Phantom Limbs and Childhood Thinking

There is a phenomenon some people experience, those that have lost an arm or a leg, called "Phantom Limb". They feel pain, heat, cold, even movement despite the fact that strictly and scientifically speaking, there is no "there" there. It is as if the body can not accept the fact that something so essential, so natural a part, has moved on. The memory of what had always been there is so strong that even in it's clear and sudden absence the connection can not be denied. 

Children are like our "phantom limbs". Even when they leave they are never really gone. They come back from time to time, for laundry, or a shoulder, or a fist full of cash; to dance with you at a friend's wedding. And those sleep deprived, whirling dervish early days that you thought would never end, somehow, they do. Then you blink, look up, and you find a boyfriend with a beard and a U-Haul on your front lawn. 

Psychologists say children believe in magic because their brains can't grasp the limits of natural laws. As a kid, I tried to bend spoons with my mind like a magician I had seen on Saturday morning TV. It broke my heart when it didn't work. I thought, if I couldn't think a spoon into a knot, how could I will my mother to put down the Jim Beam and the bottle of pills long enough to make dinner, or wish my father into coming back home to eat it.

Beginning again. Some people embrace it, the chance to start fresh, to leave whatever baggage behind. For others of us, change is a dizzying loss of control. We cling to our baggage like a floatation device, like a phantom limb. Our old life is gone, changed forever, and yet we cling to the feelings, cling to memories, cling to the hope of what it could have been like. We feel the pain, the cold, the heat, and we can't move away, can't let go. 

What is unleashed in the soul when we love outside ourselves is sharp, unexpected and beyond words. Love turns smart people stupid and conjures courage from thin air. That we can love so wildly, so recklessly, yet feel it in the tame ways of every day, is something of a miracle. 

For some, a miracle, ordinary or otherwise, would take a miracle. Still, there's room for repentance, there's hope, if only in glimmers. For others, hope is all there is. Love, miracles, hope, not my kind of words any more but I find as life pushes relentlessly on, they nudge their way in and set up shop, undeniable as moon tides. The pie in the sky, magical thinking of childhood is quietly replaced by a grown up sense of wonder and the reality that something as simple as a sunset...can still surprise you.