Will Work For Just Long Enough to Demonstrate My Ineptness

I have had many, many jobs.

I have been a gas station attendant, a dish washer, a car washer, a book store clerk, an art store clerk, an environmental department cubicle dweller, an analytical lab tech chemist type person, a butcher, a baker, a candlestick maker. But the last three I don’t get paid for, since they’re part of my wifely duties.

The thing is, I keep convincing people they should hire me, and these people continue paying me to work for them even after I demonstrate my total lack of common sense or normalcy.

I’m pretty sure if my husband wasn’t financially too invested in me he would upgrade, but I don’t know where else he’d find someone with such diverse experience.

Not only can I pump gas and wash dishes, but I can formulate scathing tongue lashings for the customer service reps that have screwed up our accounts, all while I’m on hold and playing Memory with the kids.  I can analyze our drinking water for lead and also sew buttons back onto pants. I can write copy so hilarious and captivating that it sells a cheap, fake engagement ring on ebay.  I can create truck routing schedules for hazardous waste pick-ups, a task that may seem irrelevant for a mother but believe me…it is not.  I can count minuscule dead minnows in the bottom of a beaker. I can breed actual sea monkeys successfully, and then feed them to the minnows that did not die.  I can fix Gas Cromatograph Mass Spectrometers that cost more than $100,000 each.

But now, my jobs seem so mundane. Wash dishes. Do laundry. Make appointments. Cook supper.

Where’s the glamor?  The money, the glitz? I was destined for greatness, and now I’m…what?

Now I’m a model. A famous woman who is clamored over and stalked and hears my name shouted from everywhere, over and over and over:

“Mommy? Mommy? Mommeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!”

Love Them

I’m referencing a post by my bloggie friend Betty, who inspired this response.

We all feel inept and bumbling when it comes to parenting, but most people are afraid to say it. We pretend we know “the answer” or “the way,” so that we can put our minds at ease that we will turn out people who follow our advice  but really we are all just floundering around here creating people who will one day do things that make us cry, or laugh, or tear our hair out, or wail inside with almost unendurable pain.

You have to create a way of living that will work for your family. I’m not saying it’s okay to treat children any old way, either. As the product of a destructive home environment and the survivor of some horrible events, I am know the mess that can make.

Yes, there are some absolutes: Don’t teach racism. Don’t beat your children, with belts OR words. Don’t leave them alone in the bathtub. That sort of thing. And yes, there’s even empirical evidence that breastfeeding is best, and attachment parenting can be really good psychologically. But that doesn’t mean it will all work out perfectly. I have almost never yelled at my daughter. I fed her organic, I wore her everywhere, I breastfed her and tried to do everything I thought was right, which is to say, everything I was capable of doing at the moment.  But she is nearly an adult, and she makes some choices that are unhealthy and self-destructive.

I like to quip to my friends that we all mess up our children. The trick is to give them good stories to tell their shrinks.

We could do this to ourselves forever, this throwing ourselves up against the wall of condemnation and inadequacy.  We can damage ourselves and ruin any chance of being even a remotely good parent if we aren’t careful.

What all of it comes down to is this:

Love them.

Validate them.

Love them.

Hug them.

Love them.

Let go.

Let go.

Let go.

To My Daughter on Mothers Day (Sappiness ahead, consider yourself warned)

Dear Daughter,

I hope you’ll forgive me for so public a display as this.  Maybe you’ll never even see it.  If it does what I hope it will, you will instead receive a hand-written letter of apology and remorse from me.

See, I’m so used to typing, it’s hard to sit and write.  But maybe this habitual action will help me sort out what I want to say.

Seventeen years ago, I found out I was pregnant.  An accident, but not really.

The truth is, I wanted to be.  I wanted a baby.

I wanted someone to love who would love me right back.  Someone who wouldn’t leave me or hurt me the ways I’d been hurt already.  I wanted you, always.  Even before I knew.

You were born ten weeks early, so fragile and tiny, I thought I would lose you immediately.  I had no way of knowing whether you would survive.  I cried every day until you came home five weeks later.  I railed at the unfairness of never getting to experience a sense of peace about you.  I knew from the minute you were born how tenuous our hold on life is, how you didn’t really belong to me after all.

Because of who I am and what my life had been, I made bad decisions.  A lot of them.  Your father and I are both damaged people, mostly incapable of making reasonable choices for ourselves.  In order to survive, I had to leave him.

I hated the split of our lives.  You were just a baby, but I hated that I’d failed you already.  I made vows to do things better, to be a different kind of parent than mine were.  I swore I would never be the one to say you couldn’t see your dad, as long as you were safe with him.  I wanted you to know him and me for what we were.  I never spoke badly of him in front of you.

But all my hopes of being a good parent were nothing in the face of my mental illness, my irresponsibility, my dysfunction.

And now I see that no matter how much I loved you, it wasn’t enough.  I didn’t do the things that would make you feel secure in yourself.  I wasn’t well enough to model maturity and security for you.

I brought men in and out of our lives, I moved us around incessantly.  I was selfish and impatient and wouldn’t just sit and play games with you, or hang out.  I worked long hours and still didn’t do a good job of building a life or supporting you.  I indulged you out of guilt over giving you me as a mother.

And now, you are lost to me.  Not in a physical way, but I sense the distance and I feel fear about you.  I fear your anger and overwhelming emotion; I’m all too familiar with it because it mirrors my own.  My love for you is so strong it burns a hole in me.  I fear it’s too late to undo the damage I’ve done and the patterns already so ingrained in you.

Being a mother is the most wonderful awful feeling in the world.  Every action takes on vast meaning and sometimes irrevocable consequences.

But if I can start to learn how to loosen myself from this miry muck, then anyone can.

When you need to know the way, I hope you’ll still love me enough to ask.

99 Bottles of Blog on the Wall

Interestingly, my biggest motivator and friend, Melissa, is also celebrating her 100th post TODAY!  I guess we both started taking our writing more seriously about the same time, only she was much more disciplined than I was for a while.  Then she started nursing school, and with four kids and a husband to take care of – let’s just say I caught up.  For now.

For my little celebration, I’m doind a round up of my favorite posts.  Mostly funny, I think, but I’ll let you be the judge.

Just keep it to yourself if you disagree, mmkay?

Dear God, Someone Please Stop Her

How to Leave a Party in Three Easy Steps

My Morning Routine

Not So Serious, After All

Top Ten Reasons to Only Go Places With Nice Bathrooms

Cleaning Tips for Real People

The Cow Call

Male Female Relations in a Nutshell

Cool Beans

P.S.  Thanks for all the love!

We Are Not Alone (in our messy houses, even if you don’t count the squirrels and the action figures)

Yesterday I got to laugh a bit while taking a break from writing about depression when I came across Her Bad Mother’s post about house cleaning.

I’ve been pretty clear about my skills in that area, but I haven’t been what you might call…transparent.  She posted pictures!

So in a show of solidarity (and maybe just a bit of competitiveness for the “don’t use her bathroom award”) – I’m posting some of my own before pictures, because I plan to fix it.  Soon.  Like maybe tomorrow.  Or the next day.  Or surely by next month.

In fact, I think I will do a video series.  Maybe the pressure of knowing you will be watching me will help me stay on task and finally organize this house.  Or maybe I will end up needing a second zip-lock baggie to hold all the meds.  We’ll see.

Drum roll please…

My back is to this mess while I write. It's the only way I survive.

The little circle on the table is Beckett’s musical toothbrush.  He likes the variety of leaving it odd places and having me look for it every day.  The string is the remnant of an invention.  No, not the invention, but something similar.  The great big circle is the to-do pile of sewing and paper crafting and other stuff that I want to do but I’m too damned busy taking pictures.

Preschool teacher's nightmare.

Here we have a baggie of felt I need to ship for an Etsy customer, and just below that – my kids’ favorite toy.  Tampons.  They were my daughter’s, because for some reason she won’t use cloth pads, but now they are just another weapon in the arsenal of “what can we play next, mommy?”.   The little, tiny circle at the bottom?  That’s my cappucino machine.  You put your appliances where you want, and I’ll do the same, mmkay?

My sacred space.

This is the cluttered corner of hell peaceful oasis in which I sit when I type all this tripe, since my laptop is unbearably slow now.  Chained to a desktop – can you believe it?  The view on my screen is one of Her Bad Mother’s photos.  And you know, looking at her house I got jealous.  I thought, my house could be that tidy!  Really!  If I just had some help.  And some cute, modern throw rugs.  But what really gets me about her house is the book tossing.  Here, the best my kids can throw is a Richard Brautigan, or a Chuck Palahniuk.  Her kids get Bukowski and Derrida, for crying out loud!  I need to work with them more.

Anyway, the rectangular plastic container holds beans from the great bean extravaganza of 2009.  I should throw them away, but why?  Maybe we’ll use them again.  Next to it is my bag of mother’s little helpers.  All legitimately prescribed to me – and totally ineffectual.  Then some random shit is circled,  and I quit, because there’s just too much to look at here.  Where do I start?  The wine glass from three nights ago?  The paper towels with coffee grounds in the tube?  It’s just too overwhelming.

I think I’ll go tackle a project now.  I feel motivated.  Or maybe it’s tired.  Something like that, anyway.

And in case I need to say it – no, you cannot use my bathroom.

Postpartum Depression: My Story

I finished my story, and posted it over on Blogher.

I’m not thrilled with it, just like everything else I do.  There’s more to tell, more to sort through, more to figure out.  I want to be able to tell you I am all better, but I’m not there yet.

PPD can disguise itself as normal parenting fears, irresponsibility, anger.  It can cause a grown up to behave childishly or irrationally.  And moms, of all people, are most likely to want to hide it, and to be capable of doing so.  We keep going, because really – we have to.

I can only tell you, if you are reading my story because you have one of your own – get help.  Tell someone you are not sure what’s going on, but you might be about to self-destruct.  Force yourself to ask for what you need, or arrange someone else to make sure you are getting it.  Friends won’t mind lending a hand.

They’d much rather wash your dishes than go to your funeral.

The Results Are In on the Elephant in the Living Room: Part I

I have turned this topic around and around in my head over the last few days.  And now several bloggers have beat me to the punch.

But that’s okay, because I’ve decided to take a slightly different direction with it.  I want to talk about medications used to treat depression, anxiety, irritability, anger, and suicidal ideation, and their place during breastfeeding, but not before a little chat about postpartum depression itself.

First, let me tell you what your votes say:

The majority of you (41%) would live with the depression and continue breastfeeding,  24% of you would take a medication with uncertain risk and continue breastfeeding, 17% would seek or increase counseling and continue, about 13% would wean  (divided in half at less than 3 months or 6-12 months), and about 3% would do something else entirely, which I am not sure I want to know about.  Okay, maybe this is not the best time for my dark sense of humor.

But let me tell you what is going on right at this moment:

I have a diaperless toddler running around who just peed on the floor, a 4 year old riding a Kettler trike around the dining room (where I am) because it’s been raining for 837 days, a pizza burning in the oven because that’s the only thing Ethan will eat at the moment, a blog post I desperately need to write, and a migraine.  And all of this on two hours of sleep, because Beckett’s “language explosion” decided to happen today.  At two in the morning.

You may find yourself thinking – clearly this woman is not depressed!  She is far too funny and lighthearted to be depressed!  And clearly she is totally insane.  Not depressed at all.

And so here we begin.  Some of the posts I’ve been reading on this issue indicate that the symptoms most people associate with depression can be lacking or distorted, leaving many women with confusion over their feelings and no help, since no one realizes they are suffering from depression.

Baby Ready, for instance, talks about the extreme anger she felt, which caused a terrible cycle of being irritable, yelling at kids, yelling at self for yelling at kids, then hating self, which causes more irritability.  Joanna at the Modernity Ward writes about obsessing over safety issues, having outbursts of anger, and even punishing herself for perceived failings as a mother.

There are so many problems with diagnosing postpartum depression. The only time a woman really sees her care provider after the birth is at the six week checkup.  If a woman has any kind of support network like a church or family close by, she has probably been getting at least a little help up to this point, in the form of meals, or just leave from a regular job. And the symptoms must be present for at least two weeks in order to meet DSM-IV criteria, although there is room for clinician judgment within the diagnostic framework.  Postpartum depression typically manifests itself around four weeks after parturition, but can be delayed as long as a full year.  And it can last beyond the one year mark.  This means that a care provider might never see even the slightest hint of a problem.

When you have a baby, you know you will not get significant sleep for the first few weeks, so you nap when possible.  You are encouraged to nap, in fact!  People bring you meals, sometimes.  You understand that a newborn is a particular kind of challenge so you are somewhat emotionally prepared for it.  But then something else happens:  the baby gets older.  People start asking you if he is sleeping through the night yet (breast milk is more quickly digested than formula, and even formula does not guarantee a “good” sleeper; in fact, some studies show that a lighter sleep is best because the frequent rousings can prevent SIDS).  Community members may expect you to start “getting back out there.”  There is quite a lot of pressure to participate, to be active and constantly busy, which makes it hard to just be – home, snuggling with your baby, lying around in your pajamas when you feel like it, enjoying your children.

According to the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (part of the University of Toronto), postpartum depression is the “most common complication of child-bearing,” affecting an average of 13% of women who have given birth.  Did you hear that?  THE MOST COMMON COMPLICATION OF CHILD-BEARING.  Much higher than the rate of being diagnosed with breast cancer (I am aware that the breast cancer rate applies to every woman, and the PPD rate applies only to women who have given birth.  For a woman who has given birth, the numbers mean the same.  A woman who hasn’t – well, she wouldn’t have PPD, would she?)

I bring up the statistics only because I believe we need to begin having this conversation now. You know the facebook app asking if you’ve felt your titties?  If we are comfortable enough to ask that question in that middle-school way, certainly we can ask the hard questions about “How are you doing?” and start to make it acceptable to answer honestly.

I don’t know a mother who doesn’t ever lose her temper.  I don’t know a mother who doesn’t think she is screwing up her kids in some permanent way.  I don’t know a mother who doesn’t wonder sometimes, in the really bad moments, why she ever had these children anyway.  I do know mothers who pretend.  And I know mothers who silently punish themselves for what they see as their inability to measure up, because they don’t know what happens in their friends’ homes.

Here are the main issues I see:

1.  Women generally have to take care of life, whether they feel like it or not.  We are more practiced at keeping our boat afloat because who the hell else is going to do it?  Some things may get neglected, but enough might be held together that no one really notices there are problems until the situation has spiralled out of control.

2.  The modern world is a scary place.  If I say I’m afraid of lead in toys and phthalates in plastic, no one is going to think it’s all that strange because everyone is scared of that.  Well, okay – a lot of people.  Moms.  A bunch of moms.  Anyhoo – If you don’t press me, I’m not going to tell you that I lie awake at night imagining the damage the plastics are doing to my babies’ endocrine systems and telling myself what a bad mommy I am because my son played with that plastic toy at the book store today.

3.  Women generally do not talk about committing violent acts, no matter how small.  Throwing an iron (like Joanna), kicking a hole in the cupboard (um, that one’s mine), or striking a child are all violent acts.  We want to model better behavior, but intense anger is a symptom – a symptom of depression!  It took me 30 years of therapy for someone to let me in on this little secret.

So now you know what  postpartum depression can look like.  Tomorrow, we’ll see what medications are available to use while breastfeeding, as well as how we, as members of a community, can help women identify and recover from its most severe symptoms.

And then, when all the facts are delivered, I will tell you a story.  My story.

Sometimes Words Are Everything

Sometimes, late at night, when it’s dark and quiet and I’m completely alone at last, I think:  maybe I should never have had children.

And my heart clenches and I start to cry and I want to argue with myself that it’s not true, but there is some little, hard, honest place inside of me that knows it.  I am a bundle of psychoses, neuroses, maladaptive coping mechanisms and personality disorders.  I am an addict; a temper tantrum prone, emotionally labile woman with more problems than she has years left to sort through them.

When I look at these children, whom I love more than life, I cannot help but think there might be better out there for them.  If I could somehow remove myself from the equation, they might stand a fighting chance at something like a quiet, happy life.

But I can’t.  In fact, it is only because of them that I am still alive at all.

I am acutely aware of the myriad ways parenting can go wrong.  I might never know if my makeup is the result of years of slights and invalidation or one major event that broke a girl and made her grow into a caricature of a woman.  Or maybe it is a merry mix of biochemistry and environment, a perfect storm of serendipity.  Or it may be that nothing happened at all.  Maybe I was just born broken.

But my children are not broken.

And all too often I find myself saying something that could take just the smallest little chip from their health, their potential.  How many chips does it take to ruin a life?  How much work does it take to put it all back together when it’s already halfway over?

I constantly battle with the voice that tells me I am not good enough.  Not worth anyone’s help or love.  I must be so much better than, just to measure up at all.

I’ve mentioned before my thoughts about God and Jesus, and why that kind of love draws people in.  The love!  Oh.  You should see it.

“I know the plans I have for you, plans to prosper you, to give you a hope and a future. I will restore to you the years the locust has eaten.  I have loved you with an everlasting love.  I have drawn you with lovingkindness.”

Aren’t these the words we long to hear from our parents?  Maybe not so flowery or poetic, but the idea is there.

“You are good.  You are precious to me.  I love you and nothing you do can ever change that.”

When we don’t receive this from our parents, we might just spend our whole lives searching for it elsewhere.  And those places we look?  Trust me.  They are overwhelmingly not good.

I just discovered that a woman I know writes exceedingly well, and might have some things in common with me.  Some difficult things.  I read a blog entry she recently posted, and I sobbed.  And sobbed.  And every time I have recalled her words since then, I’ve bawled again.

I wanted to be able to tell her why, but I think I’ve just sorted it out.  It’s not the sad things she tells that make me cry.  It’s the very ending, where she shows that somehow, despite everything, she figured out the right words to give to herself, and in the process, to me.

I might not believe them yet, but at least I know which words point towards healing.  Towards belief.

I really want to know how she learned them; how she forgives herself for falling short.  I know we all do.  But some of us mind more than others.  She has found a way to love herself anyway, to believe in her intrinsic worth.

I have yet to learn to handle truth.  I take it and turn it into something dark and skittery; I turn it into a weapon to use upon myself.  I can’t imagine finding that place of strength in me that will allow me to see my weakness and faults as a parent and still believe that I can love my children well and keep them whole.  I do not yet have the courage to see myself clearly.

But when I do, I want to remember these words my friend wrote.  So here they are:

“It’s hard to struggle through your own feelings of inadequacy to muster up the courage to ask someone else, “Am I okay? Am I good enough? Do you think I’m pretty only skin-deep, because I know what’s up inside and I’m pretty good in there? Do you like me? Do I please you? Will you love me? Could you? Just love me?” And I guess that’s what we’re all looking for; an honest answer to that question and also the reason the blanket notion of Jesus’ love is so very appealing. Because, I tell you, it’d take the son of God to love some of those people out there.

But I don’t mean you. Because you are okay. You are so beautiful. I do like you and you are pleasing in every way to me. How couldn’t you be? I love you. I love you. I love you.

And I mean it.

Honest.”

Now excuse me while I go dry off my keyboard.

Dora the Explorer dolls get controversial new look

Dora the Explorer dolls get controversial new look.

Because, you know – little girls just stay little too long nowadays.

I’m starting to think Rorschach was the sensible Watchman.

Speaking of, look for a review of The Watchmen written by my even dorkier alter ego, coming soon to the Indecorum blog.  If you’re into such things, I mean.

The Things We Lose Sleep Over

Tonight at bed time, these are the questions I answered:

“But Mommy, what if the bugs come in and eat all my toys?”

“But Mommy, can’t we bring the TV back into your room from Ellie’s room because you said you were going to just do it for tonight!  Can’t we just take it?”

“But Mommy, why can’t I just put the waffles on the floor and have them in the morning?”

“But Mommy, what if the squirrels come in through the attic and down into the walls and into the floor between the second floor and the first floor and chew through the wires so our dining room light and the refrigerator and the toaster don’t work?”

Okay, well – that last one really happened, I just thought I would throw it in there.  Sometimes, imagination just can’t top reality.