Rebuilding Pompeii

2014 feels weird.  Every year of my life before this one, I was kind of given a mission by default: I took care of mom.  There were lots of other things I did, including running around hectically after Jesse, Christian and Jonah and their friends and legions of youth group kids, depending on the season.  And of course, grad school, too, and keeping my GPA above a 3.5 in grad school isn't always the easiest thing.  And work.  I've done a lot of weird jobs to keep afloat so I didn't have to work full time and have to abandon mom.

After dad died and before mom died, I was generally up before dawn. I had to get mom's stuff for the morning together before I could leave the house.  I had to arrange for people to check on her while I was away.  I had to arrange to give myself opportunities to call her every hour or so to make sure she was okay.  I'd go to work, or school, or to pick up Jonah in Bellville.  The average day meant two trips from Shelby to Bellville and back, but often times it was more.  Throw in sports or doctors visits or dialysis three times a week or trips to the vet or whatever other ordinary things that life throws at you, and I was going, going, going all the time.  Meanwhile the constant texts and phone calls because I need to know that things aren't spiraling out of control here or there or anywhere.

I would get home at night and cook dinner.  Sometimes I would come home in the evening, cook dinner, run off somewhere for a while, and then come back again to get mom in bed before I had to run off somewhere else for a while just to get all the things done.  And even when I would finally actually get in bed, usually after midnight, I'd be up multiple times through the night to do things for mom because being terminally ill means that going to the bathroom in the middle of the night is an adventure.  Every day and every night was potentially an adventure for years, because being that sick means that there is always an emergency or there is about to be one.  All the time.

Between the illness and the fact that the drugs which tame pain cause hallucinations and what looks like seizures and random fits of vomiting, there was mom's paranoia and her loneliness and her grief after losing dad.  When I try to talk to people about what it was like to take care of someone who on her healthiest day could be unstable and unpredictable because she had bipolar disorder, I have to temper my need to be told "you did a good job" with the urge I have to rip the face off of anyone who could criticize her in any way... because, I loved her.

Anyway, I don't know how this is getting so long.  My point was, I used to run a lot and sleep very little and somehow I managed to keep my life together.  I have no idea now how it ever was that I did that.  Because now I feel completely put out if I have to drive the grocery store five minutes from my house.

It frustrates me to no end that it seems like no matter what I do in life, I'm always letting someone down.  I thought that when mom died, it wouldn't be so hard to keep up.  Not that I was looking forward to her dying by any means, but it just seemed logical that with fewer things to do I would be able to organize things finally.  I would have time.

But there's never time and the needs never seem to stop.  I have to fight this urge to just withdraw from everyone and everything because I know that isn't healthy.  It's nearly 5am and I didn't sleep at all last night because it's lonely being alone sometimes and when I'm anxious I just want someone to talk to and there's nobody here.  So I stay up talking to myself inside my head and words and thoughts spill out on this page without resolution.

I know that even if I weren't alone, people would get tired of hearing about it.  I know that many people already have.  I try not to talk about the misery, but I can't stop myself somehow.  I have to tell the same story over and over again because I can't figure out what it's telling me in my head.  And until I process whatever it is, it won't stop haunting me when I'm trying to sleep, eat, drive, breathe, be...

I don't know where I'm going now or what I'm going to anchor my life around.  I'm just sort of drifting.  Waiting for the next horrible tragedy to set things in stone, so there are no choices and I just have to survive again.  Because when your focus is just survival every day, the priorities are so much clearer.