The Redhead Mom

Dear Thomas,

Today is the last day you will be 9 years old.  This is my 11th letter to you.  One for every birthday and the one I wrote to you on the day you were born.  I don’t tell you much about the time leading up to your arrival but I was sick and scared and to be honest never really thought I was going to get to take you home.  But then you arrived despite the scary and horrible pregnancy and you were so amazingly perfect.

I wasn’t really ready to be a mom when you were born.  In fact, you arrived after a very quick labor and in a panic I screamed at the nurse to push you back in I wasn’t ready.  While I was ready to have you I was wholly unprepared for the emotions and responsibility in parenting.

I think I do a pretty good job now.  I think part of it is just realizing I can’t be perfect and no parent will ever be perfect either.  I love you.  I can’t imagine this world without you.  I miss you when you are traveling the world without me.

I have known you and loved you for 10 years.  That seems so unbelievable to me.  I can’t imagine where all that time is gone.  Sometimes late at night I sneak into your room and crawl in bed with you and I secretly don’t mind too much when you crawl in bed with us.  I know these days are quickly coming to a close and while I look forward to the relationship we will have as you approach adolescence and adulthood I will always, always miss these days.

10 years ago I held you in my arms in the hospital while your father slept.  You weren’t even named yet (your father would do that the next day leading to a decade of my grousing about how HE NAMED YOU WHILE I WAS SLEEPING) but I snuggled you and I sang you the song I had in my head my entire pregnancy.  I know it was a love song written by Paul to Linda but the truth is it always felt like my love song to you.

I love you.  I am honored to be your mother.  Happy birthday my boy.

Who knows how long I’ve loved you
You know I love you still
Will I wait a lonely lifetime
If you want me to, I will.

For if I ever saw you
I didn’t catch your name
But it never really mattered
I will always feel the same.

Love you forever and forever
Love you with all my heart
Love you whenever we’re together
Love you when we’re apart.

And when at last I find you
Your song will fill the air
Sing it loud so I can hear you
Make it easy to be near you
For the things you do endear you to me
Oh, you know, I will
I will.

It is not a secret that I am a raging control freak.  ABOUT EVERYTHING.  Nor is it a secret that I am pathologically introspective, self absorbed, and completely socially inept.  Luckily I have found that being a control freak can help you develop a quite successful career of managing projects and making lists and being the go to girl who gets it done.  And adulthood seems to reward my eccentricities and oddities in a way that childhood and adolescence did not.  Unfortunately these traits have their downsides as well.  No one likes living with a control freak.  And the combo of introspection, self absorption and my social ineptitude has meant I typically have a hard time maintaining friendships through distance and time.  I was thinking about this the other day in my self absorbed introspection way.  Something that comes up periodically with my psychologist is I seem to be unable to define why I make the choices I have in the past and therefore seem unsure as to why I continue on the same road (other than I dislike change).  I was recently asked what it was about Tom that changed my life and made me what to marry him.  I was sort of at a loss…I was 19 then…my life and even my person and head were different.  Why I chose him doesn’t have anything to do with why I love him today and continue to choose him.

Or so I thought.  I had a mild epiphany yesterday about something I have said for a long time.  Without Tom I am alone, completely utterly alone.  That isn’t wholly accurate of course, my relationship with my brother and sister in law as blossomed into something I never though I would have.  I trust and love them deeply and know they are in my corner.  I have the delightful Rosemary Waits who besides being unbelievable smart and talented loves me for reasons I don’t always understand and has never wavered in her support and love.

But before Tom, before those, I was alone.  I struggled in my relationships with people.  I was highly manipulative and distrustful.  I never really knew love before Tom.  He swept into my world and was the first person in my entire life to establish himself firmly and resolutely in my corner.  We didn’t and don’t always agree and while being loved is as hard as not being loved sometimes he made me not alone.  We were in this life together.  We loved, mourned, celebrated together.  He has always seen the best in me even if he might have a hard time telling me that.  He sees the best in me even when I am at my worst.

He was the first person who has never, not in the nearly 13 years we have been married ever implied I can’t accomplish something or that I am not smart, funny, and everything I not-so-secretly want to be.  He maintains his friends love me (although I have my doubts).  Every single thing I have ever expressed wanting to do he has encouraged me and shown nothing but absolute confidence in my ability to do it even while I wavered and cried and struggled.

He was the first person who ever really loved me, through all my faults and weaknesses.  He loved me through every single poor choice I ever made.  It is hard to remember and see that when I am frustrated by coming home late or not following my obsessive need to be in control.  But he does, he always has, I believe he always will.  And that is why I married him and while I choose him every single day and will for the rest of my life.

Be forewarned this is yet another post about being crazy.  I talked and wrote about being pregnant and having a baby when I had a newborn.  I thought birth stories were incredible interesting and now that I am figuring out at least part of my brain I am sort of fascinated by it.

Several days ago we were halfway watching a show on the Discovery Health channel about anxiety disorders.  While I did not identify with any of the characters because I fit most strongly in with General Anxiety disorder (but I have a touch of everything as part of that) I was struck by something one of the doctors said.  Anxiety disorders don’t happen overnight.  They are insidious and like growing your hair out.  One day you realize wow, my hair is long.  For me, one day I looked at my life and went holy shit, I am crazy.

While it both myself and my psychologist believe I have had anxiety disorders since early childhood they reached the point that I was losing the ability to cope or function like the rest of the world.  While it is easy for me to say I have always been like this, the truth is some of it I haven’t.

Tom and I had a lovely date night tonight where we bowled and then went for ice cream.  We walked around the shopping center and I admitted that if I were not seeing the amazing and wonderful Dr. C I believe that I would either 1. not be alive or 2. be unable to leave the house.

At the time I started seeing him there were two new-ish things that had started happening to the level that it was really making me odd.  1. I developed overnight a phone anxiety.  I work for a Canadian company.  Where almost everyone I deal with I deal with by  phone, in Canada and conference calls.  Being wracked by fear of making a phone call was making my job hell.

It is hard to explain why I could at the same point realize how stupid my fear was and yet be unable to control it.  And the stress.  Every time I needed t o make a phone call I would be at the point of throwing up over it.  Why exactly?  They might ask me questions.  And they might be unexpected.  And I wouldn’t know what to say.  Every single instance I needed to make a phone call started off with these thoughts about how someone might *gasp* ask me a question.  It wasn’t just work.  I wouldn’t call my dr. to make a dr. appointment without the routine of stress, tears, throwing up, stress, walking around the building, etc.  I was paralyzed with fear of calling my brother or sister in law and interrupting them.  If I needed to call to resolve a billing issue over something..I might put it off for months or just pay the overage instead.  As soon as the thought occurred to me I needed to make a phone call the worrying and obsessing began.  I would think about it when trying to go to sleep at night.  I would think “I really have to do this, but I can’t.”  And then the thoughts of worthlessness would start and I would be ready to either throw up or drown myself.

The second fear, the one I told my husband about tonight and he simply stared at me as if I were an alien, is remarkably similar.  I couldn’t go into a store or restaurant without being consumed with fear that someone would ask me  if I needed help with something.  I seemed to be able to do it with Tom so if I wasn’t eating lunch with him, I ate it in my car.  I would put off shopping or cry in the car before I went into the store.  Again, I don’t know WHY, it just happened.  I don’t even know why I was scared they might talk to me.  At one point I had to stop going through the drive thru at McDonald’s which had become a safe way for me to get food because they didn’t have the sauce I wanted for my mcnuggets but they didn’t discover this until I was at the pickup window.  And I started crying over that because I didn’t want them without that sauce and the stress of simply asking for them to change my order overcame me.

From that point on every single time I thought about McDonald’s I couldn’t bring myself to go because what if they had a problem again.

I realize how crazy I sound.  I realized it then.  And to be honest these thoughts still happen but between medication (and yes, I am taking it) and the year of cognitive therapy I am doing a lot better.  But what is amazing to me is how so much of this part snuck up on me.

I am failing in what I am supposed to be writing about.  That tag line up there says Commentary on politics, education, motherhood, feminism and finding my way back but I seem to mostly write about being crazy.  Which I suppose really does fall under finding my way back but the part of the picture that is missing is where am I finding my way back from and where am I trying to go.  A deeper shade of sane I suppose is the easy answer.  But the truth is I only know where I am leaving with the vaguest idea of where I want to be.

I woke up after I turned 30 and discovered my life wasn’t what I planned on and I wasn’t where I wanted to be.  I was newly diagnosed with an auto-immune disease that while minor in perspective to real horrors in this world was taking things out of my life that I had enjoyed.  Crafting and reading were gone.  I had to change how I cleaned, what I bathed in, what I ate and drank, the makeup and clothing I wore.  I was marked by embarrassing scars on my hands and feet.  I was in a job that was slowly killing the bit inside me that made me ever care a bit about my job.  It was (and still is) a dead end job.  I was working 80 hours a week.  My marriage was falling apart.  My child hated me.  Did I mention my job sucked?  I had no relationship with my family and but two friends who seemed to be there for any of this.  I was ready every single day to die.  I was no longer clever and funny and successful and oh so very on top of things for my age.  I was a failing 30 year old who was in such a rush to be a real grownup I peaked at 25 and was suffering an identity crisis I didn’t even deserve.  So the way I have described the next 6-8 months of my life was that I lit a torch and threw it in and burnt down every single thing I had in the world.

And now, I am rebuilding all that while a lot of those problems still exist.  I am still have my first world problem identity crisis.  I still am in a job out of simply inertia and my love for my nearly 4 weeks of vacation.  I am not sure the W family situation is ever fixable, rather simply tolerable.  My child doesn’t really hate me and probably never did but I continue to be the Hater of Fun™ in my house.

The thing is I can rewind every single year of my life and all I see is that I was trying to get to a destination, but not where I was going much less why I was headed there.

My mother found this blog through Facebook.  This alone has kept me writing about my family with much depth.  I have no desire to hurt people and I know that what I say and how I feel will hurt her.  But then I consider the fact that almost no one who reads this (and there are so very few anyway) knows my mother and hurting me has never prevented her from venting her spleen online and to people about me and the one conversation I ever attempted to have with her about how I felt minimized in my own life by the very people I should matter to she ended it by proclaiming “I was a very hard child to love.”  And that was where it broke.  I talk about that moment a lot with my psychologist because it became the moment that I remember every time I am weak and share something of myself with them.  I remember the abject lack of love I feel and have felt by the very people who should love you no matter what.

And that is when I realize that is what I am trying to find my way back to, a place of love.

I love Christmas.  I love New Year’s Day.  I love giving things (and some getting too!) I love spending time with family and friends.  I love explaining my most recent injury (this year I broke my ankle the Sunday before Christmas)  But mostly I love the end of it all and the beginning of something new.

I am a person who loves patterns and organization and planning and lists.  And last year I declared 2008 just entirely too miserable to discuss in any way at all and didn’t bother doing the count down.  But 2009 found me lucky.  Actually, it was the same sort of lucky I was in 2007 and 2008 but just was too blind or to close to see it.  But I found it again with the help of some friends, my lovely husband and son and of course my 2 different psychologists.

January – We battled Chicken Pox which my son self diagnosed as mosquito bites. Thomas and I traveled to OKC for the OWL Yule Ball and I said goodbye to the Wizard Rock community.  I wrote a lot.  January was a good mental health month.  Although I was just 60 days out from no longer taking anti-depressants and had yet to start to circle the anxiety drain.

February – I was madly in planning mode for what turned out to be two wonderful vacations.  A cruise with Tom’s sister and parents and a trip to China.  Thomas asked about sex, sort of.  I failed him, totally.

March – We go on a cruise.  It was a lot of fun.  We came back and immediately decided to take Tom’s parents on another one!

April – I read a lot.  I start to struggle and have some hard weeks.

May – I effectively dropped off the face of the earth.  But I start to feel a lot better out of no where.

June – Thomas turns 9 and continues to make me one of the luckiest people in the whole world.  Shortly after I talk about feeling so much better and how I will never ever again let things get bad, I stop sleeping.

July – For the first time ever, I don’t hit rock bottom but immediately start seeing my current psychologist(s).  We got to China.  I see Rose.  I feel, can I say it, happy?

August – Tom has a birthday.  Thomas goes back to school.  I take on the task of a new lunch regimen.

September – I surprise Tom one morning with a weekend trip to Dallas.  It was lovely and one of my most favorite things I did with him.  I return and begin antidepressants the following day.  Within 2 weeks I feel remarkably better and clearer and am not plagued with the side effects of previous medications.  I get braces, I take Thomas to see the Dalai Llama. I get some teeth pulled.

October – I take Thomas to Indiana for fall break and have a lovely weekend with my brother.  I ran into my psychologist at SuperTarget and get a really great story out of it that will probably always make me laugh at myself.

November – I turn 32.  I get pneumonia.  We spend Thanksgiving with my brother in Indiana.  All of us return with our limbs.  I figure out some boundaries for some people in my life.

December – I love December.  It was altogether great.  I spend a lot of time thinking about how for me, this is all I have.  This one life.  I don’t believe in an afterlife.  This is it.  And I have the choice to do what I have to to not be miserable, to stop making others miserable and to even make things better if only very superficially for other people.  I realize, like so, so many of us, I am lucky beyond all belief.  I have a great husband and child.  I am rebuilding a relationship with my parents and brother in a way that is healthy.  I am blessed with the most amazing family that exists as in laws.  I have friends who will seemingly do anything for me no matter how much I fuck up.  And most of all I am loved and can love. Lucky.

Oh and I tripped over firewood, flipped on my back and broke my ankle while walking across the street.  But hey, it was another great laugh at myself story!