1/12/2005 11:22:36 AM|||Amy|||Gosh. I was just reading over the last couple of entries, and I'm kind of embarrassed. Not embarrassed enough to delete the entries, but still a little red faced flushed.

The whole jury pool was dismissed. Apparently there weren't enough jurors who didn't have tort reform on the brain to make enough of a balanced jury. I was chagrined - the process took a lot of time/energy/anxiety for nothing to come of it but no longer! I just looked up the case online, and apparently this trial was an appeal and the case would have been more than a little boring and distressing. I feel really sorry for the plaintiffs in the case though. They've been going through the courts for 10 years.

So, Bear threw up at school today and came home with a slight fever. He's called me at work twice already to report that while he doesn't feel well enough to go back to school today, he will be fine for the den meeting tonight. I assured him that unless he's running a fever and throwing up, he can go to the den meeting tonight and that the school will be happy to let him stay home today.

And there I was thinking this morning that for the first time in a few weeks, all three kids appeared to be in perfect health!

Monkey's allergies seem to be abating a little, and Winston's ezcema is clearing up again with the cream her doctor prescribed. I sat for a long time in the hall last night gazing at the hateful carpet on the living room floor and discussing warm and cool color contrasts with John. Domesticity is back on the rise!

Now for the part where I talk about my mother:

My father is holding strong. John, the kids and I went to the cemetery on Sunday to leave some flowers. All the debris from the funeral has been cleared up. I'm just having a really hard time with the image of my mother in that casket deep in the earth. Perhaps, oddly, this image had never occurred to me before her death. It's strengthening my resolve to ask to be cremated. I do believe that my mother is not in that body in the earth, but her body's presence there is not making the grieving any easier.

Each time I step into her room, I expect to see her there in her bed. Going into her room is becoming more and more painful. My father still hasn't changed the sheets or put away her things. Her house shoes remain under the bedside table where her c-pap machine and cans of juice continue to rest. I should take action, but I don't know what to do exactly. If I take the sheets off the bed, or if I clear up her things - then I risk hurting my father. The only thing I feel I can do right now is talk to him.

I do know that my father and I did everything she wanted us to do. She would have rather died than gone into a nursing home, and on that point she felt strongly. We also did everything we could, and that which she would allow us to do, to properly take care of her. My feeling is still that her family did not or does not understand the push and pull we experienced with her.

Even with the divorce on the horizon, John, the kids, my father and I are starting to settle into this new life. We are coping, surviving. Without having to attend to my mother's continual needs, more time has been freed up to work on the house and devote more attention to the kids. At a horrible price, life is adjusting into an easier routine. The price of even writing that is a tearing, grief-stricken guilt.

One of the emotions I've been having off and on is that there is something wrong, really wrong. There is a discordant note which I can't pick out. I am assuming that this is related to my mother, and as such it is even more important that we keep everything normal. Every morning and night I go through a checklist. There are the basic things such as breakfast, homework, clothes, diapers, dinner, teeth brushed, toys picked up but then there are the bigger things such as hazards averted, location of each child and adult. These checklists are a normal part of the routine, but I feel a little nagging worry sometimes that something terrible is on the horizon and thus it is with more urgency than usual that I attend to hearth and home. |||110555271624715843|||Erp