Weaving the web of a life unexpected

By Shideh Etaat

Like a skilled spider, a woman weaves her own reality, and at the center of it always lives a question. For the past seven years mine has been — what do we do when the miracle doesn’t look how we thought it would? When life looks different than the picture we had painted in our heads and we have a wounded heart as proof? Life unexpected as a woman, as a mother, can weave in different ways. Maybe our webs are about divorce or losing our mother just as we become one, maybe it’s about having a child who has health complications or our houses burning down in a wildfire. There is no doubt that a life unexpected can bring you to your knees, can make you resentful of life itself, but it can also become your greatest teacher if only you let it. 

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There are certain things always pulling us from our insides, and maybe there’s an explanation for them and maybe there isn’t. I had a pull to move from LA to San Francisco in my 20’s for grad school. I had a pull towards my husband after talking to him on the phone for a month without ever meeting. His voice was a land I’d traveled to before. When we did meet, it was like a door opened up; I’d always wanted to be loved like this. It felt like we were just meeting each other again after a very, very long time. Elia was laughter and safety and comfort and gratitude and determination and kindness and stubbornness all wrapped up into one beautiful human.

Elia had things pulling him from his insides too — his love for me and music and nature, a deep devotion to living in San Francisco, and an ultimate calling to become a protector of the city, his city. He decided not to go to law school and to become a police officer.

I never expected to be married to a cop. I’m already an anxious person, and this made me even more so. And I don’t think he ever expected to be one, either. As a borderline socialist, former punk rocker, and a troublemaker teen, it didn’t make sense. But when you love someone and you see them walking their path, doing what they’re meant to do, you don’t tell them to stop. Elia would become a bicycle cop in the Tenderloin, partially to get more exercise, but mostly because he wanted to immerse himself within the people. His superpower was shooting the shit with just about anyone, finding a way to connect, to make people feel human, seen, important. Elia could talk to anyone about anything, to make the greatest outsider feel like they belonged. It was a really fucking hard job and he was good at it.

The first time I got pregnant I didn’t expect I would have an abortion because of a complication that made the pregnancy high risk. It was a brutal and difficult decision, but 10 months later I found myself pregnant again. I was on my way to see the doctor, a three-month checkup. Was he the size of a plum or a prune I can’t remember. I was going alone to the appointment because Elia was working. 

I’ve thought so much about this moment. For me it was a scream, levitating outside of my body and needing to find the ground so I could remember I was still alive. What was it like for Elia? Zooming down the busy streets of San Francisco on his bike looking for a man with a gun, the suspect everyone was searching for, believing he could save the day and then the next and then the next, his sleep ruined because of our loud downstairs neighbor, the stress of juggling law school part-time. It feels like a hollowing out of me when I think about it, the second between life and near death, the millisecond of impact from the suspect’s car, his body, the suspect exiting a parking garage with his car, hitting Elia at the same time that he rode by on his bike. 

He was flying, he really was, and I know my face was there too, and the face of our unborn child, and his own face as a child and all the faces he had worn in this life, so many of them I never even knew. It’s the saddest thing in the world to think of his body so vulnerable, slamming back down into earth, how deeply his beautiful brain was rocked, all of the memories, all of the faces disappearing, leaving his body like a thin trail of smoke.

For an entire month I carried life in one palm and death in the other. Surgeries and shock and a deep cavern of grief, but we were also protected by family, friends, officers, strangers, a force that felt bigger than any of us  all — call it spirit, or love, or God or whatever you want. I don’t think it really matters. I could see reality, and it didn’t look good, the doctor’s giving him only a 20% chance of not being a vegetable, so I chose to see life beyond that reality — a deeper sense of knowing took over me after the initial 24 hours. An inner voice nudging me. He’s still here. He’s still here. 

After the incident, when Elia had to relearn what it means to be human, a person, a living, breathing, speaking, swallowing thing, I wanted to be the one to teach him. For a long time it felt like a sacred act, a mitzvah. I believed my breath, my bones, my touch would bring him back, but I didn’t understand how putting him back together, how not seeing the truth of it all, would break me. 

This is the web I started to weave —  I would get him back, for myself and for our son who was still inside my belly. I would manifest the shit out of this miracle and then I’d write a book about it for the whole world to know. We would both be heroes. I sunk my teeth in the hope of it. I looked at his face. His wide eyes, his brain bouncing inside a head where a piece of skull had temporarily been surgically removed, gibberish pouring from his mouth like spit, and I could not see it, I refused to. I only saw the before, the love, the wisdom, the charm. I could only hold onto what I knew so I could steer us in the right direction. Denial as thick as armor protected me from being swallowed up by disappointment. I needed this denial to get through it, to get him to the other side — to a place where he could speak, swallow, laugh with our son, walk with assistance, sing his favorite songs, which he is able to do now. 

What a life unexpected can teach you is opposing things can be true at once. A miracle did occur and I didn’t get him back; he still has huge memory issues, cognitive deficits, physical and visual limitations, he’s a different version of himself. I still love him and that love has morphed into a different shape. I am grateful our son can know him and I grieve daily that our son will never know the before of him. There was death and there is still so much life. Grief and gratitude all wrapped up in one intricate web — a new web of my own weaving. 

Four years into this, it took a global pandemic and many sleepless nights and many, many different therapies. Nothing was really working anymore for me to be pushed to the absolute edge, to be able to say the words out loud finally — enough. It’s a hard thing for a woman to say.

I tried to save him and it’s not my job to save anyone.  

It took six months to find a proper living situation for him, one where he would get the 24/7 care he needed. We’re one of the few lucky families where his insurance will cover it. The blessing within the curse. I bought him a mattress and went shopping for his new room, like I was sending my kid off to college, except it was my husband. It was another death. A true separation. It was reality slamming into me headfirst and, let me tell you, it really, really hurt.

Look, I’m still in it. I’m not writing this from some far-off galaxy where everything is suddenly perfect, but I’ve sat in the darkness long enough to tell you that a life unexpected isn’t a waste, or a detour, or a wrong turn, or a glitch on the path, it is the fucking path. I’m digesting my disappointment, my loss, and learning to grieve in my own way for the best guy who ever was, to stay connected and loving towards who he is today, all while helping this little tiny human start to navigate his own loss. 

In the end each of our webs can look so different, but what I know for sure — even when the web feels like a broken thing —  is that there is always a woman left standing on her feet, a spider who knows a lot more than she thinks she does — the ultimate creator. 

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Shideh Etaat is a LA based mama and writer with roots in Iran. Her first novel Rana Joon and the One & Only Now was published in 2023. She is also founder of Aramesh Well Being where she does one-one coaching and leads women’s groups with the intention of processing through writing and the magic of being witnessed. She will be hosting her next women’s group on 2/26 - sign up to reserve your spot here.