There are times when I love nothing more than to just sleep. I can leave a nightmare behind that I have no control over, and simply drift off into peaceful ignorance. Turn life completely off.
Then there are nights like last night when life becomes a 3D Steven King movie that you can't find relief from. By nightfall the temperature had dropped and the air became so damp that my arthritis started to hurt in seriousness. I took enough pain medication to get me through the night, and fell asleep.
Even in my sleep I went from nightmare to nightmare as though I was going from room to room in a house going to different levels of panic and anxiety.
An hour later I woke up with a tsunami of a migraine. I woke up so violently ill I couldn't even move my legs to get out of bed. Going from the nightmare with my eyes closed to the nightmare half awake intensified the pain as I started to realize that I was in a shed, not a home.
From January to July, the year Robert Huckins stole our building fund, I went from having Auburn hair to being gray. Almost white headed.
But I can dye my hair. What I cannot do is replace my mother, or come to the point where I count the past four years of not being able to see her as a mere hiccup. Nor can I come up with the finances to replace a stolen home. And the stress of trying to is slowly killing me.
Over the years I have developed a picture of what a human being living humanely is like. She is a person who understand, values and develops her body, finding it beautiful and useful; a person who is real and is willing to take risks, to be creative, to manifest competence, to change when the situation calls for it, and to find ways to accommodate to what is new and different, keeping that part of the old that is still useful and discarding what is not. ~ Virginia Satir
