Revising the End

To my memoir class:
Here is a new ending for "The Breach." your feedback suggested that a final wrap-up might be helpful to this piece if i am to submit it as a stand-alone piece. i'm a little worried about shifting the metaphor, or saying too much - you know how i am.

i included the last paragraph to get you in the mood, the the revision starts with "Two years later" -- as always, feedback welcome.

I lean on the railing and take in the horizon - a crisp line separates the cloudless sky from the water. It’s August and we are already in hurricane season. It was a September when Isabel hit the island. Hurricanes begin as simple thunderstorms that drift off of the coast of Africa and then travel for weeks in the warm waters of the tropics. Most simply die out, but others join together, gather strength and move up our coast. They cause untold damage when they make landfall. I gently thump the warm banister with the palm of my hand. The islands of the Outer Banks are really only delicate strips of sand in the sea and any part of it, including this very house, may not be here in the years to come. As I pull open the sliding glass door and head inside to shower and get into my bathing suit, I find myself wondering if there’s a storm out there now - just beginning to brew.


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Two years later:

An eye of a hurricane can be quite small, sometimes called a pinhole, or it can be fifty miles wide. For slow moving expansive hurricanes, such as Hurricane Isabel, it can take days to pass. The eye is surrounded by what’s called the eyewall, a ring of towering thunderstorms and high winds. It’s risky to leave shelter while the eye is passing, even though it may be calm and even beautiful outside. Rather, one should stay inside and prepare for the opposite eyewall, the unavoidable second punch.

My silence was like the eye of a hurricane, many miles wide, or, in my case, many weeks long, and, naturally, there was no avoiding the second punch. The calm I invented was how I coped, how I made everything seem just fine for my family and myself. But it was temporary and had a high emotional cost. The silence, it turns out, was the hardest part for me to bear.

Ultimately, I turned Justin in to his employer and to the state licensing board for massage therapists. I went on to press charges, but lost in court. Difficult, yes, but for me, along with my writing and the support of my family and friends, doing so turned out to be the very wires and pipes, the stilts and the shingles that I needed to rebuild.

Revising: Brain Pain

You know, in general I like the process of revising my work. I like to read it again and again, admiring it, amazed that something close to coherent has come out of my hand. I like changing a word here, a sentence there, dawdling in the meaningful parts. .
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I even like fixing those pesky errors I’m prone to: grammatical errors, spelling errors, telling more then showing, using clichés. But I’m OK with that, god knows I’m not an English Major. I’m a doctor. I nearly flunked out of high school, and then worked my way up from Community College focused on science. And I don't come from a highly educated family. In fact, even after I had everyone I loved or admired proofread my ‘personal statement’ - the essay section of my medical school application, a spelling error remained for all to read, and comment on, as I sat across from them in my stiff interview clothes. (I had suggested it was helpful to stay away from pier pressure, which is good, I guess … if you’re, I don’t know, a dolphin.)
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So, yes, I'm impressed when I write something that clearly shows a moment of life, has a message, or holds a thread of an idea long enough to land it in the end. And I know I’ll have to fix it up.
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But revising to the degree suggested in class last week doesn’t feel possible.
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Go with the mother angle or my own revelations, not both. But (she whines) the whole point was to be that it is both. If I drop the mother angle the last line, which I love, won’t work. And I can’t bear to drop the lessons of pie being a balance of crust and filling (yin/yang) or learning how quickly one can move from not quite enough to far too much.
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And, more importantly, I have no concrete idea how to do the whole thing metaphorically.
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Help! My revising brain hurts. Anyone else in this same boat?
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Janice