Excuse me while I hork up the contents of my head.

I'm having that on-the-verge-of-falling-apart-feeling again (isn't it interesting how it goes in cycles? And no, it's not related to PMS, thank you very much). Michael's feeling the effects from the chemo - and even if he weren't, just the fact that he's got cancer is huge and unsettling. The baby is sick again. I am forever running hither and yon to the pediatrician or some specialist. I can't remember the last time I got a good night's sleep (it's literally been months). Michael and I are trying to figure out how we can rearrange our lives to enable the bills to get paid and for him to keep his job while still somehow taking the time to deal with the cancer and the treatment and get well. In short, it's all getting to be a bit much. I feel overwhelmed, run ragged, on the edge. I feel like I might start crying and never stop.

He asked me today what I need. Which was really sweet, and I'm grateful that I have a husband who has my back. But what I need right now is the impossible: I need for nobody in my family to be sick. I need a vacation. I need someone to take care of me.

And in all ugly honesty, this is all making me feel very bitchy and bitter about people who complain about how overwhelmed they are with so much less to deal with than what's going on here in our house. Not fair, I know, but there it is.

I actually find that I am having a lot of issues over my mother, though we have no contact and haven't for years. I think about how as long as I knew her, she was always the victim in her own mind, how she wasted her whole life crying to whomever would listen (and plenty of people who didn't want to, I'm sure) about how awful she had it, when I would say that the vast majority of her problems have always been the result of really bad choices on her part. But more than that, I've been thinking a lot lately about how she spent my whole growing up, and into my adulthood, trying to force me to avail myself to the wisdom of her vast life experience. Yeah, Mother, you have no fucking idea what hard is. I know what hard is, and I'm still standing. Even if I fall apart every now and again.