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Last week Brenda asked on her blog, Mummytime, “where do you hope your blog will take you?”
This morning I followed a twitter link to a blog post that asked why do most artists blogs fail?
I commented with Interesting point but it all depends on how you measure success. I am an artist and I have a successful blog as well.
So this morning the ideas have meshed and I need to ask the question,
“How do you measure success?”
This time last year I measured my success by my ability to keep those I loved, alive and safe from harm.
I failed to keep my mother alive. The cancer that consumed her was too strong and the strength of my love was not enough to save her.
My love was strong enough to let her go peacefully though and Veronica writes about it beautifully here.
I failed to protect my daughter from my brother and in his pain he lashed out bitterly at my girl and wounded her deeply.
I am an only child.
I am an orphan.
I am motherless.
I am successful.
We have survived the first year and my son is alive.
I kept my son alive in those dark months following the death of his Grandmother. It was touch and go there for a while and I watched him like a hawk.
I didn’t restrain him when he punched the walls.
I screamed back at him when he screamed his anguish at me. I held him as he cried like a baby and my tears mingled with his, I fed him pizza and let him sleep and protected him as best I could.
How do you tell a 15 year old that grief will pass when you are so immersed in the same grief and the tunnel is too long for even the tiniest glimmer of light?
I managed to get through this last year because of my blog. I could write out my grief here. When there was a deathly silence after the funeral and only my closest friend rang me, I came to my blog for solace. When my head was going to explode with all the words I needed to say I came to my blog.
And you listened. You sent me chocolate and clippies, classical music and cards. You commissioned my art work and made me think of renewal. You posted photos on your blogs for me and You held me close and let me cry. You filled my inbox with emails and when there werent any words You hugged me and now we are here together.
My blog is successful and that is down to You.
Look who is speaking at The Uni tomorrow night.
Yesterday afternoon my daughter rang me, Veronica had dislocated the bone behind her knee and it was refusing to go back in. I was full of useless advice and it was a horrible but brief conversation. Veronica was in a lot of pain and I was unable to help her. There was one small consolation though and that was that Veronica was trapped on her chair in front of her computer.
I suppose if you are going to be in excruciating pain with a bone poking out the side of your leg and unable to move, there are worse places to be than at your desk in front of your computer. I told Vonnie to keep me up to date via twitter.
Here are some of our tweets over a three hour dislocation.
@SleeplessNights will straightening your leg out make it pop back in?
@frogpondsrock Nope, will tear the tendons.
@SleeplessNights Bloody thing! While you are stuck there you could look up quince recipes for me.
@frogpondsrock lmao – I think not.
Relocated. Excruciating.
It wants to pop out again.
All the painkillers in the house wasn’t (isn’t) enough to deal with that. #ehlersdanlos
@SleeplessNights now strap the fucking thing
@SleeplessNights not that strapping it will help but it will make me feel better.
@frogpondsrock It’s braced with tube bandage, lots of it. Best stuff.
@SleeplessNights Good. Now please be careful, I still feel a bit sick for you.xox.
@frogpondsrock I am being very careful. Can’t bend the leg at all. Funny – I didn’t do anything to dislocate it, just bent the knee.
It is that last line written by Veronica that sums up all my fears and frustrations with Ehlers Danlos Syndrome. The fact that you don’t have to do anything at all to suddenly have a dislocation and be faced with excruciating pain is frustrating and terrifying at the same time.
My husband, son and daughter all have Ehlers Danlos but with varying degrees of symptoms.The Spouse has only started to dislocate in the last few years and it is apparently quite common that dislocations will only start to present in middle age. David is in the middle of puberty and isn’t as bendy as his sister but to date he has dislocated his shoulder, elbow, fingers and his ankle subluxes. He can make a horrible clicky popping sound with his jaw and I worry that he will do it one time too many and bam out goes his jaw.
They all share the same symptoms of nausea, headaches, insomnia, low blood pressure, dizziness, achey joints, pain, stretchy fragile skin that tears easily, slow healing and they are also prone to infection. The Spouse and Veronica also have Livedo reticularis and Veronica and David have stretchmarks in strange places. They all have allergies, excema and asthma, poor circulation, weak eye muscles with a slight blue tinge to the whites of their eyes and I would trade them all in on new models if I didn’t love them quite so much.
Doctors in Tasmania know very little about Ehlers Danlos Syndrome and so it is very under diagnosed. Medical students only ever see the very extreme cases in medical text books and Doctors often fail to connect the dots. EDS has a lot of similarities with Lupus and EDS is commonly misdiagnosed as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome or Fibromyalgia.
The Spouse has two sisters who are suitably sympathetic towards our diagnosis of EDS but completely refuse to believe that their children could have EDS. *sigh* It is glaringly obvious to me that some of my nieces and nephews are definitely very EDSy and as much as I worry about them, I have to conserve my energy for my own children and grand children.
There are some very good bendy bloggers out there and I would recommend that you click over to Bendy Girl at Benefit Scrounging Scum or Achelois at The Tensile Times as well as my daughter Veronica at sleepless nights.
If you have any questions about EDS or if you think you have EDS leave a comment and I will get back to you and help you as much as I can.
My grandmother is 87 today and Isaac will be one in a few days.
I successfully avoided getting together with my extended family at Christmas.Today we will all be together for the first time since Mum’s funeral. Combined with the fact that I handed the keys to Mum’s house over to the lawyers on Monday has made this past week very emotional.
Tears are never very far from the surface and my men are tiptoeing around me lest I rip their heads off.
Veronica has been busily disagreeing with a “hate blogger” which has provided me with a much needed distraction from myself. The comments section of that blog is a hoot. Accusations, sweeping assumptions,aspersions and arseholiness are the main themes.
It is all very amusing for about five minutes until you realise that it is real people they are ripping on. I am very proud of Vonnie for standing up for what she believes in and loudly saying that by our silence we are giving these stupid hate bloggers more power. Personally I believe in Karma and I cant be bothered with the small mindedness of chicken liver and her pathetic cronies but I will stand shoulder to shoulder with my daughter and say this crap shouldn’t be tolerated.
David is aghast at the ramming and subsequent sinking of the Ady Gil by the Japanese security ship the Shonnan Maru. The Japanese are killing whales in Australian territorial waters and our government is hoping that by ignoring the problem, it will just go away.
I have been very impressed by my son’s articulate and passionate response to the sinking of the Ady Gil. David would love to join the Sea Shepherd’s crew and be actively involved but the ships are vegan and my son is honest enough to admit that he isn’t quite that committed. Yet.
There is a rally to support Sea Shepherd at the Abel Tasman Memorial fountain at Salamanca at 11 am on Saturday the 16th of January.David is keen to attend his first environmental/political rally.
I am very proud of both my children for passionately standing up for what they believe in.
Thankyou for the response to my video of Harry and the pigs. Jientje and Barbara have asked me to make some more videos and so I will. What sort of things would the rest of you lovely people like to see?
I have had the camera out a bit this past week and I think that I might have enough decent shots to post a couple of photos later on this week.
Lastly I want to thank you all my dear internets. I really don’t know how I would have gotten through the last six months without your support. Thankyou.
The first sentence of the opening paragraph sets the tone for the whole piece of writing that follows. This is even more true for a blog post where lots of people don’t actually read the whole post. The opening and closing sentences give the skimmers a point of reference to frame their questions or comments.
Sometimes I will sit here and the words just spill out onto the page faster than I can type them. The piece of writing takes on a small life of its own and all the words fit together nicely.
Other times I will be interrupted and lose my train of thought so many times that, I either just give up and save the piece to my drafts folder or I struggle along clumsily, placing all the wrong words in a crooked line.
Often I will read something my daughter has written and the powerful beauty of her words will take my breath away. I will start to cry as I nod yes to her words, and then with her pain ringing in my ears I end up here trying to articulate my own.
Veronica will be 21 on Thursday. Veronica’s 21st birthday was the milestone that Mum was aiming for. I am struggling to contain my bitterness that we lost Mum to a cancer she should never have had. I am so sad for Veronica that her birthday will be such a difficult day without Mum.
Normally we would have planned a celebration. There would have been lots of food and music, laughter and joy. Now there is only sadness and ashes.I am bitter that the joy has been stolen from my child.
Veronica and I are going out for lunch to our favourite Japanese restaurant tomorrow, just us two together.
Tomorrow is Remembrance Day (11 November) marks the anniversary of the armistice which ended the First World War (1914–18). Each year Australians observe one minute silence at 11 am on 11 November, in memory of those who died or suffered in all wars and armed conflicts.
I wonder what we will be remembering?
