short-years-long-days-blog

[short-years-long-days-blog]

After: Day 101

I was just on a walk and fantasizing about bingeing on all kinds of off-limits foods. 

I knew I wasn't going to actually do it but decided to take the edge off with something safer when we got home. 

So I bought myself some time with a kombucha (harm reduction) and showed Malachi the dance Otis and I made up today, which is mostly me lifting Otis in circles above my head then moving his arms up and down to "Don't Stop Me Now.”

[short-years-long-days-blog]

After: Day 97

I made it through my first post-baby teaching job.

It was a strange mix of disassociation and hyper-awareness born of fatigue and hormones: I would feel myself floating slightly above the whole room, hearing my voice explain something about the structure of the new SAT, then whoosh—the prickly ache of milk letdown would yank me back inside my skin.

“So you’ll need to pace yourself through all five sections of the reading test.” My lips formed the words while all other thoughts fled my brain except: Shit, just a few more minutes. Just get through this last part of class without leaking through your shirt in the presence of 25 teenagers.

I have new-found compassion for moms working full-time outside the home. A 30-minute commute each way plus two hours of actual work time is all this mom could manage.

[short-years-long-days-blog]

After: Day 96

I just got off the phone with a mortgage rep to discuss refinancing our house. 

We want to lower our monthly payments as part of the experiment in frugality we launched while I’m testing the waters of self-employment.

I was dreading this experience because after the first two times I called, no one followed up with me. In the past I would have abandoned the whole enterprise out of fear, or verbally abused someone over the phone out of anger. But now, I knew the best approach was to be firm yet polite and tell them my needs weren't being met. I started to explain that today, but I somehow got a new guy on the phone who took care of everything right away.

It was still scary because I'm pretty ignorant when it comes to real estate and financial stuff like that, and I hate not knowing what I'm doing and looking incompetent. But I was honest about what I didn't know and was able to follow along pretty well with most everything he explained. The upshot: we’ve started the process of reducing our payments by over $100 a month!

Jesus Christ, being an adult is hard.

When you drink and drug and binge-eat and starve for over 15 years, all of the emotional and social growth you should be experiencing during that time simply just stops. Your body keeps growing, and you keep walking and talking and moving through the world, but parts of your brain, and your heart for that matter, freeze in place.

When you stop drinking and drugging and binge-eating and starving, the reckoning begins. Your body may be chronologically older, but in many ways, your brain is not. You find yourself at parties, in meetings, on the phone—feeling baffled, drawing a blank, asking yourself, What would an adult do here?

You learn by watching, and seeking out the guidance of your wiser friends. Your brain forms new pathways. Your heart starts to thaw. It’s like when your leg starts to regain feeling after falling asleep; as the nerves wake up, it is so painful that even the lightest touch makes you wince. But you stand up and hobble, and the pain subsides with each halting step.

Better late than never.

[short-years-long-days-blog]

After: Day 95

Here’s one way to instantly acquire triage-nurse-level prioritizing skills: have a baby.

I just agreed to teach a class with a K-12 enrichment program over the next five Saturdays because the regular instructor had to cancel last minute. This will be my first (and unexpected) experience as a “working mom.” I’m surprisingly not that nervous at the moment. Based on past evidence (oh, you know, like teaching for 10 years), I can trust that I'll know what to do and be more than decent at it.

I've used the precious little time I have to delve right into the prep work and just get it done. I don’t have the luxury of unnecessary worry anymore. And rather than dreading meeting new people like I often have in the past, I'm actually looking forward to it. This might have something to do with the fact that the main company I keep these days can only drool and grunt in response to my musings. 

This class not being a big deal is entirely due to my work in recovery over many years, and now more recently in ACA. At the meeting last week the topic was the laundry list item "We are addicted to excitement." I dismissed it at first, assuming it didn’t apply to me. But then people talked about spinning in fear as a form of “excitement,” which is something I do so much I could practically claim it as a hobby. Excessive worrying is one way I know I care about something and is a warped kind of proof to myself that I am working hard. 

When I realized I wasn't doing it around teaching this class, I felt good but also a weird tiny wave of sadness, like I was letting go of an old friend.

[short-years-long-days-blog]

After: Day 94

People always tell me what a handsome guy Otis is. 

Of course I agree, but I only see the rarity of this when we’re around lots of other babies at a time. At mom-baby yoga yesterday, surrounded by about 12 other babies, my sister pointed out that we had the two cutest babies in the room. 

It was true. Some babies are just little Eisenhowers.

[short-years-long-days-blog]

After: Day 93

I daresay we’ve been released from the fourth trimester.

It just occurred to me that I no longer feel that sense of constant disorientation I had gotten so accustomed to living with over the last three months. I’m still sleeping in chunks of four hours or less, but I think I’m scraping together at least about six hours of sleep per night, which might as well be a spa vacation at this point. I’m getting several things done in a day pretty easily, like a semi-functional person again.

[short-years-long-days-blog]

After: Day 90

I unsnapped the belt of Oskar’s car seat to give him a little more freedom of movement while pushing him around in a cart through the store today. 

I didn’t realize until we pulled into our driveway that I never snapped the belt back together for the drive home. 

This was after I clipped a parked car’s side mirror with our cart in the store’s lot, then had to apologize to the couple sitting inside and ask them if they wanted to check for damage. The man kindly dismissed me, but I still was shaking as I got back into my car and put the key in the ignition.

A mother of the year kind of day.

[short-years-long-days-blog]

After: Day 89

The disease of perfectionism tells me that if I accomplish a few things, I should be able to do another 10. 

And I find myself thinking, if I weren't breastfeeding, I would totally restrict my food right now. But since I can't restrict, I end up scarfing some meals down before I can register how full I am, then I end up too full. Going to try to slow down at dinner tonight. And remember to be grateful for the energy I've had today and what I have managed to get done, even if so much is still undone.

Later I just discharged shame, via blame, all over Malachi. I was counting down to him coming home this afternoon, then he reminded me he had a happy hour work thing tonight and couldn't take over baby care as usual.

I have so much compassion for single moms and housewives through the ages who almost never got a break. Self-pity took over. I wouldn't say goodbye to Malachi as he left.

Then I touched Otis’s arm and wondered why it felt rough, and realized he had a layer of dried shit on his skin.

Next, I read an email from our total space cadet tax lady saying she still needed some forms for this out-of-state part of our taxes related to an investment and it made zero sense. I started our taxes with her five weeks ago and thought we were done after I've already been to her office five fucking times.

That was it. Self-pity became FULL. BLOWN. RAGE. All this shit I run around doing, and I have to clean up another mess now. 

All I wanted to do was go out and run to blow off some steam, but oh, I can't, because running makes me pee all over myself.

I settled for some furious power walking.

[short-years-long-days-blog]

After: Day 88

I am currently reading the devastating novel A Little Life.

In addition to its labyrinthine exploration of Catholic priests, sexual abuse, the art world, corporate law, and male friendships, among other things, it has this to say about parenthood:

“[The love for a child] is a singular love, because it is a love whose foundation is not physical attraction, or pleasure, or intellect, but fear. You have never known fear until you have a child, and maybe that is what tricks us into thinking that it is more magnificent. Every day, your first thought is not ‘I love him’ but ‘How is he?’”

[short-years-long-days-blog]

After: Day 87

Otis’s new sleep record: 

9:30 pm to 6:00 am with no wake-ups! 

Of course I woke up several times though, staring at the baby monitor to make sure he was still breathing. I can’t tell if the baby monitor alleviates or aggravates my anxiety. It gives me a reassuring spy eye’s view, but its creepy greenish glow suggests the paranormal. When I look at the screen, I half-expect it to reveal Otis’ head spinning around or that girl from The Ring hovering near his crib.

One of his favorite new things is to join his hands in front of his eyes and study them closely. He also brings his fingertips together and kind of twiddles them, which we call his “Mr. Burns.”

[short-years-long-days-blog]

After: Day 86

The shadow of depression has been looming over me the last few days. 

I'm not sure what is going on. Could very well be more hormone fluctuations.

I'm also at the 12-week mark where many, if not most, women go back to outside work. Instead, I’m quitting my job of almost a decade. 

Or: I am throwing off the shackles of commute hell and bureaucracy, and striking out on my own as an entrepreneur. 

But I still feel I'm avoiding responsibility in some way. 

I don't want to over-pathologize things, but I do need to keep an eye on the depression. Sometimes I have that dark feeling like things are closing in on me and I don't see the point of it all. Which is even scarier to feel when I have this beautiful baby in my life.

I really don't want to have to go back on meds. I have been off them for over a year now. Turning it over for now and committing to doing things that can help. Making a plan for the day tomorrow so I feel purposeful, upping my fish oil, doing a gratitude list and step work, exercising, reaching out to others.

[short-years-long-days-blog]

After: Day 85

The last couple days have been shaky food-wise. 

I don't know why, but I felt like a bottomless pit yesterday. It was like PMS even though I don't have regular cycles again yet. I guess I still could be having lots of hormone fluctuation.

It was hard to tell what was just a larger appetite and what might have turned into compulsive eating. I did have chocolate twice, and the second time was definitely not helpful. I could have paused and reached out but purposely did not. I need to take my own advice to my sponsees and reach out anyway to get some perspective.

I may need to re-evaluate sugar in my food plan. I avoided it for several days and felt good, then had some small amounts again. I've eliminated it before but just ended up overeating other foods, so letting some into my diet seems like a kind of harm reduction.

The recovery I do have has saved me from what would have been total insanity since the baby was born. Being home so much with so little structure would have been a recipe for all-out bingeing and depression. As of today, I’m still hanging on to abstinence.

[short-years-long-days-blog]

After: Day 84

Cultural schizophrenia all up in my face today. 

After watching a mediocre movie starring Leighton Meester from Gossip Girl, I remembered reading something about her having a baby recently. I decided to look up pictures of her, which eventually led me to Blake Lively and Rachel Bilson (the Josh Schwartzoverse will never die).

I knew this wouldn’t end well, but I couldn’t stop myself. I then read a celebrity gossip “article” gushing over how just a month (or something close to that) after having a baby, Blake Lively’s body LOOKS AS IF IT NEVER HAD ONE AT ALL!!!

Got that? 

We exalted her and projected our Madonna complex onto her and objectified her pregnant body, which, by the way, was pregnant in exactly the right way, all long, toned limbs extending out from the epicenter of a perky globe of a belly. We obsessed over her and celebrated her for embodying the highest glory of womanhood. 

But as soon as she pushed out her little human, she ERASED ALL EVIDENCE THAT IT EVER HAPPENED. AS WAS HER DUTY.

I know better than to dip even a toe into this uninspired, predictably misogynistic drivel. But we all have our weak days.

[short-years-long-days-blog]

After: Day 83

I think Brené Brown just might be the Bill Wilson for normies. 

Well, at least for white, middle-aged, Oprah-fanwomen normies.

[short-years-long-days-blog]

After: Day 82

I woke up today thinking about chocolate. 

Like eating it for breakfast. While there wouldn't necessarily be anything terrible in and of itself if I did that, it would set up cravings, and I don't want to be a slave to it all day. I want to treat myself well in food and action.

I am in an insecurity storm after a party yesterday. I'm feeling painful awareness of the thought patterns that keep me stuck and create existential angst and more pain. I'm powerless over the self-doubt I feel as a result of my family's dysfunction. It seems I feel it all the time if I'm paying attention. 

My life is unmanageable because I feel totally oppressed by my ego that becomes a constant inner critic in an effort to protect me from further pain.

Last night, the shame hag was on the loose and my ego took over, trying to triage the situation. It's always looking for where I fit in—Am I better or worse than this person? It doesn't want me to meet new people because if they seem more intelligent, talented or interesting than me, I will feel worse about myself.

It replays every interaction I have, always asking, Was I too much? Too enthusiastic or forward and so I turned off that person who doesn't want to be that close to me? Or was I too withdrawn and cold, and people will think I'm boring and lifeless?

It's always one or the other. Never feeling like I'm just…enough.

The shame hag tells me my mom is socially anxious and awkward, and my parents don't have friends, so I never learned how to even talk to people at a party and never will. My friend's mom was there last night, and she is a very intelligent and accomplished spiritual leader, like her daughter. I can't imagine having a mom like that. A confident woman who modeled that for her child.

It's like when I meet really well-adjusted people who seem like they grew up without toxic shame—it just boggles my mind. I almost don't know what to do with people like that. My ego says, If only my mom weren't so fucked up, if only I weren’t an addict, if only, if only...

All of this thinking is such a dead-end, but I can’t seem to stop it. It’s loudest at night, when there’s no escape into distraction. Ego and fear team up, finding and picking apart every instance when I should have done things differently.

If the Steps can help me get even a little relief from this, I will be so grateful.

I just want to be free.

[short-years-long-days-blog]

After: Day 81

Today I’m remembering a scene from the show In Treatment. 

A woman tells her therapist about her formerly adventurous friend’s new scale of pleasure after having a baby. I’m summarizing from fuzzy memory, but she said something like: “My wildest sexual fantasy is a full night’s sleep.” 

Word, sister.

I finally feel some of my month-long numbness melting. Yesterday I gave notice to HR, admin, and my work friends that I’m not coming back after maternity leave and I’m resigning from my teaching job at the end of the year. I know I'm doing the right thing, but this is still hard. I am surprised by the waves of sadness crashing in.

I worked at that school for nine years. I went through so much at that job—I got sober and abstinent, ended an engagement, learned how to be single and start a relationship based on something other than purely sex, got married, and did something during which most of my life I believed I was patently unfit: became a parent.

And I learned how to be a teacher there. Perhaps against all odds.

Sometime after my first or second year in the classroom, I ran into one of my grad school professors at a party who confessed to me that during my tenure as student she wasn’t sure if I would make it. She wasn’t sure if teaching was for me.

Apparently, my carefully constructed armor from that time had more chinks than I wanted to admit. Sure, grad school was the beginning of the end of my drinking, and student teaching was the emotional equivalent of standing naked before a jeering crowd every day. I had regular panic attacks, and took to walking at all hours of the day and night as I waited for them to subside.

I compensated, or attempted to compensate, for this by working all hours of the day and night to conceal my sprawling mess of an inner life, earning enough good grades and accolades to persist in the delusion of my powers of obfuscation.

My first couple years in the classroom were not much easier. More often than not, I cried on my drive home, ashamed of the day’s fumblings and utterly bewildered by the crushing weight of a broken public education system I worked within yet didn’t understand.

I kept showing up. At times not without Xanax, but I showed up. 

I was just as bewildered by my students’ misplaced faith in me. They extended their trust like a blank check, and I let myself consider the possibility I could become someone worthy of this trust. Something in me knew I needed to connect more than I wanted to hide. That it was my duty to show my students one of my deepest truths: literature could save lives, as it saved mine in high school and ever since.

I was assigned various teacher-mentors and sent to trainings and conferences. I worked closely with department colleagues. I worked 10-hour days, and on weekends. After I quit drinking during my second year, when I wasn’t working as a teacher, I was working 12-step programs. Very, very slowly, my days became less painful.

I completed a reading endorsement program, adding a “literacy specialist” title to my resume. I was assigned AP and honors classes. I hit some kind of stride around my fifth year, when repetition alchemized into competence, and even confidence.

So now here I am, closing the door of the place and life I know and sailing toward a new destination through a bank of fog. There is so much to do, and I have to figure out how to even work again in the first place.

I put a sleeping Otis next to me on the bed the other day while I started tinkering with a website for my new tutoring business. He napped through quite a bit of it, but I was deep in a rabbit hole, my brain prickling with obsession and buzzing with the thrill of creative productivity, when he stared stirring.

“Just a little longer,” I pleaded, and I managed to squeeze out another guilty hour or so of typing with one hand while dangling a toy above him with the other.

Gahhhhhh, I’m already a mother-guilt cliché. Not professional enough, not maternal enough, never able to reconcile both sides of my balance sheet.

When I wheeled Otis and his stroller through the checkout line at the grocery store yesterday, the cashier peered at Otis’ little form, then asked the requisite “How old?” and “How are you sleeping?” Then, “Are you working?”

My mind flashed to a bumper sticker image from my childhood: Every mother is a working mother. But I only said, “Not right now.”

I know her implication was:

Hey, at least you don't have to show up at a job outside of the house.

Which is totally valid.

Every mother is a working mother. Am I inferior because I'm not suffering as much as a new mom who’s on a payroll? 

Fuck. Mother-guilt is enough; I refuse to add martyrdom.

[short-years-long-days-blog]

After: Day 80

I so desperately need the demarcations of the day. 

Every afternoon Otis and I are at home, I get very still and start listening to car doors shutting outside, waiting for the honk of Malachi’s jeep as he locks it. 

I'm like a dog waiting for its human to come home.