[From May 31, 2016: And just like that, doodles!] Every time there’s a litter of golden-doodles at my sister’s house, I pick a favorite. And each time, I’ve said goodbye before they’ve gone to their forever homes, always with the thought that “one of these days” we just might get one of our own. “Maybe […]
[From February 7, 2016: Because sometimes the little things… aren’t.] I know it wasn’t really about toothpaste. Standing there in the middle of Target late on a Sunday evening a couple weeks ago, though, it felt like a personal assault, like the final insult in a string of ridiculous injustices being thrust upon us. And […]
[From January 19, 2016: Here’s another from some of the earliest days of The Shitshow, when every day felt like a new indignity, a new diagnosis, and a new reality.] When a tornado rips through a small town in the Midwest, leveling a trailer park or maybe an elementary school, invariably there will be someone […]
[From February 20, 2016: This entry was written on a quick 36-hour “mental health getaway” to Los Angeles, something I used to do a lot in the days before the shit storm. It’s weird to think that I haven’t been back to LA since.] Sometimes I worry that I’ve given you the wrong impression. I […]
[From April 6, 2016: If you want to guarantee the ire of a caregiver, lecture them about the importance of “self-care.” That said, most caregivers could probably use the occasional lecture about self-care. I wrote the following at the beginning of my own dalliance with the very notion of self-care. It’s worth noting that several […]
[From August 10, 2016: Reading this entry again now, all these months/years/lifetimes later, makes me realize how much I have dropped the ball on this, how often I have let those “apologies” creep back in to our conversations. I need to do better. I needed this reminder.] The first time she asked the question was […]
[From January 14, 2016: In what would become less-than-affectionately known as The Shitshow, Chelli’s first actual actionable diagnosis, the first Big Bad we could focus all of our collective energy and ire on, was an autoimmune disorder called Sjögren’s syndrome. Those first IGG infusions, a process we would eventually abandon at the beginning of the […]
Way back in the summer of 2011, what seems like three lifetimes ago by almost any measure, two different people close to us found themselves dealing with the harsh reality of addiction. It was an experience that Chelli and I knew more than a bit about, having quietly weathered Chel’s own journey (god, I still […]
There was a freak ice storm on the day we were married in a beautiful old Methodist church in downtown Tulsa, 23 years ago today. I was nervous about all sorts of things that day — I worried that the weather might make it more difficult for out-of-town family and friends to be there with […]
I know and love people who struggle with various forms of mental illness. They are caring and beautiful souls, who just happen to be afflicted with a chemical imbalance in the brain. Sometimes these imbalances are easily kept in check with medications or therapy and sometimes these people fight for years to find a treatment […]
Sometimes I ramble. 