Something, Anything

I thank the Lord for a sound mind and the activity of my limbs. I grew up hearing people say that. It was a common preamble during testimony service, one people would say but rarely have any experience losing either faculty. I know I had my moments during boot-gate 2009 when I lamented my foot jail, sleeping with it, hot muggy days in it, not being able to drive because it was on my right foot, the totally clashing ankle brace I wore for a month after including to a friend's wedding (the one picture I saw-not happy, eyes go right to the ankle). Total bummer. But tonight at the gym (which I badly needed), I was taking a break between sets and thinking of my mother who can't even sit up without assistance. The shoulder presses were hard but not as hard as it is for her to go from the hospital to rehab so she can try to walk again even while she struggles to eat still. A person who has absolutely no expertise in renal patients told my father there was nothing they could do about her inability to eat or keep anything in her she does eat, that's what renal patients to. Total sack of shit community hospital fucking attending physician said that to my father. What. the. fuck. I seriously want to burn the place down--actually I just want to lock him in his car covered in napalm and set him on fire, just him. Tell him that's just what napalm does, nothing I can do about it. My father wrote us devastated. I told him no one is less credible than this attending since Mom's doctor at Hopkins (a diabetic nephrologist-kind of an expert at this) kept hunting for this thing that has ailed her since the transplant and made it really hard to stay healthy. Same thing with her less competent current nephrologist. Never said what was going on with her was normal. Kept trying to figure out what it was. My god. Every vet I've ever met is leaps and bounds better than any medical doctor I've ever met. That's what's wrong with healthcare. Not a damn thing caring about it.

So I started this post intending to speak of how lucky I am to have the activity of my limbs, that I dug deeper tonight knowing my Mom is struggling far harder than I am with a bicep curl. I'm conflicted about what to do next. A part of me says stop everything, go home, stay until everything is better. Or stay until...until what? I stayed until the transplant, now I wish we hadn't done it. This is just a very hard time. I've been short with friend and foe alike. A person I do not like is coming into our office tomorrow and I'm not sure I'm going to make it without saying something inappropriate. My mother said she understood how people become addicted to drugs when I saw her last weekend. They had to give her morphine for her pain and she felt so good after, she said she wished she could always feel that way. This is a woman who wouldn't take tylenol after her hysterectomy. Seriously God, coming through with that healing would be pretty great and well-timed right now.

We're all coping or not coping in our own way. I'm trying to use exercise but I do feel often like none of this matters and I should just invite either one of the worthless guys I knew over just to have the company and distraction. I just want something else to think about before I go to bed and wake up in the morning and throughout the day. I want something good to happen.

I'm on my period

That's more an alibi for what follows than a piece of information the world just needed to know about me. I read a story long ago written by a woman who was very close to her dying father-in-law. She wrote about her grief and about her husband's grief. She asked her husband at one point what she could do for him and he told her, have sex with me every night. He wasn't being facetious or crass, he just wanted the comfort, release, the life affirming thing that sex can be. Most of my girfriends have rarely been without a man in their life. Even when they say they need to not be with someone, they are still kind of seeing someone. I've only met 2 other people who are, as Ashley coined, 'sex camels' who go without for long stretches. I am without a man in my life and at times like these, I could really use the affirmation, the comfort, the release.

I know I *just* said I was happy being unmarried but can a girl get a boyfriend or something?

This is the hard part

Dear Dad,

Oh holy mother of god. I've been thinking about it and yes, you did say absolutely every soul crushing, hope stealing, deadly thing you could have said to Mom tonight. The part of me that wondered as a teenager why she stayed married to you kind of hoped she would ask for a divorce instead of turning her head and looking out the window to be somewhere other than listening to you say she couldn't go home. A part of me wondered if it would have been better for her to have slipped away from us without having to endure this hardest part, especially since she has to do it with you.

~Ava

It is only a matter of time before we blame the sick for their ills. Why do we do this? Why do we pretend life is fair? That if you eat healthy and blah, blah, that life won't just steal your health anyway. Why do those of us who enjoy health feel like we've done something to earn it? Don't get me wrong, my chubby ass is in the gym working it out to try to mitigate the ass kicking life has in store for me but I'm not 'healthy' because I'm good, I'm healthy because my ass is lucky. I want to tell my mom it's okay if she doesn't want to fight to stay here. I hate to see her so miserable, so alone, so without hope that she can even eat normally again. Who would force someone to stay here under those circumstances? I want to quit my job and just stay home to get her better. I don't want to leave her to the psychological torture of my Dad. It was truly awful. He went without a breath for 3 minutes covering themes like the hospital sending her home to die, sending her a shitty rehab place where she would be left in a corner, all the things she couldn't do right now, how he would figure out how to live on a fixed income so they could both retire, things he needed to do for work, how he didn't want to move to be close to her family.... I finally said, 'this isn't really hospital talk.' I mean, Jesus man why do I have to tell you that? We didn't know this time last week if she was brain dead or would ever regain consciousness. She sat up today. For fuck's sake, calm yourself man. She's in a really tough spot. It's hard to be so weak you can't reposition yourself on the bed. Give. her. a. break.

Dear Mom,

This is not your fault. You are a trooper and continue to be. We didn't help you as much as we should. We left you to your own care and hoped our nagging and goading would motivate you when you were clawing your way through every day just trying to get by. We failed you. I'm sorry. I love you and I want more than anything for you to be well. I question my very faith in the face of your suffering and I know you wonder if it will ever be better, if it's worth all the hard work just to be here miserable. I know my answer will always be yes, I want you here in whatever condition you are in, but I also know my answer is selfish. I love you and want more than anything to see you healed whether this side or beyond. I guess what I'm saying is you don't have to stay here for me. I will never be over you and I wish you didn't have to suffer.You have done so much. You have seen the world, visited me every place I've lived, held wise counsel both in my youth and now. You have remained married to a very flawed man. I don't know how you did it. Seriously. I mean, you had some money and you know your family would have helped raise us. If they were handing out Nobel prizes for living with him, I think you'd sweep. I hope it's the gall bladder. I want so much for you to feel better. If there were justice your drug addict sister wouldn't be the healthier of the two of you.

A good old fashioned fight

Most times my tack in confrontational situations is to write a letter or just ignore it until I can discuss it in good humor or not at all. I rarely want to talk about something at the moment it bothers me. I like to examine it, figure out what bothers me, what parts of the interpersonal conflict are mine (i.e. I'm more mad at me than them), what parts are useless staying mad about because they are things that can't be changed, and then press on. I don't like emotional conversation because it's messy and rarely drills down to actual issues, it's name calling, it's walking out, it's accusatory tones, it's just not usually useful and it wasn't useful this morning when Ashley and I had it out either. But it felt good to leave her ass at home to take the bus to Virginia and I hoped she had a horrible trip because I'm evil but also because her sense of entitlement pissed me the fuck off.

No fight, even between strangers is ever just about whatever set it off. This fight was no different. We're rounding the corner on a year of occupation. She's a semi-terrible roommate (the semi an allowance for the times we enjoy in spite of ourselves). Her room is terrible, she does next to no household work. I even wash her clothes because she refuses to pay attention to where the soap goes and I don't want to buy a new washer before I go. She has never vacuumed, she's destroyed my property, disrespected my home, and daily disrespects me by not showing the simplest considerations. And though I shouldn't, I get overly emotionally involved when I see people making stupid or inefficient decisions. She makes them all the time and then argues her stupid position with conviction I wish she had for making better decisions.

The details of this fight are not important. The upshot is I left this morning to visit my Mom and she could have gone with me. She didn't and she is still on her way here. If my calculations are correct, a three hour trip has taken her over 8 hours. Time she could have spent with Mom. I never expect her to acknowledge I was right but I do wonder what she'll do next time. I'm usually pretty good about not rubbing it in. We'll see how I hold up.

It's that time again

It's that still time between big things when I have just enough time to be wistful and sad. I'm not proud of this and can probably rationalize it but I think I fall in love with someone I work with everywhere I go. They can be a boy or a girl but it's that one person that makes leaving so hard. I've worked in small organizations my entire adult life and have never worked with anyone twice so as much as I hope to work with my boss again, I'll be lucky to grab a drink with him or catch him by chance in the hallway and that makes me sad. When I left for Philly, it was time. And leaving Philly, it's time for that too. Even if I stayed my boss would be gone and he's the best part of coming to work.

So I'm doing that thing. That thing that fills the quiet with noise. When it's quiet I'm sad or I worry. I think about increasingly awkward ways to be a total fan boy to my boss; the heartfelt letter, the ridiculously inappropriate expensive gift. Arg how I hate change and losing things. How I hate breaking new people in, feeling them out, treading lightly. How I hate finding where to shop, where not to shop. But I keep choosing it because I hate being bored more. Because I know there's a small town girl in me that would be content to stay and never even know what the people do three towns over. That hates seeing the same thing over and over again. That feels relieved and blessed that I sold my home and no longer have a place I have to come back to. I love feeling unattached. I feel both claustrophobic and nostalgic when I go anywhere I've already been even though a part of me really hates going somewhere new. Mostly because of the people. So it's that time again.

Boo-hoo. Sniff-sniff.

I hope you new people are awesome.

Getting back into the swing of things

I forgot my password so I was locked out of here for a few days but now I'm back. (Yay). Much to cover, much of what I meant to post will never make it here but before I lay my head down for the evening, the high points follow:

-Mom is doing better. Though she is still in the hospital and we still have much ground to cover, she is awake, she is talking, she is here.

-I woke up this morning feeling badly. I stayed home. I ended up taking several extended naps in the sun. I'm pretty sure my sun napping habit is to blame for the number of people in the hospital who mistook me for my mom's sister. Her face was smooth, soft, and unlined even unconscious. We were all a little worse for wear but I'm apparently wearing it worse than everyone else.

-Sometimes I wish I were married. Most times I'm happy I'm not.

-I really like letting Baloo loose to chase squirrels. She's sprawled out on her doggy couch totally pooped.

What I've learned (I think)

I've learned that while I will never be ready for my parents to pass, there is nothing unsaid between us. There are potential milestones in my life I would like for them to be present for (marriage, children), and things I wish we had done (family vacation) but I'm not estranged from either one of them like my brother and sister are from my dad. Probably takes twice as long to work that stuff out in the vacuum of loss so I hope they both make it a point to try to get there before a very sad time.

I've enjoyed the conversations with my father during this time. We're not a TV family but some of the conversations we have feel like they could have been written for a movie. They are honest, articulate, funny, deep. I know my brother and sister are still figuring out how to have that kind of conversation with dad but I think it will come.

I think dad is right, my mom would do better emotionally without him than he would do without her. He's been a mess. That woman is his entire world. But on any given ordinary day, we all take each other for granted. We take ourselves for granted. We make plans assuming we will be able to follow through on them. We hurry off the phone assuming we can call someone later. We get pissed at one another and don't speak. Whenever we don't have to acknowledge our mortality, we live like we are here forever. This time last week, I was attempting to get my mind around losing my mother at any moment. Anytime we weren't physically in the room, we panicked thinking she might slip away and would have been alone. Even driving back Monday night to drop Ashley off, we figured we might miss her so we lingered in her room talking and hoping she could hear us so she would at least know we were there.

Mercifully, cruelly, callously, life does go on. It reminded me in the occasional call from work from someone who didn't know and in the updates I received from my boss. People are having bad days because they broke a nail or got a flat tire or because they don't know how long it will be before they fully recover from an injury. In the middle of all the family drama, I went one morning before going to the hospital and got my car washed and my eyebrows shaped. It felt so weird to do. It felt weird to decide I was hungry and leave the room to eat. Seemed selfish and pragmatic at the same time. My eyebrows were out of control, my car was filthy, I'm glad both are looking good now. Still kind of felt like a BP executive taking a vacation.

As much as I want to seize this moment as a carpe diem live fearlessly moment, I still won't ask the cute guy who parks next to me out for a drink though I just adore his way. Saw him this morning. He noticed I had washed my car (he was giving me crap about how filthy it was last time I saw him) and then he gave me a hug and told me he was on his way out of town for a week to see family. Bless his West Virginian accent cotton socks. I just want to put him in my pocket. If I knew that was the last chance I had to make my move, I might have taken the plunge and just proposed we grab a drink sometime. Instead I told him I would see him when he got back. So basically, I've learned nothing from the last week.