Let me drive! Sunny and I are going somewhere in an RV, long-distance. It is her turn to drive and I don’t want her to. She gets in the front seat and is speeding up canyon corners and it feels as if the big box vehicle will skid to its side and roll. She believes she is petting our little, black terrier, Angel near her feet without looking as she drives and I am annoyed by her being distracted—try to tell her he is in the back with me.
We are simultaneously stripping paint from wood and Sunny is steering and stripping the wood quickly and efficiently--as fast as I can hand it to her.
Next, I am with an old boyfriend I don’t think much about. We wake to discover he has peed the bed. I am trying to clean it up--the sheets before his mother sees--stripping the bed.
I wake thinking of buying a book on how trauma affects the brain, that there is likely no hope for me at this point, how no amount of counseling seems to repair IT (yes, vague pronoun to match the tenuous misfiring’s) and just how many hours a day I devote to understanding what is wrong with me and how I might be spending the rest of my life alone. I must learn to not want men.
But, then I think about the brats, or punks, as my Grandpa O’Bryant would have called them, at the middle school yesterday. The kids, boys who did all that they could to make a game of disruption and defiance and me the cowboy who slammed the gate as soon as they sniffed around the chute. No fair, no fair, they cried when I gave them no lead, but I know it’s imperative if I’m ever to return and am grateful for my grit when I get them again for my last afternoon class. This hour there is no trouble.
Trauma is the reason I’m bringing all this up and these are the sorts of boys with none. The most hateful at the middle-levels are those whose parents love and indulge them. The suffering ones sit silently back and know when to listen to the messages of sovereignty I slip into each and every lesson.
No doubt I’ve been rewarded through early head-flushes, strangling’s and punches to the upper back, bruises to the eyes, as I now have a gift for seeing the details.
All in green, with the colored connotations of love, worth and feeling ill.
