Most modern meals require a fork, but they lack the simply beauty of spoons. Spoons are for stirring, scooping, serving, tasting. Spoons are symbolic: silver ones for prosperity, “spoon fed” for having it easy, “greasy spoon” for a diner. I collect spoons; for me they are a totem. It started with my Great Grandmother. She had two racks of decorative spoons hanging in her dining room. Some of them were from places she had traveled, others may have been gifts. When she passed my sister and I each inherited eighteen spoons.

My Great Grandmother lived 96 years. Until the end, she had rich auburn hair, wore pearls, and lived alone. She was the smartest woman in my family and the most liberal, an avid reader, news junky, who could beat anyone at cribbage. She was elegant, a dainty eater who loved beautiful serving dishes and always put a bendy straw in my Coke.

I wish I had started my own collection earlier, mapping out my travels with coffee spoons like J. Alfred Prufrock. Instead, there are haphazard additions: a spoon my sister brought from Rome, one decorated with a confederate soldier’s cap found by a friend at a thrift shop here in Georgia, a blue one salvaged from the beach at Dead Horse Bay.

When I inherited the spoons I examined each one, imagine the places they came from, noticing the fine details. One is adorned with a tiny pair of clogs, another has the raised veins of a leaf. Their beauty enchants me. I imagine them laid out on the tables of kings, traveling over the ocean, carefully wrapped in towels. I love the way they’ve aged, the dark rainbows of tarnish. I imagine their stories, as if each was a tiny world like a snow globe encapsulating a piece of my grandmother’s history.

When we say someone has healed, there’s an implied permanence, a sense that the sickness or injury is gone forever. Like “happily ever after,” healed is an impossible promise. And yet, we believe in healing. Healed is a word doctors won’t use with diseases like cancer that may return. For tentative restorations, there’s a different vernacular. We talk about remission, reduction. We fear false hope, being caught unawares.

But does impermanence negate recovery? My IBS symptoms wax and wane, and every once is a great while, they disappear. Yet even in symptom-free times, in my mind, my condition lingers. I don’t think of myself as well.

Unlike the relief I feel waking up after a lingering cold and finding that my head is clear and my breathing easy, with my stomach, feeling well is not enough.  I cannot shake the worry that I may get sick again. I do not simply enjoy being well. I get fixated on permanence.

It isn’t just in matters of physical health that fixedness matters. When it comes to loss, grief, or heartbreak we also speak of healing as if it is a single process, something that leads to a definitive moment when we are cured. But I’ve found that much like my IBS symptoms, my emotional discomforts increase and lessen, but are never wholly negated. I learn to deal with certain triggers, but the underlying tendencies find new outlets. Things improve for a while and then get difficult again.

Obsessed with patterns, I track these recurrences, their cyclical nature. Sometimes I feel that I have improved, matured, but this may be more a matter of stabilizing my environment than developing internally.

It’s the holiday season, a time of traditions and memories, when past and present blur. As adults, we return to our childhood homes. We return to our pasts, old symptoms, old habits, old feelings, return. My parent’s house evokes complex feelings. Sometimes I enjoy the familiar rooms, other times I find myself angry or forlorn. Uncertain of what to do, of how much freedom I am allowed, I lose confidence. I lose maturity, insight, autonomy. I feel old pain. Wounds that I thought had healed reopen.

Does this mean that I never healed, that my mettle is a matter of distance, that my poise is only a lie? If my answer is no, then I must rethink what healing is, to allow the possibility that to be wellness is always momentary, that a relapse of sickness does not negate the moments of health and comfort. Instead, it makes illness and wellness transitory states, both of which, will pass.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the Little Mermaid, possibly the most powerless of all fairy tale heroines. She isn’t vulnerable because she is weak or passive but because the world around her acts in ways she doesn’t expect.

I’ve been struggling with my IBS, had a terrible flare up despite my best attempts at self-care. I’m feeling better today, and I’m grateful, but I worry about when the next attack will come. When I’m sick I struggle to write, to read, to talk about anything else. I become completely absorbed with my own body, my own discomfort. I become irritable and prone to tears. I wonder if I’ll always have these symptoms, and I search obsessively for some diet or supplement I haven’t already tried to ease my discomfort.

I think about the Mermaid, how despite her beauty and faithfulness, she ends up alone because she can’t explain who she is. Nothing she does can bring back her voice, which she gave up because it provided an opportunity, because she does what she knows is right for her. Even though everything goes wrong, I still feel she made the right choice, that she would have been miserable if she hadn’t tried.

I tell myself this because my own illness seems to be the result of a decision, the choice to quit smoking, a choice I made for my health. But I don’t feel healthy. My body doesn’t work as it should. Try as I may, I find over and over that I am powerless, that I cannot prevent my symptoms. I berate myself for all the years I spend smoking, and feel that the damage I’ve done is irreparable. Surely the mermaid, looking back, could blame herself for ignoring her father’s good advice, can see her behavior as reckless. But I understand why she didn’t. I forgive her rebelliousness, her daring, her curiosity, and try to see my own youthful poor judgement sympathetically.

When you’ve believed something about yourself for long enough, it feels factual. It becomes part of how you define yourself. As a lover or fairy tales, you’d think I’d believe in happy endings, yet what is more quintessentially fictional than a fairy story?

I gave up on having a family of my own long ago. Marriage and children, I said, were not for me. I can’t remember if this was this a choice I made at some point out of a desire for freedom or if I felt that I was defective in some way that would prevent me from having them. I honestly can’t remember, but once the belief that I would never marry or have children became part of my identity, both things seemed true: I didn’t want these things and that they were unavailable to me.

But somehow I’ve landed in stable relationship with a man who wants to get married and have children, who sees these things in our shared future. And now that I’m faced with the possibility, I’m not sure what I want. It is delightful to let go of the voice in my head that says I’m not the marrying kind, but it is terrifying to think that there is nothing special or strange about me.

In fairy tales the heroines are often defined by some oddity: Rapunzel’s hair, the Pea Princess’s sensitive skin, Little Red’s bright cloak. But they are also conventional: pretty, feminine, obedient. Their adventures, however fanciful, end with the same, bland happily-ever-after. The girls have their adventures and then they settle down and have families. There is part of me that feels drawn to the new possibility of being able to have a normal life and part that resists falling into the expected pattern.