a mild case of fatigue

There are several points of discouragement and mystery occupying my thoughts right now. One is that I have had a mild sore throat now for over two weeks, and just about everyone I know has been sick at least once this February, and it is getting to the point where I'm almost afraid of going to the grocery store, lest a flu virus on the cart handle jump up into my nostrils, or stick to Esme's little fingers and travel home with us. Every morning I wake up thinking that this will be the day that my sore throat will be gone; I swallow and find it still there.

I have also been thinking a great deal about fatigue. I was at a gathering of women last week-- all mothers. My friend Kristy arranged the get-together, and there was a lot of talk and sharing stories of birth, children, and childcare. Listening, I started to realize that motherhood, although universally demanding, does not necessarily leave a woman feeling as if a huge alteration in her health and well-being has taken place since before the birth. I don't hear this coming from the stories of other women, many of whom are happily pregnant with their second child. I read some things last night about a thing called adrenal fatigue, which can hit a person after a major life event--whether good or bad. Death, the loss of a job, and, of course, the birth of a child were among the things that could trigger such chronic fatigue and adrenal maladjustment. It made sense to me, because it isn't really the tasks of motherhood that I find exhausting, such as diaper changes, putting down for naps, picking up toys, or mashing up sweet potatoes. It isn't about Esme, or motherhood itself, which I love. It's physical. Childbirth itself, breastfeeding perhaps, and the new patterns of sleep have somehow changed me--my internal chemistry, hormones, or what have you. I don't feel horrible every day, but I never feel more than just o.k., and never wonderful, and it is only now hitting me that this is not quite right, and I should look into what I can do to get back to normal. Perhaps a mild case of fatigue is almost more insidious than a severe one, because it passes under the radar, and after a while its sufferer forgets what it was like to live without it.

A pre-bedtime routine to help me get into bed earlier, remembering to take my daily vitamin consistently, a probiotic perhaps (one friend just tipped me off to that), more raw foods, more fresh air, more sun (oh...wait...no sun to be had), less caffeine, zinc, vitamin D, and a host of other potentially health-giving supplements I cannot really afford to buy from our dear local health food store "The Garden Patch." Healing begins to feel like pulling myself up by the bootstraps, or toiling up a steep mountain trail, with a backpack full of colloidal silver and magnesium.

But I am trying to remain undaunted; I am trying to take it all seriously, even though, deep inside, I am beginning to hold a more fatalistic view of life and death. I hope it is alright to discuss this, as it is so fresh and terrible. News of the death of a woman who I knew as an acquaintance when I lived in Boston stunned and grieved me a few days ago. The evening after I heard the news, I could not sleep for thinking of her in disbelief and sadness. She was about my age, with a husband and four-month old baby boy, and among the most vibrant people I have ever encountered, and yet she collapsed and died quite suddenly, due to a hidden heart defect. This in contrast to my ninety-two year old grandmother, who suffered three strokes, did not feel quite well for years and years, and yet lingered on and on for so long before she died, just has me bewildered.

I remember a few years ago when the mother of one of my friend's in Orlando died, also suddenly, in her early fifties. I loved her mother, but after her death my mind kept seeing her kitchen, where there were always bottles of vitamins, herbal supplements, and health foods on the counter and in the cabinets. Somehow this made her pre-mature departure that much more poignant and troubling to me--the thought of her kitchen.

The air outside the window I am facing right now is absolutely dense with a wall of snow blowing sideways. Esme naps in her crib beyond and I should be trying to take a nap too. So many obligations to my body, and yet intangible, invisible, incorporeal thoughts are far more demanding, and on most occasions I am obliged to exorcise them into written words before I can succumb to sleep, which is why I stay up later than I should, staring into the glow of a computer, over-stimulating my retinas, no doubt. I always think I want to be a writer, but the more I read books, the more I suspect that writers are not exactly the healthiest people, probably subsisting on coffee and cigarettes, and preferring nervous, psychic energy to the energy that comes from whole grain bread.

Why won't my sore throat go away? Is my immune system in such bad shape? Why can't I care for my body the way I care for Esme's, protecting her sleep routine with vigor, and fretting over her vegetables, breastfeeding her long past the pediatric recommendation? I have passively accepted my low-grade fatigue for so long now-- about a year and a half-- carrying on with the basics of housekeeping and childcare, but feeling exhausted at the mere thought of things I used to enjoy, like thirty minutes on an elliptical machine. I hope that I can learn to care for myself better, although sometimes the litany of self-care responsibilities presents itself as a burden whose very weight may just cancel out its benefits and leave more tired than ever.

neither inspiration, nor perspiration

I'm not a jogger, but if I were, I would jog boldly into the frosty landscape and generate heat and energy within my cells to counter this terrible February indifference. I would shuck off the oppression of the overcast perma-dome above South Bend and feel closer to the remembrance of sun-warmth. But I'm not a jogger, and I also have a baby under my wing all day. I would take her on walks with the stroller, but although I can bundle and protect her core and appendages in warmth, this baby refuses to keep any sort of coverage on her little hands. On another foolish attempt at a winter walk yesterday, she looked down at her red little hands at one point with distress and said, "Cold?" She understands cold but somehow resists the concept of mittens, and chucks them over the side of the stroller each time they are re-applied. The last stressful stretch of the return journey were inevitably spent in tears, screams, arching back, and numb fingers. There will be no more stroller walks until spring, and I am so tired of being inside.

The stagnency of February always frightens me into thinking that I will never feel vibrant or artisticly inspired again. I took the above picture out of Esme's window yesterday but it was only by a rote effort to capture an image. This tree is one that I see every day. At the beginning of the winter, when it first emerged leafless, I thought it looked charming, dotted as it is with little round, botanical spheres. But now anything I could possibly see out of any of our windows looks banal. My camera felt like led in my hands and the visual world has never seemed less interesting. I don't like this, so I was aiming to get back some inspiration through perspiration. But even perspiration seems far from me right now, since I can't find a creative way to exercise with a toddler, and, as aforementioned, I'm not a jogger. So I sit tight through this February. I hope the wheel that turns us into Lent will bring renewed interest.

remembrance of things past

During my entire time in Florida, I struggled with a sore throat, eye cold, cough, and earache, in that order. These ailments layered down upon me and went through stages of benignity, but never lifted altogether. So although the weather was what I had dreamt about escaping to, I plainly lacked the energy to maximize my time there in the ways I had imagined, and cared little for excursions. On principle, I tried to get outdoors with Esme at least once each day, taking her out in the stroller or just letting her roam, supervised, in the backyard, its spongy jungle grass bouyant under the soles of her small shoes. But mostly I stayed indoors, took it easy, and made runs to Walgreens for kleenex and things that come in dropper bottles. I came home with my suitcase a veritable medicine cabinet.

One night after taking some nighttime cold medication, I got in bed intent on that one needful sleep thing, but could hear the voices of my family in the living room, close, noisy, and impossible to block out, even through my congested head. It is my weakness to never lie in hiding when a good rankle is taking place; the devil in me wants to join in the fray. There wasn't any rankle or fray going on, to be exact, but I still wanted to join in, so I gave up on sleep even as the drowsy ingredient in the medication began to take effect, dragged my quilt out to the living room, and found my place within the conversational circle my two older sisters and parents had formed without the aid of electricity, sitting in Floridian moonlight. I had forgotten about Floridian moonlight, and also my mother's quirky habit of turning off lamps prematurely in the evening. But I discovered that when three sisters gather in their parents' old home, the very place where they grew up, without any husbands-- new blood-- to alter the dynamic, the old household is reborn, reconfigured. Being at home this time was like going back in time. I half thought that I would have go to school in the morning, or get chewed out for sneaking into my sister's room and stealing a squirt of her perfume. Lying in bed, I half expected to hear my sister's footsteps pounding up the front walk just before her curfew, and my dozing dad rousing from his arm chair like a grizzly bear in spring to unbolt the front door for her.

The five of us have not been all together in that house for fifteen years, and I didn't know when this special configuration, like a rare astronomical event, would happen again. I knew that we were long overdue for such a reunion. Of course, we have all seen each other separately along the way and gone home at different times. And of course, we all keep in touch and no one doubts anyone's love for the other. The rarity of this reunion was mainly due to geography, the care of small children, and limited funds. Both of my sisters married what my family calls "northern men," who caused them to settle in far flung locations. I married a so-called southern man but still landed rather unluckily in Northern Indiana--at least for the time being. But I knew as my grandmother's death approached, that finally something was happening that would have the power to draw us all back at the same time-- to cut through our busy schedules and limited budgets so that, at whatever price, we all had to buy a plane ticket for the same dates.

So the familiar voices of my family were bouncing around the living room one night and I felt compelled to join in. How do I describe such a conversation when it contains a world unto itself of contextual information? As I listened I tried to weigh my writing abilities and gauge whether or not I might one day be able to convert all of this family data into a novel, or even a short story. I'm not sure. It would be a huge project like nothing I've attempted. Families are so complicated, and mine is no exception. My mother kept a very basic family diary during the early years of our childhood. She wrote down the funny things that we said, major headlines in the news, when we were sick, and what we did. She brought these red hardback diaries out to the living room in a big stack and begged us to divide them up and take them home with us. I didn't have room in my suitcase, so my sisters took them and promised to pass them to me at some point in the future. We sat around reading some of the entries and laughing. Once when I was three I told my parents, "No one is making me happy."

I think my obsession with wanting to understand my family comes from being the youngest. Being born last is like walking into the middle of a movie and trying to figure out what is going on. You can't interrupt the flow to ask irritating questions (the youngest always gets labled as a pest), so you quiet down and become hyper-aware of clues in the dialogue as it progresses. This is what makes me want to write--hyper-awareness, and the feeling that I will never wrap my mind around the whole thing. But it is in my nature to stubbornly, ceaselessly try, because I will never believe myself to be caught up.

It seems fitting to me that I come from a city where everything constantly changes and develops-- Orlando. My old neighborhood, College Park, looks different every time I return. At my grandmother's funeral, I met my grandfather's old business partner, whose name I have heard many times but who I had never met before. He talked about how his family came to Orlando in the 1920s, and I told him he must have lived a very interesting life, witnessing such dramatic change in one place over so many years. He said it had been interesting "and wonderful, really." He seemed like a very sweet man, with watery blue eyes, and not a drop of cynicism. I would not have been able to span that many decades in Orlando, watching the touristy takeover, watching the urban sprawl, without calcifying into one large block of salty cynicism. So, this man rather mystified me, and confirmed my suspicion that my understanding of human nature is still insufficient for authoring fiction.

The photo above is of the grocery store that we always shopped at growing up-- Publix. It was not a stylish grocery store in my childhood, but has become so now. The owners remodled it but kept the retro neon sign. In my mind this Publix is somewhat iconic of my childhood. I don't think of myself as being old enough or interesting enough to have anything worthwhile to remember, but during this particular time with my family, I did feel like the content of my life was starting to feel, for the first time, expansive. The more change I witness, the more stories I watch circle to semi-completeness, the more things begin to make sense, and the more I long to tell them, write them. On a quick run to Publix one night, my sister and I bumped into a familiar face. She was the mother of our old babysitter Carol. Out of nowhere she said: I remember (speaking to me) the day you were born. I was shopping and ran into your two sister's being babysat by your dad's secretary. That was a long time ago." I responded that it was thirty years ago, to be exact. I can't explain why but it was nice to run into someone who remembered the day I was born.

the end of struggle

Yesterday, my grandmother finally passed away. I say finally because our family was given countless false predictions over the course of the last few weeks that she would not live another hour, another night, and so on. But her organs, apparently engaged in a ninety-two year old habit of functioning, were more reluctant to shut down than even the most experienced hospice nurse could account for.

All week I was imagining them at work, laboring on the subconscious level of organs, yet attuned as ever in their long-established relationship of servitude to a steely will. She willed more time, and her organs gave it. They kept vigil, unlocked their dark room for her and cleared out a workspace. There, in the internal place behind eye-lids, I cannot help but imagine that, with or without the aid of lucid thoughts, she engaged in an intensive struggle on the foyer of death.

My parents would call and announce that hospice informed them she would not last through the night; this would be followed by a call the next day that she was breathing better than ever. Even while externally my life proceeded as usual last week, I was preoccupied with that internal room where I imagined my grandmother, her will, her organs, the angels, and also the demons, engaged in a final colloquium. It troubled me, and one night I got in bed with the chills, followed by two days of the common cold. Jeff had to go to school and I struggled during the worst part of my cold to care for Esme. At one point I resorted to an afternoon of lying on the couch watching Anne of Green Gables while Esme played on the floor. I wept inexplicably the entire way through, not just when Matthew Cuthbert dies. I knew I was really crying for my grandmother, and was relieved that I finally found my tears for her. I e-mailed my priest's wife and asked her to pray. I tried to pray too, but felt feeble. Her battle with the demons seemed close and immediate to me, and yet distant and barred from me all at once.

It seems inappropriate to use a birth analogy, but I felt as if my grandmother was almost laboring in her death-- in a particularly long and difficult labor. The remarkable length of time she took to die, past all medical norms, made it take on spiritual proportions, with spiritual complications. It began to feel like something quite tangled, as life is known to be, was demanding to be un-knotted through the honesty-with-self that is so painful. My grandmother had ninety-two years of entanglement with this life. I would think that some backlogging is inevitable in ninety-two years.

I know I have an active imagination, and perhaps a weird metaphysical bent. I am admittedly lugubrious at times. All of this reflection on my grandmother's death, this worry, this getting sick, this mind's eye picture of a demonic struggle worthy of a fourth century desert saint's deathbed, could be, in short, all in my head. It could be a deluded spiritualization of a natural process at best, or a projection of my own fears about life and death onto the death of my grandmother at worst. But it has made me wonder about what we are involved in through being born and possessing a body. It made me thankful for a spirituality that affirms constant honesty with oneself and disclosure of one's darkest self to another. I know for a fact that such a way was not provided or encouraged for my grandmother, either in our out of church, in all her faithful churchgoing life. In fact, I am certain that the opposite was endorsed at every turn-- keeping up with appearances. I suppose this was at the heart of my worry all last week.

Yesterday, my father called to tell me that he had re-assembled an old crib for Esme to sleep in and it looked great, and that Gogo had finally passed away at 2 p.m., in that order. I did and still do feel a shift into lightness; I do sense the end of struggle and the hope of overwhelming, canceling mercy. Saturday I will take a plane into gold sun and green fronds and seventy-seven degree days; Saturday I will take a plane to her funeral.

I took the above photo two winters ago in Florida.