FIVE CHURCH ROAD

We eventually found a house I loved and felt I could invest myself in financially and emotionally. We made a profit on our Baltimore home and were able to afford a home in an old Philadelphia suburb on a train line so we could manage with only one car. I was completely distracted by the logistics of the move and redecorating the new house on a budget of zero. I was completely absorbed.

John was usually quiet and we were not good at communicating our anxieties and distresses to each other. Instead, one of us would pick a fight when the stress got too high. That would let a little of the steam out offering only very modest and temporary relief. However, the boil was furious and growing. John was unhappy at his new job and wanted to quit but we needed the income from his job as I was not working and had not planned to work while we had kids at home.  Gratefully, he was able to land a new job. In the meantime, I was also looking for work in case John was not able to find something he liked.

When John got his new job he told me to stop looking—which I pretty much did but in late July, just a little less than a year into our life in Philly. I got a call regarding an application I had made to the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania a while back.  John said, “don’t take it we don’t need it”.  I thought about it and decided to try it

This would mean putting Marnie in day care, which I hated and imagined she did too, only to be told by her when I took her out after I had left my job at Penn that “Mom, I cannot stay home with you every day because she need to see my friends at school. That was the beginning of my realization that I need my kids at least as much as they need me and maybe more.

My mother was slipping into renal failure after years of hypertension secondary to diabetes. I began what would become or maybe already was a lifelong habit. I was unable to recognize or to register the seriousness of what was going on emotionally deep inside me. After all, my mother had been not feeling well since I was in my early teens.

My sister Kathy, also a nurse, would call me and read to me my mother’s' blood work over the phone. My reaction went something like this—Kathy is overreacting. She is always talking about Mummy’s health.  I would say, “It’s not too bad” and tell her not to worry. I only occasionally visited after my mother became so very sick and even less when we moved to Philly.

 

When John took the second new job in Philadelphia, I was still in graduate school studying for my masters degree in nursing at University of Maryland. So now, in addition to my 18-month-old toddler, our new home, John’s new job, and my new job, I was commuting at least one day a week to Baltimore, writing my thesis and studying for my comprehensive examinations.  This completely distracted me from my dying mother. Instead of being worried about her and visiting often, I was so absorbed in the day-to-day drama of my new responsibilities that I failed to realize that the source of my incredible anxiety was that my mother was dying and that everything else was merely protecting me from dealing directly with the horror of my mother’s impending death.

This manic craziness I would repeat again on the death of my father and my son. I had even less awareness for my Dad and slightly more awareness with Andrew, but certainly no conscious recognition that he would die.