Project One, Part Two

I am a great and wonderful worrier.  The best there is, really.  I've inherited it from my mother.  For example, a couple of weeks ago I bought a Groupon to the Franklin Institute.  You would think this would be a relatively innocent piece of information to share with a person.  Not my mother.  She knows Groupons expire.  I have been asked every weekend since, sometimes several times, when we are going to use the Groupon.  She's worried that it will expire and we won't have used it.  It keeps her up at night.  I luckily am not to this stage of worrying in my life.  I suppose when all my children are gone and have families of their own and there isn't all that much left to worry about, I'll worry about if their Groupons will expire before they have a chance to use them.

My current worrying expertise, other than finances, is what I will say when someone will, eventually, affront me.  Over the past six years or so I have had people, people who are close friends and family, say some pretty awful things to me.  I won't go into details now.  I am left speechless after the stinging comments. Often it takes me days to even process that what they said to me is as awful as it is.  So, now if I find myself coming into contact with such people I try to mentally prepare for the insults and cruelty.  They, of course, don't attack when I'm prepared, but prepared I am often at the expense of precious sleep.  I'm working on this.  (Also, please don't ask why these toxic people are in my life.  They are because they have to be.  That is all I will say for now.  I have limited my contact as much as humanly possible without also hurting the people I love the most, my husband and children, and it is for them that I continue to endure these people in my life.)

Unfortunately, this summer has presented me with some bigger worries in my life, things actually worry-worthy, not that worrying makes them any less of a concern, but they are real just the same.  They leave me feeling a bit out of control, and if you haven't figured out by now, I'm definitely a Type-A personality, a.k.a. control friek.  As I said in a previous post, this whole blog is based on the fact that there are certain things in my life right now that are on hold, and yes, I am OK with that, but it doesn't make it any easier to accept and deal with it on those bad days.  My career, if you can even call it that, is possibly non-existent.  And there are some things going on with my kids, my oldest in particular, that keeps me up at night.

So, this is where Part Two of the challenge comes in.  I'm not a particularly religious person, and I compare myself with some pretty heavy hitters.  My college roommate volunteered a year of her life to a Catholic charity working in inner-city Chicago with under-privileged preschool children.  My cousin converted to Mennonite, lives in Lancaster County, PA, and attends regular prayer meetings and bible studies.  She even wears the bonnet.  I am not so dedicated a soul, but I do attend church somewhat regularly and have a firm, solid relationship with God, though not as educated as some.  Sometimes I forget this.  I forget that I have these beliefs and have fostered a relationship with God.  I forget to pray.  And you know what?  Prayer works!  Big time.

Case in point, three years ago I was pregnant with Milo and we were about to have the twenty week ultrasound to find out if the baby was healthy and the sex.  A close family member made an awful comment pretty much discounting this baby's worth and place in the family.  (Again, I won't go into details.)  This wasn't the first time this family member hurt me, but to say something so horrific about an unborn child crossed the line.  I did confront her, but it made no difference; in fact, I saw that her utter lack of remorse showed the kind of person she really was.  A couple months later she was diagnosed with cancer.  Sadly, after the cancer diagnosis, she still found the time to commit an act of revenge against me that in turn was pretty horrific as it affected not me, but a friend, almost leaving her unemployed. (Sorry, no details here either.)

Here I was faced with quite a dilemma.  I wouldn't wish cancer on my worst enemy, but now a person who quite frankly displayed sociopathic tendencies towards me was battling cancer.  The family needed me to be supportive, and I felt nothing but indifference.  Indifference, by the way, is a much worse emotion to have. Really it's a lack of emotion, and how do you work through emotions that aren't there?  I wasn't happy that she was sick.  I had stopped being angry with this person because I now knew what she was.  If I had been angry, maybe I would have felt gladness at her misfortune.  Anger is a powerful emotion, and as wrong as it would have been for me to feel those things, I at least would have been able to acknowledge them and work through it.  My emotional attachment to the woman was completely severed, but here was this long process of surgeries, chemotherapy, and radiation sitting before me that the entire family would need to endure.  Being a fairly empathetic person, I had never experienced emotional detachment to a person, especially one who was so close to me.

I turned it all over to God.  I literally said, "God, I'm giving this to You.  This is way too big for me to handle."  I turned her over to God.  I turned the family over to God.  I asked God to deal with her cruelties to me.  I asked God to bless her through the treatment because no one should suffer through that.  And finally I asked God to help me find my place in offering support where I could.  He listened.  It was just that simple.  People often ask God for a sign.  He sends me "signs" all the time.  It's the same sign over and over again.  I turn something over to Him, and I'm assuming when he gets the message and puts it on his "To Do" list, I suddenly am able to fall asleep.

Despite God's constant answering of prayers, I still forget to turn it over.  So for the month of September, as I complete one yoga circuit each day to strengthen and heal my body, I will offer a prayer to God to strengthen and heal my soul.  I'm pretty sure as far as my wish to move or to have more money, God has said, "Hold on.  Not right now."  So, this blog, these challenges, is me finally saying, "OK, I'm listening."

Project One, Part One

If anyone wants to make sure their teenage daughter or son doesn't become a mommy or daddy, send them my way.  Basically, pregnancy broke me.  I knew back pain came with pregnancy, but no one tells you about the back pain, hip pain, and pelvic pain.  Apparently, the hormones partying in your body during pregnancy stretch your ligaments to prepare for child birth.  This I didn't know.  The hormones also made me a volcano of vomit. My first pregnancy was so bad they had to give me a special medicine to stop the vomiting.  I had morning sickness all day, every day of that first pregnancy.

When I first became pregnant I had a vision of doing prenatal yoga and taking longs walks in my cute maternity workout clothes, drinking a homemade smoothie, recipe found in the baby books I would carry with me and read on a park bench.  The actual vision that others saw was me bent over at a ninety degree angle attempting to walk anywhere shoving a piece of cake in my mouth.  My hips and back would go out on me at any given moment.  This was probably worsened by the fact that I was so sick I couldn't move, let alone take invigorating walks every day, and my muscles turned to pudding.  The cake I'm sure didn't help.  I don't even like cake, but it was the only thing I could eat that didn't make me sick.  I ate a lot of cake those nine months.  A lot, a lot of cake.  The book, you ask?  I trashed it.

The second pregnancy wasn't quite the same as the first.  I wasn't as sick and didn't want cake, but I was still pretty miserable, or so my husband says.  It was the third pregnancy that broke me once and for all.  I was sick at first, but as the first months passed, I realized that eating...anything...made me feel better.  It was like the more I shoved down my throat, the less likely it would be able to come back up.  I was genteel at first, and would serve myself a small portion of Hamburger Helper on my plate eating it with my fork.  That didn't last long.  I usually abandoned plate and fork and pulled the entire skillet over to me, shoveling the beef and processed cheese into my mouth with a giant serving spoon.  I was completely out of control.  The beast inside of me had all the power!  He still does, in fact.

It was so bad I actually got stuck in a booth in Arby's.  I didn't care, though.  I ate my super-sized roast beef with cheddar cheese dripping down my chin as my husband stared in fear, pushing his extra mozzarella sticks my way to appease the monster I had become.

Suffice it to say, baby number three was a whopping ten pounds.  I pushed that sucker out with every last ounce of energy I had.  I did NOT bounce back.  My body felt like a Stretch Armstrong doll that had been stretched one too many times and would never go back to its original shape.  I was so weak I couldn't even lift the car carrier without Milo in it, let alone carry him to the car and lift it into place.

So here I am, nearly three years later since Milo's birth.  I've gotten some of my body back, some, but not much.  Having three kids, there is a certain degree of activity that I must maintain to keep up with them.  Unfortunately, I am not an exerciser.  I kept  in shape in my teens and 20's by doing activities that happened to also be athletic:  march around a football field twirling a flag, dancing a couple nights a week, skiing, cheerleading, horseback riding.  I do not run.  I do not do aerobics.  I have tried doing these things and they are boring as hell.  (And yes, all you runners out there who talk about your times and distances and half-marathons...you're boring, too.)  Unfortunately, in order to maintain some of the activities I mentioned previously, you need $$$.  Especially to carry them out with three kids in tow.  Instead, I walk, which burns a surprisingly and depressingly low number of calories compared to other activities.  I people watch and look at gardens and houses, something you can't do while running.

Last summer I was very committed to walking every day and doing a small amount of weight training at home.  I slowly (very slowly, too slowly) lost ten pounds from the beginning of May to the end of September.  And while I felt better because I was fitting into my clothes again, I still had pain.  A lot of pain. My upper back has been a source of pain since my first pregnancy and has been easily explained.  I've always been a sloucher, so when my boobs blew up to the size of Pam Anderson's and I was constantly carrying a baby around, my muscles couldn't take it and rebelled.  Unfortunately, I noticed that the hip pain I experienced during pregnancy was constantly with me last summer.

In the fall, I went to a new chiropractor.  I hadn't been to one in nearly three years and I was having shoulder issues that were work related.  As the weather turned bad, my walking subsided and suddenly my lower back completely went out.  It had done this a couple of times before, but has always been resolved after a week of TLC.  This time it did not get better.  The chiropractor ordered an x-ray of my lower spine which showed permanent damage to a couple of the lower vertebrae, probably an old cheering injury, or skiing, or horseback riding.  Who the hell knows??

I have been doing stretching every day and some exercises, but the pain hasn't stopped and right at this very moment, it's pretty excruciating in my lower back and hips.  The chiropractor has ordered x-rays of my hips to check for arthritis (very rare for someone my age) and an MRI of my lower back.  He said he's wondering if I have some "disease" where your hip sockets aren't as deep as they should be.  Turns out all that ligament stretching during pregnancy that caused my hips to go out on me might not have been solely the hormones.  I could have this disease that exacerbated the problem.  Thanks for telling me there was such a disease, let alone hearing about it eight years and three babies (big babies!) later.

OK, so here's my confession.  I haven't been as good as I should be in doing my back exercises.  I stretch all the time, but I cheat.  I don't hold out my stretches.  And I really cheat when it comes to my strength exercises.  Here is where the monthly challenge comes in.  I don't really know what the future holds for me in terms of back surgery and/or hip replacement and I really don't want to think about it.  I'm only thirty-seven.  I still have in my mind, when we get some extra money, that we'll take ski trips and go horseback riding with our boys.

So...there is one form of exercise that I love doing and I will come up with the dumbest excuses NOT to do it...Yoga.  I picked it up in college and it is the everyman's exercise.  The excuses I make up?  Too many Legos on the floor.  The boys will bother me.  I'm taking away from my husband's TV time.  (That last one is the WORST!  He could care less about his TV time, and any other time I have no problem interrupting him watching a show, but I have actually said that in my head as an excuse.  SHAME ON ME!)  Do you know that I actually have a yoga for the back DVD?  It could potentially solve every pain issue I am currently having.  Know how many times I've done it?  Once...Once.  I felt amazing after it.  Know why I haven't done it since?  It requires me carrying a kitchen chair downstairs to our family room.  I could probably buy a cheap folding chair and keep it in the family room.  That has been my sorry excuse for possibly costing me my dream of shushing down a mountainside with my boys.  A frieking chair!

So, for the month of September, no more excuses.  I'm going to do a yoga circuit every day for the month.  After the thirty days, my hope is to find some relief and new found strength.  The results of the x-ray and MRI will be in by then and hopefully there won't be any significant problems that contains the words surgery and/or replacement in the solution and I can continue with the yoga.  If there is something wrong, so be it, but at least I'll know it's not because I didn't try because of a chair.

That's Part One of my September challenge...yoga to strengthen and heal my body.  Part Two's goal is to strengthen and heal my heart.  But, I can't write about that now because my back is killing me!!!!!!

Feeling Inspired

Alrighty, so it's August and here is where I am in my life right now.  I'd like to travel with my entire family.  I'd like to go back to school.  I'd like to move.  This is what I want.

All of these things require me to have more money.  The closest thing I have had to a job interview is a math position in my husband's district that is "very part time" starting maybe in January if the district can get funding.  I am not a math teacher.  They are going to interview math teachers and if they can't find anyone, they are going to turn it into a Language Arts position...maybe.  I'm not going to hold my breath on that one.  That's Plan A.  Plan B is to win Publishers Clearing House.  I entered at the beginning of August and have been searching on their website every day to ensure more entries.  Plan C is to crochet things and sell them at the school's December craft show.  My mom was talking a little while ago to some cousins of my fathers.  They are hicks.  If you've ever seen any of the National Lampoon's Vacation movies and are familiar with Cousin Eddie, well, there you go.  Not even exaggerating.  Now, they told my mom that they took their entire family to Disney a couple years ago for over $26,000.  They take two vacations a year.  As far as we know, he runs a small barber shop out of his home and she crochets washcloths which she sells at carnivals in the Poconos along with working the throw-the-ping-pong-ball-to-win-a-fish stand.  If this is truly where their money comes from (as oppose to an illegal moonshine operation ???), this might be Plan D.

Clearly, right now certain things are not possible in my life.  Financially, I don't have the means of paying for school or selling my house. I don't think my family would appreciate me running off to India or even a monastery in the midwest even if I did have the money.  Afterall, there's only one Elizabeth Gilbert and the reason her book was such a success is because most of us can't do what she did.  We have commitments, restraints, obligations.

So I have come to accept that certain things right now need to be placed on hold.  And I'm OK with that.  But as much as I love my kids and being home with them, there are imperfect aspects of our situation.  Somehow I need to bridge the gap between where we are right now and where I want us to be in a year or two.  I need to find an in-the-meantime happiness for the sake of myself and my family.

This is where Julie and Julia comes in.  Julie Powell needed, for lack of a better term,  a distraction from her life.  It's not about being bored.  I AM NOT A BORED HOUSEWIFE!!!  I need something to take me out of myself right now.  I unfortunately cannot cook my way through Mastering the Art of French Cooking because a) it's already been done, and b) though a fearless eater, I am not a fearless chef and have no desire whatsoever to cook brains.

I began to ponder "projects" of my own.  I love projects, by the way.  Like rereading all my favorite books.  I like assigning things to myself.  I'll assign myself the task of going through all my magazines, ripping out my favorite articles, and sorting them into categories.  Right now I'm crocheting three Lego blankets for my boys.  Two are finished and my deadline is to have the third finished by the end of August.  My husband does not get this.  He doesn't understand the urgency I have to complete something even though absolutely no consequences will occur if I break pattern and read a new book or not finish the blanket by September 1st.    I know what you're thinking...I'm a bored housewife.  Seriously, I'm not.  I've always given myself projects, even when I had a full time job and was a mom.  Projects take me away from me.  I'm can be very annoying.  Just ask my family.

Of course, while reading Julie and Julia I'm racking my brain to come up with my own unique year-long project.  But, I realized that I didn't want something to take me through an entire year.  I need to take it one month at a time.  Making plans too far into the future never really works out for me.  For example, if we do x,y, and z then in two years time we'll be without a car payment; enter unprecedented hail storm that severely dents every panel of my car, totaling it, just a month or two after making the last payment.  (This didn't actually happen to me.  It happened to my best friend.  This is why we're best friends.  I usually have the pet crisis to put on a credit card.)  I need one or two things to focus on for that month that will give me a sense of accomplishment, somehow improve my physical and/or emotional well-being, and most importantly distract me from, well, me.

The first project is to begin September 1st, which is perfect because as a teacher, that marks a new year even better than January 1st.  Stay tuned for my list of projects in the making.        

I Lied...This Past Summer

Just after I sent out my resumes and applications, Eli my middle son, who up to this point had remained relatively healthy, came down with strep throat for the second time that school year.  Seven days after going on an antibiotic, he complained of a bug bite just before bed.  I thought maybe he came in contact with a small spider and put some hydro-cortisone cream on him.  The next day he awoke covered in "bug bites".  Thank God for Facebook because when I posted a picture of him about ten of my "friends" jumped on it and said get him to the doctor because he was having an allergic reaction.

The doctor at our urgent care put him on a steroid treatment, Benadryl, and changed his antibiotic.  The poor kid who had always had an Amoxicillin allergy but could tolerate other forms of penicillin now was allergic to all of it.  Unfortunately, the next day he awoke again with a few hives.  I kept him home and followed up with our pediatrician, and while in the waiting room the hives just started popping up all over his face.  We were rushed back into a waiting room where they made him gag down more Benadryl and they seemed to go down.  I had him home with me all that week.  Have you ever spent a week with a kid on steroid treatment?  They told me it could "alter" his personality.  What they meant by the word alter was, "Your child will be inhabited by a demon, but do not consult an exorcist until after seven days and the symptoms persist."

Week two hit, he went to school slightly less demonic (but that was the teacher's problem now, not mine), and still on Benadryl.  I got a call from the nurse every single day that week because the hives persisted despite the medicine.  Our school nurse, God bless her anal-retentive soul, described each hive:  its location, size, shape, time of arrival, time of departure, etc.  I was in and out of the school several days that week and the next administering Benadryl and hydro-cortisone cream.  Finally, after week three and another consult with the pediatrician who advised allergy testing if the hives persisted, we were in the clear.

If there was ever a sign from God that it was NOT my time to go back to work, ripping open an unpaid for tube of hydro-cortisone cream in the middle of Target and slathering it all over your five year old is it.  I mean, I was it for the kid.  If I was working, Eli would have suffered.  My parents live two hours away, and I'm trying to be nice here, so let's say that my in-laws who are nearby aren't really capable of long-term care. I really don't know what I would have done because I really would have had no one to rely on for those three weeks.  Sadly, I ignored the sign from God and jumped into Eat, Pray, Love to bolster my spirits and keep me on the optimistic path.

Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love, for those of you haven't read it, is one woman's journey to happiness by living four months each in Italy, India, and Indonesia.  I lived for five months in Nancy, France and if you ever need to do some serious soul-searching, go live in another country for a prolonged period of time.  It's hell, let me tell you.  So since I couldn't hop on a plane myself, I escaped vicariously and ate tons of pasta and did yoga and met a fantastically sexy older Brazilian man to get me through the rest of spring.

As June came and went and I received not one phone call for an interview, I decided to stay on my spiritual journey kick and jumped into Kathleen Norris's The Cloister Walk about a woman who spends three years in a monastery as an honorary monk/nun.  I believe the official term is oblate. I first read this book while I was in France and as I was in the middle of a deep and troubled soul-searching of my own at the time, I did not remember how heavy and academic the book was.  I trudged through it the second time, and though not as life-altering as the first read-through, I did have a bit of envy at this woman's ability to devote three years of her life to the study of this very simple and ritualistic life.

Mid-July hit with still no interview.  I returned my interview clothes I purchased in the spring and added the extra hundred bucks to my bank account.  How sad is that?  Fuck spiritual journeys.  I needed some fluff, so enter Emily Giffin and Something Blue.  It was the first book I read by her and hated almost every minute of it the first time I read it until I came to the end.  Then I realized I was suppose to hate it.  The character was meant to be hated wearing her Jimmy Choo's and ignoring the prenatal care of her unborn child.  Emily Giffin is a great author because her characters are very real, very imperfect, and it's a smart kind of chick-lit where you don't have to think all that much but you still aren't scraping the bottom of the barrel either.

I finished that and then needed a moment to think about where to go next, not just with my next book choice, but with my life.  I clearly was not going back to work.  It was all status quo for me.  That's when I remembered Julie and Julia.  I totally jumped on the band wagon when this came out.  Saw the movie, loved it.  Read My Life in France, thought it was OK.  But, what really got to me was Julie Powell's memoir.  She's a very accessible "character" in the memoir who drinks too much, hates her job, has cat hair on her pots and pans.  I get it.  She was living the status quo.  And suddenly I was inspired, sort of.

The Last Little Bit of Background, I Think

Anne of Green Gables saw me through much of February, comfy and cozy, illnesses starting to subside, cat not crapping as much on the bed.  I could almost imagine looking out at the blankets of snow on the ground and pretend I was on a peaceful, small farm on Prince Edward Island...almost, I mean, it is South Jersey.  No one can be that imaginative!

I then decided to stay with a few of my favorite books from my youth since I really needed that simplicity to stick with me through the never-ending winter.  I went with J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit.  My high school was small and in my time there when grunge bands ruled the world, the football team was in a dry spell (mostly because pot does not increase your athletic aptitude), and the pretty girls were all too busy banging the faculty (substitute faculty, not tenured), we geeks and goofs had a bit of a role there.  A strong and wonderful role.  Our junior and senior English classes were divided into 12 week "mini" courses.  Over the course of those two years you picked three writing minis and three literature minis, and Tolkien was one of them.  Twelve weeks to read The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy with one of the greatest Tolkien fanboys their ever was, Mr. Danny Kaye (no relation to the singing, dancing Danny Kaye.)

We obviously started with The Hobbit and his advice to us, many of whom hadn't read the father of modern fantasy or anything like him, was to "just not think about it.  There is absolutely no connection to our world and Middle Earth and don't try to make one.  Just read it.  Just take it for what it was and enjoy the adventure."

It was awesome! (said with total geekiness)  And having not read it in twenty-some years, it was just as awesome reading it the second time.  I have often tried to get my mom, an avid reader herself, to pick up a fantasy book herself and, though she has tried a little, she has never gotten through the first chapter.  It's just too far of a stretch for her to jump into another world.  Well, I love it, and it's so therapeutic.  My best friend described it best.  A few years ago I asked her if she read a particular chick-lit author and she said that at this stressful point in her life (She had taken a job at a hospital in the discharge office and had to deal with a lot of crap and see a lot of people discharged from the hospital with nowhere to go.) she couldn't read anything remotely as depressing as real life.  She thrived on trolls and goblins because they were the only thing that allowed her to escape our harsh reality.  And, yup, it's just like that.  Processing tiny, furry little men, a man who is sometimes a bear, dragons who are very smart (did you know dragons could talk?), and an all powerful ring leaves no time in your mind for the other junk.*

Feeling nostalgic for high school after reading The Hobbit, what should naturally follow, but a book that brings back such great memories of another time in my life--college.  Since I can't really relive my glory drinking days of college (I have tried with sad and pathetic results.  Just ask my husband.), I thought I'd relive my ultimately favorite college course, Austen; and thus picked up Sense and Sensibility.  We met once a week, almost all of us female with the exception of two guys, and we discussed (nope, not the right word again, you don't discuss Austen, you gossip about Austen) gossiped about all of Austen's novels--who was dating whom, what dress she wore, who was a slut, who was a snob, etc., etc.  Everything we said was right.  We watched all the movies, and at the end of the course we were deemed official Janites (term used for Jane Austen fangirls).  And, ironically enough in an Austen course with only two guys, I had my first crush...let me clarify...a guy had a crush on me for the first time at school.  (I went to a school that was 75 percent female and my favorite class was Jane Austen, so don't judge!  It was so totally a HUGE deal!)

Sense and Sensibility isn't exactly my favorite Austen novel; in fact, it's my least favorite.  But, I typically reread an Austen novel once a year and this is one I haven't ever picked up again.  I chose it for that reason and also because it was the first book we read in that class, so rereading it really and truly brought me back to that time in my life.

OK, so after Anne of Green Gables, The Hobbit, and Sense and Sensibility, I'm feeling a lot better and it's spring and we're almost all illness-free, AND the cat is starting to come downstairs and sleeping on the dining room table again.  Life is getting brighter by the minute!

Our financial situation has always been somewhat bleak and when you're a one-income family your prospects of getting out of that aren't really that great.  We live a relatively simple life so there isn't really much room to cut any more out of our budget.  The idea of me going back to teaching full time gets closer to reality with each year.  After having read these three books, books from the most promising and hopeful time of my life, I make the decision to return to teaching.  The older boys are both in school full days, and I've spent nearly three years home with the little guy.  I can return to work with a minimal amount of guilt and minimal child care expenses.  This is totally doable!

I have had these thoughts before, but this past spring I went into action.  I actually applied to several school school districts who had actual job postings.  Shit was getting real!

And then disaster struck again.  Panic set in about how I was going to juggle work and kids.  I needed something to inspire...Enter Eat, Pray, Love.



* Side Note:  I do not have any plans to move onto the LOTR trilogy.  That requires much more thinking and is much less an adventure and much more a war story.  Different train of thought that my mind wasn't quite ready for in high school and has yet to become ready for it again.

Some More Background...The Winter from Hell (A Very, Very Cold Hell)

So let me back up a bit to this past winter:  It's December and my baby, Milo, just turned two years old.  I loved that age with both of my older boys, no terrible two's there.  But one week after his birthday, on the night of my oldest son's winter concert, a terrible accident occurred involving said two year old, a door, and the cat.  We all heard the door slam.  Thought nothing of it, really.  The kid had been slamming the door for the past half hour.  I walked into the dining room and  thought I had found one of the cat's mousies, a little rabbit fur covered cat toy, but when I picked it up I noticed blood and flesh hanging from it.  Yes, what I was actually holding was the tip of the cat's tail.  

We found the cat, and I  rushed him to the emergency vet who was completely unfazed by this accident...happens all the time apparently.  (Not to me it doesn't.)  Somehow I managed to get back in time for the concert and was able to send off an email that night to my son's teacher asking to excuse him from homework that night because his cat was undergoing a partial tail amputation.  (And once again I was that crazy parent.)  I did not get a response to that email and will probably find it on Facebook one day as part of a list of poor excuses bad parents have sent in for not helping their kids finish their homework. 

We had to cancel all plans to see my family so we could stay  home and nurse the cat.  I don't live by my family and since my grandmother passed away 4 years ago, we hardly ever see each other.  Christmas is the one time we all try to make plans to get together.  I'm not particularly close to my family, but when you lose all connection with them, you feel a bit, well, disconnected with the world.  This got me down.

Then right before Christmas break we all came down with strep throat.  No big deal, except that it never left our house for the next three months.  One of us was always sick.  And then came the Polar Vortex.  I have never been so cold for so long in my life.  That got me really down.

Back to the cat...he recovered after a few weeks from his surgery, but entered into a Post Traumatic Stress Disorder/depression for cats.  He refused to leave our bedroom except to go to the bathroom, and even then if walking the four feet to the bathroom seemed too overwhelming, he'd just crap on our bed, our new comforter and all.  He'd also developed that phantom limb syndrome, sort of.  He'd sit and stare at his tail, or the part that was missing, and he'd just stare and stare and stare, and then BOLT, like he could outrun the terrible accident he fell victim to and when he'd look around again the inch and a half of tail that had been chopped off would suddenly appear.  Well, this just made me sick.

So I'm in the middle of one of the worse winters ever, cut off from family, with a crappy job, sick kids, and a PTSD cat.  My dissatisfaction with my situation in life has been with me for quite some time, especially since losing my adult high school job.  I don't particularly care for where I live and in the ten years we've been here haven't made any real friends, friendly acquaintances yes, but no real friends.  The depression hit hard.  

We went into survival mode, depressed and cold, shuttling kids back and forth to doctors and pharmacies, taking turns to go and lie with the cat so he wouldn't feel alone and shit on our bed, and that's about all I remember.

New Year's resolutions were completely pointless, but come the end of January I felt I needed to do something, SOMETHING!, to shake things up a bit, and that's when I decided to pick up Anne of Green Gables.  (I know, I'm so wild and daring.)  Anne of Green Gables is one of my favorite books and L.M. Montgomery one of my favorite authors.  I've read everything she's ever written.  Her books take me to a simpler world.  If Anne of Green Gables was comfort food, it'd be the gooiest baked macaroni and cheese with sweet stewed tomato topping you have ever eaten.  I felt so good and comforted while reading it that I decided to make a Valentine's Day resolution and reread as many of my favorite books in the next year as I could.

It was a small gesture on my part and far from life changing, but at least for the fifteen to forty minutes before falling asleep at night, I could pick up something that had been good to me in the past and would be good to me again with great certainty.  It got me to the summer, which is bringing me closer to my new project, but I have a two and half year old pulling at my arm right now saying he's hungry and there's no telling what this kid is capable of, so I'm going to go make dinner.  Until next time!    

  

Some Background...Part 1

The short story is that I'm a stay-at-home mom who feels unfulfilled in her life.  It's a story that has been told over and over again, and will continue to be told over and over again.  

The longer, but abridged story, is that seven years ago when I quit full time teaching I got a part time job working for an adult high school.  It basically allowed me to stay at home during the day, work a nine hour week at night, and supplement my full time salary minus day care expenses.  Little did I know that it would become the perfect position for me, my "calling", if you will.  And then Chris Christie came into office, cutting (no, that's not a nasty enough word, let's go with obliterating) obliterating education funding across the state.  The recovering addicts, ex-cons,  teen moms, and other such societal drop out dregs didn't stand a chance against the innocent children and the program was shut down.  

I was on unemployment for a bit and then began working for a god-awful company as an online instructor.  The company paid crap, when they were able to pay us at all.  I did get to work from home, which isn't all it's cracked up to be, and my only interaction with students was via email and an occasional phone conversation.  It had it's rare bright spots, an unexpected connection with a mom or student where a life was changed for the better because a sympathetic ear was lent, but that's it.  I'm not knocking my significance in that person's life, but I also didn't teach anything, which is what I really like to do.  

I'm still doing the same thing, but the original company I worked for dissolved, sort of, and some of it's workers started a new company.  I'm with them now.  They pay me on time, so far.  They are pretty decent people and educators, but in a fledgling stage of leadership and business ownership.  Though I feel positive for the company's success, I have no real expectations for my own personal role in it.  I mean, I can't really say tallying a student's hours is a life-fulfilling career.

And that brings me to the present day where quitting my teaching position, becoming unemployed, and working for pennies with three kids and a teacher husband has left our family piss broke.

Alas, the smell of poop is wafting this way, so stay tune for Part 2 and my new Project.

(It's a poopy diaper I need to change, for those of you who were wondering.)