Mourning Into Dancing

Hugh is home from the hospital with a plan in place to wear a heart monitor for the next two weeks.

“You’re not high-risk right now,” his cardiologist told Hugh.  “You didn’t have a heart attack, you don’t have a blood clot…But something isn’t right.  The monitor should help us figure it out.”

Now Hugh is curled up in our bed and snoring loudly.  I keep wandering in and looking at his face,  thinking about life without him.

What if I hadn’t been home?  What if he died? I don’t think I could actually handle it.  I think I understand why Indian women committed Suttee years ago – they threw themselves onto the fire as their husbands bodies burned.  The grief was too much.

But my children need me – regardless of grief or tiredness.  Today and every day.  They compel me this morning to wake up! Make cereal!  Watch Camp Rock 2 again, please, Mommy! Play Junior Monopoly!

So this morning I woke up early and I am walking numbly around my house, feeling grateful that Hugh is home and doesn’t seem to be dying anytime soon.

I want to stay in this gratitude.  It is so easy for me to move from “grateful” to “completely angry” when I think about the mountain of work I have to do for school.  I am so deeply behind right now -  I had three days off this week (because my students were gone on a retreat) and I was full of plans to spend hours on my lesson planning.

But my precious husband is home.  My children are here with me.  I have three more days of Labor Day weekend.

My cups overflows.

Yesterday was the first day that I’ve been home during the day since school started.  My students were on a field trip; I got the day off.  Around 9:30am, Hugh came downstairs from his home office.

“Call 9-1-1,” he said, then slid to the floor next to our new IKEA bed.  The next few hours were spent in the ambulance, at the first hospital, getting initial tests, being transferred to the second hospital, and eventually told by my husband’s doctors that something is – indeed – wrong with his heart and they will keep him at the hospital until they figure it out.

I have felt a lot of things over the last twenty-four hours, but the overwhelming feeling that rises up and up in my gut is:  alone.  I feel alone.  I’m alone at the hospital and I’m alone telling my kids that Daddy is sick but will be okay and I’m alone in the bed and I’m alone this morning.

“I told you I’d come to the hospital,”said Amanda last night when I called her. But I didn’t want to bother her.  She’s really busy and in the middle of a crisis.  My friend Alley texted and called as soon as she heard that Hugh was sick.  “CALL ME.” But I haven’t called her lately and I don’t feel like I’ve earned the friendship.

I feel alone, too, because we are out of church.  For the first time in my sixteen years as a Christian, I am not part of a connected local body of Christ.  When Hugh is in the hospital and I’m crying and I’m scared, I’m realizing that the Body of Christ is for days like this – not just a place for me to serve and tithe.

Today I will spend the day at the hospital.  I will be brave with Hugh.  When he says, “how are you?”, I will say, “fine” because I don’t know how else to answer him right now.  I’ll reach out and hold his hand through the mess of wires monitoring his heart.

In that moment, I’m not alone.

Yesterday Hugh took the day off and we loaded up the kids in our van to spend the entire afternoon in my classroom.

My husband is so wonderful.  He lugged old textbooks in the hall (Speech Bob Jones Speech Textbooks circa 1985? Hee.) and dragged dusty rugs into place so I could vacuum.

My kids alternated between playing the DS and helping us carry trash to the dumpster.  I alternated between talking to Amanda on my cell and trying to organize my desk.

I threw away dusty curtains, sorted notebooks, rearranged the prop closet, and wiped down tables.  I scrubbed walls with Lysol wipes and killed spiders.  I took old posters off the wall, including a poster of The Passion of the Christ (I loved the movie but with Mel’s recent calls to his girlfriend, I am just not feeling it.  Sorry.).

After five hours, we left the school and headed to Yoforia for frozen yogurt.  We were sweaty but filled with accomplishment.

Once we got home, instead of collapsing on the couch, I felt a huge surge of energy.  I ran around the house doing dishes and taking out trash. Then I started laundry and made dinner, feeling very much like Supermom.

Working fills me with energy and focus in a way that staying home does not. Instead of depleting me, having a job always seems to increase my ability to give to my family because I am so deeply satisfied with my life in the classroom.

Ahh, School.  Come quickly.

Yesterday I sat down to pray and wrote the date at the top of my prayer journal:

August 2nd.

It hits me like a rock every year. Unexpectedly. Quietly.

I feel alone in my grief about this day.  One of the most painful aspects of grief is the isolation – no one else understands the depth of your loss or why you feel the loss so deeply.

August 2nd is my mother’s birthday.  I have not seen my mom in almost five years, though every few months she breaks into my house and leaves me a little present.  Sometimes she prints out a misspelled word on a label maker and leaves the word by the front door, other times she crams a book from my childhood on my shelf with a new dedication on the front page.

These “gifts” are stark greetings to me from her fragile mind that remind me why I cannot allow her to be around my family.

But every year I am sad on August 2nd. Her birthday reminds me that I still want a mother. I need a mother right now. Today.  I feel a deep longing for a wise, older woman who loves me unconditionally .

I am adrift with the stress of trying to manage my life.  I am unsure that I am doing it well. I long for a mother to come over with a couple of lattes, sit on my couch with me, and say, “Jess, this is working…” or simply, “Well done.”

I know that this deep ache for a mother can be met by my Jesus. He offers to wrap bloodied arms around me and whisper reassurance to me. He doesn’t leave me weird notes. He is safe every day of the year.

This pain – like all pain – drives me back to His feet.

And I become His daughter again.

I woke up at 3:30am this morning.

Yesterday I woke up at 4:15am.

Must be almost time to go back to school.

And every year I do this “I can’t sleep because my mind is racing” a few weeks before school begins.

I wake up extremely early and my mind starts spinning with questions.  Will my students like me this year?  Am I prepared enough?  Will this be the year I don’t manage well as a working mother and my children go off the deep end and forget to brush their teeth for three months and get lots of cavities and my dentist reports me to Child Services?

Rational questions like this.

AH!

I think it is time to bust out the Tylenol PM.

If I was rested I would think of a witty way to end this post. But my sleep-deprived mind can only come up with:

Bye-bye.

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz……………

Last year I taught a girl who is a brilliant writer.  I told her to start a blog and she did. And it’s great.  But I feel insecure when I read it because she is a lot more talented than I am and I feel like a crap teacher.

In two weeks I will go back to school and I am teaching (among other things) a 10th grade English class.  And it’s great.  But I’m scared because I haven’t been writing lately and that is what I want to offer my students – the “write write write because I write write write” thing. So I feel like I am a liar.  And I made my blog private for the last two days because I’m so insecure.

Then Hugh sent me this link by Donald Miller.  And it’s great.  The post has a poem by my favorite poet Billy Collins.  It contains the word “penis” and it’s funny and makes me want to brew coffee and spend the day at my keyboard, trying to find my love for words again.

But I feel too scared lately to write.  Too many things I can’t write about.  And I’m scared because a couple of years ago some people read my blog and said some really bad things about me and I wanted to yell at them and say “it’s just a stupid blog and I don’t even know you, why are you writing me an email and why am I still letting you have power over me?”.

But then I think about my student, who sits in bookstores and writes these posts on her blog because maybe – just maybe – months ago I told her she was a wonderful writer.

So, I, too, start typing again.

1.  Why don’t my children remember to flush the toilet?  Ever?  And why can’t I respond with a little bit of grace instead of resentment?

2.  Why does summer seem so long?  I have never been more ready to go back to school.  I have a meeting next week with my Principal to talk over the details of our Fall Play – I was so ready to start working on something for school that I shutmyselfupinmyofficeforoverthreehoursandyelledatmykidswhentheytalkedtome.

3.  Why can’t I stick to a diet?  I feel so excited every time I try a new plan and then three days later I find myself eating Ben and Jerry’s while watching HGTV. Surprise.

4.  Why do I still have nightmares about my friend from five years ago that dumped me like a bag of trash when my life got hard?  Last night I had a dream that she came into my classroom and started pulling my hair while I was teaching English.  Apparently I have issues.

5.  Why do I spend more time cleaning my house than reading the Bible?

6.  Why do I feel guilty that I fed my children hot dogs for dinner tonight?  At least I MADE dinner.  That doesn’t always happen.  Plus, I fully made frozen corn and fresh cherries.

7.  Why have I already spent forty dollars on back-to-school supplies at Target and Rite-aid? Cute new Post-it products, a few new binders…I LOVE IT ALL.  People complain about how early stores put out this stuff. It’s because of me.  Me. ME.  And I can’t stop.