How the virus is like the yeast (an OCD saga from long ago with reverberations today)

When N was around six months old, I developed mastitis and then a thrush infection. 

Now, if you've ever been a breastfeeding mother and develop thrush, it 1. is painful and 2. sets you off on a course of fighting an invisible enemy. 

Maybe things have changed and the instructions for how to mitigate thrust differ now, but back in 2004, I went down a rabbit hole of crazy trying to fight thrush. I tried to follow everything I read. Boiling N's pacifiers and teething toys (she will probably develop cancer from all the leached plastic from that). Using paper towels for months in case I was getting anything from multi-use towels (like in the powder room). Trying to wash everything that came into my baby's mouth. NUTS, I tell you. 

This was one of the things, besides my hormones, that led me deep down into the pit of OCD where I'd never visited for so long before and seen such icky sides to it. 

It felt like I was never, ever, ever going to win.

How, exactly, do you fight something you can't see?

This is what I've been thinking about since M's COVID diagnosis yesterday, especially as it concerns keeping the rest of us "safe." 

My OCD wants to go bonkers trying to keep everyone away from each other and all of us wear masks nonstop and clean, and clean, and clean. 

But then I think back to what my mental health was like fighting that invisible yeast. I was fucking insane and as miserable as I can remember being my whole entire life. I stopped eating and sleeping and started crying and waking up in full-blown panic attacks.

Sure, it was hormones, but it was also a lot of feeling completely and totally out of control and not being able to handle it.

I'm medicated now, but I also don't think it is wise to intentionally poke the OCD bear if you can help it. Especially when under stress. Stress brings out the worst in OCD. And I've been stressed (like everyone) for the past 18 months with additional stress for all of Dad's health issues last year. 

So we're taking some steps to try to keep the four vaccinated in the house "safe," but maybe not as safe as we could. 

First of all, M is 11. I'm not locking him in his room like a pariah. If it was me or D, we'd lock ourselves away and try to keep the kids safe. But the most vulnerable person in our house is sick so what is the point? 

G is sleeping on a mattress in the living room (which in some ways is kind of stupid because he slept in the same bedroom with M the four nights between M's negative COVID test on Friday and his positive COVID test on Tuesday). 

We're keeping the ceiling fans on where M is to move the air around for when we are near him. 

I changed the filter in the HVAC system, and we're keeping the house fans running at all times (although this may be the worse thing to do because of circulating the virus). 

I brought a box fan upstairs to circulate the air in the kitchen and office since there is no ceiling fan. 

I disinfected the remote control because M was using it yesterday.

But I'm not wearing a mask inside my house, and I'm not making my sick kid do it either. 

We did a shit ton of things to keep "safe," and it didn't keep us totally safe. I don't for one second regret any of those things, but I think it is kind of absurd now to try to put the cat back in the bag, especially since we don't know when between Friday and Tuesday that M became contagious. At what moment did he officially become contagious? We will never know. 

I may be walking around today, right this minute, positive with COVID. Just because I was negative yesterday does not mean I am negative today. 

For my own sanity, I cannot allow myself to engage with this invisible enemy the way I did in 2004.

I hope if the four of us who are vaccinated get sick, it is mild. But ramping up my anxiety and destroying my mental health in the effort to stay physically healthy may not be the best choice at this time. 

If your kid gets COVID (a sad retelling of If You Give a Mouse a Cookie)

Apologies to Laura Joffe Numeroff and Felicia Bond.

If your kid wakes up feeling hot and with congestion, you'll probably regret having sent this child to school the day before when he was also a little congested (but you live in the Ohio River Valley and 4/5 of your family take allergy shots so congestion is like a way of life, not a symptom).

If you're having these regrets, you'll remember that you have an at-home COVID test stashed away and you'll give it to this child (who is TWO FUCKING WEEKS from turning 12). 

If you give the child the COVID test and it is positive, you'll have to call the substitute center because you're subbing that day and WHAT THE FUCK DO I DO NOW?

If you call the substitute center and explain the situation, they will tell you to call health services.

If you call health services, they will tell you to go on in and substitute teach because you're fully vaccinated and without symptoms. (But try to stay six feet from students....have you ever been in a school before, lady?)

If you go on in and substitute teach, you will text your congested, at-home-COVID-tested positive child multiple times through the day to make sure he is not more sick. You will also text several friends throughout the day and notify the grandparents (one of whom is now also COVID-exposed). 

If you don't die from "My child has COVID"-induced anxiety while subbing, you will take your child to get tested through the district's drive-through testing site.

If you take your child to get tested at the drive-through site, they will be unable to record the test because the directions on their website are super freaking unclear (someone hire an ENGLISH MAJOR to make it less confusing so antsy parents don't screw it up). 

If your child gets tested and isn't able to be registered because the website instructions are unclear, you will call the company and text the people at the testing site and reregister again so that the freaking results can be recorded. 

If your child feels hot and is congested and cannot distance in any capacity especially at lunch, he will get a POSITIVE  COVID test TWO FUCKING WEEKS before he is eligible to get the vaccine (have I mentioned that?)

If your child is officially COVID-positive, you will look at your calendar and determine all the places and people you now need to call.

If you call the dentist to tell them you have an appointment next week and have COVID in your house, they will tell you they have to talk to the doctor because who the fuck knows what to do in all these various situations. 

If you call the volunteer organization to ask what their COVID protocol is since you are now officially COVID-exposed, they will not email back in the 1.2 seconds you want a response (because isn't everything SUPER CRITICAL AND TIMELY NOW?).

If you look ahead next week, you will realize you have to reschedule the orthodontist appointment for both your sons on Monday.

If you look ahead to Wednesday, you'll realize you probably need to call the hairdresser and find out what their COVID protocol is. (Likely another several weeks to get your mop cut.)

If you look to Friday, you'll see that your plan for a short day trip is now cancelled.

If you continue looking at the calendar, or you look at your COVID-positive child on the couch, or you look at your vaccinated but maybe will also get sick older children, you may WILL pour yourself another glass of an adult beverage.

If you feel overwhelmed, you will remember that there are all kinds of single parents out there who are dealing with this shit without a safety net of a spouse who works from home. 

If you think about single parents, you'll also think about parents who can't work from home who have to go into work or give up jobs because their kids may be quarantined for 10 days at a time, whether they are COVID-positive or not. 

If you think about all this stuff, you will feel the violent urge to throat punch anyone and everyone who has made light of this virus that has killed close to 700,000 people in this country in 18 months and continues taking people down either temporarily or permanently every single day. 

Stingy with the L word

When I was a kid, I threw around the word "love" like confetti. I loved Duran Duran. I loved dancing. I loved my best friend.

Even as I got older and into college, I threw it around with various guys I dated. I was in love with all of them. 

But at some point, I closed it in and determined that I didn't feel comfortable throwing that word around. And the older I get, the more cringey I feel when other people use it. 

At one point, one of my biggest pet peeves was when people would say or write "Love ya." 

Gawd. 

Just seeing that gives me the willies, so maybe it remains a pet peeve. 

On occasion people still write or say this to me, and my insides shrivel up a little.

Sure, there are different ways to experience love.

There is the general love of mankind, but I don't share in that feeling. I'm not sure when I heard the word misanthropy, but I identified with it then, and I identify with it now. I identify with it even more strongly after these last 18 months of watching people do things completely against their own best interests on the daily. 

I may aspire to a Christ-like love of others, but I don't think it is in the cards. People make it very hard to love them (including me; I am a hard person to love).

There are people I like, people I find fun to be around. There are people I admire. 

But to love someone, at least in my book, there has to be a history and a long one. There has to be honesty above all else. There has to be mutual respect. 

I cannot even begin to love someone I cannot trust. And I cannot trust someone I barely know. I'm not sure I can trust some people I've known for several years or even most of my life. 

So I am truly stingy when it comes to the people I say "I love you" to. 

And there are circles of it. Sort of like Dante's Inferno but with my own weird love designations. 

I tell my children every single day that I love them. Sometimes even more than once a day. 

I tell my husband and my parents a little less often. 

I tell my brother and his family and my mother-in-law less often than that. 

I tell my oldest friend usually once a year in a letter. 

And that is it. 

Because of this, I have an automatic revulsion-type feeling when I hear people throw the L word around. 

It is similar to the feeling I would get if I saw someone put mayonnaise on their waffle instead of butter and then smother it with syrup. 

Ewwww. 

Teaching children to advocate for themselves

I don't want to be handling my kids' stuff when they are adults, so when they enter middle school, I start handing over the responsibility keys to them.

This is a slow process and is somewhat dependent on the personality of the child. I can't do with G what I did with N. M has practically raised himself and is ahead of both his siblings despite being several years younger than each of them. 

Handing over the responsibility keys doesn't mean I throw the kids to the wolves. There are times when my kid doesn't know what's going on, and I need to insert myself into the process. 

But if it is a matter of questions about an assignment or something of that nature, I encourage my children to email their teachers themselves.

When they first learn to do this, I don't just say "Email your teacher" because they don't know what to say or how to say it or anything. They are still under the impression that adults know what they're doing. I try to gently disabuse them of this notion. 

Today, I had to help G advocate for himself.

He was assigned a group project yesterday (Friday) to be done and turned in on Tuesday. It is a long holiday weekend. 

Now I have issues with this assignment from the outset. An assignment over a holiday weekend is plain idiotic.

Also, group work at the start of the school year is usually dumb, especially if things aren't specifically laid out for kids like "Jane Doe is in charge of writing slide 1 and Bob Smith is in charge of slide 2."

(I know this from having assigned things without being very clear and specific about roles and responsibilities; I've learned from my own stupid mistakes.)

I asked G if he and his group had specific roles. He said no.

He said that two of his group mates weren't even at school on Friday and the other had to leave early to complete MAP testing. So G's group on Friday consisted of himself. 

G said he was just going to do the entire assignment, to which I responded, "No, you absolutely are not."

Maybe I'm just at the end of my rope with the pandemic "group assignment" in which some of us have done ALL the work to try to end it (vaccines, masks, social distancing, etc.) while others have done whatever the fuck they want, but I'm not about to agree to G doing an entire project so that the other four members of his group can get an A or a B or even a C on his back without contributing in the least. 

I tell students all.the.time when I sub that giving other people the answers is giving away their brain work for free. And it doesn't help the other person in any way, shape or form. 

So I watched as G wrote an email in which he explained the situation to his teacher and asked what she recommends he does. 

I'm hoping that he gets a reasonable answer back. If not, that's when I'll need to come into the picture and do some advocating.

I was wrong about sports

Many years ago I read the novel Jack Gance by Ward Just. It tells the story of a young man who goes to Washington, DC with idealism and a desire to make change, but the political machine slowly wears him down. He eventually gets sucked in by that machine that rolls over anyone who tries to push it off its course. If there is a lesson in that book, it is that you either conform or you get out. 

Or the machine crushes you. 

I've never been good at conforming. It was one of the reasons I stopped attending Catholic church in my twenties; I would attend out of a sense of obedience/shame and would leave with a massive anger-induced headache every time. My mental health won out, and I got out. 

I couldn't change the church, so I left. (Eventually, I found a church that allows me to be me where I can attend without feeling like my head is going to explode in rage.)

Last night, after a conversation with D, it occurred to me that I have been wrong about this whole sports thing ever since N was in middle school. 

I've written once on this blog about my failed sports "career" as a kid, but it wasn't even failed. It never began. What I realized even then was that sports was focused on results, on winning. People were a means to an end, not an end in themselves. That is what sports is; to try to change it would be like trying to change the spots on a leopard. 

But for me, people have always been more important than winning. 

In a real sense, sports rejected me, and so I rejected sports back. Some people react differently, I suppose. They continue to love a game that didn't love them. They continue to want to be part of the team.  There is an entire field of sports psychology, and I can't even pretend to know all the iterations of people's feelings about sports, winning, losing, self-esteem, etc. But I imagine that for every kid for whom sports gave a leg up, there are as many or more for whom sports let down and so they found something else that they feel a meaningful part of. 

I can find parallels between why I left the church and why I rejected sports: both were an exclusive club. If you didn't meet certain requirements or qualifications, you were out. Or you might be part of the team, but you weren't really part of the team. 

And, of course, there is a need for requirements. I want there to be requirements for lawyers and doctors and mechanics. I don't want some idiot willy-nilly sawing on my brain if I have an aneurysm. 

But religion and sports seem different to me with sports being far below religion in importance. The state of my conscience is way, way, WAY more important that tossing a ball around. 

[I mean, when I really think about it, there is a whole lot of angst/drama/anger/money spent over tossing a ball, and it seems like something Samuel Beckett should have written a play about. But he stuck with religion, which is also often absurd.]

Eventually I found a church that has an open-table. This doesn't exist in sports at least not that I have seen or found yet. The goal is, above all else, winning. 

And my conversation with D last night made me recognize that I have been wanting sports and asking sports and demanding that sports be something it is not, and I'm in the wrong for that. 

My view about sports seems the exact opposite of what sports enthusiasts think. I see it as exclusive and full of drama and half-truths and a whole lot of mind-fuckery. I cannot reconcile "We are a team; let's work together" with "We want to win and will isolate/ignore you in order to do that." Those same ideas are at work in sports, and they seem, to me at least, to be irreconcilable. 

Perhaps the problem is in the openness of joining. "Come join the team" is often followed by "But we're only going to play the same people over and over again." 

For some people who love the sport, I guess that is good enough. 

For me, it has never been good enough. (And gives me a deeper appreciation of women who have said "F you" to the Catholic church's refusal to allow women to become priests.) If you are good enough to be on the team, you are good enough to play. And if you're not good enough to play, coaches should have the guts to cut people, even if it makes the players sad (as it did me when I was a kid). They are going to be sad and/or angry anyway, but especially if they are being told "We love you; we're a team" but then actions are different. 

[As much as I felt rejected when I didn't make the A, B, or C basketball teams as a 10-year-old, it wasn't as bad as what I would have experienced if I'd made the team but was too shitty to actually put on the field/court.]

I truly try to understand sports dynamics, but after seven years of watching my kid play a sport (and I only watch when my kid is actually on the field), I have gotten nowhere. 

Another thing I suppose I've always known about sports but never specifically focused on is that it is a power imbalance that sometimes makes people do things they wouldn't otherwise do. I understand now how Larry Nasser was able to abuse girls. Parents may have spoken amongst themselves, may have wondered or questioned or felt uncomfortable or been downright angry. But to fight and fight and fight means their child loses something valuable to them. Their child would lose an opportunity, and their child would be stuck in a quagmire of uncomfortable. I have seen this dynamic play out in real life so I get it now. 

Parents may be angry as hell and speaking loudly and proudly amongst each other but quiet as mice when the coach is around. I both love and hate that I cannot just be silent, that I can't just let it go, but what I really hate is that other parents allow me to speak out without speaking up with me. I understand why they don't, but I hate it anyway. 

Even parents whose child plays a lot put up with stuff they despise so their child will continue playing a lot. 

I'm fairly sure someone who loves sports would read this and call it a major case of sour grapes, and they aren't wrong. But if I were to care about sports at all, I would care for the underdog most. I would care for the kids who aren't the all-stars but who just enjoy playing. (And yes, this is what my kid is like, and so I know I have that bias, but I would have that bias anyway based on who I've been my entire life.)

How much shrieking and gnashing of teeth would occur if coaches decided to bench their all-stars and only play the other kids? How quickly would those same parents who think everything is great when their kid plays a lot suddenly find themselves angry and frustrated? When we're in a privileged position, we can  quickly call someone else's frustrations sour grapes. "They're just angry because their kid isn't playing much," and they are right. If they put those shoes on their own feet, they would feel the same. 

They just don't have to wear those shoes. 

As a rule, politics doesn't change and religion doesn't change and sports don't change. The power imbalance won't allow it. And if it happens, it takes many, many, many people working together.

Somewhere along the line, I forgot that I cannot change the animal that is sports. It can bend me if I allow it, but I cannot bend it. 

People and their dumb natural consequences

When N was little, maybe 3 or 4-years-old, I told her to put her coat on when she went outside, and she refused. Threw a duck fit. 

I could have fought her, wrestled her into her coat, but I just let her go outside and then enjoyed myself immensely when, with teeth-chattering, she came back into the house a short-time later because she was freezing. 

This is now how I feel about people who have refused to get vaccinated for COVID. 

I am a skeptic by nature, hence the reason I have never fallen head-first into a pit of religious faith or absolute belief in anything. (There is some irony here when those who put belief above all else must experience with their every sense the pain and suffering of COVID infections themselves before they will understand it is a serious fucking problem.)

I have reached a point where I absolutely do not have any compassion for people who have remained unvaccinated and are now sick. The biggest problem I have with them is their utter selfishness that is now keeping health care workers exhausted and delaying hospital care for people who have other non-COVID life-threatening issues. 

I don't pretend to know what Jesus would think, but I hope he would give them a good lecture and maybe flip a table at them. 

Recently a parent explained to me why she is not making her child get a vaccine. I did not ask; she offered this information willingly and unprompted, and I tried to keep my eyes from bulging out of my head. 

She said, "She's old enough to make her own choices."

I think I said, "Oh," because, again, trying to keep my face in check. 

I didn't give my children a choice because if they do get COVID and require care I AM THE ONE WHO IS GOING TO FORK OVER THE MONEY TO PAY FOR IT. 

I AM THE ONE WHO IS GOING TO HAVE TO PUT MY LIFE ON HOLD AND BE AT THE HOSPITAL.

I AM THE ONE WHO IS GOING TO HAVE TO TAKE CARE OF MY CHILD IF SHE IS HOME SICK. 

I AM THE ONE WHO IS GOING TO HAVE TO TAKE MY CHILD TO VARIOUS DOCTOR VISITS SHOULD IT COME TO THAT. 

Besides my child who gets sick who will suffer most, I AM THE ONE WHO IS GOING TO SUFFER. 

And why would I choose to suffer in this way and be inconvenienced if I don't have to?

My senior does get to handle lots of her own stuff. She gets to pay her own car insurance. She gets to decide where she goes to school and what she wears to school and how she handles her schoolwork and what she wants to eat as a snack when she gets home. 

But as long as I'm the responsible party for her health care, she doesn't get to avoid a vaccine that has the ability to make COVID a largely preventable disease. 

What makes this statement by this parent even more mind-boggling is that this person's child plays on a sports team. There's no I in TEAM, or that's what sports-minded people say. And yet, not getting a vaccine could put the team and their games in jeopardy. Focusing on the "I don't want a vaccine" means the "TEAM could be harmed."

I am tired of being angry. I am tired of watching people do the dumbest possible things and reap the harshest consequences from their dumb choices. And I am mostly tired of knowing that because of their dumb choices so many other people are suffering. 

The relief (and joy) of ending things

Endings aren't nearly as exciting as beginnings.

But they are immensely freeing. 

I started to think about the "relief of the end" today after taking M to his 6th-grade orientation. His entry into middle school means our family has said "So long" to the elementary school we'd been a part of for something like 12 years. 

It did not make me sad for him to move on. 

Perhaps some of this lack of sadness was because we didn't have the "traditional" promotion ceremony or any of the before-times banquets and things, although I generally dislike that kind of stuff so I don't think I felt anything besides relief that we didn't have to do it (one of the rare positives of COVID). 

Last weekend when I saw local church members doing a service project at schools to spruce them up in anticipation of school starting, I didn't feel sad that I wasn't pulling weeds at the elementary school with these volunteers as I had in years past because I was the school's "Beautification Chair."

This lack of sadness made me think, too, about the freedom of releasing myself from connections with people I didn't really know or like or have any real reason to be connected to. 

Yes, I know this has been something I have mulled over here before. 

It is my blog....so I chew on what I want. 

Let's blame it on the obsessive part of my OCD. 

I think what can and does happen to moms who spend years not working outside the home is that they sometimes confuse their own needs with their children's needs. As my children made friends, I became friendly with many of my children's friends' parents. Some of them I truly became friends with, but the vast majority were never my friends. We didn't socialize outside of our children. We don't really know anything about each other. I would never dream of calling them if I were in a bind. 

But sometimes I have mistaken them for more than acquaintances.

Even though I am well beyond the angst of teenager and young adult life, adult friendships or acquaintanceships or connections can still be a little confusing, especially in our social media world. 

It occurred to me that one of the most wonderful things about my children moving on is that I can give myself permission to move on as well. 

I do not have to stay connected (however loosely) to people I truly don't know or admire or like or care about. 

In many cases I no longer remember why we were connected, to begin with. 

(That doesn't mean I wish them ill, but I want to be connected to people I admire or find funny or who make me think. I want to be connected to people who don't say or do or post stupid things unless they are being sarcastic or ironic in which case I probably like them. I want to be connected to people who I feel are kindred spirits.)

And there is a special category for people whom I don't see often but who make me feel happy when I am around them or when we do speak. I won't pull my mask up and put my sunglasses on and turn the other way down the grocery store aisle if I see them. These are the people who I think would probably come to my parent's funeral or at least send me a card in the mail to let me know they were thinking of me. 

Something remarkable I also consider is how much I have changed from the time N started at the elementary school to the time M left. 

I went from "friending" everyone and wanting to know everyone and be involved to being extremely selective about who I friend (and downright delighting in unfriending people). Maybe it is because when N started elementary school I was a stay-at-home mom of three children under 5 who had absolutely zero time for myself or life beyond my children. Whatever friends I had were going to come through my kids or I simply wasn't going to have friends. 

The ending of things in terms of M's schooling has provided me some happiness I didn't expect to find there.