The Fractured & The Fingers

Random writing thoughts early Good Friday morning: Five fingers represent five siblings… the hand is me. How do I type or write with just one hand? And dictating it on my phone, I don’t know if my brain can write speaking? Maybe, if God is in this and He is helping me….slow…everything takes longer… I am ever late…. Something's in the way and inside the brain, all the time. I am learning first-hand the effects of the fractured.

During this past month, I am learning many things about the fractured. After one odd half-spin and fall in my home, all is not well. Specifically, I have a fractured wrist, and it affects everything. At first I felt unsafe. Like I could fall at any time and hurt myself again. Then, I quickly needed to move past that feeling and learn to do things independently and on my own, like cooking, driving, and dressing. Because my temporary caregiver, my husband, would depart in 10 days for an already-planned-and-impossible-to-re-schedule 11-day group overseas missions trip.  

I feel the need to protect myself and try to walk cautiously, always. It seems that not only is the use of my right wrist physically immobilized because of the cast, but my brain is fractured. Everything takes longer... getting dressed, showering, typing, cooking. I drop things, clumsily. And again, not just because of the fractured wrist, but if medical technicians were to take a brain scan, I am certain the x-ray would show a fracture somewhere inside my brain. There is something in my brain, always, that was not there before the fracture. Because all is not well with my wrist and hand. "It" (whatever the brain's "It" is) gets in the way. 

The five fingers can individually move and bend, and on command they can attempt to pick things up; but overall, the fingers as a group are weak for tightly grasping to use things like a fingernail clipper, and unscrewing lids, and skillfully picking things up... ultimately hindered by the injury and the cast. Even though the fingers individually appear to be fine, the cast's job is to immobilize wrist movement so that healing will take place. I am literally hand-icapped, and at my age there is no guarantee that full wrist mobility will ever return.

And so it is with my family-of-origin who experienced a tailspin 28 long years ago. Since then as a group we have not been the same. Full mobility has not yet returned. Some of us have not seen each other in 25 years. Like the way a wrist fracture hinders my fingers and my hand, our overall relationship is emotionally fractured. Family.Fractures.Immobilize. My 5 long-distance siblings always have been and always will be a part of one cast; they are permanently a part of injured "Righty." Even though we are all still here, something in the inner-workings and in the brain is fractured. We are handicapped.

"Lefty" clumsily takes over and composes and types. "Righty", with its physical (and emotional) fracture and its cast, copes and moves-on.