This past summer and early fall has been one for the books, that’s for sure. John and I did our own personal version of Love It or List It. We decided to update our house top to bottom and bring it from 1993 to 2017. The idea was either we would love the house and stay here or downsize and build an executive ranch in a different part of town.
This required moving our entire two-story home into our basement where we dwelt from Memorial Day weekend until Labor Day weekend. Overall the project went very well, there were delays here and there and some contractor issues, but as the general contractor I had most things moving along as they should.
The goal was to have a Pinterest-worthy modern country industrial farmhouse when we were done. It took a ton of research, shopping online and in local retail stores, pouring over Pinterest pages, consulting with numerous folks in the industry, and a boatload of hands-on work but in end everything turned out even better than we could have imagined.
We ended up coming in under budget and under the original timeframe. Just kidding! Like every project on every HGTV home-improvement show, we came in over budget (about double what we estimated) and weeks later than we anticipated.
Our summer was spent working every day at our jobs — since I’m self-employed that meant being holed up in the basement day in and day out. BTW, how was the weather this summer? All I could see of the outside was our window wells and some grass. Every night we were either working on projects in the house or yard, or at one of the local hardware stores buying or returning things. (Here’s a shout out to the crew at Menard’s, we were there an average of once a day.)
To make it even more interesting, I took on two substantial copy editing jobs early in the summer. So, in addition to writing for two newspapers, educating folks about Kangen water at various events, a big R&D project, attending the CMN convention in Chicago, and taking care of our grandson as needed, I copy edited a business book (with a 48-hour deadline) that has since gone on to be a best seller (check out Why They Buy — it’s a fantastic book for anyone in sales, and really, who isn’t in sales?), and I took on the job of script supervisor for a $40 million movie that is being shot this fall.
I was managing to keep all the balls in the air until I got blindsided. My mom had the misfortune of having her colon rupture which required emergency surgery. At 80 years old, she’s one tough cookie. She made it through surgery, spent 10 days in the hospital, then 30 days in post-acute care. Physically she recovered well, but she went into a state of confusion that worsened as the weeks went by.
While I thought I’d spend a couple nights with her after she was released until she got acclimated to being on her own again it turned out to be a 24/7 job with me taking care of all of her personal and medical needs. I had to learn on the spot such things as how to replace an ostomy bag and how to dress an abdominal wound.
Two-and-a-half weeks into that I was physically and mentally exhausted. I took my mom back to the ER and she was admitted to the hospital where she spent 10 days undergoing every test in the books to try to figure out what caused the confusion and memory loss. Nothing conclusive was found so it was back to a rehabilitation facility. She’s been there a week now and some days we see glimpses of the real mom and other days are pretty discouraging.
My friend sent me a text today that said, “You know the Lord has all the authority, He’s the one in control. Take your hands off it and let Him take care of her. It’s not your will what’s to be done but His. Sometimes we tend to get too much in the way and try to make things our way, not His. It’s hard when we’re used to controlling things and making sure everything is in order. But life is much easier when you take the control off of things.”
Like everything that happens in life, there’s a lesson to be learned from this. Maybe that’s it.
Amanda, I can so relate to this post! Your beautiful mother is in my prayers!