untitled April 21, 2009

so thank you for the help the other day. it prevented me from doing a lot of very unnecessary lecturing.

my friend stopped everything unsavory and her partner never found out (as it usually should be because often the telling is really about the cheater trying to relieve their own guilt). i was honest with my friend in a loving way (i’m upset, i’m disappointed, scared but i love you and how can i help you make things better) and she was honest back, and we are doing pretty okay. but anyway, i am back-ish.

littleO loves kitties so much that i cannot show her any books with kitties in them at the library or bookstore because she SCREAMS at them and shrieks at the top of her lungs and people do not think it is cute. oh and she has no teeth. lets see, what else can i say? be patient people, i am WAY out of practice here. i can’t even come up with a title.

hi people April 14, 2009

yes i am shamelessly writing now because i need help. sorry. i don’t blame anyone for skipping the post or not replying at all. anyway. first a quick update then onto my problem. here is a pic (it is the most recent one i could find on the computer i am on) of littleO:

she is almost a year old now! holy. she’s absolutely fucking brilliant and hysterical and challenging. and my smarty is such an amazing big brother, i could weep just thinking about it. he’s currently obsessed with Tinkerbell and Star Wars. he calls the character General Grievous “genital grievous” and of course we do not correct him.

onto my problem. one of my bestest friends (in real life – not in blogland) is, i just found out, having an affair. WTF is my effing role? I am so MAD. I understand the reasons, but we are family friends, and I just want to lecture her and make her listen to me tell her how mad I am and say “how dare you” and stuff like that. but honestly I have no idea what my role is here. i have never been through this before. they have kids. i love her partner. they are having marital difficulties. we go on vacations with them. WTF do i DO?

slightly inspired January 29, 2009

I am a little inspired by the recent blog flurry over at my friend/donor-for-littleO’s wife’s blog. I am having an interesting time with the drinking. I really love it. Maybe too much. Maybe not. I went to a training for my work for adoption related issues and it was VERY interesting in terms of how to talk to kids about the truth of their biology. According to their research (a leading center in the field of adoption) you should be talking about the donor, or bio parent from birth. Wondering if the child got their eye color from him, wondering all manner of things out loud. You are not supposed to wait until the child brings it up. It is supposed to be integrated into all aspects of the child’s life. Not that it should be talked about all the time or anything. It was very interesting to learn that it is not supposed to be a wait-till-they ask deal. One is supposed to bring it up in an age appropraiate manner whenever the subject naturally arises (like a discussion of eye color, genes, etc.) I am surprised by how often these topics come up. How do you people handle this issue?

how do you do it? December 31, 2008

how do you people keep your house clean??? i’m not talking about spotless, just company worthy…unembarrassing…not  gross. we just can’t seem to make it happen and we are constantly doing a binge-purge system which doesn’t work AT ALL. everyone i know who has a clean house was born that way or learned it in young adulthood. we are both slobs who hate living in a chaotic household. what can we effing do?

i’m still here December 28, 2008

all is well. i don’t know yet if my blog life is over. i am busy playing rock band with S and taking care of my 2 very lovely kids. saw our donor family for littleO recently. all is well there. still taking antidepressants. xmas and hanukkah are over, thank god. littleO is cheeky and smiley and charming, unlike smarty who was massively serious at 8 months old. i miss you all. i have not figured out how to incorporate this blog into my new life without ttc and pregnancy, because honestly, that is what the purpose was. it became so much more than that, but i have not figured out how to turn my nottryingtogetpregnant life into a blog. and i am regularly aware and grateful that the ttc part is over. so grateful. so incredibly grateful. for fuck’s sake. hard years, those. little pieces of me are returning as i shift my obsessiveness away from baby making, deal with my depression, hug my baby, muster some answers and empathy for my 4 year old who broke down in tears in the back seat of the car 2 weeks ago because “i’m so sad that i don’t have a dad”, making gingerbread houses, surviving an emotionally taxing job, attempting to have any semblance of a sex life again,  weeping on a morning when i wake up and find myself in bed with my wife who i love and my son who is snuggled between us holding his arms out for us to put LittleO on top of him so they can both shriek. what can you do except cry? it is just too much sometimes.

thank god for drugs October 26, 2008

I started the Webbutr!n last week and I am over the hump of the jittery-speedy-floaty feelings. I feel like a cranked out freak the first week I take it and then it mellows out. To answer a commenter’s question, yes I have tried therapy. HAH. Have I ever. Many times. I am a therapy proponent, and I would be a mierable looser without it, but when I take Wellbutr!n (this time and one other time at the beginning of the year – I stopped to attempt breastfeeding), it is so clear to me that something is wrong with my brain. This something is correctable through medication (shocking) and not really so correctable through therapy. Well, maybe I could change my own brain chemistry if I could go live in an ashram for a few years, but that is sooooo not happening.

I only wish I had tried this earlier. For some reason (stigma? stubornness? fear?) it took me years and years of being depressed, and anxious, and loop-thoughty to finally try medication. Instead I went to therapy (to great benefit). I went on spiritual journeys, I was rigorously honest with myself, I surrounded myself with good, honest, loving people. I went to more therapy. I have done it all. But not until this past January did I finally try some effing medication. Like, hello!? Anyway, this pill does not make my problems disappear, but it takes takes a HUGE edge off the depression, and makes it so much easier for me to cope with my problems, even at the lowest prescribed dose. And thankfully, it does not flatten the top end of my emotional range. So things are better.

funk October 13, 2008

I am in a funk, but I elaborate about that later.

First, the drinking. It has been mostly very, very FUN. Wine tasting, tipsy sex, a glass of wine after putting the kids to bed on a Friday night. Searching for wines is also amazing and overwhelming. And I discovered that I get quiet and observant when I get a little drunk, which is hysterical if you know me IRL, being an intrinsically unquiet person. The process is also confusing. I think most people my age (33) have, by this point, figured out how much they can drink, if they can mix different alcohols, how much water they need to drink, if there will be any consequences the next day. For me it is all new, and I am discovering that too much wine and no water = parched feeling of wanting to die in the middle of the night, crappy sleep and grumpy me the next day. Does drinking make any of you more depressed the next day? Just so you know, by ‘too much wine’ i mean 3 glasses, which is the most I have had so far. Sometimes I wonder if I like it too much, talk about it too much, think about it too much. Maybe that is good. Some checks and balances. Ultimately I know I cannot avoid a period of thinking about it mucho after 17 years of abstinence. It is just too damn exciting.

What I want to blog about today, however, is the subject of me being in a funk. Depressed. Insecure. I have made some new friends lately (the last 6 months at my new job) and that is a vulnerable process for me. One friend in particular, I really like and we became instantly close. We planned a number of trips together, both alone and with our families. Ah. How do I write about this without it being boring?? And long?? Um. I am just always wondering if people really like me and it takes me a long time to trust that someone does…that I am worthy of smart, funny people liking me. I make everything they do personal. Do you know what I mean? Like if New Friend is a little off one day, or doesn’t return my call the same night, or tells me that she would rather we take two cars on our upcoming family vacation after we planned on all going in her minivan, I get all ‘she doesn’t like me anymore’ instead of thinking maybe she had a bad day, or didn’t get my message, or just wants some quality time with her husband. Why must I be so insecure and self centered? I think about everything too much. Today I just wish I was someone else. Someone who wasn’t so hard on myself. So needy. This leads me to thinking I should go back on antidepressants, because when I was on Wellbutr!n, I ruminated so.much.less. But I was a little angrier too. Anyway thank you for reading this self indulgent post when I hardly ever post anymore.

p.s. amer!cas funniest home videos is so.much.funnier after a beer. for realz.

holy fuck people September 27, 2008

the drinking. the wine tasting? a corona with lime and salt with a delicious mexican lunch? i had no idea.

so.fun.

more later.

p.s. thank you for all of the lengthy comments. I LOVE lengthy comments.

What a long time means September 23, 2008

This coming February it will be 17 years since I have had a drink.

Recently I have been considering that my teen drinking career may have been more normal than alcoholic.

I stopped when I was 16. My father was an alcoholic…you know, the kind who slept in the creek sometimes. He got sober when I was 11. I displayed some early behavior indicating that I had problems drinking: wanting to get drunk every time I was around alcohol, stealing weed from my friends, not ever knowing my limits, barfing. But hello? I was stealing before the drinking started, and of course I wanted to drink when it was around, since it was so hard to get. I stopped for those reasons, but mostly I stopped because I made friends with sober people in high school. I went to meetings for a few years, and then I found that I didn’t need them anymore to stay sober. I met S, and she stopped drinking altogether 6 months into our relationship because I asked her to.

Where am I going with this? I always believed that alcoholism was a disease I had, which meant that certainly, I could never, ever, ever drink. I assumed that my teen behavior (for less than a year) and my family history meant I needed to be sober forever, lest the progressive disease catch up with me.

I’m not sure what happened recently but something changed. All of a sudden I told S that she could drink if she wanted to. I started to question my unquestioned beliefs about myself and alcoholism in general. My dad was surely an Alcoholic, capital A, as are many more functional folks. But I decided, and I really can’t be more articulate about it in this moment because my thoughts and feelings about this are incredibly complex layered and detailed, to consider drinking again. As an adult. With guidelines.

What I know for sure is that 17 years without drinking is a long time.  I could have a problem, but most likely I don’t. I find myself surrounded by friends who drink “normally”. By normally I mean sometimes they get drunk and regret it (once a year?). By normal I mean that they monitor their drinking and have made rules for themselves that they generally respect. Some don’t hang out with people that they know they will be a little out of control with. Some have decided not to drink around their kids, in general, or on weeknights and so on. Most have decided not to make drinking a regular (daily) practice of relaxing. I have been quizzing them about their “rules” so I can muddle through if I decide to drink. I know that I probably can’t ever drink without monitoring myself. If I am a giant genetic alcoholic I may find that I make rules I cannot adhere to. I have, of course, considered that this whole attitude change is just more of my justifying addict behavior/thinking, but when I really check in, that is not what is happening.

Current research actually does support people returning to controlled drinking after a period of abstinence. I know that for people in 12 step programs all of my thinking probably sounds blasphemous. I’m not sure that I am explaining myself well, but I suspect that even if I did there is no way NOT to sound justifying. What is really upsetting to me is that I don’t know any on else in this position. No one I know or have even met has been sober so long with such a limited drinking career. I even tried googling this and came up with nothing.

So. What to do.

What are your rules? How do you not use alcohol or drugs in an abusive way? Has anyone ever started drinking again after a long period of abstinence?

quick post September 5, 2008

• it’s my birthday
• it is Smarty’s birthday next week – he’ll be FOUR!
• i am going to make Smarty an ice cream cone halloween costume, and i’m going to make Chicky an ice cream sandwich costume.
• i am going, sans kids, to santa barbara next month with some friends
• i am now regularly (and by regularly i mean 3 times) going to a Zumba Class. YES I AM. My skill level is akin to the chick in the back wearing light green.