Do you really want me to write today? Because I must warn you that my thoughts are a tangle. I am trying to gather them up and have them make some sort of sense, to put them in some sort of order, but they keep slipping through my mental fingers. Here are the threads I am dealing with:

• where to live in the short-term
• school for davey (and how that will influence where we live in the short-term)
• school for edward and all the stuff going on with him (which I will write about separately)

Again — again I say, it’s all up in the air. We are standing down here on Earth, mouths agape, watching the flying bits of our lives tumble in the air above us, wondering when, where and how they will come down.

Last night, Dex said to me that maybe, just maybe I have spent way too much time thinking about and researching and preparing for us to move. Five years isn’t too long, is it? Because that’s how long we’ve been talking about it, working toward it, been on the verge of making it happen.

And I thought about what he said. And I thought about all the hours — months worth it feels like — I put into researching North Carolina. How I can close my eyes and picture the whole Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill map with clarity. How I know the schools and the malls and the neighborhoods. And for what? We are not moving there. That plan evaporated a while ago. For the best, in the end, I suppose but what about all the time and effort I invested? Was it all a waste?

No.

Two things I know. One is that we very much intended to move there; it just didn’t work out. And all the research I did helped me crisply define what I believe we need and want, wherever we end up.

And two? Two is that all the time, all the research and planning and imagining has perhaps been the one thing that has given me any sense of control over the direction of our lives these past five years. In the past five years we have lived in a near-constant state of uncertainty. Would Davey live? Would he beat the pulmonary hypertension? Would he stay out of the hospital this winter? Would my mom beat the cancer? Would my dad kidney’s be ok? Would Dex’s company be able to pay him this week? Would he still have a job next month? Would we still be here in a year? Two? Would I be able to adjust to having celiac disease? Would the twins be born term? Healthy? Would I be able to give Edward the nuture he needed? Would something else blow up when we all least expected it?

Seriously. How much damn uncertainty can one heart live with?

I remember one afternoon when I spoke with Davey’s cardiologist about his pulmonary hypertension. Davey was two and still seemed to have moderately high pressures. Pulmonary hypertension is an awful disease, frightening and eventually fatal. The heart eventually cannot take the strain and just gives up. Davey’s disease was under control but not cured. So I asked Dr. D what that could mean for him. Would it get better or worse?

And Dr. D was honest in his reply. He said, I don’t know. It could get better over time, it could get worse over time, or it could stay the same. And if it stayed the same, he couldn’t say what that could mean for Davey’s long-term health.

I thanked him, hung up, and was immeditately overwhelmed by the weight of not knowing. For two years we had done everything we - Dex and I and a huge medical team - could to cure him only to come to this point of not knowing. My heart couldn’t take it anymore. It wanted to give up, it was tired of hoping and wishing. It was tired to trying to bend the course of life through sheer force of will.

Then, and this may sound silly, as I sat there, I thought of Blade Runner. The lingering question of how long any of us has.. the ultimate uncertainty… it is something we live with every day. The only difference for me that afternoon was being painfully aware that such uncertainly is and will always be a prescence in our lives. For Davey, for my mom, for me… for all of us. “It’s too bad she won’t live,” Gaff says. “But then again, who does?” And the realization seemed to wash over me and calm me.

So yes, I plan and research in part because I need to find out about schools and houses and all that. And I do also because it helps me keep the feelings of uncertainty at bay when they are at their most intense in these periods of upheaval. I know whatever lies ahead for us will be good. We have good alternatives. That’s not my worry.

I just want to know. I want to be able to move forward. Make definite plans. Make something happen and get on with life for a while.