Year 2, Day 232: So the good news? Smol slept in until 730 am!!
The bad news is I woke up every hour because of internal temperature fluctuations, I’d wake up in a sweat, then wake up freezing, and then leapt out of bed at 1 am startled because my subconscious brain was positive that something was wrong. By 9 am, my entire body was fatigued beyond belief.
But Smol’s sleeping in was so much appreciated.
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JB was so wiped from the day before that they slept in until 930 which was both surprising and appreciated too, just in a different way.
They are grumpy that there’s laundry to put away again. Yeah shocking how with two kids there’s always some laundry to put away, isn’t it? Also shocking there’s always food to be cooked and dishes to wash as well. Life requirements, so tiresome!
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Light rain all day. I’m glad for the gentleness, we need the rain but the heavy rains bring worries of floods.
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My doctor’s office wanted me to take the 13 question questionnaire meant to ferret out depression and can I ask if there’s anyone who isn’t feeling most of those things every day? As an example: Feeling down, depressed, or hopeless; Little interest or pleasure in doing things; Feeling tired or having little energy; Feeling nervous, anxious or on edge. Yes, yes, yes, and yes…. who isn’t??
I function but of course I feel all these things every single day.
A friend pointed out that it’s the people who ignore the pandemic and just live like nothing’s changed who aren’t experiencing this. They’re probably right and that ticks me off too. This could have been so much better, and we could be back to some semblance of a safer normal, if it weren’t for people acting like we aren’t in a deadly pandemic.
I can’t help but feel bitter that the tide shifted from alarm and attention to the “fuck them, I’m fine” attitude the moment the data started showing that this affects PoC more than white people. And it’s not like they were hiding it. They just came right out and said so.
Year 2, Day 225: My Anxiebees were incredibly active today, slowing down my brain processing by a factor of ten, and inspired a new design (women’s V-neck; standard tee). I stopped to make those to burn off some of that oppressive worry / stress / brain fog / creeping depression / fiddly twitchy feelings.
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I had Royal Pains on in the background while I was working and Henry Winkler’s character — can I just say, MAJOR FLASHBACKS. That scene when he and Evan talk about his taking all their money: “You’re gonna get your money back, day or two, week tops.”
That exact same expression on his face is what was on my dad’s face when I was following up with him on getting the money back from the loan I’d made. That lying manipulative asshole expression of “trust me, I’m your father” when he really meant “trust me, I need to take more of your money.” That shook me pretty hard. I still can’t deal with these flashbacks. I think about how angry Hank was, and how angry I am, and how that tracks as we were the responsible siblings. How easily Evan forgave him, I still can’t wrap my head around. Maybe it’s because he had a protector, where neither the Hank character or I did.
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I finally asked Michael’s if they were still going to ship my fabric. They confirmed that the fabric was still in stock, and that their warehouse was just ten days behind. I started to ask if it was ten days in addition to the two weeks they’re already late but decided that doesn’t matter. It’ll get here when it gets here, it definitely won’t be in time for me to get through my holiday projects. They sent a $10 gift card for my trouble so that was nice since there’s nothing they can do to hurry along the shipment. I guess it’s a good thing I bought that back up fabric after all. Now I just need to learn to sew on the machine! 😬
Year 2, Day 218: Huzzah!! Smol made it through the night to 6 am! A painful hour but so much better than 3 and 4 and 5. The combination of overnight diapers and a touch of sleep training the first night they woke automatically predawn without real cause, no leaks!, and we’re back to square two with their sleep. Thank goodness. Zero (1-4 wake ups every night) really sucked. Hard as it was to crawl out into the dark cold to fetch Smol, they were so HAPPY, babbling and chatting away to their little plushie friends, it was hard not to be infected by their mood.
For my part, the flu shot we got over the weekend is kicking my behind up and down the corridors. I was fatigue-aching from head to toe, not unlike a pain flare tbh, yesterday and today my whole left side aches in a different way. Like it’s inflamed and angry. Here’s hoping this is actually producing an immune response and not just torturing me.
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It feels like I blinked and here we are deep into fall and Halloween just around the corner. I’m glad that I thought ahead enough that JB and Smol already their costumes for whatever small activity we do with their little friends, and I’m trying to use this time to get equally prepared for Turkey Holiday and the winter holidays. I’d rather put in the hard work early so I can enjoy what I feel like enjoying come the time. Half the winter presents are done but there are some I forgot to put on the list or haven’t been able to come up with yet.
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Yesterday I’d tackled the problem of all the kids’ clothes in too small (to give away) and too big (store sensibly for future use). Today I tackled the problem of boxes of uncurated hand me downs from friends clearing out their old stuff and figuring JB would probably like it all. They would, they are a budding pack rat, but I went through to sort things to keep, donate, or recycle. It was spiritually freeing to clear up the post-hurricane-looking closet and floor. This was during my long childminding break from work and it was deeply satisfying to get most of the way through.
I was reading this Inc article on happiness and fulfilment and they talked about relative deprivation: when “persons may feel deprived of some desirable thing relative to their own past, other persons or groups, or some other social category.” Then they gave an example of a businessowner who fell prey to “keeping up with the Joneses” in material ways and somehow that led to a massive decline in the happiness at his once thriving business in six months. I don’t know how true that story is but the idea that you should find your own happiness without comparing to others isn’t exactly new. The advice was basically to know yourself, and only compare yourself to yourself.
I thought about that in the context of my life.
I like things as much as the next person but I’m not sure that I experience that much relative deprivation that can be temporarily assuaged by spending. Sure, I could go bananapants over buying stickers that are adorable and stationery, that’s one definite weakness, along with books books and books. But my need to not feel claustrophobic among my belongings goes a long way to offsetting that strong pull.
My areas of envy are typically in my areas of weakness: intellectual. If I were to envy anyone, it might be Nicole and Maggie for being able to make good rational decisions about their kids. Or Cloud for having had the foresight to be in an area where she could enroll her kids in Spanish immersion (her eldest can read literature in Spanish. HOW. COOL. IS. THAT.) Or it might be Tanja for making the early retirement happen, while making it seem manageable, and writing and publishing TWO books (second one coming out in December!). But these are things I mostly admire about them. Money isn’t going to make them happen for me. Well, not the kind of money we’d need. Except for early retirement, having more money would help there but my point is about spending money rather than having it.
I like the good cheese, but I don’t want it all the time. Same with any other edible treat. Yummy but even I have learned moderation.
Certainly there are things we can and want to buy that have that snowball effect. Rather than being pulled to it, the snowballing repels me. The nicer car thing, for example, is a real life current example. We were mentally putting that off until it became clear it’s going to be more pain than it’s worth to delay. But the spending, the need to rearrange our parking situation (a huge pain because garages here are TINY and parking on the street is not an option), the need to figure out how to dispose of our existing car(s). All of that is so tiresome that I’m back to trying to figure out how to avoid the purchase again.
It’s probably a good thing for our finances, though less so for my psyche, that my hatred of change will lead me to look for ways to make do than to upgrade to the newest thing. I don’t WANT to have to learn how to pilot a spaceship that is a modern day car. I’m convinced that this will be me:
The first time I had to drive a car made in this decade, my shoulders were up by my ears the whole time. Hated it. Haaaaated it.
You know the thing that I MOST envy right now? This isn’t solely a pandemic thing but it most certainly is exacerbated by it. People with time. Time enough to be alone AND have to spend with other people too! Time to do one thing at a time and not have to multitask every minute of the day. Time to be creative. Time to be contemplative. Time to experiment. Time to be still. Time to be themselves and not “mom” or “manager” or “employee” or “cook” or “household manager”. I mean, I actually enjoy all those things in moderation but not when I have to be at least three of them at all times. We don’t have nearly enough money to make that kind of time happen.
I also envy people who have more choices than we have solely because they have massive shedloads of money. But since the kind of money we’re talking about is vastly more than what we’d ever see or deal with, it’s not the kind of envy that sticks. So yeah, I get green, sometimes. But thankfully not enough to feel like that has a huge impact on our lives.
Perhaps also the always ongoing Lakota project helps keep my head on more straight than it would otherwise be. If so, I’m thankful for that, too, along with the opportunity to lend a helping hand.
:: Do you have areas of relative deprivation that you struggle with or are you pretty good?
“I’m trying to teach JB to operate from a spirit of abundance.” I said to a friend. You?? My dear friend hooted. I laughed too.
Isn’t it nice to have friends who know you?
As much as I (intellectually) know we are well off, both by comparison to the rest of the world and in absolute terms even if we aren’t in the same league as our neighbors, I’m still me. My gut is still deeply rooted in the past. It’s lodged in the year 2000 when I didn’t have any financial support for college as promised, when I had to figure out how to make rent AND tuition, still protecting the Past Me that clawed her way to where we are today, inch by bloody inch.
What do I know about the spirit of abundance? Not a whole lot. I’m learning but, confession that’s not going to be a surprise to anyone who’s been here for a while: I’m still scared of being poor again. I’m still scared that it’ll all go pants. That we’ll have to start over with nothing and I won’t have it in me to do that again. I’m still scared of reliving the harsh cold last years of my mom’s life: fighting daily to get by, stressed to the gills about the bills, dying without a penny to leave behind for my kids.
As my therapist says, these are fear thoughts. I know they are. Earlier I stated unequivocally how I know we’re rich. It riled some folks when I said that it’s ridiculous not to know you’re rich when you have multi-millions in the bank. I also said that not feeling rich doesn’t make that a fact, and that if you can’t feel rich with millions, you’re deficient in something but it’s not money. I didn’t write that for clicks. If I had, I would have named names. I wrote that post because it’s both my valid observation and because I know those feelings. I have them from time to time myself! That’s how I recognize them. It’s important to remind myself, as much as anyone else it resonated with, that whatever our feelings are, we ARE rich.
The hell of it is, I can know we are rich, and also have a metric ton of fear thoughts bubbling under the surface. When I make a purchase, especially for myself, I agonize over it. I talk myself out of it, or I need a friend to talk me into it. I know $20 is ok to spend. I know $20 is ok to give. We can afford to send grieving friends flowers more than once, I know that we can help friends in need. Yet I still lie awake some nights (especially if painsomnia is already keeping me up) toting up the spending and second guessing myself. That’s going to happen, and I can’t just tell it to go away.
But maybe, aside from simply being honest with oneself, that’s another reason why it’s so important to be brutally honest about the facts of being rich. Logic can’t banish the fear but logic can pierce the fog that the fear creates. It can elbow aside the overwhelming worry that it’ll all go to pot, and point out that, as scared as my inner child is about how we were always scraping to make rent, we will probably be ok. (more…)
Year 2, Day 204: I don’t know why but I notice that I’m irritated by effusive reactions over how terribly I feel from relatives who choose not to vaccinate (not to be confused with folks who cannot, like our kids and immunocompromised folks). It’s not my choice to make for them but these days, with the pandemic raging on and killing and hurting so many, it feels like the latter is such a selfish and politically driven choice that I can’t help but feel reactive to it. I think my core self rejects sympathy from them because it doesn’t feel like it could be real? I don’t know. I suppose it doesn’t matter, I’m just noticing the feelings and now hopefully releasing them to the winds.
Actually. Before I release them, I think I do get it. Because if I want to see them, their refusal to get vaccinated feels a whole lot more personal now. Because they know how vulnerable I am, even more so than Smol because it’s quite possible that Smol has a working immune system but I don’t. And while they’re not obligated to care enough about me to get vaccinated and help a sister out, it’s clear they don’t care enough about me to get vaccinated and help a sister out. Whatever their personal wants are, they’re more important than my needs.
That’s why it feels insincere. There’s nothing I can do or say about it since that call is their own, but it feels wrong.
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On a commercial for a university, the narrator says: “The world equally distributes talent, but it doesn’t equally distribute opportunity.” It made me think of this post I’d just read from Jim at Route to Retire: “Many times folks want to attribute financial success to one’s background. …. I don’t buy into that. I’ve already said that you need to play the hand you’re dealt to live the life you dream and I meant that.”
Later in the comments he agrees with me that what you do matters, so does where you start from, and so does luck. So he and I agree. But initially it made me flash back to all the PF bloggers who argued that it’s ONLY down to what you do with what you have, and that your background has nothing to do with your successes. That group overlaps with the group that thinks everything in this world is merit based, microaggressions don’t exist, and that diversity is pandering to the masses rather than leveling a heavily tilted playing field. It’s weird.
Year 2, Day 205: I was struck by a realization today. Yesterday, a friend played sounding board for a family holiday communication and scheduling dilemma. Basically a part of my family that I miss and wanted to see, but has been adamantly anti COVID vax, and only masks when required, hasn’t been answering my messages for months. The last time was when I asked a direct question about gifts they’d sent for the kids. So I messaged a direct question about holiday plans and it’s been crickets for weeks. In the interim, I’ve seen other parts of the family and I didn’t think we had an issue since they readily agreed to all staying masked for both my sake and the baby’s sake. I’m immunocompromised enough that I truly can’t take risks and they all know that. (more…)
Year 2, Day 197: What a day. Up three times to the piercing screams of a Very Sad Baby with a low grade fever, even though PiC was going to cover, because I can’t sleep through that ruckus and it’s really hard for one of us to medicate an uncooperative baby at night. He took the last call alone because I couldn’t move anymore but I couldn’t stop myself propelling my body out of bed automatically the first two times. Unintentional, but still. The damage was done.
Whatever it is that started the fever in Smol also left them with general fussiness (so many tears, soooo many tears) and a red nose. I can’t see any other obvious symptoms – no coughing or sneezing but they have cried so hard they’ve thrown up on me, twice. This is NOT our deal, child. Vomit –> PiC. Not Me. Sigh. At least it’s not sick vomit, and yes, there is a difference. And somehow it matters to my brain.
Of course the virus also took out my ability to function. Every millimeter aches, breathing hurts, my brain can only zero in on faults (that floor is filthy and needs to be scrubbed!), I’m feeling sad and angry and lonely and isolated. But I don’t want to talk to anyone because I’m angry and tired and hurting.
I’m sad that when this happens, the load all falls on PiC. I’m sad that I have a million dishes to keep spinning and when I’m sick, I cannot spin but half of them, if that. I hate feeling this way. I hate feeling physically crappy and feeling emotionally like a scooped out husk of a fruit rind. I’m also mad that my body still cannot handle viruses.
Turns out, of course, Smol Acrobat does not like taking medicine, and found that alternating a few CCs of meds with a scoop of yogurt helps that medicine go down. I had to take the morning part since he had meetings he couldn’t cancel but thankfully PiC quickly took the rest of the day and tomorrow off so that he can be primary childminder and I can get some rest.
Year 2 of COVID in the Bay Area.