Sylvia's Journal

The day before departure is always a funky day. There is the desire to whittle down my to-do list so that I can leave with a near empty slate, knowing it will be full again when I get back. And then there is always that ambivalence: the part of me that wants to travel pushing and pulling the part that wants to stay home. And finally, in this particular case, there is the possibility that my passport will not arrive in time. I try to keep a zen stance about it all. Whatever happens is what is meant to happen and any outcome is good if I am willing to change my position. Because of the mess up with my visa application I ended up with the gift of today which was a really good thing, even though it gets me to arrive in Ghana a little later than I would have liked to.

It was a long and hot day with a thunderstorm brewing that never arrived. We are lucky to have the biggest self cleaning swimming pool in the world in our backyard. I went out for a long swim at the end of the day when my clothes were sticking to my skin. The swim, a reward in itself , was rewarded with a gin tonic consumed in my swing hammock while Axel and Sita prepared dinner. The suitcase is nearly packed and except for a few things (that passport among others) I am ready to go.

After dinner we had our long postponed family meeting, ordered by various therapists. The intent was to get everyone to understand that Axel’s brain needs to heal and he needs all the attention he can give to the exercises and therapies that are focusing on this one task. As part of his homework Axel and Joe had worked on getting all his worries and to-do lists that he carries in his head on yellow stickies and arranged according to high or low urgency and high or low importance. Sita and Tessa took over the sorting to keep Axel from putting everything into the high importance and high urgency quadrant.

We wanted to shift away from parents giving their kids chores to do and move back to the shared responsibility that was so present 11 months ago but had slipped away. Now that Sita and Jim are moving out, and Tessa and Steve moving in, the household help that is to relieve Axel will have to come from those currently not gainfully employed and eventually shared by the three of us until Axel
can manage to deal with more than 5 tasks at a time again. The doctors say this capacity will return but for now this executive function of his is not fully recovered. Regaining Axel’s full health and full capacity deserves our full attention as a family and so everyone, including Jim and Steve rallied around him. The meeting was recorded and scribed, of course, mostly because Sita cannot help herself