Shell Tells

I’ve tried to launch my blog five times since March. Every time I began a light, innocuous post my family was hit with more drama. Ironic when you consider my theater background.  But I’m an actor who firmly believes that all drama belongs on the stage. I’m tired of Drama Queen and Drama Mama jokes.  After our spring and summer I don’t find them funny.

Anyway, after a few attempts at writing I finally realized I couldn’t launch anything until I launched my daughter off to college. My tears haven’t completely dried but I know I must stash the Kleenex and move on. My intention with this first post was to impress myself and others with my keen, witty observations about everything–family, politics, contemporary culture, society’s triumphs and shortcomings, and whatever else moved or disgusted me. I began my literary masterpiece on March 31^st, and by the next day—April Fool’s Day– it was all over. Unfortunate circumstances had morphed my piece into a meandering tale of personal woe. Spew. So I killed it.

Fate, Providence, Luck, The Furies, The Stars, Karma, etc., thumbed their noses at my family through April, May, and June. I’ve recovered my balance now and would like to share some highlights, (and low lights) of our spring. Please feel free to comment, or simply nod your head.

It all began on March 31^st when I was trying to avert a health crisis with my very charming mother who’s in her eighties and looks like Betty White. We’d been to several doctors during the week to address problems with her legs and balance. While she was experiencing her last blood draw of the day, my teenage daughter was experiencing her own bloodsucking event. Her unstable, former boyfriend called her after school to tell her he had a knife to his throat and was going to kill himself.  About a minute after she drove off to rescue him she was hit by a driver speeding through a school zone. She didn’t call to tell me her ex had unraveled and that her new car was totaled. Probably because just that morning I warned her to stay away from him; he was radioactive.  My warnings didn’t prevent the ugly scene that followed with the police and an ambulance, etc.

A little while later, in the wee hours of April Fool’s Day my husband screened a phone call and played back a shaky voice on our voicemail. My mother had fallen and broken her leg. This was after she had crawled around banging into walls for a few hours. The doctor visits and labs and fancy walkers couldn’t stave off her neuropathy and Restless Leg Syndrome. She had fallen asleep standing up, and then hit the floor. Two minutes after my husband rushed over to her house my severely autistic, epileptic son had a seizure.  Normally this wouldn’t be a problem but I hadn’t anticipated it and was unprepared.  I couldn’t wake my daughter up to help me with his postictal thrashing because she was sleeping off her own trauma.

My husband secured my mother in a hospital and waited to leave the next morning after he knew she was comfortably knocked out on drugs. Then the day after my mother’s accident, on April 2^nd, we met my daughter’s new boyfriend who had just arrived from out-of-town.  He was sweet and attractive, but homeless.  (He’s Dutch so we liked telling people he was taking a gap year.) I had no idea how long he was going to visit, or even where he was going to stay. My son was a challenge and I wasn’t ready to run a boarding house.

Anyway, we couldn’t quite figure this boyfriend out, (or his headband) so we asked him a few questions. “How do you get around without a car?”  (This is Amurica after all.)  “Where do you sleep at night?”  “Where do you bathe?” He promptly educated us about his lifestyle. He hopped freight trains, slept on people’s floors, and broke into college dorms to take showers. I was waiting for him to produce the kind of knapsack I used to attach to a pole when I went trick or treating as a child.

My husband and I were still trying to dissect this relationship when my mother had her leg surgery five days later. I was at the hospital every day meeting with social workers, filling out forms, visiting with Mom, and then feeding her cats, watering her plants, fetching her mail, playing with her cats, and doing everything I needed to do but spend time with my son and supervise my daughter and her new companion. It didn’t help that it was spring break and she was running around unfettered. Some nights I was too numb and tired to care.

Anyway, we eventually found a good rehab facility for my mother, and on her very first day there, about two hours after she checked in, she was rushed away in an ambulance for a completely unrelated medical emergency. (I’m not even sure the rehab place caught her name.) So I visited with Mom in another hospital about 45 minutes away and divided my time between her, her cats, my daughter’s covert activity, and my son. When my brother arrived from LA at the end of the month to help me I was stumbling around in a fog of worry and fatigue.

After back-up arrived, I made a run for it. I headed to a beach house I’d bid on earlier in the fall at a fundraiser. I knew I wouldn’t be able to stay the allotted week but it didn’t matter. I’d take an hour, a day, half a day, anything. And I wouldn’t allow one person, creature, or crisis to hijack my plans. I was supposed to finish a project that required complete focus, (oh how I laugh) and I needed a writer’s retreat that wasn’t fancy, expensive, well-authored, well-appointed, or distracting. I fled to the beach in the rain.

So this, my very first official blog post, has turned out to be nothing more than background material. Or rather an account, a detailed explanation, an expository gem, a set-up to elucidate the following posts. They’re in date order because I need that. I will continue with what I recorded at the beach. . .