Author: Outrunning my demons

The (not so) little things

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This past weekend we took my mother-in-law out for Mother’s Day. I also took Friday off to spend the day with my mom. We went for a massage then I took her out to Red Lobster for seafood. The rest of the week previous to Mother’s Day, I spent being a mother. I watched my kids perform more days than I didn’t. It was fun but busy, busy, busy.

Paul was gone almost all of last week for work. I was happy to hear that our business friends missed me. They said that Paul was downright boring without me around. I suspected that. LOL. I am the one that is up for anything. Well, except zip lining. I would never do that. I received a message from a friend saying that she missed me at the conference and hoped I was having a great Mother’s Day. It really meant a lot.

Saturday Angel went to state for her solo and ensemble pieces at my old college campus. It was strange walking through those halls again. I haven’t been on campus since I graduated 19 years ago. Nothing really changed much on campus, except for me. I am not the same person that lived on crackers, minute rice, and macaroni and cheese. I was thinking about that as I was sitting in the same location that I used to eat my meager snacks. It was strange being there with my daughter who is close to the age I was back then. Some day I will have to tell you some pretty good stories about my psycho roommates, but I have so many more stories to get through before that.

By the time Mother’s Day rolled around on Sunday, I just wanted to stay home!

We did go to church on Mother’s Day. I sang a solo about motherhood, my two daughters performed in the Mother’s Day celebration as well. Then I forced the kids to stay home and spend time with me. We played indoor and outdoor games. We even went for a family walk around the neighborhood like we did when the kids were small. Except, of course, this time they were not sitting in a wagon, stroller, or in a back pack.

I took joy in the little things. I didn’t want gifts or jewelry, I just wanted everyone to get along for the day. I thought the day went pretty well, except it could’ve been warmer. 

I received my favorite Mother’s Day gift several years back. I told Paul that I wanted him to put up a clothesline for me in the backyard. I have a bit of a laundry fetish. Since my old washer started smoking, I’ve been wanting to write many posts about my joy over my new front loading washer. But I thought I would spare you from that. You’re welcome! Angel and I sat in front of the new washer with a bowl of popcorn for the first load. We lead pathetic lives in WI. I’ll blame it on the cold climate and lack of sunshine. 

Anyway, Paul constructed a clothesline for Mother’s Day. Nothing relaxes me more than hanging laundry on the line and watching it billow gently in the breeze. That very summer, I received a call from the gas company worried that our gas meter was not working right. I told them that I wasn’t using my gas dryer as much anymore. Then they thanked me for going green. Hey, at least my fetish saves the planet! LOL. 

That year Angel was taking an art class in school. She wanted to make me a necklace for Mother’s Day. We came up with the idea that the cord for the necklace could be a clothesline. Then she designed a pair of shorts to be hanging from the clothesline. Maybe that is why I like sailing. There is nothing like watching sheets blow on the lines. Hmmm… 

Sometimes it is the (not so) little things in life that mean the most. 

Our last supper

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Paul and I decided to take his mother Martha out to eat for one last Mother’s Day celebration where we can all be together.

A quick recap…Martha has stage 4 lung cancer that has already spread to her brain. This will most likely be her last Mother’s Day. Plus we were able to go out with all of our kids. This will also be the last time the kids are all living at home since Angel will be in college next year several hours away. So this was the big hurrah!

We took the family out to a Japanese steak house for hibachi. Martha doesn’t get to enjoy fine dining often and was very happy for the opportunity to go out. She was very sick earlier in the day from her chemo, so we weren’t even sure the evening out would happen. We thought about just cooking a nice meal at our house. But since this is the last time, we decided to go to a small quiet restaurant and make it memorable.

We had a wonderful hibachi chef. Arabella even tried some raw tuna sushi to get ready for her trip to Japan this fall. She is very brave. Martha was wearing a baseball cap to cover her bald head. Paul made sure that she received a special chef hat that they reserve for birthday parties. I took a lot of pictures.

When we received the bill, we were told that Martha’s supper was paid for. Someone at the table next to ours covered her bill.

Paul went over to the table and thanked the man. They embraced. Later the man followed Paul into the parking lot. He told Paul that his mother passed away a few months ago from cancer. He wanted Paul to pass on this generosity someday to another person going through the same thing.

Once again, the two grown men embraced. Total strangers sharing a moment of sorrow over their dead and dying mothers on Mother’s Day weekend.

Together they wept in each others arms.

I have never seen two big masculine men sobbing together in a parking lot before. Complete strangers for a brief moment sharing the same pain.

It was very moving.

 

A little down

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I think I am depressed. 

One of the signs of depression is losing interest in hobbies. What if you just can’t do the things you enjoy anymore?? 

If I spend too much time at work, type a lot (write), shuffle cards, or work jigsaw puzzles my carpal tunnel acts up. My hands ache. I need to wear a brace. If I exercise with weights, sometimes I can’t grasp them. Several times a week my hands just let go of items and I drop them. I’ve dropped my phone several times. Lately, I’ve dropped containers of foundation or eye shadow shattering them into powder so I have to throw them out. I have problems opening lids on jars. 

Sometimes my acid reflux gives me a hoarse voice and sore throat which makes it very difficult for me to sing, another hobby of mine.

I have enjoyed running and competing in races, but now my knee hurts so much that I might have to cut back or stop altogether. 

It seems like everything that I really enjoy doing to deal with my stress is being taken away from me. 

I feel depressed that my daughter will be graduating from high school in a few days. She is a lot like me. We have so much in common and have become close friends. Now she will be moving several hours away and starting a new life without me. I am happy for her, just sad for me.

My relationship with my other two kids sucks. My son is currently failing all of his core classes. He is angry at us or depressed when we give him consequences. The hard part is that he has a brilliant mind, but is too lazy and unorganized to put any effort into his studies. I have no control over this. My youngest daughter and I have nothing in common at all. She takes pride in annoying me and arguing with everything that I say.

Work is stressful. Running our own business, having employees, and demanding customers takes a lot of energy.

My mother-in-law has terminal lung cancer and at best has a few months to live. 

I am starting to see my own parents age in new ways that worry me.

Every organization that we belong to thinks that they are the only organization that we belong to. Everybody wants our time, our money, a life blood commitment. 

My husband and I have both been irritable and stressed these last couple of months. I honestly don’t know how much more of this we can take. Instead of people helping us through these difficult times, they drain us of whatever we have left.

So, yeah, I guess I am feeling a little down. 

  

My friends…

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Sometimes I wonder, I sit and think. 

I have 3 close friends. None of them know that I have this blog. You probably know more about me then they do. Isn’t that funny? 

I am a private person, although it probably doesn’t seem that way to you.

Sometimes I wonder if they stumbled across my blog, would they like me?

Would they like the real me? 

What I really want for Mother’s Day

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You have expressed concerns that you do not have money to buy me anything for Mother’s Day, but it is not your gifts that I want. I want something much more difficult than that.

I want peace. 

I am sick of hearing your constant fighting. I don’t like how you tease each other and put each other down. I have had enough. I don’t care if you have to fake that you like each other.

I want hope.

I  want to believe you have a good future. I want you to be organized. I want you to turn in your assignments on time. I want you to enjoy life long learning. I want you to care about your grades. I don’t want you to tell me that you don’t care about school, that you will never need to use the things you are learning in real life. I don’t want you to struggle.

I want respect.

When I tell you to do something, I actually want you to do it. I don’t want you to tell me that you are going to do it later or say that you are not going to do it. I don’t want you to ask me why I am asking you to do something, I just want you to do it.

I want character.

I don’t want to hear you whine about how hard your life is because I asked you to do something that you don’t want to do. You father and I worked very hard to provide you with the ideal childhood, something neither one of us had. Your attitude towards us and our sacrifices for you is very hurtful. I don’t want to always feel angry with you.

I want responsibility. 

I don’t want to tell you repeatedly to wake up in the morning. I want you to get yourself up for school. It makes me feel stressed out when you almost miss the bus almost every morning. I don’t want to hear you complain about having a bedtime, especially since you can’t seem to get yourself out of bed.

I want faith.

I want you to grasp onto something bigger than yourself to help you through the hard times in your life. Your dad and I won’t always be here to protect you from the storms of life.

Maybe this gift will cost more than you can give me at this time. 

Some of you are further down the road than others at giving me this gift. 

Even though I really want the gift of knowing that someday you will be responsible well adjusted adults, this gift is not really for me. It’s for you.  

Knee deep

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I bet you have been sitting at the edge of your seat waiting to hear how my knee is holding up. Today is the first day this week that I went out for a run. The marathon is two and a half weeks away. I braced myself for the run. Literally. I was able to run 6 miles today without stopping. However, my endurance wasn’t the greatest and it wasn’t completely pain free either. I think the tight brace changes how I run. I feel like I am running on a wooden peg. But the run did go better than the run last week. Yeah, baby steps, I know.

Friday night Paul and I spent the evening at the store getting my prescription drugs and looking at braces. Admitting this, I feel old. I am getting old. I am 41. There now you don’t have to go to previous posts to try to find my age to see if I am really old or not. Well, you could go back and read previous posts if you want to. Lol.

The reason why I was seen out drug storing Friday night was that I had some time to kill while Alex was taking his behind the wheel driver’s ed class. Why did I sign him up to drive on a Friday night?? Well, I called to make his monthly appointment at the end of the month. Why? Because I felt embarrassed to call and set up the appointment any earlier. The previous month my son was late for his driving time. They had to call me and ask me where he was. It kills me be late, although he could care less.

It has been a week and a half of doubling my acid reflux meds. The first few days were pretty bad. I think being stressed out about it made it act up more. But I am finally starting to feel a lot better. Maybe I’ll be able to run my races pain free this summer, well as far as my stomach is concerned anyway.

Today I decided to run wearing my old shoes. I was wearing in new shoes when I ran 18 miles and my knee started hurting. Just to be on the safe side, I decided that maybe my new running shoes were to blame for all the difficulties I have been running into.

I also decided to wear the new wireless ear buds that my daughter bought me for Christmas. They hook up to bluetooth on my phone so I don’t have to trip over wires. The only problem is that I have tiny years. Most babies are born with bigger ears than I have. I have met one other person that has smaller ears than me. It has been a source of vanity for me for many years, until now that is. The ear buds were too big to fit into my ears. Back to being wired I guess. 

At this point, I feel like I’m damned if I do and I’m damned if I don’t as far as the marathon goes. I don’t know if I will be able to handle it physically if I run the marathon. I don’t know if I will be able to handle it emotionally if I don’t. I don’t think I will be able to run the race without knee pain. But the knee pain isn’t bad enough for me to drop out especially after months of training. Right now I am praying that if it is not meant to be then it won’t happen.

The only things stopping me now would be the stomach flu or a high fever. A death in the family. Possible, but not wished for. Or the race could be cancelled for severe storms. One year they did cancel the race because the heat index was incredibly high and people were dropping like flies. However, we have had a really cool spring so a freak snowstorm would be more likely.

All I know for sure right now is that I am in this knee deep.

Is my run over?

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I feel like I am letting go of my dreams.

For a long time I held a handful of colorful helium balloons. Today I let them fly off into the air. Maybe I still grasp a few in my hands. But they are shriveled up like oxygen got in them….breathe…I can’t let go of all of my hope.

Saturday I had a wonderful run. I ran 18 miles without stopping except for a short bathroom, gu, and water break. I was fast. I had the stamina I spent months training for. Life was good. At the end I felt a twinge of knee pain, but it went away after a day.

Yesterday was my first run of this week. I ran 12 miles. The first 6 miles went pretty good with my knee brace on. I had to walk 3 out of the last 6 miles. Afterwards, my knee felt fine.

Today, I decided to go for a 6 mile run but only made 5. The first mile or two I felt a twinge of pain in my knee with my brace on. Then it started getting worse to the point that I needed to walk. I was afraid that by pushing on I would get hurt. At this point, I was halfway home regardless of whether I decided to keep walking or turn around. I tried calling my husband to come pick me up but he didn’t answer.

I was feeling so angry that I wanted to take my arms like a baseball bat and knock over mailboxes. I also wanted to kick over the garbage containers that littered the side of the road. But I convinced myself that further injury probably wouldn’t help my cause. It probably would piss off the neighbors, provide them with entertainment, or I would end up crossing off going to jail off my bucket list.

The marathon is 3 weeks away. I am going to try to take it easy for the next week or two and see what happens when I try running again. Right now I am not even fit to run a 5k.

I am so disappointed. There is no way that I am going to be able to run a marathon if I can’t even run a few miles without pain.

The real kicker is that my knee feels fine right now.

Patching things up

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I live in a house that is almost 20 years old. Everything is starting to show its age, but few things need major repair. The carpets, flooring, and counter tops are showing signs of wear. I understand the feeling.

We live in an air tight house which does have some advantages. We never have high heating bills in the winter. However, we have had some major problems with condensation on our windows. On freezing cold days, it rains inside our house. Water pools on our wooden sills.

After a decade and years of condensation issues, our windows frames and sills are rotten. Black mold is growing on the woodwork. Years ago we had an air exchanger installed to pull in the dry air and expel some of the moisture from our house. But the years of condensation have taken its toll. There are a few windows in our house that I am afraid to open because I fear they will fall out.

We have known for awhile that our windows need replacing. But it is a very expensive project. Something that we do not have the expertise to do ourselves. We could’ve hired our next door neighbor to do the project, but decided to go with someone else.

This is one lesson we learned the easy way because someone else learned it the hard way.

Lesson learned: Never hire a friend or neighbor to do a big remodeling project for you.

My parents live in a brick house with a mansard roof. Basically, their roof slopes down to cover the second story of their house. At one point, they needed a new roof for their house. Luke suggested that his friend and his friend’s father (a neighbor) put on a new roof. My parents hired them to do the job. What they didn’t know was that they didn’t have any experience working with a mansard roof and they didn’t know what they were doing.

One stormy evening my parents visited our house. That night after they returned home, at about 11 PM, I received a phone call from my mom who was crying. Who died was my first thought. My mom called to tell me that it was raining in her house. Her things were getting wrecked and there was nothing she could do about it. She felt sick to her stomach.

They found out with the first torrential downpour that their new roof leaked. They had out every bucket they owned, but it wasn’t enough to contain all of the water coming through their roof. The next day they had to rent a dumpster. I helped them haul out all of the items that were ruined from the flooding.

Their new roof leaked! It also looked like crap. Shingles littered the lawn every time the wind blew. It took them months to come back and patch things up. My parents spent a lot of money on the roof. They were thinking of suing the people that did a shoddy job. But they were neighbors. Not to mention that Luke was a good friend of the guy who did the work. They stood up in each others weddings. This caused some bad blood between the neighbors. This also caused problems with the friendship that could not be easily patched up.

Every time my thoughts stray to hiring our neighbor, Paul reminds me of what happened to my parents. Sometimes being a good neighbor is asking someone else.

Thankfully, my parents ended up getting a new roof a couple of years back from someone who has a lot of experience with mansard roofs. It looks absolutely wonderful. Unfortunately, the friendship did not patch up as good as the roof.

Now we are just waiting on a price quote for the new windows. Yikes!

Feeling my age

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Today it started. I am starting to feel old.

I had my yearly physical today. This year I didn’t even need blood work, pap, or mammogram. Easy breezy, right??  I have always had low blood pressure and cholesterol. I have the cholesterol levels of a runner. So does my dad, but he never ran. So I don’t think my heart will be failing me anytime soon. My blood work was so good last year that they didn’t even bother checking it this year. 

The doctor asked if my parents were still living. That was one of the scariest questions she asked.

One little thing that I didn’t tell you about my 18 mile run on Saturday was that my knee started hurting again. My endurance was great. I didn’t have to stop and walk. But with endurance and speed comes knee pain for me. It was the same pain that I felt during my first marathon, just not as bad. Besides wearing my knee brace, there is not a lot that I can do. I am worried about the marathon next month. I can clearly see the writing on the wall. The doctor asked me how badly I wanted knee replacement surgery. I told myself and her that if I have knee pain with this marathon, this will be my last. 

I feel like my body is failing me. 

Then I was hoping to decrease my acid reflux meds and instead my dose was doubled. Apparently after treatment I was not supposed to have any acid reflux break through at all. Supposedly, I should not have to take massive doses of Tums and liquid antacid on top of Prilosec. So she doubled my dose and said that if I am still having symptoms in 6 weeks that I will have to be scoped. 

I don’t want to take medicine. I don’t want to get old. I want to have some control over my body. I don’t want my body to control me.

This roller coaster ride

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Sometimes raising teenagers is like riding a roller coaster. There are a lot of low points followed by high points. Sometimes you are excited to be on the ride and at other times you feel like you are going to throw up. Just when you have had enough, the ride is over.

That is what life is like here every day. The last 24 hours has been one hell of a roller coaster ride. It started yesterday when Angel received a text from her ex. Or at least someone that she thought was her ex. Her ex saw her perform in the musical she was in over the weekend. He complimented her on her part, made small talk, and left. Then the next day she started getting texts. They were innocent at first with questions like where she was going to college. Then things got strange. He told her that he wanted her back. He wanted to meet for coffee. He still had feelings for her, etc… She didn’t recognize the phone number and his sister said it wasn’t his. She didn’t hear back after she told him to call her to make sure it was really him.

We started to worry that she was getting messages again from Jeremy, the guy that was previously stalking her. He would sometimes pose as a friend through text. He even hacked into her boyfriend’s Facebook account and broke up with her while pretending to be her bf. He is going to the same college as her bf which resulted in a fist fight. He threatened to rape her. At that point, Paul called him and told him never to contact Angel again. And Angel told this person where she was going to college. Uugghh!@$#

Yesterday evening she called her ex and he said that he hasn’t been texting her. He thought it may be a girl that liked him. Angel did ask in the text about the conversation that she had with her ex at the show. The person knew  about it, but it was a very general conversation. The girl went with her ex to the show. When her ex confronted this girl, she got really upset. Everyone is denying sending the texts. At this time we think it may have been someone else and not the guy we threatened to get a restraining order against. But we really don’t know. It could be anyone. 

I thought that would be it for the day until we got a knock on the door last night at 10:15 PM. Apparently, Alex’s ex-friend went for a walk last night and didn’t come home. This isn’t the same friend that ran away at the beginning of the school year. This is the long time friend that he is no longer allowed to see because his friend got expelled from school for drugs.

This morning my son got a text from the mother of his ex-friend saying that her son was still missing. She asked Alex if he knew where her son was. Alex replied that he didn’t have any contact with him for the last month since they were not allowed to talk anymore. At this point, she called my son a selfish piece of shit, etc…for no apparent reason.. She was angry and worried. Then Jake’s mom got involved. So this started a round of texting for hours while I was at work trying to actually work. Work was crazy busy. I was dealing with phone calls at work, on my cell, and texts at the same time. Eventually the boy returned home. I hope this is the last we hear from them, but I don’t think so. 

Then my son called me from school saying that he didn’t turn In an assignment. We have been monitoring his grades and missing assignments online. That is a real mess since he missed 3 days from being sick. We don’t know what has been turned in because they are still showing up as missing even if they were turned in. My son said that some were turned in but not graded yet. I love having the ability to see grades online, but it is enough to drive a parent crazy. Unupdated notifications about missing assignments and poor grades blow up our emails. Then the status is not updated for weeks sometimes. 

Then I received another call from the school today. Damn, I cringe when I see that number. Angel was calling for me to pick her up from school. She donated blood for the first time today. Afterwards she felt nauseous and dizzy. She almost passed out in class. This may have been caused by being at the bottom of the weight requirement. She didn’t feel well and couldn’t drive home. I had to pick her up from school. 

Then I heard from the school one more time. This time it was good news. Arabella was chosen to be a foreign exchange student for one week in Japan. It has been a dream of hers since I don’t know when. Last year we hosted a foreign exchange student from Japan for a week and loved it. 

That has been my 24 hour teenage roller coaster ride. I don’t particularly like roller coasters. I like to watch other people ride.