fox

We're halfway through the dark.

When we last met, it was November 3 and my mother's um-friend had just passed away and I was in wracks of agony about choices she had made at the beginning of that relationship and hoping that now that the relationship was, perforce, over, I wouldn't have to Deal quite so much with those choices anymore.

The next day, of course, was Election Day, and as you know, Bob, the good guys did pretty well all the way up and down the street. It was a good Tuesday night and a good Wednesday morning.

Which is why it was a surprise when I got to work Wednesday morning and I was still wound up way too tight and feeling much too upset to function and subject to four-or-five-minute crying jags for no obvious reason at random intervals. I did not like it. I have come to expect to feel like this—although not to this degree—for the month of October, but here it was October 36 and I wasn't feeling any better, and that hasn't happened in 12 years. So I said to my boss, in my daily check-in email, I think I'm also going to have to write up some ways I'm realizing my mental health has been not okay for a while now and regrettably may have been affecting my work. Always fun. (To his credit, he immediately said "Well, we've got to find some time for you to come talk to me, okay, because I see an employee say 'mental health,' I sit right up and pay attention.")

( So I made a list. )

Update: HA HA HA when I began it on November 20, this was going to be a post about how I emailed my doctor on like November, I don't know, 5 or 6, and she immediately (like, by that weekend) agreed to double my dose of Lexapro, and within a couple of days I was breathing more easily, and I stopped crying so much of the time, and hopefully if that happens again one of us will realize it a lot sooner so I don't spend so long suffering? And then for some reason I was looking through the old entries in here and found where someone in one of my Discords said "panic attack" on July 23 and apparently none of us (self, Himself, my brother [who doesn't live locally but given that the major precipitating event was evidently moving my mom to memory care, his input is not irrelevant]) listened? So, erm, that wasn't our best collective decision, in retrospect.

And then it turns out it's a good thing I've bumped up my Lexapro dosing, because holy shit the first week of December has been what in the being-my-mom's-children racket could safely be called a humdinger in ways I simply cannot talk about right now. I can feel the tightness trying to tighten up my chest, in fact, and not being able to do it. It's something. But whoo boy.

Longtime readers may remember that my father died 13 years ago (in fact I lit his yahrzeit candle last night ❤️) and that my mother took up with a widowed family friend not long afterward and told us, my brother and me, about it in a manner so astoundingly insensitive that our relationship never really recovered. (The description at that link says he, the um-friend, invited her on the European river cruise, but in fact I learned some time later that inviting her hadn't been his intention; he'd mentioned it in a way of saying it would have been nice to have been able to plan something like that with company and she went ahead and invited herself to join him, because it turns out this woman may never have seen a boundary worth respecting in her entire life.) I'm not going to go hunting for the exact email at this time, but I have a pretty clear memory that it included the assurance "I would never do anything to hurt you" and that in the conversation the three of us had in which the two of us said we were unhappy about the suddenness of the seriousness of their relationship, the message we got from her was you're going to need to deal with those feelings. It wasn't exactly "I would never hurt you" / "This hurts us" / "I'm going to do it anyway" but it wasn't a million miles off.

( Aftermarket cut to hide 950-odd words of illustration )

Anyway. The old man passed away peacefully yesterday afternoon. He was a nice guy. He saved my mother's life at least twice. He was a product of a time and a place that may have been responsible for his having some attitudes that I didn't always care for, but you know, what can you do. Mainly, he was important to my mother, which was fine, but I was never able to forget that he'd been more important to her than our feelings were, which was not. I'm very sorry for his children and grandchildren. I myself will not miss him. I'm not going to pretend there was never any such person or anything, but a small selfish still-hurt place inside me hopes that now that he's gone, my mother will think about him less and less.

I've noted before that my most common type of dream is mishaps while traveling: I can't get to the platform for the train I need because the station has turned into an Escher drawing, or the car is hovering just a bit off the road so the wheels don't have any purchase and I can't go anywhere, or the bus changes its destination after everyone except me decides they like the other route better, or whatever.

This morning I had the strangest feeling that I couldn't remember how I'd got to work. Did Himself drive me to the metro? He used to do that sometimes if the timing was going to be weird or the weather was bad or I had something inconvenient to carry or I'd turned my ankle or something like that - but none of those things were the case today. Still, I didn't have any memory of taking the electric scooter up to the metro station or of locking it up . . .

. . . and that's when my brain said no, of course you don't have any memory of locking up the scooter, because you're still asleep in bed, ya goofball.

Almost every joint in my body cracks. I don't normally feel aches or tension in my hips or elbows (or lower back, thank god) before they make The Noise, but I do everywhere else - ankles, especially the right; knees, especially the right; shoulders, usually the right (but lately the left is bothering me more); spine, which I know is not a joint; neck; both wrists; all fingers.

Each finger (but not the thumbs) cracks at two knuckles, and there's something so very strangely satisfying about getting all eight in a row without having to Do Anything Special to my left little finger (first knuckle) or either index finger (second knuckle).

Last spring I'm pretty sure I strained or even sprained my jaw singing Mozart. That was a bummer. It did an unexpected pop two or three days in a row and then it hurt for weeks - I had to be careful how I opened my mouth when I yawned, which is surprisingly difficult. And just for the past couple of days my left shoulder, as I said, has been bothering me. I thought it might be referred pain from switching to a new bite guard on my bottom teeth, one that I haven't worn a hole in, but it doesn't seem to be that; my next theory is Hormones. (Perimenopause can suck a flagpole.)

1. Nobody, boss included, wants this, but it's not impossible I will be laid off in a month's time.

2. My mother's mental acuity is slipping; my brother thinks he may think it's worse than I think it is because I see her every week and he, although he talks to her every day, only sees her in person every few months. Likewise the director of her assisted living facility has just returned from a short vacation and called my brother yesterday to say if they were seeing her for the first time now, they'd think memory care rather than assisted living was probably the best place for her. Put another way, the call scheduled for the three of us tomorrow afternoon is definitely going to be about how it's time to plan to move her over to memory care when a place in that wing opens up. She's not going to like that, of course, but I was surprised by how strongly I didn't like it—the wave of NO that I felt in my whole body, a physical wash of Kubler Ross denial. It was something. Rationally I know it's happening and I know keeping her safe and getting her the best care is going to involve changes and adaptations and so on, but wow, the fact that the ego and superego know that didn't stop the id going MOMMY!

3. On the up side, one of my favorite co-workers came in to talk about a work thing yesterday, in the course of which conversation I mentioned #1☝️, and at the very suggestion that the big boss might let me go, favorite co-worker said "Jeeesus Christ, he's lost his mind." That doesn't affect whether or not I'll keep my job, but it is good for the ego.

4. My brother's mother-in-law is also not well, so my sister-in-law is going out this weekend to help her (because her sister, who lives near their mom, happens to be away this weekend), meaning my brother is going to have to bail on a family wedding; he and I were both already going to leave our families behind, as the bride is our cousin's daughter and our spouses nor kids don't really know almost anyone up there, so now it looks like I'll be the sole representative of my mom's node of the family tree. (The bride's-grandmother's-sister node is often not well represented, I'm sure.) My nephew is almost 15 and would be perfectly safe in the house by himself for a couple of days, but he wouldn't be comfortable with it, and of course it's right for his father not to know that and ditch him anyway. I said "You could bring him with you?"—but a last-minute plane ticket and an extra guest the caterer hadn't known about, nah; I said "You could ship him to my house?" (because the prince would love, love having an unexpected visit from his cousin, oh my gosh)—but even as I said it I went on to say that wouldn't really be fair to spring on Himself, outside of a true emergency—I could totally say "Listen, Nephew is coming to stay with us next weekend," and Himself wouldn't say "Why wasn't I consulted about this?", he'd say "Oh my God, what's happened?!" In short: My brother is staying home with his kid this weekend, which is the right decision but a bummer all around. (The much, much bigger bummer being that my sister-in-law's mother is doing as poorly as she is.)

5. The other bit of up side from yesterday is that when I got home from work and told Himself that my sister-in-law has to go be with her mom so my brother can't go to the wedding because nephew, etc., almost the first words out of his mouth were "He could come stay here?" ❤️❤️❤️ He went on to have a whole text-message conversation about that with my brother while I went to pick the prince up from day camp, and the end result was the same (my brother is staying home with his kid this weekend), but the fact that Himself went directly to "I can take him" without even the merest hint of a suggestion from me made me so happy. SO happy.

6. Only then I went to pick the prince up from day camp, and on the way home I started feeling a sort of light-headed vertigo feeling that does happen to me sometimes—most recently on the way home from grocery shopping on Saturday—but usually just for a split second, which I don't like, especially when I'm driving, but it really is normally less than the time it takes to blink twice and I don't think an awful lot more about it. Yeah but: Yesterday it came on partway home and didn't go away. I was able to see clearly and concentrate on the road, and my reaction time was fine with respect to signaling, steering, braking, all the things you need to do to drive safely, but it was absolutely terrifying and the minute we got home I told Himself about it and insisted that he do the driving this afternoon (and maybe all the driving until I know what the fuck is happening to my head?!). He suggested maybe my blood sugar was low and asked me to eat about a teaspoon of sugar straight, which in his experience is like a shot of adrenaline, so I did, and nothing happened. I ate a little dinner, though I didn't have much appetite, and that didn't help. I drank some water and that didn't change anything either. Took my blood pressure: 128/86. No fever. I emailed my doctor to tell her this whole tale and conclude with "?!!!?!??!?", and Himself said if I wasn't planning to take an Ativan at bedtime he really thought I should.

7. [gestures at the world in general and at our federal government in particular]

8. Someone in one of my Discords mentioned that in a recent protracted panic attack of theirs, one of their main symptoms had been vertigo, which reinforced Himself's Ativan suggestion. I told my usual Tuesday evening dS-watching Discord that I was going to bail and go to bed early, and they offered to punt this week's episode to next week, and I said no need to do that because of me (the responsibility of everyone else's plans changing because my stress levels are making me crazy was also kind of stressful), and they said hey look, everyone who isn't Fox is fine with shifting to next week, decision made, off you go, feel better—and that made me cry a little, people being nice to me, which just goes to show that taking Ativan and going to bed early was the right decision.

9. Reader, I took the Ativan. I made up a little song to the tune of "Sodomy" from Hair, and then I slept soundly for the whole night. And this morning I feel—well, none of the stressy things have changed, but I feel like I slept well and I know I'm going to be making dinner this evening instead of driving on the freeway with my son in the middle of a dizzy spell, so that's a little better.

10. Here's my song:
    
    Ativan,
    Lexapro,
    Gabapentin,
    Buproprion,
    Doctor - what pills am I even on?
    Medication
    Can be fun!
    Join the Holy Order Pharma Sutra,
    Everyone!
    
    You're welcome.

Last night I dreamed I went back to my home town—it was weirdly shrouded in mist, but it came into view just fine at the top of the hill around the corner from my parents' house, the one that always wigged people out the first time they turned right and there it was but never really bothered me to drive down because I grew up going that way almost every day. Anyway then I started passing by buildings that should have been familiar, but they weren't there; the whole place was unrecognizable; I barely knew it at all.

And then I woke up and thought: Well, that was overt.

When my mother moved into assisted living last summer, we got her a landline phone with big buttons and six presets where you can put pictures to make it super easy to tell who it is you're calling. Alas, the pictures are hard for her to make out because the contrast isn't great at that size, so I turned them over and just printed everyone's initials, black on white, easiest thing. Her brother, her sister, her um-friend, and her cousin all have different initials, no problem. My brother and I have the same first initial so all our lives we've been designated on family calendars and things by our first and middle initials together.

She can't remember our middle names.

I'm working (slowly!) on a fairly elaborate cross stitch cushion cover - and part of the reason it's so slow is that there's a fair amount of dithering, so each color has blocks and then random confetti nearby so they can blend together. Fine. But for an added complication, the fabric is not aida cloth; it's a tightly woven cotton canvas, so when I worked out that I get 14st/in if I do three threads vertically and two horizontally, that meant I have to count threads the whole time my own self. There aren't more prominent holes where the stitches go, I mean.

So naturally at some point I miscounted something and about a dozen stitches were half a column off, which needed fixing or the stitches coming to meet them wouldn't fit. Annoying, but not devastating, because it was only about a dozen stitches. Still kind of a drag to find as close to the midpoint as possible in the offending thread, snip, pick out, redo what I could, secure the new ends (where there didn't used to be ends at all), and finally get new thread and redo the last of the stitches in the correct column.

I showed it to Himself and we had this conversation:

me: See? Isn't that better? [of course I don't expect he has the first idea what he's looking at]
him: Sure, honey.

And what's super funny about that is that I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times in our relationship that he has called me by anything but my name. (This is the second time. 😆 His family of origin are not a pet-naming people.)

XI

Yonder see the morning blink:
   The sun is up, and up must I,
To wash and dress and eat and drink
And look at things and talk and think
   And work, and God knows why.

Oh often have I washed and dressed
   And what's to show for all my pain?
Let me lie abed and rest:
Ten thousand times I've done my best
   And all's to do again.

—A.E. Housman

Prolog

Good-Fortune is a giddy maid,
Fickle and restless as a fawn;
She smoothes your hair; and then the jade
Kisses you quickly, and is gone.

But Madam Sorrow scorns all this,
She shows no eagerness for flitting;
But, with a long and fervent kiss,
Sits by your bed—and brings her knitting.

—Heinrich Heine (translated by Louis Untermeyer)

Das Glück ist eine leichte Dirne,
Und weilt nicht gern am selben Ort;
Sie streicht das Haar dir von der Stirne
Und küßt dich rasch und flattert fort.

Frau Unglück hat im Gegentheile
Dich liebefest an’s Herz gedrückt;
Sie sagt, sie habe keine Eile,
Setzt sich zu dir an’s Bett und strickt.

First week at the new job is in the books. They're all very pleasant and happy to have me there, which feels a little bit strange; nobody is giving vibes like they wanted the gig themselves or recommended someone else for it or anything, and nobody whose writing I've looked at seems to wonder who the hell I am to tell them I think they should say something differently. There's almost no obstruction to anything I ask - can I have this software, is it okay if I order those reference books, hey could I bring in a dorm fridge to put under my desk? I'm so sorry but my key fob doesn't work on the doors it's supposed to. At the old job the answer to all the questions would have been no (or at least not without a lot of rigmarole) and more than one person would have heavily implied that if my key wasn't working (when I'd just said it wasn't working) it was because of something I did. Not because the old job was a bad place to work! But not being with the government, man. It's a whole other experience. These guys want me to (a) be happy and (b) have what I need, and there isn't anything stopping them from trying to make those things happen. What a trip.

And, you know, speaking of not being with the government. UGH. I feel like someone who got a last-minute phone call that caused them to miss the RMS Titanic.

About a month ago, a few of us went for coffee between Christmas concerts and in the course of the conversation about networking and jobs and whatnot one of my fellow singers mentioned that a friend of hers works at an organization related to the one where I've been working for 10 years and is trying to hire someone there to do what I do and long story short, today I gave notice and in two weeks I start at that related org for approximately twice my current salary, better medical insurance premiums, and an office with a window? It's a lot to process and it's all happened really fast and I'm very sad to be leaving ellen_fremedon and the rest of my team, but because the orgs are related I think there's a decent chance I'll still see a lot of them and everyone has been super encouraging and happy for me. I'm sort of hoping in the next couple weeks I go back to sleeping soundly and experiencing less digestive turbulence.