A Repurposed Mom

... A dispatch from bewilderness

A repurposed object is something that acquires amnesia and forgets what it did before. A “repurposed” human reconfigures any shards she can find of anything she ever knew, like she always just missed a step or a train or a decade.

A crazy mix of clips from my first and second life careens through my current brain. It is on the “fried” setting. Unzipped, emptied, inside out.

It is thirty years ago and my child and I are building a sandcastle. Then finding heart-shaped shells. We stayed at The Cliffside, all forest greens and whites.

I was her anchor and then I was not. I was my anchor and then I was not. My mind broke and so did we.

I would put the pieces together if I could, careful, like building a sandcastle on the beach when she was small, architecture of buckets and cups.

Scooping, molding, adding shells, castle standing shore side until the ocean sweeps it out.

Showered, we walk to town, glowing, shiny, arms like wings in perfect rhythm, legs as long as they can be. Days stretch out in perfect rhythm between perfect sky and sea.

In a little brain, I carried all my past and history. My child and my child’s childhood, And all I thought was me.

Once upon a time, movers I can’t recall packed boxes I can’t recall for a trip I can’t recall.  I landed east of somewhere and west of somewhere else in a rambling farmhouse nine hours south of my life and my child.

Each year, an estimated 2.5 million Americans sustain a traumatic brain injury.  Of these, over 60,000 die and another 80,000 suffer permanent disability, which means they lose the lives they had.  In addition, hundreds of thousands lose the child, or mom, or dad they had.