quest for a faerie child

we always prevail...

Our house.  I sometimes wonder what people think when they come upon it for the first time.  The body is a dark purple and the trim is orange.  I used to insistently call the colors of our house by the names I chose when I went searching for that perfect combination of something striking, yet fun.  The names of the colors are ripe fig and orange marmelade.  I would insist when Moose described our house as purple and orange, that it was actually "ripe fig and marmelade".  Do you know how pretentious and ridiculous that sounds?  Can anyone truly visualize ripe fig?

I am going to say, no.  Hence, I threw up my hands a while back and finally gave in to the truth.

Our house is purple and orange. 

It is surrounded on two sides in front by a picket fence of the same colors and the third side borders our neighbors 8 or 10 foot tall side fence, built I am told, to keep anyone on our front porch from being able to look at them when they are eating on their side deck.  I can't say I really blame them. 

At any given time, there is a hodgepodge of children's play things strewn haphazardly across the fenced portion of our yard, on the sidewalk, in the space between sidewalk and street.  A small-child sized play/slide structure also shares that space. along with a raised bed built out of remant pieces of granite in varying sizes, sculpted together with mortar and stones, which James did last year when he was going through his "tiling" phase.  To truly describe it is difficult.  Eclectic, might give you an idea....

On one side of the fenced portion of our yard, another remnant of James' tiling phase is the mortar and tile walkway with no particular pattern to it, winding its way through the yard.  The tiles were laid more as a result of whatever he could pick up from the habitat for humanity resale store and while there isn't truly a pattern, there is something of a symmetry to it that is at once interesting to look at, as well as somewhat offputing.   This side contained our mostly failed vegetable garden of last year, which I have since moved to a different area.  Now it contains ornamental plants, an extraordinarily large rosemary bush (read: more like a tree) and a suffering lavendar.

And more children's toys.  Always the toys.

On the front porch, a very old and tattered native american-style rug covers the majority of floor space.  An old lazy-boy type chair Moose and I bought for $50 before Max was born, provides the only seating.  There's a double stroller and the wooden shelving, which used to hold Max's dialysis cycler and supplies back in the day.

And the other side of the yard contains a huge rhodedendron, long since grown into a tree and a chicken coop fashioned like a small red barn with a six foot run attached.  There are three two month old chickens peck, peck, pecking and cheep, cheep, cheeping inside. Lola, the cat, prowls around.  Sprawls around is probably also a great descriptor.

The driveway holds no cars or vehicles of any type.  We've sprawled out into the driveway and it now contains a long raised bed, where the majority of my vegetable garden can now be found. It is the only space on the property with truly unobstructed sun from about 11 am or noon till after 6 or 7 at night.

This is our house from the outside.  During the late spring and summer, we, hold court on the front porch, the yard.  During the late spring and into the summer, the sounds of my boys riding their tricycles up and down the sidewalk is a constant.  The sound of their laughter, their screams, their fighting, their bear and tiger-like growls, fills the air.  It is music to me. 

Probably less so for our neighbors.

I know I have mentioned this numerous times previously, but Portland is truly spectacular in the summer and even though I am not quite sure yesterday's temperature of 71 degrees would qualify it as "true" summer, it was brilliantly sunny and warm enough to spend the entire day on the front porch and within the confines of our front yard.  Which we did.

As I rocked my daughter to sleep on the front porch for her naps and finally for bed, I listened to my boys chattering away.  The fact that they hold entire, full-sentence conversations with one another, never ceases to amaze and delight me, especially since it was not altogether long ago I despaired Max would never speak like a normal child.  Recently, I was reading back over old blog entries and I came upon one where I was worried because Rowan's speech was developing slower than I would have liked.  I was convinced it was because Max was behind and Ro is so highly imitative, that he would only mimic the way Max spoke.

I still believe this was true....

It no longer is.

I marvelled as I sat on the porch, how distinctly sublime my life seems at these moments.  We have come full circle once again.  Was it really last summer that my primary worry was money?  Did I really spend the entire summer obsessed and worried about paying our bills?  Did I find myself having to do yoga every single day as a means of taking my mind off of financial issues?

The answer is, yes.

But once again...we've made it through the darkness and the light has begun to shine upon us once again.  We prevailed.

We always prevail...

 

because it just feels good...

It is Friday.  I am sure this is obvious to everyone else and I am sorry to state the obvious.  But you see, it is not so obvious to those of us with lives as crazy as a circus on steroids.  Somehow I convince myself life is going to inevitably slow down, that the cycle of neverending tasks, appointments, work, caring for three children, is going to miraculously cut me some slack and allow me to take a break.

I am here to say it never happens.

Ever.

And honestly, I don't know if I would even have any clue how to handle a normally paced daily existence.  Lately I've been dealing with the ever travelling Moose and what that means for our household.  And when I say ever-travelling, I mean he has been on the road for a total of over seven weeks since the end of February.  

 It's not all at one time.  

Sometimes it has just been four or five days.  But he just returned from a sixteen day trip and less than a month ago, he was gone for something like twenty.  I will tell you, what you think you will never be able to handle is almost always doable.  If you had told me six months ago, I would be single-parenting my three kids for almost two months this spring, I would have told you you were crazy. 

But, I have done it.  And if I do say so myself, I have done it well.  I've handled car troubles.  Twice.  I've handled Max crises, including a three day odyssey in the hospital.  I've cared for our three chicks, our three children, our cat and our dog.  And I've maintained my mostly normal work schedule.

Yes.  I've done it all.  But, don't label me super-mom.

I've had help.  Moose's company has been paying directly for an oncall nanny service for the majority of these trips and I am so unbelievably thrilled with the service that I find myself wanting to reach through the phone and kiss Paul, one of the owners of the service, everytime he tells me they can do whatever crazy schedule I have had to come up with to balance everything.  I guess because I am not paying for it myself, I keep forgetting these people are actually getting paid to help me and that they aren't doing it out of the kindness of their hearts.  I generally only end up using them when I do actually need to be at work, except that I do allow myself 1 day of what I call "sanity-relief", where I have someone come in and I use that for "me" time.

I could not do this without them.

Max is going through what is termed "acute kidney rejection".  It sounds bad, doesn't it?  It's definitely not good, but it isn't as bad as it could be.  Acute kidney rejection is treatable if caught early enough and hopefully his was.  It is likely a result of the immunosuppressant dance we've been having to perform in order to keep what I secretly call the burger-king virus under control.  Burger-king because the actual name of the virus is the BK virus.  It pains me that I immediately associate BK with a fastfood restaurant I refuse to even step foot in or drive-through, as the case may be. 

But I digress.  I've posted about this before.  I posted about it a year and a half ago when it reared its ugly head.  It's an insidious little virus which could be the demise of Max's kidney.

Only time will tell and obviously a great deal of time since we've been dealing with this little bugger for a year and a half and only just now are we seeing the rejection we always knew was a possibility.

As I sat in the hospital with Max during the days and with all three kids at night, I had moments to reflect on life with Max.  This was not the worst.  In fact, the intense worry I've felt at various times in my relatively short time with Max in my life, was just a shadow of its former self.  I can't tell if this is because I can now put things in a perspective I used to find difficult, or if I am somewhat deadened to the spikes of worry that used to invade me time and again, or if I am just able to take what the doctors say at face value and realize this whole situation is only mildly concerning.

Regardless.  I've come a long, long way, baby.  We all have. 

I met someone when we were in the hospital.  Another mother.  Another mother who is dealing with not just one very sick child, but two and no, they are not twins.  And no, they do not have chronic kidney disease or anything renal related.  She struck a chord in me.  I think we recognized in each other, a kindred spirit.  Someone else who understands the yawning, gaping fear, the stress, the fact that noone else understands, no matter how much they empathsize with you, no matter how much they love you.

I don't know if that burgeoning spark of a friendship will sustain itself, but one thing it showed me is that I have a wealth of experience to offer and that there is something truly satisfying about offering that experience and offering a listening ear to someone when they are in need.  It also showed me that I should try to find time to offer myself in that way, either through some type of support group or as a volunteer, regardless of how crazy my own life is.

So, even if we can't find the time to nurture this relationship with each other, I think I need to investigate how to do something for others.

Because it just feels good.

It does.