A Painful bit of Honesty

I’m sitting in my glider rocking chair, covered in a quilt that has seen far better days but was made by my grandmother out of grandpa’s work shirts and other bits of fabric she had collected over the years.  Tattered and torn is accompanied by loved and cherished in this covering.  It has been quite a long day.  Because I’ve run out, I haven’t taken my depression medication in four days.  After one day, my nervous system gets upset, and makes it known by sending electric shocks through my body each time I blink my eyes.  As this is day four, it is a bit of an understatement to say that it’s worse than that.  I woke this morning and Riley was up and ready to play.  I felt like I would fly apart at any second, but gave my best effort not to.  We watched some cartoons, and Riley played some in his room while I rested on the couch.  I gathered myself together as best I could and took us to church.  I suppose twenty minutes late is better than a 4^th week in a row of not attending.  After church we went for fried chicken at the diner.  I wore sunglasses from the time we left the house until the time we returned.  Riley had been talking all morning about playing outside with his Frisbee.  I didn’t have it in me, but hoped that Michael would take the Frisbee shift and let Riley burn off his lunch of pancakes and syrup followed by bites of each of our brownies for dessert before laying low a couple of hours.  I for some reason tried instead to get Riley to lay down with me.  Michael got up and Riley didn’t want to lie still, probably from the loads of sugar we just sent coursing through his veins only minutes before. I told him he could go play in his room.  I remember falling asleep really fast.  Then I remember waking up to the sound of Riley kicking the wall; a thing he knows far better than to do.  I suspected that he was looking for attention from one of us.  He got it.  It was not positive attention, but Riley isn’t picky.  He will take any attention he can get, positive or negative.  I just wish I could get him to seek the positive with as much fervency as he seeks the negative.  When I woke, It was my shift again, as I promised Michael I would make sure he could go out for a ride on his motorcycle today, since I preempted his trip yesterday with a trip of my own.  So, he left and Riley and I played some, and I watched a little bit of a show, and then we went outside.  I had been what we call ‘barky’ all day.  Cranky and irritable doesn’t quite describe it.  While outside, the renters downstairs came to pay the rent while Riley played in the yard.  I called Michael’s Mom and Dad to tell them the renters had paid, and I made the mistake of complaining to Mom about my frustrations with Riley and Michael.  She rightfully chastised me for doing Riley a disservice in his life by not getting my stuff together, and by not communicating with my husband.  I was on the edge of falling apart all day.  She is the last person on this earth that I would ever want to upset, but at that moment the fine threads like that of my quilt holding together the outer shell of me gave way, and I was reduced to tears.  I did something that I have never done in my life.  I hung up on her.  I couldn’t bear to face my feeling like a disgrace to parenthood-to say nothing of daughterhood.  I sat there in my lawn chair and cried and cried until I couldn’t breathe.  Riley tried to comfort me.  He said, “It’s okay mama, I take care of ooh.”  I cried more.  What a lovely heart God placed in my boy.  The boy I was failing with.  The exchange was only seconds, but years of failures flooded my thoughts.  “I am a bad mama.”  I said, meaning it to the depths of my soul.  Through my sobs, he hugged me and patted my head.  “You are a good mama.  It be okay.”   I couldn’t stop crying.  I couldn’t stand the thought of failing him.  I couldn’t stand the thought that I had hung up on Mom.  I tried to call back if only to apologize.  The line was busy.  More tears.  I couldn’t see.  My head was pounding.  I finally took a deep breath and calmed a bit.  I called again.  The phone rang.  She answered.  I burst into tears.  We talked and I cried and eventually I had worked myself into a frenzy.  I couldn’t breathe, and I couldn’t see.  I was a bad mom and a bad daughter.  No one said these things except me, but I believed them to be true.  I had fallen completely apart.  Michael came home from his ride then.  He coaxed me inside, hoping to avoid the scene I could easily have made.  I went to the bathroom and climbed in the shower and sat down under the stream of heat and steam and continued to sob.  I could not stop hyperventilating.   The tears flowed from my eyes as if they had been held back for ages.  I had to take a sedative to finally calm down.  My heart is so fragile.  My temper is so short.  I am able to forget that about myself when I have my medication to rely on.  After my attack, I took a moment to calm down, and then I played school-buses with my boy until his bed time.  He is such a good boy.  This is not the life I wanted for him.  He has struggles and obstacles of his own.  No child deserves to have to reassure their mother at the tender age of six.  They need to play hard and live a full and fun life.  I feel sorry that he has to wait for me because I am slow.  That he has to be gentle with me because I’m fragile.  Please note at this point that just because he is supposed to be gentle doesn’t at all mean that he is.  But he doesn’t understand, and quite frankly he shouldn’t have to. But alas, I suppose each of us has to take our life’s experiences as they come, and from each one choose to either learn a lesson and grow, or drink in the draughts of bitterness set before us and simply endure.  Tonight I will try to accomplish the former, and shrug off the latter and substitute a cup of hot chamomile tea.

Missing Billy

As I sit here, I try to think back.  I met Billy while he was still in high school.  His friends were my friends, and because my friend Emily and I were a little older and shared the rent on a house, we typically had lots of visitors.  Emily was dating Aaron Sanders, and I was dating Michael Williamson, both of whom Billy knew, either from school or from ‘around.’ Billy would grace us with his presence on occasion, and always be welcome, witty and wonderful to be around.  Emily and I were the hosts, but he seemed to be happy to provide entertainment.  He and ‘the guys’  -- Aaron, Dustin, Patrick, Damien, Michael, Rob, Jed and Reed and Laramey, (I have mostly guy friends) and a stream of others seemed to compete for laughter amongst the group.  I remember Billy being full of hardware J  I couldn’t imagine having so many piercings, but they suited him quite nicely.  I remember one particular night close to the end of high school for them.  They had their prom, and quite a few people—even some I didn’t know—came to our house for a get-together afterwards.  Many of the party-goers stayed the night at our house on couches, in chairs, pallets on the floor, etc.  Billy, however, ended up sleeping like a rock on the hardwood floor.  He started out his sleeping endeavor in the living room, but somehow ended up down the hall and around the corner in one of the bedrooms, snoring happily.  My friend Emily woke up at some point to use the bathroom and tripped over him and nearly face-planted in the hallway.  Neither of us will ever forget that!

Then I try to think forward.  I remember meeting Billy's wife for the first time.  I don’t remember exact details.  I remember it was back behind the glove factory on one of those side streets at a house.  I don’t remember why we were there.  I just remember thinking to myself “I really like her!”  Then, sometime later we (My husband and I) saw Billy and his wife in their car in the Leatherwood parking lot, and lo and behold, they had a baby boy – quite possibly the cutest kid I’d ever seen in my life.  I was so happy for Billy! 

Then I was shocked.  He told us he had cancer.  After that meeting, a long, long time went by before I heard anything about Billy again.  I thought about him and all the guys a lot as life happened along as is its habit to do.  I asked someone somewhere how Billy was, and they said better, and that he was working as a medic.  Awesome! I decided to look him up on the notorious Facebook spy network, and found that he was just as awesome and funny as ever, and that there was a new baby to adore there.  I loved how he called her Jack It seemed so endearing to have this beautiful girl with a beautiful name being called simply Jack.  I never got the chance to ask him why he called her that.  I would have loved to know the story.  There had to be a story.  With Billy, there was always a good story! 

I may not have had the in-between time with Billy that I would have liked, but that is actually true of many of my friends since the early days after high school.  Just because we were far apart doesn’t for a second mean that they weren’t thought of, missed, wondered about, loved, cherished for the memories they helped to make, and remembered for all the special things that made them who they were to us.  I feel honored to be even a small part of his full life, and I’m sorry that we lost him so soon.  But much can be learned from someone who was loved and who loved so much.  May God bless Billy’s family and his children and his many, many friends.  I hope that reading this will stir love and respect in the hearts of any who knew him.  It was certainly stirring in the writing.  I will miss you, and I am not alone.