Telling the Kids. Oh yeah, and Charlie Sheen.

A few weeks back, I begin our typical Saturday to Boston from Uberbia. Zora awakes whenever the heck she likes, we eat vegetarian sausage, over-syruped, non-homemade waffles and drink carrot juice. She dresses in her best princess outfit over jeans, over a diaper, over whatever else she decides shed like to also wear, as they are all "must-haves" and she is a must-do kinda kid. We, as usual, are overdone.

I like to think we're genetically predisposed to being so.

We finally get out of the house, into the green car (which of our two, Zora refers to as her own) and drive to see Nana and Papa. My parents. I type this proudly as a little over two years ago, I certainly didn't think I'd refer to them so lovingly. But I do, and I am lovingly loving them.

But back to the today. So, Zora is happy. She hasn't seen Nana in days. She knows Nana will have her "interesting" concoction of a surprise for her: a bag of second-hand (if coffee and cigarette scented) surprises. Perhaps they'll be in a pillowcase; a reused lingerie bag; a gucci store canvas... it's always a surprise for us all. An endearing one. An expected one.

We pull up to the brownstone and Zora is giddy. Nana emerges from the doors; she isn't glowing. She isn't smiling. There is no bag.

Shit.

So, it began, Nana's first low day in 2 years since she's first laid eyes on her granddaughter, whom, in my mind I refer to as my mother's "cure". She has been on a high with love and affection for my little one, and most are: the kid is hilarious, engaging, and well, a bit overdone. She inspires the overdoneness in all. Which, is what she's done for my Mummi. Her Nana. Just perhaps not today.

Zora doesn't understand whats up, but she realizes its something. Now none of my bubbles are bubbling, not Zora, not her Nana.

So, I'm annoyed, and I don't navigate well annoyed. I try to get food, to coax them into a compliant happiness with music. I'm driving them from park to main street and realizing I'm getting miffed about lost gas. Which isn't the problem. It's just an off-day in all of our lives.

So I end it. I get Nana/Mummi some food, diabetic-friendly, no fructose, closer to the grain organic, which I'm not convinced anyone in her household will consume. I let everyone know the visit is going to need to come to its end. Politely. I love everyone, Drop Nana/Mummi off and drive a little bit faster than I should back home.

Zora, looking out the window in our now quiet car says: "Nana sick?"
Startled, I say "Yes baby"
Z: "Her head hurt?"
Me: "Yup. And maybe some other stuff does too."
Z: (long pause). "Oh. She need her doctor?"
"Perhaps sweetie she does"
Z: "Why?"

So, this is where it ends and begins. How to melt the reason why into something a 2.5 year old will get, will or won't share, will or won't ask me about constantly. And since she doesn't believe in Santa, does believe in princess magic, knows God makes everything including Mummah's purse and Noah's arc, I give her the best of a response I can offer:

"Baby, everyone is a little different. Nana too. Some days when Nana doesn't feel good; she sounds like she did today. Some days she doesn't. But we love her anyway. And we maybe love her more on these days. And she loves us all the time. But maybe something inside her doesn't feel good today."

In traffic. En route to our burbs, Zora's accepts this response, almost relieved by it. She falls asleep. We go home. I cry a little.
Ultimately though, its more than ok. We are as we are made.

I threw the Charlie Sheen piece in there for good measure.
But...Someone please help him now. He needs it. Perhaps now more than most times/most days.

And help doesn't come on a stage, it comes in a car, from a conversation with your kid, and a head-not towards your most humbled self.

Mine did.

-D

Bio-feedback (kinda)

So, I'm decently active on Twitter (as in constantly on), and a Twitter friend graced me with a wonderful compliment:

I haven't tweeted you in a while, but I've found NAMI and disability caretaker wisdom from you to be in invaluable...

She shared with me that her life is taking on a new path, as a caretaker for a loved one (a very loved loved one) with psychosis. I wish you well on your journey sis, and I'm really touched (seriously, I am) that you're on this path, and what I've said will in any way help.

I think (not to sound cliche) that if we all (each and every single one of us) realized our fragility, and the overwhelming community we could gain by saying: hey, I hear you, I am there. I am there too. A space would open up, just large enough for us to fit, not be judged, and be at home.

I look for that space every day. Most days I find it. Some days, its an awkward lonely run.

Recently, at a friends party, I mentioned (if its the kind of thing one mentions) as part of a preface to something that my mom has mental health issues. We both cringed, albeit for different reasons. I hate that its an issue, they were weirded (and likely saddened, and later alert) to a strange and startling acknowledgement: crazy.

I mean, it is what it is. I can't necessarily fake a former life, I was a kid, we ate hotdogs and went to the vineyard. We also scoured the bowels of the south end at night, dug in trash pails, gorged and purged, searching for things my mom never could communicate to me, things I somehow kinda always got. And that reality is (at least now) mine, acceptable, a part of my place of origin. Largely because it must be now. Largely because it no longer makes me cower, and in part, because I'm proud/humbled by it.

But ultimately, it makes for interesting conversation.

(or palpable silences).

Sometimes you need both.

I been blogging (in my head) for months.

So, like others I kinda like blogs. You know, I like the idea of my own, I love certain others, specifically my friend Claire's gluten free blog (kind of delish) and a woman I don't know personally has an awesome blog about relationships and being a single mama (she's decently fierce). But I like mine too. And I'm pretty close to mine, perhaps too close.

Everyday is an opportunity to share (blah, blah, blah) and I have, its likely we all have, in a variety of forums. Like, just yesterday I was blogging to my homegirl about how just this weekend: I was pulled over for the first time and could feel my legs quivering as the officer wrote me a warning. I think it best I didn't tell him I was in a hurry to purchase Easter clothes on sale. I was blogging when I got my finger stuck in a ring still attached to a box in said Easter clothes store, and while my pulsing index finger is sadly not a 7, it is now mobile and flexing proudly as I type this blog... for the first time, outside of my head.

So, where am I going with this: I've not blogged, as in printing it out, as in on my site for a while, and I'm on some level reaching out to the blog gods as if to say, quite biwinningly: FU and I'm back.

More soon. Oh, and yes, Mummi still makes hats.

Caregiving 2.0, or just plain nosey? Is web based monitoring just what the doctor ordered?

This is a decently curious article. Ultimately, yes, I'm thinking of Mummi, and others who, even if from afar, move day by day wondering how to care for, and support our loved ones who have mental or physical impairments keeping them from full self-sufficiency in an environment, that is less mindful than it should be, to physical and mental differences among people.

Check it out. ireminder sounds, well, expensive, but two, like a step in some direction for caregivers to our loved ones with mental illnesses. Perhaps.


Though I'm nearly certain Mummi wouldn't be thrilled to know that her weight was being calculated by sensors under the rug. Though (this time) when she would mention it, no one would wonder if she was experiencing... an "episode"...

Click on the link to follow: Monitoring Elderly Parents - NYTimes.com

Unlisted: A Story of Schizophrenia - A film by Delaney Ruston, MD - MyDOC Productions

My gut says this is going to be great: Unlisted: A Story of Schizophrenia - A film by Delaney Ruston, MD - MyDOC Productions

I haven't been THIS excited since SITC...

though that would be the likely end of any comparison.

Click. View. Share.

D

A lesson on (un)forgiveness.

So, lets say there was a girl. She was a nice girl. Tall.
She had bushy hair and a soft voice. She wasn’t pushy, perhaps silently headstrong.
She was loyal, and considered herself righteous, whatever that means.

Said girl loves green-tea ice-cream, pays attention to poetry, loves the local news (however exciting or boring that day) and lacks an ability to forget faces, low-laying points of stories, stated facts, and nutritional information.

I guess you could call her detail oriented, but that misses the point. And she’s not about missing points.

So, this detail oriented logician had her feelings hurt. Perhaps they were hurt on a regular basis. Perhaps it wasn’t intentional, but occurred none-the-less.

It’s very factual. They were hurt.

So, she processes the hurt. Acknowledges the ebb and flow of a hurtful comment on a Monday. Starts to heal on Tuesday. Regresses (a little) on Wednesday. Calls in sick on Thursday. And so on, until the hurt has become a freckle, a slightly noticed mar of skin. A beauty mark, perhaps. A near-distant ache.

She does this for years. It’s a process she’s very aware of. Sometimes she schedules time to cry. Sometimes the tears are impromptu.

I know this girl well. She’s 30, I’m 30. We both like green-tea ice-cream. Tofu and beef fried rice. We co-reside at the edge of blemished reason and plausible absurdity. We are, by all accounts: ridiculously flawed in our logic, and not, at the same time.

So, the concreteness of it is this:

I don’t believe there is a finite reservoir of strength/resilience or whatever internal gunk that you pull from when you are hurt and need to heal. I don’t believe that all can, or should, be forgiven when you have been injured. I don’t believe that it shouldn’t happen either. I don’t believe in blanket layered statements, though sometimes, the rhetoric does soothe and calm and nourish the soul that doesn’t want true answers. I don’t believe that saying what I just said about souls and true answers is a judgment call. I believe all of our souls want to be calmed.

But I know my soul. And I can forgive what I want to forgive. And I probably could forget, if I wanted to, or was made for it: but I don’t. And personally, which is all I feel like speaking from at this point in the day: that’s ok.

I don’t blame my mom for our reality, though I wish, if I one-day get married, she could speak about times we’ve never been gifted. She can’t. We won’t. We didn’t.

I don’t carry an anger, now, for the disappointments. For the worse-than-thats. And there was worse-than-thats.

I don’t have the same openness for everyone. I don’t have a full unforgiving heart. I want to say sorry, but I can’t. It wouldn’t be true. I am a bias machine sometimes.

I don’t believe it will align me with a life of sadness. I could be wrong. I tend to be at least a quarter of the time.

It’s very human. I forgive me for that. But I needn’t forgive everybody.
True story.

Rise. Remember. Rinse. Repeat.

So, this weekend, I was able to spend time curled up on the couch with my toddler. Don’t get me wrong, she’s no baby, so I use the T word cautiously with this 19 month old. She’s starting to string words together forming short sentences (poetic ones, if I’m allowed a proud Mummi moment) that densely pack meaning and hilarity.

This particular morning, we have no where to rush off to. I’ve again lost my phone in the crevices of a crumb-catching couch. Sesame Street is our only known destination, and she’s happily (if steathily) biting on her bubble wand between semi-private conversations between herself, Ernie and Emmo-wo (i.e. Elmo).

I figure I have a moment or two to snooze and do. I wake up every few moments to find her waving to Bert’s pidgeon pet, a corn-rowed little boy on television, or one of the Elmos with the squeaky-ish voice. Goodnight for a second or two longer. Goodnight for perhaps 5 minutes...

I wake up again and the house is quiet. Zora’s not in sight and I freeze. I look to all the household places most warned in parenting magazines: the Venetian cords are wound, the outlets still covered, I hear no angry cats, and the screens are all intact. I sit up with my heart no where near my center and find my daughter nestled quietly with her Big Bird doll near my ankles. She’s become an adept couch-climber.

So I realize I have another thing in common with my mom, though, this feeling doesn’t haunt me, as I can imagine it haunted her. I share some of the same experiences: watching Sesame Street, being close to Zora. But as the days pass and parenthood becomes less an act of changing diapers, and more a mechanism for instructing and guiding life; I realize how difficult it is and can be when we’re less able, less apt to control or better yet, understand what is happening internally.

I wasn’t, even though it was momentary, and I couldn’t breathe. How many moments did my mother, when I was a mirror image of my own daughter 28 years ago, how many moments left my mother breathless?

How many still do.

Having a child is tough, being a parent ain’t easy. Loving, at least, is a natural current and I’m so blessed to have these moments to process both, each, inchly.