Can't sleep

I imagine that there are hundreds of blogs across the 'net that have this as the title. What a pitiful state of affairs when the only reason we hit the keyboard is that sleep is defying our will and we are somehow, for some reason, still awake.

Such is the state I'm in now. I'm sitting on my futon, in the main room, with my precious pit bull, Atticus, snoring pleasantly beside me on the sofa. My stitches itch, I've got a cough that wracks my abdominal cut everytime I have to hack and it feels like someone is poking a hot iron in to the right side of my abodomen. I'd much rather be in the land of nod.

But the middle of the night is also the only time I have available to write! My days are so full right now - I'm having a ball with my Mom here, and with my sister Katie now added to the mix, it's been wonderful.

I was worried about having Katie come. I've not handled our relationship well the last decade or so. We're so alike in some ways and so dramatically different...I'm really having fun with her - it's been the same wonderful release that I'm enjoying with Mom - for some reason, all of the chips have finally, FINALLY fallen off of my shoulders. Is it the cancer? The Effexor I'm taking to deal with the Tamoxifin? Did I suddenly grow up at 40, independent of any of the other crap I've been dealing with? Why are some parts of life getting easier right now?

I'm a bit of a polly-anna - I want my experiences to have a jewel buried in the middle of them, the quintessence of the diamond in the rough. Inside, I'm giving cancer the credit for all of this, that the disease, while it has been trying to kill me, in many ways is saving my life by cleaning out the detris of the other traumas I've been through and has returned vitally important parts of myself back to me - my self respect, my sense of humor and of the absurd, a knowledge of what is really, truly important and what is just plain crap. I have precious little patience with crap now. I can feel myself operating from my center, as if my fairy god mother or the good witch of the north by north east finally cleared the spell that obscured the road from my eyes.

Not all is clear yet, but I can see the way to finding some Windex to help things along.

There have been many poignant moments in all of this. Long distance family relationships create a house of mirrors - different parts of the other's personality, habits, life become distorted in my perception simply due to lack of personal, day to day contact, regardless of how often we speak on the phone. The reality of a person is lost until you start living with them again - until then, parts of the relationship are still trapped in time, like a note in a bottle.

I've discovered, from living with Mom on a daily basis again, her real humanity, which is something that you never get as a kid, so until this point of time, some of that unhuman, superhuman quality of her hung around. Now I know she's a fellow adult. Not "merely" a fellow adult - it's so much more amazing than that! - but at the same time, she is just a fellow adult, not the woman who could do no wrong, as I'd created her in my memory. Nor is she any longer the woman who held my self esteem under lock and key, dependent on her approval. That's also gone - instead I can hear her and see her and just know she's "Bunny" and that if something falls out of her mouth that's critical, that I can take it on or not, and see it as more of something describing who she is rather than who I am.

What's more, now that I've relaxed and quit taking things personally, I can see that she feels more free to simply be herself. What a wonderful compliment! She's comfortable around me as a friend! How many daughters and mothers can enjoy that kind of relationship?! I've rediscovered how funny and irreverent she is, how very intelligent and beautiful she is. I can admire her graciousness and her huge heart. It's created such a sense of gratitude, but at the same time a very real sense of loss - how many years were lost by my tilting against her personality, being angry, taking things personally, keeping parts of myself hidden from her? What a shame!

So, it's been an amazing interlude here at the house on Frasier Street. I'm enjoying having a home full of people, as only a true extrovert can, but more than that, I'm so enjoying the return of my family into my heart. The world seems so much less lonely now.

Good night.