Note from Caitlin of Dose of Wonder about today's guest post author - Ruthie Urman is an obsessive, passionate writer, who emerged from her mother's womb with a pen and pad in her scrawny bird claws and never looked back. Her upcoming memoir is titled Luminous Touch: Awakening to Sensuality in Everyday Life and explores relationships and living on the Big Island of Hawaii, where magic happens. On Substack she is all about human connection (heart to heart) and loves hearing from her readers. You can check out her Substack The Elegant Bohemian Life here.
And now without further ado…
It wasn’t as though I didn’t know how to be kind.
It was as if I had momentarily forgotten.
It began with my son-in-law. He and his friend were playing around and experimenting with liquids I don’t know anything about. And suddenly–there was the explosion.
Everything happened too quickly–my son-in-law and his friend had to dash out of the small garage pronto and my son-in-law's hand grabbed the doorknob–which was basically on fire.
Yet he opened it–he had just recently had a child and he needed to take care of his new, small family, his baby and his partner (my daughter).
He ran inside, to tell my daughter; she was nursing the baby and they both looked up, horrified to see him in such a burned condition. His beautiful hands–burnt. His upper body–burnt as well.
(As my daughter later described it, she said, “His face was melting…”)
In his hospital room, my daughter's partner was on meds and sedated. We were visiting him, my daughter, my then-hubby and I.
My daughter sat at her partner’s bedside and we sat behind them, at the window.
My son-in-law was asleep and we were all concerned about his welfare, since he had already almost died from the administration giving him a too high dosage of pain medication. It was a tough pill to swallow.
My daughter sat there, gazing at her loved one, her soul mate, her extraordinary sweetheart since high school. Her sadness was as if it were floating from a cigarette, swirling around in the room, landing on each of us, absorbed through each of our hearts.
Her body was crumpled in the chair, like a shriveling pear, going bad.
All I wanted to do was to hold her, to love her, to give her kindness.
Yet I somehow couldn’t.
Something stopped me, as if I had forgotten how it is to hurt so badly, you want to die. To hurt so horribly because someone you deeply loved was in such a dark, fathomless trench of pain and fear.
When partially healed and leaving the hospital, the doctors told my son-in-law that he couldn’t be in sunlight and that if he were, his skin would immediately burn again. It wasn’t a joyous prognosis. And with the new life, a baby.
Our tears were unstoppable and our hearts almost stopped beating because we all love my son-in-law so terribly much.
Yet I couldn’t seem to hold her.
And I hated myself, then.
Hated myself for not giving her the love I never received. The love I understand is so needed.
But I froze. My body sat there, frozen, behind her, wishing I had been prompted to get up, to move, to love, instead of freezing in some kind of awful fear, some kind of foreign fear.
But was it foreign, really?
What I believe was foreign was the kindness factor. Because I had grown without such kindness, without such compassion, my body stopped itself, like a boulder crashing to the ground on the road directly in front of me. As if it weren’t okay of a thing to do. A bad thing, an embarrassing act.
How could an act of love and kindness be that uncomfortable? How could it feel embarrassing?
I’ve learned that mean-spirited lesson. Because I don’t want to be mean-spirited any longer. Not one inch of me.
I don’t want to hold on to anything that lowers me and everyone around me flat–like a roller in a cartoon, flattening out Bugs Bunny to the ground. It steals my passion for people and my heart closes itself like an accordion. It feels tight and old, breathless and choking. Clusterphobia, big time.
I want to breathe with every corner of my body, let in the fresh air and expel it so that it’s just as fresh, just as illuminating.
I want to illuminate, to enlighten those around me, so that they light up like a Fourth of July sparkler.
I want to be that kind. To be that loving. To be soft and pliable. To be open and willing.
To remember. To remember who I truly am.
And I vow to never fear my goodness, my kindness and my love, ever again.
Thanks so much to Ruthie for being a guest on Dose of Wonder and sharing her story with us here. And don’t forget to check out her Substack below (or here if viewing on the app and you don’t see a link below) to The Elegant Bohemian Life.
If this letter found you at the right time, feel free to share it with someone else who might need a little wonder today.
 | A guest post by
|
Thank you from the bottom of my heart for posting this and sharing my writing with all the other dear Substack writers and readers.
‘I want to breathe with every corner of my body, let in the fresh air and expel it so that it’s just as fresh, just as illuminating.’ Me too!