I’ve been giving my attempt to “step back” a lot of thought and it just doesn’t seem possible.  Jenna needs my emotional support more than I need to be free of the psychological torture that comes with dealing with all the issues involved.  I think if i did just run away to an island somewhere I would be even more depressed and worthless-feeling than I am already.  Perhaps I just think about things too much, am too sensitive or whatever.  Just this morning I got up before dawn to do some window work outside before the sun hit that side of the house, and I am standing on the ladder listening to the radio, and just weeping and weeping over something that was on the radio.  Even after all this time its always right there just under the surface, and I HATE to constantly complain and whine and weep and etc., I wish I could get past it, accept it and be positive about the future.  But this kind of injury, unlike if Jenna had simply been killed in the accident, it is indeed that gift that keeps on giving (in reverse).  Maybe if she had died I would be the same way, constantly mourning her loss and etc., but … I dont know.  God I hate myself.  I WANT TO GET OVER THIS, get past it, dammit, to the point where I can just get through the day without f*cking CRYING at least once.  Dammit dammit dammit… see why I feel like such a pathetic piece of shit?  I probably just need to be on anti-depressants myself but every time I go to the doctor its another vast sum of money I can’t afford and at the moment have no hope of affording.  One of the first things I am going to do when I get to Indiana is declare bankruptcy to try to get some of my past debts wiped out and try to focus on the future more.  I think when I am around Cooper he will be a good source of positivity and focus…

For a long time I tried to do the best I could with the whole faith thing, and believing against hope in some kind of Christian miracle. I mean, I *really* tried to believe it. The name of this website itself is testimony to that much. The funny part of all of this is that if you had asked any of my college friends about an eventual Christian conversion for Mr. Robert here, they probably would have put that at a -100000% probability. At least I would have. But maybe its like they say, the more you resist something, the more you will eventually succumb. Just ask all the moralizing preachers who are eventually caught — often literally — with their pants down on the question.

I don’t know if “succumb” is the right word. I distinctly remember being in a hallway with Jenna’s dad and some church and “believer” friends of theirs, and I so very desperately wanted Jenna to be OK, to be whole again, that I really wanted to be able to believe.  I just didnt think it was possible, given where I had come from on the subject.  I walked that hallway a FEW times before I could convince myself that such a thing was even possible. I eventually decided I would have to make myself believe it was possible, and for a long time I believed and prayed that Jenna would be able to return to her former life.

I do have to note that if it wasn’t for the possibility-of-whole-recovery thing to begin with, I may not have been able to make it at all. And where Jenna is right now is not all that bad, recovery wise. She is happy, so I should be too.

Nevertheless, in my darker moments, I blame myself for so much of this. I blame myself for ever entering Jenna’s life to begin with, etc. I wont make a list because I am trying to move beyond it all. If I persist with it, and with trying to be so entwined with Jenna’s recovery on a daily basis, I am going to end up in a rubber room, or a morgue.  At least until I can get my own emotional soup cleared up, I just have to step back from the Jenna war room mentality I’ve kept up for the past four years.

I used to try to be as honest with Jenna as possible, including telling her the truth about my own mental status. Big mistake. I need to get some distance from all of this. For my own survival. I have been wallowing in the gap between where I want Jenna to be and in the reality of where Jenna is going to be, and it is just not working. Now its been a frickin YEAR in the hellabama house. When I dropped Jenna off with her parents in Indiana last summer, I was a weeping wreck. A year later, I am still a weeping wreck. I have had conversations about “keeping” Jenna, aka whether to completely cut her off, with her dad, wondering whether I have the ability any more to deal with it all. God knows I tried, but clearly I do not.  I have no intention of cutting her off entirely, I just need to step back a little bit.

I will still stay in Jenna’s life, take her many calls, but I am going to try to detach spiritually and emotionally from the impossible goal stated in this website’s URL. Jenna is happy, content, and functioning as best she can in her current situation, and I need to be happy with that, just that, and not be a Sisyphusian mess.

The library is closing right now (actually now im in the parking lot doing a revision) so I will try to articulate more of what I’m talking about at another time.

I am at the library again, different one this time.  This one is on the way to Home Depot in a ghetto-y part of town.  Not making a judgement, just an observation.

I worked on the falling-down garage this morning again.  The pain in the leg was far more intense this morning, so I quit after about an hour or an hour and a half or so.  Sobbing was involved.  Every time I hear love mentioned in a song, I cry.  I think of Jenna and it all bowls me over.  This time it was an Elton John song of all things.  And the only reason why I was listening to a music station at all was because I woke up super early and the NPR station was doing its repeat of the morning show I had heard earlier that am…

 This morning I managed to work on the falling-down garage for about two hours before I had to stop due to the pain in my leg.  I was half the time sobbing while I was working because I kept seeing Cooper’s old tricycle sitting there, and that reminded me of so much that has gone “wrong” with this whole situation.  I put “wrong” in quotes because there was really nothing else that could be done, I know that I made the right decisions in keeping Cooper away from his mom during her own uncontrolled manic anger stage.  In the process I have missed out on so much of his life myself.  The tricycle has barely been used, which just reminds me how much Cooper has been gone. 

I suppose I am a “wuss” for crying so much.   The good news continues to be that Jenna is doing well on the Ritalin.  I tend to upset her on the phone which I know I should not do, but in my own personal hell here in ‘bama I have few others to talk to.  My policy on Jenna has been never to shield her from things, which I know at some level is the wrong policy.  But in my heart of hearts I want to treat her as “normal” as much as possible, which means being honest with her and not sheilding her from things that could upset her.  I know when I am doing it that I SHOULDN’T be doing it, but I just can’t stop myself sometimes. 

 The other thing that is positive is that Cooper is doing well, also.  I try to talk to him as much as possible over the phone.  He loves to have me read him stories over the phone.

I was in Wallyworld the other week and was looking at the childrens’ books to see what is on the market (I am writing stories for Cooper, and wanted to see what if anything I might eventually market), and I found this really cute book called “Amelia Asks for a Pet”.  Anyway, I read it to Cooper over the phone the other night and it soon became a regular thing to read him that book, two others he left here last time he was here, and one story I wrote him myself.  I am working on another one right now about a family of bees, which is why I am at this library computer ( I have again lost internet access at the house again), to do a little research.

 Well, my back is killing me and I need to go get horizontal.  More later when I can get back over here….

I have Jenna on the phone right now, and she is doing well. She is talking to a rehabilitation counsellor in an informal chat outside as she has her cigarette. I am having her check her own rehab “session” appointments and take responsibility for her own scheldule, to try to get that 50% attendance record up, WAY up. She has also given me a shopping list of some stuff she wants me to get her, just some bath items, and with Casey’s gift, I can! Thanks again, man!

Jenna just told me that she is very proud of me (awwww!!) and is glad I am sticking around.  Me, too, Jenna (the sticking around part).   She also says things like she is glad that the accident happened, that she prayed for something like this to happen, to “knock her the f*** out.”  There is a kind of innocence there (of what she has truly lost) but also a rememberance of the way her bipolar condition used to plague her moods and cause her so much angst and pain before the accident.  The difference is that before the accident the bipolar stuff was largely hidden, controlled.  Now it explodes onto the surface at the drop of a hat, although that too is also much improved now that she is on all the medications she is on now (zyprexa, elavil, lithium, ritalin, and Im probably leaving some out).  The brain injury combined with the bipolar is truly a double-damned situation and I am so grateful we finally found the meds to control it.  Now we just need to get her better and truly get her her life back, as much as is possible anyway…

First, thank you from the bottom of my heart to those who actually follow this story and give a poop about the trials and tribulations of my little wounded family. I know of at least a few of you still out there!!

I am *still* stuck here in Alabama. For some reason I sent my father home before the project was finished, something I am regretting doing now. The reasons for doing so are complicated, but suffice it to say, he needed to get back to California to get back to his regular doctors’ appointments, and I was getting a little tired of having him here. I wont go into the details, much of which are kind of stupid (a specialty of mine) in retrospect, but I thought I could send him home and then finish the last details here on my own.

Unfortunately, I threw my back out shortly after he left, and I developed a seperate issue in my upper leg/ass area with my sciatic nerve and piriformis muscle battling each other with my ability to move around the main casualty. That and fairly severe depression/thoughts of suicide have kept me largely immobile the last couple of months.

It must strike the casual reader as awfully selfish to think of killing myself, but for a while I was thinking that would be the greatest gift I could give everyone around me. As I said, I am at times rather stupid, and combined with the irrationality of depression, it all made sense at the time. I know Cooper needs me, as does Jenna, as does my wonderful Mom, among others, but the mind is sometimes a confusing place to live.

The week before last, I missed Cooper’s preschool graduation ceremony up in Indiana, and that fact was both a terrible blow (reminding me that I have now missed roughly 30% of his earthly existence so far due to sending him to Indiana when I had Jenna in California, and now the past year (!!!) here in Hellabama) and a huge kick in the ass as far as getting things wrapped up here finally.

Jenna for her part is doing well, considering. She is on a new medication, Ritalin, to help her with her moods and energy levels. I asked them about putting her on Ritalin a few months back due to her complaining on the phone to me in a desperate-sounding plea for coffee. She kept telling me “I need it for my mood” and “it calms me down!” which is what made me think of Ritalin. They give Ritalin to little kids all the time to help them calm down, so I figured that they could try it on Jenna for the same reason. Which they finally did. She has only been on it since last Thursday, but every time I talk to her since, she sounds upbeat and happy, and reportedly craves less coffee. We will see if it lasts. In other words, whether she develops a tolerance to it or something along those lines.

I talked with her case manager on Friday for about an hour and a half, and we talked about her possible outcomes, none of which include a 100% recovery. That dream is dead, I hate to admit. All the manic God and healing talk, I see now, was very naive of me. But at least I gave it a shot. Maybe I didn’t do everything right, but in the darkest of the dark days it helped me get through the worst of it, and gave me the ability to do everything I did do. I believed in Jenna’s God because it was Jenna’s life on the line. It was kind of a borrowed faith, if you will.

Back to the outcomes things, we are talking about Jenna staying in the Carbondale facility on a long-term basis, at least for a while. It is a sort of graduation from the active program that she is in now, meaning that she wont be in the active recovery phase of treatment anymore. It is an assisted living arrangement where she would still be going to therapy but not as much as she is (supposed to be) going now. I say supposed to be because I learned that she has only been attending 50% of her sessions, which is unacceptable to me. Hopefully with her being on the new medication she will feel up for more actively participating in her own recovery. Her case manager went with her to the doctor’s appintment and when Jenna was asked what could be done for her, she replied that she wanted something to make her feel “more normal, not just like a bump on a log.”

I made it very clear to her case manager that I want Jenna to be given every opportunity to stay in the active program and get better before she is “graduated” out into the assisted living situation. Whether it is the Ritalin or something else, until she is able to go to more than 50% of her sessions, I don’t see how anyone can say we really tried to get her better there.

I had extremely high hopes for her stay at this facility, and I am reminded constantly that it is the “best in the country” for this type of injury, but if this is the best our country has to offer, we have a lot of work left to do. I wonder about that flood of TBI patients coming back from Iraq. Where do they end up? I guess in VA facilities that Jenna would never have access to. I dont know if that is a good or bad thing. With VA facilities in the news and not for good reasons, probably a good thing.

Whenever I get down on the whole faith, God, 100% recovery hopes, etc., I have to remember how far Jenna has come. From that neurosurgeon telling me “Its like a forest has been mowed down by bulldozers, we have to wait and see how many trees will grow back,” to now, I still have to be grateful she has come back at all. Remember she was hit in the side of the head by a 4,000 lb. truck doing 65 MPH, so it is fairly miraculous that she survived at all. Even if she never returns to 100% like her former self, can I really call that failure? She is still with us, and still has her punk-rock personality, knows and is very proud of who Cooper is, and, I am determined, will someday return to us and be Cooper’s mom again. And not just on paper, I’m talking about that apron-strings relationship that right now she and he are both missing out on. That is the deepest wound for me, that loss of the mother-son relationship. I have to be grateful for Jenna’s mom taking on that role, but at the same time it embitters and depresses me each and every day that Jenna is not able to take on that role herself. I think that once that is achieved, we can really talk about a 100% recovery.