I don’t know why I feel like I can post more often in Blogger. Maybe it’s just that the software I use can be a pain in the ass. I dunno. I also don’t know how posting will be for me once I am on NC. My ritual is to read and write in the morning while I’m eating breakfast. And I’m usually listening to KPFA. But my time with the folks will be more geared to what they want to do and when they want to do it.

Which, by the way, is why I’m posting. Just to be clear. I am not in North Carolina yet. I’m flying out of SF at 10:00PM on Tuesday night. But I thought I’d just do the whole month of December here. And … there will be five days In January.

I just got back from swimming and lunch. At lunch I was talking about the feeling of the unknown that this trip has for me. My stepfather is still in the post surgery rehab center and is not totally cogent yet. I guess when older folks have surgeries they can have trouble coming back, mentally. It might have been nice if the docs had told my Mom this. He had surgery to get a bone spur that was pressing on his spinal column removed. That might not be the way to say that but he’s still working on walking. And then there’s the mental fog stuff. My Mom is anxious to get him home, She sounds tired.

My Mom & Ken have a pretty great system of dividing tasks. He has always made the bed, and on the weekends when she’s doing laundry he takes the sheets off the bed. Last night she was talking about having to all that by herself, plus she’s driving the 45 minute trip to the rehab place twice a day. When she picks me up on Wednesday morning we’ll go there to visit him. And we may bring him home on Friday. But, right now there’s no way to know. His recovery is troubled.

As I write this I am realizing that I haven’t really detailed it all on my page. I’m feeling a little weird about talking about their life. But, for the next month, my life will be about their lives. This is a conversation I want to have with my Mom. I’m writing a book about my life. But that means that I am writing a book about her life. There may be issues.

So. This is not your basic going home for Christmas trip. And there are layers of complexity in these relationships. I’m just not sure what I’ll write about. But I know that writing about any of it will help me process it.

I was trying to tell Deb about the blog conversation. It does get pretty weird trying to explain blogging to people who don’t do it. There’s a lot of she said and then he said and then she said and then I said. And as I was telling her about it all I realized how easy it is to jump to an assumption about someone from one line of what they say. Reading a person every day gives you a sense of them. So, even when they say things that seem …oh lets just say sexist…for an example…you read it with your sense of them. Which may not always be a good thing.

And then there’s the problem of feeling.

It’s pretty amazing that there are such hearts in the world.

See. This is how it’s going to be. I’ll just ramble and babble. And now I’ll be doing it a few times a day. Heh.