Moving Forward

March 20, 2012: The way forward… is looking thick. Mom is due to come home tomorrow. My back is on the fritz, due mainly, I think, to terror of being left alone to deal with Mom. I will be controlling her meds, which she says she agrees to, but which has been an enormous power issue in the past. I will be emptying the commode, helping her every time she gets up or down (which she is now just about able to do, with a walker), dealing with her episodes of breakthrough pain, cooking and running the household, and listening to her shifting stories weave in and out of reality all day long. This last is the most horrifying prospect.

As a mature, rational, capable adult, I have been preparing for all this by 1. Not eating enough, and 2. Developing a huge crush. On the positive side, I am losing what winter weight I had gained, and I wrote an essay I had been meaning to write for some months (as I have been exchanging essays and Torah ideas with the feller I’ve got the crush on).

On the negative side, we have inability to stop obsessing about any and all things, the magnification of feeling and the diminishment of logic that come of eating too little, and a feeling like I’m about to be swamped and drained simultaneously. Which I have felt before, here in the lovely state of New Hampshire where I grew up.

The fact that I grew up here allows simple things like a hill of moss in a forest, a spring breeze, or the expression on another New Hampshirite’s face to bring on waves of feeling and memory that I haven’t noticed in years. Some rediscovered memories, like playing in the soft sunlight in a white pine wood, are welcome. But then there are the others.

I didn’t really enjoy revisiting the feeling of being alone amidst vast, potentially life-threatening needs. This goes back to my mother’s illness and my father’s depression when I was a teenager, and there is nothing like a long look at the spare, frozen fields and marshes of New Hampshire to bring back that alone-in-the-world, no-one-understands-or-cares sensation. (Out of all my old baggage, I realized today, this feeling is probably contributing the most to my crush, as the feller in question is doing things like keeping in touch on Facebook almost every day, praying for my Mom, writing back and forth about things that matter to me, sending me songs he thinks I might like, praising my ideas – all those things that contradict loneliness and feeling invisible. My only concern here is that he is not at all eager to get together in person, which makes me think that he is not interested in a real-world friendship.)

Then there are memories of my parents’ divorce, shortly preceding the illness and depression era. Oh yeah, that felt like the people I cared about most in the world tearing each other apart. I am so glad that I have been able to get more in touch with that memory! What joy! (I had another fun experience that year, which was an enthusiastic correspondence with a young man in another state who, after six months of writing letters that said things like, “I miss you so much! Can’t wait to see you,” got himself a girlfriend and quit writing to me. Unless I quit writing to him first. It was more or less immediate. I would like it to go on record that I did not know until recently that he and my current crush share a first initial and a last name. How weird is that? You can see how the less rational side of my mind comes to be freaking out over the potential for being disappointed here.)

Right now I’ve got a rickety bridge of stoicism over a raging emotional river. I would rather not have to swim. But I know I will.