Hodge-podge Edition

Five things I want to tell you (updates and downloads of momentary thoughts from my currently chaotic brain) in no particular order. Kind of like what you'll get if you open up one of my kitchen drawers (don't ask):

1. Ethan has been dropped off at camp.

Ethan, excited at camp drop-off

Five whole days apart. I am missing him. And yet? Wow, is the house quieter and more peaceful.

Every now and then something happens and I realize yet again that my son who doesn't have autism is actually higher maintenance and more exhausting to parent much of the time. Go figure.

2. And Jacob? About to do the same with him on Tuesday, a return to the wonderful ASD Jewish camp program he went to last summer. The one I had to drive like a bat out of hell up to last summer, a full day early, to pick him up and then race Hurricane Irene back down to New York.

Please let this year be a repeat of the wonderful time he had last year, but can we just skip the hurricane emergency and accompanying parental anxiety? Thanks in advance, gods of Autism. And extreme weather.

3. My mother is doing... better. I have heard that the swelling around her eye has gone down considerably. It was so hard to not be with her yesterday, but I had to take Ethan across 2 states to camp, and then come back, and I just didn't have it in me to then travel an hour each way in an opposite direction. (Many thanks to Suzanne who lives one town over, and came to visit my mom in my absence. True friend.)

I will spend today with her. Hopefully she can go home. Even if that "home" is no longer a true home (sob), but just her nursing home bed, it's better than a hospital one.

Mom is constantly anxious about her glasses, which I will be bringing with me today when I see her. But she forgets. This is the tragedy of my mother's cognitive impairment. In the moment she is so with it: bright and connected and funny and kind. But her short-term memory, her ability to make things told to her stick? Is just... GONE.

And so she is constantly anxious and worried and upset about mysteries that have no need to be mysteries if she could just remember. But she can't.

I HAVE her glasses. They have been fixed. I will bring them to her today. She has been given this information at least twenty times in the last two days. But I am positive she will wake up this morning not knowing where her glasses are, and worrying that they are completely broken and she will never get them back.

Number 342 of the things that are breaking my heart.

4. I am having a really hard time right now with all that's going on (and I'm not even telling the half of it). Anxious. I do not feel anxiety often. Which is a good thing because I tolerate it REALLY poorly. I am jumpy, twitchy and more distracted than usual. My ADD goes into hyper-drive. And I get really cranky. And negative.

And I write things like this:

When you've been spending time with your sad, injured mother, you tend to think ungenerous thoughts about strangers as you walk around streets of New York, like: "How come YOU get to stroll down Broadway chatting with someone who is clearly your sister, with your twin, odd, ungainly gaits while my Mother has to lie in a hospital bed with a baseball sized purple goose egg swelling her eye shut?" 

The brain screams NotFairNotFairNotFair as I and everyone else just walk about on our daily routines, oblivious to the manifold disasters that lurk around each bend. Every able-minded and -bodied person is just one misplaced step away from becoming a member of the underclass injured, the invisibles who shuffle or wheel among us oblivious, lucky folks.

See? I am just SO much fun right now. (Yes, it IS appropriate to start feeling sympathy for my husband right about now.)

5. Squirrel! ... Shiny! ... Was I going to say something else i was going to tell you? Never mind. I'll remember later. You don't mind a call around midnight, right? Or better yet - something to post about tomorrow.

High Anxiety

I'm not generally a terribly anxious person. In fact, sometimes I go the opposite way and roll too much with the punches, fail to react with the alacrity necessary to a given situation.

And while the uber-anxious among you may be thinking "Gee that's great, bully for you!" I have to say there's a considerable down side.  Because when I AM actually anxious? It freaks me the hell out.

My tolerance for anxiety is kind of zilch.

So when I was single and dating and feeling all anxious about a relationship that was neither here not there? I would often push the other person until they broke up with me, just so I could have some resolution and therefore a drop in my anxiety level. Of course then I would get all mopey and depressed. But depression was much more comfortable to me than anxiety, and THAT I could live with. Not exactly a winning strategy.

So lately due to a bunch of converging crap in my life, I have been feeling more than my usual share of anxiety, and frankly that is making me, well, anxious. But this time there's no ambivalent boyfriend or girlfriend to pick a fight with, to quickly resolve this thing.

I'm certainly not going to speed my mother toward the purchase of the farm just to relieve myself of the jitters around not knowing her actual expiration date.

I'm not going to fire my kids and replace them, even though some other, more neurotypical ones would be easier to manage. I'm kind of attached to them, what with the loving them with my complete heart and soul and all.

And now my Aunt Eva - my mother's brother Walter's wife, mother to my beloved cousins Jessie and Annette - is not doing well.  

Mom and Eva enjoying some fresh air

I had moved my mother out to do her sub-acute rehab stint on Long Island precisely because Eva was in this same nursing center. They had been two doors down from each other for the first week, and were finally made roommates this weekend.

And now Eva is gone from the joint, and back in the hospital. ICU. Pneumonia and what-all.

Damn.

I can see I'm just going to have to live with these icky, jiggly, jangly, unsettled feelings for some time to come.

(You might want to purchase some Ben & Jerrys stock, because I have a feeling that consumption around here is going to go through the roof.)