Finding Feral

By Andrea Pardue

After the death of my mother, I started to take stock of my life. I was in midlife and it had been a hard, traumatic road. This is my story of finding hope and myself in the tiny green of a sprout, the soaring austere of an eagle, color dripping from a paintbrush, and the possibility of a loving Creator. This is a journey into my willfulness

• Language: English
• Publisher: Strong Whisperer
• Release date: Aug 20, 2021
• ISBN: 9781737215912

Book preview

Introduction

Not Broken

Once upon a time there was a little girl who loved her mother. Every day she served, survived, and played. Then one day, she grew up and found herself motherless and spent of her sensibilities. Her emotions were buried so deep away from her heart that nothing seemed real anymore. The colors in the flowers were just an illusion, intangible. Even the air she breathed left her choking.

I’m terrified to be visible and to face the depths of the difficult things in my life. Mostly, I feel mortified to be seen. I want to be tucked away in my own private world, imagining, diving into things of my own making - unseen, uninterrupted.

The cage I had built to protect myself from the awful things I had seen, from love, death, and dying, and the torment of living had turned into my own trap. This trap had left me paranoid and unable to handle even the most basic stimulations of life.

I am realizing that the defense mechanisms that were necessary to protect me as a young person have become obsolete and only hinder and block my growth now. My defense mechanisms are the ways that I distance myself from the full awareness of my unpleasant emotions.

When I try to sort out my life experiences, they jumble together, like clips and scenes from a thousand movies flashing before my eyes in a stream. It is hard to capture any one. It just rushes by relentlessly. How do I begin telling my hard and triumphant story? Why am I compelled to even go through this marathon to write my story? Because I am welling up with an incredible compassion to share a voice of healing and possibility. I want all the things I have learned and experienced to be a part of the whole of humanity. I can understand the darkest places of the soul, and I want to reach down into that dark pit with compassion. I want to find the light on the other side where that spark of passion is hiding, and not let my voice be quiet. I am becoming bold and feral, wildly willful, and unrelentingly curious in exploring myself. I am becoming a gentle claimer of authority.

Meeting My Mother

I have known such a great love in this life. It has seeped into the fabric of me. I don’t want to tell my sad story. It feels boring. If I do not acknowledge and get to know my tragedy, it will be hard for me to find the treasures and triumphs on the other side. There are treasures that have been hidden in darkness.

I had a mother that suddenly experienced severe chronic illness in her early 30s. I was nine when I first witnessed the dire suffering of my mother. I spent the next 26 years helping her stay alive and watching her tormented in this life. Then she died.

It is very painful to give the full acknowledgement of what I have lost. What I have had is, perhaps, uncommon. I had a powerful force of love in my life from my mother. I have been unsure about how to go about reckoning with something that big, that significant.

Sometimes I wonder if I was spoiled or jaded to have known such an unconditional deep love. It was made all the richer through our family suffering together, side by side, in the battle to keep my mother alive. She never stopped or was thwarted from loving or supporting me in every way she could muster up the strength. She washed my dishes when I had babies despite excruciating nerve pain in her legs. She went out with me on fun dates even while her body was malfunctioning. There were times in the dressing room of Anthropologie that I wondered if I should call for medical assistance or just block out her dire state and enjoy playing dress up together, soaking up that moment of pleasure and delight with her. She deemed it worthy of the energy and capacity that she didn’t have.

She could have so easily gone into focusing on herself, justified by her constant physical torment. She could have been bitter and disgruntled. She could have sucked in the energy of her family’s emotions to try to sooth the unsatisfiable of her condition. Instead, she persevered, gaining strength from a higher Source, and building a vast compassion for others. An outpouring of something unique, wonderful and life giving.

Her compassion and love for others was transcendent. I see it in the letter she wrote to her niece, encouraging and spurring her on in the demands of life. My mom wrote, I know things have been challenging for you and I think about you and pray for you. Everyone in her life got this tender loving touch of concern from her. She had an enduring love and compassion for others. It is something I have always thought deserved more commemoration. It’s the beauty of her life, the irrefutably powerful counter to her suffering that shines ever more brilliantly. Yes, we endured the trauma of her suffering, but we also drew in a wealth of gracious love.

My mom talked weekly with her best friend, Jan, while she was still alive. I miss your mom every day! I want to call her every time something happens that impacts me, Jan wrote to me recently in a card. What a reflection of a depth and safety in friendship. My mom wanted, and was eager, to know the deeper journey of her friend.

Mom flew across the country to be with Jan when her husband died early in his life, leaving his young family behind. Mom and Jan often reflected on their relationship as being akin to Jonathan and David in the Bible. It reflects the willingness to be there no matter what. I’ve got your back. I’ll go through anything with you. Our hearts are combined. It’s a relationship reflecting the very heart of love and loyalty.

Dan and Lily Smith are some of our oldest and closest family friends. My mom met Lily at the health club where she worked. They connected as middle-aged women beginning to have serious health issues way too young. Dan was our family physician. Our families clicked and became loyal friends. We often went to Taco Bell after church for $.50 tacos. When I cut my knee on a nail, Dan stitched me up in his office Sunday morning before church.

They remember keenly how much she was constantly in the Word (reading or meditating on the Bible). I read in her journals about how much she meditated on verses, claiming their truth with all of her might. It has always baffled me a little. I am too cynical perhaps. Or I just don’t identify with that kind of resource. Or maybe I have never been in the complete state of physical desperation that she was in all the time. Communing with God that way was a source of power for her to keep going.

I seem to find the same inspiration in the mysterious air of creation which, I believe, is equally connected to knowing God and Her power. I just got back from an overnight in the wilderness, and I feel like I have 20 extra springs in my step. Creation provides such a personal and intimate interaction with Creator.

My mother pursued, with all of the strength she could cling to from the universe, to really live out the fullness of her life. Despite the relentless battle of her health crisis, she was so humbled by her experience of life. She had to fight past the insecurities of feeling useless.

One of her greatest drives in life was to be useful. My kids had a book that was about an inch worm that would go around measuring things. He did it to show the other animals they shouldn’t eat him because he was useful to measure them; then they could know how long or tall they were. He found his simple way of contributing. My dad and I would lovingly refer to mom as an inchworm because she loved being useful and accomplishing things. Maybe that deep inherent drive to participate also helped to raise her above the impossibility of her health and partake fully.

It has been hard for me to approach these powerful aspects of my mother because it involves delving into an even greater grief of what I have lost. Not encountering this loss blocks me from still hearing the presence of her voice that is left here on earth. I have had several people tell me that they see her in me, carrying something on. I guess she is in my essence now. It lightens the weight of feeling that she is so starkly gone and silent. I feel a little less frozen in knowing how to encounter the depth of that loss.

I love this note I found in a card my mom wrote to her friend. It shows the simple graciousness of her spirit. She acknowledges that life is challenging but doesn’t seem to have expectations for anything to be different. She is accepting. She has gratitude.

This is a difficult time for me. Every day is so hard, but I do see God working in my life and others, but it is easy to lose perspective and feel hopeless and helpless (as you know). My health seems worse if anything.

- Peggy Jo 2002

The Fall from Health

I was ten and my brother Adam was seven when an unforeseen force began to invade our lives. This big, invisible monster came landing down in the middle of our security. It started eating away at the beautiful things that gave us a sense of grounding. It was an ugly monster of circumstance. It was inside of my mother, taking away her ability to participate. It stripped her down to a basic level of survival. It twisted food and drink into the enemy and made her skin crawl invasively with pain. We were helpless to this unnamed thing. This pervasive destroyer.

This monster began to give the first inklings of its presence when my mom started to have digestive issues and the first tingling of nerve pain. She charged forward as she usually did to tackle whatever came her way. She talked to her doctor. Diabetes seemed a viable explanation, so they scheduled testing.

To test for diabetes, you consume large amounts of sugar to see how it affects your blood sugar. Our family went to McDonalds for breakfast before school, a rare treat. My mom dutifully poured syrup on her pancakes. She never consumed much sugar because she had always been sensitive to it. She asked us to pray that she wouldn’t throw up all that nauseating sugar. After breakfast, my brother and I got dropped off at school. We innocently went along our day with the warm feelings of our special family communing that morning, while feeling the strangeness of something unusual happening.

I still carried that innocent warmth with me when I was picked up from school that afternoon. However, instead of going home, dad took us to the hospital to see mom. She lay in her hospital bed looking pale and weary. Her blood sugar levels had sky-rocketed to life threatening levels. Her pancreas had almost completely shut down. It took days for them to get her blood sugar under control. She had fragile diabetes, the kind that is really hard to regulate as it jumps around so sporadically. Her new life of pricking fingers and insulin injections had begun.

She was determined to be the best diabetic she could be by eating the right diet, consistently testing her blood sugars and exercising. In whatever she did, she would be gung-ho and 1,000% invested in what she took on.

Along with the diabetes, her body made this immediate shift into extreme and constant pain from a sudden onset of nerve damage. Her digestive system was partially paralyzed, causing incessant nausea. The ever-present dilema became to keep her hydrated and nourished. It was a sudden and drastic attack on her body. An invisible war. My dad jumped into the battle blindly looking for weapons and a strategy to fight. Home IVs barely kept her alive. Intermuscular shots did nothing to alleviate the pain.

One moment, mom was radiant and energetic, and the next moment she was precariously close to death. She had been the head of the aerobics department at a health club while she gracefully carried on her role as mother. She was inspiring and her demeanor contagious as she came into herself in midlife. It’s that golden time of parenting where your kids can feed, wipe, and dress themselves and yet they still adore being tucked into the center of the family. I admired my mother as she bounced out front, leading the way. She had been charging forward in her independence.

Dr. Smith had come alongside our family not only as our physician but also as a loyal friend. He was doing everything he could to keep my mother alive by putting her on IVs at home. We were just watching her die of dehydration and malnutrition. I didn’t think she was going to make it, said Dan.

I came home from school one day and found my mother in bed, an IV needle sticking out of her arm. The clear line snaked up to hang from a shiny metal pole. This was attached to a bladder of clear liquid. The once comforting room of my parents had turned unfamiliar. The safety I had so recently felt was transported obscurely. Any concept of what was happening was intangible. I stood in the doorway of her room, afraid to enter. I was frightened of the unfamiliar situation I found my mother in. It was grotesque in its desperation. I said a quick, monotone hello and left the room. I was scared to get close to what looked like my mother. It was the situation I was scared of. My small, undeveloped mind didn’t yet know how to distinguish and separate the two.

My mother stayed in bed for the next two months. At best, she could keep down a little Carnation Instant Breakfast. She was withered and worn thin. The devices she was constantly entangled in had crossed the situation over to something that smelled more desperate.

I came home one day, and my parent’s friend was sitting at her bedside playing a guitar and singing to her. It all smacked of unsettling. You don’t serenade someone at their bedside unless something is really, really wrong. It was like I didn’t know where my mother was and what this strange situation was that had replaced her.

As a little girl, I hardened myself.

Not Safe

My first really big discovery at the age of ten was that life is not safe. The people that you love and depend on the most are not immune to being taken out. What did my ten-year old heart conclude with that information?

You need to not need anything.

All energy and resources should go to Mother.

Above all, we need Mother.

So, I diminished myself. I made the inside of myself as small as I could. I found a long, dark hallway in the shadow of my soul and tucked myself into it. This was the beginning of the story I would tell for myself. I took this