The Bearable Lightness of Being

This morning my mother called to check on my husband who hasn't been feeling well. Recovering from a sinus infection herself, her voice was still weak and a little broken. When I mentioned it, she said "Yeah, I need to get back to my voice exercises. I'm supposed to be doing them for the rest of my life and I haven't done them in two years."

I chuckled at the irony of her remark and soon we were both laughing, a moment's reprieve from our more serious concerns. And an uplifting reminder that in spite of coping with increasing medical challenges, my mother has a way of making lemonade out of the sourest of lemons.

Last week I took her to the outpatient surgery center for a caudal epidural of steroid, the hoped for remedy to a painful spinal stenosis that undoubtedly worsened this summer after 6 weeks in a cast for a broken foot. Just prior to treatment for the stenosis, I and other family members rotated shifts to take her to a local hospital for a two week regimen of daily IV antibiotic infusions, her only treatment option for a serious infection. Before that she had a partial procedure to improve blood flow to her legs and feet and at the beginning of the year, she tripped and fell on a city sidewalk severely bruising her hand and upper lip where a feint scar remains as a reminder.

Yet, through all of these trials she has maintained her sense of humor, the most recent example evident when she completed paperwork in the over-crowded waiting room of the surgery center. She turned to me when tasked with answering the all-too familiar questions about reproductive health on the medical questionnaire and said, "Sometimes I just want to write 'are you serious?'"

Trying to lighten her mood, I egged her on with "Well, why don't you?" We exchanged a glance and with a wry smile she filled that in as her response to "When was your last menstrual cycle?" When it came to answering "Are you pregnant?" she wrote, "I sure hope not." Admittedly, I suggested that last answer.

We both had a good laugh, a release of tension at the uncertainty of things to come and at least a momentary belief that the only answer that really matters sometimes is that laughter can be the best medicine.

A Metaphor for Mondays

Years ago, I heard the phrase paralysis through analysis, and thought it a fitting description for my inertia brought on by over-thinking. As a chronic thinker, sometimes I'm still seduced into pondering rather than doing. Today seems to be one of those days.

My writerly self had planned to observe the specific details in my neighborhood while out for a morning walk. Instead, with each step those details receded further behind a curtain of mental chatter over something that had occurred yesterday.

While walking, I spoke my insights about the problem bothering me into a hand held recorder that I'd brought along. I'd intended to use it to capture metaphor for all the things I'd see, hear and smell on my outing. And while I suppose this rumination had some therapeutic value, it did nothing to inspire my muse.

Only vaguely do I remember the red and golden hued leaves, the brisk, moist air, the lone landscaper sodding a bare brown yard a few houses down. While I can't recall most of the outer details of my walk, I could write a script about the inner details. It would seem my observational mission for metaphor failed.

Then the last 100 yards before reaching home, I looked down and saw a sprout of leafy green jutting upward through a crack in the pavement. A 2-1/2" shoot rising from beneath the constricting concrete, it stretched skyward, proud and flowering. In stark contrast to its barren surroundings, it pushed past constraint to find an opening into the air and light.

If that isn't a metaphor for a thinking woman's life, I don't know what is.

What I Did During My Summer Vacation

A friend emailed me last week asking "What happened to your blog? Did I miss something?" I told her that life had happened and she'd missed a lot, but that I'd been thinking about it and would post something in the next week. So Patti, this one's for you (and my 6 other followers).

When I started the blog back in March I had planned to write two posts a week. At the time, recently renewed in my commitment to writing and just coming out of the fog from an unexpected job loss, I had all kinds of topics that I wanted to write about and plenty of time to do it. As spring wore on, one post a week seemed more manageable than two and by early May I thought two posts a month were better than four. Shortly after, when I was unexpectedly met with one family crisis after another, those two posts a month were the first to go.

In May our cat had emergency surgery to clean up an abscess, the apparent result of a cat bite. While I was running through the house trying to keep him from leaping onto table tops (the vet admonished jumping was prohibited), or knocking himself unconscious as he head-butted his cone-collar into furniture and walls, we had a couple of human crises: My 82 year old mother fell in a doctor's office and broke her foot while balancing on the other foot in an attempt to put on her shoe, and two days later another family member flew to L.A. to check into rehab.

For the next six weeks, I became a part-time caregiver for my mother, who was confined to a wheelchair for three of those weeks because crutches presented a further danger. Not a person of patience to begin with, it was an exercise in humility and an opportunity to repeatedly practice unhurried acceptance. Things previously taken for granted--pulling a plate out of the cupboard, washing her hair, going to the bathroom--all had to be re-thought and new temporary strategies devised so she could manage when I wasn't there to assist her. When she moved from wheelchair to walker for the final three weeks in the cast, once again new methods of navigation and adaptation were required for both of us.

Shortly after she got her cast off at the end of June, I came down with what I thought was a severe chest cold. After a week with no improvement, the onset of laryngitis and a mild form of pink eye (because it takes a few attempts to get my attention), I went to our family doctor who told me in his thick Indian accent, "You have a full blown bronchial infection." Fourteen days of antibiotics, a moratorium on my usual cycling and gym routines, and a self-imposed house quarantine only slowly relieved my symptoms. It would be another four weeks before I really started to feel better again.

Before I knew it, August arrived with its hellish heat. My sister and her family, who had been making box and furniture drops throughout the summer, now rolled into town to stay after finally selling their tiny, over-priced tract home in the Bay Area. My mother, although regaining her mobility and autonomy, was still experiencing pain and my husband celebrated a milestone birthday, which brought family members in from out of town. There were now new distractions with added family members and always more chores around the house.

By this time I had two writing related projects, for which the seeds had been planted in the spring, now beginning to bear fruit: a writing gig for a regional magazine and a writing program for incarcerated women. At the same time I was revising my resume and searching for teaching jobs.

And writing. Last month, I submitted an essay to a national magazine and entered one of my blog entries in another journal's "Best of the Blogs" contest. In the months since starting the blog, I formed a critique group with another writer and am making final revisions to a poem I'll soon be sending to still other journals. I've had the opportunity to join and serve in a local writer's group and to read my writing in the community.

Importantly, as I've begun to submit my essays, I've learned that publication of writing on a blog is considered by many magazines and journals work "previously published." It doesn't seem to matter if the readership is all of 7 people and not the Huffington Post.

Since my writing has evolved beyond that which I initially conceived, I'm having to revisit this blog's form and purpose. I plan to continue posting on a semi-regular basis my insight and oh-so scintillating observations on life lessons learned, but there probably won't be many more posts like Midlife Midriff's or Slumber Partings.

Still, my loyal friends and readers, I hope you'll hang in there with me. I thank you for your readership and encouragement. For the "hey, what's up with the blog?" nudges. For the gentle reminder that the next post is only a login away.