The little angel went to school today after puking for two days. Puking, then feeling great and wishing I wasn't working. Of course, I felt horrible for her, but I also felt horrible for me because it is so hard to try to write and meet deadlines and participate in meetings while simultaneously entertaining/caregiving of a sometimes-feeling-sick-but-mostly-not eight-year-old who insists on playing Zhu Zhu pets while bumping into your laptop because she must sit RIGHT ON TOP OF YOU. 

This morning, she cried for almost an hour because she didn't want to go back to school and be in the school musical this afternoon that I worked late last night to be able to take off work to attend. She'd missed a bunch of rehearsals due to being sick and is worried because she has a speaking part. Beloved tried one approach and I tried another, and either way she was wound for sound five minutes before the bus came. Finally, she calmed down to sniffles and sat on my lap while we waited and I seriously considered just declaring it Saturday and being done with everything.

Because I am so done with this week.

I'm done with the four-day headache. I'm done with the doctors' visits for me -- I found out this week I have to get new doctors and more tests for two different health problems. The tests will be uncomfortable and expensive and I'm so done with that. I'm done with cleaning up barf. I'm done with my cat who won't stop sneezing in my face. I'm done with my endless lists. I'm done with the laundry and the house that has grown dingy again and the thought of spending my entire Saturday cleaning it, again. I'm done with the tears and the fears and the effort of dragging myself through this week. I'm done with wishing and praying about my novel. I'm done with trying to be upbeat and stop whining. This is my blog, and today, it's a whinefest. 

I know I have many blessings and should be happy my body is mostly working. But right now, WHINING FEELS GOOOOOOOOOOOOD. 

Thank you for indulging me. I feel better already.

---

One thing I'm not cranky about: notebooks. See my share of Miro notebooks on Surrender, Dorothy: Reviews.

This morning, I was starting to think I was imagining the vise around my head and general body cramps as a virus. I decided to blame some new medication.

Then school called. The little angel had been in the health room twice, but she didn't have a temperature and the nurse suspected there was actually nothing wrong.

This is the kid who has never asked to stay home sick in her entire academic career. 

And I still felt like shit.

"I actually think I know what is wrong," I said. "I'll come and get her."

When I got there, the school nurse still looked puzzled. She looked, actually, as though she suspected we were both playing hooky (working from home means I'm often still in yoga pants at 11 am, and guess what? I was still in yoga pants at 11 am). I put my arm protectively around the girl and guided her outside. 

"You know this means you can't play with friends, right? You're really sick?"

When she met my eyes, it was like staring into my own aching self.

About five minutes ago, she threw up for the first time since she was about four years old. It's been so long since she's been sick, I think we'd both forgotten what that was like. I remember always bawling after barfing, but she just asked for a Kleenex and said she was hungry now that her stomach felt better. 

She is sometimes so me, and sometimes so her father. This would be inherited from her father, who would probably barf and then go chop down a tree if he were here. Lucky for him, he's traveling for work and gets to avoid the stank that is now our living room.

My poor little duck. And I also feel a little vindicated for moping around the house all week groaning as though I might die.

My cat, Petunia, is thought the world over to be a hellcat. When you ask my niece what Petunia says, she says "HISS." The neighbor girl who desperately wants a cat is scared of Petunia. And the last vet we had saw Petunia as a personal challenge, a mustang to be broken, a spirit to crush. 

Petunia, at home, looks more like this.

But when we went to our old vet, Petunia would barely be out of her travel carrier before she transformed into a flat-eared, fanged, hissing, spitting, malevolent force of nature capable of stealing your breath and banishing you to the land of lost souls. And that sometimes could occur even in the lobby. After two or three rounds of this, the vet suggested we tranq her before bringing her in.

See those pupils?

After the last visit last December in which Petunia was getting her three teeth cleaned (she had to have one canine pulled when we adopted her because of tooth decay) and that little procedure took twelve hours, I called last straw. I couldn't take it anymore. I know Petunia wasn't being abused, but the mental anguish I was going through seeing her so revved up just broke me. I swore never again would Petunia grace the threshhold of what normally looks like a major pet big box store.

And then I put it out of my mind.

This weekend, we hosted Easter for my parents and sister. Somewhere along the line, Petunia ate something she shouldn't have (we can be messy eaters, especially a certain redheaded someone who had a chocolate birthday cake with pink icing that can be seen from outer space) and commenced barfing last night. She's thrown up six times in the past 24 hours, all, of course, on the carpet.

This morning, I told Beloved I was going to do it: I was going to take her to a new vet.

With great apprehension, I stuffed her in her carrier and drove to the new vet. She gurgled the whole way there with unhappiness. I explained to the receptionist that she could morph from sweet baby girl into Satan's spawn in nanoseconds despite having no front claws and only three teeth. They took note.

Into the exam room we went. It had a window, and Petunia and I spent several minutes watching a robin try to brain itself against the glass for no apparent reason.

The vet walked in. I went over again with her that she might want to don a flak jacket. 

She opened the bag. 

She pulled out Petunia.

She palpitated Petunia's neck. She rubbed Petunia's belly.

Petunia meowed in annoyance.

She held Petunia and talked to me for like seven minutes and only at that point did Petunia hiss a tiny bit with impatience.

The vet told me she was going to take Petunia in the back and give her an anti-nausea shot after I mentioned I'd seen her sniffing at some chocolate cake crumbs before I could sweep them away. She told me she would not hurt Petunia but she would restrain her if needed, and then she took her into the back. I heard Petunia meowing and meowing, but none of the gutteral underworld yowls came from the back. There was also no hissing.

All the sudden, the vet was back putting Petunia in her carrier.

And it was over.

Now, does this mean Petunia won't grow to hate this vet, too? Jury's out. However, I'm absolutely kicking myself for allowing a wellness plan to keep me at the old vet for so long. Breaking up with a vet is like breaking up with a stylist, and when this new vet called the old vet to get Petunia's records faxed over, I felt a little like hiding under the steel table lest they see me through the phone.

As I type this, Petunia is winding around my ankles, begging for food, because she can't have anything to eat or drink for twelve hours, and I'm not going to give in because $57, an hour of my time and at least three cups of adrenaline are not going to be wasted just because she is temporarily thirsty and hungry.

This whole adventure just goes to show rule 1 of catdom: HOLD GRUDGES FOREVER.

Sorry, old vet. Petunia clearly just had your number.

By now everyone with media access knows the Komen Foundation defunded Planned Parenthood this week. I wish I could say it leaves me shaking with anger at Komen, but what it does more is underscore my belief that the private sector cannot be depended upon to be fair to people across income levels -- and therefore healthcare should not be run by the private sector.

We need universal healthcare, defined as:  a term referring to organized health care systems built around the principle of universal coverage for all members of society, combining mechanisms for health financing and service provision.

If we don't have universal healthcare, organizations like Planned Parenthood that provide services -- of which abortion is only 3% -- depend on private donations. So private donations by wealthy people determine whether or not a woman like I was immediately post-college gets to have a pap smear or a STD test that year. Private donations determine whether someone like your mother gets her mammogram if she doesn't have health insurance. Private. Donations. Other people's generosity. 

People are fickle.

Private donors can be influenced by politics or emotion. They can decide no one's taking care of them, why should they take care of other people? They can get swayed by religious beliefs about when women want to have children -- and don't get me started on why women's health can be influenced by religion but not men's -- and decide because they don't agree with what's happening with 3% of an organization's legal health care services that they'll defund 97% of the cancer screenings and women's health services provided to women who can't afford to go anywhere else and will otherwise go without health care in the richest country in the world.

And the only one -- unless things go as intended in 2014 -- without universal  health care: 

Thirty-two of the thirty-three developed nations have universal health care, with the United States being the lone exception [1]. 

People got so upset about "Obamacare." I got upset with the people who are upset, because it's completely clear to me when one women's health organization can defund another's so easily that all health -- but especially women's health, the only health tied to religious issues -- hangs completely in the balance unless it's universal. Women are held captive by their reproductive organs, which like any organs can get cancer and you know, kill you. Women can be held back from medical care for those organs if they're too poor to afford to go anywhere but Planned Parenthood and then Planned Parenthood doesn't have the money to help them because the private sector got honked off about something and refused to fund them. 

This whole Komen/PP issue reinforces for me so clearly all the problems I have with pure capitalism: People can be selfish fools who only care about themselves. I believe when we live in a First World country, we don't get to behave like prigs. When we hold ourselves up to a higher standard and pass judgment on other countries and step in to "help" them see the error of their ways, we have to be a shining example of democracy and capitalism and freedom ourselves, or why the fuck are we telling anyone else how to behave?

AND WE ARE NOT.

We don't take care of our own very well. We argue over "the food stamp president." We deny our women healthcare because their reproductive organs got tangled up in religion, whether we or they follow those religions or not.

We have to change!

We can't depend on the generosity of the private sector for something as important as our health care. It is clear, and I hope the events of this week make it crystal clear for anyone questioning why we need universal health care.

What if it was your cancer screening, your mother's, your daughter's -- because it could be, anyone's, any time. Everyone under this current system is one health nightmare away from poverty. And that's ridiculous and scary and this is America and it has to change. Part of the luxury of living in this country with all its shining highways and FDA regulations should be contributing to the health and safety of every single citizen. We neglect each other, we neglect America, we neglect our future.

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. 

On Sunday night, I developed a pounding headache. Maybe it wasn't pounding so much as squeezing, viselike squeezing, perhaps powered by Bank of America. My sinuses had become enflamed ripe  peaches wishing to explode. My forehead demanded pressure, but it couldn't be finger pressure because finger pressure is not equal all over. I needed perfectly calibrated pressure that could apply counterpressure to the peaches. It took Advil, a cold compress and cold on the base of my neck and about forty minutes of writhing in pain on the couch for my headache to subside back to just ripe peaches, less enflamed.

I am not a headache person usually. My mom and sister get migraines, but I usually don't. So I was really scared of making that killer headache come back yesterday morning when I sat down at my laptop and the backlight was brighter than Venus. I tried to focus on the little black marks that seemed to be some sort of language and the ripe peaches that were my sinuses raised their arms to begin conducting a sonata of revenge across my forehead. I whimpered and my co-workers told me to LEAVE, and for the first time since I started working at BlogHer, I do believe, I took a sick day. A whole one.

I slept the twitching, back-spasming sleep of the very ill on and off all day on the couch. When the little angel got home, I explained that I was dying and we would be eating mac and cheese on the couch while watching Cake Boss instead of sitting up on the Wooden Chairs of Doom at the kitchen table. Anything made of wood hurt my body, I explained, and my ripe peaches were having none of that vertical business. She immediately understood.

We got through the bath part and the books part and then she fell asleep while I reclined on her bed and tried to get up the mental and physical energy to go back downstairs. Somehow I did, and Beloved came home, and I went to bed thinking it would be impossible for me to sleep through the night after all that sleeping, but I think I might take up sleeping as my new full-time job, for I am so good at it. I slept all night long and probably could go back to sleep right now if I wanted to, but I don't want to because there are these black and white marks on my computer that I can now identify as words. I think there might be something I'm supposed to do with the words, and I'm fine with that as long as they don't make my head hurt.

I do think today will be filled with blankets and pillows and other Soft Things, though, and fuck those wooden chairs.

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. 

This post is for Strong Start Day from Kat Stone at Postpartum Progress.

I remember Then. I remember waking up to the screams of my baby girl, another day. Stumbling through what felt like water, brushing the not-quite-sleep from my eyes, wondering how I would get through it.

When my daughter was born through about twenty-four months old, I was in the throes of what I now believe to be undiagnosed PPD.

If only I could've had a crystal ball to the Now, to when I would be doing a job I believed in, that used my skills to their utmost, in a house that would become my Forever Home, with neighbors who invited us to housewarming parties and bought my girl Halloween socks, and not the house that encompassed a leaky, Silence-of-the-Lambs basement and mice and ghetto birds whirling above us at all hours of the night.

I now see the exhaustion in my face.

I wish I could've talked to the me, Then, to tell her all about the me Now.

It's real. PPD is real.

And there is nothing that can comfort you when your brain is telling you it will never be better, that the pain will never go away, that the world as you know it will never return to normal.

It was a slow path away from the job to which I offered nothing and to which nothing was offered me, from the home office with no air condititioning, in which the atmosphere often reached ninety degrees with no solace, no comfort. A slow path from being told I was stupid and inept to a being told I gave writers a path, a gleam of hope. A slow path from three hours a day spent crying and googling sleep solutions to a happy, well adjusted seven-year-old who sits on my lap and rests her nose in my neck and tells me I am the best mommy in all the world.

I'm sure it was confusing and annoying to my love in life, who must've thought the happy, ambitious woman he married had disappered forever, leaving a whining puddle of goo in her wake.

That was the Then.

This is the Now.

I wish I could tell you some amazing story of renewal, a doctor that helped me. I didn't really have that. I had a slow path of waking up each morning and slowly seeing the light. When my daughter finally slept through the night around age four, I started to recover. When I got the therapy that actually made sense to me, my mind stopped waking me in the middle of the night, churning and refusing to go back to sleep. When I finally accepted that I needed some medication to relegate my inadequate brain chemicals, my inordinate influx of stress hormones, and I combined that with visualizations and meditation that enabled me to envision a life walking around walls instead of throwing my body against them, that became the Now.

I am happy.

I didn't think -- in the Then -- that I ever could be.

Again, here, I see emptiness.

It scares me to think how seriously depressed and anxious I was in the Then. I couldn't handle the normal ups and downs of life at all. Every red traffic light and misplaced set of keys became a major crisis, when they needn't have been. We moved here and I lost two cats in a row, one of whom had been my substitute baby for nine years, and that may seem like nothing to most people, but to me, when Sybil died, it was the end of my youth. It was the end of having a wubbie, a talisman. When my first cat died and my daughter was three and we had just moved to this town where I knew no one and couldn't even find the gas station without help, I was hanging on to life as I knew it with my fangs. Life was red in tooth and claw, and I honestly didn't know if I would enjoy it again.

My daughter was three.

It should've been over by then, right?

The brain is a strange organ. It regulates or lacks regulation of happiness. It tells you things will be all right or everything is going to hell in a handbasket, and regardless of you intellectual ability to realize it's all a crock of shit, you believe it. As my former psychologist used to remind me: The intellectual frontal lobe and the reptilian feeling brain are not actually connected all that well. You can understand intellectually that nothing is wrong and if your reptilian brain disagrees, then my friend: You.Are.Fucked.

There was a time, in the Then, that I thought I was. The writing didn't matter. The job didn't matter. Motherhood didn't matter. Nothing mattered but the hurt, and the dark, and the hours without sleep.

As I sat down to think about this post for my friend Kat Stone, whose daughter could be my daughter's twin sister, I realized how happy I really am in the Now. I love my husband, my daughter, my job, my writing, my family, my friends, my life. And with the exception of the job -- nothing has changed but my perception of it.

The mind is a powerful organ.

And sometimes, it is wrong.

If you cry when you read this, if you or a friend or sister is stuck in the Then, please encourage her to get help. Life is short. I wish I could've spent fewer years in the Then. I wish I could've spared my husband and child and family and friends the Me that was in the Then. I wish I could've spared myself the Then.

It was unnecessary.

I didn't learn anything other than it doesn't have to be that way.

Kat has dedicated her online life to supporting those who suffer from PPD. I sincerely wish I had known Kat in the Then. The entire time we've been friends I've been in the Now. But when she asked me to share my experience to raise awareness, I could only say yes.

Because you or someone you know might still be living in the Then.

I welcome all to the Now.

Kat's trying to raise $30k on Postpartum Progress to:

• Develop a compelling national awareness campaign for postpartum depression
• Create & distribute new and improved patient education materials for distribution by hospitals
• Translate our "plain mama English" information and support into Spanish and other languages

If only I'd had that instead of a free blanket in the hospital and a host of instructions for how I could scar my baby for life by doing things wrong. Kat says  only 15% of all women with perinatal mood and anxiety disorders ever receive professional treatment.

I certainly didn't, in the Then. How much more I understand about my brain and how it works and how it impacts not only me but all the people in my sphere. My little girl is a happier girl because I got help. She doesn't have to deal with a mommy who screams and cries every day like she did when she was 0-3.

I'm going to go donate. If you have had PPD or know anyone who has or even who can relate to what I've said here, please help out Kat, who's dedicated her life to helping women overcome what affected both her and me and countless other members of this community of women.

Let's live in the Now.

This week has really just drained me. I've had three family health scares, an extremely time-consuming and stressful parental extracurricular activity and a few unexpected curveballs in other arenas. I've sat here staring at this screen for a few minutes now, and I don't want to write about anything that has happened this week. I feel like there are a few brewing good posts about current events, but honestly with getting so behind with aforementioned dramas, I don't have time to write anything good.

Yet, I feel compelled to record something this week, and perhaps that something is this: I'm tired.

Yet another thing: I'm in love with my whole family. Having people's health threatened made my already-squishy heart explode with love, and I felt it gushing out with such volume it threatened to drown me. All this week I've looked at my daughter and thanked God the challenges the world threw at us this week were manageable, everyone turned out to be okay after various doctor visits, scares were mitigated, and life is very close to returning to normal, except the new normal for me, is even more grateful than I was before.