My mother is, well, apparently indestructible

96 years old. A broken leg. Internal bleeding. An endoscopy. A mass in her stomach. Four transfusions. 3 1/2 hours of surgery to repair the leg by putting in a plate, under general anesthesia. Possible stomach cancer. Morphine causing itching which made her scratch her face for more than ten days. (No one figured this out until the last days.) Horrible pain whenever anyone moved her. Some cursing. This to a lovely, Orthodox Jewish nurse who came to clean her up:

Mother: "Go to hell and get out of here."

Nurse: "Helen, I don't want to go to hell. It's very hot."

Mother: "Well, then go somewhere else and leave me alone."

And now she's back in room 509 at her nursing home, exactly two weeks from when she went into the E.R. at Maimonides Hospital. I can tell you that it was an extremely difficult two weeks, I was pretty sure this was going to be it, and we're still waiting for the stomach biopsy results. But I have a friend whose father is, I believe, 103 - and he just found out he's got pancreatic cancer and it hasn't killed him yet. I think that there's no way we're going to live this long. We've ingested and breathed in too many toxins.

Anyway - it was a roller coaster ride, each day not knowing what we were going to hear next and yet somehow my mother is not ready to go.

So this weekend, once my mother got settled in, I have to say that I had a fantastic time, making up for the stress of the past two weeks. I went to two parties on Friday night and danced till one in the morning and then today, my group of women from Mama Gena got together to perform our tribute to Mama Gena (re-written lyrics to the song "Mamma Mia.") We had a ball. We all love seeing each other and rehearsing, then performing our song to an audience that enjoys it and then going out to catch up on each other's lives over sangria's and margaritas. (And quesadillas. What can be wrong when you have Mexican food?)

It was an excellent weekend. My mother's back home, the weather is extraordinary, I got to dance and sing and we had so much fun! Saturday night was a low point, but I called my friend O, who is dealing with lymphoma and we had a long, lovely talk.

I am grateful for all the good that is in my life. Next Sunday Steve is leaving for a month in California and then Zoe is going out on June 14th to explore living in San Francisco. Big changes. Sometimes I feel very sad and I also have had some wonderful times as well. Even with all the stress and all the emotions, I feel more alive than I have in years. And - I can fit into my skinny jeans.

Next comes bringing in money. That's the next big challenge.

The Sky and the Sun

I woke up again this morning very early, around 5 am, and couldn't get back to sleep. I seem to be sleeping about six hours a night and waking up early and dragging through a good part of the day. And then I have started slipping caffeine into my diet again and I'm not so happy about that.

Meditation also seems to be more of a struggle for me lately and I realize that when I'm not at least trying to meditate every day, I feel worse, sadder.

There's not much tougher than feeling that you've failed at something and right now I'm feeling a lot like a failure as a mother and in other parts of my life. Intellectually, I know I've done my best and beating myself up isn't going to help anyone. It's how I'm feeling and eventually it will pass. I'm also having a rough time with my husband and our living situation. I don't have a room of my own anymore and it's driving me a little crazy. It's my fault, for not being able to say what I needed. I need a room of my own, it doesn't have to be much, but I need a place to be by myself.

So because I was so down, I thought I'd better give meditation a shot this morning and also do some reading. I picked up Pema Chodron's book "When Things Fall Apart" - and once again found exactly what I needed to read. This chapter is called "The Trick of Choicelessness" and it's about "Samaya" which means "not holding anything back, not preparing our escape route, not looking for alternatives, not thinking there is ample time to do things later." It's about "total commitment to sanity, total commitment to our experience, an unconditional relationship with reality."

"...through years and years of gentle training and honest, intelligent inquiry, we begin to trust our basic wisdom mind. We find that we have an essential wisdom, an essential good heart, that is stronger and more fundamental than our unkindness and aggression."

"It's like finding that the sky and the sun are always there and that it's the storms and the clouds that come and go. Somehow, feeling that we are ready to have no exit just occurs by itself."

I started feeling more able to sit with the place that I am at and continued reading.

"At first, meditation instruction is all we have to keep us from dissociating from our body, speech and mind. Year after year, we just keep practicing coming back to our own experience of being in the present moment."

"We are thoroughly conditioned so that the minute the seat gets hot, or we even think it's going to get hot, we jump off. The trick is to sit on the hot seat and have a commitment to our experience of hot-seatness. With or without a formal samaya (relationship) to a teacher, this remains the main point."

So I guess that for today, I wanted to be able to stay with my feelings and be okay with them. And not have to distract myself with eating, or shopping, or watching TV, or getting angry, or whatever would take me away from the feelings. And that is hard. It really is.