update: the car is out of the pool

yes, really. you read that correctly.

It’s been almost 48 hours since a navy, VW SUV jumped the curb in front of my house, barreled across the lawn, up a four-foot berm, and through a row of conifers to crash through my fence. For reference, the fence is at least fifty feet from the road, which has a speed limit of 25 mph. The car stopped only when it landed in my pool.

those conifers, tho! they immediately bounced back after being driven over!

When it happened, I thought there had been an explosion. I thought my neighbors’s garage had caught fire, or possibly mine. When I finally saw the car in the pool, I’m pretty sure my mind rejected it. I couldn’t quite comprehend how that could be possible. But I knew enough to call 911. I knew enough to run outside. When I got outside, the driver of the car was already out of the car, out of the pool. He was walking around my front yard, in shock, his hands on his head. He kept saying oh my god oh my god oh my god. I kept asking him if he was okay. I kept suggesting he sit down. He was taller than I, and big, and I didn’t know if I could catch him if he were to fall. He was my children’s age, I just knew from looking at him, not-yet-adult. I learned, later, he is only 22. He tried to sit on the steps, I think in deference to me, but he could do it only momentarily before he popped back up and resumed his pacing. I can’t sit, he croaked. I can’t breathe if I sit. I knew he was in shock. I suspect he was having a panic attack.

A patrol car arrived, but not the paramedics. Where are the paramedics? I scream-asked the sole officer who had been dispatched. Did you request them? he asked me, as though calling 911 no longer includes an automatic ambulance dispatch. The kid pacing my front yard was bleeding from his forehead. Please send paramedics, I begged. A Good Samaritan walking by approached my house. Can I help? He offered his phone to the driver. The driver called his mother but she didn’t answer the unknown number. Then I called the mother from my own phone, a decision that feels not well-considered, since I can’t imagine what I would have said if she had actually answered. I wanted to tell her that her son was okay. I wanted to tell her he was alive. I wanted to tell her, also, that I know how hard it will be to sit with his pain and shame and guilt. I wanted to wish her love.

For my part, I was having my own panic attack. On repeat through my mind, images of a packed sidewalk, of a pool full of swimmers, of my daughter and her friends enjoying a moonlight swim. Thankfully he didn’t hit your house, one neighbor said, giving me yet new grist for the looping thoughts.

Most days, I feel as though I am operating at full capacity, without much ability to tolerate something unexpected. I work three different jobs, all of which have multiple responsibilities and projects. Most of you writers who are reading this know what I am talking about—taking on any freelance work I can get so as to protect a few hours each week for my own writing. I have three enormous dogs that require a lot of time and energy. I often have financial stress when my maintenance payments aren’t made properly. I am coaching—willingly, gratefully!—my children into adulthood. This is all work I love, and yet it doesn’t really leave me with any downtime. There is always someone or something outside of myself that needs attention.

What I know about myself: I have big reactions to scary things. It doesn’t take a lot to throw my nervous system into chaos. I haven’t yet healed from the traumas of these last several years—not only the end of my marriage, but a handful of very real, scary emergencies involving my children and their friends. I haven’t recovered from the time an officer knocked on my door in the middle of the night. The nights I had to call paramedics to my house. The nights when other bodies—bodies I loved—were in acute physical and emotional danger and distress.

Yesterday, I forgot all of that. Instead, I could think only about what a loser I was for not reacting better to a car in my pool. It could have been so much worse, Francesca! Why are you so negative all the time? Why aren’t you better at handling emergencies? From there, it was easy enough to conclude that not only was I bad at handling emergencies, I was generally bad at handling life:

1. I was an incompetent professional. Proof: I would likely miss at least one if not several of the looming deadlines I had been working towards for weeks as a result of the ensuing insurance calls and tedium.

2. I was a lousy mother. Proof: I snapped at my kid when they were only trying to help.

3. I was an undesirable and unworthy partner. Proof: I brushed off the kindness of a man who loves me in some sort of misguided show of bravado masquerading as independence.

Anyone else know what I’m talking about?

It’s so exhausting, this double arrow, the way in which we cannot just let a bad thing be a bad thing but must, as well, judge our reaction to the bad thing, thereby increasing our suffering. There is my constant expectation that I must always show up only in certain ways, in appropriate ways, in ways that some anonymous tribunal somewhere down the road will judge right and good. What’s worse, too, is that when I am in the process of stabbing myself with a second arrow, I can’t even recognize it as such. If a friend says, Hey, maybe you don’t need to be so hard on yourself, I immediately think, Oh, sure, what do they know, they’re fucking clueless about what a loser I am. And on and on.

By 8 o’clock last night, I had finally met the critical deadlines of yesterday. By 8 o’clock, I had enjoyed a couple of hours with A. on my front porch while handing out candy to adorably-costumed youth: Italian football players, so many Minions, a baseball player from A League of Their Own, dragons and werewolves, skeletons and goblins. Trick or treat! they yelled proudly or whispered shyly. Some wanted to tell me all about their costumes. Some grabbed fistfuls of candy with both hands. Some took only one piece, with urging from a parent. Some parents were proud, snapping pictures. Others seemed exhausted. The children all said thank you. Almost everyone smiled.

a long-ago Halloween 🎃

Once we ran out of candy, we had to close up the stoop. We turned off all the lights to discourage new Trick or Treaters. While I finished the last work project of the day, A. went out to get us some burgers. When he got back, we sat at the dark kitchen counter, just a sole flickering candle between us. The burgers were delicious. After that, we walked the dogs, out among the remaining revelers, and I tried to tell him about my brain, the way it’s not always reliable, the way I sometimes get confused about what I need, the way I can’t always accept help when it’s offered, the way I sometimes let fear and my deep well of insecurities steer the ship. He listened. He stayed right beside me, his two feet walking next to mine. He held me when I cried.

Today, I woke up and remembered: Ah, yesterday I was scared. Yesterday I was exhausted. Today I understand that yesterday did not need to be about my worthiness as a person, that it is okay to have a big reaction to a scary thing, that it does not mean that I will slip back into my 2021 vat of despair and self-pity. Sigh. If only self-growth were easier. If only there were an instruction manual all of us got: If this, go to page 103. If this other thing, try page 346. If only self-growth weren’t so complex, full of so many twists and turns.

Thanks goodness for writing. Thank goodness for art. And thank goodness, too, for the tow crew, the paramedics, the officer, the pool clean-up crew from today, my contractor friend who arranged for a makeshift fence for the dogs, the insurance agents who have been kind and responsive.

And, of course, thank goodness for all of you. Sending big love to everyone reading this, and enormous gratitude for your presence in my life.

xoxo, F