Battle Hymns of a Hot Mess Mom

I woke up this morning to an absolutely horrible nightmare. I had a dream that we were at a festival of sorts and parked. The children bolted out of the car and asked if they could go play and I asked them to stay together. When it was time to go I pinged their phone and couldn’t locate them on the app. I kept pinging and pinging but no response. J started to look for them and I finally got a refreshed location on S. I yelled out the location that refreshed and J ran to it. We found the watch laying in the dirt and then saw her body. I saw her face. She had drowned. I ran over to hold her body screaming and crying. I woke up in a cold sweat. She wasn’t going out anywhere today. After I woke up I reached for my phone to call J and saw a text from a friend stating that L is invited to the ocean. Talk about breathing out of a paper bag.

After talking to J about the nightmare, I asked L if he wanted to go with his friend – S was going to be tethered to me no matter what today. My chemo meds were delivered around 10:45am which meant that we had the ability to leave the house. I delayed my chemo pills this morning so that we could go have acai without me feeling hazy and groggy. While it was a simple morning, it was a nice one with the two of us. I definitely enjoyed the time we got to be together just the two of us. We haven’t been able to do our favorite activity together, biking, in a long time. We love to go biking and exploring new bike trails together. We had wanted to go to the secret garden together, though I unfortunately didn’t have an opportunity to take her, it was J. We went with L to the secret garden before I went into my first round of chemo in the hospital. Since then I have not been able to go biking with the kids. The stationary bike is the closest I have to a bike now.

S and I absolutely loved to ride down to the ocean and play at the playground. There was a really unique playground that I could see from the room of the hospital with binoculars. I want to take S there, but have to get strong enough to take her. I know that I can’t reverse time so I sometimes obsess that time is slipping away as she won’t want to do this with me when she gets older. I want to go tomorrow with her, but I know that it would be a huge risk of falling, crashing or losing control. Now that I have the time to spend with the kids either I can’t physically keep up or they are out with their friends. It definitely is a cruel joke sometimes. But then had I not experienced this and in this way, will I know how valuable it is when I get better and go back to the workforce? Will I realize how precious these moments are? Will I value and be present again when I return to the workforce? Since I took my meds late I can’t think more today.