Welcome To The Dollhouse

You Mean You Don’t Worry About That Too?

2012-03-16T00:51:35Z

You Mean You Don’t Worry About That Too or Reason #207 Why I Love My Husband

What? You mean that you don’t worry all the time that your car is going to blow up every time you start it? Are you telling me that fear isn’t common or (gulp) normal?

Well…I don’t know what my problem is, but I do have some unusual fears. These aren’t paralytic or run-screaming-from-the-room fears, but they are the self-talk-needing, get-that-thought-out-of-your-head type fears. It all began with lightbulbs.

I’ve very hesitant to change a lightbulb for fear of electrocution. (Wha? You’re not afraid of that too?) I blame the Girl Scouts for this fear. Yes, the Girl Scouts!

During my tender years long, long, long, long, long ago when I was but a little Brownie in the GS, we were shown a film (not a video…a film on a reel with a projector) about CPR and first aid. I think we were a tad young for such a film, but it was shown nonetheless.

The initial scene was one where a carnival worker reached up to change a light bulb on the outside of his booth while standing in a puddle of water. As I watched in horror, he was electrocuted, requiring someone to perform CPR and send him on his way in an ambulance.

However, to my young mind, this was an astonishing event to witness. The idea that something as simple as a light bulb and a puddle could combine to cause death was just dumbfounding. It imprinted in my mind at such a young age that every time I go to change a light bulb, I still look down to make sure I’m not standing in a puddle (yes, I do this in the house, even). It’s ridiculous, I know, but that image of the electrocuted carnival worker made me look differently at light bulbs.

Now the whole car-blow-up-when-I-start-it fear comes from heaven knows where. But it’s real as I sometimes find myself holding my breath as I press the starter just waiting to be incinerated into a crispy critter before my brain can even log what’s going on. I truly have no freaking idea where this fear came from. Perhaps I watched too many crazy movies of the week. I just don’t know.

The funny thing is that this is a fear I must have forgotten to share with AdoringHusband. So he was a little taken aback when I blurted out, “I hope the car doesn’t blow up” as we were making our way in the parking lot after a lovely Valentine’s Day dinner. I can blame the Cosmo for making me speak aloud my silly thought, but it resulted in one of the funniest conversations we’ve ever had.

“What do you mean, ‘I hope the car doesn’t blow up‘? Why would it blow up?” he asked in confusion.

“Well you know,” I stammered, “cars do blow up some times?”

“Where do cars blow up sometimes?”

“They blow up sometimes. You hear about it,” I insisted.

“On the news. In the Middle East.”

“No, they blow up here too.”

“When’s the last time a car blew up here in SmallSuburbanTown? When’s the last time one blew up in Philly?” he pushed.

“I don’t know,” I exclaimed huffily, “but it still could happen. Don’t you worry about your car blowing up?”

“No. Of all the things I worry about, that would not be one of the them.” he said flatly.

“Well what if someone put a bomb in your car? That could happen!”

“Why would anyone put a bomb in my car, for goodness sake?”

“It could happen! Like what if someone put a hit out on me…”

“What?!,” he interrupted, “Wait a minute! Why would anyone put a hit out on you, suburban pediatrician without enemies or vices?!”

“I do have a weakness for cheesecake. That could be considered a vice.”

“So a hit would be put out on you because, what, you bought too much cheesecake and didn’t pay for it?! Your cheesecake loanshark is going to blow you up for that?!”

“Well maybe would put a hit out on me because, well, I took the parking space they wanted.”

“Someone is going to be so mad that you took his parking space that he’s going to follow you, find out who you are, and pay someone to put a bomb in your car?”

“Maybe they’re angry and obsessive…”

“But to pay a hit man?! If he’s going to take out a hit over a parking space, there would be dead people all over the city!”

“Maybe the hit man would accidentally put the bomb under my car when it was meant for someone else. He could have confused me with someone he actually wanted to blow up.”

“So let me get this straight. This lazy and careless hit man is going to think you’re the target, not bother to verify this in any way, and then spend the time dangerously wiring a bomb into the ignition of the wrong freaking car!” His eyes were wide with incredulity. “Hit men who hit the wrong targets are really not good business investments. The guy would have to find another line of work!”

“Well maybe he just wouldn’t care that it’s the wrong car because he likes killing people!”

“Oh, well that’s different! So now we have a lazy, serial-killer hit man who likes to kill people by blowing up their cars even if they are the wrong target of the hit?!”

“Ok, so maybe he’s not a hit man. Maybe he’s a serial-killer, car bomber who will decide that I should be his next victim!”

“A serial-killer, car bomber, huh?”

“Could happen!”

“But why you? Where is this putative serial-killer, car bomber even finding you to decide you are the one who should be blown up next?”

“He could have just happened upon me getting out of my car at work and then decided that I was next.”

“What’s he doing in your work parking lot? Is he an employee? Do you work with serial-killer, car bombers?”

“Maybe he was passing by, saw me, then decided I was the one.”

“So he passes by, sees you, circles back, goes into the parking lot, pulls out his bomb materials from his fanny pack and gets to connecting?”

“It could happen!”

“Wouldn’t someone notice him messing under your car?”

“Maybe he’s really fast…”

“Oh so now we have the suburban, serial-killer, car bomber with superhuman ability to get into your funky ignition wiring with his bomb materials, hooking it all up in 2-3 minutes with no one noticing?”

“Well, it could happen,” I pouted. “All that is possible.”

“I think the likelihood of all that happening is less than the likelihood of your winning the lottery 3 times in a row and THEN getting hit by a comet.”

“Could still happen…” I grumbled under my breath. “And start the damn car, already!”

Happy 9th Anniversary to my AdoringHusband, a man willing to address head-on my likelihood of being blown to smithereens by a suburban, serial-killer, car bomber with mad installation skillz. For this and for so much more, I love you.

Why Bother?

2012-03-14T20:09:12Z

Ever since the months of steroids, feeling like crud, and dealing with hypertension and other maladies, my general approach to my appearance has been “why bother?”

This is not to say that I leave the house wearing raggedy sweats and days of body odor. Not at all. I’m clean. My clothes are clean. But the pains I use to take to enhance myself have gone by the wayside.

I was getting my nails done last Sunday (still do that otherwise they fall off) and the woman asked me if I wanted my eyebrows waxed. Though its been about 700 years since my last waxing, my answer was, “why bother?” It just didn’t feel worth the effort since the wheels have already come off the track, as it were. And we won’t even speak of the dire condition of my feet that need about 70 pedicures before they look human again.

AdoringHusband is all, “stop putting yourself down!” but the truth is that I don’t think I am. I’m just feeling that these acts, these embellishments that I used to do because they enhanced how I felt about the person I saw in the mirror are just no longer worth it. I’m old, too heavy, and too tired to bother.

But today, something felt a little different. Today, here in N’awlins for a conference, I woke, showered and suddenly thought, how about putting on some mascara and lipstick? And before I could even mentally say, why bother?, I ran to my trusty travel makeup bag that sits alone and unloved in my suitcase and grabbed the eyeliner and mascara. Took a second and I had lashes and defined eyes. Another second and I had some peachy gloss on the kisser.

First though upon regarding myself in the mirror was, good for you. Though I did hear someone in my head muttering, you shouldn’t have bothered, I chose to ignore it.

Checking in on Valentine’s Day

2012-02-14T23:39:19Z

Hello friends,

Life has been extremely busy but I did want to jump in and wish you a happy Valentine’s Day!

I Am A…

2012-01-10T01:27:49Z

Cross-posted from Eclectic Journey Photography

Clickin Moms, my home away from home, has a great project going on now to benefit RAINN, an anti-sexual assault organization. They call it the I Am A Photographer project, but it is really about sharing who you are apart from being a photog or a mom. You are to shoot a photo of yourself (or have someone else shoot it) holding a sign that completes the sentence, “I am a…” It can be serious or light-hearted. And for each submission, CM will donate $1 to RAINN.

I had so many possibilities swirling around my head for weeks, but it took until today, the final day submissions are being accepted, to land on the right one. The result is not fancy, but it is honest and real.

I strive every single day to be a better role model for my daughter than some focus-on-my-looks-must-appeal-to-a-man-someday-my-prince-will-come-to-rescue-me stupid Disney pink princess.

Thank you CM for starting such a great project!

Anatomy of a Family Photo

2011-12-26T04:51:16Z

Crossposted from Eclectic Journey Photography

Hi Friends,

So here’s the question for the day: how many photos does it take to get the ideal Clark-Schecter holiday card picture? Now before you answer remember that this involves my being in front of the camera and not behind it. That added a degree of difficulty of about 200%.

What do you think?

5 shots
50 shots
100 shots
200 shots
417 shots over 3 separate sessions

If you chose any option other than the last choice, well, you must be one of those optimists!

Our first foray was on December 4th. I was going for a sun-going-down, golden hour look. It was unseasonably warm and the kid was cooperating. Honestly after that shoot, I thought I had nailed it then and there. Got some great shots. Rocked the backlighting. Of course when we had started, I had forgotten to tell AdoringHusband to take off his damn Transitions glasses! Those things have plagued me for years. I’ve spent way too long in previous years attempting to restore visible eyes behind those sun-darkened lenses.

But that notwithstanding, I was able to find some goodies. I then posted the ones I was considering for the card on Clickin Moms to get some feedback.

So I’m thinking to myself, these both look pretty good, if I do say so myself. Though I prefer the second one to the first because of Zara’s expression, I think the softness in our features from the backlighting might make it the weaker choice.

And then the feedback started to come in.

“Gorgeous shot, but that tree is too distracting,” one commentor said. From another: “I agree with the previous poster. Wish you had positioned yourselves differently.”

And I’m thinking to myself, OMG, there is a tree growing out of our heads. Am I mental? How did I not see that?!

The truth is that I had seen the tree but ended up at a loss about how to position us in relation to that tree. Somehow I thought that if there were three of us, it wouldn’t look as if the tree were growing out of all of our heads. But there is it, up close and personal. The tree IS growing out of our heads!

Other commenters attempted to assure me that those I would send the card to would not be nearly as distracted by the tree as we photogs are. Of course, by that point, I could see nothing in the photo BUT the tree! I decided to reshoot.

Unfortunately Saturday the 10th was nothing like Sunday the 4th. It was about 20 degrees colder and the ground was wet and mucky. The kid was cold and uncooperative and the hubby was surly because she was cold and he felt that I hadn’t dressed her warmly enough. I ended up rushing the shoot despite doing all I could to keep her in the warm car between set-ups. I then made the mistake of asking her to smile showing her teeth. She’d never had any problem with that in the past, but after getting back to my computer and uploading the images, I found that my kid must have decided that she was a beaver! I saw some of the most silly faces she has ever made.

I was so sad that night. What kind of photographer did I hope to be if I couldn’t even get a photo of my own family?! So my dear, supportive husband made me get right back in the saddle. The next day, he insisted in going out and doing it all over again. He’d dress Z in more layers and he would stop breathing down my neck in order to allow me to relax and do my thing. Of course Z ended up in one of her oppositional defiant modes again, but a total of 417 shots later, we had some good photos that didn’t have trees growing out of our heads!

Here are some of the outtakes:

Note the wonderful Transitions lenses in these:

Yes, this still has the tree, but I love this shot!

So which photos made it to the card?

Front:

Inside top:

Inside bottom, flanking holiday message:

Back Panel:

Not so bad, despite all that work, right? I’m going to use these to make a canvas wall photo collection for the house.

But I do have to show you guys the beauty of digital editing, though. Now you all know that I’m massively huge these days thanks for my steroids. Even though I’m in a feel good about myself because fat is better than dead place, I still shuddered a bit at how round both Mason and I looked in these images. I opted to use a can-be-used-for-good-or-for-evil editing tool called liquify. Using this PS tool, I managed to give us a bit of a digital diet in some of the photos:

Before is on top and after below. We lost a good 20 pounds with the use of technology! Mason wanted me to go even further, but no. These tools cannot be used to suspend all connection with reality!

So there you have it, my friends. The fun of a family photo shoot when you are both photog and subject!

Hope your holiday was wonderful! Best to you in the new year!

Combating Genderism over Ice Cream

2011-11-13T04:49:51Z

This afternoon, while AdoringHusband was indulging his man cold, I decided to take Zizi to the movies. She’s not yet at the point where she will watch a non-animated feature in the theater, so I decided on Puss in Boots, in IMAX 3D.

We had a really good time together after the mother with the whining/crying/loud child finally moved away from us after repeatedly being shushed by many of the patrons. Even Zara turned around and offered some shushes of her own. The mother’s response? The typical, he’s just a child. Yeah, like it was our fault that we didn’t accept and indulge her noisy offspring. Sure, I really wanted to pay $35 for two tickets to a movie neither of us would be able to hear.

The movie was cute, Zara was entertained, and I could eagerly listen to Antonio Bandaras read my shopping list. I did spend an inordinate amount of time during the film trying to identify Humpty’s voice (Zach Galifianakis).

Afterwards, we stopped by the empty Coldstone Creamery for mommy-daughter ice-cream bonding. Zizi gushed on and on about the cats, the golden goose and so on. She’s at an age where it is really fun to talk to her. That little mind is just fascinating.

But in between spoonfuls of dark chocolate ice cream with M&Ms, she said something that made my heart sink to my feet.

“I want to be a hero, too, Mommy, but I can’t because I’m a girl.”

I tried to keep my expression relatively neutral but it was clear that I had failed miserably when her eyes widened considerably as they moved from her spoon to my face.

I had an immediate feeling of anger and outrage that little girls in 2011 are still getting messages from the media that courage and heroism belong in the male turf and beauty/appearance and princessness are female turf. I was also very saddened that my and AdoringHusband’s “fierce girl” egalitarian messages were not enough to counter society’s onslaught of genderism. I had hoped that she would never think such a gendered belief, much less utter it as if it were fact. But I knew I had to get the warring emotions under control so that she would not get the message that she had done something wrong.

The first thing I started with was in clarifying why I had reacted to what she had said.

“Mommy is not upset with you about what you just said, honey,” I started. “Mommy just doesn’t like that movies and TV shows make kids feel like the hero is supposed to be a boy and the person he rescues is supposed to be a girl. You are a hero when you put on your SuperZara cape to go rescue people. And you are a hero with your sword and shield you use to slay the dragon. There is no ‘girls have to do this‘ and “boys have to be that‘ in our family. We can all be and do whatever we want. There are no limits.”

She looked a bit relieved that I wasn’t upset with her, and smiled a lot when I recounted SuperZara’s and Zara the Dragonslayer’s exploits. There seemed to be a yeah, I am a hero, recognition inside herself. I took that opportunity to recount Grandma Ericka’s story.

“You remember how I’ve told you all about Grandma Ericka?” I asked.

“Yes, she is up in heaven with God,” she replied reverently.

“Well when she was in school, she decided that she wanted to become a doctor. The problem was that way back then, there weren’t very many doctors who were women. Her teachers kept telling her that she had to be a nurse.”

“That’s silly, Mommy! You’re a doctor,” she interjected.

“Yes I am, but back then you didn’t see women doctors like you see now. And because of that, people tried to tell Grandma Ericka that she was being ridiculous. But you know what happened?”

“What?” she replied, ice cream forgotten.

“She went to her father, my grandfather, Papa, we called him. She went to Papa and told him that she really wanted to be a doctor but that her teachers were telling her that she couldn’t do it. She should become a nurse instead. And Papa, who had only gotten to 8th grade in school told her that if that is what she wanted to be, that she should become a doctor and never let anyone tell her that she couldn’t do or be something if she wanted to. He made her a promise that if she got the good grades, he would find some way to pay for school so that she could become a doctor. He also went down to her school and told off the teachers for telling his daughter that she couldn’t be a doctor!”

“And then what happened, Mommy? Did he beat them up!”

“No, silly! He didn’t have to. Grandma Ericka made excellent grades and got into medical school. When she graduated only 4 of the students in her class were women. Can you believe that?!”

She shook her head, no.

“She became a doctor, and so did Auntie Marsha, and Aunt Jade and Mommy. We don’t care what other people tell us we should be or should do (except for behaving and listening to the teacher’s instructions in school). We do what our heart, brain and soul tells us is RIGHT. And you, my lovey, are just like Mommy and Grandma Ericka: whatever we want to be, we go for it and never let anyone stop us. Right?!”

“Right!!” she chimed excitedly in response.

I know that this was just one of many battles that will need to be fought for her benefit. I also know that ages 4-6 are the prime ages for gender awareness and gender conformity. But good lord…how do I fight Hollywood, the Disney Princesses, hell, our genderist society to give my girl child the best foundation she can have?

I’ve been chatting with another mother during Z’s ballet class time. I’ve made no secret of my anti-princess crusade during our talks and she admitted that she feels similarly about them, yet her family makes her concerns out to be much ado about nothing. Yep, that sounds familiar. Recently her just turned 4-year-old kidlet told her one day before school, “Mommy, I have to wear a dress today because otherwise I won’t be beautiful and no one will marry me!” The child is barely 4 years old and she has already received the loud message that as a girl/woman your worth is your appearance first and foremost. How do we allow this to be done to our girls…to our children?

Some days I just feel ill. But I’ll keep fighting…for her sake.

This is what a hero looks like:

For more information about ways you can help address genderism in the media and raise healthy girls, check out the following sites:

Miss Representation
Geena Davis Institute on Gender in the Media
7 Wonderlicious
Parenting Pink
Girls Inc.
Hardy Girls, Healthy Women

What Do Normals Do?

2011-10-28T02:55:29Z

The really cool and fun thing about blogging about yourself is that no matter how out there or different you think your experiences may be, you can usually find another traveler who has also journeyed along your particular offshoot path. My doppelganger is my fellow blogger-doc-mom Kayla.

She was quick to let me know that she too shared my oddball, raised indoors, decidedly not normal upbringing. And like me, she seeks to simulate normal as much as possible for her daughters.

So my last post resonated with her a good deal. This led to a discussion of how we wish that there was some Manual for Being Normal that people like us could follow. I think I forgot to tell her that I was so daunted by the idea of free play with my kidlet during her toddlerhood that I actually bought books to help me think of things to do (beyond let’s play nap and be quiet and stop bothering me, two of my mother’s favorite games).

She started us off with a list of things that she’s heard that normal families do. We then began exploring these ideas with the zeal of social anthropologists studying the parenting rituals of the long-isolated Zuglut Tribe of outer Mongolia. (Yes, I just made that up. Don’t go off and start searching for “Zuglut!” Stay with me now!)

Here was her list:

1) Family game night

2) Pick their own fruit

3) Watch their kids compete

4) Start sports/activities before 7th grade

5) Display affection

I was all like, yes, I’ve heard of these activities. When I was a kid, I thought only the people on TV actually did these things, however. I would have sooner heard my mother announce we were taking a trip to Mars than going apple picking! Game night? What was that? All I could remember were drunken holiday games of Monopoly that degenerated into accusations of villainy and treachery before the night was done. We won’t even start on the rarity of kissing or hugging.

However my parents did come to watch me run track in 4th grade. It remains one of my most infamous memories.

It was my first real race where a starter pistol was used. I jumped straight up, startled, when the shot was fired. By the time I had recovered, I was in last place since the others had known to run forward and not straight up into the air. I tried to catch up but couldn’t. I was devastated. And then I had to face my family…

My mother was nearly hysterical with laughter. “That was the funniest thing I’ve ever seen,” she exclaimed, oblivious to my rising shame. “You looked like you had lead in your shoes, you were so slow!” Then she dissolved into another laughing fit.

Yeah, at that point I would have preferred that she had kept her ass home.

I decided to add a few more items to the list Kayla had started:

6) Take family vacations together – I don’t mean the immediate family. I mean collecting the grandparents, siblings, cousins and their families and heading off on a cruise together. It seems like the most bizarre thing ever. The most my family has ever been able to manage was dinner together…with great difficulty.

7) Go as a family to pick the Christmas tree
Go to a parade, neighborhood festival, fireworks display or other celebratory congregation of local strangers

9) Share food – Do you know how hard it was for me to learn to share food with friends, boyfriends, my husband? No no no! Your food was the food on your plate, plain and simple. If, as small children, we dared reach for something on Mom’s plate, we found ourselves stabbed in the hand with the quickness. Thus in later years when someone said a “let me try your” whatever it was at the time as his/her fork angled toward my plate, it took all my self control not to commit forkicide. I learned to tell myself, “this is what normals do” and “put the fork down.”

10) Have or patronize garage or rummage sales – People in our little subdivision love to have community garage or yard sales. I think I still look at them as if they are speaking in parseltongue whenever they ask me if I want to participate. Sell my old stuff?! To my neighbors?! What the what?

Why would anyone want to buy any of my old crap? And why in the name of all that is holy would I want to buy their old crap?! It has been used, right? This is likely to be one of the normal rituals that I’ll just have to pass on…seriously.

So OK my peeps. Help me and Kayla out with more lessons on normal family activities. I know you have a ton more you can add to our list, right?

Being Normal

2011-10-13T04:28:40Z

Last Sunday was such a beautiful day. Clear skies, great temperatures. Just gorgeous.

Now had I followed my usual habits that day, I would have slept as late as the kid would have allowed, rolled around in my jammies for too long, and then start trying to balance the work that I need to do with the kid’s need to “do something fun” as she likes to put it. The “doing something fun” part is always a struggle for me. Between being chronically exhausted with batshit moods, fun isn’t always in my arsenal. Luckily AdoringHusband is much better finding fun for her, though he does tend to repeat the same tried-and-true fun again and again.

But last Sunday was different. I had a photo shoot scheduled in West Chester, PA for 9 AM. That meant no rolling around in bed or in jammies. It meant getting up, packing up the car and driving for almost an hour to take photos of some adorable kids. It was on my drive back that I got some inspiration. It was a nudge toward being normal. Being normal is NOT something that comes easily to either me or AdoringHusband.

Those regular readers of the blog know that my childhood did not tend toward normal. Some might call it strange, bizarre, extremely sheltered or overcontrolled. Of course I didn’t realize any of that while I was growing up with Mummy. I thought it was normal for some people to just remain housebound…for long periods of time. I remember a Christmas vacation spent indoors 90% of the time…in California. We didn’t often go anywhere as a family and we certainly weren’t allowed much freedom to go and play outside if my mother wasn’t home. Add to that the fact that my mother disliked well, people, so we rarely had visitors either, ergo…decidedly not normal.

It didn’t bother me too much at the time. I was so involved with reading, crocheting, and soap operas that I wasn’t as bothered as one would imagine. And we did have school and day camp that allowed us to be socialized so that we didn’t act like primates around the normals. But a day, or weekend spent in the house was my version of normal. It was what I knew.

AdoringHusband’s childhood was similarly not normal as well. He too had a parent who shunned people and thus didn’t get out and do much. He, even moreso than me, is still perfectly happy staying in the house all day, in his PJs playing on the computer or watching TV. To my surprise, I ended up being the one exhorting us to get out and do something during our early years together. Quelle suprise! But in my adulthood I came to learn that normals don’t spend weekend after weekend roaming the house in their pajamas. They do things! So I was more likely to agitate for doing something, even it was going to the bookstore, getting a cappuccino and reading there (as opposed to doing so at home).

Zara’s arrival changed us even further. First, I found myself fearful of following in Mummy Dearest’s steps and raising another ~~broken~~ chronically housebound child so I ended up pushing even further when she was an infant to get her out of the house regularly so she could see things. I would kick myself if I did nothing more than walk her around the block in the stroller. That wasn’t enough!

Then Z’s innate personality kicked in. As soon as she could formulate the thought (even if she was unable to express it fully) the kid wanted to be outside. Like all the time. Though her first word was “shoes,” her fifth word must have been “outside.” She felt the calling of the breeze, the grass, and the sky. (Her mother, on the other hand, had a fear of grass most of her young childhood because her mean ol’ auntie told her that there were bloodsuckers in the grass that would suck her blood in 2 seconds. It was only when she reached 3rd or 4th grade that she learned of the trick that had been played on her!) Thus very unlike her mother and father, Z would have loved a bedroom located on our front lawn! Being indoors was seen as torture. How dare we take her inside?! AdoringHusband and I both realized that we had to step up our game for this kid.

That’s when we really began trying to simulate being normal as best as two not-normal adults could possibly achieve. We’d ask ourselves, what do normal people do on the 4th of July? Then we’d do our best to emulate normal with variable success. Sometimes we executed flawlessly: take kidlet to see Santa and have her picture taken…easy peasy. Other times there were challenges: AdoringHusband said our township’s 4th of July parade started at 1 pm. Yet when we drove near the parade route, all we saw were torn streamers and no parade. We got to the starting point and found that the parade had started at 11 am and by 1 pm had long been finished. This caused AdoringHusband to get defensive about what he’s sure he read as a 1 pm start time, as Z kept asking in that repetitive way that 4 year olds do, “Where’s the parade, Daddy?” All the while I’m both pissed and amused, thinking, see what happens when you try to be normal? We get it wrong as often as we get it right.

Which brings me back to last Sunday. As I drove back from the shoot, I noticed many cars with bikes attached as they made their way to the park, bike trail or wherever people ride bikes. I had a flash of inspiration. What if we went on a family bike ride too?! That’s something normals do!” Whoa! I almost had to fan myself after that bit of normalspiration!

I arrived home just before noon to find both AdoringHusband and Z still in jammies (what did I tell you?) playing Dora Rescues The Ice Princess on the Wii. I took AH aside and shared my bright idea. Brilliant, he concurred. But where do we go for such a ride?

This is where the normals have us beat by a mile. In order to figure out where to have our great family bike ride, we must take to the computer, making extensive searches for “family bike trails.” Why? Because we have no freaking idea where normal families go to ride bikes. Our neighbors, who we like to emulate in their being normal, have not shared that secret with us. So AdoringHusband found a few potential places, agonized over the length of the trail and our 4 year olds ability to ride 20 miles (NOT!). Then he got into the perfectionistic worry of choosing the wrong bike trail for The Family Bike Ride, a fate that will not only earn him a D- on his report card of life, but will cause untold need for therapeutic intervention when Z gets older. I then had to validate his choice of Nockamixin State Park‘s 2 mile trail surrounding a lake as being an A+ selection. I then went to entertain Z while he got the bikes ready and the rack on my car. 40 minutes later he announced that he was done, though I was a bit surprised that though the bikes are outside, they have not been attached to the car. Clearly his done and my done are a bit different.

I went back in and packed snacks, filled water bottles and debated about plates and napkins or just napkins? What is the right choice? Just napkins, I decided. Z got the picnic blanket and we waited for AH. He was not out putting the bikes onto the car. Where was he? Comatose on the toilet, I thought. 15 minutes later, he returned downstairs. Z and I have all our supplies in the car.

“Are you going to get the bikes onto the car?” I asked.

“Yes, but I can’t find my wallet?”

“How do you lose your wallet in the house?” I started.

“Well I guess I don’t need it…I’ll just go without it,” he decided.

And then I had a flash of him getting plowed over by a passel of skateboarders on the trail, having a head injury and no ID for the police to figure out who he is. (Where Z and I are in this twisted fantasy, I have no idea.) “Oh go find your wallet,” I grunted.

Z and I got into the car and waited for ~~a year~~ another 10 minutes before he came out with wallet to put the bikes on the rack. It then took ~~a century~~ 15 more minutes to get the two bikes secured. (Z’s went into the back of the wagon). He got into the car.

“Do you have the address of the park?” he asked.

“Of course not,” I snapped back, “you had all the printouts!”

He went back into the house. Z and I waited another millennium for his return before I decided to call him from the car.

“Yes honey” he answered.

“Will you be out soon?” I asked trying to keep the edge out of my voice.

“I’m just not sure that the park we chose is the right one. There’s another in Doylestown but it is 40 minutes away…”

“You’re back on the computer?!”

“Well, I just wanted to make sure…”

“Fine, we’re going to get gas. Will that give you enough time to figure it out?”

“Yes, you go get gas,” he answered hurriedly.

I then needed to convince Z that we were not leaving Her Daddy, but were going to get gas and come back for him. This accomplished, we returned to find Her Daddy ready to go to the original bike trail. And with that, we set off for our Family Bike Ride!

A fabulous time was had by all.

These photos were taken with my crappy point & shoot.

Z took this one herself. I think it is perfect. Her mommy & daddy reflecting their cockeyed version of being normal for the most important person in their lives.

As we went riding down the trail, Z asked, “When are we going to find something else fun at this park?” We just had to laugh…

Excuse Me While I Go Batshit For A Moment

2011-09-08T03:40:10Z

Last week in my return to blogging post, I wrote that I’d be doing a lot more real life, everyday blogging. And then I disappeared.

In my defense, there was a mini-vacation over the holiday weekend: Hershey, PA. Fun, but no diva vacation like I had hoped. The kidlet seemed to have a great time, though.

But back to the no blogging thing. I swear that it wasn’t that I didn’t want to blog. It was more that something else came up. And that was my falling into being batshit again.

Maybe batshit is too harsh of a term. I’m not hearing voices or seeing the green tooth fairy riding an elephant out of my bathroom mirror. But my mind and the delicate equilibrium of medication and pure will that keeps me halfway functioning has been thrown completely out of whack.

I’ve had depression since adolescence (though at the time it was hard to tell whether it was actually depression or being raised by my narcissistic, love-withholding mummy. Those things can be hard to sort out for even the most aware of adolescents!). There were many, many rough years, but sometime during residency when the on-call crying jags became almost career-limiting, I found that medication helped me feel what, I guess, others call normal.

Coolness! It was as if someone had changed the television of my life from B&W to color. I was like, wow, this is really amazing…until it stopped working. Then there was a dose adjustment, and woo-hoo, the blue skies were back again! All was well for a little bit, a few years actually, and I managed to wean off completely. Hooray!

Yeah well, unfortunately my brain’s wiring was still screwy. Gradually a couple years later, both depression and some phobias began to creep into my life. Sigh. It was time to return both to talk therapy and medication.

I’ve adjusted to the fact that I have mood disorders that require medication. There’s no shame in that. It’s just a genetic twist of fate that has to be managed. But what ticks me the heck off is that I can’t just have ordinary depression. I’ve got to have atypical depression or treatment resistant depression that requires the combined brainpower of a psychiatric think tank to medicate properly.

Sure you’re saying to yourself, what’s she got to be depressed about? She should just exercise more or hang out with good friends. That’s all she needs! You’re probably even thinking about saying something helpful like, don’t be depressed, so that these words will snap me out of my stinking thinking. I will warn you that if you ever utter any such words in my direction, I will travel through your computer and bitch-slap you for uttering such ridiculosity to me! I have been through enough, tried enough, and seen enough specialists to know that my brain needs assistance through meds. I’m so talk therapized by now that I could BE a therapist. But my brain neurochemistry that controls my mood (and my phobias and assorted other DSM-IV crap) needs medication. Well that is IF and only IF I want to function, be employed, and resemble a normal human being,

So where was I? Oh yes, medication. In the mid-90s I managed to find a psychopharmacologist (I didn’t even know this specialty existed until then) extraordinaire in Dr. Nick the Diligent. Nick knew his meds inside and out. He was finger on the pulse of the latest data. He took me off the 3x/day v@lium another doc had put me on (yikes!) and tried a little of this and a little of that until we found a regimen that worked. I had graduated from a plain ol’ simple antidepressant prescribed by a simple psychiatrist to something resembling witchdoctoring. I was that complicated…until Nick found a newish drug (at the time) that worked on both serotonin and norepinephrine. That drug was Eff@xor and it was the mainstay of my mood/phobia/crap management for 15 years.

That is until I started that whole trouble breathing thing last Thanksgiving. You may remember that the best what the hell caused this lung hypersensitivity pneumonitis theory we have relates to a very rare side-effect of a medicine I’ve been on for 15 yeqrs. Yes, you see where this is going. The best guess was that it was the Eff@xor (though I believe it was probably the generic version that my prescription company switched to mid-last year that caused the reaction). I then had to wean off of my mainstay drug.

At first I was sorta-OK. Hell, high-dose steroids can get you feeling better than you have in decades (if you don’t mind the insomnia, chipmunk face, and long-term badness that can happen with chronic use). And it took me a month to fully wean off the Eff@xor. (That med is a beeyotch to come off of).

Yet after being off for about a month and also decreasing my steroids, I began to notice some batshit moods developing. My current psychopharmacologist, Dr. Sarah the Patient, tinkered here and there with this med and that one. I’d get a little better, then have a bad day, and then do better again. But it was hard to figure out how much was:

a) being off Eff@xor

b) being on steroids (yes, steroids can make you batshit)

c) not sleeping at night (my insomnia was terrible)

d) putting stepfather into assisted-living

e) managing stepfather’s finances (a hot mess)

f) trying to negotiate the dysfunction that is my family with regard to my stepfather

g) the job

h) the unemployed husband

i) the wonderful but challenging 4-year-old

You can see how it might be a tad difficult to sort out what my freaking problem was.

We had managed to achieve some semblance of stable, though not good by any stretch, when I decided (yes, I do decide some stupid things at times) to take myself off of one of my helper meds. I didn’t think it was doing that much and it’d been replaced with a different helper, so gee, did I really need both? I stopped taking it.

It.did.not.go.well. AT ALL.

I called Dr. Sarah the Patient. “Start taking it again,” she counseled. She is wise. So I started again. And I got to relative stability in a few days. But then I went back to my, well can I take less of it, mode of thinking. I did ask first this time. And we talked about the possibility of moving from 40 mg to 25 mg at some point in the future. OK, I thought. But a week later I found myself running out of 40 mg capsules and unsure whether to get a new prescription for the same dose or move to the 25 mg dose. So what did I do? Did I call Dr. Sarah? Nah, it was a holiday weekend. Did I call myself a refill? Nah. Why pay the copay when I’m not sure which dose I should be on? So what did I do? I found the 80 mg capsules I had from before and (I can see your face scrunching up already…the train wreck is about to hit!) proceeded to open the capsule each day and dump out what I perceived with my discerning eyes to be 40 mg from the 80 mg capsule.

Guess what happened? I went batshit again!

Last night with my kid was a horror that I do not wish to repeat. I was so wound. I felt like David Banner right before he changed into the Hulk. I was so angry. My muscles felt coiled and ready to strike (and no, I did not strike my kid, but there was a lot of batshit yelling involved in last night’s horror). I could not stand down. And did I mention that I also had a migraine? Bad mixture. Awful, awful, awful.

Before I put her to bed, I told her that I was sorry that I was so grumpy. I also explained that I didn’t know why I was so grumpy. But one thing I did know, it had nothing to do with her.

To that, my amazing child replied with a question, “Is someone else making you grumpy?”

“No, my sweetie,” I said hugging her and fighting the tears, “Mommy just doesn’t feel OK right now. Something inside her is making her feel grumpy.”

“Maybe you’re just tired. Maybe you’ll feel better if you get a good night’s sleep and not stay up too late,” she offered.

Once again I felt so undeserving of this incredible child. I kissed her goodnight and felt both shame and relief. Once the house was quiet, I felt the rage leeching out of my muscles. The shame continued, however.

Today I called Dr. Sarah the Patient. She made recommendations and I listened. I know she can help me. I know that it will take time to find the right regimen. But the struggle against batshittedness is exhausting.

Once Upon A Blog

2011-08-30T20:52:26Z

Once upon a time I had a blog. I blogged to share, I blogged to vent, I blogged to process all that was my crazy life. It wasn’t always pretty or profound, but it was a great outlet for me.

Yet somehow things began to change for me and blogging. It became more about crafting the writing than it was my lifesharing tool. I ended up doing my lifesharing (or microblogging) on Twitter or Facebook because I began to believe that if I blogged, really blogged, it had to have meaning and depth. In order words, it had to be an oeuvre rather than brief missive from the brink. And there I lost sight of how important this sharing has been to my life over the years.

There has been so much crap going on in my life of late. I don’t even know where to begin in deconstructing the dramas. Most nights, I’m so zoned out that all I do is lie across the bed and play the latest Hidden Object game I have on my iPad. I don’t feel depressed, per se, but there is a certain lassitude to my mind that doesn’t feel right at all. It is of no help that I had to be weaned off my trusty antidepressant of 15 years since there is a very good chance that it caused all my lung disease drama. Since then I’ve been coping with steroids (I’m down to 10 mg/day now) and a combination of an antidepressant and an ADD med. Other than obsessive-compulsive hair pulling, I’ve been relatively stable of late…much better than the flying batshit banshee that I was when my steroid dose was higher. But now I don’t have any idea whether my lassitude (love that word) is related to my mood dysfunction, the steroid decrease, or the fact that so many other whack-ass things have been going on in my life that I’m just freaking spent.

Yep, AdoringHusband is still unemployed and is a bit too comfortable with that status.

Yes, my little spitfire, Z, continues to put me through my parenting paces. (Difficult to cope with when you are alternately batshit crazy or suffused with lassitude)

And yes, my stepfather, who we moved from his home to assisted living during a difficult trip in June, has had 4 hospitalizations in the past 6 weeks. Did I mention that I’m tasked with paying his bills, dealing with his creditors (people with dementia can spend a lot more money than they have), convincing people that my having his power of attorney and being appointed the successor trustee of his living trust is enough to allow them to talk to me about his IRS bill? Did I mention that I’ve spent so long on hold that I’ve started to appreciate good Muzak?

Then there is the dysfunction that is our family. We were never the most normal or supportive of families, but now our interactions have moved to the twilight zone of the ridiculous. Between who isn’t speaking to whom and who is upset about one thing or another, it can kinda be hard to rally together to manage yet another crisis.

Once upon a time, there was a blog that helped me keep my sanity together during some tough times. It’s time that I revisit that blog again.

Sure there will be the occasional oeuvre, but right now, right here, I need release more than I need to create art with words. I hope you’ll stick around for it.