July 14
I had such an interesting conversation with Brad last night. He was reading my blog and though he usually doesn’t take personality quizzes, he followed the link and started going through the categories. I was watching TV next to him while he did it, and he’d ask me a question, so I’d look over, answer and then try to guess which one he was going to pick, which would then cause him to shoo me away, only to ask me another question with the next category. Totally odd. So in the end, I discover that his favorite way to enjoy music is at a club. Wha?! This man, the man who has danced with me two, count them, two times, who said he wouldn’t dance at our wedding, would rather enjoy his music at a club. I do know that he likes electronica, but never in a million years would I have guessed that. He says we went one time to a club in Vegas, which I hated. Well, yes, I was 21, it was the club I most wanted to get into my whole teenaged life, and it wasn’t exactly the scene I was looking for. I do remember the outfit I was wearing - it was a Guess black catsuit, and then I had a turquoise lacy sweater/jacket thing over it. I think I looked pretty cute, but he says I thought I looked hideous. I don’t remember. All I know is, I didn’t realize my one experience would shape the entirety of our marriage’s approach to music. I thought it was him, honestly. When he said he refused to dance at our wedding, which made us switch to a harpist rather than a DJ, I thought that pretty much shut the door on our dancing days. I find out last night that it’s not the dancing he didn’t want to do, it was the first dance waltz. I don’t remember any conversation about a waltz, just a slow dance to “I’ll Still Be Loving You,” would have sufficed, with some standard 80’s music in there to keep things going. Honestly, it doesn’t matter, considering we got kicked out of the country club early because friends of the manager were using it next (friends who now have turned out to be a co-leader in our Girl Scout troop and her daughter is one of Ailish’s close friends - what are the stinkin’ odds?! Pasadena is 40 miles physically and a million miles psychologically from here, and yet I meet so many people up here who have ties there. My friend Gina, whose son is in the same class as Ailish and whose daughter has now become very close friends with Kieran, her kids were both delivered by our much adored OB, Dr. Jick. Last time we were together, we traded all these stories of how amazing he was. It’s been 8 years since I’ve seen him, and I still adore him - not in that hunky sort of way, but I’m positive he saved me once or twice and saved at least one of my girls from great harm - anyway!)
Okay, so come to find out, he really enjoys clubbing. How could I have possibly known this? He blames not going all on me, which I find so unfair. At this stage, I could not care less how I look compared to the other women there (one of those things I so welcome about getting older), I am just not sure they have a club where overweight 30- and 40-somethings are the ones who get through the door first. Maybe we’re on to something! He’s not looking for ballroom, jazz, or anything like that, he’s looking for something closer to a rave, just old-style. If you have any ideas, let me know!
We already knew we had very different views on love, especially the, ahem, physical part of it, but it was quite surprising to see some of his other views. When we first began dating, I pulled out the Book of Questions, and we went through the whole thing together. It was one of the things that made me fall completely in love with him in such a short amount of time. I wonder now if we went through it, 16 years later, just how closely our answers would match up at this point.
After that discussion, I was all fired up and couldn’t sleep, so I sat up (one of the benefits of having your scrap table literally so close to your bed that it’s hard to maneuver between the two) and finished a layout I started long before Ailish came home. Standard disclaimer, nothing earth-shattering, I suppose that should just be the regular expectation from me - where I used to try to re-invent the wheel on each layout, now I’m just happy to get a page completed. I so admire those of us old-school scrappers who are still so amazingly creative, Karen Burniston immediately comes to mind, I just can’t find it in me to do that anymore. I feel just a teensy bit (ok, a whole lot) inadequate, but I remind myself, getting the story down is a huge part of the battle, and the uncertainty of my medical situations add an urgency to getting pages done. When I have the energy, I can’t waste it on technique. Not that anyone else wastes theirs on technique, it’s just for me, I have to stick to the basics.
In reading my blog, Brad and I got into the discussion about the book-writing, just as I was watching the Food Network’s Next Star show or whatever it’s called, and Paula Deen was on, saying that she didn’t find her passion until she was 42. I said that was #3, and when the universe tells you basically the same thing in rapid succession three times, that’s a sign, I say. So I tell him as much, and he says, “I’ve been telling you this for years, I don’t know why you needed the universe to tell you that.” He’s right, but immediately I protest that I just need everyone to leave me alone for six months, and he says, “Didn’t that Meyer woman do it in the middle of the night?” Yes, and Tawni O’Dell did it while her young kids were in school, and Paula Deen probably had teenagers, and the Julie/Julia girl was working a tough secretarial job helping 9/11 survivors and feeling like a pariah as a Democrat amongst a Republican staff, so yes, I’ve run out of excuses. I know it’s the emotional part of it, but you know what? I just have to dig in. I’m going to make myself accountable here - report how many pages I completed in a day. Someone/thing has to be pushing me. I’ve always been very deadline-oriented, and I can’t seem to get going until I’m pushed up against one, so I need to make myself a deadline and just get it done. What’s reasonable? If I make it too soon, I’ll feel like I failed. If I make it too far off, I will just wait until the month before and then stress out anyway. Okay. By Thanksgiving, I will have a substantial portion, if not finished, completed. Because I know I just won’t get anything done during the holidays anyway. So I’ve said it, it’s out there, in public, and this will get done. Whether I keep setting that alarm to get up before the sun, or I work into the night, I will not let the other distractions stop me. No turning back now.
So back to this morning...Ailish woke up easily, which was a surprise since she didn’t fall asleep until well after midnight. She had a whole list for herself for getting up in the morning - that was impressive. I had mentioned last night that I only check on her not because I’m mad but because she has a way of getting off track, and she really took that information to heart. I was proud of her for making herself a list to keep on it. I also noticed she had picked out all of her clothes for the week, so even though I was not happy to find her still out of bed with the lights on at 10:00 p.m., she did have good reason. Although when I checked her list at midnight, and saw she’d written three times, “FIND DAY SHEET!” with the last sentence on the bottom being, “Note to self: If you can’t find the day sheet, remain calm,” I felt bad because the Day Sheet was down on the kitchen table the whole time. She’d given it to me Friday, and normally she puts it right back in her bag but she was using it for her trip to Grammapoppa’s, so I had to keep it out, and I had kept track of it all weekend, but apparently I’d forgotten to let her know that. Oh, the Day Sheet is a list of their behavior scores for the day, the points they’ve earned, and a little blurb about what they did that day, what she’s working on, what needs to be improved, etc. She and I both have to sign it, and it has to be returned each day. No, she doesn’t get kicked out or lose a level or anything, but for a girl who doesn’t ever want to mess up, it’s a big deal.
Last night, after dinner and chores were done, we played two rousing rounds of Apples to Apples. If you aren’t familiar with the game, it’s really fun actually. You get cards with nouns on them - anything from bugs to football games to Surprise Parties, things like that. Each round, an adjective card is placed on the table, like Famous or Gigantic or Scary. Each person has to put a card face down that they think best matches (or is completely opposite) of the adjective. The rules say you are allowed to argue why your card is the best, but we learned for family-style, it’s much better to institute a no-talking rule about your card, because then the person would know whose card it was, feelings would get hurt, etc. The second round went much more civilly than the first.
All in all, I have to say that Ailish has really come around and been much more “there” with us. Ever since that day at the beach, it’s like she’s been a totally different person. The whole time she was with Grammapoppa, she had her cell phone and was texting us, asking us how we were doing, ending each message with, “I love you!” She called several times to see how we were - I asked if everything was going okay, and she said yes, she just wanted to see how we were. It is a good thing, I just hope it’s not an act. I know, I know, I should just appreciate and enjoy it for what it is, and I am. I tell her I appreciate the efforts, I just, ugh, I wish I didn’t wonder when the other shoe was going to drop. Maybe the therapist being here to help her sort things out has helped, maybe removing the computer privilege has helped, I don’t know. It’s not perfect by any means, we still have strange things that come up every day, things that make us shake our heads, but as far as affection, she’s definitely behaving more like she belongs here, and isn’t just stopping by for a bit.
I made the plane reservations for my next two trips to see Brenna. She’s got quite the line-up for the next few months, actually. Brad is going next week to see her for four days, which have both of them very excited. Brad’s just happy he won’t be involved in any snow! Brenna has lots of plans for him, so I’m sure it will be fun. Then Grammapoppa are going out in August (brave souls that they are, less than 2 weeks before the Democratic National Convention) to take her camping near the Rocky Mountain National Park. She *loves* camping, must have gotten that gene from them, so she’s just over the moon about that idea. Then in September, Ailish and I are going to go out for four days. This will be the first time they’ve seen each other in over a year, and I’m a bit nervous about how things will go, but whatever happens, it will definitely help in the healing process. Kieran wants to go, but I think we need to concentrate on their relationship this time around. For Thanksgiving, it’s just way too expensive to take all of us out there, so I’m going to go out early on Thanksgiving morning and stay for 5 days. I got us a room at a Candlewood Suites, which claims to have a full kitchen in each room. We’ll be staying there in September too, so at least we’ll have a dry run and know what we’re dealing with. If we do have said kitchen, we’ll be getting all the food together to make the two of us a nice Thanksgiving meal, and then we’ll have four days after that to eat all the leftovers :)
Christmas gets a bit more tricky. We are having a Wohlenberg family reunion in Florida beginning on January 1st. Key Largo, to be exact. The last two family reunions have been out here - first the cruise in 2004 and then the outings in the Ventura area last summer. It is definitely our turn to go out there, but the $3,000 it is costing us to get there, rent a car, and stay in a decent hotel are definitely budget busters. I *know* without a doubt that we’re going to have an amazing time, it’s just a bit of bad timing with Christmas and Brenna’s birthday on the bookends of this trip. I would never allow her to have Christmas alone, and she made me promise her last year that I’d never let her wake up on her birthday alone again, not to mention, this will be her 13th, so I *have* to be there. We’ll be gone for 5 days to Key Largo, and if we planned a family trip to Denver first, we’d have the dogs in the kennel for two weeks - that alone would be over $600, not to mention, the poor dogs would be in the kennel for two weeks! So, we’re going to try to bring Brenna home for Christmas. It will be her first time here in two years! It’s still going to cost $1,000 for me to go out, get her, come back, then take her back and come back, but cost-wise, it doesn’t even begin to compare to what it would take to get us all out there, hotel, car rental, etc. I couldn’t believe last year how different the car rental prices were during Christmas - the hotels aren’t so bad, at least in the ‘burbs of Denver, but it’s the car rentals because people are flying into Denver and driving up to Aspen or Vail, that’s the killer. That alone was $400 for Brad’s trip last year. So that’s the plan, and it’s a big one. I am just praying she does what she needs to do to be able to leave campus for that long (we’re hoping for 10 days, so I can try to get us through the most expensive part of the flying season). I really want her to be able to be here, to meet Reilly, to see her Duncan, to see our completely different house, to have the comforts of home. She just has to want it as badly as we do and not sabotage herself before we get there. Her therapist has been on a 6 week study sabbatical in Europe and is returning next week, so hopefully she’ll be happy with the plan and help Brenna get working on achieving it.
Late 7/14
Have you ever had to deal with a friend whose boyfriend treats them badly, and they come to you crying all the time about it, and you just want to shake them and tell them to stop going back to that man? Or maybe your child has a “friend” who is so mean, so on and off, that you just want to forbid them to see this “friend” in order to stop the madness. Unfortunately, this is how I feel about Kieran and Ailish. Kieran just wants *so* badly for things to be different, for them to be friends, to have a positive relationship, and Ailish just shuts her down at every turn. After writing all the above about Ailish and her recent upswing, it was so disheartening today to see how differently she was behaving when she got off the bus. She seemed at the least bored, and didn’t really want to talk to us as we walked back from the bus stop. At the grocery store, Ailish decided to spend her money on candy, and Kieran still owed us for a Dodger bear she bought at the stadium the other night, so she couldn’t get any. Trying to inspire a little empathy, I said, “Hey, Ailish, Kieran looks pretty sad - you think you could share a little?” Ailish shrugged. Once we got in the car, Ailish did share a few with Kieran and I thought all was well, but then when the therapist came out this afternoon, Ailish accused me of spoiling Kieran by making Ailish share with her. I didn’t really see it that way, and tried to explain I would have done the exact same thing if it had been her, but honestly every single thing out of her mouth today was how Kieran is perfect, Kieran gets away with everything, Kieran has a disorder called ESB - Extremely Spoiled Brat. I respectfully disagreed, but Ailish was not convinced. She also spent a good deal of the session either curled up in a ball with pillows over her face or pretending to be an animal on the living room floor. This therapist drives more than an hour to see us - I’m so embarrassed that when she gets here, she doesn’t even get Ailish’s attention.
So the therapist leaves, and the girls go upstairs. Almost immediately, they began fighting. Kieran was trying to ask a question and Ailish was screaming at her to get out. Since I’ve been accused of stepping in and making Ailish feel like the “manic monster,” I considered staying out of it, until seconds later when I heard Kieran make a phlbbt sound. Wow! Talk about out of character! Spitting is considered very disrespectful in this house, so I immediately called her downstairs. She was just so furious, I think she just didn’t know what to do. She keeps trying, every day she keeps trying to have some sort of relationship with Ailish, and Ailish in turn is just so rude to her. If Ailish were not my child, I would tell her to stay far, far away from her. Actually I still said much to that extent, but it’s just so hard to wrap her head around the idea that she needs to stay away from her sister. As the mom to both of them, it’s heartbreaking and infuriating all at once.
July 15
When I first moved to the L.A. area, I worked for a very rich, very eccentric man who had a stock and financial newsletter. He lived in a huge mansion in Pasadena, one of those that, at the ripe age of 19, and coming from an upbringing comprised of a mixture of rural farmlands and Las Vegas cheeze (at that time, Las Vegas was only about the cheeze), completely blew me away. He had a Degas in the living room, a real Degas! He had a full time housekeeper and a handy man, and a staff of five of us (including his wife) who helped run the newsletter business. It was kind of the twilight zone for me - my jobs before that had been very corporate - Citibank and Kaiser Permanente. There was a structure, a bureaucracy, and I didn’t know until I took this job how comforting I found that kind of world. But during my eight months working there, I fell in love with their two Rottweilers, Morgan and Rex. Morgan was the younger one, the girl, the love bug. Rex was older, and had been abused at some point during his young life, so though he was loving, you had to be very careful about how you approached him. You had to touch him from the front, not from behind his line of vision. I was scared to death of Rottweilers when I first started there, but Morgan, laying at my feet through much of the day, convinced me otherwise. One afternoon, though, I came down the stairs into the foyer, and Rex was asleep at the bottom of the stairs. I didn’t see him until he startled, and then he went on the attack. He’s charging me, I’m screaming and trying to retreat without turning my back because I knew he’d fully charge if I did, and then Morgan came running out of the kitchen, barked at Rex, and instantly he stopped, dropped his ears and slunk away. It scared me to death, although I felt pretty foolish about the octave levels my voice reached. My boss scolded me for both the screaming (it was disturbing his thought process) and the fact that I must have done something to make him upset. I didn’t, but that didn’t make a difference to them. No, I wasn’t fired, it was just soon after that that I realized I needed to go corporate again. Corporate may have its limitations, but I knew what to expect.
Why this story now? Because it completely reminds me of Ailish in so many ways. This morning, she was sweet as pie again to me. Yes, she was moving slowly, and yes, I had to remind her several times which steps still needed to be completed before we could leave for the bus stop, but she was lilting and lovely and in such a good mood. I have no idea what I’ll get when she gets off the bus, or how she’ll behave towards Kieran. We have the movie tickets to Kit Kittridge, which ought to help relieve some of the strain, but Kieran has a Kit doll and wants to bring her, so I’m sure that will cause some sort of issue. Ailish does have an American Girl doll - remember she requested one for Christmas at the last minute? Yes, when I found her the other day on the floor of Ailish’s room, most of her hair had been chopped off.
Tonight, the babysitter is coming, which should make them happy for the most part, except having to share her. It’s my Support Group night, so hopefully that will be a help.
I did get a call yesterday that Ailish’s IEP will be scheduled for her birthday. We always seem to have her IEPs on special days - Kieran’s birthday, Valentine’s Day, it’s weird - it never seems to fail that something is going on those days. No surprises, just making it official that she’ll still be in the special day class program next year. I know she does well behaviorally, but 6th grade is such a loaded year, from the social aspect to the pressures of the endless projects, I just think it would set her up for failure to try to put her in those classes.
I forgot to mention yesterday that we had quite the wildlife walk yesterday morning on the way to the bus stop. We saw a squirrel on a patio ledge not more than 3 feet from us - honestly I was a little scared to walk past it. Was it brave because it was rabid? Was it going to jump on us as we passed? I moved Ailish to the other side of me, but as we came even closer, he finally scampered up a nearby tree. Not ten steps later, we saw a very tame bunny sitting in the grass. It didn’t even move, just watched us as we walked by. Though we have *lots* of bunnies in our complex, much to Reilly’s enjoyment, I am afraid that this very same very tame bunny is the one I saw dead on the street when we came home from swimming yesterday afternoon. It was so sad - most of the time when you see dead animals, they are so mangled, it’s almost impossible to know what it is. But this one, it just look like the bunny had one blunt trauma to maybe the midsection? It just laid there, eyes blank, with a pool of blood around its belly. I was thankful that the girls didn’t realize it was even there. I called our management company and left a message, so hopefully it got picked up before any other kids or, let’s face it, birds or bugs found it. I never was a fan of Mutual of Omaha featuring that whole circle of life thing, and after seeing Jon and Kate Plus 8 watching Planet Earth, I definitely know I won’t be renting that one!
I had every intention this morning of getting Ailish to the bus stop and then getting back here and starting on the writing. But then as I was making my coffee, I realized that Brad and I were getting kind of low, and it was time to place another K-Cup order. You know me, I’m always wanting the deals, but then again, every site has a different selection. It took me the better part of an hour to place orders for coffee, then I got an email about an office max sale, so I thought I should see if my printer ink was cheap there (it’s not), and then the phone rang, and then I remembered stuff to write here, and now it’s 10:00 and I haven’t done a thing. So as soon as I save this, I’m going to start a load of laundry and come back and write a page. I can’t think about the whole thing, just a page...one page at a time.
Late 7/15
Guess how many pages I got written? If you guessed zero, you would be right. I don’t quite remember what happened between 10:00 and 12:22 (the time we leave to get Ailish from the bus stop), I only know that it was gone before I knew it. Once we got back home, we left for the Kit Kittridge movie across town. It was a good movie, and the girls loved it - it just got me thinking about a lot of things. So many things that we take for granted now as a society all occurred because of a global shift in thinking. I was thinking about the Great Depression, which somehow made me think of World War II, and how that really changed the roles women had in this world. More women than ever before were made to work for the good of their country, the good of their families, and then when the war was over, they were expected to return to their roles as housewives. While some did, the shift had already occurred, and I think that’s what really started the way women viewed themselves, and the value in their contributions, whether in the workplace or at home. I’m thinking too about the situation we have here, right now, with this war that is so costly, both in lives and in money, with the threat of Global Warming, the talk of water rationing next year in our area, the cost of gas, and of course the collapse of the housing market - it is scary to think about, but in a way, I think people get so set in their ways, it takes something this massive to change their behavior. Though it is painful to go through, individually and as a country, I hope that we can look back on this period and see it as the time when Americans began to consume less - less gas, less water, less energy, less *stuff*. Things just seem so turbulent right now - it would be nice to think that all of this taught us something in the long run.
Tonight I went to my support group meeting. It was interesting because normally we have parents of all ages of kids, but tonight, all of our kids were nearly in the same age group. One mom has a nearly 6-year-old, and has already been through one hospitalization. I really feel for her - I remember that so vividly, and I think it’s one of the most difficult times of this journey. When you don’t know exactly what’s wrong, the tests aren’t designed for someone that young, the hospital vacancies are not designed for someone that young, and yet there is something truly wrong with them, and you just want answers. In some ways, as difficult as things are here at times, I consider this the calm before the storm. We have so much ahead of us in their teens, so much I don’t even want to think about, but right now at least we have a somewhat consistent diagnosis and they willingly take their medications. Not to mention the whole teenage hormone, exposure to substances and people and all that...<shudder> No, I certainly don’t want to go back, but I’m not sure I want to go too much forward either.
It’s a really good thing I have that Dry Erase calendar. I was just thinking tomorrow was going to be a very light day - then I realized that Kieran has a playdate in the morning, Ailish has the allergist at 2:00, Kieran has swim at 3:00, we have a WrapAround support meeting at 4:00, and then Musical Theater at 7:00. I’m exhausted just thinking about it!
Sandy made me promise I’d post this at 12:01, since I told her I wasn’t going to post sooner than every three days, so here it is! I hope it was worth keeping me up for that extra hour waiting for midnight to roll around - just kidding :)