Eternal Layer Cake of the Self-Conscious Mind.

Tragedy and truth bombs

I’m walking the dogs around the block, recording myself because I’ve got an idea sprouting, and I have this new app that transcribes for me. It’s free and makes Stacking a breeze. Here, let’s pretend I have a sponsor. The app is called Aiko.

Download it today!

(Dollar bills fall from sky.)

Okay.

Eternal layer cake of the self-conscious mind. The cake, the first layer of the cake…

Lighter days, September 2016

Miss Miller’s former bestie Alissa, I knew she’d had a terrible accident but I hadn’t thought about it since last year.

In middle school there was DRAMA. Alissa apologized later on. She was the instigator as far as I knew. That’s one thing about Miss Miller. She’s a good egg. Not the drama-rama type.

The breakup occurred in seventh grade. Picture: American suburban middle class girls. Triangulation ensued. Alliances formed, crossed, formed again, et cetera, and so forth.

This was all in the origin days of my daughter’s trans identity. The shit hadn’t hit the fan yet. I wasn’t stinking of it… yet.

I remember shopping with the girls at Whole Foods. They got a kick out of the strange tropical produce. What is that thing? Is it delicious? Is it breadfruit? Comment below. I took them to the township pool. Afterward, they goofed around at Alissa’s. She came over for play dates. Good fun. Innocent stuff.

I hadn’t heard about her after the middle school drama.

And then ever so breezily, around senior prom last year, Miss Miller mentions that Alissa is paralyzed and can’t walk.

And I’m, WHAT!? Unbelievable. Devastating. How is she coping? How did it happen? How is her mother?

And Miss Miller is all, shrug.

And life goes on.

I forget about it. They’re not in each other’s orbits.

But we have this digital picture frame, which I keep meaning to tell you is the BEST gift Mr Miller ever gave me, because it’s a bright and enticing screen of photographs endlessly shuffling through the years, displaying—presenting the evidence Your Honor—our family over the years. He bought it KNOWING it was a way to keep Miss M solidly—one foot at least—in the door of reality, reminding us all of her girlhood, our family history—that Miss Miller was a normal¹ little girl—a Happy Girl from a Happy Family. (Still is!)

So she can’t go rewriting history because it’s staring her in the face—incontrovertible light and pixels—every day, from seven a.m. until midnight.

It was a really great gift. The best gift. One of the companies should totally sponsor me.

My little baby muffin. We were so young then!

So last night, up pops a photo of fifth grade graduation, with Miss M and Alissa.

Missy and I are relaxing together on the couch. I see the picture and say, “Oh, yeah, how’s Alissa?”

She says, “I don’t know. I guess the same.” Very unfazed.

“Does she chronicle this recovery or whatever is going on with her?”

“Yeah. She’s on Instagram.”

“What’s her handle?”

She tells me what it is and I go on.

Alissa is 18 now, like my Missy. Her latest post is a video where she’s flanked by two recovery specialists and she’s working really hard… to stand up.

And I’m gutted. BOOM. I sit up, possessed by questions. “What can you tell me? How did this happen? Do you talk to her?” Just—What the Hell?

And she’s annoyed because now I’m interrupting her vampire show or whatever she’s binge-watching for the fourteenth time. She offers a crumb. “I think it’s in her first post.”

Sure enough, it is. There’s a GoFundMe too.

It reads,

My name is Alissa. At the age of seventeen I suffered a traumatic spinal cord injury due to an approx. forty-foot fall in the summer of 2023. I am now eighteen years old. My injury level is C4 complete, meaning I am paralyzed and have no sensation from the shoulders down.

Oh my God.

It floods you with—

I don’t even know what to call it.

If you’re baking it into a cake, the recipe would call for one part I can’t imagine. One part life is so fragile. One part we’re so lucky. One part how is this child coping? Ten parts OH MY GOD.

The batter rises in my chest and jaw. It bakes there.

A few minutes later Missy exits and Junior enters. I say to my son, “Do you remember Alissa who used to be friends with your sister?”

“Oh, yeah,” he says.

“She’s paralyzed from the shoulders down,” I say.

“I heard about that.”

“She fell from forty feet,” I say.

“Oh my God,” he says.

“I KNOW,” I say. “How does that happen? How do you fall from forty feet and even survive? And how do you fall that far if you’re not skiing? Or hiking in Hawaii? If you didn’t jump out a third-story window? There was no suicidality. It was an accident from what I gather. And what is it about needing to know? I can’t stop thinking about it.”

He shakes his head with the horrible weight of it all.

It’s one of those conversations—I think it is anyway—where he and I are on the same page and I always get very excited when this happens.

So I’m going on, trying to figure it all out.

And he says, “I think I’m done with this subject now. It’s too upsetting.”

I flinch. I say, “Mom strikes again, going on too much.” Eye roll. Sigh.

And he goes dark like he sometimes does. Says, “Could you not. Every. Single. Time I say something. Respond with, ‘I can’t do anything right.’”

Now on top of this rotten thud of pain for Alissa—the horrible tragedy of a seventeen year-old not being able to feed herself or go to the bathroom on her own or tuck a strand of hair behind her ear, because of a freak accident—there’s the truth of my manipulation and self-pity. Talk about gilding the lily. Browning the poop. Frosting the cake.

Then I think, you criticize me all the time, bucko. I’m never not a hair away from being told I am a doing something wrong by my twenty year-old hyper-sensitive child who takes after me, his hyper-sensitive mother, God save us all.

But I can’t add another layer to the cake of pain.

So I say, “Clearly, I’m very sensitive, and I will be more aware of it in the future.”

Hmph.

And he says, “Okay,” and dinner is served.

Then I walk the dogs and talk to myself like a crazy person.

Well Mister, if you didn’t feel so generously inclined to give me a critique of my character every freaking day maybe I wouldn’t feel so sensitive. Jerkface.

But you know what? It’s really not on him. It’s on me because I’m the one with steam coming out of my ears. Clearly I have some growing up to do. I’m 55 and it never ends! Of COURSE I do the passive-aggressive thing I hate in other people—woe is me and violin cringe. That’s how it all works.

I can’t do anything right.

What a conversation killer.

I want to put an end to this habit even though the message stings. I guess that’s why they call them truth bombs. Because they have the capacity to destroy you, at least egoically. And kids! Kids can cut you to the quick in the blink of an eye, the same way a teenager with her whole life ahead of her can lose her footing, fall forty feet and sever her spinal cord at C4.

Tall cake.

So if you have the luxury of examining your own bullshit, give thanks because we’re so ridiculously lucky. I am so lucky to be able to lose my sense of self in a thirty-second exchange, take the dogs for a walk and verbalize the crumbly little issues I have with myself and my healthy gorgeous son who side-hustles as my spiritual teacher, a young man who, incidentally, I inform later has a way of being very harsh in his character assessments, which he gracefully acknowledges, and makes me feel even luckier.

And Alissa, she just wants to WALK. She’s a champion. I can’t stop thinking about her and her mom. Here’s her GoFundMe again if you want to contribute. They’re on the way to $177,500.

Happy New Year Friends. Thank you for your support. Enjoy your miracles.

1. I realize that the word ‘normal’ has been usurped by the word ‘typical’ in our exhausting, virtue-signaling culture, and sometimes I indulge the word swap. Just telling you I’m aware that I’m not being PC and also stating that the word ‘normal’ is actually a fine and accurate term and that people who bristle at its use in cases like this are lying to themselves that ‘normal’ and ‘typical’ do not mean the same thing. If one is outside the norm, one is not normal. I guess the conflict comes with value placed, i.e, normal = good. But that’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying that normal = the expected standard. Thank you so much.