figure it out

I always schedule myself to go run errands on Saturdays, but actually, what I want to do is hibernate after a long week. Particularly today. Last night I realized that water was POURING from the ceiling onto my kitchen floor. Ran up the stairs….Oh, no, it’s pouring through the ceiling!! Ran up the stairs to the attic: No obvious water, but the site of the water seemed to be awfully close to the air conditioning units. Ergo, I turned them off and waited. The water stopped, and I spend 2 hours mopping it up (there was about 2 inches). There was nothing else to do but tough it on the couch downstairs, with the ceiling fan going. I woke up feeling like an unhappy pretzel with a cat on her back.

Benny, my friendly A/C guy, came right over today after my frantic late night phone call. He had it fixed in a couple of hours (I love this man. I’d marry him for his A/C, plumbing, and repair skills if he’d have me). He just shook his head and gently reminded me to clean my units twice a year.

Things I never learned while growing up. Dang!

It is really essential to balance giving to myself vs. giving to others.

This is pretty obvious, but I realized today how imbalanced I was. I was pushed into an early morning appt I couldn’t keep….was late for another one that was really important…ran between appts trying to eat on the run (and I’m diabetic, so eating is important), skipped afternoon snack while teaching vigorously (bc I love it, but still), and then answered questions for my scared TA, who just needs a bit of experience.

Driving to get my daughter after work, I felt like a wrung-out sponge. nothing there.

It is important to slow down….limit commitments….set limits….eat…..roast beef, not cookies on the run…..read…...and ignore multiple demands that could drive me crazy. I am as important as all these things. If I don’t treat myself like that, there is no one to keep me going.

Now. I’m going to bed and try to unwind…..

He called to let me know that my younger brother, C, did go into the hospital about a week ago. He stayed a week, but decided he wanted to go home for the Memorial Day weekend. So leaving was at least somewhat against medical advice, since I can’t imagine a substance-abuse program recommending that short a stay. But he got de-toxed, and my older brother said it sounded like he had a pretty good doctor who was on to him.

I just hope they have a powerful post hospitalization day treatment program. But then, would he work it? He has put aside almost everything in his life in order to work his job. Not that the job requires it: He just works to avoid thinking or feeling.

I have loved him for such a long time. He was hospitalized for alcoholism and drug use in his teens, and again in his early 20s when his use prompted an impulsive suicide attempt that could have been deadly. He has always hated treatment as evidence that he’s somehow “f**ked up,” in his words.

He suffered the worst of our parents. My older brother and I can remember some time when they were stable, but not C. He closed off and started doing damage to himself by the time he was 15. That’s also when our dad died.

I always wanted him to make it. I have cleaned this shacks he’s lived in, sent cookies when I couldn’t send money (bc of drugs), let him flop at my place, arranged his Christmases, and remembered all his birthdays. I’ve told him about my therapy and been willing to let him see my pains and mistakes. I’ve tried to include him in my life with the kids, who are so angry with him now for what he’s doing.

I don’t know how I could have turned a blind eye to his level of impairment. I knew he was having several beer a day, which I hate, because of his Hep C. I won’t keep alcohol in the house, which he handles by bringing his own. THAT should have tipped me off.

But he’s managed for so long, I had no idea it was this bad. I just really, really hope he gets help. I know he can’t do this alone.

has Al-Anon meetings. I’m thinking it may be helpful to go, something I’ve never done in my life. Because this is so complex to deal with—my love for my brother and my fear for him and my anger at him, and my distance now from him.

It makes me incredibly sad, although I have to say, every time something like this happens, it seems like I can cope with it more clearly, if you know what I mean.

I’ve been thinking about calling him daily, even knowing that he most likely won’t answer the phone for me.

I’ll say one thing: At least I didn’t marry a substance abuser. Thank God. Pattern broken in at least one place.

M came over this morning and let me help her with a manuscript she’s writing for a couple of hours. I know it sounds geeky, but it really cheered me up; I like feeling useful, and this is an easy way for me to help her. Then I had a quick meeting with a student and a longish faculty meeting. Then a meeting with all my students who went to Ireland with me….which turned into a story-fest. So all-in-all it was a much, much better day.

Tonight Son-child had a sports banquet, to which I went with him. It was really relaxing to sit with the other parents and watch him hang out with his buddies. He was in a much more relaxed mood, so I felt less angst about being around him.

Now off to bed, thanking my lucky stars for short-lived bad moods…

I’m verging on not functional here. I just couldn’t get up this morning, and all day I felt like I was in a fog. Finally I called M, my closest friend, who could hear it in my voice. Nuff said.

We met at Starbuck’s and talked for a couple of hours. Then I went over to her place and got to see her mom, which always makes me feel better. I think I can do better tomorrow. I hope every day is better.

This is a week loaded for bear, though. My ex-in-laws are in town for my son’s graduation, and he is with my Ex this week. Which means I really won’t play any role in these festivities. Although I like Ex’s new wife, his mother is one of the most hateful people I’ve ever met in my life, and it’s better for all if I don’t have to see her. Since they will all be together, and I’m alone, it’s awkward at best.

Given that I am alone, and boy-child and girl-child aren’t exactly thinking about me at this moment, I’m thinking I will give up on all this crud. I mean, I’ll go to his graduation, but then I’ll get out of there before Ex-mom-in-law from hell can start in on me. In fact, I can probably slip in and out without anyone seeing me. I don’t much care if Son-child sees me or not—it seems unlikely in his current mood that it will matter much to him. If I could, I’d play it another way, and take a friend with me, but M is busy and my other best friend is not available on Saturdays. Ergo: Mom on my own.

The best thing would be to go from there straight to the barn and ride like there is no tomorrow.

on the off-chance that he reads it.

“Sorry. I needed some time offline as well.

I heard you got back okay. I hope you’re doing better now and back at work.

Regardless of where things are for you this week, you know you have serious problems with alcohol and drugs, right? D told me about what happened several months ago. It helped make sense of your blackouts for what you’d said and done in Ireland.

You have got to get help for this, C. I don’t think it’ll go away without treatment. I won’t think the worse of you for getting treatment. But you need treatment and deserve it.

I cannot be around someone who is drunk. Call it an effect of growing up with Mom and Dad, but I just can’t do it. If you continue this way, you will lose our relationship. You’ll also lose boy-child and girl-child, because I can’t run the risk of your drinking like that around them.

We all three love you very much. I don’t want to lose my relationship with you at all, but it hurts too much to be treated like that. I hope you go into a hospital program and deal with the hurt that I know is there. I will always love you, but I have to love you from a distance when you are drinking.

Sherlock”

The bizarre stresses of the last couple of days just hit me upside the head like a ton of bricks. I’m not usually one to just sit in a crisis, but since there’s nothing I can do about my brothers and there’s nothing I can do about the legal system and there’s nothing I can do about boy-child being so detached at the moment…..I just felt frozen.

I should have gone riding. I felt incredibly tired, though, just exhausted from the whole cosmic mess. My brain wouldn’t work.

I’m praying that this is a short-lived thing, this muggly-ness, and that I will get up and charge about accomplishing things tomorrow. Perhaps it’s not such a bad thing to just stay in a corner and lick your wounds for one day after the world has been beating up on you.

I feel like I’m losing too much—my son (self-centered as he is right now) going off to college, my brothers and I on the verge of another extended relationship freeze-out, and my daughter caught up in the frenzy of almost high school. Where do I fit in anymore? What if I don’t? What if I’ve built my life around people who are leaving me?

If there’s a finer statement of a mid-life crisis, I haven’t heard it. You’d think I’ve stayed home with these children all my adult life. It must be very hard for women who have. Or maybe they are comforted by having a husband who adores them, or just talks to them as they are getting ready for bed at night. I talk to my computer. I feel…......superfluous.

So after I got back from Scotland I called my older brother to tell him about what happened in Ireland. He admitted, then, that my younger bro had called him several months ago in an alcoholic meltdown. Apparently he was having digestive problems that prevented his ingestion of alcohol; as a result, he had gone into delerium tremens and was hallucinating.

My older brother is a psychiatrist and a former drug/alcohol addict himself. He took a friend, drove several hours down there, and apparently detoxed by younger brother (not the best thing, to practice medicine on your family). Then he talked to my brother’s internist and went with him to several AA meetings, as well as providing info on a local inpatient program.

Then he went home and didn’t talk with younger bro at all. And didn’t tell me, because younger bro didn’t want me to know he’d “messsed up.”

I get so tired of the secrecy in my family. This has happened when my father was hospitalized (at least 2x), my mother (at least 2x), by older brother (at least 2x) and my younger brother (at least 2x).

Obviously, I wouldn’t have taken him to the drinking capital of the universe if I’d know he was in that shape!!!!

I explained that to older bro, but he doesn’t get it—he is out to save the universe. Not to worry my little head….I don’t need to contact younger bro….he’ll handle it all. Yeah. Just like he did last time.

Oh, and I need to be suitably sympathetic to younger bro. Which I find a little funny, in a very, very sad way. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of an addict going into treatment because they felt people were sympathizing with them. Usually they go into treatment when they’ve driven everyone away and there are no alternatives.

This was all in the hypothetical, of course. We couldn’t reach younger bro all weekend at all, so it wasn’t clear whether he came back from Scotland. Yesterday older bro finally got him to answer the phone. He was dead drunk. Sadly, as soon as he got back, his cat was eaten by a cyote (sp?) in front of him. I just can’t imagine much more awful, since that cat was one of the few sources of affection for him right now.

Older bro said he was planning to go to work on Monday. We’ll see. I wish I had the number of his supervisor or friends. I’m going to try to email him, when I’ve got myself a little more together.

My brother, the one who shunned me a year or so ago, and I met up in Ireland and had planned to finish the rest of our trip together. I’ve worked hard to repair our relationship and this trip meant a lot to me.

The first 3 days or so were fine. But on the fourth, he started acting really strange. He was withdrawn, irritable, but wouldn’t tell me what was wrong. We went to a couple of museums, and he kept literally walking away from me, so that I had to keep finding him, taking away from my enjoyment of the experience. Through lunch, he barely spoke to me.

That night we were flying to Endinburgh. At the airport, he walked away from me, muttering that he would meet me at the gate. We were 3 hours early, so I just spent most of the time at the gate.

He didn’t show up. I was really worried, but my cell phone wasn’t working, so I couldn’t reach him. I got on the plane, and finally, at the last minute, he got on and sat away from me. I dove back into the book I was reading, reassurred that he was there.

The next thing I knew, the flight attendant was announcing that we were late getting out of the gate because a man got sick and had to deplane. I looked up and thought I saw the back of my brother’s head, so I stopped worrying. But later in the flight, I looked again, and wasn’t so sure the person I was looking at was him.

It wasn’t. When we reached Scotland, I watched everyone deplane and realized my brother wasn’t there. When I talked with the flight attendant, she was shocked that he had a sister on the flight, because he’d not said a thing about a family member. She said the ground staff had determined he was drunk, and the captain made the decision to get him off the plane. All they knew was that he was acting extremely drunk.

They helped me call him—and yes, without a doubt, he was drunk. He was slurring his words while he was talking to me, an hour later, and his perception of what was happening was way off-base. He said he wasn’t drunk; he’d just had a darvon and an ambien and a valium while having a beer before the flight. I told him I was shocked by his judgment, and he went off on me, telling me off for things that didn’t even make sense. Frankly, I just hung up the phone. Talking to him in that state didn’t make any sense.

So I found a taxi alone, at midnight, and made it to our hotel. I told the manager what had happened, and asked that they notify me if he showed up. A few minutes later the manager called me—my brother had called and said to tell me he wasn’t coming to Endinbough. Frankly, I slept more peacefully, knowing he wasn’t going to continue this saga.

I slept too soon, apparently. He called early the next morning, spoke to the manager again, and said he was flying to Glasgow and would take a train to Edinburgh. I just waited, too scared to leave the apartment.

He showed up at about 1:00 pm. He was still drunk—or perhaps drunk again. Angry at me for not “understanding” all that he’d been through, he started in on me. Something in me snapped, and I told him I wasn’t going to stay in that room with him, and I began to pack. I had completely packed before he announced that he would find another place to stay instead of me! Great. I unpacked. This is insane.

I talked again with the managers, and they were incredibly supportive. I had a brief, stormy cry, and then pulled myself together for some sight-seeing. I wasn’t going to let him rob me of another day of my vacation.

The rest of the story tomorrow, when I’m more awake!