Everyone Keeps Asking….

From the Little Cuter. 

Everyone keeps asking how I’m doing. How we’re doing. There is absolutely no correct way to respond.

Do you really want to know? Are you interested in the glossed over version? The version we’ve concocted that is shiny, protective… the Teflon version that we’ve created so that we can keep breathing? Because that version I’ve got down pat.

We are doing great! Mom is incredible, a superhero, she is recovering at a rate that I can’t even keep track of. Emotionally, physically, spiritually… she is surpassing every expectation given to us from people who are properly educated in gauging their own opinions. 16 weeks of physical recovery? No way, she’ll be back walking in 10. Emotions? Yeah, this is unspeakable, but she’s got 24-hour access to therapists who are trained in walking you through these kinds of things…

..... These kinds of things … those are the kinds of phrases that keep coming out of my mouth, the kinds of phrases that, the second they enter the air in front of me, I feel like cringing, like hitting the quick rewind button on my “life DVR” because they feel so trite. There’s no way I said something that slight, something that glossed over.

But I did, I’ve had plenty of practice, I’ve gotten really good at it.

Do you really want to know how I am doing? They haven’t invented a word for it yet.

How do you describe a time in your life that has been simultaneously the most horrific, most unimaginable, and the most inspiring, the most encouraging, the most incredible that you’ve ever seen?

In one week I saw my mother, my totem pole for existence, my pillar of strength, my role model, my MODEL, my template, my third ear, my second brain, my MOM, riddled with BULLET WOUNDS.

Think about that for a second. BULLET WOUNDS. HOLES in her person. Passages in
her body that did not exist before someone inflicted them upon her.

That same week I hugged the president. Twice.

How would you describe that? How would you answer, in a sound bite, when someone asked you how you were?

I use the Teflon version of my reaction because I can’t begin to expect people to understand. They want to know if I am, if we are, surviving. Yes. If that is what we are doing right now then, YES, we are surviving.

But I also feel something that I’ve only recently been able to put my finger on. Stay with me for a second… Do you remember the first time someone described outer space to you? The first time you were able to conceive the fact that you, your body, your entire existence, live on Planet Earth. And Earth is part of a solar system, which is part of a galaxy, which is part of a universe, which is always expanding. Then you realize, WAIT, the universe, which contains ALL of existence, is expanding? WHAT is it expanding into?

Do you remember how it feels to try to wrap your head around the space that our universe is expanding into? That, that brain ache, that inconceivability… That is how I’m feeling.

I am trying to convince my brain that what I’m going through isn’t just an elaborate dream. I am trying to rationalize evil. I am trying to come to terms with that fact that I CAN’T. I am furious with people telling me to “try and find a new normal”, and realizing that they are absolutely right. I am the kind of woman who relishes the mundane. Ask me before how I would describe my ideal day, and I would say it was “blissfully dull”. I finally learned to love my reality, to accept what brought me peace, and be proud that I could find it, maintain it, and be proud of it.

And then someone SHOT my mother.

Shot her. Shot her. Shot her. Three times. SHOT my mother. How do you say that? How do I write it? How do I conceive of a nauseating “new normal” that consists of my mother as a “victim”? Suzi Hileman, my template, my role model, my MOTHER, is not a victim. I now know that I hate that word. Victim. Victim implies weakness, that someone is capable of DOING something to you.

I can’t think of her, of us, of the Hilemans that way. We are not victims. We survived that week: That first week of restoring my mom’s body so that her mind, her incredible, incalculable, incomparable mind could come back to us. I’ve never been one for spirituality, never done much praying of any kind. But if there is a higher being to thank for bringing that mind back to me, to us, I thank it. Good gravy do I thank it.

I thank the people from my past. People whom I have loved from every different point in my life, for reaching out to me and reminding me that the love is still there. I thank compassion and empathy. I think back on those nights in the hospital, reading notes from them and knowing that I could call on any one of them for strength.

I understand now, and thank Shock: An emotion I’ve feigned in the past when something unnatural has happened. I give Shock credit for the strength I was able to maintain in the hospital. I thank it for allowing me brief moments of terror, but then reminding me that there was a job to be done, a woman to remind to STAY THE HELL WITH US, and I got back to the task at hand.

I thank my Brian. SIR. I know no other human in this world that could have been with me at that time, and helped me to hold it together like I did. Whatever “it” was that got me through that week, has gotten me through the weeks since, he was one of the main reasons I was able to maintain it.

So….

So how am I doing? The Teflon version reads the same. The other version, the one I, we, have now to learn to live with every day, the nauseatingly necessary and “healthy” new normal, the most honest example of an “ugly truth” that I’ve ever lived through, is far more complicated.