Heart Healing: A Memoir of Trauma and Belonging
hook: A single mother must heal her broken heart and her adopted daughter’s trauma. As she contends with self-doubt, intergenerational wounding, and her new love’s reluctance to father, liminal encounters with indigenous wisdom keepers transform her world.
Opening Scene-Introduces protagonist, antagonist, tone, setting, and foreshadows defining event
We haven’t seen another soul for four days. Traversing the wilderness of the Eastern Sierra Nevada in King’s Canyon National Park, Tom’s and my first long backpacking trip together, we’ve fallen into the simple, quiet rhythm I love: walk, sleep, cook easy meals of soup, devour star-studded sky, repeat. My journal, Tom’s fishing pole, and our senses nourish us.
My long legs are strong and golden brown after a week of walking, my arms firm from hefting my 50-pound pack. I’m clear-headed and present: with each step, each breath, I’ve shed worry and the stresses of completing my last book contract. My heart is full of the stunning beauty that surrounds: endless massive peaks and deep valleys dotted with lakes, clear, brilliant Milky Way, masses of granite batholiths formed from magma deep in the Earth’s crust, and the love that is building between us.
A steep climb awaits us.
We’re approaching a field of large, jagged, ice-cracked boulders sliding slowly into the shimmering, deep blue Lake Alaska. At 11,394 feet, it’s a treeless moonscape. Beyond the lake, we see our trail winding up barren scree towards the pass we’ll cross. We decide to take a break. Pulling off our worn, hard-frame Kelty packs—Tom’s army green, mine blue—we rest them against the rocks and clamber to a level seat. We pull out some salty almonds and share a joint.
We’re curious about a lone figure, tiny against the peaks, walking down from Ghost Mule Pass towards us. As he gets closer, his brown uniform tells us he’s a park ranger. Content to be still, we wait.
He stops, facing us. “Are you Meg Beeler and Tom von Tersch?” Both of us tense a little and pull back. He’s an official, we’re stoned, and how does he know our full names? When I say yes, he blurts “I have a message for you. Call home about Los Niños.”
Wow. That’s the name of my adoption agency. His body relaxes as I explain. He tells us he’d been worried that something had happened to our children, los niños. Then we get his wild backstory, and tell our own.
Ranger Randy had been digging latrines for a week when his supervisor radioed him the message. He thought he’d seen us on our way in. Tom agreed: after our snow-threatened first night, they had chatted about our planned route. When the supervisor radioed again, suggesting Randy take a break from his backbreaking assignment and look for us, he put down his shovel and hiked over two mountain passes for two days, searching.
“You came all this way just to find us? I ask, still incredulous.
“Yes. But the radio message is it. I have no more information.”
My mind whirrs with questions, excitement, anxiety, anticipation, too much to process. I’ve been waiting for a child for over a year. Is the wait over? I’m scared to feel too excited. It’s like when I go on long trips: I don’t let myself anticipate until I’m on the plane. Maybe because I’m a little stoned and nonplussed, I deflect. I ask him about our bear encounter instead.
“On the morning you and Tom talked, we were eating breakfast. All our cheese was in a bag, just behind me on the boulder where I sat. A Black bear came up right behind me, lifted the bag, and clambered away up a hill. I was so irate—I’d had food stolen by bears twice before on backpacking trips—that I leaped up and chased the bear. I didn’t think, I just wanted our two weeks’ worth of cheese back. Bear climbed a tree. Trying to unnerve him, I threw rocks. He dropped the bag, I grabbed it, and only then noticed that I had chased him wearing my down booties.
“For the next hour as we packed up, that bear circled our camp over and over. His thick reddish fall fur glimmered in the sunlight. I’d met many bears in my life, but had never had such an intimate look. We stayed alert, but he wasn’t aggressive, just stalking. Did I do the right thing?”
“Absolutely,” Ranger Randy says. If you let them take food they learn it’s OK and keep doing it, keep harassing people.”
“Even though the official park brochures tell you to leave them alone and let them keep what they take?” I ask. I know this is a crazy, irrelevant conversation, given the potentially life-changing message he's brought. But I can’t let it go, can’t let myself feel my feelings or think about all the momentous possibilities. We continue in this vein, learning more about our particular bear, Randy’s own encounters with him, and bear behavior until it is time for us to get moving and cross the pass.
Tom and I hike in a daze, as if we have all the time in the world, no place urgent to go, no worries.
Silently I savor the possibility that a child might already be chosen for me in Honduras. The years of wanting to be a mother and anxious waiting might be over. Then I tell myself not to anticipate too much. I might be disappointed, like when a potential adoption fell through six months earlier. The loss had felt like an emptying, a miscarriage. It had taken months to heal my sorrowing heart.
We reach Red Lakes Basin at sunset and make camp. The peaks glow golden red, infusing boulders, trees, and lakes with pink-gold. Heating some leftover beans and rice, we talk about our options. The closest telephone is 21 miles and 3 mountain passes away. The adoption agency is two time zones ahead in Texas. To reach them before the weekend, we’d have to walk out in one day, more than doubling our usual mileage-per-day.
By nightfall we can’t contain ourselves. Even Tom, who’s an important new relationship in my life but not part of the adoption, is too excited to wait. We decide to rise early and hike the remainder of the trail the next day.
With aching feet, sore knees, and tired backs, we reach Tom’s old yellow Toyota pickup truck in Onion Valley by early afternoon. Driving down the mountain we pass Aspen groves turning golden in the fall air. As soon as we see a pay phone in Independence, the closest town, I jump out of the truck, but it’s too noisy to hear. Instead, we drive until we find a telephone sign on a bar.
Inside it’s dark, with just three locals chatting and sipping Friday night beers. The bartender points me around the corner to the phone on the wall. There’s no booth, no privacy. When I finally reach the agency director at home, he says “Your father knows all about the child waiting for you. He has already made plane reservations. Call him. The lawyer is expecting you in Tegucigalpa in six days.” He signs off quickly, leaving no room for my questions.
I call my dad, who has offered to accompany me to Honduras. He’s bubbling with excitement and pride as he shares the good news. “Yes,” he says, “We leave next Wednesday. When we arrive in Tegucigalpa the lawyer will meet us at the airport and take us to our hotel. Your daughter’s name is Maria Fernanda.”
I’m jumping out of my skin, can barely breathe. We order a beer and slide onto bar stools to take it all in. I’ve been waiting so long yet it feels so sudden, is so sudden: I have four days to drive across the Sierras to the Bay Area, buy diapers and bottles, pack, and prepare to be gone from home for two months.
As we drive north on Highway 395, we voice the same thought at the same moment: with a baby coming, this might be our last chance to have a special time alone. We decide to splurge on brunch at the elegant Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite on Sunday morning, camping near Travertine hot springs along the way. Then home to Menlo Park to pack and get ready for my new life as a mother.
