Dread

There are a lot of things I want to tell you about. I want to talk about Fritter’s birthday, and how cute she is. I want to talk about my father and his struggle with Alzheimer’s. And I want to talk about Outlander because HOLY CRAP did I dislike that book.

But I feel like I need to tell you this more, so you can understand why I haven’t talked about all of these things.

We went home to Nova Scotia for three weeks in March. My parents hadn’t seen the kids in over a year, and my father is deteriorating and I wanted to spend some time with him. Plus my mother is worn from care giving so I wanted to help in whatever minor capacity I could.

It was nice.

I mean, it’s always nice to visit home although it’s feeling less like home with every visit. It was nice to see that my father still knows who I am. It was nice to hug my mother and offer to run an errand for her or sit with Dad so she could run an errand.

But it was also nice to just be free of things for a bit.

For three weeks, I didn’t have to go to work. I didn’t have to stand for hours in a vet clinic. I didn’t have to drive an hour to meet a training client who lives far away. I didn’t have to suffer the financial anxiety that comes with an empty schedule or the social anxiety of having lots of appointments booked.

For three weeks, I had someone there at all times who I could turn to and say things like, “Can you watch the baby while I take a shower?” or “Do you mind if I go upstairs and take a nap?”

For three weeks I had regular meals prepared for myself and the kids, dishes were washed, and laundry was folded.

When staying with my mother-in-law, I would be feeding the baby in the morning and she would walk in, take the spoon, and say, “get out of here.” And I’d scoot back upstairs and sleep for like THREE MORE HOURS.

And then, halfway through the visit, I realized that I was halfway through the visit.

The dread started.

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In Which I Hide From Adult Responsibilities In Ridiculous Pipe Dreams

Tags

books, life, Twilight, writing

I like to hide from reality.

I mean, my reality is mess right now. I never know when I get up in the morning how much work/parenting I’m going to have to do. PH’s energy levels vary from “practically functional” to “zzzzzzz”. I almost always do the morning diapers/breakfast/clothes/school routine (although PH did handle things this morning, giving me the first sleep in I have had in many moons). Evenings, though, vary wildly. Sometimes he cooks dinner and puts the baby down. Other times I cook dinner and put both kids to sleep.

Then there’s work. I’m working part time at the vet clinic because I like a steady cash stream. But they’re always badgering me to work more. In dire circumstance, I agree, and then I feel guilty for putting more burden on PH. Other times, like today, I refuse and feel guilty and worthless for not being able to do my job.

On top of the clinic job, I’m supposed to be focusing on my dog training career. But I have extremely mixed feelings about my dog training. On the one hand, I enjoy teaching classes and helping people with their dogs privately… WHILE I AM DOING IT. The process of arranging appointments, booking appointments, calling back prospective clients etc etc fills me with crippling levels of anxiety.

So I haven’t been doing it much.

Instead of focusing on actually getting work, instead I’ve been focusing on a complete pipe-dream.

My book.

Remember when I first starting complaining about Twilight, and I made my Rowling vs Meyer rants? Well, for NaNoWriMo in 2012 I wrote a book which I intended to be a sort of Twilight parody, featuring a strong female character named Stella and a gentle zombie love interest named Howard.

But as I worked on it, it stopped being a parody and became a unique book in its own right. I got attached to Stella and Howie, and I realized that in order for it to be a true opposite of Twilight it would need to have a complex plot, three dimensional characters and so on. So I spent years and years achieving that.

After years of beta readers’ feedback and re-writes and re-re-writes and obsessive editing, I’ve decided to finally publish the thing. And so, when I should be out leaving flyers for my dog training business or working more hours at the clinic, I’ve spent it getting my book published.

It’s scheduled to come out in December. I have an author website, and a Facebook page, and an instagram account. I have it available for pre-order on kindle, and it’s listed on Goodreads. I’ve arranged a giveaway on The Militant Baker‘s website on November 30th. I am setting up advertising. I have it listed on Netgalley for review (hopefully they’ll be gentle – Netgalley readers are notoriously tough). I have mailed copies to the big pre-publication review houses.

Whenever I get a free moment I spend it on promoting my stupid feminist zombie book.

Because the thing is, what I really want to do is stay home and write all day. Not call people back about their dogs (as much as I love dogs) or work at a vet clinic. I love writing. That’s what I want to do.

Or at least, I think I do. So far, I have only gotten rave reviews on my book. I’ve emailed free copies to strangers and they have replied with enthusiasm. A complete stranger, who reviews books harshly from what I can tell from his Goodreads account, said my book “far surpasses what it was inspired by” and called it a “masterpiece” and that MADE MY DAY. Another, a children’s author who has won a bunch of awards from her book, said she stayed up all night reading it. And man, that got me through another day.

But if a rave review can make my day, what will a negative review do? Because I’ll get them. It’s a book full of swear words and feminism so some people out there are going to HATE IT. I like to think that I’ll be okay with it as long as people hate it for the right reasons (feminism) and not because they think I’m a hack.

I think that when it is finally published and more reviews come in, I’m in for an emotional rollercoaster.

But in the meantime, I am living in this dream world where my book could be adored by everyone and I could become a famous author and stay home and just write in a white room with a lovely view.

That makes much more sense than just, like, dealing with reality, right?

Eight Years

Tags

anniversary, depression, family, life, love

Yesterday, we were sitting around watching Stephen Fry’s Q.I. on Youtube when Perfect Husband sat up straight.

“Oh, SHIT.” He covered his mouth. “I forgot!”

“What?” I was alarmed. I wracked my brain. Were we supposed to be doing something that night? Was there something vital that I had let slip through my calendar?

“I have to call a prostitute right away! It’s my last chance for the seven year itch!” he said.

I leaned back on the couch and stuck out my tongue.

Eight years ago, we were married. 

Eight years ago, he was my rock, my prince who made me feel like the luckiest person in the world. I couldn’t believe that I was getting to spend the rest of my life with this man who worked so hard to make my life better.

He was the kind of person who cooked dinner and then washed the dishes, while insisting that I sit and rest. He was the kind of person with whom I could talk for hours and never grow bored.

The best part of it all was the fact that he thought he was the lucky one – he actually felt lucky to be with this socially anxious awkward girl with weight problems who loved to take care of pets and babies but also desperately needed to be taken care of by someone else.
Ten years ago, I started dating my best friend. I avoided it for so long, because it sounds like such a terrible idea, but within days we knew that this was it.

We knew that we would move in together. We knew that we would get married. We knew how many kids we would have and what their names would be before he even formally proposed.

Sometimes you just know.

Eleven years ago, he emerged from years of crippling depression, and I discovered that the man who had always been my best friend because even better when he was free of his chains. The man who had always been willing to talk for hours about books or argue with me about hypothetical situations, who had always been willing to give the shirt off of his back to help a friend, stepped out from under the clouds so I could really see him in his entirety. He turned out to be a sunny optimist with a can-do attitude that I found deeply attractive.

Twelve years ago I stopped him from committing suicide. Even then, I knew that I couldn’t live without him in my life. Even then, he was part of the furniture of my mind. Even then, I was willing to sacrifice his happiness to keep him alive. Even then, his pain mattered less to me than the continued beating of his kind heart.

Thirteen years ago my parents met him for the first time, and they thought, “that’s the one.”

“That boy is in love with you,” my father told me later.

“Yeah… we don’t talk about it, though,” I replied, and my parents wisely kept their mouths shut. But they told me later that they knew from the first moment that they saw us together that this would happen. That he was meant to be their son in law.

His parents have said the exact same thing.

Let’s face it, Perfect Husband has said the same thing. “I knew it was just a matter of waiting,” he said.

Show offs.

Fourteen years ago, I sang a Lorne Elliott song with one of the actors in the production of Hamlet that I was stage managing. Almost no one knows Lorne Elliott and we were both delighted to find someone else who did. Almost no one else has read Gordon Korman, but he had, and we talked about it for an hour. He liked Who Is Bugs Potter. I preferred I Want To Go Home.

Fourteen years ago, I found a new friend.

So here we are, fourteen years in, thirteen years in, twelve years in, ten years in.

Eight years in.

I don’t have a photo of us, now. He doesn’t want his picture taken. He doesn’t want to remember this.

Life is different now.

The depression is back and has been raging for years. Most days, he isn’t the sunny prince that I married, but he is still the best friend that I couldn’t live without.  I have met this side of him before and I married him knowing I would probably see it again. So it doesn’t scare me. He is still kind. He is still my best friend. He is still the man that my parents knew I would someday marry.

We have two young children that demand almost all of my time. I feel a constant gripping anxiety based on the fact that I want to work more, because we need more money, but I also want to work less, because I feel overburdened as it is, and I can’t afford to shift too much of that burden onto my husband, and I really can’t afford to pay someone else to take on some of that burden.

I struggle constantly to hide my stress because he blames himself when it emerges. A stray tear, wiped away too late, and he will be pestering me, asking what he can do, beyond the impossible. He thinks that I will blame him, or should blame him, for this.

I don’t.

I was there, you see. I saw how he couldn’t make himself wake up and go to class. I saw how he sometimes backed out of plans because he couldn’t face a social scene. I knew him. I married him.

Yes, I miss the man who pampered me and spoiled me. Yes, I miss feeling like he was someone that I could lean on. Yes, I miss feeling that he was someone I could come to with my problems, instead of someone that I needed to shield from them. Yes, I sometimes feel envy when I meet people who can just get their husbands to take the kids at a moment’s notice, no problem, or who can go out with their friends or on date nights on a regular basis.

Then again I know people who have husbands that are perfectly well and are just giant dicks, and then I feel very grateful. He may be asleep a lot, but he’s not a dick.

Besides, I knew he was sick, and what that meant, and I said the words, “in sickness and in health”, and I knew what I was saying when I said them.

“You could still run away, you know,” he whispered before the vows started. “Now’s your chance. Look, there’s a door just there.”

I looked out of the side door near the altar. It was open to let in cool breezes. The dandelions swayed in the old cemetery where couple after couple lay side by side. Then I looked back at him and shook my head, “no.”

“Now is YOUR chance,” I told him.

Sometimes I think he should have run. He isn’t equipped to handle the stress of caring for small children. I see how just our presence in the household raises his stress levels. I think about how much  of his time is spent on blaming himself for my own stress and misery.

Sometimes I feel like we are Albatrosses around his neck.

And I know he feels like an Albatross on mine.

We keep telling each other that we have no regrets. We keep telling each other that we prefer this to the alternative.

Maybe one day, we’ll finally believe one another.

Because let’s face it: If there is such a thing as fate, we are it.

So let it be. If we are lucky, we’ll have another thirty or forty years together. And I can’t speak for him, but I would still sign up for that in a heartbeat.

Confessions of a Terrible Mother

Tags

anger, breakdowns, five year old, parenting, stress

Dear Owl,

I’m sorry. I’m sorry that I am not the mother you deserve. I’m sorry that I’m not the mother I thought I would be, or that I think I could be, if maybe things were a little different.

I’m sorry that when I’m stressed, I revert to old patterns probably set in my childhood – I talk to you as if you are an adult. I treat you as if you an adult – a belligerent, unreasonable, whiny little adult.

You are not an adult, you are a child. But when I am stressed, I don’t see you that way.

And so, today happened:

The Time Draws Nigh (In Which I Agonize About Going Back To Work And Am Both Successful And In Deep Trouble Simultaneously)

Tags

anxiety, depression, dog training, maternity leave, parenthood, Perfect Husband, work, working mother

How has it been nearly a year since Fritter was born? Where did the time go?

  
I have spent the last month or two slowly gearing back up to work mode, because in a month I am going to have to go back into the world of unmet expectations and absolutely no down time which is the life of the working mother.

I don’t wanna.

I don’t want my cuddly baby to get bigger.

I don’t want to leave her at daycare because she has some stranger issues (which I will discuss at some point).

I don’t want the stress of having to meet people’s expectations, avoid judgement, etc.

I don’t want to lose the hour and a half of down time I get every day during Fritter’s morning nap while Owl is at school.

I don’t want any of it. I LIKE maternity leave.

 
But, since it isn’t a choice, what I really want is to get my dog training business going, and going HARD. Because training dogs pays between 40 and 70 dollars an hour and working at the vet clinic… doesn’t. Also because it’s one of my life dreams, along with being an author.

The Cancer Principle: Depression is Okay, Abuse Is Not

Tags

abuse, bipolar disorder, depression, marriage, mental illness, relationships, suicide

I joined a support group online for people with depressed or bipolar spouses. I expected to find other people who know what it is like to sit downstairs alone in the evenings imagining life after their husband’s suicide.

What I didn’t expect was to end up becoming a relationship counsellor.

Some people are angry and impatient with their spouse’s depressive symptoms. They use words like “lazy” and “can’t be bothered” and “selfish”. I have to remind them that depression is a disease and should be treated as such. They shouldn’t go around getting angry at someone for being sick.

There’s a difference between “won’t” and “can’t”. People with depression often CAN’T get out of bed, CAN’T interact positively and CAN’T pull it together for important family events.

Others are putting up with horrific levels of verbal and emotional and occasionally physical abuse, and blaming it on the depression/mania/addiction. They talk about how their husband tried to choke them and threatened to kill them and say “I had to call the cops. I felt so guilty, I really hate this illness. I know he won’t understand why I did it, either. He’ll think I am against him.”

I have to remind them that depression or bipolar disorder is not a get-out-of-abuse-free card that gives someone carte blanche to emotionally damage their loved ones, particularly their children. You shouldn’t stay with someone who abuses you or puts your children at risk physically or emotionally just because the person is ill, especially when that person keeps insisting that this is all somehow your fault.

But how, people are always asking, do you know what is okay and what is not? Why is okay for my wife to sleep through our daughter’s birthday party, but it isn’t okay for her husband to swear in front of the kids?

So I have developed a litmus test to tell what should, and what should not, be tolerated from a spouse.

The Cancer Principle

Since depression is a deadly disease which causes a wide range of known physical symptoms, I find that cancer makes a good analog because it is a deadly disease without the stigma that comes with mental illnesses. Depression is one of the leading causes of death in the world. Like cancer, some cases are worse than others, and some kinds are more curable than others.

Really, though, you could use any illness that is serious enough to put someone in the hospital. The point is to consider it from the point of view of “my spouse has a serious disease” and not “my spouse is abnormal”.

So, when your depressed husband or wife does something that makes you angry (and they will – it’s hard NOT to be angry when they suddenly sleep through an important event, or leave you scrambling for child care at the last minute, or snap at you for no good reason), ask yourself this:

Would this be considered acceptable if they had cancer?

For example – I go out for a walk with Owl and Perfect Husband is perfectly fine, watching football. I come back and discover that he has crashed in the hour that we have been gone. He is now in the throes of a suicidal misery. He snaps at me twice, then removes himself to the bedroom because he realises that he is growling like an injured bear.

Would this be considered acceptable if he had cancer?

I conclude that the answer is yes – if he had cancer and he suddenly started to feel sick or his pain medications wore off and he became very painful, it is understandable that he would become snappy and then retreat to the bedroom to be alone.

On the other hand, if he had gone onto a verbally abusive tirade calling me a “selfish whore” and threatened to hit Owl, that would NOT have been okay, no matter how much pain he was in.

For example – Perfect Husband agrees to watch the baby while I go to train a puppy. When the day arrives, he has been unconscious for two days and is clearly going to sleep through today as well. I have to cancel the appointment and reschedule it with apologies.

Would this be considered acceptable if he had cancer?

Yes! He was feeling better and thought he could handle it, but then he had a relapse and had to take medications which made him very sleepy and unable to take care of his child. If that was due to cancer, that would be totally understandable.

So I was not angry with him.

On the other hand, if he had agreed to watch the baby and then went out partying with friends and didn’t come back until 5 am, only to fall on the bed dead-drunk, that would not have been okay whether or not he had cancer, so I would have had the right to be angry with him about it.

For example- I watch Breaking Bad. Walter White’s wife discovers that her husband is manufacturing and selling meth, and his contacts with the drug underworld is putting himself and her family in serious danger. He has cancer. Does that make his behaviour okay?

No!

The Cancer Principle. It works every time.

Once someone argued with me, saying “I think there’s a caveat – if they aren’t seeking treatment. My husband sleeps all day and snaps at all of us and he won’t get help and that’s not okay.”

Okay, so then you ask yourself, if he had cancer, and it was making him sick and miserable and yet he refused to seek treatment for his cancer (not even palliative/symptomatic treatment), would that be okay?

No!

The Cancer Principle, man. It WORKS.

Thank You, 2015

Tags

depression, family, life, maternity leave, new years, parenthood, parents, pregnancy

I have mixed feelings about the passing of 2015.

Some parts of 2015 really sucked. My husband nearly killed himself, I ended up heavily pregnant, with a bacterial infection, working and caring for our four year old who also had a bacterial infection, while he was stuck in the hospital and unable to help.

My father broke his hip and overall has deteriorated markedly in his health.

My relationship with my son deteriorated, as my capacity to tolerate his extroverted highjinks hit a new low.

I spent a significant amount of this year coughing, exhausted, diabetic, extremely stressed, half-expecting to become a widow at any moment, researching the potential cost of burying my husband, and wearing Depends because I kept wetting myself.

On the other hand…

This year also brought me the generosity and love of the friends and relations who came streaming in to help during these difficult times. There were friends who picked Owl up at daycare when I was stuck at the hospital, and friends who brought Chinese food so that I wouldn’t have to cook, or took Owl for play dates so I could nap.

There was my mother in law, who is terrified of flying and financially limited, flying in TWICE to spend a grand total of three months sleeping on our couch, just to help.

On the first visit she made me diabetes-friendly meals and arranged snacks for me at a time when I was working and exhausted and could never have kept up the dietary management that was expected of me on my own. She put my son to bed at night and made him breakfast in the morning, she read to him and joked with him and brought some humor and pleasantry to a home that was seething in stress.

On her return she cooked and cleaned, entertained Owl and then held the baby so I could shower, get dressed, eat meals, and spend some quality time with my son.

And in between those visits, my parents flew in for four months. They took money from their nest egg to rent a place nearby, and my mother drove back and forth making meals and snacks, cleaning, and reading Owl bedtime stories.

Not only did it bring me much needed aid, but I got to spend time with my father while he still knows who I am.

And this year brought me Fritter, who made a safe landing on the shores of time and gave us the gift of a colic-free fourth trimester. She brings me joy every day with her grins and chortles, and I wouldn’t change a thing about her.

And with all of those months of support from our family, PH was able to retreat and rest and begin healing. While he is still very ill, I have seen more of the old Perfect Husband in the last three months than I have in the past two years. There are mornings when I come downstairs to find breakfast laid out for me, afternoons when he greets me at the door to take my coat and offer me a drink, and evenings when he rubs my feet and offers to run me a bath.

Whenever he has a good day, I feel like I could suffer another two years just for a chance at more days like that.

I feel like I could kiss 2015 for bringing me even one day like that, let alone as many as I have been gifted with these last few months.

2015 also brought me maternity leave, which I love because I am a lazy slob. I love being home with my baby and watching The Walking Dead or writing during her naps. It’s way better than working. I’m sad that there are only a few more months left. I have a lot of writing to get down in that time.

Yes, over all I am very grateful to 2015. I feel like it got handed a terrible set of cards but it played them all right.

2015 for me was a year of defeat and renewal, of family and love.

We survived it, and maybe it has made us stronger.

If 2016 can keep up with this upward trend, I think I can look forward to the coming year.

And if it can’t… well… Bring it, 2016.

In Which I Unravel The Secret of Meditative Tasks

Tags

anxiety, coloring, knitting, meditation, tasks

So, colouring books for grownups. That’s a thing, now.

It happened so suddenly. One night, my mother in law told me about an article she had just read about how colouring can help depression and anxiety, and how they were making special books designed to soothe one or the other. The next day – the VERY NEXT DAY – I went to our local drug store and BAM, those same books were there.

  
The next time I went into Chapters I saw even more, with even fancier, more intricate designs.

I was intrigued.

You see all of those pictures and they seem to just beg to be coloured. They are beautiful, and all they are missing is your own artistic touch.

(As a random piece of trivia, I won a colouring contest when I was a kid and it netted me a $100 gift certificate to Toys R Us. Unfortunately, I let my mother talk me into giving HER the gift certificate to use as needed for gifts for friends’ parties. My mother gave me a verbal IOU of $100 which I was hypothetically supposed to be able to cash in on an as-needed basis. Eventually, after much wheedling, I managed to convince her to part with $40 of it for a stuffed porcupine puppet. Then we moved to Curacao where there was no Toys R Us so I called it a loss.)

I tried colouring along with Owl in one of his books one day, too, and it was pretty fun, even if I did feel like I was showing up my five year old.

Then reports started pouring in from friends. One with anxiety says she really enjoys it. She finds it helps give her focus, takes her mind off of her anxieties, and refreshes her a bit. Another friend has actually set up a standing date with one of her other friends to colour together. They love it.

It seems like there’s good science behind the fad, too. Colouring seems to inhabit the perfect space between “too challenging” and “not challenging enough” to create a near-meditation state. You can focus on the task while letting your mind wander. Instead of thinking about your breathing or something, you think about your picture.

Heavens knows I need something to help me get into a meditative state because I’m not doing too great lately.

So I have been seriously thinking about colouring, but there was something that was holding me back, and it has nothing to do with Toys R Us gift cards.

The honest fact is that I’m not very interested in colouring. I mean, it sounds fun, and it looks fun, and I think I would like it if I were on vacation and just wanting something to do. But I’m not on vacation, and I have a long list of recreational activities that I would rather do when Owl is either in school or asleep and Fritter is sleeping.

Writing is pretty high on that list, as is reading and binge-watching The Walking Dead alone or watching QI with Perfect Husband (by the way, if you enjoy intellectual British humor, rare trivia, and Stephen Fry, but you haven’t heard of this show HIE THEE TO YOUTUBE THIS INSTANT).

When I have some semblence of mental energy, I write. When I don’t, I collapse in front of Netflix or I read. Colouring would be ignored in both instances. I certainly wouldn’t want colouring to take up potential writing time. My writing, no matter what it is, feels productive. Colouring wouldn’t. Like Netflix, it would be purely recreational.

So I put it on the backburner.

Then, last week, I was visiting my friend the Farm Fairy at her knitting store, and she was pushing me, yet again, to try knitting.

She is always trying to get me to knit, and I always say no. I’m not good with my hands. My fingers aren’t nimble. Maybe it’s because I spent my childhood galloping around on four legs pretending to be a horse instead of dressing dolls. Maybe it’s my poor spatial skills. Maybe it is because I am left handed and my mother is right handed and when she tried to teach me knitting left handed she got all confused and gave up.

“The thing is,” said the Farm Fairy, as her puppy licked my baby’s face and Fritter chortled and pulled on the puppy’s fur, “I took a break from knitting to prepare for this big trade show, and when I was able to start again I realized how much I missed it. It’s sort of meditative, because it’s repetitive and you need to pay attention a little, but it’s also the sort of thing you can do while watching TV or chatting with your friends. It’s something for your hands to do, and I realized that I worry about things a lot more when I don’t knit.”

 

KNITTING!

After all, the colouring books aren’t a unique way of de-stressing. Psychologists have observed the same effect from other repetitive, only-slightly-challenging activities, like playing Tetris. They all lead to “flow”.

In fact, I bet that was why everyone got obsessed with Flappy Bird.

PH likes to clear-cut things in Minecraft. Talk about repetitive tasks. I don’t know why, but he will spend hours in Minecraft simply demolishing huge mountains. But more on that in another post.

Anyway, my point is that knitting is just as good an activity as colouring. It is repetitive, mindless, but also requires a certain level of focus.

“Think about it,” said the Farm Fairy. “What happens to dogs when they don’t have enough to do?”

“They bark, destroy things…” I said.

“Spin in circles, chase their tails, suck their flanks… they develop stereotypies, right? Destructive ones. People aren’t so different. They need something to occupy them, something repetitive to do just to keep their hands busy.”

She makes an excellent point.

Plus then instead of just instagramming my colouring pages, I can actually have THINGS that I could MAKE for people.

And the nice thing about being able to make people gifts is that they have to cherish them no matter how crappy they are because I MADE IT FOR YOU.

Besides, the world is full of nerdy knitting projects that I would love to be able to recreate. If I could do that while watching The Walking Dead I would actually be improving my productivity!

What about the fact that I’m spatially impaired with poor manual dexterity?

Yeah, there is that. Well, you don’t know until you try, right? And the Farm Fairy is a good teacher.

So I had my first lesson last week, and it IS fiddly and difficult for me, but I spent all this week knitting while listening to QI. I feel like I’m able to focus more on the dialogue while I knit. My mind doesn’t wander as much. There’s no room for mind wandering. The knitting and the conversation eat up all the brain power I have.

Plus in the end, I would get a square, blue dishrag. So my evening productivity was already going up.

I finished off my first knitting project, the dishrag, today. Here it is:

I don’t know about you, but I think it’s beautiful.

Thankful Enough. I Think.

Tags

depression, gratitude, laughter, parenthood, Thanksgiving

It’s Canadian thanksgiving, so we cooked a turkey and were all thankful and stuff.

I’m thankful for a lot.

In fact, I think thankfulness has replaced other positive emotions, like joy or pleasure, in my life.

I’m thankful that my husband is still alive. I’m thankful for the fact that most days, lately, he has been able to help significantly around the house, cooking dinner and or doing laundry and such. Once or twice lately he has even extended signs of affection to me and I get extra thankful about things like that.

I’m thankful that my baby is alive and healthy and that I have bonded strongly with her. I’m thankful for her chubby little cheeks and her goofy chortle when I snorgle her. I’m thankful that my son is so bright and curious and so loving to his sister.

I’m thankful for my immense support network, for all the friends who helped me when things were in crisis, and that so many of my friends have kids Owl’s age.

I’m thankful that Owl loves school.

I’m thankful for the mountains and the incredible views that I get to enjoy every day taking Owl to school and back.

I’m so thankful for everything that I’m just bleeding out with it.

That’s right. I’m ungrateful about gratitude.

It’s odd. I’m not depressed. But I’m somehow… jaded. I feel like my sense of humor has deteriorated. I always used to be looking for the funny side of things.

Somehow I have lost that. You notice that I’m posting less? It’s because I have fewer funny stories. It can’t be that less funny stuff is happening. I’m just not seeing the humor.

When Owl tries to dick around with his general five year old silliness, I’m more likely to shut him down than join in. When I try to make jokes it feels forced and stupid. I’m like a cranky old lady.

I don’t like it.

But I don’t know where my sense of humor has gone. I want to see the funny side of things again.

I think PH has noticed. He keeps telling me bad jokes. “What does a pirate octogenarian say?” “I’m eighty.”

But in the meantime, there is turkey. I love turkey dinner, it’s my favourite thing, and when I smell the good turkey dinner smells and listen to the sounds of music from our ipod playing in the kitchen, football whistles from the living room, and cuddle my snuggly six month old, and enjoy the peace that comes from Owl being invited out by a friend on a playdate, I feel content and very grateful.

So why do I still feel like there’s something wrong?

On Our Own

So, our inlaws flew home at the end of July, and we’ve been hacking it on our own for the first time since January.

That’s right. We haven’t had to be proper, full fledged adults in EIGHT MONTHS.

I’ve forgotten how I did it all – how did I get dishes washed and Owl’s face wiped and keep him entertained ALL ON MY OWN?

Luckily, PH’s mood is more stable these days. He’s still struggling, but he’s further from the edge. He has a bit of energy – enough to get Owl his breakfast in the morning and help him into bed at night, and sometimes help out during the day either with laundry/tidying/dishes or simply taking our extrovert out of the house. Of course, he still thinks that he isn’t doing enough but compared to what he was able to do eight months ago, I consider this level of help freaking miraculous.

Besides, we’ve organized a bit of help for ourselves.

Last week we put Owl in a preparing for kindergarten camp which took him from 9 am until 3 pm every day, which was fantastic.

This week we could only find a gymnastics camp from 1-3 pm, so that’s where he is.

It’s wearing us out, but we’re managing.

PH deals with Owl in the morning and lets me sleep until Fritter wakes up between 8 and 9 am. Then I get up, shower, dress, have a diet pepsi, put Fritter in a carrier and her and Owl out on a looooong dog walk with Beloved Dog. Sometimes Fritter falls asleep on the long walk and so when we get home I can do some dishes and clean a bit while she snoozes.

The biggest problem is not the baby, although she complicates things and fills my arms for the majority of the day. It’s TALKING TO OWL. He wants to talk all the time. He wants to move all the time. If I take him out of the house it’s not so bad, but in the house he wants to be bouncing or swinging or climbing within my personal space while saying “Mom? Volcanoes esplode lava, right mom? Lava is hot rocks. Mom? The rocks are hot. Right Mom? Hot rocks make lava. The lava is so hot. Mom? What if lava esploded IN YOUR HEAD?”
It’s exhausting to introverts like PH and me.

So we take him out places. 

  
On really good days, I can arrange to meet a friend for a playdate, and then I can stand around and cuddle my baby and watch Owl playing with his friend and it’s adorable and I feel happy.

  
On days like that, I have time to reflect on how lucky I am. I’m lucky that so many of my friends have boys about Owl’s age. I’m lucky that I live in such a beautiful place. I’m lucky that Vancouver hardly ever has rain in the summer and so I can take Owl outside because otherwise I don’t know what I would do.

  
I was lucky to have so much help for so long.

And I’m lucky to still have a husband who can take Owl for a couple of hours in the morning, and help him brush his teeth at night, and sometimes even clean the house while I’m out on a playdate.

We have each other.

So really, we’re not on our own at all.