It was a long night that first night home. I was tired, I was annoyed, but I did what I had to do because well….that’s what I do. The following morning, the first actual full Day home, Day 1, was filled with making breakfast and getting her comfortable in the living room, having her want to pet the cats and play with the dogs. It was medication and my parents coming to visit. It was my sister and nieces stopping in, everyone each not staying longer than thirty minutes to an hour. It was a tough first full day. The other three girls seemed to star at her in awe. They looked at her as if she may break in two and each eager to jump at her next request. She couldn’t reach the water, or the remote, or her medicine, or her pillow was in the wrong place. It was an endless up and down all day. I spent a lot of the day on the phone trying to schedule her follow-up appointments and figure out her physical therapy schedule. My brain was moving fast, but I felt like the rest of me was moving in quicksand. I know my body was telling me to go rest, but there was no time. I had gotten so used to not eating that when I tried to eat I would get sick. Sick to my stomach in the bathroom, want to cry kind of sick. So I stopped eating. It got in the way anyway. It was one thing I could check off the list I didn’t need to worry about. And the list of things to do and worry about was long enough. Sometime in the afternoon of that day jolly guys girls were supposed to go spend the day with their aunt that was visiting. They waited and waited and when the call for them to be ready finally came they begged me to stay home with my daughter and me. I tried to insist they leave being I needed to time to rest, but I could see in their eyes all they wanted to do was be with each other. So after countless phones calls and texts back and forth to both jolly guy and his sister, the decision came tat they would stay with me and go visit later in the day. I was a sap. All I wanted to do was have a little time to adjust, but life was already moving faster than I was and they didn’t want to leave her side. I get it, I really did, but I was trying to self preserve before I imploded. Fine. They were all staying. Home. With me. Alone. Again. Ok, moving on. It was like having a new-born baby, completely dependent on you for every single need. Except the tears were fierce and plentiful and I could see depression starting to set in as the adjustment wasn’t going as smoothly as she’d hoped. It was hard to get around at home, it was hard to get comfortable, it was loud and trying to keep three teenage girls quiet for an extended period of time was almost an impossible feat. She cried a lot. I mean a lot. Always with the same question “How could someone just hit someone walking across the street? how does that even happen?” At this point she had asked it so many times, that I knew it was rhetorical. I called our therapist and asked if she could see her or do a phone session. Since she had seen basically everyone in the family at some point in time, she asked that she see my daughter when no one else was around. One for and two because she felt this would be very hard for m daughter to work through and wanted her complete attention and no interruptions. In theory this seemed perfectly normal in practice it would be harder to facilitate, but it had to be done. I called jolly guy and asked if the kids could all be gone for a few hours the following day. For some reason this enraged him. He was adamant that his children would not have to leave his house for any circumstance and that the question was ludicrous. I knew it was a bit of an imposition, but ludicrous seemed a bit of a stretch. At every request I got push back and resentment and I didn’t understand why the answer couldn’t just be “sure, I’ll see what I can arrange.” It was always how selfish I was being. How was trying to do what’s right for my daughter selfish? It didn’t make sense to me. He was livid; at me, at the therapist seemingly at everyone.