This is not a gadget.

The Reluctant Farmer decided that purchasing a robotic floor cleaner would be a good investment in our relationship. I was skeptical, I mean, I ought to be doing the floors myself. It’s expensive. It’s a gadget. Surely a broom and a mop …

Well, the broom and mop haven’t really been keeping up very well, since they are powered by me. And I haven’t got a lot of extra juice these days. So I accepted his generous offer, and today, the Braava 380T arrived in the mail. A little square device, a bit smaller than those countertop sandwich makers that were popular in the 90s, it was super easy to set up. Batteries for the little cube that it uses to assist with navigation were even included in the box!

Now, I wasn’t really sure how well this thing would work. Obviously, I figured it would be better than what I was doing – sweeping with a broom every other day or so and mopping with either a steam mop or a sponge mop about once a week – but I really wasn’t sure how it would work on our floors. We have wide plank hardwood in the south wing (which is badly scratched and dinged up and needs to be sanded and refinished, but that’s another tale) and engineered hardwood in most of the north wing.

I was STUNNED by how well it cleaned.

I made things a little more straightforward by putting the chairs up on top of the dining table, like you do at the end of the shift at the restaurant, and I moved most of the spinning wheels out of the way so it would have fewer obstacles to go around. Then I just watched.

The cats weren’t quite sure what to make of it at first, but after stalking it for a little while, they decided it was harmless and ignored it. It went under the couch and around the table legs and puttered back and forth across the floor for about 45 minutes.

By the time it was done, the microfibre cloth was thoroughly loaded with pet hair and dirt, because I hadn’t done a preliminary sweep with the broom – I wanted to see what it could do by itself. As it went around the room, I did occasionally swipe the dust bunnies off the side, but when it returned the starting point and sang it’s little “all done now” song, I was amazed. The floor felt way cleaner to my bare feet than it does after sweeping: no doubt the effect of having been gone over very slowly with a microfibre cloth rather than quickly with rather tired synthetic broom bristles.

Now that the worst of the dust and dirt were picked up, I filled the little water reservoir at the sink, rinsed and wrung out one of the damp mopping pads, and set Matilda loose again.

(She is called Matilda because the movement of the mopping action looks like a waltz step to me: forward and to the right, back, forward and to the left, back, forward and to the right…)

The damp mopping amazed me even further.

The floor is CLEAN.

I am barefoot, and it feels wonderfully clean. Of course it’s not as clean as having been scrubbed on hands and knees, but it’s way cleaner than I normally get it, even with the steamer. Again, no doubt because it has been gone over slowly and methodically with a damp cloth, rather than quickly and haphazardly with a squishy mop.

And I didn’t have to do any scrubbing. Or sweeping. I washed the mats, since they needed to be picked up anyway and were pretty dusty, and I moved a few things around to clear the path, and that was it. While Matilda swept and mopped, I worked on an assignment that needs to be done for the weekend.

Now, see, you need to realize that I do not like gadgets in general. I used to have a food processor, but I got rid of it: I prefer a bowl and a spoon for mixing and a knife and board or my v-slicer for chopping things. I don’t want a rototiller. I have no need of a panini press or a toaster oven or an electric can opener or any of the fancier gadgets. This high-tech machine is not the kind of thing you’d expect a girl like me to be impressed with. I mean, it sweeps and mops. I can sweep and mop.

Except that when I sweep and mop it costs me spoons. When I sweep and mop, it costs me spoons and even then, it’s not a great job – it’s just enough: never any more than enough, and often not quite enough, truth be told. But I have so few spoons to go around and such a big list of things to do that it gets tough to prioritize floor mopping.

Matilda is not a gadget, see.

Matilda is spoons. In a little black box that meanders across my floor in near silence, quietly sweeping up the mess and leaving me free to spend my spoons on other tasks.

The Reluctant Farmer bought me spoons.

The Fragility Index

It seems to me that it would be a public service to those around us if we could have a kind of warning sign, and indicator of our risk of collapse / freak out / bursting into tears / going into withdrawal / tipping over the edge into whatever form our particular brand of crazy might take.

So, I made some images, kind of like the ones you see at the provincial park to indicate the risk of forest fire – low, moderate, high, very high, extreme, and critical.

Feel free to use them on your Facebook, your blog, a t-shirt, a magnet on the fridge … wherever you think they might help.

Yoga and Journalling Workshop

Today I attended a yoga and journalling workshop run by a friend of mine. It was, apparently, exactly what I needed.

I realize that I’ve been fighting against the call to move forward in my healing journey. I’ve been resisting taking the steps I know I need to take. Today helped me move forward a little further on that healing road.

Below you will find some of what I wrote today. For those readers who are deeply religious, please do not be startled when I refer to the Divine in terms of the feminine … our Creator is both Mother and Father, and I speak to and of God in either fashion. I don’t think our human minds can easily encompass all that is God with just one mental image, and so I move rather fluidly between various ways of thinking of God.

That said, here is what I found in my heart today…

~

I have issues with control.

There, I said it.

I realize that control is an illusion … but it’s an illusion I don’t want to let go of. I want to believe that I can do it all. I want to just try harder to make my mind behave, to make my body live up to my expectations … but this isn’t a problem stemming from a lack of effort. More effort isn’t going to make things better. More effort is how I got here, for heaven’s sake!

I spent years and years holding down the trauma effects by sheer force of will, squashing my feelings, ignoring all the warning signs, just working harder so I didn’t have to think about what happened, didn’t have to face my guilt, my shame, my complicity, my sins.

But the truth will not stay hidden. When eventually I did look at all that I had been avoiding, when I finally told my story, I saw that the girl who lived through that mess deserved compassion and forgiveness … and things improved. I did the work, faced up to my past, changed the way I thought about my story and said, “whew, the hard work is done and now life can get back to normal and it will be all better.”

Only the injury was deeper than that, and the healing journey nowhere near done.

And I got mad.

I don’t want to do any more work. I don’t want to cry any more. I don’t want to learn how to manage my life so that I can live fully and make the most of my gifts while staying within my limits.

It’s frustrating having to pay so much damned attention. I want the ease of autopilot, the simplicity of routine.

Except that the life I had before was dishonest. And I wasn’t the kind of mother or spouse or friend or co-worker or human being I want to be.

So I need to find another road.

And the first step on that other road – the light only has to shine on the next step, after all – the next step is

surrender.

It’s okay not to be able to wrestle it all into submission by applying the not-insignificant power of my will.

My will, in this case, is entirely the wrong tool.

The divine, Ordol says, cannot fill anything but an empty vessel. When we are full of our own will, there is no room for the divine within us. We must make room in our souls, move aside so that Powers greater than we are have space to work.

I kneel before the Mother of Summer, the great Healer, and I say, “I can’t do this.”

And the Mother says, “You don’t have to,” and enfolds me in her loving arms.

~

I have been fighting for so long, and I’m tired.

I see now that I don’t have to keep fighting. I can choose to lay down my weapons and stand unarmed and vulnerable before the world.

They can, after all, kill me but once.

And I am, always, held in the hands of God … and I am perfectly, utterly safe.

It is my own weapons that convince me I am surrounded by danger. I am carrying a semiautomatic with me everywhere, cinching tight the buckles on my Kevlar and bracing every moment for the incoming barrage. But it is my staggering display of weaponry that prompts everyone else to bristle, makes them draw their own guns and train them on me – just in case, you know – because that bitch looks like she means business.

What if, instead, I walked up to them with my arms wide open, wearing my colourful silks and singing of summer and sunshine and love?

What if I were to say, here, have a cup of tea?

What if I were to listen, instead of shouting?

What if I were to trust the Mother of Summer to heal my wounds, to relax into her embrace, and allow the old injuries to be tended by the only Power great enough to heal them?

What if I were to fall asleep under my God’s loving eyes, and allow my soul to recover?

Then,

 

I would never need to pick up my weapons again

 

and my soul would be filled with song.

Let’s talk.

Today is the day to talk about mental health issues.

So, let’s talk about one of the things that makes living with mental health issues so much tougher than it needs to be: shame.

We all know we’re supposed to be productive. We’re supposed to be cheerful, contributing members of our families and our communities. We’re supposed to have our acts together, to behave like civilized grownups, to be capable of holding down a job, caring for our kids, and keeping the sidewalks shovelled and the grass mown.

When your mind keeps betraying you, though, when you don’t sleep at night so you drag your butt through the day in an exhausted fog, when your chest aches constantly and your head feels like it’s going to explode from the pressure and your memories keep escaping your grasp no matter how many times you try to make lists and set alarms and you are so freakin’ tired you just want to sit down and cry …

… when your day goes like that, it’s hard to be the cheerful, contributing member of your family and community that you want to be.

But we don’t want to tell anyone how we feel, either, because we are ashamed. It seems so weak, so silly, so … inexplicable. Do I confess that I don’t remember the conversation you’re referring to, or do I just smile and nod and fake my way through? Do I stop halfway through the short list of things I want to do today to sit in the chair because I’m just too weary to go on, or do I push through so that I don’t have to explain why we’re having frozen pizza for dinner again tonight? Do I dig deep to find the words (and the courage) to ask you for help, or do I just swallow my fears yet again and try to talk myself out of the gut reactions I can’t actually control?

Just managing my inner world takes more energy and resources than you can possibly imagine. It takes more energy and resources than I want to give it, but if I don’t do all the things that I know I need to do to stay on top of things, the Darkness overtakes me, and then I am undone.

But the things I have to do take time out of my day, time I want to spend on productive things. Time I don’t want to  have to justify or explain to anyone else, because it is hard to wrap the words around it all. I can’t adequately explain it … all I can tell you is that believe it or not, this is the best I can do. And I know my best is no great shakes, believe me, but this is all I’ve got. If I had more, I’d give it, please believe me. This is as good as it gets right now.

And I am ashamed that this is all I can do. I want to be so much more.

I realize that shame thrives on three things: secrecy, silence, and judgment.

We need to tell our stories – to deny shame the power to control our lives any more. Yes, it’s scary to shine the light into the darkness, but when I told my secrets, when I refused to stay silent anymore, instead of being met with the harsh judgment I expected, I was met with loving kindness and support.

I still want to run back into the darkness and hide sometimes. I don’t have that choice anymore – I’ve outed myself quite thoroughly now and I can’t go back. This is good: the accountability keeps me moving forward, and keeps me from slipping back into the darkness that still calls to me, promising that everything will be okay if I just hide everything once more, shut my mouth, and behave.

It’s a lie. I know it’s a lie. But I need the help of those who have heard my story. I need people I can lean on while the emotional bones that I shattered in that long, brutal fall are given time to heal. I need supportive voices who encourage me to be gentle with myself, to allow the healing to progress at it’s own pace, to help me drown out the judgmental, punishing voices that still plague me.

I need to hear 

You are doing a big job even though nobody else can see it, and we know you’re working hard. We understand that you need to rest, and that you hate having to do it. It’s okay. We’re proud of you just for hanging on. You’re getting better, we can see it, even if you can’t. And when you have bad days, we are here for you. It’s okay if every day isn’t a good one. We love you anyway.

I need to hear this. We all need to hear this. Those of us struggling with the invisible demons of our mental illnesses and injuries, we need more support than we let on.

Be extra kind to everyone you meet this week. You never know what inner battles people are fighting … that surly clerk at the store, the grumpy spouse, the distracted teacher … maybe this is all they’ve got to give today. We’re hard enough on ourselves, really, we don’t need one more voice saying “come on, is that the best you can do?”

A voice that says, “It’s tough, eh? Anything I can do to help?” … now that would be welcome.

At some point, you know enough

I went to visit a friend of mine a little while back, to talk about … well, life, the universe, and everything I suppose. He does personal coaching work and leads group spirituality workshops (after leaving a successful career in software development, believe it or not) and has generously offered to help me any way he can. He’s one of the few people outside of my family to have witnessed all of my story so far, and he’s been a great support to me through so many parts of this difficult journey. I am blessed by his friendship.

Anyhow, as we were talking, I realized that what I’ve been feeling most often these days is frustration: it seems as though further treatment is a waste of time (recognizing as I say this that I’m probably wrong). It feels like there’s no more to ‘uncover’, nothing else to ‘dig up’ or ‘unearth’ or ‘face squarely’. I’ve done all the thinking. I’ve processed all I can stand to process, at least for now. Yeah, there might be more stuff buried down in there (actually I know there are a few things that still need to be washed out, but they’re just now starting to appear, and I have the sense that it’s not quite time to do that work yet). He had a good answer for me:

At some point, you know enough.

You can keep reading the self-help books, keep attending workshops, keep searching and reaching and trying to find the answers … but at some point, you know enough. At some point, what you really need to do is just pick yourself up and start living. Wherever you are, with whatever you have, no matter how inadequate your resources may seem to be.

After all, life keeps on happening while we’re reading and attending workshops and meditating. Our inner lives most certainly need attention – even more so if we have unhealthy thought patterns that need to be changed – but maybe, just maybe, I know enough now to just get on with getting on.

My acupuncturist had said the same sort of thing to me: she encouraged me to stop thinking about “when I get better” and to instead focus on the moment, to realize that “right now, this is what my life looks like”, to learn to live right now with the resources I have, few though they may seem to be. Who knows what better will look like in another six months? Right now, this is what my life looks like. Better is a relative term. I am better now than I was before. I can do more. I sleep more soundly, often without waking at all in the night. The chest pain is now only occasional rather than constant. I can drive to town, do a bunch of errands, and drive home. I’ll be tired, but I can still make supper when I get back. These are major improvements.

I’m just getting on with getting on. I do as much as I can, and sometimes I do a bit too much and sometimes I don’t do as much as I’d like. Okay, I rarely do as much as I’d like, but we all know that my concept of “a reasonable day’s work” is badly skewed, so that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. In the fall I was doing chores every morning, hoping that come winter I’d be able to be the farmer on duty. As it got colder, though, my body called a halt by taking my feet out from under me for a couple of weeks. I didn’t post about it, but it was kind of scary … the palindromic arthritis that occasionally affects my ankle joints flared up noisily for awhile, forcing me to walk with a cane for about two weeks, and to walk rather gingerly for another week after that. It passed, as it always does, but I took it as a clear sign that I had been overextending myself. The Boy has taken up the chores now – fortunately it’s not a huge job, just 15-20 minutes twice a day, and I help out whenever I can, but I had really wanted to do it myself this winter. I don’t like being unable to do the things I feel like I ought to be able to do … I feel like I ought to be well by now, like there’s nothing more to be gained by resting and I need to get off my lazy behind and get back to having a busy and productive life.

But when I overextend myself, I end up shouting at someone, or crying, or in physical pain, or putting myself to bed at 7 pm so as not to inflict myself on my family any more than is absolutely necessary. I do know that overextending myself isn’t a valid option. it isn’t a smart choice. The smart thing to do is to carefully try adding one more thing and see how that goes. Then adding one more thing after that, and seeing how that goes. Unfortunately, I still haven’t figured out the subtle clues that indicate “you are almost out of spoons, you need to slow down now” and I only realize that I’ve overdone it after it’s too late.

Presumably there are subtle warning signs that will tell me what “approaching empty” feels like, but I haven’t learned to recognize them reliably yet. I suppose that would be the next thing I need to learn … not quite sure how best to go about learning it though.

Hmm. Maybe that’s what I need to work on next.

I don’t want to do that work yet though. Right now, I’m going to finish my holiday knitting (projects 6 and 7 are both underway, and both are more than half done!) and drink tea by the fire. Maybe for today, that’s enough.

Walking

The ability to walk is something we often take for granted. Most of us are fully mobile, able to quickly dash to the other room to get something we forgot, to hike out to the barn over uneven ground without worrying, to pace the floor as we think.
Having your ability to walk suddenly impaired is a very eye-opening experience.
I have palindromic rheumatism – a mild, non-degenerative form of arthritis that flares up without any rhyme, reason, or warning, and then disappears. My ankles are the joints usually affected – one or the other, thankfully never both at once (so far), and occasionally I have troubles in my hands and wrists. Honestly, I have a very mild variety of the trouble: I can go years between flares, often the pain lasts no more than a few days, and the longest episode I had lasted a few months. Advil manages the pain, and really, it’s not so bad.
However … when my ankle gives out, putting weight on it can feel like the bones are grating against one another inside the joint. This, of course, makes walking somewhat more mindful than it is the rest of the time: every step is carefully considered, and I place my foot gently, testing the joint before shifting my weight, to see if it’ll hold without pain or not. Even during the course of a flare up, the pain will ebb and flow – I can be walking fine, then suddenly my joints are screaming at me to stop.
Now I have figured out how to walk without stressing that joint – usually. Gently testing the steps, not twisting the ankle at all, and walking on the ball of my foot rather than heel-toe, or with a careful limp that prevents the full flex of the injured ankle. None of it is particularly graceful, and sometimes, I just need a little extra support.
So, today I picked up two rubber cane tips at the drugstore ($2.99 for both of them), and went out to the stand of poplar saplings with my machete. I cut two straight and sturdy trees that looked like they could probably be stuffed into the openings of the cane tips, shaved the bark off, and shaped the ends.
I have a little bit of sanding to do, and I need to add a coat of Howards Feed-n-Wax, then they are ready for use.
If you’re local to me and you’d like one, just let me know!

Overdrawn

Yesterday, I crashed.

We got up early to take the Small People to school, then The Boy and I stopped for breakfast at McD’s (the only food from McDonalds I will eat is breakfast … well, that and french fries), returned a pair of too-small jeans I’d picked up for him a few days ago in the faint hope they might fit, and headed into the city for student/parent/teacher interviews.

The Boy does virtual schooling – this means that he schools at home, but I don’t teach him. The school does all the teaching via online courses and printed correspondence materials and I just supervise. We do go and meet with his teachers a couple of times a year, and we are in the main office for exams and other activities once a month or so as well. On interview days, they always have other things going on to make it worth our while to go in … sometimes there is a craft activity, this year there was an aboriginal musician doing a drumming workshop. And they feed us, which is nice.

The Boy had a few issues with planning and scheduling his coursework earlier this year: the flexibility of the virtual school environment is a huge blessing, but it is also a big challenge. Brick-and-mortar schools tell you what to do when: the bell rings, time to get up and move to the next class, your assignment is due Thursday, no excuses … you don’t plan your life, you do what you are told. In the virtual school world, there are deadlines set – but you figure out how to get there from where you are. This is actually quite a complicated task, one many grownups aren’t all that good at, in fact, and as a parent, I think I had overestimated The Boy’s readiness to handle this. After reading up on teen brain development and realizing that the frontal cortex (where planning and decision making happen) isn’t actually *wired in place* at his age, I can now see why it was so hard for him! It’s not that he isn’t bright, he’s a very clever kid, but teenagers have what amounts to a neurological deficit that makes these particular tasks extremely difficult. He’ll grow into it – my job is to be the coach and help him practice the skills he’ll need, so that his brain learns these patterns while it is getting wired in … then when the wiring is all finished, these planning pathways will already be optimized. Fortunately, planning and tracking and documenting are all things I am pretty good at, having worked in project management in one way or another for much of my career.  :)

Still, that’s work for me (as well as for him). Planning, documenting your work (what we always called “CYA documentation” at the office), double checking that things actually worked the way you expected them to (i.e. just because you hit the save or submit button doesn’t guarantee that the file ended up where it was supposed to go, and it is actually up to you to confirm that it is where it needs to be), those kinds of things. Coaching him through it all has been educational for me as well as for him, I think. And stressful … for both of us.

Anyway, the interviews went well – the teachers and staff are very supportive of forward movement and incremental improvement, so it was encouraging to talk to them and to hear their support of the new approaches we’ve been trying out. There was a presentation on careers in the trades (The Boy wants to be an electrician, and he has the makings of an excellent one already, judging by the experiments and soldering projects he has done around here). The drumming workshop wasn’t really something I’d have travelled anywhere to see, but we had time to put in anyway and I always feel like the artists should at least have an audience after the trouble they’ve gone through to set things up. The drums were neat – hand made in northern Alberta of moose hide and wood.

With school meetings behind us, it was back to the Small People’s school to fetch them at the end of their day, a stop at the post office to mail a couple of books and pick up the bills (and a parcel from my parents!), then home, make dinner and …

… and I crashed.

I got dinner on the table for everyone, and when I sat down and looked at my plate, I couldn’t even eat. I had a glass of water, managed to stay through the meal, then went directly to bed. I didn’t even put my pyjamas on, I just got under the covers and lay there, contemplating the pain in my chest and the pounding in my head.

I dozed fitfully for awhile, then fell deeply asleep. I woke up at 9:30, uncomfortable with my skirt tangled around my legs, and finally put my jammies on. I got a glass of milk and talked to The Reluctant Farmer for a little bit, then went right back to bed and stayed there until morning.

It’s so hard to know when you are about to hit your limits … in fact, I often don’t realize it until I’ve gone way past them and collapse in a heap.

It’s hard. I want to feel guilty for being so weak, I want to say “good grief, girl, what is wrong with you that you can’t even handle the very quiet, very lazy-looking life you lead these days?”

Of course I know that this isn’t about the very quiet, very lazy-looking life I lead these days … this is about the sixteen years of chaos and grief and pain and stress and refusal to slow down and take care of myself that I lived through, and the very quiet, very lazy-looking life I lead these days is called recuperation.

So, I asked The Reluctant Farmer if he was able to modify his plans for today and do the morning drive-to-school that I had been scheduled for, and with a few tweaks to the plans, that worked out. I slept. I’m up now, slowly getting my feet under me and deciding how much I think I can handle today. I have some things that must be done today, including acupuncture and a drive to the food co-op, but the rest of the day can be modified.

I think it’s going to have to be pretty quiet. I’m still recuperating, after all.

Aftermath

This past week was a busy one.

We had several trips to Barrhead for school events and final exams for The Boy, along with some of the unpleasant last minute drama that, apparently, is an essential learning experience for teenagers. After all, until things actually go to hell in a handbasket because you didn’t confirm something and just assumed it had all gone as you anticipated … until something unexpected but certainly within the realm of likely possibility actually happens to throw the schedule off … well, how is a kid supposed to know that Mom’s insistence that the devil is in the details and being proactve makes a huge difference in real life … how’s a kid supposed to know any of that applies to him?

Well, he knows it now and as life lessons go, it was a cheap one, so that’s all good. However, cheap lesson or not, it cost me a decent chunk of energy on top of an already packed schedule that was likely  a bit over-ambitious in the first place.

Add in the unexpected crash at the dentist’s office yesterday, and I’m utterly knackered.

My body is telling me loud and clear that that was way too much. I’m listening – I’m taking it very easy, and The Boy is being very helpful about picking up the slack. Today I find it tiring just to sit in a chair – so I’m reclining on the couch, alternately puttering on my laptop and working on a new shawl design.

Forward Movement is a shawl specifically designed to make use of the long colour repeats of Noro Silk Garden Sock yarn – two skeins of which I won from Flannelberry’s blog contest a while ago. The yarn is really interesting: very much like a handspun single, with thicker and thinner spots, slubs of silk every so often, and a wonderfully varied texture. I hear this yarn washes up to be much softer than it is right off the skein, so I’m interested to see how it is after blocking. It is a silk/wool/mohair blend and not as soft as I’d expect given those ingredients, so I imagine there might be some sizing agents involved in the spinning process that will wash out once it’s knit up.  

The reason for the shawl’s title is that the two halves of the shawl curve forward, over your shoulders and to the front of the body. With all the lovely colour in the yarn, the pattern can be very simple so I’m not planning to add much in the way of lace or other effects … we’ll see what it needs as it gets a little larger. So far, it’s only about 13 cm long (measured down the center back) but it appears to have the shape I was hoping for. I expect I’ll add some decorative yarn overs lower down the body of the shawl, and I’m still pondering the best way to do the bottom edge so as to accentuate the idea of forward motion and give it a bit of swing. Tassles, maybe? Still thinking.

I’ll post a picture when I have enough energy to get up and find the camera … meaning not today.

Back to my restful knitting and my cup of tea…

Endings/Beginnings

Well, the final verdict from the insurance company arrived today: the ‘experts’ there (who have never seen me, just the reports from my GP and my counsellor and some documentation that I submitted along with the appeal) are not convinced that I am unable to work at my job, and so there will be no income replacement, no disability coverage.

There are all kinds of public service announcements that ask us all to be understanding of mental health challenges, to be compassionate towards people who are dealing with mental health problems, to encourage everyone to get help if it is needed … but insurance companies don’t make money paying out on claims, so I suppose they don’t listen to those kinds of announcements. All the other people I’ve had to deal with seem to have paid attention though, and for that I am grateful. It makes a difference when folks see your pain and say nice things like, “you take care of yourself.”

Thus it is that I join the ranks of millions of others who have learned the hard way that insurance is there to provide peace of mind - as long as you don’t actually need it.

Ah well.

I submitted my initial request for disability in June, right after my employment insurance benefits ran out, and it has taken nine months to get to this final verdict. “Thanks so much for continuing to pay your premiums all this time, but we will not be paying you anything at all. Hope you got your teeth cleaned while you could.”

By this stage of the game, we really just needed to know one way or the other, and so it is good to at least have an answer, even if it’s not the optimal answer from a financial point of view. I am certainly very grateful to The Reluctant Farmer for being willing to work as hard as he does to ensure that we have everything we need.

When the phone call arrived from the insurance company, I happened to be in town, so I drove over to  my office in order to tell my manager in person that I will not be returning. I realized a few months ago that I will not be well enough to do that kind of work again for a very long time, if ever. PTSD is an anxiety disorder characterized by constantly being on the watch, scanning for trouble, and jumping into high gear as soon as anything dangerous is spotted. This is a highly adaptable set of behaviours when you are in a dangerous situation – if something bad can happen at any time, you need to always be ready to react as quickly and decisively as possible. However, when you’re just living an ordinary life, this is really not a helpful approach. It makes you jumpy, testy, quick to anger, quick to explode. I spent years allowing these skills to settle themselves firmly in my mind and body, and learning different skills is a long, slow road. I’m having some success, definitely – I don’t startle as badly as I did anymore, I am more able to control my reactions to upsetting experiences, but I am still really fragile and I still have a long way to go. I do have complete faith that I will get there one of these days, but in the meantime, it is essential for my recovery that I avoid practicing those less-adaptive skills, as the more I use them the harder they are to unlearn. And I’ve used them for a lot of years already.

The peculiar thing is that the work that I was doing (software quality assurance, plus technical documentation, analysis and design) actually relied rather heavily on my ability to constantly be on the watch for trouble, to immediately notice things that were out of place or out of the ordinary and to react quickly and decisively whenever something set my spidey sense to tingling. Unfortunately, that just meant I had daily opportunities to practice the very skills that I am now attempting to unlearn. The world is safe, I am not in danger, and I do not need to jump into full defensive mode every time something startles me or seems somehow ‘wrong’. Thus, I need to not do the kind of work I was doing – not until I am completely healed and can manage to avoid slipping fully back into the old habits.

So it is that an era has come to an end, and I am leaving information technology for the foreseeable future. I really enjoyed working with my team. We did good work. I was with the company for over six years, which is, in fact, a personal record. I said often that I could not have continued working in the field as long as I did anywhere else, and I still feel that way: I have nothing but gratitude towards my team. If I am ever in the position to look at doing this kind of work again, they would be my employer of choice.

However, it’s time for a new beginning. I don’t know what kind of work I will be able to do in the near or distant future – in the near future, I am still not well enough to tackle full time employment, but I’ll be there eventually, so it’s time to start pondering the available options. I don’t think that ‘full time author’ actually pays the bills, at least not for mere mortals such as myself who aren’t writing about young wizards or courtroom drama, so I suppose it’s time to break out the old “what do you want to be when you grow up” books and see what they can suggest.

In the meantime, more rest, more writing, more tea. I have faith that the universe will unfold as it should.

And yes, that’s a Star Trek reference. I’ve been a geek for a long time: just because I’m not working in IT anymore doesn’t mean I have to give up my geekiness!

Listen.

When chest pain wakes you out of a sound sleep and won’t go away … listen.

When your blood pressure goes up to 144/100, but only intermittently … listen.

When the doctors say ‘your heart is fine, your lungs are fine, your chest wall is fine … follow up with your GP” … listen.

When your GP says ‘perhaps it is stress that you aren’t consciously aware of’ … listen.

I didn’t want to listen. I know what stress is, thank you very much. I’ve had two round trip tickets to Hell and lived to tell the tale – I know stress really, really well, and this ain’t it. My life is better now than it has ever been! How could I be suffering so much stress now that I’d be in pain, unable to sleep, and feeling like my head’s about to explode … when I managed just fine when things really were crazy?

It just made no sense.

But my body would not be quiet. The pain got worse.

Listen, my body said. Listen to me. It’s time.

Time for what?

Time to finish the old work.

I’m too busy. Go away.

You are not too busy, and I am not going away. Listen.

I have things to do. Can’t this wait?

It’s waited long enough.

:sigh:

And so I booked myself off of work and sat down to hear what my body was trying to tell me.

Some days I feel like I’ve already lived two lifetimes. My first child died the day she was born (Valentine’s Day, 1995) from a severe neural tube defect. The pain of that loss changed my life completely – that’s when I really started to wake up and take a look at what it is to truly live, to be in the present moment, to really make the most of the time we are given. That was the first trip to Hell. Nothing in my whole life has ever hurt as much as saying goodbye to my baby – it felt like someone reached into my chest and tore out my still-beating heart. I got so tired of crying and hurting and missing her, it was exhausting and sad and unfair and it hurt.

The Boy was born a year later, and things got better. His smiling face healed many of my sorrows – though the pain of my daughter’s death did not fully ease for several years, and once in awhile it still catches me off guard. Rarely now, though. She’d have been 16 this year. I do wonder what she’d have looked like at sixteen. She had dark hair and dusky skin and a round face, and she was beautiful to me, even in death.

Just before the turn of the millennium, my marriage started to fall apart. My husband, The Engineer, who had always been a fairly even tempered kind of guy, suddenly became insanely jealous and controlling. I tried everything I could think of to mollify him and keep him happy – I gave up my friends, I stopped going to the gym, I kept my opinions to myself … and I slowly died inside. We went to counselling: it didn’t seem to make any difference. Eventually I moved out in a last-ditch effort to save the marriage: perhaps, if we started ‘dating’ each other again, and weren’t faced with the multitude of challenges of living in the same space every day, we could put things back together. For the sake of The Boy, too, we had to find a way to live peacefully – even if that meant living in two households.

It wasn’t until I was in my own condo with the door safely locked behind me that I realized I’d spent months huddled on the very edge of the bed, unable to relax, even in sleep. I was so afraid of him, yet he said he loved me, he never hit me, and I could not articulate the source of my fear. All I knew was that if I was meeting him for the first time, now, I wouldn’t have had anything to do with him. In five short years he had gone from the love of my life to a total stranger, and I had no idea how this had happened.

Just before Thanksgiving he was admitted for what they assumed was a nervous breakdown of some kind. I wasn’t there – friends of his took him in after he started acting strangely during dinner at their house, and I was asked to stay away lest my presence make things worse. The next day I got a phone call at work: it was the neurologist who’d examined him, and she had bad news. “He has a brain tumour,” she said, “and he is refusing to let us contact his parents.”

And the conductor shouted “All aboard for Hell!”, the train whistle blew, and I was dragged on board again.

Thus began the worst years of my life. The tumour was located in the part of the brain that governs personality, which of course explained why he had changed so drastically from the person I had known. This also meant that for the rest of his life, I had to deal with a complete stranger whose brain was scrambled in a way that made him utterly self-centered and with no trace of empathy for anyone … not even his own child.

I probably could’ve found a way to work with that stranger, though it would not have been easy. I did try though - when we realized what was going on, I moved back home to care for him. I took my vows seriously: in sickness and in health. I leased out my condo, quit my job and borrowed money from the bank and from friends to buy him all the fancy toys he wanted for his ‘last go’ – including a Lexus SUV. We lived in Fort McMurray and he was employed by one of the big oil companies there … I knew that his disability pay would cover our living expenses, and that when the inevitable occurred, life insurance would pay the bills for his toys. We’d be fine.

A month later, his parents stepped in and reclaimed their son with the ferocity of a pack of wolves fighting a stranger off their territory. I was to blame for his illness – I was a bad wife, I stressed him out, and stress causes cancer. I know they were hurting parents who needed someone to blame and I was the convenient target but oh, the drama that ensued.

I was kicked out of the house: he had a friend convey his “need” to have the house to himself, and didn’t blink when I said if I was leaving, The Boy was coming with me. He wasn’t allowed to drive and didn’t want the Lexus anymore, so I should just keep it – though I couldn’t possibly afford the payments for it, nor the fuel to drive it. I was unemployed, and having been a contractor I had no EI, and I was faced with the costs of setting up my own household again.

In less than two weeks, I found a job in Edmonton for half the pay I’d been making as a contractor up north. I rented an apartment and moved my own things out of our house – the spare bed (which I’d had as a girl), my son’s things, the every day dishes and cutlery, a few pots and some Corningware, a fold out couch I’d had in university and the old table from out on the deck. I left all the ‘good things’ behind without a backward look, blessed the salesman who gave me a good trade on the Lexus for a 4Runner, found a daycare for The Boy, and went to work.

The next two years were one crisis after another. I was served with court papers demanding regular visitation and I offered generous terms (every Saturday and every other weekend from Saturday morning until Sunday night) and was granted my request that all visits be supervised, in light of the medical issues at play. As The Engineer was effectively living with his parents, this wasn’t really a big issue, though it was perceived as a grave insult.

See, The Engineer and his family chose denial as their coping strategy, and I chose to face the truth. He was fine! How dare I suggest otherwise! Then they found out that I also chose to tell The Boy the truth as I understood it: I showed him the scans and the huge mass in Daddy’s skull. Even a child could identify it as ‘wrong’. I told him that the doctors would try hard to fix it, but this kind of tumour isn’t the kind they are able to fix. Nobody knows when, but probably before you are big, Daddy will die. He accepted this calmly, as most children do. They can handle the truth – it’s the lies they can’t accept.

I refuse to lie to my child. However, his grandparents were appalled by my candour and told him I was wrong. There’s no tumour, it went away! He didn’t believe them, but was confused by their strange pronouncements: a kid who is in the middle of potty training recognizes both a commode chair and waterproof pads … so why was Grandpa telling him that the commode chair was just a garbage can and the waterproof pads were just to keep Daddy from slipping in his seat? Every week I spent the drive home from their house trying first to follow my child’s convoluted narratives to figure out what he was talking about, then reframing things for him so that he would still be able to love his father and not be crushed by his grandparents’ lies.

At Christmas time, for several days they told The Boy that Daddy couldn’t come to the phone because he’d lost his voice. They never mentioned that they wouldn’t be at the school Christmas concert, they just didn’t show up: when we called, they said they didn’t come because it was raining. After a week of the stories not making sense, we finally realized that The Engineer was in the hospital – but he refused to see The Boy. I don’t suppose I will ever know why. I was just the enemy and had to be kept in the dark at all costs.

Eventually, the tumour made it’s last charge: The Boy told me that Daddy was now in a bed in the living room and not talking to him. I explained that it wasn’t because he didn’t want to talk, it was because he couldn’t. The next weekend, on our way there, The Boy quietly said from the back seat, “Mom, do you think my dad will talk to me this time?” I told him, sadly, that he probably wouldn’t be able to. A few minutes later that same quiet voice said, “But it’s okay to hope, right?” It was all I could do to see the road through my tears.

Daddy didn’t talk to him that day, and before The Boy’s next visit, I got a phone call at work. It was “a message for The Boy”, he said, “Tell him that his Dad died this morning.” That was it. The Boy wasn’t allowed to go say goodbye, his father was cremated, and I was told that we were not welcome to sit with the family at the funeral – I should stand at the back of the church. I didn’t … I sat at the side with my own friends and family, and during the Sign of Peace I carried my little boy over to shake hands and offer peace to those who had treated us so badly for so long. The priest had to wait for us to get back to our seats before he could resume the service. It was a small victory, in the heaping coals of flame on their heads kind of way.

Then my child support payments stopped, and I was told that nothing could be done until the will was probated (this is patently untrue, but I had no money to pay a lawyer to get it sorted out). The Boy asked for some of his toys and a few mementos of his father, and we were ignored. Eventually, a few things showed up on our doorstep, but it was all so difficult, we just gave up and did without.

When the will was sorted out, a year later, the back support was paid up and regular payments resumed, but that year had been long. When I was finally able to get the value of The Boy’s actual inheritance (and this took me more than a year and the intervention of a lawyer), there was so little there I was shocked. The generous life insurance was not left to him. All the costs for two funerals were taken out of the estate (i.e. The Boy’s inheritance), not paid for by the insurance money (wherever it went) nor from the bank account that had been made joint with The Engineer’s father for convenience during his illness. So much disappeared … and all I could think was that The Engineer could not possibly have intended for things to end up this way. But, by the time the decisions were being made, he was not himself anymore, and his parents’ hatred guided the decisions that were made. Apparently it didn’t occur to anyone that if the household the supposedly-beloved-grandchild lives in is short of money, the grandchild suffers too, and that sending a card that says “we love you so much” with a Lego set a couple of times a year doesn’t really make up for the hurt that has been done nor the lies that have been told.

Eventually the drama quieted down, though it never really did get resolved. The original child support order is not legally enforceable, because it has The Engineer’s name on it: we need a judge to scribble “The Estate of” in front of his name and put a new stamp on it and then it’ll be legal again, but I’ve been unable to get this done in the five years I’ve been trying. The last time we tried, we got a year and a half worth of post dated support cheques instead … which was fine, except that the year and a half ended in January 2011 and there aren’t any more cheques and none seem to be forthcoming. So once again, I’m paying a lawyer to try to enforce my son’s father’s wishes, because the “loving grandparents” are too angry to see that hurting me hurts The Boy.

And so here I sit, with my chest tight and my head aching, off work for however long it takes to get all of this sorted out in my head and to get my body’s alarm system reset to a lower threshold. My counsellor describes it as Delayed Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and that rings true.

I’m trying to help my body let go of the tension and fear: it’s safe now, but I’ve run at high throttle for so long it’s a lot of work getting my body to reset. This will take some time and a lot of concerted effort.

I’m also trying to find the path to forgiveness, but it is a difficult road. I’m still really angry at the injustice of it all, and I long for things to be made right. I can’t change the situation, though, so I have to change my outlook. It’s not easy, but I’m working on it. It’s the only road to peace.

So why write this? Why go through all of the old stories again, feeling the hurt and pain anew?

Because I am a Scribe, it is part of who I am. Tell the story and heal your past. By listening to me here, you help me heal. Thank you for your courage: my stories are hard to hear, and I know it. They’re hard to tell, too.

May we all find the path of forgiveness and peace.
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It's now 2017: I have, indeed, found the path of forgiveness and peace: I even wrote a book about it.
My body has been permanently changed by the trauma I survived, and my PTSD is chronic and complex. However, my soul is at peace, and I am content.

Fifteen minutes

I survived fifteen minutes on the elliptical trainer, on it's lowest setting without having a heart attack or chest pains ... but I did rather easily get my heart rate up to 176.

Clearly I need to work on my cardiovascular health.