DANCING IN THE NARROWS: An Excerpt

May is Lyme Disease Awareness Month. Anna Penenberg’s new book, Dancing in the Narrows, is about her journey to self-discovery as the mother of a Lyme Disease patient.

“Dancing in the Narrows” chronicles a mother and daughter’s multiyear journey through illness and trauma. At sixteen, Anna’s youngest daughter, Dana, is stricken with a mysterious debilitating condition, eventually diagnosed as Lyme Disease. Completely dependent and in excruciating pain, Dana spends years on the sofa.

Desperate to find a cure, the two women are thrust into the established medical world, then far beyond. When endless supplements, pharmaceuticals, dietary restrictions, and alternative therapies don’t deliver, only hope remains. Full of adventure, humor and blind faith, “Dancing In The Narrows” is an inspiring story of self-discovery, as a single mother fights to save the life of her child. 

EXCERPT OF DANCING IN THE NARROWS

“I attempted to make the youth program on campus sound appealing to Dana by telling her she would be going to “day camp” while I was in class. She shot back with, “Mom, I’m old enough to be on my own. I don’t want to go to day camp!”

“What will you do when I’m in class?”

“I’ll go scootering . . . and sometimes I’ll sit at the back of your class and knit my scarf.”

“Hmm . . . Okay, but you have to check in with me so I know where you are. Keep track of the time on your watch.”

“Yay!” She did a little happy dance.

Dana spent her time among the trees, gardens, and grass areas of the vast campus. There she found herself again in the lap of nature. She spent her time admiring each leaf in the vegetable gardens and each petal on the flowers surrounding the buildings.

We had lunch together every day, and one day after we’d devoured our ice cream cones, Dana grabbed my hand and exclaimed with glee, “Come with me! I want to show you my garden. I know every plant in there, and I’m watching them grow and blossom!”

I can still hear her laughter ringing through the New England foliage as she rode her scooter over the dirt paths on campus. She was free.

It may have been in the vegetable garden that a tiny tick crawled onto her leg, embedded its teeth in her tender skin, and drew her blood into its mouth. I never imagined that a tiny insect could, some years later, make her life unbearable with discomfort. Nature isn’t all benevolent. There are deaths and killings and pathogenic takeovers. There are species vying for survival and borrowing bodies to carry them around. So it is with the Ixod tick that can breed Lyme spirochetes in its belly and then suck the blood of a young girl to nourish itself, leaving behind spirochetes to thrive and multiply in their new host. “

BUY THE BOOK HERE

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Anna works with individuals and families affected by trauma. A healer by nature and training, her approach integrates neurobiology, psychotherapy, and wisdom traditions into personal pathways of re-patterning. Anna’s métier is the relational field, providing safety, cadence, and dimension in the therapeutic exchange.

She uses a sophisticated method of soul retrieval to restore somatic, psychological, and emotional balance—unearthing traumatic fragments held by the inner child and within the physical body. Navigating the dynamics of trauma through this unique work addresses suffering at its core, fostering compassionate healing connections with oneself and others. Anna holds a BA in Psychology and MA in Dance Therapy from UCLA, with certifications in Marriage & Family Therapy, Body-Mind Centering®, Infant Developmental Movement, and Kundalini Yoga & Meditation. She is the mother of two adult daughters and lives in Topanga, California. Dancing in the Narrows is her first book.

Find out more about her on her website https://annapenenberg.com/

Tags: women writers

Category: On Writing