Author: Dre

Categories
Home and Garden Life in general

Slumlords

Jeremy and I like projects.  We actually fell in love while remodeling a condemned crack house, eleven years ago.

Who says romance is dead?

This year, we bought three foreclosed properties and have been working on them in our “spare time”, where “spare time” = who the hell has spare time?  It’s more like we work on them when we’re supposed to be sleeping, or having a “date night”, where “date night” = working on condemned crack houses is romantic!

Two of them are now tenant occupied, thanks to my hard working husband, and the third is now in the line of fire.  Guess what?  There’s a reason we saved it for last.

I now present to you, our newest crack house project:



See the floor?  Let’s take a closer look, shall we?



That would appear to be a hole.  In the kitchen floor.  Yes, hmmmm.  It seems they built the floor right on the DIRT, and now it’s completely rotten, giving off a lovely damp, earthy smell.

Know what else we’ve discovered?  They put some walls up to create new rooms but forgot to nail the walls to anything.  So they were just held on with some tape and paint at the joint between the walls and the ceiling.

Yes, people, we do love our projects.  We’re the proudest slumlords you’ll ever meet.

Categories
Kids Life in general Parenting

Even

This delightful piece of writing hangs in my mother’s dining room.  It hangs from a red and white lanyard, and adorns a hand-made gift from my sister  several years ago.

I read it often, and it has become one of my favorites.


The Lanyard – Billy Collins




The other day I was ricocheting slowly
off the blue walls of this room,
moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,
when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.


No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one into the past more suddenly—
a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid long thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.


I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that’s what you did with them,
but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.


She gave me life and milk from her breasts,

and I gave her a lanyard.

She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,
laid cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light


and taught me to walk and swim,

and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.

Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.

And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.


Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,

and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.

And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift—not the worn truth


that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hand,

I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough

to make us even.

———–

Friday, when I picked Alison up from school, she proudly handed me a Mother’s Day card she’d made in class, along with a plastic cup filled with dirt.  Protruding from the dirt was an inch-tall green stalk, a small plant she’d grown herself from a seed.

It doesn’t matter that her sister yanked the tiny plant from the dirt less than 24 hours later.

It doesn’t matter that Alison still sassed me and stayed up later than I intended.

Because while I know her efforts don’t make us even, I’m going to pretend, just for a little while,

that we are.

Happy Mother’s Day!

Categories
Health and Nutrition Life in general

Answers

I’ve been feeling sluggish lately.  And by “lately” I mean for the past two years. 

What?  “Lately” is a relative term.

So I went to my doctor last week and poured my heart out.  It took a lot of courage for me to do that – to ask for help.  The fact that I not only called to make the appointment but actually showed up for it is testament to the fact that I have been feeling especially horrid for the past few weeks.

After calming me down, my doctor took a brief medical history, including asking for details about Blythe’s birth, which seemed, in my mind, to be the catalyst for my downward spiral.

It didn’t take long for him to make an educated guess on my problem: a fairly rare condition called Sheehan’s Syndrome. 

All the pieces fit, the biggest one being that I hemorrhaged after giving birth.  I continued to bleed internally for two weeks, until I gave birth to the softball sized clot keeping all that inside my uterus, (a fun mental picture, no?) and then hemorrhaged again in the operating room, losing an entire liter of blood in one go.  So, blood loss after pregnancy?  That’s a big fat CHECK.*

All the rest of it – the moodiness, the lethargy, the difficulty breast feeding, the feeling cold all the damn time, the depression, the anxiety, the “female issues”, the low metabolism, it all fits, too. 

They’ve drawn my blood to test the levels of my hormones to see how badly my pituitary gland was damaged by lack of oxygen during the blood loss.  From there, I’ll start on hormone replacements and see if we can put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

In the meantime, I’ve been taking an anti-anxiety/anti-depressant (Lexapro, 10mg) for a week now.  While the side effects were a bit daunting to begin with, I think I’m starting to adjust, and beginning to see more and more of my old self – my real self – shining through.  It’s so nice to see her.  I was beginning to think she was lost forever.

The amount of relief I felt when my doctor told me there was most likely a physiological reason for the way I’ve been feeling far outweighed the bad news that I’d have to be on hormone replacements, possibly for the rest of my life.  Here I was, feeling guilty for my depression for two full years, and there was a perfectly logical explanation for it all. 

But, as the days have passed, I’ve begun to wonder how I’ll feel if my blood tests come back ‘normal’.  Will I still feel as good as I’ve begun to feel, or will the guilt start creeping back in? 

For two years, I’ve been angry at myself for feeling resentful of the chaos that is my life, all the while knowing I’m grateful for everything I have.  I don’t want to feel that way anymore.  I want to forgive myself for feeling like life is just effing hard sometimes, regardless of whether my pituitary gland is broken or whole.

So, I wait.  Another week, and I’ll know for sure.  I hope I won’t care about the answer.

* Go here and here if you’d like to read more about that crazy experience.

Categories
Home and Garden Life in general

One Task

My wonderful husband took Blythe out to play for awhile this morning and I took the opportunity to do some serious cleaning around the house.

For my first task, I chose to vacuum the living room rug.  Not such a huge job, but it never fails to make the whole room look better.

I headed back to the mud room to get the vacuum, and when I opened the door I was greeted by Cage the Dog and an overwhelming stench of pee.  I figured he’d have an accident eventually – he refuses to go outside to pee in the rain, and his bladder is only so big.

I went to grab a towel to wipe his feet and clean up the mess, but while I was gone, he made a run for it, tracking pee through the house on his way to the living room.  I chased him down to wipe his feet, and then back-tracked, wiping up paw-print pee puddles as I went.

I dropped the towel onto the puddle on the mudroom floor, and noticed that his dog bed was soaking wet, too.  Nice.  

I shoved his bed into the washer, and then ran out to the living room to get Cage settled in there.  It was then that I noticed the ashes all over his blanket from the fire we made last night.  So, I shook off the ashes and swept them up.

While I was shaking out the blanket, I saw that one of the kids had put dry cereal in all the little divots the buttons make in the living room chair, and picked them out, sweeping up any that fell.

Then, I had Cage lay down so I could soak his injured foot in betadine, because I don’t care what they say about pee being sterile, I’m not taking any chances.  I wrapped a paper towel around his foot and went to get the vacuum from the mud room.

Oy, but the floor in there was still disgusting, so I finished cleaning up the pee, tossed the pee-soaked towel in the washer with the dog bed, and mopped really quick.

I finally set about vacuuming, and wouldn’t you know – the vacuum freaked Cage out, and he ran across the WHITE living room rug with his gooshy, betadine-soaked foot.

I got him back on the blanket and finished vacuuming, keeping my evil-eye focused on him the entire time, and then cleaned up the rust-colored paw prints as best I could with some Resolve.

Feeling a bit exhausted after all that cleaning, I got myself a drink and decided to check in on twitter for a few minutes.

It’s then that my husband walked in, having given me a full hour to clean the house.  I’m on twitter, and all I’ve done is vacuum the living room rug.  Sweeeeet.

No wonder he thinks I spend all my time on the computer!

Categories
Kids Parenting

Different

Last night I was on Google Chat with Meghan, and we started talking about Alison, my 5 year old.

me: She’s what they call “gifted” but I’m trying to come up with a better name for it than that
  I’ve got a post in my drafts about it, but haven’t had the balls to publish
Meghan: If I can publish my post, you can publish yours
  HEH
me: GAH, don’t go THERE

So, just to prove to Meghan that I’m not a huge coward, here it is.

——–

Alison is different.

No, it’s OK.  I know she is.  It doesn’t offend me when people notice.   



For the first few years of Alison’s life, I had nothing to compare her to.  Not really, not in a way that was concrete.  It was when she started preschool at age three that her difference became glaringly obvious.

“She’s so… different from the other kids,” the moms would say.  They’d look from her to their own child (or children) and ask at what age she started doing this or that.

I became the queen of vague answers.  They probably thought I had some sort of memory loss.

But the truth is, she’s not ‘normal’.  She’s ‘gifted’.  In her therapist’s words, “she reeks of giftedness”.

I cringe at the use of that word.  Gifted.  It is my belief that we all have gifts and talents to offer the world.  So the fact that her brain works differently than the ‘normal’ brain, well… it’s different.  But is it gifted?  I struggle to find a more appropriate term.

If the ‘normal’ brain is a forest, a ‘gifted’ child’s brain is a jungle.  You can’t turn a forest into a jungle, or a jungle into a forest.  They are two completely different environments made up of the same key elements.  One isn’t necessarily better than the other, they’re just different.  People don’t go to Yellowstone National Forest and then complain that it isn’t a jungle.

So why do many other parents feel threatened by my daughter?  She’s just a child, and she’s not trying to compete – she’s just being herself.

-Yes, my 5 year old reads at a 2nd grade level.  She is capable of solving fairly complex mathematical equations.  But she won’t wipe her own butt. 

-She can grasp abstract concepts such as atoms and molecules, but she is too timid to go to a birthday party if there is even one person she doesn’t know in attendance.

-If we are having a problem with the wind blowing the door open, she will invent a door-closing mechanism in less than 2 minutes.

  
    
    But she refuses to dress herself.

In other words, she is different, but she can still be a pain in the ass.  There are areas where other children are superior to her. 

How do I relate all of that to another parent when she (or he, let’s be fair) feels that Alison’s ‘gift’ makes their child inferior?  Here’s one of the myths about giftedness that I want to print out and keep in my pocket:


Giftedness is something to be jealous about: 


This is perhaps the most damaging myth. More often than not, gifted children can feel isolated and misunderstood. They have more adult tastes in music, clothing, reading material and food. These differences to other children can cause them to be shunned and even abused verbally or physically by other children.

Alison feels so alone.  She already knows she’s different.  The kids don’t yet hold it against her, but she knows.  She knows.

I’ve only told a handful of people about Alison’s ‘giftedness’ because I learned very early on that it is one of the surest ways to ruin a budding friendship – for myself as well as for my daughter.  It’s the main reason I’ve never written about it here, on my blog.  Please know, I’m not bragging.  Far from it.  I know ‘gifted’ sounds like a blessing, but in so many ways, it’s also a curse.  And also?  Try parenting a child with a higher IQ than your own.

I had originally decided that I wouldn’t even tell Alison until she was in High School, and maybe not even then.  College, perhaps?  On her 30th birthday?  She already feels different – would it help or hurt her to confirm that she actually is?  It’s something I struggle with all the time. 

Especially because, God help us, people are starting to make comments about Blythe being ‘different’, too.  At least they can be different together.