Once Upon A Time When I Was Young(er)

Me & My Blessings

Yesterday I was 39.  Today, I am not.  I still have a hard time saying my new age.  I guess you could say that "forty" is the new "F word" at my house.  I've been walking around in a funk the last few days because forty is a really big number.  If you don't think it's a big number you should hear the way my daughter says it - "FORTYYY!?".  She keeps me young and makes me feel old all at the same time. I have big birthday plans for this evening which is making me cheery and I have a wonderful life full of many blessings that I am grateful for (which also makes me cheery).  I also have many many many years of happy memories that I can reflect back on and the beautiful thing about being forty is that I am old enough to have a plethora of "back in the good old days" kind of memories and yet still young enough to be able to remember them.  I am going to work hard to embrace this new decade in my life - hair dye, wrinkle cream, spanx and all.  I am forty.  Yay me!

Haughty Derision

     Owen's tenth birthday is tomorrow and being the sentimental mother-type that I am I've spent some time tonight looking through his baby pictures.  He was a beautiful baby - all eyelashes and long fingers and toes.  I came across this photo of Joel and tiny baby Owen napping in the hospital bed and thought it was very fitting that they were napping with a comic book - then I turned the photo sideways and read the title.  Can you see what it says?  It says "BODY BAGS"  and it's on the bed next to my sweet precious newborn baby boy.  When I brought this to Joel's attention a few minutes ago (because there was no way I was not going to bring this to his attention) he defended his comic book choice by telling me that "BODY BAGS"  is the touching story of a father and daughter bounty hunter team who are reconnecting and working on their relationship while catching bad guys. Then he went downstairs to his comic room to retrieve this book because apparently he wants to commemorate his son's tenth birthday by reading the same comic book he read the day he was born.   The saddest thing about all of this is the fact that I've spent years putting together baby books and photo albums and one day Joel is going to trump all of that by dragging out a comic book and saying "Hey Owen, this is the very comic book I was reading on the day you were born. You're mother even took a picture of us with it.  How cool is that?"  I've got my angry face on and I keep glaring at Joel over the top of my computer. "BODY BAGS" . . . seriously!? 

A Needle in a Haystack

   When my mother was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis in the summer of 1993, one of the first things she wanted to know was if it was genetic. She was worried that I might develop it too. The neuroligist did his best to reassure her that he didn't think it was, but he didn't really know. This was par for the course in my mother's experience with doctors.   Before her 1993 diagnosis, my mom had spent the better part of two decades trying to find out what was wrong with her (chronic pain, weakness, fatigue, vision problems, more pain).  Frustrated with her doctors in Knoxville who after years of surgeries and treatments finally told her she should consider seeing a psychiatrist because her pain was probably in her head, she and my father spent the summer of 1985 at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.  After six weeks of more tests and procedures they sent her home with a diagnosis of chronic myalgia.  They recommended that she visit a pain clinic and gave her a prescription for some heavy duty pain killers that did nothing to help manage the pain but were extremely addictive and took her several months to detox from.  It was a long road for her.  So, why share all of this today?  Because yesterday I found the medical records of my ggg-grandfather, John David Williams at ancestry.com. His listed disabilities are uncannily similar to my mother's disabilities -  defective vision, lumbar myalgia(1), and neurasthemia(2). My first thought when I googled his symptoms was "Oh my God, he had MS too!"  And then I called Joel to share what I'd found.

      A bit of background - John D. Williams was born in 1843. He enlisted in the Union Army on April 24th, 1862 in Kentucky and served with Company A of the 6th Tennessee Infantry through the duration of the Civil War.  He mustered out of the service in Nashville on April 27th, 1865. Historical accounts indicate that the 6th Tennessee Infantry "moved on foot and otherwise, near ten thousand miles" during their three years of service.  He returned to Knoxville and married Catherine E. Coker on September 18, 1866.  By 1910 they were living in Fountain City and were collecting a war pension of $12 per month. In July 1910, John D. Williams was admitted to the Mountain Branch Home (3) for Disabled Soldiers in Johnson City, Tennessee and lived there until January 1911.  I'm not sure of the exact date of his death, but he was interred in the Knoxville National Cemetery (Section A, Site 3494) on September 11, 1912.  He was 69 years old. Catherine died in 1919 and was buried in the Coker family plot in Knoxville's Old Gray Cemetery.

       I had no idea what I would find when I decided to continue my mother's family tree research.  I had hoped to fill in some missing names and dates and write down the many stories that my grandmother told me over the years, but yesterday's discovery was unexpected.  I'm still trying to put into words what it means that my my mother's gg-grandfather may have had MS (or at the very least suffered from a list of disabilities very similar in nature to my mother's disabilities).It's validating - I think because it makes her illness seem less random. It's also one of those "ah-ha" moments that makes this all worth doing. 

A link to information about his son, also named John Williams.

http://adayinthelife-julie.blogspot.com/2010/03/gone-quiet.html

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(1) myalgia: means "muscle pain" and is a symptom of many diseases and disorders, including MS.

(2) neurasthenia: a condition explained as being a result of exhaustion of the central nervous system's energy reserves including fatigue, dyspepsia, and indications of intra-cranial pressure and and spinal irritation.

(3)For more info about Mountain Branch: http://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/veterans_affairs/Mountain_Branch.html

"Moving Day"

     My parents are in the process of moving from Knoxville to Nashville.  To clarify, when I say "my parents" what I mean is that my dad is moving himself and my mother and when I say "in the process of moving" what I mean is that they bought their condo in February 2010 and have been living in it mostly furniture free since last June.  I can't even type that sentence withough sighing out loud. BUT, as of last week my dad has hired actual movers with a truck who are going to bring some of their stuff to Nashville very soon (and by "some of their stuff" what I mean is every single thing that my father can't live without - a lot of which falls into the category of "I have to bring it because they don't make this anymore.")  I have been trying to la-dee-da my way through this move which has required me to not comment on any number of things my dad says, but last night it all just got the best of me.  To be fair to my father, change is hard for him and while I know that change is hard for everybody,  my father could probably be classified as "gifted" in his inability to accept change.  Gifted.  That's a compliment, right?

     Anyway, yesterday he called me and he was listing all the things he was moving and when I stopped him mid-list and said "I thought you weren't moving the [big-ass thing you just listed]" and pointed out that there really wasn't room for it in the condo, he told me his solution was going to be to put it in the attic.  And that's what pushed me into the deep end of the crazy pool. To flesh out my frustration with his attic solution, it's important to understand "we can put it in the attic" seems to be his go-to answer for everything that may not fit inside the condo and I just want to go on record as saying that this is not a magic attic that can expand to hold an ever-growing list of items - this is a regular sized over-the-garage kind of attic that has a rickety ladder that pulls down from the ceiling so while it might be reasonable to store Christmas decorations or books or empty boxes in the attic it's probably not the best solution for large pieces of furniture. Of course, I couldn't say any of this to my dad.  What I said was "well, if it's that important to you, we'll see what we can do."  Then I hung up the phone and I cried. And here's the thing, I know this is hard for him and I know that he is doing the very best that he can do with this move but people, I am tapping into reserves of patience and understanding that I didn't even know I had which means I've been venting to Joel a lot. God Bless Joel (seriously). So, last night I was venting to Joel (again) at the dinner table about all of this when he stopped me and said "You know what this is don't you?  This is your very own Kobayashi Maru*." And I laughed out loud because I've been married to a nerd long enough to get all the Star Trek jokes and because his reference was absolutely perfectly on target.  Any attemp to engage with my dad on the specifics of this move (what to bring, where to put it, what to accept as a gift because he can't make the decision to part with it) is a no-win situation for me.  This is his move and I'm going to have to remind myself of that over and over and over again in the next few days. I also need to remember that the moving process is temporary and the fact that my parents are living in Nashville only five minutes from my house is a win-win situation for all of us.  It's good to have them here - we just have to get through this next week.  In order to help all of us do that I'm officially adopting  "Kobayashi Maru" as my new mantra. It's fun to chant, it makes me laugh and it will do wonders to lighten my mood.  I wonder if I have time to order a t-shirt.  

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The term Kobayashi Maru is used to describe a no-win scenario. It is a test in the fictional universe of Star Trek. It is a Starfleet training exercise designed to test the character of cadets in the command track at Starfleet Academy. The Kobayashi Maru test was first depicted in the opening scene of the film Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and also appears in the 2009 film Star Trek.

Me and Sally Albright

     In the summer of 1989, not too long before I left home to go to college, a friend and I went to see "When Harry Met Sally."  I loved everything about this movie when I first saw it and it has continued to be a favorite of mine over the years.  There are a plethora of memorable lines from this movie ("I'll have what she's having" and "on the side is a very big thing for you" and "men and women can't be friends because the sex part always gets in the way") but the ones I've been thinking about for the last few days are Sally lamenting the fact that she's going to be forty  - "someday".

Sally: " And I'm going to be forty."

Harry: "When?"

Sally: "Someday."

Harry:  "In eight years."

Sally: " But it's there.  It's just sitting there,

like this big dead end."

     Forty.  Good grief  how did "someday" get here so fast? My mother used to say that having birthdays was better than the alternative, but quite honestly telling myself  "better forty than dead" isn't the happy cheery thought I need right now.  Of course that's probably not exactly what she meant, that's just always how I took it.  As of today I have a month left to enjoy being in my thirties and tease Joel mercilessly for being so much older than me. I plan to make the most of it.