Monday, April 20: Nothing / Entire Life

I'm delinquent with this blog for the first time in ages. I can't possible catch up day by day, but I'll capture a few details of the past eight days here:

We barely see Lucia. Between musical rehearsal followed by runs and then meets on weekends, she is an invisible presence in our household, visible only for a second at a time if we're lucky enough to make it to a track meet and see her careen by. It is time, past time, for these all-consuming activites to come to an end. She has no time for anything, and by "anything" I mean schoolwork, and by "schoolwork" I mean precalc, in which, at the midpoint of this semester, she currently has a C. We have met with her teacher and advisor. We have a plan in place. The biggest part of that plan is THE END OF MUSICAL AND TRACK. Fortunately, the musical is this weekend. Then she will reclaim some of her time.

(This weekend, with Andrew getting ready for a work trip to Italy, I was faced with a track meet an hour away that coincided with a predicted huge rainstorm. I was lamenting the fact that I'd be forced to both drive outside of the East End as well as drive in the rain, both of which I detest, when Andrew decided to change his flight, which meant we could all go to the meet together. Best husband ever. A peach, a gem, the best of all eggs. I nearly cried.) 

When Lucia is free, she wants to work on her junk journaling pages, which are getting increasingly more elaborate and beautiful. "Will my child's life focus on STEM or the humanities" is a sentence I will never need to speak. Maybe she'll major in decorative paper art. Maybe she'll dedicate her life to papercrafting. I'm fine with that. 

Greta is also doing track, as well as crew, but with only one activity per weeknight we see her pretty often, except the most recent days, when she's been frantically preparing for her Spanish placement assessments.

My white blood cell count has once again plummeted, and at the end of this "off" week of kisqali, I have to get labs done (again) and then, if the level has recovered enough, resume at a lower dosage. I'm frustrated at my immune system, and would really like to stay on the full 600mg dose rather than 400mg, but I know this is a standard side effect and treatment adjustment and will just have to accept it. The low count does explain why, by 9pm each night, I am so tired I can barely form a sentence. I'm fine all day, working and parenting and etc, and then BAM, nonfunctioning.

Being nonfunctioningly tired isn't really an option, unfortunately. Last night, after picking Greta up from crew at 6:30 and then heaving myself out of the house again at 9:30 to pick up Lucia, and having her announce she's missing a full day of school (precalc) this week for a track meet and also has a track meet before the musical on Saturday, leading to a Discussion About Priorities; and then having to actually do some extra work for my job (which I literally never have to do after the workday); I was just tired beyond all reason. At the very moment I realized I was nearly crying with exhaustion, Nutmeg scampered into the attic (I saw a furry flash when I looked away from my computer), resisting capture, and Farrah threw up on our bed. 

Anyhoo. That's the update. Basic chaos, life with teens. It's all okay. I'm tired but will still take a moment for a quote that has lived rent-free in my mind since I saw it in a book recently: "So what I had believed to be nothing to me was simply my entire life" (Proust).