Big Girl Pants
E&G | Issue 188
The groans and sighs of the oxygen machine are back for another visit, this time for a little case of viral pneumonia for Mom. In true tanklike fashion, she got herself discharged within 26 hours and is back in business so to speak. Funny how quickly we shift here from peace to chaos to what the hell is next. I need to buy new underwear that’s one thing that is next.
With kids and I starting school soon, I am persisting in a state of total denial which is never good for anyone, especially me. The reality is, it’s the end of August, I saw that first tree starting to shift colors up in New Hampshire last week, and ohmygod now I feel like I’m about to have diarrhea. Let me put that anxiety on the back burner for today as it’s hard to think about that with an oxygen machine competing with the Food Network for airtime here. So very loud.
Viral pneumonia seemed to come out of the blue although Mom did admit to “fussing with something” for a while though none of us were aware, including me. As the primary caregiver to her husband, she plays a pivotal role here and her absence is not just alarming to her children, it is downright scary for Dad. I stuffed her bed with pillows so that if Dad woke up during the night, he’d think she was right next to him. It made me sad and laugh at the same time. As Mom said, she’s like that Mom from Psycho. If you don’t get the reference, look it up. Her one liners are classic. I guess that makes me Norman? Oh god, please help me.
As we face another little hiccup in this delicate ecosystem we have here, I am confronting not just the reality of going back to school but also the reality of not knowing how to best handle the plate in front of me. Living here is the very thing that saved me when all the wheels came off my life. Are things perfect yet? Nope. But it has been three years since hell broke loose and I’m better; I’ll take better over worse any day. Now I just have to figure out how to keep moving in that direction and how to keep my cool in these moments; we’ll call that a work in progress.
I’m a little drained today with the added torture of having whiplash from jumping off a rock into the Saco River a half dozen times (as Meg said “the old grey mare ain’t what she used to be”). I was emotional this morning and lost my cool. I owned that as much I could and now I am forcing myself into a moment of quiet reflection. Coming down, I have to congratulate myself on a crisis well-handled. I will do my very best to not take a nosedive into freak out land like I sometimes do. The kids came home, Maire asked to go school shopping, Isaac is creating a morphed Nerf gun in Grampy’s workshop, and J.D. has his athletic meeting tonight because tryouts for high school soccer are tomorrow (yes, we now have a high schooler here). Reality can suck sometimes but in a way it’s just the thing needed to push you back into the lane you know and manage best. I can’t predict the future, but I’m going to place as much hope as I can into my belief that things will get better and better albeit with a lot of shitty things that will inevitably arise. I was built for this ecosystem I am part of—this is where my big girl panties are and the new ones I’m going to buy will go.