(no subject)
Aug. 30th, 2008 09:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_rckI've been in the depths of incoherent melancholy and wanting something that I can't name or define. It's cyclical, something that happens for a couple of days every menstrual cycle and is one of the reasons I'm kind of looking forward to menopause. Scott used to buy me baklava when this happened, but I can't have that any more due to the developing nut allergy (I *miss* baklava!), and we haven't found a good substitute.
Not that baklava made it go away. It was more that the fact that he would go out to buy me something helped. I've tried explaining that, but the concept seems to be a difficult one.
The mood is one that I describe as a rock kicking one. It's the sort of mood where a person could stand in one spot, kicking rocks and dirt repeatedly and whining about how there's nothing to do and the world sucks and everything's boring and stupid and... Yeah. When I think about it much, I'm embarrassed because it sounds so stupid.
I can use this mood to write if circumstances are good, but that only works if I can retreat from other people. It can power good role playing, but again that only works sometimes. It has to be just the right sort of role playing because I get irritated by ridiculous things or spiral off into angsty depression.
This time around, the mood is feeding on some real issues. Cordelia going to kindergarten changes our lives vastly. It's a milestone, and it's making me think about things I haven't for quite a while. Scott's working awful hours this weekend, 7-7 today and possibly 7-3 tomorrow. We think he'll have Monday off. He's exhausted, physically and emotionally, and feeling trapped.
With regard to Cordelia, I've put almost all of my time and energy into her or things for her for six years (counting the pregnancy). Kindergarten is by no means the end. There are going to be a lot of new challenges, including things that I can't even imagine yet and things that I can imagine but have no idea how to address. I'm also going to have some time to myself, time at home to myself. Three hours a day, M-F, isn't a vast amount, but it's riches in many ways.
Still, this transition is making me think about other things. There's part of me that would like a bigger family. I've squashed that part of me for many quite practical reasons, and it's a decision that neither Scott nor I are likely to consider changing. Still, grief for those impossible possibilities hits me more often than I like. I think it would even if I had a dozen kids. It's like something a character said in one of Mary Renault's books about how nobody's written a tragedy with the central theme of characters who should have met and didn't because such a tragedy would be unbearable. Cordelia is wonderful because she's Cordelia. I just wonder, if I had other kids, who would they be?
Most of the time, I don't want another child. I'm too exhausted by getting this one this far. I see babies and vaguely want one (I'm not sure, if one has baby hunger, that it ever quite goes away), but there's also a component of utter relief that I don't have one, that I'm not committed to caring for another baby, toddler, pre-schooler.
If I were five years younger, the temptation would be huge, but I'm forty-one. I'll be fifty-four when Cordelia finishes high school. My illnesses add years to my functional age, and as I get older, unless we find medicines that help, my functional age is going to remain the same distance from my actual age. (This is why I laugh a bit at the 'non-degenerative' label on FMS. Yeah, it doesn't get worse exactly, but simply being alive is some degree degenerative. Feeling forty at twenty is different from feeling sixty at forty or eighty at sixty.)
The problem of Scott's job is harder for me to think about. He's really trapped by the needs of his family, my limitations and his current salary. He works in manufacturing. The work involves physical labor, quite a bit of it. The factory is hot and humid enough that he's had heat stroke a couple of times in the nearly fifteen years he's worked there (and coworkers have had the same problem). He ends up with small bruises, burns and cuts almost every day. He has mandatory overtime with no real advance notice. He doesn't know, when he goes in in the mornings, when they'll let him leave or if they'll require that he come in early the next morning. He doesn't know until late Friday whether or not he has Saturday and/or Sunday off.
Before I stopped being able to work, we were talking about having him quit to go back to school full time. It would have involved borrowing a lot of money, but we could do it as long as I was employed and providing health insurance. Then I fell apart and lost my job. It took a year and a half to get the various disability claims settled so that I had income again, and that income was (and is) less than I made while working.
We'd always known that I couldn't handle pregnancy and child rearing while I was working. I was too sick in general. We'd talked about trying to adopt, but that still had problems-- the cost and the barriers to my being able to care for a child were considerable. Scott's schedule was such that I'd have had to get any theoretical child to daycare before I went to work, either on foot or by bus, and be ready to pick the child up the same way after work. Scott might be able to do after work pick up, but we wouldn't know until mid-afternoon of any given day.
By the time I got my disability insurance (social security was relatively easy. I was fortunate, extraordinarily fortunate), we'd realized that we had a window for having a child. I was thirty-four. I was at home all day. Caring for a child wouldn't be easy, but a lot of things I couldn't do for myself, I could do for a person depending on me.
We didn't make the decision quickly. We looked at the inheritability of asthma, allergies, fibromyalgia, and anxiety disorders. We considered whether pursuing medication for my anxiety might be necessary. We looked at Scott's job. I talked to some other women with disabilities who had had children. We looked at our support network.
Having Cordelia came, to some extent, with a commitment on Scott's part to staying employed. His job provides between two thirds and three quarters of our income and provides Cordelia's health insurance. (Scott and I both have fallback health insurance due to my long term disability insurance, but I can't add new dependents.)
Scott's current job doesn't provide much in the way of measurable, transferable skills. He's learned to do a lot of work with hand tools, and he has a fair amount of confidence in his ability to repair certain types of machines, given time. Any entry level job he could find in a different field wouldn't pay more than three fifths of what he makes now, and three fifths assumes getting lucky. We could probably figure out how to live on that and still pay the bills, but it would be very hard. It would involve cutting out a lot of extras we enjoy-- cable, Netflix, DSL (and our websites), the cleaning lady, occasional pizza, driving anywhere for pleasure or family visits, Origins, keeping the house at a temperature that doesn't make my pain worse, BookMooch, my psychiatrist and so on. The pay gap simply keeps getting worse, too.
The current job is pretty secure. The company's not likely to go anywhere, even in Michigan in this economic climate. That can't be said for a lot of other jobs around here.
I just wish that Scott had something to do that didn't leave him drained and miserable. He's happy to see me and Cordelia. He enjoys his time at home. It's just that he spends most of his time doing something that hurts him, that he doesn't feel proud of (though he's not ashamed of it), that he only values because it lets him take care of me and Cordelia, that doesn't leave him very much time for anything else. A measure of how he feels about his job is that, after a bad day, he'll often buy a lottery ticket. That happens at least once a week. He knows the odds, but it's the most constructive thing he can think of doing.
Before Cordelia, he took an evening class every semester at the local community college. It didn't go anywhere because what he learned kept ending up out of date before he completed any given cycle of classes, but he can't even do that now. We need him home when he can be.
I'm about to get some free time. I can't really share it with Scott. I can't do anything much to make things better for him. I can refrain from making things worse, but I can't improve them much if at all. I wish I could. I wish.
I'm not really looking for advice or solutions on this one. I'm primarily venting the stress. We have a pretty good life compared to many. I suspect there are always regrets for roads not taken and desires for things out of reach.
Not that baklava made it go away. It was more that the fact that he would go out to buy me something helped. I've tried explaining that, but the concept seems to be a difficult one.
The mood is one that I describe as a rock kicking one. It's the sort of mood where a person could stand in one spot, kicking rocks and dirt repeatedly and whining about how there's nothing to do and the world sucks and everything's boring and stupid and... Yeah. When I think about it much, I'm embarrassed because it sounds so stupid.
I can use this mood to write if circumstances are good, but that only works if I can retreat from other people. It can power good role playing, but again that only works sometimes. It has to be just the right sort of role playing because I get irritated by ridiculous things or spiral off into angsty depression.
This time around, the mood is feeding on some real issues. Cordelia going to kindergarten changes our lives vastly. It's a milestone, and it's making me think about things I haven't for quite a while. Scott's working awful hours this weekend, 7-7 today and possibly 7-3 tomorrow. We think he'll have Monday off. He's exhausted, physically and emotionally, and feeling trapped.
With regard to Cordelia, I've put almost all of my time and energy into her or things for her for six years (counting the pregnancy). Kindergarten is by no means the end. There are going to be a lot of new challenges, including things that I can't even imagine yet and things that I can imagine but have no idea how to address. I'm also going to have some time to myself, time at home to myself. Three hours a day, M-F, isn't a vast amount, but it's riches in many ways.
Still, this transition is making me think about other things. There's part of me that would like a bigger family. I've squashed that part of me for many quite practical reasons, and it's a decision that neither Scott nor I are likely to consider changing. Still, grief for those impossible possibilities hits me more often than I like. I think it would even if I had a dozen kids. It's like something a character said in one of Mary Renault's books about how nobody's written a tragedy with the central theme of characters who should have met and didn't because such a tragedy would be unbearable. Cordelia is wonderful because she's Cordelia. I just wonder, if I had other kids, who would they be?
Most of the time, I don't want another child. I'm too exhausted by getting this one this far. I see babies and vaguely want one (I'm not sure, if one has baby hunger, that it ever quite goes away), but there's also a component of utter relief that I don't have one, that I'm not committed to caring for another baby, toddler, pre-schooler.
If I were five years younger, the temptation would be huge, but I'm forty-one. I'll be fifty-four when Cordelia finishes high school. My illnesses add years to my functional age, and as I get older, unless we find medicines that help, my functional age is going to remain the same distance from my actual age. (This is why I laugh a bit at the 'non-degenerative' label on FMS. Yeah, it doesn't get worse exactly, but simply being alive is some degree degenerative. Feeling forty at twenty is different from feeling sixty at forty or eighty at sixty.)
The problem of Scott's job is harder for me to think about. He's really trapped by the needs of his family, my limitations and his current salary. He works in manufacturing. The work involves physical labor, quite a bit of it. The factory is hot and humid enough that he's had heat stroke a couple of times in the nearly fifteen years he's worked there (and coworkers have had the same problem). He ends up with small bruises, burns and cuts almost every day. He has mandatory overtime with no real advance notice. He doesn't know, when he goes in in the mornings, when they'll let him leave or if they'll require that he come in early the next morning. He doesn't know until late Friday whether or not he has Saturday and/or Sunday off.
Before I stopped being able to work, we were talking about having him quit to go back to school full time. It would have involved borrowing a lot of money, but we could do it as long as I was employed and providing health insurance. Then I fell apart and lost my job. It took a year and a half to get the various disability claims settled so that I had income again, and that income was (and is) less than I made while working.
We'd always known that I couldn't handle pregnancy and child rearing while I was working. I was too sick in general. We'd talked about trying to adopt, but that still had problems-- the cost and the barriers to my being able to care for a child were considerable. Scott's schedule was such that I'd have had to get any theoretical child to daycare before I went to work, either on foot or by bus, and be ready to pick the child up the same way after work. Scott might be able to do after work pick up, but we wouldn't know until mid-afternoon of any given day.
By the time I got my disability insurance (social security was relatively easy. I was fortunate, extraordinarily fortunate), we'd realized that we had a window for having a child. I was thirty-four. I was at home all day. Caring for a child wouldn't be easy, but a lot of things I couldn't do for myself, I could do for a person depending on me.
We didn't make the decision quickly. We looked at the inheritability of asthma, allergies, fibromyalgia, and anxiety disorders. We considered whether pursuing medication for my anxiety might be necessary. We looked at Scott's job. I talked to some other women with disabilities who had had children. We looked at our support network.
Having Cordelia came, to some extent, with a commitment on Scott's part to staying employed. His job provides between two thirds and three quarters of our income and provides Cordelia's health insurance. (Scott and I both have fallback health insurance due to my long term disability insurance, but I can't add new dependents.)
Scott's current job doesn't provide much in the way of measurable, transferable skills. He's learned to do a lot of work with hand tools, and he has a fair amount of confidence in his ability to repair certain types of machines, given time. Any entry level job he could find in a different field wouldn't pay more than three fifths of what he makes now, and three fifths assumes getting lucky. We could probably figure out how to live on that and still pay the bills, but it would be very hard. It would involve cutting out a lot of extras we enjoy-- cable, Netflix, DSL (and our websites), the cleaning lady, occasional pizza, driving anywhere for pleasure or family visits, Origins, keeping the house at a temperature that doesn't make my pain worse, BookMooch, my psychiatrist and so on. The pay gap simply keeps getting worse, too.
The current job is pretty secure. The company's not likely to go anywhere, even in Michigan in this economic climate. That can't be said for a lot of other jobs around here.
I just wish that Scott had something to do that didn't leave him drained and miserable. He's happy to see me and Cordelia. He enjoys his time at home. It's just that he spends most of his time doing something that hurts him, that he doesn't feel proud of (though he's not ashamed of it), that he only values because it lets him take care of me and Cordelia, that doesn't leave him very much time for anything else. A measure of how he feels about his job is that, after a bad day, he'll often buy a lottery ticket. That happens at least once a week. He knows the odds, but it's the most constructive thing he can think of doing.
Before Cordelia, he took an evening class every semester at the local community college. It didn't go anywhere because what he learned kept ending up out of date before he completed any given cycle of classes, but he can't even do that now. We need him home when he can be.
I'm about to get some free time. I can't really share it with Scott. I can't do anything much to make things better for him. I can refrain from making things worse, but I can't improve them much if at all. I wish I could. I wish.
I'm not really looking for advice or solutions on this one. I'm primarily venting the stress. We have a pretty good life compared to many. I suspect there are always regrets for roads not taken and desires for things out of reach.
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no subject
Date: 2008-08-30 02:04 pm (UTC)And, you know, there is stuff you can do to make his life better. Thrive as much as you can within your disabilities. He's working for you and Cordelia, for those precious times you have together as a family, so spend the times they're not around resting and caring for yourself, so you have more spoons to spend enjoying your family life.
I know what you mean about those unborn children. In fact, it's reassuring to know it's not just a thing for women who can't have any at all. It is fading for me, now, although it'll never go away, I don't think. I just try not to focus too much on what ifs (for obvious reasons) and enjoy the life I have, venting along the way just as you have here.
I'm very happy for you, though, that you do have a loving family unit, that you have the gorgeous Cordelia and although I know you have a lot of pain and hardship, you can see and enjoy the value of those things. I know it's not always easy. *hugs*
no subject
Date: 2008-08-30 04:19 pm (UTC)I'm doing my best to thrive. I just want to give him as much as he gives me. I want to see him thriving, too.
I suspect that anybody with an imagination ends up mourning possibilities passed by. It's not just one possibility, either. Grief is complicated. ::hugs::
no subject
Date: 2008-08-30 02:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-30 04:32 pm (UTC)People still sometimes suggest that we should adopt a second child, but I'm rather afraid of the process. It also seems like a bad idea when this house doesn't have a good place for us to put another bed.
I try not to think about grandchildren. Cordelia's five, so she's years and years from making that sort of decision (at least I hope so). When I think about that stretch of time, I start thinking about how old I might be when she has kids.
no subject
Date: 2008-08-30 04:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-03 02:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-30 10:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-03 02:27 am (UTC)I still have to dig out the birthday card I bought for you and send it. My apologies on the delay. I may mail it in time for you your next birthday.
Oh, and Cordelia's been asking questions about you due to the postcards. She likes them, particularly the one with bears.
no subject
Date: 2008-09-01 02:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-03 02:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-02 07:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-03 02:27 am (UTC)