Family Cycles

The crewmembers onboard my little ship of fools seem agreed that it is time to head home. There remains much to do here, but the heart calls for the comforts and interests we left on the farm. I am grateful those comforts and interests are stable and appealing enough to call. The journey through CPS, funeral homes, et al, was a long, hard ride, but? ? ? Am I safe to speak of all that in the past tense yet? Have we normalized on this little deck of the family fleet?

There is a big chunk of my own heart which wants to stay here on the porch of my Pirate's Den and resume my "river research." Dare I call my tramping up and down river banks, "Research?" Somehow the word implies a level of pretense I have neither the creditials nor the support to claim. Family member and psych pros have provided some colorful names for this odd quirk over the years, but by whatever name, the compulsion has been with me my entire broken life. I love rivers and am drawn to them with the intensity of a moth to a light bulb. Call ^it^ what you will.

Among the potentials which have been lightly discussed on this porch is DOS2 returning to the farm with Hubs and the kids while I stay here and play river pirate. She loved her months on the farm. The children love her as much as they love me. The biggest fly in that ointment is the sister between DOS2 and I in age. I will call her Middle Middle here. MM for short. She is languishing in the end stages of alcoholism and caring for her is DOS2's retirement hobby. In me, she is yanking the very same heart string as my beloved and suffering eldest son. My drive to save MM was one of the first hot topics in my psychotherapy under the heading of, "Survivor's Syndrome." For ES, the therapy was under the heading of, "Enabling." While ES has been pulling my heartstrings here on this porch, MM has been hitting my psycho senses as a preview of ES's future and a rerun of my mother's decades of lifeless breathing. Same old syndrome, different body. I have entirely too many names for ^it^. ^It^ be a complex weave?

Sorting. . . Again I leave the mood icon on the rapid cycling median.