Earrings and Easter Eggs

When you are a member of a church choir, Easter is more busy than Christmas. From Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday, a church choir member has a lot of singing to do. Since I am both a church choir cantor and a member of the Grand Philharmonic Choir, with a tradition of singing a major Bach work on Good Friday evening, Easter means I am stupidly busy.

I abdicated hosting Easter Sunday dinner a few years ago, because I am usually (more of a) babbling idiot by Easter Sunday afternoon after the busy week I have just completed. Singing, especially singing at the level of the Grand Philharmonic Choir, is physically and mentally demanding and exhausting.

Since I was a child, one of my favorite things in the lead up to Easter was decorating Easter eggs. It ranked right up there with the first bite of Easter Bunny ears. I have passed my enthusiasm on to my daughter, and I had promised her we would decorate the eggs on Holy Saturday.

Having a child with OCD and Anxiety means dealing with a child with a laser-beam focus...and a need for constant reassurance. She went to bed Friday night knowing we were decorating Easter eggs on Saturday. She had been asking 30 times a day for 2 weeks when we were going to decorate the Easter eggs, and she checked the contents of the kit as many times a day...

At 3am Saturday morning, she was up and ready to decorate Easter eggs, because it was now Saturday. Yes, you read that right, 3 am. She STAYED up for the day and didn't crash until 10pm that night. We had gone to bed around midnight, and 3am is not a good time of night for me. I ended up going back to bed around 6am for a couple hours to try to beat the migraine into submission. The Kid came and woke me up at 7:30 am to inquire when we were going to do Easter eggs because the movie we had put on at 4am was over. She asked again at 9am. She asked again at 10am...We decorated the Easter eggs in the afternoon. They were lovely, at least I think they were, I was too tired to notice.

There are times when her challenges are exhausting, and when she is on a broken record about something, in absolute frustration I have said to her "don't ask again." And then I realize she can't help it. the combination of OCD and Anxiety creates a loop that she can't help. She will often answer "I can't help it." And she really can't. And then I realize it and feel like the world's worst mother. Maybe is a word we do not use in our house, because maybe means yes. It doesn't mean maybe.

Easter hasn't really been a big deal in our family tradition-wise (see Paragraph one). I was doing fine on Easter, until our music director handed me my mom's earrings, that my daughter had left at church on Good Friday. Minutes later, we started a hymn called "We Who Once Were Dead"... and I had to go and sob in the coatroom again. The combination of mom's favorite earrings and a hymn about death was my undoing.

I miss you, mom. I miss you in a million big and small ways every single day.

Tough Choices

My daughter didn't want to go to school today. There was going to be a supply teacher and my daughter's behaviour is an acquired taste, so to speak. If you don't understand the special needs, it looks like bad behaviour.

It was going to be a tough school day. Over the weekend, one of her classmates died. He was born with heart problems, and had recently had surgery to correct it, but experienced complications. He has been in the Kid's class since her first day of school. He was 6. I burst into tears when I read the notice, and the other mothers have said the same thing. The parents are devastated by the loss; our kids are taking it in stride.

My mother is scheduled for another cognitive assessment this morning. The first one was done the afternoon after she'd been sitting in the ER for 27 hours. She'd had very little sleep, was in a hospital, was disoriented, and they asked her to count backwards from 100 by 7s. I couldn't do it. I got to 93 and I was done. Mom made it back as far as 50 something, and although she didn't always have the exact interval, she did pretty well. This assessment will give a better benchmark for the level of marbles left in the bag in her brain.

The funeral is at 1030 hrs. The assessment is scheduled for 1100 hrs. I gave the Kid the option of going, and I would have rescheduled things if she wanted to go. She tought about it, and then, with the simple logic of a child, decided that she wasn't really friends with him, would rather stay at school and "she had enough sad for now with Grandma."

This morning, she didn't want to go to school. I had to make a tough choice and I sent her anyway. I suspect the teacher will have a bad anxiety-reaction day because the Kid is empathic and will pick up on the stress and sadness in the school. Normally, I would have kept her home, but with mom's cognitive assessment, she doesn't need the distraction of her granddaughter blurting out the answers, climbing the cupboard in search of cookies, interrupting to show grandma her progress on Mario Kart...so I sent the OCD-Anxiety kid to school so that I could take care of the vascular dementia parent.

Sometimes there is no good choice. I just had to make the best one I could.

And RIP little one. I hope you've found lots of angel friends in heaven. Your smile will pave the way.