Last night I dreamt I'd forgotten my name because I sold my soul, but I woke just the same

I feel like a zombie version of myself this morning. Last night we had to take my mother to the hospital emergency room and she's still there. In case you don't know, she has MS and while she typically manages well, things get complicated when she gets sick with even a cold. Especially at her age. She takes a gazillion drugs, most of which have actual street value, and this also worries me and has for some time. So when she came down with bronchitis earlier this week, the coughing triggered her trigeminal neuralgia, which is a fancy way of saying the nerves in her jaw send shooting pains up the side of her face. It's quite debilitating. The doctors prescribed her a narcotic and something to calm those nerves, but did not tell her to cease any other medications in the meanwhile (this point is of course debatable because my parents do not listen well).

Two days ago, my father asked me to go over and take care of her but I declined; I said I'd get things for her and take anything to her she needed, but I didn't want to be at the house because I can't afford to get sick. I've become a total germaphobe - purell and handwashing make my hands dry and cracked and I refuse to touch anything from a student who is not well. Plus, I think my dad should be the one to take time off to care for my mother, not me, but that's yet another story entirely. I did call her yesterday to ask how she was and she told me she was "very confused" but I didn't think much about it when she said my dad was home for lunch.a

By suppertime, dad called to say that mom was barely awake and incoherent and could I come over. I asked if he had called an ambulance, but alas, he had not. Decided that a phone call to me was preferable to the one to 911. Ugh. Men of my father's generation didn't need wives, they needed mommies. Anyway, I go over there and she's sitting up but looks like someone who just came from a Dead concert - she's obviously OD'ed on something and when I talk to her she can only reply - if at all - with nonsense. She doesn't know what day it is, what month it is, nor how many grandchildren she has; in fact, she seems somewhat confused about the fact that she has them at all. I do mini Mental Status Exam on her and she scores zero. Can't tell me a thing. When I ask her who her own children are, she can only reply by spelling out the word "thing." I tell my dad that she is at the very least overmedicated and because she has twitching muscle spasms, I worry that she's having a small stroke. I tell him to get dressed because we're going to the hospital. Naturally, he opts for an ambulance instead.

Why is it that I'm the only one who can manage this situation?

It's me who rides in the ambulance because dad needs to "get dressed and wait for Tim" - my brother, who will undoubtedly ride in a white horse and save everyone and go home early because he needs his sleep. He will get all the credit for coming despite the fact he did nothing but grouse about bad hospital service and how much he has to do tomorrow. Yet another baggage item to be checked for later unpacking. The paramedics give her a drug to reverse the effects of narcotics in the ambulance, and by the time we get to the hospital, she is more like herself and can tell me that she has six grandchildren and clearly knows who I am and where she is. But she doesn't know why. It takes two hours to see a doctor, who basically only seems to know everything that I do about the situation and orders a million tests.

I have to teach at 8 the next morning (now), and so I excuse myself because my brother and father are there and call Jamison to come pick me up. During the time it takes for J-mo to get there, my brother decides he really needs to get home (but doesn't want to be selfish, he says), but he's the one who drove dad to the hospital. So instead of going home when Jamison arrives, I have to sit for another hour plus while my dad goes back home to get a vehicle. When he finally does get back, I finally go home and go to bed. It's after midnight and Jamison's got a yard full of fucking car parts that have to come into the garage tonight because it's going to snow. Make that three checked pieces of baggage.

So this morning I call dad's cell phone for an update because I knew they kept my mom overnight. Turns out, he went on home after all of that. He was so tired. I'm so angry that my mom spent the night alone that I could kill someone, and namely him. He was sleeping soundly at seven a.m. today. He mumbled that my mother has pneumonia at the very least, and they're concerned about her toxicity levels. That's all he knows because he's not fucking there. If I'd known that, I would have stayed there with her myself. She was still confused and there's no way she's going to be able to retell what the doctor says, and I still don't know what her head scan said. I doubt she had a stroke, but I want someone looking at important documents to tell me this and not just go on my educated guess.

And why am I here to teach anyway? I should be on the way to the hospital myself except I didn't know how to cancel this early morning thing without a whole class of folks being angry with me. Oy.

Perhaps it's just overkill

I have a theory that at any given moment in central Kansas, one may hit 'scan' on the radio and find at least one Def Leppard song (typically, Pour Some Sugar on Me - beautiful in all its subtleties, or Rock of Ages) and multiple conservative Christian radio programmes. I find both of these equally amusing and despite the obvious reasons, it's because Kansas feels like the land that time forgot. There are places there that do not take credit cards, and this is wholly unacceptable. No wonder they're all still into Jesus and voting Republican; the last time they checked in with the rest of the world, it was reasonably prosperous under Ronald Reagan.

Please don't write to me and explain the virtues of Kansas, if you live there, or how everyone in the state is not necessarily this way.

My brain is all over the place today and I want to write like mad. I had a dream yesterday morning about the school building that is supposed to house the DU English department but it's not Sturm. I dream this building all the time; it's reminiscent of Sturm and while I know the ED is on the 4th floor, the building is labyrinthine and if you go the wrong way on the 4th floor, you cannot get to the ED and instead will be hopelessly lost, unable to even get back outside. The elevator is worse - it's the Wonka-vator and goes in any direction and no one knows where you'll end up. This place in my dream causes me great anxiety. I wonder if it's some kind of metaphor... haha.

I ran into Lindsay two weeks ago and it was good to see her. I don't think I knew that she was still at DU, and her presence there brings me comfort because she's been there a year longer than I. I don't know how, but we got to talking about my being a nerd - liking Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter; sci-fi in general; graphic novels; Scrabble and jigsaw puzzles. She seemed shocked to learn these things and when I joked that I just hide my geekiness well, she said "I never pegged you as a nerd; more like edgy." She went on to say that I am intimidating in my edginess and this positively floored me. Sure, I'm a grouch and sometimes an outright bitch, but somehow I thought no one really noticed this. Further, before I knew her at all Lindsay intimidated me because I think she's so much smarter than I am and because at first she isn't openly friendly. Little did I know that the feeling was mutual. How odd to think about the public personae we create for ourselves and don't even know it. Why can't I seem to intimidate the people in whom I wish to breed fear of me?

See? All over the board. I dyed my hair myself this time and it is some serious color of red, let me tell you. Not just red; but RED!

Nobody wants to hear you sing about tragedy

One of the things I find probably most disturbing as I grow older is the repeated sensation of discovering that few things are what they seem to be, even after you've accepted that they are not what they should be. And that's hard enough. I had one of my students talk to me the other day about going to a graduate program, and he commented that he planned to start thinking about his dissertation now so that by the time he gets to his doctoral program, he'll be ready. I didn't mean to, but I burst out laughing. I apologized and told him I was not laughing at him but rather at the sudden realization that his comment brought to ME. Then, of course, I told him not to bother because it would be useless, and to focus on getting good grades, sending his creative work out to contest, etc. Focus on the stuff that actually may count for something.

I went into my doctoral program fairly sure about what I wanted it to be, what I would write my dissertation on, and how long it would take to do so. After a short while, I was sure who I wanted to work with, and what classes I would take. Now that I'm ABD and actually working on a dissertation, I laughed because it hit me that none of my so-called preparation or assuredness helped me a whit. My dissertation project daily morphs into something I can scarcely define and has little to do with anything it started out to be. This is the end of my fourth year, and instead of graduating, I'm still trying to figure out what to call my dissertation, let alone preparing to defend it. And this does not bother me in any real way because I know that whatever happens with my Ph.D. program, I'm fine. I love my jobs, my students (for the most part), and what I contribute to the world daily.

To illustrate this remarkable change, consider this: on the last day of Kiteley's class (the last class I will ever have to take in my life), I sat talking to Shawn and Kristy and the subject comes up again from hella-bitch Joan about how hard the first-years have it and how unhappy she is, blah, blah, blah. I name her openly here because I no longer care what gets back to her or if it does. She's an older student, supposedly having already achieved success, and she graces us with her presence in this program. She is sure that her writing is something special, but I have seen no evidence to support such a claim. She is hostile and also appears certain that she is above us all in one way or another. In short, I wish I could smack her and not be arrested for assault.

She's blathering on about disorganization, etc. and I find this offensive. It's never cool to bitch about your standing anywhere when others in the room have suffered more than you, and by a signficant amount. You don't tell a woman who's birthed ten children about how hard your one pregnancy is. Or stand in a Georgia church with secret rooms under the pews to hide slaves and tell the tour guide how your Irish people are just as put upon because they too were discriminated against (true but long story). While Joan is grousing, I pipe up and tell her she needs to be more grateful because the three classes before hers fought a hell of a lot of battles to make her life as good as it is. She looked over to me, in front of the entire room and said, "I was asking Brian." Dismissed me openly - again. Shawn looked at me and all but begged me to put her in her place and I might have, except that every time I went to put a scenario of what I'd say to her together in my head, I realized that I don't care enough to berate her. Let someone else fight a good fight; I'm done.

Did you think you'd escaped from routine by changing the script and the scene?

I read Jim Grimsley’s Dream Boy yesterday and it shook me, like all of his books do. Less so for the homosexual concerns and societal realities for gay men in the American South than for the simple staggering world of southern poverty in general. Both his male and female characters are always avoiding drunken fathers and husbands and homophobic classmates with no boundaries about violence and sex.

What makes me think and may disturb me even more is that parental sexual and physical abuse is not part of my life, but it easily could have been. And I do not mean that my parents are dodgy, either, but that I'm simply lucky to have been born to them and not someone else. I wish I could say I had the same luck with regard to boyfriends.

Nearly every woman I know has been in some way physically victimized by a spouse or boyfriend and I cannot help but feel it is a disturbing norm rather than exception. Some women learn early to embrace the kind of self-worth that intimidates and deflects these types of men, but sadly, most of us do not. Some women at least get the sense beaten into them at some point, when they have had enough and made the attempt to face down the demons and never ignore warning signals again, but most do not. The truth is, for whatever reason, women continue to accept everything from subtle coercion to overt sacrifice in the name of being with someone.

I think there are worse things than being single.

It is so easy to say “why doesn’t she just [fill in blank here: leave him, call the police, get a restraining order]” but if it were that simple, no one would need to pose such a question in the first place. Not many of said women I know are the passive sort; if a man hit any one of them at the start, she'd tell him to simply fuck off. But it never happens that way; it is always one tiny compromise after another that leads to larger ones in sum. And asking for help is admitting the problem and it too often sounds like weakness.

A friend I'm not close too just last week had to flee her apartment with a live-in boyfriend who raped her. She didn't even call it rape when she explained what happened. This is a man who used to take her cell phone from her and pry into her email and write text messages to friends and family posing as her. Another friend had to leave the state entirely to remove herself from a violent situation. I myself have sat up late into the night listening to every sound and erasing histories on my cell phone and having friends accompany me into the house to insure no "incident."

And I won't ever do it again. I made the decision when that person was out of my life that I would never allow another person to control me; that I would never make even the slightest compromise where my freedom to be myself was concerned. I refuse to be beholden to anyone in this way ever again. Sometimes Jamison has to remind me in subtle ways that I can give a little without giving anything up. Sometimes it's difficult for me to even go somewhere with him that he wishes me to go if I don't entirely want to without making myself feel bitter about it. Even if there is no coercion except a request for my presence that can be turned down with ease. It's one of the ghosts that haunts me.

Two weeks ago, one of my students came into class a half hour late and she had a black eye nearly swollen shut. I didn't confront her directly but sent a passive email asking if she was okay and to mention that if she needed to be pointed in the direction of help to say the word. She wrote back and thanked me for my concern but noted that the "situation has been dealt with." Jamison said, "hey, she's a smart college student; I'm sure everything's fine."

His naivete is refreshing in a way but I know differently; I was a Master's degree student when I had the ball and chain round my ankle. Both aforementioned friends have advanced degrees; intelligence, availability of help, and even knowledge does not change much about abusive situations. To my great chagrin, in fact, it actually makes them worse for this very reason. Educated independent women don't find themselves in these situations, right?

More than anything else, we need to talk about these things and not hide them away as secrets. The only secret being kept is that your abuser is not such a bad person and he/she does not have to face the shame of others knowing it. Why we afford these people this luxury is beyond my comprehension. Let's talk. Out loud and name names.