Meaningless Chatter

This post is going to be about Shimmer and Shine underwear, balls of yarn, getting booed, grief, hormonal teenaged daughters and skirting the responsibilities of life, but not necessarily in that order.  I've promised this post to myself for a long time but the timing had not seemed right until this morning.  I had to let things percolate in my mind for the past several weeks and now the whistle is blowing and it's time to release the steam.  

A quick refresher; my cousin, Lara, died unexpectedly on August 30th, 2017 at the age of 48 , one day before her 49th birthday.  I've been in this anesthetic bubble ever since, impervious to thoughts or emotions not related to the incomprehensibility that she no longer walks on this planet.  Nothing penetrates my bubble and nothing escapes my bubble.  For the time being it has been safe, warm and dry.  It might not be the best thing for those around me because access is restricted.  No one is allowed inside my bubble.  No one.  When my kids are around, the membrane becomes slightly permeable but otherwise, it is a barrier and a shield.  

As one might expect, it's difficult to remain sheltered and to simultaneously respond to the responsibilities of adult living.  Mostly, I've shut down and I can perform the routine stuff very mechanically because it's been pre-programmed in my brain.  I don't have to think about it.  This grief stuff requires all of your mental capacity so there isn't room for anything other than processing the fact that your person is gone and remembering to brush your teeth.  Ironically, I've cried very little.  I mean, I have cried, but it's so disproportionate to the amount of love and devotion I felt/feel for my cousin.  It makes me wonder if I'm human or a droid.  

I know that it is tiresome to hear about sadness or grief or whatever you want to call it.  I'm kind of bored of it.  I keep thinking that one day I'm going to wake up and feel like I felt on all the days prior to August 30th, 2017.  And some days, mostly some half-days or hours, I temporarily forget that my world no longer contains Lara and I can make dinner or go to work or interact with my children.  If I could choose to completely ignore life's demands, I'd do menial tasks that are repetitive and require no cognitive abilities, like folding clothes or tidying the house.  Or I'd jog.  I started jogging right after Lara died.  My friend and I made a pact and started an 8 week walk to run program.  We never run together and we don't even talk or text or hang out that much, but we made this commitment and we're doing it.  And I feel alive when I am running and immediately afterwards.  She and I are the same.  We both like to hibernate, for different reasons, but we get it and I love her for that.  No expectations. Complete understanding. 

About 2-3 weeks ago I spent an entire week unraveling a mass of yarn that had been living at the bottom of my closet for the past decade.  The yarn had been purchased in 2007 while I was going through breast cancer treatment and I had taken up knitting.  Several lucky souls were recipients of my scarves that year.  I still have about 2 dozen balls of yarn and I will never part from this yarn because I intend to finish those scarves.  

Timeline of ludicrous tasks performed by Michelle since Lara's death

August 30th, 2017 - Lara dies

August 30th - September 5th, 2017 - systematically go through every photo album, box of photos and electronic file of photos.  I recreated our entire 49 years of existence together in a span of 6 days via photo.  During these 6 days I did nothing else.  Obsession requires commitment.  

September 5th - September 8th, 2017 - funeral festivities

September 8th - current - exist

The unraveling of yarn constitutes existing.  Five or six balls of fuzzy yarn had intertwined.  Every night I sat on the sofa and worked on my task.  I don't remember if my kids had started school or not.  Days prior to her death, Houston experienced flooding of biblical proportions and vast swaths of our city lay under water.  Our home was spared, but all around us were friends whose entire lives were in soggy piles of debris in their front yards; photo albums mixed with sheetrock mixed with gramma's Queen Anne chairs mixed with wooden planks from the hard wood floors.  Instead of helping with relief efforts, I picked apart an endless maze of string.  My kids' schools pushed back their start dates by 2 weeks. During that time, I didn't know where they were or what they ate or when they went to sleep because I was either systematically going through hundreds of thousands of photos, at a funeral or pulling apart twine.  One Friday night, after I had freed about 2 balls of yarn, I realized I had no idea  the whereabouts of my 13 year old daughter.  So, I did what every good mother would do, I made her 16 year old brother track her down.  She and a friend were watching a scary movie at a boy's house with his friend.  My son knocked on the door, introduced himself to the parents, retrieved his sister and brought her home.  In the recesses of my mind I knew that it was my job but I didn't care.  I also knew that my 13 year old daughter shouldn't be at the home of some random boy at 10:30 on a Friday night, but it was too much.  I put my money on the fact that she's a good kid and figured I could retro-actively parent at some undisclosed time in the future.  I had made my nieces watch the movie Thirteen when they were 8 and 12 years old to scare them into lives of chastity and my own 13 year old was being parented by her 16 year old brother.  By the way, I finished unraveling that massive, twisted ball of yarn and I never even had to use a pair of scissors.  Once the yarn was unraveled, something unlocked in my brain and I could move forward, but only a few millimeters.  This is a slow and incremental process.  

Teenagers want freedom.  By default, I had been allowing my kid to have boundless freedom and, after the fact, I was questioning her judgement; judgement I should have put boundaries on in the first place.  My same friend who has gotten me off my ass and gotten me running gave me this wise advice: "Talk to her.  Tell her you're sorry.  Tell her you've been in a fog (head's been up my ass).  Tell her you trust her but these are the guidelines."  DAMN!  She is so wise.  It worked.  There has been some resistance and push back but, as it turns out, communicating is helpful.  She doesn't like boundaries any more than I like my husband suggesting I shouldn't eat a whole gallon of ice cream, but we both know it's right.  Her intermittent resentment and the back and forth between us has been a good thing and this morning we bonded over trimming the mini-schnauzer's eyebrows and beard.  He was a reluctant victim of our beauty salon as we roared with laughter.  It's far from over; the bartering and bargaining and strife inherent in raising a teenager, but we've reached a Waterloo.  At least for the time being.  

Last week I took a 2 day course on Advanced Trauma Life Support.  I'm not a surgeon, have never worked in the trauma areas of our ER, never taken the course previously, but now it's a requirement to continue to work in the ER even if I'm only in the triage and urgent care areas.  Generally studying a subject will lend to passing tests of the subject material.  I never opened the book prior to or during the 2 day course and miraculously, I failed the written test.  The test had 40 multiple choice answers and, as I'm a remarkably seasoned and successful test-taker, I figured I could wing it and I'd do just fine.  When your mind has a Bunsen burner motoring it, you're not working at full throttle and you lack the capacity to "wing it".  I failed the f*** out of that test.  As we reviewed the answers I realized that my mind was no where near those questions.  I missed some really stupid and obvious things and I'm not even sure I read the questions half of the time.  In my 35 + years of standardized testing (as a medical professional I've taken more standardized tests than poops) I've NEVER failed a multiple choice test.  I'm probably in the top 10 percent of those in whom bubbling-in answers correctly is part of their skill set.  I was mildly humiliated.  Rather than a warm handshake and look in the eye and hardy, "congratulations, you passed the test", I received a glance of shame, had to stay after class and was scorned for questions answered incorrectly.  "You didn't know the answer to that one?  Come on!  That was easy."  No.  No sir, it was not easy.  It was anything but easy.  A) because I didn't study and B) because my mind has ceased to function since August 30th, 2017.  Back to the drawing board as I read the book, take practice tests and retake the test next week.  Humble pie, self-awareness and forgiving myself.  

Yesterday as my 15 year old middle kid and I walked up to our front door, I noticed a package from Amazon and a gift bag stuffed full of Halloween candy and decorations.  My heart sank.  "Mother-f*cker!  Dammit Jake we've been booed!" Of all the rotten luck I thought to myself.  Getting booed is the dollar store equivalent of getting chain mail.  Pinterest exists for people to either judge others or to be judged.  I'm in the latter category.  "Booing" occurs around Halloween when someone anonymously drops a bag of candy and other crap on your doorstep and then you have to turn around and do it to someone else.  It's cute when your kids are in second grade, not when they are in 8th, 10th and 11th grade. I was PISSED!  How inconsiderate of someone to boo my family when I'm in mourning.  Jake thought my response was hilariously over the top but he did not fail to immediately claim the candy corn as his own.  I picked up the loathsome bag of treats and threw it on the kitchen counter and texted my friends an accusatory text: "Did you boo me?"  Denials from everyone.  I looked at the package and the address was similar to ours, but one number off.  The people at the address on the package had 2 young kids.  Ohhhhhh....the gift bag had been meant for their house.  They were the intended recipients of the booing, not us.  That made more sense.  No one wants to boo us.  I pried the bag of candy corn out of Jake's hands and took the package and the bag of treats down the street.  I'm especially

glad it wasn't for us because someone had taken a lot of time to make the bag look nice and had printed cute stuff to label the bag and I think I was more mad about the expectation that had been placed on me to turn around and have a Pinterest-ready Boo bag than the bag itself.  I couldn't have just put shit in a Walgreen's bag and left it on a door step and that made me mad as hell. 

I realize this whole post has been stream of consciousness.  That's what happens when your mind has been frozen in time.  It starts to thaw out and random thoughts pop up like microwaveable popcorn.  There is no order to it.  This morning I was FaceTiming my friend.  She has 3 small kids and her middle kid just became potty trained.  She gave him the option of underwear with Paw Patrol characters or Shimmer and Shine characters.  He chose the latter.  She questioned whether this was the correct thing to do?  Allow her 2 year old kid to wear Shimmer and Shine underwear.  Initially I thought she shouldn't have given him the choice, but then I realized she was allowing her kid the opportunity to make decisions and demonstrating that she supports his choices.  Shimmer and Shine underwear at age 2 has no impact on your future sexuality or gender identity but your mom letting you make that decision has amazing impact on your confidence.  I'm proud of her.  She's my role model.  She'd 14 years younger than me but oh-so-wise.  

I think I touched on all the topics I had wanted to discuss.  There will be more.  The sadness and grief will wax and wane.  Some days there will be bigger glimpses than other days.  I don't know if I will ever feel the same way I did before August 30th, 2017 but I am open to modifications.  I think I'm less tolerant.  Saying it makes it sound bad.  But maybe I'm less tolerant to requests of my time that I feel are pointless.  I've spent 49 years of my life making sure everyone feels good about the choices I make and now I'm not sure I care.  It sounds like I'm giving up but I'm not.  I'm just becoming choosier.  I'm sure there will be some carnage in my wake but I'm doing my best.  I had to drop a writing class because I couldn't fake it through the class.  Every time someone spoke, all I heard was meaningless chatter and I became more and more irritated.  

That is all for today.