Summertime and the Loving isn't Easy

Is this a self-indulgent journal entry?

The windowsill above my dining table. We’re going for a cluttered plant-girl aesthetic.

This morning I woke at 8:28 AM. If my phone had lived through the night it would have told me to wake 28 minutes before, but dead, it told me nothing. That was okay. 

I charged the phone, I got up, I made coffee, I fed and shushed the mewing cat at my feet. I washed my face and put on sunscreen, I dressed, I put up my hair. I filled the whole washing machine with sets of scrubs and a couple of boxer briefs and started it. I grabbed my phone and keys, I took my scooter out the door and rode it approximately .4 miles in the sunshine to my therapist’s office. I told her my problems, we laughed, I left her office, I returned by the sidewalk past the pool in my apartment complex. I detoured through the pool gate, I put my feet in the water, I stared at the flowers and trees and sky, I listened to my neighbors. I went back home, I ate cereal, I took dishes out and put others into the dishwasher, I hung the washed scrubs on a drying rack. I talked to the mewing cat, I sat down at this table with this laptop, and then Garrett woke up.

I thought this morning that if there was a job description for spouse of student in medical field, it would say:

Wanted: spouse of student in medical field

Primary duties include:

• Wash the same several pairs of scrubs once to twice per week

• Prepare and enjoy meals at ever-altering times of day

• Receive unnecessary, invasive medical procedures in unprofessional settings from an inexperienced practitioner

• Listen to medical stories featuring mild to extreme danger, violence, and trauma

• Support student coping/not coping with the above

Ideal candidates will be:

• Independent

• Introverted

• Flexible 

• Good with cats

• Good with scrubs

• Not squeamish

• Located .4 miles from their therapist

Garrett says that some parents sit for hours in the pediatric ER waiting room with a febrile child in the wee hours of the morning, only to receive Tylenol and reassurance and an oversized bill. Best to stay home. He says that sometimes the teens who overdose do it on purpose, and sometimes they do it by accident. He says to make sure your toddlers don’t find your edibles. Nothing much will happen to them, they’ll just space out, but DHS will probably happen to you. He says parents are non-optionally invited out of the room while practitioners prise back into place their child’s radius or ulna. It’s good but it looks bad. He said that one night this week he stepped on the little gray cat, fast asleep in the dark, when he got home at 4 AM.

It’s now two days after I began this post, and yesterday I bought yet another basil plant. Basil and I have a really rocky relationship: I treat her as good as I can, and sometimes she thrives, sometimes she stagnates, and sometimes she just up and dies for no reason. There probably is a reason, but I don’t know it. The thing is that the little plastic container of refrigerated basil leaves at Walmart costs two dollars for about one meal’s worth of basil, and the whole plant I bought yesterday at Trader Joe’s costs four dollars, and it’s absolutely bursting with green gold. 

The little gray cat escaped outside when I took this picture.

Given our past, I did more research on how to give me and basil the best shot this time around. Since grocery stores pack multiple plants into tiny pots to make them look like they’re flourishing, I split the cube of roots and soil along the most natural divide I could find and planted the halves a bit apart in a gardening bag that offers them some space of their own. Then I trimmed some of the stalks to give the remaining plants even more room, and I watered her new digs well. I pinched the leaves off of the lower halves of the stalks I trimmed, then arranged them in a glass planter filled halfway with water. In theory, they will root in a week or two, I’ll move my five or six baby basil plants into their own soil, and we’ll all be on our way to perfect Margherita pan pizza for the rest of the summer.

Primary duties include:

• Growing basil

• Making pan pizza

Ideal candidates will be:

• Tenacious

• Unafraid of dirt

• Sensitive to feelings and photosynthesis

• Located 2.2 miles from Trader Joe’s

Did you think I was complaining earlier?

I wondered if I might have been. I felt sorry for myself a few times in the past two weeks and the past two years, and remembering I’ve felt sorry for myself made me think I might have been complaining earlier. But then I thought about it and remembered that I don’t want anything else. Not a thing. And I’m really proud to be here and happy with my life.

Okay, I may want one thing, but it isn’t a different life, a different husband, a different home, a different cat, or a different basil plant.