story of a friendship...part 3

So life went on, back east and out west.  Our children grew taller and looked so grown up.  We marveled at them and loved them.  Our conversations gradually went from wading through pain in the aftermath of Jack‘s death, back to the day-to-day happenings of life; and as we talked, we again were struck by similarities...our little boys (who happened to be only a few months apart in age) getting into the same types of mischief, the same colds and flu bugs seeming to strike at similar times as if we could pass them to each other over the phone.  I began to hear happy voices in the background again when I talked to Anne.  Childhood’s resilience was kind to her babies...they learned to laugh again, although I would see a depth and maturity in their eyes later that I knew spoke of sorrow.  On the whole, they all seemed to be adjusting well to life in their new home.  Finally, Anne had a phone plan with the same company I had.  It was great--we could talk when we wanted to without worrying about using up too many minutes on our respective phone plans, or confining our conversations till after 9 pm or on weekends.  We took advantage of this new freedom--we could talk more than once a week without sacrificing sleep or time needed for caring for our families.

We shared the dubious privilege of more health problems than the usual, for our relatively young ages--late 20‘s, early 30‘s.  Some of the things we suffered were similar, some were totally different.  (At least we knew we weren’t mirror images of each other.)  I began to be very concerned as i listened to increasing pain and weakness in Anne’s voice when we talked.  It became a regular thing.  This was not the emotional pain and grief that I knew from earlier (although that still came up at times); this was physical.  I knew she had had surgery in childhood to correct a severe spinal curvature, and now daily lived with pain from the rods that had been placed in her spine then.  But this was different from the usual.  There was something very wrong. 

My gut feeling was correct--something was quite wrong.  After a bit of a runaround, she finally found a doctor who she was comfortable with and who seemed to take her seriously.  If I could hear that something was so wrong, over all those miles between us on the phone, how could a doctor sitting in the room with her, and having the advantage of today’s medical care and testing, continually brush it off?  But her persistence paid off, and she was finally scheduled for much needed surgery.  Her choice of doctors proved to be a wise one as well; after surgery he informed her that it was a complicated procedure.  He found he needed to remove masses of tangled blood vessels which had been spontaneously bleeding into her abdomen; then he was able to repair and remove the worst of the damage.  I was vastly relieved at how much better she sounded afterwards. 

Meanwhile, back east, I was facing my own joys and challenges.  Allow me to backtrack a bit. 

My husband had promoted to the rank of sergeant back in 2009...Merry Christmas to me. 

I knew he had not been sure of how he would do on the sergeant’s test.  He had taken it once before; and, while he earned a respectable score, he knew that it was likely not high enough to earn a promotion.  He said it wasn’t a big deal to him--he enjoyed the job he was currently doing.  He had just wanted to see what kind of a score he got.  I was proud of him no matter what.  In the job he was doing at the time, he was earning a solid reputation for common sense and fairness with a low tolerance for nonsense and manipulative head games.  But for his sake, it angered me that a good man could not get a promotion based on his abilities and worth on the job. 

So when he tested again, just to see how he would do, neither of us expected much. 

A few weeks later, when we had almost forgotten to be curious about his test score; a plain white, rather unassuming envelope arrived in the mail holding a rather momentous piece of paper.  Not only had he done well, he had gotten the highest score for the entire county.  The unassuming white piece of paper ranked his score against the other scores in the group that tested...how many tested higher than he did; and how many tested lower.  In the “number who tested higher” column, there was a fat little zero.  I was so happy for him.  I knew he was good at what he did, but now it would be next to impossible for the powers that be to turn a blind eye to it. 

At the tail end of the opening of Christmas presents that year--after the childish glee was somewhat muted and most of the tissue paper and bows were picked up, he presented me with a small ring box.  I wasn’t sure what to expect--money was a bit tight and I hadn’t been expecting anything too expensive.  Jewelry?  But okay.  I popped the lid, and found lying on the velvet a small pair of chevrons--the “Sergeant’s Stripes” worn on the collar to denote rank.  I was thrilled. 

I was delighted for my husband‘s sake, but I also knew that my load would be heavier.  We were still homeschooling, which seemed to be the only way that our kids would have much time with their daddy now.  In his new job, he was now starting as low man on the totem pole of seniority.  With this came an evening shift position for an indefinite amount of time.  He would leave for work around lunch time and come home about 11 pm.  If the kids had been in school, they would have only seen him briefly in the mornings (if he dragged himself out of bed in time to see them off to school), and on his days off--some weeks “daddy time” would only be two short evenings in the middle of the week.  So homeschooling was certainly advantageous to us in that regard.  But in addition to carrying the majority of the load of schooling our children, I would now be almost solely responsible for evenings at home as well.  But, I was happy for my husband and optimistic about the future.  I would deal with the day’s work as it came along.  And back then, we were quite hopeful that in a year or two, he would work his way up the seniority list high enough to be awarded a day shift bid when one became available.  But there were no guarantees, no sure timetable.  It was ultimately out of our hands.


So I tried to adjust.  I tried to teach the kids to help me out around the house as much as possible.  I hired a neighbor’s teenage daughter, Emma, to help out one afternoon each week, for a while.  She was a good worker, a delightful kid, and will always have a special place in my heart.  (Time has flown by since then; and she is looking forward to getting married in a few months.  I have no doubt she will be a delightful and capable wife too.) 

But no matter how I tried to make this combination of evening shift and homeschooling work-able...I was still always tired.  Never caught up, and almost never a break.  My house was usually layered with dust and clutter in spite of Emma’s best efforts.  We were always in our house, always working on school, cooking meals, and just living there.  Someone once said that trying to clean with children underfoot is like trying to brush your teeth while eating oreos.  Nowhere is that more true than in the house of a homeschooling mother, and we were the poster children for it.

Never a quiet moment when kids were in school, hubby at work, and I could breathe freely.  I loved all so dearly...but I was suffocated.  I felt guilty for my frustration.  How many infertile couples would be glad to have 3 such lovely children?  How many jobless families would be glad their daddy had a job, any job, any shift?  How nice was it that I had a “maid” (as teenage girls who helped young moms were referred to in the conservative Mennonite circles that Emma and her family were part of).  Many of my other mom acquaintances expressed slight jealousy for my good fortune of hired help.    They didn’t see the constant pressure of our day-to-day life, and how Emma’s help was sometimes the thread holding my escaping sanity somewhat intact.

All of this added up to convince me I was being selfish and was definitely doing something wrong, since I couldn’t keep up with the daily demands of life without feeling overwhelmed.  Everywhere I turned, I found evidence that if I couldn’t keep up, it must be my fault.  I should learn to rearrange, to make it work.  There are lots of great homeschooling resources that put forth this outlook, coupled with lots of ideas to rearrange and make things work.  But none helped the situation I was in.  Rather, they just piled on the guilt because, slithered in between all the creative homeschooling ideas, there was also the reminder that it is always mom’s responsibility, mom’s fault, when the workload of homeschooling gets too heavy.

How could i cut out anything else?  Rearrange anything else?  Kids had to start school in the morning, or we would be at it all evening.  Besides, evenings were for sports or church activities.  If i cut those out, my homeschooled kids would be deprived of important social interaction with people.  And in the morning, I was trying to get morning school finished up with the kids at the same time as I was putting our main meal of the day on the table.  I wanted to send my husband to work with a good dinner under his belt.  He often got the short end of the stick when it came to my day--the least I could do was feed the guy.  But I couldn’t help being a little resentful at how difficult it was to do school with the kids, with Daddy underfoot.  Mornings were the kids’ only time to see him, and he is the head of the household as well...so his agenda usually took first place in the morning.  Again, I wasn’t sure what do differently under the circumstances...but it was a heavy load on my shoulders as I often had to play catch-up for the rest of the day when the morning’s schoolwork and housework had not gotten completed.

It was an exhausting pace.  And the next day, I got up wearily to start the process all over again.  When could I rest?  Sometimes I dropped off to sleep from sheer exhaustion while reading school material to the kids in the afternoon.  I tried to go to bed in a timely manner, but it was so tempting to enjoy a quiet house between the time that I put the kids to bed, and the time that dear hubby got home from work, that I was guilty of staying up later than I should have, much too often.  And even when i did go to bed early, it didn’t change the feeling of suffocation that followed me everywhere.  The structure of the day did not change; I had people underfoot from the time we got out of bed in the morning till the time I got them back in bed at night.  Once in a while I had a chance to have a few hours out.  It was nice, but it was a band-aid, not a solution to a structural problem. 

So for me, the next three years went by mostly in a blur, punctuated by events in other people‘s lives, and remembered when I look at the pictures I took during those years.  Sometime around the beginning of 2012, the blur began to darken.

I could blame it on the work load I carried.  I could blame it the discouragement of facing yet another surgery at the end of March, 2012; after I had thought I had put the majority of health problems behind me, as well as the possibility of any more pregnancies and deliveries (much as I loved my kiddos, the arrival of a new one was always difficult for me emotionally as well as physically, although I would never admit any possibility of postpartum depression at the time), after a hysterectomy in the summer of ‘09.  I could blame it on hormonal changes following all that.  I could blame it on the opiate painkillers that I took after the 2012 surgery.  I could blame it on genetics--there is a high incidence of mental illness running through my family...but wherever the blame lies, I was in a downward spiral.

I still kept a tight rein on how much of my inner self to reveal to anyone, even my husband.  I didn’t tell my hubby what I was experiencing until several weeks into it, when I was overwhelmed with pain which was largely mental and emotional, although residual surgical pain played a part as well.  He, of course, was completely supportive of this decision to shut him out.  On the bright spring morning that I sat in the dining room holding my hands to my head and telling him that I couldn’t stand to be inside my own mind, I believe his exact words were along the lines of, “Why the hell didn’t you tell me before it got to this point?”  (His job has made him refreshingly blunt of speech.  A person doesn‘t need to wonder where they stand...he will let you know.)  And I said something about there being nothing to be done about it anyway, since it was all in my head.  Of course I knew that it was simply a character flaw and a weakness I had to bring under control...well, actually, I now know that not to be true.  But at the time, I treated it as such; and when it began to subside, I took personal credit for having survived relatively unscathed.  (I was certainly a bit misled...as Anne later pointed out, “Who did you think you were, God?“  Well, not really...but I was having a bit of trouble with human limitations and reasonable expectations, to say the least.)  I slowly came out of it--one of my post-surgical pain meds had exacerbated the situation, although it was not the cause.  The onset of the depression had been some weeks before the surgery.  So I had a short reprieve before the next onset of blackness descended on my soul, and I fell apart again.  We went on in this fall-apart, pick-up-the-pieces fashion for the summer, with me feeling steadily more overwhelmed with life.  My parents and several of their church friends were involved in a serious vehicle accident in late summer, which resulted in the death of a close friend of my mother‘s.  These events also contributed to another downturn of my wider and wider mood swings.  Although, again, it did not cause the problem--just sent me spiraling downward in another round of a variation on the general theme of the spring and summer.

We finally hit a new low in early November which caused dearest hubby to lay down the law--send the two oldest kids to school.  No fuss, no argument, he was making the decision as a loving husband slowly driven crazy by his overwhelmed, and exhausted wife.  I was only too happy to agree, having gotten to the point where I was having a hard time getting through a day.  Panic attacks had overtaken most of my waking hours--which were many, as sleep was often elusive after 4 a.m.  Any tasks I got done needed to be tackled in minute portions--I couldn’t look at a sink full of dirty dishes.  I could wash one dish.  Then the next one.  It was not a fun way to live. 

I was ready to push the kids out the door onto the next bus that went by, hopefully one that was headed to a nice boarding school with a one-week summer vacation.  If I could have started them in school the next day, and had mostly peace and quiet thenceforth, I may have recovered quickly enough to have been able to keep shutting the rest of the world out, at least enough to hide the worst of what I was experiencing.  For the first time in my life, I also became open to the idea of pursuing medical treatment for this, pretty much only out of desperation.  I was hoping that I could quietly find a doctor, get some therapy or medication, and have life go on a bit more quietly in its new routine.  And hopefully very few, if any, of our friends and family would be the wiser.

But it was not to be.  Because of the upcoming Thanksgiving vacations coinciding with my reaching the end of my rope and needing to address these things; initiating both school entry for the kids and medical treatment for me became a long, drawn-out process.  In the meantime,  I was getting worse. 

Over the next weeks, Anne was my lifeline.  She had a way of pointing out that God still loved me even though I was failing at everything...being a mom, wife, friend (I was just not friendship material, remember?), homeschooling...all of it.  As I said before, God seemed to speak to each of us through the other.  I am convinced that God was whispering in her ear as we talked during those dark days, often telling her “this is what I want you to say to Rose, right now.“  I began to feel that I was still worth something.  And not only did God still want my friendship, she did too.  I knew my family loved me.  My husband loved me dearly and assured me that he wasn’t going anywhere.  My children loved me desperately, sometimes smotheringly.  I had supportive extended family.  But all of those close to me were tired from dealing with this, and often frustrated with me.  I didn’t blame them.  Many of my other friends had gone by the wayside, either by my choice or theirs.  I didn’t blame them either.  (Besides not being great “friendship material” to start with, hiding out in one’s house and shrinking away from human contact has a way of pushing people away...I was getting quite good at this.)  But this girl, she was still there.  There were 2000 miles between us.  She could have backed out and walked away from the stress that tends to follow the loved ones of someone with an anxiety and panic disorder.  But, in spite of how easy it would have been to tell me, “Take care, have a nice life,” she stuck by me.  She earned my fierce loyalty.