Support Staff

Anticipation

Progress was definitely being made and all began to look as if we would be going home in a week or so. I had been gone almost five-weeks from my home, from my family, my kids, my bed, my life and I was eager to get home but growing increasingly anxious over it. The days themselves, with the help of all the doctors and nurses and aides was hard enough for me, how was I going to manage all this care at home alone? The thought began to weigh on me and I was getting scared. I would have my disabled daughter, my other daughter and jolly guys two kids with me from the minute I arrived home. He would go back to work and it would all be back on me. The thought was daunting and actually made me physically ill. I was going to need help, but more importantly I was going to need a few days to re-assimilate both her and I back into the house. So much of the last two months had been a blur; getting kicked out in the middle of the night, therapy for a week to return to the house, being back at the house for a week, the vacation that was pretty rotten overall, then the accident and now the five weeks of this. Going home made me feel lonely and empty and I knew I had to call my therapist and have her walk me through this. I could not do it on my own. Also, how was I going to get Jolly guy to understand how much help I was going to need? He didn’t even get that I needed help before all this because as he would tell me “You make it all look easy.” But it wasn’t. On the contrary. It was hard as hell. A few nights in a row I would talk to my therapist on the phone and she would talk me off the ledge. From the minute this all happened she was there for me; phone conversations, encouraging texts, notes to my daughter. It all helped. I needed someone to be able to talk rationally for me because I know at that time I was too fragile to really put my emotions and fears into words. How would I manage everything at home? How would I take care of my disabled daughter and the other three by myself? How would I get to and from the doctors offices at home? What about getting her in and out of the car? The shower? The bathroom? The bed? It was a lot to think about and really it was all on me. Plus run the house, handle the other three kids and their schedules, make all the meals…..it was overwhelming to think about and sometimes I would actually make myself dizzy. I saw no easy way to make this all happen. Jolly guy would reassure me that it would all be fine, but HOW? He would go to work and the rest would be up to me. As it always was. I had to begin to devise a plan. For the house, the kids, the visitors, for real life to set back in. It felt like the day I was going to leave the hospital after she was born. How was I going to be a mom all by myself without the help of all the hospital staff? How would I know what to do? And then you take the baby home and somehow you are thrown into the lion’s den and you figure it out. The difference here was I was so tired. My bones, my soul, my whole being was tired and I too needed time to adjust to being home. To being back to “normal” because nothing was normal anymore for any of us. We all suffered this trauma, yes it happened to my daughter and I was there right next to her, but my younger daughter, Jolly Guy, his kids, his family, my family, Gingham….we all suffered a trauma during this time and we all needed to figure out how to heal each other and ourselves. The difference in all this was that all of those people, especially the immediate five people that would be at my house would all be depending on me. To fix things, to bring them back to normal, to make it all ok. But who was going to do that for me? Again silently I would wonder, what about me?

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