A Girl Reads a Conversation About the Appropriate-ness of Publicly Airing Ones Feelings

And promptly writes a blog post about airing her feelings.

Scott Simon of NPR is currently sitting vigil at his mother's beside, in the ICU of a Chicago hospital and tweeting about his experience. If what I am reading is correct, his mother is dying.

One of the websites I frequent linked to Simon's twitter feed and the subsequent conversation wandered into "this is totally inappropriate for him to do, he is an asshole / No he is not" territory. Most of the comments were deleted, thankfully, before I posted my point of view on the subject.

So I'm putting it here, this comment that I can not say because (ironically) it is too personal for me to share there.

I envy Scott Simon. I envy the freedom, whether granted by his mother or not, to openly talk about his participation in this painful journey. What a luxury he has, to send out into the universe the pain he is feeling and garner the support he needs to make it through to the other side.

I am not as fortunate. I am constrained, by the rules of decorum, to keep the pain and stress that I am feeling at witnessing my mother go through an illness that may very well kill her, to myself. In order to honor my parents wishes to keep this matter private, I can not talk about it. If I were to draw out the Venn Diagram between the people I am permitted to tell and the people who would be the best at giving me the support that I need, the overlap would be miniscule.

So I am glad that Scott Simon has the permission, even if he gave it to himself internally, to take the rest of us on his journey. May he and his mother find peace.

The One in Which the Intrepid Heroine Crushed All Hope

Buying a larger home is something J and I have gone back and forth on for the past two years. For a very long time I steadfastly insisted that we needed to possess fewer things rather then buy a large house.

Then Boy Alien finally grasped the concept of using the toilet and I woke up one day and realized that I was just as tired as J of all the little battles that take place when you live on top of each other all the time. Getting my study back was nice, but I would also like to be able to brush my teeth and put on sunscreen in peace.

Since I like looking at houses, it didn’t feel like work until I discovered that the majority of listing agents I contacted to view property either completely ignored me or refused to show us anything unless we were pre-qualified for a mortgage loan.

J and sucked it up, contacted a friend who is a mortgage underwriter and got a pre-qualification letter. I contacted the agent who assisted us when we purchased our current home. She was more than happy to help and didn’t require a pre-approval.

We went on a formal house hunt on Saturday, boy Alien in tow. We saw three we genuinely liked. The first one had a steep driveway and heavily textured walls. But it was also laid out very well, had a remodeled kitchen, beautifully retro bathrooms, restored floors and a fair amount of closet space. The basement was unfinished and had enough space to do laundry and for Jeff to brew. It even had a storage room that could be converted to a wine and beer cellar.

The second house was beautiful on the surface and decorated in French provincial style. The kitchen was especially well done and the owners had added a spectacular sunroom to the back. The size was just right.

It was also on the verge of falling apart. All the windows in the home needed to be replaced, including the presumably newer windows in the sunroom. The sunroom because the seals were bad, the rest of the house because the windows were the original single-pained numbers and leaked air. The air conditioner was ancient. The furnace was not much newer. The porch railings were splintering and the planks were very aged. The steps to the lower part of the backyard were mushy and the wood/brick side-path was falling apart.

But the worst part of the house was the distinctive odor of stale cat piss in the basement. It permeated into every corner and lingered heavily into the air. It was as if the cats were allowed to pee on the floor with impunity and no attempt was made to clean up after them.

Home three was made of stone with vinyl siding on the front. It had a family room with a 50's style bar and marble flooring, tiles on the ceilings in the kitchen and all bathrooms and a large basement and garage. The kitchen has original steel cabinets with stainless steel countertops. One bathroom has a walk-in shower' the other a perfect vintage-style sink with built in towel holders.

The funkiest aspect of the house is the toilet seat. Three of the four seats are clear. Two of the three are ocean scenes, one with dolphins, the second with tropical fish.

The third seat was the highlight of the tour. It was embedded with straight razor blades.

We liked it far more than we expected.

I crunched numbers. I made spreadsheets and looked up millage rates and calculated wage taxes. In the end, I discovered that short of winning the lottery, we can't buy the house without selling ours first. The burden of carrying two mortgages with all the accompanying costs (property taxes, homeowner’s insurance, utilities, acts of gods…) until we were able to unload our current home would break us. We wouldn’t be able to rent it out for enough money to break even the expense of owning it.

There have been a lot of minor crappy situations this year. The buyout of my company and the subsequent fallout in the form of having no idea what will happen next. No trip over my 40^th birthday. No trip to Europe in the fall. J annoyed and disappointed that I couldn’t save more money. Me pissed that the repeated conversations I initiated over the past year explaining how expensive plane tickets and accommodations are when you want to travel in reasonable comfort with a small child falling on deaf ears. Me pissed at having to explain that one of the reasons why I have less than he thought was because of dips into savings to pay off debts to friends (hockey tickets) and to keep us in the black.

Killjoy me. No vacations. No new house. No fun at life.

More Things I Don't Like About Cancer

One of the things I am finding difficult about dealing with my mother's illness is that I don't know whom I can talk to about it.

My mom comes from a family with a life-long tendency to keep things to themselves. I recently learned that out of the six children who comprise my mother's side of the family, four of them have had cancer of the reproductive organs. Two siblings with breast cancer. Two siblings with prostate cancer. Two siblings cancer free.

It is no surprise that my mother decided to have genetic testing done. My brothers and I wait for the results.

Because my mom and her family don't talk about these kind of things, I'm not sure if it is ok for me to talk about it. I've told some close friends and a couple of coworkers. My in-laws. But I don't say much to anyone else. Which is hard, because I have a decent circle of friends who would happily send my parents happy thoughts and good wishes. But I don't know where the boundary lies, so I don't talk about it.

My mom is having a rough time of it. She has been in the hospital twice since the mastectomy, once to have a portion of her incision re-done and an infuse-a-port put in, once to drain an abscess and receive IV antibiotics for an MRSA infection.

This is on top of the break in the water line leading from the distribution line to the house. They were forced to shut off the water completely and have been living in a hotel for the past several days, as they wait for the other utilities to mark their lines before digging up and repairing the pipes.