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In the fall, my friend asked me to paint the alley side of her garage. She wanted it to inspire hope. I thought about hope for a long time. When I googled hope, I came up with symbols of rainbow and breast cancer pink ribbons. I wanted something else. I started with a tree. I had recently painted a tree at a coffee shop and loved how it turned out. Right next to the garage was a large tree stump. I think old trees are kinda mesmerizing and I think the promise of taking root and growing in one place is hopeful.

Then I painted in a girl looking toward the horizon and the sun beyond the mountains. My friend told me after I’d started the mural that she used to stand looking at the mountains as a child imaging that a band of Indians would come over the horizon and sweep her away from her small, dark life. I didn’t know that when I started painting the mural, but it didn’t surprise me. Sometimes I sense pain without being told.

I haven’t finished the mural yet. It’s been a slow project for me. I usually have a mural project waiting in the wings, so finishing one quickly gets me to the next. But for whatever reason, it feels like taking slow deliberate steps is the right way to approach this wall. I painted in lots of color for the sky and fields, but it is still missing something.

I woke up yesterday morning and heard my sister-in-law’s voice on the radio talking about grief. I wonder how long that spot will run on the air. Her service was yesterday, in the church that used to be a roller rink. I have so many memories of the rink and arcade games and birthday parties and suicides (drinks with all the sodas mixed together) and the music that shaped my youth. I know the space was a gymnastics academy before a church, but in my mind it is the roller rink. Sometimes I have dreamed that I show up to skate and there is a funeral going on. Weird, right? Almost like knowing that one day, I’d be there for a funeral.

Through this whole journey, I haven’t known what to say to my brother. Losing my parents unhinged him, and his wife was the force that helped ground him. Losing her is like losing his will to live. He looked good and held himself together during the service, but I know him well enough to see the frayed edges and I’m not sure what comes next for him. I hope he finds peace and comfort in knowing that she isn’t suffering. I hope that he is able to see the light and faith that his wife lived her life with.

After the service, I took a look at the wall. I’m ready to finish it now. I am going to add wild horses running in the field. Freedom. Hope. They will be for my sister-in-law. Fly high, honey. You will always be loved.

One of my favorite things growing up was the summer reading program. It was six weeks on Tuesday and Thursday and we got a colored sheet of paper to keep a log of the books we read. I say we because my brother, the boy next door, and two of our friends, went to the program faithfully every week throughout our childhood. I don’t know if any of them remember it as well as I do, the library was MY JAM. School was okay, but the library was the one thing that I really, really loved.

The summer between second and third grade, I discovered the Charlie Brown collection. Each year of the comic strip, Peanuts, was bound in a hardback book on the bottom shelf on the south wall. I was familiar with Peanuts. It was a comic strip, I read everyday while I was eating my cereal and on Sunday it always topped the colored portion of the pull-out comic section. I’d bring the paper in, hand it to my dad and he’d hand me out the comics. We had that ritual until the day he died. That summer after discovering the Peanut books, I read every single volume. I was too little to do an in depth character analysis, but I poured over those characters and really got to know their personalities. If you want to see me geek out ask me about Charlie Brown and his complex relationship with Linus van Pelt. In fact, I would love a third cat to name Linus, but that would put me in crazy cat lady territory and I am not ready to make that leap.

Anyway, it is no secret, that I am really struggling professionally. I am good at relationships with kids, but hate discipline. I don’t want to fight with kids to do the right thing. When I was teaching art, I had high engagement because kids wanted to be there and they wanted to do all the things I was asking. Not that I didn’t have jackwagons, but overall, kids were excited to see me and to do the projects. I went from 98 percent engagement to mmm…thirty, maybe forty percent engagement. Reading and writing and math are hard and I have a lot of students really struggling. And the shit–and I am choosing that word deliberately–I am asked to teach them is not engaging or captivating or relevant. And they don’t care. And you know what? I get it. I get why they don’t want to do it. And part of me agrees with them. And even though I have a rebel inside my heart, I rarely let her come out to play. But something about being right here, right now, has brought that rebel to the surface. She is loud, crabby and in my face. Lucy van Pelt is yelling at me to make a move. And she is not taking no for answer.

Messages come in all kinds of ways. Even though I am hesitant to make such a bold statement and want to be wishy-washy as Lucy would call it, and use words like maybe and probably and might, I know I need to leave the classroom.. I have known it for awhile and I have had all sorts of excuses related to retirement and salary and all that jazz. But honestly, the path is there and I just have to be brave enough to trust and have faith that I can take the next step in the journey.

For a short time, when I was a little, little kid, I shared a room with my brother. He was a one of those lucky people that could fall asleep the moment his head hit the pillow. My mom and I had a deal that if I went to bed at the same time he did, I could get up when he fell asleep and watch TV with her. Mostly I remember Carol Burnett doing the Tarzan yell and Johnny Carson laughing. When I was old enough to read, I’d read late into the night. Mom would yell at me to turn off the light, so I used the same lesson she taught me and turn off the light and wait until she was asleep and turn it back on. For a long time, I just thought my sleeping problems were just a life time of bad habits.

At some point, something changed. I can actually pinpoint the time frame. When I was fourteen, my uncle had a stroke and we spent many, many days for the next few years driving to visit him in facilities in different parts of the state. During my childhood, my brother would sleep on road trips, but I’d read unless it was too dark, then I’d stare out the window trying to count the white highway dash lines, listening to my mom and dad talk about semi interesting gossip. But after my uncle got sick, I started falling asleep in the car, almost immediately. I thought being in the car all the time finally taught me the fine art of road trip sleeping. But I also started falling asleep other places–like during school and movies. I wrote that off as staying up late to work on homework. That continued to be my pattern for decades. Weird sleep patterns at night, but unable to stay awake when I sat down for an activity. It made for embarrassing moments. One time I fell asleep in a college lecture and my friend woke me up and I screamed like I was being attacked, causing the entire room to turn to look at me. The professor said, “My lectures don’t typically inspire such horror.” Another time I punched a man on an airplane when his cell phone ring woke me from a dead sleep and my arms flailed out in a startle response. If a video was taken during these moments, I’d have a hilarious reel.

I mentioned my sleep difficulties once to a doctor during my twenties. She told me that I was just a young mom and it was normal to feel tired all the time and that I needed to not nap and go to bed at the same time every night and only sleep in bed, not read, or write, or watch TV in bed. My daytime sleepiness got so bad that I couldn’t drive to thirty minutes without getting really sleepy. And I started taking naps in weird places–like the mall, and the book store, or a random park bench. I started making fun of myself, saying I was in training for my life as a baglady. But at night, I continued to be restless and I’d wake up all night, reaching for my cell phone to check the time and then checking my Facebook, or playing a game on line, before trying to get back to sleep.

I suspected that I might have a real problem one day at school. I was doing a weaving unit and I sat down with the yarn and the kids would have to come to me if they needed me to tie or cut more yarn. It was chaos–twenty five kids with yarn–picture kittens learning to knit. And I DOZED off, probably just for a second, but I jerked awake to a little girl in front of me asking for blue yarn. Soon after, my daughter looked up the symptoms for narcolepsy, and read them off to me. I had EVERY. SINGLE. ONE.

The big marker is cataplexy. Cataplexy is physical collapse during strong emotion. Some people have cataplexy so strong that they fall over, or can’t move. Mine is super mild. I feel it when I laugh hard. It’s like my body is having weird muscle spasms. I just thought that’s how my body felt when I laughed really hard. I didn’t know it was an actual medical condition. I went to a sleep doctor and I did the sleep study.

He thought I’d be a slam dunk narcolepsy patient, but I woke up 134 times during the course of my sleep study, even though I don’t have the typical signs for sleep apnea. The doctor said my uvula was a little long and blocking my airway when I slept. He said that it didn’t rule out narcolepsy, but I had to try a CPAP, to see if it improved my sleep. SO I gave the machine a try. It didn’t help at all, just made my face cold.

What actually did help was just knowing that I had TWO legitimate sleeping disorders. My sleeping issues weren’t from Johnny Carson, reading, or even blue light. My erratic sleep habits were because my body couldn’t stay awake or stay asleep. Even though I was a little sad that truck driving school is off the table forever, it was a relief to know the root of the problem.

In a lot of ways I am really lucky. My cataplexy is mild. I’ve never fallen over or become paralyzed. In fact, I’d bet money that I’m the only one that notices the weird muscle spasms. I can tell when the sleep attacks are coming and I can get to a safe place to nap. The lucid dreams have given me hundreds of story ideas. One day one of those dreams might be the next bestseller…

I can’t speak for all educators, but this teacher right here loves SNOW Days. It makes me almost feel sorry for teachers in Hawaii. Maybe they have hurricane days? Right now I am bundled up in my Snoopy pajamas and the softest blanket on record, looking at the window. I can really only see the sky from my bed and it’s white and gray and looks cold. I have a lot on my mind today. Some people make a to do list; I make a “let me overthink this list.”

1. I realize that if I never went back to work, I wouldn’t even care. Perhaps that’s another reason I made the change so late in my career. It’s so much easier to let go when you don’t have a good hold.
2. I need a beading needle. That requires putting actual clothes on, scraping the ice off a windshield. The Honda doesn’t have that much gas in, so I would also have to get gas. Why do I always need gas in the worst weather? I could take the truck. Should I really drive across town just for a beading needle? I could also get a few groceries.
3. I wonder if my brother is awake. Should I call him? Wait for him to call me? If I do go out to get a needle, should I physically go check on him? Help him take down the Christmas decorations? Maybe check on his gun situation and slip the ammunition in my pocket?
4. I am listening to the radio. My sister-in-law just came on with her hospice commercial. That’s irony. She finally found a job she loves with grief counseling and now she is possibly facing hospice.
5. How do I talk about what happened with her over the weekend?

Trisha woke up on Saturday. Her tube was removed. The brain bleed damaged her gag reflex and she is in pretty severe danger of asphyxiation. Normally, in these situations, a feeding tube would be inserted, but because of the risk of infection, nothing has been done about a feeding tube. She could handle small sips of water, so that’s what she is doing. She can talk, but it is slow and hard, and very difficult for her to make herself understood. When the tube was removed, hospice came in, this was not what the family was expecting. The hospital is saying if cancer treatment stops then she will die. Oncology wasn’t available for consultation over the weekend. The strokes and brain bleed have left her partially paralyzed and the gag reflex issue makes the rigors of chemotherapy almost inconceivable to imagine. But yet she has not given up. The fight is on.

To be honest, I am more worried about my brother than her. When my parents died, he sort of lost his mind. He went to a dark place and Trisha really stood by him and helped him through all his stages of grief. She is his whole world. I think she knows that he will not be okay without her and it is keeping her in the game. As far as the next steps, we are all just taking it moment by moment.

The sun is starting to sort of filter through the clouds, bringing a bit of light that is almost warm. It feels like hope.

I had my first panic attack last year. I didn’t know what was happening at first. I woke up with an intense dread of going to school. I didn’t know how I was going to manage walking down the street and going into the building and doing teacher things for seven hours. My chest was hurting and I thought maybe, possibly, I was having a heart attack, but I could still walk and move, so I put my jacket on and left the house. By the time I got to my classroom, I was crying uncontrollably and didn’t think I could make it through the day, the week, the year.

When I described how I felt to a doctor, she said, “It sounds like PTSD.” PTSD is for soldiers or prisoners of war, so I didn’t really buy it. At first. Then I started thinking about my life in a real way. The doctor said, “Grief is like when your pet dies. Trauma is like watching a mountain lion grab your pet off your front porch and crunch its neck in front of you. ” She asked me to name a time when I was traumatized. I just looked at her and said, “Just one? Because I can name three things like that just last year.”

So I had to pick a starting place….and I picked the night that I got the call about my parents’ accident. That was the night I lost my anchor. That was the night everyone started looking to me to be the anchor. And maybe if I’d been an anchor before that night, I was only strong because I had a bigger anchor holding me down.

I thought I was getting through and doing what I needed to do. Going to school was my sanctuary. I’d go to work and see my friends and laugh and mostly love the kids and celebrate in their achievements. So the panic attacks centered on being afraid to go to school were super confusing. The best I can explain was that something happened to me last year when I was on the levee and Shayne was missing. I thought he might be dead and nothing about that made sense to me. Like how do you go through the rest of your life if your kid kills himself. And then what came after was even worse. I still can’t talk about it. So even though I KNOW logically that it isn’t my fault that my son is schizophrenic, I can’t let go of my responsibility as a parent. He is mine. I chose him. After all that, I would go to school and see these little kids in all kinds of trauma and it would eat at me, trigger panic in me, and I’d think, “I’ve no business being around these kids. I’m just gonna screw them up too.” Rational? Probably not, but that’s where I was last spring.

I’ve spent months working on layers and layers of trauma. I’m no way “healed,” but I hadn’t had a panic attack or a nightmare in months. Until a few days ago. The nightmare was about one of my students. In the dream, he was on his bicycle and run over by a jeep, with the rest of my class looking on. The old agitation and fear are back and hard to push away. It makes sleep hard to come because the dreams are so vivid and real, and on and on and on. But being surrounded by kids actively living in trauma isn’t doing great things for me. I have a huge network of family and friends to love and help me and it still is super hard. I have no idea sometimes how some students in my class come to school and do anything at all. And helping them just seems so impossible.

So I have to remind myself–you write your own story, so figure out how to weave this shit in, in a way that brings hope, and love, and light.” And breathe.

I want to my doctor yesterday. He was sick. So I tried to make a dermatologist appointment. December was the earliest I could be seen. So I went to urgent care. It was closed, BUT, the sign said it was reopening, so I sat in the parking for thirty minutes and waited. I knew if I left I probably wouldn’t go back.

The urgent care guy looked at my ankle and said the growth needed to be lanced off and biopsied. He said he thought it might be a reaction to the dye in the tattoo. He said he would send me to a dermatologist. I told him I had called that place and was told I’d have to wait until January. He said the referral would get me in faster. I took the paperwork he gave me and went home.

The floor guy was gone. He has sanded everything and he put the finish on the space where the stove will go. It is going to look freaking fantastic. While I was standing there admiring it, there was a knock on the door and Shayne poked his head in.

About a month ago, Shayne was in Pueblo with me at school. He waited in the parking lot while I ran up to my classroom to drop something off. I heard on the two way radio, “There’s a shady guy just walking around in the parking lot and I am afraid to get out of my car.” I knew it was Shayne they were talking about and I went down immediately to diffuse the situation.

Now that I have been working on the East side for a bit, I know why people are leery of skinny, homelessy, unkempt people. I was driving home the other day and a man was standing in the middle of the street with all his belongings fallen all around him. I stopped and asked him if he was okay. He turned real quick and shouted, “Are you fucking okay?” I could see the glint in his eyes and I knew instantly that there were a million voices shouting in his brain. But I also knew it probably wasn’t a good idea to get out of the car and help either. I drove away, but on some level it hasn’t left me. He could have easily been my son.

Anyway, Shayne has cleaned himself up and is back on meds. I fixed up the sunroom as a fourth bedroom and I am letting him stay there until the garage apartment is built. I am uneasy about this choice. I am not ready for another rollercoaster ride and I don’t know what is worse, wondering if is okay, or living with the uncertainty of his instability.

So many things in my life have changed in the past month or two. I really don’t know where this journey is taking me, but I am trying my best to believe that everything will work out for the best.

When I was in college, I was interested in learning to tattoo. I hung out at a shop in Boulder and was working with an artist from New York. One day we were sitting around the shop waiting for customers. He said he hoped someone would walk in because he was in the mood to tattoo. I told him that he could give me a new tat if we didn’t have customers. He dared me to wear a blindfold and let him pick out a tattoo. I tell this story to illustrate how completely fearless and idiotic I behaved at twenty.

Flash forward a few decades. The tattoo had faded to mostly a green color and since it is on my ankle, and really visible I have considered getting it recolored. So in August, I had some time to kill before a hair appointment; on a whim I walked into a shop and made an appointment.

Round two of this tattoo wasn’t at all like the first time. It wasn’t as much fun and it hurt more than I remembered. It also seemed like it took a long time to heal. It had weird bumps on it for a while and actually hurt for several weeks and just one spot never seemed to heal. I kept waiting for the skin to feel smooth and normal, but it just never has

I am not exactly sure when I noticed the area on the bottom of the tattoo swelling and growing. But when I’d shower, the water hitting my ankle would hurt, or getting in bed at night, the pressure of the sheets would get my attention. It isn’t horrible pain, just kind of uncomfortable. And then I noticed that the area was feeling hard and scabby and I was afraid to shave over it because I didn’t want to it to bleed.

It is getting bigger and looks like a tiny volcano with darkened lava at the crest. I haven’t been to the doctor yet, although I did teladoc on the phone. I just keep thinking about my mom.

My mother had a rare, atypical type of skin cancer that presented on her head and neck. She had a tumor excised from her calf that went almost to the bone, one from her neck and several from her scalp. She was in so much pain and had to have help washing her hair and putting the medicine on. The lesions on her head would come back. She called them trees. I went with her to her last appointment the spring before she was killed. The doctor gave her a shot in the head and then started up-rooting mom’s trees with a tiny scalpel thing. She held my hand and asked ME if I was okay. I am not going to lie; it was horrible. I hate doctor shit. She was so brave and strong.

And I keep thinking maybe it will just heal on its own. Maybe bag balm would help? Okay, so I know I need to get it actually looked at, but I would rather do almost anything than go to another doctor’s appointment. I kind wish doctors still did house calls or there was a drive through option…i could stick my leg out the car window or something. Maybe get some fries at the same time. I know I am being ridiculous, but at the same time, I am kinda terrified.