Last Thoughts: What to Say

Thanks for putting up with this series of posts. I've never shared so much of the whole story before and I felt the need to do so. I hope you found it worth reading, and maybe even informative.

Some of you might have a friend or family member who is coping with infertility. You might feel awkward about the subject and wonder what to say to them, how to support them. That's OK. We don't necessarily know how to handle this ourselves. We don't expect you to know either.

If I was telling you what I needed this is what I would say:

Love me. Be my friend. Listen to me when I need to talk. Fight the temptation to solve my problem. Believe me, you have little chance of coming up with something my doctors haven't thought of. I'm also getting lots of bad folklore from everyone else about how to conceive, so if you could be the person who doesn't do that it would be so great.

Please don't second guess my decisions or tell me I'm doing something wrong. I've put a lot of thought into this. I need you to respect that. Please don't second guess my treatment or my doctor's advice, either. My doctor is experienced at this and knows more about my condition than I've told you. I will follow my doctor's advice regardless of what you think and I don't have the energy to argue with you about it. I need your support.

It may be that you have a legitimate concern about my decision or my doctor. It's OK to bring that up, if you do so with sensitivity and respect for my decision. This is hard enough. Please don't make it harder.

And please, please, don't try to make me feel better by telling me how hard it is to be a mom. That just makes me feel like you don't think I have enough sense to already know that. I understand it's hard. I don't care. I want it anyway. I'm perfectly willing to ruin my figure, never sleep in again, worry myself sick over a teenager, and go through all the other difficult aspects of parenting. I think it's worth it.

Between the emotional upheaval of coping with something I might never have expected and the drugs I'm taking, you might notice I'm a little hard to get along with. Please be patient. If you can, please forgive me and keep forgiving me. I know I'm asking a lot and putting you through a lot, but I've never needed you more.

I'm feeling really bad about myself right now. I feel broken, I feel cheated, I feel guilty. I keep wondering what I did, why God or Fate is punishing me like this. I have to keep reminding myself that children aren't a reward for good behavior and that I deserve to be a parent as much as any other person. Please don't make me feel worse by reinforcing my fears. Please don't minimize them by dismissing them. The best thing you can do is listen and gently let me know when I'm not being very rational.

Yes, if you get pregnant it's going to hurt. Please don't feel guilty. If you don't hear from me for a while, I don't hate you. I just am hurting a little too much and need some space to breath. Please don't shut me out of your life and your happiness. I'll let you know if I can't handle coming to the baby shower, birthday party, etc.

If you don't know what to say that's all right. Just tell me that you love me, that you're sad with me, and that you don't know what to say or do but you wish you did.

(Next week will be back to normal, I promise!)

Happy endings, one day at a time.

You think all your life that children will happen when you want them to happen, that all you have to do is stop using birth control and within a few months you'll be spending your mornings puking your guts out. And then month after month goes past with nothing happening.

You start worrying, wondering if you're being unreasonably anxious. Should you go to the doctor or will you just get laughed out of the office? Maybe if you're just patient and keep trying, one day you'll wake up with a baby on the way.

Besides, I had fantasies to fulfill. I wanted my child conceived in love, in an act of intimacy between my husband and myself, a living symbol of the beauty of our relationship. I'd waited so long to find the perfect match. I wanted our baby's creation to be perfect too. I didn't want to bring in a third party, to have my child's conception be the result of a visit to a sterile, white-surfaced doctor's office, to maybe even have our child conceived when my husband wasn't even in the same room, maybe when I wasn't even in the room. Oh, no, that was impossible, unbearable.

So I put it off, denied anything was wrong, and kept hoping.

Hope is not a plan.

Eventually, I had to face it. I simply wasn't going to be getting pregnant unless I saw a doctor. So I made an appointment with my primary care physician, who gave me a referral, which got me into the gynecologist's office, where I finally (2 months later) saw an OB/GYN.

He listened to my symptoms and identified the problem right off the bat. PCOS. It would take some blood work to confirm it, but he was sure of it. There was just one little problem. The way my symptoms manifested, I shouldn't hold my breath waiting to get pregnant. He didn't think they could get me to ovulate. It was my choice, of course, whether or not to pursue fertility treatment, but (insert shrugged shoulders here) the odds were against success.

I didn't care. Of course I would try. How could I not?

For several months it looked like the doctor was right. We kept trying; take the Clomid on cycle days five to nine, watch my basal body temperature for a spike (that never showed up), try to make a baby days 10 to 20 (just in case I ovulated late), go in for a blood test on day 21, then find out a few days later that I never ovulated at all. Nothing. No eggs. No chance of a baby.

Finally, we hit the end of the road. I'd just finished the last month on Clomid that my doctor was willing to give me. I had to schedule an appointment to go in and start talking about other options. Stronger drugs, surgery, donor eggs. I had to make the call, but I had to make sure I wasn't pregnant first, and I didn't want to do that. After all, while it's almost bearable to live with knowing you've probably failed again, it's so much more depressing to be confronted with hard reality. As long as I didn't know for sure there could still be a little glow of hope.

But I had to make that phone call, so I took the test. And then watched in shock as the "You're Pregnant!" line started showing up even before the control line.

I couldn't believe it. I thought the test must be defective. But it was there, it really was showing up as a positive. I started sobbing and shaking. My knees buckled and I sat down hard on the edge of the tub, arms wrapped around myself, begging God, "Please, please."

I couldn't get more than that one word out. Please don't let this be a false positive. Please don't let my heart be broken one more time. Please don't let me miscarry. Please, please, please let me be a mother. Oh, please, oh please.

I looked at the test again. Both lines were getting darker. I went into the bedroom and collapsed by the side of the bed, sobbing so hard I started gagging. Sorrow and relief and joy and pain finally released and emotions I didn't even know how to name or describe came pouring out. I buried my head in the comforter and flung my hands above my head to grasp the blankets in my fists, twisting them as I prayed, begging God for this baby to be real, to comfort me if it wasn't, to give me strength to carry on. And, if I was pregnant, to keep the baby safe and healthy, to not let me miscarry.

The husband wasn't home and I didn't want to tell him over the phone. By the time he walked in the door I was calm, a little excited even. He reacted with skepticism, afraid to open himself up to hope. It wasn't until the next day, and a second positive test, that he stopped warning me against getting too excited. He didn't relax, however, until I first felt the baby move.

The toddler was born one day after her due date, induced because of my gestational diabetes. 8 lbs, 6 oz, 21". She was beautiful. She still is. And now I have a second. I feel incredibly blessed.

I doubt we'll try for more. We'd like to get all the kids out of the house before we retire, and well, it's just too hard on me. I really don't want to have to deal with simultaneously being a mommy and fighting off suicidal ideation. Neither do I think it would be a good thing for the kids to have to cope with an out of control, insanely angry, screaming shrew of a mommy. We have two; I have friends who've never managed to have even one child. I say it's time to count our blessings and protect them.

Though I do think, every so often, how nice it would be to have another.

Doesn't play well with others.

Adoption is wildly expensive. If you're lucky you'll be able to work with an agency that is willing to charge only a percentage of your annual income. Most of the time, though, it's going to cost a lot more than that. At the time that we were looking at adoption our costs would have wound up being more than half of our combined annual income. Not that we could have adopted anyway, probably. Our age, the husband's marital history, finances, everything was against us, not least my own ambivalence about adoption.

We looked into adoption because it was seeming increasingly impossible to have a child any other way. Month after month was going past with no response to the fertility drugs at all, other than a mad desire to shoot myself whilst screaming dementedly at the poor husband for breathing too loudly. Oh, and hot flashes. Horrible, killer, throw-yourself-naked-into-the-Arctic-Ocean hot flashes.

Adoption, however, made me nervous. One of my high school friends was adopted. He talked all the time about finding his "real" parents. Other adoptee friends I've had were the same. One woman told me how happy she was to have found her biological mother and how much better she fit in with her biological family than her adoptive family. Others said much the same thing. Even the husband, who was adopted by his stepfather, had said in the past how he never felt like he truly belonged.

I couldn't shake those thoughts when we talked about adopting. I didn't want to be a second best mother. The worst thing I could think of would be to love a child, to put my heart and soul into raising a son or daughter, and then have my child just walk away to find the "real" mother that I could never be. I saw myself as a stand-in only, a years-long babysitter, endured, borne, but never loved. Just someone to put up with until the happy family could be reunited.

I know that's not rational and only part of it comes from hearing those stories, I'm sure. At least part of this comes from the pain of being a stepmother, too. But it's there, and I never could shake it. I don't think I could ever let a child go in search of his or her biological family with anything but deep hurt and anger, and I couldn't justify adoption under those circumstances. Children deserve a mother without that much fear about their relationship.

Of course, if we hadn't eventually conceived who knows what I might have decided?

I know, I know, life isn't fair.

The low point of my infertility was when they found the baby in the snow-covered garbage bag outside the local hospital.

I came off the couch, my knees hitting the floor, knuckles buried in the plush carpet in front of me as I leaned forward, bound to the news coverage. Tears were streaming down my face as I whispered, over and over, "I would have taken him."

The baby survived. They found his mother. She got him back, with the requirement that she take some parenting classes.

I was livid. It's not that I can't understand and feel for the girl that bore this baby. She was a teenager, scared, with the bad judgment we all had at that age. And I certainly don't want the government to be too casual or quick in taking children from their parents.

But do you know what it takes to become an adoptive parent? The kind of white glove inspection your life, finances and home have to undergo to be approved to adopt? You just about have to be Mary Poppins to adopt a child. Which isn't a bad thing. You can't just let children go into situations where they'll be mistreated; the biological parents of that child and the people overseeing the adoption have an obligation to make sure that child is going into a safe and healthy family.

Except that a biological parent is assumed to be fit until proven otherwise.

It's so frustrating to have to sit there and watch people mistreat their children, when you'd practically sell your soul to have one of your own. All the understanding in the world doesn't make it any easier to be told that you're not good enough to be a mother, just because your body doesn't work.

It wasn't fair. I knew I would be a good mother, but the girl who left her newborn in the snow to live or die, depending on chance, was the one holding a baby that night. And I might never have that opportunity. It just wasn't fair.

Alice

When I first learned I was infertile I leaned on a good friend at church who was also infertile. Alice had raised two adopted children and I thought she was happy with the way her life turned out. She loved babies and was the unofficial grandma for every little one at church. It seemed like you never saw her without a tiny baby in her arms. She loved children and they loved her. When I was pregnant with the toddler I couldn't wait to see her face the first time she held my new baby.

It never happened. After the toddler was born, Alice avoided me. She never even looked at the baby, much less held her. I assumed it was just too painful for her, after the way we'd bonded over our infertility, so I didn't push it. I didn't want to hurt her more and I thought, given time, she'd feel better and our friendship would get back to where it was. She was killed in a car accident though, when the toddler was six months old. I still miss her.

Skulking in the Shadows

I often joke that I have to trick my body into getting pregnant, and then it punishes me for the next nine months. Fertility drugs make me suicidally depressed, unless I'm psychotically angry. Four weeks into both pregnancies I started violently throwing up and didn't stop until about four weeks after delivery. I also got gestational diabetes both times and had to take insulin with the toddler. With the baby I had Pregnancy Induced Hypertension, and both antenatal and postpartum depression. Oh, and my heart goes crazy, throwing in extra beats every so often, just for the fun of it. Never when they're doing an electrocardiogram, of course.

So, naturally, I feel terribly guilty about having children. Because you see, it doesn't matter what I've gone through to have these two beautiful little girls, it's not ever going to equal what some of my friends have had to go through, what some of them are still going through. Who cares what it was like being pregnant? At least I got pregnant, and I was even able to do it without resorting to IVF. A little Clomid (OK, a lot of Clomid), the right proportion of Metformin and voila! I'm pregnant. They've gotten me to ovulate three times. Three eggs, two pregnancies, one husband with supercharged fertility. I've got nothing to complain about.

I keep my mouth shut around other infertile women, though. It's like a club in some ways, with only one, very simple but very painful, membership requirement. I'm not hurting like that anymore, and I've seen how much my joy can hurt some people who are still in the middle of it all. So I don't leave any comments at any of the infertility blogs I read, and I quit the infertility support group I used to belong to. I have children now. I don't belong anymore. And I can't help feeling guilty that I've moved on when their pain is still so raw.

The 90/10 Rule

Reading Chez Miscarriage and following her links has led me into the infertile blogging world. Wow. The memories that brings back.

Did you know that 90% of all sexually active women will get pregnant within a year unless they are taking precautions against it? Of the remaining 10% another percentage (I don't know the exact number) will get pregnant on their own within the next year. And then you have the rest of us.

I have Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome. I didn't know for years. I knew something was wrong, and I went to doctors about it, but I kept getting the same answers from all of them.

"It's normal for some women to have irregular menstrual cycles." Um, no, it isn't. It's normal for teenagers to be irregular. It is NOT normal for a woman in her late twenties to regularly go three and four months without a cycle. And neither is it normal for a 19 year old to go a full 12 months without menstruating. Of course, I didn't know that at the time, so I just listened to the doctors.

"You just need to lose some weight." Actually, I didn't gain the weight until after I started having some really weird things happen to my cycle, and then I gained 30 pounds in a month without having changed my diet in any way. Found out later that weight gain is one of the symptoms of PCOS. It stinks, because the extra weight aggravates your condition, which leads to greater weight gain, which aggravates the condition ... It's not how much I eat, it's what I eat. I have to eat like a diabetic and exercise like a fiend, or I'll blow up to the size of a parade balloon.

"Well, let's look at those thyroid results. Nope, those are within the normal range." PCOS can look a lot like an underactive thyroid. I have to give kudos to those doctors that paid enough attention to me to suspect thyroid; it would have been nice, however, if even one of them had looked further once my tests came back in the normal range. Everyone of them sent me off with a pat on the head, promising that I was, "Fine, just fine." Then why is my hair falling out in handfuls?

"What you describe is impossible. You can't possibly be feeling that way." That one was memorable. I'd been put on birth control pills to control the heavy bleeding I'd suddenly started experiencing. My ovaries blew up like basketballs. I could feel them when I pressed my fingers slightly into my abdomen. Not that I tried that more than once. It hurt even worse than the cramping that month, which had me doubled over from the pain. I immediately stopped taking the pill and made an appointment. Of course, by the time I got in I was just fine again, hence my doctor's scorn. Who would have thought going to the doctor was like taking your car in to the mechanic? She did consent to give me a different type of birth control, though she made it clear she thought I was more than a little crazy. I still don't know just what the heck happened that month.

I wasn't diagnosed until I went in to the doctor because I couldn't get pregnant. He listened to me, asked a few questions, and immediately diagnosed me. I thought it was the end. It was only beginning.

Shakespeare Was a Liar

Parting is not sweet sorrow. It's lousy and I hate it.

Dropped my sister off at the airport early this afternoon, saying good-bye at the counter. It didn't hit the toddler until we were heading for the elevator that we were leaving her aunt behind.

There wasn't the hysteria I expected. Instead she just kept plaintively asking, "Bucket? Bucket!" She didn't stop until we were halfway through the two hour drive home.

Incidentally, Bucket is not my sister's name. My parents were very much into odd and unusual names (I'll have to tell you the story some time of how they messed up with my name) but even they had limits. We don't know where Bucket came from. Mysterious but sweet, that's my little one!

The sister has worked it out so that she will be back in about a month. This is the first time she's ever taken a long car trip, so she's both scared and excited. Our parents are having fits. They didn't want her to fly back, just stay here so she doesn't do the road trip. Unfortunately for them, she has a car and a car payment back there and she really didn't feel like paying for a car she isn't using. Not to mention she'd like to leave her current job, such as it is, on good terms.

News Flash! As of right this minute the baby has become mobile. She just flipped onto her tummy and started scooching around the living room floor. Uh-oh. Heading for the newspaper, too. Bye!

The Mileposts You Love to See

The baby slept through the night!

I woke up at 4 a.m., realized she hadn't woken up yet, and went charging out of the bedroom to check on her. I honestly thought she'd died.

Don't laugh. I know I'm not the only mother who's done that.

Ah, sleep. Glorious, glorious sleep.

Catching Up

Arlene's funeral went well. The husband was asked to be one of her pallbearers, but then they realized her brother would make it after all, so he gave a prayer instead. It was a very positive service, very hopeful, the kind of funeral that you leave feeling sad because you miss your loved one, but feeling uplifted and sure that you will see them again.

I am glad that I was raised to believe that this life is only one part of our existence, that we are more than we appear. There is always the promise of a new and hopeful future ahead of us. That hope gives me such peace and joy.

My sister and I had a ball together this last week. She is my youngest sister (much younger) and is very beautiful. It's pretty funny when we're out and about to see men's heads turn to watch her walk past. She never notices and gets embarrassed when I point it out. She's so cool.

She wants to move here, and I hope she does. I miss my sisters. She spent the week looking at job opportunities, checking out rental prices, etc. She's still living in our hometown but it's small and there isn't much opportunity of any kind there. Whereas here, there's not much for the husband, but plenty for a young woman just starting out. Hopefully she'll be back in a few weeks. We'll see how it turns out.

I'll be back next week. I've got some things I want to write about. I've missed blogging, interestingly enough. To think that at first I wasn't sure I could do this for more than a few days.

Arlene Nwosu, 1962-2004

A friend died of double pneumonia Saturday, after spending several days in the hospital on life support. She was kind-hearted and friendly, strong and courageous, generous to a fault, with a delightful sense of humor. She was dearly loved by her family and friends. Around her, the world was a better place and with her exit it is the poorer. She leaves behind two daughters, her father, two brothers and a sister.

You would have loved knowing her.

"God be with you 'til we meet again,
... With His sheep securely fold you:
God be with you 'til we meet again."

Hiatus

My sister is coming for a week, today, so if you don't see any updates, that's why. Have a great week everyone!

Yippee!

The problem with having two little girls is that just as soon as you've finished washing one load of little pink things, you have another load of little pink things waiting to go.

Yes, the dryer is fixed. I am so happy!

The husband tried to fix it himself, but gave up after nearly two hours of bewilderment and frustration. He tried to follow the instructions in the repair manual, but nothing was looking the way it was supposed to. We have a Kenmore dryer; Sears claimed the manual that they sold us had all the information we needed for that particular model. Let me just point out that the husband bought the dryer before we met; I have never liked Sears because, in my opinion and in my experience, this sort of thing is typical of their customer service. As in, what customer service?

We finally called a repairman. He took care of the whole thing in no time at all. He was also kind enough to show the husband just where the repair manual was wrong and how to do this ourselves the next time. Cost? More than I like to think about, but at least we didn't have to pay the markup for the heating element, since we'd already bought that.

I never would have thought that I'd be so happy to be doing laundry! The piles of clothing littering my hallway are slowly melting away, while closets and dressers are filling up again.

Hip hip hooray!

And I haven't even gotten to the worst ...

Wanna hear more melodrama from last week? Yes, this is going down in the memory books as one of the most difficult weeks of my life. From layoff to losing the cat, all in seven days. What fun!

Soooo, we went to the commissary last week (the base grocery store for those of you not familiar with the military.) The baby was napping, so I seized the chance to take just one child with me. The toddler was only too happy to leave Daddy at home to go bye-bye with Mommy.

Halfway through the trip, I was about 5 large steps from the cart the toddler was sitting in, checking out the rack holding the marked down items, when I noticed this guy eyeing some frozen pizzas. A couple of things made me uneasy: he was standing between me and the toddler, and those pizzas just didn't deserve the intense concentration he was giving them. Not enough there to make me walk over and move the toddler, but enough that I kept an eye on things as I continued to browse through the damaged cereal boxes.

When he moved, it was fast. Dumping some pizzas in my cart, he grabbed the handle and started pushing my daughter away. I yelled and ran.

He didn't stop until I grabbed the cart.

"Hey!" Not an original comment, but I wasn't thinking clearly.

He reacted quickly, snapping back, "I wasn't trying to take your cart."

"Don't take off with my daughter!"

He sneered. "I wasn't taking your daughter, lady."

He walked back to his cart and started to walk off. I grabbed the pizzas he'd dumped in my cart and threw them into his.

In times of stress I don't think clearly. It wasn't until after he was out of sight that the full implication of the whole incident hit me. I started replaying it, the way he'd reacted with anger instead of embarrassment, the way he'd looked off to the side when he first grabbed the cart instead of at the toddler. Too much off to the side. Again, there was something weird in his body language right then. Surely nobody would naturally turn their head to that extreme sideways angle? He was almost looking backward. My suspicious mommy mind immediately decided he was trying to alibi himself in case he was intercepted.

I headed off to customer service. I didn't know if I was overreacting, but what if something was really wrong? What if he wasn't just a jerk, and managed to grab some other child because I didn't do anything?

Things went nuts at the customer service desk. The toddler and I got hustled into the manager's office, where the MPs were called. A store employee was assigned to watch the toddler while I went with the manager to point out the guy. The toddler started panicking, sobbing in terror at Mommy moving away from her.

It didn't take the MPs long to get there. The guy was checking out through the lane directly in front of the manager's office, so I didn't even have to walk out the door to ID him. The MPs talked to me, talked to him, decided it was an honest mistake. He had a daughter the same age, he told them. He was used to shopping with her and didn't realize his mistake until my daughter started crying.

And that was that. We all went home, me without any groceries, but a lot of questions. Had I overreacted? I didn't want to impugn someone's good name, but what else could I have done? Sure, some people react with anger when they're embarrassed. I've had people absent-mindedly grab my cart before, too, though never when I had a child in there. But my daughter didn't cry as he claimed.

Even after thinking it about all weekend, I still don't like the way things add up. And I'm still not sure what exactly happened. I don't know what else I could have done, though. It just isn't the sort of thing you can afford to take chances with these days, is it?

Short Ends

The husband is taking advantage of being unemployed to spend some time at the gym. Since we're retired military we can go on base and use the gym there. Not that I do. I really, really hate exercising around men, especially extremely fit and healthy ones. I wish we had a Curves around here. I wish we could afford it. It's scary what this last pregnancy has done to my tummy.

The toddler has discovered Cinderella. She hauled it off the video shelf yesterday and begged until we put it on. She was enraptured. So much for Caillou, Barney and Elmo. They have all been replaced. We watched it twice yesterday, and it is on right now. Only one viewing will be allowed today though, lest she spend too much time in front of the TV. That's the plan at any rate. I mean, it's not like 2 hours of screaming red-faced temper tantrums are going to bother me at all, right?

Kira wrote about racism recently. I never ran into that when I was engaged. My family and friends weren't at all upset about the husband's being Hispanic; they were too busy being freaked about his being Special Ops. "But he's a trained killer!" This from my brother in the National Guard. And just what do you think your training weekends are all about, little brother?

Surprisingly, both the girls are very fair, the toddler having blonde hair in spite of the fact that neither of her parents do. Genetics is weird. The baby is still mostly bald, so I'm interested to see what her hair settles down to. So far it seems to match her daddy's. I kind of hope it stays that way. She'd be so cuuute.

Speaking of genetics, the baby is working on hard on standing. She can't even crawl yet! I'm afraid, very afraid. My mother tells me I was walking at 7 months. I think the baby is going to do the same thing. Great. Let the games begin!

CUSTODY: A melodrama in three acts
Sometimes life sucks.

Characters:
The teenager
The teen's mom
The teen's dad
The stepmom

Background:
The teen lives with his mother, several states away from his father. The relationship between the teen and his mother has been deteriorating for the last two years. He has recently been diagnosed with ADHD, for which he is taking medication.

Act 1/Day 1

Teen's mom calls teen's dad. She is upset, hysterical even. She and the teen have been fighting again. Shoves have been exchanged. She gives teen's dad three choices: she calls the police and has the teen arrested, teen's dad flies up there and collects the teen with an eye to changing custody, or she has the teen committed. Teen's dad immediately says he will fly up there.

He informs stepmom, who scrambles to find affordable plane tickets. How to pay for them? There is money in savings, set aside for the car insurance. Oh well. They buy the tickets. Non-refundable, but the airline grants a 24 hour cancellation window.

Stepmom and teen's dad start discussing the schools, child support, the budget and how to afford a lawyer to legalize the custody change.

Act 2/Day 2

Teen's mom calls teen's dad. Does he want to tell the teen at the airport or drive to their town and tell the teen there? Teen's dad is astounded. He refuses to fly up unless the teen knows. Suggests teen's mom invite the boy's religious leader over to provide support when she tells him.

Teen calls dad, hysterical. Mom has said dad is insisting on custody change. She has said nothing of her ultimatum to dad. Dad tries to explain. Teen gets angrier, accuses dad of ruining his life. Teen hangs up.

Several phone calls later there is a consensus. Teen would rather go to a hospital than leave his friends. He will stay with mom.

Teen's mom takes the hospital off the table. Teen can stay. Peace will reign. Everyone is happy.

Stepmom cancels plane tickets with one half hour to spare. Teen's dad stays up late, watching infomercials.

Act 3/Day 3

Somehow the kitchen door blew open in the night. The cat is missing. Since she has been declawed, she has been a house cat since they first adopted her. She has no way to defend herself and no experience to help her find her way home.

The teen's dad searches the house, the yard, the neighborhood. He drives around in the car, calling for the cat. He returns home empty-handed.

Sitting down to the kitchen table, he buries his head in his hands and cries.

Mystery

The refrigerator is clean. I know it is, because I pulled everything out of it and scrubbed it down. I sniffed every item, inspected every leftover, opened every container and looked at the contents.

I emptied the freezer, too. Every piece of meat in there is still frozen solid, hard enough to break someone's head if you chucked it at them.

Yet the freezer and fridge continue to stink as if there were rotting meat in there. It billows out everytime I open the door. But I can't find it!

I don't need this.

Artist in Training

The toddler has a secret stash of crayons somewhere, I know she does.

This is the third time I've gone into her room after naptime and found crayon all over the walls. This time, she decorated her sheets as well.

Each time this has happened, I've taken every crayon I could find. Where is she getting them from?

I showed her the marks on the wall and sheets and told her that was a no-no.

"Sowwy, Mommy." She looked at me solemnly for a moment, then smiled brightly. Leaning over she planted a big kiss on my knee. "Better, Mommy, better?"

I'm so doomed.

Delay Tactics

"Please?"
"No."
"Please?"
"No."
"Please?"
"No."
"Please?"
"No."
"Please?"
"Stop asking."
"Please?"
"No!"
"Please?"
"Get in bed, NOW."
"Okay."

Three guesses who kept saying please, and the first two don't count.

For a man who's unemployed, the husband sure is busy. He's had meetings every night this week about the volunteer organization he's involved with. He'll be gone tomorrow night, too. Friday night, though, he gets to put the toddler to bed and put up with the endless pleas for just one more thing. She's gotten amazingly good at finding new ways to try to put off bedtime.

We found out today what the unemployment will be. If I disappear all of a sudden it's because we've decided we can't afford internet access anymore. Although I hope it doesn't come to that.

Still Waters

I was a taking a personality test, one of those that gives you a one word or short sentence description and then you have to answer yes or no. Psychologists call them forced choice tests. It doesn't matter if the true answer is really neither yes nor no, because what matters is how you choose to answer it. I hate them. Very annoying.

So, this test asks if you are calm, yes or no. That's one of those, "Oh, sheesh, I don't know, neither one!" questions for me. Call me reserved if you want to be nice, or a wallflower if you don't. Either way, unless you are one of the people who is super close to me, you'll never know what's really going on inside me.

I've had people assume that I'm stuck up because of this, which always amazes me. It's the opposite. I'm shy because I'm not good at dealing with unfamiliar situations and I worry too much about doing the wrong thing. So I avoid new things, pretty successfully too. Far from thinking I'm better than anyone else I value other people very much. I worry that they won't value me back, is all.

Am I calm? Well, that depends on if you're looking at the inside or the outside. It cracks me up how people who know me, even good friends, are so easily astonished at what an emotional person I am, at what a naughty sense of humor I have, at how much I struggle to control my temper. It's like that duck joke, calm and serene on the surface, paddling like crazy underneath.

Diaper Mountain is here.

It's been a trying weekend. Because of the ice storm our trash pickup was delayed. Our driveway was a sheet of ice, which made it almost impossible to get the trash can down to the curb anyway. The husband volunteered to take it down, then missed the pickup, stuck on the ice as the garbage truck drove past, the guys looking right at him but uninterested in stopping, I guess.

Add in the dryer (got the part right away, but the manual was delayed) and you have a house full of garbage and dirty clothes (since I really don't feel like spending the money to go to a laundromat under the circumstances.)

This much mess makes my mind feel snarled. It's ironic, because I grew up in conditions much worse than what my house is like right now. Since starting Flylady, though, I find that I'm tolerating clutter less and less. I like the way the house feels and looks when everything is reasonably clean. I'll never be a cover model for Clean House Weekly but I do like being able to navigate in the middle of the night without stepping on anything.

My next cleaning goal: working with the toddler to pick up the toys twice a day, before naptime and before bedtime.

I want her and the baby to grow up with a better idea of how to clean their homes than I did.

The best part is the anticipation.

The husband and I really are getting to be an old married couple.

I realized that tonight as I was ironing. See, every Sunday, the husband wears a suit to church. Every so often (like right now with the dryer broken) I get behind on the laundry and I wind up frantically ironing late Saturday night/Sunday morning.

Every time this happens, the husband tells me to only iron the front of the shirt, not the back or sleeves. He'll just be sure to not take off his coat. And, every time I nod, say, "OK, dear," then go ahead and iron the whole shirt anyway. After all, why not? It doesn't take long to iron a shirt, and I love him and want him to feel free to take off his coat if he wants to. Then, Sunday morning after he puts it on he'll come to me and tell me I shouldn't have and give me a kiss to thank me.

So we did this again tonight, and as I was ironing I realized for the first time that we've established a habit here. I smiled and I thought about how we might still be doing this years from now when we have grandchildren, and how they'll laugh at us for being so weird.

Just an old married couple, full of quirks and silly habits.

I can't wait.