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Chances Of Hope

January 30, 2011 By

It is incredible – and sometimes so desperately sad – how everything can change in the blink of an eye.  Just a week ago, I was tweeting and posting messages on my Facebook wall asking people to think healing thoughts for the survival of a little baby known affectionately as Capt. Snuggles.

Today I am asking everyone to send out thoughts of strength and love to his grieving mother, Amy, three days after the tiny body of Capt. Snuggles was laid to rest.

It’s one of those situations where words are not enough.  What do you say to a Mom who has just buried her child?  “I’m sorry your baby died”?  That seems so trite, so inadequate, not nearly enough to express the depth of the sorrow I feel, which is nothing compared to what Amy must be feeling.

It’s not to say that I haven’t tried.  I have left Amy messages letting her know that I am here for her, that I am grieving with her, that I want to do what I can to shoulder some of the heaviness that is filling her world right now.  When she is ready, if and when she needs to, she will reach out to me.  She knows (I hope!) that I am here.  For now, that is what matters.

There is a message that I want to put out there, though, to everyone who reads this.  Capt. Snuggles, during his five month stay in the hospital, underwent a massive array of medical treatments.  That he had hope at all was due to the fact that a family allowed the liver of their loved one to be given to the Captain.  Without that liver, there wouldn’t have been hope.

If you are healthy, if there is no medical reason for you not to, please sign your donor cards.  Please talk to your families, let them know that if they ever have to say goodbye to you, that you would like for your organs to be used to save someone’s life, or at the very least, to give someone hope, to give a family hope.

Capt. Snuggles also received blood.  Many, many units of blood.  Again, that blood would not have been there if there were not people out there willing to give away blood of their own.  These events have inspired me to become a blood donor myself.  I donated for the first time on Thursday, January 20th, and I will donating again in March.  Every 56 days, I will roll up my sleeve, and whisper a prayer for the unknown person who will receive the blood flowing out of me.

I am hoping that by writing this, at least one person who reads it will consider becoming a blood donor.  I know that there are people who are not able to donate for medical reasons.  There are people who really do need to keep their blood for themselves.  But for the majority of us, giving away blood is a piece of cake.  I had absolutely no ill effects after my encounter with Canadian Blood Services.  I felt great, and I didn’t even have a bruise.

If you are medically able to, please look into what it will take to donate blood in your area.  Please think about saving a life, bringing hope and joy to a family.

Filed Under: Death, life, postaday2011 Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,
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What’s On My Bucket List?

January 29, 2011 By

One of my friends recently showed me a list of the things he would like to do before he dies.  “See the Eiffel Tower” was one of them.  OK, that sounds reasonable.  I’m more into the Pyramids myself, but the Eiffel Tower is nice enough.

“Learn to Scuba dive”.  “Go skydiving”.  Those are pretty good ones, actually.

“Go for a Bungee jump”.  I did that once, and when people ask me how it was, I always tell them it is something I’m glad I did once, but that I will never do again.  It is a worthy addition to a bucket list.

“Go to the moon”.

OK, my friend lost me there.  The moon?  I can appreciate that the view must be spectacular from up there, but it’s cold and dark and there are no good places for trail runs.  Besides, don’t you make lists in order to be able to cross completed items off?  Isn’t that the whole point of a list?  Not to put a damper on things, but the chances of my friend going to moon are about the same as my chances of fitting into a size 32B bra.

My own bucket list is not as comprehensive as some other people’s.  There are not, say, 100 things that I absolutely have to do before I die.  And my list does not include things that I am never likely to achieve.  I’d like, for instance, to be a contestant on Hell’s Kitchen, just for the pleasure of telling Gordon Ramsay to piss off, but that’s not on my bucket list because what are the odds of it ever happening?

No, my list contains a few things that I really, really want to do, that are achievable, and that I actually intend to do.  Here is a sample of a few of them, in no particular order.

  • Run a marathon.  Someday I will do this.  When my kids are a little older, and I am able to devote more time to training, I will get myself into really good shape and run a full marathon.  I’m not sure which one, but possibly New York.
  • Get into full-time writing.  This is a long-term plan that will require much planning, but it what I want to do.  I have finally realized, at the age of 41, what I actually want to do for a living.
  • Meet in person the friends I only know online, who are real friends nonetheless.  To name a few: Margie, Amy, Kerry, Ray, and quite a number of others.
  • Travel to the very Northern part of Canada to see Aurora Borealis (a.k.a. Northern Lights). This is a beautiful phenomenon that has always intrigued me, and now I live in a country where it can actually be seen.
  • Go on a cruise.  I’ve never, ever done this, and I’ve always wanted to. Someday I will do it.
  • Travel to Colorado to meet the parents of my friend Jason who was in North Tower on 9/11.  I want to tell them what a wonderful son they had, what a good and true friend he was.
  • Finish the fictional novel I started writing, AND get it published.  It’s a good storyline, really.
  • Run the Disney Princess Half-Marathon.  Happens every year, in Disneyland, at the end of February.  And it’s apparently TONS of fun.
  • Weigh the same as I did when I was 30.  OK, so I’m eleven years older now, I’ve had two kids since then, and I had a long period of inactivity that only ended a couple of years ago, but YES, it’s achievable!
  • Stand on top of Table Mountain with my two boys. Someday I will take my kids to South Africa and show them where I came from.  We will go up Table Mountain in the cable car, and we will stand there together feeling like we’re on top of the world.

 

 

Filed Under: life, postaday2011 Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,
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I Don’t Want To Say The Words

January 24, 2011 By

Oh God, how badly I don’t want to say the words.  What I would give to not have to write this, to have to tell you that after five months of sitting by the hospital bedside of Captain Snuggles, my dear friend Amy now has to leave there without her son.

Today, the Captain – a brave, tough little boy who touched and inspired so many lives – lost his battle to survive.

The heartbreak and devastation I am feeling at this moment is but a drop in the bucket compared to what Amy is going through.  This is a situation where “Sorry” cannot begin to be enough.

Thank you for all of your prayers, your positive thoughts, the healing vibes you have sent out into the Universe.  Even though Captain Snuggles is no longer with us, your thoughts and prayers did make a difference.  They made a difference to Amy, who drew comfort from knowing that we were out there, rooting for her son.

And who knows: maybe, through our collective efforts, we succeeded in shifting the Universe just enough to give Amy a bit of extra time with baby David.

Amy continues to need lots of prayers, love and positive thoughts.  Maybe, when she has the time to sit down and take a quiet moment, she will feel our love and support, and be uplifted by it, even for a moment.

R.I.P. Captain Snuggles
11 May 2010 ~ 24 January 2011

 

Filed Under: Bereavement, life Tagged With: , , , , ,
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Giving Blood, Giving Life, Giving Hope

January 20, 2011 By

I sit in the chair across from the nurse, anxiously waiting for that tiny little needle to pierce the end of my finger.  Has it worked?  Has my healthy eating, strict regimen of iron-enriched vitamins, and consumption of gross vegetable juice made my blood as healthy as it needs to be? If I am turned away now, I will be pissed off.

I am lost in my thoughts, willing my blood to cooperate, trying to analyze everything I’ve eaten in the – OUCH!  Holy crap!  For a tiny little needle that HURTS!

Not as much as the big fat needle going into my arm is going to hurt.

Not as much as the multitude of agony that Captain Snuggles has endured over the last five months has hurt.

It’s a tiny little needle, don’t be such a baby.

The nurse puts a little smear of blood onto a slide and feeds it into a machine.  She tells me that the number has to be 125 or higher.  We wait for a few seconds, the machine beeps, and…

…154.  YES!  As I follow the next nurse into the next screening area, I imagine my healthy blood cells, marching around my body like sergeants, getting ready for deployment into the next human body that needs them.

Screening goes well.  My temperature is good.  My blood pressure prompts the nurse to tell me I must work out a lot.  My heart rate is slightly elevated because I am excited to be doing this.  No lesions or bruises on my arms, all of my questionaire answers are acceptable.

I am deemed Fit To Donate.

I am taken to a row of folding chairs, where I take a seat and wait my turn.  I know that my friend extraordinaire and maid of honour Michelle is a short way behind me in the process.  I look for her and she is not in the room; she is probably in the screening area telling the nurse whether she has ever taken money for sex or taken cocaine intravenously.

As I am waiting, a man starts to pass out with his blood in mid-flow.  The kindly woman seated beside me looks at my “First Time Donor” sticker (which I feel entitled to since my one and only donation attempt, over 20 years ago, ended in disaster and could not be completed) and says, “Don’t look at him.  He’s a man.  Us girls can handle this!”

I am led to one of the stations, and as I take my seat in the thing – it’s not a chair; it’s not a bed; what’s the word for it? – I imagine those blood cell sergeants lining up in my arm, getting ready for their marching orders.

Michelle takes a seat on one of the folding chairs, which means I can talk to her instead of looking in the direction of the nurse who is taping tubes to my arm in an ominous manner.  I squeeze my eyes shut, grit my teeth, and – the needle is in!  Those little sergeants have started marching!  I imagine the blood cells in the Captain’s body straightening up and getting their act together (because let’s face it, they have been slacking off in the last little while).  I imagine them coming together, strong and whole, forming a line of defence against illness and infection.

As my blood flows out of me, I imagine Captain Snuggles getting better.  I picture his broken body healing, becoming whole.

My actual blood will not get to Captain Snuggles.  But it will get to someone who needs it.  Captain Snuggles, through his suffering, will have saved a life.  Many lives, since I am now committed to being a regular donor.

It takes less than ten minutes.  When the needle is removed, I sit in my thing-thats-not-a-bed-or-chair for the prescribed five minutes.  There is more fiddling with my arm and bandages, and then I am permitted to go and sit down in the cookie and juice room (no caffeine for first-time donors!)

As I sit there drinking my orange juice and eating my cookie, I imagine where my blood will go from here.  Samples will go to the lab for testing, and the donation will be added to the blood bank.

I imagine it being transfused into someone’s broken body, transforming the probability of death into the possibility of life, into hope.

I imagine the joy of some family, in some hospital, when they are given the news that their loved one is going to make it.

I imagine Captain Snuggles healing and becoming whole.

I imagine myself someday saying to him, “Thank you.  Thank you for making me a better person.”

Filed Under: Blood donation, life, Medical, postaday2011 Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Lost For Words

January 13, 2011 By

I think the Internet was the best thing ever invented.  OK, make that the second best thing, after coffee, which when you think about it, wasn’t actually invented in the true sense of the word.  One reason the Internet is so great is that it enables me to keep in touch with people without actually having to talk to them.

Lord, that sounds awful, doesn’t it?  It makes me sound like an arrogant, antisocial jerk who doesn’t care about the people in her Facebook friends list.  Let me assure you that this is not the case.  I care about people a great deal, and my friends are very, very important to me.  I realize that this is the kind of thing that anyone would say, even people who would sell their grandmothers to the devil.  But I really do mean it. I have my fair share of faults, but I believe that the people I care about would describe me as a good and loyal friend.

So when I say that I want to keep in touch with people without talking to them, it’s not the actual people that I have an aversion to.  It’s the talking.

Let me pause for a moment to say this: what I am sharing today is a glimpse into a part of my life that I have difficulty with.  It is something that, while not exactly earth-shattering, is not easy or comfortable to talk write about.  And while there are certain aspects of my life that I will never share publicly, I just-about-kind-of-sort-of feel brave enough to discuss this.

You see, all my life I have suffered from pretty intense social anxiety and awkwardness. While I always enjoy being around people, I frequently don’t know what to say when I’m with them.  Or to put it more accurately, I know what I want to say but I find myself unable to say it.

Are you confused yet?

Here’s what it’s like for me.  I often find, when I am talking to people, that I am able to formulate an idea in my head.  I can script the words I want to use in order to verbally express that idea.  But when it’s actually time for me to utter those words, I cannot.  The best way to describe it is that the words get lost somewhere between my brain and my mouth.  It’s as if the synapses in my brain that are responsible for translating thought into speech just aren’t firing.

Picture yourself sitting in your car in your driveway, intending to drive to the post office, and suddenly discovering that all of the roads between your house and the post office have suddenly disappeared.  So you sit in your car at home, at a loss as to what to do.

Or if you’re me, you sit there not taking part in the conversation, and people just assume that you don’t have anything to say.  And you get more and more frustrated because you do have something to say, but you are unable to say it. Or when you can say it, you sound awkward and stilted, and because this whole conversation effort is so stressful, you come across sounding abrupt or disinterested or babbling in an uncomfortable way.  If I’m in a situation of conflict with another person, this problem multiplies a hundredfold.

Some people who know me personally are probably reading this and going “Huh?”  This verbal debilitation I experience is not visible to everyone – a lot depends on who I’m talking to and what the circumstances are.  This problem is a disability of sorts, and people with disabilities learn how to adapt, and how to live life as seamlessly as possible without letting the disability take over.  But even at times when I give the appearance of having a normal conversation, I am capable of feeling a level of anxiety that most people probably cannot relate to.

Although certain events in my life may have exacerbated this issue, it is really something that I have always lived with.  I had a variety of developmental delays as a child, and only developed a reasonable level of functional speech at the age of five.  Throughout my childhood and adolescence, my social development was far behind that of my peers.  At an age where most of my contemporaries were going to parties, acquiring boyfriends, and traveling in large, noisy packs, I was the quiet, awkward one who never said much.  My social anxiety was frequently misconstrued as shyness.

As an adult, this has impacted my life in a number of ways.  Certain events in my life can be attributed at least partly to the fact that I did not have the social skills I needed to deal with things differently.  These events have ranged from the minor events that you forget about the next day to the bigger events that stay with you for life.

My social interactions tend to vacillate between two extremes: one the one end, I kind of clam up and don’t say anything.  On the other end, I talk non-stop, saying inconsequential stuff to cover up the anxiety I feel.  In the middle of these two extremes are the “normal” interactions I enjoy with my family and my closest friends; with people that I have a high degree of trust in.

Telephones terrify me.  Seriously.  I hate the things.  If I could get through life without ever talking on the phone, I’d be happy.  When I do find myself on the phone, I get the hell off as fast as I can.  Again, there are exceptions.  My Mom?  I could talk to her on the phone all day.

I love to write.  Love, love, love it.  My tendency to lose words does not extend to my writing – in fact, I have a theory that my writing skills have developed pretty well in order to compensate for the difficulties I have with oral communication.  This is a good outlet for me.  It is a way for me to share a part of myself with the world, without going through the anxiety that I might otherwise experience.

I find my social anxiety issues to be disabling at times, but being the eternal optimist, I strive for things to be better.  I adapt, I compensate, and I seek opportunities to overcome.

(Photo credit: Flickr Creative Commons Attribution License)

Filed Under: Communication, life, postaday2011, Speech, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Life Blood

January 12, 2011 By

What can I do?

This has been the question plaguing me for the last few days, while friend and fellow writer Amy sits at her critically ill baby’s bedside, waiting, hoping and praying.  I have been doing my best to send out an ever-expanding circle of positive energy to Amy, and to the baby, David.  I have tried to let Amy know – hopefully Amy does know – that I am with her in spirit, waiting and hoping and praying with her. I have been giving my own kids lots of extra hugs, letting them stay up past their bedtime just so that I could have an extra fifteen minutes with them, not getting so het up over silly things that prior to learning about the severity of David’s illness, would have had my knickers in a twist.

All of this is important.  I believe that the positive thoughts and the shifts in focus and the offers of support do at least let the intended recipient know that they are being thought of, that they are not alone.  But it doesn’t seem enough.  I have found myself wishing, longing to do something practical to help make this journey even a little bit easier for Amy to bear.

What can I do?

The obvious problem is that Amy and I live in different countries.  If I lived in Ohio, I would be able to do stuff.  I could cook meals for Amy’s family.  I could take her laundry away and bring her fresh changes of clothing.  I could bring books to read to Captain Snuggles. I could offer to babysit her kids so that she could get time with her husband.  The list of what I could do if I were there goes on and on.  But the fact remains that I live in Toronto and Amy lives in Ohio.

What can I do?

Realistically, my ability to help Amy in any practical sense is severely limited.  But this morning, I thought of something I can do that could potentially help other people in her situation, in David’s situation.

Over the last few days, Captain Snuggles has had multiple blood transfusions.  His mother has watched desperately as his life blood has flowed out of him faster than it can be replaced.  Without the transfusions he has received so far, it is extremely likely that David would not still be with us.

That blood has to come from somewhere.  I have plenty of what I assume is perfectly good blood: there is no reason for me to not give it to someone whose life might well depend on it.

The last time I donated blood, it did not go well.  But that was twenty years ago, and due to extremely stressful events that were happening in my life at the time, my health had taken a hammering.  Now my health is fine, and I feel inspired to give it another go.  There is a blood donor clinic at my place of work next week, and I have made my appointment to be a part of it.  For the next week, I will be eating lots of healthy stuff and doing what I can to make sure my blood is whole and healthy.

Maybe this small act will save someone’s life.  Maybe it will bring some family back from the brink of despair.  Maybe it will give someone hope.

Amy, if you are reading this, I really wish I could do something that would help you directly.  But please know that my decision to donate blood is inspired by you and your beautiful boy.  Even though he will not physically benefit, I am doing this for Captain Snuggles.

(Photo credit: Flickr Creative Commons Attribution License)

Filed Under: health, Illness, life, Medical, postaday2011 Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,
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Mission: Not Impossible

December 13, 2010 By

After a brief absence from the Blogosphere, I am back.  Last week my employers sent me on a three-day training course that due to its reflective nature, left room for little else in my brain.  The course was a seminar version of Stephen Covey’s book “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People”.  I expected it to be like many corporate training programs I have been on – interesting but a little dry, high in metaphor but low in practicality.  What I did not expect was that I would walk out at the end of the three days with a personal mission statement, a seven-week plan for applying what I learned to my life, and an invigorating feeling of “Holy crap, I can really use this stuff to change my life!”

The first useful thing I got out of this course was the process of actually turning a behaviour into a habit.  If you do something every day, after 28 days or so, the brain will have laid down new neural pathways for that behaviour.  In other words, it will be a habit, something you can do without consciously thinking about it.  The trick is to maintain the behaviour for the first 28 days.  I’m testing out this theory with my vitamins.  I am notoriously bad at remembering to take them – which is why I am currently sick, unable to run, and officially going crazy.  I am going to make sure I take my vitamins every day for the next 26 days (because I’m already on Day Three of this particular habit).  By Day 28, I will be taking the vitamins without even thinking about it.  I will also be thinking proactively, setting goals, thinking win-win  and generally being a Highly Effective Person.  OK, that might take a bit longer than 28 days, since my seven-week plan involves focusing on one habit at a time.

Formulating the personal mission statement was a very interesting exercise.  I was asked to visualize myself at my 80th birthday party, and write down what tribute I would want the most important people in my life to pay to me at that time.  Once I had figured out what I want people to say about me towards the end of my life, I was able to think about what I would need to do – how I would need to live – to get to that point.  And from there, I could draw up my personal mission statement.  It was an emotionally intense exercise, because it was so reflective.  Not only was it reflective: I found myself reflecting on things that I am not necessarily comfortable thinking about.

In the end, though, I came up with a mission statement to live my life by.  The mission will be adjusted from time to time as circumstances in my life change, but the substance of it will pretty much stay the same.  My mission, from this point forward, is the following:

  • To nurture my children, and help pave the way for them to lead happy, fulfilling lives
  • To be one half of a synergistic whole in my marriage, and for the whole to not only be functional but fulfilled
  • To be someone my coworkers value, and to make my contributions to my team really count
  • To write
  • To take care of my body so that it can run many, many miles
  • To be true to myself, and to take care of myself
  • To overcome
When I turn 80, I want people to be able to say that I accomplished all of this.  And I want a big-ass cake.
Filed Under: life Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,
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Blowing out another set of birthday candles

December 2, 2010 By

When I woke up yesterday morning, I felt a little bit down. It was my birthday, and for some reason I was thinking that very few people would remember or care. The previous day had been torture for all of us – it had been a very rough day for George – and none of us had managed to get much sleep. I think that at the start of my birthday, I was suffering from exhaustion as well as emotional fall-out. For a variety of reasons, I just wasn’t expecting a lot from my day.

Then I turned on my computer and checked my email. There were about a dozen birthday messages waiting for me from friends and family members. I opened my Facebook page and my eyes popped as I saw birthday wishes from about fifteen more people. It was only six in the morning and already I had received birthday wishes in one form or another from almost thirty people.

Wow.  Maybe my birthday wouldn’t be so bad after all. I got myself dressed and looking semi-presentable and left for work.  My pathetic self-pity tried to follow me, but I knocked it on the head and fed it through the paper shredder.

In the middle of the morning my Mom called.  This is always a highlight of my birthday. Even from the other side of the world, my Mom manages to make me feel special in a way that only Moms can. Later in the day, I got a call from my brother. He was calling from a cell phone in South Africa, so we had only a brief conversation that I struggled to hear in the chaos of the bus station, but it was so lovely to hear his voice and know that he was thinking of me.  And all through the day, the emails and Facebook messages were pouring in.  By the time I got home from work last night, I was feeling touched by all of the kindness, and truly humbled that so many people had taken time in the chaos of their own lives to think of me and wish me well.  Even today, the wishes are still coming in.

When I got home yesterday evening, there were flowers and a birthday dinner and cake and presents. As I sat there among my family, the feeling of being loved and appreciated settled on me like a soft snowfall.  How had I thought, that very morning, that people would not care?

Turning 40 worked out well for me. I became a citizen, received a marriage proposal, and after a rough start, I had a great running season. Now that I’m 41, I look forward to more great things. My wedding, for one, which is just five short months away. Now that I’ve joined a running club, I expect to go from strength to strength. I have started the process of conquering demons from my past and making positive changes to my personal life.

And next year, I will not start my birthday by feeling sorry for myself – life is too good for that!

Filed Under: family, Friendship, life Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Taming the Butterflies

November 23, 2010 By

Sometimes I wonder how I stayed sane before I started running again.  The answer, of course, is that I probably didn’t.  Several years ago things got kind of hectic in my life.  I left my job in a whirl of negativity on the same day that my Dad, on the other side of the world, started chemotherapy. Six weeks later he died, and my guilt about not having made it home in time to see him alive plunged me into depression.  A year later, my second son was born, and I learned the hard way that post-partum depression does, in fact, exist, no matter what nonsense Tom Cruise may have been spouting at the time. A year or so after that, we were hit with George’s autism diagnosis.

So for a period of three years or so, we were very unsettled.  As soon as we came to grips with one thing, something else would crop up and derail us again. And in those days, I didn’t have running. I had no means of escape, no way of letting off steam.  Anger, despair, and sadness reigned supreme in my household.

Several years on, I look back at those days and wonder how on earth I got through it all. How did I endure the stress, the confusion, and the absolute lack of self-esteem without blowing a gasket?  My life now is so different.  I have a job that I enjoy. I love being Mom to my two beautiful boys.  I am getting married next year (the day after the Royal Wedding, no less!) to the man who has been by my side for the last ten years.  I have rediscovered running.  I am, for the most part, happy.

For the last little while, though, a certain level of anxiety and nervousness has been creeping in.  It’s not all bad – it is attributable to the fact that I have been making decisions to make some changes in my life, to make things better, and to confront ghosts from the past. The destination that I am aiming for is positive, but the journey to get there is somewhat unnerving.

What this means is that I have entire herds of butterflies constantly jiving around in my belly. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind them being there.  Butterflies are lovely, and every healthy belly needs a few of them from time to time.  I just wish they weren’t breeding like rabbits, and I wish the little buggers would all dance to the same tune.  And I wish they were waltzing instead of breakdancing.

I get relief from this state of astonished nervousness when I run.  I am very focused as a runner.  When I’m on the road, I do not think about what’s going on in my life.  I think about what’s going on in my run.  How is my pace? Is my heart rate within range?  Does my body feel good enough for me to kick it up a notch or do I need to hold back?  Am I hydrated enough?  Do I need to take a gel?  And so on and so forth.  From time to time my thoughts drift into non-running-related territory, but they always come back to the running.

When all of this is going on, the butterflies don’t get much airtime.  They probably realize that no-one’s watching their manic performance, so they lie down and take a nap.  For whatever reason, when I am running, the butterflies are still.  I feel a sense of calm that is almost surreal. I always know that as soon as I stop running, the butterflies will wake up again, but in the moment, the lack of nervous agitation is a beautiful thing.

At the end of the day, though, I find that I have to embrace the nervousness, because it is symbolic of positive change. To cross the finish line, you have to run the race, even if the road you travel on takes you past places you weren’t sure you wanted to go.

Filed Under: life, running Tagged With: , , , , , , ,
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Rude awakenings

November 12, 2010 By

Yesterday, my day got off to a bad start. There had been a power cut at some point during the night, so my alarm got reset.  Which just proves that those old-fashioned alarm clocks with the annoyingly loud tick-tock sounds have merit. Anyway, what it meant was that I didn’t get up at five in the morning to go running. Instead, I woke with a jolt and discovered that it was 7:20 – roughly the time that I am usually getting onto the bus to get to work. I flew out of bed, frantically put on my clothes, attacked my head with a hairbrush, and randomly jabbed eyeliner and mascara in the general direction of my face.

I like adrenaline as much as the next person, but I don’t like a massive jolt of it first thing in the morning. As hard as it was for me, though, it was probably worse for James. Usually I wake him gently and slowly, and give him time to ease into the day before getting him up and dressed. This time, I went into his room, shook him gently by the shoulder, and hissed, “James! It’s time to wake up!” With that, I thrust his morning cup of milk into his hands and started shoving his arms and legs into his clothes before he’d even opened his eyes.  The poor kid was startled into compliance. Five minutes after he woke up, I was hustling him to the front door to get his socks and shoes on.  He started protesting, “Mommeeeeeeee! I want to sleep!”

I knew the feeling. Both of us went out into the world grumpy and barely awake, with our bodies quivering with misplaced adrenaline. It was not a great way to start the morning, but both of us got to where we needed to be, albeit somewhat later than usual.

My day didn’t really get into a groove, though. I felt displaced and dysfunctional, scattered and kind of agitated. I was the human version of a radio tuned to static, where nothing is clear or focused, and you expend all of your energy just trying to make sense of the noise.  I was glad when the day was done.

So far, today is going a lot better. I didn’t wake up in time to go running, but I got to work on time, without giving my child a rude awakening in the process. This evening after work, I will go for my run, and then settle into what will hopefully be a good weekend.

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