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Three surgeries in three months really will knock the wind right out of your sails. This last operation, the smallest and possibly the most insignificant of the whole bunch o' crap that's been done to my face, has knocked the nimbostratus right into me and knocked the high flying and kind of whimsical cirrus unicus right out of me. Pain? Has been non existent. The itching though, my god. My eyes swelled up to gargantuan proportions on Tuesday, and hung around to send me mad crazy with a hunk o' burning itch on Wednesday, and I ended up spending sixty bucks on eye drops and anti histamines and all manner of anti itch creams (including vagisil. Not for my undercarriage, mind, but when I had chicken pox a few years back, vagisil was the ONLY thing that stopped the itching, so I put it on all over my chicken pocked self and felt no itching WHATSOEVER. You can imagine the pharmacists face though, when I walked in and asked for a crate of the stuff. Ha HA! So yes, I bought a tube of it last night, along with the eye drops, the antihistamine tablets and the other tube of no itch cream, and smeared it all over my eyelids-and it worked! My eyes were a lot better from then on, weee!) after the itching and burning on my eyelids became so unbearable I thought I was going to go crazy. Mum had called to say she couldn't pick Daniel up from childcare (I'll get to that later) , and maybe it was the physical stress of getting up and dressed and out and about, but minutes after getting in the car to collect him, my eyelids went nuts and burned like I never would have thought possible. One of his carers brought him out to so that I wouldn't have to face anyone while looking like this (I honestly looked appalling)(still do, come to think of it. Now I look like an appalling me though, when earlier I was unrecognisable appalling) and then *bam* I hightailed it straight to a pharmacy I've never been to before because Mr Sociable (currently in the other room and NOT sleeping, gah, for about thirty seconds because you all KNOW I'm not a cry-it-out advocate, but thirty seconds of waaah? God, save me. Or give me five minutes without either a short guy hanging off my leg and begging for more or five minutes sans the wah. One or the other, PLEASE...oh....wait...wait for it...yes....a snore! Cool. Hallelujah and thank you baby jesus) got his talent for witty repartee from his ma, and had I gone anywhere else, the staff would know me well enough to engage in a conversation beginning with OHMYGODWHATHAPPENED?! and I just wasn't up for it, what with being distracted with wanting to rip out my eyeballs and all...where was I? Oh, at the unknown pharmacy, where I begged the guy behind the counter to do SOMETHING. It's a quiet, dingy store with way over inflated prices, ostensibly to make up for the absolutely zero customers they get in a year, please see above reference to "dingy", so a) after an extended time with no human contact, dude was excited to finally have some damn company, and b) thrilled to make a sale. I'm sure too, that my palpable desperation told him that had he said "that'll be five thousand dollars, ma'am", I'd have thrown him my visa card and yelled "Charge it!". Man, it was THAT bad. And normal, according to message relayed to the nurse co-ordinator (I ended up seeing at the hospital after the pharmacist suggested I mihgt be having an allergic reaction to the dressings), who mostly stared slack jawed at my amazing kaleidescope of colour and swelling in between giving the prof a detailed description of said over the phone. His verdict was reassuring, if not more than a little annoying as I'd called his rooms earlier that day to ask about the eye bizzo, prefacing it with "I reckon it's the swelling doing it but..." and his nurse said "Oh dear. I've never heard of itching being a problem". Which was great. Had she said what the prof relayed, which was, "It's very common and due to the swelling. It's nothing to worry about" - WHICH IS WHAT I SUGGESTED IT MIGHT BE IN THE FIRST PLACE - I wouldn't have stuffed around all night getting it checked out. Criminy.

I guess this case of flattusapancakitis is also due to the emotional load I inevitably carry around when mum is in town. Which she generally is. Out of the three surgeries though, this is the one mum has been around for most: not at all for the first, found out about it three days later for the second, and here the entire fucking time for the third, and being here, it was planned that she'd take care of Daniel, and according to her, me, for the duration. Not my choice, mind, firstly because had she actually looked after me, hell must have frozen over and secondly because I'd have preferred to chuck Daniel in child care on the Monday and possibly the Thursday in addition to his usual three days, and then thrown Daniel's previous sitter a hundred bucks for that night plus whatever extra to take him to childcare for the entire week. We'd organised it all a few weeks ago anyway, but when mum chimed in and offered, I thought I should do the right thing and shove my concerns aside and let her be Daniel's grandma, so gave Kay the flick. Man, I felt bad about that too. NO matter what I do, I feel I'm letting someone down. Wah, etc. Anyway, as it turned out, everything went wrong, which truth be told, is what I expected. At least this time around I didn't have stars in my eyes and hope in my heart when mum began acting like a mother and offered to help out her damn daughter. Yes, that IS my bitterness showing.

Bottom line is, she ended up doing one (one!) of the six road trips needed to get Daniel to and from childcare, and didn't help me AT ALL, either with Daniel, with the stupid work needed to get him fed, clothed, watered and cleaned, or with the damned housework. On the one single day she was here, she stood around gazing at Daniel while I cooked, cleaned and generally got in touch with my inner housewife. Yes, I could say something, but experience shows that I'd rather fester resentfully than deal with her inner petulant and defensive child.

Thing is, it's not all her. I...collude. I think that's an appropriate word, because I don't let the past go and I don't accept her for who she is, and I don't just roll my eyes and just get on with it when who she is clashes with who I demand she be. I get so pissed off that she thinks it's her right to be a part of Daniel's life. It isn't. It's a privilege, and one I give to her because I'm trying SO hard to put our history aside so that she and Daniel can create on of their own. Then I get so annoyed that she thinks she was (and is) Saint Mother and that her life sucked because of me.

I want to let go of the hurt, but I don't know how to get past being left to die. Mostly, I feel indignant, and the words "how could you?" swim through my head with boring regularity, but when she swans in acting like nothing ever happened, my anger rises and...bleah. How could she leave and how could she expect me to forget that? A father I can understand leaving a child more than I can a mother, and having become a mother myself I now judge my own a lot more harshly than I ever did. Could any of you? Could you leave your child behind to not just die, but to die alone? Or if you were the one left behind, could you accept that past, live in the present, and move into the future with the person who condemned you?

I know some people can, and I'd love to move on, but I'm not Oprah Winfrey and much as I want to let go, I don't. I'm hanging on to the anger and hurt and I don't know how to let go. Considering I'm hanging on so tightly, I don't think I want to.

Thing is, I don't think I'd know who I was if I did.