Today, I’m feeling particularly grateful for all the lovely things in my life. The wonderful spouse, the gorgeous house, the sweet dogs, even the pain-in-the-ass clients, and the lovely family.
On February 15 last year, I got a call from the Foothills Hospital about my mum. She was in energency, and she had a “terrible headache”, and she couldn’t remember my dad’s work number. So did I mind coming down there? I did not mind, and I gave them my dad’s work number and jumped in the car. I thought I’d be driving her home an hour later or something, because my mum had always had horrible migraines.
Apparenlty “terrible headache” is ER nurse code for “brain aneurysm”, whidh meant that my mum did not, in fact, go home an hour later. She had surgery that night to clamp it, and then began a long process of getting better, which included a trip to the ICU, something nasty called vasospasm, a shunt, and a lot of therapy. She went home four months later, thankfully still the person I’ve known and loved my entire life.
This wasn’t the beginning of what I think of as the Shittiest Year Ever – my grandmother passing away six weeks earlier was really the beginning of that. Nor was it the end. A month later, Mike lost his grandfather suddenly, a month after that, we thought our little brown poocher was on the way out. Later in the year, both our grandmothers were sick. In the middle of it all, we decided to rip our house apart (note to anyone facing a year of crisis: this is not smart. Do not do this.), and then Mike quit his job to go back to school (a positive, but still a stressor). It was a year of total upheaval, a real, live, emotional roller-coaster. It was awful, and I don’t care if I never repeat that experience again.
There were lots of days when I wished my mum could call me up and chat, the way she always had. I hadn’t realized how much I liked that little bit of contact a few times a week. I also hadn’t realized how nice it was to talk with either of my parents about everyday, mundane things, not medications, or therapies, or what which doctor said. Conversations when everyone has a clean bill of health are so, so different. You talk about that horrible movie you saw, or what you’ve read, or who has fish on sale this week.
So I am thankful, because this year we have had little to talk about beyond the mundane. We chatted for half an hour this evening, about movies and house prices and the women in her aquacise class. We talked about my grandmother’s birthday, which is also today, and how they’re all going to have diabetic brownies instead of birthday cake. And then we hung up, and she and my dad went off to eat diabetic brownies, and I took an hour to do absolutely nothing.
I am hoping this heralds the beginning of The Year of the Mundane.