5.03.2009

i have been ill of late, in both body and spirit. my lungs are made of pork, so the joke has been going, their inhalations sporadically ending in coughing fits, like the swine flu that's supposedly everywhere and awful. here, we seem to be handling it well enough, if we aren't exactly well. the hacking has yet to manifest as pneumonia, so i think we'll be all right in the end. plus i've turned a corner and no longer feel as though i've been beaten along all my bendy points in the night whilst i slept.

my mood, on the other hand, has been dampened by one bit of bad news after another: an entire month spent in doctor's offices with aleks arranging and arguing with care providers about what he needed and when and how to configure it, resulting in his sixth surgery scheduled for 8 days from now, provided this illness doesn't incapacitate any of us further, then work and taxes and scary taxes and stress and work and volunteering, then a car break-in and the flu within but hours of one another, the smallest child vomitous all night long while i shivered unnecessarily, my body trying to muster heat to kill the disease, then travel and holidays and my 30th birthday, then the sudden and tragic death of a friend... then more birthday, then bad moods, then more illness, then our health care pulling a houdini, then discovering that jon has no job whatsoever come july-ish.

it can all leave a girl wondering what she did to deserve this last decade. and i have no answers there. i am smart and creative and have done my best to make decisions both in keeping with my heart's true desires and with protecting myself and my family to a reasonable degree. yet i have been bombarded by this onslaught of that which is out of my control and every time i am here, in this bell jar, as it were, i find myself meditating uncontrollably on all the horrible and awful things that have befallen me and wondering what i might have done to prevent it. i find it all weighing heavy on me. it's the helplessness and the uncertainty, the seemingly impossible heights of instability and it feeds the stressed us, our bad moods and short fuses, makes us entirely too human allthetime.

this is the real me that guilts and worries and frets over everything always. this is not the collection of short stories about my life that show us in the glaring yellow of eternal sunshine, its rays haloing the angelic downy heads of my children, their laughter ringing out, like the blogs of so many mothers or the soft-focused lenses of fabric softener commercials.

i try and try to see if i am being unreasonable, if i might not be able to somehow twist this all as advised by so many psycho-spiritual self-help gurus, into a storyline that refuses to elevate these traumas to such an important status that knit their way into everything else. but i've not found the way to do that and in many ways reject such advice as counter to my authentic self. i am not overly despairing, i do not think. i am simply in the muck of it, as so many are and have been. i can see the blessings, if i cannot always feel them beating heavy in my chest. i know my privileges, but i also know too well these obstacles. i am trying. i am always, always trying.