Well, her I am to blog. I've decided to blog about my community project for my class project--one of three last classes before finishing my MA. My community project is attempting to begin a group in Fort Wayne, Indiana for women who have disabled husbands--physically disabled--to come together and talk, cry, complain, express all the feelings that come with losing the physical contact that so many women are use to having. I'm not speaking about sexual intimacy alone. There is the hugging, the playfulness, the ability to chase each other like some children.

What i miss most is the playfulness, the wrestling, the grabbing and biting, the sneaking up behind him and squeezing. when his physical disability started to show itself, I told myself, "I can deal with this. I didn't; not really. I ignored it, I pretended that the doctors would figure out what was wrong and correct it. When the doctors couldn't tell us exactly what was wrong and began to give an assorted listing of all the physical symptoms as individual problems, I decided to keep busy, to not think about touching, to keep physical contact at a minimum. Avoidance. I became hard, keeping my feelings out of reach, telling myself I didn't have time to cry, telling myself I couldn't be weak, telling myself that I had to have control to help him get through, control to keep the family together. Finally, after nearly two years of not allowing myself to cry, I cried sometime during the first week of November (2209) after watching my daughter with her new boyfriend--wrestling, laughing, chasing each other, goofing around. I've always watched my daughters, both of them much like me in different ways, but my youngest is the more outgoing with her actions, not so resign in showing exactly how she feels. I saw me in her. and listening to the two talk as they watched movies in the living room, and watched them goof around, I saw my husband in my daughter's boyfriend. Within the first week of them dating, I wrote three poems.

My creativity had been stifled; I writing about the very distant past and not the present, the words feeling too old for whom I was. In a poetry class, a class I attempt to take at least every other year, I couldn't release myself as I should, although I thought I had. Now I see that I was holding on to something, a secret that I didn't even know I had. After releasing this secret, not only did the words begin to come forth, so did all those issues I had been burying--more than my husband's disability, all those worries I forced to set aside and not combat, making ailments appear that I had never had. (I do remember the last cry I had before November 2009, and it has been longer than two year!: may 2004, the day before April 1st and my gallbladder surgery.) No wonder I broke so hard during Christmas break.

Those poems began to make me think; I kept intently watching the actions between my daughter and her boyfriend. I must say that I became "smitten" with the vitality he had--that he has!, the vitality my husband could no longer display (and talked about). My daughter is just as physically needy as me; I like to be touched, a lot, and I get depressed when the physical contact is limited. I'm a hugger, I'm a poker, I'm a biter, I'm a sucker, I'm a kick you butt, I'm a pinch your scrumptious ass person. So is she! I started to see my life in her, not through her; I started to want her life. This is where the Christmas break breakdown began, the first week of November, the day after ISSMA State Finals (Indiana State ?? Music Association--I always forget what the second 's' stands for), the High School Marching Band finals in Indy.

In a way, I should thank both of them; still, I need somewhere to go, I need to talk to another that deals with a disabled husband that can no longer give the physical contact she is use to, and to help me prepare for the worse that is yet to come--even though the doctors can't actually tell us, I would love to know what all the individual diagnoses add up to--some new disease, syndrome, whatever! There is one symptom that none of the doctors can explain, and at first the initials MS were whispered, but they have done little to rule it our or to rule that it is. Is it because there is nothing more that can be done then what is already being done; or is it because Medicaid won't allow for the test that would determine, or . . . well . . . I just don't know. a part of me doesn't want to know the whole, and the other part of me would think it would all be simpler if we knew.