Here We Go

Monday, October 23, 2017

Thoughts on Society and Moms

I read this article in Time magazine this weekend and found it incredibly interesting to read all of the ways that moms are prone to feeling terrible about the role of being a mom. I sat a meeting recently at work where a co-worker, whose children are now in college, was listing her regrets for things she didn't do often enough when raising her sons. I started listing things that I feel bad about in raising my daughters. A few other moms chimed in with their regrets. Another one of my co-workers who does not have children looked around the room and was flabbergasted that all of these women who she thinks are amazing, and are probably excellent parents, were sitting at a conference table talking about everything the felt awful about. She said she didn't understand why we all felt like there was so much to feel bad about when we were clearly all involved and dedicated, and it made her sad to hear all of these things being said.

But that's kind of how it is, isn't it? We, as mothers, are often bombarded with so much feedback about how every one of our life choices will somehow damage our children that we overlook all of the really amazing things we do. We overlook the kissed boo boos, the extra bedtime story, the hugs in the morning, the way we lovingly swaddle a newborn, the millions of diapers that get changed before your child finally is ready to potty train, the encouragement given as you struggle with that potty training, and the celebrations you throw for every single success your child has. We discard the birthday parties, the afternoon spent making cookies, the few minutes you can squeeze in to color together, the tea parties we attend, the lovies we patch back together after they've been loved a little too much, the clothes we purchase, the shoes we tie, the bath times where we end up soaked from overzealous splashing, the way we check on them before going to bed ourselves each night. We think of those things as "ordinary" or "expected" and we forget that each of those things IS motherhood. They are all strung together bit by bit to weave this tapestry of motherhood that our children will remember. And none of those things involve whether you bought organic or conventional apples.

Those aren't the things that society as a whole, and certainly not other mothers, seem to think matter in the long run. If you're a new mom, you're immediately bombarded with tons of advice on what you should or should not do. What you should eat (organic chemical free everything!!). What you should drink (Water! Filtered to remove all chemicals! Never coffee!!). Whether you should breast feed or bottle feed (Breast feeding is the only answer, formula is poison!!!). You are slammed with "advice" that sounds an awful lot like judgement, because it is. It's a million judgements thrown at you to pressure you into making the "right" choices. But "right" for other people might not be "right" for you, and there doesn't seem to be a clear voice of sanity to talk about that on a large scale. There aren't many voices saying "fed is best". There aren't many voices saying "Circumcision is a personal choice, do what you want". There aren't many voices saying "I trust you're not trying to damage your growing fetus with what you eat, so I'll keep my damn mouth shut".

The article I read was followed by this essay, detailing the many opinions people want to hand out like Halloween candy while you're pregnant. It brought back some vivid memories of the "advice" people wanted to give me while I was pregnant. I distinctly remember a moment where I was at my in-laws house and I reached into the fridge to grab a soda. My sister-in-law looked directly at me and said "The caffeine free ones are in the door". She was pregnant at the time as well, and I said "OK, thank you" as I cracked open my can of regular Coke. She stared at me and said "You know you're not supposed to have caffeine, right?" and I said "I'm not supposed to have too much caffeine, and I haven't." It was a strange moment of realizing that suddenly people were watching me, and paying close attention to what I might be eating or drinking. The reality was that I was told I could have 200 mg of caffeine a day. The can of Coke contained 34 mg, which I knew because I had looked it up. Plus, at that point I was over five months into my pregnancy and the caffeine concerns were less of a concern in general. I wasn't damaging my baby, I was giving myself a little sugar rush. That wasn't the assumption that was made, in this case, though. The assumption was that I should know better than to drink that soda. I had never experienced anything like it before.

All of this leads me to wonder WHY so many people feel qualified to weigh in, pass judgement, give "advice" in situations where we are perfectly capable of figuring these things out on our own. Sure, we've all met that horrible bratty kid who listens to no one and misbehaves constantly and wondered "What are that kid's parents doing?", but I feel like that's often the exception and not the rule. Why do people around us feel like it's ok to tell you that you're feeding your kid poison if you mix up some formula? Why do they feel like it's ok to tell you that if you breast feed you can't do it in public? Why do your friends and family get to weigh in on whether you circumcise your son? Furthermore, why do we as parents, particularly moms, have to feel like we're always doing the wrong things for our kids when all any of us wants to do is what's right? It seems like there's some mystical force in the universe that has somehow pitted us against each other instead of supporting each other through something that is really fucking difficult. Because sometimes being a mom is really fucking difficult! Self doubt doesn't make it any easier. Having your family tell you that you don't love your kid because you make sarcastic jokes about them doesn't make it any easier. Having your friends tell you that you should raise your kid like they raised theirs doesn't make it any easier. Having strangers pass judgement on you for how you choose to discipline, speak to, or interact with your child doesn't make it any easier.

I've been a mom of an infant/toddler for nearly three years. In that time, I can count ~~on one hand~~ on one finger how many encouragements I've gotten while out in public with my daughter. I can't begin to tell you how many judgmental head shakes, dirty looks, admonishing glances, whispered comments, or outright verbal backlash I've gotten. And my daughter is pretty damn well behaved in public. I can't imagine what mothers with children who are extra challenging in public spaces get. I can guarantee it's probably not encouragement. I can guarantee that what they need in that moment is encouragement.

I don't know why we do this to each other, but damn do I feel like it needs to stop. Maybe the next time you're out, and you see a mom doing whatever she's got to do with her kid, just give her a smile and tell her she's doing a great job. You might be the only person who says that to her all year.

Late night thoughts

Today she's sweaty hair plastered against her forehead from the baby fine waves that escape her pigtails as she runs around outside, exploring ants and digging holes with a stick. She's scraped knees, and dirty sneakers, peals of giggles and exclamations of "Come back here you silly goose!" as she chases leaves blowing in the breeze. She's more person than baby now, and every moment is a new discovery. She relishes in exploring the world around her, would rather be outside than in, and has taken to kissing her toys goodnight. She has begun telling me about things she loves, from books to trampolines to flowers, there is always something she is excited to tell me about. She is learning to socialize with other children, but often would prefer to be by herself. She holds her small friends at a distance, preferring the safety of mommy's lap or daddy's arms to the scary idea of having to learn to befriend children her own age. At parties, she will disappear into a corner with a book or some crayons and paper while other children argue over dolls and other playthings. When she finds another child she enjoys time with, she will talk excitedly about her time with them for days, even when they've spent very little time interacting. She has so many opinions, and everything has to be her idea. There is no forcing her into something she doesn't want to do, she will be the leader in her life. She knows her alphabet, most of her letter sounds, and her numbers up through 30. She notices everything. She thinks she's hilarious, and she is. She remembers plots from her story books that she hasn't had read to her in months. She giggles as she says "Leave the goldfish alone!", a line from one of her favorite books. She loves cats, and usually the dog, as long as he's not trying to give her kisses.

She's a new person each day I greet her. She's grown since yesterday. She's learned more things since yesterday. My yesterday girl has left me and my today girl stands before me, ready to do it all over again. She is beautiful, and brilliant, and infuriating and endearing all at the same time. She has a temper that is rivaled by few. She can be affectionate in ways you'd never expect. Her smile is so beautiful that I know some day it will get her out of whatever trouble she gets herself into. She is light, and wonder, and fascination all wrapped up into one person.

She is one of my favorite accomplishments.

I am so grateful for her.

There are a lot of opinions

There are times in the past two years of this parenting journey where I've wondered if other people listen to some of the things that I've had people say to me. Like, I know that everyone faces their own hardships, or their own challenges and struggle with judgmental people on some level, but I wonder if other people have experiences similar to mine.

It's been no secret that my internal struggles have been largely with feeling like I'm cut out for this mom thing. I've had so much inner turmoil over whether I should or could be a parent that it robbed me of all appreciation of the experience of becoming a parent. It's been an ongoing voice in the back of my head that I work to silence every day. I am always questioning every decision. Every piece of progress she makes or doesn't make, I wonder if I should have done something different. Nothing is straight forward. Nothing happens without questioning or insecurity. I try to project confidence, but when I'm by myself, alone with my thoughts, the voice starts creeping in and I'm spending a significant amount of energy to silence it.

So, imagine how hard it is to silence that voice when you also have people around you outright telling you that you're a crap parent. To have people say things like "Your daughter deserves better" or to have people tell you that your child deserves to know they're loved but you don't show them that you love them in any way, or to have people tell you what you would do "if you were a good parent".

My in-laws have taken to attacking me and my parenting skills. And when I say that, I don't mean some sort of polite, passive aggressive commentary offered up in conversation. I mean outright attacking me. My mother-in-law told me that I don't show my daughter I love her. My brother-in-law decided to tell me what I'd be doing if I were a good parent. And I'm just supposed to accept that shit in an effort to be polite. But you know what it doesn't do? It doesn't help that voice in my head get any quieter.

The thing is, I've dealt with mistreatment from these people for years. I know that their invalid opinions shouldn't get to me because they're awful, but it's infuriating that I have to put up with that kind of stuff, or listen to it. And, it makes me wonder if other people deal with this kind of shit, or if it's just something special that life has chosen to shit on me with.

If I'm being honest

I'm not ok. I'm not.

I've avoided talking about this with anyone because I everyone in my life has either abandoned me, or if they haven't, they've made me feel like I'm somehow a burden when I actually need someone, so I've been white knuckling it, and this is my only safe space.......or, at least as safe as I can get since it, too, has caused problems when I've let a select few people in, but since it's as safe as I can get, I'm here.

I'm not ok.

I have spent the last two years battling a lot of things that I've been burying and pretending didn't matter, and pretending weren't a problem, but lately I've been reading a lot of stuff, and I'm realizing that everything I've been burying is cropping up when people talk about their issues and it's becoming apparent that I've been in the same boat as them. For example, this week's essay by Chrissy Tiegan hit home. Sections like this:

"I had never, ever—in my whole entire life—had one person say to me: “I have postpartum depression.” Growing up in the nineties, I associated postpartum depression with Susan Smith [a woman now serving life in prison for killing her two sons; her lawyer argued that she suffered from a long history of depression], with people who didn’t like their babies or felt like they had to harm their children. I didn’t have anything remotely close to those feelings. I looked at Luna every day, amazed by her. So I didn’t think I had it."

So I started doing some digging, and apparently undiagnosed PPD can last up to three years. And suddenly, so many things started to fall into place. Some of the crazy I was feeling, some of the struggles I had early on, and have continued to have. I started looking up symptoms and while not all applied, there were some that just......damn.

You feel guilty because you believe you should be handling new motherhood better than this. You feel like your baby deserves better. You worry whether your baby can tell that you feel so bad, or that you are crying so much, or that you don’t feel the happiness or connection that you thought you would. You may wonder whether your baby would be better off without you.
You don’t feel bonded to your baby. You’re not having that mythical mommy bliss that you see on TV or read about in magazines. Not everyone with postpartum depression feels this way, but many do.
You feel irritated or angry. You have no patience. Everything annoys you. You feel resentment toward your baby, or your partner, or your friends who don’t have babies. You feel out-of-control rage.
You feel hopeless, like this situation will never ever get better. You feel weak and defective, like a failure.
You feel disconnected. You feel strangely apart from everyone for some reason, like there’s an invisible wall between you and the rest of the world.
Maybe you’re doing everything right. You are exercising. You are taking your vitamins. You have a healthy spirituality. You do yoga. You’re thinking “Why can’t I just get over this?” You feel like you should be able to snap out of it, but you can’t.
You know something is wrong. You may not know you have a perinatal mood or anxiety disorder, but you know the way you are feeling is NOT right. You think you’ve “gone crazy.”
You are afraid that this is your new reality and that you’ve lost the “old you” forever.
You are afraid that if you reach out for help people will judge you. Or that your baby will be taken away.

Check. Check. Check. Check. It's just...so much of my life has been this, for two solid years.

And then I think about how hard it's been, because I've been doing it solo. Because while I spent several months feeling like a crazy person and playing desperate person attempting to break through that invisible wall between me and the rest of the world, that became too much for some people, and in the time I most needed people in my life, they all left. And it's stayed that way. And I haven't had anyone to talk to. I haven't had anyone to understand any of this. I haven't had......anyone. I've been so incredibly focused on putting up this façade of a person who has everything under control, and who was easing into all of this without much struggle, and it was forcing me to just bury everything. But, over time, it's gotten harder to bury, and harder to pretend I'm holding shit together. Furthermore, it's harder to actually hold my shit together.

Then, when I think about all of those items in that list that I've been fighting for so long, and I couple it with people telling me my daughter deserves better, or that my daughter deserves to know she's loved and cared about but I don't adequately do that, or what I'd do if I was a good parent, it's sort of shocking that I haven't completely lost my shit before now. But I've held it together through all of that too. Through the times when I needed people to support me, and they chose to do harm instead. Though, since it has never felt really safe to fully discuss this with anyone around me, maybe it's not their fault.

At this point, I'm getting to where I just don't care about anything, at least not in a way I should. I don't really care about keeping the house as clean as I used to. I don't care about hosting gatherings. I don't care about going to gatherings. I'm physically exhausted all the time. Most nights I just want to go home, curl up on the couch and sleep. I don't necessarily want to play with my kid. Everything feels like a chore, and everything feels like it'll take way more effort than it needs to. And I don't care about most of it.

I don't know where I need to go from here. My life doesn't currently have time for therapy, or help, really. And I'm sure there are a lot of people who are going to roll their eyes and say "There is always time to take care of yourself", but those people can shut up because they don't understand how my life is structured and they don't understand how hard it is to take time. I could probably talk to my doctor and pop some anti-depressants, but without therapy I think that's just a Band-Aid on a problem. So, the reality is that since everything is indicating these issues can last up to three years but I hear nothing about it going on for longer, maybe I'll just wait it out.

My knuckles are already used to being white anyway.

Reading and thinking

The past few weeks have had me feeling a bit down. It might be the mid-winter blues, or maybe I've given in to feeling sorry for myself a bit, or maybe everything I've shoved aside is becoming apparent. I'm not sure. Regardless, I feel like I've been on the struggle bus, and I've spent a lot of days on the verge of tears over the stupidest things. I've whined to a co-worker far more than I ever should. I've been grasping for a sense of connection, and not finding it. This isn't new, it's just sort of weighing on me at the moment.

This morning, the poor co-worker I've been whining to sent me this blog, and I had to read it in pieces, because reading it all at once threatened to send me into tears while sitting in my cubicle. Sometimes it's odd, to hear what feel like your words, coming out of someone else's mouth. Or keyboard, as the case may be. When I got to this passage, I felt like I was this blogger for a moment:

"...supporting my husband while he went back to school. The more I gave, the more was asked of me, and the stronger my guilt became when I wanted anything: a night out, a haircut, to go to the gym, to be left alone for five minutes. I was…. An inconvenience."

This. This more than anything is how I feel a lot of the time. Last week I spent an evening away from home. My husband picked up our daughter, and I went to happy hour with some friends from work. Then I met my cousin for dinner and drinks, so I didn't get home until nearly 10:00 p.m. The entire time, I felt guilty. I felt like I didn't deserve that time away. Never mind the fact that my husband spends evenings away at class twice a week, and I handle everything at home pretty much on my own while he's in classes or teaching. Never mind that I do bedtime literally every night and have for at least the last year, barring being out of town for work. Never mind that I cook dinner every night, and I spend literally every waking moment that I'm not at work with my daughter. Never mind that I probably earned an evening away. I still felt like I didn't deserve it. My husband told me to go, to have fun, that he had everything under control. And he did. I knew he did. But....for me, it felt like wanting something just wasn't ok. That me needing a night to breathe was unacceptable. Like I was abandoning my responsibilities. It was also coupled with the guilt of knowing that when my husband has evenings away, he's in class, so it's not like he's out enjoying himself or having a good time. He's basically working, so I don't feel like I deserve to have my time spent frivolously when he doesn't get to do that. This is all self imposed guilt, but it's hard to shake a lot of the time. And, that feeling of being an inconvenience, of being invisible, of being somehow unworthy of what everyone else seems to get so easily, that gets hard to shake after a while too.

Which led me to that feeling of needing to connect. Needing to be able to confide in a person, and feel like I'm not burdening them with myself. As I was thinking about this, someone in my Facebook news feed posted this article, which had some stats in it that made me feel pretty sad. Like this stat, for example:

In a survey given in 1985, people were asked to list their friends in response to the question “Over the last six months, who are the people with whom you discussed matters important to you?” The most common number of friends listed was three; 59 percent of respondents listed three or more friends fitting this description. The same survey was given again in 2004. This time the most common number of friends was zero.

So, I guess at least I'm not alone? But, doesn't that suck? Doesn't that say so much about who we are as a species where there isn't anyone you can talk to about your life? It's just......it's depressing. But the fact that having a weak social circle is as detrimental to your health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day is even more depressing. Because I have basically no social circle. No support system. I have one friend who has been around for a long time, and I cherish his friendship, but at the same time, he's not always the guy you can go to with your dark, unhappy thoughts. And that's ok. He's always there when you need someone, and that alone means a lot. It just also makes me feel like a circle isn't two people. It's not binary, me and you. There needs to be more. Often, I find that I'm really seeking a sense of family, of acceptance. I'm seeking relationships where you can disagree on a topic and still be friends. What I've realized in the past several years is that I don't have time or patience for people who just ghost you and disappear, or outright tell you there's no problem when clearly there is and they stop talking to you, or who claim to want to amend things and don't put in any effort, or who just decide that you suck without bothering to tell you why so you have a chance to try to fix it. People who act like you've misunderstood the relationship, when the reality is that they're trying to separate themselves from any guilty they may feel for having hurt you. Or people who just seem to think you can't be hurt, like you have no feelings, or that because you have a tough exterior, it's ok to just shit all over you because you can take it. Unfortunately, those are the only people I really know. Those are the only people I seem to come in contact with, and I'm beginning to wonder if there are any other types of people out there. I often wonder if this is just it. And so, I read that article thinking "Well, this would be easier if people weren't all a fistful of assholes". That also becomes a barrier, because it means you can't force yourself to trust anymore, you don't care about making an effort for something that's going to die or hurt you anyway, so you sit, isolated and alone, and at that point you might as well be smoking 15 cigarettes a day for all the good it's doing you.

I don't know what the point of all of this was. I just needed to clear my head. Reading seems to give me a lot of things to think about.

A wealth of useless information

I was talking to a co-worker the other day about the things that worry her about becoming a parent, largely whether the balance of responsibilities will tilt too far to one side. She said something about how she doesn't want to be the one who has to remember everything all the time. I told her that once you're on the other side of that parenthood hump, remembering everything isn't really a choice. It's just a weird habit that you develop and hold onto. It's this mass of swirling information in your head that doesn't necessarily make sense to anyone else but your brain is holding onto it in case, at some point, you find you need it. Spoiler alert: A lot of times, you never need it.

That's just how it is, though. You think about stuff and realize that your own wealth of useless information grows with each passing day, and you can answer the most random questions. Like, right now, these things can just be pulled from my head:

The cat only has one can of cat food left
My daughter needs an appointment made for her next checkup
My living room's paint color is "Earl Gray"
There are no diapers left in the diaper basket, but there's a spare box next to the arm chair
There are no diapers upstairs on the changing table
The Snurtch book is downstairs in the book basket instead of upstairs in the bookshelf, so if she freaks out that she can't find it, that's where it is.
We're out of Swiffer cloths
There are three pairs of socks with no matches in my laundry basket
The dog only pooped once yesterday, which seems weird. Must watch to make sure there's not some sort of issue with him.
I have half a bottle of dish soap left, which means I'll probably have to buy a new one the week after next.
The HOA needs paid, but I want to wait until it's past due because I find the HOA useless and resent paying them so I pay late every year.
The Disney Junior book is hidden under my daughter's crib.
The Paw Patrol Christmas book is hidden behind the sofa.
My husband's phone charger is still sitting on the counter at home, which means his phone will be dead by the time he leaves work.
I have to text my friend at 4:30 to follow up on how her interview went.
The purple shoes are upstairs under the rocking chair, but the dress shoes are downstairs under the coffee table.
There's still a load of laundry in the dryer that needs to be folded.

All of this can be rattled off at a moment's notice. But can I remember that we already have two containers of parmesan cheese in the fridge? Nope. Better buy another....

What's missing, and what's not

Over the last couple of weeks, my world has been able to shift a bit. My husband had a break from classes, and with the return of free time also came the return of social interaction. It made me notice a few things. First and foremost, I miss social interaction. Beyond that, I think I might need social interaction. Up until the holiday everything felt like it was too much work. Too much effort, too much work. All of my normal enthusiasm for gatherings, and party planning was gone. It was like I was just zapped of my ability to care about that kind of stuff. Then the holiday season happened and suddenly there were social gatherings back in my life and it was like I got recharged. Then, I realized that maybe my lack of ability to care about social gatherings was due to the lack of actually having them. So, that led to wanting to continue having that social interaction, but life picked back up and I think those are off the table for the time being.

And having that back in my life made me realize how few people there are left to invite to something like that. I used to have a list of go-to people, and now that list consists of two. Two people. That sort of reminded me of why I stopped pushing to have gatherings at the beginning of the fall. Beyond life making it hard, the idea that my guest list was two people long felt lonely. And depressing. And it reminded me of how isolated I feel a lot of the time. The isolation drains me. The lack of a village drains me. But, it also makes me grateful for the couple of people who stayed.

I do enjoy the time I have with my daughter, though. I think it keeps me from being depleted. It is still draining, because it's still life with a toddler, but it keeps me from feeling completely alone sometimes. And I'm grateful for that.

So, in the end, what's missing is a piece of the life I used to have. And my village. What's not missing is something to keep me from feeling the full brunt of that, and that something is pretty great. It makes me smile nearly every day, even on days when I don't want to.

Holiday thoughts

This past week I had some time off of work for the holiday, and it was much needed. My husband, who has less free time than I do, was able to take some time out of his schedule and spend it with the family. It was a rare treat for both me and my daughter, who seems to acutely notice her lack of daddy time as weeks go by. But he was able to play with her, and read her books, and spend the time he doesn't typically have to spend with her, which I think she needed. I also got some time with him to actually talk, and enjoy his company, and that was a nice change of pace as well. We sat on the sofa on Saturday night and just watched movies. Nothing else. Just sat and watched movies together. It's been a long time since we've been able to do that without him multi-tasking on the laptop to get work done. I've missed it.

The holiday didn't really give us much of a chance to slow down, since we host several holiday gatherings and the house needed cleaned, the tree needed to go up, there was food to make and shopping to be done, but when all of that was over, on Sunday when I had a chance to slow down and not focus on any responsibilities outside of my average every day chores, I was able to slow down and appreciate some things. I actually got to sleep in. Truly sleep in, as late as I wanted, for the first time I can remember in a long time. I try to let my husband sleep in as much as possible, because I know how exhausting school and work are, and even though I'm supposed to get to sleep in on Sundays, I never seem to get to do it. There's always somewhere to be, or my daughter has a meltdown and I get up to help deal with it, or I feel guilty that he needs to be working and he's managing her by himself instead, so I wake up earlier than I want to and push on with my day. But this week, I got to sleep in and as I woke up in my bed, under my very nice down comforter, in my large airy bedroom, I suddenly appreciated how nice it can be to sleep late in your own bed. When I got up, I stayed in my pajamas for a long time instead of immediately throwing on some clothes and dashing through my day. I wore my pajamas, and I played on the floor with my daughter. I rolled around with her, and laid in her tent with her while she pretended to go to sleep and then made me kiss her Red Fraggle doll. I tickled her until peals of laughter rang through my entire house, and were met with cries of "AGAIN!" each time I would stop. I read her books, and snuggled with her on the couch. I made her toast, and I laughed as she gave me an enthusiastic "Tank ooo!" when I handed the plate to her. She counted to five on her own, and correctly named some letters from the alphabet in one of her books, then named off all of the colors in her book about colors except for green, which she stubbornly refuses to remember.

When I put her down for her nap, and finally got myself showered and ready to go out to grocery shop and manage the responsibilities I had for the day, I found myself realizing that this might be the happiest I've ever been. Not to say that there aren't struggles, I hate that my husband is never available and that his work and school take up so much of his time, and I wish there was more time the three of us could spend together. I still struggle with having no support system, and not having anyone I can be open or honest with, and that my social interaction comes largely from a nearly two year old, but on the whole, I think this is the first time in years that I can look around say that, yes, I am happy. I am often exhausted, and frazzled, and sometimes at the end of my patience with the world, but this life I have in front of me is pretty beautiful. And it's not one of those mom things like "Oh, I had a baby and suddenly everything was happy" because that's not it at all. It's just that there have been so many years of absolute darkness in recent memory, and it feels like that cloud has been lifted for a little bit, and the sun is having a chance to shine through, and the little things are easier to notice and appreciate than they have been before. I needed that reprieve. I needed a little bit of light. I'm just learning to appreciate it again.

Thoughts on being lonely and other things

I'm not sure what it is about the changing of the seasons that seems to trigger things in me. It's not like a seasonal depression thing, really, but just a sense of restlessness and typically an impending dread of dealing with upcoming holidays and the drama they bring. Plus, as much as I love fall, life changes a lot when school starts again. My oldest daughter and husband are back in college classes, and my husband goes back to work, so his job coupled with his college classes often mean he brings a lot of work home, or spends evenings and weekends doing homework. It means I have to find ways to occupy my time without him participating. Where we might usually spend a weekend going shopping, or taking our daughter to the zoo, I now have hours and hours to fill without a partner. I can take my daughter to the zoo alone, if I want, but it loses something when we don't share the experience as a family. So, we run errands, and we spend time at the library, and we go to the park, but she's not much for conversation and sometimes I just miss having someone to chat with. I've channeled my energy in the evening into creating some gifts for people who are having babies or have recently had babies, and that takes up my time and keeps me occupied, but it doesn't solve for my lack of conversation. Sometimes I wish I had someone I could just meet up with for lunch or coffee, who didn't mind that I'd have a toddler in tow, so I could just....talk. I don't even have anything important that I want to talk about, I just want to chat with people. So, maybe that's what fall triggers for me. A sense of loneliness. It allows me to be too much in my own head, and that's hard. It's particularly hard at the moment, since the only person I really get to socialize with is my husband, and he's absent. It just highlights the fact that my support system has crumbled.

I think it just makes me think about other people who are absent, and how sad it makes me, and....often....how terrible it makes me feel. Probably because this sort of thing happens over and over and over, so it feels like I'm the problem. And maybe I am the problem. But I try not to be the problem. And I try to understand what it is about me that does this to people, so I can attempt to change it. But, I don't always understand, and there will always been lingering "What did I do that was so terrible?" questions in my head that are hard to manage because there aren't always answers to that question, because people just disappear. And maybe that's another thing that all of this loneliness is triggering, it makes me notice more quickly when people start to pull away. Then I get more sad.

But, I'm still there when people need it, even if they are holding me at a distance. I haven't closed doors, I'm just not expecting people to walk back through them. It's an ongoing battle I have with my self esteem, and my sense of self worth, but I'm still there. If people want me to be. That's about all I can do anymore.

So, it drives me to be here, writing this. I know some people might think this format isn't the best way to deal with my feelings, but I think it's the best format for me. It's sometimes just something I have to get out of my head so I have space for other things. So, I get it out of my head and I move on. I read something a friend posted a few days ago about why she writes, and she said "I am a (somewhat) well-adjusted member of society because I write. Writing saves me from myself". I think that's what I do here. I'm saving me from myself by writing it all out and in some ways it keeps me balanced. It keeps me from dwelling on the darkness that can creep into my head when I'm left to my own devices for too long. And I need that.

A little bit of credit

When I first set out on the whole parenthood journey, there were a lot of people who were significantly less than supportive. There were people, some very close to me, who said I wouldn't be very good at it. There were people who said they never "saw me as a mom". There were people who asked me if I was sure I was cut out for this. That was hard. That put a lot of doubt into my head. It shook my confidence to the point where I actually didn't think I could be a good parent, because no one around me thought I could. That's the weird thing about people. When a person has faith in you, it's like you can do anything, but the second you feel like no one is in your corner, everything feels pointless.

Then, after my daughter was born, after I had been told while in labor that I "probably couldn't do it" ("it" being labor and delivery), I found myself in a panic at the idea of being allowed to go home with a baby that I clearly had no business taking care of because even while in the midst of birthing her, people still didn't think I could do it. I panicked that I'd be sent home to care for her without the help of people who know so much more than I do about babies. I was afraid to leave the hospital, because I thought that once I was on my own, I'd fulfill everyone's prophecy about me.

That's when something kind of amazing happened. I did just fine. I took care of her, kept her alive, seemed to know what she needed and when she needed it. I got her through sickness, and through GERD, and through teething. I snuggled her when she cried. I played with her when she was alert. I did all of the things that were expected of me, and I did them well. It took me a long time to bond with her, but once things clicked, that was that. It all worked. I proved the naysayers wrong.

Then, we got to the point where my daughter was older, and despite the fact that she was thriving, people wanted to weigh in again on my abilities. This time it was less about someone thinking I could do the basics of loving her and keeping her alive. This time the thing that came into question was again about me, and about who I was, and whether I was a good enough example for my daughter. The question of whether my daughter deserved better was brought up several times by people, and it cut deep every time. It was so hard to hear that people thought that the person I am was somehow going to damage my daughter because I was going to set a bad example for her. It was demoralizing to feel like you were finally doing something right in your life just to hear that others thought simply by being yourself, you were going to destroy your kid in some way. I cried over that. I cried a lot. I ugly cried. It was a weight that sucked all of the oxygen out of a room.

I took a hard look at things after that, though, and realized that those people don't matter. When I look at my daughter, she is bright, she's funny, she's intelligent, she's well adjusted, she's curious, she's social, she's loving and sweet. If people think that I didn't have anything to do with any of that based on the example I set for her, then they're dead wrong. A lot of those qualities are just in her nature, but they continue to grow and flourish due to my encouragement and the example I set for her to continue to be this way. I set examples for her to solve problems for herself. I set examples for her on how to interact with the people she loves. My whole life is an example for my daughter, and so far I haven't done so badly. So for people to comment on how she deserves a better example really just goes to show that they do not know my daughter at all, and deep down they probably also don't know me. They don't know that I always put my best foot forward for those that I love, and that I desire nothing more in this world than to see my daughter have a childhood that looks the polar opposite of the one I had. Those people who wanted to talk about me as a parent haven't actually watched me as a parent. They've drawn their conclusions based on who I am away from my child, or who they think I am based on social media, and not who I truly am when I raise my daughter. And honestly, that's their mistake, not mine.

When I take inventory of how things have gone to this point, and how I've handled this life I've sort of fallen into, and I let a note of conceit fall into my thoughts and opinions, I can allow myself to say I'm a damn good mother. I don't do everything right, but I certainly have more right than wrong under my belt. I am not perfect, but my daughter is thriving, happy, and vibrant. So can anyone ask more than that of a child as young as mine is? My older daughter is also thriving, challenging herself, living a life that she once couldn't have imagined living. Her boyfriend recently said that our family is what he uses as an example of what a family should be, and he hopes to have one as great as ours some day. That's high praise. Far more valid than the people who have criticized from the outside, since he's basically living at our house and sees every day life. So, yes, I'm a good mom, and maybe I need to say that out loud more often because it's true. I'll always make mistakes. I'll always worry over whether I'm doing the right things. But on the whole, I'm always working to be the best parent I could possibly be, and anyone who thinks that's not a good enough example well......I guess that's their problem.

It's an ok life

This morning while driving to work I heard a song on the radio from a Broadway show, and the song itself was directly related to the show's subject matter, but every once in a while you hit a cluster of lyrics that you relate to and you think "Well, that's for me today". Early on in the song, the lyrics were:

And if my life's not perfect,
If I'm anxious, bored, or sad,
Well, today may be less shitty--
With whole chunks of not so bad!

And I wouldn't change a thing about it;
No, I wouldn't want to change a thing.
In a world that's unreliable,
These are rocks on which to cling.
Nothing's great and nothing's new--
But "nothing" has its worth.

I liked these lyrics. I liked them because it's a reminder that even if things aren't exciting all the time, and even if "nothing" is going on, that's ok. Life might never be perfect, but there are big chunks of "not so bad" every day that you can be grateful for. That's nice. That's comforting. Because we all have bad days, but when you shake it out as a whole, the entirety of life is a lot of "not so bad".

Time to reflect

I went on vacation recently, which was nice because I really needed to get away from day to day life and re-center myself. It's hard to appreciate the day to day a lot of the time, because you get caught up in the million demands of your average life, and often it seems as if the day is over just as soon as you feel like you've gotten your feet under you. Vacation helps me turn off the noise of every day life. It takes away those nagging responsibilities like cooking, laundry, dishes, grocery shopping etc. for a little while and just lets me be present in a place and enjoy it. It's nice, and I need it every now and again.

Stepping away from life gives you space to think. Space to breathe. Space to sort yourself out. This particular trip left me thinking about the last year of my life. It's odd to think about "this last year" in the middle of August, right? But, here we are, doing just that. In many ways, the end of last summer was a precipice my life was teetering on, and when September hit, everything started tumbling in all directions. My husband quit his job shortly after this time last year, and this year he starts a new one that is exactly what he wants to be doing, and he's excited about the work he's doing for the first time in as long as I can remember. The journey for him to get from walking out on his job to where he is now was a series of events that all just sort of fell into place to lay this path for him, and while I was terrified of what would become of our lives when he walked away from his steady job, I can see now that it was the thing that had to happen to lead to where we are now, which is a much more positive place for our whole family to be. While I initially was really angry and worried about how his decision played out, for the first time ever, I did the thing that was entirely out of character for me. I let go. I didn't try to control the situation. I assumed that everything would work out in the end, and I let the chips fall where they needed to fall. I stopped worrying about the next 10 steps down the road and just thought about the short term steps in front of me, and something miraculous happened. Everything was ok. Everything did work out. Everything happened the way it needed to happen. And, I learned that sometimes it's ok to let go a little. I probably won't do this as often as I should, but now I know that if there's a voice in the back of my mind saying "It'll be fine", I should listen to it.

The Murphy's Law of my life, however, is that everything can't be going smoothly on all fronts at the same time. I think it's some sort of curse. Now that my home life is evening out, my extended family life is in a state of turmoil most of the time, and my friends at this point prove to be non-existent. I suppose that's not entirely true. The friends I depended on, the ones I cared about and opened up to, the ones I let see my rusted edges, those are all gone. There are still friendships out there, many still small and in the early stages getting to know one another, but it doesn't replace the feeling that there were people you could depend on whenever you needed someone. At least not yet. Maybe not ever. It's hard to say. But, I suppose if I look back at the past year, maybe that idea that I could depend on people when I needed someone was really an illusion. Between the people who simply disappeared, the people who have said that my daughter deserves a better example than I provide, the people who have backed away slowly, the people who literally refuse to attend anything if my daughter is present, and the people who find me to be somehow too much......did I really have anyone that I could honestly depend on? When you look at the track record, I think maybe not. But it felt that way, at least for a time, and sometimes it's the feeling that I miss most. Now, instead of spending a couple of weekends a month with friends, I spend all of my weekends with my family. It's enjoyable, though sometimes lonely. Sometimes you just want to see people who make you laugh, who want to talk about their lives, or politics, or the motherfriggin' Olympics because the Olympics are awesome. The family time is nice, though. It's not a substitute for catching up with people you don't see every day, but at least we all enjoy each other's company, and none of us have to feel like we're forcing someone to spend time with us.

I think maybe that's the lesson I'm supposed to learn here, though. That there will likely never be other people you can truly depend on. That you need to rely on yourself entirely, and friendships are best kept at a surface level where no one has to get attached to one another, that way it doesn't matter if those people disappear. And I think I am learning that, slowly. I may always envy people who have these beautiful friendships with people who have seen them at their best and worst. My sister has several of those, and it's sometimes hard to watch and realize that can't be my life, but I think my life is just made to be different. I'm made differently. I'm not the person people keep around for years, and I need to be ok with that. I'm starting to.

The upside to things is that because life at home is going smoothly, I enjoy the time spent with my family. I enjoy my daughters. I enjoy the life we continue to build within the four walls of our home. I enjoy who both of my girls are becoming, and the way their lives are changing. I enjoy my husband's newfound happiness, and the way our lives are growing together. There are a lot of good things. I just hope those good things keep growing, multiplying, and becoming better.

An Update

It's been a while. There have been a few times when I've sat down and wanted to work through my thoughts here, but lately writing has felt like a chore. Life didn't stop moving forward, but my brain hasn't been able to stop and organize my thoughts in any sort of meaningful way for a while, so I would open the screen and immediately feel exhausted at the thought of filling it up, so I'd close it again and walk away.

I think part of the reason for this is that I've been working through emotional roadblocks here for basically the last two years, and I'm at a point where I just can't be bothered to do that anymore. Nothing has changed. Friends still don't talk to me. Family continues to be a train wreck. My weekends are still spent at home with little social interaction. I still sometimes crave the freedom to be completely myself without having to hear about what I need to change to please others. But, I can't be bothered to think too much on any of that anymore. Nothing is going to change any of it, so the fretting and sadness over everything just feels pointless. This is what my life looks like, and I honestly need to just accept and deal with that. So, I guess maybe I have. At least in some small way. At the very least, I don't give it as much space in my head anymore. I may crave what I see other people have in terms of personal relationships, but I think maybe that's just not the life the universe intended for me to have, and I need to stop trying to force it. So, I have. And it's ok. I can think about other things.

As for life, it goes on. My husband got a full time teaching job, which is amazing. He's been working toward this for years and after he left his office job last fall, the stars all seemed to align for him and pieces kept falling into place, each piece leading him closer to this final step. He's excited, and I'm excited for him. He is the happiest I've seen him in years, and I'm glad. I needed him to be happy, to be honest. I tend to absorb the emotions of the people I surround myself with, so his misery was becoming my misery, and since he left his old job, it's like a weight was lifted from our lives, which I needed. We both needed. Probably him more than me. But it has made the world feel like there's more oxygen in it, and it's good to breathe again.

My daughters are doing well. The oldest has been dating someone for a while now who seems like a very good fit for her. She's the happiest I've seen her since she moved in with us, and she keeps casually dropping comments about some day marrying this guy into conversation, looking for a reaction from us. In reality, I think my husband and I would both be fine with that. Not tomorrow, obviously, but if that was her choice somewhere down the road, he's a decent one. Plus, I don't think she's going to find someone who matches her level of weird quite as well.

The younger is in full toddlerhood, which has its good and bad sides. The fierce independence is hard, and it comes with tantrums that are epic and sometimes exhausting. Then she swings quickly into moments of adorable that make you want to snuggle her to pieces. Her vocabulary keeps growing, and she is starting to recognize letters when you point them out to her. She continues to be obsessed with the cat, and insists on picking out her clothes each day. Over all, she's turning into a stubborn, quick tempered, bright, hilarious little person, and there are times I wish I saw a little less of myself in her. For those at home, it's not the bright and hilarious that she and I have in common.

Was it Robert Frost who said that he could sum up everything he's learned about life in 3 words: It goes on? I think it was. I think he's right. I think that's the best any of us can hope for. It keeps going, and we go with it. So that's what I'm doing. I'm moving along with life. And for now, that's ok too. Sometimes it's nice to just go where things take you.

Departures are hard

A few days ago a friend of mine told me that she and her family were moving to Colorado. It was casual, just a quick drop-in comment amid a conversation we were having, but it hit me in the gut like a punch. I sat there, staring at my phone, trying not to cry. I was crushed. This was one of the only friends who didn't treat me differently after my daughter was born. She was the first person I told I was pregnant. She has never questioned who I am, or asked me to be anyone different. She talked me off the ledge every time I said I was afraid of being a bad mom, and she listened to every one of my crazy rants about how nervous I was, or how I felt like I was a bad person for not crying while I boxed up my daughter's newborn clothes, or not getting emotional when she hit new milestones, and each time she reassured me that I was ok, and that not everyone falls apart over little things like outgrowing an outfit. She is my only friend who has never expected me to be more than what I am, and she's leaving. I'm heartbroken.

I'm at this strange place in my life where all friendships are precarious. People I loved, people I valued, people I would have given the shirt off my back, people I accepted for who they were despite their flaws, they're all disappearing. It all started going down hill last January when my daughter was born, but it's just continued on and on to the point where my weekends are spent at home watching Netflix and communicating with no one. If it weren't for my sister, I'd have just about no one left. I don't know if that's my fault, or the fault of other people, or if it's just life and how people evolve, but it's sad. It's sad because I sill need people. It's sad because I truly believe it takes a village to raise a child, and my village is gone. It's sad because I feel like the reason is, as it is so often, because I am who I am. I have tried, oh my goodness I have tried, so incredibly hard to be someone else, but at the end of the day I default back to this flawed and busted version of myself and it never seems to get better. I have gone to therapy, I have done the work, I have pushed myself out of my comfort zone, and I have come up with the same conclusion each time. At my core, I am me, and I'm learning that it's not what people want. I try. I try every day, in my work life, in my home life, and I'm pretty sure that every day, I fail.

Last week my family was in a state of upheaval, which is so often the case with my family, and the insult that was being wielded like a weapon was that people in my family were just like me. Being like me was being used to insult other people. It was clear that the general opinion is that I am the worst thing a person could possibly be, and I had to sit by and swallow that and pretend it didn't matter. But it did. It mattered a lot. It just reinforced years and years of people telling me that the biggest problem with me.....is me. Then I heard the same thing at work. And I'm starting to wonder, some days, why I exist at all. This isn't being said in an attempt to assign guilt, or seek some sort of pity. It's a true and valid question I ask myself quite often. Everyone is supposed to have a purpose. Everyone is supposed to be here for a reason. I just.....I can't seem to figure out what mine is, or why I'm here. I hope it's to help my daughter to be so much better than the flawed and broken person I am, but I always fear that I'm going to pass my flaws on to her, and I'm going to leave her sitting in this same place 30 years from now, asking herself these same questions. It's a huge fear I carry with me every day. I've been told that my daughter deserves better, that I should be better for her sake. The crushing thing about that statement is the assumption that I'm not trying every single day to be better, to be stronger, to be different for her. So, if my purpose is to be a better example for my daughter than the one I had for myself, the implications here are that I'm failing at that as well. And there are some days when I just need a win.

So....I guess that's why it hurts so much to hear that one more piece of my village is leaving. I know we'll still have ways to communicate, but it's hard. It's hard to know that when I need someone to celebrate with, she will be so very far away. Her family has often included us as their own. When her sister graduated college the same year I did, they threw a party for her, and when I arrived I saw that my name had been added to the cake. No one had celebrated my achievement to that point, and there I was, at a party for someone else, and they thought to include me anyway, because that's who they are and that's what they do. I will miss her. I will miss brunches, and New Years Eve, and summer kickoff parties every year on the last day of school. I will miss my friend. Probably more than she will ever miss me. She will always have her village, no matter where she goes, and I don't even know if she realizes how important she was to mine. I just hope that distance doesn't prove to be impossible to overcome like it has in the past with other friends who have moved away.

I will miss my friend.

I miss all of them.

What was I afraid of?

Today my husband and I met up with a friend at a local museum to see an exhibit that's housed there through the end of the summer. We took my daughter along in her stroller, and she clapped and danced to the music playing in the exhibit. Later we took her to an outdoor area and let her run around and look at animals on a working farm. She seemed to have a great time, and we brought her home for her nap. She woke up and played with her train set, shouting "Choo choo!" and rearranging the houses and trees on the train table. She ran through the house, playing with toys, and on occasion when she'd run from one room to another, she'd do a run past me or my husband and climb up onto one of our laps and give us a big hug before going back to her playing. At one point as she was hugging me, she said "Loooove you!" before sliding down onto the floor to run back to her toys. I sat there for a moment, watching her look back at me with a huge grin on her face as she hugged a toy bunny and thought "Why was I so afraid of this?".

I'm always afraid of the unknown. I'm afraid when I can't plan, can't anticipate what's going to happen, can't get ahead of the unexpected. There were a million things about bringing a baby into our lives that scared me to death. There were a million things about being a parent that scared me. There was so much to be afraid of that I never had a chance to think about all of the things that wouldn't be scary. And, if I'm being honest, even the scary things weren't all that scary. I totally resent having to get up at 6:30 every morning, and I don't love having to work a day around nap time, but the big things I was afraid of weren't really worth being afraid of. The payoffs you get outweigh the things to fear, and I wish I had known that.

Unnoticed lessons

Last week my mother bought my daughter a new toy. This isn't really a shock, since my mother has a habit of buying things for my daughter whether she needs them or not. This time it was a baby doll that has a stroller it can be pushed around in. My daughter loves it, not because she loves baby dolls, but because she loves pushing things around. She loves to be pushed in her stroller, and she loves pushing this baby doll in its stroller. The doll itself is one of those weird dolls that makes noises when you squeeze its tummy, so it says "mama" and "dada" and then cries. All of this is unremarkable, to be honest. It's just a toy for little kids to play with.

So why am I bringing it up at all, right? The thing is, after my daughter got this relatively unattractive doll and began playing with it, my mom sent me a couple of photos and a text message. My daughter was kissing the doll in the first photo, and in the second one, she had picked it up and was hugging it. The text message said "When the baby cries, she gives it kisses and hugs and picks it up and says "ohhhh" while she hugs it". That was the moment when I realized that she knows what to do when a baby cries because she knows what my husband and I do when she cries. Right down to saying "ohhhh". My husband does that a lot. He will hug her and say "Ohhh, it's not so bad. It's ok". I pick her up and give her hugs and kisses. She knows how to love something else because she experiences us loving her, and that's really something I had never thought about up to that point. I never really considered that so many of the lessons she will be learning are not through us sitting her down and actually teaching her, but through watching us interact with each other, and with her. Every day, we are teaching her lessons in how to treat other people, how to behave in social settings, how to understand and interact with the world around her, and we don't even realize we're doing it. I guess that, for not realizing this has been happening all along, we've been doing a pretty good job since she's a fairly well adjusted kid so far. In reality, all that means is that if she's a reflection of what she's been watching us do for the last year and a half, it's a decent indication that we're not total assholes. Hopefully. I guess time will tell.

Thoughts on understanding

Over the past week or so I've read several blogs written by people of faith that have gotten thinking. I'm not a person of faith, and generally speaking, I don't really like most people of faith. I find them closed minded, bigoted, exclusive, and self righteous. I understand these are sweeping generalizations, and I'm sure there are people of faith out there who are not like that. I know a few of those people, and I appreciate them for who they are, but I also would contend that they're in the minority. This leads to the question, "Why were you reading blogs written by people of faith if you don't like people of faith?" and that's valid. But, I try to be a well rounded person, and I read a lot of things written by opposing viewpoints from my own because it's good to see all facets of this life we live. Honestly, I've been reading one for years because I find the person so polar opposite in point of view from me that it's like learning about a completely different world. And I think she's a bit nuts, so there is a pretty high entertainment factor to it. The other ones I've read recently were from blogs that were not about faith at all, but about home renovation, or organization, or children with illnesses, and the faith just sort of came to the surface with recent posts.

The sad thing about reading some of these posts is when you find pieces of yourself in them, and realize that you probably still couldn't be friends with these people because the differences between you are still insurmountable, but you also see that there are connections. Tiny little things that tie you to that person in some similar way and you think "If only we could grow that thread and ignore the rest of them", but that's not what life is like most of the time. This morning I read a blog that was largely about missionaries and faith, but touched on being a parent. Specifically, being a mom. It talked about how being a mom is hard, and it's a big deal sometimes, and to ignore that really large piece of a person's life serves to make them feel isolated. To make them feel they're misunderstood. That hit me between the eyes. It's so true, and I related so much to that one sentence. It's what I've been doing for the past two years. Trying to help people ignore that aspect of my life, which has just led to me feeling more and more isolated. More and more misunderstood. More and more alone. Yet, I still try to help people pretend my daughter isn't a part of my life. I hide her away when we have friends over. I plan things for after she's in bed. I clean up the toys as best I can. I try not to talk about her. I take a piece of myself, and I slice it off to appease people who don't "want to deal with it". But, what that means is that people don't want to deal with me. They don't want to deal with a huge part of who I am. And while I never let my daughter be the dominant focus of anything, pretending she doesn't exist so that others feel more comfortable isn't fair either. It's not fair of them to expect me to do that so that we can maintain a friendship. I find I'm working so hard to make things easier for others to deal with, but they're not doing the same in return, and I have to ask how that's fair to me at all. It's not fair to me. So for others to feel ok, I have to feel isolated, misunderstood, cut off, alone. When I read those sentences in this person's blog, I flashed to the many posts I've had on here over the past few years about feeling isolated. Feeling alone. Feeling a need for connection to other people that I used to have, but that seems to have died. This person, who I will never be friends with, who I will never sit across from at a table having coffee, this person gets me. In one sentence, they understand this piece of me.

The blog continued on about how those are the times she leans on her faith, and I started thinking about how simple life could be if I was the sort of person who could lean on something like faith as a foundation. There has to be so much comfort in something like true faith. There's comfort in the ritual of it. Comfort in the sense of community that comes from it. Comfort in the ability to feel like somewhere, someone else is always looking out for you and doing the right things for you for the right reasons. Comfort in handing yourself over to the ritual and familiarity of faith, to turn off all of the voices sometimes and go on auto-pilot with ritual and repetition and to come out on the other side feeling whole and renewed. I can see the appeal. I just can't, personally, suspend my own sense of disbelief and skepticism to accept it. I can't be a person of faith. I've tried. I don't think I necessarily want to be a person of faith. But there are moments when I envy that trust. That ability to feel cared for by a higher power when times get dark. I envy those who can see everything as the plan a higher power has set out for them. Personally, I look at the world and I see no plan. I see happenstance, and inexplicable tragedy, and so many things that make me question how a divine plan could be out there working for the greater good. There are days, though, when I wish I had the comfort of that belief.

I'm not sure what point I'm trying to make here. These were just some thoughts going through my head after reading some of these things. It's really just rambling of things to continue to think about. And perhaps it's about me going through my own sort of learning as I read things by people on the opposite end of the spectrum from me. That, no matter how much I disagree with the majority of what someone thinks, or says, or does, there may still be some small thread of understanding that connects the two of us, and if people in staunch disagreement can find that thread, maybe everyone would be better off because we'd be less apt to destroy one another over disagreement.

Just some thoughts.

Mother's Day

Another Mother's Day has come and gone, and I find that Mother's Day is a weird holiday because you get to "take a break" as a mom, but then the next day you're just left doing all the stuff you didn't do when you were "taking a break". It's just an illustration that you can't really take a break from your life. Everything is still waiting for you when you get back. It's ok, though. It's nice that people want you to take a bit of a break on a day that's supposed to be special for you.

I think Mother's Day is generally weird for me. I spent years functioning as someone's mom without getting the credit for it, and then I had a baby and everyone acted like I was suddenly hitting my very first mother's day and made a huge deal out of it. But, because it's not just my Mother's Day, I find that we spend a lot of time doing things for other mothers, like mine, my mother-in-law, and my husband's grandma, so the whole "celebration" piece of it seems focused on other moms. I think that's just how it goes, though. Everyone has obligations to their moms, and you have to share the day, which I think would be easier if our families all got along and we could truly share it instead of bouncing from one house to another all day long.

I think the most striking thing this year was the contrast between this Mother's Day and last. Last year I had a million text messages wishing me a Happy Mother's Day from all of my friends and family. This year I got messages from the some people, but it was greatly reduced. I think maybe that had to do with last year being the "first" one, but I find myself wondering if some of it was because people are putting distance between us. It's been ongoing, it's impossible to ignore. It's not just one or two people, it's almost everyone I know. The only people who reached out this year were people who never got weird after my daughter was born. People who, despite any flaws or missteps in the past, still show up when things matter. The group is very small, but it's interesting to see who is still around a year later, and who still reaches out. I'm sad that things have gone the way they have, but it's also not entirely in my control. I miss a lot of things and a lot of people, but I'm not the one who pulled away so I guess that's just how things are now.

On the whole, as Mother's Days go, mine was nice. We went to dinner on Friday to celebrate since we knew Sunday would be spent making the rounds to everyone else, and my husband and kids got me a lovely gift certificate that I look forward to using. That's about as extensive as it got. I think that's ok, though. I don't love being the center of attention most of the time, so keeping things low key was nice. And I got a lovely card filled with scribbles from my younger daughter, and a very nice card from my older daughter and her boyfriend that was filled with love and kindness. That's really all anyone could ask for.

It's like the ocean

Last week I was talking to a co-worker about her life and a friend she has who she feels she's drifting away from. She was saying that she just feels like it's hard to continue to be friends with this person because they don't ever seem to just fix their own problems, and it's frustrating. I told her that I understood, but that people have said the exact same things about me before and it sucks to be the person who hears that the reason people don't want to be around them or whatever is because they don't just "fix it". She seemed surprised that anyone would have that opinion of me, but in her defense she's my co-worker and it's not like she knows the deepest depths of my soul or anything. She said that her friend just has so many problems and is always going through a rough patch and it's hard because she's not fixing herself. So, I gave her this analogy:

Imagine you're out in the middle of the ocean. Everywhere you look it's just water, and no sign of hope that anything good can come of this situation. You're treading water where you are, and you're starting to feel a lot of despair.

Then a friend flies over you in an airplane, and they can see from above that there's a sand bar just 300 yards from where you're currently treading water in a bottomless depth of ocean, and upon seeing the sand bar they shout down "Oh god, just swim a little bit and stand up, you're being so dramatic!" and fly off.

The solution seems so easy to them, because they're outside and they can see it and they don't know all of the variables you're facing in the water. They don't know if you're a strong enough swimmer to make it that distance. They don't know if you've been treading water so long that you're too exhausted to actually swim. They don't know if getting to the sand bar will REALLY solve your problem, because you'll still be in the water and maybe you're getting hypothermia, and at any rate, even if you can stand up, you're still in the middle of the damn ocean and you've got to get to land. What they know is there's a simple solution from their perspective to fix your current situation.

The other problem is, they tell you to "swim a little bit and stand up" but they don't tell you which direction to swim, or how far you'll need to swim, or anything else. All you know is you're being "dramatic", but from where you sit, all you can see is ocean and you're afraid of drowning.

Sometimes that's what it's like to be the person who "won't solve their own problems".

She looked at me as if I was some sort of incredibly wise individual, and said she had never thought about it that way and maybe she had the wrong idea about what was causing her friend to have these problems, and maybe she should consider the true cause instead of just looking at the situation in simple terms where a solution seems so very obvious.

I guess, in the end, I hope I helped her relationship with her friend. But, if I didn't, at least I know I can craft a damn good analogy.

Maybe I'm a Vulcan?

I'm sure my geek husband will be a fan of the Star Trek reference here, but this is something I was thinking about the other day while I was painting my guest room. That's how things often happen, I'm working on something that is relatively mindless and can let my brain wander into lots of other topics while I work. Roll some paint, think about how absurd it is that some cultures used to believe in human sacrifice. Roll some more paint, think about how easily hula dancers move their hips and wonder if it was hard to learn. Role some more paint, and so on and so forth. This weekend I was thinking about myself, because sometimes I'm self absorbed, and my life and some observations made by other people and why things are as they are.

Basically, I have a habit of taking care of a lot of things in my home and in my life. Things that others may not think about, or things that may go unnoticed. Things that I think people would only really remember to do themselves if I wasn't around to take care of it. Sometimes, that's exhausting, because it's a lot of day in and day out cycle of work that makes your life feel like there's not enough down time. For example, I cook dinner almost every single night, and after dinner I'm also the one who does the dishes. In most households, the person who cooks doesn't have to clean up and in so many ways that sounds like SUCH a luxury to me, but it's just not the reality of my living situation. I've argued with my husband about it a million times, and he always says things like "If you don't want to do the dishes, don't do them. Just leave them. Someone will do them eventually. Your problem is they don't get done on your timeline". My challenge with a statement like that is that, yes, eventually they will get done. But probably not before I have to use them again to cook and I won't be able to. So, if I don't do them, no one will do them in a timely manner, and I'll just be unable to cook after a day or two because there will be no clean dishes left. I suppose I could leave everything sitting and just wait for someone to step in and do it, but I feel like that's more frustrating and stressful for me than just doing the stupid dishes. I'm annoyed that I have to do them every night, particularly when I'm cooking food I won't eat (I'm picky, I don't always eat what's on the menu for the week) and then washing dishes for the food I didn't eat. It gets annoying. In the end, though, the reality doesn't change that the next day I will need to cook again and I will need clean dishes and if I leave the dishes in the sink overnight, no one else is going to take the initiative to do them. So I do them. I still don't love it, but I've started to take a sort of Vulcan-esque approach to my thinking about the situation. I have three other people in my family, and they all need food every night. They need clean dishes to eat that food off of. They outnumber me. Maybe I need some down time, but I'm only one person. So, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. This means I do the dishes.

When I look at my life on the whole, that's how I've always handled things, really. I've been called selfish before, sometimes by people who are closest to me and I always feel like they should know better. I have spent my whole life doing what's best for the most people. I always did things with my siblings in mind and made sure that their needs were handled growing up before mine. I have supported friends repeatedly through rough patches, when in reality what I really needed was support myself for my own challenges I faced, but I never asked for it. Their needs came first. I've been selfish at times, I'm sure. I actually hate the idea of being seen as selfish, because I try so hard to be selfless, but I'm sure there are times when I've been a bit of a petulant brat about things. On the whole, though, I typically put the needs of the many first, and the thing is, I'm not bothered by that. I mean, sure, the dishes thing kind of pisses me off sometimes, but on the whole I don't mind that I'm never first. I feel like people often think I should be bothered by the lack of balance there is a lot of the time, but I'm usually not. And when I am, it's typically when it comes to something dumb like chores, because I just hate being the only one doing daily chores while everyone else gets to sit around and do once a week chores. Yeah. That sucks. But, it's not like it's a deal breaker in my world. There's a piece of me that actually LIKES making sure everyone is taken care of. At the end of the day, I bring a lot of it upon myself by not telling other people they have to do things differently. I don't think the chore thing would change, since I've already had a million arguments about that, but I could tell people I need more support, or that I can't make sure everyone is taken care of all the time. I just don't really want to. I think that might be a problem from someone else's point of view, but it's true.

I think that the only time it really becomes a true problem is when I need other people, and they're just not there for me the way I would be for them. That's hard. That's when I want to become a selfish person and say "I would do it for you!" but I've also come to understand that it's often expecting too much and that I'm seeing the world as I am, not as it is. Just because I would do something for someone doesn't mean I should expect the same in return. That's been a long and hard lesson to learn, but it's also true. I've also learned that while it's often easy for people to give a gift card, or a meal, or a donation to something, the hardest gift to give up is their time. And sometimes that's what people need, it's your time. I know I've had friends who have needed my time from me and I've made that work, but it's been a struggle on occasion and it's often done with a sacrifice on my part of something else I may have wanted or needed to do. But, it wasn't easy.

And that's where the Vulcan part of me comes in. I've always just been like "Well, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few" and that's who I am. And, I guess, I kind of like that about myself.

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