Arduousness

Four kids would be too many. I had 2 miscarriages and I think it was because God knew I'd be a terrible mother if I had more than 3 children. As it is, with 3 kids, I'm a marginal mother at best. You see, everyone has needs. And I am supposed to attend to these needs and I do. But then at 11:30 pm I start getting resentful of neediness and then I'm just plain angry and I honestly don't care how hungry or sad or confused or scared or constipated or febrile someone might be. I just want everyone to leave me the fuck alone. Truth.


Tonight I stayed up to watch a movie with my surrogate young adult child. Side Effects. I wouldn't really recommend that you watch it with your 9 yo daughter and maybe not your 12 yo son. Aside from the lesbian love scenes and graphic heterosexual sex, the movie was a bit creepy and kinda wigged me out, so now my daughter wants me to sleep in her room and my son is asleep in my room. The 20 yo is just fine though it has made her reconsider a career in psychiatry (it might help out her cousins who will need therapy bc their mother/her aunt let them watch developmentally inappropriate movies).


Summer has been incredibly busy for us. My solution to long, hot days is to be inside an air conditioned car as much as possible and this can only be accomplished by scheduling an exponential number of activities. I don't know if this is the solution to slothfulness but it sure as hell has the potential to cause exhaustion in the driver and irritability in the participants. So far kid 1 has 2 water polo teams, swim team, chess club, youth group and Boy Scouts. Kid 2 has lacrosse team, water polo team, swim team, chess club and Boy Scouts. Kid 3 has swim team and water polo and she did a week of basketball camp and she has a weekly reading class because I thought she might be a bit slow in the reading comprehension department (then I got her standardized test scores and I realized she's been fooling me). We still have another 3 weeks of water polo, Junior Olympic water polo, youth group trip, volleyball camp and sleep away camp for all 3. And I work, part time, but it's still work. WTF am I thinking? I hate TV and video games so much that I'm chasing my tale and spending close to $10,000 to torture my kids just to avoid it? Why didn't I just pull the plug?


Honestly, I don't think it was this hard for our parents. All they had to do was yell at us for talking on the phone for too long. They didn't have to contend with social media, assassinating video games, online Minecraft weirdos, electronic envy (my 9 yo has 2 friends with an iPhone 5 and she's outraged that she can't have one). Do I lock them in a closet? Give in? Or keep hemorrhaging cash and keep them so busy that they collapse in bed every night? Do they resent me? And, if it keeps them out of rehab or jail, do I care?


I realize that none of this is funny and I'm only bitching, but tough shit. And these are all rich, white girl problems. Yesterday at the dry cleaner, the kid who took my clothes was 14 yo and he and his 2 younger sisters are spending their summer in the dry cleaner's shop because their mother works there and she has no where else for them to go. Maybe that's the kind of camp in which I need to sign up my kids?


Alright, I'm exhausted now and I've been typing when I should have been cleaning the kitchen or sleeping. My poor husband is still working and he's so tired he could use tooth picks to keep his eyes open. I guess this is how it's gonna be unless we go to year round school...Australia anyone?



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Location:My messy home

Summer

It's 90 degrees at 10:30 in the morning, but with the humidity it feels like 98 degrees (according to The Weather Channel app). We are barely into the third week of summer and already I sense mutiny is on the horizon. I don't think there are any correct answers on how best to occupy your kids throughout the months of June - August. If you ask my kids, who are in the throes of/approaching adolescence, they'd tell you this is their ideal schedule:
A) stay up till 12-1 am every night
B) wake up at noon everyday
C) spend the 12 hours in between either playing Black Ops, Minecraft or watching movies on Amazon. (9 yo sister would request play dates with a different friend everyday and want you to do things like, take her ice skating)


I have a problem with their schedule. Maybe it's my mom's fault because she didn't tolerate slothfulness and now I'm conditioned to be the same or more likely, I'm just mean.
I don't mind being mean, because I figure that my popularity as a parent is inversely proportional to my effectiveness. But it can be exhausting, especially since everyone has an opinion now. I had no idea how easy I had it 5 years ago when they did what they were told, more or less.


I see myself as drill sergeant and they are in my boot camp. The really terrifying thing is I have morphed into my parents: "as long as you live under my roof...."
Yesterday as my almost 13 year old was complaining about some injustice, I told him not to worry because he only had to suffer through his father and my rules for 6 more years and then he could make up his own. He was surprised at the relatively little time he has left living with us and suddenly he was little again, "Mom, don't some kids still live with their parents after college?"


Speaking of which, we have the pleasure of my 20 yo niece living with us this summer. She's finished her first 2 years of college and a decade worth of teen years and she is not that much closer to maturity than my 12 year old. Don't get me wrong, she is absolutely lovely, and a joy to have in our home and I can only hope that my kids will be as successful, academically, but adolescence seems to extend into the mid 20s. The next 15 years look bleak for us.


I think I understand why parents want to live long enough to see their own kids struggle through parenthood. There is no price tag on vindication.
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Squalor

I'm sitting in my car bawling my eyes out while my daughter is in her guitar lesson. It's raining outside and I have guinea pig fur all over my black leggings and t-shirt.

I've been sick the past couple of days and I think I should have just stayed in bed today. I probably wouldn't be weeping like a toddler, sucking back snot, with guinea pig fur all over my clothes sitting in my car in the rain outside the guitar teacher's house.

I've had 4 large plastic tubs lined up in our hallway for about 4 weeks waiting for my husband to put them in the attic. He's not lazy, just busy. Because of the 4 large tubs there is a very narrow path by which you can get up and down the hallway. And there is a bookcase in the hallway too. That's mine. I moved it out of my daughter's bedroom about 3 months ago with intentions of finding it a permanent home. But it's sat in the hallway instead. My husband put the turd infested guinea pig cage into the hallway on top of the plastic tubs about 4 days ago. He said it smelled too bad for it to stay in our daughter's room. So his good idea was to really reinforce the concept of squalor. I swear to you if you walked into our house you'd think you were on the set of an episode of Hoarders.

Probably because I'm sick and not thinking rationally, I chose today as the day to clean out the guinea pig's cage. There were more turds than bedding in the bottom of the cage. Those things are just poop factories. Because it smelled so bad in her room, I decided the thing needs to go in a common room-more open space to disperse the odor. The problem is the current arrangement of the furniture doesn't allow for guinea pig cage placement. So I decided to start rearranging major pieces of furniture and thus the tears. Now I no longer have just a nasty guinea pig cage to deal with but I have chairs huddled together in the TV room and a piano in the dining room and tumble weeds of dog hair that have been unearthed and suddenly I feel like my home is not fit for humans and I'm just an imposter...a slob and CPS and the SPCA are gonna come remove my kids and animals and I'm gonna become part of the homeless community living under 610 fighting over discarded cigarette butts.

I probably need to go back to bed (if I can find it) and start again tomorrow.


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Cousins

An old one I never posted. A text to my dad.

Last night...


Have cousins here. They spent the night last night. The girls are still asleep in my bed. Last night we watched "Throw Mama from the Train" after eating at a little hole in the wall by their house, Jolly Cup. The cousins directed the dining and cinema choices and everyone really enjoyed themselves. You'll have to get the cousins to take you to Jolly Cup when you come. They have great Vietnamese sandwiches (banh mi) and shakes with tapioca balls. We were trying to find a cheap place where I could feed all 5 of them and they both were very much in favor of this place. At first oldest son tried to stage a hunger strike (he had been out-voted 4 to 1 against his choice, Chipotle) but the Big Dawg knows good food when he smells it and eventually his sense of taste and smell won out over the his principles (must always have my way?). Jolly Cup was a good way to let the searing pain and humiliation from my 322nd back up into another car (can anyone say back up camera on the next car?) dissipate. Niece forgot her handmade gift to Uncle Lee so I decided that reversing down the cul-de-sac at night with a van full of kids would be the most expedient method of retrieval. Only we didn't get very far because our backward progress was impeded by a white Toyota Camry, which lucky for me, sustained no damage. We managed a quick get away without the gift and with only one explicative said aloud (which daughter was quick to spin for me in a moment of crisis. "You mean frick, mom, right? Because you hit the car? That's what she means 6 year old girl cousin"). Regardless, Vietnamese sandwiches in a dodgy strip mall in a restaurant filled with patrons who mostly spoke either Spanish or Vietnamese (except for the very loud 5 children who were alternately demonstrating Jane Fonda-esque aerobic maneuvers as can be done with your bar stool-niece with daughter as her star pupil or an 11 year old executive-nephew-handing out food orders whilst simultaneously looking very grand with a functionless blue tooth poking out on his right ear). Niece was generous enough to share her copy of Auto Trader magazine with me when she was done reading it and nephew was quick to explain the virtues of a giant bottle of communal Great Value Ranch Dressing vs bastardized barbecue sauce in a Siriracha bottle on your hot wings to his 10 year old cousin. Thankfully C-Span was playing on the 65" screen TV for all of us to enjoy.

On the car ride home I learned that Isaac likes niece as evidenced by his demonstration of love in kindergarten with a kiss to her forehead. The admiration is not reciprocal because niece has pledged her affections to Conner.

The girls started on a puzzle which generated a conversation about nerdiness; is it good or bad and what constitutes a nerd? The general consensus was, though they may like to study a lot, it was good to be a nerd although no one present was willing to be categorized as one.

The girls, very sweetly, laid in bed and read with me last night. Niece with her stack of Berenstain Bears books, daughter with her chapter books and me with my People magazine. And their they remain with books all over the bed. The boys all bunked in middle kid's room and nephew had emerged for a brief moment but went back to sleep when he learned he couldn't start playing video games at 7 am.





It's so comforting to be in their presence witnessing the creation of memories as a fly on the wall-just a facilitator. They all have their own unique and special role in the family dynamic and that sweet new baby niece better rest up now because she's gonna have to be ready to rumble soon enough!



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Giving Bad News

Giving bad news never gets easier. And the older I get the more difficult it becomes. I suppose it's because I now have more life experience and when I was a younger doctor I could easily separate patients' lives from my own. Recently, I had to tell a woman that she has metastatic cancer. I had suspected as much but, like her, I was holding out unrealistic hope.

The past week or so I've been having paroxysms of sharp pain in my right temple and in my back, over my ribs on the right. The pain doesn't last long, seconds, but the rib pain, especially, catches my breath.

Normally, I'm prone to ruminating over whatever ache or pain I may be experiencing. Let me clarify, I don't ruminate frequently, but when I do have a pain, my mind immediately conjures the worst case scenario with me dead within weeks to months.

The mind and body have such a powerful connection. I'm not particularly new-agey but things in your subconscious can manifest themselves in many different ways, both bizarre and simple. Over time, doctors develop coping mechanisms to deal with unpleasant and uncomfortable feelings. Humor and repression are two popular and convenient ways to handle them. My husband is on a committee that deals with professionalism and medical students. Many of the committee members are not clinicians, meaning they have no patient contact. To them, some of the things that are spoken during rounds or in clinic would be incredulous. What they don't understand is that clinicians, on the whole, aren't cold and insensitive; we're simply trying to stay sane. In his brilliance, my husband has developed something called "the box of unprofessionalism". It's kind of like a confessional booth in that while you are standing in the box of unprofessionalism (which is far away from patient care areas and behind closed doors) you can say whatever you like without reprimand. It's not that he embraces insensitivity or crassness, rather he understands the importance of decompressing during incredibly stressful situations. (Maybe this is why he wins so many teaching awards).

For several days I've been repressing my grief over my patient's diagnosis. I had to tell someone, speak aloud, the words no one wants to hear. Every year Lee and I, along with one of our colleague's, give a lecture to the medical students about being a doctor and having an illness. We all discuss how your life changes the day you (or a loved one) receive the unwelcome news. All of the sudden you have to alter the landscape of your life. As a doctor, I don't think I can discount or underestimate the significance of giving another person equally life-altering news. What's the correct way to process? There is no course in medical school or residency that tells you how you are supposed to act, feel, behave. And for how long afterwards should you feel like shit? What's that patient thinking right now? Is she scared? Resolved? Indignant? Angry? I'll tell you how I feel, overwhelmingly sad and if I'm really honest with myself, guilty. Why her and not me? Why do I have the burden and responsibility of reminding someone of their own mortality and why is her number up and not mine?

I think that if I could get alone for a bit I'd probably have a good cry and I think I need a good cry. Not just for myself, but for that lady. Maybe the lump in my throat would go away and the pain in my head and the ache in my back.

One last thing, especially since I'm typing this on my phone while my family is on a road trip and my kids are about to mutiny because they want lunch (and maybe that's why I can finally think about this. I'm not helping someone with homework, or finishing a yearbook, or paying a bill. I'm on vacation); it's a story from medical school. When I was a second year student on my general surgery rotation, my friend and I were given the task of sewing closed a young man's chest cavity after he had died. I can't remember the mechanism of his accident, either a gun shot wound or a car accident, but he had been brought into the emergency room as a shock, meaning he was being artificially resuscitated. Well, chest compressions alone weren't reviving him, so the surgeons cracked his chest and performed cardiac massage. After what seemed like an eternity, they called the code realizing nothing was going bring the guy back to life. What had moments before been a shock room full of frenzied activity was now silent, with me, my friend and the dead man. The nurses and surgeons had gone to talk to the family and left us to "close him up" so he would be presentable to his family and so we could "practice our suturing skills." So Carie and I stood there, silently, each carefully sewing up one side of his thorax. Sometimes we still talk about that night an how ill-equipped we were to be given such a responsibility and how, afterwards, no one but us thought it was a big deal. When the surgeon came back in he said, "Good job, but make sure to take the tube out of his mouth because it's upsetting to the family." And that was it.

In the 22 years since I started medical school, they have advanced a lot in terms of sensitivity training and all of that 21st century PC stuff (no such beast as a professionalism committee in the early 90s), but personally, it never gets any easier and I hope it never does.




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House Guests

Text sent to my father this morning, 2 days before our trek to visit him. No offense to any Lithuanians....

Yo daddy....you awake? Wanna make sure you and Jan are still ok w/ us coming out there. You seem a bit hesitant about the number of house guests. Is it stressing you or Jan out too much?

By the way...I hope you don't mind, but we are hosting a band of Lithuanian foreign exchange students and their flock of camels. We feel bad about leaving them behind with the language barrier and all. We figure there is enough space for the camels in the yard and the Lithuanians don't take up too much space...they are compact and you can stack them on top of each other. Maybe one or two can sleep in the bed with you and Jan. They are cuddly creatures. By the way, the camels are gluten free, so would be good to have some grain free camel kibble for them. The good news is you can reuse the dung in your compost. You'll have award winning azaleas next year. If you don't get the grain free stuff, they get gassy and, pardon my language, but that shit smells and then the whole situation can get uncomfortable. On the whole, they've been delightful and I think you'll enjoy the lively, high spirited bunch. And the good news is they are a very loyal people so they are likely to come back next year and they usually bring with them many distant relatives and livestock


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Saturday Morning

It's a beautiful Saturday morning and I'm sitting in my front yard watching 2 of my kids play lacrosse with our neighbors (and hoping to God that no one breaks a window or dents a car) and not helping my oldest kid with his science homework (because it involves physics and I suck at physics and I was giving him the wrong answers).

The best part of today is: WE HAVE NOTHING SCHEDULED!!!! This is a minor miracle. The other best part is I can sit in my front yard in my pajamas and no one cares. Let me clarify; I'm not wearing a neglige (in which case people might turn to stone if they cast a glance upon me and my middle-aged physique) but flannel bottoms and a sweatshirt. And I'm wrapped in a blanket drinking my coffee. This is considered appropriate weekend attire on my street (especially considering we have a batty old lady who routinely walks up and down the street in her inside out pjs and peers into everyone's cars, windows and trash cans).

The kids and neighbor kids have decided that using one of our plastic adirondack chairs as a target would be a good idea. And from an 11 year old boy's perspective it is very ingenious. From the broken chair's perspective, not so much. In case you didn't realize this, children destroy things. Usually it's not intentional but the formula is directly proportional; the higher the concentration of boys the greater likelihood you have for destruction.

Middle kid's best bud moved in across the street. This is a good thing. However, right now they are in a battle over how to calculate points per shot. It's like I'm watching a political debate and tempers are flaring. It's a completely ridiculous and stupid argument and they've already been warned so now they are each in their own penalty boxes on separate sides of the street. Not sure if this is the best way to handle it or if I should just let them work it out themselves but the volume of bickering was starting to disturb my peaceful morning. Now they've crossed to the middle of the street, shook hands and negotiated rules.

This morning our dog (# 2 of 3) relieved himself in my bathroom and closet. I thought one of the boys had failed to flush...Puffy (i realize that some might consider this an effeminate name, but his given name is Puff Doggy and he is quite secure in his masculinity-even though he's a eunuch) took a piss on the corner of a stool and the pee had spread through all the grout lines like little rivers and streams. As if this wasn't enough, he, or possibly dog #3 (the geriatric beast, age unknown, who is vision, hearing and cognitively impaired) took a poop in my closet.









I haven't perfected my turd identification skills so with the absence of DNA testing, I couldn't determine who dropped the 2 desiccated turds. So, they were both cast outside. I suspect it was all the little, middle dog as he is too scared to walk down the hallway leading from our room to the back door. We put one of those buzzer discs under a chair near the path so he wouldn't get on the chair but he's too dumb to realize that his collar wasn't even on his neck. That and I watched the old dog take a poop outside this morning so I could better characterize each dogs' poop. Old dog's poop is more of an orange hue, a bit bigger in diameter and not so dry.

The funny thing about the dog collar alarm system is that whenever one of the batteries goes low in a smoke detector and starts to beep, the dogs freak out. It's psychological torture because they think it's the big dog alarm in the sky. Even though their collars don't buzz, the noise must be the exact same pitch as the dog alarm noise. In a sick an sadistic way, it's kind of funny....

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