Friday? Really?

(This photo has nothing to do with anything in this post.)

Today is Friday? Really?

How did that happen? It was just Monday, like, 10 minutes ago.

Wasn't it?

No?

(Insert much cursing here, especially the word that is alliterative with the day of the week it actually is today.)

I have gotten nothing done. NOTHING.

I've been sick as a dog all week.

A few different things all converging.

Including - TMI WARNING: LOOK AWAY IF YOU DON'T WANT TO HEAR ABOUT GIRL-PART RELATED THINGS - my first period in 3 months that came on like gang-busters and has knocked me completely on my ass for 3 days. I know last year I told you all I thought maybe I was done with all this.

Not quite.

Instead I've been continuing on, regularly irregular, for the past year.

Fun. (Not.)

And today Ethan was home sick, too, with the same sore-throat-voice-stealing-nasty-cold I've got.

So I have had to scrape myself off the sofa to bring care and comfort to him all day. Because sick kids need their Mom. Right?

And while sometimes I find hard times inspirational? Not this week. This week I have had neither the energy nor motivation to write anything.

I feel lumpen.

Completely.

And yet my blog is staring at me, glaring at me, with a Monday date on my last post. 

(Insert more cursing here.)

I got... nothing.

And not the wonderful nothing like my friend Neil's amazing post last week.

Serious nothing.

(Although I have stolen a page from him and included an instagram photo since I figure if I've given you nothing really to read I should at least give you something semi-interesting to look at.)

My mojo is missing.

My lyricism has left the building.

But I am feeling sad in the silence.

I miss you guys.

Even if I have nothing more to say than: Hello. I'm still here. I'll pull through this all, and hopefully be back sometime soon with words wiser and worth reading.

And until then?

(Insert more cursing here.)


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Period? Period.

Well, it's been 53 days since my last period.  So I can safely conclude it's not coming this "month."

Another skip.  The first was was in August, the month of my 50th birthday.

How cruel is that?  A slap in the face, insult added to injury.  The heavens reiterating the message: "You're an old woman now, babe."

Never mind that I have 8 year-old twins at an age when many women are grandmothers.  Hey, some are even great grandmothers at my age, although that involves kids having kids, something I would not recommend to anyone.

But still, this gives me pause.  Meno-pause.  (It's OK, you can groan, I surely did.)

I think it's time I took the "peri-" out of the term when I talk about it.  Increasingly, it seems the real thing is here to stay.

I might get a period next month, I might not.  It feels maybe 50/50.

I can feel my body changing yet again, a subtle shifting of the gears.  Some things slowing down (my brain, my legs) and some things speeding up (acquiring of gray hairs, increasing waist girth, my insomniac nights).

None of this is for the better.  50 year-olds were not meant to run around after active 8 year-olds on a full time basis.  Whose idea was it to have kids in my 40's again?  Oh, yeah, mine.

They say you should look back down the women in your mother's line to determine the age you are likely to enter "the change."  But my mother had a hysterectomy at 48 so I have no way of knowing when she would have switched over.  She was still having periods at that point though, so I know for sure she wasn't on the early team.

I think the hardest part of this is accepting that the baby shop is now, really and truly, finally closed for good.  It was never in our plans to have more, we can hardly afford it time- or energy-wise.  But still, it's nice to feel like it's by my choice, not something chosen for me.  I used to think: if we win the lottery we can try for that girl.  A long shot fantasy, but still within the realm of vaguely possible.  Not any more.  I'll have to wait now until I'm grandma to little Venus to get my girl.

It's also a little hard for me to reconcile with all this because I hardly look my age, am always assumed to be a decade younger.

My mother, too has a much more youthful demeanor.  People are always remarking on how much younger than her 88 years she appears.  Her usual response is a sharp and funny retort: "Thank you. But my bones know how old I am"

Me and my Mom on her 87th birthday, 2009

Next time someone surprisedly gushes about how I don't look 50, I may borrow my mother's line but add my own particular twist:

"Thank you. But my ovaries know how old I am."


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Momsomnia strikes again

NOTE: This post originally appeared on the sadly closed NYC Moms Blog.

Maybe it’s those peri-menopausal hormones (the 3 month countdown to 50 has begun), or the to-do list not done, or all the coffee that gets me through the day, but I have been up in the middle of the night waaaay too much lately.  

I thought when my father passed, things would finally ease a bit, that some of it the insanity would finally release, but that seems to have actually ramped things up instead.  Everything I put on the back burner to care for him and support my mother in his final, faltering, increasingly dependent months is now aflame.  

My children really need me present and I am swimming back to them slowly through the muck of feelings long pushed underground to just grind through those last gruesome, awful days.  Two months since he has died and I have really just begin to mourn him. 

The biggest flaming pile in my life is that my son with special needs, the one on the Autism Spectrum does not have a school for next year. Yes, you heard that right, it is now MID-MAY and I have no idea where he is going to school, nor how it will be paid for.  We are transitioning in the middle of elementary school, which is none too easy.  

Friends ask “Can’t he just stay where he is?” and I want to bang my head into the wall (wait, who’s autistic now?)  Hindsight is always 20-20.  No, he can’t, he’s in a school that only goes K to 2, forcing a change at this point.  

We had been hoping that he’d be ready now to go to his twin brother’s public elementary school, which has wonderful CTT classes (for the laymen: Collaborative Team Teaching by a Special Ed and regular teacher, kids w/ IEPs integrated into the regular classroom), but no such luck.  He still needs more support and a less chaotic environment. So here we are in limbo.

The school we really, really want for him, which would really be a great fit, has absolutely no spots for a 3rd grader next year.  Were a space to open up (it could happen) we’d be jockeying with about 50 other kids for that one spot. And if any of them are girls, forget-about-it, they’re in, we’re toast (since so many more boys than girls are on the spectrum, schools need girls to keep the classrooms balanced).  

And at the point this past fall and winter when I should have been blitzing every Special Ed school in a 50 mile radius and putting on a full court press I was coordinating my father’s palliative care and holding my mother while she sobbed and cabbing cross town at 2 AM to pick my Dad up off the floor, again, and …. well, you know.  

I wasn’t a total slacker, I went on tours, I filled out applications, but the competition is so fierce and getting the right school for my son is such a tricky business, it needed my full on, laser beam attention, and that just wasn’t there.  So now I am playing catch-up and calling in all callable favors, and praying a lot to the gods of Autism (whoever you are) that this work out for Jacob, because he is an amazing, bright, sweet boy who will sink or swim next year depending on finding a school and teacher who “get” him. 

And let’s not talk about the mess that is my apartment (I’m not saying we’re giving the Collyer brothers a run for their money, but it’s getting close) or my other son’s issues with homework (DO NOT GET ME STARTED) or the 15 lost pounds I regained this winter (why did I think it a good idea to give away all my summer fat clothes?) or ... I could go on, but I’ll spare you.

Momsomnia, it’s a bitch.  So someone please get my son into a great school, throw out all my piles of crap, and come cook healthy food for me and make me run 5 miles to get it.  Then I can get some sleep.