And We Have Each Other

"Mom do all houses have issues?" Olive asks me, as she scooters around on the subfloor pushing her doll's pink stroller around the table.

"Yeah, I think they all have issues."

I'm heating water on the stove to wash dishes in the plastic tubs that serve as my sink. It's only September and we all wear coats in our unfinished home. I can hear the plink of water falling into a metal pot placed behind the wood stove.

Our dreams await, placed on hold temporarily, as Nick and I struggle to maintain the vision, as our stress radiates into our children's pores.

"Is everything Ok?" the director of Olive's after-school program asked Nick when he picked her up last night. "Is something going on with your house that you're building?"

The list is too long for a simple response.

After a two day reprieve, two days of pause-in-your-tracks sun rises and blue skies...

...the rain returns.

Prescipitation predicted for days.

 

Elias shakes his head at me when I ask him to feed the dogs. He swats at his sister as she scoots past.

This is when I want to hide.

To find my own den in the forest and line it with leaves for winter. To curl up in a ball and sleep for days.I stop calling friends, as much as I need their love and support. I choose paths through the woods where I am least likely to run into another soul, as much as spontaneous connection would do me good.

I envy other families with their social ease. With their easy-to-babysit children, with their teenagers off on their own, with their ample adult time.

Or at least I imagine it so with typical kids.

I remember fondly all my babysitters as a child, thinking I was the lucky one earning Saturday night play time with my beloved Nina-- and yet now I see the glimmer in my parents' eyes as they headed out the door to find a dance floor. Or adult companionship. Or food prepared by someone else, served on dishes neither my Mom or Dad would wash.

There are so many small accumulative losses on this special needs parenting road.

One of which is the ease of engagement. Every outing needs to be carefully measured and weighed, as if we are cataloguing our chance for a successful outcome.

Do we have supplies? Does he have that certain look in his eyes? Will we need to divide?

This weekend is the Seward Arts and Music Festival, plus one of our favorite Alaskan bands, Hope Social Club, is playing at the Yukon Bar, and in my alternate life I'd be enticing Nick to swing me around the dance floor for countless hours night.

But nothing flows quite so eaily in my actual life.

And yet, we are the lucky ones.

We are fortunate to have four hours of respite on Saturday evening, one of our last weekends with our fabulus provider before her overwhelming responsibilities of single parenthood and full-time school force her in a different direction.

And we have each other.

I actually want to spend time with my husband.

I miss him even when we are in the same room, responding to the needs of our kids. When we are shooing Olive out of the kitchen with her scooter and asking Elias, yet again, to just do something besides tripodding on his cane, with his fingers in his mouth, in the middle of the entryway.

I miss Nick as we sit together in our shell of a home, after the kids are asleep, trying to prepare for our upcoming meeting with our contractor to discuss all our construction issues.

(I mean really, don't we all, I mean all houses have issues.) 

I miss my husband as we discuss guardianship and Elias and the fact that someday not so far away he will turn eighteen. As we imagine the nest that might never be empty and all the decisions and paperwork, the never-ending-paperwork, ahead.

I look into Nick's sky-blue eyes and see the young man who climbed up Cody Pass with me all those years ago, still inside, shining bright, within the layers of regret-laden stress and grief that seem to roll across us like the fog descending upon the bay.

I see him. And he sees me.

 And in the end, that's what will carry us through all this grey weather to the next crisp blue day.

 

Comments

[Nancy Yeaton]

Christy you write so eloquently of your family, your husband and you on this journey of life's bruises, deep love, layered with the warmth of recovering from those bruises that are so deep. I thoroughly love to read and hear if you still do story telling, I ask Nick each time I see him when we as our group meet in Anchorage. It is amazing how beautiful blue skies, the smell of the ocean and the sun make the day seem like life is so good and giving. Thank you for sharing your journey.

[Valerie Demming]

Keep seeing each other even if both of you miss each other in the same room. Keep those messages going between the two of you...because when you do connect it will be so very very sweet.

[Toni]

Wow, you gave me goose bumps! Beautifully written as always!!!!

[Christy]

Thanks all. We ended up with a date night after all, much needed, much love, always!