Barnmaven

Where does it go?

I listened to Ann Tyler talk about her new book on NPR this morning.  Some of the plot is the result of the emotional processing she has done since losing her husband fifteen years ago. 

Tyler recalled her feelings around the loss, saying, "The thought that came to me was: 'I just don't understand. Where did he go?' He was this exuberant man who was a real enjoyer. And that's just gone without a trace. It's just not possible."

I considered my own exuberant SG, and thought about how quiet and how much more bland life is when he is not here. I tried to imagine how it might feel if he were never going to be here again and failed.  Put in the context of my brother's death, though, I think I understand.

I think love is a feeling but it is also a physical thing,  a set of behaviors and actions. Its both organic and contrived, innate and created.  I consider the love that I feel for my children, for my parents and other family members.  It is embedded in my bones, that love.  I've loved my parents and trusted them for my whole life.  The love I have for them is one of the cornerstones in the foundation of everything I've ever done and everyone I've ever been.  Loving my children came as naturally as breathing.  And when I think of them, shape their names in my mouth and picture their precious faces in my mind, a bubble of feeling that is too large to fit inside me wells up inside.  That feeling is love and joy and pain and worry and warmth.  Its the sum of all we've experienced together, all I hope and dream, all I fear.

Love seems a complicated tangle of physical sensation, emotional turbulence, concrete action and wishful dreams.  But what do you do with love when the person you love is gone? 

SG isn't here, but he's still here.  So I love him but I try not to think about how much I love him because it makes his everyday absence too uncomfortable.  I try not to think about how much I miss his touch and his physical energy.  I'm filled with love and pain, all tangled up and constantly needing to have the ends sorted out and tied up into a manageable knot.  That pain, though, is somewhat tolerable because the separation is finite.  He is coming home eventually, he's not gone forever. 

For the brother I've lost, though, what do I do with that love?  Its still there, full of hope and fear and memories.  I still had things to say, hugs to give.  I ache for wanting to hear the sound of his voice.  The enormity of what sits bottled up inside of me begging to be expressed, but without the human target of that expression, creates a feeling of pressure in my chest that is actually physically painful.  What do you do with all of that love you have for someone when they will never be here again to receive it?

Its not just the spirit of my brother that I loved, but the physical reality of him: His face, his eyes and smile, his unique nose and the shape of his hands; the voice that I could recognize instantly over the phone line that evoked the image of his face in my mind.    The human expression of all that he was shaped his physical presence and created the ability for us to relate to one another, to bond as family over meals and stories and shared experience.  The love my brother and I had for one another was reciprocal, had shape and meaning, helped to create the person that I am today.

And now he is gone, and the love we had for one another, what happens to that?  I don't know where to put it, I don't know how to properly express it.   What does it mean to the concept of "relationship" when one of the people in the relationship is gone to a place that we cannot go and cannot yet understand?

I see my children in one of those rare moments when they put their childhood fighting aside and I realize just how very close they are, and try to imagine one of them without the other and my heart crumbles into dust.

I have so many questions and so many feelings.  As yet I lack the understanding that I suppose will only come with time.  Just as love has a shape and a physical sensation, so I now understand, does bereavement.

Am I supposed to be over it already?  I hope not, because if grief is finite, I'm doing it wrong.  If grief is uncomplicated, I'm failing miserably.  My grief has a slippery volume knob, it won't settle at any one point on the dial.  Sometimes I can't hear it, and then some event or memory jostles the knob and it becomes so loud I can't bear to listen to it.  It goes quiet now for days at a time.  I sometimes even manage to forget about it to the point of no longer remembering that he's gone.  And I think of some future event and I imagine everyone who will be there, naturally including him...and the air is sucked out of my lungs as I realize thatwill never again be my reality.  Our reality.

 

 

Its better if you do it quickly

I've added another guest to the pasture this week, a mare that was injured after getting her hind legs torn up in barbed wire.  The people who were boarding her didn't even notice she was injured for several days, so she was in some need of doctoring and pain management.  Fortunately her injuries are not going to leave her permanently lame.

Part of doctoring her for the moment involves hosing down her legs until the scabs are softened and then scrubbing them off with a bristle brush so that I can get antibacterial agents into the wounds themselves.  The first time we treated her there were some pretty big scabs that had to come off.  Just scrubbing wasn't working and I had to grab them and pull them off.

Its one thing to grab your kid and pull off a bandage or a scab. You know they're going to yelp, you know its going to hurt, but you have to do it fast and all at once.  And your child is (hopefully) smaller than you are and so you're not taking your life in your hands.

Its another thing entirely to put yourself within striking distance of a 1200 pound animal and do something that you absolutely know is going to hurt like hell. 

I've been fortunate in my years not to have many injured horses that needed doctoring.  Only twice have I ever dealt with having a horse stitched up.  Both of those times I just held my horse and let the vet do their job, then made sure I kept the stitches clean until they could come out.  My friend Michelle, on the other hand, has dealt with a sizable herd for a long time and is no stranger to doctoring horses.  She says that its the uncanniest thing sometimes, even horses you don't think will be able to tolerate what you need to do will actually be very quiet and patient when you have to do something that hurts.  Perhaps they realize that they need your help to get better, and so they stand still and let you work.

For whatever reason, this lovely mare allowed me to grab hold and yank some fairly large scabs from her hocks without kicking, rearing, biting or bolting.  She was an angel, and has been every day since as I clean and reopen her scabs and treat them with Betadine and a gel spray. 

I guess she knows the truth - the only way to take off a scab is to stand still and yank it all right at once. 

When SG and I got married its not like I was unaware of the fact that his current career means he is gone for weeks at a time.  I'm still getting used to it, though.  I liked having him home, having two of us doing the heavy lifting together.  Enjoying each other's company, having him there to come home to at night, to kiss goodbye in the mornings.  With him gone life seems emptier, less meaningful.  Far too stressful.  The part of me that is logical acknowledges fully the need for paying work in a down economy.  My inner drama queen, however, is less inclined to care about logic.  She's far more concerned with her creature comforts.  She wants her man home, and NOW.  She puts up such a fuss and my inner Spockette has found herself drowned out by the brouhaha.

A couple of weeks ago, there was a murmur of further jobs on the road.  Maybe months worth.  My inner drama queen blew up like a unicorn full of glitter with a hand grenade shoved up its ass. Then she stuck her fingers in her ears.

Its been a merry spectacle, let me tell you.  Tears, emotionally charged text messages.  Hangups.  And really, nothing had been decided yet. 

Fortunately, my inner Spockette and I tag-teamed her, stuffed a handkerchief in her mouth, duct taped it in place and shuttled her off to the back of the attic for the time being.   When SG called, inner Spockette and I had it all under control.  He ripped the scab off - he will be going directly to North Carolina from Arizon with no time for a visit home, and he will be gone until the end of May.  Inner drama queen made a barely recognizable muffled yelp and hasn't been heard from for a couple of days.

If you try to pull the scab off a little bit at a time it takes forever.  Every little tug hurts just as bad as the one before it and the one after it.  All you have accomplished in the end is to make your pain last longer.    Even horses know this.  Hopefully my inner drama queen has figured it out as well.

 

For shame

Short post tonight.  The last few days I've had that periodic sense of wanting to crawl into a hole and pull it in behind me.  Everything is overwhelming.  I miss my husband.  I miss my kids after they drive off with their dad at night because its not my week.  I miss the sense of normalcy and calm that pervaded the house just a month ago when SG was home and even on downright crappy and stressful days we could at least just hold hands and hug one another, laugh at the crazy that is our life together and find countless ways to make it all bearable.

Still, there are things to laugh at and find at least momentary relief from my quivering psyche.

Like this:

Poor T-Bone.  Somehow he ripped a hole in his groin about the size of a fifty-cent piece.  I could see viscera and muscle...and I knew he needed stitches.  Which meant an overnight at the vet and anaesthesia, and $260 later (at least that includes antibiotics!) he's on the mend. 

I'm pretty sure if I duct tape him to the roof I can improve our satellite reception.

 

So sensitive

I think of the bloggers I follow as friends.  Some of them know that, and perhaps feel the same way about me.  Some don't.  I feel they are friends because I have shared in their lives through the medium of their words and in them I have recognized myself. 

But sometimes I don't understand their sensitivity to the slightest insult. 

Perhaps my experience as a blogger doesn't lend to understanding.  It helps to have a small audience.

It helps to not be (s0) sensitive (anymore, after years of therapy and, one must say, getting old).

It helps that in almost five years of blogging I have probably only had one truly negative comment on this blog and one or two on posts elsewhere.

Even so.  I've had negative comments in other places that mattered way more than this space.  At work.  From friends or in organizations I belong to.  I'm no stranger to hearing really remarkable things being said about me - some true, some not.  Some nice, some ugly.  Whatever.

I don't care if you want to criticize me.  It's fine.  Go ahead.  I can take it.  If I weren't prepared to be disagreed with I wouldn't be putting my words on the internet for the world to view.  Offering opinion invites scrutiny.  Invites differing opinions.  Invites others to be amused, outraged, insulted, offended, enraged. (With any luck, not so much of the enraged. One hopes.)

Rarely am I critical of other bloggers, at least publicly.  I tend to be a supportive person, and I think that life's challenges for other people are for them to work out.  I think most people know what they really need to do to solve their problems, and the best way I know to help them is to just let them know I care.  I might have my own opinions about why they're in the pickle they're in, but personally I don't know that its helpful to share those opinions.  Besides, unless I know the person intimately, there are details of their particular situation that are invisible and unknowable to me.  That's the point where sharing an uninformed opinion might just make me an asshole. 

But just because someone's being an asshole doesn't make them a troll.

Very rarely will I leave a negative comment on another's personal blog, with the notable exception of Penelope Trunk, who absolutely makes me want to weep in frustration.  Other than that, mostly I believe I'm benign.  But I believe very firmly in the value of the critic. 

Insulting for the sake of insult is childish.  Taking umbrage or offering a different opinion is something different.  Perhaps others don't dialogue the way one would like them to, always, but the opinion that is offered is nonetheless often quite legitimate. 

 My sincerest advice to any blogger ( or friend on facebook or person on Twitter or coworker or RL person I love) is to let the voices of the angry horde blow by you like so much dust in the wind.  Listen to your own heart.  Do what you think is right.  It might not be right for me, it might be a bad choice that you make, but you have the right to make it and you have the right to ignore all advice to the contrary.  This is, though, only a first step.  Learning to put your life out there for the world to comment on means starting at step one:  Let it go. 

You could stay there forever at step one, learning to let what others think mean just what it does.  Staying at the first step is an option, certainly.  There's another place to grow, though, if you're up to it.  If you are secure enough to handle a little criticism, hear what is offered.  Receive it from a different place than one of defensiveness.  Listen to criticism with ears that are not  emotionally engaged.  Sometimes the simple act of doing this will grant you the ability to garner insight out of what you might have one time dismissed.  You don't have to take everything to heart, you don't have to take anything to heart. But don't be afraid to sift through it.  Dismiss what doesn't resonate, accept what might be worth digging in to a little deeper.  Do it without apology, without anger, without judgment.  Without EGO.

I appreciate the sense of community that being online offers.  I have a deep and abiding sense of gratitude to so many bloggers who have made me laugh, made me cry, made me think, made me mad.  Every interaction I've had has helped me to know myself better, helped me to grow.

But I think many times some of us fail to make the distinction between those that are critical of us and those that only wish to make us be quiet or be hurtful.  I think it is too easy to lump all negative commentary into one big cooking pot and label it "troll soup."

Yes, there are those that simply leave nasty words because for whatever reason at the time they wrote them, they felt joy in being destructive.  So what?  Unless they're threatening you bodily harm, their words mean nothing.  Hell, when I wrote the piece a couple of years ago about my daughter punching a boy  in the junk, the secondary syndication of that post on a nationally read platform actually had one commenter suggesting readers look me up via my BlogHer profile and pay me a visit.  (You bet, pal, I welcome you into my yard, so long as you're fine with really big dogs and if you don't mind the police officer who lives across the street may wish to handcuff you if you get out of hand.)  That kind of crap is out of line.  But whatever.  Someone calling me a jerk or a bitch or saying I'm a terrible parent or a terrible human being?  Those are just words.  Those words don't carry any more power than I lend them.  The ability to cope with the virulence of others, the responsibility to cope with the opinions of others , lies not with others.  It belongs to me.

Those who put their words in the court of public opinion have known this truth for as long as the written word has existed.  People will never as a whole respond to my words in the manner I hope they will.  I can deal with that.

I don't have to be angry with people because their opinions of me or my writing aren't what I hoped they would be.  Neither do you. 

Burning Down the House

Its tempting.

SG's been gone about 12 days.  Really, the house is only about half as bad as I expected it to be by now.  It was actually clean this weekend, but then the shitstorm that is the work week landed on top of us.  SG called last night right around 6 pm, at which point I'd been home about a half an hour.

"Hey babe, what's up?"

I can only laugh. 

"Homework making dinnner feeding animals emptying dishwasher trying to find a clean fork I'll call you later bye!"

What would make things really easy would be if we could have a shred of consistency.  I blame myself for this, of course.  I'm the reason the behavior charts failed, I'm the reason the sticker reward system failed, I'm the reason why the Family Resolution of One Family One Dinner fails.  I can do something the same way two, maybe three times, but then I forget or I get bored and the bottom falls out of the boat.  So they learn from my example. 

One day they fight the meds, hate their socks and fight like cats and dogs.  The next they turn into these completely compliant little angels who cuddle together on the couch while they watch cartoons.  The latter days, of course, are the days that prevent me from locking up their little heathen arses in chains in the basement.  Its hard to duct tape them to the ceiling when they're looking so innocent and adorable.

This weekend the little guy scraped his ankle while they were playing.  I heard him howling, and the next thing I know I hear his sister yelling, "Mommy!  Mommy!  _______ hurt himself and its REALLY REALLY BAD!"  Its BLEEDING!"  I set down the thing I'm doing in the barn and I peek around the door.  She's giving her howling brother a piggyback ride.  She stops and he throws himself to the ground, painting a picture of a child on the verge of bleeding to death. 

"Where does it hurt?"

"My foooooooooot!  Look!"

I see a shallow scratch, about two inches long.  In the few places where the skin has been broken, tiny drops of blood have welled up and already begun the business of clotting.

"This?" I ask, pointing.

"YEEESSSS!!!  IT HURTS!!!!"

His sister immediately offers to get him a bandaid. 

"I'm not sure it really needs...." I start to say.  "YES IT DOES!  IT NEEDS A BANDAID!  It HUUURTS!"

She takes off for the house, and returns a few moments later, bandaid in hand.  I turn back to my task and hide a smile as she opens the paper wrapper and applies the strip to his leg.  His sobs subside.  Surreptitiously I glance over at her patchwork.  The bandaid is about five inches away from the actual scratch.

But he's happy, so I suppose that's all that really matters.

That night, neither one of them wants to go to sleep.  I hear them whispering to each other across the hallway that separates their rooms.  "Go to sleep or else!" I yell at them.  Secretly, though, I'm smiling.  My heart is so full of joy for the love that my children have for one another.  Its like a magic salve that cures every bad thing that ever went wrong in the whole history of everything.

Until the next day, of course, when the brokered peace treaty has been violated and the siblings resume their long war over territory. 

It was nice while it lasted.

Being Girly

Sometimes I think I write too much about dealing with my kids and their issues.  This morning, for instance, could have provoked yet another thousand word essay on the joys of trying to get out of the house on time and why it never ever happens and how I'll never qualify as Mother of the Year because I keep losing my temper and my son hates me because he doesn't get TV, DS or laptop time tonight.  But...his medicine got in him.  So I assume his teacher will have a better day than my morning was.  But this isn't about that.

This post is about being a girly girl.  Or being not a girly girl.  Or about being both all at the same time, and reconciling the picture of who I am in my mind with the reality of me.

With all due respect - and apologies - to the ultra-feminine among us:  I have never felt I was one of you.  I was the girl who wanted to get the most offensive rebounds in the basketball game, not cheer the team on from the sidelines wearing a tight sweater and a skimpy skirt.  I was the girl who collected snakes and dug clams and spent most of her weekends on or around her horse and who only wore dresses if threatened with death or disinheritance. 

It wasn't that I didn't want to be pretty.  I did want to be pretty, oh so very much.  But I knew that I wasn't.   I knew, deep inside of me, that I was never going to earn peer acceptance for being cute or petite or having a feminine voice or a sweet laugh.  I could only be good at certain things, and those weren't necessarily the things that purchase a pass into the world of beautiful girls.  And I liked the things I was good at, even if they weren't considered truly feminine pursuits. 

I sailed along through high school and college mostly feeling like Marmaduke trapped in a china shop.  Eventually, finally, I started figuring out that I had assets that went beyond being able to beat the average guy in an arm wrestling match, and more importantly, learned to enjoy making the most of them.  I would guess its taken me about twenty years altogether to become more at ease with the woman inside me who wants to look pretty.  I finally had to understand that pretty and smart don't have to be mutually exclusive.  I finally get it, that I can change the oil in my car by myself and that doesn't disaqualify me from putting on a pretty dress and some makeup and a dab of perfume on my wrists and being attractive in a more conventional way. 

I've learned that there is NOTHING WRONG with wanting to look attractive.  And the most interesting thing about it all is that I reached a point in my life where I don't do it for anyone but myself.  I don't get dressed up to impress a man, I get dressed up because I want to.  And I dress down because I want to.  Dressing down doesn't make me a dirty mom.  Its just one aspect of who I am.

And to clarify, "attractive" to me doesn't mean looking like Angelina Jolie or Grace Kelly or any of those skanky Jersey Girls on television.  It means looking like me, all dressed up.  Beautiful is the way you see yourself, beautiful is the way love sees you.  Likewise, ugly comes from inside too.  Ugly is the way some people act, not the way they look. 

I don't worry what people will think of me in the grocery store if I've been on my horse and I'm covered in dust and hair and I'm wearing my boots and I have hat head.  Go right ahead and stare at me disapprovingly if you must, I don't notice it and even if I did you lack the power to make me feel bad.  The flip side of that coin is that when I make the effort to dress up and look pretty, I don't need you to approve of me for me to know I look good.  That comes from me, not you.

One physical trait that I've always not liked about myself are my fingernails.  The women in my family of origin have very sturdy, very strong hands.  Functional hands. But - terrible nail beds.  Short, wide nail beds, not the nice long oval ones I so admire.  The nails grow out splayed and split and not so very nicely.  I am also not good about caring for my hands.  I never wear rubber gloves when I'm cleaning house or doing dishes.  So I have these short fingernails and they're always getting broken and cracked.  They're ridged, my cuticles are an embarassment.

I have mostly accepted that these are the hands I have, but I don't necessarily have to like them.  And it does feel strange when I go and pay for a pedicure and come out of the shop with lovely toes and newly de-calloused feet in sharp contrast to the mangy cuticles and chopped off nails on my hands.

I have talked myself into and out of artificial nails for years.  I had them briefly in my twenties.  I even bought nail polish the exact shade of my red Nissan Pathfinder.  But they didn't last, I split one painfully due to my clumsiness, I was terrible about getting fills done.  And then with my current lifestyle, horses and dogs and cleaning stalls and all...it didn't seem like something I could - or should - do.

Except I have this one index finger where the nail is splitting.  And it won't stop.  Its been split for over two months now, and as it grows, it just keeps splitting.  I've tried polish, I've tried special plastic "bandaids" just for fingernails, I've tried acrylic nail polish.  I've tried nail treatments.  In the end, I just keep cutting it back farther and farther and no matter how far down to the quick I get it, it still splits and the edges of the split catch on things like my saddle pad or my shoelace and it splits farther and more painfully every time.

So I gave it some thought.  Artificial nails don't have to be long nails.  They can be as long or as short as I want them to be.  Even if the nail technician thinks they should be longer, it doesn't really matter.  I'm the customer, I get to ask for what I want.  And yes, artificial nails are harder than hell on your real nails.  But my real nails are complete crap anyway, so honestly, does it really matter if they get thin and brittle and crack?  They do that anyway!  Artificial nails require maintenance.  I'm notoriously bad at taking care of myself.  So now I have a compelling excuse to go take some time for myself and spend it on something that looks nice.  Artificial nails look fake.  Yes, but even fake looking nails look a thousand percent better than the ones God graced me with.

Wow, I had an argument with myself and I WON. 

Lookie here:

Girly hands. 

I can still beat you at arm wrestling, though. 

The contest of likeability

I hate elections, particularly presidential elections.  I hate the ads, the debates, the analysis and the endless barrage of information.  What I most particularly hate is that there are only two platforms for candidates to be electable from, and the candidates that are playing for my vote have more dissimilarities to me and to many similarities to one another.

Electing a president is not about electing someone who is smart enough, strong enough, capable enough and honest enough to be entrusted with the highest office in America.  Sure, we'd like to think that it is.  But its not.  Its a contest over how many people each candidate can convince that he is more likeable than the other guy. I was watching Morning Joe's interview with Steve Schmidt, Mcain/Palin campain chief strategist.  The interview itself outlined some particularly intelligent opinions about why we choose certain people to run for office, but it was a segment header that followed that made me cringe and begin typing this post.

"Coming up next:  Candidate Y says he's starting to use the phrase y'all and that he loves Grits.  Candidate Z says he loves grits even more than Candidate Y." (paraphrased)

The ridiculousness of it -- down to the fact that news outlets are actually reporting this as news, should be a huge DOINK on the collective consciousness of us all.  Sadly, only those who actually agree with this assessment understand the importance of it, and those who don't understand it will most likely disagree with me.

Politics today are a caricature.

Races are determined by which candidate is a better liar.  They lie to make themselves more attractive to us, to convince us that they are LIKE us.  Mostly, they are not.  Candidates at the highest levels have as much in common to me as an individual as I have to a spineless mollusk.  But the most important job they will undertake while on the campaign trail is not to convince me that they are capable, not to convince me that they are trustworthy, not to convince me that they are intelligent.  Their job is only to convince me that I like them. 

Ever since Gallup ran its first presidential poll in the 1960's, we've learned that of the three main characteristics that determine who will win an election (political party, stance on the issues, likeability), LIKEABILITY is the most important.

And here's the problem:  I don't.  Like them. 

Not a single damn one of 'em.

 

Maybe Someday

My husband, as I might have mentioned before, is a capital L Libertarian.  He is consumed with the problems we face not just as a country but as a world.  He believes those problems only grow greater with a larger government that wants to mandate belief and opinion, and to him there is no difference between one side which would mandate one set of thinking and rights and the other which would mandate the opposite set of thoughts and rights.  Its all a matter of perception - and to a very large extent, I agree.  I tend to the humanistic side of things, I care about people, I care about women and children and minorities, I care about those who suffer the most under the heavy hand of poverty and discrimination and violence.  We discuss this a lot.  Even where we have laws and agencies and systems in place, we still have people who are hungry, victimized, isolated and discarded.   So we talk about ideas and beliefs and I sometimes think he lacks compassion and he often thinks I have too much of it.  But the ideas, they flow.

We like music at my house.  We are not "musicians," but we enjoy singing together and playing around on our guitars.  Over the course of twenty some years, SG has written a handful of songs.  A couple of months ago, on a day where I was off on a horse and the kids for some odd reason were remarkably quiet and occupied, he sat down and he wrote a new song. 

He couldn't wait to play it for me when I got home, and he kept playing it and refining it and toying around with it over the next several weeks, to the point where it became a permanent earworm for me.  At that point I started picking up harmonies and making suggestions.  He took his guitar to a local Libertarian phone banking event and played it for his buddies there.  One of his friends told him there was a recording studio locally that wasn't too expensive and that he should see about getting it put on disc there. 

The next thing you know, we're in the recording studio, laying tracks.  After he put down his guitar and vocals and I added harmony, the studio owner went over the whole song and added drums, bass, fiddle, mandolin, and the next thing you know we have a song.

Its not terribly professional, we know we're not *that* great or anything, but he -- WE -- are proud of it. 

So the next step of course is to put together something with images or video and upload it to share.  Except that's where I'm supposed to really get involved.

As I'm moping around the house and SG is packing for his road job, he suggests that we could get together on Skype or on the phone for a few hours a week and work together on compiling and editing said video, at which point I think I sort of went apeshit for a few minutes.  Because with him gone and the timesuck of working and commuting and kids and animals and you know, the general WTF that is my life when I'm alone, I'm going to have SO MUCH TIME  for that project.

Even so, I hope it gets completed and soon so that he can get it out there. 

So many of us end up in careers out of necessity and lack of opportunity that we might not have otherwise pursued.  Its a nice thought that America is the land where anyone can do anything if they just want it badly enough, but in the real word that's not quite true.  My husband was not built to be an I&C tech or a valve tech, he thinks and walks and talks like a writer or a professor.  He has ideas he wants to share and a passion to express them.  He has spent an unbelievableamount of time studying ideas and theories and the structure and framework of society.  Being married to him is like having a compendium of world history AND an encyclopedia in your pocket.  An innocent question can lead to a 45 minute off-the-cuff discourse which includes names, dates and other historical accuracies along with a complete dissection of the event and its repercussions down the line. 

I look at him in the throes of many such discussions and all I can think is "This man is in the entirely wrong line of work.  He needs to be doing something with this knowledge, with these ideas." 

Even if I don't fully share his vision of what our country should be like, I fully support HIM.  I think he's pretty incredible. 

Even when he leaves me trying to hold all the balls in the air for six weeks.

 

Lady, you are so fired

There are three things it is nearly impossible to find when you relocate from one town to another: 

• Dentist
• Lady doctor
• Hairdresser

I finally found the right dentist and hairdresser in the last couple of months.  It took damn near five years, but I finally found the right fit.  Personality is a big part of it, but quality of service is important too.  I want care providers I enjoy interacting with and from whom I can expect not just a high quality of care but some personal attention.  I want them to remember who I am, what I've discussed with them in the past, what my kids names are.  I want them to remember that I never shut up about horses and special needs kids and that I hate needles and I also hate having my hair styled like I'm somebody's middle aged mother.  (Yes, I know that's what I am, I just don't need my hairdresser reminding me of it.  I want The Sexy.)

I had found what I thought was a great little practice.  It catered to mothers and children and was run by a Registered Nurse Practicioner.  They had a funky little clinic and even offered sick child care at a reasonable cost for mothers who had a sick child with whom they were unable to stay home that day.  I liked having a female practicioner for my female stuff, and I liked that she could also manage my ADHD meds.  I mostly didn't mind the long waits when I went in.  For one, OB practices are often like that.  A baby arriving might push all the appointments back.  And because she would take time talking to me, I assumed that she gave the same consideration to her other patients.  I liked that. 

Little by little, though, things changed.  And I didn't like it.  First she started offering the HCG diet out of her practice.  I'm one of those people who think that fad diets are dangerous and I wasn't impressed that my doctor was jumping on the fad diet bandwagon.  The waits started getting longer.  I waited an hour for an appointment, and it was pretty clear from the stack of people in her waiting room that she was trying to rotate too many patients.   And then, two visits ago, at the end of my visit, she handed me a business card with my prescription.  It was for a company that sells internet service and cable tv and wireless plans.  "I dont' know if I told you about this company I'm representing.  If you are in need of any data services please give me a call." 

I know doctors don't make a lot of money these days and I realize that its terribly expensive to run an OB practice with the burden of medical malpractice insurance, but really?  I'm a little more compartmentalized than that.  You're the doctor who looks at my vagina.  I really don't want you reviewing my cell phone usage, too.  And if you're trying to take care of too many patients at one time, its a sure bet every single one of us is getting a lower quality of care.

I guessed (correctly) at that point that finances were strained and she was looking to supplement her income in any way possible.  And of course, she has the right to do that.  I might not have jumped ship at that point, because I am human and I do try to be understanding.  But after the last appointment I don't know any other way to proceed.  I made an appointment for a prescription refill.  I hadn't been to her practice for three months.  I pulled up to the door with 10 minutes to spare for my appointment, only to find an empty office.  Empty as in completely devoid of furniture, phones and people.  A sign on the door only said that the office was closed, but didn't indicate if it had moved somewhere else.  I was confused.  I had made the appointment only a few days earlier.   Did they close their doors suddenly?  So I called them, and when the receptionist answered I was even more confounded.  "We moved offices." 

Wouldn't that be something you might have wanted to tell me when I made the appointment?  Or maybe added on to the "No Longer in Business" sign on your door?  So I threw the kids back in the car and drove to the new location.  I waited forty-five minutes to be seen, though the guy schlepping pharmaceuticals came in after I did and got to go back and have a few minutes of her time before I got to have my appointment.  I had to fill out all new paperwork because apparently my old paperwork didn't move to her new office with her.  And at the end of my ten minute appointment (that I had to wait a half hour for), she once again handed me her new business card with my prescription.  "I don't know if I told you about this company I'm representing."

Yes, yes you have. 

I suppose if I was interested in a dialogue I would let her know personally why I'm leaving her practice.  But the thing is, I never know if someone really cares that you don't want to be their client anymore.  Not if they don't care about telling you they've moved or remembering what they talked to you about the last time you looked at their cervix.  I mean, she'll figure it out when I don't come see her anymore.  I'm sure the request from my new doctor for my medical records will be a clue too.

 

Kill a groundhog, save our sanity

We woke up a week ago tomorrow to three inches of snow on the ground and frozen, crappy roads about half the way of my 45 mile commute to work.  The irony of this is that it wasn't that long ago I was begging for snow, and the minute I woke up and looked out the window, all I could think of was strangling a small burrowing mammal in Pennsylvania.

Over it now.  Enough with the winter already.

And then yesterday and today, I've had to drive with my windows down because its so warm.

Ahhh.  Spring.  Or as we like to call it in the Tri-Cities, mud season.

The arrival of snow was mitigated by the arrival of my parents, who returned this week from their annual winter sojourn in Yuma.  This was the last one for a while, my dad is increasingly less mobile, it takes an act of God to get him on an airplane, and the 1200 mile drive is getting increasingly more difficult for him.   I'm selfish enough to be grateful for this.  Their annual October departure is really hard, and not having family nearby makes me feel a little empty in the middle.   Now they're home, and not surprisingly I notice the absence of my brother far more acutely.  There's an empty seat at the table, we all know it, and we all struggle with it in our own way.  They're back though, that's what really matters right now.

Their timing was excellent, as SG left Friday for a six week job in Arizona.  (ARIZONA:  You are on notice.  Please stop borrowing the people I love. Thank you very much.)  I hope this is the last road trip.   He's starting a new venture when he gets back, and I'm hopeful that it will work out well enough to keep him from ever needing to do another outage.  Life is full of The Crazy as it is, and not having him here to balance out the Doing of Things That Need Doing makes for a very busy me.   Plus, the last couple of road jobs had him gone so very long, it was really a low time for me.  I'm struggling with it, I suppose I should know better, but there it is.  I hate it when he's gone.

I've managed (as usual) to complicate things by taking on two horses on a care lease.  I wouldn't have normally done this, because we all know I don't need two more horses.  These girls, though, are in need of some TLC.  Their owner is a very young woman who has had some issues and some difficulty, and they haven't been receiving the level of care they need.  They're severely underweight and need some vet care.  Sweet mares, both of them. 

Its never not a zoo around here.  Sometimes it surprises me how well SG has adapted to my chaotic life.  I think he has nerves of steel.  Or perhaps he can cope with it because he knows he can run away every few months and get a little vacay from the cray cray.  God knows I wish I could have one.

SG's departure and the bigger sense of loss I've felt around my brother with my parents return have me thinking about loss and the changing nature of life.    As David Richo reminds us in The Five Things We Cannot Change, "everything begins and ends," and you know - the beginning is always the easy part.  The ending not so much.  I took Tasha, my brother's dachshund, to my parents today so that they can care for her while SG is gone.  (She's used to having someone home, she's elderly, and I am gone 11+ hours a day when I'm working.  She needs someone to keep company with).  She's doing really well, considering, but we all know its a matter of time with her.  Truth is, its just a matter of time for all of us - and for all things  in our lives and in our world. 

Everything changes and ends.  Its a simple fact of life that its hard to embrace some days.  But I know that fighting it only leads to increased pain and stress.  Accepting it just means I can grieve and then, at some point, let go.

Its just...the last few months seem to have been so filled with loss.  My brother, SG's grandma, a close family friend, Hercules, a smart and talented blogger, someone's husband, someone's father, someone's wife, someone's child I read about in the paper. Half my chickens.  Even famous people who I normally wouldn't think twice about, but when your mind is dwelling on loss, their passing seems to only compound the egregiousness of it all.  I'd just like us all to have a break, thanks, even knowing that its not at all likely.

The changing and ending aren't always bad things.  Winter ends so spring can arrive with the scent of growing things on the warm breezes and the return of the birds and eggs in the chicken coop on a regular basis.  Spring ends so we can bask in the heat of summer and enjoy the great outdoors in all her glory, and then summer bows her head and gives way to the lovely burnished hues of fall.   

The seasons and all of nature, they just roll with it.  As should we all.