(no subject)
Hospitals at the holidays have got to be the saddest places in the world--the only place that might match them, I think, is being in the drunk tank on Christmas eve. I mean, I almost wish they would just pretend that the holidays were happening someplace else and just keep things professional and antiseptic.
Today at Lancaster General--or was it yesterday? The days just blur together--they had a classical music concert in the lobby next to their big tree, and just hearing the music made me want to burst into tears. I know that damn hospital so well now because of my father's repeated hospitalizations, which is somehow worse. I know members of the staff by their first name, I know where the good vending machines are, I know the little shortcuts to get from the parking garage past where the bad-girl nurses go to smoke . . . it's depressing.
But, I have to say, for this hospitalization, I'm strangely detached about everything. I just can't expend any more mental energy running around in hysterics because my mentally ill father has wound up in the emergency room . . . again. Plus there's the work issue. The first time this happened, my bosses were so kind and supportive, they were like "Take as much time as you need, James". This time, when I told them my dad was back in again, they either rolled their eyes or else there was just this long silence that very clearly said "I don't care anymore. Just get everything in by deadline".
This needs to end, and I don't know how to deal with it. Do you just step back and let your parents self destruct on their own? Do you do nothing, hoping that the next breakdown doesn't happen behind the wheel of a car and dad winds up taking out a school bus? My other writer friends with severely mentally ill parents--you would not BELIEVE how many writers out there have mentally ill parents--have basically just turned their back on that parent forever. My friend Lisa's mom is somewhere in the bowels of New Jersey, apparently holed up and posting to web site after web site about the Whore of Babylon and the End Times, while my firend Matt's mom has, essentially, moved into a cabin in the woods and "gone off the grid". My father wants to go live in his car and write frighteneing Evangelical Christian musicals about the end of the world and the return of Christ, complete with born-again Christian ninjas and space aliens making crop circles--plus the bar code tattoos we're all going to have so we can be electronically "scanned" by the Anti-Christ.
I wish, so wish, I were making this up, that it was just some weird joke.
If reincarnation exists, I want to come back as an accountant without a lick of creativity or genius, a guy who is maybe good at high school sports, goes to the local State University, gets married, and never once questions or steps out of his Norman Rockwell world.
I want to be normal--painfully, painfully normal, someone who thinks canned laugh tracks on network sitcoms make the jokes better, who has never had to deal with dad being naked at three o'clock in the morning, nailing all the furniture to the wall three feet above the floor.
Today at Lancaster General--or was it yesterday? The days just blur together--they had a classical music concert in the lobby next to their big tree, and just hearing the music made me want to burst into tears. I know that damn hospital so well now because of my father's repeated hospitalizations, which is somehow worse. I know members of the staff by their first name, I know where the good vending machines are, I know the little shortcuts to get from the parking garage past where the bad-girl nurses go to smoke . . . it's depressing.
But, I have to say, for this hospitalization, I'm strangely detached about everything. I just can't expend any more mental energy running around in hysterics because my mentally ill father has wound up in the emergency room . . . again. Plus there's the work issue. The first time this happened, my bosses were so kind and supportive, they were like "Take as much time as you need, James". This time, when I told them my dad was back in again, they either rolled their eyes or else there was just this long silence that very clearly said "I don't care anymore. Just get everything in by deadline".
This needs to end, and I don't know how to deal with it. Do you just step back and let your parents self destruct on their own? Do you do nothing, hoping that the next breakdown doesn't happen behind the wheel of a car and dad winds up taking out a school bus? My other writer friends with severely mentally ill parents--you would not BELIEVE how many writers out there have mentally ill parents--have basically just turned their back on that parent forever. My friend Lisa's mom is somewhere in the bowels of New Jersey, apparently holed up and posting to web site after web site about the Whore of Babylon and the End Times, while my firend Matt's mom has, essentially, moved into a cabin in the woods and "gone off the grid". My father wants to go live in his car and write frighteneing Evangelical Christian musicals about the end of the world and the return of Christ, complete with born-again Christian ninjas and space aliens making crop circles--plus the bar code tattoos we're all going to have so we can be electronically "scanned" by the Anti-Christ.
I wish, so wish, I were making this up, that it was just some weird joke.
If reincarnation exists, I want to come back as an accountant without a lick of creativity or genius, a guy who is maybe good at high school sports, goes to the local State University, gets married, and never once questions or steps out of his Norman Rockwell world.
I want to be normal--painfully, painfully normal, someone who thinks canned laugh tracks on network sitcoms make the jokes better, who has never had to deal with dad being naked at three o'clock in the morning, nailing all the furniture to the wall three feet above the floor.