Cafe Hitch-hike

2022-02-23

It's mine and quite all right

We activated the Family Emergency Network over the weekend. Sis Lana the Wild Child in Austin called Sis BM up in Michigan because our mother didn't respond to her for about 2 days. Sis BM texted me, told me what happened, and asked that I call one of our uncles who lives up the street from her. BM also called Austin PD to do a welfare check on our mother. A woman who identified herself as Mom's sister said Mom was at work for the day.

I called Mom about 3 days before that but she didn't text me back. I kind of wondered but Mom had spells where she said little to others. I texted Uncle Bert who then called me 2 hours later. Aunt Juana was with him and she confirmed the cop visit and talking to him (BM suspected it was a cousin who fibbed about her identity because of arrest warrants, hah, but it wasn't). Bert said he had seen our mother last night. He was surprised though impressed that we checked up on Mom the way we did.

I could quickly see why my sisters were so quick to do this. Their father, my step-father, died around this day 5 years ago. He was alone and at home, and was out of touch for 2 nights and a day before our youngest sis, Rosepetal, found him at home and unresponsive. My sisters wanted to be sure this would never happen to anyone else.

Mom will be 69 this year. She is quite healthy and active, though she is now diabetic and on blood pressure medications. She stopped dying her hair 4 years ago and now has long gray hair.

I may had been singing the blues about my upcoming surgery, but I'm keeping it in perspective. It's a usual, age-related thing and it's nothing more. My friend Mari also described having a perimenopause that was nearly demoralizing for her, and she was divorcing her one husband for the second time while she went through it. A friend of my friend who's 44 was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer and he had just seen her enjoying herself at a party last month.

I also had a little conference with a colleague over a project. She mentioned having a noncancerous brain tumor, but she also mentioned a host of other health problems and an autoimmune disorder on top of it, and all the medications she has to take for it. This colleague is a divorced mother of 1 adult child and is 3 years older than me. I knew about the tumor, but didn't know about the other problems.

Sometimes I need to tell myself to put my feet back on the ground. I need to be on earth where the rest of humanity lives. Sometimes I do sweat the small stuff way, way, way too much. Sometimes I'm not grateful for what I've got when I finally seem to understand that I need to be; I'm seeing that it's a big part of what anchors me rather than feeling adrift. I feel more present and in the moment.

At least I'm not as depressed as I used to be, it is much less frequent and at lower levels. Anxiety is still there, but also not as terrible. I'm not making extraordinary demands or have expectations on myself. Although I have some ambitions for an area or 2 of my life, it's not out of the scrapping, hungry spirit where it used to come from. The ambitious are really because of a personal interest.

I smile when I go home and see the wide blue sky and having the ocean be to my east and the Everglades be to my west. It's a simple place, nothing extraordinary, but it's mine and quite all right. My car is now 10 years old but I have no reason to get another because it runs fine and can likely go for another 100K miles.

I definitely can't complain about these different things. It almost makes me want to bodyslam the anxieties that now seem so-- trivial? I also feel some regret about the time I wasted on that and other forms of mental/ emotional ruminations that filled large episodes of my life.

I guess the only answer at this point really is simply to live.

downwind | upstream