rough week

Wow. Working even part-time was hard this week--and I don't even have a hard job. I didn't have to teach today, so I spent all day on the couch. I'm a bit less tired than I was earlier in the week, but I've had to take my percocet two nights this week and I had some mild pain again today. For the past several hours, I've had a killer headache. At least it's a regular problem and not a surgical one.

My co-workers are the most wonderful people in the world. We haven't had to cook all week. We've been given a lot of pasta dishes, but they're yummy. We've had lasagna, macaroni and cheese, a spaghetti casserole, and a chicken pie.

I've had no energy, but I've found that I am enjoying being back at school and into a routine again, even though it's hard.

Today I watched the Blagojevich coverage. Although I live in Wisconsin now, I lived in Illinois for the first 36 years of my life and my parents and in-laws still live there. This must be so hard for his family.

Last night there was an open house at the high school for next year's freshmen, which include two of my own children. As next year's chair of the Site Council (kind of an advisory board consisting of parents, administrators, faculty, and students), I was there to talk with new high school parents. Fortunately, we had a place for me to sit in the computer lab and show people our updated website. It was nice to focus on something outside myself and still be comfortable. We live a block away from the high school, but I still drove. There are still some icy patches, and although I probably could have gotten there okay, I knew I would be tired coming home. My husband walked around with the kids.

I'm looking forward to the Superbowl on Sunday. Neither of the teams I like is in the game, so I'll enjoy eating and watching commercials. I'll be feeling good enough to make some of our food. I don't think we're having anybody over, but I enjoy just being with my family, too.

Tomorrow will be a strange day. I have just one class in the morning. The students will be writing an in-class practice paper, so all I need to do is sit while they work. But then I have a department meeting at 1. Maybe I'll try to clean my office. I have the best job to dress for. I can go to work in jeans and tennis shoes if I want, and if I wear a school sweatshirt I feel totally appropriate. I'm glad I don't have to wear heels!

back at work/pants on fire

It's been four weeks since my surgery, and I returned to work today part-time. I'll be teaching two courses, and in two weeks I'll return full-time to my administrative duties as well.

This morning was interesting. I arrived at 7, made a couple handouts, watched to see how long it would take Outlook to update (I lost track), made coffee even though I realized all my coffee is stale, and got ready for the one class I was teaching today. Class went fine, and I'm actually ready for the whole week. As I went to check my mail and walked through the halls, I had so many people giving me hugs and wishing me well and telling me how great I look. I felt so loved, and that was wonderful.

I left home at 7 am and returned at 11. How can four hours have exhausted me so much? I walked slowly, but I definitely was walking more than usual. I was totally vertical, with no reclining. The institutional floors are harder than the floors at home. I came home, heated up a can of soup, and I haven't gotten off the couch since I got home three hours ago. I feel totally wiped out. However, I do not feel like I'm in pain, which I had worried about. I feel a bit swollen and tender inside. I have a night class that meets once a week on Tuesdays. Enrollment was low, so I haven't done any of the course preparations since I figured it would be canceled. Over the weekend, we picked up enough other students that I will be spending the day tomorrow working on the course. It will be nice to have a sense of purpose to the day, anyway.

I'm on the superintendent's advisory council for our school district. We have our monthly meeting tonight. I am going to take a nap and see how I feel later, but since the meeting will be for an hour and a half on wooden library chairs, I will have no qualms about not going if I don't feel much improved after my nap.

My son came home today with a strange look on his face. Today was his last day of finals, so he and his buddies ended up at one of the guys' houses to play some Wii. Apparently, someone in the family had vomited in the Wii room a couple days ago, so they lit candle to help them deal with the remaining smell. Stupid boys--they put the candle on the floor! Matt said that his leg felt warm. When he looked down, his pants were on fire! He has a big burn hole and the bottom of his pant leg, and his socks and ankle have char marks on them. He totally freaked out and was very happy to be home to tell me about it. To celebrate his survival (he's 16 and tends to exaggerate), we ordered subs from Jimmy John's and had a nice lunch today.

chocolate and antiquing

Today was the first day of my daughter's period, so we took our monthly trip to the chocolate shop downtown. She got a chocolate rocking horse, and I got a sampling of several different small chocolates. Then we went across the street to the antique mall. We looked at cookie jars and double-boilers, but we ended up getting a cookbook from 1965. My daughter has recently begun doing a lot of baking, and she enjoyed seeing all the different tips and techniques as well as foods that don't show up in modern cookbooks.

My city has a winter festival every January called Janboree, and it's this weekend. We live right across the street from the best sledding hill in town that has a toboggan run at the top (you can see it at toboggan run (http://www.janboree.org/event03.html) ), and this park is the place that Janboree kicks off. I'm sad that I won't be able to do any sledding this winter, but I enjoy watching all the sledders out of my kitchen window. There's someone doing an ice sculpture, there's a chili cook-off between the fire department and the police department, and there will be fireworks this evening. It's such a treat to get to see fireworks in the middle of winter.

I'm a bit achy from the antique store, but I've enjoyed feeling a bit more normal than usual today.

history in the making

I am so glad that I get to park in front of the tv for all the inauguration festivities and formalities. This is truly an amazing moment for our country.

When I was a child, my parents worked for equal housing rights in my hometown. This was at the same time as Father Groppi's marches in Milwaukee, although we were in a different town, in a different state not too far away. My early years were spent with white and black families, and I truly didn't see any racial differences until I was seven years old and watched how the other kids treated our school's first black student. My tanned dad's skin was darker than my mom's, so it made sense that someone else's skin could be darker than his (even though I wanted my daddy to be the darkest). Due to their civil rights work and the fact that my parents had minored in Russian in college, they were investigated and watched by the FBI at that time. In fact, I watched the FBI interrogate my mother when I was four years old, in my own living room after my dad had left for work.

So I watch this inauguration with awe. On the day I went to vote, I felt the enormity of the process in which I was participating. No matter what my vote, history would be made, and I was part of it. We would have either a black president or a female vice-president. How awesome is that? And in just a few days, it will happen.

Wow.

shades of grey

I've been having mixed feelings this week.

One of my favorite former students was charged a year ago with molesting several adolescent boys. This began when he himself was an adolescent and was trying to come to terms with his homosexuality. We know so much about the development of the adolescent brain and that wisdom and mature judgment aren't in place until the early to mid twenties. For some reason, this matters to me, although there's no way he should have done what he did. This student did fairly well in my class and later on worked with me for a summer in our student services office. He was the most dedicated worker I had. He always kept his personal life private, which I assumed was just him being professional. His career was going well. He had always wanted to be a sports promoter, and he had jobs with a couple major sports teams in our area.

This has been really hard for me. I genuinely like him and have a great deal of respect for him as a worker. And I also know that if at any time he had offered to take my sons to a ball game, I would have let them go with him in a heartbeat. Through my eyes as a parent, I see him both as a monster and as a heartsick young man. His mother works at my eye doctor's office, and she's been so happy when I come in and ask how he's doing. We are all much greater than the worst things we've ever done, and I know from my own early adulthood how sometimes the only way to cope with having done something bad is to continue doing it in an effort to make it seem normal and okay to help suppress the feelings of guilt. (In my case, the only one I was hurting was myself.) But I'm very sad. This student of mine had seven victims who came forward. He could've gotten a prison sentence of 100 years. Instead, he got 15 years. Prison is not kind to child molesters. He will suffer a great deal. As a parent of adolescent sons, I am glad he will be out of reach of other young men to hurt. As his former teacher and supervisor, I am heartsick that he felt that these choices were his only option. How is it possible to feel these contradictory feelings in a situation like this? His own mother must be in so much soul pain. But I feel like my own boys are just a bit safer today.

I always think about another favorite former student, from the same academic year in fact. This student wrote a paper about how he was molested by another student at a regional meeting of some kind. He felt so vulnerable and unsafe. Later he came to the conclusion that he was gay (which I'd guessed the first time I met him), and it makes me wonder how conflicted he must be about his experience of being assaulted and aroused at the same time.

Both of these young men--one victim and one victimizer--struggled to accept their sexual orientation, and I wonder if either one will ever be able to have a healthy adult relationship. I feel quite bad for both of them, although their situations and experiences seem completely opposite.

I see very little black and white in life. Usually, that is something I'm very comfortable with. But there are times, like this, when shades of gray are very difficult to wear.

unexpected losses

When I lost my uterus, I lost something else that I hadn't expected.

When my 16-year old son was born, I nursed him and totally fell in love with it. There was something so indescribably calming, purposeful, and intimate about breastfeeding. I felt part of the circle of life and movement of the earth more than at any other time. When he was 8 months old, he weaned himself because he was bored and wanted to look around at the world. I was so deeply sad, and the only thing that got me through it was the knowledge (I thought) that I would have another child to breastfeed.

When I found out I was pregnant when he was 2, I was ecstatic, in part because I looked forward to the nursing experience again. Well, life doesn't always work out according to our plans. I ended up pregnant with twins and was in preterm labor at 20 weeks. I spent 3 1/2 months on bedrest and completely used up all my leave from work. (And I carried our health insurance.) I had to return to work when the twins were 9 weeks old. Everything is different with twins. Things you would never do with a single child (prop a bottle, for instance) become life-savers when there are two. I knew that if I didn't figure out a way to get some sleep every night, there was no way I would be able to function. Plus, we couldn't afford for me to get the new wardrobe that would be necessary to accommodate breasts that were providing the complete sustenance for two babies. I made the very difficult decision to bottle feed. Although I didn't feel guilty for the twins' sake, I very much grieved the loss of this beloved and anticipated experience for myself.

Two years ago, I had an endometrial ablation. We were done having children (my husband had a vasectomy years ago), so I wasn't concerned about the loss of my fertility. I realized that not only was it very unlikely that I could ever get pregnant, if I did it would be likely to kill me as the placenta would bond with my organs and I might well bleed to death at delivery. I was surprised at how often that first year I felt so sad at the reality of never having another child. Having worked through that then made the fertility aspect of the hysterectomy pretty much a non-issue. I had already dealt with the reality of no longer having babies.

So imagine my surprise several days ago when a lot of my friends on Facebook posted pictures of themselves breastfeeding their children, in protest of Faceboook's policy to delete photographs that show nipples, including breastfeeding pictures. Although I had dealt with the loss of fertility, I had completely forgotten about the fact that I would never breastfeed again. It just hit me very hard that I would never again have that experience. In the past, when I used to think about breastfeeding or wanting more children, I would feel my womb ache and cramp just for an instant. This time, I could feel abdominal tensing and then--nothing.


It had never occurred to me that in addition to its role in reproduction and hormones and holding everything in place, my uterus was a physical site of some of my emotions. I have lost a physical component of my emotional response, and now I don't know how to go about feeling my feelings anymore. I had no idea I would experience this loss.


By now, the emotions have faded from an instant of deep and intense grief to loss to weirdness. But this was an experience I was not at all prepared for. I felt very, very empty.

outing

What an exciting adventure I had today!  Doug drove to Walgreens so Becky and I could pick up a few items.  I was in regular clothes, in public, walking around, feeling somewhat normal.  I was tired out by the time I got home, but it was nice to get out of the house for a while.

Jett Travolta

I am so sad that Jett Travolta died yesterday.  It just seems to hit so close to home since I have a son the same age.  I can't imagine having to go through that at all--even more so due to the paparazzi attention.  I hope the family receives some respect and privacy.  This is so horrible for them.

one week post-op report

What a week it's been! I think my recovery is going normally, and I'm surprised at how achy I feel. On Day 4, I did some light housework that involved bending and about 15 trips up and down the stairs. I don't know what I was thinking, but I paid for it. I felt really swollen and had some pain that night. Since then, I have been very good.

Other than the fullness of waiting for my first post-op poop and the occasional gas pains, I'm feeling pretty good. I feel achy and swollen, especially toward the end of the day, but I haven't been feeling in pain since the first couple days. I've been taking my ibuprofen every four hours during the day to keep swelling down, and then I take one percocet at night, which helps.

Sleeping has been interesting. My first night home, I woke up quite a bit, but mostly I've been sleeping quite well, with weird and vivid dreams but getting a full 8 or 9 hours each night. The past two nights have been more of a challenge, though. On New Year's Eve, I was awake until 1. Last night I went to bed at 8 and didn't get to sleep until 2. I took a nap this morning for a couple hours, which is actually my first nap since I've been home.

Today has been interesting. I got a call from the doctor's office that my pathology report was normal other than the fibroids. This is what I expected, but it's still a relief. Then I had my first outing. My son had lost an eyeglass lens in the snow, and the new one was in. My older son has his driver's permit but not his license, so he couldn't drive his brother there alone. Instead, he drove while I sat in the passenger seat. He did a very good job, but the 10-minute drive there and back did not feel good. I was very happy to get home. But it felt nice to be in a bra and shoes (don't worry--I had other clothes on, too!).

2008 was the the year of the appliance breakdowns for our family. Four days ago, we weren't able to use our new dryer. The gas connector hose was faulty and we had a minor gas leak. The latest victim has been the water heater, which gave out three days ago. Fortunately, my husband bought one on his way to work this morning and it is being installed this afternoon. My 16-year old son has had to be the one to deal with the gas company and the water heater installers. It's a blessing to see him be able to step up to the plate in such a mature fashion. It's frustrating to have these household issues arise when I can't do a thing about them. I want to go move laundry piles, hang wet clothes up, heat water on the stove and bring it upstairs to be able to wash my hair and do sponge baths, etc. It's been very frustrating, but I'm learning to just let go of the stuff I can't do. If I take a sponge bath with cold water, it isn't the end of the world. If I have to have my husband help me wash my hair, that's okay, too. I'm having lots of opportunities to practice acceptance and patience.

I had a difficult time concentrating for several days after my surgery. Now that the general anesthesia is out of my system and I'm not taking my percocet during the day, I'm finding that I'm able to read, watch a full tv program, and think. I'm very grateful that my brain has come back! My laptop is my best friend, and I've been able to spend way too much time on hystersisters, for which I'm very grateful.