December Sadness

It's not unusual to feel down this time of year. We're supposed to feel happy and excited all the time, but in reality, the holidays can be overwhelming. Halloween came and went with Hurricane Sandy. The power of nature and the devastation was humbling. Where I live, near Poughkeepsie, NY, we were very lucky and spared from the worst of it. But all around us, others were not so lucky. They are struggling today, even. Thanksgiving is always so much work for me. But it's my favorite holiday, so it really is a labor of love. Having my kids and my sister's family here and just enjoying being with each other is a joy. But since Thanksgiving I haven't been able to get any of my energy back. I feel exhausted and in pain in every joint in my body. Sleep is as elusive as ever. The For Sale sign is still on  my lawn, but I am happy to still be in my home. My husband hasn't been able to move his right pinky for some time now--it's bent in half. Turns out he'll need surgery to fix it. I never heard of Dupuystren's -- but he's got it. He meets the surgeon tomorrow morning to find out all the details and whatnot. This past Friday I took a vacation day from work with the intent to drive up to Oneonta and bring my son, Ryan, home from college for his Christmas break. But it turned out that my other sons, Rich & Sean, decided they would get him. It was also my niece, Jenn's, 18th birthday and it was pretty nice outside, too. I was delighted to have a real "vacation" day to myself and decided I would do a marathon of Christmas shopping and then meet my husband and his brother at Double-O for drinks and apps. I relaxed in the morning and had just posted on my Facebook the above-mentioned plans. Not a half hour later a breaking news report came on TV about how Newtown, CT schools were in a lockdown with reports of shots fired. I turned the TV off and got ready and then went shopping. In my car, I listen to satellite radio...no commercials or news...just E Street radio and holiday music stations. So when I got to the restaurant, I was floored to see what had happened in Newtown. All around me people were stunned. The media, meanwhile, couldn't get their facts straight and were even interviewing the little school children. I was disgusted! There is no journalism anymore...just sensationalism. Me and Sean and Ryan went to the Palisades Mall on Saturday.  I couldn't shake the feeling of apprehension in being in such a big, open place and being vulnerable to anything. I saw people that looked just like me. I saw people that made me wonder if they were the one that was going to go off today. It felt very much like September 12, 2001. Man's inhumanity to man is unfathomable. I can understand people being down and angry...but kill yourself and leave everyone else alone. What a coward to just randomly ruin so many lives! It's just heartbreaking and sickening. In the middle of the night last night, I woke up feeling nauseous, with abdominal pains shooting down my right leg. I felt like I was going to throw up. So I went into the bathroom, but didn't throw up. But while I was in there, contemplating why I was feeling the way I was, I could hear water running. I figured Richie's toilet downstairs was running. I was so annoyed and went to check, but it wasn't running. I noticed that in my laundry room it was very hot and I thought that I could smell gas from the furnace. Then I started to feel panicky, thinking something was wrong and that might be why I was feeling ill. Before I left for work this morning, I told my husband that I felt like I was going to throw up and then I told him about my night. He said he would call the guy to come and clean the furnace. I got to work and the first thing I was told was that my boss had called in sick because she was throwing up all night. I thought, oh crap, stomach bug! I always say "You know it's Christmas when everyone is throwing up." So I figured that was that, and hoped I'd make it through the day. I nibbled on some salty pretzels around 11:00 a.m. or so, and hoped it would help. But waves of nausea kept washing over me. Around noon, my husband called and he was in a panic. He said I needed to come home right away. He didn't know what to do. I thought that maybe there was something terribly wrong with our furnace and hot water heater. He told me that the town was at our house. When the repairman was in the house for the furnace, he discovered that he, too, could hear rushing water, but it wasn't IN the house. So he called the town and they came out and so now they knew that there must be a broken pipe somewhere on our property. They had to leave to get some equipment they needed and Rich wanted me to be home when they got back. If it was our problem, homeowners insurance would not cover it. I felt terrible leaving my co-workers, but I didn't feel well either, so I went home. The next couple of hours were tense and the town had to cut a hole through my driveway...all the while I was fighting the nausea...I dozed off here and there. Finally, they were done for today, They have to come back tomorrow morning to determine where the water is actually going. But it looks like the problem is going to be the town's responsibility to fix. Of course, it's going to be a mess for us, no matter what. I'm still nauseous, but still haven't thrown up. Tomorrow has to be a better day for all of us. I'm praying for some sleep for me and to feel better, not worse. I'm praying for Newtown, CT. I don't know how they'll ever feel better and move on. I just don't know anything, I guess. I pray for Peace on Earth, too.

Life Happens Fast!

So much happens in between blogging. Good, bad, ugly, life, death and everything imaginable. Life happens so fast, it's hard to catch up and catch your breath sometimes. Since the last time I was here, my two younger sons have gone off to college. They are doing great and having a blast. It makes me happy, but the first week or so, I was moody and miserable. Now it's kind of exhilarating having the remote control all to myself. I started another new job in our school district. I now work in the Transportation Dept. Despite being cursed at and abused by parents of students pretty much on a daily basis...I love it! I work with wonderful people and you really feel like you are working together to accomplish something great & crazy at the same time. I got a new car in September, a 2012 Nissan Rogue. I love it. Believe it or not, it's been in the body shop since Monday being repaired. I should have it back on Friday. I didn't have that car for 48 hours when someone ran into it in the parking lot at my new job! No, it wasn't hit by a bus. I'm thankful that the woman who hit it came in and owned up to it. It sucked, but it will be good as new again. We put our house on the market in September, not because we want to move or down-size, but because it costs too much and since my husband's brain tumor was discovered in 2008, he has never worked again. Our income has decreased dramatically and, of course, the economy sucks & the recession drags on and on. I don't like people walking around my house, picturing themselves living in it. I really hate it, actually. I got my flu shot a couple of weeks ago. I must have been coming down sick, but didn't know it. The next day I was in excruciating pain and long story short, I just finished 10 days of the antibiotic Cipro. Did not like it at all. Still feeling crappy & sluggish but mostly pain-free. One day last week I was looking through my Facebook photos when it dawned on me that since being put on Prozac in the summer of 2011, I look completely different! My weight has gone up, up, up like crazy. Of course I'm aware of that, but I don't even look like the same person. I have not liked Prozac since the first day I started taking it. So, I have just stopped taking it since Sunday. Whatever happens will happen. That I know for sure. That's life.

Family Secrets

You just never know when a family secret is going to come out. Me and my husband will be married 28 years this coming October. In all this time, my husband has always been the youngest of 4 sons. Or so we thought. While attending our nephew's engagement party last Saturday, our son dropped a bombshell on us. Out of the blue he says that if he ever has a secret he will tell it to Rich's oldest (or so we thought!) brother because "that guy REALLY knows how to keep a secret!" I was intrigued and it didn't take much coaxing for him to tell us what he was talking about. Apparently, my son told us, that my husband has a 68 year old brother named George, who lives in California. Holy Crap! This is better than Dallas or Knot's Landing!! This is real life! AND it turns out that Rich's cousins & other relatives like two of his brothers, knew too. One said he knew for about 15 years, for sure, but had suspected something since childhood. Now ... I thought this brother said that their oldest (or so we thought!) brother knew for four years. I said "He knew this for 4 years and never mentioned it?" His brother then said "Not 4 years -- 40 years!" I almost died right there! So now me and my kids are obsessed with trying to find their newly discovered (or so WE thought!) half-uncle George. My husband never knew any of this, or that his father had been married before marrying Rich's Mom and had a son and got divorced. Too much! We all will be following up on this. When we were leaving the party that night, I asked Rich's former oldest brother about why we never heard about George Haan and this is what he said to me "That's a story for another time." Really? He's known for 40 years and is 62 years old himself, my husband will be 56 in October. Seriously...how much longer do we have to wait for this story? Their father passed away in September 1993 and their mom passed away in November 2011 without ever telling them. Why not? My mother-in-law even had the divorce papers in her belongings. How can people keep such secrets? I hope to find out much more. WOW!

Intentions

I'm not the biggest procrastinator that I know. But...I always have the intention that I'll write in my blog and then I think, nahhhh...I've got nothing, good or bad to say. Which is funny because my brain never stops and there is always a conversation going on in there. I see that it's exactly one month since the last time I blogged. So much happens in a month...attended a fun wedding, 2 graduations, one was my own son Ryan's graduation and the other was Orchard View Alternative High School's, which also was the very last day I worked at Orchard View. After the ceremony we enjoyed a lovely luncheon at St. Andrew's Cafe in the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, NY. The next day I hosted a fantastic graduation party at my house for my son. The weather was perfect, the food was plentiful and delicious (hint: aworldoffood.com) and the beer was flowing. It was a great day. I began my new job in a different school in our school district. Now I am the Principal's Secretary at Sheafe Road Elementary School. This is a big change for me, but there may be more changes so I'll try to get back here before another month has elapsed to write about it. We had our CSEA luncheon at Christo's in Poughkeepsie. It's a beautiful catering facility but the food was not up to par. I don't know why. I bought a new gas grill that has an infrared searer. A new grill is just as exciting to me as a new car would be to someone else. I spend a lot of time grilling, so I like my grill to be just so. And it's hunter green, which makes me even happier! I went to the movies and saw "Rock of Ages." I absolutely loved this movie! It was fun and silly and just what my brain needed...a mindless, guilty pleasure. It even made me like Tom Cruise again. The weather has been soooo hot that I've been lazing in my pool every chance I get. I have gotten extremely tan. I'm tanner than people who have spent a week or two in the Bahamas! My glasses broke & I got them fixed. The assisted living facility that kicked my Dad out to a nursing home told my sister that he had clothes that needed to be picked up. So I go and there were 3 humongous and ridiculously heavy bags of clothes I had to drag out of there. My sister Kathy came over yesterday and went through those bags. One sweater was my Dad's and nothing else! Needless to say, those bags are all ready at GoodWill! I BBQ'd and sweated bullets on the 4th of July (yesterday). Finally cooled off in my pool and then hung out on my deck enjoying whoever was shooting off fireworks in our vicinity. It was awesome. I took a vacation day today, tomorrow & Monday. A mini staycation. I cleaned out my old mail, my pocketbook and my bag that I bring to work everyday. And now here I am. I'm getting ready to do some shopping and then we are going to RiverStation on the waterfront in Poughkeepsie for a scrumptious dinner. After dinner we'll sit out and watch the fireflies (biggest I've ever seen in my life) and I'm sure they'll be some remnants of fireworks from yesterday that will light up my night. Tomorrow I have to tackle cleaning out my closet, dresser and bedroom. I've probably left a few things out. The moral to this story is: I must not let a whole month go by without writing down my thoughts! 

Dinner

When I got up this morning, I took frozen boneless, skinless chicken breasts out to defrost. Of course at that moment, I guess I had lofty thoughts about cooking dinner after work. At different points of the day, the chicken would cross my mind. And I found myself thinking about how I would pound them thin and make wonderful chicken parmigiana with them. I also fantasized about some pasta to go with them. By the end of my workday, I felt a headache creeping over me. When I arrived home, my son Sean said he noticed the chicken on the counter and wondered what I had in mind. Unfortunately, I told him, that I had a headache and was very tired and had going out to dinner in mind. Then my husband came in and told me about his day of playing with the pool & buying stuff and I also noticed he got a haircut and was drinking a beer. He walked in the kitchen and said "What happened to the chicken?" I said that I didn't feel like cooking. He asked me if HE could make the chicken. I said "Do you know how to make the chicken?" He, of course, said "No." Then he went back outside and then came in and asked me why I wasn't sitting out back with him. He said the sun was coming out & it was getting nice out and I should relax and have a beer. I said I didn't feel like sitting outside. I'm tired from working all day! And I have a headache! And I'm hungry! So he went back outside and I don't know what he plans on doing for dinner. But when my son, Ryan, gets home from work, I plan on going out to dinner with Sean & Ryan. My son Richie has class until 9pm. Usually, when I say it's time to go out to dinner, my husband will act very annoyed with me and say that he doesn't feel like going out & he'll say he'll just eat leftovers of all the food I cooked the last couple of days. And that's OK, because I will enjoy a nice meal prepared by someone else, a couple of nice mixed drinks and then a cappucino for dessert. But in a surprising twist, my husband just came back in & asked me did I want to order something to be delivered for dinner or order something for him to pick up?!?! I said I would like to go to Double-O for dinner & use the gift card we had. He said, "Wow, that sounds like a great idea." Now I have to figure out why he's so chipper today! Anyway, one day I would love to come home from work to discover that someone in my house decided to cook dinner for me. That would be lovely. But in the meantime, Double-O will be lovely tonite.

Mondays

Mondays signify the start of a new work week. I am the only secretary in our school district's alternative high school. Most Mondays I'm slower from the get-go, like everyone else. Today I felt as though the weekend went by even faster than usual. I don't know why, but I just wished I could have called in sick today. I've had this feeling over and over again for the past few weeks, honestly. It's not like staying home would be exciting in any way, but I guess I would prefer it to having to go to work. It doesn't help that I haven't been able to sleep for longer than I can remember. I went to an over-night sleep study just over a week ago and I'm waiting for the results. I'm hoping that I will be on the road to sleep soon. In turn, I think that the road to working will be easier on me. I'm over-tired, over-stressed and understandably overwhelmed by my life, almost all the time. Something's got to give. Anyway, I made it through another Monday.

Born Under a Black Cloud

I always say that I was born under a black cloud and that if it wasn't for bad luck, I'd have no luck at all. I've always tried to be positive throughout my life nonetheless. My mother died an hour after I was born. Not exactly a stellar beginning for me, but obviously it could have been worse. But there isn't a day in my life that I haven't wondered about my mother. So every birthday, this past February was my 51st, is the anniversary that my mother died. It's hard to explain how difficult it is to experience that every year. When I was born, I was the youngest of 7 children. My mother was young, not even 30 yet, I think. I don't know for sure. No one ever spoke about my mother to me. I don't even know when her birthday was. I was told that she hemorraghed to death because the afterbirth was not expelled as it should have been. I've never seen her grave. I remember being very little and my stepbrothers saying to me that my mother died because I was so ugly she couldn't stand to live. I ended up being one of 12 children, as my father remarried and I have 3 stepbrothers and 2 half sisters. But I never call them that. We were all brothers and sisters. I never called my stepmother a stepmother, because she was the only mother I had. I won't go into detail now, but eventually I'll explain how our family put a great, big DIS in front of the word functional. The 60's & 70's and into the early 80's were a wild and crazy time. 

Unexpected Surprise

Mondays are always tough. The weekend seems to go by in a blink. I have been extremely tired lately -- just seems I can't get a spark of energy to ignite. Before I went to bed last night, my 18 year old son handed me his laptop & told me I needed to fill in the parental income information section of a college scholarship application. I had been after him for weeks to complete the application, which was supposed to be postmarked no later than April 1st, which was Sunday, making today, April 2nd, the last possible day to mail it on time. I was tired and cranky and pretty annoyed that I had to get my tax return so I could put accurate information in. When I was finished, he still had to finish his application and then he printed it out. He told me I needed to sign and date the second page, and would I mind putting it in a big envelope, too. I said that I would bring it to work with me today, copy it and get it to the Post Office. As it turns out, today was the first day of his spring break. I work in our school district's Alternative High School, but being a secretary, I don't get a spring break. But I was blissfully alone...no students...no teachers...no Principal...just me. So it is a nice break. I settled into work and pulled out Ryan's application. I signed and dated the second page and then decided to go through it page by page, to make sure it was complete before I copied it and mailed it. In the middle of the application were two essays he was required to write. One was about what he wanted to do with his life and it revolved around sports, music, knowledge and having a career that would make him happy. He really has a knack for writing. The second essay was for one of the scholarships that required an essay that shows how he has coped and/or is coping with an obstacle in his life.  His essay was well written and thoughtful, about the fateful day in July 2008, when he found his father face down in a pool of blood on our back deck. It was supposed to be a carefree summer for him before starting High School. Instead, his whole life changed. Of course, that was the day we discovered his dad had a brain tumor. In the essay, Ryan went on to explain that he had to grow up faster than his peers. I felt a lump begin to form in my throat and then read on that these past 4 years he has been inspired by me! He said that I did everything I did before, but more, to make our lives seem as normal as possible through all the changes. He said that I showed him that he needed to work as hard as he could at school and take on extra responsibilities at home in order to have a great life in the future. He will have a wonderful life because he makes life wonderful. It was a lovely Monday morning surprise to read my son's words. My baby boy is going to be just fine out in the world. I didn't feel as cranky as I headed out to the Post Office to mail his scholarship application on time, with a little spring in my step!

Marriage

We all know that marriage is work. It's not easy. I will be married 28 years in October. People are surprised when I say that and then say, but I don't have a marriage, or a husband. Rich's brain tumor and subsequent health issues have changed the dynamic of our lives dramatically. He is more child-like now and very un-husband-like. Now, I know women always say their husband's are like children, but mine is really more like a child than a husband. I miss having a partner and all that goes with it. It's very lonely. I go through the motions of everyday life, but when I am home I feel exhausted and empty. Sometimes I stare at Rich and wonder who he is. He does not resemble the man I married. I would not have married this man. He is a stranger. Every now and then a glimpse of the "old" Rich comes through. But it's a fleeting glimpse. And then I am more frustrated than before. Recently, Rich bought a dog as a Christmas gift for me. Ranger is a 9 month old Hungarian Vizsla and he's the best thing that's happened to all of us. He brings so much happiness and energy into our home. For almost 4 years I've been saying that happiness comes to our house to die. Ranger makes us all laugh and laughter really is the best medicine. Amazingly, he's made a change in my husband, because Rich has to take the focus off himself while taking care of Ranger all day while I'm at work. I believe that Ranger was God-sent to us to help us heal and move on. Finally...a bit of light after the long darkness that has been the aftermath of Rich's brain tumor. Hope is a wonderful incentive. I don't know that my marriage can ever recover, but at least we are having some fun and laughs again.