The Broken Page

Prayed to the Lord for a new beginning, and here I am, broken at the blank page, coffee in hand, trying not to be overcome by nervous mom anxiety. Today my heart kid wouldn’t eat breakfast, wouldn’t drink much, woke up trembling and coughing and with a diaper that wasn’t wet at all. He has a heart cath scheduled for Tuesday (today is Friday) and I don’t know if he’ll be able to go under anesthesia with this cough. He wanted to go to school so badly, but I hated to send him with an almost empty-stomach, with my nervous fretting energy flitting around the little lightbulb of his existence. We got our first snow of the winter, finally, last night and the school wants to let the kids outside, even though it’s only about 20 degrees out right now. I plan on swooping in shortly before release at 11:30, always the earliest mom there, to rescue my son from imminent dehydration/hypothermia/neglect. And to give him his next dose of medications, which I push back so he can go to preschool. But this is all my nervousness—he loves preschool, and they take great care of him. Keeping him home to mope about and stare longingly outside didn’t feel right, either. So I released him like a canary from cupped hands, and he raced into school with a “goodbye Mom!” and didn’t notice at all when I came back in with his snowpants and boots. This makes me happy—to let him be where he wants to be. I just hope he’s ok—that his strange and “off” behavior is nothing more than a touch of a cold and maybe, like me, being woken from 1:30-3:30 am by snowplows.

Life is not tied up in neat packages. Unfinished novels show us that—Hemingway died and left over 300 unpolished, unfinished, or otherwise unpublished works behind. Yet that doesn’t stop us from reading them, from imagining our own endings, or engaging in a self-satisfying flight of fancy, "WWHD?” “What Would Hemingway Do?:” imaging the old man had something up his sleeve after all. But reading a published, unfinished novel reminds me that tying up all the ends is merely a convention of the genre, like a sitcom or a blog post—an “all’s well that ends well” or a sense of an anecdote, a false sense that it has happened, and we can now stand back objectively and laugh about it a little—“see how cool I am? I can see the irony in my own situation.” The end. But no, problems aren’t always resolvable, especially not to an author’s or mine or your satisfaction. Maybe we don’t want resolution to a story yet, and resent having to tack on an ending to an otherwise unfolding story. And that is how I feel about my journey right now. I want to write about being a heart mom, but to do so with any authority seems to imply I have something final to say about the topic, and just when I think I’ve found my footing, I have more summits to climb after all.