Imagine that I am a professional juggler. (I can be wearing a brightly colored court jester outfit, if that helps you establish a solid mental image.) Got it? Good. Now I am no spectacular juggler by any means. But I’m adequate. I’m good enough to keep entertaining the King’s court without being beheaded… or whatever they did to really sucky jugglers back in the day.

Each of my balls are smallish in size. Nothing too tricky. I don’t necessarily do any frickin awesome tricks with them, I just manage to keep them all in the air.

One of my balls represents the kids. Their general health and well being. My ability to remember and successfully transport them to their various activities is represented by another ball. There’s a ball for Jon, a ball for keeping the house in semi-functional order, a ball for my church work, a ball for school volunteering, a ball for social time (lately that’s been a very, very small ball), a few more balls for whatever. I’ve really tried to focus more on my writing for the last year or so. That ball got a little bigger, a little brighter and shinier… but it fit into the rotation okay. All of my balls were still in the air.

Last year Jon got sick with a weird heart thing — which, luckily, turned out to be nothing horrible — and for a while I was juggling that. Only that wasn’t represented by a ball. A ball is something that any competent juggler can handle. ER trips and medical bills and uber-anxiety weren’t things that I was used to handling. So Jon’s heart thing was something more of a bowling pin.

So I had a bunch of balls and a bowling pin. But still, everything was still in the air. It wasn’t super pretty, but I was keeping it all up there.

Then Deacon had his hospital stay. Deacon’s thing was way beyond the scope of my normal juggling abilities. Deacon’s hospital stay — and all that whole ordeal encompassed — was represented by a large frickin dining room chair. It was hard, and foreign, and — if not handled properly — could have poked out my brain via my eye socket. When one gets a dining room chair into the juggling mix, one is bound to have some balls fall. And some did. I started fumbling, balls started dropping, and I imagined hearing the people of the King’s court booing me. Threatening to behead me… or whatever. But as flustered as I felt about dropped balls, my main concern was just keeping the damn dining room chair in the air. Just the chair, baby.

But the chair passed. I got to toss it out of the rotation. Got a short reprieve. I was back to my usual balls.. even though I couldn’t quite get back into the rhythm of my simplistic juggling routine. The chair really threw me.

Then Jon got sick. And we couldn’t figure out what it was. And he stayed sick. And we still couldn’t figure out what it was. And he got sicker. And they only sorta figured out what it was. And he’s still sick. Jon’s poor health is a long and drawn out situation. It can only be represented by something heavy, weighty, and fatiguing. Watching him in constant pain and frustration feels not so much like something impossible to handle, so much as something that is mentally, emotionally, and spiritually draining. Sort of less like having your legs torn off by a shark, and more like having them sucked dry by leaches.

So picture me again: bright jester suit, pointy shoes. Balls in the air, accompanied now by a bowling ball. A real heavy sucker. And the bowling ball has precedence over everything else, because it just has to. The bowling ball’s not going away. And dude, if you could see me trying to keep everything up in the air… wow. I’d be beheaded for sure. I’m fumbling, faltering. Balls are falling and rolling away. And kindly people are stepping down from the King’s court to help me with my dropped balls. They are picking them up for me, tossing them back. Some people are keeping my dropped balls altogether, pocketing them until I seem able to handle them again.

People are kind.

My juggling act is a joke. But not a haha joke… just a sad-ish joke.

I miss my simple, adequate routine. I miss seeming plain, yet competent. I miss sleeping well. I miss being completely awake. I miss my husband being happy.

And I so very much look forward to the day when I can drop the bowling ball out of the rotation, when all of my balls are back up in the air.

It may not have been the fastest… but who gives a crap. Dude, look at it!

Zoe is home from school today. Sick. Again. (Zoe is one of the few kids on the planet who actually LOVES school… so much so that she will fake wellness to go. Like, if her arm was half severed, she would try to tape it up and put on a heavy sweater and attempt to get out the door before I spotted the blood.)

Anyway, I made her stay home again today. She is bored beyond words. I am about to go print her out some math sheets so she can pretend that she is at school.

In the meantime, though, check out the sweet fort she built this morning in the piano room. She built it especially for spying on the neighbors and people delivering things to our door. (Our flat screen is scheduled to be delivered this afternoon… yeah, you heard me. Flat screen. The family who hasn’t had cable — not even local channels — for a year and a half is getting a flat screen. Sometimes we actually like to flush our money directly down the toilet.)

Behold: the “Sick Fort”

Did you see her wallet? Did you catch it? If not, go back and see if you can spot the 86 seconds its on screen again.

And here she shows you the peephole for spying:

And now I’m off to print math sheets and stealthily administer medicine.

(Post script… I realized after watching the videos that the video of her wallet was so long that flickr actually cut it off. You don’t get to see the other objects contained in her “adventure bag” or the sweet Exit sign. Darn.)