Hear it?
…
There it is again. The silence.
First things, first. My bad! I’m horrible at this blog thing. Nevertheless, I’m not giving up on it. Recent life has been…well, quite frankly, a bit of a train wreck. The 2017 holidays were rough. I barely survived that shit. They’re always hard, at least for the last ten years, but this year, they were pretty awful.
My step-father is dying of cancer, metastasized to the whole of his body. He can barely walk. He’s fallen several times, which in his condition, is a nearly lethal thing. He’s on so much morphine, he’s hardly lucid. He got laid off from his job Thursday. He was planning on resigning at the end of the month, sticking it out until then so he could get his vacation pay. His employer beat him to it and his last day is sooner than he would have preferred. He sits by the gas heater in the living room slumped over in his chair waking up for the occasional drink of water or coffee. His appetite, which was pretty good there for a while, is now bad again. He’s reluctant to get in bed because he’s afraid he won’t wake up.

My mom is a nervous wreck. She was always a control freak but lately, it’s full-throttle. I am an only child and she is estranged from her “family” so I’m all the family she’s got. And as my step-father worsens, the tighter her grip on me becomes. I’m a natural nurturer. Care-giving is in my DNA. But my life is far from normal. At forty-four years old, (I turn forty-five in five days) I am essentially a casualty of family dysfunction. (I could go into elaborate detail and maybe I’ll conjure the courage to do that one day, but now’s not the time.) That’s pretty much been my normal for the last twenty-six years. My mom is drowning. And what do drowning people do? They reach for anything and everything to keep afloat. Even at the risk of drowning you too.

Then throw in my own issues (too many to list here, but suffice to say, anxiety, depression, PMDD and shitty self-esteem are just a few) and what you get is a big hot mess in a big hot pot. I’m doing what I can to ride it out and see it through. At times like these, I’m reminded of Winston Churchill’s quote…
If you’re going through hell, keep going.
So that’s what I’ve done, kept going. Hoping and praying my little family comes out the other side of this rough patch, still intact or at least, no worse. I’m being tested and I don’t want to let the Universe down. Everything I’ve read and heard, tells me things are looking up for the next couple of years for Capricorns. It’s okay if you don’t believe in that stuff—astrology, tarot, etc. I take it all with a grain of salt and wear a big grin when what happens aligns with what was foretold. It’s fun and keeps me thinking and dreaming and that’s always a good thing. The holidays are over and we’re staring down the bulk of winter, an entire year of possibilities before us. Now I can realign my energies and focus on the things I want to accomplish in 2018. I won NaNoWriMo 2017 but haven’t written much at all since. I have faith though. The words will come. They always do. I’ve just got a little more hell to go through first.