Remote Control

There is so much going on. My daughter left on Monday for Italy, my niece left this morning to visit her BF in Buffalo, then home to Jamaica, and my son is working his camp counselor job on a beautiful lake in the Connecticut woods, so it's just my honey and me, totally unsupervised! Woo-hoo!

But who am I kidding? I miss them all terribly, and haven't been able to speak to my daughter since she left, though we did get the "your child's group arrived safely" email. And my girl did call home yesterday at 11 p.m. Roman time, but it was just 5 p.m. in New York and I was still at work. She spoke to her dad. I was so jealous. I just called her hotel but her group was out to dinner. Once I speak with her myself, I think I'll be okay—as in, I'll be more ready to allow her to choose when to be in touch with us, and more ready to kick up my own heels and enjoy our couple time stateside.

In the meantime, I am forced to grasp the reality that I have absolutely no control over most of what I want to control, and I have to make peace with that. The intensity with which this truth is coming home to me feels piercing.

In other news, my cousin Pearl (not her real name) has agreed to go to rehab. After many, many phone calls to places that wouldn't take her insurance, we found a residential facility in upstate New York that happens to have been founded by a woman who is the namesake of her mother. They won't have an available bed until July 6 though. To complicate things, my aunt is being released from the hospital tomorrow, so my cousin will have to stay in a hotel until next Tuesday when she's supposed to meet the van that will drive her upstate. I can just imagine all the abusing of substances and selves that will take place in that hotel room for the next 5 days. The man who treats her so cruelly will undoubtedly hole up in the room with her, and I worry whether she will actually honor her word and take that bus to rehab. I know the man will be doing a number on her head, because he does not want her to get sober. She is his meal ticket, his source of money and drugs, so he will do his best to convince her not to go.

But if she doesn't go, she won't be able to come back to my aunt's house. Her brother, who put up his credit card for the hotel and has agreed to drive her there, plans to change the locks on the doors after she leaves. Because the emergency room doctor made an elder abuse report against her, by law my cousin is no longer allowed to live in my aunt's house, the place she came home to when she was born. That's why I pray she makes it to rehab. It's her best hope of setting up her living situation—more than that, her life—anew.