Blurts, Flirts and Desserts

Blurts: I have two types of “disruptive” students. The blurters tend to be well-meaning. They have something that comes to mind and they say it, without much thinking about the context of whether their comment is appropriate (during lecture) or inappropriate (during a shy person’s oral report). And blurting doesn’t just happen with their mouth…I have several students who also blurt with their bodies. They get up, mill around, pick up their guitar and begin strumming a little tune. For the most part, I recognize that learning styles come in all types, and that students, especially teenage boys, can’t be cooped up in their seat for too long. Though, this Tourettes like activity is often distracting for my more introverted students, and still needs to be appropriate. I appreciate that my students feel free to express themselves, but yelling “Fire” in a crowded theater is dangerous AND annoying. So, how can I help my word-vomit and body-blurters have a little more…self-control?

Flirts: Mah baby likes to flirt, that is, when he’s not feeling stranger danger. He definitely doesn’t discriminate based on gender, either. He equally gives doe eyes to the men AND the ladies. Though he doesn’t seem to be a huge fan of Trader Joe’s or Costco cashiers talking to him while he sits in his seat in the cart. But he saves his special flirts for his mama. And I’ve been enjoying those open mouth laughing kisses he gives on my cheeks!

Desserts: After almost 1.5 years in our house, we officially met our next door neighbor. She was helping her sister move, and brought a few leftover treats by. Yay for lemon bars and raspberry/oatmeal bars! It was nice to have an actual name to the “hi howareya?” that I’ve thrown across the fence or in passing to her husband while we have tried to round up our escaped pooch. I’m thinking of reciprocating the desserts with a sweet bottle of wine and thank-you card, but have yet to muster the energy to walk across our tiny lawn to give it to them. Because this is Seattle, I do not feel weird that my neighbor waited 1.5 years to meet me…I’m just glad she stopped by at all. Because, while we are known to be surfacely friendly (saying ‘hi’ and nodding on the street), to actually go out of our way is a pretty huge deal!

Speaking of desserts, since beginning again in the world of offices, I have noticed a strange fascination with chocolate. While I have somehow eaten my own packed lunch for the past 6 weeks, I have also begun drinking more coffee (an excuse to get out of the office) and eating more chocolate during lunchtime. Gah!

Sweet dreams ya’ll!

Grinch No More: A Mama story

Talk about heart growing four sizes in the past 9.5 months. Seriously. While I wasn’t necessarily always a hard-hearted grinchy type person, I rarely batted an eye at sad stories in the news or books or movies. In fact, there was a time that I prided myself on never cryting during movies (especially not during Titanic, because WE ALL SAW THAT COMING, since, it was, based on history, after all). At one point I even felt that crying could only be accomplished when reading a few key essays from Chicken Soup for the Soul, cheesy, I know. Perhaps my grinchiness was actually due to the fact that I felt so much sadness (depression?) inside, that if I let myself spontaneously cry, I felt as though I might never stop crying, and I’d still be sitting in my childhood bedroom sobbing, as a 30something adult (because, as a teen, that was as far as I could really imagine).

But since Potamus came bursting onto the scene, breaking down all of my heart-walls, I have actually found myself drawn to sadness…not as much in a must-have-catharsis-because-my-sadness-is-so-bottled-up way, but more of a genuine curiosity in relating and sitting and mulling over the place this emotion has in the world, as well as working on boundaries of sitting with sadness and feeling other people’s sadness through empathy, but also not carrying their burden inside myself, because I have my own sadness, and their sadness is not mine to carry.

As I was perusing my favori Parent Section of Huffington Post, I came across an article entitled: Lots of Tears With Less Than a Few Months to Live, where a woman writes about her experience blogging, with stage IV breast cancer, with only a few months to live…as a mother of a sweet girl Niomi.

I haven’t ventured to her blog, as the article left me struck with sadness, and my boundary is to only go as far as I feel like I can still keep my life-preserver and leave the sadness when I feel like I am drowning.

Two quotes struck me:

I will never get over my fears of not being there for Niomi as that is what truly scares me to death, but until the day comes, I will live each day to the fullest. I will instill in her the most valuable lessons I can. I will teach her to be strong, to give her advice through letters, through videos and even through our little talks while she’s falling asleep at night. But for now, we live day by day and that takes my fears away.

and

Can you believe I won’t know the season finale of Grey’s Anatomy, Private Practice and Parenthood? UGH. Now, that sucks. Hopefully they know these things in Heaven.

Initially I was a little embarassed about admitting that the sadness of missing a TV show, but it was so refreshingly honest and real and a great metaphor for missing all those little, mundane, real moments that we take for granted. Of course, as I go home and watch our DVR’d episode of Parenthood, tonight, with Boof, I will think of this woman who is dying of the same cancer that the character Kristina is diagnosed with.

But most gut-wrenching, is her explanation of how she is going to live moment-to-moment with her daughter. While hopefully no cancer is looming on my horizon, I got to thinking about the loss of mother, from a child’s or infant’s perspective. Does Niomi understand what is about to happen in the very-near future? Does she see and experience these moment-to-moments with her mama in a way that will stick with her somatically and emotionally until she is a very old woman?

Before Potamus, I believed that if I died, people would simply go on. I often wondered about what it would be like to simply cease to exist (not so much in a suicidal way). And I know, with my head, that Potamus would go on…everyone does, in their own way, but how can I go on?

Maybe that’s a weird statement. And maybe it’s selfish, but I wonder…if I was dying, how would I feel about going on without seeing Potamus grow up? I would be sad that he would grow up without me, but I think much of my sadness is on my end, around not wanting to miss his milestone moments.

 

Thoughts?

Melancholy Monday

When I was in my younger twenties, I had less of an understanding of my issues of anxiety/OCD/depression and how it related to my career. Initially the anxiety pushed me to excel, be early all the time, but then there was a certain crash, where I felt unable to control myself. My early-to-work anxiety left me sitting in my car, weeping, writing in my journal, and listening to music, all in an effort to muster the strength to actually go to work. This pattern of thoughts/feelings ruling my actions actually became debilitating for awhile. I remember calling in sick from anxiety one day, and then sick again and again and again for four whole days because all I could muster was to putz around the house. It’s led to passive-aggressive sneaking around behavior at work, lying to my supervisor and generally acting like how I would imagine a young child would act when they are trying to get around their parents’ rules.

But I’ve come a long way since then. When I’m on medication, that has helped. I’ve done more introspection and understanding of myself and emotions and on days, like today, where melancholy rules, I still force myself to get out of bed, drive across the I-90 bridge in the not-quite-yet-sunrise, and walk into work. That’s where I am today, beginning my workday, with my emotions feeling raw and tender for no discernable reason (though leaving Potamus snuggled up with daddy certainly feels like that could be a starting point.)

I know that once I get in the swing of things this morning I will be okay, but for the moment, I cannot seem to shake the blues.

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In other news, Potamus is a healthy 20lbs and 27 inches long…which initially concerned me because he hasn’t gained weight since his last apt (well, it has actually felt like he gained weight, and then lost it), but the pediatrician said it was totally normal and he is height/weight proportionate and that all his moving around has caused the slimming down. When asked about his reverse cycling, the pediatrician laughed and said that he was “sorry” for me, but that the baby is getting what he needs and is totally healthy. He was also very proud of my husband’s efforts to get breastmilk into Potamus in creative methods, like mixing with yogurt or using a clean Coke can, etc. What I found to be most fun, though, was that he is a dad of 4 and was totally pro co-sleeping. It was actually his suggestion for us, since Potamus doesn’t sleep longer than 2 hours at night, even telling Boof that he and his wife co-slept/bed-shared with their 4 kids. Awesome! Not many pediatricians would be so honest, especially since it is discouraged by the APA!

Loss

It seems as though the universe is trying to teach me about non-attachment. I don’t consider myself to be that sentimental of a person, but when asked what (non-people) items I would save from a house-fire, I am certain to include photo-albums and the journals I’ve been writing since I was 14. Everything else could be replaced, but those things feel priceless to me. So imagine my surprise, and shock, and horror, and sadness when I change out my SD card on my camera, put the filled one in my wallet to later transfer to a safe place, only to find that somewhere in the transfer my wallet has fallen open and my SD card is missing.

Big deep breaths.

While it wasn’t the SD card holding the pictures right after Potamus was born, it did hold months 4-7 and if you know me in real life (or on facebook) you would know that SD card held over 5,000 photos of my sweet little cherub that are now…gone.

Well, Boof tries to console me that they really aren’t gone, not all of them at least, thanks to the handy Facebook photo archives and random hard-drive backups…but all of the pictures in high quality are gone.

When I realized this happened, I tried to not freak out. Being able to still see many of those photos online is okay, it means that I can still see them, but the loss of those digital “negatives” is pretty heart-breaking to me.

And then, my backup hardrive went kaput. Yeah. Not only did I lose all of those photos that I had backed up, (some still saved on Boof’s computer), but random documents from the last few years. Things I don’t necessarily need, or even remember, but just knowing that they ARE NO LONGER THERE is sad and disconcerting to me.

But I survived that.

AND THEN our Scrummy-dog chewed up the memory stick that held ALL of my music. I had lost several CD’s after my trip to India, but still had them all this memory stick, which is now a mangled mess of plastic and metal. All of those songs. Thousands of songs. Gone. Now all of it can be replaced, as I could go to Amazon and just buy them all again, but still…the time and energy going into that is ridiculous.

So what am I supposed to learn in all of this? Is there some big mystery lesson or just really really crappy luck?

 

I’m Sensitive: A Musical Review

Oh Jewel, where have you been in the past few years? We need more of these songs:

I was thinking that I might fly today
Just to disprove all the things you say
It doesn’t take a talent to be mean
Your words can crush things that are unseen
So please be careful with me, I’m sensitive
And I’d like to stay that way.
You always tell me that is impossible
To be respected and be a girl
Why’s it gotta be so complicated?
Why you gotta tell me if I’m hated?
So please be careful with me, I’m sensitive
And I’d like to stay that way.
I was thinking that it might do some good
If we robbed the cynics and took all their food
That way what they believe will have taken place
And we’ll give it to anybody who has some faith
So please be careful with me, I’m sensitive
And I’d like to stay that way.
I have this theory that if we’re told we’re bad
Then that’s the only idea we’ll ever have
But maybe if we are surrounded in beauty
Someday we will become what we see
‘Cause anyone can start a conflict
It’s harder yet to disregard it
I’d rather see the world from another angle
We are everyday angels
Be careful with me ’cause I’d like to stay that way

When listening to this, my mind splits in two, like those picture-in-picture TV’s, and I see myself as a little girl. A shy girl, with anxiety and depression, who felt things deeply and lived in an almost dream-land. A little girl who tried valiantly to hold onto imagination and tenderness, but was misunderstood and hardened to overcompensate for the overactive conscience and empathy. It’s easy to read Highly Sensitive People information now and see myself in the descriptions. It’s easy to understand that empathy can be used, harnessed even, for a life of work in social services, but as a kid I was sensitive and it was trampled on.

The other screen is the view of my sweetly sensitive son, who reacts strongly to tone of voice, and who loves snuggling on both mama and dadda’s lap. There may be a day where he has to harden himself against portions of the world, but it is my wish, my intention, to surround him in beauty, to tell him how good he is, to remind him that he is an amazing human being, and to do my best to not crush his sense of self.

Godspeed: A Musical Review

In high school I had the pleasure of seeing The Dixie Chicks open at The Gorge for Tim McGraw. My dad was in radio, and he got us tickets that summer, where we sat in 100 degree sun on folding metal chairs feeling hoity toity (and sweltering) compared to the minions up on the grassy free-for-all seating. While we were there for Tim, I was blown away by The Dixie Chicks and have loved them ever since. One summer, at camp, we did a skit to “Earl’s Gotta Die,” which I still laugh about with my friend to this day. So driving down the road, listening to that aforementioned burned CD, I was startled to find a Dixie Chick song that I hadn’t heard before: Godspeed, another song that made me cry, with the lyrics that cut right through all of my warrior walls:

Dragon tales and the “water is wide”
Pirate’s sail and lost boys fly
Fish bite moonbeams every night
And I love you

Godspeed, little man
Sweet dreams, little man
Oh my love will fly to you each night on angels wings
Godspeed
Sweet dreams

The rocket racer’s all tuckered out
Superman’s in pajamas on the couch
Goodnight moon, will find the mouse
And I love you

Godspeed, little man
Sweet dreams, little man
Oh my love will fly to you each night on angels wings
Godspeed
Sweet dreams

God bless mommy and match box cars
God bless dad and thanks for the stars
God hears “Amen,” wherever we are
And I love you

Godspeed, little man
Sweet dreams, little man
Oh my love will fly to you each night on angels wings
Godspeed
Godspeed
Godspeed
Sweet dreams

The imagery takes me forward twenty something years, imaging myself dancing with Potamus at his wedding. I’m somehow both a young mother and an old mother at the same time, both recognizing the sweetness of the moment now, where I breathe in his fading baby smell as he sleeps, and aching for the stillness of his brand-newborn days. I project myself into the future, twenty, thirty, years, with maybe a bigger pouchy stomach, but an even more tender heart from the millions of moments of mother-love that will change me. And I imagine it just being Boof and I in the house again, Scummy the dog long dead, Potamus grown with a partner of his own, maybe children or dogs or neither, and I miss this moment, the one I’m in right now.

Godspeed little Potamus.
Sweet dreams little Potamus.

 

I Love You Sweet Baby: A Musical Review

Since becoming a mother, I’ve let so many of my walls come down. In years past I would fight off feelings of sentimentality that might result in tears, but now I find myself rushing headlong into sappy moments. Now that I have been consistently commuting in the mornings, I have been trying to find alternatives to the lame morning shows full of prank calls and celebrity gossip. My favorite news station doesn’t have its morning show on until 9, well after I’ve already arrived at my office, so I’ve begun to dig through some music and came across a CD that a graduate-school friend burned me for my baby shower. The first track:  Kimya Dawson’s I love You Sweet baby, which promptly made me burst into tears and smear my freshly applied mascara. Here are the lyrics:

“I Love You Sweet Baby”

The first thing in our list of things to do
Is to wake up right next to you
Second thing that we have planned
Is to kiss both of your handsThird thing that we’ll do today
Is look you in the eye and say
I love you sweet baby, I love you sweet baby
I love you more than anythingThen we’re gonna change you
Then we’re gonna feed you
Then we’re both play peek-a-boo
Then we’re gonna read to you

Then you have more milk and have some water
And we’ll smile at you and tell you we’re so glad that you’re our daughter
Then you’ll fall asleep on daddy’s lap
We’ll watch MacGyver while you take a nap

When you wake up we have more plans
Say good morning baby and kiss your hands
Then you’re gonna make a pee
In your little green potty

Then we’re gonna eat our lunch
Mash apricots for you to munch
Then you’re gonna nurse again
Then we’re gonna call our friends

Then we’ll dump out all your toys
Singin’, dancing, make some noise
Then we’re gonna take a walk
Down the street to the park

We’ll play on the see-saw, play on the slide
You’ll get tired and rub your eyes
Then we’ll go home for more nursing and sleeping
Bouncing and nursing and waking and peeing
Crawling and bouncing and dancing and hitting
Nursing and peeing and kisses and seeing

You’re an amazing human being
You’re an amazing human being
You’re an amazing human being
You’re an amazing human being

Then we’ll all cuddle in our bed
You’ll nurse to sleep, we’ll kiss your head
Good night sweet baby, I love you sweet baby
I love you more than anything
Good night sweet baby, I love you sweet baby
I love you more than anything

The first thing in our list of things to do
Is to wake up right next to you
Second thing that we have planned
Is to kiss both of your hands

Third thing that we’ll do today
Is look you in the eye and say
I love you sweet baby, I love you sweet baby
I love you more than anything

I love you sweet baby, I love you sweet baby
I love you more than anything
I love you sweet baby, I love you sweet baby
I love you more than anything

I love that this song references nursing, that it recognizes and names the fact that babies/toddlers/preschoolers/little kids/children/teenagers are all amazing human being

, and ends with the lyrics “I love you more than anything.” . Potamus isn’t amazing because he DOES something special, he is an amazing human being just for being him.

Sibling Rivalry

When strangers ask me how many brothers and sisters I have, I usually have to pause, and think before answering. If it’s just the run-of-the-mill stranger, who I won’t see again and the answer “two” will suffice my conscience, I go with that. If it’s someone I think I might remotely run into again, who might remember my answer of “two,” and then question me about why I am suddenly talking about ‘my little sisters,” or, “my other brother,” I have to answer more truthfully, which is more of a mouthful than a number. There are stories and backstories to my answer, which makes things complicated. On a good day, I have six, though two I almost always claim, since I was raised with them, despite the fact that we share zero DNA, two “halfs” as I refer to them, since that denotes the fact that we do not share the same father, and two “littles,” because thats what they were to me when I met them: 4 and 8…little sisters.

Sibling relationships are complicated.
Adoption makes that even more complicated.

I was in graduate school when I found my sibling’s families. My sister is lucky enough to be born in a state that allows her easy access to her Original Birth Certificate (you know, the one that’s historically true, and lists the vagina she came out of, and not the made up one that she carries identifying her as being my sister by blood). Once she got that certificate in the mail she had a last name and my sleuthing dug up an old Classmates.com account and voila, she was in contact with her mother. And her sister. Or half sister. I’m not sure how she classifies it, now.

My brother wasn’t so lucky as he was born in the same locked-down version of Washington State law that doesn’t allow us access to our own medical and historical documents without having our parent’s consent (though how the fuck we get the consent when we don’t know who these people are is beyond me). We did have first names, though, and the information that they were married, or at least HAD been married at some time. 24 hours of hardcore internet searching, cross-referencing and examining birthdates and address records, led me to his parents. They are married. One older half brother. Two younger full sisters.

The English language doesn’t have words or names for my brother’s sister. No, she’s not my sister-in-law, I told someone one time. She’s my brother’s sister. Or my sister’s sister. Funnier yet is when I talk about my sister’s mother, a lovely woman, who I got to meet one spring day at my parent’s house.

Confused yet? Cause I sure am…

It’s strange enough that I have to always explain that, yes I have 2 moms and 2 dads, no they aren’t step-parents, and no they aren’t gay, either. I have between 2 and 6 siblings, and my siblings have siblings, and I don’t have a name for that, or a name for my sibling’s parents, either.

So I was talking to my sister Poochie this week, and she was telling me her excitement and anxiety about going down to see her family in Oregon. That she was walking Hood to Coast with them, her mother, and grandmother, and aunts and cousin and her sister. And that she was excited because “all the girls” were gonna be in the same van.

But I would not be in that van.

And I felt sad.

Left out.

Not intentionally, or like I even want to be a part of her family in that way, but because she and I weren’t doing something together. That I had to share, and sharing is hard, and I wanted to say mean things like “my son is cuter than your other sister’s son,” but I held my tongue.

Her reunion with her family is what I’ve wanted and advocated and fiercely defended to outsiders and our parent’s alike. Same with my brother, though he is much more private about his encounters wiht a fully functioning biological set of family, though I am often startled when pictures pop up unsolicited online.

I am jealous.

It’s not that I want their other lives, but I sometimes long for it to not be so fucking complicated.
Mostly I just kinda wish I was wearing pink sneakers and walking to the ocean with my sister.

It started as self-care…

As part of my decision to buck up my self-care regimin, I have begun to re-read one of my favorite books: Trauma Stewardship. Reading this in not just a backup justincaseidon’tgetthejobthatireallywant anxiety push, but because it’s good and important to take care of myself ESPECIALLY since I have a young one and still want to work with at-risk youth (even if it means I don’t want to do CRISIS work anymore).

I saw the author, Laura van Dernoot Lipsky, in a workshop a few years ago, and found the material to be AMAZING, like aloe vera to a nasty sunburn. So I picked it up, and one of the first things that stood out to me was:

There is a Native American teaching that babies come into the world knowing all that they will need for the rest of their lifetimes-but the challenges of living in our strained, cofnusing world make them forget their innate wisdom. They spend their entire lives trying to remember what they once knew.

This quote stopped me in my tracks. While I had read it before, and even read up and believe in past lives and lives between lives (aka, the soul realm), it really hit me in a different way this time…because of Potamus. He is such a kind and sweet and loving soul. Yesterday I yelled at Boof on the phone, not because I was angry, but because his phone wasn’t working right and he couldn’t hear me. Potamus started crying, like a hurt crying, but like a combination hurt/scared cry and he looked at me like, “what is that noise coming out of your mouth?!”

In a flash I flew back in time to all those conversations my mother would have about my using that tone of voice and how I just couldn’t understand what she meant (or I didn’t want to understand).

But in another instance, today, when trying to get my mother-in-law’s attention in the other room, I yelled again and BAM we had the same crying uncontrollably episode as the day before.

Hmm.

So here he is, sweet Potamus, born with everything he needs to know to navigate the world. All the trust and sweetness and love and innocence. And the world is going to try and take that away from him, and it will be hard and beautiful all the same. But I am learning something…my child is affected by moods…very much so. I’m trying to get ahead of this burnout so that I can learn to deal, in whatever situation I’m in, so that I can calmly, peaceably deal with my baby’s needs.

 

Burnout

There’s a clinical term for the rage I fee: secondary trauma…vicarious trauma…burnout. Try to explain that rage, funneled into one angry outburst of angry “stop screaming!” at my teething/growing/over-stimulated baby tonight.

Not my finest mother-moment.

Sure there are many contributing factors to this rage: Boof being out of work due to his own dumbass mistakes and taking this intensive 10 week class while also working for the Mariners when they are at home (currently there tonight, yes, part of my frustration), and a family caregiver who loves Potamus dearly, but hasn’t quite gotten into a very good rythym of watching him due to the up-and-down nature of my job. She’s gotten too comfortable, scheduling hair appointments one day, nail appointments another, and while I’ve been okay for the most part, I am actually getting paid a salary, even if my work is slow, things come up and Potamus needs to be minded, and I can’t be the village raising my child. And as my clients get better, I seem to be getting worse, but then I beat myself up about wanting a new job.

Today I consulted with a dear friend, former colleague, and former classmate. She made me laugh when she said, “oh, you aren’t supposed to be affected by seeing suicidal kids everyday? by seeing the worst of the worst situations?” I do see the seedy underbelly of mental health and family life. I impart wisdom and coping skills and education to my clients, and am losing just a little bit of myself in each of these exchanges. I am having  a hard time stopping the slow leakage and its effecting me deeply.

The look on Potamus’ face when I yelled at him, was heartbreaking. While this isn’t my first time, when he was only a few weeks old, he reacted out of what seemed to be simply instinct. Tonight there was awareness. There was this flitting look on his face that seemed to say (before he broke out in even more tears) “but this is my mom who is yelling, why? why?”

After 30 more minutes of nursing/rocking/stroking of sweet baby hair, he was finally asleep. Will he wake up with forgiveness? Will I?