Mentally, Adele, Steve and I checked out of Adele's sixth-grade year about two weeks before it ended. From August to May, tests and projects came at a fast pace. Because Adele learns best verbally, we supported her workload by reading aloud and reviewing material orally nearly every night. Social studies and science were particularly grueling, requiring several nights of intense study before each test. The first of fifty items on one social studies review guide read, "Be able to identify on a map all the countries, major cities and landforms of Africa." Talk about daunting.
Sometimes Adele became outraged by the academic demands on her. After a late night spent studying plot elements for a quiz on the structure of the short story, she came home from school the next day and slammed down her backpack, ranting, "Since when do quizzes have essay questions!?" That seemed a fair question.
Other times, I felt indignant about her unnecessarily heavy workload. I thought back to my own sixth-grade year, when we spent many slow weeks learning how to organize various levels of information into outlines. This was accomplished entirely during the school day, and it has proven useful my entire life.
A simple question Adele asked me one winter afternoon crystallized my experience of her sixth-grade year. Around three o'clock on a Sunday, she paused from playing with her neighbor friend to come into the kitchen and ask, "How long do you think it would take a person to write ten typed pages?"
I looked at her suspiciously. "Who needs to write ten typed pages?"
"Um, we have ten typed pages of imaginary journal entries due tomorrow," she said.
I tried to remain calm in front of her friend. "Okay, then," I said in an unusually high-pitched voice. "You need to say goodbye now."
To my surprise, Adele was able to sit at her laptop all that afternoon until bedtime crafting ten typed pages about an imaginary two-week trip to Europe, complete with real references and points of interest she'd researched on the internet. In the end, it was a fantastic assignment requiring her to focus, synthesize and create at a level that stretched and stimulated her.
Before social studies and science tests, Steve was a great help, genuinely enjoying the subject matter and oral reviews. But then there'd come an evening, after he'd weathered a long day teaching, when his response to the mention of a test the next day was to shut his eyes, drop his chin to his chest and say, "I can't." He'd look up at me across the dinner table, pleading, "You've got to do this one."
Then Adele would collect her messy reams of handouts, and we'd sit on the couch going over in detail the makeup of the planets in the inner solar system versus the makeup of the planets in the outer solar system, until we could stand it not longer. A perfectionist by nature, I sometimes found myself saying, "Let's just go to bed. You don't have to get an A. Go for a B."
When May arrived, we all felt like the hard work should be behind us, and it was difficult to muster up our drive much longer. Steve and I pooped out, silently rationalizing that Adele needed to finish up the school year on her own. But she also pooped out, forgetting to bring home her textbooks and instead devising her own fashion magazines and videos, planning slumber parties, baking and decorating cakes and playing out on the sidewalk until dark. We let her.
Adele's brain was stuffed full of information over the course of the school year. For the most part, this souped-up learning was energizing. She may forget the names of the presidents of the African countries, but she is sure to benefit from the lasting glimpses into distant worlds. She came to know that the things we can learn about and explore are limitless.
The beauty of the way Adele learns is that we often end up learning along with her--about continents, countries, landforms, politics and economics; about space, planets, stars, religions, world views, short stories, laws of motion, prepositions, sentence fragments, comma use, the colonization of Africa and the deforestation of Brazil. All the pockets of fascinating information that we delved into inspire me to learn more and to stay open to the richness of our world.
But still, I'm glad summer is here. Adele has both an artistic and entrepreneurial spirit, and I want her to have this unstructured time to allow the unplanned to take shape. Her school year was packed with learning. That knowledge needs to settle so that one day she can transform it, applying it in some personal, meaningful way.
Into what beautiful mosaic will she piece together the elements of her mind, spirit and imagination? A process of alchemy needs to occur. I'm eager to see over time just what exquisite creations she will be able to bring into life.
6/11/10
5/13/10
Change of Life
In her response to the tearful week I spent after Colette's prom, the therapist, who usually aims to restructure my thinking, surprised me: "You'll have to embrace your sadness," she said, "in order to go through this transformation." I left the office with the understanding that some significant process of change must occur within me over the coming year, in order that I may be able to let go of Colette, to release her to the wider world.
In the meantime, our town flooded. Life changed. For two long days, water poured down over the ground in great torrents, turning streets into rivers and yards into lakes. Whole neighborhoods were swallowed, leaving houses under water and families jumping out of top-floor windows into boats there to rescue them.
In parts of town, the flooding was catastrophic. Everything familiar was suddenly altered. The terrain was no longer the one we knew; the signs that made sense before lost meaning. For several days, our town lost its bearings. For those who lost their homes, the displacement was traumatic and continues. Each of us, as we've assessed the damage through photos and videos, firsthand experience and conversations with friends, has been pushed to regroup and to reach out to one another in new ways.
The water is drying up, and recovery efforts are in progress. Wet carpet has been ripped up and lugged to the sidewalks, and all across town industrial-size fans are airing out basements. Many of us are fortunate enough to be back to our normal routines, sharing a renewed sense of the fortitude of our community and the power of experience to transform people.
Today I can barely keep my eyes open and my head up simply because of a night spent tossing in my bed with hot flashes and insomnia. I seem to be entering pre-menopause in earnest now, and I wonder about this change too. How will I fare through this natural, but protracted and unpredictable, process?
I am letting go of my child-bearing years, seeing the end of my biological fertility, and I intend to emerge in the next stage of life as a strong and changed being. I have borne my children, and soon they will leave to explore the world outside our home. I will transform as I release them. Not only they, but I too will come into a new orientation with the world.
As I enter this bumpy phase, there are moments when I see clearly the perfect beauty of things around me just as they are now. There exists a wisdom outside and within me, amidst the topsy-turvy signposts, if I can pause and locate it. The poem Adele wrote to me for Mother's Day gives me exactly what I need: "Just take a breath," it says, "I love you to death."
In the meantime, our town flooded. Life changed. For two long days, water poured down over the ground in great torrents, turning streets into rivers and yards into lakes. Whole neighborhoods were swallowed, leaving houses under water and families jumping out of top-floor windows into boats there to rescue them.
In parts of town, the flooding was catastrophic. Everything familiar was suddenly altered. The terrain was no longer the one we knew; the signs that made sense before lost meaning. For several days, our town lost its bearings. For those who lost their homes, the displacement was traumatic and continues. Each of us, as we've assessed the damage through photos and videos, firsthand experience and conversations with friends, has been pushed to regroup and to reach out to one another in new ways.
The water is drying up, and recovery efforts are in progress. Wet carpet has been ripped up and lugged to the sidewalks, and all across town industrial-size fans are airing out basements. Many of us are fortunate enough to be back to our normal routines, sharing a renewed sense of the fortitude of our community and the power of experience to transform people.
Today I can barely keep my eyes open and my head up simply because of a night spent tossing in my bed with hot flashes and insomnia. I seem to be entering pre-menopause in earnest now, and I wonder about this change too. How will I fare through this natural, but protracted and unpredictable, process?
I am letting go of my child-bearing years, seeing the end of my biological fertility, and I intend to emerge in the next stage of life as a strong and changed being. I have borne my children, and soon they will leave to explore the world outside our home. I will transform as I release them. Not only they, but I too will come into a new orientation with the world.
As I enter this bumpy phase, there are moments when I see clearly the perfect beauty of things around me just as they are now. There exists a wisdom outside and within me, amidst the topsy-turvy signposts, if I can pause and locate it. The poem Adele wrote to me for Mother's Day gives me exactly what I need: "Just take a breath," it says, "I love you to death."
4/28/10
Stupid without You
To my surprise, the theme they chose was the hundred-year-old children's book, The Secret Garden. With this as their inspiration, the junior class officers, led by my daughter Colette, hosted a prom for the upperclassmen this month that was breathtaking in its gorgeousness. Their year-long efforts of fundraising and planning culminated in a transformation of the school's beautiful, old auditorium into an English garden at night.
A month before the event, the juniors presented antique keys on ribbons and dusk-colored calla lilies to the seniors with their invitations. On prom night, when the guests arrived in the foyer, couples passed through a wrought iron arch wrapped in tiny lights and ivy, past a tinkling fountain, classic concrete garden benches and an abundance of flowers.
The view of the interior garden was deliberately and cleverly concealed by a tall, constructed garden hedge covered in verdant moss and flanked with urns of flowers. Around that hedge, in the secret garden, meticulously crafted balustrades, low moss-covered hedges and greenery surrounded pretty tables, and low twinkling lights hung over the dance floor. Along with projected shadows of vines, real ivy crept up the walls.
With money they raised themselves, Colette and her committee created all of this beauty, and then gave it to their friends, in celebration of high school.
The prom was a big accomplishment for my daughter. It was something I played only a miniscule part in, but in the end I was thoroughly caught up in her excitement. What a thrilling time, in the balmy spring weather, constructing a real secret garden! Her date, her dress, her dinner and limousine plans: Colette's happiness became my happiness.
Because of her heavy responsibilities for the event itself, she let down her usual guard with me and allowed me to help with her personal affairs, even permitting a mini facial. Blissfully, the week before prom, I laid a warm washcloth over her young, radiant skin and then with my fingertips rubbed in special potions and creams.
I began to want the experience to be perfect for her. In the final days of preparation, when I was enlisted to dash around town picking up boxes of fresh moss from the florist, the heady magic of prom carried me away. I became, in a word, over-involved.
The morning after her prom, as Steve and I lay in our bed, he said to me, "You love this stuff. I wish you could have been my prom date."
I couldn't take in the sweetness of his words over the sadness of what I was feeling. Colette's presence expands my life. Her experience enriches mine. For the first time, I sobbed about her growing up. "I'm going to miss her so much!"
Steve stroked my hair. "It's okay. We'll find new things to do."
"I don't want to find new things!" I cried. Everything seemed trivial in comparison to my connection to my firstborn. What came to mind as Steve tried to console me was a saying I'd seen on some whimsical German stationery: "Ohne Dich ist alles doof," translated, Without you, everything is stupid. With Colette gone, I thought, everything would be stupid. Flowers, ladybugs, butterflies--all stupid.
Colette conked out after the prom, sleeping through until the following evening. The house was dark and still. I tried to move on with my day, my life. But for a full week after prom, I was uncharacteristically and hopelessly weepy.
Forget the image of a mother bird forcibly shoving her baby birds out of the nest. No, I'd been soaring in a hot air balloon with Colette, and suddenly I'd flipped over the side of the basket and landed smack, splat, on the pavement below. It was not my glorious adventure. It was hers.
How I would love to stay up there with her, but it isn't my place. My responsibility is to stay down here on my street--grocery shopping, raising my sprightly secondborn, tutoring students, feeding the dogs, taking care of and engaging in the full life we've created. With a mixture of sadness, excitement and love, I watch Colette, floating aloft in her beautiful balloon, so full of promise, and I'm eager to see in which direction she's headed.
On the radio, I hear my favorite new song, "Nothin' on You," and I think only of Colette. The song seems to be about her, how I feel about her and what I want to express to her: "Beautiful girls, all over the world...They got nothin' on you, baby, nothin' on you, baby...." The combination of B.o.B.'s hip-hop lyrics with the loveliness of Bruno Mars's singing moves me, conveying everything I want Colette to know--that there is no one on earth more beautiful and amazing than she; that I have felt this way since the day she was born; that I will always feel this way; and that I want her to carry this with her wherever she goes. This is how I want you to be treated, I will tell her; don't ever settle for less. I weep in the car over the song's power to connect me with my huge love for her. Does she know how loved and lovable she is, and will I be able to find ways to joyfully participate in her life as she moves toward independence?
While driving out to an adult friend's birthday gathering, Steve gently advises me, "So, you got pretty caught up in Colette's prom. You need to step back a little now and give her some space."
I think about how it all transpired and how I really tried to keep my emotional boundaries in tact during the week leading up to the prom. "I think I did pretty well," I respond with uncertainty. "Was there a specific point when you thought I didn't have good boundaries?"
He looks over at me with raised eyebrows. "How about when I had to pull you out of the trunk of the limo?"
"Ooh. Yeah. That."
We both laugh, and it strikes me that this was a big experience for all of us, a powerful passage into her senior year--one I'm so glad we shared.
A month before the event, the juniors presented antique keys on ribbons and dusk-colored calla lilies to the seniors with their invitations. On prom night, when the guests arrived in the foyer, couples passed through a wrought iron arch wrapped in tiny lights and ivy, past a tinkling fountain, classic concrete garden benches and an abundance of flowers.
The view of the interior garden was deliberately and cleverly concealed by a tall, constructed garden hedge covered in verdant moss and flanked with urns of flowers. Around that hedge, in the secret garden, meticulously crafted balustrades, low moss-covered hedges and greenery surrounded pretty tables, and low twinkling lights hung over the dance floor. Along with projected shadows of vines, real ivy crept up the walls.
With money they raised themselves, Colette and her committee created all of this beauty, and then gave it to their friends, in celebration of high school.
The prom was a big accomplishment for my daughter. It was something I played only a miniscule part in, but in the end I was thoroughly caught up in her excitement. What a thrilling time, in the balmy spring weather, constructing a real secret garden! Her date, her dress, her dinner and limousine plans: Colette's happiness became my happiness.
Because of her heavy responsibilities for the event itself, she let down her usual guard with me and allowed me to help with her personal affairs, even permitting a mini facial. Blissfully, the week before prom, I laid a warm washcloth over her young, radiant skin and then with my fingertips rubbed in special potions and creams.
I began to want the experience to be perfect for her. In the final days of preparation, when I was enlisted to dash around town picking up boxes of fresh moss from the florist, the heady magic of prom carried me away. I became, in a word, over-involved.
The morning after her prom, as Steve and I lay in our bed, he said to me, "You love this stuff. I wish you could have been my prom date."
I couldn't take in the sweetness of his words over the sadness of what I was feeling. Colette's presence expands my life. Her experience enriches mine. For the first time, I sobbed about her growing up. "I'm going to miss her so much!"
Steve stroked my hair. "It's okay. We'll find new things to do."
"I don't want to find new things!" I cried. Everything seemed trivial in comparison to my connection to my firstborn. What came to mind as Steve tried to console me was a saying I'd seen on some whimsical German stationery: "Ohne Dich ist alles doof," translated, Without you, everything is stupid. With Colette gone, I thought, everything would be stupid. Flowers, ladybugs, butterflies--all stupid.
Colette conked out after the prom, sleeping through until the following evening. The house was dark and still. I tried to move on with my day, my life. But for a full week after prom, I was uncharacteristically and hopelessly weepy.
Forget the image of a mother bird forcibly shoving her baby birds out of the nest. No, I'd been soaring in a hot air balloon with Colette, and suddenly I'd flipped over the side of the basket and landed smack, splat, on the pavement below. It was not my glorious adventure. It was hers.
How I would love to stay up there with her, but it isn't my place. My responsibility is to stay down here on my street--grocery shopping, raising my sprightly secondborn, tutoring students, feeding the dogs, taking care of and engaging in the full life we've created. With a mixture of sadness, excitement and love, I watch Colette, floating aloft in her beautiful balloon, so full of promise, and I'm eager to see in which direction she's headed.
On the radio, I hear my favorite new song, "Nothin' on You," and I think only of Colette. The song seems to be about her, how I feel about her and what I want to express to her: "Beautiful girls, all over the world...They got nothin' on you, baby, nothin' on you, baby...." The combination of B.o.B.'s hip-hop lyrics with the loveliness of Bruno Mars's singing moves me, conveying everything I want Colette to know--that there is no one on earth more beautiful and amazing than she; that I have felt this way since the day she was born; that I will always feel this way; and that I want her to carry this with her wherever she goes. This is how I want you to be treated, I will tell her; don't ever settle for less. I weep in the car over the song's power to connect me with my huge love for her. Does she know how loved and lovable she is, and will I be able to find ways to joyfully participate in her life as she moves toward independence?
While driving out to an adult friend's birthday gathering, Steve gently advises me, "So, you got pretty caught up in Colette's prom. You need to step back a little now and give her some space."
I think about how it all transpired and how I really tried to keep my emotional boundaries in tact during the week leading up to the prom. "I think I did pretty well," I respond with uncertainty. "Was there a specific point when you thought I didn't have good boundaries?"
He looks over at me with raised eyebrows. "How about when I had to pull you out of the trunk of the limo?"
"Ooh. Yeah. That."
We both laugh, and it strikes me that this was a big experience for all of us, a powerful passage into her senior year--one I'm so glad we shared.
4/14/10
Coming Around to Spring
The spot on my eye is a comet, a small blur of particles speeding through space and time. We here on earth are careening around the sun at 70,000 miles per hour. I put down the science book I am reading aloud to Adele in order to grasp this crazy fact. It is unfathomable. Our hair should be blown off our heads, our heads ripped off our bodies, at the speed we are traveling. I call up the stairs to Steve: "Did you know this?!" I cry.
I had thought the earth was inching slowly around the sun, but no--we are flying. Even with the pull of gravity, is it any wonder we don't always feel grounded?
As the gray winter days wore on throughout March of this year, I struggled with a bout of obsessive thinking that is a recurrent problem for me. I wondered whether my anxiety, which seemed to have been borne of a small brown spot, might also be tied to my firstborn's formally beginning the college search process, and thus the process of leaving and change. The school year was at its most demanding, and it was hard to resist the feeling that life was all work and pressure, trials and tests. Each day was cold and rainy, and for a time it seemed nothing came easily.
Something needed to shift.
And it did. As the earth flew along its orbit, axis tilted, the light began to shift in the hemispheres. A boy threw pebbles at Colette's window, and when she went to the door, he presented her with a bunch of fresh yellow tulips and a blue plastic Easter egg with a note inside that read, "Prom?"
This unexpected gesture toward my daughter broke winter's spell at our house. My vision is clearing: This is why we are here, to create radiant sparks with and for one another as we fly along our orbital paths.
Yes, the future is always uncertain, but with the return of warm sunshine, I feel calmer. I needed spring to come, bringing its inherent hopefulness and promise. It came on its own as a result of our passage around the sun. We are on course, and I am enjoying the season's colorful blooms and participating in the new growth around me.
I had thought the earth was inching slowly around the sun, but no--we are flying. Even with the pull of gravity, is it any wonder we don't always feel grounded?
As the gray winter days wore on throughout March of this year, I struggled with a bout of obsessive thinking that is a recurrent problem for me. I wondered whether my anxiety, which seemed to have been borne of a small brown spot, might also be tied to my firstborn's formally beginning the college search process, and thus the process of leaving and change. The school year was at its most demanding, and it was hard to resist the feeling that life was all work and pressure, trials and tests. Each day was cold and rainy, and for a time it seemed nothing came easily.
Something needed to shift.
And it did. As the earth flew along its orbit, axis tilted, the light began to shift in the hemispheres. A boy threw pebbles at Colette's window, and when she went to the door, he presented her with a bunch of fresh yellow tulips and a blue plastic Easter egg with a note inside that read, "Prom?"
This unexpected gesture toward my daughter broke winter's spell at our house. My vision is clearing: This is why we are here, to create radiant sparks with and for one another as we fly along our orbital paths.
Yes, the future is always uncertain, but with the return of warm sunshine, I feel calmer. I needed spring to come, bringing its inherent hopefulness and promise. It came on its own as a result of our passage around the sun. We are on course, and I am enjoying the season's colorful blooms and participating in the new growth around me.
3/24/10
Seeing Spots
A spot of brown pigment the size of a small kernel of corn sits in the white of my eye. I take myself to an eye doctor, who examines it and says, "Come back in four months." I begin to obsess on it. Figuratively, it limits my vision. Obsessing on a spot is like proofreading, and I'm a genius at it. Detail-oriented is an understatement.
This is not the first spot I've obsessed on. There was the premature skin cancer on my temple. The mysterious mole on my palm. The dark spot on the sole of Adele's foot. The white spot on my mammogram.
Each one has stopped me cold for weeks. In each instance, my life has suddenly become small, like a rain poncho that folds up into its own tiny sack. The spot becomes all that I am.
How are you?
I am a spot, thank you.
For a time, I live inside its small circle, confined by fear.
How can I push through the anxious thoughts and view this as a circle to look through, a lens on my life? If I look through it, what can I see? The future is unclear, unknown. What will I do when my fast-growing girls leave home? Teach? Write? What will life be like without the anchor and structure of raising them? How will I face my own aging and my parents' inevitable passing?
I want my girls to go forth in the world strong and resilient, and I try to prepare them for all that lies ahead. It's an impossible task. Even without major trauma or illness, our lives will unfold into new shapes entirely, and I wonder whether we'll be able to absorb and adapt to the changes. It's scary to look through this lens--maybe easier to stay focused on the spot itself.
Using a cognitive behavioral strategy to curb my anxiety, I ask the eye doctor, "What is the realistic probability that this spot will turn out to be a problem?"
He hesitates, looking serious. "Twenty percent," he answers.
My strategy backfires. Twenty percent feels like a big number. The remaining eighty percent is for the moment blotted out by anxiety, eclipsed.
On the girls' spring break, we visit with friends, staying for two days at a hotel with a special water feature--a pool with a current, in the shape of a circular river. Guests float around and around the water track in clear vinyl, doughnut-shaped innertubes. My old college friend and I get in, jostled by other vacationers. If viewed from above, we would look silly, crowded creatures bumping into each other, drifting in circles. Why do we do this? Does it soothe our souls to travel in circles, passing by the same reference points over and over, without need of volition?
From my innertube, I ask my friend what she thinks about my obsessing on the spot in my eye. "How do I break out of it? Is this normal?"
She consoles me as we float along together. "It sounds perfectly natural." Any new spot, she suggests, is a subtle reminder of our mortality. "Aging, mortality--they're hard to accept."
I relax in the sun with her words, perfectly natural.
Back at home, I want it gone. I'm mad. Out, vile jelly! I tell my eye.
Then again, I'm attached to it, to its sharpness of vision.
I want to shake out the little sack that is this spot so that my life opens up again and is expansive--a warm, infinitely wide bed sheet from the dryer, floating down to where I can smooth out its flowers and curl up on it with my dogs, my family and our community, with a cup of tea and a magazine, a breeze at the window, and the sounds of birds and lawn mowers ushering in a new spring. I want to experience and share with others the beauty and fullness of life all around me. This will require a softness of vision and compassion. I don't cause spots. What I can do is to do what the doctor tells me while gently training my eye back to bigger things, like supporting and connecting with all those I love.
This is not the first spot I've obsessed on. There was the premature skin cancer on my temple. The mysterious mole on my palm. The dark spot on the sole of Adele's foot. The white spot on my mammogram.
Each one has stopped me cold for weeks. In each instance, my life has suddenly become small, like a rain poncho that folds up into its own tiny sack. The spot becomes all that I am.
How are you?
I am a spot, thank you.
For a time, I live inside its small circle, confined by fear.
How can I push through the anxious thoughts and view this as a circle to look through, a lens on my life? If I look through it, what can I see? The future is unclear, unknown. What will I do when my fast-growing girls leave home? Teach? Write? What will life be like without the anchor and structure of raising them? How will I face my own aging and my parents' inevitable passing?
I want my girls to go forth in the world strong and resilient, and I try to prepare them for all that lies ahead. It's an impossible task. Even without major trauma or illness, our lives will unfold into new shapes entirely, and I wonder whether we'll be able to absorb and adapt to the changes. It's scary to look through this lens--maybe easier to stay focused on the spot itself.
Using a cognitive behavioral strategy to curb my anxiety, I ask the eye doctor, "What is the realistic probability that this spot will turn out to be a problem?"
He hesitates, looking serious. "Twenty percent," he answers.
My strategy backfires. Twenty percent feels like a big number. The remaining eighty percent is for the moment blotted out by anxiety, eclipsed.
On the girls' spring break, we visit with friends, staying for two days at a hotel with a special water feature--a pool with a current, in the shape of a circular river. Guests float around and around the water track in clear vinyl, doughnut-shaped innertubes. My old college friend and I get in, jostled by other vacationers. If viewed from above, we would look silly, crowded creatures bumping into each other, drifting in circles. Why do we do this? Does it soothe our souls to travel in circles, passing by the same reference points over and over, without need of volition?
From my innertube, I ask my friend what she thinks about my obsessing on the spot in my eye. "How do I break out of it? Is this normal?"
She consoles me as we float along together. "It sounds perfectly natural." Any new spot, she suggests, is a subtle reminder of our mortality. "Aging, mortality--they're hard to accept."
I relax in the sun with her words, perfectly natural.
Back at home, I want it gone. I'm mad. Out, vile jelly! I tell my eye.
Then again, I'm attached to it, to its sharpness of vision.
I want to shake out the little sack that is this spot so that my life opens up again and is expansive--a warm, infinitely wide bed sheet from the dryer, floating down to where I can smooth out its flowers and curl up on it with my dogs, my family and our community, with a cup of tea and a magazine, a breeze at the window, and the sounds of birds and lawn mowers ushering in a new spring. I want to experience and share with others the beauty and fullness of life all around me. This will require a softness of vision and compassion. I don't cause spots. What I can do is to do what the doctor tells me while gently training my eye back to bigger things, like supporting and connecting with all those I love.
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