Snap!

A further note on how we handle things, springing off yesterday's post.  Barry Magid says we can have two approaches to illness or pain:
1.  try to always tough it out, and never admit anything is too much for us.
Or
 2.  easily feel overwhelmed and always think things are too much for us to handle.
But wait - for me, though perhaps not for everyone, there is a third way "I", my bipolar body/mind, can react:
                      Snap!
I do snap.  People do.  You might be surprised.  My own mother did when she found my father carrying the phone number of a slim, intelligent divorcee.  I won't put the whole story here, but he apologized and she came home and spent months sitting in a housecoat in the breakfast nook smoking and saying over and over, "That woman's evil.  Evil."  My mother was a regular ordinary non-bipolar oppressed woman of her generation, and her generation didn't put crazy people away or even on medication.  I tell you, my father paid heavily for apparently not even having the affair yet.

Part of my problem is simple chemistry.  I need to get off Seroquel, it's causing tardive dyskinesia, an ugly problem.  But without it I can't sleep.  I have not been able to get to sleep without medications since the transplant until Seroquel because of the 1000 mg of steroids they injected me with because they think that helps prevent rejection.  There was no negotiating a damn thing with them. They are surgeons.

When he saw the symptoms, the shrink had me ramp down and off on the Seroquel and I did and now I can't sleep again, and furthermore, I am going snap! snap! at people like a f--------- bowl of sugar snap peas.  The shrink now recommends 3 mg of melatonin.  I recall that the transplant people took me off that at the time of the transplant, and told me not to use it.  So I called the transplant nurse this morning and told her my story.  She explained why it may be Monday before she can get with the doctor about this.  Okay.  Meanwhile, I still have Seroquel, which, BTW, is a hideous drug of the kind mentally ill people go off of, because it makes you stupid. STOOPID.  Next thing you know, you're capitalizing things and using lots of exclamation points!!!!!!!!! and trying to think positive.

And here's something else that occurred just now, NOW, in the f------ present moment.  Backstory:  Tom has been going around in a black cloud of anxiety for a month about a family meeting with his mother's estate attorney that was to take place this morning at 10:00 this morning.  Meanwhile there was all his angst about, IF they ever got his new van ready, IF he had the van in time, then should he drive up there, if so should he have a friend help him drive or should he drive alone and stay the night. There are no simple decisions in the Tucker family. Christ, you ought to see them make macaroni and cheese.  I'm sorry folks, I seem to have turned into Phyllis Diller or something, only without the facelifts.  But if it's funny it's not mean, right?

Anyway, they called at 10:00 am, the time the meeting was scheduled for, to say the meeting is abruptly cancelled.  Without explanation.  Not the first evidence of this lawyer's flakiness.

See, it's not about me, it's all just karma wheeling all around in that vast potential, things happening for reasons that are not my fault or choice, entwinement through no act on my part in the lawyer's karma (maybe she killed herself because she just couldn't face another meeting with the Tuckers!).  But it comes down here and bites me because Karma is a bitch, and I go Snap!

I am not a little dot at war with the universe, as if the universe was sending evil ugly orcs up over the hill one after another specifically to fight me, and all I have is my magic sword.  Anyway, girls don't have swords, for obvious symbolic reasons.  I have to rely on Wonder Woman and her magic jewelry for imagery.  She's not all bad if you can see past the soft-porn costume.  Neither is her Wikipedia article.  Reading it I feel better already.  Maybe I've snapped out of it.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
p.s. It's Saturday now, 10 am, and the financial planner who was coming to meet with us called to cancel. Merciful Buddha giving another lesson in how to roll with the punches. Ah, no meeting!

Marriage

This is Cassie, my daughter, and Chris getting married in our back yard.  I think this must be when Rev. Eric Meter is asking Chris whether he . . . I don't think it was "take this woman."  Different words, more meaningful.  I made Cassie's bouquet, but someone else did her hair.  A part of the service I liked was when Eric asked the assembled company - me, Tom, and grandson Otto - whether we would accept and support this couple, and we said "We will" in loud unison.  Many of Chris's relatives in Canada were watching via video, and if they said "We will" I couldn't hear it.

It was cool when we three surprised them with chimes and bells at the end.  But the most impressive part of the service to me was when Eric spoke about responsibility.  The service was firm about that; marriage is about assuming responsibility, not only for the other person, but for this third thing you are inviting in - the relationship.  You will be required to give it time, to tend the relationship itself.

I thought how Tom and I sit down and talk when something is troubling one of us, usually me, or have a meeting when there are major financial decisions to discuss, like getting a furnace. And we routinely just sit with coffee and breakfast and the morning paper, and casually download miscellaneous stuff, our dreams, our daily schedule. That is marriage-tending time.  Then of course there is murmuring in bed.  You can't have an intimate relationship if you are not available for this kind of ritual.

We are coming up on our 26th anniversary in October, pretty good for people with disastrous early relationships.  I wish the same for Cassie and Chris.