Juxtapose

A dreary and rainy day, but somehow everything had a good positive lilt to it. I got out of my early morning eval with my manager in exchange for one in the early afternoon instead, and after an AM filled with dread, it all seemed to work out when I got a raise and some compliments. I've been there for two years and somehow with all the hoopla that my manager has had to deal with, I've managed to evade a yearly evaluation for.. two years. All was well, though. I spent the morning praying for a good attitude if things didn't go the way I wanted them to, and it wasn't until hours after I got home from my eval that I breathed a sigh of relief and realized I hadn't thanked God for doing just as I asked. Thanks, God. Seriously. Thanks.

I spent the rest of the afternoon in the pleasant as always company of my Mom, sister, Chaz, and Amelia, making our typical family conversations - the kind that Mark calls "arguments." To call them arguments is truly a misnomer. We don't argue, we just like to be argumentative. Two different things. I missed escalating social commentary dialogue with Chaz after he'd been gone for two weeks as a shotgun instructor at camp, I was making up for lost time, and it was wonderful.

Just as soon (it seemed, anyhow) as I got home and fed the bambino a supper of Israeli couscous and chicken, I got a call from Tess asking whether I was bored tonight. Since Mark was gone for The Drewb's bachelor party of bowling and pizza, I took her up on her offer to have me pick her and our cousin Emily up and take them out.

Now here I am. Baby is bed. Typing up a useless blog. Happy. Waiting for Mark to be here. Happy.

Life is full of things I can't control. My poor little Pookie (as opposed to Mark, my big Pookie) spent the night at the hospital the other day after a week of not being able to keep down anything she ate due to a stomach bug. I was truly worried. As she got droopier and droopier, more and more tired and crabby and able to keep less and less down, I was reminded of the fact that while this sort of thing happens to me at work all the time, it's much more difficult to deal with it at home. Were my patient's blood pressure dropping, their urine output dwindling, and their faces getting sallow with dehydration, I'd just bump up their IV fluids, pop them on a vasopressor, and pump them full of anti-nausea med. At home, with my kid, I had none of these things. I felt dumber than a stump to be hysterically crying when she vomited up her stomach for the second time that day, just as I thought we were making headway on keeping things calm. I called my mother, still hysterically crying, and asked her if she wouldn't mind holding Amelia while I cleaned up and called the doc again. I'm not a hysterical crier when it comes to my kid. I think this was the first time, except for maybe when she was in-utero and we got some bad news about what the doctors thought they saw on an ultrasound. It was scary, I was overtired.

Fast forward a few days, and her dehydration has resolved with the help of some IV zantac, a couple of liters of IV fluid and electrolytes, and lots of cheerios, popsicles, and crackers. She is her old self again. But we left the hospital with worrisome labwork, things that may not even be related to her stomach bug, worries stirred up out of nowhere, courtesy of a week's worth of not feeling well and a happenstance panel of bloodwork that would not otherwise have been drawn. What wonders and what horrors can lurk inside our very own bodies, ambiguities of which we may never even be aware. In this instance, that one little elevated number can mean something serious or nothing at all, a reminder to me that nothing I hold dear is my own. My child is the property of God, now and forever, entrusted to me just for the more simple task of raising and feeding her. I can't even love her the way God does. I am barely a facsimile of love as it should be. I hold on tightly, yet loosely all the same.

My mother and a small group of friends of hers are my heroes. As mothers, they carry a unique burden of knowing their children are very sick, often (usually) with the incurable and sometimes with sicknesses that are unknown even to the foremost experts in the way our bodies work. Each has a different illness, each different struggles, but they share a common sadness of watching their kids struggle. If every parent cared for their children like some of these moms do, the world would be very different. In fact, if every parent treated their child's life as fragile, perhaps remembering that their child does not belong to them and that nothing in life is promised to be perfect and lasting, things might be different as well. I say this not to say that my baby is sick with anything like this, not to make any assumptions about the future. I wish everyone would look at life that way, not assuming they are entitled to perfection from their children, their husbands, their lives. Not assuming that happiness is a right in the life of a Christian. Not assuming that trials only happen to those with little faith. Realizing that we are not yet perfected and that we never will be in the here and now.

I hold on tightly and loosely all at once.

Times have certainly changed, my friends. We've all gotten lazy with Facebooking and Tweeting and putting babies to sleep at all hours of the night. I've gotten lazy. To sit and write seems like a selfish luxury, though nothing could be further from the truth - to sit and purge my brain of so many thoughts is a necessary release and it couldn't be more important to do now than it has ever been.

I have a problem, however. Whenever I sit to write all I can think of is my husband. His face, his quiet friendship, his beard on my cheek. I loved him when he was words on a screen and a voice through my phone, I loved him the day I married him, and I loved him more than all of these when our daughter lay sleeping in his arms in bed with us this morning. I tap my brain to sit and write out my frustrations and my sadnesses, and I find it suddenly unnecessary, knowing that he has already listened to them, my God-given confidante. He has taken up my griefs as his own. And yet we are separate people, which seems so inconceivable. I'm reminded of Madeleine L'Engle's poem To A Long-Loved Love, lamenting:

"You are still new, my love. I do not know you.
Stranger beside me in the dark of bed,
Dreaming the dreams I cannot ever enter,
Eyes closed in that unknown, familiar head."

It's been six years since I met this husband of mine and as I muse on all the oddities of our separate lives coming together to make a singular life together, I can only say that God is good. He saw so much that I didn't see myself, and I know He sees things in our future that I may never want to know. But He abides with us. To know the unknown is something we expect of God, something we barely think of when we muse on His vastness. We expect it, so mundane, so much a given thing that God knows where we are going, when truly it's anything but.

And yet the contrast seems so clear to me. With this husband I can experience with every one of my senses, we are still somewhat strangers, and yet he loves me, he cares for me, he knows me in some mortal manner. How much greater then is it that I cannot see God, cannot sense him in such a human fashion, but I know my future is known, and I can know His plans for me. And He loves me.

In a marriage, as with any friendship, we struggle to know one another and understand all the nuances of our mutually-lived yet separately-experienced lives, to make sense of what things mean and how they affect us and what we should do with all this information we are given. We fail so often because we are still somewhat strangers in familiar bodies with familiar voices. It's in this realization that I take so much comfort that we are strangers to God, but God is no stranger to us. He sees us moving in our little joint life and it's familiar. For God, there are no surprises.

Had a number of rather "odd" patients today. There were numerous episodes of unprovoked tears, bizarre repetitive questions, multiple viewings of the floor's coumadin teaching video... all within the first hour I got on the floor.

Anyways, I always try to give it the benefit of the doubt, you know, give these poor peeps a break. They just went through surgery - pump brain and all that - give them a break, Cass, you big mean jerk. I know, I know. See how gracious I am? So I go over coumadin video again, I pat backs and wipe tears and apologize for my inability to allow my diabetic in failure to drink a giant extra-extra from Dunkins. I do my best, okay?

There is a point, though, where the family comes in and you shake hands and then, all of a sudden, you see that maybe this is not a new thing for the patient, and Weird is just the world some people live in. It's an odd, bizarre, strange world, but it's their world nonetheless. I knew that moment had come for me today when my patient's adult daughter asked me if her mother could shower at home and get water on her chest incision. I gave the lowdown and explained that they use a cousin of superglue to hold the incision closed. I emphasized that it holds the wound together very well and will come off on its own.

This is where is gets weird.

Daughter (adult, working, drove motorcycle to hospital... presumably functioning?) gets an interesting glint in her eye and describes in great joyous detail her enjoyment of using superglue to play with as a pre-teen. Super glue spread on her hands, then a clasping of the hands and then ripping apart of the hands and, "Oh, it didn't usually take off too much skin... *glintyeye smile*... I was an odd child!!!"

I can't say I would/could/should argue with that.

But then.. what to say at all? So I stood there, mute, reeling from this story describing what seemed to be an incredibly intriguing activity and, believe it or not, I did not know what to say. I couldn't say, "I love that too!" or, "Gotta try THAT sometime!" Acknowledging out loud the possibility that this might be something worth trying in the most dire, most tragic of boredoms seemed a tenuous truth at best. What's worse, I felt my childhood fears of peer pressure creeping back in: "If the cool kids see me hanging out with this strange person, will they think I LIKE strange people and, by proxy, am strange myself?" Also troubling was the statement where the daughter referred to herself as "odd," which was not something I felt in any position to dispute, knowing only three things about her: mom's medical history, superglue fun and her apparent ability to drive a motor vehicle. I fished for any viable response - anything, really - and came up with nothing, so I cut the conversation short the way I do in those instances where I have no words and I am extremely mortified with embarrassment: complete and utter avoidance.

"Oh. Well. Drive safely!"

And then she was gone, and as she was walking through the doors of the unit, I locked eyes with those of one of our cardiac educators. She gave me a look that said she understood exactly what I was thinking. And as I turned to get on with my day I thought that thing I've thought many times before in situations such as these:

Thank you, Mum and Dad, for not being utterly insane.

God is so good, so giving, so full of grace.

My husband is so handsome.

Baby is so silly.

My life is full right now. Home, work, life. I just want to eat it all up and fill up on the goodness. Don't want to waste a single morsel of this sweetness.