Defeated

I am not proud to admit how I felt this weekend… Defeated, powerless, fragile. These are NOT words I want to describe myself by. In fact, lately, I’ve been the opposite. I’ve taken pride in the strength I’ve shown in rising above situations and making changes in my life and my relationships. So, what could possibly have packed this punch to send me off track? The answer is: a few simple, short words from my husband. Barely a full sentence, but enough to bring back into the limelight our issues from a year ago, which had been caused by the confusion and grief I’d been dealing with in silence. Although the words were fast and unintentional, I felt them to my core. It made me feel like maybe all of this work I’ve been doing to improve myself is for nothing. How can we leave the past behind and change our lives when the very people closest to us are still judging us, if not to our faces, in the silence of their deepest thoughts? When it came down to it, he ended up apologizing, but the words still sting. Today, I woke up with a new determination. I know he still has hurt in his heart from the bad decisions I made, and that is where his words came from. All I can do is keep pushing forward, proving with my actions and changes that I am not that same person anymore. Rebuild the trust and hope for the future, one day at a time. 🩷

Along came Millie

“We’re getting a cat.   Like tomorrow.  This is important.”  These words, especially from the lips of my husband, were confusing to say the least.  He had just spent several minutes in deep conversation with our friend Mary, who volunteers her free time at the animal shelter.  She had spent the last four months trying to sell us (mainly the hubs) on this cat who is in her words “the absolute sweetest!”  

Still, my husband is a hard sell, one of the main reasons being that he is allergic to pretty much everything from seasonal ragweed to any house pet living outside of the water.   

Myself, I’d had outdoor cats at different times when I was a kid, with the common ending always being that they “ran away”.  Youthful naive me did not connect the dots to the fresh holes in the back yard and the sudden disappearance of the food dishes.  That is part of being the youngest in the family;  it is a blessing and a curse to be sheltered from life’s realities.  

On this day, however, after the conversation with Mary, something clicked, and my husband was adamant.  So, the next day, Millie, the cat, became a part of our family.   The kids love her, but they did take a while to adjust.  Until then, their only pet experiences had been a year with a goldfish named Harvey and two short months with the cutest little hamster named Mae.  I wish I could say that Mae’s short stay had to do with the hubs’s allergies and that she lived out the rest of her long life elsewhere.  But sadly, that wasn’t the case.   I’ve heard that everyone has a sad hamster story… this one will be for another day.

It took me a day or two after we became settled in with Millie for me to think to ask the husband why he had the sudden change of heart in wanting a pet.  His answer was that our friend Mary, the animal loving volunteer, told him that after having been at the shelter for almost a year and being the featured pet several times, Millie was about to be sent to a different shelter, and her time there had no guarantee for a positive outcome.  To this day, my husband is still Millie’s favorite human.   It’s like she knows that her future was completely changed by a five minute conversation with an animal loving friend.  🩷 🐈

This is for you, Daddy

“What would I ever do without you,  Dad?”   No truer words were ever spoken, and yet I would find out less than 24 hours later.   My dad, whom I had considered the smartest person I’d ever met (and still feel that way), had just fixed something on our computer for me.  I knew he was sick.   Even though everyone tried in their own ways to shelter me as much as possible,  at the age of 13 I found that cancer, chemo, and radiation were the on everyone’s minds as much as the New Kids on the Block had been on mine.  But I still went to bed that night.. my last “normal” night for so many years to come.   I rested easily under a blanket of naiveté  knowing that everything would be alright.

Until it wasn’t…..

The next day mom and dad went to Columbus for his treatment.   It was supposed to be a “simple” radiation therapy.  They hadn’t started chemotherapy yet. I thought it was strange when my much older siblings all showed up at the house and said we were heading to Columbus too.   In the car I heard hushed conversations about, “Mom insisted she needed to be there.”  Still, I thought it must be a mistake… it shouldn’t take them long at the hospital.   Either we would meet them in passing on the way or they would get home just as we got to the hospital.   Regardless, we better get this straightened up soon… my mom was not a person to mess with and she gets stressed out when things don’t go right.   

At the hospital, I heard more “adult talk” about how my dad had collapsed in the elevator from the parking garage.  We waited outside of a room that the nurses said my father was in, but the voice I heard in there asking for a kleenex… that wasn’t my dad.    The man I knew had a strong voice, authoritative but kind all at once.  This voice was garbled, throaty… and all of that coughing!   Couldn’t someone please help this man AND tell us the correct room my dad was in?   We were wasting time.   Why couldn’t my mom find the room… they had been there for at least a couple of hours hadn’t they?

My brother and sister-in-law said we should walk to the vending machine.   Food??? Who could even behungry right now?   Ok, actually a snack sounded kind of good to be honest.  I can’t remember if we even made it to the machines.   I know we got to a different floor and were walking down one long hallway after another, but then this…. SOUND…. So loud, so urgent sounding!  Kind of like when you were watching TV late on Saturday night and all at once the color panels come onto the screen.   Then… we run – back to the elevator.   What about my Pepsi?   The elevator door opens and my oldest brother is there.   He’s in tears.   Woah, this is the strangest day of my life.  I just don’t get it.   Then all of the words made sense and it hit me.   GONE.  

Suddenly, my mind put together all of the pieces of the puzzle from everything that had been going on within the previous months.  Yet at the same time those pieces were lying on the floor in front of me.  Hindsight tells me that I would spend so many years working those pieces back together, only to find out that the picture was NOTHING like the box advertised.