Slow Panic

When I Was A Little Girl

noreply@blogger.com (slow panic) — Wed, 14 Apr 2021 14:03:00 +0000

When I was a little girl I loved to sing, write, create.

When I was a little girl I didn't have a plan or a to do list. I sang all the time and danced in my room. I spent hours drawing my dogs and horses I wished were mine.

When I was a little girl I didn't worry about what I could or couldn't do. I didn't worry about what other people thought. I lived in a small town in a small house. I didn't know there was a big world out there.

When I was a little girl I didn't worry about my dreams. I didn't know my dreams were dreams.

No one told me I couldn't so I didn't tell me I couldn't.

Then I wasn't a little girl anymore. I was a girl. I wanted to sing, write, create. I didn’t realize it but I wanted to connect and communicate. I sang in choirs, in my room, with my friends. I wrote horrible poems and read lots of books.

I realized there was a world out there and it was big and bright and wide.

I started to realize my dreams were dreams.

When I was a girl I also began to realize other people had ideas and expectations about who I was and who I should be. The world was sending me messages. I wasn’t quite listening, but I wasn’t not listening.

Then I wasn’t a girl anymore. I was a young woman. I wanted to sing, write, express, connect. I was serious about the piano. I joined choirs and took voice lessons and played in the school band. I wrote more bad poetry. I hung out with my music friends. I shared things I wrote.

I didn’t have a plan or a todo list. I finished high school. I went to college. I kept playing the piano. I kept writing. I still felt the pull to create, connect, communicate. But I was crumbling. I was crumbling and I was scared. I didn’t know how to take dreams and make them reality. I was shy and melancholic and kind of fucked up. I didn’t have the tools. I didn’t have the strength or the belief in myself. I didn’t realize what I really needed to do was buckle down, make a plan and do the work.

And those external messages, ideas, and expectations? Now they were coming in loud and clear. Blasting at me from all directions. My mom, my peers, my community, the media, society. I was malleable. I soaked all those messages in and internalized them. I started to think the external voices were internal directions, feelings and ideas.

So I drifted. I drifted into adulthood, into motherhood. I drifted through jobs. Years of depression and anxiety. I shoved creativity and self-expression down so far I forgot they were there. I was compacted and pressed into a horrible, painful, tangled mess. I kept trying to shape and shove myself into the world’s expectations of who and what I should be. I kept looking for external validation. I became emotionally and physically sick. Mild, chronic stuff. Overweight. Inflammation. Sky high anxiety. I was drowning and lost and wandering all at the same time. I was imploding and blowing up.

Now I’m a middle-aged woman. I still want to write, create, communicate. I still feel a need to connect with others and to express myself. To say something.

This time I’m making a todo list. I’m working on a plan. I’m coming full-circle, back to the little girl who didn’t know she couldn’t.

Morning Sunshine

noreply@blogger.com (slow panic) — Thu, 11 Mar 2021 15:55:00 +0000

Most mornings I wake up a few minutes before the alarm goes off. I am annoying that way. Total morning person, ready to kill it moments after the first few sips of coffee. The world is mine.

I peak around 2:00 p.m. Before I know it, I'm slipping downhill. Not quite so impressed with myself. By 4:00 p.m. everything looks like a bed and it is with Herculean willpower that I manage to keep going. Dinner seems insurmountable. Post dinner clean-up ridiculous and uncalled for. By 7:00 p.m. don't even talk to me. Anything you say will be forgotten, if actually processed by my foggy brain.

What happens during the night to bring me back and start me over? I know there are scientific things happening during sleep. The body resting, the brain dreaming and processing. I prefer to see it as magic. A little protal I slip into as I fall asleep, traveling through the night and popping out on the other side. Queen once again.

I Held Her Hand

noreply@blogger.com (slow panic) — Wed, 10 Mar 2021 16:39:00 +0000

Mom died in a bare room, across the hall from the nursing home dining room, and away from the other residents. There was a bed, a wardrobe, a nightstand, and a chair.

After years of caregiving we were nearing the end. The past few months had been filled with frustration, fear and anger. After so much sadness, confusion, pain and helplessness, she was still.

She held on longer than expected and I spent three days and nights in that room with her, flattening the chair into a bed and rolling it next to her when I needed to sleep. I held her hand. I told her I was sorry. I told her it was OK. Of course it wasn’t.

There were some hard moments in that room. Although she was unconscious the majority of the time, there were times when it seemed she could hear us or when she seemed to be responding. There were a couple of times when she seemed to be suffering and there was the moment when we knew it was time to start the morphine.

It was a time of transition for both of us. She was in the process of leaving and I was in the process of staying. Time stood still. For just a bit we sat at the intersection of life and death. There was nothing else happening in either of our worlds. I held her hand.

November 2014

noreply@blogger.com (slow panic) — Tue, 02 Mar 2021 19:09:00 +0000

November 2014

I drove south on I-35, crossing the state line from Minnesota into Iowa. It had snowed and everywhere it was bright and flat and white.

My mother, a few months out from being diagnosed with Mild Cognitive Impairment, dozed in the passenger seat.

We had flown to Minnesota a few days earlier for my cousin’s funeral. Now we were on our way to Audubon, IA to visit mom’s last living aunt.

As a child I had made the trip from Minnesota to Iowa many times. Large family reunions or funerals for relatives I didn’t know. I most often found myself in a corner, listening to the adults catch up and reminisce.

Although I didn’t know it at the time, that trip in November 2014 was the beginning of the end. A quiet prelude before the MCI diagnosis, the decline into dementia. The tension and friction of taking over more and more of her life. The bills, the car, the house. Moving her, against her will, to an independent living facility.

All that was ahead of me. For now I drove. I relished the moments when she slept. I took in the plains, the farmland, the quiet. I recalled the feeling of being huddled in the back seat, mom and grandma talking and talking as they drove south. I can still see the gentle roll of the hills. See them stretched before me, three or four rising ahead of us as we dipped and rose, dipped and rose.