CAUTION: Woman In Progress

 I feel as though the more I try to be normal the more life reminds me that I'm not "normal" anymore. I hype myself up to do things I used to do like participate in work things like group photos and pot-lucks and social things but leave the experience feeling drained and miserable. I feel myself shrinking into myself as soon as I'm around people and the more I try to pull myself out and be present the worse I feel and I feel as though the people around me are either oblivious to my even being there or just think I'm a wierdo. My friends have apparently adjusted to this new me, though, so I guess...yay? Ugh.  I got up this morning and put on a full face of makeup and straightened my hair and put on what I thought was a cute outfit for the big group photo we were taking for social media today and then when I got out there I immediately wanted to leave. And then the pic was posted and my eyes are closed and all the fat rolls I've gained over the past three years ...

 I wish I could say that I'm back and feeling great, but I'd be lying. This grief might be what finally takes me out. I just can't shake the sadness. Everything makes me want to cry. My prayers feel like useless words spoken into an empty sky. I feel useless and unloved. I'm lonely in a way even I don't understand. It isn't as though I just want to be around people. I have sisters and friends willing to fill space but it's not that kind of lonely. It's like an ache in a place I can't quite reach.  I miss my parents. I miss Libby. I miss my pre-2020 life. I long to go back to a time when I just had regular depression and not this truly hopeless, infinitely sad, yet also numb zombie-walk through life that I feel stuck in now. I want someone to hug me. Like a big, no holds barred bear hug like Daddy used to give me. I miss affection and someone who cared about how I felt. I miss spending time with people who just wanted to be with me and not because the...

 I'm well aware that life can always get worse. No matter how dark the days are, the darkness can always get darker. So I try not to dwell on all the crap things going on and move through life thankful for what is not bad. A count your blessings mentality, if you will. But some days, man...some days as I sit in my grief and try not to think about all I've lost or what and who is missing from my life my emotions get the better of me. This morning, not long after I got to work, I sat at my desk and cried because my coworker and I are being moved from our semi-private office to an open area with four-foot high cubicles and 30 other employees in August or September and I don't want to move. I like my semi-privacy. I like the quiet. I like that my desk is tucked into a corner and I don't really see anyone while I'm at my desk. The thought of being in a big open room with four-foot high cubicle walls fills me with anxiety. So I sat at my desk and cried about something tha...

 The Sunday after my birthday heralded the beginning of the end of life as I knew it. In the wee hours of the morning, Daddy showed up at my house needing to go back to the emergency room. He'd tried calling me multiple times, but my phone had been on silent because I was tired of getting texts from my friends. We'd had my "birthday party" Saturday and I had been trying to be fully present with my family and they the friend group text was blowing up with just idle chit chat. So I had silenced my phone and forgot to put the ringer back on before I went to bed. And trust, when I realized my dad had to come to my house in the middle of health crisis to get me up to take him to the ER, I was devastated. My dad has been my top priority for the past two years. So yeah I was devasted that I missed that.  But we made it the ER where they x-rayed his chest, pumped him full of lasix and decided to admit him to prepare him for stents in his heart later in the week. So Daddy and ...

Yesterday I had to take my dad to the emergency room. He's been having problems breathing properly for a couple of weeks now. Up until yesterday it mostly happened when he was trying to sleep. But yesterday morning he texted me while I was at work saying that he needed to do something. See a doctor. Something. So I called his cardiologist because he'd also been having heart palpitations and some shoulder pain. Cardiologist couldn't fit him in until next week so Daddy chose to go on to the ER. He's typically a very stoic man and sucks it up until he's nearly dead so for him to WANT to go to the ER without any hesitation scared the crap outta me.  I've been living with the fear of losing him for years. Between all his heart problems, his leukemia, etc. it's not an irrational fear. But ever since my mom passed the fear has heightened so you can imagine the state I was in yesterday. It didn't help, either, that it was around this time in 2020 that I was in t...

The hardest part of losing Libby,,,other than her being gone...is that this grief I am grieving alone. With Mama's death, I at least have my dad and sisters who understood and commiserate with me. We all grieve Mama differently, but we grieve together. With Libby I feel as though I'm grieving alone. They loved her, yes, but in that abstract way that we love people we don't spend a lot of time with. Which is understandable because she lived with me, not them. She was bonded to me and I to her. We spent 16 years together. I built my life around her. She was, for all intents and purposes, the center of my universe. I made a lot of my life decisions based on her needs. There are things I didn't do because of how it might affect her. She was--and still is--the first thing I think of when I wake up in the morning and the last thing I think about before I go to bed.  I see their eyes glaze over when I try to talk about missing her. I have felt their tiredness of my sadness so ...

 I've been so consumed by my grief over losing Mama that I haven't really talked about Libby here in a while. To be honest, I've been trying my hardest to live in denial for the past year and a half or so. She's been deaf since sometime in 2020, at least, but she and I had both adjusted to that fairly well. But then sometime in 2021 I noticed that she seemed to get disoriented sometimes. At first, I chalked it up to maybe her eyesight not being all that great but then it became obvious to me that not all of the disorientation was eyesight related. Her behavior really started to change. It was small things at first but over the past year she seemed to fade into a different dog. She was still her, just different. And it was so gradual at first that it took me a while to realize just how much she'd changed. And then she started struggling to get onto or off of the furniture, so I started helping her...which she hated but submitted to. Libby was nothing if not independe...

 So I had another dream about Mama the night after the grocery store dream. In this dream I walked into Mama and Daddy's house and she was at the kitchen table folding towels and I came in and was like, wait, you washed towels? Did y'all finally get a new washer and dryer? And she grinned and said, "Sure did! Come look!" and sure enough, there was a new laundry set in the little laundry nook and she had a load in the washing machine. I exclaimed how glad I was that she was back and made Daddy pull the trigger on getting a new set. She said something along the lines of "I wasn't going to let him put it off anymore." Meanwhile, Daddy was in the living room asleep in his chair and I remember thinking how relieved he must be that she was back and taking care of things again. Now, in real time, their washing machine went out a couple months before Mama passed and I've been doing their/his laundry ever since. Daddy keeps saying he's going to have to ge...

 I dreamed about Mama last night. It wasn't the first time but it felt so real. Not like most of the other dreams I've had. I don't really remember much about the other dreams but this one is still in my head so I want to get it "on paper" before I lose it, too. I ran into the SuperWalmart to pick up some groceries for my dad and myself after work and when I walked in, she was there. I remember being surprised--my dream self didn't remember/realize she was dead but remembered that she wasn't able to get around and I wondered to myself how she was there and looked so good. She already had a buggy and was in the produce section shopping. And she looked like her healthy self. When she saw me she told me to come on and we'd share a buggy. It was something we used to do back when we commuted to work together...anytime we had to stop at the store after work, we'd share a buggy if neither of us had a lot to get. So I ran over and we started walking over t...

Right now I feel like I'll just never see the daylight of pure joy again. I know it's been over a year. I know I need to shake loose and someday I will. Right now, though...everything just feels so overwhelming. Before Mama passed I never really gave death too much thought. I never really considered all that I have to lose. I'd lost grandpas and an uncle before, so it's not as though I didn't have a concept of loss. And believe me, I loved those grandpas and that uncle deeply but the loss wasn't such a dramatically monumental shift. They weren't part of my daily life. They didn't shape me to my core. Losing Mama and the constancy of her in my life ripped my heart to shreds. But more than that, as I've settled into the grief it's instilled this terrible fear in me. I literally live in fear of losing my dad. Of losing Libby. Of losing my sisters. Or my nieces.  Every time my dad doesn't answer a text right away or doesn't come to the door b...

So turns out, the test I took last Thursday was a false negative. On a whim I got retested the following day at a free drive-thru they were doing on campus. It, my friends, was positive. Something I found out while I was sitting in my dad's living room Saturday morning after I'd brought his groceries and breakfast. To say that I was a complete wreck is putting it mildly. My dad is fully vaxxed and boosted but I was terrified. What if his Leukemia meds affected the efficacy of the vaccine? What if he died? I'd be responsible. I spiraled  hard . He didn't seem concerned at all. He was more worried about me and making sure that I was okay. I never got sick, y'all. Just a little sinus drainage at the back of my throat and ONE DAY of a runnier than usual nose. That's why I trusted that negative test! If WBF (work best friend) hadn't wanted me to go with her to get tested at that drive-thru test cite I'd have never known I had it.  Daddy is fine, btw. He isola...

 So I went yesterday for my first ever Covid test. Don't worry, it was negative. This Omicron crap ain't playing, though. So many people around me have had in the past couple weeks it's amazing that I haven't caught it yet.  I got a little concerned, though, when my nose was a little runnier than usual and my throat was a little scratchy. It felt like sinus drainage but Omicron, they say, mimics common cold and sinus issues. I tried SO MANY places to find a convenient test and ended up at urgent care and waited for nearly five hours.  When the nurse finally took me to the back she had to do the whole "family history" routine because you apparently don't just get tested and go about your way. They give you a whole office visit with vitals, family history, the full nine yards. When she was going through the family  history questions she asked, "Does your mom have a history of ____" and I stared blankly at her for heartbeat, a little stunned. I didn...

We survived our first Christmas without Mama. It was both beautiful and devastating. And now a new year is here and while it's still so hard figuring out life right now, I'm seeing some light in the darkness.

Before Mama retired, we used to have lunch together in the staff lounge nearly every day. For some reason it always seemed to take her longer to heat her lunch up than it did me so, more often than not, I'd typically be seated at the table before her. She had this habit of kinda strumming her finger tips on the top of my head or along my back as she passed behind me. It used to kinda low key bug me because I'm not much of a "casual toucher", if that makes any sense. But just now, as I walked past an empty chair I strummed my fingertips along the top of it's back--no real thought to it, just a mindless little motion in a day filled with mindless nonsense. The impact of that one simple act was like a kick in the gut. Suddenly the memories of all those times Mama did that to me flooded through my mind and I can't help but WISH she would do that to me one more time. That she was HERE to do that no matter how much it once annoyed me.  I feel sometimes as though my ...

The week before my mom passed away, my dad and I had ordered him a utility vehicle. Mama had been adamant that she wanted him to have one because of the deterioration of his knees. Typical of her that she was grappling with her own pain and illness and she was worried about him. So we ordered him one and it came in last week. As excited as  he was to get it, there's a tinge of sadness around it, too, that she didn't live to see him get it. She knew he had it ordered, though, so I suppose that comforted her enough. I've never really driven any sort of ATV's or UTV's. That was my middle sister's thing to do with Daddy when we were growing up. But Daddy wanted me to learn how to drive it in case he needed me to. So we took it out yesterday and I drove it through the hunting trails and while it wasn't nearly as scary as I had thought, it was very different from driving a car. The gas pedal takes some finessing and there's no power steering. In the course of ...

Mama passed peacefully at home, Friday, March 12, 2021 and we laid her to rest yesterday, Sunday, March 14, 2021. I will write more later.  Thank you for any and all prayers lifted up for her over the past year. 

Back in the 80's, kindergarten in my state wasn't mandatory. Instead, an assessment test was done to determine if kindergarten was necessary. If it wasn't, you could choose whether or not to send your kid to kindergarten. From what I recall of the test, it consisted of drawing a stick figure, reciting the alphabet, and counting to a certain number--I don't remember how high--all of which I could do. There may have been more to it that has slipped my memory over the years but whatever else was assessed, it was deemed unnecessary for me to attend kindergarten--or as they told my mom, I was too smart or Kindergarten. My mom chose to keep me at home.  My middle sister had started first grade that year which meant I had an entire year at home with my mom all to myself. Despite whatever of our relationship has been relayed here over the years, I was/am, indeed, a mama's baby. I loved being near my mother, often not wanting her out of my sight. Looking back, I'm pretty...

 I’m here sitting beside a hospital bed for the umpteenth time since March and I am sad. My mother, who I have had some strange ups and downs with over the years but who I love with all my heart, is lying in that bed waiting to have fluid drained from her abdomen for the fourth time since October.  She kicked the stomach cancer and almost immediately got laid flat by a tumor in her lower abdomen. She’s had three rounds of some powerful chemotherapy treatments and is wasting away before my very eyes. She is down to a skeletal 94lbs and is unsteady on her feet enough that she requires assistance whenever she gets up. When I look at her, I scarcely recognize her. She lies in her bed most of the time and stares at her deceased mother’s photo, wishing to be with her. She has random days of feeling well enough to sit in her recliner but those days are few and far between.  The chemo wipes her out for at least three days after and just as she’s getting over that, the fluid build...

So I’ve been beating myself up for my chocolate consumption the past couple of days, especially since I’d vowed  to go on a sugar break this week because my belly looks so bloated but then I made French toast for supper tonight and put chocolate sauce on it instead of syrup and after I ate it I was moaning about how bad my back hurt and I hate my life and how I’m going to gain all my weight back and then it hit me.  The last time I ate all the chocolate things and battled a back ache and bloating (and moaning)...I quickly checked my calendar and you (probably) guessed it! 28 days. Ugh.  Sometimes I really hate being a woman. 

So. I think I left off back in May with "The university will have news soon of phasing us back into working on campus." And, well, as of right now, I have been and will continue to work from home until at least August 2. There is a small chance that if I can ever get a particular medical form back from Mama's oncologist, I may be able to telework through the fall semester. Unfortunately, the university keeps changing it's thoughts on teleworking. At first they were like, "anyone who can telework should telework" then it was, well, fill out these forms and if your unit and HR approve it, you can telework. Now it's "you need a medical assessment form before it can be approved." Next week they may do away with it all together. Who knows! Whatever happens, though, I am forever thankful that I work for a university that has taken care of their employees. Any confusion is, I'm sure, the result of none of us knowing what to do during a world-wid...