Background Noise

pause, rewind

Now that things seem to be leveling off, I have to figure out where to go from here.  The situation I am in right now as a stay at home mom wasn’t exactly what I’d planned.  About a month before I lost my shit, I’d started a really great job, something that I’ve been working toward for the last three years.  Turns out it didn’t fit into my life as perfectly as I thought it would. 

Wait, I should back up.

When I came back from my maternity leave I tried for a promotion at the company I’d been working at for three years.  I was perfect for the position, I had several glowing references from people who’d worked with me over the years, and a few people even went in to speak to the hiring scientist on my behalf.  I thought it was in the bag.  Unfortunately for me, I’d walked around pregnant in that place so it was pretty obvious that I had a little one at home.  I found out through the grapevine that someone with “family responsibilities” was an undesirable candidate for the position, as it required some travel and occasional long hours.  I was passed over for the promotion and an outside candidate was selected instead.  I handled it well and accepted the decision.  HA, you don’t believe that, do you?  Right. 

I lost my fucking mind when I found out what went down.  First I raged, then my boss tried to calm me down and give me a pep talk so that I wouldn’t quit, then I cried at night at home because it was so fucking WRONG.  The day I broke down in the bathroom at work and had to stay there for an hour because I couldn’t stop, I knew what I had to do.  I quit that stupid fucking job and on my last day sat down and had a long talk with human resources.  I didn’t burn any bridges, but I left with a few people hating me.

About a month later I got the new job.  And it was everything I’ve ever wanted.  I got a huge raise in pay, my own office, a computer and a laptop, and even my own business cards.  My boss was smart, the work was smart, my coworkers were smart, everything about this place was smart, oh and they also had free coffee and cappuccino, all you could drink.  The trade-off is that I didn’t see my son anymore.  A quick kiss at night before bed, a diaper change in the morning before I headed out to sit in traffic for two hours, was the extent of my daily contact with my baby.  Two years ago I would’ve sacrificed anything for this job but today I sit here and I know it can’t be like that.

So now I’m looking for something to do part-time.  Something that doesn’t involve standing in front of a cash register or a drive-thru window.  Something that is closer to my home and will let me be a part of my son’s life as he grows up.  Right now it’s all fishing baby hands out of the toilet and trying to keep him from eating dust bunnies off the floor and keeping his teeth off my nose, but it’s also first steps and first foods and watching his personality emerge and change little by little each day as he grows.

I’m starting to figure things out.  My priorities have shifted, and I’ve had to stop living as though they haven’t.   And on the advice of a counselor as well as some other moms who have been there, I joined a local mother’s community.  My hands are spasming as I type that, because they don’t understand.  They haven’t gotten the message yet that I cannot do this alone.

all the pretty blossoms

Things are changing, I can feel it.  It started with the sleep, which has always been an issue for me.  My body lacks the normal rhythms that most people have where you feel awake in the day and drowsy and ready for sleep at night.  Since the baby came, I’ve been spending my whole days dying for sleep, aching for it, and then in the evening, when everything is quiet, and the little one is snoozing in his room at the beginning of his big 12 hour sleep, I’m just revving up and the last thing I want to do is rest.  Why would I sleep when I could be obsessively cleaning, or organizing the fridge, or anxiously pacing the house and thinking about all the things that piss me off until I want to pick up the phone and start dialing so I can tell everyone I have ever met to fuck off because they SUCK!

But over the last week I have been getting drowsy in the evening and when I get into bed I feel completely relaxed and I’m asleep in minutes.  This is bad news for my sex life but it’s been awesome for my mind and body.  Once I figure out a way to stay awake long enough for some lovin’, things in the bedroom will be perfect.

And sex is important because I am feeling more loving toward my husband than I have in a long time.  He’s an amazing person and he never stopped that, he just became my outside target for pain when torturing myself was not enough anymore.  I want to ask him why he came home every night.  Why did he not escape, even when I sat crying and blaming him for everything going wrong and even telling him I thought we shouldn’t be together.  I guess that’s the good thing about having such a long history with someone.  When one of you goes off the deep end and loses perspective, the other person has been around long enough and has loved you long enough to know that something is broken and this is not how things really are. 

But we had a great weekend and it was different from the last fifty or so weekends because we actually had fun and there was peace in this house.  I did a bunch of baking and cooking and I even took a glorious two-hour nap on Sunday and was still able to go to sleep at night, and I just felt amazing.  Nothing has changed except that I’m not angry in my head anymore and I’m not tense and I’m definitely not lashing out at everyone like I have been.  There is a small part of me that whispers doubt, though.  It’s a little voice that wonders if this is all artificial and maybe I’m on goofball happy pills that are turning me into a ridiculous glowing retard.  I guess I wouldn’t be me if I couldn’t find some negative aspect to joy.

As a testament to the great weekend we had, Eli didn’t want to go to work on Monday morning.  As he was getting ready to walk out the door, he turned back and came over to the couch where I was feeding the baby and kissed both of us and told me he wanted to stay home with us and just have another day of things feeling better.

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Love is a temporary madness; it erupts like volcanoes and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of eternal passion. That is just being in love, which any fool can do. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Those that truly love have roots that grow towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossoms have fallen from their branches, they find that they are one tree and not two.  -Captain Corelli's Mandolin

the recipe

So here are some things the nurse practitioner in charge of my mental health suggested I do to feel better:

-Drink tea during the day.  The relaxing kinds with names like sleepytime and tension tamer.
-Take a multivitamin with extra B for stress.
-Exercise.
-Join a mother’s group and do playdates.
-Go on scheduled dates with my husband.  Just us, no baby, away from the house.
-Go out by myself without the husband and baby and have alone time for myself.
-Take a break from the guilt and re-fucking-lax.

At the end of the session, after she gave me my diagnosis, I asked her to be honest with me about how crazy I am and what kind of recovery I should hope for.  She told me I am not crazy, just suffering with undiagnosed post-partum depression, and that I will get better.  The bad news is I need to be on medicine for at least a year, and if I have more children, I am at risk for going through the same thing again.

But I liked her suggestions for relieving stress.  The only thing on her list I might have trouble with is the mother’s group stuff.  I don’t feel like I fit in with most mothers because I think of mothering styles in terms of black and white, and mine is a shade of gray.  I am not a career-driven, stress-driven, have-it-all psychopath (anymore) because I know now that you cannot have it all like that without something suffering.  In my case, everything was suffering.  I was half-assing it in my career and as a mother and wife while I was trying to balance it all, and I was feeling no satisfaction at all from my life.  On the other hand, I don’t relate to the full-time stay-at-home moms who derive all of their feelings of accomplishment and satisfaction from parenting and being a good wife.  I need something a little more, but not so much more that I lose sight of the fact that my son is small and he won’t be forever, and I need and want to spend time with him at this stage.

But then again, all the mothers I know are one way or the other.  One mom’s advice is to suck it up and just realize that daycare is fine and I should keep climbing the ladder and not worry so much; He’ll be fine no matter what I do.  And another mother is down on me for not cherishing my new role as a mother, and for even wanting anything outside of it for myself.  But I’m going to give the mom’s group a try and see what happens, because maybe there’s a mom out there who feels the same way I do, and it would be nice to have someone like that to talk to sometimes.

Anyway, I just have to accept that I feel how I feel and I cannot ignore my heart or feel guilty about my decisions.  But it’s easier to say that than actually live it.

not perfect

Last night was the first night in about a month that my body and mind both got tired at bedtime.  There’s nothing like the crashed out feeling when you hit the bed, everything is relaxed and your whole body feels like a pile of rock.  It’s a nice change from feeling jacked-up, itchy and restless in my bed.

I have my first therapy appointment this afternoon and I’m nervous about what we’ll talk about.  I have a hard time talking about my feelings with real people, and I hope I don’t do that thing I do where I act like I’m together and cool and there are no problems.  I’ve become so good at the show, walking through my day like a completely competent person, and then falling apart each night at home where it’s safe.  The show has become a circus of hell and I need to stop it.  Especially when I’m paying good money for someone to listen to how not together and not cool and not perfect I’ve been feeling.

I played balls with the baby for an hour this morning and then I let him gnaw on my knee for a few minutes while I sat on the couch and drank coffee, until my pants were so wet with drool that I had to pry him off of me and blow dry my pant leg.  He’s teething and I am his favorite chew toy.  At least with my knee he can’t get a good bite in with his teeth and he just ends up slobbering all over my pants.  He sometimes tries to bite my toes and it hurts so much that I reflexively almost kick him in the mouth when he digs in hard and sends pain shooting through my foot.  If I’ve learned anything about being a mother it is that once your baby grows teeth, you must never let your guard down because those teeth will be clamped down on your toe or finger or ankle faster than you can scream NO BITING MAMA!!! 

The weird thing about this mom thing is, I’m surprised by how natural it feels and how good I am at it.  I never thought that it would be like this and that everything else, including my own needs, would come second to him.  It’s like everything shifted that day in the hospital, my priorities, my career, my relationships, all spun out of control into chaos, but my love for my child is the one thing that I never question.  And part of what I feel ashamed about in having to be on medication and in therapy is I don’t ever want him to think this is his fault.  That I came undone because of him.  He is simply my motivation to be well.

anti-drama

I had a bloody nose this morning and it was exciting and gave my heart a quick jolt when I looked down and saw an explosion of blood in the tissue.  I am fascinated by the vulgarity of the human body and one of my favorites was the ingrown hair my husband had that time in his face.  The hair grew in a coil beneath his skin and when he pulled it out it was freakishly long and gross.  But I’m getting off track.

The bloody nose is just the latest in a series of side-effects I’ve been suffering while trying to find the right medication.  The latest one is affecting my blood pressure and I’ve had a headache and heart palpitations and a squeezing sensation that grips my chest for a week since I’ve started it.  So I went back to the doctor and we’ve completed the circle and I’m back on the initial medication that is very expensive but also makes me feel better.

This waiting to reclaim my mind is making me crazy, though.  And a small part of me wants to just stop messing around with the drugs and try to solve this with the power of my will.  The thing that stops me from doing this is remembering what I felt like a few weeks ago, and six months ago or even a year ago and knowing deep down that willpower isn’t enough.   I’m starting to accept that my life has been sucking the life out of me and I need to work it out. 

So I’ve been taking it easy and doing some stuff that I enjoy that I haven’t had time for in the past few months like baking and cooking and painting and reading and playing with my baby and just waiting to not feel like I have to force myself to feel okay every day.  And some days it’s easy, like this morning when I got up with the baby and turned on the TV before going into the kitchen to make coffee and it was still on HBO from the night before, and when I walked back into the living room I saw my child sitting perfectly still in the middle of the floor, smiling up at the screen where strung out meth junkies were telling their stories to the camera.  My son, who has no interest in shows like Sesame Street or Bob the Builder, would prefer to watch Methodonia, a documentary about the struggles of people addicted to methadone.  He cried when I turned it off.  And it’s so bizarre that it makes me smile.  I can play with him for hours with his toys, showing him how the shape sorter works or making castles out of blocks or reading books to him, but nothing thrills him more than when I throw his soft toys at him and they ricochet off his forehead and into the air, or when I make a pretend karate chop to his belly with my hand and scream HAI-YAH! like I’m going to take him out and he bursts into hysterics of glee.  And how he dissolves into giggles so hard he gets the hiccups when Eli and I start a toy fight and just start whipping stuffed ducks and megablocks across the room at each other.  He’s a weird little freak, but he makes me laugh.  And he’s definitely mine. 

playland of danger

The baby is in a curious mood today and I spent my morning trying to keep him from hurting himself.  Most days his toys and the cats are enough to keep him amused in the house, but some days he gets that itch in his diaper, that reckless urge to live on the edge, and his favorite playland of mischief is the kitchen.  We’ve babyproofed about as much as we can short of roping the entire area off, but the boy is smart and he has figured out ways around our meager attempts to keep him safe.  We’ve latched the cabinets, so he pulls them open only so far as the latch will allow and then he sticks his hands in grasping blindly for anything he can reach.  One day I found him sitting in the middle of the kitchen floor staring down the end of a grill fork probably trying to decide whether he should poke his eyes out first or try to crawl with it in his mouth and rip out his throat.

Now that he’s tall enough he can peek into the trash and pull interesting things out.  I found him quietly chewing on an old pizza crust the other day and this morning he was happily shredding a cold cut wrapper with his teeth.  He likes to crawl into the dishwasher while I’m loading it and play with the twirly thing that I think makes the soap fly around when it’s on.  I don’t mind him playing in the dishwasher if he would just be content with touching the racks, but he always gets distracted by the shiny stuff and  before I know it, he’s in the silverware bin sifting through the sharp stuff. There’s nothing like the heart-stopping adrenaline jolt when you look down and see your tiny child holding a steak knife to his own face.

And then of course there’s the lazy susan with its delightful assortment of spices and baking supplies.  At least once a day I find him trying to bite the top off the nutmeg jar or trying to chew through the lid for the spicy steak rub.  He hasn’t been successful yet, but I know the day is coming when I’ll be faced with a screaming baby with a mouthful of pepper.

The freezer is his other favorite play place.  It’s on the bottom and if I open it he crawls right over and goes in.  The freezing cold doesn’t seem to bother him, and he balances on the racks with one hand while he uses the other to empty the contents onto the floor.  Out go the cold packs and ice cube trays and bags of vegetables.  Does the frozen broccoli offend?

So this morning while I was trying to do some dishes and make a pot of coffee, I was having to stop every few seconds to pull the baby away from yet another hazard, so I gave him a measuring cup to play with.  A stainless steel measuring cup.  And he was content to sit and study it for a few seconds before he decided to try it out against the floor and that’s when he discovered that stainless steel thrown against ceramic tile is the best noise ever.  scrape scrape scrape CLANG!  Scrape scrape scrape CLANGGG! BANG BANG BAAAAAAAAAANG!!!!  And on it went for five minutes because that’s how long it took my nerves to unravel.

But at least he wasn’t eating the flour or trying to crawl into the bottom of the stove.  There should be a line of measuring cups, pots, pans and silverware made out of pillow, for parents of kitchencrazy babies.

kitchen pharmacy

The new medicine I started yesterday makes me feel stoned.  It became clear how much it slows me down when my neighbor came over this morning to talk to me and I had a hard time following the conversation and kept zoning out with a peaceful smile on my face while she talked.  I feel pretty relaxed and perfectly content to sit back and watch while the world provides the stimulus today. 

This is definitely a better feeling than the crazed, skin-twitching mania I experienced on the last medicine, but I’m pretty sure I don’t want to walk around feeling dull and stupid every day.  But since I’ve never been medicated before, we have to do some pharmacological experimentation to find the thing that works best on my brain.

Meanwhile, I’m building up a pretty nice kitchen pharamacy of pills and sometimes when I walk by it I feel like the craziest person on earth.  I’ve always had normal prescriptions for things like birth control pills and antibiotics and I have the usual collection of pain relievers and cold pills.  But now there’s shit like valium and prozac all mixed in and I look at them and I’m like, who am I?  Have I really become the crazy?  But then, I guess an empty kitchen pill pharmacy and a person who cries every night and is angry all the time at everyone for everything and screams in her head that this is too hard I can’t take it why do I feel so fucking bad??? isn’t exactly the normal.

picturebox

We’re thinking about moving in the spring, so we decided to go through the loft and start sorting things out for a yard sale.  Our house is three stories with a big finished loft at the top and it was originally supposed to be our office.  But it has slowly become a random crap graveyard where we keep not only our books and computers but all the other random stuff we’ve accumulated over the last 12 years.  When the baby came, we had to move the futon up to the loft to make room for the crib.  And then we moved the coffee table up there too because it is a perfect baby death device, complete with heavy metal legs and sharp jutting corners, ideal for destroying baby eyes and denting soft spots.

So we started to go through everything last night and we only made it through a couple of boxes when we found the pictures.  We met before the age of the digital camera so pictures of everything that came before our current house are stored in drugstore photo department envelopes.  I used to just walk around taking random pictures of stuff like the cats sleeping or maybe a new shower curtain I was particularly fond of, and whenever I’d get them developed I’d want to smack myself for wasting money on such randomness.  But what I realized after going through twelve years of random pictures is that the history of our life together is in those envelopes.  I have pictures of twelve different Christmas trees, all our old cars, the apartments we’ve lived in through the years to include some very hideous decorating that I’d been so proud of at the time, and even us looking so young when we were 23 and newly married and had no idea what we were starting.

And it occurred to me that this is a big deal.  Everything in my life has changed over the last twelve years except for one thing—the person who has always been by my side.  The longest relationship I’d ever had before I met my husband lasted one year and even that was off and on and always riddled with teenage drama.  I can’t believe it was so serious to me back then.

I don’t know what this is about or what I’m trying to say.  I guess I just feel lucky.  Friends have passed through my life, some have left and some are still around, but my best friend, the person who has been with me every day since I was twenty years old (he had to buy my drinks when we first met because I wasn’t old enough to do it for myself!) is still here in my life every day.  We built a life together full of history and memories and difficult times that almost broke us apart, but also so much fun, and we didn’t even realize that’s what we were doing.  I’ve had times over the last couple of years when things have felt so hard that I just wanted to throw it away and start over.  Not because of anything unfixable in the relationship, but something damaged in me that makes it so terrifying to have a person know me so well.

All that to say that I’m going to make a book to put the pictures in because we shouldn’t have to dig around through storage boxes to remember.  Oh yeah, and that envelope with the secrets we couldn’t possibly put in a book?  It will be burned before our luck runs out.

brain chemistry

For two weeks now I’ve been noticing little side effects.  A little nausea, some anxious tension, a small growing hopeless feeling in the pit of my stomach.  The first night on the new medicine, I woke up at 2am and just sat in my bed wide awake wondering why I felt like working out or cleaning the house or doing anything other than staying in bed.  One day I toasted half a loaf of bread and ate it for lunch and I still craved more carbs.  I was feeling sad every day.  But even with all the weirdness, I continued to take the little pills that were supposed to make me feel better until I really thought about it.  Is this me?   I‘ve never been afraid before to drive on the road the runs along the lake.  Why now do I feel scared and impulsively dangerous.   I am the queen of anxiety, not the dutchess of doom.  Can an antidepressant actually make a person feel depressed?  So I went on the internet and I read up a little bit on my medicine and I found out that suicide is listed as a possible side-effect.

Let’s just reflect on that for a minute.  SUICIDE AS A POTENTIAL SIDE EFFECT FOR AN ANTI-DEPRESSANT MEDICATION.  When you think about what people take anti-depressants for, there are lots of things that would be acceptable side-effects.  Heartburn is an acceptable side effect.  So is nausea, gas, problems urinating, sexual dysfunction, hypertension or even fatigue.  But feeling so low you want to drive your fucking car into a lake because, well, there’s no fence and it would be easy!?  This is not an acceptable side effect.  Especially if you weren’t feeling that kind of stuff to begin with!  Jesus Christ, I need to start my own pharmaceutical company so I can get rich too by making medicine that DOESN’T HELP PEOPLE.

I know the brain is complicated and messy and it’s not easy to fix when things go wrong,  but I’d had a little more faith in pharmopsychology before this week. Things got pretty bad and then I decided on Saturday night that I’d had enough.  I discontinued my medicine, and for the last two days I feel better.  A lot better.  I caught myself singing to the baby as I changed his diaper this morning.  So tomorrow the doctor and I are going to have a talk.  I am going to ask him to prescribe medicine that will not make me fucking insane.  Hopefully he will agree to my radical treatment proposal.

keys to happiness

I went to Target this morning in the middle of a terrific rainstorm on a search for the perfect sippy cup.  My son is almost a year old, and I got it into my head last week that I should start trying to get him off the bottle.  I decided to just start giving him his formula in a sippy during the day, instead of the bottle.  That was my whole plan, just give him a sippy and he will drink.  The cats will find and suck the liquid out of anything in the house: their water dish, our glasses, the faucet, toilet bowl...and babies are smarter than cats, right?  So imagine my surprise when I gave him the sippy and he sat there looking at it, smiling at the milk sloshing around inside, biting at the nozzle and then flinging it around like it was a new toy.  Formula sprinkler.  No amount of instructing helped, and I finally gave up when he wrapped his mouth around the nozzle and started chewing at the plastic with his teeth, overjoyed when he realized that teeth on plastic makes a delightful, high-pitched squeak.

But I went to Target, playground of the short-attention-spanned, and spent exactly thirty seconds looking at sippy cups before deciding that sippy cups are boring and I am in TARGET and there's a toy section and hair care stuff and stationary and cookware and bathroom notions and pillows and a whole aisle of funky picture frames!  Fuck sippy cups!

I ended up in toys.  I get unreasonably excited about new toys.  I walk the aisles packed full of brightly colored junk imagining all the fun I could have with each thing.  I mean, my son and I.  How much fun my son and I could have playing with each thing.  And I get bummed out when I realize that the toys I want most are sometimes not age-appropriate for either of us.  He's too little for a pirate ship with little plastic pirates that have eye-patches and swords and lots of choking hazards and hey! It comes with a plastic plank and we could make the civilians walk it while screaming WHERE'S YOUR PIRATE BLOOD??? And I am too old to buy it for my own enjoyment. 

I ended up buying the most brilliant toy ever for my son.  A set of car keys made out of metal and with a remote and strikingly similar to the real set of keys that I used to let him chew on until that dark morning a couple of weeks ago when I spent a very panicky few moments crouched over his face trying to dig a bitten off panic button out of his throat.  We have a new rule whenever we get ready to go anywhere in the car: No mama's keys. 

So I guess I haven't solved the sippy cup problem today, but who cares because I found the keys to happiness.  And as soon as I can figure out how to keep the little one from using them to scrape the grout out from between the new slate tiles in the entry way, he can have them.