To Sleep, Perchance to Dream.

To shake Dan out of bed I have a cup of fresh coffee and a hot breakfast ready and waiting for him. Waking up isn't an easy proposition for Dan. He is a Gulf War I Veteran. He was a Corpsman with a Fleet Marine Force Reconnaissance Unit. Expressions like, "seen some shit", "dicked up", and "PTSD" apply to Dan. More technical terms like Unspecified Dementia, fibromyalgia, neuromyopathy, and many more, also apply. Finding sleep is hard. Waking up can be hard, when you have a day of pain, confusion, and feeling used up ahead of you. That's where I come in. I manage the man, the moods, and the meds. It's a fine line we walk together.

Any Veteran's wife can tell you that you don't wake a Vet in close quarters. That's an excellent way to get an elbow to the face. They won't mean to. It's their training paired with PTSD and a startle response. Our girls know if they have to wake Dad, stand about three feet from the side of the bed, and progressively louder say his name until he wakes up. Do not touch him. Even by our usual morning standards, this morning was... odd.

Usually Dan is a tornado of sheets, covers, and pillows. This morning when I went in he was ramrod straight. A pillow down each side. I did my typical "Wake Up Honey" routine. Nothing. Not a twitch. Did it again. Still nothing. Hmmm... Now, normally this would be when you would go shake your husband's shoulder, give him a kiss on the cheek, pat his chest. Not I. Something told me that would be a bad idea. A very bad idea. Especially today. Instead, I turned off the fan in the room, gave one of the pillows next to him a little tug while talking to him- telling him breakfast was ready. Left the bedroom door open as I left, so the sounds and smells of the house would come into the room. Then I turned up the sound on the TV, a British cooking  show.

About five minutes later Dan came shuffling out the back hallway. Still hazy from sleep. He walked into the kitchen looking for me, for a hug. He had been stuck in a nightmare. He was a POW and his captors told him that, if he opened his eyes they would kill him. He was stuck in a nightmare where he couldn't wake up/open his eyes, and my trying to wake him, he could have mistaken me for them. Interestingly enough, Dan takes meds to block his dreams. It would seem one sneaked through.

I can tell you, I don't have Money. But what I do have, are a very particular set of skills. Skills I've acquired over a very long career. I am a Veteran's wife.

Valkeries of the United States Military

Valkery. The warrior women of Norse myth and legends that swoop down into battle and rescued the worthy Viking warriors and delivered them to Oden for their rewards, to save them. These women weren't slight, impish, maidens, more girl than not. No, they were powerful, exacting, strong, decisive, they were mature and beautiful.

In many ways, what the warriors of lore were relating, in some small way, was knowledge of surviving another battle and returing home to their wives - their own Valkeries. What I have come to realise through my own daily trials and grind, is that the Veteran's Wives is the modern day Valkeries. At the end of the battle, at the end of the war, we are the strong arms that are there to welcome the warriors home. We are the calm in the storm.

We have been tested, and hardened, and we know our own worth. We are strong, we value ourselves, our family, and our warriors. A veteran once told me he saw it like this, "When your Vet gets too tired to hold his sheild, you're there to pick it up and carry it for him. You have his back." He then thanked me for my service. Valkeries are in it as much as their Veterans are. It's not easy, it's not fun, but it's what Valkeries do.

What few people understand is that once a warrior seperates from the military that close knit band of brothers practically evaporates over night, and he will never feel so alone as he does then, even surrounded by "real family". That closely guarded set of routines that he has been living his every waking moment, for how many years, falls by the way side when there isn't a chain of command to worry about, and "civilians do everything wrong" becomes a mantra. The one bridge between their past lives, current, and future are their Valkeries. He may resent that bridge at times, but warriors and Valkeries are timeless, they alway end up at the party together. To be with a warrior it helps to be a warrior yourself. The slight, impish, maidens just won't survive.
Valkery, part myth, part legend, the modern day Veteran's Wife.
#Veteran'sWife #PTSD #TBI #GulfWarSyndrome #Veterans #KeepItPositive

Adventures in Dementia Land

It's been close to seven months since the last post- getting better! And life in Dementia Land has settled into a uncertain kind of routine. The only things that are certain, is that it's going to be hard, emotional, and primarily over ruled by a temperamental 44 year old. Yesterdays adventure was about macaroni and cheese.
Yes, mac n' cheese. How can mac n' cheese become a deal, an issue you ask? Something that someone will argue tooth and nail, and will go twenty rounds over? Well, first take a Marine, smother him with Dementia, make him a virtual reclues that seldom leaves home, and all of the sudden, minute details- like the shape of the pasta used in the mac n' cheese is worthy of inquisition style "discussion".

"This isn't Macaroni and cheese."

"Yes it is. Homemade. Even baked it, so you would have the crunchy edges you like."

"No, this isn't macaroni. So by definition, this can't be macaroni and cheese. It's something else. I hate it when you do this to me. Do you do this on purpose to mess with me? You used a different kind of pasta, bow ties."

"Yeah, it's all an evil plot to drive you insane over pasta shapes. Pasta, is pasta. It all tastes the same."

"But it's not the same, if it were all the same it would all be called pasta, but it's not..."

And so we're off. About here is when I start to hear only static. In my mind I'm recounting all the different times he had seen me cooking bow tie pasta, seen the box of bow tie pasta on the counter earlier in the day, had seen our daughter eating her mac n' cheese, because she doesn't like her's baked, but yet none of it stuck or made it through the Dementia haze to click into place. We do the same damn thing when I forget and call rigatoni "spaghetti".

Welcome to Dementia Land. Please be sure that all your possessions are secured and you are fully strapped in. It's going to be a wild ride.

Not the Quitting Kind

It's been nine months. I could have had a baby in that amount of time. It's been nine months since my husband of thirteen years, my 42 year old husband, has been diagnosed with Frontotemporal Dementia. I remember sitting in the doctors's office while the doctor went over this huge packet of test results with my husband and I. How he scored on this part and that. What it all added up to mean. Ironically enough I already knew, or close enough, since I was the one that pushed for the tests in the first place. Still, suspecting and having confirmation are two different things. But in all of the doctor's talking he didn't get around to telling my husband his final prognosis. I would get that "honor" the next day, after shock had settled a bit. No wife should have to tell her husband how long he has to live.

It's been nine months of fighting for the Social Security they don't intend to give him. Nine months of fighting with insurance companies for medicines that actuary tables say he can't have until he's 43 (that's still a month a way).

Everybody wants to know how such a young man can have such an old man affliction. War. PTSD. Toxic exposures. Contaminated Anthrax. He was fighting; now I do the fighting.

In those nine months we have tried (and did with some success) to celebrate Thanksgiving, Christmas, News Year, Valentines, Easter, Mother's Day and Father's Day, our youngest turned 12, and our eldest graduated high school and was accepted into college. Both daughters also attended counseling to deal with their father's failing health and mental state. I tell the girls often "normal" is an illusion that most people propagate to fool those around them and more so themselves. Everybody's family has problems and issues, you just don't hear about them. Granted, our's are a bit more than some, but we don't quit. We are not the quitting kind.

Books

This probably won't come as a surprise to anyone, I enjoy books. I really, truly enjoy books. I love the weight of them in my hands, the feel of the paper as the fibers catch against my finger printers, the smell of ink between the pages, the sound of a binding opening up to give away it's secrets. I love it all. What you might not know is that I also love cookbooks. I actually collect those. I have been known to pick up an odd one or two during my travels. Even as a high school student I was unexplainably drawn to them. During a family vacation to the Carolinas we took a day trip out to Fort Sumter. In the gift shop one of the area historical societies had put together a collection of Civil War era recipes. I had to have it. Never mind that I would never actually cook with coal ash, or fat back, but I still had to have it. I still have it to this day. And I have prepared a few of the recipes out there over the years, with a tweak here and there- as all cooks do.

Over the years my collection has grown to a modest size. There are a few celebrity chef books in there along with turn of last century volumes written in German. You could say it's varied. I have also begun collecting my own recipes, recipes that I have been adapting and cultivating over the years, and hope to one day put to my own cookbook. Until that time they are securely placed in a big black binder.

I love experimenting on, I mean trying out new dishes with my family. Often I'll head over to the local library and peruse the stacks for something that catches my eye. I have found some of the most incredible meals that way. I have also found a few stunners as well. I love simple, basic flavors that are layered or assembled in ways that make you take notice. Soul food, cooking from the heart, that sort of thing, resonates with me. So when I saw a cookbook with a cover a two tatted up guys sitting in a diner, going on about their love of family and good food, my heart skipped a beat. Another book! No. No, it was not. Their Po Boy was lobster with some sort of roe and a fricken quail egg. A raw quail egg mind you, dropped on top on that expensive car crash of a sandwich. The travesties just went on from there. If I remember correctly they were even dropping some gold leaf on something or the other... How is the home cook suppose to replicate any of that? And secondly, why would they want to? I was honestly mad when I set that book back on the shelf. I felt like I had been deceived and in a way cheated. Cheated because that book had so much more potential and for whatever reasons it was all just thrown away, and I had to bare witness to it.

I had to do a Nigella, Paula and Jamie detox just to get over the shock! But on a more serious note, looking back, my books are almost a part of the family. For every holiday and special occasion, the books get pulled out and poured over. When I met and married my husband he had a few of his grandmother's old cookbooks, hers have joined mine. My daughters know how to use a recipe and enjoy flipping though them with me and bookmarking their favorite pages too. They have become a part of our family's history without even trying. That is the power of books.

Sidewalks...

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Every morning on my way home from dropping my youngest, in fourth grade, off at school I pass the same couple walking their kindergartner to school- the same school. They will be late. Everyday. But they are singing songs, wandering over snowbanks in the neighbors' yards, laughing, and have a swell old time in the process, so it's okay?

Maybe it's a generational thing. I'm firmly planted in Gen X. Life was going to suck and we knew it. So we embraced it, we changed it. We didn't try to change the system we found lacking, we made our own. The Cold War, first personal computers, AIDS, Chernobyl, Space Shuttle Challenger, fall of the Berlin Wall; I remember them all. We voted in record numbers. Volunteered like never before. We were the first generation predicted not to surpass our parents in economic security or success (ended up being by -12%). But we planned for it, expected, and most of us are doing just fine.

Fast forward to Generation Y, Why?, or Gen. Me, or possibly Gen. Why Me? There are a few of these parents in my daughter's class as well. As it would turn out, I am one of the old moms. Go figure. With my oldest daughter, I was one of the youngest moms in the room. Six years later I'm on the other side of the fence now. Any hoo, I have seen some of these parents in action, or inaction, as the case may be. We were all gathered in the classroom for a small presentation on ducks (or some such thing), the kids were suppose to be getting out their homework, binders and assignment notebooks for the teacher to look at. My daughter reaches into her backpack and pulls out all the stuff she needs, opens up her workbooks and notebooks and sits for the teacher to come around and check. Mean while the little girl beside her is looking sick and her parents a bickering over who was suppose to have checked her homework and made sure she had put her backpack back together. Because mom is working now and she's too busy to do it. Dad's arguing the same. And their daughter is crying, if anyone cares. Apparently this happens a lot in their house. FYI: binder was in backpack, homework and assignment notebook, home on kitchen table.

I see this happening with alarming frequency. The parents that pat themselves on the back, because they fork out three times the price any sane person would pay for some sort of “hand knit” knobbly, ear flapped, pomponned festooned, Ecuadorian llama wool, monstrosity of a hat at the Fair Trade store in a trendy shopping district, are the same parents that pat themselves on the back for “letting their child be self-directed” and putting them in a Montessori Charter school with no idea what it means or involves and then gripes out loud about what the teachers are doing. There is “self-directed” and then there is letting your child run around like a wild animal and smiling with an insipid smile on your face because you just don't care enough to stop the craziness in the first place. Lets not fool ourselves.

These are the parents that need to insist that their kids get to school on time everyday. On time. Everyday. That we will walk on the sidewalks, we will respect out neighbors lawns and property and use the sidewalk. We can sing and laugh, skip and swing hands but we will do it on the sidewalk. And all before the bell rings. We need to follow directions.

Why does it matter? They're just having a little fun before school starts. Because it carries over into everything they do all day long. I use to go on a number of field trips with my daughters' classes. They're in a science charter school that does a number of field experiences over the year. With my older daughter's class it wasn't so bad, there were a couple kids that were always on the short list but that is to be expected, but with this younger class... It's like herding cats. They are off being “self-directed”, not following directions, not listening to the teacher, not listening to chaperons and generally being an embarrassment to the school. I'd come home and be so upset over the afternoon spent with the little darlings it would take me all evening to calm down. So I stopped going. I'm not the only one. They get very few parent volunteers anymore.

Parenting is hard. I get that. But it doesn't get any easier as they get older. The problems just more complex and the stakes get greater. I think the lessons on walking the straight narrow will be a lot easier to take in as a young adult if they have been getting them from a child on. Sidewalks, my friend, sidewalks.

The Voices In My Head

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In my “normal” life not many people know I'm a writer. They know me as the someone's mom, the carpool mom, the 4-H mom, the PTA mom, the lady that answers the phone and doesn't let them speak with the luthier (my husband) so they give the lady attitude, and usually that's fine. It's simple. But, every once and awhile the two hemispheres of my life converge.

Conversations will slow, and talk will turn to what we had been doing that day, or someone I know better than most will ask me a question in front of an acquaintance. Folks either react one of two ways: first, dismiss it as a phase or as a character flaw. They have preconceived ideas or notions about people that engage in such long term pursuits of artistic expression and merit (flibberty gibbitt, head in the clouds, and such). So I get an “Ahhh... good for you.” and a pointed change of subject. Yeah, duly noted. The second sort of “typical” response I get is more of a vicarious one. The “Oh! That is so cool! How did you ever come up with that idea? How long do you think the book will be?” and a continual onslaught of questions all the way down to “What kind of music do you listen to when you write?” Creativity can be very mysterious, I have found, and there for intimidating. So, I thought I would take the time to answer some of the more frequented questions. My answers, I understand, are different than some writers. We all have own paths to follow, our own truths to seek.

To answer the top of the Hit List questions...

My background: I have a fine arts background, I taught high school art- including photography and film making- along with all the other standard courses. I have a very visual approach to most things. I also have a Masters of Education degree in Instructional Technology. I am one of the few art majors that can hook up the Wii and get the Netflix working! I believe technology is the great equalizer. It rocks.

What music do I listen to when I write? I don't listen to music when I write. I have music playing most every other time, but not then. My girls have a wide and vast appetite when it comes to their music so I could be listening to Taylor Swift with one girl and then Blood on the Dance Floor with the other. When we are in the car it's usually top 40 radio, Tokio Hotel, or movie soundtracks, like Almost Alice. My husband has a penchant for really old or dead guys with either Red or Bone in their names. So when I'm with him there is a lot of blues, blue grass, classic rock, instrumental rock and the occasional swing. When left to my own devices I listen to what would be considered hard rock and pop rock. I like Rob Zombie, Velvet Revolver, Muse, The Civil Wars, Mumford & Sons. I'm all over the place depending on my mood. But when I write (even right now), no background music. As I had mentioned before I'm a visual person and when I'm writing I can “see” in my mind how a scene is playing out and I can hear the dialog between the characters, like in a play or a movie. I have found that if I have music playing, for me, I end up listening to the music and not the voices in the head. Sounds crazy, but true. The scene usually comes complete with it's own music anyway...

How did I come up with the story idea in the first place? The series that I'm currently writing is about a teenage girl that is, as it turns out, half fairy, and there are all sorts of shenanigans surrounding her. When I was first batting around ideas in my head and jotting down notes here and there about story lines and plot devices I realized I was missing the big “Whoa”. I needed a Voldemort and Dumbledore but I wanted it to be somewhat grounded in myth or folklore, female would even be better. That was when I had stumbled across a university website (at least I think it was) talking about the creationist theories and the whole Adam and Eve story. There they went on to explain how in Hebrew folklore Adam had in fact three wives. The first, was made the same way as Adam, equal in every way, and was called Lilith. The story goes that she and Adam fought horribly. Even thought they were equal Adam refused to see her as such, (a bunch of sexual references later, some concerning animals...) Lilith becomes so consumed by her rage and fury she expells herself from paradise and becomes the first demon, the mother of all demons. After awhile Adam decides he would like to try again with a new mate of the female persuasion. God then creates the Second Wife the same as he had created Adam and Lilith, from the inside out. Right before Adam's eyes he saw his new mate materialize, bone, muscle, veins, skin, and hair. He was so completely discussed by the scene that he refused to touch her. Plus, he argued that if she was created the same way as the first one, she was probably going to be just as difficult. So without even receiving a proper name first name, Second Wife is just cast a side. That then brings us to Eve. One rib to make them compatible and mud and dirt to make her mailable; We all know how well that all turned out... The part of that story that struck me was that after the Second Wife was cast off, there was never anymore mention of her. You hear blips and blurps about Lilith whenever powerful women have come into power in ancient times, but never anything about Second Wife... So I made up one for her. Beginning with her daughter. Voldemort = Lilith, Dumbledore = Second Wife, and they're both female. Double word score!

How long will the book be? Well... that's hard to say. I have a lot of story to tell. The first installment of the series that I am currently refining (already writing book two) is in the 700's. I envision this being a long running series. I love writing it. It's one of the few things in life that have been “easy” for me. Not necessarily fast, that has been the only frustrating part. Right now my writing is part time, my hope, my goal is be a full time in the near future.

If you have any of your own questions, hit me in the comments below :-)