Oxygen Shortage

A little over 18 months ago, I was rolled onto my side, clinging to a hospital bed and ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN that death was a breath away.
The pain.  Oh my gosh, THE PAIN!  It was the most intense physical experience of my life. 
Danny was standing next to me, but he wasn't on the bed with me.  He wasn't feeling what I was feeling.  In short, he didn't know.
"My body is breaking," I cried out, desperate for someone -ANYONE -to realize and see!  SEE!
"Your body isn't breaking," Danny said.
I hated him in that moment.  My brain went into a tail spin.  I realized that everyone in the room THOUGHT I WAS FINE.
But I wasn't.

I knew I wasn't fine, but no one else could feel it.  In fact, they were certain I was fine!
"Your body isn't breaking."
The contractions weren't letting up.  Before one would let go, another would start.  There was no break, no rest, no regrouping, no recentering... there was a shortage of oxygen getting to my brain.
I couldn't THINK straight.

My body responded to the pain and that was that.
"I'm dying," I told my husband, desperate for him to TRULY SEE that I was -in very fact -DY.ING.
"You're not dying," he tried to soothe me.
Again, I felt crazy.  No one that wasn't me didn't seem to realize the seriousness of the situation.  I bypassed my husband and looked at a nurse.
"CAN'T YOU GIVE ME ANYTHING FOR THIS PAIN!?!"
She seemed surprised.
"Oh!  Yes!"
Apparently when I'd said a few months before that I wouldn't be having an epidural while I was in the hospital that I was one of those women who was against pain medication while birthing babies.  But I wasn't.  I just strongly felt I should have an epidural.  It was a gut feeling, so I went with it.
The hospital staff was obliging.  TOO obliging.
The nurse ran out of the room to order and get me some relief, and THAT'S when it happened.
That's when the baby decided maybe she ought to debut.

The nurse came back in, her hands filled with magic vials, "What happened?  I was gone for a minute!"
The baby happened.
Calm, serene, plump, quiet.  They placed her in my arms, and still.  STILL.  The pain was fierce.  I begged for medication.
"It will interfere with your bonding," the Dr. warned.
Oh my gosh, WHAT BONDING?  I was hurting so much I could barely focus.
It wasn't until a few hours after she came that I finally felt bonded to my baby and her cute little elf-like skin tags on her ear.  Her imperfections were just perfect to me.  I breathed her in.  I'd had two babies before, but this one?  Something was different.  I knew her.  I'd known her before.  It was a sort of foreign kind of "you're HERE" kind of reunion.
The pain -the seemingly lethal pain -brought me an immeasurable gift.

The trials in life right now seem to be just like those contractions.
Marriage broken.
Cousin hit a bus the same day Alicia starts job.  Dies twice on helicopter, makes miraculous comeback despite brain trauma.
I leave my full-time Mommying in the past and fully underestimate how hard it will be emotionally.
Grandpa in hospital.
Dad works shop and Grandpa's ranch.  Overdoes it.
Dad in hospital with viral infection.  Nearly loses the fight, transfers to ICU down int he Phoenix area. 
Alicia fields job without training because her boss (Dad) is in the hospital.
Dad comes home.
Danny leaves for 2 months to train for his new position (K9).  He's home on weekends.  The break is very timely.  As much as Alicia needs help, the marriage is just so fragile.
Mom goes into the hospital -knee surgery.
Thanksgiving comes -family tension causes a boundary Alicia hated enforcing.
Baby turns one -Alicia forgoes a baked cake and instead sticks a candle in a ho-ho.  Ole!
The next day, Danny and Alicia sit in front of the computer where Brannon is "present" as Danny reads his full disclosure.  Everything addiction related.  Alicia listens.  The session ends.  Alicia leaves town with cash and writes a very angry letter in a bed and breakfast while entertaining a fantasy about cancer... the kind that kills you.
Christmas.
Holidays.
Sicknesses.
Mom gets her other knee replaced.
Alicia starts to realize something is OFF and realizes she's going through depression.
The depression wreaks a strange sort of havoc in her life and Alicia struggles to understand what the eff is going on.
The baby begins walking and Alicia gives up on any chances of being able to sit on a clean floor.
Behind the mess of the depression and the actual literal mess of the house, the marriage situation is confusing at best and straining and worst.
But we work hard.  Counseling, group therapy, weekly meetings -both online and in person.  Sponsors.  Talking, connecting, honesty.
And then the group therapy ends abruptly.
As does counseling.
Danny's boss puts pressure of holy pressure on him.
Alicia's gall bladder begins assigning her a seat on the bathroom floor.
Each day she's sick -nausea follows eating.  Rinse repeat.  Surgery in July.

And guess what?
I'm at the "MY BODY IS BREAKING" point.  I can't breathe or see clearly anymore.  To everyone around me, I'm not breaking.  I'm fine.
But I'm on the table again.  Looking around for a blessed nurse with magic vials.
So many nurses are thronging me -food is brought in now and then, children are taken from time to time, house cleaning help both hired and volunteered is given.  The Lord is taking sweet and precious care of me as I cling to the hospital bed and cry out in desperation, "I AM DYING."

I used to wonder at people who couldn't seem to get enough help, who still despite seemingly having their basics needs me still struggled to just SMILE.  I judged them. 

And the Lord -in His sweet wisdom -is stripping me WHOLLY of that judgement.

All things will work together for our good.
I'm grateful for the suffering -it's setting a course for the way I will live out the rest of my life.  My priorities are shifted (and shifting), and if anything... if NOTHING else... the Lord is preparing me to serve His children with pure charity, unmarked by judgement.

I feel ungrateful writing these things.  I feel like a whiner.  I feel FEAR that people will hear my words and judge me because my basic needs are met and I'm still crying out from the bathroom floor, "Can't you give me anything for this pain?"

Today and everyday I will simply do the next right thing.
Living one day at a time?  When things are good.  Today I will live one moment at a time, one situation at a time.  One hour at a time. 

For when the oxygen returns to my brain, I will behold a mysterious, miraculous gift... imperfect and perfect, grand and small, a sort of birthing experience in it's own right.
And I know at that point -I will bond with it and look back on this laborious treachery as a worthwhile investment.

But for today, I'll just do the next right thing.

 

Feelin' the Burn

How long ago was the disclosure?  the one where he told me everrrrrrything?
Today it April 12.  December 13th was the Big Disclosure Day.  So that's?   4 months?

I keep feeling like I should be doing better.  I shouldn't be so angry or depressed or whatever.

But you know how it feels when you lose something or someone?  It stings and hurts for DAYS afterward.  It gets a little easier with time, but there's some days where something as simple as a song triggers that wave of deep emotion and suddenly your Thursday is thrown in the wastebasket and you're curled up in your pajamas with comfort food and a pile of pillows.

As the months roll by, the emotions are getting easier.  But some days... words, a song, a circumstance throw me for a loop and I feel sad.  or depressed.  or ANGRY.
I still don't know quite what to do with anger.  It's such a foreign emotion to me.  I'm sort of wading through uncharted territories with it.
Do I write?
Do I scream?
Do I drive outside of town with a wooden baseball bat and tell a tree what I'm feeling?

Yesterday I felt that awful fire encased carefully in my ribcage -the kind that makes you want to scream and cry and take a million showers to put it out.

Trying to yoga it out or bath it out proved impossible.  My thoughts were crazy, whirling out of control...

So I fought that fire with... fire.
For the first time since beginning recovery, I burned something to cleanse it OUT of my life.
I took my workout DVDs -the ones that make me feel shame and hideous and shame and hideous and less than and lazy and hate hate hate -and I burned them.
I set holy fire to them.

As I watched the flame, I remembered how much I used to love fire baptisms... how I'd taken fire to anything I cared to get rid of in my younger days.  Ex-boyfriend pictures?  burned.  Small gifts from people who hurt me deeply?  burned.
notes?
letters?
memories?
BURNED.

Yesterday I rediscovered how healing fire is for me.

I have an entire bag full of things I'm ready to part with... not all addiction related, but all definitely demons I'm facing and that have reared their ugly heads since starting recovery.

I'm saving them for another chest fire.

The Emo Alien

 

I was raised to think logically and reasonably.  This meant that tears were foolish little things that were usually shed over a lack of Big Girl Panties, and anger was something only the criminally-minded gave any reign to.

But here's the thing: I'm just not logical.  and half the time, I'm not reasonable.  
I'm free-spirited and colorful and emotional and sensitive.  When things happen in life, I react emotionally. 

I've always thought it was something in me that needed to be reigned in, squelched, FIXED if not sooner then STAT.

I miscarried and it changed my life.  I cried so hard my body was sore.  I stayed in bed for week and read Jane Austen novels and ate a package of Oreos.
A few years later, a friend of my mine miscarried and... shrugged it off.  Oh, well.  That's that.  Wasn't meant to be.

I felt immediately weak, stupid, and less than.

In fact, I still do.  When I think back to her reaction and my reaction to her reaction, I STILL feel weak, stupid, and less than.  It's something I'm still working through, something I'm still trying to understand in myself.

I'm still trying to accept that it's totally reasonable for me to be an emotional being.

Lately, my mind has been overtaken.  hostily. by an Emo Alien.

My thoughts are negative, sad, and awful. 
And The Emo Alien whispers to me, 'this IS you.  I AM YOU.  You're just LIKE THIS: weak, incapable, negative, sad, stupid, weak, weak, weak!'

I hate The Emo Alien.

This is my friendly reminder to myself -a courtesy call, if you will: The Emo Alien is NOT me, that it's perfectly natural for a free spirit like myself to be more emotional than someone who isn't as free-spirited.  It doesn't make either of us wrong or less than... it simply makes us US, and variety is not only a beautiful quality in mankind, it's VITAL.

I am vital.
The Emo Alien is most definitely not.

I Don't Know Stuff

They say we're living in The Information Age.

But I really think we're living in The Answer Age.

Everyday I'm bombarded with answers!  They blow up my facebook feed, headlines, even my phone line.
Stay at home as a mother.
But don't.  Don't stay at home.
Let babies sleep, but wake them up.  Make them take naps -no wait, DON'T.
Wear pants to church!  But also remember that you should absolutely NEVER wear pants to church, and there's a bunch of meme pics of Elder Holland to back it up.
Give cake to gays!  But for the love, don't EVER bake a cake for gays.

There's answers for addiction, for relationships, for marriage, for parenting, for lifestyles!

A few days ago, I began to be bothered.  NOT by the insane amount of answers being shoved into my face at any given moment (because we all know you don't have to be online to have someone have answers for you!) but because I felt stupid.

STOOPID.

In the sea of answers, I seem only to be on the receiving end.
And that must mean -by default -that I am stupid.  Right?
All right, so that's a false belief, but before you diagnose me and give me an answer, please just listen for a few minutes...

I don't have the answers to addiction.  I don't have the pathway down.  I can't sit here and type out what you should be doing or shouldn't be doing or what to tell your Bishop or which boundary you need.  I can't laden you with comforting answers or set you on a path or put you on my back and carry you down my path, expecting you to see the RIGHTNESS of it all as you observe.

Because all I have is questions.

Through this whole thing, I've resigned myself to a few unchangeable truths in my own life.

1) I really don't know anything which doesn't make me stupid -rather, it sets me free.
2) God knows everything.
3) He doesn't tell me everything, and I reserve the right to resent Him for it now and then instead of handling this truth how I feel I'm "supposed" to (which is to stuff my anger down and go to church.  Now I shake my fist to the sky and go to church which is different because my stress level has gone down.  Follow?  No?  That's okay.  I barely follow and I'm living it).

In the past week and a half, I have bit laid out flat with all kinds of stuff that makes me mad at God, one of which being my brother and his wife who suffered through 7 years of infertility and the eventual loss of their second child to a heart condition have now lost a baby at 20 weeks gestation.
Twenty weeks of development, not only of her frail body but of her parents' hopes and dreams, her older siblings hopes and dreams... gone.  Just very, very gone.

That on top of a few other, "are you KIDDING me?"s has brought me and my depression to a place where I'm sort of just moving through it all, not reacting or feeling like myself, but moving from appointment to appointment -gratefully overwhelmed with doing so I can't be overwhelmed with FEELING.
God has given me too much to do because He knows if I weren't doing, I'd simply be in bed, covers over head.
That is ONE thing He's let me know.
"Just keep going forward," He said to me when I asked Him if my schedule was too full.  Ahhhh, HE filled it for me.  My gift of having things to live for.

But as I got ready for work on Tuesday and felt anger toward Him for not letting me know WHY our family is suffering in so many ways, a good friend a few states away (I think you know her as Jane) sent a poem my way that read:

"I SHALL know why, when time is over,
And I have ceased to wonder why;
Christ will explain each separate anguish
In the fair schoolroom of the sky.
He will tell me what Peter promised,
And I, for wonder at his woe,
I shall forget the drop of anguish
That scalds me now, that scalds me now. "
~Emily Dickinson

My answers lie where Emily's lie: in heaven.  Even reading that poem minutes after shaking my fist to the sky, I found God giving me my #3 truth all over again.
I KNOW, Alicia.  I KNOW, so don't worry so much.  Just keep asking questions.

Truth #4:
I have no answers for you.  I will respect you enough to let you tell your own story and find your own answers while simply sharing my story.

My days are filled with me content to not know enough to participate in online arguments, happy in my question quest, but reserving the right to let God know how irritating it is that He keeps so much to himself even though I truly know what a beautiful gift it actually is.
Not all beautiful gifts are 100% irritation-less.
 (*cough* kids *cough*)

Truth #5:
I used to have answers.  I used to give advice and hand out "HERE'S THE WAY" tickets.  And sometimes letting go of that makes me feel dumb.

But abandoning a world where I insist on having answers has freed me.
There's no pressure anymore.

There's only a world of exploring questions and asking God for my own truth.

I won't wear pants to church, but will you?
I would totally bake a cake for a gay couple but don't hold an opinion on your answer to the same situation.
I let my baby sleep, but would you?

I can't walk you through this path of addiction.  But I can tell you that God has walked me through it.  And sometimes I pretend He sings songs to me... songs about calling and answers.
I smile each time I hear the line, "and if you court this disaster, I'll point you home."
What?  Me?  Court disaster?  Please...
(By the way, it's 8:30 in the morning, and I'm currently dealing with the stench of burned milk.  I forgot I let the burner on, okay?  It happens.)




This is me coming to acceptance with not having answers and owning that THAT doesn't make me -by default -shallow, dumb, stupid, or clueless.

It makes me free.

On a Binge

Isn't there something in all of this addiction education about the part of our brain that regulates when we tell ourselves "no"?
I think there is.  I'm too tired to Google it, frankly.  Want to know why?

Because.
I just spent the last.
TWO.
DAYS.
Watching an entire television series.

Granted, the series only lasted a season... as it should have because it was total malarkey -but still:  STILL.

I didn't tell my brain "no."  Not even once.  I had a stomach bug yesterday, and I just watched and watched.
And today I didn't have a stomach bug, but I watched some more.

Last week (or was it two weeks ago?) I watched 6 hours of a British TV show.  CHAINFULLY!

I DO this.  I do this.
I love stories.  I love them.  I'm picky about characters, mostly.  Plots?  They could be absolute malarkey (see above ^^^^) but if I fancy the characters, I can't stop watching. 

And just as our infamously immortalized creepy kid-friend says, "I see dead people," I'm here to announce that "I become obsessed over fake people."

In High School, I was religious about Maury and watched so many episodes that I once busted out in the middle of my honors English class with a pretty dead-on "Upset Audience Member" impression that no one ever let me forget.
Was it MY fault Brandon decided to make his book report on Oedipus Rex LIVE and turn it into a really twisted rendition of Jerry Springer involving members of my own peer group?  No!  Okay?  I couldn't help busting out widdit.

Says the crazy, white mathlete.
(and for the record, you could remove the comma between "crazy" and "white" and still have a pretty accurate description of me.)

Which brings me to my next point: I kind of adore acting.
Which is actually -if you think about it -my first point... I love characters.

The truth is I have different personas I bust out on my kids and husband when I get in a rut, when I get tired of hearing my own voice my own way.  I make up stories constantly.

And I watch stories constantly.

I have since I was tiny.  Little.  Little tiny.
When the mother raising you is a brain-trauma survivor and doing her best to simply try and cope with life, you sorta spend a lot of time watching TV.
The good thing is I loved it. (The bad being, of course, that I operated under the false belief that my mother hated me so much she made me watch TV.  I thought she loved me so much she let me watch TV.  So that's something worth celebrating, right?)  I loved every minute of it.  I loved Bonanza the most and Sleeping Beauty on special occasions.  My first crush was MacGuyver and my second was Uncle Jesse from Full House.

And I'm just coming here to tell you this because after spending two days watching a show full of amazing characters and a flimsy plot line...
I am angry.
At myself?  No.  At the STUPID WRITERS OF THE SHOW because the ending was so ridiculous and stupid!  SO STUPID!
My stomach bug was better than that ending.

I'm just a little surprised at the reaction I'm having to this.  Yes, it's partially hormones.  But the other partially is just... me. 

How is my story addiction serving me?
Welp, I can quote a lot of movies and quote them well AND use voices.  So... I'm pretty indispensable in the case of the apocalypse.  Let's face it, with all that mayhem swirling around, the voice of funny-girl entertainment is going to be ranked right up there with the voice of reason and the lady who stowed away a million kegs of lipstick to use for trading.

That's all I have to say tonight.
That I have a problem and this is my "writing about problems" place.
And Bonanza NEVER let me down this hard.  Pa Cartwright would never ever.

And maybe I'll just start writing my own television series about a crazy white comma optional girl who grew up in a rigid home watching hours of CMT and eventually married a man who turned out to have a sexual addiction and the end -whatever it may be -will leave the readers fully satisfied and feeling complete because even in the plot line is flat line, the characters are pretty characteristic.

And really: that's what I love most about my story.
The characters.

Admission: I do binge on my own characters, and I've never had enough of the smallest one these days.  Seriously, can 14 month olds BE anymore awesome?  Best inventions ever. 
When it comes to characters in stories -be they small or tall or addicted or lonely or absolutely certain they were a dog in another life -I can't say no.

I can't say no to characters or people.
It's one of my God qualities, I think.  God feels that way about us... that intense interest.
He just doesn't BINGE CHAINFULLY because He already know how all the series in the whole entire world end.  Super jealous of that, by the way.

I'm just glad that even as I binge on TV and try to figure out the waters of depression (Vitamin D, more walks, leafy greens, surrender y prayer, tissues...) He is here. 
Binging on me always.
It sounds weird, but it brings me an inordinate amount of comforting safety.