The painted ponies go up and down
posted in Arizona, Family, Illnesses, OmegaDotter, Parenting, The Move |The seasons, they go round and round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We’re captive on a carousel of time.
We can’t return
We can only look
Behind from where we came
And go round and round and round
In the circle game
Painted pony number one: Five years ago Saturday, we met our dotter for the first time. It doesn’t seem possible that it’s been so long already. We’ve gone from a tiny little baby coming home for the first time:
To an almost six-year-old full of creativity and vitality:
Her first tooth to come out is just about out–it’s at that stage where it can lie almost flat. We almost thought it was out tonight, but it looks like at least one more day, after all.
Our trip to Arizona has blindsided us with some Issues. The dotter decided–unbeknownst to us–that it meant we were moving again. Um. Oops. Then, since OmegaDad’s job is still fairly new, we had decided early on that he would stay only a few days, while the dotter and I would stay longer. So I spent this evening in the bathroom with her in full-blown brokenhearted weeping mode–Daddy was gone, she missed him, I would be gone on Wednesday (a trip to the office) and would leave her all alone, and she first refused to believe we were actually going home on Sunday, and then declared in tears that she wanted to go home now, and then told me that Sunday would never come.
Some kid point-of-view things just blindside you, y’know?
Painted pony number two: A person who I have posted with for years on various debate boards died of colon cancer this week. She was in her early 40s.
Painted pony number three: Marguerite, coming up on her 104th birthday, had a bad infection that required her to be on antibiotics. The infection and antibiotic combo, along with heparin, had her hallucinating and sleepless for three days and nights, unsteadily wandering the halls of her assisted living center and falling often. No broken bones, but they finally hospitalized her, got the infection under control, figured out the right antibiotic, and got her to sleep.
But the assisted living center said they couldn’t handle her anymore, and she needed a nursing home.
Sigh.
So Great Grandma (my own grandmother) is now in a nursing home, and sad and confused. Nothing tastes good. She can’t hear well. Her eyesight is going, with black spots in her vision that make her think there are black bugs wandering all over her food and her clothes. And she, like OmegaDotter, wants to go home. Imagine going to sleep in one place and waking up in another–with the intervening days and nights just vanished from your memory–and being told, "This is your new home."
I’m so glad that we had planned a party for Great Grandma, so that there were lots of folks in town to help my mom out during this extremely stressful time. But it’s so sad for us all–we have been spoiled…Marguerite was still bowling up until 1999, she was still out playing bridge at the assisted living center two years ago, she has always been sharp as a tack and filled with tart commentary and memories. Having her in this state is…heartbreaking.
This evening, at bedtime, the dotter quizzed me: "Why is Great Grandma like that?" And I had to explain to her that Great Grandma is 104 years old, that most people don’t live that long, that she’s wanting to go home and is having a hard time realizing that she has a new home, and that she’s just tired tired tired. So in the midst of all the upheaval, all the worries about moving again, the dotter is learning some other things that are very difficult to process.
Parenting is hard sometimes.
Life is hard sometimes.
But I’m so glad we have the dotter with us. I’m so glad my family can pull together like this. I’m so glad we all have each other. Because it makes the hard stuff more bearable.
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