The Lesson I Can't Seem to Learn

When Karina was a little girl and I was freshly divorced, life was hectic.  It always seemed I was in a rush to get somewhere, do something, never caught up.  At the Nugget in Sparks there were two elephants that performed and were kept in an elephant enclosure in the parking lot.  You could stop anytime the elephants were in their enclosure and see them.  Every time we would pass the Nugget, Karina would ask if we could see the elephants.  The answer was always no because we were rushing somewhere else.  Correction, I was rushing somewhere else.  One day we got into the truck and the announcer on the radio delivered the news; the older elephant had passed away and the younger one was being sent somewhere to be with other elephants.  I put my head down on the steering wheel and wept.  A simple request that would have brought her joy and taken maybe fifteen minutes was put off until it was too late.  The lesson of the elephants has haunted my life.

And yet, I did not learn it.

There never seemed to be enough time to just sit down and play a game, do a puzzle, just be.  We rushed to day care, I rushed to work, I rushed back to day care, then home to race through dinner, housework, bedtime, endless papers to grade, yard work, pet care, bill paying...

I did try to make somethings special, agonizing over birthday parties and Halloween decorations.  Making spider cupcakes for the whole preschool, complete with licorice legs.  I look back and see that while Karina and I were always together, we didn't spend nearly enough time being together.  Just being.

I know, Kiara, cut yourself some slack.  Single mother.  Dead beat Dad not paying his share.  I hear you guys.  And, I can't change the past.

In Las Vegas, it seemed the same thing.  Always in a hurry.  Always rushing from one project, one job, one responsibility to another. So many nights of eating fast food in the late evening and bundling the girls off to bed to start on papers to grade, bills to pay, projects to finish, etc.  The cycle continued.

Again, we did have game night once a month that brought fun to our lives.  Pot lucks, Harry Potter night, visits from the Smiths.  Special events.  But no matter how hard I tried, I could not be happy there.

We quit our jobs, put our house on the market and bought a house in Eugene based on seven pictures on the internet.  We had to get out of Las Vegas.  Life would be different here.  I would stay home for a year and get us situated and then the perfect teaching position of some sort would magically appear and we would live happily ever after in our perpetually clean house making a lifetime of magical memories for our children.

Well, not exactly.

Kelly did have a job magically appear, for which we will be forever grateful.  Our "temporary" house we didn't see until we drove 900 miles with two kids, two dogs, a cat and a guinea pig and took the key out from under the mat (literally), turned out to likely be our permanent home.  Our house in Vegas took 17 months to sell.  We signed the closing papers the day before my open heart surgery in 07.  Because the fates had other plans.

Between the surgeries, life continued.  I said I wanted to live more mindfully, but I'm not sure that I did. There still seems to  be so much rush rush and not enough living in moment.  How many opportunities to see the elephants were passed up to do the laundry?  Or worse, some mindless game on the computer?

Now I am grappling with how many of the things I put off will I still be able to do.  All the hiking, biking, camping that I profess to love (and I do) but never seem to have time for; will I have the strength?  Karissa has asked dozens of times to go fishing.  Each summer there is some reason we can't.  We don't have fishing gear.  Don't have a license.  Don't know where we can go fishing.  Really?  None of these is insurmountable, why do I put it off?  You can't bring the elephant back to life.

I'm really not as maudlin as I sound.  I typically process information by talking about it.  Endlessly.  Since speaking is challenging for both me and the listener, this has become my clearinghouse of thoughts.  In fact, I was feeling almost productive yesterday.  It gets better.

As for the medical stuff, I have managed to have several consecutive meals without spraying them all over myself.  Thank goodness we have some industrial strength cloth napkins, because they end up looking pretty bad by the end of a meal.  Everything seems to be improving, even if it seems it is at a snails pace.

The feeding tube itself is not painful and is looking better.  It still drains around the stoma, which is rather yucky, but should stop within the next month or so.  Apparently all normal. The reflux issue is hit an miss, with some days being fine and others being awful.  Last night (GROSSNESS ALERT), I was leaning over putting water in the tree and the contents of my stomach came up, filling my mouth and running out my left nostril.  No cough, gag or choke, just pouring out unprovoked.  Yuck.  It looked nasty and felt worse,especially my nose which is not accustomed to stomach acid and food.  No idea why.  Gravity works, I guess. I am thankful that the presents aren't under the tree yet and only the floor and a few legos needed a clean up.  We would have had some major re-wrapping to do.  I guess I'll let someone else water the tree from now on.

Today I am trying to focus on living in the moment and stop dwelling on the mistakes of the past or fretting about the future.  Yoda would say, "Do or do not.  There is no try."  Try is the best I have today, though.  If you get a chance to stop and see the elephants today, take it.