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:

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In Which I Find Everything Unnecessarily Difficult And Fight Hormonal Reactions To It

Tags

anxiety, doctor, hormones, ob-gyn, pregnancy, prenatal care, stress, work

My friend Hannah from Hodgepodge and Strawberries recently said to me that ‘pregnancy is like 9 months of non-stop PMS’ and I thoroughly agree. Life is hard enough on general principle, but when you’re trying to do it while surfing on a wave of irritation and overreaction it becomes just that much more difficult to navigate.

Picture trying to hold sixteen different items in your arms at once, while sobbing.

I have become a ball of horrible crippling anxiety and tears.

On top of the two jobs not to mention the “gee I haven’t bought any presents and now there’s no time to mail them back to Nova Scotia in time for Christmas” stress, I’ve been trying to deal with my medical situation.

So, you won’t have forgotten the mysterious disease of May/June. Well, a month or more ago I went back to the specialist because the itchy rash kept coming back. It usually starts on my chest and neck, burning and red, and then fades away while the itchiness spreads over my whole body and causes me to scratch my skin off for days. Antihistamines don’t help. Cortisone cream doesn’t help. So I went back to the internist. I was thinking that maybe this thing was autoimmune after all.

The internist listened carefully, and narrowed her eyes. “I think you should go back to the opthamologist and see if your optic nerve swelling is back,” she said. “If it is, we should probably do a lumber puncture, and you might need to talk to a neurosurgeon.”

I’m sorry, what now?

Yeah, it turns out that itching which isn’t soothed by cortisone or antihistamines can sometimes be NEUROLOGICAL.

I hadn’t mentioned it to her, but the wooshing noise in my left ear had returned a few times, too.

So I went back to the opthamologist, having spent the last three days at work saying “I MIGHT NEED A BRAIN SURGEON” whenever someone asked me a question I couldn’t answer.

The opthamologist looked in my eyes and said, “Yeah, the swelling is back again. Not nearly as bad as the first time I saw you, but definitely worse than the last time I saw you.”

Then, when I went in to my family doctor, she said that the bloodwork that the internist had done showed that my CRP (inflammation) values were up again, too.

So… what does this mean? Lumbar puncture? BRAIN SURGEON (FUCKING  BRAIN SURGEON OH MY GOD)?

Well, I don’t know! Because NO ONE SEEMS TO KNOW.

I called the internist’s office on Monday and was like “Uh, what do I do now?”

And they said “We don’t know… doesn’t say in your file… we’ll ask the doctor tomorrow.”

Today is Wednesday. I still haven’t heard back. So I called and left ANOTHER message asking what the hell I do now.

And that ain’t all.

The internist also apologetically told me that I should be considered a high risk pregnancy because they have no idea what’s wrong with me. Better safe than sorry.

That means that I need an OB, not a midwife.

I decided the last time I was pregnant that I wanted a midwife this time around. Midwives are covered in British Columbia, and you can still have a hospital birth and epidural and all that wonderful stuff. The big benefit to a midwife, as I saw it, was that she will come to your house and check your dilation so you don’t need to go back and forth to the hospital UMPTEEN TIMES and wait for two hours just to be told that you haven’t dilated in the slightest EVEN THOUGH YOU’VE BEEN HAVING CONTRACTIONS EVERY 3 MINUTES FOR THE LAST 18 HOURS.

Not that that wasn’t wonderful and all.

Besides, it sucked that I saw one or two doctors throughout my prenatal care and then my baby ended up being delivered by a stranger who didn’t even remember me when I went in for my 6 week post delivery checkup.

So I got a midwife for my last pregnancy and had all of one appointment with her before the baby died in the womb and all that stuff happened. 

This time I held off for a while – partly because I was half-convinced that the baby would die again so I didn’t want to jump the gun and partly because my doctor was like “let’s make sure your weird disease doesn’t cause any problems.”

So I’ve been seeing my family doctor for prenatals which she said she could do through 20 weeks of pregnancy.

Then the rashes and the head wooshing started and now the internist has officially said that I should be considered high risk.

Which means that I need to have an OB.

Which sucks.

So I asked my family doctor to refer me to my previous OB clinic. After all, if I have to have an OB again, it might as well be the place that gave me a healthy baby last time, somewhere I am familiar with and with some faces that I’ll recognize.

Does that seem too much to ask? DOES IT?

APPARENTLY IT IS.

No More Purple Pills

Tags

anxiety, busy, depression, generalized anxiety disorder, motherhood, stress, time management, welbutrin, work

I have been off of my Welbutrin for about three months now. I started to wean myself off in June, skipping the occasional day, until I actually forgot to take it at all for a week.

Then, when we went the the states, I left the pills behind, and I haven’t touched them since.

I’ve been doing fine.

I had a happy summer, loving my husband, liking my job, training dogs, writing on Elance.

I’ve been very tired. I feel very extroverted out.

I wish that I didn’t have to juggle work AND dog training AND Elance, but I’m not willing to give up any of these. I need them.

I need the work, the dog training is my insurance for the future when we have a second kid and full time work will no longer cover daycare costs, and Elance is extra money in my pocket while building my writing credits, which is REALLY part of my long term plan.

I spend my mornings trying to shepherd Owl into his clothes and into the car, I work for 9 hours with no break, and then I pick Owl up and entertain him while PH makes dinner. By the time we get Owl to sleep it’s 9 pm and I’m exhausted.

PH wants me to take more time to myself, to hand him the baby and say “YOU deal with it, I’m out of touch for an hour” but I rarely take him up on it. First of all, because I hand him Owl and then disappear training dogs a couple times a week as it is, and second of all because I want to spend time with my husband and son.

But PH thinks all this work is adding to my anxiety.

I haven’t really noticed it (maybe fish don’t notice water, much) but PH thinks it has been worse lately. I don’t know if fall coming on is beginning to activate my SAD, but that seems hard to believe, because it’s been warm and sunny an gorgeous outside lately.

So maybe it’s just all too much.

But I’m not quite sure what to do about it. We need money, and I need to make money while building a way to make money with fewer hours in the future. So I think this is just how it is right now, and I’m not unhappy or miserable.

Just a little stressed.

That’s within normal range, right?

The Cloud in the Silver Lining

Tags

anxiety, choice, employment, GAD, generalized anxiety disorder, jobs, life decisions, stress, worrying

I got the damn job.

To make it worse, the lady offering me the job is so NICE. She says that they are “excited to have me joining the team” and “looking forward to seeing me” and that she will arrange my schedule to be sure that I am out before my daycare closes.

Yes, that’s right, I’m COMPLAINING about how NICE she is.

“Carol always manages to find the cloud in the silver lining,” PH said over the phone to my mother today, which made her burst out laughing.

Let me walk you through my mind:

In order to determine how I feel about something NOW, I need to know how I will feel about it in the future. I’m afraid to be happy about something now if I think there may be a chance I might regret it later. So here are the future scenarios running through my mind:

Scenario A: Maybe I’ll love the people at this job, and won’t be offered the awesome charity job that would be perfect for me. I will be overworked from trying to work full time at my job PLUS the dog training business, and never see my family, but at least I will like my workplace.

Scenario B: Maybe I’ll love the people at this job, and will ALSO be offered the awesome charity job that would be perfect for me. Then I’ll have to choose between a full time job in a setting I don’t like but with awesome coworkers, and disappointing people who have been awesome to me and who I enjoy working with in order to pursue a more “ideal” job that may or may not pan out.

Scenario C: Maybe I’ll find myself in a similar situation to last time – feel incompetent, feel disliked, be generally unhappy. I won’t get the other job either, and I’ll just tough it out until the dog training business gets big enough that I can quit.

Scenario D: Maybe I will feel incompetant but then get the other job, and will leave feeling like a failure but at least I’d be going to a more “ideal” job.

Scenarios A and D are preferable, and I still dislike both of them.

I didn’t sleep much last night. I’m near tears most of the time. PH is alternately worried about me and frustrated as hell with my I’m-doomed attitude.

I can’t help it.

The future just… scares me. I have no idea if things are going to be okay.

Lurking Anxiety Monster is Lurking

Tags

anxiety, GAD, generalized anxiety disorder, post partum, stress, work

My anxiety has been coming back lately. I’m dealing with it as I’ve been taught: facing the thing that makes me anxious, instead of putting it off. Trying to accept the anxiety and let it in instead of pushing it away.

But I wish I knew why it has come back, or what it is even about.

I’m not anxious about anything in particular, most of the time. I just feel the tightness of it, clawing at me. Like there’s something important that I need to remember. So I try to remember it, and instead I dredge up all the minor to-dos on my mental list, which just add to my stress instead of helping to identify it.

It might be related to the fact that my old workplace has shoved its way into my life again in a highly stressful way. The issues don’t directly involve me, but they strongly affect me and people and dogs that I care about (I obviously can’t share it publicly, but if any of you want to know, send me an email and I’ll share what I can. I’d like to share it with someone, but I’m not idiotic enough to post it here).

If so, then it’s not so much the anxiety of this particular event but the ghost of anxieties past, come floating with the new troubles, like an old smell. Maybe it arrived with the news but it lurks around corners, emerging when I least expect it.

It’s mostly just when I’m alone. When I have Babby with me, I’m never anxious.

Tired? Sure.

Frustrated? Sometimes.

Joyful? Often.

Relaxed? Every time I nurse.

I feel bad for mothers who don’t breastfeed, because it’s practically impossible to be nursing ( when it’s well-established, I mean, not the first few weeks when it hurts like a mofo) and stressed at the same time. Hormones won’t let you. You might as well try to have a panic attack in a warm bubble bath with soft music playing.

Besides,  how can you be anxious when you’re dealing with someone who makes this face?

Babby: Not Anxiety-Compatible