I Think I’d Take the Fall Again

At about three in the morning, my cocker spaniel starts running. She isn't going anywhere. She's sound asleep beside me, tucked against my left side because that's where she likes to be. We have nine dogs, so personal space in our house has always been more theoretical than actual, but this particular little girl has decided that sleeping beside me is her safe place. Unfortunately, my left side is also where the arm I broke at the end of June is still trying to heal, and when she starts running in her sleep, all four legs get involved.

Eventually one of them connects, and the pain feels electric. It shoots through my arm and sometimes seems to travel through my entire body. By then I have usually been lying on my back in one position for hours, so the arm has already begun to ache. I spend the next hour trying to convince myself that I can fall asleep again, even though experience suggests otherwise. Sometime around four, I usually give up, get out of bed while Craft, the dogs and apparently the rest of the civilized world are still sleeping, and go to the little writing nook in our bedroom.

The first thing I do is check my Amazon dashboard to see whether anyone has bought one of my books or read another few pages since I last looked, because apparently three in the morning is not too early for obsessive sales monitoring. Then I write, reread something I've already written or sit there with The Tudors playing on the little television above my childhood desk. Henry VIII has been marrying and executing people in the background of my life for months now.

I would have thought by September that my arm would no longer be waking me at three in the morning. It has been almost three months since I fell, although when I remind myself that the fall resulted in surgery, a plate in my arm and screws in my shoulder, three months doesn't sound particularly long. I'm still in physical therapy and still working to regain my range of motion. At three in the morning, though, it's easy to wonder whether this is simply what my arm feels like now.

The big things about breaking an arm are fairly obvious. There is pain. There are X-rays and surgery and doctor's appointments and physical therapy. What I wasn't prepared for were the ridiculously small things I would suddenly be unable to do for myself.

For about a month, Craft had to help me put on my bra. Eventually I developed a method of wiggling myself into one without assistance, which felt like a surprisingly significant achievement. I couldn't put on most of my clothes because I couldn't maneuver my arm through the sleeves of anything that had to go over my head. I had bought the cutest linen tunics and little peasant skirts for summer and had the whole thing planned out. It was going to be my linen-bohemian summer, although, to be fair, almost every summer is intended to be my linen-bohemian summer.

Instead, I have spent months wearing the same three button-down shirts. I refuse to buy a wardrobe full of button-downs because I don't particularly like them and don't intend to wear them once my arm is working properly again. So the cute linen tops have been hanging in the closet all summer while I have repeatedly appeared at doctor's appointments and physical therapy in one of the same three shirts. I'm sure people who see me regularly have begun to wonder whether I own other clothes. I do. I just can't get into them.

Then there are my armpits. I haven't shaved them since the fall because I can't raise my left arm high enough to get a razor underneath it, and I can't stretch that arm far enough across my body to shave underneath the right one. This bothers me considerably more than it probably should because I don't like body hair on myself. I want hair on my head, eyebrows and eyelashes, and I am perfectly happy for the rest of it to go. I'm reaching the point where I may have to ask Craft to shave my armpits, which will represent another level of marital intimacy I don't recall seeing mentioned in the vows.

Deodorant has become its own problem. I am a stick-deodorant woman. I like the way it glides over freshly shaved skin, which is admittedly a standard I haven't been able to meet lately. I can manage to get some underneath my injured left arm, but my left arm won't reach across far enough to put stick deodorant underneath my right one. A friend listened to me complain about this and asked the obvious question: Why don't you just use spray deodorant? Because I like stick deodorant.

Nevertheless, I bought the spray, and I don't like it. It goes on incredibly cold, assuming I can get the can positioned at exactly the right angle to make anything come out. Half the time it seems to spray nothing but air. When I finally manage to hit the correct angle, I either get too little or far too much, and then it feels as though tiny cold crystals have formed underneath my arm and attached themselves to the armpit hair I already don't want.

This is not the sort of thing the orthopedic surgeon asks about. He wants to know about pain and range of motion. Nobody at my appointments has ever asked whether I have successfully applied my preferred deodorant lately. But I've learned that losing your independence doesn't always announce itself through something dramatic. Sometimes it's standing in the bathroom wishing you could shave your own armpits and put on deodorant the way you've done it for decades without ever considering either one an accomplishment.

My surgeon told me I needed time away from work to heal. I couldn't lift the heavy books I regularly handled, and there were simply too many things I couldn't safely do. For a while I found myself at home without much of anything I was supposed to be doing, and I am not particularly good at that. I can watch television, but I can't sit for days and simply watch television. I needed something to occupy my mind while my body was insisting on being left alone, and the one thing I knew I could do with one functioning arm and a laptop was write.

At first I wrote from bed. I had one of those lap desks with a hard top and a beanbag-like cushion underneath it, and I balanced my laptop there with my left arm still in a sling. I spent so much time sitting in the same place that I think the mattress may now have a permanent record of my recovery. Somewhere in my medicated enthusiasm, I decided I needed a website.

I don't remember having a particularly sophisticated business plan. I thought I could write about things I was experiencing, things I liked and things I had discovered, and I decided to call it Jennifer Maier Living. Martha Stewart, I assumed, would not feel particularly threatened. I discovered the domain was available, bought it with my debit card and started building a website on Wix.

The first version was very pretty. Sage green, plum and cream. Calm little sayings. An anonymous woman walking down a sun-dappled path, presumably toward growth, freedom, self-discovery or possibly a parking lot. I wrote about things I was interested in at the time—products I liked, things I was learning, whatever happened to catch my attention. I started a Pinterest account because apparently building a website while recovering from surgery wasn't enough, and people gradually began seeing what I posted.

Eventually I cleared the boxes out of that odd little alcove in our bedroom and reclaimed the wooden desk I'd had since childhood. I put the old Queen Anne-style chair from my parents' living room in front of it and made myself a place to work. I added the little television, The Tudors began its seemingly permanent residency, the dogs claimed the floor around me, and I kept writing.

Some manuscripts and ideas had been waiting for me to find the nerve to do something with them. Others developed as I kept working. Eventually I started publishing books instead of merely wondering whether I ever would. There are ten of them now, sitting out there in the world where strangers can buy them, borrow them through Kindle Unlimited or apparently read two pages and decide they have had enough of Jennifer Maier for the evening.

Jennifer Maier Living changed too. Only recently I looked at that soothing woman walking down the sun-dappled path and realized the site didn't look like me anymore. It looked lovely, but it also looked like a thousand other lifestyle websites. So I took her down and put myself there instead. The homepage now has my face, my books and a description of what the site has gradually become: personal essays, books and observations from a life still in progress.

That description feels about right because I think that's what I'm writing now—a life still in progress. I don't know whether these personal essays will eventually become another book. I don't know whether the books I've already published will sell enough copies to become something significant. I don't know whether Jennifer Maier Living will grow into a business, an author platform, a gathering place for readers or something I haven't thought of yet. It changes from week to week, and for once I'm enjoying not knowing exactly what it is supposed to become.

What I do know is that it feels like mine. I have spent much of my adult life being responsible for things, working inside organizations and taking care of what needed to be done. This is different. I decide what I write and what the website looks like. If I wake up one morning and realize the whole thing has outgrown sage green and a woman walking toward enlightenment through the woods, I can change it. There is something deeply satisfying about being responsible for the direction of something that exists because I decided to create it.

Which brings me back to the fall. If someone could take me back to that moment at the end of June and let me avoid it, knowing that avoiding it might also erase everything that grew out of the months afterward, I think I would take one for the team and fall again. I don't say that lightly. The pain was terrible, the interruption to my life has lasted far longer than I expected, and I don't know yet when it will completely end. My linen-bohemian summer never happened. I would very much like to shave my armpits, return to my stick deodorant and sleep until six in the morning without being awakened by a cocker spaniel running through whatever adventure she's having in her dreams.

But something happened while I was sitting in that bed with one arm in a sling and a laptop balanced across my lap. I started building something, and I'm excited enough about where it might go that I wouldn't want to erase the beginning. At three tomorrow morning, with an aching arm and too little sleep, I may question that assessment, but right now I know what grew out of an interruption I never wanted.

My cocker spaniel will probably be curled against my left side again tonight because that's where she feels safe. I could make her sleep somewhere else, and occasionally, after one of those running feet connects with my arm, I seriously consider it. But she is my pretty little girl, and if being tucked beside me is where she feels comfortable, I don't really want to take that away from her. I just wish she'd stop running.

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