Reeve Foundation Paralysis Community

Dan,

 

Your incident of peeing your shoe cracked me up.  Believe me if I had been there, it surely would have sent me into a frenzy but since it was you, I found myself a little cracked-up.  By the way, my husband has peed his shoe many a time too, but typically I can only blame myself because I have left the leg bag improperly secured.

 

Sometimes I crack myself up feeling like what I call a poser.  Poser, meaning posing like a normal person; posing like a normal wife and mother.  I remember one day when I stepped out of bed and slipped and fell on 2L of my husband’s urine that had drained on the floor all night.  My jammies are soaked in pee, and I have a big clean up on my hands.  However, I manage the clean up of both the floor and myself and even make it to work on time. 

 

I have also gone to work when just a mere hour before I was cleaning up a code brown in my husband’s bed.  Or literally I have been on my way out the door and given my husband a quad cough only to have him cough up a big lougie into my hair.

 

I arrive at work thinking if these people only knew what I had been doing this morning.  I wonder what my work colleagues would think of me if they knew I had rolled around it in husband’s urine just an hour ago.  Work is where I feel the most normal.  Most people have no idea of our circumstances.  I never talk about it; only if someone approaches me and specifically asks something.  I have a couple of very good friends at work that I have known for over 15 years, and they hear all the stories.  But they are the only ones that have any idea. 

 

After a disastrous SCI morning, I plop down in my desk chair at work and almost snicker out loud.  If people only knew.  I can only think, OMG I’m posing like a normal person and nobody realizes it.

 

Is it normal to pretend to be normal?  Shoot, maybe I am normal and just don’t know it.  Maybe some of the people I work with are posers too.  Maybe nobody is really normal.  I dream of being just normal again and not a poser.

---

Trish

"Life isn't about waiting for the storm to pass...it's learning to dance in the rain."

Trish,
your mind is an ongoing source of delight and I thank you for introducing us all to it.  As a psychotherapist, I see the foibles and vulnerabilities of everyone I treat -- mostly people in the Delaware Valley.  And because my office is just a regular shrink office in the community, I see regular people like you and me rather than people with severe mental illness.  So I know a bit about people like you and me and how we all look on the inside versus how we look on the outside.
When I go to synagogue on the high holidays, we have a large choir of about 60 people all dressed in white robes singing beautifully looking like angels.  But I know, angelic voices is one part and underneath the angelic exterior might be extramarital affairs, compulsive spending, overwhelming insecurity, struggles with children -- the normal human stuff.

When I was in Taiwan I did a reading in front of about a hundred people and then we had a long and wide ranging discussion.  Halfway around the world, their stuff is the same as our stuff.  Holding on to resentment from an ugly divorce, coping with anxieties or wayward children or demanding parents -- stuff.
Very few people swim in urine before they go to work, I'll grant you that.  But almost everyone goes to work with secrets.  And that's normal.

And the fact that I am calling you normal it is not a compliment. Sorry.

---

Dan Gottlieb Ph.D.
www.DrDanGottlieb.com