You are here: Home / Archives for Family
Aug 20, 2008

Racing Through The Fog

August 20, 2008 By

I really don’t have time to be depressed right now.

August is shaping up to be one of the busiest months for me, and only an Olympic-sized effort is going to get me through to the end of the month finish line with everything accomplished.

In exactly one week school begins for Cordy, and I’m completely unprepared at the moment. It’s not like I really need that much to be prepared – there are no crazy lists of supplies each child must have, including the requisite three boxes of Kleenex. She really only needs a backpack, plenty of pull-ups, and a good pair of shoes. Her feet have spent most of the summer in the freedom of sandals, due to my own obsession with summer sandals. (Am I alone in this? Foot claustrophobia is real, people. My feet must be free.)

I do worry that the emotional preparations for going back to school will be far harder. While she loved preschool last year, and will be returning to the same teacher and many of the same classmates, it’s still another transition that we must face. We’ve discussed it daily, and each time she brushes it off, saying, “I never want to go to school.” I may try giving her teacher a call this week to see if we can come visit the classroom before school starts, so Cordy can re-acquaint herself with the room before adding in the additional stress of several kids.

I’ve procrastinated on several writing projects and now must force myself to finish them and move them off my plate. They’re not difficult at all – getting the motivation to sit down and write is the hardest part. The overwhelming feelings of inadequacy attack every time I try to write something, telling me I’m not good enough to be paid to write, and anything I turn in will be rejected and laughed at. I know it’s not true, but that little voice has become very loud and persistent. I need to find a muzzle for it.

I’m so angry with myself for being depressed. Random crying fits and the energy of a sloth aren’t conducive to getting all of this done. I want to shake it off, get working, and be in overdrive again. I’m paralyzed by my thoughts. Being held down by your own emotions feels worse than being oppressed by any outside force.

I’ve called my doctor to inquire about going back on antidepressants. I have a prescription for Wellbutrin sitting in my patient file, but when I checked with local pharmacies, the cheapest price for the generic version is $130 for 30 days. (!!) My doctor will be calling me back tomorrow to discuss options. Should have figured that the antidepressant that works best for me isn’t one of the $4 generics that pharmacies offer.

Thank you all for your support on my last post. That virtual hug from so many was a very soothing feeling, and I see I’m not alone in fighting with this monster at the moment. I hope those of you who are also feeling the sting of depression can find the help you need, too.

Knowing there is this community of support is what keeps me coming back to blogging, even when I feel like I have nothing worth saying.

And because I do have a pathological need to end on a hopeful note, I will add that Aaron has another job interview tomorrow. It would be a good position for him with a great employer. Fingers are already crossed.

Filed Under: clearly insane, Cordy, daily life, me me me


Aug 18, 2008

There Are No Rainbows and Unicorns Here

August 18, 2008 By

I should have known the monster was lurking in the shadows.

Lately I’ve felt out-of-sorts. It started innocently enough – I could blame my uneasy moods and little dark cloud over my head on our employment situation. (Still no jobs yet, by the way.) I might have felt the cold breath of it on the back of my neck at BlogHer.

But over the past week I’ve started running little self-checks in my head, and I didn’t like the results. I’m having trouble keeping up with everything. I’m short-tempered with the girls. I’m occasionally finding a nearly empty box of Cheez-its in my hand with no idea where they all went. Cleaning up the house seems so pointless.

I don’t even want to get out of bed in the morning. I’m lazy at getting back to e-mails, comments, and even phone calls.

Trying to write a blog post is an actual chore. When I do write anything down, I hate every word I write, unable to find the right words, put them in the right combination, or find the right hook to really capture attention. When I read my own posts, I feel like a broken record. I’m still reading blogs, but I feel like I have so little to contribute that I’m rarely commenting. I feel empty inside.

It really hit me when I was on a conference call about depression with Dr. Myrna Weissman and Families for Depression Awareness. I listened, asked questions, and as the call continued, I started to realize it: I’ve lost interest in activities I enjoy. I fit all of the symptoms.

I’m depressed.

Again.

It was so sneaky this time. Taking advantage of the bad times, and piggybacking on a few negative feelings, growing and feeding them until they were big, bad Negative Feelings.

I’ve also tried to deny it for some time now. After all, I don’t have time to be depressed. I can’t put my life on hold to deal with this. We don’t even have insurance right now. I need to be in overdrive right now for my family – depression does not figure in this plan.

But the monster is out of the closet, and it has completely overtaken me. The last time I was depressed was when I was pregnant with Cordy. It took me by surprise then, too. After all, I was pregnant, it was a planned pregnancy, and it was what I really wanted – shouldn’t I be over-the-moon happy? I was put on antidepressants while pregnant and continued them through Cordy’s first year to prevent postpartum depression.

I was expecting to be depressed again when pregnant with Mira, but I wasn’t. Once she was born, I had some normal postpartum sadness, but it quickly faded and there was no sign of depression. Now over a year later, it seems to have caught up with me, like an unwanted visitor you hope won’t show up for the party.

I hate this. I don’t want to be depressed. I don’t know what to do about it right now, either. As soon as a job with insurance materializes I can get myself to the pharmacy for antidepressants again, I guess. In the meantime, I need to keep pushing through each day, getting all of my work done with minimal lateness and making efforts to be social.

So I guess what I’m saying is I hope you’ll please bear with me as I work through this. I’m sorry I’m sucking at being a good blog friend right now. I’ve spent 10 minutes trying to find an end for this post, something that puts an upbeat end to it, but I’m at a loss this time.

I want to feel like me again soon, instead of this hollow shell of me.

Filed Under: big issues, me me me


Aug 13, 2008

Meet My New Tech Support

August 13, 2008 By
Mark my words: in a couple of years, this kid will be hacking into government supercomputers for fun.

I’ve been having sporadic internet service the past few days, making reading blogs and posting difficult. My suspicions first fell on our internet provider – Time Warner has been nothing but unreliable in service, but for this particular problem I think they’re not to blame, amazingly.

We’ve narrowed the problem down to our four year old wireless router, which in networking years is practically an ancient relic. I think it’s time to put it out of its misery and look into replacing the router tomorrow.

Or I could always call in my pint-sized electronics guru to fix it. At 14 months she can already open a new browser window, switch users, shut down a computer, eject a CD, run a virus updater, turn on closed captioning and change channels on the TV, record a program on Tivo, and make a phone call.

If it’s electronic, it has to be hidden or Mira will go for it the second we look away. We bought her a laptop of her own in the hopes that she’d leave ours alone. No dice – she still thinks our laptops are better.

Maybe I’ll give her the old router?

Can you get me an ethernet cable? I can’t get a wireless signal on this thing.
Filed Under: daily life, Mira Tagged With:


Aug 10, 2008

Why We’ll Never Be Welcomed Back For Dim Sum Ever Again

August 10, 2008 By

Everyone has that one tale about kids acting up in a restaurant, right? Often the tale is of another family, and how you couldn’t focus on eating when some little monster was walking up to your table and reaching for your food, throwing things across the restaurant, or just screeching loud enough to be heard at the Olive Garden across the street. But sometimes the stories are of our own kids, too – times when we wish we never would have gone out to eat that day.

Last fall we were invited out for Dim Sum at a local Chinese restaurant with relatives from Aaron’s family. Aaron and I both worried about how Cordy would react there, especially in light of her recent autism diagnosis. She had been so distant the previous day, and back then she really didn’t handle new experiences well, especially if they involved a lot of new sensory input. (She still doesn’t handle them well, but it’s so much better now.) We feared what might happen, but decided we couldn’t spend our lives trying to avoid the epic meltdown.

The restaurant was packed, with tables close together and no windows in the room. It had a claustrophobic feel for me, so I couldn’t imagine how it felt for Cordy. It was fairly loud, with TV screens on the walls showing Chinese TV, and lots of servers moving from table to table, pushing little dim sum carts. We were shown to an enormous round table, and Aaron and I guided Cordy to the seat against the wall, with us on either side of her to keep her corralled in.

As the food began arriving, we realized that there was nothing that Cordy could recognize. In a familiar setting, we can sometimes convince her to try new foods. In a new setting, though, it’s practically impossible. I pulled out the few snacks we had in the diaper bag, but those were soon exhausted, and Cordy got very upset that she was hungry but couldn’t find any food. Meanwhile, my father-in-law was snapping pictures at the table, and I think the flash from the camera was further provoking Cordy. Normally she could handle each influencing factor, but in a strange location and all at once, it was sending her into sensory overload.

Cordy started out restless, standing next to her seat, then back in her seat, and then letting her head drift backwards so she stared at the ceiling. She whined for milk, pulled on Aaron’s sleeve, and looked more and more out of it. (She wasn’t tired, though.) Actually, Aaron’s dad took a picture of her during this time, right before she snapped:


See how zoned out she was? Her pupils were huge, she had a vacant stare, and her mouth hung open. She was about 10 seconds away from full blown meltdown.

Eventually, she couldn’t take it any longer. She slipped under the table, rolling around underneath for a few minutes, crawled to the other side, and then threw herself into the walkway, screaming. A server was trying to push her cart through the narrow pass, but Cordy proved an unmovable roadblock, writhing and screaming and partially rolling under other people’s tables.

Heads at other tables snapped around to see what the commotion was, and some of our family tried to talk Cordy into coming back to her seat. Aaron and I jumped up, asking family members to please not help (not that we didn’t want their help, but when she’s like this, all the people crowding around her only makes her more upset). Being an old pro at dealing with this behavior, I scooped her up and carried her out to the quiet of the lobby while she fought me and tried to break free, forcing deep, primeval screams out of herself that echoed off the walls.

I’m sure people thought she was possessed as she screamed and wailed and growled for over ten minutes. Her eyes continued to have that vacant stare in them, pupils dilated and glassy, almost like a seizure. I held her tight to prevent her from seriously hurting herself by banging her head onto things or scratching or biting herself. She cried out, “I need to go home! I need a waffle! I need my jacket!” – she didn’t really want any of those things, but during meltdowns she would commonly ask for anything that popped into her head. People were staring as they walked by, and I felt the redness of embarrassment burning my face. But I held on and waited for this fit to pass, while Aaron spoke with family and explained why they shouldn’t get too close at the moment.

Finally it was over. Her eyes looked less distant, the screaming stopped, and she quietly sniffled and wiped away her tears. “Go to the car?” she asked in a feeble voice. “Yes, we can go home now,” I replied, and I carried her out of the restaurant. She quickly fell asleep in the car and slept for over two hours, worn out by the experience. I wanted to do the same.

After that dining experience, I began to wonder if we would ever go out to eat again. During her screaming fit, everyone in the restaurant was looking at us, and I could see that look of Why can’t they control their kid? in the eyes of several people. (Along with the What are they doing to that poor child? look from others.) I felt like the worst mother in the world.

However, we do still eat out, and we haven’t had a major dinner meltdown since that incident. Part of it is due to Cordy’s behavior improving after being in therapy. But we also try to plan the details of dining out now. We make sure Cordy is well-rested, we go at a time when restaurants are less busy, we bring back-up food options for her in case she doesn’t recognize any food, we bring crayons and paper so she can color while we wait for food, and we also spend a lot of time talking to her about where we’re going, what to expect, and what we expect from her. Making sure nothing surprises her goes a long way towards a better experience eating out.

And while I know we’ll probably be “that family” again someday, I hope it’ll never be that severe ever again.

This post was written for Parent Bloggers Network as part of a blog blast sweepstakes sponsored by Burger King Corp. You have until Sunday night to enter your post about being “that family” while eating out.

Filed Under: Autism, Cordy, family time Tagged With:


Aug 6, 2008

Murphy’s Law & Unexpected Kindness

August 6, 2008 By

As I mentioned recently, we lost our health insurance last Thursday, and we’re currently in the process of getting the kids onto state health insurance, just until Aaron can find a new job.

Thankfully, we have two healthy girls. Mira has seen the doctor once outside of normal well-child visits. Cordy has only been twice for a sick visit in nearly four years. So what are the chances that the girls would get sick in this small window of no insurance?

On Friday, Mira ran a high fever. I was sure we would have to take her to the doctor because she was so hot. However, I treated it with ibuprofen at home and after a few days it went away on its own. Whew – crisis averted.

But over a week ago Cordy started to develop some red spots around her mouth. Then they turned into weepy sores. I thought at first that maybe she had eaten something that caused an allergy, but they only got worse, not better, and then they started to spread to her chin.

I called the doctor last week (while we still had insurance), and they told me it was probably impetigo and to put some antibiotic ointment on it and it would be fine. They didn’t want to see her. I did as instructed, but on Sunday I could see it was still getting worse.

Of course. The child who never needs to see the doctor now needs to see one. Even worse: she’s the one who has epic meltdowns at the doctor’s office.

So I looked over our options, and the cheapest was to visit a little clinic inside our local grocery store. It was only $59, versus over $100 at the doctor or urgent care. We waited our turn, with Cordy being amazingly well-behaved considering we were going into a medical setting. After half an hour, Cordy’s name was called by a gentle looking older woman.

We walked into the office, and the woman – a nurse practitioner – could immediately see our problem. She pulled on some gloves and took a closer look at Cordy’s face while I explained the history of the sores and how I’ve treated them so far. She agreed it was impetigo.

“Have you been here before?” she asked.

“No.”

“What insurance do you have?”

At this point I explained that we had none at the moment, due to my husband losing his job. She nodded, glanced at her computer with the new patient form waiting to be filled in, then turned back to us.

“Well, I can write her a prescription to clear that up. And don’t worry about a charge for the visit.”

My jaw fell open. “Are…are you sure?” I asked. (And yes, later I thought to myself WHY DID YOU QUESTION HER? Take the free offer and run!)

“Oh yes, don’t worry about it. I’ve had to do so many sports physicals for kids today, with all the paperwork that goes with them, that this is a relief! Let me go check with the pharmacy and find the least expensive option for you to clear this up.”

As she left the room to consult with the pharmacist, I reflected on her generosity. She had no reason to do it. After all, this place was designed for those who don’t have insurance or need to see someone after regular office hours, and she gets paid for seeing patients. The visit fee isn’t cheap, but it’s far cheaper than other options.

I couldn’t even consider Cordy as the cause. While I never encourage it, Cordy’s inability to deal with certain situations has resulted in being ushered to the front of line or given quick service in the past, probably to get rid of us as rapidly as possible.

But this time Cordy was brilliant, and I was so proud of her. She stayed in her seat, with only minor quirky behavior and even let the nurse touch her – unheard of behavior for this child! Cordy actually focused on the nurse when she spoke to Cordy, too. I wondered if this nurse was secretly some kind of spectrum-child-whisperer, and could she please come home with us?

When she came back into the room, she told me that the first choice of treatment for impetigo was very expensive, but the second choice was an antibiotic that comes in a generic form for roughly $20. I agreed to that, and she wrote the prescription. We chatted for a few minutes about nursing school and she gave me tips for finding a job after graduation. I thanked her at least ten more times before we left. She asked Cordy for a hug, and again the stars aligned and the heavens parted to shine down on this nurse as Cordy gave her a big hug.

Times may be tough, but there are good people out there doing what they can to help. We all – no matter our situation – have the ability to help others in some way, even if it’s something as small as saying a kind word or giving a friend a hand with moving. (Or participating in Blog the Recession.) I hope I can pass on to others the benevolence given to me.

Our kindness to each other shows humanity at its best, and reminds me that just maybe the world isn’t the cold, selfish, impersonal place that I often worry it’s becoming.

Filed Under: Cordy, daily life, money, people who don't suck