Hard to believe...

...but I passed my first semester of "real" nursing school with an A.  I only achieved that A because my professor rounded my grade up: I'd actually ended the semester with a 89.6, but she gave me a 90, because apparently she liked me.  She didn't have to do it, and I know it, and I'm super grateful.

Second semester started (technically) today, but it was a snow day.  We do clinicals in a real hospital, and while I'm super excited, I'm also super-duper scared.  I felt like this last semester, too, and everything was fine in the end, even though there were days when I felt like I was going to die.  I made friends, and learned a lot, and the same will be true for this semester, too.  I'm just terrified.  Understandably.

It will be okay.  Maybe not right away, but it will be okay in the end.  I know it will.  I've made it this far, with all the stumbling blocks put in my way, and I can't quit now just because I'm scared.

a testament to my time in therapy

So I started nursing school for real-real last month.  I knew it wasn't going to be easy, even without the added complications of everything going on with Sid, and the acting out from Spagett, and the stress of walking into a giant unknown as Sid is medically retired from the Navy...

I thought I knew what I was getting into.  And I was wrong.

I barely passed my first exam.  BUT I PASSED.  However, on my first summative skills check-off, I failed.  At first, I felt all right about it: I get the chance to redo, so it's not the end of the world, right?  RIGHT?!  But when I started to talk to one of my old professors about it, I burst into tears.  Right there in the middle of a crowded hallway, dressed in my uniform, I cried like a wiener.  It was the culmination of all that's come before: Sid's cancer, everything.  And it went on and on.  I went to see our nursing retention coordinator and sobbed in her office for probably an hour.

One thing she said that really stuck with me was that there are student nurses who come into her office in a worse state than me, and they don't have nearly as much bullshit going on in their personal lives.  She said that I was holding it together admirably, that she actually didn't even know how I was managing the amount of stress I must be experiencing.  I told her it must be a testament to my time in therapy, and she laughed.

I walked out of her office, not exactly feeling better, but feeling as though I wasn't fighting this uphill battle alone.  School has only been in session for a month, and I'm already blown away by the support I'm receiving from my professors - old and new -  and my fellow students.  It's been amazing and humbling and inspirational.

Nursing school isn't what I expected at all.  In some ways it's a lot better, and in some ways it's a lot worse.  I can't even imagine what next semester will be like, and truthfully, I'm trying not to think about that when there's so much going on right now.

this wasn't supposed to happen

Sid had an endoscopy done last month, something to do with checking his upper GI tract and GERD and stomach lining and blah.  I don't recall the exact reasons why he had the procedure done.  What is important about this endoscopy is that the doctors found something in his duodenum that shouldn't have been there and they biopsied it.

It is cancer.

We found out yesterday that Sid has cancer.  Specifically, follicular lymphoma.

I will never forget the way the air left my lungs when I heard those words.  I will never forget the way I stood there, looking at him, and he had not heard a single word the doctor had said.  "What's that?" he whispered to me, and I was too stunned to work up the breath to respond.  I mouthed back, "cancer."  He cried.  I didn't.  I still haven't.  I don't know if I can.  It doesn't even feel real.

I went to the grocery store today and felt like everyone would be able to see that I was absolutely shattered.  Like, look at this woman pretending to be normal!  Who does she think she's fooling?  I put things in the cart because that's what you do at the grocery store, but I wasn't paying much attention to what I picked up. I tried to remember that Sid had asked me to get ramen, and Spagett wanted dinosaur shaped chicken nuggets, and we needed more coffee. And the whole time, I'm inside my own head screaming WHO THE FUCK CARES, SID HAS CANCER.  People asked me how I was doing and I said "fine" because that is what you say when someone asks, but I am not fine.  I am a mess on the inside.  I don't know how I'm supposed to finish my report this weekend and do my take home exam and go to school on Monday like there is absolutely nothing out of the ordinary.

All I know is that this wasn't supposed to happen.  It wasn't supposed to be like this.  But it did, and it is.

DV is fucking disgusting

When I was 17, I had an epiphany.  It came in the guise of my stepfather, who didn't like my attitude while I did homework and he shouted at me over one thing or another, tossing me like a ragdoll into the corner of the living room and tipping the recliner that I had been sitting on over onto me.  He tried to hit me, punch me maybe, I'm not sure which, but I remember he must not have been trying very hard because I had thrown my arms over my head and was blocking the blows.  And my mother.  My mother just stood there and watched this happen.  So did my younger sisters.  I don't blame them for not intervening or calling the cops.  But my mother did nothing.  And afterward, when I confronted her about it, she denied the entire thing had happened, that I had overreacted and blown this small spat way out of proportion.  She tried to make exuses for her husband, when his actions were inexcusable.  She tried to gaslight me.

That was when I realized that my mother would deny, deny, deny this man's actions, and keep making excuses for him, until one day she ended up dead at the wrong end of his temper.

He pulled a gun on her the other day.  He's been keeping a girlfriend in the home he shares with my mother and pulled a gun on my mom when she dared to demand a divorce.  She refuses to leave, refuses to call the cops.  She is still making excuses.

She could have died, and she is still making excuses.

I feel sick.

I knew this was coming.  I've known it for 13 years.  And yet I still feel totally blindsided by all of this.

I suck at blogging

Yea verily, truer words were never spoken.

Holy shitsnacks, I have been BUSY.  My first year of nursing school is done (it was all prerequisites, so hold your applause), but I held onto that 4.0 GPA for both semesters and made the deans list.  I took "advanced algebra with into to trigonometry" and walked in expecting a firing squad.  Would you believe I actually fucking enjoyed that class?  I had people in this last semester's psychology class telling me they'd already earned one degree and this was the hardest class they'd ever taken, EVER, and I had no trouble with it.  I feel like I'm on a roll.  I feel stupid for being so scared for so long, when even though it's a lot of work, it's not as scary and awful as I thought it would be.

Never did manage that half marathon, though.  My longest run was 8 miles and then my heart gave up.  No really, it did.  I woke in the middle of the night with palpitations so bad I thought "this is how i die" and it lasted for the longest fifteen minutes of my life.  I'm ashamed to admit that I wanted to pretend like nothing had happened, but the thought of Spagett finding me dead was enough to motivate me into going to the ER.  No pulmonary embolisms, no heart attack, nothing off on the EKG.  Was referred to a cardiologist.  I love this guy.  I really do.  He's a shit-talking little Indian guy who makes me laugh even though I'm sitting in his office with a fucking heart problem.  I've done a stress test and worn a Holter monitor and taken magnesium supplements because I had low mag, and the general consensus at this point is that I have some kind of arrhythmia, most likely AV node re-entrant tachycardia.  But we are waiting to see what another specialist, an electrophysiologist, thinks.

Oddly enough, even though this is my heart we're talking about, I'm not as freaked out by this as I was by Sid's neck mass (FYI, it was totally a thyroglossal cyst, the surgery went fine and you hardly notice his scar).  At any rate, the cardiologist has me on Toprolol to help with the arrhythmia and I have noticed a huge difference.  The side effects are kind of wonky: I have headaches a lot, and not the kind you normally think of as a headache, but an "oh my god, everything is going to hit me in the head" kind of headache.  And the weird-ass dreams I have on this medicine are sometimes goddamn terrifying.  I wake up like "oh thank fuck that was just a dream..." quite often now.  Even though the idea of undergoing an ablation procedure to treat the arrhythmia scares the shit out of me, I think that, long term, it would be a better option than this medication.  I will do it if I am offered the option.

I've been told "gentle cardio only" so no interval training, no massive jumps in mileage.  I run 2 miles sometimes 3 times a week and do a "long run" if it's not hot as balls.  By long run, I mean 3-4 miles.  It's whatever.  I'm just glad I didn't have to stop running entirely.

But, swear to shit, someday I'm fucking running that half.

edit:  I totally forgot to mention the (to me) worst part of this whole arrhythmia thing.  The wooooooorst.  Coffee.  I had to give up caffeine.  Oh yeah.  Yeah, it was not pleasant.  However, I like feeling like I'm not dying, and I like not having to deal with coffee headaches, so overall it was a good thing.  I drink a bottle of water in the mornings instead of coffee: I tried tea but I felt like it was a weak replacement.
All or nothing, baby!  I've adjusted, and I treat myself to decaf coffee or regular tea if I feel like I need a pick-me-up, but usually it's just water for me.  How blah!  Why starky, I do believe you are becoming a bore!

confession

I am struggling.

My first semester of nursing school is coming to a close, and I have straight A's.  That's not the problem.

It's everything else that's the problem.

I think that Spagett has ADHD.

I can't deal with him.  I can't.  I can't mediate between him and Sid any longer.  I feel like I'm losing my mind.  I can't deal with being forced to side with my husband or my child in this bullshit drama that has become our home life.  I can't.

And yet, what choice do I have?

When the time outs have not worked, and neither have the spankings, and Spagett is throwing toys at my head because THAT is his definition of "playing with toys", when you tell him to play quietly and he starts throwing things at the ceiling fan, because hey, it's quiet, isn't it?  When it's mid afternoon and you can see his body is in need of rest and yet he can't lay still long enough to allow himself to nap, when it's midnight and he's still awake because he literally cannot stop running around and we have to be up at 7 am, but if you just lock him in his room and try to go to sleep yourself, he's going to tear everything apart and scream so loud that the whole neighborhood will hear...

What choice do I have?

When Sid has checked out, and all his contributions to the problem involve screaming "shut the fuck up, go away," what fucking choice do I as Spagett's mother HAVE?!

This is not what I wanted for my little boy.  This is not what I wanted for Sid and I as parents.  I feel like somewhere along the way, I have done something wrong, I have made a bad decision, and now every single one of us is paying the price.

So yeah.  Seriously, what do I do?  What choice do I have when I'm the only one left to handle the problem and I've been slogging away at school work for goddamn hours and I still have homework to do, and laundry and dishes, and everyone still needs dinner, and here's my kid who doesn't give a shit how many times you punish him for throwing things and climbing all over the furniture, he's just going to keep right the fuck on doing it, what the FUCK am I supposed to do?

sweet relief and a zombie run

While we still don't have solid answers, the MRI results are in and the doctors are saying the mass in Sid's neck is most likely not cancer, but a benign thyroglossal cyst.  While it will require surgery, from what I understand, it's a fairly simple procedure with minimal scarring, and the likelihood of it coming back is fairly small.  Sid also does not have MS, but a cervical osteophyte: in layman's terms, he's got a bone spur in his neck.  We are so relieved.  I can't even tell you how it feels to not have the weight of that worry constantly bogging me down.

So I ran my zombie race on Saturday unburdened by personal bullshit!  I actually didn't run much of it at all, the ground was way too rocky, uneven, and muddy.  The times I was running, I was full out sprinting and trying not to slip and fall.  I pulled something in my right ankle, which I totally didn't even feel until after the race was over, and my back got wrenched pretty well when I did some hard twists trying to keep my balance in the slick clay mud.  Overall, I enjoyed the shit out of that race and definitely intend to come back again next year.  It was worth every fucking penny: I had the time of my goddamn life out there, belly crawling through stinky mud, getting shocked, and crawling through mucky water up to my neck.  Dirty as hell at the finish, but so much fun.

being brave

The Mansons are facing some tough times right now.  Sid has a mass on his voice box, and is about to undergo testing to figure out if it's cancer.  His doctor is also testing him for Multiple Sclerosis, after years of weirdness.

Maybe it's not cancer (but maybe it is).  Maybe it's only benign nodules (but maybe it's not).  Maybe it's not MS (but maybe it is).  We'll have answers soon enough, and I think knowing has got to be so much less scary than this uncertainty.  I can't speak for Sid, but I know I'm going about my daily business feeling like I'm waiting to be hung: the noose is around my neck, and I know the floor is about to drop out from under me, but I don't know when.

Right now, running is what is keeping me sane.  What I've learned while outside sweating and plodding are keeping me from losing myself in anxiety, and until now, I had no idea there was anything at all to learn from putting one foot in front of the other, but that itself is the lesson: all you can do is put one foot in front of the other.  Keep moving, and eventually, it will be over.  It feels like it will last forever, but it ends.  It will end.

Plus, The Zone.  Oh, The Zone.  Fuck a runner's high, The Zone is where it's at.  There's nothing at all but the silence.  Nothing else.  No worries, no doubts, no voice in your head telling you shit you don't want to hear.  Just the rhythm of your breathing and your feet on the pavement.  I call it my brutal meditation, and it is glorious.

Sometimes I have to remind myself, I am doing this.  I am running, I am going to nursing school, I am going to sit in the waiting room while Sid has his surgery and wait to hear what the doctors say.  I am doing it.  I am brave, I am strong, I am doing this.

And it helps.

big changes at Manson Homestead IV

No, I'm not pregnant.  Good lord, perish the thought.

I'm starting nursing school in September.  This is a big deal!  HUGE!  This is something I have wanted to do for ages and couldn't work up the courage to go through with.  Because, you know, it would be difficult.  And maybe I wouldn't be good at it.  Just trust me when I say there were myriad reasons why I constantly talked myself out of taking the big step and actually applying.  And every single one of them was my anxiety talking.

The fact that I recognized it and talked myself out of being afraid is another big deal.  Because lets face it, I am a huge ball of worry.  I don't have full blown anxiety attacks anymore, but I still manage to give myself palpitations over silly shit.  In this instance, I had an epiphany.  There really is no other way to describe it.  I realized that I was letting my fear rule me.  I was letting my fear dictate the course that the rest of my life would take.  And goddamn if I didn't sit down that very day and apply to nursing school, because you know what?  Fuck that.

Another thing I went ahead and did even though the thought made me vaguely nauseated is sign up for a Run For Your Lives race.  I'm gonna be chased by zombies!  On an obstacle course!  A couple of my friends have done it and said it was a blast, and I have planned on doing one for ages but never did because Landwhale.  Fuck that, too.  I've lost 15 pounds, I'm lighter than I was when I got pregnant with Spagett, and I'm in way better shape.  Still slow as fuck, but getting better.  I'm training for a half marathon, for gods sake, I can handle a good ol' fashioned apocalypse.

saying goodbye to Sammy

published March 19

I've waited a while to post this, not only because I needed to put some space between me and the actual event, but also because I needed this time to process all that has happened.

Sammy's last day was as peaceful as we could manage: we gave her a full dose of alprazolam, not the half we'd been giving her to keep her mellow. We fed her a can of wet food, and tuna when she wanted more and we had none. She spent most of the day outside, lying in the flowerbed where the sun was shining. Someone was with her all day: we took it in shifts, sitting with her in the grass, on the sofa, wherever she wanted to be. I actually didn't want to do it - didn't think I could bear it, because I knew that what I was going to do later that evening would be hard enough - but Sid insisted. We have a picture of me with Sammy, sitting in the sun, her head on my boot, sleepy and unaware.

The drive to the vet was terrible. I had intended to go alone, but Sid wanted to be there, too, and so we brought Spagett as well. Everyone at the vet was so nice, so understanding. I remember one of the techs telling me about when she had to euthanize her dog: "It's the hardest decision in the world, isn't it? Like, you don't want to know, but you know."

I don't clearly remember much about what happened. I remember they took her into the back to place a catheter in her leg, and she screamed. Sammy never had much voice, she always squeaked and squawked like she had laryngitis. When I heard that scream, I thought she knows. Perhaps she really did. They brought her back out, and then all I truly recall is holding her, wrapped in a blanket, and telling the vet to go ahead. I remember the hollow feeling in my chest as she injected the medicine into Sammy's leg. She was purring. I do remember feeling so grateful to hear her purr like that, because it had been ages and ages. She started nodding like she was falling asleep. Sid started to cry, and all I could manage was "don't," because I was barely holding it together, myself, and I didn't want to scare Sammy. And then she stopped purring, and that was it.

Afterward, when I carried her out of the vet's office wrapped in that same blanket, there was only relief. It was over. It was the odd peace I felt after Spagett was born, that total stillness of the soul after going through the circles of hell.

It's been almost five months since she died, and it has taken that long for me to tell the story of her last day. Five months, and I still sometimes see a little black shape out of the corner of my eye and turn, totally expecting to see her there.

when it rains, it pours II

We are moving in a week.  One week.

And tomorrow we are having one of our cats euthanized.

Fun times, right?  Sammy has been on a slow decline for a while now.  She paces, and poops on the floor, and isn't as friendly as she used to be.  We have taken her to vet after vet and there's nothing we can do for her.  For the past few days, she's been on a benzo and while it's made her loopy and she falls into her own poop, she is like a kitten again.  Seeing her so happy and mellow just emphasizes the point: It is time to let her go.

That doesn't make the decision any easier, even though I've felt in my heart for a while now that this would be the end result.

We have talked about it, and cried, and talked some more, and cried some more, and Sid agrees with me 100%.  Everyone I've talked to agrees, this is the best choice we can make.  And that doesn't make me feel any better about it at all.

So I have made the tearful call to the vet, and scheduled the death of a beloved family member.  And tomorrow, I will go with her - Sid can't bear the thought of being there - and watch her die.  I will hold her as she takes her last breath.  It is the very least I can do for the little black cat who has stuck by me for 14 years.  

a quarter for your vomit

Spagett loves money.  He calls it "doy" and every time he finds a penny on the sidewalk, you'd think he won the lottery, the way his face lights up.  He loves his money.  This is turning out to be problematic.

There was a quarter on the floor.  Fuck if I know where he found it, but it was keeping him occupied while I changed his diaper.  He was turning it in his fingers, looking at it, dropping it on his chest, and then he started to stick it in his mouth.  I used Mom Voice: don't you put that money in your mouth!

BLOOP, down the hatch it went.  Right down his throat.  My first reaction was one of panic.  Holy shit, my kid just swallowed a fucking quarter, is he going to choke to death?  But Spagett was screaming and crying too loud to be choking.  So then I started laughing.  Maybe that was mean of me, but I was envisioning a shit-coated quarter, and how I was going to make Sid get that diaper and just let him wonder what had happened.

So, I was laughing.  And Spagett was freaking out so badly it's pathetic, so I held my arms out to him and he flew at me for a hug.  But I was still laughing, and I couldn't stop.  I tried to tell him it's okay, you'll be fine between giggles and I'm pretty sure he couldn't understand what I was saying.

And then he started gagging.  I couldn't tell if it was gagging like choking, or gagging like puking, so I pulled him away from me and just then he bent over and sprayed a fantastic amount of vomit onto the rug in front of me.  Dinner and dessert and snack, all over the floor.

So then he was upset about that.  There were strings of vomit hanging off his face, he was sobbing, and I am officially going to hell because I was still laughing.

He calmed down once I stopped laughing and started cleaning, but I'd be lying if I said I could see straight through the tears in my eyes.  And as I scooped up chunks of cherries and tortilla chips from the carpet, I found the quarter.

I wiped it down with Lysol and clipped it onto the fridge.  It is officially a keepsake.

she's baaaaaack!

I didn't expect to say that, ever.

Four days of putting up flyers, calling shelters, checking Craigslist and generally telling myself that she was never coming back, and Knut came home.

I was sitting on the recliner, reading, and Spagett and Sid were out in the garage doing Spagett and Sid things, when I heard scraping at the door.  And then again.  And when I got up to see what it was, fully expecting it to be the fucking raccoon I've seen around here lately, there was Knut.

Whatever else she's done in the past four days, she got into a fight with something at some point: there are bite marks, scrapes and punctures, all over her neck and shoulders.  Her ear was bitten.  One of her claws got ripped out.  A fly had laid eggs around some of the wounds.  She was dirty and smelly and tired, but so glad to be home!  I picked her up and took her out to the garage, because Sid didn't hear me yelling for him.  The look on his face was priceless.  Shock and joy and disbelief.  It was Knut!

We got some food and water in her and carted her off to Banfield Pet Hospital.  She was cleaned up and shaved and checked head to toe.  She's beat up, but otherwise healthy, and hopefully there will be no complications with those bites.

I hadn't expected to see her again.  Honestly, I thought she had died, or someone had picked her up.  I didn't think she was going to come home.  That she did seems like nothing short of amazing.

when it rains, it pours

Truly.

Friday, first thing in the morning, I had my wisdom teeth out.  The bottom two were sideways, and all four were impacted.  The surgery went fine, all I remember was they were having a hard time finding a vein for the IV, they gave me nitrous, and once the IV was in everything went wonky.  Right before I passed out, I remember thinking I was never going to pass out, that I would just feel dizzy and sleepy forever. Next thing I know, I'm waking up with gauze in my mouth and being herded out the door.

That afternoon, I looked like Bethenny Frankel.  The next day, my face was unrecognizable from the cheekbones down.  I blew up.  The swelling was worse the next day, if such a thing could be possible.  I cried.  Spagett was scared of me.  It was horrible.  The Vicodin I'd been prescribed didn't seem to take a dent out of the pain I was in.  I can't say it enough: it was horrible.

While the swelling has gone down, my face is all bruised along my jaw, and I still can't open my mouth very far.  It isn't pain stopping me; I literally cannot open my mouth.  While I understand this is normal and will resolve in time, it fucking sucks trying to eat.

But.  That's not even the worst of it.

Yesterday Knut disappeared.  I spent all day today walking around with Spagett on my back, or biking with Spagett in his seat, putting up flyers with Sid and looking for that bitch cat.  And she is nowhere to be found.  We lost Knut.

Holy shit, we lost Knut.  We may never get her back.  I don't even want to talk about it anymore right now, just thinking about it, just typing the words, leaves me with this hollow, sick feeling.  Even though I know, I fucking know anything could have happened to her, I can't even bring myself to consider that she might be dead.  Eaten or otherwise killed by another animal.  It simply is not a thought I am willing to entertain.  Even though I know she is old, missing teeth, not as spry or able to defend herself, following that train of thought to it's conclusion is unfathomable.

I have to believe she'll come back.  That someone will find her, someone will pick her up and call me.  Or that I'll open the door one morning and there she'll be on the porch, having gotten tired of her adventures and found her way home.  This has to happen, because if it doesn't, the implications are more than I can take.

to the two gay men in Celebration, FL in '96

I'm sorry.

I know it's been 16 years since I saw you holding hands in Celebration, FL, but I have to admit, I think about you two a lot.  Probably a lot more than is considered normal or sane.  It's just that my mom and her boyfriend said a lot of shit about you guys that I'm sure you heard, and you ignored it.  And I laughed at what they were saying, because I was 12, sheltered and ignorant.

You would be justified in thinking that they were bigots raising bigoted children: I would think that, without doubt, if someone heckled me in such a manner while I was out just living my life.  I assure you, those two adults may be bigots (among other things, which I'm not getting into here), but the three kids you saw have grown to be fairly respectable adults.  We're not without our issues, which is another story entirely, but we're definitely not homophobic.  Hell, at least two of us aren't even religious anymore.  These apples, for the most part, fell pretty far from the tree.

I wish I hadn't laughed.  I wish I had known better.  I wish I could go back and shake my mother by her shoulders and demand an explanation; why did she think it was okay to act like that, to teach that kind of blind hate to her children?  But mostly, I wish I could tell you two that I'm sorry.

What happened that day should never have occurred at all.  Ever.  To you two or anyone else.

I'm sorry.

baby steps

It's no secret to anyone who has spent even a little amount of time with Spagett: he is a kid who loves the fiddly things. He loves to figure out how things work, how things go together, how things come apart. He is very curious. When he was a year and a half old, we had to change from simple child-proofing caps on the electric sockets to a full plate because he figured out how the CHILD-PROOF LOCK worked ("Child-proof my fucking ass," say the Mansons). He learned to fly a remote-controlled helicopter! Since he learned to walk when he was nine months old, he is constantly going, constantly doing, constantly figuring things out.

 But he will not learn to talk.

 He has made-up words for "cat" and "helicopter/plane," ("nu-nu" and "oin," respectively) and he will point to a keyhole and say "key." He calls me "mum" and Sid is "dad'n" or "dada." He calls Spongebob Squarepants "BobBob," and will not hesitate to tell you "no" if he disagrees with you. Recently he started saying "cheese," "bug," "candy" (sounds more like "nanny") and "ball." He does use two word sentences. He knows exactly what we mean when we tell him things. But this still puts him behind other kids his age.

 It sounds alarming, but truth be told, I feel like he is just so fixated on figuring out his world that language skills have taken a backseat. I don't know of any other kids his age that can fly an RC helicopter, after all. I don't know of any kids his age who have figured out child-proof locks. As his mother, who worries all the time about everything, I do not worry about his speech. He will get there in his own time. If he goes about talking like he did walking, he will wake up one day and just decide this is the perfect day for talking in sentences.

 However, when he went for his 2 year well baby visit at the clinic, I was told we would get a referral to speech therapy. Which I'm fine with. I know he's behind. And if I'm wrong, and there is a problem, addressing it is the only thing we can do. To ignore it would be terrible.

And so my beautiful, brilliant, busybody little Spagett is going to see a speech therapist.  As the saying goes, may god have mercy on that poor sap's soul.

making progress and hitting roadblocks

When I started running, I was horrible at it. I mean, really, really horrible. And I slowly started getting better, but Sid felt like I wasn't getting better fast enough, so I started the Couch To 5k program.

I had no trouble running nearly 3 miles today, okay? I've gotten better. I ran my fastest mile today. I've gotten a lot better. My average pace is definitely a lot faster than when I started. I've really gotten a lot better.

But I'm still slower than Sid. That doesn't bother me, though it seems to really bug him. My ultimate goal is to be able to run a half marathon, 13.1 miles, and today I did just under 3 miles, so the goal is still out of reach, but I'll get there eventually. I want to focus on distance. I don't care how slow I am, as long as I get there in the end. But Sid wants me to focus on speed. Who gives a shit how slow I am, if I can run 13.1?

Maybe I should just focus on speed for a while. It would be great to be able to go running with Sid, and keep up without difficulty. But he walks faster than me all the time, anyway, so why should I have to move faster than I'm comfortable with, just to keep up with the pace he sets? I do that all the time as it is. But I run to slow for him. The pace I set makes his ankles hurt. BITCH, THE PACE YOU SET MAKES ME HORK UP MY LUNGS. Needless to say, it's coming down to the moment where I am going to have to make a decision on what to work on next, because I'm a week away from finishing this Couch To 5k thing. Part of me wants to continue on with my own goal, and part wants to make this effort for Sid. But what if I work my ass off, run faster, and it's still not good enough? I would not be a very happy Landwhale.

get your nose out of my crotch

Sid and I agreed when we got married, we'd have one biological child. I felt like that was all I could handle, and if someday we wanted more kids, we would adopt. We felt like that was a good plan, one that was right for us. So now that we have our one bio kid, we've been looking at long-term contraception. I thought Sid was going to get a vasectomy, but he's had two years to get it done and is still dragging his feet.

So I decided I should get an IUD. Specifically Mirena. I don't want to deal with periods. Ever since Spagett, my periods are irregular and stupid, and I would just rather not have to deal with it at all. I cannot remember to take my morning Synthroid, so taking a birth control pill at the same time every day is beyond me. An IUD, perfect.

My doctor agreed that it was a good choice, and I am waiting for her to set up my appointment at the naval hospital to have the thing put in, but she's been giving me a lot of crap about my decision to only have one child, and it's totally unnecessary. It's entirely unwanted.

Quite frankly, it's horribly presumptuous. She tells me "oh, you can't stop at one!" Uh, yes, I can: this is primarily why I'm getting Mirena, after all. Like I don't know myself well enough to know when enough is enough. I should just keep on popping out the kiddos until I go totally crazypants, is that it? It makes me so angry.

holy crap, IT'S ALIVE

So. It's been quite a while. More than a year. And what a year full of bullshit it's been.

Don't get me wrong, it had it's good points. It was also full of crap, too. BUT. Spagett is still full of beans. Sid is still a butthead. And I'm still a bitch. And I never thought I'd see the day where I run more in a week than Sid does (and this is not a brag on my part, this is testament to one man's laziness). But here we are!

Now that I'm through boob feeding and Spagett falls asleep pretty much on his own at night, I have much more free time and should have time to spare blogging now and again. I've just been lazy and preoccupied.

some fucking bookends

I am lying in bed with a sleeping Spagett next to me, browsing the internet on my phone. More specifically, browsing my blog posts from when I was pregnant. And there is a picture of the very first positive piss test that eventually ended with... Spagett.

That's some fucking bookends, if you ask me.

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