Dr McCreight's priceless book, Recovery From Hazardous Parenting, is more of a booklet, short and sweet, at least to my ears. Grandma read it through yesterday, and was strangely silent afterwards, mulling it all over in her mind. It put to words the inexplicably bizarre life we'd been living.

When one has had a front seat to all this, a front row to the difficulties and challenges, the absolute inability of a parent to change ingrained behaviors or genetic predispositions, when the elderly parent of the beleaugured parent has had to watch helplessly all the attacks and the assaults, the rages and the destruction, well then, the secondary trauma spreads.

Grandma, too, finds immense solace in hard work. She went back to her side of the house to peel, chop and cook down apples into applesauce. She baked a ton of potatoes, put supper on the table as I continued to paint, finally making my office right perfect, using the rest of the sunny paint to cover the battle scars in our over-used kitchen.

I'd never washed my face, nor brushed my teeth all that day, had been single mindedly painting when a car pulled up, the gate already open, as different kids of mine were going here and there.

One of my oldest friends in this town came over, she'd retired from CPS, she'd been instrumental in the 1980s to guide me to the international adoption agency I'd initially used when I'd gone to Honduras, later steering me through the currents of DFACS when I continued adopting through the foster care system which was her domain for 30 years. She worked in town, my adoptions generally came through Texas. She's been my friend since Sarah was a pre-schooler.

She successfully battled through breast cancer, ten years clear now, only to find out this week that she has a MALT lymphoma.

Stunned, I just stood there crying. Really? Another massive battle for her? How is that fair?

She laid it all out for Grandma, who got that wide-eyed, yet shut down look of shock on her face, this always reminds her of Ellen, my late sister. Like me, Grandma just gets busy, trying to beat down the worry demons that tend to course through us all.

I told her, my lovely friend, that I had plenty of prayer warriors on my blog, could I ask for prayer there using her name which is Janet? I have her permission and I'm begging y'all for prayer. Her prognosis is good, I goggled everything later, yet the procedures are onerous of course, the battle can be debilitating.

And I'm whining about trauma?

Reality check.

I'd run through the entire gallon of paint, washed the brushes, eaten three baked potatoes, yeah I know, I'm a pig, but I'd sure worked up an appetite.

Tabby had somehow broken the shower head holder upstairs in my bathroom for the second time, the first time Super Glue repaired it for a year or so, but this time it, the Super Glue, squirted everywhere, down my fingers on both hands. Uh-oh.

I coped as I usually do, hollering my frustration, Lily came running with nail polish remover, which she'd heard would do the trick.

Yeah, it did, unsticking my fingers eventually, but there's a white residue, a crustiness that's gonna just have to wear off, I suppose, and the shower thingy is unfixable. Back to Lowes, I'll go. Daniel had put it on for me several years ago, the most modern thing I'd owned it seemed.

I fretted about the harsh chemicals I was soaking my fingers in, super glue itself is a chemical, we don't know where cancers originate, although chemicals play a big part in cell mutation.

Janet, a devoted yoga practitioner, she'd explained to me what Tai Chi was some 30 plus years ago, doesn't glue her fingers together clumsily like I might be prone to do, but we all suck up carcinogenic car exhaust, Lord knows the Hell that our food has encountered in the form of malathion, etc, and we inhale all sorts of everyday toxicity. I'm as baffled as anyone.

And I'm just terribly upset that she has to go through this again. It just doesn't seem fair.

I watched a fascinating National Geographic special, Aftermath: Population Zero about how much better off the earth would be without us piggish humans destroying it. A rather harsh solution...