And Then…

Update on the hearing aid situation:

The day after I posted about my delays in getting my mom’s hearing aid repaired I did, in fact, manage to get it fixed and back to her. Mad props to Columbia Hearing Center for excellent and speedy customer service, especially as the holiday weekend approached.

I delivered the working device to my mom with the satisfied feeling that comes from one less item on your to-do list. Only to have her say, “I got something in the mail. I don’t remember what, but I remember thinking you should look at it.”

I found the envelope the top drawer of her nightstand:

Jury summons

I looked it up on the state’s website. There is no maximum age for jurors. Apparently, residing at a skilled nursing facility is no automatic exemption, either. What can you do but laugh?

No worries. I contacted my mother’s doctor, who was happy to email a letter stating Mom should be excused from jury duty indefinitely.

It’s always something, rarely anything I expected.

Feeling the Sandwich This Week

Sometimes lately, I can breathe. Sometimes, now that my kids are young adults, I feel a little space opening, giving me fewer needs to meet, fewer conflicting priorities. But then I have a week like this one. This week, this is me.

grilledcheese

Not only sandwiched, but toasted.

Mom’s hearing aid needs repaired. I don’t remember the brand or know where to take it. But surely I can find time to pick it up to see the brand and then find a place that will service it. Um. That much is accomplished. As far as actually getting it to the place…I feel like the world’s most neglectful daughter.

My older kid found a job they want to apply for, which is way up there on the priority list and a major step forward, but they’re floundering in confusion and anxiety over creating a resume. Can’t wait forever to apply; got to get it done right away. Sure, I’ll help. Anything. Anything to help facilitate this step toward self-reliance. Conflicting priorities. I choose helping my firstborn over taking in my mom’s hearing aid. It can wait one more day. I should have a couple of hours after work and before the business closes.

Oh, but then my second-born has arranged to have his friends gather at our house as soon as I’m home from work. It’s the only time all summer they can make it happen, what with all of their various summer classes, jobs, travels and volunteer obligations. One of the boys in the group is leaving the country in a couple of days. These are good kids. Regardless, I’m not leaving a bunch of teenaged boys unsupervised in my house for any length of time.

I’ve also been prepping for a program at work that puts me in a role I haven’t played before. Ideally, this should only affect me during work hours, but I have so much anxiety about it I feel compelled to spend time at home refreshing myself on the details to know and remember.

I was about to call my mom last night and explain all of this to her, hoping she could hear my words of reassurance that she isn’t forgotten, when the tornado sirens went off. Have I mentioned the weather? We’ve been spending a lot of time in the basement lately. Fortune has spared us tornado damage, but not the imminent threats.

Tomorrow. Tomorrow I will definitely get to the hearing aid place. And hope they’re not closed early for the holiday weekend. Sorry for making you wait, Mom. I said SORRY FOR MAKING YOU WAIT ON YOUR HEARING AID.

Summer Fun, Making Memories

Summer

For several years, I dealt with the inevitable summer kid complaint of “I’m bored” by keeping a list of possible activities posted on the refrigerator. Some were solo ventures – blow bubbles, draw a picture. Others were group doings – board games, etc. Some could be done at home and others were of the out-and-about variety for times I was available. Dozens of times each summer, I’d say “Go look at the list and choose something.”

Now I wonder how many summers I have left with any kids still at home. I hope it’s more than one, but fewer than ten. I know the empty nest can be bittersweet, but failure to launch is not all roses either. While I still have them, I want to do more than get through my daily checklist of bare survival tasks over and over: get cavity filled, pick up denture tablets for Mom, go to work again, cook dinner again and again and again… Continue reading “Summer Fun, Making Memories” →

Last One Standing

One of my uncles died yesterday. He had been married to my father’s sister, who passed away last year. I remember at my dad’s funeral, this aunt lamenting that she had none of her childhood family any more. I come from a large clan on both sides. My dad was one of five children and my mom one of nine. Now, of the siblings and their spouses in my dad’s family, my mother is the last one standing. That’s one of the drawbacks of living a very long life. You lose a lot of people along the way.

On my paternal side, it’s an entire generation gone. Yet another milestone where I realize I’m supposed to be a grown-up now, in a big way. In taking charge of my mom and her affairs, I failed to anticipate one significant responsibility. I’m the bearer of news, the one who sits with her over another loss. I never feel I’m competent enough for this and find myself thinking there must be some real adults around somewhere who could step in.

My mom still has six surviving brothers and sisters, including one older the she is. They’re hardy stock. I have a greater than average chance of making it to ninety. But I can’t think this without thinking of my aunt who was the last of her family of origin. She was the youngest by quite a bit and so am I. You never know what life will bring, of course. People don’t always die in chronological order. In fact, I wasn’t even accurate earlier in this paragraph when I said I’m the youngest. There was one sister who followed me by two years and never made it home from the hospital.

People always want to live a long time, but who really wants to be the last one standing? It’s a conundrum.

I don’t know if I have an end point to this blog post. I simply felt like sharing the ramblings of my mind. Maybe I won’t try to come up with some neat concluding sentence. I’ll let it be a little incoherent and messy, like life.

Oklahoma City 20 Years Later

I don’t usually reblog myself, but this is one I feel like sharing on both of my sites.

Nomadic Noesis

Where were you when…? 100_0699

On the morning of April 19, 1995, I was at work at an office job when I overheard colleagues talking about a bombing somewhere. I was slightly more than 8 months pregnant with my first child. 450 miles away, my sister-in-law was at home, taking a personal day off from her job in the Murrah Federal Building.

Neither my husband nor I knew she hadn’t gone in that day. We had no cell phones. Phone lines were jammed; we couldn’t reach anyone in Oklahoma. There was email, but it was accessed through dial-up connections – same problem.

As everyone in my building listened to their different news sources and conferred back about the latest, the pit of despair began to seem bottomless. A daycare in the building? I put my hand on my belly, feeling my baby kick, willing the report to be wrong.

At OKC Memorial

At OKC Memorial OKC Memorial. Each…

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Reclaiming My Space

Yet another birthday. Mine this time. Yesterday. And with it a goal for the coming year. I want to reclaim some personal space, both on my calendar and in my house. Whenever it comes to shuffling things around in an attempt to make life work, I’m often too quick to volunteer for giving up something of mine to make the needed room, whether an activity, a goal, an object, or my home office space.

This is supposed to be my office for writing and whatever else I want to do in there. It’s pretty messy at the moment.

Messy office

Our house was built around 1901. I believe this upstairs room was originally a sleeping porch. The house needed A LOT of work when we bought it. This room didn’t even have real windows, only storms. We installed windows, put in carpet (found an end roll the right size for $50!), insulated the ceiling, and painted the walls, so I could have a writing space. I started the project so full of hope and cheer.

But, letting my inner martyr take over, I’ve gradually allowed everything else to encroach on it. Might as well keep all of our paperwork in there, right? Paid bills, taxes, insurance claims, mortgage stuff. I’m the one who handles the finances, so it only makes sense. Then sometimes we have a box of random stuff with no designated place, and we’re cleaning the common areas because we’re expecting company. Oh, I can put that box in my office, out of the way, “for now.”

And eventually we moved my mom to town, into her little tiny half of a room in the skilled nursing facility. With her came multiple season’s worth of clothing and many items she couldn’t let go, yet has no room for. Hmmm..where to put it? I know! How about the writing salon turned storage unit?

Storage

Oh, but see the green container there on the right with paper stuffed in it? That’s a sign of progress. Of hope. See the filing cabinets? They had been so bulging I’d stopped putting things in them. The green container is a paper shredder. Those papers were shredded after this photo was taken. I’ve made a good start on transforming this jumble back into a usable office by purging my files of old utility bills and operation manuals for appliances we no longer own. Tax returns from the early 2000s – gone! I freed up a ton of space so I could start sorting and filing the more recent piles that have been growing.

My plan, my small, specific, tangible goal for this next year of my life is to reclaim my writing office and begin using it again. I’m going to work on it at least four days a week, even if I only have ten minutes. Take a look at the progress I made this afternoon.

Bookcase

I’m talking about the bookcase. See how half of the top is clear of paperwork? That empty spot represents an hour of work on my part. There had been a huge, tottering pile next to the smaller stack that remains. Some of it got filed, some shredded. About half of it is on the floor there in the photo, but has since been moved to a recycling container. I also returned the clothes hanger to a closet. I’m not sure how it made its way to the room to begin with.

This will happen. I’m tired of the sad, discouraged feeling of loss I have when I look into this room. I will have my writing space again within the year.

Entrance Ramp to a New Decade

90 is the degree of every angle in a rectangle. The Kansas City Royals came within 90 feet of tying the score in the bottom of the ninth inning in the last game of the World Series. A score of 90 gets you an A in many academic classes. 90 is a highway in the southern part of the United States. Most importantly, my mother is 90 years old today.

When we moved her to town three years ago, I didn’t expect we’d get to celebrate her 90th. She seemed too frail. She’s still here, though, and even using a walker instead of a wheelchair. She’s one of those tiny old ladies, struggling to maintain a weight that’s at least as high as her age. But she’s always been tough at the core, and she comes from sturdy stock. She has an older brother who is still living in his own home. Her own mother lived to be 94, and two of her aunts also survived more than nine decades.

Mom made it through a childhood marked by hunger and hard labor during the Great Depression, maintained the fortitude to raise six children, despite the immense grief of losing two, worked long hours at whatever she needed to do to keep us fed, clothed, housed and healthy. She’s picked cotton, worked as a welder, run a dairy farm, managed a cafe, assembled suitcases in a luggage factory, had a home daycare, and always kept her house clean (something I can’t manage.) She’s made the “final move of my life” four different times over the past 15 years and has adapted every time.

We’d planned a big party for her, slated for yesterday, but the weather had other ideas, laying a coat of ice on everything. A handful of us still made it to the nursing home yesterday for cake. Through the miracles of Internet and Skype, even more loved ones were included. We’ll try again for a big gathering with extended family, maybe after spring is officially here. Meanwhile, every day I still have my mother feels like a bonus. I’ll try to remember to celebrate every one of them.

What Dreams May Come

I dream a lot. Always have. Vivid, detailed, complex, Technicolor dreams. Sometimes (okay, often) they’re bizarre – I won a trip to the Mars Colony, which totally existed. The biodome looked like an abandoned warehouse, and I was upset because I’d forgotten to bring my pedometer. I’d been planning to live-blog how many steps I was taking on the red planet. Sometimes they’re boring – I dreamed I had insomnia. Sometimes they’re a jumble of all of my anxieties – I’m late to work, while somehow 30 miles away and I can’t find my car. Also I discover the denture tablets I thought I’d bought for my mom are really kittens that need to be fed.

Sometimes I have a dream that’s a wake-up call, so to speak. In the early days of my marriage I dreamed I had died and was a ghost. I couldn’t go beyond my house. Only my husband could see me. He said it was okay, he’d stay married to me. But I knew I had to go “on” for his sake. What kind of burdensome,unfairly limited life would that be for him? As I mulled this over the next day, I realized it was a message from the part of my mind that had noticed I was depending too much on my spouse to be everything to me. I was living through him and it wasn’t healthy for either of us. I was at risk of losing my own life and of tying him to someone who wasn’t a fully realized person. I made some changes after that one, I can tell you.

I experienced another dream of this variety a few nights ago. I had time-traveled back ten years on accident. I’m not sure how. But I was stuck there. It wasn’t one of those time travel adventures where you risk running into your earlier self. It was more of the Peggy Sue Got Married variety, where you have to go back and relive an earlier time in your life. I was a mess. Ten years ago, I had the same employer, but a different job. Our building has undergone some changes in that time, so the layout is different. So, I was trying to do my work and act like nothing was wrong, as if I didn’t have tons of foreknowledge about changes that were to come – Facebook, co-workers who would have babies, or get divorced, or die, all in the next few years. I had to hold myself back from taking care of things that weren’t on my list of duties then, but are now. I couldn’t remember where things were back then or the procedures for any job tasks. And I was full of worry over not remembering what time my kids would be getting out of elementary school, or what exactly was going on in their daily lives. What could I say to them when I picked them up without tipping my hand? Then I fretted about all of the things I knew were to come for them – major surgery for the younger one, the older one being bullied at school.

So many times I’ve wasted my energy on regret. Wishing I’d done something differently with my kids. Other times, I find myself missing their younger selves, feeling nostalgia for the days when I was a much bigger part of their lives and we’d do fun things together. Playing on the tire swing at the park, sledding in the snow. You might think, given the opportunity for a redo, I’d look forward to doing the things differently, heading off my mistakes, that I’d revel in the opportunity to relive the fun and closeness I remember and long for. That I’d relish being ten years younger and therefore having an extra decade to live. But I felt none of this in the dream. Like Peggy Sue, I only wanted to get back to my now life. I missed the kids I have now. I missed the job I have now. I was downright incompetent in my old roles.

Once again, I woke up realizing a part of my being had been noticing some things about my life and felt the need to hit me over the head with them while I slept. This is the only way I can get my own attention sometimes, I guess. Do I genuinely wish I could have the chance to do things over and enjoy them again and make better decisions? I mean for really real? No. I’d make a mess of it. I can’t be who I was then. Okay Brain, I get it. Stop worrying about things that are done and over with and unchangeable. Take pleasure in the good memories, but appreciate what I have now while I have it. Enjoy who my kids are at this moment, who I am at this moment. Seize the day, because even if it came again, I’d wish it hadn’t.

The Snail Mail at My House These Days

Typical snail mail day at my house:

My son gets courted by colleges. I get courted by life insurance companies. One would suspect we are in different demographics.

Light

Light. It’s the primary reason I will never move north of my current home in Missouri, USA. I don’t think I could bear shorter winter days than I endure now. This year, December has been especially gloomy, with many overcast days and little sun. I’d pick up my son from school at 4:05, car headlights already on.

The longer I live this northern hemisphere existence the more I appreciate the inclusion of some celebration of light in most winter holiday traditions. I know folks who have a bonfire to mark the solstice. Then there are yule logs, the seven candles of Kwanzaa, menorahs, and good old Christmas lights. One of the things I like best is that other illumination needs to be dimmed in order to fully experience any of these. The presence of a light in the dark, rather than a bright overhead fixture to make it seem like daytime, helps me feel welcoming toward night.

Last year we bought LED lights for our Christmas tree and it’s been transformative. Because they’re not running up the electric bill (much) and they don’t get hot, I leave them on all night. Most mornings I’m up before the sun, assuming we’re even going to see it that day. This is dictated by schedule and not by choice. I’m a person who needs to ease into full wakefulness. The multi-colored fairy glow that greets me when I come down the stairs helps me transition less grumpily than I otherwise would. So far this season, we’ve avoided our traditional middle-of-the-night crashing of the greenery that usually comes with Christmas trees and cats. I have to wonder if keeping the lights on is keeping the felines at bay. Any excuse, really.

I had a “be still my heart” moment the other night when my two teens actually liked my suggestion to pile in the van and drive around town looking at Christmas lights. This was our ultimate destination:

But we took a lot of side streets to get there, turning down any block that looked well-decorated. I’m grateful to my fellow residents for their efforts. In the middle of the busyness of shopping and wrapping and holiday logistics, our little outing was the equivalent of a deep, relaxing breath.

The holiday lights will be coming down in another week or so, but it’s okay. The days are getting longer again. Until then, whatever holidays you celebrate or don’t, I send out thoughts of light and love to you. Yes, I mean you.