Parenthood

Nit Picking


As no critters were discovered during this morning’s hand delousing session, Miss Katy will be returning to school today with about four inches less of hair because I realized that we couldn’t avoid cutting some of it off. Her hairs is fine but think and curly. I felt terrible about that for some reason. But Katy is more than ready to be done with Rob and I hunched over her head picking through her hair practically strand by strand and dislodging nits with our fingernails because those little nit combs are useless on the fine hair that many children, ours included, have. The laundry is nearly caught up but we’ve decided that until Katy is louse and nit free, her bedding will have to be done daily.

We slept this morning. And then I slept in more because I awoke with a horrible headache behind my eyes. When I did get up my left eye was matted and a deep angry red color possibly as a result of my fingers being in Kate’s chemically treated hair so often over the last two days. I am very sensitive to that kind of thing. I have had to give up showering at the gym because the disinfectant they use on the showers sends me into days long hay fever attacks. I can’t even use the bottled spray to wipe down equipment as it is just a watered down version of the same disinfectant. Rob told me at breakfast – following a bug hunt and nit-picking session – that I slept horribly. Startling easily and talking a lot. I know I have been dreaming constantly the last week or so. Nightmares some but usually just those exhausting dreams about searching for someone or something and hiding and running from someone or something. Not totally unexpected with the second anniversary now less than a week away and with the added stress of the lice visitation and trying to sort papers for taxes (a world of confusion awaiting there) and shredding and storage – not to mention the whole gearing up for Texas thing. I am lucky to be sleeping at all. I will take crappy sleep or insomnia any day.

I told Rob that I am having a hard time find charitable feelings for his sister. You know, poor Widowed SIL – she has it so hard, so I guess I can let the little lice thing go. But he wondered why I was bothering to think about her at all. I should just be like him and forget about her. He’s right. If not for the lice, we’d have forgotten about her already. Lord knows that I don’t waste time or thought space on my own mired in inertia youngest sis. Some people like and need the kind of misery that goes along with victimhood – whatever its original source. I guess if that kind of thing didn’t have collateral damage it wouldn’t be so irritating. I just forgot the critical rule of being related to people like that – all visiting should be done on neutral territory and confined to the phone or Facebook as much as humanly possible.

So today is Jordan’s birthday. She wanted to meet us in the city at the Muttart to visit her mom’s memorial bench before supper out. But with lice and having a lawyer appointment in the afternoon to sign wills and directives and other cheery stuff and then needing to get back home in time to meet Katy’s school bus and the insurance adjustor who is coming to appraise the damage to the car that Jordan was driving in a fender bender last week – well – just another detail that we will have to manage and figure a way to work out. Things will fall into place. They always do.

Lice


Well, my sis-in-law’s visit has turned out to the be gift that keeps on giving. Katy has lice. The irony abounds really because back in Des Moines Katy had a classmate who had lice, continually it seemed, for two years and despite her long curly hair, she never did get it. The reason for that of course is that lice isn’t that easy to catch. According to the health unit nurse I spoke with this morning (and my best friend in Iowa who is a nurse as well) it really takes head to head contact such as sharing pillows, bedding and hats. So, even though it is remotely possible that Katy could have picked up the offending insects at school or child-minding at the fitness center, the most likely suspect is Rob’s niece who slept up in Katy’s room on the trundle bed. Katy loves the trundle and played on it, building tents and such for days after. Also, it given the time span needed from contact to infestation (7 to 10 days), Rob’s niece fits the profile (the girl had her hands in her hair constantly -raking and rubbing). When Rob saw the title for today’s blog he said, “So you are just going to blame my niece for this then?” “Yep,” I replied. He just shook his head and laughed, “I hope my sister never finds and reads your blog. She’ll never speak to me again.” Ah, if it were only that easy to rid one’s life of drama-makers.

So, in addition to the hair-treating – mine too probably because I have long hair and Katy is in close contact with me – there are beds to be stripped and washed……..again. Clothes to be washed. Stuffed things and dress-up clothes to be bagged. The cat, according to my best friend, should be dipped in a flea bath. (And the cat is becoming a saga onto herself anyway at this point. One more straw and Rob is going to reassemble his old shot-gun.) Rob volunteered to work from home today to help out. The last lice scare, which was the first time Katy’s daycare sent home a note, I stripped and quarantined stuffies while Will walked in circles – something he was wont to do because of the dementia – oblivious, unable to even give moral support. I commented yesterday on Alicia’s blog piece about how hard it is to be a single parent. I made the observation that even having a second adult around didn’t change things in some respects. But I didn’t mean with the heavy lifting, like today. Rob will help with the cleaning and head dousing. For me the emotional aspects of parenting have always been and continue to be the toughest thing. I just find it draining to be on call to another human being from infinity to beyond. Katy is very demanding and has been since moment one. She doesn’t make the demands on Rob or anyone else really that she does of mean in terms of needing my attention and needing me near. And I am a person who needs down time and to retreat into myself in order to maintain equilibrium. Perhaps because double parenting is so new to me I went into it with expectations that were too high. I really thought I would be magically altered and that the things about Katy – her clingyness and incessant questioning and her difficulty entertaining herself – wouldn’t bother me as much anymore or that Rob’s presence would abate this somewhat.

Rob and I talked about this last night. I told him that I just don’t find joy and fulfillment in the kinds of things that most mothers seem to. Sitting for 45 minutes in that nasty waiting room at her ballet school for instance is beyond boring, but their our moms their happily nattering away like it was an outing for them. Last spring we were visiting my folks and tagged along to a t-ball game of my 6 year old nephew, I was so bored. The coaches do their best to move those games along but it is still painfully slow. My sister though had a grand time with the other parents. Clearly this is social for her. Just thinking about years of this kind of thing to come doesn’t give me the same thrill that many parents seem to get. Rob’s late wife coached their girls even, but I was a basketball and a volleyball coach when I taught middle school. Did that for years, but only because they paid me. I couldn’t imagine doing it for any other reason. Coaching is thankless and the kids’ parents are maddening to deal with. My friend Meg literally sacrificed her free time for her three girls. Nothing superseded their activities, not even her own needs really. She was quite Buddha like in her contentment about it too. I sometimes think that years and years from now Katy will sit around with her friends and say this like, “I love my mom, but she just wasn’t quite cut out for motherhood.”

Mounds of lousy (maybe an exaggeration as we find just a few bugs and no nits yet on Katy) call me from the basement below. Rob should be back in the next little while with the shampoo and treatment stuff. Fun awaits.

Photographic Memories


Last night I went through the totes with pictures. When we moved up here I had just tossed them all, most in the original packaging from the photo shop, into two pink totes and I haven’t looked at them since. Not that I looked at them much before anyway. I haven’t been one to document my life on film. Most of the time the camera was put away unless it was a holiday or a special occasion of some sort. I vowed to changed that after Katy was born. I didn’t want her to be one of those people who had scant evidence that she was ever a child. But despite my best efforts the pictures never made it to a scrapbook or photo album and now that I have a digital camera and computer – I am even worse about getting pictures out and on display.

I made rather quick work of the totes. I was surprised that I could identify and date the pictures by lot as easily as I could as I still have a difficult time with time frames. One thing that was striking was the fact that as time went on Will’s presence in the photos diminished and then disappeared completely even though he was still alive. But maybe that is why. He was just alive in the physical sense and no more than that. I do remember that I deliberately stopped taking pictures of him when he went into the nursing home. I think there is just one photograph of him there that was taken at a holiday dinner they had for the residents and family in very early December. He would have been there about two months at the time and the social worker there took the picture and gave me a copy later. My memories of that time and place are awful enough without photos and Katy, thankfully, can’t remember him there at all. It probably wasn’t the worst that nursing homes had to offer but it was typical of what most of those places are. Understaffed and full of demented seniors who are in various types of restraints and drugged more insensible than they would have been anyway. Will, unfortunately, had to be quite quite medicated as he was aggressive and combative due to the areas of his brain that were under attack from his immune system. It wasn’t until the last six months or so when he had lost completely the ability to move that it was safe to take him off some of those medications. It’s odd that I should be thinking of this kind of thing right now because Rob and I are putting the finishing touches on our wills and personal directives and we have this list of “what ifs” to plow through and decide upon. I am pretty sure I would not want to live the way Will did those last two years even if I was suffering from dementia as severely as he was and didn’t know what was going on – or at least couldn’t remember it from one moment to the next. Sometimes life is not worth living and I think a lot of what passes for respect for the sanctity of life is just the cowardice of family to do the right thing or the selfishness in wanting to preserve someone in a horrible existence to put off their own grief.

But not everything in the photo totes was about Will. Believe it or not I had a longer life without him than with him. There were pictures of students and events that took place at the various schools I have taught at. There were tons of photos of my oldest nephew who I borrowed quite a bit during my single days. I found all the family history stuff that my cousin, Anne, and I had worked on. I have a fairly intricate family tree map that I used for my own writing and it reminded me of the stories that I wanted to write up at some point.

And I found cards. Why did I save all these cards? What is the purpose? Rob says not to be too hard on myself in that respect as everyone does this. He has nearly every important card ever given to him. I suppose he is right but I am not overly sentimental in this respect and whenever I pull out this stuffed shoe-box, I am more annoyed than pleased that it exists. Perhaps though I would be upset if it didn’t turn up from time to time and maybe I will be glad of these cards someday. And then there were the bereavement cards. I did nothing with this aside from take money out of them which sounds awful but I needed that money to pay for the lot and the burial. My aunt paid for the wake. I was so broke and still had about six months to go on my masters – with the accompanying bills and nearly a year before I would see the corresponding pay raise that I so desperately needed already. I verbally thanked everyone at the time of the wake but I know this doesn’t clear me with Miss Manners. At the time I wasn’t up to sending out written acknowledgment and as time went on I came to resent more and more the idea that this was expected. A death isn’t like a wedding or baby shower. It’s not a party and the cards are not gifts. And I found no comfort from them and still don’t. By and large they are from people who abandoned us for over two years and I didn’t, still don’t, see any good reason to thank them for throwing me a bone and showing up after Will was gone especially since I never heard or saw all but a handful of these people again. And these were people that had stuck with us anyway and I still tell them how much that meant to me.

Today all these photos are labeled and packed into two much small, and easier to pack for moving, photo boxes – ready for scanning onto my computer at some later date. The most immediate plan I have for them is to gather up pictures for Katy to create a book telling her story. I have read, and the hospice grief program confirmed, that it’s good for young children to have a photo book that tells the story of their lost parent. It helps them remember and facilitates their grieving process by giving them something concrete to thumb through and read and remember. Aside from that I am content to have them in some sort of order at last.

Now it’s on to the last two boxes of papers to be sorted and then filed or shredded. A widow at the hospice group asked me if it was okay to have not gone through her husband’s things. She is barely a year out and I told her that it was fine. For me though, at almost two years, it is not okay anymore. I can’t string this out over the remaining decade and I don’t see the sense in that anyway. The photos, papers and miscellaneous items left will not lose their power over me through my delay and may indeed gain grief momentum if I set it up as something arduous rather than something that is necessary and, in my experience, spiritually cleansing. I can’t protect myself from memories by hiding or ignoring things.