Don't Ruin It By Talking
I am sitting here watching Hope play on the floor with a set of glass marbles from the Chinese Checker board set. If I wanted to play "teacher" I could sit down there and try to show her how to play the game, but being the understanding mother that I am, I can see that if she wanted to learn the game she would say so. She is content to arrange them, rearrange them, find little nooks and crannies in the room she can push them through or drop them down and pick them up again. She pushes them all together into piles organizing them into colors and then pushing them into shapes. At one point she was saying she was Marlin the clownfish and these were her eggs, her Nemos. Thanks a ton, Disney. Now she is stuffing them into one of her daddy's stray socks from the laundry basket full of socks the dryer ate the mates to. All the while she is talking to herself, or someone. Maybe an imaginary friend.
It would seem a "teachable moment" to get down there and use them as counters or try to show her some math with them, but it would ruin the "teachable moment" she is teaching me. Sometimes the best kind of lesson you can give them is by leaving them alone with their own thoughts and imagination.
The same could be said for constantly standing over Logan and "helping" him with his work. Today he has decided that Jumpstart 5th Grade seemed a good idea and was trying to complete a crossword puzzle by answering questions. The whole game is divided into rooms such as Geography and Art and you read about different things on the globe and about different pieces of art. The answers to the crossword are always found in some other section of the game. You have to go hunt it down. This takes quite a bit of resourcefulness at times, figuring out which section to go hunt the answer down in. He constantly wants help. What he really wants is for me to do all the leg work and guessing at where we might find it and then once I get there he manages to pull the answer out of a paragraph or caption. My goal isn't for him to know what river dumps into what body of water or really about what artist painted what picture. I want him to be able to think about the question and deduce on his own where and how he will get the answer. I tried to explain to him that when I need to know something I don't call my mother up and ask her to look it up for me. (Sometimes that is a lie. I call my mother and ask her lots of things.) However, the point is that if he wants to know he needs to do the work to find out.
Last night Savannah whined and cried wanting Logan to get her through the hard parts of a PS2 game. I wouldn't let him do it. No one understood why. I simply stated that when Logan was six no one played the game for him and it wasn't going to happen for her either. If she wants to win she will have to do the work. Period.
Posted by gwendolyn on March 29, 2004 at 01:52 PM
Strange Days
Frequently I drive past the hospital I lived in for several wretched weeks of my life. Each time I do I look up at the line of windows on the third floor and though I cannot make out which of the regular third floor rooms was mine I feel that there may be someone looking down, from one of those rooms, or from the long windows at the end of the hallway, just as I did hour after hour, pacing the halls praying to either be well or just die.
I think of all the people up there just struggling to breathe as if the world sits on their chest. I feel how hard it is. I hear the machines. I see the lines form on their families' faces from nights of no sleep and the realization that they cannot take any of the pain away or bear any of the burden for the ones they love. I have seen the same lines on my families' faces.
I realize even more clearly each time that even with all of the people you love around you, when you are struggling every second of every minute of every hour of every day just to cope with the pain and how tired you are and how you just don't want to breathe anymore, you are still very much alone. No one can fight this fight for you. The scary thing about death is that when you die you die alone no matter how fast or slow it goes, no matter who is holding your hand. They can't do it for you and they can't go with you. Even though I could not have struggled through what I did without Terry right there with me and the thought of needing to get home to my babies, every time I had to go through those swinging doors alone I felt the reality of how alone that really is.
Then I look up at the room just above the Emergency room sign. It never fails, I always slow down to look. That was my room for the better part of my stay. During the day I look to see if windows are open. Signs that someone is there now. At night I can see in. I see the television, I see the lights, I see the doorway. Each time I say the same few things in my head..."Maybe you are watching me drive by the way I watched the rest of the world drive by. Maybe you, like me, were so very tired and scared and in pain. I don't know you, but I feel you. I know you are there. Alone. Struggling. You may not realize it but I know you, I care about you. I hope you get better."
Tonight as I was driving home from watching a movie at the theater I passed the hospital and someone was in my room. A lump formed in my throat as I remembered that very soon I might be moving away from here. It would seem insane to most people that I don't welcome the opportunity to run as far away from the place as I can possibly get, but for me it has the opposite effect now. I used to get panic attacks when I walked through the front doors. The smell of the place would bring tears to my eyes. The thought of being inside the building would make me sick to my stomach.
Time has passed. I now feel like it stands as a reminder to me of how strong I actually am. It reminds me to be humble for the things we all take for granted every second of our lives. It reminds me every single time I pass it that all of those seconds I fought to breathe and walk and talk and just sleep through the excruciating pain were all monumental accomplishments for me. I felt like I was saying "Fuck You, Death" each time I made it through another day there.
My scars might be disturbing and make most people squeamish but sometimes when I look in the mirror I don't see all the ugliness I usually do. Sometimes I see strength and endurance. Everyday in the mirror I see a reminder of just how precious and fragile life is. They will be a constant reminder of the struggle between life and death no matter how far away I am from those faces pressed against the glass at the end of the hallway on the third floor. These are my battle scars.
However, never driving past that hospital again and remembering how strong I was and how many obstacles I overcame will be strange. Never waving up to all those people who just might be looking out and feeling like no one even knows they exist makes me sad. Never going back and seeing all the people who took care of me and who cleaned me up and smiled at me even when I couldn't smile back, that will be hard. Not all of them tried to kill me. Some of them saved my life. They wouldn't let me quit. I will miss some of them. I had always thought that someday when the smoke cleared I might go back and volunteer there in some way. Pay it forward. Now I may not get the chance.
I know it is all very strange.
Posted by gwendolyn on March 23, 2004 at 02:39 AM
Moving On
You know, writing here has been happening less and less. I guess because life has been happening more and more and I have less time to rehash it all before more stuff happens.
So one way or another we are leaving our apartment in 30 days. I can't really give too many more details than that yet because I don't know many more. We pay too much to put up with the stupid shit that happens around here. We expected way more than this.
I feel sad about that. I really looked forward to living here again. What a shame.
I took savannah to GS yesterday. It was at a church that donated a room and across the street there was a house for sale and it was in a so so neighborhood, one that looks promising but has ghetto written all over it and so I called the realtor number on the sign and left a message. Then I had to sit there in the car for and hour and a half waiting for her meeting to let out, and we read The Hobbit, but this man with really long hair came riding by on a bike with a plastic carton tied to the back and he looked at me funny...hatefully. So I immediately rolled up the windows and turned the truck on incase i needed to drive away and that made him look meaner. Then I watched him for an hour as he went through the people's trash across the street from the house for sale and they had dumped a bunch of large furniture out on the curb to be taken away and he found a can of white spray paint and a wooden box of some sort then proceeded to spray the inside of the box and stick his head into it to huff the fumes for an hour. That is when I realized that I was going to have to give up trying to be happy here in Ft. Lauderdale, because the only houses we can afford are in neighborhoods like that where old weird vagrants are huffing paint fumes in the garbage across from your house.
As I am writing this, the realtor called me about that house. They want $249,000.00 for it. They are insane.
Posted by gwendolyn on March 17, 2004 at 04:26 PM
Battle Of The Bands
I taught the children to mosh today. It was part of our unit study on how to drown out the next door neighbor's stereo. Granted, Sex Pistols and Misfits songs aren't really ones I want the kids learning the words too, however, I think the stereo combined with all their shrieks and giggles was loud enough to drown out any of the lyrics you can barely understand anyway. There is just something cute about Savannah screaming "Mommy play Ruby Soho again, again!" Wait until I tell her she was a Rancid fan at the age of six.
So after another day of The Great House Hunt, Charlie Brown I am mentally tapped out once again. My greatest fear yesterday was the prospect of living within spitting distance of my entire family. Even the bad ones. We decided this morning that my comfort level was indeed an issue and ruled out moving across the Ohio border. I like the idea of safe anonymity the west side of the big loop provides much betterer.
So now that we have established exactly how much of the bank's money they will let us spend on a property and realized that you cannot get jack shit in Florida for that amount we have ruled out the idea of trying pacify ourselves into buying something here with that. Besides, the issues aren't just with the neighbors. Ft. Lauderdale is pretty and there is the beach and all that but it doesn't change the fact that the people just suck royally. I feel like I am robbing my children of a childhood by keeping them here. We can't afford to go buy a secluded house in a quiet friendly neighborhood, not that I know of any here. Davie would be nice because of the horse farms but that is even more pricey when you start factoring any amount of actual land into the cost. The cards keep pointing to moving North. I am so afraid that we will get up there and then his work situation will not go well and we will be stuck, and we will have fucked up a perfectly good situation we have with that.
He asked me right before he dozed off tonight where I saw myself when I closed my eyes. The problem with that is that when I close my eyes I see myself in a lot of different places. I don't have that happily ever after in one spot mentality. My dreams aren't quite the same as everyone else's.
I know that I could spend the next several years watching my children play in a real yard. Somewhere where I won't have to worry constantly that I'm not going have anything left over after bills next month. I know that things would start going my way really quickly if the job situation and the move up there went well. I know that the children would be so much happier if they could see their family sometimes, as would I. I know that it would be so much easier for us to have friends there, to go out once in awhile and remember what it feels like to be a couple. I so want it all to work out for the best. I just wish I knew what the best was. I wish I had more control over what was happening. I wish I could relax and sleep.
Posted by gwendolyn on March 11, 2004 at 12:55 AM
Damned If I Do...
I am so incredibly tired, but I can't get to sleep. I think I just have so much to think about I can't turn my brain off.
News: After several complaints, meetings, and phone conversations with property management here, we are being released from our obligations to fulfill our lease basically because the property management cannot enforce their own property rules therefore due to circumstances supposedly beyond their control they are in breech of their contract. This would be in reference to the neighborhood of asswipes we live with and the fact that we cannot get the police to make people shut the hell up at 4a.m. on any given weeknight, we can't depend on the neighborhood children (or their psycho parents) to act like civilized people long enough to be within three feet of them and the constant feeling of having to be shut up here inside the apartment out of complete disgust for all living creatures within 100 miles of us. However, if we are going to leave we must give 30 days notice. We need to let them know what we are doing next week. This puts a tremendous amount of pressure on us.
I am struggling with the recent decisions to possibly move house outside of this state altogether. As much as I don't really want to go back north, I know that it is in our financial best interests to do so, should it all work out the way it is supposed to with work. That is always the thing with us though. Nothing goes as it is supposed to. That scares me badly. It is if we were trapped in a snow globe and once in awhile something shakes our whole world up. In order to move forward we are going to have to make changes. Drastic ones. Sacrifices even. This may mean moving back to the midwest where cost of living is extremely affordable and we would be able to pay off our debts easily.
Personally, I dread it. The thought of being that close to so much I don't want to be close to makes me feel ill. That must be why I can't sleep. I really wish there were some other option.
Posted by gwendolyn on March 09, 2004 at 12:50 AM
Multitasking Life
It has been one long week. Terry is gone to Orlando for conference until tomorrow night. Savannah has been spiking a fever of 103.2. I packed her in ice on day two, then took her to Urgent Care. Waited two hours to be seen only to be turned away with absolutely nothing to help her. Back hurts from carrying her around as she turns into a sack of potatoes when she is sick. She is a bit better today. I am going on three days of cleaning up puke and not a lot of sleep. Hope is still sniffling but thankfully no fever. Logan is a huge help but we are having a moment of chaos there too. We are thinking of the possibility of moving back to the Midwest. Being as angry at the human race as Henry is worries me. I call these my Trent Reznor moments. I am having a major one this week. Still, just considering the moving possibilities. I don't know how to make it all work. I just need to keep all my shit together at this point. It is all a lot on my brain right now.
Posted by gwendolyn on March 03, 2004 at 11:00 PM