Summertime Blues

Well, *is* there a cure?

I don’t understand how we are expected to go on living and functioning when everything is on fire, the world as we know it is being dismantled and the rights of those we know and love (and many, many, many of those we don’t know at all) are being stripped away) while we are living and functioning (and trying not to get sicker).

June was so busy that I could barely breathe. Some of it was intentional and luxurious: older daughter spent a week in Hawaii with her high school science department doing some incredible sightseeing and some community service, both kids spent a week at younger daughter’s camp for children with serious illnesses and disabilities and their siblings, we all spent a week in Dallas at Theater on Ice Nationals where three of us skated, and both my kids became national champions.

But before any of that, Johnny’s closest friend Pete died suddenly. 44 years old and he dropped dead of a heart attack. Johnny, whose strongest quality and what I love most about him is his loyalty, jumped into helpful mode. He was there for Pete’s wife and kids around the clock, and I did my best to be there for him in the same way. But wow did that take a lot out of us. Grieving. Explaining to our children, especially since he was at our house the evening before he died, hanging out with them and playing video games like everything was absolutely fine.

But of course it wasn’t absolutely fine. To explain to two children that there is a world in which a young-ish person they knew well could just die the morning after they saw him looking as healthy as he ever had was incredibly difficult. Because he wasn’t healthy: he’d had a congenital heart issue that had been corrected nine years earlier but he was also overweight, worked at a desk, seated for twelve hours a day, and led a generally unhealthy lifestyle. So while we were mourning, we were also getting a wake up call about how we could take better care of ourselves and each other.

My biological mother died at 56 and my biological father died at 60. I am 52; I feel that clock ticking every day. So when people in my life start dying, it’s really scary. It’s a giant reminder that I have terrible genes. I don’t want to die soon. But after Pete died, I didn’t jump up and start exercising and eating more kale. I did not write. I worked when I had to, I parented when I had to. The rest of the time, I got in bed and didn’t want to get up. I watched trash television on my phone and my migraines came back. Until I had to travel for work: to the Atlantic region of Canada, to Toronto, to Phoenix.

In Dallas, I got super sick and had to push through a week of managing three different, incredibly busy skating schedules including my own. Since each team stayed in a different hotel (and we were in a fourth) and everyone had to be in a different place at different times, I only managed because Johnny was there, helping to chauffeur us all around to meet up with our teams for different practices and team events and competitions and whatnot. Still, I had an emotional meltdown and missed my birth mother so much that I cried nonstop for two days. I think I scared a few people. But I pulled it together in time to cheer and scream and lose my voice for my kids as both their teams won gold, skating as beautifully as they ever have in their lives before a national audience of other theater on ice skaters and families and coaches and judges.

We came home from that and the next morning, Johnny drove the kids the four hours to camp. Then I had a glorious week home alone with my spouse, which only happens that once a year when they’re at camp. Normally that is a week I stretch a year’s worth of productivity into: cleaning the house, sorting and donating kids’ stuff, organizing, shopping, and spending quality time with Johnny. But apart from one dinner out, once again, I could barely get out of bed.

It feels so extreme. Like the country, I guess.

And that was just June.

Towards the end of the month, 40,000 people and I signed a petition to stop fireworks in Big Bear Valley. I signed because the eagles Jackie and Shadow that I’ve written about here before live there peacefully and every time Big Bear hosts a fireworks show, they are spooked away from their home, staying away as long as six days. I signed it because I am attached to those eagles and their babies, who are fledged but perhaps not dispersed, and still very young. I also signed it because while many people enjoy fireworks, they are terrible for wildlife and the environment, and also because there’s nothing to celebrate right now anyway. 40,000 people signed and it got tons of news and press, and they held the fireworks anyway.

My so-called holiday weekend was just a long weekend. I watched the eagle cam and I heard Jackie’s cry when the fireworks started and then I watched as they disappeared.

Now, I am in a hotel room in Los Angeles where I am with my younger daughter to participate in the Rollettes Experience. We arrived yesterday. Traveling with a child in a wheelchair takes twelve times as long as when I travel alone. I travel so often that I have status everywhere: Clear, TSA Precheck, Sky Priority, Platinum Medallion Status, lounge access for the next two years, early check ins, late check outs, bla bla bla. I get in and out of everything in ten minutes. But with Freyja, we check bags, we have to register her chair for every single flight, we worry that she will get detained and patted down (like in Dallas), we have to be the first to board because she needs a tiny wheelchair to get her down the aisle to her seat and we are the last to deplane because of same, and I have to carry everything. It takes hours. We are at a hotel four minutes from the airport and we can see planes take off and land from our window, but it took us over an hour to get from baggage claim to the room even though I’d checked in early and had a digital key because we had to wait for a shuttle to take us the four minute ride that was wheelchair accessible.

Exhausting.

Now it’s 2 pm Pacific time and Freyja is still sleeping. I have tried to wake her since 11 am: fed her through her tube, taken off her scoliosis brace, talked to her, sung to her, told her how much she’s missing, and she finally very clearly said to me: Mama, I know we are in LA and I’m excited for the Rollettes Experience but I am tired and I want to rest and I will enjoy it more once I’m rested and I don’t even care if I miss some of it.

Out of the mouths of babes and all that. Maybe I should stop writing this and get in bed with her and take a nap too.

So, how’s your summer going?