I am so glad today is Friday. I am feeling really down, and I don’t really have any particular reason why.

Just feel all heavy and wiped out and pointless. I realized that I have an all-day work day on Monday — when the school where I work is closed but it is part of my job to provide childcare from 8:30 AM to 6 PM. These days are long. They are tiring, for me and for the kids I care for, including my own.

Carla isn’t going to be there all day, though, because D is taking her to see a specialist. She’s reached the age of “it’s time to consider what to do.” Her issues are mainly relating to the way that she is able, or not able, to pay attention. We’ve met with our pediatric nurse practitioner, who is wonderful. The nurse agrees with our assessments, and with Carla’s teacher’s assessment that Carla almost certainly has ADHD.

ADHD, or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, is a poorly named disorder. If you aren’t familiar with it, it sounds like a label for kids who have ants in their pants, and don’t ever pay attention to anything. You know, those lazy kids who just spaz out all the time.

That’s certainly not the case. Sometimes ADHD has hyperactivity as a symptom, and sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes there are kids who can’t ever focus on anything, but not always. It’s really a cluster of symptoms, relating to one’s attention and activity levels, but it really does vary from case to case.

In Carla’s case, she has what they call the “inattentive” variety. This doesn’t really sound right either, since when she wants to, she is GREAT at being attentive. She can focus for hours and hours on something that she’s passionate about– say, making incredible art, or reading a whole book that she likes. She loves writing and will do that in a focused and determined way. But when something is the kind of task she’s NOT interested in, well, then — yeah, she’s a total space cadet.

Her mind is busy doing something else. It’s kind of like when you’re using a computer, and you KNOW you just clicked on something, but apparently the computer wasn’t ready to do what you asked. That’s how Carla gets — she just doesn’t respond sometimes. And it’s not easy to re-boot her, either!

“Huh? What?” she might say, coming back to reality, touching down from her little world of her own mind. “I spaced out,” she’ll admit. She even went so far as to tell me that spacing out is her super power.

In a way, she’s absolutely right. People with ADHD often have the ability to do INCREDIBLE things. They have a tendency to be bright, engaged, interesting, creative, and when they turn that super power focus to the “ON” position, well then: WHAMMY! What amazing success comes from that!

Unfortunately, life often contains things that don’t automatically trigger her WHAMMY attention. She might not be that interested in the math lesson — either she’s already mastered it or maybe just doesn’t care. Whatever the case is, she tunes out and misses a lot of stuff as a result.

Her teacher sees this happening even more when Carla is doing some class work with a partner– her partner is already finished and she’s just finally starting to put pencil to paper.

So anyway, we’re on to the investigation phase of what can we do to help Carla. I don’t think it’s easy– but there are routine, behavioral things that we do to help her and then there’s the medication route. Unfortunately, she’s anti-meds. Because they taste yucky.

It is hard being a parent.

Carla also has a problem with bed-wetting. She’s 8 and a half. She’s getting BIG. To still be wetting the bed these days is really getting to her. It’s every damn, night, too. I would be lying if I said I don’t mind washing sheets every day. She’s too big to wear a pull up– even the “deluxe” kinds that are supposed to be so great for big kids.

Her appointment on Monday is for the bed-wetting issues, but I think it all ties into the ADHD. People with ADHD have something different about the way their brain is “wired.” I believe that when she is asleep, her brain’s attention to body signal is pretty much zilch. That is my theory as to why she wets the bed: because her brain is somewhere ELSE.

I wish I could go to this appointment with her, but I am confident that D will be extremely competent at asking the right questions, getting good information. He is really on the ball, and understands Carla’s attention issues quite well. Nevertheless, I do wish I could be there.

As usual, writing has helped me somewhat. When I started this post, I just felt really dreary and dreadful. I am still down, but I feel a little bit better. (If people were to leave me little nice comments, that would help, too. Hint. Hint.)

Well, shoot, it turns out there ARE cats out there for whom a life of ease at our house is in fact, quite adequate.

A friend of a friend recently found herself needing to find a home for her cats. We took one of them, and we’re in the process of nursing her to better health. Saffron, the cat in question, is a small calico cat who is very, very skinny. The friend of a friend had to find her a new home because her (soon to be) ex husband was not taking care of the cats. So Saffron is clearly in need of some TLC. Wouldn’t you know, that Carla and Annie are VERY attentive cat mommies?

As for Mini, well, you snooze, you lose, Cat Lady. She’ll have to find another family for Mini – maybe one where the psychological profiles of the other cats are more suitable. Ahem.

Meanwhile, JOY of JOYS, we are being sued AGAIN by our City of Brotherly Love. I think they have figured out that suing us is a good way to collect “court fees” for cases that get dismissed and never even come before court. I am livid, though, at the accountant who this time caused us to get sued. Apparently, he did NOT file the taxes he’d prepared, as we’d thought. Grrr. Bad communication is not acceptable for CPA’s — if he wasn’t going to file our taxes he should have at least told us so.

At work, I’ve been working hard to help this one little boy. He’s so emotionally volatile – he will go from fine to SCREAMING BLOOD MURDER. When I talk to him about why he’s so angry, he tells me “it’s because my parents yell at me all the time. They’re just always mad at me, because I cry.” His parents are divorced, and there’s a step mom who seems really nice. I have met both his parents, and they both seem plenty nice as well. I have never seen them say anything even in a harsh voice to this kid. I suspect that his parents might be angry, but not at HIM. But little kids don’t always see things that way — they often think that everything is about them.

My heart? About a thousand little pieces on the floor. Not sure how to help him, other than to be kind, and listen, and remove him from the room when he’s getting upset with other kids. It is really doing damage to his friendships that he can’t resolve minor conflicts without screaming and crying. I’m not sure what to say to his parents, other than to report the facts — that he gets upset easily and is having trouble controlling anger. I wonder how his parents would take it if I suggested a nearby therapy-for-kids practice that I know.

Tonight I threw together some steamed chicken dumplings, using left over chicken breast, some fresh garlic and ginger, and won-ton wrappers. The trick is to beat an eggs, add some soy sauce, and then add whatever you want to try out. Tonight I threw in some diced portabello mushrooms and green cabbage. If you don’t have an Asian market near you, you may have a hard time finding won-ton wrappers. We are lucky to have a really big Asian supermarket not that far from us, and we bought some wrappers and can keep them in the freezer. Annie really liked the dumplings, though Carla thought them too spicy. Perhaps too much garlic and/or ginger for her tastes. I also made scallop dumplings, using some sea scallops that I’d had in the freezer. I was delighted to find that they were still quite good. The garlic and the ginger really cut any fishiness from the dumplings. Too bad Drob doesn’t like scallops. Alas, Cammy and I had to eat them all ourselves. Sigh.

The other goofy thing that happened this weekend was that we had this Cat Lady visit us to see our house, and meet our cats, to see if the cat she’s supposedly fostering (ie, trying to find a home for) would be well served to live here. Hah, a no-brainer right? A nice family, pet friendly, everyone is nice. We met this cat– Mini– at Cat Lady’s house, and she’s super sweet. We thought, great, that’ll be it for us. Four cats. I know, I’m nuts, right? But we kind of all fell in love with Mini. I thought for sure we’d have adopted her by now.

But no. Cat Lady called me back yesterday and said she’d become too emotionally attached to Mini to give her to us, as yet. She might be able to do so, but she isn’t sure. Okaaaay. So meanwhile my dear children have cleaned their rooms, made cat presents, concocted various schemes for helping Mini get acclimated, etc. They were disappointed to hear we’d been, essentially, turned down by Cat Lady.

What kind of cat rescuer turns down an adoptive family?? I ask you.

Memo to myself: Do not answer the cat personals anymore. They are not really written by cats, but by nutty Cat Ladies who will probably screw with you.

“Annie! Carla! Time to brush teeth!” I say, as the children hustle upstairs.

Annie stops in her tracks and stares up at me with huge sad eyes.

“Ooh! We were about to travel back in time! Mom!” she exclaims. I tell her she has ten more minutes, and I head for refuge in my own room.

Five minutes later — she and Carla bustle into the room.

“We need toilet paper, because we’re in another world,” Carla tells me, matter-of-factly.

—

Apparently the girls are in ancient Egypt tonight, wrapping up some mummies with toilet paper. It’s really adorable when they play like this. I almost hate to interrupt them at all, but it is getting late and there’s school tomorrow. But really, what’s more important, sleep and promptness and being all orderly, or wild and wonderful creative abandon in another world?

5 extra minutes. Just because.

I think I am officially a Cat Lady now. We are going to get another cat. Another cat, you say? But you have three cats already? What do you want another one for?

I saw a sign up for a cat who needed a home. A small cat, fluffy and orange. We met this cat, who is being fostered after being abandoned by a family who moved away. Her name is Mini — because she’s little.

I sure hope this cat will be as sweet and friendly at our house as she was when we met her. The Cat Lady I’m getting Mini from wants to do a home visit at our house, you know, to make sure it’s suitable for Mini. She will take a formal personality assessment of each of my three cats and make sure that Mini will be able to cope with that tribe of cats. Once the results are all in, and the house seems OK, we’ll probably take Mini in. We can always send her back to the Cat Lady if it doesn’t work out for whatever reason.

Anyway. Yesterday was a half birthday for Carla. She’s Eight And A Half now. She wants to know if Mini is her half birthday present, or what. She wants to know why we aren’t doing more to celebrate this glorious event (turning 8.5). She’s such a sassy little thing. I love her to bits, of course.

There are so many colorful words for being mentally ill — crazy, nuts, bananas, bonkers, out of one’s mind, cracked, touched, goofy, schizo, loopy, psycho, lunatic, mad, deranged, barmy, maniac. It’s no wonder, too, since when one is dealing with the behavior of a person with mental illness, it can be quite frustrating, alarming, and confusing.

When that person is someone you love, someone you knew prior to illness, it can really feel like the person you knew left, went away, even died. It’s as if the person you loved and liked is gone, and was replaced by some stranger, who can be demanding or irrational, or hurtful or just bizarre. It is heartbreaking, for sure.

At the same time, as you can tell from the myriad words used to describe insanity, there is a huge stigma attached to it. No surprise then, that people tend to be suspicious of getting help when they need it – there is a taint to getting counseling, even though being mentally ill and needing counseling are really not the same thing. Ironically, if more people went through some counseling in their lives, that might help reduce the amount of actual mental illness, because people could work their their emotional behavior before it becomes truly a problem.

I find “mental illness” to be a phrase that is really not helpful, either. It is so vague. I appreciate its clinical sound, because so many people who suffer from mental illness are truely ILL and require some MEDICAL attention. But this over-arching term also threatens to remove all meaning.

I ask myself… am I mentally ill? I mean, I do take an anti-depressant pill each day. And sometimes I’ve had trouble where my mood has been low, I’ve gone through suicidal times where thoughts of death were constantly with me. So why is it that I find myself squirming when I ask if I am mentally ill? I’d have to say, I certainly don’t feel ill right now.

My anti-depressants work wonders. I feel great. I haven’t been having any trouble at all, and even find myself failing to over-react to the behavior of others. By which I mean, I know I would have reacted badly to certain situations, and cried or fallen into a black mood, even thought of suicide had I been depressed when someone, say, snapped at me over something trivial. Instead I just react with a calm and, dare I say, NORMAL response?

So if I’m not “mentally ill” now, was I before I started my anti-depressants? If not, then why would I even need them? You start to see some circular logic here, right?

My kids often grin and hug me and relish in how “crazy” mommy is. Yes, sometimes I am silly, or goofy, or funny. I like saying weird things to provoke a laugh, to provoke a bit of healthy confusion. I sometimes pretend to be other people for the amusement of the kids. Most recently, I donned a huge goofy blond wig and swaggered around with a British accent– I told the kids I was Keith Richards (not that they knew who that was!). It was hilarious to the adults around. They pulled off my wig, giggling and laughing at the spectacle.

Crazy mommy! Hah! Yay! A more normal person would not do all the things I do, but that’s not mental illness, that’s just my eccentric personality.

Illness of the mind is something that is awfully subjective. If I really believed that I was Keith Richards, yeah, that would be a problem. I was, in fact, only pretending. Does this make me insensitive to people who have actual delusions of being an aging rock star of a different gender than themselves? Nah… such people just have my sympathy.

There but for the grace of god go I: I am grateful that I am able to manage my depression (the common cold! ha! of mental illness! there’s that word again, damn!) so easily. I’ve had a lot of sessions of therapy, working on relationship issues, communication, self-esteem, and other issues. I can say that those sessions certainly help me to see my behavior and the behavior of others through various helpful lenses. At the same time, I feel that it is the work of the anti-depressant medication that has lifted me up and away from the seriously bad parts of my depression. Anti-depressants are not cure-alls, but frankly, I think they can come close.

Except when they don’t. It is so hard when one is going along through life, happily doing great and feeling normal (or maybe just good-crazy instead of bad-crazy) and then suddenly for no understandable reason, the black moods, the whining, the self-hatred, the whatever-one’s-issue comes back.

What occurs to me is to ask: What are we? Where does the “me” come from and where does it go to, if I am having a mental illness. I ask this, of myself, but really what I want to know is, where do people store their personalities — or their souls for that matter? It’s not exactly under the hood, between the radiator and the engine.

We are precious bundles of reactions, hormones, brain chemicals, situationally provoked. We rise and fall with our environment, and we feel — it is in our bodies, and our minds.

When a person working with D was struck by mental illness, his work performance was terrible. This makes perfect sense — who can work productively when feeling suicidal? It was so awful, because we knew that he was ill, and he knew, too. I just remember something that D told me he’d said, or perhaps written… “This isn’t me. I know this work is bad, but that is not me…”

The disconnect is between what one feels is one’s own SELF — and the strange behavior and accompanying emotions that have replaced the self. Sometimes, though, this self-awareness is actually absent. Then we have people who are around the affected person who look on in wonder, often in anger, confusion, derision… oh, god, what happened to so-and-so? She’s turned into a psycho.

If it’s your partner who is ill, you might feel deserted, hurt, angry. Everything is disrupted by mental illness, which it also is with physical illness. If your partner is going through chemotherapy, you know that they are ill because of something quite real, quite dangerous.

But mental illness doesn’t have the same feeling to it – it’s more like a person is no longer doing what they should and perhaps even just choosing not to. They don’t get out of bed, or they stay up all night. They react in weird and inappropriate ways. Oh, it’s awful. And at the same time, the treatment isn’t easily understood either.

Modern medicine has a long way to go. I’m pondering all these things, when I should probably be getting ready for work. A little philosophical thought about madness in the middle of the day never hurt anyone. Now. Back to my regularly scheduled activities.

“Look, Santa put coal in my stocking!”

“I didn’t put antlers on my wish list.”

“This Examined Breakfast – Panncakes with Pann!”

We were nine at the table. Well, ten when Moonlight the cat jumped up. (Shoo!)

This morning we arrived at school promptly at 8:30 AM sharp, bookbags and lunches at the ready, gym shoes appropriately on the right feet. Great! Now let’s do that again tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow!

I am glad to be back into some form of structure. Right now I’m sitting at home alone (just me and the cats and the guinea pigs, that is) and I’m listening to music on Pandora.com. If you don’t know Pandora, and you like listening to music, then you should really check it out. It’s free to listen to music, you don’t download anything, and they have just about everything. .

I feel really good. I am delighted that the holidays are “done” and I feel really satisfied. I do wish D (my husband) were able to get a break like I had. Having two full weeks to reset my brain, focus on home, etc., was really nice. Yes, he was off for some of the time, too. But he seems really stressed out and not at all re-charged. This makes me sad.

I have no New Years Resolutions at this point. I mean, I could think of some things that I could just, well, ignore. I don’t know about lofty goals. I do wish I’d get the hang of being prompt to school and work Every Day. This kind of drudgery isn’t my thing, unfortunately. But I think if I make up new ways to think of it, new rewards, new systems, say every month or so… that might help.

I wish more people visited / read / commented here at This Examined Life. I could make it a goal to publicize my blog more in the new year. It is so lonely writing and not knowing if someone (besides D) is reading it. I wish I knew what creative and fun ways that other people tackle the everyday challenges of work and parenthood — well that is actually one of the reasons I enjoy reading other people’s blogs!

The next time I do a conceptual overhaul on my home/work routines, I’ll try to blog about it and share here what works, what doesn’t.

Happy New Year, Internet Buddies Far and Near!!!

Oh, and, here’s a picture from Christmas morn. Note the presents stacked all around the … guinea pig cage?!? We had the world’s smallest Christmas tree, a live baby tree in a pot, but up on a pedestal and it’s not in the picture!