Pickles and Tickles
Healing comes in many different forms. It’s in the weekly therapy I attend. Therapy is a solid, “yes I am healing myself” activity of which I leave feeling both drained and replenished, every time. A year ago, therapy was survival. I’m relieved to say it has transformed since losing June in this last year, and it’s less and less survival and more and more cathartic. Consistently, therapy has proven to be the only sacred and safe space where I can drain the well of tears before I drown. Most times, I morph into a puddle as I lower myself onto the gray loveseat, allowing every ounce of me, the puddle, to trickle into the nooks and crannies of the couch in search of a piece of me that isn’t lost, lonely, or broken. “I want to be happy,” I tell my therapist. A familiar feeling phrase as it surfaces. Familiar because even before June became sick, I had spent thirty-five years of my life trying to escape brokenness and loneliness. Thirty-five years spent cultivating what I thought it meant to be happy. The moment the doctor at the stuffy pediatric urgent care said to me “this could be one of two things: a blood infection or childhood cancer” those thirty-five years of work went poof, and vanished.
Healing is rolling around on the floor tickling my two babies who are on top of one another in a giggling mound of sweet smelling skin and stinky bums. An activity I often forget to do and have to remind myself of daily. An activity I’m really too tired to take on, so I try to make it simple. I drop to my knees and tell the kids to come see me, that I have a secret to tell. They drop their toys or crayons and round their individual corners. I see the blues of their eyes flitter. A smile cracks at the corner of my sons mouth. The anticipatory tickling fest jitters are beginning and giggles can already be heard. My son crawls onto my knees and wraps his milky baby arms around my neck. A second later my daughter pushes him off my lap and onto the stained, dirty, hand-me-down living room rug on the floor, and swiftly secures a position for herself squarely on my lap. Just then I go in for the tickling kill, really trying to dig while not really digging my nails into their ribcages. Shrieks of joy spill from their mouths and in seconds we are all collapsed and staring at the broken light fixture on the ceiling. One second after that, little voices beg me for more.
I wonder if there is healing in wondering. Since there’s healing in therapy and tickling, I decide there has to be healing in wondering too. When I pull the car into a little burnt red convenient store parking lot and see the back of the head of a little girl sitting at a picnic table eating a sandwich. Her head is perfectly rounded and hair so blonde, it’s white. Like June’s was. She picks up a sandwich with two hands and pickles fall out onto her lap and onto the pavement below as she so carefully and methodically lifts it to her tiny mouth. She’s learning to eat a big girl sandwich. She furrows her brow in protest. Her mother and father are sitting on either side of her, shielding her from the harshness of the world, pouring only love into her as demonstrated by the mother who pulls the pickles out of her own sandwich and neatly tucks them into the girls. She’s a good mother, I can tell. I try to look away, but I’m parked too perfectly and directly in front of them. Both the mother and the father glance my way as parents often do when they’re analyzing the safety of a situation. I decide it’s best to avert my eyes and sift through the crap in my center console to find the cash for which I am going to use to buy a Kinderegg for my daughter who is at home and a sandwich and drink for myself. The entire reason I’m sitting in the parking lot. I acknowledge my wonder as I’m moving hair elastics, coins and endless lipsticks around in my console. I allow it to surface. I wonder if that’s what June would look like now. For a moment, I pretend I am seeing the back of June in real time again. It’s a trick my mind is good at playing because although reluctantly, it has had practice. I can’t help but flash one more glance at the girl as I think of my beautiful baby also dropping pickles on the ground. Would she cry? Would she tug at my shirt and furrow her brow? Would June even like pickles?
