Just Write {176}

I went around town putting up flyers for a Story Show that I’ll be hosting with my friend Riley. We’re planning on having people read stories around the theme “Home” on the Saturday of Easter weekend, from the stage of the New London Little Theater.

This is something to look forward to, something creative, something like food for my word-y heart. I’m grateful.

Everywhere I went with flyers, I had to ask for tape, to hang the flyer. This is how I roll, hanging things up, with no roll of tape. And every place I went, I was met with the familiar faces that make up Home, and tape was handed over counters and flyers were hung from boards and windows and doors.

It was a cold cold walk, waking me up, and I thought about how it is always best for me to have as little time as possible alone with my own thoughts. My friend Jean reminds me often that if my mind should go There, to the place of Me and Me and Me, it is time to change the topic. This almost always means doing something for someone else, right? So I did, and there it was, the peace that passes understanding and all that.

After the flyers, I went to The Building and worked and I opened the mail. Papers from a pediatric cardiologist, bills, junk. Stress is close all the time these days, and I said the Serenity Prayer more than once. Then last night, after reading myself to sleep to avoid the butterflies in my stomach, I woke up to Miles standing by my bed. 11:08pm. This can only mean one thing.

So began a completely sleepless night of waiting for the next round, washing bedding, rubbing his back, cleaning up god-awful things. There is nothing like a sick child to change the topic.

I would lie awake waiting for the next round and I would say that Serenity Prayer some more and I would hope with all my might that the other two will not get it, that I will not get it. That’s what I did, until I heard the next “Mommy!”

But whatever will be will be, even though this Friday is the consultation with the pediatric cardiologist for Elsie, and the bills, and the missing work for sickness. Sometimes I think my head may explode, but my heart wants to get there first. There is nothing to do but wait and hope, sometimes get mad and cry, and just keep going.

It is not all about me, and I am back to learning it the hard way. I am falling straight into the abyss with Recovery as the only net because with Recovery comes change for the better and I need it so much. Being a sober person is never done. I don’t have a desire to drink, not in the slightest, and yet I have the potential to drink, and even more, the potential to self-destruct by way of my own brain’s stubborn propensity to throw me.

Life ignores what you think you need and want immediately–now, now, now, and it is only in the surrendered waiting that we see something good was coming the whole time.

Today I am here with this sweet sick boy, and his skin is pale and I have disinfected everything I possibly can other than his thirsty tongue. (I would wash that off too but I think he may draw the line there.) This is what we do, we try to control all the outcomes, but we can’t. So I’m going to let go of the big and little things, while I wait. Then I’ll forget and try to control it all again, and then I’ll remember, I am only here to serve.

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This is the 176th installment of Just Write, an exercise in free writing your ordinary and extraordinary moments. {New here? Please see the details.} I would love to read your freely written words so join me and link up below. You can add the url of your post at any time. Just be sure it’s a link to your Just Write post, not to your main page. (Then link back to this post in your Just Write post so people know where to go if they’d like to join in.) (Any links not following those two guidelines will be deleted.)

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