Not New This New Year

My kids bustle. Little Brother twists buttered noodles on a plastic fork that we have failed to slip out of rotation. A new medicated bandage runs the length of his nose, protecting — we hope — his skin from his ever-picking fingers. How many different kinds, brands, and sizes of bandages we have tried over the past few years to shield his forehead and now his nose is too many to count. This one, though, seems promising.

(I’ve taken to clipping his fingernails at night after he falls asleep. To brace for the two-parent team getting him to accept fingernail clipping has become too daunting. We’ve tried being funny, giving him choices, bribing, doing countdowns, treats, a screen, a book, a sister telling jokes, and lately the whole process takes at least an hour and lots of screaming and tears in order to get one or maybe two fingernails cut. So I do it at night, with the little flashlight from either my phone or my watch. He doesn’t wake and it’s working for the time being.)

Sister, hair wet after her bath, folds a piece of bread with butter in one hand and dances beside Little Brother. This is dinner for her. Dancing with one piece of bread and butter. She doesn’t like meat. She won’t eat sandwiches and she doesn’t like to sit down. Husband made lasagna last night and Big Brother at least considered it. Sister had some bread. Somehow, though, she’s growing. We know this because she had her monthly oncology exam at the end of December, an especially stressful appointment for me as I’d noticed some changes in her walking over the past few weeks and I needed some side effects to this current treatment to be ruled out. She’s grown taller and has gained weight. She was referred to physical therapy for an evaluation of her gait, and the x-ray the oncology team ordered did rule out a serious side effect. Sister is all right, for now, even though all she eats is bread and butter.

Big Brother nests in the front room. Still in his Boy Scouts uniform after an outing to the National Weather Service, he huddles on the dark brown couch with his iPad. He researches new mods to install in one of the many computer games he plays. Or, he researches which species of animal to fantasize about introducing to the vivarium he continues to design. Or, he researches ice augers for the newest business venture he’s conceived, in which he and two of his friends fish year-round and eventually hunt (even though he doesn’t like the idea of killing animals for any reason) and, after selling fish and meat at farmers’ markets, they’ll teach themselves to live off the grid.

I sit on the stairs. This is my new resting place. Any step on the stairs. Physical comfort is hard to find lately, so I’ve taken to perching in a high traffic area where I can see and hear almost everybody almost all the time, even when I’m staring at nothing in particular and the kids’ voices are usually drowned out by the three doves that now reside in the living room. There is so much to do. I should not be sitting, even though it’s terribly uncomfortable and not restful. I should be vacuuming, or throwing away everything in sight. The Christmas tree stands next to the bird kennel, a drooping declaration of neglect, needles clumped near discarded feathers the shouting birds no longer need.

Today is only the fourth of January, and I’ve already given up on the resolutions I didn’t make. To clean, to tidy, to exercise, to drink more water, to smile, to get stronger, to feel better, to organize, to relax, to let go, to meditate, to care about food, to feel grateful that my daughter’s cancer is “good” or that I shouldn’t worry or that it’s not that many pills or that “at least she feels well” or that I always need to know that it could be worse. Believe me, I know it could be worse. I know it in my dreams, where I witness an open heart surgery my daughter undergoes because she needs it before she can continue with her current cancer treatment. I know it could be worse because my left TMJ has been dislocated since, as it happens, I clench my teeth all night and most of every day. I’m always bracing for what is worse.

Big Brother stands just behind Husband, who plays Minecraft with Little Brother. He finished his buttered noodles and asked for a “family Minecraft night.” Big Brother watches the screen over Husband’s shoulder and pulls at this hair. Over time, the strands fray and break off. When Big Brother was a toddler, he’d make little bald spots of his cogitation — any time he thinks and plans and designs, he twists and pulls at his hair, much like Little Brother scratches and picks at his skin.

I am most content when I can hear them and see them, when I am near their chattering and spinning. But they certainly empty my reserves. With their questions and meltdowns and ideas and fights and resistance, they scrub off every fleck of energy that I might attribute to anything that isn’t necessary to survive the day. At night I go to bed a sanded, inelegant, plain-like-bone stick that I hope will hold up with a sturdiness flexible enough to bend in the winds of tomorrow.

I resolve to continue.

Other Stuff

• Does anybody else read along with what your kids are reading? One of my favorite connection points with Sister is when we talk about which character we like the best, which character likes another, and whether I’ve gotten to something intense about to happen in whichever book. She is enamored with the Wings of Fire series lately, and so I’ve been reading along via audiobook. I’m right now in the middle of the 15th book of the series. The 16th book is coming out in March, and there are two off-shoots already published that Sister got for Christmas. I like the series, though wow, the past couple books have gotten dark. Not Harry Potter dark, but with some scary imaging.

• I’m trying to watch more TV because I love it so much. The fourth season of Stranger Things is so, so good. Very, very scary. We won’t let Big Brother watch the series, and that decision has been reinforced with this season.

• I don’t sleep well if I watch TV (probably especially Stranger Things) anywhere close to the end of the day, and I have maybe a dozen real life actual books stacked on my side table that are mostly short story collections. This is the best way to do it — read a whole story, beginning to end, and it takes maybe 10 minutes, and I go to sleep with fewer nightmares. Oddly enough, I’m loving the collection Tiny Nightmares: Very Short Stories of Horror (gifted to me by my friend Steve Fox who just published his second collection of short stories These Are My People).

• On Mondays, I listen to an album released by either a new-to-me artist or a new album by an old favorite artist. I’m looking forward to hearing Wet Leg’s most recent release “moisturizer” this week.

Anyway, I hope we all feel less of the bad and more of the good this year. Good luck out there.