CurrentMom

Settling In

Truth Thursday

After a long, three-month dry spell, I finally had a day like I remember from before. A day where I felt accomplished, one in which I remembered why I love my work. A day that bolstered me instead of defeated me. A day in which I remembered why I was willing to step up and take on a full-time job that is actually three jobs and why I was willing to rework my relationship to my family, my life and myself.

It wasn’t a remarkable day in terms of what I did. I had the chance to meet someone new and begin a conversation about how we might work together. I had the chance to meet someone I’ve known for a long time and have a conversation about how we are already working together. And I had a chance to talk with the person who oversees my work (I have decided to stop using the word “boss” – it feels patriarchal and intimidating) and have a conversation about the many pieces I’m juggling, most of it seemingly successfully. 

That’s it. Three interactions. That was my whole work day. Very few emails. Little if nothing actually moved forward. But three incredibly satisfying, emotional and important interactions. 

At the end of the day, a day that also included incredible sadness intermingled with the satisfaction, as I had learned in the morning that the father of a very close friend had died, at the end of this day and after these conversations that fed me, I felt grounded in way that has eluded me for several months.

I have been twisting and turning since I took on the mantle of these new jobs, nervous about the many moving parts, overseeing a big move in our office that affects everyone – both physically and emotionally. Being responsible for how other people are feeling. Planning a trip to another country and not knowing how to land on the exact right dates for the trip, trying to please a lot of different players in the decision-making and not trusting my own instincts quite yet. Overseeing a dedicated group of volunteers who look to me for leadership and yet, feeling like I don’t have quite enough arms to ensure that their direction is clear.

Theft 101: Or, How My Kindergartner's Purple Backpack Came Back

Truth Tuesday

Guest post by Amy Rogers Nazarov

The other day, someone stole my kindergartner's backpack off our front stoop.

We'd walked home from school together, like we did every day. Upon arrival, Jake grabbed his crotch.

"I have to pee, Mama!" he yelled as he wriggled out of his backpack and tossed it onto the steps.

I unlocked the door fast, helped Jake throw off his coat, and cheered him down the hall to the potty. He made it in time, so we celebrated with a banana smoothie, sweetened with chocolate sauce, discreetly enhanced with wheat germ. I poured most of it in a glass for him but siphoned off a little for me.

I like these mundane after-school rituals and I hope Jake does, too. He's got big days at kindergarten: social interactions with peers to be negotiated, a tripod pencil grip to be practiced, numbers and rhymes to be learned. I think he benefits from chilling out at home with me, where the biggest decision we face is whether we'll make a skyscraper out of blocks or try to replicate a stop sign in chalk on the blackboard.

"Your backpack is still outside, honey," I suddenly remembered. "Let's get it."

We walked back up the hall, the door and looked at an empty stoop. The purple backpack – containing his lunch bag and homework folder – was not there.

Good Grief

Truth Thursday

The American Psychiatric Association is in the midst of a controversy around the updating of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders or D.S.M., psychiatry’s official tool for deciding between mental disorders and “normality.” 

Apparently, the DSM-5 is preparing to classify grief from the death of a loved one as clinical depression, as early as two weeks after the loss.  The change eliminates the so-called “bereavement exclusion,” which exempts grieving people from diagnoses of depression for two months unless their symptoms are self-destructively extreme.

The change was first proposed over a year ago, and there has been a hue and cry in psychiatric circles about this change in classification.  The controversy has yet to die down, and the D.S.M. 5 will not be published until May. 

Opponents of the classification change worry that it is an easy way to simply medicate people to ease their pain, when in fact, the need for processing, perhaps coupled with talk therapy and simply time is usually the best way to move through profound loss. 

I haven’t been in therapy in many years, but my understanding is that there is a movement towards medicating for even what could be classified as mild depression, rather than spending months on the couch working out your problems through talk and analysis. My hunch is that this has to do with the movement in our quite-broken health care and insurance system, the same one that moves women who have had babies onto the conveyor belt out of the hospital the same day they give birth, or, when generous, the next.

In other words, a quick fix for something that probably could benefit from a little more time.

Final Exit

Truth Thursday

As I write this, it is a day before my neighbor and friend will begin her final journey. She is planning to stop eating and drinking in order to put an end to what has been horrendous emotional and physical suffering for many years.

By the time this gets posted, we will have said our final goodbyes, and I am fairly certain she will have died.

She called me at work yesterday, and asked me, quite insistently, to come over last night after I finished having dinner with my family. Honestly, I was so tired from a long day at work, I wasn’t up for a visit. But there was something in her voice, a voice that has called me many times for help over the years, that was different. I knew that I could not beg off. 

So as my husband was cleaning up, I took a deep breath and walked the few steps across the street that I have walked many times before, often with a prescription in hand that I’ve picked up for her, or an extra challah that I’ve baked on a Friday night. 

Her husband guided me upstairs, and I sat down on the bed right next to her. She actually looked quite fit, and happy, compared to many times in recent months where she barely looked alive. She grabbed my hand and my arm and made hearty physical contact with me. We looked into each other’s eyes, and I asked her what was wrong.

She told me that I needed to read her letter. In it she described the unbearable pain that has afflicted her over the years, both mentally and physically. I had known about her bi-polar disorder, and her severe Parkinson’s, but I had not known about her respiratory challenges as well, which have plagued her since she was a child.

In the letter, she referred to her conditions as “thieves,” in that they have robbed her from her loved ones.  But I also know that she was robbed from her loved one – one of her beloved sons – when he was a young man. He died of cancer, and sharing stories of that loss and the loss of my own young baby boy is what brought us close together many years ago.

Teach Our Children Well

Truth Thursday

I did something this week I haven’t done in years – I gave a homeless person $1 as I walked by. I was in a tony part of town, hyper-conscious of having just repaired my Mac computer at the local Apple store, toting a fancy $10 salad home for lunch, wearing a cute coat I had picked up in Paris on my last trip, and looking at my iPhone. 

And there he was, sitting on a box, smoking a cigarette, his hand out. And without really thinking about it, I reached into my wallet, handed him a dollar bill, and smiled, and he smiled back and thanked me.

And now I can’t stop thinking about it.

Decades ago, living in New York during what was the height of the homelessness/crack crisis, I told myself that I would not give money to people on the street. Instead, I would do what many people tell themselves they do – I would give it to organizations that help the homeless.

Except I never have. I give money away, but I always wind up giving to organizations that lead the fight around social issues that I care most deeply about, and frankly, homelessness has never quite made it to the top of that long list. I once participated in a rally and march on Washington for housing, but that was more because my boss at the time was involved and asked me to be too.

But I was so conscious of who I was, walking in Bethesda that morning, with all my fancy accouterments, compared with this poor man sitting on the sidewalk, that I caved. And it made me feel a little better about myself … momentarily.

My kids and I have had some conversations about homelessness and extreme poverty. My oldest is very self righteous about how privileged we are, and although he doesn’t do anything in a volunteer capacity about it, he understands. My two younger kids have come to Manna, a local food distribution warehouse for our county, to help pack boxes; we’ve volunteered at the local JCC on Thanksgiving and at local shelters on Christmas. Homelessness doesn’t generally stare them in the face as it did for me when I was there age, living in New York City, but they are vaguely aware and indeed, aware that it is our responsibility to help when we can.

But is any of it enough?