1. Ming finally passed his driving test!
2. Someone wants to buy our old car for more than the price we wanted!
3. I got my new bike!
4. A blog friend is sending me a gift!
5. Ming and I saw Anthony this morning (after two days of not seeing him) and he didn’t get all down in the dumps when we had to go!
Details to be blogged soon – I am too busy grinning!
Oh yes, and Gutsy9 (baby peacock, for those who don’t know) is thriving!
I am half elated and half deflated in anxious anticipation of Anthony coming home for the day tomorrow.
It will be a difficult day, and no amount of positive thinking will change that because the Parkinson’s Disease owns him now.
Two nights ago, I rang him and he said ‘they’ were going to blow him up and I wouldn’t be able to find his pieces. I could hear a nurse calming him down.
One of our best friends is going through the ordeal of chemotherapy and radiotherapy for cancer.
Several of my blog friends are battling severe health issues and one has just lived through the death of her daughter.
I am scared because I dón’t want Anthony to come home tomorrow because he is so heavy with illness.
It’s the old Ants I want – and so does he – ironic.
When I first began blogging, I had no idea that I would begin to care about people who I may never meet face to face.
As a newbie to the world of birds, I was drawn to blogs about birds, then drawn to blogs about photography.
As a carer for a husband with Parkinson’s Disease, I was drawn to blogs about PD, nursing homes, other people’s experiences of other illnesses.
As the mother of a teenage son, I was drawn to blogs about parenting, children and Erma Bombecky humour.
As a writer, I was drawn to blogs written by an array of different people – all ages, all styles, all genres, all fantastic.
As a woman battling grief, I was drawn to blogs about grief and blogs about inspiration – a good mix.
Tonight, I am drawn into the blog of a woman who has become my friend. Her daughter died today after a gruelling battle with disease.
I care about you.
Apart from once again being subscribed to too many blogs, all of which I love, I am also having a terrible time with WP’s latest innovations. For eg., if I read your blog via the email link, the ‘Like’button often won’t work, and if I read your blog via the Reader, I sometimes can’t get the ‘Comment’thing to work.
So I have decided to take a blogreading break until WP fixes the glitches because it’s too hard. I am not unsubscribing from anyone’s blog but will confine my blogreading to the blogs of friends who are going through very hard times, and catch up with others later.
I will keep blogwriting though because it keeps me out of mischief!
I’m not scared of Despair anymore because today she told me that she only wanted a tiny hug before she went to visit somebody else. She said she had tried to visit us before but the doors were always locked.
So I gave Despair an enormous hug, apologized for us locking the doors and, as she hugged me back, she wept into the crevice of my left elbow, then she gave me a short bit of advice.
I kept hugging her until I realized Despair had gone and I was hugging my silly self!
Translation: Despair’s visit catapulted me into seeking help. Tomorrow! Yeah, she was okay enough, but I don’t want her to come back.
Last night I was feeling really low with my flu, the hot weather and a smidgen of rage against a couple of people who have hurt Anthony over the years but especially recently. I had planned to write about this today until I read these two wonderful posts by fellow bloggers:
http://eof737.wordpress.com/2012/12/29/reflections-keep-the-faith/#comment-33855
In reading both of these posts, I realized that to write about such negative stuff is absolutely pointless and probably extremely boring.
So instead, on this broiling New Year’s Eve, I will show you Gutsy9, the baby peacock who spends most of the day on my shoulder. He is now 3 weeks old and getting too big to hide inside my shirt. His tail feathers are growing and his crown has begun to sprout. He can fly across the room or the back yard with ease. I love him.
Last Christmas, my husband, Anthony, was still living here at home. This year, on Christmas day, he will be visiting for a few hours via a wheelchair taxi and then going back to the nursing lodge. I am having a very hard time accepting the reality of what has transpired over the year – Anthony’s deterioration with Parkinson’s disease, Ming’s spinal surgery, me having to resign from my job as a university lecturer, and a whole lot of other stuff.
Tonight, Ming (nearly 19) saw me struggling with my seemingly endless grief and told me that he was scared – scared that I was totally ‘losing it’. That made me cry even more until he said, “Mum, please just let me in, let me help, we only have each other.” Then he vacuumed the inside veranda, cleaned the microwave and refrigerator, hung out the washing and sang one of the songs he wrote this year – You and me, cup of tea – while he was doing all of this.
I have never understood the term ‘griefstricken’ until now – not just my own, but others’ of course. And now I have the flu and am feeling sorry for myself while parents are grieving beyond any grief imaginable. I can’t say any more about this because I don’t feel I have the right to intrude on the already-trampled privacy of the griefstricken.
This will probably be Anthony’s last Christmas.
I have often wondered this because, almost by definition, a blog is a public thing, isn’t it? When I first began blogging, a bit over a year ago, it didn’t take me long to realize just how public this kind of writing is. Comments from friends and family were encouraging and, like many, I discovered I had a ready-made audience. When people I didn’t know (other bloggers) commented, I was initially astounded but gradually I began to explore their blogs and became accustomed to the reciprocal dynamics.
A week ago, I re-started my romance novel blog. Originally this had contained posts about my life with husband, Anthony, then I decided to incorporate these into this blog and the romance novel blog lay dormant for awhile. Then, suddenly realizing I had an already written draft of a novel for Harlequin Mills and Boon that needed editing, I decided to re-motivate myself to do this editing by blogging it, bit by bit by bit. So far I am halfway through and up to Chapter 6.
BUT, when I got to Chapter 5, I was rather shocked to find that it contained some rather explicit erotic material. It wasn’t pornographic but it was odd to read something that seemed to have been written by somebody else. I was in a quandary, so (not having that many followers on that blog) I asked them what to do and it was suggested that I put an “Adult content” warning on any posts that were risque, so I did, and I posted one of these and hoped for the best. Before doing so, I asked my mother to unsubscribe but I forgot that many people who were already subscribed to the romance novel from way back (when it was autobiographical and PG!) might still be reading it.
My dad, nanna and grandparents are all in Heaven, and have been for some time, but what if Heaven has the internet now? And what if my sisters-in-law see the erotic post and show my brothers for a laugh. What if my previous workmates from the university see it? What if – OH NO! – what if Ming sees it?
Hence I am about to make the romance novel private for a couple of days until I figure out who is still on the reader list. Yes, I am going to do this right now!
jmgoyder 