by Band Back Together | Jun 16, 2016 | Poverty, Economic Struggles and Hardship |
I remember the day I found out my family were migrant farm workers. I was sitting in my tio’s kitchen, and we were talking about something, I think it was about Cesar Chavez or something, and he said it, “You know they were migrant farm workers, right?”
At first I thought it was a joke, because come on now. Only illegal immigrants work as migrant farm workers—illegals or the Joads from “The Grapes of Wrath”. But this wasn’t the Depression, so there is NO WAY that MY grandfather, a Tex-Mex born and raised in AMERICA, would be picking fruit for a living!
I remember coming home, and asking my mom about it. “Tio Lou was joking around, and he said you guys were …that you picked fruit …haha”. My mom said, “That’s right.” Whoa whoa whoa! What??? “Your grandfather would drive from Texas up north, working all summer on the different farms.” She sounded so nonchalant, like she just told me to pass the salt.
What the hell? Was everyone playing a mean joke? We live in Villa Park Illinois, for God’s sake! There’s a Target five minutes away! From what my ignorant mind could grasp, migrant farm workers were like sharecroppers—freed slaves that got ripped off by the big bad white man. I couldn’t reconcile the fact that my grandfather, the gentle mechanic with the wicked sense of humor, was picking apples while some guy named Zeke yelled at him to “git.”
My mom just kept talking. She said that when they moved to Chicago, my grandfather took them along to the farms. It was like an adventure for her. She was 13 years old, and she and my Tia Gloria tried to help by working in the lettuce fields. They were supposed to pull weeds, but ended up pulling all the lettuce. They got fired their first day on the job.
She was smiling as she told me about it …I couldn’t believe that—I mean, how humiliating. “Why are you being so calm about this, can you see how awful it was for you?” My mom replied, “Awful for us? No. You see, a lot of the people …I don’t want to say they worked professionally at it, but they were used to that kind of life. I remember my friends would be pulled out of school because it was time for their families to go work in the fields. Some of them would never come back. When we got sent back to the camp, you know, for weeding out the lettuce, there were a couple of girls that were sent back too. We were laughing about the whole thing, but they were crying, because they knew they would get in trouble with their parents. You see, I knew with our dad we would be okay. He didn’t want us to work, but we had wanted to try. I mean, we really worked hard. That poor lettuce really suffered.”
The story unfolded with such gentleness, just a woman sharing her memories with her daughter. My mom ended by saying “We should always walk in someone else’s shoes. It’s one thing to see something like that on TV or hear a story, but it’s another thing to know what they are doing, to know how hard it is. It makes you that much more grateful for what you have. Your grandparents wanted us to go to school, not work long hours in a field. It’s a different world out there.”
I thought of myself at 13 and how my biggest problem was having to wear generic gym shoes instead of Reeboks. I thought of my mom at 13, trying to work hard to help her family, but knowing deep down that it wasn’t entirely necessary …and I saw those two other little girls crying because that’s all they had. We just sat quietly, my mom and I. We sat there and all that kept running through my head was …God, I have SO much to learn.
by Band Back Together | Jun 15, 2016 | Help With Relationships, Loneliness, Marriage Problems, Video Game Addiction |
Look at me, tear your eyes away from the screen. Just for a day, understand why I’m upset when you say you’re going to bed.
Weekends? They come and go, with you sitting there, asking me to play with you, sit with you, talk to you.
I don’t want to anymore.
I keep thinking how I want time with you, how I craved you when we were states apart, for so long. Now we’re here, and we don’t even spend the weekends together. Sometimes you come to me, and you leave. Desperate to play.
You don’t see this, but I do. And I feel like it’s wrong for me to feel this way. I refuse to nag any longer, or mention it.
It’s created a distance and loneliness I can’t describe.
I wish you’d understand, I wish I could also understand.
If I ignore it, it doesn’t matter or hurt, but some nights, it’s very clear that you prefer a Saturday night playing online with strangers than with your wife talking, cuddling, and maybe watching a movie.
When was the last time we watched a movie together?
I don’t pressure. I wont complain, you’re not a bad husband.
But some nights like this, it hurts to realize that we don’t spend time together unless I sit beside you while you play. That sometimes I have to pick up a game to be near you. Please, stop saying that I’m avoiding you if I am not sitting next to you.
Sometimes, I am uncomfortable with the situation. How we talk, and you game, looking at the screen instead of me. Us spending time together is basically on your terms, but you don’t realize this.
It hurts to realize that tonight we have been in the same house, but in two different rooms, only because I don’t want to sit on the couch while you play away the night.
I know we met on a game, but please, realize our relationship has moved past video games. We have a family to care for, we have each other.
Why don’t you approach me to stay, to do something else, like watching a movie? Why don’t we spend time together like the couples on the street do? Talking, walking, sitting outside to look out and cuddle. Why don’t we do something outside of watching what you want to watch, and playing video games?
But I wont mention this to you anymore, the times I’ve tried, it’s only made it worse.
I wish you’d understand how it hurts, that you don’t want to watch a movie with me, not just one night, but the next, and the next …and as the time just builds up, I just end up watching it alone.
by Band Back Together | Jun 15, 2016 | Anger, Breast Cancer, Cancer and Neoplasia, Cancer Survivor, Coping With Cancer, Depression, Faith, Fear, Guilt, Mastectomy, Stress, Trauma |
Have you ever been swimming in the ocean and wondered what was lurking underneath you…eying your body…sizing you up to see if you would make a tasty meal? That’s what I call the breast cancer “shark attack syndrome.”
I liken the physical and psychological impact of a double mastectomy to a shark attack. It happens quickly and violently. In a matter of minutes you are struck hard and parts of your body are carried away into a vast ocean by a predator much bigger than you. It isn’t personal. The attack is random. You are left alive but amputated–stunned and with a life long fear of the water.
People who know about my diagnosis gawked at my chest like an accident scene on the freeway. Family, friends…they can’t help themselves from looking. I chose not to have reconstruction due to the lengthy recovery…an infant and a toddler don’t lend themselves to extensive plastic surgery. My daughter was 8 months old and my son was 3 years when I had the surgery, not exactly the age where I could be out of commission.
I don’t wear the prosthetics I bought…they constantly remind me I am amputated, and the first time I took yoga one of them fell out! My beloved yoga teacher said, “Just take them out, honey.” I never looked back.
Rough Waters
The journey through a breast cancer diagnosis with two small children was so very hard. I searched for the words to tell my son…
”The Doctor found a lump in mommy’s breast that isn’t good for her body and he has to take it out.”
Thanks to my son’s school and my amazing husband, we got him through it…but he STILL talks about it and recently asked, “Mommy, why don’t you have boobies?” At that point I realized my beautiful daughter would grow up never knowing her mother’s body to look “normal.” She only knows the scars. That is the day my heart broke forever. As if depression didn’t make me feel inadequate enough, now I felt like a carnie act. Come on down and meet the lady who was attacked by sharks!
I will never truly recover from knowing what I look like and what I represent to my children. But I am here to be their mom and truly thankful. Thank god I had it checked. The mammogram showed no abnormalities! If I had just had the mammogram I would have faced a diagnosis of invasive cancer and perhaps required chemotherapy or radiation. As of now, they tell me I am “cured.”
And I found it myself.
Not a minute in the day goes by that I don’t worry that it will return and take me from my children. Every woman who has had breast cancer knows exactly what I’m talking about. Every cold, every headache, every stiff muscle, still scares me into thinking I am still out there in that ocean—defenseless to another shark attack. What part of my body will they take next time?
I saw my mother lose her breast early in life. The same month I was diagnosed, she was diagnosed with Stage IV colo-rectal cancer. I watched the sharks circle her for six years, taking feet of colon, and eventually her life.
But it isn’t a pity party. I am glad I got cancer. It was a hell of a lot easier to deal with than postpartum depression, than life-long depression, than the cancer that is depression. And it got me immediately in touch with impermanence, and subsequently, my spiritual practice.
If I were thrown back into the dark ocean again and a recurrence reared it’s ugly head, I have my faith to thank for curing me of my fear of sharks.
by Band Back Together | Jun 14, 2016 | Coping With Depression, Depression, Fear, Mental Health, Self Loathing, Shame, Therapy |
Well, Bandmates, this is the day. I have an appointment with my general practitioner. I will refuse to leave until I have a path forward and an appointment with a psychiatrist or counselor.
This is it.
If I don’t do anything, I know the outcome will be tragic.
It’s not a matter of willpower any more. I’ve used all that up. The only thing that’s keeping me even slightly together lately is the thought of how much my kiddos would hurt if I killed myself. I am exhausted and at the last shreds of my willpower. This pain I have carried for my whole damned life is destroying me.
I must say that I’m very nervous. I don’t know what is going to happen, but I’m going to spill my guts. I feel shame at the prospect of sharing this pain I have in a non-anonymous setting. I feel shame that this disease has wrecked my life. I am scared to death that I will wreck my kids if I don’t get this shit handled. I am horrified at the state of my life, the feeling that I am capable of so much, yet do so little with my time.
I’m fucking smart. I’m handsome in a kinda scruffy way. I have a decent enough job. But I feel that I am unworthy of anything enjoyable. I’m done ignoring the phone calls from my friends. They’re coming fewer and further between. I’m done procrastinating. I’ve sat here for more than five months, losing more and more of what I have come to cherish. Time with my kids, friends, art and music. I haven’t touched my bass guitar in months. It’s got to the point that I don’t even like to hear music any more, and I have been a musician/singer for most of my life.
I can only write a few paragraphs at a time before these damned hopeless feelings overcome me and cloud my imagination. Even my favorite time-sink of video games has become something I simply don’t enjoy anymore. My only friends are my pets, workmates, my computer, and Netflix. The first thought in my head whenever I wake, be it at a normal time, or at some odd hour of the night, is I hate my life, I hate myself.
Today is the day that enough is enough.
Please, if you feel like I do, get help now! Don’t wait until your life is left in ruin because of a disease. Don’t let your mind tell you that your problems are due to your own failures, that somehow you’re a weak person. That is the disease talking. Every lie this disease tells you has a grain of truth in it. That’s how you come to believe all the negative nonsense. We don’t try hard enough because the disease keeps us from doing so, but the disease doesn’t ever take the blame for keeping our reserves of willpower so low. If you’re at the end of your rope, there’s nothing left but to either give up or try to get the help you need. This disease is going to tell you so many half-truths that you really don’t know what the truth is anymore. That’s why you need to get a helping hand. Please, don’t let the disease hold you back.
by Band Back Together | Jun 13, 2016 | Loss, Pet Loss, Sadness, Service Animals |
After he started getting sick in November 2015, and multiple vets treating him, and special diets, and over $5000 in medical costs, he was too sick, so I let him go in February. I thought I was okay.
I’m not.
Everyone misses him, remembers him, asks about him. His ashes are up on that shelf, sitting there. He never sat, unless we were at work and then he sat and was so damn good. He kept my blood sugar from going low, he kept my blood sugar from going too high; he kept me sane.
He was my Herbert. The best service dog. Ever.
Why does it still hurt? Why do I still feel so heart-hurt? And worst of all – why isn’t it fucking getting better? Is it because he was only four fucking years old? Or is it because he died due to a stupid goddamned ridiculous grass barb embedding itself into his esophagus? Of course, we didn’t know that until the necropsy.
People who have lost a pet seem to think they understand, I have lost quite a few pets throughout my life and it hurts, and I grieved; but this feels so different. He was with me 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Now I feel alone.
