Despite my fancy graduate degree and years of executive training, I have learned that not everything is organized perfectly inside a box. The most valuable lessons are outside the square.
I have tried to live in the safety of four sides with a top to shelter me. For a long time it seemed to work. With my small children in my arms, I took them to playgroups in French and Spanish. I made my own baby food even though buying it in the store was much easier. I spent long hours breast feeding as if I was some fine milking machine. I made everyone wash their hands and take off their shoes when entering our home. Nothing was going to harm my babies.
As time went on the job got a little tougher. My babies grew into kids that leapt around with the energy of an insect with twenty legs. With a husband who constantly travelled for work and kids that no longer listened to me, I felt the cracks in the family I was building. Yet I recognized these as growing pains and went on trying to live within the safety of our box.
Eventually, we left my beloved New York and moved to sunny Southern California where I thought there would never be a rain storm. Out of the blue skies, one struck hard. It had all the violent ingredients—thunder, lightening, fear, even death. I couldn’t catch it in a net. I couldn’t take a deep breath and blow it out to sea. I tried to stick out my chest, but missed it entirely. Instead, it struck one of my children.
When the skies cleared and we checked the damage, it was all very grave. Our hospital stay leapt from months to years. Drugged into a deep slumber, my child’s body would shake violently, registering something terrible on the Richter scale. I would sit and watch the blinking lights on the life-saving machines, the alarms ringing constantly. It was like Vegas, but we were losing. During those years I wrote daily. Sometimes it would be on the back of lab reports, get well cards or even on the sides of styrofoam cups. I wrote mostly in the dark, the only light coming from the blinking machines and a small tear in the curtain draped from the window. Eventually, I put those scraps of paper together which became The Tunnel, a timeless story of an ordinary family, and the endurance of the human spirit, sustained by love and hope, to survive.
Back in our hospital room, the darkness softened and everything became brighter. I realized that even hope can peep through a very small hole. By the end of The Tunnel, my child fought fear with courage, and survived. As for myself, I found a way forward.