Checking My Balance

"Where wealth is health, bankruptcy is death." - John Maiorana

Last week I started to wonder if I have become emotionally bankrupt.  As silly as it sounds, this pondering was a result of my response or lack thereof to the last two episodes of This Is Us.  My friends were posting on Facebook that they had cried buckets after the late night airing of an episode on Super Bowl Sunday.  Another episode aired on Tuesday night.  Some of them were still crying on Wednesday.  Then I started to see magazine articles popping up in my newsfeed about how heart wrenching the episodes were.  I really like This Is Us and normally my emotions tend to be a bit close to the surface.  I'm that person who cries at Hallmark card commercials.  But for some reason, I didn't shed a tear during either of those episodes.   I could appreciate the theater of them but they left me feeling nothing. 

So, living in my head, as I have been doing lately, I started to worry.  Why are my emotions so flat?  What is wrong with me?  I thought perhaps it was just cabin fever.  On the day my post-surgical restrictions were lifted, I celebrated by putting my hair in a ponytail (a two-armed task which I had not been allowed to do), drove to the grocery store and the hardware store.  My mood improved a bit but I still felt pretty flat.  A few days later, there was another mass shooting at a school in Florida.  I can now definitely state that I am not emotionally bankrupt.  I cannot stop crying.  I am experiencing a depth of sadness that I haven't felt for a long time.  How is it possible, I keep wondering, that one morning a group of mothers kissed their teenage babies goodbye and dropped them off at school for what would be the very last time because they would be shot to death in the corridors and classrooms by another teenager with an automatic, legally obtained gun?  How is it possible that their senators and congressmen, governors and even president lack the will and interest to do what needed to be done so long ago to keep them safe?  What were their lives worth to the politicians who took so much money from the NRA?  Maybe I don't actually want to know.

Emotionally bankrupt - no, just saving my deepest emotions for things that are real and I can add a lot more emotions to the list.  I am not just sad, I am outraged.  I am scared for my American family, for my cousin Stephanie who is a teacher, for her daughter Bella who is a little school aged child.  I am resolved to do something about this horror.  I don't know what and there are some who will say it is not my country - not my business but of course I will not, cannot accept that.  There are no borders that restrict love for family and care for others.  I don't know what the right action is for me to take now but I will figure it out.

Waiting for Parole

“Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage.” – Richard Lovelace

It has been a little more than three weeks since my surgery and I'm suffering badly from cabin fever.  Everyone has been really kind, offering to drive me around or do my errands for me.  While I'm very grateful for their attention and kindness, I am climbing the walls.  I don't want to be driven around.  I don't want to be accompanied on every errand.  I just want to get in my car and drive to the craft store or the bead store and spend an hour wandering the aisles and looking at all the things I don't need but that give me joy to look at and that spark my creativity.  I want to pop down to the hardware store and pick up a case of canning jars, come home and can the dark sweet cherries that are freezing on my back deck and mix up a batch of wild blueberry jam and some grapefruit jelly.  I want to paint the table with the carved legs that has been calling to me to be refinished but that I am not allowed to lift for another week.  I'm waiting for my four week post-surgery sentence to end - waiting for parole.  

Another week and I will be able to go back to physio, which I have so much missed, not just for the relief it gives to my aching bones but for the way my therapist Claire, soothes my soul and spirit.  A couple of treatments under her capable hands and I will once again have the feeling back in my left toes as well as two functional shoulders. I can hardly wait.  

I'm trying to be patient.  Trying to understand the lessons of this latest challenge to my mortality.  Looking for the gifts that this problem surely carries in its hands.  I'm finding it a little harder this time but I'll get there.