Hello Walking On Eggshells Readers! Victoria asked me to write an update for her blog, as so much has been happening over the course of the last year that she’s too often left too frazzled to post.
. . . .
Victoria and I were in our kitchen drinking our coffees, and one of those catchy old tunes came on the radio.
“Raindrops keep falling on my head.
But that doesn’t mean my eyes will soon be turning red.
Crying’s not for me.
‘Cause, I’m never gonna stop the rain by complaining
Because I’m free
Nothing’s worrying me.”
Her eyes lit up. She told me about how her Grandmother often sang her this song, whileVictoriawaited for the school bus, when she was just a little girl. Even on days it wasn’t raining, her grandmother would shake the dew-drops from the leaves of the tree they waited under. It was a good memory. And, a fitting song for a woman as courageous and determined as she is.
Childhood is a slippery subject. Once one begins to dig up memories, it’s hard to stop. Nikolai, her first born, is sixteen now. And we spoke at length of her life as a sixteen year old. Her first experiences living on her own—rather, with roommates. How they raided her underwear drawer one Christmas, to improvise a fiendish tree-skirt. How she spent a Thanksgiving holiday alone for the first time. She cooked a Thanksgiving Turkey for herself, but didn’t thaw it correctly. It was brought to her solitary table gold and scrumptious on the outside, and red and slushy on the inside. I myself found that story rather sad, butVictoria’s eye held a twinkle. What a strange thing it is to grow up. A series of stumbles and scrapes. Of hopes and dreams, and almosts, not quites, and exactly rights. Then, somewhere in the tiny cracks, the magic that turned her into the incredible woman she is today. There’s no knowing when or how, though. For one moment you wait for a school bus, then you blink, and you see your children off to school on a bus of their own.
It is all the stranger, when we stop and try to understand that this same thing is happening to these kids in our house even now. One moment Nik was a big headed, lumpy pile of baby on her lap. Now he walks through the house nearly six feet tall.
I am so proud of Victoria and Nik, for all of the growing they have done together. And the growing they continue to do. . .
. . . .
After being a calm, nonviolent kid for nearly a year, Nik stepped down from an ‘intensive’ level of services early in 2012.
Tomorrow,Victoria has a third procedure to resolve a cyst on her liver. It will be slightly more invasive than the surgery she underwent in 2010. We are all hopeful that tomorrow’s surgery will finally resolve the problem, and that she’ll recover swiftly to a pain free state.
Jeffrey Puukka, for Walking On Egg Shells, © 2012.
