Driven to Distraction
1.4.06
I wake after a sound sleep and now the images of the impact come back. Last night with the kids home, back in the routine it was easier to push them aside, take care of the family, get distracted. Michael tells me that what was most upsetting to them was how upset I was. I ask Hanah to recount what her experience was and she does very matter of factly and then shows me all her new moves on the trampoline. Noah seems fine, but when I ask if we can talk about what happened, he doesn't want to so I drop it. I make myself eat, go through the moves of whatever needs to be done, while my mind whirls around what this means. Hanah tells me a bedtime story, with her large brown eyes animating the characters, filling teh action with life and I am grateful for the distraction. I am aware of little fingers pulling my glasses off as I fall asleep.
Now the house is silent and I am wondering who this person, Eun Jung is. Where is she from? Where does she live? She had a CA license that I saw, her voice souned quiet when she spoke to me and she was well fed. That's all I know. Does she have family here? Her address is unrecognizable to me. Was she in our neighborhood to shop? At that time of day, does she not work? Was she headed to a job? How is she feeling? What impact did this have on her body? Who is taking care of her?
One of the first things Michael wanted to know was what kind of person I hit. Had it been an fragile senior or a toddler, the impact could have been fatal; indeed, I have no idea if it wasn't even for this healthy, lightly padded young woman. I will find out the extent of her injuries as soon as the adjuster does. Is she still in the hospital? With privacy requirements, even her family doesn't have the right to her medical info, so obviously I am not allowed in the loop. Why does it matter to me? Will I feel less guilty if she only has soft tissue damage rather than broken bones and long term disabilities? Perhaps. I don't even want to think about worse outcomes.
So I force myself to think about other things, how to take care of the kids during their last days of vacation. Financial matters, work, life. And I marvel at how this brain, which drove me to distraction from my driving task, now allows me to escape ruminations about this event. Cognitive dissonance, the bi-cameral brain, mult-tasking. It's a blessing and a curse. Had I been doing something else that distracted me, I could swear off that activity while driving. But how do you turn off your thoughts? Meditation technique advises that we let our worries, concerns, mental machinations wander onto the stage of our mind, then let them exit as we attempt to center our attention on our breathing. I am about 50% successful with this.
So much of my current edginess is this feeling that comes from not having the time to do everything. All my women friends who are mothers feel this same pressure, whether they work full time out side the home or not. We have so many aspirations and ambitions, yet never enough minutes in the day to devote to them all. We talk about simplifying and saying no to requests for our time. But underneath is this current of untapped creativity that got put away while we made babies. Now they're in school and we volunteer and do the housekeeping and work and drive and take care of our husbands and our friends and work, if we do. Some of us have our hobbies. Some make time to write. Some knit and bake and re-decorate. We kvetch about the demands of modern living over lunch and then go about meeting them. We are the privileged who even have time to bemoan our many choices.
Keeping busy is supposed to keep thoughts at bay, so I will attempt to do so today, sending my prayers to Eun Jung and trying not to worry about information I don't have. I will drive carefully, mindfully. I will try to think only of the task at hand. I cannot help the people I love, nor this stranger I have impacted, by merely thinking about them. I can only offer an ear or a hand when asked. I can send a card or flowers. My thoughts are mere soldiers fighting for attention in this cerebral cacaphony I call a brain. I can disarm them, send them home, give them weekend passes, let them go AWOL. And when the troops have left, and there is no one else to battle with, who will I meet on the empty field? What mines lie under the surface? What weapons of mass or even minor destruction will I discover? I dare not ask who the real enemy is; we know that answer all too well.
I wake after a sound sleep and now the images of the impact come back. Last night with the kids home, back in the routine it was easier to push them aside, take care of the family, get distracted. Michael tells me that what was most upsetting to them was how upset I was. I ask Hanah to recount what her experience was and she does very matter of factly and then shows me all her new moves on the trampoline. Noah seems fine, but when I ask if we can talk about what happened, he doesn't want to so I drop it. I make myself eat, go through the moves of whatever needs to be done, while my mind whirls around what this means. Hanah tells me a bedtime story, with her large brown eyes animating the characters, filling teh action with life and I am grateful for the distraction. I am aware of little fingers pulling my glasses off as I fall asleep.
Now the house is silent and I am wondering who this person, Eun Jung is. Where is she from? Where does she live? She had a CA license that I saw, her voice souned quiet when she spoke to me and she was well fed. That's all I know. Does she have family here? Her address is unrecognizable to me. Was she in our neighborhood to shop? At that time of day, does she not work? Was she headed to a job? How is she feeling? What impact did this have on her body? Who is taking care of her?
One of the first things Michael wanted to know was what kind of person I hit. Had it been an fragile senior or a toddler, the impact could have been fatal; indeed, I have no idea if it wasn't even for this healthy, lightly padded young woman. I will find out the extent of her injuries as soon as the adjuster does. Is she still in the hospital? With privacy requirements, even her family doesn't have the right to her medical info, so obviously I am not allowed in the loop. Why does it matter to me? Will I feel less guilty if she only has soft tissue damage rather than broken bones and long term disabilities? Perhaps. I don't even want to think about worse outcomes.
So I force myself to think about other things, how to take care of the kids during their last days of vacation. Financial matters, work, life. And I marvel at how this brain, which drove me to distraction from my driving task, now allows me to escape ruminations about this event. Cognitive dissonance, the bi-cameral brain, mult-tasking. It's a blessing and a curse. Had I been doing something else that distracted me, I could swear off that activity while driving. But how do you turn off your thoughts? Meditation technique advises that we let our worries, concerns, mental machinations wander onto the stage of our mind, then let them exit as we attempt to center our attention on our breathing. I am about 50% successful with this.
So much of my current edginess is this feeling that comes from not having the time to do everything. All my women friends who are mothers feel this same pressure, whether they work full time out side the home or not. We have so many aspirations and ambitions, yet never enough minutes in the day to devote to them all. We talk about simplifying and saying no to requests for our time. But underneath is this current of untapped creativity that got put away while we made babies. Now they're in school and we volunteer and do the housekeeping and work and drive and take care of our husbands and our friends and work, if we do. Some of us have our hobbies. Some make time to write. Some knit and bake and re-decorate. We kvetch about the demands of modern living over lunch and then go about meeting them. We are the privileged who even have time to bemoan our many choices.
Keeping busy is supposed to keep thoughts at bay, so I will attempt to do so today, sending my prayers to Eun Jung and trying not to worry about information I don't have. I will drive carefully, mindfully. I will try to think only of the task at hand. I cannot help the people I love, nor this stranger I have impacted, by merely thinking about them. I can only offer an ear or a hand when asked. I can send a card or flowers. My thoughts are mere soldiers fighting for attention in this cerebral cacaphony I call a brain. I can disarm them, send them home, give them weekend passes, let them go AWOL. And when the troops have left, and there is no one else to battle with, who will I meet on the empty field? What mines lie under the surface? What weapons of mass or even minor destruction will I discover? I dare not ask who the real enemy is; we know that answer all too well.
posted by Barbery at 6:47 AM
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