Baggage

I try not to live in my regrets. Mainly because I have so many. If I let them, it'd be like the poster for Drag Me to Hell - I'd be enveloped and sucked down by all the ghosts of the stupid shit I've done in life.  I've screwed up way more than almost anyone else who isn't serving a prison sentence. Maybe that's overly dramatic, but maybe it really isn't.  I always jokingly say when talking about my career that I learned by making mistakes.  I had a LOT of lessons in both my work and personal lives.  Not sure why I'm so prone to being a screw up - impetuous I guess.  I leap before I look a lot, or I did anyway. Sometimes I'd get so worked up or passionate about something, I failed to see reason. The list could go on. So best to just look forward and not back, trust me. But once a year as the calendar turns to May, it's hard as a mother not to stew in the juices of past mistakes. There's Mother's Day to ponder one's shortcomings in that role for one thing, but primarily it's because my oldest daughter's birthday is in late May. Of course she's no longer here to celebrate said birthday, and invariably I tend to wonder if she was, would she even have a relationship with me? Or would she have shut me out as the reason she struggled as a teenager.  She wouldn't be entirely right if that's how she felt, but she wouldn't be entirely wrong either. Of course, we'll never know because she's been gone almost 15 years now.

But why am I thinking about all this early when the calendar still says April? Well, ironically, it's indirectly due to a posthumous gift my daughter left me: Fall Out Boy. When we were organizing a fund raising art exhibit in her honor back in 2009/early 2010, I was trying to pull together the music for it and was going through all her CD's and sampling them. I knew about a lot of the bands in her collection but she had all these FOB discs, and I had never heard them before.  So I'd load them up and give them a go. And I loved them.  Where had they been? Why hadn't she done what she always did and try to get me exposed to these guys? Of course, half the time she'd do that with a band, and if I ended up liking them then she'd discard them as no longer worthy.  She hated it when a band got too popular, and I seemed to be the litmus test for that: if square old Mom liked a band, they'd peaked and needed to retire. The exceptions were Foo Fighters and Sigur Ros.  She survived me liking them but they were exceptions.  Maybe she'd kept Fall Out Boy to herself for that reason. Whatever the reason was, the cat was out of the bag. An acoustic version of What a Catch, Donnie made the playlist but maybe more notable I was hooked. And how. When they came through Pittsburgh recently when I had the migraine bout, I drug myself there. I told my husband there were only three bands I'd make it out the door for feeling the way I did. Rush, Foo Fighters and the great guilty pleasure band: Fall Out Boy.

A few days later my husband rewarded that loyalty by surprising me with a signed copy of the lead guitarist's autobiography.  Joe Trohman, it's no surprise, is a funny engaging writer, but he's carrying a lot of anger and resentment toward his deceased mother. His mother, he fully, clear-headedly acknowledges was the way she was because she had a brain tumor eradicated through radiation in the 70's. The treatment changed her and significantly altered the way she could express affection, among many other odd behaviors. In short, she was mentally ill. But of course that's not his fault, and for a young boy it was a rough way to grow up, admittedly, and he hopefully processed a lot of that damage in the writing process but the pages tell me he wasn't there yet when he started. And his mother herself apparently held onto a lot of resentment toward her parents. I'm sure if he could have kept digging into his family history, the cycle would repeat itself back to the cave dweller days, and I say that only because I think that's the way a lot of families are. And as I read all this written by a contemporary of Kelsey's about a mom who is of my generation, I'm thinking a lot about the amount of baggage I left my own children with. How could I not really? And then I can't help but ponder the mental weight I brought to the job of parenting that I had accumulated growing up with a father who self-medicated his PTSD with booze, and a mother who was complicated to say the very least. Sometimes the spouses of alcoholics have as much if not more to work through, let me just leave it there.

I swore I'd parent differently. All that meant is I made different mistakes.  It's not lost on me that I'm incredibly lucky that my younger daughter still has a relationship with me, including accompanying me to the concert the other day.

But here's something I know: there's no erasing the past. I can make amends where I can and should but that doesn't change history. Personally, all I can do is work through my own upbringing and find a way to make peace with it.  I did that work about my dad long after he died. Casting off all that resentment was liberating.  I feel lighter.  And I genuinely feel like I got my dad back. He'll never know any of this, but I know it, and I think it sends positive little ripples through the rest of my life. The history is still there, but I changed my future.

I hope that our children find that same release and forgive us for all that messy baggage we packed up for them to carry around. Not for our sakes. But so they find the same sense of release I felt.  But I also realize we can't make that happen, they have to do that work themselves. 

And we need to make peace that we weren't perfect humans. 

My Gum Band's Got No Snap!

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The 90th birthday celebration for my mother-in-law is officially now more than a week behind us. One would think I suddenly have all the time in the world to blog, read, and not the least of which is to catch up on all the Oscar nominees I couldn't see before the actual ceremony (I have done some of that: I can now discuss Poor Things and American Fiction with you if you're so inclined). But the reason I was lazing around watching movies after the party and the furious prep for it was over is part of a hard lesson I've had to learn about aging: one does not snap back easily once in the 60+ age bracket from illness, injury or just in general exhaustion. I have qualified for all three so far this April.

The two weeks leading up to the actual event were brutal. No one's fault.  Bad karma maybe, and definitely rough timing, but nothing anyone, including myself, set me up for. But the hits, once they started, kept coming. I ended up first with a brutal migraine that lasted well over 48 hours mid-week the week before. Then the grands came to stay for a couple of days, and I picked up something from them - likely because I was already sleep deprived and vulnerable because of the migraine. Flu? Maybe. I can tell you it wasn't COVID because we tested for that, thinking we might actually have to call the party off. All I know for sure is that by Easter Sunday I was the sickest I could ever recall being, and by Monday it was worse. Tuesday took it to a new low, and I ended up racking up the highest temperature I have ever had in my life, all while Mother Nature was hammering the entire region with freezing rain that flooded our basement and hit us with snow squalls when it wasn't raining.  By the Wednesday before the party, which was scheduled for the coming Sunday, I couldn't quite believe I was still so sick, but between whatever I was sick with added to the cold weather, absolutely everything ached. My head, my back, my legs. My toes hurt. I wasn't rebounding. Which meant that walls weren't getting patched and painted from where my mother-in-law bashed into them with her walker like it was a Sherman tank on the way to the Battle of the Bulge. Bathrooms weren't getting cleaned and spring flowers weren't going to grace our visitors as they walked up to our door. My husband in the meantime had his hands full with his mother 's care and keeping the water creeping into the basement at bay.

I sound like I'm complaining but seriously I'm not.  I probably was at the time.  My sense of self-pity was pretty refined at the worst of it.  But it's more that I just can't quite believe I couldn't push through it and will myself to be better. 

As a working mother who has always suffered from migraines, I adopted over time a Han Solo like toughness: never tell me the odds. I could power through - miserable and half-assed but still upright - just about anything. By Wednesday I realized my ability to snap back and gut it up through an illness coupled with miserable weather wasn't going to be a happening thing. I thought about the old rubber bands I'll come across in my office from time-to-time. So old they've lost their elasticity and they're just brittle. I felt that defined me in that moment: just a brittle old gum band ready for the trash.

In the end, everything pretty much did get done. The fever broke, and I wasn't a physical threat to anyone who came that Sunday. The sun even came out and it was a pleasant, mild day. And my mother-in-law truly loved her party, which of course was the whole goal, but the next day both she and I were exhausted.  I tried getting back on the Peloton for the first time in almost two weeks that morning and could only handle 20 minutes. Badly, I might add. More than a week later, I'm still not back where I was.  There's no life in my legs. I still have a cough that racks through me after I ride, and I still tire easily.

Is this what it's going to be like moving forward? Things will hit me hard and fast, but leave me only slowly and with a fight? If so, I think of all the things I've faced in the post 60-yr old landscape - wrinkles, gray hair, weird bumps on legs and arms and veins that look like a map of Middle Earth carving across my skin - this loss of bodily control is the hardest. Not just physically but mentally. 

But, for anyone else who has gone through something like this, I will offer what I always said as a migraine sufferer: the one upside is you would never appreciate how great just feeling normal is unless you get taken down by a migraine at least once in your life. I can appreciate that same sentiment now. Just sitting here now without every inch of my body aching is worth being thankful for.  Maybe there's some snap left in the old gum band after all.