Tubulence

I accepted a job this week that I should be happy about but I'm not. It's a new TV show on which the network has extremely high hopes. The show runner is a well respected playwright (this is why I could not say no) and we seemed to hit it off. I have a month to secure babysitting and get things underway. In some ways, I'm happy. I love the people that I work with and spending time immersed in something new, something that might actually be good might be just what I need.

But of course I'm terrified. We work really long hours. Who is really qualified to take care of my kids, basically be their full-time caregiver for weeks and weeks leading into months? I'm trying to assemble a team of babysitters, a paid for "village" so to speak but it's not like I only work 20 minutes away. To be honest, this is one of the reasons I lasted as long as I did with C. Without that full-time live-in partner, I always viewed long-term work as an impossibility.

So now I'm going to try to make it a possibility. My mother has cancer and Eliza is starting first grade at yet another new school so to say the timing is bad is an understatement. I want to do this job and make this connection with the playwright but that won't go well if my head is very divided. I basically demanded that C work some weeks from home, thus supervising our daughters with the help of daytime babysitters. He said this "wasn't realistic" but didn't say no either. He's enlisted for the first week anyway, the week that Eliza starts school.

And then after that, we're on our own. Oh how I long for a sibling or some one to share these children with. Not just for me but for them.

And here's more pictures from our disney trip. For some reason the prior posting didn't print them all. I put these pictures up to remind myself of what I'm working for.

Family Pictures, Part Deux

One of my most loyal readers posted a comment today that just made my world. My mother has pancreatic cancer and I recently posted about my complete lack of photos of my mother and me during my childhood. I only have one photo of myself with my Mom from my childhood and this makes me so, so sad.

I haven't posted any photos from our Disney trip but here's a few, including one of me with the girls. I want them to have photos of us together, so they can see all the great things we did do together. We found out about my Mom's cancer shortly before the trip and we nearly didn't go. But my mom urged me to go and my father said that he seriously regretted never taking us to Disney.

So not only did I just make my first trip to Disney, I accomplished something my parents never did for me. And I did it all on my own.

Family Pictures

My mother has always hated how she looks so there are very few existing photos of her. I have a polaroid of the four of us, her, my father, my brother and me taken at my grandparents house in the early 1970s. As far as I know, this is the only photo from my childhood with her and myself in it.

She agreed to be photographed with me at my cousin Bettina's wedding in 1998 and again at Eliza's Christening in 2006. I'm not sure where I put the photo from Bettina's wedding but I had it in a frame on top of my dresser for a long time.

I took my mother, the girls and myself out on a boat to watch the fourth of July fireworks. I didn't bring my camera but the boat staff took polaroids of all the guests. The tiny polaroids were then placed in plastic key chains I purchased for $7.00. The keychain is already broken and now the tiny photo is lodged in my wallet where it's sure to get lost.

The stupid thing is, my mother was quite good-looking. She always had a bit of a weight problem but as the handful of photos I've seen of her taken in the 1970s reveal, she was not half as big as she thought she was. There are no photos of her from the 1980s that I know of. Although I was photographed with my friends and with both grandparents at my high school graduation, there aren't any photos of me from that day with either parent.

While we attended my daughter's end of the school year picnic, I tried to take a photo of one of Eliza's classmates with her mother. The mother quickly moved before I could snap the photo and suggested I take a photo of her daughter with another friend. At the time my mother was in the hospital and I suspected or feared bad news and I nearly yelled at the mother, telling her that someday her daughter would treasure these photos.

The new on my mother's health is bad. My cousin was here throughout the 12 hour surgery and to distract and keep me standing for the past few days but now she's gone and I'm alone with my girls while my mother recovers from her marathon surgery in the hospital. She doesn't yet know how bad it is and I don't know when her prognosis will be laid out for her. She will not handle it well, just as I have not.

I've been offered a great job with great people that will dig me out of a financial hole and continue my much needed insurance coverage. But it will require me to be gone from my mother and the girls for too long so I don't think I can do it. I'm not sure if a shorter term job will come along and I might lose my benefits and commit financial suicide on top of losing my mother. But I don't see how I can leave my mother and the kids right now and work 60-70 hour work weeks two hours away when these might be the last few months of her life. Part of me wants to take it for me--I'll be immersed in work, surrounded by my work friends, earning a living and valuable.

But it's just a job and this is the life of my family and life is so much more important to me. So I'm holding out hope that a job that's a better fit will come along and that I won't end up on the street because I'm choosing now to be where I'm truly needed.

Being a mum

My mother, like any good mother, has made her fair share of mistakes in mothering me. But as parents we all try our best and sometimes, the mistakes she made came from loving me too much. And that's not a bad thing. My mother is far from perfect, my mother is not a candidate for Sainthood but my mom loves my brother, me and my daughters in a way few people are fortunate enough to experience.

And now she has cancer again and we don't even know if it's operable. I'm trying to be a cheerleader but I'm scared shitless. I have no idea how I'm supposed to live my life without her. No one loves me and loves my children as much as she does. My mother dragged her unhealthy, cancer laden body out of bed day in and day out to get my kids ready for school when I last worked some time ago. C can't get out of bed and care for his own children if he has a cold. The adrenaline that's necessary to care for young children comes from love. My mother's body is failing her but that love has kept her here, probably past her body's expiration date, because she knows my brother and I still need her. My grandfather always used to say that he lived as long as he did (104) because us kids still needed him.

And now I still need my mom but my needing her doesn't magically stop what's going on inside her body. I've been trying to stay positive and hope for the best but as the days pass and the wait for any glimmer of good news continues, I am collapsing. I have no one, no one to help with the kids except my mother's next door neighbor (thank G-d for her) but she's got her hands pretty full at the moment with her family issues. Now that Eliza's home from school, she craves constant activity and stimulation. I just don't have it in me to not only be the caregiver but playmate of a five-year-old.

Remember the good old days, when we had neighbors, when kids went out in the street and played with other kids? What happened to that? I moved to a little town where everyone kind of knows everyone and still feel completely isolated. Getting Eliza together with other similar age children requires a lot of texting, phone calls and leg work on my part. Eliza is a wonderful child and makes friends easily. She's not the problem--it's this new playdate, mom chaperoned safe vacuum world we've created that makes parenting today so hard. The fact of the matter is most moms are more inclined to make playdates with the children of their friends. So because I'm new here and I'm kind of shy and don't have any siblings or lifelong friends nearby with kids, I've become my daughter's current BFF. And I'm not being a very good one for the moment.

As a child, my mother was not my BFF but my mother. She cared for me, tried to guide me and did everything she could to make me love myself. She took me on special trips to parks and planned special outings for us but she was also just as inclined to let me watch TV for hours or send me off down the street to a friends without double-checking every five minutes that I'd arrived safely and was now having my healthy snack. She gave me the freedom to grow up, to learn how to function in this world on my own, to find and create my own sources of amusement when there was no one else there.

So now, why do I feel so completely incapable of functioning without her?

Quantity time

A director I worked with once told me that when it comes to parenting, a parent should aim for quantity time, not quality time. He said quality time is something that's not planned it just happens. So if you spend as much time as you can with your kids, the real quality moments will happen when you least expect it. He spoke of elaborate family trips to parks, vacations, when the kids were often happiest just playing in the backyard.

I had to have routine blood work done today and with no babysitters, had to drag the girls. Two other men waited in the waiting room when we arrived with a third right behind us. I signed in and planned to keep Elena in the stroller because I didn't want her running around the waiting room. Elena struggled to get out. Eliza leaned in and kissed her.

"Mom, she really, really wants to come out," Eliza said, just in case I didn't notice that Elena was straining to get out of her three point harness. "Please, mom, can't we please take her out?"

I refused at first, but seeing that it might take a while, I decided to free her. Elena was elated, practically jumping out of the stroller. Once her feet were on the ground, Elena put her little hands on her hips and started doing her little knee bends.

"You're a dancer," a man seated across from us said.

"I'm a real dancer," Eliza said, rising into a releve. "I'm going to take hip hop this summer."

"Hip hop!" Elena echoed.

"You're not taking hip hop, I am," Eliza said, arabesquing. "She's too little to take dance class."

"You're a good dancer," the man said. "I have a niece who dances too."

Eliza and Elena joined hands and started dancing together. And then Elena started jumping. Two feet on and off the ground, real jumps.

"She's really jumping!" Eliza said, excited. "Before she couldn't do a real jump."

Elena giggled with glee. I watched her jump and realized Eliza may have been right. This may have been the first time Elena did real jumps. How did my daughter see things that I didn't even notice? How could a five-year-old be this observant, this proud?

"She's so cute!" Eliza said, cuddling her up. "You can jump now! Look at my baby!"

"That's a really good big sister," some man said as his name was called, just in case I wasn't aware of this. Believe me, I might be walking around in a fog half the time, but I know Eliza really is an extraordinary child.

This morning I told her I was very worried about Grandma, that we had a lot of not fun things to do and that I'd need her to be understanding and cooperative. And she was. She took Elena into the playroom and let me exercise. She let me make phone calls. She made the most of our time at the lab, a few other errands and then our trek to the hospital to pick mom up.

At the end of the day, Eliza thanked me for a wonderful day. She said her favorite part was when I went to give blood. It may have been the highlight of my day too. Now that school's out and beyond the Disney trip we don't have too many summertime plans, we will have plenty of quantity/quality time.

I don't really know how much time I have with my mother. In truth, none of us knows how much time we have with anyone. Elena is so attached to my mother, I want so much for my mom to be here long enough for Elena to remember her. There's no way of knowing how advanced my mother's cancer is until they do the surgery and if the surgery doesn't work, that's it. There's no other treatment. I think so much of why I'm so happy to be with my mother and my girls together is because my mother really loves me. C stopped loving me shortly after Eliza was born (I became competition) so the entire time I was with him, I never knew what it was like to just be a family without bitterly being viewed as a rival. With my mom, I get to feel like a real family.

My mother is a great person and now her eldest granddaughter is a great child. Everything that is great about my mother and her family, is in my daughter. I am so happy and so proud to be the primary caregiver of this child.

not much

So my mother has cancer again but supposedly it's treatable. She has to have surgery and I don't think they'll know until they do the surgery how bad it is. So I'm not sure how treatable it is. It's better than what I thought when she went into the hospital. But it's still cancer, it still sucks.

And we're supposed to leave for Disney in six days. I don't want to go but don't see how I could deny Eliza her stupid fucking Disney trip.

Not really much else to say.

The Waiting Game

So my sick mother had a CT scan a few days ago to determine the cause of her liver inflammation. The scan revealed a blockage in one kidney but not much else so an MRI and other tests have been ordered. Next week, she'll go into the hospital to try to get most of the tests done in a timely fashion.

I'm a bit of the agnostic type but as I knew some results were coming in yesterday afternoon, after I dropped off Eliza at school, I swung back around to a local church and took Elena inside. I expected an empty church and some quiet time to light a few candles and say my own prayers. Instead I walked in on a mass already in progress. I decided to stay through the mass which was mercifully brief because to say Elena is not well versed on church etiquette is putting it mildly.

I sat in the last pew so I could made a quick exit if necessary. Right behind me was a pedestal containing a basin of holy water. Elena apparently mistook the pedestal as a water fountain and when I let her disappear for a moment behind me, I was shocked to find that she'd somehow managed to climb the pedestal and was slurping holy water. Horrified (and yes, I'll admit it, entertained), I wrestled Elena away from the holy water. She exhibited her displeasure by screaming at full volume for about two minutes. The Priest continued to speak, a few heads turned, the elderly couple closest to me scowled but finally the screaming fit was replaced by Elena's enthusiastic imitation of my shushing, followed by her slapping at my legs, saying, "stop that shh, no shh." Hoping for quiet, I let her toddle to the pew in front of me and ignored her as she lay down and say, loud enough for people in the next county I'm sure, "Nappy nap!" I'm sure you can imagine the fun she had with the kneeler at the bottom of the pew. Finding a "fan" at the end of that pew, ie an elderly man who was charmed by her noisy antics and waved, Elena responded by running over to him and promptly hiking her dress high over her head to show off her tummy and bloomers. The man looked away, I imagine not sure of what to make of this mass-attending strip-tease.

But the mass ended swiftly, I had my quiet moments to say, well beg, what I needed to say. Later that day, I brought both girls to see my mother. They fell asleep in the car so I left them in there while I asked her what the results were. Finding that everything was still up in the air but that my mother seemed a bit stronger, I woke the girls one at a time and led them into the house. We had a lovely evening. Elena ran into the house saying "Gandma! Gandma!" She jumped into my mother's arms and all the weakness seemed to leave my mother. Eliza ran up to my mother's chair and draped herself across my mother's lap. I didn't know that Eliza had been worried but I saw it in that moment, saw the relief in her eyes as she nestled against my mom. We ordered a pizza and my mom managed to eat two slices. Then we headed out to Rita's for an ice, my mother's first non-medical outing in a month. My mother surprised me by getting out of the car to eat the ice at the table. Eliza was cold and headed back into the car, waving to us from the open window. Elena waved back, calling "Hi Sissy! Hi 'Yiza" when Eliza disappeared inside the car. Eliza poked her head out the girls seemed to have their own moment.

So we wait but for now, after that wonderful night, I have more hope than I had a few nights ago. I'm so lucky to still have my mom after all the health issues she's had and I try to cherish each good time as much as I can because I know, there's no guarantees here. I know that life is a finite thing, that death is something none of us escape. But that doesn't mean I'm in any way prepared to lose my mom.

So for now, we had last night. I hold onto that, the image of her seated at the table with me and Elena, happily eating her mango ice, while Eliza waved to us from the car.