Do you ever feel like the curveballs are stacking up against you?  I have found myself in that place many times and after the years, I have learned how to dodge the curveballs or to get up once they have knocked me down.  It is not like I could have avoided the curveballs but I have to decide whether to feel helpless or keep a perspective.

Often times, curveballs make a person feel like there is nothing they can do but there is always something we can do.  Feeling helpless is a normal response and generally, that is the first response.  Things happen that are beyond our control so we feel like we have been robbed or cheated and helpless.  While it is okay to feel this way, it is not a solution and thus, we have to learn to wallow less and to keep an open mind.

I have been pretty vocal about my health, my struggle to get answers, and all the feelings that came along with that.   While I have never really stopped looking back at the challenges I have faced in the last couple years, I have never really consumed myself in self-pity.  A while back, I wrote about my disabled neighbor saying, “If there wasn’t something going wrong every minute of my life, then it wouldn’t be my life,” and I understand that no one is immune from challenges.  Self-pity is fine and all but there is a time and place.

I look back at the challenges as a means of response so that I can dodge the next curveball.  The last few years had been adverse for many and hundreds of thousands of people have lost their jobs, their homes, and their livelihoods and while I have been faced with my challenges, mine were close calls, and I am one of the lucky ones. What I learned throughout many adverse situations are survival skills.  The better a person gets at dealing with adversity determines how well things turn out. It has taken me some time and experience to get there but I think I gotten the “curveball” thing down.  After the initial shock (and the panic attack), I look at the situation, get my composure back, and decide how the situation can be best handled.   Sometimes, I have to be quick on my feet and other times, I am able to take a little more time to find answers.

Tough times require perspective and that perspective starts with removing the emotional barrier between you and the situation at hand.   I look at the facts and start to consider what my options are, and once I have considered the options, I determine how feasible they are.  Sometimes, a quick resolution is required and other times, it is not.  I also look at the situation and wonder whether it really is a bad thing.  Sometimes, we are quick to decide whether a situation is bad or the worst without fully understanding it.  I step back and look at what really is happening and while a situation can look bad, it does not mean the solutions won’t turn it into a good thing.

Often times, I remind myself to count my blessings in order to gain perspective. I thank God for all the gifts and blessings in my life and I realize that the situation isn’t as bad as it appears.  I start to look at the situation and realize that there is a big picture here and what is so horrible now may not be in a few months or even years.   Chaotic events are only a tiny point in time when you look at your entire lifetime.   I also consider the alternatives because sometimes today’s tragedies are a blessing in disguise.   Weighing what is happening at the moment you are in against the alternative makes the situation more manageable and allows you to think clearly about goals and resolutions.

It is much easier for a person to be calm and focused in order to gain control and perspective of a situation in a healthy manner rather than jump into panic mode or start wallowing and playing the “woo is me” card.  You can make better decisions if you are thinking clearly.  I have learned with a lot of practice that when things do not go according to even my best laid plans, it is important for me to stop and process my thoughts and emotions so that I can gain control of a situation.   This takes a lot of effort and practice but you learn over time.

Once you have gained perspective, you can focus on dodging those curveballs.  You have to learn to manage crises one step at a time.   You also learn that denial solves nothing and acceptance helps you not to delay action.   You have to trust your instincts when it comes to the next steps and keep emotion out of the way.  Remember to make up plan B as you go because you can easily get lost again once plan A fails.  Last surrender but don’t give up.  Once you accept the situation at hand, you can relax to move forward to your plan.  Accepting your limitations doesn’t mean you don’t have alternatives because there are always alternatives.  Even a person with a terminal illness knows there are alternatives.  Just because a person is dying doesn’t mean that they cannot make the best of the life they have left.  That is the thing about curveballs; even if you can’t dodge them, you can still heal your bumps and bruises after getting hit.

The last few weeks have been challenging to say the least but I feel like I have handled them better than I would have in the past.  My mother has been at my brother’s bedside for the last three weeks and while, I jumped into panic mode in the beginning, I found a way to remove my emotions from the situation to get answers.  Because I know what is like to be sick, I understand that solutions, cures, and good health are possible.  My younger sister was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Disease a couple years ago and now she is in remission.  My mother and my brother did not want to tell her how sick my brother is and about the stomach cancer diagnosis.  Because of my own experience, I believed that she could handle it quite well and she did.

To me, this crisis with my brother’s health is a mountain we have to climb.  My brother’s mountain is much higher and steeper than the mountain the rest of us have to climb but nevertheless, people can climb mountains especially when they are given the resources.  This is our mountain to climb as a family and I believe we will all be able to climb it and yes, there will be some near falls, bumps and bruises but we will get there and hopefully, we come out of it better people.  I pray that we do.

It feels like it has been a very long week.  With my RA and FMS symptoms taking turns ganging up on me, I really wish I could sleep for a full 24 hours without being disturbed but I can’t.   I have a job to do, children to take care of, a home to clean, three loads of laundry waiting for me upon my arrival home, a trip to the store to pick up Pull-Ups for the rebellious toddler who refuses to wear a diaper, a husband who walks around all melancholy because he has little responsibility and thinks he has a lot, an empty fridge because I have not had a chance to go shopping, and so much more.  On the bright side, I won some chocolate – talk about making my day.

I received a text message this morning from one of closest friends, Rhonda, telling me she was thinking of me and she wondered how I was feeling with this damp weather we are having. What I like about Rhonda is that she knows when I need a pick me up and she also takes the time to understand my conditions.  She knows more about RA and Fibro than my husband does and having a friend like that is wonderful.

Right now, with this fibro headache, I really need someone to peel me off the ground – may be a massage for those tense shoulders too. I think my family thinks I am invincible and they forget that I am human.  Sometimes, their demands make me wish I could get into my Subaru Outback, start driving and not look back – but, everyone knows I am too responsible to do such a thing.  I am going to stop complaining considering this is the life of every working mother in America.  Yes, we all want to get into those minivans and station wagons and runaway but we know that if we did, we could not sleep at night.

I have doing some new things including taking on the role as the patient advocate at Fibromyalgia Connect and becoming a health care blogger.  In case anyone has not noticed, I like feeling important and useful so that one of the reasons why I stop myself when I realize I am complaining about how busy my life is. I love my life despite all of its twists and turns and even the obstacles that get thrown in my way.  I know it is not easy being me and I know it is not easy for my family that I am obsessive or that I am an overachiever.  I don’t know how to pace myself and I don’t stop until my head hits the pillow at night.  While many people would look at me and say that I am overwhelmed, they don’t realize that I strive for challenges and I am capable of handling the stress.  There are days where RA and Fibro make it hard, but I have learned to pace myself on those days and to focus on my goals on my good days.  That is my balance and I know that if I let my conditions stop me, it will be a permanent thing and that is definitely not the person I am.

I am proud of my ten year old – all A’s and B’s on his report card.  I know all that money for tutoring paid off.   I noticed the other day that he was turning into me and I am not sure how to take that.  He is doing well in school, playing the viola for the 5^th grade orchestra, involved in the sports club, reads a lot, spends time with his friends, helps generously at home, and thinks he does not have a lot going on. I want to stop my son from burning out but I am not sure how much of an example I am setting.  It does not help that I can be a drill sergeant with my kids and myself.  When I realize I am playing the drill sergeant role, I stop but I don’t always realize that I am doing it.

I only have two classes left to complete my master’s degree and while, I have dreamt of going to law school, I have decided that it’s no longer part of the plan. I love my life where it is at now and I just don’t see any reason to want more.  It is time for me to start looking at my children’s victories because I have already had mine. Does that make sense to anyone?

My brother is into his third week in the hospital and we are still being kept in the dark about how his health.  As of this weekend, his kidneys are failing and he may need a transplant.  However, I don’t know the time line nor do I know his treatment plan for the stomach cancer. My family is secretive and it is something I have gotten used to after all these years.  Being the black sheep in the family, you know how to rebel and get answers.  My sisters accepted the answers that they were given and I refused.  I interrogated my mother on Sunday about how bad things were, about the kidneys, and the treatment plan.  I definitely got more answers out of her than my other siblings did but there are still pieces of the puzzle that are missing.  Once I had answers, I called my siblings and told them and now, my mom and my brother are both mad at me.  Welcome to my life.

Now, I am waiting to see who will be mad at me next.  I have been the black sheep all my life and when I was younger, it bothered me but the older I get, the less I care. I spent a lot of my life trying to prove something and the fact is, I have nothing left to prove.  I am the most educated and the most successful of my siblings and I have run out of things to prove. I feel bad that I interrogated my mother but I had to and it was the right thing to do; now I wish I didn’t feel so guilty about that part.  I so suck at being a daughter.  When I was a kid, my mom used to tell me that one day I would have a kid like me that would put me through all the same stuff I did to her growing up.  No wonder my head is always spinning!

Is it still Wednesday? This is where I would rather be.

Any questions?

When you are kid, you imagine that being an adult is much easier than being a kid and it seems to be that way at least in the beginning.  Then, you start dealing with real adult issues like a career, money, major decisions, marriage, children, and health crises and you realize being an adult is hard work.  It makes you wish that adulthood was a childhood nightmare that you could wake up from.

In the last couple of years, my life has given me a variety of adult lessons and while I have had adult lessons in the past, they weren’t thrown in front of me all at once.  Growing up I never saw my parents’ adult problems because they did such a good job hiding them from us and while I appreciate that they did that, I wish that they hadn’t because they didn’t prepare us what adulthood was all about. Most of my childhood, I never saw my mother cry and I never saw my father show emotion until I was 17 years old when my 20 year old cousin passed away. My kids have seen me cry, they have seen me hurt and at my worst and I don’t know whether my parents were right for hiding adulthood from me or whether I am right for letting my children see it.

What I don’t remember about being a kid is how poor we were and I didn’t even realize that were poor until I was an adult because my parents hid it so well.  When I was 15, my dad became sick for the first time.  He died before I turned 19.  It was not until he was hospitalized in 1995 that I realized the extent of how sick he was.

My parents never let us see the tragedies of adulthood, only the triumphs.  Growing up, I lost grandparents, uncles, and cousins and my parents never let us see the hurt that consumed them with these loses.  When my father died, I knew loss for the first time and I was devastated.  It was as if a part of my heart was ripped out of me and I grieved for years, as did my siblings.

While I understand that my parents did everything they could to protect us, did they not really prepare us.  In my eyes, my father was as tough as they come, and my mother, she was as resilient as a woman could get.  In the days that I watched my father get sicker and sicker and my mother lose parts of her soul as days came and went, my world was shattered because I knew my parents weren’t tough or resilient because they were merely human. It makes me think about my health now, my brother’s recent cancer diagnosis, my struggles with my marriage, the financial issues my husband and I have dealt with for the last two years, my failed relationships with my brothers, the physical distance between my sisters and I, and my parenting as a whole. I wonder whether I am preparing them for adulthood by letting them see me when I am most vulnerable rather than hiding it as my parents did.

Do you prepare your kids or do you protect them?  That a dilemma that every parent has to face and it is another thing that makes being an adult so hard.

My life is as complicated as lives gets.  My family is as complicated as families get.  There is no question that everything about me is complicated.  Sometimes, the complexity of it all leaves me a position where I feel like I am locked into a tight space and I can’t breathe.

I am very claustrophobic and I have been for many years.  I am not sure when it started or whether there is an association with the claustrophobia and my conditions, but I hate tight spaces, in particular a packed elevator.  I work on the 7^th floor but there was a time I worked on the 42^nd floor.  It was a temp position and when offered the job, I did not take it because of the elevator issue.  I also have issues with height but that is not as bad as the tight spaces issue.

I also fear failure and that is how I have been all my life. That is why I make wise choices because failure has a tendency to set me back.  Mostly, I dwell on my failures but I also I find ways to fix my failures and get past them.  It is like I always feel like I have something to prove.  That is probably why I plan everything ahead of time, I am a control freak, and why I hate surprises.  My family knows better than to plan a surprise party for me.   I am this way mostly because of my Type A personality but I also think that life has made me this way through all of the obstacles I have been handed. As far as failures go, lately I have been dwelling on my failed relationships with my brothers.

One thing I have learned is that I can only control myself and I can’t control anyone else and sometimes, when I see someone I love making bad choices, I want to have control and it hurts that I can’t.  That is a setback for me because I never make a decision without thinking it thoroughly and investigating and when I see people I love making spontaneous choices, it scares me.   The reason I bring this up is because my brother has been in the hospital for two weeks and we have been told it’s stomach cancer and he is really sick.  He is also in denial as to the extent of his condition and he won’t let anyone have a say in particular why he continues to smoke.  I know that I don’t have any control over his actions but even a suggestion as to how successful his treatment will be if he made changes turns him into a mad man.

I know denial because I was there two years ago when I received my diagnoses so I am trying to keep my mouth shut.  He also isn’t sharing with his family specific details on how bad it is and even the treatment plan.  I think that we have a right to know so that we know how to prepare or how to handle particular situations.  He is 31 years old, never married and has no children and he is acting like he has nothing to lose.   He can have a long life ahead of him, get married, have kids, but he has to start making changes now so that he can be cured and go into remission.  I am very upset about the diagnosis and how he is handling it and I have spent a lot of time praying and crying.  This is when I realize I what little control I have and sometimes, just that feeling alone makes it hard to breathe.

We were all close when we were kids because we  were born one right after the other in terms of years.  Our ages now range from 36 to 30 when it comes to the six of us (two boys, four girls).  My youngest brother is 19 (he is number 7) and my mom had him after the youngest was 11 so he was a surprise.   When I got married to my first husband, I was eighteen and my brother was thirteen, and life happened and we went on with our adult lives.  I don’t really know my brothers but I know my sisters and we are as close as sisters get.  I wish I could be close to my brothers but I am not.  I am close with the youngest but that is because I had a part in raising him because after my father got sick when he was only four months old, my mom spent the next four years taking care of my dad, and then when he died, my mother was never the same and my sisters and I continued to take care of our baby brother.

You can imagine that this diagnosis has had an impact on my mother, my sisters and I, and my brother seems to think that we have no say.   I know we have grown apart and I know why but when it comes to things like this, I really wish he would let us in.  My younger sister (she is a year younger then me so she’s 33) was diagnosed in late 2008 with Hodgkin’s Disease and we had answers because she let us in.  I believe hers was pretty early, maybe Stage 1 and she has been remission for over a year now. The not knowing and the feeling like you have no control is difficult and you feel like you can’t breathe.

I want to close my eyes and wake up to a time when we were kids, when life was simpler and when the C-word wasn’t a part of our lives.  When I start thinking about it, I start to cry.  I am tougher than most but I also know that good health comes with hard work. I also know that he is in denial now, but he won’t be forever so I pray that he fights and that he learns to make better choices.  That is all I can do because clearly, it is out of my control.

I am a very content person and I love to laugh but I also know how to cry.  I know how to feel hurt and how to feel angry.  Being an adult sucks and it is not much fun.   I get my drive from my own successes and I have never really learned how to get it from anyone else’s successes.  Maybe I will learn that better as my kids get older.  The problem is that I am so focused on my goals that I forget to stop and smell the roses.  Sometimes, I need a reminder and if anything, my brother’s illness is a test.  Maybe, it is meant to bring us together again but it is really scary to see someone you love so sick.

My brothers and I are not close.  In fact, the next one in line is 32 and I have not talked to him in nearly two years.  We don’t see eye to eye on anything and he has been known to be a jerk.  In fact, I am not the only one he has not talked to in years – the only person he talks to our mom and more often than not, he is asking for money.  That is why there is animosity there.  As for the younger one that is sick, he and I just lost touch.  We talk if we see each other and we don’t spend much time together and the problem with my brothers is that they think that they don’t need anyone, and it takes things like this to remind them that they do.

See, I didn’t lie when I told you that my life and my family are complicated.  What is more is that I am even more complicated.

My sister told me last night that my brothers are all intimidated by me.  I thought to myself “WTF?” What is so intimidating about me?  So I asked, and she laughed and told me that I was smart, determined, opinionated, and strive for success at every opportunity while raising two children and living with chronic illness and that is what made me intimidating.  These are things that they are incapable of doing with fewer obstacles so they “think” you’re flawless and that makes them envious.

After that phone call, I got to thinking and I thought about the post from a week ago where I basically showed you a different side of me – a person who doesn’t necessarily have it together but works really hard to make it look that way.  I also grabbed a pen and wrote down some good traits I have and some bad ones.  Here are my two lists.

Good traits

I (am):

Practical/Realistic

Careful/Cautious

Ambitious

Disciplined

Patient

Reserved

Analytical

Capable of seeking answers to problems as they arise

Capable of handling stressful situations

A boundary pusher even when it might cost me

Hardworking

Capable of admitting when I am wrong

Very passionate

Laugh when I want to cry – might be a bad trait as well

Bad traits

I can be:

Pessimistic

A Grudge Holder

Rigid or Harsh – in particular to myself

Overly controlling of people and certain situations

I have a tendency to settle for less if it makes others happy.

Absolutely Stubborn

Opinionated – this is also a good trait

Because of my good and bad traits,

• I never lose sight of my goals and I am not a risk taker.  However, I have a tendency to seek approval and I always want harmony even when is unrealistic.
• I am a dreamer and I am also my biggest critic.
• I have been known to judge people by first impression or by their flaws and I can be critical of mistakes but I also am capable of admitting that I am wrong.
• I have a tendency to hide my emotions but they show up when I least expect them to and that is when I see how strong I am. In addition, while I often appear calm and cool, I wrestle with my inner strengths and I question myself often.
• I can very creative and at the same token, I am a traditional person.  I am grounded and would never wonder away from house to chase wild dreams, but I believe in personal expression and freedom.  I believe that everyone should do what makes them happy even if the cost is that their choices will not be accepted by others in their life.

While my brothers may think I am flawless, what they don’t know is that I am human. Moreover, they have been known to be critical of my choices so there is a lot animosity there which I have learned over the years to let go of.  They think that I am in control of every aspect my life, my marriage, my family, my career, my health, etc., but they don’t have a clue.  The older I get to more realize that I am not really striving for perfection, I am striving for normalcy.  I know that my good and bad traits flow together to make me the person that I am, but flawless, I am not.  If people look at me to see me as all together and normal, I will settle for that.

See, I “like” me, even with all my flaws and imperfections.  That is the Capricorn in me.

Don’t forget you have until next Monday, November 15 to enter to win The Law of the Garbage Truck.