Today's Eyes

Or, seeing that the things I could not have changed are the things that changed me

God is always doing more than one thing, the wise woman at the table says, and her words resonate with my heart in a way they wouldn’t have twenty, ten, even two years ago. Like most profoundly true things, the weight of what they mean is more visceral the more and more life they carry.

// It is 2002, the summer before my senior year in high school, and my soccer career is rebounding from a one-year stint of starving my body of the calories it desperately needed. I lost some weight, but mostly, I lost a profound amount of strength and stamina during that year of misplaced hope in the mirror and the scale. But this June and July, I am finally feeling like the Katie who had never even thought about the curves of her stomach, never questioned the shape of her hips; the Katie who just loved to play soccer, and was pretty good at it. And, having the regional summer camp of my life with a few hundred other players from the western quarter of the U.S., I am hoping desperately to regain my spot on the youth national team roster, and help my own club team win a National Championship just three weeks later in Washington, D.C. On the very last morning of camp, dribbling up the field and making a move around the defender to my right, the girl turns her body just as mine is passing, knocking my left knee inward. Everyone standing within ten feet hears the sound of everything inside that knee joint tearing in half.

// I’m sitting at a large round table, tasked with creating a watercolor art project: one 11 x 18 piece of poster taped off into six individual squares. There is no real plan for this kind of abstract art, and at 37 years old and an artistic expression that taps out at stick figures, I’m not feeling optimistic about my project. But the facilitator—my friend, Annie—keeps encouraging us, keeps reminding me each next step builds the vision; you don’t necessarily see it all clearly before the next stroke, next color, next addition. Just keep painting. 

// On an unseasonably warm May afternoon in 2005, just a few days after finishing my sophomore year finals at Arizona State, my mom comes into town for what is supposed to be my fifth knee surgery in less than three years. I have somehow managed to keep playing college soccer the entire time, but I can not keep ignoring the softball size of my left knee after every practice and every game, or the fact that sitting in lecture halls for too long makes the back of my knee cramp into place at a 90 degree angle, or how I have to practically limp off the airplane until the muscles can loosen up on road trips. Ice, stretch, Advil, get back out there, Katie. This is all you know how to do. But this fifth surgery, it can’t fix what is happening anymore. Carefully guided by the camera and a small incision, the surgeon sticks his probe into the joint at the end of the femur bone to assess what everyone thinks is cartilage damage. The probe goes into the femur like it would a marshmallow. Bone is not supposed to be the same density as a marshmallow. Fed by too little blood flow and too much demanding over the years, the joint is slowly, but actively, dying. Despite its very best efforts at healing, every dream of mine is just too much for my little knee to carry anymore. They, the doctor and our team trainer, tell me just as I am coming out of anesthesia. I look over to see my mom’s eyes hold back tears as she sits next to the bed. Time to learn how to do something else.

// God is always doing more than one thing, I tell a friend after the retreat where those words were first spoken. We apply this to our lives in a dozen ways, making connections and naming lessons. That’s so true, she tells me as we reflect together, some moments silent for thinking, others excitedly sharing for resonating. Gosh, it’s so true.

// I meet him in 2007, when we work together during graduate school. It’s friendship—truly, just friendship—for the first two years. He isn’t my type and I am not his and that suits us both just fine. I love being his friend, he loves being mine. We trust each other in the way friends do. But I don’t know—when you’re in your mid-twenties and your friends are all getting married and you’re on your fourth, maybe fifth, bridesmaid’s dress and it’s just really easy and fun being around someone, you start to wonder if maybe it’s not just friendship. He tells me he is wondering the same thing. Call it naivety, but for months, I have no idea at all that he really isn’t. That I am merely an option in the contact list. I never took the masterclass in saying all the right things that he seemed to be fluent in. But someone else who works with us, another friend, is looking out for me. He leaves a book on my desk one evening, with a bookmark on a specific page from what I still consider to be one of the most important reference guides in my life, He’s Just Not That Into You. Out of sheer love and care for my heart, this other friend has highlighted a few sentences. As bright as a room you finally find the light switch for after gingerly feeling around in the dark, I get it. I understand. He didn’t fall asleep early. He didn’t forget he had made plans to visit home. He wasn’t alone all weekend resting. He didn’t overbook himself, Katie. It takes a few more weeks for my heart to catch up to my head, but in March of 2010 I walk out of his office for the last time. I never even turn around. I still feel proud when I think about that.  

// I am a writer, but I have never substituted that for the word “artist”. That feels like a title I haven’t earned. Artists are real, professional, qualified. I am just trying to find the meaning of things in sentences that sometimes make sense only to me. Nonetheless, I am loving every single moment of this watercolor, every attempt at making it beautiful, every freedom to define what that even means. Each square in my painting is unique, but there is something beautifully, wonderfully cohesive about it, too.

// My second born is on the cusp of turning two, and everyone in our lives knows something is…off? Wrong? Not typical? Slow? Different? He doesn’t turn his head at the sound of his name. No words come out of his mouth. Many people, our pediatrician included, say wait and see, but I already know what I see. He is diagnosed with autism six months later, on a perfect fall day in October of 2016. Even when you know something is coming, it can still hit you with the force of a tidal wave. I’ve come to think that there are at least two major griefs for the mom of a child with a life-changing diagnosis: the grief of, well, your life actually changing; and the blame, the profound sadness that comes with the blame you put on yourself. I ate too many processed foods during pregnancy, I vaccinated him, I didn’t breastfeed long enough. This is all exacerbated by well-intentioned friends who send me articles postulating what I am already blaming myself for. Everyone wants an answer for hard questions, but I can assure you, no one wants that answer for her child more than a mom.

// Exactly two years to the date of that perfect fall day when I left the specialist’s office with a stack full of papers and a new life to face, I got a phone call about a baby girl who would need much, much more than the life she was being born into could afford.  Could we give it to her? God must have thought so.

// I take a gold marker and sketch one line that travels across every individual section of my watercolor; one story connecting the different parts. I have no idea if it will turn out or if I will regret the choice and want to paint over it. But once I finish, once I sit up in my chair and take the whole project in, it feels just right. Maybe I am an artist? Or, maybe art just helps me see more clearly the master Artist. 

// The tears are streaming down my cheeks, and with no tissue in hand, I pull the sleeves of my sweatshirt over my thumbs and use it to dry my face. It’s a few days before Christmas 2021, and my mind has been on a loop of shock and numbness for two weeks. I should have noticed it, I tell my friend–making a list of hunches and inconsistencies I had overlooked in the past six months, but that had proved to be all the ingredients for the hurricane of addiction to be gathering strength off the coast of our lives– but I didn’t notice it. She looks on with kindness and compassion, sitting with me in the darkest moment of my life. You didn’t have today’s eyes yesterday, Katie, she reminds me. You’ll only ever have today’s eyes. They can prepare you for tomorrow, but they cannot change yesterday.

// It’s been fourteen months, and it has taken every minute of that time for me to understand–no, to truly believe–something about someone else’s sobriety: it is not up to me. I tell Alex this, confessing fears and lingering desires to control and the wild insecurity that my mind can run with at the slightest hint of anything being even the slightest bit off. Slight. A word with new connotation for me now. You’re five minutes late, you didn’t call at lunch today, you’re in a somber mood tonight, you didn’t want to go for your run. Is it all happening again? It’s as if, somehow, if I can see it before it happens, relapse would be less painful. But I finally know, that’s not true. Relapse would be the most painful thing I can imagine. But it also is–in a way that frees me today more than I can possibly say–not up to me. You can be fully in it together with someone, and still fully relinquish control. I have to do that, I tell Alex, citing all the ways I have tempted to manage his recovery for my own sense of security, and he hugs me and smiles and says, I know, I know you are scared, Katie, but thank you for giving me the chance to really show you, on my own, how much I want this, too.

// The line between regrets and lessons, between the person I would have been and the person God is daily making me to be, is mostly blurry to me. More and more so with every passing year.

But there’s this, too: God is always doing more than one thing.