Yeah, this has not been a good month

Can we get a do-over?  Just the from Setember 15 until now, please.  Can you manage that, universe?  

No?  Well, damn.  Then help me figure out this mess of crap you've piled in my lap, okay?  

Apparently, my job doesn't think my family and the life of my husband is more important that my continued productivity.  As you can imagine, I've been a bit preoccupied.  Productive isn't a word I'd use to describe me right now.  So, I'm being let go.  For real.  No job.  That means there are two of us, both healing, both hurting, and not a single job.  No health insurance.  

I'm scared.  I'm humiliated.  I feel defeated.  

I haven't been the world's best employee.  There are things I'd change.  I know that.  I made mistakes.  But the lack of empathy for a person and their real-person life from my company just hurts.  I've been there over three years.  I've done good work.  

Seriously, about that do-over?  Can you think about it again, universe?

A Week in Paradise

Life goes on. And on. We all must figure out how to go on within it.

To that end, we took a week just to be. To be together. To be alone. To be happy.

I'm not ready for this week to end (though I am still working--this would be much more relaxing if my work didn't keep enticing me back to the computer screen. I should be grateful, and I am, but if I am truthful, I'm also a bit spiteful.) There is a garden to be harvested, bursting with tomatoes, pumpkin, squash, raspberries, potatoes. There are grapes begging to be plucked off the vines. Juice and jellies to be made, pies to be eaten. Leaves to gather and woods to be hiked through, sheep to be watched and dogs to chase balls. A certain tot's grandparents to take care of us all.

Real life is waiting for us at home, but for now, we're relishing the fall; the beauty, the primal work, the bounty and the colors.

It feels good.

Sofia is beaming. At first her molars (damn the molars! ) caused her to wake hourly at night, and she could sense all the upheaval that had been our life. Now, she's walking everywhere, completely given up crawling. The Grandpa she'd been suspicious of since birth is now her best buddy. She loves watching the sheep and has figured out how to throw a ball for the dog. She's eating raspberries direct from the garden and discovered that she adores cherry tomatoes.

Life is good. [pictures to follow]

Hiding in Plain Sight

Know how life bumbles along and bumbles along, and things like politics and clean laundry and a dog-hair-free floor seem to matter until all of a sudden something cataclysmic happens and the world just stops and the only thing that matters is that the person you love keeps breathing?  Yeah, it has been that kind of week.

For the most part, I haven't talked about it.  But then, that is the problem, isn't it?  There is this hidden illness that nobody talks about but so many confront every day.  This disease that kills and maims and reduces life to misery and is very, very real.  It's been a part of my life since I met my husband, much as he and I both tried to sweep it under the rug.  And it became very, very real to us both a week ago last Thursday.

Depression.  For so long, I just didn't understand.  Perhaps I still don't.   But until people open up and talk about it like they do any other disease (diabetes, cancer, heart failure) wonderful people like my husband will go without help, not understanding themselves, and not understood by those who love them most. 

We tried.  For years, we tried.  I asked Julio to get help.  I begged him to talk to someone other than me.  "Choose happiness", I'd say.  "Home is where you are", I'd blabber.

But I completely missed the point. 

He could no more choose happiness than a patient with leukemia can just tell all those blasts where to go.

After a few years, he finally relented and sought help.  Only, the help he got wasn't enough.  The meds were working, but none of us; not his doctors, not me, not even himself took it seriously enough.  We didn't talk about it outside our family.  We kept it hidden, attempted to deal with its ramifications all by ourselves. 

Until we couldn't.  

We can't not talk about it anymore.  We can't keep it between us, and take the medications as prescribed.  They aren't enough.  We're fighting, but the disease is fighting back.  

September 19th at 10:30 pm, I thought it had won.  It tried to take his life, and so very nearly succeeded.  

But we prevailed.  Life and love and luck and medicine came through.  His life was saved thanks to the ICU and ventilators.  And now, we're talking about it.  Too many people suffer, too many families hide in shame, pretending everything is okay, that no disease clouds their lives.  It is time to bring this very real disease, with its very real life-threatening complications out of hiding so that it can be vanquished and controlled.  

Julio wants to live.  He wants to get better.  He does not want this disease to permeate our lives, tear us apart, isolate us from those we love.  He's fighting back, and I'm alongside of him.  We're not doing it alone.  We can't.