At this point I feel like the only post I can put up is about what I’m thankful for. And I am thankful for so much, but I don’t feel much like writing about it right now. So I won’t. But I’m obliged to write something, so this will have to do.
Sometimes we can’t bring our A game, no matter how hard we try.
Have a happy turkey day!
As the purse strings tighten I’m being forced to determine what my standards are.
ADDED: Perhaps it isn’t obvious from the picture, but these shoes are older and the color has worn off many large areas, so they look really shabby.
Last night much frustration and resentment that I’d been trying to keep to myself bubbled over and said a bunch of shit in entirely the wrong way and now I’m the bitch who loses her shit and he doesn’t have to think about his part in any of this and I’m just so fucking tired of our sad, tired, unproductive cycle.
We really need some outside help, because I don’t know how to broach these tender, entrenched issues effectively, but we absolutely can’t afford therapy.
And so our sad, tired, unproductive cycle will continue. I wonder how long we both will last?
We attempted our first at-home vision therapy today.
It’s going to be a looooooong 12 weeks.
The other day my daughter left her blankie at home and we didn’t notice until her class was walking into the school. When she realized she didn’t have it, her face crumpled and she started to wail. I knew that without her blankie she’d have a really hard day.
So I drove home, grabbed it, and high tailed it all the way back to her school. I had to park and run in to give it to her. When she saw me in the doorway with her beloved blankie, her tear stain face looked so relieved.
The whole ordeal took long enough that I was nerve-wrackingly close to being late for work. When I picked her up from after care, I fished a bit for a thank you, but the one I got didn’t seem very appreciative. I lamented the fact that being a mom was a rather thankless job.
A few days later I found a paper crumpled up in the bottom of her backpack. “I am thankful for mi mom.” Was scrawled below a picture of me bringing my daughter her blankie.
Yes I cried.
Maybe parenthood isn’t so thankless after all.
I spent a lot of the first years of my daughter’s life carefully broaching the topic of behavior. I hardly ever came out and said how hard it was for me to parent my child, but I dropped breadcrumbs and waited to see if they were followed. 99% of the time, they were not.
I could tell, early on, that I was having a different experience than most moms I met. They just didn’t seem as anxious, or fearful, as I was. They didn’t seem as tired, as bone crushingly exhausted, as I felt. I wondered a lot if it was just me, if I was just not cut out to be a parent, if the normal struggles of raising kids were just too overwhelming for me. I wondered if I was defective, in some way, unable to manage the only thing I’d ever wanted to do in life.
As my daughter got older and I spent more time with other kids, I realized that my experience was different. In some ways fundamentally so. Parenting my daughter was such an intense experience, every day felt like a battlefield.
Everyone assured me that what we were dealing with was “normal,” and I believed them, because what did I know? I had never parented before. I didn’t know what to expect. If other people, especially professionals, told me it was par for the course, who was I to argue?
And the thing is, what I experienced probably was normal, as it couldn’t be described as clinically disordered, but it was definitely not what most parents were dealing with. We were not the mean, median or mode. We were the outliers.
When I started the diet, and joined the FB page, I quickly recognized that the mothers there were really struggling. If I thought I had it hard, these women had it hundred times harder. The normal, run of the mill parenting challenges that most people face would feel like a cake walk to them. They were parenting in the trenches. They were struggling to survive.
The past few months with my daughter have been the best I’ve experienced since she was a baby. For the first time in four years I have an idea of what other parents are experiencing, and my views on parenting have changed dramatically. I get it now, all the people going on and on about how incredible it is, how fulfilling, how wonderful. It’s not that I didn’t have those moments before, but they were the exception, not the rule. They were the little morsels that kept me from starving, the assertions that held bakc the fears that maybe I’d made a horrible, horrible mistake. They did not define my motherhood, but were fleeting, hopeful whispers of a promise that kept me going.
For me, parenting has fundamentally changed. It’s still tiring, in fact it’s still exhausting in a bone crushing way, but the exhaustion is not wrought of anxiety and fear, but of the unavoidable daily grind of continually meeting the needs of others while putting your own needs last. It’s the kind of tired that I can manage because it holds a certain predictability that you don’t appreciate unless it’s never been yours.
I think a lot, these days, about the parents who have it hard. The ones who struggle mightily just to get through the days, and rarely, if ever, enjoy them. The ones who feel they have to sacrifice the needs and wants of their other children to manage the demands of one. The parents who don’t even remember that they have needs themselves. The mothers who are alienated from other mothers by their extremely divergent experiences, who are misunderstood and misrepresented and judged, often mercilessly. I am not one of these mothers. I never have been (nor did I ever believe myself to be), but I know them now better than I ever have before and I feel so much empathy for them, such a deep well of compassion. Theirs is a long, hard, unrelenting road, one with few rewards and fewer accolades. It is is isolating and lonely and soul crushing and sometimes seemingly hopeless. And worst of all, it is often not recognized nor validated.
My road through early parenthood was not as difficult as it could have been, but it was so much more challenging than I even imagined it would be. I was so unprepared and I stumbled so mightily. I read so many books and I tried so hard and I felt like such a failure, and then when others mothers told me they didn’t read books because their instincts were enough, I berated myself for not knowing what to do, for not being enough. I wondered why the suggestions didn’t work and assumed I was doing them wrong, or wasn’t trying hard enough. I couldn’t do it with the help of professionals, when everyone around me could do it on their own. For much of my early parenting journey, I felt like a failure.
I don’t feel like a failure anymore, and parenting isn’t nearly so hard. I am so, so thankful for that. There isn’t a day that goes by when I don’t breath a sigh of relief that the transitions don’t require all my energy plus a million tricks, that bedtime isn’t a four hour marathon affair and that showers aren’t a torture session, that birthday parties don’t need to be left early and that teachers don’t need to leave notes about expectations that were not met. I’m so thankful that my daughter is making friends and actually playing with them, that she’s feeling successful in school and wanting to read and sounding out words and making up stories.
I am so thankful that I didn’t dread my parent conference today, and felt pride in the many compliments the teacher had to give.
And then I left the classroom and thought about all the parents who don’t get what I have. And I felt for them, because I have glimpsed, only momentarily, how hard it can be.
And it terrified me.
The app for the reader I use is down. It automatically updated a few days ago and now when I try to open it, it immediately crashes. I haven’t really been able to read blogs on my phone for two days.
I (and others) have talked a lot about how this community has changed over the years, how we feel less connected now than we used to as people we read and responded to slowly (or abruptly) stopped participating in the strangely connective dance of posting and commenting. And yet, now that I can’t access what is left of that community, I realize how much it continues to mean to me, despite all the ways it has changed.
I guess it’s true that you rarely realize what you actually have until it’s gone.
Of course my community is not gone, it’s just trapped in my computer, which I don’t have access to much of the day. I hope that when I update the operating system on my phone my reader will work again. In the meantime I will have to schedule more time at my computer, so I don’t feel totally disconnected.
How do you feel when you can’t (or don’t) read blogs for a while?
I turn the shower off while I’m washing my hair. I use baking soda instead of shampoo so the process of applying the water with baking soda to my scalp and then rubbing my scalp for a minute takes a while. I did this before the horrible drought, and I’m definitely doing it now.
The only problem is that now it’s cold, and every day it’s getting colder. A month ago, standing wet in my shower for a couple minutes was a perfectly pleasant experience. Now, it’s quite uncomfortable. Some days, especially if I shower at night, it can be really unpleasant .
I was contemplating leaving the water on during the winter, at least at a trickle, or turning the energy-sucking space heater on while I showered, when a tiny thought formed and floated into my mental debate: it’s okay to be cold, you don’t need to make this better. The thought quite literally stopped me in my hair washing tracks.
But the thought didn’t end there. It kept growing: people all over the world are cold all the time. Many of them don’t even have warm water. Heck, many of them don’t have indoor plumbing. Many of them pour freezing water over their trembling bodies to get clean, and they are probably lucky to do it once a week. It’s okay to be cold for two minutes while you wash you’re hair. It’s okay to be uncomfortable. It’s okay to shiver, and to get goose bumps and for your teeth to chatter. It’s okay to be in pain. You don’t need to fix this. You’re doing to keep washing your hair with the water off, and without the heat.
This might seem like the most obvious thought in the world, but I to me it was a profound realization. I’ve spent the past 35 years running from discomfort and avoiding pain. If there was some way I make a situation less uncomfortable or painful, you better bet I did it. If I was really cold turning off the water during a shower, I left the water on, conservation be damned.
This thought reasserted itself last night, when layered my thick robe over my sweatshirt as I huddled on the coach, grading papers. As I started to consider getting the heating ducts fixed so we could enjoy our central heating, I stopped myself: It’s okay to be cold, remember? It’s okay in the shower and it’s okay here. Fixing the ducts will cost money. Turning on the heat will cost money. Just be cold this winter. So many people are so much colder than you, and they survive. You’ll survive too. (Obviously it would not be okay to keep the heat off if temperatures dropped so precipitously as to threaten harm, but that won’t happen where I live.)
And so I’m exploring this kernel or truth, that it’s okay to be cold, to be uncomfortable, to be tired, to be upset. These things are okay. I don’t necessarily need to fix them. Sometimes they just need to be endured.
One of the worst things about being a teacher is how fucking hard it is to take a day. I’m trying to think of another profession where being out is such a labor intensive hassle. When my husband is sick he has to reschedule a few meetings and maybe push back a couple of deadlines. When I’m sick I have to leave detailed directions that account for every minute of my day, AND leave materials and resources available to execute those directions.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve spent 2-3 hours at work, before dawn, sick as a dog, getting my shit ready for for a sub. There have been days when the prospect of preparing for a sub was so overwhelming that I just went in sick (like really, really sick) to avoid the whole ordeal. It usually takes half as much time to prep for the day as the time you would have been there, so you only ever get part of the time off. It’s kind of infuriating how hard it is to not be at school when you’re a teacher.
Writing sub plans suck. Coming back and realizing your sub didn’t really follow them sucks even more. The whole thing fucking sucks.
Can you tell I hate writing sub plans? Can you guess what had me up past midnight writing this post?
It looks like my son has hand, foot and mouth disease so he probably can’t be at daycare all this week.
I guess I’m going to be writing more sub plans.
So, remember how I said it was going to be tight for a little while? Well, it turns out that it’s going to be more than tight.
We are kind of financially fucked.
The good news is, the really dire stretch is relatively short term. We have some small raises coming to us next summer, and that will give us a few hundred a month extra to work with. The other good news is that I seem more aware of just how fucked we are and how drastic our response (re: spending) has to be, and I’m making the necessary changes. (Even better, my husband seems to as well! (See below))
The other good news is that we haven’t been paying for childcare for three months and I didn’t spend all that money on dumb shit! Hurrah! So we have an extra few thousand to fall back on before we start dipping into our real “in case of emergency” reserves.
And, if I could find a tutoring gig or two I could be bringing in some significant under-the-table cash to take some of the pressure off. This will take work and a significant amount of ingenuity, but if I can find tutoring I should be able to pay for my daughter’s vision therapy without going into debt.
The final silver lining is that this is going to force us to get on the same page about spending, because there just isn’t any room for our old habits.
The bad news is those raises aren’t much, which means this is our financial reality for the next 3-4 years. It’s going to be REALLY tight for a while.
The other bad news is that if something big breaks on our car or at our house, we’re totally fucked.
{I bet you’re all thinking, I told you so, about raising the rent. And fair enough. You did. And you were right. But what’s done is done, and we’re helping someone who cares for the physically disabled stay in the city, so I feel pretty fucking good about that.}
How did this happen, you ask? Well a couple of shitty things happened to put a crimp in our finances this past month. Our tenant left, which means we lost a month of rent, and then her toilet was flowing/leaking like crazy while she was gone for two weeks (before she moved out) and we got stuck with two water bills equalling $1200. (Yes, we had someone come out and yes we fixed the leak and yes we’re petitioning for a leak credit.) We’ll get some of that back, but I’m guessing it won’t be much. These are obviously one-time, short term obstacles, but they put us in a less-than-ideal position as we enter into this tight period.
Most importantly, our childcare bill is just a lot bigger than we’re used to. So we need to absorb that extra $600 a month (and no, there are no cheaper options for child care, we already send them to the cheapest options that we feel comfortable with).
Then there was my daughter’s eye exam and the subsequent vision therapy that is required. Our vision policy specifically says “vision therapy not covered,” so I’m not expecting they’ll be reimbursing us, even partially, for the appointments (though I’m still going to try). This is only for 12 weeks, so even if we go into debt, it’s not a long term monthly cost.
One good thing is that in December I’ll have $3K in my 125 tax-sheltered childcare account to claim, and if I put that toward my student loans, that is $350 a month I don’t have to pay. And if things are looking REALLY bad in January when I get the money, I can keep that $3K in my checking for when we’re not able to make ends meet and still not pay my student loans for a while, because I’ve been over-paying them for so long that I’m not required to make another payment until 2018. Of course in that scenario I’m paying 6% interest on that money, but 6% on $3K is probably better than 20% on some amount we may need to put on a credit card. (If you want to weigh in on this in the comments, please do, I’m not quite sure how I should proceed with the student loan/$3K coming to me situation).
And we have other things going for us, like the fact that my son has enough hand-me-down clothes and shoes to last until Kindergarten (except for some pairs of khaki pants because that he needs to wear for “school” (yes they wear a uniform in preschool/daycare) and we weren’t handed down any of those). My daughter is taken care of until she grows out of the 6/6x/7 size–which probably gives me a year. Both sets of grandparents are very helpful and would totally get either of them a jacket or shoes if we really needed them too. They will also get them so much for Christmas that we could really get away with getting them almost nothing, which is currently my plan.
We haven’t promised to see anyone for the holidays so we don’t have to budget in expensive plane tickets or even gas to travel. The few things we really should fix on the house can wait–we lived without heat last winter and we can do it again. I guess the biggest thing is that my husband seems to understand how tight things are and has made changes without me prodding him; he asked me to get him a box of small chip bags at Costco which means he’s packing his lunch for work at least some days. And he hasn’t asked if he should pick up burritos for a month. We didn’t even order a pizza last Friday. (I know, we’re ridiculous but it really is a CHEAP pizza). We should be able to make this work. It’s going to be a challenge, but I think we can manage it. Right now I’m just taking it one day at a time, while I run the math on my budget to make sure I’m accounting for all expenditures. Hopefully in a few months, after I see that I can keep expenditures in the very narrow margin of what’s left after paying the necessities, I’ll feel a little better about the whole thing.
So yes, it feels like we’re financially fucked, but I’m hopeful that we’ll be alright.