Christmas Expectations

My "baby", aged 27 has arrived and has now zoomed off to spend the night with a friend, taking my car.-how normal- he'll be back in the morning.

The halls are decked.

I will see step kids, my kids, good friends and a kind hubby. I will lead a beautiful formal concert (the cello part) this Sunday which will be spectacular.I will hug my dogs and cat.

Then I will go to Seattle for a week to see grandbabies-who are now 4 and 7-not babies!

I feel tired, but also excited, thrilled, more than ready.

BUT
O God I want my baby boy back. I just want to see him, whatever he might be- babe in arms, funny schoolboy, ravaged schizophrenic- I will take anything. Please, please let him walk in the door with one of his wonderful Mom hugs.
Just one. Just once.

O Shawn, your Mommy loves you. I love you so much.

In the picture: Shawn aged about 6 and his adored big sister, Jenn, about 8, Christmas 1980

And Then There is Real World Shopping....

bleh.
I thought I would drop into the local Zellers because I wanted P.J.'s for my daughter for Christmas and there are a lot there. But maniacal hordes had picked over everything, and although it wasn't all that crowded, I sort of got hypnotized-I spent a couple of hours in the end. I did get what I wanted (more or less) but I was SO SORE that I had to fall in bed and sleep for a couple of hours as soon as I got home. I don't know what this is really about-well, it is about the fibromyalgia-the pain is, but why is it such an extreme reaction?? It makes me vow to stick to the web shopping! I don't seem to be able to do much in a week-end before I need to crash.
How could pain this bad be "just" fibro?
Off to bed!!!!

Late night shopping

See the two of us in the letter

• 
  

Just as we were in real life?

Oh, my heart.......







It is interesting how things change. We don't really notice day to day as we are such adaptable creatures...I guess for a 59 year old I am a pretty early adapter- I follow blogs. I am keeping again, I hope, my blog. I look everything up on Google. I like Firefox, not Explorer- How do I know any of this really? No one told me..it sort of seeps in.

My Christmas shopping is pretty much done- most of it at 2 AM in my room here.Imagine how much difficulty I would have had finding two Ninja costumes- for a 7 and 4 year old -if I had had to go to a store. And find them I did have to do!

["DEAR GRAMMA I WOULD LIKE A NIHGA MASK THANK YOU XOXOXOXOXOXO"]

It took a lot of time and a phone call to Kansas to check on the sizing, but the Ninja outfits are on their way to Seattle where I will wrap them two days after Christmas and make a little boy and his sister happy. Think of the implications- I doubt I could have found them ten years ago, even when I had more energy to run around in malls. Or even now- I wouldn't have begun to know where to look.

I would feel even more computer savvy if it hadn't taken upwards of three hours trying to down load that picture....

Two Years, Three Months, Twenty Days Later

So. I have been Reading on line.
Lurking.
Dressing up as Grammacello for my Hallowe'en
Concert, along with 30 kids.
Living my life, as we tend to do, but at the same time,
Having A Crisis.
One of my students found this blog and read it. Asked me why I don't I keep it any more?
I have been thinking about this.
Here's the thing....
My tiny perfect life by the lake didn't work out in a big way....Let's see-I'm still married, still teaching, dogs all fine, ditto kids and grandkids. But WHEN: the neighbour from HELL moves into the townhouse next door, reports your innocent cello teaching to the town, after digging up the information that you must be in a detached house to be legal, a small but salient fact that NO-ONE else seems to know, including the 22 other teachers you work with, most of whom are doing the exact same"illegal" thing, you scoff, (at first) ultimately pay $35,000. plus in legal fees fighting, decide to beat a strategic retreat- [note omission of about seventeen million explanatory details here]move to a detached house not on the lake, sell the townhouse (thankfully!)and regroup, it kind of takes something out of you. Like 2 years, three months and twenty days to get to a place where you feel able to crawl out from under the rock -the one that fell on you-
You have been teaching from home for 31 years, now, albeit in a different city where it is, by the way, ALSO illegal, although you were never caught....
Anyway, where you feel slightly more able to put anything of yourself out there.
I still read the blogs of some of my commenters. Have found others as well. But don't even comment. Just hide, licking my wounds and wondering how it is possible to have been SO badly de-railed on the trust front, not even able to comment.
In the world of crises it is way down there- I know this in my own story even, as I am a Mom whose son has died, I know grief. And crisis.
But the last two years have been very hard.
I am changed- in ways hard to articulate.
I am going to post this. Then I will go around and say "hi" in comments to some people with whom I had begun forming some tiny, tentative connections, two years and more ago.
I will see what happens.