Those who know me know I have a hard time sitting still. I’ve always got something going on, something that prevents me from sitting down on the couch and veging out. Which is odd because if you knew me as a teenager, you’d have said the exact opposite.
But this last week and a half, I’ve taken time to just stop. I watched my daughter recover from her head injury (she’s still not fully healed but she sure is acting like she is) and the entire time I was in the hospital with her, I just sat. I watched How to Train Your Dragon a dozen times, I worried every time she coughed but the over arching need to be doing something was gone.
It was a strange feeling for me. There was no pressing need to be anywhere or doing anything but sitting with her. She started pulling out of being ill about half way through day two. She started climbing. She started drawing and wanting to get out of bed. And as she started getting back to normal, so did I. I started following work from the crackberry. I chatted on Skype with my husband, keeping him appraised of her situation.
It was odd for me to just sit with her. To not feel the need to distract myself from what I was doing right then. At that moment, the most important thing in the world was for me to be there, focused on her. And I guess I was. I am so incredibly grateful that she’s doing well. If you didn’t know her, you’d never know she had a fractured skull that was still healing. It was so hard for me to keep her in the house this weekend when the weather was beautiful but I did because, even though she might act fine, she still has several weeks left of healing to do.
And my leave, thus far has been anything but not busy. I’ve gone into work every day last week, dragging my kid with me. I never thought I’d be that company commander who traipsed her kids to the office but I am. I’m on leave and I’m still working but it doesn’t matter: my soldiers still see my kids in the office. I’m going to be lucky if I don’t have a daycare started in the back now. But emergencies happen and overall, my company has been really flexible when dealing with family issues. I like to think we give our soldiers the ability to parent and be soldiers.
Around the house, I’ve finally finished painting my kitchen and I painted my hallway, too. I think I’ve found a really nice cream/yellow for the living room. I fear yellow. It’s such a hard color to get right. But this color might do the trick. Hopefully, the husband likes it whenever he gets home from Iraq.
And on the writing front, I’ve dug back into a novel I was working on back in Iraq. I cracked it open and while it needed a ton of work, I thought the guts were basically there. So I plotted that sucker out using Alexandra Sokoloff’s Screenwriting Tricks for Writers and set to work. I’m almost a third of the way through the revised first draft and its coming alive. I haven’t bounced it off my agent yet, though, so we’ll update y’all accordingly when the time comes. But he gets to see it first.
As you can see, I’m back to being busy. Life only took a moment to stand still but it was a moment I’ll appreciate for years to come. I was alone and still with my baby girl, something that hasn’t happened in a long, long time. And here’s to committing that it won’t take intensive care for it to happen again, on a more regular basis.