Little Bits of Life…

I will hang on to the small thread of hope that there may, someday, be a breakthrough. I will continue to press forward. I will keep showing love and acceptance even when all I get in return is anger, pain, and belligerence. I will not give up.

Such is my day today. Woke exhausted and the exhaustion isn’t waning. After my day yesterday, draining despite the positives, today has been yet another completely exhausting day. And it is nowhere near over yet.

The screaming. The talking back. The blatant refusal to do as asked. And then she kicked her shoes off so hard as soon as she walked in the house that she knocked a jar to the floor in the kitchen with one flying shoe. Off to her room, screaming and yelling, slamming the door. And I know I need to go up and try to talk with her, try and calm her, and try and soothe her. But how can I give what I don’t have? Patience and love and understanding escape me when I’m this drained.

The one thing that keeps me from falling completely apart today: nobody has been physically hurt. That is a giant blessing.

And so I will drag myself up the stairs, put on my happy face, go in and try to be understanding. See if she will talk to me. Maybe tell me what has her so upset. I suspect a large part of it is related to the 3 hour appointment yesterday and then today’s therapy intake appointment where she had to listen to me detailing to the doctor all her problems and all my concerns. Where she had to chime in and talk about her faults and things that are hard for her. She handled it very well in the moment, but that is my child. Holding it together for the public eye. Never able to be less than perfect in the eyes of the world.

I will not leave her to do this on her own. I will not abandon my child when she needs love and understanding the most, even though she pushes me away. I will not give up.

Please be warned: This post is nowhere near as polished as I usually write. I just don’t have the brain power for it. Read on at your own risk.

I am exhausted. So ready to crawl in bed, yet here I am writing this post, because otherwise I think I may just go absolutely and completely insane with all these thoughts swirling around in my brain. Hopefully, writing it all down will clear my mind and then I’ll be ready for sleep.

Today has been quite a day. Up this morning and the first thing I’ve got to do is get kids up and fed, medicated, and off to school. Two headed to school (thanks to their Dad for taking them where they needed to be this morning), while Erica and I went to a 3 hour appointment at the Bowel and Bladder Clinic – we’re dealing with some issues there that need more help than I can give, and that are apparently a lovely genetic blessing I have passed on to all three of my lucky kids. I was expecting the appointment to last for 5 hours – that’s how long Isaac’s appointment took with the same clinic – so the shorter time was a wonderful blessing. Not least of the blessings of today was the clear and hopeful direction I have for helping Erica with this problem. There is a good chance we will have this one under control within a year or two (same outlook for Isaac). However, hearing this morning that this is likely genetic means I have one more child to go through this whole process with – the 3-5 hour initial appointment, then the follow-up appointments with the gastroenterologist, urologist, and physical therapist for the next 3-6 months. Thankfully it is mostly home treatment and the doctor appointments are only intense for about 6-8 weeks of that time, but it is very likely that we’ll be dealing with this for at least a year and possibly more for each child – copious amounts of medication and intense home maintenance on a daily basis.

After the B&B appointment, we picked Cambria up from Dad’s office (he was my hero again today and took her to school, went on her field trip to the fire station, and took her to the office afterwards where he fed her lunch and entertained her until I could come get her) and then it was a quick lunch and off to school with Erica. Distribute doctor’s notes to the school nurse and Erica’s teacher to make sure she is allowed and encouraged to: 1) drink a ton of water all day long and 2) use the bathroom every 2 hours.

I had planned to go home after dropping Erica off, but by the time we had finished at the school it didn’t make sense to drive for 30 minutes to be home for 25 and then turn around and drive another 30 to be in time to drive carpool. Instead, Cambria and I went to the mall where I picked up some facial cleanser (who knew acne could be adult onset???) and we rode every escalator and elevator we could find in the whole mall, trying to kill time. I think Cambria will remember this day forever, between the mall and the stop at Dairy Queen for ice cream on the way to pick kids up from school. I’m really not an ice cream fan, but today it hit the spot. There is so much to be said for emotional eating (don’t tell my therapist I said that… yikes!) and today has been a day of that for me between the ice cream, dinner, and the box of crackers I finished after the kids went to bed. Ugh – old habits die hard.

Rushed through the ice cream (well, really I rushed Cambria through it – she is the world’s slowest eater) so we were on time to pick the kids up from school. Today was a relatively good day for getting them out to the car – 2 of the 3 at the first school were in the car within 10 minutes of school letting out, and the third was out about 8 minutes after that. Off to the second school to pick up the last two who were waiting for me (YAY!) and then dropped everybody off.

Got home in time to grab the kids a snack before my hero came home to watch the younger ones so I could go to Activity Days with Erica (that’s my calling right now). We were cleaning the nursery toys today. The girls did pretty much all the work, and I got to talk to a wonderful friend (and my accomplice in Activity Days) for an hour – a blessing in and of itself!

Came home and supervised piano and violin practice, performed surgery on Bananas (the stuffed monkey Cambria brought home from school; he is the class pet and his head, tail, and one leg were hanging on by a thread so I gave him stitches), ate dinner that Kimball cooked (I’m telling you – this is one fantastic man!!!), got the kids ready for bed, and helped with Erica’s math some more (she is behind by about 30 pages in her math book so we did math at the doctor’s office and again this evening in an attempt to put a dent in that seemingly insurmountable number of pages – the kid has been lying to me about having done her math homework for the better part of the quarter, apparently). Put all the kids to bed after forcibly brushing Isaac’s teeth and administering his inhaler, then began the prep for tomorrow.

Smoothie made, paperwork filled out and test results found for Erica’s therapy intake appointment in the morning, kitchen table cleaned off (How terrible is it that I can’t remember the last time the kitchen floor was swept? Things are sticking to my feet and making me insane but I just don’t have the time to sweep it.), dishes done (once by Kimball and once by me), appointments added to the calendar for the urologist. Map printed for the appointment tomorrow morning. Turns out instead of the Meridian office, I’m headed 30 minutes away to the downtown office in the morning – good thing I decided to print a map tonight or I would have been in the wrong place!

There are a million more things I need to do. A million things running through my brain, fighting for a space and some attention. I need to buy birthday presents for my husband (who hasn’t given me a list yet… HINT, HINT), need to go through the paperwork the doctors gave me today and get Erica started on her medication, need a new water bottle for her (she destroys every single one I buy her and we are out AGAIN), have a blog post I’m trying to work on about schools for my kids, we’re out of flour so I need to grind some wheat, I missed a wedding reception and completely forgot to RSVP anyway and I need to purchase and deliver a gift, not to mention that I can’t recall the last time I read my scriptures. I’ve got to figure out what to do about school for Cambria – that means scheduling and doing testing and talking to principals and trying to worm my way in to places people don’t want me to be. I need to finish indexing the file I’m working on…

I’m sure there is more, but every time I think of something it pushes another thing right out the back of my brain. I think I am completely maxed out on brain power, especially for this late at night. I can so totally see how people might get hooked on energy pills or brain enhancing drugs. I feel like I need some of that just to keep up lately…

At any rate, this has been my day. Some really good, some overwhelming, and some not so fantastic. Not every day is misery here. Not every experience I have is completely and totally draining. Today I had a lot of good moments.

And yet I am still emotionally and physically spent – go figure.

Time to crawl in bed.

Some things I may never understand. In fact, there are a lot of things I’m sure I will never understand. For the most part, I’m ok with that. Most things I don’t understand don’t need to be understood by me. Most of them can be left to the experts and that doesn’t bother me a bit. But there are a few things that I just lay awake at night, trying to figure out, and failing miserably. One of them is the duplicity that is each of my daughters. Let me give you a perfect example of this.

One day last week, I opened the door to my bedroom and walked in to discover a piece of paper on the floor that had obviously been slid under the closed door. This is a Cambria technique for the delivery of pictures, bookmarks, notes, etc. when my door is closed. I reached down, picked it up, and started to read. My eyes began to fill with tears and my heart sang a little song of joy as I deciphered her note to her dad:

Well Dad i love u just remember that God made you speciall and he love’s you very much! i love you! Love Cambria!

I remembered that earlier that day, she had asked me how to spell “special” and that I had seen her with her paper and pencil at the table, working on something. This is apparently what she had been working on. It amazed me that something so true, profound, and meaningful could come from the mind and heart of such a small person, and that it could have such a large effect on me. It was one of the moments I will treasure forever.

Lovely, no? Enough to make up for oh so much pain and struggle with her. Even made Sunday’s debacle seem small and insignificant.

Fast forward no more than five minutes. Cue Isaac’s blood-curdling scream. Out I rush to find Isaac crying hysterically and Cambria with the meanest, dirtiest look on her face. It was obvious to me she had just taken an opportunity to express her displeasure with her brother in a much-less-than-acceptable way. I walked toward her and she, knowing what was coming, sat back on the couch and began kicking her feet wildly in an attempt to ward me off. I scooped her up and off to her room we went for the inevitable time-out.

Isaac is still crying loudly, so my next immediate concern is to see what damage has been done. I hugged him and asked him if he would be ok. “Ya, I’ll be all right,” was his half-choked response. On his upper right arm was the evidence of what had just passed: a perfect imprint of all Cambria’s teeth. My heart almost broke. I know what it feels like to have those teeth implanted in your flesh hard enough to leave a mark like that. I was so thankful the skin hadn’t been broken, but he would invariably have a large bruise on his right arm.

I simply could not and still can not understand how Cambria could fly to such an extreme. It seems that both my girls can be set off at the smallest, most insignificant thing. To be fair, Isaac does tease them both, and I can see that there are times when he deserves to be harassed a bit for the way he treats them, but I honestly cannot understand what it is that causes my sweet girls to become so completely horrid. Especially when I know they are capable of so much good.

Anxiety plays a big part in this violence for my girls. They are both on anxiety medication (as is their mother, so I’m certain that is something they have inherited), which caused a noticeable change in the frequency of Erica’s violence. I’ve begun to wonder if Cambria’s medication dose needs to be adjusted, as the incidence of her violence has become more and more frequent. I’ve expressed before that I am not sure how much I think is a learned behavior for her and how much is possibly biological/chemical/genetic. I’m hopeful that getting Erica’s behavior back under control will help, but there is a part of me that is pretty sure there’s more going on with Cambria than her simply reproducing behavior she has observed.

Next week Erica has an intake appointment with a clinic where I am hopeful we will find a good therapeutic connection for her. Maybe if we can find someone she will open up to and connect with, then things will settle back down. And maybe if Erica’s behavior settles down, Cambria’s will as well. But it is so hard to know. I don’t know how long to wait before I need to do something else. And when it comes to that point, what is the “something else” that I need to do?

I love my children. They have brought me so much joy. But this is so difficult. It breaks my heart to see my son putting up with so much. I’m so thankful he doesn’t get violent with them, but at the same time, I want him to stand up for himself. I don’t know how to teach him to protect himself without condoning violence to combat violence. I don’t even know how to deal with it myself when the girls start to take their anger out on me. The safest thing I’ve come up with is seclusion for the offender, but Isaac can’t very well take the girls to their rooms when they attack him.

It is so frustrating to me to not know what to do. I feel like I am floundering so much of the time – like no matter what I do, all I am managing is survival. Life should be so much more than simply surviving one day to the next. But when it takes every ounce of emotional and physical energy I have just to make it through the day, I just don’t see how there can be room for more than that. For now, survival is the best I’ve got.

There are some things in life about which you must choose either to laugh or cry. Either option is fitting, and the choice must depend on how the release will make you feel. There is merit to both responses, and certainly we have been given the ability to laugh and cry for very important reasons.

And so, when my girls we diagnosed with strep throat a week ago, and I added three more bottles of medicine to our (rather large) home pharmacy of daily medications, the decision confronted me: do I cry as I look at this huge pile of medications or do I laugh it off?

I chose to laugh. So I had to share. I honestly can’t believe my family of 5, aged 5, 6, 8, 30, and 34, seriously need THIS MUCH medicine. Two are mine, and two are Kimball’s. The rest belongs to the kids. It is what it is.

I spent several hours over that last few days cleaning my room. I am not a messy person, so you might be surprised to hear that I could really spend HOURS cleaning my own room, but it is true. Hours and hours of my life gone, because for some unknown reason I saved every single piece of paper that came across my field of view. I’m not one to hang on to stuff, but papers seem to pile up in all the places I can manage to hide them. I’d had enough of the piles; thus the hours of cleaning.

Among the piles of scribbles and school handbooks, I found a few gems:

• Lots and lots of blank paper (at least on one side) for the kids to draw on. We are ALWAYS running low on scrap paper, so this was a wonderful find.
• A whole host of “lost” pens. How they managed to get sucked into my piles and piles of papers is a mystery which may never be solved.
• A lot of papers from my children, professing their love to me. Especially coming from Erica, these papers mean a lot. Many of those drawings were done by her in a time of her life when she seemed to detest me the most; no hugs or praise were welcome, no desire to be cuddled or helped in any way, no expression of love was acceptable to her, and the only interactions she and I had on a regular basis were negative and draining to us both. So to find papers from her saying she loved me, and pictures she drew of me and herself together, smiling, with hearts, brought my slowly healing heart so much joy.
• A bookmark, which actually is the reason for this post. On the bookmark is a short poem that really spoke to me. I don’t recall ever reading it before (I have no idea where I got this bookmark from as it is not even remotely familiar to me) but it was so meaningful that I had to share. I hope you will take from it some hope and courage. Sometimes life seems so hard that I feel like giving up. A few very dark times in my life, I have come too near giving up to be able to comfortably share in such an impersonal setting as a blog post. But there is always an end to every seemingly endless trial. I have learned through some very difficult times that the moments when things seemed the most dark and dreary were when I really learned and grew emotionally and spiritually. So read on, and find hope when you feel there is none to be found.

Don’t Quit