Disguised

A post over on The Girl Who is asking for commenters’ favorite childhood Halloween costumes. Here’s mine:

The year after my mom died (this is shaping up to be a horribly depressing comment but I promise it really isn’t) I was 11 and I tried my hand at homemade Halloween-costume-making, because she had made our costumes for as long as I remembered so how hard could it really be, right? For whatever reason – I had a really weird sense of humor as a sixth-grader – I decided to go as Brunhilde, i.e. the Wagnerian “it’s not over ’til the fat lady sings” opera Viking lady. My dad and I managed to stitch together a long plain dress out of red jersey material without too many problems, and then for a breastplate I cut some shiny silver fabric and glued it to the dress. The best part, though, were the boobs – at a newly-pubescent 11, I didn’t have anything like what I needed to pull off a convincing portly Valkyrie – so we made broad cones out of posterboard, covered them with the silver fabric, and glued them to the front of the breastplate. (We did something similar for a hat with horns.)

So on the day of the school Halloween parade, when all the students dressed up in their costumes and marched laps through the school hallways, I secluded myself in a bathroom stall, wrapped myself in cotton batting, pulled the dress down over it, bobby-pinned the hat to my hair, and strode back to my classroom to join my other costumed classmates, readying myself for their gasps of approval and admiration.

That was when I realized that all the other sixth graders were waaay too cool to dress up for Halloween, that was apparently little kid stuff. Ah well. I adjusted my cotton flab, pointed my shiny conical boobs, and – as the oldest student in the parade – led the little kids around the hallways, like a Viking princess with her minions. It was pretty awesome.

What was your favorite Halloween costume? Were your costumes store-bought or handmade?

Smug

On my refrigerator I have a handmade sign that says, simply, “Quiet.” Usually the people who see it laugh and think it’s an order for my children, or my Calgon-take-me-away dream, and I smile and let them think that, but really it’s an instruction for myself. After a Bible study I did last fall I realized how much I need to remind myself to practice quiet, that maybe instead of telling Aaron he’s wrong or nagging my children or criticizing my loved ones to my girlfriends I should just shut up and not talk. Let my husband figure things out for himself. Let my kids experience the consequences of not using the bathroom when it’s obvious to me that they need to, let them learn to listen to their bodies instead of their shrill mother. Let my girlfriends think my loved ones aren’t always annoying.

And I need to practice quiet in my self-talk, too, and shush the voice that tells me how much I’m in danger of being unloved, unliked; turn off the tape that plays telling me that I’m not good enough, smart enough, right enough, worthy enough. And quiet the words that come out of my mouth desperate to prove how much I know about everything, so eager to show you how much I know so you don’t think I’m stupid – or worse, wrong.

I rarely pay attention to the sign, of course. Every once in a while I’ll glance at it just as I’m opening my mouth to say something unnecessary; but mostly it hangs there, unnoticed, while I drown it out with useless talk. Today, for example, I gave some very wise, considered advice to a friend about potty-training her son – never mind that she is a very smart mommy who is quite skilled at figuring out what her son needs without my lengthy advice, and never mind that of the two children I have potty-trained, one wets the bed and one refuses to wipe his own bottom.

There I sat, feeling very satisfied with myself for having such helpful things to tell her, considering myself a good friend and an excellent mother; and then I got up to go check on Peter — where I found him down in the basement, decorating himself with the contents of the catbox. I stood there going EW EW EW EW EW for just a short moment before I grabbed him and whisked him away to the bathtub. It wasn’t until after I had shampooed his hair that he smiled at me, exposing a grinful of gravel, with blue flecks from the Odor-Eliminating Crystals; whereupon I grabbed the closest toothbrush – mine – and scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed until there was no more gray paste in between his teeth.

Moral of the story: NEVER, EVER, EVER TALK. For the love of God, JUST SHUT UP.

Pumpkin spice syrup!

This is not a food blog. This will never be a food blog. I’m a decent cook, and heaven knows I love to eat, but I’m awful at actually planning meals or buying all the groceries I need or cleaning the grunge off my stovetop. So this is not a food blog. But I make this very rare exception to post a recipe because I am a coffeeshop junkie and I have spent the last three and a half weeks mustering all my willpower to not spend our month’s grocery budget, $4 at a time, on pumpkin spice lattes. And then this afternoon just when the urge to drink designer caffeinnated beverages was at its strongest, I found a dusty can of pumpkin in the back of my pantry, and the heavens opened and angels sang and I poured and mixed and simmered and tasted until I had a darn close approximation of the Starbucks pumpkin spice latte. So here you go – enough for a big jarful!

2 c. sugar

2 tsp. cinnamon

1 tsp. ginger

1/4 tsp. cloves

1/4 tsp. nutmeg

1.5 cups pumpkin puree (one 15-oz can)

1 c. water

4 T. vanilla extract (one 2-oz bottle)

Stir together sugar and spices in a medium saucepan. Whisk in pumpkin and water; stir frequently over medium-high heat until mixture is smooth and comes to a low boil. Remove from heat, stir in vanilla, and allow to cool. Makes approximately 1 quart. Use to taste in lattes - I started with about 1/4 cup in 12 oz milk and 4 oz espresso.

Bear in mind that this isn’t a very syrupy syrup – once it cools it has more a molasses consistency. But it is so delicious that I am using every ounce of my restraint not to fill my bathtub with it and coat myself in sticky, pumpkiny deliciousness, and then paper myself with all those extra four-dollarses I’ll have lying around.

Yes, I just broke my blog hiatus for this

So Aaron has this sebaceous cyst thing on his back, and first of all I should tell you that you do NOT want to do a google image search for “sebaceous cyst,” that is NOT the proper way to diagnose your husband’s skin maladies and the things you will see in your search results cannot be unseen. And so but he’s had this cyst thing on his back for probably ten years, and at some point we discovered that it isn’t just a bump, it’s a bump that I can squeeze like a pimple and if I squeeze it hard enough it squirts out stinky white goo, but then it always comes back no matter how much goo I squeeze out. We call it, fondly, his tumor.

So I was reading online about sebaceous cysts, and I learned that sometimes doctors remove them, if they’re like in an annoying place or they get infected or anything, and what they do is they use a scalpel to make a little incision just a few millimeters long across the cyst, and then they squeeze it like a pimple and all the stuff just squirts out, and they keep squeezing until the actual walls of the cyst come out the incision and then it’s gone for good and it won’t grow back. But apparently, when the doctors do this procedure, they are advised to wear protective eyewear, because the cyst can just like ERUPT, and there are accounts of the goo squirting out onto the far wall of the exam room, etc.

This is totally disgusting, obviously, but also fascinating, because let’s face it when your spouse gets a pimple there is a certain amount of glee you take in squeezing it until all the pimple has been squeezed out and then it’s just that clear liquidy stuff. And sometimes if you catch the corner of his nose just right you can get half a dozen of those tiny invisible blackheads to squish out all at the same time, and it’s almost sexual the satisfaction you get.

Don’t act like you don’t know what I’m talking about.

But so this is how I found myself approaching my husband’s unsuspecting back with a serrated steak knife this morning. He was not very receptive to my impromptu outpatient procedure, but after I described the potential for squirting and erupting he acquiesced, but only until we figured out that the knife wasn’t sharp enough for really slitting the cyst open, I was going to have to do more like back-and-forth sawing, at which point he rescinded his permission. So I don’t yet have any firsthand cyst-eruption stories to add to the internet, but ask me again late tonight, after he’s asleep.

Readjustment

Lately I’m more awash in hormones than I’ve ever been without being pregnant (and NO I AM NOT PREGNANT DON’T EVEN THINK IT), and I feel like the embodiment of every feminine cliche about PMS and ice cream and crying at diaper commercials. I am a walking Cathy cartoon. In the past week, I’ve gotten weepy holding a friend’s three-week-old firstborn (“The first few months are so hard! And you’re doing such a good job!”), listening to my sister-in-law talk about her birth plan (“You’re going to be such a good mommy! Your life is going to change so much!”), and sharing labor stories with a friend (“I wish I would’ve known you then! I would’ve visited you in the hospital! And brought you casseroles!”).

Actually, upon closer inspection, it appears my hormones have a particular fixation on firstborn babies and their births, which (besides probably being fascinating to my therapist) makes sense given that my levels haven’t yet adjusted since I finished breastfeeding my third, and presumably final, child about six weeks ago.

Here’s something: I did the math recently and figured out that since I became pregnant with David nearly seven years ago – 83 months – I’ve spent 58 of those months either pregnant or nursing. NO WONDER I’M INSANE. And in the past eight weeks, I’ve switched antidepressants, stopped breastfeeding, and changed birth control pills. So, yeah, I’m a bit unbalanced, in the same sense that Shaquille O’Neal is a bit tall, or that Edy’s Mud Pie ice cream is a bit tasty.

Watching my sister-in-law prepare for her first wee one, in particular, is touching a nerve I never realized was exposed. I’m loving being part of her support system, getting to go to Babies R Them and scan tiny pink onesies and talk about epidurals and doulas and FMLA leave and the pros and cons of the My Brest Friend nursing pillow (Pros: great for nursing; cons: “MY BREST FRIEND”??). I think what’s making me sad (and therefore uncontrollably sniffly) is looking back and realizing how much of a support network I DIDN’T have in place during my first few months as a mom, and how clearly that contributed to the paralyzing postpartum depression that engulfed new motherhood for me. I’m not saying I wouldn’t have gotten hit with PPD anyway – the fact that I still deal with depression and medication now means it was bound to come up regardless – but I grieve for how much harder it was facing it alone.

Labor and delivery with David was awful. My work schedule made childbirth classes impossible, so I watched some videos the hospital lent us, videos that were so old my own parents could’ve been featured in them; and I blithely assumed that since I knew from the onset that I would be requesting – nay, demanding – The Good Drugs for my labor, there was nothing more I needed to know.

Go ahead, laugh.

So instead I woke up at four in the morning, five days before he was due, thinking at first that I had just overindulged in Hamburger Helper the night before (yes, gross; cravings are the great equalizer) before at some point I realized the stomach cramps were getting stronger and oddly regular and hey, Aaron, wake up, I think I’m in labor, whee! By the time we left for the hospital I had been in labor for nearly five hours and my uterus felt like it was trying to escape through my belly button and I thought I was dying and I couldn’t wait to get my hands on the drugs, the beautiful drugs, when will they give me the delicious wonderful drugs? Instead I had to wait in utter and complete agony while they checked my cervix – and if cervical exams during pregnancy felt like they were trying to reach up to my tonsils via my private lady parts, the cervical exam while I was in labor felt like they were trying to reach my tonsils using an extremely angry bobcat – only to be told that I was only three centimeters dilated, not enough to admit me, and by the way your baby hasn’t dropped so the best thing you could do right now is walk around for a while and come see us again in two hours. TWO. HOURS.

“But I’m dying,” I whimpered, once the nurse had let go of my tonsils. “I can’t possibly walk when my uterus is trying to crawl out through my belly button!”

So instead I sat in the waiting room and watched Monsters Inc. on the ceiling-mounted tv for two hours and when they finally checked me again I had progressed to five centimeters, hallelujah!, so they admitted me and hooked me to tubes and wires and gave me Stadol to make me not care about the contractions until they could get the anesthesiologist for my epidural, which wasn’t for another hour – during which time I kept comically falling asleep between contractions and then waking up to go OOOOOOF every three minutes. And then there was the epidural, glory!, and then I napped and generally lived the good (albeit paraplegic) life until late afternoon when suddenly there was TRANSITION and I was throwing up and then it was time to push, and pushing was HARD, horrible exhausting work, so much harder than I had been prepared for. And I pushed and pushed and pushed and it felt like nothing happened because the baby still hadn’t dropped, so I had to push him that much farther and it was two hours, two exhausting hours, before anything that seemed like progress happened and I wanted to give up long before that happened.

And I kept pushing, and finally he was out, It’s a boy!, What do you mean it’s a boy??, Look Aaron he has your toes! – and because it had taken so long he and I were both running fevers and so they whisked him away to run tests and make sure he was okay while I was left, shaking and exhausted, on the table, without a baby.

They brought him back after half an hour or so, but he and I both had to be monitored more closely for the first several hours, and anyway I was so tired I could barely hold him anyway. But what I am saying is, I wish I had been more prepared, I wish I had had a doula or a strong friend to encourage me, to help me walk the hallways instead of sitting, to help me endure the pain and frustration better, to just help me. Aaron was thoroughly wonderful, but even so he spent the entire sixteen-hour day looking slightly startled at how much harder everything was than we’d imagined. So I just wish it had been better.

And I wish the first few weeks and months had been better – I wish I hadn’t been so afraid to leave the house, so afraid of everything that could go wrong, so afraid to go to sleep. I wish I had had friends to bring me casseroles and hold baby David so I could shower, or sleep, or let down my guard for just a few minutes.

All this to say, I’m watching my pregnant sister-in-law and her huge, amazing network of friends, watching my new-mommy friend who seems so confident and well-adjusted, and grieving that I didn’t have that back then. Wishing I had been able to ask for the help I needed before depression sank my battleship. And this is all surfacing now, in the midst of my joy for my friends and my own tangled hormones, and I’m a bit of a weepy mess. But it’s okay, because now I know, better than ever, how to help them have a better experience than I did. I’m going to be the friend I didn’t have.

West Side Market

Today I finally upgraded my Flickr account, and my stars suddenly I can’t stop uploading photos. Ever since we got a DSLR for Christmas, I’ve really been wanting to learn how to take better pictures; now, thanks to Flickr, the entire internet will get to be a part of my learning process. Yay, right?

Three weeks ago Aaron and I took a day trip to Cleveland and went to West Side Market; we didn’t buy anything, just wandered around so I could act like a giant tourist with my camera. I wanted to share a slideshow here, but I’m still learning the limitations of WordPress; so here are a couple photos and a link to the flickr set. Go see!

And So But Also

Have I mentioned Infinite Summer? It’s the biggest thing – besides those three kids of mine, and also the fact that Hulu just posted the series run of Dead Like Me – that’s been keeping me away from here lately. Infinite Summer is a giant internet book-club with the goal of reading David Foster Wallace’s epic 1,079-page opus Infinite Jest over the summer, from June 21 to September 22.

Of course, I’m already about a hundred pages behind schedule – see above re. three kids, Dead Like Me – but the time I’ve spent in the book so far has been vastly enjoyable, albeit strenuous. DFW doesn’t pull any punches, and the book has been a mental and emotional challenge. This is the second time I’ve been through Infinite Jest; the first was during my pregnancy with David, back when I could get home from work and read without any interruptions, assuming I ignored the dishes and the laundry (I usually did); I remember getting odd looks in the waiting room at my obstetrician’s office, with this gigantic tome propped on my belly while all the other moms-t0-be leafed through copies of Sexy Pregnancy Today or whatever. I discovered early in the book that I’d have to set my sights low, that success would be merely making it through all 1,079 pages with a vague grasp of the plot. And when I did make it to the final page, I let out a huge breath and said HOLY CRAP WHAT WAS THAT and patted myself down to see if I’d lost any parts.

This time through, however – now that I know where the story goes – I’m trying to dig much deeper, taking notes and using post-its, trying to find the clues he’s planted along the way, to really UNDERSTAND what the heck is going on. Having the online guides along the way has been immeasurably helpful, but I’m having a very difficult time finding time to read; it’s taking all of my focus.

I’m finding glimmers of myself in the reading, too. Dave Eggers wrote of the book in its introduction,

It’s long, but there are pleasures everywhere. There is humor everywhere. There is also a very quiet but very sturdy and constant tragic undercurrent that concerns a people who are completely lost, who are lost within their families and lost within their nation, and lost within their time, and who only want some sort of direction or purpose or sense of community or love.

Which is of course how I feel very much of the time too, humor and pleasure but also sadness and lostness, a feeling I’m slowly learning to push through with therapy, the slow sort of finding-myself that comes with maturing, I guess, and with laying to rest old issues, old demons. Which is what many of the characters in the book are doing, also, I suppose, with varying degrees of success.

I also liked this David Foster Wallace bit from his commencement speech at Kenyon College, which Eden quoted today in the Infinite Summer blog:

“Learning how to think” really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. … The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t.

This fits well for my treks through both the book and therapy – picking up the pieces, examining them, deciding what to do with them. Learning how to think about myself, my parents, my life; watching as these characters make the same choices.

Even if you’re not interested in plowing through Infinite Jest, I’d suggest you go read Eden’s post, maybe poke around the Infinite Summer site a little. Now, I’m going to go see if I can make some headway (or, let’s be honest, watch more Dead Like Me.)

Coming Soon

I started this blog to talk about my progress in therapy overcoming what my therapist calls “closet narcissism,” but because I’m a big weenie I’ve shied away from talking about that stuff in favor of – witty anecdotes! and pictures of my kids! and meaningless slices of life! But more and more people have been landing here after googling “closet narcissist,” and how selfish would it be for me to monopolize this rockin’ site name without ever discussing the thing itself? The googlers deserve some answers!

At least, this is how I justify Feelings Talk to myself. Because I’m a total weenie.

So: feelings talk coming soon – brace yourself. Meanwhile, here’s a picture of my bangs, which I dyed purple. I am not exaggerating when I say that this was a total whim. 

Have you ever tried to take a picture of yourself in the bathroom mirror, get everything centered and focused, and not make a weird face? This one’s a little blurry, but it’s the best of the bunch. Anyway, you get the idea – purple! 

I’ll be back later with What I’m Learning In Therapy. Stay tuned.

Helpful hint

Excited as you may be about your new espresso machine (yes, another one), 11:30 p.m. is not the appropriate time to start fiddling around with your espresso recipe to figure out the perfect proportions of water and grounds. Taste-testing “just a little sip” of 12 consecutive espresso pulls is still the equivalent of drinking 3 shots, which probably isn’t the best way to spend your midnight.

What Happens in Tennessee

I’ve been on vacation this week, visiting my folks in Tennessee. I love visiting my folks – I always come home with a southern accent, and using words like “folks.” I have terrific pictures I can’t wait to post – from our trip to Rock City, from a hike in the mountains, from Peter’s first birthday cake – but first I want you to meet my kid sister, Ashley, and my baby brother, John:

This is Ashley, my gorgeous sister. She’s a graphic designer from Atlanta and she’s looking for a job – anyone want to hire her? She’s terrific!

And here’s my baby brother, John, who just finished his junior year of high school this week: 

John is 11 years younger than me. I used to change this kid’s diapers. I haven’t quite gotten him to change any of my kids’ diapers yet, although it seems like it would be only fair. 

By the way, have you heard of a neti pot? You use it to pour saline into your nose. It flushes through your sinus and comes out the other nostril. For kicks, we tried out my dad’s neti pot. And, y’know, took pictures. 

There’s not that much to do for fun around here. Well, okay, there is. But this seemed like a good idea at the time.

Have you ever poured anything through your nostrils? It’s kind of a trip. 

I love a man who isn’t afraid to pour saline through his nasal passages. 

And actually, the neti pot thing was rather nice, once you got over the part about pouring saltwater through your nose. In fact, my allergies, which had been bothering me ever since we crossed the Mason-Dixon line (things are actually growing down here, not like back home on the tundra), were much better once I flushed all the pollen out of my sinuses. 

Just look how happy John is with his squeaky-clean nasal passages!

We’ll be traveling for the next few days, but next week I hope to post some of the highlights of our trip, almost none of which will involve nostrils of any sort. It’s been a great week, y’all.