clickmom

TISMF

Marion visited yesterday. I’m so sad when my kids leave! I want to be around them. They’re so much my favorite people. Boo hoo. Nice visit though!! We got massages. It was her idea. Holy shit I needed that. I have been walking around so tense. My whole left side hurt way more than it should have. Left shoulder? I almost screamed when she touched it. I may have been doing Lamaze into my mask while lying face down on that table with my head in the hole. My left side smashed into the car when it spun. I think it’s from the car accident. Also, weird pains in my mid back which is completely new. Typically I’m a lower back pain kind of girl. But I felt this area of my back tensing up before I even called the police after that filthy ball sack of a human plowed into me. But I am wondering if maybe I should drag myself to a real doctor to get some X-rays because I am so used to living with pain that I totally didn’t realize how much extra pain I’ve been in

Just found out what kind of bird is nesting over my front door. It’s a barn swallow and there about SIX babies sticking their adorable bald heads over the edge of the nest. I’m in freaking heaven and every time I see their little open beaks poking over the edge of the nest my heart just sings and I’m so happy they are there - no matter how many baby bird poops I’m going to have to clean up when this is done.

Well I am just now realizing that I must have PTSD because the husband fell about four times this week. (Skinned both knees, both elbows and assorted small bruises) I had to mop the floor because he had to get on his knees to get upright and that took all the scab off both of them. There was so much blood on the floor. There is so much blood on the rug. Cry cry cry. Tonight is my town‘s fireworks celebration and every time I hear that boom I’m ready to jump out of my skin and I have to coax my heart out of my throat. Took me a minute to realize that the ka-boom was coming from outside and not down the hall. I’m so afraid he is going to fall again.

Friday is wound care day. Wound care said it looks stable. I said I wasn’t going for stable I was going for healed. The doctors said they like a positive attitude so I looked at his foot and said HEAL BITCH and the whole room cracked up. Then one of the doctors said “That’s why I love you” and to be honest, I’m gonna hold onto that for way too long because it’s important to me to be the person who brings a good vibe to the room. They said I am way more positive than most. (Or clueless, because it never occurred to me that this wouldn’t eventually heal)

Then the doctors asked me if I was going to see any fireworks and I burst into tears recalling how frightened I got every time they went off last night. PTSD maybe? This life is hard. I do not recommend it.

The air quality is so poor that we came right back to the house after wound care. We are both super tired for some reason. We stared at the TV for a while but eventually the husband went down for a nap. So now comes the almost nightly question: will he get up for dinner or not? No one knows until the time comes.

My allergies suddenly kicked into high gear last week after I did the summer solstice ritual day of photographing. I want to scratch my face off. Probably doesn’t help that I dragged my tired self outside yesterday evening to mow the lawn while the air was still safe to breathe. I did another great job. It’s so rewarding to look outside and see a tidy lawn. I want to put my hands on my hips and shout. BEHOLD! I DID THAT! and then nod knowingly to all the other people who mow their own lawns. This is the best kept secret.

On Fridays

On Fridays I bring the husband to wound care. Some days I know the wound is looking better. Some days I hold my breath until the doctors see it and gives us the thumbs up. Today the doctors saw it and said it looked good. Then while the nurse was re-bandaging the wound the doctor asked me if we were planning on seeing any fireworks.

And I burst into tears

Like real tears

Because last night was the fireworks in this town and my friend was organizing this big picnic on the beach that I would have loved to be at and that made me sad. Then the husband went to bed early, and I was sitting all alone feeling a pinch sorry for myself and binging a series when I thought I heard him fall so I leapt off the couch and then I heard another ka-boom and I called out to him. No response. I looked down the hall. Lights were all out. And then I heard another ka-boom and I realized I was hearing the fireworks so I went back to the couch and tried to focus on the series but every time I heard the ka-boom my breath would catch in my throat for a quick second.

The husband fell three (or maybe 4) times this week and each time he skinned (or re-skinned) his knees or elbows. There was a lot of blood. One time he fell on top of his walker and crushed it beyond repair. Luckily we have a spare.

I know that last night I responding to the all the falls of this last week. But it still upsets me.

Remembering

I’m pretty sure that I’ve mentioned before how socially out of touch I was as a young person. And it’s kind of funny because I was so oblivious to the pressures that other kids were feeling that everyone thought I was a cool kid and super confident but the truth is that I was just clueless and I thought of a story that demonstrates my cluelessness.

One thing that I had no skill at was taking the clues when a boy was interested in me and this happened my freshman year so I was probably still 17. There was a guy who talked to me a lot and was in fact trying to see if I was interested in him. I had no idea! The crazy thing is if he had said something specific like “Would you like to hang out?” I probably would have said YES because up until that point he seemed like a nice guy.

One night he was hanging around my class area and he kept saying how tired he was and I kept telling him to go to the vending machine and get some sugar and I kept saying get some sugar get some sugar and I did not know that that means kissing down south. The poor kid ended up so frustrated with me and my cluelessness that the next night he got super drunk and came around when we were all sitting around late working. He came in with a can of spray paint and spray painted a happy face onto just a random stool and held it up over his head and screamed to me from across the room that now I can sit on his face.

So in the heat of the moment I had no idea why he was upset and I did not know what it meant to sit on a boys face so my reaction was just confusion and that made him even more upset and then he stopped coming and hanging around with my whole class. I think I figured it out about 10 years later.

Gonna be okay

This morning I took sweet pea to the fields behind my house. I park in about the center and then essentially walk a lumpy figure 8. We had just returned to the center and started on the second loop when my phone rings and it’s husband calling. Okay this is unusual. I inhale sharply and answer. We get disconnected. I stop walking and call him back 3 times. They all eventually go to voicemail. I look at sweet pea, and we turn back towards the car and a million scenarios are running through my head and I wonder if he’ll be dead on the floor when I arrive and then I stop in my tracks. And I think to myself. CHECK IN AND SEE HOW YOU’RE FEELING ABOUT THIS. And the voice in my head said NO MATTER WHAT I’M GOING TO BE OKAY

Then I jumped in the car and sped back to discover him lying on the bedroom floor. He had fallen trying to pick up a pair of shorts from the floor. He said “I think every time I bend over I fall down so I probably shouldn’t bend over anymore.” It came out of him in the saddest most pathetic way possible. In my head I was thinking NO KIDDING? YA THINK?? but I didn’t say that out loud and it did totally break my heart.

TISMF How is your day going so far?

So. I got up super early, watched the news for a bit, (Very alarmed over what’s happening in Russia) tossed a load in, and finally came downstairs. Made myself some breakfast, was about to go upstairs to transfer to dryer when I hear the husband calling out to me.

CUE THE ALARM!!! DUDE NEVER SENDS OUT THE ALERT.

I go trotting down the hallway, trying to push the urge to panic away until need is confirmed, and the first thing I see is his skinned right knee. My eyes are trying to take in his physical appearance and the room- shelves have been knocked off the bookshelf, the rug is all bunched up weirdly on the far end, and there on top of the mess is the twisted wreckage of his walker.

He got up in the middle of the night (because he Fucking refuses to go to the bathroom before going to bed, like the emotionally anal and urinary retentive 6 year old he is) to use the bathroom and must have tripped over his own sneakers which aren’t usually in his room, but were there last night because he went straight to bed after getting back from wound care and I freaking forgot to grab them and put them somewhere else.

So, immediately I am upset that I heard nothing. Slept through the whole ordeal. Hello GUILT, my long time companion. Would I even exist if I didn’t feel guilty? I’m not so sure. Then I get angry that he turned his Apple Watch off. But NO, he did not turn it off because he forgot to put it on. Good lord give me strength.

Anyways, other than the skinned knee he seems fine. We have extra walkers and walker parts so I just put his extra long leg extensions onto a different walker body, and he is sitting here eating a chicken salad sandwich but my heart is going a million miles an hour and I’m pretty upset.

TISMF about tomorrow …

….because tomorrow is the summer solstice. And now I have a summer solstice ritual. The first SS of the pandemic I was in distress because The thing that had given me comfort through the first few months of the pandemic was photographing the birds that I could see on the bare branches but now the branches weren’t bare except for a few dead or dying trees. Also the first few months of the pandemic moved so slowly for me. I was bored in a way that I had not been bored since I was a child. I can recall afternoons were minutes felt like hours and that’s how the first few months of the pandemic felt and we were coming upon the longest day. I was so hung up on the somehow agonizing fact that this was going to be the L O N G E S T day. So I sat outside from dawn to dusk on the summer solstice and photographed every bird that landed on one almost dead ash tree.

This where the text begins: The way that this has evolved is kind of interesting because the first year I did it because that was how I could see the birds and it was all about the birds. At that point the tree had a tiny bit of life left in it - with small clusters of leaves at the end of the branches but mostly empty. The second year the tree had completely died so I knew I had to do it again and I did it the third year because once the tree had died all the smaller branches were falling off and it looked so different. I was totally going to stop at three years. Until this spring during one of those terrible wind storms. It got the tree, which had split on its way up into two huge branches, that in the first 3 seasons of being photographed made up the entire tree top, lost one of the branches- the bigger one! So- it was 2 now it’s one……. Are we seeing the parallels to my life yet?

The one thing i have to figure out how to talk about it because it began as a bird thing and is continuing as a tree metaphor for my world thing. I guess the birds were my world there for a fast minute during the initial months of the pandemic

Dementia gaslighting

Despite the reality that my 62 year old husband has the physical and mental acuity of someone 40 years his senior, the husband is still in utter denial. One thing he has consistently tries to do since the day he started to use a walker (January 2021) is this potentially graceful move where upon getting to his destination he theatrically swings the walker away from him as if he is a tango dancer releasing his dance partner for her to take her final bow.

1. He almost falls or falls every time he tries this move

2. It leaves him needing to take his last couple of and first couple of steps when getting up from or sitting down upon his chair/bed without his assistive device, which he is utterly reliant on for remaining upright.

3. This forces me to nag nag nag him. I nag all day every day. Every time he gets up.

4. Tonight I lapsed for the first time and did not say anything when he pushed the walker as far as it could be from the bed and then fell onto the bed unable to remain upright for the final step of his journey. I lapsed you guys. I saw where he pushed the walker and then I got distracted and didn’t put it where I wanted it to be, which is closer to him.

5. I, refill his pill caddy, take the dog out, close up the house, transfer a load to the dryer, go upstairs, brush my teeth, wash up, then I’m standing right beside my bed about to pull the blanket back for entry when KABOOM. Oh yes he did, fell forward out bed reaching for the walker. Is there any skin left on his left knee? Not much, actually, looks like he dragged it behind a car or something. Luckily, I have all the supplies.

6. So as I slap the adhesive tape around the triple layer gauze pads, I say “This is what I’m talking about when I tell you to leave the walker next to the bed!” And he says “I’ve never heard you say that before. It’s a good idea though”

You all. Guys. Help me make it through the night.

Diaphanous

Some nights I walk the husband down the hall, help him change his clothes, escort him to the bathroom and back to the bed, tuck him in, turn off the light, resume my place on the couch and then immediately talk out loud to him as if he is still here. I figure either I’m talking to a spirit or he is so energetically drained that I can’t actually feel his absence when leaves the room. I think I know which it is though.

TEQUILA

I often joke about the phone always listening and also that the word puzzles I play sending me secret messages so you can’t tell me it’s coincidence that these two words are next to each other on the puzzle I’m sitting here doing hours after we discussed our favorite summer beverage recipe! TEQUILA!

TISMF

TISMF in which I realized early on I should also put here so I typed way more than I normally would have:

Hey! I had a GREAT day. First, my friend, Pal, came to visit me and we took a long walk in the woods with Sweet pea, leaving just in the nick of time to escape a thunderous downpour. Then we grabbed some takeout and sat and ate it in my car and chatted for another hour and a half. It was perfect and exactly what I needed. I had called him a couple of weeks after my accident when I was still in the CAN NOT STOP CRYING stage and I told him that I really needed to see him and asked him to come to me. I was just thinking that he hadn’t visited and wondering if I should mention it to him when he called me last night and asked me what I was doing today. It was very much a big deal for me because I don’t often ask for emotional support like that and just the act of asking was a personal breakthrough. Then the fact that he didn’t forget and did come to see me was HUGE. He is a real soul mate friend for me.

Then I had a guitar lesson. I’ve been working on House Of The Rising Sun, impressed the kid who is teaching me (I don’t think he really thought I’d practice) and today he gave me the chords for another classic. I’m so tired I’m blanking on the title. (Freebird. I fricking blanked on Freebird) I’m psyched though. I need to do some hand stretching exercises or something. I feel like I have old lady witch hands. I even joked and curled my fingers and told him to come into my gingerbread house so I could push him to the oven. HAHAHA. Nothing like an old lady joke!