Excitement ’round these parts

1. The owner of our former property management company (we live in a condominium complex) has apparently been arrested for embezzlement. Twenty thousand dollars are missing from the HOA coffers. A few weeks ago, our HOA leaders caught wind of what was going on, hurried to transfer as much of our collective savings as they could into a new account, confronted the swindler, and hired another manager, who now has to clean up the mess. 

2. Blur started daycare this morning. We hesitated and hemmed and hawed and kind of agonized over this decision, but we think it’s for the best. Life was assuming a frenetic pace that neither WAHD nor I was keeping up with. Two and a half days a week, Blur will go to our neighbor’s house while WAHD and I work. We’re not thrilled about paying someone else to look after our child (though we certainly trust her), but the only other option is for one of us to cut back significantly. With our long-term goals, that’s not feasible. 

Anyway, Blur loved the daycare experience so much (I assume it was the combination of the other children and the Thomas the Train set) that he screamed bloody murder when it was time to come home. I can live with that. I’d rather he cry about leaving than freak out about going.

Cataclysm

My friend S, who lives across the street, came over this morning to tell me that one of our neighbors committed suicide a couple of days ago. The guy was a father to two young boys and a two-month-old daughter. His wife is a stay-at-home mom. I didn’t know him; I’ve seen the family getting in and out of their cars and I’ve seen the children play in front of their house, but I’ve never spoken to any of them. Still, it’s shocking to me. It’s an act of violence that rattles even a stranger.

I get how horrible depression is and I get feeling like no-one understands. I know what it’s like to not want to get out of bed, or to want to crawl back into bed because you just don’t know what else to do with yourself. I understand what it’s like, at least on some level, to think of yourself as a bad person, a hopeless case. Depression is no stranger to me. But what I don’t get is acting on those feelings by taking your own life when you know your children and spouse will have to find a way to survive in the aftermath. Your pain is over; their pain is just beginning. When you become a parent, there are some things you can’t do anymore. Like off yourself.

S told me the wife’s family is in town to help her out – but what about when her parents leave and she’s left to raise and support these three kids all by herself?

Blues

WAHD and I moved to inland USA from coastal California last year. Fresh fruit stands, the ocean, moderate temperatures, excellent food, surfing competitions, and laid back, late night barbecues are among the things we miss the most. We sometimes miss our fellow Democrats, too. The taxes, long commutes, and gang violence – not so much.

I’m still acclimating to our new town. When you work from home, it’s hard to meet people. When you’re a (somewhat unsociable) mom who works from home and has a strange, unexplained fear of playdates and mommy groups, it’s especially hard to meet people. (I’m a three-time mommy group dropout. I try, but I fail every time.)

It goes in waves: sometimes, especially after we’ve had people over or joined friends for dinner, I feel like we’re making progress. Other times – like now, after having spent the last few weeks as a little three-person island – I feel like we’re never really going to be part of the community. We’re in it, but we don’t belong. We have few attachments. And frankly, I don’t always like it here all that much. It’s hot, and I’m allergic to the pollen.

Today, I’d like to be back in California. I’d like to grab a sweatshirt, walk from our house to the shore, stop for a cup of coffee at the tiny independent coffee house along the way, enjoy the sunshine and clear air, let my son play on the beach, and relax into the slow-paced surfer-culture lifestyle.

Food (or lack thereof)

I feel like I can’t eat ANYTHING good anymore. Even with the Nexium, I still get reflux if I consume alcohol, chocolate (!!!), citrus, anything spicy, anything fatty (like cheese or ice cream), tomatoes, and pasta. At this point I am living on apples, apple juice, veggies, lowfat yogurt, rice, chicken, fish, and sprouted grain bread.  The good news is that I am eating healthfully and even losing some weight. The bad news is that I feel like I am in some sort of no-fun-food prison run by Gwyneth Paltrow and Zooey Deschanel. My idea of a gourmet meal is a chunk of artisan bread, some gouda, some arugula, a nice big piece of chocolate, and a glass of wine. I’ve never been the kind of girl who’s willing to deny myself just to be thin.

I draw the line at coffee, though. I’ll give up merlot and Hershey’s, but I need my joe.

Duckling

After nearly 2 1/4 years of ambivalence as to which parent he’d rather hang out with, Blur has suddenly decided that he and his mom need to be attached at the hip. While this is undeniably cute and sweet and flattering, it also makes getting stuff done pretty much impossible. WAHD had to take Blur out of the house several times yesterday (Sunday is always my busiest work day) because my little duckling kept barging into the office, drumming on the printer, pounding on the keyboard, and generally trying to capture my attention. Attempts to distract him with toys, games, balloons, and crayons proved futile. It was exhausting – not just for me, but for WAHD, too, because he always has things he needs to get done as well outside of changing diapers and giving baths. Sometimes, I envy families in which one person makes the money and one person manages the household. 

My weekends now are nothing like the  relaxing, do-nothing weekends I used to enjoy. Then, Saturdays and Sundays were all about sleep, eating, vegging out, running, and going on dates. Now, If I’m not actively parenting, I’m working. If I’m not working, I’m making grilled cheese sandwiches for lunch or playing cars or trying to figure out what it is, exactly, that Blur wants (he’s a little hard to understand sometimes). Dates are special occasions; vegging out happens only in my memories. 

Quality free time – on weekends or anytime else – is such a valuable and rare commodity for me now that I am a mom.  If I want time to myself, I either have to leave the house or make WAHD and Blur leave the house. And if I leave the house, I usually don’t know what to do with myself. I’m not much of a shopper, I hate movie theaters (especially alone), massages are too expensive to enjoy more than a couple of times a year, and my friends aren’t always available to entertain me. Usually, I’ll go to a coffee shop or the library and try to read, but more often than not, I end up thinking about WAHD and Blur and how I should really be hanging out with them. The invisible chain between me and Blur is truly permanent. I can’t just remove it for an afternoon.

Purple Pill

My wallet may as well have had a hole in it this morning. Between the hours of 8 a.m. and 10 a.m., I spent a whopping $680: $521 to pay the second installment of a dental crown that cost more than $1K in total, and $162 for a one month prescription of Nexium. I’ve known about the crown for weeks now, so I was prepared for that, but the prescription took me aback. $162! For 30 teeny purple pills! When the pharmacist reviewed my bill, he actually started to look a little nervous. He umm’d and hmm’d for a few seconds, then said, “Yeah… We’re going to have to talk about this. Your insurance only covered about $30.” He said if the Nexium takes care of my heartburn, I should ask my doctor for an alternative generic brand. Otherwise, I’m going to be handing over about $2000 a year to the fine folks at AstraZeneca. 

Our part-time employers don’t offer health coverage, so we purchase our own private insurance. For basic coverage with a high deductible, we spend about $400 a month. Preventative care (yearly physical, pap smears, etc.) is covered, as are two dental cleanings per year. As I discovered today, prescriptions are somewhat covered. Other office visits are not covered. Neither is dental work like fillings or, obviously, crowns. Theoretically, if something really bad and really expensive happened, something involving hospitals and operations, the insurance company would pay the bulk of it. Theoretically. Do I trust my insurance company to follow through? Not particularly. I’ve had bad experiences in the past (another story for another time). Based on those experiences, I’ve come to support some kind of universal government-sponsored health care option. It’s awful to have to pay today’s sky-high medical costs without having a safety net beneath you. I’m grateful – though perhaps grudgingly so – for the thin net we do have.

Anyway. Tomorrow morning I’ll be taking my first dose of Nexium. Here’s hoping it works better than the ineffective Prilosec I’ve been downing for the past two weeks. Acid reflux sounds like no biggie, but when it’s chronic, it’s persistently uncomfortable (even when I stick to my GERD-friendly diet).

Stuffed

WAHD and I went out to dinner ~alone~ for the first time in something like two months. For us, date night feels like a glistening, transient oasis in a vast 18-year-long desert. We enjoyed four hours to ourselves while Blur enjoyed an evening with his beloved babysitter (she does things like bring him Elmo kites and washable finger paints; in return, he worships her).

Now I am stuffed, and my throat hurts because I ate a load of food that exacerbates my acid reflux. It was good, though, and totally worth it. I had tortilla soup; a spicy seafood salsa made with shrimp, scallops, avocado, tomatoes, and tequila; part of WAHD’s delicious red snapper; a margarita; a vanilla latte with whipped cream and graham cracker crumbs on top; and a Diet Dr. Pepper (who brainwashed me into thinking that artificial sweetener negates calories? And yet somehow I seem to believe it…) I offer no apologies, not even for the whipped cream.

ETA, two hours later: Never mind. I do offer apologies, namely to my esophagus. I’m sorry, esophagus, for turning you into a pipe of burning, prickly pain. This will not happen again. No more spicy food, I promise. No more whipped cream. Decidedly less alcohol. Tomorrow I will go back to eating the (boring) food you like, such as apples, yogurt, and sprouted grain bread.

Overwhelmed

Too much work.

Too many responsibilities.

Too many people wanting stuff from me.

Too few hours in a day.

Too many things I love getting pushed off to the side.

Too many fears, fears that discourage me from making any changes.

Too much guilt over the fact that I simply can’t do it all.

That said, WAHD was AWESOME this afternoon and took Blur to the park so I could finish up some projects. Now I’m going to make dinner, drink a glass of wine, and pop in a Netflix movie.

Secrets

I’m going to spill a secret, something I’ve admitted to few people (especially other moms). In fact, if I had a little more time and more creativity, I’d achieve catharsis in a more anonymous way by scrawling this on a postcard and sending it to the Postsecret website. 

Here is what my postcard would say:

I make my husband put my son back to bed almost every time Blur wakes up in the middle of the night – and I have for the past two years. 

Keep in mind that Blur has never been a great sleeper. He wakes up a lot.

The truth is, I’m a beast when dragged from slumber anytime between the hours of midnight and six a.m.* I bump into walls, stub my fingers and toes, mutter to myself, and get really really frustrated really really fast. I’ll do anything else with little to no complaint: I will readily wash dishes, sweep floors, vacuum rugs, scrub windows, make dinner, do laundry, clean up poop and puke, dust the blinds, feed Blur, play with Blur, change Blur’s diaper… but somehow, like some sort of stereotypical 1950s sitcom dad, I struggle with middle-of-the-night wake ups. It’s my Achilles heel, my kryptonite. Heck, Oprah could shake me awake to tell me I’ve won a trip around the world and I’d still get pissed off. Maybe it’s a physiological thing. Maybe I have some sort of unnamed disorder. 

Luckily, WAHD saves the day (the night) every time. He’s a master at getting Blur to go back to bed. WAHD doesn’t particularly enjoy this duty, but unlike me, he does it without melting down. He says (with some resignation) that it’s easier on everyone to leave me be. Technically, since WAHD and I both work from home and neither of us has to get ready to leave the house each morning, I suppose it doesn’t matter. Someone needs to do it; he’s the better parent for that job. I still feel guilty. Being able to soothe your kid back to sleep seems like a touchstone of good mothering. Instead, I’m sprawled out under my sheets with my ears plugged.

So that’s my secret, and why I will never, ever be in the running for a Mother of the Year award.

*I would like to add, though, that when Blur threw up at 4 a.m. yesterday, I somehow managed to bounce out of bed, clean the carpet again, and get Blur to fall asleep for another hour. So that’s progress. By the time he’s ready for Kindergarten, I should be just about there.

Sickie

Blur got sick yesterday. It was one of those out-of-the-blue things: one second he was blazing his usual path of destruction, and the next, his lunch was all over his bedroom floor. Even Blur looked surprised. WAHD dunked him in the bath while I did hazmat duty, cleaned the carpet, and started a hot load of laundry.

Luckily, that was his only bout of puking (thank GOD… A few months ago, he came down with a stomach bug that made me feel like I was in a remake of The Exorcist). He ran a mild fever last night and woke up this morning in a subdued state, even going so far as to sit on the couch and watch a full hour of Thomas the Train. By evening, though, he was back to his old tricks, racing back and forth between the front door and the back door and tossing balloons into the air.

I hope WAHD and I can avoid catching whatever it is he had. If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s gastrointestinal issues. I went 13 years without puking, and then I had Blur. I am no match for hardy, vile kid germs.