This is just a note to my blogfellows: I will catch up with your posts soon but can’t sustain at the moment, due to our freak/freakish storm. I have had to delete most of the last two day’s worth of email notifications in order to keep my sanity – very sorry!
Get off the car!
Anthony (Husband): Would you mind putting the car away, Jules?
Son: Put the %$#@*^#@** car away, Mum – the peacocks are pooping all over it AGAIN – aaaarrrrrggggggghhhhhhhhhhh!
Me: They’re sweet aren’t they!
I love this picture!
This is Son with Little Second Cousin, about a year ago. I have an almost identical picture of Son at this age on the lap of Little Second Cousin’s father’s knee but I can’t find it! I will ask Little Second Cousin’s father’s wife to see if she has it because I remember us being amazed by the similarity in the pictures.
Oh, and Little Second Cousin’s father is the Beautiful Little Brat in the love story on my other blog at http://jmromance.com/. Now if that isn’t a blatant plug, I don’t know what is – ha!
Yes, it is a bit confusing!
Laughter
Anthony has always had such a wonderful sense of humour and a way of being firmly planted, accepting of all contingencies, and light-hearted. I used to think these attributes were rather superficial and that he didn’t have depth (whatever the hell ‘depth’ means!) but I have, over our nearly 20 years of marriage, learned to do what he does, which is to laugh his way into and around various situations and then dismiss them as unimportant.
Well, no, I haven’t actually learned to do that exactly, but I am trying and I have Anthony’s verbal handbook by my side just in case I forget. He could run around paddocks and round cattle up without a murmer of exhaustion; he could climb onto the roof of this house during a cyclone and stop it; he could nurture a rejected calf and bring it up (and, until a few years ago, before ‘Reject’ died, this calf-come-steer would actually leap into Anthony’s arms and give him a hug.)
“Am I like you, or Dad?” Son asks me and I hide my anxiety behind a chuckle that reminds me of Anthony’s attitude.
“You are you, kid!” I say.
“Yes, but I think I might be more like you, Mum – serious and sad….”
I take a deep breath and say, “No, you are much more like Dad because of your sense of humour!”
“You know the way you laugh, Mum, in that loud way – could you try to do that a bit more often?”
“Okay.”
Anthony hasn’t laughed for a couple of years now. He used to have this raucous guffaw and his whole face would crinkle up in mirth and it was absolutely contagious and Son and I would be swept into this wonderful hilarity – always.
Anthony can’t even smile anymore and, the other day, when I said to him, “I wish you would just smile at me,” he said, “Jules, I have Parkinson’s – remember?”
“Yes,” I said, “but can’t you just try to smile?”
Anthony tried and failed and then looked at me (I was smiling hyena-ishly, trying to get him to do the same), and said, “Jules, you really are quite thick, aren’t you!”
And we both smiled….
Dancing days
It’s Sunday here and in a couple of hours I will go into the nursing lodge to have lunch with Husband. I haven’t seen him for a few days because I have had the flu, but we have, as usual, spoken on the phone several times a day. He has missed me terribly but has coped. I haven’t missed him as much, which seems a terrible thing to say but there you are – I’ve said it.
We have talked about this disequilibrium of the missing-you thing.
Husband: I miss you now, I miss you all the time.
Me: I miss you then, I miss the way it was when you were well.
Husband: But I can be the way I was. I’m getting better.
Me: It’s not your fault – it’s the bloody Parkinson’s. You’re not getting better, you’re getting worse – that’s why you’re here so you get proper nursing care.
Husband: I don’t want nursing care. I want you.
Me: But I can’t lift you anymore, and I can’t make you walk, and I can’t manage you during the nights.
Husband: So I am never coming home for the night again?
Me: I don’t know. What’s wrong with coming home for the days?
Husband: It isn’t enough.
Me: I know.
Husband: And where’s the kid?
Me: At another party.
Husband: Just like I used to be.
Me: Just like you used to be.
Now I realize this all sounds very poignant and sad, but it always (well, almost always) ends up in a laugh about the dancing days.
An apple crumbly day
Son and I went in for lunch with Husband at the nursing lodge today and it was lovely. Well, the food was lovely, Husband was feeling okay, Son arrived a little late from his last night’s party, and I was quite boppy but then, as Husband ate his dessert, my dessert and Son’s dessert, hardly looking at us, I felt my boppyness subside into a more low-key tone.
“Are you starving?” I asked Husband, laughing at his appetite.
“Well, you never make me sweets,” he said, polishing off the third apple crumble and custard.
Son and I got the giggles briefly and Husband glared at both of us, between mouthfuls, then winked and said, “Glad I provide you guys with so much amusement.” His mastership of irony has always caught me off guard and, as I didn’t have an appropriate response, I just said, “You are such a glutton!” and he replied, “And you are such a glutton for punishment,” and reached out and squeezed my knee.
Not long after this, when the three of us were back in Husband’s room, he started to have one of his ‘turns’, getting very drowsy and weird. We alerted the nurse, then eventually we left Husband almost asleep in his chair and came home. Needless to say, all my boppyness had dissipated. We had only been there for two hours but it had felt like ten hours – oh, the guilt of admitting this!
But worse was to come when Son said, “Mum, I don’t want to do this anymore.”
It seems so strange that only a few days ago, I was worried about Husband’s apparent heartbreak at not coming home to the farm overnight anymore; then, when we encountered such difficulties bringing him home just for the day (and his lack of mobility shocked me), I realized that all three of us have to somehow accept that the nursing lodge is home for him now.
So already, the routine we decided to stick to (several posts ago) has become impossible because getting Husband home has now become a big ordeal due to his deterioration with Parkinson’s, which I think is in its final assault mode. I hate this disease more than I have ever hated anything because it is so slow and cruel and humiliating and scary. Many of Husband’s best friends are nervous to visit him and I don’t blame them at all.
I think the most heart-breaking thing today though was when Son reiterated to me on the way home, “I don’t want to see Dad like this any more, Mum.”
And this puts me in a dilemma. Do I force Son to come with me to visit Husband or not? My opinion is not – and to let Son choose when and if. He has been through this huge scoliosis surgery which more or less coincided with Husband going to the nursing lodge and, now that Son is nearly out of his spinal brace, I think Husband and I need to let him go, let him do what he thinks is best.
Below is a photo of a photo of Husband and Son, when Son was just born. I love this photo!
Oh yeah, and I’ve never particularly liked apple crumble anyway.
Tony
I’m not sure whether to call Tony my best, oldest friend, or my oldest best friend because I don’t want to imply that he is old! On the other hand, it is his 60th birthday today in Perth, so Son and I are travelling up for his party and we can’t wait!
Tony and I have known each other since I was 15 and he was 22 and we have seen each other through some interesting times. He became an Anglican priest and he was the one who performed the marriage ceremony between Husband and me. He has visited us often over the years and he and I love to reminisce about our various escapades. Nobody has ever made me laugh as much as Tony does.
This was us way back in time. I am on the left and he is on the right.
And, more recently, but still some time ago.
Tony sent me these photos and in this latter picture, I like the way you can see the light in our eyes and I guess that is probably the best way I can describe his friendship to me over so many years. He has been a light, he has been lightness and he is, and always will be, the most well-lit person I know.
Happy Birthday, Tony!
No
As I write the tidbit scenes of my love story with Husband, I am filled with a nostalgic joy, the memory of anticipation, the thrill of our marriage of nearly 20 years, and our now teenage son.
At the same time, the thud of our present circumstances seems to twirl the present and the past into a surreal mix of agonizing happiness, of hopeless hope, and a longing that stretches across this farm to once upon a time.
Today, when Son and I visited Husband in the nursing lodge, Husband wanted to come home with us for the night and I had to, once again, say no.
I never realized until today how horrible the word ‘No’ is.
Joy
I used to think that Joy just automatically flew into your soul
She doesn’t
She always waits patiently for you to stop feeling sorry for yourself
and she doesn’t tolerate grumbling, mumbling, bumbling, stumbling or crumbling
She waits for you to tell her that it is okay to fly away
but to come back soon.
You can’t just say ‘yes’ to Joy; you have to say ‘yes, please,’ because Joy is very polite
I said, ‘yes please’ to Joy a minute ago
and she just landed on my shoulders.
Joy was a bit abrupt when she told me to clean the cobwebs out of my soul,
but I followed her instructions with a bit of Ajax.
I quite like her!
Just around the corner
I think there are a few gifts waiting for us – Husband, Son and me – just around the corner, but I cannot seem to get us to that corner we need to turn.
One of my best friends arrived this afternoon, just as Son and I got home from visiting Husband, and another best friend rang a moment later and, for a split-second I thought, yes, we are going to have a party, so I said, ‘come over.’ But in the next split-second, as my first friend fetched some wine from her car, I suddenly, unexpectedly, and rather dramatically, broke down and sobbed.
Now I have been in that situation myself, watching someone else’s grief leak/pour out and it is not the most comfortable of situations to be in, because you don’t know whether to put your arm around them, leave them alone, listen to their noise, or slap them. My friend did the perfect thing and just let me cry and stammer and Son then rang the second friend to say tomorrow might be better.
It was Husband’s sad, sad face that triggered this I think. I had left Son with him for a couple of hours while I had coffee with my best oldest friend, Tony, so I had been enriched by this. But when I got to the nursing lodge, Son was impatient to go home and I had to break it to Husband that we weren’t taking him home with us. Watching the pleats around his mouth deepen with disappointment, I comforted him by saying, “It’s tomorrow you’re coming home,” but that didn’t seem to alleviate his misery. So then Son crouched down between Husband’s legs and thumped him lightly in the chest, “Dad, I know you are sad being here, but we are sad being home without you. Mum and I are sad, Dad – it’s not just you who’s sad.”
Just around the corner is a brand new, butterknife day. Husband will be home, Son will be out and I will not sob.
jmgoyder 