Aug 12, 1966
Charlie Mike and I had been working our butts off
the past week There was quite a bit of rain during the week so tons of muddy muck to
get out of corrals and dirt to fill them back in, (so many buckets; if we’d
just had even a wheelbarrow!), fences to fix, various small injuries to doctor
etc. I said each day how tired I was and slowly more and more tired. Finally on the 11th we had seen
Earl and learned Dusty had gone back to work that week and B&B 6 would be at
Drake for some time. I was worried about getting his birthday card safely to
him but felt it easier now that he was back at work. I still worried
if he was cured, really well, and feeling okay.
Aug 12
I write caught in the teeth of a hungry pain. It gnaws at my insides, tears me up like fighting animals snarling over--or in me. I really ought to go have a physical exam to check this all out, maybe a total GYN exam. Kept busy today , hauled hay and waited for it to rain but it never did. Heard from GJC (?) and the clinic. How I wish I were free to go but there’d be such an uproar. Maybe I can go and talk to Peckham tomorrow. Will have to see. Well, Dusty’s been back one week to work now from what Earl said.
It's nice that he’s “safe in CA having transferred to that division and left B&B 6 to Blair. Takes awhile to get the news around but the grapevine does it. Wonder what Blair looks like? Rather like Dusty I guess since they are close to the same age.”
I hope he does not feel as sick as I do tonight. God, I really get bugged by the pain. I dread it and start tightening up several days before I’m due. That probably makes it worse. I should quit riding and lifting etc. I only do it 1) because I can’t quite bear to give up my favorite pets and they’d be the first to go and 2) to try to buy the Boss’s regard back and prove to him I am not a whiner and coward etc. (what a dumb goal!) But it is tearing the guts out of me to do it. I really think I feel worse every month. That’s why I’d practically sell my soul to the devil to just pack up and go off to school and forget all of these darn problems, the animals, etc. If only these stupid lawsuits would vanish; if we could get some money so as to move out of here, sell off the stock that we don’t need, put the rest on pasture and just rest, all of us. I don’t see how we can last this out much longer. I just get tired-er and sicker daily, the Boss is falling apart and Mom is cracking up awhile the boys are torn twenty ways from Wednesday.
Goddamn the whole mess. The principal of those suits for achievement and 'success' of owning property is more important to dad than life itself. I think he’d see us all dead before he’d quit or even waver from perseverance and pursuit of that goal. It’s just not that important. But he won’t listen to anyone. The doctors try to tell him, we have tried over and over, the relatives have as well and it’s all in vain.
Note: the brief passage in the journal part above in the smaller font was written to be sure any sneaky reader would be thrown off! Until we locked the shed--shortly--I was still wary. It was not factual at all!
Those suits--there was revenge and a pie-in-the sky goal of getting all the losses and problems redressed and "made whole" again. Ha ha. Dad would go to lawyer after lawyer and convince them for awhile 'til they'd eventually see how impossible and unrealistic it was. Then he would say they had been bought off. After that, he would decide to be his own lawyer--even worse.
As the summer stumbled on, I kept feeling worse. Every month was about 24-36 hours of agony. with tearing, cramping pain. I am sure I had severe endometriosis and possibly some damage from the mumps two years earlier plus who knows what the fiercely strenuous and stressful work had done along the way. I guess if I were a big, stout, husky woman it might have been easier. I was always very thin and rather small boned. I don’t know. In some ways I have never stopped “being tired” and I found out later I was sterile for all practical purposes. A curse or a blessing? I am not sure.
I was deeply discouraged; definitely in clinical depression. Would it have helped to know it was just four weeks more until that seemingly hopeless wish came true? It is said what does not kill you makes you tough. Yes, I suppose I have to allow that since I have made it to 81 with fairly few serious health crises so it must have served such purpose. Now it seems so far away and very unreal, a bad flick or TV show, unbelievable book or nightmare type dream. I am not sure the young woman who 'lived' then really existed or if she is still a part of me somehow?
I cannot think of what GJC stood for or what I got from the clinic, assuming the mental health one Mom and I were attending fairly regularly. I often wrote my journal as if I would always know exactly what was going on and did not explain much!
A few barely pertinent pictures. First the little girl I once was or had been, serious if not lonely or unhappy, at Camp Wood or in the Kaibab. Then the teenager--working, always working. Setting a post for a fence, perhaps at the pasture. Then an image I saw on Facebook that touched me in so many ways... Did the woman remember and still send love to the girl-child she might have been? Was her heart empty now or left behind with her past? So many possible meanings; I see both sadness and hope in it.
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