We had a meeting over the phone with Chickadee's "treatment team" (and I use that term loosely) last week, during which I'm pretty sure my head exploded. In the aftermath I had a small tantrum and then returned to all of the things I'm supposed to be doing. We took Chickie out for a while on Saturday and on the drive home I made Otto stop and get me some coffee because I was starting to feel that bone-crushing weariness that was putting me to sleep while I was sitting up. He stopped; I drank my coffee; I fell asleep anyway. And then we came home and I was futzing around online, and while...
So, I have a confession to make: Today's post of mine over at Feel More Better, about how today's teens text more than they talk, is a little more grumpy than it seems on the surface. Yes, I'm wondering about the parallels between what they do now, and the note-scribbling, constant-phone-talking existence I led as a teen. Sure. But really, deep down? What I was thinking about when I wrote it is that Chickadee's received exactly two contacts from friends since her hospitalization: One lengthy letter from a lovely young woman who also emails to ask me how she is, and one card from a friend...
If Chickadee had cancer---if she had a tumor in her brain or rogue cells infiltrating her marrow---everything would be different. Well, almost everything. The thing that wouldn't be different would be the fear and the worry and the what-if-ing I try to only indulge in in the middle of the night. But people wouldn't avoid us or say, "I don't know what to say." They would say, "I'm so sorry" and they wouldn't act like we were contagious or whisper about our parenting. Our health insurance would pay for her treatment, because that's what health insurance is supposed to do. Even though brain...
This one goes out to all of my fellow parents of teenagers, with love and respect. God, grant me the serenity to accept that the only difference between teens and psychopaths is that most teens eventually change, The courage to smile around gritted teeth and ground the offender, And the wisdom not to smother anyone in their sleep no matter how tempting. I'm not saying that things won't change, because---as ever---my mantra is "this too shall pass," I'm just saying that right now we are realizing that things are pretty off-kilter around here, and it's time to find that missing balance. That...
I told someone yesterday that if our life right now was a novel or a movie, I'd be rolling my eyes at how unrealistic it is, because NO ONE has luck that bad. It's just not believable. In other words: How was your weekend? Ours involved The Hunger Games, and then stomach flu. Yes. Because of course it did. And it's not like the kid hasn't missed a bazillion days of school already.... Anyway, because I suspect you'd rather not hear stories about rainbow gummy worm puke (see?), today you can go on over to Off Our Chests and read about flying, instead. What greater joy is available to the...
I was feeling pretty good yesterday, which was surely my first mistake. Sure, the pollen count is SO HIGH (how high is it?) that no one can breathe, but whatever. Details. Yesterday evening Chickadee commenced falling into giant chunks of woe and sickness, and the FANFUCKINGTABULOUS thing about the combination of 1) chronic illness and 2) TEH DRAMAAAAHZ is that it can be very difficult to suss out what is a real crisis and what is merely a teenage crisis. It took the threat of a trip to the ER and about an hour on the phone with various doctors to determine a course of action and decide she...
In 2010, Monkey had a seizure, and I spent about three weeks completely convinced that he had a brain tumor. Otto and I lay in bed at night, holding hands, talking quietly about the "what if"s and sometimes about nothing very important, just because neither of us could sleep and it was comforting to whisper in the dark, together. Then the flu tore through the house the next month, causing us to cancel our holiday trip, and our battle cry became "2011!" As in, "2011 is gonna be our year!" Well, 2011 was good in that we found out that Monkey didn't have a tumor and wasn't dying. That was VERY...
Oh, hello. You know what's awesome? Being the sort of person who is prone to psychosomatic illness. Now, a lot of people think that "psychosomatic" means "faked," but in fact it means real physical illness that just happens to be caused or aggravated by mental factors such as stress. If they gave grades in psychosomatic maladies, I would get an A+, as well as comments like, "Really gives it her all!" and "Rarely do I see this sort of dedication." When I made it through our two-week-long tour of illness, stress, and family dysfunction over the holidays with nary a sniffle, I was set to...
Yesterday I was crazed, swamped with work I'd put off all weekend, trying to carve out a spot in the afternoon to write here. Because although I write for a living, writing HERE is what keeps me sane and grounded (despite periodic exclamation-point-riddled evidence to the contrary). But then my work day got cut short, because Chickadee---who has been doing her very best recently to make me reconsider selling her to the circus---texted me from school. During school. Which was weird. And it got weirder. And my baby wasn't okay, and despite weeks of clashing wills and shrill shrieking about how...
