facing Donner's

"If I was big I wouldn't be afraid of anything."  I say down the fence line. I am mostly talking to myself knowing that he is listening. 

The draft horse staring away. He simply cannot be bothered by us and our smallness. Even our shadows can't touch him.  Wanting to be big is a very strange thing for a grown girl to say but as always Brandon is unfazed by the things that pop out of my mouth in his company.  

"If you were big," he pauses a fraction of a second, "what happened to you wouldn't have happened, you would have stopped it."

There is a truth there so large you can see it breaking through the lie encasing it. 

If only she had been big enough.... 

When I get scared I pack on the pounds.  I build a wall with my body.  My latest fear the travel season for Beach. The 2 winter drives. They have been haunting my sleep for months.  I wake to threat of them waiting.  The cost of travel. The cost of food, gas, & lodging. Stress and dangers both real and imagined.  The nightmare of letting her down.  Of failing this child who thinks I can make the world work for her the way she wants.  And I can't.

Weight morphs very quickly from a shelter to a prison.

Disaster number one. We drive to Las Vegas only to have Beach fall violently ill. She can't compete. We spend all that money we didn't have and drive home. All for nothing. 

But nobody died and the world didn't end. 

Disaster number two. A snow storm on Donner's pass. If you know me you might also know of my fascination with the Donner Party. Perhaps you have heard me joke that whenever I get scared I can hear the narrator of the book Ordeal By Hunger, the true story of the Donner-Reed Party in my head narrating my last moments.  "If only she had..."

The storm sent us from our beds early in a race to beat the worst of it but we find ourselves driving straight into the big white belly of the storm. We were forced to chain-up and drive 20 mph over the pass. Tangled in the mist of semi-trucks.  Climbing through the ghost of my biggest mountain.  

And still nobody died and the world didn't end.

I had already promised myself & my nervous doctor that as soon as this season of madness is over I will take better care of myself. 

With an end in sight I am already in the process of undoing what I have done to my body. "If only she didn't react to fear in such a self destructive way" the Narrator sighs.  

When I grow up I want to be very, very big- but just on the inside.