Count Your Blessings, page 13
At that moment I began to get excited. I went on craigslist to see what rentals were going for in their area. For what we would need, a little house with a yard near my kids came to one-third of our mortgage payment. I began imagining myself in my new lifestyle and then I started doing all the preparations to make it a reality. With each day that has gone by since I let go of my fear, I have grown more and more eager to start my new life. I wait with anticipation that we may receive our foreclosure notice, only to be disappointed day after day. The banks are so confused. There are already 764 bank-owned and foreclosed places in my small zip code. I must be patient. But it’s hard. I may be the only American who’s looking forward to foreclosure. That’s only because I let go of the past and figured out a brighter future.
I do not feel a lick of shame from this turn of events. I am just one of millions struggling to get by. It’s temporary. Our lives are changing whether or not we like it—so we might as well find a way to like it. I count my blessings regularly, including the fact that I am able to see the glass half full.
So, now, rather than looking at this huge financial loss as a disaster, we are using different language. We’re talking about a fresh start, not starting over. I feel like we’re moving toward something, rather than away from disaster. My husband and I are on a mission TOGETHER and we have been shown more love and appreciation than ever. And every night we sit outside and plan our future, profess our love and wait till the bank gets itself organized to take our house away.
~Marilyn Kentz
Carrying On
What seem to us bitter trials are often blessings in disguise.
~Oscar Wilde
Sometimes it can take years to be thankful for a gift when it arrives wrapped in such sorrow. It all began seven years ago on a Thursday in early November under a crisp Colorado blue sky. I remember it was warm enough to run in shorts. As I ran, I wondered why my breasts hurt—late period, hot ears, hot breasts. At forty-five, I was new to menopause. My neighbor said, “Perhaps a pregnancy test would be a good idea.”
In the small bathroom next to my psychotherapy office I stared at the two blue lines of a positive pregnancy test. I shook like a teenager in trouble. As I greeted my 9:30 patient I knew I needed a session more than she. Afterwards I called my husband of nineteen years, the father of my three children. “It happened again, could you come down, the baby thing?” It was like a telegram without “Stop” every few words. That was how it all began and I’ll always feel it was a ride I never asked to get on or off.
At our doctor’s appointment my husband and I sheepishly faced my obstetrician. “At your age miscarriage is very common.” The ultrasound showed a flicker, the small heart. “The flicker is good but you never know.” Two weeks later we returned. The flicker flicked. It was my husband’s forty-sixth birthday. “Happy Birthday Dad,” she said, handing him a fuzzy black and white photo.
Telling the children was next. Getting the five of us together on a weekend was not an easy task. My fifteen-year-old had other priorities that didn’t include a Saturday night family dinner. Our nine-year-old’s mouth stayed open as our twelve-year-old ran crying from the table. “Ever heard of birth control?” I was pulled in many directions that night as ambivalence, excitement, fear, and uncertainty seasoned my chicken and broccoli.
The CVS (chorionic villus sampling) test drew near—a test we had decided on to determine if the baby was healthy. I could only remember the name because of the drugstore chain. I sat in a cold examining room watching the baby frolic on the ultra-sound screen. I was told a large needle would be inserted into my uterus to draw tissue from the placenta. Not to worry—the baby would be fine. The pain felt deep, felt wrong, it was over. They showed me the baby again still swimming softly. “You may have cramps, don’t worry. Don’t vacuum, fold laundry, or cook for twenty-four hours.” They’d call us in two days to let us know if the baby was healthy. Later I wondered if bending over for thirty seconds to vacuum up Christmas tree needles killed my baby.
I was making the kids pancakes when the phone rang. We had a healthy boy! At ten weeks, I flipped the pancakes, exhaled and decided I could survive pre-school once again.
And then it was another Thursday, this time, melting snow marking the end of February. I proudly celebrated the three-month mark, feeling I’d made it to shore and could breathe a little easier. I sat in my doctor’s waiting room surrounded by large stomachs. I placed my hands on my small stomach embracing my child, finally willing to do it all again. I carried my baby and freshly baked coffee cake into the doctor thanking her for a healthy child.
She rubbed the clear “gook” on my stomach, positioning the cold doppler so we could hear the heartbeat. Once again I lay peering at the ultrasound screen. I saw nothing but blackness and my doctor’s shaking head. I cried and she apologized. He was gone. Tearful nausea filled my emptiness as I fumbled with my drawstring pants. Somehow I moved to a black leather chair in her office holding my knees to my chest, weeping like a lost child, late picking my daughter up from Brownies. My world was small snapshots after that. I drove home conscious of my breathing as if I were in the labor I would never have.
We were instructed to arrive two hours before the necessary D&C procedure. I lay and waited as my husband worked on his laptop. A nurse arrived and introduced herself as my “cocktail waitress” for the evening. She was kind and I cracked a smile as she patted my hand and called me “Dear.” I kept talking, kept weeping, telling my “cocktail waitress” how sad I felt. It was over and they all kindly complimented my strength as I kindly thanked them. My husband held my hand as I sipped sweet grape juice. We drove home on a cold night and had to pull over. I threw up beside a stranger’s driveway.
As tears welled from my empty womb, loving friends told us to plant a tree, which my husband painstakingly planted in our front yard. I bought a rock that read “Remember” and placed it in our garden. But my healing began only when I told my story on the page. Instead of the cries of a tiny newborn I was listening to my own creative voice. My writing burst forth like a baby’s first breath. A tiny soul had delivered me this beautiful gift. I haven’t stopped composing since I said goodbye. Our children, even those we never meet, truly are our best teachers. Our miscarriage was not a “miss” but a carriage from the stage of procreation into a new stage of creation. With much gratitude, at age fifty-two my writing blossoms like the beautiful tree planted a few years ago.
~Priscilla Dann-Courtney
The Strings that Pulled Me Through
Happiness is a thing to be practiced, like the violin.
~John Lubbock
The words rang in my ears for days. With her arms around me as I fell apart and my world drowned in black, my surgeon whispered to me, “Leah, thousands of women have been where you are and thought it was the end. They are still here.” She was right. Those words didn’t mean anything to me then. I only remember I never cried so hard. I couldn’t stop.
I was like a zombie. My feet moved, I continued breathing, but I couldn’t think. When I saw her face as I walked into her office, I knew immediately it was cancer.
My mother and sister had jumped on a plane to be with me. They tried to distract me with jokes, luncheons, and outings to the movies. Their lightheartedness would make me forget … for awhile, but a lengthy operation involving the removal and reconstruction of my left breast awaited me and I began to wonder what I had done wrong in my life to deserve such a sentence.
The night before my operation, I was quiet on the outside, but inside I was screaming, I was on my knees begging the sun to remain, the night to stay away and the clock to stop ticking the hours away, counting the minutes down to the second I would be wheeled into that operating room. It was then that I came to grips with the possibility of my death.
I had been on the operating table for nearly ten hours and I knew my body would never be the same.
The day came when we all went to the oncologist to talk about the plan for the dreaded chemotherapy. I was prepared to hear that I would have to endure six months, which was the standard treatment at that time. When my doctor informed us I was to have a year of chemotherapy, the nightmare seemed to begin all over again.
My sister, mother and I huddled with our arms around one another, praying for the strength to accept this new sentence. My tears had begun again and the world seemed to go silent.
It was at this time I finally began to see that I had a mental strength, a positive attitude my mother had ingrained in me. My sister reminded me of this. She calmly sat down at a table with a piece of paper and folded it down the middle.
In one column, she explained, were the difficulties I would have to endure. In the second column, all the things I was grateful for. This was a technique my mother (who, ironically, was outside pacing and smoking) had taught us. I always knew what the outcome would be. The column for things I needed to be grateful for: my grown son, my completed education, a supportive family, good insurance coverage, a good job and a difficult divorce behind me, would always outweigh the other. As the year of chemo and radiation jumped out at me, it became clear. I had so much to be thankful for.
If you have never experienced that cold poison introduced into your system, it’s very difficult to explain the sensation. I would try to think of other things as I looked away and my doctor would put the needle in me. The feeling was chilling, like ice flowing through you instead of blood. Having been informed it was the strongest kind of chemo at the time, I had prepared myself for the vomiting, the nausea and the sleepless nights hovering over the toilet. I braced myself that day. I had my vomit bag beside me. I was ready. I waited and waited, but the nausea, the vomiting never came … not that day or any other.
Sitting quietly alone in my room one day, I thought about my year off from work and my year of treatment. The way I saw it, I had two ways to look at my situation. It all came down to this: Either I could tell myself that I was losing a year of my life, taken by cancer, or I could tell myself that since I would be at home and undergoing treatment without the reaction to chemo others had, I would actually be given a gift of a year. Then I saw it. Even though it had been leaning against the wall for the past three years gathering dust, there it was … my violin, one I had yet to learn to play. It seemed to scream at me, “Here I am! Look at me!”
It was a gift, given to me for my birthday one year by a good friend. The old violin, in a case nearly as worn, had been restrung and was waiting for me to fulfill a dream I never had time to pursue. For me, the sound of a violin was the closest sound to angels singing. I told myself I would finally be given the time to make mine sing.
I began to pursue this goal in earnest as I signed up for the beginning strings class at the local community college. But the rounded, smooth notes I planned to produce emerged in abrupt, stop and start screeching of unrecognizable “melody.”
As I mastered each song, I would go on to other simple songs on my old but angelic instrument, always with the impending orchestra performance a few months away at the forefront of my mind. The role of our beginning strings class was to accompany the more advanced class in the playing of the “William Tell Overture.” What a lofty undertaking I had set for myself!
In a few weeks, I knew my hair would begin to fall out. So, I had it shaved off before I could see long strands of hair lying on my pillow. Meanwhile, I would imagine the voice of the violin speaking to me to encourage me to keep practicing, to work to make my dream come true. Soon, those sharp, shrill screeches began to glide into smooth, buttery notes, responding to the touch of my fingers, propelling me forward to reach my goal.
Now, I had something meaningful to do with my fingers, with my mind, something that made my heart soar when I felt the strings vibrate under my fingertips. It was as if they were calling me. After years of silence, the strings awakened my spirit again, the way it had been awakened when I was a child and first learned to play piano and when I was an adolescent and learned to play guitar. The violin, however, was more intense. It was medicine for my soul and spirit, literally counteracting the dark liquid flowing through me. It lightened my fear, replacing it with hope.
A few months later, as I sat in the strings section of the college orchestra, my dream became a reality. Though I was bald under my scratchy wig, it didn’t matter. Those angelic chords were being played by me, by my fingers, as I was surrounded by my musician friends. I knew deep inside me that there was a light and an end to this journey. The strings of my violin had pulled me through.
~Leah M. Cano
Hurricane Hummers
Birds sing after a storm; why shouldn’t people feel as free to delight in whatever remains to them?
~Rose F. Kennedy
Although many people envy the residents of sunny Florida, with our almost constant, summertime weather, the fall of 2004 brought nothing but sympathy from our northern friends and relatives.
During a period of two months, the east coast of Florida was hit by three major hurricanes!
But in the midst of boarding and un-boarding windows and living without electricity and hot water for weeks at a time, a tiny miracle arrived in our yard which seemed to make everything else bearable.
When we woke up on the morning of September 5th, after Hurricane Frances had hit our coast with winds of up to seventy-five miles per hour, my husband and I stood on the porch on the sheltered side of our home and watched the still-powerful winds topple and break huge, ancient, mighty oaks.
Suddenly, in the midst of these destructive winds, we spotted a flash of color in our garden. No more than ten feet from where we stood, a ruby-throated hummingbird emerged and hovered in front of our native firebush plant, jockeying back and forth with the gusts of wind to get nectar from the swaying plant. Unbelievably, this bird came back time and again to drink from this plant.
After years of trying to lure them, this was the first time we had ever seen a hummingbird in our yard—or in Florida!
Because of their scarcity, the sight of a hummingbird in Brevard County, Florida, is almost a miracle in itself. But to see the determination of this tiny three-inch bird, which weighs about a tenth of an ounce, in the face of a storm that put fear into the hearts of millions of Florida residents, was truly remarkable.
The next morning, most of the firebush plant was gone, victim of the winds that continued to batter our state for hours. But much to our pleasure and surprise, our new hummingbird visitor was still there, dining on the plants that remained.
Although we didn’t have power and the boarded windows blocked out the light, my first action of the day was to dig out an old, previously un-visited hummingbird feeder, and boil up some hummingbird nectar on our propane stove.
The next day, when the stores opened again and most practical people were standing in line buying batteries and bottled water, I was at a local department store with an armload of new hummingbird feeders, which I quickly filled and hung outside. That was enough to get the hummingbirds to move right in!
I had lived in Florida for thirty-seven years and had never seen a hummingbird, one of my favorite forms of wildlife, in our state. Although I had been trying to plant all the right plants to attract them, it took a hurricane for me to finally lure them to my yard and to really observe them up close.
Almost every day since the hurricanes, I have had the joy of observing the visiting hummingbirds. With a feeder right outside my office window, I get a daily bird’s eye view. I have watched as they chase each other through the yard and I have had them fly right between my arms as I refilled their feeders. And I have become very familiar with their buzzing and chittering sounds that let me know they are always around, even when I can’t see them.
They remained through the next, more powerful hurricane (Hurricane Jeanne), and have stayed every since.
The hurricane season of 2004 affected everyone in Florida, some more than others. They affected me in a very positive way.
Every time I see the hummingbirds, I am reminded of the many blessings that nature holds for us: messages of beauty, strength, and determination. But perhaps the greatest message is that wonders are out there waiting to pay us a visit. We just need to keep planting seeds of beauty and faith, and we need to keep an eye out for the miracles!
~Betsy S. Franz
The Uninvited Guest
Attitude is a little thing that makes a big difference.
~Winston Churchill
No one was more surprised than I when the oncologist told me that I had stage IV lung cancer. At fifty-four, I was in excellent physical condition. I never smoked, have watched my weight and have exercised regularly for years. Tests revealed that because the cancer in my lung had already spread to my bones, surgery was no longer an option. My wife and I were stunned.
My first response was disbelief. Surely my tests must have been mixed up with someone else’s. But the reality of the situation quickly sank in, and I realized that the course of my life was not in my hands, but in God’s. We cried several times on the way home from the doctor’s office, and had to stop the car to regain composure.
All I could think was, “What am I supposed to learn from this? What must I do with the time I have left? How much time do I have?” I wasn’t thinking “why me?” or “this isn’t fair,” but that the sudden turn of events was a wakeup call for me. I never imagined that there would be many blessings to come as a result of my illness.
Needless to say, the news of my cancer was unexpected and would mean a total change in my life and lifestyle. When he shared the diagnosis, the doctor said matter-of-factly, “You have a one in ten chance of survival.” I looked at him with a mix of fear as well as confidence and said, “Great, I’ll be in the ten percent group.”
I realized that the only thing I could control was my attitude toward the situation, and prayed for the strength to deal with it, knowing that God doesn’t give us tests we cannot pass. Perhaps easier said than done. The thought of leaving my wife, of not seeing all my children married or knowing my grandchildren, was almost too daunting.
