Status: Cup is half-full

I went walking today for the first time in months. I love to walk. Around tracks at the park. Along trails in the woods. On the streets of my neighborhood. By waterways. I love walking. When I am walking, I feel like I find myself. I do my best thinking while walking. My best epiphanies happen. Best comeback lines. Best first lines of chapters of novels I may never write. But, for the past few months  I haven’t gone walking. For the past few months instead of finding myself, I have been losing myself. Slowly, but surely. I was there and then I wasn’t. It was such a gradual change that I didn’t even realize it was happening until one day, I found myself picking up a book to read and I just didn’t care about it. This is strange for me because I love to read. Or, at least, I used to. I used to devour books. I could sit down all day and read a book from cover to cover. But recently, I would read a few pages and then lay the book down and stare off at nothing. I love to plan. I love to plan a party. A vacation. An organization project. Anything. But, lately, I would start the planning phase of the project and lose interest before I had even gathered my notebook and pen. I used to love to menu plan and try new recipes, but…you see where this is going. What happened to me? Where have I gone? These have been the questions circling around in my mind for the last few months and I am no closer to answering them now than I was then. A lot has happened in my life recently, and that has contributed to these feelings, but I need to get back on track. 

So, what has happened? 

March 31st. I woke up and got the kids ready for school. Everything was going according to plan except that my husband was sick. He was staying home from work and had been planning on going to Urgent Care later that day. We thought he might have bronchitis because his coworker had it the week before. However, when I went to say bye to him before leaving for work, I couldn’t wake him up. This was the single most terrifying moment of my life. I shook him. I yelled his name. That’s when I noticed he had thrown up. He was sweating profusely. And, as I shook him, his breathing became very labored. He opened his eye-lids slightly and that’s when I saw how yellow the whites of his eyes were and that his eyes were rolled back in his head. I yelled for my oldest son to bring me my phone because it was in the other room. I panicked and my first thought was, “Call school because you will need a sub today.”  Ok. Full stop. My husband was unresponsive and my first thought was, “I need to call work.” What is wrong with me? Why was that my first thought? I had even opened my phone app and pulled up the school’s number before I shook my head and said out loud to myself, “No, Call 911 first.” The irony is that my student’s were currently reading Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis and I had never more identified with the character of Gregor than I did at that moment. No, I had not turned into a human-sized bug, but when Gregor woke up completely transformed, his first thought was that he had missed the train to work and that he was going to miss the next one as well. He completely overlooked the fact that he was a freaking human-sized bug…with an exoskeleton and antennae, and a million legs…I feel like that would be the thing I would be worried about before work. Yet, here I was, staring at my version of a human-sized bug and all I could think about was work. At a later time, when things were more stable, I wondered what that says about us and about the conditioning that humans have undergone over the years that in our most emotionally vulnerable state, we think, not of ourselves, but of our jobs. Don’t get me wrong, I love my career. I love where I work. I’m a teacher. Are there days I question the choices of my 18 year old self? Yes. But that would be true of any career choice I had made. Are there days when I want to yell at my high school students, “Please, just trust me on this one! You will see that I am right, one of these days.” Yes, but I don’t. 

But, my husband was dying in front of me, and all I could think of was work. This is partly when I began to realize that I had lost myself. When the ambulance arrived, I comforted my son, called my mother-in-law, called my mom or my sister (I can’t remember which was first), I messaged my group of best friends, and I texted my in-laws’ church prayer group. I needed my village around me because I was starting to realize that I wasn’t strong enough on my own. This was another sign that I was lost. I could always weather any storm. I am strong. I am enough. I can do anything on my own. But, I couldn’t do this. I watched as the paramedics tried to get a response from my husband. I waited anxiously with my mother-in-law and son for updates as they stabilized and prepped him in the ambulance for transport. I held it together as best I could. Like a true Hufflepuff, I got my mother-in-law a sweater. I got her coffee. I soothed my son. I answered texts and calls. People asked what I needed, as if I knew. My husband might be dead any minute. I had no idea what I needed. Usually I have all of the answers. But, I didn’t right then. And I didn’t for the next two weeks. Thankfully, my mom, dad, sisters, and brother knew what I needed more than I did. So did several members of my in-laws’ church and my best friends. Within hours, as my husband was eventually air-lifted to a hospital much further away, I was surrounded by family and friends, while more friends and family were taking care of my kiddos, and within days so many people had come together to help us with food and financial donations. I was overwhelmed with grief at the unstable status of my husband, overwhelmed with gratitude at the outpouring of love we were receiving, and overwhelmed at what the future would hold. I am not one to ask for help, so this was really hard to receive and accept, but that was another part of losing myself. 

You see, my parents divorced when I was 9 and I took on quite a bit of responsibility around the house at a young age. I am not blaming or shaming them here; I understand now, as a parent, that they were doing the best they could with what they had at the time. But, this did teach me to be responsible and to be self-sufficient, sometimes to a fault. I will often, finagle things to work out in the short term (without having to ask for help) even if it is not the best idea in the long run…here’s looking at you pay-day loan that I got in my 20’s…So, when Jamie, my husband, was unresponsive, I went numb. I couldn’t function. I didn’t know what to do. You can’t finagle this. All I could do was wait and I am not a patient person. 

The other reason that asking for help was so difficult is because many of the people who were so generous and giving were from my in-laws’ church. I could say from my church or Jamie’s church, but that is no longer true. Jamie went to that church from before he was born up until 2021. I know that I am the reason he no longer goes. I went with him from the time we started dating until 2021, for a total of 15 years. We hadn’t attended that church, or any church, since November of 2021. I had been trying to step away for personal reasons for quite some time and it was around my birthday in 2021, that I decided it was time. For my sake, I had to make the split. If anyone from that church reads this, I miss the people (well, most of the people) so much, but church and God and I are not on the best of terms. I won’t go into it more here, because that is a whole series of separate posts for the future, I’m sure. But, receiving help from wonderful people, who our absence had confused and hurt, was difficult and humbling. This also caused me to lose some of myself, my pride. I needed help. I accepted it. I didn’t know how to say thank you for it. I couldn’t adequately express my thankfulness. I still can’t months later. 

Through this difficult process of my husband’s hospitalization, I’ve come to realize that in losing parts of myself, I’m gaining a wiser version of me. I can loosen the tie to work where it is so all-encompassing in my thoughts. I thought that I had a good work-life balance, but I think it is still a bit out of whack. I can lose some of my control and admit that I don’t know what I need and let others take the reins from time to time (here’s looking at you, Elizabeth, my amazing student teacher during this trying time). It is ok to not be in control all the time. I can lose some of my pride and ask for and receive help. I can also lose some clarity and realize that I am still a work in progress. If the vision of myself in the mirror isn’t always clear, that’s ok too, because I am an ever-growing, ever-changing person. I am continuing to battle loss of interest, but I did begin writing and I walked three miles today, so the cup is half full. Tomorrow, we will see. 

BTW: Jamie was in a coma for a week. He had a perfect storm of symptoms that caused him to have heart failure, but after two weeks in the hospital and keeping up with doctor’s visits and medication, he is on the long road to recovery.