There is a tent in my living room.
That is the basic truth that illustrates how life is going right now. A tent in the living room to distract my son from the fact that we are shuffling his furniture around the house, ripping up the carpet and replacing the floor this weekend. It is a moment of whimsy in an otherwise chaotic time. Something needed as much for its entertainment value as for its practicality of a place to sleep while the furniture stands on its side.
I feel like most of my blog posts say something like, "A lot has been going on..." or "Things have been crazy..." and those sentiments are more true now than I think they have ever been. I feel like a broken record, waiting for the operator to change vinyl to something a little faster and upbeat. But the needle keeps re-setting to the same worn place on the record. Scratchy and out of tune.
The last four months have been a daily dose of stress and strain. Through August and September, Mr. Kawaii got progressively more sick. He tried to mask the symptoms, shuffling them off as something that the doctor would quickly cure. Unfortunately for us, that hasn't been the case. Dozens of blood tests, two procedures and a host of follow up appointments later it has been determined that he has a chronic condition called Crohn's Disease. Not many of the people in our circle know much about it (we sure didn't until the last couple of weeks), but it is a terrifying disease that essentially tricks your gut into eating... your gut. Results are coming back fairly positive; Mr. Kawaii doesn't have the extensive damage that we feared, but now we are wading through the sea of NoDairyNoGlutenLimitRawVeggiesNoSeedsNoAcidNoCaffeineLimitedWholeGrains. We are trying to keep him fed while giving his body a break so it can heal and he can be in less pain and discomfort. A quick search of Crohn's Disease shows just how bad it can get, and we are hopeful that we can keep his bathroom functions intact. The dietary restrictions came just in time for Halloween and now I look forward to Thanksgiving and Christmas, holidays ruled by our combined family's executive chefs with trepidation. What on earth is he going to EAT?
We have also been winding down our family business, which has meant a lot of my time is being spent schlepping old inventory on eBay and Craigslist, working to pay off our company debt. My deadline, December 31st, is looming and although the inventory list is getting smaller the piles of product still loom around me in the office like Dementors sucking the happiness out of me. They are dark, solid, and refuse to leave me alone. Not quite the muses that I have yearned for the last few months as I putter away at the next manuscript which lays mostly unfinished on the bottom of the priority list. I am hopeful that I will find the will and energy to push through the next two months full steam and earn a chance at starting the New Year with one less load on my shoulders. I hope that my moment of optimism sticks around for a few days before it drowns itself in the gloom of another depressive rain cloud that leaves me "Ho-Hum" like Eeyore under a house of sticks.
Among all of this, and other worries that hang in the back of my mind (the floor remodel in our son's room is part of the larger project of readying our house for sale in 2016, constructing our new home beginning in January and downsizing our lives so that we both have less stress and more financial freedom), I somehow have written, edited, and am getting ready to release a new book. I'm not really sure how that happened other than that my desire to author things must really override everything else. And besides, who knows? Maybe this book will tip the scales and get my words out there in front of enough readers to make a mortgage payment or two.
"A new book," you may ask? "Why haven't I heard more about this?" Well, it's because the new book isn't written by me. I mean, it IS written by me, but I have created an entirely new personality for it because simply put, it's not for kids. Really not for kids. Not for some adults, too, including the afore mentioned Mr. Kawaii who took several months to edit it because it made his skin crawl. What I am talking about is my soon-to-be best seller S is for Serial under the pen name D.K. Greene (a nod to my former neighborhood serial killer, Gary Ridgeway). Life has thrown us under enough buses over the last few years that I felt like murdering someone, and so I did it on paper.
So there you have it. I am distracting myself from my terror over my husband's disease by cranking out a book (I really do promise Adaline 2.0 is coming soon), tearing up my son's room in the name of a future real estate sale and learning how to draw up my own house plans so that we can live comfortably in a tiny house in the woods one day.
If you have read this far, thank you for taking the time from your day to participate in my stress-dump. The best part of being a writer is the act of being able to put our thoughts out in the void to be noticed, and now my fingers are past the paralysis of the changes thrust upon me so that I can do that again.
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