Endings and Beginnings

 I am glutton for spring and summer.  I begin to suffer toward the end of the summer months; frequent attacks of panic and I feel stiffled and confined, as if the depths of winter had me penned in already.

A few years ago, after living in arctic plains outside Chicago for near 35 years, I decided I had to learn to love the cold.  At least learn to tolerate it enough to get fresh, albeit cold, air made sparkly by north winds dancing around 20 mph.  Anyone else know what 20 mph winds do to the temperature even if it is sunny?  Right, it starts to feel colder.

My experiment, of attempting in embrace the cold, was partly fueled by a need to walk two big, hairy dogs multiple times a day.  And neither one of them care in the least if I am cold.  They live for the temperatures belowing freezing, piles of snow, freezing rain, and oh yeah, pulling me down the sidewalks before they have been cleared of ice and snow.

As you can tell, my forced love of winter made me find a few positives about the cold, but I don't think I am going to trade in my swimsuit and flip flops just yet. 

I've been fortunate this year, the summer of 2024 came early and hasn't wanted to leave.  It was still 60 degrees this morning when I woke, even if it was grey and overcast and rainy and it's Nov. 19th.  I am lamenting the long light filled days and gentle breezes.  Okay, so there was some stiffling heat in July and August, too, and a super hoard of locust due to the convergence of the 7 year brood and the 21 year brood coming round again in the same summer.

No joke, there were some locust (cicada) around for the better part of 3 months that sang loudly and perished in piles under every mature tree in the area.  Eventually the piles of corpses had to be disposed of mostly to prevent house pets from eating too many of them.

This summer I sold my townhouse, moved in with my dad, held out hope that the cubs would make it to the playoffs, but alas, even my 2nd round picks during the playoff games were all eliminated.

Even deep into football season, I don't love it.  I am learning, but I don't love it.

Homefront

 A few months ago an incident with my dog propelled me to move into my high school home with my father.  A widower, with a dog and 4 cats inherited from my mother and sister before their untimely passing.  First the cats went from my sister to my mother, and then from my mother to my father. 

I've been at the house for stretches of time over the past few years to dog and cat sit when my dad went out of town, on vacation, or simply had a late meeting.  

However, the dog incident pushed me into a situation -- where I would live in my old room (now a music room), and my dad would be there.

If you have read anything else on this blog you know I most often go along to get along - most things in life are not important enough to screw up relationships over, and at the end of the day ... leave things well with people.  You never know if it's the last time you will see them.

Already, you dear reader, can see the problem.  I will bend and sway to the breeze of my dad's every whim in order to make him happy and comfortable.

And when someone kisses your ass, it's hard to respect them.  So you pick on them, and say things like, "control your dog," at dawn's early light (okay, not quite, but 7:15a) when your LGD has to bark at the landscapers arriving with weed wackers and lawn mowers.

questionable

 So my dad had a date last night.  And he’s discovered online dating.  I came over to the house tonight and watched him drink a few double vodkas.  He waxed poetic about life, gave me orders to redecorate the upstairs and then yelled at me about how someone working at the company isn’t doing her fair share.

Then he asked me to get him some soup.  After I reheated soup for him, he got a call from a lady on one of the dating sites, so I am sure I’ll be heating up the soup again.

I miss my mom.  I’m trying to be a good supportive daughter and understand that he doesn’t want to be alone, but it’s only been 2 months.

And although he often says he cares about me, he never listens to me for more than one sentence- especially after a few drinks.

I certainly don’t feel supported.

I’m ready to quit everything.  How am I supposed to work full time, take care of this house, and have a life at all?  I had to ask if I could go out to dinner tomorrow night which s for my 21st anniversary in sobriety and he didn’t even ask why I wanted to go out with my friends.

I feel small, petty, bitter.  Lost and alone and not sure how to set some boundaries to improve my life but still honor the promise I made to my mother.

15 minutes

So, I read an article or heard a news story yesterday that writers should write every day.  Seems simple, but I've been slacking on both writing and visual art for about 5 years.  I figured 15 minutes a day was a pretty easy target - the low-hanging fruit, nothing too intense.  I could even write about how hard it is to write sometimes - what pressure, the stress, and painting - forget about it. 

Although I preach process not a product, progress, not perfection - I am convinced if something doesn't look or sound perfect out of the gate then I, or it, is hopeless.

Last night I tried making a toilet cleaning bomb - an easy recipe from Pinterest (yikes) which I should have known might not work.  I was so disappointed when the concoction turned into a type of growing ooze that eventually hardened into something similar to concrete ... I should have taken a photo.  For reference, here is the failed recipe.

I was about to throw everything out, and then I realized - I should just give it another try.  If at first, you don't succeed, and all that.

In other news, my dad is on a date tonight.  He has invited a lady he met on a dating website for "old people," as he describes it.  He's spent a few weeks feeling guilty, ashamed, ambivalent for inviting any woman into his life, but he affirms that "he's just not a person that does well alone."  He wondered out loud if I would be okay with this - and probably had too much to drink and doesn't remember that I said I was okay with it even though I'm really not ready to see my dad with another woman.

Even if she's just a friend or companion, or whatever.  Part of me wants Delilah not to like her because that means more to him than if I like her.  What a petulant child I am, angry and confused.  I want my dad to have friends, and not to be so sad, but I don't want her in my mother's house, looking at her things, petting her cats and dog.  So selfish, I am.

Mother's Day

    I am sure this year will be different, but as long as I can remember, Mother's Day has meant going to the nursery and planting flowers.  Occasionally my family went to a zoo, arboretum, or a botanical garden, but there were always flowers.  Mom picked out the prettiest and most prolific annual plants like begonias, petunias, geraniums, and enlisted the help of mostly me to help her.

    We would spend the day in the yard, get sunburned, or freeze and be soaked, but we would plant flowers.  Even last year, mired by chemotherapy and covid-19 quarantines, we planted flowers.  I never expected it would be the last time we would garden together.  

    When my sister died, Mother's Day was especially hard for Mom, but she persevered and tried to engage with the day, the flowers, and me.  But her heart usually wasn't in it.  I could tell that Angela's absence was a weight on the day even though Ang didn't like worms - in fact, she hated worms and would scream and run away if she encountered one.  She would help us pick out plants, bring them out, but for the most part - Angela wasn't part of the gardening.

    My dad usually didn't really participate either, he would try and take over and my mom and dad would fight.  My dad would turn the day into an assembly line ... taking the fun right away from the planting for my mother.  The fun for her was the quiet conversations, the introductions to each plant, finding the right spots for everything, and trying to keep the livestock (dogs, cats) and night visitors from unplanting the recently immigrated crops.

The fun for her were the stories of the sunflowers from my childhood in Westacres, the aguga in Kansas, and of course, the gardens of her childhood because my mother's family were are gardeners.

Now that she's gone, and not having any children, I don't have anyone to share those memories with - so I am telling you about my mother, and the sunflowers from my childhood, and the aguga from Kansas, and how much I miss my mom.

Last weekend was amazing weather, so my father and I jumped the gun and spent $200 on plants and seeds at Lowes and I went to work with Mark, my best-friend, trying to return the life and love the backyard after a dreadful winter, the winter that my mother went to the hospital on my dead sister's birthday and never left, dying 5 days later.

It was a tough weekend.  I thought all the bad, lonely feelings would go away if I stayed away from stores, people, and television.  Needless to say, that didn't work.  Facebook was the worst.

Leave it to social media to make you feel guilty in your grief for not being grateful for all the time you had with your mom rather than simply missing her on a day you used to spend with her and being mad, mad, mad that your dad won't even let you be sadder than him on Mother's Day.

On a good note, the plants appear to be alive - even after a near frost low last night.  So, with any luck, there will be peas and beans.

Quarantine

 I’m a little late to the party to start writing about the COVID-19 pandemic and it’s impact on life as we know it, but after the recent surreal experience of watching people overrun congress, it’s time.

When all this started it seemed to me like an overreaction, typical gen x’er, my attitude was basically that it would simply stop if I ignored it.

Even after IL issued a stay at home order, and our office converted to a virtual place, come late spring and summer it seemed like the worst was behind us.  In August I started my delayed internship on a behavioural health unit to complete my social work masters degree.

My parents were frightened, but even at 48 I still believed I posed some type of super immunity.  My big concern was bringing the virus to my mother who hasn’t been anywhere except chemotherapy and surgery since March 2020.

No surprise, I got Covid-19 for Thanksgiving and struggled with symptoms long after my quarantine period.  Disturbingly, I learned that the hospital didn’t care If I worked while in my quarantine period as long as I wasn’t visibly sick.

Family Therapy

So, since my sister died my parents asked me to join them in family therapy.  We meet once a month or so.  The family therapist was Angela's therapist when she died.  My parents each see her independently.  If you've been reading for a while you might expect that I had a therapist - so I continue to see her.  Most of what I've worked on in therapy for the last three years has been about letting go of my sister - setting boundaries, limits and simply coping with the craziness her mental illness and drug and alcohol abuse brought with it.

When I look back over the past few year I can see her decline.  Momentary ups with progressively faster declines were the pattern of her life - something like a downhill ski slope. I remember driving her home from the hospital once and saying that she just needed to start over again - and she said she was so tired of starting over.  She was an adult and she didn't want to have to live with her mom and dad and be treated like a child.

Petulant Angela - the Angela that begged me not to tell mom and dad she was drinking because, "it would hurt them so much," and "she just didn't want to stress them out again," whose behavior was designed to tug at my sense of sisterly honor - to remind me of all the times she had kept my secrets. How could I dare to break the solomn sister oath - the oath that's null and void when someone is doing something that could kill them.

But I wanted my sister back.  For years she hadn't trusted me. Hadn't shared the details of her addiction and now she was bringing me back into the fold.  Foolishly, I thought it was because she loved me.  Now I realise, it was because I was one of the only people in her life that hadn't given up.

How much of this can I share in family therapy?  Not much.  My parents are heartbroken and how can I speak ill of the dead?  But I am angry.  I was manipulated and used.

In family therapy my parents talk about dreams they had where Angela comes to them and offers her assurance that she is okay.  She provides encouragement and solace.

She hasn't come to me.  Probably because I am angry.

I feel her sometimes - when I am singing, shopping, buying presents and playing this match three game - Fish Mania.

But she hasn't come to me in a dream.  I only felt her presence strongly once - since her actually inurnment.  Cause I did feel her then, too.

Delilah, her puppy bounded toward me and lept into my lap.  It reminded me so much of Angela I cried out.