"How is Mommy holding up?"
I get asked this question frequently these days, and I know that every person asking genuinely cares to know. It's not a passing "Hey, how are you doing?" that everyone expects the automatic answer "I'm fine," but I'll be honest with you, that is usually the answer I give them. Why? Because some habits are virtually impossible to break, and the truth is that I do not want to spend every day being honest about how I'm holding up.
Mom battled Hodgkin's Lymphoma for seven and a half years, the majority of that time spent in treatments like chemotherapy and radiation that made her feel sicker than she already did, which is the nature of the beast, of course. She ran fevers every day for years - literally years - and was constantly struggling with pneumonia. It's hard for your immune system to fight off illness when your disease and the treatment for it both attack your immune system. My point is that for the most part, Mom was sick and felt horrible for seven years.
And yet, every time someone asked her "How are you?" she would answer "I'm great!". Positive affirmation. You say it, you believe it, you basically will it to be true. This may seem to be optimism verging on naivety, but there's merit to it. If all you do is walk around thinking and saying how horrible you feel, what a bad mood you're in, and how much life sucks, you're going to feel more and more horrible, your mood will continue to decline, and life will keep on sucking. Not only that, but it's much easier to slip deeper into negativity than it is to rise above it.
Recently the ladies that I am blessed enough to work with formed a small-group type of Bible study for us, the nursery workers at the church, mainly because we all work there and therefore can't attend the studies the church puts on. Someone has to watch the kids, right? So on Sunday afternoons, a group of us leave the kids at home, sit in the comfortable chairs of the baby room and pray together, talk, and watch a video by Beth Moore. This series is called "Wising Up Wherever Life Happens", and the very first time we met, I had to force myself to get up and go. I was tired and down and not feeling well, but I made the decision to go anyway, and I was so very glad I did.
Barely into the first video, Beth told a story about a woman meeting for lunch with friends, and when asked how she was doing, she said "I'm okay... but kinda not."
Well today I am here to tell you, in (reluctant but honest) answer to each of you who have asked or wondered how I'm really doing:
I'm okay. But kinda not.
I'm not sleeping well, or much at all without medicinal assistance. My dreams are not friendly when I do, and I wake up just as tired as when I fell asleep.
My body is constantly on the verge of shutdown. I had my first ear infection in memory last week, along with a host of allergy-season-related issues and I've been on antibiotics and steroids for over a week now. I don't know if it's the medication making me feel so rotten or if it's stress or if it's exhaustion, or all three, but either way, I feel rotten.
Being in the (extremely lucky) position of a stay-at-home or take-her-to-work-with-me mommy since Ally was born has always given me a fairly reasonable ability to take my breaks when I needed them with minimal guilt. Ally has been with me nearly 24/7 for her entire life, and she is not what you'd consider a laid-back, easy-going child, so the times when I've felt close to my breaking point and needed to take a step back and remember who I am aside from "Mom", I've been able to do it.
Now, however, I feel guilty if I'm not one hundred percent patient and present in the moment. I would like to say that this is irrelevant because I have many many more years of being impatient with her or daydreaming about taking a roadtrip sans carseat and chatterbox. However, my brain just can not disregard the knowledge that yes, while I trust the doctors and God and believe that we are doing the right thing, there is always that chance.
I don't have to finish the sentence for you to know what I mean.
I would be flat out lying to you if I said I wasn't worried about the possible worst case scenario. You would probably know I was lying anyway, because anyone, anywhere, knows the risks to some degree, and I doubt that anyone, anywhere would be able to ignore the basic human nature of "What if?" I certainly can't.
I can hope, pray, trust, believe that everything will go perfectly, and I do, but at the back of my mind, there will always be "What if I'm wrong?" I've been known to be wrong before. It's happened. So bring on the guilt, because this Mommy is scared out of her wits of having regrets.
It's a tricky thing, needing to unload the burden and not wanting to burden others. I'm a hypocrite in this way... I am always ready and willing to let those I love (and even those I just tolerate) unburden themselves, but when it comes to turning it around the other direction, it's not so easy, even with the amazing support system I have around me.
Maybe kinda not, but I'm still okay.
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