Across and Inside my Universe

And The Walls Came Tumblin' Down

Well, that's what it feels like. 

The window in our bedroom started cracking in the wood frame that holds it in the wall; plaster cracked and water came out, and eventually wet wood sawdust bits . . . the wall is sunk in and soft in the lower corners.  There's a hole in the siding just outside.

So, what does my landlord want to do?  Bring in dirt and slope the grade away from the window; it's become sloped toward the window.  He'll plaster up inside as well.

He says he has many decades of construction experience, and simply regrading should do it.  I hope so . . . the window is also sending a crack upwards in the wall above it, as it settles on its softened lower wood frame area.  Yeah, he's taking care of it alright.

Okay, so not long after that (and it's still not fixed, the window), I'm in the bathroom, and it starts raining on my head.  I hoped it wasn't toilet water; it wasn't, but it was kitchen and bathroom sink and laundry drain water . . . eww.  That one took them a couple days.

Now, a few weeks later, they are finally looking at fixing the ceiling above our toilet.

Also, around the same time, I pushed a hole in the wall by the toilet, as I have to brace myself lowering onto the commode.  Well, I suppose I could do without, but it's MUCH more painful that way.  This time instead of spreading out my hand flat, I used the heel of my hand.

Oops.

Okay, so now last night, the people upstairs are showering, and the drain in our furnace/water heater closet bubbles up and leaks into the carpet in nearby closet, bedroom, and hallway.  We use towels and a fan.  This morning, they start to shower and BAM!  Soaking wet all over again.

UGH!  I'm afraid of mildew if this doesn't get dry by tonight; we only have one fan, as we pulled our box fan out and it was dead.  So I just had to switch it to the hall which has had no fan on it at all, although the other areas are still quite dam (edit: Freudian typo? heh).  The hall is still WET, though.  Too bad we don't have a steam cleaner to soak some stuff up; maybe I can find someone to borrow one.

They just came and are gonna snake a thing down through the system.

My daughter is completely out of sorts with all this, afraid that we'll have to move, afraid of everything breaking, and stuff.  I completely understand.

I am so tired of problems, especially water problems.  PEACE and security would be nice.  Not frequently feeling like we're in crisis mode dealing with problems would be nice.

Off to wash and dry yet another batch of towels.

Running the Gamut

We've been through alot this week.

I've felt all of the following:  Horror, pain, anger, sorrow, indignation, disgust, revulsion, outrage, frustration, sadness, regret, determination, resolve, protectiveness, strength, recrimination, failure, lost, alone, isolated, horrified, nervous, anxious, angry, empathy, and a variety of other things.

Most of all, my heart is broken for someone.  It keeps breaking, over and over.

My husband agrees that about covers it.

 

Bedroom Progress - Ribbons, Heroclix, Pandemic, & Neopets

Well isn't that an eclectic title!

One of my craft materials that needs much better organization are my ribbons.

So, I spent a few minutes pinning a whole variety of ideas to a pinboard for these ideas, on Pinterest.  Some are similar to each other, but there's some quite clever ideas in there.

See, I've realized that it's difficult or impossible to fully clean up the floor, without having somewhere in, on, amongst the cubes, shelves, and other parts of my craft organization "system", to put things that go there. 

Of course, if I don't have a place to put stuff after weeding, it's hard to settle on exactly what storage will work best, because I'm not sure what "space" it will "live in" once it's weeded and sorted . . . this is part of the problem in tackling this project, it feels like everything I do depends on doing something else that needs to be done, etcetera.

I'm not going to spend any $$ on anything organizational-wise until I have a better idea of what might go where.

AHHHhhhhh.  It feels like I'm stuck in a black hole, a vortex of doom.  What I need to remember is that's magnifying, that's catastrophizing, and if I take small moves, I can get this done.  No, thinking of getting it "done" is too much for me; I can make PROGRESS.  That is all I can think of.  Small moves = progress.

On the getting rid of my old Heroclix game figures front, I traded 2/3 of them with a fellow on Boardgamegeek.com for $80 worth of games that we wanted, and two that I wanted to try that take up no more space than a couple of envelopes (if I don't like them, they can be traded off just like the Heroclix): Pandemic, it's expansion On The Brink, and Alamo & Battle of 4 Armies.  These take up 1/4 of the space the Heroclix did.  If I can't find a trader for the balance of my Heroclix, then out they go, in the trash.

You can have BGG.com search for people who want in trade the games you have up for trade, while it also considers if they have up for trade games that you want in trade.  It's quite nifty, really.

On the Neopets front, we have some fond memories of the couple years my daughter spent on their site; we participated fully with her, as at that age we did not want her involved in anything on the internet without us.  We collected quite a few stuffed Neopets during that time, the bulk of which have been sitting in our bedroom in large bags for a couple years now.  All three of us collected; we each had our favorites.

Here are all the neopets we had, on my messy bed:

 

There are several PILES of neopets, 3 deep on there, so there's more than what you see.  On a queen-size bed. 

We weeded through our collection, with my husband keeping only a couple of Bruces; I kept the Shoyrus, the Flotsams, and one or two misc. others.  My daughter got rid of about 40% of her collection; not as much as I'd hoped, but enough.  Most of these Neopets, aside from my daughters, had been kept in a bag for their stay at our apartment; even out of hers, only two need cleaned.   Off to the thrift store with them.

What my spouse and I kept:

 

While it's embarassing to admit that we like Neopets; we're adults, after all, but they represent an age and time in my daughter's life that we all have fond memories of.  The ones we chose to keep also reflect our personalities; I like dolphins & strawberries, and the Shoyrus seem to be pleading to be loved.

What all three of us got rid of: 

 

My Mother Lives In Her Own Reality

My mother posted on Facebook, "My grandchildren are bright, brilliant, and they take after their grandmother."

GAG.

This is the same woman who hit me on a regular basis as a teenager.

This is the same woman who thinks she did a good job counteracting bullying when we were kids.  The subject of bullying came up recently when we were down there, and she said, "When (my sister) was in junior high, there was one time (my sister) was being bullied and I nipped that in the bud!"

She said this like she took care of it ALL.  HEL-lo!  Um, Mom, we younger three kids of the 6 kids were bullied mercilessly for over a decade, EACH!  You think you did GOOD?  You don't even KNOW what was going on!

And, I think she's forgetting the time I and my younger brother were sort of kidnapped; I very fuzzily remember that I think that was one thing she found out about, and my parents talked to one of the teens involved (just one?  why not both?).

She doesn't know I was beat up, several times, and THAT's why my glasses were broken; it wasn't because I slipped and fell in the snow . . . she doesn't know I was whipped with a jumprope with all those sliding plastic thingies on it, and that the pain from that was like a hundred stinging bees . . . and so much other crap.

CLUELESS.  Although she shouldn't be about the hitting thing, but then again at the time she saw nothing wrong with it; why would she now?  Then again, each of us kids holds a part in the fact that she's clueless; our relationship may not have been good enough then for us to want her to know?  But when older, we could have told her . . . I dunno that the relationship has EVER been good enough to tell her, though . . .

UGH ugh UGH.  Keeping my mouth shut when she exhibits her pride in her mothering skills, or anything else I've mentioned, is both hard and easy.  Hard because . . . I'd so love to verbally slap her in the face with reality.  (Hmm, the violent metaphor there, is probably not too hard to figure out why.)  Easy, because . . . she has no idea we look down on her for stuff, that these things happened (or that they were wrong), and we do, and she looks the fool to those of us who know . . .

It's sad, really, that she is so . . . out of touch.  Sad and pathetic . . . although I remember the raging mother coming after me physically and cornering me before whaling on me . . . and then I stop feeling sorry for her.

I dunno.  Empathy is good, but . . . when she throws this stuff in MY face, empathy is the furthest thing from my mind . . .

This whole situation reminds me of something one of the Mythbusters says, "I reject your reality and substitute my own!"  The difference here being that she either doesn't know she's doing it, or any glimmers of what reality is are too painful for her to face, so she lives in a constructed shell of glossed over (maybe painted over) memories.

Special Needs Child & Starting Junior High

OY.

It's been two weeks, and I've got a headache just thinking about it.

Every time I think, "Oh, I've just emailed back and forth with x period's teacher and gotten on top of something, " something else will smack me in the face a minute later, like missing work in Computer class because it wouldn't print and she didn't know to ask for help like other kids might.

Or tonight, after sending an email to all her teachers to introduce some of the issues (self and time management and organization of both, being the biggest ones). I had been encouraged by the responses from two teachers I had individually emailed the week before, so I thought I'd better email them all, even though I hope they've all read her IEP as it demands certain accommodations that every class had better make.

I get done doing this, and then my husband flips over a recently-graded Enlish assignment and on the back, written twice, harshly, is, "I HATE ENGLISH CLASS".

My heart is breaking and I feel like how can I expect her to stay on top of so many things when I'm having trouble staying on top of trying to keep her organized and on track with everything?

How can I expect her to be up on all this when new things and all sorts of changes are difficult for an autistic child to handle, when she's likely overwhelmed by all these new things that I feel like a "Bad Mommy tm" for doing what I need to do to help her, but feel like I'm just piling on her more?

And yet I feel like a "Bad Mommy tm" for the days when I've not reminded her about EVERYTHING, when I've not gone through her accordian organizer and her planner to check if she's written down homework and tests, and then see if she's brought the homework home . . ..

Can I pull my hair out yet? Please?!! Somebody say Junior High and a special needs child will get easier, at some point, pretttyyyy pleassseeee!!

Things I Never Want to See (or Step On) Again After Cleaning Daughter's Room

PERLER beads!! Ouch

Easter Grass. Not a pain to step on, but when you are sorting out umpteen billion tiny things, and have to pull strands of Easter grass out from around them and among them, you curse your autistic daughter's love for stringy things . . . (not out loud, just in my head!)

Tiny Polly Pocket accessories; especially footwear, that you practically need a magnifying glass to see.

Orphan puzzle pieces, that seem to have been breeding in the heaped piles of stuff (yes, it's been awhile since we overhauled her room.)

Lego, of course. Some of the pieces rival Polly Pocket stuff for microscopic-ness, although these hurt much more to step on.

All the torn off, torn apart, dissassembled pieces of toys that my daughter's urge to deconstruct has left in her wake.

Things like screws, washers, twist-tie wiry things or similar from packaged toys, miscellaneous wire, and even a "be careful where you dig this flag marks an underground gas pipe" flag on rusty wire from the local gas utility (sternly scolded for that one, with lots of internal frustration because her desire for metal objects, and especially wiry ones because that intersects with her desire for long, thing, stringy objects, makes it likely that something she shouldn't be bringing home will definitely be coming home with her in the future).

Some of my clear, vinyl cling stamps or silicone clear stamps, ruined. I think the texture and feel of them appeal to her sensory cravings, like the metal and stringy things.

Umpteen-billion rocks, some smooth, some with sharper edges (at least as felt when stepped on. If given a choice, I believe she prefers smooth rocks but she'll take any rock that catches her fancy. Lots of tactility here (and muffled or not-so-muffled curses when stepped upon).

15 shirts of varying sizes from the 4 years previous, almost always gifts (at least when we buy we have some idea of her preferences as well as she has alot more input on her wardrobe now), and 85% long sleeve. A few even still have the original sales tags on. It's money wasted, but grandparents and others that want to buy her clothes for her birthday and Christmas (she has a cool-weather birthday) would get offended if they didn't get to pick out clothes for her, or if we asked them not to. They enjoy that aspect of grandparent hood; the problem is, if they don't get worn, it's money down the drain until she grows out of it and we give it to a cousin or something. The long-sleeve issue is partly because of the water on the elbow that she gets, in both elbows now this last year, which we are having her tested on Thursday for rheumatoid arthritis . . .

The same frustration with little to no times worn, for dresses. If it's a dress that's not red, or pink to a lesser degree, then there's onlyu a 10% chance she'll wear it, and only if she likes it.

Erases popped out of the end of pencils, and the little metal piece that divides it from the pencil is also off, and chewed to almost unrecognizability. She has sensory issues here, too.

A host of other things but these things I could really do without. Because of her cravings for certain sensations, feels of objects, etc., some of these problems aren't going away any time soon.

Two Complicated Words

"Not Pregnant".

This afternoon those two words stared back at me from the pregnancy test.

I was happy, I was sad. I was relieved, I was disappointed.

Our recent decision that our daughter would remain an only child has been something that is hard for me to approach all the complicated feelings surrounding the issue of reproduction.

It's long been an emotional issue for me, because with Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome, my fertility has not been very good. Also, in the LDS "culture", it's "expected" that people have several or more kids; having an only child is something that makes you stick out as, well, not fitting the "norm". In fact, people seem to think there is something wrong, if you only have one.

Granted, that's an overgeneralization, but I have run into it first-hand; the automatic questions upon finding out that you only have the one child, at this age, as if they have any right to know what happened or why you only have one or why aren't you trying for more . . .

It's not mandated by our religion to have alot of kids, although being fruitful and multiplying IS a concept we hold dear (this of course explains the cultural expectation that is sometimes taken to hurtful words or excessive questions by those who more rigidly hold to this).

I wish people would just THINK for a few minutes, and realize that my reproductive decisions, abilities or incapabilities, and plans, is all information they aren't ENTITLED to just because they may have more kids than me, or just because they think I SHOULD be doing something differently.

Ah, well, I can't change them. What IS really difficult about those two words I saw today, is that it really brings home that I may (will) never be having another child. I use both words because it is so hard to bring myself to say the definitive, even though that is what we have decided.

When I recently discussed this decision with my doctor, he immediately started telling me about a permanent option to prevent pregnancy. I listened and asked a question or two but I mostly forestalled that discussion by saying that I need a year or two to "sit" with this decision, and that I'd like to get on the pill for the next year or two until I'm ready for the permanent solution. He was happy to acommodate me, and not upset that I'd turned down the other option. I'm glad to know about it, but it was, again, an unpleasant and surprising sudden facing of the decision we'd recently made, to be placed right up against a permanent solution . . . I need some time to come to terms with it.

Feelings of feeling like less of a woman, although my brain kicks in with, "Women who are infertile or who have gone through menopause, and therefore can't reproduce, aren't any less of a woman for it, so why feel this way about yourself?" I don't know why, I just know I have alot of complicated, mixed-up emotions about the issue . . .

Last but not least, I certainly didn't FEEL pregnant but I took the test because I'm near the end of the fourth week of the birth control, the week of "placeholder" pills, and I have not yet gotten my period. I only have two placeholder pills left before I start the actual hormone pills again, and so I thought I could be pregnant, perhaps, and was really worried about it.

So if I don't get my period next time I'll call the doctor; I read the insert that came with this first batch of pills and it talked about if you don't get your period the first month and preg test is negative, that it's only if this happens two months in a row do you need to call your doctor . . . at least I think it said that, I'll be re-reading it.

Despite all the reasons that having a baby would be a bad idea, there is a part of me that is sad. That is okay. A big part of me is relieved, as I said before. It's just a mish-mash of emotion, all brought on by two simple, hoped for yet surprisingly impactful, words.