Mirrors

Year’s End December 30 2009


Last time the winter solstice passed,

I’d foundered in a loss so

Catastrophic

That I wandered, whited out,

Through days and weeks and months,

Knowing moments only as they brushed my blinded face.



Losing from this life the Love who centered me,

Who brought me peace, who gave shape to my hours

Was a death unto itself.

It seems, however, that no one truly dies.

We move from one form to another,

Reconnoiter, Find our bearings,

Learn new ways of being,

Then go on with Spirit – loving, learning --

Changed and yet the same --

Transfigured.



Reflection:

Life is marked by passages, by times when we move definitively from one life to the next. Our birth was such a moment, as is the experience we call death. Other dramatic passages intervene between our entrance into the physical body, and our exit from it.

For me, becoming a mother in 1972 was such a moment. Everything changed, as did I. My body and my hormones were forever altered, as were my feelings and my awareness.

The day before I gave birth, I had been working in my darkroom, in the basement of our house in suburban St. Louis. I had studied to become a dedicated amateur photographer, and enjoyed making photos as esthetic statements of how I saw the world. My pictures often caught ironic juxtapositions, or sweet and unexpected moments. The subjects were often buildings and citiscapes without people, or moments when postures, faces, clothing, or colors presented a millisecond of surprise, without the person’s or animal’s collaboration in composing the image.

When my contractions became more rapid and regular, I was standing before the developer tray with my tongs, ready to extract the print that had been emerging, dip it into the rinse tray, and suspend it from the clothesline overhead to dry. I laid down the tongs and went to call the doctor, who said it was time to come in. I went to the hospital. Eight months later, I went back to the darkroom to extract the print from its tray, and knew that I would not have time to play with photography again, at least for a very long time.

The birth was difficult. The baby had been due a month earlier. I was so glad she was finally going to arrive!!! I was in the hospital in labor for 36 hours before they finally induced the birth with hormones. I had asked for anesthesia after the first 10 hours, so I was no longer conscious of what was happening. If I had been, I would have been scared witless for the welfare of the baby! Finally, she came – a beautiful girl, with the cord around her neck. She was wizened and shriveled as if she’d lost weight (she had, being post-mature), and had a full head of bright red hair. Her hands, amazingly, were shaped just like mine. I couldn’t stop looking at them. We had known the baby would be a girl, which was great. Ray always said that the baby’s hair would match my bright red “carrot top,” and, looking at the genetic background, I would just laugh. I had red hair, but no one else in my family did, and no one in his family did, either. But he was right!

Unfortunately, although the baby seemed fine, I started to hemorrhage after she was born. The only other time I’d had a hospital stay, for a tonsillectomy when I was 5, I had stayed in the hospital for two weeks also, because I had hemorrhaged uncontrollably, and they couldn’t stop the bleeding. My guess is that this history of hemorrhaging (which had also happened two or three times a year in lieu of menstrual periods) was one manifestation of malnutrition from celiac disease (gluten sensitivity).

They discharged the baby (fortunately my mother had come to help – she ended up being the main caregiver to a temporarily orphaned infant!), and kept me in the hospital for another week and a half while I bled incessantly. I can’t believe any sane doctor would have separated a mother and her newborn in that way!

They couldn’t decide whether to do surgery to stop the bleeding, but kept me fasting, except for water and occasional cups of clear broth, in case an emergency surgery became necessary. I ended up starved, weakened, and severely anemic by the time I was finally discharged home. It took till after the baby’s first birthday before I began to feel that my energy had somewhat recovered. Breast feeding at that time was routinely discouraged, and although the milk came in, I’ve always wondered if trying to pump milk and feed the baby would have depleted me even more than I already was. By the time I made it home, my daughter was well inculcated, in any case, into the routine of bottle feeding. Bonding was difficult, as the hormonal period when it is supposed to occur, within the first few days of the baby’s life, was well past.

The next traumatic life transition came when my daughter was six. In addition to being a mother, I had continued to teach French at the community college, as a full-time faculty member. I had achieved good success, being elected President of the National Association of Foreign Language Department chairs, and obtaining a major NEH grant for my research and writing. 

In 1978, the economics of foreign language courses in the Midwest, where at the time everyone spoke English and few had encountered another language, hit bottom. The college decided that no one really needed foreign language study, and that, in fact, all the humanities were likewise pretty useless. Foreign language and humanities faculty members were laid off, presumably permanently. I found myself out of a job and out of a profession. No other foreign language teaching jobs were available anywhere within commuting distance. It was a moment of despair. All that study and qualification was suddenly useless. In desperation, I started a business in Human Resource consulting, for which I had obtained some training with personality profiles. I figured that my time as an academic had drawn to a close.

In fact, I did end up being offered another teaching position days before the next semester began – teaching remedial reading at a different campus of the same community college. I liked getting regular paychecks. I took the position, for which I was technically qualified, with a doctorate in psycholinguistics, but about which I actually knew very little.

The year’s effort I had put into building the human resource consulting business as an alternative career to replace teaching had also paid off. I had recruited excellent and well qualified associates who continued to work as part of the company I had started. Now I had a full-time job that I was desperately trying to learn how to do, a fledgling business that demanded significant management and sales attention, an important National Endowment for the Humanities grant to do ethnographic and linguistic research and write two books, and a six year old daughter for whom I was trying to figure out how to be an excellent mother. I was stressed beyond imagining – “meeting myself coming and going.”

The year after being laid off and then rehired, I became severely ill, involuntarily losing close to 50 pounds in three months, and feeling only semi[-conscious most of the time, with chronic diarrhea, and eczema so severe that it restricted my fitful sleep to less than two hours a night, sometimes for weeks at a time. I was so weakened that I had to lie down between classes, surreptitiously, lest anyone discover me “flaking out.” I had also been hemorrhaging vaginally for six months or so. In addition, one day, as  I was trying to lift a heavy bird bath in the garden, my spine had fractured from osteoporosis, causing excruciating pain, hospitalization, and a year-long convalescence using a wheelchair or crutches. 

I had, previously, had premonitions of people’s impending deaths from accidents of various kinds, which had generally come to pass within a few hours of my psychic perceptions. At this point, I had a premonition of my own imminent death, which, needless to say, alarmed me. I immediately took action – that hour -- starting a gluten-free diet, and starting to research nutritional supplements, learning which ones I needed. I don’t know what pushed me toward those solutions, but they were correct. I had been trying to obtain medical treatment with no success during the months that preceded my premonition; obviously that was not working. I did see a different doctor, a gynecologist, to get hormonal treatment for the vaginal bleeding. Gradually, with the gluten-free diet, the supplements and the hormonal treatments, I started to recover from this low point.

Because of the hemorrhaging and the Progesterone treatment to arrest it, I basically underwent menopause at age 39. I found it distressing that I had had to figure out for myself how to restore my health – that medical doctors had not been able to diagnose what was going on or provide helpful guidance. I had been told by three different doctors that I wasn’t really sick, that I was overreacting. One of them had exacerbated matters dramatically by prescribing 20 bran tablets a day for diarrhea, and then, when I became even more desperately ill, accusing me of lying to him. He did do a blood test of my rheumatoid factor, which was through the roof – but he just brushed it off as a false reading; it was too unbelievably high. Of course, the underlying problem was gluten-sensitivity, which was, at the time, thought to be a myth, a hysterical “all in your head” illness.

This was the beginning of my study of alternative health maintenance. Over the next few years, I became an expert on the use of nutritional supplements to prevent disease and disability, and over the next three or four years, thanks to using what I was learning, I regained a reasonable state of health – feeling better than I ever had in my life.

Although I have not seen this described in the celiac literature, I have repeatedly observed, since beginning my practice as a classical homeopath, that a history of dramatic menstrual irregularities, infertility, difficult pregnancy or repeated miscarriage, and a very early menopause are fairly diagnostic for celiac disease in young women.

Although I appreciated that I was still employed, I actually hated teaching remedial reading and writing. In 1982, I took a year’s sabbatical, which I had earned, to further recover from my illness, to complete the book on French language and culture in Missouri, and to figure out whether I should continue teaching or should switch full-time to the consulting business. During that year, I also worked intensively and studied with a hypnotherapist, seeking to access the deepest levels of my being to answer my questions about my life direction.

The hypnotherapy was deeply healing, and helped me to achieve a very different, more spiritual perspective on what a lifetime means, and what mine, in particular, was about. It helped me to tune into a non-material level of thought and experience.

At the same time, I had found a homeopath in St. Louis who helped me further, using remedies. I had become acquainted with homeopathic medicine in France, where many people prefer it to allopathic medicine, and where most pharmacies offered both types of medications, homeopathic and allopathic. Certainly, this homeopathic treatment was much more helpful on my path to better health than the allopathic medicines had been.

When I returned to teaching, I had found a better perspective within which to do that work, and I was able to change the framework totally. I had once again been transformed, emerging from the crisis following a different path, living within in a different paradigm.



Lives December 30 2009

Sometimes we see our path

As in a fun-house mirror.

We’re sure that we know what is real and what is not,

What works for us, and what we want.

Then things happen that we didn’t plan.

We’re upended, spun around.

What we thought was fact –

The riches so enticing,

Success, the picture perfect house and family –

Suddenly, they flip into a mirror realm.

And things that held no interest,

That we didn’t think were real,

Become important.

We traverse our own road through the desert.

We are close to dying, then come back to life,

Having learned that worldly things we touch and taste and feel

Are fleeting,

And the manna -- white, unearthly, everybody’s –

And the Love from which it springs --

Are our true sustenance.