Barnmaven

Acceptance, then (maybe) love

At the very least, acceptance.

How do you feel about your body?

Love it?

Hate it?

Live with it?

Our lives are saturated by the images and messages that insinuate themselves into the fabric of our being.  "Thinner," whisper the voices.  "Bigger there.  Smaller there.  Cap those teeth, whiten them, whittle down those cheeks and plump the lips."  Wrinkles and gray hair and the inevitable trail map of life -- are they marks of wisdom and beauty or blemishes to be ashamed of?

I'll never be twenty again, or even thirty.  I'll be forty-five in less than a month.  My face and my body bear the marks of everything I've done to myself, both good and bad.  The scar on my left shin where the pointy end of a piece of driftwood punctured my leg walking on the beach in the dark.  The waistline where the chaps my mom made for me in high school for horse shows, the chaps that still zip up on my thighs, won't quite buckle after two babies did a number on my hips.  The freckles, the age spots, the wrinkles. The hands that are covered in tiny scars from so many accidents with kitchen knives. The scar in my palm where I learned the hard way that the best way to get frozen peppermint ice cream out of the bottom of a carton is NOT by prying it with a butter knife.  The scar on my lip where the bad mole had to come off.  The skin between my belly button and...well, you know...that wrinkles when I bend over because it never quite regained its elasticity after being so hugely pregnant.  Breasts that nursed two babies, not quite as perky as they used to be, but they still point in the right direction.  The other stuff that was always there - the junk in my trunk and the wonderfully strong and sturdy legs I inherited from my birthmother.  Peasant legs, I call them.  My hair, not quite as thick as it was ten years ago but still thick enough, graying on the sides.  Short now, because I no longer have the desire to maintain a long hairstyle for the simple sake of vanity. 

Do I love my body?  I don't know, honestly.  Some parts of it I love.  Some parts I used to hate, but somewhere in between the years of fighting it, hating it, exercising it and getting older in it, I grew to accept it.  It is mine, with all of its beauty and all of its sags, wrinkles, dimples and bags.  I work it out to keep it healthy and strong.  I keep it really super reasonably clean. It could stand to be thinner and stronger, but I'll be happy with strong enough.  I don't need to climb mountains or run marathons, but I want to ride horses, play with my children (and my someday grandchildren), ski, swim, walk, run, stretch and do my own yardwork until the day I die.  If I treat it right, it will get me there and I'll be grateful.

Put it in a line with a million other almost forty-five year old bodies and it'll just blend right in. (Unless you sandwich me in between Cindy Craword and Claudia Schiffer, then I'm screwed).

Beauty is not a number on a scale.  Beauty is fluid, individual, constant and timeless.   For every one of you that does not think that I'm beautiful, there is another who does. 

It really does matter that you are beautiful in the who of you.  Beautiful in the how and the why.  Your physical self, in its imperfections, its glory, its strength and weakness, all of it adds up to beautiful.

My wish for every girl, for every woman, is to celebrate and acknowledge her unique beauty.  To enjoy her body in all the ways she can, in loving, in caring for others, in working hard, in play and in rest.  To treat herself in the way that we treat someone we love, by being good to herself, caring for herself.   Whether she is a professional athlete or a mall-walker, lean or curvacious, tall or short, whether her skin is brown, bronze, freckled, pale or olive, I want her to know that she is beautiful.  I want YOU to know that YOU are beautiful.

 

This year an inspired group of bloggers, mostly women, came together to join their creative forces in a really wonderful project. 12 women of all different shapes and sizes bared it all to show just how diverse and unique and beautiful women are.  The proceeds from this project will (after printing costs) will benefit the National Eating Disorders Association.

I ordered my Blogger Body Calendar today.  Go.  Check it out.  If you have a daughter or a niece or a grandchild or a partner or a woman in your life that you care about, won't you order one too?

Make it stop

We've either had snow, freezing rain or subzero temperatures every single day this week. 

Look, I'm as big a fan of winter as they come.  I love skiing, I love sledding, I love the pretty fairyland all that white stuff falling from the sky creates.  I'm not afraid to drive in it and as long as the schools don't close their doors, depriving me of my few hours of respite from my offspring, I'm happy to go to work, go shopping, go wherever. 

My animals, however, would really appreciate a break. Horses, despite any evidence to the contrary, believe that the moment the snow starts falling that they are going to starve to death.  It doesn't matter how fat and shiny they happen to be, how many flakes of alfalfa and buckets of sweet feed they get, they are convinced that death is imminent.  The moment they sight you in the window or hear the back door open, they rush the fence, then stare at you with haunted eyes.  Its enough to make you lose sleep.

The dogs hate potty time, but since they refuse to learn to flush the toilet, outdoors it is.  And the big fella, the nearly 100-pound brute, has gotten it into his brain that he is somehow too weak and fragile to go outside to pee in the snow.  He stands at the door, looking at me with reproach in his eyes.  I can't go out there.  Yes, yes you can.  No, I can't.  I'll die.  I'll freeze.  The snow might eat me.  Look, buddy, I don't care if your pecker falls off from the cold, you're going OUT THERE to do your thing.  You are the meanest human being that ever lived.  I know, my offspring remind me of that fact approximately every thirty seconds.  Now go.  Out.  Go.  Fine, I'll go.  But I'm peeing on your lawn chair, here.

When is spring again?

 

Honor thyself

It is fifteen degrees out this morning.  As I type this, three horses lean up against the pasture fence, blowing steam from their nostrils, wondering why I haven't shown up with armfuls of hay yet.  Hang on boys, I'll get to you in a minute.  I have something to say first.

There are lots of things I don't write about in detail on this blog.  They're off limits.  And I really don't like it when people are coy and they tell you they're writing about something they can't really talk about.  And now I'm a hypocrite because that's sort of what I'm going to do right now.

You see, I've changed.  I'm not the person I was ten years ago.  I'm not the person I was five years ago.  I changed, and yesterday I proved it to myself.

One of the biggest problems with being codependent is an frightening tenacity when it comes to hanging on to something even when its totally not okay, and sometimes even when its literally destroying you.  I have hung on to people and situations in my life so hard that by the time they finally exploded, there were pieces of shrapnel and body parts found hundreds of miles away.  And of course, in that kind of aftermath, I'd be simply unable to function for weeks and months.

I am so proud of myself today, and so grateful for my recovery.  I know I still have a very long way to go, but when I am able to look at a situation in my life and say "this isn't the right situation for me" and simply step out of it, without anger and without blame, I can honestly say that I've made progress. And yesterday, I did just that.  I was sad, and it hurt, but for once the fear of dealing with my feelings didn't stop me from making the right decision for me.  For me and me alone.

Today, while we celebrate the things we are thankful for, this is going to be pretty damned near the top of my list. The top slots are reserved for the usual sappy things, my children, my family, all those things in life that I am so fortunate to have and should never take for granted.  Somewhere floating around in that list,though, is a box next to the phrase "One step farther away from bat-shit crazy."  And it is checked.

 

 

 

A little ray of sunshine

My post I weep for the girls was selected for syndication over at Blogher! 

I'd say "squueeeeeee", but if you know me at all, you know I don't squee.  I'm more of a whooper.  Therefore if you heard a very loud whoop coming from the general direction of the southern central part of Washington State this morning, that might just have been me.

Now go and look!  Hurry!  Shoo!

 

 

While snowflakes fall

 

 

I'd like to say the quiet respite of today is forced, nature's way of making me take time out from the world.  Except I"m pretty honest, and in being so must admit that its only reinforced my desire to hibernate.

I haven't left my house since Saturday morning.

I haven't gotten dressed except to go food shopping on Saturday until fifteen minutes ago.

I didn't go to church yesterday and I didn't even call to tell them I wasn't coming.  I flaked out on choir, on life.  I don't want to do anything, go anywhere, be anything but what I am at the moment.

My kids and I have had a blast watching old movies (C is now completely head over heels with Number 5 from Short Circuit and I have rediscovered my ancient crush on Steve Guttenberg) and watching the snow fall and playing hooky from life.  We've made our first fire of the year, made hot cocoa, which would have had marshmallows, but somebody (I'm not pointing fingers, SON) ate all the marshmallows.  No one has called on my new ad for babysitters and I'm perfectly OK about that, because I don't trust any of them anyway and somehow I think its all going to work out for the best.

 

And so we go on.  We watch the snow.  We enjoy our vacation from the rest of the world.  We soothe our frayed nerves with hugs and giggles and snowball fights and watching four large dogs act like little puppies in the snow, and we get by.  We get by.

And the snowflakes keep falling.

I really screwed up

I injected what I think was a note of sarcastic humor into yesterdays post.  At the time I was reeling, and trying to make it at least a little funny was my own way of coping with what was happening around me.

I also didn't want to post too many details, because at the time I thought the reason the sitter was jailed was because of something far more innocent than the real reason she was in jail.  Today I learned why she had been arrested, and let me tell you, when I learned why, my blood ran cold.

Let's start at the beginning. My sitter was last employed by a family in my town as a full time nanny for their two children, the older of which has autism and needed a caregiver experienced in special needs.  According to testimony and news stories, not too long after she started working for this family, the mother confessed to her that she wanted to kill her husband and run away to Mexico.  Some weeks after this confession, the sitter realized that the woman was actually serious and informed the husband, who then involved the police.  The police involved the sitter in a sting operation whereby the wife thought the sitter was helping her to obtain drugs to help her in her endeavor, but which were not really drugs and the whole pass-off was videotaped and wiretapped.

The wife was arrested and charged.

Six weeks after this, the husband fired the sitter and obtained a restraining order against her, claiming that he thought she was trying to take the children and was giving them drugs.  The sitter responded with a restraining order in return, things got all weird and sordid.  The wife eventually took a plea deal to lesser charges and was released from prison with credit for time served.  A month ago, the sitter filed a lawsuit against the couple in civil court for damages related to defamation of character, etc.

The police have never charged the sitter with any crime, though they thoroughly investigated her.

Because the sitter was never charged with anything, my background check which included a search of all felony arrests or warrants, turned up NOTHING.  A misdemeanor from when her daughter was a teen and stole her car, where the sitter claimed that she had let the child drive in order to keep her out of trouble, but she had told me about that in the interview.  In fact, it was comforting to me to see that she was so truthful she had owned up to the ONLY thing that came up on the background check when I ran it after the interview.

Had I run a simple search engine lookup on her name, I would have learned the details of the family she had worked for before.  In all likelihood, I would not have hired her.  Not because I thought she had done something wrong, but because there were active restraining orders and ongoing court cases and I don't need my children in any way involved with someone who is a tad notorious, even superficially.

Instead, I trusted her, gave her a key to my home.  Allowed her to pick up my children from school.  Take them to the library and the park and to her house for macaroni and cheese.

What I did not know:

This woman was in an ongoing battle with some long term acquaintances.  Over the weekend she told police the women had attacked her.  An investigation ensued, and no evidence could be found that such an attack had taken place.  What the police were able to find, though, was damning evidence that my sitter was engaging in a threat campaign against these women via text, email and voicemail, leaving them threats.  Serious threats, including a threat to "beat one victim to a bloody pulp with a bat" until she was dead.

Yesterday, after learning she was jailed, I went home early and had my locks changed.  I assumed, offhand, that she had been arrested for mistakenly violating a restraining order.  I thought I might be overreacting, but I wanted to make sure I took steps to keep my family safe.  After learning of the details of her arrest, I am glad I took those steps.  

I am horrified, reeling, unsettled, shocked.  At any point my children could have been harmed by this apparently unstable woman.  I don't know the details of the feud with the other women involved, but heaven forbid one of them was retaliatory toward my sitter AND MY CHILDREN WERE WITH HER.  Or if she had been arrested this week any day but the day I work from home, and my children had been present.  My mind keeps going over and over all of the details, fragments of conversations, thoughts, observations.  In no way did this woman seem to be the kind of person that would leave someone violent threats.  If anything, she just seemed a little too nice and possibly even naive.  I was completely mistaken about her character and the reality of what was going on in her private life.

Lessons?  Many.

Background checks are NOT enough.  An interview is not sufficient.  There are many good unlicensed people out there providing childcare.  I was unlucky enough to find one of the few who was a high risk.  There was nothing in her manner or words or ANYTHING to indicate she was a potential danger.

I'm not even upset about needing to find yet another caregiver for my children.  I'm grateful instead, grateful that my children were not harmed.  Perhaps they were never really in danger, but in my opinion we dodged a bullet on this one.  Things that could have gone wrong didn't.

Ultimately, I count myself at fault.  It is my job to protect my kids.  To be thorough in researching the people who are providing their care.  I didn't do that.  If my kids were in danger, they were in danger because I didn't do my job.  I'm incredibly thankful that the cost of learning this lesson wasn't as high as it could have been.

There's a lesson in this

Nothing good can last

DO look a gift horse in the mouth

Nothing is ever quite as good as it seems

If it seems too good to be true, it probably is

And last, but really not least:  ALWAYS GOOGLE THE PERSON YOU ARE THINKING OF HIRING AS YOUR SITTER.  BACKGROUND CHECKS ARE RIDICULOUSLY NOT INFORMATIVE.

You'd think that researching the criminal background and historical address files of a person would be sufficient.  If you're like me, you'd never assume that anyone in your relatively small community might have some notoriety.  If you're like me, you don't read much beyond the first few lines in local newspaper stories unless they have to do with you personally or are about politics.

So if you're like me, you might one day find that your babysitter does not show up at 7 am as expected.  You might leave her a few messages and then start to get worried because you know of some health issues she has.   You might make other emergency arrangements for your childcare because you have a very busy day at work and meetings that require your presence.  On the long drive to work you might start trying to reach the few people you know who might be able to check on her.  You might start imagining her passed out or even worse alone in the apartment she shares with no one.  You might even, after you get to work, try to locate someone at the church she is a member of to see if someone can check on her.  Finally, you might call the local police to go to her apartment to do a "welfare check" to see if she is OK.

While you're waiting for the officer to call you back, you might consider that maybe there was a car accident that she was involved in or something similarly catastrophic, and thinking that perhaps if the newspaper reported it they might include a victim's name, so you might google her name.

That's when you find out all the things that probably would have prevented you from hiring her in the first place.  And when the officer calls you back to say that she failed to show up for work today because she is in jail?  By that time you won't be the least bit surprised.

Then you'll leave work early, go home and have your locks changed. 

 

Heavy

Some days the weight of it all becomes unbearable. 

Its not just the things that are unique to my situation, though those are a large part of the heaviness.  Living one paycheck away from God only knows what kind of financial disaster may befall is scary.  Looking at the half-ton of hay left in the barn and Christmas rushing at me on the calendar and knowing the old gelding needs his teeth floated and my daughter wants to sign up for basketball and my life insurance premium is coming due and my son needs interventions and god, the house needs cleaning and things need fixing and I need a haircut and I forgot my meds and we're out of groceries and and and...makes my heart want to thump right out of my chest and go careening madly down the street.  There's the faces of my kids and the other inmates at the zoo who all need some portion of time and attention, which becomes harder to give the more stressed out and tired I get.  There's the ungodly amount of work waiting for me at my desk and the burden of finding a new hire before the job kills me.  There's the worrying about so many things and so many people.

There's the stuff that we all go through - am I doing the right things with my kids?  Setting the right examples?  When I make decisions about life, career, finances, am I making the right ones?  Am I OK with my loved ones?  Am I OK with God?  AM I DOING THIS RIGHT? 

So.

Thursday I will cook a big ass turkey and all the trimmings and I will sit down at the table with my kids and my ex husband (yes, we do holidays together) and I will try, for at least one day, to put these things out of my mind and remember to be damned grateful for all the things that I DO have and stop worrying about the things I don't.

I have parents who support me in so many ways you can't even imagine.  Who love and listen and care and give, time and money and hugs and words.

I have beautiful, amazing children.  Children who are funny and smart and creative and kind.  Children who are sensitive and special and miraculous.  Children who out of the blue will come up to me and squeeze me around the middle and tell me they love me "more than the whole everything."

I have friends who love me.  Friends that come get me with their rig so I can ride my horse somewhere outside of my own pasture.  Friends who drive cross country to see me.  Friends who take me out to listen to a band when I'm so stressed out I can't breathe.  Friends who send me funny emails and make me laugh.  Friends who pray for me all the time.  Friends who find little ways to pick up some of the balls I drop. Friends who live in the box on my my desk, that share their daily struggles and joys and who listen to mine.  Friends who write comments here and other places that show me they are listening and that they care. 

I have these furballs, big and small, who bring meaning and joy to my life.   The warmth and weight of the purring cat on my lap, the dogs curled around my chair as I type, the horses who rumble and look happy when I emerge from the house.  My horses who let me hug them and hang on them and who put their soft noses near my face and breathe their horsey breath on me.  My silly little chickens who follow me around whenever I'm out by the barn and who give me breakfast almost every day.

And I realize that sometimes the heavy thing that I feel is not the burden of responsibility, but a large, solid blanket of love and support that wraps me up and helps me carry the weight of all the other things. 

I weep for the girls

This post was:

Until we had monumental changes in life leading us away from group daycare, my daughter attended an aftercare program that had housing in a portable at her school.  Every day after class she would go there, play with other kids, do arts and crafts, and generally have fun.  Every once in a while she would get herself in a little trouble and get a write-up that her dad or I had to sign when we picked her up.

One day when I arrived to pick her up after work, there was a report for me to sign.  It stated that my daughter had punched a boy in the privates.

Wow.  Apparently we teach them early, here.

Before I signed the report, I wanted to understand what had happened.  I asked the young lady in charge if she knew why my daughter had done this.  "No, I didn't ask her," she shrugged.  I asked my daughter to come over to talk with us.  "A, this report says you punched _____ in the privates.  Did you do that?"  She looked me straight in the eye.  "Yes, I did, Mommy."  "Ok.  Can you tell me WHY you punched him in the privates?"

"Well, I was sitting over there," she pointed at one of the long tables, "drawing, and he came over to me and put his hips in my face and wiggled them," she demonstrated, "and said to me "TALK TO MR. WIENER!!! So I punched him."

I looked at the now-pale face of the young lady in charge as I ripped up the report.  "I'm not signing this, and unless you want me to start a stink about why you let my daughter be the recipient of sexual harassment on your premises, you will not only write up that boy but you will make sure that his family understands that if it ever happens again and he is allowed back here I will report you."

My daughter seems to know, instinctively, that her body is hers and not to be messed with.  We talk about the uncomfortable subjects - unwanted touching, what is an "Ok" touch and a "not ok" touch.  She and my son have my unwavering promise that if anyone ever does something to them that they are not comfortable with, if they tell me about it I will take care of it.  If someone tells them that if they tell me then that person will hurt me, I assure them that I am bigger and stronger and meaner than ANYONE and NO ONE is going to kill me if they tell me about unwanted touching.

They will not always be here for me to protect.  Already, as they go to school, get bigger, do more things outside the safety of my eyes watching them, the possibility of harm looms bigger and more frightening. 

Tonight I read this post over at Karen Sugarpants' blog, and I can't even begin to express how disheartened and upset I am.  That any young woman would tolerate such blatant harassment disturbs me more than I can put into words. 

Tonight I look at my privates-punching daughter, and I think, "Don't change.  Don't ever EVER change.  Punch that guy in the dick for all its worth, sweetie."

Under Pressure

For some reason I had it in my head that by now, more than a year after the separation, the kids would have accepted our new normal and we would all be trudging merrily along as a two-household family.

It surprises me sometimes how much that's not the case. 

My daughter still draws pictures of her "Happy Family" in which all four of use are depicted.  She makes posters of us standing next to a house, all four smiling and happy, with hearts floating all through the air.  The sight of those paeans of family togetherness squeezes my heart painfully.  I keep expecting her to feel differently and continue to be surprised that she does not.  Even though my expectations are realistic, I stubbornly cling to the idea that if I just will her to feel the way I want her to feel, she'll come around; meanwhile she stubbornly clings to the thought that if she just wishes hard enough, mommy and daddy will magically love one another again and we will be a "whole" family.

Yesterday had some tough moments in my house.  I was having an emotional day, and the kids had a hard time getting along.  C was having horrible issues in the car on the way home from church -- his eyes, his hands, his feet.  All were bothering him.  The crying and the screaming and the struggling were stressful for all of us.  Even worse was the "I wish I were dead" statements, that tell me the med change we instituted last week is not working for him.  When we got home, I put him in his room so that I could have some relief from the screaming and gather myself together.  After about 10 minutes of listening to him screaming about his hands, then hitting himself and sobbing heart-brokenly, I went in and laid down on the floor with him until he calmed down, then I picked him up and we curled up together on his bed.  He buried his face in my neck, wrapping his arms completely around me.  We calmed each other down.

Much of the time, when his sensory issues come into play, I can't touch him.  He doesn't want to be touched, hugged or even looked at.  Yesterday there was a different dynamic at play, and I was glad that I at least was able to recognize his needs and respond.  Sometimes its hard to "feel" what kind of response will help him best.

Not long after, he and his sister were fighting over chair space. I intervened, one thing led to another, and finally A was sent to her room for being extremely disrespectful to me.  She's been really oppositional lately.  I let her stew in there for a while, then went in to talk.  Through tears, she said, "I don't know why but I always want to fight.  When we all lived together I didn't want to fight, but now that we don't I just want to fight all the time."

I wish she understood just how much I understand that.  I want to fight too, sometimes.  Even now I walk around on  the balls of my feet, waiting for someone to say "You're doing this wrong" so that I can take them down.  I'm not as angry as I was a year ago, but I'm still angry.  And I want to fight. 

We talked about how the bipolar makes it easy to want to fight, makes us feel angry sometimes, and how the ADHD makes us irritable.  We talked about how hard it is to accept something that you don't want to, and how if her Dad and I were still living together things wouldn't really be all happy and loving, the fighting that was the hallmark of our daily lives would still be going on.  We talked about medications and I gave her the option of bringing up a medication change to her doctor if she was feeling like she was having more bad days than good days.  We held each other and cried together. 

At the end of it all, even though we had some enormous struggles, by the end of the day I felt closer to my kids than I had in the morning, before the struggles started and when we were all laughing and getting along. 

The pressure to recreate our "old" life, though, is something I think I'll be struggling with for a while.