And I am totally cool with that because really, who cares? But the timing certainly seems suspect to be running off to rehab and then announcing that you were raped as a teen by a clergyman. Maybe he was raped. Maybe he is an alcoholic. But instead of owning his behavior it seems to me that he is making excuses for it. And I hate that. This is not a partisan issue for me either. When Bill Clinton lied about screwing around with Monica I thought, “You idiot. Why didn’t you just tell them it was none of their God Damn business in the first place, instead of lying?”

Monday night’s grand finale was a trip to the ER. My Mom was over at my house freaking out because the buyer whose offer I accepted while she was away had all of the sudden come up with financing and was once again saying that she wanted the house. And my Mom was pissed. I don’t blame her, but it looks as if she legally has no recourse and honestly, I handed the house stuff right over to her as soon as she had slept off her Dublin jet lag hangover. Polly has been sick since last week. She started complaining of a headache that felt as if her head was splitting open and of feeling dizzy every time she stood up. I finally couldn’t take the worry anymore so I just announced, “I am taking her to the ER.” I offered to take the kids in a cab but my Mom said she would drive and we ended up there until 3:30 Tuesday morning. Turns out she was dehydrated. I never would have guessed. No one I know drinks more than Polly. I can often hear her coming before she enters the room I’m in because of the ice clinking against the sides of her glass or the familiar whoosh sound of her sucking on a bottle of water. She always has a drink going. If she’s dehydrated we all are.

She ended up having to have an IV, which was a big deal because she has a big time phobia of needles. While the nurse went to get the bag and supplies I had a little talk with her. I taught her some breathing exercises to calm down. See, having a Mom with chronic panic attacks comes in handy sometimes. I told her not to watch them put the IV in, but to look at me and squeeze my hand. Before my eyes the little girl who once cried for 90 minutes in the waiting room of a lab because she had to have blood drawn and the same little girl who cried for a week over having to have a shot when she was in kindergarten and ended up screaming her head off and thrashing around at the doctor’s office became brave and she looked into my eyes and squeezed my hand and we talked about the circus and camping and coyotes and she didn’t shed a tear. She then demanded I take a photo of her arm with the IV in it and send it to her Dad, who was at work, because she was so proud of herself. I used my phone and did so, although I never did read the book on my phone because it was boring and I don’t really know what all the buttons are for. It magically made it and he was proud of her.

“I guess”, she said, “My phobia of needles is over.” As I sat by her bedside and watched the bag go drip drip into her arm and awaited the results of the blood tests, the urine tests and the chest X-ray she looked at me and said, “This is kind of fun.”

Fun? “Yes, fun. Because everyone is so nice and paying attention to me and it feels good.”

I managed to hold it together but I felt like shit. My poor little girl, so starved for attention that she thinks going to the ER and being poked and prodded is fun. As I looked at her I realized just how much of me is being given to her brother, and how she silently waits for her turn. I need to remedy that.

I can remember when I was hospitalized for a week in 2003 with a staff infection, once I got over the fact that I wasn’t going to be getting out of the bed for some time, I decided to just lay back and enjoy it, like a forced vacation for my body. The nurses kept me doped up on percocet and I didn’t care that my roommate, who was there for constipation, was constantly yelling for more morphine. When the nurses wouldn’t give it to her she would wait for them to leave, get out of bed, go to her purse and get pills from there. I wondered why no one had made the connection between morphine addict and constipation but I said nothing, lying on my side of the curtain, listening to her screams of pain and the unsuccessful enemas, suppositories, laxatives and rectal exams.

Finally I whispered to a particularly cute male nurse, “Where would a patient who wanted to smoke go?”

He looked into my eyes and whispered back, “Oh, you can’t go outside. But when I get a cigarette break I go down the elevator to the main level, outside to that little enclosed area about half a block from the main entrance and smoke. No, I can’t let you leave, but I can get you a pole that we can hook your IV bag to and you could walk the halls a little bit. It would do you good.”

I nodded silently, thinking that there was hidden meaning somewhere in his whisper, that he was telling me something with those oh so blue eyes. I put a gown on backwards over the one I was wearing so my ass wouldn’t be hanging out in the halls and slowly walked down the hall with my pole. When I got down the elevator to the main level I went through the front door and down to the box built to separate those who inhale from those who don’t and sat down. I can remember that cigarette vividly. I saw the ambulances racing in, I saw people coming into the ER, people leaving, family members crying, people rushing all around me and as I felt the warm numb of pain killers mixed with the hit of nicotine juxtaposed with the coolness of the night air I remember what I was thinking as I tipped my head back and inhaled. “This is fun.” Because it was a break from my job. My Mom. My husband. My kids. The dishes. The laundry. The cat box. The grocery store. The stack of bills. What to cook for dinner. My Life.

2 and a 1/2 hours to get Nathan out of bed for school this morning. Any of you who are dealing or have dealt with kids who won’t get out of bed to go to school; my heart goes out to you. Not knowing exactly what to do is not helping. I was looking online at this website and I read this in the advice for family members caring for someone with a mood disorder “Don’t take your loved one’s actions or hurtful words personally.”

Okay. I obviously am struggling with that one. Is my son inside of this disease somewhere or is the disease inside of him? Where does one end and the other begin? At what point is he responsible for his behavior? I took him to his psychiatrist last Friday and after I gave him the run down on what had been going on he said, “Why are you punishing him for being bipolar?” I was stunned. So he’s allowed to scream and yell obscenities at me when he doesn’t get his way, threaten me physically, refuse to do what is asked of him, refuse to do what his teachers ask of him and I am supposed to let him play video games all day and talk on the phone all night? I don’t fucking think so. There has to be some sort of personal accountability here, even with an illness. Honestly, I am thinking of looking for another doctor. Every time we go in there I feel like it’s “You’ve got a very sick boy here and you’re doing the wrong things in response to X Y & Z. Here are some more pills to try. See you in two weeks.” Just when I thought things were looking up, BAM, setback.

Anyway, and now for something completely different, I finished the book I was reading, “ Leaving Las Vegas” last night. I saw the movie years ago but had never read the book. I highly recommend it. The movie mostly focuses on the relationship between Ben and Sera. The book goes into greater detail about them and their lives and the paths they have been on long before the characters meet. When I got to the end and read that the author had died in 1994 I got up and did an internet search on him. John O’Brien committed suicide two weeks after he found out his book was to be made into a movie.

I put my head down on the desk and wept. I am not even sure what I was crying about. Maybe I just needed the release.

“Being a housewife is just glorified prostitution,” my mother said, turning her head as she drove to make sure the back seat heard her too. While my two sisters and I were held captive in the car my mother gave us what little sex education we got. “Men want sex all of the time, and as a wife, it will be your responsibility to give it to him”, she declared with her mouth set in a straight line. The thought of my parents having sex was repulsive to me, but the vision of boys wanting sex more than I did was exciting. I was only five at the time, but I thought about sex more than anything else, even my dolls. I hadn’t quite figured out how it was done, I got the penis in the vagina bit, but I knew nothing about the in and out movement that accompanied the whole act.

As the youngest child of four, my brother preceding me in birth by six years, my eldest sister by four years and the next sister three years ahead of me, I was always seated in-between my parents in church. Mass lasted about ninety minutes and I found the whole ordeal dreadfully boring. Sitting, standing, kneeling, over and over again. When I complained to my mom about it, she explained that the catholic mass was set up to emulate the walk Jesus had on his way to be crucified, when he fell, we sat, when he stumbled, we kneeled, when he walked we stood. “I wish he would have fallen down more”, was my reply. I was slapped for that comment and I do remember the disapproving look that I received. I was tired in church. Years later I remember hearing the stories from my siblings of how when I was little I would sleep my way through a lot of it, snoring and farting during the homily. I don’t remember any of that, although a snore and a fart just about summed up my feelings on the whole matter. I do remember waking up with a kink in my neck, an imprint of my dress sleeve on the side of my face, and a line of drool running down to my neck. I was getting off easy, but I didn’t know it at the time. My siblings were never allowed to sleep in church. Later I would be expected to sing and keep up with the flow of things by reciting the same prayers and responses from memory as the rest of the congregation did.

It wasn’t long before I learned that the silent times to bow our heads in prayer were the perfect time to think about sex. I would close my eyes imagining people doing it, animals doing it, and if I was feeling brave enough, me doing it. I would become extremely excited from these thoughts as I sat on the hard pew and tried not to wiggle around. When we were finally home, after the coffee and donuts that came after church had been consumed and the idle chit chat of the average Sunday had come to a close, I would go home and wait for bedtime to come so I could rub myself between my legs. I hadn’t then mastered the ability to bring myself to orgasm, but I knew that there was something to what I was doing, so I continued on with it until I was red and raw and breathless.