Sometimes we have happy hour,
and sometimes (apparently at 9pm especially) we have sad hour.
We all have to work, in some capacity, to feed ourselves
but I’m reminded by my son that every once in a while we just have to stop
and smell the flowers.
(Preferably the ones without bees.)
The words buzz around in my head. I see an object, or I glimpse an expression on a face and I feel like I could base an entire novel on that very subject. The words – I can see them – twitching out from my fingertips on to the blank page. I imagine them there before I type them, and then my muscles obey, my digits stretching to reach this key, that letter. Suddenly, there they are. Right there before my eyes where I can read them. Do they make sense? Are they in the right order?
I inspect them. I skim them: sometimes I read them out loud. They are never good enough the first time around.
Inspiration is like having a balloon inside my head. It grows, it expands, until I can no longer contain it – until it either gets out or I go mad. And I do, sometimes. I’m sure my family knows when I get to the point where I MUST write. It’s almost like a disease, like an addiction. I suppose it is, in a way. I ignore my family, my housework, my social life suffers, I do nothing else in my leisure time. I haven’t watched TV in over a year.
And I can’t live without it.
I suppose, as with almost anything, if you do it enough and you’re lucky, you develop at least an aptitude for it. And if you’re really lucky, you find you have a talent for it. In the case of writing, if you have a vocabulary and an adequate imagination, all you need is a knowledge of grammar and you should be good to go. And yet, when I read those who are very talented – those who make it look easy – I realise I have a long road ahead of me still.
So, I write. The compulsion to put into writing the thoughts in my head is undeniable. As long as I have this driving will, this vast, open plain of ideas, and the means to make my hands work the magic that pulls rabbits out of hats in my noggin’, my addiction will be a part of me.
You never know what you’ve got until you lose it. It’s a saying we hear all the time; sometimes in moments of profound loss, sometimes it’s trivial. In my case, in many ways it’s the latter.
There’s no summer camp for my youngest son this week. I used to think it was a luxury to have the time to write. Now, however, my luxuries include sitting for more than two minutes at the table to eat a meal without being interrupted, showering, and going to the washroom.
The latter of these I believe, falls into the profound category.
So if you see a woman walking around the grocery store buying finger foods, with stringy hair and smudges of dirt on her face and with eyes bulging out of her sockets and her legs crossed, try not to point and laugh. It’s probably just a woman who’s missing summer camp.
Being someone who gets most of their inspiration from watching people and trying to imagine why they do the things they do (see photo), I’m finding it difficult to write anything new these days. What with summer vacation and the fact that I’m trying to save money for the trips I want to take, it’s hard to get out of the house, even for a little while. You might say, ‘Just take your kids out with you!’ but that doesn’t work when you’ve got an autistic teenager who’s bigger than you and has definite opinions on what he wants to do with his day, none of which involve leaving the house.
I suppose I could watch TV. *gasp* But whatever I see there has already been done, hasn’t it?
I should probably count my blessings. As long as I’m not finding inspiration to write something new it means I can work on editing my novel. The going is frustrating on that front as well. The re-write I’m currently working on (a section that I’m not pleased with) requires me to fully get into character. That’s difficult when you’ve either got someone looking over your shoulder asking, ‘What are you doing?’ or simply being interrupted every ten minutes.
Oh, shut up whining, Linda!
Needless to say I’m looking forward to my weekend trip next week. I plan to view the house in which I’m staying through the eyes of the girl my main character brings home with him. Her fascination will be my path to detail.
As for finding inspiration, who knows? On top of a fresh perspective on my major work, I may have time to find inspiration for a number of other things as well. I certainly won’t be sitting in my room the whole time I’m gone. Such freedom is a rarity for a single mom, especially during summer vacation.
It all started Tuesday morning at 2:41am. I was woken from my sleep by one sick little boy. You have to understand that when this kid gets sick, he really gets sick. Stomach flu has, up until now, always landed him in the hospital because of his heart condition; his heart doesn’t do well with dehydration. So after being up since above mentioned 2:41 I took him to the hospital to get him set up on an IV before his condition became critical. Then I learned something new.
They don’t automatically hook up the IV anymore. First they try a very strong anti-nausea medication. So we did that, and after they were sure he would at least be able to handle electrolytes he was sent home. Five hours later he wasn’t tolerating anything anymore, so back to the hospital. I’ve seen this kid when he’s been in distress, and believe me, I don’t want to go there again. It’s no fun seeing your 12 year old in cardiac arrest.
8:30pm we arrived in emergency again. 3:46am we were called into a room… still no real signs of distress from my little guy but he looked pretty dry having kept down the equivalent of two glasses of water all day – it was Wednesday by then. So we got into a room and he layed down on the bed and went to sleep. I managed to nod off for about 45 minutes sitting up in a chair. Then the doctor finally came in, woke me up, and demanded answers none of which I could remember right away, so she was pissed off. She informed me that they would give him some more of this wonder drug and try to feed him a half hour later, meanwhile they would send him for an x-ray because of his history of bowel obstructions. That was fine. We got back from that and I nodded off again, sitting up – 45 minutes later (an hour and a half after he’d had the drug) two nurses came in with a needle saying the doctor had ordered blood work on him.
“I thought you were going to try to give him water!” I exclaimed, tired beyond belief by this time.
“Nope,” they said. “Just blood work.”
They asked me to hold him still for them while he screamed his poor bloody head off but I was too much of a wreck. I felt sick. So they went about it without me. When I did turn to help they had poked him, unsuccessfully, and given up. Oh, did I forget to mention the discussion they’d had between them where the least experienced of them had offered to let the more senior one try and the more senior said no, you try it. … even though I told them it was difficult to find a vein on him when he WASN’T dehydrated? Yeah, that happened.
Then they left. Without saying a word to me, they walked out. I managed to snag one of them about half an hour later and I asked her what was happening.
“What’s happening with what?” she asked.
“With the blood work!” I said, shaking my head.
“Oh, he struggles too much and we don’t have enough people to hold him,” she said, and rushed away. This was at 6:50am.
I stood up after that, hoping to catch a glimpse of someone who would actually tell me what was going on. At 8:30am the doctor finally came in. She took one look at Alex, who by this time was busying himself getting packed up to go, and one look at me, and declared I looked worse than he did. Well yeah, after 4 hours of sleep over the course of 48, what would you expect? I was total mush.
I had everything explained to me, finally. His x-ray didn’t look normal so she told the nurse to let me know they were holding his water and giving him blood work instead… but the nurse didn’t. Had they done that I would have been able to tell them he looked better and saved him from being poked unnecessarily. Apparently the doctor had also requested a bed for me so I could get some sleep… Lovely.
So we were sent home.
Then I got sick.
I completely lost Thursday to sleep and, well, bed. There was NO WAY I was going back to the damned hospital.
So here I am. Both of us are better and almost back to normal. So what did I miss?
As much as I want to wish all the moms out there a Happy Mother’s Day *waves to you all* I’d like to say something else.
Happy children’s day.
Because without them we wouldn’t be blessed with the privilege of being called a mom.
Fred, Chris, Alex, I love you. 🙂
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. 😛
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?
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.
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.
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?
Coffee. There will always be coffee.
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?
lindaghill.com 