Rejection, real and imagined

It's official: Cletus the Former Fetus has imaginary acquaintances. I'm not sure that I can call them imaginary friends, as they seem to not always be super nice. A few days ago, Cletus ran up to me with a concerned look on her face, her half-eaten snack dangling from an outstretched hand. "Mama, they said no!" she cried.

"Who said no?" I asked, looking around the room. I had briefly been in the bathroom; maybe one of our friends had come by in the meantime and let themselves in through the back door, as we tend to do out here in The Sticks.

"The Dora friends said no!" she said, pointing back over her shoulder at her playroom. "They said I couldn't eat my snack!"

I followed her back into the playroom, asking "Who are the Dora friends?". I thought maybe she had been playing with her Dora and Diego dolls, or her Dora-themed Memory game, or her ridiculous purse that is designed to look like a giant head-of-Dora. But she had not; the room was devoid of any evidence of Dora-related play.

Cletus continued to stare at her snack, hesitant. I told her she could tell the Dora friends that her mama gave her the green-light on the fruit roll-up. Cletus smiled and announced into the air: "My mama said YES!" And then she took a bite. Apparently the Dora friends, mysterious bullies though they be, still cleave to my authority.

Aren't, like, actual kids mean enough, with their pushing and their toy-stealing and their name-calling? It seems really unjust that my child's fake playmates are trying to keep her down as well.

I think the Dora friends' repressive regime must be somehow related to Cletus' current obsession with being told "no". These days, whenever the husband or I tell her she can't do something, or ask her to stop french-kissing the dog, or refuse to let her eat a bowl of juice for dinner, she squints her eyes and puckers up her mouth and wails, "You said NO to meeeeeeeeeeee!" On particularly choice occasions, when only one parent plays the role of the offender while the other has the misfortune of simply being in the same room, Cletus turns to the onlooker and cries, "Daaaaaaddy, Mommy said NO to meeeeeeeee!"

We're in a real limit-pushing phase right now, so Cletus is hearing us say "no" a lot. Which results in a near-constant transition from plaintive ass-kissing (batting her eyelashes and rubbing my arm while cooing "Mama, can I watch a little bit of TV?") to tortured whining (resting her forehead on the floor while sobbing "But I WANT to watch a little bit of TVeeeeeeee!"). A Dr. Toddler and Mr. Hyde. And I fear the end result will be a gang of imaginary friends that do nothing but send my kid to timeout, over and over, all day long.

Tax-deductable contribution

I'm still volunteering for the battered women's program, still taking hotline calls once a week for a couple of hours. Like a lot of nonprofits in Illinois right now, the program I volunteer for is facing a pretty major financial crisis. The state is about two shakes from passing a ridiculous budget that, in lieu of an income tax increase, will cut significant funding to social service agencies. The mental health center in town will lose half its staff. The program serving victims of child abuse and child sexual assault will close its doors. The domestic violence program will lose its court advocacy and shelter services, among other things.

Last fall, the program opened up a resale shop to help raise money to subsidize the cost of services. They bought a house on a busy street, filled it up with racks and shelves, and opened it up as a business. Everything they sell is donated: mostly women's and children's clothes, shoes, toys, household items, books, the odd piece of exercise equipment or furniture. They're open six days a week; all the proceeds go towards providing services to victims of violence and their kids. In addition to my hotline shift, I help out at the store once a week. It's fun, mostly; I work the cash register, sort and price donations, buy armfulls of Dora-related merchandise to enable Cletus the Former Fetus' growing habit.

Today I was going through some big black trash bags of stuff that had been left in the store's drop-off bin. I stuck my arm inside one of them, felt around a bit until something sharp pricked my hand. The bag was full of crafting cast-offs: half-finished cross stitching projects, stained fabric, rusty sewing needles, half-shredded quilting magazines from the 80s, straight pins. Someone packed up the bottom half of a closet, sharps and all, tossed it all into an unlabeled bag and left it. "For charity."

There were salvageable bits. I gathered any usable craft supplies into ziploc bags and priced them at $3.00 per lot. Every little bit helps, or something. But I can't help but indulge in a little self-righteous anger. Who is the person who thinks that a) someone else deserves to buy dull, rusty needles, and b) staff or volunteers at a resource-strapped nonprofit should have to sort through bags filled with loose pins and dirty kleenex (yes. seriously.)? It's the same mentality that says "Hey, this shirt is stained and torn and I won't wear it anymore... but I bet a POOR PERSON will! I'll donate it!" Or: "This television no longer works, and I don't want to wait until the large trash pick-up day later on in the summer. I'll donate it!"

You can always tell when someone's donating crap. They come in to the store and hand over their bags without making eye contact. They practically sprint back out to the car. They never ask for a receipt for tax purposes. In contrast, people donating gently used (or even really-old-but-still-usable) items often stop to offer a summary description. "This bag is full of girls' clothing. My daughter can't wear them anymore." They look around the shop for awhile. They smile and chat and ask how the store is doing.

This may be an unpopular opinion, but I believe that beggars (for lack of a less offensive saying to appropriate) CAN be choosers. I mean, come on. There are so many people out there who are willing to donate nice things, suitable things -- I'm not talking about new merchandise, I'm talking about clean merchandise. I'm talking about merchandise that's all in one piece, that fulfills its basic intended function (i.e. a toaster that toasts, or a book with all its pages). If you've got trash, just throw it away. Recycle it. Take it to the dump. But don't assume that just because someone is hard-up (and the majority of people who shop at this store are hard-up, a significant portion of them clients of the agency), they should buy and use and wear garbage.

The end. And a hearty fuck you to the person whose crusty snot-rag I ended up holding in my hand this afternoon, whoever and wherever you may be. The downtrodden citizens of western Illinois thank you for your kind donation.

Progress report

Things are looking up on the homefront. Daniel has graduated from a walker to a cane, which he can use to get around my parents' house. He goes to physical therapy three times a week. Next week he goes to his local doctor for a pretty standard checkup; the week after that he goes back to the city with my parents, to meet with his surgical team and start Next Steps. Next Steps, of course, being the kinder, gentler way of saying "Slicing You Up To Figure Out Just How Bad This All Is."

We are going back this weekend for Father's Day. When I talk to my mom on the phone to check on my brother's progress, she says "You'll feel better when you see him. He gets really down, but he looks much better." Any thoughts on a good pick-me-up present for a housebound 26-year-old who already owns every DVD known to man?

In other news, the husband's college finished classes two weeks ago. Commencement was a rainy mess, but it was fun to see the husband and all of our new friends march up the aisle in their faculty robes and fancy caps. After the ceremony, Cletus asked, "Daddy, were you wearing a special dress?" Now that it's summer, it's like I'm married again! I have someone to hang out with in the evenings! I don't have to do every household chore myself, feeling like a martyred housewife! This past weekend, for instance, the husband and I watched a movie together (Wendy and Lucy - don't bother) AND played hours of Rock Band on the Wii! Today, he took the car to the dealership to get a new timing belt! This weekend, he's accompanying me to my parents' house! IT'S INSANE!

And speaking of summer, can we talk about the awesomeness that is So You Think You Can Dance? I know that some of you watch it (and I maintain that the rest of you should). This year, who's in for a finale viewing party on Twitter?

And someone remind me that as soon as I get my shit together for longer than 15 minutes at a stretch, I've got about 30 obscenity-studded posts on Sonia Sotomayor, misogyny, and racism just waiting to be spewed forth.

Buddy bands! They work!

This made me laugh out loud for the first time in a week:

The new normal

A dear blog-friend sent me an email today sharing some of her experiences in dealing with the chronic and life-threatening illness of her geographically far away father. One thing in particular really struck a chord with me -- she said that it took her a long time to be able to go out and have fun without being seized with fear that while she was laughing the night away, her father was on the other side of the country, dying, that exact same moment.

My OCD is such that I have always, to some degree, harbored those kinds of thoughts. It's something I used to work on a lot in therapy, my tendency to fixate on worst-case scenarios at inopportune times. Out to dinner with friends? What a perfect moment to randomly start worrying that Cletus the Former Fetus is at home, falling down a flight of stairs at the babysitter's feet!

Only now, with my brother, the thing is that my fears are more justified (although Cletus IS crazy-fast on those stairs...). I have been doing ok when I'm just puttering around the house, except for when the phone rings. When the phone rings, all bets are off and my stomach drops to my feet and I run like a mad woman to check the caller ID. Is it my parents? Is it my one of my other siblings on a cell phone, driving behind an ambulance on the way to the hospital? Cletus' daycare provider called before 7:00 this morning to let me know that she would be opening late on account of a dentist appointment; I barely understood a word she told me. All I knew was that the phone had woken me up, and all I could think was no.

What's hardest for me is leaving the house -- or rather, coming back home after leaving. I first found out about Daniel's ruptured aneurysm upon returning home from a Friday night shopping trip with a friend. We both had our cell phones turned off, and the husband had been trying to contact me for hours. He met me at the door as we stumbled onto the porch with bags and boxes. He said, "You need to call your parents." While Daniel was being airlifted to the hospital, bleeding internally and paralyzed from the waist down, I was getting a chocolate shake at the Hardees drive-through.

Here's the new normal: deep breathing and heart palpitations every time my palm hits that back doorknob and starts to turn it.

Accepting the things I cannot change

When your baby brother has a ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysm, the worst thing you can possibly do is look it up on Google. You would think that I would know this, being the queen of Using the Internet for Self-Destruction. You might recall that I spent close to a year in therapy on account of my tendency to, among other things, diagnose my ten-month-old with autism using online checklists. And yet here I sit at my computer, not four hours after returning from my hometown, reading statistics that clearly show: my brother shouldn't be alive.

Daniel came home from the hospital last night. By home, I mean my parents' house. It's going to be a long time before he can live on his own again. He's exhausted, doped up on pain pills and blood thinners and blood pressure meds, unable to sleep, unable to drive or lift more than five pounds for a month, using a walker to get to and from the bathroom. We're ecstatic -- ecstatic -- to have him home after only five days in the hospital. Only it's hard to find that ecstasy, hidden as it is by about fifty layers of gut-churning fear.

Bottom line is we have no idea what happened. No idea why, or how, or what it all means. He goes back in for tests at the end of the month.

I've never even been inside of an ICU before. Have you? How did you cope? It's such a miserable place, full of scared, crying people sitting around in huddles. The ICU waiting room had free coffee, and an internet terminal that no one even approached, and an information desk with a phone that would ring whenever nurses or physicians wanted to reach a family member of a patient. I hated that phone. Every time it rang my heart fell into my stomach and all I could think was "something's wrong something's wrong something's wrong."

Every once in awhile the emergency helicopter would approach the hospital for a landing. You could hear it coming for several minutes before it arrived, and a few children would always gather at a window to watch it come in. I didn't. The sound of it made me feel sick. That's how my brother arrived, I wanted to tell them. He was so scared, just like whoever's in that helicopter right now is so scared. It's not an airshow. It's somebody's family.

I have never been good at living in the moment. I'm trying. It was easier when I was back at my parents' house, sitting in the same room as my brother, where I could see him, whole and breathing and eating a sandwich. I could feel gratitude over his survival because hey: there he was. At home! Just like before! But now I'm five hours away again and I'm shaky, shaky like I was when I stayed up all Friday night just waiting for a phone call to update me on the first surgery (which didn't take), shaky like I was in the car Saturday morning waiting for a phone call to update me on the second surgery (which did). Shaky because I'm far away and for all I know, shit could be going down right this very moment. Shaky because what if his life is completely different from now on, what if he can't do any of the things he likes to do ever again, what if his life is short?

Earlier this afternoon I spoke with a friend on the phone, who encouraged me to take an Alcoholics Anonymous approach to my fear: if you can't take things day by day, try hour by hour. If that's too much for you, try minute by minute. So that's where I'm at. Right now, this minute, my brother is fine. This minute he's fine.