Pangea

CHIP OF WISDOM:

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CHIPPED WISDOM:

We don't talk about it much anymore.  

Sure, it creeps up every now and again-- like a zit or something-- and it finds its way into conversation sometimes.  It's usually something innocuous and banal that sparks it.  A book title, or a quirky bit of unrelated conversation.  On Sunday, it was Mother's Day.

My wife's mother was visiting from out-of-town and my wife was railing against the tradition of taking "the little woman" out to eat for a Mother's Day Brunch "because you sure can't trust a man in the kitchen and mom's got the day off-- har har har".  Her mother tried to say that some stereotypes about men and kitchens being like oil and water or Doritos and coffee are true.

"Right," said my wife, "like when I was recovering from my surgery, I remember one day Daddy was taking care of me and he made me macaroni and cheese for lunch and dinner."

And so it was time to pop the zit again.  You know, the brain surgery zit.  

They cut my wife's head open in July of 2004, back before we had children, back before we had a house, back before we had a joint checking account.  Back before she was my wife.  They were inside her head for approximately nine hours, poking around, digging, cutting, suctioning.  It's impossible for me to believe that was almost ten years ago.  It seems some days like it was yesterday that I was lying on the floor of the waiting room that you weren't supposed to sleep in, while "Bridget Jones's Diary" blared on the TV that you couldn't turn off or lower the volume of or change the channel.  Some days it seems like it is impossible that it ever happened at all.  

But, run your fingers across the top of my wife's head and, under all that lovely, fine dark hair, you'll feel that ridge.  Pangea.  It happened.

We often talk about how we were "babies" when we first met, and we were.  It's true.  She's right.  We didn't know shit about nothing; the only thing we knew was we were weird and in love with each other's weirdness.  She says that she didn't allow herself to think about all the things that could have gone wrong during her surgery.  I couldn't allow myself to think of anything else.  Terrified, sickened, half crazy with fear, I slowly marched with intractable resignation towards June 22nd, 2004.  There was an AVM in there that could explode at any moment, leaving her disabled, paralyzed, dead.  Who knew?

Brain surgery, of course, could have done all those things to her, too.  But we didn't talk about that much.  We tried to enjoy each other as much as we could.  We went to plays, movies, concerts.  We stayed up late and talked.  We were silly.  We were scared.

At least, I was.  

I don't know if she was.  I'm too scared, even now, even almost ten years later, to ask.  I guess this is me asking.  

To me, my wife is fearless.  She does things that I am frightened to do, even though she'd probably tell you that she's frequently sidelined by fear.  She makes choices that are empowering and bold, while I stagnate and caress my various stupid routines.  If they'd told me, in 2004, that they were going to cut something out of my head, I don't know that I could have gone through with it.  I really don't know.  You can't know, of course, until it's you, but I don't think I could have done it.

I know she's scared of some things-- everybody is-- but I like knowing that she faced down a pretty ornery dragon once upon a time, and I know that, when my time comes to do something similar, I'll only be able to do it because she did.  She has a career and I have a job.  She's not afraid of real responsibility like I am.  I hide in my do-nothing, go-nowhere world.  Because I'm frightened to succeed just as I am to fail.  

Fear is funny.  It's inside of you, and you know it is, and sometimes it's just dying to get out, and sometimes it's very content to just nestle and nuzzle inside of you, keeping your intestines warm, like fat. I'll never know what was surging through my wife's veins while she was wheeled into that elevator away from me for the last time with that thing in her head.  And I guess that's okay.  Because we don't talk about it very much anymore.  And I guess that's okay, too.