I was looking through some of my old files and I found this letter I wrote to A's father in 2008. This was three months after A tried to kill himself because he could not stand to set foot in his school one more time. I have another post written about the incident so I won't tell the whole thing here. At this time his father had a job in another state from where we were living. We had been separated for just over a year and he'd been out of work until just shortly before this letter. He lived in a one bedroom studio apartment and wanted us to move there and live with him because I was having financial trouble and I had just pulled A out of school to homeschool him because the school district just wasn't getting it. A was 13 at the time...
Dear,
I understand your frustration and anger with me right now. I did not plan to get into trouble again or plan to hurt you or A.. In fact the trouble escalated by trying not to hurt A. The honest truth is that neither you nor I can survive the way things are now. I don’t have enough to pay rent, buy food, gas for the car and pay bills and neither do you. I see the wisdom in us moving there, but the air of hostility coming from you does not help me to make that decision. There are things you need to understand before any move is made for us to join you. Our building has been sold and I’ve told my landlord that we may or may not be moving at the end of March.
Right now A is protesting. Before you go off and start thinking he doesn’t want to be with you or doesn’t love you stop it right now. That is not true. But you need to realize that he has serious problems and it has nothing to do with discipline. He spent a lot of energy trying to hide his problems from you, but they have been accumulating since he was seven years old. He is afraid you will not understand his problems or respect them. He’s also afraid you will yell at him all the time and that he will find it impossible to live in a one bedroom apartment because he needs some space of his own. Yes, he has problems with depression, but that is minor to the other things. I’m sending a recent photo of him. He looks like that most of the time unless he tells a joke. Once in awhile he’s in a lighter mood and more like his old self. That is happening more and more lately. He has definitely been diagnosed with OCD and other anxiety disorders. Taking him out of school to home school him was not a choice I made lightly. His anxiety about school had reached a height I could no longer deal with and his daily threats of suicide were more than I could bear. He was going all day without going to the bathroom because he can’t use a public rest room. He would go directly to take a shower, not even hugging me or saying hello, as soon as he walked in the door. His comfort zone is very small. There is no rational thought to what he does. Some days he takes three showers, depending on if we’ve left the house or not. If his arm or clothing touches a door or other surface he may have a meltdown. There are times he is trapped in the bathroom for a half hour washing his hands because he has touched something or something has touched him. He went through six bars of soap in a little under two weeks. He has three bars of soap in the shower, one for me, one for his top half, and one for his bottom half. There is an extra one on the sink for washing his feet. He insists on doing the laundry and screams if I touch the basement door, even if it has been sprayed with Lysol, but he washes everything twice and only small loads because he can only use one hand to move things from the washer to the dryer. He is afraid I will contaminate the clean laundry by touching it with “dirty” hands that have touched the door, railing, or machines, or dirty clothes taking them down to be washed. I can not reconcile this with the fact that he wants the space around his couch to be dirty, with trash mixed in with his belongings. He does not understand the consequences of this or understand that when something is ruined it is because of the mess. It is totally irrational and rational people can not figure it out or reason him out of it. You will have to think of him as Monk in that he thinks everybody feels as he does and he can’t relate to anyone else’s feelings right now. You and I are Stottlemeyer and Sharona and will be frustrated as hell sometimes, but anger isn’t going to do anything but make it worse. We will need to find help as soon as possible and the whole family will need to be involved. I will see if I can get a referral. At least we will have a few more weeks with Erin. Hopefully some progress will be made and Ethan will be less anxious.
Because of his anxieties he can NOT be enrolled in a normal school setting. They don’t understand and are not equiped to deal with him. At this point he would probably end up in a school that is teaching where he should have been and he will be lost. He has had no world history past the Renaissance, no U.S. history or State history at all. Three different middle schools in three different grades have taught the same things. If we can get the depression under control to a point where he is motivated again and excited he could work at his own pace and graduate from High School early. Your support and help can make a big difference. At his age it is mostly self taught with guidance and assignments. We could find tons of great stuff to do around there that would be interesting and teach him many important things. The first thing we need is library cards.
He has become such a picky eater he makes you look easy to feed. Somehow he manages to eat nutritiously though. He favorites are salads and thank God he still likes baby carrots. We eat quite a bit of chicken and not much beef besides hamburger.
Now, about me. I can cook and do dishes with help, especially chopping stuff. I always liked it when we did dishes together. It would be fun to make soup together again. My back will never be better than it is now and anything that puts pressure or torque on my lower back is very, very bad. I can only lift about five pounds without problems. The joints in my thumbs have worn away and a cyst that was on one of my tendons in my right hand calcified into an extra bone that rubs against where the two bones meet near my wrist. I still have Vicodin and Percocet, but I don’t use it unless I do something stupid and I’m in more pain than I can bear. If it is bad enough I can’t walk straight because my balance is affected. Then I take the pain pill and sit it out. Again, your help will make the difference.
If you can read all of this and at least pretend that you would be happy to have us come up there then I have no objections. It would be better for all of us.
This was just a year after I'd had two back surgeries and I had permanent nerve damage in my lower back. A's father has never been able to accept that I am disabled and ha never accepted any responsibility for the causes of A's anxiety problems, though I believe his PTSD comes from watching his father trying to drink himself to death for three years before we finally had enough and left him. He has never been helpful or supportive. As an alcoholic he lives in a constant state of denial and can not see any point but his own and shows no respect for A or his debilities. A saw through his father at the time and insisted we move back to my boyfriend's house ten months after we'd left it because he felt safer there than with his father. A's father insists there is something I can do to suddenly make A well enough to live his life normally. A is now 18 and after three years of paying only child support and no spousal support he now wants to cut us off. We've been separated for six years and I never asked for anything for myself all that time because I knew he couldn't afford it. Now I'll only have my $300 SSI for income and they may want to take that away because A is technically an adult and can make his own way. What do I do now?
Saturday, September 1, 2012
Thursday, August 30, 2012
I admit it. I've been lax this week too. Somehow the week has been getting away from me and before I know it the sun is setting on Thursday and I haven't posted my blog entry. Things have been going rather smoothly lately and I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop. On the other hand A is up to two showers a week and they are lasting roughly five hours instead of the normal three.
We survived the cat ordeal of few weeks ago. The cats are still with us. I will fight to the death for them as I would for A, even if we have to move. They have lived here almost as long as we have, now over two years, and they haven't done anything to harm anyone. A still jumps at the sound of steps on the stairs or a knock at the door, but so far no one has wanted to come in.
All in all I should be enjoying the peace, but I've lived so long without it I don't know what to do with myself! I ask for your patience if you're a regular reader. Check back often. I'm sure I will eventually remember what day it is and post something. I do apologize because I did say I would be regular with my posts. Thank you for stopping by. Leave me a note if you've enjoyed anything I've had to say. Oops. The bathroom door just opened. I have to go cook some rice for my hungry boy.
We survived the cat ordeal of few weeks ago. The cats are still with us. I will fight to the death for them as I would for A, even if we have to move. They have lived here almost as long as we have, now over two years, and they haven't done anything to harm anyone. A still jumps at the sound of steps on the stairs or a knock at the door, but so far no one has wanted to come in.
All in all I should be enjoying the peace, but I've lived so long without it I don't know what to do with myself! I ask for your patience if you're a regular reader. Check back often. I'm sure I will eventually remember what day it is and post something. I do apologize because I did say I would be regular with my posts. Thank you for stopping by. Leave me a note if you've enjoyed anything I've had to say. Oops. The bathroom door just opened. I have to go cook some rice for my hungry boy.
Wednesday, August 22, 2012
The week got away from me and I missed last night's post. I'm sorry. Things have been so crazy for the last week and I was completely focused on a doctor's appointment tomorrow because I missed one a couple of weeks ago. We were in the middle of a crisis and I lost track of the days then too. The rest of this may explain why.
I can’t really complain too much about A and his things, because I have them too, but once in a while our things butt heads with one another and it’s awful. A has a hard time adjusting to new pets. When he was about ten we lost his favorite cat. At that point all of the cats we had were there when he was born so he grew up with them. When Natasha died though he lost his best friend. She was wonderful, didn’t play favorites, just made sure everybody got loved in turn. My husband and I were at work when A called to say something was wrong with her. I went home to check it out and took her to the vet. They wanted to keep her overnight and try giving her fluids. The next morning when they checked on her she was gone. Later that year my husband went to California to work temporarily and brought home a new cat. A wasn’t ready. He was upset that his dad would bring home a new cat to take Natasha’s place. We tried explaining that she couldn’t do that. She came to make a place of her own with people who would love her. It still took over a year before he could really be affectionate to her.
When he and I came here we had three cats with us, two he’d grown up with and the new one. The two old ones died within a month of each other. The mama ex-feral cat I have now had a batch of kittens out on our porch. All but one of them disappeared by the time they were two months old. One night she and his dad and another stray that hung out with them left the poor little guy all alone out on the porch and he was crying up a storm. Mama cat had been helping me acclimate him to touching, petting, and picking up for cuddles. He was so sad, and LOUD! So he came in the house. A didn’t like it because he was “dirty.” He’d been outside. It was over a year before he would pet him and be nice. Until then he chased him and made very unfriendly noise at him. A doesn’t remember that because they the best of pals now.
After we moved out of my boyfriend’s house I went back and caught Mamacat and her latest batch of kittens. Two out of three survived that time. Again, A can’t stand them and is mean to them because they were outside. Mama was pregnant again when I caught her and she had the kittens on the floor of my bedroom. I found homes for all but one of those kittens and one of the middle kittens I’d caught with her died when she was ten months old. That was two years ago. Now he tries to pet the youngest one and can’t figure out why she runs. I couldn’t be because he’s spent most of the last two years chasing her and yelling at her. Anyway our family now includes the one my husband brought from California, Mamacat and one “kitten” from each of her three litters. The oldest of the younguns is A’s pal, the other three are afraid of him, though Mama lets him get away with quite a bit.
Enter our landlord. We have pretty much avoided inspections because A gets freaked out and doesn’t calm down for a week at the mere prospect of someone who is not him and is not me coming into our apartment. The manager let me write a letter explaining the situation and asking that they skip our apartment. Most of the time they respect that. Well, we were out one day. Mamacat and the two were shut up in their room. It was a hot day and the place smelled. The litter boxes are right by the door as you come in. So when I went to pay my rent (instead of saying something two weeks ago when it happened) I was told they would have to go or we’d be evicted. So I am running my self ragged trying to find a place for them to go. It’s killing me because when I make a commitment to an animal it’s for life. They become like my children. Because A doesn’t like them and doesn’t want them here he’s overjoyed at the prospect of them being gone and dismayed that I’m not doing something every waking minute to get rid of them. I have called a rescue. They haven’t called me back. All they have is voicemail. The local shelter is not a no-kill for cats and I am not going to turn them over only to have two years of my hard work and love walked into a euthanasia room. Not only that they have a fee to take them. If I’m going to pay a fee I’d rather board them. That same fee will pay for three days of boarding. A says “that’s not an option.” I can’t blame him because he’s truly afraid of being homeless. I’ve called my boyfriend, who has always been on my side when it comes to cats. He was with me when both of my babies died and the age of 18 and 17. He held me while I cried. He knows. Why doesn’t my own son, who has been with me since birth and grew under my heart not understand I can’t just through them out to be eaten by coyotes or whatever is out there? They were here for TWO YEARS without a problem. What am I supposed to do? Anybody who says “They’re only cats” without suggesting a real solution will be booted off. They are not ONLY cats. They are loving, living creatures who depend on me and deserve loving homes. Why should I have to give them up because I love them and A doesn’t? Why does he get to make the rules all the time when I’m supposed to be in charge? Along with all of this I've been breaking my back trying to get as much cat hair out of the carpet as I can because I'm having the carpet cleaned. I was planning to do it anyway before the manager gave me the bad news. I seldom have enough to buy groceries let alone have the carpet cleaned.
UPDATE: I never found a home for them. The cats are back with me after being boarded for a week. My wonderful, supportive boyfriend paid the boarding fee for me when my card wouldn’t work and was frozen. That’s another $500 I owe him on top of many, many other bail-outs. A is beside himself with fear. Three days after the cats came home we got another notice and he’s still in a panic. They are installing carbon monoxide detectors in apartments that are all electric and have no CO emissions. He asks me everyday what are we going to do with the cats if there’s another inspection and when they come to install the detectors. I have no answers. I can only take it one day at a time as it presents itself. I’ve been looking for rent-to-own homes hoping we can move out of here and have the freedom to take care of ourselves and our cats without intrusion from others. My credit is so bad though I don’t know how I can do it. All I can do is hope and pray.
I can’t really complain too much about A and his things, because I have them too, but once in a while our things butt heads with one another and it’s awful. A has a hard time adjusting to new pets. When he was about ten we lost his favorite cat. At that point all of the cats we had were there when he was born so he grew up with them. When Natasha died though he lost his best friend. She was wonderful, didn’t play favorites, just made sure everybody got loved in turn. My husband and I were at work when A called to say something was wrong with her. I went home to check it out and took her to the vet. They wanted to keep her overnight and try giving her fluids. The next morning when they checked on her she was gone. Later that year my husband went to California to work temporarily and brought home a new cat. A wasn’t ready. He was upset that his dad would bring home a new cat to take Natasha’s place. We tried explaining that she couldn’t do that. She came to make a place of her own with people who would love her. It still took over a year before he could really be affectionate to her.
When he and I came here we had three cats with us, two he’d grown up with and the new one. The two old ones died within a month of each other. The mama ex-feral cat I have now had a batch of kittens out on our porch. All but one of them disappeared by the time they were two months old. One night she and his dad and another stray that hung out with them left the poor little guy all alone out on the porch and he was crying up a storm. Mama cat had been helping me acclimate him to touching, petting, and picking up for cuddles. He was so sad, and LOUD! So he came in the house. A didn’t like it because he was “dirty.” He’d been outside. It was over a year before he would pet him and be nice. Until then he chased him and made very unfriendly noise at him. A doesn’t remember that because they the best of pals now.
After we moved out of my boyfriend’s house I went back and caught Mamacat and her latest batch of kittens. Two out of three survived that time. Again, A can’t stand them and is mean to them because they were outside. Mama was pregnant again when I caught her and she had the kittens on the floor of my bedroom. I found homes for all but one of those kittens and one of the middle kittens I’d caught with her died when she was ten months old. That was two years ago. Now he tries to pet the youngest one and can’t figure out why she runs. I couldn’t be because he’s spent most of the last two years chasing her and yelling at her. Anyway our family now includes the one my husband brought from California, Mamacat and one “kitten” from each of her three litters. The oldest of the younguns is A’s pal, the other three are afraid of him, though Mama lets him get away with quite a bit.
Enter our landlord. We have pretty much avoided inspections because A gets freaked out and doesn’t calm down for a week at the mere prospect of someone who is not him and is not me coming into our apartment. The manager let me write a letter explaining the situation and asking that they skip our apartment. Most of the time they respect that. Well, we were out one day. Mamacat and the two were shut up in their room. It was a hot day and the place smelled. The litter boxes are right by the door as you come in. So when I went to pay my rent (instead of saying something two weeks ago when it happened) I was told they would have to go or we’d be evicted. So I am running my self ragged trying to find a place for them to go. It’s killing me because when I make a commitment to an animal it’s for life. They become like my children. Because A doesn’t like them and doesn’t want them here he’s overjoyed at the prospect of them being gone and dismayed that I’m not doing something every waking minute to get rid of them. I have called a rescue. They haven’t called me back. All they have is voicemail. The local shelter is not a no-kill for cats and I am not going to turn them over only to have two years of my hard work and love walked into a euthanasia room. Not only that they have a fee to take them. If I’m going to pay a fee I’d rather board them. That same fee will pay for three days of boarding. A says “that’s not an option.” I can’t blame him because he’s truly afraid of being homeless. I’ve called my boyfriend, who has always been on my side when it comes to cats. He was with me when both of my babies died and the age of 18 and 17. He held me while I cried. He knows. Why doesn’t my own son, who has been with me since birth and grew under my heart not understand I can’t just through them out to be eaten by coyotes or whatever is out there? They were here for TWO YEARS without a problem. What am I supposed to do? Anybody who says “They’re only cats” without suggesting a real solution will be booted off. They are not ONLY cats. They are loving, living creatures who depend on me and deserve loving homes. Why should I have to give them up because I love them and A doesn’t? Why does he get to make the rules all the time when I’m supposed to be in charge? Along with all of this I've been breaking my back trying to get as much cat hair out of the carpet as I can because I'm having the carpet cleaned. I was planning to do it anyway before the manager gave me the bad news. I seldom have enough to buy groceries let alone have the carpet cleaned.
UPDATE: I never found a home for them. The cats are back with me after being boarded for a week. My wonderful, supportive boyfriend paid the boarding fee for me when my card wouldn’t work and was frozen. That’s another $500 I owe him on top of many, many other bail-outs. A is beside himself with fear. Three days after the cats came home we got another notice and he’s still in a panic. They are installing carbon monoxide detectors in apartments that are all electric and have no CO emissions. He asks me everyday what are we going to do with the cats if there’s another inspection and when they come to install the detectors. I have no answers. I can only take it one day at a time as it presents itself. I’ve been looking for rent-to-own homes hoping we can move out of here and have the freedom to take care of ourselves and our cats without intrusion from others. My credit is so bad though I don’t know how I can do it. All I can do is hope and pray.
Wednesday, August 15, 2012
LONG POST ALERT!!!!
I’ve started this post over in my mind at least three times. I started out “I’ve lived in fear for most of A’s life.” Then I realized “I’ve lived in fear most of my adult life.” Then I thought about it some more and realized that I’ve really lived in fear for most of my entire life! When I was little I was as fearless as the next child. I climbed onto the fence of the bull pen and then couldn’t get down and somebody had to come and rescue me before the bull figured out I was there. I don’t remember wearing shoes in the summer until I was at least ten. I stepped on a lot of bees. And cigarette butts that were still burning.
I don’t remember feeling fear until I had to go to school. Like most kids when I got to a certain age I got excited about going to school. As a toddler I lived next to a country school house and I watched the kids at recess. I loved going shopping for pencils and stuff for school. When I got there I learned very quickly that other kids could sense a weakness and take advantage of it. I’d grown up around adults and had never been teased before. I took it very personally and cried, which naturally made things worse. After the first month of school I was transferred to a different school closer to home. The very one I had lived next door to when I was younger. We’d moved into a house “in town” when I was five and in the meantime a house had been built where our garden was, but I knew the school well.
There were two other kids who had been sent to the wrong school and we all started at the new one together. Otherwise I didn’t know any of the other kids. Because I was unfamiliar with teasing and bullying I lived in fear for my life. My mother tried to teach me the old “sticks and stones” saw, but that really didn’t make the words hurt any less. It didn’t help that I nearly died over the winter and missed a great deal of school. When I got back I had to stay in at recess to catch up on my work. I had a few friends, but only one lived near me and I was too little to walk to her house to play.
Things didn’t change much as I grew because the bullies grew too and got even bullier. In ninth grade the boy who sat across the aisle from me in study hall took a disliking to my dress and when the teacher wasn’t looking he would give me a punch to the arm. By the end of the day I had a bruise that covered my entire upper arm. Even though it was the spring and it was hot I wore long sleeves to cover it up. One of the girls in my home ec class saw part of the bruise when I rolled up my sleeves and told the teacher. The teacher made me show her the whole arm and marched me down to the principal’s office and he made me wait there while he called the boy down and made him apologize. I’m not sure what fear turns into when it gets worse than terror, but I felt it.
I spent most of high school afraid that there would never be someone for me to marry. These were the early days of women’s lib when it was hoped that I could be whatever I wanted to be, but the reality would probably be I’d end up being a wife and mother - IF I could find a husband, which didn’t seem likely there. So off to college I went. I went to a small technical college in a big city, at least it was big to me then. I’ve lived in much bigger cities since then. But I digress. There I was afraid I’d get lost. I was afraid I couldn’t find my classes or get there on time. I was afraid of so many, many things I can’t remember them all. I made it through orientation, made a new friend, and found my way home again! First day licked. Second day I walked into typing class - on time I might add - and saw the scruffiest hippiest looking man I ever saw in my life. My first thought was that it would kill my dad if I brought him home. He was in every one of my classes. I had to fight every shyness cell in my body to speak to him, but after the fourth class in a row I had to know if he was going to be in all of them, so I asked. He was. After the next day we spent every break together and started going out. We got married nine months later. Partly because we fell in love, partly because I never thought I’d find anybody else, and partly because I wanted to show everybody at home I could find somebody and get married before I was 19 or 20. The wedding was one month before I turned 19.
Then I lived in fear that he would leave me. He threatened to regularly for 23 years. Anytime he felt like I was getting beyond his control he would threaten. We actually separated several times. Once he threw me out of our apartment and I had to go back to my mother’s because he wanted me to quit my job and I didn’t want to. He got his way because I didn’t have any choice but to pack up and go 100 miles back to my parents. A month later we were back together again. We separated again nine months later for financial reasons. We each got better jobs in different places and started saving up so we could have a place of our own again. I got hurt at work, he came to see me and because we didn’t end up having sex he asked for a divorce. It felt like a punch to the gut. I’d been working so hard to get back together and he’d been dating! So I filed for divorce. He came up for the hearing, one thing led to the other and the divorce was over. Back together again. It took six months. After that he liked to pull out the D card every once in awhile. More than once I was ready to go along with it, but he wouldn’t move out. I didn’t think I could make it on my own. I had no idea about spousal support after a certain number of years.
Then A was born. Perhaps the greatest fear of all came after I found out I was expecting A. First I was afraid I couldn’t carry him the whole time. I was afraid I would lose him, like the others. A was baby number four and the only one I carried past the first two months. Then I went into preterm labor at six months! He was saved, but I lived for three months on bed rest - not as easy as you’d think! Then he didn’t move! You couldn’t make that kid move for anything! Not even the occasional foot sticking out of my belly! Nothing! After he was born I was afraid of SIDS. Then it was abduction. I never let him out of my sight. The hardest thing was baby and me classes. He was going to have to be an only. There was too much risk to my life to try again. I didn’t want him to grow up like I did without any other kids around.
Aside from the fear for A these were wonderful, happy, challenging years when we were a real family. His dad got a great job. We bought a beautiful house and two cars. Dad left for work at a little before seven. A was pre-programmed to wake up at 6:30 (I swear he was born waking up at 6:30 every morning!). He would climb out of his crib and race down the hall to see his dad before he left for work. He went to a day care where he was well watched and protected.
We lived in a small town, the kind where everybody knows everybody else, even if it isn’t by name. They had a fall festival with a one K race for kids. A wanted to run in that race so badly. He was an athletic kid who loved to run and climb on anything, including the piles of dirt and machines at the construction site across the street - under strict supervision! He trained for that race by running around our block with me following him. The day of the race comes and dad picks a big fight over whether he should run or not. Dad says no. I don’t want to let him down so we leave dad in a snit. Problem: the plan was for Dad to be on one end of the race and I was going to be on the other. Now there’s only one of us. There is a landmark at the end of the race and A is told to go to that landmark and not leave it until I get there. He knows about stranger danger. I can walk faster than a four year old can run can’t I? It’s only three blocks. I take photos of the race starting then get out of the way and head for the other end at a fast pace. I don’t make it in time for the end of the race. A is no where to be found. I find neighbors and ask. They haven’t seen him. I panic. I walk back to the other end in case he’s gone to find me. No A. Back to the finish where I fall apart asking everybody I can find. Finally a policeman is coming to help when someone asks if that’s him across the street. IT IS! I run to him crying my eyes out in relief. He can’t imagine what’s wrong and the woman holding his hand tries to explain. She saw him faltering toward the end and went out to encourage him, then took him to look for me. I must have passed them at least twice. I can’t believe what I’m hearing, but he’s safe in my arms trying to comfort me, to get me to stop crying because it’s ok. He never leaves my sight again until he’s 13 at the county fair with a group of friends and still I was afraid the whole time!. I can still feel that panic and terror today as I’m writing this.
I don’t think I’ve ever recovered from that sick feeling of terror. It never leaves me. Even when I leave him outside in the car to wait for me while I shop of get him a book or get our food. He’s almost 18 and I don’t think I will ever stop being afraid that he’ll hurt himself and I won’t be there to help him. I know he can defend himself now and he can call for help. He’s six and a half feet tall and weighs nearly 200 pounds! He knows how to defend himself. I think I’ll be afraid for him until the day I die.
I’ve started this post over in my mind at least three times. I started out “I’ve lived in fear for most of A’s life.” Then I realized “I’ve lived in fear most of my adult life.” Then I thought about it some more and realized that I’ve really lived in fear for most of my entire life! When I was little I was as fearless as the next child. I climbed onto the fence of the bull pen and then couldn’t get down and somebody had to come and rescue me before the bull figured out I was there. I don’t remember wearing shoes in the summer until I was at least ten. I stepped on a lot of bees. And cigarette butts that were still burning.
I don’t remember feeling fear until I had to go to school. Like most kids when I got to a certain age I got excited about going to school. As a toddler I lived next to a country school house and I watched the kids at recess. I loved going shopping for pencils and stuff for school. When I got there I learned very quickly that other kids could sense a weakness and take advantage of it. I’d grown up around adults and had never been teased before. I took it very personally and cried, which naturally made things worse. After the first month of school I was transferred to a different school closer to home. The very one I had lived next door to when I was younger. We’d moved into a house “in town” when I was five and in the meantime a house had been built where our garden was, but I knew the school well.
There were two other kids who had been sent to the wrong school and we all started at the new one together. Otherwise I didn’t know any of the other kids. Because I was unfamiliar with teasing and bullying I lived in fear for my life. My mother tried to teach me the old “sticks and stones” saw, but that really didn’t make the words hurt any less. It didn’t help that I nearly died over the winter and missed a great deal of school. When I got back I had to stay in at recess to catch up on my work. I had a few friends, but only one lived near me and I was too little to walk to her house to play.
Things didn’t change much as I grew because the bullies grew too and got even bullier. In ninth grade the boy who sat across the aisle from me in study hall took a disliking to my dress and when the teacher wasn’t looking he would give me a punch to the arm. By the end of the day I had a bruise that covered my entire upper arm. Even though it was the spring and it was hot I wore long sleeves to cover it up. One of the girls in my home ec class saw part of the bruise when I rolled up my sleeves and told the teacher. The teacher made me show her the whole arm and marched me down to the principal’s office and he made me wait there while he called the boy down and made him apologize. I’m not sure what fear turns into when it gets worse than terror, but I felt it.
I spent most of high school afraid that there would never be someone for me to marry. These were the early days of women’s lib when it was hoped that I could be whatever I wanted to be, but the reality would probably be I’d end up being a wife and mother - IF I could find a husband, which didn’t seem likely there. So off to college I went. I went to a small technical college in a big city, at least it was big to me then. I’ve lived in much bigger cities since then. But I digress. There I was afraid I’d get lost. I was afraid I couldn’t find my classes or get there on time. I was afraid of so many, many things I can’t remember them all. I made it through orientation, made a new friend, and found my way home again! First day licked. Second day I walked into typing class - on time I might add - and saw the scruffiest hippiest looking man I ever saw in my life. My first thought was that it would kill my dad if I brought him home. He was in every one of my classes. I had to fight every shyness cell in my body to speak to him, but after the fourth class in a row I had to know if he was going to be in all of them, so I asked. He was. After the next day we spent every break together and started going out. We got married nine months later. Partly because we fell in love, partly because I never thought I’d find anybody else, and partly because I wanted to show everybody at home I could find somebody and get married before I was 19 or 20. The wedding was one month before I turned 19.
Then I lived in fear that he would leave me. He threatened to regularly for 23 years. Anytime he felt like I was getting beyond his control he would threaten. We actually separated several times. Once he threw me out of our apartment and I had to go back to my mother’s because he wanted me to quit my job and I didn’t want to. He got his way because I didn’t have any choice but to pack up and go 100 miles back to my parents. A month later we were back together again. We separated again nine months later for financial reasons. We each got better jobs in different places and started saving up so we could have a place of our own again. I got hurt at work, he came to see me and because we didn’t end up having sex he asked for a divorce. It felt like a punch to the gut. I’d been working so hard to get back together and he’d been dating! So I filed for divorce. He came up for the hearing, one thing led to the other and the divorce was over. Back together again. It took six months. After that he liked to pull out the D card every once in awhile. More than once I was ready to go along with it, but he wouldn’t move out. I didn’t think I could make it on my own. I had no idea about spousal support after a certain number of years.
Then A was born. Perhaps the greatest fear of all came after I found out I was expecting A. First I was afraid I couldn’t carry him the whole time. I was afraid I would lose him, like the others. A was baby number four and the only one I carried past the first two months. Then I went into preterm labor at six months! He was saved, but I lived for three months on bed rest - not as easy as you’d think! Then he didn’t move! You couldn’t make that kid move for anything! Not even the occasional foot sticking out of my belly! Nothing! After he was born I was afraid of SIDS. Then it was abduction. I never let him out of my sight. The hardest thing was baby and me classes. He was going to have to be an only. There was too much risk to my life to try again. I didn’t want him to grow up like I did without any other kids around.
Aside from the fear for A these were wonderful, happy, challenging years when we were a real family. His dad got a great job. We bought a beautiful house and two cars. Dad left for work at a little before seven. A was pre-programmed to wake up at 6:30 (I swear he was born waking up at 6:30 every morning!). He would climb out of his crib and race down the hall to see his dad before he left for work. He went to a day care where he was well watched and protected.
We lived in a small town, the kind where everybody knows everybody else, even if it isn’t by name. They had a fall festival with a one K race for kids. A wanted to run in that race so badly. He was an athletic kid who loved to run and climb on anything, including the piles of dirt and machines at the construction site across the street - under strict supervision! He trained for that race by running around our block with me following him. The day of the race comes and dad picks a big fight over whether he should run or not. Dad says no. I don’t want to let him down so we leave dad in a snit. Problem: the plan was for Dad to be on one end of the race and I was going to be on the other. Now there’s only one of us. There is a landmark at the end of the race and A is told to go to that landmark and not leave it until I get there. He knows about stranger danger. I can walk faster than a four year old can run can’t I? It’s only three blocks. I take photos of the race starting then get out of the way and head for the other end at a fast pace. I don’t make it in time for the end of the race. A is no where to be found. I find neighbors and ask. They haven’t seen him. I panic. I walk back to the other end in case he’s gone to find me. No A. Back to the finish where I fall apart asking everybody I can find. Finally a policeman is coming to help when someone asks if that’s him across the street. IT IS! I run to him crying my eyes out in relief. He can’t imagine what’s wrong and the woman holding his hand tries to explain. She saw him faltering toward the end and went out to encourage him, then took him to look for me. I must have passed them at least twice. I can’t believe what I’m hearing, but he’s safe in my arms trying to comfort me, to get me to stop crying because it’s ok. He never leaves my sight again until he’s 13 at the county fair with a group of friends and still I was afraid the whole time!. I can still feel that panic and terror today as I’m writing this.
I don’t think I’ve ever recovered from that sick feeling of terror. It never leaves me. Even when I leave him outside in the car to wait for me while I shop of get him a book or get our food. He’s almost 18 and I don’t think I will ever stop being afraid that he’ll hurt himself and I won’t be there to help him. I know he can defend himself now and he can call for help. He’s six and a half feet tall and weighs nearly 200 pounds! He knows how to defend himself. I think I’ll be afraid for him until the day I die.
Tuesday, August 7, 2012
Yesterday something fell off a tub in the hallway as he was walking by and it touched him! That tantrum because he didn’t know what to do to fix it caused 7 holes to be punched in a bifold door in the hall. That wasn’t enough damage so he cut his arm. I can’t take this pressure! I know it only lasts a little while.
By the time I got back from the store with the underwear he was all smiles. He showed me the difference between the two brands of underwear and they were significant. The new mediums were larger than the old ones, yet smaller than the old/new large. Hopefully they will fit and I won’t have to hear him complain and cry for the next two weeks. Since there basically are only two brands I don’t know what I will do if they don’t fit or “wear funny.”
I honestly don’t know how I avoid killing us both to end the misery and the hopelessness I feel. I was feeling so hopeful. He had been doing better, going into the book store and the grocery store, talking about getting his GED and a job. There hadn’t been a tantrum in nearly a week. He started learning to knit. Now I feel like the whole thing is in the dumpster. I feel like I’m stuck in this apartment until I die because I can’t afford to pay for the damage he’s caused. I feel like I can’t mention any progress because it will all go away if I do.
Wednesday, August 1, 2012
At the peak of A’s, I don’t know what to call it, OCD activity? We could hardly walk through the living room for the paper, ruined books, playing cards, and other detritus that he just dropped or flung on the floor. He didn’t keep track of his belongings and most of the time if it was on the floor it was dirty and therefore garbage, but if I touched it he’d have a screaming raging fit and I’d have to wash my hands, repeatedly.
He slept on the coffee table because he could wash it every day and you can’t do that with a mattress. He took three and four hour showers every day. All of his bedding and any clothes that were on the floor had to be washed everyday, whether he’d worn them or not. And he wanted every load to be washed twice. The kitchen light had to remain on all the time as well as the one above the front door. He would not eat anything that my boyfriend cooked. I would either have to buy or cook him something else. All of this while recovering from back surgery. He did nothing to help. He was too busy trying to maintain some kind of comfort zone all the while adding to the pile of garbage that was causing everyone else so much discomfort.
He would get an idea for something and obsess about it until I got the materials he needed. Then if it didn’t work there would be a meltdown and the stuff would just end up in the pile across the room. When I couldn’t stand it anymore it would take nearly a week, on my hands and knees, sorting through the piles, to clean just the one room.
When we moved into our own apartment it took me two weeks to clean the living room and another two weeks to clean his bedroom, which I was not allowed into when we lived there as it was a “dirty” area and he wouldn’t know what I touched or moved. He would go in once or twice a week to sleep in a cleared out space that he had to build himself a “nest” for piling blankets and sleeping.
He was like a toddler in that anything he wanted or thought should be his became his. After we moved and I was cleaning his room I found so many of my things scattered around the room under piles of clothes and books. Things he had no business touching or unpacking, but he thought were fair game because they were in HIS room so they must be his. We had briefly moved back to our old home and things I’d packed to send for later were put in his room so they would be out of the way. When we came back I didn’t get the chance to take care of them before he decided the room was off limits. I thought they were safe in there, silly me. One of the things was a family Bible, over 150 years old, that was in plastic box for safekeeping. I found it in several pieces scattered around the room.
His anger knew no bounds. I compare him to the Incredible Hulk now, but he was much worse then. Several of the walls in my boyfriend’s house have holes punched in them by A’s fist. My computer desk, which matched my boyfriend’s and was an IKEA closeout, has holes in the top that were made by both A’s head and his elbows. He started playing Go, an Asian board game similar to chess, online and when he lost he would take it out on my desk.
He always expects to achieve high results on everything, even if he’s only a beginner or he’s trying something new. He expects it to work perfectly from the first time. He’s tried games, magic, origami, inventing. He does brilliantly at everything, especially once he gets the hang of it. The problem is getting him through the beginning stages. Because he’s so intelligent, he seems to think he should just be able to do whatever it is the first time and not need practice.
Since we have been on our own - two years now - he has cut his showers down to once or twice a week. He no longer needs to wash his bed every time he remakes it, though he is still more comfortable sleeping on the board than on a mattress. He doesn’t always smash things to oblivion, though sometimes... His sleeping area is neater. He still can’t recognize the difference between a clean room and a cluttered one, but he cut down on the scrap paper pile. He still asks me if his hands are clean after washing them. He has cut down on the number of blankets and sheets on his bed so it only takes about three loads to wash them all. It used to be five. However things still get “dirty” by some pretty confusing ways. Last week he dropped a book on his lap and because he thinks he leaks urine the book had to be thrown out because it got “dirty” by falling into his lap. Things aren’t as severe as they were, but they can get pretty “different” sometimes. As more “things” go away others crop up, but they are getting fewer and farther between and easier to deal with. Not long ago he would not have even thought about getting out of the car when we went somewhere. In the last few weeks he has gone into Walmart (at 4 A.M.) and the book store several times. He even went into the grocery store with me one day. He’s talking about taking the class to get his GED, which he should have had a year ago, but couldn’t even think about going into a classroom, and getting a job at Barnes & Noble. I’m not sure what would happen if he didn’t get a job there, or if he did! But he’s thinking about it and that’s what counts. Stepping forward, even if it’s with baby steps, at whatever pace he sets, as long as it’s forward.
Wednesday, July 25, 2012
For someone who was born so easily A has been a real pain in the keester since then. Actually the lead up to his birth wasn’t all that easy. In fact it was anything but.
My husband and I had been married for 17 years. In that time we had separated and gotten back together at least three times, had lived in nine different places, both large cities and small towns, moved 13 times, had ten cats, gone through over ten years of fertility tests and treatments and lost three babies. At the time I got pregnant with A we were in the midst of another move. My husband decided he liked his old employer, whom he’d left just 14 months earlier, better than his current employer, which was probably the best one he’d had in 17 years. I had just returned from the pestilent ridden city we’d left 14 months earlier where I’d taken a bus to look for an apartment.
That trip is practically a post in itself. On the way out there I’d been sitting next to a drug dealer who was transporting product to the city we were bound for when he was arrested half way through the trip. On the way back I was sitting next to a smelly, dirty drunk and behind a young couple with a young baby who spent most of the trip sleeping and ignoring the baby. They had been on the bus for two days and had to go several hundred miles yet when I got off.
Anyway, the employer decided that my husband was so valuable that they broke precedent and hired him back. I drove him the several hundred miles to settle into our apartment with what we could carry in the car to start his job and drove back to pack our condo and drive back again two weeks later. On the way back to the new apartment I became ill, chalked it up to allergies from the dust from packing the car and cleaning the condo, and stopped several times to throw up. I wasn’t pleased to be moving back to that particular city so that might have had something to do with it as well. I had been treated for an ulcer a few months before that and thought that was part of it as well.
After we got settled in the apartment life evened out and I still experienced nausea from time to time. The scent of my husband’s aftershave seemed to bring on a bout of vomiting every morning, but I’d always been sensitive to scents so I didn’t think anything of it. We’d given up on ever having children and stopped all the fertility stuff and I figured the nausea was just more problems with the ulcer. A barium test a few months before had shown it was worse so it made sense. I went to the doctor and scheduled an endoscopy. On the day of the endoscopy they asked the normal questions including the one about when my last period was. I did a quick count back. My periods had always been irregular and it wasn’t odd that I’d skip a month, but it had been three months! They insisted on a pregnancy test and I was sure it would be negative, but it was positive! Since our sex life had slowed down naturally over the years I knew when I conceived. I was nearly through my first trimester. I’d nearly missed it!
Physical activity and I have never been companions. We’re hardly casual acquaintances, but I wanted to be as healthy as possible so I signed up for water aerobics. I was doing pretty well until one day I got severe abdominal cramps in the pool. That scared the crap out of me.
About the same time my hubby decided that he would rather be living somewhere else. Seems he got the idea he wanted to die and this was the place to do it. He had been sure he was dying since we met. He was 20 at the time and sure he wouldn’t survive to see thirty. He has a death wish that refuses to come true. Anyway the baby had given him a reason to live so we packed up again. Luckily most everything was still packed. Off to the new place for a job interview and house search. Houses were selling like ice cream on a hot day. We made three offers and were outbid on all of them. Soooo we decided on an apartment temporarily. It was a military area so you could find an apartment with a month to month lease with a three month minimum. So pack up the car and the cats and follow the movers on to the next new place.
The doctors I went to at the beginning of my pregnancy didn’t seem to think there were any concerns with a 37 year old woman having her fourth pregnancy, the first one to go past the first two months, so I went to my first appointment with my new doctors without any preconceived notions of disaster. From the first visit they told me about being cautious and the dangers of having my first baby at my age. There were tests and ultrasounds and classes and then another specter reared it’s ugly head. In a class for high risk pregnancies I met a woman who was expecting her second set of twins. She had gestational diabetes and tested her blood right there in the class. She had to test six times a day. She’d had it with her first set of twins too. It wasn’t long before I had to endure the test for gestational diabetes myself. Of course it was positive. In the beginning it was only a dietary change, but I wasn’t gaining weight so they tried insulin. No matter how much I took there was no weight gain and I had terrible hypoglycemia. Yet every month I got a threat from my doctor, no weight gain and I’d go back on insulin. So I’d gain a pound. Then the next month the pound would be gone. It was the only time in my life I had trouble gaining weight.
I kept looking for a house, looking through the paper and driving around. Hubby had certain requirements, which I’m sure had something to do with him not wanting to buy a house. One day I found one with all of his requirements. It was a bit odd, but in an interesting way. We went to see it and made an offer the same day. It needed a little work, but nothing we couldn’t handle. We made a list and I started getting bids from contractors. Most of it was out of reach so we broke It down into manageable pieces and started painting and cleaning.
I was in the grocery store checking out one Saturday morning. I was almost exactly six months along. As I was bagging the groceries I got a hard cramp in my abdomen that nearly took me off my feet. Being the idiot I am I finished packing my groceries and took them out to the car, experiencing at least two more of the cramps. Hubby was downtown at a piano lesson so I drove to the music store to get him. There wasn’t a place to park so I had to go around the corner. On the way to the music store I had to go to the bathroom really bad so I stopped in a restaurant on the way to use the bathroom. When I got to the music store he had already left and the cramps were worse. I nearly sat down on the floor. Do you think I asked for an ambulance? I was about to when he came back in the store. We could get going faster than an ambulance could get there so we walked to the car and went straight to the hospital. I was in labor. They stopped the labor, but I was put on bed rest for the rest of my pregnancy.
We were in the middle of painting the inside of the house and putting in woodwork. That ended my involvement with redecorating. Hubby did what was left himself. We moved into the house with the help of friends. The day we moved in the basement stairs were missing. They’d been taken out the day before and new ones weren’t going in until after we’d moved in. So practically everything was piled in the diningroom.
You’d think that someone who was no friend to physical activity would have no trouble laying in bed for three months, but it is not easy! The only day I was allowed to get up was the day I saw my doctor, and that changed to once a week. We had food delivered every day. It was a very very long three months. Two months out my husband did something that both surprised and shocked me in it’s show of consideration for my safety. He moved the guest bed downstairs to the dining room so I didn’t have to come down the stairs in the middle of the night. We only had one bathroom, downstairs, and our staircase was less than safe. It was one of the things on our list that needed to be fixed.
Due date was fast approaching. The bags were packed. We were down to two days when I went to my weekly doctor’s appointment. I’d been having problems with pre-eclampsia, a blood pressure problem during pregnancy. So far it had been under control, but this time the nurse took my blood pressure and went out to get the doctor. He came in and asked me if I’d like to have the baby right away? He wanted me to go right over to the hospital to have labor induced. I wanted to get my husband. Apparently my blood pressure was so high he didn’t want me upset so he relented and let me go get my husband.
We got to the hospital two hours later, labor was induced. After the first few contractions Dad took a powder to the waiting room. I had a hired labor coach. Things moved along so quickly I never got my epidermal. Six hours and three pushes later I had my son.
He came into the world at the beginning of the current wave of breast-feeding enthusiasm. They pushed breast feeding to such an extent that I hadn’t even bought bottles. I thought it would be the easiest thing in the world. Women have been breast feeding for millennia - since the first baby! Nope. It took two days for him to attach once. Then we were out of the hospital and home. After hours of trying and many, many phone calls he latched on to one of them. I didn’t want to take a chance on him not latching on to the other breast and getting too little so I didn’t switch.
Then the colic kicked in. We didn’t sleep until early morning and hubby’s family was coming to see the baby. Four hours. We got four hours sleep before we had to get up and greet them. Thankfully they stayed the night and my sister-in-lay got up to take care of the baby so I could sleep.
We went out and bought bottles and formula and I pumped as much as I could to mix in. He threw it up. It took months to figure out he was allergic to formula and we had to use soy formula. I got an electric pump from the hospital and spent the time he was asleep pumping. By the end of the first week my legs were killing me from taking care of him all day, trying to clean, do dishes, and laundry at night, and walking the floor with him. 21 days after birth I couldn’t get the milk to come out. I had to hook up to the pump and have my husband stroke my breasts to force it out. When we were done that was it. Not one more drop of breast milk. And still the kid threw up a third of what he ate. Trips to the hospital, trying everything we could figure out to do for the colic, I was exhausted.
Baptism day, one month later and trying to get him to eat. “You’re starving him!” He’s not getting enough to eat” advice from my family. He takes a whole bottle for the first time. Hubby takes him back to our room to change him and takes forever. I go to see what’s happening and he’s changing his clothes. Two thirds of that bottle is on the back of his shirt. No cause is ever found for the vomiting or the colic.
The colic is solved accidentally at a visit to Grandma’s when I’m inspired to sit him in the warm tub after his bath. He’s a month and a half old. And I’d been afraid to put him in the water to give him his bath. He can’t sit up yet, but I can sit him up in the tub of warm water. For the first time he goes right to sleep and there is peace and rest. He sleeps through the night for the first time.
My husband and I had been married for 17 years. In that time we had separated and gotten back together at least three times, had lived in nine different places, both large cities and small towns, moved 13 times, had ten cats, gone through over ten years of fertility tests and treatments and lost three babies. At the time I got pregnant with A we were in the midst of another move. My husband decided he liked his old employer, whom he’d left just 14 months earlier, better than his current employer, which was probably the best one he’d had in 17 years. I had just returned from the pestilent ridden city we’d left 14 months earlier where I’d taken a bus to look for an apartment.
That trip is practically a post in itself. On the way out there I’d been sitting next to a drug dealer who was transporting product to the city we were bound for when he was arrested half way through the trip. On the way back I was sitting next to a smelly, dirty drunk and behind a young couple with a young baby who spent most of the trip sleeping and ignoring the baby. They had been on the bus for two days and had to go several hundred miles yet when I got off.
Anyway, the employer decided that my husband was so valuable that they broke precedent and hired him back. I drove him the several hundred miles to settle into our apartment with what we could carry in the car to start his job and drove back to pack our condo and drive back again two weeks later. On the way back to the new apartment I became ill, chalked it up to allergies from the dust from packing the car and cleaning the condo, and stopped several times to throw up. I wasn’t pleased to be moving back to that particular city so that might have had something to do with it as well. I had been treated for an ulcer a few months before that and thought that was part of it as well.
After we got settled in the apartment life evened out and I still experienced nausea from time to time. The scent of my husband’s aftershave seemed to bring on a bout of vomiting every morning, but I’d always been sensitive to scents so I didn’t think anything of it. We’d given up on ever having children and stopped all the fertility stuff and I figured the nausea was just more problems with the ulcer. A barium test a few months before had shown it was worse so it made sense. I went to the doctor and scheduled an endoscopy. On the day of the endoscopy they asked the normal questions including the one about when my last period was. I did a quick count back. My periods had always been irregular and it wasn’t odd that I’d skip a month, but it had been three months! They insisted on a pregnancy test and I was sure it would be negative, but it was positive! Since our sex life had slowed down naturally over the years I knew when I conceived. I was nearly through my first trimester. I’d nearly missed it!
Physical activity and I have never been companions. We’re hardly casual acquaintances, but I wanted to be as healthy as possible so I signed up for water aerobics. I was doing pretty well until one day I got severe abdominal cramps in the pool. That scared the crap out of me.
About the same time my hubby decided that he would rather be living somewhere else. Seems he got the idea he wanted to die and this was the place to do it. He had been sure he was dying since we met. He was 20 at the time and sure he wouldn’t survive to see thirty. He has a death wish that refuses to come true. Anyway the baby had given him a reason to live so we packed up again. Luckily most everything was still packed. Off to the new place for a job interview and house search. Houses were selling like ice cream on a hot day. We made three offers and were outbid on all of them. Soooo we decided on an apartment temporarily. It was a military area so you could find an apartment with a month to month lease with a three month minimum. So pack up the car and the cats and follow the movers on to the next new place.
The doctors I went to at the beginning of my pregnancy didn’t seem to think there were any concerns with a 37 year old woman having her fourth pregnancy, the first one to go past the first two months, so I went to my first appointment with my new doctors without any preconceived notions of disaster. From the first visit they told me about being cautious and the dangers of having my first baby at my age. There were tests and ultrasounds and classes and then another specter reared it’s ugly head. In a class for high risk pregnancies I met a woman who was expecting her second set of twins. She had gestational diabetes and tested her blood right there in the class. She had to test six times a day. She’d had it with her first set of twins too. It wasn’t long before I had to endure the test for gestational diabetes myself. Of course it was positive. In the beginning it was only a dietary change, but I wasn’t gaining weight so they tried insulin. No matter how much I took there was no weight gain and I had terrible hypoglycemia. Yet every month I got a threat from my doctor, no weight gain and I’d go back on insulin. So I’d gain a pound. Then the next month the pound would be gone. It was the only time in my life I had trouble gaining weight.
I kept looking for a house, looking through the paper and driving around. Hubby had certain requirements, which I’m sure had something to do with him not wanting to buy a house. One day I found one with all of his requirements. It was a bit odd, but in an interesting way. We went to see it and made an offer the same day. It needed a little work, but nothing we couldn’t handle. We made a list and I started getting bids from contractors. Most of it was out of reach so we broke It down into manageable pieces and started painting and cleaning.
I was in the grocery store checking out one Saturday morning. I was almost exactly six months along. As I was bagging the groceries I got a hard cramp in my abdomen that nearly took me off my feet. Being the idiot I am I finished packing my groceries and took them out to the car, experiencing at least two more of the cramps. Hubby was downtown at a piano lesson so I drove to the music store to get him. There wasn’t a place to park so I had to go around the corner. On the way to the music store I had to go to the bathroom really bad so I stopped in a restaurant on the way to use the bathroom. When I got to the music store he had already left and the cramps were worse. I nearly sat down on the floor. Do you think I asked for an ambulance? I was about to when he came back in the store. We could get going faster than an ambulance could get there so we walked to the car and went straight to the hospital. I was in labor. They stopped the labor, but I was put on bed rest for the rest of my pregnancy.
We were in the middle of painting the inside of the house and putting in woodwork. That ended my involvement with redecorating. Hubby did what was left himself. We moved into the house with the help of friends. The day we moved in the basement stairs were missing. They’d been taken out the day before and new ones weren’t going in until after we’d moved in. So practically everything was piled in the diningroom.
You’d think that someone who was no friend to physical activity would have no trouble laying in bed for three months, but it is not easy! The only day I was allowed to get up was the day I saw my doctor, and that changed to once a week. We had food delivered every day. It was a very very long three months. Two months out my husband did something that both surprised and shocked me in it’s show of consideration for my safety. He moved the guest bed downstairs to the dining room so I didn’t have to come down the stairs in the middle of the night. We only had one bathroom, downstairs, and our staircase was less than safe. It was one of the things on our list that needed to be fixed.
Due date was fast approaching. The bags were packed. We were down to two days when I went to my weekly doctor’s appointment. I’d been having problems with pre-eclampsia, a blood pressure problem during pregnancy. So far it had been under control, but this time the nurse took my blood pressure and went out to get the doctor. He came in and asked me if I’d like to have the baby right away? He wanted me to go right over to the hospital to have labor induced. I wanted to get my husband. Apparently my blood pressure was so high he didn’t want me upset so he relented and let me go get my husband.
We got to the hospital two hours later, labor was induced. After the first few contractions Dad took a powder to the waiting room. I had a hired labor coach. Things moved along so quickly I never got my epidermal. Six hours and three pushes later I had my son.
He came into the world at the beginning of the current wave of breast-feeding enthusiasm. They pushed breast feeding to such an extent that I hadn’t even bought bottles. I thought it would be the easiest thing in the world. Women have been breast feeding for millennia - since the first baby! Nope. It took two days for him to attach once. Then we were out of the hospital and home. After hours of trying and many, many phone calls he latched on to one of them. I didn’t want to take a chance on him not latching on to the other breast and getting too little so I didn’t switch.
Then the colic kicked in. We didn’t sleep until early morning and hubby’s family was coming to see the baby. Four hours. We got four hours sleep before we had to get up and greet them. Thankfully they stayed the night and my sister-in-lay got up to take care of the baby so I could sleep.
We went out and bought bottles and formula and I pumped as much as I could to mix in. He threw it up. It took months to figure out he was allergic to formula and we had to use soy formula. I got an electric pump from the hospital and spent the time he was asleep pumping. By the end of the first week my legs were killing me from taking care of him all day, trying to clean, do dishes, and laundry at night, and walking the floor with him. 21 days after birth I couldn’t get the milk to come out. I had to hook up to the pump and have my husband stroke my breasts to force it out. When we were done that was it. Not one more drop of breast milk. And still the kid threw up a third of what he ate. Trips to the hospital, trying everything we could figure out to do for the colic, I was exhausted.
Baptism day, one month later and trying to get him to eat. “You’re starving him!” He’s not getting enough to eat” advice from my family. He takes a whole bottle for the first time. Hubby takes him back to our room to change him and takes forever. I go to see what’s happening and he’s changing his clothes. Two thirds of that bottle is on the back of his shirt. No cause is ever found for the vomiting or the colic.
The colic is solved accidentally at a visit to Grandma’s when I’m inspired to sit him in the warm tub after his bath. He’s a month and a half old. And I’d been afraid to put him in the water to give him his bath. He can’t sit up yet, but I can sit him up in the tub of warm water. For the first time he goes right to sleep and there is peace and rest. He sleeps through the night for the first time.
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