Through Fire

In the very early 1980s I rode to Boise with my younger brother and father. Dad had a blue pick up truck that we would fill with any can on the side of the road.  There was a certain start and stop quality to the trip.  I was along for the ride.  Dad wanted to take Alex, but he needed time to work in Boise.  I came as childcare.  Also. Adventure.

There were potholes, chuckholes in Dad’s parlance, in Red Desert, Wyoming.  No seatbelts.  Alex hit the top of the truck and knocked the shifter out of whack.  We made it to the migratory bird refuge near the great Salt Lake.  Start and stop there too.  Pheasants cross the road randomly. Alex and Dad were birders.  I was a teenager.  If I had had a smart phone back then I would have been the worst possible teen. As it was, I was as limited a person as I possibly could be.  We saw ruddy ducks and phalaropes and coots.  I was dying inside.

We got near Idaho and there was a brush fire that crossed the highway.  I held Alex in my lap as we drove through the fire.  A couple on a motorcycle in front of us worried me.  The woman was in a tube top and no helmet.  Driving through the fire we couldn’t even see them in front of us.  Visibility was so bad. I was frightened. Dad was calm.

We spent our time in Boise uneventfully.  I think there was a fair we attended and I played my recorder and Dad worked and Alex and I just hung out.  We stayed at a house of some random journalist Dad worked with.  I remember too little.

I remember the fire.  We were frightened.  Dad was calm.

In late 2006 or early 2007 Will and Charles and I visited the North Park Nature Center in Chicago. We went there often.  It was the closest nature we could get to. Charles could handle it even when he was most frightened of the world. I didn’t expect the controlled burn would be completely unannounced.  But it was.  We got there as usual and went into the woods, but within a very short time I just realized we were surrounded by flame and smoke.  I did the only thing I could think to do.  I picked up Will, I grabbed Charles’ hand and we just ran. I stayed as calm as humanly possible in the moment.

There have been times when life experiences felt like walking through fire.  But there is nothing really comparable to ACTUALLY walking through fire. 

The boys were so little then, but they remember it.  Both of them have written about it for school projects.  Alex was so little on that trip to Boise, but he remembers too.  And I remember thinking about how Dad must have felt inside driving through that fire.  The way I felt in the nature center.  All the power of that fire and as a parent we have to sometimes just hike a kid up under your arm and run.

Credible Threat

On Mother's day seven years ago, the threat was credible enough that I called the cops and had the guns taken away.

The threat wasn't against me or my kids, but inwardly driven. 

The past couple of days there has been a credible threat that kept all students on the front range at home.  I understand credible threats, having experienced my own.

My feeling is that you do have to respond appropriately to credible threats and I'm glad the school districts did what they did.  I wonder about the woman from Florida who apparently was running naked through the woods with a gun and ended up dying by her own hand.  I wonder if she has never heard of ticks, because I don't know many people who would run through Colorado forests in the spring without some kind of clothing on. Guns may be okay protection, but not against a tick burrowing into your skin.

I wonder about that woman because it seems to me the end was inevitable.  She may have been threatening outwardly, but the display and the publicity suggest to me she wanted the notoriety as much as anything.  She got it and she got what she probably wanted, an end with a splash.

I'm not impressed.

I have seen some incredibly cogent and eloquent posts on social media about the most recent incident, and it reminds me of things I have written in the past...and that I feel I can't now.  I am so done with all of it.  Guns/no guns/deaths/threats I don't even know how to respond anymore.  It's such a circus and a horror.

Children raised in this period have maybe two choices, start running through the forests naked, or start fighting back, as the Parkland kids did last year.  I am firmly on the side of the young people from Parkland and elsewhere, because my own limits seem to have been reached.

Repetition

I have just been writing out a play-by-play for running my household.  I am going to a conference next week and family will watch the kids. 

I was just so bored by the time I finished writing it out.  SO much to do and remember everyday, but it is always the same stuff.  Does anyone wonder why I occasionally look past my exit on the way to work and wonder what would happen if I just kept going west, instead of turning?

Routine is all well and good.  In an autism family, it's necessary.  But the thought of stepping away from my routine for just a few days makes me feel oh so very happy.  I have been trying to vary our routine.  I have planned hikes and outings and vacations for the summer.  The planning is fine.  The day to day is still there. 

I don't know how to make the day to day better.  Well...kind of I do. Piano lessons and swimming and helped me.  I feel like I need to make more effort to change things up...but that takes effort.  Routine is easy, just stifling.

Springtime will bring a much needed break in routine.  It is time to garden and be outside.  Bonfire season is coming, if it isn't so windy this year.  I am looking forward to not planning, but just doing the things that are not routine.  I'm looking forward to the end of the school year, which brings a much loved change in the morning routine. I'm looking forward to running in the cool summer mornings. 

The conference will be helpful.  I hope to recharge my professional and personal batteries by time away from the usual.  I hope to come home recharged in all ways.   You can't run away from yourself, but you can run yourself away.  At least for a little while.

Patience

I'm an impatient person at heart.  Watching the story unfold irritates me.  I have been known to read books and magazines from back to front.  I don't mind spoilers.  I can concentrate on the art of the writing if I'm not wondering what is going to happen.

That said, there is no way to do this in life.  It tends to make me a little snappish.  I want the plot to move along, but so much of life is work-a-day and the plot doesn't show itself for years.

Sometimes I try to sit back and figure out who is the protagonist for this part of the story. Sometimes I just am done and want to run away.

These days I am somewhere in the middle.  I feel like it's my story to establish and tell, but running away briefly sounds pretty good.

I'm still recovering from heartbreak, but I feel like it is all better.  There are whole HOURS I don't think about him.  HOURS!  I'm trying to be patient with myself too.  There is so much that can happen in the blink of an eye.  All of a sudden the years have passed and the children are taller than you.  All of a sudden the toddler is a young woman, a force of nature.

Patience is a virtue they say.  So I am breathing into it and letting life wash over me.  And I remember that the point of life is living and the plot only becomes visible when it's over and you can't get spoilers for your own future.

Talk about messy

There was a bomb cyclone this week in Colorado.  Also known as an explosive cyclogenesis, this system creates a huge drop in pressure and creates crazy weather.  We had 70 mile an hour wind gusts and hundreds of thousands of people lost power.

We were one of the households that lost power.  We were fine Wednesday, snuggled up and watching movies.  When the power went out I pretty much went to bed.  Since then I have struggled to keep things together with the kids.  They were off school Thursday and the house was like ice.  I made the executive decision to take a day off and move us to a hotel.   Our power was finally restored this morning.  We were the last block in the area to be without power.  I like to think my tweeting the energy company at 6am helped them figure some things out. 

It has only been a few days, but I had to get rid of all my freezer goods.  Everything had thawed and was refreezing.  Hello, dangerous meat!

Then I started thinking about Puerto Rico and the water in Flint, Michigan.  We had three days and were going crazy.  I have enough money to get us to hotels.  Other families had to go to shelters.  We are lucky.  All we lost was dangerous meat.  The fish and hamster survived.  Refugees don't get the options we had.  Yes, we were cold and miserable, but it was brief. 

The world is a messy place and natural phenomena make it messier.  I feel like there are not enough answers and the US infrastructure is not in a good place these day.   Some of the potholes on Denver streets are large enough to swallow small children and yet we voted against measures to fix streets.  So much of this is the unwillingness on the part of some humans to help humans who don't resemble them so much.  But all of us get sick from dangerous meat and all of us need water and shelter. 

I have had a lot of conversations the past few days with people who lost power or didn't and we bonded.  I hope that something as awful sounding as a bomb cyclone can leave us feeling more like a community.

Messy

Life is messy.

Sometimes I think we need to be handed this on a card at birth.  Life is messy.  Don't expect tidy endings and complete stories.

People leave you and you depart from places and there is sorrow and grief and joy.  You can shut yourself down or you can feel it.  For those of us who feel it, we feel completely. There are days I wake and I am fine and there are days I wake and I am not fine.

I am currently awash in one of those inexplicable hiccups of grief. There is nothing for it.  I breathe and I work and I keep moving forward.

Life is messy.

I am a tidy person.  As a little girl I loved putting my toys away.  I loved a clean room.  I had the good fortune to share a room with a sister who taught me that life is messy.  A clean room is nothing without the contrast of the mess.  Mark, too, believed that a thing belonged where it landed, not in any specific place.  So while my nature longs for tidy, I acknowledge that I am not going to get it.  I respect the mess.  I respect the contrast.

We will feel the mess sometimes more than we want to.  I want to wake up tomorrow with joy on my hands and in my heart.  I want to look at my little girl's room and be okay with the explosion she keeps in there.   I want it all to be okay.   I also want my messes to respect my desire for tidy every now and then. 

The dead husbands club

Mark would have turned 50 this coming Saturday.  My bank wished me a happy birthday month today because of it.  I had to go into the bank to get that fixed.  Apparently our birthdays had gotten mixed up.

I don't love the reminder.  I was with Mark for a long time.  He should still be here, sputtering and angry.

I am a member of the Dead Husbands Club.  We met, a few of us, on Sunday to talk and laugh and compare notes.  How are all the kids doing?  How is your love life?  What are the pain points?

There are too many of us in the club.  We always wish it was smaller. But when me met in late 2015, it was being thrown a lifesaver.  They are the only people in the world I don't have to explain myself to.  We met in a grief group.  We all had kids and our husbands (or exes) had all died by suicide.  One woman was several years out.  Most of us were fresh.  Some of us had been divorced, but not all.  Even those of us who were divorced talked about how close we still were with our exes.  Many of us had anticipated the suicides, at least one of us was taken completely by surprise.  We had ups and downs as a group, but often I felt like we were best friends when sitting in that room.

We have stayed in touch.  Seeing people last Sunday was a breath of air.  It felt good to talk about the trouble our kids were having or not having.  It felt good to know that at least one of us had gotten married again.  We discussed dating apps and whether or not to list ourselves as divorced or widowed. 

We have always laughed too much maybe for a grief group, but it feels right.  We are facing so much every day.  The exhaustion of solo parenting cannot be explained easily.  There is no us.  There is only me.