Friday, April 23, 2010

My mom is in the hospital

I'm posting this sort of late (as in, a few days after she went in) but it's taken me a bit to process this whole thing. In a nutshell, the spring bronchitis/pneumonia she always gets has changed into not only pneumonia, but reduced lung function and heart trouble. The upside---and there is one---is that her doctors seem to be good at putting the puzzle pieces together, figuring out what's wrong and working on a treatment. So I don't have any concerns there.

The bad side of it is...it's not over yet. She's still in the hospital and probably will be until next week at the earliest.

I worry a lot about her now, probably more than I would have, say, a year ago---not because I wouldn't have cared, but because losing Chan...Chan, who was exactly my mom's age when she died, put in focus that no matter how much I don't agree with her on matters political, no matter how tired I get of her endless grumbling....the reality is that one day, my mom won't be there. My mom, one of two people who remembers what I was like as a child, who did her best for me no matter what...one day, she won't be there.

I just hope that day...isn't soon.

Sunday, April 18, 2010

What Was Worth the Saying

We had an earthquake on Easter (yes, I know, Easter was a couple of weeks back but I'm the busy mom of a three year old and if I get ten minutes that I'm not hearing, "Hey mommy," I'm writing on my fanfiction blog LOL.) We live in SoCal, the San Diego area more precisely, and we don't tend to get a lot of earthquakes in our area. Usually.

So we'd just finished Easter dinner and my dad and my daughter were racked out on the couch snoozing, when I heard the dishes in the china cabinet rattle. And keep rattling. I looked through our kitchen window to see our neighbor's satellite dish rotating and then I knew---this wasn't the earth having a small fit. This was a huge nasty quake. So I grabbed my daughter and my mom and my dad and my husband and great grandfather and I all dove under the mahogany table* and waited the quake out.

We suffered no damage, aside from some goddess statues on my upstairs altar who were really not amused by the shaking, and some shredded nerves. It was a 6.9, later upgraded to a 7.2, but the point was, we were all alive.

There is something about huddling under a kitchen table while the earth throws a tantrum that tends to put things in focus. I'm not always a big fan of holidays, for the most part--I don't like the pressure to be the perfect family when none of us are, or the inevitable ick feeling that comes when some relative you know has been an asshat is also at the same gathering. I wasn't particularly looking forward to the Easter lunch---for one, it's a hassle to clean the house and get everything dusted and in its proper place for visitors, and for another...sometimes it's hard being around my great-grandfather (lots of water under that particular bridge.)

But, we survived, probably due in no small part to the earthquake. A lot of the tension was just gone...I didn't care about the dust I'd forgotten about on the coffee table, or worry about what was going to come out of my mom's mouth. I just didn't care.

So, we survived the earthquake. And maybe what I thought was important, wasn't.

*I am reliably informed now that diving under the table in an earthquake is a Very Bad Thing unless said table is uber sturdy. Our table is nearly 65 years old and, so far as I know, has lived in southern California its entire life. So, I think it could handle being an earthquake shelter in a pinch. Though next time, I think I'll just run out into the parking lot or something.

About Me

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Wife, mom of a preemie, follower of the old ways, lover of anything Irish or Celtic, history buff, trivia nut, Star Trek and Ren Faire geek and costuming fiend. Offer me coffee or chocolate and world peace is assured. Or at least I'll try really hard. :) I also believe in deleting spam. So, to the person or persons who keep leaving me comments in Chinese (along with links to what I can clearly tell are Chinese porn sites) stop it. It's bad karma, to say nothing of being really, really rude.

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