And All Along, The Canyon of My Skin was Filled With Water. And Stars.

She was the only one who could teach me how to stop being angry.

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Last week, I asked what you’d like to read about and threw out some choices, including

Mary Beth Spray

’s desire to hear more about being in my skin. Thank you to everyone who gave such generous and lovely feedback, and to

Monika Kosmakova

, for the juicy and vulnerable conversation that followed. This piece is my first attempt at describing what it feels like for me to be in my skin.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering, I kept the jacket. 💖

It started with the swimming, which started when Caly died. She was the only one, even though or perhaps because, she had four legs and a nature that attached itself to the present, who could teach me how to stop being angry and start being sad. Because anger is rushing, ruthless, hot. It's the simmering of old stories, old wounds, that turns anger to lava. But sadness, sadness takes sitting with a thing, holding it in our hands and turning it over, running our fingertips over the cracks and letting our hearts break, so we can see through to places that are full of light and clouds. 

Even if she hadn't shown me anything else, which she did, because she showed me everything, Caly showed me what it looked like to be in her skin. And just as it took me years on top of years on top of years to undo my desire to lash out, to lash in, it took me years of being with her, years of being without her, to move through the vast canyon of misremembering, of darkness, to see that all along the canyon of my skin was filled with water. And stars. 

As I learned to live in my body without hers beside me as a guide, I swam. Every morning after her death, for months, for as long as the seasonal creek flowed, I swam. And then when the creek dried, the pool, and then the lake, and then the river, and then the ocean. I swam in any body of water that would take mine.

In water, free from the absence of her pawprints on dirt, of her body no longer swaying in a trot in front of mine, leading the way down the trail, to the water, to the kitchen, to my heart, I could lose her and find her again. In the water's semi weightlessness, I could almost bear the weight of her death, my tears becoming a part of the whole that kept me afloat.

When we lived by the ocean, when Caly was still young enough to go to the beach every day, but old enough that we stayed only an hour, old enough that I gave her half an aspirin for the stiffness and pain, Caly got a stye above her upper left eye. It would scab over and she would rub the dry cakiness off as she snuffled her head around in her bed, leaving a little blood along with the slobber and the hair. She did not seem to care in the least about the stye. I however, cared a lot. I put fresh aloe on it, winding a bandage around her head to keep the slimy chunk in place, which did not work. I put ointments on it, I washed it with mild salt water, in addition to her daily ocean bath. Nothing made it heal or go away, and I was embarrassed, not for her, but for me. What did it say about my mothering that I let my dog run around with an open wound on her face the size of a pearl? 

I visited my mother last week, and as she often does, she insisted I meet one of her piano-student families. I never want to do this. I am physically smaller than my mother and in her house my stature is that of a child and my skin feels too small. When she introduces me to someone as her daughter, I am young, inept. I have already made mistakes without knowing how or when or what.

As I stood there, cataloguing the delicate glass vases in the lighted case on the wall behind the family, she told the mom and the kids that I too took piano when I was young. "I was so mad at her when she quit at 16. She was your age," she said as she pointed to the older boy. I felt hot and tight, my shell removed so the soft meat inside showed. I do not remember what happened to my piano lessons, I was busy, for all of high school, managing the emotional and mental fallout of a sexual assault my freshman year. His version was not my version, and I didn't know how to tell anyone, especially my mother.

I know she wonders why I changed, I know she was angry that I forged sick notes, that I cut class outright, but she doesn't ask, has never asked. Instead, in the spring of my sophomore year, she wrote, "TRUANT," in red capital letters on the kitchen wall calendar and pointed it out to me one morning she left for work.

Vulnerable things upset my mother, made her sad or angry or both, created even more space in which I did not know how to appease her and also be a child who needed her. This is why I didn't tell her things. It is no different now that I am 51.

Last week during my visit, after letting a dozen sideways comments lodge in my throat, cutting off my voice, I chose the prettiest one, and carefully told my mom that she’d just hurt my feelings a little. She replied, "My but you're always so sensitive. Such a tender thing, I can't say anything without being the bad guy." 

How do you tell someone you are burning if you know they will only open the window and let the air pour in, then blame you for smudging the carpet with your ashes?

In a lovely essay last week,

Sally French Wessely

wrote about fawning. Actual fawns, in her backyard, staring at her in connection or fear or both. As it turns out, when the term is applied to humans, it's both. 

Fawning is the less well known fourth option of the flight, fight or freeze group of stress responses. As researcher Janae Elisabeth put it, if fight or flight is like hitting the gas pedal, and fear is the brake, fawning is hitting both at the same time. 

Pete Walker coined the term fawning and defines it as, “a response to a threat by becoming more appealing to the threat,” and Katy Kandaris-Weiner, LPC, calls it, "a response to trauma that involves placating and peacekeeping." 

Ingrid Clayton Ph.D., describes the embodiment of it in detail as, "a mirroring or merging with others’ desires or expectations in order to diffuse conflict and find safety. We surrender our boundaries and lack assertiveness when we are fawning. We over accommodate, appease and submit to the very person or people who have harmed us.

While fawning is meant to neutralize danger, it also causes us to abandon our own needs, thereby reinforcing our wounds.

Although it appears like we are agreeable, it’s important to understand this as a mask for the terror that lies beneath. True self-expression is trapped, or only allowed in small doses that don’t rock the boat. Finding safety in a predatory relationship is always the priority, trumping self-esteem, self-care, honoring ourselves as separate beings in any way."

Many things may be my mother's fault. Or not. Things are never entirely any one person's doing. Even those humans who cause great harm to others, most of them, are informed by generational and personal trauma and their present state of responses and coping mechanisms. 

Since Caly died, I have fostered three rescue dogs and I have watched as their trauma played out in the way they related to food, noise, me, other people. One of them, as her comfort level with me grew, so did her discomfort with other people. She bit one person, then another, before I recognized that my own trauma was affecting her ability to heal. 

I always wondered what kind of person could return a dog to a shelter. How cruel and selfish they would have to be. Until I was the one who returned a dog. Bella and I had been together for nearly two years when I recognized that the waking every morning in a panic, the crying at almost anything, the feeling of tightness in my belly and the constant wanting, was not sustainable and wasn’t getting better, it was getting worse. Everything came second to keeping Bella safe, to keeping her happy, to helping her be whole. Hour after hour, day after day, I ran interference with my husband, trying to help Bella heal, while managing my husband's increasing anxiety around a skittish dog. He never wanted a dog, especially a dog with trauma, but I thought once he fell in love with her, he would change. He did not fall in love. 

As the three of us shared a house all day long, both of us working from home, I recreated the triangle of my childhood, me in the middle trying to keep Bella stable and happy so that my husband, otherwise the calmest, kindest of humans, wouldn't get triggered. It was all up to me to keep our little family afloat and I was failing. I didn't realize until I read Sally's article that I had recreated the constant state of fawning from my childhood and it had been drowning us all.

I was trying to help someone be in their skin before I knew how to be in my own.

So on a hot day in late September of last year, I drove Bella back to the shelter, a no kill shelter, which makes it bearable, but just. My skin felt too tight, my organs pressed in on each other, my mind burned. I was sick on the way home. All I wanted was to be out of my body. I had just returned from a week swimming in Lake Tahoe, where I once swam with Caly. I thought of the lake, of its calm and its clarity. Its unwavering cold, its impossible greens and blues. Of Caly and how she would swim until her whole body shivered and yet she would drop the stick at my feet, asking, “Again.”

So I took myself swimming. It was only a pool, but my body remembered the lake, my eyes saw the jagged mountains and I smelled the warm, dry air filled with pine and sap and dirt. I let the water hold my body and felt my skin against its softness. I cried for all I couldn't be to Bella. I let my skin expand with the water and allowed for the truth that I could be the kind of person who rescues a dog, the kind of person who loves that dog fiercely and also the kind of person who returns that dog.

Being in my skin that day wasn’t comfort, it was allowance and surrender. Allowance that no person is just one thing. Surrender that nothing is just one way.

I have wondered lately if I should tell my mother about what happened to me in high school. I like to think it would change things between us. Help her be less angry at me, less disappointed and confused at why I wasn't different than I was.

But I see that instead of seeking comfort and change from her, I could allow that I am both the wounded girl who couldn't tell and the healed woman who has a voice, sitting in my own skin, sometimes uncomfortable, sometimes at home, but always swimming in a canyon that is full of starlight and the possibility of surrender.

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Caly at 14, two years before she died. We swam in this creek in Austin every morning for that entire summer. The following summer it was dry and we walked over the rocks together. And the next summer she couldn’t have managed the trail and didn’t enjoy swimming so much anymore.

The dry creek bed and the stye.

If you love a piano solo that can bring you to tears, Dancing Cat Records, the label that George Winston founded, just released the first posthumous recording of his. It came on while I wrote this and fits very well. You can listen to the first track here.

With so much love,

j

xo