I Have a New, Regular Blogging Gig--On Psychology Today Magazine's website!!

Hey there, Readers!

How ARE you?  Mad at me? I know, I've been a crappy blogger-friend.

But hey, you know. Pain. Depression. Pining for Benjy. Listening to Saskia sing, angel that she is.

WRITING. JOY. YEAH!!!

OK, here's the 411.

Ben is amazing. So proud, we are. So handsome, he is. And brave. And healthy!

We'll have him the entire last week of August, and Readers? I CANNOT WAIT.

Saskia is soon to start her arts high school, as a junior. We are all hugely excited. Looking forward to a year filled with performances of all kinds!

Lars is...Lars! Gotta love him. No, not you! ME. And I sure do.

And here's the biggest news of all:

I'VE BEEN OFFERED A REGULAR BLOG ON THE WEBSITE OF PSYCHOLOGY TODAY. That's the magazine you read in waiting rooms. And hopefully lots of other places, as it's a very good one. What an honor!

What to Expect When You Get the Unexpected.

I am so excited about this--you can't imagine. The general subject matter will be similar to that of the Nickel...but less informal, fewer (read: 0) Hellacious Hound posts, and a bit less humor at Lars's expense.
(I know, bummer...you won't be reading entire posts about holey clothes.  Although I could always satisfy your holey clothes cravings back here at the Nickel. ;)

You can also expect film and book reviews on occasion, over at the new blog, and more multimedia engagement in general.

Anyway, please, please join me at my new blogging home! I'm committing to blogging there every MWF, so get ready! (And keep your fingers crossed for me--that's a lot of writing!)

Can't wait to catch up with you here! xox

My Healing Projects

Happy spring, Readers! And not a moment too soon. :)

I thought I would give you a family update and then hint at some plans I am gestating -- either brilliant or nutso plans, TBD -- to guide me toward greater wellness.

As advertised, here is the update: Life is better. I am not continually struggling against the death-grip of anxiety, trauma, exhaustion, illness, and fear. I say "not continually" because life throws crap at you now and then. Of course. But I (along with Ben, and Lars, and Saskia) have discovered some of those quiet interludes in which healing can begin.

We have figured out what we need to recover, and where we can get it.

For Ben, it is a school in the country. Horses. Sheep. Chickens. Sports of every stripe. Community. Friends. Space from the people who love him most, fought like hell for him, and found (somehow) the strength and wisdom to understand that sometimes love and fight are simply not enough.

You would not believe him if you saw him right now -- even if you only know him from this blog. I miss him like crazy, and I am so proud of him I cry when I tell people about him, or talk to his teacher or house parents. I cry when I see him laugh -- YES! He does that now! -- and when he opens his arms wide to me and says, "Mom, can I hug you? I love you so much."

(I am crying right this very minute, in spite of the fact that at my feet lies the pinnacle of fluffy cuteness, with an exposed belly and an inviting look on his face. The Fluff Therapist in IN.)

For Saskia it is a private arts school where she can devote herself to her singing as well as academics, where there are others as devoted to their arts as she is to hers. And (I hope) sufficient time spent on the butterscotch couch with her old lady, watching Bad TV.

For Lars, it is the becalming of his own, previously unacknowledged anxiety, and a desperately needed respite from the trauma and illness that was grinding the four of us into dust.

For me? Oh, where to begin... Well, I am learning to take care of myself. To pace myself every single day so that my chronic pain and fatigue do not lurch into overdrive. I am learning that it's OK to rest, to NOT be a doer every moment of the day. To not be the first person in the room with a book contract or a kick-ass blog, or a wide fan base. (Fan base???)

I am trying to kick the Mombot out of this house. Out of me. And believe it or not, I am seeing some success.

All that learning and Mombot ass-kicking I'm doing suggests something very, very important: that the chaos, the maelstrom, the shit-storm that had occupied my brain 24/7 for the past 12 years, has finally moved on. Not 100% -- I am WAY too anxious and restless for that. But one of the perks of not trying to figure out, EVERY WAKING MOMENT, how you will keep people alive and not let important things slip through the cracks and remember the names and dosages of a thousand-and-one psych meds, and find a way to do your paid work right so you won't lose the job you desperately want to leave but can't -- one of the perks of that is that you can focus on other stuff, like getting healthy.

So that's what I'm doing -- just like my darling boy does in his school and his home away from home.

And that leads me to my healing projects. I'm only offering a hint right now.

One of them looks like this:

And the other? Kind of like this:

Stay tuned for more on the healing projects...as they grow clearer to me I will share the details of them with you.

And now, Readers, I am so exhausted from writing this post I will have to take a little siesta on the butterscotch couch.

Good night. ;)

All Kinds of Wonderful

I'll bet the title of this post surprised you. You are not used to wonderful here at The Striped Nickel, are you?

Well, if you've been dropping by for a while, perhaps you are, but perhaps you've forgotten. Or think I have forgotten.

I haven't.

Here is some of the wonderful going on around here as we speak:

A. Benjy, Benjy, and more Benjy. He is doing so well, and his school is so amazing, I have to pinch myself a few times a day to make sure it's not all a dream. Readers, he is LEARNING, and not exclusively on his own. He has FRIENDS. He is MUCKING OUT HORSE STALLS AND FEEDING SHEEP.

Sorry, I didn't mean to yell at you. Not at all. I just cannot believe it and shouting allows me to hear it better. It's true, all true.

I love that boy so damn much it hurts. Seeing him hurts in a joyful way, and not seeing him hurts in a missing-you sort of way -- but not-seeing allows healing all around, so it's good. So. Very. Good.

B. Saskia is wonderful. WONDERFUL. Did I mention wonderful? Not sure what Lars and I did to deserve our girl besides contribute some genes of a very mixed nature -- when you have a spare eight hours or so I'll tell you all about our...uh, colorful families -- and teach her the things we strongly believe to be true. Which means she has a deep sense of the urgency of socio-economic justice for all. And she loves books and animals and people and ~OPERA~ and actually has the voice to SING it.

Also, she finds the dog-speak I use when I talk to Noo Noo hilarious. We laugh uproariously at the dinner table when I ask the Hound if he is ready for his Pill-Pocket with a yiddle Pred-nisone inside.

I appreciate that, because really? I think it's probably just weird.

Then again, we celebrate the weird in this household. Pied-beauties, eccentricities, things and people on the far-reaches of "normal."

Oh, and Saskia has brought music back into my life after a long, dry spell -- my own Sahara of the Bozarts, to borrow a witticism from some 20th-century southern writer but I don't remember which one -- and for that I am so grateful. Music was everything to me -- music and books, that is -- until life became so hard I couldn't fit them in anymore. There just was no room.

But every day now, there is more space in me. Every day I get to hear bits and pieces of arias and art songs floating through this house.  Sometimes I get to have them whole. And boy, does that make me happy.

Have you had enough, Readers? I hope not, because there is even more wonderful afoot here. There's Lars, of course. Everyone needs someone to make fun of, and Lars is always willing to oblige.

Somehow he has always managed to love me, even when I could not love the life I was living, or myself. He loved me through those forty pounds Risperdal packed on me, and through the long, sick period last winter and spring, when they fell off. He takes me as I am, the Gestalt, the whole package, imperfect as that may be.

Lars is good people.

Today I had the privilege of thinking about, and talking about, some of the issues that matter most to me, with some very thoughtful people. That there are real things binding all of us humans together, and that much work is yet to be done so that every person is treated with equal dignity and offered opportunities to be happy and to thrive.

It sounds so simple, but somehow it's not.

BUT: I am lucky to live in a place and at a time in which these conversations are possible. How utterly cool. How hopeful. How wonderful.

And finally, there is this:

A. E. Housman (1859–1936).  A Shropshire Lad.  1896.

LIV. With rue my heart is laden

WITH rue my heart is laden   For golden friends I had, For many a rose-lipt maiden   And many a lightfoot lad.   By brooks too broad for leaping         5   The lightfoot boys are laid; The rose-lipt girls are sleeping   In fields where roses fade.

A tiny poem, a profound thought. My Dad gave it to me as a gift when I was maybe ten or twelve. He did not write it, of course, but he wrapped it in tones of love and offered it to me so we could cry together. To this day, I hear those eight short lines in his voice. I thought of it last night because Saskia was talking about the generation of English poets writing around the time of the Great War. This was written earlier, but it trembles with that same unbearable sense of loss you find in Thomas Hardy and Wilfred Owen.

Readers, I have been thinking about "With Rue My Heart is Laden" since last night. It is so sad, yet so utterly beautiful.  Nearly perfect, I think. I hope you like it, whether for the first time or the hundredth. It's the final bit of wonderful I have to share with you until next time.

I hope next time comes soon!

Want to share your own wonderful in the comments? That would make my day!

Oh, Lars

I thought it was high time someone wrote a post making fun of Lars. It's been a while. And if I don't do it, who will?

I always get the dirty jobs around here. ;)

So this one is about Lars and technology. Now let me start by saying that Lars does a HIGHLY technical job. English major notwithstanding. He is a principal software quality assurance engineer at a very cool high tech company doing very cool and complex stuff, and by god the junk he brings home to read is LESS READABLE THAN THE DEADEST OF DEAD LANGUAGES. And the deadliest, too.

He can trouble shoot almost any computer issue we have at home, even the ones that have Saskia in tears at one a.m. the night before her assignment is due. He can converse with programmers in their language. He knows what certain dorky acronyms mean. Like RTFM (delicacy prevents me from translating that into English). He's DOWN with that tech stuff.

Unless it has anything to with television remotes, microwaves, oven technology, or DVD players.

For example, when he wants to turn on the TV, he does not know which remote to use to do it. Granted, we have three of them, so this is not quite a simple operation, but still, they are each visually distinct. For example, the DVD remote, which we almost NEVER USE, is dove gray. The TV remote, with which one turns on the TV (I know, radical idea) and also accesses Netflix on the TV (OK, a bit more complicated) is all black. And the cable remote, with which one changes channels and accesses on-demand features, is black with multi-colored buttons.

But you all don't need the explanation, right?

I have painstakingly explained these processes to Lars a hundred times. Just like I have presented the use of the digital controls on our stove, again and again. ("No, the way you set the timer is by pressing the "TIMER" button. Crazy, isn't it?") And how I haverepeatedly described the way you set the clock on the microwave, which occasionally has to be done again when we lose power. ("See that "CLOCK" button? Yeah. Now push it.")

Lest you think Lars is dumb, let me assure you he is quite extremely intelligent. One of the smartest guys I know. And also one of the most helpless. But only in very focused ways. So if a mullioned pane of glass (circa 1919) in the vestibule of our house shatters, as happened last year, and I run to call a glazier, Lars will stop me and say, "I can fix that!" No matter that he has never done anything of the sort in his entire life. And he does it, and does it well, saving us probably a hundred dollars.

There are lots of other things he does that I can't -- or won't. Which is probably more to the point.

As long as Lars has me to turn on the TV for him, why should he bother?

So the other night when he said, "Now HOW exactly do I do on-demand again?" I killed him with kindness.

"I KNOW," I said. "It's really hard. It's kind of like programming. I mean, I know you are really really good at QA, but you're not a programmer. You would struggle with that. And this is kind of like programming. It's REALLY hard. But I have faith in you, Lars. I know you can do it. BECAUSE YOU CAN READ THAT DEADER THAN DEAD LANGUAGE CRAP YOU BRING TO BED EVERY NIGHT."

"That is what I read to put me to sleep," he said.

Ah.

I showed him the little on-demand button -- really, much too little, I don't know what Verizon was thinking when they designed that remote -- and he pushed it, and I guided him through the process of selecting a movie.

He did it all by himself, and it was a lot easier than programming. Actually, it was even easier than software QA. The question is: Will he be able to do it again tomorrow?

I'll let you know as soon as I know. Because I know you want to know. Who wouldn't?

What I Want Out of Life

I think I have figured out what I want out of life. The list has changed since I was in my twenties and thirties. Even my early-to-mid-forties.

I figured it out while walking the Hellacious Hound with Lars yesterday, post-school pickup, pre-work.

We were walking in the cool sunshine and holding hands. I had been crying the past hour about things beyond my control. (An unkind word from a scheduler at Mass General. The death from Tay Sachs disease of a very young child I knew only from his mom's blog.)

The fresh air and sunshine did me good; I had not left my house, except to go to the hospital and pick up Saskia from school, in a couple of weeks. So we were walking and my eyes were wet but not I was not really crying. And it came to me.

"I don't want a vacation," I told Lars. "Or a week at Canyon Ranch." (I know of someone, incredibly enough, who insisted on a week at Canyon Ranch after her child was diagnosed with ADHD. I fear this probably makes me a bad person, but I hate that woman.)

"I don't want fancy stuff, a big house" -- that used to be on my list, a house which could actually accommodate our bedroom furniture, and in which two people could comfortably work in the kitchen at the same time -- "or jewelry. I thought I wanted riding lessons but I don't."

Lars just held my hand and listened.

"You know what I want? Two months, just two, of normalcy. Of waking up and feeling safe and quiet, and without dread. Two months without frequent medical and therapy appointments, and without the stress of constant pleas for items that cost money and that will surely ease our son's anguish, but never do. Two months of spending more time with Saskia. I want to get our nails done together, even though mine are bitten to the quick. (It will have to be toenails, for me.)"

"I want to live like 'other people' -- those folks who may be mythical (I prefer to think not) and whose kids are happy and healthy and (I hate this word) 'normal.' 

"I want to just be me and not this machine who schedules appointments and amazes doctors with how much she knows about illness and disability. I want to have two months where I am not going through the phalanx of medicine bottles, like a long row of soldiers but always at ease (as with everything in our house, the meds are disorderly) twice a day, and figuring out what is what and when it is taken."

"TWO MONTHS OF RESPITE, Lars," I said, "and then I could go back to it." I was crying again.

Lars held my hand tight and we finished our walk. I was so glad he was there beside me, my silent strength.

Dinner at the Delaunay Diner

It was broiled salmon, roasted potatoes (left over from last night, truth be told), and honeyed carrots.

Lars liked it. The Hellacious Hound thought he would too, if given half a chance. He sat and gazed upwards at Lars, eyes the most eloquent brown, with just a bit of a white ring around them.

Melting eyes.

"Give him a little salmon," I urged.

Lars looked stern. "His kind is not served here."

"On the floor, then."

Lars raised his left eyebrow. "He has a bowl full of kibble. On the floor."

Hellacious tilted his head.

"Is your heart made of stone?"

"Granite."

I made a furtive hand gesture at the Hound. He noticed immediately and snaked between Lars's feet, popping up beside my plate. He gave me an intense stare. All of him quivered, even his fluff-ball tail.

"Get down," warned Lars.

I pushed him off. I knew if I fed him even a morsel of that salmon I'd get a lecture. A German lecture. Which is bound to be bad news. So I ate the salmon myself, under two reproachful canine eyes.

When Lars had scraped every last dried-on piece of salmon from the serving dish (I can't tell if this is a German or an idiosyncratic madness) he allowed me to place it before His Nibs.

His Nibs got right to work on what remained -- mostly butter. When he'd finished he leaped onto the couch and did his trademark wriggle into the pillows.

"Get your buttery snout out of that pillow!" thundered Lars. Up popped a doggish head. I whipped out my iPhone to take a picture but he always flees when I do that.

I have had "buttery snout" on the brain ever since dinner, so I thought I'd blog about it. Sorry there's no photographic evidence.

Upstairs, Downstairs

I’ve been feeling nostalgic for our old house in Boston. This was a three-story, two-family, beige-clapboard-and-white-gingerbread house, tucked away on a tiny private way off a fairly busy street. Even though the house was in the city of Boston it butted up against a high, wooded slope, and we saw lots of interesting critters there, all the time. (Except, when we saw that dead rat in our dungeon basement? That was not interesting.) Wonderful snails with beige and brown and burgundy whorled shells, raccoon eyes glittering in trees at night, skunks, hummingbirds, tons of bats. Those animals couldn’t care less that they were living within the city limits. Our lot was a hospitable one. I liked that.

 

 

(NOT the actual Delaunay Manse.)

Our tenants were my brother and sister-in-law, R-- and J--. (Longtime readers of this blog might remember that we could not agree on their blog-names. Rick?? Jackie?? REALLY? they howled. So they have become, in the grandest 18^th-century literary tradition, R—and J--.) R—and J—lived on the first floor, and Lars, baby Saskia, later Baby Benjy, and I lived on floors two and three.

That was an interesting house. I blogged here about the triangular cut-out at the top of the stairs, and Benjy’s first real pronouncement to the world, uttered while peering through it. Other interesting features were the stairs themselves, which I (okay, J--, because I am basically domestic-project-impaired) painted in awesome alternating colors – peach, sage green, and yellow, as I recall.  It was like walking up the stairs at Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory or something; I kept expecting they’d sing out notes with each footfall.

 (Musical stairs are an actual phenomenon at Children’s Hospital in Boston. One or the other of my kids and I race down those melodious stairs at least once a month, and we love them.)

Anyway, by far the most interesting things about that house were the male inhabitants of it. Namely, Lars and R--.  Now, if you include my Dad, you have the trifecta of my favorite men in the wide world. These are good peoples. But R—and Lars – and maybe Dad, too – are, uh, a little eccentric.

R—will dispute this to the death, but Lars and Dad will grinningly admit it.

All three of them are nuts. But because R—thinks he's NOT, Lars’s nuttiness seems amplified to him. He just shakes his head at Lars’s antics and says, “Geez, Anna.”

For example. As a German, Lars has a Green Gene tucked away in his DNA. They all do. (No offense, German Friends. This is a GOOD THING.) He is OBSESSED with things like recycling, composting, cleaning litter up off the street (he always comes home from dog-walks around the neighborhood clutching dripping beer cans and chip packets and stuff like that. He picks up after the neighbors.)

So in the interest of conserving water at the old house, Lars decided he might rig up a system, involving a garden hose, a skylight, and gravity, that would drain the water from our bathtub into the backyard garden, such as it was.

 “The water is soapy,” I argued.

“This is no problem,” he answered. “The plants are hardy.”

“Okay, but it’s weird,” I told him. “What will the neighbors think?”

He looked at me pityingly and went about his business.

Where this gets really funny is the part when I tell R—and J—about it. We’re hanging out at their place, drinking coffee and shooting the breeze, and I mention that Lars has had another crazy, crazy idea.

“What is it?” they ask with a smirk. They know it’s going to be a howler.

I roll my eyes. “He’s going to drain our bathwater into the garden. To water the flowers.”

J-- shrieks with laughter.  R—looks stricken. STRICKEN.  “But,” he says when he recovers, “I WALK out there. Barefoot, sometimes.”

“Yeah?” I say.

“Well,” he says delicately, “you guys have a Jacuzzi tub. Would I be wrong in assuming you, ah, get in there together sometimes?”

I see where this is headed. “We have on occasion,” I say in as blasé a manner as possible. “We just wash, though. And talk. About life.”

R— looks pained. He’s not buying it. “That,” he says sternly, “Is GROSS. Not the joint bath but the issue from that bath IN OUR BACKYARD. I can never go out there again. J--?? Don’t let the dog out there. We might have to move.”

J— says, “C’mon, Muvvy.” (That’s her nickname for R--. She nicknames everything, and the nicknames change regularly. She’s cute.) “It’s not a big deal.”

Muvvy looks like he’s about to throw up. Did I mention he’s crazy?

“Okay, look,” I say. “There’s a VERY good chance that this will never happen. You know Lars. He rarely gets around to anything.”

This seems to work. R— takes a cautious sip of his coffee. He does not throw up.

Dear Readers, I will save for another time the story about the basement flood and Lars lying on his stomach in the muddy driveway sucking water out of a hose. (Yes, hoses seem to be a recurring theme at the old manse, don’t they?)

My husband really is one of a kind.

Sartorial Deficiencies (Or, Living With a Hobo)

Last night, Lars and I went before our town's Transportation Management Committee and pleaded for a guardrail to be erected  along our property line. We live on the corner of two rather busy streets, and our house is set into a sort of bowl, below street level. Over the past six years, three cars have hurled themselves down our declivity at night, and two of them have smashed into our house.

Yikes.

So, I prepared a presentation, including narratives from police reports and a cool map of the property complete with colored lines representing the trajectories of the three cars (courtesy of Lars). I put on a semi-respectable outfit (read: black jeans, shell, jacket, none of which were rumpled) and a little makeup. I made sure my fingernails were clean.

I may not achieve the perfection of Saskia (not even close) but I am not a TOTAL slob. Only a little slobby.

Well, we're sitting there listening to an ENDLESS presentation by some crunchy bike folks who want biking lanes on the roads, and listening to the HIGHLY ANNOYING guy to Lars's right go on ad nauseum about how his wife will NOT TOLERATE white lines on "her" street (I know, you couldn't make this stuff up) and then it's our turn.

Lars had asked to play a role in this affair so I allowed him to hand out his little maps. and that's when I saw the hole in the arm of his green and blue striped rugby shirt. Right near the elbow. A large, round hole.

My heart sank. I looked a little closer and noticed that the whole shirt looked kind of dingy. Like it maybe hadn't been washed since four of five wearings ago. And then I tried to remember him leaving the house this week in another shirt and I couldn't. HE HAD BEEN WEARING THIS DINGY, HOLEY SHIRT TO WORK FOR AT LEAST A WEEK.

I thought I was going to die.

"You have a HOLE in your shirt!" I hissed.

"Yeah?" he said, grinning.

"You look like a hobo!"

"Hee hee," he replied.

As if that embarrassment wasn't enough, I noticed he had two sets of reading glasses in use (or disuse). One perched on the top of his head, the other hanging from the neck of his shirt.

"Do you REALLY need two pairs of glasses?" I snapped.

He looked at me with raised eyebrows.

"These are two different strengths," he said, sounding hurt.

I am married to the world's dorkiest hobo. I miss the days when he only wore black turtlenecks and was this blond, European hottie in black turtleneck and blue jeans. It was a lot of black but you can't see dirt on it, at any rate.

Fortunately the Traffic Committee did not hold Lars's sartorial deficiencies against us. We got the guardrail we asked for.

But here's the scariest thing of all. This morning when I noticed Lars was wearing the green and blue rugby shirt again, and that his pants looked a bit ripe as well, I sternly sent him upstairs to change.

And Benjy, who was sitting at the table eating his waffles, said, "I'm on your side, Dad! Who CARES about that stuff, anyway?

Oh joy, now there are two of them.

Lars and the "Gardening" Clothes

So, here we are at Grandma and Grandpa's over vacation week (a real Delaunay holiday!), and I'm planning out my schedule for the week we return. You would think that, now I'm not working, there's plenty of time for leisure activities. TV. Books. Bon Bons.

You'd be dead wrong.

Every day I make a to-do list of, say, twelve items. Every day I cross off five or six, and copy the remaining items onto the top of the next day's list. I am like this little guy:

So I'm making my to-do list for next Monday, and the number one item is: Go Through Clothes.

We are buried in a mountain of clothes. Dirty laundry that just might date back to August. Socks and underwear two sizes too small, bursting out of their drawers. (Neither of my kids can close their dresser drawers.) Large piles of clothes in the corners of our "master" bedroom (the quotes are meant to signify the minuscule size of said bedroom, "master" being something of a joke in this case. Perhaps we should call it our "minion" bedroom).

In the minion bedroom, most of the visible piles belong to Lars. Not that I'm not a slob -- I am. Totally. It's just that my piles are out of sight in a laundry hamper I insisted on buying two summers ago. I filled it up at the time and haven't opened it since. Now I'm afraid to. The rest of my stray clothes go straight into the many laundry baskets that decorate our basement.

The trickiest part of this clothes project is going to be getting rid of Lars's old and holey clothes. (That would be, uh, most of them?) I try this every year or two, and each time I fail. Because unless I burn them, Lars will find them. He will pull them out of the trash, covered with egg shells and coffee grounds, and the next thing you know they're laundered and back in his drawer. When I object he tells me, "I'll use them for gardening. They're GARDENING CLOTHES."

At this point about three quarters of his garments are designated gardening clothes. Except they're not. They're just the clothes he wears to work every day. Do you think I find this humiliating? I DO. I asked him once whether his boss dresses nicely.

He said, "Are you kidding? He's gay."

"And?"

"He's a GREAT dresser."

"Doesn't he care that you wear the same shirt four days in a row and it's got holes in the elbows?"

"I wear a different t-shirt underneath most of the time, so it's okay. Anyway, he loves me."

I'll bet.

I guess I shouldn't complain. Lars is a pretty good guy, in spite of his peculiarities. He's compassionate and loving. He writes a mean Valentine's Day/birthday/anniversary card. The last one made me gasp first, and then scream. He's pretty cute, too.

I think I'll keep him.