Once upon a time, back in college, I sat in an acquaintance’s dorm room. The acquaintance was closer to my best friend at the time–they were both the same major–but I didn’t know her well. As we sat and talked, just small talk and gossip about the classes we shared, my friend brought up something in a hushed whisper: would the acquaintance tell anyone that she was an atheist?
This might not seem like a huge deal, but the college I attended was Eastern Nazarene College, a conservative (for the region) Christian college just south of Boston. Faith was a cornerstone of attending the school; though it’s been nearly 25 years since I filled out the application, I’m entirely sure that you had to give a declaration of faith in order to apply. Daily chapel services were mandatory; lack of attendance meant heavy fines. A fair number of courses began classes with devotionals and prayers, the latter ubiquitous when it came to finals time. In addition to typical college rules about GPAs and plagiarism, ENC had strict rules when it came to student behavior: no sex outside of marriage, no drinking (even if you were of age), no smoking, things like that. A few years before I attended, the school had even stricter rules in which people weren’t allowed to go to the movies (they posted school officials outside all the local theaters) and certainly weren’t allowed to do things like dancing. Even if the rules had lightened up in recent times, the punishments hadn’t. The year before I started, the entire baseball team was expelled for drinking at a party celebrating their recent championship.
The Abby of 2024 would not attend this school; I daresay, the Abby of 2024 would run away screaming. But the Abby of 2001…
I was raised in the church with all its baggage. In high school, I often felt quite alone even with my handful of friends–the beliefs I’d inherited from my church and parents made it often difficult to relate to my peers, but the fellow Christians in my school were often far more fundamentalist than I was. I occupied that strange space of 90s Evangelical kids, particularly ones in New England. We weren’t as fundamentalist as our fellows in other regions of the country (the fundamentalists in my school hailed from the DEEP deep south), but we were far more rigid in our thinking than our non Christian peers. It was a weird place to be.
So when it came time to choose a college, ENC seemed ideal. It was about an hour from my parents’ house, depending on traffic. It was a Christian school but not one that seemed more like a prison than anything else. It had quick and easy access to Boston. Best of all, it had a robust music and performing arts program. I remember seeing a play one visiting weekend and thinking, “this is it. This is where I need to be.”
(as an aside: while I was VERY involved in the school’s A Cappella Choir, I never once performed in one of their plays. A big fish in a little pond at home is very much a little fish in a big pond at college, even one as small as ENC)
And in the fall of 2001, I was. I started at ENC about ten days before 9/11, living just across Quincy Bay from Logan Airport, where the planes came from. My classmates and I walked candlelight vigils and sat in the chapel crying for days afterwards. I went on so many trips with the choir, from places as close as the next town over all the way down to the Panama Canal. I had the opportunity to study abroad at Oxford University (where I barely passed, but shh). I made many dear friends, fell irrevocably in love, pulled off crazy–and surprisingly sober!–college stunts. If I drove to Quincy now (a drive for which I wouldn’t even need Google Maps), I could walk the campus blindfolded. Give me a route, I could find my way without thought. There’s the TV lounge where I saw the second plane hit the tower, where I saw the Patriots win the Super Bowl for the first time, where I watched Mark Greene’s last episode of ER. There’s Cove, where I learned to really SING, where I felt part of a team–a family. There’s Williamson, the first dorm I lived in, the best freshman dorm I could’ve asked for. There’s Gardner, where I took all of my classes for my English major and argued before so many higher ups that I should be allowed to study abroad. There’s the church, where I spent so many chapel mornings trying not to fall asleep and so many late nights singing. There’s the green where I laughed and played football with my friends. There’s the puddle with the goldfish.
And that’s all well and good and nostalgic but would also not be on my mind at all if the school hadn’t just announced plans to close.
I haven’t missed ENC at all in the years since I graduated (19 years now!), especially as gradual changes to the school stripped it of everything I loved about it. Not long after I left, my beloved A Cappella Choir ceased to be, and then a few years later, the English department was disbanded. Budgetary reasons, I’d assume. The school was having budgetary issues when I was there 20 years ago; according to the rumor mill (and every alumni email I’d received begging for money), those issues had only gotten worse with time. Beyond that, though, there was something strange about my small Christian college. Not bad, not necessarily, but something that failed me somewhere in there, and I think it was a form of stagnation.
Another alumnus wrote about this before I did, and his blog definitely inspired this, though he’s still a Christian and has more insight into the situation than I do or could. He agreed that ENC was caught between a rock and a hard place–too liberal for the conservative Nazarene denomination, but too conservative for a school south of Boston. My experience as well was that ENC was a place where you could only grow so far, because if you learned something about yourself that didn’t fit the good Nazarene mold, you could never really be honest about it.
Like the acquaintance who was an atheist. I don’t know if she ever told anybody. I don’t remember if she graduated with us. I hope that wherever she is, she’s really living her best life, no matter what she believes.
I’d realized I was bisexual before I came to ENC, but college was when I really grappled with it and eventually accepted that it was part of my identity and not some desperate sin that I could pray away. I can’t tell you how much research and digging and praying and self loathing and panic and all sorts of things built into that realization. And the thing was, I had to keep it under wraps. If I were honest about myself, I’d likely have been expelled.
There are a fair few of us, being completely honest. I thought about it the other day when a friend, who has since come out as bisexual, commented on one of my Pride memes on Facebook. Like holy shit, life would have been so absurdly different if we could’ve all been honest with ourselves and each other. Imagine the support group we could have built! Imagine us coming of age surrounded by love and support and community rather than by the pressure to keep ourselves under wraps.
Which isn’t only ENC’s fault. I don’t know where anyone was on their journey then; I, personally, only got to the point of saying I was “bi-curious” in college because of my beliefs. But still.
I also don’t mean to solely disparage ENC because I did make some really exquisite memories there, I did grow and discover more about myself as a person, I did make very dear friends, but I guess that it’s kind of half and half. On the one hand, good memories, good times. On the other hand, couldn’t wholly be myself. What a place.
The school sort of had a commitment to helping students grow, but not really. In 2005, I was taking an ethics class with a bunch of friends (one of the prerequisites for graduation), and we had to do this final project where we examined a controversial topic from both sides and came to our own conclusions. Several of us decided to do our project on abortion, but that caused a problem. See, the library only had one book that gave any information about abortion beyond “ABORTION BAD,” and that made it difficult to research the topic from both sides. And worse, the word “abortion” was blocked by the college’s filters, so if you–like me–wanted to actually get both sides of the issue, you couldn’t do so on the campus.
Which, like. Okay. Pick one, ENC. Do you want us to actually look at the issue from both sides and come to our own conclusion, or do you want us to reach the conclusion you’ve already decided we should reach?
(for the record, a friend and I ended up going off campus to research, specifically to Planned Parenthood, and I wound up with a VERY high grade on the project–high enough to make up for me failing my professional writing class the semester before)
(additional note: depression and college aren’t a good mix)
In the end, that felt like a lie, like don’t actually grow, just fill the mold we have for you a little better. And on the one hand, that sentiment is pretty common in churches and Christianity writ large, and it’s not a wholly bad thing: when you grow as a person, you want to grow better not worse. You want to be good at crafts not good at hoarding craft supplies, for example. But on the other hand, we were adults who weren’t allowed to trust ourselves to figure out what was good growth and what was bad growth, and for some of us (me, I’m talking about me), that meant a rude awakening when we were finally out in the real world.
I don’t know. I feel like that sort of “grow, but not really” mindset is what made ENC lose appeal so quickly. It had a lot of more liberal practices and classes, like a requisite science course taught by a man who’d written a book on how one could accept evolution as a proven theory and still be a Christian (at the time, I hated it, but now I’m like… oh. Oh.) (apparently, lots of influential donors withheld funds while that professor taught at the school, which like. Christians. I need you to accept that when you do this, people are not hating Christ in you. They are hating you for being assholes). That meant that students looking for a Nazarene college would probably go to one of their other schools, maybe in the south or the midwest (California if they really wanted to push it).
On the flip side, ENC had pretty much no appeal to non-Christian students. How could it? Every class began with a prayer, every day was some form of chapel or worship, every course was through a Christian lens. And I’m not saying that it shouldn’t have been, but it absolutely felt like the school was trying to have their cake and eat it too. Trying to straddle that line ultimately was the cause of their demise, and really made my time there complicated to parse out emotionally.
The complicated back and forth feelings hit hardest when I returned to the school after studying at Oxford. Studying there was enormous when it came to experience, not just because of the freedom we were granted when not in class (because we lived on our own, and the culture of England was different enough from US culture that the rules we would have had at our home schools just would have fallen apart) but because the courses themselves were focused on opening our way of thinking about our faith and history. I remember one course that talked specifically about how archaeological evidence didn’t support the Bible being a historical document and asked us a question without an answer prescribed for us: if Jericho was not razed, is our faith in vain? There was no right answer. There was no expected answer.
So it’s all. Very complicated. I have a lot of nostalgia and sad feelings, but I also have this sort of feeling of inevitability. Like this thing was trying to tear itself in half and finally managed, and it’s hollow, but it happened.
I have my nostalgic pictures up. I have my reminiscing with my friends. I’ve uploaded so many pictures lately. I think it’s sad, but also, it’s like watching someone linger in the final phases of death for so long that you can hardly remember what they were like before they were dying. And when they finally draw that last breath, you feel relieved. You hate that you feel relieved because that feels wrong, but the relief is there anyway.
Well. Relief and some scrambling to order transcripts.
Back in March, our town’s high school hosted a conference that they’ve hosted for the last seven years. The conference focuses on diversity and inclusion, on acceptance and anti-bullying measures. Students in our predominantly white, upper middle class town get to hear different perspectives from all sorts of different communities, and there are multiple workshops throughout the day that students can participate in. This is all enumerated on the conference’s website, and students cannot attend without parental permission. In other words: your kid can only be at this conference if you give the okay.
Lots of speakers lead workshops at this conference and do so for free. It’s volunteer work, and presenters are chosen from responses to RFPs sent out several months in advance. Workshop leaders talk about topics like racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, and other difficult things students might encounter in their schools and out in the real world. These workshops aim to give students ways to respond to those sorts of instances, to prevent them from happening in the first place, and to not be discouraged if they’re the target of that sort of nastiness.
One of the presenters this year was the Pride chapter from our nearest city. Their presentation began with a performance by a drag queen, a two-to-three minute dance as Karen Smith from Mean Girls, as the movie musical had just been released (and, let’s be real, Mean Girls is absurdly gay). Once the performance ended, the drag queen stepped back to let the other presenter lead the workshop about the history and culture of drag. Students by and large came away from the workshop feeling better about themselves, one student even talking about how it filled them with actual joy to be there.
Except.
Someone took sneaky pictures of the workshop like a peeping Tom. Those pictures got around and eventually, someone brought it up to the school committee (who had nothing to do with the conference, no say in any performances whatsoever, and really seemed more interested in making sure that the budget was balanced than anything else). As our school committee meetings are always recorded, a snippet of the complaint somehow made its way to the Lib of TikTok Twitter–sorry, X, didn’t mean to deadname it–account, and our town has not known a moment of peace since.
(Libs of TikTok, for those not in the know, is an account owned by a woman in California named Chaya Raichik. It’s a hotbed of stochastic terrorism, where followers are given misleading information and outright disinformation in the interest of riling them up and inspiring them to do harm. Libs of TikTok has been linked to an absurd number of bomb and death threats, and in one instance, was a deciding factor in a mass shooting. Of course, Chaya never outright tells her followers to go do crime, but that’s the thing about stochastic terrorism: if you tell the right people that a group is evil, they’ll do unspeakable things)
We’ve had so many Facebook debates about this. We’ve had so many meetings about this. People have said the most vile things, downright evil things about the LGBTQIA+ community, specifically trans people (which is kind of hilarious because the drag queen in question? Gayer than a maypole in a sunshower but definitely not trans). People have been yelling SO LOUD, and it’s been SO MUCH, and even though the people yelling are just a small percentage of the town’s population, their screams just ring in everybody’s ears and do the work of making queer people feel unsafe here.
We’ve also attracted a LOT of out of town attention, including what seems to be a local church and this group that seems to travel from controversy to controversy, demanding that parents homeschool their kids because, apparently, public schools are brainwashing kids to be soldiers for Satan? (speaking as someone who has taught at many levels, trust me, if teachers could brainwash kids, everyone would do their homework all the time, nobody would call their teacher “bruh,” and nobody would run in the hallway ever again)
(also one of the people who went on the brainwashing for Satan tangent bragged about getting arrested at the department of elementary and secondary education’s headquarters for “just asking questions,” which is a euphemism, I’ve learned, for “property damage”)
Last night was the long-awaited school committee meeting, and it was just a disaster. Four hours of incoherent screaming and tangents and absolute nonsense that was entirely unrelated to anything (like people were talking about test scores as if this conference has anything to do with that?). Four hours of some of the worst vitriol I’ve ever heard in person. I was sitting with the members of the team who put the conference together, many of whom were queer, and everyone looked so miserable–angry, sad, uncomfortable, afraid. It was awful. And in absolute fairness, some people tried to express their weirdness civilly… but even then, when you hear someone civilly say “acknowledging that someone is transgender is like kidnapping them from the inside,” that doesn’t make it better.
BUT ANYWAY. I spoke, too. Because like… have you ever had an experience where you know that you must do something? You feel sick to your stomach about doing it, but you know that if you don’t do it, things will be so much worse. And that’s how I felt about speaking.
I wrote a speech. It was seven minutes long to start (and that’s what I’ve copied below), and then I had to trim it down to three minutes, and THEN, when I actually spoke, I got nervous and lost my place and couldn’t finish it. I wanted a lot to wish the school committee and principals and superintendents a good summer, but I didn’t have time. What I said was enough, but I do wish I’d been able to say more and say it in a gentler, calmer way instead of panicking about the clock.
But anyway. Here is what I wanted to say. It’s a lot. I edited it a lot.
(also I talk about some negative aspects of my upbringing here, which isn’t me trying to crap on my parents at all; it’s more me saying, they were doing the best they could with what they knew and what they believed were best for me, but those actions did not accomplish the goals that they–and a lot of the people so furiously against this conference–wanted to see)
Good evening. My name is Abby, and I will have been a resident of [my town] for ten years come December. I have three children in the school system, and since my youngest are just finishing up kindergarten, I’ll be around here for quite a while.
I wanted to talk a little bit tonight about the impact of sheltering your kids from things like what we saw at the conference versus allowing them access to those things. I don’t expect to change anybody’s mind tonight, because the human mind is primed to defend itself against opposing points of view, but I do want this information on record, first to be considered by the school committee, principal, and superintendent going forward; and second, so that anyone who identifies as LGBTQIA+ (which I will be shortening to “queer” from this point on) in our town knows that they are not alone.
My parents are both ordained ministers through a relatively conservative Christian denomination, and they did their best to raise me with the values passed down to them by that denomination. In many cases, this meant shielding me from things they deemed inappropriate or sinful. We didn’t celebrate Halloween when I was growing up. Certain Disney movies were completely off limits, and others came with a sort of Christian commentary reminding me that Ursula was not the ruler of all the ocean, that Allah didn’t exist no matter what the sultan said, and that magic wasn’t real. We turned off the TV the second anyone appeared in their underwear or a bikini, and the wine bottles my aunts and uncles brought over for holidays were kept well out of sight and whisked away as soon as the parties ended.
But most notably, my parents shielded me from information about sex and sexuality. I learned the vaguest of basics from a Focus on the Family book, one that only mentioned homosexuality enough to say that it was wrong, a perversion. When the topic of further sex ed arose at school, my parents screened every course and liberally removed me from classes they deemed inappropriate. Once, when I was in seventh grade, a sex ed class slipped through the cracks–leading to several meetings like this one–and that, along with my struggles with algebra, pushed my parents to pull my siblings and me out of school altogether to be homeschooled for a year. When I returned for my freshman year of high school in the town just next door, the proud tradition of pulling me out of sex ed classes continued, and so while my classmates learned about their bodies, protection, STDs, and the like, I learned about nutrition in the library.
By the time I reached tenth grade, I’d had no positive exposure to gay people or transgender people. I believed what I’d been taught–by my parents, by youth pastors, by Focus on the Family, by Christian books and other media–that being gay was a choice, and it was a choice that people only made if they were deeply unwell, oversexualized and in a dark place far from God. And I desperately feared disappointing God and falling away from grace. My parents and I did everything in our power to keep me from being anything but a straight, God-fearing woman, to the point where that was my sole defining characteristic to a lot of people in my high school.
If sheltering your child could prevent your child from identifying as queer, I would be a living testament to that–but the truth is that I’m bisexual. I realized this in tenth grade, and the knowledge that I was attracted to people of my gender and people of other genders made me sick to my stomach for so long. It calcified into this tumor of shame and self-hatred that I kept secret and tried my hardest to pray away, crying as I lay awake all night begging God to make me straight. It hurt so much that I found myself wishing that I’d get hit by a truck or fall horribly ill so that something could hurt my body as much as my soul hurt.
I’m not alone in that feeling. We have countless studies on suicidality and self-harm among queer youth. According to a 2017 study, around 70% of queer people experience major depressive disorder at one point in their lives. Another study in 2019 showed that 71% of queer teen girls and 57% of queer boys had seriously considered suicide. Unwelcoming communities are a huge contributing factor in these statistics: a 2010 study in the Chronicle of HIgher Education reported that about a quarter of queer university students had been harassed because of their orientation, and a 2009 survey found that among participants, queer students were three times as likely to say they felt unsafe at school compared to cishet students.
But. There is good news. Acceptance and support are the biggest preventers of suicidality in queer youth. A 2022 study found that transgender youths who had the support of their families were less than half as likely to commit suicide than those who did not have the support of their families. And, more relevant, gay-straight alliances in schools demonstrably reduce suicidality among queer youths, cutting that number in half. To put it plainly: programs like the conference literally save lives.
I’m very lucky. My story didn’t end in high school. I grew up, I’m healing, and beautifully, when I came out to my parents two years ago, they each held me tightly and told me that they loved and supported me no matter what.
I worry, though, about kids who don’t have this level of support at home, who feel the way I did in high school with no positive examples. Are we to let them drown in depression and lose them to suicide because “school should just teach academic subjects” or something along those lines? Or can we put aside our own discomfort and save some kids’ lives? Because if all it takes for a kid to reconsider suicide is a drag queen giving a workshop on loving yourself as you are, I think we have a responsibility to invite that drag queen back every year.
We know for a fact that the biggest shield against the messed up twists and turns of the world is community. For many of us here tonight, it’s the queer community. For many of us, it’s this town. For me–and many of us here tonight–it’s both. Our wonderful little town–with its shimmering ponds, its incredible views of the surrounding region, its quaint town common (despite the construction), and its wonderful people–has a chance once again to stand up for those who might not have the ability to do so themselves. The conference team has done an amazing job at this for the past seven years; let’s not allow external provocateurs prevent them from continuing their good work.
And to the school committee, principal, and superintendent, I hope you all get really great vacations this summer, because you all deserve it so much. Thank you.
Most of the time, I’d at least want to put some effort into slightly masking my ADHD in a blog entry, but since I’m drained and in pain, I am putting in the absolute bare minimum of effort in general BUT I wanted to get this all down because I’m still chewing on a lot of feelings, and unlike the cucumber topped with boursin I had this weekend, they are not dreamy and delicious. So you get words, but you’re also going to see a lot of parentheses where I go off on a small tangent, and I’m not sorry because you knew what you were getting into.
So.
This weekend, we did a family vacation to New York City.
I love New York City. Even after this exhausting weekend, I still love it. I love it with lessons learned and with confusion gained, but I do love it. There’s something about the energy there that… I don’t know. It feels like it breathes. I don’t just mean the six sprillion people there at all times (because if it were just the people, I’d say the same about Disney, which has its own distinct energy, or other crowded places, but I hate crowds, so that can’t be it). It’s just something about the city that is simultaneously so populated that there are entire countries that can’t compare and that is just a tourist destination, that’s both full of photo ops and must sees AND full of people just going about their daily business. The sidewalk sparkles, which is probably just a combination of mica in the concrete and garbage, but it just. I don’t know. There’s an energy there that I love, even when I’m not feeling it myself.
I won’t say that I used to go all the time, because that’s simply not true, but I used to go with some sort of frequency. My teens through my early twenties were sprinkled with trips varying in length from roughly a school day to a week, and I always loved those trips. I remember the first time I went was with my high school government class, and I remember nothing about anticipating this trip or planning for it or anything but actually being there, and then the experience divides itself into a handful of tiny memories, like snapshots from a photo booth:
Driving downtown on our tour bus and being very close to Central Park on one side and buildings on the other, and the locals were just crossing the street in a manner that suggested they were about to walk straight into the bus, and we country hicks were universally baffled by this behavior because did they not see the bus right in front of them? Spoiler alert: tour buses are almost as common as pigeons in Manhattan, so it’s less that they didn’t see the bus and more that they didn’t care.
Battery Park and then what can only–by process of elimination–have been the boat ride to see the Statue of Liberty, even though I don’t remember anything about seeing the statue or anything about Ellis Island, the other part of that tour option. I just remember “I am in Battery Park” and “I am on a boat.”
Visiting the United Nations building, which I assume was the purpose of the trip. And this gets broken down into two smaller memories:
Seeing a gift from China to the United Nations in the form of an enormous carved diorama made of pure jade, which was extremely rare and expensive. I don’t remember what the diorama was, just that it was jade and carved and from China.
Being in the gift shop and telling my government teacher that I was buying an Israeli flag because I’m Jewish. Note that, at the time, I was not (to my knowledge) Jewish at all; it was just very fashionable in Evangelical circles at that time to say things like “I’m an adopted Jew!” which… there’s a lot wrong with that statement, to be honest. And I told these bizarre details to my government teacher and, to his credit, he did not call me out on this, just sort of nodded like “sure, makes sense.” But the joke was apparently on sixteen-year-old me, since as it turns out, a branch of my Polish ancestors were actually Ashkenazi, so whoops?
And that’s it, that’s the full experience from that first trip. I remember exactly nothing else. I almost feel like I could’ve dreamed it, but no, in old pictures of my bedroom, there’s that Israeli flag, sticking out like a sore thumb among my doll collection and other international artifacts. So it must have been real, but it certainly felt like a fever dream.
The next year, I returned to the city, this time as a Christmas gift from my parents and Auntie Beth, who lived in New York at the time. Auntie Beth did an AMAZING job showing me around the city; we did everything from getting sweet potato fries at a diner (I had never known such a thing existed until that trip) to hitting up the MoMA and the Met to seeing Phantom of the Opera four rows from the stage (as any theater kid from the 90s knows, this is an absolute peak experience) to taking in a flower show to meeting up with more aunts and uncles and cousins for a big fancy expensive meal to taking in the view from the top of the Empire State Building. Unlike with the previous trip, the memories from this week are overwhelming and numerous. Because Auntie Beth was a local, she seamlessly navigated us through the city in a way that seemed as effortless as breathing to seventeen-year-old me.
The only truly negative experience of that trip was the Amtrak ride to and from the city. I don’t know what Amtrak’s deal was, but the ride that was supposed to be maybe four hours, tops, wound up taking closer to six on the way there and closer to ten on the way back. The way back was particularly awful, as none of the cars had air conditioning on what was the hottest day of the year so far, and then, when the stuffy air already had us all gagging and swaying in our seats, the dining car ran out of every food that wasn’t hot coffee or light beer.
There was the time that I went with my college choir and stayed in this really odd place that was part theater, part dinner theater, and part… dormitory for 9/11 relief workers, I guess? We all slept in this bizarre room that seemed to have bunk beds going on forever and ever, and there was a proper fancy stage in the building and a little meeting room that overlooked whatever street was outside. I remember that the place was just off Times Square, literally steps from all of that mayhem, but you never would have guessed. I don’t remember if we performed (though we must have), but I do remember going all over the city like the dorky tourists we all were, and that everyone was scandalized by the appearance of the Naked Cowboy as we scooted along through the Times Square area to where we were staying.
Another time, my brother got us tickets to see Wicked on Broadway, so we found a hotel with two beds (a surprisingly tall order in Manhattan) and took a Mega Bus into the city. We spent about two days just wandering around, seeing whatever sites tickled our fancies, taking random pictures all over the place. When we called home on our last day to tell our parents we were heading out, they shocked us both by announcing that they’d acquired a kitten in the roughly eighteen hours we’d been gone. In the crowded streets, I thought I heard them say that her name was “Twitty,” and I was fully prepared to scold them heavily for choosing a terrible name for a cat, but no, her name was Tweety, which was much better.
Then Kyle and I hit the city for a day on one of our many drives back and forth to Texas. We mostly hung out around Central Park and took it easy, not really looking to do too much while we were there. We did, however, make the terrible and severely touristy decision to eat our dinner at T.G.I.Friday’s, which, like, it’s New York City. It’s one of the foodie capitals of the world. And we ate at Friday’s, and their food is microwaved and they charged double for it because we were idiots who ate at T.G.I.Friday’s near Times Square. Brilliant move, really.
The last time I went was with my mom, who was trying to get a visa to join my dad on his six week work trip to China. Chinese visas are, apparently, complex beasts, and the process required heading to the Chinese consulate in New York City. She never actually did get that visa, but we had a good time in the city anyway. We stayed in some fancy pants art deco hotel near Macy’s, and because my mom understood that New York City is a lot of walking, we took cabs everywhere. And we didn’t do too much touristy stuff–Central Park, shopping at Macy’s, peeping various sites near Times Square–but it was still a fun little trip.
So I like New York City. A lot. And I thought, in a genius manner, that it would make for a great family vacation, and honestly? It kind of did, but I also learned a lot of things while we were there. Namely:
New York City at almost 20, New York City at almost 30, and New York City at almost 40 are very different animals. In my 20s, I could probably have wandered around the city from dawn until dusk and suffered no ill effects, and I have to remind myself that I’m not in my 20s anymore, even though I haven’t been in my 20s for roughly 10 years at this point. When I planned out this trip, I noticed that everything everyone wanted to do, save for Carrie’s preferred adventure of going to see the Statue of Liberty (or as everyone renamed her on the trip when we saw how much the ferry was rocking, the Statue of Liability), was around Times Square by a few blocks. Easy peasy! I can do that!
Except, well. No I can’t, apparently. Twenty years ago, I was practically skipping around the city. I could have gone all night! Even ten years ago, I took the cabs with my mom, but I think I could’ve done okay without. But I’m not twenty or ten years ago, I’m now, and the me of now moves a lot more slowly and gets tired a lot more quickly.
For example, on our Statue of Liberty day, I planned for us to do three things, which seemed reasonable: we’d go see said statue, then have lunch at a really cool market/counter service hybrid place I knew about, then close out our day in the city by seeing the New York Public Library’s map room. Three things seems reasonable, and for twenty-year-old me, it probably would have been reasonable, but almost forty year old me struggled with just getting to the statue. This was partly because we got a little lost looking for parking, partly because we had to navigate everywhere with my rollator (named “Wheelie” by the kids), and partly because the Statue of Liberty is kind of a most of the day thing. You have to do airport style security to get there and then wait in this long line for the boat and then try not to hurl as the boat pitches through the water and then maybe you go up into the statue or maybe you don’t but either way, the wait for the boat was hot and the boat itself was kind of stuffy and more than anything else, you want one of those fresh squeezed lemonades you keep seeing people drinking, and then when you do look at the statue, you have a bunch of emotions about so many things and you’re not really sure why, and then of course we have to go to the gift shop to get kitschy souvenirs and by the time you’re ready to leave, it’s almost two, and you’ve still got to eat lunch and find an accessible subway station and get back to Bryant Park before the library closes at 4:30.
What I’m saying is that we got to lunchtime and Kyle and I looked at each other and then gently negotiated with Sam to see the map room later because even if he was okay (and he wasn’t, he was whining about his feet hurting), we were exhausted.
The rate of change in New York City is terrifying, but also I’m just old and haven’t been there in a long time. Remember above where I talked about all the times I went to New York City between being sixteen and being twenty-eight? It wasn’t a lot, not like an annual thing, but enough that I felt familiar with certain parts of the city (like Times Square, Central Park, Rockefeller Center) and could wayfind pretty easily when near those places.
This is no longer true.
I don’t know what happened. Everything about Times Square looked completely backwards to me on this trip, and I couldn’t figure out which end was which or where I needed to go or why. I’d think I was looking at one end of Times Square and then nope, I was looking at the other. We spent a LOT of time in that area this weekend, mostly because we parked at the New Jersey Port Authority Bus Terminal, and I just had no idea where I was the entire time. Rockefeller Center was the same way; I felt like I was in some sort of alternate dimension New York City where everything was the same except a little to the left or sideways.
Which made the whole trip really hard. I was our navigator at first, sort of (I say “sort of” because it’s hard to hold a phone and navigating while also holding onto a rollator), but before being even halfway through day one, I had to give up. I had no idea where I was going. I understood the streets as much as I ever did, but beyond that, it was a weirdly off version of a place I’d been before. I didn’t like it. It felt like shoes that were two sizes too large or driving somebody else’s car.
This city is not very accessible. I’d never considered this before, honestly, because when I used to go to New York, I had two fully functioning legs and zero fibromyalgia. Now I have one leg that works all the time, one leg that’s like 60% there and 40% dead nerves, and fibromyalgia that flares like a bitch when I’m stressed, even if the stress is good (like, say, the stress of a vacation). I thought I’d prepped enough for this by bringing my rollator, taking plenty of Aleve, and pacing myself. And don’t get me wrong, that all helped, but…
Well. Like I said, NYC is not terribly accessible. It’s got one of the most comprehensive subway systems in the world, but with all of those stops, very few are actually accessible if you have a wheelchair or other mobility device. We were lucky because I can stand and walk shorter distances without Wheelie, so if we popped up at a station without an elevator or accessible entrance, we just lifted Wheelie through and pressed on. I can’t imagine if I’d been in a wheelchair.
To the city’s credit, many of the sidewalks are fantastic to walk, but plenty aren’t. I kept getting stuck and having to heft Wheelie over curbs or cracks or whatever, and then I’d imagine if I were in a wheelchair or scooter and then I’d feel kind of sick to my stomach. As I said above, I’m lucky because when worse comes to worse, I can walk, but even so, the accessibility left a lot to be desired.
I am a lot more disabled than I thought I was. I’ve had this conversation a lot with my physical therapist, where it’s turning out that my body is–for myriad reasons–nowhere near where it used to be or should be in terms of functionality. When I started PT a couple of months ago, my therapist (who is wonderful and encouraging and has helped me make really great strides in terms of overall strength) noted that my left leg is significantly weaker than my right leg overall. Likely this is because of the nerve damage I’m 99% certain is there (because it’s not like I’ve been doing leg day on one leg while the other dangles), but whatever the case, I’m at about one and a half legs at the moment.
Which I didn’t think was a huge deal because, for the most part, I’m living my life in a normal way. Sure, I need my rollator to get around, but that helps a TON. Last month, we did a family trip to Salem, and I managed just fine there. I can go to the mall without issue, I can go to Target without issue, I can do my PT without too much issue (though it wears me out, but anyone who’s been through PT understands that particular tiredness). In my day to day life, I’m fine… well, maybe not fine, but I’m not suffering and I don’t come across things beyond my capabilities very often.
New York City is beyond my capabilities.
I don’t mean that my legs fell off as soon as we entered the city limits or that I flopped around the streets like a fish (can you imagine that, flopping around NYC city streets? Blech). New York is a very walk-y city, as I’ve been mentioning, and some combination of the heat and sun plus my only one and a half legs plus my fibro acting up when I’m stressed (even good stress like vacation stress) had me exhausted so quickly every day, drenched with sweat, gulping for air, and begging to go back to the hotel (or well. Internally begging, which warred with me also internally saying, “NO, we are STAYING HERE until we DO ALL THE THINGS.”).
On our last day, when we shuffled from city parking to the New York Public Library beside Bryant Park, my legs immediately began screaming in protest, like a pair of toddlers denied their binkies. Before, I had been trying to pace my walking stops a little more evenly: every 2-3 blocks, in the shade, for no more than a minute or two. That day, I couldn’t. I had to stop so often, and I hated myself for it. This was less because I saw myself as an inconvenience (I’m in therapy to delete thoughts like that; unless someone in my family actually expresses that they find me inconvenient, I know that’s just my brain lying to me) and more because I SHOULD BE ABLE TO WALK A LITTLE BIT LONGER BEFORE MY LEGS NEED TO QUIT.
Having your physical capabilities diminish is fucking hard on a lot of levels. I’m having a lot of chats with my therapist about it, but it’s a process. It’s grief and frustration and so many things.
ALL of that said, I don’t want to give the overall impression that (a) it was a bad trip or that (b) I’m now going to become a hermit and stay in my little hovel forever and ever amen. We had a genuinely good time overall. I definitely teared up at the Statue of Liberty (something about seeing a symbol of the best my country can be hit me in the gut… either that or I was seasick) and had an incredible lemonade sitting in the park on Liberty Island.
I had the most delicious pasta of all time–mafaldine with a mushroom ragu–at Eataly near the World Trade Center.
We enjoyed an honestly adorable meal at the American Girl Cafe near Rockefeller Center, where I discovered the joy of cucumbers topped with boursin and also got to watch my kiddos interact with the dolls they borrowed to be their lunchtime buddies.
I breathed in the energy of the city, more than a little marijuana smoke, that heartbeat I remembered so well. I got to enjoy the inside of the library, imagining that I would one day be Very Rich and build my own library to match with just as many Expensive And Important Books, maps, and artifacts.
And then after, when I was evaluating my experience, I took a moment to be REALLY ANGRY that my body is now creaky and exhausted instead of young and spry and then I started thinking about and researching trips we could take as a family that took my disabilities into account. There are so many of them! More than I was expecting! In particular, I got excited about all the National Parks that are accessible because I’ve been dying to take my kids to see everything gorgeous this land has to offer, from Yellowstone volcanology to that giant hole in the ground that is the Grand Canyon to the enormous sequoias and everything in between. Apparently, being permanently disabled (which I can’t call myself because fibro is such a weird condition and we don’t have a proper idea of wtf is the issue with my leg yet) gets you free admission to National Parks as well; so while I’d much rather be able to walk and run and do New York City without every day ending at 2:00 p.m. because I’m exhausted and crying in pain, there are a few silver linings.
(another silver lining that Kyle doesn’t enjoy is that cruises are often very disability friendly, and you can rent a scooter to have with you onboard a lot of the larger lines so that you can enjoy that vacation as much as an able bodied person. His argument is that cruises are still large boats on water)
Anyway. Another trip in the bag. Even when it’s painful and exhausting, I love going on these trips because I know my kids are making incredible memories. Sammy, despite complaining for weeks beforehand that he didn’t want to go, told me the last night of the trip that he didn’t want to leave, and really, I think that speaks for itself in terms of how well things went.
In the late fall of 1989, my life changed forever.
I don’t remember the exact day, but I do remember I was with my Aunt Marianne and my cousin Nicole. It would have been around the midway point between our two birthdays, exactly one month apart (which is probably why it happened at all). I don’t remember anything about the experience except for the overall feeling I got from it, that this was the most important thing that had ever happened to me, that my life could now be broken down into before and after, that the after would forever be colored by this experience, for better or for worse.
I was six years old, just barely, and had just recovered from having the chicken pox (back in the days before the vaccine that I love forever, when we all suffered through oatmeal baths and skin so itchy we wanted to peel it off like bananas). I have only two clear visuals from that night. In one, I’m sitting in the back seat of my aunt’s car, riding through a dark night, my mind overfull with what I’d just witnessed.
And in the other? A little mermaid, having just met the love of her life, pushes herself out of the ocean as a wave crests behind her, promising that someday, she will be part of his world.
I was the exact target audience for this movie (as was my cousin, who was probably also six at the time, though I don’t remember exactly when we saw it… it may have been after her birthday, making her seven but still comfortably in the “ARIEL IS MY ENTIRE LIFE NOW” age range), and from that evening on, I wanted nothing more than to be a mermaid, specifically Ariel if I could swing it. I remember returning to school after seeing the movie and rejoining my group of playmates, most of whom were boys (because the year’s prior obsession was the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and they embraced my presence because it meant they had someone to play April, even if I would’ve given my left leg to be Raphael just once), and all of whom had seen the movie as well. Our experience was incorporated easily into our playground games, and I was the Ariel of our group, a role to which I so thoroughly committed that when we got inside after playing, I picked up a plastic fork from my lunch tray and began using it to comb my hair, to everyone’s amusement.
Since that point, I always come back to Ariel. For a while, I always said that my favorite Disney princess was Belle, as that seemed the mature answer that I should give. But if I were honest with myself, able to take off the mask of what was expected of me for a minute; if I’d said what was true instead of what I thought I should have said, I would always have said Ariel. I could give a million and one reasons for this, but I think it all boils down to that she hit that point in my psyche at the right age to just become embedded there.
Also her iconic “I Want” song couldn’t really be topped in terms of Disney songs that hit little girls right where they are until Elsa came along, let’s be real.
Ariel was on my short list of girl names and still remains there for the distant possibility that we’ll someday thaw one of our babysicles and turn our family into an even number. I kind of push my love for her onto the little girls I encounter in my life; when I babysat in high school, I gifted my charge a full Ariel costume as a going away gift when I had to leave for college, and now that I have a daughter of my own? Oh, it is on like Donkey Kong.
The original fairy tale is a tragedy, written by Danish author Hans Christian Andersen in 1837. Many of the story beats remain the same in this story, if not a bit gorier: mermaid loves the world above, saves a prince from drowning and falls in love with him, visits a Sea Witch to get human legs, has to make the prince fall in love with her or else doom. This version gives mermaids a bit more lore: they live for three hundred years and don’t possess souls but instead turn to seafoam when they die. When the mermaid takes the potion to make her human, it’s excruciating for her: she has her tongue cut out, feels as if a knife is cutting through her body, and feels with every step that she is walking on sharp knives.
(note that this is also how I feel with fibromyalgia)
But worse, in this version, she does not win her prince. He falls in love, instead, with a princess from a neighboring kingdom, whom he thinks rescued him. The mermaid knows that she will die the morning after his wedding, but as she is mourning his love and her own life, her sisters emerge from the sea with an offer for her: if she murders the prince with a dagger given to them by the Sea Witch, letting his blood drip on her feet, she will become a mermaid again and return to the sea for the rest of her days. The mermaid, however, loves the prince too dearly to cause him harm and instead throws herself into the sea, and although she dissolves into foam, she continues to exist as a sylph, with the chance to earn a real soul and ascend to heaven by doing good deeds for three hundred years.
(I’d say it’s not super family friendly, but then again, Disney came out with The Hunchback of Notre Dame seven years later, and that’s… well.)
We can dig into a couple thousand different iterations as to why Andersen wrote this story the way he did, but one of the most popular interpretations is that it served as both a metaphor and a love letter to a man for whom he pined, Edvard Collin. Andersen himself refused to engage in sexual relationships for a good portion of his life but nevertheless had powerful romantic feelings throughout for both men and women. Of Collin, he wrote, “I languish for you as for a pretty Calabrian wench…my sentiments for you are those of a woman. The femininity of my nature and our friendship must remain a mystery.” Andersen also sent a first copy of the story to Collin, who was unable to return the author’s affections, a fact that caused Andersen a great deal of heartbreak.
Fast forward to roughly 1987. Titan Disney directors John Musker and Ron Clements (known also for Aladdin and Moana, among others) recruited songwriter Howard Ashman to help with their film treatment of The Little Mermaid after Ashman contributed a song to Oliver & Company–and much of what made The Little Mermaid stand out as a film was Ashman’s work: the fact that it’s a musical, Sebastian’s Jamaican accent, and of course the iconic songs. Ashman himself was a gay man and was diagnosed with HIV/AIDS during production on The Little Mermaid, eventually passing away in March of 1991.
And here we are now, nearly 40 years later, and most of Disney’s releases are absolutely unnecessary live action remakes. They are transparent cash grabs and they are almost never actually any good. Even the best among them (strictly Maleficent and Cinderella, the latter largely because Cate Blanchett is a goddess who can do no wrong and the former because it actually gave me a singular feeling) suffer from the ailment of being wholly unnecessary, save for copyright extension and Disney raking in additional dollars, which the cynic in me refuses to give them unless they come up with something that really hits me where I live. The CGI is almost always excruciating, taking the color and joy of the originals and dragging it to a muddy uncanny valley. So many of these live action remakes border on shot-for-shot remakes of the originals, and again, it begs the question of why does this exist at all? If you’re just going to do something that’s just like the original but an inch to the left, why bother?
That inch to the left in most of these remakes is typically an inch in one of two directions. On the one hand, you have superficially progressive changes. I won’t get too much into those, at the risk of sounding like certain Florida governors, but suffice it to say that I choose the word “superficial” for a reason. The other direction is to close perceived plot holes and complaints from various pseudo intellectuals who don’t like to suspend disbelief in order to enjoy a fairy tale. Like sure, it’s weird that the villagers in Beauty and the Beast have forgotten about the nearby castle with a prince in it within the span of ten years, but that’s not the point of the story even a little bit? So honestly, who cares?
The sorts of fundamental changes that would justify the existence of many of these remakes are simply not something that interests Disney, and far too often, the remakes are literally just the same thing because they’re wholly risk-averse. These films end up not being the tentpoles you find from a Marvel release or from the newest animated feature but rather a middle of the road steady source of income that Disney can use to fund the more expensive of their projects (or line their shareholders’ pockets) without having to do too much work. And that’s all the Mouse really wants from them, so they’re somewhat immune to complaints about the films’ mediocrity (or even the films’ outright badness) because they’re making money. Maybe not to the tune of billions, but enough that from a shareholder perspective, their existence remains justified.
Which is to say that I usually have negative interest in these films, and that was going to be true of The Little Mermaid as well. The 1989 film has been part of my marrow since its release, and although I had full confidence in Halle Bailey to perform excellently as Ariel (spoiler from later in the review: she does and then some), I take issue with these films’ existence in the first place. I will defend the casting of a black woman as the titular mermaid to the death (because mermaids do not exist, black people can have red hair, and literally who even cares, it’s a movie, get a life), but the movie existing in the first place is a more difficult hill to climb. And the idea of giving Disney any money to see this blatant cash grab was anathema to me except…
…well, I have a five year old daughter. And she saw the trailer one day.
From roughly the moment she heard the opening notes to “Part of Your World” as sung by Halle Bailey, she was hooked. “Mommy,” she said to me solemnly, “I need to see Ariel.”
She had, of course, already loved Ariel. In her trio of favorite princesses/Disney royals, Ariel shared billing with Elsa and Rapunzel (a fairly common trio among the girls of Generation Alpha, I’ve discovered). This past December, when we took a family trip to Disney World, an exquisite cast member pulled Carrie aside for a complimentary five minute photo session in her Ariel costume (turquoise to match the look of Ariel in the parks), and to call it magical would be severely understating the matter.
So although I had no interest in the new, live action Little Mermaid (so unnecessary), I found myself in the position of having a five-year-old daughter who had The Most Interest in seeing the movie and, because he must do everything she does, a five-year-old twin brother who was intrigued by the concept of both the movie and cinema in general. And with the twins having a half day on the Friday preceding Memorial Day…
Well. Here I am, having seen the movie, and here you are, reading about me seeing the movie. In essay form because I can never do things simply.
(and, as a caveat, this review/essay is going to miss a fairly large chunk of understanding about the middle of the movie because the five-year-old brother remarked at the five minute mark, “This video is really long!” started asking if the movie was finished at the ten minute mark, and started doing laps around the theater at the 45 minute mark. Did I chase him and disrupt all ten of my fellow movie-goers’ experience by doing so or did I let him flee through the darkness unabated until he wore himself out for the climax, not caring as long as he stayed [a] where I could see him, and [b] not on top of other people? That’s for you to decide, dear reader, but regardless, I did not see much of the middle of the movie)
(also this review is going to contain spoilers, so if you want to be surprised by the changes Disney made to the movie, you can stop reading now)
This particular addition to Disney’s live action lineup continues the trend of not reinventing the wheel; they know what works about the original and, by and large, they stick with it. Of the film’s missteps, perhaps the most egregious is the casting and performance of Javier Bardem as King Triton. I don’t know if this can be chalked up to poor direction or Bardem mistakenly taking a horse tranquilizer before delivering his lines, but the man sounds like he’d rather be doing anything other than acting as the king of the sea. The only scenes in which he really delivers are the few times he has to act menacing, and that menace is wholly subdued, as if this is a Coen Brothers film instead of Disney milking a cash cow. When you’re doing menace for Disney, especially if you’re in a live action version of a cartoon, you need to make it huge. It’s a stage acting moment rather than a film acting moment, and if you keep things low and subtle, you just look like you could’ve been replaced by a cardboard cutout and had the film actually improve.
I found this particularly frustrating as the heart of the original 1989 film is not, in fact, Ariel’s struggle (although she is my favorite, she remains pretty static: she wants the same thing at the beginning as at the end and gets it without going through too much personal growth in that particular area) but Triton’s. Ariel is his youngest daughter (and, it’s implied through several of the sequels, including this version, reminds him the most of his deceased wife), and his primary conflict in the original film is in recognizing that she is growing up and that he has to let her go, that his tight and protective grip on her is driving her away rather than teaching her to make safe decisions. He recognizes through the course of the film that while the stupid decisions (and they were dazzlingly stupid) may have been Ariel’s, he’s still her father and that the responsibility for helping her grow while ensuring she does so safely is squarely on his shoulders. By the end of the film, when he grants her dearest wish and transforms her into a human, it’s because of his own growth, not hers.
I think? this relationship is supposed to be in the new film as well, but unfortunately, Bardem’s utterly wooden acting makes it fall flat. Triton does express regret for the way he reacts to Ariel’s actions (from skulking around the shipwreck graveyard to having a grotto full of human stuff), but again, it’s such a subtle regret that he might as well be thinking, “man, I should not have had the chicken of the sea for dinner.” I kept rooting for him to emote more, and I kept finding myself disappointed, to the point that when he was disintegrated during the climax (a change from the original, in which he simply turned into kelp–the PG movie versus the G movie, I guess), I breathed a sigh of relief.
The other area in which the film fell flat came from some of the CGI. Not all, fortunately, because this isn’t Dumbo, but some.
In particular, the trouble comes from Ariel’s sea creature friends and from the giant Ursula at the climax of the film. The sea creature friends–Flounder, Sebastian, and Scuttle–are, as far as I remember, the only non-mermaid creatures that talk under the sea (cue steel drums), and it’s. Well. Flounder looks, unfortunately, like he’s a few days deceased and being sold for a deep discount at the local Wegmans. Sebastian fares slightly better, but in trying to make him look more realistic, most of the emotive nature of his traditionally animated counterpart disappears. Of the three, Scuttle suffers the least, likely because birds are easier to make seem realistic and emotive, but even she (gender bent in this version so that Awkwafina can voice her) misses a lot of the magic of Buddy Hackett’s 1989 Scuttle. This particular issue unfortunately also affects what should be the biggest ensemble number of the film, the classic “Under the Sea.” In the original movie, this song is an exciting celebration that makes even the most miserly among us dance in their seats; here, it feels more like it’s being sung by a choir who can’t get their heartrates above a certain level, lest they explode. It’s very soothing, but it’s not supposed to be.
Ursula’s transformation suffers from a slightly different problem: it’s muddy and messy as fuck. And that’s particularly unfortunate because Melissa McCarthy absolutely owns the role (more on that once I’ve gotten my complaints out of the way). The towering, cackling Ursula, crowing that she’s the ruler of all the ocean in the 1989 film is deliciously scary; even though she’s clearly two-dimensional, the storms she creates in the sea while lording over our heroes feel entirely real, and her bellowing taunts made little me watch the climax through my fingers. In this version, however, it feels as if Melissa McCarthy recorded the final lines while driving down the highway or otherwise distracted. The towering Ursula doesn’t look so much like the villainess in question but rather like a particularly frightening thunderstorm. And that may have been intentional on the filmmakers’ part, but if so, I heavily disagree with the decision. Ursula is absolutely one of the best Disney villains of all time; let her shine in her enormous moment of triumph! Don’t drown her in this muddy, grubby, cloudy mess!
But. All that said.
I actually really liked this movie.
It certainly doesn’t feel any more necessary than the other remakes, and it doesn’t come close to the original (though that may be just my nostalgia talking), but it’s delightfully fun. Although the CGI sometimes chains it to the stone of realism, the story and acting of the leads allow it to reach the surface again and become as colorful and exciting a film as it can possibly be.
In particular, Halle Bailey is utter perfection as Ariel. Her voice is powerful and utterly gorgeous; she hits “Part of Your World,” the original “I want” song, out of the park, not just in its original incarnation but in all three (yes, three) reprises. Though she tends towards a gentle wistfulness and curiosity, she seamlessly turns up the volume to desperation and passion for the human world that isn’t simply tied to the cute prince she saves from drowning. When she sings of how much she’d “love to explore that shore up above,” it pierces the heart and makes you want to take her by the hand and help her ashore; later on, the iconic “splash” scene (in which Ariel sings of her love for Eric while waves crash behind her) feels even more powerful than it did in the original (and no shade whatsoever to the original, but damn, Halle Bailey).
Delightfully, Ariel is also allowed much more growth in this film than in the original. For one thing, she’s not explicitly sixteen years old as she was in 1989, making those of us who roll our eyes when the original mermaid argues that she’s “not a child anymore” at sixteen breathe a sigh of relief. Even after meeting her prince, Ariel is more interested in the human world as a whole than in the prince himself, and her disappearance at the end of “Under the Sea” is not to croon around a statue of Eric but rather to go and scavenge the wreck of his ship for human stuff that hasn’t yet begun to decay. Towards the climax of the film, when it seems all is lost, she lies on the rock where she’d previously sung her dreams, cradling a gift from Eric and reflecting on everything she gave up, only to end up losing in the end. This particular reflection isn’t as explicitly present in the original, and it’s good to see here, that Ariel’s heartbreak in that moment isn’t simply because she’s lost the love of her life but because the enormity of what she’s given up for that moment finally catches up with her.
In this version, too, it’s entirely understandable that Ariel wouldn’t have that moment to reflect until Eric sailed away with his villainous bride-to-be (it’s Ursula in disguise, in case you’re new here), as every other second she has on land is spent developing an actual relationship with Eric, one built less on “wow, she’s cute” and more on “we’re teaching each other amazing things, we both love to learn and explore the world, our curiosity is going to drive us into each other’s arms and then the sky’s the limit.” Throughout her time on land, Ariel shows that she’s capable of communicating with Eric even without her voice (more on that in a minute): she teaches him to make music with a conch shell, helps him choose a hat from local villagers (in a village now located on a Caribbean island instead of “vaguely near Denmark”), pores over maps with him, learns to drive a carriage properly (and without the unhinged look of the original Ariel as she took the reins). The crush aspect of their relationship is absolutely present, but it blossoms into the most wonderful kind of crush: one that grows easily into real love because of how well the participants gel with each other. Their kiss–when it finally comes–is more than well earned.
Eric gets significantly more development in this version as well, no longer simply the proto-Aladdin of the 1989 film (handsome enough but doesn’t really have a huge personality, per se) though still significantly less interesting than Ariel. Rather than existing simply as an object that exists to push Ariel to chase after her dreams of being human, Eric has dreams of his own: to improve relations with the neighboring islands, to explore the world outside of his palace, to really understand more than just his own point of view. He and Ariel have this in common, and it forms the foundation of their relationship, once the magic of her siren song has faded.
Which, yes, Ariel’s voice is more than just the prettiest in the sea in this version! Mermaids have a gift, you see–their siren song, which the humans in the film explain early on can drive people to early and watery graves. In Ariel’s case, she uses her song to call Eric back from the brink of death after she rescues him from the shipwreck; this, in turn, forms the basis for his obsession with the woman who rescued and sang to him, rather than a Cinderella-esque search for someone whom he only knows by one trait. It also lends some weight to Ursula’s insistence that Ariel give up her voice to become human: in this case, her voice isn’t only her means of communication but a power that she can use to shift the odds in her favor. Without it, she’s forced to rely entirely on who she is and what she and Eric have in common, giving their relationship a far more solid foundation than it appears to have in the original.
And speaking of Ursula…
Melissa McCarthy is typically a delight onscreen, and this film is no exception. She seems to know that, in being cast as Ursula, she is living the dream of so many of us who grew up obsessed with this movie and gradually switched from belting out “Part of Your World” in the shower to cackling our way through “Poor Unfortunate Souls,” and, in knowing how lucky she is, truly owns the role. Her performance is obviously inspired by and an homage to the late Pat Carroll (whose 1989 Ursula still sends a chill down even the most stalwart spine), but she also manages to add her own saccharine coating to so many of the lines, manipulating Ariel in a more unctuous way than her predecessor. When she convinces Ariel to take her deal, it’s not by floating images of Eric’s face in front of her but rather by echoing Triton’s demand that Ariel never leave her ocean home again, suggesting that if this little mermaid doesn’t get her legs now, she’ll be trapped beneath the sea forever. With that, she doesn’t need to argue that Ariel can totally use body language to seduce the prince; she simply points out that she’s offering an escape from the prison in which Ariel finds herself, and it’s delightfully effective.
Ariel is allowed to say “no” to the deal, initially, though she changes her mind quickly, and instead of signing a contract, she provides one of her scales and a drop of her blood (which felt like a response to the pedantic question of “well, why doesn’t she just write Eric a note?” that arises in response to the original). Our modern Ursula proves herself that much more sinister as well by adding a new component to the spell: Ariel can’t remember that she needs to get Eric to kiss her, and when her companions bring up the idea, it slips from her mind immediately. It almost makes it seem like Ursula is doing Ariel a favor: without the desperate impetus to get a kiss by the third day, without her siren song to work her magic, Ariel and Eric fall in love the old fashioned way, as if they have all the time in the world. Thus, when Ursula decides to take matters “into her own tentacles” towards the end of the film, it’s with the realization that only magic could distract Eric from the burgeoning relationship he has with Ariel.
Despite the muddy CGI, the climax is as intense as in the 1989 film (at least if you judge by the way my five-year-old daughter watched through her fingers and my five-year-old son stopped running around to stare at the screen with wide eyes and jaw dropped). Ursula raises ships from their watery graves, and delightfully, it’s not Eric who steps in to save the day this time but Ariel herself. The sea tosses Eric around like a ragdoll (bless him), but Ariel masters it and pulls herself across the deck of the ship, wrenching the wheel in a last minute turn, the way Eric did earlier in the film, and impaling Ursula on its bowspirit (there’s your new sailing word for the day, it means “the pointy thing at the front of the ship”).
In 1989, this was the end of things with little other discussion to be had. King Triton returned to his mer-self and took up his trident, and after realizing he had to let Ariel go, gave her legs (her pose in that scene is homage to the Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen–which, by the way, if you’re ever in Copenhagen, know that the statue is not in the big harbor but in a much smaller harbor that’s actually a beautiful park filled with murderous swans), and then we had a finale. Here, however, the central conflict of the film doesn’t go away with Ursula. The problem is that while Eric and Ariel love each other, they come from different worlds; the old, “a bird may love a fish, but where will they build their home” problem. Eric’s mother, the queen (a new addition for this film), expresses her understanding of his love and regret that he and Ariel simply can’t make it work as things stand (and swim) in that moment.
This theme brings the film closer to the original Hans Christian Andersen story than its 1989 predecessor, where the heart of the conflict is less that a father needs to let his daughter grow up and more that the mermaid and her beloved prince occupy different worlds, much as Andersen and Collin did in the early 1800s. And therein lies the magic of this remake: Ariel gets her legs, and not only gets to live in Eric’s world but gets to keep her family and connection to the sea as well. More cynical critics often complain about this “sanitized” happy ending in comparison to the original story, but it hit me for the first time watching this film how powerful the happy ending really is. Hans Christian Andersen, a bisexual man, wrote the original tragic tale knowing that no, he could never be part of Edvard Collin’s world, not really. Howard Ashman, a gay man diagnosed with HIV/AIDS during the production of the 1989 film, must have known this when he wrote the ending where the little mermaid finally got her prince, granting happiness to Hans Christian Andersen more than a century after his death. It’s a promise that while queer love seemed doomed in media for centuries, it could also be happy and could change the worlds in which its participants live.
Ultimately, this film is as unnecessary as the other live action remakes, but then, what film truly is necessary? If these live action remakes must keep happening (and, based on reports out of Disney studios, they must… I dread inevitably seeing the CGI version of Stitch), they would do well to aspire to reach this quality. It was not a perfect film by any stretch of the imagination (someone please make sure that Javier Bardem is okay, I really am worried about him), but despite its flaws, it gave me a new perspective on a story I’ve loved since I was a child. More importantly, it inspired my daughter the way the 1989 film inspired me; she left the theater saying, “Mommy, I love this Ariel” and spent the next several days singing “Part of Your World” as she went about the daily business of being five.
And really, I can’t ask for much more from a Disney film.
When you feel comfortable with yourself, you often don’t see the need for labels. Why label something? Why label anything? But the more you step outside the realm of what’s viewed as “typical,” the more you want to know what you are. If I’m not “normal,” what am I? Or maybe “typical” and “normal” are the wrong words, so let’s use the word “default” instead. Kind of like when you open a video game for the first time, you’re presented with the “default” option for character creation; that’s how life can feel. There’s the “default” option, and then there’s the rest of us, trying to figure out how we fit in, and that’s where labels become important.
A while back, I wrote about two of my labels: “bisexual” and “demisexual.” Both of those deviate from the “default” setting: heterosexual. The first thing most of us are exposed to in life, and the sexuality that describes most people, is heterosexual. That doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong with not being heterosexual, but it does mean that if that word doesn’t describe you, you want a word that does describe you. And so, there are labels.
Labels that we talk about a lot in our family have to do with neurodivergence. Both of my sons are autistic; my oldest also has ADHD, we suspect my younger son will probably have that diagnosis when he’s a bit older as well (he certainly has the impulsivity for hyperactive type); my husband recently got a diagnosis of combination type ADHD, and I’ve been sitting here for years, calling myself autistic because it’s the label that best fit my experience with the world.
It still does, by the way, but things have gotten much more complicated.
Self identifying as autistic is a controversial thing, and people can get pretty cranky about it. The assumption is that some people claim an autism diagnosis–especially online–for various types of clout or as a kind of “get out of jail free” card. I’d say that neither of those things happen nearly as often as the cranky folks like to claim, though being an old on today’s internet, I can’t know for sure. It’s been my experience, though, that at a bare minimum, those who self-diagnose as being autistic don’t do so on a whim or for funsies, but because they’ve done as much research as they can reasonably do and have found that the diagnosis resonates with them… and because getting professionally diagnosed can be pretty difficult, especially as an adult and especially as a woman.
My own path to self diagnosis–and eventually, an unexpected diagnosis, but we’ll get there in a minute–started when my younger sister was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome in the late 90s. She was 10 before anyone suggested that she might be autistic and 12 when she got a diagnosis (for comparison, Isaac was diagnosed at 19 months, and Sammy was diagnosed at 7).
As my family learned more and more about autism (which, note here: Asperger’s Syndrome has been reclassified as simply being part of the general autism spectrum disorder list, at least partly because the diagnosis was created by a literal Nazi who wanted a classification for autistic people who were functional enough to avoid the gas chambers. The more you know~), we started talking about “autistic tendencies,” which isn’t a thing, but it was what we had to describe ourselves at the time. A lot of this involved talking about the more overt signs of autism that would tip off a neuropsychiatrist or two: stimming, rigidity when it came to schedules and behaviors, social awkwardness, sensory sensitivities, picky eating, echolalia, communication struggles, etc. None of it was ever severe enough to warrant assessments for my brother or I–we were mostly good students, albeit socially awkward with terrible time management and a penchant for not doing homework, but nothing about us raised flags red enough that our schools suggested diagnoses for us. As far as anyone told us, we were “normal.” Quirky, but within the “default” range.
The trouble is that no, I was not “normal” or “default,” and I knew it. Which is something I want parents to internalize because I’ve read and heard before of parents not wanting their kids to be diagnosed with something because they don’t want them to have that label or go through life thinking that they’re different. Your kid knows they’re different. They know that their peers do certain things more easily than they can. They know where they struggle. They know that they aren’t the “default” setting, and disallowing that label absolutely does more harm than good.
Because, you see, when nobody tells you that your brain works differently, so of course your experience with the world is going to be different, you assume that the problem is that you’re just not good at being a person. Which is where I was for most of my life. It was like other people had been given a manual on how to do certain things: how to read between the lines of conversations, how to not bump into walls or trip over thick clumps of air, how to recognize when it was their turn to speak or not go completely silent in an echoing cafeteria or restaurant. They knew by default the order that things should go in, they knew how to pay attention in class without doodling and how to do their homework all the time. They knew how to make and keep friends.
And then: me. Socializing has always been an uphill battle for me. I don’t know when to say something or what to say or how to say it, particularly when talking to people face-to-face, unless it’s a conversation with a set sort of script (for example: “Doctor, I’ve been having worse and worse migraines for the past several months, and I wondered what we could do about that?” “Yes, I’d like to return this blanket because I accidentally ordered it in the wrong size.” “What time should I drop off my kids for this activity?” “What would you like us to bring to the Christmas party?”). I struggle to read between the lines of conversation, so those unspoken messages that are such a huge part of communication (some researchers say it’s at least 55%) go right over my head. I can write well, but most other academic pursuits are a struggle, and I can never get my homework done. I bump into walls, I trip over thick clumps of air, I sprain my ankle walking off a one foot stage platform. The louder the environment, the quieter I am. I fiddle with my hair, pick at my skin, bite my nails to nubs, pull out my eyebrows. I walk on my tip toes all the time, especially when I have bare feet. I hate wearing jackets, and I only started trying new foods once I hit adulthood and wanted to impress Kyle when we started dating (and by “impress” I mean that I didn’t want him to find out yet that I was a weirdo who subsisted on butter noodles and chips and salsa).
(which he did eventually find out, but only after I made myself look cool and default by eating ribs and drinking Dr. Pepper)
The explanations for these things ranged from physiological (“you walk on your tip toes because you have a short gastrocnemius tendon in the back of your leg and need physical therapy”) to complimentary (“you’re an absolute genius writer and breezed through the style class, which nobody has been able to do in years”) to insulting (“well that was stupid, why would you even think to put the papers in that order?”) to cruel (“you are lazy and terminally unprofessional, and unless you learn to shape up, you will never succeed in your career”), but they all seemed to boil down not to a difference in brain function but rather to a deficit in my behavior or personality, something that I could change, but I simply wasn’t for reasons that nobody could pinpoint.
And that’s a blow and a half to your self-esteem. It’s one thing to know that you struggle in areas where others seem to excel quite easily, but to have those struggles blamed on your own personality deficits is pretty brutal. And worse, I didn’t know how to repair these supposed personality deficits, because nothing I did–nothing anyone else did–seemed to work. Punishments, scolding, yelling, training, therapy, encouragement… it all seemed to go in one ear and out the other.
Which is why, when I started thinking that maybe, just maybe, I didn’t have autistic tendencies but actually had autism proper, it was like a weight slowly being lifted off my shoulders. It seemed that maybe I wasn’t bad at being a person, that maybe I hadn’t missed out on receiving the “how to human” manual. Maybe my brain just works in a different way from other people’s. Maybe I’m not “default” and bad at it; maybe I’m autistic and perfectly fine at being that.
It took a while of digestion to start accepting it, and I don’t think I really embraced the idea of being autistic until around when the twins were born, perhaps a little while afterwards. At that point, I’d left yet another job being scolded for things I didn’t realize I was doing wrong or things I was doing wrong but had no idea how to properly fix. I ended up with three straight years of being a stay-at-home mom without much of a break, save for my kids’ therapies, and that was enough time for me to start really looking at myself and accepting that hey, this is who I am. This explains so much about me. This is a label that I want to have.
The trouble is, of course, that self-diagnosis doesn’t get you very far. You can talk about being autistic, but at the end of the day, it’s your interpretation of things, and I wanted it to be solid fact, set in stone, I’m autistic and if anyone has a problem with that, they can eat my shorts. When I took my oldest to his assessment, the pediatric neuropsych politely looked at me and asked if I’d ever been assessed or considered it. I said that I hadn’t and she said, “hm,” and wrote things down, and it got the wheels turning.
I talked to my therapist, my prescribing RN, and my primary. The former two were enthusiastic about giving me references, while my primary, who is “meh” at the best of times, remarked, “I haven’t seen anything in your behavior that would suggest autism to me, but I’ll see what I can do about that referral.” Which, okay, I’ve learned over the last 35+ years of living on this planet that if I appear too weird, I may as well exile myself from society at large and go live in a cave; and what’s more, doctors only see me when I’m coming in with the prepared “doctor” script: “hello, I am dealing with [problem] and would like [solution].” It’s rare that they see me unmasked and unscripted, so. Okay.
(the doctor who has seen me unmasked and unscripted is my OB-GYN because he has performed two surgeries on me, one of which I followed by telling him–while high on fentanyl and ketamine–that I loved him)
The referral process was, to put it mildly, exhausting. I started it roughly two years ago, and it’s been a lot of back and forth with insurance companies, doctor’s offices, neuropsychiatry departments, more insurance companies, more doctor’s offices… about a month ago, someone from the neuropsychiatry office called to say that they didn’t accept my insurance any longer (which sounded fishy because it’s one of the largest insurance providers in the country) and that they’d put me in a file and I could call back if I ever changed insurances. I hung up, started to have a breakdown, and then she called back saying that she’d misread the file, and about a week later, I had my appointment scheduled for the day before Valentine’s Day.
And it almost didn’t happen. This past Friday and Saturday, I got hit with congestion and sinus pressure so bad that I thought I was going to lose my mind. I took a Covid test that I thought looked faintly positive (blame all my years trying to conceive for that one) and started to internally panic because rescheduling this assessment would be another enormous ordeal. Thankfully, though, subsequent tests came back blatantly negative, so I went ahead on Monday, even though I’d only gotten three hours of sleep and had a crushing headache.
I was apprehensive from early on, as I was told there would be a written portion to the assessment, and I had no idea what that would entail. The neuropsychiatrist mostly made me feel better, since she had a welcoming personality and was very straightforward about everything. She asked me questions about my history, my family’s history, my health, and then asked what I was looking for in the assessment. I explained that while I was fairly certain I was autistic, I wanted confirmation that no, I’m not just bad at being a person, that maybe there’s something else going on. She understood but also explained that even if she thought I was autistic, she likely couldn’t give me that specific diagnosis. As it turns out, insurance companies aren’t terribly keen on covering autism assessments once a person has turned eighteen (because, as we all know, the autism flees the body at midnight on the eighteenth birthday), so in order to get a proper assessment as an adult, you have to find a neuropsychiatrist that doesn’t take insurance and pay for it out of pocket, often to the tune of thousands of dollars.
This is, of course, absolute horse shit. Which is the neuropsychiatrist’s assessment as well.
“What I can do,” she said, “is give you an idea of anything else that’s going on in your brain that might contribute to the things with which you struggle. We’ll do an I.Q. test, and then I’ll have some questionnaires for you, and while I won’t have the full report ready for another two to three weeks, I’ll try and at least give you my impressions before you leave today.”
Fair enough, I thought, and we began.
The I.Q. test was by far the longest portion of the assessment, and while I have my own thoughts on I.Q. tests as a whole (they have a racial and class bias and don’t really test inherent intelligence so much as opportunity), it was an interesting experience. We started with the verbal portion–memorizing lists of ~15+ words, naming as many animals or words that started with S as I could, defining words, explaining relationships between pairs of words. I knew I did well there; the neuropsychiatrist kept humming and saying, “oh wow, I don’t think I can spell that one,” which are generally good signs.
Then we moved on to less verbal things, and I started to flop. She listed off a series of numbers for me to repeat back, and I think I did alright. Then she listed off a series of letters and numbers (like “192AQM7KD0217B”) and had me tell her how many numbers were in the sequence she’d given me. I had to read a page of the words “red blue green” in various orders; then I had to look at a page where each line was one of those colors and list the color given; and then I had to look at a third page that also had the words “red blue green” but each word was a different color from the word and I had to name the color and not the word. I had to look at patterns of increasing complexity and find the missing piece to each pattern. I had to look at shapes and choose the three puzzle pieces necessary to build the shape. I had to do complicated connect the dots puzzles and draw abstract shapes from memory. I had to look at a computer screen and press the spacebar whenever I saw a letter except the letter X.
(I didn’t do well at all on that one)
Once all of the I.Q. testing was done, I did the written portion, which was ultimately just self reporting on depression, anxiety, ADHD, and autism symptoms. And then the neuropsychiatrist tallied all of my scores and gave me her impressions.
The first impression she had was that she was comfortable diagnosing me with inattentive type ADHD. This basically means that while I don’t have the impulse control issues or hyperactivity associated with ADHD, I can’t focus on things to save my life–which honestly tracks with literally everything. I was explaining last night, for example, that while Kyle is an excellent DM for our D&D campaign, I cannot stay focused on just the game to save my life. I can’t focus on TV shows without having something to play with in my hands. I can’t do work without having something open in a second screen (which drives my managers bananas). My mind wanders frequently and far, and it always has, and the trappings of ADHD as a whole–struggles with time management, executive function, and rejection sensitive dysphoria–are things I’ve been familiar with for a very long time.
It’s not surprising that I was never diagnosed with ADHD as a kid, as I grew up in the 90s, and ADHD wasn’t something they looked for in girls back then, especially if it lacked the hyperactivity and impulsivity component. I have zero impulsivity and like to sleep (and always have), but distractibility is my personal demon and has been since I was a kid. Still, I got decent enough grades that I managed to slip under that particular radar and stay in the honors and AP class setting throughout high school, so nobody really thought much of the doodles in the margins of my notebooks or the fact that I couldn’t finish homework to save my life. The real struggles were ones that people either chalked up to me being lazy/not math brained (read: failing out of trigonometry) or me just being shy and socially awkward. And neither of those are things associated with ADHD or really treatable with medication, so it didn’t ping the radars of any teachers, parents, or doctors.
(which I want to make abundantly clear: because my ADHD and NVLD, which I’ll talk about below, present differently from what people expect, I don’t blame anyone for not seeing them for what they were; I just accepted them as being personality deficits for the longest time because nobody knew better back then, but knowing better now is part of my own journey towards healing and living a better life)
I have the option to treat my ADHD with stimulants, but I’m holding off for numerous reasons, not least because right now, the gold standard medications for ADHD are very hard to find for reasons nobody can quite explain. I think I do eventually want to try and medicate, just to see what magical things I can accomplish when I can actually focus for more than thirteen and a half seconds a time, but I don’t want to start only to immediately start dealing with withdrawal. I’ve done that with my antidepressant, and it’s ugly. Instead, I’m mostly using this to inform my life. No, I can’t pay attention. A fae creature at one point said, “Can I have your attention?” and I stupidly gave it away and now it’s gone forever. Give me accommodations so that I can make your life better.
Outside of inattentive ADHD, the neuropsychiatrist said she felt comfortable diagnosing me with something that’s somewhat controversial because it’s not yet in the DSM (The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, basically the guidebook for neuropsychiatry and psychology) but that she felt fit me rather well. It’s called Nonverbal Learning Disorder, and it basically does the opposite of what it says on the tin: people with NVLD are excellent at verbal expression and comprehension but really struggle with almost everything else about learning and existing, especially things in a visual/spatial context and things in a social context. People with NVLD tend to be very well written and well spoken but they also tend to be clumsy and not understand a lot of social cues or rules (like rules that might define professionalism in the workplace, for example). So for example, someone with NVLD might be able to write you the most beautiful letter you’ve ever read but then will get completely turned around trying to get to your house because they couldn’t read a map. They have extensive vocabularies but get tied up when it comes to puzzles and math. They express themselves beautifully but don’t read between the lines of a conversation.
NVLD is a disorder that’s come up a lot more frequently since Asperger’s Syndrome was removed as a potential diagnosis for people who have similar symptoms. It’s often an alternative to an autism diagnosis when neuropsychiatrists look at autism from a framework of always meaning a struggle with communication and excellence in visual and spatial (and often mathematical) fields. And at the same time, it’s often comorbid with ADHD, autism, and a whole host of other learning disorders.
And I guess I’m of two minds about it. On the one hand, I do feel like the NVLD covers a LOT of my issues when it comes to schoolwork and work work. It’s something I wish I could have on a piece of paper and take back to my high school trigonometry teacher and shove it in his face, like, “SEE???” It makes my learning methods make sense, where I’m not necessarily bad at things that aren’t language, but where language is concerned, I utterly soar while with everything else, I stroll along at a normal pace.
But I also don’t think either the ADHD diagnosis or the NVLD diagnosis cover everything. I still don’t have a lot in the way of talking about my sensory difficulties, how I can’t talk in loud restaurants or how wearing socks makes paying attention five thousand times harder. While I’m not as rigid as either of my sons (because heaven forbid our daily schedule look even slightly different for either of them), I do get tense when things change unexpectedly, more tense than you’d expect someone without specific neurodivergences to get. I think that I am autistic, and while the NVLD may be a more specific flavor of that autism, it’s autism just the same.
The thing was, too, that the neuropsychiatrist explicitly said that she wasn’t qualified to diagnose me with autism anyway, that she didn’t have the necessary training to recognize that, particularly in an adult. So whether or not I am autistic remains something of a mystery that I don’t really have an answer for, and that is, in no small part, because of the way health insurance functions in this country.
But I have some answers. Some labels. I can request specific accommodations that will help me in specific ways. I know that I’m not simply bad at being a person, just my brain is operating on a different system, and while that may be a disability (and it is, in a lot of ways), it also gives me something of better insight into who I am, why things in my life have happened the way they have, and what to expect going forward.
The last time this happened was 2020, which is an ominous way to begin any sentence.
Isaac was not quite two and had come down with a “mystery respiratory virus” that required him to be on a nebulizer and antibiotics. In very little time, I also came down with this “mystery respiratory virus” that required me to also be on a nebulizer and antibiotics. Kyle worked from home while Isaac and I recuperated, and right when we were all feeling better, we got slammed with a stomach bug. On the plus side, said stomach bug got us used to ordering groceries through a website. On the minus side, well. Everything else.
Masks work, and I know this because our absurdly respiratory illness prone family hasn’t had a winter like this since mask use became popular right at the beginning of Covid. Even last year, when various illnesses started quietly spreading again, it was nothing like the years before, when Isaac and I, both of us with the lungs of a frail Victorian character, were knocked down for the count within days of the first sniffle.
But lo, here we are in 2023, and here Isaac and I are, both fighting the same respiratory bullshit. It’s hit Isaac harder than it’s hit me. Yesterday, we took him to urgent care and found that his O2 levels were at 88%, which is easily within ER range. PCR tests for both Covid and strains of the flu came back negative; it’s just a regular ass cold that turned into regular ass pneumonia. He’s on an albuterol nebulizer, like he used to be every year, and he’s on antibiotics, like he used to be on every year. He got a dose of steroids yesterday, which has the dual effect of (a) improving his breathing, and (b) making him really angry.
So that’s fun. And while we’re dealing with that, we’ve also been dealing with a cascade of other bullshit. In order:
Last Tuesday, Kyle brought our smaller car into the shop for an inspection sticker. It’s three months overdue. While he was there, the mechanic informed him that it failed because of some LCD light thing that they could technically fix, but they needed to order the part and it wouldn’t be in until Friday at the earliest. Kyle agreed to bring the car back on Friday.
So we did the whole week with only one car, which was easier than anticipated. All things considered, last week was pretty chill. Until Friday.
Friday during the day, I started feeling crappy, which was unfortunate because Kyle had to drop the smaller car off to be fixed. He did so while I stayed home, throat sore, feverish, exhausted. Every Friday is a half day for the twins, so I played referee for them in the afternoon while feeling like I’d been hit by a small bus; but in the evening, I had the chance to rest and took it with as much gusto as I could muster.
Friday evening, Kyle called the mechanic to check on the car, only to learn that oops, they hadn’t gotten the part in by Friday after all. We couldn’t pick the car up that night, but that was probably for the best because I was in no state to be doing anything beyond sleeping. This particular virus–not Covid or the flu, mind–is brutal.
On Saturday, I didn’t get out of bed very much. I think it wound up being a couple of hours in the afternoon and then about 3-4 hours in the evening for D&D, during which I mistakenly asserted that I thought I was on the mend.
Before D&D, Kyle sought to cook us breakfast for dinner on our stove, which once turned on, made a fancy “BZZT!” sound and displayed arcing blue light under the cooktop. Kyle immediately and correctly assessed this as what industry professionals call “not good” and turned off and unplugged the stove and flipped off the breaker going to it for good measure. We called an electrician that night, and said electrician mentioned he couldn’t come out right then but that he’d try and be out as soon as he could and, by the way, don’t use the stove until he can assess it, but it sounds like said stove was on the way out. So that’s neat.
Sunday was mostly chill except we had to figure out a way to feed three kids while also not having a stove, and two of those kids are autistic and very picky about food textures. Isaac was really starting to feel sick on Sunday, as was I, so he didn’t eat much, and I ended up having ice cream for dinner. No word about the stove.
Monday could’ve also been chill and restful, but the weather decided to throw everything it had at us–snow, sleet, ice, freezing rain, regular rain, the works–so the kids didn’t have school. Carrie was now starting to feel sick, so this was a surprisingly quiet snow day for us (usually our snow days are just pure chaos), but kids being home is always a bit harder than kids being in school. We heard a bit back from the electrician, who said that he couldn’t make it out in the storm but would come by first thing Tuesday.
So the electrician came first thing on Tuesday and, delightfully, the stove is still usable, minus one burner. We’re going to be replacing it sooner rather than later, but it’s not an emergency situation, so we can get through this bullshit week before replacing it, and that’s a great sign. Once the electrician had come and gone, and once we’d dropped Sammy off at school (since the twins were both feeling crappy), we went to pick up the smaller car, which passed inspection, and came home to call Isaac and my respective nurse lines, since neither of us were having a good time. Both nurse lines said that while this all sounded miserable, they have approximately six billion people in right now with the same symptoms so unless we were experiencing shortness of breath or whatever, we should just wait it out.
Remember that for later.
Tuesday night, Isaac was waking up with a bad cough fairly often, and Carrie ended up spiking a 103 fever around 1 a.m., so we were just. In a special place when we went to bed on Tuesday night. Very stressed out, and me still feeling like my lungs were gradually filling with sand (though I started feeling like I was on the mend late that night, so maybe the sand was leaving or something, I don’t know).
But anyway, Wednesday morning, Kyle called the pediatric nurse line again to say that hey, Isaac is still not doing great. They advised that he come in, since it was only a fifteen minute wait, and lo and behold, Isaac’s O2 levels were frighteningly low. Low enough that they said, after giving him baby steroids and starting his breathing treatment, that if neither of those things worked, he’d have to go to the ER by ambulance. Fortunately, both worked, and although Isaac wasn’t doing well by the time he left the urgent care, he’d improved slightly. After a brief hunt for antibiotics, he and Kyle came home, and we started the treatment phase, and now it’s today.
It’s honestly a weird week where the car being in the shop is a footnote. And where the stove not working is a minor inconvenience instead of a Major Issue. But here we are. I have no idea if I’m properly on the mend or not; if I am, it’s a slow climb. Isaac is definitely on the mend, but is sitting at the “wounded tiger” phase of being sick, by which I mean he’s lashing out at literally everyone for any given reason. This is a welcome change from the floppy listlessness of yesterday, but I’m looking forward to getting my smiley guy back.
And, well. To this week being over altogether, mostly.
That’s what I texted Kyle and my mom and my best friends after I got out of the rheumatologist. Just one word because it was the diagnosis I received, and it didn’t need a whole lot more explanation in that moment. I was in pain; I have been in pain for years. And there was the answer to my wondering why: fibromyalgia.
The frustrating thing about getting a diagnosis of fibromyalgia is that most of the medical community looks at it with a loud shrug when it comes to what it is, what causes it, how to fix it. On the one hand, certain therapies help: gentle movement, gentle activity, tai chi, yoga, and certain medications that I was on already like gabapentin and venlafaxine all tend to lessen symptoms or, at the very least, trick your brain into saying “well this isn’t so bad.”
(the irony of the movement is that if you do too much of that, you end up exhausting yourself, so it has to be balanced: walk, do yoga, swim, but be gentle with yourself, or you’re going to reach the end of your routine and be a noodle)
But on the other hand, it’s a disorder that’s not understood very well, and unlike a lot of autoimmune disorders, it’s not one where your usual regimen of NSAIDs or even opioids will do much good, because the problem isn’t inflammation so much as it’s your brain getting confused about the signals it’s receiving from every nerve in your body. It’s sort of like this:
What research there is shows that fibromyalgia tends to develop after a physical or mental trauma, which tracks because I’ve had this pain since shortly after my Awful Back Incident in 2020. It exhausts you on so many levels because you’re constantly fighting pain that doesn’t even make sense; it’s not like inflammatory pain or pain from an injury. It’s just pain, every nerve in your body responding to every conceivable stimulus it receives by sending pain signals.
And nerves are one of those fun areas of the body that most doctors just shrug loudly about and say “idk, it’s magic I guess?” (obviously not literally, but you know what I mean) It’s roughly a step up from “you have ghosts in your blood and you should do cocaine about it” like we had in ye olden days of medicine, but not a huge step. And there are experimental and off-label treatments all over the place–LDN is one that I’ve heard a lot of good about and plenty of people happily extol the virtues of marijuana, particularly higher CBD strains–but it’s not a super sexy and easily understood disorder so it’s not something that people are champing at the bit to fix, at least not right now, at least not in huge numbers.
So. Fibromyalgia.
I’ve had a couple of good cries about it. Maybe that’s emotionally fucky of me, but I don’t really care. I know it’s not the end of the world, and I know that functionally, very little about my life has changed–I’m not even on any higher doses of medication or anything–but I think knowing that not only is my diagnosis one that’s lifelong (because as of right now, there is no cure for fibromyalgia) but also it’s one that doesn’t have any therapies that work quickly. And that shouldn’t be frustrating, but it is. Before I went to the rheumatologist, I was doing my own research (I can see you, doctors, tsk tsking me over there) and playing “what if it’s this” with a bunch of autoimmune disorders. So many people talked about going to the rheumatologist, having said doctor take one look at them and say “you have [x]” and prescribe them some shot or drug that made them feel better within 24 hours. Obviously not a cure, but a reduction in symptoms.
But fibromyalgia isn’t like that. My rheumatologist told me the main things she’d suggest prescribing were medications I was already taking. That exercise and movement would help me but both would take time to really work their way into my brain. That fibromyalgia is very real–that the symptoms aren’t psychosomatic or anything–but that it’s heavily misunderstood.
I don’t know. I feel like that’s something fair to cry about. Sorry, you’ve got an incurable disorder and the best we can suggest is that if you exercise you will eventually start to feel better, and maybe some drugs on the market could be useful but we’re your physicians and we’re very skittish about prescribing things for off label usage, so have fun.
It’s required adjustments in thought, for better or for worse. I’ve already been looking at my life differently because, hey, autism; but then you add this disorder to the list and it’s a whole new level of different ability, as the Autism Mommy T-shirts say. Right now, that looks like taking things a lot more slowly than I have been. I’d been looking at life kind of in a mindset of “I’m just going to get back into things, I’m going to push myself a little bit more each day” and yeah, that’s technically what you should do with fibromyalgia, but if you’re also dealing with mental stress while pushing yourself physically, it produces interesting results.
Specifically, this past weekend. Halloween, what have you. I feel like once upon a time, my Halloween adventures with the kids wouldn’t have caused problems for me: I stopped by a few stores Saturday morning and then took the kids to the town trunk or treat in the evening, which was a lot of standing in line, waiting, etc. Then on Sunday, we took the kids to Barnes & Noble and Target. Again, normal things, but both days just wore me out completely. Maybe it’s the stress of this month (we’re going on vacation in a little while, so I’m still piecing that together), but my brain and body are like… not fans of doing stuff.
I talked it over with Kyle, and we decided that it’s a good idea for me to have a disability placard for our cars. It’s a weird thing because fibromyalgia is a decidedly invisible disability, but I’m discovering more and more that any level of overdoing it, including walking too far between the car and the store or between the car and the hotel and so on and so forth. And on one hand, I feel like I need to justify it over and over again, but on the other hand, like… no? ??? It’s justifiable from my doctor’s standpoint and from the standpoint of the state, so there’s really not anything else I need to do.
Besides take it easy.
And get to a dispensary sometime.
And figure out an exercise routine.
But all of that when vacation is over. For now, I’m more focused on getting cars inspected, oil changed, tires checked; getting road snacks and creating packing lists; pulling together a driving playlist and figuring out where we’re going to have Thanksgiving dinner.
And doing it all while being like, ah, I can’t do as much as I used to.
You know what’s weird is realizing that you’ve finally taken control of an aspect of your life that had been almost wholly out of your control to that point and feeling an immense sense of relief about it.
I am, of course, talking about my fertility, or rather, my now permanent lack thereof.
It’s really weird to be relieved about this, the fact that I can’t get pregnant accidentally any longer, but I am. As of last Monday afternoon, I no longer have any fallopian tubes. They’ve been discarded as medical waste (which disappoints me), and if I ever want to have another child, it’s going to have to be through IVF, or more accurately, by taking the embryos that I already have frozen and having one transferred.
(only one. I will not risk another set of twins because this house would promptly collapse like unto the House of Usher)
I’m now feeling back to 100%, or as close to 100% as I am capable of feeling. My wounds are mostly closed up, though they still have lingering bits of tape on them (which I shall not peel off because I’m terrified doing so would cause Problems, and I don’t want Problems). My energy levels are back to normal, and I’m able to be upright for the bulk of the day. Kids and cats have poked at my abdomen and I haven’t screamed, so I’m calling that a win.
The mechanics of the entire situation are really boring, honestly, so I won’t go into excruciating details. It was a chill surgery. I fell asleep before anyone even asked me to count, woke up to my doctor congratulating me on my sterility and offering me some apple juice. The pain was at about a 7 when I woke up and went down to about a 2 with the administration of fentanyl. I didn’t even need the pain meds I was prescribed most days–I just slept and took them at night to make sure I wasn’t going to wake up. I ate Pop Tarts in celebration and slept like 18 hours for the first two days and then was just really bored a lot.
It’s more the emotional aspect that I’m working through, because it feels weirdly powerful. I’ve had hellish periods since I started getting my period. My uterus is my enemy. If I were more settled about never having another kid, and if doing so wouldn’t fuck up my hormones irreversibly, I’d have the thing removed and sent on a one way trip to the sun. I had no control over it, and even when I’d take birth control to try and minimize the pain in one way or another, that came with its own set of issues: weight gain, depression, acne, migraines. My body was this monster with a mind of its own, and that mine was not mine.
And I always internally took comfort in the idea that maybe, just maybe, I was having these horrible periods because it meant that when I was ready to have kids, it would be nice and easy for me. I’d wanted to be a mom my entire life, so the idea of that coming easily to me really appealed.
But no, that didn’t come easily to me, and it took either medication or procedures that, without insurance, cost as much as a small car for me to have kids. And even those expensive procedures took ages to succeed and it was like… what the hell. Why is this thing not in my control, at all? This is my body, it should be more under my control, and yet, it’s not. It’s MOCKINGLY not. What the hell.
(and this bleeds into other areas where my body is out of my control, like PCOS that makes weight loss and looking like anything but a hairy potato kind of difficult; or like whatever the fuck is going on to make my joints feel like they’ve all got a corn chip stuck in them)
But now, with the political climate being what it is (and if you want to debate me on that, fuck off), I just wanted to have something resembling real control over my body. Something permanent. And yeah, I’ve got birth control, we use condoms, there are a million other options, but I want complete control, on the off chance that Things Happen. I don’t want anyone to have a say in what my body does or doesn’t do but me.
And now that I have that say, it feels good. It feels powerful. It feels like putting my foot down and saying that this one thing, this body of mine, it belongs to me, and you cannot do what you want with it, and you cannot force it to get or remain pregnant if I do not want it, and the only one who makes decisions about it is me. You cannot use it unless I say you can.
I mean, until I’m dead. Then go nuts, I don’t care. But until then, this is mine, and you do not get a say.
Anyway, this is super short because I’m tired but I wanted to write something about getting my tubes tied, and the only other emotion I feel about it is disappointment that I haven’t yet enjoyed a celebratory cake over it, but since my birthday is in about three weeks, I’m sure that will be remedied soon.
When I was in high school and college, I paid a lot of attention to how I looked. I loved dressing up in certain ways, wearing real outfits that weren’t just jeans and a t-shirt. In college, I fought off depression by spending absurd amounts of money on makeup (admittedly, not expensive makeup, but if you’re buying a bunch at CVS every week, it adds up), and while I never put much effort into my hair outside of the salon chair (blonde for one year, red for the rest, never quite achieving the chunky highlights I wanted and thankfully avoiding a Kelly Clarkson look), I still took care to make sure I looked decent, at least when I wasn’t heading for an 8 a.m. class.
I lost that at some point.
I don’t know when I lost it. Maybe the summer between junior and senior years, when depression hit me like a lahar, knocking me down and burying me up to my eyebrows in mud so thick I couldn’t get out of bed most days. Maybe after I graduated, when I was so panicked about finding some sort of work that the idea of really pulling together a Look seemed insurmountable. Either way, by the time I’d left school and entered the “real world,” the effort required to pull together a cute outfit and do my makeup seemed pointless. I wasn’t quite schlubby–that came later–but I didn’t care.
It wasn’t really from lack of desire to care; it was more from–I don’t really know. Something sapped my ability to do so. Maybe it was the corporate grind of those early years, the drag from temp job to temp job or retail work to retail work (because an English composition degree doesn’t lend itself to very many career paths) and the slow spiral of untreated depression. I wanted to curate a closet of cute looks, but lack of money and that fucking drag prevented that from really being the case.
And now I’m on the other side, a nearly forty year old parent whose fashion sense can best be described as “pajamas that are (probably) clean.”
I don’t much like that. Don’t get me wrong, I am a proponent of comfort over style, function over form, but I look at myself in the mirror and don’t like who I see looking back at me because it’s not just that she doesn’t care about her outfits or makeup (lol what makeup). It’s that she doesn’t care about herself.
I honestly don’t know when that happened, but I feel like it was a slow decline. Bit by spoony bit, saying, “well, that doesn’t matter,” until the person looking back at me was unrecognizable by most of my standards, and I’m left doing some weird sort of mental calculus every time I want to go out, the math of “how schlubby can I get away with looking.”
And it’s part chronic pain making it hard for me to dredge up the energy necessary to really put work into my appearance, and it’s part being tired all the time, and it’s part “wow, three kids is a high number, and oh, they all have IEPs and you’re constantly emailing back and forth about whatever they’re doing at school? Wow, that’s an even higher number than three somehow.”
BUT NONE OF THAT IS THE POINT OF THIS ENTRY and also it’s really depressing to think about, so we’re moving away from it.
The point is that I now have the time, some of the energy, and the resources to actually try and make myself less schlubby. I’ve got my Caboodle full of makeup that I can use when I really want to (and/or when I find time to dig up a makeup tutorial somewhere that’s easy to follow and caters to my hooded but not super hooded eyelids), I’ve got large swathes of the day free to play with makeup and fashion, and I’ve got the desire to look less like a sentient pile of (mostly clean) laundry. My only struggle at the moment is figuring out what I want this new fashionable me to look like.
See, when I was younger, while I was really good at having outfits and wearing makeup, I didn’t really have a Look, per se. It was more just “ooh, this is cute!” regardless of whether it pushed towards surfer chic or vaguely skater-esque or grunge or preppy or goth. My closet had personality, or more accurately, personalities, and I could never settle on just one look. Now as a woman pushing forty, I want to really narrow that down and decide what I want to look like.
My first instinct is to go wholly goth. I love the goth aesthetic, less from a super edgy look at me perspective and more from a “why yes, I would like to be a vampirewitch all the time, thank you” perspective.
And I’ve been leaning that way with most of the clothes I’ve bought in the last year. I’ve started to move towards a collection of t-shirts and dresses that are all black, all the time, or at least mostly black or gray. It’s kind of lazy goth, really, because the hardcore goths REALLY go for it in a way that’s a bit more than I’m comfortable doing (largely because it seems like quite a lot of work for a trip to Target). Doing this has made shopping both more difficult and easier–I can narrow down my choices more quickly, but I also really have to dig for certain things (shopping for a dress to wear to my cousin’s wedding at the beginning of the summer was an adventure, and I’m still not wholly pleased with what I got).
The trouble, though, ends up being that I can’t commit to goth shoes any longer. This fact saddens me greatly, as goth shoes are just. Perfection. Everything about them is perfect. I’ve lived for finding good goth shoes most of my life to this point, starting with a pair of knee high platform boots my mom got me for Christmas when I was 17 (boots that, along with my favorite red dress, frequently got me into trouble during my college years) and continuing right on through to the knee high combat boots and black motorcycle boots I have nestled in my closet right now. I love them.
But I cannot walk in them any longer.
Between the wtf of my chronic pain in my fingers and toes and small bones of my feet and the “oh that makes sense” pain of my sciatica, I’m basically relegated to Very Supportive Sneakers. And that’s fine, and I love my Very Supportive Sneakers, but it is a bit jarring to pair a wonderfully curated goth ensemble with a pair of gray and pink New Balances. It’s like a fashion mullet: spooky on top, Dad mowing the lawn on Saturday on bottom.
Hrmph.
So it’s a work in process. But I’m figuring it out, and I’ll keep y’all updated as I do.
Somewhere, some judgmental person is like “how can you be so happy about your babies being out of the house all day???” but listen. I have spent the last eight years with someone either on me or in my uterus nonstop. Today, I got to go on a lunch date with my husband without finding someone to babysit for us. When I had to send emails this afternoon (because being a mom of three school-aged children means doing a lot of emailing), I didn’t have to worry that someone was going to get bored with whatever I’d thrown at them to distract them. I could just email and reply, email and reply. I was so fast.
So now I’m figuring out what to do with these hours between 8:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m. when I used to have to spend 110% of my time making sure Isaac wasn’t bungee jumping from the top of the stairs (that still is a focus between 4:30 p.m. and 7:30 p.m., for the record), and a lot of it boils down to actually taking care of myself.
Anyone who’s raised twins can tell you that it’s a LOT of work. You essentially have to be in two places at once at all times, even more as they get older and more capable of causing problems on purpose (as they gleefully inform me they’re doing several times a day). Your own needs don’t just take a backseat; they get strapped to the rear bumper with some duct tape and you pray they won’t fall off when you hit a particularly gnarly pothole. And when it’s twins, it’s not a societal thing telling you that mom should give up taking care of herself while dad does whatever. If you’ve got a decent marriage, both parents are struggling and dragging themselves across the finish line at the end of every day, wondering how they survived.
Actually me at the end of any given day.
And then add autism into the mix, with its superpowers and drawbacks, and basically, I’m amazed that I made it to the twins’ first full day of school without actually being committed to a mental institution.
(note that I did come close, but it was technically a partial hospitalization and it was under extenuating circumstances, i.e., a literal plague, so I still consider it a victory)
This week, self care mostly just looks like having very relaxing days. I was in sleep therapy for a while this spring and summer, and I’m pretty sure my sleep therapist would shit a blue kitten to see how I’m spending this first week with no kids at home. But that would be her problem because I’m sleeping not because I feel like I need to but because I can and I want to. I like sleeping, and I like sleeping even more when I know that I don’t have to worry about my kids while I’m sleeping.
After this week, though, it’s time to really buckle down on the actual self care. Not the forever naps or the eating bonbons or wearing sheet masks type of self care, but actually pulling my body back from whatever hellhole it’s been in for the past two years.
I’d written back in March, when I had time to write here semi-regularly, that I was working on getting a CPAP, and I have gotten one. And I’ve noticed a marked difference in my before and after life, though I didn’t realize the difference until one day, when I didn’t get enough sleep and suddenly, I felt cranky. That didn’t happen before because I was just in this permanent state of exhaustion that never ended, so I didn’t ever feel cranky. I just felt normal.
But then the other day, I didn’t get as much sleep as I had been and had to function on this insignificant amount of time. And I was cranky. I was so upset about everything and I was like ??? what is going on? Until I realized that oh, I was acting like I hadn’t slept because I hadn’t, and boy was that weird. I was so used to getting such bad sleep for so long (roughly 70%-80% of my nights were spent not breathing) that I didn’t know what being sleep deprived felt like anymore because it was just my normal.
So I’ve taken care of the sleep aspect, at least, but a lot of me is still tired. This is partly because I’m still recovering from however many years it’s been that I’ve had sleep apnea and been getting zero sleep. This is also partly because, increasingly, I’ve been dealing with absurd amounts of bizarre pain.
I say “bizarre” because it’s pain that I can’t really explain with anything simple. I can explain my knees and hips and ankles hurting because I am fat. That makes sense to me. I cannot explain why my toe knuckles and finger knuckles hurt pretty much all the time. As far as I know, I haven’t been running around all night like a gorilla, balancing on my fingers, or learning to dance en pointe. My fingers and toes have hurt for the last two years off and on and it’s just very, very weird.
When I spoke to my primary care doctor about it (not intending to, by the way; I went in to speak with her about a completely different matter, and Kyle said, “hey, while you’re there, why don’t you talk to her about your fingers and toes hurting?”), she basically diagnosed me with “being fat” and spent the rest of the appointment meticulously reading through the list of ingredients on the Dr. Pepper I confessed to drinking. Which… yeah, pretty par for the course when you go to the doctor as a fat person. And, mind, I’m not saying that I’m either healthy or not fat; quite the opposite, really, and I know the steps I need to take to improve my situation.
But.
Anyway, my doctor thankfully also ordered bloodwork to check for autoimmune issues, because when you have the symptoms I have (nonsensical joint pain, skin that gets hot when it’s in the same universe as a day over 65 degrees, fatigue even when you’re getting decent sleep), it tends to indicate something autoimmune going on. One of the results came back elevated in a range that, from what I’m reading, tends to be consistent with autoimmune situations, so that’s exciting.
I do not want to have an autoimmune condition, I should add. They all sound wretched. Bare minimum, they sound like a lifetime of pain and medication to do away with the pain that has awful side effects of its own. But I’d also like to know what the fuck is up with my body already hurting. Like my body already hurts; I don’t need an autoimmune diagnosis to make that a thing.
(as to why I never brought it up before, quite simply it’s because between the pandemic and raising three kids with varied special needs, my own needs were, as I said before, strapped to the back bumper with duct tape)
I have an appointment with a rheumatologist in late October, and I really hope that she isn’t dismissive, that she says, “yeah, no, drinking soda isn’t good and you should exercise, but neither of those things should cause your knuckles to hurt like this.”
So in addition to alllllll of that, I’m looking to start exercising properly, now that I actually have free hours during the day. I don’t know when I’ll be doing that exercise, but I figure ~30 minutes a day, 4-5 days a week of moderate cardio should do the trick of getting my heart pumping and my body saying, “whoa, hey, we’re taking care of ourselves now! Neat!” We have a membership at a local community center that I plan to use for that purpose, and that’s something I’ll be doing starting next week.
And in between all of this, I’m also getting my tubes tied. With all the new bullshit laws happening across the country (side note: if you agree with any of those laws, you and I are not going to get along) and with any future children I’d want probably coming from a freezer at this point, tubal ligation just seems like a good option to me. And that is happening on October 3, and I am pretty jazzed about it. Hilariously jazzed, too, considering literally everything I went through to have the kids I do have, but honestly, having power over my own body is a good feeling and one I want to maintain as much as I can, all things considered.
(those things being everything I talked about above)
And I’ve got plans to clean out a whole bunch of stuff from our house and I’ve got plans to write again and I’ve got plans to take my camera out places and and and
Basically, I do, in fact, miss my kids somewhat during the day… but I’ve missed myself a whole lot more.
Love, Science & Nat 20s 