Life in progress

Category Archives: Life


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Another week, another… seriously?

photo credit - Wikipedia

photo credit – Wikipedia

Friday evening is here, the kids are home for the second weekend in a row (their dad is supposed to take them every other weekend but apparently, work) and I’m fighting a chest/nasal infection. I went to the doctor and he asked me, “So, you have a chest infection?” – information he got from his secretary who asked me what colour my phlegm is – to which I replied, “yes”. He listened to my chest in four different places, through my shirt AND my bra strap and within 30 seconds I was walking out the door, the prescription faxed directly to my pharmacy from the doctor’s desk.

Yeah.

So I get home from the pharmacy and take two of these little yellow miracle pills and lo and behold I can speak again! For the first time in a week I don’t feel as though I’m going to cough up a lung sometime in the next few moments. Unfortunately the side effects may include death.

I hope my ex will get the hell off his ass and come and get the kids if that tiny little detail that the doctor, in his infinitesimal (no, that doesn’t mean infinite) wisdom, failed to inform me, comes to pass.

Then again maybe the run-on sentences will get me first. 😛


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Wait! Why are you running away? – how to look like a really bad parent in public

I was sitting in a Tim Horton’s enjoying a sandwich and a coffee the first time it happened. My then seven year old son sat across the table from me, smiling and flirting with the ladies as per usual. One of his new admirers (he has many) asked him from an adjacent table if he wanted one of her crackers. She must have felt sorry for him – there I was eating and he had nothing, not a drink nor food. Since he’s Deaf, I answered for him.

“He doesn’t eat,” I said with a smile.

It was all I could do not to laugh at her incredulous glare. I’m sure she wanted to ask me if I was nuts. She went back to her soup and completely ignored him for the rest of the time we were there, despite the fact that he was smiling and waving at her, trying to get her attention back.

My son Alex, up to that point had never eaten or drank a thing in his life. You see the tube in his nose in the picture?

Alexsmile

He now has one implanted permanently in his belly. Why didn’t I just give the woman in the Tim Hortons that little bit of information? Let me tell you a story.

When he was about six months old I took him for a couple of hours out of the hospital  that he called home for the first eight months of his life. I decided to take him to the mall since I wouldn’t have made it home and back before he had to feed again. I couldn’t leave the hospital, however, without equipment. Attached to his tiny body was a heart monitor. I went into the lady’s washroom to change him and a woman came up behind me to see him. She saw the monitor and asked what it was. When I told her I was graced with an expression of absolute terror and, no word of a lie, she ran from the washroom. THAT is precisely why I don’t tell people about his feeding tube.

Fast forward to when he was eight. I took him, my boyfriend at the time and a friend out of town in the car. I was driving and the friend, who knew sign language was sitting in the back seat with Alex. They were chatting and also sharing an orange – that is to say she was eating the orange and he was sucking on the rinds. For some reason he found them more appealing. (No, I’m not apologizing for that. HA!)

Anyway, we decided to stop at a KFC on the highway. As usual, we all got our food except for Alex. Two things you need to know at this point: Alex loves to suck on chicken bones, just so he can pretend he’s actually eating something and he is a clean freak, which means he HAS to be the one to throw everything in the garbage. So there the three of us sat, happily watching Alex flirt with a restaurant absolutely packed with people, suck on bare chicken bones and clean up after us. It was the general consensus that we should have brought the orange peels in for our little slave, for good measure.

The moral of this story is, if you see a kid in a restaurant not eating but seemingly having a good time, it’s probably best not to try to interfere.


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Adventures on my Paper Route – Phew, all is well

It seems the man-eating daffodil from last week didn’t eat the neighbourhood feral cat after all.

Thomas the feral cat

Thomas the feral cat

The kids call him Thomas. I don’t know if anyone has actually been close enough to pick him up to see if he rattles; maybe he’s more a Thomasina. Here s/he is picking through the remnants that the garbage man left on the side of the road. Many of the neighbours leave food and water out for him/her, but I guess old habits die hard.

Daffodil

The daffodils are doing well so it seems spring is, in fact, here.

Stalking daffodil

Stalking daffodil

You can see the dangerous daffodil in the background on the left in this picture. I still don’t trust it.


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Sundays

I remember Sundays BK (before kids) as a day when I woke up in the summer to hear lawnmowers going and the scent of freshly cut grass wafting through my window. I remember waking up and going downstairs to retrieve the Sunday Sun and laying in bed with my first husband, reading the paper and thinking about coffee.

I remember Sundays of watching movies on tv and spending my day on a knitting project or going for quiet walks or long drives: destination no where in particular. Maybe for ice cream. I remember laying in bed in the spring and seeing the new buds on the trees outside my window.

DSC00152

But that was all BK.

Now my Sundays are filled with cooking for the family, cleaning, entertaining a little guy with an unlimited amount of busyness about him. Sundays are about breaking up fights between my elderly mother and my young son. Sundays are about sleeping in until 6:30 if I’m lucky.

The one thing I can still hold on to?

080729_tim_hortons_3202

Coffee. There will always be coffee.


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Adventures on my Paper Route – Getting There!

So it’s not really ON my paper route – I took these pictures in my own front yard. But I was on my way home from my paper route, so I’ve decided this counts.

weeds

My perennial weeds

I just wanted documentation that spring is coming.  It is! And soon I’ll be able to leave my winter coat at home.

gotcha

Gotcha!

Doesn’t it look like this daffodil is about to attack? I haven’t seen the neighbourhood feral cat in a few days….


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Don’t you hate it when that happens?

I’d decided that I would stop refreshing my damned stats page, I’d stopped looking for new posts to read in my reader and I’d even gone as far as turning off the laptop.  And the other laptop. And the PC.  So I’m standing in the kitchen, making my coffee for the morning and it hits me. The perfect subject for a post. Before I know it I’ve lost count of how many scoops I’ve put in the coffeemaker (I only have to count to seven, but there you go) and I’m trying to decide whether to a) get out a pen and paper and jot down the idea or b) turn a computer back on and risk staying up yet another hour to write – and refresh – and read.

So I’m writing this now (it’s 6:46pm) but all this happened to me last night. I failed to do neither a) nor b) and now I can’t remember what my brilliant idea was. But I still got a post out of the experience, so it wasn’t a total waste. 😛


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Call me weird

This may be strange – it’s something I’ve never talked to anyone about before – but once in a while I kind of sit back from myself.  Hmmm…no, that’s not right.  (Maybe this is why I’ve never talked about it before.) Try again.  Sometimes I look at my life and wonder how I got here.  By here I mean in this house, in this town, with these people I live with. I guess that’s the strange part about it. ‘These people’ I live with are two of my kids. Of course I know ‘these people’ – I gave birth to them. …wow, right? I am responsible for the existence of ‘these people’!

Anyway, this is something I’ve done over and over again in my life. Just sat back and looked at where I am and what brought me here…living with my kids.

For the first time in the years I’ve been doing this however, this morning I did it and it scared me. I realized that this is what dementia must feel like.  How did I get here? Who are these people? That there might come a time when I can’t smile and answer those questions for myself – that there might be a time when I’m asking these questions for real…

I think I have a new appreciation for what it must be like to have Alzheimer’s Disease.

But am I weird for doing this in the first place? Or does everyone do this once in a while?


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Unparalleled grief

goes on

Flowers for Aaron

Down the street from me lives a lady. I see her often, sitting on her front porch, when I’m going by on my paper route. Occasionally I stop to talk to her – she has a grandmotherly attachment to Alex, my son. In the summer she gives him popsicles.  She never fails to ask me how he is if he’s not with me.

In early January she lost her husband quite suddenly. She has family, two daughters who live with their own families not too far away, who were very supportive, taking her where she needed to go since the driver in the household passed away. When I talked to her about the passing of her husband she seemed to have made peace with the idea that he was in a better place. He left her to live alone with her disabled son.

Today, when I came to her house I stopped to talk and she asked me, ‘Did you hear?’

‘Hear what?’ I asked.

‘My son passed away last week…’ she told me.

Tears came to my eyes before I could stop them, causing hers to flow as well.

Her son was an adult. He had been sick for the past two weeks and was unable to fight it off.  His heart gave out. He was born with a heart defect much like my Alex was.

No parent should outlive their child. I’ve said this again and again and yet, it happens.  How can life go on after that?

How?


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How comments can hurt

It didn’t start as a comment directed at me, but it bothered me nonetheless. The discussion was about a situation in which a man, with a disabled wife and a small child had taken a weekend ‘off’ to visit with friends and came home to find his wife had died. The comment, on a friend’s journal, stated that the commenter couldn’t understand why, if the man loved his family at all, he would need a weekend away from them.

I am a single mother of two disabled kids with whom I live alone. I love them more than anything in the world – but I need time off! By the time their father’s scheduled weekend with them comes around, which is supposed to be every two weeks but is more often not until the third weekend, I’m all but pulling out my hair. Loving them doesn’t preclude the work that’s required to look after their every need, nor does it make up for the fact that I don’t get any more than five hours of sleep a night when they’re here.

Back to the comment: I tried to explain to the girl who made it that it’s not that clear cut – that there are many things that go into the care of the disabled and the very young. She came back to say that she knows – and that she looks after her disabled parents. I fail to see the parallel. In the end I got the last word, telling her that she is a better person than I am.

It’s probably the way the conversation was left that bothers me the most. That I couldn’t make her see I’m not a terrible person and that I don’t not love my kids because I need time to myself to recharge and re-align my emotions, still sits badly with me.

It makes me wonder whether people out there with different problems than I have are just reluctant to look deeper into the difficulties of others or if they simply don’t care to try. It’s this ‘it’s not my problem so you must be doing something wrong to make it yours’ attitude that worries me. At the same time I hope they are never put into my situation, a little part of me hopes they are. Not very altruistic, but there you go. Sentiment breeds like sentiment.


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Just for laughs

Old Lutheran Humor
Church Bulletin Bloopers

·For those of you who have children and don’t know it, we have a nursery downstairs.

·Due to the Rector’s illness, Wednesday’s healing services will be discontinued until further notice.

·Evening massage – 6 p.m.

·The eighth-graders will be presenting Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the church basement on Friday at 7 p.m. The congregation is invited to attend this tragedy.

·Potluck supper: prayer and medication to follow.

·Don’t let worry kill you off – let the church help.

·The concert held in Fellowship Hall was a great success. Special thanks are due to the minister’s daughter, who labored the whole evening at the piano, which as usual fell upon her.

·Scouts are saving aluminum cans, bottles, and other items to be recycled. Proceeds will be used to cripple children.

·The outreach committee has enlisted 25 visitors to make calls on people who are not afflicted with any church.

·Low Self-Esteem Support Group will meet Thursday at 7 to 8:30p.m. Please use the back door.

·Ushers will eat latecomers.

·The Rev. Merriwether spoke briefly, much to the delight of the audience.

·During the absence of our pastor, we enjoyed the rare privilege of hearing a good sermon when J.F. Stubbs supplied our pulpit.

·Next Sunday Mrs. Vinson will be soloist for the morning service. The pastor will then speak on “It’s a Terrible Experience.”

·Stewardship Offertory: “Jesus Paid It All”

·Remember in prayer the many who are sick of our church and community.

·Pastor is on vacation. Massages can be given to church secretary.

·22 members were present at the church meeting held at the home of Mrs. Marsha Crutchfield last evening. Mrs. Crutchfield and Mrs. Rankin sang a duet, The Lord Knows Why.

·The choir invites any member of the congregation who enjoys sinning to join the choir.

·Weight Watchers will meet at 7 p.m. Please use large double door at the side entrance.

·The rosebud on the altar this morning is to announce the birth of David Alan Belzer, the sin of Reverend and Mrs. Julius Belzer.

·This afternoon there will be a meeting in the south and north ends of the church. Children will be baptized at both ends.

·Tuesday at 4PM there will be an ice cream social. All ladies giving milk will please come early.

·Wednesday, the Ladies Liturgy Society will meet. Mrs. Jones will sing “Put Me In My Little Bed” accompanied by the pastor.

·Thursday at 5PM there will be a meeting of the Little Mothers Club. All wishing to become Little Mothers, please see the minister in his private study.

·This being Easter Sunday, we will ask Mr. Vassilas to come forward and lay an egg on the altar.

·The service will close with “Little Drops Of Water”. One of the ladies will start (quietly) and the rest of the congregation will join in.

·Next Sunday, a special collection will be taken to defray the cost of the new carpet. All those wishing to do something on the new carpet will come forward and get a piece of paper.

·The ladies of the church have cast off clothing of every kind and they may be seen in the church basement Friday.

·A bean supper will be held on Tuesday evening in the church hall. Music will follow.

·At the evening service tonight, the sermon topic will be “What is Hell?”. Come early and listen to our choir practice.

·The 1991 Spring Council Retreat will be hell May 10 and 11.

·Eight new choir robes are currently needed, due to the addition of several new members and to the deterioration of some older ones.

·Mrs. Johnson will be entering the hospital this week for testes.

·Please join us as we show our support for Amy and Alan who is preparing for the girth of their first child.

·The Lutheran Men’s group will meet at 6 PM. Steak, mashed potatoes, green beans, bread and dessert will be served for a nominal feel.

·The Associate Minister unveiled the church’s new tithing campaign slogan last Sunday: ” I Upped My Pledge-Up Yours.”