Kitchen, Car & Blade

I have been thinking about how my life has been impacted over the past year, since the Boy has been in treatment and before, and what that looks like now. Since Jack and I have decided on a plan for next year for the Boy, and I am feeling relaxed, like I was holding my breath for a year and a half and now I can release. Now I need to heal, recover from the past crazy, tumultuous, eventful year.

Las year, I was so focused on getting the Boy help, everything else went to the wayside, but what does that mean? What is everything? What is wayside?

Imagine you are cooking a meal, a complicated meal with several of courses for a dozen people using recipes you have never used before in a kitchen that is not your own. And you have a deadline. You need to get the food on the table by a certain time. So you fly through the kitchen. During normal meal prep, I put dirty dishes in the dishwasher as I go along. I don't do all of the dishes while I cook, but if I have the choice between putting them in the sink or the dishwasher, I put them in the dishwasher. Likewise, when I am done using the milk or butter, I'll put the remaining back in the fridge. This meal, I don't do any of that. The dishes are all in the sink. The milk is on the counter. I am burning some of the food, and I don't have time to clean the pan, so the next dish I cook in the pan had burned bits on it.

With the Boy doing better in boarding and we have a plan for next year, it is as if the food is on the table and people are enjoying their meal. Dinner isn't done, but we are most of the way there and the hard part of getting the food out is finished.

Now I have to clean up the mess I made while I was cooking, and it isn't pretty.

Here is another analogy. My friend Sarah races her Porsche at a track in south King County. When she drives, she focuses on the road. She doesn't glance down to look at the speedometer. I imagine myself driving a race car last year. I was going so fast I could not take my eyes off the road. My friends sat next to me and would help me navigate and avoid obstacles. Since I didn't know the route, I made a few wrong turns and hit few bumps. More than once, I scraped the side of the car against other cars. Now that the race is over, I am getting out of the car and assessing the damage. The doors are banged up. I have a cut on my head from when I hit the rear view mirror. I am still trying to figure out the damage to the inside of the car: Did I ruin the alignment? Did the car leak oil while I was driving it? I have no idea what happened, but I know something is wrong. The car needs a long while in the shop before it can drive again.

Third analogy comes from a movie I saw at the Fine Arts Theatre in Chicago years ago. It was an independent film about an African American family. I can't remember the plot of the movie, but I remember the pivotal scene. The matriarch is standing between her two grown sons who are arguing. One pulls a knife on the other, and the mother steps between them to stop the fight. The camera pulls away, and the mom's hand is bleeding. She grabbed the knife. She grabbed the blade so her one son wouldn't stab the other.

While Jack and the Boy were going around in circles, I metaphorically grabbed the blade. I got between the two of them, stopped the insanity, and got the Boy in treatment. This is not to make me look like a hero--hardly. (What is a hero, anyway?) Like that mom, I did want needed to be done to take care of my son, even if I got injured in the process.