I Don't Know If It's a Good Thing, But It Matters

I try not to re-read whatever it is that I've written. It's not a good practice, at least not if you're trying to avoid presenting a false you, but I re-read my last post and here in the late night quiet and calm of our half empty house it's difficult to find the answers to give the man that wrote that. That's how deeply profound anxiety is...how impossible to articulate, how impervious to reason it is. When I get swept away by the stress and strain of watching my wife cry, and fighting back similar tears myself, combined with too much thinking, and too many questions, it's impossible to keep the levees from breaking. It's a good lesson in what it's like to all soft, pale flesh, fallible and more fragile than you ever let on, or believe.

Tonight, I spent an enormous amount of time in the quiet of my room, re-charging, putting things into perspective, fighting back, and looking for the tools to get me, and us, through the next week or so. The isolation (and occasional sleep) helped. At night's end Zoey snuck in for a kiss. In fact, she demanded a goodnight kiss. It was so sweet it melted me. She then proceeded to tell me how she was going to grow up to be a doctor, at which point she shuffled back and forth to her room for the better part of a half hour, grabbing plush patients and bringing them to me to help her diagnose. She was eager to treat every one of them. There were elephants with plugged noses, and pigs with straight tails...a turtle that needed a heart transplant, and more than a few animals that Zoey insisted that we "take their brains out." It was beyond cute, and distracting, and reminded me why life gets this intermittently hard...because we never had anything so valuable to provide for and protect until now.

I wonder if Zed could take my brains out when I'm starting to feel things go bad? She's a smart little girl but she's no doctor, not yet. Maybe I'll just stick with sleep and quiet isolation. I've kinda grown attached to my brain.

A doctor? I wonder where she got that from? She's spent the past week insisting that when she gets big she's going to be a doctor..."to help people," she says. Yeah, I dunno, but I suppose we'd better start saving for college.