Iowadrift

Enormous Changes At The Last Minute

I'm not sure where the title came from, but I know it's from SOMEWHERE: a book chapter? a film?  Bonus points if you know; consider yourself smart.

The changes to which the title refers are two, really.  First, after all my going on about adoption, we found out today that we essentially failed the homestudy.  Well, that sounds dramatic: really what happened was the very nice social worker called us up, after we'd had three interviews, and told us that after consulting with some other staff and reading our (read:my) medical records, The Agency felt strongly that for us to pursue adoption would "put our family at unacceptable risk."  In other words, I'm a little too close to a history of PPD that was a little too severe for comfort--theirs OR mine.

Oddly, my main emotion is vast relief.  While one part of me loved the idea of adoption and welcomed the changes it would bring, another part of me was beginning to get panicky about it: the further we went in the process, the more panicky I got.  So this feels like a hard but necessary reality check, one better faced now than, God forbid, later.  I want to be the kind of person who can navigate three children, but the fact is, I don't think I am.  Better to find that out now.

TTD seems to be OK with it too, I think because I was always the driving force behind this anyway, and because he harbored the same fears The Agency did.  So we're all on the same page.

The second change is that I am going to give the blog a rest for a while.  I want to concentrate on my own writing for a while, and I'm finding that writing here is feeling more and more like a distraction--and I'm sure you can tell by the perfunctory nature of the last months' entries.  So thank you all for reading, and I will be lurking on your blogs, enjoying them, and I have loved hanging out with you here.  Be well!

Cheers,

Gallaudet (Bihari), David (TTD), Sparhawk (Rabbit) and Rowan (Urplet)

All Better

So, the rash faded away into the sunset, thank goodness, and my hindquarters have gone back to looking like themselves (or has gone back to looking like itself?) again.  What the hell was that, anyway?  Neither TTD nor I have a clue.

It is hot hot hot hot hot here, proper summer at last.  Today I had to drive about an hour to a homestudy interview, and I actually had the top UP in the Mini because the sun was just too fryingly hot to topless driving.  Heh.  I am a wizard with the puns.

I'm going on another drive tomorrow, to see...dum dum dum...my ex.  We haven't seen each other in eleven years, since the day we went to court for our divorce.  He's living about an hour away from where I live, and is currently around between overseas trips (he has his own outdoor adventure business and leads trips to sea kayak in Baja, work on national parks in Costa Rica, and do I-don't-know-what-all in Siberia).  I don't know what it will be like to see him, but I'm looking forward to it, since he has, of course, his own place in my heart and always will have. 

Hey, speaking of that: any of you out there who have divorced, remarried, and then had kids--how did you explain the concept of an ex-spouse to your children, and when?  I'd love to hear.

Oops, crying child.  Bye.

I Have Got To Get A Grip Here

Oh geez, the guilt.  Here I make all kinds of big promises to myself and others, and totally renege.  Is that how you spell renege? Help.

But it's symptomatic of what's going on with me these days, which is, I think, a big, cosmic sigh of relief after the last six months of Mali and moving.  I am breathing out these days, and my shoulders are slowly retreating from their usual position around my ears, and I am spending whole days just swinging in the hammock with the boys and contemplating the weeds in the vegetable garden.  Or the deer in the vegetable garden; we have a deer couple who stroll on through in the afternoons and eat the corn, the lettuce, and the heads off the hosta.  I am, in short, sliding into my usual summer torpor with even more speed than usual, and blaming it (the torpor, the speed, whatever: I can't even be bothered to match pronouns to antecedents) on let-down from the move.

Problem is, I really need to, like, keep doing laundry and cooking and buying the boys some shoes and getting them haircuts and cleaning the turtle tank and balancing the checkbook and all that good stuff which I usually do almost without thinking about it. Now every action seems to require a great deal of pondering, and even when I do launch on a project, it's liable to founder halfway through as I take off on a snake hunt with Rabbit, or give in to Urplet's demand for cuddles.  All of which is fine, but the refrigerator is starting to look like a New York bachelor's and the boys have run out of clean underpants, and the bittersweet vines (think kudzu) are eating the paddock fence, the apple orchard, the raspberry canes, and the grape arbor. I need to get a move on.

In other news, TTD and I go in for our individual homestudy interviews this week, him on Tuesday and me on Wednesday.  I'm curious about the kinds of questions we'll get asked, and the kinds of answers we'll give (because of course we'll compare notes).  Do you think I should mention the fact that TTD is actually a CIA operative, or should I let him disclose that himself?  Do you think he'll reveal my strange addiction to chewy sugar (SweetTarts, Hot Tamales, Sprees)?  And what do you think they'll make of it all?

Because it's odd in the extreme to contemplate an outside observer stepping into our family and assessing it--assessing US.  The Agency and our social worker are very clear that we are not being "vetted" so much as being invited into a process or on a journey, with The Agency and the MSW as guides who can point out traps and dangerous spots, hand us maps and reference books, and explain the terrain and what kind of shoes we might want to wear.  Still, I find it hard not to be a little anxious that we will somehow be found wanting, pronounced not good enough, declared unfit.  Because isn't that every parent's fear?  That her best will not be good enough for her children?

I know, I know.  I didn't say this was a rational thought (or post); I'm just expounding away as I am wont to do.  But think about it.  How much would you clean up your house for the social worker's visit, for instance, and what kinds of things would you do while she was here?  Humph, said the camel.

I just heard the Rabbit, who's playing with trains in the next room, say, "Mama?"  When I said, "Yes, buddy, I'm right here," he said, "Oh, I know where you are, and I don't have any questions for you.  I just wanted to hear your voice."

Nothing Like Starting A New Decade By Reneging On Promises

Mea culpa, mea culpa...here I announce with abandon that I'll be posting every day for a month, and promptly don't.  I can only plead the most bizarre illness I have ever had, and one that I hope you never get, because it's just STRANGE.  Viz: on Monday I got a rough, red, bumpy rash all over my torso and back and butt and upper legs and forearms.  Kind of itchy but not bad, no other symptoms.  Hmmm, thought I.  I'd had something similar when I was pregnant (which no, I am not now) and figured it must just be a recurrance due to fluctuating hormone levels, some unknown combination of environmental triggers, you name it, who cares, it wasn't bothering me.  I did what every good nurse does when she gets sick: I ignored it and figured it would go away.

Which it refuses to do.  Instead, it has stuck around, and has TURNED MY BUTT RED.  Yes!  This rash has decided to become confluent (i.e. the red dots have merged) all over my butt and upper thighs, and has further insulted me by providing me with swollen, sore bilateral inguinal nodes.  And no, it's not some strange, or even not so strange, STD: I'm not going into details on how I know it isn't, but it isn't.  I mean, we're old, and monogamous, and long married, and that's just not an issue, and as I said, I'm not going into any more details.  I feel OK, though achey and tired and a little like I have a cold, and I'm fever-free, but my whole lower body is annoyingly edematous (as in, my butt doesn't want to fit in my pants, and I know I haven't suddenly gained fifteen pounds or changed my entire shape) and I mean, what the hell? 

TTD and I have batted differential diagnoses around, without coming to the ah-ha conclusions we would have reached were we on a network medical show, and nobody else in the family has caught it and I am, if not improving dramatically, certainly not getting worse, so we're inclined to continue in our practice of ignoring it and seeing if it goes away, but I have to say, HUMPH.  A bug that makes your butt big?  That's insult to injury.

Oh, and in other breaking news, I padded downstairs at three a.m. the other night to make the wakeful Urp a waffle (growth spurt, yada yada) and guess who was back, lounging on the kitchen rug right beside Yellow Boy the cat?  Yes indeedy: your friend and mine, the skunk.  I beat a hasty retreat upstairs and eventually awoke TTD, who went down and followed the skunk at a respectful distance until he (the skunk, not TTD) had meandered through the dining room and the living room and back out the shed door.  Followed by Yellow Boy, who is clearly either friends or smitten with the skunk.

What a ridiculous week.

A Day of Beginnings

We went for our first homestudy interview today at the adoption agency.  It was wonderful, actually; TTD and I always enjoy getting to go for a drive alone together, and the interview itself, which lasted more than two hours, was kind of a perfect mix of information dissemination, couples counseling, and issue raising.  We liked our social worker, too: oddly, she grew up around the corner from me, and we went to the same schools!  She has two adopted daughters herself, and so can talk about adoption from both personal and professional points of view, and that's helpful.  Really, the whole thing was helpful.  There's a lot to learn, a lot to think about--and by the way, thank you to those of you who shared something of your own adoption experiences and stories in the comments, and who gave me links to explore. 

As you can tell by the vagueness of the above paragraph, I am still taking it all in.  It feels right in a very deep-seated way to contemplate bringing our daughter home; it reminds me of the first days after I found out I was pregnant, when I wasn't sick or tired yet and hadn't gotten into the nitty-gritty of buying diapers and cribs, and was nine months away from the sleepless hormonal tsunami of the post-partum days.  Those first days of knowing I was pregnant were golden; they let me appreciate the reality of what was happening, unobscured by the exhaustion and daily irritability which usually fog the mirrors of my mind and heart.  And right now, I feel the same way (only, you know, the fog is there too, more like a miasma than mist, really, created by two yelling, grinning, popsicle-sticky, farting little boys).  The adoption fog will drift in, sifting down from clouds of beauracracy, jet lag, culture shock and family dynamics, but right now the horizen is still clear and I can see an amazing sight: our daughter, out there somewhere (Is she alive now?  In utero?  Just born?): a child: a PERSON.

In the spirit, I suppose, of "Know then thyself," we did a lot of talking about ourselves in the interview.  SSW (Smart Social Worker) started by asking how we arrived at adoption, and we had all kinds of answers for that one, because they pretty much tell you to contemplate that before you come in.  We've always wanted to have two children and adopt one, we said: we don't kid ourselves that we can save the world, but we'd like to give one child a home who might not otherwise have one: we would love a daughter and we're through having children ourselves, because we are old and I am not, but not, risking PPD like that again (though it's possible to have it after an adoption, so believe me, the Rescue Plan is already in place for THAT eventuality).  We've always wanted a slightly bigger family than just (well, not "just") two children, but see above re: continued procreation.  I, Larki, have had several intense experiences of being welcomed and living with families overseas, and I would love my own family to reflect that.   We want to hook our hearts into the world in this particular way.  But really, honestly, the most important reason is that we just know we're supposed to, and there you have it.

SSW did not seem to find this strange at all: in fact, one of the things I like about her, and about all the other workers I've met at The Agency so far, is this combination of total pragmatism, experienced realism, and openness to mystery.  That combination is what I aim for in mothering, and I am reassured to find it reflected in The Agency, and to deal with people who understand when I say, "I don't know, we just suddenly realized this spring that now was the time, and even though there are plenty of reasons we could give (child spacing, our ages, blah blah), the real reason is that both of us felt a strong pull, simultaneously, and knew we had to explore this." 

And boy is there a lot to explore.  Culture, race, birth mothers, sibling integration, medical background, you name it.  We are diligently reading books, of course, and we do a five hour pre-adoption class in July, and we have several more hours of homestudy interviews, followed by an actual study of the home (Note to self; remove hamster droppings from playroom carpet.  Also try to get Rabbit and Urplet to stop dropping trou and peeing on whatever bush they happen to be passing when they feel The Call.).  The Agency gives us all kinds of contacts for parents who live in our town and already have adopted children, and for parents in the area who have adopted from Ethiopia.  For now we are staying mostly clear of the adoption scene on the Internet, because I find it overwhelming and think perhaps it will be more useful when we actually HAVE Little Girl at home with us.  But still, all the dutiful, loving preparation in the world can't prepare you. 

Much like when you have biokids of your own.  In fact, I'm surprised at how many bells rang for me during the interview today, at how many issues seem to be extensions of issues we already deal with with our own children.  For instance, the issue of bringing home a child who may turn out to have very, very different interests and very, very different personality traits from TTD and me and our families: that's actually not so different from giving birth to a child who could turn out to be very, very different from us as well.  In both cases, we're going to have to, as my mother has always chanted, "Know your child, accept your child, receive your child."  (Yes, I have an incredibly good and wise mother).  Who IS this person?  What does he or she need from me to find and develop her or his passions and talents?  What language can I speak that she will hear?  What tools does he most need me to hand him or help him uncover on his own?  In a lot of ways, the questions are the same for any child I raise.  And I find that reassuring, not in a Pollyanna way but more in a, "Hmm, yeah, I've been living this a bit already," way.

Then there's the issue of walking with your child through her pain.  In an adopted child's case, there seem to be some obvious areas which could prove painful: racial differences from the community in which she's raised, racial differences from US, the whole issue of having birth parents who she may never have known and, if she's an orphan, will never know.  The issue of difference, period.  And yet, in other ways, difference will crop up in Rabbit's life and in Urplet's life, and will prove painful as well, and I suppose learning to walk through it with them will help me walk with my daughter through whatever pain awaits her, too.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not minimizing the particular problems and difficulties an adopted child faces, particularly a child from another country.  But I am oddly encouraged to realize that the problems and challenges are often extensions of the ones every child faces, and that in some ways TTD and I have already begun to deal with them in the course of being Rabbit's parents (because he's the oldest and the most like, you know, a person).  But of course, let us remember that there are challenges I cannot even imagine now, things will hit me over the head and stun me: let us not forget that, please.  Feel free to remind me of it, in fact.

Still, nothing can change the fact that I feel a deep, glowing delight at starting this journey, and it feels exactly like the deep, glowing delight I felt when the lines on the stick turned pink. Only without the bloating, barfing, constipation, weight gain, insomnia, sciatica, headaches, and hemorrhoids.

Now...from the sublime to the automotive...we picked up the Mini today!  Oh, how it is cute!  So much with the cuteness! And the smallness!  And the black racing stripes, the chrome trim, the navy leather seats with "burnt orange" stitching, the cute little driving lights, the cloth top which folds down and makes me want to wear sunglasses and tie a scarf over my hair and turn into Faye Dunaway or somebody!  It's all good.  And fun to drive, so tight on the corners and so very, very unlike the dear, middle-aged minivan.   Neither TTD nor I have ever, in all our lives, come anywhere near doing something as extravagant as this, and we are totally bemused and delighted.  Idiots, but happy idiots in a convertible.

Come Up And See Our Etchings

Our cats like it here.  They can settle into open, sunny windows like pencils into grooves and watch the cardinals on the bird feeders; they can lounge belly-up on the back porch and listen to voles rustling underground; they can make friends and invite them home for snacks.  And it's this last which is worrying me.

TTD and I had just turned out the light on Thursday night when we heard a resounding crash from the kitchen.  "Uh oh," we thought.  "The cats have succeeded in knocking the hamster cage off its perch, or they have dragged fifty pounds of cat food from under the sink, displacing pots and pans as they go, or they have decided to rearrange the furniture."  TTD fulfilled his husbandly duty by heading downstairs in his underwear to check out the scene, and a moment later I heard him call, very softly, "Babe?  I need you down here."

I went down (you have to go slowly down our back stairs, as they are slightly steeper and more dangerous than the Hilary Step atop Everest: we should have belay lines) and found TTD standing in the kitchen doorway, holding a broom and staring across the kitchen.  "Look," he said in a whisper. 

I looked.  Both cats were lying, totally relaxed, bellies a-flop, atop the kitchen table.  Beneath them, on the floor, also totally relaxed with belly a-flop, lay a baby skunk.  A real, right, and proper skunk, black with white stripes and a bushy tail, obviously blissfully at home.

I froze.  What if it sprayed?  We'd have to move out, literally, and get some disaster-restoration firm to detoxify the house.  What if, like a racoon and a skunk captured recently in the neighboring town, it was rabid?  What if it decided to charge us?  DO skunks charge?  And why had our cats invited it in to snack on the cat food?

And snack it did.  As TTD and I watched, motionless (I never did establish exactly what TTD hoped to accomplish with the broom), the skunk waddled over to the cat food, crunched up a whole bowl full, then headed for the kitchen door, which was closed.  Then he (she?) headed for the back door, which was also closed.  He seemed to know exactly where the food and the exits were, and this, combined with the cats' total nonchalance, made us think he'd been visiting several times before.  Finally he lay down beneath the TV in the playroom for a few minutes, then got up and let himself out the playroom door into the shed, a door which Yellow, our smartest cat, often shoves open at night if we forget to lock it.  TTD and I collapsed in a sort of hysterical fit of relief, and the cats just lay there, staring at us.

I am all for wildlife, and I enjoy the coyotes calling in our woods, the crickets and frogs going at it in the summer evenings, the woodchuck munching the asparagus in the garden.  But I draw the line at skunks helping themselves to midnight snacks in our kitchen.  I really do.

All is well, however, because tomorrow we go pick up the Mini, and I am like a little kid on the night before Christmas.  Santa brought me a car!  Santa brought me a car!  Oh boy oh boy oh boy!  (Note to self: put roof up on car at night, so skunks do not go joyriding).

Forty If She's A Day

I have always had quiet birthdays (except for my 32nd in India, where I was feted and wined and dined and showered with presents, because they are all about over-the-top celebration there).  But here, in the States, things have tended toward family parties, ice cream and cake, a generous and most welcome check from the parentals, and something fabulous from my brother, the World's Best Present-Giver.  I've always enjoyed everything on offer, but I confess that in recent years I'd begun to yearn for something extravagent, something surprising and ridiculous, something really FESTIVE.  And this year, the yearning--a rather shamefaced yearning, because I am not a surprising and ridiculous type, besides which, I am a little old to be so very into, um, presents and, um, parties for, um, me--kind of ratcheted up because I am (or was; it's all over now) turning forty, which feels significant.

Well.  WELL.  WELL!!!  I am here to report that this birthday was, as Rabbit said repeatedly, "the best birthday ever, right Mama!"  It was!  Thank you, dearest Huzzband and Parentals and Brother and Cool Cousins!  Thank you!

First off, TTD let me sleep until noon, literally, on Saturday, which was my actual birthday.  Then he and Da Boyz returned from a bike ride to a nature lecture at the State Park down the road, and Rabbit told me all about worms.  What better way to start your decade than with lots of sleep and an informative session on the reproductive and elimination habits of earthworms?  Rabbit even took the gummy worms he'd scored at the lecture and crafts session and tucked them into the cockpit of his toy plane.  "The Wormidi family is going for a ride," he told me.

Then the TTD family went for a ride to Grandmother and Grandfather's house, where we left the little boys tucked beneath Grandfather's arm, listening to "Old Mother West Wind," and eating crackers, and drove to the local country club for cocktails and the best damn buffet ever.  What could be more entertaining than eating perfect lobster salad, followed by luscious creme brulee, while watching an endless parade of tanned men in bright green slacks dotted with navy lobsters? 

Well, for one thing, a family party with cake and ice cream and presents--Prana yoga pants from Brother, hooray, he has amazing taste and I have been dying for real yoga clothes; a beautiful silver cross on a leather chain from TTD, along with even more beautiful pearl-and-peridot earrings and another set of turquoise flower earrings; a gift certificate for an hour massage from Cousin; a check from Generous Parentals.  The sun was out, we basked, we ate chocolate cake with buttercream frosting, and raspberies and ice cream and chocolate sauce.  I luxuriated, wore earrings, and felt grateful.

But. You haven't heard half of it yet.  Do you know what TTD did before we went to the party on Saturday?  Get this.  Get this!!   Really, did I make it clear you should get this?  Sit up and pay attention, because TTD? 

BOUGHT ME A CONVERTIBLE MINI COOPER FOR MY FORTIETH BIRTHDAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

"Cool Blue," with black racing stripes and heated leather seats.

AAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Typing With a Fat Two Year Old On My Lap

Thank you for all your comments!  It was such fun to log on today and find all these good wishes for both the birthday and the Rugrat (the latter being, I'm afraid, the way TTD and I refer to the daughter we hope finds us).  Cyberspace has given me a lovely community--that would be YOU, reading this, so go buy yourself something nice and frivolous--and I am so grateful.

Today was sort of a beginning birthday, in that my mother came up and watched the kids while I went for a massage (!!!!!) and then had lunch with a dear friend (beautiful, PhD in philosophy from Harvard, mother of a six and a three year old, writing a book on Kant, and yet you can't hate her because she's so real and funny) who lives here in my new town.  She gave me a magnolia tree, which was a much better present than the one I'd bought myself while browsing some shops before lunch: I bought some Spanx under--hmm, undergarments?  Girdles, actually.  I bought GIRDLES.  Because I am FLABBY and when I wear a thin rayon dress out on Saturday my rear view is going to look, to quote my grandfather, "like two racoons fighting in a bag."  Anyway, the magnolia tree was better than the Spanx.  I'm going to dig a big hole and plant it tomorrow, right outside the kitchen window where I'll be able to enjoy it and think of her for, I hope, years and years and years. 

So the day wore on and I spent a while sitting in the sun admiring my tree and fending off small boys (Urp: "I want to bite!  I want to bite!"), then I failed to get Urp down for a nap, decided to bring the boys to the beach, did so, got eaten to pieces by midges, fled, and ended up at a harborside playground climbing on whale sculptures and eating PB&J.  Now I am blogging madly while TTD drags everyone (tired, sticky, sandy, dirty, cranky everyone) upstairs for baths.  And oops, they are melting down.  Have to run.  Back in a minute.

Hi, I'm back.  TTD and I have just finished going over the autobiographical questionnaires our social worker sent us in preparation for our first home study interview next Tuesday, and though we filled the papers out separately, we ended up checking exactly the same boxes, which I hope is a good sign.  Look, see how well-adjusted and harmonious we are!  Look at our absolutely dazzling level of insight and our sparkling judgement!  OK, if not that, then look at our legible penmanship, itself miraculous when you consider its medical-practitioner origins. 

The home study interview is one of the earliest steps in what's going to be a very long process.  We went to an introductory meeting a few days after we arrived in MA, and learned a bit about the basic process and the different country options, then sent in the first round of registration paperwork and received two fat packets of more papers in return.  I ran around getting things notarized, finding birth certificates, xeroxing IRS 1040's, etc, and sent THAT packet in, along with a bunch of requests to various agencies for criminal background checks (they will find a lot of parking tickets) and sterling references.  About ten minutes after the agency, which we will call The Agency, received that stuff, a Social Worker Woman called us to set up the first of three home study interviews: one with TTD and me together, one with each of us individually, and one at our house, where Social Worker Woman will be able to watch both our sons prance out onto the deck at intervals, pull down their pants, and whizz onto the boxwood plants which border the deck, and which are starting to die from a surfeit of uric acid.   

After the home study finishes and The Agency signs off on it (we hope, we hope, we hope: we are trying not to get all wacko neurotic at the prospect of people scrutinizing our parenting, and we, or at least I, are not succeeding) the state of MA does a lot of fiddling around to make sure we're not fishy, and THEN what The Agency calls our Dossier, which sounds to me like something out of The Bourne Identity, gets sent to Ethiopia, where they do who knows what with it.  Eventually, if we are both blessed and lucky, Ethiopia will refer a child to us, and we will go to Addis Ababa to pick her up.  And yes, we are allowed to request a girl, since our children are both boys.  The actual time from Dossier-to-Ethiopia to a child's being referred can be as little as one month or as many as eighteen.  So we have no idea how long this will all take.

I am excited.  I am nervous.  I am braced for a long haul.  It's a bit like deciding to try to conceive a child: the only thing you know is that anything can happen, and that nothing will be as you imagine.  TTD says he feels the same way.   And  Rabbit has been asking for a baby for the last year, so I think will be very pleased about this: he certainly has been glad to have a little brother from the moment Rooster came home from the hospital, and he also has this strange sort of baby jones, where he just can't get enough of them and wants to stare at them and pinch their little cheeks all the time.  As for Rooster (Urp's current nickname), I have no idea, but whatever his reaction, it will be loud, long and definite.

So, have any of you adopted children, or are any of you in the process, or considering it?  Are any of you adopted yourselves?  If you are, or do, or have, I would love to hear about it.  I love hearing from you anyway: you know me, I'm a comment slut. 

A sleepy comment slut.  I was putting Urp down tonight and telling him a story as I rocked him in the dark, and as I often do, I began to fall asleep as I talked.  I had been telling a story about Thomas the Tank Engine, I think, but I woke up to hear myself say, "And then Thomas dropped off Percy at the sheds, and then he dropped off the lyrics for the toothbrush, and then he dropped off the Elvis impersonator for Daddy."

Please don't tell The Agency that story.   The lyrics for the toothbrush?  I ask you.

New Decade, Anyone?

I know I said I was going to write more PPD-type stuff, but I am feeling like taking a break from that: I can only immerse myself in it for so long, you know?  I'll get back to it, but not right now.  In the meantime, thanks for the comments, which are always so encouraging in making me feel like I am not alone in my wierdness.  You're all wierd with me!  Or wait, that didn't come out quite right...never mind.  You get the picture.

Wow, how was THAT for a substance-free paragraph?  Let's try something else, like I am going to be forty on Saturday. Yes.  You heard me.  On June 9th.  Forty.

I think I'm supposed to rend my garments and beat my breast at this point, but since I like my leopard-print PJ's and anyway have no breasts to speak of, I'll give the lamentations a miss.  Because actually, I am delighted to be turning over a new decade.  I feel more like myself the older I get (which means, I suppose, that I was born middle-aged), and I like the feeling that I've paid some dues and now get to take up space in the world without apologizing as constantly as I felt I needed to in my twenties.  I like that I have finished graduate school (or schools, as the case may be) and worked for long enough to feel confident in my career.  I like--I love--that I have two children and a husband whom I adore.  I love that I can write about something besides what Frank Conroy termed, "the emergency of YOU."  I love having a fresh start in a new town, a new house, a house where I want to stay (with frequent sojourns abroad!) forever.  I love that I start this decade close to my parents and my brother.  I love that I take Lexapro every night and wake up in the morning NOT feeling as though just getting out of bed is going to reduce me to irritable tears and despair.  In short, I am grateful for this birthday and the life surrounding it.

Not that I love everything and everybody, don't get me wrong.  I am Scroogey as ever.  My skin is dry, there's a strange sausage of fat developing around my mouth, as it does around everyone in my family's mouths at forty, and my hair is no-color mixed with gray (OK, my real hair is that.  My visible hair is platinum, and I still love that, embarrassingly much).  My neck has gone all Nora Ephron on me.  I have age spots on my hands, cellulite on my ass, and crepey, post-child-having skin around my belly button.  My back aches, small boys tire me, my arches are falling, my teeth are chipping, and I have to get mammograms.  And let's just not get into the ageing, post-childbirth bladder.

Also, I am sad, the way everyone in middle life is sad, because sad things have happened, and even the joyful things, like healthy children, are shot through with, at best, the poignancy of  impermanence.  I have now lived long enough that my emotions are adulterated: joy carries sadness within it, and sadness carries a kernel of joy.  The intensity and purity of my twenty-year-old emotions has changed--not dwindled, but mellowed and mixed and deepened.  My heart belongs to lots of people besides just me; when I grocery shop, I buy toothpaste and toilet paper for a whole family.  I am not wise, but I am beginning to be experienced in certain things (like, oh, how to keep the cats tick-free; not, sadly, in child-raising or getting books published).  I  have more gravitas than I had in my twenties, and at the same time I am more buoyant.  Which makes me what, a fat swim float?  Now there's a mental image to treasure on my birthday.

There's another image I do treasure, however, and that's the image of three children in our family instead of two.  No, I am not pregnant.  Yes, TTD went and got himself fixed last year.  But we have started the (long, slow) process of trying to adopt a child--a girl, we hope--from Ethiopia.

I thought for a while about whether I wanted to blog about this, and decided that yes, I do.  I want to write about the whole journey, however it ends up and however long it takes, because as I said in an earlier post, I want this blog to be as real a picture as I can make it of my life at any given moment.  I think in my next post I'll write more about how we came to this decision and what the road ahead may entail, but for now, suffice it to say, we hope that in a year or eighteen months or so, the boys will have a little sister from Africa.

And one more thing.  This blog has been languishing of late, but I have a few new-decade resolutions and one of them is to post every day for the next month, and two or three times a week after that.  So starting on Saturday, brace yourself for an avalanche of minutiae and verbiage.  I mean, can you THINK of anything more celebratory?

I can.  I'm going out dancing with my family and TTD on Saturday night, and I have a rockin' new flowered dress and very sexy platforms, and I plan to drink champagne.  Happy Birthday to me!

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

It's been a very baby week.  First, The Motel Manager had a beautiful, adorable son on May 14th, who spent all last night screaming his head off, so everyone head over there, read all about it, and offer her some words of fellow-feeling, solace, or wisdom, whatever you have available at the moment. 

Then, Elsa and Clio came to visit today with their parents, Jane and A. Folks, never have I seen such adorable five-month-old twin girls, and definitely not since The Deadbeat (to whom I would link if she still blogged) have I seen such competent, smart, relaxed parents.  It was a delight to coo over the girls, poke their fat cheeks, watch their parents heave them around in carseats, and admire their mother's truly spectacular rack.  Also, Rabbit, who love babies, thought he'd died and gone to heaven: TWO babies, right here in the living room!  At one point he asked me, "Do you think they'd like to play on my swing set in the yard?  Or maybe the baby grownups would like to play too?"  By "the baby grownups" of course he meant Jane and A.  Sadly, it's been raining here for five days (tell you what I think about THAT) and nobody ended up on the swing set, but still, it was a nice offer.

So that's the good, with maybe a little bad thrown in when you consider the all night screaming fest mentioned above.  The ugly, fortunately, is not current, but it's something I've been wanting to write about for a long time, and for some reason now feels like the time to do it.  Well, probably not NOW, b/c it's late and I'm tired, but a little now and a lot later.  Namely; Post-Partum Depression (PPD). 

I know I've talked a little about it before.  But it's only now, when I've been on Lex.apro for three months and am really, finally feeling like me again, that I'm beginning to comprehend how bad it was. 

With Rabbit, it wasn't THAT bad.  It manifested itself as anxiety, mostly, and as an inability to really enjoy him as an infant.  And, you know, the colic didn't help and neither did his refusal to sleep through the night until we (and I do mean we) cried it out at thirteen months. But still, I was so TENSE.  Not just new parent tense, but crazy tense.  I thought if I didn't get it right (get WHAT right, I think now), something awful would happen.  I had to get him on a schedule, I had to get him sleeping, I had to do everything perfectly, and I thought that if I just did that then he'd never cry, he'd always be happy...well, you see how far from reality I was.  What it boiled down to was this awful guilt and second-guessing, following me around all the time, eating away at my enjoyment of my baby and my ability to let go and just flipping look after him on a daily basis without getting chewed up by an existential crisis every time he cried. 

But down at the bottom of it all, I still felt like myself.  I still recognized myself.  And by the time Rabbit was one, I'd relaxed a lot and learned the sanity-making value of frequent babysitting.  Which is when I got pregnant with Urp and went crazy.

I found out I was pregnant when Rabbit was sixteen months.  We'd wanted another child; we'd been (I love this phrase) "trying" for three months.  But when I saw pink line number two on the stick, my first thought was, "Wait, I'm not ready yet!"  Then, about three weeks later, I woke up one morning and didn't recognize myself.  I was mean, I was angry, I didn't want any part of my family.  And I was stupid, because even though it got worse and worse I didn't realize that 20% of PPD starts DURING PREGNANCY.  And after the birth, whooeee.  There followed eighteen months of awful.  Awful.  Terrible.  Terrible for me, worse for TTD and Rabbit and Urp.  I'll get into more detail with my next post, but for now, suffice it to say that the whole experience was like  being eaten by a black hole: my center, my self, felt like it was rotting, and all I had to take its place was anger and guilt and a kind of cosmic irritation.

And then I started to get better.  I got a job, I got out of the house, I met other mothers, I started doing yoga again instead of just running all the time, and the kids started sleeping more, and my hormones balanced out (I presume) and I got a little better.  But finally, in February 2007, I realized that I was still dragging a smallish ball and chain of guilt and explosive rage and resentment and exhaustion and absent-mindedness and lack of appetite and desire to sleep constantly and all that, and I went to my very good doctor and said, "Can I have Lex.apro?" 

Which, for me, works.  Beautifully.  I feel like I'm a window and someone finally cleaned me.  I can see out of my eyes now.  There's a me inside here again.  It's not all hearts and roses, but I can function, and I can enjoy my little boys, and savor my food, and wake up without weeping at the thought of getting through a day, and I am so grateful.  Yay, drugs!  Yay, Lexa.pro!

So, why am I writing all this down now?  Well, for one, it's part of my reality and I wanted to share it with you.  Also, I want to make sure this blog doesn't get too pie in the sky and idealized.  I mean, I really try to be honest and I really want to write about the hard parts of mothering, not the cute parts (or not just the cute parts), and I really don't want to do that thing where you write all this confessional prose but in the end it just winds up making you look good (look at me, all amusing and confessional!).  Finally, and most importantly, I figured out what was going on with me from reading blogs.  Remember, I worked in an ER, I hadn't done family practice in five years, and PPD wasn't on my professional radar as much as it should have been.  Also, I have the usual nurse's denial system firmly in place.  But gradually, through several blogs, I began to recognize myself.  So I'd like to pass on the favor, just in case anyone reading this recognizes herself and in doing so takes the first step toward help.

Oops.  Battery almost out.  Must post before this disappears.  Anyway, aren't you glad to have a break from the moving talk?  Even I am ready to be done with that.