Weaned
I know, I know. Extended nursing is weird. If you’d asked me about it before I had Noah I’d've been grossed out too, so it’s okay if you are. But I have to say that having done it now, it’s in my opinion really, really natural. I have a pretty good squick meter and this was not like that. It’s not about kids seeing boobies or whatever grown people like to make of it. It’s just about the move from umbilical cord to… ordering your own meal at the local Indian joint. :)
Still, I hadn’t intended to go almost to 3.5.
But, Noah and I have still been nursing up to the last week or so. Not a whole lot; a bit at bedtime and sometimes at 4 am. First I kept it up because after being apart all day it seemed a bit much to push. Then he went through the 2.5 stuff and I thought ok, we’ll wait for the charmed 3 year old period. But then after that I’ve been so whacked out and tired that it seemed easiest to just do what we’d been doing. Except after barium swallows and the like.
Anyways, with this latest thing, antibiotics, and thinking I might as well wean while on antibiotics in the hopes of not getting mastitis, I told Noah that we couldn’t nurse while I was taking the medicine, and that he’s also a big boy and the time for nursing is over now. He’d heard this last before and we’ve been talking for a long time about “someday, we won’t nurse any more.” I actually think I may have prolonged it that way because he sort of set his heels in about wanting it, at least, despite the odd night of forgetting about it.
So, we’re not nursing any more. We’re rocking and cuddling. And Noah is pretty sad about it, but is handling it okay (so far). It’s a big deal, but it’s not traumatic or insurmountable or any other thing. For him, he’s not quite ready to end. But, we are, and he’s ok.
I feel sad too, though, which surprised me a bit. It’s not the actual nursing which, ehn, I could take or leave. It’s the symbiosis or something; that last connection to my physical body being physically nourishing for him in some way. He’s on a trajectory that eventually leads far away from me and this is another step in that path.
I’m very glad I breastfed and recommend it highly. I think what I learned from extended nursing is that it doesn’t have to be all or nothing. For a year we’ve been on very low milk, short nurse once a day ish type thing and that seemed kind of rightish.
Although it did occur to me that if we have another one and that one wants to nurse as long, and I can keep it up (honest, the last few months it was just path of least resistence) that would be SEVEN YEARS of nursing. That’s a bit insane.
Desperate times, desperate measures
I’m home again today waiting for the pertussis culture. I’m trying not to spread the plague, plus, I don’t feel well. I’m “working,” but I’m also “freaked out that I’m going to lose my job.” In this economy there may be cuts and I’m not helping my cause with all this illness.
I am trying to be Zen about it still. But it’s not working. Instead I’m just all worked up that I Suck And The Corporation Will Fire Me.
~~
Even worse, last night we resorted to fast food (A&W actually). Carl had to drive me to the doctor’s and then to get the prescription because the coughing attacks I have are really bad, the kind where you can’t breathe and you throw up half the time. Which makes driving a little unsafe. If it were summer road conditions I might’ve tried it but in the winter, you can’t be that distracted.
So we went to get the ’script when he went to pick Noah up and we kind of ran out of evening in the way that you sometimes do when you are doing the daycare thing. And he was out of gas. And there’s a A&W at the gas station. So there you go, it wasn’t even a vaguely normal food like Subway (I’m scared of deli meats right now anyway).
Noah was thrilled about the fries but eventually ate a peanut butter sandwich instead of the burger, and since we were in the fridge getting the peanut butter, he had baby carrots too. Then I wondered why we hadn’t just made peanut butter sandwiches in the first place.
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The deli meat fear is a little unreasonable, I know. But during the listeria outbreak I read the Macleans article on how it’s so hard to eliminate and it grows on properly stored meat, even. It’s just put me off a category of easy food that isn’t that great for you anyway. When I’m healthy it’s not hard to make extra chicken or do a roast and slice that up for the times you want a quick protein like that. But right now I kind of do miss the capacity to roll deli meat up in a wrap and declare that the main course. Noah’s been wary of hummus lately, the tuna has mercury… there are solutions, but I’m out of creative juice.
Whine whine whine.
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I do have a kind of Puritan belief that illness is a moral failing and confronting that is hard. I am having a hard time with it. And I’m having a hard time with the idea that slowing down would help. It would, but I would have to make choices I don’t want to make. My response to problems is to speed up, not slow down. Except right now my body is making the choice for me.
I had a friend who used to say, after she would drink until she threw up, “thank you body for taking care of me when my brain did not.” This may be that. On the other hand, it may just be bad luck.
OR CANCER!!! Damn the ABC afterschool specials. I’ve been tested for cancer! I don’t have it!
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I know my boss is kind of upset with me too and I have a hard time in that space. I get frozen, especially when I’m sick. When I’m well I can throw my energy at getting past the mental block. Sometimes I wish I were one of those people who can do bad work and not care. Although I’m not sure anyone is really like that, underneath.
Midlife is when you realize you suck, and so does everyone else.
~~
Speaking of midlife, my doctor talked to me about All This - the thyroid, the anxiety, the constant slew of germy illnesses. Do you know what she said? She said her recommendation for right now is to put all that aside and start trying to have a baby as soon as I’m finished the antibiotics.
I was a little stunned. Okay I was very stunned. I couldn’t even write about it yesterday.
You do have to understand the relationship I have with my doctor - she’s been my doctor since I was about eight. She’s been through the depression, the sexual abuse revelations (and apologized for not catching the signs, although she had in my sister), the years of miscarriage, losing Emily, and she’s also Noah’s doctor. So when she says something weird like that, it’s not as left-field as you think.
But I was still floored. So I said: “WHAT???!!!”
And she said she mentioned it because I’m 38, and my mum went through menopause very early. And so, if we want to add to our family it might be something that is urgent.
And I’m like: okay, but I cannot make it through a week without feeling tired and anxious and sick. Does this sound like a good time to be getting pregnant?
And she said that so far there’s nothing I have that would be dangerous in pregnancy. So to think about it.
I’m just like - not this week. Holy crap.
United States of Tara
So I finally, since I’m sick as a dog this week (my whooping cough culture is on the way to the lab at this Very Moment!), tracked down an episode of the United States of Tara show to watch. I don’t have cable or Showtime, but this is maybe one of the few times I’m a bit sad about that. Because I love Toni Colette and if anyone’s going to do a multiple on TV, I’m kind of glad it’s her. And Diablo Cody is smart, and I like that.
So, predisposed for the show and I watched Episode 2.
I liked it. I’m actually kind of excited about it and hoping to order the DVD collection so that one day perhaps I can watch it with Noah. When he’s like, very very old.
So here’s what I liked: Tara, the multiple, is not a serial killer, nor a psychopathic superhero. These are really both good and unusual things in pop culture. I think Colette is doing an amazing job making the people (they use alters, which I recognize as necessary but am not super fond of) come alive in a fairly 3-d way. Their motivations are human, not alien, and although there’s a bit of overexaggeration, well… sometimes multiples do that to distinguish themselves. Tara&al get pretty much a pass from me from that perspective.
I like how the family reacts to the different characters - when Kate, the daughter, goes after Alice with filthy sexy language, it’s priceless. And I like the character of Max the husband, although I keep thinking “Aidan, is this who you ended up with after Carrie? Grow a pair, dude!”
I think the show’s producers and writers are doing a really good job walking the line between making being multiple too light, and making it too heavy. In the episode I saw anyway, there was no horrible trauma; no wailing to the universe about sexual abuse. It was more about the inherent dysfunction of the whole family and situation. I’m fairly impressed by that and I hope it continues (if you want a consultation, email me!)
I find the most fantastic aspect so far is how the town accepts, more or less, Tara and her people. When Alice walked into the school and introduced herself as Alice I just about had a coronary. Maybe I’m too old-school of a multiple but my god. That’s one thing I have trouble picturing happening with a “real” multiple.
Because unless you’re really really really narcissistic, that’s just not appropriate to do at your child’s school. It’s just not, any more than it is okay to offer drugs at a parent-teacher conference. Yes, that’s an opinionated statement. But I’ll stand by it. When you show up at your kid’s school, you’re not there to define yourself. You’re there in your role as a parent and you should damn well show up as your legal identity. You can still kick Stepford wife ass if you like though, and Alice did. I found that realistic too; if there’s one thing our system agrees on, it’s don’t mess with our kid.
And then there are the parts where this show hit my discomfort zone. I hope that it deals, eventually, with some of these issues. But I find Tara and her system force me to react as a multiple. This is a good thing in television, really. So here’s my reaction.
First of all, I don’t know any functional systems that over years of adjustment cannot find a way to communicate a little bit better than Tara’s system does. The total amnesia is good television, but bad, bad multiplicity. I understand that she’s been on meds and she’s readjusting, but I hope that this changes over time. The “family meeting to explain to Tara what happened when the alters were out” struck me as hopelessly codependent.
Tara’s system needs to learn to explain it to itself. The vast majority of functional multiples I know, which is the vast majority of multiples I know, are able to accomplish this. I’ll accept it as a plot device, but as far as getting it right goes - I don’t think this show is getting this totally right, at least not yet.
And secondly, I do think this show portrays some of the pitfalls I hope we don’t fall into as parents. And it makes it very uncomfortable (again, in a good way) to watch.
Here’s what I believe. I do believe in being real and not trying to lock everyone up and hide our differing opinions and points of view. But I also believe that above any need to know their parents’ hearts and souls, kids need to know first before all things that their parents are there for them. And if there is ever a reason to tone it the fuck down a little and not be “I’m Buck and I’m a dude,” it would be to not screw up your son. You know?
So when Alice prances into her 14 year old son’s room to ask him if he made pee pee in the bed, in a way that made it clear she wasn’t his mom, it bothered me. Or when she explained to her teenage daughter that “your mom loves you.” You have to own these things as a system, in my opinion, and if you don’t, you have to be quiet. When the son quietly went and put a towel down in his bed, it made me want to cry, for him.
And that’s not terrible in a tv show, really, because it kind of hit something on the head. But oh man. It is hard to watch. And I suppose because there just aren’t enough multiples out there in television I do worry that people will think “all multiples” are like that.
But, you know. No serial killing. Yet, anyway.
ENT / Schooling
So here’s what the ENT said:
“Wow, you have a nasty cold.” - why yes, I do. If someone could explain to me why I get every single disease going right now, I’d appreciate it. I wish he had listened to my lungs and saved me a trip to the doctor, ’cause now I have to go if I don’t improve today (my doctor doesn’t work on Wednesdays anyway).
“I’m still not concerned about the lymph nodes.” - they are there and enlarged, but the general prescription seems to be to sleep more. Although I recognize the validity of this advice, I’m not happy about it.
“Your thyroid, on the other hand, has to be closely monitored, because one of the nodules has grown (from 4 mm to 6 mm) since it was first measured in the summer.” Also, he thinks that probably the anxiety, migraines, etc., is directly related even if the hormone levels measure within normal. He said that a change in the levels might result in my feeling lousy if I were very sensitive. Then he said he is not an expert. So like, WTF?
So there you have it, we’re right back to the thyroid that started the mess. He said he could follow up, but I think I will talk to my GP about possibly transferring over to the endocrinologist. Regardless of who follows up, I have to have my thyroid looked at via ultrasound every 6 months for the foreseeable future.
~~~
Noah did have pinkeye. But the OTC Polysporin drops cleared it up, and he only missed one day of school, which Carl covered.
~~~
I’m working from home today but very frustrated with how my health is impacting my work. I’m just not having a good year, and this is not a good time to be having a bad year. But I am trying to be Zen about it, do my best, and trust that whatever happens happens for a reason. Jobs are drying up in media and I have no idea what I would do instead, but if I get fired/laid off, then I’ll sort it out at that point. I might look into some online programmes.
~~~
Noah has announced that he wants to go to French School. I’m not sure whether he’s just picked up on my talking about it, whether this comes out of something at Montessori, or whether it’s just a fleeting preschooler idea. But whatever it is, I am listening.
If we were going the public route for next year, we would need to register Noah in school next month. We have junior kindergarten here in this province, for a half day, and come September he qualifies.
But Carl and I have pretty much decided to stick with the Montessori for now. Or had.
The logistics of getting Noah from junior kindergarten to another care, whether the in-school daycare (which I looked at and seems fine but is just that - daycare, occupy the kids with whatever), an in-home local daycare, or trying to coordinate some network of people to drive him to Montessori are overwhelming. (The school will not bus him there, fair enough.) Junior kindergarten is fine and good as far as introductions to public schooling go, but I’m not sure Noah needs it.
He’s not some prodigy genius, but he is advancing well. We all know Montessori teaches writing before/alongside reading right? Well my son wrote “vegetabler” on my list last week. (With some help sounding out, but not a lot.) When asked why the ‘r’ he said “s is too hard to write and r is right next to it.” Okay, then. He’s a genius slacker!
I do know that junior kindergarteners are more advanced these days but I also think that given that he’s 8 months away from being of age to enter and is writing out vegetables that it’s fair to say he’s got the basics down. (He’s not yet reading fluently, to be clear. But when it comes to encoding and decoding, he’s doing really well.)
It will be senior kindergarten that is the bear though. Because if we want french immersion we have to choose by then (unless we go private). I do like the “french solution” to asynchronous learning, maybe because it came close to working for me. (I was teased and ostracized socially, but the french did prevent me from horrid boredom for the first few years of elementary school.) I’m a big fan of bilingual education where it’s good.
On the other hand, I taught in what is a good FI school (and probably the one we would move into the catchment area for) and the truth is that the programme has been watered down considerably since the Trudeau days. There simply aren’t enough francophone teachers and so they put teachers in that aren’t super fluent, and then everyone gets lazy and then you end up with a patois sort of education - you’re in a good position to improve later, but your french is iffy.
And our local public FI school is horrible. 6 schools up from the bottom of the list horrible; I don’t go entirely by test scores but if you are that low on them, that’s a total red flag. Our local public english school, however, is great - good test scores and word on the street is very favourable; they had a bad year but they’ve more than made up for it, so I’m assuming it was something weird with that year. Originally when we bought our house I thought I could live with all this but now I’m not sure.
We do have some options; there’s a not-very-local french private school that is barely within affordable ($1800/mo); if my work stays located where it is now there is a french Montessori school that is about the price of daycare now ($1300/mo; I think this one might be a tad pricer) and Noah and I could commute together. Plus, if it’s good — and I think it is but have to look into it further — the whole asynchronous learning thing is not such a big deal. I just don’t know if we would then want to move him this fall rather than fall ‘10.
We could also move into a good FI school area - smaller house would be necessary but the $$ would be going towards equity. Except, of course, that you can’t withdraw from part of your house whereas you can move your child to public school if you have a money problem.
And finally, there is a francophone Catholic school nearby that might be persuaded to take Noah if I personally passed their language test, as one parent has to be french-speaking (they are not thrilled that I did not finish FI, but willing to talk), and Carl would have to prove his Catholicness, but he’s certified. :)
My concerns with any private school option basically boil down to a) fuss and bother and not having neighbourhood friends, and not being able to walk to school which I think is an important part of childhood; and b) continuity. There is no way we could afford that for two kids, for example, or while on mat leave. The further school is only really doable because I work in the area, which could change. There are no guarantees we could afford it year to year. So it feels like we can’t really commit the way you would want to.
And yet, every good year is a good year. I went to private high school and it was a really good thing.
So, I don’t know. I guess I know that a) we can go along as we are for one more year and b) if we want to move, we need to prepare the house for sale. And c) stay employed. So I had better get to work!
(Although if I were unemployed it would be so simple in some ways - the local JK for sure.)
Communication: Iz a gud thing.
I’d wanted to make a little note of this so here goes.
I sit near this guy at work who’s at the same level as my boss, and we mostly get along okay. But whenever Noah’s been sick and I’ve had to take sick time, he’s mentioned that he’s never been sick - in 15 years. (He hasn’t worked at my company that long, and he’s younger than I am.)
I have generally interpreted this as “so you should get your butt in” and it has made me a bit grumpy. And paranoid, because he’s my boss’s peer.
Anyways, on Friday I was saying that since we had been at a large birthday party for preschoolers in an indoor playground with a ball pit last weekend, this weekend Noah or I are liable to get something. (By the way, we’re waiting to see but one of Noah’s eyes looked a bit like pinkeye might be the golden catch! Grr!)
And he said that he’d himself vomited in the Ikea ball pit when he was four (err… EW) and that being sick so much as a kid was what’s made him so healthy.
So - after a bit of discussion - it looks like he was trying to show me the payoff all that time.
Yeesh.
Gymnastics of various sorts
This morning Carl was paged early and so I ended up taking Noah to his Parks & Rec gymnastics class. The class itself is a little bit sad: the high school is not in great physical repair and it makes me so sad that the kids have to go there every day in such a disrespectful environment.* But for a 45-minute kindergym class, it’s just fine.
So I watched Noah hopping along the balance beam and I was remembering my own gymnastics experience in high school.
The way phys ed worked was that a goodly portion of one’s grade depended on one’s score in running, specifically a 12-minute run. Then every other unit - swimming, basketball, volleyball, soccer, field hockey, tennis, skating, and gymnastics - was a small percentage of the grade, plus an attendence premium. I never really scored well enough on the run to assure any kind of decent grade, so every other unit became really important.
Swimming was fine; I was and remain a good swimmer and since I scored really highly in the long-distance swim events it was always kind of annoying that my endurance was ok even if my running speed was not. Basketball was fine too, and volleyball I did okay at. But I had never had lessons in any of the rest and sucked at them. Skating in particular was just a lost cause - to this day all I can do is go forward and do forward cross-cuts; I still can’t stop reliably. Tennis I could at least pass, and field hockey and soccer had enough group padding to shield me.
And then there was gymnastics, which was either a 4 or 6 week term. I had no gymnastics background whatsoever; I’d never even mastered a cartwheel or a headstand on the playground. Not for lack of trying. I used to spend hours in the backyard and getting friends to hold me up. I also would do them in water and gradually move shallower. But I never got there. Ever.
I did have freakishly good upper body strength though, thanks to a love of the bars at the playground and later, canoeing and windsurfing. But otherwise I was a total dud. And the way you passed gymnastics was that you had to pass a number of levels (up from the year before) to get a passing grade on one of the five girly areas (floor, beam, bars, vault, and - weirdly - trampoline).
The problem by grade 10 was that floor and beam both required handstands or cartwheels at certain points. And vault, I think, needed some rotating-balancing skill like that that I didn’t have, although I think I squeaked through grade 9 that way. Which left trampoline and bars. I maxxed out on the trampoline levels, which only left bars. And if I didn’t pass gymnastics I think I had worked out that the only grade left to me was going to be something like a C+, and gym was averaged into your grades up until grade 11 where it became pass-fail.
Since bars were actually really good for me, what with the upper body strength and the lack of fear on them, I threw my efforts into getting through the next level of bars, which involved a release move. You had to hold onto the top bar, hook your knees over the lower bar, release the top bar, pivot under the lower bar and then drop your legs to come up standing, if that makes any sense. We’re not talking about flying over the top bar or anything.
You could go in early and practice in the gym in the morning, which I did every day the gymnastics stuff was set up, because of this whole level thing. And the only other girl I really knew who did that was Tracey, who was probably about half my size in most dimensions. Now I had done this move a few times with the gym teacher spotting me, so it didn’t really occur to me that this was going to matter but…
… one morning I went for this move, and I released my legs at the wrong time and landed on my head. And unfortunately there wasn’t actually the exact right amount of padding under the bars that day either. The gym teacher, who was coming in from getting her coffee, saw the fall and ran over and with great concern grabbed me BY THE ARMS and pulled me up. Which, as anyone who has any first aid certification whatsoever knows, was a really bad idea.
I don’t remember the rest of that day, but I did give up on school somewhere around 2 pm and went home on the subway and the bus and walked in my front door. And my mum looked at me and freaked out ’cause apparently I was white with black eyes, and walked me over to the doctor’s office. And when the doctor (my current doctor actually) heard what had happened she left the room and called the ambulance, and they came and strapped me to the spinal board, and we rushed to emergency and got xrays that showed that I had…
… not broken my neck by what the doctor at the time described as a miraculous margin of error. What I had done was compressed my spine and broken my skull. I lost about an inch in height, and I also became dyslexic, which is a whole other story. (Not really good for an editor, but I can spell every word I learned before the fall… and very few of the words I encountered afterwards, without checking or mnemonics or serious work. Which actually makes me more careful. Sometimes. But now you know why I miss things in my personal blog space all. the. time.)
The next year involved a lot of pain as my spine gradually uncompressed: I had a lot of different back problems like sciatica, and I also had a lot of adjustment issues to things like picking up the pen with my left hand and not being able to figure out for 5 minutes why I couldn’t write properly. Or setting the table backwards. Or following directions backwards.
And the school closed its gymnastics programme in exchange for not being sued, and somehow I managed to get a B+. I suspect that was negotiated in the same meeting, but no one ever told me.
This long tale of woe, besides sort of being relevant because this was one of the other times I have been feeling poorly for so long, is one of the reasons that I get up early on Saturday to take Noah to gymnastics.
I certainly do not blame my parents for the trouble I had with a stupidly designed gym programme in high school, but there is no doubt that had I been introduced to skills programmes in more sports than just swimming earlier in my life, when I was more flexible and had a lower centre of gravity, that I would have had an easier time. And it wasn’t just that: it was learning to be comfortable in the classes. How to follow instruction. How to fall off things and get back up. Maybe even how to run better.
I think there’s a good and understandable backlash against the “overprogrammed” child. But I also think that sports programmes are really good things. I want to expose Noah to as much as possible without making our lives crazy. And then I want to listen to him and see what he falls in love with, what he tolerates, and what he really doesn’t like.
Today I watched him hanging off the lower bar, tiny boy, and then learn to curl up and touch his feet to the bar, and then hang down and drop off. It was very cool. This is one thing that I can do for him. Stickers for us both!
Health update: I am feeling a little better; it seems a good deal of the sudden downturn was related to a flu-like plague which decimated all members of my team who had attended a one-day brainstorming session together in close quarters. So Margret, not with child, but I had tested ’cause the thought did occur to me too.
But not all of it relates. My appointment was moved to the 27th so I must wait one more day to find out what the ENT thinks, but after that I am all for either moving swiftly to other specialists or decamping to my uncle’s home town for a complete family-based workup, which would be a capitulation of many sorts but I’m getting desperate here, man.
Still, this week things improved to the point where I could walk. Monday I couldn’t walk well enough to get to work so I worked from home, and Wednesday I went to work but got stuck coming home because I couldn’t get up a flight of stairs. (I managed eventually, but I missed a train in between. Tuesday I worked but I drove to work.) The last time that happened to me I think I had mono.
(I truly am thinking of taking this up as a cause; for those who do not deal with the TDSB the issue is that the custodial union at some point was given the concession that ONLY the union can do anything maintenance-wise at all; teachers, principals, parents, and other volunteers cannot do anything without violating the contract. Since they also make a pretty hefty wage this has meant that schools without a dynamic head of custodial staff go for years with locks with doors ripped off; gymnasia with peeling paint, and so on and so forth.)
Grumpy
I have a lot, a lot to do in the next few months, personal, professional, and family. Really good things!
So I thought it would help to be working out. I booked a trainer for a refresher and had two sessions last week. I ate better and drank plenty of water.
Today I am so. sick. I got up at 6, went back to bed at 7:30, got up for 9, and then fell asleep at the breakfast table. In a chair. I can’t even tell you what exactly is wrong: nausea from time to time, tunnel vision, aches and pains, and oh my god the fatigue.
I’m supposed to see the ENT on the 26th. I hope I make it. This thing is kicking my ass. I don’t think he’s going to find much either, but you never know, and at least we’ll know if my thyroid or lymph nodes have changed and in which direction… but from the feeling in my throat I’m guessing the same.
I’m not ready to be this old or feel this way.
38!
I don’t even want to get into what my weekend was like. But I did have a good birthday. And, Noah decided for some reason to sing me this song. We’re not sure where he got the beauty from… but here is his YouTube debut:
And yes, that’s our (horrid, in need of renovating) basement rec room. And Noah can pronounce birthday but not, apparently, while singing. So! Who could ask for anything more than that? The two hiding adults are Carl on one side and a Grandma on the other. I was upstairs.
Breathing
I am doing much better; got my feet under me gradually and had a very productive day at work Wed, followed by watching Ella, Enchanted with Noah some at dinner time (yes, I know, meals should be eaten at the table, except when things are just Like That), followed by messing about on the ‘net, followed by worrying about Noah in the middle of the night (gee, wonder why?) and then a pretty regular day today.
Although I am tired. I am thinking of working from home tomorrow. This is not reeeeaally a good idea, but I might do so regardless.
Working from home is generally no less working, but it involves many fewer logistics: clothes, driving to transit, transit, worrying about getting back in time to pick Noah up, etc. The thing is that one is supposed to do this about once a week. And I have been averaging a bit higher than that, what with all the flus and doctor’s appointments and so on.
So, we’ll see. The good thing is, there is nothing which requires me to leap either way tomorrow.
And, breathing. Still contemplating just how bad Tuesday got. But better.
Gratuitous Noah conversation: Noah found our wedding pictures. He was enamoured of the cake.
Noah: “When I grow up I am going to get married and HAVE CAKE. With 3, no, ten layers!”
Me: “Who will you marry?”
Noah: ABC. His birthday is soon and we will have cake.
Me: Well that’s a good idea.
Noah: Because I’m a MOM. And Moms have cake.
Yes they do!
P.S. Thank you guys for your comments. They were really nice to read.
Lousy, lousy day
Well. Today sucked. Recording for posterity:
I had an ultrasound and a barium swallow test, both booked back in November. So I had to miss the huge all-hands meeting where they said they would talk about the launch of my site. Always lovely when (yesterday) you have to send your regrets to the head dude.
The tests were at East General, which is where Emily died. I keep saying I will avoid that hospital, but it’s where my doctor and her specialist network mostly work out of. Noah had his hip ultrasound there and I went there for my MRI. So maybe I thought I would be okay this time.
I was very not okay. The staff were really good. The U/S tech found every sore spot in my throat by looking (which means, obviously, it is not in my head, if he can see them on the screen) and asked good questions. Unfortunately, the ultrasound test positioned me so that I was mostly staring at some emergency buttons on the wall.
Code blue buttons. Like the one the nurse pressed when Emily came out - well, blue.
Waiting for the barium swallow I was in a corridor directly under obstetrics, so the view I had when I was in labour, except down a bit. That was not pleasant. And then I got to go for a ride on the reclining table, which set Lynn off.
[I think I will never really get over the trauma around Emily's birth. But to add old abuse trauma is coals on the fire.]
Anyways, I sort of shook that off. Got home, turned on the computer. I had not checked my site because I had checked it (as best one can with my current CMS) the day before. So what greets me on the homepage, at 10:30 am?
A huge, massive broken image. During the all-hands meeting during which everyone would presumably be looking at my website. Like, the entire company here in this city.
I freaked. I do have an assistant who should have been looking, but ultimately it’s my responsibility. After some investigating we found she had made one minor change yesterday which had screwed the thing up (this is a very unforgiving sort of system that way). So I waited to hear whether I was going to have a job, pretty much.
They didn’t present on my site at the meeting. I am hoping this is not because someone checked the site before, but I haven’t heard anything yet so - we’ll see. My assistant also swore up and down that it was working when she came in and checked at the start of the day, but I suspect that (even though I was not yelling at her) she actually hadn’t checked. I hadn’t either, so. I was just focused on getting through the medical tests.
I’m hoping I got off easy.
By the way, the number of times the homepage has displayed incorrectly since July 16? Twice, including today. Sigh.
The thing is, though, that I lost it. I really lost it; I was so upset and anxious during that hour waiting for the meeting to end so I could find out what happened (I was working from home) that I felt like I was imploding. And that is not good. At the end of the day, it wouldn’t have been the end of the world. (Ha there’s a bad combination of clichees.) It might have been career-killing, but career is just one part of one’s life.
But no. This is what I felt. All through the stuff with Emily, even when she was dying; even during the funeral, I never really felt picked on. I mean that’s a funny way to word it, but I never felt it was the punishment of an angry god. I might have thought God sucked ass and the universe was terrible, but I never felt like I, personally, was getting shit. Maybe because Carl was too.
But today, that feeling came up in a great, wide ocean of drowning despair and anxiety. I literally could not move anything but my fingers. I thought I would honestly die just from the terror and sort of self-hatred or whatever.
I guess it makes sense how that happens but at the time I just thought that this missing image on the screen was going to end everything. It was horrible. If every day were like that, I would have to get on meds to sort it out. Fortunately, it got better.
I should be a bit better with the Emily cycle (sliding into March) but this year it burns. Probably because I have been sick, work is stressful, and I do think there is something to my doctor’s thought that Noah is at an age where things happened to us. Also, my trust level in the medical system: 0. When I get negative test results I basically assume they are wrong and that I’ll end up dying and then they’ll figure it out. Which is silly. I am not dying.
I might need therapy to sort this out, which is a pretty huge thought right now.