Today we won.

 Today I did something. Today was really big. Today I was brave. Today I won. 

Anyone who knows me knows, my kids come first. My kids drive me up the wall and there are days all I want to do is hide in the closet eating chocolate but my kids are the most important thing in my life. I will sit and watch the same episode of transformer 900 times if that is what it takes to comfort my oldest. I will buy all the poop toys if that is what it takes for my youngest to smile. My babies are my life and they always come first.

Today I had a big moment where I overcame severe anxiety and talked to a stranger. I do this pretty much every day in the medical world, but this was different. This had nothing to do with nurses, doctors, tests, results, appointments, or therapies. This was just to help my sweet little boy feel less lonely. His best friend moved to a different school last year. Making friends is hard for my baby, he has some developmental delays that make recognizing social cues really difficult for him. Anyway these two little boys had become inseparable at school, they held hands and told each other they loved each other and it was very sad when we learned they wouldn’t be going to the same school anymore and we actually lived quite far away from each other. 

I ached for my baby as he the days and weeks went on and he continued to miss his friend. I thought it would be like most early childhood friendships and my son would miss his friend less and eventually forget about his first friend as he made new friends and besides he still had one very close friend at school.

Those days and weeks turned to months and my son was still desperately missing his friend. He would talk about his friend and tell everyone all about “my best friend, E.” despite having not seen him for three months. My mama heart just couldn’t take that sad little soul, crying out for its kindred spirit. I took an Ativan and called the other boys mom to arrange a play date.

That was a pretty big moment for me but what was even better was that I went to the play date! I wracked up all my courage and spent the next week planning what I would say to the other mom, what I would wear, what my kids would wear, and made sure I told my son we were going to see “E” so that I couldn’t back out.

The day of the play date came, I packed all the snacks (including extras for our friends that I would only offer if it was ok with the mom) and made sure to have sunscreen, bug spray, hats (all the normal kid stuff), plus all the extras that comes with a medical kiddo. The play date was so awkward! Like facepalm, awful, I said and did all the wrong things, and was thoroughly convinced this lady hated me. I wanted to crawl in a hole and never come back out, but my son was so happy! He was having a real childhood moment, an actual just be a kid, play with my best friend, run through the woods, slide down on your belly, eat all the ice cream, normal kid fun! That smile made it so worth every painful moment of that day. I felt like a really good mom.

As the school year went on we noticed that my son was still not really making connections with other kids, he was five years old and parallel playing but not actually engaging with the other kids. We started working really hard at helping him learn to connect with other people, we had help from an amazing team of therapists, psychologists, and teachers from his school. That’s when the pandemic hit and suddenly our lifeline was gone. 

With the pandemic happening my mental health (like a lot of other people’s) became a really big struggle for me. I was terrified of my son getting sick, he is already fragile and at a high risk of death, Covid is .... I don’t have words for my level of fear. My anxiety got way worse, to the point now where leaving the house is an actual really big struggle for me. I do everything I can to not leave the house but there are times I have no choice. With not leaving the house and locking down in a very tight quarantine to protect my high risk family members I found that I stopped talking to people. My anxiety got even worse. It got to the point that communicating with people outside of my immediate family was hard. I was hardcore struggling, more than I ever have in my life. As much as I was struggling I kept going, every day I pushed myself and did what I needed to keep my kids healthy and happy. We homeschooled, we crafted, we gardened, we painted bedrooms, we read more books, we played video games, we baked cupcakes from scratch. I found a way to have groceries delivered, I managed to have almost all of our appointments over the phone. What couldn’t happen over the phone was done by video chat when possible although that still left enough appointments that I was forced to leave the house at least once a week.

I actually started to feel ok and it seemed like I was managing pretty well, and that is when my son got sick. Something was happening he had new symptoms that couldn’t be explained by his underlying health condition. On top of it when I did leave the house I got rear ended - my car is ☠️ and I have some minor injuries but overall I’m ok, didn’t help the anxiety though. As I sorted through all of that and saw my son starting to feel better things seemed to be ok again. I started to find myself coming back to life. I started feeling less of a mombie and more like a person. I was able to actually focus on the deeper parts of my kids again and hear things that I maybe hadn’t been capable of hearing before. My youngest was learning to explore who they were and was actually letting us learn so much about being happy right along with them. My oldest was happy at home and was finally showing real signs of affection to not just me but our whole family! We were getting real “I love you!” and actual unprompted hugs and kisses for the first time in years! Our kids were thriving in so many ways! But our oldest was still talking about his friend and drawing pictures of him and trying to figure out how to send him letters. 

So today I did something. Today was really big. Today I was brave. Today I won. Today I picked up my phone and I texted that other mom, the mom I met once, the mom I had that super awkward play date with, that mom who probably was trying just as hard for her amazing little boy. I texted her and we let the boys talk. They sent videos and pictures and hearts. Today we won.

Mommy is sleeping

I'm sitting here in the darkness, exhausted, fuzzy, burnt out. It's late on a Friday morning and I can hear the world ticking by. I feel guilty, lazy, lonely, as I lay here, in the silence watching his tiny chest rise and fall, counting the seconds every time his breathing pauses, methodically repositioning him when he is gasping, timing the jerks and strange outbursts of laughter. I can see the sunlight, flooding every crevice it finds in the blackout blinds. I can hear the sounds off the morning birds, my husband taking conference calls and video meetings on the patio, the nanny and my baby playing in the living room. I start to get flashbacks of the loneliness I felt being a new mother, I remember endless nights being up to feed the baby. I remember coming near to the end of my maternity leave and wanting to soak up those late night moments of just me and the baby. I remember those lazy mornings when I could nap with the baby and feel no guilt, after all, everyone kept telling me to "sleep when the baby sleeps", but what I remember most of all was thinking it was ok because "one day you will miss this stage of life." I love my children more than anything in the world, they are my everything, but I am sooooo tired! I have a child who's at nearly six years old had the same sleep pattern he did as a newborn - 5 maybe 6 hours max and he wakes up, on a good night he goes back to sleep right away (like a dream feed) on a rough night he stays awake for hours and then crashes for another 5 hours sometime during the day. I still spend much of my time prepping formula, instead of bottles I wash bags, I sterilize soothers, I even still end up trapped under a sleeping child on a regular basis. I am grateful for all the amazing skills my son has, I am so ecstatic at the gains he has made and continues to make but just for one moment I want to complain about the exhaustion.

We are the Fast Four!

I'm working really hard to keep myself mentally healthy right now, I can't lie it's been a really big struggle. Mental health has never been something I've managed very well. As a child I was incredibly anxious, I bit my nails, chewed on necklaces/hair/sweater strings/sleeves, I spent many nights wide awake terrified of any small sound. I was so anxious, my mother used to fondly refer to me as her "little worry wart" and she gifted me with worry dolls (tiny little people shaped dolls that you would whisper your anxieties too, right before bed, stick them under the pillow and sleep on top of them, watch your worries disappear)! Into my teenage years, I would replay every conversation I'd had during the day, over and over, on a loop in my head. I would plan every inch of my outfits from socks to hair elastics and definitely my underwear (God forbid what my grandma said came true and I "got into a horrible car accident so the paramedics had to cut my clothes off.") Early adulthood found me constantly crying because I was suffering from horrible separation anxiety; I'd moved in with my now husband and out of my childhood home.

In more recent years, I've suffered from postpartum anxiety and depression. This is when things got really bad. This is when I for the first time couldn't get better, at least not without some medical intervention. I saw a doctor and started medication, we talked about therapy. I even went to my first therapy appointment; I got a babysitter; I drove to the office; and... my therapist wasn't there (she had apparently called in sick and they had missed my number on the call list). Right after this my son got sick, my life spiralled. Things were out of control and it didn't matter what I did or how hard I tried I couldn't get control. We went through hell, our whole family - like our WHOLE family went through it with us; my parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, my grandmas. We had an amazing community holding us up and helping us. We wouldn't have survived without so much help. We had people gift us money, bring us groceries, clean our house, do our laundry, house our pets, and so much more. Our children were showered with love, gifts, and prayers. I had friends and cousins that stayed up all hours of the night researching every new term or medication the doctors threw at us. I had friends and family that literally let our daughter stay with them for days and even weeks. But the person who held me together, the one who held me up, the one that let me scream and cry and wipe my snotty face on his shirt, that was Shane. He was having a hard time too but there has never been a moment when he hasn't been there for me. He has brought me meals in bed when I just can't get out from under my blanket, he has helped to make sure I take my meds every day (yes I am a nurse but I am also a terrible patient, I hate taking meds), he has worked so many hours to run a very successful company so that when our son needs me, we can handle me not working.

So obviously, I definitely struggle with mental health. It's always been a struggle and now with the pandemic, I've been doing everything I can to keep myself from falling into the deep, dark, lonely, hole. I've been trying really hard to make our house feel like the safest, warmest, most comforting place in the world. I've been keeping busy painting, and wallpapering, restoring furniture, learning to garden, and organizing closets. This is my way to feel safe, to be ok. I was driving Shane crazy with my weekly resolutions and the millions of projects I was asking him to do but he did them. We were doing ok, and then, or daughter decided to show that she was struggling a little. She was acting out, regressing, and we couldn't figure out why. We spent extra time with her, bought her presents, disciplined her, even took her to the doctor. Finally one morning she woke up and declared,  "I am a boy, a boy named Jax." This actually wasn't all that surprising to us, they had always been a very fluid child, and for the past few months they had been playing "big brother" with her dolls instead of "mommy" and randomly proclaiming "I'm a boy!" We decided to go ahead and let our child explore who they were. We slowly broke it to family and friends and we started using the pronoun "they" as Jax was in their own word "sometimes I'm a girl and sometimes I'm a boy." 

That was the point when everything else in my life stopped being important, that was the moment in my life where all I cared about was protecting my whole family, as they were, for who they were. We were facing a whole new ugly side of humanity - homophobia directed at a CHILD! Now not only were we facing the pandemic with a medically fragile child but we were also fighting for our other child to simply be allowed to be their true self. On top of it the world seemed to literally be crashing around me. Headlines of death, hate and destruction were every where. Racism, homophobia, transphobia, just pure hatred seemed to be spewing from every direction. That was it, I couldn't handle it, I stopped reading the news, I deleted my social media apps from my phone (I could still use them I just had to make the effort of going through the computer), I drowned myself in crafts and binge watching tv shows. I needed an escape. I needed to find safety again. These last couple of days I've been feeling like I've found solid ground or maybe at least a sturdy cliff that will hold me for a while. The free fall was really scary but I feel like I came out transformed. I've become stronger and braver; I've learned to stop caring what other think of my life and just live my life. I actually don't care if people think my dog is too big, my yard has too many weeds, my kids are too wild, I'm lazy, my husband is a workaholic, my house is too dirty, or whatever other hateful things I've heard over the years. Take me as I am, love us for who we are; or fuck off. We are the Fast Four!