I don’t even know how to start this blog post, because I don’t want to be a writer or an educator or anything else at this point. I just want to be a mom and do leaps and cartwheels and shout from the tops of buildings that my kid is back. My kid is back.
Abby’s only a week out of surgery (well, a week and a day), and despite the swelling and bruising and lingering pain – because you don’t go through major surgery and spring back instantaneously, Abby is laughing and smiling. She’d giddy. For the last few years, she’s barely wanted to leave the house except for work and school. It’s been difficult to get her to go to the movies with us let alone anywhere she’d have to be social. When I didn’t get it, she explained it like this.
Me: But you don’t have to “people” at the movies. You just sit in a dark theatre and watch a show.
Abby: To you going to the movies is no big deal. To me, I have to deal with how people will respond to me in the parking lot. At the ticket counter. In concessions. I analyze every look, every reaction. It’s exhausting.
To her, every venture out of the house and encountering people was like running a gauntlet, afraid that she wouldn’t be accepted and that someone would make an issue of her very existence. I can’t even imagine living like that. The closest I can come is that as an assault survivor, as a woman, I have to be constantly on guard about who’s around me, how I might be vulnerable, what I can do if someone grabs me or breaks into my house. But I worry about those things when I’m alone or it’s dark and isolated. Not all day, every day. Exhausting was probably putting it mildly.
However, even since the surgery, even with the bandaging, the discomfort, the healing still to be done, Abby is more herself than I’ve seen her in years. She’s wanted to go out and meet the friends I’m reconnecting with who live in the area. She’s let me take pictures, all of them with her beautiful smile, dimples out in full force.
She’s happy. She’s comfortable. She’s our full-of-life kid again. I know there will still be ups and downs. Her doctors have warned that sometimes people get depressed after the surgery because they think it will change their lives, but they have the same lives to go back to, and we’ve seen this in people we know. However, right now it’s like the sun has come out from behind the clouds after months or, really, years, of overcast skies and torrential downpours, and the whole world is new and beautiful and glowing. And so is our daughter.
