Glueless

Do we need a maid? A ride? Dinner dropped off? An errand? Yes yes and yes and we've been getting these things consistently, thank you thank you thank you. 

But still something is missing around here. My being sick is discombobulating us. I think it all comes down to glue. Plain old Elmer's/mother's glue. You see, deep inside of me, I manufacture a sweet honey-like glue that sticks everything else around me together. It is invisible. It is taken for granted. It is unseen. It is very very sticky. Like it or not, I am the queen bee of this hive. And I am the keeper of its secrets, the spinner of its honey, and the one that glues everything else together. When I'm out things unglue.

This morning while Mike valiantly swathed his way through the jungle of getting two teen/tween girls out the door for school I lay up in my bed, pretending to rest. Crash! Bang! Squeal. I could not stop dreamwaking, existing up here in my cube room's fugue-like state where my little girls kept coming upstairs in dresses for me to approve of their outfits for the day. Fiona was a little tiny short kindergartner in a brown gingham flowery dress very short, with little short white ankle socks. This was not true. This was not real but I could not disconnect. If I couldn't be downstairs helping them get ready for school, I had to dream it along with them, painfully. My girls aren't little and don't wear dresses to school anymore, but I could not rest because I kept having this waking dream that I was helping them. Alone, upstairs, in my raft of bed, I followed their every move, connected to them by a long thin sticky filament of mother glue. 

My waking dream within my pain dream was accompanied by crashes and yells and crying when the real children and father could not find the eggs or the homework or the socks or the backpack or the lunchbox or the note or the gloves or the coat or the shoe or the shoelace or the key or the mug or the orange juice. The phone. There are no eggs, I heard, so I guess my goddamn breakfast taco plan has gone to hell.

I have proned around so much in the last two days that my neck hurts. Valium, Marinol and four ibuprofen at 3 o'clock in the morning make for fuzz. My glue is fuzzy. In fact at one point this morning in the wakedream I forgot where I lived. And I dreamt that I dreamt that I was in the bed and Mike was trying to wake me up, and then when I did get up he had a Starbucks set up in our living room and was busily trying to sell a bunch of investment bankers some breakfast. He was trying to sell them on an investment deal, and I walked into the room and ruined it with my sickness. They all hated me. And I tried to imagine the outside of our house, and I couldn't remember if we lived in Colorado or Texas. This is real, and it was not real.

Back to the glue. I am the one that knows. I know things. I know where the gift for Sydney is, and the antique horse that I bought for a little girl that needs to be wrapped up in a tiny little box with a bunch of other small things and shipped. I know where the postcard is from the orthodontist and which person to call there to set up the appointment for one of the three children that I am overseeing as their teeth tectonically move back to a more suitable plate style. I know which brushes are in the freezer and why. I have  little wrapped and half wrapped gifts strewn all over the floor of my bedroom, and they are in a secret pattern that has a very distinct meaning that only I can ascertain. Please do not disturb them or Intercontinental shipping may not occur as it should. 

I am the keeper of the ultimate Christmas list, I know what is been ordered, wrapped, hidden, planned, desired, and shipped. I know Mr. Omelchuck's t-shirt plan and exactly where Fiona is every single day at 3:54 pm, down to the chair. I know who her new friend is, and which 9th grade boy is having problems because of nail polish. I know where the stamps are. I am supposed to rest, unhook, disconnect: not DO. I know too much and nothing at all.

Don't get me wrong. I fully know how important I am. And yet. I know they could get along fine without me if they had to. And Mike is doing a fantastic job of juggling the myriad million things that he's having to do without much help from me. I had a premonition he would fall off the ladder this weekend while putting up Christmas lights, and it came true. He took a step backwards into clean plain thin air, when he thought it was the ground. There were still three steps to go so it was a very hard landing on that leg and it still hurts. Still, it's better than it could have been, and it was not the premonition of him breaking his back that I had envisioned. 

So we are getting along okay, and will continue to do so, but we are a little bit glueless right now. If you come around, watch out for chaos, and little bits of things flying out of the center of our cyclone, and a little bit of yelling and screaming and fussing. We are a little bit undone.