Sandra Tayler's Blog, page 94

The Smell of Lilac

My house smells of lilacs. I need to remember this because it is a lovely thing. The bushes are blooming outside our window and a fan brings the smell into the house. I need this small loveliness because I haven’t yet unpacked the emotional baggage from my trip, and there is no time to unpack it because this week is full of things all of which are four days behind schedule. And new things keep showing up. We’ll muddle through. For now, lilacs.

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In My Absense

The fear is that when I step out of my regular life, stop doing all the things I do daily, that everything will fall apart. Sometimes it does happen that way. I go out for an evening and get endless calls on my cell phone to mediate conflicts between siblings. After the fourth call I begin to wonder why I bothered to leave. Lately this has not happened. Lately, I go out for an evening and no one calls me. I’m not sure if this is because the kids are getting older or if the careful shifts I’ve made in the last year have helped the kids learn self sufficiency. All I know is that I’ve been gone for two days and my family back home is drawing together instead of falling apart.

Howard helped Kiki draft a bill for her Gov and Cit class. Link hauled out his Pokemon cards and has been teaching Gleek and Patch how to play. Kiki got herself up at 6 am this morning, cleaned the kitchen, then drove herself over to the school to matte pictures with her art teacher. Howard finished all his work despite being time-restricted by carpool duties and space restricted because my computer is currently residing on his drawing table. They all have a plan for today which involves an outing together. All of them are learning and growing as the cooperate to fill the gap I left. All of us will be really glad to have me return again on Sunday

It shows me, once again, that sometimes the most important thing I can do for my kids is to get out of the way and let them overcome by themselves. I’m certain there have been conflicts and crankiness. I know that the longer I’m gone, the more chances there will be for everything to fall apart. Things fall apart often enough when I’m there. I’m glad that I get to hear the happy stories and that all the conflicts are already resolved. Being in California continues to be hard. Hospitals always are and I spent nine hours with Grandma yesterday. Coming home to my parents house is not the same as going home to mine. But after talking with Howard and the kids this morning I begin to see that spending time with Grandma is not the only good thing which will come from this trip.

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Grandma in the Hospital

If you’ve ever seen the movie Driving Miss Daisy, that’s a good place to start for picturing my grandma. She’s a feisty, cranky, southern lady who is accustomed to giving orders and having them obeyed. Only now she’s ninety-two years old and in a hospital where decisions are made for her all day long. She doesn’t have the physical strength to resist anything. We’re all glad to see her crankiness resurface. It means she is feeling better. For five minutes at a time she’ll tell us that hospitals make people sick and we should just take her home, there is nothing wrong with her. My mother repeats what she’s said multiple times per day, that we’ll take her home as soon as the doctor allows. Then Grandma’s gaze sharpens for a moment and she says. “He’s just a little doctor. Beat him up and take me home.” Then the sharpness fades, her head drops back to the pillow and she is asleep again, exhausted by her own wilfulness.

Mother and I sit in silence while Grandma sleeps. We don’t want to talk and wake her up. If she does hear us talking, she’ll want to know what we’re saying. Then we have to speak loudly and in short sentences so she can hear. Even then, most things are too complicated for Grandma to retain. I tried to show her a flooring sample from my office and she seemed to think I was telling her that it was a toy building block, that I was going to be making and selling toys now. The conversation about my book went better. I gave her a copy of Cobble Stones, fresh from the printer. She petted it with her hands, so pleased to hold a book that I wrote. Grandma was my first paying market for writing; a penny per word for any story I wrote. Grandma opened the pages and looked over the words, running her fingers along them. “I’ll read it later.” she said, “When my eyes are working better.”

Grandma argues with my Mom. My mother is the caretaker, the one who is constantly trying to get Grandma to take pills, do physical therapy, telling her she has to stay in the hospital. Grandma doesn’t argue with me. I am a grandchild and thus cherished. My coaxing to get Grandma to eat results in her eating, one wobbly spoonful at a time. The worst argument she gives me is an eye roll. We’re pleased that I get her to eat three quarters of a pudding cup and six bites of mashed potatoes. Later, Grandma tells the nurse about how I badgered her into eating, but she’s doing it happily; bragging about her granddaughter who can make a cranky old lady eat. Grandma calls herself a cranky old lady sometimes. Other times she is convinced that her hair is still brown, that she is completely well, and that there is just a conspiracy to keep her in the hospital so that the hospital employees can have jobs. Toward the end of the evening Grandma starts noticing my yawns. “You need to take that girl home and put her to bed.” She tells my mom, as if I’m still four-years-old and needing tending. “Then come back and get me out.” Grandma adds.

“Have you had breakfast?” Grandma asked at six p.m. Her long afternoon nap had confused her into thinking it was morning. I assured her it was dinner time and that I would go eat soon. We had the same conversation many times over the next hour. The late afternoon light from the window seemed like morning sunlight to her. We also told her what day it was and how long I would be staying. Once she counted the days from Thursday until Sunday on her fingers and I promised to come and visit her every day. Hospitals are time vortexes. She’s been in one for 18 days now, this particular confusion is completely understandable. Most of our conversations are five minutes or less before Grandma drifts to sleep again. But twice during my time there Grandma was alert and focused for ten minutes. I told her about my kids, showed her pictures. I gave her the painting that Kiki made for her and the colorful hat that Gleek made. We took pictures of her wearing the hat. Grandma smiled and asked questions about how old they are and how tall. I held her hand and we talked for awhile. Then the nurse arrived to give Grandma a breathing treatment. Hopefully the treatments will help stop the rattling rasp Grandma makes with every breath.

Being here is very hard. It is also good. Three more days to go.

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A Trip, A River, and Painting Wood Trim

I’m getting on a plane tomorrow. This was not in my plans for the week, but my plans don’t matter so much when my Grandma goes back to the hospital. My brain is a mess of simultaneous thoughts.

I want to go hug my grandma. I want to be there for my parents and offer emotional support because they’ve been helping Grandma with medical stuff for years and the last two weeks have been particularly draining.

I don’t want to go anywhere. I want to be here at my house with my people. I want my office put back together and life to be nicely routine.

I wish the plane ticket were not so expensive, particularly in a month when our finances are in a lull and I’ve just spent piles of money on an unfinished office remodel.

I feel like I’m over reacting. Perhaps hopping on a plane to go visit is more than this particular medical adventure calls for.

I’m aware that even if there is no hurry, this trip has value. Seeing loved ones is always a good thing, because time is short and Grandma is ninety-two.

I keep looking at the calendar and wondering if I’ll need to shoehorn a funeral into it somewhere. Then I feel guilty that the auto-scheduler in my brain instantly calculates when such an event would be most convenient.

I wander upstairs to look at my sleeping kids who don’t know yet that I’ll be leaving while they’re at school. I feel guilty that all my usual carpool, homework, and bedtime responsibilities will be dumped on Howard. Part of my brain frets that he won’t handle it right, because that part of my brain is convinced that my way is “right” while another part of my brain knows full well that he can manage anything.

I don’t want to go. I expect the trip to be emotionally grueling. I’ll spend most of it in a hospital with Grandma and I don’t like hospitals.

I know that going is really important. I knew it this morning when the thought rolled over me like a wave. I knew it even more when Howard said that he felt the same. No matter how I feel about all of it, going is the right choice.

Over and through all the other thoughts, I’m aware of a deep river of emotion that I can sense only vaguely. I’m pretty sure the river is grief. I’m grieving for a death which has not happened yet, but that I know will come. Along with it I’m grieving the impermanence of life and the fact that normal is a fragile state. Grief is big, unmanageable, unpredictable. I don’t want it. Sometime that river is going to rise up and flood me. I don’t know when. I don’t know what debris I’ll find when the flood has passed. All day long my internal mental topography has shaped itself around that river trying to avoid the flood. I have things to do, decisions to make. Wood trim to paint.

Yes. I spent most of today painting wood trim for my office. It needed to be done so that the trim can be hung on Friday. Of all the things on my list it is probably the easiest thing to delay. But it was a manual task with no emotional baggage whatsoever. I could focus all my mental energy on moving my brush smoothly across the wood. And after fifteen or thirty minutes the piece of trim would be done. Piece after piece I could track my progress, visual evidence of tasks completed. In contrast, packing is more important and urgent, but littered with emotional landmines that could blast holes for the river to flood through. I will leave tomorrow with six pieces of incomplete trim. Kiki will finish them in my absence, or she won’t, and either way the result will be fine.

For now I need to go to bed and try not to think to much, because even my most insistent thoughts can’t make the impending flood disappear, not even by telling me I ought to feel differently. Tomorrow I will get up and I will use my to do list to navigate my way onto a plane. Somehow the doing of things is less difficult than anticipating them.

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Working in Exile

I did not expect how neurotic I would get when my office was disassembled. I still had work to do, but most of my tools were in boxes. It made me randomly cranky, which the kids did not appreciate. Fortunately Howard donated his drawing table as a makeshift computer desk. For the next week we’ll be sharing an office. It has been eight years since we last shared an office. We’re pretty good at sharing things after 19 years of shared life, shared house, shared children. Yet I miss having my own space. In a week my space will be nicer than it has ever been. Then I’ll be ready to arrange it so that I can share it with guests, Kiki’s art projects, craft space, etc. For now, I need to figure out how to get my work done when my workspace is new and distracting. Also I need to stop being distracted by the possibilities of wood trim and paint.

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Little Things

During our vacation trip we went to both Goblin Valley State Park and Arches National Park. These places are known for their stunning large scenery. The scale of things is amazing and encourages photography. Everyone snaps pictures, trying to capture in a still shot the scale of what they are seeing. Or sometimes they take pictures of each other in front of these huge structures as if to document that they really were there. Among the 500 pictures we took of the parks, we have lots of these shots. Howard took lots of pictures of rock textures which he’ll use later for art projects. Kiki took lots of landscape and gnarled tree pictures as reference for future art. I took some landscape shots, but mostly I took pictures of the kids, trying to capture them as they are right now. However I also found myself drawn to tiny things, the small details which are often missed in the grandeur of the landscape.

Goblin Valley was all sand and rock. The sand formed a crust under our feet that sometimes cracked into miniature canyons and boulders. I pondered as I looked, the weather processes necessary to re-create this crust time and again despite the hundreds of thousands of human feet that trample across it every year.

Along the sides of the rock formations were mudslides in miniature. Wind threw coated the sandstone with dust, then rain would cause it to slide and cling.

Goblin Valley was mostly devoid of life. We did find a few plants with flowers up a side canyon. As I admired the tenacity of these flowers to survive in such circumstances, something bright blue buzzed past me. It was a bee. I spent several minutes attempting to capture a picture of him, I never did catch the bright blue one. The one I did manage to photograph was more gray than blue.

Another thing which amazed me about Goblin Valley was the way that it made us seem small. The goblin formations did not look all that large on first glance, but they dwarfed us all once we were among them and climbing. Then of course there was the sky. Enough sky can make anything seem small.

Arches had far more life in it than Goblin Valley. We hiked among desert plants and watched crows soar above our heads. The mammals were hidden away from the squalls which dampened our hiking trail, but we saw signs of them. Spring is a lovely time to visit the desert. It blooms.

There was something wonderful about hiking just after a rainstorm. The ground soaked up the water quickly, leaving only a few puddles nestled in the concavities of rock. Link took it as his personal mission to stomp in as many of these puddles as possible. I was fascinated that the water only penetrated the top lair of sand on the trail. Our footsteps exposed dry sand underneath the wet. The plants were lovely washed clean of dust.

Most of my travels through the parks were occupied with keeping track of my kids or marveling at things on a grand scale, but every so often it was nice to notice the little things

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Returning Home

The house feels large after the coziness of a condo. The six of us can scatter one to a room and we’d still have rooms empty. The condo forced us into togetherness–four kids to one bedroom with a single room for cooking eating and relaxing. Over the long haul that small space would create all sorts of stress and friction, but for a vacation it was perfect. In the last moments before we locked the condo and left, I looked around the spaces where we’d spent four days. Partly I was looking for stray items, but I was also committing the place to memory. I was sad to leave, which is probably a sign that we’d found a good vacationing place. It is one we’ll be glad to return to next year. We’re trying a several-year-long experiment of returning to the same vacation location. This was year two. The familiarity of the location reduced several vacation stressors. We’ll see if repeat visits create a comforting vacation fabric or if we’ll need to change destinations in order to attain the same stepping-out-of-regular-life quality which is essential for vacationing.

Perhaps the house feeling large has to do with the quantity of responsibilities contained inside as much as the spaces. Cooking in the condo felt a bit like playing house. I got to open cupboards and discover resources. It was a bit like a scavenger hunt. I need to make scrambled eggs and pancakes, what available tools can I turn to that purpose? Here at home my eyes are always snagging on things to do. Every room has associated tasks. On Monday our regular lives will return in full force. I view that approach with neither dread nor anticipation. For now I am content to coast on the last edges of vacationing.

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The Next Seven Weeks

In the next seven weeks we have:

re-building the shipping system

all the end-of-school activities of which I've not yet been notified

advance copies of Sharp End of the Stick (SEOS)

a school art gala

opening pre-orders for SEOS

Kiki's AP art portfolio

receiving the SEOS shipment

teaching at LDS Storymakers conference

sending me to the Nebula weekend in DC

a time-swap week during which Gleek will pretend to be living in a pre-computer era

sending Howard to World Steam Expo in Ann Arbor

a dance festival

a week long visit from my mom

office remodeling

unspecified child crises which will pop up randomly and inconveniently

field day

preparations for Deep South Con in June

All of those things are important, as are preparations for GenCon and WorldCon. But this week contains the most important event of the entire year. This is when Howard and I gather the kids and flee our work to go do nothing in particular in southern Utah. The only agenda is to be together. Hopefully fun will be had, but even if crankiness is had, that is fine. Uninterrupted time together is the point.

As for the other stuff, I'm not particularly stressed about it all. I can see where everything fits. It is going to be busy, but not crazy. I hope.

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Brief updates

Copy edits for Cobble Stones are done. I've got a cover draft done. Schlock book layout is done. Up ahead are Cobble Stones back cover copy, Cobble Stones page layout, preparation and packing for a family trip. This next week is spring break. It is going to be an internet light week for me. I've got to meet deadlines and then spend focused time with family. Our trip location does have internet, but I'll have to access it via my phone, which doesn't allow blogging, or via my little laptop, which is currently limping along. When I get back from the trip I'll probably have lots to say and some lovely pictures to go with the words.

In other news: my grandma is doing well. She's been moved from the hospital into a rehabilitation facility where they'll be helping her practice walking on her newly-pinned and healing leg. She'll probably be back at my parent's house in two weeks. The customs issue is completely resolved and the packages delivered. Patch's book project is complete and turned in. The kid drama has also calmed down considerably. Having a week off from school is going to be really good for everyone.

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Tiny Pretty Things

These blue flowers are a weed. I find them most often in the cracks along the edges of my driveway. Tiny and beautiful, they thrive even though no one particularly wants them there and even though the conditions around them are adverse to growth. I can love that sort of flower.

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