I'm a Real Mom Now

This week, my second cousin Joey passed away after a very long struggle with Huntington's disease. He was 41. I didn't really know Joey very well. Because he was five years older than me, when we were kids, he was too old for my shennanigans, and when I was older, he was off on his own having his own family. He leaves behind a wife and three children.

However, I did go to school with Joey's brother Mark, and after my grandma moved down to live near my dad, I stayed with her sister, my aunt Sharon, Joey, Mark, and Jimmy's mother, when I went home to Portage.

Sharon was an amazing woman who lived a life much harder than she should have. She watched her husband develop and eventually succumb to Huntington's, then she went through it all again when her youngest son, Jimmy, developed the disease as a teenager and died in his early twenties, much younger than most Huntington's victims. On top of all of that, Aunt Sharon successfully fought breast cancer, only to pass away a few years later from lukemia.

Why do I mention all of this? One because I loved my aunt Sharon and I miss her and thinking about all the difficulties she lived through with actual amazing grace makes me feel lucky to have the friends and family that I do. Two because this post, which is making me reflect a little on grief, is all based around the fact that I felt compelled to go to Joey's funeral for Mark. I know Mark well and have always really enjoyed the company of him and his wife Patti. Joey's death leaves Mark the only remaining member of his immediate family. I felt he needed all the family there he could get.  So, I rearranged a bunch of stuff, threw the kids in the car, and went.

Gram told me that Lafayette was an hour behind us, and I believed her; this was my mistake. I should have double checked before I went to bed, but didn't. So while we left on time, I still felt a bit rushed because I didn't get to have that extra hour to lounge about and slowly wake up.

I kept updating the route on my GoogleMaps and I knew we were going to arrive just in time. When we were about 20 minutes away, Ainsley started to complain, "I don't wanna go! I wanna go home!" I assumed her complaints were related to the fact that we'd just traveled to Muncie the day before and she was sick of the car.

Then her complains got more urgent, " I WANT my daddy! Want to go HOME!"

"We'll visit for a bit and then go home soon, sweetie."

"WANT to go HOME! My tummy hurts." See, a good, seasoned mother would have perked her ears up at this statement. But Ainsley is the boy who cried wolf...lamenting tons of imagined pain. I assumed that this was the case.

I was wrong.

She started coughing and choking. My less seasoned ears perked. Then the vomiting started. I swung the van onto a side street (this is where I'm thankful I was on 25S with all its side streets and not, say, I65).

By the time I got the van stopped and opened her door, she was done puking and merely crying. Then I entered some weird Mom zone. I whipped her out of the van, got her out of her clothes (lamenting that she's puked all over her dress clothes while also THANKING GOD that I'd had the foresight to bring comfy clothes with us for the ride home), got her into her clean clothes, and started cleaning up the puke with what I can only describe as a shit ton of wipes. I must have looked a sight to the people driving by...running around my van back and forth getting wipes or plastic bags to put them (and the puke clothes) into...all while in my heels and funeral dress...trying to keep the puke off of myself, as I didn't have a change of clothes.

"I not spit up!"

By the time I'd finished getting the car seat as clean as I could, Ainsley was fine. She was going into a fresh round of "Momma, I wanna hold you!" And this is where my hindsight is crystal clear. We were already late. I should have held her. But I was frazzled and now running late for Joey's memorial service. So, I gave her a hug and put her in her seat and soldiered on. I kept asking her if her tummy felt ok and she kept saying it was fine. I stopped asking after she responded with a "Why do you keep asking me that?!"

We were a little late. No one cared. The service and lunch afterward were very nice and when my kids turned into little monsters, we went back home. When we got home, she decided to put on her bathing suit over her sweatpants and my shoes. Clearly she was recovered.

I thought about the vomiting incident while driving home. I felt like a soldier who got his first battle scars: I handled traveling puke. I am a real mom now.