My head feels like it has a nail in it

You know how stories about a bad day are supposed to end on an up note? I rant a little about all the crappy things that happened, but then I end with an anecdote about looking at the peaceful face of one of my sleeping children, and we all go away feeling OK.

My day was almost like that.

I'll start with the really crappy part where I left my snowy driveway to pick up Bee from school. On the way home, Bee demanded to go to "that place with decorations and lights" for hot chocolate. Internet Strangers and friends, I had no idea of what she meant, and no intention of taking her anywhere but right back home, where I had been busy all day cleaning, vacuuming, guiding MM away from dustpiles and listening to superprofane revolutionary rap in my relationship bagua. Babies love Mos Def.

Bee was unhappy about going home, and let me know so with her signature bleat-whine - a whine so powerful that it melts paint off bicycles and causes embolisms within a 20-mile radius.

If only it could melt ice, the rest of our day might have been a little better.

When we got to the house - the screaming, bleating, whining at full pitch - I discovered that my van could not make it up the driveway. After sliding around for a few minutes and raising my voice in a very badmommy fashion, I drove to the corner store and bought a "snowshovel."

No - we didn't already have one. Why do you ask? Were we supposed to have one?

I brought it home and waved it impotently in the air - because this tool clearly was not designed for actual shoveling - as I chirped angrily at the snow to Get the Hell Off My Driveway.

It didn't work.

And then I fell hard on my knee and started to cry.

I jumped back in the van and cried all the way to the hardware store where we could buy real supplies. Half an hour later, we were back home, where I parked the car at the bottom of the driveway, and carefully scaled the incline and started shoveling.

Here's the thing I learned about snow shoveling today: It's easier to do when the stuff on the ground is snow and not ice. Fortunately, I was smart enough also to buy a bag of those miracle ice melting pellets.

I sprinkled them along the driveway liberally as I shoveled. The girls sat in the warm van and watched me.

"Maybe if I shovel two tracks..." I thought.

It didn't work. But I did fall down three more times, and I am now bruised quite impressively on my knees and tailbone. And those miracle pellets are a big, stinking lie.

The Mommyvan is still sitting at the end of the driveway. I'm holding out hope that snow will melt sometime soon.

At supper, Bee sat down and said, "My head feels like it has a nail in it."

AND NOW IS THE TIME WHEN WE DANCE

Before the Driveway Incident, I spent most of my day cleaning our sunroom/office/would-be playroom/relationship bagua. While cleaning, I put on Xerxes' iTunes playlist, and tried to clean and prevent MM from climbing the bookshelves.

That baby loves to climb. Climbing and biting - those are her specialties. She'll climb onto the radio if she gets a chance. She'll climb into bookshelves. Yesterday, she spied an open drawer in the kitchen and was hanging her full body weight on it in an attempt to climb into it.

And the biting isn't a vicious biting. It's a teething/sucking thing that she does to calm herself. She'll bite the front of her dress or her bunny's ears. She'll open that little snap thingy on her footie pajamas and bite that.

The urge to bite is so powerful that it's possible to avert a full-scale bedtime flip-out by showing her the oh so bitable, irresistable corner of a pillowcase. She'll put it in her mouth and fall like a plank onto the bed.

But back to my bagua.

The Flaming Lips' song "Do you realize" came up in the shuffle, and it made me happy because it is one of those songs that I like primarily because my son likes it.

Do you realize that you have the most beautiful face?

I remember when he discovered it and looked up the guitar tabs and would sit in the little pantry corner where we kept the computer in our Florida house and he would play and sing.

Do you realize we're floating in space?

The computer was basically in the center of the house, so any time he was learning a new song, we all were treated to a serenade. This one was much better than many - the Pink Floyd, for example.

Do you realize that happiness makes you cry?

He learned this song a couple years ago, the summer after I was diagnosed with ovarian cancer and was undergoing chemo. The summer when we brought home Bee. The summer after my mom died.

Do you realize that everyone you know someday will die?

X was always close to Mom. When he was little, he would spend weekends at her house, and they  watched Animaniacs and stayed up late and ate whatever they wanted. She loved him to pieces.

He continued to spend a lot of time at her house right up until the day when we went to pick him up and her wreck of a house hit me in the soft part of my psyche in a way it hadn't before, and I was overwhelmed by her depression. I couldn't let him stay there anymore.

There wasn't a scene. He was getting a little older - 10 or 11, I guess - so it was easy just to avoid the subject.

Regardless, they were always close.

And instead of saying all of your goodbyes...

The night Mom died, my husband had taken her to the hospital. I was laid out on the sofa, just 10 days post-hysterectomy. Mom had been staying with us to help nurse me, since I was still at the point where I thought I would puke with exhaustion every time I made that long walk to the bathroom.

We had just eaten supper when Mom said she thought they should go to the hospital because she had been having chest pains all day.

They left, and I started to cry. "I just can't believe this," I said to X.

He said, "She'll be fine. Don't worry."

At 3 a.m. when my mother-in-law arrived to bring me to the hospital at my husband's request, I woke up X. I don't think either of us, in our sleepy haze, fully understood what was happening. We got into the car. I told him that, when we got to the hospital, he would need to jump out and get me a wheelchair because I couldn't walk in.

Someone wheeled me into the family room of the emergency department - the room with a door that closes so they can tell you bad news and you can have a little privacy while your body shatters into individual atoms that bounce and scatter all over the shiny floor and roll under the little sofa and armchair.

Mom's decline had been swift. One minute she was joking with the staff and explaining that they needed to let her go home so she could fulfill her maternal duties to me, and the next minute she was coding in the CT machine. She didn't regain consciousness.

Because she was so chipper and social right up until the end, it's understandable that staffers who weren't involved in her immediate care would have been unaware of the gravity of her condition.

It's understandable but utterly tragic that the clerk or intake nurse or someone else who had seen her come in reassured my 15-year-old son when we got there that, "Your grandmother is going to be okay," when, in fact, she had already effectively died.

Let them know you realize that time goes fast. It's hard to make the good things last.

We stood in the room as they turned off the machines and we waited and watched her go. They called it at 5 a.m.

At 3 p.m. that day, we received our referral for Bee.

We made funeral and travel arrangements at the same time. Family came from all over. We shared Bee's referral photos at the pre-funeral and post-funeral receptions. We focused on the promise of this baby for whom we all had been waiting so long - my mother perhaps more giddily than any of us - because it was the only thing that made any sense in the midst of that nightmare.

After everyone left town, I threw up for a week and ended up back on an IV. I got good news about my diagnosis. I got stronger every day. I got the OK to drive a car again, and two days later I got on a plane to China. Ten days after we got back home with Bee, I started four months of chemotherapy.

And my son started singing that song in the middle of the house.

You realize the sun doesn't go down.
It's just an illusion caused by the world spinning round.

I didn't give him nearly what he needed to get through that awful time. I couldn't. I didn't have anything to give. It makes me so sad and so sorry.

It made me so sad in the sunroom that I burst into tears. MM, wobbled over to me, took my hand and started dancing her beautiful, smiling, big-headed sway.

That's as close to a peacefully sleeping child as I can get today, when I am stirring up chi and dustbunnies and wishing more than anything that I could have given a peaceful sleep to my oldest when he needed it the most.

Comments

[ppb]

Oh my goodness this is just so beautiful.

[moreena]

How in the world do you find time to pour out such a lovely/angry/sad post with a new baby, a snowstorm, and school?

Is peaceful sleep even possible at times like you describe? What more could you have given him? Isn't seeing that his parents struggle with the tough times, that they aren't perfect rocks in adversity and all that, isn't that also a valuable lesson? Isn't that also reassuring, to know that you don't have to soldier through tough times without a glint of vulnerability?

I'm wishing you all clear driveways, healed knees, nail-free heads, and, if not perfectly peaceful sleep, at least a good set of pillowcases to gnaw on through the darker hours.

[jo(e)]

I cried reading this.

[Norah]

I cried with you today as I read your heart felt words. Isn't it awesome that when your heart is so sad that God brings you that little mircle to remind you that he is still there and in control? Sweet MM.

[HsH]

May I just say that I was less than 10 minutes away and super Mommy did not call for help.
We all must make her aware that she can ask for help. If I had been there I would have melted the ice with my super heat breath and pushed the thing up the hill myself. Its what I do best...

[stepblog]

This is so gorgeous Bettie, thank you.