Monday is a D%&*

 

Let’s just all admit, up front, Mondays are the shittiest day of the week.  No one wants to get out of bed.  The odds of being late to work increase by several orders of magnitude on Mondays.  The angelic children from Saturday become possessed demons by Monday that drag their feet and make you wonder how many episodes of CSI you would need to watch to pull off a homicide.

Mondays are where care-free, happy days go to die a slow miserable death.  

Monday is a dick.

I have a confession—which is mostly why I blog (I like letting people know how much of a disaster my life is, and how much I over-use parenthetical phrases).    I someday dream of being a strong, independent woman that takes no shit.  Most days, I just get pissed at myself for being kind of stupid.  I do, however, think of myself as having a little bit of constitution. I’m pretty sure I could be a bad-ass in a zombie apocalypse if I had to be one (humor me here).  But, there is one thing, that for as long as I can remember has terrified me.  Ok, two, if we count snakes, but they have already swarmed my office building on their way to hibernate for the winter, so I’m over that for a few months.

The other thing is puke. As a small child, I was absolutely positive, I mean as certain as 2+2=4, that puking meant I was dying.  As in one heave away from The Light.  I always pictured the little lady from Poltergeist, as my gagging echoed in the toilet bowl, saying in her little voice “Stay away from the light, Jeni B.  Stay away from the light!”

And, being certain that the Reaper was standing over the shoulder my mother wasn’t hovering over, I would start to cry and plead with my mother, “Help me!  Please, help me!”  And I was dead certain I was asking her to walk me through to the valley of the shadow of death.

She would rub my back and finally, firmly tell me to get it together.  “I can’t puke for you!” she would say.

Then, when I was a freshman in college, I had the most traumatic visit to the emergency room ever *cue overdramatic font, here*.  On Christmas Eve, a bunch of friends that were home for the holidays decided to go tubing.  We build a huge jump over a massive drop off at a local gravel pit (that part is not over exaggerated).  A friend and I jumped on a tube and hit it square.

She ended up with cracked ribs, and I ended up going to the ER across the desert at the “real” hospital with what they thought was a bleeding spleen. 

This was the first time I realized emergency rooms operate on triage.  It was Christmas Eve and it was PACKED.  Three old guys came in back to back to back with chest pains.  Some lady got wheeled in in a wheelchair, so far into labor she couldn’t walk.  So, they put me away with the fevers and other not so urgent cases and told me and my mother to hold tight.

Then THEY came in.  And the other THEY put THEM right next to me and handed the guy a bed pan.  After 15 minutes of him heaving and upchucking, they brought him a huge trash can.  I listened to this for a good hour and a half before I was taken for an MRI…convinced my spleen was not in fact bleeding or I’d be dead. In fact, listening to the guy puke for that long, actually had me wondering if death was something I shouldn’t fear after all. I’d heard in A&P bleeding to death wasn’t so bad, and they’d given me some kind of opioid thing in a shot in the ass before the ride across the desert, so I didn’t much care.

My mother became convinced Puker Man had overdosed on something because she was actually able to discern a conversation over his loud heaving that included the woman with him saying “What did they tell you when you called the poison center?” And Puker Man replied “Get to the hospital.”

Probably needless to point out, but before I got back to the MRI machine, I too, was puking into a garbage can, because there was nowhere else for Puker Man to go.   

TO THIS VERY DAY, ALL ANYONE HAS TO DO IS MAKE A GAGGING SOUND AND I’M VOMITING.  My brother does it to make himself laugh.

It ended up my spleen was not bleeding profusely, but did have a nice fat contusion that meant I missed part of the basketball season.  The psychological trauma inflicted on me by Puker Man, though….I have never recovered. 

I remain truly and ever grateful that The Sha never puked anywhere but the toilet.  I never had to clean up vomit (baby vomit doesn’t count). 

That is, I never had to clean up vomit until this morning.  

At 1:53 Schmoo tiptoed to my side of the bed.  I smelled it before she spoke.  I got her in the bathroom, and then I completely lost my cookies.

I was trying.  Really.  Trying hard.  I got her shirt off, and then had to hug the porcelain again. She just watched me like I was from another planet and she couldn’t decide if she needed to get her leader or not.

All this time, the dad is snoring loudly…oblivious to me on yet another verge of violent death.

I got the mess in her hair cleaned up (after sharing much love with the toilet) and new pajamas on her  before the man of the house stirred and hunkered in the door of the lavatory, rubbing his eyes and scratching, and mumbling “What’s going on?”

He got blankets and pillows changed, while I continued my death dance with the porcelain god.  We managed to trudge back to bed (while he laughed his ass off at my queasiness), but at 5:30, I realized the true extent of the damage…right before walking into the laundry room to start washing bedding only to discover the dog, too, had gotten sick.  

I don’t think, in all of my years as a mother, that I have ever just shrugged my shoulders and admitted defeat like I did this morning.  Normally, I would have called the boss, gave him the low-down, and actually TRIED to make it to work.

I feel bad for my Schmoo.  Mostly because her mother was completely incapacitated, and she ended up hovering over my shoulder asking if HER MOTHER was alright, rather than the other way around.

Today, I decided that if they gave out unwanted trophies for shittiest (pun TOTALLY intended) Monday, today was my turn to carry it proudly. So, I just sent the boss a text.  I should have asked him to send a hazmat suit and a respirator…because I puked at least 3 more times cleaning the carpet today…despite wrapping a dish towel doused in peppermint oil around my face.

But, he’d never believe me, anyway…that I was so close to dying…again.

The Awakening

There’s a certain amount of shame involved in every confession.  A certain amount of admitting you pretended something was different than it was gets added.  Stir in a shit-pile of denial. Gently fold in  shame and add a pinch of it-wasn’t-supposed-to-be-like-this.  

In a separate bowl, you have to add a heaping helping of bravery.  Bravery is the leavening for rising up to bare your confession

Then you pull back the curtains, and you realize you’ve been closing layers of drapes for years, and you have to peel them back, like the cliche layers of an onion, to get to the blinds that finally let the light shine in. The light that heals and finishes the confession for you to consume for sustenance to endure better things.  

See, I first closed those blinds over ten years ago, after making a New Year’s Eve dinner and ending up with a black eye and a hole in the wall. I patched the hole when I moved away, but I’ve been wandering this existence with unseen black eyes since then. 

I pulled the blinds. I pulled the blinds to keep the outside world from looking in. Pretty soon, I was pulling the shades to hide the blinds.

Then I hung up drapes to hide the shades. Then I bought a pretty valance, to make the drapes look good.  

Pretty soon, you realize you can’t hide inside, behind all the curtains.  The play goes on and scenes change, and you have to step into the spotlight and play the part.  There are no strings, but you want there to be.  You feel them…as you trudge.  Someone else, pulling here, releasing there.  Screaming you’re unworthy.

 So, you buy a cloak, and wrap yourself in it.  You learn, the hard way, not to let anyone into that cloak.  Mouths leak like ships hitting icebergs, and you sink.  So, you draw it tighter, sealing those leaks and closing yourself off.  

You learn to run.  Not fast.  No, there can be no quick movements.  But it’s running nonetheless.  It’s an exercise in quickness…walking on egg shells without making a sound.  Because when the sound is heard, it strikes fear deep within your bones, and you’ve become accustomed to not knowing the response.  The not knowing.  Not knowing if you’ll end in a pile of tears or brokeness, buying more curtains, covering in more cloaks.  Burying yourself and then forgetting where you left the bones.

I wrote myself a letter.  I earned my bones.  I decided to find my bones.

Before you can find them, you have to wake up.  The awakening is hard.  It’s a god aweful journey through pain and realization…realizing you gave up your spine and quit on yourself.  Learning to love yourself again is, perhaps, the hardest journey.  Because, you’ve been made to feel you don’t deserve it. 

When you wake up, and peel back the layers to let the light in, they up the ante.  They like the shades and the dark you wander so aimlessly in…questioning your very existence. They buy you prettier drapes…to hide the ever more ugly.

But you cannot stop an awakening.  The eyes just open, and they can’t be closed.

The eyes open, then they seek the light.  They take down the valance, and the drapes, then the curtains, and then you open the blinds.  The light shines in, and you see, for the first time in a long time, the light.

It’s warm when everything seemed so cold.  So, like a cat, you just sit there for a while.  In the light.  Take a nap.  Relax.

You smile and look at the ground and go looking for the bones.  It’s a digging exercise into everything you denied.  Rediscovering the light, the warmth, the smells and you welcome the journey.

And you dig.  And dig.  Deep.  Deep, deep, down until you find the you. So many piles where you buried so many parts of your soul.

Eventually, you find the pieces to put back together.  And as you glue the pieces, and it becomes whole again, you discover how truly awake you are.

You fill the cracks with the gold of lessons learned. More precious than it was before.

Then you hold the whole, and you tell her its ok.  And you lead her away from the holes…step by little, tiny, baby step.  Away.  

Back to self.  Back to whole.  Awake.  No shade.  Into the light.