A Mother's Musings and Mumblings

I’ve been seeing a lot of wildlife lately including some quite impressive up close and personal sightings of a fawn or two. It’s always the same – I unexpectedly come up on an unsuspecting creature who neither knows nor cares how interested I am in getting a closer look and at that moment I’m faced with a split-second decision on what to do next. If I keep going exactly as I had been, the encounter will be over as quickly as it began and yet any change in my course of action may draw attention and scare off the timid creature that I am so interested in.

That’s exactly the feeling that i had last night while tucking in Thing 2. She and I were chatting and she made some comment or another about the future. You know, the kind of innocent thing that Mommies and Little Girls talk about at bed time – how she’ll always be my baby even when she’s old enough to have her own babies. It was late, I was ambling along and reflexively came back with a comment about WF. Basically, I asked her if she had this conversation with him, too.

Those of you who do not know Thing 2, allow me to explain that this child is Drama incarnate. Nothing with her is small or insignificant. NOTHING. Her kindergarten teacher once said: “That’s our kid, everything is larger than life!” and that’s about the best summary I’ve heard.

So when Thing 2 very matter-of-factly came back with reply: “No. He’ll be dead too soon to ask him that. Unless they cure cancer he’ll be dead while I’m still a kid.” I froze. Literally. I was afraid to physically move for fear of shattering that moment.

I’d been laboring under the misconception that her silence on the subject meant that she hadn’t absorbed it or had and was just rejecting it. But she very clearly spelled out exactly what her understanding was with chilling accuracy. What is a Pagan Queen to do?

We chatted for a good bit after that. We talked about what she was feeling (a little sad) and how I was there if she wanted to talk about it (she doesn’t) and what kinds of questions she had. She’s the literal child of the two so it shouldn’t surprise me that he questions were very concrete: What happens to WF’s house when he dies? Where does that money go? Do I get to keep the things in my room at his house?

By the end of that I was feeling a bit bolder so we talked about losing my Grandpa when I was 15. I didn’t go into much detail, there’s stuff there that people my age struggle with when they lose a parent as adults that is just plain hard and I still don’t have the heart to warn her. I did tell her that I’d always be there for her and that we’d get through it because I’d always be her Mommy. And that brings us full circle on this conversation.

WF gets home in just over 48 hours. It will do Thing 2 good to have him back and it will do me good to be able to talk to him about some of this stuff and see if we can get on the same page. Because right now, I’m starting to feel like the deer in the headlights myself. I know this is coming and I’m powerless to stop it. I’m not sure what I can do to prepare myself or my girls for the trauma and I suspect that WF isn’t prepared to talk about that at all. I’m not sure I could if I were him.

But this week as I was trying to wrap my brain around how I would ever manage to get us through this, I turned on the radio and heard an ad for the local Hospice. WF isn’t ready for Hospice care at this point by any stretch of the imagination but I wonder if it wouldn’t be worth talking to the folks there who, sadly, have more experience with children in these circumstances than I do. A little information might just save us all from becoming road kill.

So today’s blog entry is going to be written as a tribute to my life the way it has been for the last two weeks while Thing 1 was in Norway because she left Thing 2 behind and then Iggy’s girls were here for two weeks as well and you see Thing 2 is 8 years old and she’s pretty hyper and would meet the criteria for ADD or maybe ADHD if WF and I would only take her in to be evaluated but we don’t want her to be medicated so we just kind of try to manage her behavior without anything and wait and hope and pray that she’ll just grow out of this phase and eventually settle down a bit but then I look at Iggy’s oldest and she’s going to be 14 next week and when I look at her I lose all hope that Thing 2 is really going to grow out of this phase because Dev is the typical teen who doesn’t end every sentence with “why” but only because she never really ends a sentence at all as she runs right on to the next one and then the next, often talking right over the top of her younger sister Elf (who is 10) while Elf talks in her high-pitched tweeny twang starting sentences with “Daaaady” while she competes for attention with both of the other two girls and you might have noticed by now that anything that resembles punctuation is missing from this entry because that’s the way my day has been including a trip to Staples to buy school supplies for Thing 1 and Thing 2 while also listening to a dialog about Elf’s backpack that she wanted but they didn’t have and so it had to be ordered and we needed to figure out if it would be here on time for when she got back next week because it really can’t be all that hard to figure out what day it would arrive if it comes in 3-5 business days while also sorting out how much the packs of 100 lined 3×5 note cards cost and if it would be better to buy the multi-pack or not all while listening to three girls who wouldn’t know how to pronounce a punctuation mark if their short little lives depended on it – which it might soon – and how in the world do they manage to keep talking like that all without ever taking a breath because I’m getting winded just sitting here typing like this and even if they’re staggering their breathing I swear there’s at least two of them talking non-stop at any given point in time and really I honestly can’t wait for Thing 1 to come home from her vacation on Tuesday but I’m sure she’s going to have a lot to tell me when she does and I’m scared that she might have lost her punctuation coming through security on the flight home so I really need to find a case of periods to give to her at the airport just so I can maintain my sanity because it seems less likely to get me reported to the police if I tell my 12 year old daughter that I want her to have a period than if I tell her that I want her to avail herself of the roll of duct tape that I’ve brought along with me or at least the part of the roll that’s left once I’m done with Thing 2 because I can’t duct tape up Dev and Elf but Thing 2 might just take most of the roll on her own anyway unless of course I want to try managing the other half of this equation and just get myself a pair of earplugs which could make other aspects of my life difficult but would allow me to smile and nod whenever I see a female under the age of 15 moving their lips provided of course that I didn’t nod too vigorously because if I did that then I’d give myself whiplash from the non-stop moving of mouths all around me and it would only get worse when Thing 2 started in with the questions because she might be waiting for answers at least occasionally when she stops for breath but as long as there are other girls here then I don’t have to worry about that because they tell her to quit and I don’t have to bother with an answer very often at all except when my brain starts to leak out of my ears and she demands to know if I’m okay and then she won’t let me off the hook even though the talking still keep going and going and going.

Look. A period. Pray that they’re contagious.

I’m officially “that” age. That age when a woman wears Spanx not because she wants to look hawt but because it’s less conspicuous than ACE wrap and still fills the need to squeeze all the aching spots that need to be squeezed. At least until the Advil kicks in.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go shop for support hose.

A friend of mine just got a puppy and is in the midst of the decision to crate or not to crate. This is a process that I’m unfamiliar with as I never really viewed it as a choice – dogs get crated. They learn that their crate is their den. My Old Man is nearly 11 and he still goes to his crate if a storm is coming. If he can’t get to his crate, he destroys the house trying to find a small enough space to simulate a crate.

All creatures need their places of comfort in times of crisis.

Iggy’s girls are with us this week and yesterday it was discovered that the youngest needed an item of clothing that she didn’t have with her. No worries, Thing 1 has just the item! Trouble is, it’s at WF’s house. No worries, I have the keys!

Thing 2 simultaneously levitated, announced “I’ll go” and was at the door with her shoes on. This would be less impressive it wasn’t already her bedtime and she’d been half asleep when I stood up. She was at the front door before I was and opened it so we could head off to WF’s house in search of a random article of her sister’s clothing.

The search was unsuccessful. I did find all three bottles of my missing sun block, both lost soccer bags, the swim bag with gear, a missing lunch box and two of my tote bags. Don’t worry, I left them all there. For now.

But when I was done and had given up the quest, I realized I’d lost something else at WF’s house. Thing 2. She was gone. Now I figured she’d get bored with the search so this wasn’t a huge shock. I walked back up to her bedroom and there she was.

Thing 2 was sitting on the floor in front of a pile of stuff next to her bed. She wasn’t doing anything – and that’s a big deal for this kid. I asked what was going on and she said: “Wasn’t dad nice? I didn’t clean my room so he put my stuff in piles near where it goes for me to go through.”

All creatures need their places of comfort in times of crisis.

Thing 2 and I went home, my home, and she got ready for bed. Even though it was after her bedtime, she couldn’t (or wouldn’t) go to sleep until I got upstairs. So I curled up in bed next to her and we chatted a bit about nothing in particular and fell asleep like that. Curled up with one another in her little twin bed. Two creatures seeking out a a place of comfort in a time of crisis.