pronoia

For Once, It's Not Me

Apparently, Ms. P has been getting no REM sleep. At all. She went for a sleep study last night, and while the tech couldn't tell her anything about her results, as he put it, if she registered a certain number of apneas in a given period of time, they'd switch her over in the middle of the night to the CPAP machine to see if it helped, and she could draw her own conclusions. But she didn't hear it from him.

So yeah, no REM. Serious, chronic sleep deprivation of this order is associated with everything from weight gain to ADHD-like symptoms to bipolar to type II diabetes. Scary stuff.

Of course, now we have to wait for a week for the official conversation with the doctor and then there's another delay until she gets the CPAP itself, but this is really good news.

In less good news, my sister is having surgery next Friday to see if she has endometriosis. There's only three women in my generation on any side of my family, and two of us had already been diagnosed, so this is troubling, to say the least. Even more troubling was that my sister was planning to spend the long weekend entirely alone, without help of any kind, and no one thought this was a problem worth doing anything about. Having had that surgery, I know that plan is total crap. Maybe she'll recover more easily than I did, but it was days before I could make lunch for myself, much less do anything more complicated.

But yeah, lots of health issues, none of them mine this time.

Blame Plato

Things making me happy:

• Ms. P's father is out of the hospital. He's home and on oxygen, and he might have to be on oxygen for a while, but he's home.
• I found a job I want to apply for, in a company rated very highly as an employer. It's an editing position focusing on personal finance and investing, and while I'm by no means even intermediate in my knowledge of those things, I keep finding myself wanting to know more, so there we go. I applied. Now I'm just biting my own fingernails off waiting to find out if this will translate into an interview.
• I did Ms. P's taxes on Saturday, and we're getting a nice little chunk back. I <heart> doing taxes.
• My W-2 came yesterday, as did some other tax information I needed, so I can do my own taxes. I <heart> doing taxes.
• I spent five hours on Saturday putting our receipts into Quicken and reconciling all of our bank accounts. We hadn't done it since October. In times past, I would have said fuck it, put in an adjustment, and started over. It was perversely satisfying to get it all worked through. I think I've turned a corner with finances.
• We're having a happy hour at work at 2:30, since mid-terms mean a half-day. This will give me something else to do/think about instead of my performance review. (See below.)

Things making me unhappy:

• My office is colder than my refrigerator. We're all walking around wearing coats.
• Ms. P is home sick for the third day in a row. Technically she's working from home today, but that's involving a lot of naps.
• R is similarly incapacitated, although his is a sprained ankle. It's been a week and he's still laid up, poor baby.
• My performance review with Mr. Burns is this afternoon, and I have no idea how it's going to go. I mean, I've been going crazy trying to manage not only my own job but all of the transition tasks, too, but my strategic plan was written without the transition in mind, so I haven't met all of my objectives because some of them have been pushed aside in favor of other ones. I don't know how he's going to spin this.
• Ms. P and I are struggling pretty hard around the time stuff. We've got a plan to try to fix it, and we're both committed, but the process has been (for us, anyway) kind of brutal, and Ms. P is having a lot of anxiety around the relationship. It's not very much fun, although I'm a lot happier and a lot less sad now that we appear to be getting somewhere.

If you suspect I'm moody right now then, by George, you've got it!

You Know You're a Grownup When....

...You're excited to have a day off of work so the plumber, the locksmith, and the electrician can all come without you having to take a day off of work.

...Your day goes so much better when you actually get up early.

...It turns out that person you thought you'd known for five years has actually been your friend for twelve.

Apparently I'm a grownup. Who knew?

We're slowly recovering from our weekend. Ms. P is having some serious emotional backlash from the realization that not only is her father an alcoholic, her family has been shaped by his alcoholism as well. I'm just trying to support her and help her as she's navigating it, but it can be a little intense. Important work, though.

Yesterday I got a bug up my ass about wanting to be more active, so I investigated a nearby gym chain that promised us a pool. It's cheaper than expected and fat-friendly, so we're going to check it out soon. I'm a little chagrined by the timing, because everyone and their mother is joining a gym for those all-important New Year's resolutions and my desire for the gym isn't about my weight or Ms. P's, but I know I need to jump on these kinds of impulses when they happen. And really, between my illnesses and Ms. P's medication, we're both doomed to a little bit of fatigue. I'm hoping that some moderate exercise will help us mitigate that. And besides, Ms. P LOOOOOVES the pool, and I love making my sweetie happy. Hell, maybe I'll just get us the month-long visitor's passes and see where that leads us.

Work is as bad as ever. Mr. Burns keeps standing us up, we're getting nowhere on our event planning because he's not doing the things he's supposed to be doing, and my predictions about fundraising post-transition announcement appear to be more trustworthy than those of my higher-ups. Oh well. I've somewhat successfully detached myself from enough of it that while it's annoying, I'm not incensed anymore. It's probably for the best, but it means I just don't CARE anymore either.

And on that note, I need to go back to attempting to cross at least a few things off my to-do list.

Exhausted

My FIL appears to be responding to the drugs, although he's still hospitalized, so we came home yesterday utterly exhausted from the weekend. We both took today off to sleep in and recover, because although there were no additional crises, the conversations we had to have were brutal.

FIL is an alcoholic. He drinks the equivalent of four to ten drinks a day, all straight gin. When we were there over the holidays, he didn't eat with us because he was on strong antibiotics that upset his stomach and he "couldn't keep anything down but gatorade." And gin, apparently, because we watched him drink.

It's not clear how long he's been an alcoholic, because until his retirement he was a mostly functional alcoholic. Ms. P ran into a friend of her parents' years ago now who asked if they still drank. Clearly, their drinking was notable even among academics, a notoriously hard-drinking bunch.

His alcoholism is now having a directly adverse effect on his health. I mean, he's diabetic, so it's had an impact on his blood sugars all along, which doesn't do his health any favors. But he's gotten pneumonia something like six times in the last three years, and a little research revealed that alcoholism destroys a protein in the lungs that keeps fluid out.

Even more than his alcoholism, what was difficult was trying to talk about it within the family. The minimization, the rationalizations, the secret-keeping, the denial. It was sometimes hard to hold onto the reality that we've seen with our own eyes in the face of it. BIL talks about his "drinking," not his alcoholism, and he insists FIL chooses to drink, that it's one of the few pleasures he has left. MIL says drinking doesn't affect his diabetes. Neither is a defensible position, but these are the stories they tell themselves to get through the day. And I get that.

We know we can't stop him from drinking. We tried, a few years ago, to set some clear limits about our willingness to be around him when he drank, but while it has meant that he's not obviously drunk around us, he still drinks. It's also one of the few things he has any real control over these days, because his body has deteriorated so significantly that he's not very mobile, and he's the kind of stubborn cuss who will keep drinking just because someone suggested he shouldn't. So we can't stop him, not really. MIL says she's going to stop buying gin once it all runs out, but we have our doubts that it will last, not in the face of his rage and anger.

We did, however, collectively agree that his doctors need to know how much he drinks because it will likely affect his treatment plan. It's still unclear how or whether that will happen; one of us talking to his doctors will likely cause him to sever the relationship. It's bullying, pure and simple, and it's protecting the addiction, but it's also a question of what kind of relationship people want with him in what is likely to be the short amount of time he has left.

Ms. P and I know that in many ways we have it easiest because we're not local. But not being local also means we're outside some of the dysfunctional behaviors that keep his drinking hidden and accepted. It's not easy for any of us.

He says he's not ready to die, but none of his behaviors really support that, and we really don't know what to do. So the weekend was us going around and around with one another, talking, fighting, crying, whining, and generally trying to find a way out of the trees that would feel okay to everyone and yet call a spade a spade. Because while we are accepting that this situation might just be the way it is for the duration, we aren't willing to be complicit in the cover-up.

One of the hardest parts is that this isn't the end, either of the problem or of the conversation. Even if he pulls through this, and it looks like he will, this very situation, complete with pneumonia and hospitalization, is likely to keep happening until it finally does kill him. There's not much way around it at this point, not with his health issues and his alcoholism. So we're in this for the long haul.

Scared

We're in GradSchoolTown with Ms. P's family. Her dad has contracted a form of pneumonia that has a very scary mortality rate, and he didn't improve enough to stay out of the hospital. We should be able to see him later, and we'll get an update late morning/early afternoon from my MIL. Please keep him and us in your thoughts.

RIP

My grandmother died last Thursday night. I got a call from my father in the middle of the night, and he and I set about making plane reservations and car rental reservations and figuring out how we'd each get ~1,000 miles and arrive at the same time from two different directions. It was distracting, anyway.

I hadn't been to my grandmother's house or town in five and a half years, but nothing had changed. The Trixie Belden books were still lined up in the living room, the quilts were still stacked in the hall closet, the old pictures were still on the walls, the african violets were still lined up on the bookshelf in the purple bedroom. The only difference is that she was missing.

Ten people in a small three-bedroom house with one useful shower is ... interesting. I spent most of my time preparing meals and washing up after meals, figuring I couldn't figure out her money market accounts or sell her house, but I could make sure the people who were doing those things were fed. My mother wavered between being stoic and almost funny in her recounting of the crazy things my grandmother said near the end and just falling apart. My father got increasingly cranky as he got further and further away from solitude. My aunts were wonderful and real. My uncle, as usual, told the worst jokes you've ever heard. My cousins sat and read books. It could have been Christmas or just a family vacation except for the piles of pictures and trash and give-away that just got larger and larger.

I don't miss her exactly, since it's been years since she approved of me or talked to me voluntarily. I'm sad it ended that way, that she never met or got to know Ms. P, who is loved by the rest of the family. I'm sad the house will go away, that I'll likely never again visit southern Illinois, one of the many landscapes in my heart. There will never again be a place where I am known automatically, where I'm immediately recognized as my grandfather's granddaughter when I walk into the grocery store. We will never get a picture of four generations that includes my grandmother as the oldest generation.

And so I said the rosary at her viewing, said all the prayers at her funeral. I listened to the priest, who had to work hard not to cry, and didn't flinch even at the most egregious theological statements. I sang the alleluias. I carried the gifts to the altar. It would have been important to her.

My hope is that now, we will all be freed from the trap of trying to please her, of telling half-truths, of omitting things so she wouldn't get upset. My mother especially, she who was the oldest and who was both the most distant and the most caught up in her mother's judgements.

I have my grandmother's sewing box, her scarves and hankerchiefs, a few rings, and the pile of my grandfather's hankerchiefs that were still ironed and folded in her drawer. Later, once it's all sorted out, I'll get the Trixie Belden books, the cast-iron skillets, and the sewing table. I may get some furniture my grandfather and great-grandfather made, because we aren't letting that leave the family. In many ways these were the best of her, and they will help remind me not to become what was the worst of her--her closedness to life, her persistent pessimism, her judgement. Instead I will hold on to my favorite memories of her, when she was seated in the basement with her friends around the quilting frame, when they would sew from 9 to 4 every Tuesday, making works of art that also keep you warm.

Meeting Squirt

We were in deepest farm country, visiting SIL and BIL and meeting Squirt, who is just the cutest baby we've seen all season, and given the ways our friends keep procreating, that's saying something. He's fussy but not screamy, he makes great faces, he loves getting patted very firmly on his back, and he much prefers to sit upright. He's three weeks old, and that's about the sum total of what you can say about a three-week old.

SIL and BIL are doing pretty well. They're a little testy, in that way that people who have been through something big and are currently pretty low on sleep can be, and they're facing a month of mostly living apart, which isn't helping their respective moods. But they've got some routines down, and they think Squirt's faces and grunts and little noises are adorable, the breastfeeding is proceeding apace, and the house is not a complete wreck, so they're doing very well, actually.

We didn't do as badly as I feared, but neither did we do as well as I'd hoped. One of the difficulties of this trip was that once we got there, there was be very, very little privacy to have the kind of couple time that helps us manage these things. We slept on the futon in the living room, so BIL or SIL might come downstairs at any point to warm a bottle or get something they needed or whatever. There was no opportunity to run out and do errands for them or anything like that. It was 40 hours of some pretty intense togetherness.

Which meant, of course, that I put on my cheerful face and just kept going. It's what I do in situations like that because my feelings of envy and desire and hopelessness and sadness and rage? Not their problem.

As we drove home I thought maybe we'd kind of escaped the emotional turmoil. I felt pretty centered. Exhausted, because I had taken Squirt from BIL at 5:30 in the morning and sent BIL back to bed for some much-needed rest (if they weren't going to let us actually clean or do laundry or anything like that, the least we could do was let them get some sleep), but centered. So we talked about what kind of baby stuff we would actually get and what we wouldn't bother with, how we would rearrange the bedroom when we got a bigger bed to allow for cosleeping, things like that. You know, cart before the proverbial horse things.

When will I learn?

Centered lasted exactly up to the point at which R declined our invitation for dinner. It wasn't that his declining was unreasonable or anything, and I hadn't been explicit about needing to see him for my emotional equilibrium because I'd seemed, even to myself, to be okay. So he didn't know, because I didn't know. But I. fell. apart.

I wanted an emotional blankie, I think, the kind of there-there attention that only people you're really and truly close to can provide. Ms. P, of course, is usually my blankie, but when it comes to the baby plan she needs some head patting too. And in the end, I didn't want it from anyone but R. It wasn't even that I necessarily wanted to talk. I just wanted to curl up in his general vicinity and feel safe together with my wife. I wanted my family.

We rallied and went to dinner with L&S to distract ourselves, which mostly worked through L needing to cry on our shoulders. Not exactly the plan and not exactly what we needed, but distracting nonetheless.

Since we're planning to start trying again here in a few weeks, I know the next chunk of time is going to be hard. We've been careening through our days, bouncing from one obligation and one friend-needing-support to another, and we need to do some serious nesting so our equilibria are less compromised by the slings and arrows of daily life. Every tarot reading either of us has had done lately has told us quite pointedly to attend to our own spiritual lives, so that's what we're planning to do. Meditation, prayer, journaling, you name it, it's in the plan.

We fall down, we get up again.

Puff Is Too Real

After work we're leaving to drive the 4 hours northwest to visit SIL and BIL and meet Squirt. SIL has been having a hard time--she's sad about her c-section, breastfeeding is difficult and painful, she's been somewhat depressed--so we're prepared to cook and clean and do laundry and water plants and hold the baby so she and BIL can have a little break and maybe even spend a few minutes with each other. Novel idea. But I'm not looking forward to it.

The day after K was born to J&N, we visited the hospital and got to meet him. He was cute and tiny and perfect and N was doing great and J was doing great and we left and had the biggest fight of our relationship. After dinner, on the way home, we sang the songs we plan to sing to K, since J has assured us that he's counting on us to teach his kid about tunes and staying on key, neither of them being J&N's strong suits. We sang "Puff the Magic Dragon" and I told Ms. P that it makes me sad because Puff is Jackie Paper's imaginary friend and Jackie Paper grows up and doesn't visit his imaginary friend anymore and it's sad. And Ms. P burst into tears (which made me cry too, because it was that kind of night) and said, "Puff is too real! You said Puff isn't real!" To which I said, "No! I said he was imaginary! Imaginary doesn't mean not real!" and she said "You said Puff isn't real!" and we cried some more.

For J&N&K, we got to go home. We visited for an hour or two, then we got in our car and fell apart. When we visited them two days later, we stayed for three hours and got in our car and fell apart. This time, we'll be four hours from home, an hour and a half from anyone else we know, and we're staying in their living room. There's no room to fall apart. For two days, we need to support them in every way we can, and we need to put everything else on hold until we leave.

I'm so looking forward to seeing SIL and BIL and to meeting Squirt. His pictures are adorable and they're so happy he's here. But I'm not looking forward to not being able to fall apart when we need to. It's going to make the drive home a very scary prospect.

Substitution

One of the treats I used to love was an Amy's organic soy cheeze pizza. I'd cut up tomatos, add a little garlic salt, and chow down. But then I discovered just how sensitive to wheat I am. There was a rice-flour crust in the line, but it had real cheese, and I'm far more sensitive to dairy than to wheat. I stopped buying them, what with our small freezer space and the wheat problem. But in Whole Foods the other day I discovered that, true to their pledge to make a pizza for everyone to eat, there is now a rice-crust, soy cheeze spinach pizza. And since Ms. P is out of town until late tonight and the idea of cooking makes me want to throw things across the room, I tried it.

I admit, I was skeptical. Substitutions often don't succeed for me. I can't stand fake meat, soy cheeze in anything other than this pizza grosses me out, and the Great TofuDog Search of 2003 failed to work out in my favor. (It wasn't the taste; it was the texture. Hot dogs should not be floppy. It's just ... wrong, and it brings to mind too many dirty jokes.) Given that this pizza had, according to the label, a delicate crust that required not only baking but then broiling to ensure a crisp unburnt crust and melted cheeze, well, I was prepared for the worst.

And I like it better than the wheat crust, actually. It's really good. Of course, I then looked at the nutrition information, and the whole 9" round pizza is more points than I get in a whole day. A serving is a third, but I broke down and ate a half. I'm waiting for them to make a pizza for wheat-sensitive, dairy-allergic girls on Weight Watchers.

It's time like this that I long for a girlfriend. My best friend and I do not live near each other anymore. She's in the bottom middle of the country and I'm over here on the coast. She was recently diagnosed with Crohn's and is on a crazy restrictive diet to let things heal: no dairy, wheat, corn, sugar, MSG, etc. Eating out is well-nigh impossible. For a while she got salads with no dressing and a few lemons on the side, but eating raw veggies made things worse so now she has to cook them, and she can't trust restaurant cooks. She spent today with one friend who wanted to celebrate my friend's recent gaining of tenure by going out to eat and another who invited other friends along on their movie date, thereby ending up with a movie my friend doesn't want to see at a movie house that serves food. For not the first time recently, we fantasized about how our respective evenings would go if we lived closer.

We'd get a movie, something silly or musical or screwball, something that wouldn't rip open her newly-broken heart and wouldn't freak me out with violence. We'd cook something wheat- and dairy-free with lots of garlic and tamari. We'd crack open a good bottle of wine, because if you're going to risk nitrites and points, it damn well better be good. We'd bitch while we cooked, talking about the disaster that was my mother's recent attempt at holiday gift-giving and my friend's stupid ex-boyfriend and V's upcoming visit. While we ate we'd snuggle into someone's living room with animals and talk and talk and eventually get around to the movie. And when the evening was over, we would each feel heard and loved and seen.

She's lived in her city for nearly three years. The friends she has are not what she wants. In some fundamental ways they don't get her, and she always feels like she's doing more of the work. Here I have friends, but I don't have the girlfriend who is just mine--who loves Ms. P and R and likes to hang out with us but is really mine--and with whom I run away to coffee shops and movie theaters and diners for late-night hangout. We do our best, my friend and I, and we do okay. Daily phone calls make all the difference. But more often than not I don't want to be on the phone. I want to go to her house and snuggle her kitties and climb under blankets because she keeps the house even colder than I keep mine. I want to go out for tea and sit with our laptops and write while she grades papers and complains about the stupid things graduate students write about.

But she is not here and I am not there and neither of us can have dairy or wheat. So we phone all the time and eat our soy cheeze rice-crust pizzas and we know it could be worse, but we also know it could be better. And we wish we could have the better, just for a little while.

Love for R

Last night R's cat G died after a short and sudden illness. His cat S died in August after another sudden illness. They were both funny, loving animals, and we will all miss them both. R, of course, will miss them more than anyone.

He's more than a little bereft right now, as you can imagine. We're waiting to find out what caused all of this.

Feel free to post messages to him in this comment thread, and I'll make sure he sees them.