processing

no one can prepare you for the moment when your 29 year old husband begs you to be put on life support.

when i was about 7 or so my 3 year old brother swung a bat inside the house, shattering a globe light. the glass flew, and then I flew to where my parents were to tattle, the master skill of any 7 year old. (why are we programmed so young to point out other's mistakes? survival instinct lingers, i guess.) when my mom saw me she gasped and pointed out the shard of glass sticking out of my thigh. i can remember the moment where i looked down, saw it, and INSTANTLY felt the pain of it. until then i had been so focused on my goal (re: tattling) that my body hadn't even registered the pain. but the moment i saw it, focused on it, gave it my attention? my body screamed "there is a shard of glass sticking out of your leg!!!" this same principal is part of why i haven't talked about my husband's illness yet.

a friend of mine said to me at one point "i'm worried that you haven't cried yet." she's a feeler and a processer, i'm a DO-er. i have to turn things off to do what needs to be done. at the time i told her that i didn't have the luxury of feeling, because if i stopped to focus on how it felt to have a husband on life support in the ICU, i didn't think i could stop having FEELINGS about it. and i couldn't get through what we were having to get through thinking and worrying about how it made me feel.

so i certainly wasn't going to write about it. i had always thought of myself as a cathartic writer. my best poems of teenage angst were written in the throes of whatever those life-shattering 14 year old problems were (insert big wink of perspective here.) turns out, however, that once i was in the middle of what i would now classify as a REAL problem, i couldn't imagine writing about it.

the other reason i didn't write about it was to respect my husband's privacy. i've done the best i could here to keep his name out of things, but if anyone really wanted to find us i'm sure they could. my husband's job puts him in the public eye here in our little corner of the world, and i wanted to let him choose how much to say about what happened, and when to have those conversations. lately he has been interviewed a lot and has talked about this part of his life, so i feel free to do so myself.

also someone accused me today of lacking perspective of what makes a life difficult. i realize that i can't ask someone to respect a past they know nothing about (though i WOULD ask that people not make assumptions that they know me just because i haven't shared everything.)

the kids are waking from their naps, and i'm back to the business of present day for another few hours. but i think i'm going to start hashing out the past of the past two years. i haven't taken the time, and i think that i will.