In which I suck and Richard Armitage unknowingly saves the day

Today at 5 p.m., I thought my brain was melting and oozing out through my ears. This is the post in which I reveal just exactly how selfish and resentful I am.

Yesterday, my mother ate and drank very little all day despite jokes, coaxing, and outright begging. We’re talking half of one Edy’s lime fruit bar.

Last night something happened to the drains in the house. I’m not saying what caused it, because I don’t know, except that if it involved someone depositing a surgical dressing in a toilet, a malfeasance of which I was accused, I maintain for the record that *I* wasn’t the one who did it. But I was half of the team that cleaned it up — 3 hours of shopvaccing after 9 p.m. to dry up the basement.

So I should be happy that today was “normal,” except that the nieces were here, and my father, who did find a plumber friend of his to come over and unclog the drains, disappeared. And it was too hot for most of the afternoon for the nieces to play outside for more than a half hour or so, and just not possible simultaneously to manage the needs of two active and demanding little girls and one very inactive, except for the required walking, post-operative woman. My mother has to sleep in the living room right now because she can’t get into and out of her bed. All of the inside entertainment options for little girls are in the living room. Mom needs rest. Little girls need stuff to do.

I love my nieces, but I know, today, why I never had children. The sheer repetitiveness of the whole thing. The never stopping.

The highlight of their day was probably the trip to W**-m*** to buy a so-called “j-hook” for crocheting. $1.34 for this amazing delight. My dad didn’t pack up the ones we took to the hospital, and they are lost or I don’t know where they are. (I can’t find her hearing aid case, either. The sheer number of uncontrollable details that are flooding into my life has me dumbfounded.) We also stopped at Walgreens to get some surgical dressings as we were fresh out.

I might have, through ongoing cajoling, gotten my mother to eat 600 calories today. Maybe. I messed up with the jello cups I bought and so the first one she ate was no-calorie. *Headdesk*. It’s not like there’s any space in her stomach at the moment — she has no appetite, and near constant nausea. Supper was better. I got her to eat two big spoonsful of orange jello with actual calories in it and three small spoonsful of very mushy rice cooked in broth. I’m not sure when she had protein the last time, though. But at least she didn’t look at the chicken soup the rest of us were eating and visibly suppress a violent gag reflex, like she did last night.

(If you’re asking yourself, who eats chicken soup in the middle of July, the answer is: we do.)

She also showered. That was big. It could have been the highlight of her day.

Also the phone went on the fritz for basically the entire day. (Did I mention that dad chose yesterday to decide, spontaneously, to switch media providers? He went to the store to fill a few prescriptions and he came home with a Direct TV contract.) After the nieces went home I spent 45 minutes on my cell phone with customer service trying to figure out what was wrong. We figured it out, but not without me diving into one very dusty corner of the office and getting very intimate with a phone jack that was probably installed in 1982. One more thing that needs to be cleaned. This house is just full of projects that I’m starting to be concerned no one will ever do.

And once the phone was working again it rang off the hook. And running to get it, I tripped over my father’s work boots which for some inexplicable reason he took off in the middle of the kitchen floor and I fell. And I cursed like crazy. And yelled, I quit. And my mom said, whew, it’s lucky the nieces went home. What kind of example would that be to them?

The kind of example I am. Ambivalent. Clumsy. One you should not emulate.

I guess I know she’s starting to feel better if she’s parenting me again. Now if she would just eat something.

And my father. Seriously. I am going to have to figure out how to have a talk with him about how he needs to spend more time with my mom right now, not because of my needs, but because of mom’s. At least three times today she said, “where’s [my dad’s name]?”

It is what it is, it has to be what it has to be, I’ll do what I have to do, I keep saying to myself.

But there’s another chorus playing the background. If I were a blasphemer, I would say _____ [fellow blasphemers, fill in the blank].

I don’t mean to sound like Job. Really, taken altogether, these problems aren’t that bad and could be worse (and I thought more than once today how thankful I am that when mom needs cold water I can go to the refrigerator door, instead of outside to pump water. How impossible all this would be without household appliances! After fifteen minutes I understand perfectly why people used to have live-in domestic servants). I guess the reason I’m writing this down is the thing that I realized:

I thought, this afternoon at five: I will never, ever, be allowed to be alone again. It’s just never going to happen. I will never have another thought except as concerns an object someone can’t find or a technology that needs to be fixed or a mess that has to be cleaned up.

I thought when this all started that I could give up anything but I can’t give up the writing. I feared most that it would be the pain that shut me down as a writer. That at some point the suffering would become bad enough that I would have to build a wall to protect myself from my feelings, and that would kill the writing. I suppose that could still happen, but I have been able to write through the pain, consistently. If today is any indication, the real danger is not going to be pain, it’s going to be tedium. I feel my rationality slipping away as I respond to queries and try to remember the sequence of things that makes mom most comfortable. The changing the dressing sequence (lie down on reclining chair, recline, slip down panties, lift up top, detach surgical binder, remove gauze and dressings, examine visually, remove, replace, rebind, recloth); the going to bed sequence (stand up, walk around, bathroom, change panties, deposit debris, reclining chair, check dressing, remove hearing aid, give meds, restock stuff on bedside table, say prayers, adjust lights, scare dad away from living room tv).

But I know the solution to this problem and it’s the same answer that appeared all those months ago. Open yourself to the sensation that Armitage and his performances provoke; let your senses take over your feelings.

After putting everyone to bed tonight I came downstairs and I thought, I know what I want to write next, but I’ll just look at some pictures and then go to bed. I don’t have any room in my spirit for anything else.

First, I saw the new pics of Armitage from the panorama (or whatever it’s called). Especially this one moved me:

I think because his somber quality sort of matched my exhausted mood.

But it was the POD for July 9th at RichardArmitageNet.com that saved the writing day, because even though I’m not writing about the picture, it reinvigorated my senses enough that I could write (even if it’s just the sludge I have deposited above).

Here’s the POD, of Mr. Armitage as Alex Track:

And these are the beautiful details I saw:

… unruly, boyish hair …

… eyebrow, laughlines, calm eyes …

… lips, placed together so delicately, barely indicated left side smirk …

… strong fingers, amazing MCP.

And seeing this, somehow, let my emotions cut through the tedium and burst through again. Even if it was just to write about the tedium. I got to write. If I can keep writing, I will be okay. And I will get to write what I want to write about Armitage soon. It’s there, just waiting for me.

Thanks, Mr. Armitage, as always, for making so much possible. Even for buffering the tedium that’s necessary to my family’s life just now.

You are the light at the end of my tunnel.

~ by Servetus on July 10, 2012.