Pssst... pass it on...

My interaction with the middle school principal seems quite bad enough already, doesn’t it? And yet I left one detail out.

A little thing, one might think. Just a half-dozen syllables, tucked into the depths of an hour-long rampage. Blink – or wince – and you could miss it.

I didn’t blink.

It happened on the heels of a comment I made to to Principal Mannish (which is so, so close to her real name, which makes me unreasonably happy… kind of like the pitcher from the A’s, Outman: some names just determine your fate, no?). I didn’t have the opportunity to get many words in edgewise, and so I treasured the chance to point out that this whole thing could have been avoided had anyone from the school ever returned even one of the six calls I made, between May and August, trying to get a spare set of textbooks at home prior to the school year. I hadn’t even cluttered up her precious inbox time with all of those extra syllables; all I had said was, “I’m calling on behalf of my daughter, and I need to discuss her 504 plan before school starts.”

(Her response to that? “I never bother to return parent phone calls over the summer. These things always work themselves out without my help.” Oh, yes, clearly, this particular thing worked itself out just beautifully.)

Anyway, so, I explained, in short sentences containing small words, that, if someone had helped us when I had called, we wouldn’t be having this interaction now. And she replied, with apparently characteristic grace and empathy, “Listen. I already said, the fact that your actions made your daughter apologize on your behalf tells me all I need to know about you. And now you’re being overprotective and it’s time to back off. If she just tried harder, she could get herself more organized without your help.”

She went on from there, but I briefly burst into flame and missed a few of her finer points. Because, what was that? Say again? Rewind, just a little, please?

“If she just tried harder…”

Right, that’s the spot.

Ohhh, yes! She needs to try harder! Pardon me while I smack myself in the forehead: why didn’t we think of that ourselves? Try harder! Up to this point, we’ve been lazing around, waiting for the world to cater to our every wish, never much bothered to do anything to try and improve Emily’s life in any noticeable way.

Now, the light dawns: this has nothing to do with ADHD! That’s just a silly, made-up diagnosis, anyway; we’ll call it a disability because the federal government has this pesky ADA thing that forces us to pretend to respect people like doctors and therapists, but really, she knows better. Who better than a middle school principal to be able to tell just how fake and pathetic all of these labels are?

And besides, seriously, folks: the child is eleven. Let’s cut the cord, already! It’s past time for her to be living on her own, by now. I really should have her in her own apartment, let her start dealing with her own finances, that sort of thing.

Phew. I’m sure glad we got that little conundrum cleared up before we wasted too much time on it. Now I know: I just need to stop coddling my kid – I might drop the word “advocate,” but the principal obviously sees right through that ploy – and let her figure things out on her own, because she’s just not trying hard enough.

Seriously, some things are just far enough over the border into Crazyland that I have trouble even pronouncing the words, much less wrapping my brain all the way around them. I guess while we’re at it, I should probably just start flagellating myself right now for this idiotic little spondylitis thing I’m pretending to have, and maybe if I just stretch a little more I’ll feel better, right? God knows what she might say if she knew I had a sister just lazing around all day, pretending to have some thing called muscular dystrophy. I bet the principal could set us to rights about that without even breaking into a red-faced, fist-clenching, name-calling sweat.

(Pardon me while I sit still and pant for a few seconds, just let me catch my breath. Spontaneous combustion takes a lot out of a girl, particularly when it’s fueled by rampant idiocy from someone whose job title alone suggests that she might – what a crazy idea! – know better. I don’t need, or even expect, a lot of empathy out of the people I deal with, but for some reason I kind of both need and expect it from the woman I entrust to oversee my daughter’s education. I’m just unreasonable that way, I know.)

I don’t know if I have the energy to take this any farther. I don’t know if I have the stamina to fight this the way it really deserves to be fought. I’m not sure I can put on my Cloak of Outrage and descend upon her with all of the righteous outrage stirred up by her words and actions. I know that I can, and should, take this farther, and a part of me really, really wants to. But another part of me is already so tired, so overwhelmed, so diminished from that which I once was; nowhere near the level of kick-ass competency I used to display.

Stay tuned…

Pssst... pass it on...

It all started because Emily forgot her homework.

Not at home; she had left her math workbook at school, on one of the very first days homework had been assigned. We live precisely 1/2 mile from one corner of the school property: walking distance, according to the administration, though the idea of my baby girl toddling down the busiest street in Salem leaves something to be desired. She’s been handling it pretty well, but I still try to play chauffeur at least a few days a week, especially when the weather is bad.

On this particular Wednesday, the weather was fine, but there had been some confusion about whether and where to pick her up, and Willem had called the school, so I drove down to get her. She made it about halfway home – all of two minutes – before suddenly remembering, with that special blend of angst that only a pre-teen can garner, “Oh, no! I left my math workbook at school! I need it! If I don’t have it, I’ll… I’ll… I’ll get in trouble!” Poor little girl: schools have become so sanitized and politically correct these days that she doesn’t really know what it means to get in trouble, but apparently someone has put the fear of God into her about the middle school.

Or maybe it’s the fear of Principal.

So I heaved a sigh and turned around, and we returned to the school. Students aren’t allowed in the building after that final bell rings unless they’re involved in some club or sport, so I had to sign in and walk her up to her locker. So far, so good, right? I even knew my way around, a little, because just a few days before I had finally, after six full months of trying, gotten in touch with her school counselor. I had wanted to meet with her prior to the school year, to touch base about Emily’s adventures in ADHD and what we’ve found helpful, and not, over the years, plus I’ve found it helpful to talk to both Em and Jacob’s teachers about some of what they went through with my hospitalization and recovery last year, blah blah. I’d called in the spring a few times, then several times over the summer, leaving messages with both the counselor and the principal. I was hoping to, if not have a full conversation, at least get someone to collect a secondary set of textbooks to keep at home, which is part of her 504 plan (think IEP, only the child “only” has a diagnosed disability, without it having impacted their grades…yet…). Finally, the second Friday of the school year, I’d gotten an actual phone call from the actual counselor at her actual school, and we set up an actual meeting for the following Monday. Which I had attended, and we spent an hour and a half talking about all manner of things, and I thought it went quite well, and if I was a bit disappointed in the timeliness of the communication, I was at least relieved that it was happening.

Two days later, Emily and I were crouching next to her locker, which already looked as though federal agents have tossed it for evidence, and the math workbook is nowhere to be found. Her math teacher came over to see what we were doing – not by introducing himself or anything ridiculous like that, but by actually taking me by the arm to stand me up and asking, “What are you doing here?” I believe he thought I was a student, because as soon as I stood up, a few inches taller than him, and presented him with a less-than-youthful face, he became instantly apologetic and just a tad obsequious. I explained what we were looking for, he wished us good luck, and instantly disappeared.

After five or ten minutes, it became clear that we were not going to find the math workbook in the locker. It also became clear that we were going to be bringing home almost the entire contents of said locker, so as to smooth out papers, put them in binders and folders, and generally impose order upon them.

The next step was to try to get into the math classroom, to see if the workbook was there. We weren’t able to use the main classroom door, which had been locked by the now-deserted math teacher, but there was a connecting door to the next classroom over, which was still inhabited by its teacher. I knocked on her door and asked if she could let us look for Emily’s workbook – never saying that Mr. Math Teacher had OK’ed it (if he had, then we’d have just gone in with him, no?). She scampered over and opened the door, no questions asked, so we looked around: no workbook for Emily. There were a few other workbooks with students’ names inscribed on the inside cover, and a few blank workbooks all in Spanish, but neither of those felt quite appropriate for us, somehow. Then, in a corner, I found a blank workbook, no name inside, in English, just sitting on a table, not grouped with other papers or anything. I decided, enough: we would take this blank workbook home and copy the pages so that Emily could do the homework, and she could bring it back to school with her the next day and they could work on the Mystery of the Missing Math Workbook.

Which is what happened.

So, the next afternoon, when my phone rang, I hadn’t the slightest feeling of apprehension or concern when I was asked to make an appointment to meet with the school principal. I hoped the meeting was going to cover some of the administrative aspects of Emily’s 504 plan, though I wasn’t able to get any information out of the secretary administrative assistant woman on the phone. So I walked in without any paperwork, and it turns out I probably should have brought along a tape recorder, if not a lawyer.

Friday morning, I walked in to the main office, and was greeted by an enormous, mannish woman whom I’d noticed when I was waiting to meet with the counselor on Monday. She was loud and just slightly inappropriate with her words, and I remember thinking that she might be working there under some sort of grant from the Department of Mental Retardation – which I know occurs, because once upon a time I worked at DMR and had to bring clients to jobs at various places. Well, this may still be the case here, but in my experience, we never placed clients in administrative positions like school principal… which is, it turns out, who this woman was.

She escorted me into her office – an enormous, cluttered, loud sort of place – and said, “I don’t think we’ve met.” Which struck me as odd, because (a) it was only the third week of school and Emily doesn’t tend to rise to the level of troublemaker until mid-winter, at least, (b) I’d been calling for half a year now and had been trying to meet her, without success. She said, “You’re Emily’s mother?”

“Yes, I’m –”

“Sit down.”

I quite literally gaped at her, and stood motionless for a solid 30 seconds. I can’t remember the last time an adult had spoken to me so rudely, before I’d even gotten the chance to introduce myself. And I couldn’t sit, as commanded, because there wasn’t a single flat surface in the room uncovered by various papers and books. She realized that, stalked around the table – which is easily 20 feet long and four feet wide – scooped up the papers and glared at me as though I’d left them there myself.

She then launched into a tirade about how I had broken into Mr. Math Teacher’s classroom – how I had lied to the teacher next door and said we had permission to go in – how we had no right to ever have expected a spare workbook at home because it’s not a part of Emily’s 504 – how I “just ridiculously panicked” about a simple homework assignment – how I had stolen the workbook and then returned it without acknowledgment – how Emily had apologized to the teacher on my behalf and thus proven just how wrongly I had behaved – how my actions had put my child in a bad position and thus set a bad example for her.

And so on. After the first three or four minutes, I unfroze enough to take out a notebook and start jotting down what she was saying, which only served to infuriate her more; I’ve found that this exasperates and intimidates a lot of people, when they’re angry and want to go on a rant at or around me, and that’s never my intention. I just literally cannot retain more than about three bits of information, since the coma and all, and so as a compensation technique I take notes. This made her damn near apoplectic, and then when I managed to get a word in edgewise to explain and correct a few points of error – like, for instance, the fact that Emily’s existing 504 plan does, indeed, include an extra set of books at home, and that I had made several attempts at contacting various staff members at the school without luck, and that I had spoken with the counselor (who, by the way, was in the room for much of this, but was a completely different being from the intelligent, capable creature I’d met with on Monday; this woman was timid and apparently mute) only once, earlier that week – each time I had the gall to be right about something, she just got angrier and angrier, and finally she shouted, “Don’t you ever do that in my building again!” and stalked out.

I had managed to keep it together so far, but when she left, I turned to the counselor and asked, “Does this happen a lot?” She kind of shrugged and said, “Well, she seems to like to come across as hard-core at the start of the year, but she usually calms down after a while.” Usually?? And the enormity of it all finally hit me, and I burst into tears. Once I pulled myself back together, I asked for some tissues and some writing paper – since the notebook I carry is about 1″x3″, and I wanted to capture some of the words and chronology of it all immediately, because I knew how fast it would fade away. She provided me with both, and then announced that she had another meeting to be in, thus leaving me alone in the principal’s office.

Let me tell you: I made it to 34 years old before ever being yelled at by a school principal. Turns out? It’s less fun than you might imagine.

While I was writing, Ms. Mannish (which is close enough to her real name to be a little bit hilarious) stalked back in the room. She stood directly behind me and read over my shoulder for two or three minutes, and then ordered me to leave her office. I stood up, and was grateful for my height – I’m 5’8″ – because it allowed me to stand eye to eye with her, though she has at least 150 pounds on me. I stared her down and said, very quietly and politely, “This was not a meeting. It was an attack. You will not be allowed to be alone with me, or my child, again.” She started barking about how it was her school and she could see any student she wanted, at any time, to which I replied, “That may be so, and you’re welcome to meet with her… but not alone. She is small and easily intimidated, and you are large and have just spent 45 minutes bullying her mother. If you’re willing to treat me with this level of disrespect, I have no doubt that you would happily retaliate my perceived transgressions on her.” She started to yell at me again – and when I say yell, I do not exaggerate: her face was red, the veins in her neck stood out, and her words came out at full volume, loud enough to hush all the people in the outer office area – but I gathered up my purse and my notes and left.

I spent much of the rest of that Friday on the phone with various school administrators, higher up in the chain, until I found the correct Assistant Superintendent, who could listen to the whole story, apologize on her behalf, and promise to sort it all out. It turns out that Ms. Mannish should never have gotten involved in the first place: her job is to deal with whole-school and staff sorts of issues, and the assistant principals deal with individual students and parents. It turns out that I am well within my rights to insist that she not be alone with me or with my child at any point in time. It turns out he’s very, very sorry this ever happened, and he’ll talk to Ms. Mannish, and he’ll try to get it all straightened out… and that if there’s anything else he needs from me, or perhaps if it turns out that I’ve gotten some detail wrong and I actually owe an apology, myself, then he’ll be in touch.

So far, my phone has not rung. And very, very quietly, the following Tuesday, a spare math workbook found its way home with Emily.

Pssst... pass it on...

Three months ago, I had zero plans on returning to any sort of out-of-the-house job anytime soon. Granted, with both of my older kids, right around the 18-month mark, I started feeling ready to get out in the world and have multisyllabic conversations with people for whom there was not just a lack of expectation that I should cut up their food and deal with their bodily waste, but an outright problem would arise had I tried to do so. But, like everything else in my life, this time things are different. (Something about coma, long-term hospitalization, 16 surgeries, blah, blah… you know, just the typical excuses of any housewife in America.)

But then, sometime in June, Willem ever-so-casually dropped some paperwork on top of my stack o’ stuff in the living room, which just happened to be information about the two new majors being created within the next year or so at this school: Psychology and Criminal Justice… both of which I, coincidentally, have master’s degrees in.

So I hemmed and hawed, ruminated and angsted, and ended up emailing him my résumé to pass along (being too conflicted about the whole thing to even submit my stuff directly). Just to see what happened. Willem has been in charge of hiring adjunct instructors for the math department this summer, so I knew there was a process: receive a pile of resumes, cull out the ridiculous ones, conduct phone interviews, request a face-to-face from those who give good phone, go back home and compare the candidates, and then call with offers (and rejections). I figured it was safe enough to submit a résumé, because I still had several steps where I could decide it was all too much.

Then, during that phone interview, I was offered a position. She had met me once at a casual post-staff-meeting reception, I had relevant pre-2010 teaching experience, and (most importantly, I think) she was excited to receive something from Willem’s wife because “we all know and love him, he’s a fantastic teacher, I trust his judgment”, so… *poof*, magically, there was an offer. Not just for one class, but for any or all of the three open courses.

I never had an in-person interview, never even submitted a cover letter. And instead of having several chances to get overwhelmed and back out, the process was abbreviated down to: submit a résumé, answer the phone, get a job. Apparently I decided it was a good idea, or at least not a terrible one, because, well, here I be.

The problem is that, since the dramas of last March, I’ve had ongoing memory and speech problems, and I can’t predict when or how they’ll manifest. And the germ which nearly killed me was simple little Strep A – the sore-throat type – but they didn’t know that for several days, so I was flooded with broad-spectrum antibiotics until they isolated the culprit. So between the fact that I’m apparently violently susceptible to a wildly common germ and the fact that I was told that those meds basically wiped my immune system clean and I would remain immuno-compromised for at least a year or so, I’ve developed a low-grade sort of agoraphobia… I can leave the house, but it’s really hard. Every time.

But, with a few notable exceptions, each time I do leave the house for something bigger than dropping the kids off at day camp or going to the grocery store, it has ended up being a positive thing. The actual experience is so much easier, more fun, just better than all of my worries and fears.  I don’t need to go back to work, but I kind of need to go back, you know? Because in the recesses of my brain, I understand that I somehow do still have something to offer the world – maybe even more so now, having lived through stuff I had read about but never experienced, or never read about, or never even heard about – and that, the longer I stay hidden within the safety of home, the harder it will be to put on grown-up clothes and walk in to any sort of professional setting in which someone else expects me to be the expert.

So I’ll do it. Mostly for me: because I know, kind of, maybe, sort of, that I can not just handle this, but possibly even do it well… and I just need to prove that to myself.  I’ll also do it, in large measure, for Willem, because I was hired based on his reputation and I want to do something positive for him after a year and a half of really big negatives.

And a little because, over the past six months, I have taken two enormous hits to my sense of self-worth: the first, from a self-proclaimed “friend” who decided to cut off a decade-long relationship based on a split-second error in observation and further decided that I wasn’t even worth an in-person break-up, and the second from my mother when she informed me, in no uncertain terms, that I’m not recovering nearly as quickly or thoroughly as I should be and I’m making everyone around me miserable. I need to do something to convince myself – and, yeah, OK, them – that I’m not worthless and pathetic.

Not completely, anyway.

Pssst... pass it on...

I’ve had a whole lot of unexpected visitors, just lately. Please excuse the mess; if I had known you were coming, I’d at least have kicked some of the bigger piles of paperwork and knitting projects into the corner and spread out the baby’s toys a little more, so that I could look busy and a bit flustered as I scampered around to pick them up.

(Look at that: another one of those bizarre little quirks in the Mind of Kate. Somehow, if I knew you were coming to visit, then I don’t devote a moment’s concern to the typical clutter and mayhem of a houseful of people… but an unexpected caller somehow makes me feel as though I’m failing a test of some sort. I can hear the announcer, whispering just off-camera to a rapt audience: “Ohh, too bad… her living room floor is in such disarray that she is unable to even pretend she was in the middle of cleaning it. And just look at that pile of half-finished projects in the corner! And do I spy one or two not-yet-started ones, as well? I hope she’s able to pull off an adequately disconcerted-but-potentially-competent attitude now, or she’ll lose her standing as…” …well, you get the idea. I hope.)

You’ve come from two very different directions, and I can’t answer both doors at once. So, if those of you from the allnurses.com message board would please just let yourselves in, peek around a little if you’d like, and hang on for a day or so, I would be happy to entertain you with the style of appreciation and respect that you so deeply deserve.

For now, instead, I’d like to offer a big wave and a wry smile to the people who have landed here looking for that suddenly-viral letter from a mother-in-law-to-be. It’s such a cliche, isn’t it, that whole hateful-mother-in-law routine? I mean, there are books about it, blogs and message boards devoted to it, even an upcoming series on a popular cable network – guess how I know! (…no, no, I’m not appearing on it, but I was actually contacted by producers. Twice.) It’s the kind of thing that people laugh about, sometimes out of a sense of relief that their mother-in-law isn’t quite so intense, and sometimes out of a snicker-or-weep sense of affinity. It really is a sad club to be a member of, those of us who are failed daughters-in-law, and I would happily trade in my membership card.  I just can’t seem to find a doorman willing to help me check out.

In my case, there has been an alteration in the trajectory of my relationship with my mother-in-law.  Long before the wedding, my mother-in-law began a decreasingly subtle campaign on a passive-aggressive anti-Kate platform.  There are stories, so very many stories… many of them already detailed herein.  From the iconic – the plane tickets story, her choice of clothing at my wedding and her husband’s memorial, the Splattered Brains comment – to the mundane, I’ve told a lot of tales here already.

Now, she would tell you – and I know this, because she has told me repeatedly – that these stories of mine are blatant lies, fiction, and slander (though, to be accurate, I think she actually meant libel, seeing as how the blog qualifies as printed material instead of the more transitory, spoken offense of slander). This invites an immediate regression into a she-said/she-said sort of tantrum, too boring and predictable by far.

Let me put it this way: my mother-in-law insists that not one of the stories I have ever told here, or at least none of the negative ones, hold the slightest bit of truth. She says she is deeply hurt by my words, because she insists that I have been lying about her for years. There’s an interesting distinction happening there, to my mind: she’s not claiming to be so upset that I opted to tell some potentially private, family stories to a theoretically infinite, fascinated audience of strangers (of course she has raised that point a time or three, but more in reference to specific posts). Instead, her angst stems from her belief that I have this tremendous ability to lie, consistently, for years, with callous disregard for anyone else’s feelings.

I can’t be certain, of course, but I tend to think that she probably didn’t intend for her finger-pointing to provide a certain amount of pride inside me. But, seriously, this suggestion that I made every single one of these stories up, just made out of whole cloth, without a glimmer of truth underneath: what a tremendous compliment. I do perceive of myself as a fairly creative person, but she has given me credit for a level of imagination far beyond anything I ever considered myself capable of. I simply love the lengths of passive-aggression inherent in the plane tickets story or her choice to wear black to my wedding, because that style of indirect hostility and wordless communication is not something I was familiar with, through my childhood and teenage years.

In short, just because I can recount an event with a certain amount of flair and interesting turns of phrase, just because I can knit a sock or a stuffed animal without a pattern, just because I have three separate closets full of crafting supplies in my home (all of which I use, I might add)… that doesn’t mean I also have the ability to invent entire scenarios and long-term relationships.

On the flip side, let me be clear about something: I truly do wish that my words here actually were lies. I wish these things hadn’t happened, because that would mean that I could have some level of relationship with my mother-in-law. Not so much for my own sake – the silent treatment we’ve been receiving for the past two years is probably less harsh of a punishment than she had hoped – but for the sake of my husband, my children, and even herself. Willem and the kids are so consistently beautiful and brilliant and amazing, and I simply cannot fathom her choice to cut off her son to spite her daughter-in-law. She’s missing out on so many potential good times and heart-warmingly sappy sorts of experiences, and the best I can do is hope that she has found satisfaction in her chosen separatist lifestyle.  I’m a psychologist by training and a humanist by nature; my communication skills are among my most treasured internal possessions… the fact that I put more than a decade of work into just trying to establish a simple, mutually respectful relationship, and failed utterly, is among my deepest regrets.  My choice to “go public” with my own angst and stress is a method for me to vent, and to desperately send a signal or two out into the world, to try and feel a little less alone and solely responsible for this failure; the number of other people who have experienced similar – and, sometimes, so very much worse – relationships with their own family members often depresses me far more than it comforts me.

Anyway, without any real involvement from her since the summer of 2009 (there were a few telephone calls while I was in the hospital, which form the basis for another sad/weird/crazy story, for another day), I can’t share any new stories just now. But if your search for a mother-in-law rant landed you here today, I hope you found an anecdote or two worth clicking on.

Pssst... pass it on...

Yet another thing to file under This Doesn’t Happen to Normal People…

As background, Isaac is a night owl.  He stays awake until 10:00 or 11:00 most nights, and really is pretty happy most of that time.  I keep an eye on him, and when he starts whining a little, he gets his first bottle of the evening – just milk, now, and only at bedtime, but he doesn’t seem quite ready to wean just yet – then, an hour or so later, when he starts falling down more than usual, he gets Bottle #2, with bedtime immediately after that.  He typically sleeps for 12 hours at a stretch, so it all works out quite nicely for me, since I don’t mind staying up late and I can sleep in until 9:00 and still get up and start my day before he’s awake.

Every once in a while, though, he – being a toddler – throws us a curveball.  This time, it came in the form of, “No nigh-nigh,” with precisely the intensity and emphasis one would expect from an almost 15-month-old.  The second bottle had been successfully deployed, but the child Would Not Sleep.  Which would not have been all that big a deal, except he was obviously exhausted and cranky with it.  I had a houseful of two other children and a husband who were sound asleep and needed to be awake at 6:00 in the morning, so I couldn’t just let Isaac wander around, whining at high volume and falling down repeatedly, until he finally agreed with me that it was, indeed, time to crash.

So I unleashed the rarely-used Bottle #3 upon him, despite the fact that I knew his belly was full and this wasn’t the answer… I just couldn’t come up with any better answers.  We sat in my chair, he wouldn’t drink.  We stood and paced, he wouldn’t drink.  We opened the front door so he could look outside, he wouldn’t drink… but at least, then, he also stopped whining.  So, great, put down the bottle, and watch outside.

Up to this point, it’s just another mind-numbingly boring chapter in the life of a stay-home mother with word retrieval and memory issues – that is to say, I don’t do a whole lot worth blogging about, anyway, and when I do I have a really hard time finding the right words.  But along came a little dog, as though sent from a higher power just to remind me to occasionally question my own sanity…

As Isaac and I were standing there, inside the screen door, watching the night and appreciating the quietness of our neighborhood, this little dog goes trotting through my front yard.  It’s small enough that at first I thought it was a cat, but then I realized the gait was too bumpy to be feline, plus it had a very wide, doglike collar on its neck.  It was dark in color, gray or black, and was trotting along at that pace that seems to communicate, “Ha, ha,  I escaped!  Time to explore absolutely everything!”  It spent a few moments in our yard, and then started wandering back and forth across the street without the slightest pause for traffic – and our neighborhood is quiet, but it’s only a block away from one of the busiest streets in Salem, so there was a steady flow of cars, even at almost-midnight.

Our new-and-improved Laura was still awake and upstairs (did I mention that she has moved in here?), so I handed the baby over to her and started walking down the street after this dog.  I wasn’t entirely sure what I would do if and when I caught up with it – check the collar for a phone number, first, or maybe call Animal Control?  I hadn’t gotten that far.  It was an early spring night in New England, so I was dressed in pajama pants, a tank top and a short bathrobe, no shoes.  It was maybe 55 or 60 degrees – on the cool side, but not uncomfortably so, even for those of us with Reynaud’s disorder (and thus a heightened sensitivity to cold).

It didn’t take very long for me to decide I wasn’t going to be catching up with this creature anytime soon.  It was maintaining a consistent 3-4 house lead on me, and continued its random street-crossing, to the point where I could only see it when a car drove past and the headlights illuminated this dog.  By the third car – five minutes, tops? – I was able to watch it disappear into a little patch of trees on the other side of the road, and I decided I had done my duty as a citizen for the evening.  I had tried to solve the mystery of the dog, failed, and was now ready to go back home and solve the mystery of the awake baby.

Now, that third car?  The one whose headlights finally proved to me that I was on a wasted mission and should just turn around and go home?  It also turned around, right about at my driveway.  And it was then that I discovered, it wasn’t just any car: it was a police car.  It pulled up next to me, and I could hear a male voice, so I started to reply – but quickly realized that he was talking on his radio, window closed.  So I just waited.

Thirty seconds or so go by, and he gets out of his car.  He immediately starts talking to me in that slightly-too-slow, slightly-too-loud tone reserved for people that are mentally unstable or otherwise unpredictable.  “What are you doing out here this evening?”

“Oh, I saw a dog out in the neighborhood and wanted to see if I could catch up to it, to call its owners…”

“Did you know you’re not wearing shoes?”  He pointed at my feet, in case I wasn’t entirely certain where shoes should go in the first place.

“Yes, I know.  It’s May, so I thought I’d be OK for a short walk.”

“Yes, but… you’re not wearing shoes.  Are you OK?”

“I’m fine.  You’re wearing short sleeves, are you warm enough?”

“Yes, OK.  Hang on a second.”  He reaches into his car and grabs his phone, radio, whatever, and starts talking into it.  I only catch about every third word, but it was to the tune of, “Cancel that call, not a hospital patient, woman claims that she saw a dog loose in the area.”

Wait, what?  Not a hospital patient?  Well… OK, fair enough, I am barefoot, and my pajama pants are, in fact, hospital-issued from last year, and we are only about 1/2 a mile from the nearest hospital, which does happen to contain a psych ward… hah.  Time to act just as Sane as Sane Can Be, lest I have to wake Willem to explain why I’m being transported to the ER for an evaluation.

The cop puts his radio thing away and suddenly seems to focus on me for the first time, as though up to now I was a potential threat and now I was just a mere blip on his evening.  “You said you saw a dog?  Where?”  I pointed to the area where I had seen it last.  “OK.  I’m going to go see if I can find it, and then I’ll check in with you before I leave.  Where do you live?”  I pointed again.  He drove the half-block or so to look for the dog, and I walked back to the house, now featuring Laura and Isaac on the front steps.  I explained to her what was going on, and we both laughed a little – but not too much, because that would look, you know, crazy.

A few minutes later, the cop drove back, parked in front of the house, and got out to talk to me.  He hadn’t been able to find the dog – something about the dog not much wanting to be found, I suspect, but what do I know?  So now he just had to take down my name and address, because he had made an initial call in to the station about this “potential hospital patient,” so he was going to have to write a never-mind thing that included a bit about I-talked-to-her-and-she-said-she’s-fine.  I agreed, yep, I’m just as sane as… well.  I’m fine, anyway.

We waited until he drove off, and we were safely back in the house, before we allowed ourselves to fully appreciate the humor of the situation.  Late-night dogs, police cars, escaped hospital patients… this just doesn’t happen to other people, because other people are smart enough to stay home and mind their own business.

Pssst... pass it on...

…which you can tell because I’m here, around, somewhere, almost all the time… and yet, you never see me.  Magical, isn’t it?

Yeah, no, I know, I say “magical,” you say “lazy.”  A little of both, maybe?

Because, yes, absolutely, I’m here and I’m fine and there’s not a reason in the world for my blog to sit here all silent and fallow.  Every day I remind myself to post, and every evening it’s suddenly bedtime and, right, yeah, about that…

It’s not like I’m crazy-busy, either.  I mean, Isaac is fully mobile now – he can scoot along at about 800 mph on all fours, and is up to 10-12 steps at a time, when he wants to – which means that his awake-times render me busier than before.  Plus he’s in that fabulous combination of separation anxiety and Mama-preference that always takes my sanity and stretches it ever so thin; you know, the thing that toddlers do that makes their mothers insane until they stop doing it, at which moment the mother instantly misses it terribly?  (OK, it’s one of the things on that list, anyway.)  So I’m busier than before.

And I’m increasingly involved with the bigger kids’ stuff, too.  Not just the obvious: between softball and baseball we’ve had multiple hours of practices four nights a week, and then there was their April vacation week, and the ongoing loads of homework that flows in and out of their ears nightly.  But also the subtle: the healthier I get, the stronger, the more able I am to get more involved, more engaged, in their lives.  I know who Emily’s crush is – by name, even, though that took quite a bit of effort on my part and she’s still kind of unhappy with me for having ears – and I know that Jacob is capable of doing college-level algebra (no, seriously: my husband teaches said course, six-year-old Jacob can do many of those skills in his head).  I’ve been working with each kid on those sort of subtle, nagging, psychosocial things that psychologists insist we cannot treat our own families for and them promptly begin treating our own families for: Emily’s seriously atrophied empathy muscles, Jacob’s quiet but pervasive need for extra affection, even Isaac’s burgeoning efforts at communication.  I just lost a year – we all did – to my physical recovery, and I still can’t guess how long my emotional recovery process will be, and so I struggle mightily, with varying degrees of success, against the crushing sense of guilt and loss I have over that missing time.  (You think you have Mommy-guilt?  Try spending over a month in the hospital and then the following mumblemumblemumble months barely able to see around your own scars, all while seeing your children’s needs and hoping that they’re getting met… somehow.)

So, busier still.  And there’s Willem, who continues to be my knight in shining… whatever they make no-iron shirts out of.  He gets up and goes to work, five days a week, and stays gone twelve hours a day.  He comes home tired, but still carrying the take-home work that any given teacher always has, and manages not to throw textbooks at me on the evenings when I’m just too tired or apathetic or sad or whatever to manage to get dinner on the table.  That’s an improvement over the fall semester, I suppose, because even if I haven’t made dinner I’m still able to stay awake at least as late as Isaac (not as simple as it sounds, since his preferred bedtime is after 10:00p), so I’m no longer disappearing into the bedroom as soon as Willem walks in the door.  But there’s still an incredible amount of room for improvement, and some days I’m even able to surmount the guilt about that to do a little something about it.

Yeah: busier still.

Was it Ben Franklin who said, “If you want something done, ask a busy man”? I’ve always believed wholeheartedly in that quote,  if for no other reason than the simple awareness of how much easier it was for me to add a task onto my list if I was already doing 54 things that day.  But now, when my list is often two or three items long, the slightest addition can be horrendous and hard and overwhelming – even if it’s nothing more than a quick phone call.  I want to do more, and I know very well exactly what needs to be done – my memory issues since the coma have led me to become a list-writer, and I have literally filled up notebooks with lists.  Multiple notebooks, multiple lists.  I know what has to be done… I just can’t quite do it yet.

Is it time?  Is it time for me to kick myself in the ass and say, Enough! You got a year, now you’ve been home long enough to be facing things for the second time – suck it up and get stuff done! or do I get a little longer, a little more grieving time – now compounded by the grief at the things I was not able to handle last year even after coming home from the hospital, things like fundraisers and volunteering at the kids’ school or, barring that, reading to them a few times a week? And if I get more time, how much more?

There’s no answer, I know.  No handy calendar I can flip open to say, “OK, I see.  By May 2011 I should be at… 78% capacity, as compared to pre-coma, with an ultimate expectancy of 93% of original capacity.”  And I can’t find a single person in the world who can look at me and say, without sarcasm or irony, “No, seriously, get up off your ass and deal with life again.  You’ve had your healing time, now move on.”  Instead, the people around me are sweet and kind and encouraging and insisting that I’m doing so much better than I can even see.

So I’m trying, and I’m being my own biggest critic, both because that’s how I roll and because I keep hoping that maybe I’ll be able to kick-start myself into some action, if I can only find the right words.  Little things – and oh, I can’t even begin to list them, but just details and details and details of a fuller, better life – keep falling by the wayside, things I wasn’t even aware of during March and April and even May of last year, and things I could guiltlessly ignore in favor of my medical stuff from June or so on through the fall, and things I could shamelessly abuse myself over during the darker, emotionally harder fall and winter.  I’m far less self-critical now than I was in, oh, say, November and December, so there is an improvement there.

And for today,  I posted something on the blog.  Nothing much, really: certainly nothing especially interesting or funny or really worth 1200 words.  But it’s a detail.

I’ll give what I can take, you know?

Pssst... pass it on...

Once again, here comes Kate with an opportunity for you – not just the general-web-community-you, but specifically you, the person inhabiting your brain at the moment – to get involved with a medical crisis. Just another little free service I offer, though, ohh, how I wish I could spend a month or three not thinking about health, illness, recovery, vibes, miracles and the like.

Today’s horrible situation comes courtesy of Carolyn, one of my very dearest friends ever and someone who has been wading through far more than a lifetime’s share of stress in just the past few years. If it hasn’t been enough to watch her loved ones struggle with health issues – and sometimes lose – she has been handed an unfairly high pile of her own concerns to cope with. And yet she keeps plugging away, tackling each day long after the rest of us would have thrown up our hands and started searching for the nearest big rock to hide under.

Then came today’s Facebook status, just one more shock to an already beleaguered system:

My 11 year old nephew Carlos is suffering chronic kidney failure and is in the hospital. He will need dialysis immediately and a kidney transplant as soon as possible. His blood type is B+. Anyone with type B or O blood who would consider getting on the list of potential donors, contact me asap. Please keep Carlos in your prayers. And thank you.

We’ve had a tiny bit of experience, around these parts, worrying and hoping for kidney patients. Remember Derek, the honoree at our Pepperoni Pizza and Chocolate Milk parties? He’s doing beautifully, in no small part because of the well-wishes and random kindness of strangers out there (though in even larger part because he was blessed with a mother willing and able to move mountains as needed, not to mention a father willing to part with a kidney). I’m forced to admit that I forgot to even think about having a pizza party last September… 2010 was not a banner year for me in many ways, especially if those ways required me to remember that life was going on outside the four walls of my own home. We’ll schedule a make-up pizza date very soon… and I’m also a tiny bit thrilled at the knowledge that Derek’s health has become so much sturdier, to the point that I could take it – at least a little bit – for granted.

Now, unfortunately, it’s Carlos’ turn. And you have the chance to step in much earlier in the process.

It’s up to you, of course, just how involved you get. You can send some positive vibes out into the universe, and stop there, and even that would be a lovely and appreciated thing. For all I used to hope for people and think about their circumstances and wish there was something, anything, I could do, I never realized just how much it matters, just knowing that people are bothering to think and wish and hope.

You can also check your own blood type, and give a moment’s thought to donating. No more than that, based solely on a blog post, please: just give it a little thought, and if you’re a match, maybe drop me a line so that I can get you in touch with Carlos’ mom. (They live just outside of New York City, in case geography might play a role in your decision.) This boy is a fireball, a bundle of intensity and energy, and it is nothing sort of a crime against nature that he is in a hospital bed right now. At eleven years old, he’s having thoughts that most of us get through our entire adult lives without thinking… so while I would be appalled if you were to up and decide to donate a kidney based on some random words on a weblog, I would also consider it a little more natural for you to consider donating than if I was writing about, say, my grandmother. (Who is a beautiful, wonderful human being… but she’s no longer a child.)

You can decide that, due to your blood type or to some other factor, kidney donation – either this one time, now, or in general – is not for you. That’s a perfectly valid, normal, acceptable conclusion to reach, and I appreciate your willingness to think about it anyway.

You can pass the message along, because if I don’t know someone who can donate, maybe you do. And if you are able to pass the word, either through a status message or a blog post, please let me know. Once upon a time, I might have been a wee bit prone to taking for granted the act of reposting, passing the word, spreading information… but now, when some days words are simply beyond me, I recognize just how precious they are.

And no matter which, if any, of the above actions you choose, I hope you’ll consider one more: this coming September, just after the kids have gone back to school and life starts to fall into a routine again, we need to start an annual pizza party again. For Derek, for Carlos, and for all of the others for whom a little extra protein has suddenly become a very big deal. Don’t worry: you don’t need to remember, all by yourself. I’ll remind you.

Pssst... pass it on...

Words use to come easily, and precisely, to me. I was able to say exactly what I meant, with a minimum of effort and time-filling umm’s and ya know’s, because my mental dictionary and thesaurus were readily available and easily searched on a moment’s notice. Then the events of last March rolled in, and I lost a lot of that quickness and acuity. But, even now, with more effort and longer pauses than before, I’m able to say what I intend to say, when I intend to say it.

This is a gift, of course: something I never did anything to deserve and something for which I was consistently grateful. It meant that I can’t remember one single instance of actually having homework to do at home, for the first eleven years of my educational life: every out-of-class assignment I was ever given could be done in class, or in between classes, or on the school bus, with the very rare spillover to be completed during the 20-minute pre-homeroom “open study time” or whatever it was my high school called it. (College was quite the culture shock: you mean, professors actually use their entire class times, or close enough thereto, for relevant instruction, and therefore I need to devote some of my own, after-school time to… work?? Oh, the horror!) It meant I could bluff my way through almost any verbal situation and sound reasonably intelligent. It meant I won an awful lot of arguments (and my ability to recall, verbatim, long stretches of conversation, didn’t hurt that tendency, too). It meant I could start this little thing called a blog and somehow manage to make sense to people.

And it means that, even though I have lost a considerable percentage of my former verbal abilities, I can still express myself relatively accurately. Nowhere near as quickly or as smoothly as before, and now my speech – and writing, though that’s less obvious unless you’re in the room while I’m typing – is more halting and uncertain. Helpfully, my children have learned to serve as my own little thesauri, and they have a particularly good antenna for just how long to wait before offering whatever word I’m looking for. Speak up too soon and you end up frustrating Mom because she was just about to say it herself; speak up too late and Mom becomes frustrated at her own wordlessness – so it’s a dangerous game to play, but they have become experts.

Bigger-picture, what this really means is, I haven’t made a whole lot of faux pas (faux pases? fauxes pas?) in my life. My brain and my mouth are usually in synch, at least enough to avoid overt embarrassment or social awkwardness. There are exceptions, of course: the Freudian slips, the thoughtless remarks, the sarcasm-gone-awry. But there aren’t a lot of occasions in which I’ve been able to see the words fly out of my mouth, thwack the listener up-side the head, and then fall in a graceless heap on the floor in between us.

Not a lot… but not none.

My personal unfavorite, and one that still makes me cringe now, 13 years later, happened at the funeral of my father’s aunt. She had lived a hard life, characterized by a lot of alcohol and drug issues, several divorces, contentious family relationships, and so on, and she finally reached a point of suicide. I was 19 at the time and had only met her a handful of times, all of which involved celebrations of some sort, and I wasn’t yet considered sufficiently adult by the rest of the family to be included in the whispers and the gossip, so while her death was a shock, it wasn’t a personal tragedy for me. I cleaned up my black dress, coached my boyfriend du jour in some of the do’s and don’ts of that particular family, and attended the funeral.

It was a strange, strange event, to put it lightly. For one thing, she had used a shotgun – not the method used by most females – and yet her daughters insisted on an open casket. Well, a fully opened casket would have been just awful, so after a screaming fight with the funeral director, they compromised on a 6″ gap between the lid and the casket during the service… with one hand curled over the side. For another, Aunt K had been MIA from all family events for at least the previous five years, so her death actually brought a certain degree of closure to several loved ones that had been wondering whether she had died long ago. And for a third, that family is just not one that has ever coped smoothly with grief or trauma; better to smile and pretend like everything’s fine than to admit that there’s something horrible going on.

So, an odd day. The oddness continued after the funeral itself, with an afterparty at the home of another aunt. There was food and light conversation, and not a single mention of Aunt K all day, as far as I could tell.

Now, at the time, I was employed as a photographer for the News Services office of my college, and so I had reflexively grabbed the camera on the way out the door. I hadn’t seen many of these people in years, and wasn’t sure when and if I might see them again, so I decided to bring the camera along and use it only if it seemed appropriate. Well, once the aunt who was hosting the event saw this high-quality camera, she announced that she wanted semi-formal, posed family portraits of everyone who had attended. She set up a bench in the backyard, started rounding up small groups of relatives, and then asked me if I minded taking these photos. Erm… sure, why not?

I spent the next hour or so taking pictures, which were just another layer of ghastly upon this bizarre day: dozens of people with bright, shiny smiles, all wearing black. It was just disconcerting, all around.

So I suppose it’s not entirely my fault that my brain shut off, after a while. I was wandering through the house, gathering up whichever people remained as yet unphotographed, and I realized I should probably include my own parents and sisters in the process, too. I found them standing around in the kitchen, thankfully without a huge audience… because I went into Casual Mode and sauntered up to announce, “OK, you’re the last ones to go. Let’s go out and get shot.”

To this day, I couldn’t tell you if anyone else in the room even noticed it. No one corrected me or even looked askance. But, oh, my heart just fell directly out of my body and my throat closed up tight. “Get shot,” really?? That’s the very best phrase I could possibly have used?

It was a learning experience, to say the least. On many, many levels.

---

Oh, look, it’s Wednesday! That means it’s time to join the Madhouse… or, at least, to go read and see who else posted this week:

Allison – Allimonster Speaks
Barb – Spencer Hill Spinning & Dyeing
Batty – Batty’s Adventures in Spooky Knitting
Dave – Notes from the Field
Eileen – Art Deco Diva Knits
Evil Twin’s Wife – The Glamorous Life of a Hausfrau
G – Not-A-Box
Haley – Aimless Tangents
Jennifer – Ask Poops, Please
Kate – One More Thing
LC – LC in Sunny So Cal
LeeAnne – This is the life…
Lisa – As If You Care
Louise – Child of Grace
Marcy – Mittentime
Melanie – usually, things happen
Nikki – Land of the Free, Home of the Depressed
Peri – knitandnatter
Sara – yoyu mama
Yorkie – Den of Iniquity Prime

Pssst... pass it on...

I have always been a crafty sort of person.  Not in the sneaky-and-sly sort of way (that was only in my teens; since then I’ve found that it’s a lot more fun to be bluntly forthcoming, like it or not), but in the Martha-Stewart-DIY style. There were 22 people on my Christmas list, and somehow as a 10ish-year-old I convinced myself that I needed to give something to each person giving something to me… but since my cash-earning prospects were limited, I was forced into a make-it-yourself sort of mentality if I wanted to give anything better than Tic Tacs to my loved ones.

So, early on, it was hand-drawn cards and then simple cross-stitch projects… then one grandmother taught me how to embroider, and another how to paint ceramics. I learned to crochet – and eventually knit – from yet another grandmother, and to do beadwork and macrame from another (and this wasn’t even a family with divorce and remarriage; I just was the eldest child from two eldest children, and so on, allowing me to have nine grandparents, four regular-old-grandparents and five greats, all of whom were still alive until I was in college). I was a camp counselor for several years, and so I learned how to tie-dye like a hippie guru and make water candles that were works of art. By the time I was in college, handmade crafts were no longer the only choice my beleaguered budget could handle, but people always seemed so impressed by the uniqueness or care represented by any given project… maybe they were just being nice, but I tend to think I can create some pretty neat stuff.

This never seemed like all that much of a big deal for me, being good at arts and crafts. It was just a case of having halfway-decent manual dexterity and being able to follow directions… when people would tell me that they could never do something like that, I would always smile and think, “Really? Why not? It’s not hard.” (I feel the same way about cooking, by the way: able to do it, and vaguely baffled when people tell me they aren’t.) It was easy to belittle my own abilities along those lines, because I was so good at so many other things, too: I felt competent at my job, I felt secure in my role as a mother and wife, I was good at mental arithmetic and crossword puzzles. I tried to be grateful for just how many gifts life had given me, but the reality is, no one is ever really, fully aware of just how good they have it…

…until they don’t have it anymore.

Contrary to the way I might sound, when I talk about the events of last March, I didn’t actually lose the majority of my skills and confidence in one fell swoop. I had been losing things in little increments, like the blood loss of a papercut or the bruise of a mosquito bite, over the course of several years. I consider the beginning of a long, downward slide to have started with the choice to walk away from my doctorate, a mere internship-and-dissertation away from completion, because I felt like I had to make a choice between my job and my family life. This set me up for a long line of disappointments and heartache, in the name of lost professional and academic opportunities, that continues to this day. Added to that has been the spondylitis diagnosis, which has forced me to close a number of future doors, doors I hadn’t even tried to open yet and now I know I never will. (Which is not to imply that my future is entirely bleak and empty; I still have lots of doors left that I can try – just, different ones.

And so on. The sepsis/necrotizing fasciitis/coma/surgeries/near-death events of last year only provided an exclamation point at the end of a story that had already been started, leaving me with memory issues and processing problems akin to trading in my snazzy, wide-screened laptop for an old IBM 386 processor. With a monochrome screen.

Suddenly I had to reevaluate all manner of things I thought I knew about myself. Phone numbers became tremendous, endless strings of digits that my brain simply could not retain, and crossword clues were baffling and frustrating. My résumé became a sad joke, a record of who I used to be rather than a sales pitch for who I might become. My self-confidence regarding my roles as wife, mother, sister, daughter, friend, human… just eroded, and sometimes I was terrified that I wouldn’t be able to rebuild any of it.

Always before, when I felt particularly stressed or just bored, I would reach for a craft project. Knitting has been my go-to obsession for the past few years, but really any make-it-yourself effort made-me-happy. So, when I was at my very most stressed and bored, sitting in a hospital bed for weeks on end last March, I immediately thought of yarn. I asked my stepmother to bring me some yarn and needles – thick yarn and fat needles, because I was still dealing with the very pronounced tremor that was my cerebellum’s way of expressing its displeasure at the inactivity of a coma – and of course she did so immediately. She found some beautiful yarn, in the cool colors I loved most, and some big wooden knitting needles, in a handy little purple bag.

That bag followed me from hospital to hospital, hanging on the end of my bed, as a sort of reminder that I could be doing something other than just sitting and worrying. I tried, a few times, to cast on for a new – very very simple – project, but I just couldn’t do it. I have always had this sense that whatever mood or vibes I’m sending out while knitting get wrapped up into the product, and I didn’t want that miserable, terrified angst to be a part of any sort of handknit project. So it sat, and I sat, and I just couldn’t knit.

I blamed the tremor. I blamed the inability to find a comfortable sitting position. I blamed my short attention span. I blamed my fractured memory.

I blamed anything but the fear: the terror that this might be yet another thing lost to the incredible damage wrought upon my body and mind. Another thing I simply could not do anymore, because I couldn’t remember how or had lost the necessary manual dexterity. Another failure.

But after a few weeks at home again, my fingers got itchy. I wanted, desperately, to have some semblance of productivity, something to make my endless hours on the couch, hooked up to a VAC and unable to move very much, seem a little more worthwhile and a little less pointless and bleak. I wanted to find some part of me that existed from the pre-illness time, some part of me that felt familiar and unbroken.

So I picked up those needles, and cast on for a smaller version of a Clapotis, a lovely and simple wrap that I’ve made several times before. I almost immediately ripped out, unhappy with the early results… but then I cast on again, and then once again, until I finally found my groove. (That first project, of course, went to my stepmother as a thank-you for not letting me completely lose faith in myself… and I bet she just thought she was bringing an invalid a nice present.)

All of which is a very roundabout and extended way of wrapping (hah! wrap! …yeah, knitting humor is lost on the general populace, I know) around to my current challenge: in speaking with both of my kids’ teachers, I volunteered, or was asked, or something in the middle, to lead the class in a craft project. At first I thought, of course, I’ll teach them how to make rope on a spool knitter/i-cord-maker/knitting mushroom/French knitter (they’re known by all of the above names, but how could I possibly choose to link to any but the dirtiest-sounding one?). But upon further thought, I was concerned that the first-graders in Jacob’s class wouldn’t all have sufficient manual dexterity, and that even the kids in Emily’s fifth grade classroom might not have sufficient capacity for delayed gratification for what is basically just a way of making a piece of string fatter.

And so I decided on a recycling/basketweaving project that I saw on the shelf of a box store last year sometime: you take old newspapers and cut/roll the pages into long round lengths, some of which I would provide and some of which I would have the kids make themselves. I would bring in pre-made bases with lengths of dowel sticking up – a round or square base, maybe 4″ across, with thinner-than-pencil sticks standing around the perimeter, 4-6″ tall or so – and teach them how to wrap the magazine-rope around and around, weaving-style, to create little catchalls for their desks or lockers.

A cute idea, no? And one for which I already have most of the materials on-hand, not to mention the know-how, so it won’t break the bank (or my mind) to go hang out at the kids’ school for a few hours.

So here’s the remaining challenge: being a school-type thing, we all know it would be a better project all-around if I could find a book, or two, to tie in as related reading. But what to suggest? Emily’s class is studying pre-Revolutionary America, so basketweaving fits in relatively neatly there, but do I offer a more modern sort of approach to encourage them not to think of crafts as something old-fashioned? Something all pro-recycling and Save the Earth, perhaps? And what would work for a first-grade classroom?

Help me out here, people, really. Both kids have said that they’re excited at the idea of Mom coming in to school for a day… which makes it all the more important to look halfway put-together and organized. Whip out your google-fu, or just your knowledge of children’s books, and help me find some good books to recommend, or read, or something, to the kids’ classrooms.

Thanks in advance… I know you can do this.

---

This was the title of a Madhouse entry a few weeks ago, which I dutifully started that very day and then took ages and ages to finish… but the topic was timely and there were some really interesting other posts that day… I’m far too lazy to go through and link to each individual post, but go ahead and risk it, read backward to March 16th. They’re worth it.

Allison – Allimonster Speaks
Barb – Spencer Hill Spinning & Dyeing
Batty – Batty’s Adventures in Spooky Knitting
Dave – Notes from the Field
Eileen – Art Deco Diva Knits
Evil Twin’s Wife – The Glamorous Life of a Hausfrau
G – Not-A-Box
Haley – Aimless Tangents
Jennifer – Ask Poops, Please
Kate – One More Thing
LC – LC in Sunny So Cal
LeeAnne – This is the life…
Lisa – As If You Care
Louise – Child of Grace
Marcy – Mittentime
Melanie – usually, things happen
Nikki – Land of the Free, Home of the Depressed
Peri – knitandnatter
Sara – yoyu mama Have you seen her news? Go click on her and hit her with a congratulations or three, would you? Big things a-brewin’ in Sara’s house…
Yorkie – Den of Iniquity Prime

Pssst... pass it on...

I spent the evening with one of my very favorite people in the whole world tonight. We hadn’t been able to get together much, just recently, as school and work have swamped her and I’ve alternated between hibernation/depression and the stress/busy-ness of moving… to the point that I started to wonder, had she discovered some unforgivable flaw in me, too?

I just lost what I thought was an incredibly close friend due to an error in judgment and incorrect assumptions from skewed observations, and it damn near took me out at the knees. Was I just fundamentally unlikeable now, permanently flawed or damaged to such a degree that people just want to be away from me now? Are my loved ones all watching me carefully for a slip-up or suspicious act just to give themselves any old excuse to escape from my presence?

Yeah… not so much. Turns out, sometimes one person is wrong and lots of other people are busy at a bad time, leading to a long, lonely time without much help or support… but they’re all still there, feeling guilty about not being able to be more involved in my life and wondering if maybe I’m getting mad at them for their absence, and generally swimming through the chaos and self-doubt that life throws at all of us sometimes. The reality is, we’re all far harder on ourselves than we should be, and if we don’t reach out and make firm, unbreakable plans to get together, as soon as possible, then we’re just too likely to start believing in our worst fears.

Tonight, though, I was able to escape from under those fears for a while, and reconfirm that I’m not entirely broken and unlikeable. I was assured that some friendships are stronger than a mistake, too deep to simply switch off, more important than a moment of doubt. I was able to smile, and see my friend smile back, and feel something inside my soul just stretch and relax. It was a big, desperately needed sense of relief, and at the same time a reality check: we’re all just wandering alone on the planet, alternating screw-ups with successes, mistakes with progress, self-doubt with confidence. I’m not alone in my aloneness, as existential as that may sound.

And however you want to look at it, the important thing is that I feel better in my friend’s presence, in the moment and for hours after we stop sharing the same room. And I am so very grateful to know that I have people that beautiful, that strong, in my life.