Life in the day of Tugboat

Sat in Omaha most of the day. Just drove 89 miles north to Sioux City, Iowa for a load of frozen egg going to Laredo, TX
Today has been one of those days.
Random thoughts and questions.
In the last weeks Bill and I have been able to talk sensibly.
He has said that he's been going to see a therapist at the VA and I can tell a difference in his moods. But there is still lots of work for him to do.
My thoughts are mixed and of course I'm quietly rooting for him to get his past sorted out.
What is a person to do? From my past I can speak from experience when it comes to being gave up on.
Yes at one time Tugboat was placed in the file of ...
He left and he ain't coming back! Or as I like to call it the never ending merry go round of crazy.
In my youth I did some of the dumbest shit a kid could do. But what made it equally crazy was every time Mom and Dad bailed me out a heap of trouble, I went right back to acting like a fool. Lord how I use to remind them how much I hated them. (Yes friends tugboat was a selfish asshole)
A few years passed and I figured it all out. It was what I like to call "A learning curve"

This learning curve would haunt me to no end, especially the years after My Dad's stroke in 2000.
My 60 year old Father changed overnight. He was a shell of a person I didn't know, gone. What lay in front of me was a man I had never ever seen cry or shed a tear sobbing uncontrollably. As I stood in the hospital room with Mom and my sisters, I leaned over kissed and hugged my Dad for the first time in my entire thirty five years and said in a stern voice like he had used with me in my troubled times, "You will talk, walk and feed yourself again, you never once gave up on me and this is just the beginning of me returning the favor"
Before he was released from the hospital I had already decided to move home with Mom to help her with Dads recovery. His recovery and rehab for the next two years was unreal. From the stomach feeding tube and acid re flux during times when I would be trying to feed him liquid meals down it, to his behavioral change, hateful and filthy ways.
I moved forward constantly, pushing him harder and harder to regain some of his own ability to recover.
It was a journey for me, and Dads learning curve, and no I never gave up on him.
The Dad I knew never returned but he did walk, talk, and has been able to live independently in the years since Mom died. He still pisses me off numerous times sort of a role reversal from my youth. Pay back is a bitch.
But of course all this made it possible for me to become the Son and Man my Mom would be proud of and lean on during her time of need.
I'm sure their is some fancy saying of taking lemons and turning it in to lemonade that would apply here.

Because of Dads stroke I was able to sit countless days and sleepless nights with Mom. These moments are priceless.
We talked for hours and hours, she sharing her life and me my crazy choices.
Full circle? Who knows?
Hell, in the end I let Mom slip away from me. She kept telling me she was leaving me, sort of preparing me for my next learning curve. Closure.
Life. Hum...
So much to learn in such a short time.
When I decided to drive a truck and see the U.S. Mom was so excited for me, and yes I would call her countless from the road at all times to inform her of what was happening.
Most all our conversations would include this.
Mom would begin with
"So, what are you doing?" My reply " oh just trying to figure it all out"
Then as always she would say without hesitation
"Hell your daddy's been trying to figure it out for sixty years"
And this my friends is exactly what I'm doing now.
Trying to figure it out.