“C’mon, Mum, have a laugh!”
One of things Ming says to me most often these days is “C’mon, Mum, have a laugh!” So today I will tell a funny story.
Gutsy9, the baby peacock, is now two weeks old and is quite happy to sleep in his box at night as long as he can spend the day on my shoulder. Well, when he was one day old, Ming and I had to go to town to do numerous things and I didn’t want to leave Gutsy9 alone for so long, so I took him tucked into my shirt. Ming had a gig to set up for, I had a lunch date with friends, then Ming had a counselling appointment and I was going to visit Ants (another reason I took Gutsy9 with me – I wanted to show him to Ants.)
Okay, so I dropped Ming off and went to the restaurant. Gutsy9 was asleep inside my shirt almost under my left arm so I kept my left hand on him through the shirt, sat down at the table with my friends and ordered. Gutsy9 was quiet to begin with but soon woke up and chirped, so I took him out and showed my friends who were rather aghast so I quickly chucked him back into my shirt and joined in the various conversations. A couple of hours later I picked Ming up to go to counselling and he’d forgotten I had Gutsy9 so said, “Oh that bloody bird – you’re the one who needs counselling.” He was quite nasty and I was hurt.
Anyway, the counsellor had asked me to come for the first bit of Ming’s session so I went in with him but said I couldn’t stay long because of the bird. I pulled Gutsy9 out of my shirt to show her and she looked, well, a bit surprised to say the least. Then we all sat down and she asked me how I was. It never ceases to amaze me how those three simple words ‘how are you?’ can reduce me to tears – which is what happened much to my horror. I said Ming and I had just had another altercation blah blah blah, and she suggested I stay for the whole session but I said no because I wanted to take Gutsy9 to show Anthony.
So I left and drove up the road to the nursing lodge and spent a very pleasant hour with Ants and Gutsy9 then went back to pick Ming up. By then, Ming was repentant but tentatively suggested that I should have some private counselling sessions of my own because he had been helped enormously. I told him I would think about it and we went home.
It was a few days later, when I was telling some other friends about the counselling experience, and they were laughing hysterically, that I realized how stark, raving mad I must have seemed to the counsellor and to my lunch companions!
Anthony, on the other hand, wasn’t the slightest bit nonplussed because he knows me, adores me and accepts me.
So, “C’mon, Ming, have a laugh!”
And guess what – we are both laughing today – yeeha!
Gutsy9 just hatched.
Gutsy9 – 2 weeks old today!
Parkinson’s paradoxes
When most people hear the term ‘Parkinson’s Disease’, they tend to think of Michael J Fox and the Parkinson’s that make you shake, move haphazardly or suffer debilitating tremors. Anthony’s type of PD is not like that and is often termed ‘Parkinsonism’. His symptoms have included a dramatic loss of movement. In many ways this is a kinder PD because of the lack of tremors but on the other hand the crippling immobility of brain/body has been a long, slow series of gradual shocks. First his hands couldn’t do things like open a jar of vegemite, steer a car, operate a chainsaw; then his face stopped ‘working’ in the sense that he no longer smiled and he stopped blinking, so that his eyes took on a blank look. I have already written about some of these things in previous posts so I won’t repeat myself.
One of the most noticeable things about Anthony’s PD is his stillness. Before the nursing lodge he would sit for hours on the front verandah in complete stillness. Sometimes he would be so still that the blue wrens would alight on his lap not realizing he was a human. Sometimes he would be so still I would think he’d died. Sometimes he would be so still he would drop his cup of tea.
Well, today I took Gutsy9, the baby peacock, in again to see Ants at the nursing lodge and guess who loved Anthony’s stillness?
A chick called 9
I got home from seeing Ants and went out to feed, and commune with, the birds and whammo! Some tiny scurrying thing caught my eye – a chick! All by itself! I couldn’t believe my eyes. I sat at my picnic table watching it for awhile to see whose chick it was but, despite a lot of interest from the gang and the chooks and peafowl and the guinneas, not one of them came to the party, so I had to catch it (sounds easy but it took about 9 hours!)
So here he/she is, in Ming’s hands. We have no idea what kind of chick this is, but it might be a peachick!
And its name?
9!
We have now cosied 9 into a box with some straw, water and crumbles but 9 is already addicted to cuddles.
I wonder what 9 is!
First brother
My first brother, BJ, turns 52 today which is wonderful because for the next six weeks or so he will only be a year younger than I am – ha!
BJ is a chiropractor, like our father was, and he is now working in the Solomon Islands with his wife and two of his five children (yes, First brother and Baby brother surpassed me long ago in the baby-making stakes).
This is him with our mother a couple of years ago. He has taken to wearing a kilt because his eldest daughter is getting married in Scotland next year and I think he also quite likes the look of his own legs.
And that’s BJ on the left, Baby brother in the middle and me on the right – in our father’s arms.
Both my brothers have inherited our dad’s love of being a father.
Happy birthday, BJ!
Mini-strokes
After Anthony’s hospital adventure yesterday, the hospital doctor rang me and said that the CT scan didn’t show anything and that she surmises he is having TIAs (mini-strokes) and this makes a lot of sense to me because I have seen him have these strange ‘turns’ a lot over the last few years. When I did a bit of research, all descriptions of TIAs were an exact match so, even though a TIA can’t be picked up on a scan, this does seem to explain these episodes. The trouble is – like yesterday – he just looks as if he is asleep and it’s only when I try to rouse him that it becomes obvious that something is wrong.
The nursing lodge staff want to watch him carefully for a week and I’ve been advised not to take him out, so that’s fine. I mean, I haven’t been taking him out lately anyway, because it is so difficult to lift him and all that. I rang and spoke to him and he said, “Maybe I should just step in front of a truck!” and I reprimanded him but of course who can blame him for feeling like this.
Comedy
Oh I just can’t stop laughing – I keep bursting into guffaws because of three things:
1. My BFF emailed me twice today to complain that he was getting bombarded with email notifications of my work-in-progress romance novel. His emails are shrill with angst and outrage to have such tripe enter his inbox. I have, of course, apologized and tried to eradicate him from the ‘list’ to no avail. We are having lunch in a couple of weeks so hopefully we can fix this but, in the meantime, I’m quite enjoying torturing him – ha!
2. In the romance novel that I’m editing and revising on the other blog, I thought it best to change Matt’s name to Bob. That’s because, when writing the first draft of this novel last century, I didn’t know a Matt. So now that I do know a real Matt, I thought it best to use that editorial ‘replace’ thing to get Bob into the story. The trouble is that every single time the word ‘matter’ comes up in the novel (with surprising frequency) it gets altered automatically to ‘Bober’ – do you see what I mean?
3. Then, tonight, around an hour ago, I rang and spoke to Anthony and he said, “When am I going to see you?” Argh!
That’s okay. It is fine and he is fine enough now and will probably sleep really well tonight after today’s ordeal.
Me – I am going to laugh myself to sleep!
Sick of love
I wrote this dreadful poem last night with the above title, but I didn’t post it because it was too bleak. This morning I looked at it again and agreed with myself that it was too bleak. I would like to be able to say it was absolutely brilliant but, in fact, it was so dismal that I trashed it. Good riddance.
The poem was about becoming sick and tired of love – of loving and of being loved – the heavy weight of it, an anagram of vole which is I think is a kind of rodent.
When I first met my husband I was sick with love, a buzzy, hopeful, exciting love. It worked, we worked, we were happy.
Today, when I visited him in the nursing lodge, he was sad and said, when I had to leave to pick Ming up, “You don’t want to be with me anymore.” I didn’t get angry or broken-hearted and I couldn’t even muster the empathy to reassure him adequately, so had to ring again and again this afternoon to reassure him.
I guess it’s just a phase but the weight of his love for me is too much at the moment and my love for him seems to need a holiday.
This afternoon, in the midst of a storm, we lost electricity for a few hours so I went through the archives of my computer to do a cull and found a letter that I had written to Anthony’s doctor and neurologist nearly ten years ago, outlining his symptoms, asking if his medication could be increased, wondering what the future held. I never sent this letter because I was too emotional at the time so I must have kept it for myself just for the record. It shocked me to realize how long since his Parkinson’s was diagnosed and I am still finding it difficult to believe it has been nearly a decade. Hell, Ming was only a little boy back then.
This is not at all a self-pitying post even if it seems that way; I guess it’s just a recognition that sometimes love can be way too heavy. I’m not sure.
Love story 121 – What is mine is yours (or is it the other way around?)
I have started saying this weird thing lately, that I have never said before. Instead of saying our, I’ve begun to say my and this disturbs me. Here are some examples:
- This is my son
- Come over to my place
- My birds
- My dogs
- My house
- My farm
Etcetera….
The fact that I sometimes say this my thing instead of the usual our thing in front of Anthony makes me sick to my stomach and I always try to correct the my to our before he notices or gets hurt.
He doesn’t notice, but why am I doing this ‘my’ thing when I have never done so before? Everything has always been ours, not mine, not his – ours.
jmgoyder 