An Email Changed My Life
An Email Changed My Life
On resilience, motherhood & becoming a writer in a burn unit.
“Owning our story can be hard but not nearly as difficult as spending our lives running from it. Embracing our vulnerabilities is risky but not nearly as dangerous as giving up on love and belonging and joy—the experiences that make us the most vulnerable. Only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light.” ~Brené Brown
To insist an email changed my life is a bold statement teetering on melodrama, but when I peer back across a decade of healing, I see how the words I sent into cyberspace the night of my toddler’s accident on March 27, 2013 drops an anchor in my birthplace of growth and subsequent transformation.
I suppose though, that the significance of my action rests not on the matter of expression, but within the choice I made to pick up my phone with the intention of asking for help.
In all irony, “reaching out” is a box one might check off in an empirically validated manual of resilience, but the science of positive psychology I’ve studied was the furthest thing from my mind in the moment I emailed a group of my closest friends. Rather, it was my way of “doing something” instead of “nothing” when I was incapable of sitting still in the silent void of (what felt like) an unanswered prayer.
Hindsight illuminates God’s grace—and my role as a heroine armed with positive interventions, rising with words about how to “do the next right thing” like Anna in Frozen 2. But I wrote that image to life through the million-and-one bad first drafts that live on in the graveyard of my computer, while searching for a glimmer of goodness in a plot I did not dare to define or was ever “strong enough” to endure.
That said, the carnage of my desperation to rise above the guilt and shame that nearly buried me alive—as a mother who failed to keep her child safe—is the mountaintop I share from today. This is a story about the sort of courage you can gather with the conscious and persistent effort to hold yourself with compassion, and the belief that vulnerability can be your birthplace of growth.
Vulnerability is the birthplace of growth.
Like yesterday, I remember the scene where William was still and quiet in a hospital bed many hours after the pot of hot water crashed down in my kitchen. The gift of this morphine induced nap was the chance to untangle my swollen pregnant body from his injured limbs, because from the endless car ride to the Emergency Room, through our transfer to the ICU Burn Unit, I’d held him. Therefore, the chair at his bedside offered a new perspective to observe the story I was living. My boy was wrapped in gauze and tangled in the wires of life support—his breath and heart beat interspersed with beeps and chimes in a cacophony of trauma narrated by the echo of doctor’s earlier warning, “Be prepared. This burn is so bad, your son might not make it through the night.”
He expressed this while working to stabilize William in the ER, and in the moment I pushed back defiantly, clutching William tighter to insist, “He won’t die.” What some might call blind optimism is delusion to another, but I could feel his erudite warning eroding my resolve while sitting vigil in the darkness of the night, as I considered the chance that I could greet the dawn with the loss of a child
Through many a long night since, I’ve contemplated the doctor’s warning and my prophetic denial, wondering if his words could have made the worst-case-scenario that never happened any easier to endure:
Would it have stifled the guttural wail of grief should my son have taken his last breath under the artificial hospital lights?
I’ve considered a scene where his forecast of doom somehow helps numb the anguish of a woman in the fires of maternal hell, but the quiet grief of a love so vast and irrational is as hard to fathom as it is ignorant, and perhaps inhumane to stifle. “Why me” cuts both ways, and when I consider the depths I have not experienced and all the unanswerable questions, I hold the mysteries of life against my chest with empathy for the mothers who have endured what there is no preparation or remedy for.
And while I acknowledge remnants of anger when I remember how the contractions started in the moment I paid mind to a toxic yet rational pessimism, I likewise recognize the opportunity to learn a valuable lesson about the power of words. For, what we hear and choose to believe is perhaps as potent as what we hear and choose to not believe. Furthermore, I’ve noticed that the blank space between what’s spoken and left unsaid is a gateway to the field of possibility and its infinite pathways of hope.
What we choose to believe is as potent as what we hear and choose to not believe.
Yes, the mere consideration of loss manifested as tension in my body, pulling from the small of my back with pain that moved in a girdle of constriction. The onset of labor would have made bad situation even worse, and I caught myself from tumbling down the rabbit hole of rumination by taking a deep breath before reaching for my phone. That’s when I composed the email that transformed me from a mother in despair into a storyteller of hope, sharing words about finding blessings in the darkness.
On Resilience & Motherhood
The night I became a writer, I wasn’t thinking about an audience or wanting to prove anything. I didn’t share my story to be seen and heard or even to escape. Rather, I wrote like my life depended on the ability to remain in that moment, with William, determined to see him through the rest of the ordeal before going into labor with a baby requiring surgery.
Surrender paved my way forth as my vulnerable cry for help made its way through the ethers, to land in the inboxes of friends who would by morning respond with notes of love and encouragement—before all the meals, playdates and distractions for my four-year-old Catherine, that would come in the weeks that unfolded into the unknown about the wellbeing of William and baby Henry in my womb.
By the time William was going in for his second surgery, I couldn’t keep up with properly responding to the well-wishes and prayers, but that’s when a friend sent me a link to CaringBridge with the suggestion to start a blog. From William’s skin graft surgery and recovery through to the birth of Henry, who came into this world in divine right timing—a miracle not needing immediate surgery, I wrote about the struggles and triumphs of our situation. Looking back, I see how gratitude was a life raft, and the optimism in my writing was the bar I set and reached for in the moments I had a hard time keeping my head above water.
The responses to entries I composed from William’s bedside ranged from “Me too, I almost…” to “You are so brave,” offering the camaraderie I needed while highlighting the strength I didn’t feel. Then there was, “You are a beautiful writer” or, “I’m captivated by your stories,” which pointed to a talent I wouldn’t have noticed otherwise, and I savored all that was reflected back to me as a wellspring of goodness for a parched soul.
Suffice it to say, as my words emerged in the world from a burn intensive care unit in 2013, I stepped into what can only be described as my “calling” to be a storyteller. And, how storybook it would be to then say that I went from the series of miracles that concluded this experience to become a writer in a straightforward trajectory of success. However, reality held space for an oscillation between the extremes of silent contemplation and reckless sharing as I struggled to understand the message I was born to share about creating hope and the universal wisdom of wholeness.
While many a spiritual adept has claimed instant enlightenment through adversity, my awakening continues to be slow and arduous—as constant as a womb that sheds each month in the life-death-life cycle of rebirth. I credit the authenticity and research of Dr. Brené Brown for helping me remain in the arena I felt unexpectedly launched into, and Anne Lamott for guiding my way with a word-by-word pathway of healing. But truth be told, I’d been writing since motherhood came along and knocked the wind out of my perfection sails in 2009—wondering if I would ever have the courage to share my truth about how hard it is to navigate the trenches of modern motherhood.
What I understand nearly two decades and four kids later is that the dichotomy of extremes one feels from the moment two blue lines on a stick send a freight train of overwhelm barreling down the tracks, is that you cannot contain or outrun maternal love. The choice is to either be swept up in the winds of adversity or find your way to the center point of neutrality where there is peace (not perfection) in the eye of the storm.
In the meantime, one might take pen to paper—releasing it all to something greater and wiser, allowing words of both despair and joy to fall like grains of sand into the depths. If we let go, time and space has a chance to grind it all up into pearls we might one day unearth.
Blessings in a Burn Unit
On my personal website, you can find an archive of writing that reflects the time I wrote through adversity while actively chasing my dream of becoming a writer.
The energy I poured into these creative projects that appeared in publications from parenting to psychology and mainstream media was a crucial part of my healing process. During that time I also built a website around the tools of positive psychology and the empirical language of well-being. I moved this to my writing graveyard long ago in an effort to transcend a story of adversity, but since healing and wholeness require integration, I considered repurposing it here.
While I cannot overlook my training in resilience and its influence on both my survivorship and subsequent ability to flourish, I well understand how a positive prescription might land with a razor’s edge in times of strife. That said, when I reached across the span of a decade in search of buried treasure, I noticed how the 19 original blog entries I wrote from William’s bedside on my iPhone in the burn unit glimmered with more authenticity and inspiration than any of my writing that followed.
Therefore, I’ve resurrected this work as Blessings in a Burn Unit—a short book I’m publishing chapter-by-chapter that you can begin reading here:
Introduction: Perspective and the Power of Narrative
Chapter One: The Art of Paradox
Chapter Two: The Space Between
Chapter Three: The Science of Happiness
Chapter Four:
Chapter Five:
Chapter Six:
If you subscribe to this publication, I’ll email you a new chapter each week (give or take, depending on what’s going on over at
), which pairs the original blog with reflections in a six part series that breathes new life into an old story on perspective and the power of narrative.
I might see this experience with new eyes, but it’s certainly not the desirable choice to re-share it, especially given our pervasive modern allergy to negativity and discomfort that I’m (still) not immune to. Indeed, I’ve written myself (what feels like) lifetimes away from early motherhood and the words resurrected here, which is why this project has begged of me the question, Why must I unearth an experience long released to the sands of time?
“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you” are words from The Gospel of Thomas, an ancient sacred text once buried and then discovered in a desert centuries after it was lost. Indeed, truth always finds a way to rise, but I heed the call to share mine, because of a moment that exists beyond this body of work regarding a promise I made to William about the beauty of the scars we all carry.
Scars are beautiful.
Unrelenting in my quest to illuminate the veracity of that paradox to him, I’m shining a light through all the mended cracks, because at the heart of my story is a boy who must navigate our world with the sort of imperfection I can so easily hide with carefully crafted sentences. A trained performer, it’s certainly tempting to weave a message that shimmers with inspiration while glazing over the practice that underlies the artistry of my faith. But then again, I’m a former beauty queen and Radio City Rockette who “left it all behind” in search of truth and happiness, and have since become aware of how far the pendulum needed to swing from the light of great stages to the night I stood at the precipice of unfathomable loss in its quest for balance.
This is of course, fodder for the memoir I’ve written on my way from struggle to hope, but since my work on faith, flourishing, and Mary Magdalene is inextricable from the blessings I once found in a burn unit, you are finding me at what feels like the spoke of a wheel every word I now write seems to emanate from.
Looking back, it all does feel more like an old and intense dream than a story lived. Catherine and William are now thriving teenagers, and Henry is our “middle middle” child with a younger brother and sister. Daily, I write on about a life replete with miracles and all the bones I sing over now with the wild wisdom of Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés, who so brilliantly reminds us, "Stories are medicine.”
I offer mine up with reverence for having reached a point in the journey where I can pay forward all I have received. I share this work with gratitude for the friends and strangers who guided me forth with words of wisdom, for their many seeds of hope freely given sprouted in ways both spontaneous and glorious.
I suppose then, when I behold the ashes I’ve risen from, I remember how true it is that I am not alone, and ultimately that any light you see in me or my work is merely a reflection of your own.
xo,
