"Mommy, sometimes I feel like I miss something that isn't even there."

Hormones? Anxiety? 

"Well, you're getting to the age when you will start having these suckers called 'hormones.' They help you grow your boobs, but they can be a real pain when it comes to emotions coming out of nowhere."

"Hormones make you feel bad?"

"Sometimes. When I was your age, I started to have anxiety."

"What's that?"

"When you feel nervous or really excited or scared for no reason out of nowhere. If you feel those things, tell me, and I'll tell you more about it."

Saying these words gave me a huge download of anxiety, of course. Please, God, don't let her have anxiety disorder. Please give her Beloved's even keel.

It passed, and she didn't mention it again. I don't believe in sweeping emotions under the table, as I feel my emotions with the strength of a hurricane, and I know how great or horrible they can make your life if they're kicking on too high a gear.

---

Last night, we went to parent-teacher conferences. Her classroom teacher talked about social skills and reading levels and practice those math facts!

Her gifted teacher invited my daughter to attend the conference with us. Her teacher talked about confidence with math and how my daughter needs to work on her confidence so she can take risks in that area. We talked about how scary it can be when you're gifted and just know the answers to some things through absorption, and then you hit on something that doesn't come naturally. She turned bright red.

Her teacher told my daughter she is intuitive and how important that would be in her life, to be able to walk into a room and understand which people were feeling good today and which people weren't. Her teacher complimented her on her ability to sense who needed a boost and provide that boost.

Then her teacher handed us a few articles on parenting the gifted child. I don't know if this sort of literature was available when I was in school or not. I haven't asked my parents yet. I was in one of those programs, and I don't remember anyone ever talking to me about the flip side of just knowing the answers to some things without having to learn them in any sort of thought-out way. I remember being completely unprepared for my first colossal academic failure and questioning my whole existence as a result when it happened -- the side effect of knowing the answers automatically to some things.

I don't want that to happen to the little angel, but seeing her eyes dart around in a way I've never witnessed before and watching her practically climb the chair with anxiety when we talked about timed math tests reminded me of that feeling of panic when the answers don't just pop like they do with spelling or reading comprehension or wherever your gifted wheelhouse is academically.

Her teacher gave us one article I particularly wanted to share, because if you are a gifted person or are parenting a gifted child, it's important to understand the flip side of a brain that works differently than the "normal" people (a word I use extremely loosely). It's called Gifted As Asynchronous Development, and it's by Stephanie S. Tolan.  Here's a short excerpt that grabbed me:

Often the products of gifted children's special mental capacities are valued while the traits that come with those capacities are not. For example, winning an essay contest on the dangers of global warming may get a student lots of attention and praise while her intense emotional reaction to the threat technology poses to the planet and its life forms may be considered excessive, overly dramatic, even neurotic. If she tries to act on her beliefs by going on strike to force her family or school to renounce what she considers harmful technology, she may be ridiculed, scolded, or even punished. Writing a winning essay is deemed not only okay, but admirable; being the sort of person she had to be to write it may not be considered okay.

When we focus only on what gifted children can do rather than who they are, we ignore vital aspects of their developing selves and risk stunting their growth and muddying or distorting their sense of themselves and their worth.

That is a hard one, when you're parenting a gifted child. I find myself getting very frustrated with her daydreaming, her inability to break focus when she's creating something. Last night I could not get her to stop making two levels of invites to go trick-or-treating with her -- there was the VIP level for her friends, and then a different, generic "guest invite" level for any of their +1s. For trick-or-treating. All I wanted her to do was go take a shower and go to bed.

It's hard not to push with the math facts to the point that it's uncomfortable, because her classroom teacher told her she tested her in reading up to the level she can go -- but she doesn't really know because that was the top end of the bar. The math facts tears flow instantly, at the mere mention of math facts, because the timed tests are the only things she's ever not just been able to do, and she feels a deep sense of shame because they are not easy for her. I see this shame in her eyes.

From Tolan's article:

Many gifted children are able to develop their gifts and use them productively. But some of these achievers, as adults, live their lives with a nagging discomfort with themselves. They focus, as the people in their childhood environment did, only on what they can do because they are ignorant of (or uncomfortable with) who they are.

It's my job as the parent of a gifted child to do the following things:

• Remind her she is enough just for existing and being a kind person. Achievements will come and go. Some days you're the windshield and some days you're the bug, and that has ultimately got to be okay or your life is going to be too exhausting. No one wins every day.

• Teach her coping skills for when the inevitable failure comes. Deep breathing. Reframing. Humor. Talking to a loving friend or partner. Reading great quotes from smart people who bombed it spectacularly. Exercising. Getting enough sleep.

• Help her understand that her intellectual brain is not her. It's not her spirit, it's not her soul. It's a handy thing to have around, but it is not the sum total of who she is. Her intellect's strengths or failures should not be the ruler by which she judges her existence on this earth.

• Encourage her to use her gifts to get what she wants out of life, but to understand the consequences of success -- successful people have constraints on their time, they have a lot of people depending on them, they have a lot of pressure to perform every day. Just because you're good at something doesn't necessarily mean you will be happy doing it.

• Provide her with the endless creative and intellectual challenges she needs via the Internet, books, games and parental focus. She needs to engage with my husband in me in a way that's different than some kids engage with their parents. She needs us to be parents and set limits and boundaries, but she also needs us to be creative partners participating in her elaborate schemes and internal stories. She needs us to let her stage Macy's-level window displays out of the junk in her room and appreciate her use of the color wheel doing it, and she needs us to listen to her while she worries about all the bad things that could happen to her fish if he lived in the ocean, because she is sincerely concerned with these things and needs to be taken seriously.

• Recognize when she needs to disengage because she's getting too worried about something.

• Encourage her to keep writing down her stories, because writing allows a person to get as dramatic as she needs to be while exploring possibilities in a safe and socially acceptable way.

I'm no psychologist or teacher or social worker. The things I wrote above are my instinctive reactions to her as her mother and as a reader of the literature provided to me by her teacher (there was more, but I'm not going to quote it all). And as a gifted person. It's hard to write that, because when I grew up, it was considered bragging to say you were gifted, even if you were. It shouldn't be -- gifted means your brain works differently sometimes in a way the world values and sometimes in a way it doesn't. It's an end of a spectrum. Every characteristic of a person is on a spectrum. We all fall somewhere.

---

As an adult, I find this research comforting, because even though my parents never made me feel bad about my extreme emotional reactions to everything from Hurricane Katrina to the death of an author I never met in person to my often-inappropriate desire to fix things for complete strangers, other people did. I've been called too sensitive, dramatic, over-reactive and worse. It alarms people when they see this part of my personality in full force. I know it makes people uncomfortable, and I usually try to hide it in person, the same way I used to sit in class and only allow myself to raise my hand every fifth question so I wouldn't be THAT KID.

I always thought my extreme reactions were wholly attributed to my anxiety disorder, but now I'm wondering if it's just the side effect of my brain grokking some concepts in a different way than the average bear. If that's the case, I can forgive myself the drama and focus on helping my daughter avoid 37 years of wondering why they hell I react to things that most people find puzzling at best and annoying at worst.

My daughter is very smart, that's true, and that's wonderful. But she also tends to walk around with her heart on the outside of her body, and I just want the best of everything for her. Nothing in life is all roses, and neither is being gifted.

What an up-and-down month. In the midst of the bad, there is good, and the good is that this past week I signed a contract with indie publisher InkSpell to publish my debut young adult novel, The Obvious Game, in February 2013.

Which is in five months.

Indies! We move fast!

I'm actually thrilled about the pub date, even though it's coming up soon. February is Eating Disorders Awareness Month, and there have been so many people who have emailed me about themselves or their loved ones wanting to know what the hell is going on in that person's head and how to help and what to do if it's you, I decided to write a book about it. Only this one is more interesting than my story ... fiction means you can change the beginning, the middle and, best of all, the end.

Here's the beginning of my query:

"Your shirtis yellow."

"Your eyesare blue."

"You have tostop running away from your problems."

"You're tooskinny."

Fifteen-year-oldDiana Keller accidentally begins teaching The Obvious Game to new kid Jesse onhis sixteenth birthday. As she buries her shock about her mother's fresh cancerdiagnosis in cookbooks, peach schnapps and Buns of Steel workouts, Diana bothseduces athlete Jesse and shoves him away under the guise of her carefullyconstructed sentences. As their relationship deepens, Diana avoids Jesse's pastwith her own secrets -- which she'll protect at any cost. Will Diana andJesse's love survive his wrestling obsession and the Keller family's chaos, orwill all their important details stay buried beneath a game? Nothing is obviousin THE OBVIOUS GAME.

I'm building a pinboard for it on my Pinterest page. The Birthright of Parker Cleaves is the novel I'm working on next.

What will make or break The Obvious Game (and, not to overreact, but my chances for publishing Parker Cleaves and anything else) is the success of this novel. The deck is stacked in publishing, especially for unknown authors, so if you would be willing to talk about my book once it is available, I would be forever grateful. You don't even have to say nice things, seriously. You could even be all DID YOU HEAR ABOUT THAT SUCKY NEW NOVEL, THE OBVIOUS GAME?  And I would actually be fine with it, because then that person might be all WHAT ABOUT IT SUCKS? And next thing you know, you're discussing my book. So seriously, there should be no fear here. You could hate, hate, hate my novel and I will still like you as long as you don't beat me over the head with it.

Because I don't want to spam or turn my blog into a marketing showcase, I've created this handy Google form that will forever live in the My Books page of this website.  If you or anyone you know might be interested in talking about the novel, reviewing the novel, talking to teens about the novel, etc. etc., please pass along the link to this blog and ask the interested party to look at the form on the My Books page.

For those of you who know me in real life, have heard me speak at BlogHer or elsewhere over the past three years or have been hanging around here since 2009, you know this puppy is a long time coming.

So thank you in advance for reading me here at Surrender, Dorothy, and I hope you'll read and enjoy/discuss/talk about/pass along to a loved one The Obvious Game. I'll be mentioning what's up from time to time, but if you really want to be updated, please use the form above.

Never, ever, ever, ever, ever give up.

DJ Nibbles celebrates The Obvious Game!

My brain is easily led to intrusive thinking. In the past, this has led me to restrict my eating, to exercise obsessively, to spend hours Googling sleep solutions for my toddler, to become obsessed with sunscreen for my daughter, to worry about the health and well being of my family. When I was a kid, I would become obsessed with the idea of my house burning down during fire safety week and couldn't go to sleep until I had mapped out exactly how I would escape my burning home with all my stuffed animals even though my window opened directly onto the earth.

When my daughter was a baby, we lived in an eighty-year-old home with huge wall grates. The holes in the grates were decorative and large enough for, say, a snake to climb through. So I became obsessed with the idea that a snake would get into our leaky, stone basement and somehow find its way straight up through the grate and up my daughter's crib. I thought about this a lot.

In my first apartment in Kansas City, I became so obsessed with the idea of someone climbing in through my first-floor window I nailed the windows shut. A fire hazard, for sure. But I couldn't sleep until I did it.

I'm a lock-checker, a make-sure-the-oven-is-off fretter. I've been known to turn around five miles from home to make sure I shut the garage door.

The bat thing was funny until someone pointed out my husband could've been bitten by the bat and not even know it. Then I made the mistake of looking up rabies and found it is fatal in humans if not treated immediately. I made Beloved call urgent care to see if they thought he should get rabies shots. They said no. He is not about to do it anyway.

I have thought of nothing but rabies for the past three days, of him dying two months from now and leaving me and the little angel all alone. 

I know these are intrusive thoughts. He was not bitten, he swears he didn't touch the bat, and I believe him. He is not an idiot. He swatted it down with a broom, stunned it, captured it under the broom and got it between the broom the bag without touching it. I believe him.

I've got to stop thinking about him dying.

These are intrusive thoughts, and when I think of them, I can feel the adrenaline downloading into my bloodstream as it is this very minute. My heart is pounding, I'm breathing shallowly and I feel like I might throw up. 

My daughter is watching Veggie Tales in the next room and I have work deadlines. I have no room in my life for intrusive thoughts. 

There. I just took a deep breath.

Last night, I had a dream about having to cross five train tracks set very close together and traversed by high-speed trains that came within seconds of each other. You had to memorize the patterns in order to cross the tracks safely. I was sitting on what I thought was the ground before the tracks and someone turned a light on and I discovered I'd been sitting on a set of hidden tracks. I backed up and made it across, carrying my daughter, who was a toddler squalling to be let down.

That's what anxiety feels like, actually.

The anxiety operates the trains I'm constantly worrying about. They're not ghost trains -- there's plenty in life that can go wrong. Sometimes I think people with anxiety are actually just pragmatic realists -- you could die from just about anything. Thankfully most of the time, we don't, but it's true, you could. It's far better to operate under the illusion that nothing bad will happen -- that you'll get through the entire day safely and in one piece, because ironically, the more you worry about bad things happening, the more likely you'll make a dumb decision thinking it will make things better and actually endanger yourself in some other way than the danger you were trying to avoid in the first place. The fact Keith Richards is still alive proves God protects fools and children.

It's true my husband could've been bitten by a bat and not know it and end up foaming and leaving me a widow by the time my daughter enters third grade. The man drives 1500 miles a week -- it's far more likely he'll get plowed by a semi or choke eating a cheeseburger in the car. If I allow myself to think of everything that could happen to him, or my daughter or anyone I love, I'll spend my life rocking and crying.

I refuse to live that way.

Intrusive thoughts can be paralyzing. I'm forcing them out now, because I have no control, really, over when my cards or anyone's cards get drawn. Bad things can and will happen in the course of my life, because that's life -- the bad comes with the good -- and it does no good to anticipate everything horrible that could happen. Anticipating those things will most likely cause stress hormones to clog my arteries and overtax my heart, lower my immune system and perhaps bring on a terminal disease.

In the end, it's probably safer to fiddle dee dee and go look at talking animals on the Internet.

Just not talking bats.

After my whinefest on Friday afternoon, I ended up falling asleep on the couch Friday night at around nine. But on Saturday, the babysitter came! And she hadn't been here since it was freezing cold! Even though she had hurt her back! And we thanked her and thanked her and toddled off to see Jimmy Buffett in the Power & Light district of Kansas City.

It was a gorgeous night, and the P&L was packed with an older crowd sporting grass skirts and hats shaped like flamingos, and everyone was happy. As Beloved and I sat listening to the cheesier songs by Jimmy, I found myself thinking how much I love him (though I really love his ballads more than Cheeseburger in Paradise).

Why do I love him when he drives so many people crazy?

Because he loves life. This is a guy who made an entire career of pointing out how nice it is to be outside when it's warm. How little you actually need in order to relax. How to live in the moment. When I was anorexic and cold all the time, I became a bit obsessed with Jimmy Buffett music, traveling in my head to a beach free of self-induced pressures and mental anguish and problems. When I was in college, I got a tattoo of a sun on my left foot so even if it wasn't in the sky I could still see it and think about what warmth and light means to me. 

Jimmy Buffett makes me go through my list of tastes and sensations that make me happy, things that are so easy to accomplish it's ridiculous. I love flowers. At Walmart right now, you can get a plant for less than a soda. I love the feeling of wind on the soles of my feet. All you need for that is a warm day. 

I needed old Jimmy so bad this weekend, and hearing all that old music pulled me out of my slump. He reminded me that as an adult, I have been true to my love of sunshine. I didn't wait for someday. I married my also-beach-loving husband in St. Pete Beach, Florida. Even as not-rich, family-in-the-Midwest people, we have managed to get air in our hair. We bought a bank foreclosure near water. We have Vicki, the 1997 Sebring convertible. We have a 1974 AMF Puffer sailboat we bought from my friend's dad for a dollar. We eat outside almost every night in the summertime.

I listened, Jimmy! I am reaching for the sunshine! Onward! (I'm barefoot.)

Hi everyone!

Yesterday I had a post go up on BlogHer about the sources of stress. Not sources of stress like deadlines and traffic jams and being out of orange juice at 7 am, but sources of stress in your brainz. Here's an excerpt:

That said, I've spent most of my stress-fighting career thinking about how tohandle stress rather than what caused it in the first place. Things are rough all over, Ponyboy. And I've blamed myself a lot for not being tougher.

I recently read Stress Less (for Women) by Thea Singer, a book that appeared in the mail for review. One passage struck me in particular -- one that talked about stress research being flipped on its head when researchers stopped thinking about stress or age atrophying parts of the brain and instead studied whether people who stressed more started out less equipped to deal with the stress in the first place:

The vulnerability hypothesis of stress -- that is, that a smaller hypocampus, whether due to genes or early exposure to stress -- can predispose you to the damaging effects of stress, rendering you more vulnerable to age-related memory loss and disorders such as PTSD.

There was good news at the end! Read the rest on BlogHer!

PS: Last night the little angel asked for a drink of water while in the bathtub. I handed her the crappy hot pink water bottle we got with Culver's points. She took one drink and gagged. Then she said, "I don't know why, but yesterday I put Goldfish crackers in here." I opened it and there were bloated Goldfish floating in two inches of tepid tap water. And then I threw up in my mouth. 

Recently I watched the first two episodes of Lifetime's new eating disorder reality show (yes, I really typed that) starring Tracey Gold called Starving Secrets. It's a subject I keep coming back to despite the ickiness of it, because only 30-40% of anorexics ever fully recover, and I did. I understand how hard it is to break the cycle. It's really important for that those of us who have done so talk about it, just so those still suffering know it is possible. And so, the show.

I really do want to like this show. I DVRed it but it took about a week before I watched the first episode. I was worried it would be like Dr. Phil, though I had high hopes because of the presence of former anorexic Tracey Gold.

After I tweeted about watching the show, I heard from Michelle Leath of unlockyourpossibility.com and michelleleath.com (her new bulimia blog), who is a recovered bulimic and a Certified Food Psychology Coach and life coach specializing in helping women create a healthy relationship with food and life.

I was eager to get another recovered woman's perspective. She had this to say (extended quote used with permission):

Although some may disagree with me, what I take issue with is not the exposure or the depiction of these women engaged in their (not so) private struggles. I actually felt a great deal of compassion for them, and I think its valuable for others to witness the pain and suffering that come with bulimia and anorexia. What really turned my stomach was the way these women were treated once they got into treatment!

Read the rest on BlogHer ...

Welcome to the 2011 Surrender, Dorothy Blogger Book Gift Guide! This year, I've linked all the books to their spot on the shelf at the Bookstore That Gives (remember that rockstar high school intern?). A portion of your purchase price can be designated to go to the school of your choice.

Some of these authors have more than one book, so I've put my favorite one in this gift guide. *This list is, of course, not complete ... I limited it this year to people I've met via blogging. If I've left you off, please let me know! I'm getting old.

Sleep Is for the Weak

Edited by ... moi! I know, you're shocked. Get the original mommyblogger anthology with 25 bloggers who have gone on to greatness. Buy here.

Let's Panic About Babies

By Alice Bradley and Eden Marriott Kennedy

Eden and Alice have always been hilarious, but this book takes it to a new level. Buy here.

The Beauty of Different

By Karen Walrond

I bought one for me and one for my daughter. May she always feel beautiful. Buy here.

It Sucked and Then I Cried

by Heather B. Armstrong

How her blog readers saved her from postpartum depression. Buy here.

The Pioneer Woman

By Ree Drummond

I read part of Ree's love story on her blog, and that's what made me fall in love with her as a person. Here's the whole thing in book form. Buy here.

PunditMom's Mothers of Intention

by Joanne Bamberger

Mothers and political activism so totally go together. Buy here.

Professional Blogging for Dummies

By Susan Getgood

Susan's really smart about this stuff. Also, she quoted me in her book. HA! Buy here.

The Secret Society of the Pink Crystal Ball

By Risa Green

I've enjoyed all of Risa's books, but my favorite is this young adult mystery. Buy here.

Falling Apart in One Piece

by Stacy Morrison

A heartbreakingly beautiful memoir about what matters in life. Buy here.

What I Would Tell Her

by Andrea N. Richesin

Nicki is the anthologist to end all anthologists -- my favorite is the one with the stories of dads for their daughters. Kleenex alert. Buy here.

Mommy Doesn't Drink Here Anymore

by Rachael Brownell

An honest, raw and well written story of sobriety. Buy here.

Rockabye

by Rebecca Woolf

A baby and a husband and an armful of tattoos so young -- and so right. Buy here.

Make It Fast, Cook It Slow

by Stephanie O'Dea

I have made a bunch of these crockpot recipes. They are good. Buy here.

The Essential Guide to Getting Your Book Published

by Arielle Eckstut and David Henry Sterry

The best book on the publishing business I've read yet, and I've read a lot of them. Buy here.

Insatiable

by Erica Rivera

Erica's first memoir on her struggles with eating disorders -- I couldn't rip my eyes away from the pages. Buy here.

Hollywood Car Wash

by Lori Culwell

Lori self-published this novel and then sold so many copies it was bought by Simon & Schuster. Buy here.

Kirtsy Takes a Bow

Edited by Laura Mayes

Laura's collection is beautiful and insightful. Full disclosure: I also have a piece in it! Buy here.

Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety

by Judith Warner

I interviewed Judith about her second book for BlogHer, but I really loved her first one best. Buy here.

The Happiness Project

by Gretchen Rubin

I met Gretchen when I interviewed her about happiness in marriage for a series on BlogHer. Loved her comments, loved her book. Buy here.

Life From Scratch

by Melissa Ford

A novel about a blogger. What's not to love? Buy here.

The Mominatrix's Guide to Sex

by Kristen Chase

After a few years writing a sex column and four kids -- um, I believe her. Buy here.

As the holiday giving season/tax year draws to a close, please keep in mind you can also give a tax-deductible donation DIRECTLY TO YOUR SCHOOL. Just ask at the school office. 

Reading is awesome. Writing is awesome. Schools teach both. Please support your schools, whether or not you have kids.

I was just looking at Twitter and saw a link to Alison Gresik's post on the night she almost went crazy. I wasn't planning to post today, but then I read this:

We were nearly home when I tried to make up for how pissy I’d been. This is not about you, it’s about me, I said.

And that’s when Shawn got really angry.

How dare you get this upset and then say it’s not about me? It’s impossible for me to tell the difference, and it’ll certainly be impossible for a child to tell the difference. You can’t keep doing this.

She goes on to explain how her brain took that and spiraled it into suicidal thinking, and then the next morning pulled it together to face a challenge that to someone not afflicted with mental illness might seem like nothing: taking a broken car to a mechanic.

I understand.

Last week in the midst of all the Hillary Adams beating post comments, I felt my anxiety starting to rev out of control. I had just a visceral reaction to that video. I also have noticed that since I went off The Pill a few years ago that my moods are getting more extreme at times, more like they were when I was in high school and college. 

The morning after I put up the post, I took Petunia to the vet. Petunia hates the vet. She got wrapped in a towel there once when I wasn't there and ever since then she needs to be sedated to go and will still hiss and try to bite anyone, even me, who approaches her when she's there. She has to wear a bonnet that keeps her from being able to see or bite, and even so, she tries to bite. The vet is trying to desensitize her, so she sat and talked to me for what felt like hours while Petunia trembled and growled and hissed in my arms. Finally, she started talking to me about cleaning Petunia's teeth and the anxiety peaked and I started to cry. I wasn't making any noise, but the hot tears were just rushing down my cheeks and there was nothing, NOTHING I could do about it. 

"You're really upset, aren't you?" the vet asked. 

"I've had a hard week. I'd like to go home." I thought about trying to explain anything to this woman and realized it would be pointless. I knew it would be a while before I could stop crying, even as I understood intellectually that I wasn't really that upset about cleaning Petunia's teeth or even Hillary Adams, who is now 23 and years removed from that horrifying beating. Hillary Adams was a trigger, Petunia's growling was a trigger, just in the past Hurricane Katrina and 9/11 and my daughter's conference with her talented and gifted teacher in which the same tears ran down my face as I asked the teacher to let me know if she sensed too much perfectionism in my daughter, that perfectionism went with anxiety and eating disorders for me and I really hoped my girl wouldn't ever sit in front of a kind teacher who doesn't really know her and embarrass herself by bawling when nothing at all is wrong.

That's the thing, though -- when you have anxiety, nothing need be wrong. Life itself can feel pretty insurmountable, even as you recognize there is nothing wrong. Cats go to vets, cars need to be fixed -- it's not the end of the world. 

But the part of Alison's post that really got me was the part about husbands and kids not being able to tell the difference between your being mad at them or at yourself or at nothing at all but displaying this emotion that makes no sense. I've tried to insulate my daughter as much as I can from my anxiety, but when you live with people, it can be hard. Especially when you're alone with them as much as I'm alone with my girl. As a result of seeing me cry sometimes for no reason and telling her hey, it's not you, I'm  just sad and sometimes I get sad and I don't know why, hold on, I'll stop in a minute, I hope she is kind to herself if she ever cries for no reason. I want to make the world perfect for her but I know that I can't and actually I shouldn't, because if I did, she wouldn't know her own strength. She wouldn't learn to self-soothe. Just as I would tell her these things if I had a twitch or Turret's or some other behavior I couldn't necessarily control that might look alarming. 

I've stopped beating myself up for irrational crying. It doesn't happen every day -- it doesn't happen now as often as it did when she was a baby and I was really messed up. When it happens, I try to do things I know will help. I sleep. I exercise really hard. I write. I read a lot. I take hot baths. And I let myself cry, because it does seem like there's something in there that needs to get flushed, and maybe the crying flushes it. Often I'll feel perfectly fine hours later and I know that is confusing to the people around me. The truth is that when that sort of crying or anger happens, it's not actually based on anything other than my brain. It's different from when I cry because something someone dies or because I know I hurt someone. I make noise when I cry like that. This crying -- it's just like a faucet. 

The vet's office manager called the next day to see if Petunia was okay and if I was okay. She's a nice person and I saw on her face and the vet's face that they thought something horrible had happened to me to cause such a reaction. I don't really want to get into it. I wish I hadn't had to take Petunia to the vet when I knew I was in high gear. But life doesn't stop just because you're anxious. I don't think it should. In order to have faith in myself that I am okay, I have to get in the car and take the cat to the vet even if I'm crying. I have to make my daughter dinner and do the laundry and go to work. And because I still do all those things, because I know the difference between real sadness and anxiety sadness, I feel okay about it. I know people in my life think I should get stronger drugs or go see a therapist again, but the truth is that it passes, I don't want to hurt myself or others, I know how to care for myself and I'm learning not to drag other people into my anxiety when it's happening -- it's best to go in a room and let it go, just like a headache or other type of chronic pain. People with mental illness live like this, just like people with diabetes live like this. You manage the pain. You take care of yourself as best you can. And you try not to freak out when it escalates -- you manage it back to a safe level. It's possible my antidepressant needs to be adjusted, and I can look into that, but here's the thing: There isn't a magic pill that I'll take that will make me wake up tomorrow with anyone else's brain. It will be my brain that will still try its old tricks and maybe we can stop a few more of the downloads of chemicals from coming through, but it will still try. There might be a pill that helps a little more, but we're managing this, not fixing it, and that is okay. I don't expect to never cry for no reason again. I expect to be able to cope effectively with it when I do and to make it stop as soon as possible.

I can't always control my triggers or my reactions, but I want the people I love to know I'm okay and I love them, but I don't know that I can be "fixed." I can manage this, and I'm trying very hard. 

Hey, there! I wrote this post about connections between eating disorders and postpartum depression last week, but I didn't get the chance to tell you about it. Here's an excerpt:

Pregnancy brings on a lot of changes quickly -- both physical and mental. It's no surprise to me that women previously diagnosed with eating disorders are at a higher risk for postpartum depression, but recently Stephanie Zerwas of the University of North Carolina flipped it around and looked to see if women who came in for postpartum depression and anxiety had previously suffered from an eating disorder. Thirty-five percent of them had -- compared to seven or eight percent in the general population. Eating disorders, then, could be a risk factor for postpartum depression.

Stephanie is the associate research director of UNC's Eating Disorders Program. It comprises both research studies and treatment programs with inpatient, outpatient and partial hospitalization programs. Her special interest is eating disorders during pregnancy and postpartum. She and other researchers have studied 100,000 moms and babies in Norway, looking at moms who had eating disorders right before becoming pregnant and the later outcomes for both the moms and the kids.

Read the rest at BlogHer.com! Back tomorrow to tell you about last weekend's accidental home improvements.