First day of school.
I'm sitting in the living room.
No television, music, kids, or spouse.
Silence.
No, "Mom!" "ma" "momma" "mommy" "mother".
Silence.
No, "Blah, blah, blah, Craigslist motorcycle tractor truck acreage, blah blah blah...."
Silence.
I'm sitting here in silence, a slow line of drool easing from the corner of my mouth.
Tears silently rolling down my cheeks.
First day of school. Freedom.
Enjoy, Angel. You sure have earned it.
ReplyDeleteRich
Ah, the daily dose of Empty Nest. You should get a puppy.
ReplyDeleteI have read, with real interest, your talking about your Chicks and I know you are seeing this Silence as a mixed blessing. It is lovely, and yet sometimes the silence screams...
ReplyDeleteThinking of you and wishing you the very best. Thanks for all the fun.
I have always wondered about the vaccination issues. There are those that think they are all good, with no downside. They are, of course wrong. We know of plenty of people who react badly to some vaccines. Me, for example. I am deadly allergic to pertussis, and it is now included in tetanus vaccine. Clearly, on my record, and yet the last time I got a tetanus booster I went into anaphylactic shock. Luckily, before I left the office.
There are no completely safe vaccines. I am disgusted by Pharma pulling the wool on real issues. Was my episode reported? It was not. Pharma will not admit the most obvious truth, that while they ARE overwhelmingly safe, there can be serious issues. Immune issues. (An aside: My dog also goes into anaphylactic shock with rabies injections. We have to pretreat with immunosuppressors and he STILL gets a baseball sized swelling at the injection site, and it lasts for weeks, leaving a hard nodule - he has several of those nodules now as they are required by law. But dang, they are safe? Right???)
You bring up something I had not considered, which is so obvious it is the elephant in the room, and that is we are all different. Those differences are not all about what we were exposed to in the environment either, we all differ genetically. I, like you, am Nordic (you ARE Nordic, right?) While my Dad is a Scottish Islander, his lineage is absolutely Norwegian. My Mumma too, albeit her family got here earlier and there is some Mohawk mixed into her a couple of generations back!
I am a (very) high functioning Asperger's syndrome kid - all my cousins knew I was 'weird', but they played with me anyway. Here you go: I was chatting away in complete sentences before I was two, but then stopped talking for 2 years (my voice came back. Ask my husband!!).... My parents just figured I was different. All kids are different, nobody went nuts back then, they would just watch and wait. Could it have been related to all the vaccines that my Dad had to take when in World War II?? All the vaccines I had to have as a baby? Maybe not, maybe so. We will never, ever know. There is no money to pursue research on any of these legitimate questions.
Do vaccines, in effect, save lives? I expect they do (but not nearly so many lives as claimed). Western sanitation saved millions of lives. Pasteur's identification of bacteria saved millions of lives. Identifying disease vectors such as fleas... the list goes on. And yes, I believe there are some vaccines that have certainly seemed to have helped.
We just want to know the truth. Let us see the facts... But, mark my words, they never will. They, in fact, probably do not know. Reporting issues seems to be voluntary, and no doctor wants to 'scare' their poor little 'patients', who can't possibly think for themselves.
The grant-mobile only runs for Big Money.
Sigh... I think about you and wish for you the best Sweet Angel.
TheCaptain
Our house will see an increase in the following during the next week or so.
ReplyDeleteI don't want to go back to school.
No one likes me at school.
The principal hates me.
I don't know what to wear.
And an orders of magnitude increase in general grumpiness.
Sometimes I don't know why I married a teacher.