Note: this wasn’t the article I planned on submitting today. I’d intended to publish an irreverent article on chock-full of sex advice, bad jokes and silly parenthetical remarks. Sad news from home this morning changed my mind, and we’ll save the silly sexy stories for next week. For now, an article about the things that matter even more: home, family, and feeling safe.
Before administering anesthesia before a procedure, anesthesiologists generally tell their patients to think of a happy place, because that is where their mind will be when the wake up. In my first experience with anesthesia, I woke up desperately trying to think of a happy enough place. In the five years since, I’ve been trying to come up with a happy place that I can fall back on for things like surgery and meditation. I’ve finally settled on one—not specifically a place, but and often-repeated scene from my childhood.
I’m barely more than a toddler. Yes, I’m now able to speak more or less intelligently and read (my older sibling figured it out, so I felt a burning need to as well), but for most intents and purposes I am not yet a fully realized person. My car seat, situated in the back of our old brown Jeep, is so comfortable; I once stayed asleep in it when we hit a moose on the highway and in the ensuing panic. We drive home from parties, gatherings, or school events in the evening. I lean my face against the seatbelt and make my breath as even as possible. Breathe in, two, three, four, breathe out two, three, four. I’ve never quite figured out whether they knew I was faking.
They pick up my snow-suited little body. I hold myself as limp as possible to keep up the sleep illusion. They drag the dayglo orange sled out from behind a tree by its ragged blue string and gently set me inside on my back. I hear the snow crunch under me as they pull me across the dimly lit street to the trailhead. They sky is a pristine near-black, the stars are white pinpoints in its canopy. The North Star shines directly overhead, part of one of the only two constellations I can identify.
The soft murmur of my parents’ voices almost lulls me into a real sleep as we begin to descend towards home, towards my hot water bottle and pink stuffed cat named Pinky. When I walk down the trail at night, I’m nervous. M could (and often does) jump out at me from behind a tree, or call like a wolf. But the sled is my fortress. Cushions of snow pile up around my body, insulating me. The sled is its own universe, and if I stare at the sky above me its as if I’m being dragged through the stars themselves.
My childhood must have contained hundreds of these midnight rides home. While I now feel a pang of sympathy for my parents, as they hauled me down a third of a mile of rough terrain on a regular basis, I am endlessly grateful that, no matter how much turmoil I experience in my young adult life, they gave me a happy place.
When it comes to love, the greatest and most enduring loves are not the star-crossed, tortured kind written about in great literature, or the kind that makes your head spin and your face flush when you’re fifteen and feeling it for the first time. The greatest loves are the ones that make parents carry their pseudo-sleeping child down the trail every night just to give her a few extra minutes of peace, just in case she might need those moments to look back on fifteen or sixteen years down the line.
