I Did My Best
I wrote this when my mom was still alive. When we still really thought she might get better. She was at Fairview Southdale:
I am sending this email to all the nice people I can think of who have cared, asked, and listened to how my mom is. It’s not poetry, but it’s reality. If you don’t want to read about my week it’s OK. Just keep being as good as you’ve been.
We had a pretty bad week so far. Fairview Southdale has been a nightmare. The nurse button goes unanswered for 10 minutes or more. Which is one thing when your mom has to pee and doesn’t want you to help her, but she’ll let you if she must. But when she’s got a nasogastric tube in her nose and down her throat and starts to retch and drool into it while you hold the bucket and no one comes, that’s quite another deal. When she’s lying on her side and one little tear wells up on the bridge of her nose because she’s just had enough, and the nurse doesn’t come with her pain meds… It’s like a bad dream.
Sometimes I can’t talk without crying. Frequently I can’t write without crying, but it’s less embarrassing when I cry and write. So I am sending it to you in answer to “how is your mom? ” I’m not the best judge of how she is. It keeps changing, and my heart can only accept so much at a time.
So when you read this and think, ” oh the poor thing, her mom’s dying.” just remember, I’m still thinking she’s going to get better. Even when I hear myself say things I can’t even believe I am saying. Things that, if you were talking about your mom or anyone else you loved, would make me think, “oh the poor thing, s/he hasn’t accepted it yet”. So be gentle about that, OK?
Jenny and Erin are my sisters. We have been taking shifts. My mom keeps telling us to go and stop watching her suffer. We kneel on the floor next to the bed and cry and tell her we can’t go. Cut us some slack, we say. Our mom is sick, and it’s all we can do to bear witness sometimes. She wants us to go home. But she’s too sick to kick our asses, so we stay. And there’s nothing we can do to make this better.
I washed her feet today with a hot wash cloth and rinsed and dried,even between the toes and behind the ankle bone. And rubbed her feet and pinched her calluses. I think it was good for her, I think she liked it. It kept me busy and felt like the right thing to do. I feel inept and clumsy handling her body in ways I never learned how to. I’ll sleep pretty good tonight. We did our best.
She has totally given up her will to live. She’s miserable, humiliated and depressed. But her bowels are functioning today (and people actually helped her empty the colostomy bag, which they didn’t even look at yesterday). Her surgeon is optimistic, and if we can just get her fighting… she won’t even hold my hand. I don’t know how sick she really is. But this isn’t an uncommon complication after surgery. She could get better. The pain management team is on the case. If she dies, she dies. But she can’t die in such pain… It will haunt me.
They did ask us to get them a copy of her living will. Jenny wanted to know what that meant. “What is a living will? Is that what you don’t know?” I asked in the nicest way possible, not wanting her to think I thought she was stupid. “No. What does it mean that they asked for it?” “I don’t know, Jenny, but they probably need to have it on file. ” Between that and them asking if she wanted to see Father Fein…(she didn’t). I am in touch with reality maybe as much as I can be.
She looks like Dachau. And she looks like she could die. I am thinking
of putting up picture of her when she was healthy, so they know that
she was once something other than a cancer patient. That she’s not really a colostomy patient. She had the grandchildren convinced that she didn’t poop at all. That she’s funny. That she’s a good cook. Hospital food makes her cry. She has issues and obligations which have nothing to do with cancer. And she’s not done dealing with them. She used to be strong. She’s real, or she was once. It makes me cry.
That’s how she is, and be careful when you ask, because the answer is so long and complicated… Thanks
Too Hard
Some of these stories just need to be written, I keep trying to think of a good reason to do it, but I can only come back to the fact that I have to write them. Because they were real. Because they were REAL. Because they happened to me and my family. They washed over us, ready or not. And even after my mom has died, they are still real and I need to tell. Thank you for reading,you must be tired of the theme by now. I’m not done yet.
I think the heart of all these stories is this shocker: No matter how dysfunctional your family is, no matter what you’re in the middle of, how alcoholic or mentally ill or immature or arrogant, how brilliant or stupid the people are… Death and dying will come to you, right in the middle of all that. You will never be ready except in the rarest of cases. I don’t know why that was such a surprise to me. But it was.
If you have or haven’t done care for the dying, it might or might not comfort you to know that it isn’t all soft-screened graceful moments of acceptance and bonding. It’s like labor, delivery and a new baby, in that it is natural, normal, inevitable, universal, unavoidable in addition to being much uglier and clumsier than you think it should be. As far as I can tell, helping my mom die is the only thing I’ve ever done that felt as important as helping my kids to live. And I wish I’d known in advance that people make mistakes, no matter how hard they try.
Some of these stories would be embarrassing to my mom in her live version of herself. I like to think what’s left of her loves her as much as I do and did, and can see beyond things like pride and shame. The following vignette is one I tell as confession, I must tell it. I don’t want to, my cheeks burn when I think of it, and I feel pity and some sort of compassion for myself. It was just a tiny little moment.
We’d been in the hospital for a while, maybe 5 days, maybe more. My mom had bad days and really bad days. OK moments and moments of despair. She and I had been chatting and the nurse came in to check on her. She seemed ok to me. But when the nurse asked about how she was feeling, her face crumpled, her voice cracked and she started to cry, the cry of a tired, beaten and hopless and begging woman, high and sad “I just feel like I’m going to explode. And I’m so thirsty, but nothing will go down, nothing fits. I want to drink all the water and orange juice in the world, but I will hurt more and then throw it back up”
My mom’s cancer had caused a complete bowel obstruction. Nothing was moving through her system. It got as far as her stomach and then sat there. It trickled out, about a dropper-full in a day. The cancer in her abdomen was weeping fluid which was also filling her abdomen and pushing on all of her organs. She had IV fluids to help with dehydration and a TPN line to give her some calories, but what we were really hoping for was that her guts would start to work again so she could get strong enough for chemotherapy to shrink those tumors.
I am hardwired (is everyone?) to cry whenever I see my mom cry. There is no getting around it or growing out of it. So now you have myself and my mom crying, while the nurse tries to find something that will help. But nothing will help, and I suspect most of the staff knew my mom was never going to feel better again. But they tried.
My mom took the last refuge of the miserable, she put her pillow down at the foot of her bed and lay there. Curled on her side, rocking and crying because her tummy was just so bloated. She was literally skeletal, but her tummy looked like she was six months pregnant. It was rock hard. And wrong. Sometimes rubbing it felt good to her, she didn’t know why, but we did it.
She’s rocking, I’m rubbing, and the nurse is talking about heating pads or cool pads or different things that make a person feel better. My mom is weeping and talking about how she just “can’t do this anymore, it hurts, I can’t…too hard” I’ve got my head hanging down and I’m crying and saying “I’m sorry, I know it’s too hard”. She continues to cry and says twice more that it’s just too hard. “ I know, mom.”
She turned her head and said to me, through tears except there were no tears because she just didn’t have them anymore, “No. You’re rubbing too hard.” I am so haunted by my own ineptitude. I’m not sure I’ll ever get over it.
Salt
Abbot Northwestern is nothing like HCMC. The entrance looks like a hotel; a really expensive hotel. The lobby is huge with open escalators and walkways to the second floor. Little shops line the walkways. Little clusters of furniture are arranged around the open atrium. Each cluster has some combination of chairs, sofas, lamps and coffee tables. The colors are rich and dark. It’s a beautiful place. There’s a huge salt lamp against one of the pillars.
A salt lamp looks like a huge chunk of rose quartz glowing from the center. This one is the size of a 5 gallon bucket. I knew what it was only because I saw one like it in a catalog. Well that, and it had a little plaque talking about whoever donated it and how wonderful salt lamps are. When I told Jenny what it was, she didn’t believe me. We waited in the lobby for Patrick, so he wouldn’t have to find his way up to my mom’s room by himself. He’s pathologically disoriented.
Things to talk about are at a premium when you are dealing with a serious illness. They were with my family, anyway. We told Patrick he had to see this salt lamp. He looked at it and said, “It’s cool, but it isn’t really salt. They probably mean like mineral or something, not like a real block of salt.” I shared my extensive knowledge of the negative ionizing properties of salt lamps, and said it must be a Real Live Salt Lamp or they wouldn’t say it was.
Jenny’s very sensible. Sometimes overly so. She can remember the price of anything she’s ever bought. She’s also very proper. She almost never talks too loud or dresses out of style. She’s the only white sheep in our whole family. So when we headed for the elevators and she ran back and licked the salt block, Patrick and I almost wet ourselves laughing. Then we remembered we were in a hospital and got thoroughly grossed out.
She says they’re made of real salt.
Things are funnier when you’ve been worrying all day.
My mom went in for Surgery early in the morning. I got there about 8am. Erin was there, Renee was there, Jenny was there, Ramon was there. Patrick , Tim, Martha, Bart and whoever else showed up later in the day. The surgery was supposed to be done by 1pm. They give the family blinking, vibrating beepers to keep in touch. If there’s a development, they alert you.
About noon they beeped us and the surgeon came out to give us an update.
He had good news and bad news (but you knew that, right?). The bad news was that they had to give my mom a colostomy. This had been a possibility but not a certainty. It was one more thing to have to deal with emotionally, physically and logistically. But we steeled ourselves, we’d just deal with it.
My mom’s life philosophy was, “You just do.” How do you deal with 4 kids under the age of 7? How do you make all your meals from scratch? How do you clean up a mess like that? You just do. We would just do. How do you handle losing everything piece by piece, all at once? You just do.
Saying there was good news was stretching the concept of good news if you ask me; but we take what we can get. The good news was that they had removed much, much more tumor material, more cancer, than they thought they would be able to. Because she had much more than they thought. She only weighed around 112 and he said he removed about 5 pounds of tumors. The reason they never saw actual tumors on the scans and X-rays is because there was so much that it appeared to be background.
He described it as a “carpet of tumors across her abdomen” and masses of tumors around her intestines and organs. But not in any organs. Good news, Bad news.
He drew pictures and answered questions. He would have to go back in and actually hook up the colostomy, so it would be a couple more hours of surgery. People in my clan were starting to wilt. We had brought water and power bars. But they were talking hours more. I for one, kept comparing my suffering to my mom’s. Such a ridiculous response, so pointless. I could stand a couple hours of low blood sugar if she could handle chemotherapy and surgery and everything else.
But when they told us she was out of surgery and would not be allowed to see anyone for at least a couple of hours, and when one of the nurses told us to go and get something to eat for gosh sakes, we decided to do it. Jenny went home and Ramon, Erin, Tom and I went to go get some food. We were exhausted, hungry and overwhelmed.
We sat somewhere that wasn’t a hospital, ate decent food, stared into space and made small talk. It was nice. But the heaviest burden for me was always the feeling that no matter what I was doing, I should be with my mom. It was a constant nagging that was only quiet when I was with her or on my way to be with her. It started whenever I left and got more persistent by the hour.
We got back to the hospital and they said she had already been moved to a room. It wasn’t a cancer ward. It was a back pain ward, but it was available, so they put her there. When we, en masse hit the 8th floor at Abbott, I could hear her. She was angry and loud. She was clearly in pain. But she was also very upset and irrational.
The head nurse might not have actually been a nun, but that had to be due to an error in processing early on. She should have been a nun. Big old glasses, shaped like a tank with breasts, short gray hair and sensible shoes. A complete lack of empathy and love for authority, the whole nun yards.
“Where were you?” “Are you the family?” “We’ve been paging you for over an hour, we did overhead pages twice.” That was the nurse.
“They’re lying! They said they paged you, but they didn’t. I want to go home. I don’t want to do this anymore. They won’t give me pain meds. I’m going home, where I can take my own meds. I can take as much as I want. This is bullshit. If they paged you, you would have come, you were here all day. Ramon, take me home. ” People descended on her as she tried to get up. No way could she get up.
First I listened to the lecture from the nurse-nun about how she would get pain meds as soon as they were approved. “She’s not due for painkillers for another hour. We can’t give her more than that without approval from her doctor. We are trying to reach him now.” “Isn’t there someone here on the floor who can approve it now?”
“No, the doctors on this floor are not oncologists, they’re blah, blah, blah…” Meanwhile my mom is getting ramped up, crazy, recently sliced from stem to stern, and obviously in incredible pain. I told her I was sorry, I didn’t know they had moved her. I would take care of it.
Imagine my whole family- my mom’s whole family standing around while the nurse and nurse’s assistants are talking in code to each other about boluses and bumps and overrides. Then sister Hairy Phyllis leaned against a wall, crossed her arms and addressed my family, “I just gave her some blah blah and it should kick in pretty soon here, but if she doesn’t calm down it will not be able to work. So I need every one here to just stop asking questions and be quiet and think nice thoughts for a couple minutes. Just think quiet, happy thoughts.” She dropped her arms and looked at the floor.
I thought happy thoughts for about 0 seconds and then I broke. I was pissed. “Ahhh, excuse me. I don’t want to think happy thoughts. The only thing I want to think about is getting my mom’s pain controlled. Maybe you and I can go outside and talk about this while every one else thinks happy thoughts. The only thing that will make me happy is getting something done. Now.”
Battle Axe breathed in through her happy thinking nose and we stepped into the hall. No amount of my trembling, inarticulate anger could get anything done. I had to know that. But goddammit! How could it be impossible to get pain control for a cancer patient? In 2005, when the people on the radio tell you that there have been ‘great strides in pain control’ and ‘no one should have to be in pain while they are in the hospital’, how could this be? With people who loved her and would fight for her, how could my mom be in this situation? In the most elegant hospital, where the elevators are lined in cherry and brass, how is it that this woman is in misery and no one can do anything? They had the cabinet and the key and the medicine. And they couldn’t break it out until they heard from one guy who was incommunicado. How could this happen?
The answer, unbidden and unwelcome, filled me with shame, with guilt, with anger and with sadness. It happened because we left. It happened because we weren’t there to make sure everything was in place before they moved her to this purgatory of a room, where there weren’t cancer specialists or cancer nurses. It happened because for an hour or more, there was no one to stand up and demand that she get what she needed. We were all gone.
She had needed us, asked for us, demanded to see us, asked them to page us on the PA and we weren’t there. We had sat useless for 8 hours while they cut her up, but when she came to, came fully out of the anesthesia, none of us were there. I took a big breath. I covered my mouth and nose, started to cry and walked away from the nurse. It’s hard to find a place to cry in a hospital.
I walked into the hospital room, my mom was starting to get some relief from whatever they could give her. I walked in and my mom saw my face and said, “Honey, what? What’s wrong?”. I put my hand on her leg and fell to my knees. My stupid, hungry, tired, selfish, worthless, bony, sad, overwhelmed, eating-in-restaurant, leaving-the-hospital, all-about-me, completely powerless knees, on the hospital floor. My tired,hot, heavy, salty, tear-streaked head on the hospital covers against my mom’s leg. I wailed. “Mom, I’m so-o-o, so sorry” She laid her hand, heavy on my head, and scratched my scalp a little, “Honey, don’t…”
Nurse wicked got the call she was waiting for and my mom got a bucket full of morphine with an Ativan booster. She begged forgiveness from the nursing staff once she felt better.
I am traumatized to this day. I know it wasn’t my fault. Part of me knows. Right?
My Blog Has Been Bad
I’m sorry to all of you who have been looking at my blog by way of a Microsoft or Mac browser. I’m also sorry to my husband if I just said that wrong. Sorry you all had to look at an impossible to read screen, sorry you had to be interrupted by indecipherable symbols (). I am merely the manufacturer here and was woefully ignorant about the actual mechanics of getting it disseminated.
I think it’s fixed, mostly. The punctuation and spacing is still weird,this is a low tech operation. Bear with me.
lisa
Grandpa Jim Dunn
It’s funny how one part of your brain seems to know what’s going on. Knows enough to tell you to make the right preparations, enough to keep you moving in the necessary direction, even while you yourself have no clue. My whole family marched dutifully towards my mom’s death while being in complete denial of the fact that she was going to die. So while we thought my mom was on her way down the difficult road to getting better, we thought we were helping her get through this, we were actually preparing for her death. It doesn’t stop the shock from blindsiding you, but it gets things done.
When we called my grandpa to tell him that my mom was in the hospital again, he thanked us for the call and then said, “Now your mom has things that she likes to keep private, things she doesn’t tell me, and that’s her business. I don’t question that. But I, I… I’d like to think that if she… If she goes into hospice care or something like that…. Well, I’d like to know that somebody would tell me that. Is that understood?” Yes. I understood. But only in the abstract. I never thought that was where we were headed.
She got her will done, cleaned out some closets. Wrote a long, long list for Ramon of how to run a household. She was sick, bedridden, mostly, but writing frantically about the things that she had always done. The little things no one else ever had to think about. Turn off the water to outside in the fall. Clean out the gutters when they don’t flow. Close the storm windows before you turn on the heat. Turn it down if you are going to be gone all day.
I told people my mom was terminally ill, sometimes I even said she was dying and I felt overly dramatic. I felt guilty for saying it, not because it was a bad thing to acknowledge it, but because I believed in my heart that when I said it, I was lying. It seemed like a lie. I said it anyway, some part of me must have believed it. Maybe the part that knows the neighbors will bring food for the living while you care for the dying. But I felt like I was taking advantage just a little.
So when the time came, and the nurses told us, “She’s dying. If there’s anyone who wants to see her, if you want to call in a minister, do it now.” I didn’t believe them, but we called my Grandpa. Uncle Tim went to pick him up.
My grandpa is a big man, still, although he’s shrunk a little. So big that watching him get into anything but a pick-up truck is similar to watching someone fold up one of those old-fashioned rulers. His legs are so long that they hit the dashboard in my car when the seat is all the way back.
The fact that he’s long and lean is the second thing you will notice about my Grandpa. The first is his big, big voice. He speaks like a military man. A loud military man. Even when he’s talking to the toddlers. When he walks into the room what you hear is, “Who’s that? Jenny? Jeeesus, Jenny baby, you look beautiful. And who’s that with you?! Eli? Christ, kid, let me get a look atcha! Ya look like yer Dad! Trevor, Sir! This kid looks just like you, I’ll tell ya, man, you do nice work. Those kids are alright! Chloe! Hello young lady…”
He is known far and wide as Big Jim. He speaks loud and long, in part, I think, because he is so deaf. As long as he talks, he doesn’t have to try to hear you. He’s also mostly blind. He still walks a couple miles every day.
My grandpa is larger than life in every way I can think of. I always thought of him as a cross between John Wayne and Johnny Cash. I thought he walked on water. Whenever I see him, I am instantly an 8 year old. My mom used to tell stories of him in younger days that make me sure he was a better grandpa than he was a dad. His temper was bad, and he was heavy drinker for many years.
So when he showed up with almost nothing to say, it hit me hard. I heard him ask someone by the back door where his baby was. When he walked silently into the living room of the house he had built in 1945; the house my mom grew up in; the house I grew up in, just the quiet made my eyes start to sting. I knew this was for real.
He held onto the door frame when he walked into the living room. His baby was in a rented hospital bed set at an angle near the picture window. She was unconscious, skeletal, hooked up to 3 different bags of fluids and breathing shallow and loud. She looked like an old woman. She wasn’t.
His mouthy, naughty little girl was burning up, hot. Her hair was starting to come back, downy soft on her head. Her skin was clear. Her jaw was slack, her top teeth showing. One hand was pulled up to her chest, frozen. He approached the bed, but stopped before he got there. He put one hand on the picture window, lowered his head and shoulders and began to shake.
My grandpa was crying. He was wracked with sadness. He was silent except for the gasps and sniffles. One or two people approached him to offer support and he looked at them like they were insane and pushed them away. He cried.
He sat on the piano bench by the bed and held his daughter’s hand. He cried, with his big hand over his eyes. Cried while I lay in bed with my mom, while Jenny put her head on his shoulder, Erin covered her face and while Patrick walked out of the room. My grandpa cried.
David
She is shunted directly over to the Chemotherapy place which is like a hair salon, sort of. Strike that, it’s an unfortunate comparison for obvious reasons. It’s an area. An area with a long nurses’ station on one side, facing about four little bays or divisions. Each one has a sort of dentist chair in it.
Outside these bays there are mini areas, just little chairs with arm rests sitting out along the wall. Like overflow chemo parking. When I came back from plugging the meter, she was sitting right outside the bathroom, (where you have to flush twice during chemo because your pee is toxic waste; radiation symbols all over) with this bear of a man.
David was the Chemo nurse. Gay as a party. Keep in mind that my mom worked at the gay rehab for a long time. They loved her, she loved them. She never was a homophobe. But neither was she known for her discretion or her diplomacy.
This was David, the oncology nurse. Tall, maybe 6 feet. Blond hair, beard and mustache, glasses. A bit overweight. He’s sitting with my mom, explaining to her about chemo, how it works and why it works. What it will do to her and why. I walked in just in time to hear “And remember, Susan, I told you about all those busy little epithelial cells?”
“Oh shit” I thought, “that guy is toast.” Never talk to my mom like a child or a little old lady.
He finished and went to get the next instrument of torture. My mom looked at me and said, way too loud, “ If that gay-boy talks to me again about ‘busy little epithelial cells’, I’m gonna shove that stethiscope down his throat and pull it out his ass.”
I’m sure he heard. She was snippy like that until they loaded her up with Benedryl, Compazine and chemo drugs. Then she was out like a light. Snoring like a big, hairy man, most indelicate.
David was nice. Turned out to be one of the few little pleasures in this whole ordeal. Checked on us, clucked his tongue about knocking her out, “We don’t want her so zonked out like that. Next time we’ll cut back on the Benedryl. She’s very sensitive. Plus, she’s so small. We’ll do better next time.” I think he might have really been sorry.
Renee
This is a woman, who when she had her energy audit, had the NSP guy stop dead in his tracks the minute he walked through the door. “Is this what your house looks like all the time?” Yes, in fact it was. “ I can tell you without going any further why your bills are high. To keep a house looking like this, you have to use a lot of energy.”
Renee thinks it’s time to vacuum when the vacuum tread marks are gone from the carpet. Vacuuming is not to remove particles. There are no particles in Renee’s house. Vacuuming is to groom the carpet. She has no pets, they make dirt. She will wet her pants rather than use a unisex bathroom(” because men splash, I can’t even think about that”).
Renee is a little woman from an Italian family. Short, short hair, mostly black, although it is starting go gray. A super-cute snub nose, brown eyes and medium skin. Her make-up is classic upper-end suburban. A touch of dark red blush, some mascara and a nice red lipstick, BAM. Done. She’s always stylishly dressed, conservative, but cute. God, she’s cute.
My favorite thing about Renee is her voice. Renee’s voice is a mom voice, smokey sweet from years of smoking (she still has one cigarette every night with her husband). She always sounds like she’s about to tell you about the cross-dressing music director at church, even if she’s just going to tell you where the bathroom is. Every conversation with Renee has potential.
We were shunted directly into the emergency room next-door. Stuck in ER limbo, my mom was way too sick to be in the waiting room, but not allowed in an examining room yet. She was laying on a gurney along the wall, we stood at either end. Mom, Renee and me in the hallway sneaking mom sips of water because some Nurse Ratched had taken away her cup of icy cold water. It was the best water she ever had in her life. She said so. She was dehydrated and not processing the way she should have been. They had good reasons, I know, for not wanting her to have water. But capers like this were all we had any control over. We couldn’t bring but the tiniest little lights into her life. And we’d do anything to turn up the corners of her mouth, even just a little.
When they wheeled us into the examining room, we had a little privacy. We made small talk, complained about the wait, the surly nurses, the reputation of the hospital. There was a moment where we were all quiet and my mom looked over at Renee, her voice quavering, “I thought we were gonna grow old together.” Something must have hit her then and there about how serious this was. It wasn’t just a post surgical complication.
Renee broke; I shouldn’t even have been there. This was between them. They had been friends, out like clockwork every Friday night for 20 years or more. Through husbands, infidelities, through Renee’s breast cancer, through my scandalous pregnancy, through multiple jobs and a million small acts of espionage, they bickered like an old married couple, and talked like teenage best friends.
“I thought so, too”. Renee got teary eyed, they held hands. I left the room.
.
Life’s a beach
Dear Diary
I took the kids to the beach at Fort Snelling today. Dyan was going with her boys and Lizzy. We piled the kids into the road warrior with some sandwiches, pretzels, beers and a cooler of cool-aid. It’s cheap, good fun for the kids. Wears them out and kills one more day of this hell they call summer vacation.
Dyan and her boys are good sports. The boys play with the little kids out in the lake although they’re teenagers and I’m sure there are a million places they’d rather be. Eric is just a little sullen, but Marky really seems to enjoy himself.
The day went pretty well, we let Erin run around without bottoms, aired out that rash. Patrick amused himself pretty well with sandcastles and collecting bits of things. Well, that and dropping sea-weed in the girls’ hair. Jenny chased the bugs and birds, looking for all the world like Saint Francis. They practically come to land on that kid. It’s funny. Not fair that she’s the one with allergies.
Lisa has gotten to be so neurotic, I don’t know where to start with her. How’s she ever going to live in this world if she’s going to be afraid of, or grossed out by everything in it?
When we got here, I could hardly get her to get out of the car because of the bugs. She tried to sit in the car, but it was way too hot. When we finally got her to the beach, she didn’t want to go swimming because of seaweed and whatever else is under the water. I did threaten her enough to get her to go play with Mark and the other kids. She seemed to be having fun, maybe forgetting to think about the weeds or the fish. I don’t know what it was, but she was playing with Mark (he‘s so good with the kids), and she just started kicking and flailing around like a goddamned idiot.
I hollered at her to settle down, but she couldn’t stop acting like an idiot out there, I suppose every piece of weed that crossed her feet just freaked her out, I don’t know. But the last time I yelled at her to mellow out, she splashed and kicked Mark, left the other kids and just came and sat on the beach in her towel. Wouldn’t take off the towel or go hang with the kids. Is she getting to be a sullen teenager already? She’s only 10 for chrissakes!
Dear Diary,
Today was stupid. We had to go to the stupid beach. It was bad from the time we got there. When we got out of the car, Jenny and Erin were walking in front of me. Right when we got by the trees, I saw a black bug with a red stripe land on Erin’s shirt. In the back; she didn’t see it. Then every trash can had all these long skinny bees flying around it. But when we walked by, they flew at us! I am not kidding.
I was watching Jenny, Erin and my mom in front of me, Patrick and the boys were behind us. I could see all these black bugs on Erin and Jenny’s back. Only one on my mom, I don’t know why. But then I saw an actual BEE land on Jenny’s shoulder. They were flying all over. I was so scared.
I had this picture of what if I was walking behind myself, what would I see…? It scared me so bad, I started to try to move my shirt all over to get the bugs off of me. My mom got mad because I was acting so weird. She said they were just Bogzelders on the girls. I don’t care what they’re called, I didn’t want them on me! I just wanted to go home where we don’t have Bogzelders.
Then we went down to the beach part. It was OK, there weren’t so many bugs. I didn’t want to go swimming really, but I thought if I got in the water, the bugs wouldn’t follow me there. They didn’t.
Mark was helping Lizzy and Jenny to swim. He came over and asked if I wanted him to teach me to swim. I already know how to swim, I told him. Plus, he has lots of zits and they gross me out. But he said he could teach me other kinds, like on my back and stuff. We were in to water pretty deep, up to my chest.
He picked me up so I was sort of floating on top of the water. He had one hand kind of under my ribs. His other hand pulled down my swimsuit bottoms. That part was under water, so nobody could really see. I got so scared. I started kicking and splashing and trying to swim away, but he was holding onto me, so I didn’t go anywhere.
His hands were so cold! My mom yelled at me for being wild. He stopped pulling on my bottoms for just a second. But then when I started to swim, he grabbed them and pulled them to the side. He started trying to stick his fingers into my crotch! They were big and hard and cold. It hurt. I freaked out again. It’s pretty hard to swim with someone so big holding you on the chest and in the crotch!
He did that two more times and I kicked him in the chest and face the last time and swam away. I got out of the water and sat by my mom. She asked why I was such a chicken. She didn’t really know. I pulled the towel up over my head and bent my knees so I was like a little tent. The bugs didn’t bother me, neither did Mark. But I hate the beach.
