My sister is out, picking up some groceries. My father is watching the Seattle/Tampa Bay football game, and I’m sitting in my bedroom picking silver threads of my mother’s hair out of the scarf I wrapped around her bare neck last night, as we left her stylist. Earlier, I reached into my purse and took out a green hair clip full of her hair, and moved it into a plastic bag.
The hair was wet when I took it, but dried into whispy white and silver strands over the night in my warm bedroom. Now it’s just a mass the size of my hand, tucked behind my socks in a drawer, waiting for the right photos and the right lockets for everyone.
I haven’t been writing much because I often don’t feel like there’s much to say. Life in a sick house has settled into a bit of a routine that varies very little by day. Wake up, clean up, try to eat, take my temperature to make sure the various aches and pains I feel as a normal part of my malfunctioning body are nothing more than the normal, pick up the house where I can, keep the animals entertained and fed, shine positively around my mother, be helpful, keep out of the way.
Eating and sleeping have become challenges. Well, sleeping has always been a challenge, but now the Lunesta doesn’t even appear to be helping consistently, or for long. I had done well at keeping on EST for my first few weeks here, but since feeling a bit under the weather earlier this week have slipped to what friends affectionately refer to as Kelly Standard Time.
Yesterday, I simply forgot to eat. I realized this in the evening, when I developed a splitting migraine, and put together that the cause was the lack of food over the course of a long day. I haven’t had much of an appetite for a while now, not that I ever have a healthy one, and just got enough out of any routine to forget to eat the entire day.
Neither of these things are good; part of living here, being here, is taking care of myself so that I can take care of others (and so I don’t get sick and become a burden, or worse, a risk). So I need to yank myself back on a schedule of eating small meals every few hours, of balancing the nutrition, and back to trying to sleep “right” – medications and bed at a certain time, lights out, rest, relax.
It’s easy enough to type out what I know I should do, but it’s an entirely different method to act upon it.