Tuesday, May 29, 2007

Brought back to blogging by horrible headlines

I know, I know, I've been a bad blogger lately. Bad blogger! One of the headlines today has me upset enough to start posting again. Did you all see the poor woman in Texas who hanged herself and her 4 little girls? Here's the story.

I participate on a few mothering message boards online, and the discussions there about this woman have me almost as horrified as the story itself. Everyone wants to attack the mother, to criminalize what seems to be pretty obviously an act of literal insanity. Her youngest child was 8 months old, which makes this incident, like the one involving Andrea Yates, sound a lot like post-partum psychosis. People having psychotic episodes do not act with conscious will. If it turns out that she did have PPP, then she literally could not control what happened. I'm not sure why that's hard to grasp - maybe the prevalence of "lower-grade" mental illnesses, like depression and anxiety, have made people believe that truly insane people are similarly able to function at some level. The fact that the process of her actions was so horrific is MORE confirmation, not less, that hers were the actions of a completely deranged mind. Yes, I pity people who are so irretrievably, chemically, physically, through-no-fault-of-their-own SICK. I pity the life I imagine she had and I pity the way that it ended. If someone had a seizure behind the wheel and ran off of a bridge and killed herself and her children, no one would call her a monster - sick people are not sick on purpose.

Aaaaaaaaaand....I'm back!

Tuesday, May 15, 2007

Where was I?

Hmm, it's been a while. Where to pick up? My mental health has been a little, well, unhealthy lately, but I'm a little less men-with-butterfly-nets today, so here I am. I can't prove any correlation, but the departure of Jerry Falwell from the planet has to have something to do with the world seeming a bit brighter today. That man was so awful, it's enough to almost make me wish he was right about everlasting punishment, as he certainly ought to be lining up for it now.

Things around here are about the same. Twins are lovely by day, ghastly by night, the boys are making me speculate about their future as juvenile delinquents, the house is a mess. I had a fantastic Mother's Day, though - my lovely husband took me to a hotel for the night to get some much-needed sleep, and then he spent most of Sunday re-anchoring our swingset to take one thing off my multi-page list of random crap to worry about obsessively. Our neighbor the contractor is making real progress on finishing our downstairs bathroom, and I started taking practice GRE tests today, although I'm not yet sure what course of study I'd pursue if I were to go back to school. Environmental engineering? Accounting? Underwater basket weaving? My testing so far reveals that I have retained nothing of junior high algebra but am the mack daddy of comma usage. That's right, punctuation, you have met your match.

Wednesday, May 09, 2007

Wine is good

I'm a little off this week. To put it mildly. I'm running the gamut from near-catatonic despair to trembling anxiety (I dropped and broke a jar of salsa at the store today, under the extreme burden of grocery shopping, because really, it's tough) to sobbing on the couch with my 3 year old begging forgiveness for he knows not what. I'm pretty sure the mother of the year people have shredded my application, and I'm guessing my mother and husband won't be submitting my name any time soon for the daughter or wife of the year, either.

But this afternoon, things started looking up. I got back from the oh-so-stressful shopping trip and the subsequent teacher-appreciation luncheon (really, air traffic controllers have nothing on me, what's more stressful than my life?), kicked the kids outside, and sat in a comfortable lawn chair on a beautiful afternoon with good friends and multiple bottles of wine. Wine makes me happy. It's like flavored Valium with a social twist.

As I tried to wrap up this I'm-doing-better update, a local hospital started faxing my home number every 3 minutes. Because that is exactly what my nerves were missing. I called the stupid hospital and spoke with a very unhelpful geriatric operator who said it would stop eventually. I feel better already.

The way I feel right now is why guns should be illegal. No one in my current frame(s) of mind needs to be armed.

Monday, May 07, 2007

Failure

I've been trying really hard to be positive lately. I lead a charmed life and I do appreciate it, but when the sleep deprivation worsens and I go from merely debilitated to nearly paralyzed, it's hard to see the color and joy of life. I love staying home with my kids and do not miss working. It's hard not having any external definitions of success, though. If my main role in life is that of mother, and one or more of my children is chronically miserable, doesn't that make me a failure?

My youngest, my boy twin, has spent such a huge percentage of his life crying. Screaming, more accurately. He is still, at 10 months, the worst sleeper ever, and it makes him cranky and me horrible. I just can't be nice, I can't be human, with less than 2 hours of consecutive sleep in a night and less than 6 hours total for months on end. I can't. I think those words so many times every night between 10 and 6. I can't, I can't do this any. more. It's not possible that my heart keeps beating and my lungs keep breathing when I feel like I may combust or shatter at any second. I want to be a good mother and a good person, but this is so awful.

Why is he so unhappy all the time? I dread his toddlerhood, I've suffered through his infancy, and what kind of mother feels that way? When I tell my 6 year old stories from when he was a baby, I wonder what on earth I'll tell boy twin. You were terrible? I wanted to run away from home?

My dietary intake today

Because you all want to know:

Breakfast:
1 can Coke
1 bowl granola
1 peanut butter/oatmeal cookie
1/2 piece birthday cake

Lunch:
1 can Coke
1 mini taco
1 cheese stick
1/2 large bag potato chips
1 blackberry

Afternoon snack (if one can describe a 3 hour eating binge as a singular "snack"):
1 can Coke
The rest of the chips
A whole lot of cake. And even more icing without any cake to rationalize it. But I just pulled it off the tray in chunks by hand without using silverware, so it doesn't count as an actual piece or pieces, right?

Dinner:
1 can Coke
1 serving baked spaghetti
1 weird shriveled piece of corn on the cob (I knew it was too early in the season)
1 salad with Trader Joe's kickass ginger-something dressing
1 piece garlic bread

Dessert:
1 large bowl Edy's peanut butter cup ice cream (but it WAS the slow churned lower-fat kind
4 glasses wine

I think I've actually consumed all of my calories for the week today. The babies had better step up and suck all this extra fat out of me, since it's their abominable (that looks wrong, but dictionary.com backs me up) sleep habits that are driving me to desperate measures. It's seriously only a matter of time until I'm thinking meth sounds like an awesome idea. I hear it gives you energy! Helps you get by with less sleep! Who needs teeth!

I am soooooooooo tired.

Thursday, May 03, 2007

Working on a green thumb

I've actually been doing yard work this week. I generally shun the outdoors, for the following reasons (in priority order):

1) Cold
2) Heat
3) Bugs
4) Precipitation
5) Dirt
6) Wind
7) Boredom

However, the last week of April/first week of May usually includes at least 2 of the 5 days annually that I can handle being outside. No longer cold, not yet hot, bugs still in the larva stage, underbrush still tauntingly manageable in girth. The dead rat smell chasing me out of the house has helped, too. Anyway, this week I have spent several hours digging, pruning, and weed whacking. My yard looks, if not tidy, at least less like the bramble-crap around the enchanted castle in Sleeping Beauty.

Holy crap, this wasn't even my point. Wrong kind of green entirely. That's what I get for writing while watching TV.

Okay, back on target here. My point was going to be that I have simplified our finances recently by refinancing the house. Now that I'm not juggling multiple accounts, a big part of my joy in life is gone. Maybe this is a step toward career self-actualization, realizing that I love money. Not to have (although that would be nice - I've just never really had the opportunity to find out yet), but to play with. I like to fill out IRS forms about it, I like to put it into Excel spreadsheets, and I like to read about it on finance message boards. So, now that my personal finances have become dull, I am venturing into the wacky world of Prosper.com. It's a really cool idea - people loaning to other people, cutting out banks and credit cards. I'm starting very small, and I'm nervous about some of the things I've read on the lender forums about defaults on loans, but it should be fun!

Working title: Live long and prosper.

Also, The Office is the funniest show alive.

Sorry this is scattered, now I'm sucked into My Name is Earl. And I wonder why I haven't made it as a writer. I think lack of focus may factor in.

Wednesday, May 02, 2007

It's like Egypt around here

What with the plagues and all. Girly's ear infection is back/still here, but worse is the RAT infestation. Yes, rats. Giant-toothed, verminous, vile, foul, spine-chilling, big fucking rodents took up residence in our back enclosed porch. Oh. My. God. Gross. Fortunately, my husband has a friend who used to be an exterminator, and he came out this weekend to poison the rat(s). We know the poison was successful. How do we know? Because there is an odor about our house now that is so thick and vomitous that you can almost see it. My husband is a brave, brave man (or is a little boy trapped in a man's body - I asked if he was dreading the dead rat hunt and he said mischeviously, "I'm gonna poke it with a stick"). Anyway, he went to great lengths after work today to try to find our dead guest, but after tearing apart every conceivable place it could be, he had to admit defeat. We are hosting a party for the now-6-year-old on Sunday, and I would really prefer that the house not smell literally of death for the party.
As if that weren't enough, the aforementioned 6-year-old has reverted to his old ways this last couple weeks and is throwing Victorian-era hysterical fits about everygoddamnedthing for no. fucking. reason. But oh! I have a story about him that adds nicely to the portfolio of embarassing things I'm saving for his teenage years. Yesterday was his birthday, and one of his presents was a jar coin bank with a calculator thing on top to automatically count money as you put it in. Today, he wanted to play outside with the hose, but couldn't find his bathing suit, so he was sitting naked in the living room waiting for me to detach one of the milk-leeches and help him. While he waited, and I was only sort of paying attention here, he rubbed his penis all over the bank, then treated poor unsuspecting me to a very distressing display involving an odd gymnastic position, the bank, and his boy bits. I'm a little more scarred just thinking about it, like the rat thing isn't enough.