Return to Real Life

DH is home from the hospital, mostly well and no, we have no idea (nor will we likely ever) what it was that he had. My faith in "modern" medicine isn't at an all time high right now.

Re-entry is not pretty. While DH came home from the hospital and rested quietly at home for about a week, followed by days of late starts and early returns until returning to full steam, life as the mom returned immediately and with a vengeance. Perhaps we should call it post traumatic motherhood. Each of the kids has weathered these lost weeks in a different way. M was more clingy, but chafed at the inactivity of quiet time at home with mom and dad. Bam quietly carried his blankie in his back pack to school every day for a while (something we had left behind in preschool). Z became VERY conciliatory and CE alternated between being extremely helpful and extremely 13 in a bit of a whiplashy fashion. CW was just more. More frenetic, more competitive, more pesky, more impatient (MUST do the book report the night it's assigned, even though there's a month lead time, no waiting for anything, even dinner), more drop at the hat emotional, more inexplicable headaches that send him quietly to bed, more. Each seemed to be crying out for reassurance and attention in their own non-verbal way. I'm grateful that our brush with critical illness was just that, a brush and I can reassure them that dad is home and safe and well.

But life goes on. People we love are very ill, having far worse episodes of critical illness than DH did. In fact, it's causing a bit of vertigo for me when people ask me how DH is doing when my mind has moved on, in so many ways, to others who are far more sick, far more uncertain of future wellness. People we love have uncertain employment horizons, tearful and fearful family changes. As real and as scary and strange as it was for us, we really lost only about a month, we know too many people hurting, struggling trying so hard not to lose far more than a few measly weeks. That is real life. Maybe there are many elements of this realness I wouldn't know about if DH were not the bishop, or didn't know the stories of lasting grief and loss that I already knew. I feel we dodged a bullet, somehow skirted actual danger in a disingenuous way, like DH getting well was cheating notions of fair play and substantial justice. While I know this to be untrue, it's still very much a vertiginous situation, but I don't have the luxury of acting out or walking around with a blankie like my kids. Unfortunately, I have resorted to oreos and TJ's chocolate raspberry sticks. Blankie probably would have been the healthier choice.

Re-entry is still good though, and definitely preferable to the alternative. And my chocolate consumption can probably be chalked up to my part in helping the GDP or something like that. Here's to keeping it real.