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We have a common misreading in American culture of Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken." Maybe it's our American pride, our blazing-new-territories kind of attitudes, our love of individualism. I don't know why, but we don't see anything but the last three lines of that poem. Every high school valedictorian, freshman English teacher, and pandering politician believes that the poem is championing taking the untrodden pathway.
If you take a closer look, the poem describes being at a fork in the road and having to choose. The traveler can't take both pathways. So he examines them. This is where we as Americans stop understanding. He says the second is "just as fair" and that the "passing there / had worn them really about the same," that "both that morning equally lay" untrodden. He chooses the second one not because it has any specific advantage. He chooses it because he cannot split himself and take both paths.
In the last stanza, he sees himself in the future, "somewhere ages and ages hence," justifying that choice by claiming that the road he chose was the right one - the untrodden one, the greater, but if that were the truth, the first 17 lines of the poem would have set it up differently. The poem is not about blazing the new trail and going against the flock. The poem is about how to deal with the reality that you couldn't choose both paths - and the other might have led you somewhere greater. You'll never know. So "with a sigh" you tell your story as if your choice was the braver. It's self-deception.
This is not a new reading of the poem. It's what any college poetry professor will say regarding the piece, and the ironic interpretation that Frost intended. But I've had the text in my head a lot recently.
I stumbled onto this discussion in an online diabetes forum: "if you had had the choice between a life with or without diabetes, would you have chosen diabetes?" I considered my response before reading the other posts. But after reading people's responses, I felt I couldn't post. I felt that anything I could have posted would have been misread as negative. The respondents seemed to categorically choose diabetes, citing the claims that it made them the strong, responsible activists for their own health that they have become. Were they just making lemonade from their lemon of a pancreas?
I can't help but see the ending lines of Frost at play. If I had had the choice, standing in that yellow wood, between diabetes and no diabetes, I would never knowingly have chosen to have a difficult chronic illness. I believe that I was growing into a strong, bright, positive person before the condition manifested itself in me and that I would have been the same strong, bright, positive person I am today without struggling with and against an illness. Yes, I'm sure it has contributed to my strength. I don't deny people's experience of the personal growth they know through their diabetes. But there are healthy experiences in our lives that develop character, too. I don't believe that I "needed" diabetes to fashion me into the me that I know and love today. But, as I explain in my mushroom analogy, it's not something I can separate myself from anymore. I didn't have that choice. For one biological reason or another, perhaps randomly, my body destroyed its own pancreas. I accept it. I have never been one to shake my fist and be angered that there is still no cure. I'd settle for awareness, education, and research. I have lived with diabetes for as long as I remember. I have accepted it as a part of my life that I didn't have a choice in. And I just kept right on living.
I suppose there is always the argument that, if things hadn't gone just as they've gone, you wouldn't have the life/family/spouse/happiness you have today. Sure, that may be true. But you don't know that. I might still have met and fallen in love with my husband. Again, I can't know anything other than the trail I took.
But, seriously, if given the choice, how could you really choose this path? What kind of myth would I be participating in to find myself "ages and ages hence" claiming that diabetes was the better choice for me? I can't help but find it self-deceiving. I'd like to think that I would have been me either way. I happen to be me with diabetes - but only because there was no fork in that road. But, seriously, if someone had been able to give me the option back on that day of my diagnosis? "Bring it on" would have seemed an ignorant and masochistic response.
I'm not so arrogant as to claim that the hypothetical split in the road might not have yielded a better option. So in the safety of an imaginary scenario, sure. I'd happily turn down the diabetes. It's a chance to divide yourself into both of those half-travelers and see what life might have been like. What's the worst that could imaginarily happen?
So Kevin and I went to a party Friday night. My friend Shanna celebrates her friends twice a year with a chili night and a spaghetti dinner. Last night was the long overdue spaghetti dinner. A vegetarian with fabulous recipes, her food is always so good that the carnivores in the bunch are convinced from the first bite (myself included). But still, as we all know, party food can be a horrific experience. The snacking, the desserts everywhere, the "when exactly is the food going to be ready and how long ago did I take my insulin?" questions we diabetics have to deal with. I've always left parties with sugars in the 300s.
When I spoke to her on the phone last week and asked if I could bring anything, she answered "dessert." I had to laugh. Yeah, sure, the diabetic on Weight Watchers. Which sinful thing I shouldn't be eating should I stress about preparing for next Friday night? But I knew I could do something inventive and tasty. After all, my cooking skills get better all the time. So I found a recipe on dLife for Mexican Chocolate Cake. The ingredients, though odd, all happened to be lurking in my pantry Friday morning. And I had new silicone cupcake cups I hadn't opened (another wedding gift I'd yet to use). So what was supposed to be a cake that served 8 could become 12 smallish cupcakes. I had enough to make two batches.
I have an off-limits shelf at the top of our small pantry. No, this is not where I keep Hostess and her friend Little Debbie. It's where I keep baking powder, chocolate chips, powdered sugar, cocoa, etc. That way when you want something that's bad for you, you really really have to mean it. Besides the expected ingredients for a chocolate cake recipe, it called for egg beaters, toasted almond slices, lowfat buttermilk, and the unexpected kick of ground chili pepper (I had some ground chipotle chili pepper, thanks to my husband's love of spicy foods) - all of which I happened to have and needed a use for.
Well, as you can see, they turned out cute as a bug and they were a huge hit among her health-conscious, risk-taking party guests. Everyone commented on the unexpected spicy aftertaste that the chili pepper and cinnamon brought out. I think they have a more muffin consistency than cupcake, but they're good.
As for dinner, I was a little high before things even began, so I took insulin and the food was ready in time for my bolus to kick in. I had a couple bites of a veggie lasagna roll and a bell pepper stuffed with orzo and artichoke hearts. Very reasonable. Where I failed as both a weight watcher and a diabetic was in these amazing little finger sandwiches - cheese, pesto, and roasted pear on tiny crispy rolls. I had four. I probably ate triple the points I arrived at the party with. But all in all, the party was a success. Bedtime BG: 110.
So they prick me, and so do I bleed.
The thorns on the tender stem, protecting itself, reminding.
My fingers prickle from injuries garnered twenty thousand times or more.
They are too stubborn to recoil from the lance.
I squeeze one more droplet, dark and red,
from my traumatized fingertips,
having learned to court the cactus flower.
In my youth, roses were enticing blooms,
climbing my neighbor’s backyard fence.
I would stand in the street and stare,
drinking in their tempting perfume,
knowing it was forbidden to pluck,
but touching a petal anyway, careful of the thorns,
savoring the velvet on my then-unbruised fingers.
After a jolting heartbreak, Roses was a word
on the wrapper of a fresh roll of toilet paper.
In my most private grief, blubbering into a wad of tissue,
I felt the intrusion of this timeless symbol of my revoked love and passion
when all I wanted was a good cry in a bathroom stall.
I folded the wrapping and placed it my pocket,
telling myself that I’d want to remember this moment.
Today, in my prime, I am still tempted by smells which,
by any other name, are still too sweet.
I still feel intruded upon by the prick of the thorns
when my hands are sore and my mind is tired.
But the rose, with its cascading folds of soft, strong petals
is nevertheless the bud I chose to carry in my bouquet.
Thorns and all, the flower is fierce, feminine, and somehow gentle.
Roses thrive.
Today makes 18 years for me as a Type I diabetic and my first blogging experience as a diablogger. So I'd like to introduce my blog.
There’s this species of mushroom, Armillaria mellea, that scientists kept finding growing along the northwestern seaboard back in the late 90s - mostly in Oregon. Anyway, they continually dug up the honey-colored stalks and killed them, hoping to save the trees from root rot in the national forests, but the growths would come back, again and again. What they finally discovered was that it was one giant fungus – growing under the state, spanning for over a thousand football fields and weighing in at over a hundred tons – and what they had thought were multiple occurrences were really just parts of this überfungus rearing its ugly honeyed head up above the surface of the ground.
So what I've always wondered is, when a climactic, traumatic, personality-forming event happens to you when you’re still a little, little child, is there any part of your adult form that is untouched by that? You can work to pull and dig and uproot piece by piece of your rotten core as it pokes out into your visible psyche, but what if we're made of it – the hurt, these events, the guilt, your baggage – what if your whole soul is just one spongey fungus? How far back do you have to go before you're at the beginning, before you went down that path? Who would you have been without that trauma?
And it's described many parts of my life, from abuse to bad relationships to...*drum roll please*...diabetes. Kerri's "Six Until Me" back-story reminds me of my troubled relationship with diabetes over the years and this analogy I've gone back to in multiple circumstances. The question "who would I be without diabetes?" is not a valid question. I am the only me that's ever been and that me comes with diabetes mellitus - the honey-sugared syndrome. I don't get to pull off the stalks for a day. It's underneath. Deep, deep, deep within.
As for the roses, that's another post. :)
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