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I was supposed to be at the BlogHer conference in Chicago this week. Had I been able to attend it would have been the first vacation I've had in three and a half years, but I'm not at BlogHer, and I can't even help promote it, and I've turned off the guilt machine in my head because if I listened to its dogma, you all would have to order a straight jacket for me.
Today, I've run errands for my son, my parents, and myself, which included taking my mother and father to a doctor's appointment. I can't complain. My brother and sister-in-law have been my parents' caregivers since Katrina smacked the Gulf Coast. My guilt machine worked overtime whispering to me about that inequity until I arrived in Louisiana last Saturday, but my brain's still overcharged. This afternoon I find myself slumping on a bed, struggling to write a post about family while family envelopes me.
For the last six days, I've lived in my brother's house with six other people--my brother and his wife, my son, my daughter, and my elderly mother and father. In addition to us two-legged mammals, four-legged creatures--three dogs and one cat--explore each other, mark their territories, and beg for attention because their world has changed as well.
In the bedroom where my daughter and I sleep, suitcases, storage containers, a pet crate, and dirty clothes crowd our space, all evidence that we've traveled a long distance in physical miles and have many more mental miles to go. We are crowded in this Louisiana home, awaiting the settling of our bodies and spirits into the now. This is what we have and where we are, being with each other, and I am grateful. When you're with family you love that you've not seen for three years, a loss of living space matters little.
It seems that my life may go if not well then at least better here as my children, the dog, cat, and I wait for the completion of the post-Katrina refurbishing of my parents home in New Orleans. Yesterday I had my first mini-tour of familiar spots in New Orleans, the hometown I had not seen since Katrina devastation, a hometown holding memories in opposition to reality.
Today I've seen wooden houses in a heap, fallen after the flooding two years ago. I've seen windows blown out in the neighborhood firehouse, firemen in trailers, and the nearby Federal housing project--a land I traversed after school to get home to the brick ranch house near Paris Avenue--stands like a prison. High fences topped with barbed wire surround its tall brick buildings. These scenes scream "ghost town. Run!" However, brown-skinned children playing on sidewalks, the bustle of workers rescuing the neighborhood Catholic church, and signs saying "We're back!" also dotted my tour.
I am numb; yet I am aware that my recent trials are nothing compared to those displaced following Hurricane Katrina. My troubles can't compare, but that doesn't mean I'm stress free. Everyday since my arrival in Louisiana I've contemplated the mental and physical states of my parents, the coping skills of my brother and his wife--a young couple under pressure as caregivers-- my offspring adjusting to blazing heat with daily rain and consideration of a new school or new work, and my own grappling with bills and worries that I may not have made the right choices, that I may have chosen the wrong door when I chose to return to New Orleans.
Do I look like the living dead wandering from room to room, chore to chore, complication to complication, I wonder. And I know what plagues me; it's burn out.
Have you ever walked blankly, doing what needed to be done, depriving yourself the relief of breaking down, not even the trickle of one tear, just so you could make it to the next day or the next storm, or you hope to the possibility of contentment? Of course you have if you're a parent watching your own parents decline, seeing their challenges may be your future, and observing your own children rise toward adulthood or more responsibility. You walk blankly and do because you don't want to break and be a new problem for everyone else. You walking blankly knowing that only you can accomplish certain tasks.
This is where I am now, soundly in
