Adding Percentages

I keep waking up in the night with a surge of fear in my chest. I think I’m aging right in the mirror. It doesn’t help that I wake up two or three times a night before I finally get enough sleep.

So, I have questions that I’m afraid to ask anyone:

1) Since Mike has two different levels of risk, if he catches COVID-19 before the vaccine comes out, does the death rate for each add together to calculate his overall risk? The website I looked at said that the death rate is a person’s risk of dying if he catches the virus. Do they add together if he has more than one?

2) If everyone in my family catches COVID-19, do those individual numbers, the death rates, add together to tell me the risk of someone dying in my household? Do they?

I never studied statistics in all the math I took in college. I don’t know why. I passed four semesters of calculus and differential equations. I used math for physics, mechanics, and electronics. I really rocked that math, but I didn’t even get the basics of statistics. I remember doing something with dice in junior high, but it didn’t stick. All I know about statistics is that if you flip a coin seven times and get heads each time, the odds are still 50% that you’ll get heads the next time you flip the coin.

So my brain keeps trying to look for flaws in my logic as I try to figure out that combined death rate.

Because if all you do is add the numbers together, then there is roughly a 25% chance that someone in my family will die if we all get COVID-19. And that’s not including adding Mike’s age risk to his specific risk.

So as I’m trying to get back to sleep at 2:16 am, my thoughts move on toward my friends who’ve used the words hysteria and hype, and these are not MAGA types. I lie there, too angry to sleep. I realize that they’re not feeling the risk the way I am. If they have a kid, and they’re younger than Mike and I since we had our kid late, they’re only looking at between 1% to 2.8% combined chance that someone in their immediate family will die. That’s only if my math works the way it should and I’m not certain that it does.

Then, I realize why they aren’t all that worried the way I am. If I look at the person in my family with the least risk, me, I’m already three and a half times as likely to die than anyone in their family combined. If my math is right.

I picture four families like mine and figure that one of us is going to lose someone. If my math is right. They picture a hundred families and see only one family.

And then, I start thinking how those statistics go up drastically if I have someone in the hospital and the doctors are short of ventilators and they have to triage for the people most likely to survive. Then, because two of my family members are already high-risk, they would triage me out of two family members. Two. I only have two. It makes me think of the mothers that lost all of their sons in the Civil War.

That is the scenario behind my extreme response to this pandemic. This is why I’m so angry with my friends. I’m selfish. Yes. I am. This is why I do not want my family to get hit with COVID-19 when the hospitals are short of vents because in that moment, I would lose everything. Everything. I’m not sure I’d have the will to live if I lost them both.

Then, I think maybe Facebook will help distract me so I can get back to sleep. Scrolling through the pictures, I realize that I can barely stand to watch my friends post all the creative things they’re doing with all their free time.

Me? I can barely work a few hours a week. I can barely stand to go to the store and see people without masks and gloves.I have to imagine that cloud of breath around any person who talks to me. Even if we’re outside, I wonder if I’m upwind or downwind of them. I have to wonder about convection in the air. I have to come back home and disinfect each item in my groceries once I carry them inside. I don’t even let Mike or Nick help carry them in. Chlorox wipes for plastic, cardboard. I try to imagine how someone will pick it up. Soap and water for any container, like soda cans, that someone will put up to their mouths. Soap and water for fruits and vegetables with skins. Vinegar for fresh fruits and vegetables without skins. When I’m done, I have to clean the counters where grocery bags sat. Then, I put my clothes into the washer. I have to disinfect my phone if I used it as a list at the store. It’s exhausting.

My one percent friends aren’t doing any of that.

My one percent friends aren’t terrified at night.

I am.

Thank you for listening, jules

Call Your People

I went to bed after looking too long at the statistics and projections regarding the coronavirus. I feel like I’ve been watching the Twin Towers collapse over and over. It hasn’t maxed out yet. It’s going to be grim. I’m having trouble getting my head around it.

So, I made a list of my people, the people I love and the people who love me. Sometimes those people annoy me, but I love them anyway. I hope I don’t annoy them in return. I miss my people. I do.

I keep thinking that not all of my people will still be around when I go back out into the world to see them. Out of about a hundred, I’m going to lose a few. I keep thinking that I might never see my mother again.

I keep thinking of more people to add to my list of people I love.

I need to go listen to some people sing. I need to look at kid videos and kitten pictures. I need to see bad paintings. I need to talk to more of my people on the phone. I’ve got a wad of gum in my mouth right now and I’ve chewed every bit of flavor out of it.

Go call your people.

Thank you for listening, jules

No Coronavirus Confidence

Tomorrow, Mike and I are going to drive Nick to his college to pick up his stuff from the dorm. His school is going to do the rest of the semester online. So, we have to go get his stuff.

“I thought you guys are self-quarantined?” you might say.

We are. So, here’s what has to happen. We get up in the morning and leave before I’ll have enough sleep. Then, we drive five hours across the state of Washington to the edge of Idaho. We can make stops. We can. For gas. And to pee.

But when we stop, we have to use nitrile gloves on the gas nozzle to keep from getting infected. It never occurred to me how DEAD SERIOUS Mike was about keeping this virus out of our house until he said that he used nitrile gloves when he pumped gas and touched the keypad. I’d been using hand sanitizer after I was done. And, he told me, he throws the gloves away when he’s finished. He doesn’t reuse them.

Is this the beginning of some fucking horror movie?

Then, when we arrive at the dorm, we have to put on more gloves, open doors, press elevator buttons, and pick up the care package I sent to Nick from the front desk if anyone is even working there. Then we have to clear out his dorm room without touching anything his roommate might have touched, right? Nope. Gloves.

Wait. Are they different gloves than the ones we used to come into the building? I can’t keep my imaginary germ contamination straight.

It’s exhausting.

When we’re done packing, we can’t rest and stay at a hotel overnight. Do you know how many germs could lie in wait on those comforters, on the floor, the walls, on the remote? Was the woman who made the bed feeling a little sick? Did she cough then pat the pillows into place with a hand that she’d used unconsciously to touch her face?

Then, without stopping for food, not even fast food, we’re going to take two cars because we believed at the beginning of the semester that Nick needed to have a car on campus, and we’re going to drive them back across the state back home without ever stopping at a restaurant. Not even drive thru.

That’s obvious to me. We have to make sure we don’t get any coronavirus snotrockets on our food. I worked at a fast food joint when I was a teenager. I know what happens to that food when the manager isn’t looking. Plus, Mike doesn’t want me to shop at the grocery store today. So we have to kludge together two meals for three people on what I bought at Costco that day last week when I blindly bought four boxes of rice, a five pound bag of flour, eight pounds of dried pasta, six bags of chips, and a flat of green beans. Seriously, they were out of toilet paper, diet Coke, canned corn, and monitors.

I didn’t even have recipes with me. Now, I realize that I should have sat down beforehand with recipes and figured out what ingredients I needed for actual meals. I don’t have enough cheese for baked ziti. I don’t have enough ground beef for chili. I have enough rice to cook it every day for four months. I can make bread for sandwiches but we’re out of sliced meat and cheese. I don’t have a thing I know how to do with all those canned green beans. What the actual fuck am I going to do with a flat of canned green beans?

And so we’re going to bring a lot of odd food parts, cooked pasta with seasoning, tuna salad, homemade bread, and the remaining bag of chips so we can picnic safely as we drive back home tomorrow. And I’m out of greens for my salads, so I’m going to bring a can of green beans and eat it cold. Ten hours of driving in one day on pasta, tuna sandwiches, chips, and a fucking can of green beans.

Meanwhile, my friends called me on FaceTime last night from the happy hour I couldn’t go to. It was loud. They were laughing. The place looked busy and happy. We talked about how the schools were closing. We talked about how they were working from home. We talked about ordering a Corona, with lime. Don't forget the lime. It has vitamin C in it. Someone they knew stopped by and hugged them. Then, she remembered her social distancing and did an elbow bump afterward. I watched them. They were eating sliders and macaroni and cheese prepared by people in another room. I watched them eat.

Macaroni and cheese. I could see it in the foreground where they put the phone.

They lived in a different universe than I did. That was the only explanation. I had to use a glove to touch the gas station keypad and they were eating coronavirus macaroni and cheese and social distancing at happy hour.

I know this is important. I do. I love my family and I don’t want to struggle to get them beds in an overrun hospital next week if I screw up and forget to use a glove on a keypad tomorrow.

But watching how the other half lived, the healthy half, the ones with coronavirus confidence, was hard.

Thank you for listening, jules

My Next Best Day

It’s still getting light outside my window. I went outside to get my notebook from my car and the air was chill, clean, and worth waking up to. Teddy danced in the lawn. We didn’t usually go outside together in the morning. He was wearing his furry white coat. I was cold, but it was worth looking up into the sky at the silhouette of my Western red cedars, Western Hemlocks, and Douglas firs. It was worth pretending I could still play with the happy dog, just for a moment.

At night, I’ve been falling asleep to Netflix and Amazon Prime because my mind runs so much at night. If I keep the sound down, I can pull the covers over my face and listen for a while, and just drift off into a fantasy world. There’s a movie I wish I could put on repeat: About Time with Domhnall Gleeson and Rachel McAdams. It is a love story, but it’s about what we do with our time. If you could go back in time, which days would you go to?

I suspect that in a few months, I might come back to these days, any of these days, the time during Christmas, the summer, or weekends that I might have believed to be boring when I first lived them.

I would go back to a summer day in Seward Park sometime around 2005.

Nick was still small enough for Mike to swing him in circles, but when I did it, Nick and I were more like twin planets. I wobbled in the orbit almost as much as he did. Pearl Django played on a stage. When we first got there, Nick ran up to a family with small children and made instant friends with them. We had to ask them not to feed him anything in case they’d made their banana bread with nuts. In 2004, Nick’s allergy kicked in. That made him about four or five. Nick’s adopted family were sweet people. We trusted them. Then, when Nick returned to us, the French plaza music playing as background, Nick asked Mike to spin him in circles. He asked me first, but after a few times wobbling and trying to heft him higher into the air, I let Mike take over.

Then I spent the next minutes trying to time my camera’s shutter to go off just as Nick’s feel swung out to the side. If I followed my instinct, he was always a quarter turn from that, the two lined up so Nick was eclipsed. I took more than half of the pictures with him blocked from view. It was funny and we all got to laughing together until we couldn’t stop and we lolled about on the ground.

The violin, stringed bass, guitar, and accordion played. Pearl Django. That music will forever remain in my mind as the sound track to the perfect day.

Last fall, Mike and I had gone to Salmon Days and were about to head back to the high school parking lot when I heard music drifting down a lane we were going to skip.

“That sounds like Pearl Django,” I said to Mike. Nick was at college so it was only the two of us. The music was Pearl Django, so we wandered down the lane and stood to listen to them. We stood there for a long time, both of us thinking of that day so many years ago at Seward Park. I got weepy and just couldn’t stop crying. I missed my boy. He’d only been gone for five weeks and he said he was happy, but I missed him. I stood there in Mike’s arms, my face buried. I hoped the band members didn’t notice, or at least that they understood the power their music had on me, that they played the sound track to the best ordinary day of my life.

Mike, Nick, and I are in a semi-quarantine. I say semi because Mike thinks it’s okay for me to be out and about at places where the coronavirus has been confirmed if I am careful with my space and hands. I have to remember not to touch my face. It’s hard to remember all I’ve touched and all I want is to do is finish what I’m doing and get back home to them.

They are not good at self-quarantining. Yesterday, they asked me to bring home Chinese food. Really? We go three days and already they’re done with their quarantine? Someone is going to prepare our food, possibly someone sick? When I brought the bag home, I opened it carefully and threw away the bag. Then, I made up plates and microwaved the hell out of them. My kitchen smells like a pool from all the bleach I’m using. The skin of my hands hurts because I’m washing them so often. And my nose itches just because I know I’m not supposed to touch it.

Ultimately, we’re all going to get this virus, but not all of us are going to survive it. I have a one in ten chance of losing somebody. That means that if you put ten people in a room, and you shouldn’t these days, and I am there with my family, the odds are that one of those people won’t walk out. I’m working so hard when I’m out to keep from bringing those odds into my house.

Last night, I read a grim account on Twitter by an Italian doctor at one of the hospitals there. I won’t make it worse for you by repeating what he said, but when the disease really hits this area, hospitals are going to be overwhelmed and more people are going to die. I had begun to believe that I could relax a little. Denial is strong with this slow process. But luck is going to favor people who aren’t in denial, people who wash their hands, people who don’t eat out, people who stay home, people who don’t need the hospitals just at the time when they are most overwhelmed with the infected.

And it helps me to think about this day. This could very well be the next best day of my life, stuck at home with the people I love the most.

What about you?

Make yourself a cup of tea, put on good music, pull out a lovely book you’ve always wanted to read, pet your cat, plan to walk the dog later in the clean air, look at the people across the room from you, and think about what you’re going to do with this next best day.

Thank you for listening, jules

My Preparation for a Pandemic

So much has changed since I last wrote to you.

Whether you think it’s overblown or are terrified witless or something in between, coronavirus has happened, is happening, is beginning to happen. I live too close to it in the Seattle area. Two of the three people in my family are at high risk and I’m slightly elevated because of my age.

I saw a meme the other day that said, “Keep calm and wash your hands.”

That’s good advice.

I have to remember that I have good experience with this kind of thing. It’s like the Universe trained me for it. My son has viral-induced asthma. What that means is that whenever he gets a cold, his lungs fill up with fluid, he gets a certain sound in his cough, and he needs medication to keep his airways open. Between the ages of four and ten, Nick got pneumonia at least six times. One time, they told us he had pneumonia again, but since it was only two months later than the last time, we thought that maybe it was the same pneumonia and he never really got better from it. That year was stressful, his first-grade year. His teacher kept arguing with me that he was missing too much school and we should bring him in anyway. I told her and the school nurse that if she could monitor his breathing, check his oxygen saturation on an hourly basis, and give him nebulized medication two to three times during class, I would consider it. The school nurse told me, and her, that he should stay home until he could breathe more easily. He missed nineteen days of school that year.

When Nick was nine, H1N1 hit the scene. Do you even remember that? I do. Mike and I implemented the handwashing/hand-sanitizing method of protection. At ten, Nick washed his hands before and after lunch and at every recess. Back then, it was cool enough for him to sing 'Happy Birthday’ to know when he could be finished. He carried hand sanitizer in his pocket at all times. We all did. As soon as any of us got home, we washed our hands. We told him not to touch anything he didn’t need to touch when he was just standing around. We taught him not to touch his face after he’d touched a surface that could be contaminated. Those are hard lessons to learn. Do you know how many times in an hour that you unconsciously touch your face?

That’s worth thinking about.

Nick was in the first group of people among the high risk and the elderly that received the H1N1 vaccine. They also gave him a second pneumonia shot then, the one that they usually gave to people who were frail. The nurse insisted that the whole family get the H1N1 vaccine then too. It was the only way to protect him, she said. I can’t tell you what a relief it was when two weeks passed after that shot. Nick was out of danger.

He still washes his hands when he gets home. We all do.

A year later, when Nick was eleven, he got bronchitis again and was home trying to keep it from turning into pneumonia, I got a text from Mike that he was being transported to the hospital. The tone of his text was completely even, so I knew that it was frightening him and he was trying to keep us both calm.

To tell you the truth, I’ve been feeling that same way for the past three days, trying to keep calm.

He’d had a mild heart attack.

In the days that ensued, I went back and forth between my sick boy at home and my sick husband in the hospital. Mike had had a mild heart attack in a vein that was too small to catheterize to open up. In the meantime, Nick was at home having hallucinations from low oxygen and prednisone. Hallucinations. Even Nick used that same even tone when he called me.

“Don’t worry, Mom. I know they aren’t real.”

Fuck!

That week, I also witnessed two accidents on I-90 and when I mean witnessed, I mean that two cars directly in front of me hit each other and I had to dodge hunks of flying metal going sixty miles an hour. For the first accident, I was the only person who stopped and I had two people who were going into shock, one of whom hit her head and wanted to stay seated in a smoking car. Did I hand out that furry blanket I usually used for my dog? You bet I did. I also had to walk out of the tunnel and call 911 again because I saw that the fire truck had ended up on the interstate going the wrong direction.

Do you see how I took a tangent down the road toward the accident and didn’t tell you more about how I felt trying to jockey between a husband with a heart attack and a son who couldn’t breathe and was having hallucinations? I’d also had some experience with heart attacks. Three of my grandparents died of heart disease by the time I was twenty-one. What I believed in my soul, based on my experience with a statistical group of three people, was that heart attacks almost always killed someone. Almost, because my grandpa Roy had three heart attacks and the first two only nearly killed him.

Ah, I took that tangent again.

I just can’t quite tell you how I felt during that week. It felt a little like the Universe was giving me Sophie’s choice. Which of these two people that you dearly love should live? You pick.

Well, I leaned into the wind and shouted, metaphorically that is, that I wanted them both. No, I didn’t do that in real life. That would have looked crazy, but I did cry in my car a lot that week. I needed to get it out of my system so I could appear calm and efficient when I was around Mike and Nick.

So now, though I’m working hard not to panic, I am not actually feeling laid back about this pandemic. I’m not. I have two high risk people in my home and I love them both very much. I’ve learned a lot to combat contagion over the past fifteen years. I don’t wish this same kind of experience on you.

But I’ll tell you this: I’m going to be washing my hands and whispering ‘Happy Birthday’ a great deal in the coming weeks and I’d appreciate if you would do the same.

Thank you for listening, jules

You Have Four Eyes

I find it difficult to tell you of my angst these days. It’s just normal insomnia with side order of anxiety, I think… It’s boring. It’s whiny. It’s exhausting. But here goes: it’s my eyes. My eyes haven’t been right since my cataract surgery.

Isn’t it ironic that this year is 2020?

I have double-vision. I never had double-vision before my eye surgery. My eye surgeon said that there wasn’t any possibility that my double-vision was from the cataract surgery. He said I must have always been this way. Or maybe it was a problem with my left-eye dominance and the left-eye surgery would get rid of it. The second cataract surgery didn’t get rid of it. The new pair of glasses didn’t get rid of it. And now the second set of lenses, through which I have to turn my head thirty degrees to the left and tuck my chin down to see in the distance, still doesn’t resolve my double-vision.

Can a person actually get depressed because she can’t see right?

Maybe it’s the fact that I can now read double sets of words in addition to reading sideways or upside down. I SHOULDN’T HAVE TO LEARN TO READ DOUBLE WORDS!

Maybe it’s the fact that most people I talk to have two sets of eyes and it creeps me out sometimes.

I’ve been upset at my inability to adjust to these new glasses, but when I looked it up on the Internet, there are a number of professional journal articles about patients with double-vision after cataract surgery. One of them said that some patients, because they haven’t found their surgeons able to solve their problems, have become litigious.

I feel pretty fucking litigious right now.

My neck hurts from leaning in to see what I’m typing. My eyes hurt from trying so hard to stop seeing double all day. My doctors are making me feel stupid and the receptionists are practically rolling their eyes when I come in. My regular eye doctor’s receptionist asks me for my name now, with a peculiar look on her face, as if I haven’t been a patient of theirs for the past ten years.

I HATE when doctors make me feel stupid. I’m not stupid. I hate when doctors minimize something that is bothering me. If it’s bothering me enough that I make yet another an appointment despite my busy life, it’s not minimum. If I can look it up on the Internet and see plenty of evidence that my complaint is a one percent side-effect of the surgery, then my doctor had damned well better not tell me it never happens.

And yes, it could be that I have insomnia anyway with a side serving of anxiety and it’s making me crabbier when I’m trying to work and live despite this awful problem with my vision. But it is just possible that seeing a bunch of people with two sets of eyes like some kind of mass metamorphosis happened while I tried to sleep or the Wuhan virus enjoined with Zika and offered a side serving of mutation, and it’s just getting me down.

Pretty far down.

And I can’t see the bottom.

Thank you for listening, jules

Chilling

I am experimenting with the joys of CBD oil.

Yeah, here I am, unwashed, clad in sweats, underemployed, living in the basement (and upstairs too) as a teenager+ person, and I’m pretty sure I’ve got the munchies.

On Monday, I felt like a derelict asking the pharmacist to unlock a small tube of lotion from his case, one that contained CBD oil. I felt I should have also asked for a pack of Marlboros, an extra-large box of ribbed condoms, some lubricant, and a magnum of whiskey.

Yesterday and again this morning, I spread a pea-sized glob of it on my hands, face, and a sore spot on my leg. I wondered what this would do to my New Year’s resolution to stop procrastinating stuff. I wondered if I’d ever strive to do anything useful again.

And all it did was blot out my spiraling thoughts. It was a plain little result, but it was a result. That was all it did. I was a bit disappointed. I didn’t feel high. I didn’t giggle. I didn’t slur my words or say, “Hey dude, chill out.” I didn’t buy a bag of Doritos. And best of all, I did’t puke.

I’ll admit that back in college, I inhaled a few times when a joint was passed around. My excuse is that it was in another millennium and I was always drunk. The problem was that I never once smoked pot without first getting roaring drunk, so, though my brain began to associate pot with puking my guts out, it could simply have been a result of getting a little dizzier with my liver already overloaded with beer.

Here’s the truth: In addition to the puking, I also began to associate weed with those kids who would never finish their degrees or get into their post-graduate schools or get good jobs or use commas properly and I did not want to be one of those people. Somehow, it was okay for me to drink a lot on the weekends, but I didn’t want to smoke pot and drop out and live on Pizza Pockets in my mother’s basement until I was thirty-five.

So, when one friend told me I should try CBD oil for my aching joints and anxiety, I silently put her into a different category of person though she is gainfully employed as a nurse. I told her I’d think about trying it when I knew I was lying to her face. When the second friend recommended it, I put one more high caliber person into my spam folder and worried that if I pressed the delete button, I was going to run out of friends. So instead, I kept them both, but I kept one eye out for Doritos and sweat pants. When the third and fourth friends said they swore by the stuff, I figured if they were all going to live in their mother’s basements and exist on pot, Pizza Pockets, and Doritos, then dammit, I was going to hell in a handbasket with them.

I looked it up on WebMD. I read past all the side-effects, warnings of mislabeling, and lack of credible research and found this:

In a recent review paper, researchers say CBD has potential uses in pain relief, anxiety, arthritis, depression, diabetes, and cancer. "I think the most exciting future [for CBD] is going to be metabolic disorders, obesity and diabetes," says Lee of Project CBD.

Did you see that? It has potential uses! That’s good, right? And later in the article, it noted that most people were probably under-dosing because it took more CBD oil than most products contain to have any but a placebo effect on the user.

So then, I’m doing it right! I am using a mostly natural method, the placebo effect, to combat my anxiety and inflammation. That means that I’m not going to have to go live in my mother’s basement and I’m not going to exist on Pizza Pockets and Doritos for the rest of my life. And best of all, my friend’s aren’t either.

Chill out, dude!

Thank you for listening, jules

Recurring Dreams

I seriously wonder how much people want to hear about the dreams I've had in the night. I've been dreaming about failing jobs and classes.

Last night, I dreamed that I went to my job every endless day and worked there for years without accomplishing a thing. Though I've never done that at a job, it feels like a recurring dream, one in which I worked for the best company with a great boss who never seemed to notice that I had no idea what my project was and that I produced nothing. Sometimes I dream that I’m at work, wondering what I’m supposed to do and why I’m in my underwear. Why doesn’t anyone in my dream notice that I’m in my underwear?

Last night, it was a variable of that dream only someone who had been a coworker in real life reappeared and instead of being an engineer, she was an accomplished artist and had been hired for her artistic skills. She'd always been more beautiful, acted as if she was smarter and more creative, and at the end of our relationship, she even made a play for Mike. And in my dream, I still sat there, across from her yet again, and dawdled, with a distinct unease and not knowing what I should do now that someone beautiful and accomplished sat across from me and watched what I was not doing and had no interesting in figuring out.

In my dream, I honestly didn't know what I was supposed to be working on and every single person around me was busy working on something I didn't understand and hated learning about.

I'm sweating. Is it the toast I just ate? Carbohydrates warm me up and sometimes make me hot. Or am I sweating because of the pressure of a dream about being inept and lazy.

When I was a kid, my mother used to call me a lazy bum. Oh, there wasn't any verve to it, not like some of the other things she said, just a casually repeated phrase that still catches in the back of my neck whenever I hear the word 'lazy.' Whenever I used to hear any of my old coworker-tutors at a staff meeting say that a kid was lazy, I corrected them even before I was lead tutor. Disinterested, disengaged, resistive, yes, but don’t call them lazy.

It does a lot of damage to call a child lazy. I can attest. I'm nearly sixty and I still have dreams about it.

No, I don't want to write this here for you. Why should I write about a recurring dream and my insecurities?

My recurring dreams are always about being in school and not doing very well or having a job that I had no interest in doing and couldn't understand anyway. Insecurities and anxiety, huh?

Am I doing a job I have no interest in or ability to do?

No. I'm worried about these students that I'm probably going to lose today. I just never got traction with them. They never showed any interest and sometimes they dug in their heels and didn’t do what I asked them to do. Plus, their mom kept asking how I was preparing them for the test so I kept doing SSAT work that none of us liked. Instead of doing my weird free-flowing method of reading and writing, I stuck to the workbooks that said Comprehension across the top. Ugh.

And here I am, about to lose them, and I should just let them go. Instead, I'm sitting here not knowing if I'll even be allowed to work with them today and dreading the phone call their mother promised me.

My two mistakes, I want to tell her, were that I didn't talk to her when they continued to resist what I brought for them to do and that I didn't take my more casual and creative approach to reading and writing. I feel it may be too late for that. It's possible that I just wasn't a good fit for this family.

My eye stings. Am I reading too much? Do I need to rest it or put in saline or go back to the doctor?

Ah, I just put a saline capsule in my pocket for later and I'm working here with that one eye closed as I type. It feels better now and I like typing with my eyes closed.

I just cannot find my creative flow today. I feel like I'm a bore. I feel like I should be cleaning my house. I feel like I should I should I should I should. It's an endless record of things I should be doing. If I finish one thing, something else flows right into its place without any breaks.

Today:

• Walk Teddy.

• Shop for groceries.

• Clean the house, vacuum, dust, put away junk, donate more stuff.

• Write Mike's annual calendar full of useless facts.

• Scan my grandma's old photos and make a book out of them. Do I even need to write the words underneath, especially since I don't know who everyone is in the photos?

• Plan a dinner.

• Prepare for tomorrow's students.

• Edit my next book.

• Edit Rachel's chapter.

Maybe I could simplify editing my whole book to giving Rachel another chapter on Thursday. Could I do that? Could I make progress little bit by little bit?

Yes, I could make progress that way. I could.

But do you see how that list is too big to get done in one morning? Do you see how facing a rotating list similar to this could become boring and daunting at the same time?

...a little like a dream of trying to do that job I didn't understand and didn't want to do. Yes, my recurring dream is fashioned from the real thing, except if that particular coworker walks into my house, I'm leaving. Seriously. I did not get along with that woman.

Thank you for listening, jules

Do One True Thing

I woke up too early. Today, I need to walk Teddy, to get milk and my library holds, and to find a way to get enough sleep. Today, I need to work with my two reluctant students at their house and find a seat in the library for me to meet with another student who seems to care about her work.

I'm cold. I'm always cold in the morning after I drink my smoothie. I can imagine how my cells feel, expecting something to keep them warm, some carbohydrates to burn, but I don't give them many in the morning. Plus, I give them cold food, something with nine ice cubes. It's so disappointing to them. They consider going to the cabinet that is the fat they've stored on my butt and eating some of that, but it's like they've stood in front of the open door of my butt-fridge and there's nothing they want to eat in there. They just want to order pizza and have it delivered straight to the couch.

Do you think my cells are just too lazy to cook what they've already got in the fridge? That's about the time every morning when I just want to crawl back into bed and sleep. I could give them caffeine to rev them up for the day, but I hold off on that until I really need it, when I'm about to leave for work.

 Last night, I dreamed I couldn't find the spot in the library to work with my students. Can you believe that's what I'm worried about? Plus, I had to work with all the students that I swore I wouldn't bring with me. Will I run into them and their parents at the library? Will they realize that I rejected them? Will I have to face all these people I don't want to see any more as I make my new office at the library? 

I probably will. And there will probably be days when I can't find a table just like in my dream. And I'll run into my old coworker whose name I'm sick of hearing in my mind, you know, they guy who was the reason I quit my old job.

I also dreamed I didn't know what to write on my daily work sheets.

Oh, I worry about what I'm going to do with my students. I didn't have to worry about that before when curriculum was provided, but I went off the curriculum so many times, I should feel a relief. Math is easy. I can work in the textbooks for math and find worksheets, but reading and writing? Is it enough for us to read and write?

Oh, I have my list of exercises. It's an amazing list. I just have to figure out what we're going to do next. I can relax.

But I don't.

This morning, I woke up with a feeling, that feeling that if I can't do one true thing in my lifetime, what is anything worth?

My lemon meringue pie is true. It is. I put my heart into lemon meringue pie.

So, what do I do that is authentic, so true that I can't fault myself for faking it?

Calzones

Pie

Reading books

Writing? I feel like I've been faking it with my writing lately. I can sit here and look out my living room window at the dark greens and browns of my winter landscape and feel like I'm cheating you. Am I really doing this the way I should? Am I putting my heart into it?

I can tell I’m exhausted. I've been wondering what I really want to do lately. I want to take an art class. I can feel that, but not enough to sign up for one.

Do I want to write? It's my go-to thing to do, but do I really want to keep doing it? So many times when I get a chance to finish my little cat book, I don't. Why?

Because nobody wants it. It feels futile to keep going when nobody wants a thing.

And yet, if it's true, then I should finish creating it anyway. I should because it is an authentic creative act.

Is it true?

Sometimes, I don't think it is until I go back to reading it and it makes me laugh and it makes me cry. It does. Isn't that the definition of a work that is true? Somehow, this book has gotten a shadow of sadness over it, for being pathetic and worthless, until I open up the pages and remember what's there and I love it all over again. The shadow is from the agents' doubt, the ones who didn't read any part of it. The shadow is the looks on my friends' faces, the ones who haven't read it, who have no intention to ever read it. That shadow is my despair over the lonely fate of my sweet little book.

Even though I still believe it is one true thing.

What do you do that is true?

Thank you for listening, jules

I Can't Assume to Know

I just finished eating Thanksgiving leftovers and it feels like Sunday night. I have, like most of us have, two more days to hang out before work begins and I need to have my Christmas shopping done. What are you going to do with those two days?

I plan to clean up a little bit, pretend I’m going to put up the Christmas tree, and read a book. I doubt I’ll get much Christmas shopping done.

I’m reading It Gets Worse: A Collection of Essays by Shane Dawson. A student recommended it. It's really good. This guy is so funny and so incredibly vulnerable.

I have to tell you that I always wonder if a student is trying to tell me something when she recommends a book to me. A book choice is so personal that I always feel I’ve learned something about the person who recommended it. So there I was, at that good spot in the book when I started crying, as if it were my student telling me about herself instead of the author.

Maybe I can blame my insomnia. I get so tired that tears come easily, that my emotions are on the surface. Did you ever know one of those old people who cry easily? One of my grandmas was like that. I never understood how she could start crying as she talked about seemingly ordinary things. I didn’t know until later that she’d gone through multiple traumas when she was a girl. And maybe, I think these days, that she could have had insomnia and couldn’t keep herself together because she was just so tired. That coffee that she drank all day could keep her moving, but it couldn’t keep her from sounding a little tilted. I know what that tilted feeling is like.

So yes, I cry in the desperate spots in the books that I read. What is that? I have thinning skin, both physically and mentally. Am I going to be totally transparent in a few years?

I’ll have to work on that. Plus, I’ll have to assume I don’t know what the book taught me about my student.

Because maybe it didn’t.

Thank you for listening, jules

Tap Dancing in My Dreams

Another bad night. Three and a half hours of sleep. Stress, anxiety, insomnia. After that, I was awake for hours, hours, staring at the television because that was the only thing I could manage to do.

Sometimes, you just have to watch TV.

But then, I felt a little bit of real sleepiness and I went back to bed and snuggled under the comforters. Yes, I sleep under two heavy comforters. I slept long enough and late enough that my stomach felt weird when I woke up. You know what I mean. I had that slept-in-the-middle-of-the-day feeling. It sucks. I also woke to vivid dreams, the ones that are so close to reality that they’re the most confusing ones you can have.

I dreamed I was in my last week at my old job. I won’t tell you the whole crazy dream. Dreams always seem so important to the person telling them, but not so much to the person listening. Don’t you hate when people try to tell you their dreams? I hate that. And yet, when I have a compelling dream, I want so desperately to tell someone. So, I’ll compromise. I’ll tell you a little bit which might actually be more annoying than when someone tells you the whole thing.

I dreamed I was trying to work the last couple of days at my old job. It was crazy. Don’t you hate when people tell your their dreams were crazy? They’re crazy because they are dreams, idiot.

So, in my dream, before I woke up, the students had split themselves into two groups, the ones who were trying to learn and the ones who ran circles around the room, screaming. They disrupted what we were trying to accomplish and I took a deep breath to figure out how to tell them to fuck off and stop bothering the other students without using those words..

Instead of being diplomatic like I should have been, I looked at the disruptors and said, “Get out! You’re fired. You have no intention of learning. You just want to keep these kids from learning too. Get out! Go!”

And I ushered them out the front door and locked it. When I turned around, I had a group of kids that actually wanted to learn from me.

That’s a little like what is happening in real life. I’m leaving the collapsing place where I used to work and bringing students along with me who I know are willing to learn. Really, the only criteria I had for choosing them was that. I could work with the ones who had trouble learning, even the ones who were diagnosed with a learning disorder. If they were willing to learn, I was willing to teach them.

I imagine that this will be the only time I will have this luxury in my life, as I end this old job where they are closing their doors and begin again with fewer students, the ones I get to choose.

I know there’s a reason for apathy in a student. I know that kids who disrupt a group of working students have a reason for disrupting it. I know these apathetic students deserve to be taught. They do. But, I’d rather work with the ones that are at least trying to learn something, anything.

My worst failure days were when I sat with a student who frittered away their time and accomplished nothing while I tap danced in front of them, when I tried everything I could to get them to look at the page in front of them and think, and I still failed because of their apathy. I swear, if it would make them try to learn, I’d wear a chicken suit and stand on my head during my tutoring sessions. The absolute worst days were when I was with one willing student and the rest of the room worked to keep us from working. I hated those days.

At Nick’s karate dojo, there was a plaque that read: Teachers can only open the door. It is the student who must walk through.

Walk through the door with me, please. I don’t want to wear a chicken suit and it’s hard to stand on my head.

Thank you for listening, jules

Two Jobs and a New Book

I have two jobs. I haven’t had two jobs since I babysat and mowed lawns as a teenager. I’m not actually working any more than I was, but I’m trying to arrange my new schedule and trying to work within two systems. Thankfully, the people I work for are pretty nice about it all.

My goal with my old job is to let it fall gracefully. He’s closing the business. It was ironic or intuitive that I gave notice a week before he intended to make the announcement. Now, I’m the architect of the demolition. Take out what’s valuable and bring it down without losing too much money for my boss in that last month. Keep things safe for the people.

My goal with my new job is to establish myself. Okay, I’ll be honest. I want them to get to know the me that I present while I get them used to the me that is a little quirky.

For example, I think I just blew it when i wrote two emails in response to an email from a parent asking if we could cover some material I’d planned to cover later. The first email was enough, but since I woke up after only five and a half hours of sleep and my early-morning mind got hold of that, it began to go over everything I’d planned, in the past week, to cover with this woman’s boys and ultimately my other students. Did I tell you that I have a weird and temporary form of anxiety that only strikes when I haven’t slept?

I do.

Yes, and I’ve been doing lesson plans since I don’t have a curriculum on hand. It’s not that I’d been lazy before. I hadn’t. I just hadn’t written it all down. I just hadn’t worried about these particular boys or their mother. I just wanted to cover the material for all my language arts kids.

See, I thought the curriculum from my old job was boring and outdated. It still talked about record stores and ‘new CDs.’ It had so much implicit bias that it was embarrassing. My students might have been to Dubai, Europe, and NYC, but they’d never been to a farm. They might never have played with a top.

So, in my insomniac state this morning I began to organize the list of games and exercises I want to do with my students, like a writer’s workshop on steroids. Imagine material that I couldn’t convey in twenty weeks.

So, I finished this list and got up from the computer, starving, and toasted an English muffin. I could feel the heat rising from the toaster. I was cold. I could smell the bread and the jelly that I’d uncapped. I hadn’t bothered to eat yet.

When I got it buttered with a dab of jelly on each side, and took one delicious bit, I realized that I’d just created an outline for my next book. I would call it Playing with Words: Comprehensive Games for Young Readers and Writers.

I’d always told my old boss that I wasn’t going to write a book about tutoring even though he said I should. It just didn’t feel right, writing about the boy who had an accident and tried to hide it despite the smell. It definitely felt wrong to write about the boy who was finally given the diagnosis of extreme discalcula after two agonizing years and frustration out the ears of math tutoring for him. And I had no authority to write a book about the technicalities. There were professors and doctors to do that.

I just wanted to make the work fun and thorough.

So, I guess I am writing a book. I finished writing the outline. All I have to do is fill in the gaps with the specific games I play with my students to do what the teachers do in all seriousness. I do all this until the education system catches up with all the books I’ve read about pedagogy.

After I finished my toast, I trundled back to my bed. I really need all eight hours if I’m going to be patient with kids.

And then, I dreamed.

I dreamed that I went to my old job and needed a book from my car. When I went outside, I exited an entirely different business. After I found the book, I had to walk a gauntlet of grumbling parents and the pieces of paper in my pocket that I’d thought were my new business cards were scraps of paper with random numbers on them. When I sat back down, my student was gone and a new student sat in his place. I tried to recognize this kid, to remember her name, but couldn’t. I looked around the room and didn’t know who any of them were. I dreamed I fell asleep. I dreamed that my boss and none of the other tutors showed up and I tried to wrangle twelve kids of different ages into accomplishing something without any individual tutoring from me. I dreamed I was so tired I couldn’t keep my eyes open or speak clearly.

That’s the new job/old job dream. That’s the metaphor for losing everything and not knowing what I’m supposed to do.

But when I woke up, I realized that I had a decent schedule. I had some of my old students and some new ones. I realized that I had a shiny new curriculum that I could turn into a book even though I have no specific authority to do write a book about education.

That’s how I roll. I didn’t have authority to write my last two books either.

Thank you for listening, jules

Trying to Understand Myself

Physician, heal thyself.

I'm not a physician. I never was, though I had a brief bout of nausea regarding my potential to become a doctor. Brief. I just didn't want to be in school that long. Little did I know I'd end up being in school in one way or another all my life. I didn't want to give up my life to being a doctor though.

But there is a benefit in being able to look at your own problems and see them for what they are. Don't you think so?

I have anxiety, but only with relation to insomnia. When I get enough sleep, the anxiety settles down into a bit of an oddity, a quirkiness of my personality, and nothing more. When I'm tired, when I don't get enough sleep, my anxiety grows into a larger thing. When I'm seriously sleep-deprived, it becomes that hulking mass that chases me around the lip of the abyss.

I am occasionally seriously sleep-deprived. I try not to let anyone know during those times, but I'm sure its shadow looms large behind me and I'll have that deer-in-the-headlights look in my face.

Do you think demons are real?

I used to think that heaven was real but hell was made up.

Now, I know that hell is a place people create for themselves. It's not an after-you-die kind of thing, but something that rips at the flesh of humanity all around us.

Did you ever know that person who is eternally miserable? You ask him what he did last weekend and he regales you with all the work he did at home and how he can never afford to sit back and read a book because he just doesn't have enough time. You wonder if this guy will explode if he pops the wrong zit on his back. You wonder how he thinks his life is worth living when it's a constant misery to him.

Yeah, hell is real. It's right here on earth, haunting people who won't allow themselves the joy of propping up their feet to read a novel, someone who never ever is caught napping and thinks less of people who do.

So, I give myself the freedom to lie back in my chair and not only read a book, but to fall asleep to it too. Today, I had swaddled myself in a blanket and had propped my book onto a pillow in my lap when drowsiness crawled up onto my lap in the form of my old cat, Seth. I swear, he has the ability to make me sleepy. That control keeps me still for long enough for him to warm his bones on me. In a few more minutes, Blitz was there on my shins, ready for his afternoon siesta. I was going down like a baby sung a lullaby.

Unfortunately, my nephew arrived and suddenly, I was awake and the cats scattered.

I believe that Blitz rests better when he can nap with me. The leaf blower and the dog returning to tell me how far my nephew took him up the mountain made that siesta impossible. Poor Blitz.

He's tired now. He sits hunched on the carpet to my right. He doesn't look comfortable. He looks a little tired, as if he's been forced to work too hard all weekend and isn't it just hell when a body can't read a book and take a nap in the afternoon?

Blitz and I have so much in common. I believe in the power of rejuvenation. I think that people must allow themselves a break in their lives. They must, or life turns into sheer hell, that hulking mass that pushes us into the abyss.

There's enough hell in this world. Take an afternoon nap when you can. Your anxiety will decrease. We all need that.

Thank you for listening, jules

Examining My Implicit Biases in a Distorted Mirror

I work with two students who seem to be polar opposites.

One is quiet, is easily ignored, and gets lost in the system. And yet, I find myself reaching out to ask him how he’s doing, telling his parents what a good kid he is and how much I like working with him. I try to challenge him but don’t push too hard in case it makes him duck back into his shell. In some ways, this boy is overly-compliant and hides his true self, and yet I can see the sparks of his humor if I get quiet and listen closely. I can see who he is, I think.

I just wonder how much he has to sublimate his own soul to fit into my expectations of him.

Now, did I tell you he’s a student of color? Doesn’t that change everything?

I think it does.

The other boy, also a student of color, is scrappy. He’s a whirlwind of fury. He lashes out at any hand that reaches toward him. He expects the worst. He’s willing to fight and gets into trouble often. I have argued with him myself because he rejects my help. I have written notes to his parents about how uncooperative he is, Yet, he works diligently and independently in my presence. I admit that I’ve pressed him until he had to leave the room and spend a little too long in the bathroom. I have used the word misogyny with him. I have used the words implicit bias regarding his views of women. But, I need to examine if I get mad because he rejects my help, really, or because he rejects my authority.

This morning, I realized that I needed to examine my own implicit biases. It’s easy to work with students of color when they defer to me, when they are quiet about my errors. But how do I reach out to a student who is not so easily manipulated, the one who lets his anger show?

I have to think about that. I’m not sure this boy would be receptive to talking with me openly about it. It will be hard to examine my own implicit biases without an angry young student of color to challenge them directly. But I have to try.

Maybe what this boy needs, as much as the boy who is quiet and well-behaved, is compassion for his feelings.

Thank you for listening, jules

Insomnia Talks

3:48am

a jumble of words

awake, awake since 2:57 am, snorkeled in my CPAP, aching, bones grinding through thin skin, thoughts curled around me, burning ash, awake,

If I had a cigarette, I’d inhale it just to watch the smoke curl out of my mouth.

awake, curled, fetal, trying to hide in sleep, awake, white paper blankets covering children piled inside chain-link fences, chain-link, concrete horror, cold, and given granola bars,

I did this by ignoring it. We all are responsible.

fetal position, sleep, please, sleep,

ill people deported toward death, summa cum laude people, advocating people, inspirers, deported to death because they’re from Guatemala, deported, death,

where is sleep? gone,

speaking is futile, sleep is futile,

In the morning, I pretend I’m normal, in the morning, I flip into sunshine out of dark though gray skies suit me, rain cleanses the dry season, rain slakes the thirst. In the morning, I smile. Everything is set right in the morning, isn’t it?

in the morning, I make calls, I buy groceries, I squabble over the election, I cook, I clean, I work with children,

I try to be a helper. Fred Rogers would be proud.

I work with children,

the good ones, apparently, the others are cast aside, wrapped in white paper blankets, cast out,

How do we decide which children are worth teaching and which should be wrapped in white and piled up in stacks on concrete?

I fought hard, didn’t I? I spoke out, stood up, despite its terror, and spoke,

nothing,

futile sweat, futile crying out, standing up for what’s right, what’s right, fighting what’s wrong,

Why bother?

Because

Children wrapped in white paper blankets,

Children piled onto concrete floors,

Children huddled in pens,

Waiting,

given granola bars,

brown children.

Let’s talk about social justice in the morning.

Thank you for listening, jules

Irrelevant

It comes in waves.

No one died. I keep telling myself that. Mike and I dropped Nick off at college three days ago. It’s normal that he went to college, healthy. Throughout millennia, billions of women have watched their children go out into the world. I tell myself that this is what I am supposed to do, a sign that I did my job. Some moms had to send seven year old children away to apprentice. I had more time than that. The separation was already happening between us. We were ready.

That’s what I tell myself.

My grandma used to crochet great volumes of articles that no one seemed to need. Even then, I did not use doilies, or scarves after the third one in an odd combination of colors, or toilet paper covers with the half-barbie doll standing in a wide, pink toilet-paper-roll-shaped dress. There were green and orange hats that were either too large, too small, or weird with flaps and droopy brims. There were lumpy purple slippers with flopping yellow pom-poms. There were dining-table-sized doilies that left drinking glasses listing to the left if placed on a thick crocheted knot. I had bright yellow and blue throw blankets on every couch and chair made with scratchy polyester yarn. I had place mats made of granny squares in orange and pink.

I dreaded complimenting anything Grandma was working on or recently bought because before I left, she would have packed it in an old plastic grocery bag and tucked it under the seat of my car where I wouldn’t find it until I arrived home or some time later when I was looking for something I’d dropped as I drove. She gave me crystal pitchers and gold trimmed grandma vases because I’d simply said they were nice when she’d showed them to me. It was awful, knowing that I now owned a gaudy ornamental doodad I didn’t want and she was going to miss out on displaying this thing she thought was beautiful.

Though I had a good job, Grandma put wads of money in my purse when I wasn’t looking.

It was embarrassing, a show of neediness that I could barely tolerate.

Whenever I left, Grandma, it seemed, would not be able to breathe properly until I came to visit again.

Grandma needed to be needed.

I get that now. I knew it then, superficially, but I understand now. In my bones, I understand.

I have a job to go to where I work with children. Some of those children need to hug me. Lots of them thank me for my help. Some make me work harder by resisting in the same way Nick did when he was little. I have to care for two cats and a dog. They let me hold them like babies. Seth stands here on my lap as I type, making it hard to see the keyboard. I still cook for Mike, though I suspect I’m buying too much at the grocery store. And there’s editing and cleaning to accomplish, and geometry I have to review to keep up with a student I might tutor at work. I have plenty to do, plenty more I could volunteer to do if I didn’t.

I am not without purpose.

But I’ve been floating around wondering what I should do next, feeling that it would be easy to become useless and out-of-date. When I sit at home thinking of the next thing on my list of things to do, I’m afraid I’m about to become irrelevant, like a set of orange and pink place mats made of scratchy polyester yarn that wouldn’t even go home from a garage sale to a new and useful life.

It’s only been three days. I miss my boy. I feel irrelevant.

Thank you for listening, jules

The Netflix Cure

I’ve been running on my little hamster wheel as fast as I can.

Nick leaves for college in a week. I’ve made lists, ordered stuff, almost finished a quilt, set up his move-in date, transferred credits, paid tuition, figured out how to get reimbursed from the right fund for tuition, scheduled hair cuts, doctors, and dentist appointments, helped position an engine onto a transmission, and taught Nick how to drive a stick. I’ve nagged.

Finally, Nick bought his books, but he hasn’t yet emailed his new roommate.

Some of you already went through this part of mothering. I didn’t know. I have more compassion for you now that I know. If I missed it, I’m sorry I wasn’t more sympathetic. It’s a big deal. Big.

It’s been a really weird summer, not like a summer at all. I keep trying to take care of myself, but I’m slipping. My thyroid medicine needs to be adjusted. Again. The last setting only lasted two weeks before it fell too low, leaving me tired and dispirited. My vision is bothering me. I need to schedule my other cataract surgery. I keep trying to get enough exercise, eat right, and have a good attitude.

Fuck my attitude.

I don’t have a good attitude. I don’t. I try to blame my thyroid. I try. But I’m also going through a big adjustment and I’m just not going to be normal.

Can you imagine how much worse I’d be if Nick were dying? I don’t know if I’d remember to breathe.

I am still breathing now, maybe hyperventilating a bit. It’s exciting for Nick, exciting and nerve-wracking. But the whole thing leaves me feeling like I’m a little bit less. You know.

So, I’m going to go stitch a binding and distract myself with the new Queer Eye episodes on Netflix. I love those guys. I’m going to learn to love Nick from a distance starting eight days from now. I’m trying not to think about that too much. I won’t be good for anything except Netflix. I’m going to need the Netflix cure.

Thank you for listening, jules

The Tingle of Angst

Writing is a conversation and sometimes I wonder if you’re interested in the places that darken my soul.

I keep thinking of the summers when I was thirteen then fourteen and fifteen. I don’t want to write about those desolate years. I really don’t.

The year Nick turned thirteen, I was afraid. I didn’t want to die and leave him in the same space where I had once lived. I knew, intellectually, that Nick’s life would never copy my own, but my heart said that the whole thing could happen all over again if I died within that year.

I drove more carefully that year. I was afraid whenever Mike and I rode in a car together or flew in a plane without Nick. On and off, I was afraid for a whole year though I didn’t want anyone to see my neurosis so I kept it quiet. I never told Mike about it as we occasionally traveled alone together, preferring to let it tingle the back of my chest with its message: Nick is too young to go through all that pain.

And yet, I went through that pain.

At least when my father was sick, so ill with cancer that he’d lost a hundred pounds and looked like an emaciated man in his eighties… At least then, I was mostly there with my family. After school, after play practice or piano practice, I’d walk up the hill to the hospital and wait for them in the lobby. I was too young to visit my dad, so I did my homework, read, and ate dinner out of the vending machines while they visited. I will always be grateful to Snickers for having significant substance. But even as I waited, I knew my family was upstairs and when they came down, I would intercept them, my mother, brother, and sister, when they were on their way out. If I was asleep, it was usually my brother who looked past the plastic bushes where I’d set up camp and wake me. The one time I was in the bathroom when visiting hours ended, they arrived home, realized I wasn’t there, and someone came back to get me.

At least they remembered where I was when my dad was still alive and we hadn’t yet fractured. But afterward, after April 2nd, when the doctors told us that Daddy had pneumonia because his immune system was too weak and he was in a coma… It always struck me that the day before, on April Fool’s Day, they had announced that they’d finally gotten all the cancer, yet the next day, he fell into a coma and died. Afterward, my family began to move apart like negatively-charged particles.

The funeral was scheduled during spring break. My mother always said how fortuitous that was, as if my education, even then, was more important than being recognized as someone living with loss. Or maybe it was her way of keeping the family business more private.

We remained a family for another week while we sat at the funeral parlor. People sat together before and after funerals back then. People brought casseroles. That week, all my extended family visited. My dad’s coworkers, our neighbors, and all of our camping buddies showed up for my dad’s funeral. The smell of gladiolas and lilies was overwhelming.

I hate gladiolas.

But my family and I were still together.

Some of the hardest days came a couple weeks after the funeral. People went about their colorful lives while the four of us lived in black and white. Every morning, I’d wake up and feel my stomach drop as I remembered my new reality.

At least I was back in school, where I should be. Only three people mentioned that my dad had died, my lovely geometry teacher, a warmhearted friend, and a boy who fumbled with words and said his hamster had died so he knew how I felt.

But at school, I could pretend to be normal. My dad had always said he wanted me to get a good education. School helped me stay connected to people, though I lost my two best friends to your typical middle school social shifts that year. Or maybe I wasn’t fun any more and they moved away from all that angst. Either way, keeping my grades up and being surrounded by kids whose outlooks weren’t bleak kept me from sinking too deeply. At home, my mother continued to clean and make meals. My brother and sister finished up their senior years, one in college, and one in high school.

But then, they all began to make plans for their own lives. My brother signed up to be a counselor all summer at the Boy Scout camp. My sister went ahead with her plans to be an exchange student for a year in Switzerland and left in early May. And my mom studied for her GED, got it, then applied to school to become a nurse. She was gone all day.

And then middle school let out for the year.

Picture me alone in my house for the first time, eight hours at a stretch. Picture me waking up to an empty house and a bad dream and trying to figure out what happened. Picture me with a list of chores my mother had left—dust, vacuum, mop the kitchen, clean the tub. Picture the curtains drawn to keep out the heat, and me peeking out through them to see a car load of kids in bathing suits depart from next door. Picture me sitting in front of the TV watching episodes of M*A*S*H with a tub of weird chocolate pudding that was government cheese’s nearest sugary cousin. Picture me playing morose tunes on a new piano. Picture me looking into the fridge and looking again ten minutes later. Picture me heating up a can of mixed vegetables and adding butter.

Hours stretched out to millennia.

My mother didn’t take me to the library any more. We didn’t join friends to go camping. I had to beg for my mother to take me to church. Even the visits to my grandparents’ houses had changed. It was as if no one knew why we were there, but at least that didn’t end and there was love, if not despair, at my grandparents’ houses.

When my mother came home from school, I’d make her a meal and justify why I hadn’t done more of the chores she’d left for me. Honestly, I procrastinated because I was a teenager, but I was also afraid of what I’d face if I got them all finished in one day and had nothing on my list of things to do. Then, I’d watch more TV while she studied. At her bedtime, I’d take her yellow highlighter out of her hand, move her books to the bedside table, pull the covers up, and turn out the lights. Then, I’d sit in my room, reading whatever I could get my hands on, staying up most of the night.

I babysat a lot that summer. Hey, they were real people, those children, so at least I talked to more than one person the summer I was thirteen. That was the summer I began to write. That was the summer when my life took a hundred and forty degree turn.

By the end of that summer, I’d wake up, eat a snack, and walk out the back door to go for a long and rambling walk across the countryside. I crossed highways and trestles. I hiked through forests and cornfields. I faced angry dogs and even a bull once. Well, I didn’t really face the bull. I ran.

Never take a shortcut through a bull’s field.

That was the summer, through writing and walking and being so very alone, that I became the person that I am. Sometimes, I still feel the tingle of angst about that.

Thank you for listening, jules

Feeling Purpose

I promise you that I haven’t spent the last month all chatty and never crabby. That would be creepy.

Oh, I have been crabby.

My thyroid has stopped working.

If you don’t want to hear about ailments, don’t fucking get old because it’s going to happen to you whether you want it to or not. Well, maybe your thyroid will be fine, but you’ll have arthritis or shingles or diverticulitis or something. You’d better listen up because you need to learn compassion for your future.

Actually, having a bad thyroid isn’t so bad as long as I can keep my medicines going. Plenty of people have no thyroid at all and are just fine. But mine is still in the process of shutting down and I keep dropping into this zone.

I am a soulless hag.

I assure you that I am.

I’m not sleeping so I have deep circles under my eyes and I’m developing skin tags. No, I don’t think that skin tags come from not sleeping, but suddenly, there they are. At least I don’t have any on my face yet.

I knew this woman who grew a great hairy knob just to the left of her right eyebrow. That thing did everything but grow fingers and wave. I’m telling you that if I had a great hairy knob growing on my face, I’d get plastic surgery to have it removed. I don’t generally want to come into the circle of judgment that going to a plastic surgeon would involve, but I’d see one about a great hairy knob on my face. I can live with wrinkles and sagging skin. I can even live with lumps and fatty deposits in strange places. But I couldn’t live with a great hairy knob wobbling off my face.

About the bags under my eyes—coffee isn’t helping. It just keeps me up at night.

And the soulless part?

Yes. I have lost my soul. I fake it pretty well, but being low thyroid not only makes a body tired, but it also makes a soul depressed.

I’m not sad. I’m just empty. I pretend to care until sometimes I manage to care. Then, I’ll feel okay for a little while and people look at me like I’m strange, being so happy because I sang in church or a kid stopped to say hello. The problem is that it doesn’t stay with me without a lot of help. Basically, I feel no creativity. Do you know what it’s like to be a creative person who is stripped of that feeling? I feel no spirit for anything. I don’t want to write or draw or read. I don’t see the point. Sometimes, I don’t even believe in God when my thyroid is low.

Yes, it’s true: when my thyroid is low, there is little to no chance for me to meet the holy spirit. It sucks. That joy, the awe in seeing the complexity and beauty in the earth is gone. I keep trying and now and then, I feel a little blip. I know it’s there, but I can’t touch it. Or rather, I can’t feel it touch me.

Years ago, my grandpa died of emphysema. I loved my grandpa. But he had smoked his whole life and worked in a coal mine when he was young and in a water treatment plant with chlorine when he was older. His lungs were a mess. Toward the end, he used to say that it was ironic for him to struggle to get air when he was surrounded by so much air.

I feel that way about the holy spirit. I see it in fidgety children that I tutor and in dogs romping at the park. I see it in flowers that bloom, even the ones with thorns. I read it in books, watch it in movies. The world is full of spirit, even if you don’t want to call it the holy spirit. Life exuberantly blossoms, pollinates, dies, and resurrects around me, but I don’t get to be touched by that right now.

I have a newfound compassion for people with depression. I get it. They aren’t sad. They just don’t feel there’s any point.

Thankfully, I get to go to my endocrinologist tomorrow. She’s going to take blood. She’s going to adjust my levels of Synthroid, and suddenly, I’ll feel just fine. It will be as easy as that. I know it’s not that easy for people with depression.

Tomorrow, I get to feel again.

Thank you for listening, jules

The Dangers of Living Vicariously

I keep stumbling along. I’m not quite awake enough to get anything right. Late last night, I had to join a new Facebook group in order to offer up extra graduation tickets I’d acquired. I only needed four. The school gave us eight for free, but somehow I ended up buying five extra in the confusion of senior week. I managed to get nine more tickets than I needed and I paid for some of them to boot. Stumbling. I am barely stumbling along.

So, I gave up trying to get that money back since the school wouldn’t give me a refund or take the tickets. Instead, I joined a Facebook group for Nick’s school district and posted a general note about it. That was nearly midnight last night. This morning, I got a bunch of requests from people before I realized they were talking about one school and I was talking about another.

I didn’t even realize there was another high school in that district. There is but it's on the lowdown.

I really wanted to tell you about prom.

No, I didn’t go to prom, but I did live vicariously.

In the last episode, I told you that Nick had been rejected by the cool group of kids going to prom and I was heartbroken for him.

The next couple of days, I tip-toed around the subject, but since I either needed to get cracking on tailoring the fit of his suit or returning it, I needed to know. It might take a couple of extra days to do the tailoring. It was hard-linings, cuffs, and four formal buttons all in a row.

On Tuesday morning, three days before prom night, I walked past Nick as he hunched over his bowl of Chex. I patted his back.

“Hnnn,” he said as a greeting.

“Good morning, sweetie,” I said. “Did you figure out what you’re doing on Saturday night?”

“Hnnn,” he said.

Okay, I’d have to try again later, maybe after he’d gotten out of the shower and was throwing lunch into his backpack five minutes after he was supposed to be out the door already.

So, I slowly unloaded the dishwasher. Five more minutes. Then, I started the Tetris game of loading the dishwasher to maximum capacity. Nick dashed into the kitchen, tossing out yesterday’s veggies, and putting dirty containers next to the sink. Why couldn’t he put them directly into the dishwasher and save me the effort? Seriously.

“I need to know if you’re going to prom or not so I can alter your suit in time. You know, you could ask that girl who’s in your lunch group. Do you know if anyone asked her? It’s always more fun going to prom with a friend.”

“I’m going, Mom.”

“You are? Okay. Okay, that’s great.”

I’m not sure I sounded very enthusiastic. I pictured him walking through those double-doors by himself on Saturday night and trying to fit into the group that decided their group was full. And then Nick left for school without looking at me, without saying goodbye.

That kid had some courage. Nick was going to prom even though his friend had allowed some little wanker in that group exclude him.

After that, I procrastinated my complicated sewing job and left to meet my friend Rachel for a walk instead. When she stepped out of her car and opened the hatch to let Max out, she said, “So, isn’t it funny that the kids are going to prom together?”

“What?” I said.

“Nick didn’t tell you?”

“No! Well, okay! Okay! That’s so cool!”

And suddenly, Nick went from being that brave yet ostracized boy who goes to prom by himself to being that boy who goes to prom with a real girl. Let me tell you, this girl is sweet, smart, and beautiful.

I floated through that walk. Nick wasn’t alone after all.

I really am invested in Nick’s happiness, maybe more than I should be.

As a mom, I try not to feel the pressure of his schoolwork, but I do. I try not to feel his failure or his success, but I do. I know I have no hope of keeping his heartbreak out of my own heart. But his joy is there too. It always will be, well after I’ve stopped worrying about school and jobs and success.

So Nick went to prom with his friend.

He had a great time!

And, I lived vicariously, just for a few hours.

Thank you for listening, jb