Stuck on the Shoulder

Life can never be exactly what you want it to be—
I could be satisfied, Knowing you love me…
(This is dedicated to the one I love)

I’ve reached epic fail on the blogging front.

For both of you who read here, I apologize. Not because I have some deluded sense of Sin of Word Deprivation, but because I’m a creature of habit who obsessively checks several blogs regularly. I know that twinge of disappointment when there are no new words to be read.

I’ve hesitated to post this. Nobody wants to read Confessions of a Waaaambulance Rider, and I feel like the descent into whine is never more than a step away. But I hope that by at least putting some words on screen I can take some kind of step, even if it’s a slippery one.

When I began this blog, I called it “Moving Right Along”. As a Jersey girl/manic mom/sugar addict/high school teacher/wannabe runner/bearer of an NF-brain tumor flag, my life tends to hurtle forward, kind of like Daffy Duck in the Robin Hood episode…

“ I trip along merrily! I trip along merrily! I trip I trip I trip I trip I tri-hip up and down! I trip trip trip trip (falls down hill)…trippity trip trippity…I tri-hip it up and down!” .

Well, that, and I like Muppets. Inordinately.

But recently, for whatever reason, I am not going anywhere.

I’m still busy as all get out. School has been a challenge: a good challenge, but a challenge nonetheless. My teenager defines Challenge, generally not in a good way. My little ones…well, one isn’t so little anymore, and she’s trying to make sense of growing up. My baby is my heart, a balm to my soul (albeit one that can NEVER find her socks or her ballet tights and forgets herself in a game or movie when I send her to do a chore). Everyone has activities, everyone has projects, everyone has needs and wants and the washer is broken and my spouse’s running clothes REEK and I have no clue what to make for dinner.

In that respect, life is moving right along just like it always does.
But somehow, lost in the late summer, my heart is stuck, my mind is frozen. Well, frozen in the sense that there are 57 million ice cubes racing around inside the frozen brain and yelling at any given second. This is most annoying at 5 a.m., but it gets old at any time of day.

I can go into a store, and see something that puts me right back in 2004. Yesterday it was those crazy erasers, the little Japanese collectible erasers my girls are nuts for. I saw a sushi set…and instantly was back in the onco playroom, where the play kitchen set had a somewhat disturbing plastic sushi play food collection. Today it was a song on the radio, more accurately a conversation about radio songs that meant something, followed by the thought of the song that was playing when we headed to Philly for biopsy results in 2006. It’s like my mental TARDIS is broken (not unlike the actual TARDIS often is, which I guess should be comforting).

It’s like the crazy vines in the movie Jumanji, or Audrey II in “Little Shop of Horrors”. The vines catch my ankle and drag me down…and darn, they just keep
growing.

Many of our long time friends in our community of woe are really suffering. Many are reaching that point in the journey that is the nightmare of every parent, but an acute agony for the parents who walk this long road too. Every child suffering, every parent suffering, is another tendril that holds my heart from moving.

Why, after 6 years, this is such an issue, I have no idea. Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?

Last night I saw a quote on Facebook that said, “Anxiety is the crippling fear over some possible future evil. The irony is that, except for sin, anxiety is a greater evil than any evil that could possibly come upon us -- for anxiety disquiets the entire soul and renders it unfit for any good work.


While I don’t know that anxiety is a greater evil than any ACTUAL evil –about 10 minutes in a pediatric intensive care unit with your child kind of puts the doubt on that—I do see that the disquiet of anxiety, the noise, the 57 million ice cubes, can get a gal stuck. The noise makes all other words, all other blog entries, just seem meaningless.

I am waiting and hoping that the poster of that quote posts the “and so you do this and live happily ever after” follow up quote…

And waiting…and hoping…and waiting…and hoping…

But in the meantime, I am trying to make sense of things, trying to embrace once again that life really can never be exactly what I want it to be, but love truly makes things bearable, if not better.

Hopefully as we get into Thanksgiving I can get some of my verbal and mental mojo back. I don’t really know how, but as a Jersey girl/manic mom/sugar addict/high school teacher/wannabe runner/bearer of an NF-brain tumor flag, I really don’t have the time to be caught in some mental game of Chutes and Ladders, where every step forward leads to a big twisty slide down to yikes.

Really, NOBODY has time to be “merely a flesh wound!” everywhere she goes.

I’m not sure how to do this; but I hope that I can start moving right along again, that I can formulate coherent sentences and get the washer fixed. Until then, I’m going to see how many more movies I can reference in a single blog entry… : )