Deb O's Blog

I had an amazing tarot weekend recently. It was beautiful and powerful. I was surrounded by “Crones,” those wise women older than I, warm and loving and full of understanding. I discovered the Gaian Tarot deck this weekend and I am quite overcome by the beauty of it. In fact, tonight I am feeling some anxiety. The cards gave me such great guidance and I drew a lot of major arcana. This scares me. Even today and yesterday I drew lots of majors. They indicate big change in all kinds of ways. Will I live up to all this? Somehow I am afraid I will disappoint the cards, the entities who help us through life. I look for specific measurable results in life but I’m wondering if there are other differences I could be looking for. How would I know them if I met them? Are they feelings? I haven’t trusted them in a long time. Being a creature on Zoloft, who knows what is real in that realm? And yet I look to my feelings to know how I am doing in life no matter what specific measurable results I may have.

What is real? I have spent time in this space before, but not very long. It’s too unstable and I have children to take care of. I can’t afford to question my existence and reality. Even as I feel unsatisfied with the tasks of my day to day existence, and look for a new view of life, I worry about stepping on unsteady ground and losing my ability to function.

Some things are important. The boys need fed and a stable home. I take care of my relationship with Daryl. My parents and brother feel loved. What else is there in the specific measurable universe? Learning new things, fun, being a source of wisdom and guidance for others, being loved and loving. These easily slip into a not-specific universe….

One of the thoughts I left my tarot weekend with was “It is time to give up the Bindweed.” This the number 15 card of the major arcane in the Gaian Tarot deck (traditionally the Devil). How will this show up in my life? I also drew the Explorer of Earth as a response to what I’m committed to in life. This is traditionally the knight/prince of pentacles. Normally I choose the Queen of pentacles as my significator (called Guardian of Earth in the Gaian Tarot). I certainly see myself at a point where I’m hovering between the two. There’s not much expertise in the outdoors though. It’s more of a proficiency in maintaining a household. I don’t feel like I’m in the right climate to start spending one on one time with nature but I would like to more, maybe as it gets colder out. Still, what does it mean? I feel like I’m waiting to have it revealed. One of the wise ones in my class told me it was my job to be “open” to what Gaia gives. That she will take care of Draegan and me in ways I don’t know of yet. I just need to be open. I also drew the Star at one point and she strikes me as a creature of grace and “being” rather than a call to action. Receptive and giving without being busy with doing.

Some people write interesting blogs. Mine is crying to the universe. I have a headache and I’m tired. I‘m sleeping so badly – I just keep thinking and thinking instead of falling asleep at night. I get up and check Draegan’s blood at whatever a.m. it is and then I lay there thinking. Worrying about Draegan and now worrying about Daryl. His platelets are low so he had gone to a hematologist. He has some condition that may or may not pass. It is not Leukemia. But if his platelets don’t go up on their own, he is going to have to get treatments that have various side effects. He told me this last night and I just tossed it on the crap pile that includes diabetes, Daryl’s stress with his job, Daryl trying to figure out if he should go with a new job (and move us all to California), my mom’s health issues, the confusing and annoying behavior of the boys. That’s the big stuff. The problem is the crap pile makes all the normal stuff in life seem so much harder. I spend all day with Draegan, I have so little will to do go out, he wants me to play with him constantly, his brother is at school until 3pm and D’Artagnan doesn’t want to play with him when he gets home anyway. D’Artagnan comes home crabby and Draegan is tired by 3pm so they both squabble and call my name repeatedly. I find myself turning on the tv a lot during the day to get Draegan to let me sleep. Of course, I sleep in the same room with him because I’m afraid to leave him alone (low blood sugar) so he wakes me up again and again. I feel my own anxiety slowly increasing but I don’t know if that is just hormones or everything piling up.

Tonight I am going to my Tarot group but I don’t want to. I don’t want to do anything. I am so depressed and hopeless. I just hate being this way in life – it is so familiar – but I’ve never felt quite so exhausted about it all. Everything seems pointless and I’m easily confused. I just want to sleep for a long time. Last night I tried to fall asleep thinking about all the specific things I’m grateful for in life – my family is alive and together – but it took so much will not to go down the paths of pleading for help, in not thinking “woe is me” about so many issues. So even being present to appreciation seems out of reach right now.

I focus on Draegan walking around the living room. Most of the day he is a little bundle of joy, excited about all kinds of little things in life. Thank god he can still make me smile every day.

Today my nose is stuffy and my sinuses are aching. I slept late in one of those dozing type sleeps where there are way too many dreams. The dreams leave me with a lot of strong feelings – embarrassment, fear, frustration, sadness and general sense of demanding “why?” I had another plane crash dream. I am not on the plane. I am outside watching the huge jet come crashing down to the ground. It’s appropriate I suppose since it is Sept. 11th. I’ve had so many of this dream that in my dream I say to the people around me, “if that plane crashes, this is not real, it is a dream.” Sure enough, the dream ends soon after it crashes, as if I don’t know what to do in the dream anymore. It still feels real though. Anyway, there were other meandering endless dreams, one was quite like a movie.

Somehow the dreams, along with Draegan’s condition, remind me of how uncertain life is. Specifically, they shine a light through the illusion of certainty. 9/11 certainly made us all clear that there is no certainty – the sheer terror of this realization has led us to being at war even today, nine years later. It’s almost as if war is so familiar that perhaps it sooths the fear of uncertainty. I find that losing my sense of security around certainty, gives me a lot of anxiety. The kind that makes you shake, the kind that makes it so very hard to make decisions, the kind that makes me cry over the smallest things. In my present life, Draegan’s diabetes reminds me every day how uncertain life is. Perhaps at some point I will be able to feel some security around the sheer uncertainty of it all. This morning his blood sugar was 336, very high. It is normally in the 100’s. Why? We have no idea. No idea what is going on in his body, his mind, no idea. And he was in a great mood, completely unaffected by the high blood sugar. Two days ago his blood sugar ran high for two days and he had so little energy. All he wanted to do is watch TV and cuddle. I can’t even get a sense of his blood sugars by how he is acting. No certainty.

I took him to the doctor Wednesday because he has been complaining of stomach aches, pain in his legs and low energy. I kept a journal for three weeks of the frequency of the complaints, his blood sugars when he complained, how often he pooped and such. Now they have decided to draw blood and run a bunch of tests. One concern is Addison’s – a condition in which the immune system attacks more than just the pancreas. Of course, this all reminds me that everything could be worse, “and may be” I whisper to myself. I went to an event on Wednesday night where we did a guided meditation that included visualization, some drawing and sharing. I distinguished my huge fear of Draegan dying. The fear is so big I can hardly breathe sometimes but at least during the meditation I could see the fear as a thing with boundaries and limits, not something that goes on forever. I imagined my little Draegan with his huge dragon spirit, so fierce and loving. And I imagined that spirit choosing the life he wanted to have and I imagined me just barely being able to reach out and touch acceptance. Afterall, I think our spirits go on well beyond our corporeal forms and this gives me some comfort. But I can’t imagine life without him, not even for a second. Even with his constant chattering and noise making, no matter how irritating he gets, I never want to be without him.

The same goes for Daryl who doesn’t have a normal amount of platelets in his blood so he is going to a hematologist Tuesday. Of course, we have googled this – all sorts of horrors are possible. We have some comfort in knowing that he has none of the other symptoms of the horrible things. It’s jus t more uncertainty, less illusion.

I am the mother of a child with Type 1 Diabetes. I am his Islet cells, a sort of walking pancreas. A Pancreas that doesn’t even do a good job. He is four so I give him his insulin after he eats allowing his blood sugars to spike. I can’t give it to him before because he eats an unpredictable amount of food. At the hospital, the doctors and nurses made it seem like high sugars weren’t that big a deal. Since low sugars are a more immediate problem the desire to avoid them is bigger. But it is so hard to get between 80 and 120 with any consistency, that at first I tried to keep him on the higher side of things. Now I have read about so many complications that come with diabetes. Years of high sugars can cause him to lose his eyesight, his kidneys to fail, his nerves to stop working, his digestion to slow down, increased chance of heart attack and stroke. Even if it takes 10 or 20 years on average for one of these complications to occur that makes him only 14 to 24 years old. Of course, none of them could happen and this is what we hope for. But already he complains of stomach aches daily with no particular pattern that I can discern. Sometimes his legs hurt (maybe it’s just growing pain but leg pain is common in diabetics). His wounds still heal up fine although this is another complication. One pamphlet said never to walk around bare foot because the feet are so at risk but I can’t stand to make him wear socks and shoes all the time.

This morning Daryl gave him his shots (long acting and short acting in the morning) and Draegan got upset. I had walked D’Artagnan to the bus stop. D’Artagnan was scared. I’m not sure why. He likes the bus in the afternoon but the morning has more kids on it and the kids at the bus stop seem to know each other all ready. There is a fairly easy solution to this by having Daryl drive him to school on the way to work. It’s not out of the way and he and D’Artagnan can spend a little time together in the car. Anyway, I came back from walking D’Artagnan to the bus stop and Draegan was fussing about the shot. To be accurate, no one but me ever does the morning shots because Daryl sleeps in on the weekends. I held Draegan while Daryl did it and it was fine. This comes the morning after I found out that Daryl is worried that I don’t think he is taking Draegan’s diabetes as seriously as I am. He was very upset about this last night. But it seems typical that I am so much more involved with Draegan’s diabetes. I am with him all day, I can afford to sleep less at night, I have more time to obsess about blood sugar numbers and insulin amounts. On the one hand, Daryl gets to leave and go to work. On the other, he is less involved in something that risks his son’s life every moment. At least Daryl’s confidence in my obsessiveness hopefully gives him some comfort that Draegan is in the best hands he can be.

In one year, Draegan can start kindergarten. A lot will change in the next year and there are many things I don’t know. Will Draegan have a pump by then? Will that make things easier? Will I need to go to school at lunch time to give him his shot? I could just keep him at home with me…. Intellectually, I know he’ll be ready.

I wonder what my purpose is any more. I’ve always wondered really, but lately life has made such an unexpected turn by giving us diabetes. It appears my purpose is to keep Draegan alive and healthy. Ever since I had kids I thought my primary purposes were to keep them safe, healthy and growing in every way. So I suppose I am living out the same purpose, it’s just going to last longer than I had predicted. As they got older, they were supposed to be less maintenance, but with diabetes now that maintenance will be even more intense for a lot longer. The biggest fear is that he will die in his sleep. That I will walk in his bedroom one morning and his blood sugars will have dropped so low, his brain couldn’t function anymore. Statistically, this rarely happens with diabetics and I work hard to ground myself in the facts of our situation but the fear niggles and nags. One night his sugars will run high all night and the next they will run low. As soon as I get a little comfortable with his insulin dosage, it pulls the stability rug out from under us. I often sit in my chair throughout the day and think I should be doing more with my life. The woman down the street has three kids under 10 and she is working on her PhD. She met me at the bus stop this morning in a pretty orange dress, ready for her busy day. I hadn’t brushed my teeth or even put a bra on yet. I still had pajama pants on. But then I remind myself how much of my thoughts are consumed by thinking about Drae’s blood sugars, listening to him talk, watching his behavior, wondering why his tummy hurts “all the time”, getting him food and drink due his frequent thirst and hunger. I think even if I had had a job, I would have quit to take care of him. No one else is going to care about him like I do (except Daryl). No one is ever going to give up as much as I have for love of him. If I have it my way, my will alone will keep him healthy. My Will will keep me doing the hundred tasks a day that parents do for their kids with diabetes.

D'Artagnan has been extremely excited about Civilization IV. He would play it all day if I let him. He is most excited about Barbarians which I believe he imagines as simple pure bad guys. He likes the fighting his guys do with the Barbarians. There is much talk of killing and war. At times I think this is not a good influence but then we need to talk about these issues at some point. So I'm listening to him and watching him work out what he thinks of “bad” guys and war and dying. In some instances we can”click” the health button and he revives after being “killed” by barbarians. This is when imaginative play takes over after turning the computer off. I know even at 5 years old he is trying to figure out death and the idea that our lives stop at some unknown point. I believe I need to support him during this figuring out stage. I'm just not sure how much to guide him, steer him if you will, and in what direction. So I'm mostly letting him play out whatever he wants with cautions and stops placed around “you did not just kill Draegan, or anyone else,” “no, we are not chopping people's heads off,” “you are not to actually hit your brother with your “sword”, or punch him, or kick him,” etc. Sometimes I suggest that their might be “good” barbarians, which he accepts, it just doesn't seem to help him work out all this fighting and dying stuff. Eventually we will approach the subject of how the word barbarian is a generic term that has traditionally referred to native peoples of a land who were really just people trying to live their uninterupted lives, neither good nor bad.

In the mean time, I have checked out kid's books on Medieval times, knights, and castles, as well as other historical books on the various civilizations he is encountering in the games. The game spans all the major time periods from the moment the nomadic humans decided to build huts and farm up through modern times. He is learning the names of all these civilizations and their leaders. He is also learning about world wonders – the great wall, stonehenge and the pyramids being his first favorites. I even found a book that spans 12,000 years of history (kid's book), where each page is the same river scene going forward in time to see how it changes, from the moment humans settle and farm, to roman times, to barbarian invasions, viking invasions, medieval times and on. This is the part of homeschooling I really love – connecting all this stuff he is experiencing in life. He also has to read to play the game so he is learning that too.