Nicole Lombardi is a high school creative writing and literature teacher near Chicago, IL. She has work featured in English Journal, Mindful Word, Beyond Words Literary Magazine, Dissident Voice, and Verse-Virtual. Nicole enjoys winter, long mornings on her porch, and Spanish wine.

Fireflies

I record our days of healing to give a shape to them, to give us a record of our interventions, to give us a feeling of agency. To give us hope. Today we have acupuncture. I'll record it in my journal under October 11th, two weeks and a day after the start of my medical leave to take care of Bella.

We came for acupuncture last week, and while Bella sat in the room alone, Natalia did a mini-session with me in the waiting room for my tinnitus, which began building toward a scream since the day an antibiotic scrambled the signals in Bella’s body, sending it into central nervous system dysfunction. Part of the causes of tinnitus, according to Dr. WebMD, is stress, and part of its features is that no one can hear it but the one affected.

Now, as we enter Natalia’s soft-colored basement office, she declares Bella and I are having our session together, in the same room, at the same time, “so that Mom’s strong energy,” she says to Bella, “can work its way to you.” I sit up tall on one of the two beds feeling proud of my strong energy.

I am glad Bella can’t hear my ringing ears. I want to take her pain away, not add to it. As mothers, there are things we sometimes hide, like our pain, and things we lay bare, like our energy.

Bella had been to Natalia three times before this joint session. Three times since the day that would become her “before” and “after” day–August 22nd—when she emerged from an Uber and collapsed on the grassy parkway in front of our house. Her Spanish Visa in hand, she had been fine at the Consulate, fine the days before, but the central nervous system doesn’t always give fair warning of its malfunction. Neither had her doctor who prescribed the antibiotic.

The following weeks were an exercise in lives unraveling. Hers, mostly. As her move to Spain and her new job and new roommate and new beachside flat drew closer, her symptoms only intensified. A storm no one predicted. One day lightning, another, thunder.

Every day, underwater.

Mine unraveled, too. Starting with my ears. I tried to stay calm while my twenty-seven-year-old independent, strong-spirited daughter returned to the three-year-old pictured in a little frame on a shelf in my bedroom: she needed meals cooked for her, rides to appointments, juices blended, supplements given, tears wiped, muscles rubbed, baths drawn.

My ears were ringing.

As Natalia would later explain, when stress builds in the body it’s like water in a kettle rising to the top and popping off. My ears were popping off as a constant ring, so loud I could barely hear my students from across the room. What’s that ringing? Do you hear it? Close the door!

But on this day, despite my ringing ears, Natalia sees my strength. And she wants to use it.

Natalia has us lie next to each other on separate beds and she begins her work, which for me means needles along the ear meridian–my hands, arms and feet. She goes back and forth between Bella’s body and mine with a determined focus that seems other-worldly. Like someone outside the room is whispering to her where to perform her next move. No need to surveille the scene first. Sometimes she rubs, sometimes she needles. Sometimes she rubs lemon oil. Back and forth from my broken girl to me.

During my first session last week, Natalia held my ankle in her hands. “Let me hold it,” she said. “Stop doing the work for me. You are doing the lion’s share when you’re not here, so right now, let me.” I had known her for five minutes and felt called out. She was right. I had taken on the medical mystery of the antibiotic’s damage to Bella’s body on my own: figuring out symptom relief, scouring the web for information, bringing her to every doctor who might listen, getting her every supplement she might need, talking her off 40 ledges. All while teaching full time.

Natalia said my adrenal system had crashed. “Weakened,” was her word. When I returned home after my mini-session, I couldn’t move. A general malaise took over, landing me on the couch like I was stoned. I Googled, “Why am I so fatigued after acupuncture?” Apparently, your state of energy after your first acupuncture session represents the true state of your energy inside your cells. We drive our bodies to push past the threshold between tired and depleted; in response, our bodies use adrenaline and cortisol to keep going, and we help with caffeine. These chemical hacks mask our actual bioavailability. Acupuncture removes the mask.

I was leveled to the couch.

But today, Natalia sees my strength.

The time comes for her to leave and let the needles begin the healing. She’s a fit fairy, toned muscles shaping her yoga pants, skin glowing as if she swallowed the sun and it’s seeping out slowly. She exits the room, leaving the lemony air behind her.

“Mom, picture the needles working on your tinnitus. If you picture things, it helps them happen.” Bella has gotten used to being open to every available means toward healing that the collective wisdom has to offer. I tell her I do believe in the power of visualization from my years in sports, and yes, I will visualize! I know she’s worried about my tinnitus and overall health, having become dependent on me to survive. I try never to reveal any kind of physical challenge in her presence, knowing how her trauma brain might catastrophize even a small cough.

I set about the task of visualizing energy pathways opening, like pulsating tunnels of light through my body. But that picture doesn’t last long. Natalia’s words hang heavy in the room: “You need Mom’s strong energy to come to you.” I wonder how that works. How can my energy get to her? How does energy get transferred? Is it like little fireflies emerging from under my skin and soaring directly to where they’re needed, on commission from the spirits?

I breathe in more lemon while the room fills with tiny wings, bright and translucent, flapping with the strength of a thousand prayers and darting from me to Bella with Natalia’s same smooth certainty. They find every cell in my girl’s body, every mitochondria depleted of nutrients the drug had carried away. My fireflies are smart. They don’t waste energy by dawdling. They know who needs them. I can hear their whispers as they conspire to heal her with what they take from me.

But it’s hard not to let the mind wander when you’re visualizing. I remember the moment I decided to take a leave from work. My friend and I were sitting on her porch, and she took one look at me and said, “I have never seen you like this.” She didn’t even know my ears were ringing. She suggested I take a couple weeks’ leave from work. I remember a week into my leave when two other friends insisted I extend it another month. Women have a way of stopping you in your tracks. Of hearing what you might be hiding. Maybe something I couldn’t even access hearing, regardless of the ringing?

Natalia returns and works on Bella by taking out needles and rubbing her in places that need more flow, more blood, more life. “What is happening above your heart? What’s wrong? It’s tight here.” She applies pressure to Bella’s chest. “Something is blocked,” she says. “You’re trying too hard, pushing yourself too hard. Let it go.” She rubs her. “Give in to your body’s knowledge.” Bella sobs.

I hide my tears in the soft pillow. I don’t want them to undermine Bella’s belief in my confidence this waking nightmare will end. Natalia pushes on her chest while whispering “let it go, let it go,” and Bella cries. I want to hitch a ride on one of my fireflies and go to her, hug her, tell her that this is going away so she can repeat back to me “This is going away” like our daily call and response ritual. Sometimes it’s during the morning light on the porch when she’s at her best, eating her oatmeal before the fatigue sets in, and sometimes it’s when her brothers and dad come home with the smell of having lived life. She finds me alone in a corner of the house where I might be doing dishes or reading, unaware that fear has once again wrapped its fingers around her neck under her long dark hair and she can’t find a calm breath to hold onto. “Tell me again, Mom.”

“You’re going to get better.”

“I’m going to get better.”

“You’re going to get your life back.”

“I’m going to get my life back.”

But now I can’t get up to go to her and I can’t interrupt Natalia to start our call-and-response ritual, so I command my fireflies while concentrating on her symptoms: one for dizziness, one for fatigue, another for brain fog, more for her heart racing, her body heat, her night terrors. One for hopelessness.

Bella’s sobs subside, and I open my eyes. Natalia turns her attention to me now, where I’m becoming more aware of my discomfort from the needles; I’m ready to get them out. I want her strong and certain hands on me. I want her sunshine.

I notice how quiet the room has grown, how settled. She rubs a little lemon balm on my wrist with fingers smooth, powerful, glowing.

In the car, Bella’s face shines in the afternoon light with a calm that cheers me. I envision I’ve held back one firefly to come home with us. 

At the end of my journal entry, I’ll record how Bella looked after me, asked on the way home about my ringing, which was quieter but still perceptible, and how the session felt. And I’ll answer her openly, except for the part about my fireflies. 

As mothers, there are things we sometimes hide, and things we lay bare. It’s just a matter of when.