Back in the Saddle Again

About a week ago, I was standing somewhere public, dreaming my small dreams, when I happened to catch a glimpse of myself in a mirrored building. In seconds, my brain was flooded with questions:

How long has my hair been doing that?

Where in the hell did my lipstick go?

Why did I think these pants could still be seen in public?

What is up with my posture?

The last one was the most provocative, because I was standing in a singular way. My head was over here, my shoulders were way up here, only not symmetrically, and my hip was way over there. I thought, “I’ll just stand up strAAAAAUGH!”

Yes, it’s a word. It’s what “Straight” evolves into when you try to align your back and a thousand invisible elves with anger-management issues and white-hot carving knives attack you. My spine, from cranium to sacrum, made their feelings known (The coccyx remained neutral). Instantaneously, I went back to my old position, but I had awakened the beast.

I knew exactly what this was; I didn’t wail “WHY?????” and shake my fist at the Fates, at least partially because I couldn’t raise my arm above my hip. I was in five serious car accidents between fifteen and twenty-nine, and while I never broke a single bone, the EMT guys usually ended up tying me to a board and whisking me off to the nearest ER where I would be diagnosed with soft-tissue damage. Soft-tissue damage is like a very bad bruise which takes forever to heal and holds a grudge. Have five of those and that’s a lot of grudges. My spine and I would make a great episode of “Dr. Phil.”

[You are now thinking “Five car accidents? How badly do you drive, Quinn?” I was at fault exactly once. Three times, I was a passenger. My karma is mythically weird.]

So that answers “Why me?” and here’s the answer to “Why me, now?” At the start of the year, we put Daughter back in school and were rewarded with a book list only slightly shorter than the Britannica. The first day she went beetling off with her rolling backpack crammed full, and she came home with even more material. I was confused; why wasn’t some of this stuff staying at school? After a week, I wrote an email to the teacher, who wrote back saying there was no storage space for the kids. I suggested this was insane; she agreed and begged me to write to the principal and beg for bookshelves. I wrote, I begged. I got an email back from the principal letting me know the teacher had plenty of storage space for the kids, if she just organized her room correctly. I went around with them two more times and discovered that there was plenty of shelves or none at all, depending on which reality you chose to adopt.

One of the few nice things about being over forty is that I now see pointless turf battles much earlier than before and don’t try to engage, but it did mean the backpack never got smaller. By December, Daughter weighed fifty-four pounds and the backpack weighed forty five. She could pull it on its wheels, but there was no way for her to get the thing in and out of the car every day, so I did that. Every day, four times a day, I would grab something heavy and poorly balanced and twist it in and out of a confined space. A couple of times a week, I’d think “Ooh, I bet my spine isn’t enjoying this” and then I’d think “But nothing has happened yet, so I don’t have soft-tissue damage anymore! There will be no consequences for me!” This is the same part of my brain that thinks if a light on the car dashboard stops blinking, it means the car fixed itself. And every day, my posture got a little stranger, the backpack got heavier and I grew a little more helixed, until last week when I tried to stand my full 5’3” once more and got bitch-slapped, spinally.

When you have intermittent back problems, you learn certain skills, like driving yourself home even though you kind of resemble a grimacing ironing board. I inched into the house and fell face-first on to the couch. Consort and Daughter came out and stared at me curiously.

“Do you need help?” Consort asked politely. I said something into the couch, because turning my head wasn’t an option. Daughter tried to pet my back but stopped when the sensation of her hand moving the shirt-fabric closer to my back caused me to scream. By putting his ear next to the couch-cushion, Consort gleaned that I wanted one of the Vicodin my ER doctor had given me for the cat-bite. I knew it would make me seasick and nauseated, but I hoped it might addle the knife-wielding invisible elves. Considerately, he got the pills and some water. Sweetly, he turned my head and drugged me. Deftly, he peeled me from the couch and arranged me on my back, squinting painfully at the ceiling.

“We’re going to let you rest now,” he said, shooing our offspring and the pets away from me, all of whom found me unbearably desirable now that I was the Tin Man before the oil can. I hissed to grab his attention. He leaned over. I whispered, “If I die, you can start dating after Thanksgiving. If I’m still here on Wednesday, kill me.”

“Got it,” he said astutely, and walked out of my line of sight. I stared at the ceiling and lay very still and longed to once more be the Quinn whose biggest problem was bad hair and missing lipstick.