Inspired by Your Face(book)

I think we talk to ourselves and secretly hope that someone else is also listening.
– Kolys from TOBWOT, quoted on FaceBook

I’m a long-time journaler. Somewhere, packed in a box somewhere, there are old books – many with cheap, flimsy locks on them – detailing my daily life as a preteen, as a teen, and through my twenties. I have a paper journal even now, as well as maintaining multiple blogs and online journals. With online media, one expects to be read – by our friends and family, or by the Internet at large. We know we have an audience, and we hope they’re paying attention and not bored to tears by the ins and outs of our every day lives (or maybe that’s just me.

Funny thing is, though, what struck me about my husband’s comment wasn’t its relation to blogging. It resonated with the paper-journaler within me. After all, it’s no “secret,” as he puts it, that we want to be heard when we’re typing away at our screens. But paper journals are private. Aren’t they? Still, what aspiring writer hasn’t thought, at least occasionally, that their diaries might be found someday, long after they’re gone. (or, again, maybe that’s just me).

I write for myself, yes. I write to get my feelings outside of my head, and to thrill when I find just the right turn of phrase.  But I also write for my audience, real or perceived.  I write with the hope that someone will read my words and be affected by them.

I write because I hope someone is “listening.”

Photo credit

The Withdrawal Method to My Madness

Bottle of spilled Lexapro. Image from http://www.scumdoctor.com/

A few weeks back, after accidentally skipping a dose or two, I decided to try weaning myself off my trusted friend, Mr. Lex A. Pro. I was on a very low dose as it was – only 5 mg per day. So I did as my doctor had directed, taking my dose only every other day for 2 weeks. That ended … about a week ago, I believe. For the moment, I am med-free.

It’s been an interesting journey. My whole life, I’ve battled anxiety and occasional depression. It peaked after my son (now 18 months) was born, but I didn’t get the help I truly needed until 10 months ago when I finally decided medication was the answer.

I’d always resisted medication before that point having heard far too many horror stories, and just generally hating the idea that I might have to rely on medication to stabilize my emotions, possibly for the rest of my life. But when my postpartum depression/anxiety hadn’t faded by the time 8 months had passed, I couldn’t resist any longer. My relationship with my son and with my husband… and with myself… absolutely depended on it.

As it turned out, the medication was a godsend. I could sleep like a normal person, my temper was in check, and I could cope with day to day stressors without blowing them way out of proportion. I really liked the way I felt, and freely admitted I’d been wrong to resist so long.

Having said all that, I still don’t like the idea of being on the medication forever. IF it can be avoided. I suppose, in a way, my stopping is something of a trial for me. I want to find out whether or not I can manage my problems in a med-free manner, now that I’ve adjusted to motherhood and my life has attained its own (new) status quo.

So far, it hasn’t been terrible, but I definitely felt better on the Lexapro. My moods are less stable, I’m more on edge, and I’m staying up too late at night. If this is the reality of non-medicated me, I will likely return to Mr. Pro. Time will tell, however, whether the dizziness, the crankiness/irritability, the fatigue (which is likely related to…), the insomnia, and the generally heightened emotionality fades back to more manageable levels on its own, or continues as is. Right at the moment, it’s impossible to tell whether what I’m feeling is my own struggles with GAD, or just the lovely sense of withdrawal from my medication.

Stay tuned to find out where this road will take me.

Back, Forth, Oink Oink Oink

Sick Pig image from www.cuddlecards.com/ccpics/sick_pig1.gif

My 18-month son is a genius at sharing. Early this week, he came down with a sniffly, sneezy, clingy. whiny, unhappy little virus and a 102.5 degree fever. By a day and a half later, I had a scratchy throat. Waking up the next morning, I could barely move – which is a lot of fun when you’re home alone all day with a toddler, let me tell you. Aches, fever, still coughing, and just generally miserable. This was yesterday.

By afternoon, my husband had also started showing symptoms, and came home from work. We made a call to our doctor, who said that our symptoms sounded very much like swine flu. Yay.

So … off to the Urgent Care center we went, and the doctor there said it didn’t sound like the strain of flu that’s been going around. O convinced them to test him, at least, as he’s forbidden from working until they know whether or not our doctor’s suspicions are correct. Mind you, at the time of the appointment, none of us had fevers, and Buggie’s symptoms had largely subsided. She figured his illness had run its course, and therefore ours would soon follow.

Forward to today. Fevers haven’t returned, but Buggie’s symptoms have. His nose is runny again, and he’s been tantrumy and miserable. (Those who know our sweet little boy know that this is NOT his typical disposition.) O has been sacked out on the couch with body aches, a cough, and exhaustion (like me, yesterday). I’ve had waves of misery, alternating with waves of actually feeling almost human again. My nose is drippy (as in, has not really stopped at ALL since yesterday afternoon), my eyes are puffy, and I have a mild cough still. Last night, I was prepared to accept what the urgent care doc said, but when Buggie’s symptoms returned today … we’ll just say I’m less convinced.

We should know for sure by Monday, in any case. In the meantime, we’ve stocked up on groceries, canceled our weekend plans, and spent a lot of the day watching TV, reading … and being yelled at by a cranky toddler.

Hurry Up. No, Wait!

My husband and I are buying a house. This is the first house either of us have ever bought, so it’s a whole, brand new adventure.

Sale Pending sign from istockphoto.com

(In waiting.)

It feels like months ago that I received the e-mail notification about a house, forwarded it to Bear at work, and made an appointment to go see it. The day after we saw it, we submitted our initial offer, which was accepted fairly quickly. This all happened at the end of May/beginning of June, which really wasn’t that long ago, but it feels much longer.

Since that time, we’ve gone back and forth on the tiniest of details – (proposed) closing date, sellers’ concessions, etc. Each one has required its own set of initials from us and from the seller, until finally all the t’s were dotted and the i’s were crossed. Or something. Today, we finally (2 days from our 7 day deadline) were able to schedule the home inspection. Finally, the process is moving forward again.

Those of you who are not new to this process are probably groaning and rolling your eyes, remembering your own piles of paperwork and weeks of playing the “hurry up and wait” game.

I know it will all be worthwhile when we sign that final piece of paper and a set of keys are placed in our hands. I know that the first time I take Bug outside to play in our very own backyard, all the red tape that got us there will vanish into the ether.

And I know there will be other bumps along the way, both in the buying process and once we officially become homeowners.  Still, that knowledge doesn’t making the waiting game any more fun, nor me any less anxious to get the ball rolling.

The Secret Is in the Sauce

My son has a soybean allergy.  We haven’t yet gone through the rigamarole of allergy testing yet, though that comes soon, but trust me when I say that his body reacts poorly to soy.  Now that he is eating table foods pretty much exclusively (with the occasional exception of a toddler-meal soup here and there), this makes for some interesting challenges.  Grocery shopping takes longer now because I have to read labels carefully (note: the absence of the words “Allergens: soy,” does not necessarily mean soy is not an ingredient).  Some previously-loved foods have become absent from our cupboards because it’s easier to just avoid keeping them in the house, than to allow my husband I access to them but disallow them from Buggie.

However, the biggest challenge we’ve found centers around restaurant-eating.  Over the course of the past couple of weeks, O and I have started what we’d like to have become a tradition of Friday Night Dinners Out.  What used to be as simple as just making our minds up where we wanted to go now has a whole set of extra hoops to jump through because we also have to make sure the restaurant will have Bug-friendly foods.  We’ve lucked out both times we’ve gone recently.  And we learned that Red Robin actually gives out allergen information on all of their core menu items upon request.  Color me impressed!

Covered in non-soy spaghetti sauce.

On the flipside, however, I am having serious issues with the idea of soybean oil being used in, of all things, pizza/pasta sauces.  We wanted to take my mother out for an early Mother’s Day dinner on Saturday evening.  She wanted pizza and suggested Pizza Hut, figuring it to be reasonably kid-friendly.  My husband called them, and we were surprised to learn that there is not one single item on their menu that our son could eat.  Not only does every one of their different crusts contain soybean oil, but the same is true of each of their various sauces.  I have been making yuck-faces about this since O hung up the phone that evening.  When I make (or, more accurately, when O makes) sauce, there’s no oil in it at all.  Tomatoes, spices, water, etc.  Why would you need oil in sauce?

But even laying aside personal preferences, it’s frustrating to find situations like that.  We ended up at Friendly’s instead, which honestly wasn’t much better.  In their case, there is soybean oil in the butter they use (which to me sounds rather like they’re using margarine, rather than butter), which means … there is soy in almost all of their food as well.  Luckily their macaroni and cheese (pre-made, from Kraft) is soy-free, so Bug was able to eat.  But of course, I couldn’t order him a vegetable because those tend to be slathered in butter at restaurants.  So his dinner was macaroni and cheese with applesauce on the side.

As if it weren’t difficult enough to feed a toddler (because let’s face it – toddlers are picky by nature), and to find him something that isn’t absolute junk, we have this extra challenge.  It’s not the restaurants’ faults that my son has an allergy, and I can’t – and don’t – expect them to cater especially to him.  But it is frustrating.

And I still maintain that soybean oil in pizza sauce sounds gross.

Yes, I AM Proud

My husband, the U.S. citizen

As a high schooler, I really resented having to recite the Pledge of Allegience.  To me, those words we were speaking were a great idea, but they weren’t the reality of the country we actually lived in, in the 1990s.  To be honest, I don’t think my teenaged self really understood what we have as Americans.

We live in a country where we are free to speak, to dress however we like, to marry whatever race (and in five states now, whatever gender) we so choose.  Certainly those freedoms are imperfect – and it was that imperfection on which I used to lay my focus – but we have them.  To think otherwise is to really display one’s ignorance of the world outside our own backyard.

There are places in the world where I could be killed for speaking with any man who is not a relative.  Or for wearing the gym shorts and t-shirt I have on right now.  There are places where even the imperfect tolerance of other religions, races, orientations, etc. we have, simply do not exist.

It’s taken me years to realize what I have.  To understand that yes, I still need to keep fighting for the causes I believe in, but that I at least have the freedom to keep up that fight.  In this country of ours, we have hope.  We can dream, and we can make those dreams a reality.  And that, readers, is why the man up there in that picture is smiling.  He is one of us now.  And look how proud he is!

Coping Quiet

Buggie with his favorite "uncle"

This morning I woke up to startling news about a dear friend’s health.  It’s one of those situations which could be nothing, or could be very serious.  Only time (and likely a barrage of tests) will tell which it will be.  This man is the husband of one of my best friends, and has slowly become a friend of mine in his own right over the years.  He is also incredibly close to Buggie.

I told O about it as I was driving him to work today.  The rest of the drive passed in relative silence – a rarity around these parts, let me assure you.  When questioned, O said he was thinking about M.  It made me realize that I … mostly wasn’t.  Not because I don’t care, but because I do. That’s how I cope with things – I put them to the back of my mind until I can fully process how to cope with it.  I skip immediately into denial/distraction, moving along with life as if I hadn’t heard what I heard, until I can’t any longer.

My Gramma

This actually seems to be something of a family trait.  It’s not only a matter of self-preservation and pride, but also of strength.  There are a couple of us in the family – most notably myself and my Gramma – who have taken it upon ourselves to be The Strong Ones.  It isn’t a matter of stoicism, nor of hiding our emotions.  I’m absolutely no good at that; my face and eyes betray me, every time.  It’s just a matter of putting our own feelings on the back burner while others may need us to be strong.  For example, when my mother calls me with any kind of difficult news, I tend not to react right away.  I get through the phone call, hang up, and only then do the tears come.  She doesn’t need my pain to make hers all the worse.

Mind you, it’s not by any means a conscious decision.  Sometimes, I wish it didn’t work the way it does for me.  I would be able to heal faster, if I didn’t delay my pain.  I know this, but my brain seems to not be wired that way.  Instead, I grieve after the fact.  I panic when the danger has gone.  I cry when everyone else’s tears have dried.

“Hanging” on to Memories

Laundry seems a strange thing to be nostalgic about.  Yet there I was today, out in my backyard (by which I mean the postage-stamp-sized lot in back of the duplex in which I rent), hanging my first load(s) of laundry for this season, and remembering.

Buggie outside at 4 1/2 months

Last spring and summer when I would go outside, it took numerous trips.  I needed to get the laundry, a blanket, some toys, and then finally the baby.  I would put him on the blanket in the shade with his toys while I hung the laundry, and he would just stay there.  He would sometimes play with the toys, but he was also just content to watch the world go by around him.  He loved the change of scenery.  When the laundry was hung, the whole process was reversed – baby inside, then the blanket and toys.  (The laundry would stay put, obviously.)  In the spring, he was only just rolling over.  By summer, he could sit up, but crawling wouldn’t come for a while yet.

Me at 31 weeks pregnant

Let’s back up by another year, then.  Two summers ago, I was pregnant.  As the weather got warmer and warmer, I got bigger and bigger.  I remember the unique challenges in hanging maternity clothes because the seams don’t line up quite the same way as they do in regular clothes.  I remember the end of summer, when I received my first lot of hand-me-down baby clothes.  I washed them and hung those outside as well.  It made me smile to see those tiny garments on my clothesline.  Burpcloths, receiving blankets, and tiny, tiny little clothes.  We never had any “newborn” sizes, which was just fine.  At 8 pounds and 5 ounces and 21 inches long, Buggie would never have fit into them anyway.

Buggie at 16 months old

This year, I have neither a growing belly, nor a tiny little baby.  Now I have a toddler.  Today, he came outside with me again.  This time, we didn’t have the blanket, but we still had toys.  I didn’t have to carry him out to the backyard; he walked there himself.  I couldn’t just park him in the shade because he’s so very mobile, which meant being sure he was slathered with sunblock and wearing a hat.  Today, he kept me company as I hung up our clothes – his (which keep getting bigger!), his daddy’s, and my own.  He “helped” by taking the clothes out of the basket, and either handing them to me or (more often) dropping them on the ground next to it.  Once or  twice, he started to wander off, but mostly he stayed right nearby, finding his own amusements.

By next summer, I expect even more changes.  By then, we hope to have bought and moved into our own home.  Perhaps I’ll have returned to the workforce and Buggie will be in daycare.  Will we be expecting baby #2 then?  What changes will be shown on 2010’s clotheslines?

Read for Earth Day

It’s Earth Day. I have to admit, I hadn’t really given it much more than a passing thought this year. This may be a surprise for some of my readers, as I tend to be considered the Green one among my friends. But really, I don’t celebrate the Earth any more today than any other day.

Michael Recycle by Ellie Bethel

All that said, I did choose an Earth Day themed book to read to my son before his nap today. The book, Michael Recycle was a gift from his grandparents in Italy, and I hadn’t yet taken the time to read it to him. O and I both looked through it when it first arrived, but Buggie wasn’t really in a “read to me” stage at that time. Now, he loves books, and we read to him every day. So today, this was my choice. I’m sure that at 16 months, he doesn’t yet understand words like “recycle” and “sustainability,” but I want him to grow up with them. Books are an excellent way to achieve that.

Eco Babies Wear Green by Michelle Sinclair Colman

As such, I was thinking of other “green”-themed books we have in the house. For Buggie’s first birthday, he received a copy of Eco Babies Wear Green. It’s a board book, and is an amusing take on ecological concepts, as they pertain to children. For the most part, its humor is there for the parent or other reader. And if you’ve ever read to a young child, you know that board books can get monotonous, so humor is a nice touch.

Gaia Girls: Enter the Earth by Lee Welles

Now, if your young reader is old enough to start on chapter books, I heartily recommend the Gaia Girls series. At present, there are three books, with a fourth due sometime this year, according to their website. So far, I’ve only read the first, but I was very impressed. It’s written for the YA audience, but even as an adult, I found it enjoyable. I’ve no doubt that the rest of the series is just as good.

Take a few minutes today – with your child, or on your own – to pick up a book, and to learn a little bit about the Earth.

Feeling Like a Grown-up

(not our actual car)

In 2004, my husband and I bought our first “real” car. It was actually the third car we owned together – the first we bought from a guy down the street for $600, and the second was given to us by O’s brother. Our current car, a Subaru Outback sedan, was our first experience with going to a dealership, taking test drives, getting financing, and eventually coming home with a shiny new-to-us vehicle.

Throughout the whole experience, I remembered going to car dealerships (and being bored to tears!) with my parents, when I was a child. It’s rather surreal to do things for yourself that you remember your parents doing when you were a child. It really hit me then (at age 28) – I was a grown-up, at least in one way.

one of the houses we looked at

This year, O and I started shopping for houses. That, too, brought back memories of trips with my parents to view homes. Doing it myself, though, was overwhelming and more than a little terrifying. Somehow it was a lot less scary dealing with cars than with houses. Perhaps because instead of the 5-figures of debt that a car purchase brings, we were looking at going for 6. Six-figure sums are pretty intimidating to think about! Besides, we were choosing the place where our son would grow up, thereby reminding me of all the responsibilities in my life. So again, now at 33 years of age, I was becoming a grown-up in a whole new way.

People ask me sometimes what I want to be when I “grow up,” and I jokingly respond that I don’t necessarily plan to grow up at all. Those who know my family well know that we all tend to stay pretty young-at-heart well into our golden years. I’ve gotten married (twice), become a mother, graduated from college. I’ve made life-changing decisions, and moved way from the area that was my home for nearly 26 years. I know what I want my career to be, and I am taking steps in that direction. I’m the one who generally handles our finances, and I am very responsible with our spending.

Somewhere along the line, when I wasn’t looking, I think I actually did become a Grown-up. In all the ways that count.