Tuesday, August 30, 2016
The Letter I Can't Post
Dear Mum,
Yesterday, I was trying to explain to Dad that I had been crippled by an anxiety attack on Friday night for the first time in years. He, along with Bob, and the one other close friend who knows about this, all said I sounded like I was experiencing some postpartum depression and that my hormones were out of whack and I probably needed therapy.
He also said that I was wasting my time if I wasn't talking to you about it because, as my mother, you would be the person who knew best what I was going through.
The problem is, I can't talk to you about it, and not because I don't think you would understand, because I know you would, but because you can't make it better, and that will hurt you.
You see, it's not postpartum depression. It's not hormones. It's not the anxiety of the new mother that's overwhelming me.
It's all the fucking imminent death.
Granny getting really sick was very scary. I was surprised by how upset it made me, and I realized it's because I promised her she'd get to meet her great grandson, and I have yet to fulfill that promise.
Similarly, it was scary because when I talked to you about it, you told me how things were with her, watching her struggle and fight and get angry and be ready, and I listened to how you, a child, were preparing yourself for the loss of your parent. I listened as you told me about how your uncle had died while you were with your mother, and I heard the tears in your voice because it was too much to think about.
I listened, and I heard how tired you were, and how resigned you are, and how, no matter how prepared you make yourself for death, when it's in the room with you, there is no being ready.
I listened to you, and I thought about Dad.
How I will someday, someday much sooner than I am ready for, be in your position. I will be watching my parent struggle and fight and get angry and then acquiesce as his body finally fails.
I will prepare myself, and then I will still be taken by surprise by how much it hurts, the loss, when it happens.
I can't talk to you about this because he's your husband.
And losing him is going to hurt you so much too. It is unfair of me to place my loss above yours, because neither outweighs the other. They both suck.
And they both incapacitate us to comfort the other.
I feel so helpless.
And I think that's why I fell apart on Friday.
I keep losing people.
I lost myself when I had the baby.
I don't know who this person is, but I mourn the girl I used to be. I have faith that this new version of myself will be better in many ways than she was, but I don't know her yet, and I am sad. I miss the old me even though I would not trade her for him any day.
I lost Sarah (my sister) for some reason this Spring. She doesn't want anything to do with me or the baby. After depending on me for three years when she first moved here, after I helped her get a job, get a place to live, after I did nothing but give her soft landing after soft landing while she went through hard times, she has completely abandoned me during the time I am in the most need. She promised me she would be here when I needed her after the baby was born.
And she broke that promise.
Then, when I got angry, hurt, and upset enough to confront her about it, she acted as though I were mad. She accused me of infantilizing her and blowing things out of proportion. She never once apologized. She still hasn't. She hasn't made any effort to even see the baby again. It hurts me every day that my own sister doesn't want to be a part of my son's life.
Alex is lost, but in a different way. She's been eaten by another movie. She works and works, and she texts and sometimes calls, and tries to invite me to things that I can't go to, but it's not for lack of trying. I can't be mad at her because she clearly wants to be part of my life. She wants to be around the baby. She tells me she misses us all the time. It just sucks that we haven't seen her in four months.
Granny is going to be gone soon, and I don't know if I'll get to introduce her to her great grandson like I promised. I feel horrible about it. I am rushing to print out passport renewal forms. I may have a plan to get to Canada by the end of October. I refuse to go down without a fight. There at leasr is something I can do.
Dad is sick.
We don't know how much longer we have left with him.
It could be eight more years.
It could be three.
I am drowning in loss.
Every day I look at the baby and I grow more sad that someday I will have to leave him alone in this world too. I see how you are experiencing Granny's decline, and I feel how I will miss Dad, and I see my child and I want to protect him from this pain.
I can't.
The thing that makes life so sweet is its most bitter counterpart.
I know you are probably best equipped to talk to me about all of this, but in truth it feels cruel to bring it all to you and ask you to make it better.
Not only is that not something you can do, but not being able to do it will make you feel like you are failing me somehow, and the last thing I want to do is make you feel worse.
I already know how this powerlessness is the kind of thing that makes us scream.
We are better when we have tasks to do that make us feel effective.
There is no mess to clean up, no event to organize, no, at this moment, there is nothing to do but wait.
And the waiting is killing me.
And I can't tell you that.
Saturday, August 27, 2016
Do you know where your bruises come from?
I don't.
I wake up every morning with blue marks on my legs that look like the ominous shadows of fingerling potatoes, bullet tip sized green irises on my arms, the centers of the eyes of impact, now bloodshot and firm to the touch in my jelly like flesh.
The daily humiliations of having my hair ripped out by tiny, lovable, chubby fists: the flop of extra skin from the pregnancy that still hangs from my abdomen some 37 weeks after the babe entered the world; the unrecognizable nips on the end of these new, incredibly important tits I own, as long as a fingertip and as pink and unfeeling as a pencil eraser except when nipped by newly budding teeth, when they blossom with crimson crescent tooth marks, accompanied with sharp intakes of breath, and my resounding cry of "no!"
Now these daily tribulations are added to with the discovery that I am receiving beatings of which I am unaware. I must be, or else where would these shadows on my shins be coming from?
So too are these shadows in my brain. These uncomfortable blooms of suspicion and misery, that like these small indigo spots on my skin, show up after some unobserved, small act of violence.
Is this postpartum depression?
I have recently decided to leave facebook for a while.
I always feel so lame saying things like that (as though anyone should care that I am no longer participating in a meaningless system of message boards and overproduced note passing).
To me, the site had always been a source of life news from those friends I couldn't imagine calling and catching up with, but whose lives had briefly intersected with mine, and so I wanted to know how they were doing, what color they had decided to paint their bathrooms, and how many bowls of rice crispies they could eat at four in the morning.
And up until recently, that was great.
Even as I watched the site itself metamorphose into a weird bot. The "personalized" ads stolen from my amazon wish list, or the tailored clickbait in the margins harvesting vocabulary from my own statuses, were not enough to deter me. This is the future, I would shrug, and carry on, blissfully ignorant that my brain was not only being harvested, but implanted as well.
I'll make no arguments against the fact that tragedy is constantly happening somewhere.
It always has been.
As a child, my father received three daily newspapers (five on Sundays!), and he almost always snarfed his dinner down so he could get to the television and watch the six thirty news.
He was a journalist though, so it made sense to me that he wanted to be abreast of global news and events. I used to join him for as long as I could stand it, my head resting in the crook of his elbow, my eyes trained on the gritty, pixelated images of Princess Diana visiting AIDS victims in Africa, or Boris Yeltsin visiting troops in Russia. I usually had to leave at the ten minute mark because it just got too sad.
There was too much hunger and starvation, too much violence and destruction. It seemed like every other country in the world was at war, and in the U.S. and Canada, there were more urban examples of warfare, like pipe bombs, school shootings, serial child abduction, murder, and rape.
I turned away from the news, and in my head, I called myself a coward.
A real adult would be able to face the truth, I thought sullenly.
A grown up sees the world in all its misery, and accepts it, acknowledges what is beyond her control, and then helps the best she can, and goes to bed knowing she did her best and sleeps the sleep of the just. A coward can't stomach the actuality of the world. She runs away before they show the image of the crime scene. She hides in books and fairy tales. She listens to the radio because somehow, listening to terrible things is easier than watching them, and she goes to sleep at night fretting that she isn't making anything better at all.
Now as an adult in my own time period, I don't have cable or a subscription to a single newspaper, but I have a facebook page and a twitter account, and I have twenty four hour access to global catastrophes whether I want it or not.
Only I didn't notice before.
Somehow, I was able to read the daily bits and pieces, and let them go.
Then I became a mother, and -out of nowhere- everything stuck.
That picture of the Syrian child covered in dust and blood after a bombing, sitting shell shocked in the back of an ambulance? It showed up in my newsfeed seven times in 24 hours posted by seven different people. Just when I'd managed to get the poor child's stunned eyes out of my mind, there he was again, looking hopelessly out into a world that for him moments before made sense and was now unrecognizable, his entire life shattered in a matter of seconds over a disagreement between people he had never met, and doesn't understand.
Newsclips about the earhtquake in Italy started playing before I knew what they were, slideshowing me images of people being pulled out of ruined buildings and rubble. Their bodies mangled, their hair matted with plaster and stone dust. Text scrolled across the screen explaining that an eight month old boy and his 7 year old brother were found dead in their home after the steeple of a church collapsed on it.
An article began circulating talking about the planet and its inevitable, accelerated path to destruction. I couldn't bear to read it, just the tagline gave me nightmares.
And I started discovering fear, like those bruises, the day after, showed up in my mind with the same mysterious origins. I had forgotten all the articles, all the photographs, but they had left an impression, and the shape of the tragedies was showing up in my sudden fear of strangers, and traveling, and long car rides, and crowded places, and my mistrust of unwashed fruit, mosquito bites, certain fabrics, and brands of shampoo. I used to be one of those people who dropped her potato chip on the floor, picked it up, dusted it off, and ate it without a care in the world. Now I stared at my bathroom ceiling wondering if a bomb would collapse it on top of us where should I place the baby's seat so that he would receive the least of the damage?
So I am turning away.
I am taking a break.
I am calling it a media detox.
And I am perfectly fine with admitting that I am a coward.
I AM TERRIFIED.
But I cannot teach my child to live his life in fear.
And I am afraid that I am starting to live mine that way.
Because I am afraid.
I am too much afraid.
And I still don't know where the bruises come from.
I wake up every morning with blue marks on my legs that look like the ominous shadows of fingerling potatoes, bullet tip sized green irises on my arms, the centers of the eyes of impact, now bloodshot and firm to the touch in my jelly like flesh.
The daily humiliations of having my hair ripped out by tiny, lovable, chubby fists: the flop of extra skin from the pregnancy that still hangs from my abdomen some 37 weeks after the babe entered the world; the unrecognizable nips on the end of these new, incredibly important tits I own, as long as a fingertip and as pink and unfeeling as a pencil eraser except when nipped by newly budding teeth, when they blossom with crimson crescent tooth marks, accompanied with sharp intakes of breath, and my resounding cry of "no!"
Now these daily tribulations are added to with the discovery that I am receiving beatings of which I am unaware. I must be, or else where would these shadows on my shins be coming from?
So too are these shadows in my brain. These uncomfortable blooms of suspicion and misery, that like these small indigo spots on my skin, show up after some unobserved, small act of violence.
Is this postpartum depression?
I have recently decided to leave facebook for a while.
I always feel so lame saying things like that (as though anyone should care that I am no longer participating in a meaningless system of message boards and overproduced note passing).
To me, the site had always been a source of life news from those friends I couldn't imagine calling and catching up with, but whose lives had briefly intersected with mine, and so I wanted to know how they were doing, what color they had decided to paint their bathrooms, and how many bowls of rice crispies they could eat at four in the morning.
And up until recently, that was great.
Even as I watched the site itself metamorphose into a weird bot. The "personalized" ads stolen from my amazon wish list, or the tailored clickbait in the margins harvesting vocabulary from my own statuses, were not enough to deter me. This is the future, I would shrug, and carry on, blissfully ignorant that my brain was not only being harvested, but implanted as well.
I'll make no arguments against the fact that tragedy is constantly happening somewhere.
It always has been.
As a child, my father received three daily newspapers (five on Sundays!), and he almost always snarfed his dinner down so he could get to the television and watch the six thirty news.
He was a journalist though, so it made sense to me that he wanted to be abreast of global news and events. I used to join him for as long as I could stand it, my head resting in the crook of his elbow, my eyes trained on the gritty, pixelated images of Princess Diana visiting AIDS victims in Africa, or Boris Yeltsin visiting troops in Russia. I usually had to leave at the ten minute mark because it just got too sad.
There was too much hunger and starvation, too much violence and destruction. It seemed like every other country in the world was at war, and in the U.S. and Canada, there were more urban examples of warfare, like pipe bombs, school shootings, serial child abduction, murder, and rape.
I turned away from the news, and in my head, I called myself a coward.
A real adult would be able to face the truth, I thought sullenly.
A grown up sees the world in all its misery, and accepts it, acknowledges what is beyond her control, and then helps the best she can, and goes to bed knowing she did her best and sleeps the sleep of the just. A coward can't stomach the actuality of the world. She runs away before they show the image of the crime scene. She hides in books and fairy tales. She listens to the radio because somehow, listening to terrible things is easier than watching them, and she goes to sleep at night fretting that she isn't making anything better at all.
Now as an adult in my own time period, I don't have cable or a subscription to a single newspaper, but I have a facebook page and a twitter account, and I have twenty four hour access to global catastrophes whether I want it or not.
Only I didn't notice before.
Somehow, I was able to read the daily bits and pieces, and let them go.
Then I became a mother, and -out of nowhere- everything stuck.
That picture of the Syrian child covered in dust and blood after a bombing, sitting shell shocked in the back of an ambulance? It showed up in my newsfeed seven times in 24 hours posted by seven different people. Just when I'd managed to get the poor child's stunned eyes out of my mind, there he was again, looking hopelessly out into a world that for him moments before made sense and was now unrecognizable, his entire life shattered in a matter of seconds over a disagreement between people he had never met, and doesn't understand.
Newsclips about the earhtquake in Italy started playing before I knew what they were, slideshowing me images of people being pulled out of ruined buildings and rubble. Their bodies mangled, their hair matted with plaster and stone dust. Text scrolled across the screen explaining that an eight month old boy and his 7 year old brother were found dead in their home after the steeple of a church collapsed on it.
An article began circulating talking about the planet and its inevitable, accelerated path to destruction. I couldn't bear to read it, just the tagline gave me nightmares.
And I started discovering fear, like those bruises, the day after, showed up in my mind with the same mysterious origins. I had forgotten all the articles, all the photographs, but they had left an impression, and the shape of the tragedies was showing up in my sudden fear of strangers, and traveling, and long car rides, and crowded places, and my mistrust of unwashed fruit, mosquito bites, certain fabrics, and brands of shampoo. I used to be one of those people who dropped her potato chip on the floor, picked it up, dusted it off, and ate it without a care in the world. Now I stared at my bathroom ceiling wondering if a bomb would collapse it on top of us where should I place the baby's seat so that he would receive the least of the damage?
So I am turning away.
I am taking a break.
I am calling it a media detox.
And I am perfectly fine with admitting that I am a coward.
I AM TERRIFIED.
But I cannot teach my child to live his life in fear.
And I am afraid that I am starting to live mine that way.
Because I am afraid.
I am too much afraid.
And I still don't know where the bruises come from.
Friday, August 26, 2016
Eschews Issues
Since becoming a Mother, my anxiety has been a big problem.
I watch Baz noshing away at the boob. His eyes droop. He gets all sleepy and milk drunk. Then boom, his lips fall away from me, and his breathing gets slow and steady. He sleeps, beautifully. Wonderfully. Blissfully ignorant of any such thing as stress.
I think about how his biggest sources of worry are when I put him down, or when I leave the room. He gets upset because he doesn't know where his milk bar has gone, and I represent food and sleep and safety, and I imagine that's pretty stressful for a baby, but as soon as I pick him up again, or throw him on the nip, he calms down. Resolution accessed. He is happy and content, the stress of a moment earlier completely forgotten.
This.
This is what I need to do.
As an adult...
I should clarify.
As an adult with a history of control issues, anxiety, and some compulsion problems, I am incapable of letting go of things. My constant goal is to be in the moment, to dwell in the now, and I used to be better at that when I had a day job. Nothing keeps you present like minute to minute problem solving. At the end of the day, maybe I'd be exhausted, or I'd be angry about something that happened, but ultimately, the reason I had to leave my job was because my employers were severely anxious, and while I strove not to be ruled by those thoughts and feelings, they took it to mean I wasn't as invested in my work if I wasn't having a meltdown about every little thing.
It wasn't a healthy expectation, and I was so relieved when I left.
Anxiety and stress are like plaque buildup. If you don't find a way to brush them off at the end of the day, they build up and eat into your soul. If you let them run riot, you need to call in a professional to help you fix the holes because you're no longer capable of doing it on your own with the little tools you have.
Cosmically, I know Mercury is in retrograde, and we are entering a solar eclipse season. The moon is waning, and there's a fuckload of weird, transitional, uprooting, seachange type energy running through us little animals right now. I look around and I see everyone reexamining their progress, their achievements, their goals. Some people are making big commitments, getting married, moving, starting new jobs and the like. Some people are falling into bad habits and comforting unhealthy rituals because they do not feel they have the ability to change their lives, or they feel they are not in control of the changes occurring in their lives.
I know this.
And I know which category I fall into.
DOES THIS MAKE IT ANY EASIER?
Fuck no!
For me, my ability to control my environment ties directly to money and food.
Hello.
As a kid, some of the biggest and worst things that happened to our family were money related, and completely beyond my control.
I think a lot of kids who grew up poor(ish) become adults for whom budgeting and monetary organization is very important. We never feel secure. We can have 401Ks, retirement savings, back up plans for our back up plans, and we still feel like it could all be stolen away from us at any moment. In small doses, this is healthy. If you let it seep into your every waking thought, not so much.
When I began controlling food, it was a way of controlling my environment too at a time that I felt I had no control over my body, my relationships, or my life.
It's amazing to me that here I am, 15 years later, and I am still tempted to fall back into those habits when things feel like they're spiraling away from me.
Because having a baby means you must control every environment constantly. This is for your baby's well being and health. It also means you must be okay with having no control over what that environment may contain at any given moment (which completely undoes your previous conception of what environmental control means to begin with).
At any given moment the baby needs to be fed, contained, comforted, and cleaned.
At any given moment those needs are brought into perilous rotation by the baby.
We go from screaming from teething and needing to be cuddled, to pushing away because we need to move, play, and crawl. We go from howling for food to writing from the discomfort of a wet diaper to long, languorous sobbing out of pure exhaustion, and all of this can be contained within an hour.
As an anxious human who has had a couple of moments of mistakes (I left him on a hotel bed for a moment to grab the diaper bag and he rolled off and hit the floor like a starfish, another time, as I peed with him crawling over my lap, I didn't notice he had grabbed the toothpaste tube and had it in his mouth until he had a minty fresh mouthful). I know mothers experience these trials and mistakes all the time, but I cannot forgive myself for them.
I currently do not have a job. I do some occasional freelance work, but as of right now, I am experiencing a little dry spell, and the frustration I feel about not contributing to the household makes me want to be extra awesome at mothering our child.
Except it's really fucking hard right now.
I miss writing.
I haven't been able to, since the baby graduated from "sure I'll sleep on you for four hours while you type, Mum"..to.."I must constantly be moving toward things that will kill me and/or be engaged otherwise screaming, also sometimes screaming anyway".
I am not getting decent sleep due to teething, sleep training, and growth spurts.
I have very little left in my emotional reserves to back up the psychological and spiritual reactions I am having to the lack of control I have over my life.
Does this make sense?
Can anyone else relate?
Last night, after logging in to facebook, where I was greeted by yet another article about how the planet is doomed and we're leaving our children a broken, unfit world to inherit, I had a bit of a breakdown.
I can't do this, I thought.
I can't keep ingesting this casual negativity and just carry on.
I keep internalizing all of this guilt, all of this horrible stuff. Cops shooting defenseless people. Monsters shooting up schools and theatres. Earthquakes. Floods. Religious zealots murdering en masse. Complete hypocrites attempting to control the consumer rates by making people simultaneously hate and love their bodies and crave products to make themselves worthy of love.
All interrupted by constant videos of people melting chocolate and cheese all over everything and then declaring how much better they feel about themselves for devouring it while guiltlessly wearing a crop top.
I can't do it anymore.
I'm so fucking over being told what I should value and what I should strive for.
Yesterday, in line to buy a coffee, with the baby strapped to my chest, a woman cut in front of me. She placed an enormous order, and then was looking for exact change in her purse.
I had been staring laser death rays into her back the whole time we were in the shop. How dare she cut in front of me? How dare she be so rude? How dare she be so selfish? So unthinking?
And then I realized that I had a quarter which could totally help her out.
And I realized that if I smugly held it in my hand and thought about how haha now she has to break a dollar she doesn't want to break, it sets off a chain reaction of how she'll be in a bad mood and maybe go out and treat someone even worse than she normally would because of the inconvenience.
So I offered her the coin, and she was so grateful and thanked me a bunch of times, and tipped the barista three bucks (which he totally deserved), and then she went on her merry way, and maybe she held the door open for someone later because she was in a better mood, or maybe next time she's in a coffee shop she will let someone go ahead of her.
I will probably never see her again, but you know what?
I feel better because I did the good thing.
Being bombarded with negativity is not making it easy to do the right thing.
It is encouraging me to be selfish and frightened and to hide.
It is making me lazy and full of excuses.
I am taking an active role in being positive and turning my reactions to the world into good ones, and it starts with me limiting the amount of horror I ingest on a daily basis.
So I'll see you over here, in the thoughtful space, but no longer will I participate in the negative hate orgy that I see on social media.
And that is something i can control.
I watch Baz noshing away at the boob. His eyes droop. He gets all sleepy and milk drunk. Then boom, his lips fall away from me, and his breathing gets slow and steady. He sleeps, beautifully. Wonderfully. Blissfully ignorant of any such thing as stress.
I think about how his biggest sources of worry are when I put him down, or when I leave the room. He gets upset because he doesn't know where his milk bar has gone, and I represent food and sleep and safety, and I imagine that's pretty stressful for a baby, but as soon as I pick him up again, or throw him on the nip, he calms down. Resolution accessed. He is happy and content, the stress of a moment earlier completely forgotten.
This.
This is what I need to do.
As an adult...
I should clarify.
As an adult with a history of control issues, anxiety, and some compulsion problems, I am incapable of letting go of things. My constant goal is to be in the moment, to dwell in the now, and I used to be better at that when I had a day job. Nothing keeps you present like minute to minute problem solving. At the end of the day, maybe I'd be exhausted, or I'd be angry about something that happened, but ultimately, the reason I had to leave my job was because my employers were severely anxious, and while I strove not to be ruled by those thoughts and feelings, they took it to mean I wasn't as invested in my work if I wasn't having a meltdown about every little thing.
It wasn't a healthy expectation, and I was so relieved when I left.
Anxiety and stress are like plaque buildup. If you don't find a way to brush them off at the end of the day, they build up and eat into your soul. If you let them run riot, you need to call in a professional to help you fix the holes because you're no longer capable of doing it on your own with the little tools you have.
Cosmically, I know Mercury is in retrograde, and we are entering a solar eclipse season. The moon is waning, and there's a fuckload of weird, transitional, uprooting, seachange type energy running through us little animals right now. I look around and I see everyone reexamining their progress, their achievements, their goals. Some people are making big commitments, getting married, moving, starting new jobs and the like. Some people are falling into bad habits and comforting unhealthy rituals because they do not feel they have the ability to change their lives, or they feel they are not in control of the changes occurring in their lives.
I know this.
And I know which category I fall into.
DOES THIS MAKE IT ANY EASIER?
Fuck no!
For me, my ability to control my environment ties directly to money and food.
Hello.
As a kid, some of the biggest and worst things that happened to our family were money related, and completely beyond my control.
I think a lot of kids who grew up poor(ish) become adults for whom budgeting and monetary organization is very important. We never feel secure. We can have 401Ks, retirement savings, back up plans for our back up plans, and we still feel like it could all be stolen away from us at any moment. In small doses, this is healthy. If you let it seep into your every waking thought, not so much.
When I began controlling food, it was a way of controlling my environment too at a time that I felt I had no control over my body, my relationships, or my life.
It's amazing to me that here I am, 15 years later, and I am still tempted to fall back into those habits when things feel like they're spiraling away from me.
Because having a baby means you must control every environment constantly. This is for your baby's well being and health. It also means you must be okay with having no control over what that environment may contain at any given moment (which completely undoes your previous conception of what environmental control means to begin with).
At any given moment the baby needs to be fed, contained, comforted, and cleaned.
At any given moment those needs are brought into perilous rotation by the baby.
We go from screaming from teething and needing to be cuddled, to pushing away because we need to move, play, and crawl. We go from howling for food to writing from the discomfort of a wet diaper to long, languorous sobbing out of pure exhaustion, and all of this can be contained within an hour.
As an anxious human who has had a couple of moments of mistakes (I left him on a hotel bed for a moment to grab the diaper bag and he rolled off and hit the floor like a starfish, another time, as I peed with him crawling over my lap, I didn't notice he had grabbed the toothpaste tube and had it in his mouth until he had a minty fresh mouthful). I know mothers experience these trials and mistakes all the time, but I cannot forgive myself for them.
I currently do not have a job. I do some occasional freelance work, but as of right now, I am experiencing a little dry spell, and the frustration I feel about not contributing to the household makes me want to be extra awesome at mothering our child.
Except it's really fucking hard right now.
I miss writing.
I haven't been able to, since the baby graduated from "sure I'll sleep on you for four hours while you type, Mum"..to.."I must constantly be moving toward things that will kill me and/or be engaged otherwise screaming, also sometimes screaming anyway".
I am not getting decent sleep due to teething, sleep training, and growth spurts.
I have very little left in my emotional reserves to back up the psychological and spiritual reactions I am having to the lack of control I have over my life.
Does this make sense?
Can anyone else relate?
Last night, after logging in to facebook, where I was greeted by yet another article about how the planet is doomed and we're leaving our children a broken, unfit world to inherit, I had a bit of a breakdown.
I can't do this, I thought.
I can't keep ingesting this casual negativity and just carry on.
I keep internalizing all of this guilt, all of this horrible stuff. Cops shooting defenseless people. Monsters shooting up schools and theatres. Earthquakes. Floods. Religious zealots murdering en masse. Complete hypocrites attempting to control the consumer rates by making people simultaneously hate and love their bodies and crave products to make themselves worthy of love.
All interrupted by constant videos of people melting chocolate and cheese all over everything and then declaring how much better they feel about themselves for devouring it while guiltlessly wearing a crop top.
I can't do it anymore.
I'm so fucking over being told what I should value and what I should strive for.
Yesterday, in line to buy a coffee, with the baby strapped to my chest, a woman cut in front of me. She placed an enormous order, and then was looking for exact change in her purse.
I had been staring laser death rays into her back the whole time we were in the shop. How dare she cut in front of me? How dare she be so rude? How dare she be so selfish? So unthinking?
And then I realized that I had a quarter which could totally help her out.
And I realized that if I smugly held it in my hand and thought about how haha now she has to break a dollar she doesn't want to break, it sets off a chain reaction of how she'll be in a bad mood and maybe go out and treat someone even worse than she normally would because of the inconvenience.
So I offered her the coin, and she was so grateful and thanked me a bunch of times, and tipped the barista three bucks (which he totally deserved), and then she went on her merry way, and maybe she held the door open for someone later because she was in a better mood, or maybe next time she's in a coffee shop she will let someone go ahead of her.
I will probably never see her again, but you know what?
I feel better because I did the good thing.
Being bombarded with negativity is not making it easy to do the right thing.
It is encouraging me to be selfish and frightened and to hide.
It is making me lazy and full of excuses.
I am taking an active role in being positive and turning my reactions to the world into good ones, and it starts with me limiting the amount of horror I ingest on a daily basis.
So I'll see you over here, in the thoughtful space, but no longer will I participate in the negative hate orgy that I see on social media.
And that is something i can control.
Monday, August 22, 2016
Are You ready for a New Sensation?
Right now life is weird.
I have a six week break from teaching my Saturday writing classes, during which I scooped up some contracting work, that has stalled out because my project director vanished to the UK and left me no direction for what to do in her absence. lolz.
So all of a sudden, I am staring down a solid seven days of JUST BABY.
This is no new news.
Essentially the first three and a half months of this year were JUST BABY, and I was in much worse shape by April than I am now. I mean, he and I were still very new to one another. We sorta know each other now. We might even sorta like each other now.
But as time goes on, those "things we do in a pinch because we don't know how else to get the job done and can figure it out later" things are becoming glaring issues, and with nothing to plan or organize, my happy little obsessive brain likes to run them all on a loop from the moment I open my eyes to the moment I shut them.
Having a baby is kind of like having a lovable bomb dropped in the middle of your life. The first 90 days are all just fall out and survival. You're cleaning up things and trying to make your house resemble the house it was before the baby dropped. It's impossible. The explosion continues to happen, and you are running on adrenaline for much longer than adrenaline is meant to last.
You start pitching tents, rigging bedding, people come by to help with basic necessities like eating, bathing, and putting on pants. You want to depend on them, but you can't, and you know you need to figure out how to do this on your own now anyway.
You jerry-rig a lot.
Maybe your kid has colic at five weeks.
Maybe it's so bad that you can't be in the bedroom with the baby where his crib is all set up beautiful and tidy with a moon nightlight that actually follows the phases of the real moon. Your husband has to work forty-five hours a week, and you feel bad about him going in on four hours sleep and five plus hours of screaming infant, so you pack up and move to the small room off of the kitchen which houses the couch, the tv, and the closet with the vacuum in it.
You throw down a small fortress of pillows and you breastfeed until four in the morning when the baby finally stops writhing and howling and you both nod off for a couple of hours.
It's the most uninterrupted sleep you've had since he was born, so you do it again the next night.
The colic continues to be awful. Even on good nights you're getting three, maybe four hours of sleep, piecemeal, and it's not to be depended on. You go to the doctor a bunch, and they can't figure it out. They prescribe antacids, you cut coffee, then dairy, then peanuts out of your diet.
After ten weeks of this horseshit, you cut wheat out of your diet, and the colic is miraculously on the decline.
Two weeks later, you and the baby get six (count them!) six uninterrupted hours of sleep on the floor of the tv room.
You wake up feeling like Snow Fucking White. You're pretty sure if you throw open the windows, birds are going to fly in and help dress you. You do. They don't. You don't care. Coffee tastes sweeter. The baby is in a great mood. You've been converted. You want to do everything the exact same way you did it the night before so you can get another solid six hours of sleep again.
You do this for a few weeks.
Suddenly the baby is five months old.
You've been sleeping on the floor of a tiny room for 18 weeks. You don't know how it got this far.
But you have a routine.
Your back doesn't like it, but you're not in constant pain, and the sleep is so precious.
You decide to try sleep training because it feels weird to still be not in the lovely bedroom with the lovely nightlight.
It goes horribly. Screaming, no sleep, fighting with husband.
You resign yourself to the floor.
Your classes have begun anyway, and you have to be able to function.
The baby bomb clean up continues around you.
You begin to get the house cleaned up from the initial blast. Y
ou figure out cooking and grocery shopping, errands and social activity.
You start reading to the baby.
You start the baby on solid food.
The baby is cutting teeth!
The baby is trying to crawl!
The baby whips his head around when he hears his name!
Then one day you wake up and it's been almost nine months since you had the baby.
He's been outside of you for as long as he was growing inside, which is mind-blowing.
What's more mind-blowing?
You're still sleeping on the floor.
The small protestations your back made a couple of months back are now full fledged caterwauls, and the cushions of the couch are flattened. The baby doesn't know how to sleep by himself, and you and your mate have not shared a bed in so long it's embarrassing to mention.
This is how terrible shit happens.
Every day, a little bit at a time, until you suddenly realize you've done irreversible damage.
I am a full grown woman who has always taken responsibility for her actions.
I am the first to admit when I fuck up, and so here I am, I did it. I threw together something temporary for a good night's sleep and then I didn't want to let go of what sleep I was getting, so I kept it up, then it became habitual, easy, and all of a sudden, it's the norm.
Now I am faced with the horrendous task of sleeptraining a child who doesn't understand why he's being taken away from his mama.
And all I can think is:
I need a new bomb...
I have a six week break from teaching my Saturday writing classes, during which I scooped up some contracting work, that has stalled out because my project director vanished to the UK and left me no direction for what to do in her absence. lolz.
So all of a sudden, I am staring down a solid seven days of JUST BABY.
This is no new news.
Essentially the first three and a half months of this year were JUST BABY, and I was in much worse shape by April than I am now. I mean, he and I were still very new to one another. We sorta know each other now. We might even sorta like each other now.
But as time goes on, those "things we do in a pinch because we don't know how else to get the job done and can figure it out later" things are becoming glaring issues, and with nothing to plan or organize, my happy little obsessive brain likes to run them all on a loop from the moment I open my eyes to the moment I shut them.
Having a baby is kind of like having a lovable bomb dropped in the middle of your life. The first 90 days are all just fall out and survival. You're cleaning up things and trying to make your house resemble the house it was before the baby dropped. It's impossible. The explosion continues to happen, and you are running on adrenaline for much longer than adrenaline is meant to last.
You start pitching tents, rigging bedding, people come by to help with basic necessities like eating, bathing, and putting on pants. You want to depend on them, but you can't, and you know you need to figure out how to do this on your own now anyway.
You jerry-rig a lot.
Maybe your kid has colic at five weeks.
Maybe it's so bad that you can't be in the bedroom with the baby where his crib is all set up beautiful and tidy with a moon nightlight that actually follows the phases of the real moon. Your husband has to work forty-five hours a week, and you feel bad about him going in on four hours sleep and five plus hours of screaming infant, so you pack up and move to the small room off of the kitchen which houses the couch, the tv, and the closet with the vacuum in it.
You throw down a small fortress of pillows and you breastfeed until four in the morning when the baby finally stops writhing and howling and you both nod off for a couple of hours.
It's the most uninterrupted sleep you've had since he was born, so you do it again the next night.
The colic continues to be awful. Even on good nights you're getting three, maybe four hours of sleep, piecemeal, and it's not to be depended on. You go to the doctor a bunch, and they can't figure it out. They prescribe antacids, you cut coffee, then dairy, then peanuts out of your diet.
After ten weeks of this horseshit, you cut wheat out of your diet, and the colic is miraculously on the decline.
Two weeks later, you and the baby get six (count them!) six uninterrupted hours of sleep on the floor of the tv room.
You wake up feeling like Snow Fucking White. You're pretty sure if you throw open the windows, birds are going to fly in and help dress you. You do. They don't. You don't care. Coffee tastes sweeter. The baby is in a great mood. You've been converted. You want to do everything the exact same way you did it the night before so you can get another solid six hours of sleep again.
You do this for a few weeks.
Suddenly the baby is five months old.
You've been sleeping on the floor of a tiny room for 18 weeks. You don't know how it got this far.
But you have a routine.
Your back doesn't like it, but you're not in constant pain, and the sleep is so precious.
You decide to try sleep training because it feels weird to still be not in the lovely bedroom with the lovely nightlight.
It goes horribly. Screaming, no sleep, fighting with husband.
You resign yourself to the floor.
Your classes have begun anyway, and you have to be able to function.
The baby bomb clean up continues around you.
You begin to get the house cleaned up from the initial blast. Y
ou figure out cooking and grocery shopping, errands and social activity.
You start reading to the baby.
You start the baby on solid food.
The baby is cutting teeth!
The baby is trying to crawl!
The baby whips his head around when he hears his name!
Then one day you wake up and it's been almost nine months since you had the baby.
He's been outside of you for as long as he was growing inside, which is mind-blowing.
What's more mind-blowing?
You're still sleeping on the floor.
The small protestations your back made a couple of months back are now full fledged caterwauls, and the cushions of the couch are flattened. The baby doesn't know how to sleep by himself, and you and your mate have not shared a bed in so long it's embarrassing to mention.
This is how terrible shit happens.
Every day, a little bit at a time, until you suddenly realize you've done irreversible damage.
I am a full grown woman who has always taken responsibility for her actions.
I am the first to admit when I fuck up, and so here I am, I did it. I threw together something temporary for a good night's sleep and then I didn't want to let go of what sleep I was getting, so I kept it up, then it became habitual, easy, and all of a sudden, it's the norm.
Now I am faced with the horrendous task of sleeptraining a child who doesn't understand why he's being taken away from his mama.
And all I can think is:
I need a new bomb...
Wednesday, August 3, 2016
Seize the Cake
My Dad is dying.
To be fair, everyone's Dad is dying. We're all dying. Some of us just a little quicker and assuredly than others.
My Dad got his marching orders last December, right before my son was born.
So he didn't tell us for about five months.
He has been diagnosed with Pulmonary Fibrosis, a lung disease that slowly transforms your healthy lung tissue into scar tissue which eventually seizes their ability to function.
Average lifespan from diagnosis is five years maximum.
My Dad is pretty healthy.
He may live longer.
He may also get hit by a rogue meteorite tomorrow, but most likely he will enjoy a slow decline in lung function for the next few years, followed by a rapid period during which all the inhalers, drugs, and oxygen tanks the hospitals can throw at him will only prolong the inevitable.
One day, my father will asphyxiate.
He will run out of breath.
I can only hope that it is at home, in fairly decent shape, preferably after a truly epic meal surrounded by those of us who love him the most.
There are many ways I have felt about this since I found out around the end of May.
At first, I knee jerk gasp-cried into a diaper, while the baby, naked-arsed waggled his legs in confusion on the change table below me. I may have put the tear soaked diaper on him. I don't recall. He doesn't seem the worse for it.
*shrug*
Immediately following, I decided I wanted to do something to help.
Could Dad get a lung transplant?
No, even with the new lungs, it only resets your life to the point of diagnosis granting you another five probably years, and these years will be spent in a bubble of drugs, sterility, and restricted activity to ensure you don't reject your new organs. Dad doesn't want to live like that. I don't blame him.
Drugs, there's a good idea. Aren't there any pill cocktails to treat this biz?
There are, but they're steroids, and my Dad, remarkable bastard that he is, has a spot of TB on his lung leftover from when he self inoculated against the illness as a child. Steroid use would wake the little bugger up, and then my Dad would have the ironic pleasure of dying of consumption in the 21st century.
That's pretty much it.
We met with a holistic healer, who prescribed Dad a prohibitive diet restricting him to consuming only plants and whole grains and water, but again, my dad wants to enjoy his life. He figures, what's the point of prolonging it, at the age of seventy, if it's going to be miserable?
Carpe Lagunum as it were.
or
Seize the Cake.
So we have to get right with this.
We have to get right with the idea that we are all going to die someday, perhaps soon, perhaps not, but unlike most of us, my Dad now knows exactly how he's going to go.
I want to make it better for him. I want to make it easier.
I contacted the Pulminary Fibrosis Foundation in their home city of Chicago, and they excitedly told me all the ways I could fundraise for them.
I thought really hard about it. I so want to be useful. I want to use my hands, my health, my time, my abundance of breath to do something for my Dad, but there's little incentive to having a fundraiser for a foundation that will gladly take all the money I raise and pay themselves to "raise awareness".
My dad doesn't see any of that cash. It won't help pay for his inhalers or new lungs or even research in the field.
So I am stuck with only one recourse.
Make however long we have left together wonderful.
Give him as much access and time with his grandson as he wants. Let go of the petty bullshit from our fights and disagreements, and forgive him for the big stuff he fucked up when I was a kid.
As a parent now, it's a little easier to do the latter. I'm also still his child though, so it's hard.
Amazing, isn't it? How we remember so vividly the way we felt about our parents as children?
My father was so god-like in my eyes. The smartest man, the bravest, most adventuresome, cleverest, funniest, wildest one.
He was also the one who got angry quickest, the one who had the most cutting comment when you made a mistake. His fuse was the shortest, and his punishments were long.
I remember being grounded one summer for two weeks.
I remember the sense of injustice was enormous. While he yelled at me, I could feel his breath on my face, and I burned with it as though I was being forced to wear a hair shirt. I spent the time in silence, living monastically, pledging myself to not hug my father for at least a month after my grounding was complete.
I think I forgot about that part a day or two after I regained my freedom.
There are other memories.
Roadtrips and Christmases and long family walks through the woods and on beaches. All of us sharing a block of Cadbury's fruit and nut as we sat on felled tree at the site where my parents built their dream house.
I remember my Dad springing up like a lion when Alex fell through the roof of a shed on the Australian property. We were picking pears, and I'd lifted her up there not knowing there was a hole in the corrugated tin covered over with plastic. I'd never seen my father move so quickly. He was over the fence in moments and running out of the shed with Alex wrapped up tight in his arms. His breath coming fast and hard.
When I went to college, and after, I remember the weekly phone calls with my parents. My dad was always talking about how beautiful my sister Sarah was becoming, how clever, how talented a writer. How proud he was of Alex living in Chicago and fighting for her dream of working in the movies.
I tried not to seethe with sibling jealousy. It occurs to me now, he must have spoken about me the same way to them. I would listen to him clear his throat on the phone and try to come up with my own accomplishments, my proud moments to hold up in shining comparison.
My father has always said that my emotional happiness has been my priority before anything else.
When I was younger, it sounded like a flaw, but now it's a compliment.
I see the love he has for my sisters, for me, for my baby boy, and I realize how my Dad is only now allowing himself the luxury of forgiveness and love with abandon.
In the shadow of what's to come, he is using what is left of his breath to tell us how much happiness we bring him. He says over and over all he wants is to spend as much time together as we can.
And when you begin looking at the hourglass of breaths we will take in life as running low. The stream between the two globes as thin as a thread, you realize that letting go of the frustrations and the agonies doesn't mean forgetting them, and loving someone doesn't mean that you forgive them for everything.
It just means that bringing it all up would be wasting breath.
And we don't have that luxury around here.
To be fair, everyone's Dad is dying. We're all dying. Some of us just a little quicker and assuredly than others.
My Dad got his marching orders last December, right before my son was born.
So he didn't tell us for about five months.
He has been diagnosed with Pulmonary Fibrosis, a lung disease that slowly transforms your healthy lung tissue into scar tissue which eventually seizes their ability to function.
Average lifespan from diagnosis is five years maximum.
My Dad is pretty healthy.
He may live longer.
He may also get hit by a rogue meteorite tomorrow, but most likely he will enjoy a slow decline in lung function for the next few years, followed by a rapid period during which all the inhalers, drugs, and oxygen tanks the hospitals can throw at him will only prolong the inevitable.
One day, my father will asphyxiate.
He will run out of breath.
I can only hope that it is at home, in fairly decent shape, preferably after a truly epic meal surrounded by those of us who love him the most.
There are many ways I have felt about this since I found out around the end of May.
At first, I knee jerk gasp-cried into a diaper, while the baby, naked-arsed waggled his legs in confusion on the change table below me. I may have put the tear soaked diaper on him. I don't recall. He doesn't seem the worse for it.
*shrug*
Immediately following, I decided I wanted to do something to help.
Could Dad get a lung transplant?
No, even with the new lungs, it only resets your life to the point of diagnosis granting you another five probably years, and these years will be spent in a bubble of drugs, sterility, and restricted activity to ensure you don't reject your new organs. Dad doesn't want to live like that. I don't blame him.
Drugs, there's a good idea. Aren't there any pill cocktails to treat this biz?
There are, but they're steroids, and my Dad, remarkable bastard that he is, has a spot of TB on his lung leftover from when he self inoculated against the illness as a child. Steroid use would wake the little bugger up, and then my Dad would have the ironic pleasure of dying of consumption in the 21st century.
That's pretty much it.
We met with a holistic healer, who prescribed Dad a prohibitive diet restricting him to consuming only plants and whole grains and water, but again, my dad wants to enjoy his life. He figures, what's the point of prolonging it, at the age of seventy, if it's going to be miserable?
Carpe Lagunum as it were.
or
Seize the Cake.
So we have to get right with this.
We have to get right with the idea that we are all going to die someday, perhaps soon, perhaps not, but unlike most of us, my Dad now knows exactly how he's going to go.
I want to make it better for him. I want to make it easier.
I contacted the Pulminary Fibrosis Foundation in their home city of Chicago, and they excitedly told me all the ways I could fundraise for them.
I thought really hard about it. I so want to be useful. I want to use my hands, my health, my time, my abundance of breath to do something for my Dad, but there's little incentive to having a fundraiser for a foundation that will gladly take all the money I raise and pay themselves to "raise awareness".
My dad doesn't see any of that cash. It won't help pay for his inhalers or new lungs or even research in the field.
So I am stuck with only one recourse.
Make however long we have left together wonderful.
Give him as much access and time with his grandson as he wants. Let go of the petty bullshit from our fights and disagreements, and forgive him for the big stuff he fucked up when I was a kid.
As a parent now, it's a little easier to do the latter. I'm also still his child though, so it's hard.
Amazing, isn't it? How we remember so vividly the way we felt about our parents as children?
My father was so god-like in my eyes. The smartest man, the bravest, most adventuresome, cleverest, funniest, wildest one.
He was also the one who got angry quickest, the one who had the most cutting comment when you made a mistake. His fuse was the shortest, and his punishments were long.
I remember being grounded one summer for two weeks.
I remember the sense of injustice was enormous. While he yelled at me, I could feel his breath on my face, and I burned with it as though I was being forced to wear a hair shirt. I spent the time in silence, living monastically, pledging myself to not hug my father for at least a month after my grounding was complete.
I think I forgot about that part a day or two after I regained my freedom.
There are other memories.
Roadtrips and Christmases and long family walks through the woods and on beaches. All of us sharing a block of Cadbury's fruit and nut as we sat on felled tree at the site where my parents built their dream house.
I remember my Dad springing up like a lion when Alex fell through the roof of a shed on the Australian property. We were picking pears, and I'd lifted her up there not knowing there was a hole in the corrugated tin covered over with plastic. I'd never seen my father move so quickly. He was over the fence in moments and running out of the shed with Alex wrapped up tight in his arms. His breath coming fast and hard.
When I went to college, and after, I remember the weekly phone calls with my parents. My dad was always talking about how beautiful my sister Sarah was becoming, how clever, how talented a writer. How proud he was of Alex living in Chicago and fighting for her dream of working in the movies.
I tried not to seethe with sibling jealousy. It occurs to me now, he must have spoken about me the same way to them. I would listen to him clear his throat on the phone and try to come up with my own accomplishments, my proud moments to hold up in shining comparison.
My father has always said that my emotional happiness has been my priority before anything else.
When I was younger, it sounded like a flaw, but now it's a compliment.
I see the love he has for my sisters, for me, for my baby boy, and I realize how my Dad is only now allowing himself the luxury of forgiveness and love with abandon.
In the shadow of what's to come, he is using what is left of his breath to tell us how much happiness we bring him. He says over and over all he wants is to spend as much time together as we can.
And when you begin looking at the hourglass of breaths we will take in life as running low. The stream between the two globes as thin as a thread, you realize that letting go of the frustrations and the agonies doesn't mean forgetting them, and loving someone doesn't mean that you forgive them for everything.
It just means that bringing it all up would be wasting breath.
And we don't have that luxury around here.
Saturday, July 16, 2016
The Voices
I know I've been writing a lot about my struggle with an eating disorder/disordered eating and my postpartum biz, but it's helping.
See...these evil voices that tell me I'm worthless until I feel dizzy and empty in my stomach, that I'm a failure if even an inch of belly rolls over the top of my leggings/shorts, that every mouthful I am chewing too quickly and forcing into an already full stomach at night, in front of the fridge, in the dark is making me a shittier person, an uglier person, a person undeserving of success or love, these voices have plagued me since I was 18 years old (which I know is late. Some girls start their horrific self loathing as early as 8 or 9 these days, and are battling full blown eds by the time they hit puberty, that doesn't make my journey less valid, just different. Everyone's journey is different).
Still, it's something a lot of people are talking about now. Which is wonderful. It's hard to let something that thrives on secrecy and shame take over your life if you are constantly talking about it with people and comparing your scars and building each other up and sympathizing with one another.
The body positive movement is really wonderful I guess is all I'm trying to say, and it is helping me a lot, because I am in a place I never thought I'd be.
I'm on the verge, the edge, the tippity tip tip of getting better. Really better, like well enough that I stop caring, stop assessing, stop weighing, balancing, comparing, and hating. I'm really close.
The thing that has helped me get here the most?
Pregnancy.
I know it's so crunchy and hippy and earthy, but truly it was. The need to take care of myself properly, as I hadn't done since I'd been a kid, had never been more important as when it was fostering a new life. Because I couldn't do it just for me. I had to do it for us. And once I started doing it for us, I realized I was also doing it for me, and IT ACTUALLY WASN'T EVEN THAT HARD.
Now, of course, the baby is on the outside, and he's wonderful obviously, but it means i am no longer directly caring for him when I eat, so it's trickier. The voices...they try.
I was doing pretty well for the first four months. My body bore the obvious signs of childbirth: a soft tummy with a pouch of extra skin, humungous, hard, sore boobs that leaked and sprayed and generally sought to embarrass me whenever I left the house, deep dark under eye circles, hair loss, and a few other tasteful things I shall not mention.
Because everything was a mess, I was okay with it looking a mess. I ate when I was hungry, and I ate what I wanted. I craved carbs a lot, so I ate a lot of bread and pastry. I also ate a lot of fruits and veggies and nuts and cheese. My body was gearing up for breastfeeding armageddon, I let it do what it needed to do.
Then colic came. Colic hit the babe so hard we started frantically trying to find the cause. The doctor said it was most likely something his undeveloped colon couldn't handle in my breastmilk, so I started trying to cut out things that could be making my baby scream and cry and writhe in agony at all hours.
See where the trouble began?
Where it always does.
Cutting things out.
When I first began my disorder, I had read an expose on factory farming and I went from comfortably omnivorous to vegan in the space of an afternoon.
This was in 2001, before almond milk, before Quorn, before kale and quinoa, gluten free, quest bars, Siggi's dairy and all the trendy trendy treaty ways to be healthy we have right now. I had a college meal plan, and the only thing that was vegan was the salad bar. I could eat tofu for protein. They didn't even have peanut butter at the toast station.
But you know that story.
So fast forward to colic times.
I'm healthily omnivorous again, but I have, like, a lot of baggage.
I cut coffee out of my diet first.
No change.
Then dairy.
Then peanuts.
Finally, in the last ditch effort before we started trying prescriptions, my pediatrician told me to cut out wheat.
So I cut wheat out of my diet, and the colic went away.
Like magic.
And then, I started to lose weight.
It was the losing weight that first made the voices come back. They didn't even speak at first, just lurked, loitering in the shadows when I realized there was nothing at the potluck barbecue I could eat except naked hot dogs and watermelon. They skulked in my periphery when Bob ordered a pizza and I had to get another salad with chicken.
I replaced the cravings for toast with peanut butter and oats. I replaced the pastries with trail mix and yoghurt. I would see an eclair and I would reach for a banana.
Then, one day, I looked in the mirror and I just knew.
Between breastfeeding my little baby, and this new complete lack of wheat, I was losing weight.
And not in the slow way that my body had been shedding the baby pounds. I was losing it in the way that most people who are trying to lose weight do.
Then one day, the voices started whispering.
I got on the scale.
I saw a number there I hadn't seen since freshman year of college. A non-ed number, but the number that I had seen on the scale after a couple of weeks of being vegan that started me thinking maybe I liked this whole "structured eating lifestyle". It's my gateway number. This is the number that I see that makes my brain think..."Well shit, just start counting calories again and you could lose that extra ten pounds and look like a super model. It's not that hard. You've done it before."
Except I haven't heard those voices in a long ass time.
I swandove from restricting into BED really quickly. I was 20 years old at my lowest weight, the one at which I stopped menstruating for a year, tried this new fun activity called "passing out frequently", and had a large black scab on my spine from where I spent two hours every morning doing 1800 sit ups and crunches on a towel on my dorm room floor.
Then I fell off the wagon.
In the space of a year, I went from there to eating entire jars of peanut butter at 3am using frosted animal crackers as spoons. I went through a truly low phase where I stole food to binge on because I wouldn't buy it. I rationalized in the daytime that if I didn't buy the "trigger foods" then I wouldn't have them to binge on, but then I would see my friends with their care packages from loving parents full of sugar cookies and fudge, stuff I hadn't allowed myself to touch for ages, and those lovely friends would say, "oh sure, if you want some oreos just come by and grab a couple." In their minds they thought I'd stop in and chat to them in the afternoon and eat a couple of cookies (like a normal person). Instead I'd wait until my stomach, hollow and creaking from restricting all day, was so loud and insistent that I went into psychotic survival mode. With nothing to eat of my own, I would creep into these friends' rooms and steal first one handful then two, then the whole package came out into the hall with me, sometimes a bathroom stall, where I would stuff, tears running down my face, hatred coursing through my veins, the voices screaming in my ears, until there was nothing left.
It was such a slippery slope.
I could recuperate for months. I went on trips, lost ten, twenty pounds, then rapidly gained it back. I stole bulk packages of almonds and cashews from a family I stayed with in Australia. They were so kind as to let me sleep in their daughter's room while she was abroad, and I repaid them by binging in their kitchen until they actually started asking me where things were disappearing to. The shame I felt during that time period was unlike anything I've ever been able to describe.
I moved to this city and to that one, and then I got into a loving relationship, and the happiness I experienced spurred the longest period of restricting (because I thought restriction=happiness) I had since I was in college. At 25 I weighed my gateway weight, and then I lost ten more pounds without even trying. Instead of binging at night to make up for my restricting, I was having sex, which was so much better.
Then the newness of the relationship wore off. Life crept in around the edges, and before I knew it, we were living together in a new town, worried about money and jobs and saving up enough to get married. I was experiencing that mid-twenties let down that all liberal arts grads have.
(Wait, you mean nobody's just going to HAND me a book deal?)
And soon the voices were back.
I had a few blow up fights with my partner, when he discovered the empty peanut butter jars I hid under the bed.
He'd buy ice cream, which I'd finish and then scrambled to replace before he noticed it was gone. It was impossible. I was a bad liar. He was shocked, then concerned, then when I refused to talk to him about it, he was angry.
Then I started working at a bakery again, and it was easy to hide my disorder.
See, you don't have time to eat when you're working. You run run run and work work work, and the coffee is free and the camaraderie is satisfying so you don't even think about food for eight hours.
Then it's time to go home, and you've got a bag of day old pastry and bread that "you couldn't stand to see go to waste" or "will totally send to work with my fiancee", and you sit down at midnight, and you eat eat eat until you realize you can't breathe.
It took eight years for me to get to a place where I sort of ate normally.
I still fell into restrictive eating habits during the day and binge habits at night, but the big binges, the really bad ones, got fewer and further between, and I stopped cycling at badly as before.
Still, i had almost no self control around pastry and bread that I brought home from work because it was free, and being a poor kid, I couldn't bear to see it go to waste.
And if there were brownies in the house, I couldn't just eat one. I had to eat them all.
I gained weight.
I tried to be okay with it.
I called it giving up and giving in.
Then I got pregnant.
So here we are.
The gate-weight staring up at me from the scale, and I feel all the voices rushing at me.
Cheering me to lose more, to restrict more, to hide and shrink and wither.
And alongside them the others telling me to pig out blindly, eat until I can't breathe, nobody will judge me, I just had a baby, I've got wiggle room, I deserve to because I'm exhausted and I feel like shit all the time anyway...
Only, I've worked so hard to get here.
Not the weight here.
The brain here.
The health here.
I've worked so hard to make a healthy baby, to make a child who I want to grow up with absolutely no self consciousness about his body.
Already he's growing faster than lots of kids his age. He's 20lbs at 7 months and people remark about his rolls and his size. It's all positive, but it frightens me. I don't like that they're already saying this sort of thing.
What if I have a fat kid?
Do I want him to hate himself? Do I want him to judge his worth based solely on his waist size?
When I picture my baby hating any part of himself I want to burn cities to the ground.
I worked so hard to make him, and he's perfect. Nobody is allowed to make him feel anything less than perfect.
And there it is folks.
There's the voice that's louder than anything else in my head right now.
The voice I am clinging to for dear life.
Love.
The love voice.
The no nonsense, don't bullshit me, I know you voice that I couldn't tap into for fifteen years has finally set up a bullhorn and she is here to stay.
Get the fuck off the scale, she says.
Who gives a shit if your pants are too big this week, they're gonna be too small again and then too big again, just be glad they don't have spit up on them, she says.
Eat the fucking pudding, she says.
Eat the fucking fruit salad, she says.
Are you drinking enough water? she says.
Did you get enough sleep? she says.
Are you doing what's best for the baby? she says.
And I can answer her yes. Yes I am. Yes I will. Yes I know what's important now. Both of us. Yes him, but both of us. All of us.
Instead of shoo-ing the voices back into the shadows, I put them in a cage, out in the daylight, and we look at them, this love voice and I. We refuse to blink. We stare them down. We don't let them speak, but we refuse to pretend they don't exist, and then we eat anyway. We love anyway.
We put one foot in front of the other on this journey, and we keep talking about it, because that's how we keep them locked in place, and how we don't let them think they know me anymore.
See...these evil voices that tell me I'm worthless until I feel dizzy and empty in my stomach, that I'm a failure if even an inch of belly rolls over the top of my leggings/shorts, that every mouthful I am chewing too quickly and forcing into an already full stomach at night, in front of the fridge, in the dark is making me a shittier person, an uglier person, a person undeserving of success or love, these voices have plagued me since I was 18 years old (which I know is late. Some girls start their horrific self loathing as early as 8 or 9 these days, and are battling full blown eds by the time they hit puberty, that doesn't make my journey less valid, just different. Everyone's journey is different).
Still, it's something a lot of people are talking about now. Which is wonderful. It's hard to let something that thrives on secrecy and shame take over your life if you are constantly talking about it with people and comparing your scars and building each other up and sympathizing with one another.
The body positive movement is really wonderful I guess is all I'm trying to say, and it is helping me a lot, because I am in a place I never thought I'd be.
I'm on the verge, the edge, the tippity tip tip of getting better. Really better, like well enough that I stop caring, stop assessing, stop weighing, balancing, comparing, and hating. I'm really close.
The thing that has helped me get here the most?
Pregnancy.
I know it's so crunchy and hippy and earthy, but truly it was. The need to take care of myself properly, as I hadn't done since I'd been a kid, had never been more important as when it was fostering a new life. Because I couldn't do it just for me. I had to do it for us. And once I started doing it for us, I realized I was also doing it for me, and IT ACTUALLY WASN'T EVEN THAT HARD.
Now, of course, the baby is on the outside, and he's wonderful obviously, but it means i am no longer directly caring for him when I eat, so it's trickier. The voices...they try.
I was doing pretty well for the first four months. My body bore the obvious signs of childbirth: a soft tummy with a pouch of extra skin, humungous, hard, sore boobs that leaked and sprayed and generally sought to embarrass me whenever I left the house, deep dark under eye circles, hair loss, and a few other tasteful things I shall not mention.
Because everything was a mess, I was okay with it looking a mess. I ate when I was hungry, and I ate what I wanted. I craved carbs a lot, so I ate a lot of bread and pastry. I also ate a lot of fruits and veggies and nuts and cheese. My body was gearing up for breastfeeding armageddon, I let it do what it needed to do.
Then colic came. Colic hit the babe so hard we started frantically trying to find the cause. The doctor said it was most likely something his undeveloped colon couldn't handle in my breastmilk, so I started trying to cut out things that could be making my baby scream and cry and writhe in agony at all hours.
See where the trouble began?
Where it always does.
Cutting things out.
When I first began my disorder, I had read an expose on factory farming and I went from comfortably omnivorous to vegan in the space of an afternoon.
This was in 2001, before almond milk, before Quorn, before kale and quinoa, gluten free, quest bars, Siggi's dairy and all the trendy trendy treaty ways to be healthy we have right now. I had a college meal plan, and the only thing that was vegan was the salad bar. I could eat tofu for protein. They didn't even have peanut butter at the toast station.
But you know that story.
So fast forward to colic times.
I'm healthily omnivorous again, but I have, like, a lot of baggage.
I cut coffee out of my diet first.
No change.
Then dairy.
Then peanuts.
Finally, in the last ditch effort before we started trying prescriptions, my pediatrician told me to cut out wheat.
So I cut wheat out of my diet, and the colic went away.
Like magic.
And then, I started to lose weight.
It was the losing weight that first made the voices come back. They didn't even speak at first, just lurked, loitering in the shadows when I realized there was nothing at the potluck barbecue I could eat except naked hot dogs and watermelon. They skulked in my periphery when Bob ordered a pizza and I had to get another salad with chicken.
I replaced the cravings for toast with peanut butter and oats. I replaced the pastries with trail mix and yoghurt. I would see an eclair and I would reach for a banana.
Then, one day, I looked in the mirror and I just knew.
Between breastfeeding my little baby, and this new complete lack of wheat, I was losing weight.
And not in the slow way that my body had been shedding the baby pounds. I was losing it in the way that most people who are trying to lose weight do.
Then one day, the voices started whispering.
I got on the scale.
I saw a number there I hadn't seen since freshman year of college. A non-ed number, but the number that I had seen on the scale after a couple of weeks of being vegan that started me thinking maybe I liked this whole "structured eating lifestyle". It's my gateway number. This is the number that I see that makes my brain think..."Well shit, just start counting calories again and you could lose that extra ten pounds and look like a super model. It's not that hard. You've done it before."
Except I haven't heard those voices in a long ass time.
I swandove from restricting into BED really quickly. I was 20 years old at my lowest weight, the one at which I stopped menstruating for a year, tried this new fun activity called "passing out frequently", and had a large black scab on my spine from where I spent two hours every morning doing 1800 sit ups and crunches on a towel on my dorm room floor.
Then I fell off the wagon.
In the space of a year, I went from there to eating entire jars of peanut butter at 3am using frosted animal crackers as spoons. I went through a truly low phase where I stole food to binge on because I wouldn't buy it. I rationalized in the daytime that if I didn't buy the "trigger foods" then I wouldn't have them to binge on, but then I would see my friends with their care packages from loving parents full of sugar cookies and fudge, stuff I hadn't allowed myself to touch for ages, and those lovely friends would say, "oh sure, if you want some oreos just come by and grab a couple." In their minds they thought I'd stop in and chat to them in the afternoon and eat a couple of cookies (like a normal person). Instead I'd wait until my stomach, hollow and creaking from restricting all day, was so loud and insistent that I went into psychotic survival mode. With nothing to eat of my own, I would creep into these friends' rooms and steal first one handful then two, then the whole package came out into the hall with me, sometimes a bathroom stall, where I would stuff, tears running down my face, hatred coursing through my veins, the voices screaming in my ears, until there was nothing left.
It was such a slippery slope.
I could recuperate for months. I went on trips, lost ten, twenty pounds, then rapidly gained it back. I stole bulk packages of almonds and cashews from a family I stayed with in Australia. They were so kind as to let me sleep in their daughter's room while she was abroad, and I repaid them by binging in their kitchen until they actually started asking me where things were disappearing to. The shame I felt during that time period was unlike anything I've ever been able to describe.
I moved to this city and to that one, and then I got into a loving relationship, and the happiness I experienced spurred the longest period of restricting (because I thought restriction=happiness) I had since I was in college. At 25 I weighed my gateway weight, and then I lost ten more pounds without even trying. Instead of binging at night to make up for my restricting, I was having sex, which was so much better.
Then the newness of the relationship wore off. Life crept in around the edges, and before I knew it, we were living together in a new town, worried about money and jobs and saving up enough to get married. I was experiencing that mid-twenties let down that all liberal arts grads have.
(Wait, you mean nobody's just going to HAND me a book deal?)
And soon the voices were back.
I had a few blow up fights with my partner, when he discovered the empty peanut butter jars I hid under the bed.
He'd buy ice cream, which I'd finish and then scrambled to replace before he noticed it was gone. It was impossible. I was a bad liar. He was shocked, then concerned, then when I refused to talk to him about it, he was angry.
Then I started working at a bakery again, and it was easy to hide my disorder.
See, you don't have time to eat when you're working. You run run run and work work work, and the coffee is free and the camaraderie is satisfying so you don't even think about food for eight hours.
Then it's time to go home, and you've got a bag of day old pastry and bread that "you couldn't stand to see go to waste" or "will totally send to work with my fiancee", and you sit down at midnight, and you eat eat eat until you realize you can't breathe.
It took eight years for me to get to a place where I sort of ate normally.
I still fell into restrictive eating habits during the day and binge habits at night, but the big binges, the really bad ones, got fewer and further between, and I stopped cycling at badly as before.
Still, i had almost no self control around pastry and bread that I brought home from work because it was free, and being a poor kid, I couldn't bear to see it go to waste.
And if there were brownies in the house, I couldn't just eat one. I had to eat them all.
I gained weight.
I tried to be okay with it.
I called it giving up and giving in.
Then I got pregnant.
So here we are.
The gate-weight staring up at me from the scale, and I feel all the voices rushing at me.
Cheering me to lose more, to restrict more, to hide and shrink and wither.
And alongside them the others telling me to pig out blindly, eat until I can't breathe, nobody will judge me, I just had a baby, I've got wiggle room, I deserve to because I'm exhausted and I feel like shit all the time anyway...
Only, I've worked so hard to get here.
Not the weight here.
The brain here.
The health here.
I've worked so hard to make a healthy baby, to make a child who I want to grow up with absolutely no self consciousness about his body.
Already he's growing faster than lots of kids his age. He's 20lbs at 7 months and people remark about his rolls and his size. It's all positive, but it frightens me. I don't like that they're already saying this sort of thing.
What if I have a fat kid?
Do I want him to hate himself? Do I want him to judge his worth based solely on his waist size?
When I picture my baby hating any part of himself I want to burn cities to the ground.
I worked so hard to make him, and he's perfect. Nobody is allowed to make him feel anything less than perfect.
And there it is folks.
There's the voice that's louder than anything else in my head right now.
The voice I am clinging to for dear life.
Love.
The love voice.
The no nonsense, don't bullshit me, I know you voice that I couldn't tap into for fifteen years has finally set up a bullhorn and she is here to stay.
Get the fuck off the scale, she says.
Who gives a shit if your pants are too big this week, they're gonna be too small again and then too big again, just be glad they don't have spit up on them, she says.
Eat the fucking pudding, she says.
Eat the fucking fruit salad, she says.
Are you drinking enough water? she says.
Did you get enough sleep? she says.
Are you doing what's best for the baby? she says.
And I can answer her yes. Yes I am. Yes I will. Yes I know what's important now. Both of us. Yes him, but both of us. All of us.
Instead of shoo-ing the voices back into the shadows, I put them in a cage, out in the daylight, and we look at them, this love voice and I. We refuse to blink. We stare them down. We don't let them speak, but we refuse to pretend they don't exist, and then we eat anyway. We love anyway.
We put one foot in front of the other on this journey, and we keep talking about it, because that's how we keep them locked in place, and how we don't let them think they know me anymore.
Sunday, July 10, 2016
Prescription Time Killer
Hello,
My name is Jess Mann, and I have a problem with things being beyond my control.
I don't know when it started...perhaps when I was eight and we moved away from everything that was familiar and normal to the other side of the entire world and never went back...
Not to knock my parents or anything. They did what they thought was right at the time. They did the best that they knew how to do. I often think they attribute every bad thing that's ever happened to our family to the "big move" but I wouldn't be who I am if I wasn't where I am, and there would be no Beard, no Bastian, nope. I'm very glad we left Australia exactly when and how we did.
That doesn't change the fact that it was devastating at the time, and I had absolutely no control over what was happening to me, my family, or my life.
So I guess I save a few bucks on therapy or something?
I know for a fact that it doesn't take an earth shattering event to give people control issues. I know tons of people with relatively delightful, mundane lives, who are constantly anxious and controlling to the point where it has interfered with their everyday business. It's all about perspective and inclination. We all have coping mechanisms. Some of us like to be in charge, okay?
Right now my house is under quarantine.
Sometime last week, the dreaded summer cold made an entrance into my house, and both my boys are in the thick of it right now.
It's a doozy, so just skip it if you can.
The Beard first started feeling lousy on Tuesday morning. He complained of a headache, and over the course of the day, he kept saying he was super tired and achy.
Welcome to Sick City. Population: Us.
Since, through some psychotic miracle (I might have to chalk this one up to breastfeeding or some old pact with the devil I forgot about) I am the lone non-effluvia spewing family member. Of course this means, I have taken on the essential duties of nurse thing.
I cancelled my Saturday writing class and had to renegotiate when my current project is due for my contracting job. Let it never be said I don't have my priorities in order.
This means every day, since Wednesday has been a weird haze of activities with only echoes of the usual routines.
I make coffee (this is standard) and then I make soup and tea.
I walk the baby to sleep, feed the baby, dance/play/exhaust the baby because somehow, even while snotty and coughy and sneezy, he is also active as fuck.
I walk to the store and buy tissues and snacks because when we are sick we like treats. I say we, because even though I have yet to come down with this, I like any excuse to buy peanut m&ms.
I make the dinner and I do the dishes.
I cut lemons and grate ginger into hot water with gobs of honey.
I walk the dog, take the baby's temperature, hoover all the fluids out of the baby's nose, and then stay up with the baby when he's coughing and congested and can't nurse properly because his little nose is blocked, so we hoover it out again, and he screams and cries, and then we sleep a little more, before getting up and making the coffee again.
These are jobs i do gladly. I list them in my head and I shuffle and reorganize and prioritize them each day to make it feel as though I am contributing.
I pump breastmilk and count seconds in my head on each side. 600 seconds is ten minutes which means I can switch.
I started doing this when Bastian and I were first learning how to breastfeed, because staring into the unblinking eye of the television for hours was making me feel crazy but not as crazy as staring into the darkness did.
Here's the thing.
Counting seconds, making pancakes, juicing ginger, running the shower for steam, and greasing up noses with vaseline does nothing for the cold.
Walking 4 miles so Bastian sleeps for an hour and serving shots of nyquil so Beard sleeps at night does nothing for the cold.
Reading Helen Oyeyemi aloud at three in the morning to my son while he nurses and stopping ever paragraph to make sure he's breathing does nothing for the cold.
The only thing that makes the cold go away is time.
And according to my mother, who is about three days ahead of us with this bug, we have another 24 hours before we see an improvement.
This is a ten day bitch y'all, so if you can dodge it, I highly recommend that you do.
I remain ineffectively active.
Measuring my days in increments of 600 seconds the way when I had an eating disorder I used to measure my day's worth of calories into 600 of them too.
Sure, they're old demons, but they're the friendly kind, the kind that won't mean I shed thirty pounds in two months and scare my family come Christmas.
I have always liked counting things.
I liked counting the steps from the school bus stop to my front door. I liked counting the number of times I brushed one side's worth of teeth and then doing the other side the same number of times so they'd be even.
It gives the world order and makes me feel that even though I have absolutely no control over what is happening, I am the master of managing my time.
As an adult, I can recognize when this stuff gets unhealthy. Like when I start totting up calories unconsciously, and I need to step back from the blender or the sink or the fridge and take a couple of deep breaths, and shake my head like it's an etch-a-sketch that can be reset.
There really is nothing I hate more than feeling like I can't help, especially when it's that i can't help people I love. I almost wish I was sick too because then I'd have the excuse of not being up to it, but somehow, I am not, and I am not helping either. I am merely shepherding the two physical bodies that are acting as hosts to this plague.
I use the term plague because I'm running out of synonyms for "sick" not because anyone is actually bleeding from their eyeballs.
Even writing this blog is part of the equation.
Bastian is taking his midmorning nurse. He seems to feel better today. The fluid is moving more easily out of his nasal passages. His activity levels are high. He's laughing and snuggling and remembering that he's also teething right now and attempting to shove handfuls of my hair in his mouth.
I should be working on my contracting project, catching up on emails and researching.
But I just need a minute more to gaze ahead at the activities that make up the day.
I've already made the coffee, the breakfast, the batch of vegan, wheat free, chocolate, zucchini muffins. I've walked the dog, done the dishes, fed the Beard his pancakes, played with the baby, and then settled him down on the boppy cushion and counted 600 seconds on one side.
Now I need a minute to refocus, to remind myself that there are ten and a half hours before I put Bastian down for bed tonight, and in those ten and a half hours, there are 63 increments of 600 seconds, and I will need to be doing something for each one or I will start to feel crazy and awful that everyone I love in this house is miserable, and there really is nothing I can do but kill time.
My name is Jess Mann, and I have a problem with things being beyond my control.
I don't know when it started...perhaps when I was eight and we moved away from everything that was familiar and normal to the other side of the entire world and never went back...
Not to knock my parents or anything. They did what they thought was right at the time. They did the best that they knew how to do. I often think they attribute every bad thing that's ever happened to our family to the "big move" but I wouldn't be who I am if I wasn't where I am, and there would be no Beard, no Bastian, nope. I'm very glad we left Australia exactly when and how we did.
That doesn't change the fact that it was devastating at the time, and I had absolutely no control over what was happening to me, my family, or my life.
So I guess I save a few bucks on therapy or something?
I know for a fact that it doesn't take an earth shattering event to give people control issues. I know tons of people with relatively delightful, mundane lives, who are constantly anxious and controlling to the point where it has interfered with their everyday business. It's all about perspective and inclination. We all have coping mechanisms. Some of us like to be in charge, okay?
Right now my house is under quarantine.
Sometime last week, the dreaded summer cold made an entrance into my house, and both my boys are in the thick of it right now.
It's a doozy, so just skip it if you can.
The Beard first started feeling lousy on Tuesday morning. He complained of a headache, and over the course of the day, he kept saying he was super tired and achy.
Welcome to Sick City. Population: Us.
Since, through some psychotic miracle (I might have to chalk this one up to breastfeeding or some old pact with the devil I forgot about) I am the lone non-effluvia spewing family member. Of course this means, I have taken on the essential duties of nurse thing.
I cancelled my Saturday writing class and had to renegotiate when my current project is due for my contracting job. Let it never be said I don't have my priorities in order.
This means every day, since Wednesday has been a weird haze of activities with only echoes of the usual routines.
I make coffee (this is standard) and then I make soup and tea.
I walk the baby to sleep, feed the baby, dance/play/exhaust the baby because somehow, even while snotty and coughy and sneezy, he is also active as fuck.
I walk to the store and buy tissues and snacks because when we are sick we like treats. I say we, because even though I have yet to come down with this, I like any excuse to buy peanut m&ms.
I make the dinner and I do the dishes.
I cut lemons and grate ginger into hot water with gobs of honey.
I walk the dog, take the baby's temperature, hoover all the fluids out of the baby's nose, and then stay up with the baby when he's coughing and congested and can't nurse properly because his little nose is blocked, so we hoover it out again, and he screams and cries, and then we sleep a little more, before getting up and making the coffee again.
These are jobs i do gladly. I list them in my head and I shuffle and reorganize and prioritize them each day to make it feel as though I am contributing.
I pump breastmilk and count seconds in my head on each side. 600 seconds is ten minutes which means I can switch.
I started doing this when Bastian and I were first learning how to breastfeed, because staring into the unblinking eye of the television for hours was making me feel crazy but not as crazy as staring into the darkness did.
Here's the thing.
Counting seconds, making pancakes, juicing ginger, running the shower for steam, and greasing up noses with vaseline does nothing for the cold.
Walking 4 miles so Bastian sleeps for an hour and serving shots of nyquil so Beard sleeps at night does nothing for the cold.
Reading Helen Oyeyemi aloud at three in the morning to my son while he nurses and stopping ever paragraph to make sure he's breathing does nothing for the cold.
The only thing that makes the cold go away is time.
And according to my mother, who is about three days ahead of us with this bug, we have another 24 hours before we see an improvement.
This is a ten day bitch y'all, so if you can dodge it, I highly recommend that you do.
I remain ineffectively active.
Measuring my days in increments of 600 seconds the way when I had an eating disorder I used to measure my day's worth of calories into 600 of them too.
Sure, they're old demons, but they're the friendly kind, the kind that won't mean I shed thirty pounds in two months and scare my family come Christmas.
I have always liked counting things.
I liked counting the steps from the school bus stop to my front door. I liked counting the number of times I brushed one side's worth of teeth and then doing the other side the same number of times so they'd be even.
It gives the world order and makes me feel that even though I have absolutely no control over what is happening, I am the master of managing my time.
As an adult, I can recognize when this stuff gets unhealthy. Like when I start totting up calories unconsciously, and I need to step back from the blender or the sink or the fridge and take a couple of deep breaths, and shake my head like it's an etch-a-sketch that can be reset.
There really is nothing I hate more than feeling like I can't help, especially when it's that i can't help people I love. I almost wish I was sick too because then I'd have the excuse of not being up to it, but somehow, I am not, and I am not helping either. I am merely shepherding the two physical bodies that are acting as hosts to this plague.
I use the term plague because I'm running out of synonyms for "sick" not because anyone is actually bleeding from their eyeballs.
Even writing this blog is part of the equation.
Bastian is taking his midmorning nurse. He seems to feel better today. The fluid is moving more easily out of his nasal passages. His activity levels are high. He's laughing and snuggling and remembering that he's also teething right now and attempting to shove handfuls of my hair in his mouth.
I should be working on my contracting project, catching up on emails and researching.
But I just need a minute more to gaze ahead at the activities that make up the day.
I've already made the coffee, the breakfast, the batch of vegan, wheat free, chocolate, zucchini muffins. I've walked the dog, done the dishes, fed the Beard his pancakes, played with the baby, and then settled him down on the boppy cushion and counted 600 seconds on one side.
Now I need a minute to refocus, to remind myself that there are ten and a half hours before I put Bastian down for bed tonight, and in those ten and a half hours, there are 63 increments of 600 seconds, and I will need to be doing something for each one or I will start to feel crazy and awful that everyone I love in this house is miserable, and there really is nothing I can do but kill time.
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