This All Seems So Familiar

An awareness has been swirling around in my head and heart for quite a few days now and I have not wanted to give it voice. You know what happens when you do that - it becomes real and you have to feel whatever is attached to the awareness. What finally pushed me over the edge from 'maybe this is what is going on' to 'oh no this IS what is going on' was a blog someone wrote. The blog was about how people change so much when serious illness or an accident happens and they are never the same on the outside but they are still the same on the inside. Now mind you I have no idea if that is what the blog really said but that is what I heard.

Of course I posted a comment to the blog in my most Flicka, there is a pony in all this manure personality. I meant what I said 100%. Absolutely. I almost made a clean get away...

Then I thought about my father. My father is gone. I don't mean he is dead. I mean that my father, the man I grew up with and loved, adored, respected and sometimes hated and resented is gone. I was daddy's girl, then went through a stage with him where we fought all time. He was sarcastic, condescending, and demeaning. Then mom died and in the last eleven years everything healed and he became my hero ago. And heroes are not suppose to get sick or die.

He had a TIA in May and he slips away more everyday. What is left is a fragile, confused, distant, and still funny, little old man. A little old, fragile man who probably needs to be in an assisted living facility or a nursing home but he is in California and I am in Texas and it makes avoiding the inevitable easier - for both of us.

I don't want to do this again. I went through it with my mother eleven years ago and it hurt more than I thought it was possible to bear. It never occurred to me that I might have to go through the exact same thing with my father - talk about denial.

But I will go through it and I will try and be as present and loving to him as I know how. I can't even imagine how terrified he must be to have his life slip away and to be powerless to stop it. I hope his fear goes away soon. I will be glad when I don't have to remember to breath.

I have a mantra that I use: 'Nobody's parents live forever.'

The adult woman, the grown up daughter in me, thinks this logical and sensible. The little girl in me wants to lay down and cry.

Virginal Experience

I love virginal experiences. The sense of excitement, mixed with a little fear, when you do something for the very first time. I have always wanted to write - more than that I have always wanted to communicate what matters to me, what touches, makes me laugh, cry. I thought about starting a blog but I kept seeing that wagging finger. You know the one that can also talk and says 'who do you think you are?' Well, I bit that *!#@& finger right off thank you very much. So get ready...