The Best of Sundays

It wasn’t the best of Sundays.

Sundays are never terribly good for me. The religious trauma is very bad on Sundays. But this Sunday, I was sick.

Adrienne has brought home a series of nasty head colds from middle school, each a little worse than the last, and I keep catching them. I’d been sick with the last one for most of October– and on top of it, I’m still not sleeping well. Adrienne still prefers to get herself ready and take the bus to school with her friends in the morning, but half the time I still sit bolt upright when her alarm goes off at five-thirty and can’t go back to sleep or take a nap later. My brain never likes to go to bed until after one in the morning, so the results are not good.

PCOS causes fatigue, and my fatigue used to be severe. With a great deal of hard work, I’ve been able to combat the fatigue and stay relatively healthy for about three years now, but a tendency toward fatigue on top of insomnia and a head cold have left me wrecked. I feel tired all the time, as if I’m always about to drift off but I never really do. This is frightening, because before I was properly diagnosed, I suffered with fatigue for over ten years. My life was irrevocably changed when I had such a prolonged flare of a chronic illness I didn’t know I had, in Steubenville among the Charismatics. The sensation of fatigue washing over me is triggering. It makes me feel like I’m going to be trapped again.

The end of Daylight Savings further destroyed my circadian rhythms. I sat bolt upright at dawn on Sunday, panicking that Adrienne would be late for school, and was completely unable to fall back asleep. When I gave up and went downstairs for coffee, my brain was certain it must be nearly noon– but the oven and microwave clocks said it was seven in the morning, and my phone insisted it was really six.

Coffee brought a rush of energy and hope.  I knew that it would be intensely awkward to go to Mass and listen to a homily in Steubenville, the Sunday before a pivotal Ohio election, when I was already feeling so off. My panic attacks don’t do well at Steubenville Masses as it is. But I’ve been doing better if I can go worship far away from home. Why not a trip to Pittsburgh? If we left at eleven, we could go to the noonday Mass at the beautiful cathedral and see the museum for an hour afterward with my membership. Parking is free on a Sunday, after all; we could leave Serendipity near the cathedral. That would be a nearly free trip, which is good since there were only about ten dollars in the checking account.  Driving doesn’t usually trigger my fatigue, and that itinerary would only involve a small amount of walking around and talking to people. I thought I could handle it. At just eleven O’clock, Adrienne and I hit the road.

Everything went fine until we actually got to Pittsburgh.

How many times have I tried to tell you about how much I love Pittsburgh?

Pittsburgh is the most gorgeous city I’ve ever visited, but it’s also impossible to drive in. I’ve figured out how to get from my house in Steubenville to the Oakland district, which is where the Carnegie museums of art and natural history are, as well as Saint Paul’s Cathedral. All you have to do to get there is stay in the far right lane all the way through the tunnel and across the bridge, then down 376 past the Post-Gazette building over that stretch that makes your car feel like it’s bouncing, then take the Forbes Avenue exit and just keep driving until you pass that building from The Mothman Prophecies. That part was easy. What I didn’t factor in was that everyone else in the tri-state area had also decided to go to Oakland on a Sunday. There were no parking spaces anywhere near the cathedral. We got to the right place ten minutes before Mass began, but we circled the great Gothic structure and zigzagged around the one-way streets for twenty minutes before giving up. I had to park in the Carnegie museum garage, which cost most of our money.

“It’s okay,” I told Adrienne. “There’s a Mass at the Oratory just a little past the cathedral, at four. We just have to stay in the museum for four hours.”

Even as I said it, I balked.

How was I going to walk around anywhere, even a place as pleasant as the Carnegie museum, for four hours when I was this tired? I’d planned on a visit of about two hours, half of it sitting on a bench.

I ended up spending the last of our money on a coffee to keep me upright, and a hot chocolate for Adrienne.

People with chronic illness know that caffeine is medicine. It’s not something you should mess around with indiscriminately. You have to administer it at the exact right time to get the desired effect of a clear head and a few hours of normalcy. If you take too much of it or take it at the wrong time, it can backfire spectacularly. There’s only a certain amount of energy in a chronically ill person’s budget, and borrowing more with caffeine charges you a great deal of interest. Twelve-fifteen wasn’t my usual time for a second cup of coffee. I hoped my fatigue would not demand to be paid back before night.

We admired the dinosaurs and the taxidermy beasts, and wandered around a gallery displaying different kinds of furnishings and appliances from different eras in history. I showed Adrienne the boxy 1986 Macintosh computer, and tried to explain what it was like when it took a computer about ten minutes just to turn on.

We were halfway through the art galleries when things began to get impossible.

“Just two more hours until we can go to Mass and go home,” I muttered as I sat on a bench to catch my breath, in front of a Degas painting of zinnias.

It crept up on me again a moment later, while looking at a Van Gogh composition, but I tried to ignore it.

It was in a gallery of strange modern art that I got so sick my eyes lost focus. I darted through a curtained doorway into a tiny theater to sit down again.

The theater was showing rare experimental footage of a nuclear bomb test.

My veteran readers might remember that I’ve got a terrible phobia of nuclear war. I can’t watch horror films about it and I don’t even like to look at mushroom clouds. When I saw the black and white video of the great column of smoke,  I was afraid I’d have a panic attack, but I didn’t. I was too exhausted to panic. My body tried to give me an adrenaline rush and only ended up becoming alert again. I had a little bit of energy now, and I might get us out of this mess if I used it wisely.

“Adrienne, we’ve got to go home. I can’t stay standing any longer. I’ll take you to the 5:30 Mass in Steubenville after all.”

Adrienne was agreeable, so we went to the car.

The way back to Steubenville from Pittsburgh is a little trickier than the way into town. You can’t just go back the way you came because whatever sadist designed Forbes Avenue decided that it should be a one-way street for most of its length. You have to zigzag a bit, and get back on the freeway in a left turn which makes me think I’ve gotten onto an off-ramp and am about to be flattened by a semi truck no matter how many times I take it. Then back on 376 where there’s a certain pair of lanes that take you back to the bridge– the others go to different bridges, and then you might never make it home again. Mercifully, the exhaustion held off until I was halfway home. I got off the freeway and parked in a Sheetz somewhere in Robinson as it crashed over me once more.

There was nothing else to do but to overdraw the checking account by about twenty dollars, and to overdraw my chronic illness energy budget by a fortune I will be repaying for days. I swiped the debit card for a meal for both of us, and a THIRD coffee only two hours after the last. That got us back to Steubenville.

I parked.

I said “hello” to Rhonda the hen.

I threw some lettuce at Lady Mcfluff the guinea pig.

I collapsed into bed, with my brain making noises like a 1986 Macintosh computer.

As soon as my head hit the pillow, I realized that I was not getting behind the wheel again for 5:30 Mass.

I cringed as I had from the video of the nuclear bomb. I braced myself for that rush of agonizing panic, the way I used to panic even as recently as last spring, but it didn’t come. I thought I should be terrified. I was told again and again growing up that it’s a mortal sin to miss Mass, and you aren’t allowed to do anything fun on a Sunday if you’re not going to Mass. I used to force myself to sit through Mass even when my religious trauma made it completely unbearable or my fatigue meant I couldn’t sit upright on the bench– not to praise a good God, but out of terror that a vindictive god would smack me if I didn’t attend his party. Now here I’d spent the whole day in Pittsburgh doing silly things, meaning to go to Mass and missing it twice, and I couldn’t move. But I wasn’t afraid.

I realized that part of me has finally accepted what I have professed for the past year or so: no god is worth my time except a God of Love.

A god who would damn me for missing Mass is not a god worth my time. I’m bigger than that god. I can’t worship something so ridiculously childish.

A God of Love would be thrilled that I tried, and sorry I went to all that trouble for God’s sake while sick, and happy to meet me right where I was if I couldn’t make another trip out.

And then I realized that I really do believe in a God of Love.

And the God of Love was with me just then– there, in the dilapidated rental house, in Steubenville where everything has gone wrong. There was God. There was perfect Justice and also limitless Compassion, and a Father overjoyed that His ridiculous child had tried to do something to make Him happy even though it had all gone wrong.

Maybe it was the best of Sundays after all.