It all changes in a blink of an eye

Last week my afternoon students were immature and disrespectful to put it mildly. It’s a challenge with any group of ‘at-risk-youth,’ (aka high school dropouts ranging from students who were homeschooled since the womb and former felons) to create a community and break old habits. It’s even more of a challenge when five of your students all attended the same previous alternative school AFTER all attending the same high school (and getting kicked out).

Recipe for disaster.

Or, like today: recipe for amazingness.

I’m not sure if I passed their hazing test, but they all seemed surprised when I let them out early. They stood outside the door and talked about ‘ballin” and I was able to heckle one young man who clearly wasn’t dressed to play a game of pickup basketball. It’s about connecting, and somehow my GIANT white-girl-former-basektball-playerness was enough to hang with them for a minute. And one dude even said that he learned something about himself today, which is a miracle all around.

Sure they’re chatty, and sometimes off topic, and I wanted to poke my eyeballs out last week, but it can all change in a minute.

Like, how, at 12:50 today, my friend’s mom died.

Yesterday she was alive. And today she died. And my friend went from having a sick mom, ciorrosis of the liver, given 5 months to live (which was changed to 5 days in the span of less than a week), to not having a mom…planning a funeral…all the emotions attached to the death of a parent.

Two extremes. In the blink of an eye.

Adoption Reunion: Meeting my Great-Uncle

The beautiful thing about technology, is that it has opened up the possibility for reunion with my biological family. Starting way back in 2005, when I looked up my 1/2 sister on Myspace and contacted her, I have had an online reunion with biologicla family members. And the family circle widened even further when Facebook came into play. So, a few years ago (I think? the math is getting kinda fuzzy in my head), my great-uncle (maternal grandfather’s younger brother) reached out to me on Facebook and we hit it off. Which was SO refreshing, since I haven’t yet hit it off with my maternal side of the family. His older brother, (my grandpa) is kinda weird and hard to get to know, and chain-smokes more than a chimney, and is obsessed with Mayan calendars (haven’t called to see about his current obsession since the world didn’t end). We just…didn’t click. But Great-Uncle and I seem to have a very similar worldview, way of writing online, and from Day 1 it seemed completely…well…NATURAL!

So, we’ve corresponded via message and he loves seeing pictures of his great-great nephew, but lives all the way up in the great white North and doesn’t make it down to Seattle that often. Until last week. He was in town for 36 hours and we had bantered before about meeting up so he could finally give my son a hug, but I wasn’t sure the short time-frame would work with his schedule. Unlike my grandpa/grandma, he offered to drive to my work and meet me for lunch because he wanted to meet us. For those of you who don’t know, the drive from where he was up north of Seattle, to the Eastside, in traffic probably took a good 2 hours. AND THEN he would drive all the way back to Canada, get on a ferry, and go home. Yeah, my great-uncle rocks the socks, because he basically drove 4 hours out of his way to see me and meet Potamus.

And, by the look on my kiddo’s face, we clearly had a great time!

It’s funny, though, the day I met my great-uncle, I learned that my adoptive great-uncle had died.

The world is strange.

Genetics & Medical History

For the longest time I  was able to check the “I don’t know” box on medical history forms at various doctor offices. The naivete and bullheadedness of my youth left me feeling like “fuck adoption, the genes don’t matter, I am invincible” and I smugly filled in the forms with a giant scrawled “adopted” and let the doctor scratch his head as what to do with that information. I felt like not having a medical history meant that I didn’t have a medical history.

But that was less ‘ignorance is bliss’ as it was an ostrich with its head in the sand. Because of course I have a medical history. We all do. I simply did not know mine.

And then I hit reunion, and slowly I learned things like: my depression isn’t me being a bad or melancholy person, it is genetic. So is my asthma. And the inexplicable fainting spells from 12-17 are also genetic, and could have saved my younger 1/2 sister years of tests for epilepsy if she had been raised with me and seen me go through & grow out of them.

Today I was reminded of the scary power of genetics, in a text from my n-father that read: “your cousin Trina died, she was 40, of a pulmonary aneurism.”

A quick phone call revealed that a great- aunt died of a cordial aneurism at 42, and some uncle of an aneurism, as well. Apparently this woman, my cousin, was overweight (check) and asthmatic (check) and thought she was having trouble breathing from her asthma, went in for a CT scan and flat-lined in the chamber and wasn’t able to be resuscitated.

He said, “I just wanted you to know. You’re family. And this is genetic.”

Grinch No More: A Mama story

Talk about heart growing four sizes in the past 9.5 months. Seriously. While I wasn’t necessarily always a hard-hearted grinchy type person, I rarely batted an eye at sad stories in the news or books or movies. In fact, there was a time that I prided myself on never cryting during movies (especially not during Titanic, because WE ALL SAW THAT COMING, since, it was, based on history, after all). At one point I even felt that crying could only be accomplished when reading a few key essays from Chicken Soup for the Soul, cheesy, I know. Perhaps my grinchiness was actually due to the fact that I felt so much sadness (depression?) inside, that if I let myself spontaneously cry, I felt as though I might never stop crying, and I’d still be sitting in my childhood bedroom sobbing, as a 30something adult (because, as a teen, that was as far as I could really imagine).

But since Potamus came bursting onto the scene, breaking down all of my heart-walls, I have actually found myself drawn to sadness…not as much in a must-have-catharsis-because-my-sadness-is-so-bottled-up way, but more of a genuine curiosity in relating and sitting and mulling over the place this emotion has in the world, as well as working on boundaries of sitting with sadness and feeling other people’s sadness through empathy, but also not carrying their burden inside myself, because I have my own sadness, and their sadness is not mine to carry.

As I was perusing my favori Parent Section of Huffington Post, I came across an article entitled: Lots of Tears With Less Than a Few Months to Live, where a woman writes about her experience blogging, with stage IV breast cancer, with only a few months to live…as a mother of a sweet girl Niomi.

I haven’t ventured to her blog, as the article left me struck with sadness, and my boundary is to only go as far as I feel like I can still keep my life-preserver and leave the sadness when I feel like I am drowning.

Two quotes struck me:

I will never get over my fears of not being there for Niomi as that is what truly scares me to death, but until the day comes, I will live each day to the fullest. I will instill in her the most valuable lessons I can. I will teach her to be strong, to give her advice through letters, through videos and even through our little talks while she’s falling asleep at night. But for now, we live day by day and that takes my fears away.

and

Can you believe I won’t know the season finale of Grey’s Anatomy, Private Practice and Parenthood? UGH. Now, that sucks. Hopefully they know these things in Heaven.

Initially I was a little embarassed about admitting that the sadness of missing a TV show, but it was so refreshingly honest and real and a great metaphor for missing all those little, mundane, real moments that we take for granted. Of course, as I go home and watch our DVR’d episode of Parenthood, tonight, with Boof, I will think of this woman who is dying of the same cancer that the character Kristina is diagnosed with.

But most gut-wrenching, is her explanation of how she is going to live moment-to-moment with her daughter. While hopefully no cancer is looming on my horizon, I got to thinking about the loss of mother, from a child’s or infant’s perspective. Does Niomi understand what is about to happen in the very-near future? Does she see and experience these moment-to-moments with her mama in a way that will stick with her somatically and emotionally until she is a very old woman?

Before Potamus, I believed that if I died, people would simply go on. I often wondered about what it would be like to simply cease to exist (not so much in a suicidal way). And I know, with my head, that Potamus would go on…everyone does, in their own way, but how can I go on?

Maybe that’s a weird statement. And maybe it’s selfish, but I wonder…if I was dying, how would I feel about going on without seeing Potamus grow up? I would be sad that he would grow up without me, but I think much of my sadness is on my end, around not wanting to miss his milestone moments.

 

Thoughts?

Tiny Beautiful Things: A Review in Dreams

Holy shit my dreams have been intense and seemingly completely fucked-up lately. I blame the book Tiny Beautiful Things, which I purchased from Kindle after finishing Cheryl Strayed’s last book. This one is a compilation of advice columns that she wrote under the pseudonym Sugar. Some of these Dear Sugar columns can still be read over on The Rumpus. The advice she gives is raw, based on her own life experiences, and her no nonsense tell-it-like-she-sees-it mentality, it was a quick read (though I found myself taking breaks in order to process all the advice and stories I encountered.

The stories I encountered in her book did not leave my psyche upon entering dreamland. In one night I had 4 terrifying dreams, including:

1. A dream where I was sleeping in a dream and my father-in-law came in, spooned me for awhile, and then left when he heard my husband get home. His creeping into my room woke me up, and my dream self pretended to be asleep in order for him to go away sooner. Upon waking I felt very much like a little girl who had been molested (though I have no history of sexual abuse in my past).
2. A dream where my husband was sexually assaulted by a mentally retarded girl wearing a green shirt. He was tied to a chair when she raped him, and there were many people around, like what you would see at a college frat party.
3. A dream where my grandma and I visited a museum where the first room was full of mummies and decorated with bones and skulls in designs (I partially blame this on a travel channel show featuring such a place), and I was afraid to look around and we walked into another room which was similarly decorated with taxidermied animals, duck wings and antlers, until finally we made it to the part of the museum we came for…which was a room full of balloons and bouncy balls. WTF?
4. Perhaps the scariest of all…a dream where I pulled up to a park, was listening to the radio and finishing a snack before I got Potamus out of his carseat to go play. When I did turn the car off and go to get him out of the carseat, I realized that his head had gotten stuck in the straps and he had strangled. If I hadn’t been sitting there calmly eating a snack he might have lived. I called 911 and saw myself dissociate while  I did CPR, but he did not live.

Jesus, 4 intense dreams involving sex and death all in one night was a little too much for me. In the daylight I very much enjoy reading her frank advice to people struggling with all sorts of topics, but it entering into my dream-world is a little too much. Perhaps my next book choice will be something with a little…lighter…material?

What should I read next? Any good suggestions?