Back to my mid-August panic at the impending doom of September. Summer = smooth sailing. Weekends are spent swimming, playing outside, (or, more likely, basking in the frozen breeze of AC), and generally enjoying a laid back pace of life. Even the foods of Summer are better - think about it, grilled meats, juicy fruits, corn on the cob. What's better than corn on the cob? Nothing! So, I'm not totally neurotic for wanting to freeze time and enjoy Summer for as long as possible.
I digress. September has historically sucked, dating back to, like, 2003. My sophomore year of college, my parents separated because my step-dad sucked at hiding his progressing alcoholism. Then my sister went through a pretty dark period, and the curse officially started. I bet there's a giant book of Curses somewhere, and there's one for my family that dictates that each September we are all to be dealt with life-altering, gut-wrenching obstacles to overcome. So, sophomore year, the curse began, and I was affected, but able to stay distant enough from the problems at home by devoting my entire life to my sorority, school, and booze. The curse didn't really hit me too hard that year. In fact, I think the curse may have even subsided for the next couple years. But then, I graduated college and moved back to Delaware, where the curse's power is strongest.
The Summer after college, I moved back to Wilmington and started getting chronic, painful sinus infections. By the time September rolled around, I was suffering to the point that my ENT determined I needed a surgery that would involve removing a large part of my sinuses (which were 90% congested), and likened the procedure to cleaning out a honeycomb. He also put the kibash on my planned vacation to Peaks Island, and deemed me as not healthy enough to travel to a land covered in trees. [Side note: I didn't know at the time, but that was my last opportunity to ever go to Peaks again. Looking back, this makes me sad.] So, not only did I cancel my vacay, but I had to take a two-week leave of absence from a job I'd only been working at for three months. Needless to say, it was an unpaid leave. But that was painless when compared to the recovery from the actual surgery. I should have known the curse was back in full effect when I woke up in the recovery room feeling like I'd been hit in the face with a 2x4 and promptly vomited up a healthy (or unhealthy?) amount of blood. Those two weeks off work are pretty foggy in my memory, probably because I spent most days counting down the hours til my next dose of Percocet. Sinus surgery sucks.
Fast forward to September 2007. I still hadn't realized that this month is cursed, and therefore don't really remember any sense of impending doom towards the end of Summer. I do, however, remember feeling angry all the time, mostly because of the time capsule that had been slowly leaking its contents of memories into my consciousness for the past year or so. By September, my anger towards my step-dad had grown so obvious that it could no longer be attributed to his treatment of my mom or blamed on unresolved issues relating to his alcoholism. So one September day, my sister was at my apartment, and my step-dad became a topic of conversation. I don't remember details, only that my sister asked me, point blank, why I was so angry at him. My answer to her question changed our lives forever. My sister has not spoken to her father since. Mark moved out of our house that same day. My mom filed for divorce. Large amounts of money were moved into accounts that were never identified or accessible to my mom. I began a long journey of therapy, that I am still on today because any sighting of a person resembling my stepfather triggers a panic attack. I think you get the idea, September had finally cemented itself in my life as a cursed month, to be dreaded before its first day and celebrated after its last.
All I remember from the entire Fall of 2008 was that I slept a lot, gained a lot of weight, skipped a lot of showers and was reeaaalllyyyy depressed. We'll blame this on the curse.
September 2009 wasn't devastating in the sense that anything happened to completely shatter my world. However, my wedding was set to take place on September 27, and as of September 24 (give or take a day), the money that was to be used to pay for said wedding was still tied up in settlement negotiations that my stepfather had dragged out for two years. The entire month was rife with setbacks, negotiations with attorneys, and nail-biting. Finally, two days before my wedding, the money was released and I was able to breathe easy and write checks to all the vendors (who did amazing work to create a beautiful wedding).
2011 was the year the curse shifted its focus to my beautiful daughter. My poor daughter had suffered through months of respiratory and GI issues, along with a string of ear infections that culminated in two surgeries in, you guessed it, September (technically, the second surgery was the first week in October, but for the sake of this post, we're putting it under the umbrella of the September curse). The worst part of the endless testing and ever-changing diagnoses was not knowing what was wrong with my child. My marriage suffered, my faith faltered, my nerves were completely shot, and I sank into the now-annual September depression. This was our darkest time as a family, as we faced the potentially fatal diagnosis of cystic fibrosis (which wasn't in September, but see above reference to 'umbrella'), to the manageable prospect of mere constipation.
By the Summer of 2012, I was no longer naive to the Curse's impending doom. I thought, "I'm going to get in front of this train, and prevent the Curse from happening this year." I made an appointment with my therapist, to discuss my propensity to fall into a depression in September, and made a clear "action plan" of coping mechanisms to stave off the darkness. But, alas, the Curse proved to be stronger than me, once again. We began the month trying to overcome the setback of two months of unexpected, very expensive car repairs that really hurt us financially. Then, I was presented with a career opportunity that would seemed too good to be true, only to end in disappointment. My husband was also dealt with disappointment in his career. Then, we had a pretty ugly storm that caused a power line to fall into some neighboring trees, and resulted in my yard being covered by Asplundh in downed tree parts that, to date, has not been removed. Then, Belle developed a cough. It started innocently, more annoying than dangerous. Until last night, when we rushed her to the emergency room because her body shut down because she was struggling so hard to breathe. The nurse who took her vitals was so alarmed at the lack of air in her lungs that he had Belle set up on a nebulizer in the coffee room of the E.R., because her condition was emergent enough that we couldn't wait for an available room.
I feel so discouraged. I keep praying, and telling myself that there is no such thing as a "September Curse," and attempting to rely on God to lift the darkness from my heart. I keep trying to be mindful of the great things in my life, the love of family, the community and friendship of my CCW family, the roof over my head, and so on. I keep thinking that, even though there's no money in the bank, and Eric and I can't even exchange gifts on our anniversary, that God's plan is in action. God provides. It's really hard to stay so positive when your child is suffering, though. It's really hard to keep getting slammed with the "hard stuff." So, today, as it stands right this second, September, I throw up my hands in defeat. Wake me up when you're over.
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