Not a Wasted Word

I was already in a pretty deep hole after Conferences week, and then my cat died.

Now I’m pretty much buried in this hole.

The next couple of weeks are not going to help me dig myself out, so I’m just trying to make sure there are pockets of air big enough to breath, and to keep still so it all doesn’t come down around me.

And that is where I am, or at least it’s where I feel like I am.

The next couple weeks are packed with events I am not looking forward to. All the reserves I will be able to muster will be spent just getting through those events. Hopefully, in November, there will be some time and space to take care of myself.

And now I need to do laundry and wash dishes. At least I’m listening to a good audiobook (though it’s almost over, boo).

I hope you’re all having a better start to fall.

We had to put down our cat yesterday.

It felt sudden, though in retrospect it shouldn’t have been. Looking back the signs were all there, I guess we just didn’t want to see them.

The only saving grace is that we knew it was the right decision. She wasn’t doing well and hated the vet. Prolonged care in an attempt to keep her with us would not have been a mercy.

She was 13.5 years old. She was my miscarriage cat. She came to us when my grief was so wide, and she filled up that space with some love. She was our family and our friend.

I am just devastated. I can’t believe she is gone. I see her everywhere. I’m about to go upstairs and she won’t be waiting for me for breakfast or a treat. I don’t want to go upstairs and see that she’s really not there.

I took the day off. My eyes barely open and I don’t want to spend the day pretending I’m not fighting back tears. Tomorrow is a better day to go back, so that is what I’m doing.

I’ll write more about my sweet girl soon. For now I just need to put these words out there, to help me make it more real.

I’m so sad. It hurts so much.

Thank god it’s the weekend.

I finished conferences at 3:30pm yesterday, then assisted at the dojo, and finally graded two class’s worth of projects before I called it for the weekend.

It felt so good to shake off all the stress of conference week, and to know we had a three day weekend ahead of us.

But this morning I’ve felt very… blah. I think I have a bit of a stress hang over honestly. And there is still stress to be had. Our cat isn’t doing well. My periformas syndrome and lower back pain are returning, and I’m almost sure martial arts is the cause. My neck is a mess from looking up at my TV at school (I project my computer screen on to my TV to teach). I have a ton to do around the house, which has been neglected for weeks. There are more projects to score.

But we’re going to a free concert in the park near our house today. And I don’t have to do a ton of lice-related laundry. And I think we found a Halloween costume for my son, who has been melting down about not knowing what to be for a couple weeks. I have next week planned at work, and I got my Día de los Muertos decorations up yesterday in the 30 minutes before conferences started. I already cleaned the cat’s boxes and have loads of laundry in the washer and dryer.

And I left this post sitting for a bit while I folded laundry and talked to my sister.

Right now I gotta work out, then roll out my legs and back.

I hope everyone has a restful weekend.

You know when you are sure something is going to be unpleasant, but you try to talk yourself into a better attitude about it, and then it comes and it’s even WORSE than you were originally expecting and you’re like, oh hell fucking no. Enough of this shit.

Well this has been one of those weeks.

I knew it was going to suck. I KNEW it. But I tried to go into it with a positive attitude. I told myself maybe it would be okay to have short periods, and maybe conferences wouldn’t be as exhausting as I was expecting, and maybe they would even feel gratifying in some ways.

But nope. Having short periods all week was even more energy intensive, and yet less productive, than I was expecting. Conferences have been even more exhausting than I worried they would be, and since students were not given a chance to complete a reflection they haven’t been “student led” at all. We just sit there trying to think of things to say about students who are doing fine, but whose parents requested a conference anyway, and who are supposed to be showcasing some of their early school year accomplishments but instead are just sitting their responding to our questions monosyllabically.

I leave work every day super late and super drained and feeling incredibly resentful.

Today I asked my principal if next week we could unpack what worked and what didn’t this week and she said, no, we have too many other things on our Wednesday meeting agenda.

So we’re not even going to learn from this ridiculously ineffectual experience, which means we’ll probably repeat it next year.

I’m thinking of sending out a google doc or form and asking people for their input so at least we have SOME RECORD of how awful this felt, because I really do not trust our admins to understand what a mess this week was.

I have really been struck this week with how hard it is to parent a middle schooler with ADHD. Especially since I also have ADHD and struggle mightily with executive functioning myself. And when my husband, who is incredibly well meaning and handles most situations calmly and effectively, periodically forgets what is developmentally appropriate for middle schoolers who are not neurodivergent, let alone those who are.

So many of my students this year seem very needy. I need to have directions written a million different ways. I need to have copies of my notes for them, since they can’t seem to write effectively with a pencil. They are absent all the time which means I’m constantly creating supports so they can finish work at home, and then following up with them when they never get the work done at home. I gave our first assessment last week and seven kids missed it between the three classes and I’ve spent my lunch and after school half hours ALL WEEK giving make up tests. Everything is requiring twice as much effort and time as it did before. I swear it’s worse than last year, and I can’t tell if that’s true or just that I expected last year to be a raging dumpster fire and expected this year to be just a smoldering dumpster fire and so the fact that the dumpster fire is, in fact, still raging, is throwing me off guard.

Oh, and lest I come off as the glue holding all sorts of shit together, let me exemplify one of the ways I am a hot, hot mess, that is surely contributing to the chaos.

Remember how I couldn’t tell if my daughter still had lice? That is because she probably never had lice. What happened was that, last Thursday night she was scratching her head like crazy, so I asked her what was wrong. When she showed me her head, it was covered in white stuff, and her scalp had red, patchy spots. Then she told me that on Saturday, at her friend’s birthday party, a guest’s hat had fallen off and when she picked it up and put it on, he told her he had lice.

So of course I assumed she had lice.

And I stripped her bed and combed out her hair and did all of those things, which in retrospect I think were probably the right moves.

But then I didn’t really see anything I was sure was lice on the towel, but I just assumed I didn’t know what I was looking for and decided that lice was still the problem. Which means I kept washing bedding and towels and kept combing out her hair every three days, even though I didn’t have concrete proof she had lice.

Except the third time I combed it out I saw all the white stuff again and I freaked out. And then I realized the white stuff was probably just dandruff, which my daughter has never had before so I wasn’t used to seeing on her head. But what about the kid who said he had lice?! And of course it hit me, that kid was just fucking with her. He probably didn’t want her putting on his hat and told her he had lice so she’d take it off. Kids do dumb shit like that ALL THE TIME.

So yeah, my daughter doesn’t, nor did she, have lice. But since I didn’t trust my ability to figure it out for myself, and just started blindly following the directions I was given years ago, I didn’t realize that.

But honestly, the fact that parents have to know how to diagnose and combat lice infections, or cough up hundreds of dollars to have someone come comb out their kids hair, is some serious bullshit. Still, I should know this is a weak spot of mine because our bed bug experience, and the many tens of thousands of dollar wide hole it blew up in our savings, has me seriously scared when it comes to small bug infestations. Like I get blindly terrified when my kids get a bug bite I cannot immediately identify, even if it’s clear it happened at a park. I just need to accept that I can’t be level headed about any of it without professional guidance, and I suppose that is what I learned from this experience.,

See! I’m trying to learn from this dumpster fire scenario, instead of just looking away and pretending it never happened! Even though every time I think about it I want to punch a hole if my own reflection, I’m so, so mad at myself.

Okay, enough of my pity party. Tomorrow is Friday. Maybe I’ll feel better after a three day weekend.

A girl can dream.

I couldn’t sleep last night. I went to bed at 10:30 and read until 11pm, but at 1am I was still up.

I feel sleep at some point in the next hour I think, but refused to look at he time after 1am.

And now it’s 6am and I have to start my day.

It really throws me when I can’t sleep like that for a night. The nights when my son wakes me up and interrupts my sleep for a good thirty minutes are hard (and still happen way too frequently to be honest), but the nights when I just can’t fall asleep myself wreck me. I’ll be trying to recuperate from last night all week. 

I guess I should just be thankful that it doesn’t happen to me too frequently. Some people deal with insomnia on the regular. Or they wake up every day at 3am and can’t fall back asleep. I know elusive sleep is a big issue for a lot of people.

But it does feel like, what’s the point of any of it if sleep is always so hard to get. Between my son and my own sleep issues, it feels like I’m rolling be dice every night.

God I’m so tired. I want nothing more than to sleepy for another three hours at least. But instead I have to get up; teach, administer retests, go to several hours of conferences, come home and manage my kids, including helping my daughter catch up after missing a day yesterday (she came down with a bad cold suddenly on Sunday night, while I was combing out her hair).

And if I don’t start now I’ll be late to work.

This post barely makes any sense, but there are some photos if you keep reading. You’ve been warned.

It’s officially October. I like October. I like Halloween, I love Day of the Dead (which is actually November 2nd, but which we study for much of this month). I like celebrating my son (his birthday is the 22nd). I like when the weather gets cool, and the heat waves finally stop making surprise appearances. I like fall, and I like knowing the holiday season is fast approaching.

I have already pulled out my Halloween leggings and we put up our Halloween gel clings. I’ll be getting the other decorations out this week.

So I’m trying to be excited for October, but right now I feel really beaten down.

I did laundry all weekend. At least it felt like I did. I combed my daughter’s hair out again today. I honestly don’t know how to look for lice or nits – I’m the worst when it comes to identifying what is a bug and what is dandruff or something else. So I have no idea how my daughter’s head looks. But I’ve used the Kapow! treatment twice and combed it out twice and put coconut oil on it in between, so I’m feeling pretty confident that it’s a lot better than it was on Thursday. I think I’ll take her to one of those combing places next weekend, or later this week, to see what they say. Or ask my friend’s mother-in-law to comb her out. She is really good at it, and doesn’t mind doing it for others.

I think I managed to avoid getting them myself. I’ve had a few people check for me, but I haven’t combed my hair out, or asked anyone else to do it for me. Maybe I’ll do that this week as well. Except this week is going to be really busy,

This week is Conferences at my school. I HATE conferences. There is never enough time and the students’ you need to meet with the most never show and it’s an exhausting week all around. We see all our classes for just 35 minutes every day, then we have a short 30 minute lunch before we start conferencing for two or more hours. By the end of the day I’m just wrecked.

Our admin really dropped the ball this year too, and we didn’t start planning for conferences until basically last week, which means we aren’t at all prepared. We started a week later this year and I swear NO ONE is taking that into account with planning. It’s driving me nuts. This year has felt so rushed and chaotic. I’m over it and we’re only six weeks into the school year.

But at least this week zero period starts at 8am instead of 7:45am. I will ABSOLUTELY take those extra 15 minutes and put them to good use.

Saturday we stayed home and got shit done, but Sunday we went to the Presidio for the first Sunday of the month event at the new Tunnels Top park. It was a beautiful day and the views were stunning. The kids had a great time, and I was grateful to get out of the house, because if I’d stayed there all day I would have just kept doing laundry. Last Sunday I did chores all day and was in a foul mood by the end of it. I’m glad we made it out of the house this Sunday.

My daughter and I were actually in this same area last weekend, but the bridge was totally covered in fog. You couldn’t see it at all. So it was nice to have such a beautiful view this weekend.

On the way home last weekend I got this shot of the city, which is my new favorite. San Francisco can drive me crazy, but she really is a pretty city.

It’s almost 11pm and I’m still finishing up a presentation for tomorrow. If I have what I need ready from last year, I can keep my head above water, but when I need to create new materials and resources, everything goes off the rails. My Spanish 1A class is pretty much set for the year, but there is a lot I have to make for my Spanish 1B class, and it hasn’t been easy to find the time to do it.

Next weekend is a three day weekend. I’m just counting the days until that Monday off. Maybe then I can catch up a little. Maybe.

And… my daughter has lice.

Talk about a pre-pandemic throw back! I almost forgot about lice!

But lice did not forget about us.

We realized around 7:30pm. She wasn’t in bed until after 11:30pm. I combed out her hair with a nit comb, washed all her bedding on hot, braided her hair, made her bed, and threw a bunch of other towels, clothes and blankets into bags for washing tomorrow.

I guess it’s good that changing my daughter’s sheets was a task that I let fall by the wayside for so long. I would have been pissed if I’d finally changed her sheets last weekend, only to have to wash it all on hot tonight.

Today was actually a pretty good day. I was starting to feel like maybe I could get out from under the to-do list. Now of course it’s grown exponentially.

I really hope I don’t have lice too. For the past two days my daughter has been doing my hair while we listen to Ender’s Game. She swears she didn’t use any of her own brushes or combs on my hair, but it seems unlikely that I won’t get them. We shall see.

Blerg. I’m bummed out, but I know we’ll get through this. We have many times before, and even though I’m a little rusty, it’s coming back to me.

I’m sorry I’ve been AWOL. Things have been busy, both at work and at home, and I’ve been struggling to show up here. I feel, simultaneously, that I have too much to say, and nothing really at all to relay.

I’m definitely in one of those weeks, that if I write about it I’ll come off as kind of neurotic. This is a busy season, with the start of the school year for myself as a teacher and for both my kids. My husband is back at the office three days a week. My son and I are at martial arts. We’re all getting little viruses that are making the rounds. It’s that time of year.

My to-do list is too long and I keep pushing stuff that doesn’t get done to the next day. Sometimes things get pushed back a whole week. I start to feel stressed out and overwhelmed. The weekends aren’t long enough to dig myself out of the hole. Things fall by the way side. Some of them can stay there, but others I’ll have to go back for, and dust off.

And that’s all I have in me tonight. Again, too much and nothing at all. Story of my life right now.

How are you doing these days?

*I put OK Computer on the other day and my kids said it sounded like elevator music. I wish they played Radiohead in elevators! And I wish my kids were willing to try a song longer than a minute before they reached for my phone to change it.

I feel like I’m getting into the rhythm of the school year, but one of the only reasons I’ve been able to get into that rhythm is because I have a million alarms and reminders set on my phone. Every day I have alarms and reminders that make sure I get out of bed, start my zero period class on time, stop teaching so certain classes have time to clean up, make it to my break duty, plug in the computers before I leave, pick up something on the way home, take my vitamins, plug in the car, start reading, and so on.

My phone is the only thing keeping me on track.

Of course I don’t have alarms set for my son’s random wake ups in the night. He’s always needed someone to come to him at least once a week. But lately it’s been every night again and it’s starting.to wear on me. No one talks about night parenting an almost night year old but I’m definitely still doing that. It’s really rough.

It’s because he called for someone at 5am that I’m up writing this. But my second alarm is about to go off, so I better just hit publish on this.

I don’t think I’ll be able to get by with no alarms and no reminders any time soon. And I suppose it’s okay that I depend so much on my phone to get through my days. I just hope my son can start getting through his nights without me.

I swear I was going to write this post before SHU put hers up. It does help to know I’m not the only one! I also have a couple other complications that are arising, because unlike SHU, I do plan a fair amount of hang outs for my kids with their friends (I refuse to write out “play dates,” I just can’t).

So one issue we’ve come across, especially since the school year started up again, is our kids’ insistence that they just want to stay home all day and chill. I would love to have a day or two, here or there, where this were possible, but so far it most definitely is NOT. Sure it’s lovely while the kids are playing their two hours of video game time in the morning – this is when my husband and I sleep in (we try to take turns) or get chores done – but as soon as that time is over it all goes to shit.

Like SHU’s oldest (also a girl), my daughter (12yo now) can hang out and not do much relatively well. She does want to spend the entire time listening to podcast episodes she’s already heard, and drawing on my iPad, but if pestered long enough, she can at least move her art endeavors to actual paper. Still, she requires constant vigilance to make sure she’s not back on a pad again soon.

Also like SHU, my son (9yo in a month) cannot really manage much “hanging out” time. He can read for a bit, and he too can hole up in his room listening to podcasts he’s already heard for a fair amount of time, but eventually he comes out and makes sure everyone who can hear him knows that HE’S SO BORED. Or he spends the hours asking when we can watch some TV (they also get 45 mins of TV in the afternoons on weekends – yes I know it’s WAY too much screen time). He also will read longer if he’s allowed to read on his pad, even if I have the exact same book available in print (right now, for him, it’s the Big Nate graphic novels).

They both say, why does it matter if we’re on our pads, if we’re reading or doing art? To which I reply, why do you NEED to be on your pads if we have books and art supplies EVERYWHERE? It’s clear the pad offers a kind of comfort they crave, even if they aren’t playing a game or watching something on them.

So we make them go do something most days, and even though my husband finds really cool and interesting things to do, they generally make our lives hell for the hour before we leave, and for the first half an hour of the outing.

It. Drives. Me. Crazy.

I asked my mom friends about this, and they were all like, DOING NOTHING IS LOVELY! And when I asked how their girls killed the time, it was clear pretty quickly that they spend a lot of it on screens. We already feel like we’re giving them way too much screen time on weekends, so that is not a possibility for me.

I find that usually just one short outing can be enough to break up the day, even if it’s just an hour long (or less!) trip to the library (and when I say “hour long” I am including the 10 minutes walk on either side). It’s even better if we do something longer. Both kids usually give us a ton of grief when they get ready (though our son gives us less) and have a fine time once they are out (though our daughter can usually hang longer, and in more varied circumstances).

We’re also having them do more chores, which definitely helps to keep them occupied, but it requires a fair amount of my attention and is again more effective with our daughter than with our son. (She’s even getting so good at some chores that it saves me time! Our son is definitely not saving me any time yet.)

When I have a very specific task I’m getting done, I will say that they are welcome to join me in it, or to find their own activity, and that will keep them away for a while, but my son especially always comes back, even more agitated than he was before.

One great way to break up the day is to plan a hang out with friends. My three best friends are my daughter’s friends’ moms, so that used to be really easy (though it’s gotten harder now that they are at different middle schools). My son has a few friends we can reach out too, but a lot of times they are busy doing family stuff. His best friend, who lives really close and was in our pandemic bubble, is available so infrequently that we almost never reach out to him.

{Most of his friends are the older child, so they are still doing a lot as a family with the younger sibling. They also weren’t as used to setting up hang outs with friends. When I first asked one set of parents if I could take their son to the zoo, they were very concerned about when they’d be able to reciprocate. It was hard for me to make them understand that letting me take their kid was actually doing me a huge favor!}

One issues we’ve been having, is making the friend hang out stuff “fair.” And I put “fair” in quotes because my son’s understanding of fair skews HEAVILY to his preferences. There have been times I have not set up an easy friend get together for my daughter because I couldn’t plan something comparable for my son. Or times I’ve done something extravagant with my son, to assuage him when I couldn’t put something together with his friends after his sister got to see hers.

My son has also been having some big feelings about his sister growing up and away from him, which is making this whole situation WAY more volatile than it used to be.

This has become a pretty consistent weekend wrinkle, one I’m not sure how to iron out. My in-laws sometimes take one kid at a time, and that helps, but it’s not a consistent possibility. I find that I’m less interested in having my daughter’s friends over, because they just want to sit on their phones the whole time and as a middle school teacher I just cannot abide that shit. I will be the mean mom who makes them put their phones away, but then they sit around not knowing what to do because they literally don’t remember how to hang out in person anymore. If I’m not trying to “make it fair” for my son, I’m less likely to reach out to his friends, even though doing so would probably make my life easier.

The best case scenario is meeting a friend at a play ground for a couple hours. Why is that so hard to manage most days!? Obviously the 12yos aren’t really interested, but my son and his friends would be. I’m always shocked how hard it is to find a friend who is available.

I did just send out invitations for my son’s birthday, and in the process got the contact info for some new families. Maybe some of them will available more often…

I haven’t read much about this on other blogs. The few parenting blogs I still read have younger kids, or older kids, or more kids, and I never read anything about coordinating “play dates” and managing sibling expectations around them. My friends have one child, or their kids are spaced farther apart (7-9 years) so they aren’t dealing with this as much either. I”m curious how other people manage this stuff. Do all kids balk at idea of leaving the house, even to do something fun? Do all siblings melt down if they perceive inequality in time spent with friends?

Maybe I just need to tell my son to suck it up, that life isn’t fair, and weather the melt downs as they come. That is probably the right answer, but it’s not a pleasant or easy answer.

I wanted to wrap this up more but it’s late and I need to head to bed so I’m going to set it to post. Please let me know if you have any insights or suggestions!