Seems like we’ve been sick with one thing or another more in the last 3.5 months than we have in the last 3.5 years. You too? What started as, most likely, another rendition of the Thanksgiving Flu on Christmas Day morphed into RSV by New Year’s Eve and after a brief jaunt to the ER yesterday I am now back to resting, resting, resting in my own sweaty sheets. I am laid low. A few rungs below the rest of my people who are likewise not great, but also awesome nonetheless.
ye ol sweat sheet situation
Once I got through triage and back to a room the first thing I did was ask for a pad because everytime I coughed I peed my pants and also was bleeding so it was all a real treat. I was kinda hoping they’d give me some of those mesh mom panties that you get to wear after giving birth but no dice. At any rate I feel extra lucky and thankful for a small-town hospital with nurses who are also friends and the chance to feel like someone and not just somebody.
My hope is that all of the illness is casting off, incinerating, destroying beyond all recognition, all of the outdated programming I have been harboring in my being these past years. Like maybe it is the biggest cellular turnover of all time and I am eviscerating my insides and everything will be washed clean and made new. Not new like new year but new like the most fresh, least weighed down perspective that has ever been. That is very hopeful. I will probably get sick again. But maybe in my newness I will know to surrender to it and let go with a little more ease.
I have been scrolling IG too much, I haven’t really had the energy for anything- not reading, not knitting- same blast cuff left to complete- not writing. I mostly stare into space or scroll the app taking in everyone’s stance on the calendar page until I am too sick to my stomach and headachey and have to go back to space staring. I think that is what makes the apps so mindless. It is easy to do when you can’t do much. I need an alternate.
I do most of my writing in this doc on my laptop called “posts/or not” that I started at the beginning of 2022. I write there if I cannot tell at the outset how long something will be or if I want it to be read by anyone else ever anyway. If it’s too long for IG it becomes a blog post and vice versa and all of that feels extra dumb and annoying like there should be a more mature way for me to go about writing in general. I have never been very organized. And my ambitions around it aren’t significant either. So I try not to complain. I have spent a lot of my sick time talking to myself- probably more like muttering on the outside but on the inside it feels like these grand compositions, stringing together words and ideas, whole revelations living inside of this moment right now. I don’t think they ever make it into any doc. Chances are slim. The voice in my head is like an old weathered and worn cowboy, it’s a new alterego for me and I’m kinda into it.
The big kids stayed home from school today, maybe they are sick, maybe it is sympathy sick, but either way it feels right and they get no fuss from me about it. Our house is a disaster and Wilfred has been on the couch watching TV and eating popsicles for weeks which makes me feel like a complete failure as a parent and also just is what it is. What are you gonna do? I am so far below the level of healthy functionality that I guess I gotta just let some things be. I’ll pay some price later, but isn’t that always the case?
Anyway, the main thing I can think of when it comes to this year is that it is the last full calendar year that Maple will live with us. I’m not ready. And I know I need to be. Holy hell I have been trying not to think about this for so long and yet think about it enough that I appreciate every single moment- impossible- that I get to have with her. With each of them. This is a one-way train and we are all on it. I’ve known from the beginning that it is a game of letting go but yikes, it hurts a lot. When you become a parent it’s kinda like relinquishing your wholeness because you know all those parts are bound to disperse eventually. What horror. What privilege.
I don’t have any big ambitions for this year. Right now I just want to feel better. And in general, and forever and every year, I want to keep doing a good job of being me. That is not perfect shit to be sure but it is definitely owning my mess and my inevitable fuckups and learning from all of it. My greatest desire is that no one ever feels othered by me. That feels like a high bar but it is where my heart is. It is how I want to meet today and the year and all of life. Resolution in perpetuity.
I know there are whole cannons more to say on everything but that is all I’ve got in me and FYI I am still alive.