One More Thing

Last Post.

2007-07-27T17:18:00.000-04:00

Oh, relax, not the last post from me ever. Just the last one here.

I'm moving over to wordpress, and I do hope you'll follow me over and play there. New digs at: http://katesaid.wordpress.com/.

I'm sorry, Blogger. I'm just not that into you.

Perhaps "Better" Wasn't the Right Word

2007-07-26T23:52:00.000-04:00

Isn't this just the funnest thing ever?

I've been informed, in no uncertain terms, by two different doctors, that as long as my experience today of heart rate up over 120 for over an hour remains an isolated incident, with no pain, dizziness, or shortness of breath, then I'm allowed to consider it a fluke and continue living my normal daily life, but that if any of those other symptoms come and join the party, I'm to go to the nearest emergency room, strip down to a skimpy robe in front of my coworkers, and get checked out for a heart attack. Fabulous!

It sounds like what actually happened is that I didn't react well to my secondary migraine medication, naproxen (i.e., Aleve but in a higher dose). I take it for a week or so each month when my primary medication, Vicodin, runs out and they refuse to up the prescription, because 20 a month is safe but clearly 30 a month would be a serious danger to my health and welfare and I can't be trusted to make my own decisions there.

Sometimes I totally understand why people start using street drugs.

But I digress. This afternoon, I took a naproxen, with food, as directed, and then tried to lay down and take a nap. I'd taken my first trusty little Ativan earlier in the day and generally wanted to tune out. Staff meeting and then an annual gynecological exam makes for a long morning, you know?

So I slept for maybe 45 minutes, and then laid awake and listened to my heart throb away, about twice as fast as I'm used to. My knee-jerk reaction is to blame any new symptoms on the most recent medication I'm taking, but really, a racing heart rate and/or high blood pressure, whatever it was, seems like a very stupid side effect for an antianxiety medication to have. After a while I figured out that the naproxen is a newish prescription, too, and somehow that seemed like more likely a culprit.

But seeing as how my father had his first heart attack at 30, many in the medical community are sort of standing back and waiting for me to start with mine.

So, yeah, I don't know if it's exactly better living through chemistry, but it's certainly weirder. The plan for the moment is to switch me to a different NSAID (Relafen, whose primary warnings have to do with heart and circulation risks... seriously, funnest thing ever!) and see what happens. Now I'm anxious and dealing with intermittent migraine pain and anxious about getting migraine pain and taking the wrong medication and killing myself with it.

Are you seeing why I've not been blogging my brains out this week? There are some vibes that just don't need to be sent out into the wilderness.

Better Living Through Chemistry

2007-07-24T23:01:00.002-04:00

It's been a long time since I've been on any form of psychoactive drugs. And I'm not even talking about the fun stuff that afterschool specials are made from, I mean antidepressant, antianxiety, generally make-your-brain-run-smoother type meds. A few choice chemicals helped me through some bad times in my adolescence and early 20s, but ever since being inflicted with motherhood and family life, I've had this weird, happy-type feeling. Almost like life was pretty good, or something.

There were a few dark periods, most especially about a year after Jacob's birth (when I wouldn't take meds because I was all up on the breastfeeding-no-chemicals thing, which I recognize was ill-advised but stuck through it anyway) and then again from early 2006 for several months after I dealt with the fact that I'd effectively sold my career for the price of a healthy family. I'd make the same decision again now, but this time I'd find a way to somehow be insured and not broke, so that I could go through the resulting readjustments with a little help from my meds.

But now we come to, well, now. I'm not depressed, exactly; things are pretty good for me, I feel happy more days than not. But between Emily being at camp and the resulting junk that's bringing up for me, my dad being in limbo in a job he hates and waiting for a new one and newly single after a long, slow train-wreck of a relationship came to a grinding, clunking halt, Willem being something less than his usual sunshiney, rainbowy self while he studies and braces for his comprehensive exams, and a pile of other small but transient concerns, I'm stressing. I'm not sleeping much at all, and not well then, and I'm letting myself get roped into small petty arguments (Willem and I snarked about spaghetti sauce for 20 minutes this afternoon), and generally not liking me a whole lot.

So I took what, for me, is a huge step, and called my doctor, and tomorrow will pick up a 2-week supply of Ativan. An antianxiety drug that works with each dose you take, rather than needing 4-6 weeks to reach optimum blood levels a la antidepressants. By the end of next month, most of my biggest, pressing concerns will have faded. Sure, I understand, you irrepressible optimists out there: they could all be replaced by new, even bigger concerns. But I'm working on activating my inner Pollyanna here, okay?

I don't need to be perfect, with smooth edges and serenity of soul and perky breasts. I just want to be good enough, and right now, I'm not.

Two More Lines

2007-07-24T01:10:00.000-04:00

I did pretty well through the day, but now that it's dark and quiet here, I'm having a hard time heading to bed. I'm running about a thousand miles an hour inside my head, which is about 994 mph too fast for 1:00 a.m.

The good news is, I'm able to channel some of this nervous energy in the service of organizing my home:

Mary and I made a CD holder for Jacob's room, and chances are there will be one for Emily's room by the time she comes home. The kids have, between them, probably 20 of the Most Annoying Bouncy Children's Music, and they also routinely request "Mama music" or "Daddy music." Apparently Mama music runs in the realm of Jack Johnson or Barenaked Ladies, and Daddy music is more along the lines of Opeth and Rush. Jacob gets very unhappy when I dare to play something he deems to be non-Mama music in the car, but from long, long ago, we told our kids that kids' CDs don't play in our cars, so they have to cope with whatever we choose.

Cuts down on road rage, you see.

Anyway, Jacob's CD player sits on a shelf several inches above my head, which made finding a given CD more of a challenge than I liked (read: took all of 15 seconds instead of my preferred 2). So, viola! A display from the various previous crafts we've done, including trimming Emily's flower girl dress and making beanbags.

I was manic enough about it to make Willem step out of the bedroom at 12:15 and growl, "Howmuchlongerareyougonnarunthatthing?"

To which I replied with my very best impression of a cocaine addict: a sheepish grin, an innocent shrug, and a muttered, "Just two more lines, babe. Just two more lines."

I have to appear in court tomorrow. Well, today. I should try that sleeping thing soon. Wish me luck!

Just Another Migraine Monday

2007-07-23T16:32:00.001-04:00

Well, really, the big bad headache was yesterday, magically appearing just as we turned onto the camp road. But I've had echoes today, not to mention a serious desire not to move much of anywhere. I'm not good at maintaining a good, solid level of anxiety over a prolonged period of time, and really, I've worked through a lot of that stuff already. Yesterday was bad, today has been so-so, by the end of the week I'll be fine.

Especially if my mother-in-law decides not to come out for Jacob's birthday on the weekend because, as she explained to Willem in intimate, painful detail while standing in the middle of a Toys-Backwards-R-Us, she has watery diarrhea. How fun is that?

Anyway, so, thank you. All of you. It helps, the support and encouragement. I called the camp today, and they hadn't heard of a single homesick camper amongst the eight in Emily's cabin, which I consider to be a good sign. I still asked them to have the counselor call me back sometime this evening, because right now talking to someone who has talked to her today is the closest I can get.

And I take it as a good sign that I'm still able to find things like this seriously funny. With, of course, a sociall appropriate level of disapproval.

Summer Camp

2007-07-22T13:12:00.000-04:00

The last time I went to summer camp as a camper, I was twelve years old. I'd started going around eight or nine, so by then, it was more of a comforting tradition then a new adventure. I knew it was my last year as a camper, but I also knew I could return the next year as a counselor's aide, and eventually as a full counselor. Quite the aspiration, back then.

The first six days went just like every other year, with the typical camp stuff. I woke up on the last morning on my back, in the woods, alone. I was bleeding profusely from two separate knife wounds, likely had a mild concussion, and couldn't hear anything. I still don't know if I was in shock and briefly deaf, or if it was just so intensely, perfectly quiet that there was nothing to hear. I don't think I knew the word rape yet.

The attacker was a fellow camper, who had lied about his age in order to slide under the below-13 rule. He was 16, and had gone with the specific mission of breaking a bitch in. He'd told me this during a lull in the night's activities, and I never asked whether this was an individual plan or a gang thing. I didn't care. I still don't.

I made it home with the help of an accomplice of his, an adult and a counselor at the same camp. He who said all the right things to ensure maximum trauma and minimum healing: don't tell anyone, he'll find you and hurt you again... your parents won't believe you anyway... it happens all the time, no one cares...

It was at a church camp. I don't know where God was that particular evening. I didn't tell my parents until I was fifteen. I left home for college a year early, at seventeen, and will always be grateful that I was smart enough to escape then.

It was many years before I could withstand the physical sensation of being in the woods at night, and I still cannot lie on my back and look up at the sun through the leaves. My physical wounds healed over the course of several weeks; my emotional ones closed up after about ten or twelve years, with a few raw edges still vulnerable to the right - or wrong - combination of statements and sensory input, even now.

And yet, in less than an hour, I'm leaving to bring my seven-year-old daughter to her own summer camp. We're three states away, and it's an all-girls camp. She is as excited as any human can possibly be, and Emily has a special gift for radiating just a little more excitement than the rest of us. I consider it another rite of passage, parenthood-wise; letting your kids do the fun and innocent things that somehow twisted around to hurt you, and trusting that your experience was a fluke and not a genetic predestination. I will put on a smile for her, knowing in advance that sometimes my smile will get a little ragged and brittle around the edges, and I will wait until I'm back in the car to cry.

And she'll be all right. I believe this because it's true, and because I have to. She'll be okay.

Harry Secret and the Chamber of Pots

2007-07-20T23:50:00.000-04:00

It was a long week. Work was rough, lots of extraneous stress going on, head exploded on Wednesday, blah blah blah. But I took Mary out to her first non-restaurant bar (read: total dive bar) last night, for my weekly knitting group, and had the horrifying realization that I'm a regular. At a bar. And I don't drink.

She never even got a stern look, much less carded. (Though, Mom, no. She didn't drink. Didn't even try. We do all our heavy drinking at home.)

Having survived that, then, we felt duty-bound to dredge ourselves off the couch and keep our date for tonight, which was to go down to Barnes & Noble to people-watch during the seventh Harry Potter book pre-release extravaganza. My friend G is a manager there, so we got a random glimpse or two of her, spent some time wandering the shelves, and then got a table near the Highly Caffeinated Beverage Counter and tried to figure out which people were dressed up for the event and which were just out for a Friday night bookstore run. Not so easy a task, that.

So now we're home again, feeling more normal than we have in a long time. Didn't buy the book, because Mary's not allowed; she and Sarah have an agreement whereby Sarah will buy the book, read it in the coming week, and bring it out when she comes for Jacob's birthday next weekend, and Mary can go see the fifth movie. In IMAX 3D tomorrow night, which seems like proper revenge for delayed gratification.

Get Well Soon... or Not, Whatever

2007-07-19T16:46:00.000-04:00

One of the recent topics of discussion in my house, of late, has been my mother-in-law's health, or lack thereof. This is a woman who has major surgery once a year; it's usually something medically necessary (removal of various optional parts, repair of broken parts, tire rotation and oil change) because she's prone to illness and accidents. I'd love, trust me how I'd love, to label her a hypochondriac, but from what I can tell most of these seem relatively legitimate.

And in between, in those rare years in which she doesn't have an illness or fall off her horse or bend down to tie her shoe and stand up abruptly into her side mirror (oh yes she did - got a concussion that time), she finds elective surgeries to tide her over. She had a breast reduction in 2003. I found this out when I went downstairs to tell her that dinner was ready, and she turned around and flashed me to show off her scars.

I still have blind spots in my vision from that one.

So, you may recall, a few weeks ago I was feeling weirded out by her stooped-over posture of ass-kissing. I didn't know why she was doing it, but in my experience, the woman is not nice to me without some explicit reason. Usually it's because I'm either pregnant or breastfeeding and she knows I won't hand over the child under those immediate circumstances (though if she thought I would, it would be a national news media type of event).

Well, we found out why. Turns out I was right; she wasn't just being nice to me for the sake of balancing out some of the worldwide karma from that whole Middle East deal. She was being nice to be because she had diagnosed herself with stomach cancer, blamed my dead father-in-law for it, and convinced herself that she had one year left to live.

It must be such fun living inside her head, don't you think?

I'm going to provide as near to a chronological narrative as I'm able to piece together; you can rest assured that I did not get the information delivered in an organized package. From what I can tell, about a month ago, she started having stomachaches and explosive flatulence after every meal. (And, yes, you're right. I did, indeed, get a most uncharitable thrill at the concept of my mother-in-law having explosive flatulence.) As a result of this, she stopped eating large amounts at a time, and, in turn, started losing weight.

Meanwhile, she'd forgotten that she'd had the initial unsocial gastrointestinal symptoms and resulting limited food intake, and began to panic at the fact that she was losing weight. Now, for at least the ten years that I've known her, this woman has been on a perpetual diet, constantly complaining about her size and then reaching for another bowl of ice cream. And she wasn't morbidly, or even just grimly, obese; she was a size-16 in a size-16 world. Anyway, now that she was actually losing weight, it freaked her out. Unwanted weight loss? Discomfort eating? Flatulence that could strike a roomful of frat boys after a bratwurst-eating contest into respectful silence? It must be stomach cancer!

Another difficulty with my mother-in-law is that she is a retired nurse, of the recovery room variety. This gives her just enough medical knowledge to be really, really annoying, with the haughty terminology to match, without actually being helpful to herself or others. So she waited a while to see a doctor, so as to really maximize that panic and worry, and have it miraculously coincide with Willem's visit.

She spent the week alternating between two of my very favorite displays: moping and melodrama. Willem and she decided to take the kids bowling; Willem and the kids bowled while she sat at a table, stared off into space, and sniffled every time she felt lonely. (Read: she may not have exhaled once the whole time, being so busy sniffling.) After a good mope, she would garner the energy to launch into a melodramatic rant, typically along the lines of, "The only way people ever get stomach cancer is by exposure to cigarette smoke. So if I do have it [dramatic pause], then I'll know that it was all H's fault, because he smoked like a chimney every day I knew him, and he made me breathe that poison every single day, and if I die from this then I will hunt him down wherever he is and kill him again."

Yes. Way to buck up stoically under pressure.

So, the week was a wash, and Willem and the kids came home cranky and high-maintenance, none of them having been expected to eat a single molecule of nutrition or clean up after themselves, and only two of them having been expected to regulate their bodily functions. It's been a period of adjustment for us all; them to recover from a week living in the wild and me to not kill them all and bury them in the backyard.

Then, last Friday, we got a phone call. Well, Willem got a phone call, and I had the audacity to answer it. Right away, I knew that we were back to normal again: "Oh. Kate. Yeah, hi. Is my son home?"

I had the surpreme pleasure of telling her, yes, but he's busy at the moment. So she had to be contented with relaying the news to me: she does not have stomach cancer. I don't know what manner of indelicate medical tests she had done, because I've become quite adept at selective deafness (the woman will discuss a surgical procedure and its resulting dead white corpuscles in excruciating detail at the dinner table, complete with comparisons to the food being served). But they proved that, no, it's not stomach cancer. It's a hiatal hernia, which she has opted not to have surgically corrected because apparently she is the only person with such a condition who is not a good candidate for laproscopic abdominal surgery. (I did not ask her if that has anything to do with her head being shoved up in the way down there.) In essence, she has been on the receiving end of an all-natural stomach-stapling procedure; there is a certain karma to this following her endless obsession about weight.

She also "found out" that she has lactose intolerance. That deserves the dreaded visual quotes because I've known for years that she was lactose intolerant, because she told me. Whenever she visits, I cook without cheese, I supply non-dairy creamer, I listen to the preemptive woe-is-me before we have ice cream. But no, apparently I am mistaken, because this is brand-new hot-off-the-presses information to her. Okay.

I didn't post about it back when she was bemoaning her stomach cancer and imminent death because I just couldn't find the right words. Somewhere over the course of the past year - I think perhaps when she told Willem that I was not her family - I've stopped thinking of her as a family member, someone I would drop anything to help even if I can't stand their fundamental personality. It was very weird for me to hear of someone's illness and just not care; I couldn't even fake concern over it. When she dies, which we all understand won't be for another 30 years, I won't rejoice; she loves my children, in her way, and they love her. But the only times she is genuine with me is when she hates me.

Internalized

2007-07-18T18:32:00.000-04:00

Who says that stress and worry can make you sick?

Well, me.

I've got a vicious migraine today; the kind where you load up on just as many drugs as your liver will allow and then come home for a three-hour nap in the middle of the day and even then you still can't bend over or complete a thought. It happens, sometimes at random, but just lately I've had a little extra stress and worry flattening out the ridges and valleys in my brain, so I'm guessing perhaps there's a connection.

Normally, when stressed, I can unload, either here or on my friends or my husband, as needed, and I'm fine. But I'm experiencing a peculiar mix of angst, which can't be completely unloaded in any one place, which makes it harder to efficiently distribute out of my brain.

Can't even go into detail here, because of the mix of people who post here. Well, I can, but the resulting post ends up looking like one of the government-declassified Area 51 documents:

First, there's my dad. He's blah blah and now his blah are blah, plus he just broke up with his blah girlfriend. I'm seriously worried for his mental and physical health, and while there are ways I can help, those are limited.

Then there's Willem. He's upset about blah blah and doesn't know what he wants to do about it. Likewise with the blah and blah situation. And let's not forget the blah, with all its resultant details and decisions. And, of course, his comprehensive exams are in a month, so even in the absence of the other stuff, he'd be freaking out just a tad.

Work was hard yesterday. Really hard. I hospitalized an eight-year-old blah with PTSD and a blah of blah blah, and a blah-year-old man having his first schizophrenic break. I watched another ED patient die. In the hallway. Watched it.

You get the idea.

So, stress. And worry. And nowhere to put it.

Which all, frankly, sucks, because there's so much cool stuff going on in my life right now, too. I went to the library with Mary today, and actually took out some books. For myself. To read. It's been ages and ages since I've done that - I had to get a new library card - and I'm optimistic that I might finally be moving out of my mental stagnancy and ready to absorb some new ideas. I taught Mary to knit the other night; she's already made a washcloth and about 1/10 of a beach bag. We're sending Emily to sleep-away camp on Sunday, which scares the carp out of me (which is, admittedly, probably better than having carp in me) but I think it will be really good for her, too. Jacob is almost completely potty-trained again, after being effectively untrained after a week at my mother-in-law's. And so on.

Just riding a bit of a roller coaster right now, and starting to get a touch of motion sickness.

Twelve Miles Per Hour

2007-07-18T13:12:00.000-04:00

This article was in the Cincinnati newspaper a few weeks ago. It's about a dance troupe featuring kids in wheelchairs as well as independently mobile kids, and tugs at the appropriate heartstrings. Oh, what a good man, running this group for those poor little souls, and at no charge, too...

And I agree. Good for him. Many kudos. That's good karma he's developing.

But the bit that stays with me is from the video - go ahead and click on the video part, it's short - is the little girl who talks about how fast they're going. "Like twelve miles an hour."

Think, for a second, about living in a body that can't let you run full-out toward a lake in high summer. That won't tolerate riding on the swings so high and so hard that the chains buckle a little at the top. That can't be maneuvered into the front seat of a roller-coaster.

I hope she continues to get her twelve miles an hour, and maybe even more, when she dances. We all need to be fast and beautiful once in a while.

The Power of (Poor) Communication

2007-07-16T09:24:00.000-04:00

I spent yesterday in Newport, Rhode Island, with two of my closest friends. We toured The Breakers, the Vanderbilt mansion, and had lunch at a lovely seafood place on the harbor. The weather was perfect and the conversation plentiful.

Sounds about as perfect as a day can get, right?

Hah. Since when do I do perfect?

The day started on a jittery note when I got lost on the way to Carolyn's house. I've been there dozens of times, but hadn't in a while, and somehow just got confused. I knew she lived near the 95/93 interchange north of Boston, but couldn't remember which road or which direction from the intersection. So I chose all three wrong possibilities before finding the right one. Love that lost-in-Boston feeling.

But I found her, and asked if she would drive from there, because I was frazzled already and didn't want to spend my day irritated at myself. Sure, no problem; off we went. We drove down to Jenny's house, where we left Carolyn's car and piled into Jenny's minivan. Her tricked-out, ghetto minivan. She's got all the toys: automatic doors, built-in GPS, DVD, camera for reversing, small tanned men who leap out to administer massage at every red light. My minivan would have had a serious inferiority complex if it knew.

We proceeded to have a few quiet, pleasant hours, driving to Newport and wandering the mansion. Having recently been to Versailles I had a double-edged reaction to The Breakers; on the one hand, its opulence pales in comparison to the palace at Versailles, but on the other hand, Versailles was a palace for a king and this was just a mere summer cottage for some random Americans. Crazy.

We decided to take a break from the excesses of the wealthy and head to lunch. On the way there, Carolyn got a phone call, and Jenny and I listened to the inform-ee side of a bad-news exchange: "Oh, no! Really? ... Is anyone hurt? ... What is broken? ... How did it happen? ... Calm down ... No, calm down ... Get someone to watch the kids so you can deal with this ... Call the sheriff and try to get them to take a report ... Calm down..."

Turns out, the bad news was, her husband called to report that they'd had a windstorm and a tree had fallen over... on my minivan. He said he couldn't begin to estimate the amount of damage because he couldn't even see the driver's side because the tree was in the way. He had fallen into hysterical freak-out mode and was not making or receiving decisions by this point. Lovely!

So, we talked about it and decided we might as well continue with our lunch plans. Hurrying back north wasn't exactly possible anyway; we were two and a half hours away anyway, and frankly none of us wanted to deal with hysterical husbands. Carolyn kept trying to call her husband back, to remind him to take pictures and to generally find out what the status was. He wasn't answering his phone.

I called Willem to share the latest adventure. I told him I thought the minivan was cursed, given the number of adventures I've had with it in just one year. He replied, "Oh, I don't think it's the minivan. I think it's you. Things like this don't happen to anyone else."

Way to be supportive, there, chief. We'll be scheduling sensitivity training soon.

Because it's not that what he said was bad, it was just poorly timed. There is a time and a place for sarcasm, and that was neither.

The next four hours, between lunch and driving back to Carolyn's, were characterized by Carolyn trying and failing to get her husband to answer the phone, and Willem calling me to complain that Carolyn's husband wasn't answering the phone. And Jenny's husband calling to complain that she was a half an hour late and he really, really needed her to be home so that he could start his role-playing game with his friends. (Read: "My playing with my friends once a week is more important than you playing with your friends once a month.") Testosterone was not high on our list of favorite things yesterday.

Finally, after hours of nothing, her phone rang. It was her husband. She asked him, "Why haven't you been answering your phone? We have no idea what's going on up there."

He replied, "Oh, two more trees fell down. One fell on our swingset and the other fell on our neighbor."

She about died on the spot. Turns out, ha ha!, he was only kidding. Let's return to the concept of a time and a place, shall we? Because this was really, really neither. He was actually calling to ask when she would be home (thereby making it a perfect trifecta of husbands calling to ask, "When are you going to be home?" and making me consider not bringing my phone on these days out anymore) because he wanted to take a shower and couldn't possibly figure out how to do so with both kids in the house. Both kids, who are 7 and 3, and old enough to behave themselves for five minutes while he attacks the major areas; how does he think Carolyn, a stay-home mom, ever gets clean?

And, oh, by the way, Kate's minivan is completely fine. Not even a scratch on it. He'd just never bothered to go all the way outside to look closely at it before making the initial phone call, and then was too busy helping cut down the tree to call back with an update. Or answer his phone.

Which leads us to the idea of, really? Really? You couldn't have bothered to investigate the situation before making an alarmist phone call? Okay, in the presence of panic and initial freak-out, you were unable to censor yourself. Fine. But then you couldn't be bothered to make a 30-second "never mind" call and save me several hours of problem-solving and anxiety?

Great, thanks, dude.

And what does one do, when angry at the husband of a friend? You can't exactly lay into him in front of the wife and kids, and really there's nothing else to be done. Except seethe, and blog it.

So, it ended up being fine. The minivan is perfectly fine, no one was hurt, and I still had a lovely day with dear friends in Newport. And except for the headache from stress and teeth-grinding, no ill effects. All's well that ends well, except for the phenomenal pile of miscommunication in the middle.

Sanity Abounds

2007-07-13T15:39:00.000-04:00

Has anyone else noticed that it's Friday the 13th? Anyone?

Because I really expected today to be, literally, crazy-busy at work. Dates are significant to people. I don't believe that there is a phase-of-the-moon thing, at least as far as my mental health crisis assessments are concerned - but Christmas Eve, New Year's Eve, the first gorgeous day in early spring (when the weather is finally better and everyone else seems happy but this person just can't shake the depression and now that they're finally accepting that maybe they weren't just miserable because of the New England winter they start to sneak toward a very dark and dangerous edge), anniversaries of prior losses... those are busy days for us.

But today... nothing. Not a single work-related phone call since 6:30 last night.

It's really creeping me out, man.

Whelmed

2007-07-12T18:50:00.000-04:00

They're home, which is much goodness. I got good long Jacob-snuggles, because he had just woken from a nap and needs many minutes of cuddling before he is ready to face the world. Emily regaled me with 14 stories at once. Mary plodded in and practiced her skills of invisibility so as to get a brief break from children.

Willem walked in. He saw the kitchen. He was lukewarm. He has since decided he likes it well enough, though he never in a million years would've picked the color himself. (And, to be fair, I wouldn't have chosen it on its own; but I needed an orangeish color that would go well with both the dark wood cabinets and the light wood furniture.) He's worked his way from underwhelmed up to whelmed, so it's a good start. He's blaming his singular unimpressedness on exhaustion from a week with his mother and a long drive, but somehow I don't expect him to be doing cartwheels on his way into the kitchen tomorrow. Ah, well. I'm still happy with it.

And, just to be contrary, he is actually more impressed with the organization and cleaning of the office, because he knows that it was a lot of details and he was probably going to have to do it himself.

I understand that this is really my issue, not anyone else's. I'd gotten myself so excited and anticipatory over their homecoming that, really, any reaction short of passing out unconscious on the floor would have been a disappointment.

All are equally thrilled with the new refrigerator, though unfortunately the water has only been hooked up long enough to make a few rounds of ice cubes - not enough for Jacob to pelt himself in the face with one when he was checking it out. Maybe tomorrow...

A Mysterious Thump

2007-07-12T12:42:00.000-04:00

My cat was just sitting in the living room, staring intently at the individual air molecules, in the incisive and pensive way of a nuclear scientist, only with 150 fewer IQ points.

Suddenly, from the kitchen, there was a thump. The cat leaped directly into the air, made a murph sound, and ran down the hallway.

Get used to it, my feline friend. That sound is the melodious thump of ice cubes being deposited into the reservoir of my brand-new, now all-hooked-up ice maker.

And now my family is about four hours away, returning home to bask in the beauty of a new kitchen and organized office. I'm all jittery and bouncy, and oddly deflated because I can't think of any other quick little projects to throw together quickly before they get home. So I'll just sit here and knit, and vibrate a little inside.

How Big is your Fork?

2007-07-11T19:27:00.001-04:00

Because I'm really, really done.

I reorganized and sorted the office over the past few days. The before-and-after pictures are far less dramatic, mostly because I didn't take pictures of the inside of the file cabinet and such, but I can see a difference. At the very least, I won't have to worry about Mary tripping and falling into a box of random papers on her way to the bathroom.

So, the photos:
beforeafter

beforebeforeafter

beforeafter

beforeafter

See? Less intense. (And did you notice, I'm so underwhelmed by the transformation that I felt the need to label the befores and the afters this time?) But my sister once dislocated her elbow by tripping over a pillow and falling on a carpeted floor. My children have been taught a mantra: We have to be gentle with Mary. She's delicate.

We apply the same mantra to Mama, the cat, and most things in other people's houses.

The only other change I made, I forgot to take a before picture of... which is really too bad, because it was hilarious. The backstory is, I cannot keep a plant alive inside my house. It's really bad. People say this about themselves when they mean, can't keep a plant alive for more than a year, or can't keep a fancy high-maintenance orchid alive. No, no. I kill spider plants and aloe. Really.

So I had a dead spider plant in the corder of my living room, and it was just depressing. Not as creepy as a dead stuffed animal head, but bad enough that other spider plants are sitting around campfires telling stories about me right now.

I finally took mercy upon it, and dumped it into Emily's garden, where it might actually live for a while. And replaced it with this:

And now we wait for my family to return. Less than 18 hours until they are all back in their rightful place... and less than 24 before I start to wonder why it was I wanted all of these short, noisy people in my nice, clean house.

A Thing of Refrigeration is a Joy Forever

2007-07-11T12:33:00.000-04:00

I have a brand-spankin' new refrigerator. Isn't it amazing how things change? Ten years ago, I couldn't have cared less what the appliance looked (or even smelled) like, as long as it kept things cold and held food.

But today, I got to pull all the weird blue tape off myself, and set the shelves at the height I wanted (carefully calibrated to accept a margarita mix in each the fridge and freezer, just in case such a need should ever arise). Then I went right ahead and cluttered it with our calendar and some magnets, because while I was basking in the unbroken white expanse of a new fridge door, I also knew that, in my house, an uncluttered refrigerator is not a viable possibility. Might as well leap off that cliff right away... a bit like being the first person to spill something in a new car. It's a disappointment, but also a relief.

So I just have to clean the floor, clean the bathroom, and let the plumber come in and do his magic tomorrow to make my ice-maker make ice, and I will be done.

And then my family will come home. And there will be much rejoicing.

The Down Side of Marrying my Best Friend

2007-07-09T15:51:00.000-04:00

I've been effectively muted, at least until Thursday. Willem and I have talked on the phone every day, sometimes several times in a day. He has needed the chance to vent (he is staying with his mother, you understand), and talk about his friends and his golf game, and generally make contact. All of which is good, I'm all for it. But then it's my turn to talk... and I have done almost nothing in the past three days that I can tell him about.

I can't talk about how amazing S&W have been - S is a classmate of Willem's, and a friendship has developed from there. I can't talk about how fun it is to be making a new friend in G, and look how helpful she's been already.

I can't talk about the warm happy little glow I get just sitting on my couch staring into the kitchen, and how I'm fairly certain I'll actually break into a full-on butt-wiggling happy dance when the fridge is delivered. (And how I just hope I can wait until the delivery guys leave.)

And so on, and so forth. I've realized just how natural it has become, over the years, to talk to him about ev-er-y-thing, including - perhaps especially - the mundane little stuff that no one else wants to hear. And that I want to hear his random boring stuff, too.

So, yeah. The rest of you out there, especially those of you who are going to be seeing him this week, zip it. If I've been able to keep this secret, then you understand that you darn well better be able to, too.

He'll be home sometime Thursday afternoon. After then, feel free to ask him about the kitchen.

What Did We Learn Today?

2007-07-09T03:44:00.000-04:00

Well.

We learned that I don't sleep well when Willem is gone. I was up until 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning, and could not sleep anymore after 8:00. Which is just sad, really, on a childless Sunday with no plans.

We learned that it's impossible to buy a spice rack or a mug rack anywhere in the county, but it's possible to buy shelves and make them work.

We learned that shopping and detail work in the kitchen is necessary and even fun, but far less satisfying than the intense and in-your-face changes that happen when four people are simultaneously stripping the walls and repainting.

We learned that the devil is in the details... the precise lengths of fabric, the placement of mug hooks, the width of the mixer. But, apparently without realizing it, I must have sold my soul, because all of the details worked in my favor. This never happens. I can't count the number of times that I was mostly done with a task and realized, "Oh, hey, that could have gone horribly wrong. Lucky for me..."

We learned, again, that I don't sleep well when Willem is gone. As evidenced by the fact that I took a break from about 10:30 to midnight, and then started in again. I was scrubbing the cabinets with the pad from a Wet Swiffer (very successfully, I might add) at 3:00. It's now 3:50 and I'm still revved up. And I quite deliberately avoided caffeine after noon today.

Ah, well. All this unsettledness is to your benefit, if you're interested in seeing photos. Grainy, slightly unfocused photos, but photos nonetheless. I tried to match up camera angles somewhat, but this entire project has been an exercise in two key abilities: abandoning pointless pride and learning to accept help graciously when it's offered, and accepting minor imperfections in service of getting to the bigger picture.

So, without further ado... my kitchen, before and after.

The shadow boxes on the table will be mounted to the rear wall tomorrow morning. And the other stuff will get put away, but when I'm tired I get jumpy, so I refuse to go into our unlit breezeway until morning.

The fridge is the last big thing on my to-do list; a new one is being delivered on Wednesday and a plumber is coming to make the ice maker make ice on Thursday. Until then, I have my old and suddenly rusty dinosaur... the moisture seal called an unannounced labor strike last week, so even if I wasn't graced with an empty house for a week in order to make it all pretty, we'd have been fridge-shopping. This way I'll have a kitchen worthy of the newcomer.

I think it looks pretty darn good for three days' work. I really hope Willem likes it. And for the sake of his own structural integrity, he'd better at least notice.

Benevolence and Wallpaper

2007-07-07T23:27:00.000-04:00

So far, it seems that Willem has done an admirable job of not reading that which he is not supposed to be reading. Though this may be due to the fact that he was using his mother's computer to check his email and the ESPN website, typed in "http://e" and her Internet Explorer automatically filled in the rest: "http://eharmony.com." So he was instantly stricken blind at the idea of his mother Internet dating.

Whatever. Good behavior is good behavior, regardless of the motivation.

As for here, things are moving along just swimmingly - so well that I could practically post After pictures, if only I could figure out how to post any pictures at all from this camera. Maybe tomorrow I'll be smarter. It's been a busy couple of days and I only have a few neurons left firing at the moment.

It started immediately after Willem and the kids left yesterday; I dug in and started clearing out the kitchen and peeling off wallpaper. When we bought this house it was, as far as I can tell, mostly balsa wood and wallpaper held together with cheap adhesive and good intentions. The prior owners had four children, two teenagers and two toddlers, crammed into a three-bedroom house. I get that decorative house projects may not have ranked too high on their list.

But seriously. The laziness? Why even bother? "Half-assed" would be an optimistic term for the way most things were installed here, which is to my advantage once I finally get around to doing something about it. Half-assed is far easier to take down and replace than whole-assed.

So, the wallpaper whooshed down quickly, and by 3:30 in the afternoon I was ready to take down the cabinets. Our friend W called to say she'd be over shortly, which was just barely in time to prevent me from being stupid enough to try and take it down all by myself. My unconcussioned head thanks her.

Once the cupboards were down, I expected her to turn around and head home, but instead she became intrigued by the thin layer of adhesive left behind after the wallpaper was removed, and intrigue soon morphed into helping me do it. Like I said, cheap adhesive - a few quick swipes of hot water on a sponge, wait a few seconds, and peel like a week-old sunburn. There's something deeply satisfying about nonviolent destruction like this.

At 4:30, we were most of the way around the room, and nearing a decision point. In two places - each about 9 square feet - there were patches of even older and wildly hideous wallpaper underneath the cheap stuff, and I had a sneaking suspicion that this was going to be a nightmare to remove. W is very much of a "Do it Right" mindset, bless her heart, and I recognized that my desire to just slap a coat of primer on top and paint right over the stuff was causing her some heart palpitations.

Before we quite made it to the first of these areas, my phone rang. Because oh-by-the-way, I was working from 8:00-8:00 yesterday. It had been quiet, primarily because I'd been very careful to restrict myself to non-messy aspects of the project all day, but as soon as I start playing with water and wallpaper adhesive, ring, ring!

I felt a little weird, leaving W to continue working on my kitchen walls while I went to work, but she showed zero inclination to leave, so I just... left. Told her to let herself out and leave the door unlocked, and off I went.

I was at the hospital from 5:00-6:30, and then decided that I would have just enough time to stop at Home Depot for paint and a new refrigerator before rushing home to meet friend G, who had, completely unprompted, offered to come over and help me in the evening. By 6:40, I had completely mixed paint and a voucher for Wednesday delivery of the fridge, and first spot in line at the Customer Service ("Home Depot - you can do it, we would help if we could figure out how") Desk. At 7:20, I was still in line, waiting for a manager to figure out how to both give me their advertised 10% off and not ask for my tax ID number, see as how I'm not a business.

The good news is, I finally escaped, voucher and multiple rebate forms in hand, having saved 10% on the cost of the fridge, getting a $6 rebate on the paint and a $75 gift card for buying an Energy Star product. There was much rejoicing. The bad news is, I was now a half hour behind schedule. I hate feeling late.

As I was muttering and driving home, my phone rang. It was W's partner, S. "How are things going over there? Do you guys need me to bring over some pizza or something?"

I blinked. And blinked a few more times. Then, "What do you mean? Is W still at my house?"

Pause while S blinked. "Well, she's not here. Where are you?"

"I'm coming home from work, I had a hospital call to do." Just then, I turned the corner onto my street, and sure enough, W's car was still in the driveway. I came in to find her meticulously chipping away at the old, cast-iron, industrial-grade-adhesive Wallpaper of Steel. Mind you, this is almost three hours after I'd left to go to the hospital.

W spoke to S on the phone, and S arrived a half hour later with extra spackle and a case of beer.

Meanwhile, G arrived, blessedly later than planned so I could cross the mental image of her sitting endlessly in my driveway waiting for me to escape Home Depot off my Guilt List. I ordered pizzas. It seemed like the thing to do.

W and S stayed until 10:30 at night. G stayed in the kitchen until 11:30, and then hung out to chat for another while or two.

How cool is that? Seriously. I am notoriously slow to make friends, especially after moving to a new town, and a week ago I'd have said with confidence that I had plenty of people who would be willing to join me for a social event but no one who would be willing to spend more than 20 minutes helping with any random household chore. Turns out I have three people willing to spend hours doing hard, tedious, wonderful work. I'm still a little choked up.

So instead of being a smidgen of the way through, I'm almost done. The old fridge is half-heartedly back in the vague corner where the new one will live, the kitchen table is back in its rightful non-living-room position, and the majority of the work left to do is shopping (spice rack, wallboard scraps and netting and still more spackle, foam to cover the pipes for the second bathroom and fabric to make curtains) and then applying said purchases appropriately.

And if that weren't sufficient evidence that I live a charmed life, my children are safe and asleep at my mother-in-law's, my mother-in-law is every bit as obnoxious as we all expected her to be, and my husband is doing a marvelous job of holding it all together. And of not reading this blog like I asked.

And furthermore, I just got back from a $350 (yes, that's a zero on the end there) dinner at Aujourd'hui in the Four Seasons Hotel in Boston. Darn right it was expensive, but it was to celebrate Jenny's birthday and my God, was it good.

So I'm just abrim with charity and love for all of humanity right now. And to maintain that feeling, I won't be watching the news, talking to my mother-in-law, or going to work tomorrow.

Can You Keep a Secret?

2007-07-06T12:36:00.000-04:00

Willem! Stop reading this, Mr. No-Self-Control. You promised. Leave my blog alone.

Seriously. STOP. Log off and back away. I understand, it'll be a surprise no matter when you find out. Shut up and turn off the computer.

Okay?

Okay.

Willem left this morning with the kids... for SIX DAYS. Yes, bask in my glory, I have six days alone in my own house. This is 2 months after 10 days in Paris without the children... not that I enjoy being separated from my family, but, well, I kind of do.

So rather than give in to the screaming primal urge to be just as slothlike as one can possibly be in their absence, I've gotten all social and motivated. I'm going out to dinner - a nice dinner, here - tomorrow night, and possibly joining friends for a cookout on Sunday, and planning to visit another friend on Monday.

Oh, my God, Willem, seriously, this is your last chance. STOP READING. You don't fake surprised well enough to get away with reading the blog this week and still coming home next week without me knowing.

Anyway, as for the motivated, I'd decided quite a while ago that the wallpaper in the kitchen just had to go... especially the second horrible pattern that we found when we put in a laundry room and moved the refrigerator over the winter. Within moments of the minivan backing out of the driveway, I'd wandered over to just peek a little, see how firmly the wallpaper was attached.

Turns out, not very. Half of the room is naked, and I'm sort of on pause for the moment until I can get help here to get the cupboards down to strip the other half. I'll start priming and paint shopping and refrigerator shopping in the meantime.

I actually did remember to take Before pictures this time - most home improvement projects see me 75% of the way in and then muttering because I forgot again - so if I can figure out how to get them off my old camera (of course, for once, Willem remembered to take the good camera with him - not like he'll use it), then I'll post them here.

So that I can share this all with someone. And so that someone knows why, when my unconscious body is recovered from underneath a huge, steaming pile of flowery wallpaper.

Random

2007-07-05T23:48:00.000-04:00

I've been mememememed. By another Kate, this time, who thinks we have lots in common although she's far more lyrical and together than I am. Maybe when I grow up.

Anyway, eight random things about me. Presumably, things which you wouldn't be able to pick up easily from just reading, because I toss about p-l-e-n-t-y of randomness here on a daily basis. I can do that.

1. I'm hard of hearing. I rely almost entirely on lipreading and, on TV, closed captioning. I can, and do, use the phone, but beware to the poor soul who tries to use my phone after me - they'll be knocked backward several feet because I need to use it at maximum volume.

2. I cannot stand the sound of water pouring if I can't see the source. Makes me physically nauseous. Once upon a time, I used to transcribe interviews and meetings for a living (again, always at top volume), and quite often, the tape recorder is planted quite near the pitcher of water. I would shout, out loud, at the offender - who poured the water months ago and many states away - to Stop that, for the love of God, it's a horrible noise!

3. I would sooner parch than drink beer.

4. While in college, I lived in a fraternity house for a few months, during which time I crawled on my hands and knees down the length of the hallway, into the bathroom, and lay on the bathroom floor while very ill with what ended up being a week-in-the-hospital kidney infection, using a stack of Playboys as a pillow. I will never quite feel clean again.

5. I have Reynaud's disorder, a pretty mild case, which means that my fingers and toes are almost always cold, and my legs flush bright pink after a shower.

6. I used to hang out with the guys from Godsmack, before they were big. I've never lifted my shirt at one of their concerts, but I have indulged in questionable behavior at parties afterward.

7. I have never smoked a single thing in my entire life. The closest I've come is a contact high at my first-ever concert, Phish.

8. I watch crime documentaries. A lot. I read about crime, especially murder and serial killing. I know far, far more about serial killers - names, dates, places, details, crime scene photographs, histories - than a nice, suburban soccer mom probably ought to.

How's that for random?

Let's see... I don't know eight random things about... Jack's Raging Mommy, stephaneener or Jason. Or, really, most of the rest of you who comment - Janice, where is your blog address when I need it? (Edited: See? The ninth thing - I'm obsessive in small and harmless ways, and am very comfortable postponing my own bedtime) - but it's after midnight and a girl's gotta sleep. Bonus points to you if you respond to the meme without an individual tag.

Quivering

2007-07-04T19:50:00.001-04:00

In order for this to make any sense, you have to know that one of our old inside jokes has to do with cheesy romance novels, and the quest to come up with the horriblest euphemism for sex that has ever been uttered. The winner in our little contest has been, "He thrust his purple-headed warrior into her quivering mound of love pudding."

Go ahead, say it out loud. Lower your voice and hold your chest while you say it. Try not to die of snorting and giggling.

Okay.

So, I took the kids to the beach today. We live in New Hampshire, an area of the world not widely renowned for its balmy and comforting ocean currents. The sign at the entrance to the state park advertised an air temperature of 74 and water temperature of 59. Um, brrr.

Emily, being a child between the ages of 3-12, has no nerves, and didn't notice the icebergs floating by until it was time to get out of the water and head toward the car. Jacob, being a few weeks shy of three, still has a natural avoidance of things cold enough to stop your heart, plus this whole Really Big Body of Water with Living Creatures and Boats thing kind of freaks him out. He spent a while prancing back and forth like those shore birds you see just beyond the water's edge, only cuter. But then the jealousy of elder sister's frolics outweighed the fear of Big Loud Waves, and he asked me to carry him into the water.

And being a sucker, I did. Stayed in long enough to spin him and splash him and generally freeze his little legs a bit.

And as for me? There was decided quivering, though in a far less romantic way. And not a warrior in sight.

There's a Black Hole Under my Loveseat

2007-07-03T16:41:00.000-04:00

That's the only explanation. At first I thought maybe it was just a random toy-sucking vacuum, which had an occasional affinity for nail clippers and the DVD remote. But then, today, I picked up my purse to carry it outside while I watched an impromptu puppet show (so nice to know that I'm not the only one in the family with the occasional urge to shove a stick into the nether regions of a plastic dinosaur) and my phone rang. Turns out the answering service at work had been trying to reach me for the better part of an hour, and my phone just hadn't rung (rang? ringed?). It was a non-emergency emergency call, so that's a good thing, but still. I'd prefer my phone to ring when someone calls it. I'm strange that way, I suppose.

So after the call, I checked - and sure enough, I have 3-4 bars everywhere in my living room, except on the floor at the base of the loveseat. Thus, a black hole. It's good to know these things.

Marital Exchange

2007-07-02T16:45:00.000-04:00

HE: In keeping with our spring cleaning recently, I just decided to rearrange the freezer.

SHE: Good for you.

HE: My hands really hurt now. They're frozen. [AWKWARD PAUSE WHILE HE STANDS THERE, A WHITE BOY WITH GHETTO-SIGN HANDS]

SHE: So go put them in water then, don't just stand there and hurt.

HE: I was kind of hoping to stick them in your armpits.

"I'm Not Even S'posed to Be Here Today"

2007-07-02T16:32:00.001-04:00

Quick, name that film.

That's been my mantra for the day. It's been a particularly administratively irritating day at work, with small annoyances getting in the way of my knitting, and I keep quoting that line. So far it's worked to keep me from going all berzerker.

Enter at Own Risk

2007-07-01T19:40:00.000-04:00

I've been in a foul mood since I woke up this morning. My children have suddenly been stricken both deaf and uncaring, my husband is perfectly attuned to irritate me in small insidious ways that won't allow me to plead justifiable homicide after I snap (there are THREE opened jars of strawberry jelly, two opened gallons of 1% milk and two opened packages of Parmesan cheese in my refrigerator right now), and have an endless supply of DVR'ed shows but none of them are appropriate for the inevitable audience which completely ignores the television when Willem watches things but flocks from far and wide when I try. I have a low-grade headache, low-grade menstrual cramps, and low-grade nausea.

Much of it is this thrice-bedamned fatigue. I just can't shake it. I'm so incredibly tired of being so incredibly tired - I keep nodding off, it's frankly embarrassing - and I'm even more tired of whining about being tired. I've taken to drinking coffee recently, which is really more a punishment than a cure, and even that doesn't keep me awake. My shins still hurt, too.

I must be a treat right now. I imagine that's why my family has been avoiding eye contact and leaving a six-foot radius when navigating around me.

I think this calls for ice cream.

Impending Doom

2007-07-01T09:19:00.000-04:00

I haven't written about my mother-in-law here in ages. Which is odd, but nice, because she used to be a common topic of discussion and never in a good way.

She continues to act oddly and delusionally in the wake of my father-in-law's death, which was last August. She's playing this grieving-widow card to the maximum extent allowable by law, which is just creepy seeing as how when he was alive she was never able to string together a single, unconditional, nice statement about him. Even now, she talks about how he was The Love of her Life, but then has to qualify that with a remark about how flawed and unworthy he was. 'Tis bizarre.

A new, and possibly related, theme from her is this sudden attack of free love and rampant affection for all, including Yours Truly. Her normal means of communication is to call our house and, when I have the gall to answer my own phone in my own home, say, "Oh. Kate. Yeah, hi. Can I talk to my son?" (Always "my son," and I have never been her "daughter-in-law." I am her son's wife and the breeder of the grandchildren.) Recently, instead, she has been calling my husband's cell phone directly, and then asking to "just say hi to Kate" when they're done. Which is always awkward and uncomfortable, and makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. She has decided to kiss up to me as enthusiastically and simperingly as possible, and I cannot figure out why.

Cynical of me, I know, but I refuse to believe that she has actually made a decision to be nice to me simply for the sake of lessening the hostility and conflict in the world. I may be an incurable optimist and a naive, smiling infant set adrift in a cold, cruel world (or I may be sarcastic and suspicious, whatever), but I do have the capacity to learn. There were times in the past when she would begin to treat me nicely and I would buy into it, only to get hurt once again when she suddenly recalls that I am the Spawn of Satan brought unto the earth to steal away her son and her grandchildren. I'm not interested in being hurt again, because it would be all my fault for allowing it to happen. So I'm suspicious and cynical, waiting to figure out why she's been puckering up in the general vicinity of my derrière.

There's also the matter of Emily's vacation time. Last summer, she spent a week away at my mother's house, and it went swimmingly. This summer, she wants a week "or maybe two" at my mother's, and we're sending her to sleep-away camp for a full week, to be surrounded by strangers with unknown criminal records. But when my mother-in-law called to ask when Emily would be able to spend a week at her house, it triggered a several-week process of Willem and I trying to find a polite euphemism for "not until well after hell has frozen over."

It's not that I think that my mother-in-law is so wildly incompetent or toxic that I won't allow her to be alone with my children... not yet, anyway, though there's always time for that to develop. But right now, she's still acting oddly and delusionally, and I don't feel that it's right to leave her the responsibility of a bossy-and-headstrong 7-year-old for an extended period of time - nor do I think that said 7-year-old is quite ready to navigate the waters of grief and narcissism alone. So, no. Emily won't be spending a week at mother-in-law's alone this year.

As a compromise, Willem is taking both kids out for several days at the end of next week. This should, in theory, present the best of all possible worlds: she gets time alone with Her Son and the grandchildren, without my polluting presence, and we're not dealing with the doubts and worries of sending Emily alone. I don't know if mommy-in-law-dearest has quite figured out yet that this group visit means that there won't be an individual one... that'll be a fun conversation.

And until then, it's just this sense of impending doom in the face of niceness and limit-setting. Neither of which sits comfortably on the head of my mother-in-law.

Date Night

2007-06-30T22:06:00.001-04:00

We spent all day in a frenzied orgy of spring cleaning, and now our breezeway, play room and crafts closet look like humans live here, instead of a bunch of flea-infested wombats hopped up on speed. Who don't put anything away.

Then in the evening, my dad decided he wanted to take the kids out to McDonald's for some unhealthy food and germ-intensive play place action. So Willem and I quickly got dressed and out of the house before he could change his mind, and had dinner at a nice, non-child-friendly place and then wandered around downtown Portsmouth, soaking in the upscale wicked cool blasé yuppie atmosphere and listening to live blues on the street and eating our weight in ice cream, and generally were about as adult and datelike as we could possibly be.

It's good to know that I still enjoy his company. Handy, in a marriage.

The Audacity to be Right

2007-06-29T22:19:00.000-04:00

Tonight, Willem was watching the Red Sox game, and they were playing against... some other team. I'm a bad sportswife; not only do I not pay attention to important details like who they're playing or what their record is, but I don't even care. I passively and distantly enjoy watching, because I find Jerry Remy's voice and the cadence of a ball game to be hypnotic, but I don't tune in much.

And when I do, I get in trouble, because I'll apply principles of psychology to the game and then Willem gets mad when I'm right. Like, tonight, the pitcher was involved in a temper tantrum regarding a close play at first base. It was the bottom of the ninth with one out to go, and Willem was muttering some mantra along the lines of, "Just one more out, just strike the next guy out..." and rocking back and forth. (I'm not sure if he was in a religious trance or if he just had to pee.) And I remarked, "He can't just throw the next guy out. He's all riled up now, he's going to be all over the place for a while."

And sure enough, he hit a batter and jiggled and wiggled a bit, before finally getting his last out.

"I hate it when you're right," muttered my dearest love, my best friend, my life partner.

You'd think he would be used to it by now.

Proof of my Horribleness

2007-06-28T22:07:00.000-04:00

See what insomnia/fatigue does to me? It makes me babbly and takes my sense of humor in a perhaps inappropriate direction.

Because I was just reading this article about the professional wrestler that strangled his wife and his son, then killed himself, last weekend. I have lots of thoughts on it, political stuff and sociological stuff (have any of you seen Jackson Katz's film Tough Guise?) and criminal justice stuff and psychological stuff and that-poor-baby stuff... but for the moment, the standout detail of the whole affair, to me, is the fact that, quite a while after killing his family, he hung himself on his weight machine.

Which means...

That which does not make you stronger, kills you.

Ugh. I'm sorry, it's not funny, I know. But it kind of is.

What Do Jack the Ripper and Winnie the Pooh Have in Common?

2007-06-28T20:17:00.000-04:00

The same middle name.

"Mom, There's a Bus Stuck in my Hair."

2007-06-28T19:14:00.001-04:00

Certain sentences are just never uttered in childless households. And have been uttered in the past 24 hours in mine.

"Are your underpants dry?"

"Hand me that truck."

"Quiet and eat your dinosaurs."

"Stop licking the cat."

"Mommy, there's a bus stuck in my hair."

"Hold still and watch TV for five minutes, would you please?" (This last while I attempted to turn my son from a 2-year-old Beatle-wannabe into a teenage sophisticate.)

Stuck in my Head

2007-06-28T07:52:00.000-04:00

Is it possible to get a song stuck in your head that you're happy with? I'm starting to think that maybe it's the simple experience of having the song stuck there, lodged, crammed into the dark recesses of your brain, that makes the song undesirable, even if it's actually the best song ever.

And the one I have now? Clearly not the best song ever. It's Hinder's Lips of an Angel, which does have a certain power ballad wonderment to it, but any song lyricizing infidelity? Not my best thing.

It's really good to HEAR your VOICE, saying my NAME...

I'm going to go take a shower and either pound my head against the wall or just run water into one ear and out the other, in hopes of exorcising this particular demon.

Sometimes

2007-06-27T20:59:00.001-04:00

Sometimes my job is a true privilege. I'm allowed - invited, even - into people's lives at their very lowest moments, to see them at their very worst, most broken, most hopeless, and given the opportunity to listen, and sometimes I can help. Sometimes I leave a person feeling like I just gave them something they didn't have before, a new perspective or a validation, something to just get through the night.

That's an honor, and a thrill.

Othertimes, my job is a farce. I'll be facing legitimate, intense, worthy problems, and will be completely unable to do one measly little thing to help. There are no words to make it better. There are no hospital beds available anywhere within a 90-minute drive to keep the person safe. There is no magic pill or special secret to healing, or coping, or just living. And I leave feeling helpless and sad and, worse, useless.

Wet Sleeping Bag Contest

2007-06-26T22:01:00.000-04:00

As promised, a photographic journey through our tenting adventures in Canada... these would be most realistic if you went out and sat in the passenger seat of your car for ten hours first, then completely drenched your bedding in the coldest water still available in liquid form, then woke up in the morning too cold to shiver. And yet somehow, even though the first adjectives that come to mind when I reflect on the weekend are wet, cold and tired, I'm still glad we went. And gladder that we came home.

We started off our Canadian trip with an all-American breakfast... and nap.

We spent the first night at a dear friend's B&B in Truro... to minimize (but apparently not eliminate) the stalkers she adds to her guest register, I won't name the spot. But if you're planning to head to Nova Scotia and need a place to stay that feels like the home of old friends, if your friends happen to live in a gorgeous house with beautiful well-behaved children and impeccable manners, then let me know. I'll hook you up.

There were several bucketfuls of children, between my two and her four, so most of the photography was aerial.

Smart people would have stayed right there, for at least two nights, basking in the cleanliness and comfort of an official B&B.

We, evidently, are not smart.

We drove several more hours, up to Prince Edward Island. For those of you who've never heard of it before, don't worry about it - apparently it's a very American thing, to have no idea where this place is. It has still managed to become heavily touristy and commercialized in small pockets, but for the most part its very invisibility has allowed it to remain a worthwhile vacation spot.

We got our tent sweet tent all set up, and the kids were inordinately excited.

So, apparently, were the grown-ups, because if you look carefully, you'll notice that the windows are not tied down, and there is no rain guard tied to the top of it as we drove away to dinner.

Of course it rained. It poured. It thundered. There are no pictures from that evening, because we were too busy panicking, and then hanging out in the laundry room. My initial reaction, which I will blame unabashedly on this autoimmune nonsense, was a complete and utter inability to cope. "Everything's wet? Let's go home." After a trip out for quarters, I was able to regain enough stamina to actually check the clothes bags instead of believing Willem's doomsday statements including words like soaked and dammit. Our clothes were not soaked; only our synthetic, manmade, dries-in-mere-moments sleeping bags were. Five dollars and a couple hours solved the problem, and we toughed it out.

Which raised the philosophical question: Does this mean that our family motto is, "We Don't Quit," or, "Stubborn to the Point of Stupidity"? It's a fine line.

Other highlights included indoor black-lit mini-golf... cows in awkward positions...

...and goofy, blissed-out facial expressions following the Best Mussels in the History of Mussels.

I'll even post the recipe, they were so good. Take a propane stove, and a steamer pot. Dump in homemade lobster stock (okay, go ahead, get storebought... won't be as good as mine, but whatever), crushed tomatoes with basil and canned mushrooms with juice, bring to a boil. Set the steamer pot inside, toss in three pounds of $1-a-pound fresher-than-a-12-year-old-boy-in-timeout PEI mussels, and clamp on the lid. Wait until the mussels open (by melting a half-stick of butter on the other burner, you know, just to pass the time) and then try not to embarrass yourself by diving face-first into the pot.

Meanwhile, have the foresight, a half an hour prior, to cut up a half-dozen potatoes, a Vidalia onion, and some garlic butter, toss all into an aluminum foil bag, and throw on the fire for a while.

It's touch-yourself good. Seriously. My God.

Then go out for dessert. It's worth the drive.

Jacob got a new friend during our dessert run. This is Brown Cow:

What? He's not brown, you say? Well, he tried very hard to become so, by diving into the fire pit, rescued by an alert Mama fearful that Jacob would feel honor-bound to try and get it himself. How now, Brown Cow?

Our last morning in PEI, we finally reached our coping capacity when it comes to the hordes of Tiny Ultrasonic Minions of Satan, otherwise known as mosquitoes. You mock, I hear you - but I have never in my life experienced a pestilence like this. Literally dozens and dozens of them swarming you from the moment you breathe until the moment you throw yourself off the nearby cliffs in abject despair. Bathing in DEET, inhaling it, had no effect. We'd planned on leaving the campground around noon, and were on the road by 9:30. Frantically and itchily.

Sunday night, we erred in the Stupidly Stubborn and Plan-Dependent side of things. We'd left PEI early enough that we could have made it all the way home that night, but we decided to stick with the original plan and stay in New Brunswick. Which is neither as pretty, nor as quaint, nor as soft-grass-campsited as PEI. So none of us slept well, and we were on the road by 7:30 on Monday morning.

It was neat, I'll grant, to be someplace with such intense tides. At the left is the view across Oak Bay from our campsite in mid-afternoon... at the right is the same view, six hours later.

Not to mention, fun to bond with the children over the simple pleasures of throwing rocks in water.

But still. Better to be home. In a bed. Out of the rain.

Triumphant... or Stubborn?

2007-06-25T19:10:00.000-04:00

...you decide.

We're home. The vacation was fabulous and horrible, sometimes at the same exact moment. I'll write up a synopsis - new! with pictures! - soon. Tonight, I hope. Because it is a trip worthy of remembering, and with my brain in its current Jell-O-like state (Idaho, perhaps?), it's imperative that I apply words to the experience immediately, before it all evaporates and vanishes.

I'm still dealing with this erythema nodosum stuff (yes, thank you, Firefox, I realize that you don't recognize the spelling of those words. No one does. I wish I didn't, because it is such an annoying and useless condition). It's not especially painful - just bruiselike - or intense, just tiring. As in, I can go from wide awake to ungracefully asleep in the space of about 5 seconds. I was, quite literally, too tired to knit during most of my 30-plus hours in the passenger's seat this weekend.

So, I'm here and home, and there's more to come. Honest. Soon.

Off the Grid

2007-06-21T00:56:00.001-04:00

We're heading off to a weekend of Enforced Family Fun Time, spending one night at a friend's B&B in Nova Scotia and then tenting three more nights in various spots in Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick. No computers, no cell phones... it's really going to be quite the bizarre and amazing experience, I think. Willem and I may actually have to have conversations, and don't even get me started on all of the nature and imaginative play the children will have to do.

See you on Monday night...

The Nightmare Before Wednesday

2007-06-20T08:21:00.000-04:00

I've been up since 4:45 this morning. I gave in and got out of bed at 6:30, tired of rolling around and feeling irritated. This is not the norm for me; I'm someone who will hit the snooze button five times on any given morning, only because hitting it six times would just be ridiculous. I can sleep, and I do it well. Most of the time.

But lately, it's become a lost talent. It's taking half an hour to fall asleep at night, which is about 29 minutes longer than it usually takes me. If I wake during the night, I'm up for long enough to get mad at myself for being awake. And if I wake after daybreak, forget it.

Last night was particularly bad, because I fell asleep around 10:30 and woke up at 1:04 with a nasty nightmare. Some people have bizarre, technicolor, creative nightmares involving zombies and plushies and blackberry ice cream; not I. I have very realistic and very upsetting dreams involving the people I love in very believable, if unlikely, circumstances. I've had dreams about my kids getting sick, dreams about fires, dreams replaying old traumas... it's very Lifetime Movie in my head, only less pretty and with unpaid real people in the place of campy actors.

Last night's was a long episode of A Life Unraveled, starting with Willem admitting that he had allowed a relationship with some random woman to become inappropriate, and then admitting that there had been another, and another. In my dream, I could picture, with aching clarity, the meetings with divorce lawyers, the packing and moving to a new apartment, the need to send my kids to stay with my mother while I checked myself into a psychiatric hospital with suicidal tendencies. I went through a whole broken life in the space of five or six hours.

I have the extra added benefit, in my nightmares, of having episodes and chapters to it all. When I woke up, upset, at 1:04, it was just after we'd had the initial horrible conversation, in the car, on a specific road near our house. I've had enough experience with bad dreams to know that I shouldn't go right back to sleep; I know to get up, walk around, have a drink of water, and generally wake myself up as much as possible so that I don't just roll over and fall right back into the same dream. Didn't work last night. Each time I woke up and later went back to sleep, I was picking up after the next commercial break and following the same story. So I was up several times during the night, and by 4:45 I was more exhausted than if I had just stayed up until then in the first place.

And I don't know how to convince Willem that having nightmares like this does not mean that I don't trust him enough now. I'm fully aware of where dreams like this come from, and I'm fully confident in the strength of our relationship when I'm awake and conscious (not always the same thing with me, lately). I do not believe that dreaming about things means that I'm actually, deep-down, secretly obsessing over the possibilities. I think it's a topic that would be upsetting to dream about, regardless of our past, and my brain just has some nice, pre-defined pathways all laid out, to know exactly how it feels to live through this stuff because of prior experience.

I've noticed that I've had increasing difficulty sleeping for the past few weeks, and I wonder if it's related to this erythema nodosum crap; perhaps there's a certain cosmic cruelty that makes me drag my leaden body around all day, longing for the next chance to nap, and then revs up my brain at bedtime and afterward. I've certainly noticed more fatigue and achiness since being told by a doctor that I should be tired and sore, and I can't decide if that's just latent hypochondria rearing its ugly head or if I'm more aware of what was already there.

I really need to get better at complaining about my physical ailments; my general attitude is, "Why bother complaining? It doesn't make me feel any better and there's nothing anyone else can do about it." But by not verbalizing it, I tend to minimize or forget that it happened.

So, whatever. I'm tired, physically and mentally, and ready for a nap. Except, whoops, I've just started a 24-hour shift, to cover for a coworker whose brother is dying of AIDS. Sure, I've got an official ailment and could probably beg off work, but in my book, death trumps tired.

Everybody just stay sane for another 23 hours, okay? Thanks.

It All Comes Back Around

2007-06-18T20:50:00.000-04:00

Turns out that an autoimmune disorder, such as my current friend, E.N., makes one much more prone to miscarriage.

I'm not really sure how I feel about that. Relieved, again, because this is one more thing that would have made a pregnancy very scary and stressful; and sad, again, because maybe if it weren't for this I'd be craving turnips and unable to watch game shows because they'd make me too choked up.

It's all as it should be, I think. It removes that little niggling doubt that maybe I miscarried because there was something wrong with the parts themselves, that this was a harbinger of things to come. Removes the wonder about what I might have done wrong. And very much reinforces that we need to wait until I have a completely clean bill of health before we try and inflict that particular roller coaster upon me.

File Under "Normal Doesn't Live Here Anymore"

2007-06-18T17:29:00.001-04:00

Okay, this is weird. Even by my standards.

When I was in Paris, I noticed these sore spots on my shins, raised up a noticeable amount from normal shin level. First just one, on my right leg, then another there and, a few weeks later, another on the left. They hurt like crazy if someone has the audacity to brush past me with anything stronger than featherweight force, and I can't sit on my knees on the floor, but otherwise they're quite ignorable. Just another bruise, you know?

But here it is, a month later, and they're still sore to the point of me yelping and eeking if I roll over wrong. So, after unsuccessfully searching for someone, anyone, to agree with me that it's probably just bruises, no big deal, they'll fade, I gave in and went to the doctor today.

She asked lots of scary questions, about my breathing and my glands and my joints, and sent me in for bloodwork and a chest x-ray. Turns out I have something called Erythema Nodosum, an autoimmune disorder which, when said very quickly by a doctor while you're wearing half a sheet and shivering, is the Scariest Thing Ever. It turns out that's just a fancy name for Weird Painful Lumps on Your Shins, and it's evidence that your body is reacting weirdly to Something Else. Hence the chest x-ray, to rule out sarcoidosis, and the bloodwork, to rule out whatever else.

"It's weird," said the doctor, once I stopped hyperventilating, "because the most common cause of it is actually strep throat. Have you ever had it?"

"Why, funny you should ask," I replied. "I just had a nasty case of strep in April. I didn't mention it, because somehow I don't associate shin pain with strep throat. My bad."

So, she's pretty sure that's what caused it. I don't have sarcoidosis, and the other causes aren't likely. There's no real treatment for it, other than rest and ibuprofen and waiting for it to go away, and if it doesn't go away on its own in a few more weeks then I'm supposed to go back to the doctor, get mostly naked, and see what to do then.

Do I know how to have a good time, or what?

And, not to be bothersome, but rest? Really? I have two children and a plan to drive 600 miles away this weekend to go tenting. What about that scenario allows me to take it easy?

Apparently I'll be sleeping in the car.

A Bad Day to Be a Child

2007-06-18T13:07:00.000-04:00

I just watched several consecutive stories on CNN.

A 4-year-old died in Texas due to flash floods.

A 15-year-old died in Tennessee trying to watch drag-racing. (Which is a sport with a wildly misleading name. I expected far more sequins.)

A couple had sextuplets, and so far three have died.

There are such things as pedophile rings, and if it took 10 months and 35 agencies to find and deal with this one, how many smaller, work-from-home operations are still running?

Five children died in the same fire in Pennsylvania.

A 5-year-old girl survived a boating accident while her grandfather died.

Another 4-year-old boy is going to live his life without his mother.

A pregnant woman is missing in Ohio, leaving her 2-year-old home alone.

Life is dangerous stuff. I'm going to go gather up my babies and keep them in a bubble, if you don't mind.

The Color of Good Parenting

2007-06-16T21:58:00.000-04:00

Red.

The bright, glow-in-the-dark red of your child's back, sunburned for the first time, because the first application of sunscreen might not have reached her back, and the second application just somehow never happened.

Nothing makes you feel like a good parent quite like a nasty, painful sunburn. At least she's not to the point of blistering or bursting into flames. Still.

What Does Blonde Sound Like?

2007-06-15T16:48:00.000-04:00

After appearing in court today for a commitment hearing (something which is far, far more mundane than it sounds), I stopped by the Admissions office of the state psychiatric hospital to get copies of some forms. I've talked to the various people in Admissions on a weekly basis for a year now, but had never seen any of them face-to-face.

Which means they hadn't seen me, either. When I met one woman, she kept looking at me oddly, in a check-your-teeth-and-wipe-your-nose sort of way. Finally she said, "I just always thought you were blonde. You don't sound like a brunette."

I'm kind of surprised she didn't ask me for ID.

Not Quite Defeated

2007-06-14T13:43:00.000-04:00

He is an ex-husband, a weekend dad, a non-custodial parent. He finds out many things after the fact, and others at the last minute, when it's too late to offer any well-thought-out ideas or opinions. He ends up saying no a lot, more out of a desperate need to have some input, some control, than out of an actual desire to prevent things. He cares deeply about this troubled and brilliant child, and he wants to protect him, especially from things he doesn't understand.

He has said no to psychiatric medication. He had grudgingly agreed to therapy, only because he couldn't think of any dangerous side effects of talking. "You can put him on medication," he announces, "if you can guarantee me that there will be no side effects." And no one can guarantee him this, so he has held his ground. In most states, the no of one parent trumps the yes of everyone else in the world, even the other parent.

Now he stands, helpless and oversized, many inches taller than anyone else in the hospital, except for the seven-foot-two security guard. He is dressed in khaki pants and a button-down shirt, but there are telltale paint stains on his hands and jacket, belying his blue-collar existence. "I'm not a bad guy," he whispers. "I don't want to hurt him, or prevent him from getting help. I just don't want to throw medication at him and worry that I'm causing permanent damage."

He seems to hear the feedback: with the possible exception of his ex-wife, no one here thinks he is a bad guy. His mere presence is appreciated, in a world where 13-year-olds can overdose on Tylenol PM and lie alone in a hospital bed while the parents refuse to spend another long and boring night in the emergency room. It is clear to anyone who can get past his initial gruffness that he is a scared, overwhelmed, underinformed father who can't quite understand how ten years have moved a squalling, helpless, protectable infant into an intelligent, volatile, emotionally dysregulated boy. The hospital staff would rather have a concerned parent saying no than a dilatory, absent parent, any day of the week.

And yet he is deflated, sinking into himself. He has heard his ex-wife's tales of their son's uncontrollable outbursts, his violent acts and his screaming fits, but he hadn't yet seen it in action. He had convinced himself that this was one more instance of the woman playing head games, and the boy was fine, would continue to be fine. He was doing the best he could with what he had, and he had believed it was good enough.

But now, he stands in the emergency department, hovering in the doorway, shocked and frightened to watch the boy devolve from a talkative, polite pre-teen into a kicking, whining toddler at the mere mention of having blood drawn. He goggles at the admission from his ex-wife that this is the sixth attempt in a year to draw blood, and every other time the boy has thrown a large enough tantrum that she has given up and gone home. He agrees that blood work is necessary, given certain alarming symptoms, and can't understand why it hasn't happened before now. He nods as he's told that the boy will be physically restrained for the procedure, and acquiesces to staff requests that both parents remain in the hallway for what is going to be an unpleasant experience for everyone if the boy continues to escalate his protests.

He has learned that the best he could do was not enough, because his child is not okay. This is not how a normal 10-year-old reacts, and it has clearly moved well beyond a power struggle into the horrifying and confusing realm of mental illness. He pulls aside the mental health worker to whisper, "Would medication help this? Would it help keep this from happening again?" He nods at the answer, which, like anything else in mental health, comes with caveats and uncertainties.

He is reminded that the child is lucky to have parents who are so concerned, lucky not to be alone. "As long as I'm alive," he said, "he will never sit alone in a hospital." The father is reminded that there is every reason to be optimistic that serious and long-term changes are possible to make his child's life, his heart, feel better. His nod is barely perceptible.

From behind the closed examination room door, screams and moans erupt that are unlike anything anyone - including the staff - has ever experienced. The noises continue for a long time; more than 20 minutes, though it feels far longer.

And the father stood very straight, back against the wall. And tears flowed, unchecked, down his face.

House of 1000 Dressers

2007-06-13T15:43:00.001-04:00

We live in a pretty quiet neighborhood, if you ignore the mufflerless and overaccelerated testosteronemobiles of the teenage boys next door. No lines painted in the road, lots of people out walking after dinner... you get the idea.

It makes sense now, though we hadn't anticipated it when we moved in, that this makes for an ideal setup for getting rid of crap. We've stacked any number of random useless item at the edge of the street - we don't even have curbs - and it has become a game, guessing how long the latest cast-off will last. We've offloaded an old television, several plastic storage bins, some cheap rickety cupboards, even a pile of rusted and hole-infested gutters, all within days or even hours.

I'm now learning that it's quite possible that everything we've gotten rid of has ended up in the same woman's house.

She came to our door today, a little manic and intense, to ask what we were doing with the big table-looking thing at the side of the road. Since we were all sitting inside at the time, the answer was pretty clearly, "Nothing. We're ignoring it. It's been bad." But I didn't offer this answer, because I'm not sure she could handle it. Instead, I gave her a sanitized version: it was inherited from my great-grandmother to my uncle, and I'd gone to pick it up from his house on Monday - but it needs more refinishing and care than I'm willing to give it. I don't have the space and time to pick up refinishing as a hobby.

I didn't tell her that the only reason I considered keeping the dressing table at all is because we, in my family, refer to my great-grandmother, deceased as of 1996, as Jimmy the Greek due both to her political ideology and her physical appearance. And that it was kind of fun to talk about having Jimmy the Greek's dressing table. Again, I didn't think she could handle it. (Besides, I have Jimmy the Greek's china. It is the ugliest set of china in the history of dishes. Seriously, it's amazing.)

Anyway, I gave her a short version of all of this, and she replied, "Yes, I was driving by the other week and I saw a dresser out there. I hate to see wooden pieces going unused, so I picked that up, too."

Willem helped her move it away from the road so that her husband could come pick it up later - lucky guy! - and then decided that this woman must have a house just crammed to bursting with every piece of furniture we've ever gotten rid of. It's like the little-known sequel to House of 1000 Corpses, this time with hardwood.

I almost feel guilty, thinking of the wooden twin bunk bed set that we gave away via craigslist.org last year - now this woman doesn't have a complete set.

Surprise

2007-06-12T22:10:00.000-04:00

Do you like surprises?

'Cause I don't.

I don't mind things in the gifts-as-surprise genre. I don't even pick up packages and shake them at Christmastime, and I don't try to weasel hints out of the gift-giver. I can sit, smug and comfortable in the knowledge that, eventually, I will be able to open that gift, and then the mystery will be over.

But I'm realizing, of late, that I actively dislike the "get dressed and ready by 7:00 on Saturday, we're doing something" type surprise. And everyone around me seems to just loooooooove perpetrating this type of event upon me. I wasn't allowed to know where we were going for my birthday dinner, and two of my closest friends have organized "a day trip" in mid-July that I'm only allowed to know that I should block off the date on my calendar.

I can understand that it's fun to try and keep things on the down-low for a while. I've done it myself - I worked hard to keep Willem's 30th birthday plans a secret until the last possible second. But I'm realizing it makes me a tiny bit berserk when the tables are turned, so I'm thinking that will continue t be the exception rather than the rule.

It's just this: if I don't know what we're going to do and where we're going to go, then I can't get properly excited. The anticipation is so formless and blurry, and it's just hard for me to really sink my brain into it. I like counting down the days, and planning out my outfits, and watching relevant TV shows or what have you.

So, pretty please, if any of you out there feels the need to shower me with gifts, you go right ahead, and I can comfortably promise not to open them before the appropriate deadline. But if you're planning an outing, please just go ahead and let that cat out of the bag right from the start, okay? Cats don't like bags much, anyway.

Sprained Brain

2007-06-12T11:43:00.000-04:00

I think I may have done a little too much thinking lately. I may have strained something. I don't think my brain is actually broken, but I do think I should watch some mindless television - Game Show Network is always a good bet - and knit something I've already been working on and generally do what I can to figuratively wrap an Ace bandage around the afflicted area and keep off it for a day or two.

I've just been far too involved and worried and useless when it comes to my father's life. He's still living here, still trying to negotiate some form of relationship with his girlfriend, still trying to decide how and when and where to go back to work. The best I can offer - and, yes, I recognize, I'm offering enough and it's good enough but I still feel inadequate - is a safe place to live and good food to eat, and some basic respect and intelligent conversation. He needs to make the ultimate decisions himself, and me offering unsought (or even sought) advice or worrying overmuch won't be all that helpful. Not that that stops me.

I've also been mired down in the emotional abyss of family dynamics, specifically whether we should - or will - have a third child. I want to. Deeply. Desperately. Truth be told, I want two or three more; I really enjoy the four-year spread between my two now, and I'd like to be done before I'm 40, which means I could sneak three more in and still maintain both of those criteria.

That won't happen. Willem will very likely faint dead away at the mere reading of such a preposterous concept. He's comfortable with two, and until about a month ago was flatly disinterested in having a third. We had a long and involved conversation on the drive to Potsdam last month, and somehow I managed to say the right things, because now he says he's on board with planning for another.

Things seem to work that way for him: he can think one way, have a conversation, and flip a switch. I don't know whether I'm more prone to sulking, or ruminating, or what, but I don't adjust that quickly. I've heard him say the words, and I believe that he means them: he's comfortably, if not ecstatically, ready to talk about having one more child. But my heart hasn't bought in yet. When I was taking a pregnancy test the other week, and then dealing with a miscarriage, I had the expected range of disappointment and sadness, but also a relief - because I was scared of his reaction. Not domestic-violence-and-black-eyes scared, not even yelling-and-sulking scared - I knew he'd do the right thing, be the right guy. But still scared, because I didn't believe it would be okay. And a large proportion of my own okayness rests on his okayness.

And ambivalence about a miscarriage? Doesn't feel okay. Wanting desperately to have another child but not being able to convince your heart that it will be wanted by both parents? Ditto.

So, yeah. My brain is tired. I recognize that the bottom line is, my dad will work things out and be okay, and I'm glad that we're able to help him in any capacity at all. We'll try for a third baby someday, and it will be wonderful (but, yes, hard work), and I'll accept the fact that three will have to be enough, because more than that will not be okay.

And in the meantime I'll put some ice on it to try to numb the process of getting to that bottom line.

Short-Term Leasing

2007-06-11T07:49:00.000-04:00

Sometime between Friday night and Saturday morning, Emily apparently entered into a short-term lease agreement with Satan. It may have been brokered without her awareness, as she is claiming ignorance and the non-binding nature of a contract entered into before age 18, and I have my suspicions about the use of Tom & Jerry cartoons as a portal for such transactions.

Be that as it may, she spent the majority of Saturday convincing me that there's a good reason why many animals eat their young, and reminding me of one of my central rules of parenting: You always have to love your children, but you don't have to like them all the time. And on Saturday, I disliked her with a vengeance.

Then, around 6:00 p.m., the lease expired. She was suddenly polite and fun and sweet again, and we made it through the rest of the evening without incident; no small feat when there wasn't a single consecutive hour through the rest of the day in which I didn't have to repeat myself, apply a consequence, or glare sternly.

Kids are hard work.

Not How it's Supposed to Happen

2007-06-09T23:42:00.000-04:00

SCENE ONE:
Early morning. Slow pan through children's rooms, oddly still filled with sleeping children, into parents' bedroom. Husband wakes up, rolls over, begins to gently and romantically awaken his wife: quietly and affectionately rubs her back, arms, other strategically selected areas. Wife stirs, rolls over.

WIFE: Mmmm.

HUSBAND: Yeah?

WIFE: Mmmmmmmmmmmmm.

HUSBAND: Yeah.

WIFE: I feel like I'm going to throw up.

[FADE TO BLACK]

SCENE TWO:
Late evening. Slow pan through living room, lights left on, television paused long enough for screen saver to activate, knitting project and computer game abandoned on furniture. Various items of clothing scattered in hallway. Children, again, sleeping in their respective bedrooms. Parents in bedroom, considering further enactment of activities interrupted earlier by a head cold and vertigo.

WIFE: My dad is still out with his girlfriend. If they come home, see the living room, movie on pause, lights still on... I might die.

HUSBAND: You're 30 years old. You have two children. I think they know you've done this before.

WIFE: [PAUSE] Yeah, I might die.

[FADE OUT FOR CENSORS]

Some time later. Husband and wife exit bedroom, somewhat disheveled and out of breath. Wife enters bathroom, husband continues to living room. Close up on wife's horrified expression as muffled male conversation wafts gently from living room. No lethal weapons immediately apparent, so she waits for mortification to kill her on its own.

[FADE TO BLACK]

In a Just World...

2007-06-08T22:43:00.000-04:00

...Paris Hilton would assault another inmate following a heated exchange on the general topic of the worthiness of pocket-sized dogs as pets, thereby earning a several-year extension onto her sentence. Instead, she will get a book deal, and maybe even a (not-NC-17-rated) movie out of a couple of weeks of minimally just consequences for illegal actions.

...More people would read this story and, instead of invoking God and luck and miracles and rabbits' feet, would take a moment to pause, reflect, and say, "I wonder what the kid in the wheelchair is up to." Instead, the assumption is that the presence of a wheelchair creates a feebleminded, pathetic, innocent creature who couldn't possibly have just been bored and looking to shake things up. (Note: I don't know any more than what's in this type of article - maybe he is faultless. But am I really the only person in the country willing to consider an alternative hypothesis?)

...Idiotic medical conditions would strike people mute as well as causing pain. Instead they get you published.

...the phrase "half a foot deep" would apply only to liquids.

I need to not read the news. Not even yahoo's fake pretend cutesified version of news. Argh.

Gentle Advice

2007-06-08T11:41:00.000-04:00

If, God forbid, you find yourself in a hospital emergency room, for the second time in two days, being assessed for mental stability to determine whether it's safe for you to return to your home (where you'd rather be) or you need to be hospitalized involuntarily in a psychiatric unit halfway across the state, it might not help things move in your favor to hand your lunch tray to the security guard, flip it up into his face, and then attempt to escape, hospital gown a-flappin', out the nearest doors. There's one very specific reason why those particular doors are kept locked, and you are it.

I'd also encourage you not to tell your friendly neighborhood mental health clinician that it wasn't you that was assessed yesterday, but rather a woman named Jenny who is trying to take over your life and is your identical twin but isn't because your real twin lives out of state. Statements like this don't make you seem less> crazy, even if they're stone-cold truth. Especially because, unless the mental health clinician is also having visual hallucinations, you look about as unfemale as a person can look without walking around naked. (And, please, don't do that. Really, really.)

Too Much Volume

2007-06-08T08:26:00.001-04:00

I stopped at the grocery store for milk and some odds and ends (odds, Aisle 3, Ends, Aisle 12 - I don't know why they don't shelve them together), and used the self checkout to escape the store.

The prerecorded Exorcist-meets-2001 voice announcing the prices and walking me through the process, just in case I was actually a Capuchin monkey with a recent lobotomy, was FAR LOUDER THAN IT NEEDED TO BE.

I'm just glad that I wasn't buying anything embarrassing.

Weird

2007-06-06T09:57:00.000-04:00

We all knew, right, that I was not as completely unruffled and untouched by the miscarriage as I thought I was. Right? I'm still not depressed. Aside from a brief and hormone-fueled burst immediately after figuring it out on Saturday, I haven't cried, haven't felt the need to. But stuff like that doesn't happen without a price.

My price has been this sense of weird. That I'm forgetting something; that I've missed some crucial detail or am about to make some huge mistake. It's a sense of vulnerability, a lack of self-confidence, that I find alien and yet all-too-familiar. A year ago, two years ago, this would have blossomed into a full-fledged depression, complete with hibernation and caustic humor and an inability to quite be myself at any given moment.

I know it would have happened, because it did. I had post partum depression for over a year with Jacob, which wasn't entirely the fault of the pregnancy because I was married to a man who was profoundly unhappy at his job and therefore unhappy in most of his life, and I find it very difficult to watch that kind of misery on a daily basis without getting a little on me. But the pregnancy, the stress of it all, and the ongoing hormonal roller-coaster of breastfeeding and working two jobs and grad school... it wasn't good.

Then I started to swim out a little. We moved across the state, we had a fresh start, I got to stay home with my kids full-time... life eased up on me a little. I picked up a new hobby, knitting, which has become a way of life now. Things were on the mend. Until I got run over by the You Didn't Get an Internship Steamroller and was flattened for several more months. Especially because, hard on the heels of that, came the You Can't Continue to Stay Home Jackhammer which just eroded at my core well-being. No insurance, no money, working at the only low-cost mental health provider in town... all added up to just fumbling through, just coping.

I can say, with honesty and confidence, that I've been better for the last, oh, eight or nine months. Since the fall, sometime, when I accepted the necessity of a full-time job, and learned to take pride in the work I was doing with such hurt, damaged people. When I was able to really see the fun and sociability my kids were enjoying at their respective schools. When I was watching my husband - whether he wants to admit it or not - succeeding at grad school.

Which is why I'm able to sit here now and recognize my weirdness without falling down into that funnel again. Because that's what depression is like for me - it's like sitting at the bottom of a huge, slick funnel. You can't climb up the sides; there are no footholds, and every time you make it a few inches, something happens and you slip and wind up at the bottom again, only worse because it's again. Things keep coming over the edge and falling down on you, and you're at the bottom so they can't land anywhere but on your head, and you can't avoid them. Life just keeps pounding away at you, and on the really dark days you wonder what would happen if you just let go.

I'm not there now, to begin with, which is what is allowing me to keep it together through the various stresses falling down around me. I'm not at the bottom of a funnel, so some of those stresses are able to miss me a little - not everything feels like it's my fault or my responsibility. Such a relief.

But I'm still weird. I'm moody, and far too easily frustrated. Just ask Willem and my kids about what a paragon of stability and cheer I was last night. They'll say, "What? She was? I didn't notice, what with all the yelling." I'm impulsive and reactive, doing instead of thinking. I took the first step toward rejoining a message board that I'd left a while ago due to my own inability to figure out how I fit in, whether I fit in; I'd been thinking about going back for a while, but I don't know for sure that I was done thinking. I think it'll be good for me to get back; I miss some old friends and am in a better place to be myself without referencing others' responses. But still - I'm not normally impulsive, so it's weird.

Adding to this all is my recent experience with both my parents, in which I have been more Something than each of them. It started with my mother, in France - I'd traveled internationally before, so I knew things about air travel, and using a subway system, and speaking French, that she didn't know. And it put both of us into an odd relational spin, because normally we're both pretty willing to live and let live, but in this case I felt the need to step in and be more of a leader of our little group. My mother doesn't like it when someone else knows things she doesn't know, and she doesn't like being told no. (Does anyone?) So it was weird.

And now, with my father, watching his relationship with his girlfriend roller-coaster up and down - he's thinking of moving back in with her - and at first thinking, "This is all way too fast. What is he thinking?" And then realizing that my parents got married at 17 and only officially divorced about a year and a half ago. He may have had other short-term flings before now - let's not delve too deeply into that thought, okay? - but this is only his second relationship, ever, that he is sharing with the family and sticking with for more than a few months. So, yes, it really is sort of unsophisticated and impulsive in a lot of ways - negotiating relationships is a learned skill, not an instinct.

So, yeah. I've been weird. There've been other examples - I applied for a per diem neuropsychology job this morning, an hour away, which would probably be a good thing for me but, again, not like me to just bang out a cover letter and C.V. like that. I ate the better part of a pint of Ben & Jerry's last night, and I've come a long, long way from daily overeating. You get the idea.

But I'm not out of control, and I'm not depressed. Know how I know? Because I'm not playing mindless computer games for hours and hours at a stretch every day. That's one of my early symptoms - I fall into card games or thoughtless Windows games and can't stop. I've done my share of solitaire and played Hoyle's gin for a while last night while my father watched the Republican debates, but I'm keeping an eye on it. So far, it's all been a choice - "I think I'll play for a while" - and I've been able to stop when I want to, instead of staying up until 3:00 in the morning for one more game of Jezzball.

So, for now, weird isn't bad. And with a little luck, I'll shake it off soon.

Niggling

2007-06-06T00:15:00.000-04:00

Something is bothering me.

Itching my brain. Pestering. Niggling.

Like I've forgotten to do something, but I can't think what.

I'm sitting on my couch at 12:17 a.m., wandering through my consciousness. It started off as a systematic process, and now I'm just throwing stuff everywhere in the hopes that one of these neurons will move out of the way and reveal Whatever It Is.

I've already remembered several things that I thought I'd forgotten - like, we're supposed to send in cut-up fresh fruit to Emily's school tomorrow so they can make a fruit salad. I have some shopping to do, pronto, post-haste, yesterday, for a group gift, that I keep forgetting until it's the completely wrong time to do it. (Such as, midnight.) We're painfully late on Emily's thank-you notes for her birthday. I have to send my uncle an email about picking up this antique dressing table before he moves. I have to figure out where we'll put it once it arrives at my already-cluttered house.

I keep hoping that one of these light bulbs will be the one to squelch the nagging sense that I'm going to wake up in all-too-few hours and immediately smack myself in the forehead because of The Big Important Thing.

So far, no luck.

Let me know if you think of it, okay? I need to try to get some sleep.

Limitless

2007-06-05T10:12:00.000-04:00

One of my favorite quotes is by Piero Scaruffi: There is a limit to human intelligence, but there is no limit to human stupidity. And the longer I work in the mental health field, I think it would be safe to twist it around a bit: There is a limit to human kindness, but there is no limit to human cruelty.

And I'm not even talking, right now, about the times when family members hurt each other, when parents call their children stupid and worthless, when fathers attempt suicide in front of their children, when blame is placed and when responsibility is refused. That stuff happens every single day, and on a good day I'm able to remain somewhat aloof and superior to the foibles of these people who probably don't intend to hurt anyone but just can't figure out a healthier way to live in the world. On a bad day, I hover close to despair because it shouldn't be this hard to live a respectful and harm-minimizing lifestyle.

Right now, though, I'm talking about Rickhead, the resident IT guru and Snotty Man Extraordinaire. Witness the following exchange of emails, beginning on Friday. The printer at the hospital (WDH) stopped working earlier in the week, and Perfect J had been in touch with the Rickhead about it before then.

Friday
Kate:

Hi, Helpdesk,
Do you know if anything has been done with the WDH printer today? It hasn’t printed in two or three days – if you send something to print, it starts to make the initial noises like it’s about to print, but then does nothing. I stopped by this morning, still no luck. I’m on my way there for an assessment, and wanted to know if I should just handwrite the paperwork this time...

Rickhead:

Hi Kate,
I won’t be able to get over there to troubleshoot until Monday.
You’ll need to handwrite or email to yourself for printing elsewhere until I can get to that.
Sorry for the inconvenience.

Kate:

There aren’t any other printers available onsite there, so I’ll just handwrite. No big deal – thanks for the update.

Rickhead:

If you must submit notes immediately then I guess you’ll have to handwrite.
You’re welcome for the update.
Just a reminder that all requests for assistance need to go FIRST directly to the HELPDESK so they don’t fall through the cracks, like this one apparently did.
Hopefully I can get it resolved on Monday.

Kate:

I'll forward your reminder of the proper helpdesk procedure to the rest of the team, including our supervisor. My first note, today, was indeed directed to the Helpdesk, and I was under the assumption that you had already been working with a coworker earlier this week on this problem.

Perfect J:

He attempted to walk me through the corrections over the phone on Wednesday, and said he would take care of it by going to WDH.

A fabulous start, to begin with. Nothing screams "PROFESSIONAL" louder than a handwritten assessment and a printer that has been offline for a week. Not to mention his pointed use of CAPITAL LETTERS.

Monday
Rickhead:

FYI ES Team,
Printer at WDH now printing/working fine. It was 'OFFLINE', something that presumably happened when someone configured the printer's FAX capabilities and altered some of the printing preferences.
Unless it is not printing (or printing improperly) the settings/preferences should not need to be altered. If you do need to have the settings modified, or if there is another printing problem, please contact the HELPDESK. We'll troubleshoot it for you.
Thanks!

Sanctimonious P:

Complicated email describing a workaround because the printer still won't work.
Ends with, "There must be an easier way."

Rickhead:

That’s odd Paul, it worked fine yesterday afternoon at around 3:30. I’ll swing by again and have another look.
I will go back again at my first opportunity (hopefully today) and make sure it’s printing properly. I will let you all know as soon as I’ve done that.
To avoid any confusion, I’m going to ask that anyone who uses that computer at WDH please NOT adjust the printer or printer settings without checking with me first.
Thanks,

Kate:

Hi, Vic,
I do appreciate your involvement and hope we’re able to reach resolution soon. I would like to say that it’s very unlikely that anyone from the ES team changed the printer settings – aside from sending things to print and changing ink cartridges, and using it as a fax machine directly from the machine, we tend to notify the helpdesk quickly instead of trying to fix things ourselves. I can’t imagine anyone opening the printer preferences and changing any settings through the computer.

Rickhead:

Great. That’s a good tendency. Please keep it up.
It’s always nice to be appreciated and I’ll let you know as soon as it gets resolved.
Thanks,

Argh.

Perhaps I'm just oversensitive and vulnerable... but if so, then everyone else I work with is, as well, because four of us in my department happened to be here this morning for this particular email exchange, and I'm certain I was not the only one feeling condescended to. And, guess what? I don't like that.

Rickhead has shown a particular tendency to seem threatened by me because I made the mistake, early on, of telling him that I used to work on IBM's helpdesk. Thereby proving that not only are my testicles bigger than his, but that I was able to escape with some semblance of people skills.

I remember well, that IT-tendency to act as though the central role of any business is to have computers and anything else that the business happens to do - say, providing therapy - is secondary. Not to mention the attitude that only gods disguised as men (and manly women) deserve to be allowed to touch the inner workings of a computer, not those mere peons outside the IT department, and yet at the same time there is a scorn when those peons don't know the correct vocabulary or the Secrets to Technological Perfection.

Somehow I don't get the same attitude from the other specialized fields - my plumber doesn't scoff at me when I ask for help with an exploded water heater, and my doctor doesn't dish out 'tude when I call for a prescription. Makes me wonder whether working in IT changes people, or whether a special certain type of person often gravitates in that direction.

And to be fair, I know any number of sweet and caring people, with social skills and without an over-reliance on the CAPS LOCK key, who work with computers. So it's not inevitable... it's just annoying.

Freaky

2007-06-04T21:33:00.000-04:00

I just had a whole day go by without a single bit of drama or crisis or oddity. At least, no new oddity.

It's kind of freaky. I don't know what to do.

In the morning, Jacob and I went out shopping, because I needed some ribbon to finish a sweater I'd been working on. (It's on my knitting blog, go see! It's cute! And finished!) I was able to find the right color ribbon for $0.59 each. In stock.

We stopped to have my car inspected. It passed.

I went into Walgreen's to pick up a few things. They were on sale.

Jacob ate his lunch and took a nap just like we planned. Emily came home from school uneventfully.

No major injuries occurred during the course of the evening.

I made a baked tilapia dish that came out perfectly.

Willem brought me ice cream. Several kinds, actually.

It's just... odd. I'm going to go to bed soon, before that Godzilla foot comes crashing down. And how sad, that a normal, smooth sort of day seems like such an anomaly.

Blech

2007-06-03T21:30:00.000-04:00

Yeah, by now I'm sure. I'm still surprised by my own unruffledness; I'm not exactly skipping around and singing, but nor am I wallowing. I think if I'd gotten a positive pregnancy test earlier in the week it'd be a different tune, but as it is I'm not getting what I already expected not to get. So I'm okay.

Physically, for those not versed in this particular experience, and I wish that this applied to most everyone, I'm hovering right in the middle of the cosmic pain scale. A miscarriage, even this early, is more painful than a regular monthly event, more uncomfortable than a sprained ankle or a tattoo, but not as bad as a severe migraine, strep throat or childbirth. Ibuprofen deals with it, though I found last night that top-shelf chocolate martinis (two, thankyouverymuch) help take that edge off just fine, too.

Even feeling emotionally okay, I'm deeply appreciative of the comments here, and notes and phone calls, because this okayness is certainly not a given. Any number of small details, slightly altered, could have snowballed into the sort of baffled, betrayed self-loathing that I've done twice before.

It's actually quite bizarre, feeling this normal right now. It's as if I shouldn't laugh or enjoy the kids; I don't feel guilty so much as confused. To the point that I wonder if I'm just innocently grazing in a field, unconsciously waiting for that big lizard foot to come smashing down. But I don't think so. I hope not.

I'm obviously not quite myself tonight, because it has taken almost 45 minutes to come out with this pathetic little excuse for a post, and it's neither witty nor intense. Just vague. Which is really how I'm feeling - like someone has turned down my volume, except for these odd little moments of moodiness which everyone just loves.

So I'm going to go back to my heating pad and stop with the drivel. For now.

The Pendulum Swings

2007-06-03T09:59:00.000-04:00

Hell of a day, yesterday.

It started off normally enough, for a Saturday. I got up with the kids, dealt with breakfast and clothing, no big deal. Except that I found myself hair-trigger reactive to the slightest thing; the normal daily allotment of whining and balking struck me as unreasonable and infuriating instead of being just another day in paradise. I never lost my cool with the kids, but I was certainly playing fast and loose with it - the kind of parenting where, even as it's happening, you're thinking, "It would be so annoying to be in a store watching me with these kids right now. Not call-Social-Services annoying, just irritating."

I was edgy. Noodgy. Irritable. Like PMS - the "pre" of which still, 6 days late, would have applied yesterday morning. I recognized it while it was happening but still was unable to do much more than dilute the moodiness a little. I couldn't just vanquish it with mere recognition.

We made it through some errands in the morning, including a wildly unsuccessful attempt to have my minivan inspected. I'd made an appointment for 9:00 a.m., showed up at 8:55 with both kids and quiet activities, and was told, "Oh, the girl who did the scheduling somehow put two inspections in at the same time. It'll be a while before we can get to yours."

"Well, how much of a while?" I asked.

"We haven't started the other one yet... so maybe half an hour, 45 minutes."

I didn't bother to ask how come the other one took precedence over mine, if we were both scheduled at the same time, I was on time, and I had infinitely more children than anyone else in the waiting room. I just announced, "Okay, then, we're going to go somewhere else. Come on, kids."

Which is apparently code, at this certain car-care chain (starts with M, rhymes with bidas), for, "Everyone get excited and get the manager, this woman is about to unleash a 'roid rage upon innocent bystanders." Because I was immediately accosted by a sweaty, self-important man in a tie - thereby proclaiming him as a manager, I suppose - insisting that he can't help it, the scheduling was done by someone else and now they're late and there's nothing he can do. Throughout which I gave him my best freak-show quizzical look and then pointed out that I wasn't angry or upset, I was simply going to find another establishment more willing to uphold their own appointment book. He continued to bluster and gesture even as I was pulling away.

It was, at least, nice to know I wasn't the only one with a bit of a self-censor malfunction.

From there we went to Home Depot for their free kids' craft, because I just love the word "free," and made actually pretty neat little biplanes. Came home, had lunch, and I did my best to steer clear of any child-related interactions that would require me to speak or, you know, interact.

The pendulum of the day continued to swing toward "bad" for a few more hours. I had increasing discomfort, starting in the morning at "hey that hurts" and escalating by early afternoon to "WTF." Hard to go from cranky to cheerful while grinding one's jaw, somehow.

I'd been informed that my dad was going to babysit for us while Willem took me out for a birthday dinner, though because [insert unknown guy reason here] it was all supposed to be a big surprise about where we were going and who we were meeting. I'm someone who enjoys the opportunity to look forward to an event, so surprises are kind of lost on me, but it seems to make Willem happy. I'd been provided with a departure time of 4:30, so around 2:30 I headed into the bathroom. I figured, whatever we were doing, it was going to require a shower within 24 hours of said event.

Now, I won't go into detail here. You're welcome. But the outcome is, I'm fairly certain that the reason for my moodiness and pain was explained while I was in the shower. I don't think it was a mere case of delayed need for feminine products. I'm as positive as a non-doctor can be that I had a very early miscarriage. Bear in mind that just two days earlier, I had established that (a) I wasn't pregnant and (b) I wasn't ready yet, so this wasn't the total full-out crushing blow that the last time was. It's more disturbing, unpleasant, but at the same time a relief that there's some non-bipolar reason for my inability to control my own moods.

That was the low point of the day, right there. Because I don't care that I wasn't ready yet - there's still a sense of inadequacy and brokenness to the concept of miscarriage. And pinning a reason on my emotional roller-coaster wasn't enough to just stop that particular train. So I cried, and hugged my husband, and briefly thought about crawling into sweats and sending Willem out for Ben & Jerry's and hibernating for the rest of ~~my life~~ the night.

Instead, I put on a nice outfit, smiled nicely for my dad and his apparently-on-again girlfriend, who both watched the kids for free while we went out, and got into the minivan. Willem took me down to Beverly, MA, to eat at a place we loved when we lived in Salem, and we met Mark and Jenny there. We had a fabulous time. The meal was amazing, the dinner conversation was fun and intelligent, and Willem was seated jut perfectly to be able to sneak glances at the baseball game being televised in the bar.

Afterward, we drove over to Salem Willows, watched a violent thunderstorm pass quite close but not enough to rain on us, and wandered through the vintage '80s arcade games. I doubled the top score in Tetris, which is the only video game I'm good at but I'm really, really, really good at it, Willem reminded the Galaga universe who's boss, and Jenny played games involving rifles and zombies. Mark, the most inveterate gamer of us all, sort of wandered around with the awed overstimulation one might expect of a pilgrim finally making his way to Mecca.

Being all parents and still 99.44% lame, we were all ready to head for home by 9:00, but first Willem and I took a detour around Salem and Peabody to revisit the places we lived and worked way back when. Did you ever live someplace that just felt right, like the very air you breathed was a better match for your lung chemistry? That's how I feel about the North Shore. I'll be back. Someday.

So, a day that ran the gamut from brief but intense misery to a perfect birthday dinner out - kind of exhausting, but somehow right, too. There's something to be said for balance.

Unfrozen

2007-06-01T17:52:00.000-04:00

My freezer isn't working.

But only when I'm approaching the house or actually inside.

I called Willem on my way home with the kids, and he said he was having "some sort of emergency... not a major one... but still." Of course he was. It's already been that kind of month.

I arrived home to find our crammed-full stand-alone freezer slowly rising in temperature. This was enough to push me over the line from moderately stressed - busy afternoon at work, ongoing weirdness with Emily which is either just normal 7-year-old bossiness or the sign of a serious personality disorder, toilet-training issues with Jacob - to unable to cope. I just stood there with an idiotic look on my face, replicated all of the things Willem had already tried, and then realized that I really needed to head back out because I'd gotten another hospital call.

The moment I stepped outside, the freezer started working again.

Shortly, I'm going to leave the hospital. Anyone want to place bets on how close I have to be to the house before the freezer dies again?

Argh.

A Letter to the Makers of e.p.t.

2007-05-31T11:15:00.000-04:00

Dear Sirs,

Forgive my presumption; perhaps there are women employed there, but I assume a certain male influence behind today's experience. Women understand that there are certain things with which we do not trifle. We don't mix glass shards in with baby food, we don't replace the contents of Tylenol capsules with cyanide, and we don't complicate the reading of pregnancy tests.

This morning, I decided that, being several days late and moderately paranoid about the combination of new birth control, a course of antibiotics, travel and time zone changes in my life over the past month, it was time to reassure myself that I wasn't embarking on a new round of procreation. Please understand, I do indeed want to add another individual to the world population, but not quite yet.

Over the years, I've had the opportunity to use a number of different brands of home pregnancy tests, all purchased after a strict selection process centered around choosing the cheapest per-unit price on the shelf. All other times, the mathematical calculations required to determine the test results have been consistent: two lines indicate pregnancy, while one line assures me that I will continue to be the sole occupant of my body for the immediate future.

I don't invest in great quantities of this type of product at any given time, but it's something for which immediate availability is imperative when the need arises, so I try to keep one on-hand. I can't recall the last purchase, but at that time, e.p.t. must have won the lowest-price competition, because it was what I found under my bathroom sink this morning. Feeling well-versed in the ways of home pregnancy tests, I rather arrogantly proceeded to apply the necessary bodily fluid to the proper region of the stick and then continue with my morning ritual, consisting primarily of staring at the wall and wondering why I don't drink coffee.

I then glanced at the test, and counted lines: two.

Two.

I hadn't previously realized that it was possible to hear the sound of adrenaline coursing through one's veins. I instantly and simultaneously had four thousand distinct thoughts, was able to briefly see through time, and hovered several inches above the floor. It was adequate reinforcement that I was not ready to reenter the world of gestation, and an overabundance of proof that I was not ready to break said news to my husband.

In a desperate delaying tactic, I found the package instructions, and read them in Spanish because I was too panicked to realize I can't read Spanish. And lo and behold, in your test, two does not equal pregnant. Two equals not pregnant, and three, one at a 90-degree angle, means a legitimate early morning jolt of adrenaline. It was several hours before my heart rate returned to a beat that would not require a double-bass technique to replicate, and my eyes continue to hurt from the uncontrolled pupil dilation.

The decision-makers at Pfizer have therefore been tried and convicted in the Court of Kate, on the charge of unreasonable cruelty and unlawful induction of panic. Your punishment is yet to be determined, but will likely involve a specific bodily fluid.

Resentfully and tiredly yours,
Kate

Apparently the 3-0 is Big

2007-05-30T08:22:00.000-04:00

I'm officially no longer in my 20s today. Unless you're my mother, who refuses to acknowledge a birthday until the actual time you were born, which effectively gyps me out of a full birthday because I was born at 7:30 p.m. Whatever. I want a full day, so I get a full day. So there.

I'm celebrating and not mourning today; I'm sort of shocked and saddened by the number of people I know who look at birthdays like they're a bad thing. Another year without winning the Nobel Prize, or having twins, or appearing on national television, whatever their big dream involves. Another year older, and tireder, and slower. Another year closer to death.

For me, my birthday is a day to follow my own instincts and indulge a bit, depending on where my whims take me. This year, that meant administering a cheesy redneck pedicure in the morning (slap a coat of nail polish on top of the stuff left over from Paris, then drive to work barefoot with the fan blowing at floor level), wearing a skirt and earrings (and a shirt, relax, I'm not that celebratory), and not listening to the news on the drive in. A story I heard yesterday is still bothering me, and I just don't want to go there this morning.

I just don't feel older, or worse, or sad, or whatever, this morning. If anything, there's a certain level of relief every time I hit a milestone. I've spent a lot of time doing things early in my life: graduating high school at 16 and college at 20, having my first baby at 22, buying a house at 23, and so on, and so forth. So when I reach that next milestone, and get older, there's a feeling that I'll get a little less of, "Oh, but you're so young." Not that I'm insulted by that, but, just, what do you say to it? It's not usually meant as a compliment so much as a vaguely shocked/critical sort of thing, and even when it is a compliment, what do I take credit for? Choosing a good birthday? Being born with enough brain and motivation and parenting to move myself along? I dunno. Feels weird.

So, it's a good thing, this birthday stuff, if for no other reason than I can unabashedly demand good behavior and positive attention from those around me. Most of the people I spend time with - even Perfect J, at work - are socialized enough to know that the correct response to, "Today is my birthday," is to smile brightly and say, "Happy birthday!"

So, all together now, you readers... today is my birthday...

Skip to the End of the Line

2007-05-29T08:52:00.001-04:00

In another Storyland-related ramble, we were in line at Guest Services to get season passes. It's about an hour and a half from home, and we go three or four times a year. Season passes are less than three times the price of admission... so we bother.

We had to wait in line, and watched the family ahead of us get their passes. "Family," in this case, equalling Mom, Dad and a baby small enough not to need shoes. You don't need to pay admission until a kid is four, so it was just the parents getting their passes, and I guess when my kids were that small I didn't think they needed amusement parks to be, well, amused. Then again, now, at 7 and 2, I still don't think they need it, I just think they're able to appreciate and enjoy it more than, say, a paper bag on the living room floor, now that they're older.

Anyway, the family behind us in line seemed like a pretty average bunch: two parents and two boys. They waited their turn, and as we were leaving, I heard the mother explain to the Guest Services minion, "My son has ADHD. He can't stand in line. We need a pass to let us skip to the end at all the rides." And the minion handed one right over, no questions asked.

Which raises all sorts of musings in my poor, sunscreen-addled head. Really? ADHD makes him unable to stand in line? Really? I understand very well that ADHD can impact one's executive functioning, the ability to control impulses and think things through, but this was a Monday on the first open weekend of the year. The park was very quiet; I never stood in line for more than 5-10 minutes at a time and on several of the rides we could just stay on and loop around more than once. So, then, if this kid is so severely disabled that he can't stand in line for no time at all, how are we to feel about his ability to behave appropriately on the rides? Maybe that looooong uphill climb to the top of the log flume will prove to be just too much for him, and he'll stand up and get hurt. Something.

Lest I sound totally unsympathetic, I can come up with several circumstances in which skipping to the end of the line makes total sense. I saw one family, no dad present, in which the mother was in a wheelchair - so she would lead the two or three kids with her to the exit-door, show her pass to the employee, and the kids would hop on from there. Makes total sense to me, because she can't weave through the entrance lines and she needs to keep track of her kids, so, fine. I can also see a child with a physical health problem needing not to stand still in the sun but able to handle the ride, or someone with autism not being able to maintain personal boundaries and control but being able to enjoy the ride itself and therefore needing to skip the stand-and-wait part.

But ADHD? Really? The kid was able to stand in line behind both my family and the one ahead of us to wait to get the pass, and he never whined or fidgeted or did any of the other sorts of hyperactive/impulsive/inattentive things that I'm used to looking for in ADHD assessment (which I did, professionally, for two years).

I'm skeptical. At the very least, my hey-not-fair sense wants them to have to provide some form of documentation, a note from the doctor or similar, to reassure me that this is not just a case of the parents not feeling like standing in line. Because it really kind of felt like that.

(in)Dependent

2007-05-28T18:08:00.000-04:00

Last month, Emily turned seven. For those first few weeks, we didn't really notice much of a difference; she was still in first grade, still dramatic at the wrong moments, still as bossy as ~~her mother~~ all get-out.

But today. Today we had tangible proof that seven is different than six in at least one key area: going on the rides at Storyland has suddenly become a solo activity.

And who would have guessed that it is infinitely harder to stand idly by and watch your child climb aboard and wave from the top of the log flume ride by herself, than to laboriously clamber aboard ride after endless ride because she was too short to do it alone last year?

So, I'm still thinking about this the next morning. It's not a sad situation for me, exactly; just an acceptance of the inevitability of time and growth and blah blah blah. I spent summers with various grandparents, including Grandma O, in Old Forge, NY, and from about age 9 onward, she would drop me off at Enchanted Forest when it opened and pick me up outside in the afternoon, and I loved that freedom and never got into any trouble (there, at least). Emily's certainly not old enough for solo trips to the amusement park yet, but it's conceivable in the next few years. We're sending her to sleep-away camp for a full week in two months. Time rolls on, and all.

Actually, Willem's having a harder time with it all than me. He views himself as sort of Keeper of the Safety Rules in our house (though let's not talk about who the Enforcer of Said Rules is, hmm?) and by climbing onto a big ride and disappearing form sight, Emily proved yesterday that she is able to be responsible for herself for a few moments at a time; she was able to wait her turn in line and remain seated with hands and arms inside the car, and so on. It's a good thing, this independence... but it aches, too.

Snapshots

2007-05-26T17:11:00.000-04:00

It's been a long week. A rough one, really. I don't like to look at a whole block of calendar and relegate it to the "Well That Sucked" pile, but it's a challenge coming up with big bouncy piles of optimism for this one.

Let's review, shall we?

I came home from France. Home to the kids and Willem, which is good, but home from France. From Paris.

A little over 24 hours later, my dad called, thus beginning the process which ended with him moving back in. The fact of him living here? Doesn't bother me. I'm glad that we're able to offer, and glad that he has a place to live that involves people who love him and respect him. But it's another change. So far, everyone is adjusting pretty well: Willem, now having a partner in crime, is drinking more beer; the kids, having a new audience, are behaving in particularly annoying ways at dinner; I, given my propensity to think too much, am worried about his health and finances but have used this opportunity to eat more ice cream. And fried dough, which Willem has suddenly started making at home. (There! There it is! My unequivocal positive for the week! I knew there was one, somewhere.)

My water heater died. And in case Willem was harboring ongoing doubt about whether we really needed to pull up the carpeting and replace it, this morning the whole house smelled uncomfortably like, well, moldy carpet.

Friday, I overslept. And the door fell off the medicine cabinet in the bathroom. And I had two very long and difficult cases that kept me out until 10:00 last night.

So, I'm feeling toasty today. Stick a fork in me, and all.

When I think back over the week, I get little snapshots of memory, instead of mental movies. Moments that seem to have nothing to do with each other and yet somehow work together...

I was walking my normal oft-repeated path from my coat-closet office at the hospital to the emergency department where the patients are, and glanced idly into an exam room on the way... and noticed that, in a moment of supremely bad feng shui, the occupant's feet were pointed toward the door. But then I realized, it's actually not such horrible feng shui after all, because while the young gentleman's knees were aimed straight at the door, his right foot was pointing directly at the right-hand wall. Those sorts of images bother me enough on sports-disasters shows, but in real life? No, thankyouverymuch.

I was talking a family through the process of involuntarily hospitalizing their father, and had a moment to think that the 17-year-old, in front of whom the patient had overdosed, had gone from looking older than her years to about four at the moment that her mascara started to run.

This morning, I was lying on the couch with Jacob, trying to convince my brain to wake up because the boy was clearly not going back to sleep, when he looked up and me and said, "I love you so much." Unprompted.

I took a nap today. Normally this means I will wake up groggy and disoriented and spend the rest of my day cranky and stupid. So far I've avoided at least most of these side effects.

Yesterday, my father needed to get a form to his doctor, which he needed signed and faxed to work for an all-clear sort of thing. I faxed it from work in the morning, and by evening, the doctor had received the form, signed it, faxed it successfully along, and my dad was making plans to return to work next week. This is remarkable only in the sense that it's about the only thing all week that has gone smoothly for him.

Enough. Clearly I'm just free-associating now and it's not making a compelling story. But at least it's all out of my head now.

Deer Strike

2007-05-25T09:24:00.001-04:00

This morning, I was listening to AM radio on the way in to work, because it occurred to me that I haven't been following any semblance of local or world news in the past several weeks and perhaps, maybe, something new has happened.

It hasn't.

But on the traffic report, they said that Route 95, south of Boston, was held up because of a deer strike.

I didn't know they were able to hold up the signs and chant. Maybe they just all wear sandwich boards.

Welcome Home

2007-05-24T14:49:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, my dad got an email. It was from the venerable United States Postal Service. It was a confirmation of his address change.

He hadn't asked for an address change. His girlfriend did it for him. Seems like a pretty clear signal to me.

Nothing like kicking a guy while he's down, huh? Getting to move houses within two weeks of abdominal surgery, what a treat!

So I just spent my day off schlepping boxes from her kitchen, where she had helpfully arranged all of his stuff, into (and on) my minivan, and then rearranging his room and our old-and-new-again playroom, and then schlepping the stuff out of the minivan and back into his room here. Great fun, on the first over-80-degree day of the year.

And I hurt for him, and I'm worried for his health, physical and mental. And I'm tired.

To make matters more fun, we got to have a brief pause on the drive to her house for Jacob to throw up in the backseat. The good news is, it seemed to be a passing thing, and by the time we got there, he was quite happy to watch ants and peek around corners and mostly stay out of the way while we loaded the van. And he took a two-hour nap once we got home, which made unloading the minivan (and throwing out a bunch of old toys) vastly easier.

I'm just hoping for a 24-hour span with no drama or crisis. Is that so much to ask? Sheesh.

Fill in the Blanks

2007-05-23T15:04:00.000-04:00

Some conversations are so predictable that you don't actually need the other person to participate. Others... not so much.

For instance. Today, we've been making lots of phone calls (no, insurance does not cover a water heater; it would cover the flooring if the repair went above our $1000 deductible, but while we're at it we're going to tear up all of the carpeting and replace it with laminate so it won't be worth involving insurance) and my dad and I went to Home Depot to browse through their "Install it Your Damn Self Flooring" aisle.

On the way out the door, my phone rang. It was Willem, with an odd tone to his voice - not the "water problems" tone, more of the "WTF" tone. "When are you going to get home?" he asked.

"Soon," I said. "We're leaving Home Depot now, so maybe 15 minutes."

"Okay. Because the flooring guy is here for the estimate."

"Yeah..." Can you see where this is going? I couldn't either.

"And he bent over to look at something on the floor."

"Yeah..." Oh, God. He had a heart attack. There's a dead flooring installer on my living room floor. I bet insurance won't cover that, either.

"And his glasses fell off. And they broke."

"Okay..." And you want me to buy him new glasses? Help me out, here.

"And neither of us has the manual dexterity to put them back together. We need you to come home and fix them so he can leave."

Seriously. At any moment during that conversation, Monty Hall could have shown up and offered me $1,000,000 or what's behind Curtain #3 to supply the next sentence, and I'd have walked away empty-handed. Or, worse, with a goat wearing diapers.

They were able to fix the glasses before I got home. I'm hopeful that it'll earn us a discount - Personal Medical Device Reduction or something - because something has to go well today. Just anything, really.

One More Thing

2007-05-23T08:50:00.000-04:00

Indeed, it is a new blog title. And some half-assed changing, mostly because I really like that gargoyle picture and because I wanted to deal with some detail stuff, but I lack the energy and determination to really change the whole site around. Maybe someday.

But, right now, I'm living the philosophy of the title. One More Thing. Some time ago, Willem and I started saying this to each other, because it seems like we don't accumulate crises in a big avalanche all at once; instead, they gather in a string, so it's never too much to handle but it's always one more thing. And usually that one new thing is something so preposterous and outrageous that we just could not have predicted it. Seven hundred monkeys on seven hundred keyboards for seven hundred years would create the complete works of Shakespeare, but I'd still be randomly guessing and being wrong about what the next event would be.

Today's excitement arrived before I'd even crawled out of bed this morning; I was snuggling with the kids and generally being sleepy and happy (two out of seven dwarves ain't bad) when Willem said my name in his we-have-water-problems voice. Which, yes, he does indeed have a special tone of voice reserved specifically for events such as a pipe bursting in our home office, a waterfall in the garage, a flood at the back door... ask me how I know.

This time, it was apparently the water heater - on the floor in the hallway outside of the water heater closet there were, conservatively, 4,000 gallons of water. It's a good thing we sleep with the doors closed and locked, because we'd have had a synschronized swimming team in there this morning. And ducks. I'm guessing that the bottom just dropped out of the water heater, and you can safely imagine just how happy this makes me.

The good news is, somehow I was still able to take a hot shower this morning. I don't understand how that works, but ignorance is cleanliness.

The bad news is, who knows whether our homeowners insurance covers this? And we were planning on pulling up the carpets and laying down laminate, but we weren't planning on doing it today. And Willem has wet socks. There's just nothing worse than wet socks.

Housecleaning

2007-05-22T09:13:00.001-04:00

This blog may be intermittently messed up in various ways today - I don't mean in my normal slightly neurotic and on-the-verge-of-rambling way, but in a technical sort of manner. I want to change the template and customize with a new picture on top, and sometimes this is a quick and easy process and sometimes it takes hours and hours. So, we'll see.

In non-blog-related news, once again, things in my household have turned upside-down. Last night around 10:00, my phone rang. This is unusual, and far enough past the typical 9:00-or-so time when my brain stops interpreting phone calls as normal events and starts reacting in uh oh mode that I got a lovely late-evening jolt of adrenaline.

It was my father. This is a man who had three heart attacks between the ages of 30 and 45, and had a hernia operation a week and a half ago, and has been denied short-term disability through work for some stupid reason and is therefore sitting on 6 weeks now of not working and steadily going broke, and has been in a brand-new relationship since the fall... lots of options there for drama and crisis. Today's was that he was having serious difficulties with his girlfriend and needed a place to stay for the night. He'd just moved out of my house and into a new place with her in February (and did I somehow not blog this? Really? How is this possible?), and while I don't know for sure that things are over and done there, I do know that we'd already reclaimed his room and were using it as a playroom.

So, there's just a lot of uncertainties and unanswerable questions floating around right now. Are things actually finished between my dad and his girlfriend? Is he moving back in with us? Do we need to reorganize all of the kids' toys, again? What will he do for work when he's recovered from surgery? Will he return to the truck-driving, which he truly hated, or what? What will our summer look like now? And so on, and so forth.

I can't quite define my own feelings and reactions right now. I'm somewhere in the neighborhood of stressed and anxious, but not resentful or disdainful; just worried because there are so many potential outcomes and I can't predict which way this particular train will go. I know that Willem and I will do what we can to help out, and I'm glad that we're in a position to, at the very least, offer a place to stay and food to eat and some basic human respect and love while he gets through this... but at the same time, I can't imagine that it feels warm and fuzzy in the first place to be recovering from abdominal surgery and completely out of work, no income, with the knowledge that the only way to get income is to return to a physically demanding job that you despise, and then to have a relationship fall apart partly due to the financial stresses and partly to the fact that there may just be a basic incompatibility there... that can't be fun in the first place. And then to have to move in with your daughter, whose life is as obnoxiously close to perfect as anyone is allowed to have, at least for the moment... something about "insult to injury" there.

So, I'm a tad revved up right now. Seems like a good time to play with the blog template and enact some changes I can control.

Oh, and Sarah and Mary, and anyone else who happens to interact with my mom on a regular basis, please hold off on talking to her about this just yet, okay? She doesn't need to know, and my dad certainly does not need her to know, until things are clearer. One may recall that ambiguity is not her best area. Unless it's her ambiguity.

Reinvestigating Normal

2007-05-21T13:27:00.000-04:00

Yes, I'm back home.

Yes, Paris was wonderful.

Yes, I had a fabulous time. No, no regrets.

Yes, my kids were happy to see me. Yes, I was happy to see them. Willem, too.

Yes, I'm still tired, but getting back into the swing of things.

I'm back at work today, which has exposed me to the same questions a number of times. Had I known there was going to be a quiz, I would have studied harder. I realize that I sound snotty and petulant here - honestly, I'm not irritated, and I appreciate that people are asking about my trip and seem happy to have me back. But, seriously, "How was Paris?" How can you possibly answer that question in a non-effusive way? It's a bit like walking into a restaurant and having a hostess greet you with, "Hi, how are you doing today?" I suppose you could get cranky and tell her that you have a head cold and a hemorrhoid and a headache, but most of us just baa our socially-expected replies so that we can go sit down and dig into our rolls, you know?

I did, indeed, miss my kids and my husband a lot. To the point that their absence did mar my trip a little, but not to the point that I wish they had come with me, if that makes any sense. I recognize just how much extra work and stress it would have been for everyone, especially the kids, if they'd come along. I can remember looking askance at one of my father's sisters, back in my pre-parenthood days, when she would take vacations without her kids. "Oh," I sniffed, "I would never want to travel without my children. Why have them if you don't want to do things with them?" And it turns out, there are lots of reasons to have them, and lots of reasons to travel without them. I don't have any desire to travel again, particularly for more than a week, without my children anytime in the near future, but jet lag and fast-paced activity levels and not a lot of kid-friendly entertainment all add together to a trip that wouldn't have been right for them... but it was right for my mother, my sisters and myself.

I remembered why it is that distance is a good thing. My mother and I get along so much better ever since I moved out of the house; I think in many ways, we're very similar, and so those areas of difference - such as, I tend to communicate in a fairly direct way in which I try to state my preferences without making demands, whereas she tends to communicate with more implications and assumptions - those can be emotional minefields, especially when you're tired and hungry.

I remembered why time is a good thing. I had time away from my immediate family to miss and appreciate them, and I was able to realize just how far my marriage has come in almost-seven years. The last time I was in Paris was just days after Willem and I got engaged, and our relationship was so new and awkward and still stumbling over a number of not-so-old hurts, and we didn't have a well-established flow of conversation yet. Now, the main reason we don't finish each other's sentences is because we both find it irritating when other people do that - but if we wanted to, we could. Makes me look forward to the next seven years, and so on.

I was surprised at how things went in my absence. Not as far as Jacob is concerned - he's a mellow little dude and tends to roll with things, right up until his sister has stolen one too many Matchbox cars and he flips out a little. But Emily was far more emotional and dramatic and unfocused and missing me than I would have expected; normally she prefers Willem in all things. But I think the combination of me being away and Willem taking on more of a disciplinarian role than he usually has left her feeling a bit adrift, like nothing was normal, parentwise, and she showed it. We'll see how long it takes her to stop acting like a Barbarian now that I'm home again. And Willem did a wonderful job - I knew he'd keep the kids alive and the house standing, but you hear so many stereotyped Mr. Mom stories that I wasn't sure what to expect beyond that. But I came home yesterday to a clean house, a stocked refrigerator, and a rearranged toddler bedroom, so any expectations I might have formed were surpassed.

So today I'm back at work, and I think that by tomorrow I should be over the worst of the jet lag. I have things to say - I did blog a little last week, but it was travelog blogging, not the randomness that is my modus operandi, so in the near future I have stuff to say about body image, and birthdays, and Grey's Anatomy and whatever else rises to the surface of my little brain.

In the meantime, I'll be over here, at the bottom of an amazing pile of blogs left unread over my week away. Me not commenting is not to be interpreted as a sign of neglect; I just only have so many minutes in a day, you know?

Bonne Journée, les Mères!

2007-05-13T13:26:00.000-04:00

I don't know if they celebrate Mother's Day in France - we saw lots of women with flowers this morning, but that may just be because it's Sunday and because they're French and because it's a beautiful, perfect day today.

But regardless. I was fortunate enough to take my mother to lunch in Trocadéro this morning, facing la tour Eiffel. Such a wonderful way to celebrate, I highly recommend it.

The trip has gone wonderfully so far - photos and commentary here - despite the inevitable and expected near-lateness from my mother, random quiet-but-apparently-looks-upset-ness from me, spasticity from my sisters - but no scars, no traumas. There's not been a single thing yet where I've thought, "Well, I would have done that differently."

I miss my husband. I miss my kids.

...but not enough to go home early.

Stage Name

2007-05-10T22:12:00.000-04:00

Less than 24 hours, baby!

I'm at my mother's now. We just had dinner with a friend of mine from high school, with whom I'd lost touch between 1997 and about a month ago. I'll call him Bird... because that's what I actually call him.

He just set our vacation off on the right note, by informing us that his stage name in his drag routine is Jenny St. Croix... because it has that certain "je ne sais quoi." Go ahead, say them both out loud, it's worth it.

And while we're saying things out loud, there's a golf course a few towns over from my house, called Nippo Lake. You have to wonder if that can be treated with over-the-counter medications.

What? I'm giddy? Darn right.

Vive la France!

2007-05-09T10:08:00.000-04:00

Oh, yeah.

I'm excited.

Like, wiggling in my seat and randomly giggling. It's time to go to France!

I've got the accessories and fun stuff packed, and have not yet packed my clothes. I don't own enough clothing to be able to pack for a 10-day trip away (7 in Paris, 3 for travel) and still be able to wear things to work. And they really, really prefer it when I do not show up to work naked. Distracts the clients, and all.

So, that's on the schedule for tonight. Then, tomorrow, I get up, go to staff meeting (and for once, I'll be smiling through it) and then it's off to my mother's for the night. We fly out Friday evening.

The most common response, when I tell someone I'm going to Paris, is, "Oh, how fun! I'm jealous!" And my reply? "Yes, I would be too, if it was someone else going!" Somehow I think people feel badly about feeling jealous, but seriously, people - this is a cool freakin' trip and I'm well aware of how lucky I am and I just hope that the rest of you are all able to go wherever it is your heart yearns for, very soon.

The theory is that the apartment we're renting for the week has wireless internet access, so I should be able to log on from there. I've started a mother-in-law-safe blog just for the occasion - so that I have one place to post photos and stories from the trip, rather than clogging up people's email or trying to remember who is allowed to see which blog. (I have this one, not safe for my coworkers or in-laws; and I have a family photos blog, which has my last name in the address so I don't advertise it to the general public here. Too complicated to post everything twice, or to remember who I can send which link to. I would not do well in a life of crime.)

Anyway, so, that blog is at http://takingonparis.blogspot.com.

I've also, in honor of the trip and just because I can, changed the name of the blog. I'm guessing that even without the help of a snazzy online translator you'll figure it out. I plan on completely changing the template and colors... later on. After my trip.

Man, I tell you what, if I was into emoticons, there would be little bouncy guys and smilies all over the place.

Healthy

2007-05-08T10:11:00.000-04:00

I'm in this odd little nether region, past Potsdam and not yet in Paris. I'm leaving in three - THREE - days, so I need to hurry up and process whatever I need to process about the trip northward, because I need all the mental space I can clear before we head eastward.

The trip was good. No qualifiers, no yeah-buts. Willem worked very hard to make sure I was as comfortable and happy as I was going to get, and I appreciate his efforts. Sure, there were awkward moments and of course that's what I'm going to write about here, but the preponderance of evidence points to an enjoyable, solid weekend away. The next time we go, it will be with less advance anxiety.

We spent most of our time with M & J, with whom we're close even apart from the fraternity idiocy, and who are dealing with some challenges that are all too familiar and yet totally unsolvable by anyone else. On the one hand, it was wonderful to see them, fun to hang out - I can't remember the last time I laughed as hard as we did over dinner at The Cantina, and if I tried to explain why it was funny you'd give me an indulgent and raised-eyebrow look and slowly edge away - but, on the other hand, it was difficult to watch them dealing with it all and feeling useless and unable to help. This was all most obvious on Friday, when the four of us went up to Ottawa for the day. Willem and M had planned a very romantic day - wandering through Byward Market and getting a picnic lunch to eat on a boat on the Rideau Canal - and not everyone was able to throw themselves into the moment unguardedly. And that bites.

But we all managed to get through and enjoy ourselves, and there's not a lot more I can say about that without overstepping.

So instead I'll bring up the other, bigger, glaring moment of discomfort that happened on Friday afternoon. I'd just spent the day in Ottawa with my husband, enjoying his company and feeling good about how far our relationship has come since college, and generally being all warm-fuzzy. We had plans to meet a group at The Cantina, and Willem and M wanted to stop out at the fraternity house first to see who was around and wander through. I was willing enough - not my favorite place ever, but I was in a good mood and was happy enough to follow the group wherever it wanted to go.

I stopped being happy the moment we crossed the plane of the front door. The smell hit me, and I was instantly 19 again. It's not a bad smell - sure, a frat house has the capacity to create any number of noxious odors - but this was just a house smell, same as how your grandmother's house and your friend's house and your new car all have a unique and instantly recognizable scent. And it was overwhelming, and suddenly I was insecure and anxious and sad and nauseous and scared all at once. I felt jumpy, scoping out the exits of every room, and I felt endangered in some way, in the total absence of any outward threat.

I followed their little tour through the house, arms crossed and head down. When they came to the dining room, in which there were several dozen photo albums spread out on the table, I stopped. I understand, the intention was to let the alumni flip through old memories, laugh at a certain drunken incident and blush a little at the harmless excesses of the good old days. But I physically could not enter the room. I couldn't cope with the possibility - the likelihood - of seeing photographs of Willem, arm around this girl or kissing that girl, glazed eyes and goofy smile, loving his life and fully aware of just what he was getting away with while I was somewhere else. There are no photographs of me in that room.

It's a physical ache, and a vertigo, and a tightness in the chest. An inability to breathe, coupled with a full-on fight-or-flight impulse. And I always fled.

Because even though I didn't know about his infidelity at the time, I had plenty else to cope with in the moment. I'd been raped, violently, at 12, and told no one until I was 15. And then, got no real treatment for it: two visits to a therapist who bore an uncanny resemblance to ET (and this was a woman) and one unspeakably awkward family therapy session with both of my parents, and then the sense that since I hadn't responded to those efforts, I was on my own. Then, my first full weekend at college, I had a friend up for the weekend and we ended up at a party at Ian's house. Ian was a friend of Willem's at the time, and I think Willem had been at that party early on - but we were two years away from dating, and that night my friend and I stayed late, until only four of us remained. Two guys, two girls, and a lot of rum. I drank a 32-ounce travel mug of it. Straight. And woke up the next day with the unenviable task of navigating through another sexual assault, once again ultimately alone and untreated.

So college was a bad time for me. I had developed this belief that no one would bother standing up for me, helping me, when something bad happened, and this brought all sorts of feelings of hurt and defiance into the picture. I wanted to be cared for, and some of the time I was even able to try to get that in a somewhat healthy way. I had boyfriends, who were respectful and did the best they could with a complicated situation. But how can any 20-year-old boy be expected to deal appropriately with a girlfriend who wakes up in a panic from nightmares every single night? With a consensual partner who dissociated through every sexual interaction? (I still cannot remember having sex in college. I know it happened, and I remember bits and pieces of lead-up and follow-through, but the act itself? Not there.) They cared for me the best they could, and I wasn't able to care enough for myself to make it work.

I had this running fantasy, adjusted on a constant basis to fit the circumstances, that something terrible was about to happen to me. A car accident, a robbery, a fall on the ice; you name it, I envisioned it. It wasn't precisely that I wanted these things to happen; I was never acutely suicidal and I took steps to keep myself safe and healthy. But I imagined them all the time - all the time - and wondered what everyone around me would do. And had expectations about what they wouldn't do.

I lived through it. I had to move to Boston and start over, get into what became a year and a half of weekly therapy and constant mental and emotional work. I was slowly, slowly able to develop an idea of myself that was not so hurt and vulnerable and unimportant. I got better - then worse again - then better, until, at some point, I started sleeping through the night again. At some point, I stopped having these mini-movies of my next tragedy. I just, at some point, got better.

The thing is, I bet if you asked most of the people who knew me in college, they would have no idea of the depth of my messed-up-ed-ness through those years. They may have known something was not quite right; I know I tried to tell people what I was living with, but I also know that I didn't express it well. But I've always had a very self-confident and competent exterior, and I did well enough in classes, and I held down a job and maintained an apartment and laughed at jokes and enjoyed enough of my life that people wouldn't have realized the turmoil and misery just under the surface.

That's what PTSD is, I think. Not always - sometimes it spills over and becomes obvious to random bystanders - but most of the time, it's about living a normal life while tamping down this incredible burgeoning load of anxiety and fear, every day, even long after the dangerous situation has ended. It's what PTSD was for me, anyway.

So I got better. But then, on Friday, in Potsdam, in the fraternity house, I had a sharp and unpleasant reminder that all we can do is deal with our problems and move on with our lives; we don't get a clean slate. Those emotions and hurts are still there, and every once in a while they can jump up and slap you in the face, because, really, why nudge gently when a full frontal assault will do?

But that "I got better" thing? Not just a passing whim; not ephemeral or false. We left the house and I immediately felt able to breathe again. I remained on edge and uncomfortable for the rest of the night, but I didn't run away. I didn't hide in the hotel room, or drive away, or drink too heavily, or a thousand other inappropriate or self-destructive things that I might once have done. I hung in there, and by Saturday morning I was back to myself, now, again. I was even able to go back out and spend most of Saturday afternoon at the house, some of it inside, without a relapse.

I coped. It was a pretty cool thing.

And now I'm back in my regularly scheduled life, having received a wonderful gift from the weekend: a reminder of just how strong my marriage is, how good it feels to hug my kids, and how actually healthy I am now. No more of this fake-it-till-you-make-it stuff; I'm okay now.

And I'm grateful.

Baa Baa Bachelor

2007-05-07T21:30:00.000-04:00

The Bachelor is just about to start. We're down to the Final Four tonight. I'm ready to feel superior and self-righteous and smug, oh my.

Allow me to indulge in a few predictions.

First, the ladies will dress in ways designed to remind us all of why it's the first syllable that's accented in titillated.

Then, there will be long intense looks, tearful confessions, and dramatic statements about "falling in love."

Then there will be the pre-rose-ceremony interviews, with their unique style of smug insecurity - "I'm really scared of being sent home, but I'm pretty confident that we're meant to be together forever."

Then Captain Obvious, er, Chris Harrison, will come in just before the last rose, as though there's one person in the surrounding county who doesn't know precisely how to count to one, and announce, "Ladies, this is the final rose of the evening." And I will be reminded anew of what a genius that man is, finding a way to ride the Bachelor juggernaut all the way to the end, while still managing to be married and have children and generally look paternalistically amused at all of this silliness.

I'm, like, psychic or something.

Piggling

2007-05-06T00:01:00.000-04:00

Greetings from Potsdam... it's been a halfway-decent weekend so far, and all signs point to a likelihood that I'll get through the remaining 10-12 hours without major trauma. Who'd've thunk it?

A few random observations, because, while not trashed, I have had considerably more alcohol than my brain and typing muscles are used to, and random is the best I can do:

Chocolate martinis are a really, really good idea.

Bravery comes in lots of forms. Like showing up at your fraternity's alumni reunion openly gay, but quiet and dignified about the nature of that openness.

It's really, really hard to watch two people you care about struggle so deeply over a problem with no good answer. To know that I found my own answers in a similar situation, but that my answers might not work for them, and the only way they'll find their answers is to hurt and fumble through it.

I married a really great guy.

I miss my kids. But not so much that I either regret depositing them with my mother for the weekend or wish to hurry and pick them up earlier than planned tomorrow. I miss them because we've had time and distance apart, to allow for a little perspective.

It just took me five tries to successfully type out the word "because."

I'm back at the hotel room alone now, while Willem plans to close out the bar. He just looked at me and said, with a big, sweet, lopsided grin, "I just went from buzzed to trashed!" I think I'll be doing some driving tomorrow, while he whimpers and wonders why I'm choosing to take the 270-degree on-ramp to the highway when there's a perfectly good 90-degree one right there.

My haircut really is a good one. Low-maintenance. And there was much rejoicing.

It takes about 3 1/2 days for me to get used to new glasses and stop noticing the frames all the time.

We've had some fun discoveries, beginning with the word "vurp." It's a verb. Know what it means? Yeah. From there we coined the verb "piggle" - for the pee/giggle combination that has never happened to anyone we know, but we've heard about a friend of a friend who did it once.

I can't remember what I was about to type. So it's time for bed.

With a little luck, we'll be home at a reasonable time tomorrow and I'll be able to post something a tad more coherent. I have a few thoughts, profound and otherwise, just begging to be expanded - but not right now. Thoughts about memory, and shopping, and public displays of affection. So, stay tuned... as the Great and Powerful Ahhnuld once said, "I'll be back."

Departure

2007-05-03T00:04:00.000-04:00

We're leaving, in about twelve hours, for Potsdam. I've written about it ad nauseum already. It's not a place I recall with fond memories, but it wasn't all bad. I remember getting together with friends to listen to Sunday Night Sex with Sue, and going to Stone Valley, and going through champagne and strawberries at alarming rates with my roommate Jen, and and a number of other fun things, and not-so-fun things. College had a lot of good times, and about as many bad, and my experience wasn't especially unique.

And it's a situation where I need to just get over myself, buck up, and go. So, we're going, and it will be fine. We'll see people I haven't seen in ten years, and some of them I'll hope to go another ten years before seeing again. We'll tell the same five or ten major life stories over and over again, and Willem and I have been together long enough that we're developing an unintentional routine around that sort of thing. We'll eat at a bunch of unreasonably good restaurants, and I'll do my best not to put on too many of those pounds I've scattered here and there over the past few months. It will be fine.

Every once in a while, I'll spend some time in a dark and brooding place, because that's what I did in college and if I'm returning to the scene of the crime, I may as well act the part. But to counteract, I'm bringing along a knitting project - a sweater that I am really, really jonesing for, but in this lovely, soft, mist-gray angora blend that I keep petting. I certainly won't finish it in a weekend, but I'll work on it a little, and will carry something positive out of the trip. Literally.

And I'll keep trying to clear my head of this visual I have, of another departure. One that happened last weekend. There was this guy. A client. Young; able to buy his own alcohol, but not old enough to know his way around the liquor store yet. Into a lot of different substances. Ostensibly seeking anger management but really looking for someone new to yell at. Complicated, chaotic life, with lots of violent episodes and unemployment and hurt and a sense of being uncontained, unfixable.

He was found dead on Saturday afternoon, of an apparently accidental overdose. He'd been in his father's house for the better part of twelve hours by then, and the estimates suggest he wasn't alive for most of that time. There was no note, hence the assumption that it was accidental. His father had been out since Friday, and came home in late afternoon to find him on the living room floor, rigor mortis already evident.

But he hasn't spent the day alone. His not-quite-two-year-old twins were there with him. In the playpen, next to him in the living room.

I wasn't there. I never actually met the client, or anyone in his family, or his babies. And yet I cannot get that image out of my head.

So, this weekend? The traveling, and the overindulgence, and the return to a place where I have never been not-depressed? It will be fine.

Wicked Smahht

2007-05-02T10:10:00.000-04:00

Just thought I'd brag on my husband for a minute... he went and won his school's Graduate Teaching Assistant Achievement Award, which means a nice corpulent check and the ability to take the summer off to ~~be with the kids~~ study for his comprehensive exams this August. I'm not the least, tiniest bit surprised, because he works all sorts of body parts off for his students, even when they are collectively as dumb as a box of rocks, and he's good at what he does. A brazilian positive student evals can't be wrong, right? But it's wonderful that other people realize it, too.

So, we're all excited and happy for him. AND we'll be able to afford a new refrigerator. Ain't life grand?

If You Wanna Be My...

2007-05-01T22:08:00.000-04:00

...hairstylist?

No, I just can't continue to blaspheme the exalted Spice Girls by coopting their song for my own selfish blogging purposes. But, as I discovered tonight, there are certain criteria. I'll have to wait until I get my Little Orphan Annie Ovaltine Decoder Ring before I can know in advance who can be trusted with ma coiffure.

Tonight, I can only speak to J. You know who you are.

For one thing, please don't giggle. I understand, the world is a funny, funny place. We can share our mirth another time. Occasional breaks in giggles to pop your gum - alarming close to my hair, by the way, thanks - were appreciated, but not quite sufficient to convince me that you're in line for the next Mensa entry test.

For another, please don't, don't, DON'T stop mid-cut and say, "Oops!"

I do owe you an apology, because you're a beauty school student and you're nervous and self-conscious and I understand that you need to chatter (and giggle) to keep yourself from going all Day-O and ending up face-first in a bowl of shrimp cocktail, and here I was, chatting away with Betty, who was at the next station and who I would totally have asked to cut my hair again if I'd known she was there tonight. She did a great job the last few times, and my preferring to speak to another adult about semi-intelligent topics? That totally does not reflect on your own personality, J.

Okay, yeah, it kind of does. But it doesn't mean I love you any less. And you did do a good job. I think, anyway. So that redeems you quite a bit.

While we're on the "do not" list, please don't lie to your instructor when I'm sitting right here, close enough that I can vouch that your Secret is strong enough for this woman. You did NOT cut the back first, and you did NOT brush it all forward to check the ends before she came over. I didn't rat on you, because you won't see me putting Baby in a corner, but still. It makes me feel yucky inside, all complicit with your schemes and manipulations.

And one last thing. Please don't sing along with the radio while you're doing my hair. Because, those big skin-covered things sticking out of the sides of my head? Those are my ears. They do some funny things, ears. Like, hear.

Anyway. It could have been worse. I'm not all spaced-out Ferris Bueller Cameron-zoning out, so I think I've avoided significant trauma.

What do you think?

Why I Eyes Ya

2007-05-01T09:44:00.000-04:00

My eyes hurt today. I went yesterday and got new glasses, and in a fit of overenthusiasm decided to get a totally different style than I've ever had before. I have made some Poor Eyewear Decisions in my life, believe you me... I've worn glasses that were so unattractive, so unbecoming, so Golden Girls, that if I had digital copies of the photos I would post them just for the sheer amusement of it all. Really.

So, over the past ten years or so, I went very conservative and minimalist in the realm of spectacles. Thin metal frames, rounded-but-not-circular lenses, not especially noticeable. To others, or to me.

I decided, this time, that it was time to try something new and, for me, bold. So I got a pair of dark-framed, rectangularish frames - seriously, words cannot adequately express how completely un-me they are. They seem to suit me; so far no one has stopped, done a double-take, and said, "For the love of God, what happened to your face?" and I'm taking that as a good sign.

But the thing is, I'm not used to having glasses that I can see while I wear them. I find myself constantly aware of the frames drawing big dark lines around everything. I suppose, once it stops hurting my poor eyes to constantly check out this weird thing in my field of vision, it will be a bit like watching television all the time. I can't decide if that will be fun or horrifying. Think of the commercials.

Title is in reference to this video which has become a new and oft-repeated family joke. I sort of suspect that Willem and I find it funnier than the kids do.

Answer Me This...

2007-04-29T20:36:00.000-04:00

I'm much better, healthwise, although I'm still in that pathetic post-illness fatigue thing where I need to stop to catch my breath on the way to the refrigerator.

My anxiety continues to increase at the knowledge that we're leaving for Potsdam in 87 hours, give or take. It will be fine, I know it will be fine. Honest. Fine.

Instead, I continue to focus on the fact that I'm going to Paris in 12 days. TWELVE. Oh. My. God. I have sooooo much to do! Very soon, within a day or two, I'll be starting a separate blog, just for us to chronicle our trip. I'll post the address here, if you want to come along and play - but I plan on giving the address to my mother-in-law too, so I won't be linking back. Ugh.

In the meantime, I got some good questions in the comments the other day, and I'm finally motivated to actually answer them. So...
Sara asked, "Where in the world would you live if money/jobs/schools were of no concern? Why?"

My sister Mary asked, "peas: canned or frozen?"

I always prefer to visualize whirled peas.

And the hard question. Baino asked, "Given the opportunity and the will, what is it about yourself that you would change?"

lot

Wendy

There was one mother, with some number of children, who lived near enough to me that we were able to get together once in a while, despite an initial relationship formed on an online message board. She was nice enough, and her child(ren) were adorable. But the youngest, from an early age, showed clear signs of developmental delay.

I have made a very strict rule with myself, that I will never offer my professional opinion to friends unless it is explicitly sought... and even then, I keep it fairly light, because there are boundaries I just don't want blurred. So, she never asked whether I thought there was anything wrong, and I never volunteered it. But I listened, as she recounted tales of doctors and specialists telling her there was something wrong, and she denied it. Agreed to go to the minimum number of assessments and appointments to satisfy her pediatrician, but held a consistent stance of, "I know there's nothing really wrong. I know (s)he will grow out of it. I know they're all wrong."

And after a while, I had to stop smiling politely and changing the subject. I had to stop making playdates, and even started standing her up. I let myself become the bad guy, the bad friend, the one whose fault it all was, because she was so closed off to any realism on this particular topic. And while I never felt that she was nearing a level of neglect that would make the headlines, I did feel that she was refusing to see her child for who (s)he was, and refusing to accept and love the quirks and challenges of her particular child.

Sure, I feel guilty about this, even now. Maybe a better friend would have stood up and challenged the woman's views, risked hurting feelings in defense of the child's best interests, something; but I felt like she was already getting clear feedback and was ignoring it, and it was not my place to do more along those lines. Maybe a better friend would have continued to smile politely and ignore the big white elephant. I couldn't do it.

I was a member of a different message board for a long time, and a fairly frequent, active participant. There are women there that I care deeply about, to this day, and women I am closer to than many in-real-life friends. But there were two - maybe three, though I was never able to read the third that clearly - who overtly disliked me.

If they'd hated me from the start, well, sure, I can understand that. After all, I'm not very good with words, and I routinely make random, sweeping generalizations meant to insult whole segments of the population.

Whatever. Seriously - if they'd disliked me from the start, fair enough. But in these cases, both were close friends to me for quite a while. Sending emails and IM's off the board, confiding in me, letting me confide in them, generally doing those things that one might expect friends to do. Except that the condition of my friendship, with both of them, was that I was not allowed to like or be friends with another board member.

Yes, it feels like high school. But there's a reason that cliques have such a draw. It feels good to be included, and I totally fell for that for a while. And then I realized, hey, wait, I'm not 16! I can be friends with both. And, for a brief time, I was - until both of those women were clear with me that I was being insensitive and unacceptable and ended the off-board friendship. They were still cute and perky to me in public, but that extra stuff stopped dead. And it hurt.

(Although, I will admit, the friendship with the "uncool" one has been totally worth the consequences.)

I've never been able to heal or resolve those friendships; and not for lack of trying. I've sent notes and asked if we could talk about it, and been told, twice, separately, "No." And after time, continuing to share public space with those two women, acting friendly in public while simultaneously shunning me off-board, became toxic for me.

And so I left. I left 15 dear friends because two were ruining the experience for me. How unfair is that?

I think that's just about enough blog randomness for me today. Remember that tomorrow, there's this:

...so I'll see you on Tuesday.

Because I Can

2007-04-27T15:24:00.000-04:00

It's amazing to me how quickly I'm able to get complacent and take things for granted. Like, electricity - until we lost it for a day a few weeks ago, it had simply never entered into my consciousness that we could lose it. Similarly, I have this cute little laptop and the idea that it could malfunction and suddenly none of the keys would work (okay, it got ginger ale spilled on it, but it was still sudden) had not presented it to me, until, viola! A large electronic paperweight!

And, seriously. I spent *plenty* of time whining about my illness this week anyway, don't you think? It was probably karma's way of stifling at least some of my moaning, by making me wait for times when I could borrow Willem's computer. Otherwise I would have gotten really annoying. More so than I was. Shut up, it would TOO be possible.

So yesterday, I was finally well enough to make some phone calls - we needed a plumber because somehow the drain-toggle thing had snapped out of the tub, and an appointment for Willem's Jeep to stop self-destructing, and other ways in which my house and belongings were slowly crumbling to little pieces around me. And I called Gateway, at about 3:00 in the afternoon, to mumble about "something spilled" and "keys not working" and "please help." And today - at 2:00, less than 24 hours later - FedEx showed up at my door with a package containing a brand-new laptop keyboard and instructions on how to switch 'em. For free.

Yeah, so, I loves me my Gateway.

And the timing is perfect, too, because I opened myself to the cruelties of Wordnerd and invited her to interview me, and that happened in the comments sometime today. Granted, she was gentle with me and didn't ask anything TOO scary, but she could've. And without my keyboard, earlier, I was able to read her questions and mentally answer them, but I don't think a whole ton of you out there in cyberspace are completely clairvoyant (and that's probably a good thing, there's enough going on in my head already without spectators), so now I can actually share my answers.

And there was much rejoicing.

So, the way this works, as far as I can figure, is that I answer my interview questions, and then I open it up to the comments - the general rule is that people can request to be interviewed there, but from what I'm seeing, there's not an outpouring of interest here. Fine. Be that way.

So, you can still feel free to ask questions in the comments; I'm percolating on them and will reply when I can gather both of my surviving non-diseased brain cells and bang them together to form coherent thoughts. Mostly because I'm curious, what can I possibly not have told about myself here so far??

So, anyway... from the fertile mind of Wordnerd:
1.Your Ipod has malfunctioned, and now it will only play five songs. You’re on a long road trip. What five songs can you listen to without ever getting tired of them?
Well, hmm. This is not as hard as it might be for, say, my husband, because I'm very prone to having comfort music and listening to the same few songs over and over anyway. More than five, but I have two playlists of about 30 songs each that I select almost every time I'm in the car, with reckless disregard for the other 1300-odd songs on the iPod. So it's a matter of choosing from them...

Regarding Steven by Blues Traveler

Grey Street by Dave Matthews Band

Anna Begins by Counting Crows

It's Alright, It's Ok by Leah Andreone

Man in the Box by Alice in Chains

That was harder than I'd thought, only because choosing between my songs is in the same vein as choosing between my children. If I could instead put in a vote for a single Genre on my iPod... I collect acoustic versions of all sorts of songs, and have things ranging from '80s hair metal to Alanis Morissette's version of My Humps in there. Pretty please?

2.Favorite. Movie. Ever. (That’s a question!)
Pride & Prejudice, the A&E version with Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth. It's about 15 hours long and as true to the book as I have any right to hope for. My sister Sarah bought it for me for Christmas 2005, and I've (only) watched it about four times since then. It's my version of comfort food.

This would've been a lot harder if I'd had to name, say, my top five. Because there's this one, hanging out above all the rest, and then about 15 crammed into the #2 spot.

3.What are some of your guilty pleasures?
Ooh, is this, like, confession? I offload the guilt and then can continue doing the pleasurable things without feeling bad? Hah.

I don't actually feel guilt very often in my life. This probably has more to do with being raised to have a fair amount of self-confidence than because I'm innately perfect, but I'll accept either reason. Either way, while I don't feel guilty, I do have things that I don't brag about. Like, I read People magazine cover-to-cover every single weekend. In the bathroom, perched on the side of the tub, with the door closed so as not to be interrupted, a few pages at a time. And, every time I make buttermilk waffles, I deliberately leave too little batter in the bowl for a complete final waffle so that I can eat it raw. And if Fox ever decided to start a new season - or, hell, reruns of the old seasons - of Temptation Island, I would both DVR it and watch it live, with my phone unplugged.

4.Define happiness – for you.
Happiness is being able to do a mental count of all of my loved ones and not being able to come up with a crisis or ongoing struggle for any one of them. Happiness is being able to drink a chocolate banana milkshake without whimpering because it hurts my throat. Happiness is waking up to the snuggly and sleep-warm body of my son crawling into bed, and bantering with my daughter just like she's a real person instead of just a kid, and the long-car-ride talks with my husband. Happiness is finishing a knitted item and getting a final result that's at least somewhat like the initial vision, writing a post and getting more than ten comments, and eating chewy gooeys.

5.What scares you?
The thought of harm to my children. And I have a very, very active imagination, so when I let myself go too far, I can come up with any number of realistic and imminent threats. I also get scared if I stay up too late, alone - I get jumpy, and become convinced that if I look out the window I will see a face looking back in at me. The sheer size of my student loan balance scares me. Guns scare me.

Viola! More than you ever thought you'd want to know, and now that information is crammed into your head forever. BWAH-ha-ha....

Gratitude

2007-04-26T12:05:00.000-04:00

I'm a smidge better today, I think. Not quite up to the strenuous tasks of walking across the room without stopping to catch my breath, or talking on the telephone, but so far today I've kept down about 8 oz. of water and 1/3 of a scrambled egg, so I'm counting that as a victory.

I'm also well enough to be a little more aware of the world around me. Yesterday I was as withdrawn and self-focused as one can be without actively stepping on small children and pets, paying attention to my various miseries with essentially no thoughts for others. I don't even think I complained out loud about how crappy I was feeling, because I didn't really care whether my gripes had an audience.

But today, I've got my head above water (i.e., out of the toilet bowl) and am a little more in touch with my surroundings. Enough to realize that I have an awful lot to be grateful for.

The big, glaring obvious one is, of course, my husband. Aside from the tiniest of all tiny freakouts yesterday morning when he had to simultaneously dress, feed and prepare both children for daycare while steering me (and my ever-present garbage can) toward the minivan, he has been a paragon of husbandhood. Pacing nervously in the hallway while I have a 1:00 a.m., um, incident. Cleaning the kitchen to the point where it doesn't look like a grown man and two small children have had the run of the place for the past several days. Bringing Emily along with him to class so that I can nap during Jacob's nap and then nap after he wakes up, too. Completely abandoning his homework and some class time. And - and this is a big one - never once complaining. He's done amazingly well, and I'm not above a little gloating. It's just good to know I chose well, spousewise.

(Although, hmmm.... the conspiracy center of my brain suddenly wonders whether he wanted me to get sick this week, because now I should be all healthy again in time for our trip to Potsdam and it's hard to complain about going up there when he's done such a great job this week. Hmmm...)

So, there's that. Then there's my work. It has its moments of crazymaking and inanity, but they all - my boss and coworkers, have been very understanding and supportive all this week, with nary a mention of the fact that I'm scheduled to take 6 days off in May. The ED doctor yesterday wrote me a note to get out of three days of work, and it's kind of nice to not even need it - to be trusted enough that they'd never ask for such a thing.

There's been a wonderful support network of friends, online and off. None of you are sadistic enough to try and visit or call, which I appreciate greatly, but the emails and messages and comments I've gotten have been lovely. I hope I'm feeling better soon, too.

And, of course, my kids. Until I was ill - contagiously so - I sort of took for granted how openly affectionate they are. It's been very, very hard this week, having to tell them, "No, I'm sorry, I can't snuggle right now, I'm still sick." They both have taken it well, but both of them makes a beeline at the slightest signal that I'm able to have physical contact. Last night, I was home alone with Jacob for a few hours, and he was playing alone, happily, when I asked, "Do you want to come sit with Mama?" He scampered over and snuggled into my side tightly enough that he could have passed as an extra body part. They've both just been very mellow about it all, and I'm grateful.

So, my throat still hurts far more than is reasonable, and my ears itch and sting, and I haven't been able to sleep through the night without a mad dash to the bathroom to call up Ralph on the big white telephone... but my life is still pretty good.

What's Less Fun Than Strep Throat?

2007-04-25T18:38:00.000-04:00

One might think that strep throat all by itself would be plenty excitement for me, but apparently not. I ended up in the hospital this morning, dehydrated and with a possible allergy to medication or kidney infection. The short version is, Willem initially freaked out but ended up doing a fantastic job of managing the household and shepherding my loopy, pathetic self around; it's "only" dehydration as a complication from strep and 6 hours of vomiting overnight; and... well, I'd like to be witty enough to come up with a third thing, but I just can't. I'm tired.

Way, WAY awkward to go into the emergency room as a patient, seeing as how I work there. Go ahead, you wear your jammies to your work and see how comfortable you feel. But the good news is, having connections meant I was fast-tracked and treated with some humor. Like when she gave me this horrible, snot-consistency viscous lidocaine crap to try and swallow to numb my throat, Nurse Betsy admitted, "Sometimes we crowd in to watch people drink this, because you all make such horrible faces. But just for you, we'll make an exception... we hooked up the camera instead."

Everyone's a comedian.

Anyway, I plan on continuing to hold down the couch and whimper through most of the day tomorrow, and am not sure whether I'll go to work on Friday. My computer is still broken, mostly because I didn't do a thing about trying to have it fixed today. Ain't life grand?

Adequate Punishment

2007-04-24T20:50:00.000-04:00

For having the audacity to throw an eight-hour birthday party (though, true, only three of it involved personal responsibility for children not my own), to allow my mother-in-law to stay in my house for four days, and to drink frozen strawberry margaritas like it was my job (and, if part of my employment description includes "not killing people with knitting needles," then it may have truly been my job), I have been adequately punished. Instead of basking in my hostessly successes and preening a bit at avoiding a much-deserved hangover, I'm sitting on my loveseat, bundled up in my softest clothes and a big heavy blanket, and whimpering every few seconds, because it hurts to swallow, and either I normally swallow saliva on a freakishly frequent basis or a horrible twist of cosmic irony has caused me to overproduce saliva just for the occasion.

I have strep throat.

It hurts. A lot.

I've never had it before. In fact, for a long time (like, until yesterday) I kind of suspected that I might not be susceptible to whatever tiny little germy nastiness causes strep, just in the same way that I am apparently not allergic to poison ivy. I very, very rarely get sore throats; when my body decides to hate itself, it is most often in the form of sinus ridiculousness, or very occasionally a gastrointestinal two-exits-no-waiting sort of adventure. This means that whenever I do get the tiniest, mildest of sore throats, I turn into a great big baby, because I simply have no idea how to deal with it. Except to whine about it, which, thus far, had worked pretty well.

But yesterday afternoon, I came home from work to have lunch, laid down on the couch for a moment, and woke up two hours later all disoriented and logy. Happily, I had not slept past my kids' pick-up times at daycare, and the true beauty of my job is that, as long as I have my cell phone turned on and within reach, I can work from anywhere. (Yes, I have answered the phone in the tub. It's a good thing we don't do video conferencing yet, because I'm not entirely sure that the sight of me naked would make everyone less suicidal.) "Hmm," I thought, slowly and discombobulatedly, "I didn't even realize I was tired. I hope I'm not getting sick. Does my throat hurt?"

I was immediately distracted from these musings by a motorcycle accident. Two mentally underburdened boys cut in front of me and then decided to pass the car ahead of them on the right... despite her slowing down and signalling her intent to turn right. It's kind of fun to be able to call 911 from the safety and comfort of the witness role.

Anyway, we were fine for the evening; the kids were well-behaved, I continued my whine-and-bear-it solution to the sore throat and fever, and life went on. My second signal that something wasn't quite right came when I was unable to stay awake for The Bachelor. Never fear, I have it DVR'ed and hope to be able to watch it tonight.

This morning, I had reached a level of sore-throatedness that rendered me unable to yell at my children. Can you imagine? It was truly a loss. I did get up and go into work, but after an hour I came home, and spent a few more hours of alternating between sleeping and whimpering every time I swallowed - and I was only swallowing because I'm not so sick that I'm willing to drool on myself. Plus we're talking a lot of saliva here. Wet t-shirt contest amounts. No, thanks.

So, I went to the urgent care clinic, and yes, indeed, I have strep throat. I've realized that I never actually had even a sore throat ever in my life, not compared to this. Willem and the kids have spent most of the evening sitting around watching my poor, pathetic, overdramatic reactions to anything throat- or skin-related, because the fever, it is yucky.

I will be contagious for another day, so I'd advise against licking your keyboard, just in case. And because I am trying to be gentle with myself, I may also skip out on staff meeting this Thursday.

But I will not be able to spend my time doing rampant blog-hopping and posting like a mofo, because after his nap today, Jacob came out to the living room, stumbled around the back of the coffee table, and proceeded to spill a ginger ale on my laptop.

Oh, yes, he did.

It sort of works; well enough that I'm able to do a long-overdue iTunes, photos and C-drive backup on it, so there is some benevolence in my universe. But I can't type with the ZXCVBNM,. or Enter keys, and it acts as though the Alt-key is stuck down. I may be able to pop out the keyboard and clean it myself; I'll try when my hard drive is all happily backed up. If not, it's back to the factory, because clearly one major computer malfunction is not enough.

So, I'll just spend my day tomorrow enjoying my karma, in a stifled manner, because I can't steal Willem's laptop when it's way down there at school with him.

Woe is me.

Spewing Forth Toxicity

2007-04-23T09:51:00.000-04:00

Let's face it, I'm pretty smart. I can think things through, and I can organize my thoughts, and express myself with a halfway decent chance of being understood.

Usually.

So, then, you'll understand why it feels so strange to me that I just can't find the right words to express my horror and dirty-feeling and resignation after a weekend with my mother-in-law. She's not Joan Crawford; there were no wire coat hangers or even raised voices. Her damage happens in more insiduous ways; if she was a government test facility, she could plausibly deny that her toxicity even exists because it takes such a long time after exposure to manifest. In the moment, there's a vague feeling of nausea and ickiness, but it takes some time to fully comprehend her unique skills.

I don't like her. I did, or tried to, once upon a time, on the theory that you're supposed to like your mother-in-law. But aside from her overtly inappropriate diaplays in the past, I also just plain don't like her. She leaps at every possible chance to be hurtfully sarcastic, and is all the more gleeful if she can make you feel stupid in the process. So, if you have the audacity to stutter, or misspeak, or pause just a millisecond too long to find the right word, she'll interrupt, correct, and smirk. And she's wildly, frantically defensive; nothing is ever her fault, and she is always, always the victim.

Which, honestly, is sad and pathetic, and I do have some pity for her. It can't be comfortable or fun to lug around that level of anger and learned helplessness and resentment on a daily basis. But pity is not the same as like, and it's nice to be able to dislike her because she certainly does not like me.

So, it was a long weekend, and I feel dirty and abused, and I just need to toss out some of her bon mots so that I can get them out of my system and move on. Without further ado...

To my coworker, Kerri, who somehow has managed to stay in this job for several years and still has a sense of humor and therefore gives me hope for myself, "No one gives me birthday cake anymore. The last time I got a birthday cake was over five years ago, and I was so shocked when it happened that I got choked up."
Willem was right there and was able to remind her, "Wait, we gave you a big surprise party and cake and a $500 gift certificate to an airline in 2005, so that you could come visit the kids. You went to Paris instead."
"Oh, no," she replied. "I went to Ireland that time."

Again to Kerri, who trains horses, making her my dressage-riding mother-in-law's favorite person ever, "Next time I buy a horse, I'll be able to spend as much as I want, because my sons have trust funds now." Okay, that's just crass.

To Willem, in front of friend Nisa, who is fast becoming Perfect: she stayed between the kids' portion of the party and the adults' portion to help prepare food, and she reports back to me when she hears nasty things fall from my mother-in-law's face, "Well, if you hadn't gotten married, you wouldn't be living like a pauper." Indeed. What kind of an idiot was he, getting married and having two gorgeous children? Seriously.

No words for this one. After some soul-searching and a decision that raising the topic doesn't imply a promise, I brought out a magazine of knitting patterns to show her, with the statement, "I'd like to get an idea of what types of styles you like, just to know and maybe someday be able to make something." She flipped through about three pages, tossed the magazine on the table, sat back with her arms and legs crossed, and never acknowledged it at all. Seems to me like the offer for a handmade, customized knitted item might be appealing, but apparently not. Since it would be knitted by the hands of ~~Satan~~ Kate.

And then there was the big huge bombshell that Willem dropped on her head yesterday morning. After much agonizing and thought and planning, he decided he wanted to tell her that he's been in touch with his birth mother, and that it's going pretty well. He hadn't told her before now, both because it was too new to really be able to get his own head around it and because it was so close to my father-in-law's death and she was so over-the-top with her reactions. But he felt like it was the right thing to do, to tell her before she found out some other way, and we're not sure (amen!) when we'll next see her.

So he told her. And she reacted just as selfishly and guilt-intensively and inappropriately as one might expect. Her knee-jerk reaction was to change the subject to how awful Willem's childhood was, emotionally, but how it wasn't her fault because she was "barely keeping my head above water then." This is not a woman with any long-term history of depression; and you know what? Being a parent removes your right to wallow in your own misery, at least while your kids are young. If you truly felt that they were being mistreated by their father, then you leave. End of discussion.

From there, she went on the attack toward Willem about, "You had pericarditis a few years ago. Are you getting regular EKGs now? Because you can have valve damage years later. Why aren't you getting better health care? You know I worry about you." The woman must have some serious arm strength, to be able to trowel on the guilt like that.

Then she found a way to insist that Willem needs to be more accommodating and understanding about his brother, who has never once showed the slightest interest in having any sort of an adult relationship with Willem or any of us. "He has a documented, diagnosed learning disability and expressive disability, you have to cut him some slack." Cutting him some slack is one thing; holding the responsibility for the entire relationship is something else altogether. He's an adult and he's not disabled; he has a job and a home and is his own guardian. She can defend him all she wants, but he's not unable to have a simple social chat. He's unwilling.

She did eventually circle back to the topic at hand, and cried, and talked about how scary it all was, and got angry, and proclaimed, "Well, I'm your mom and those are my grandkids." She told Willem that since his birth mother didn't provide him with any new information about possible genetic disorders or health issues, then he didn't need to have searched for her in the first place. She argued with him about his ethnic heritage, to the point where he opened his computer to pull up that email from his birth mother to read it from the source. Then she went off on a fresh new guilt trip about how he emails with his birth mother but he doesn't email with her, and now he has to email her because she knows he emails other people.

It's all just so pathetic and competitive and insecure, I really can't find the right words.

Then she spent the rest of the day sulking on the couch, barely speaking except to the kids.

Sigh.

She left this morning, after bogging down our Monday-morning routine as much as possible, and it will be at least a few months before we deal with her, face-to-face, again. I should be done banging my head on the wall by then.

Brewing

2007-04-22T22:14:00.000-04:00

I have lots and lots to say about this past weekend. The one in which my mother-in-law was here for four days. The one in which Willem told her that he's been in touch with his birth mother. The one in which we had an 8-hour birthday party for Emily and I'm still sore. The one in which I drank more, over the past three days, than I'd had in the prior four years - altogether.

But right now I'm still very tired and jumbled about it all, and I need some time to process and sort it out.

In the meantime, I have two videos to share with you. These will remain as high points of my weekend for years to come.

We watched this one at the kids-portion of Emily's party:

And then we did not watch this one while the kids were awake. Fewer questions to answer that way:

2007-04-19T22:58:00.001-04:00

Moody

2007-04-19T13:26:00.000-04:00

I'm trying very hard not to let this be a bad day. I'm not meeting with wild success so far, but it's only 1:30 and there's still time for improvement. Right? Right? I'm not naturally all Pollyanna, but I'm trying here. I want an "E" for Effort, anyway.

See, Thursdays, I wake up in a crap mood anyway. Most mornings, my alarm goes off at 6:40, I beat it into submission twice, and am on my way into the shower shortly after 7:00. Thursdays, I hit the snooze more than that - more than I should - and after I turn the alarm off I continue to lie there, lumplike and grumpy, and hide. Under my pillow, under my hair, under whichever child has found its way into my bed, it doesn't matter. Then I proceed to bite my husband's head off for a misguided display of affection on a staff meeting day. He should know better by now. My inner praying mantis comes out, and no one needs to go there.

After much muttering and glaring, I dredge myself off to work. I don't see clients on Thursdays - I have a four-hour staff meeting and then I go home and consider assessing myself for suicide risk. Because, yes, really. Four hours. And there's only about 6 or 8 of us in a room any given week. It's not okay.

These meetings are so chaotic and argumentative and pointless that I literally cannot think of a single thing we talk about over those four hours. It's mostly just Curmudgeonly J and Perfect J and Sanctimonious P snarking at each other and lecturing and pontificating and interrupting and generally behaving like a bunch of sleep-deprived monkeys, only with less hurling of feces.

You learn to be grateful for the small things, after a while.

Most Thursdays, I'm able to come home and shake it off by noon or so. But this week, I'm feeling frazzled because Willem thinks that the house is a total disaster area and wildly inappropriate for us to receive guests in, and we're having Emily's birthday party this weekend. I just spent an hour doing dishes and picking stuff up, but honestly, I don't know what else to do. I can't go shopping because DCYF frowns on me leaving the house for extended periods of time while Jacob naps. So I'm sort of at loose ends, willing to be useful but not quite sure how.

And then there's the issue of the mother-in-law. I've been quiet about her in recent months, have you noticed? It's partly because I'm trying to have some respect and, while I cannot sympathize with delusions, I want to accept her right to have delusions of grief and misery since my father-in-law's death in August '06. And partly because she's wildly wrapped up in her own issues and routines, and so it doesn't often occur to her to call us - and we certainly don't go out of our way to expose ourselves to her. Trust me, there's been plenty of insanity and passive-aggressive masterwork in the past few months, I'm just holding it all in so that I can adequately explode one of these days.

But she's coming here tomorrow, planning on actually staying here instead of in a hotel, and I'm not doing cartwheels over this. She has invited herself to stay until Monday, and I cannot convince Willem that, seeing as how she is his mother, it is his responsibility to tell her that Monday mornings are too hectic and complicated around here and it would not be a good thing for her to be here.

Ugh. I can't even think. Staff meeting and mother-in-law on consecutive days. Horrifying.

I Think, Therefore I ... Blog?

2007-04-18T15:23:00.000-04:00

The lovely, talented, and fertile Melissa has bestowed upon me a Thinking Blogger Award, either because my posts make her think or because I am one of only three in her acquaintance whose writing is so singularly uninspiring that we are the last remaining ones not to have gotten this award already. I have been known to drool on my keyboard a time or two, but I think instead we'll be all optimistic and assume it's because I'm so wicked cool. (Stop the presses! I was also awarded over at In the Trenches of Mommyhood, which clearly means I actually am wicked cool.)

There's a certain pressure I feel, now, to write something thoughtful. But, you know what? I just did. Can't have too many thoughts in one week, you know? Bad for the complexion.

So, instead, I'm passing along a few others who make me think, whether I'd like to or not. In no particular order...

Do I Have to Call it a Blog?

Penguins in the Fridge

....and other things not-so-holy

Not So Daily Thoughts

Ostendo

So, go forth and think!

Seven

2007-04-17T09:52:00.000-04:00

Dear Emily,

We made it. You're seven today. How did that happen? It's such a cliché, for a mother to talk about how fast the time goes, but truth happens, even when overused. There's a different sense of time that happens as we watch a child grow up: you may only be seven years old, but I've had a lot more than seven years' worth of loving you. The brain and the heart don't always correspond.

Sometimes I hear people say, "We're waiting until we're ready, before we have children." I'm usually able to wait until the conversation is over before I make a sign of amusement or disbelief. It's a nice idea, readiness, but I don't actually believe in it. No matter how financially stable you are, no matter how solid the marriage or how nice the neighborhood, I am skeptical that it's possible to actually be ready. How do you get ready to change every major relationship in your life, including the way you think about and treat yourself? How do you get ready to reprioritize every action, plan, and goal? How do you steel yourself for the vulnerability and sweetness that comes with having your heart exist outside your own body?

The thing is, today is not just about changing your age. It also marks the anniversary of my own rebirth, as it were; the first day of the rest of my life. Going from childless to mother is such a huge, mind-altering step. I have learned more about myself in the past seven years than I had considered as possibilities in the prior 22 years. I've discovered unsuspected wells of patience, unreasonably sensitive buttons which only your fingers are properly formed to push, and an ability to use my deafness in service of seeking extra sleep or to ignore just one more mindless children's television show. I've done what I can to teach you the important basics of life: morals, thoughtfulness, the value of a rockin' '80s one-hit wonder. But anyone who believes parenthood is a one-way flow of information from parent to child has never spent several years trying to sneak actual nutrition past the lips of someone with, shall we say, discerning tastes. They've never performed in-home laboratory experiments to determine the long-term effects of sleep deprivation, minimal personal hygiene, and interpersonal interactions centered solely around children. They've never tried to simultaneously explain God, the Tooth Fairy, and September 11th.

Don't worry, I don't want my own party for your birthday. I won't usurp your cake and singing at Applebee's. My personal celebration is more internal; a reflection and appreciation that don't need noise and candles. I know, the idea that one can celebrate without noise has not yet presented itself to you. But I hope for you that, someday, you are able to reflect quietly and enjoy your life on its own terms. I hope that you're able to find happiness in the moment, without constantly needing the next thing to come along.

Let's not forget about your dad. If growing and maturing means learning how to put the needs of others before yourself, learning to be reliable, learning how to share knowledge and find fun in everyday life, then I've taken a step or two forward in the past seven years. Your dad has run a marathon. He loves you with such fierceness and consistency, and parents with such thought and effort, that he has become the kind of father I never would have dreamed he could be, in the early days of our relationship. And even then I thought he'd make a pretty good father; I just didn't realize how committed and focused he would be.

Your life has convinced me, in a way that years of schooling and study were not able to do, that personality is largely an inborn, preprogrammed phenomenon. You had formed the fundamental core of you long before you were able to form words. I am routinely amazed at your enthusiasm for life. You bound out of bed, ready to take on the next challenge or adventure. Shyness is not a major stumbling block in your life, and so far you have not yet learned to be cynical and untrusting about the world at large. While I recognize that, someday, you will need those attributes, I'm content to let you hang onto that innocence for a while longer. You're a trailblazer and a rock star; I don't know what you're going to be when you grow up, but you're going to touch people's lives and remain in their consciousness.

Not that life with you is one, big, shiny bowl of cherries. Those very traits which I think are going to be most helpful to you as an adult - your assertiveness, your way with words, your passion and singlemindedness - are the same things which make me tear out my hair and think, "For the love of God, just once in your life could you please just be quiet and listen to me??" And then I remember, "No, she can't. This is who she is." And I don't throttle you, and I love you for another day.

It doesn't happen often enough in this world that we get clear, unequivocal proof that we have made the right decision. And of course I have my doubts on a daily basis, wondering if this is the thing that's going to land you on a therapist's couch someday. But the bigger-picture is so clear and blatant: of course I needed to have children. I needed to have you. And seeing you with your brother creates the kind of heart-achy, breathless sort of love that I've never experienced anywhere else. You and he are so different; when you go on to be a movie star, he can take his mellowness and laid-back openness and be your manager. The two of you can drive each other insane, but the fierceness with which you love each other reminds me every day of how much you enrich each other's lives.

So, my beautiful girl, who would be beautiful even if your eyes weren't so rich and brown and your hair wasn't shiny and wavy, thank you for coming along and turning my life up-side-down. Without you in it, my life would not even bear a nodding acquaintance to where it is now, and for that I am endlessly grateful. You bring a rightness to things that I couldn't have gotten anywhere else.

I promise, over the next several years, to be outspoken and stubborn just at those moments when you most wish that I would just sit down and shut up. I know you'll do the same for me. Remember that loving someone means making the extra effort to do the right thing; some of those days when you wish I would, just once, lower my standards and let you take some stupid risk, I am also wishing that I could just let it happen. But I can't, because that's my task. There will come a day when I will step aside and let you fly on your own, and if I've done it right, then you will simultaneously fly strong and wish that I was still in charge.

Let's see what seven brings, together, shall we? It'll be something new and big and different; it always is. When you were a few hours old, I sat in the hospital and sobbed to your father. "She has already changed. I can already see differences in her, and I wasn't ready to let go of the first way yet. I don't know how to deal with this," I said. And he, in a fit of infuriatingly accurate wisdom, said, "Well, that's her job. We don't have children to have babies, we have children to create adults." He unintentionally changed my mindset then and there, and reminded me that this constant striving for independence, for new skills and talents and musical taste, is a good thing. My job, as a parent, is to render myself obsolete, and if I do it right then I can enjoy it along the way. True, I've never had a stage of yours where I thought, "Enough already - let's move on to the next thing," but then the new you that comes along is so magical and precious that I can't regret the change. You are my girl, my shining star, my pride.

I love you,
Mom

A Prediction

2007-04-16T16:30:00.000-04:00

Pardon me while I channel my inner Nostradamus for a moment.

I predict that, within the next few hours, emergency rooms around the country are going to be crammed full of people needing treatment for their poor, tired, overworked fingers. The fingers that they're going to begin pointing, at anyone and everyone, in a desperate scramble to assign blame.

Because, at last check, there are at least 30 people dead on the Virginia Tech campus. Security measures, parenting techniques, access to guns, mental health treatment, privacy policies, equal opportunity policies, abortion rights, separation of church and state, the need for all young girls to get a Gardasil shot before entering sixth grade, the rights of noncustodial parents, the relative merits of Steve versus Joe on Blue's Clues, and any number of other debates, relevant and wildly not so, are going to be dredged up, waved around, and thrown onto this massacre until the speaker feels justified in his or her anger. Fault will be found, blame will be assigned, and as long as the finger-pointer is able to absolve himself or herself of all possible responsibility, then relief will follow.

By all means, if it makes you feel better, limber up that pointer finger and tell me that it's all because of the change in SAT scoring policies. Assert your belief that this never would have happened if school lunches included 2% instead of whole milk. Denounce the No Child Left Behind Act, or insist that it should have been enacted even sooner. If it makes you sleep better at night, identify a cause and decry it.

But maybe, just maybe, there's no one reason why this happened. Maybe it's no one person's fault. Maybe mental illness, and anger, and hurt feelings, and access to weapons, and inadequate security response, and a million other factors all worked together to contribute to a completely avoidable and yet completely inevitable tragedy. And we all have to continue living in a society where things like this are possible, even when it's not fair and horrifying.

Can it ever get better? Sure. Will it? Sure. But not as a result of finger-pointing.

And meanwhile, my heart aches for everyone - everyone - involved. The victims, their families, the injured, the barely-misseds, all of the parents of all of the students who were away at college, the law enforcement officials, the school administration, and so on, and so on. Even, yes, the shooter; happy people don't open fire on their classmates. Everyone who survived this is going to spend a few moments, maybe years, second-guessing their own actions and wishing a happier ending, and everyone who died has lost the chance to make it better at any given second along the way.

Minor Discrepancies

2007-04-16T12:30:00.000-04:00

In my perfect, fantasy world, I would right this minute be curled up on the couch, knitting close at hand, with a crime documentary on TV and an icy glass of Coke nearby. I'd be in sweats, and if I missed several minutes of a show due to nodding off a bit, it wouldn't matter because I have DVR. I'd even accept my current migraine into this fantasy world, because I would be able to close the drape and keep things quiet while I rode out the lightning storm inside my head.

Instead, I'm sitting in my husband's home office, watching my backyard flood dangerously close to the back door, listening to my school-was-canceled children run around like a pair of banshees after an espresso-pounding contest. Everything is bright and loud and a bit overwhelming. I can't watch crime shows because, while they are able to happily ignore the sounds emitted by their parents, my progeny tend to tune in and absorb every second of any viewer-discretion-is-advised show within miles.

But it's not all a wasted, miserable day. I am still in sweats and did an admirable job of holding down the couch in between nodding off this morning. My kids were well-behaved, albeit volume-enhanced, and Willem just fed them and herded them off for nap/quiet-time.

And I just bought 6-day Paris Passes for my mother, sisters, and myself, because we will be in Paris in THREE AND A HALF WEEKS.

So, discrepancies aside, I think I'll accept my real life over my fantasy one. At least for now.

Tidbits

2007-04-13T16:00:00.000-04:00

A few random thoughts as we enter the weekend...

First, the gripes.

Don Imus: Shut up, already, dude. Seriously. And why has this become such a huge debate topic? He wasn't fired due to censorship - and even if he was, public airways are federally regulated and therefore subject to censorship, whether we like it or not. Otherwise, Janet Jackson's cervix would've been pressed up against your television screen at the Master's golf tournament. Imus was fired due to financial pressure on the part of advertisers who didn't want to be associated with someone who, after 35 years in broadcasting, hasn't figured out that there are certain words and phrases that white people can't say without causing offense. This was not a learning opportunity for him; he already knew better, and just chose to ignore what he already knew. We all know he'll be rehired somewhere else plenty soon. And I still won't listen to him even then.

New England Weather: I have had enough of this. This is ridiculous. I can't even go home to my sister's 16th birthday party this weekend because of the combination of two storms, one due to hit NY on Saturday night so I won't be able to head home early on Sunday, and one due to hit here late Sunday so I won't be able to wait until later to drive home. The kids are going to be out-of-their-minds disappointed, Willem's going to be cranky because he was looking forward to a weekend of watching hockey playoffs uninterrupted, and I'm officially freaking out about our utter lack of plans for Paris, which oh-by-the-way is in FOUR WEEKS.

Softball Organizers: Thank you, thank you, thank you. I was concerned, given my need to be a supportive and cheery parent, that I would not be able to find a way to satisfactorily weild sarcasm around the activity. But by having my daughter's team-to-be sponsored by the H Poultry Company, my needs for positive reinforcement and for rampant teasing will be equally met. Goooooooo, Chickens!

Emergency Department Doctors: You don't have to like the patients. That's okay. You don't even have to be especially nice to them; minimal professionalism would be fine. But referring to a patient as "the big useless lump" does not fall into my definition of professionalism. Ya think that, maybe, just maybe, if someone is already in the emergency room, that perhaps hearing themselves referred to as "just another waste of my time" might not be therapeutic? And I guarantee that the 400-pound 20-year-old is already quite aware of her relative size without you mentioning her "unreasonable and insane obesity." I don't need you to make my job easier, but would not pushing my clients over the edge be a reasonable request?

In happier news, a million congratulations going out to Mike and Maria (and Peter) for the arrival of Alice, and to Brendan and Sara (and Harrison) for the arrival of Emma!

And nooooooo, you all with your new babies, that doesn't make my uterus ache in the very least little bit... Not at all...

And in an assault of cuteness - because, let's be honest, for a mommyblogger I really don't throw around all that much child-related cuteness here - I love my Jacob. Last night, when I was calling for pizza, Jacob was looking at the facing page in the phone book, which has a large blue wildcat pawprint on it. He said, "A clue! A clue!"

I asked, "What is the clue for?"

He said, "It's a clue to get me a pizza!"

And because I can't have one cute kid without another, I was having a talk with Emily about how she needs to ask more of her friends at school whether they'll be attending her birthday party. Apparently, RSVP'ing is totally not-cool in New Hampshire. "We've only gotten like two responses," I told her.

"Yeah, but Rebecca called six times in one night last week. That should make up for some of the others," she said. And there's just something cool about your kid reaching an age when they are deliberately sarcastic instead of merely unintentionally funny.

The Whys and Wherefores

2007-04-12T19:23:00.000-04:00

You are welcome.

Really. And you didn't even realize you were grateful, did you?

I know. Sometimes it's the unstated things that make all the difference.

Like, today, I was tagged by Brian, to talk about why I blog. And, being dutiful and occasionally obedient, I provided a long-winded, incredibly boring, response.

And after I recovered from my ennui-induced coma, I decided I just couldn't leave such a flat and uninspiring collection of words smeared all over your screen.

So, instead, a shorter version:

I blog to give my children concrete examples when, as angst-filled adults, they are asked by their therapists to talk about just how it was that their mother drove them crazy.

I blog because I kind of enjoy that fine, dangerous edge of not disguising our names and waiting for the day when my mother-in-law stumbles across this and learns how I really feel.

I blog because there are times when the thoughts in my head are heavy or intense or funny but I can't seem to force them into spoken words. And, yet, I don't want to lose those same thoughts to the abyss which is my motherhood-addled brain.

I blog because somehow having an audience helps me to keep writing, when any number of journals and scrapbooks have fallen by the wayside.

That's about it. It's not especially complicated, really. My only source of surprise is that I didn't start blogging sooner - I've been online since back in the days of dial-up modems and BBS's.

Okay. So, gypsyhick and Maggie, how come you blog?

Thump

2007-04-11T19:03:00.000-04:00

Have you ever found yourself in a conversation with someone who speaks so slowly, with so many "ums" and "uhs" and "wells," so many long pauses, so many repetitions, that eventually you find yourself itching to thump them on the back of the head just to see if the words fall out any faster that way?

Yeah, me neither.

Dog + Stairs + Kate = BAD

2007-04-11T13:24:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, I parked at the far end of the back parking lot, as I do every time I go to work, and walked to the back door of the hardware store. If I squeeze toward the righthand edge of the doorway and scamper through, I can avoid triggering the automatic door-opener; not as much an issue now, but I always felt guilty to be opening their doors and sending a blast of February air through the place.

I work upstairs, and the stairs are in two sections of about 15 steps each. First 15, no incident. Second 15, I made it about three steps up when the door at the top of the stairs burst open, and a dog roughly the size of New Jersey, but with much sharper teeth, came muttering through and headed down the stairs. With him was a woman who clearly was using the leash as a propellant for herself rather than as a canine control device. I startled, because dogs aren't my favorite under good conditions and they are very much not my favorite when they're big and slobbery and muttery and heading toward me from above. I slipped down those three stairs, grabbed the railing, and avoided a butt-thumping landing by luck rather than by grace.

The woman may have apologized - I can't be sure, because the dog, I swear to you, growled, "Get outta my way." And they disappeared, and I continued into my office. Felt fine through the morning, but by midafternoon I had a distinct baseball-sized knot in my lower back, on the right side. If it was in the center, I'd be more worried about spinal involvement, but this is far enough to the side that it's obviously a muscle or tendon pull, nothing a doctor can help with.

And today, it's softball sized and doing its own muttering and growling. Do I know how to have a good time, or what?

How to Move On

2007-04-10T09:24:00.000-04:00

As if our planned trip to Potsdam isn't enough of a reminder of our snarly and dark beginnings, Willem and I have also been vicariously dealing with the topics of infidelity and betrayal in a more present tense. Close friends of ours are in circumstances that are simultaneously very different and painfully similar to where we were eight years ago.

It has created a bunch of late-night conversations between us, because - and I can't decide whether this is sad or sweet - we have a bit of a reputation, now, as being a couple who was able to get through unfaithfulness and move on. Experts in the field, and all. I'll be brushing up my résumé later today.

Anyway, the basic underlying question is, "Can we get through this? And, how?" Being bereft of a crystal ball - nobody can remember whose turn it was to watch it - we can't answer the first bit, but I can talk about how we got through it. I don't know how other people do it. It's really hard - certainly harder than just breaking up - and it's difficult for me to encourage anyone to open themselves to that much more uncertainty and hurt. But the end result was worth it here, so...

What Willem Did (The Parts that Worked, Anyway)

He gave me a brief, and undetailed, list of his indiscretions. He was as complete as he could be - but he did not give locations, outfits, positions, etc. My imagination is keen and self-destructive: he needed to provide me with the basics because that knowledge allowed me to rein in some of my very worst fears, but sometimes he provided too much detail, and I will never, ever be able to get those images out of my head. He basically acted like he was on the witness stand in court - answered the questions, without avoiding or overelaborating.

He didn't treat me like a confessor. Confession feels good. I know. It's why Catholics the world over do it. It's scary at first, but then once it's out and not a deep dark secret anymore it will feel like such a weight is lifted. Fantastic. I don't know what he did with all the gory details, the your conflicted emotions, the guilt and self-flagellation. I don't care. He could have gotten a therapist, or a priest, or a (mature) friend, or a dog - anything is better than dumping that stuff on someone who is already bleeding from the heart.

He had to learn to own his emotions. Some days I felt okay, and his heart would lift and he would get all optimistic and bouncy and giddy. Much like a schoolgirl, without the kneesocks. Other days, something would poke a new hole in my heart, or rip open an old one that everyone thought was healed. On those days, he learned how to validate and acknowledge my feelings, without then leaping off that Cliff of Insanity right behind me. I didn't need to feel responsible for his emotions on top of everything else. He had to buck up and be supportive, and find someplace else to wallow when it got to be too much.

He changed his lifestyle. His previous life was structured around finding people and opportunities to act in a certain way, and that had to change - not just the actions, but the circumstances that allowed those actions. He stopped going to bars, trolling for girls; he started calling me every night when he got home from work; he just avoided potentially dangerous/stupid/tempting situations. Much like how they don't hold Alcoholics Anonymous meetings in bars.

He didn't grovel. Much. It was either going to work out, or it wasn't - that's a long-term situation, and we didn't know the answer right away. He offered what I felt was a sincere apology, and had done what he could to get rid of any secrets (not just the infidelity-related ones), and then he focused on building a life together - not on continuing to revisit the past.

Not a comprehensive list, true, but it's a start.

What Kate Did

I learned how to say, "I cannot talk about that with you," as many times as it took until he stopped trying to confess all the details and circumstances and guilt feelings and justifications. Willem felt like there was a big difference between the girls with whom he actually Did the Deed, and the girls with whom he "just fooled around," and the girls with whom he had dinner or watched movies without the exchange of bodily fluids. I did not. And his trying to clarify or distinguish between them only succeeded in making me angry or hurt or frustrated all over again.

I learned the difference between keeping secrets and controlling information. Keeping secrets, particularly from those who should know, is not a way to build a healthy relationship. But just because we needed to work on eradicating secrets between us, that didn't mean that we had to open the details of our relationship to the whole world. (At least, not until I got a blog and told the whole world, ha ha... ha.) I talked to a few people about it, when I thought they could handle the information and be supportive of my choices - but I did not talk to others, because they would still hold onto that knowledge and their judgments long after we had settled it and tried to move on. Or, at least, I was afraid they would.

The cheating? Not about me. It's a set of actions by someone who felt a need to push the boundaries and misbehave, and nothing about me caused that. (And when you figure out how to truly, deep-down-in-your-heart, steadfastly believe that, then write it down and sell it, because I still haven't gotten it down fully.)

Just because I decided to try and fix the relationship does not mean I had become a doormat or a masochist. It just meant that even with this new and bad information, I still felt like the positives in my relationship outweighed the negatives (though, true, by a much narrower margin). I was very comfortable with offering an ultimatum: one more indiscretion, at the time or 20 years from now, and I pack up and leave, no further discussion. I needed to feel like I had taken back some control in the relationship, and saying that if-then statement out loud helped me to feel like I wasn't just letting myself get walked on.

Moving on is not the same as forgiveness. I agreed to move on, to not use this as a weapon every chance I got and to start building something new. But - and this is a whole other post - I don't believe that one human being should hold enough power over another to offer forgiveness. And even if I did, I would never offer absolution for Willem's behaviors. They don't go away just because we want them to. I've said that we can be okay, but I will never say that what he did was okay.

Ugh. Enough. The longer I write, here, the more lecturey and know-it-all I sound. Which I don't much like, somehow. The thing is, this is all in retrospect - I can look back and figure out some of what helped us move on. In the moment, it was just a massive case of muddling through until something felt right, interspersed with lots of screw-ups and do-overs.

And yet, with all of this, I still don't have any regrets. If we had changed any one thing, then very likely the whole relationship would be different now. If Willem had told me right from the start that he slept with Horizonal Stripes Heather within a week of getting together with me, I'd have left him without a backward glance. If he had told me that he'd done any number of things when they happened, I'd have walked. I'm not glad that they happened, but I believe that life is an accumulation of all prior acts and decisions - and my life now is still pretty amazing.

Bah. I need a new Alanis video to lighten the mood.

I Heart Alanis Morissette. And Her Humps.

2007-04-08T09:32:00.000-04:00

Consider this my Easter gift to you.

For comparison, here's the original.

And let's remember that Fergie's version earned a Grammy Award. God Bless America.

Drowning in Enthusiasm

2007-04-07T07:25:00.000-04:00

Do you ever feel like one of these days, you're going to crack one too many bright-and-cheery smiles, pronounce one too many enthusiastic reviews of artwork that is clearly mediocre at best, gaze benignly one too many times while your child takes 27 minutes to tell a story which could have been summed up in seven words or less ("Josh snarfed his milk out his nose. It was funny."), and suddenly, with very little warning, your head is going to simply split in two and fall on the floor, at which point a stream of platitudes and cheerleading and "use your words"es and "how do you ask nicely?"s and lullabies and peek-a-boos will all come pouring out and stain your carpet?

Which won't really matter all that much anyway, since it will just blend with the other gazillion stains and scuffs and clutter which have taken over your home.