This particular good mood started when I started telling Melissa just how badly I was doing. This was at least a week ago and my pain had gotten worse for sure. The stress of every day life was adding up as well. I decided to find a plan that would deal with stress and all by solving various problems and doing as much as possible on my own. The idea was tried and true: move through the various elements of my life and organize them. Surprisingly, Melissa rejected the first step or two in the plan. According to her, I was in too much pain already.
This was true but I didn't want to admit it so I included fighting through the pain as part of the plan. Melissa rejected it again and reminded me that I was unable to fight through the pain of lying in bed. Lying my head on the pillow gave me a migraine complete with extreme light/sound sensitivity and inability to speak. How did I expect to manage physical labor?
This could have gone badly at this point because I was frustrated. My body and mind have failed me even if it's not my fault. My beloved didn't stop there. She went on to describe how she didn't want to be a cause of extra pain for me and she didn't want me suffering extra pain for any reason. It also helped that she wasn't volunteering to take on avoidable pain of her own. We've both learned to respect pain in our 40s.
After that, it became easier for me to enjoy myself again. It wasn't a matter of pain relief. My skin lesions that seemed so close to healing a week ago peeled down to raw, red skin while what my doctor called circulatory issues in my legs have ballooned back up. They are quite painful but the strangest thing happened. Madeline stopped stomping all over my sore place and launching herself into the air using her back claws on the sorest places. She curled up or stretched out for naps that didn't hurt me and she's gone back to following me around the house the way she did like a kitten.
Writing has gone back to being the great enjoyment that it was once before. Despite my teeth continuing to get worse, I've started enjoying food and drink more again. Part of it is the chance I've had to share a few meals with Melissa recently. Some of these were as great as if we ordered off the menu at a five star restaurant. It was all about the conversation.
Have I mentioned that Melissa is all kinds of wonderful? She decided to get me a cell phone since none of our landline phones actually work. I suspect that the reason for it might have had something to do with my recently increased level of pain and my difficulty dealing with the feelings of intense loss. I've admitted that I grew up with a strange sort of aspiration. My dream was to be like my grandparents and Grandmom Mahoney in particular. Pop Pop (Mahoney - I don't remember knowing his Stapleford counterpart.) was someone I admired as much or more. I just never considered myself capable of working as hard as he did. It took me what I remember as a long time to sit in his chair when he wasn't there. Then he had his heart attacks and I came to know and love him.
Grandmom Mahoney (just Grandmom to her face just like Grandmom Stapleford) was one of those figures who influenced me so much that I'm not sure where it stops and starts. Like her, I cope with a long illness by sitting in a comfy chair and reading favorite books. Okay. I'm not quite that limited thanks to Melissa. My beloved wifey (who turned 45 today) has gotten me good tech stuff. First, it was the tablet which made my favorite books light enough to read plus lit them so that I could read them in bad lighting. Next, I was connected to Facebook even when I hurt too much to come upstairs to sit up here at the PC.
Limited as it was, I was able to stay in touch with people I'd lost in previous decades. I don't care that it makes me a weirdo. I want my time sitting with friends telling old tales. "Do you remember that time you handed me that note to deliver to my best friend in my first two years in high school so that she could deliver it to me? After so many girls felt that crushing my heart was their duty, you were the one who realized that what I wanted was friendship." "Please stop. This is embarrassing." "Okay. Stopped."
Somehow, I don't think that will happen and I have an idea of why. I'm the weirdo and forgetting people is the normal thing to do. So, Grandmom and Pop Pop met terrible ends more than a decade ago not even recognizing each other. Somehow, Grandmom seemed to recognize me but there are so many Johns in the family that it's hard to be sure. I know that I could have conversations that fit into most of her life. I knew who Jack Benny was and I knew about the origins of that expression, "filling your dance card." Then I saw why my Pop Pop was in another room because he didn't react to my presence at all. That's not a request for sympathy because he was like that with everyone. I wish things had been better for him. I wanted to go on one of our walks down at the beach.
A lot of my current friends are trying to console me by saying that those who have abandoned me were never true friends but that's not the case. They were my friends when I needed them most. Now, they can remain my friends if in a way some might find odd. I imagined my Grandmom doing this during all those years in a chair. I can remember and relive those glory days that happened without anyone telling me that they were no big deal. On days when the pain gets to be too much, there are methods of dealing with it that I believe most 40+ married men know well.
I can watch my children play. These are my adopted fur babies, of course. Pippi is the clown of the family who sticks with Melissa making sure she doesn't study too hard. Pippi gets incredibly jealous and chases everyone away when she wants her Mommy's attention. This includes me, of course. She also sends out subliminal signals, "You must pet the Pippi. You must pet the Pippi, now!" Meekers, aka. "The Last Straw" is a very loving cat once she gets to know you. She decides when it's time for snuggles which involves laying out like a human and exchanging full body hugs. If she gets me down, I cannot resist. She's heavy for a cat but not for some object out there. The Great White Belly is too jiggly for me to lift. I'm not one to throw stones, though. She can't lift me either.
Madeline gets her own paragraph because I complain about her so much. She had been hurting me so badly just by stepping on my sensitive places. Well, my health has declined a bit recently with a lot of vascular issues for one thing and so there are a lot of sore places on my legs where I asked her to walk on me if she had to walk on me at all. Well, I had some sleep deprived weeks not all that long ago and Maddie went back to her original role all but overnight. She had been walking across me a dozen times each half hour, only to tire herself and refuse to get up when I very much needed to get up. Now, she's gotten back to settling very quickly on my lap and distributing her weight nicely. I've caught up on sleep quitely simply because Maddie catnapped me. She got very comfy, started purring and I found myself knocked out.
No one's life is always a bowl of cherries and I've been dealt some pretty vicious hands over the course of mine but it comes down to one of my deeply held beliefs. I'm toeing the line here but trying not to cross into hypocrisy. My belief in divine Providence leads me to believe that God would not force me to face obstacles that I could not overcome. I do not ask you to believe that. It's not easy to sustain such a belief in the face of one's own pain and I know of parents so frustrated that they want to punch the next person to suggest their kid can handle whatever. I come down on the value side of the fix the problem/value the person debate no matter how many people tell me that I should risk a metaphorical head explosion from another doctor's opinion because to do otherwise is giving up.
I choose to live my life and that is that.
