In true Stone family fashion, we had been planning our days purely around food. To that point, my only blog note for Wednesday was about our lunch. We rented a golf cart (the primary mode of transportation in Hopkins) to cruise to the other side of town for a meal at one of the restaurants our hotel recommended.
I should have known that the hotel staff may be used to recommending restaurants for perhaps a different type of traveler. As far as I’m concerned, the beach shack fry fish like what we had the day before is essentially the pinnacle of human experience. The restaurant we were sent to that day was a bit more polished than what I would have sought out, and didn’t have much in the way of local fare. It was a vaguely Asian restaurant run by a seemingly Russian expat. But somehow, in the cultural melting pot that is coastal Belize, that felt completely natural. (Which reminds me, I haven’t even touched on the Mennonites yet. I’ll work that in at some point.)
The meal was solid, and I’d easily go back if there weren’t so many other places worth trying, but it was nothing to write home about. The real memory (and the focus of my sole note today) was the scene a table over. A group of three women in their 60s who looked as if sunscreen hadn’t made the cut on their packing list (ever) were talking relatively loudly about some stresses and whatnot. Well, really one was talking and two were acknowledging. I didn’t really catch much more than the occasional swear word while trying to keep my kids’ hyperacute hearing focused on the conversation at our table. I didn’t want to get into any awkward explanations.
But at some point, a woman sitting at the only other table in the restaurant stood up and said, “Excuse me. I couldn’t help overhearing (tell me about it), but you have somatic trauma and you need to release it from your body.” I looked to Aimee, who had heard the same thing and had a smile on her face that said, “We’ll be talking about this for years.”
As our attention turned back to them, the conversation had moved on to trauma management strategy. “You just need to turn your head to the left and look out as far as you can before going to bed.”
Now, I’m a very receptive audience for how to manage generational trauma. It’s what I do for a living, after all. But I won’t be taking that advice back to my patients. Although, maybe the joke’s on me, because within minutes, all four women were standing up, hugging, and fully sobbing. I’m not sure if the multiple empty beer bottles on the table had anything to do with the degree of sobbing, but hey, a breakthrough is a breakthrough.
Hopkins is dotted with quite a few hostels, and seems to be a popular spot on the backpacking/adventuring/spiritual journeying circuit. So I got the feeling that whatever just happened at lunch is a pretty regular occurrence around here.
The advice-offering woman had already been on my judgement radar for about 10 minutes, even before whatever just happened happened. A vanlife-type camper that had seen better days honked spontaneously from restaurant’s dirt parking lot several minutes before the group therapy session. The man sitting with the presumably-unlicensed therapist said something along the lines of, “Should I check? I’ll go check.” He walked out to the van, poked his head around for a minute and came back in the restaurant. I heard him say, “Jack was fully in his thing a minute ago, I don’t know how that happened.” I assumed Jack was either a dog or a baby, and was fully prepared to judge them for leaving either in the van while they enjoyed their lunch.
Fast forward through the recounting of recent stresses, “excuse me,” and the subsequent sobbing, and we were all getting back into our vehicles around the same time. Us into a comically overloaded golf cart, them into their cosmic spaceship/Winnebago camper van.
As we were getting ready to putter out of the parking lot, we saw a nearly naked toddler streak by in his diaper. “Jack! Come back, Jack!” came echoing out of the van.
Thirty years from now, I look forward to hearing stories from my kids’ trip to Belize. “Some guy named Jack was venting about his crazy parents at lunch when a stranger stood up and offered to help him get through his somatic trauma.”
Just look to your left, Jack. Just look to your left.
