I had said to friends that I was not going to post on my blog for a while, that I had some personal things going on and I had to deal with them. But here I am posting anyway. I am not writing this for pity, or for feels. I know that you who care for me wish me to not be in emotional pain, and there are those of you that don’t care at all but find it interesting, or are bored, etc. I am writing this with the original purpose of this blog in mind, to write about my thoughts, good or bad.
First, let me update you on my Mom. She is doing as well as can be expected, level 4 lung cancer and in hospice care. She also has sepsis; assumedly from a surgery she had a couple of weeks ago. They did not expect her to survive the week. As with most diagnosis against my mother, they were proven wrong in how resilient and strong she is. She is weak and tired; she has said she is ready to die. These are never easy things to hear about someone you love. I pray for her, even if I am not religious. I pray for her because she asks me to, because she believes and I am not above being wrong. So now we wait.
My mind drifts to the future, thinking about what life will be once my mother is gone. My tendency to overthink situations, cause/effect and to try to anticipate people I have no ability to understand often overwhelms my ability to process it. It’s a fool’s errand, which makes it a perfect task for me, for I am afool. When my mother is gone, I will come out to my remaining family, to my brothers and stepfather. The only reason, I have said before, that I do not tell my mother is only because I don’t want her to worry over me. She would be ok with it; she would deal with it and then want to fix things for me. I didn’t and don’t want her to worry over me, when she should be the one taken care of. But I will come out to my family and my wife’s family. They will accept me or they will not, they will tolerate me or make fun of me or whatever they wish. Their reaction will not change who I am, it will only change our relationship.
My mother dying is not in any way freeing me to do something. It is however a wakeup call to not take time for granted. There is so little time in our very short lives to not seize each moment like a child grasping a balloon. In that vein, I am coming out to family and friends very soon. With work, it won’t be long at all, a little longer than now, but much shorter than another year. I still have to be able to pay for things, to provide for my family.
It was as good a Christmas as it could be. I wasn’t sad the entire time, nor was I happy either. We have moments of either, small moments that if stitched together make a pattern of a good life or a sad life. Since most of my moments this Christmas were happy, interwoven with moments of sadness for my mother, I can say it was a good Christmas. Our children opened presents; we adults managed a few ourselves. The time passed, a week off work went by and there were times where I thought I would dry up completely from crying. The New Year rang in with us at home, quietly celebrating the clocks twelfth toll.