A Week of Holding Things Together

I had plans for a different essay this week.

Something more polished. More shaped. More “I sat down with coffee and thought deeply about the meaning of things. Again.”

Instead, this week looked like my mother having brain surgery, me trying to stay present for the unknowns around that, and also trying to finish up my paint studio — which, like most things involving paint, dust, boxes, decisions, and emotional attachment, took more out of me than I expected.

So this is not the essay I planned.

It is the essay I actually have.

And maybe that matters more.

There are weeks where life gives you a clean house, a quiet room, and enough emotional bandwidth to make art about what happened.

And then there are weeks where you are inside the happening.

You are answering calls. Carrying things. Waiting for updates. Moving your body through errands and rooms and hospital thoughts. Looking at your unfinished studio and thinking, somehow, this also has to become a place where I can begin again.

That has been this week.

My mother’s surgery has pulled me into the kind of attention that does not announce itself as work, but absolutely is work.

The watching. The listening. The translating of medical language. The trying to understand what is being said, what is not being said, and what needs to be asked next.

In some ways, this has been going on since August 2025. Since then, I have been to more doctors with “neuro” in front of their titles than I can count.

But really, it has been going on since August of 2012, when my mother suffered a traumatic brain injury.

Caregiving has a way of bending time. A day can disappear into one phone call, one appointment, one decision, one worry you keep setting down and picking back up again.

And now, fourteen years later, she is finally having brain surgery.

To say I feel relieved is an understatement.

Relieved because there is finally a procedure, a plan, a possible shift.

Relieved because hope, even when it arrives late, is still hope.

And I am tired.

No, that is not the truth.

I am exhausted.

I am hoping this surgery gives her relief. I am hoping it gives me some too. Maybe not forever. Maybe not for the rest of her life. But maybe for the next ten years.

Maybe enough time to stop living in constant response.

Maybe enough time to breathe.

I’m sharing a little more from the middle of it: the studio, the work injury, the strange act of preparing for a creative life I can’t fully return to yet, and what I am doing to keep from disappearing while I wait (for paid subscribers).