Mom is Just a Nickname

Make me strong in spirit, able to weather the challenges of life without breaking in the storm.  Make me able to bend with the winds and the rain, while knowing that I will once more stand straight when the storm passes.

Being strong in spirit does not only mean weathering storms, though.  Sometimes it means knowing when to ask for help, it means knowing when I can bend no further without someone to lean on.  Anyone who knows me may know how hard I find it to ask for help, unless I trust you very well.  Asking for help is not my strong suit.  So in asking to make me strong in spirit, I also ask for help in knowing when I need to ask for help.

Being strong in spirit means being strong enough to know when I can and should offer my help to my loved ones, to my friends.  I feel a fierce urge to protect those I care most about, but I must recognize that they too have their own storms to weather and I must wait for them to ask for help.   I have a hard time with this, since I know how long I will wait , how far I will let myself bend towards breaking, before I will grudgingly reach out for help.

Make me strong in spirit that I might weather the storms of life with grace;

Make me strong in spirit that I might reach out to others with dignity and gratefulness;

Make me strong in spirit that I might help others with respect and awareness of their needs;

Make me strong in spirit that I might live life with joy.

He deals the cards as a meditation
And those he plays never suspect
He doesn’t play for the money he wins
He doesn’t play for respect
He deals the cards to find the answer
The sacred geometry of chance
The hidden law of probable outcome
The numbers lead a dance

I was going to write about finding myself. I’m always trying to find myself, I’m always trying to dig beneath the layers, starting with the names I’m called.  Maybe this search is all part of growing up, of living life.  Maybe I will never know the answers, maybe I will never be at peace within myself.

One evening in January, the kids were doing their normal nightly routine of noise and mayhem. I’m sure the dog was throwing her two cents in, and I’d be willing to bet there were dishes waiting to be done and laundry that needed to be done.  I, however, felt a headache coming on, and I just needed a few minutes of peace. So, I retreated to the bedroom with a trashy Harlequin romance novel to read. (Yes, I read trashy Harlequin romance novels…it’s a guilty indulgence I share with my mother…who incidentally feeds this addiction of mine by passing on all of her books to me when she is done reading them.)  I remember being stretched out on my side of the bed, but with my head slightly on Toph’s pillow, on top of the blankets.  I remember our cranky black cat beside me.  I remember looking at the clock’s neon red numbers and seeing it was just past 7 p.m. and thinking that I ought go help Toph get the kids ready for bed.  The monkey, in particular, was being cantankerous that evening.

As I heard the monkey’s voice raised to make some point to Toph, I felt the moment I knew was coming. It always comes when I feel a migraine coming on.  The monkey’s words echoed in my head and with an internal twist, I felt I had seen and done all of this before. That internal twist made me sick to my stomach, I felt disoriented, and the pain began behind my forehead just like always…but this time, the world faded quickly away….

The next thing I remember from that evening, I was on the floor beside my bed, blinking at the wall and a man’s leg. A strange man’s leg. I heard a strange man’s voice saying my name, “Beth!”  Why, I thought blearily to myself, is there a strange man in my room, by my bed, saying my name? When I looked around, there were several strange men in my room and I still could not think clearly enough to understand what was going on.  My brain felt so slow. The men were asking me questions: Where was I? What was my name? What was my social security number? And although I could slowly think of the answers it took me long moments to sift them out of the cotton wool in my head and then to transfer them from my thoughts to my mouth.  During this time, I realized Toph was there. I heard his voice…his beautiful, deep voice, assuring the strange men that I was answering correctly.    Although hearing his voice was a comfort to me, as it always is, I could hear a strain in it. I knew there was something wrong, just by the worry in his voice.  Still, the cotton wool in my head could not process what was wrong with the scene being enacted in my bedroom…strange men and all.

When the men, with their latex gloves loaded me on the wheeled gurney and pushed me out the door of my house, while I heard my monkey-child asking questions (although, at this point, I don’t remember exactly what he said), it began to dawn on me what was going on.  When the blanket over me didn’t keep out the cold air, and the lights on the ambulance flashed in my face; when the gurney bumped roughly over the cracks between the driveway and the road; when the gurney had to be lifted from the surface of the street into the ambulance; when the doors clanged shut and I was strapped in; when the sirens wailed and the lights flashed at every intersection….I was getting a trip to the hospital.

I still wasn’t sure what had happened after the deja-vu aura had set in.

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Apparently, there are ugly realities people never think to tell you about seizures.  Sure, when it comes to what used to be known as “grand mal” seizures, the person often falls to the ground in convulsions, and it lasts for several minutes.  Then, I always guessed, life went on and la dee da dee da.  That’s not quite true. The person who had the seizure must often change their clothes, because their bladder often also convulses during the seizure.  I didn’t realize mine had until I was at the hospital and the blankets were removed from my body.  That was a little embarrassing.

I had also always heard the old advice about sticking a wallet in the convulsing person’s mouth (that is an OLD piece of advice, by the way. It is NO LONGER recommended.) to keep them from swallowing their tongue or something.  Well, I don’t think swallowing the tongue is so much an issue, but it sure as hell hurts after the seizure when you’ve bitten your tongue.  The swelling didn’t go down for nearly a week for my tongue.

I had also never thought about how much a person’s muscles must be working when they are involuntarily convulsing.  It makes sense, though, that I was exceptionally sore for several weeks after the seizure.  I moved like a little old lady, bent over, hobbling, groaning and moaning.  I slept a lot, since I didn’t hurt so much when I slept.

And, I guess it also makes sense that a headache is common in the aftermath of a seizure, since the seizure is caused by misfiring of electrical pulses in the brain.  And in the case of a “grand mal” type seizure, the pulses are generalized over the whole brain.

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So, that was it. In January, I had a seizure.  It started with a deja-vu…the first time I remember having a deja-vu moment was in high school.  I was in algebra class, I believe, and it made me so sick to my stomach and gave me such a headache, I begged to go to the nurse and go home for the day.  The phrase “migraine” was tossed around, and I think we (mom, doctor, me) all just figured that’s what it must be.  Until the day I sat down with my neurologist and described what happened in January this year and related how that seizure had begun much like my migraines usually did and she said, I bet those migraines were seizures.  Who knew?

I know next to nothing about seizures even after two months of doing research.I forget half of what I read ten minutes after I read it these days!  Thank you, dilantin and topamax.   But twice a day, now, I walk with my dog through the neighborhood to pick up the monkey-child from school, where before I drove the car while the dog stayed in her crate.  The dishes pile up in the sink and the laundry gets done when we hit the bottom of our drawers and I hear, “I don’t have any clean underwear!” and I constantly sleep and get cranky and say I’m sorry to Toph…but I guess it’s one more challenge on this path to figuring out who I am, one more road to explore as I define myself, one more nickname to tag myself with….

This blog was about my journey away from being just a mom.  And then I got so caught up in other things, I forgot to keep posting. Terrible, I suppose.  Today, my life involves being a mom, a wife, a friend, a struggling student thrown back into the harsh waters of school, an amateur gardener, and an amateur crochet-er.  I flip between the different roles with difficulty. I spend a whole month with my focus narrowed down to just one interest and then abruptly set that aside to focus on something else.  It’s an ongoing struggle to remain focused on any one thing for as long as it takes to finish it.

I also struggle with the feeling that I am tied so closely to someone else that his moods, his preferences…hell, his very presence so directly affect what I do with my life. I read in a book once (I think…can’t remember specifically) the idea of one spouse being like a spring who was only wound up to action when the other spouse was present…and I can relate to that feeling.  Life seems more real and more active when Toph is around.  It is a weird thing to me, to feel that life is on ‘pause’ when he is at work.  I struggle to be productive even though he is gone and it is frustrating to me.  I begin to feel that I have little internal motivation at all.  And it scares me, because what will happen to me if anything should take Toph out of my life permanently? How then will I go on and get done what needs doing?

I write this out of the need to remove the idea from my brain, where it has been resting heavily for many days now.  I expect that very few people ever read this blog anymore with any regularity since my last posts are so old and, imo, kind of uninspired.  What happened to being able to dig into my brain for something deeper than ‘hey these jeans fit me well!” oi.

And I find this very frustrating.

I’ve been a stay at home mom for the better part of ten years. It’s my JOB to keep the house in order and to care for the kids. I’ve tried creating my own routines, based on what I do anyway but with tweaks here and there to make them more efficient. I’ve tried using things like Flylady, which is supposed to give a person some shape to the days.  None of these seem to help.

I’d like a routine for a few reasons.  First of all, I get so tired of looking at my messy house.  Granted, it’s not as messy now as it has been in the past.  We’ve done better with keeping up with it since moving to this house.  But it’s never as nice as I’d like it, unless I’ve just busted my butt for a day or two to make it shine.  That quickly fades, though, no matter my good intentions.

I read about other families whose children happily fall in line with an orderly day.  They get up, they make their beds, they get dressed, they eat breakfast….etc. Everything falls into place.  This is not what happens in my house.  There are days (as there have been this week) that we simply don’t get our acts together and get dressed until late in the day.  Ok, so if you go to work (or school) each day, that may seem like such a luxury.  I know Toph often says he envies us our ability to take it slow.  I’d rather get up and moving and feel like I’ve accomplished something in a day.

Obviously, something is holding me back.  Some inner something is overriding my desire to have a clean house and to have productive days.  Is it laziness?  Is it boredom?  Is it some chemical imbalance in my head?  Is it a lack of purpose?  On any given day I’ll answer yes to every one of those. I don’t know what causes it.  I wish I did because then maybe I could get my act together for longer than a couple of weeks.

Sometimes I just get so sick of being me.  Sick of not being able to stick to something for any length of time.