I pretty much lost the month of May, and I'm glad it is over.

[davsand]

I am talking about a HUGE sense of relief that the month has ended. The shit storm first landed May 7 when my mom had her heart attack, followed by a quadruple open heart bypass the following week. May 19 she got out of the hospital and checked into a nursing home/physical rehab center. Within 24 hours she had to be moved to a DIFFERENT facility because the care in the first one was so bad.

May 21 we took our daughter to Chicago to compete in a band competition and decided to stay over one more night so we could take her to a medieval dinner theatre on that Saturday. We'd had that planned for quite a while and my mom insisted that we go because she thought I needed a break from the stress. I got food poisoning from the chicken at the dinner theatre.

Finally, on Wed of this last week we had flash floods in our area, and the sump pump was overcome and it burned out. I had four inches of water in my basement--which is our family room, laundry room, and a storage room. The detergent bottle was literally floating in my laundry room, and water poured out of my computer when we moved it...

And did I remember to mention that my job has been a hotly contested item for the last month complete with editorials and headlines? I have not been pilloried (far from it, in fact) but my own local party has pretty much thrown me under the bus in favor of a young guy with no experience and minimal training because I dared stand up in public when the abuser was in office. (Some of these people are STILL mad at me for speaking out in public when the local party did nothing.) Nobody can point to anything I have done wrong, nobody can point to any fault, all they can say is they want more "diversity." This has been public enough that my kid's principal actually mentioned it to her and told her to tell me they are all supporting me.

I told my husband that at times like this I almost want to go out in the front yard and shake my fist at the heavens--but I am afraid to lest something ELSE happen.

I am done in. I am exhausted, I feel completely battered, and frankly, at this point in time I am tempted to tranquilize the cat, load the family into the car and just start driving. On the plus side, we are all still alive, the house is still standing, and I have at least one more year left on my term that cannot be messed with.

Jeesh, I am SO glad May is done and gone. It gets better from here--right?



Laura

[Kookaburra]

1. Here's to June being much better for all of us

and a big :hug: to you Davsand. I hope your mom gets well very soon, and that your political pressures let up.

[Flying Dream Blues]

2. Ohhhh, that sounds really awful.

You must be exhausted from the stress on so many fronts! I really hope things do lighten up for you soon. And yes, it always gets better. But you might want to have someone look at your chart and see what the timeframe looks like because it sounds like you might be experiencing an astrological "growth period."
:hug:

[Fire Walk With Me]

3. ...

:hug:

[Celebration]

4. hooray for June

So sorry you had to go through all this..........in ONE MONTH. Sheesh.

:hug:

[Cleita]

5. Family crises are very hard as well as added problems. In the past, I even lost a year over some

of them. Here's hoping for a breakthrough for you and a better summer. :hug:

[japple]

6. Dear Laura, I ask that Universe send you peaceful days and

a new breath of energy. I don't know why it is that troubles seem to come in multiples, but may this soon pass and your blessings begin to arrive in equal measure. :hug:

BTW, who's the cute kitty?

[davsand]

7. LOL. I was looking for a new kitty pic and found that cute baby picture.

Reminded me an awful lot of a kitty I had when I was a child. He was absolutely adorable, but a complete whirlwind. My mom still refers to that cat as "hell on wheels"...

I almost always have a cat pic in my sig line. My avatar has always been that skinny black cat. I do that to remind myself that so many people and animals are living "without" or "living skinny." I look for a happy cat or a fat cat for my sig line to remind myself why I keep on working for change. Sounds kinda lame, maybe, but it is just what I do.

_____

On a personal note, I told my husband this morning that June is looking to be the "clean up" month where we clean up the mess made in May.

Yesterday the plumber came and installed a new sump pump along with a back flow valve to help keep water from backing up in the house again. His opinion was that that old pump burned out the motor under the sustained burden of the flood. We made an additional discovery that ALL our basement drains run thru that sump pit--so the water that was flooding back up from the drains was NOT storm sewer water as we had initially thought. It was still water to flood our basement, but at least it was ground water rather than the gray runoff out of a sewer...

Yesterday I got a text from m brother (who lives on the other side of the state) asking was I planning to go to the "meeting" at Mom's nursing home today. It was a "WTF?" sort of moment because I knew nothing about it. I am in and out of there several times a week, and they never mentioned it to me. I was there last night and asked my mom about it, and SHE didn't have a clue what was going on. I grabbed the nurse and asked her what was going on--she knew nothing about it, either. She left and came back a few minutes later to tell us that the meeting is some kind of "update" thing to let us know how my mom is doing with her therapy. My first question was "Wouldn't it make sense to notify the PATIENT rather than a family member that lives across the state?" Sigh. We hope she gets to come home in the next couple weeks.

I've started on Probiotics to try and get my digestive system back under control. That case of food poisoning just about did me in.

Work just IS--and that is how it is gonna be for a while yet. I have a job and I am grateful for that. The rest will either clear up or it won't, and my continued angst is completely not productive, so I am working to try and just let it go.


My regular joke is that this too shall pass--maybe like a kidney stone but it will pass.




Laura