Condiments

I got my miracle yesterday, and the swelling is going down.

Wednesday, for reasons I won’t go into here, everything that could go wrong went wrong, mentally and in my most important relationships. While one friend got chemo, another broke a bone.

My life became an after school movie.

I felt that all of life is shit and men are pigs and America cannot make a comeback, plus my mind is going and and my body has turned into grandma pudding and I shouldn’t have had a child and the mysterious four-pound weight gain since Thanksgiving was almost certainly a massive abdominal tumor.

I was in what they used to call “a state” when I was coming up, which meant that you were a walking Florida panhandle of self-righteousness victimization. Also, very sad, scared and lonely, which is the same thing.

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First I did what one does if raised by the English: I put a smile on it. I stuffed down the victimized self-righteousness. I fluffed up the moral superiority. I did what my friend Marianne calls pouring pink paint over it all. And it was good.

Until it wasn’t.

The pain, fear and anger of the present began to shimmy inside me, in harmony, like a Goth girl group. So I came up with a plan, even though I know that if you want to make God laugh, tell Her your plans. My plan was to eat my body weight in sugar and fats to numb out. I headed to Safeway to buy three individually packaged servings of their great carrot cake, because buying and eating a whole cake would indicate a disorder. But I prayed the great prayer “Help!” and somehow bought sushi instead.

I went back home, where They lay in waiting. “They” were the people whose behavior had caused poor darling innocent me such distress. I am not going to name names but I was the younger sister to one of them, who told my parents “Take it back” when they brought me home from the hospital; gave birth to one of them; and married the other. If I were God’s west coast Rep, I would change their hearts so that they would come crawling to me, asking my forgiveness for their insensitivity, finally wanting to do the things and be the way that I am positive would make them less infuriating to others, i.e. me.

Regrettably, that does not seem to be the way miracles work.

I resent this more than I can say.

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Instead, miracles seem to begin when all hope of one’s best thinking fails, and you are forced to tell someone (not the bad people) that you hate everyone and all of life. Horribly, you always see a dear friend love you anyway and in fact, love you even more, because of your pain and vulnerability. Being loved like that changes you molecularly.

Then you have to be what they call in English prisons “a personal well-being officer” to your own prisoner self. In English detective shows, a personal well-being officer helps you get gluten-free food so you are not violently ill all the time, or more books from the cart. I got more food and the new issue of People.

I let myself keep feeling sad and damaged for awhile because it was in the natural order of things. Life is just too goddamn lifey sometimes. But I prayed, rather bitterly, for grace to meet me right where I was, because it always does, and to load me into its wheel barrow, because again, it always does, and wheel me away from the slag heap of teary, angry existential exhaustion.

And it did. It used a friend’s profound love — the main source of my religious faith — and the willingness to be in the truth of terrible feelings to bring me first to tears and then to loving and forgiving everyone, even (pretty much) me.

If that is not a miracle, I don’t know what is.