Barnmaven

Not a care in the world

I rush through life in fifth gear, constantly worrying about the things I need to get done.  I run in a million little circles, and fry my internal circuits trying to be all places at once, all things to all people, and micromanager of my universe.  Its got to stop!

I made some headway on that this weekend.  I was offered a pair of tickets to see Diana Krall at the winery's Woodinville location.  The company draws two sets of tickets for employees for every summer concert, and though I never ever seem to win anything requiring luck, the friend who *did* win them couldn't go and so offered them to me.

The venue was beautiful, the wine was not too expensive, the seats were terrific and the music soothed.  Diana Krall is even more engaging in concert than I imagined.  Her song selection disappointed somewhat, I was hoping for more of the songs from her Live in Paris CD, but nevertheless, she is an incredibly talented and compelling musician/vocalist and I thoroughly enjoyed listening to her. I took my big brother as my date, and what a wonderful evening we had.  At one point he looked over at me and said "This is great, I am so relaxed and having such a good time.  I feel like I don't have a care in the world."  It was the prevailing mood of the evening.  

All By Myself, I Did!

I fixed it all by myself!

 

 

The past couple of weeks I’ve been complaining to my carpool buddies that the water pressure in Franklin Irrigation District was really crappy.  Then this week the pressure in my sprinkler heads dropped to pretty much zero.  I asked my neighbor across the street if he was having the same problem and he said “You don’t have a pressure problem.  You have a milfoil problem.”  Huh.  Somehow I had forgotten that we get our irrigation water directly from the Columbia River, which this time of year is literally up to its ears in the stuff. 

 

I shouldn’t complain about my irrigation at all, honestly.  I pay next to nothing for all the water I can douse my pasture in all spring and summer.  Seriously, my irrigation taxes for the entire year are under $200.  I think my monthly household water bill is about $25.  And I live in THE DESERT.  I know, right?

 

So, no water.  Time to check the filter, which is housed in a big gray plastic junction right near the front of the property, along with the shutoff valve.  The cap of the housing is a big plastic cap about 4 inches in diameter.  I tried to unscrew that cap with everything I could find in my garage and nothing worked.  So I heisted my butt up to Lowe’s and bout the biggest pair of Channel Locks I’ve ever seen -  all 16.5 inches of them.  Turns out there’s not many things you can’t solve with the correct size channel locks. 

 

I did figure out how I could have made it easier on myself.  The cap has a big O-ring inside, and it comes off easier, I found, when it is not (NOT) pressurized.  Oh.

 

So not only should I turn off the shutoff valve, I should also open the pressure release valve to let the last of the water inside the housing escape *before* I unscrew the housing cap. 

 

Damn, that lightbulb almost hurt my head from the brightness. 

 

My filter was indeed plugged with milfoil.  A toothbrush and the garden hose with the sprayer set on “Jet” did the trick and before long my lawn and pasture were once more receiving their daily allotment of life-giving water.  TAKE THAT, BROWN GRASS! 

 

I love the rush I get when I have fixed something all on my own.  I love it when my instincts are right, when I am strong enough to do something without help.   Even if I am a little bit, um, slow in figuring out how to fix it.   

My mother mentioned to me the other day that my Aunt Bernie (God rest her soul) was a Rosie the Riveter during the war.  I hadn’t known that.  Why didn’t I know that?  I’m a little perturbed and surprised that no one would mention it to me, since I am, I believe, the first self-identified women’s libber in my entire extended family.  At any rate, I get a kick out of knowing that my little short, feisty, Aunt Bernice was one of what I like to think of  as “the ones who came before me.”  Freakin’ coooooooool.

 

 

Oh, that felt good

I don’t know why, I keep forgetting that if I don’t do yoga on a regular basis I feel like shit.  And yet, I keep skipping it and suffering.  I truly enjoy yoga, even if I am relatively inflexible and can’t do many of the poses really well.  Lotus position may not be achievable in my lifetime, but I’d be happy just to be able to do cobbler’s pose and bend my spine forward farther than a fraction of an inch.  Thing is, I suspect if I’d get off my lazy fat ass and actually DO a session four or five times a week, I COULD do that.  Couldn’t I. 

So I had time yesterday, while the kids were over at their dad’s enjoying the swimming pool, to do Rodney Yee's Power Yoga for Beginners .   I have several yoga DVD’s, but whenever I am limited on time or haven’t practiced in a while, I tend to gravitate toward this one.    I picked the 20 minute stamina section, since I like how he takes the sun salutation and eases you into the forward bends.  For my arthritic back I like to have a couple of slower transitions into forward bend before I try to swan dive it, otherwise the lower lumbar region tends to squawk quite vigorously over the injustice of the whole thing.  And the best thing, besides how good it felt and how focused and internal I felt, was that there was almost immediate relief from the pain in my hip and knee that had been plaguing me all day. 

One of the other benefits of yoga is that even if the kids are climbing up my butt, its something I can do with them in the room.  Its cute to see them attempt the poses, although I have to admit that laughing so hard you fall right out of triangle pose sort of defeats the purpose.  But to Little Man, EVERY pose means trying to do the splits.  And Child A is as uncoordinated as I was at her age (which means she is considerably uncoordinated) and it is so fun to watch her try and follow the instructor.  I’m hoping some of what she tries will stick and help her start figuring out how her joints work.  

 

I know part of the problem is that she’s so darned tall, and I remember trying to figure out at her age how to control my hands and legs and failing miserably.  I was (and am) the proverbial bull in the china shop  It doesn’t help that my ass seems to own an entire territory all its own.  I’ll be in the laundry room and turning around and it will bump into something that I hadn’t thought I was remotely CLOSE to.  I find myself looking down at it with a sense of irritation and surprise.  Geez, ass, I keep fooling myself into thinking you’re not that big and yet, there you are.  Then there are the arms – so long that I think I might possibly be half-simian.  (Now THERE is a question for my birthmother, who has never revealed the identify of my birthfather. NOW I KNOW WHY!  He’s a MONKEY!)  I have permanent bruises on my wristbones from whacking them on every doorframe and desk I walk past.  You would think after 43 years I would KNOW WHERE MY HANDS ARE and yet, I have no clue.

Yoga helps with the uncoordinated aspect, really it does. The first time I managed to do tree pose without falling off my one foot I was SO PROUD.    If I’m going to get any decent level of flexibility and balance, I’ve got to work a little harder at it.  So, today, I’m setting a goal of 4 practices a week.  If I meet my goal, I give myself a little prize.  Maybe a spa pedicure.  Or a new yoga DVD.  Suggestions?

The Rheumatiz

That's what they called it when I was a kid, back when sabre-toothed tigers and mastadons roamed the earth.  The Rheumatiz.  Now its simply known as arthritis.  I prefer thinking of it as The Rheumatiz, since that sounds vaguely sinister and possibly even deadly, and plain old 'arthritis' sounds so, I don't know, commonplace.

I can't even remember when it started wrapping its creeping tendrils around my knee, hip and back.  One day I was young and whole and suddenly I was not, it was as simple as that.  Some days its no big deal, just a little creaky in the morning when I get out of bed and maybe need to support my back when I bend over to pull the bag out of the garbage pail under the sink.  Other days, it has me scrambling through the medicine cabinet to find something, ANYTHING to MAKE IT STOP. 

Last spring I got tossed off of a horse I was working on, nothing big but it did rock my noggin a little.  I went to the chiropractor the next day, since I had done a nice twisty number on my back as I fell.  He was concerned and ordered x-rays.  His old crappy x-ray machine (hey, fancy chiropractor?  You can afford better equipment!) showed a couple of lines on one of the lumbar vertebrae that he was afraid looked like hairline fractures, so he sent me to the hospital's x-ray group to get the digital pictures.  As it turns out, they were only scleroidal tissue, but the scans did show an amazing amount of that all over the lumbar region.  As if I needed a picture to tell me what my body's been saying for YEARS.  The Rheumatiz.

So today is a bad day, as it turns out, for the old arthritis.  Which has me feeling cranky and mean.  And wanting to scramble through the medicine cabinet.  But its too early for drugs, I don't want to fall asleep at seven freaking oh clock in the evening.  Then I'll have more in common with grandma than just the bad hips.  I'd just like say, though, if I seem a little bit crabby?  I am.  Painfully so.

No Band-aid

One of the more painful aspects of motherhood is coping when your children have issues that you cannot fix. From the time we learn of our children's existence, there is some insanely sensitive radar that switches on. This radar, this "mother sense" if you will, tells you when your child is happy, sad, hurt, angry, overjoyed. The bulk of every task of mothering is to ensure that the radar so keenly attuned to our child returns a fairly constant stream of "happy" or at the very least, "ok." If all goes according to plan and desire, we only experience infrequent issues of "not ok" and these ideally are easily addressed. Hungry? No problem, here's a grilled cheese sandwich. Dirty? Lets toss you in the tub. Scraped knee? Band-aid to the rescue. When the best-laid plans fall awry, we have much more serious problems to address.

When my daughter was about 18 months old, we got a life-bomb. She started throwing tantrums. These were not ordinary tantrums, not by any measurement. This little beauty threw tantrums that would make a prison guard shudder. As she got older, the intensity and violence increased. By the time she was five she'd been tossed out of three daycares. Her bedroom looked like a disaster zone due to her destructiveness when she would tantrum. No kind of discipline worked; time-outs were not possible as she would hurt herself if put behind a closed door, or she would put holes in plasterboard and wood. Time-outs for her always meant a time out for me too, sitting with her or near her to protect her from herself. At the age of four she was diagnosed with severe ADHD. At the age of five she was also diagnosed as bipolar. This was an incredibly painful chapter in my life and is of course ongoing. With the help of some wonderful doctors, therapists, a psychiatrist and modern medicine, my daughter is functioning at or above grade level in school. More importantly, she is able to be successful socially, has friends, and more often than not, she is a happy child. Getting to here has not been particularly easy, and I'm under no illusions that we have smooth sailing ahead. We live in a region where behavioral health care is seriously lacking in ratio to the percentage of the population requiring those services. Wait lists for evaluations and specialists are typically months long, and when you have a child in crisis, your entire family can feel like you've been dropped in a blender and pureed to smithereens, while the healthcare professionals around you simply stand back and watch it happen.

The process of getting help for her was agonizing, and I logged more hours on the phone with doctors, insurers, crisis centers and mental health professionals than I would have ever imagined possible. Not that I'm complaining. I've got some very dear friends who have children with issues much more serious than my daughter's, and what they deal with makes this look like special-needs kindergarten. Even so, I think I've got some sort of PTSD over the whole process, because this week I started to have to rewalk this path for my son and the turmoil I feel is sharp, unbelievably so.

My son also has an intial diagnosis of ADHD, but he's dealing with other, undiagnosed issues as well. The recent decision my husband and I made to separate is wreaking havoc with him, and he's just undone. I'm in the process of setting him up with the professionals he'll need who will help us walk this path. At least this time around I know who to call and how to ask, what to say. I can't fix this, but I can call people. I know how to do that. I can make appointments, I can listen, read and learn, start implementing behavior plans. I can't make it go away, but I can hug him and tell him how much he is loved and that nothing he ever does will change that.

Its hard enough to watch your child struggle with an extraordinary need that you know she likely inherited from you. Its an awful thing to see your child suffer pain and anguish because of a decision you made that will impact him for the rest of his life. Somehow we got off the path, we strayed and became derelict in our job as parents. Even when the decision is inevitable, unchangeable, there is little consolation.

Someday I hope my children can forgive us for the mistakes we made. I suppose that all we can do going forward is to be better parents to them. This one can't be fixed with a grilled cheese sandwich.

It Never Lasts

Going back to work after nearly two weeks of being on Vacation involves wrapping my head around a job I've somehow conveniently forgotten how to do while I was gone.  As I've gone through hundreds of emails today, my brain is a constant litany of "oh, fuck, I have to deal with that?" and "What is it I do, again?"  Even though the trip to visit in-laws and friends in NJ had its definite downside, it was still a wonderful time reconnecting with people I love and enjoy.  I also had a few days after we got back to putter around the place, cleaning, mowing, gardening. I even got to go for a ride for the first time in more than a month, and even though I had to get up at 5:30 am to go before it was too hot and even though being out of riding shape and not taking ibuprofen first meant my hips were a hotbed of agony halfway into it, it was still incredible. 

So I'm back at work today and I'm not sure whether I'm glad or whether I'd like a few more days of freedom.  Honestly, having some serious work (and five bazillion emails) to tackle is helping me keep my mind off of some of the tougher issues of the day.  (Oh, did I mention the whole getting separated from my husband thing?  More on that later.)  At the same time, I loved having time to take my kids to the river and work in my yard and hang out with the horses.  Down time is so rare these days that it feels like having a precious gift.  And I didn't even use all of the time WISELY!  I know, you're shocked, aren't you?  Me, whose brain keeps her body from sitting still for five minutes (unless there's a restraint involved), WASTED TIME.  I did!  And it was fun!  In fact, it was so fun, I plan on doing it some more this weekend!

OK, you, stop wasting time reading my blog.  Leisure time is over.  Get back to work!