|
This is a simple column by a complex
woman.
“docked with tinsel”
Right now as I type, I’m fending off the advances of the stomach flu. Wait, I think I just crapped myself. I’d planned on turning this column in to Katrina of “Eye on Soaps” yesterday, as is my usual Monday habit, but I felt too out of it to even change out of my pjs. I’ve just finished a bowl of soup and am praying to God I don’t crap myself again. It’s not fun half-sleeping in the early dawn as a fart turns into a full-blown diarrheic nightmare, with dreams of Taco Bell no less. With a household and a family to take care of to boot. If I were single, I could plug a small TV in the bathroom while I went to town all over the toilet with steamy hot baths in between for relief, for days and days. And, I wouldn’t have to blindly obey THE HOLIDAYS. I wouldn’t feel guilt-tripped into loading up on $100-plus worth of Thanksgiving fixings for a needy family that I only NOW, one day before the deadlined event, received the final delivery instructions from the church for on the same day I have to finish two columns, give my son his Wednesday morning bath, take the garbage out, and do my usual filling up and shitting out IBS-D ritual so I can actually leave my home without fear of an accident standing in the middle of a long holiday line waiting to pay for these groceries we can hardly afford ourselves... all before the 4 p.m. hour. I probably have to wake up at, oh, 3 in the morning. Just like the many many years since, I got deathly ill two days after my November 22nd birthday and several days before Thanksgiving. Then, there’s Christmas and New Year’s, God help me. I love the food. I love the decorations. I love the carols. But I could do without the excessive consumerism (one more “Cat in the Hat” plug and I’ll scream), this endless need to buy gifts for everybody and anybody just because it’s the thing to do, the phony holiday spirit in four octaves, the overcrowded airports (which kept my mother from visiting until late in January), the loneliness of neighbors and friends off to those airports to visit extended family elsewhere (extended family I’d never had the pleasure and annoyance of enjoying, being the product of an only child mom, a deceased adoptive father, a loser waste case of a brother and that’s about it there), the utter isolation in the precipice between fall and winter where everything’s closed, everybody’s on vacation and nobody’s accessible, least of all doctors and ER resident just in case I accidentally cut the tip of my thumb while slicing pizza into strips and fear I may need grafting. Not to mention November-December being the cold and flu and hurricane season. I feel overwhelmed, resentful, chaotic and just really fucking out of sorts. I yearn for a hot bath, a hot chocolate and my mommy tucking me into bed while I watch my favorite TV shows as I drift off to sleep, her fingers tucked through my hair. Instead, I am the mommy, right about now, to two babies, my son and my husband, who is suffering immeasurably with the worst stomach flu to hit him ever, after having spent all day and most of the night previous vomiting up a storm, shitting and moaning piss. Before that, for two weeks, I had to take care of our son here while my husband tended to his ailing, retired parents there in Florida. So, he’s dealing with his own post-traumatic stress, reacting belatedly to his mother, then his father taking turns for the worst midway through his trip, settling them in their separate hospital beds, preparing them for their separate rehabs and probably, separate nursing homes and wrapping up the paperwork involved in selling their house, taking care of the arrangements and ensuring the government not sneak its greedy fingers into their nest egg. While dealing with his own grief at two dysfunctional chain-smoking wasted lives. It’s a lot to deal with. But so’s what I have to deal with on a daily basis. And I can’t even swim.
|
