Hello, friends! Today, I’m sharing for the first time the true, and very personal account of my eighth-grade year. This is the story of how I first learned to truly revere and cherish life, and how my homeschool mom had enough faith and trust to let me.
~Foreword~
Reflecting on the wild, external pause and internal transformation of my eighth grade year, the words of Lamentations 3:27-29 come to my mind: “It is good for a man that he should bear the yoke in his youth. Let him sit alone and be silent since He has laid it on him. Let him put his mouth in the dust, perhaps there is hope.”
I had to bear quite a yoke, even a literal one, at just thirteen years old. The experiences of that year were so incredibly humbling and, therefore, defining for me, as I learned what it meant to put my mouth to the dust. And with that dust, from which I was first formed, I was formed a second time.
~The “aGAPe” Year~
- agape (noun, Greek): selfless, unconditional love
- agape (adjective, English): wide open in wonder
Permissive is not the word I would use to describe the way I was parented; a fact for which I am profoundly grateful. My eighth grade year, however, was an exception. Indeed, when I was thirteen, my parents were positively permissive. I basically got to do whatever I wanted. . . which, incidentally, wasn’t much of anything at all.
It was late summer before my eighth-grade year. My big sister and I were in our shared bedroom getting ready to go to a pool party. I had just put on my first two-piece swimsuit (a big deal) and was bending down to grab my clothes when my sister looked at me and screamed. She scared me so badly, I dropped my clothes. My mom came running into our room shouting, “What?! What happened? What’s wrong?” My sister was, and still is to this day, terrified of spiders. Judging by the pitch of her scream, I was certain I had a black widow crawling up my back. I stood there motionless, waiting for someone to pluck the offender off of me but no one did. My sister’s mouth was open, and she stood staring and pointing at me, clearly in shock. Mom kept asking “What? What is it?” Finally, my sister answered quietly, “Candace’s back. Her spine. It . . . the whole thing . . . it just popped out of her back when she reached down. It was all twisty, like a snake.”
I don’t remember if we went to the pool party. In fact, I don’t remember anything about the rest of that day. What was my mom’s reaction? Did my dad come in from the orchard to look at my back? Everything that followed has been entirely washed from my memory. The next thing I remember, it was morning, and I was sitting on the familiar, yellow-brown medical table of our family doctor, staring down at my faceless reflection in the white tile.
My hands twisted in my lap and my legs fidgeted with a crackling noise over the white parchment paper. I remember there were two big slashes in the paper where my legs had been when our family doctor asked me to stand. It only took about thirty seconds of examination; thirty seconds to change the entire trajectory of my young life.
Our family’s long-time doctor and longer-time friend, ran his hand up and down my spine a few times and then frowned. This wasn’t the face of the man who often brought us donuts on a random Saturday morning. It wasn’t the face of the man who went backpacking or skiing with my dad. It wasn’t the face of the man who picked his sons up from piano lessons to laugh and joke at the door for ten minutes. In fact, I had never seen this shade on him before; this downturn of his mouth and eyes, this grayness of heart.
A half hour later, we were in the hospital waiting room. I remember my mom clutched a white label with the heading “Radiology Lab” on it. My name and the word “scoliosis” were printed on it without embellishment.
My first x-rays and the rest of that week are a blur, but I remember the four-hour drive to Sacramento and walking into “Shriners” which looked more like a five-star hotel than a hospital.
I remember meeting a nurse who may have well been an angel.
I remember meeting a doctor who surely was.
I remember being fitted for my back brace and returning to the hospital the following week so I could lug it home; a hunk of white plastic with bolts and straps hanging from it ─like a hideous piece of modern art.
I remember wearing it to the prescribed twenty-three and a half hours per day.
I remember trying to sleep in it.
And I’ll never forget having to wear it out in public for the first time.
My oldest sister tried to help me find a top that would hide my brace beneath it as we got ready for church. We soon realized, however, there was no way to hide the sharp point which dug mercilessly into my right armpit and the Velcro straps on the back which left a hulking turtle-shell bulge under even the baggiest t-shirt. Worst of all, I couldn’t get my pants to button or even zip halfway because the brace went all the way down to my pelvis and even extended two big paddles down onto my bottom. A size zero in pants at the time, I was only able to button a size six over the brace, leaving my bottom and legs swimming in denim tents. Finally, I put on my baggiest dress and looked at myself loathingly in the mirror.
My body had morphed in a week’s time from a willowy preteen to a lumpy block with tiny calves and pin of a head at the top. I desperately wanted to hide, even from my family. The morning at church was mortifying. For the first time in my life, I hunched as best I could and tried to avoid attention. With resign, I answered my friends’ wide-eyed questions before gratefully climbing into the van to go home.
The problem of what to wear over the brace was only one of its challenges. I had to wear an undershirt beneath the brace as well so that the foam lining wouldn’t chafe against my skin. The brace was cinched so tight in an attempt to squeeze my vertebrae back into position, it would wrinkle the undershirt like the skin of a baby Basset Hound, no matter how tight the shirt was. Worst of all, my skin began to grow moist and sticky under the brace within minutes. On my twenty-minute shower break each day, I recall the relief of undoing the straps and freeing my sweaty body from its cage. My entire abdomen would be red, wrinkled and creased every time, the way pie dough is after being wrapped in cling film. The sensation of air against my skin was so tantalizing I nearly felt like crying every time I removed my shell.
The school year started. Thank God, sincerely, that I was homeschooled. A few weeks in, however, I began struggling academically. I had suddenly lost every ounce of my already-moderate academic drive.
History felt more obscure than ever, bordering on the absurd. This I know to be true: it is impossible for a thirteen-year-old to care about the fall of Rome when she feels like her own life is crashing down around her.
Worse than history was Algebra. Even then, I knew I wasn’t trying to understand it. I couldn’t even attempt to. I didn’t have any processing real estate left. Mom sighed but let me off the hook nearly daily, something she’d never done before. And Dad was so quiet those days, perhaps even more numb to it all than I was, that he didn’t protest. He also let me off the hook on my outside chores. Maybe he didn’t have the heart to watch me struggling around the barn in that brace.
A few months later, I felt an irony of joy when the dearest doctor in the world shook his head and said that the brace was not making enough of a difference for me. My mom’s face fell when he said the word “surgery” but then she looked at me and laughed, for my face had lit up for the first time in weeks. I remember celebrating my upcoming surgery and soon-expiration date to what was supposed to be my four-year, plastic exoskeleton. I felt as if I was counting down the days to release on my cell wall. Mom got a stack of books from seemingly nowhere, each one with a snake-shaped spine on its cover. I hated the sight of that book stack. Even thinking on it now makes my stomach churn. Her bookmark traveled inconceivably each day through the pages of that stack as I sat and stared blankly at my schoolbooks.
Then one day, Mom suddenly stopped pushing my history and algebra textbooks across the dining room table. Instead, she asked one morning, “Candace, what do you want to learn about this year?”
I hadn’t seen this coming and didn’t even know what to answer at first. Then, as if I’d known all along, I said “I want to write more. . . and learn to cook.” I remember the way her face softened and warmed as she chuckled. Writing and cooking are two of the things she is best at. We started working together on my third essay contest for the Daughters of the American Revolution. We shelved Algebra and World History.
“I guess you can take Algebra One freshman year,” Mom said with a sigh. And then we got cookin’. Mom taught me how to roast a chicken, mash potatoes, and knead bread dough. In the course of a few months’ time, I was pretty proficient in the kitchen. We even made Chicken Cordon Bleu one night for my unit “final.”
Piercing chicken breasts with toothpicks and wrapping them tightly around decadent posies of ham and cheese does wonders for freeing the mind and composing the soul.
Also in those early weeks of fall, my mom took me into town to audition for the local kids’ production of Cinderella. She let me go without my back brace, something strictly against the doctor’s orders. Kids I’d never met scrunched in around me and asked who I was. None of them knew I had scoliosis and I made three friends in about three minutes. When it was my turn to read from the script, I decided on the spur of the moment to put on a Scottish dialect. All the kids and my three new friends stared up at me in awe and I remember the director raised an eyebrow. He had me stay up and read with six different partners, switching them out one after the next. After auditions, a crowd of kids gathered around me giving me more attention than I’d ever gotten before for anything. “You never been in a play before?” they asked. “Where’d you learn that crazy accent, that’s so cool.”
I was given the role of the fairy godmother and for two hours every night I got to live under a magic spell where all the children of the land thought I was enchanting and things like scoliosis didn’t exist until the clock struck midnight.
Mom said she knew she should make me wear the brace to rehearsals but I told her I wouldn’t do the play if I had to. Vain and frivolous though it would have been, I know to this day that I meant it. To my amazement, she let it go.
That fall, I won the Daughters of the American Revolution essay contest for the third consecutive year. The year before, I had won it for the state of California. I got to read my speech on a stage anchored with flower arrangements before a white-gloved tea service, and I was featured in the local newspaper with my very own interview. A year later, I was mentioned in the newspaper again as the standout performer in the local production of Cinderella; awarded “Best Supporting Actor” of the year by the stage company.
Christmas came, then New Years. January was a flurry of preparation. Annual valentine making was replaced by hours of phone calls (Mom), filing sections marked by colorful tabs in a binder heavier than I was (also Mom), and absent staring out the window (me). Every week now, Mom and I took the long, four-hour drive to Shriner’s Hospital in Sacramento as my surgery date approached. The school satchel had long since stopped making those treks with us. Instead, we talked. All the way there, in the waiting room, over a lunch of fettucine alfredo and breadsticks (my comfort meal) and all the way home again. When we were home, we cooked, or I journaled, or I daydreamed, or I sat in numb thoughtlessness in my room or the herb garden.
Then one sudden day, we were packing up the car for the long-awaited and dreaded week. I have no recollection of who stayed with my sister and little brother. It was as if my surgery were the only thing in the world at that time. It was all my parents seemed to talk about. My previously high spirits about the surgery gave way to something like apathy. I remember my mom and dad both asking me a lot how I was the day before surgery. They asked if I was nervous or scared. I nodded my head to their questions but didn’t have anything to say.
I recall my dad was holding my hand as the anesthesiologist came in the morning of my surgery. He looked for the first time in my life entirely helpless.
Then a nurse said, “can you count for me, sweetie?” I counted slowly, then she said “ok, can you count backwards from ten?” I remember saying “ten, nine, eight, six, seven . . .” as my dad blurred in a pool of water above me.
The recovery was traumatic as recoveries from eight-hour spinal fusions always were twenty years ago now. My mom sat by my bedside for a week straight, journaling incessantly. Every time I opened my eyes, she’d say “Hi Candace, how are you feeling?” then she’d scribble down everything I said. At one point, I remember asking her why turkey feathers were coming out of the floor. They tried to get me to use the bed pan after removing my catheter a few days into recovery, but I refused. The nurses were shocked when I insisted on making my way to the toilet.
I remember to my very core that the need for dignity became more crucial to me than the need to avoid pain. And like the metal on my spine, this principal fused to me for life.
Dear friends came to visit me, but I saw little of them. Every time I awoke, another vase of flowers and a few more cards had been crammed onto the table by my bedside. My mom always told me who they were from, but I don’t think I heard her until weeks later when the names came back to me. She asked me to describe my pain and took down this sentence: “It feels as though someone used an axe and split me open like a log.” The first time they made me walk down the hall of the hospital, I thought I might actually die. And the nights, when Mom was asleep in her room, somewhere on the other side of the hospital, I often laid awake listening to the agonizing cries of the babies and toddlers in the burn unit. I aged I think a decade that ten days in the hospital. Mom says that she drove a child to Shriner’s Hospital for back surgery and came home with a small adult.
The hospital wouldn’t release me at first because I couldn’t eat. I had lost fourteen pounds and couldn’t manage more than two spoonful’s of anything they brought to me, all of which had the characteristic aroma of airplane food. Or cat food. Or a semi-clean outhouse. I remember my mom standing in my room staring down at my cafeteria tray and telling the nurses, “I can get her to eat if we go home. If you release us, I promise you, I can get her to eat.” Reluctantly, they let me go on a few days’ trial. But of course, Mom was right. The tubs of Jello and chocolate pudding and horrific chicken with mushy vegetables were replaced by first a small little helping of simple buttered pasta. I slurped it right down and Mom smirked with her hands on her hips and said, “HA. I knew it.” Then she hurried back into the kitchen and asked me what else sounded good. Mom became my short-order cook for the next few weeks and I steadily increased at each hospital weigh-in until I was just a normally skinny thirteen-year-old again.
From February to May, I mostly slept and ate and tried to block out the pain. I’d refused to keep taking the Vicodin which gave me horrible nightmares and what I called “daymares.” My mom sighed worriedly when I told her I’d rather live with the pain. That fused dignity again. I was far too weak and foggy to do any coursework during this time and Mom hardly mentioned it. Instead of nagging me about a history lesson, she set me up in a folding chair out in the sunshine-filled herb garden and left me alone for hours at a time. She brought me tea at intervals and ensured I was visited by a friend every day, even days I told her I didn’t want to see anyone. One day, she brought me out a journal and I filled it.
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~one of my entries~
April 1st, 2004
Believe it or not, it is April. It has been more than two months since I’ve written for the simple reason that I really didn’t feel like writing after my surgery.
It’s abnormally warm for April. I believe ninety-three was the high today. It’s late afternoon now and there is a refreshing breeze as I sit in my lawn chair beneath the shade of the lemon tree. The fragrance of summer is in the air. The iris are in full bloom, the cherries are turning pink, and soon it will be time to plant the corn.
Oh, it’s so peaceful out here ─how I love the solitude of the country. The birds are making the sweetest music for me, and at this moment, everything makes perfect sense.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Mom gave me time and space for my young mind, body, and soul to heal. And slowly, they did.
In the fall, I attended high school as a “normal” freshman who, for some odd reason, didn’t have to take PE, and who had a friend who met her after every class to carry her books but inexplicably wasn’t her boyfriend. I had refused to use a wheely backpack (the young vanity had survived surgery) and was only allowed to carry eight pounds at a time for a year. So, my mom had arranged for one of her best friend’s sons to become my textbook pack mule.
I took Algebra One and World History “again” that year, along with Honors English and Drama. I went out for the school musical Little Shop of Horrors and got the female lead, Audrey. I also had one of my poems published in a local literature magazine. My mom suggested I join choir. She always has loved to hear me sing. “Fine,” I said with a roll of my eyes, and fine it was for it was at an honor choir rehearsal some months later that I met my first boyfriend. And my last.
I lived life to the full, on and offstage, all through those high school years. I graduated as a member of the National Honor’s Society and was voted “most likely to become famous” by my senior class. I went on to major in theatre in college and took as many writing classes as my academic advisor would allow. I graduated Magna Cum Laud and became a middle school English teacher my first year out of college. Later, I began writing teaching curriculum, became a mom, and finally a homeschool educator. Then, I started a blog. A few years later, our little family embarked on the adventure of building a homestead together way out in the country, and I started on the adventure of writing about it all.
Looking back, I don’t think my mom’s permitting me to cook, journal, perform, and daydream for almost a year was planned or even what she thought best. She merely knew I couldn’t bear to touch my schoolbooks, and I think she was wise enough to let it rest. To let me rest.
Mom sensed I was in a season where my soul needed more education than my brain. She must have known somehow that I couldn’t gain the capacity to learn again until I had fully healed. Or perhaps she was simply too emotionally wrung out from all she’d been put through that year and just couldn’t muster the strength to push schoolwork on me. Either way, I will forever be thankful for that year of accidental unschooling. I was gifted a year to focus on the things in my life which simply made it bearable. This allowed my body and soul to come back into balance, freeing up my mind to thirst once again. And thirst I have.
~Afterword~
Looking back on my “agape year,” I can’t help but extrapolate out its impact on me to a broader educational discussion. Of course, few young people will experience the extreme circumstances I did in my eighth-grade year. However, even on a less critical scale, I can see how most (if not all) children might benefit from a bit of what was given to me in my “agape year.”
If our children are never given enough time and space to pursue their passions, allowed to develop the delight-directed will to investigate new interests of their own volition, or let alone long enough to dream over the years to come, then I believe we have failed them in both their academics and affections.
I suspect that many of us know this, instinctually, yet I observe that few actually follow through on this conviction. We push our children up that ladder, through exhaustion, through boredom, through apathy, even through defeat or depression, all the while knowing in our heart of hearts that this is indeed a lifeless journey. Our children may even achieve great academic feats on this force-fed education trajectory, but at what cost?
It is my personal experience that children who have had education shoved down their throats like a giant pill to be swallowed are long to recover their love for learning. Too often, they never recover it and forever view learning through a negative, even punitive lens.
As for me, I would rather fill my child with vitality and arm him with virtue than merely crown him valedictorian. In fact, I would rather she fail every class and learn to love and embrace her life than ace every course and despise the course that is her life.
~Dedication~
To my homeschool mom:
Thank you, Mom, for being humble enough, strong enough, brave enough, trusting enough, to gift me a year of no expectations.
Thank you for letting me fall a little behind so I could look ahead. . .
Thank you for giving me a year that became as much about discovery as it was about recovery . . .
For believing that I would emerge from the gray . . .
For understanding that I needed to write for endless hours in an herbaceous garden . . .
For choosing my person over my personal achievements . . .
I know without a doubt that much of myself was formed in that year of grace and space.
Like you’ve always said: “the music is the space between the notes.”
In truth, a rough draft for my life music was composed in that year of silence, stillness, and space.
It was the silence that gave way to a melody . . .
The stillness which moved me to fill my lungs again . . .
The space which beckoned me to write down the lyrics for my life song.
Only many years later did I realize my song wasn’t written by me at all.
Indeed, it was composed for me from the very beginning.
And I think you knew this all along.
Thank you for reading! HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY!
Love, ~Candace Arden
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