age, spoke French, and dreamed enormous dreams. Then Dorothy, my Gramma Dot, my dad’s step-mom, was just amazing. Grandpa was her second husband, she was young, they got married the year after my parents and had a son the year after my sister was born. This fabulous woman, who was probably just a few years older than I am right now, joyfully jumped into the role of Gramma Dot, spoiling the shit out of my siblings and me. She was stolen from us, by cancer, far too young. I was in 6th grade. Moving forward, through life, Gramma, my mother’s mother, was the grandmother I got to keep.

And boy did I ever. This woman came to every play, game, and recital that I ever gave. She took me to our local theatre, both at San Luis Little Theatre (now SLO REP) and PCPA, she sat through the ballet recitals where I waved a garland for 2 minutes, and she and Poppa muddled their way through my singular season in water polo, when none of us really knew the rules.

My grandmothers are gone. Gramma lived into her 90’s, remaining sharp and engaged, living at home due to the incredible attention of my mother. Poppa passed in August of 2011 and she followed in April. She was born in 1920, the year white women could finally vote. She lived to see microwave ovens, and a space race, a man on the moon, women in Congress, Madam Speaker, a woman primary for President, a Black man become President (I so clearly remember her scraping off her Hillary bumper sticker and replacing it with OBAMA ’08), great grandchildren be born, so many new branches…

And I’m grateful she hasn’t had to witness recent history. That the free press, she and her husband worked for, was still relatively free and respected when she left. I think back to that warm afternoon of Poppa’s service, and this tiny, giant woman, standing throughout the entire reception line. Refusing to sit because these people had come “to honor Bob,” so she stood.

She stood. Through so many chapters. I think of the high schooler, watching her sweetheart graduate and go on to college while she stayed behind to graduate, and then working for another year to save up for school (I also vomit at the thought that one year working in a department store used to be enough to then pay for COLLEGE), but she did it. She waited and worked and then went. She graduated and got a job and then when they got married right before he shipped out for basic, she was FIRED for being married. Because married women were not welcome in the workforce.

So she hopped a train and left Colorado Springs forever, moving in with her sister-in-law, her new husband’s, brother’s-wife, also left behind while he fought in Europe, up until the Battle of the Bulge.

I think of my grandmother, younger than I am now, watching her sister-in-law receive the worst news ever. A preemptive haunting, a warning of what might be, the ever present threat of grief.

Poppa always downplayed his own role in WWII. He told me about fool’s errands around England, driving miles to pick up arm bands for the superior officers, things he felt really silly about having done. As we both grew older he told a few more stories, about the French women who taught him a few phrases, and the Christmas he spent there, about a guy he knew who was part of liberating the camps, “He never spoke again after that day.”

Poppa was a gentleman of a mold I cannot describe. The youngest of three, all boys, born to a German-American woman and a Norwegian-American man. He delivered papers as a boy, and after the war, came back to write for, and eventually edit and publish for the same paper. The dude lived the American dream. Married his high school sweetheart, had three daughters, sent them all to college, lived through Nixon and changed parties, lived to see grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

From Depression-era children through marriage equality, my grandparents, my mother’s line, they really saw it all. They got to evolve with the times– to see another World War, and the Red Scare, and Civil Rights, and Space Exploration, and I think of all the things that have happened recently, the times I’ve thought the thought I never thought I’d think, the times I thought “Thank goodness they’re dead and don’t have to see this.”

And then… I think of this week. I think about Kamala Harris and my grandmother. I think about all the merch she would have bought. I picture Gram in chucks.

I wore her pearls when I volunteered at the polls. I wore her shoes when I primaried for Elizabeth. I carry her with me always.

I may live under a Patriarchy, but a Matriarchy lives in me.