loriestories

Moving has been the start of an absolute whirlwind of activity – work activity, social activity, nesting activity, etc etc. It’s to the point where I frequently say I don’t have time for something and I mean it. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it takes some getting used to for sure. There is work stuff and work stuff and work stuff, poker and pool and volleyball and karaoke and picnics and dinners out and kids’ birthday parties and the dog park and seriously, I have had barely any idle time since we came crashing into this pretty new town on which I currently have a dreamy and desperate crush. That was kind of the whole point of moving, to have Stuff to Do, but holy crap, I really had no idea we’d have this much Stuff to Do. It’s pretty great.

So last Tuesday I found myself with a rare couple of hours to myself with absolutely! nothing! planned! and somehow I spent a great deal of that time making a fatter version of myself for Rock Band. We’re really into Rock Band, see, and lately it had been bugging me that my little rocker girl was just way too skinny. Sure, I’d like to be skinnier but the fact is that I’m not, and plus my little rocker girl had no boobs. So I made a new one, and I made her fatter, big and curvy and luscious. And then I had to make some money to buy some better rock clothes, so I queued up a song list of full chick rock because Seth wasn’t home to make me do boy songs, woo! and we were off to the races.

How come I’m always doing something really loud when bad news comes in on the phone? Seriously.

So my cell phone rang, and I ignored it, because I was way too busy wailing on “Spiderwebs.” Seriously! That’s ironic, right? So then our newly-installed, can’t-quite-remember-how-to-use-it landline rang, and it was such a foreign concept to have a landline ringing that I ignored it for a second, and then I was all like, “A LIKELY STOOOOOOOOOOORY BUT LEAVE A MESSAGE AND I’LL CALL YOU BACK,” and then it kept ringing and I thought, hmm, I’d better get that. So I paused the game and dove across the couch to snag the non-caller-ID-enabled corded $5 cheapie phone and one of my sisters was on the line, breathless, scared and sad.

“Ginny called and Dad’s in the hospital and Mom’s in Richmond and it’s something with his heart and I don’t know what to do I’m supposed to teach a class in fifteen minutes and what’s going on? Do you know what’s going on?”

I was too far away. I was useless, utterly useless and helpless and impotent. All I could do is work the phones, so that’s what I did. I called Mom in Richmond, I called Ginny at the hospital, I called Sammi in class, I called Jamie in Westover. I got all the data I could and tried to calmly relay it and help everyone feel calm and empowered and then I made the rounds again, sitting hours away on my new kitchen counter with that crappy phone in my hand.

And as my mother blamed her business travel and Ginny paced the hospital halls and Sammi and Jamie worried separately then together, I sat on that counter and blamed myself. I have placed so much of my confidence in my ability to know what to do, to help my family when they need it, to help with planning and staying calm and details and logic and order, and due to what seemed like a completely selfish decision, I was sitting on a kitchen counter three hours away and there was, quite literally, nothing else I could do. I felt awful. I felt like I had abandoned my family.

Dad definitely had a heart attack. His main coronary artery had a 90% blockage, and two other arteries are also blocked. Ginny and the hospital staff saved his life. I sat on the kitchen counter and made useless phone calls, probably more for my own peace of mind than for anyone else’s. He had an angioplasty, they used a stent to open the blockage, he spent a couple of days in the hospital, and now he’s at home. I’ve talked to him a few times and he sounds great, says he feels twenty years younger. They will be scheduling a double bypass surgery for the other blockages in a few weeks.

Everyone else went home, but I haven’t yet. I’m so torn because I love them and want to be with them, but I have no time off from my job yet, I’m scheduled up to my eyeballs for the next few weeks (mostly work, but other things too), and it feels like there’s nothing for me to do. I’m getting conflicting messages about whether I should be there and it’s hard, because I’m far enough away that the trip is kind of a big deal, but not so far that it’s unreasonable. And yet, though I’m calling a lot and checking in and thinking about them constantly, I haven’t gone. Instead I sit here feeling useless and making excuses.

Hello to you, my dear friends and family, stalkers and creepers, exes and lost loves and regular readers and random passersby. A lot has happened since we last spoke, so much in fact that I hardly know where to begin. But I’ve been feeling that itchy urge to write here again, and here I sit in the fading light of day, with my love and my practice daughters downstairs building Lego cities, my dog and my cats snoozing on the furniture, music in the background, a keyboard and a white page in front of me. And it’s so different from the last time I wrote.

Spring was lousy. It was miserable and awful and I don’t even really want to talk about it, but I’ll need to talk about it a little bit so you know how it laid the foundation for what was to come. I used to be really into establishing superlatives – my worst birthday, my best year, my worst season, my best month, and so on. I can’t do it anymore. Spring sucked, but I don’t really know if it sucked more or less than the previous spring. Nobody died this spring, so in that sense it was better. But on the other hand, this was the spring when I realized I was drowning. It was not a sudden realization; in fact, it came up so gradually that by the time I could give it a name, it was nearly too late. I was out so far that no one could see me. My feet couldn’t find the ground, my legs were too tired to keep kicking, my arms were leaden weights, my lungs and ears and eyes were filling with water and it was rapidly closing over my head. Maybe no one knew. Maybe everyone knew. It doesn’t really matter now.

So among a million other sucky things, I came down with mono, which is stupid in the one sense because hello, I’m thirty years old and that ought to be too damn old for mono. But it isn’t. It wasn’t life-threatening, but it was absolutely debilitating for me. I spent nearly a month at home, isolated and lonely and miserable and more exhausted and sick than I’ve ever been in my life. I had a lot of time to think. And as I came around the corner and began to recover, I slowly realized that I was drowning. Mono wasn’t the cause – it was a symptom.

And once I finally got it together enough to realize I was drowning, the answer was simple. Find solid ground.

So I did.

It would make a far more dramatic, better story if I told you how hard it was to find solid ground, but seriously, it wasn’t that hard. The answers were right in front of me the entire time, and once I could see them, it was fairly easy to choose them. And though those choices happened to also be beneficial for others, it’s important to know that I made them for myself.

I talked to the people who matter and support me. I quietly stepped out of the way of the people who didn’t. I found a new job and a new house in a new city, and all the other pieces began to fall into place.

I am calm and centered these days. I am effective and productive at work. I am happier than I’ve been in a long time. And I can’t wait to tell you the rest of the story.

I’m still writing it, and I hope you’ll be here to read it with me.

This is me, waving.

Once upon a time, I read an article about why cats and dogs don’t get along that completely fascinated me and has stuck with me ever since. What it basically boiled down to was a fundamental mutual misunderstanding. Cats and dogs, it seems, communicate using body language that in many cases has opposite meanings, and so they’re always misunderstanding one another and can never seem to get it straight.

Before I had a multi-species household, it was simply an interesting article. But now that I’m a mama to a dog and two cats, it’s a struggle I see playing out on a daily basis. We’ll have to eliminate Marco from this observation, as he is somewhat atypical. He might be a cat on the outside, but on the inside he’s one part snugglebug, one part lap dog, and one part wusspuss. So we’ll just talk about Abby and Bean.

I am pretty sure Abby and Bean would like to be friends. Ever since we brought Bean home, Abby has made a point of putting herself in his general vicinity, which in Abby’s world means she’s probably interested in a friendship. Bean, of course, would like to be friends with every single living creature in the entire universe, and so OF COURSE he wants to be friends with Abby. He wants to be BEST BEST BESTEST FRIENDS FOREVA OMG.

But they just can’t seem to get on the same page about things, no matter how hard they try. And of course, in addition to the dog-cat misunderstanding, Bean is still just a puppy and is kind of still learning how his legs work and why it’s not good to walk across people’s faces and stuff. So when they’re trying to hang out and make friends, Bean’s laid-back ears mean he’s feeling submissive and gentle. Abby’s mean YOU BETTER NOT FUCK WITH ME, MISTER. Bean’s waggly tail means he’s alert and interested and friendly. Abby’s twitching tail means she’s wary and feeling a little dangerous. Bean shows his belly to indicate submission. Abby shows hers to indicate she’s ready to fuck you up. And so on.

Poor Bean either gains points for tenacity or loses them for stupidity, because Abby has actually clawed his face on more than one occasion, and he still approaches her every single day as though maybe today she’ll want to play with him and hang out and be pals. And every day, she mistakes his friendly overtures as threatening acts, and reacts accordingly. And then Abby does what Abby does when she doesn’t like or understand a situation, and she peaces out. And of course while she’s running off to show she’s had enough, Bean thinks that means it’s time to play chase and he’s finally won himself a friend. And so on.

I tend to let them try to work it out themselves because seriously, it’s not like I can fix it. But it’s been something I’ve been paying attention to and kind of thinking about a lot lately. In life I sometimes find myself in a situation with other people where one of us is a dog and one’s a cat and we’re trying to form a friendship but we keep misunderstanding each other. And it’s rare, but when it happens, I really struggle to figure it out. Is it possible that, like Bean, I just don’t have the right communication tools to make myself understood?

I’ve decided I shouldn’t wait until my loved ones die to write them love letters. It’s your turn.

This year was supposed to be so much better, right? I remember the end of last year, swaying with the crowd, singing “Start Wearing Purple” like it would become the anthem of 2010, the very essence of our hopes and dreams. You were across the room from me but I didn’t feel lonely or left behind. You were checking in, we made eye contact, and I thought of how much I loved you, how lucky I was to have you, and how much ass we were going to kick this year. You’d fought your way to the front of the stage and the Gogol girls were pouring champagne into your mouth and I stood back, to the side, and I was happy there. It was fine. It was as it should be.

So this year, it’s not better so far. I am not sure if it’s worse. It has certainly been a test, or perhaps a series of tests – a gauntlet, I think sometimes, that I must run at full speed if I am to survive. The problem is that I’ve never been a very good runner, and though I try my very best, I am so slow, and so weak, and so scared, and so unsure of my ability to make it through to the end. Sometimes I think I will never catch up to you, much less keep up with you. Sometimes it is very hard to see to the end.

I am not easy to love on the best days, and these have certainly not been my best days. I know what it costs you sometimes to stick around, and you know I fear that I can never repay that debt. I worry that by the time I am better, by the time I am able to be the partner you need, that it will be too late. But through all of that, through the nights when I keep you up coughing and feverish, the days when I drag you down with my worries, there is this:

I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you in a way you have never been loved. It is a love that carries no conditions, that does not judge, that does not depend on good behavior or a positive attitude. It is a love that persists through the worst weather and the most infuriating challenges. It is a love that is patient and pure enough to watch from the back of the room while those Gogol girls feed you champagne. It can embrace that effervescence, can give you the time and space you need to enjoy it, can even share it at parties sometimes. Those girls won’t build a home with you. Those girls won’t take care of you when you’re feeling bad. Those girls won’t fold your underwear, won’t carry your babies to bed. Those girls won’t be around when money is tight, when you hate yourself and the world a little, when you’re angry with them, when you feel frustrated and powerless, when nothing seems to be going right.

This one will. This girl always, always will.