258. Not There, But Here - Mariah Zebrowski Leach
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When all the ashes of our old life settled and we were able to begin anew, it occurred to me that we had weathered this storm and come out the other side more or less whole.
On December 30, 2021, the Marshall Fire burned our neighborhood near Boulder, Colorado, completely to the ground. While I was full of gratitude that my family and neighbors were safe, it wasn’t easy to look at the ashes of the only home my three children had ever known. To realize that every object we had ever treasured—everyone’s first Christmas ornaments, hand-sewn baby quilts, wedding rings, family photos—had all been reduced to nothing was devastating. It was raw. I felt a twist of pain in my belly. I could actually taste it in my throat.
Yet it was also somehow vaguely familiar, this feeling that everything was forever changed. Fifteen years earlier, illness had interrupted the trajectory of my life. Though it began in college, I made it almost all the way through my first year of law school before I got too sick to ignore, and at the age of 25, I was diagnosed with severe rheumatoid arthritis. I can’t tell you how many times someone told me I was “too young” to have arthritis—meanwhile I was spending the second half of my twenties tethered to IV poles, learning how to stab myself with needles, dealing with chemo side effects (albeit at a much lower dosage than for cancer), and searching for a treatment that would help me “get my life back.”
My life since the fire is sort of a blur, but flashes of memory are clear. Telling my small kids that absolutely everything was gone. (My seven-year-old cried about his stuffies, my nine-year-old cried about his books, my three-year-old couldn’t understand why we never went home.) Desperately searching for nearby temporary housing with 1,000 other devastated families. Visiting donation centers and leaning on our community for basic necessities like clothes, shoes, and toothpaste. Evaluating all our options and eventually making the heart-wrenching decision to relocate instead of rebuild.
But, when all the ashes of our old life settled and we were able to begin anew, it occurred to me that we had weathered this storm and come out the other side more or less whole. Part of that, I realized, was that I had already been practicing resilience in the face of chronic illness for over a decade.
After my own struggles as a new mom with rheumatoid arthritis, I always wanted to write a book about pregnancy and parenting with chronic illness, but I think I was waiting for some sort of conclusion to my own story—as if I would magically hit some special point where my own life experiences would culminate into some resonant ending. But since the fire, I’m beginning to think that maybe the important thing isn’t a “conclusion” at all. Maybe what I need to do is write about the journey, and the inevitable ups and downs I have faced along the way. Maybe I will never get there; likely there doesn’t even exist. But perhaps I can figure out how to thrive here.
Mariah Zebrowski Leach
