So Much

Back in August, my husband was in a motorcycle accident.  We have had to cope with so much surrounding this event in our lives that we're starting to regret letting some of my son's issues fall through the cracks.

You know, when Really Important things happen and you have to focus all of your attention on them that the Moderately Important things tend to pile up?  Well, that's kind of what's been happening at my house. When my husband had his accident and broke his leg, it turned our world upside down.  At first, he couldn't do very much for himself and had to have A LOT of attention.  Literally, he could not move from one room to the next without assistance.  He still has to have assistance, but he can move around on his own.  He still has huge metal pins and wires and bolts attached to his leg and it's a chore just to take a shower, but he is more self-sufficient.  Thank the universe!

But with all of this, my son started school and some of the things we normally would be right on top of, fell by the wayside.  He started getting used to being on the computer waaaay more than he should.  And we just let that happen because, you know, we were busy making sure my husband's leg wasn't rotting away and falling off (oh, wait, that was just me worried about that).  After I had been home for about 30 minutes, it was time for dinner, then it was time for the quest normal people call The Shower.  It took an hour and a half, from start to finish, to bath my husband and doctor all the wounds and get him dressed.  Then it was bedtime.  Now, in between all of this, I had to make sure my child did his homework, his chores, took his meds, took his own shower and got to bed on time.  Needless to say, there were some chores that fell through the cracks and some homework that went undone.

In ignoring things like chores and homework, here's what tends to happen: the unfed animals will chew on wires and other such important things around the house, one of the cats will decide her litter box isn't quite tidy enough so, the clean clothes that didn't get folded make for a nice new litter box, and a child who discovers you aren't scrutinizing their homework will tend to not do things or say they did them when, in fact, they didn't and bad grades creep in.  It has been hard trying to right all the wrongs that have cropped up in the past few months.  I can't see how any of it could have been done differently because I was sometimes, literally, dragging because I was so tired of care-giving for everyone, home-making for everyone, cooking for the masses, bringing home the only paycheck we're getting and holding on to my job by the most frayed thread you can imagine.

Some of those things are still happening, but there's some sunlight at the end of this tunnel.  I can see my husband getting better (although there are still bad days intermingled) and getting back to work before the end of the year.  The cat seems to have decided its much better to use the litter box than to be pelted with water from The Water Bottle.  And, the child...well, he's a teenager, I can't say he's really learned anything but mastering the art of arguing about doing homework instead of actually DOING homework.