cranky pixels

I have had just about all I can take of myself.- S. N. Behrman

The world is conspiring against me this morning. First, there was the living room, which seemed so promising. I’d asked Not So to do the floor after we went to bed. Something about a floor in the process of being cleaned is irresistible to a toddler. Piles of dirt! Brooms! Shiny shiny mopped areas! You try convincing him to stay put on the couch while all of this obviously fun activity is taking place at his feet. All in all it’s much, much easier (not to mention faster) to clean when the baby is elsewhere.

Not So had, indeed, cleared the floor, which prompted an initial bout of mama-related glee, but once I actually got into the living room it seemed that’s as far as it went. The couch and the chairs were piled with toys, but no actual sweeping or mopping had occurred. Which…sigh. Is fine. But confusing, as was the bewildering decision to leave some of the needing-to-be-washed clothing at the foot of the stairs and some of it on the couch, and the half-eaten bag of goldfish crackers not only open but perched, precariously, on its side at the edge of the desk. The whole thing had an air of arrested progress, as though Not So had suddenly been disappeared in the middle of cleaning. Only he came to bed at some point, so the disappearing must have been temporary.

So I quickly swept while the baby was distracted by the piles of toys, gathered up all the laundry and put away the goldfish crackers and then got started making coffee. By this time Happy Fun Baby had grown weary of the toys and decided to pass the time by eating my mouse. Not cool, Happy Fun Baby! I shouted at him, which I don’t feel good about at all (although he thought it was HI-LARIOUS) and went back into the kitchen to take a handful of Calm pills and a B vitamin and have a moment to get a freaking grip. Because do I want to be the sort of parent who shouts at her child? I do not.

In the desert I saw a creature, naked, bestial, who, squatting upon the ground, Held his heart in his hands, And ate of it. I said, “Is it good, friend?” “It is bitter — bitter,” he answered; “But I like it Because it is bitter, And because it is my heart.”- Stephen Crane, “III in The Black Riders and Other Tales”

The best way to get over an irrational bout of anger is to kiss a baby. Preferably my baby, since he is so imminently kissable. He also has the added bonus of being particularly nearby. We ate some cereal, and we watched some Wonder Pets, and we peeled an index card off the desk where it had apparently become stuck because of a heretofore unknown incident with a water glass, and then we decided to take a video of the aforementioned kissable baby, who was being unmentionably adorable and babbling in a way that causes my heart to burst with the cute.

At this time it was revealed that the new camera had been put…somewhere. So we tore apart the room with a mounting sense of frustration – finding, as we did, that our phone (and did you notice that we have lapsed into the plural?) was quite dead and in need of a charge, which reminded us that Not So had mentioned the batteries on the camera dying yesterday when he was taking some test shots.

Nothing, of course, begins at the time you think it did.- Lillian Hellman, “An Unfinished Woman”

The batteries were, in fact, on the charger, but the camera was still nowhere to be found. I eventually located it on a shelf in the kitchen. So, okay. Batteries inserted. Camera ready to go. Or…was it? Apparently being battery-less all night had wiped its internal memory, because before I could get it going I had to re-enter the date and time info. By this time, of course, Happy Fun Baby had grown weary of prattling adorably and was sitting on the floor chewing on the end of his broom. Which, while cute, does not a compelling video make.

It doesn’t really matter whether you grip the arms of the dentist’s chair or let your hands lie in your lap. The drill drills on.- CS Lewis, “A Grief Observed”

So, yes. That’s been my morning. Some days you just have to take a look at it all and roll your eyes, because that sound you hear is the laughter of the gods, and it’s not going away any time soon. Not that I believe in god, mind you, but I sure as hell believe in schadenfreude.

All quotes from:The Quote Cache

technorati tags:schadenfreude, housework, anger management, quotes

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Christmastime just isn’t the same as it was when I was little. Sure, it was always kind of disappointing, seeing as we were dirt poor and often received gifts that still bore dirty price stickers from the Salvation Army. Sure, gifts from our dad were usually things he wanted and would commandeer the minute they were unwrapped, under the guise of “showing us how it works.” Sure, I was usually in trouble for some reason and had only been taken off restriction as a special treat for the holiday. But man, did we have Christmas spirit.

We’d spend the weeks leading up to the holiday wearing bells on our shoes and practicing some sort of Christmas pageant. (Hello, poor folk have to make their own fun!) I’d invariably “direct,” which meant telling my brother and sister exactly what to say and getting horribly frustrated when they didn’t follow my vision. Heh. I was a party as a kid. We’d sing (constantly, and badly) and watch endless Christmas specials on TV and put tinsel on everything.

These days I’m just not feeling it. Here it is, Christmas Eve, and I can barely muster up a “Bah, humbug.” Not So made his traditional Italian Christmas Eve dinner, which was delicious but so unlike the lovely White Trash holiday feasts of my youth. I don’t even remember the specifics of my holiday meals, but I know they involved potatoes. How can we have a holiday without potatoes?

It’s not the food, I know, but how do I generate excitement for the holiday when it just feels like another day? I don’t get a vacation from work. There’s no snow or visiting family. It’s just us, hanging around the house, trying to keep the baby from throwing a fit because his molars are coming in and apparently this engenders a great deal of wailing. Oh, the wailing. Maybe the wailing is trampling my holiday spirit, but I have a feeling it wasn’t hanging around in the first place.

We’re in this weird in-between state as far as holidays are concerned. Usually we spend Christmas with Not So’s family, simply because Not So has a family who gets together for holidays and I really, really don’t. They do this elaborate dinner/breakfast/gifts/more dinner ritual that I always found both comforting and foreign. But it was a thing, you know?

Last year we had Christmas here, but since we’d just had a baby on December 13th, Christmas was sort of anticlimactic. Gifts? Whatever. I just gave birth. And then we snuggled the baby some more.

So this is really the first time we’ve been genuinely on our own for the holiday, and we’re not really sure what to do with ourselves. Do we go all out and decorate, even though it’s only us? (The answer to that is, obviously, no.) Do we sing Christmas carols and watch Christmas specials and gaze beatifically at each other in the glow of the Christmas lights? (Again. Really not.) Or do we sit around like good little atheists, one of us on the computer, the other playing on the PS2?

I hope that by this time next year I’m busy baking Christmas cookies and teaching my kid to sing the in-between verses of Rudolph. We’ll have Not So’s Italian Christmas dinner and then we’ll have some suitably White Trash dessert (like a marshmallow pie or something) and then we’ll snuggle together on the couch to watch The Nightmare Before Christmas. And everyone will live happily ever after.

technorati tags:holiday, christmas spirit, white trash

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I am not blogging about the Kim family, because I do not have the proper words.

I am not blogging about my anxiety, because who wants to hear about how my brain regurgitates at least a dozen possible-death scenarios for any given situation? No one, that’s who.

I am not blogging about my relationship problems, because we talked and things are better and I don’t want to jinx that.

Things are actually pretty good in the Cranky house. Right now Not So has the baby upstairs, so I have an unexpected window of solitude. It’s very odd and I don’t really know what to do with myself. I’ve already tweaked the theme on my blog (the new version of Tarski came out today, so of course I had to go and mess with everything after I installed it) and gone through all my rss feeds (including the ones on LJ, which is totally just an aggregator for me these days). I took a picture of myself with my camera phone. I read some BSG fanfic and wished, again, that I could write decent sex scenes. Now I’m…sitting. And it feels very odd.

I used to crave solitude the way some peope crave cigarettes. I’ve always been someone who has no problem going to a movie by myself or spending an entire day reading a book. On the other hand, I loathe sleeping alone and I get weird if I go too long without talking to anyone, but there you go. My incongruousness is endearing. You were totally just thinking that.

Now that I have a moment to myself, I feel like I should do something to take advantage of it. Paint my toenails, or clean the house, or write a paper. Something. Instead I’m doing the same thing I do when the baby’s in the room, only without the constant interruption and frequent play breaks. Solitude, these days, feels like a deadline I’ve got to meet. It’s exhausting.

technorati tags:solitude, busy, sahm

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The last 24 hours have been somewhat sucktacular. Last night I spent three hours working on some holiday-themed icons in Illustrator, only to have the program crash. But of course I had saved, right? Wrong. So three hours of work went *poof* and all I could do was stare at the screen and kick my own ass for being an idiot. Because who doesn’t save? Me, that’s who.

Then this morning I got up late, showered through the UPS guy’s arrival and missed the delivery of Not So’s new cell phone, which he’s been eagerly anticipating for the last week. This of course prompted a frenzy of weeping, since Not So and I have been having…I don’t know, problems?…and this is just another example of How I Manage To Screw Everything Up Due To My Incompetence As A Stay-Home Mom. Back when I was gainfully employed, we would never have had issues about whose time was more important. Back when I was gainfully employed, I had people paying me for my time, so I knew exactly what it was worth and could prioritize accordingly. If I chose to work overtime, I got paid even more. Now that I’m home all day, I have to somehow make sense of the fact that I am working all the time and still find myself with more things than I have minutes, and no one is offering me time-and-a-half as compensation. Or even hazard pay. Which, if you’ve ever changed the diaper of someone whose diet consists primarily of bananas, is really not too much to ask.

Lest you think I am always thinking in the negative, I will share with you this list of things that make me happy:

• Kittens
• Babies
• Sleep
• Autumn leaves
• Etymology

Now then. See? I am practically bursting with positive energy!

technorati tags:stay-at-home mom, SAHM, incompetent, bah

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(That’s “jiggety jig” in the “home again, home again” sense, not any sort of newfangled rap reference. If you were confused.)

We’ve been home since Saturday afternoon, but the last day and a half was spent laying around in a post-vacation daze. Home seems particularly small and cluttered after six days at Auntie Pep’s spacious abode, but also comforting and familiar. The minute we got into Portland I felt a bizarre sense of calm that couldn’t simply be ascribed to a break in my PMS. I guess that means Santa Cruz isn’t home anymore. Which is okay with me.

When I moved away from California the first time, everything I saw went through the Santa Cruz comparison filter. Sure, this cafe is nice, but it’s no ERC. Lovely view, but it’s no Seabright. I like this bookshop, but - okay, actually, Henderson’s bookstore in Bellingham left Bookshop Santa Cruz in the dust, but that’s about the only thing.

Portland was the first place I’d been that came out on top comparison-wise, so of course we had to move here. Even so, there were things. Salsa, for example. How could any salsa ever be as good as the salsa fresca from Planet Fresh? I’ve spent the last six months craving the salsa from Planet Fresh. The tomatoes, the green onions, the cilantro I always picked out and left in a careful pile at the side of my tray…my mouth watered just thinking about it. I had some on Monday, and it was…not as good as I remembered. I actually wished we’d gone to Baja Fresh. How depressing is that?

My grandiose plans to write thousands of delicious words while other people wrangled my baby were, unsurprisingly, never realized, although I did get to spend some time in the place I always think of when I’m picturing myself writing in a coffee shop: the back porch at Lulu Carpenter’s (which used to be ERC but isn’t, anymore). Ever since I was about 15, I’ve wanted to sit back there with a laptop (or “pen and paper,” as we called it in those days) and churn out pages of novel-related angst. Instead I sat there with my sister-in-law and niece and husband and baby and watched them playing together while Not So and I passed the camera back and forth. Which is like writing, you know, only not. There’s a lot of only not in my world right now. I might need to get that printed on a shirt.

Now we have Christmas shopping and sleep training and laundry and school and holiday parties and birthdays and doctor’s appointments and website building and business wrangling. And that’s just in the next two weeks! I’m glad we went, and I’m glad we’re home. Portland is my hometown now. And I only miss my old hometown a little bit.

technorati tags:santa cruz, vacation, portland, home, planet fresh, lulu carpenters

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It’s 4pm and I just got out of bed. I wish I could say I spent the day lazing around with a book or having a lot of kinky sex. Actually I could say that; it would just be a big fat lie.

I started getting migraines when I was about 20. I’m now 32. That’s twelve years of migraines. Twelve years, people. For a while I was getting them reliably every month (yay, hormones!) and occasinally in-between; I barely had any at all while I was pregnant (the ONE side-effect that was actually good!) and I’ve had maybe 3 since Happy Fun Baby’s birth.

This one kicked my ass, though. Sleep didn’t help. A hot bath didn’t help. Pulling my hair and crying? Surprisingly ineffectual. It wasn’t the worst I’ve ever had because I didn’t actively vomit. I did stagger shakily to the bathroom and hover over the toilet, gagging, until I got so dizzy that I actually considered laying my face on the toilet seat so I could rest. I’m not suggesting we don’t clean our toilets (I cleaned that very toilet the day before yesterday, in fact) but when snuggling with the toilet seems like a good idea, we have a problem.

And, see, I have a terrible feeling I know what triggered the migraine. Yesterday I ate three squares of very dark chocolate. The same very dark chocolate that I ate before my last migraine, although surely, surely the two cannot be related because I love dark chocolate. The darker the better. Bring on the cacao! Only don’t, because apparently I will spend several subsequent hours writhing in pain and wishing I were dead.

Now that I’m feeling well enough to be upright, I’m doing a little half-hearted checking to see if there are any new migraine meds on the market. I tried Imitrex about…what, eight years ago?…and it was pretty useless. It got rid of the pain, but all the secondary symptoms – including nausea, vomiting, auras, sensitivity to light and sound, numbness, difficulty in speech – remained. Want to know how much work I can get done while not being able to look at the computer screen? Not a lot.

Controllable triggers [...] include bright light, chemical smells, second-hand smoke, particular alcohols such as red wine and some hard alcohols such as scotch, foods that are known vasodilator such as fish, some chocolate, aged cheese, and foods which contain nitrates and/or the radical vasodilator MSG.

Migraines: Myth Vs. Reality

Migraine.org (and why is it that migraine sites are so headache-inducing? Seems counterintuitive, doesn’t it?) has an exhaustive list of medications used for preventing and treating migraines. The most promising are the attack-aborting meds, because seriously, I can seldom tell I’m getting a migraine until it’s well underway. Which means I need to send an e-mail to my doctor. Because, dude, if this hadn’t been a weekend and Not So hadn’t been able to wrangle the baby? I’d have been screwed.

technorati tags:migraine, headache, pain

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I finally feel like I’m getting the hang of this mama thing. I know, I’ve said it before. It’s an incremental thing; every day I feel slightly more competent, with some days bringing a false sense of accomplishment (I have the happiest kid in the world; I must be a great mom) or an inflated sense of failure (my kid won’t stop crying; I must be a terrible mother).

It’s a strange thing, motherhood. It’s not like having a job, where you go through your training and learn all the tricks and show up on time and behold! You’re a good employee. It’s more like puberty. Things happen pretty much without any input from you, and somehow you’re expected to take it all in stride. Unlike puberty, you don’t have the luxury of self-absorbtion; there’s another person who takes priority and requires most, if not all, of your attention.

I recently rediscovered the bliss that is the library card, so I’ve been doing a lot of reading. Right now there is a stack of parenting books next to my desk, which I’ve been slogging through any time I have a free moment. It feels almost decadent to read for pleasure these days, and I try to justify it to myself somewhat by focusing my leisure reading on motherhood. Also, as when I was pregnant, my focus is almost exclusively inward. I want to rid myself of any bad parenting ideas before they have a chance to manifest. Because, seriously? My own parents did not exactly set a good example. On a related note, I miss my therapist with the fire of a thousand suns, but until we start making “extra” money, I’m the only therapist I can afford. Hence, the parenting books.

The one that’s made the biggest impression on me so far is Mothering Without a Map by Kathryn Black. It’s the idea that women who grew up without mothers for whatever reason (death, abandonment, abuse, whatever) are at a disadvantage when becoming parents; we can’t refer to the wisdom of our mothers or rely on them for advice or support, so we essentially have to teach ourselves to navigate this territory alone. The thing I found most interesting was a comment Black made about subconscious traits of the under-mothered. Among the various coping mechanisms, Black mentions “[s]ome women develop a sense [...] of being behind schedule or otherwise out of sync, no matter what they’ve accomplished.”

That resonated with me, for reasons which should be obvious. It also made me think that perhaps I’m not as self-aware as I should be, and, at the same time, maybe I’m doing a better job than I think I am. Because if the majority of my anxiety is just echoes from my childhood? I’m probably okay.

There’s a certain comfort in self-analysis. I’ve always felt better when I could categorize my issues, label them like lab samples and keep them on a shelf in plain view. I’m finding, though, that motherhood has changed my M.O. I still want to shine a bright light on my issues, but I don’t want to keep them anymore. I’ve got better uses for that shelf. I don’t need my problems to define me.

technorati tags:motherhood, depression, issues, therapy, self-help, books, reading, library, parenthood, trauma, childhood

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