Bravery Test

There’s something magical about the nature of a childhood experienced outside in the Deep South. The world is lush and wild. Pine trees soar to glorious heights, scattering their needles like a carpet while dropping their cones as if to say, “Here, kid. Let me do you one better. Take this and chuck it right at that boy’s head.”

Magic.

Each year when spring appears, children grow anxious for the grass to turn green. Or at least I did. Because as soon as the grass turned green I was allowed to do away with the limits of shoes and instead move through the world barefoot. I sat on the brown grass as early as March, staring at it, WILLING it to turn green. Alas, my efforts were of no use because even in the South, the grass waited until the proper time to return to life again.

Rude.

One of the wonders of our neighborhood was the “ditch” that ran through it, carving a massive, winding crevice the length of the subdivision. Practically speaking, the purpose of the ditch was probably some sort of water irrigation system. Flood prevention? Maybe? Who knew really. Who cared really. For sure I didn’t. For the purposes of my childhood, the ditch had endless possibilities.

My best guess as to the depth of this ditch is about 100 feet. This means, of course, that it was more likely about 20-25 feet deep. But my 8-year-old self insists on sticking with 100 feet, so let’s split it by a third and go with about 30 feet.

And here’s where it gets really dreamy… the sides from top to bottom were completely covered in kudzu.

Now before you leave here to go look up the word “kudzu” let me do you a favor and go ahead and tell you all about it. Kudzu is a crawling vine found all over the South. It is lush and green and in my mind, it’s beautiful and full of nostalgia. Side note: it is also a major nuisance to all the grownups.

As a child, though, I was quite sure heaven would be covered in kudzu.

Since the ditch was so conveniently clothed in kudzu beauty, it was quite easy for us kids to scale up and down the sides at will – and we did so liberally. The ditch would fill with water after storms, so we’d find something (anything would do – a board, a jug, a random piece of rusty tetanus-producing metal…anything, really), scale down the side, and float down the ditch through the big drainage pipe before climbing back up the kudzu, running up the street and doing the whole thing all over again.

Oh, man. Those were the days.

Another glorious element to the ditch was that the forest in the green belt that it carved through was still largely intact. There were huge trees throughout the neighborhood and many of them surrounded that ditch. Interestingly enough, though, when the ditch was carved out, whoever or whatever carved it didn’t remove some of the larger trees as they went along and instead just left them where they fell. For us this meant that at several places throughout the neighborhood we had fallen trees that made natural “bridges” allowing us to cross over the ditch without having to climb down and then back up again.

And this is where things got really interesting.

Those trees that made our ditch bridges were old and very wide. One tree in particular was so big that it was quite comfortable on a hot summer day to walk across the trunk, find a cozy spot along the middle, stretch out in the shade of the giant tree and the forest all around me and just be.

It was one of my favorite ways to enjoy a summer moment or two. I often went there to be alone. But I also went with my little brother and other kids in the neighborhood. But kids can “just be” for only so long and one day, while we were “just being,” laying across that tree bridge, one of us (okay, it was me) got this brilliant idea to use the bridge as a bravery test.

As I explained the plan, I assured my friends it was totally safe. You know, with the confidence that came with my 8-year-old credentials, and instructed them to just sit on the lowest part of the fallen tree (just about six feet from the bottom of the ditch) and then jump. Easy!

Everyone thought that was a great idea.

Well, of course it was. So we all did it and congratulated ourselves on our amazing bravery until… I interrupted our celebration with, “Wait, though. The bravery test isn’t over yet. Look up.”

And everyone looked up to see that, because the giant tree was on its side and therefore its limbs branched out higher and higher above us, the tree bridge had many levels.

MANY.

And I had a plan to work through them all.

Now, if this were a really great story, it would follow that my friends embraced my challenge (maybe after a necessary rousing speech of some sort on my part), and we accomplished the bravery test with great celebration and bravado together as a band of brothers and sisters with a common purpose. But this was not to be. Instead, they all bailed on me.

And the bravery test just became really, really important to… me.

On some of the particularly difficult days at home, I often escaped by running to the tree bridge – sometimes with my little brother on my heels – climbing up to the next level, and sitting there – sometimes for an hour or more – working up the courage to jump off.

You’d be surprised how high 12, 13, 14 feet can feel to an 8 or 9-year-old. It was scary. And summoning up the courage to leap off the branch to the sandy bottom of the ditch often took much of the time the summer days had to offer.

But I’m not sure I was just searching for the courage needed for the jump.

Many days I found myself running to the tree bridge fueled by some compulsion to discover if, on that particular day, I was brave enough to…

• find a way to comfort my mother when she was faced with yet another day of crushing disappointment in my father’s neglect, abandonment and total disregard for our well being
• go to school wearing someone else’s clothes that most certainly didn’t fit my body and endure the taunting hurled my way from the every-school taunters that would surely come as a result
• meet my father’s exacting standards for performance in every area of my life
• suppress the longings and needs within me that had no place in my home
• protect myself from those who sought to prey upon me as I roamed aimlessly through the neighborhood and surrounding areas attempting to steer clear of home for as much of every day as possible
• carry the weight of responsibility I felt for the welfare of my family while feeling the helplessness that exists within the limitations of childhood.

Somehow, sitting on the tree limbs that extended higher and higher as time went by, with sweaty palms and a racing heart, I found a way to work through the crushing fear and disappointment that life continued to rain down on my family and to summon up courage from within to bring myself to leap off the tree and fall to the ditch below.

Standing solidly after each fall, I could feel a new strength in me that allowed me to brush myself off and move forward toward whatever was facing me.

I just felt…. brave. And it became something I craved. I looked for ways to experience that over and over again. I jumped with my bike using ramps the neighborhood kids and I built together. I jumped from the stairs in the two-story houses of friends. Climbing up to the next step and jumping, then the next, and then the next…and so on. And I spent one summer jumping off the roofs of all the houses in the neighborhood. Don’t ask.

But then one day I went too high.

That day I ran to the bridge to jump not because I was afraid, but because I was angry. I chose one of the highest jump points and planted myself there. It’s funny. That day, like every other day, I remember feeling my sweaty palms and racing heart, but I don’t remember feeling fear. I just remember anger.

And then I jumped.

I can’t say for sure how high the branch I chose was on that fateful day, but my best guess would be about 20 feet from the sandy bottom of the ditch.

It was for real too high.

When I landed, my chin connected with my knees as they buckled underneath me, so that my neck really took the force of the impact. It popped back, and I felt a hot rush go through my neck and into my head. Then I saw a flash of white light before everything went black.

I was alone in the ditch, which was for the best, to be honest. No need to get anyone all riled up and cause alarm that might lead to my mother’s discovery of the tree bridge and my little bravery test antics, thereby destroying the future summer days of all the children in the neighborhood. I also could never risk my reputation as the bravest soul and most solid jumper in the neighborhood. That was for damn sure.

So I stumbled home and soaked my aching tweener joints in a hot bath. No harm, no foul.

Unless you consider the artificial joint I now have in my neck as both harm AND foul.

And here’s the real rub… after that jump I was still really angry.

And I don’t think it was because I didn’t land the jump.

I think it was because jumping was never going to resolve my anger. Or make me brave.

My father was a 5’6″ scrawny little man who somehow managed to tower over my mother, my brother and me both emotionally and physically. Despite the fact that we should have known better, he had this way about him that charmed us and convinced us he was going to change our world (and maybe the rest of the world, too). This is so attractive to a child who desperately wants relationship with her father. One little spark of hope would often be enough to convince me he was changing his ways. But then a sharp turn in the next moment would devastate me… a phone call from a county jail somewhere in Tennessee or Mississippi letting my mother know my father had been arrested for driving under the influence; another month without the resources to buy the basic necessities for a family of four because Dad had spent what little money there was at the local bar; a family “trip” that involved me, my mother and my baby brother hungry and abandoned in a hotel room with no money and no transportation while he sat in a bar somewhere drinking himself into oblivion.

And these kinds of scenarios were repeated ad nauseam.

Anger made a lot of sense. Anger was always right there within my reach. But despite the obvious patterns at work within our family unit that were driven by the behaviors of my father, it was nearly impossible to hold the anger I felt out in front of him. It wasn’t safe to do so, to be sure. But mainly it was because the next time he decided to be charming that little spark of hope would be enough to once again soften my stance. It’s actually embarrassing to admit how long I let him drag me along on this ride.

Hope can beat us up if held for the impossible. And I got the hell beat out of me.

So I became a master at shoving those nasty emotions down deep and out of his sight. I remember the last day he made me cry. I was ten when I vowed he would never make me cry again.

Spoiler alert: This decision has cost me thousands of dollars in therapy.

Those bravery tests were for me a necessary conduit for the emotions that weren’t safe to access…somehow giving me the release, the courage and the confidence I needed to face whatever came my way. But there came a day – that day – when my emotions just got too big for the tree bridge. There wasn’t a way anymore to physically prove to myself that I was capable of handling the feelings churning inside of me. I couldn’t handle the height required to do that.

That was a hard place to be. Honestly, I’m not sure how I managed it.

I don’t think I did.

Because forty plus years and a broken body later, I have discovered that I still need a tree bridge to run to.

In the last few years or so I’ve been on this devastating little journey we’ll call “Bravery Test 2.0.” On this journey I am learning that true courage lies not in the jump to prove I can do pain, but in paying attention to the pain I am already in. And, even harder, to be still with trusted people in the midst of that pain.

So my tree bridge these days looks much different than the tree bridge of my childhood. Mainly, it looks like a whole lot of therapy. And it is a most worthy bravery test.

And if you know me, you know that is really saying something.