Recovery

And with the turn of the new year, this is a blog about Parkinson's again.  Or at least a post about coping within our own limitations. 

The last hurrah of the year has been sincerely and truly crazy.  We had one kid home from college for the three week break, one set of kids home over Christmas (the holiday weekend), and another home for the week between Christmas and New Years.  The company was great, but neither of us had time for any personal downtime for three weeks.  B has his garage, but that's another story.  It's hard to hide when you're the host of the party. 

They say that 'good' stress is just as bad as 'bad' stress.   For example, getting married or getting a promotion is 'good' stress, and 'bad stress is what we'd normally think of as stress:  losing a job, someone dying, a serious illness, etc.  They all add together to make the haystack on the camel's back.  Sometimes we cope pretty well.  Other times, it just takes that one little straw to break the camel.  PD has a tendency to seriously reduce the size of the potential haystack.  We know that, so we figured we were only taking on what we could feasibly handle:  the visits from the kids, which were self limiting.

We didn't figure on the little things that cropped up.  The art show.  The college kid's tagalong (and very persisitent) toxic boyfriend.  The ticket the girls got on the night they went out visiting friends late at night.  The Christmas project we forgot we had to finish. 

Today we finished the last of the outstanding obligations:  taking the college kid back home to her dorm.  It's an all-day project, and when it wasa done, we were relieved.  Not happy that she was gone, mind you, but relieved that we were going back to normal.  Since we went early and were done by shortly after one, we thought about going car shopping in the nearest big city, a couple hours away, but by the time we hit the cutoff for the freeway where we had to turn to head there, it was evident that we weren't going to make it.  He was exhausted and so was I.  We made it back to town, sat at the restaurant and had late lunch/early dinner, and went home.  It was too late for a nap, but too early for bed. 

I knew when we got home what was going on.  He was really wobbly and terribly fatigued.  He retreated to his garage and I let him be, knowing that he needed some defrag time playing sudoku in the quiet.  I, too, needed some defrag time.  I cleaned the girl's room and picked up the remainder of the house, started some laundry and dishes, and sat down to craft.  After awhile, I felt better, like my brain was finally coming back to me.

Unlucky for B, his recovery isn't that easy.  He went to bed early tonight, and is absolutely wiped out.  He was this way the last couple of days, but hasn't wanted to slow down.  But the PD demands its due.  He can deny it for a time, but in the end, it always gets its way.  He will sleep nearly ten hours tonight, since it's a work night and we have to get up, as he slept last night, and nearly twelve the night before.  It's hard for me to imagine that it takes so much to catch up, but it always does.  Who knows how long it will take this time, after all this stress?  Outside of the divorce, this is probably the most stress he's had in three years or so.  Now that our lives are quiet, he isn't used to the constant stress anymore, and so it really wallops him. 

So here I sit in the darkness in the living room, reading a book and taking a second to catch up myself.  I will probably be here for several more nights, waiting for his body to catch up with itself.  We can't do this again.  We are going to make some changes (most importantly to the house rules, for the college kid who thinks its okay to come home at 3 a.m. and wake the whole house up) and not let this 'perfect storm' of stress catch us out again.  For now, I watch him sleep, in the hopes that soon, we will be able to connect again.