Resurrecting a Blog (and a Life)

It has become clear that my real skill is vanishing off the face of the earth at will.  Alas, an intense final month of fall classes followed by the holidays and yet another serious illness (including a hospital stay this time) has kept me from my blog and my writing (as well as lots of other things I love.)  It's discouraging, but it seems to be a fact of life around here.  The good news is that I'm back (again), and I've still got a few weeks until classes start back for me.  I'll be teaching English 102 this term, my first lit class, so there's an incredible amount of planning yet to be done, and I'm grateful to only be teaching the one class.  I am determined to use the extra time to get back to writing and to stop letting life and illness get in the way.  As in the past, this blog is a good tool for holding myself accountable to a daily writing schedule, and if I can manage to stay healthy for a few months, I just might make some progress.

Ah, my little workspace, how I have missed you.

Interestingly, these post-illness life reboots are something I haven't encountered in all my reading about chronic illness.  There's lots out there about missing out and fatigue and trying to help people understand invisible illness, but I don't believe I've seen anything about the starting over (physically, socially, etc) that happens after every episode or relapse.  After dropping out of circulation for days, weeks, or even months, you have to maneuver your way back into your commitments, your friendships, your schedule, and sometimes even current events.  And this isn't something that you have to figure out one time.  You are faced with this jockeying for position every time you return from a major illness (at least until you quit trying and withdraw altogether, which can be a real temptation.)  It's discouraging, intimidating, and isolating.  Basically, it sucks.  Every time.

First, there are the logistics.  You don't generally just wake up one day feeling hale and happy.  In fact, most chronic illness patients exist more on a sliding scale of wellness that never quite reaches "All Better."  So deciding when to go from confined-to-bed to back-to-normal can be tricky.  How much of your "normal" workload/social schedule can you even manage?  Because you don't want to cause a setback in your recovery.

Then you have all the people who have had to make other arrangements when they couldn't rely on you.  No matter how much they care about you and your health, these folks (whether they are work, church, or school colleagues) need someone they can depend on to get the job done, and when your ability to deliver is frequently a big question mark, it can be challenging to convince them to let you back in on the work.  This situation can be painful to navigate, as there is plenty of guilt and frustration to go around for both "sides."  I never feel anger for the person who's reluctant to let me back in, but I do feel incredibly guilty at having failed them and unbelievably frustrated at my body's repeated betrayals.  I'm organized and goal-oriented, and illness is neither of those things.

And let's not forget relationships.  There is a hard truth about chronic illness: When you're sick and confined to home or bed, the outside world keeps turning.  Friends still meet for drinks.  Couples still have dinner parties.  Movies are seen in theaters by those who are well enough to venture beyond their bedrooms.  While certainly, there are those close friends who make the effort to see and encourage you through your periods of incapacitation, it can be very challenging to maintain any sort of social circle when you're constantly having to drop out of the loop.

I have found this socially isolating aspect of chronic illness to be intensified by having special requirements or needs even when you are healthy.  Because of my Celiac, I am very limited to where I can safely eat, and so much (a dizzying amount really) of our social interaction is built around food.  Meals or snacks are incorporated into nearly every church event, club meeting, or even meet-up with friends.  So, even when I'm not pulling a bed-ridden disappearing act, I'm having to manage one of my illnesses by saying no to numerous social events, and it doesn't make for a very full dance card.

Lastly, these repeated beginnings lead to a sense of disconnection.  Talk about feeling irrelevant.  You weren't there.  You don't know the funny stories, the inside jokes.  New shit has come to light, and you missed the memo.  And to make matters even more awkward, every one you see wants to talk about --you guessed it-- your illness.  You look great!  You look tired!  You're so thin.  Should you be out yet?  I don't know how you do it. People are just being kind, and you know this, but when you're trying to make a comeback (for the millionth time), often the last thing you want to talk about is your weight loss or meds.  All you want, really, is just to be in again, to not be marked with that invisible "S" on your chest --Sick.

So here I am, yet again, starting over.  My writing, my commitments, my relationships, my life.  While I was on pause, the rest of the world continued on at what seems like double speed, and nobody recorded what I missed.  Thankfully, this was one of my shorter vanishings, but I live daily with the fear that I will vanish again without warning, and sometimes, I wonder if I'll ever despair of the fight to reinsert myself into my own life.

Write Harder

I'm trying this again.  My last attempt to write an entry ended in unpublishable ramblings that managed to capture exactly nothing of interest.  My fiction writing tonight could probably be classified similarly, but at least I wrote -- something I've seriously struggled with lately.  Struggled with to the point of despair.  Like maybe I've been kidding myself all along.  Like I just don't have enough drive to do this.  Like I still feel the physical need to write, still suffer near physical pain when I don't, but lack the discipline to actually put ass-in-chair and do it.

It's all so weird, really.  I've always been the queen of discipline and order.  Procrastination, fear me!  Even my mind lacks the order it once had, drifting along incoherently, unable to focus on longer projects, unable to comprehend relatively simple concepts without intense effort.  Much of this loss seems to coincide with the addition of a child to our family.  Pregnancy plays havoc with brain cells, and part of me has never fully returned to my original level of mental quickness and acuity.  Chronic illness may also play a part.  I just don't know.

Here's what I do know:

I crave solitude in a way I never did before.  Don't get me wrong.  I've always been a loner who avoids large (or even small) groups and noise.  But this characteristic has intensified into an deep need, a necessity.  Quiet has become an intrinsic requirement.  My resentment toward interruption is all out of proportion.

My ability to think/write creatively has taken a major hit.  Yeah, I know.  If you don't use a muscle, it atrophies.  But it seems that when I put pen to paper these days, each thought is more inane than the last.  Originality?  An unreachable goal.

My time is not my own.  Even when it is.  Once you become a mother, you are always a mother.  It doesn't matter that your child is sleeping peacefully in another room.  Your brain has been rewired, and part of it will always be present with that other little (or not so little) person, wherever they are.

While I still love to read, there is guilt for reading when I could be writing.  I tell myself that reading is vital to developing my writing, but lying to myself is hard.  A lot of writing has been avoided by reading that book by that author that is just so necessary.

My mom identity does daily battle with my writer/teacher identity.  I have no idea why these two won't co-exist peacefully.

I have become the Queen of Excuses.  My writing sucks because I don't write, and I don't write because of, well, So. Many. Reasons.

I'm seeking accountability.  I have avoided many events and connections lately because of my non-writing status.  There's an overwhelming feeling of fraudulence that I just can't shake.  And apparently, the accountability of seeing fellow writers is something I need to make myself try to overcome everything and focus.  I'm tired of drowning in fuzzy, crowded thoughts.  I'm tired of the lack of mental clarity that medication leaves behind.  I'm tired of interruptions and noise and sickness and excuses.  I'm tired.  And still I must write.

Update, or Back From the Dead

So I'm not dead...though a few days I considered it.  More sickness, well, my eyes are sick anyway.  Went to the dermatologist for a recurring rash around my eyes.  Following his advice, and now I look like I'm somewhere between a bender, pink eye, and leprosy.  And have for a month.  Because it's not enough to be perpetually sick, losing my hair, and taking more pills in a day than most people take in a month.  I have to also have red, flaking lizard skin around my eyes.  That hurt.  A lot.

In between frightening small children and strangers with a glance and applying moisturizer by the quart, I've also been finishing up my first full semester of teaching.  It's been such a great experience (glitches and resistant freshmen notwithstanding), and it feels so so good to have all of those essays graded.  And the most exciting news (and that's saying something because having seventy five essays graded and done is pretty exciting) is that I get to teach Intro to Creative Writing in the fall! This is such a great opportunity, and I have to confess that I had trouble sleeping the night after I found out because I couldn't stop planning my syllabus.  I'll be teaching another section of Comp as well, so that'll keep me busy during my first school year with Kiddo gone full time.

Yep, I said full-time.  Kiddo is starting Kindergarten in the fall.  We went to the orientation at her school, and she is so excited (in between her bouts of mourning for her preschool teacher and friends.)  I too am very excited about all the alone time I will gain the fall, but I'm not going to lie: That school seemed so big, which made Kiddo seem that much smaller.  I have to keep reminding myself who we're talking about here.  Kiddo is unstoppable.  A school full of kids twice her size won't daunt her.  

Today is her last day of preschool, and I'm trying to crank out some work at BN before the summer of together begins.  Kiddo will be going to day camp a bit over the summer, but mostly she'll be home with me.  I'm not teaching over the summer, so I'm determined to get lots of writing done and stop being such a slack ass.  I've even given up teaching the kiddos at church on Wednesday nights in hopes of limiting my exposure to germs.  Let this be the summer of writing and writing some more and NOT GETTING SICK!

Reading Crazy

It's Sunday night, and I'm holed up grading papers while my husband watches TV and my books languish on my night stand.  Of course after over two weeks of prednisone, it's probably safer for everyone concerned that I be kept under lock and key.  I was so keyed up yesterday that the smallest annoyance took on epic proportions, and sitting still and following an hour-long television program was impossible.  The good news is that today was the last of that hateful drug, and so tomorrow I should begin to come back down from my steroid mania.  I'm certain everyone in this house will be glad to see the back of Crazy Sarah.

It's going to be another hectic week, full of appointments and classes and general life maintenance.  Here's hoping that I don't crash from prednisone withdrawal as I have in the past, or the week could get a whole lot trickier.  After all the chaos from my illness, I'm constantly feeling a step or three behind, and I realized late Friday afternoon that I double-booked myself for tomorrow morning (doctor's appointment and Kiddo's preschool field trip.)  So now, I'm crossing my fingers that the rain nixes the field trip (they have an alternate date -- I'm not that terrible), so I can make it to my appointment.  Meanwhile, I feel more like a flake than I have since I was pregnant.  I'm still not sure what happened to that organized, no-nonsense, never procrastinating woman who used to live here.  I miss that chick sometimes.  Okay, all the time.

While I haven't been able to watch anything on tv more complicated than episodes of Bob's Burgers (which is AWESOME, by the way), I can, for some reason, read like a fiend while in the midst of my prednisone insanity.  It's so weird because you'd think that would be harder to do than watching television when your brain is on fast forward.  Nevertheless, I've been powering through my TBR list like a boss.  Recently finished:

The Buried Giant, Kazuo Ishiguro.  Not quite the fantasy revelation I'd seen in reviews, but okay.

The Paying Guests, Sarah Waters.  This made so many lists in 2014, but basically it was just a happy-ending lesbian love story/implausible crime novel -- and not that great of one at that.  it was kind of like if Jodi Picoult were British and wrote historical fiction.

Yes, Please, Amy Poehler.  This was entertaining.  If you like Tina Fey's Bossypants, you'll love this too.  The structure is pretty random, and I wasn't personally interested in most of the Parks and Rec stuff, but overall it was a good read.  Also, she and Fey are the only two memoir writers I've read who were like, "Hey, our parents were so great and supportive and wonderful."  It was kind of refreshing.

Currently in-progress:

All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr.  I'm only a few pages into this.  I tried to start it over a week ago, and then library books came in that needed to be read, so now I'm starting over.  But I like it so far -- even if it does have these little mini-chapters that I'm not completely sold on yet.

Searching for Sunday, Rachel Held Evans.  This one isn't even supposed to be out till Tuesday, but apparently Barnes & Noble stores across the country started shelving it on Friday night, so I swooped in and snagged a copy.  So so good thus far.  Beautiful writing about faith and doubt.  Plus I get to be one of the cook kids and read it before everybody else.

Next up in the queue are some used book store finds that are about as dissimilar as you can get:

Wild, Cheryl Strayed.  I've been listening to her Dear Sugar podcast.

Lady Chatterley's Lover, D.H. Lawrence. Because I've never read it.

House of Sand and Fog, Andre Dubus III.  It was $2.

So Over It (or Everyone Should Just Shut Up and Eat Their Own Burger)

This is me being so over talking about women's bodies.  About my body.  This is me begging you to wear whatever it is you want to wear without worrying about sagging skin or cellulite or knobby knees.  This is me after a harrowing weekend of clothes shopping (one of my least favorite things ever) and that fresh hell they call the ladies' fitting room.  After two years of nearly constant sickness and a year of significant weight loss, this is me being over the way almost-strangers feel entitled to pass judgment on other women's health, weight, eating habits, or medical treatments.  Right now, I am closing the curtains, shutting the door, locking it down.  I can't change others, but I can make sure that I never again make those kinds of statements or judgments.

It starts nearly at birth.  Of course, I don't remember those days, but I have a little girl now.  I've seen it in action.  The comments about her appearance above all else, her "prettiness."  I know I've done it myself to others.  To her.  I find myself looking at her and thinking, "I hope she doesn't inherit my pancake butt" or "I'm so glad she got her daddy's nose."  And then I catch myself and feel a little sick. This is a child who was reading at age four, who never meets a stranger, who has the biggest heart.  So what does it matter if she has two heads and a prehensile tail?

Except it does.  It matters when you start school and your body isn't shaped exactly like the majority of the other little girls.  It matters when clothes aren't made or marketed for petite/tall/skinny/fat girls or women, and you're left facing that fluorescent-lit dressing room mirror in ill-fitting clothes that make you feel isolated and different and not at all like the happy-looking women plastered all over the shop walls.  It matters when puberty hits and you're the only one who gains fifty pounds or still looks like a nine-year old.  Girls get labeled "late bloomers" or "very developed." Boys get called, uh, wait a minute.  They don't get labeled anything.

If only it were a matter of getting through childhood and adolescence, it might be manageable.  But it doesn't get better.  Finish college -- hell, be the valedictorian -- what's the next question? When are you getting married?  And this from people who don't know your telephone number or your taste in movies.  When are you "starting a family"? (Because you can't call two people a family, apparently.) When are you having another?  You're too thin.  You look anorexic.  You should eat more.  You're doing too much.  STOP!

I am married to kind, loving, attractive man.  We are the same age, have similar levels of education, similar temperaments, etc.  I have never once heard him debate a piece of clothing because he didn't like a certain part of his body.  Nobody cares what he eats.  No relative strangers ever suggest that any of his problems might be a result of his own ignorance, neglect, or inability to care for himself.  Doctors and other professionals never treat him like he's hysterical or over-wrought.  In fact, most doctors and the like are the same gender as he, so he isn't some mysterious other to them.  People don't suggest that he should do less before he wrecks his health. When we were expecting our daughter, no one felt entitled to touch him or ask personal questions and offer comments about our chosen delivery method or feeding choices.

So what does all this rambling rage have to do with anything?  Simply this.  It doesn't matter to me what your "body-type" is.  I couldn't care less if you are a vegetarian, a paleo devotee, or die-hard burger aficionado.  I don't care what you choose to wear.  If it makes you feel strong and confident, you should be able to wear it.  Whatever it is.  Regardless of whether or not you have breasts and hips.  I want you to be in charge of your own health and well-being, communicating with your doctors and ignoring the incessant babble of pseudo-medical advice that is constantly on offer from every talk-show-watching, internet browsing, random person you meet.  Make retailers offer women's clothes that are sized by actual measurements, not arbitrary number sizes meant to inflate the egos of upper-middle class women facing the middle age spread.  Refuse to answer probing questions about your relationship status or procreative plans.  Praise your little girls for their brains, their kindness, their ability to climb or dance.  But most of all, just stop talking about weight, about most hated body parts, about genetic "flaws."  Stop analyzing the bodies of celebrity women, or even women who pass you in the street.  There are so many more interesting (and important) things out there to discuss.  This little rant is for me too.  I'm just as guilty as everyone else of obsessing about my appearance and making mindless comments to others.  So, here's what I'm going to try.  If I wouldn't say it to (or about) a man (or a boy), I shouldn't say it.

And also, the next person who tells me to eat something, is getting force-fed my copy of The Feminine Mystique.

R & R (Reading and Resting)

It's happened again.  I've lost more than a week of my life to serious illness.  I can't understand how a span of time can progress at such a tortuously slow pace, only to seem like a blink of an eye has skipped you ahead days or weeks from where you left off.  Now, I'm left limping and wheezing my way back to normal life and trying to find order amidst the chaos that sickness has made of my schedule and plans.  Papers all graded?  Lessons planned out?  Laundry caught up?  Ha. ha. ha.

The good news is that I've had help -- dear friends to care for my child while I was carted off to the hospital via rickety ambulance, parents who fly great distances to do my laundry and chauffeur me to doctor's appointments.  Of course, the appointments lead nowhere, as is too often the case.  More pokes, more blood, more meds, but no answers.

I am looking forward to getting back to my class.  We lost a whole week due to my illness, and I'm anxious to make up for lost time.  I'm especially looking forward to the following week when I have spring break and Kiddo goes back to school (her spring break is this week.)  That means a whole week where she goes off to pre-school every morning, and I can finally get some writing (and let's be realistic) some grading done. I'm less excited about the grading.  Mostly, though, it will just be a lovely time of being alone in my own house every morning.  I'm really excited about that.

One of the worst parts of being really sick is that you can reach a point where you're too sick to read. (Hard to imagine, but it happens.)  So, I started Kazuo Ishiguro's The Buried Giant just as I was coming down with this loveliness, and then I stalled out on a slow start that wasn't helped by my slowly simmering brain.  I'm glad to say, though, that as I have started to feel better and picked the book back up, it has gotten better.  It's definitely different from anything else he's ever written (understatement), but so far, it doesn't seem to be that revolutionary a fantasy novel, with its Arthurian quest storyline and slightly removed, nearly comical narration (think Princess Bride's narrator, only more serious.)  So, I'm enjoying it, but mostly I'm excited about finishing it so I can read All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr, which is burning a hole in my bookshelf.

Well, that's all I've got for now.  I've got a book to read and a bed to hold down.  Tomorrow it's back to serious class prep, and Tuesday, it's back to work.  You'll know me when you see me.  I'll be the girl in the bubble.  Seriously, please don't breathe on me.  Just don't.

Enough for Today

I'm writing today during a break in grading papers at the local Barnes & Noble cafe, aka the slowest internet in the county.  My earl grey is cold now, and the caffeine has already worked its way out of my system.  It's gray and misty outside, and I'm sleepy (a condition not helped by the fact that I'm grading the dreaded persuasive essay.)  Still, I am grateful for the mostly uninterrupted work time, even if I do have to keep turning up my headphones to drown out the two elderly gentlemen playing Point/Counterpoint next to me.  Part of me is imagining future Steve in a cashmere sweater vest and tassled loafers destroying their arguments over a black coffee, and then after a dramatic mic drop, heading out for a game of golf (still wearing the cashmere sweater vest but sans the tassled loafers.) Pretty sure he'd go for that vision today.

After another hectic bout of sickness, I seemed to have settled back into a semi-healthy routine over the past week.  So grateful for a weekend of nothing special with my family.  Sickness is so intensely personal, so solitary, that someone who already tends toward solitude can fall into a trap of isolation, huddling in my room with my books and quiet while everyone else keeps on living.  This weekend, I made a concerted effort to leave the house (together), to wander, to watch stupid kids movies, to not have a plan, to feel a part of the family unit and not just the troublesome accommodation that has to be made.

Chronic illness is lonely in a way that is difficult to explain to someone who has never lived inside it. No matter how many people care about you, no matter how many family members lovingly provide for you, illness is something you experience alone.  You are the one who can't just take off and do something spontaneous.  You are the one who can't be in the sun, or eat in restaurants, or climb stairs. Nobody else is exhausted by a short outing.  Everyone else is accommodating you (or not.)  You're an outsider in your own healthy, able-bodied family.  Their willingness to make adjustments for you only highlights their daily sacrifice on your behalf.  Some days, you're so grateful for their love and acceptance, and some days, you're just so sick of being the person that requires so much special attention.  Some days, you just want to be invisible, to have a camouflage of able-bodiedness.  

I long for a life that requires no explanation.  I'm tired of exceptions and accommodations and explanations and discussions.  I know everyone has their own issues, their own thing that makes them different or an outsider.  But somedays, I can't decide whether I wish my own pain and illness were either more visible or less.  If I wore a sign that listed my limitations, would it eliminate pointless conversations/explanations or simply become my label/identity?  Believe it or not, I have more interesting things to add to a conversation than yet another discussion of my dietary restrictions or my latest diagnosis.  And yet, I understand and even appreciate the sentiment.  Having people love and care for you, to ask questions about you is important and meaningful and beautiful, but for some reason, I can't really pinpoint, it frequently leaves me feeling more isolated instead of less.  It's a puzzle.

But for this weekend, I am grateful.  For a day-long Saturday outing that didn't require going home to nap/rest.  For a safe place to eat.  For a little girl who finds joy in having a parent at the end of each hand as she scurries across the street.  For a man who constantly searches my face for signs of fatigue or pain.  For a church family whose Sunday mornings always leave me feeling lighter and loved. For today, that is enough.

Forget About It

I've been thinking a lot about memory lately.  NPR has a new podcast called, Invisibilia, and we all know what a NPR junkie I am.  I don't miss my TAL or Moth or New Yorker podcasts for anything, though I have learned I can't listen to them with Kiddo in the car.  Don't even ask about that time I was listening to a story from Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son, a story with a main character named, wait for it, Fuckhead.  Seriously.  With my four-year old in the car.  I've never pushed a pause button so fast in my life.  But I digress.

Back to memory.  The ladies from Invisibilia, while not talking specifically about memory, do talk a lot about the brain and all the tricks it plays on you.  And then I listened to a special science-themed Moth where a neuroscientist who studies long-term memory shares an experience she had with her father and his slowly deteriorating memory.  And then there was this morning...

I'm working on yet another draft of my latest short story, a story that is set in the late nineties, a story with autobiographical elements.  I like to listen to nineties music when I'm writing/revising it to get myself fully in that time and place.  So this morning, I'm at Barnes & Noble tapping away on my Mac (why yes, I do hate myself for writing that sentence), when the Foo Fighters song, Everlong, comes up on my queue.  No big deal, right?  Just another in a long line of 90's classics.  Except it was a big deal.  The most indescribable feeling swept over me.  I say indescribable, but, of course, you know I'm going to try.  It was this perfect wave of melancholy and nostalgia and loss and sadness and joy and some other unnameable thing I can't pin down. I have no idea if was just the song, or the story, or the combination of the two.  All I can say for sure is that I wanted to cry and laugh and maybe go for a drive (something that was significantly more affordable in the nineties.)

I don't cry.  I mean two things when I say that.  The first is that for medical reasons that I won't go into here, I am physically incapable of shedding tears.  I barely produce enough natural tears to keep my eyeballs from drying out and crumbling out their sockets, let alone enough to produce those fat drops that overflow lashes and track down cheeks.  The second meaning is that I rarely feel the urge to cry.  I don't sniffle over sad movies or books.  I'm not a sympathetic crier who chokes up when they see a friend in pain.  I'm not emotionless; I just don't express my feelings through tears that often.  Sometimes I wish that I did/could.  So the fact that a song that I'm only moderately fond of could reduce me to a sentimental puddle (though not actual tears, of course) is bizarre and remarkable.

So what is it?  What triggered that weird wash of feelings?  I have some theories about deep memories that may have been triggered (which I won't share here).  It could just simply be a result of having taken my meds late yesterday.  It could be that my health is a factor.  Maybe it's all of these things, or none.  What I do know is memory is a tricky thing.  (Not exactly an original thought, I know, but bear with me.)

For as long as I can remember (see what I did there?), I have been the Queen of Memory.  As a kid I would memorize and perform LONG poems in competition.  Song lyrics stuck in my brain like the words were printed on sheets in my brain.  Then there is the fact that my memory is heavily photographic.  I'm not perfectly eidetic (did I use that correctly?) or anything, but when I study for a test, I remember the words as they were printed on the page in book, not as abstract facts.  I knew every detail and plot twist in every movie I ever watched.  Much of my academic success has been based on my ability to memorize large quantities of data.  But I've noticed that over the past ten to fifteen years my memory has taken a sharp dip, and I don't think age or the internet and its information overload are solely to blame.

There are two (maybe three) contributing factors that I suspect have something to do with my memory decline.  One is my belief that because I attempt to not dwell on unhappy or unpleasant memories, my brain has essentially grayed them out.  They still there, but because I have made a concerted effort not to dwell on them, they are not easily accessed, though I do believe they can still be triggered by specific things (more on that in a minute.)  This is going to sound unbelievably mushy, so forgive me, but I have forgotten so many details about my life prior to 2000 (pre-husband).  Obviously, some of this can just be attributed to age and the passage of time, but I don't think all of it can, which leads me to my next significant memory eraser.

Twenty years ago (we won't talk about how old I was twenty years ago), I still possessed a sense that I now lack, a sense that plays a vital part in memory.  Twenty years ago, I could smell.  A whiff of snickerdoodles in the oven was enough to transport me to every Christmas of my childhood.  Bay leaves?  Mom's spaghetti sauce.  (Apparently, all my scent memories centered on food.  Go figure.)  You get the idea.  As my ability to smell diminished, I think my ability to easily access many of my memories diminished in direct proportion. By 2002, I had completely lost my sense of smell (Yes, you can do that, and most people's inability to accept that is a whole other post.)  Sometimes it is a loss that I truly mourn.  Other times, it seems so far removed that I barely recall it.  But there are scents that I remember.  Walking into a bread shop, the reek of the seafood counter in the grocery store, Mom's bayberry candles at Christmas time, that glorious oldy-moldy smell of an old bookstore or library, the erasers and old farts smell of an elementary school classroom, and thinking about those smells can trigger specific memories.  But without the actual scents to frequently remind me, those memories are rarely accessed.  Sometimes I worry about how this sense loss might affect my writing, but that's for another day and post.

The third area that I think plays a significant role in my diminishing memory is an obvious (and much written about) one: Motherhood.  "Mommy Brain" is real, and I think that having a gregarious child while being an introvert creates a whole new level of mental and emotional exhaustion that is not conducive to forming detailed memories of things like movie plots, historical dates, book characters, grocery lists, etc.  I'm less focused, less sharp, a little slower, and maybe that's okay.  Maybe it's better for things to be a little fuzzy when you're a parent, especially of a small child.  And I hope that one day some of that mental acuity will return.

All of this brings me back around to the music memory/flashback I mentioned earlier.  There was no specific memory triggered by the Foo Fighters.  It was more a memory of a feeling, and a hazy feeling at that.  So what does that mean?  Am I so disconnected that the most I can resurrect is a vague/slightly weird feeling?  I don't know.  What I am sure of, however, is that memory is a vagarious thing.  We are all of us unreliable narrators.  That memory I shared in a previous post of my husband's proposal (or whatever we're calling it)?  Turns out I was picturing the two of us sitting side by side on a piece of furniture I no longer owned at that time.  My brain made a composite story of that moment, and if I hadn't thought a bit more deeply, I would have just accepted that it all happened on a sagging loveseat with a spring protruding through the fabric like John Hurt's alien baby.

As I wrap this post up, I'm not really sure how to end.  I struggle daily with trying to imprint memories of Kiddo's childhood onto my brain, to etch certain moments so deeply in my memory that nothing can erase them.  I think about family members whose precious memories have been wiped away by disease.  I wonder at the vastly different recollections of people living through the same event.  I speculate over which moments in my life really happened the way I recall (probably none.)  Perhaps this is partly why we write, to try to record a feeling or moment in whatever flawed way we can manage before it disappears.

The Big Psych-Up

This wasn't a terrible weekend.  It wasn't great, but it also wasn't disastrous.  On Saturday evening, I got to meet my best friend for our weekly coffee (or in my case, a skinny hot chocolate) while my husband took care of the Kiddo.  Yesterday was church AND spaghetti day, which always makes for a good combo.  And last night I finished Lolita and started on Elizabeth Gilbert's The Signature of All Things.  That's a pretty good start to the week.  Also, most of my Thanksgiving dinner shopping is done (aside from picking up -- uncooked -- Tom Turkey on Wednesday morning at Whole Foods.)

So why am I just not feeling Thanksgiving yet this year?  Don't even get me started on Christmas decorations and music (with this one exception.)  Don't get me wrong.  I'm thankful.  I have a lot to be thankful for, but as far as the usual traditions go, I am all out of steam before I even start.  Usually, I am chomping at the bit to start cooking for Thursday.  This is my favorite holiday, and I look forward all year to cooking this one meal.  Admittedly, the Celiac diagnosis from nearly two years ago has taken some of the fun out of cooking and baking in general, and this carries over to holiday meals as well.  But we managed last year without any trouble.  Maybe some of it is my continued poor health.  It is discouraging, disheartening, and seemingly never-ending.

It's certainly not my little girl who is already chattering about turkey and mashed potatoes and the Macy's parade on tv and setting up the Christmas tree.  I'm hoping that her excitement will overwhelm me come Thursday and kick my ass into gear.  Tomorrow is their Thanksgiving feast at preschool, and Kiddo is so excited.  I wish I could be the proverbial (and mega-cliched) fly on the wall during that little shindig.  Wednesday evening we'll probably go to the Thanksgiving devotional at church, which is always good for getting me in the right frame of mind.  I'm sure I'll rally.

In the meantime, I have writing to do, housework to plow through, and reading to squeeze in between.  This brisk morning (not as brisk as it's been, but brisk nevertheless), I broke out the sherpa blanket, the shearling boots, and the British Breakfast tea (because Earl Gray just wasn't going to cut it.)  Now that I'm toasty warm from nose to toe, it's time to get down to work.  I've got editing to do and maybe even some straight up new material to write.  It's going to be a good morning.  Or at least a highly caffeinated one.

Trainwreck, or My Life as an Imperfect Writer

I've been playing catch-up the past few days after more than a week of illness knocked me out of commission.  One of my biggest frustrations when I deal with these setbacks, however, isn't the piled-up laundry or the grocery shopping that keeps getting postponed.  It's the fact that my writing schedule/discipline gets gutted every time.  In fact, it's as if I can't ever really develop a good schedule because every time I build the least bit of momentum, sickness takes me out again.  I miss the regular, disciplined writing of graduate school.  My writing feels stuck because I never write for enough consecutive days to get back in the swing of things.

Hence the return of my blogging.  I know I need to be sitting in front of my MacBook on a daily basis.  It doesn't matter if I make progress on my novel or most recent short story every single time I work.  I just need to keep writing.  It's the same advice every writer I admire gives.  Just keep writing.  Daily.  And for whatever reason, I am able to keep up with blogging without the massive procrastination that I usually employ (and yes, I know that writers are famous procrastinators.  I tell myself this frequently to at least try to arrest the shame spiral.)  So once I tap out my latest blog entry, I'm already in place for my writing and editing.  That's the strategy anyway.

My last blog ended with my completion of graduate school, so it's been a while since I've done this, though I've read tons of blogs in the interim.  I just wasn't sure what direction/content/etc. I would want for a new blog.  The world doesn't need another "mommy blog," and I certainly wasn't going to bring anything new to that party.  And as for my writing, well, I've been so sporadic that I felt like a fraud writing blog posts solely about that.  I read voraciously, but I didn't want to just do book reviews.  That's when I decided -- the blog was just like my other writing.  At this point, what I write is far less important than the fact that I'm writing.  Typing out words on a daily basis is what is going to bring everything back together (including my sanity.)

Ever since I completed my MFA, I feel like I've been putting limits on my writing -- limits to the point of paralysis.  I'm my own worst editor.  There are all these voices in my head: professors, fellow grad students, writers whose advice I've read, and it's been really difficult to drown them out and just type.  So I have given myself to permission to write badly (as I've been told to do repeatedly) in this blog.  Don't wait for the brilliantly witty and well-constructed post to come to you in a dream.  Just write it, check for typos, and get on with it.  Because life is too short for perfection.  Here's hoping for a week where I read and write more than ever before.

Just Trying to Help, or 7 Things You Shouldn't Say to the Chronically Ill

I have serious long-term health issues.  I have good days and bad days, but there are no days that the threat of illness doesn't loom in the corner of my mind.  There are multiple doctors in my phone contact list.  The people at my pharmacy pretty much know me by sight, and some days it seems like I swallow more pills than food.

The good news is that I am surrounded by supportive people who love me and who step in when I am unable to do the important stuff.  My husband, of course, bears the brunt of this burden, but we also have friends and family who help where they can with babysitting, food, or just a sympathetic ear.

All of that being said, it must be stated that all forms of assistance are not equal.  When you are chronically ill, many people (complete strangers included) feel that the best form of support they can offer is pummeling the ailing person with questions and unsolicited advice.  These people are rarely medical professionals.  Rather they are just somebody who heard something from their second cousin who used to be a nurse, or read half of an article on a holistic medicine site five years ago.

These people are well-meaning, but good intentions are not an excuse for bad behavior.  Do you know how the sick person feels in that situation?  They have been doing battle with their own bodies for years, and now someone with zero understanding of their condition (and absent of any medical training) is suggesting that if they just did a little more research and tried this thing they heard about they'd be all better.  In fact, you're just choosing to be sick because you haven't really exhausted all your options.

Please don't defend these people.  Much like when I was pregnant, people suddenly lose their filters when faced with my illness, and I can only presume they do it to others.  I don't offer information or details about my health.  They are generally pried from me with probing, invasive questions.  It doesn't matter what the questioner intends.  Chronically ill people hear unsolicited advice on a daily (and sometimes hourly) basis.  It is exhausting and insulting, and if you're guilty of this, please stop immediately.  But, just in case you're not sure if you're an offender, here is a list of things you should never say to a chronically ill person:


1.  "I know [      ] who has [    ]."
I get that people are trying to connect with you, but, seriously, why do I need this information?  Also related to this statement is... 


2.  "You should meet [    ].  They have [     ] too."
Because  nothing bonds people like sharing an auto-immune disorder in common.


3.  "I heard about this treatment on Dateline, the internet, etc.  Does that not work for you?"
Why yes, it would.  I was just too stupid to take it.  Now I'm saved!  Thanks!


4.  "Have you tried vitamins, yoga, meditation, acupuncture, chiropractor,  natural medicine?"
Actually, my doctor recommended all of those things, but I'm refusing to do them just to piss him off.  Plus I enjoy being sick.


5.  "I would lose my mind if I were sick all the time/had to give up gluten/couldn't exercise/had to take lots of medication.  I just couldn't do it."
I understand how hard that would be for you.  Fortunately, I'm having a blast, so don't worry about how you're pointing how badly my life sucks.  For me, it's just all fun, all the time.


6.  "I don't take prescription medication.  It's unnatural poison."
How lucky for you that you have that option.  


And last but certainly not least....


7.  "I have [     ] symptoms.  Do you think I have what you have?"
First of all, I don't profess medical proficiency like you, O helpful-advice-person, so I cannot diagnose you.  But yes, you probably have it.  Only worse.  Allow me to give you some advice.

First-Time Mom, Long-time Writer

It's been nearly five years since I had my little girl.  She was my first and will be my only.  It's been three-and-a-half years since I finished my MFA.  My thesis manuscript remains unfinished, and I've been working on the same short story for the better part of a year.  I'd like to say that I've just been too wrapped in the joys of motherhood to have time alone, just me and my MacBook.  But that would be a lie.  Kiddo goes to preschool four mornings a week, and next year will be kindergarten. I can only barely remember the person I was five years ago.  Of course, that's not necessarily a bad thing.  Having a child teaches you patience and priorities (and a relaxing of boundaries, a good lesson for me), and I love my little girl with my whole being.

But there is still a loss there. Nobody tells you about that.  There is so much focus on warning new parents about the time they'll lose, the sleep, the ability to remember why you walked upstairs.  Nobody tells you that in all the fulfillment of having a child there can be an emptiness as well.  Your identity changes, and you mourn that old self that disappeared the first time you had to step away from the computer to feed the baby or watch an insipid cartoon rather than the cerebral indie film.  Sure, that sounds selfish and shallow, but if a parent tells you they've never felt that way? They're lying.

My brain doesn't function the way it did before I had a child, the way it did when I started my MFA.  It doesn't even function the way it did when I first had a baby.  Raising a verbally precocious toddler is exhausting in a way I could never have imagined.  In theory, it would seem that I would run to the computer to write every time she slept or went to preschool, but the truth is that by then I often have nothing left.  Even on days when my sweet husband takes her school and I have four straight hours to work, I often find myself procrastinating.  Of course, writers are famous procrastinators, but I have taken the trait to new heights in the past few years.

There is more to this story.  I'm chronically ill, and the past two years have been a roller coaster ride (pardon the terrible cliche, told you I was out of practice) of new drugs, new diagnoses, and new symptoms.  Some days it's all I can do to drag myself out of bed and care for my child.

I've said all of this though not to complain or elicit sympathy.  I just want to give context to what I plan to write here.  It's been quite a few years since I last had a blog, and I decided that rather than try to revive my previous blog that was no longer a good fit for who I am, I would create a new one.  This is not a "mommy blog."  No offense to you mommy (or daddy) bloggers out there.  You're doing good work, and there are plenty of you whose writing I enjoy on a daily basis.  But I'm not that woman.  I'm not the mommy type.  I'm not a super-mom.  I never pureed my own baby food.  We don't do crafts unless they are incredibly simple and come with minutely detailed instructions.  But this is the mom that I am:

I love to read.
I love to read out loud to Kiddo.
I love bookstores and libraries and quiet restaurants and funky little holes in the wall places.
Most children's television programming and movies make we want to pound myself in the head with the remote.
I don't allow toys to "live" in the living room.
I can't whistle, and I've never been stung by a bee.
I avoid tight spaces, large groups, and reality television at all costs.
I'm a bit of a snob about what I read.
I'm a bit of a snob in general, though a mostly good-natured one.
Sometimes my poor health makes it difficult to enjoy parenting, and this is one of my greatest heartbreaks.
I love my Kiddo and sweet husband even more than books.  Really.