Waves of guilt

 I am dealing with a great deal of guilt these days. 

With back to school and resuming the regular programming,  I am filled with anxiety, worry, and guilt. Guilt that I cannot be up with my parents to help them through this, anxiety, and the worry of what is going on up there and how I can possibly mitigate any of the trouble or difficult times. My mind runs on overdrive trying to remember appointments for mom, scheduling for kids, and the general mishmash of work. When I am up with my parents I am feeling guilt about not being with the kids as that time is precious and fleeting, when I am home I am feeling guilty because I also recognize that time with my mother is precious and finite as well. It's not enough to want to accomplish the impossible, I have to beat myself up over it too. My father keeps telling me that I am doing more than my fair share and that it is okay, but when I hear the quiver in his voice or the worry, I cannot help but feel panicked. I worry about his health too. His health and happiness are tantamount to the situation. He is a lynchpin and if he fails or falls apart the whole house of cards falls too. My mother's health is what it is at this point. I have resolved myself of that much, but what I am concerned with is damage control. I want her to be comfortable, I want her to be, I don't think the right word is happy,  but more so what I am aiming for is contentment or to be at ease. I want her to live in the moment and not worry about the constant barrage of medical shit coming her way. I get it, it's what I want, but what about her? She seems to want to go on willfully that things will be fine but deep down I know she understands. She is one of the strongest people I have ever known and probably will ever know. I wonder sometimes if it is the sheer will of her determination but she always has been strong and resilient. This has shaken all of us as she is and was at the same time, stronger than all of us. We have had to learn that strength from her, and persist. 

Fuck. That in itself is a hard pill to swallow. My mother is and always will be an important person to my life but her ability to have a leading part has always waxed and waned. We have never had an easy relationship and that in itself is something that adds to the guilt I am feeling. What if I was more amenable to things, what if I just curtailed to what she wanted... well then I wouldn't be me and I would have been a fucking pushover. So no, I can't say that to myself. It's an unfair statement but still, I persist with beating myself. There was a year where our relationship was heavily strained. I dug my feet in, I showed my stubborn side to say "no, this thing that happened was not right" they wanted me to carry on and brush it under the rug... and at the time I refused. I did it based on the measures that people needed to take responsibility for. I pushed forward with tough love and to be honest there was a lot of healing that needed to go on and at the point of mom's diagnosis, it forced a reconciliation. It forced some healing but also I had to "eat crow" for the perceived pain I had caused everyone. Things have improved beyond expected but still... I wonder sometimes about that time. That year and a half. If I could ever get it back... nope, more abuse. Continual flogging of things that have been long since dead. I am hurting and I think the exercise of bargaining is part of the process but a useless stage. It is denial masked as bartering. The whole grief cycle is all about denial and acceptance when you boil right down to it. the Anger, the sadness, and of course the denial all lead to the same place. 

I just want more fucking time. I want to not deal with the hard realizations of this. I want my father and mother to have 20 more fucking years and I do not want to feel like I need to be split down the middle. My children need me and so do my parents and all of this seems like utter bullshit. I am a wreck about this, but at the same time, I am numb. Numb is good for a time because then I can focus, but numb is a stopgap. It is denial too. It is the body's way of avoiding the problem. We are doing that, we are surviving. Because every breath, every movement is all about survival. The symptoms of survival are all over our bodies. My dad is anxiously scratching and damaging his arms, I am grinding my teeth so hard that I have broken two teeth and my jaw hurts every morning. My sister... she has her own manifestations of this. We are surviving but we are damaged. We are denying the truth, we are masking it with focus, grit, determination, and numbness. We are abusive to ourselves but we are also being abused by cancer, by circumstance, and by each other. Guilt is a fuck of a thing.