A Mother's Musings and Mumblings

If you Google “SCA” you come up with the home page for the Society for Creative Anachronism. That’s all well and good but today I’d like to talk to you about the entity known as Selective Compulsive Antagonism. This is where some things and people persistently and compulsively piss me off to the point of requiring a blog entry just to let off steam. In this particular case, we can also use the acronym “SCA” to represent the things that are causing a disturbance in my cognitive-emotional state today.

And so it begins.

S

“S” is for Streptococcal Pharyngitis a.k.a. Strep Throat. Thing 1 didn’t sleep well last night at her father’s house. He gave her Tylenol this morning and brought her to school. When I saw her after her graduation ceremony she looked like something I picked up out of the yard and had a fever. She told me then that she’d had a sore throat since yesterday. Her father’s reply? “I have Tylenol in the van, we should give her more.”

Hmmm…..here’s a crazy idea: Why don’t we take her to the doctor while we still have access to a car and someone to drive? Or did you really think that giving her to me, on a Friday, when I can’t drive and she has a soccer tournament this weekend is a great idea?

I suppose the good news is that after 10 years of marriage he’s still trained to listen to me – particularly when it’s related to medicine or the girls. And this was both. Sure enough the rapid strep was positive and we stopped to get her antibiotic on the way home. That was six hours ago (another “S”) and she’s still asleep. I just woke her up for her second dose and she fell right back asleep.

Nah. She wasn’t sick. I just overreact.

C

“C” is for that word that I don’t like to say and won’t write here but should be used and preceded by “crusty” and “old” when referencing the Rat Terrier. Yup. She’s on my last nerve. I don’t know what’s going on over there but I know that the weekend getaway they had planned has been canceled. I know that she’s bought a house and was to be moving out in July but is now in the process of putting all her things into storage. I know that she and WF are still playing both sides of Crazy Street (another “C”). And none of that excuses the latest.

Last night we were having a nice dinner with a nice conversation about the different types of witches spawned by a question about the origins of a particular Reclaiming chant. In the middle of this, Thing 2 pipes up with “RT doesn’t want me to believe in this.”

Full stop.

Excuse me?

“RT doesn’t want me to believe in this. She wants me to grow up to be a smart, thoughtful young lady who doesn’t believe in nonsense.”

I took a time out. It didn’t help. Thing 1 attempted to dig her nails into my arm deep enough to quiet me. It didn’t help. I tried to be rational. Maybe I was but I’ll confess that the next words out of my mouth were not very flattering to the dominant religion of my culture. Let’s just say that people who live in glass houses should not throw stones and that any of us with religious convictions live in some form of glass dwelling or another. Viewed from the outside, any of our beliefs could be seen as nonsense and I severely resent the implication that if one is “smart” or “thoughtful” that it would lead you to one belief structure over another. It’s called “faith” for a reason, folks. Accept that and move on.

But wait. There’s more. Isn’t there always? Today when I saw Thing 2 she was wearing a pair of dangle earrings. The kind I told her she couldn’t wear until she turned 10. The kind I told her she and I would make for her when she was old enough to wear them. RT bought her a pair. Under any other set of circumstances I would chalk this up to just a simple misunderstanding. She wanted to do a good thing and didn’t realize that this was something that was important to me. But not with the RT. Nope. I don’t have it in me to give her the benefit of the doubt.

A

“A” is for Annoyed. Lame, I know. But if you’re still reading you’re just ready for this to be over with anyway. I’m globally irritated right now. PMS (another lovely, if over-used, acronym) is certainly playing a leading role in that irritation but there are some worthy targets presenting themselves.

There’s a whole batch of people I feel the need to avoid hearing anything about. They are all mothers who seem to believe that the fathers of their children are unnecessary extensions of a necessary wallet. Now I may do my share of whining and crying and even bitching about WF but when push comes to shove, he needs to be in the witchlets’ lives. They need him. He is part of who they are and his presence helps define their identity. They gain strength knowing that they have two parents who love them – not a mom and a child support check and some guy who shows up when it works for mom to have them gone and doesn’t show up when mom wants them to be there and do something. I know. I’m just jealous because I wish I had it so good. That I could just up and take my girls wherever I wanted, whenever I wanted and WF would just suck up and accept whatever scraps I offered him. Yeah. That sounds like best interests of the children to me.

I suppose there are more, and I could go on, but that would be giving energy to the emotional vampires. So instead I’ll hang up the virtual garlic next and go crawl into a hot bath with a good book and some soft music. And what makes me think I deserve such treatment? Well, because I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me!

What do you call an adrenaline junkie with no adrenaline?

Me.

Seriously. My doctor told me to take some time off work. As in, disability leave for a few weeks. So yesterday was spent running and getting things done – kid stuff and work stuff and getting stuck without a ride stuff – you know, the usual. Today was the first day of being “off”. No, not that way. I’ve been “off” for years if you take that meaning. This refers to “off” work.

I don’t know if I can bring myself to actually type out the details of how little I got done or how long I slept. Personally, I think it’s a little embarrassing. But there you have it. What I did with my day. Or rather, what I didn’t do.

The conclusion I’m coming to is that my body was waiting for me to come to my senses in the same way that my doctor and everyone else was. I’ve been pushing myself so hard for so long that when I quit pushing everything falls into a state of glorious inertia. As it should be. The fact that I barely have a caffeine-withdrawal headache despite blowing off my three shot a day espresso addiction tells me that even my brain knows that there’s nothing left to be squeezed from my adrenal glands so why bother asking?

Sure, the crap is still there to deal with – Jackie is up to something – unless my spidy senses are failing me; Thing 1 has a soccer tournament this weekend, the forecast is for rain and I still can’t drive; BFF is still not speaking to me; the last day of school is tomorrow and witchlets are at two different summer camps next week; my house is still trashed and I’m still tired – but oddly I feel better able to look all of that squarely in the eye and say loudly and with renewed strength of conviction:

Meh.

I will do what I can and that will just have to be good enough for now. Believe me, I know there’s going to be backlash from that attitude, I can even suspect from whom, but there you have it.

Before I begin, allow me to take a moment for a public service announcement. There is no need to call the suicide hotline on my behalf. Yes, I’ve had those thoughts and no, I can’t go there. Something about messing with the witchlets for all eternity that bugs me. I just feel the need to say that because I know that’s the first question that would come to someone’s mind if I didn’t preempt it.

My bucket doesn’t runneth over, but only by virtue of the surface tension holding things in place. I swear, one more drop and she’s gonna blow! I have no capacity left and that bothers me.

This became all too clear to me over the weekend when a small amount of crap was lobbed at me and I just about lost it. I pulled the rug into the cave and rolled the rock over the opening to regroup and think about why I would have such a strong reaction to something so small.

With the air flow cut off it didn’t take long for my attention to turn to my bucket. There’s a lot in there, folks! I didn’t realize exactly how bad it was and I’m sure that no one else did, either. Or for that matter, the fact that about half the volume of the bucket is taken up by an issue that is rapidly turning to cement and isn’t going anywhere soon. My health issues – the one’s I’m not talking too much about IRL and venting about here only a bit – are really wearing on me more than I’ve admitted. I’m upset about the whole thing. Not driving is making me insane – I mean, y’all know how much I like asking for help. Having these “spells” makes me feel like I’m already insane. And trying not to think about it and put it out of my mind just isn’t working. So this single issue is filling about half of my capacity to cope without an end in sight.

Layer on top of that a healthy dose of work being a pain. Jackie is still at it and with me distracted by health and other issues the rate at which she can accumulate evidence of my incompetence is frightening. I know what needs to be done to neutralize the threat that she represents but with half my capacity dealing with health issues, I don’t have the time or energy to do it justice. And doing it half-assed would be a mistake.

Just for fun, let’s throw some more into the bucket. Without being able to drive, I’m no longer taking my turn in the car pool. So I spend less time with the witchlets. And I miss them. Particularly when you factor in that Thing 1 wanted me to take her bra shopping yesterday and WF gave me a window of 11:30 to 2 to do it where I had to pull her from a play date. Not what I’d envisioned for that particular right of passage but there you have it. Deal with it.

And my BFF has decided that she doesn’t like me anymore and gave me some bullshit excuse why not and now won’t talk to me at all. Much less to help me understand what the issue really is. I’m hurt and upset and feel like I’m back in the 8th grade but that’s what I’m stuck with. The trouble there is that she threw out another friend in the mix and so I’m hurt and upset for both of us. I’ve been sick about this for a week but there’s not a damn thing I can do.

Toss in a couple of little things like my house is a mess, the yard looks like wild grass land and dealing with the occasional random insecurity and I just have no capacity left to deal with one more thing. Like burnt toast. I think that would spiral me off the edge of sanity right now. And don’t even think about spilling milk. Not without handing me a handgun to put myself out of my misery.

As I said, I wouldn’t do those things so what will I do? I have to do something, and fast. If past experience is any indicator having no capacity to deal with upsets is a trigger for the car to break down. Or the plumbing. Or a window to break. So I have to free up some space in the bucket NOW.

The health stuff is not going away. I may as well resign myself to having that to contend with for a while and find a way to deal with half the capacity. Missing the witchlets isn’t going away, but anything I can do to find more time with them would be a bonus. What stops me is the transportation issue. The issue with my BFF isn’t going away but it isn’t going to get worse either. She wrote me off. The sooner I can just let that be and let her deal with her issues on her time, the sooner it will take up less space in my bucket. Work isn’t going away but it could take a holiday. And I think that may be the best plan yet.

But doesn’t that make me weak? I can’t deal with everything that Life is handing me – that’s weak. How can I look at myself in the mirror knowing that I can’t cope with Life?

The answer, my friends, is that I can deal with Life and I can do it without taking a break or asking for help.
 I just choose not to pay the price of doing that.

There’s a picture of me I remember vividly. I must have been about 6 or so and I was sitting in my favorite chair with my hair up in foam rollers all ready for bed. I was munching on chips and had my head cocked off to the left with a big smile on my face. I was happy. I was dealing with a lot that Life had handed me even at that age and I was still happy.

What’s different now? Why can’t I take everything now and still just be happy?

The answer is, when I was six, I didn’t know the cost of burying your troubles. Hel, I didn’t just bury them –
I stuffed them so deep into my unconscious mind that some of that “trouble” didn’t resurface until 30 years later. I’m not necessarily wiser now but I’m older and classical conditioning alone would dictate that I’ll avoid situations that cause me that much pain. I can’t afford to stuff things like that anymore. And if that means accepting that I won’t be happy for a bit or having to ask for help or take a break from something then that’s what I’ll have to do. Personally, I refuse to think of that as weak.

As I watched the witchlets leave for school this morning with the BFF in tow a random thought occurred to me:

We are raising a generation of flight attendants.

<ramble>
Yup. Totally random, all the time. That’s me. So welcome to flight WAL520 to Nowhere. Please fasten your seat belts low and tight across your laps as I expect that we’ll encounter more than a little turbulence on the way there. We understand that you have a choice of entertainment options and we’re happy that you’ve selected Witchlet Airlines to meet your recommended daily allowance of drivel. We apologize for any inconvenience but the beverage service today will be BYOB.
</ramble>

So there go the girls pulling their wheeled backpacks behind them, hair neatly pulled back with a sweater over one arm. I’ve seen that look in airports but it usually involved wearing a uniform and the “backpack” was smaller. And was actually a suitcase/overnight bag. These girls weren’t going anywhere overnight, this was just the stuff they needed for the day at school. And I’ve lifted the backpacks in question – the wheels aren’t just for giggles! These bags are heavy!

Now I’ll admit to being old but I cannot remember needing that much stuff for a day at school. The generation before me may have – at least if my parents’ stories about hauling stone tablets five miles uphill each way in two feet of snow are to be believed – but I never had to carry anything that heavy to school. Particularly elementary school! I mean, seriously folks, how much can you need in the fifth grade! For one day!

And let’s add another layer of silly onto this already illogical development. Aren’t we supposed to be an electronic society? Does “going paperless” ring a bell for anyone else? And I don’t mean the chime on the laser printer telling you that it’s out of paper – I meant the metaphorical bell of recognition. Fine. Go ahead. Check your PDA and see if you made a note of it. I’ll wait. If you don’t find it, try the Free Dictionary.

We live in a world that is virtually exploding with new information. There is simply more to know than we have capacity to learn in the time currently allotted to formal education. I see that in across the spectrum from elementary school to higher education. And it is exploding – this isn’t a past event – more information and knowledge is generated daily. Keeping up with any given field is challenging and gaining a broad AND current knowledge base is nearly impossible.

Given those circumstances it would seem that the best we could do for ourselves as a society is to focus our educational efforts at least as much on learning how to learn as on learning itself. Yes, there are basic facts that every child should know but they should also know how to determine the credibility of a source and triangulate information to determine how reliable it is. They should know how to approach a problem in such a way as to determine what knowledge or skills they need to solve it and where or how to acquire them.

I have yet to see this kind of meta-knowledge covered in the books and papers that fall out of the weighty backpacks that my little flight attendant wheels around with her. Rather we have an assortment of fact-filled books and worksheets. Now, I’m all for fact-filled books – anyone who has seen my house knows that – but is this really what little Witchets and their peers need to be expending their energy on? Carting around loads of facts that they should know how to find in 10 minutes or less anyway?

Maybe, and I’m going out on a limb here, maybe the kids should be sent home to work on more critical thinking problems that don’t come in a book. The kind of problem where you know what needs to be done but don’t know how to do it and have to figure out what you’ll need in order to implement your solution and then do it. The kind of problem that Thing 2 had the other day when she wanted to hang a bird house in the willow tree but the string wouldn’t support it and she couldn’t put it on the place where she stood to climb and it needed to be protected from the wind and gee, maybe the willow isn’t best because the dogs could get to the birds there. She had to do a lot of critical thinking there and it didn’t involve hauling a single book home. OK, maybe a better lesson plan for a first grader than for a fifth grader but I’ve got to believe that lugging 20 pounds of paper everywhere is just unnecessary.

I have a private confession to make and somehow a pubic space like a blog or a billboard seems just the place to make it. Why not? It’s public and yet strangely anonymous. Besides, I lack the good judgment to know if it’s an appropriate venue or not. And that was the confession. Now, for those of you who need clarification let’s peel this issue a bit, shall we?

While I’m otherwise a reasonably intelligent person (if you believe IQ tests) who functions at what society considers to be a fairly high level, I am socially retarded. I lack anything that resembles judgment or insight when it comes to interactions. I cannot read people or situations, social cues fall into the category of “background noise” and Goddess help me if someone expects me to actually function in a social setting in any way that might call attention to myself. The end result of this is that I’m an introvert who doesn’t talk much to people that I don’t know. If I don’t enforce that rule then I talk too much and violate all kinds of boundaries and get into all kinds of trouble. It’s a binary function for me with no middle ground. And it’s worse when I’m under stress – thus the isolationist approach to life.

As a reasonably intelligent person, I’ve obviously over-analyzed the situation’s causes. And, somewhere over the last 20-odd years I’ve worked out various solutions to various bits and pieces of the problem. For example I recently invited nine people over for a Cinco de Mayo potluck. It wasn’t much at all – the sort of thing that anyone else might have done without thinking twice about it – but for me it felt like an accomplishment. I have WF to thank for that but before him was Hanna. Hanna was my friend at university and I’ll never forget when I moved and she suggested that I have a “house warming” party. When she got done laughing and told me what that was, I fell in love with the idea. The only trouble was, I had to confess to her that I had no idea how to do such a thing.

When I was a kid, we never had anyone over to the house. OK, that’s a bit of an exaggeration – with the exception of my immediate family and my grandmother’s immediate family we never had anyone over to the house. I never had friends over – I went to their houses. At this point I don’t remember if it was forbidden or just discouraged but either way, it never happened. And by the time Hanna was talking me into a house warming party, I’d still never once invited anyone over to my residence for a social event. The simplest details – like how to invite them – were just out of the reach of my brain. Hanna literally had to walk me through the entire thing.

In retrospect, it’s amazing that I had a friend like that. I must have been the poor retarded kid that she took care of because social graces seemed to come so easily to her. For me, not so much. To this day I have to stop and remind myself that if someone asks “How are you?” it isn’t really a question. I can either act aloof and silent or open my mouth and disclose more than people wanted to know. And the line between “funny” and “disturbing” escapes me.

I grew up in a house where children were to be seen and not heard. This house was in a family where adults were given free reign to say or do anything they wanted without repercussion.  If something were “wrong” or “unacceptable” – up to and including illegal – it simply didn’t exist. You could see the police, hear the conversation, and watch them put him in the back of the car with handcuffs but the official story was “He did nothing wrong.” You could feel the pain, cower in fear and wake screaming every night but the official story was “He loves you.” We were socially isolated to protect the guilty and reading social cues was punished. Your own senses and interpretation of events was explicitly not to be trusted.

When you leave a prison nest like that and enter the ‘real’ world it takes time to learn to believe your own eyes and ears. Time to figure out how people are supposed to treat each other and what some of these words – “wrong”, “love” – really mean or at least what you want them to mean.

Or does it? There are days – days when I’m under stress and hanging on by a thread with a very small knot in it – when I wonder if this does just take time. Or maybe this is a developmental disability. The kind of thing that if you didn’t learn it as a child you’re never going to “get” it, not really. Maybe I’ll catch on enough to be in an integrated classroom with the other kids someday but I’ll still be the retarded kid sitting in the corner. The one who doesn’t answer right away when you talk to her because she’s got to stop and think about what you expect since intuitive knowing isn’t in her repertoire. The one who values her alone time more than oxygen itself because it is the one time when she doesn’t have to be constantly thinking about these things.

So let’s recap:

I’m fine. How are you today?

Yup, nothing for nearly a month then two entries in one day. What can I say? I figured it was only fair to let y’all know what the Neurologist had to say. Particularly since she is keeping me grounded (as in, no driving) for nearly another month and if I can’t drive I might just take up drinking heavily. So don’t bother calling……

Ultimately, the grounding is the biggest news. I’m grounded until further notice – which will be at least until the EEG can be done at the University and she sees me back with the results. I’m guessing that they’ll be drugs following that and that I’ll be grounded for a bit beyond that date but I’m hoping it won’t be too long after. Things start to get interesting once school is out for the summer and the witchlets need to get places. Right now there’s just the matter of I need to get to work and get groceries and generally keep from losing my mind thinking about the fact that I’m grounded.

So what does this have to do with her believing me? She believed me. Apparently there’s some odd place between a seizure and an aura that folks with migraines can find on a bad day. Her thoughts are that I’ve found it and paved a path there but that given the description we need to rule out seizures before we draw any conclusions. Thus the EEG.

Stay tuned. We’ll prove that I have a brain yet……..

When I was a kid, I had JRA. I suffered for years with it before a diagnosis was made and I finally started seeing a Rheumatologist and Physical Therapist. By that time, I was pretty firmly convinced that the whole thing was all in my head. As late as my 20s I remember sitting in the waiting room thinking that my Doc would laugh me out of the office and tell me that I was malingering even though my knees resembled hot, pink grapefruits. There was just something about being “sick” that my brain couldn’t accept. I suppose some of this goes right back to the way my family handled the “truth” about so many things – what I saw and experienced had little bearing on the recorded “truth”. So why should I believe the pain in my body to tell me that something was wrong?

And if the Doc had told me that there was nothing wrong, wouldn’t that have been a good thing? I mean, given a choice between illness and health, who wouldn’t choose health? Except that my lived experience was physical pain. Telling me that there was “nothing wrong” would only deny my experience – again. If there is nothing wrong, then what is the cause of the pain? Worse yet, what was the solution? Is telling me that there’s nothing wrong the same as telling me to just will the pain away?

Of course, there were more than a few times I tried that. I’d quit taking medications because I just refused to believe that there was anything wrong. If there was nothing wrong with anything else in my life that I experienced as being “bad” then why should I have to own the one problem that was exclusively mine? In short, if no one else had to live daily with any burden for what I saw then why should I have to take pills every day for something no one else could see? And every time I tried that logic I fell on my face. Literally. Out of bed, on my face, knees screaming in protest.

Somewhere in my 20s the JRA burned itself out and I only occasionally have trouble with my knees and hips – mostly from damage done from so many years of inflammation. I know there’s damage there because in a fit of frustration one day my Rheumatologist pulled my radiographs to show me where the joint spaces were abnormal and the bone density was too low. He did that because I told him about my fears. He told me that it was a common enough fear and when he showed me the films he pointed out, loudly, that there was no way I could have made that up.

So here I am making things up again. The last year has been scary and eventful and generally distressing in a variety of ways. I have a full punch card for the MRI scanner, battle scars from an LP that took more needles than the acupuncture treatments I tried first and weeks lost to drug-induced sleep. There’s a diagnosis, Intracranial Hypertension, but even that isn’t uniformly agreed on. There are symptoms, but no signs. In short – we have only my word and no observations to base much of my treatment on. Except for the LP, there’s really not much objective to go on.

Like my teen years, I take my pills everyday and it keeps the pain at bay. Mostly. But there are days it doesn’t. And now I’m having new symptoms. Not signs. This is different from JRA – there are no swollen joints to examine. This time the only thing to go on is my description of my own lived experience. The very lived experience that I’ve been taught to ignore and devalue and overwrite in favor of something more acceptable.

We don’t know what my pressure is, and Goddess help me that someone decides to take a needle to me and find out, and I appear to be having temporal lobe seizures. I say “appear” despite the fact that there is no appearance to them – only my description. And I am loathe to describe them because they sound insane. I wish I could ignore them – pretend them away and go about being like everyone else. But falling on my face doesn’t sound like fun and, unlike JRA, if I’m wrong I risk hurting more than myself.

In less than an hour, I’ll be seeing a Neurologist and I’ve been pacing the inside of my head all morning. I’m right back to being that kid, near tears sitting in the waiting room knowing that in just a few minutes the Rheumatologist is going to tell me that I am faking and that I’ll be stuck dealing with the pain alone. Because the pain is real to me.

My symptoms are real to me. The Neurologist may tell me there’s something wrong that’s causing them – and that would be good and bad. Good because I’d know but bad because there’s something wrong. Something flawed that I’ll have to treat and deal with everyday. Again. But the Neurologist may tell me that there’s nothing wrong. That would be good. Nothing wrong is always good. But then, why do I feel this way? If there’s nothing wrong, will I be left to feel this way forever? It’s worse than that, actually. I feel better now than I did before starting treatment for the IH. If we take that away will I have to just deal with the blinding headaches everyday?

But why shouldn’t I have to? Why should anyone believe my lived experience if I don’t believe it myself? So here I sit – scared that she’ll believe me and just as scared that she won’t.