The Best Laid Plans…

Categories: family, health, my history, traveling

My weekend / vacation was in two parts. The Houston leg and the NYC leg. Flew down to Houston on Friday night. It was pretty uneventful. Ended up hanging out MORE with cats from NYC that I could see on a daily basis than any of my H-town folk. Then, for some ungodly reason, couldn’t find enough peace within to get a good night’s sleep on that amazing feather bed in the immaculate room that I had at the Doubletree. Just couldn’t relax enough. And when I did relax for more than 20 minutes, it only lasted an hour, tops. Zombified, I returned to NYC last night and settled unsettled in my messy messiness and caught up on some emails, TV, IM chats, etc. Watched Six Feet Under, hoping it could provide some further catharsis to my feelings from earlier regarding Grandma, but nothing. It was empty for me. Just devoid of what I needed to have a good cry. Not like I hadn’t balled in the bathroom at the Doubletree on the phone to my brother, but I felt like there was so much more just waiting to come up. But I couldn’t dredge it up for anything. I wasn’t even really shocked by anything during the show. It was all pretty standard to me. But ended the watching feeling really empty. Restless. Sad. I called my baby and told him that I didn’t really know what I wanted but I could use being on the phone with him. I guess I was vague in what I wanted; he suggested that I get some sleep (knowing that I hadn’t done so in days). But it felt more like a push off to me. So I got off the phone and told him on IM that I was confused and upset and he helped me through it. Then I took his advice and laid down… and slept. From 11:30 PM till 10:30 AM… and it was GLORIOUS…

Till I woke up this morning. I knew the order of the day was to take my dad to the dr… He was going to give daddy a clean bill of health and we’d keep it moving. My mom woke me at 10:30 to get ready because it was time to take dad to the Dr. So I got up and showered and dressed. While I’m dressing… I feel this blanket of annoyance come over me… because, I felt like the days I had slotted for myself were not going to end up the way I had planned. Just then I heard my mom call out to me “Vicky… Fafanne is here!” Wow. My cousin Stephanie whom I idolized growing up. Just a beautiful black woman with long flowing ebony hair and just a vision of everything I thought I wanted to be when I grew up. I had to be 10 when she went to college. She came back, got engaged shortly thereafter; I remember sitting up with her and her mom and my mom sewing all these white satin lace pillows with the favor ribbon going across the middle… but stewing that I worked so hard just to not be invited to the wedding. Never mind that it was in Haiti. Didn’t dawn on me that maybe my parents couldn’t afford for us to go. Anyway… fast forwarding, she had 2 daughters with this cat she married, found out he cheated on her with some other or many other women… got divorced and lost her effin mind. Even my dad came back from Haiti about 3 or 4 years ago marvelling at what a loose woman she was down in Haiti, dressing in clothing that was too tight and too short and just… acting floosie-ish. I just knew then, that wasn’t the woman I grew up idolizing; knowing that she had set a better precedent for me as a child than she was for her own daughters. I thought to myself sitting there getting dressed about what she would think of me now that I was older and of how I looked and how I grew up. Then I realized… I plain old didn’t care for what she thought of me. I was proud of me and everything I’ve done. I walked out met her and her daughter and didn’t care anymore about all that stuff. She was family and I’d missed her. She touched my chin lovingly, “Gad’e Vicky, non??” (Look at Vicky!) How old are you, she asked me? 30, I said without skipping a beat. She doted on me for a while longer and then it was time to take my dad to the Dr.

I haven’t enough strength to go throught the litany of all the events from then forward. We’ll end up saying that Dad is in the hospital right now, catheterized with Sodium chloride flushing out his nether regions. I’m home trying to keep my mom from crawling out of her skin at the fact that she couldn’t be there… and my day tomorrow — at the hospital with him again.

More details tomorrow. It took me 2 hours write this post… I need sleep.

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