20 Years Later for Some Reason

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Like most people my age, I have a lot of complex feelings about 9/11.

I was a freshman in college when it happened, living away from home for the first time. My grandfather was dying, I was thrown off kilter by the huge changes in my life already, and then the entire world changed completely, and pretty much everyone my age has been completely off ever since. Watching 3000 people die live on national television while your prefrontal cortex is still developing does that to a person.

And I don’t really want to go into those feelings as they stand right now because pretty much everyone everywhere is going to be talking about that today. Instead, I want to talk about a few pieces of media I’ve been diving into as kind of a memorial to the whole thing. Some of these, I watch and read every year, and some of them, I’ve only just discovered, so without further adieu:

Loose Canon: 9/11 – Part 1 || Part 2

Lindsay Ellis is a leftist video essayist and author that I’ve been following for… oh, probably around a decade now. She did a series about five years ago called “Loose Canon” that explored how certain characters are portrayed in different pieces of media (for example, looking at different portrayals of Santa Claus through the years). As part of that series, she wanted to look at a particular historical event, and 9/11 won the poll among her supporters on Patreon. And it’s a lot. 

(note that if you’re clicking those links and aren’t familiar with her: she is very liberal and does not have any nice things to say about a lot of the right wing politicians involved in that day or its aftermath. Also some of it is funny. If either of those things will upset you, do not click those links)

In summary, as with everything else, 9/11 rocked the media we’ve produced and consumed in the 20 years since. Some of my favorite points:

  • Before 9/11 we had a lot of films where we were really into seeing stuff get destroyed. I think we had about five years in the mid- to late- 90s where destroying stuff on film was basically the best way for a film to become a blockbuster. Shoot, when Independence Day had a bunch of trailers showing the destruction of the White House, THAT was what got everyone talking. And now… well, we’re not so into that. We all sit with the uncomfortable knowledge of no, that’s not what that sort of wholesale destruction looks like or sounds like. And we’re understandably not super interested in watching it unfold on the big screen.
  • Films directly made about 9/11 don’t really do well, critically or with audiences. We watched it happen in real time; seeing the events dramatized feels weird. Maybe it’s a “too soon” sort of thing, but it just has never resonated with Americans as a whole (which is not to say that nobody enjoyed those films, or that there’s anything wrong with you if you did, just that in general, people weren’t really into them).
  • Similarly, films that come too close to 9/11 in their imagery and color palette tend to go over like a bowl of lead. If you can separate the imagery a bit and the events a bit, we tend to be more comfortable with that as a whole.
  • Unrelated to Americans, India uses 9/11 a lot in their movies, mostly as a way of coping with their own terrorist attack in 2008. I’m not sure how these movies go over in India; they’re unintentionally hilarious in a very dark way here in the States.

And from that film, we get the book I’m slowly working my way through…

The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, by Lawrence Wright

This book won the Pulitzer Prize for literature back in its day, and while it’s not an easy read by any stretch of the imagination (I can only manage a chapter or two a night because it’s heavy stuff and makes you really need to chew on it), it’s really good. The book serves as a biography of the major figures who contributed to the creation of al-Qaeda and dives into their motivations and psychology. It acknowledges the mistakes made by western countries leading up to 9/11 while simultaneously not blaming those countries (e.g., the British occupation of Egypt was beyond shitty and definitely contributed to the radicalization of several figures in al-Qaeda, but Great Britain isn’t to blame for the attacks).

One thing that’s been a hard swallow for me with this book is learning that before he was fully radicalized, Osama bin Laden was a really loving and involved father. One particular passage talks about how his second son was born with hydrocephalus and though he survived, he was left mentally disabled and prone to violence and emotional outbursts. And despite this, bin Laden insisted on making sure that son was involved whenever he spent time with his children. He was a monster by every definition, but monsters are made from men, which I think is the ultimate lesson of the book: not that terrorists are just like you and me, but rather that radicalization is not something that just happens to That Guy Over There. It’s something that we can all be vulnerable to, given the right political climate and circumstances.

And related to the videos above…

Protest Music of the Bush Era

This is another Lindsay Ellis video, and while it’s not about 9/11 directly, I think it does a good job of sorting through a lot of the emotions and public mentalities of the years that followed. It’s wild to remember that after 9/11, we were all so traumatized and hurt/angry/afraid that we wanted to lash out at anyone and anything that might have been slightly a threat to us and our way of life. Which is not to say that al-Qaeda shouldn’t have been rooted out and destroyed (the above book, while helping to explain a lot of the psychology at work, has very solidly confirmed for me that something had to be done about them) but rather that we went at it kind of the way a toddler does when throwing a tantrum. We were sloppy, a lot of innocent lives were pointlessly lost, and we really didn’t know what we were doing.

Despite this, both the Afghanistan war and the Iraq war were really popular in their time, and even when their popularity dipped, people didn’t tend to be as ragingly against them as they were against Vietnam for whatever reason. Like people were against both wars, but the scenes of protest that we recognize from the 60s and 70s just weren’t there as much, and neither was the protest music. And that’s pretty interesting to me–I think that probably because of 9/11, it was hard to find a way to say, “I really can’t stand the military-industrial complex, and I think both of these wars are terrible ideas,” without someone calling you unpatriotic. Shoot, it’s STILL hard to say that without a handful of people popping up to “well actually…” at you.

Anyway, this video doesn’t get into the nuances of that discussion so much as it explores the little protest music there was and how the themes in that music are still kind of around today and how we probably won’t ever escape them. 

So. That’s my 9/11 media dump for you. This was going to just be a Facebook post, but then it got absurdly long, so now it’s here. Enjoy.

Regularly Scheduled

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There’s something to be said for normalcy in one’s life.

I don’t push myself or my kids to conform to society’s ideas of normality, mind. I’m gloriously weird, my kids are gloriously weird, our family life doesn’t reflect what a lot of people would consider “normal,” but all of that said, we have our own beat of normal that we’ve been missing for a long time. It was missing for a variety of reasons–summer vacation, Covid, Kyle being out of work–but at long last, I can say with some confidence that it’s starting to come back. 

For one thing, all three kids are in school now, finally. The twins started back in the spring, because they aged out of early intervention services, so it was less of a huge transition for them. Other kids in their preK class started the school year with tears and clinginess, but the twins just marched right on down to their classroom like they owned the place. Even in the spring, school was just so good for them overall. Carrie went from babbling a lot to actually using words more often than not (which we expected of her–she loves to use words and speak in complete sentences when she knows how, and school helped her refocus those abilities somewhat), and Isaac has done the same (which is huge for him–he actually answers questions without being fed options now, and that’s amazing) (and an addendum: if he just didn’t want to communicate verbally or if he wasn’t comfortable doing so, I wouldn’t push it on him, but he’s made it more than apparent that he LOVES to talk with us and communicate verbally, so I’m happy to encourage it). They’ve made friends and are comfortable with the routine they have at school, and I love to see it. They’re also so much calmer when their days are in this kind of routine, which I love to see for other reasons (like my own sanity).

And Sam started back at school, which is fantastic. Yes, Covid is still raging, but our schools have fantastic protocols in place, and after the stress of last year and knowing that Sam has ADHD and is likely autistic as well, I wanted him to be in a place where he could receive the accommodations he needs rather than struggling with me at home. His friends are all in school, and that has been huge for him–he’s not alone anymore, and I can see just from that how much happier he is. And that alone does my heart a world of good.

He’s receiving special ed services this year, too (which means I have three IEPs to keep track of, and as any parent of a special ed student can tell you, that is basically a full time job except you don’t get dollars for it), and that’s been great. His accommodations aren’t super complex, like he doesn’t require a constant aide at his side or anything, but he does have accommodations: he gets to work with a special ed instructor every day of the week and on his English/Language Arts lessons, and he’s got the special ed instructor around daily to make sure that he’s doing well. His teacher is also aware of his accommodations and will let him step out into the special ed classroom if he’s getting too overwhelmed by things, which will be good for keeping him from melting down in class. 

I love his school’s philosophy on so many things. Their view of writing is that kids should be able to write about whatever they want in order to develop their writing skills and narrative voice, which I hope helps Sam as much during the school year as it helped him over the summer (when he would write five chapter long stories about the cardboard spaceship he built, and those stories were and are wonderful). They’re sensitive to each kid’s needs, and while that shouldn’t be a “wow this makes them stand apart from the crowd” thing, it kind of is, and I’m glad they’re standing apart from the crowd like this instead of in a bad way. 

So the kids are back in school, and that routine is getting back to something like normal. It means that mornings are just me and Kyle, which hasn’t been the case since 2013, and that’s pretty wonderful in and of itself. The house is quiet except for the sound of both of us typing and someone quietly talking about the weather on TV, and maybe Kyle on a work call…

…which, oh yes. Kyle got a job.

It’s a fun sort of story. He’d interviewed with this company last year at the suggestion of one of his old managers who currently works there. They didn’t have a position for him then, but they promised to keep him in mind if anything else came up. Nothing did in the fall, and Kyle started his most recent job then only to be laid off in June. And it was the whole song and dance of applying to companies, having companies say, “mmm, thanks but no thanks” (anyone who’s looked for a job in the last decade or so, and especially the last two years, can attest to that particular Broadway number) for a couple of months, and then he called this company back. And wouldn’t you know, they had a position for him. 

It’s a good position. Without getting into details, it’s an incredibly comfortable salary and benefits situation, and they sweetened the deal in all sorts of ways that are really blowing my mind. So far, Kyle is loving the people he works with and the company’s philosophy as well, and I really REALLY hope this good fortune settles in and sticks with us a while. We just have to get through the next five-ish days before his first paycheck comes in and then we should finally, FINALLY be okay in the longer term. 

Having him working again is really nice. It just gives us a schedule during the week, real weekends instead of every day blurring together into an endless hellscape. It feels like life is just… life and not life with an asterisk about it being weird. 

And I’m loving it. 

In case you were wondering

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I mean to write about this every time a new abortion law gets pushed through somewhere, but I always end up chickening out for whatever reason (well. No. It’s not for whatever reason, it’s because I’m tired of discussing it with people who are coming from a position where their sky is a different color than my sky, so we can’t really talk about the conversation on even ground), but I’m tired and I’m headachey because of ragweed and Texas is being terrible, so let’s dive in tonight. This is the story of how I became pro-choice.

Because, you see, I wasn’t always pro-choice. I grew up in a moderately conservative Christian church (i.e., they didn’t make all the girls wear long skirts and prevent women from preaching, but they were Bible literalists and whenever I bring up things about my churched upbringing to people who didn’t share it as if they’re normal, I always get raised eyebrows) in the Nearest Moderately Sized City. Since it was the 90s, there weren’t a lot of major political issues for churches to get up in arms about besides abortion and who Bill Clinton was doing, and the former was easier to protest than the latter. Some subset of people from our church and other area churches would go stand outside the City’s Planned Parenthood and hold signs like “Abortion Stops a Beating Heart” and “God Forgives” and things like that. Never anything distasteful like “Abortion is Murder” because they didn’t want to be Like That, and they had to stand a not insignificant distance from the entrance because of the way things were set up, but the protests happened with some regularity.

I never attended one myself. My mom went a few times, I think, but I don’t really remember. I just remember that they happened, and I remember my earliest understanding of abortion was that it was killing babies (my understanding, not necessarily reality), and to my eight- or nine-year-old brain, that was ghoulish at best, and that understanding persisted well into my teenage years.

In high school, I was happy to play the Conservative Christian Girl role wherever I happened to be, though my views most frequently ended up challenged in history/government classes and English class. I went to See You At the Pole and prayed with people before drama club performances and had my purity necklace on and didn’t go on dates until I was 16 and didn’t listen to secular music or read Seventeen magazine, and I was against abortion. I had a little pin on my purse about it, a pair of tiny feet that were supposedly the size of a fetus’s feet at something like 8 or 9 weeks’ gestation. I liked it a lot because it gave me a chance to be like “I believe a thing” without being alienating; if someone asked me about the feet, I could explain it, but it wasn’t the same as having a huge red button on my purse that was like “I AM AGAINST ABORTION IN CASE YOU WERE WONDERING.”

College was really where things started to change, though probably not for the reasons a lot of more conservative people would expect (especially in a lot of churches–and other people from super conservative circles can back me up on this–the fear tends to be that higher education will brainwash a person to become a liberal. In reality, you’re just suddenly exposed to viewpoints and backgrounds that differ from your own while simultaneously, your prefrontal cortex stops being underdeveloped and catches up to your amygdala… eventually). I went to a small Christian college, so I wasn’t really confronted with a whole lot of people who were pro-choice there; if anything, most of us existed happily in our little anti-abortion bubble. 

Instead, I was confronted with people who were even MORE conservative than I was, telling me things that I knew weren’t true. I remember one time, a friend spotted my birth control pills (which I’d been on since I was 16 to control severe menstrual cramping, something I didn’t realize at the time was caused by my PCOS) and was appalled that I had medication in my possession that could cause an abortion. I responded that (a) you kind of need to have sex to get pregnant and you kind of need to get pregnant to have anything aborted; and (b) what. Birth control pills, I explained to her (as had been explained to me by my mom, by my doctor, by everyone ever, because it’s how they work), prevent ovulation, and if there’s no egg, there’s nothing to get fertilized and aborted. To which she responded that yes, they usually do that, but sometimes, an egg gets through and SOMETIMES that egg gets fertilized and then it gets aborted.

(please remember this because I’ll come back to it later)

And it’s weird, because I’d been debating religion and politics online and with friends in person for 2-3 years at that point and had been confronted with all sorts of ideologies more liberal than my own, and those had never come close to swaying me. On the other hand, having someone more conservative than I was come along and say something blatantly false about an issue I’d studied in depth made me feel… well, more than a little confused. I can’t say why now, any more than I could then. It just made the whole movement ring a little less true for me, like if they’re lying about this, are they lying about anything else?

Senior year of college, we all had to take a course on ethics that was… well, I’m not sure what it was designed to do in other years, but during my senior year, it was supposed to teach us to form our own ethical opinions outside of what the people around us believed and taught (which, honestly? Pretty good for a small Christian college to teach their students to think for themselves). The final project was to be a ~15 page term paper discussing both sides of one of the ethical issues we’d discussed over the semester and coming to our own conclusion about it. And, like roughly half of the class, I chose to do my paper on abortion (the other half did gay marriage, which had been legalized in Massachusetts the year prior). 

The trouble was that while the school said they wanted us to think for ourselves, they didn’t allow us access to resources that would give arguments for opinions outside the Christian status quo. I don’t know what people doing their papers on gay marriage found, but whenever I tried to search the internet for accurate information on abortions (which should’ve been easy, even in those Wild Wild West internet days), I was blocked from accessing those sites. The school library was no better–they had exactly three books talking about abortion, and all three were checked out well before I even got there. And, yeah, I probably could’ve half-assed a paper about abortion without doing any real research for the pro-choice position, but I wanted to be honest about the other side (I said to myself, remembering the birth control incident), and I couldn’t do that if I couldn’t even access real information about abortion. 

Around the same time, I read an article in one of my parents’ Christian magazines about a young woman who’d gone to a Planned Parenthood and apologized to its workers on behalf of Christians and realized in doing so that, hey, Planned Parenthood wasn’t some awful place where babies were being torn limb from limb and then devoured by a demon in the back room (which, like… that seems like a duh thing now, but when you’re in the thick of it, they tell a LOT of lies about what happens at Planned Parenthood, and demon buffets seemed about as likely as anything else) (also Jemila Monroe, if you ever Google your name again and find this, hi! Hope you’re doing well!). And that basically gave me the skeleton for my own term paper: I would go to Planned Parenthood, get information straight from the source, and come to my own conclusions.

And, well. I didn’t come away from the term paper fully pro-choice, but suddenly, the anti-abortion side of things seemed a little less… right. None of the horrors I’d expected from a Planned Parenthood had actually been there (and I know my experiences aren’t universal, but other than the necessary metal detector, it was one of the nicer medical facilities I’ve visited). They had information on adoption, abortion, parenting, all the options someone could choose. The girls at the front desk were friendly and sympathetic (though I’m sure also skeptical when the friend who went with me and I remarked that no, neither of us were pregnant, we just wanted to get information on abortions for a term paper, and no, we couldn’t just find it online because our school blocked every website that gave accurate information on it). They seemed to have resources there for people no matter what they chose, while the anti-abortion side didn’t seem to have many resources at all and also seemed to be teeming with people who were against social supports and sex education and birth control and all the things that would prevent anyone from ever having to consider an abortion in the first place. 

It made me think a lot. 

The true clincher, though, was my own struggle with infertility and both of my pregnancies. 

When Kyle and I first decided to try and start a family, I had what’s called a chemical pregnancy. It’s basically when an egg is fertilized but doesn’t implant for whatever reason. It’s absurdly common, and the only reason I knew it happened was because we were trying to get pregnant and I happened to take a pregnancy test super early (factoid for you: the most sensitive pregnancy tests can detect the pregnancy hormone, HCG, at about eight to nine days past ovulation, which translates to a little over three weeks pregnant; but that said, nobody is peeing on those tests if they’re not obsessively trying to get pregnant). If we hadn’t been trying to get pregnant, I would’ve assumed my period was just a week late, whoops.

After that, months went by, and I still didn’t get pregnant, and I consoled myself during this period by latching onto conception, pregnancy, and delivery as an autistic special interest. Anyone who knew me at all during that time period knows that I was up to my eyeballs in literature and websites and videos and, hey, did you know that Richard Armitage narrated a documentary about getting pregnant, and hey, did you know that humans form butthole first, and hey, did you know that the natural birth movement really took off in response to the twilight births of the mid-20th century and hey hey hey

Understanding fetal development did a lot of cement my pro-choice position, which I’d casually started to adopt in the preceding years. Since most abortions take place within the first trimester (and, really, within the first twelve weeks, which isn’t even the full trimester), it was kind of hard to argue for personhood when I knew that scientifically, a fetus isn’t all that developed at that point. Up until eight weeks, it’s technically not even a fetus–it’s an embryo–and organ systems aren’t even fully developed until around 12 weeks. The brain itself takes a long time to develop, which makes sense when you consider how big and complex the human brain is; the neural pathways that distinguish pain aren’t even developed until around 26 weeks, so previous arguments I’d heard about fetuses screaming in pain as they were aborted clearly couldn’t be true. 

(never mind that you have to breathe to scream… which you can’t really do when your lungs aren’t developed, which doesn’t happen until ~23-24 weeks anyway!)

Being pregnant myself cemented things even further. I didn’t even have a terribly rough pregnancy with Sam–ICP and elevated blood pressure towards the very end, but I was overall healthy. But BOY was I miserable. I can say confidently that my body is very good at building babies–but that it absolutely cannot multitask while doing so. A lot of the things I’d heard about pregnancy being the healthiest time of a woman’s life also seemed untrue, or at least like things my body hadn’t been informed of (like why was the alleged energy surge of the second trimester more of an “oh, I can stay awake past 9:00 again, but I still want to be asleep by 10, neat” instead of the “ALRIGHT IT’S TIME TO CLEAN YEAH” I was promised?).

And I thought: could I really force this on someone who didn’t want it? Because the usual response to “look, some people don’t want to parent” is to say, “well adoption, duh” (never mind that adoption is not as simple as that, but we’re not going into that right now), but that doesn’t consider that while some people have really great pregnancies where they feel fantastic all nine months, others among us have absolutely miserable times, where this gestational period is nothing but a means to an end that we’d fast forward through if we could. 

(and yeah, cool moments like feeling your kid kick for the first time are cool, but they do not in any way make up for the inability to sleep from about 25 weeks on, the heartburn, the nausea, the aches and pains that are sometimes downright debilitating, the restless legs, and alllllll the complications out there)

AND THEN came my attempts to get pregnant with our second child, attempts that would eventually result in the twins, and I got to experience an abortion procedure firsthand.

See, the first IVF cycle we had was technically a success, but I had a miscarriage, and rather than suffer through the pain of miscarrying naturally, I elected to have a dilation and curettage. 

And admittedly, in my procedure, there wasn’t much of a fetus to remove because I was only about nine weeks along when the miscarriage was confirmed (really, it probably happened closer to seven weeks), but again: most abortions happen around that time as well. There’s not much in there to take out, and in the case of an abortion, medication stops the fetal heartbeat before any procedure takes place, so the whole argument of them tearing a squirming fetus limb from limb doesn’t even work because it’s already dead by the time the lamina are inserted into the cervix for dilation. 

(and like. You can’t really sell fetal organs on the black market because they just aren’t developed enough for it? Like cool, you’ve given me this glob of tissue that may have someday developed into a liver, what am I supposed to do with this)

When we had the fetal tissue tested, we found out that it had a chromosomal abnormality called trisomy 16, which some fetuses can have and continue to develop up to a point, but it’s absolutely not compatible with life. What were we to do with that information, if that fetus had continued to develop and we’d only discovered much later on that it would be born horribly malformed and not survive even a minute outside of me? I don’t think my emotions could’ve handled going through with an entire pregnancy and delivering a still baby. I don’t know how the people who do suffer that kind of unimaginable loss survive it. 

We also had to confront the idea of abortion when it came to the thought of how many embryos we would end up with as a result of IVF. It’s all well and good to sing a song of let’s keep all six sprillion embryos that have ended up implanting (and we were fortunate enough to have very ethical doctors who had a strict policy against transferring more than two embryos at a time… good thing, too, when it came to the cycle where we eventually succeeded because yikes), but doing that runs a very real risk of losing all of them… or losing your own life. 

I’ll be honest: even if I were in a position where I’d have to terminate a pregnancy to save my own life, I would have a really hard time with it. As exhausted as it leaves me sometimes, as stressful as it can be, benign a mom and raising my kids is one of the greatest joys in my life, and if I could do it healthily, I’d gladly have whatever children Kyle and I conceived accidentally or otherwise.

But my life isn’t another person’s life. Kyle and I are in a fortunate and comfortable position (more on that next week) with a lot of support if we ever need it. Not everyone is so fortunate. And just like I don’t want anyone to force something physically, emotionally, and financially difficult on me when I don’t want it, I can’t abide by forcing people to go through with pregnancies when they don’t want them; nor can I see a good, objective, scientific argument for doing so. 

Personhood is not something that can be scientifically proven, and even if it were, it would be difficult to argue that personhood objectively existed in a first or even second trimester fetus, as their brains just aren’t well-developed enough; therefore, you can’t argue that a fetus is a person with rights because that simply cannot be proven and, if it could, would likely be something proven for a time well past what most anti-abortion groups find acceptable. Physically speaking, pregnancy is essentially giving up one (well. All, really) of your organs for 40 weeks, something that’s great to do willingly but not something anyone wants forced on them. It’s kind of like donating a kidney, even if you could get it back after a few months: a lot of people are perfectly willing and even eager to donate an organ for someone else to use, but nobody’s very happy to wake up in a tub full of ice with a huge scar on their side.

I don’t like abortion. I don’t think it’s a position anyone should find themself in, but we know from history that criminalizing abortion doesn’t result in fewer abortions but rather in the same number of abortions, this time performed in unsafe illegal conditions that kill people. Other countries with lower abortion rates aren’t the ones where abortion is illegal but rather the ones with strong social safety nets, universal healthcare, comprehensive sex education, and a general societal value placed on people rather than on control. 

So that’s how I came to be where I am today: I started to realize that a lot of what I’d thought about abortion was simply untrue, came to understand both fetal development and abortion procedures through personal experience, and had rough enough pregnancies that I wouldn’t want anyone who didn’t want to be pregnant to go through what I did. And at the end of the day, nobody has to agree with me or any of this; I just hope some of what I’ve written makes you stop and think for a moment. 

Until next time…

July

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The other day, I realized I hadn’t written anything the entire month of July. 31 days, no writing, just me buckling in and holding on for the month. And it’s been a month, but it’s been a month where comparatively little has happened, so it’s not like I have a whole lot to talk about overall. 

We left the month intentionally empty because I was supposed to have my spine surgery on July 1, which would’ve had me still recovering for the rest of the month and then slowly being able to sit up more and more again and eventually getting my life back, BUT that hasn’t happened. Instead, July was nothing but rain and nothing, over and over again. 

I don’t mind the rain. I overheat so easily for so many reasons, and having nothing but rain all month was nice. But despite going on several dates with Kyle over the month of July and despite leaving the house with some regularity, it felt like the month just existed in a limbo of not giving a fuck. And then that ultimately cascaded into me giving too MANY fucks at the very end of the month for a variety of reasons, which is all to say that I spent a lot of last weekend crying and getting a headache from doing so. 

It’s basically that whole tripping at the finish line feeling about the pandemic combined with me letting the stress of Kyle not having a job get to me. For the latter, I’m not surprised that Kyle isn’t employed yet because even in the best of times, finding a job takes a minute. And he’s had a LOT of nibbles and basically hasn’t gone a week without half a dozen interviews or technical screenings or what-have-you. But, you know, you try to keep a smiling face despite things not exactly being great and eventually, things are going to crack somewhat. And I cracked. And I’m fine. Sort of. Probably not that much. 

My therapist has basically been pointing out to me that I’m treading water right now. Three special needs kids at home, very little break for them from anything. Husband out of a job. Bills coming due. A pandemic (on that point, I am so very sick of catering to people who are so afraid of science that the idea of science helping them is a completely foreign concept) that seems like it will never end. My own health being on the back burner for the foreseeable future.

Yeah, that’s a fun one. When Kyle lost his job, we lost our health insurance. We signed up for a different health insurance through the state website, but shortly after getting on that health insurance, the state called to tell us that no, actually, we had to be on basic bitch state health insurance instead, and that unless we choose the correct basic bitch program through state health insurance, we can’t get actual healthcare for the foreseeable future. No surgery to fix my back, no primary care, nothing but emergency care, but at least we’re covered for that?

Oh, and if that wasn’t enough, if Kyle ever gets an unemployment check (yeah, still haven’t received those, don’t know what’s going on there), we’ll have to report that income to the state and switch health insurances again, but at this point, we’re probably not going to get any unemployment checks until roughly January. Which nobody knows really why. In theory, it’s because Kyle’s previous PREVIOUS employer (not the one from which he got laid off in June but the one from which he got laid off LAST YEAR) needs to confirm to the unemployment department that he’s been laid off from them for a year, but I just??? 

Like we’re really fortunate to have family helping us through this stressful time, but if we didn’t? Are we supposed to wait for the whims of enormous corporations to ensure that we can put food on the table? 

(if anyone was wondering, being on unemployment SUCKS, nobody would do this unless they had to, if you think they would, maybe go read something outside of your own echo chamber for five minutes; also if anyone was wondering, that we don’t have universal health coverage that’s not tied to employment in this country is frankly barbaric)

SO ALL OF THAT TO SAY that I put my surgery off AGAIN. It’s been bumped to at least January now because I can’t imagine trying to get through the beginning of the school year and the potential beginning of a job for Kyle while stuck flat on my back recovering. It’s definitely the best decision, but I feel angry and frustrated and stuck. I want to do so much and there’s so much that could improve my physical and mental health, but I’m so afraid of triggering that severe pain again before I’m in a place where I can have surgery to repair it, so I end up being a lump on a log, which really just makes everything worse.

Hence the treading water thing. Hence the not writing. Maybe I’ll have more to write about later. I don’t know. But right now, I just feel so drained and angry and stuck that it’s a more exhausting experience than it should be. 

Bi Bi Bi

/ lovescienceandnat20s / 1 Comment

I’ve wanted to write this for a really long time. Most of my life, actually, now that I think about it. I’ve wanted to be upfront and honest and open about who I am for so long that it’s hard to remember a time when it wasn’t something I wanted, but life has this funny way of preventing this level of honesty. You worry about what people will think, you worry how your truth will affect other people, you question yourself on every level.

But ultimately, here I am. Being honest and open, and I hope that after you, dear reader, finish with this post, you’ll still stick around and love me (if you do love me; if you didn’t to begin with, it’s all good) as much as you did before. If you don’t, if you’ve changed your mind on me, I’ve reached a point where I’m okay with that, okay with people who can’t accept me for who I am seeing their way out of my life, because at the end of the day, I’d rather be authentically myself than keep up an act. 

In that vein, rather than just beating around the bush and leaving you to read the whole post and be like “BUT WHAT ARE YOU??” like this is some vague Facebook status where I say that I’m HARD TO GET ALONG WITH and I’ll ALWAYS FIGHT FOR MY FRIENDS because I’m a SCORPIO WHO LIKES ELEPHANTS or something like that, I’ll get the big revelation out of the way first, as a sort of thesis statement. That way, if you don’t like it, you can stop reading now, unfollow me, walk away, and not worry about the rest. 

But I hope you’ll stay. And I hope that you’ll read past this point, where I tell you that I am bisexual, I always have been, and I always will be. 

But how do you know??

Do you remember the first time you saw someone who took your breath away and reset your brain to factory settings? And all you could do when it happened was just stand there and blink and wonder what had happened and when you were going to get back to normal?

I remember. I was fourteen years old, and I was in typing class. There was a girl in my class, whose name I absolutely forget, and one day, even though I’d seen her hundreds of times before, she left me dumbstruck. I was the teacher’s pet in typing class (thanks to Mavis Beacon and having a college boyfriend with whom I chatted on AIM all the time), but I don’t remember doing very well that day, because it was all I could do to kick my brain back into gear and stare at the passage we were supposed to be typing instead of that girl. 

Now, I grew up in a pretty conservative Christian household, and as I’d neared puberty, the main thing I’d learned about sex was that doing it outside of marriage was Bad and Wrong and would probably result in me getting pregnant with AIDS. To my parents’ credit, this wasn’t their messaging, by and large. They put their collective foot down when it came to my love life overall (still let me date a guy five years my senior, mind, but their rules about physicality were strict enough that they got me grounded at least twice over kissing), but the hellfire and brimstone didn’t come from them so much as from the culture of conservative Christianity at the time. 

My awakening, as it were, happened right as purity culture was finding its footing. For the uninitiated, purity culture was (maybe is, I don’t know what churches similar to the one I grew up in do with their adolescents now) this obsession with not only not having sex until you were married but not getting into emotional entanglements either. It often involved things like purity rings and girls getting compared to things like chewed up gum, tape that’s lost its stickiness, shattered glasses, etc., if we were “loose.” Nobody much talked about sex itself… it was more the idea that having sex outside of what the Bible condoned (i.e., one man and one woman in marriage, however the current culture defined it) would absolutely ruin you. You’d turn into a sex addict, you’d get pregnant with AIDS, you’d be worthless, your future spouse (assuming we’d all have future spouses) would be the Bigger Person for accepting you in your gross, already-did-the-nasty-ness.

And anything outside of heterosexuality? Don’t even think about it. Being gay was a sin, being attracted to anyone outside of a cisgender “opposite” sex spouse was a sin, and a bad one. Almost as bad as abortion. 

So I had this moment of “KAPOW, beautiful girl!” but I had no idea what to do with that feeling because bisexuality just wasn’t on my radar in the slightest. Sure, we had internet, but it was the baby internet, a wild west without real search engines, and anyway, even if Google had been available, the idea of my parents finding out about me researching this perversion terrified me. I had no label for myself, and all I could think, when I was trying to sleep and fantasies about that beautiful girl and other beautiful girls danced through my mind, was that I must be addicted to sex. 

(mind, I’d gone no farther than kissing my boyfriend at that age, I only just barely knew what sex entailed, but there I was, fourteen years old and an obvious sex addict)

This was, in retrospect, the wrong conclusion, but I had no way of knowing that. Shame over my apparent sex addiction consumed me, and some nights, I’d lie awake all night, begging God to help me not give into the temptation of wanting to have sex with a girl (the temptation of wanting to have sex with a guy, mind, was perfectly fine–after all, being a good Christian girl, I’d definitely be doing that eventually) and to forgive me for letting things get this bad. I was particularly terrified after one sermon brought up that Jeffrey Dahmer had Jeffrey Dahmered because he saw porn and, therefore, sex outside of acceptable parameters could naturally lead all the way to being a serial murderer and cannibal. I wasn’t there yet, but that sort of thing gets into your head when you’re autistic, and I was convinced that unless I repented for being attracted to other girls, I’d be there soon enough. 

This particular theme played itself out many times over the years. I’d have these bursts of being okay with myself, somewhat, followed shortly thereafter by all night repentance fests, right on through college. 

Some things did change. When I was sixteen, I found out that bisexuality existed, thanks to religion message boards and an improving internet. Further searching led me to the term “bi-curious,” which I adopted for myself–I wouldn’t ever actually have sex with a girl or date a girl or fall in love with a girl, I told myself, but I was awfully curious about it. 

Warring with yourself that long, however, is exhausting. All those sleepless nights took their toll. Acceptance finally started to come to me when I spent a semester abroad, studying theology and Christian history at Oxford University (which makes me sound super smart, but y’all, I barely passed). I was there a hundred days, living with people who seemed really comfortable with who they were, more than almost anyone I’d ever met. And living with them, I had to be mask-off with my autism because it was exhausting not to be. 

Not only that, but being in Oxford introduced me to more liberal forms of Christianity than I’d known my entire life, different interpretations of the Bible that looked at words in Greek and Hebrew and said, “but is that what it meant historically?” and “can we apply this literally to our lives today or do we need to sincerely consider the historical and cultural context in which it was written?” I studied Plato and Aristotle and fell absolutely in love with Plato’s Symposium and the idea of Forms. And all of that combined so that by the time I was on the plane home in April, I knew that even if it was a sin to be so, I was bisexual. It was my cross to bear, and I’d have to bear it. 

And I felt guilt over it still, so much guilt, but the sleepless nights grew less and less. And then one day, when I was a few years out of college, I connected with this amazing guy from Texas, and while I still wasn’t wholly guilt-free about it, I told him early on: “I’m bisexual.”

And he said, “oh.” And loved me just as I was and just as I am, and the guilt started to go away. Eventually, after we left the church altogether (that’s another story for another time), the guilt was gone, as if a huge weight had been around my neck, and I could finally live knowing who I was–who I am–and not hating myself for it. 

It did take me longer to be open about my orientation with others in my life, mostly because I didn’t know how they would react, but as I’ve been inching out of the closet, everyone has been so loving and accepting, and it’s such a good feeling. 

So to answer the question: I know that I’m bisexual because I’ve tried to fight it for so long, because I spent the better part of nearly twenty years at war with who I was, and in the end, I decided to let myself win. If I weren’t bisexual, some of that warring, that repenting, that begging would’ve worked. But none of it did. And I’m so glad.

But what does it mean??

A fun thing in the LGBTQIA community is dissecting labels. 

I realized, after watching the Blue’s Clues Pride parade with my kids (hurrah, hurrah, oh you want to hear it again, Isaac? 42 times in a row wasn’t enough? Alright) that nearly every sexual orientation and level of attraction has its own label. It’s very convenient on some level, but if you’re not super immersed in the community, it can also get pretty confusing. 

(in the writing of this blog entry, for example, I had to look up “aegoromantic,” “maverique,”and “coeosexual,” among others)

Bisexuality is something that’s become particularly contentious to define lately, with a subset of the community saying that it’s exclusionist towards nonbinary people or trans people. This is, of course, bullshit–bisexuality has always included nonbinary and trans people, and it always will. Still, those who aren’t comfortable with the “bi” part of “bisexuality” have tended in recent years to identify more as “pansexual” or “polysexual,” rather than bisexual. 

I use my own definition of bisexuality, thanks to some message boards I’ve poked around and articles I’ve read. And this might be its own microidentity, but listen, I read the word “bisexual” first in 1999. It entered my identity almost 30 years ago. I’m not giving it up, thank you. 

So anyway. For me, bisexuality means that I’m attracted to and can fall in love with people of my gender and not of my gender but that gender identity does play a role in how that attraction manifests. For example, when I’m attracted to another woman, I cannot talk, I become an absolute idiot, and flirting is 100% out of the question. Good-bye, Abby’s brain, I hardly knew ye. When I’m attracted to a man, however, I’m able to turn on the charm, flirt like crazy, make wonderful jokes, and just be naturally fun. 

(in theory, at least; it’s been a loooooong time since I’ve been in a position to really flirt with anyone except Kyle, and our flirting mostly consists of teasing each other through the house while trying to be a functional pair of adults, key word: trying)

I find different things attractive in men than in women, different things attractive in enbies than in trans people, and so on. Gender absolutely plays a role in my attraction to people, not in the sense that I’m not attracted to certain genders at all ever but in the sense that how I’m attracted to someone will change depending on their gender.

It’s hella confusing, of course, but that’s the bisexual life for ya.

But wouldn’t this mean you’re just a slutty mcslutface??

Which brings me to the other part of my identity: demisexual.

I fought this one for a while, too. Basically, being demisexual means that you’ve got no interest or sexual attraction towards a person until you’ve developed a deep bond with them. For me, it mostly translates to me being perfectly content to flirt with people (when the opportunity arises or arose), but having an actual intimate relationship with a person requires at least a 5th level friendship and constant reassurance that yes, we’re on the same page. 

I had my slutty mcslutface days in college and right afterwards, but nowadays, eh. Kyle and I have a good relationship, and I’m honestly too tired to throw myself at anyone else, even if I did have the inclination. 

But you married a man, so doesn’t that mean you’re just straight??

No more than getting married means that you never look at your celebrity of choice and think, “daaaaaaaamn.” 

Look, I’m married, not dead. I’m not exactly running around and dropping trou for every warm body I come across, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t fanning myself through the entirety of Thor: Ragnarok (Cate Blanchett, Chris Hemsworth, Tom Hiddleston, Tessa Thompson, Mark Ruffalo, Karl Urban, AND Jeff Goldblum? Um, yes please?).

I get gobsmacked by people who hit my every type, male or female or neither or both or somewhere in between. I’m not swiping around on Tinder (even if I were single, just… no.), but I didn’t stop being attracted to people just because I got married. 

Bisexuality is weird in that I constantly feel random pressure to prove that hey, yeah, I’m still attracted to women and enbies and trans people, even though yes, I’m married to a man and, from the outside, you’d probably think we’re just your friendly neighborhood heterosexual married couple. But while my marriage, being absolutely wonderful, changed a LOT of things about me, it did not change my sexual orientation in the slightest. 

IN CONCLUSION

I feel like I could probably write a TON more on the subject, going into years of that warring with myself all the way up to getting my first Pride flag this year (because it was free! which is my favorite price for things). And I probably will write a TON more about this eventually.

But for now, I really just have one real conclusion, that being the wish that I hadn’t warred with myself for so long and that I’d come out sooner. I know and I love who I am, a bisexual woman, and I hope that you do, too.

 

Little bit louder, little bit worse

/ lovescienceandnat20s / 1 Comment

Do you ever get serious deja vu about life? 

Things just seem to go in cycles, patterns repeat themselves, and then you end up looking at your situation and asking, “…wait, didn’t we JUST do this?” which is annoying because nobody wants to keep doing stuff over and over again AND YET.

Long and short, Kyle got laid off on Friday.

It sucks. There’s no other way to say it. We weren’t super comfortable lately (various unexpected expenses keep popping up and, as per usual, they end up costing roughly $500), but we were managing. I was thinking about getting a job in the fall after recovering from my spine surgery, just to give us a little more wiggle room for Things. And we were managing. 

And then Kyle got laid off. 

It wasn’t his performance. It wasn’t tight budgets. It wasn’t a CEO throwing their weight around. It was a managerial decision that made a lot of sense, which is even more annoying because there’s nowhere to throw any misplaced frustration except space, I guess. Space and capitalism. But more the latter than the former. 

Friday was all about getting ducks in a row: Kyle signed up for unemployment and signed the two of us up for state healthcare (which, in our state, is really good). I called the hospital and rescheduled my spine surgery to make sure that our health insurance will be updated before I go in (because while any insurance we’d have would be retroactive to the first of the month–when insurance should kick in–I don’t want to wrestle with billing departments over a $40k surgery). We both sat down and cried. We both went on all the sites to see how the job market is looking in Kyle’s sector.

And on the upside, it’s a decent enough market. Lots of jobs for his title, a lot of them with remote options. Lots paying decent money. And in the meantime, we have families willing to help us out as much as we need. This will hopefully be a short season, and it’ll be a season where Kyle gets to spend a lot of time with the kids and with his family, whom we haven’t seen in two years (thanks, pandemic), and then take care of me/them after my surgery in August. 

But I wish it weren’t going to be a season at all. It’s that Lord of the Rings feeling, where you wish the ring hadn’t come to you and that you weren’t living through these times. Sure, you can decide what to do with the time you’re given, but that doesn’t make it feel any better to see Gandalf fall down to the middle of Middle Earth or to have the damn ring around your neck try to turn you evil every second of every day of your life. I think both of us are happy to make the best of the 24 hours we’re given in this shitty ass season, but I’d really prefer to be in a better season.

Like maybe one where we’re financially comfortable, where the world is an objectively good place that isn’t constantly heating up, where I can feel optimistic about the future for more than 15 minutes at a time. 

But instead, we just sing this verse again, and really, I’d just rather move onto the next. 

May be.

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Have you ever had a month where everything happened so much and you didn’t have any time to really process one thing before the next was happening because that was May in our house. 

It happens roughly this way every year. From the twins’ birthday in March to the Fourth of July, I’m basically running around like a chicken with my head cut off–baking cakes, wrapping presents, organizing mini parties (because aside from the twins’ first birthday, they haven’t really been in a place to have a real party). Even in typical years, May is the heaviest chunk of this insanity, with Sam’s birthday, Mother’s Day, and Kyle and my anniversary squeezing into the mix. 

But this year is not a typical year, and unlike last year, this does NOT mean that things got quicker and easier. 

The first chunk of the month was sort of easy. It was mostly just organizing for Sam’s birthday, his seventh birthday, which feels like a monumental year. We’d hoped that by this time, he’d have been back in school and able to have a birthday party–a real party–but 2020’s claws aren’t fully extracted, so we had to make smaller plans, plans that involved a Minecraft cake (of which I am VERY proud), a trip to the Museum of Science, and trick birthday candles.

And admittedly, that’s a far cry better than last year. Last year, I scrambled to pull something slightly special together, and it was all taking place roughly in and around our house. This year, we could at least go somewhere and do something. We could go visit my parents, which we’d BARELY started doing last year. And that made a HUGE difference. 

He’s a happy seven-year-old, missing one of his front teeth, obsessed with Pokemon and Beyblade and Minecraft and science. Bouncing around the house at 9000 miles an hour when he gets excited and then flopping down on the couch talking about how exhausted he is. Begging us to have a Beyblade battle with him literally every second of every day or, failing that, to play Pokemon with him (this currently involves him telling us what to say about our Pokemon and us saying it). 

He is also, it’s turning out, not a neurotypical kid. This isn’t surprising in the least, but all of the testing that Sam has had over the last several months in preparation for him returning to public school in the fall has kind of confirmed what those of us close to him have suspected for a while. At the very least, he falls pretty solidly on the “yes” side of the ADHD scale (as in “yes this kid has ADHD”), and everyone who’s evaluated him is pretty solidly convinced that he’s autistic as well, which is giving me a lot of emotions. 

On the one hand, I’m thrilled. I’m autistic. Isaac is autistic. We’re a neurodiverse family, and that’s how it’s been from the beginning. It means that on some level, Sam’s brain and my brain work the same way, and that is just SUCH a relief as a mom, knowing that your brain and your kid’s brain are on the same wavelength. It makes sort of “hacking” those wavelengths a little easier, because even though the same things that worked for you almost certainly will not work for your kid, you at least have a common starting ground, and that’s an amazing feeling. Instead of watching your kid melt down and not knowing what to do about it, you can recognize “okay, the TV is too loud, he’s hungry and tired, and his blanket needs to be washed so it’s less scratchy.” And you can even find ways to motivate schoolwork, if you’re an A+ student (which I am. Sometimes.). 

But on the other hand, I’m frustrated at the narrowness of diagnostic criteria for younger kids. When Sam was much younger, everyone who met him said that he couldn’t possibly be autistic. He forced eye contact with everyone, literally took people’s faces in his hands and made them look at him. He’s always been a little comic and so talkative. In daycare and even up through kindergarten, he’s always been a social butterfly who makes so many friends. He’s beyond clever and, to my great envy, has none of the social signs that people look for when diagnosing autism… so he went completely undiagnosed despite the ways he melts down during times of transition and despite his sensory issues with food and despite how he shuts down when something seems too hard for him. 

ADHD and autism look really similar sometimes. 

I’m a little relieved that he didn’t get diagnosed earlier because it spared us a lot of stress with therapies that might not have benefitted him in the long run, but I’m also annoyed because now, we have to go through the whole referral process, which can take up to 18 months (I’ve filled out paperwork for a place that could theoretically offer him an appointment in July–more on that being a silly idea coming up later–but they haven’t gotten back to me since I sent it). He has an IEP now, but it’s there without the legal protections in place because he doesn’t have that diagnosis, and that frustrates me. 

So it’s a whole thing. I still have more paperwork to fill out for him to get back to school in the fall, and it’s a lot. But having these pieces to the puzzle has really helped. 

Sam turned 7. We set up his IEP. I went to the eye doctor for the first time in eight years (ah, American health insurance). And then, since Kyle and I are both fully vaccinated and it has been a YEAR, we hopped on a plane and flew down to Florida for our tenth wedding anniversary.

We went to Disney for our honeymoon, and I can go on a whole rant about how awful a lot of their business practices are, but I also tend to light up like Christmas at the idea of being there, and after this trip, Kyle does as well. It was just the two of us, no kids or anyone else. We went at our own pace–made lightsabers on the first morning, ate around the world at Epcot the second day (I love Epcot festivals, they are magical), drove down to Miami-ish to spend time with my bestie Sherrie on the third day. 

There was no real pressure. We did what we wanted to do when we wanted to do it. No worries about someone getting too tired or not wanting to eat the food at a certain restaurant. No rushing to make this Fast Pass time or that restaurant reservation. Lots of crowds, to be sure, but without the stress we’ve gotten used to on these trips. 

And it was just. Nice. Nice and earned. We’d been burning out pretty quickly, thanks in large part to my sciatica having us running on empty since November, and while this didn’t refill our tanks by any stretch of the imagination, it was VERY nice to be able to just be with each other, relaxing and having a good time. Kyle enjoyed himself so much that he actually took pictures (I’m the one with the camera most of the time) and has been talking about what we’ll do the next time we’re there, and I’m just happy. Very happy to have had that time with him. 

And now we’re back and 30 days out from my spine surgery. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t genuinely really nervous about the surgery. It’s not a complicated procedure like a fusion or fixing scoliosis; it’s just removing the herniated disc material and letting my sciatic nerve heal some, but because of my weight (let me tell you, a pandemic and a spinal injury are really not good when you’re trying to get healthier), there’s a possibility they won’t be able to reach my spine. And there’s always a possibility that it won’t work, that I’ll just leave the hospital in more pain than I had when I went in, and that scares me. 

The recovery period scares me, too. Basically from July 1 through October 1, I won’t be on my A-game, which is annoying because so much is happening in that timeframe that I need to be present for: Sam starting school again, the twins starting school in the fall, Halloween prep, picture day… it’s all stuff that I love doing about parenting, and it’s all stuff I’m either going to have to be very lazy about or else entrust to somebody else, which I HATE doing because delegating is scary because what if it’s not exactly the way I would’ve done it but HNNNGH.

I need this. I desperately need this surgery and the recovery time, but I am stressing so much about getting through the recovery. Kyle suggested (per his therapist) that I focus on something after the surgery that we’ve got planned (which is nothing right now because I’m not sure if any of our usual fall activities are even happening this year–I think they are, but who knows?), and I agree with that, but it’s so hard to make my brain see past the recovery all the way to what comes after when so much comes in between. 

I think I may need another vacation. 

Spring

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I started writing this a couple of weeks ago because I was feeling ranty, and I don’t even remember what I wanted to rant about (C-sections and autism, I think? Tl;dr – my C-section was amazing and I would do it again, Autism $peaks sucks, and autistic people like myself and my kiddos need acceptance, not just awareness, the end). And now, I’m looking at it like (a) I’m not in a ranty mood anymore, so I’m not going to rant; (b) my blog is WAY too depressing, WAY too often; and (c) what if I want to talk about good stuff?

So you’re not getting a rant today. Sorry!

Instead, you’re getting me cheerfully updating you on my life, why I’m feeling optimistic, and what’s up next!

BIG OPTIMISTIC POINT #1: SHOTS!

My name is Abby, and I am FULLY VACCINATED AGAINST COVID-19!

Obviously, all sorts of crazy things could still happen. The world is still in some measure of chaos, and who knows what variants might come from Brazil or New York or something. I sincerely doubt anything will mutate so much that we’ll be back where we were in 2020, but anything is possible. 

BUT for now, I am 90-someodd percent protected from getting infected. And oh, my god, it feels so GOOD. And even better, almost my entire family that can be vaccinated is very close to the same boat! My dad got fully vaccinated around the time I did (I qualified earlyish because of my asthma and obesity, he qualified earlyish because of his old) (ha ha), and my mom and Kyle both have one shot under their belts. My sister is up next once I find her an appointment next week (I’m the family’s designated “vaccine finder”), and I keep hearing from people I love that they’ve finished their second shot, that they’re fully vaccinated. 

And I know that *technically* we’re not supposed to jump right into everyone hanging out again, but GOSH, I just really want to go and give my aunties and uncles and cousins very tight hugs because I haven’t seen them in forever. And I can’t wait to see people in person after canceling playdates and get togethers all last year. Two of my cousins had babies in the last year and I haven’t even showered them with gifts like they’ve done for my babies yet! And we’re all so close to being vaccinated, and I’m just like AUGH please please PLEASE let us be able to get together for the Fourth of July, that would be amazing.

(granted, I will probably be on copious amounts of painkillers–more on that later–but I wouldn’t miss it for the world)

My favorite, favorite, FAVORITE shots moment came really early on when my friend who’s an ICU nurse got her shots. She’s been really heavily on the frontline this entire time and has been so strong and brave (which, I remind everyone reading this, doesn’t mean she hasn’t been afraid or had moments of weakness, but that she accepted those facts and continued to be the amazing, compassionate nurse she is anyway), and knowing that she isn’t going to get Covid was just like…

(I don’t even have words for it, so just picture me squealing with delight and bouncing)

The pandemic is far from over. There’s still a non-zero chance that my kids will get sick, and that makes me very nervous, BUT the risk is decreasing pretty steadily. Shoot, look at death count graphs lately, and you see a very sharp drop-off starting about two weeks ago, at least in states where the most at-risk got vaccinated first. These vaccines work. When I got my second shot, I teared up a little bit, not because it hurt, but because it feels like a genuine real time miracle: the world got together to fight back against a collective horror and we’re going to win. It is amazing what human beings can do when we stand united.

And related to me getting my shots…

BIG OPTIMISTIC POINT #2: PLANS!

I have plans.

Maybe it’s just how my autistic brain functions, I don’t know, but I am at my absolute best mood-wise when I have plans. I love looking at the future and being like “oh awesome, something to look forward to.” And honestly, the pandemic rained on that particular sort of parade a lot, because you just couldn’t plan for anything. Inevitably, things would close or get cancelled, and you’d be stuck at home, thinking too much about Tiger King or something (seriously, how was Tiger King a whole-ass year ago?). 

But I’m vaccinated, Kyle will be fully vaccinated as of May 6, and we’ve got plans.

Plan number one is our anniversary. We’ve been married for ten years as of May 22, and I was feeling mildly sulky about it not being as big of a deal as it could have been because of Covid, but then vaccines actually worked and I was like, no, you know what? This is a big deal. We’ve been through a lot together, some really difficult years, but what we haven’t been is on a real actual date without the kids in more than a year. 

So we’re going on a BIg Date, by which I mean we’re flying to Florida for a weekend.

It’s a risk, but it’s a calculated one. We’ve been reading every article that’s come out about Covid, variants, and vaccines for ages. We’re not data scientists, but we’re human, and while we’re not crazy about the idea of being in a plane with recycled air for three hours, we’re also vaccinated. So we booked a first class flight (anniversary trip, plus it ensured we wouldn’t have to sit next to anyone who didn’t share a house with us, AND it meant that we could be in the absolute front row with nobody’s air coming back at us), we rented a car, we made the plans. Of course, we’re hitting Disney. Of course, we’re getting our toes wet on a beach. Of course, we’re still going to the Melting Pot. 

And I feel beyond excited and also a little stunned, like is this really a thing that’s happening? I half expect everything to get cancelled again, and it may very well do just that. 

But oh, to TRAVEL again. The thrill of going places, of using tickets, of the smell of stale coffee and exhaust, of announcements over a PA and the knowledge that something exciting is happening, I’m just over the moon about even being in an AIRPORT again.

And then we get back, and life is going to continue! I’m getting new glasses! I’m prepping Sam to go back to school in the fall!

I’m having surgery!

BIG OPTIMISTIC POINT #3: BACKS!

Remember back at Thanksgiving, when I had such agonizing sciatica pain that I went to the ER and they were like ‘mm, that’s nice’ and gave me a nerve blocker and a lot of painkillers and promised they’d follow up but very little came of that because everything is 6000 times slower because of Covid so I’ve been gradually feeling more pain ever since and panicking about the idea of it getting WAY worse and me basically having to shit in diapers all the time?

(my brain is a fun place)

So despite Covid delays, I did get to see an orthopedist in January, and he recommended that I go get an MRI. The MRI was its own fun thing because they were already booking a month out, but then Kyle’s company switched insurances at the beginning of March (and my appointment was initially on March 5, I think?), so they had to cancel the appointment, get approval from my new insurance, and rebook the appointment. 

WELL. 

The new insurance said they wouldn’t cover the MRI because I hadn’t met my deductible yet, so the office just. Didn’t rebook it. And blah blah blah, I basically had to call them and say I’d pay out of pocket for it, which, long story short, is part of where our Biden bucks went (more on those later). So my MRI, which was supposed to be at the very beginning of March ended up happening at the very end of March. And it was a fine experience. I got there before sunrise, lay perfectly still in a loud machine while looking at pictures of a calm beach, and then was told I’d have my results soon. 

So here’s my back:

At the very bottom on the left, you can see the root (haha) of all my problems: a herniated/ruptured disc that’s compressing my S1 nerve root between itself and my magnificent bone spurs. On the right, you can sort of see the way the erupted disc material is covering up the nerve in question, which is why I can’t feel any of my inner thigh and otherwise feel like cold lightning is shooting down my left leg. It’s really fun.

The first doctor I saw wasn’t too big on the idea of surgery; he wanted to start with conservative approaches, like epidural injections to just turn off the whole nerve for a while, which would’ve been great back in October when the problem started. But now, it’s the middle of April, nothing has gotten better, and I just want to get my life back. And I know that surgery doesn’t guarantee me getting my life back, but I feel like it’s doing more than just putting a booboo bandaid on it and wishing me good luck. 

So the second doctor I saw agreed, but said that the surgery might be somewhat complicated by my size (because I am, in fact, fat), since their retractors are only so big, so if they can’t reach my spine during the surgery, they can’t do it. BUT in either case, they scheduled me for surgery on July 1 (and I’m like HNNNNNGH SUFFERING FOR TWO AND A HALF MORE MONTHS THIS WILL BE FUN), so we’ll see what happens. I’ve been judicious about my diet since that point (save for Easter week, when I just ate brownies and chocolate bunnies as quickly as possible so they’d go away), and I’m hoping to find a way to walk every day (which is harder than it sounds, since we live on a very steep hill, like it feels like a 45 degree grade, and that is B A D for herniated disc spinal issues). 

But either way, we’re actually doing something, and I know where the problem is now. Once the surgery is over, I can reenter physical therapy and focus specifically on healing that area instead of just doing general stuff and hoping it works (which I think actually made things worse before). And with any luck (read: hard work on my part), I can finally put my back behind me. 

BIG OPTIMISTIC POINT #4: MISCELLANEOUS!

And a list of other miscellaneous things that have me happy right now:

  • We bought a new (to us) van yesterday. A 2016 Honda Odyssey fancy pants version with heated leather seats and screens in the front and a cooling box and seating for eight and rear temperature control and SO MUCH SPACE and everything about it is wonderful. It’s a little bit of a price stretch at the moment, BUT it’s worth it because our old van was basically falling apart at the seams. 
  • Sam is finishing up his testing to go back to public school in the fall. A lot of it relates to him being almost obviously on the autism spectrum and scoring SUPER HIGH on ADHD tests, and we want to make sure that he’s able to get whatever accommodations he needs in school next year so that he doesn’t fall behind at all (because he’s absurdly smart but he’s also very… mmm, executive dysfunction-y). We’ll be having that meeting the day before Kyle and I leave for Florida next month and with any luck, they’ll really see him and be able to give him whatever accommodations he needs next year.
  • The twins continue to excel in school, which is wonderful. Their vocabularies are soaring, and they’re absolutely loving their class and their friends. Carrie, who was already pretty conversational, has added so much vocabulary to her speech, and it’s hilarious. She’s got enough vocabulary to express herself more clearly but she also sometimes grasps for words, like the other day, she wanted us to close the car windows because they were messing up her hair, so she said, “Turn it [the windows] off! My hair is not working!” And that was adorable. And Isaac has gone from being incapable of expressing himself when things are hard to being able to confirm in words what he wants when we ask him. Today, he informed me that he wanted the lights turned back on in his bedroom (because he didn’t want to sleep yet), and he’s just overall been so much more talkative and happy because he has words and is understood.
  • Also the cats are awesome. And Kyle is awesome. We’re all awesome.

Spring is trying its best to start in these parts, and thankfully, it feels like life itself is coming back to life. And that’s a good feeling.

Senioritis

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Do you ever get in one of those foul foul moods? Or not really a foul mood, but a mood where everything you want to talk about comes out tinged with complaining? And you don’t want to be that person that nobody wants to talk to or about because they’re always complaining, but it’s just. There.

I feel like that’s me right now, so close to the end of this pandemic, hope being dangled in front of me, but still far enough away that something or someone could ruin it, and maybe because things feel mostly good, the bad is amplified somewhat? I don’t know.

I try to do the gratitude thing, but that feels disingenuous, like yeah, I’m grateful for a LOT, but that doesn’t make the bad feelings go away any. And I want to be honest in my writing, but I also don’t want everyone to be like “ugh, Abby’s complaining again, bye.” Because I know things aren’t that bad, BUT.

Well anyway.

Hi. 

I guess I can talk about the angst first and then end on a good, or better, note. The angst stems 100% from my sciatica and how it makes me feel so… limited. Because I am limited. I don’t know if it’s fear of pain or actual pain, but I’m constantly finding myself incapable of doing things that used to be easy for me, like cleaning the house or taking a walk or standing in the kitchen cooking dinner for the kids. It’s not the worst thing ever, like my pain isn’t back at Thanksgiving levels, but I think on some level, every time I feel a twinge, I worry that it’s going back there, so I limit myself.

I’m fortunate enough to have a really understanding husband who would rather I limit myself now, before it gets bad enough that I like. Need adult diapers at not even 40 years old. But it’s still frustrating. I don’t know how to explain it, really. It’s like one day, you’re able to do things, and then the next, you find yourself stuck for an indeterminate amount of time. You forget that there’s an issue because you’re feeling better, so you start picking up stuff off the floor, but then two minutes later, you have to sit with your feet up for another ten minutes so that you stop hurting. It is SO dumb.

And it’s so easy to say “well, do two minutes at a time!” but it’s somewhat Sisyphusean or worse. You do what you can but then you’re out of commission because you pushed yourself. 

So that’s kind of colored my last month or so, and it’s annoying, and I hate it. I’m going in on Thursday to get an MRI and find out exactly what is causing this issue and if it’s something I can fix through targeted physical therapy or if it’s something I need surgery for (though the fact that it’s lasted as long as it has makes me think that probably we’re past the PT working point). Insurance companies like to go for minimally invasive steps first, but I’m like… I’m clearly having issues here that are more in-depth than just oopsie, threw out my back. 

But yeah. Background radiation of my life, etc.

The twins turned three about a week ago, and it was a fine time. They were happy with the day, even if it kind of went by in a rush (one that I’m not getting into, but suffice it to say that my annoyance at being unable to do stuff definitely made things less fun than they otherwise would have been). 

I ended up turning their day into a much bigger Thing than it normally would have been (for Sam’s third birthday, for instance, we just went to a museum and had cupcakes) because their last birthday ended up being a flop because Covid, and I guess I wanted this year to be something of an improvement. And I think it was, but man. Twin birthdays take a lot out of you. You do something that seems like the bare minimum, except because you’re doing it for two humans instead of one, it actually feels like you’re overdoing it by a lot. 

But again: they’re happy. Which is what really matters.

Happier news without the asterisk, they started school last week! Early Intervention ends when your kid turns three, so they transferred to our town’s public preschool the day after their birthday, and so far, they’re loving it. We’ve yet to have one of those separation anxiety crying days, not even on the first day (maybe them being in the NICU desensitized them to going away from us for a while), and every afternoon, they come home talking about how they had “so much fun!” Their crafts are starting to cover the fridge and walls, and I’m just relieved that they’re able to do the art projects they love so much without me picking up after them. 

It’s surreal having kids going to school in person. I’m a little worried because Massachusetts has been trending upwards in terms of cases, but at the same time, the school of ~600 people (kids, teachers, staff, etc.) has only seen about 12 cases in the entire year, so whatever they’re doing seems to be working. I wonder if it will still work once the schools are forced to go full time in person in April (which I do NOT agree with–it’s two months, y’all, just take the L and prep for next year), but the kids are so good with their masks that at least I feel like they’re protected on some level.

I have no idea what their days at school look like. I know they’re getting speech therapy, physical therapy, and occupational therapy, but I have no idea what the schedule is, anything like that. And I’ll be real: it feels SO GOOD to not know. SO GOOD. Because it means that I’m not the one coordinating it! I don’t have to shepherd them into a Zoom call that they won’t pay attention to, I don’t have to freak out because I forgot a meeting, I just get to use the mornings to do Sam’s homeschooling and then let them sleep the afternoons away. 

It’s very nice.

Sam, meanwhile, is in the process of being evaluated by the school to see how he’s done this year and what accommodations he’d need in the next school year, if any. His therapists across the board have suspected that he’s not neurotypical, but waitlists to get a diagnosis from a doctor are a year long at least because of Covid, so we’re trying to push things through with the school first and see what they say. Last week, he spent three days doing academic testing, which went very well. His tester remarked that he’s clearly VERY smart, and that he does seem to have some executive dysfunction issues, but that he’s also good at getting himself back on track. 

(at least when I’m not around, but I figured that would be the case, because he’s comfortable enough around me to melt down completely and know that I’ll never stop loving him or being blown away by him)

We’re next going to talk with the school psychologist, just to see where he is there, and hopefully, we’ll have a game plan in the next couple of weeks. I’m committed to sending him back in the fall, partly because I’m getting to the academic point where I’m a little out of my depth (he’s already learning area and perimeter, and algebra can’t be far behind), partly because he needs to be with his friends again, and partly because we both miss me just being his mom, not his mom and his teacher. It’ll take the pressure off both of us for him to be back in public school, and I’d be surprised if it weren’t safer for him to do so by fall.

And I think he’s in a good place to go back. It usually takes some cajoling, but he’s been keeping up with his schoolwork, and he’s on track with other first graders in that regard. I’m excited to see what second grade brings for him, and what life with the kids out of the house for a couple of hours a day brings for me. 

(I just realized that I haven’t been home alone with nobody else in… probably six years? Or so? Maybe four? It’s hard to say)

Meanwhile, vaccines are rolling along in our house. I’ve got asthma and am obese, so I got to be the first in the house to get a pair of Pfizer jabs, the last one on Saturday. Side effects were minimal–I was REALLY tired on Sunday (slept for ~15 hours because my husband is wonderful and hung out with the kids on his own all day) and then had pretty gnarly body aches when I went to bed last night, but things have since calmed down. No fever, no chills, certainly nothing at all compared to actual Covid. 

I’m hanging out on my phone a lot to try and get my mom an appointment for her vaccines, too, since she’s part of the group whose eligibility just opened up today. This remains a tricky thing to do, but I’ve been keeping up with vaccine news, and considering how manufacturers are ramping up production, I feel like supply will overtake demand in the next couple of months, and how good will that feel? And with any luck, that will correspond with cases going down, with hospitalizations going down, with deaths disappearing entirely. 

It’s just that end of the school year feeling, that time when summer is RIGHT THERE, IT’S RIGHT THERE GUYS, and you just. Don’t care about classes, you don’t care about homework, summer is RIGHT THERE (and GOD, so much worse when you’re a senior in high school or college, you’re just like THIS IS ALMOST OVER, HOW AND WHY SHOULD I CARE??). You can’t think about your finals or about anything but summer being RIGHT. THERE. And YET, despite that feeling, it’s important to still be careful. Still wear a mask, still be safe, still make good choices, because unlike skipping homework during senior year, skipping out on responsibilities as the pandemic starts to cool down will genuinely have consequences (see: Brazil), consequences that can be deadly.

In other words: take care of yourselves, and each other.

Until next time…

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.