Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Bradford, Bradford Woods

Everywhere we go/ people always ask us/ who we are/ and where we come from. So we tell them: we're from the Woods. Bradford, Bradford Woods. And if they can't here us, WE SING A LITTLE LOUDER!!!...

Okay, okay. I know it's too early to start doing the good-old-days thing about summer camp. Approximately three months too early, if you wanna get technical about it. But I have Spring fever. I have it so bad, I can feel it in my toes -- just itchin' to be bare in the grass, these toes -- and when I get Spring fever I think of summer as kind of a natural progression, you know, and I cannot think of summer without thinking of Camp Riley and Bradford Woods.

These woods are friends of mine, whose roots do twine, and twine, and twine ...

And so now you get to hear some stories, like: "This one time, at crip camp..."

No. Really. *Ahem*.

The first time I saw brochures for Camp Riley, I was ten years old, and I thought my mother was sending me to boarding school. Seriously. I really did. She threatened it all the time, telling me all about these places where parents sent their bad little girls to get "whipped into shape." The stories she concocted made boarding school sound a million times worse than living with her, and I believed them without question. At that age, it had not yet occurred to me that my mother could lie -- she was God; her word was Gospel; the end. If she said I was bad, then I was bad, even if I couldn't quite figure out how or why. If she said boarding school was a place where they beat kids three times a day and four times on Saturdays to get all the badness out of them, so it was. And thus I lived in never-ending fear of the threat of boarding school -- so much so that when my mother called me into the kitchen one long, golden summer afternoon and I came pounding through the house with my braid undone and grass stains on my shoes and saw the Riley brochures spread out on top of the deep freezer (out of the corner of my eye, before I'd even managed to reign in my momentum), my heart stopped dead in my chest, turned to stone, and crashed down onto my feet. I thought I was doomed: that's it, I was done, nice knowin' ya. It felt like I had been sentenced to die -- but as I'd come to find out, I was getting an opportunity to live.

How do you describe the safest place you've ever been? I was safer at camp than I had ever been in my own home, my own bed. It took a full week for that to sink in even the slightest bit -- that no one was going to beat my brains out of my head the second my feet hit the floor. In subsequent years, I knew I was safe the second we pulled into Bradford Woods, and it was like letting out a breath I'd been holding for eleven months. It always felt like coming home after a long, long journey and being surrounded by beloved things again. In Bradford Woods I was a different child: I scrambled out of bed every morning running full steam ahead; I couldn't wait to see, touch, do, everything. I shed timidity and shame and became loud, boisterous, and confident. "Natural leader," said the papers the cabin counselors had to fill out at the end of the 12-day sessions. "Tiffany has the ability to motivate everyone around her." I laughed. I sang ditties. I led ditties. At vespers and campfires in the amphitheater, I stood on stage:

Heya Mister, Hiya Mister, wanna buy some cookies?

At dinners, I'd start food fights that would end with empty wheelchairs scattered across the room and a whole gaggle of kids scrambling around on the floor, covered in Jell-o, crawling under the tables and shrieking with laughter. I did the table chants right along with the rest of them, pounding the wood with my fists and shouting:

We're table number one, number one, number one -- we're table number one, where's table two?!
Round the tables you must go -- you can't dance!


I learned so much about myself at camp, without even knowing it was happening. There were so many firsts: I climbed my first tree (yes, Riley is so freakin' cool that crippled kids climb trees -- on belay, of course) played my first game of no blood-no foul street ball in the parking lot behind the dining hall, rode my first horse, took a kayak across the lake by myself for the first -- and only -- time, and even had my first kiss. (It was a scandalous twelve-year old romance; his name was Daniel. We deliberately paced ourselves ahead of everyone else on the way home from the lake that night so he could kiss me at the Overlook. All our friends, of course, were totally in on the plan. The girls had even snitched a few extra treats from the dining hall freezer so we could stay up all night and I could tell them all about it. I had butterflies in my stomach for days, but I was widely regarded as wise and all-knowing after that.)

The most amazing thing about Riley wasn't that I finally fit in, that everyone around me knew what it was like to be stuck in a body that didn't do all the things I wanted it to do -- though that was pretty high on the list. I was raised in a small town; the only other disabled people I ever really saw were the two other kids who went to the swimming pool with me every week during gym time at school and the kids who happened to be at Methodist Hospital when I was there getting prodded, poked, x-rayed and otherwise examined. Riley, then, was like some spectacular alternate universe where I had always belonged; my home planet. And that would have been enough, but then I actually got to be a kid -- to act like a kid, think like a kid, play like a kid. The food fights, the skits and ditties, the stolen kiss at the Overlook -- those things were my childhood, which I got to experience 12 days at a time out of every year. I packed in as much as I could: late-night toilet-papering raids on neighboring cabins; illegal dessert raids to steal ice cream and gelatis from the infirmary freezer; being one of 12 or so girls packed onto the art studio porch tie-dying our bras and panties, or spread out on a beach blanket at dusk watching fireworks explode over the lake, or holding a contest to see who could eat the most fajitas in one sitting; fanned out on the Common playing Capture the Flag, sitting in the cabin great-room at night braiding each others hair and singing "Jack and Diane," or "Like a Prayer," or Piano Man," or maybe meticulously applying lipstick again and again as part of taking "How to be a Perfect Kisser" lessons from one of the girls who was a bit older. I remember a few nights having a water fight in the bathroom so incredibly, well, watery, that the drains in the floor couldn't keep up with the job and we slogged around ankle deep. (And when it started to recede, there was a competition to see whose wheelchair could hydroplane the furthest, but the counselors put a stop to that one.)

I said goodbye to Riley when I was seventeen. Technically I was eligible to attend for one more year, but I had plans to be long gone by then. I knew I'd start college the first summer session that popped up, the faster to get the hell out of Dodge. At the last closing campfire I ever attended, I got a very high honor: the Camp Riley Tom Kovacks Memorial Award, presented  each year to a graduating camper who had "expressed the most spirit and enthusiasm during his or her time at camp." It was in a beautiful mahogany frame -- thick parchment paper with gilded letters and the signatures of the camp director and activities coordinator. They put it in my hands, and I was awed: stunned that the girl who had no voice outside of Bradford Woods could truly be seen as someone worthy of such a thing and what it meant. When I had gazed at it rapturously for awhile, I left it in the care of one of my counselors and went off by myself to the darkness at the edge of the amphitheater. Banjo, the camp's Golden Retriever, found me there and sat down next to me. I wrapped my arms around his neck and pressed my face into his fur and cried, quietly. I was sad, and grateful, and gearing myself up for one more year of the fight that was my usual life. And Banjo sat there until I was done, huffing patiently.

I have not been back to Bradford Woods since. I would love to go -- they have Riley Reunions every summer, and attending one of those would feel like going back to my true home again. But they cost a certain amount of money, and then there's travel, and then the question of who I would take as my guest: people can't just drop their responsibilities and go jaunting off to BW with me for a week. But I hope I get to return someday, and stand at the Overlook, and watch a campfire roar at the amphitheater, and great the woods whose roots do twine, because Bradford, Bradford Woods has a piece of my heart.

Everywhere we go/people always ask us/who we are/and where we come from. So we tell them: we're from the Woods -- Bradford, Bradford Woods. And if they can't hear us/we stop singing.

Tuesday, April 5, 2011

To Carry a Candle Into a Dark Place: Leaving Victimhood Behind

(I told Becky I'd have this up Saturday, but I've been busy writing a ten-pager due for my Social Work Policy class. 8 pages down.)

At 7:00 on Friday night, I had my back against the counter at Avenue 209 and was peering anxiously down the street. The crowd I had expected had not materialized. Even an important part of my lineup was missing: Von and his guitar were there to play, Jared and his chapbook were there to read a poem; Celeste from the DV shelter was there to give a small speech; but Lyrically speaking were mysteriously absent. (And they never showed up, either. Not one of them. I am still pissed about that.) I waited till 7:30, and then finally decided to start. The crowd was small: Dad, Von, Jared, my friends Claire and Ashley, Rick and Jacqui Conklin, Celeste, some random artist who wandered in, and Josh and Sarah with the kids. Not the full house I had envisioned.

"Quality over quantity; quality over quantity ..."

It turned out to be a good thing that there was a smaller, more intimate gathering, because I completely flubbed as a public speaker. That almost never happens -- usually when I speak, my head is high, my smile is wide, and my voice is authoritative and direct. I love to speak in public. I'm good at it. But on Friday, I just couldn't bring myself to look anyone in the eye. I was afraid of what I'd see: Pity? Disbelief? Apathy? By the end of the speech I had written, I was reading off the paper -- largely to avoid glancing over at Daddy, because I was sure the look on his face was one that would make me lose my cool and cry in front of everyone.

I sat and caught my breath while Von played and sang two very beautiful songs on his guitar. Von had agreed to perform just two days before, when both of my singers canceled for personal reasons within 2 hours of each other. I freaked. I went down to Avenue to drown my sorrows in chai tea, and there sat Von. My brain clicked on (with the help of the barista, Jake): "Von. Guitar. VON PLAYS GUITAR!" And so he covered both spots, and saved me from having an apoplectic fit because he is the awesomest guitar-playing guy in the world and on several lesser-known planets, too. He had a prior commitment and had to leave before the vigil was over, but he gave me a giant hug on his way out the door, guitar case and all.

Then Celeste spoke. When she learned about the vigil way back in February, she jumped on the bandwagon before it even rolled to a stop. She's the advocacy and awareness guru at the local domestic violence shelter, and I was flattered and grateful that she'd give up her very little free time to come speak to a small crowd at a coffee shop about children and abuse.

I showed a video: 36 children that had died in Washington state during three weeks in February of 2010. I was connecting abuse with a face. It had an impact: while the faces, ages and death dates of 36 children faded on and off the screen, I saw Sarah reach for her little boy and pull him to her for a hug. She had to stop watching and look at the floor, at the scatter of Isaac and Ava's toys at her feet. Then I opened up the floor for anyone who wanted to say anything. It ended up being 20 questions, Trauma Survivor Edition:

"How do you tell if a child is being abused?"
"What do you do if you think a child is being abused?"
"What would you have wanted someone to do for you?"

This last question came from Pastor Josh. Every time I mentioned the vigil or anything related to it to him during the weeks leading up to April 1st, Josh's eyes got sad. He'd shake his head. More than once, he looked me in the face and told me he just couldn't imagine it; he'd never seen it; he didn't even know how to tell whether or not it was happening. The kind of sheltered person I usually snub, turning up my nose before I can stop myself and thinking: "You were a selfish, spoiled kid and I dislike you for having a proper childhood," thoughts. But Josh was so eager to learn, so attentive to the importance and the realness of the issue, that I stopped mid-snub and reversed course. I could tell I had his respect, so I gave him mine -- and when he asked what I'd have wanted someone to do for me, I told him the truth. I thought of all the crying and pain and blood and fear and loneliness and fear and fear and fear and fear and said:

"Something. Anything. Anything besides keeping the secret."

Jared got up and read his poem, "Shootout at the O.K. Corral," which happens to be my favorite one of his. At the end of the night, I lit four small candles (current estimates are that between 4 and 5 children die in the U.S. each day as a result of abuse) and we bowed our heads for a moment of silence -- during which Isaac dropped Mr. Potato Head and shouted "CRASH!" as all the plastic parts scattered over the floor, and Ava shushed him with, "Shhhh! We're praying." It was so appropriate; I had to smile.

When I got home later, I was exhausted. I curled onto the love seat with my body pillow and tried to settle into sleep, but I couldn't for some reason. I got up again at about 10:30, and I was sitting at the computer when it hit me: I had pulled together a vigil, albeit small, and I had spoken, however haltingly, and people had cared. People had listened. People had learned. And that's when I realized I wasn't a victim anymore. I was a survivor. Tears streamed down my face. I was suddenly filled with the knowledge that no matter how much I had suffered, no matter how much it hurt, no matter how hard the struggle still might be in the future, I was going to make it. I was going to make it through. I was going to be ok.. I knew it like you know your name in your own mouth: a surety. A boon. A blessing. And then I was *really* sobbing: gasping and spluttering and rocking and smiling,smiling, smiling the whole time like a demented mourner at a mass funeral, all while trying to explain to a very concerned wee beastie named Jude that, "No, no, sugar. Mama's alright."

When I finally managed to put a stopper in the emotion, it was after midnight. I was hungry, so I poured myself a bowl of Cheerios -- and ate 2 bites before I put down the spoon and fell asleep sitting up.

And something has turned a little, in my head. It sounds patent to say, almost canned, but something about that vigil made me a little stronger. Saturday night, for the first time in over a year, I rested this body on the actual mattress of my actual bed and slept there. And Sunday night. And Monday night. I wrapped myself around my body pillow comfortably -- my feet didn't kick the TV; my arm didn't hit the floor fan when I tried to move; there was no crick in my neck -- closed my eyes, and went to sleep. I left the lights on, but I slept in my bed without watching the doorway, waiting for my mother to materialize in it. That's a huge step for me.

It feels good to know that I'm gonna make it. I guess when I look back I've been overcoming the past bit by bit for years now, slowly realizing what is mine to keep and have and hold and what is mine to throw away, slowly coming around to knowing and caring for myself. But never before have I felt like I have the ability to become a whole person,a well person, even with the things that are indelibly stamped on me. I'm starting to see my past suffering in a new light -- not as this ugly, extra thing I need to chop off and throw away like a mutant limb, but something that is a part of me that makes me the person I am. Something I can teach with; something I can use, in little ways, to make a difference in other people, to have an impact on someone's life. I'm not out to change the world: I'm too practical to think that'll happen. And I still don't understand why people insist upon making one another suffer so grievously. But that is the way of things, and I have a tool to help change it, to contribute to the fight to make things better. Like I said before: I'm not a victim anymore.

Now I'm a survivor.