Be It Ever So Humble

Tags

British Columbia, friends, home, moving, Nova Scotia, travel

I had a new experience this year, while “home” for Christmas in Nova Scotia.

…I missed home.

West Coast home.

…Things have changed.

While I spent my early childhood in Ontario and the Caribbean before settling in Nova Scotia, the Maritimes were always “home” to me.

I loved my home town and my university fiercely, and I have made many, many, many posts about how much I miss it, and how much I love the close-knit culture of the East Coast. Perfect Husband, who grew up on the South Shore, feels the same.

It used to be that whenever we traveled back to Nova Scotia, we would be hyper-vigilant to change: That store moved to a different location! That other store is gone! Someone repainted that house! They put in a STOP SIGN!

Things change all the time, slowly, but when you’re only home once every year or two you see them all at once, and it feels like you have entered some sort of strange parallel universe where everything looks slightly wrong.

Perfect Husband especially would get indignant about changes made to his neighbourhood back home (which is the sort of neighbourhood where people look out the windows and wonder “who is that?” when they see an unfamiliar car).  It hurt him to see developers come in and destroy his old stomping grounds and built large vacation homes on top. It hurt more when one of the wealthy retirees who moved into those houses called the home where he and his four siblings grew up a “quaint little cottage”.

That was his home, and it has been largely plowed over and rebuilt, and he resents it.

But we have come to accept over the years that Nova Scotia is not our personal museum, and now it has gotten to the point where I am surprised by what hasn’t changed after all this time: The local convenience store is still there, with the same sign. My favourite Pita Place, still going strong. The neighbourhood houses which seem to have used the exact same Christmas lights for the past twenty years.

The changes no longer faze me. I have accepted that life goes on. I’m just delighted by what stays the same.

Nova Scotia has also emptied itself. Most of my friends have evacuated in search of jobs that suit their education level. Of the remaining old friends and relatives, I only saw a couple. Traveling was challenging for us with two kids in tow, and they didn’t have the time or inclination to travel to see us. They were all busy with their own lives and kids during the holidays and I am just not relevant to those lives any longer.

It isn’t their fault, it’s mine – I’m the one who left. Besides, with Facebook I can still chat with them and see pictures of them and their families, so maybe the need to see each other in person is less urgent because of that.

Really, I was touched by the couple of people who did take time out of their day to meet up with me when I was passing through their region. The holidays are a busy time, and the weather was not always great. So it meant a lot to me when they did.

Nova Scotia just… doesn’t belong to me any more, and it doesn’t miss me or need me. I felt strangely superfluous on this visit, except among immediate family.

Meanwhile, BC has been growing on me slowly for a long time. It took me years to start putting down real roots, and up to a few years ago I desperately missed Nova Scotia and wanted to go home.

But I finally built a strong support network of friends. Besides, the mountains and the cherry blossoms get to you over time, and I have started to take pride in the beauty.

I loved the look on my Mother In Law’s face on her first week staying with us last year, when she saw crocuses coming up. Just small trips around town had her amazed.

“I went to the grocery store and they had FLOWERS on display outside!”

“…isn’t that normal?”

“Carol, it’s JANUARY!”

“Wait until you see the fruit and vegetable market. It doesn’t have walls.”

And when my parents came out, they kept taking pictures of daffodils while their friends back home sent them photos of snow piles up past their shoulders.

It made me proud, because BC is starting to feel like it is mine.

 

 

I love the early spring, and the long, dry, but not-too-hot summers. I love the snow on the mountains, and the mix of skin colours, languages, cultures and cuisines all around us.

So, while I cherished every day of our time with the family, and I ate a lot of pitas, it also felt really good to come home. I missed our bed, our bathroom, and even our cluttered, toy-laden living room and minuscule kitchen.

It’s not perfect, but it’s ours.

And I kept getting texts from my friends here, asking when they could see me, now that I was finally back… back home.

To Shut Up or Not To Shut Up: A Parent’s Question

Tags

attachment parenting, babies, dvds, friends, friendship, parenting, parenting styles, psychology, research, tv

When you have friends who are also parents, things can get awkward when parenting philosophies clash.

I have known since I was a teenager that I wouldn’t let my baby watch tv, and that I would use a diaper service, and that I would carry my child in a carrier instead of lugging around a car seat, and that I would breastfeed. They didn’t even feel like decisions. They were things I felt I knew about myself.

When I was getting my B.Sc in Psychology, I added things to my mental list of future parenthood.

I would practice attachment parenting, because I learned in Interpersonal Relations and Emotions classes how vital a secure attachment is to a person’s future happiness.

I would use babytalk (sorry, “parentese” :-p) with my baby, and sign language, because Psycholinguistics taught me that they actually speed up language development.

Watching a parent in a store, I would think about how I would deal with a discipline problem, using methods I had learned from Behaviour Modification.

Now I am a parent, and so are some of my friends.

And it can get awkward.

We see reflections of ourselves in the people around us

People feel very personal about their parenting decisions.

Everyone wants to be a good parent (I hope). No one wants to believe that they might be doing things wrong, and yet that fear lurks beneath the surface of every truly good parent. For that reason, people tend to get violently defensive of their own parenting techniques.

So I tread on eggshells.

I nod and smile when people suggest letting my baby cry it out, rather than lecture them about attachment styles. I downplay my use of the cloth diapers. Instead of talking to them about links to asthma, and low sperm counts, I tell them that “it’s laziness, really”, because the diaper service will deliver diapers to my house.

I don’t want to hurt my friends by suggesting that they did things wrong by letting their child cry it out, or by using disposable diapers. I don’t think they did do anything wrong. I just know I don’t want to do it.

Many of my friends are excellent parents whom I admire very much, and these little things are very minor in comparison to the many other things they do as parents that I wholeheartedly agree with. Some of them made those choices many years ago, when there was less information on the subject. So I don’t tell them why I make the choices that I make, in case they feel like I am lecturing them or implying that they did things wrong.

Doing this goes against my natural instincts, because I am a lecturer by nature. However, I was blessed with a friend of lesser intelligence when I was younger, and the hurt she invariably felt whenever I lost patience with her taught me the beginnings of self-censorship. I still don’t always know when to shut up, but I’m better than I used to be, and I know that parents don’t take lectures on parenting styles sitting down.

So I shut up, but sometimes it is really hard.

The other night, when a friend offered me her DVD for infants, which she referred to as “baby crack” I had to think fast to turn it down politely. I had an idea that a reflexive “Oh, HELL no, why don’t you just offer him some methamphetamines while you’re at it?” would not be a well-received response. This is a kind and intelligent person who doesn’t deserve that kind of rudeness.

I suppose I could have just accepted it from her and just never played it for Babby, but then she might have asked me how Babby liked it, and if I had been amused by it myself, and that could have started a whole web of lies. So I summoned every bit of tact I had and said,

“Thank you, but we have a DVD of original sesame street, and that’s enough for now.” I neglected to mention that there’s no way Babby is watching that before age two or three, either. I resisted adding that we don’t want Babby watching TV because pediatricians recommend absolutely no television before age two. I just said no thank you, and hinted that Babby was watching other things.

I feel bad, as if I had lied to my friend, because in a way I did lie. I misled her to think that I was not opposed to DVDs for infants, and that I had my own collection of such things. On the one hand, I spared her feelings and avoided insulting her own parenting choices. I feel that this was the right thing to do.

On the other hand, she babysits for us sometimes, and so I feel like I have delayed the inevitable… unless I want to take the risk that some day she will play “baby crack” for my own child… something I’m sure she wouldn’t do if she knew that it was against my rules. But if I tell her my rules, I’ll be risking making her angry and hurt.

What do you do, when someone suggests something for your child which violates your parenting beliefs? Conversely, what do you do if someone lectures you on your own?

I have some questionable parenting tactics myself

Acceptance

Tags

acceptance, family, friends, homesickness, love, pregnancy, the power of now

Perfect Husband hates my therapist because she makes me cry. He keeps threatening to “kick her inna box”.

But it’s not like she pokes me with sticks. She just brings up those words – those words that you avoid saying because they make you cry.

Homesick

Money

Worry

Family

Guilt

Self-Blame

Forgiveness

Hurt

She got me to read The Power of Now, and it says that true peace is found in acceptance of the Now. Which means I need to accept that I’m far from home, that my baby shower only had five attendees and four gifts, and that money is very tight because I got laid off and so stopped working a good three months earlier than we had budgeted before I got pregnant.

I need to accept these things so I can truly enjoy the good things – the generosity of people who have given me handmedowns ranging from exersaucers to breast pumps, from baby gyms to baby clothes. The support of friends willing to give up a precious day off to paint my nursery for me. Loving cousins who send me more than enough money to cover the expense incurred by the painting of said room. The fact that someone DID throw me a shower, with balloons and punch and food (most of which sadly went uneaten as it was vastly above and beyond the number of people who decided to show up) and shower games. That one of the guests spent three hours decorating an amazingly beautiful cake, with my future child’s name written in icing. That someone who has barely known me for a year or so went to the trouble of making an intricate cross-stitch -framed- with my son’s name on it, and a blank space for her to embroider his birth day and weight when he is born.

So amazing, so touching. The kindness of people. I try to focus on that, but trying to push away the other feelings just doesn’t work. the more you push them away, the more determined they become.

Like a cat.

I need to welcome those bad feelings, accept them, and so let them go.

But that’s dang hard, you know?

Don’t Fight the Zeitgeist

Tags

friends, nursery, painting, phones, zeitgeist

My phone still works, and I find this vaguely suspicious.

Everyone seems to be getting a new phone lately. Perfect Husband’s old MUCH Music phone died in the spring after many years of faithful service, so he replaced it with a shiny new model. My friend had to switch phone companies after a massive blow-out with her provider which I won’t go into here. She had to get a new phone. Then that same friend dropped her new phone in a parking lot just as the person in the parking space next to her was backing up out of their space – CRUNCH.

Then Perfect Husband calls me from rehearsal from a strange phone number. He tells me that his phone got wet, shorted out, and now doesn’t work reliably, so if I need him I should call this other number, which is a cast member’s cell. I don’t ask him what happened because his voice has that strained tension that comes with having to tell one’s director “I have a wife who is nine months pregnant and can’t get a hold of me. If you don’t give me five minutes and someone else’s cell phone, I’m going to start a massacre”.

When he came home he was too angry to talk about it. All he would say was that there was a “toilet incident”. I puzzled on this for a while, because his anger seemed to denote that someone else was at fault, but sometimes he gets angry at himself, so I didn’t push things further. Then I signed on to Facebook… and his director’s Facebook status was about HER phone getting wet and going on the fritz that same night. So apparently this “incident” affected multiple cell phones in the area that night. One’s imagination fills in rather too vividly at this point.

The next day someone else on Facebook posted that their phone was broken and they had to get a new one.

Then Spokeit made this post.

Meanwhile, my phone is three years old, has a damaged top with a Labrador’s tooth mark in it, and has been dropped more times than I could ever count, and then been retrieved by uncountable numbers of slobbering dogs. It works fine.

I’m watching it suspiciously.

In other news, I’m getting clouds put on my nursery today! YAY!

Except that since PH needs to buy a new phone we are even more broke than we expected to be, and I can’t even afford to buy awesome room-painting friends lunch. *Sigh*. I have freezies. They can eat all the freezies they want.

Surf and Sun… and now I have Sunburn.

Tags

dogs, friends, off leash dog park

The great thing about having worked in the dog training industry is that all of my new friends are dog owners. When one of us visits another, our dog roars in ahead of us. It’s not a matter of “Can I bring Fido?” because Fido’s welcome is assumed and assured.

We get together every couple of weeks for a good dog park romp. We stand around and talk about our dogs while watching them out the corners of our eyes and occasionally delivering discipline or shouting warnings, like parents chatting on a playgrounds.

My poor Beloved Dog doesn’t get a lot of excitement these days, so Dog Park Day is what he lives for. It’s not so much the dogs – except for an occasional butt sniff, tail held high, he doesn’t really like other dogs. It’s the free reign and the water that he revels in.

I love seeing him so happy.

WAVES!

MOM! DID YOU SEE THE WAVES??

Perfect Husband said his poops were pure sand the next day, so clearly he had a VERY good time.

Still not ready

Tags

busy, friends, heat, nursery, pregnancy

I spent yesterday at a friend’s house “helping” her get ready for her garage sale today. I put “helping” in quotes because I don’t feel that I was very helpful. I sorted some books, moved some not-too-heavy objects from point A to point B, and directed her teenagers a little.  Even with that minimal involvement, I was wiped and back-achey by the end of the day. The sweltering heat is really getting to me.It’s only really at times like that, when just a bit of minor light lifting in the heat sends me into spasms of Braxton Hicks that I really realize how pregnant I am.

Just like how Perfect Husband’s first words to me when I get up in the morning tend to be “holy crap… you’re PREGNANT!” when he sees me afresh each day.

My friend really didn’t work me too hard. SHE’S more aware of the limitations of my pregnancy than I am, I think. Mostly, I was there for company and to poke her if my friend wandered off to a computer or something. That wasn’t necessary, though. She plowed through an entire garage worth of junk and by the end of the day everything was sorted.

This is the same friend who wants to paint my nursery for me as a gift. To my original vision of blue sky and clouds she has slowly added in her imagination a giraffe, a lion, a tree, and even my own pets all painted on the walls. All of which would be totally amazing. But she works full time, has two teenagers, and is trying to get her house ready to be sold. She’s a busy, busy lady, and she just hasn’t found the time to get paints and come to my house yet.

As much as I would love the giraffe and lion and tree with my cat in the branches, I think I’m going to have to remind my friend that it doesn’t all have to be done at once. In fact, the nursery doesn’t NEED to be done at all, since the baby will sleep in a moses basket with me for the first few months (breastfeeding = getting up every hour and a half = me not wanting to go to a different room to pick up the baby every time) but the pregnancy hormones are screaming “YOU NEED A NURSERY!!!”. The baby, due to show up in the next eight weeks, doesn’t really feel real yet, even when he’s propping up my ribs like a tent pole with one of his limbs. The spare bedroom is still a mess of gulag-grey walls, bare futon, piles of clothes and so on. It doesn’t LOOK like we’re expecting a baby, so it’s hard for me to believe that my life will change so utterly in just a couple of months.

So I think I’ll wait until her garage sale is done, then call her and propose that we do the basic blue paint with clouds, so I’ll feel like there is a nursery around, and my friend can add giraffes and trees and things in the nebulous future when she finds the time and energy.

So many brands of crazy am I.

Tags

babies, baby names, family, friends, Thanksgiving

I have so much I want to talk about that I haven’t been able to decide on the topic for a blog post. So I’m just going to update you on all of it in one big muddled post. So there!

Thankgiving was amazing. An old friend from Nova Scotia recently moved to the Okanagan for a temporary internship, and she and her brand spanking new husband drove down to visit us this weekend. Since Perfect Husband and I are trying to lure them further West, we took them straight downtown on the skytrain, took them through Stanley Park and the Aquarium, and then finished our seduction with a meal of high-end sushi. They are now willing to admit that they might like to live here for a couple of years. Not to settle, of course, they say hastily, but maybe… just a little while.

Mwahahahahahahahaha.

Since my main complaint about living out here is how isolated I feel from my friends and family, this is a huge step. I was in pure delight all weekend. I love turkey dinners, so I spent all Sunday happily puttering about in the kitchen with my friend and looking forward to a big dinner with people I love. It was grand. I was so happy. Thank you, Wellbutrin (or possibly Placebo Effect)!

Speaking of which, yesterday was my last pill. I have an appointment today for a recheck in the hospital’s Care Clinic (where they referred me since my family doctor is patently useless).

Next: People are having babies again. I wish they would stop that. This time it’s an old acquaintance from the days when my ex and I were still together, who still reads my LJ and is on my Facebook. This is her second son, and I find it unfair that she gets two while I have none. What’s more, the baby is cute. I don’t get bothered so much when people have ugly babies. A girl I went to high school with recently had a baby too, but either the pictures are lower quality or the baby is missing some essential cute-factor, because it didn’t make my uterus squee the way this other baby did. I’m willing to blame lower quality photos. In any case, I’m sure this newest influx of babies was behind my dream last week. Over the weekend I dreamed that another, very unmaternal friend of mine had a baby. Even she has a baby, I remember thinking.

It’s stuff like this that makes me feel like a crazy person. When I worked at Sketchy Vets, two of the vets were pregnant. Both were women in their mid thirties who had hit a plateau in their careers and decided to have babies out of sheer boredom with life. Both freely admitted to never having planned to have children, and I believe them, because in the four months I worked there, they still didn’t plan for children. They talked pregnancy a lot. Pregnancy yoga, pregnancy pilates, lets-check-the-ultrasound-machine-to-see-what-my-baby-is-doing-in-there. But never once, in the four months I was there, did they talk about what they would do with their fetuses once they exited the womb. They didn’t talk about parenting methods, or whether they would read to their babies. They didn’t talk about sleep training or attachment parenting. They didn’t talk about parenting period. They were pregnant, and that was fun. Trendy even. All the celebrities are doing it, don’t you know? But even half way through their pregnancies, they still weren’t thinking like parents. I’m sure that all changed once the babies arrived, but they thought it was bizarre that I already planned to be one.

I have always planned on being a parent. I got attached to my Baby Think It Over in high school. I remember reflecting on the name Matthew when I first read Anne of Green Gables at age eight, and how I might like that for my son’s name. I remember having second thoughts when I discovered that the nickname for that name is Matt. I wasn’t sure I wanted to name my son for something you wipe your feet on. Even now, I love the name Matthew though I probably won’t use it. Perfect Husband and I had the Great Name Conversation before we even got engaged. For weeks we would be driving in the car and someone would say “Jeremy?” or “Hazel?” and the other would accept or veto it. We had our children’s names agreed and decided on before he ever proposed. After all, how could we get married if we couldn’t agree on our children’s names?

The vets at Sketchy Vets thought this was bizarre. Here I was, engaged to be married, only in my mid twenties, and I wanted a family. When a cat named William came in, and I said, “Oh, that’s what I want to name my son,” they said “you have a name picked out?” like they thought I was crazy.  When I said once day that I’d like to own a King Charles Spaniel some day, and maybe name it Ramona, they said “You have your whole life planned out, don’t you?” and they did not seem to think that was mentally healthy.

I’m sorry, should we all just get pregnant out of a “sure, why the hell not? I’m 35” sentiment? Is that a better way to become a parent, or just a different way?

I haven’t seen these women in nearly two years, but I still keep defending myself to them in my head.

“You know babies are false advertising, don’t you?” a woman said at my current workplace last year, condescendingly. Yes, thanks. My goddaughter is now five years old. I walked the floor with her during her bouts of colic. More and more women I know who are my age are becoming mothers. I read Mommy Blogs. I am aware that babies scream, and poop, and ruin your social life and your personal life, too. It’s crazy to want one, I know that, but I do.  And if having children was really that terrible, I wouldn’t know so many women who purposely conceived a second time.

Maybe it’s unfeminist to want to procreate. Maybe it is only considered acceptable if you are in your thirties and simply want to try maternity fashions. Maybe actually wanting to rear and raise a child is considered far too humdrum unless one is nearing their midlife crisis. But here’s the thing – it took my parents eight years to have me. They just celebrated their 35th wedding anniversary. My mother has always refused to explain why it took them so long to have me, but has admitted to having to seek “professional help.” She has frequently apologized to me for not being able to give me siblings.  Maybe the problem was on my father’s side of things, but I don’t know. Maybe I’ll have problems conceiving too. And I don’t want to find this out when I’m 34.

Or maybe I’m simply a product of peer pressure and genetic urges.

But I want to be a mother, dangit. I’d even take a girl at this point. That’s right, folks, I’ve hit that point.

Is it really over?

Tags

antidepressants, friends, Thanksgiving, turkey dinner, wellbutrin, work

Turkey + Old friends +Wellbutrin = Happy Carol.

Back to Work +Working Saturday + Dark When I Get Up = Tired Carol

Girlfriends

Tags

friends, love

“When I was in high school,” a friend told me this evening over coffee, “I had lots of friends, but I didn’t have a best friend. I always wanted to find that one person, but I never really did.”

She paused for a moment.

“…But I’ve realized that I have different friends for different things. There’s the friend I call when I want someone to listen. There’s the friend I call when I want to know what I should do in a certain situation, and friends I call when I want someone to be angry on my behalf. And one isn’t better than the other. But I have different people for different needs.”

What she said rang very true. We all do have friends for different things. There is the friend you see horror movies with, and the friend you see chick flicks with. There is the friend you like to have dinner with occasionally, and the friend who you feel comfortable calling at two in the morning. But haven’t we all also longed for that one, special friend? As children, before we thought about boys, and dating, and marriage, we thought about best friends. Didn’t we all agonize over so-and-so, wonder if she liked us back, got excited the first time she invited us over to her house, become inseparable, have fights, have break-ups, just as we would later with the romantic partners in our lives?

When I moved to the Caribbean as a child, I made a new best friend very quickly. She was my whole world. We played as much as we could, whenever we could, and I still remember the sting of the day she decided to play cards with some other girls one recess, instead of going on the swings with me (!). Thankfully, that was the one and only time she ever abandoned me… until  she moved to Holland at the end of the year. The loss of my best friend devastated me as terribly as if I had lost a family member. Her very name meant life, according to the Name Books, and I believed it. How could life go on without her?

It’s hard to lose a good friend, but it gets easier as the years pass. She and I never lived in the same place again. She’s still in Holland, and I moved back to Canada when I was 13. We spent one year together at age 10, and I can count the number of times that she came back for visits on one hand. But she was there for my bachelorette party. She was there as I was getting my hair done. She danced at my wedding reception. She said she wouldn’t have missed my wedding for the world. And I still have the half of a charm that she got me – it’s half of a heart, and she had the other half, and if you were to put them together, they would read “BEST FRIENDS”.

Since the day she left for Holland, I have made many other close friends, all of whom I love and cherish. But one of them was my “Best Friend” through high school, and still is the official title holder to this day. The title is purely nominal, grandfathered in from the days when such terms were used, since she is not the only one who I feel especially close to or whose love I especially cherish. But by labelling each other “Best Friend”, we created a special relationship which I feel that every person needs. A relationship which, like a romantic one, involves mutual trust and support, love and comfort.

I have other best friends – people who I can talk for hours with, who I love unconditionally, who I feel understand me and love me for who I really am deep down. Perfect Husband is one of them. So why is having a girl best friend so important, when I live with my best best friend? Maybe it’s about history together. Maybe it’s just about having someone to talk about boys with. All  I know is, a best “girlfriend” is something every girl should have. Not because you can’t get those things from other people, but because when you have that kind of one-on-one relationship, it gives you certain inalienable rights.

“Girlfriends” means that it’s okay to call in tears at two in the morning on a Tuesday night.

“Girlfriends” means three hour long phone calls, and still finding stuff to talk about.

“Girlfriends” means you can watch terrible, sappy, slushy chick flicks, and cry together, and then laugh so hard that you’re both crying together still.

“Girlfriends” means you can sign off from a tearful phone call with “I love you” and “I love you, too.”

“Girlfriends” means you will go out to fetch her in the middle of the night after she has ended a relationship and doesn’t want to stay.

“Girlfriends” means she will drive three hours out of her way to help you move out of your apartment, and bring you home three hours back again… and not ask for gas money.

“Girlfriends” means she will be supportive, no matter what kind of an idiotic pickle you’ve gotten yourself into this time.

“Girlfriends” means you can understand what she’s saying, and translate for others, when she’s sobbing so hard that it all comes out like this.

It goes on and on, the Rights of Best Girlfriends. It’s true that you have different friends for different reasons, but every girl should have at least one friend who is extra special, and who thinks you’re extra special, too. I am so lucky, because on top of Perfect Girlfriend, I have other awesome close friends, including one who I am every bit as close to. When I was home in July, we sat up talking past three in the morning for three nights running… and never ran out of stuff to say. We don’t say “I love you” in so many words (we express affection through insults, mostly), and we don’t weep over chick flicks, but the friendship is still vital to my happiness.

And my best friends live so far away. When the time difference is this great, even a casual evening phone call turns into a two in the morning call, and I reserve those for emergencies. It’s not the same when you can’t gather for a coffee, or have a girl’s night on the couch.I’ve gotten one friend to move out here, though, and I’m going to keep working on it, because life just isn’t right without my girls.

Perfect Girlfriend posted this link on my Facebook recently, because it  made her think of me. When I heard it, I felt it too. We’ve gone from a phone call every day, to one every week, to one every couple of months.

We need to fight for our friendships, because “girlfriends” also means… never drifting so far apart that you can’t reach each other in a hurry.

Did you ever find your “one friend”? Are you still in touch?

In Which I Update on the Counsellor Situation and Explain the Baby Clothes

Tags

babies, depression, friends, parents, periods

Okay.

So, for all of you who have been waiting with bated breath, yes, the counsellor actually showed up yesterday. So did my period.

Nothing too exciting to report from the counsellor visit, unfortunately, except for the fact that she actually DID spend the full hour with me and didn’t say the words “you have depression all right. I can’t help you, but…” the way everyone else has. She also seemed suitably disgusted by my doctor and agreed that I shouldn’t have to go back and that I was right not to try the pills. She does want me to get checked out by some doctor, though. Of course, Dr. Useless had examined me just recently, but it’s true that she was rushing the whole time. If I can find a doctor who has time for me, I’ll get looked at. I still wouldn’t mind trying Wellbutrin on top of the therapy.

Since I don’t have Wellbutrin, I am trying iodine.

My mother’s always gone on about idodine since it is supposed to be important for thyroid function and my father’s whole family is riddled with thyroid issues (one on hypothyroid medication, another with a goiter, another dead of thyroid cancer… and these are his three siblings) but iodine supplements are hard to find. Mind you, they put some iodine in my prenatal vitamins, and I never noticed a difference. Still, Perfect Husband found a dropper bottle of iodine supplement and we’ve been adding it to our juice at least once a day (after checking toxicity levels etc online – there is such thing as too much of a good thing). Maybe it’s the placebo effect, but I actually feel slightly better this week. My arms aren’t so heavy, and things don’t seem so unbearable. Could also be hormones. I’ll let you know if I get a goiter from all the iodine 🙂

And now, the moment you’ve all been waiting for… in which I explain the baby clothes properly, so as to not sound like a crazy woman who is already purchasing baby supplies for an imaginary child.

When I was in university, a girl I went to high school with got pregnant. We were friendly, so when her baby was born I bought her an adorable fuzzy yellow sweater with the name of my university on it from the campus store. It was the softest thing in the entire world (the sweater, not the store itself). She loved it, kept it, and when my best friend got pregnant a couple of years later, she donated it along with many other baby supplies to my friend. The sweater, now a well loved hand-me-down, had lost some of its original fleeciness but was still darn cute. It fit my goddaughter for, like, a day. When she had outgrown it, my best friend asked me if I wanted the sweater back. She knew how much I loved that school. Darn straight I wanted it! I’ve always known I wanted kids some day. I have so many books that I wouldn’t let my mother get rid of because I wanted my children to have them. So I put the sweater away in a closet, waiting for the day when I would need it for my own child.

I laid the sweater next to a tiny tie-dyed girl’s top which I had picked up at Frenchy’s for, like, fifty cents one day. The year before, in grade 12 Chemistry, I had tie-dyed my own T-shirt, and I thought how cute it would be for my someday-baby to have a little tie-dyed shirt too (the shirt was very much part of my self-identity at the time). It was cheap, and cute, so I picked it up on a whim and hid it so my mother wouldn’t panic.

Fast forward many years down the road. I am married, that first baby is going into second grade and my goddaughter just finished kindergarten. While I am home for a friend’s wedding, my mother and I go through my old closets, trying to get rid of some of the clutter, and my mother finds a folded fuzzy yellow sweater with my university’s name on it and a girl’s tie-dyed tee, both clearly for babies under six months. I hastily explained about the yellow sweater, and left my mother to imagine that I had also received the tee from my best friend, as well. I didn’t want to be too explicit over the fact that I had been yearning for a baby since High School (although she probably got a clue in grade 11, when I became emotionally attached to my Baby-Think-It-Over and didn’t want to give him up).

I set the stuff aside casually, but later shoved the two tops into my suitcase to bring home with me. After, my period was late, my husband was bugging me over the phone, going “you’re preeeegnant” and wouldn’t it be cute if I showed up with a little sweater with the name of our university on it, all ready for baby?

Of course, I wasn’t pregnant, but the baby clothes came home anyway, and have been folded on my dresser ever since. Every now and then I pick up the fuzzy sweater, unfold it, look at the logo on it, think of the babies who wore it, fold it again, and sigh.