...farewell, fall...

 It's been gray and gloomy all day here.  I think even the weather is ready to put fall in the rearview.

I'm feeling...some kind of way...today, as I pack up the final remnants of Thanksgiving decor and lighter-weight apparel.  Normally, Autumn is my season. The hot swelter finally broken, and the outdoors just a tad bit safer for our explorations as the bees go bye-bye.  I love the cool breezes that make for perfect bonfire nights in September ~ the costume creating chaos in October ~ the retreat to the kitchen in November as I prep for Thanksgiving and fill the freezer with stock and soup and casseroles.  Autumn is ideal for daytrips and hikes.  It's sunny days and cool nights.  It's hot coffee to start the day, and spiced sherry cider to end it.  Autumn is adventure and cozy and a million things in between.

Usually.

This year, Autumn has been...a season of struggle.  Like so many, our household was impacted by the pandemic financially.  Profit losses, coupled with a significant reduction in work did not pair well with the mass price increases everywhere.  Constraints on time and a push to fuel that second-stream income wreaked havoc on our normal schedule. I felt my frustration spiraling every time I looked for "family friendly fun things to do" and found that the base prices had more than quadrupled since we'd last visited.  Our poor broken budget, already stretched beyond capacity, definitely couldn't take any more.  It felt like such a mom-fail...this making do with crafts at home, instead of taking the toddler apple-picking and fall-festing and daytrip-adventuring. And even our few attempts flopped.  Price-gouging and "closed due to covid" and scheduling upsets all'round.  What a waste.

Henri and I, confronting Fall and losing

I feel like fall failed.

I feel like I fell.

Which..I mean...I sort of did.  We all did...for two weeks...fell sick with RSV.

And now it's all rush to catch-up and make-up.
And just like so many years ago (17, but who's counting) I have a toddler who was seriously sick and is now in the "skill drop-off" stage of recovery.  Only this time, instead of needing extra assistance, he needs extra patience and extra strength and extra pain relief as he exorcises his discomforts: non-linguistically, but very verbally and very, very physically.

It's like he's trying to fight fall to the bitter end, but I'm the collateral damage.

I'm so ready for the next season.
I'm closing this out now and stepping away to put finishing touches on holiday decor. 

I've got plans...big and small...things to look forward to and things to create.  I've got magic to make, for this family of mine...both my two boys, and my step-children.

I've got high hopes and simple pleasures filling the calendar for December.

I'm so ready for it.

Farewell, fall...do better next time, won't you?

...reunited, and it feels so (not) good...

I was an awkward teenager.

Heck, I've been awkward at every stage of life thus far. 

But high school was The Worst.

Sure, I had a friend group...a selective few who tolerated my quirks and character flaws.  But raised in the manner I was, I wasn't built for fitting in or playing well with others.

I didn't have access to the right clothes.
I didn't have access to the right music or entertainment.
I didn't have anything to contribute when it came to the socially accepted norms of typical teenage conversation in the '90s.
I wasn't raised to be a part of my peer group.

My adoptive parents have/had specific ideas and ideals in mind when it came to raising the children they had adopted. And for the most part, barring some puberty-onset defiance by both of us, my adoptive brother and I fell in line.  We knew our place.  We knew our duty.

We followed the rigid guidelines.
And we were both...weird, because of it.
Me, probably more so.

Skirts and dresses instead of jeans. Classical music instead of trending pop stars.  No to parties, and late nights, and mixed-groups. 
No, to seemingly everything that everyone else was doing, wearing, watching and talking about.

So, I was awkward.

~~~

Tonight is Reunion Night. 25 years. 

(That, in and of itself...the 25 year part...is a bitter pill to swallow.  When did I get so oooooold?)

I've watched the FB event fill up with vaguely-familiar faces and names with some sort of dispassionate curiosity. I've seen the notifications as details and comments sporadically populated the page.  I've noted the stats change as interested clicks over to going.
And I haven't for even a moment ever wanted to attend.

High school was The Worst.

I was such a misfit. And boy oh boy, did my classmates know it. 
I went through school with a target on my back.
I was skinny...oh, fine, I was scrawny. 
I was...brown.
I was dressed all wrong, and brought lunch from home, and walked to and from school each day.
I was a music and theatre geek.  A nerd who desperately tried to dumb herself down by not turning in assignments so the other kids would stop calling her nerdy. 

I was a bookworm and a writer (oh, hey...hmmm...)

I was an easy target.

I was shy and quiet and desperately trying to melt into the hallway walls.

I rushed through the teaming cesspool of students, when the bells rang, shoulders hunched and head down...desperate to avoid notice.

I was...unknown to self and others...neurodivergent and utterly incapable of understanding, much less playing the social-construct games of teenage hierarchy.

'90s teenage me:
Yes, that's an oh-so-popular Hypercolor tee, and yes, I had to work hard for it.
And yes, that's my beloved guinea pig, Butterscotch.

So, I was bullied.

No surprise, there.

I was taunted and teased and inappropriately touched. I was shoved and snickered at. My belongings would mysteriously go missing. My long hair was tied to the back of chairs and stuck with discarded gum. The home answering machine would be full of gross jokes and threats when I got home,,,thankfully well before anyone else, with time enough to erase them all.

High school was The Worst.

One of my friends from those way back days, some years later when we were still in friendly touch, used to talk about how excited she was for future reunions and how she couldn't wait to show up and prove them all wrong.

I never quite got that.  Wouldn't the proving be in not caring about their opinion? Wouldn't the evidence of their wrong be in the life you successfully built beyond the boundaries their immature games had defined for you?

More to the point, why would anyone want to Go Back?

Go Backward?

Even for a night...a gathering...a memory re-telling/re-writing?

Why would anyone who'd not been part of the in-crowd ever want to be reminded of how ostracized and unwanted they once were?

Why would anyone want to resurrect those discards of unformed-self, shed like too-small skin once we were free of those hallways?

High school was The Worst.

I've no desire to open that door to the past.

I don't want to try, and fail, to fix that damaged teenage girl.

I don't want to sit with her big feelings and silent tears and hot humiliation.

I don't want to hear their memories of me, or see the confusion of not remembering me at all.

I don't want to listen to the liquor-induced one-upmanship of strangers desperate to impress.

I don't want to prove them wrong.

I don't want who I am now to be compared to who they thought I was then. I don't want the life I've built and the things I've accomplished to be diminished by the constricting constructs of their version of teenage me.

Tonight is Reunion Night. 25 years.

I haven't gone to the other reunions. I won't be there tonight. I can't imagine a future where I might attend one at 30 years or 40 years or...

I was an awkward teenager.

Heck, I've been awkward at every stage of life thus far.

I'm more than capable of self-sabotage and self-deprecation.

I don't need help to make myself feel small and misfit.

I've got that covered.

I don't need to confront my bullies, or wait for their apologies, or listen to their shallow excuses.

I can just say Not Attending.

 

...an exercise in exorcism...

 Warning, lane departure!

This post was begun on 16.July, 2021.  The words have sat, slowly festering, in my draft queue till this morning, when I decided to click through on all the drafts and make myself accountable to finishing them.  I was shocked to see that this one was so...full.  More than just a few scrambled words and notations.  A full (incomplete) post.

And I cried as I read it. Because part of me is still there. The me of now is just the convenient shell of form and function, that I've covered all that mess up in. She is still me, and I am still her, and we are still just broken bits scraping along. 

Here's what I wrote first:

I've been avoiding this page for months now.  Steering far clear of all the white space and the demands of its blinking cursor.  Staying in the "safe zone" where I don't have to acknowledge how disorderly the chaos in my head has gotten.  Going through the motions...running on empty...too tired to think clearly.

Too tired to think clearly.
Maybe that's it.
Maybe that's the problem.
Too tired to think clearly.

My exhaustive state has winnowed me down to naught but reaction and instinct and coping skills.  
No clear thought.  No organization of thought.  No logic or reasoning or analysis.

I've been struggling since Henri was born.

After multiple early miscarriages, my pregnancy with him was terrifying.  Nine months of high-risk and complications to worry through.  Nine months of thinking each twinge was the end.  Hemorrhaging during delivery.
The face of my eldest when he walked into the delivery room and heard the doctor say, "I can't stop the bleeding."

Those fears still take up room.  Those moments of terror in freeze-frame images my mind flicks through at the slightest trigger.

I don't know that I'll ever be able to write them out and free myself of their weight.  Every time I try, I feel like I can't breathe.  

We brought him home into chaos.  Our hard-earned homecoming absolutely destroyed by the cruelty of toxic family histrionics and coupled with pandemic lockdown.  Sleepless and under attack those first days, I wept as I nursed him.  My eldest son and my partner both watched me splinter and wondered who this stranger was.  Post-partum took over...telling me they would be better off without me... telling me I should have bled out...telling me to take all the pills in our medicine cabinet one night.  Self-preservation stopped me just short of that. I sat on the edge of the toilet, carefully putting each pill back into the correct bottle, overcome by tremors and silent tears.  I bit the inside of my cheek to keep quiet that night in the bathroom and run my tongue over the scar from that wound as I write this now.  Symbolic, that.  Biting through my own flesh to make sure my self-loathing didn't disturb anyone else.  This scar whose very existence is proof that I am capable of destroying myself but not of asking for help. 

At my 6-week check-up, my questionnaire was flagged. So exhausted was I, that I'd actually filled out the answers truthfully instead of with some version of "I'm fine".  I sat there, stoic on the outside and withering on the inside, as my midwife gently coaxed me to try medication.  Even in that moment, railing internally at my failure and cursing my weakness.  There, as she spoke softly to my broken heart, I wanted to disappear.  To cease. To never have been.

My eldest was watching. To this day I think that's the only reason I actually followed up and took my prescription.  After a few days, the edges blurred. Nothing cut quite as deep. Nothing was sharp or loud. Everything dulled.  Everything grayed.  There was no high...no low...no importance or impetus.  I just floated in a cozy gray haze, going through the motions of motherhood without a care.  Nothing penetrated the gray. Not fear or anger or joy or love.  Henri nursed and napped, fussed and fretted, and I was but a dispassionate automaton.  The daily pill just strong enough to silence every emotion. 

Until it stopped working.

Several months in, my mind cleared just enough that I realized I was having near-constant anxiety attacks.  Every morning walk ended in hives and racing heart. Trips to the grocers were terrifying.  I clutched railings and armrests and froze mid-step.  My mind went into hyper-drive...feeding me never-ending reels of worst-case scenarios at every turn.  My alertness to detail (that I've always relied on) was suddenly both overwhelming and unreliable, creating danger from the most innocent sources.  Daily life was terrifying.  Every noise and shadow and shifting of light caused me to freeze.  I could no longer trust my senses...or my brain to make sense of their input.  I became angry.  So exhausted by the constant pain of heightened stimuli that my defenses took over.  I was suddenly spastic. My arms and legs reacting to sensory input before I could think.  Tripping over my feet...crashing into furniture...spilling my coffee and rearing back from the sudden hot drip.

Somewhere, somehow...a moment of clarity. The pills!  One days' realization that what I'd needed then, was the problem now.  They'd done their job, wrapping me in bubble-wrap through my post-partum.  Thank goodness for that!  But I no longer needed them now.  Bluntly put, that gray fog bubble wrap that had kept me safe during the worst of it was now blunting my senses so much that they were becoming hyperactive to break through.  I was like an exposed nerve, reacting to every bit of sensory input as though under attack. 

So, I stopped.  Finished the week out and said, "No more!". 

But the hair-trigger response my body had developed in that time remained.  I find myself, even now, having to "talk myself down" from my fear responses when we're in traffic, or when I see a bee, or when there's an unexpected sound.  And I hate it.  I hate that I'm still so reactive.  It's physically painful- the muscles spasming up and knotting.  It's exhausting-the rush of adrenaline and resulting low blood sugar. It makes me feel weak and broken all over again.

While I waded through post-partum and meds, the stressors only increased.  The two-weeks of distance learning that started right after we came home from the hospital extended into the end of the school year.  My eldest, a high-schooler, was suddenly home 24/7 because of the lockdown.  Our small apartment shrank day by day, as I tried to keep a newborn quiet during the hours of remote learning.  Zoom-school meant a constant presence of computer camera in the main part of our home, which hampered every natural response of early motherhood.  I snuck around the outer corners of rooms, trying to find private spots to nurse and eat and nap.  I couldn't help but feel embarrassed when the camera caught my post-partum-pudge on display as I fled past. I couldn't help but feel I was failing my eldest son in not being able to offer him a separate place in which to do his schoolwork. I couldn't help but compare myself now to myself of years ago, when I was a new mother to my first baby and had all the normality of a pre-Covid birth and homecoming.  

Comparison. Oh, that took over as well.  I found myself forever falling short.  He didn't sleep except for power naps?  My fault somehow for not being able to comfort him down properly.  Nursing problems?  Mine to address and suffer through bouts of mastitis for.  Reflux?  My diet, obviously.  His lip and tongue tie? Something I should be able to work around. All of it my doing and my undoing.  All of it not going as smoothly as it had...or as I remembered it...or mis-remembered it from when I'd had my first.  17 years later and failing at what I thought I'd so easily done before.  17 years of fervent hopes dashed in the reality of my failures.

Even my body was betraying me.  The weight accrued in pregnancy failing to shed off as it had once so easily and quickly done. Insomnia at an all-time high. 

Continued...

Some 16 months later here, having found this post I don't really remember writing, and shocked that I was brave enough at one point to do so.  Not brave enough to post it and send those words out into the world, of course.  But somehow brave enough to sit down and type out that ugly truth.

I've been struggling since Henri was born.
A repeated line. A repeated truth.

I continue to struggle. I continue to cycle through shame and rage...with myself.  I haven't bounced back.  I haven't rolled with the punches.  I haven't adjusted, naturally or otherwise, to any of the changes of the last 2+ years with grace, or found new footing, or...or...or...

I haven't rediscovered myself.
I haven't re-invented myself.
I haven't re-emerged as a new, better parent and person.
I haven't recovered.

From waking to crashing, every single day, I'm just pushing through...deplorably...anxiously, nervously, angrily sometimes even. 

I feel...removed from self, in a way.  As though, so long as I keep busy and just-keep-moving, then that's enough. 

I feel that scar inside my cheek, sometimes, when Henri is nursing and the room is quiet and still.  I flick at it with my tongue and feel that little spark of pain. I remember the emptiness of that night...the exhaustion and hopelessness. Holding him, in the here and now as he suckles, it's not just a memory.  

I'm still failing.

I'm failing at those things that I thought came so easily to me.

Resilience and creativity and patience and energy and grit.

I'm failing to be the mother I want to be...the partner I want to be...the friend I want to be. 

Because I spent 9 months terrified that something would go wrong, and then it did.

Because everything changed including me...in ways I never expected or planned for.

Because this miracle cost so very much.

Because I'm scared.

Because I'm ashamed.

Because I haven't recovered.

Because trauma eventually catches up to you~me~everyone.

I want myself back.

I want the familiarity and ease of the me I was before.

So, this is my first step...

hitting...

POST.

...of snake monsters and other scary things...

 Morning is in full effect here, after a deliciously late wake-up.  From where I'm perched, I can hear my partner grumbling as he waits for the french press to reach peak brew.  Turning just so, I can look past the open door, to where both my boys are snuggled up with Henry Raccoon in between them, and the cat is dutifully submitting to her morning fluffing.

My best laid plans have come to naught, by light of day, as I woke up this morning with my right eye swollen shut.  (To this day, despite consults with specialists, I've no idea the cause or cure...I just have to wait for the swelling to go down, frustratingly slowly.) A lifetime ago, when my eldest was barely verbal, he said that my swollen eye made me look like a one-eyed snake monster (thanks, no doubt, to far too many hours spent watching Scooby Doo together) and the name stuck.  So here I sit, sulking in my robe, feeling every bit monstrous and hideous, and absolutely not planning on leaving the house today.   While the morning unfolds around me, I'm hiding in the corner, hot compress up against my eye with one hand and typing with the other.  Slow and steady...on both counts.

My youngest stared at me intently this morning, when we first woke up.  A little furrow of a frown between his eyes as he tried to puzzle out what was wrong with Mami's face.  Quick thinking, I put my hand up to cover my swollen eye, and he giggled...all set right again...

If only...

Would that it were that simple.  Just a cover-up, and on with the day.  Just a flick of a hand, Vegas magician style, and back to normal.

~~~

Normalcy, or the feeling of it, has been in short supply around here lately. Whether it's the background work of my brain trying to prepare for all the emotional dysfunction of the upcoming holidays, or the logistics analysis I seem to be constantly running to cover all the bases, or simply the inevitable psychological frailty that comes part and parcel with the whole family having had RSV for a week plus...
I feel...othered.
Which is nothing new, but somehow suddenly much more profound.

Last week, I shared this as a fb post:
Being an adoptee is...weird.
Sort of...defining...as "undefined".
I don't belong in any family... I'm not a part of either birth family, nor am I really a solid, rooted part of my adoptive family.
It's like having both no history and borrowed history at the same time.
It's growing up seeing connections and not having any yourself.
It's rather like looking through windows...watch all you like, but always from a distance.
It's never really celebrating your birthday because that's the day you weren't wanted.
It's...maybe reconnecting with half-sibs, but not being a real part of their story or their family either.
It's being the eldest and feeling the emotion of 'I should be there for this' on your baby sister's/half-sister's/biological sister's wedding day but knowing full well at the same time that you aren't her big sister in any of the ways that count.
It's feeling the loss...the missing out...the trauma of separation...all over again any time you let your mind go there.
It's starting a family of your own and finding yourself in your children's faces.
It's knowing they'd be awesome nephews to have, but that shared genes don't equal aunts and uncles

I find my mind wandering to those mysterious alternate realities more and more lately...the what ifs of biological family and siblings, of shared DNA and memories, of holiday traditions and photo albums full of 'big sis' moments and nephews basking in the glow of uncles and aunts. What history went into making these faces, mine and my boys...and, even now, what chains in the gene sequence cause my eyelids to randomly swell shut?

I feel weighed down by a sense of obligation to my adoptive family, to fulfill the debt owed of saving me from foster care. That tour of duty doesn't peacefully coexist with any want on my part to build bridges to my half-siblings.

My mother-in-law (and dear friend) learned late in life that the father who raised her was not her biological father. I won't share her story in detail here...it's hers, not mine...but I've watched (or listened) to the beauty unfold as she's connected with her half-siblings and researched her genetic inheritance. It's been an interesting counterpoint to my experience, as she's felt free to explore and I feel stifled by responsibility and rejection and childhood-trauma.

I can't help but wonder about all those what ifs...

I can't help but wonder if my boys and I would see bits and pieces of ourselves in those half-siblings of mine...if shared genes equal comfortable familiarity, and if our shared face (because, really, that picture could be any one of the three of us!) would be reflected in any of their features...

Happy Thanksgiving, and thanks for being here...

"Having somewhere to go is home.

Having someone to love is family.

Having both is a blessing."

~unknown

~~~

Thanksgiving is a wonderful reminder to reach out and tell your people how grateful you are for the gift of their presence. In a complex and baffling world full of strangers, each of them is familiar. They are in a way, both home and family. Whether it is the homecoming of a hug after days~weeks~months of distance, or the kindred chat long-distance via talk or text...each of them is a blessing in your life.

Be grateful for the time shared together, and the promise of memories still to be made.

Wishing you and yours a very Happy Thanksgiving... 

...try again tomorrow...

 Words on the page.
That's how simple it should be.
But for...reasons...both vast and vapid, I've found it impossible to
Just Start.

I can count a million false starts...scribbled notes and spooling text docs...even good intentions dressed up as titled drafts...but still that blinking cursor taunts me.

There are, it seems, both too many words and too few words all at the same time...clamoring for attention and chiding me into silence. 

Words have weight.  And of late, I haven't wanted to bear that weight. I've been terrified of that weight...that added weight that would surely break me.

This season of life has been the undoing of me.
I am, as I have been since March 2020, a breath away from unraveling.
Every day is a study in controlled chaos and contained disaster. 

Every day is a failure.

I'm behind on everything.  I'm overwhelmed in every area.  I'm not so much drowning in the waves, as compressed by all the pressure...compressed down and down and down until there's nothing left of me.

Insomnia is my nightly companion again.  2a.m. is silent and empty of need...empty enough to plan the next strategy and steel my resolve, silent enough to hear the echoes of who I was.

I'm surrounded by need.

A partner who needs constant correction to steady his course of sobriety and effect responsible decision making. A young adult who needs inspiration and redirection and organization and (life skills, self-care skills, mental/emotional, big life choice) support. A toddler who needs creative solutions to strengthen his areas of deficit, and patience as he learns by failing, and non-verbal translation and comfort-nursing, and immediate gratification.
Step-children who need far more of me than they are getting.
Extended family members who need my presence and my skill sets. 
Friends who need me to show up.
Big life things that need my time and my voice and my resources and my energy.

And somewhere deep down under all that need is me...needing to just sleep and recover and rebuild.

I hate this part of my story.
I hate the mess of it.  The ugliness of it. The overwhelm and the panic and the rage of it.
Oh, I hate it.
I hate how I feel like I'm scrambling on loose gravel.
I hate how I'm failing everyone.

2a.m. is dark and lonely and empty.

Its silence holds a mirror up to my every day and finds the fault.

2a.m. is my guidepost.

My challenger.

My "try again tomorrow".

And so I will...

 

 

...when push comes to shove...

 I needed a push to come back here.
 I needed a firm push to put everything else aside for a few moments and sit in this little space and remember how much better it is when I write things out...

I needed to confront all those half-written drafts and brainstorms that I'd abandoned and come up with the courage to finish each of them.
But every time I opened the door, I didn't want to stay...

So today (having actually planned out time for the task, because planning is the only way to hold myself accountable) I asked my eldest son for help. 

I explained the problem, as best I could. The notion that, visually, the site didn't look like a corner seat in the cafe...it didn't represent the way in which I write. It didn't transport you to my paper-strewn table, where we can catch up over a cup of coffee. It didn't reflect those few stolen moments of calm and comfort that I steal for myself, with a steaming mug and empty page.

So, he fixed it. And fixed me, while at it.

(May we all be blessed with genius sons who can translate all the new tech for our weak little gen-x minds and spout verbatim every bit of self-care trope they've been inundated with!)

So here we are.  Or, at least, here I am.  Having a "if you build it (and then burn it all down and build it again) maybe, just maybe they will come" moment.  Hoping you'll join me for a coffee now and again.

I'll be here...

Thanks, Johannes, for the technical assistance and the shove (direct hit!) to just make the time...