Four years ago this month, I slipped on a wet tile floor while carrying my sleeping toddler. My son was fine. My knee was not. In bracing him during the fall, I went down hard without a hand to catch myself and shattered my patella into several pieces. It was the day before my husband’s 40th birthday, and two days before our son’s second birthday. We were supposed to be hosting a party for 50 friends at our house the next day. Instead, I was headed to the hospital in the back of an ambulance, enormously thankful for the painkillers the paramedics gave me to dull the screaming pain. I spent my husband’s birthday in surgery and my son’s birthday crying in my hospital bed rather than celebrating with him. To put it melodramatically, it felt like the end of the world. But of course, it wasn’t. It was a bump in the road—and a relatively small one at that. The months following the surgery were hard ones for me. The surgeon had pieced my patella back together using screws and wires, and there was a metal cable running from my tibia to my kneecap so that I wouldn’t disrupt the healing bones as they knit themselves back together. My mother and mother-in-law, thank goodness, were able to come over and help out for the first several weeks while my husband was at work, but I felt completely adrift in my own life. Who was I if I couldn’t care for my son? I couldn’t pick him up, play with him, or put him to bed. I couldn’t even bend my knee; I cried with the excruciating pain of trying to move it when the physical therapist, Tony, dropped by to run me through exercises designed to help me regain my range of motion. I was supposed to be putting weight on my knee, but each step I took felt like I was breaking it all over again. Tony assured me that if I stuck with the routine, I’d be back to normal within the year. But at the beginning, I couldn’t imagine it. Still, I gritted my teeth and let Tony help me bend my knee while tears of pain and frustration ran down my face. I did my exercises on my own. I weaned myself from the pain medication, which made my head fuzzy and my belly ache. And little by little—step by literal step—I began to feel like myself again. Except that’s what I had forgotten for that first month. I had always been myself. I was just myself with a challenge to face. I was myself at the bottom of a valley, but there was a path right ahead of me leading back to the top of the mountain. A broken knee is nothing in the grand scheme of life. But those little bumps in the road feel like big ones when we’re in the middle of enduring them. It turns out they also become the things that teach us just who we are. We spend so much time thinking of ourselves in terms of the things we’re capable of, and the tangible things we bring to the world. But we’re only who we are at our cores and in our hearts, and there’s no injury, illness or loss that can take that away from us. That’s what matters. Today, the screws and wires are still in my body, a constant reminder of that day. But they’re also a reminder that as human beings, we’re all capable of amazing things, that we’re all resilient, and that in our darkest hours, there will always be light. Life will hand us lemons, and we’ll have to ask ourselves if we can make lemonade. Life will also, unfortunately, hand us wet tile floors and we’ll have to decide whether we’re capable of putting one foot in front of the other and starting again. But we are. I am. You are, too. As long as there’s a road ahead of us, we can learn to walk it, even if that means we have to face the dips, the valleys, and the potholes along the way. Catch up on all the Friends & Fiction essays here! Friends & Fiction is an online community, weekly live web show, and podcast founded and hosted by bestselling authors Mary Kay Andrews, Kristin Harmel, Kristy Woodson Harvey, and Patti Callahan Henry, who have written more than 70 novels between them and are published in more than 30 languages. Catch them and their incredible author guests live every Wednesday at 7pm ET on the Friends & Fiction Facebook group page or their YouTube Channel. Follow them on Instagram and, for weekly updates, subscribe to their newsletter. Kristin Harmel is the New York Times bestselling, USA Today bestselling, and #1 international bestselling author of more than a dozen novels, including The Forest of Vanishing Stars, The Book of Lost Names, and The Winemaker’s Wife. Her novels are published in 29 languages. A former reporter for PEOPLE magazine and contributor to the national television morning show The Daily Buzz, she is the co-founder and co-host of the popular web series and podcast Friends & Fiction. Follow her on Instagram, Facebook, and KristinHarmel.com.
