With my hands tied I cannot speak about what I have been processing lately (my childhood, it always goes back to my childhood). I would love to share about my one friend (my texting buddy) who is struggling and I am dying to write about that really off-guard moment (with family), which triggered a pain that took me all the way back to Mr. Eide (our next door neighbor) and my five-year-old-girl alligator dreams. I had so many freaking alligator-in-the-backyard-pond dreams that I began to refer to them as if they were my very own middle-of-the-night television series. Even when I would run into my mom’s room screaming, I would sob, heave, sniff and sob some more, “Mom, I had that same one two nights ago and it still scared me!” I would shake and shiver uncontrollably until she calmed me down and then I would spend the rest of the night sleeping in her bed until I had so many dreams that my mom and step-dad began making me a bed on the floor. Today I am not ready to get into it. Be advised, however, that anything I write now is totally being controlled by my alligator pain [wink wink].
It is probably not so crazy that as I write I still am feeling those crazy alligator knots. The knots come from five year old aligator-dream me, nine year old me and most definitely fifteen year old me night-terror me. Yes, when I was fifteen I had the craziest night terror ever. My parents found me standing in my closet with my pink blanket covering my head. They were afraid to come into my room because my screams were so loud and shrill. As they tried to wake me I screamed, “The Titanic! It is going to get me! I am in a little boat! HELP! HELP! H-E-L-P M-E! The Titanic is going to get me! HELP!” Yes, I really was standing in the closet with a pink blanket over my head and yes, that is really what I was screaming. And no, the knots did not leave after that. I believe I carried those knots all the way to twenty-one year old me. And when I was twenty-one and on a Mormon Mission, the powerlessness became so suffocatingly huge that were I to survive, those knots had to begin untying themselves and so they did. Ah yes, life likes to remind us that we are human and so on occasion, like now, something brings the knots into view and I am reminded that I still have some work to do. Damn Knots! And why does everything we do have to go back to something that happened to us when we were children? Why?
Sadly one of the things that happens when these knots show up is that I feel powerless. When I feel powerless I always experience writing paralysis. Stupid writing paralysis! Yet as I think and not write, I think about how cool the past five years has been and how happy I am that I opened this internet door again. I would not be so bold as to call myself the Little Engine that Could, but more I would call myself The Little Website That Has A Goal To Write Every Single Day and is Not Quite Meeting Her Quota.
Thank God there are no alligators here.
