Now to describe the feelings I have today.
In the morning I had conversations with my spouse about how all the things that are going on affect him. He likes to fix things and wants to fix me. He feels inept to it. He is our life line, and we depend on him to hold things together for us. He gets frustrated. He’s had to be away at work, but he wants to be here.
Depression sank in for the both of us, leaving us both feeling powerless.
Even though I can normally be just as dependable and can control the works in my current state, sometimes I am so weakened that I am limited in what I can do. So I used to be super mom. I was also a single mom for many years and I have great experience managing a family. When we married I was happy to hand over the control panel to the fixit man. I stayed with the financials and the domicile lighting dept. and he took over the structural dept. and engineering aspects of our family. It has been a great balance. But now his commuting has been taken its toll on him, while at the same time, I have become unable to do a lot of the things I used to be capable of handling. My strength has faltered so much that even raking, or gardening has become impossible.
We had this conversation while sitting in a restaurant eating lunch and I felt my eyes burn as the tears started to collect. I am the one that gets his resentment, and he feels terrible about it, because I am the next one in line, and our daughter is innocent on all counts, because even if she understood, she’d still be innocent as she is not strong. My husband and I hold this all together, we are the glue for each other. Even though the three of us are molded into this family, my husband and myself keep this all cohesive, just so that our daughter can go out to her program and return each day and feel like a contributing member of the family. Even through all of this she knows something is not right. She also knows that I will be leaving soon for several weeks and that she will be staying with a friend. She cannot communicate so we are unclear regarding her fear levels about all of these transitions she will be experiencing.
We got back from lunch, and talked some more, and finally as my husband laid down for his sleep (prepping his body to resume its graveyard cycle for the remainder of the week), I settled in on the sofa under a blanket to watch some TV and listen to the pouring rain outside. Everything is flooding out there, and it’s been raining incessantly for almost a week now.
I was almost asleep when the phone rang. We have caller ID that shows on the TV screen and it said “University of Washington.” University of Washington!!!! My call! This is the call I have been waiting months to receive!
I jumped up, as usual, the O2 line followed, being that it was partially wrapped into the blanket, and as I tried to go around the coffee table the O2 line lifted up over the table, knocking a glass of water over, spilling it onto a laptop computer and a leather calendar…..
I got caught on the edge of the desk, and then again 5 feet short of the phone, when the line caught on the edge of the refrigerator and around my ankle. All I wanted to do was to get to the phone before the call went to the answering machine.
I started to cry, out of relief, happiness and fright. All this time I have waited to hear; all this time I could put off any feelings of impending surgery, as it was always out there in the future. Well now the future has arrived at my doorstep.
I woke up my husband and we cried together.
Now I face the hard part.
