quarantine 2020

A LOT TO TALK ABOUT

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Hi, so life is busy.

Well, no. It’s busy but it’s also not. It’s fallen into this nice routine but I’m tired all the time, which is unpleasant and probably the fault of the nerve medication I’ve been on for a year at this point (more on that in a minute), but it also means that by the time I reach the end of the day, I’m a noodle who isn’t very good at writing things. And I have so much to update on and so much to talk about but again: noodle, living in a constant state of no bones.

So life. 

The kids have been in school in person for coming up on three months now, and it’s mostly been a pleasant time. We’ve had… mm, I want to say three Covid scares? Two that were everyone and one that was just Carrie. It’s a weird thing because I don’t like to send my kids into school sick anyway, but now in the time of Covid, you can’t just not send them to school sick, you also need to get them tested. And I am okay with that, just so we’re clear. It’s a pandemic, kids have only just started to get vaccinated, and I’d rather know one way or the other. 

BUT it does take a day home with a head cold to five days home because we couldn’t get in to get tested until 12 on Wednesday so the results aren’t back until 10 on Friday, so we’ve missed the last three days of the week plus the weekend, and by that point, all three children have gone completely feral and are jumping from couch to couch to couch to couch while scream singing “Grace Kelly” by MIKA.

Thankfully, our school has recently implemented a “stay and test” option for people who are just close contacts, but that does nothing if your kid has the vague “maybe it’s a cold or hay fever or Covid?” symptoms, so we just check everyone’s temperature in the morning and get really caught up in the mitigating circumstances of each and every symptom (e.g., our kids are hot sleepers, so if one seems warm but they were in bed all night, we wait another hour after they get up before doing a temperature check). 

Kyle and I are both triple vaccinated, so even with ominously named variants popping up all over the globe (seriously, if they’d just gone with Omicron from the start, I feel like this entire pandemic would’ve been taken a lot more seriously. Like I’m not saying that Covid isn’t a threatening name except it very much is not a threatening name), we’ve both felt comfortable and safe enough to go to the movies again and go out to dinner again and mostly resume our normal lives, sometimes with masks and sometimes not. And despite the handful of Covid cases in our schools, both of us feel pretty safe about our kids being back in person (and all three have IEPs, so even if schools went remote again, they’d end up taking the in-person option anyway, whee). 

Being back to school in person has benefitted Sam so very much. We weren’t sure how he’d take to it, since it was a full year away, but the phrase “like a fish to water” comes to mind. He picked up right where he left off with his best friend Hunter, and he’s made new friends (Declan and Eamon) in his class. His teacher has nothing but good things to say about him, even taking into account his reluctance to put away his scissors sometimes and his adorable motormouth tendencies. He comes home constantly with stories about the games he played at recess (apparently, Among Us is popular with the kids these days, which… okay, cool, it’s literally just Mafia, but cool) and the time he spent with his friends, which is enough to make my heart feel warm and mushy, but THEN you add in that he got the highest scores on their classroom testing in math and ELA and I’m just. Beyond proud. Is there a way to be beyond proud, because that’s me. I’m beyond proud.

I also feel a weird sense of pride because, as it turns out, Sam is also autistic.

Roughly around this time last year, his therapists asked us if we’d ever had him tested, which we hadn’t. Sam and Isaac are both similar in that, while they’re both definitely autistic, they’re also both really social kids. They like to make friends and be involved with other people, but where Sam was in daycare from the time he was a year old, Isaac was home with me. Isaac was also notably delayed from the start because he was a preemie, whereas Sam would’ve just stayed in for the next ten years if the doctors had let him. 

Anyway, we didn’t ever have Sam evaluated for autism because he’s such a social kid, and he learned from very early on that socializing means eye contact and it means language and it means doing things that autistic children typically aren’t seen doing. He had his pickiness sometimes and his need for routine, but we figured that was just typical toddler stuff. 

And then the pandemic.

And a fun thing with neurodivergence is that when those of us who fall under that umbrella get stressed, we don’t mask as well. Our divergences become more and more apparent, and as a result, people start to notice. 

The pandemic was stressful for everyone, and it was particularly stressful for Sam, who had his routine and life upended overnight and never quite found his footing again. Early on, we had him seen by one therapist who recognized that he has ADHD (both inattentive and hyperactive type, because we like to cover all bases here), and once he started receiving in-person therapy, his new therapists agreed with that and said that he also seemed to be autistic.

SO. 

It took a whole goddamn year to get him an evaluation because everything is absurdly backlogged and you can’t do an autism evaluation virtually. We went for the first available slot in Boston, and an hour and a half later, the doctor said, “Yep, autistic” and sent us on our merry way with a bunch of emails and links and information and suggestions about therapies and what-have-you. 

And, real talk, Sam is excelling so much in so many ways that I’m not super interested in pursuing therapy unless he asks for it. Talk therapy, sure, because I think that helps a lot with a lot of things. But ABA (gag)? Anything besides the OT he already gets? Nah. I think he’s doing pretty well on his own, and the diagnosis mostly just gives us a tool and a shield that we can use to say, “okay, because of this diagnosis, you cannot deny him services.” 

(not that our school district WOULD HAVE denied him services, but just in case)

Anyway, he’s doing SO well that we’re actually shifting his services to an “as needed” basis, meaning that he’ll still have the help if/when he needs it, but he’s transitioned so smoothly and is doing so well that we don’t need to force it on him. And my god, he’s happy again. Last year, it was like a cloud over him, but this year, the sun’s back and it’s so beautiful.

My health is also on the docket of things to talk about. A year ago this weekend, I was in the ER with nerve pain so bad that I couldn’t do anything but scream and shake, and in a logical world, they would’ve pushed me through getting an MRI and surgery ASAP because nerve pain that bad is a major red flag for nerve injuries that could become permanent damage.

But.

I got sent home with meds, celebrated Christmas and New Year’s, then saw a doctor in January. The doctor said it sounded like a herniated disc but I’d need an MRI to be sure, but the next available MRI appointment wasn’t until March. I would’ve taken that appointment, but it fell on the same day our insurance rolled over from one to another (not that the new insurance covered the MRI anyway?), so the MRI got pushed out to late March. Then I saw the doctor again in April, and he gave me the option of either getting injections to ease the pain while the nerve healed or having surgery. I said I wanted surgery, so I got to see ANOTHER doctor in May, and we scheduled the surgery for July.

So it’s already been eight months with this injury and things not really getting better, right? And then Kyle’s company laid off his entire department literally two weeks before my surgery and we had no insurance, so I had to postpone the surgery to August. And THEN we were in this kind of song and dance with MassHealth, where nobody was really sure if we’d be able to stay on it once Kyle received his unemployment payments (note: we still have not received unemployment payments), so we postponed the surgery indefinitely until Kyle got a new job and we were on that new insurance.

September rolls around, and Kyle gets his new job and good new insurance, some of the best we’ve ever had. I call to make a new surgery appointment, but first, I need a new MRI because it’s been, at this point, six entire months so who knows what’s going on in there? And I pay roughly the same for the new MRI that I did for the one with the shitty insurance, but whatever, right?

Within 24 hours, the doctor calls me back and says, “hey, you have zero herniation left. I’d do surgery on you, but it would be pointless because there’s nothing to remove. All you have to do is just wait for the nerve to no longer be inflamed.”

To get a clearer picture, I ask, “But what about the fact that I cannot feel anything on the inside of my left thigh and also at least two and possibly three of the toes on my left foot take a good thirty seconds more to get the message that I want to move them than the rest of my foot?”

“Oh, well, those are probably permanent, but in 90% of cases, the pain goes away completely within a year of pressure coming off the nerve.”

SO LET ME GET ALL OF THIS STRAIGHT. Because of insurance issues, I had to wait and wait and wait and wait on my surgery to the point where I’ve now been left with permanent damage and pain that has an okay chance of disappearing completely but nobody is really sure when that will happen?

I’m on this nerve medication, gabapentin, that makes the world completely fuzzy. I’ve been on it for a  year. You’re not supposed to be on it more than a few weeks because it makes you sleepy and messes with your memory (not permanently, thankfully, just while you’re on it). I don’t know when I can come off it because I don’t know when my herniation stopped pressing on the nerve because I had to keep putting off the surgery again and again and again.

And like. I don’t want to get into it about universal healthcare, but I’m pretty sure that my waiting would’ve been cut in half if I hadn’t had to change health insurance five times in the last year.

Whatever. I have an appointment on December 13 to talk to the surgeon and discuss my options. I want to see if I can get hydrotherapy of some sort to try and take some pressure off things, and I really just need to find a decent and quiet gym and go there in off hours to walk and slowly bring myself to a healthier level of activity. I’ve been in so much pain the last year (and still am sometimes) that activity feels daunting, but I need it to heal, and I need to find a way to do it that won’t scare me away. 

Meanwhile, I’m just keeping myself in a floating state of planning mode. Planning Halloween (Sam was a ninja and the twins were Spider-Man and Ghost Spider). Planning my birthday and a trip with two of my best friends to Cape Cod in the off season (was delightful but also very cold). Planning Christmas. Already thinking ahead to the twins’ birthday. Planning road trips. Planning planning planning. 

Planning that extends kind of far out as well, but only kind of. 

Kyle’s new company has some really great insurance, you see, and through it, we were able to cover PGS for our remaining embryos from the cycle that gave us Isaac and Carrie. Unbelievably, six of the seven embryos were healthy and there are exactly three boys and three girls.

Which brings us to the age old question of WTF are we going to do with all of these frozen babies?

I want one more. Not twins, please god not twins. I love the twins so much, and about 50% of the time, I love that they are twins (the other 50%, they are beating the ever loving shit out of each other for reasons that I do not understand, so I’m like, why couldn’t you be born one at a time so we’d have some buffer space?), but I physically could not do twins again. But I’d love one more girl as a coda.

BUT not for a while yet, if we did. Kyle isn’t fully onboard, which is fair because the twins are a LOT right now, and if someone dropped a baby in my lap right at this second, I’d be like, “WHY DO YOU HATE ME SO MUCH????” because I cannot infant right now. If we went ahead with one last transfer, it would be in 2023, no sooner. Too much is going on in 2022, and my health isn’t where it needs to be.

But it’s on the table now, and we didn’t know if it was on the table before. It was a daydream and now it feels like it could happen? I don’t know if it actually will, but it’s there. One last girl. 

Maybe.

Or maybe a puppy instead. I don’t know.

Parting Clouds

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I feel like this blog has been an absolute downer for the past year, though understandably so. The last year has SUCKED. I don’t think anyone had an objectively good year last year (except Big Daddy Elon Musk, but billionaires don’t count towards people having good years), and I was scrolling through my blog reflecting on how… just MLEH I’ve been about everything in the last twelve months. And again, completely understandable, but also I feel like that can’t have been fun to read. I’m sorry.

But here we are, encroaching on March 2021, one year of pandemic and social distancing and 500,000 people dying because assholes and masks and so on and so forth, and I’m actually starting to feel something that tickles a bit like hope. Real hope, not the false hope that kept popping up over the last year when people were naively like “it’ll be gone by summer!” or things like that. Real, honest-to-god hope.

After all, this is roughly the timeline they told us to expect back in mid-March of last year, when everything shut down and everything changed. Mid- to late-2021. We’re right on schedule. 

I’m getting my first Fauci ouchie tomorrow, 4:30 p.m. I don’t think I’ve been this excited about a needle since the first injection for IVF, way back in 2016. My state, dear old Massachusetts, has kind of bungled the process for people to make appointments–my dad, 68 and with a heart attack in his medical charts, hasn’t been able to get an appointment, so I’m refreshing all sites frequently to try and snag one for him–but by some flash of luck, I woke up the other day to an alert on my phone telling me that a CVS near me had appointments available. I fit squarely into Tier 2 of the second phase of vaccine rollout up here–obesity and asthma qualifying me as medically at risk of a Bad Time–so I signed up. 

And I’m ready.

(even if I’m a bit frustrated that Massachusetts hasn’t bothered to start prioritizing teachers yet while other states have and the websites to get appointments are basically strung together with some twine and duct tape and a few prayers and GOD, I wish I could take a hammer to said websites and get my handful of coding friends to rebuild them functionally from the ground up)

I have plenty of friends who’ve already been vaccinated for various reasons, ranging from frontline workers to teachers to people with medical issues and everything in between. Of that plenty, many have experienced the “your immune system is working” side effects–the aches, the fever, the chills, the generally feeling like shit from about hour 33 to hour 48 after the second dose. I’m ready for that. Kyle’s been keeping in touch with his boss about what’s going on, so with any luck, when I get the second dose, I can just coast through all of those side effects feeling vile but being mostly unconscious.

But I’m ready. I’m ready to not be afraid to go places besides Target or to not be afraid when I’m IN Target because the people behind me don’t seem to grok that six feet and six inches are not the same thing. I’m ready to feel like I’m not going to be putting myself in more danger if I have to go to the doctor for whatever reason (seriously, in the past year, I have avoided going to the doctor so many times I probably shouldn’t have because I didn’t want to accidentally expose myself). I’m ready to hopefully not be a link in a chain of people getting sick (like we don’t know yet that the vaccine prevents or reduces transmission, but the science–even with the new variants–looks pretty good so far).

And I mean. When even the most conservative estimates have everything easing up by summer, it’s hard not to be hopeful, outside of the trenches.

(in the trenches is another story, and every time I talk about hope, I think of my friends who do work on the frontlines and wish that I could somehow have a million dollars each to give them so that they could go on the most luxurious, relaxing, magical vacations of all time. Like hell, wanna spend two months on sabbatical in Hawaii? Go nuts, aloha. French Riviera whispering your name? Au revoir, you amazing heroes)

I’m getting vaccinated tomorrow, and then the twins turn three on March 14 and start school on March 15. Sending them in person isn’t a decision we made lightly; even though the school they’ll be attending has had exactly 10 cases out of 300 students and about 50 staff (and none of them in the preschool), the risk isn’t zero. On the flip side, though, Isaac has stagnated and regressed so much since daily ABA stopped, and I HATE phrasing it like that because it makes his autism sound like this horrible thing, and it’s NOT, but at the same time, I can feel how badly he wants to communicate with us, and goddamnit, I can try with the rudimentary PECS and I can say the words and do all sorts of things as his mom, but because I’m his mom, there’s a lot I can’t do. I’m not trained or qualified to do so much of it. 

He really was making such incredible progress when he had ABA five times a week, and I know the language is there. And he wants to express himself and is SO HAPPY when we understand him. And preschool will give him an opportunity to be better understood, whether that’s vocally or through signs or through PECS. Whatever he needs. I just want him to not feel like he can’t be understood, because to me, that’s about as lonely and terrifying as it gets. 

And Carrie is something of a ragdoll. She’s clever and sweet, and where communication is concerned, she’s at age level if not above it. BUT when it comes to physicality, her muscle tone is almost comically low. She seems comfortable wherever she is, which is great, but she gets tired quickly because she has to put more effort into making her muscles work than a kid like Isaac (whose muscle tone has always felt high to me because he’s always. so. tense.) or even Sam does. It impacts her ability to use her fine motor skills with holding a pencil or getting herself dressed and undressed, and I have no doubt it’s impacting her digestion. In the long term, it’s going to cause problems for her–she’ll be in pain, and I don’t want that at all. And if we can get started fixing it now, if I can get her therapy now, maybe she won’t follow in my footsteps and end up in remedial gym or getting an MRI for sciatica and feeling like she’s in her 90s when she’s not even 40 yet.

Plus, they’re SO good with masks. It’s kind of surprising, honestly. I would’ve expected the twins to just hate wearing a mask and to fight it all the way, but the two of them are absolute champs. They even have Barbie and Hot Wheels disposable masks along with the other disposable masks I’ve gotten them for the remainder of the school year. I think we’ll be okay. I think they’ll thrive in school, and I think we’ll be okay. 

For the first time in forever…

…I can kind of see the rest of the year clearing up, like the way the sky clears up when it finally stops raining after a particularly long stretch of wet days. I feel like when I say, “when the kids go back to school in September…” I’m not doing some sort of wishful thinking; I’m saying something that will happen. When Sammy goes back to school with his friends, when the twins are in preschool five days a week, when I see my extended family for the first time since Christmas of 2019. WHEN, not IF.

Speaking of Sammy going back to school (WHEN that happens), I got in touch with the special ed department at his school to see if they could evaluate him for ADHD and autism or at least just to see if he has anything that would require an IEP to deal with in the coming year. His therapists have him on a waitlist to see if he can be evaluated outside of the school, but because of Covid, that waitlist is excruciatingly long–we’re talking years–and I don’t want him to start second grade at a disadvantage. I know that whatever else is going on, he deals with a lot of executive dysfunction and hyperfixation. I know that his mind goes so fast from one thing to another to another, I know that he acts like boredom is torture. I know that the idea of failing at something even a little brings him to tears, no matter what reassurances we offer. I know that if he’s asked any question about himself, no matter how benign, he shuts down and furiously refuses to answer. 

I don’t know what that all adds up to. I do know that it affects his schoolwork. That he melts down when something is hard for him, that it’s an absolute WAR to get him to do his social studies and reading. That he doesn’t focus, can’t really focus, even on subjects he loves. But give him Pokemon or Minecraft or the deep sea, and he will tell you everything in excruciating detail. That he’s terrifyingly smart–doing third grade math as a first grader and absolutely OWNING it–but that he needs someone to help him apply that intelligence.

And I don’t know. Maybe it’s that I’m not as good of a teacher as I like to hope I am. When he’s on, he REALLY gets stuff. He’s getting straight As in math without even blinking, and I think he’s doing okay with improving his spelling and handwriting, but I feel like there’s something about his learning style that’s out of my reach, and if nothing else, I’d like to see if the staff at his elementary school can identify it. 

SO. 

A lot on my plate. Again. I can sort of feel my sciatica flaring, but I’ve been more careful to take time off and be diligent with my medication because I am NOT doing that again. I have an MRI to look at it up close on the 8th, and until then, I’m just taking it all one day at a time and knocking items off my to-do list little by little. 

And feeling like the sun is starting to peek through the clouds. Which is nice.

Check it off

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This year, when we went to my parents’ house for Christmas Eve (we basically see them every week anyway), my mom talked about how she’d felt a bit like Christmas was another thing on her to-do list sometimes. That with everything to check off–the decorating, the buying, the wrapping, the cleaning, the cooking, the baking–it can feel like it’s just another Thing. And Christmas is absolutely my second busiest time of the year, no doubt. The March-through-July stretch is still a LOT crazier because every event every month in that stretch is a Big One, not an optional one, and none of them are my birthday.

But still. 

So yeah, Christmas is a crazy time of year, but it’s usually also a rewarding time of the year. Sure, I’m pulling my hair out somewhat when we try to finish up on Christmas morning so that we can get to my uncle and aunt’s house before everyone settles in for dinner, but then there’s the catching up with everyone and the laughing and meeting new babies and new boyfriends and sometimes, my uncle makes this amazing saffron cream pasta that makes you understand why people pay so much for saffron…

Which isn’t to say that this year wasn’t rewarding. It was, just. You know. Different.

Like all of 2020.

We’re still combing through everything the kids got. My parents and Kyle’s parents spoiled them, of course, because that’s what grandparents do, and our playroom is currently overflowing with both (a) boxes, and (b) toys. We’ve been bringing things out one at a time, all while trying to sort through what’s in the living room and find places for that.

Sam got a pair of robots and some video games for Christmas, along with a few Lego sets, because he’s frustratingly easy to shop for. He’s one of those kids whose interests are narrow and specific, so on the one hand, you know exactly what themes to hunt down in toy sections; but on the other hand, you’re just like… I really want to get you something different, but all you want are these things. But he’s seemed pretty happy with what he got, and I feel like his gifts have much more staying power than the twins’.

Isaac was the one I thought would be least impressed with his gifts, but to my absolute surprise, he’s the kid who took to everything the fastest and has been playing with his gifts most consistently. Santa gave him a singing Mickey Mouse train, Kyle gave him a weird musical toy called a “Rocktopus,” and my parents gave him a little red Playmobil minivan. The train and the Rocktopus are never NOT singing, and the minivan, despite being hard as a rock and full of breakable things, has become his first ever “must have it in bed with me” lovey.

And Carrie, who is every little girl ever, received pretty much the best gifts for every little girl ever: an Ariel doll, a makeup table (for pretend makeup, of course), a dollhouse, and a dress up gown with accessories. She’s been frolicking about the house in a whirl of joy, and when she’s done being whirly and joyful, she falls into my arms, sighing happily and saying, “Oh Mom. I you so much!” (which is her way of saying that she loves me so much)

So it’s been good. And Kyle and I spoiled each other, too (I gave him Whataburger sauces and a fancypants sleep mask; he gave me jewelry and my very own fountain pen), and we spent Christmas Day doing nothing but watching movies on TV while eating popcorn and pretending that it was a normal Christmas and we were totally at our local theater and not scrunched up on the couch and saying things like “SAMUEL MATTHEW, STOP RUNNING RIGHT NOW.”

We saw Soul first, and it was honestly one of the best Pixar movies I’ve ever seen. It’s hard to explain it because the plot is kind of loose? And the message is kind of loose? But it also was a film that wasn’t escapism, that didn’t want to be escapism, that wanted you to leave the theater-slash-living room and go live life, not just exist. And it was heavy material, but it was handled in a strangely effervescent way, so that even though it was a lot of DEEP questions that required a lot of heavy pondering, you didn’t feel bogged down by them. 

And it was gorgeous and made me more determined than ever to take the kids to New York when this craziness is over.

Wonder Woman 1984 was… eeeeeh. Kyle and I watched it after the kids went to bed, having our first “date” since the pandemic kicked in, and… eeeeeh. There was a scene at the very end that had us both sobbing, Pedro Pascal and Kristen Wiig did great jobs for the most part (the CGI got in Kristen Wiig’s way towards the end, which was a shame), and there were some fun moments, but… eeeeeh. It was disappointing. I didn’t go in with super high expectations, and even my lower expectations weren’t quite met, so that’s a shame. Still one of the better DC movies but… eeeeeh.

And thus the year is finally, finally drawing to a close. I know that the world in general won’t turn a magical corner on January 1 that has everything back to what we want it to be (though wouldn’t that be a trip), but at least we have the vaccine and a new presidency to shake things up a bit, and hopefully, by this time next year, I won’t be digging for scraps of things that made this year good. 

It’s funny. Back last December, I bought a memory jar for us to keep this year, figuring we’d have a lot of cool memories to read about on December 31 as we counted down to midnight. It didn’t last long, mostly because mindfulness, while awesome, is one of those things it’s harder to do when you’re in the trenches of motherhood. You know what I mean? Those days, those weeks, those years where you give all of yourself and then some, and you take a shitton of pictures, not to show off your awesome mommy skills or embarrass the kids in the future but because you can’t be in the moment. You’re clinging by a thread, and you want to remember the good, but you can’t focus on it because the bad keeps showing up.

It’s not been the worst year for me; by comparison, we had it pretty easy. Despite Kyle losing his job in the spring, he got a MUCH better job in the fall, one that pays more, even if the benefits need some work. Sam being homeschooled has meant I can really focus on him for hours at a time, despite the twins, and he’s been able to get a more individualized learning plan (read: my six-year-old is doing multiplication and division without even thinking about it, and it’s weird). He and I have had more than a few outdoor adventures, including a really fun hike back in October (sigh, that was roughly the last time I felt healthy enough to get out and go) and a visit to a nearby pond. 

Sam and Isaac both started therapy (in December and March, respectively) to help deal with everything. Isaac’s ABA has been better than I expected and not the nightmare I’d feared; Sam’s therapy has just started, but I can already see how he’s much calmer on therapy days than on days when his therapists don’t come. They’re both doing really well, and wildly enough, they’ll both be starting school again next year… in March and September, respectively. 

I was hospitalized for my mental health, and I’ll be real, it’s a miracle more people haven’t done that this year. I’m lucky: my husband noted that I was doing really badly (I legitimately do not remember this summer, that’s how bad it was) and MADE ME get help. I learned the difference between wanting to die and being overwhelmed by life (there is a difference), and I learned actual real coping skills. I’m starting maintenance therapy next week so that I can focus on keeping my brainmeats healthy instead of letting them slip and slide and become a mess again. 

I have a path forward for my physical health: my doctor has finally referred me to an orthopedic specialist for my back, and with any luck, I’ll have a specific way to get to a point where I can actually get out again (like I feel like I could now, but it’s cold and I’m also terrified). I survived the worst physical pain I’ve ever felt this year, somehow (wild thing about sciatica being that you’re in the worst pain of your life, pain so bad it gives you PTSD, but you are nowhere near dying, and when the pain ebbs, people mostly just tell you to walk and lose weight, like they do whenever you have a problem while fat). I had surgery and ruled out a major potential cause of my overall life issues. 

So it hasn’t been an all bad year for me. But I’m still eager for it to be over. 

I don’t necessarily think 2021 is going to be better overall, at least to start, just that we’ll all mostly be used to the chaos, so it won’t hit as hard. And slowly, slowly, things will get better. Plenty of people will still be idiots, of course, because that’s the world we live in, but idiocy can be mitigated by good people doing good things and stopping bad things. It’s going to be rough going. None of the positive things are quick fixes; they will take time, and they will need a lot of pressure, and just because things are no longer at an immediate boiling point does not mean things are better. Creating a better world is a true effort. 

With that in mind, I decided that no, 2021 is not my year. It is my bitch. I am transforming myself into a screaming banshee of rage and forcing things to get better. I will scream and I will fight and by this time next year, I will be able to say, “you know something, that wasn’t a half bad year after all.”

I hope you’ll fight with me. Until then…

A Full Plate

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It’s finally mid-December, which means we’re ~20 days away from this hell year being over. The FDA has approved the Pfizer vaccine with shots beginning ASAP (I think someone in the Massachusetts government was saying that the first shots would be going out on Thursday), so there’s a light at the end of the Covid tunnel; and a new president will be inaugurated on January 20 (although he’s not as progressive as I’d like, it’ll be nice to wake up without that sinking sensation of pure dread for a little while). 

In my house, things are busy and have been, to the point where my body is 100% telling me to slow tf down, but it’s like… I can’t, because if I do, everything falls to pieces. I’m not saying this because I’m being overdramatic; sometimes SAHMing feels like being the manager for an entire company. 

But I digress.

I said last time that I’d been planning to write about sciatica, and boy do I have a story. Towards the end of my partial hospitalization program, where I was feeling mentally healthy and ready to get there physically as well, I woke one day with excruciating back pain. Nothing touched it–not NSAIDs, not Tylenol, not warmies, not stretches. When I went to the doctor for it, the x-rays showed that I basically have (a) mild scoliosis; (b) bone degeneration; and (c) bone spurs in my spine, which explains why I’ve been prone to throwing my back out since I was in college. 

(it was November of my junior year, I had just turned 20, and I had a lot on my plate: finishing out the semester, providing stage manager/dramaturgy stuff for our chamber choir’s Madrigal Feast, violin lessons, pulling my act together for a semester studying abroad at Oxford University, plus all the typical late-teens/early-20s drama that comes with being a college student. Oh, and that’s when I first got diagnosed with asthma and what’s probably chronic bronchitis, so yeah. A little on my plate)

My doctor had me go to physical therapy, and I was slowly getting better, but I’d also have days where I’d get worse. The pain seemed to be doing weird things, sometimes being very calm and manageable and other times being too bad for me to get out of bed. Eventually, by about mid-November, I found that I couldn’t sit up for long periods of time. I had to lounge on the couch or in bed with my legs and back in a specific position or else the pain would become unbearable. I started using a TENS unit regularly, trying to confuse the nerves in my back and leg, where the pain had now spread, and while the massage was pleasant, it didn’t do much long term. 

This all came to a head in the days leading up to Thanksgiving. Even without the usual hubbub (read: 20 something people at my uncle’s house and baked brie and so many desserts and family for days), I had plans to bake cinnamon rolls and cookies and green bean casserole for our more subdued holiday (my parents, whom we see pretty much every week anyway, were hosting and making the pies). The Tuesday before, I had physical therapy first thing in the morning and felt GREAT, but that afternoon, we did pictures with the kids…

…which, don’t get me wrong, turned out AMAZING, but once we were done, I was in too much pain to do anything but go collapse in bed. I wanted to be at my best on Thanksgiving, so I decided to spend Wednesday in bed, recovering.

Well, silly me, because that’s the opposite of what you should do with sciatica, especially if it’s caused by a herniated disc (which I suspect mine is). Being horizontal spreads the disc material out and makes it bulge out more when you eventually, inevitably stand up (because I am not going to get a fucking bed pan for sciatica). So Wednesday wasn’t too bad at first–I spent the day lying on my stomach, doing press-ups as instructed by my therapist, and listening to hypnotherapy and guided meditation on YouTube to get my mind off the pain. 

BUT sometime Wednesday night, all the things I had been doing just… failed. And Thursday morning, I woke up in blinding agony.

I have pain rankings, and this was only the second thing in my life to hit a 10. The first was gallstones, and those rank lower if only because they’re temporary. Once the gallstone breaks up or passes, the pain fades, and you go back to your life until it happens again. With sciatica, though, sitting and standing and walking and doing anything hurt like hell, and if you don’t figure out how to take care of it well, you eventually get to the point where there is nothing BUT pain. Pain is your existence, and you can’t remember a time without pain, and you can’t imagine a future time without pain, because that’s all there is. 

Eventually, I was screaming. Just mindlessly screaming because it hurt so much. My primary care doctor had suggested that if my pain got this bad, maybe I should go to the ER, but I’d been avoiding an ER visit because our new health insurance has terrible copays for everything, to the tune of “an ER visit before you’ve met your annual out of pocket maximum will cost you at least $3500, and if you HAVE met your out of pocket maximum, you’ll have a $1000 copay.” 

(MAN I am so glad that we pay 20% of Kyle’s paycheck to get THIS insurance instead of however the fuck much we would pay to get universal healthcare, like WOO this is so much better than living in Denmark and getting taken care of for the low low price of FREE)

But we called the ER and said I was on my way, and then I couldn’t even sit up at all, so we called an ambulance. I had to wait for the ambulance in the living room while screaming and crying and shaking from pain, and Sam had to see me like that, which I hate. I don’t remember anything about what I said or thought beyond “I hate that Sam is seeing me like this”–allegedly, I was telling the EMTs that I hoped they were going to get to have turkey, and I was really worried about making sure they’d have their turkey, but I don’t remember any of it. 

They were great, as I recall–they gave me a nasal shot of fentanyl to take the pain from an impossible place to a place where I could be transported, and they were really funny. The pain did not go away completely from the fentanyl, but I stopped screaming for the ride and managed to get to a point where I was just lying there, quietly hurting, with nobody helping me. 

That was probably the second worst part (the worst part was Sam seeing me like that)–being in the ER and nobody being there to even check in with me. They looked me over once I was there and gave me like… whatever generic painkillers they had available and eventually did prescribe me a nerve blocker called gabapentin, which has done WONDERS. BUT it also reminded me why I hate going to the ER for anything ever, because unless you’re dying or possibly dying, they sort of don’t pay attention to you at all. 

And that’s understandable–there are a lot of people coming in and out of the ER, sometimes just to get painkillers, sometimes just to get an ultrasound of their baby, sometimes just because they’re like. Itchy. It’s especially bad now with Covid and people having to go to the ER because they might have it (on my way out, I saw three rooms designated as Covid-only). And I didn’t WANT to go to the ER, but my pain just got to an impossible point. 

My therapist helped me with it this week. She told me that one of the hallmarks of chronic pain is that eventually, your body is too tired to try and fight it off, and the more you have on your plate, the harder it is for your body to work through the pain. Which was like, wow, I didn’t come here to be attacked like this, but that makes way too much sense.

There’s not much of a choice in the matter, of course. Kyle’s job doesn’t necessarily demand too much of him (he’s able to come out and help when I really need it, especially since after the ER), but he’s still working full time, and I’m full time with the kids. Especially during the holiday season, that means that my daytime hours basically evaporate, because there’s so much that I need to organize and do and make sure of, all while I’ve got three kids asking things of me at all times.

I’m not complaining. I love being a stay-at-home mom. But I think I might be reaching a pandemic breaking point, because said pandemic has unquestionably made things MUCH harder. There’s no chunk of afternoon time where the twins are napping and Sam is at school where I can just focus on getting household stuff done, whether it’s cleaning or setting up appointments or paying bills or whatever. There’s no time when I’m awake and not exhausted where I can just be. 

I think I’d be able to bear it much more if I weren’t prone to chronic pain, but when you add all that work to the work of bearing chronic pain, the pain gets severe that much faster. You’re already exhausted from the everything–the kids jumping on the couches and knocking each other over and batting at Christmas ornaments because they want to be kittens, the homeschool battle because even on good days it’s a battle, the trying to keep up with everyone’s therapies like ABA and speech and coordination and whatever the fuck, the socializing that starts to feel like work because you’ve been overwhelmed with people being literally ON you all day, the weekends where it used to be getting more done but are now just gasping air before being pulled under again–and then the pain creeps in. 

And pain is so exhausting. I remember when I was younger and used to get excruciating menstrual cramps (I found out while trying to have Sam that I had a tilted uterus, which has fortunately fixed itself since having kids, but let me tell you, it’s a for-sure recipe for very bad periods), I’d reach the end of the day and just fall asleep for 18 hours straight. There are a lot of ways to think about pain that involve accepting it and trying to help your body cope with it better, but sometimes, it really is just a battle that you end up losing.

So here we are in December. I can tell that if I weren’t on the meds I’m on, I’d be in a lot more pain, but the gabapentin is doing the excellent work of keeping the pain manageable, as long as I don’t push myself too hard and keep mobile. Sciatica is a weird thing where the more you’re able to stay mobile and keep exercising, the better it gets; but at the same time, when it’s at its peak, the pain defies belief, and all you want is for someone to just knock you out so you don’t have to deal with it anymore. BUT the meds I’m on make it possible for me to stay mobile, and I have a timer set on my phone that reminds me to get up and loosen up every two hours or so (I call it my dance break, and the twins participate, and none of us are very good dancers). 

I keep doing Everything because I have to, which is something I keep thinking whenever someone remarks on us having two-year-old twins (and also three four-month-old kittens, more on that in a second) and asks, “how do you do it?” The only answer is that we do it because we have to. We had these kids, and we’re going to make sure they thrive. And there’s a light at the end of the tunnel–as I’m writing this, the FDA is an hour past approving the Covid vaccine for emergency use. By the time the twins turn three in March, we should be well on our way to getting our jabs, and in any case, the twins start preschool March 15 (assuming all things run smoothly). That will make things easier. 

But in the meantime, I’m sitting here, feeling my leg be numb because it can’t hurt, and knowing that I can’t stop juggling all these balls or else everything falls apart.

And in the midst of all this, we adopted three kittens!

Honestly, they don’t add a lot to the load. We’ve been on waiting lists since Tinkerbell passed because I cannot go a long time without a cat, and the shelters we applied to wanted to make sure they paired us with kittens that could thrive in a house with three kids. I got the call Monday about a litter of five cats that had been raised with kids about Sam’s age and the caveat that I had to bring all three kids to meet them and the kids had to behave or else the kittens wouldn’t come home with us.

We went in wanting just two, but of the litter of five, two had already been adopted, and these three were the only ones left. And we couldn’t just LEAVE them, so. 

Well. 

They also kind of adopted us. Each one snuggled up to us and purred and rubbed against our legs and force pet us (you know, when cats bump their heads against your hand like “LOVE ME” and you’re like “I already do?” and they’re like “NO LOVE ME” so you do), and… well, they’re necessary. Not because we have any sort of mouse problem, not because I need more on my plate, but because they spark joy. A whole lot of joy.

Biggest brother is Duke Orlando Stinkybutt Catrissian, so named because he farts like an unholy terror. He’s a little fighty, but only with me or Kyle; with the kids, he keeps a respectful distance unless they’re petting him. He’s the most adventurous of the trio, most prone to getting into trouble and the murderer of at least one tree ornament. 

Then we have Duchess Oreo Zoomies the Experience, who has established herself as Sam’s Cat. He named her–he saw the pictures of the kittens and decided that her name should be Oreo because she’s black and white like an Oreo. She ADORES Sam–hunts him down wherever he is and snuggles up with him. And she’s been so good for his anxiety, too, helping him to calm down and feel safe enough to sleep, even when he’s worried about something. She’s almost as much of an explorer as Orlando and is highly prone to Zoomies at all times.

Last, but certainly not least, is Duchess Orla With the Chanel Boots…

…who is Mine. She established herself as Mine when we were meeting them and she only came out to socialize with me and Carrie. She’s the shyest of the three, only really coming out for cuddles when the kids are safely in bed and Kyle and I are in a quiet place. Once she’s out, though, she’s a party animal but very ladylike about it. She’ll mince around the covers and attack our feet with the same attitude as Miranda Priestly going after an incompetent staffer. She’s adamant about being held but will also fight me forever about the cat pouch hoodie I bought (yes, I am being That Kind of Cat Mom). 

And, well. It may have been biting off a lot, but I feel like the joy and stress relief they give with their cuddles make up for the buying food for three cats and scooping a litter box again and “what are you chewing on???” and “GET OUT OF THE TREE” and “Isaac, it is REALLY ADORABLE that you’ve decided to pretend you’re a kitten, but if you try to climb the Christmas tree, nobody will end up happy” and the “yes, Carrie, the kitty is sharp, have we learned a lesson?”

They’re necessary. They don’t feel like more on my plate. They feel like they’re individually taking the stress of having so much on my plate and dissolving it, and that’s a nice feeling.

November

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This month has been here for roughly two weeks, and it’s already established itself as wild, even by 2020 standards, and as a month that nobody understands why it’s here already, as if the rest of 2020 hadn’t lasted for 70 years. But here we are, November 12, and I’m overwhelmed with all of the things I’ve accumulated in my mind this month.

(the arrows are the things I’ve accumulated in my mind this month, for reference)

We’ll start with the end of last month.

On October 26, I went in for laparoscopic surgery to see if I had endometriosis and, if I did, remove as much of it as possible. The surgery didn’t make me nervous in the least; when you’ve been through as many cycles of IVF as I have, things like anesthesia or the usual surgery worries kind of roll off you like water off a duck’s back. I was actually kind of looking forward to all of it, because it meant a day where I wouldn’t have to juggle the kids and everything about the house but could just rest and heal.

The surgery itself went about as well as I could hope, though my doctor didn’t find any endometriosis. He did find a non-zero number of adhesions in my abdomen—basically scar tissue glueing my organs together—from a previous surgery, probably my C-section, and he removed those. And honestly, that seems to have done the trick? My only pain right now is from sciatica, which is a BITCH, but the abdominal pain seems to have utterly vanished, and I’m LOVING it. It’s a good step on the road towards eventually yeeting my uterus and ovaries into the sun, because those bitches have been nothing but trouble for me. Couldn’t even manage their biological function without scientific intervention, stab and crush me on a monthly basis for the past 25 years… fuck them utterly.

Even though my adhesions likely came about as a result of my C-section, I’m still glad I had said surgery, and I still look back on it with a lot of fondness. It was a really good experience, genuinely—from it being 100% my choice to the way I was cared for before, during, and after the procedure, I wouldn’t change a thing. But that’s a rant for another day. 

So I’ve been recovering from that surgery for about two weeks now. I’m at about 85-90% functional most of the time, though I still get tired way more easily than I did before the surgery. I also have had to get creative with twin parenting, since I wasn’t supposed to pick up anything heavier than 10 lbs for the first two weeks after the surgery, and the twins are much more than 10 lbs. And they’re two, which means they’re getting into EVERYTHING and living life on the edge. Isaac’s latest game has been getting as close to the television as possible, despite the playpen fence we have around it, and my only tactic for dealing with that is to pathetically holler for Kyle until he’s able to come and rescue our son from trying to pick Donald Duck up from the TV screen.

Carrie, meanwhile, doesn’t need to be picked up because she merrily plops herself right in my lap at all times, sometimes to disastrous effect. The other day, I was sitting on the couch, minding my own business, and Carrie pranced up to me and proceeded to throw herself—elbow first—right on top of the incision at my belly button, popping it right open. Fortunately, it’s since closed back up (laparoscopic incisions heal pretty quickly, and I got on it with a bandaid right after), but oy. Recovering from literally anything with one toddler is difficult; recovering with twins is basically impossible, and it’s a miracle that I haven’t been eviscerated.

In the midst of all this, an election happened. 

Fortunately, Kyle and I had requested absentee ballots when our state offered them to everyone in light of the pandemic. We voted sometime in mid October, with me telling Sam how important it was to choose political leaders with good character (because we were studying good character in social studies and still are—citizens with good character are respectful, responsible, kind, and honest, per his curriculum). And then the surgery happened, and wouldn’t you know it, I was sound asleep at 11:30 a.m. on Saturday when the election was called for Joe Biden. 

Thank God. Like I am not religious, but thank God.

It’s hard to emphasize how difficult it’s been the last four years to raise kids to be proud Americans, to be citizens of character when the leadership in this country was so desperately lacking in it. I imagine it was similarly hard when Bill Clinton was off being a sleaze bag in the 90s (before anyone gets on me for “tribal thinking” or what the fuck ever). You want to tell your kids that character matters, that it’s important to be respectful and responsible and kind and honest, but then you look at the leadership in your country, and the people in the highest offices are the opposite of those things and, what’s more, so many, so VERY many people who voted them in have merrily embraced hatred and spite to the point where they’d rather see their fellow citizens die than listen to them. How can you teach your kid not to be a bully when the bullies seem to have all the power? How can you teach your kid the power and value of respect and responsibility and kindness and honesty when the world seems to reward the opposite?

Joe Biden wasn’t my first choice of candidate, but it’s refreshing to see someone who’s treating their colleagues and fellow citizens with respect, regardless of political belief, who’s responsibly planning his transition into the presidency despite all of the obstacles being thrown in his way, who goes above and beyond to treat individuals with kindness, and who, while not 100% honest, is at least not telling me that my eyes and ears are the ones lying. It feels good to be able to envision telling Sam about the president next year and not biting my tongue. 

But I don’t want to dive into it too much, mostly because I just don’t want to deal with the people bitching about this whole thing. They can all go hang out on Pander or Parlor or whatever-the-fuck, and I’ll be over here, sleeping a little bit easier these nights.

And there’s light at the end of the pandemic tunnel! I was already feeling better because of the election news, and then boom, the Pfizer vaccine is over 90% effective. I’ve been reading up on it, and this translates to only needing about 60% of the population vaccinated for herd immunity—how awesome is that? My biggest fear with any vaccine was the sheer number of people who wouldn’t take it—not from justified concerns but because it might give them 5G or something (ha! I wish! I could use a personal hotspot!)—negating its benefits. But here’s another area in which I’m breathing so much easier.

I’ve been thinking so much about what I want to do once things have cleared up, and I think one big thing will be taking the kids down for a three or four day weekend in Philadelphia. It’s educational, what with the Liberty Bell and all; it’s close to Sesame Place, with its autism friendly atmosphere; and I 100% need to find and hug Gritty, avatar of chaos that he is.

And then, I think, a road trip down to Texas again, with stops in Philly and Atlanta. Let the kids see their grandparents again, finally, see more of the country again—GOD, how I’ve missed being outside this little bubble. 

The twins are past due for their first trip to Boston, so that’s on the docket. We’ll take them with their stroller, probably down by Quincy Market and the Harbor, and we’ll ride trains to get there. Sam wasn’t old enough to appreciate being on a train the last time we took one into the city, but he definitely is now, and I can’t wait to take him. 

We’ll go to the mall again, eat in the food court, get truffles from Godiva, and browse the shops slowly and without worrying how crowded they are. The kids can go to the indoor playground and run around to their hearts’ content; they can go to the new outdoor playground down the street and do the same, no masks or worries. 

Kyle and I will have a long overdue anniversary date at the Melting Pot, and maybe another date at Chili’s, not because it’s exactly fine dining but because those are our places.

In September, the kids will all go back to school, Sammy to second grade and the twins to preschool. I’ll have precious quiet hours in the house to write more, to clean up more, to feel my own skin again. I’ll run errands without wondering if I’ve got enough masks or enough clean masks. We’ll go to the movies and eat popcorn and not care if the theater is packed. 

(…well. We’ll care a little)

We’ll see our extended family, my aunties and uncles and cousins that we’ve missed since last Christmas. I’ll see my cousins’ new little babies, and we’ll celebrate being together again with Feasts. 

(I feel like all of our third generation kids need “cousin crew” shirts for that inevitable meeting)

Sam wants to go to the beach, and of course we will, and build sandcastles and not mind that it’s crowded on a summer day. Maybe I’ll even wear a bathing suit this time. Like, it’s not LIKELY, but it’s possible. 

In other words, November has done to me what I never expected any month in 2020 to do: it’s made me back into an optimist, someone who’s looking forward to 2021, not just because it’s no longer 2020 but because it seems like it may bring something good after all. 

…but we’ll see. Until next time!

Breathe Again

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2020 is still garbage, but at least the garbage is starting to look like nice garbage instead of a complete dumpster fire on a personal level. 

(globally, the dumpster fire still rages and leaves us with a LOT of work to do once the flames die down in the hopefully near future)

My time in the PHP has drawn to a close, but it ended on a pretty positive note. I actually stayed a week longer than anyone had planned because I started back on my birth control to try and calm some of the really wretched pelvic pain I’ve been dealing with for years now (still no idea when I’ll be having the laparoscopy to look at that, by the way, which is annoying). Back in April/May, we wondered if my birth control had contributed to my depressive downswing, so the psychiatric RN for the program wanted me to stick around another week in case she needed to make immediate changes to my antidepressant in response to my altered hormones. 

BUT so far so good where that’s concerned, so my last day in the program was on Friday the 18th, and I’m now readjusting to the world. One of the biggest ways the program helped, I found, was that it kept me from getting super overwhelmed by the sheer volume of STUFF on any given day with twin two-year-olds and a six-year-old, because the program is over and I’ve found myself feeling overwhelmed again. Not like I’m drowning but just like parenting three kids, two of whom are two years old, one of whom is autistic, another of whom has a tentative diagnosis of ADHD, plus homeschooling the oldest, and all of that during a pandemic… is a little much. 

Nothing has become less since I finished the program; if anything, it’s become MORE because the twins have to get used to me running ABA again and have been super clingy since I finished the program because MOMMY DON’T GO BACK INTO THE OFFICE AGAIN AAAA. The biggest difference has been that I recognize what’s going on and am able to stop it in its tracks with a bunch of techniques I’ve learned. It’s all dumb stuff that mostly relies on me recognizing that I am feeling overwhelmed and that I have a right to feel overwhelmed (and that, in fact, most people would also feel overwhelmed in my shoes), and that’s the hardest part. Depression is a sneaky monster, and it uses whatever looks even slightly like it to gain a foothold, and that’s the danger with it. 

BUT BUT BUT

I’ve also got a lot of things in my corner now. Like a better dosage of my medication (same meds, just more of it, which has slowly but steadily been helping me get to a better place), and like tools to help me recognize when I’m feeling garbage (all written down in the now very FAT notebook), and with all of that working for me, a weirdly genuine optimism. 

It’s weird to have optimism in 2020, but I do. The world is a garbage place right now, but there are still stars, and there are still Octobers and Novembers. Despite it all, people as individuals are good. The pandemic isn’t forever; even if things go horribly in November and incompetence persists past the point of overwhelming sense, pandemics eventually end. An overwhelming majority of the world agrees that climate change is an emergency that needs immediate tending. People care about each other. Vaccines are coming. And time passes so fast these days, which is how aging works, so by the time I’ve blinked twice, it’ll all be over and hopefully better for it.

I wonder if some of the optimism isn’t also because Kyle got a job.

Finally.

No details here, because details there are still being ironed out, BUT the long and short is that it’s a FANTASTIC position that will not only help our family financially (our primary criteria) but will also look AMAZING on his resume, and I’m really proud of him for getting the position and persisting through these last ~5 months where it all seemed really hopeless. 

The only downside is that the job is just north of Boston, an hour commute without traffic (lol no traffic going into Boston, bless). We’re going to drive the route as a family sometime in the next week, just to see how it looks and how stressful it is to get there and back again, like unto a Hobbit. The higher ups are pretty okay with Kyle working from home (since it means fewer days with hours lost to an exhausting commute), but it’s still a schlepp. 

But. We’re going to make it work. 

And with him working again, I feel like I can breathe again. 

*

In other news (in bullet list format because I take my antidepressant at night now, so I find myself being completely useless well before I want to be): 

  • I’m seeing a physical therapist for my everything. I went to the doctor about two weeks ago to see if I could do anything about my back pain that was coming along with the pelvic pain, and my doctor referred me to a physical therapist after taking an X-ray and seeing that my spine has a slight left curve and some minor bone degeneration (which is wild because I’m 36 and that’s not supposed to happen yet?). I’ve been doing those exercises for about five days and (a) ow, but (b) I’m already feeling an improvement. Essentially, the therapist found that my core muscles are a disaster area (no surprises here), so most of my exercises are focused on getting those working again so that the other muscles related to making me upright don’t dissolve from overuse.
  • Homeschooling Sam has been mostly good. He does better on days when we vary up how we study–read a story, get up and run around, watch a video, do some math. There are still more than a few days where he’s not interested in doing ANYTHING, but those days are becoming fewer and farther between. This week will be weird, since he’s having to wait to start until Wednesday (he had a doctor visit today and has a dentist visit tomorrow), but mostly, he’s blowing us away with how clever he is and how even things like third grade math are a breeze for him. 
  • The twins are talking up a storm–parroting (Isaac) and making up the most hilarious sentences (Carrie), and it’s a delight. 
  • And Isaac kept us up until 4 a.m. last night, so I’m going to cut this off here before my writing ceases to make sense. 

Until next time…

Hysteria

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I have no idea how long this is going to end up being, but I wanted to get it down on “paper” just in case someone else is going through something similar and wants to know if anyone can relate (because yes, I can). 

About 18 months ago, I started having vague pain in my lower left abdomen, just a faint, bruise-like pain as I was trying to fall asleep. I could mostly ignore it except that last October, it got so bad that I couldn’t function, and I spent a morning in the ER over it, only for them to do a CT scan, observe that I hadn’t yet pooped that day, and diagnose me with a case of constipation that I should follow up with my gynecologist about (a.k.a., they had no fucking idea). 

And I did. I’ve mentioned here before that my gynecologist is awesome. He’s one of those doctors who believes you when you say that you’re suffering, and offers you whatever avenues could possibly exist to alleviate that difficulty. When I was pregnant with the twins and started getting the really bad itching that led to an ICP diagnosis with Sam (albeit, at the very tail end of the pregnancy when I was ready to deliver anyway, and my body just said, “listen, get the kid out of me or I am going to turn myself inside out”), he believed that it was a real problem, even if the lab results didn’t reflect that, and referred me to whomever he could in order to get me treatment that worked.

(in the end, it didn’t matter a lot because not long after the itching started, Isaac decided that he was done with being stuck under his sister and I delivered them)

So his initial steps were (a) to get me a consult with an endocrinologist because my ovaries showed signs of being polycystic; (b) to get me a birth control prescription to try and regulate my menstrual cycle some; and (c) to get me a breast cancer risk assessment as an added bonus. And, admittedly, with the birth control, I wasn’t having as severe pain. It was still there, but it didn’t have the highs and the lows it had without the birth control. The problem was that I got super SUPER depressed (remember that?) and didn’t know if the birth control was to blame, and anyway, I was having so much breakthrough bleeding that the whole thing just seemed silly. I thought he’d said that I should stop the birth control when I saw him back in May/June for the depression, and he thought that the endocrinologist said that I should stop the birth control, but ultimately, the birth control stopped.

SO.

Now we’re getting into July/August. Early August, I suddenly had agonizing pelvic/abdominal pain, like the kind of pain where you feel like you can’t see or think or breathe when it’s happening. It lasted for three days, also around the time that I got depressed enough to need the partial hospitalization program. Well, tl;dr – I got my period on day three. A nasty period. One of those ones that’s just… 

Yeah. 

The pain was bad enough that I could’ve probably gone to the ER for it, but here’s the thing: when you’ve been dismissed in an ER for pain you’re dealing with, you don’t trust them anymore. What were they going to do–give me another CT scan, tell me I was constipated again, tell me to go see my gynecologist? That would be $250 that we didn’t and still don’t have thrown towards an exercise in futility, so I just… skipped the middle man. I called my gynecologist again and said, in essence

I went to see him last week and had an extensive ultrasound, both transvaginal and abdominal. He found nothing on ultrasound but did notice that every time the probe or someone’s hand pressed on a specific spot on my left side, I would writhe in pain. Even if it wasn’t showing up on the ultrasound, something was clearly going on, and he decided that it would be a good idea to do laparoscopic surgery to investigate.

I haven’t had the surgery yet; it’s not for at least another three weeks, maybe more, since his calendar for the month is booked solid. BUT basically, it’s an exploratory surgery to see if I’ve got any endometriosis hanging out. 

Endometriosis is a condition where bits of your uterine lining (called the endometrium) somehow end up other places in your pelvis and abdomen. They don’t die there, though, and instead grow and shrink with your cycle like the rest of your endometrium. And it’s extraordinarily painful. If you’ve gone through childbirth, think about the pain of transition, and that’s about where I am right now. If you haven’t, imagine a giant bull has driven its horns into your lower abdomen and is using them to pin you to a wall. Every time you start to get used to having giant bull horns in your abdomen, he wiggles a little bit, just to make sure you know that yes, you have been stabbed by a bull. 

Or at least that’s what I’m feeling. The other fun thing about endometriosis is that you can’t really diagnose it without getting elbow deep in someone’s abdomen or giving them an MRI, and the surgery is kind of the more helpful step because if the doctor sees endometrial cells while poking around, they can just remove them right then and there and give some temporary remission of pain. 

(they can do this either with a knife or with fire, but a knife is the preferred method because fire can make your organs stick together, apparently, which sounds roughly as unpleasant as what I’m going through now)

So THAT is going on, and I’ve been having this specific bout of pain for five days now–my usual pain relievers haven’t been cutting it at all, so it’s this frustrating mess of misery, where I’m feeling mentally in a place where I want to get out and walk, I want to walk for 30 minutes, I want to hop in the shower and get clean, but I can barely stay upright for more than 2-3 hours at a time. I’m frustrated because this is depression behavior and would/will make it so easy to slide back to a bad place, but I’m just physically having such a hard time right now. 

And THEN, since I’m on day five of being stabbed in the abdomen by a large bull, I went to see my primary doctor today, and she pointed out that while she definitely agrees that it seems like endometriosis (we purposefully didn’t bring that up to see what she’d say, and she said it, so I felt validated), she also thinks I’ve got some sort of wonky thing going on with my hips/spine, because when she pressed on my spine to see how it was doing, it made me scream and writhe and also because I couldn’t lift my left leg very far without it shaking because it hurt so much. 

SO.

Now I have Xrays being processed, a prescription for horse tranquilizer levels of ibuprofen, a physical therapy consult, a laparoscopy to be scheduled, a partial hospitalization program, and a partridge in a pear tree.

AND I’m homeschooling Sam. 

Honestly, occupying a physical form is so dumb and pointless, and I would be much happier, I think, as a being of pure light and energy (that could still eat, because let’s be real, brownies almost make the horrifying ordeal of being mortal worth it). 

I’ll hopefully have updates on all of this hot mess soon. Right now, I’m feeling just barely well enough to sit up and spew words on a page because the huge ibuprofen hasn’t worn off yet, but it will fairly soon, and then it’ll be back to wondering if my uterus really is wandering my body while possessed by the devil. In the meantime, please enjoy Sam’s back-to-school pictures and the knowledge that, despite everything, he’s done really REALLY well with the first two days of homeschool. 

Something I never thought I’d say…

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Little known fact about me: I was homeschooled for a year.

If I’m remembering correctly, the reasoning went something like this. My grades had been slipping for two years at that point, due to what I now recognize as my first ever bout with depression (because no, eleven-year-old me, wishing that you’d get hit by a car is not normal). I remember a lot of talk about me not knowing how to study, which is fair enough I suppose, and a lot of blame being cast at the decision of the school district to put me in a fourth grade class that was, charitably speaking, a disaster. 

(the same fourth grade class in which a boy gave me an index card with pee on it, in which I was so bored by the material that I took to drawing on my desk for hours at a time, in which I was a permanent member of the “100+ club” because I’d learned two years before that 0x0=0)

(if I’m casting blame for my depression, it falls at the feet of puberty hormones, a pair of abysmal school years in a row, and plenty of bullying)

So I was homeschooled for eighth grade. My sister was homeschooled the same year, because the district was thoroughly messing up the accommodations for her learning disability (at one point, someone caught her closing herself in her locker during a break in classes because she didn’t want to do her assignment). My brother was homeschooled the same year because it wouldn’t be fair to leave him out. 

It was a weird year. I know that, at the start, I was… reluctant, to put it gently, and by “reluctant,” I mean that I remember having some screaming afternoons for no reason beyond that things were weird; but I eventually got the hang of learning at home, especially after we got into a routine that largely consisted of schoolwork ending by 12:30 every day and plenty of free time afterwards.

My parents used mostly religious curricula; I don’t think it was all A Beka, which was the In Thing at the time, but I feel like I used A Beka for math. My science book talked a lot about how evolution wasn’t a real thing and came with some supplementary materials on that subject, including a book I loved called “Dinosaurs by Design,” which had lots of informational pages on dinosaurs sandwiched between illustrations of, for example, Adam and Eve hanging out with a parasaurolophus. 

(I had to look up how to spell that, don’t judge me, when I was in my dinosaur phase, everything got its name from The Land Before Time)

The history text wasn’t terribly memorable. The English/language arts stuff was great, but then again, I’ve always been an E/LA person. I had to memorize a bunch of poems, and while I don’t remember how any of them went, I remember the act of memorization. For math, I did Algebra I, and I cheated so very much. Whenever my mom would leave me alone to take a test, I’d grab her answer key and input everything, which she must have known about, but it happened anyway. And then in June, as I was preparing to head back to public school (having apparently learned how to study), I had to take the Algebra I final at the high school and panicked because I’d been cheating all year and now my inability to math would be public knowledge and my parents would be furious and it was the end of the world…

…and then I got a 93?

Oh, and then every week or so, we hoofed it up to the nearest Christian school for my sister’s in-school therapy (I think? I don’t remember much because I spent the entire time reading Baby-Sitter’s Club books and longing after the smell of pizza in the other room), and most of what I remember about that was sitting in the front seat of our van singing off-key along with my Sound of Music CD.

Even 20 years later, I can’t decide if it was a good or a bad experience; honestly, I mostly settle on neutral. I don’t know if I actually learned to study or if my depression just ebbed somewhat. I was in honors and AP classes throughout high school, so something went right somewhere. And I remember, my first day back at high school, being beyond surprised when the friends I’d last seen in June two years prior not only remembered me but were incredibly happy to see me. 

(hahaha, thirteen-year-old me was such a miserable child, someone please go back in time and help her and also please de-frizz her hair)

*

Meanwhile, in the world of today, we’ve decided to homeschool Sam for the school year. 

I’m excited for it and simultaneously terrified and worried, because I don’t want to pull him out of school this year, but it honestly seems like the best option. Even in Massachusetts, where a lot of people have been doing really well social distancing and wearing masks, we’ve started seeing Covid-19 cases creep back up, which bodes incredibly ill for the school year. Had we kept up with the low numbers of the summer, I’d have been happy to send Sam back for at least a few weeks so that he could’ve had access to the school’s counselling services and learned to use the distance learning tools they’d set up for the students. 

But the numbers started to creep up.

And ultimately, Sam is… not the best at being self-guided. If we set him up on my computer or on a laptop and said “you need to do your schoolwork,” it wouldn’t take very long for him to end up on YouTube watching Markiplier play a game in which he’s a piece of bread (this is a thing, apparently). I don’t blame him for that, because he’s six. I barely know any adults who, when presented with doing work versus watching videos on YouTube, will easily choose the former. 

It’s the rock and the hard place I’ve been talking about. School isn’t safe. Distance learning won’t work for him. What are we supposed to do?

Well, it turns out that the answer is homeschooling. 

Just for a year, mind. I still think that Sam really needs that social aspect to his education, and that if Covid can get under control by next September (please please PLEASE), I want him to be back in a classroom for that reason alone. He needs kids his age. He needs socialization. He hasn’t had that in ages. 

But for now, homeschooling.

A friend of mine in the next town over posted a link to the curriculum we’re using; it’s called “Moving Beyond the Page,” and it’s largely literature-based and customizable. Sam’s a pretty smart kid overall, but he’s definitely far more advanced in math than he is in reading/writing, so we’re doing a first grade curriculum for reading and writing and a third grade (!) curriculum for math (because he can multiply and divide, and I listen to him do it and think how are you doing this, I couldn’t do that in my head until I was an adult). 

In my fantasy dream world, I’d want to grab one or two of his friends and their families and just do a small group working on the same curriculum, but that almost feels too risky and seems impossible. I wish there were a way to make sure he keeps in touch with his friends, but they’re all so young that the Messenger Kids app ends up being a “sometimes I remember to message my friends but mostly, I play games” thing. And I know that, if he’s anything like me, he’ll spend a lot of the first couple of months in screaming tears over our new normal. 

But. If he’s anything like me, he’ll adjust and come away better for it, having a good and fun (albeit very weird) year and blowing his future second grade teacher’s mind by asking them, “So when do we start square roots?” as everyone else is just getting into their times tables. 

School Shopping

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The Fourth of July is behind us, we’re not quite to the point where people find it acceptable to go all out on Halloween (at least some people, I’m more of the mindset that spookiness should be a year-round thing), which means that it’s time to think about going back-to-school.

Our town has come up with some plans, though they haven’t shared the full details with all of us yet because their plans aren’t completely finalized, and they’re going to be getting them approved by the state first. What they did, since we are a small town of less than 10,000 people, was hold a series of town hall meetings with the principal of each school explaining the way things will likely look in the fall.

Because yes, by some beautiful miracle, schools aren’t starting until after Labor Day. I am so relieved. I hope that this remains the case for the rest of forever, even when there isn’t a deadly global pandemic.

But our town is small, and Covid cases here are few and far between–no clusters, just a person here, a family there, that sort of thing. Easily traced and manageable. And the Commonwealth wanted school districts to have three separate plans for back-to-school, so they came up with three separate plans, with the caveat that (a) the full in-person school just was not going to happen this year and anyone trying to insist on it can suck the big one; and (b) regardless of plans made, we’d probably be switching to remote learning again at some point during the school year.

The plan they want to implement, at least to start, is a hybrid remote-distance plan, with half the kids coming into school for two days, a half day of Zoom calls for everyone, and then the other half of the kids coming in for two days. On days they don’t come in, kids will have day long learning assignments, which I hope won’t translate to their time being monitored, because Sam finishes his stuff in less than an hour, and I genuinely cannot devote a lot of time to handholding; not because I don’t want to, but because other things are happening. 

I’m definitely leaning towards sending him in during the hybrid days, partly because I just don’t have the ability to give him the guidance he needs five days a week, and partly because I think it will be good for him, emotionally and mentally, to be around kids his age again, even if it’s only for a little while. 

I don’t like it. I don’t like any of it. I’m furious that we, as a country, shat the bed so profoundly with this pandemic (like, come on. Wear fucking masks. It’s not hard. You are all just whiny babies), because we shouldn’t have. We should have just been able to put on our big kid undies and socially distanced and worn masks for six weeks and then moved on. We should have had a government that cared about people instead of lining pockets.

But we don’t, and like I told Kyle earlier this week, should is irrelevant. You need to focus on what is.

And in that line of thought, I went school shopping for Sam today. 

It’s early to do it; last year, school supply lists weren’t available until around August 1, if not later, but because of the pandemic (I think), our district is trying to offer everyone a little more wiggle room, so they released the school shopping list last night, with another caveat that we needed to get double supplies–half to keep at home for distance days, and half to have at the school for in-person days. 

I honestly always have fun with school shopping; it makes me feel like a kid again. You know that really great feeling that only comes with smelling brand new, sharp and never-used crayons? The perfectly sharpened pencils, all in a row? The erasers, still pearly pink and perfect? I popped open Sam’s pencil case from last year today to see what of it we could salvage for school, and I got immediately overwhelmed with the scent of pencils, crayons, and erasers. For just a moment, it was like I was back in my first day of first grade.

This year, classrooms are going to look like they did when I was in school, too. I think we had some classrooms where teachers arranged the desks in something besides rows, but I also know we had more than a few teachers who were pretty old school and kept desks, even for first and second graders, in carefully distanced rows, not groups or circles or anything. 

But things will be different, too, because each classroom will only have less than 10 kids in it at a time. Things will be different because if your kid’s friends are in a different class from them this year, they won’t get to play with each other at recess–they’ll be outside, running around in little cordoned off yards, staying six feet away from each other. Things will be different because there won’t be a holiday concert or birthday parties or parties for holidays or anything that would be dangerous. 

And I wish that I didn’t feel like Sam needs that in-person interaction to really succeed at school and to be mentally healthy. 

They’ve told us that we can change our minds at any time, though, so I’m giving it something of a trial period. For the elementary school, they’re using the teachers the kids would normally have for distance learning instead of using an outside agency like they are for the upper level schools (which is just one of the six billion things the district is doing wrong, according to Random People On The Town’s Facebook Page). We’ll see.

And in the meantime, I buy supplies. I stocked up on two things of number 2 pencils, and six erasers. Fourteen sticks of glue, three pairs of blunt end scissors, two boxes of 24 crayons, two whiteboards with markers, lots of paper (colorful and plain white). Every time I go into the back-to-school aisles, I feel this enormous pang of sadness for the teachers having to deal with this mess. They deserve so much better pay and so much kinder treatment than they’ve received. I’m grateful beyond words that I live in a state where our elected officials are taking this pandemic seriously; I feel horrible for teachers in other states who are being forced to write living wills as they go back to school, a time that should be exciting and fun, so that they can help keep the cogs of the economy turning. 

I was feeling sulky today and saw that the coveted box of 96 crayons was on sale for less than $5, so I bought it, along with some drawers for all of my various craft supplies purchased in better times (I have about 3000 stickers and pens and washi tape and markers and so on). It helped for a minute, but just that minute of “wow, being six was awesome!” that quickly melted into “being six is less awesome right now.”

My therapist has gently been reminding me that this, too, shall pass, which is such trite advice, but it’s something I need. I need to know that this isn’t forever, because it’s not. People are going to continue to be dumb about it, but a vaccine will come soon enough, and if they don’t take it, that’s on them. Kyle will have a job soon (he has to), the twins will start school soon, things will go back to something resembling what we knew, though hopefully a little better for us having learned some harsh lessons along the way. 

(part of my plan for this year, back before it became 2020, was to get my first tattoo–something small and simple to see if my skin would scar horribly. If my skin didn’t scar horribly, I’d want to get something more complex later, and it would probably be a crocus)

And I ordered Sam ten more cloth masks so that he can cycle through them all as he needs them. He inexplicably wanted ones with pizza and tacos on them, and I say inexplicably because he does not eat either pizza or tacos.

We paid bills yesterday, not worrying at all whether or not we could afford it. I don’t know if I’ll be able to say that again for a long time. 

But I have 96 crayons, and Sam has school supplies. Kyle has job interviews, the twins have therapy, and this will not last forever.

Stuck

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Like nearly every parent in the country right now (shh, homeschoolers, you can gloat about not having to change anything later), I’m facing a dilemma right now: do I send my kid to school in person this fall or do I try and do at-home learning for him?

It’s a rock and a hard place.

On the one hand, this pandemic is a serious thing, and I don’t believe that schools should be opening right now. Our state is doing pretty well by the numbers for now, but I look at sites like CovidActNow (www.covidactnow.org) and I see the states around us creeping back up to ugly numbers. I see people carelessly heading down to Disney World on a vacation–it can’t be that bad if Disney is open, right??–and wonder how much they’ll adhere to quarantine practices when they come back. I see things from the Federal government that make me wonder if they aren’t actively trying to make things worse, and also that something as simple as wearing masks to protect yourself and the people around you has inexplicably become as much of a political statement as open carrying in Walmart. 

(who are you going to fight in Walmart, anyway, the deep discounts?)

I read our state teachers’ union’s ideas for reopening, and they sound theoretically okay–phased, slow, paying attention to the numbers–but none of them want to risk their lives like this, and we shouldn’t be asking them to. Some people say that oh, it doesn’t spread among kids, so it’ll be fine! Other people still think that the whole thing is a hoax to get us all implanted with 5G chips so that Bill Gates can take over the world or something (I wish they’d implant me with a 5G hotspot; I’d take my family and my Netflix and go ride this nonsense out somewhere very far away from other human beings). 

And then there’s that… look, have you met kids? Schools are absolute petri dishes, and unless you’re going to be putting them in little bubbles for the whole day, they’re going to be getting themselves sick and getting each other sick. I remember Sam’s first year of daycare, he had a cold and ear infection every three weeks. Literally, every three weeks. And it put my job in danger because he couldn’t be at daycare with a fever and ear infection every three weeks, so I had to take off to take care of Sam, but that wouldn’t matter now because I don’t work anyway, BUT ANYWAY, the point is that any given virus will go around a school like wildfire.

Like another example. I remember when I was six, the chicken pox went through my school. This was before the vaccine, back in the days of ill-advised chicken pox parties (my parents did not have one of those; I just happened to sit near a kid who was patient zero for that particular outbreak). Even without the chicken pox parties, though, you couldn’t avoid it. If the kid next to you had the chicken pox, you were going to get the chicken pox. And that was doubly true for the everyday viruses that marched through the school like a faceless army on a mission. In the winter, we’d all rotate being out of school for days to weeks with whatever yuck was going around. Stomach bugs, colds, flus, all of it.

So the idea that Covid-19 won’t spread through schools like wildfire is kind of silly to me. The idea that it’s a risk worth taking is also kind of silly to me. I don’t want to get this disease. I don’t want my two-year-olds to get this disease. I don’t want my parents to get this disease. I don’t want my kids’ teachers to get this disease. 

The obvious answer to all of this is to keep Sam home from school until there’s a vaccine (please please please let one of the three or all three work, I don’t care which one, just please give us a chance to focus on fixing our inherent issues instead of watching the world burn down around us). It’s theoretically possible. We finished out last year entirely online, with twice weekly Zoom calls, new boxes of crayons as consolation prizes, and gosh I miss the first half of last school year.

Even if I didn’t follow the school’s inevitable plan, homeschooling is easier now than ever. A lot of my friends currently homeschool (dear international friends: the school systems here in the state were wonky long before the current disaster timeline, that’s why), and they’ve got kids Sam’s age, and they’ve all been sharing helpful link upon helpful link. So it’s a thought.

But.

Here’s the hard place.

The hard place is mostly a picture of my average day. The morning, from 8:30 until 11, is all about the twins. On any given day, I’m coordinating ABA (they still come into our house because they’re considered essential, thank goodness), plus 1-2 other therapies for each twin, all of them at random times in the day that have nothing to do with any logic that I’ve found beyond “this is what time I’m free.” Afternoons are free of coordinating, but that’s when I dive into trying to get Stuff done (as in, house management stuff: bills, trips to Target, making sure we’ve got the things we need, doctors’ appointments, etc.). And all of that before 5 p.m. so we can get the kids to bed at a normal time. 

Earlier, when this was all starting, Kyle took charge of a lot of Sam’s school stuff–he didn’t stare at Sam and force him to do stuff, but he was able to coordinate Sam while being a little light on stuff at work. He was also able to help set Sam up on Zoom for those calls, and when he lost his job about two months into this nonsense, he was even more able to help–he was a lot more hands-on, helped Sam with art and science projects, etc. 

BUT. Kyle will absolutely be in a new job by September (please please please or else we’ll have more to worry about than just Sam’s schoolwork), and while I didn’t worry about the impression it made when he was stepping away from waiting for his computer to load a build when he was at a company he’d been at for six years, I do worry about it at a new company. Whoever he works for will likely be “understanding,” but it’s still not a good look to get a brand new job and then spend most of every morning away from your work. 

All of this creates the hard place. Who’s going to teach Sam? He’s not old enough that I feel comfortable leaving him to his own devices–I know that if he’s left alone with the internet, he’ll be through with schoolwork and diving into Let’s Play on YouTube, which he’s not supposed to do, but he does when left to his own devices. This isn’t kindergarten, either. He’s actually going to have subjects to study this year, beyond just learning to read and write and very basic stuff. He’s going to have things that he needs to be taught, not just things we can throw at him and say “here, color this.” 

That’s not even getting into the social side of things, the other intangibles that come with in-person learning. Sam hasn’t seen other kids his age since May. He hasn’t spent time with people outside of the family in about as long, and I know that’s affecting him. He’s more anxious, more nervous. He wakes up at night at least 2-3 times a week, sometimes with nightmares and other times just wanting to be with us. He doesn’t want to go and play by himself at all, so his playtime has mostly devolved into video games, which I hate because I’m like–dude, stop playing video games. You have six sprillion Legos, you have such cool toys all over the house, play with those so I can stop feeling like I’ve been flushing money down the toilet the last six years. Every day, he checks his Facebook kids messages, but that’s a sporadic form of connection at this age. 

There’s no good answer. I still don’t know what we’re doing. And I’m angry that it’s come to this: that the alleged “greatest country in the world” couldn’t get our act together four fucking months ago so that, come the start of the school year, we could send our kids back safely. Because it’s not safe right now, but the costs to not sending our kids back are pretty high, too, and as a parent, I’m feeling entirely lost.