clickmom

TIS to the two kids who couldn’t be here for Thanksgiving

Hey babies- hope you had a nice Thanksgiving. Did you cook something special? It was weird here. The plastic popper on my turkey didn’t pop so my turkey was overcooked. I’m traumatized over dry turkey. Really.

Evan and fiancé made everything else. It was cute. They work well together in the kitchen! They did a good job. Pal brought his boyfriend so fiancé’s mom interrogated him instead of me the entire night. That part was kind of nice, if I’m gonna be honest.

Then the house alarm system seemed to malfunction in the middle of the night and go off a couple of times so that was disturbing. And I really don’t know what happened so I have to get someone to come out and look at it next week when everybody goes back to work.

Last night i went to a friend’s for a party. Didn’t even get home until 1AM. I know?? Who am I?

hey

Still working out the kinks on this road to my new life. I saw Pal at the memorial and then stopped by his house for a 2 person sleepover party a couple of days ago. He joyfully exclaimed how great it was to be seeing me so often and I wanted to return the joy because I was totally feeling it too but it felt disrespectful because the husband had to pass away in order to make that possible. But it feels so good to be getting back to myself, when myself is not someone who sits around the house day in and day out.

It's a bit complicated since I also do not want to get covid and I will inevitably get covid because I keep hanging out with other people, so I have to do the mental gymnastics that will be necessary not to want to destroy the person who ends up getting me sick. This will be tricky. Peanut tested positive for covid yesterday. She was feeling pretty bad and I didn't have the courage to ask her if she had informed the people she had seen the day before that they had been exposed. 

Scratch that. I asked her. She did too many things to know where she picked it up and she did let the people who saw her right before she became symptomatic know- but not because she was informing them of her covid status, it was because she had to cancel their next gathering. I am a bit concerned that someone might be around me after they've been exposed and expose me because we live in this kill or be killed world where no one cares about other people enough to let them know that they may be infectious so that they can not infect others. This is why I will 100% refuse to return to this earthly existence for another go around. I hate it here. People suck.

Speaking of hating it here, on the one hand all of humanity is a profound disappointment to me, but on the other hand I am brought to tears of gratitude every time I think about how present and caring my friends have been with me throughout this journey. I am a lucky girl. Definitely chose well. Enough people have told me that they saw who their real friends were after going through a crisis and I am over here inundated with calls, cards, flowers, meals, and company and finding my experience to be quite the opposite. My friends have shown up in a way that I never even dreamed about. I could hand out awards to my friends to the point that some days I think I might like a break. I'm a lucky woman. 

The next hurdle in my life will be getting through thanksgiving emotionally intact. Evan will be my only kid here because Josh doesn't have off from school (damn you Canada!) and Marion is working (with my approval since Canada was going to ruin my day anyways) and then the husband, well, you know he can only be here in literal spirit. Evan and his fiance want to do all of the cooking. I'm letting go! Pal will bring his boyfriend, and I am wondering if I know anyone else who doesn't have anywhere to go so I can fill up the dining room. But maybe a small gathering is best for this year. Yeah, I think small might be better.

 

 

TISMF. Yesterday was the work memorial

You know. I heard many stories yesterday. Many of them were about how outrageously fun it was to be with the husband at the conferences. Many were about his fairness in the field and his vast knowledge of the law.

One of the nicest stories for me to hear yesterday was told to only me. There was a couple there who met at the law firm. The husband was in the husband’s department but she wasn’t. However, her office was right near his and she would see him walking around. She said that after he met me she noticed him walking around the office with a big smile on his face, which she had never seen before, and heard him chatting about me, she would hear him telling people what I had been doing in the classroom with my kids and it was so unlike the “all business” guy that she had been used to that it stuck with her. So I got to have a moment where I pictured young husband (he was 27 when we met) being goofy and so in love that his coworkers took notice. That felt warm and fuzzy.

Then, one woman handed me a letter that I didn’t read until I got home. She told me how she worked with him as a paralegal while going to Cardoza for her law degree and how when she applied for a job as an attorney at the firm she was told outright that she might not have the “pedigree” (I know. What a repulsive concept in today’s world also, not lost on me that was a woman of color so totally fighting against the system) for their firm but that he went to bat for her and she did get the job as an associate and she has always known that he was the one who made that happen for her and now she is a partner there and she will be forever grateful to him. That was also especially nice to hear.

Choice

As time unfolds and I begin to have more perspective on what the last 10 years or so were like, you know that 20/20 perspective that we never have until something is over, I am seeing more and more that I wasn’t entirely understanding on what terribly rough condition the husband has been in for a much longer time than I realized.

It probably has to do with the fact that his decline was so slow and steady, and also the fact that we had essentially been on lockdown for 4 1/2 years (before he left us) it’s really painful to go through old photographs, which I’ve been doing for the memorial coming up and realizing that everything Pal told me is actually happening to me. Pal told me that after his husband passed he looked back and did not know how he managed. Check.

I don’t know how I stayed on high alert 24 hours a day for so long because without being on high alert, I feel like I’m living in this crazy void. People told me that , they were worried about me and that I needed to give myself a break, but I honestly didn’t understand what they were talking about until now. I’m sitting here with nothing but time on my hands. It’s so weird!

I picked up the husband’s sneakers today, thinking I’d toss them into the garbage. They were so old I was sure they would be in too rough of a condition to even think about donating them. How many times have I tied those sneakers without really looking at them? In the end his fingers weren’t even working right. Nope. Not worn out. They actually looked brand new. Even the bottoms looked completely brand new. And it hit me how little he walked in the last 5 years.

It’s tough seeing him getting thinner and thinner and wild eyed in the photos. It’s crazy looking at photos from 10 years ago when I thought he looked so awful and compare them to photos from recent times. I took photos of his thighs years ago because they seemed so frail. I had no idea what was coming. That was probably for the best.

How many times did I stupidly say “If only I had a crystal ball I could pace myself and this would be so much easier”? Too many to count! Now I know that we don’t have crystal balls because if we did have crystal balls, we would go running into the night because the future is too scary until it’s in the rearview mirror. I don’t like it when people ask me how I did it because I did it when I didn’t have a choice. Was there ever a choice?

Tangent. This is a thought I might need to flush out in some future post. The people at hospice, keeping in mind that I did not have a great hospice experience and didn’t really care for the hospice caregivers on whole, often suggested to me that I get a full-time caretaker so that I could go back to being a wife. What the fuck does that mean? Do wives not take care of their spouses? Did they want me to leave the house and hang out with friends to be a wife? It’s so confusing to me. Do wives pay people to do the wifely duty?

Back to my current state. Choice. Right now I have a choice. I have a choice to get off the chair and do what needs to be done so I think I need to remind myself that it is now that I have a true choice and I can finally choose to do the things that I need to do that are all just about me. Gotta get this house in order. Gotta reduce the amount of stuff I own. Gotta get going

TISMF

I saw an ad for an engraved identity bracelet type thing that said

REMEMBER WHO THE FUCK YOU ARE

And then I sent a screenshot of the bracelet with this text:

So this is interesting because this ad just came up as I’m scrolling around on Fcbk and at first, I realized I read it as “remember who the fuck you are” in a humbling way as in “you’re not good enough- take your place in the back of the line“ but then I realized that a healthier person would’ve read it as “You’re fucking fantastic and don’t let anyone else tell you otherwise .”

Too bad I just had therapy yesterday.