Baseline Happy

I don’t even know what I’m going to write about tonight.   Usually, when things are more normal in our lives, I have things I want to say.   It’s gotten to be a bit of a habit or maybe it’s a dependency thing for me to write these posts.    I mostly want to write them for me.   I’m still not completely comfortable with people reading what I write so I pretend I’m writing to some large storage device somewhere in a data warehouse that no one knows about.   It’s sort of like an X-Files episode.

Today, I’m just going to ramble.   There are so many things running through my head that I need to just dump whatever’s coming to the surface right now and get it over with.   Writing is cathartic in that way.

I’ve had some migraines lately.   I’m not surprised.   I get them infrequently but when I do I can usually point to the reason why.    Today, right now in our lives, my husband and I have a lot to think about.   We can picture the future for my daughter.   We can see the tragedy in her vision loss.   We can imagine the growing darkness and lack of clarity she’s having to deal with and it’s frightening to think about.    It’s crushingly sad and depressing.    It’s migraine material, thinking about all those implications.

I’ve never thought about sight the way I’m thinking about it now.   Everything we do is based on sight.   I never realized how much we use words like “look” and “see” in everything we do.  Sight is pivotal in so many things in life.

There was a party tonight I missed.   I was hosting our neighborhood luminary event my running buddy and I coordinated.    We spent a lot of the day at the clubhouse after weeks of preparation and handed out almost fourteen-hundred luminary packets with sand.   Afterwards, I was going to leave the neighborhood and miss the lit luminaries because we had a Chinese Dinner we’d bought at our school auction.   This meal is at the home of one of our teachers.   Her husband makes a traditional Chinese meal with more dishes than people at the table.   It’s something you don’t want to miss.    I missed it.  

I was overloaded with the event and the need to pack and get ready to depart for several days.   I’m sorry I missed it, but truthfully, I don’t know that I was emotionally prepared to go to the event.   It’s so, so, SO wonderful to have people come up to you and hug you and tell you they’re there for you if you need anything.   It’s so heart warming to know we have so many friends that care.   It’s also draining, re-thinking about the sadness going on in my daughter’s eyes.  I wasn’t sure I could do another event tonight.

The thing is, I don’t mind explaining the situation.   I’m good at explaining.   I was a teacher and making things easy to understand is what I do.   But as much as I don’t mind telling people about tit, every time I do adds to my sadness.   I can’t explain it.  If you’re reading this, I’m not saying don’t ask.   It makes me smile inside every time I talk to someone because I know they’re there for us.

I don’t know what other people’s mental temperaments are, but I think I’d describe myself as, “Baseline Happy”.    Without anything specific inserting itself into my life, I’m pretty much happy all the time.    I have a great family, we have fantastic friends, we don’t have financial issues and until just recently, there we no health mentally debilitating health problems.  

Even now, if I’m not lying awake in bed at night, unable to get to sleep because I’m trying to picture my daughter’s future, I’m a happy person.   If you talk to my husband he might tell you I’m picky as hell, always like to be right and am easily irritated.    Be that as it may, I’m still happy.  

Am I happy now?   Overall in life, yes.   But my daughter’s eyes have made happy a lot harder to find lately.

The Big Boy Update:  I told my son about the activity we were going to do when we got home.   He replied in a cranky voice, “I don’t want to do that.   I deleted that.”   (Guess who’s been deleting apps on the iPad in the hopes there will be room for new games?

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter kept asking to be put into underpants for bed.   With the eye situation coming on at the end of August we decided to not move her to underwear.   She continued to tell us, “my diaper is dry.” in the mornings so a few weeks ago we gave underpants a go.     After all that wetting of her pants earlier his year, suddenly she has it completely under control.   She hasn’t wet the bed yet.