Chapter 2: Sink or Swim

Mom's chapter 2 is similar to Loie's chapter in section one.  It is long and has several themes critical to the rest of her book.  I'd like to break her "Childhood and Adolescence: Not for Sissies" chapter into a few entries, then post an unabridged version later this week (okay, by Christmas for sure).

What struck me in reading the chapter today was mom and sport.  After the surgery mom is fitted with a prosthetic eye.  As mentioned in a previous post, it had its affordances and constraints.  One serious constraint was:

Most of the time I looked cross-eyed if I didn't just look straight ahead.  Any looking to the sides or up and down was to be done with my neck, and I was supposed to stare straight out of the center of the lens frame.  How many young kids can do that?  The worst was in school or in church when they asked you to close your eyes.  I couldn't, so I dipped my head down in hopes that no one could see my face with one eye staring straight ahead.  Ugly...

She talks in the strongest terms about her loathing of P.E.  She was not athletic that I recall, but did enjoy walking, hiking, and floating on her back in the water.  On her abhorrence of P.E. she writes: "I hated P.E. but couldn't ask for preferential treatment or they might send me away to some horrible alternative.  Virginia Satir said that, "Often people prefer the certainty of misery to the misery of uncertainty."

First of all, this quote would have fit right in with my "Pardon the Interruption" entry.  That's exactly how it felt, the cycle of cancer in our lives.  And second--Mom set out to write a 50 year survival of cancer book, and she pulls out the big-gun Virginia Satir quote not on round 1, 2, or 3 of cancer, or her divorce, or her going blind...but for P.E.?!?  She must have really, really hated PE.  It's easy to understand, particularly when you consider she lacked binocular vision.  I watched Bella in Twilight today shy away from a volleyball, and she had the advantage of two eyes and decent depth perception!


On the same page as her rant about P.E., she describes her gift of floating on water.  She writes: "My parents sent me to private swimming classes....because we had been told that I could literally drown if my head went underwater.  There are open sinus passages in my eye orbit that cannot be blocked.  They function as another nose and feed into my throat and my face." 

Patch that matched my favorite of mom's swim suits.

So what did she do?  She learned she could float like no one else.  "Life has compensations, and I have to laugh that I was given a body with so much celluloid and buoyancy that I can float forever on my back, even if I pull up my legs to my chest.  As long as no one else jumps on top of me, splashes me, or I am thrown from a boat or pool edge, I can float on forever and would make a great survivor from a boat accident--not in a storm however."

I sometimes envision mom now experimenting as different elements of nature: lightning, wind, and rain.  The vision of her floating along on the surface of the water is so comforting.  It also reminds me of the lines from Teresa of Avila's poem, "Her Heart is Full of Joy,":

And swims across the sea of life
Breasting its rough waves joyfully

Translation by Eknath Easwaran

Wave images by Clark Little viewed at CBBC Amazing Waves.