Family

Wednesday, August 6, 2008 10:40 pm

My mother got home tonight after two drama-filled nights in the hospital. She has pneumonia and she’s asthmatic, which - who knew - isn’t a good combination. Oh, and she’s a smoker, which certainly doesn’t help the situation.

She was taken in by ambulance on Monday night, and let me tell you, when you go downstairs at 1:00 in the morning to find out why the dogs are barking and find five paramedics in your living room, and your mother on the couch gasping for breath, it’s cause for panic.

I don’t think she’s well enough to be at home yet, but she said she couldn’t spend another night on the uncomfortable ER bed. They never moved her from emergency because she was in contact isolation and it was the only place they could actually keep her isolated. I’m listening to her cough up a storm as I write this, and I have to say, if we get through the night without calling 911 again, I’ll be amazed.

My mum and I haven’t always seen eye to eye, and there was a time when I was in high school that her presence in my life was just completely negative. I’ve written before about absent parents, and I’ve written before about how I’m pretty sure if she had suddenly died when I was, say, 14, 15, 16, it really would not have affected me that much.

Such is not the case anymore. I was a basket case when they carted her off in an ambulance on Monday night. T, bless his heart, came and stayed with me, which was so nice. I didn’t sleep much but I felt so much better having him there. Even when he rolled over in bed and told me I needed to CALM DOWN because I was fidgeting, fussing with the blankets, playing with my BlackBerry, turning the TV on and off… you get the point. I didn’t start to relax until I actually saw my mother in the hospital on Tuesday morning, and even then, she was so sick that it wasn’t much of a relief. In any case, she’s home now, and hopefully for her sake, she can stay here.

In other news, I started seeing a therapist today, because as we all know, I spent a good chunk of last week and the week before acting like a moron, and that is due to a bout of depression caused, primarily, by the pill. I also realized that there have been A LOT of major changes in my life in the last six months or so, and I’m just not quite as resilient as I used to be. I used to be able to roll with the punches. Literally. (Ha, oh what a great sense of humour I have.) ANYWAY, some of the decisions I’ve made lately haven’t been all that well thought out, and have contributed to this growing sense of being overwhelmed. That’s not to say that I have made all the wrong decisions; certainly some of them have been the right ones - they’ve just all been made kind of hastily, and I used to be the kind of person who thought things out very carefully before acting.

There’s a part of me that is a little bit scared of what will be unearthed in these therapy sessions. When I saw a therapist in Montreal last year we opened a can of worms I had no idea was there, and it triggered emotions and memories I had long since buried. I think it was a bit easier to deal with because I was living so far from home. This time, I’m right in the thick of it and how this plays out should be interesting, to say the least. Therapy is good for me if only to have the opportunity to throw out everything I’m thinking and have someone repeat it back to me and help me make sense of it. This first session today was mostly a “just the facts” session (and believe me, explaining my family history is a complicated affair), but she did send me out with a lot of questions that I need to really think about before going back in two weeks. Of course, her number one question was, why the hell are you living at home? And of course, my answer was that I work in non-profit, which is pretty much my answer for everything. She also asked me to think about some of the decisions I’ve made recently and start considering WHY I’ve made the decisions I have. Why did I move home? Why do I feel I can be around certain family members at all, given the history? Are the people who are in my life now the people who SHOULD be in my life? How do I decide this? If they’re not, how do I deal with it?

So, I have a lot to think about, and you can bet your asses I’ll be thinking “out loud” here over the next little while. Run now, while you can, before I suck you into the swirling vortex that is my mind right now.

(That’s a bit of an exaggeration; I’m feeling approximately 742% better than I was last week, and my mind is a lot clearer. If you could have heard some of the things I was thinking then, MAN ALIVE you would have wondered who let me out of the asylum. All I have to say is THANK GOD I had enough presence of mind to (mostly) keep my mouth shut and not voice it all, because I think I’d really be up a creek right now if I hadn’t.)

Tags: momma l, therapy
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The zoo

Saturday, August 2, 2008 11:28 pm

T and I went to the Toronto Zoo last weekend, and the day that started off beautiful, sunny and hot turned into a spectacular thunderstorm and ended with us changing our soaking clothes in the car in the parking lot. Because we’re classy like that.

I was thoroughly enchanted by everything we managed to see before the downpour began. I have no recollection of ever going to the zoo when I was growing up (although I’m told I did go once with my aunt) so it was actually pretty thrilling for me. I was really looking forward to the weekend, and as we stood in line at the entrance, I told T I was pretty sure I was more excited than all of the children in line combined.

We could only view the tigers from above so I couldn’t get any really good shots.

It was really hot and humid that day and a lot of the animals were just lounging about, not really doing anything.

This one just stood there, motionless.

Doesn’t she look cuddly? Until you look at the size of her paws, and then not so much.

The elephants (or ephelants, as my dad calls them) were my favourite. I love how quiet and peaceful they seem, just going about their business. I could have watched them all day.

That’s about all we got to see, before the heavens opened up and soaked us. And by soaked, I don’t mean we got a bit wet - I was wringing water out of my shirt pretty much by the bucketful. We had gone to the zoo knowing that the forecast called for rain, but thinking, eh, a little rain won’t kill us. Well, it didn’t kill us, but it was enough to drive us from the zoo earlier than planned. The storm was amazing - the thunder was louder than I’ve ever heard it, and caused me to shriek, and caused T (and some strangers on the path) to laugh at me. By the time we got to the parking lot we were absolutely drenched, and by that point I was just splashing in the puddles because, what was the difference at that point? (And also, I spent a year puddle-splashing with The Boy and sometimes I miss it.)

Just before we got to the car, we snapped a photo of ourselves, because I really wanted to document the ridiculousness of how wet we actually were. And then we hopped into the car and blasted the air and changed our clothes. I can now say I have been naked at the zoo, although who I would say that to, I’m not sure, because it’s kind of strange. Needless to say, I was glad there was a blanket in the backseat of my car because it provided much-needed cover as I struggled to put a dry bra on - and hello, when you’re cold, wet and clammy, that’s not the easiest task.

I had this photo printed and I’m going to frame it because I love pretty much everything about it, right down to the makeup that made its way from my eyes to my cheeks.