Barnmaven

Not defeat

Accepting a situation is not the equivalent of conceding or admitting defeat.  It simply means choosing to control what you can and letting go of what you can't.  Trying to control something that you cannot will make you insane.

Right now, on another window on my laptop, I've got a picture of my lumbar spine open.

"Hey, L5, have you met your neighbor downstairs?  S1?  Oh, wait...I see you two are already intimate.  Never mind."

There are a lot of reasons why I haven't been here.  Or on my horse.  SG being gone is part of it,  work too for certain.  But mostly I've just been hiding because frankly a lot of the time I'm in pain. I thought it was my hip and knee.  I tried injections on the bursa and then in the hip joint.  They didn't touch the pain, and the pain got worse.  Some days driving to work has been so intense that I cry without wanting to.  My knee and my foot will throb and nothing except something that would keep me from driving or working will touch that pain.  Many nights I sleep in fits and starts or not at all.

I haven't been riding my horse, not more than a couple of times over the last few months.  If I ride it hurts, if I ride I pay for it for days, measure for measure of amplified pain multiplied by minutes spent in the saddle.  

My doctor finally ordered an MRI of my lumbar spine.  The images contain no surprises.  Bulging discs.  Herniated discs.  Torn discs.  Nerve impingement.  L5 resting squarely on S1 with nary a smidge of disc to be seen between them.  I've been seeing the chiropractor a couple of times a week, and next week I will also start physical therapy.  I'm waiting for a return call from the office that does the targeted injection to see if we can get the nerve to quiet down.  In the meantime, nothing else has changed, really, nothing except my approach.

Short of taking pills I don't want to take, not many things help when the nerve flares.  Since I can't control it, I have to find a way to accept it.  I'm reminded in some ways of childbirth, when you are caught up in something that is relentless and inexorable, where there is no way out but to endure through it.   During my MRI, I was positioned in such a way that the sciatica flared and my whole leg felt like it was on fire.  Between the pain and being enclosed in a very small space, not able to move, I took the only option that I felt was available to me:  I fell asleep.

All these months it was right there in front of me and I couldn't see it.  Just...let go.  No, the pain doesn't stop.  But I can let go.  I have to learn how to keep letting it go. I am not defeated, the pain doesn't win.  Its just that its here with me, and instead of being the thing I push against, it becomes simply a part of my life for now.  Just for now.

Sometimes Vain

I like to think I'm approaching aging with the same philosophy I approached parenting babies - somewhere in the median between crunch and plastic.  I didn't cloth diaper, but I did extended nursing.  I vaccinated, but selectively.  I did sleep training, but gently and over time.  I co slept but not until they were walking and talking, only until they could sleep through the night without nursing.  I was too crunchy for the mainstream circles and too mainstream for the crunchy.  Like every other aspect of parenting I tried not to judge other people's choices, vowing instead to focus on my own choices and let other people do what worked best for them.  I fell to judgment on many occasions, but I tried to keep it under my breath.

As I've crossed over the top of the hill and the aging process has most definitely gained some momentum, I find a precarious lack of control on my balance in the  middle.  I have long stated - emphatically, I might add - that while everyone has the right to choose for themselves whether they would undergo the knife or the needle to be comfortable with their looks, I personally eschew such dramatic measures.  I've even had the dishonor to be proud of myself for my lack of skin care regimen.  "Oh sure," I'd laugh, "I have one,  if you can call falling asleep in my makeup and never remembering sunscreen a 'regimen'!"

"Oh, I don't color my hair to cover gray," I have been known to say.  "I color it because its so fun to be a [insert color here]!"  

I humbly assert that these things are far easier to say when one is young.

Menopause, evil-hormone-sucking-she-ninja, entered swiftly and with deadly intent.  She stole my sleep with surges of heat and sweat and suddenly the undereye circles I've laughed off since my twenties made me feel disheartened and teary.  The drying skin and hair and nails that were merely annoying a decade ago became insurmountable overnight.  I started looking in the mirror less and less; this "aging gracefully" thing isn't happening AT ALL as I imagined it would.  The "aging" part, hell yes, but without very much of the "graceful."

Several weeks ago SG gifted me with a spa massage and facial package.  It was a day of pure bliss, and the crunchy mama inside me crumpled and added the glycolic peel to the package without one ounce of remorse for vanity.  I impulsively bought the skin care items the aesthitician suggested, and they really did work and my skin looked and felt better.  So much so that as I waltzed through the hair care aisle on a trip to the store I made another impulse buy and threw a reddish haircolor kit a few shades lighter than my own sturdy brown into the cart.  

For whatever reason that haircolor job was an unmitigated disaster.  It didn't cover my grays, and over the weeks since I've noticed that the grays seem to have gone into unmitigated copulation mode, bursting into existence in numbers heretofore unseen. I even found that the hairs growing in along my part were alarmingly populated with silver.  

All the self-assured platitudes have gone right out the window.  

I'm not aging gracefully -- I'm just AGING.

I tell myself that its OK to just let my gray hair arrive naturally, but the minute it does I'm hitting the haircolor aisle at the drugstore trying to find the magic solution that doesn't make it look like I'm trying too hard but doesn't give off the suggestion that I'm not trying at all.  

I've reached the point at which my self-talk has devolved into an ongoing wrestling match between my crunchy better angel and my inner narcissist.  There's a lot of finger pointing and things have been said that can never be taken back, never forgotten.  I look in the mirror and words and phrases pop into my consciousness uninvited:  "Botox!"  "Boob Lift!"  "Tummy Tuck!"  At one point (or two) I may have even pressed my fingertips against the skin at the end of my eyebrows and swept upward, wondering just how much it costs to get a facelift.

What have I become?

More importantly, when does this stop?

I reassure myself that I "have" to do these things, that I'm still in the workforce, and we all know that the career field can be unkind to women who are growing older while rewarding those who maintain a youthful appearance.  But we all know its more than that.  

Its not "career-mindedness."  Its vanity.

I imagine every woman who has ever fancied herself a rugged individualist and self-appointed icon for young career women everywhere has run into the same, painful brick wall:  Its beautiful and admirable and amazing when someone else does it but GOD FORBID it should happen to YOU.  Its all great in theory, but when the push comes to shove (or broken capillaries come to nostrils), all bets are off.

This is the time when we start taking selfies carefully, judging the quality of light and the capability of our photo editing software.  This is the time when we admonish everyone to "keep it real" while hiding our own true face.  

This is the time that I realize that age will catch me no matter how I try to avoid it, and it will not only put to test all of the things I decided I would be when I reached this point in my life, it will reveal many of those things as nothing more than lies I told myself.

This morning I plunked a box of "darkest brown" haircolor on the bathroom vanity after my first cup of morning coffee.  Ten minutes plus one shower later, that crappy gray red dye job had swirled its way down the drain and SG met the newest version of his wife.  Unfortunately she still has the same set of luggage under her eyes.  One hopes, ever so fervently, that the new haircolor makes them somewhat less noticeable.

 

 

Not doing what I can't

I think I'm starting to get better at this grownup thing.  Perhaps, just maybe.

Race Car Man started a few weeks ago with a new therapist, this time one at a place whose clientele are people with autism (as opposed to a therapist who deals with autism among other things, which for us did not work so well).  I think its helping.  He's had more good days at school, he's starting to get homework again.  My ex had a schedule change at work that allows him to go to our son's classroom two days a week for a couple of hours which is fantastico.  If I could only find a way to make life outside of Minecraft even remotely palatable for this child all would be straight up and down.  You can't have it all. 

Amazon Girl also started with a therapist last week, as the doors of pubescent hormonal hell have apparently opened wide and beckoned her therein.  She's struggling emotionally and needs some support from an adult she can talk to about life, about her parents, about her brother -  which means a third party is required.  Fortunately the last therapist she saw, the one I really really liked, is still practicing and takes our insurance. 

Then on Wednesday nights I still have obedience school with TBone.  And Sundays there's church and then Amazon Girl has her riding lesson, and most Saturdays from here until the sun goes away in the late fall again, I have something to scheduled to do with my horses.  SG has guitar lessons every Tuesday and just got started with some group political thingamajig.  And so on.

Sometimes in between all of that we sit down for a few minutes and breathe and maybe fold a load of laundry.

Last week Race Car Man's therapist asked if we wanted to start him in her next social skills class.  "Sure, when does it start?" 

Next Tuesday. (Two days ago)

Its a class he needs, BUT - it starts at 3:45, just 5 minutes after he gets out of school, AND its a half hour ride away from his school.  And I work full time.  And my husband works full time.  And if I had some time to sit down and sketch out a plan it we can do it but Next Tuesday just does not work for me right now and I for ONCE in my goddamned adult life opened my mouth and said the magic words:

"I'm sorry but that doesn't work for our schedule right now."

I didn't even feel guilty about saying it.  I felt relieved.  I am doing all that I can do for my family and myself right now and I am not going to try and cram one more thing down our collective throats, not at this moment. 

There have been a lot of times in the last several years where I've felt almost all of my waking time was consumed with trying to frantically get everything done that I am supposed to do and failing miserably at it.  Its a horrible pattern - try to do more than you're capable of, fail, drop two or three of the balls you're juggling and then spend a month trying to dig out of the hole you've just created for yourself.  

Perfectionism just isn't going to happen for me right now.

There will be a point where our schedule will open enough to make the social skills class do-able for us.  It will happen.  Just not two days ago.  

Slow down. The tempo isn't as fast as you think it is.

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I may or may not have had a wee lil' bit of wine this evening.

This perhaps does not bode well as a prelude to a blog post, but I have it on good authority that you haven't filled your bucket list until you've written a blog post after one (mebbe two) too many glasses of cheap chardonnay.

You know, I write here about my personal life, and people are nice enough to stop by and comment here and there, and there are some folks who come by and almost never comment but stop every day or so and give my words a gander.  And that's so incredibly nice.  It feels good.  We all like to have someone pay attention to us.  Sometimes I think that blogging is my way of garnering a "hey girl" and a shoulder pat from time to time when my real-time life seems slow on handing out such badges.  And blogging keeps me from focusing my efforts on any sort of real adult writing effort, because everyone who has ever wanted to write "for real" but wasn't sure how, likely shares the same fear I carry that I'm not really as good a writer as I want to be and I lack the time/energy/resources to really focus myself on becoming as good a writer as I want to be.  This is my little outlet, this small wee blog toddling along in the margins of the world wide web.  It gives me the illusion that I'm doing something worthwhile with my words, but the reality is that it just allows me to piss away time better spent doing other things.  There are stalls to be cleaned, lawn to be mowed, dishes to be washed and floors to be scrubbed.  So instead of going to bed at 9:30 when I actually should, I go to bed at 11 so I can do the chores and still have time to see what's happening on the damn internet.

Some people who are better writers than I, and some who are both marginally worse and sometimes (I know, this is not nice) terribly worse, these people have found a way to make an actual living blogging.  They heavily pursue ad networks, they run giveaways and contests, they write more sponsored posts than original content, they bend whichever way the internet winds do bloweth, because at heart they all want to be the next Heather Armstrong or Jessica Gottlieb or Penelope Trunk.  And before there were such things as sponsored posts and giveaways and ad networks, those bloggers were out there creating the path that eventually made it possible for them and for others to make a crapload of money by putting their words up on the web. And others came along and saw the way the wind was blowing and took note.  The path to the Emerald City was glowing golden before them, and they hesitated not a moment before they embarked on their merry way to internet riches and fame (hopefully).

Hey, there's nothing wrong with having a goal, folks. 

But success inevitably breeds contempt.  And I have written before my feelings on the value of criticism and the necessity for strength in ones own beliefs and opinions as a precursor for successfuly surviving the inevitable negativity that presenting ones' life and opinions in a massively open and public forum will inevitably engender.

Just like here at home, though, no one ever listens to me.

I follow the drama and while at times it provides a respite from the actual serious drama of the minutiae of raising two very special people and trying to make sure every hungry animal on this small farm is fed  before it starts feeding on the other animals on this small farm, sometimes it just makes me want to put my face in my hands and weep.

This fall we will vote for the next President.  And while for most of us there is a clear distinction and a clear choice, I think we all know that the reality is we are choosing someone who, for us, is the lesser of evils, because our two-party system does not afford us the ability to effect real change by voting for this presidential candidate or that or by supporting this senator or that congressman.  We all must realize, deep down, that our government is a vast wasteland and our country is in terrible crisis. 

In our own cities and suburbs, in our country, around the world, there are men, women and children who are coping with violence, with hunger, with poverty.  We have more able-bodied people than we have jobs.  We have an environment in flux, whether you believe it is caused by humans or by a natural shift in the earth's weather patterns is irrelevant, because there are whole regions and millions of creatures who will be required to undergo significant change - perhaps even die out as a species - because they environment they have adapted to live in is disappearing.  It doesn't really matter WHY the problem exists, it only matters that it does exist and that it will affect us, affect our children and our childrens' children.

This world is painfully full of parents who are struggling financially, emotionally, phsyically.  Parents trying to raise a family on too little income, or parents trying to get services for kids who have needs beyond what most insurance companies and school systems can meet, parents trying hard to take an active role in their children's lives but who are struggling just to pay the bills and God knows its hard to find time to help with homework when you've worked all day and had a long commute, and then you've had to make dinner and do baths and do homework and yet you still feel like shit because you should have also gone to the PTO meeting like the rest of the parents who ARENT single or who have spouses who work locally.

And yet, the drama on this internet, it carries on.  It supplants our very real and personal dramas, it tries to distract us from the deeper thing.  We bloggers, we open our veins and bleed our lives out here for all and sundry to read.  We relate truths or we invent truths, we have terrible problems which always result higher pageviews whether that was the intent or not.  And yes, some bloggers invent drama just to create pageviews.  I look for the good in people but we all know that this happens.  And there are people who have bullshit meters or who don't buy into the fairy glitter of A list blogging, and they have the need to vent their spleens, and from time to time there is an event where the Ghostbusters accidentally cross the streams and the internet explodes.  

Don't cross the streams.

Why?

It would be bad.

Thank you, Egon.

(And thank you Ghostbusters)

We need our entertainment.  We love our celebrities and we love to hate them.  We need sports and violence and for HBO and network TV to come up with the next hottest show because Oh My God if we don't have the distraction we won't be able to cope with our scary and difficult lives.  We don't want to think about the million ways that humanity is suffering, because we can't do that 24/7 and still function in our lives.  We need the drama like we need our oxycontin and our crack.

I am not taking sides.  Or maybe I am taking both sides. I just don't get the need for the posturing.

And it all just makes me feel so jaded and cynical and tired.

I don't FUCKING CARE about your drama.  I don't care. 

You all make me so fucking exhausted sometimes.

 

 

If you've read this and you have no clue what I'm talking about, GOOD FOR YOU.  The internet has not yet had its way with your innocence and beauty and I respect you so much for being innocent and pure that I want to kiss you on your face and throw rose petals at your feet, because you're still pure and you represent what we all were before Eve ate the apple.  Don't you ever EVER change.

 

 

 

Its better if you do it quickly

I've added another guest to the pasture this week, a mare that was injured after getting her hind legs torn up in barbed wire.  The people who were boarding her didn't even notice she was injured for several days, so she was in some need of doctoring and pain management.  Fortunately her injuries are not going to leave her permanently lame.

Part of doctoring her for the moment involves hosing down her legs until the scabs are softened and then scrubbing them off with a bristle brush so that I can get antibacterial agents into the wounds themselves.  The first time we treated her there were some pretty big scabs that had to come off.  Just scrubbing wasn't working and I had to grab them and pull them off.

Its one thing to grab your kid and pull off a bandage or a scab. You know they're going to yelp, you know its going to hurt, but you have to do it fast and all at once.  And your child is (hopefully) smaller than you are and so you're not taking your life in your hands.

Its another thing entirely to put yourself within striking distance of a 1200 pound animal and do something that you absolutely know is going to hurt like hell. 

I've been fortunate in my years not to have many injured horses that needed doctoring.  Only twice have I ever dealt with having a horse stitched up.  Both of those times I just held my horse and let the vet do their job, then made sure I kept the stitches clean until they could come out.  My friend Michelle, on the other hand, has dealt with a sizable herd for a long time and is no stranger to doctoring horses.  She says that its the uncanniest thing sometimes, even horses you don't think will be able to tolerate what you need to do will actually be very quiet and patient when you have to do something that hurts.  Perhaps they realize that they need your help to get better, and so they stand still and let you work.

For whatever reason, this lovely mare allowed me to grab hold and yank some fairly large scabs from her hocks without kicking, rearing, biting or bolting.  She was an angel, and has been every day since as I clean and reopen her scabs and treat them with Betadine and a gel spray. 

I guess she knows the truth - the only way to take off a scab is to stand still and yank it all right at once. 

When SG and I got married its not like I was unaware of the fact that his current career means he is gone for weeks at a time.  I'm still getting used to it, though.  I liked having him home, having two of us doing the heavy lifting together.  Enjoying each other's company, having him there to come home to at night, to kiss goodbye in the mornings.  With him gone life seems emptier, less meaningful.  Far too stressful.  The part of me that is logical acknowledges fully the need for paying work in a down economy.  My inner drama queen, however, is less inclined to care about logic.  She's far more concerned with her creature comforts.  She wants her man home, and NOW.  She puts up such a fuss and my inner Spockette has found herself drowned out by the brouhaha.

A couple of weeks ago, there was a murmur of further jobs on the road.  Maybe months worth.  My inner drama queen blew up like a unicorn full of glitter with a hand grenade shoved up its ass. Then she stuck her fingers in her ears.

Its been a merry spectacle, let me tell you.  Tears, emotionally charged text messages.  Hangups.  And really, nothing had been decided yet. 

Fortunately, my inner Spockette and I tag-teamed her, stuffed a handkerchief in her mouth, duct taped it in place and shuttled her off to the back of the attic for the time being.   When SG called, inner Spockette and I had it all under control.  He ripped the scab off - he will be going directly to North Carolina from Arizon with no time for a visit home, and he will be gone until the end of May.  Inner drama queen made a barely recognizable muffled yelp and hasn't been heard from for a couple of days.

If you try to pull the scab off a little bit at a time it takes forever.  Every little tug hurts just as bad as the one before it and the one after it.  All you have accomplished in the end is to make your pain last longer.    Even horses know this.  Hopefully my inner drama queen has figured it out as well.

 

The snow fell and I right along with it

Finally, it came.  Boy, howdy, did it come.  We got a good six inches between Tuesday night and Wednesday morning.  School was delayed, meetings were cancelled, we pretty much didn't leave the house except for putting the kids on the bus and getting them back off. 

The kids had a blast playing in the snow.  All Wednesday it was the perfect snowball snow - fluffy, just wet enough to stick together to form a ball.  Race Car man quickly got over his aversion to socks when he discovered how cold his feet got in his snow boots without them. 

We found out Wednesday night that school was cancelled for Thursday and the kids were beside themselves with the excitement of playing outside all day long.

We woke yesterday to a light freezing rain that continued all day long.  It left a two-inch layer of ice crystals on top of our snow and coated every tree, fence, mailbox and vehicle in a sheet of ice. 

I did leave the house, though.  Had to.  We we were out of dog food and milk, two things that in this household are required to keep the earth revolving around the sun.  And then, I had the followup appointment for Race Car Man's evaluation.  He had to retake one test series, and then we met with the psychologist.

I answered a lot of questions.  My son answered some questions.  The doctor was kind, measured, and very patient.  As he interviewed me, he completed an evaluation.  We clarified some questions.    He will compile his report and send it to us, probably in a week.  But of course, as a parent, you want to know the answers to your questions, even if you think you know what they are. And so I asked him.  And he very kindly and gently shared the results of the evalution form he had just completed with me.

I've had to learn some new phrases about myself over the last couple of months - some easier, some harder.  I've had to learn how to say "I am a wife" after a few years of wanting to be anything but. 

I had to learn how to say "My brother is dead" and saying it still causes a surge of anxiety and pain that feels like its going to break my sternum in half.

And as of yesterday, I have one more to add.

"My son has autism."

 

 

 

 

On the calendar

I am going to the dentist on Friday.

I have not been to the dentist in over two years.

I hate the dentist. I hate needles.  I hate drills.  I hate the way my gums feel after the hygenist has brutalized them with her instruments of torture.  Okay, maybe that's not really fair-- not all hygenists do that to me.  But I have had a couple in my lifetime who really made it hurt, and one in particular who appeared to take so much joy in making my mouth hurt that I had to go home and take a painkiller to ease the throbbing in my gums.

Even worse than this, though, is my well-documented phobia about needles.  SG has to have a few tests done because, well, lets just say laughing so hard during the scene in The Big Lebowski where Walter tosses Donny's ashes from the coffee can and the wind picks them up and blows them all over The Dude's beard and sunglasses that you actually pass out momentarily from the laughing is a sign that something's not working quite right.  And so he has to have this test where they take blood from a vein and also blood from an artery, and I'm literally trying not to pass out as I TYPE THESE WORDS.  He was describing it to me in great length until he noticed the faint sheen of sweat on my upper lip and mercifully stopped talking.

So.

I. Hate. The. Dentist.

When I was young it was obvious from an early point that my mouth was overcrowded and I would need to have braces eventually.  The first time I had to have a tooth pulled to make room for other teeth I must have been 7 or 8, I don't remember precisely.  I DO remember the more pertinent details, such as the valium or whatever the dentist's office made my mother wake me up at half-after-dark-thirty to give me so that I would be knocked out and compliant.  And the fact that when you're me, sometimes you live in opposite-land so that things do the backwards to you of what they're supposed to, and so no, I was not knocked out.  I was ramped up like a rabid squirrel on meth.  I remember the dental assistant yelling at me, "You're supposed to be ASLEEP!"  Like, hello, that's MY fault somehow.  Get better drugs, bitch. 

Then there was the time that I had to have a cavity filled, and I was so anxious that the adrenaline in my bloodstream appears to have been chewing its way through the Novacaine like a honey badger.  They upped the saturation level on the gas to compensate, and suddenly not only did my damn mouth hurt, but the tiles in the ceiling turned sideways and then started to swirl around like they had melted and were being stirred by an invisible spoon.  Yeah, that was delightful.

Then there was the suffering through of the braces for two plus years, not the kind that go on the front of your teeth, no, but the BANDS and the tightening of the wires and the headgear that made my mouth hurt so bad I couldn't sleep and the retainer that I eventually just "forgot" to wear so that my teeth moved back a little bit.  And to think that when I was in the third grade I thought having braces would be SO COOL because you know, all the bigger kids were doing it.

Then there was the gentle dentist in the U-District who had a soft touch, but who also wasn't thorough and who gave me a filling when the tooth was actually cracked and needed a crown and a root canal, and so as soon as I was back at work and the numbness wore off I was in such extreme agony I wanted to cut my own head off.

Finally, though, I found this red-headed Lithuanian dentist downtown, and he turned out to be the most kind, gentle, thorough dentist I had ever found.  I saw him exclusively for the next 9 or 10 years.  I went to my appointments every six months.  I flossed.  I was a dental hygenists DREAM patient. 

And then I moved.  To New Jersey.  YOU try finding a dentist in New Jersey.   In 10 years I went to approximately five different dentists and I hated every single one of them. 

And then I moved again.

And I found another dentist who was OK, but not...just not THE dentist.  You know?  And because I hate the dentist anyway, my motivation to go see one has sagged below the waterline.

I brush, with a very expensive toothbrush that is supposed to destroy plaque, clean between teeth and make your gums as tight and strong as the buttocks of a professional soccer player.  I floss, most of the time, anyway.  But I still have the same bad enamel I was born with and I still grit my teeth when brushing my hair or clipping my nails or having a generally stressful day.  I grit my teeth so bad I don't have a single molar that isn't crowned because of me cracking it with my stress.

And now I have a tooth that's sensitive.  It already has a filling in it, and I've been looking and looking to see where there is evidence of a cavity and I cannot find it, so I can only guess that maybe the existing filling is getting old and needs replacing.  And I cannot, with the cold weather, stand having a tooth this sensitive, and I KNOW I need to get my teeth cleaned and x-rayed, and so I am going to the dentist on Friday.  I'm just scared (irrationally) that somehow I'll come home without any teeth.

My nightmare is that the dentist will look at my mouth and solemnly inform me "I'm so sorry, but they all need work.  This is going to take a while," as he holds up the biggest, longest needle I've ever seen in one hand and a pair of pliers in the other.

Ugh.

 

Today's post brought to you by the wonders of cold medicine

I shudder to think of what I'd feel like right now without the bubbly goodness of Alka Seltzer Plus cold medicing roiling through my tired veins.  Even on the sauce, my nose is running, I"m sneezing like someone's sick idea of a cartoon joke and every time I blow my nose, the goop in my left nostril tries to exit via my eyelid.

I managed to make it to work, though.  I'm sure my coworkers appreciate the plague I'm spreading via every doorknob.

Image courtesy of  US National Library of Medicine

Once when I was in high school I had a sinus infection that spread into my eyes.  It wasn't pinkeye, it was a sinus infection, and every time I would blink my right eye, a think film of yellowish-green goo would spread itself over my eyelid, almost completely obscuring my vision.  So attractive.

In a way, I'm grateful for the fuzzy wooziness of my brain right now.  It provides an insulating blanket between me and life. 

I just managed to get a new evaluation appointment set up for my little guy with a psychiatrist in a couple of weeks.   That's unheard of around here, this doctor and most of the others have a 3 month wait for new patients, but we managed to call right after somebody cancelled so we got lucky.  Lucky is a rather dubious term, but lucky it is, to get in before the end of year while our deductibles are all met, lucky to see the doctor who already knows him because he treats my daughter too, lucky to have a teacher who communicates so well on what she sees in the classroom so that there's no disconnect between what we think is going on and what is actually happening during the school day.  He's still struggling.  He's in the right place, no doubt, but still struggling.  And the teacher is kind of surprised that he doesn't have a certain diagnosis, because behaviorally he is so similar to the other kids in her class that have that particular issue.   I had ruled it out before because there were a couple of symptoms that didn't seem to be a match, but looking at it more than a year later with kindergarten behind us and current behaviors in our face, I'm shocked it didn't stand out for me before now. 

I don't want to put it out here yet, because with kids a lot of issues that might seem like one thing can actually be something else.  So I'm going to try to just be patient and open-minded and see what the eval results tell us, then we go forward from there. 

All I really care about, ultimately, is that we know enough to provide him the right kind of  support.  It doesn't matter whether he has diagnosis A, B or C -- it is what it is, all that changes is how we help him cope.

I spent the obligatory hour on the phone with three different people at the insurance company yesterday, only to end up with a referral to a psychiatrist who, as it turns out, doesn't actually do pediatrics.  But that landed us with the resident psych at the center who does, and we already know him, so that should be good, right?    Still, its frustrating.  We're also being assigned to a dedicated team by the insurance company who are supposed to provide me with as many local resources as they can find for me within a week. 

Fortunately, my wine rack is well stocked right now, its a Friday night,  and the kids are at their dad's for a few days.  I have some time for a pity-party before I need to lift my chin up and buckle my seat belt.  Of course, with the cold medicine I'm not really sure I'll need the wine, and with a clogged schnozz I probably wouldn't enjoy it anway. 

 

 

Earplugs. Or something.

Honestly, I don't know why we don't see more stories in the newspaper about parents with oppositional children driving their cars straight into brick walls or off of the sides of overpasses.   And I confess to having a burning curiosity as to how so many oppositional children manage to survive to adulthood.  And even as I write this I have to kind of laugh, because after this long, my coping skills have developed to levels I never imagined were possible.

My son, God bless him, is simultaneously one of the most charming and one of the most maddening people I know.  He has been at his new school for just over a month now.  He knows the name of everyone in the school.  I pick him up and no matter which crossing guard is waving us across the pavement to safety, he knows her name.  He smiles at her, waves at her, enthusiastically shouting, "Hi Mrs. So-and-So!"  And they all smile right back at him.  "Hi Mr. Race Car Man!"  They love him.  And he IS lovable.  So charming.  About two days after his birthday party he came up to me in the kitchen and wrapped his arms around me. 

 "Mommy, when is your birthday?" 

"Just after Christmas.  Why?"

"Because you made such a special birthday for me. I want to make you the bestest car in the world for your birthday."

Melting.  I'm melting.  He is so adorable when he does this.

He remembers people's names, he remembers the smallest details about everything.  His brain is fascinating to me, and I know I've only scratched the surface of what he's capable of understanding and doing.  As a kindergartner, he rarely participated in learning activities in his classroom.  He was mostly curled up in a ball on the floor, not coping.  Yet he passed the end of year testing with perfect scores.  Of course, they only test them to their grade level, so that's not so amazing.  What was amazing was that his aftercare provider, on days when he'd been naughty, made him sit in her office and do math and reading books during recess.  "Just for fun" (or so she says), she gave him the first and second grade math tests.  He scored perfectly on first grade math and about 80% on second grade math.  As a kindergartner with little to no math instruction whatsoever.   I tell people that this is the child who will eventually be building nuclear bombs in the basement if his abilities are not channeled very carefully.   SG wanted to get him a chemistry set for his birthday.  My response was "Please, no, I like my house without the burn marks on the walls and carpet."

 And then there are the days (or the segments of a day) when things just get borked. 

Now that my daughter is doing "real" homework, I've become weary of being her walking thesaurus.  We went to the bookstore yesterday afternoon and she is now the proud owner of a thesaurus, a dictionary, and a children's encyclopedia.  I showed her how to look up words in the index of the thesaurus to find what pages to look on, and she was off and running.  But bookstores - places I used to love, places I used to be able to hang out in for hours - are my nemesis anymore.  If only they would just carry BOOKS.  But no, they've got toys now, almost as many toys as they have books, it seems.  Brilliant marketing tool, people.  Oh, and BITE ME.   While I searched for materials for his sister, the little man played at the train table in the kids section and then with the muppet puppets in the puppet theatre (it sells for just $89.99, folks, and if you buy it they throw in a free puppet.  Neato Frito. )  But when it was time to check out, he was standing there holding a box of train pieces. 

"Mommy, can I have this?"

"Not today buddy.  We're not here to pick out toys."

And let the screaming begin.

Would it hurt to buy my kids a toy sometimes?  Maybe not.  But unfortunately we did that a few years ago and somehow it took hold in their minds that they should get a new toy everytime they go to the store.

"But I was GOOD!"  he shouts at me.

"Yes, you were good.  That doesn't mean I'm buying you a toy."

I finish paying, I ask the kids to get in the car.

"NO!!!! I want this train!!!"

I'm not going to let him stand there disrupting anyone else's day one second longer than I have to.

"OK, here's the deal.  You have to three to put the box down and walk to the car.  If you don't, if I have to take the box from you and carry you to the car, you will lose the chance to watch television after homework.  No Mighty Machines."

"NO!!!!!"  he screams.

I count.  He does not comply. 

I very calmly take the box from him, calmly pick up his taut, struggling body, and carry him to the car, put him in his booster, buckle him in.  He is screaming at the top of his lungs.

I get in the car, put on my seatbelt, turn on the CD player.  "Daydreamer" by Adele.  Though I can barely hear the song through his shrieking, I focus very intently on the words so that I will think about something other than his piercing yells.

He kicks my seat and screams almost all the way home.  I manage not to drive off the overpass, slam into a concrete divider or drive us off a cliff.  I manage not to scream back at him.  But finally I cannot take anymore of the screaming.  I don't want to engage and I don't want to be upset, I am working so very hard at maintaining my composure.

"Buddy, you need to stop the screaming.  If you can't stop screaming you're going to have to stay in your room when we get home."

He yells at me for a few minutes more, but then finally his shrieks turn to quiet sobs.  Eventually he stops.  He picks up the encyclopedia I bought for his sister and starts to read it.

Some might classify this as a colossal failure.  I think it was a screaming success. 

Sorry for the pun.  I couldn't help myself.

My son lost his cool, but I didn't lose mine.  Where in the past he might have screamed for an hour or longer, he screamed for about twenty minutes.  See, in special-needs-land, we measure success incrementally. 

Even so, there are still times when driving off the overpass seems like a reasonable alternative.

 

Resistance

My daughter will be entering the fourth grade tomorrow.  My almost double-digits daughter, who it seems only yesterday was a red-faced, dark-haired, dark eyed covered-in-goo squishy newborn fresh out of my uterus and laying on my chest and staring into my eyes in that way that says "Hey.  I know you from somewhere."

I've loved her in my bones before she was even conceived.  I've always felt deepy connected, even in the height of her challenges as a preschooler and toddler.  She would be raging, I would be sitting with my back to the wall, holding her from behind, head cocked so she couldn't knock my teeth out with the back of her skull, worn out and ragged, and even then I felt connected.  I knew she wouldn't let it go like this if she didn't trust me to keep her safe. 

We struggle frequently right now with oppositional behavior.  Whether its a free-standing issue or an adjunct of the bipolar/ADD issues doesn't really matter.  Its there, and I see it twist her up when I know she wishes it wouldn't, and I still don't get sometimes how I can help her unravel it so that our life could be easier.  So that her life could be easier. 

Every other Sunday when the kids transition to being at my house, the oppositional defiance manifests itself in almost every aspect of the day.  Every request, no matter how I phrase it, is met with a NO hurtled back to me at earsplitting volume.  Every question about meal preference, clothing preference, snack preference seems to be a signal for anger and yelling.  I recognize part of this is the irribilaty inherent with the ADD.  I know exactly how it feels to be walking around feeling so on edge that it feels like an attack just to have someone talk to me. The blowup has nothing to do with the person who is talking to you; it has everything to do with feeling completely unbalanced.

I don't take the behavior personally, but it makes it damn near impossible to get anything done.  Tasks that should take a few minutes - taking medication, selecting a snack, getting a haircut or a bath - take forever.  I run out of time because I spend ten times as much as I ought to just negotiating an outcome.  

It seems like every muscle in her body is tensed, seeking something to push back against. 

We talk about it with the doctor who manages her medications.  We measure progress made and he and I both agree that expecting perfect behavior out of my daughter isn't an appropriate goal.  We are looking to find a balance of medication and therapy that helps her to function and be happy.  And so I'm torn because I sense to some extent this resistant behavior is largely in part just the way she is and I won't - can't - don't want to - medicate it out of her.   But sometimes when I'm tired and frustrated and late to work once again because she won't take the one pill that gets crushed up and put into something sweet, even though she took it that way the last three weeks without a problem, sometimes I have this small desire to do just that.  Make it go away. 

I have a hard time letting go of my frustration, because five minutes later she's just fine, she's getting in the car and playing with her toys and giving me a hug.  But I'm still seething and raw over having to deal with yet another morning where we've had an epic struggle before my second cup of coffee.

My beautiful, funny, maddening, heartbreaking, amazing daughter.  I love her so much.  I hug her  and we talk a little bit about what we can try to do better tomorrow so that we can both have a morning where we get to enjoy each other and not have to struggle.  She says she doesn't resist taking her pills at her Dad's, even though he gives them to her exactly the same way I do.  And so I think back to her toddler years, and I wonder if its that bond between us that gives her the freedom to be more challenging.  She knows I will forgive her, protect her, even when she gives me her worst.  And I know that she will forgive me even though I lost my temper and yelled at her because I couldn't think of any other way to negotiate her cooperation.

I need to find a way to do this better, to help us not fall into this cycle again this year.  Its too hard on both of us.