Breathe in, breathe out

Progress happens one day at a time. Kinda like growing a human being inside your body.

Now

I look down at my ring and scratch some dirt off the diamond with my thumbnail. Things are cloudy, just like its surface. Just like the air around me, spitting snow. Snow that annoyingly invades my space when I roll the window down to tell the Starbucks drive-thru speaker which caffeinated escape I need today. I roll it back up before a crackly voice responds. Doesn’t she know it’s snowing out here? Faster, faster. Move faster. Away from this morning and towards whatever comes next.

I am a year older today than I was yesterday.

Nothing makes any more sense today than it did then.

The boys gave me a card with a perforated crown. I painstakingly poked it out of its cardstock home and put it on my head, feeling uncomfortable with a fake grin. The smallest things feel the biggest. Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear. Move faster. Towards the next thing. Something else.

They were almost as excited about my birthday as they would be about their own. But the problems of mundane daily life, getting through one step at a time, those don’t disappear just because it’s someone’s birthday. Their excitement makes up for my lack of. I’m grateful for it.

My computer dings the alert of an incoming email. “Help,” it says. I chew my lip too hard and it’s bleeding. Angry red pulses just below a thin surface and with a little more pressure, release.

Something’s gotta give.

My Broken Boy

Watching him struggle with a pencil in one hand and a piece of paper in front of him, I am a mess of emotions. I want to shake him. I want to scream at him. I want to rip up the paper and tell him it’s okay and I know he’ll figure it out in his own way eventually so who cares about these stupid spelling words. I want to cry.

It takes him over an hour to write four sentences. There are seven more.

I look at the faint blue and pink lines on the thin paper. I hate those lines. The sky, clothesline and ground.  The letters are supposed to fit nicely between them. Letters that you can’t form when ADHD wins. So often, it wins.

My son struggles with barriers in his brain that I can’t comprehend because they don’t exist in mine. And they make me angry at him. And then reminding myself it’s not his fault they are there, I get angry at myself for my misguided frustrations. I love my son. I hate his ADHD.

It’s bedtime. I tell him he must stop now and turn in unfinished work. And he cries, anticipating his teacher’s disappointment, whom he adores in spite of the fact that he is not the prized student. The boy cries because he didn’t finish his sentences, but yet, he can’t (?) won’t (?) finish.

Will he ever? He is smart, so smart. He asks the right questions and comprehends, inquires, analyzes, problem solves. But follow a simple direction? Write some words on a piece of paper? He stares at it. He asks about noises, and erasers and why is this pencil so sharp and Mrs. Bundy has paper like this, and my Stompeez are slippery and what is Reid doing and, and, and…

I email his teacher with the heads up. I search for solutions beyond medication. New strategies. Tweaks. Options. Diet changes. The medication is on only during the day. It’s off at homework time. Our time with him is off time. And oh how it throws everything off. But still I have a love/hate relationship with the little blue pill he takes each morning. It helps and even he knows it. But he is so little. What about the long-term? Is enough really known? What if?

I try to keep my focus on ways I can help my son. I try to separate ADHD from my relationship with him. I try to silence the white noise of society’s judgment. His parents should be stricter disciplinarians. My child would never. Such behavior problems. Too much TV. Or, those who think ADHD is a cop-out label. Every other kid “has” it, right? The squirrely kid? The kid who doesn’t want to follow directions? The kid in her own world? Oh, of course, it’s ADHD! Someone once asked how we had Graham “diagnosed.” In quotation marks like it was made up. A mask. Are that many pediatricians throwing meds at first graders these days that this real misery has become synonymous with some imaginary state?

ADHD is very real here. And it is horrible. And it will never leave my son alone. Just like him, dancing around that lined piece of paper, it will never finish.

Getting There

Slowly but (painfully) surely, we are getting there. We will one day move back into our home. We will get out of my mother's hair and take our shoes to a place where her puppy can't chew on them. We will have our own space again. It will happen. Right? Right. Looking at pictures like these remind me of that.




Starting work on second floor facade framing... notice there is no more front balcony eye sore/safety hazard!



And a few days (weeks?) later, a tarp, which may or may not be covering up the fact that nothing else has been done, but I'll give the benefit of the doubt since there are new windows in...

 

And the back. A big, beautiful window overlooking the backyard in what is now officially the baby's room.

Add some pretty windows in the master and things look less hollow and more homey... almost...

Lucky Me

This is my man.

My baby daddy.

Here he is winking at me, sitting in a bay-side bar in one of our favorite spots.

He's probably had a few Bud Lights and is clearly wearing a couple days' scruff.

I love it. And him.

Lucky.

All this in one Fall?

The starts and stops in my posting schedule are probably indicative of the volume of stuff in my brain clogging up the flow of words from mind to fingers to keyboard.

It's a tangled web.

Since my last post, I have quietly celebrated a new life growing in me. And also shed tears for my best friend and her daughter over a leukemia diagnosis.

I have watched our home lose more of its walls, floors, and shell. And I have watched new lumber raise up, constructed where old once was.

I have ached for various colleagues, many of whom I spend more time with than my own family members, as they have alternately contemplated divorce, prayed for their infant son's cancer to go away (again), taken in a homeless person, and buried their mother-in-law. And I have marveled at the fact that no matter what is happening at home, behind closed doors, we are a group of people who show up and perform at the top of our games and bring passion and enthusiasm, even if it's cobbled together some days, to a job we are truly invested in.

I have held my tongue and my breath while navigating the tricky waters of first grade reading curriculum as a parent of a smart kid who is bound by hurdles in his brain that he didn't create. And I have reveled in the relief of his good grades, awesome spelling tests and a teacher who is actually on his side, working with, not against, him and his quirks.

I have been reminded that I am the daughter of a selfless mother whom I don't outwardly appreciate enough. But oh how I appreciate her. She is my village. I could not _______ (you name it) without her.

I have tried to stop myself from thinking that things are going so well right now we must be in for a disaster around the corner. 

I am emotional.

I am pregnant.

I am getting fat. And dealing with my anxieties. And wondering if this will be the last time in my life that I will physically experience this miracle of humanity - that I have the ability to produce and grow another person. Every now and then reminding myself that I need to stop and be conscious of that more often, in the 21 weeks remaining of this unique time of my life. 

I am thankful.

A Perfect Date

I took the smaller Hawklet on a mommy-son dinner date recently on a whim. One of us suddenly thought cheesecake needed to appear and jump into our bellies. I can't recall exactly which one of us had that hankering... hmm.

When we arrived at our booth, he insisted on sitting next to me on the same side. I nearly shed a tear at the gesture. He was the perfect date, excited about being there, about the menu choices, about being just the two of us, about the carb-loading he accomplished.

We held hands walking back to our car, loaded with take-home bags. I promised him we'd do it again.

What an easy promise to keep.

He could not be more excited to be on a date with Mommy. That, or, to choose his cheesecake flavor. Maybe both.