Selling Mom's Stuff

It feels like a relief to slowly get rid of my mother's stuff. I guess it has taken me since last fall to realize that she won't be needing it. I don't know where she is staying or if she is taking her meds. Hopefully, she'll stay in the Baltimore area and continue working with her mobile treatment team. It's depressing to wade through disorganized papers wadded in drawers, with even more disorganized thinking on them.  She is so very very sick. I have more papers to go through, and I dread it.  I skim them and keep the really bad ones in case I ever need proof of her illness. Although if anyone talks with her for 5 minutes it is evident.

Our village is having a village wide garage sale Mother's Day weekend. I plan to have a sale for all the things that we brought up from her Louisville storage unit last year.  It seems appropriate. If I find her, I'll send her the money from the sale so she can continue to live independently. Or, if she needs furniture, we'll buy replacements.  None of her possessions are anything I recognize from my childhood.  My guess is that all of those ended up in another storage unit somewhere and was auctioned off like in American Pickers.  I try not to think about the trunk full of heirlooms and somebody bidding on it. Oh well. You can't take it with you when you go, so you might as well let it go now.

Mother's Day is one of the worst holidays for me. It's the one day of the year that I feel overcome by grief.  She is alive, yet gone. I mourn the relationship we used to have. Her smiles and her saying, "I love you," or "I just enjoy you so much."  She may be capable of saying those things still, but other conversation is very limited and complicated. Maybe someday I'll be better able to articulate this. I guess it's like talking to someone with brain damage who has delusions of grandeur about herself and delusions of the worst in everyone else.  Oh, the things I have read!

Maybe Mother's Day will be different this year, knowing that I'm doing something to help her. Maybe I'll be able to think about my own family or my amazing stepmom or my wonderful mother-in-law, or my friends who show me up close how to be a mom.

I look forward to having an empty basement and garage and being able to move on from the hopes I let get too high.

Surgery update

Shane's surgery went well, except it wasn't exactly the surgery Shane thought it was going to be.  He thought he was getting bone put in the roof of his mouth, but that will be the next surgery (Stage 2).  Today was Stage 1 -- patching the holes in the roof of his mouth and repositioning the muscles to their proper place.  In Stage 2, they will also fix his lip.  At minimum, that surgery will be 3 months off.  In Stage 3, they will fix his nose so he can breathe better.

More later.

Shane's Surgery Now

Shane is in surgery at Johns Hopkins as I type this.  The doctors are taking bone marrow from his hip to strengthen his palate and filling two holes in the roof of his mouth.  He will be at Johns Hopkins for 1 or 2 nights.  Post surgery, he can only have liquids for two weeks.  Poor guy is going to go nuts.  I should have weighed him this morning to see how much weight he loses. He wants to go back to work on Tuesday, but I predict he'll be too weak. 

He will have more surgeries later to fix other things related to his cleft lip and palate, such as his nose and his lip, as well as replacing some teeth with dental implants.  Today's surgery will allow there to be enough bone in the roof of his mouth to let the dental implants hold.  So as you can see, he's just at the beginning of a journey that will probably take a couple of years.  I'm happy for him and look forward to seeing him smile confidently someday.  Just imagine how different he's going to look by the time we move back to Wisconsin in 2016!

Last night we ate dinner at Fuddrucker's (yum!) for his last meal of solid food for two weeks.  I took a short video of him making his "dolphin noise," because today it's going away.  While I will miss it, I'm glad for him.  I told him he's like the penguin in Toy Story whose squeaker was broken, only instead of having it fixed, he's having his squeaker removed. :)  Here's the video I took last night.  (Sorry for the loud background noise.)

I wish I could be in two places at once: at the hospital with Shane and at home getting the kids ready for school.  After dropping him off at the hospital at 5:30am, I came home.  I plan to go back to Johns Hopkins once the kids are off to school and stay with Shane until mid-afternoon; then home to get the kids so they can see Dad.  I'm not sure if they'll let Allie in to see him because she isn't 12.  Please pray for God's will to be done here - on the one hand, she would be super sad not to see him but on the other hand, it might be scary for her to see him out cold with tubes sticking out of him.  God knows best.

I texted this verse to Shane this morning and am holding it near and dear today:

Isaiah 26:3
Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee: because he trusteth in thee.

Thank you for lifting up Shane and the kids and I in prayer.  We can feel it.  May you also feel God's love through us.

Cindy

Shane eating green onions