Where is the time going?

I can't believe it's been two whole weeks since I blogged anything. Two whole weeks!! Where has this year disappeared to and why is it in such a hurry to get there?

The last two weeks have been rather .. um .. interesting. I was feeling very uninspired and sloth-like over the long weekend (March 1-3) and had managed to have a very quiet one until Monday morning. Then I got a phone call from Peter telling me his brother, Mark, had been rushed to hospital at Southern Cross (about 150kms from the minesite where they work) with major abdominal pain. Mark was then airlifted to Perth via Royal Flying Doctor Service on Monday morning. The doctors did some tests but couldn't figure out what was causing the pain so they decided to operate at 12 noon. They found about a metre of his small intestine had died and was rotting inside him. Poor guy was cut from chest to groin, put into an induced coma and onto a ventilator in ICU. He was taken off the ventilator on Wednesday afternoon and moved up to a normal ward on Friday. He's now well on the way to recovery but will still have to take it easy for another month or two.

I went over to the hospital and sat with Bec (Mark's wife) while he was being operated on. Another friend (Kirsty) turned up as well so the three of us sat and chatted in the coffee shop at the hospital. When I thought back on those five hours later, I realised how scared Bec must have been, yet she still managed to put that aside and have a normal conversation and even a few laughs.

Isn't it amazing how strong we women can be? When faced with all manner of problems, we put our "faces" on and keep going. Why do we do that though? I think we have to let go of the need to preserve the face for the world and instead, show it how it really is. Not all the time of course, or the world (as our families know it) would come to a screeching halt while we dealt with everything. But to just sometimes give ourselves permission to not be everything to everyone, to not always be the strong one, the happy one, the one with all the answers.

Because, let's face it .. none of us have all the answers.