Sleeping Brain vs Thinking Brain, and: The War of the Phone

I have a problem with the phone. Over the years, I've tried to work with it. Build boundaries. Understand the needs of the people around  me. Move on. Accept it. For the most part, I manage.

Sadly, today is not a "managed" day. Today, I have a new appreciation for the depth of my phone problem. That appreciation is making me grumpy.

The problem is simple: if the phone rings when I am sleeping, my brain automatically kicks into hyperhighdrive, flinging myself towards the phone to answer it breathlessly, sounding awake and alert, which, coincidentally, sounds similar to panic.

It doesn't matter if the phone rings during an afternoon nap. Or late morning. Or "normal" phone hours. If I'm asleep, and the phone rings, my brain freaks out.

Inevitably, I crawl back to the bed (or, rarely, couch) to  nurse myself back to some semblance of sanity. The adrenaline rush leaves me nauseous. My heart races. My brain circles itself. It takes time to find a measure of peace physically - and then I can begin to find peace within the panic. This is a panic attack. Panic attacks are exhausting. And if I'm sleeping, it's because I was tired. So. Layers.

Given how often a phone rings around me, it seems strange that such a simple and normal thing is such a cause for distress. But knowing this originating event is easy. It's all tied up to my mother's illness and death.

I was two weeks away from my high school graduation when Mom was diagnosed with cancer. Life sort of fell apart dramatically - her diagnosis came after major abdominal "exploratory" surgery. During which they removed three tumors, most of her colon, and a few other odds and ends we keep in there. Surgery was a few days after she'd been admitted to the hospital. The day before her admission, she had worked her regular shift at Target. I was busy planning my graduation celebration... and then we weren't. We were busy with other things.

The next few months was a whirlwind of radiation, chemotherapy,  doctor visits, nurses visiting the house to help us learn ostomy care. And in the midst of it, my parents insisted I keep my spot at the college for the Fall, taking me 4.5 hours by car away from the unfolding disease. I agreed. After all, I had always thought of college as my "ticket to freedom." And I truly still believe Mom would get better. And, like any reasonable teeanger, facing my mother's mortality was terrifying and I wanted a reason to run away.

So I did. I moved to college, driven up by friends, so my parents wouldn't be burdened another thing to do. And because I was angry and scared.

During my first year on campus, Mom didn't get better. She got worse. The first semester, I wasn't very aware of what was happening at home. I talked to her, and to my dad, but they didn't say much. Until they couldn't hide it anymore. Enter: The Phone.

Dad called to tell me Mom had to go back into the hospital.
Dad called to tell me they'd scheduled a second surgery.
Dad called to tell me the surgery failed.
Dad called to tell me her prognosis was now terminal.
Dad called to tell me that she still wasn't well enough to leave the hospital.

Eventually, the end of the semester/year came. I made it back home.  Mom had made it home, too, after 40 days as an inpatient. She came home to die, with an unknown timetable. Her decline was excruciatingly slow, but also fast. Then,

My sister called me at work to tell me that Mom had died.

Fast forward to years later. The handset for the house phone only occasionally found its way back to its bedroom base. I would deliberately leave it on the first floor, because of the sleep/ring/panic cycle. Which is why, on one November morning, we slept through

My mother in law called, via their cruise line,  to tell us that my father in law was being transported to a hospital in Florida due to serious illness.

Getting back in touch her after we got the message 2 hours later was a nightmare adventure through "please hold" transfers. And it was serious. It was his last vacation. He, too, then came home to die.

Now, nearly everyone I know has a phone. They ring all the time. Now, the rings sound widely different, too. I don't notice the rings anymore. So much exposure. But I can't seem to get past the wall of sleeping brain/ringing phone.

I don't take my phone to my bedroom. Or, on the very rare times I do, I turn the ringer off. I finally accepted that there's no landline in my room. But. I share that room with my husband, and he does bring his phone into the room. This is a sort of tacit compromise - he overlooks the unplugged landline base, knowing that if his mom needs him, she'll call his cell.  He even uses his phone as a wake up alarm in the morning, and I've learned to sleep through it. Our situation has worked, mostly. It also led to today's appreciation.

His phone rang this morning. I woke, but not in a panic. Just a sort of foggy "what's that noise?" And then, he didn't reach over and silence the sound. Instead, he said "Hello?" Cue: Panic.

The nice pleasant sound of his ringer was enough to wake me, but not thoroughly. But years of phone use connected the act of answering the phone with the fact the phone had to ring, and my brain set off. Starting a day with a panic attack is not a method I'd recommend.

I'm working on just accepting it all. I'm not willing to venture into exposure therapy to "lessen" the distress response. I'm not even sure it would be very useful in this case. So it's time to just realize: sometimes I panic when the phone rings. Most of the time I don't. And, it's still all going to be OK. I think this acceptance will be easier tomorrow, after a full night's sleep.

20 Years: An Essay on Missing a Mom

My mom died on July 16, 1997. That's the starting point. The start of missing her. The start of the next 20 years. The start of a fundamentally different kind of life than I had known before.

Life is like this, I've found. A series of moments that divide things into "before" and "after." Before I could drive. After I graduated high school. Before I got married. After I had my first child. These individual events that together create a timeline to understanding what it means to just live every day. Death and life and everything in between. And mom's death was all those things. 

Today, a few days before the official death-iversary, my thoughts are full of the last twenty years. The time after mom died, rather than before. I don't think this is a commentary on my mom, the life she lived, the relationship we had.... I'm just nearly overwhelmed by the fact that twenty years have gone by. I've been busy. And each day closes, and another week begins, and then the next month is here, and now a year has gone, and so on and so on. Until. 20 years. 

It's such a weighty number. Somehow, it feels so much more than 19. A lifetime more than 10. 

Or maybe it's me that has changed so much. 

Over the years, I've written some sentences about all the things my mother has  missed. Meeting my spouse. Loving my children. Visiting my home. Stepping back and seeing me as an adult. In the midst of it, I have missed her. I have longed for her presence. I have ached for a relationship. And all for naught, because death is stagnation. 

Oh, I've learned some important lessons. 

I've learned that I'm comfortable wearing pants to a funeral now. When Mom died, I irrationally knew that I had to wear a skirt for her funeral proceedings. I only owned one black skirt, so I wore it two days in a row. Thankfully, I didn't spill anything on it during day one. I had to go to a funeral a few months ago, and I wore pants. Black ones. But pants anyway. And no one noticed, or cared, though  I may have heard my mother sigh a little in the back of my mind. 

I've learned that I can be an amazing mother. My mom wasn't perfect, and I've never tried to make her so in my memories. One lesson that she tried to give me was to be a powerful and capable woman, able to stand independently. The best way she could say this was "Don't grow up to be like me." And in some ways, I did grow up to be like her; in many ways, I am the better version of her. And now, I tell my children "grow up and be you, capable and competent, compassionate and a good human being." Then I teach them the skills they need to achieve this goal. 

I've learned that I can keep stepping forward into the future, even when the future is painfully uncertain, and that I will be OK. Because when my mother died, I was crushed by the loss and cast adrift. And yet here I am, 20 years later. A (mostly) functioning adult. 

That's how 20 years go by. One foot in front of the other. 

For a long time, when I thought about mom, I thought I might drown. I was a legal adult but an emotional child when Mom died. She was the glue in my universe. Losing her shifted everything I knew; the world became a dark nighttime bedroom without a comforting nightlight glow. Familiar, but full of frightening shadows shaped like monsters. Twenty years, though. You learn the shape of the shadows in twenty years, you make peace with the monsters. After twenty years, I've come to accept that I'm not going to drown. 

Though sometimes, her absence hurts like a pain I can't describe. 

Mostly, I've come to some terms with not having a Mom. 

It's terrible, really, to say or think that I've come to terms with the whole, raw deal. I still hate that she suffered so much before her death. Mom died with cancer, but the cancer ruined her digestion and slow starvation killed her. I hate that we bore witness to this decline, the slow march of disease through her body. 

Yes, there are still things I hate. 

And yet. I can't carry the pain of it all forever. So as the days have gone by, I have set down a little bit of it along the way. I've left it behind me like mythical breadcrumbs and the birds have stolen it away so that I can't make my way back there, to that place of crushing loss. I don't miss her more than ever but rather, I miss her a little less. 

This is a different experience for everyone, I know, the loss of someone you love. There's no right or wrong way, it is the way that destroys you or doesn't. Holding on to what could have been, holding on to what was - these things would have destroyed me. I don't think Mom wouldn't have wanted that.. and I know now, that I don't want that, either. 

On July 16, 2017, I'm going to sit down with my siblings and father and we're going to mark the date. I don't know what this means, to memorialize the dead so long after. For each of us, I'm sure it will be something different because though we all lost the same person we all experience that loss uniquely. It's odd, how this common thread is woven into our separate lives. But I can't begin, yet, to understand what this means to me. 

Twenty years is a long time. I've made friends of the monsters, or kicked some of them out, or simple learned to ignore their monstrosity. I look like an adult version of my teenaged self but I'm so much more than most people would guess. To date, my life has been full of growing and learning and adapting and getting better and better and better so I can't self-destruct. I'm surrounded by people who love me, and that's the best part of the whole thing. For twenty years, my mom hasn't been here. Not to love me, support me, be angry with me, play cards with me, bake cookies in my kitchen, sing out loud with the Christmas music, laugh with her head thrown back at on my jokes, or drive me crazy with the bells in her earrings.  And in those years, other people have come into my life. None of them are her, none of them replace her. And all of them make it easier to miss her a little less.