Onion and Orchid

two plants that grace this earth

The orchid. The sometimes fickle creature that loses its blooms for seemingly no reason and then stares at you with giant leaves. No longer providing the visual marvel that convinced you to keep it initially. What do you do? Toss it? Keep it and hope? It’s hard to know. I tend to keep them. The one in the photo has been flowerless for a while with no new spikes. I wonder what it will do?

Then the onion. I like to always have an onion on hand. I like them cooked. I like them, in small amounts, raw. I like them in things. They make a kitchen look complete. Potatoes and sacks of flour sort of have the same effect. Usually if onions get too old they just go bad. Moldy. Nasty. This one… it’s alive. It started by growing upside down in my kitchen garlic/onion rack.

I’ve since put it on top of a vase (the first picture). We’ll just see how long it can go on its own juices.

The brain is a mysterious thing.

Much like the onion and orchid. For me, it has moments of wakefulness. Then calm. Moments of clarity. Then confusion, anger, worry.

Tuesday I sat in a meeting with all the teacher aides and extended care. A plan was being developed to make sure there was uniformity in procedures. Mention was made of how students weren’t freezing and melting well at the end of recess. That’s a procedure we have to mark the end of recess and also to serve as a safety procedure in case there is some kind of emergency. At the sound of the bell or whistle students are taught to immediately be quiet and crouch into a ready position. They then listen to instructions from the person on duty. The students have been getting lazy lately. Shooting baskets after the whistle blows, barely crouching, talking a lot. Before the concern had been completely stated my brain had fired with a complete image of how I would lead the school in freeze and melt practice in the morning during assembly. I didn’t ask my brain the question. I didn’t wonder how the problem would be fixed. It was just there. Pow. I would do it at the end of assembly… and I didn’t think about it again until the next morning.

And then, it just came together. The morning of assembly I saw that there was an ice cream maker in one of the auction baskets in the office. Then, during assembly the 1st graders introduced their shoe tying competition. The picture of my plan became even more complete - realized - by the time I took the mike. I announce the auction. I mention the ice cream makers. I switch to the drills, I mention freezing like ice cream and then melting to crouch as if you’re tying your shoes… I have my safety vest on. I blow the whistle - the school freezes and melts. Not fast enough. No laying down. Do it again. I encourage them to stand and be liquid. They wiggle. Whistle. Much better. Too slow still. One more time and I dismissed them to listen to the instructions of their teacher.

Reports are they’ve been better at the end of recess since then. We’ll do something similar next week.

The anti-brain

My same brain that can have sudden realizations and form complete pictures will sometimes fixate on things. Worry. Imagine scenarios. Usually regarding people I care about when I know something unusual or unpredictable is going on. TK has got some unpredictability going on right now and my mind will flash to him throughout the day. The amazing KS is brave and goes out and does things and regardless of what they are, I worry. Sometimes I wonder at my worry. Why? These people are competent and supported. They are capable. They are their own beings and should not be concerned by my worry. But the worry can be debilitating. It can fill my brain so full of scenarios that I can think of nothing else and my soul will be heavy. I have always had this tendency to some degree. I can remember it as a child. The worry. It may have come about during the time my parents split and we basically went from a household of 5 to one of 2 in a very short time. (My parents split shortly after my brother and sister went to college). Suddenly it was just mom and me. And me with a lot of time to think about things, and yes, I did blame myself for their split even though it made no sense. And then years of largely being an only child in a big house with a single mom. The brain finds paths and I would over think things when I didn’t have anything constructive to think about. It’s good for me to have constructive things to think about. Sometimes this substack is one.

More recently in my life my worrying tendencies became more trained. More refined. And in a funny way, I think my worrying and my scenarios actually helped me to deal with the chaos that was Katie. Sometimes riding home I would have visions of her in horrible states of being. Maybe mean. Maybe nasty. Maybe having taken another step at suicide. I never really knew. Most days I would come home and she would be just fine. But other days there would be chaos and I would, for the most part, react calmly. It was rarely too different from something I had imagined. One day I came home to a mess in the walkway. After drowning her depression she had pulled the bookshelf down - probably after going to the bathroom. Disaster. When I saw the mess I charged through the house to find her asleep on the couch. Sigh - relief. I took a picture after I managed to get the book shelf back up. I figured she would not remember the incident and if I didn’t have photo evidence she wouldn’t believe me.

She broke at least 2, 5 gallon fish tanks in similar fashion. Those, btw, are a pain to clean up.

Things seemed to always happen when I was away so I learned to worry. My level of worry was largely based on the length of time I was away, or out of touch. On her own, her brain and frantic mind would take over and she would burn bridges until there was no hope of ever rebuilding. She quit jobs, she went off on people, and then she would drink to try to drown out her own mind but in the process of getting to that deep sleep she would go even deeper and go off more and wreak more chaos and I would come home after a day or two or a week and it would just be hellfire. Conflict at Trader Joes. Called the police on people in the park. Called the police on the neighbor. Called the police on the neighbor but then wouldn’t talk to the police when they came.

I got so I didn’t want to leave. If I stayed home things were, for the most part, calm… or she would go off on me. But rarely to the degree she went off on everyone else. I didn’t want to come home to disaster. So my leavings were limited to work and runs. I did occasionally get out to visit family or friends but I always had a heavy mind on those trips. Dark loops of what I would come home to. Even so, I did still dream of coming home to hugs and I missed you’s, but mostly it was disasters. Pretty much every time. I sometimes think now that every time I left the house, her own personal history and fear of being abandoned would rear its ugly head and that would start her on her own dark loops. We were just a pair of loopies.

And so now. It’s been three years since Katie died but I had 20 years of intensive training. My brain can quickly revert to worry. It finds things to fixate on and worry about. Sometimes I can feel my body being pulled toward an individual that will be a constant source of worry. I seem to be drawn to it, attracted. The chaos to go against my calm. So far I have not given in. The people in my life now are kind and considerate and I am learning that it is okay to be comfortable… but the worry still comes and it can be debilitating if I let a worry loop form in my brain.

You may be wondering . . . and rightly so . . . what the hell? 20 years? Well yeah. Mostly, when it was just the two of us, it was pretty good. Honest. But I do marvel at my own brain and soul for my persistence. Despite it all and knowing, for the most part, what was happening and that it was total hell at times, I had almost no thought of going anywhere. I did have a few thoughts, but they were brief. My commitment was true and powerful. I guess that’s the way I’m wired.