Welcome to this next installment of my “Oak Leaves” series where I introduce you to the many “Parts” of me that carry imprints, wounds, traumas and also strength and courage.
There is a part of me I call Snowbird. She is 8-years old.
Picture this…. she has Wind-chapped cheeks. Snow pants. Boots soaked through from hours outside.
The kind of kid who only came inside when the sun disappeared.
Snowbird lived in a world that felt wide and alive.
I grew up in rural northwest New Jersey in the late 1970s and early 1980s (so dating myself). Far enough from New York City to feel like the real country, but close enough to the city to experience the excitement and opportunity that existed just over the horizon.
When people hear “New Jersey,” they imagine highways and industrial sprawl. But where I grew up, it was mountains, lakes, horse fields, and long winding backroads. Looking back, it truly was a paradise. It was safe and expansive.
Snowbird was an outdoor kid. Movement was her native language. Bikes. Skateboards. Swimming. Running. Football in the yard. Basketball on cracked driveways. Baseball in open fields.
If it moved… she wanted to be on it.
And at the center of that small childhood universe was a boy named Jon Petri.
Jon was only a year older than me, but when you are little, one grade ahead feels like a lifetime of wisdom. He lived about a half mile up the hill from my house on the same quiet backroad.
He entered my life when I was 5 years old.
That was during the era of Lil’ Blu, the part of me you met in the last installment. (CLICK HERE TO READ) The girl in corrective shoes and dresses she hated. The little person who somehow already knew who she was but was still soft clay in the hands of the world.
Jon showed up during that fragile window. As a first born of 3 girls, he was the “Big Brother” I always wanted but didn’t have of my own.
He walked me to the kindergarten bus stop every morning.
I remember feeling completely safe beside him. Not because he treated me like a helpless little kid…but because he didn’t.
He never treated me like just a girl in a dress.
He treated me like an equal.
Whatever the boys were doing, I was doing.
He stood up for me when needed. Included me when others might not have. But he never made a show of protecting me. It was effortless.
In a way I didn’t understand at the time, Jon gave Lil’ Blu something she needed at exactly the right moment in her development:
Validation of her strength.
With Jon around, I could just be. And by “being”, I could be me AND be safe doing it.
Over the next few years we were outside nearly every day together.
We rode bikes endlessly.
Skateboarded down driveways.
Played football, basketball, baseball.
I loved speed. I loved movement. I loved the feeling of my body in motion. And so did Jon.
By 8-years old I had even taught myself how to drive our ride-on lawn tractor. I figured out how to hitch a trailer behind it and haul my friends around the yard like we were running our own miniature farm operation.
Movement became a core feature of my life.
It still is.
That story of why movement matters so much to me, will unfold more in other parts of this Oak Leaves series. (Stay tuned).
But Snowbird was already learning it then.
And Jon was the safety net that made all of it possible.
He gave me the freedom to expand.
To explore.
To grow into a strange and wonderful childhood identity that was a little confusing but completely natural at the time. I sometimes wondered if I wanted to be Jon and always possess that masculine energy-type confidence… or simply be always just under his wing.
But really, it was neither.
It was simply a young girl discovering that strength and girlhood could live in the same body.
Jon made that feel normal. He was only a year older, but looking back, I believe he really was a divinely planted angel in my life.
Life with Jon was…
Easy.
Natural.
And then one winter day, everything changed. A huge snowstorm had come through.
The hill on our backroad was perfect for sledding, and we spent the entire day flying down it on sleds. Laughing, crashing into snowbanks, climbing back up and doing it all over again.
Eventually Jon’s parents called him home for dinner.
He left, promising we’d pick it back up the next day.
I remember feeling excited about tomorrow.
More sledding.
Cross-country skiing.
Snowball fights.
And one of our favorite childhood rituals… eating snow with maple syrup poured over it.
Yes, we did that in the 70’s before pollution, or maybe just us “hicks” did as we called ourselves.
When Jon got home, his mom was cooking dinner.
But he wasn’t done playing. (Because Jon loved “movement” just as much as I did.)
So he did what any adventurous boy would do.
He snuck out of the house while dinner was cooking and grabbed his sled to ride down the hill of his driveway one more time.
The snowbanks on both sides of his driveway were huge.
As he slid down, a car came up the backroad at the exact same moment. There was no way the driver could have seen him, the snowbanks were too high.
Jon was hit and killed instantly.
His parents ran out of the house just as it happened.
His father held him as he died.
His older brother Chris, just 10 or 11 years old himself, witnessed almost the entire thing.
I didn’t see the accident. But I was only a half-mile away and I swear to this day, I still feel it in the air.
From that moment forward, I carried the echo of it.
For years after, every time the Petri family drove slowly past our house and would wave, I could feel their grief from the road.
Even as a child.
Even before I understood what grief really was.
That night is burned into my memory…and in my body. I can still feel the energy of it.
I was in my bedroom trying to fall asleep. My mother sat with me, trying to comfort me the best she could.
I remember feeling grateful and safe she was there. But I also realized it was a different kind of safety now without Jon.
But what I remember most… was the radio.
Two songs (for some reason I still can’t explain to this day) played again and again that night on FM radio. (Sorry my younger readers, but go look up these songs, they are bangers!)
“Come Sail Away” by Styx.
“Baby Come Back” by Player.
To this day those songs can stop me in my tracks.
When I hear them, I am instantly transported back to that bedroom.
“I’m sailing away
Set an open course for the virgin sea
‘Cause I’ve got to be free
Free to face the life that’s ahead of me
On board I’m the captain
So climb aboard
We’ll search for tomorrow
On every shore and I’ll try
Oh Lord, I’ll try
To carry on
I look to the sea
Reflections in the waves spark my memory
Some happy some sad
I think of childhood friends and the dreams we had
We live happily forever
So the story goes
But somehow we missed out
On that pot of gold
But we’ll try best that we can
To carry on
A gathering of angels
Appeared above my head
They sang to me this song of hope
And this is what they said
They said, come sail away, come sail away”
Followed by….
“Baby Come Back, any kind of fool could see
There was something in everything about you
Baby come back, you can blame it all on me
I was wrong and I just can’t live without you”
Eight years old. Learning, for the very first time, what it means to lose someone.
I just had no way of knowing the deepest imprint, beyond the grief, that this would have on my life unconsciously for the rest of my life.
I remember silently begging him not to leave. To do like the song said and just “come back.”
And realizing slowly, painfully that he was never coming back.
In the years that followed, I think Snowbird carried something far bigger than she understood.
Jon had been more than a playmate.
He made Lil’ Blu feel powerful and validated in her own skin. At a time when things like corrective shoes and dresses I hated could have easily made a young girl feel small, bullied and traumatized.
When Jon died, that validation disappeared overnight.
At 8-years old, I had no language for grief.
No roadmap for loss.
And life didn’t pause long enough for me to learn.
The world simply kept introducing new challenges, new fears, new adaptations.
So Snowbird did what children often do.
She kept moving. But not always in the way Jon and I enjoyed as kids.
Snowbird kept moving by staying small and careful and learning to be the “responsible one” to make sure she was always safe and never felt that pain or loss again.
I hear those lyrics consciously and unconsciously over and over. Now at 8-yrs old without my “Big Brother” it meant I had to take on the world all by myself.
And I have spent the last 50 years doing that until I started doing the inner “parts” work to reconnect with this wounded imprint and unburden and heal little Snowbird.
Now at 56 years old, I can see something I could not see then.
Losing Jon left a deeper imprint on my development than I ever realized.
Without that early mirror reflecting back my strength, parts of me slowly began to stray away from Lil’ Blu’s self-leadership.
Not because the strength disappeared.
But because grief had nowhere to go.
It took decades—and eventually the practice of Parts Work (IFS work)—for me to understand just how profoundly that loss shaped my inner landscape.
And yet… there is another truth.
Jon’s story did not end with the accident.
In many ways, it continues through the work I now do in the world.
Because Snowbird carried the memory.
The love.
The loss.
The questions.
I know now that deep grief means “this thing and this person mattered. It has a legacy.”
And eventually that realization and that legacy led me to the inner exploration that has now become Living Oak Leadership.
I still think about Jon almost every day.
I miss him. I miss that feeling of protection and safety.
But without that moment in the snow…
without that first encounter with grief…
I might never have gone searching inside myself for the answers that became this work.
Sometimes the earliest fractures in our story become the very openings through which meaning enters.
Now I provide the “Self-Leadership” to myself that Lil’ Blu first introduced me to and Jon’s presence in my life guided me to live by.
Snowbird learned that lesson first.
This week, ask yourself: “What part of me may be stuck, frozen or is living in a way that doesn’t honor who and what you are here to do.?”
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Stay tuned for next week’s installment and meet another part.
