Borrón y cuenta nueva means clean slate in Spanish. The year is winding down. Today I saw many a tree blushing orange. I'm not used to fall in the full sense of the word and in Mississippi, might not experience it as fully as a northerner. But orange trees are quite nice and seems a good reminder of things ending. I often forget the endings are good too. Another phrase I heard in Spanish. Nada dura cien años. A humbling thought, as distressing as it is comforting.
Today I took my daughter to do the last appointment that was required in the CPS investigation. It should by all means have been closed, but this requirement lingered. A series of blood tests to confirm she is healthy. This all started because she had a sensory issue, showed a behavior that was against the rules, and her inability to articulate things cascaded into a monumental problem and misunderstanding.
There is an innocence one has coming into parenthood. That one has an infinite amount of love, and in that love, though things can go awry, they work out for the most part. But this case exposed me to people who had to investigate if I were a party to the hurting of my child. Even that the merest hint of that possibility crossed anybody's mind was world shattering and devastating. I do not exaggerate for drama.
My situation this year brought to mind The Stranger, by Camus. The fragility of life when things cascade to the point that a situation escalates, and the subsequent misunderstandings by an unsympathetic society turns a investigation into a minefield. There were multiple steps in my daughter's investigation, each one terrifying. Because one can know in one's heart that one did not harm one's child, but with her language, age, and social delays, I felt that I was one misunderstanding away from losing her and having to fight to raise her again. And the trauma for her. To be taken and remember that as an adult.
That is a major reason I feel broken this year. Phone calls, sirens, unknown cars, texts all trigger me. But like I mentioned, I believe we must appreciate that some endings are positive endings. Today, I felt a bit lighter in my soul leaving that building. Perhaps I will trust one day that everything will be ok.
Next week we have another ending. A follow up with her neurologist after finding in her last EEG that she no longer has seizure-like activity. The year is ending, the case is ending, her seizures a chapter almost officially closed. So many endings to be able to start anew with less weight on my shoulders. To have a clean slate.
The world is bad and sometimes good things happen, not the other way around.
– Zoraida Córdova (The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina)