Handicapped?

I was only in a wheelchair for a (relatively) short time, but it felt like an eternity. I didn't have a mechanized wheelchair for fear that it would make me lazy, or I would stop trying to get better.

I've known several people who due to age or other factors, have no hope of improvement. I feel somewhat guilty now that I'm on the verge of walking unassisted, but I still have a long way to go.

The other day my next door neighbor mowed our lawn for us. We didn't ask him to, he just saw the lawn needed mowing and kept going. I appreciated it.

When my wife thanked him, he said he wasn't sure if he should have, but he noticed I had "a handicap of some sort."

My wife mentioned that I had a stroke and that up until then, I had mowed the lawn. I had also cooked, cleaned the house, washed the dishes, taken care of the laundry and half a dozen other things that likely contributed to me having a stroke.

Robin stepped up to the challenge and managed to take care of everything I used to do, handle the kids, work a full time job and somehow not crack. I'm very proud of her.

But, the point is, I don't even like her doing things for me, that's why I took on too much. Since my stroke she has had to help me in the bathroom, pick me up off the floor, and half a dozen other humiliating things that no wife should ever have to do for a husband.

Back when my right side was still completely paralyzed, I used to roll out of bed and be stuck in the floor. More than once Robin threw out her back trying to get me out of the floor.

I appreciate that.

I've known people who have had strokes and can't recover. I'm not sure why, physically, I had the stroke but I'm slowly coming back. I suppose if I'm forced to admit it, I am handicapped. I can think of things I still can't do for myself. So when I saw that New York is replacing their handicapped logos, I saw the new logo as inspiration.

It's a logo that implies trying. It's much less depressing than the old passive sitting in the chair-with-hands-folded logo.

Of Cabbages and Kings....

Kevin Smith tweeted that when he had the idea for Clerks 3, he woke up in the middle of the night, noticed the time was 4:20 in the morning, took it as a sign and went from there.

I just noticed that it was 4:11 in the morning, which is the number one dials for information, took it as a sign and started to write something.

I hope it's something informative, which is a bad segue, but if I stop now I won't finish, and writing is my central coping mechanism.

Lately I've been stressed, as stressed as I was before my stroke, which is worrisome because I'm on an antidepressant now and it shouldn't be possible for me to get depressed. The last time I was this depressed on my antidepressant, it scared me. I moved out of my parents' house, where I had moved with my family after my stroke.

Which wasn't a bad decision. Living with one's parents is never easy, plus just before I moved in I learned my father and mother had been lying to me about the biological parentage of my cousin, Michael. I needed space, before I snapped and said hateful things that I couldn't take back.

The situation in the last few weeks eerily resembles the time before I had my stroke. We're having money problems. A good friend of ours is having marital problems, so we don't see them as often as we used to, which leaves a big hole in our social calendar. Like last time they were our primary gaming partners and they had a young child, which is a serious situation when you have children and they notice the absence of this other child from their lives.

Also the one less child to buy a present for at Christmas becomes awkward.

But I'm meandering away from the subject, which (if there was a subject) would be that I am unduly stressed and worried about my health.

My chest has been sore for a week and I've been ignoring it, because Robin is stressed over work related issues and I don't want to cause her more stress. She's already told me that I'm not allowed to have a heart attack, and having watched how she coped with my stroke, I don't want to put her through that again.

Also like last time, my medical coverage is in limbo. My disability was recently cancelled and we got it reinstated, but they medical coverage runs out in July.

Which wouldn't matter, since I was about to go back to work and was about to get a driver's license, but I'm fairly certain that was tied to my being on SSI and since now I'm not (and since Robin hasn't mentioned it for a while and I never went to Lexington for my eye test) I'm pretty sure that dream evaporated.

Which causes even more stress.

Lastly and leastly, I said writing was my central coping mechanism, but in no way was it my only way to cope. I had comic books (which I haven't been able to pick up for three weeks because of our cash flow problem), cleaning (which Robin complains when I start to clean because she can't relax, regardless of the fact that I sit around and watch television all day while she drives across the state for her job), movies (Iron Man 3 has been out for two weekends and Star Trek 2 just came out, the last movie I saw at the theater was GI Joe Retaliation, and that was a once in the summer fluke) and laundry (which I can't easily carry since the stroke).

The Family Secret

When I was in the hospital, recovering from my stroke, my parents dropped a bombshell. My cousin Michael, was really my half-brother.

My mother gave birth to him before me, and my aunt and uncle adopted him straight out of the hospital and raised him as their own.

Suddenly, a lot of things from my childhood started to make more sense. My mother in tears because of a paper Mike had written when he was seven that said, I was adopted but that's okay because Superman was adopted, too, comes to mind.

After they told me this, I was still semi-verbal, but I had no "filter" on what I could say or not say. The very next time I was alone with Robin, I told her, "I have a brother."

"Yes you do," she explained. "John is your brother."

"No," I answered. "Michael is my brother."

"No, Michael is my brother," she said. "Your brother is John."

She has an older brother named Michael, too.

"No," I explained. "Michael is my half brother."

Again she responded that Michael was her half brother. Which he is. She does have a half brother named Michael that for various reasons we ignore, but somehow or another, and with much effort and comedic misunderstanding, I finally conveyed to her that my mother had another child, and that child was my cousin Michael.

"What I don't understand," she said, "is why they chose to tell you now?"

I don't know exactly, but over the next few weeks, my brain kept thinking about it. I'd wake up at three in the morning and tell Robin things like, "That's why Mike named his kids Holt!"

The next family dinner was awkward because I knew that Mike was my brother and he knew he was my brother but neither of us knew the other one knew that we knew.

I wrote in my blog about how awkward it was to know family secrets and not be able to say them out loud.

Mike's younger sister Kate emailed me, "Was that about Mike being adopted?" which sent me into a whole new frenzy of random thoughts. She had guessed it first thing, which I guess means either I wasn't being as vague as I thought or there aren't a whole lot of Holt family secrets. I'm assuming both.

Kate told Mike and she seemed horrified that John didn't know, so I told him. Neither of us told Elinor.

Kate said that Mike had been trying to get my mother to tell us for years, but that she wouldn't.

The first time Robin met Michael she told me, "You told me he was adopted, but you didn't tell me he was adopted from within the family."

This was years before I knew the truth, so this caught me off guard.

I'm pretty sure I said something along the lines of, "W-w-what?"

We decided he had been Aunt Carol's son, and that she had him out of wedlock.

The first time Glenna, John's wife met him, she told John he looked like Papa, our grandfather.

So now, Glenna, John, Robin, Kate, Michael and I all knew and it was starting to feel like a conspiracy. When we went to Berea to have pictures taken with the extended family my mother took us out to Cracker Barrel for lunch, had Robin take the kids to the car and gave the announcement that Mike was our brother. Robin, Glenna, John and I already knew this, so really Elinor the only person surprised.

She didn't take it well. Her boyfriend broke up with her after meeting another girl online and ahe posted, "Does anyone else have any secrets they want to dump on me?"

My mother was oblivious that one of those secrets was the news about Michael.

We moved in with my parents for the summer, because we had nowhere else to go. It was awkward. I couldn't trust them, and they couldn't figure out why not.

One day, when my mother, Robin and Christian were riding in the car together one day, and my mother and Robin were talking back and forth about "the situation" in veiled terms, after my mother left Robin asked Christian if he knew what they were talking about.

"Elinor is pregnant?" he guessed, so Robin had to include him in the conspiracy and now he knows.

John and I have bumped Noah and Calla up to full niece and nephew status as far as Christmas presents and birthdays go.

After Christmas, Mike and I had a brief conversation about it. We both acknowledged that he was my half brother and then I told him, "I was surprised to find out I had another brother, but I'm glad it was someone I knew my whole life."