Christmas Card Syndrome
If your family was like mine as a kid, you received Christmas cards from perfect families.
Their photos of matching sweaters and shiny, combed hair touted their obvious superiority.
The accompanying letters reinforced that superiority with stories of children who earned straight A’s while riding a unicycle through flooded rivers to save poor starving orphans.
We rarely took family photos.
If we did, one kid was holding fingers above another’s head, my hair was always greasy and someone was looking away. One parent was gritting teeth while the other was trying to unobtrusively push, shove or shoulder a kid into a pose that would hide holes in jeans.
No recently-rescued orphans were ever present.
My college roommate and I discussed the harm inflicted by those images of immaculate perfection at her temporary dining room table in Palm Springs, face to face for the first time in almost 15 years.
Bridget’s chronic Lyme’s disease with a side order of Bartonella permeates every single aspect of her commanding force.
Her life is less than immaculate.
I ranch.
I haven’t seen immaculate since before we attempted our first family photo.
As we compared our far-from-perfect lives, we found remarkable similarities.
We both use routines to mitigate uncertainty.
We both plan, knowing that uncontrollable outside influences might upend those plans instantly.
Bridget swims laps for 32 minutes one day and faces the potential of seizures and the inability to climb out of bed the next.
Poor starving orphans are on their own that day.
I might face a truck that won’t start or water that won’t flow.
Then orphans don’t get my attention, either.
Neither of us controls the outside influences that dictate our lives.
I check my weather app daily so I have some idea of what I will face.
Neither Bridget nor her doctors understand the bacterial and viral influences on her body so they gamble on a crapshoot of treatments to alleviate them.
Bridget’s doctors recommend a treatment until the horrific side effects overwhelm the potential benefits.
Then they try another treatment.
Ranching treatments to the land move much slower, but the strategy remains.
Experts recommend one type of management until the damage outweighs the benefits.
Experts in both human and environmental health offer recommendations before peer-reviewed science proves the recommendations work.
Typically, research to measure actual results follows 5 to 10 years behind ideas so every moment of every day, ranchers and chronically ill people wonder if they are inflicting harm or helping.
Neither has a way to know.
As we walk our foggy paths, we shove down our uncertainty about whether we can cope deep under our feet.
With each step, we wonder whether to stop and re-evaluate or keep pushing -- a break-through might come with just a little more effort.
Fortunately, as a rancher, I get a do-over every year.
My land is resilient and I am healthy so I have the energy to attempt a do-over.
We both face misguided expectations from people who follow different paths that siphon our energy.
Unless they make us giggle.
Christmas Card Syndrome permeates Palm Springs, of course, with trendy, overpriced athleticwear sold out except in size XL, manicured sand and sculpted bodies implying the ability to ride a unicycle through flooding rivers.
As we walked downtown, Bridget pushed her wheelchair, following a route on her phone.
The route kept changing.
We kept following.
Finally, on a street corner with crowds streaming past, we pictured the scene from a drone – two gray-haired women holding the phone like an idol, staring at it, turning in circles, completely lost.
We roared with laughter, confusing perfectly-coiffed passersby even more.
Sometimes the juxtaposition of Christmas Card Syndrome and reality is just too funny.