I Blame Hollywood, or Maybe June Cleaver!

I was 44 years old, having taken my three year old and living with my parents for what I assumed would be a short two-week visit (which turned into two months). I had just been diagnosed with a mysterious illness called, Lyme disease. Having abandoning my husband and five older children, leaving them to fend for themselves, I sought refuge in my mother’s caring arms. Surely with two weeks of loving care, I would be back to driving carpools and cooking meals in my self-imposed career called, motherhood.

That morning my father came into my room to chat, he himself miserable with shingles and the aches and pains of old age. “Linda, do you know why they call old age the Golden Years?" I replied, “No Dad, why?” “Because the doctors get all the gold,” he laughed, scratching his itchy shingles rash. He had only been to but a few doctors in his life, yet it was funny all the same. Little did I realize how true of a statement it would become in the following 13 years as I have battled my disease. It was 1996 and I had been searching for answers to my unexplained symptoms for a year. I lived in Utah, where no one tested for Lyme disease at the time. “Lyme disease?” I’d said, to the Nevada doctor in the clinic where I was finally diagnosed. “What’s that? Do you get it from eating limes?”

As I begin writing this first entry in my new online blog, I smile at the irony of it all, having told my mostly grown children, “Why would anyone want to write a public journal?” I wonder if I will tell them about it or if it will be one of those dark, hidden family secrets, the kind that are eventually revealed when you are standing in line at the supermarket, only to realize your life has suddenly been exposed, openly displayed on the front page of a trashy tabloid newspaper. Ah, the justification of it all! It would serve my children right and give them additional material to complain to Oprah about, telling her how their formerly sane mother cracked under pressure, becoming “crazy mom!”

How did I get here? Why did I choose this crazy life of mothering helpless creatures, loving, nurturing, caring, knowing they will eventually come to a point in their lives where they blame me for everything gone wrong, as I did my mother. The mother-daughter bond is a love-hate relationship, one we’re never entirely able to break away from, even if we wanted to. I blame Hollywood really, or maybe June Cleaver! The movies fill our heads with romantic ideas of motherhood and June certainly didn’t help out either in her 1950’s Television sitcom, "Leave It to Beaver." June served three nutritiously prepared meals everyday, displayed on perfectly set tables with china and crystal goblets. She was greeted each morning by her well-dressed husband, eager to go to work and be the bread winner and her two shiny faced, clean cut boys, handsomely dressed and ready to begin their school day. Oh that Beaver, now he was a rascal, sometimes having dirt under his fingernails, but not June. She cooked breakfast immaculately dressed with wrinkle free, pressed, tightly wasted dresses, salon hairdo, and pearl necklace displayed neatly around her neck. I don’t know how she managed, as I think of my sleepy-eyed, nightgown attire in my years of young motherhood, yawning as I put cheerios on the table, wondering if I’d get a chance to shower that day. June wore this same outfit when cleaning walls and vacuuming her home, never breaking a sweat or mussing her hair! Oh wait, I don’t think her home ever needed heavy cleaning, it was dirt free and magically self-cleaning somehow!

So here I am today, in the middle years after raising most of my children, rapidly approaching my mature years (old age). I am wife, mother of six, grandmother to eight and counting (hopefully), living my life with Lyme disease. It’s not who I am nor does it define me, as I think of those whose voices have lowered with sadness when asking my family how I’m doing, as if my situation is tragic beyond belief. My disease has marched on as my husband and I have attended high school and college graduations, given four wedding receptions as our children found love and married, and as we have held each new grandchild for the first time. It’s true that this disease has been expensive and the medical professionals get all our gold, but my life is golden, nonetheless!