I did something about twenty minutes ago that I should have done two hours before--turn off the t.v. and political news and put on some nice Christmas music. I feel much better already. This is probably the biggest understatement I could begin with, but I am not gifted with great skill at waiting for answers so I listen to noise, both annoyed and distracted by it. I am choosing to become better at living with questions. I am not sure if it is because I have no choice but to do so or because I will go nuts if I don't. So I am living peacefully inside of several yet unanswered questions that have a profound effect on my future.
I have a pancreas inside my body that is non-functioning. I am having trouble finding words for the fear and dismay I feel about it, but believe me, it is there. I have learned (like a good academic) to adopt a certain dispassionate posture when I write, and can turn that tone on at will after many years of practice. While it is a functional strategy under many circumstances, it is not with matters of the heart. I am in fact a bit numb, the way my skin and nerves are when I prick my fingers several times a day hoping for a "good" glucose number and four other times in the same fourteen hours when I inject myself with the insulin my pancreas is not producing to help any nutrients I consume make their way into the cells that motor my nerves, muscles and other organs. Sleep frees me of these worries and irritating routines that keep me alive. Yet what it means to be alive is a little at issue here.
Don't get me wrong--I am grateful for my life and all it entails--even these current challenges. I just wish I could feel more. I have slipped into a well-practiced dispassion and traded it for adopting a one foot in front of the other mode of existence. I don't think that is "living" in the fullest sense of the word. I think I have too many years of practice trading my feelings for functioning. So here's what I'm afraid of. . . I am supposed to go teach in Rome in May and June, and am afraid my body will not cooperate. I have a big opportunity that may or may not come to pass early in 2012. I want to do my very best to make it happen if it is a good situation, but I do not know yet if I will have the ultimate chance to do so. I am three months away from finding out if I will achieve the rank of Full Professor, but am encouraged that the first committee "pass" was positive.
I am fairly certain that things will look different when I feel better, but I've gotta say that it kinda sucks when you try to do everything right and the outcome is so unpredictable at the most basic level (e.g. pancreas). I have never been afraid of things "known," but don't do so well with challenges that are inexplicable. I got an e-mail from my endocrinologist today that said (dispassionately), "reduce the morning humalog to 2 units and keep doing 3 at lunch and dinner". I can do that.
What I don't feel like I can do is bitterly complain. To begin, it's not part of my general constitution to load others up with my frustrations. I don't want to forget the things that made me smile today--Doretha and Sabine who expressed genuine concern, Don, who said no problem when I explained that I cannot get myself together until about 1:00 or 2:00 pm to work or for that matter, be assured that I can drive safely to work. Pictures of Cora always make me smile. Reading Amanda's blog and seeing her photos filled every part of my being with a kind of joy that was born of simultaneous pride and love. Thinking about Steffie and Ryan coming during the holidays got a smile in my heart. Even hearing about Dana Edlefson's six month old doggie that got hit by a wayward car made me sad and angry, but at least reminded me that I can still feel. Thinking about Deb and her "not normal" life made me laugh hard inside. She would understand. Getting a little facebook note from Amy made me smile and at the same time, wonder if I will feel well enough to get to her holiday party on Friday.
So what to do? Pray. . . to continue to be able to feel--that I have not been so challenged to stay strong that I have lost all ability to connect with myself or other people. I feel so much tenderness for the people in my life who have shown me all kinds of parts of themselves and love me in doing so. Yeah, I have faith.
Tuesday, December 13, 2011
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Ventures into virtual land
I admit I am a techno dinosaur. My laptop is slow and low on memory space. Maybe these first two lines parallel mid-life. Both of my daughters have recently married in the last two years. I am at odds with myself and contented at the same time. Is that possible? I began this blog in a technology boot camp that was our faculty retreat just days before the halls of our new building were filled with cute boots that college girls wear and the sounds of cellular equipment dinging, vibrating and rapping. Within the span of two years, I turned fifty, traveled to Africa, accepted a position as Associate Dean of a brand new School of Communication that had long roots in a small department I have been part of for eighteen years at an institution I love. I became a grandmother of a little girl, deployed thirty five students to mentor young girls, women and migrants from faraway places out of one of my classes, and traveled to two different states to stand in my role as proud mother of the bride. Alone. Their weddings were as perfect as my daughters are different. I cried unbridled tears at the ceremony where I felt like I was revisiting my former life with their father's family and loving them all, healing from an ancient divorce and regretting the unfinished business I have with the bride. The second ceremony signaled a "coming out" of shyness I had never seen in my younger daughter. I have not been successful in love, though I have loved and been loved; yet both of these beautiful young women, my daughters appear to have found their life's mates. I wish I could take credit for that, but I have no idea if any is mine and am grateful for their good judgement. My insides moved at the second wedding from fatigue, joy, a sense of completion, and overwhelming sentimentality at the simultaneous sight of watching my eldest nurse her baby, worry about a baby girl's fusses while cutting new teeth, and my youngest's embracing of her big, beautiful day that she had worked months to deploy with a budget spreadsheet, delegation of roles to aunts, uncles, parents, grandparents and her truest friends. I spent that day in two places very far away from each other--ecstasy and longing. I celebrated a beautiful couple's joy, likeness, practicality and sense of humor, watched my parents who are in their seventies dance for perhaps the first time in fifteen years. They came alive as if they had not suffered the loss of many dear friends over the past few years; they looked young and as I remember them loving each other in sweet and funny ways throughout my growing years.I felt the loss of my importance in each daughter's life as I watched my eldest fulfill her role as wife and mother, nursing her baby girl, feeling those early pangs of watching your daughter suffer, even if only from cutting new teeth. I felt like a woman cutting new teeth in suffrage and liberation at once. I was far away from my home in Chicago and close to the home of all that I knew as a child and young mother stranded between the whole of what I thought I might do with my life's future over five decades. I have failed miserably in some things and reached heights I never knew I was capable of. I finished a book manuscript over the summer that took me eleven years to write through the trials of tenure, raising teenage daughters and managing parts of my life that always seemed like bikes and ropes and water and steam that I tried to hold onto, but could never fully grasp.