When I was 10 years old, my mother had a dream that I would be severely injured while wearing the colour red. She had this dream the night before I was to attend my first local football game as a cheerleader.
I awoke the morning of the game and dressed my skinny little self in a wee cheerleader sweatshirt and miniskirt. Our team colour was red.
We had been rehearsing for months for this game. We had a half-time performance prepared. I was a grade seven student, but this game would be between community teams, on the field of our local high school, so this was a big deal. We were rather mercenary cheerleaders who would show up and cheer for anyone if they asked us, and the team we were to cheer for today had lost every single game all season. They were the losers of the losers, and it was our job to pick up their spirits, and make this their very first winning game.
I have a vivid memory of standing inside the front door, dressed in my uniform, waiting for my ride to the game. My grandmother lived in the apartment downstairs and she and my mother stood facing me, a rare united front, as they both tried to convince me to stay home instead. I so clearly remember my grandmother’s words, “Your mother had a dream…”
My mother was not the type to share her dreams. She was practical and driven. I don’t think it occurred to me that she even had dreams. But on this occasion she was behaving in a very unusual way. Never before had both women confronted me about something, and yet as wily pre-teen, I could feel that I still had a choice. My mother was hesitant to press too hard, as it was just a dream after all, and I, in my stubbornness, would not allow it. I was not going to miss this very exciting day because she had dreamt something up. I remember closing the front door quickly behind me, and not looking back.
Unbeknownst to me, my mother instructed my father to trail me to the school, where he quietly made his way up into the stands. I had no idea he was there. In hindsight, this was an interesting choice as my father was not known for handling emergencies well. When my brother chopped off the end of his finger in a car door, my father passed out on the floor of the doctor’s office. But halftime finally came and we cheerleaders prepared to hold centre stage. One of the highlights of our show was to be a gymnastics stunt performed by myself and a schoolmate I will call Patty.
Patty was dark-haired, short, muscular and tough, and had already had a hard life. I don’t think she liked me very much and I was a bit afraid of her, having watched her hold her own in girl fights. Her job during the stunt was to support me as I did a handstand up against her back and then, holding me firmly by the ankles, tuck forward, as I rolled over her and into a flying somersault. To be honest when I describe it now, I’m not sure how I didn’t kill myself attempting this, but I was a fairly capable gymnast and dancer, and we had done it successfully in practice, um, maybe twice.
To add a bit of interest to the story, my cheerleading coach, whom I will call Debbie, was deaf. Debbie was a kind, chipper young woman but there was something surreal about the fact that she couldn’t hear us as we cheered. She did have some speech capability herself, but it was not easy to understand her, and to my ten year old ears, she always sounded drunk. She gestured with her hands a lot, and somehow we figured out what she she was trying to say. I liked her, and knew she really loved her girls. Perhaps she wanted the experience of teaching us to be loud and clear, precisely because it was not an option for her.
It was time for the stunt and I remember being a little disappointed that the crowd in the stands was small. This was community level football, and not hugely attended beyond faithful parents. Patty stood in position and I executed my handstand. Next there was to be a signal from me that I was ready for her to flip me. Patty was excited about the game. She didn’t wait for my signal. She took hold of my ankles with her strong, muscular arms and flipped me without warning. I flew.
Both forearms were severely broken upon impact, one of them a compound fracture. I landed in the field on my back with arms splayed, screaming. I turned my head both ways to briefly look at my arms and saw them rising up like snapped matchsticks on either side of my elbows. I decided not to look at them again and raised my eyes up to the wide, blue and empty sky.
Immediately I was surrounded by onlookers, a perspective which holds my central memory of the incident; lying helpless, staring at that sky in excruciating pain while being surrounded by dozens of faces peering at me with a mixture of horror and concern. Someone kept asking me to move my feet. I understood later that they feared my back was also broken because of the way I fell. All I could think was that they were idiots not to realize that it was my arms that were broken, and at one point, in between my cries, I told them so.
I didn’t see my father, but he of course had witnessed the whole thing. Apparently his immediate reaction was to get help – he had been prepared for this and didn’t waste any time comforting me but instead began running around the football field asking someone to bring him a phone. To put the scene into context, this was long before cell phones, but my father was a brilliant inventor by trade and a kind, sensitive soul by nature, so perhaps the shock of the accident catapulted him into a future time warp. We will never know.
The story goes that eventually someone stopped him and suggested he go into the school to find a phone. The school was locked for the weekend. He then went running down the street and realized he could just knock on the door of any house and ask to use the phone, which he finally did. By the time he returned to the playing field, an ambulance had already arrived. This is exactly what I loved so much about my father – his capacity to be overcome by love and completely impractical at the same time. I’m afraid I have inherited the exact same quality.
Meanwhile my poor, sweet cheerleading coach was positioned crouched in the grassy ground above my head, holding my face upside down in her hands while I screamed. Her long fair hair fell into my eyes as she tried to comfort me with her slurred words. Looking back, Debbie must have been so frightened herself, as I was a child in her care. But these were the days before every injury was a lawsuit opportunity, and I am sure she was simply present with my pain.
Debbie held on to me as they injected a pain-killer into my stomach muscles. She continued to murmur while they lifted each arm, one at a time, to insert them into inflatable splints which then expanded into tight compression. I recall that process being just as painful as the initial injury, and I wailed without control. She held onto me as they got me onto the stretcher and lifted me into the ambulance. I didn’t think to ask for my mother. I still did not know my father was there.
After the ambulance drove off the field to the road, a consultation was held between team coaches and the decision was made to go ahead with the game. And here’s the magic, in the wonderful irony of life’s ways, our team actually went on to win. It turned out I was the lucky charm that broke the curse and I’m told they were very, very grateful.
The men in the ambulance were kind; the driver slowed to a crawl to go over the train tracks near the school so I wouldn’t be jostled. In the hospital they had to cut my little red sweatshirt into pieces to get it off me before I went under anesthesia. Later Debbie brought presents, kisses and flowers. The team signed a big card of thank you’s for my dedication to the success of the team. Patty, to my recollection, never spoke to me about the incident again.
Managing for months without the use of my arms was an interesting exercise. I was essentially reduced to infancy and my mother had to do everything for me. I couldn’t scratch, wash, feed or dress myself. I slept on a structure of pillows in an attempt to find a comfortable position. My mother fashioned a device made from a dentist’s mirror tool with a rubber thimble stretched over the mirror part, which I held in my mouth so I could turn pages of a book.
Just to give you a sense of how old I am, I was a child in the days when children read for pleasure, and so I was grateful for the device. It meant however that I also had to try to keep up with my schoolwork, and read the god-awful textbooks too. My friends brought their notebooks by after school and my mother copied out the day’s lessons in her beautiful handwriting, so I would not fall behind.
I couldn’t wear a coat so we found a navy wool cape, long before capes were fashionable. My casts were covered in signatures of friends. I became a local celebrity of sorts, for awhile. I remember being very afraid the day they removed the casts with a loud circular saw and pliers, as my hairy, skinny, scaly arms emerged to feel the light again. Occasionally I experienced moments of electric shock go through my body in a PTSD response as the trauma was triggered from time to time, but my bones healed, and life went on.
My mother never spoke to me about her dream. It became a small anecdote in our family history, but the image of my father running in circles on the football field, asking for someone to bring him a phone, was a much more popular part of the story.
Many years later, after I married and had children of my own, I was to experience an intuitive awakening which changed my life. I began to receive information, guidance about individuals all over the world whom I had never met. I was given insights far beyond my human awareness. My life changed profoundly, and my work became focused on the use of my gifts. My grandmother had passed away, and so had my father. My mother, ever the practical skeptic, had very little to say about my work. The only comment I can recall her making was that she hoped that my talents wouldn’t spontaneously disappear one day, as suddenly as they seem to have come.
One day my elderly mom was going through old papers and albums, and she came across a tiny, yellowed newspaper clipping. It was a few paragraphs published in a Cornish newspaper from my grandparents’ day, about an ancestor of my maternal grandfather. The article described a woman who lived in a small hut in her village and all day long received visitors who came to her to hear the guidance she received from a spiritual source, to help them with the troubles in their lives. My mother asked me if I wanted to keep the clipping. I read it and looked up at her in amazement. “But this is exactly what I do!” I said. “Yes, I thought that.” was my mother’s reply and the end of the conversation.
The gift of knowing, of hearing, of feeling and sensing, is perhaps much less rare than we think. I believe my mother may have had a lifetime of dreams she kept to herself, as she was a woman who did not often reveal her heart. Imagine the world which awaits us, wherein we may trust our wisdom and make choices based upon the intelligence of the soul. It may be that a headstrong young cheerleader will still need to live out her own painful experiences, to prepare for her own awakening one day, but imagine the trust and the love that we could come to know as we realize there is nothing random, nothing without meaning and purpose under the sun.
And to my dear father, if only you had gone out the next day to take out a patent for the mobile phones that in your genius, you knew were possible. Both you and my mother saw the future. I am therefore, and always will be, a child of the wide open and unknown sky.
© AdiKanda