Saturday, June 23, 2018

the dungeon is kind of an office building now

It’s five in the morning and I am pumping. I thought I was awake because I had a bad dream someone was trying to hurt my child but after tossing and turning for 20 minutes, then reading a bunch of parenting stories about how to protect my kids from predators, and an hour of catching up with what a blogger I used to follow has been doing the last eight years, I realize this strange feeling is the need to empty the tanks. So I’m pumping.

This is stupid because my kid is going to wake up really hungry in about 25 minutes and I won’t have much to give. So I should stop. 

I have so much to say and no time to say it. One of these days I’ll come back here and tell you about my son, who radiates joy every second of the day—even when he’s hungry—and he *may* even prefer me sometimes to his father, which is surprising and nice. And my daughter, who is very likely smarter than I am already: when I tried to convince her a goblin ate her cookie, she said “no, mom, I really think it was you.”

I am filled with anxiety so much of the time—it used to be the mechanism that kept me in line, but I think it’s veering off into the land of hindering more than helping. I’m probably just paranoid. 

Two years ago I started to suspect I had always had ADD and started talking to someone about it. Then I learned if my goal was to have another baby and not consider taking medicine, there’s really nothing to do except techniques and tools you use “until they don’t work anymore.” I did get that baby (it wasn’t easy), and I’m cycling through those techniques and tools. Still, I’m pretty wound up and easily distracted most of the time. 

Last month I went to Greece for 14 days with my best friends from college, leaving my 9-month-old and 3.5-year-old with their dad. I grappled with unbelievable mom guilt about it, but many people were encouraging me to go—including my husband and mother (who would be taking care of the children). Truly the one sentence someone told me that made me feel ok about going was “think of this as “Jon’s separated pelvis.” And while it was probably a rough 14 days for him, as FaceTime showed, trying to heal a separated pelvis (twice) takes a LOT longer than two weeks. Also? An infant doesn’t understand FaceTime. Recording/sending videos is better when you’re on another continent and your child can’t get to you. That brief but heartbreaking experience is probably the reason this government-separating-families-at-the-border thing has been keeping me up at night, crying.

It took me a full ten days to unclench and start to relax on vacation. I did carry the breast pump with me wherever I went and dumped more ounces of precious milk than I care to admit, but I’d be damned if my kid was going to stop nursing because mommy got a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to hang out with her friends in a gorgeous place for 14 days of only having to worry about what she was going to eat for dinner. 

Part of the reason I sought the tools and techniques about the ADD was because I was so miserable at work and of course thought that was my fault. Allowing myself to be bullied probably was, though. After six years, I found an oppportunity to report to a different person and, damn, that makes a big difference.

I am typing this on my phone, and while I am wearing my glasses, I’m pretty sure I’m looking at 0.2 font size. The Blogger app has been unsupported for years and this may not even post. Doesn’t matter because I’m the only one who will read this, likely in a few years when I’m up at night worrying about where we will get drinking water when the United States coastlines have flooded and all those people show up in the Midwest to maim us for lake water. 

Oh the sun is up. Perhaps it’s time to go to bed. 

Im willing to bet you can find that exact line in posts from 2006, when I was working in the dungeon. In rather sad news, the castle where I worked is being turned into condos, so half the staff has been relocated to the dungeon. Which is good, because with all those witnesses, the odds a person will be murdered and dismembered have gone way down.