Compassion is painful. That’s how you know it’s working.

I heart the bloggess

The Bloggess

I’m sad about last night for a lot of reasons.  And if you are human, and allow yourself to be so, then you probably are too.  Maybe it’s the verdict that upset you, or the destruction afterwards, or the long and difficult path that has led us here and has shown us we have so much further to go before we get to the place where we want to be…a place where kindness and compassion and vulnerability are the things which can be lauded and seen and encouraged and felt.  Or maybe, like me, you’re upset about all of those things and you feel too defeated to want to care anymore.

But if you’re like me, you can’t switch those emotions off.  It’s so much easier to turn those feelings of vulnerability and hurt into a shield of rage.  Rage feels powerful and strong.  It feels good.  And rage is important.  But…

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It’s a nice place to visit

I don’t know if I have the words to say what I want to say right now. I don’t know if I ever will. Missouri is my home, it’s where I grew up and it’s where my family still is. They aren’t in St. Louis, thank goodness. My church headquarters is in St. Louis. There’s a joke about St. Louis being Mecca if you’re an LC-MS Lutheran (which is probably insensitive, now that I think about it). It is painful to watch a place I call home explode again. But I don’t know that I would call it unexpected. Missouri is a segregated state. It’s cities were built with black neighborhoods and white neighborhoods “safe” distances apart on purpose. De-segregating Kansas City schools was a topic that was making local news when I was a kid in the ’80’s. I grew up less than an hour from Kansas City and there were no black people in our town for most of my life. And most people thought the N-word was a perfectly acceptable term. There is a lot of rural Missouri that is still like that, and I would guess that urban Missouri isn’t as removed from that kind of thinking as they would like to believe. Maybe I’m wrong, I know there are exceptions. My parents are an exception. My dad was born in 1929. He remembers black people using seperate entrances to homes and stores, but he also made African American students feel welcome on his college campus and in our home, and was encouraging about a Black man I dated. My mother was one of the first white people to attend a historically black university in Jefferson City. Not everyone who grows up there grows up intolerant and afraid. But a lot of people do (part of me is wanting to unfriend my cousin on Facebook right now) so it’s not a huge surprise to find out statistics like these: http://m.motherjones.com/politics/2014/08/10-insane-numbers-ferguson-killing
Of course people are angry. I would guess that they have been angry for generations. How long can people feel left out, in a place that is supposed to be their home, before they say “enough”? Before they rise up in anger?  Missouri has been this way a long time. St. Louis is an old city, one that proudly flew the Confederate flag. Maybe this was the straw that broke the camel’s back there. I’m sad to see business owners hurt, and innocent people frightened. I’m sad for this family who lost their son and didn’t get any answers. I’m sad that another generation will grow up not trusting the police to “protect and serve”. I hope very much that all of the sadness in Missouri right now will eventually lead to some real change. I’m not sad that I no longer live there.

Blech

I have a lot on my mind today, but my stomach really hurts so I think it will have to wait until tomorrow to find it’s way to the page. I think I have PMS. It happens once in awhile, because I still have the one ovary, but it always kind of sneaks up on me. I regret not having the other ovary removed. It’s had a cyst on it twice that we know of, and they hurt. And I still have insomnia and hot flashes too, so I don’t know that I gained much by keeping it to avoid menopause. But I’m stuck with it for the time being, so I’ll try to suck it up.

I actually agreed to go somewhere tomorrow night. Out to dinner with a friend of ours that is in town for the holiday this week. So far I actually want to go even though another couple is going as well (and one of them is my friend who has asked about Thanksgiving repeatedly even though she knows I don’t want to host). I don’t know if I’ll still want to go tomorrow, but right now I’m actually looking forward to it which is a nice change of pace for me.

http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/6145156?ncid=fcbklnkushpmg00000046&ir=Women
I came across this in my news feed today and it’s so spot on. Someone has said all of those things to me, because mental illness doesn’t look like other illnesses. And sometimes I wonder if that’s why I’ve withdrawn so much in the last year. I don’t want to be told to try harder, or that nothing is really wrong with me because I look fine. I don’t want to have to explain myself. I’m not unwilling to share about my bipolar disorder if people are interested but I don’t think I should have to justify it either.

Anyway, going to put my yucky stomach to bed.

To The PTA Moms at My Son’s School

I am not really writing my own post today, because I am tired and itchy and my stomach hurts. (I’m allowed a whiny day once in a while.) I stumbled on this post today and I really enjoyed it. I can’t even imagine how challenging her situation must be. I know so little about transgender people, and gender identity struggles that I have no idea if I’m using the terms correctly. But this mom has done what all of us moms do when our kids are faced with challenges: she’s educated herself and worked hard to make her child as happy and successful as possible. I’m impressed she even bothered with PTA, because I never did with Alex. PTA activities aren’t designed with Special Needs kids in mind, and I’m uncomfortable being noticed and/or stared at if my kid is struggling. So I just wrote PTA off. Audrey of course thinks I should be more involved at her school, but there’s a part of me that thinks why should PTA have things to offer for one child but not the other? So I don’t attend carnival or movie night, and I don’t volunteer for health fair or picture day. Maybe I’m just stuck up? Then I remember that my son’s high school has a “special ed hallway” where his classroom, the resource room, the behavior disorder room, and the fundamentals classes are held, and I don’t feel to guilty.
Anyway, enjoy this mom’s rebuttal to other PTA and school parents. I know I did.

Raising My Rainbow

Last week I published a blog post about things said during a PTA meeting I attended at my youngest son’s school. I wanted to shine a light on the homophobic, transphobic, insensitive, hateful and hurtful things that some moms said during the meeting and show that as far as we have come in LGBTQ acceptance and equality, there is still much work to be done. And sometimes that work needs to be done in heavy doses at places much closer to home than we’d like.

Almost immediately, PTA moms from our school started commenting, messaging and reacting viscerally on social media.

As they did, I stared at the PTA tagline: Every child, One voice. I’m not convinced that our PTA as a whole cares about every child and some of the voices I heard that night are not voices I want speaking on behalf of my child. That being said…

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Thoughts on purpose

“I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes.

Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You’re doing things you’ve never done before, and more importantly, you’re Doing Something.

So that’s my wish for you, and all of us, and my wish for myself. Make New Mistakes. Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody’s ever made before. Don’t freeze, don’t stop, don’t worry that it isn’t good enough, or it isn’t perfect, whatever it is: art, or love, or work or family or life.

Whatever it is you’re scared of doing, Do it.

Make your mistakes, next year and forever.”

–Neil Gaiman

I stumbled across that piece of Neil Gaiman’s commencement address today, and it suited my mood. Partly because I couldn’t really decide what to write about but I didn’t want to skip a day, and partly because of a conversation about mental illness and failure that I had with a friend yesterday.

He brought up the fact that he felt his life was a failure. And usually I can find something positive to say to things like that, but I didn’t want to give him a bunch of BS, so I told him the truth. I struggle with that too. He and I have similar stories: loads of education that was hard-earned, but that is now not going to use because we are at home receiving Social Security Disability benefits. And we need those benefits, because neither one of us can function without medication and regular visits to a psychiatrist. Before I had disability I went without insurance and medication for long periods, two of which ended in the psych ward. That is the reality of mental illness: it has to be treated like any other illness or it’s dangerous. But like any other treatment, psychiatric treatment isn’t without side effects. I’ve had meds that made my weight balloon up, ones that made me constantly nauseous, ones that gave me headaches, ones that gave me “cognitive difficulties”,  ones that kept me awake for days, and ones that made me sleep for days. Finding the right medication combination for a person is really an art, more than a science, and that is one of the things that makes working difficult. The other thing that makes it difficult is the illness itself of course.

I don’t always know that my mood is off. A lot of the time I think something is physically wrong with me because I will be sore or tired or have a stomach ache. But those things can signal depression too. Several of the times I’ve been fired have been for having too many sick days, and that’s more than fair, because I’ve thought I was sick, or maybe stressed myself sick, more times than most people. During my practicum semester at the middle school I had the stomach flu NINE times. And I wasn’t faking, my stomach did act up; I was very stressed out and unhappy and those are conditions that make for all kinds of symptoms to show up. I knew I had a mental illness when I went back for my Master’s, I just underestimated it. I assumed that because things had been quiet for a long time that they would stay quiet.  I hadn’t really challenged myself  in years, and it turned out to be too much. I can run on caffeine and hypomania for a while, but that takes a toll.

I ended up taking a part-time semester after the stomach flu semester and almost didn’t finish my degree. I probably shouldn’t have, seeing how much use it’s getting. But I had plans. That’s where the whole “my life is a failure” thing comes in. I had plans. My friend had plans. Being mentally ill was NOT part of those plans. I don’t know how to tell him his life isn’t a failure because it’s hard to find purpose in mine too.  Yes, I know, I’m a mom and a wife and those are important jobs, but they aren’t all I intended for myself.  In that semester that I cut down to part-time I took a creative writing class in order to still have financial aid and it was the most fun I had throughout my whole Master’s program. It was the most motivated I was too, I actually did assignments ahead of time. It’s been interesting to do this every day, because once in a while I remember little things like that class that was kind of an accident. Maybe it was a “mistake” that I needed to make, so that now, when I’m looking for purpose, I can remember that there’s something I enjoy?

Kid stuff

Watching my favorite tiny dancer again today. This is from last spring’s recital, which is our most fun and stressful time of year I think. I suppose it’s not worse than the holidays, but all that hair-doing and costume changing does get to be a lot. Still, I love it, I love to watch her. She continues to amaze me with her talent. She’s taking a technique class for the first time this year. I told her she could quit after the first month if she hated it, because it’s all work, not all the games and loud music of most of her other classes, and her attention span wears thin by the end of the day. But she has stuck with it and the teacher is impressed with her. I’m not really the stage mom I sound like, but I am proud 🙂

Tomorrow we go to court to officially become my son’s legal guardians. We’re actually a bit late with it, we should have had it done before he turned 18, but honestly we forgot. But luckily nothing has come up where it’s been an issue. The judge actually said Alex didn’t even have to be there after he saw our paperwork, but our lawyer thought we should bring him anyway. And it does look a bit shady becoming someone’s guardian without them even being there. What if we weren’t his parents? Just some random people taking advantage of him and his SSI benefits. That does happen, and is honestly one of the things that I’m scared of for him. We’re not going to live forever. And I don’t want Audrey to have to care for him when they’re grown, although that may be how things turn out.

Their relationship right now is interesting. She’s just starting to notice that she is ahead of him in some things. And, being nine, she points it out. She likes to inform him how much harder her homework is than his, which makes him mad. I just tell her that his school is different than hers and she should be nicer, but that only works for a while. Or I get “I want to be in his class, it’s easy”. I think she does understand that he is different, but I don’t know how much it interests her at this point. I do know that she is kind to children at her school who are different, so I think her awareness is greater than I think it is.

Sigh. We’re done with dance and off to the grocery store.

Dog video

Today I am out of sorts and tired and I don’t really know why. So please enjoy this video of my dog. If I could get even a tiny bit of Roxy’s enthusiasm about going places, I’d be unstoppable. Alas, inertia, my arch-nemesis has reared its ugly head and I am in my recliner again. Sigh.

I do want to give a big thank you to the people who have read and liked my posts and even started following me. We’re getting closer to the end of November and I haven’t missed a day yet, and I know that I keep going because there are people reading. So, thanks very much! It means a lot to me 🙂

More holiday musings

My parents

I honestly don’t have much of an idea today. I think I vented so much yesterday that now my brain is tired. My husband is annoyed with me for insisting that I am not traveling for Christmas, but he will get over it. Especially when we save a bunch of money on not kenneling the dogs. Actually when he heard I wasn’t going, my son said he wanted to stay home with me-something we’ve done before-so it will be interesting to see if he does. It’s not like my husband’s grandmother or mother really want to see him, or at least not for more than a couple of minutes, because they don’t really get him at all. And Alex doesn’t like going to my husband’s grandmother’s house at all. He likes to have everything on: the lights, the TV, his Kindle, the computer, another TV. He LOVES having a screen in front of him at all times. My husband’s grandmother spends the whole time Alex is at her house telling him to turn things off. It drives him crazy! He wants all the TV’s in every room on, and yes, he is watching his Kindle AND the TV because that’s what he does to tune out everyone else. She can’t let it go, she’s on about her electric bill all the time, and is constantly making Alex go turn things off.  My husband even yelled at her about it once. He told her that if she could afford to go to Europe twice in one summer she could afford for the TV’s to be on for a few hours. That didn’t go over well,  but even that didn’t stop her from demanding our presence at Christmas again and I’m not having it, and hopefully I can protect Alex from it too. He and I can watch all the TVs and eat pizza while my husband deals with his relatives. That would be ideal for both of us.

I have been thinking about how I’d like to visit my own family. I haven’t seen them in over a year. I don’t know how it got that long, Audrey and I usually go in the summer for about ten days, but it didn’t work out this year. Part of the problem was that my brother-in-law didn’t have his two-week national guard drill–that’s when we usually visit, in order to not drive him crazy. And then my mother wanted to come here, which my sister and I knew wasn’t going to happen, but she really wanted to.  My dad is 85, he doesn’t travel anymore. The last time they were here was 2005, and I gave them all the stomach flu (seems to be a recurring theme?). I’ve tried to convince them to come on the airplane, because dad used to like to fly, and there is much less risk of blood clots with that than with the twelve-hour drive. But he hasn’t flown since 9/11 and I think the new security stuff scares him a little and the dogs can’t come on the plane with him, and he absolutely will not kennel his babies. Dad was the other reason I didn’t visit. Every time I brought it up he was worried about the dogs getting upset, or the septic tank, or the well.  The idea just seemed to stress him out.  So it just never felt like there was a convenient time to go and stay at my parents’ or my sister’s house. My sister also informed me she had a brown recluse problem in her upstairs bedroom, which is where I sleep, so if she wanted to keep me away that is the way to do it. Oh my do I hate spiders.

So now it’s been a year and a half at least, and my parents have two new dogs, and they’ve redone their living room, and my mom got hearing aids (yay!) and I haven’t seen any of it. And my nieces have grown so much they probably won’t even recognize me. It was my choice to live here and be this far away, and I don’t regret that most of the time, but thinking about the holidays makes it a little hard. Honestly, just acknowledging that my parents are getting older is hard. And I know that I am luckier than I lot of people, having dad be 85 and really doing pretty well.  I should just appreciate that, even if it is from a distance. But it would be nice to be home for Christmas.

Me, my sister, my mom, my dad, and the granddaughters. Surprising my dad with a celebration of 70 years of church work (He started playing church services when he was 12)

Bah, Humbug!

When I was a kid I loved Christmas. Not just because of presents, although they were awesome, but because it really was a magical time. When you grow up in the church you get lots of time to anticipate Christmas while practicing for the Christmas Eve program at school, and doing Advent calendars, and finally moving into the New Testament in religion class. When your parents work for your church and a Lutheran college you get even more anticipation with extra services and Christmas concerts and recitals and your dad practicing Christmas hymns on the piano (and Christmas hymns are just Christmas carols so it’s kind of like having your own piano bar accompanist for the holidays).  Lutherans are similar to Catholics in some ways, but not when it comes to singing, we LOVE to sing, and Christmas services are a great time to be a kid in a Lutheran church, so many awesome songs: Joy to the World, Angels we Have Heard on High, Oh Come, All Ye Faithful, and if you’re lucky, Go! Tell it on the Mountain. And of course there were cookies and homemade candy. My mom baked, my mom’s piano students baked for her, people at church baked for dad, even some of his students gave him baked goods. The wealth of sweets at Christmas was truly amazing. But Christmas Eve was the best. The program was always in the evening at our church, and there were fancy Christmas dresses (My mom made the most amazing Gunne Sax dress by hand one year: I’ll never forget it, it had big leg of mutton sleeves, and a ribbon and lace edged neckline with a row of tiny buttons with loops down the front–making that dress was the first time I heard my mom swear, but it was fantastic.) and hair-dos, and my brother even had to wear a tie. The  programs themselves  all kind of run together: (except one where I had a big coughing fit up front and had to leave in front of everyone, childhood strep reared its ugly head again) there were carols and Luke chapter 2 and Mary and Joseph. And on our way out one of the church elders would give each kid a white paper bag full of candy and an orange.   My brother and sister and I would wait for our dad to be done playing the postlude and packing up his organ shoes while our mom took the other car home;  we’d take a drive around to look at Christmas lights on the way home. When we got to our house we’d walk in to our family room where the tree was and it would be lit and the presents would be there,  like Santa had actually been there while we were at church. It took us years to figure out that it had been first my grandparents, and then my mom, who put the presents under the tree while we “looked at lights”. And even after we knew, and had moved several times, we would drop my mom off after church, drive around for a while, and come home to presents under the tree. It’s just one of our traditions.

Then I met my husband, and Christmas with his family is a WHOLE other deal. It involves piles and piles of presents and even more alcohol.  The first few years all the booze made things pretty funny; then I started to notice the bickering and veiled insults that went with it.  As years went on and life brought tragedies the insults became less veiled and the bickering got meaner. There’s still a lot of presents though. There are so many presents that one year my  husband’s cousin accidentally threw out the leather gloves I got her with the trash because she didn’t see them (and then complained to my husband’s grandmother that I didn’t get her anything).  My husband’s mom wraps stuff and then doesn’t remember what it is or who it’s for. She also wraps things for herself. There’s no real thoughtfulness to the gifts themselves, I don’t think, because my husband has gotten the same sweatshirt two years in a row (two identical sweatshirts, two separate Christmases) as well as a pile of other shirts that he will never wear. I’ve received a lotion from my mother in law that I had given her the previous year, and one that my husband’s grandmother had given her previously. My kids receive all kinds of things that don’t remotely interest them or that are completely not age appropriate. They are always yelled at for not saying “thank you” enough,  and so am I, but I think we’re just stunned by some of the craziness of it all.

A few years ago, after driving on glare ice for a large part of the trip to the Twin Cities, we said no more. We were going to spend Christmas in our own home, so our kids could have their own tree and not be dragged all over during their break. And we made that happen for a couple of years. And then we got the “but  I might  not be here next year” speech from my husband’s grandmother, so we agreed to go in for Christmas Eve 2012, even though I had had stomach surgery three weeks prior and Alex came down with the stomach flu two days before were supposed to leave. We should have stayed home, because the night we checked into the hotel my daughter threw up ALL OVER. And the next day I cooked for everyone anyway, a prime rib that I couldn’t even swallow yet because my stomach was still healing. (Only my husband’s step dad thought this was odd, and he helped me in the kitchen all day.)  Right before they started in on presents I realized I did NOT feel good and had my husband take me back to the hotel.  That was the start of my near death experience. My  surgery (a Nissen Fundoplication) makes it so NOTHING goes up your esophagus: great for getting rid of acid reflux, bad if you get the stomach flu from your kids. So I went from being in a little pain to being absolutely convinced I was going to die. and I was out of anti-nausea drugs. All I wanted was to get some Zofran so I would stop wanting to hurl and not being able to, and stop feeling so much pain. But did we go to the ER or urgent care? NO. My husband took his grandmother tile shopping at Home Depot because that was super urgent. Then he visited his dad who was feeling neglected. By the time I went to the ER when we got home 3 days later they were like “what took you so long?” but all of the sutures held and there was no bleeding. So I was miserable but lucky.

But I’m done.  I will not be talked in to any more Christmases that I don’t want to participate in. If it’s just me and the dogs and the chickens I’m cool with that. At least that’s genuine.

I didn’t forget

I didn’t forget to post today. I went to Target with my daughter and had a nice time just meandering around. Then I came home to a chicken with poop all over her. She couldn’t puff out her feathers to keep warm or put her head under her wing because she was so matted with poop. I have no idea how it happened, I don’t know if she was in the line of fire, so to speak, or if she rolled in it while dust bathing. But it was super nasty. So instead of eating dinner and sitting down to write about being irritated with my husband’s grandmother and the holidays I gave a chicken a bath in my bathtub and then blew her dry with my hair-dryer. She handled it better than I expected, but it’s not an experience I’d care to repeat.
Good night!