Birding with Yeats: A Mother's Memoir (23 page)

I could tell Ben was irked by the smaller boat and by all the people in it — there was barely room for him and his stuff. I sat very still, holding my shoulder as we bumped over the waves, and I told myself Ben would have noticed if I hadn’t come.

He said, “Sorry. You didn’t need to come.”

“Yes, I did. What are you sorry about?”

“Your shoulder. You coming to get me.”

“You don’t need to be sorry. It’s not your fault. Really Ben, look at me. It’s. Not. Your. Fault.”

He grunted.

“We haven’t had dinner yet,” I said.

“I’m not hungry. You go ahead.”

“You can come over and just sit there. There’s a place for you.”

He didn’t respond.

Greg had made a delicious chickpea curry with rice for dinner. Ben didn’t eat and I knew better (we all did) than to try to get him to eat when he didn’t want to. He also didn’t have any of the banana-blackberry cake that Laurie had made, even though he brought a coffee over with him so he could sit at the table and not talk.

He didn’t really say much for the whole weekend. I was exhausted and weepy and didn’t want to make love. He didn’t even mention it. Two weekends in a row were like this — almost no conversation, profuse apologies, guilt, guilt, guilt.

I could have screamed, but I was trying to stay calm and patient to heal the shoulder. I was in too much physical pain to deal with this emotional stuff.

The weather changed at the end of August, mirroring what was going on inside me: gusty wind high in the trees, rain and thunderstorms, gloom.

Laurie said, “I’m sad today. This always happens at the end of the summer, but it’s worse this year.”

“Nothing feels right,” I said. “I don’t want to go back to the city. I’m afraid I won’t be able to look after myself, let alone the family.”

“Ben and Yeats will have to do it. They’ll look after you, won’t they?”

“They’ll try. But Ben gets so busy. And who knows how much time Yeats will be spending at school? I’m sure glad he decided to stay in Toronto, though. At least he’ll be able to do the laundry and clean the kitchen . . .”

“And Ben will cook you dinner. And I’ll come to take you grocery shopping and your shoulder will be better soon, anyway.”

“I feel so helpless, so useless. I can’t do anything without this pain shooting into my shoulder. I’m tired of it. I don’t know if I’ll be able to work, but I’m going to try. ”

“Maybe you should give it more time.”

“I don’t want to give it more time. And I don’t want to go home, either. I don’t know what I want, except for this pain to go away.”

Every day, my journal started the same way:
A bad, restless night. I kept waking up in a painful position.
I woke five or six times a night. Some nights I didn’t sleep at all, despite the rain on the roof and the wind in the pines.

Ben drove all my family over to the mainland, but because university didn’t start until the following week, the three of us stayed at the cottage alone together. It was very quiet on the lake. No dogs barking or doors slamming on neighbouring islands, no jet-skis roaring past or little people running over to our cottage asking for Ben’s baking. It was restful and my guys took care of me, but the shoulder wasn’t mending. I was living on Advil and ice and whatever healing vibes the forest sent me, but the pain wouldn’t abate.

I SAT ON THE
front verandah with a glass of wine, breathing in the city. Danielle was back at Western and all the boys had started university. The city was green and lush and not too noisy, but it was the
city
and I didn’t want to be there. Ben was in the kitchen making dinner and Yeats was upstairs listening to Townes Van Zandt. I could hear the music through his open window, hear the regret and heartbreak in Townes’s voice as he sang of the lonesome blue jay and the crying cuckoo.

We sold books at Michael Ondaatje’s launch of
The
Cat’s Table
, at a restaurant in the west end. I sat at the table, hoping the credit card machine didn’t hurt my shoulder. We used the old-fashioned imprinters and every time I pushed the top part over the bottom, my shoulder cried out. It was no good, but I worked anyway because it was busy and I didn’t want to let Ben down.

Rupert came in from another event and spelled me off. I left the table and mingled, careful to avoid shaking anyone’s hand. I was beginning to learn which actions caused what kind of pain.

After this event I went see my doctor. I’d been going to the physiotherapist and doing exercises, icing the shoulder and taking Advil, but it was only getting worse. The shoulder felt stiff and sore all the time, getting stiffer and sorer by the day.

My doctor asked me to raise my arm at different angles and when I couldn’t raise it more than six inches in any direction, she said, “You have Frozen Shoulder, Lynn.”

“Frozen Shoulder? What’s that?”

She looked regretful as she said, “It’s an inflammation of the joint capsule. And chronic spasm of the surrounding muscles. It might get a bit worse before it starts to get better. You can have a cortisone injection right into the joint, but we have to combine that with an ultrasound to make sure we’re hitting the exact spot. There are possible complications with that. You can think about it.”

I was wondering about the look on her face. I said, “How long does it take to get better?”

“Back to full range of motion and strength? Typically, eighteen months.”

“
What?
Eighteen
months
?”

She nodded and we sat in silence for a few seconds. I could hardly breathe.

“Okay,” I said slowly, “and if I don’t have the injection, how long before this
pain
goes away?”

“Well, that varies. Probably four to eight weeks for the worst of the inflammation to go down, but yours was caused by trauma, so it’s hard to say.”

“So that means I need to tell Ben to hire someone else to work through Christmas?”

She watched while I started to cry and then handed me a tissue.

“It would heal faster if you could do nothing, really, except work on this. Physio, ultrasound, acupuncture, massage, ice. I’ll give you a prescription for anti-inflammatories and Tylenol
3
s.” I had told her I wasn’t sleeping. “The Tylenol is for night-time, so you can sleep. But they might constipate you, so beware.”

She gave me a gentle hug before leaving the room and I felt wretched. Eighteen months? It couldn’t be true.

Over the next few weeks I learned that several of my girlfriends had had frozen shoulder, one of them three separate times. She’d had the cortisone shot each time. Another friend had opted not to have the shot and said she had three or four weeks of intense pain before it lessened. Her sister had had it, too. My neighbour had frozen shoulder one time when she was younger. One of the shopkeepers on the Danforth had had it in both shoulders at the same time (it could always be worse, right?). Everywhere I went, I met more and more people who had had this ailment I’d never heard of before.

I couldn’t work or drive or write or chop vegetables. I couldn’t do anything with my right arm, my dominant arm. I couldn’t exercise beyond walking and even then I had to be mindful not to jar the arm. I ate and brushed my hair with my left arm. Since I was the person who usually did just about everything around the house, from grocery shopping to laundry, from grinding the coffee to feeding the cat, the family quickly had to adjust. Ben loved to cook and now he did the shopping as well, but we were approaching the busy time of year in the store. I was a bit panicked at the thought of asking my guys to do everything, even though they quite cheerfully offered.

I was resolute about continuing with my weekly writing group, but had to write with my left hand. I had some experience doing this because every week we did a ten-minute writing exercise using our non-dominant hand. I liked those sessions because they seemed to access a different part of my creative brain, but it was slow going and doing it for the entire morning was tiring.

Everything made my shoulder scream in pain. It turned out I was part of the small percentage of people who are stimulated by codeine, so the Tylenol
3
s were a failure. The pain subsided but I was wide awake nearly all night. I tried taking them for three consecutive nights, just in case, but was then so badly constipated that I gave up and stuffed the bottle of pills deep into my underwear drawer.

It felt like I was under notice from the universe to slow right down. It was time to stop doing all the most important things I’d taken for granted — work, writing, exercise, sleep — and figure out who I was once these aspects of my life were taken away. It was time to reconsider everything.

YEATS PLEDGED TO HELP
me around the house while I was recovering. One thing he couldn’t do, though, was drive, and even this situation didn’t inspire him to get his license. But he took out the garbage, raked the leaves, did laundry, carried groceries. I realized that although he and Ben often helped out with these chores and others around the house, I had largely kept responsibility of them. I loved raking the leaves and shovelling the snow and walking out to the Danforth to grocery shop. I didn’t want to let it all go and I wondered if Ben would be happy doing
all
the driving.

“I love being your chauffeur, baby,” he said.

I was in such an exhausted snit that even that didn’t cheer me up.

I had to be mindful about everything I did and it was draining. I may have thought that a decade of meditation and fourteen years of yoga had prepared me for just sitting there, but this was really hard-core Zen practise and I fought it all the way. I was miserable. I was focused on what I couldn’t do, rather than on what this accident was offering me — time to reconsider my life.

Then, one morning I sat in bed and decided I had to surrender to it, like the Lama of Shey Gompa. No more craving what I couldn’t do. I remembered how, when Yeats was a newborn and I was crying on the phone to my midwife, she said, “The only way to survive this with any joy is to surrender to it. Surrender to your baby.”

Her words were like magic: a little shift of mind, and a whole new life opened up. So I sat on the bed remembering that shift and cried a little with relief. I could surrender to this, too.

I surrendered to the immobility and to months of physio and pain and a feeling of uselessness. I surrendered to Ben, asking him to tie my hair back so I could take a shower, opening every single door for me, and doing up my zippers and making my breakfast. I surrendered to the goddess of the household, who told me (in the form of my imagination) that it was okay to let the house go for now. I gave myself permission to not care about stacks of papers and magazines, or boots and shoes in a messy heap at the front door.

It took a while but eventually I found that when I gave myself permission to do “nothing,” I set myself free in a profound way. I realized that it was like birdwatching. It may look like I was out there doing something — looking for birds — but really I was just giving myself the gift of freedom. I was not coming back with anything tangible (maybe a story or two) and, for the most part, the time I spent outdoors was experienced, at the most profound level, internally.

Throughout those months of immobile self-awareness, I learned that all those things I thought were important to me really
were
important. I wanted to get back to the bookstore, I wanted to get back to writing, and I wanted to get back to exercising and keeping house (although I admit I was very happy to give up a lot of the chores). I also learned that I didn’t mind if Ben did all the driving.

I usually drove us everywhere, including up to the cottage. Now Ben drove and I sat behind him so the seatbelt didn’t dig into the front of my right shoulder. Yeats sat in the passenger seat and chose the music.

Because I was sitting behind Ben, I didn’t feel the need to converse with him, or with anyone at all. It was perfect. I could look out the window and daydream, something I had always done as a child on family holidays.

I saw things that I’d never noticed in all the years of being focused on the road ahead. On Highway
118
out of Port Carling, the trees along the road were a thin curtain hiding all sorts of development. I’d always thought it was thick forest. On Highway
400
I saw the same thing and I saw quarries, too, where I used to think there were fields. In the city, I noticed alleyways and gardens and architectural details I’d never seen before. I found myself looking out the car window as we passed buildings and marvelling at the stonework or the rooflines.

My world was changing around me.

WE SPENT OUR LAST
cottage weekend of the year on Thanksgiving. I still couldn’t do a thing, so I managed to get out of almost all the housework, including cooking the big dinner.

Mom or Laurie always cooked the turkey (which the three of us didn’t eat anyway, being vegetarians), and I provided a few of the vegetables along with a tofu dish. This year my family excused us from any cooking. Ben prepared a Brussels sprout salad since that’s one of his specialties, but that was it. We gathered in the new cottage, where the children made a centrepiece from colourful gourds and red and yellow leaves they’d collected from the woods. We lit candles, drank good wine, and were surrounded by the smell of pumpkin pie.

Thanksgiving at the cottage was always bittersweet, because it marked the end of the summer and the onset of winter, when our families didn’t see much of one another. I found myself mourning the passing of summer at Thanksgiving, but the deciduous trees were beautiful with their changing colours and the air was fresh and cool.

There was much to be done to close up the cottages and I couldn’t do any of it. Ben cleaned out the fridge at the old cottage; he vacuumed all the carpets, swept and mopped the bathroom and kitchen floors. He folded the sheets and towels and packed up the food to bring home. He and Yeats took the stereo apart and packed it into the back closet.

“Thanks, Ben,” I said to him, over and over again, until finally he said, “Stop it. You’ve done all this stuff for twenty years.” Oh yeah. I have.