Unsettled

In the past day and a half I've read all 450+ pages of a book about a school shooting (Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult). It is fiction, but very unsettling because that kind of thing really does happen. Reason #101 to homeschool... not just the shooting part which is rare, but the bullying which is very common. I love our life just the way it is. We do enough picking on each other, we certainly don't need others doing it!

We went to Mass last night (well 4pm isn't really night is it?) because Mike is playing in a golf tournament this morning as part of a Petroleum Marketers convention. The rest of us will head down to the resort where it is later to swim in the pool and spend the night there. I am slightly unsettled about this as well because it was last summer at this same convention that Mike first had the abdominal pain and we wound up in the ER. The pain that returned in October that led to the procedure that led to the pancreatitis etc...etc... Mike is looking at it as another way of getting past it all, but it is still painful bringing back all of the memories.

This morning as I was trying to quickly hang the clothes on the line so as not to get too much sun, I was thinking about the different crosses we each have to bear. I recently had a third basal cell skin cancer removed from my shoulder, and things like hanging clothes on the line or going to the beach, pool or park are different for me than for people who don't have a high risk for skin cancer. It made me think about how Mike can play 18 holes of golf today out in the sun without really worrying about his skin. He can't eat handfulls of hidden M & Ms like I can though because of his blood sugar issues. We all just have to play the hand that we are dealt. When Jake was a toddler we couldn't walk holding his hands and do that swing the kids up by the arm thing because his elbow would get out of socket. When Jonathan was little we couldn't do the "this is supper, eat or go hungry" thing (we probably wouldn't've anyway) because he HAD to eat because of HIS blood sugar issues. We also didn't have the "luxury" of letting him (or making him) sleep all night because we had to give him a drink in the middle of the night to make sure his blood sugar didn't crash. We could swing Jonathan by the arms though, and we could've let Jake go hungry if we wanted to. I'm not looking for any sympathy or pity here, just pointing out that we all have our own things that we have to deal with. So often I think people look at others as having having a charmed or easy life, but everyone has something going on, everyone has a cross to bear. Some people hide theirs and others show them to everyone who will look, but really we are all just trying to play then hand that we were dealt.