When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. What if the lemons are rotten or too sour to make tasty lemonade? Or if you don’t have the stamina to process the instructions to create said lemonade? I entered my 40’s feeling young and vibrant, only to have the wind knocked out of my sails due to devastating life events.
Follow along with the previous blogs to understand the whole story.
Starting off this decade, I have a 3rd husband, seven children, a dying mother, and my 13-year-old becomes very ill. What appears to be a persistent cold turned into a sinus infection, which seems like no big deal at the time. With the strongest of antibiotics, my son continues to be ill and wakes up one morning with a swollen eye. The short end of the story is he was suffering from an epidural abscess. We stayed for two weeks in a children’s hospital while they tried to figure out what germ infiltrated his body and what the best course of action would be. It was scary.
Not Enough of Me
The day we were shuttled to Philadelphia, I was bringing my mom home from a month-long hospital stay. She was still battling many cancers, and this time culminated in her having her spleen removed. It was a very long month of ups and downs in her health. I honestly didn’t know if she would ever come home again. Keep in mind, I am an only child, and she is a widow X2. It was challenging to find someone to care for a very sick mom at home when I abruptly had to leave her and be by my sons’ bedside in Philly.
My other children were also in need of supervision and feeling the stress of my absence. Primarily, they were caring for each other. My youngest was 20 months and still breastfeeding, so this wasn’t very easy. The oldest had already moved out, so it left my 17- & 16-year old to care for the 11, 4- & 20-month baby. The teens were homeschooling, so it didn’t affect their missing presence in a classroom. It was easy enough to catch up on studies once the order returned to our home. My husband went back and forth and brought the kids occasionally to stay with us at the Ronald McDonald House when possible. Thank God for the mom tribe I had established over the years. Friends that would drop everything to help out whenever available. They pitched in, brought meals, and shuttled kids when necessary.
Are You Kidding? More Lemons
While at my mother’s bedside and days before the trip in an ambulance with my very sick son, my oldest daughter informed me that she was tying the knot AND converting her religion-to Mormonism. She wasn’t announcing the wedding for next week, month, or year, she was getting hitched in a few days. I was dumbfounded as they had been together for only a few months, so I assume she is pregnant but later discovers she is not. I explain that I cannot be there and wish she would wait for a better time as well as honestly reconsider her religious choice. As any adult-ish child would do, she cannot hear me and proceeds to do what she set out to do, without any of her family in attendance.
I had a hard time processing who came first in the pecking order of chaotic necessity. It was hard to make lemonade out of this series of events. I decided to be there for my son and mother while wishing my daughter well, from a distance. Staying in the Ronald McDonald house and praying, my son and mom will be ok was all I could handle at this time. Facetime wasn’t a thing in 2008, so any communication with my children or mother was via phone. I kept up with the goings-on back home as much as humanly possible, but it seemed everyone was going off the deep end. I was learning things that could’ve broken me to the core, including that my oldest was newly pregnant (unbeknownst to her at the wedding time).
No Freaking Way; Can’t Make Lemonade
My son spent his 14th birthday in St. Christopher’s Children’s Hospital and eventually came home with a PICC line and nurse visits throughout the summer. He continued to have sinus infections and later needed more surgery, but overall did recover well. In the fall that same year, that same son, the extreme sports kid, decided to jump off a trampoline with a snowboard on his feet into a pile of leaves, while my 5-year-old watched. I’m sure I don’t need to paint much of a picture of the outcome. Two broken elbows, a stay in the local hospital, and a chance for another surgery. I should’ve played the lottery that year! My gray hairs quadrupled, andI’m still in awe that I didn’t jump off a cliff.
That same summer (3 months after their wedding), my newly pregnant oldest daughter and her new Mormon husband came on a camping trip with us, so we could get to know the new son in law. It was clear to me that the relationship was abusive, almost instantly. After a heart to heart with my pregnant offspring, she left him. While displacing a few kids to fit my oldest back home, her siblings create a room for their sister and nephew-to-be. Being a single mom wasn’t a terrible thing with a family like ours. None of us would let her and the baby suffer. Incidentally, the father of my first grandchild has never seen, cared for in any way, or inquired about his child. Maybe listening to your parents has some merit!
Losing a Parent is Like Nothing Else
Entering my 40’s caring for a very sick mother and many children under 20 was another hell to go through. We all know our parents are going to die someday, but it always seems so far off. There is little thought to what that might look like for yourself, your kids, your mothers’ siblings, etc. until it happens. Mom made it through the surgery remarkably well. She had a few more surgeries and a lot worse than good days for the next two years.
When the cancer was first detected, in her early 50’s, it was Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, and it went into remission for three years. Unfortunately, when cancer returned, it was Chronic Leukocytic Leukemia (CLL) that went into lung, labia, and in the end, bone- the most debilitating. I am thankful that mom lived to meet all my children and a great grandbaby, as well as share in some of the life events we all experienced. She wasn’t always feeling terrible through those years, but the roller coaster ride of her health was daunting for us all.
Never Go to Bed Angry
Those last months of my mother’s life rocked our relationship a bit. We realized we still had some unresolved conflict that needed tending to before she died. Thankfully, we took the time to repair and deepen our connection because, in that short time, she was not comfortable. Once cancer entered the bone, her quality of life diminished, and she deteriorated quickly. Sure, some days were ok, but most were not. She suffered on and off for 11 years in total. She was so young, and no one should have to live a life that way.
When life gave me multiple lemons during that era, I was unable to make the lemonade. It has taken many years to find the lemonade recipe, nevermind actually make it.
My mother died ten days before her 62 birthday-I was eight days away from my 42nd, and my grandson was six days away from his first birthday.
[…] Now an only child who has become the matriarch of her family begrudgingly. I’m angry that I didn’t have anyone to share stories of mom with except my children-who, honestly can’t possibly understand. I’m bitter that I didn’t have a sibling to take on some of the responsibilities associated with moms’ health and death. It was also devasting to feel disconnected from her siblings, who have never checked on me after the funeral. I may sound like a bratty child talking, but grief has its own rules. There is no controlling the process that your brain works through. So, I feel guilty for all of these reactions, even though I shouldn’t. It’s not what I signed up to be or do, so I struggle with the rules of grief. […]