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| I'm buried in a pretty deep hole in terms of how many things I was supposed to have done already that haven't even made my list yet. That can be discouraging but everyone keeps telling me to do one thing at a time and eventually I'll catch up. That's a method I've never really tried before and so far it seems to be working. Unfortunately I filed two gigantic petitions on Friday and neglected to staple the required appendix onto the back of them so I inadvertently created yet another time-consuming errand for myself. That's annoying. On the other hand I managed to finish a brief yesterday so assuming the helpful and motivated employees at the copy place can get it copied within four hours as promised complete with binding and cover sheets I won't have to go to jail for contempt of court. I've been having a little problem with the helpful and motivated employees at the copy place ever since the people who liked me moved onto better jobs and the copy place hired new people who don't care about me at all. It's not that they intentionally don't help me. It's that they don't particularly try to help me either. It's like this: *if* they get a copy job completed in the time promised and *if* they do it correctly, it's all good for me. But if they don't, they don't. The problem is that the courts are not particularly flexible about their requirements. Things have to be at the courthouse in proper form at the right time. Sometimes when I walk into the copy place I feel like I'm taking my life into my hands. Or at least my license. The solution is to buy my own binding machine and card stock and rent a copier from someone and eventually I might have to do that but for now my ultra-cheap office doesn't come with a binding machine *or* card stock and it only comes with a part-time, rickety shared copier.
I have a room of my own now in every sense including the Virginia Woolf sense and it's dark and quiet and I'm getting a lot of sleep. I could write in my room. I could do yoga. All kinds of possibilities are open for me now that I'm sleeping more than thirty minutes continuously during the night and I don't have to wear squishy, gross shooting ear plugs made out of silicone all night long. On the other hand I'm still buried at the bottom of a deep black hole as memorialized by my to-do list and by the late notices that keep showing up in my mail so right now I can really only use my room to keep up. I can only hope that my husband's patience for our separate lifestyle will last beyond the time when I eventually climb out of the hole so I can actually use the room of my own for something more interesting than lifestyle maintenance. I don't want to live a separate lifestyle on a permanent basis. I always thought it was kind of sad and pathetic when middle-aged married people gave up on romance and decided to have their own bedrooms. Admittedly that thought was arrogant and ignorant but even so I retain my basic antipathy for that sort of arrangement if it is going to be permanent. But I can imagine enjoying it for a year. I have to tell you it's really nice to wake up alone in a dark, quiet room with my own bathroom attached. I've got time to wash my face and brush my teeth in peace.
My husband has been enduring a modern reenactment of King Lear but without the familial relationships wherein he (unfortunately) is Cordelia and the real fault lies not with Regan or Goneril but with Lear himself. I'm re-reading Lear so I can remember how it ends for Cordelia because my vague memory is...not well. Maybe that's because Lear is considered a tragedy. At any rate it's hard to explain much about the situation other than to say it continues to amuse and depress and amaze us both. The firm was saved, recently. We, however, are not yet saved, and may never be. This makes it complicated for me to think about turning work away as we will either have to figure out how to make a lot of it together or reconsider putting the house on the market, again. The second or third time you confront this kind of problem it stops feeling like a dramatic emergency and starts feeling more like a run-of-the-mill thing. People adjust I guess. In this case at least I'm no longer fearful of big changes in our financial situation.
My clever endocrinologist asked me recently whether I had any issues with turning 40 last May and I smiled and told him about my big party and recounted all the reasons I'm glad to be 40, chief among them that people don't underestimate my age as often as they used to. They frequently appear confused about my age because something in my face must tell them I'm no longer 20 even though everything else about me (for what reason?!) apparently screams out "underage." It's a relief to be accorded a little respect. It's nice that my clients and their parents can meet me in a conference room and not ask when my boss will arrive.
That's not the whole story, however, and the whole story is this: lately while I'm jogging on the treadmill and listening to songs that are aging as fast as I am I frequently have to run through a kind of panic because I'm 40 and I'm a writer who doesn't write. The pain in my left hip which appeared after the kids and the fat around my middle and the wrinkles on my chest are beginning to make me aware that I might not be immortal. I've never actually considered the possibility that my time could realistically be limited and I might actually run out of time if I continue to procrastinate for too many more decades.
Well. I'll leave you with that uplifting thought as it's time to get my daughter from dance and launch myself through an entirely busy schedule of errands and appointments and practices and homework, time ticking, hour glass glued to a table, life ebbing away... | | |
| I'm in the zone but the zone, for me, requires frequent breaks.
From my office window I can see toilet paper fluttering in the breeze, hanging from the neighbor's trees, no doubt left by the same juvenile delinquents who think it's hilarious to "ding dong ditch" us at 10 p.m. My office is a disaster. The floor is covered with papers and records of a criminal trial and legal reference books and water colors my four-year-old has been avidly painting for me, mixed in with stress-eating wrappers (popcorn, GF cereal bars, discarded tea bags) and Bendaroos and the contents of my purse which I emptied on the floor when I couldn't find my lucky pen.
I'm in my pajamas wearing noise-cancelling headphones. Even with the headphones I can hear my husband walking back and forth in the kitchen and using kitchen appliances to make who-knows-what.
My kids are dressing up like Superbowl participants, in costumes of their own creation since none of them has ever played football and they have no real equipment. My oldest has created enormous 80s style shoulder pads out of something. They have black streaks on their faces under their eyes and inexplicably they're wearing baseball hats turned backwards on their heads. My daughter is in her underwear wearing only one of her brother's cast-off soccer jerseys. She's the coach. Sometimes, as if from a great distance, the sound of her tiny voice yelling, "hut hut hut!" seeps in past the headphones. I guess they're doing the pre-show now. Not sure what one-man football teams do, before the Superbowl begins. So glad my husband had the presence of mind to photograph their costumes.
It's like musical theater here, every day.
I had to ditch out on Ladies Night Away From Football because I procrastinated to the point that if I don't finish my case tonight there is a realistic possibility I'll be hauled into court and held in contempt. This is what happens when you procrastinate: something better comes along at the last minute and you have to choose between saying no or going to jail.
I idly asked my husband to stop reading Anna Karenina and make a batch of gluten free brownies for me and guess what?
He did! | | |
| What I want to do: play with the kids all day and go for a cocktail and a movie with my friends this evening. Read. Clean out my office. Make lists for the week ahead.
What I have to do: finish writing an appellate brief for a man who is still a child who pick-pocketed someone and is going to end up in the pokey for eight years.
So.
As I am not tired and the noise-cancelling headphones are muting my children (oddly I can still hear them so they must be making a LOT of noise upstairs) I have no excuse but to acquiesce to responsibility and work.
Ah, childhood.
Ah, young adulthood.
Ah, hours and hours and hours of time spent doing whatever I chose. Where did you go?
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| Okay, so in 2005, I had my daughter and I was gluten-free and had been since January when I got pregnant. On the advice of my doctors. Advice of *her* doctors, really. After she was born my sense of well-being tanked because new babies suck the life right out of you and it's only worse if you have other living children who still require your constant attention.
Six months after she was born I stopped nursing her and started eating gluten again and felt perfectly fine.
But a year later I sought out a physician for the first time in 8 years because I had: migraines, reflux, indigestion, fatigue, muscle aches and a rash on my shins. Oh, and my hair was falling out. So I said to the doctor, a woman who came highly recommended, "hey, do you think it's possible I have celiac disease?"
(Symptoms of celiac disease include: digestive problems, fatigue, muscle aches, alopecia (hair loss), migraines or neurological problems and sometimes a rash.)
She said, "oh no. No one has that. It's rare. You don't have it."
So I said, "my kids have it, and it's genetic."
She said, "eh, no, I'm sure you don't have it."
She prescribed: Maxxalt for migraines, Synthroid for fatigue and hair loss, Prilosec for reflux, a steroid for the rash and inexplicably, Advair for asthma (which I don't have).
Today when I was explaining this to a friend while we were on our weekly six-mile walk she asked, sensibly, "well, you didn't actually FILL all those prescriptions, did you?"
Uh, yeah, I did. I'm weirdly deferential to professionals, even though I have firsthand experience with their utter wrongness. I can't help myself. So at 38 I went from taking birth control to taking: 1) birth control, 2) Synthroid, 3) Advair, 4) Prilosec, 5) Maxxalt and using a steroid cream for the rash on my shins.
Once I diagnosed myself with celiac disease and went gluten-free (more than a YEAR later) I stopped taking the Advair, Prilosec and Maxxalt. But for some reason I couldn't get comfortable with taking myself off the Synthroid.
Recently I've been extremely fatigued again. I've been so tired I keep thinking I must be pregnant. Working is torture. Reading is hard because I fall asleep. So, I went to a well-known endocrinologist.
I'm off Synthroid now. Yay!
But that leaves the fatigue.
Diagnosis: SNORING.
My clever endocrinologist asked me lots of questions about my fatigue, among them whether anything was interrupting my sleep. Oh, yeah, well there is that thing about my husband being depressed for all of 2009 and gaining weight and SNORING loud enough to wake a dead person.
Not being dead, I'm even easier to wake.
I probably wake up 5 five times during an average 7 hour night with him. I have a fancy collection of ear plugs, most of them made for shooting, because there isn't much in this world louder than a firing range. Except my husband, SNORING.
For a week now I've been sleeping upstairs in the guest room, which is sad and all that, but whatever. Yesterday my husband said, first thing in the morning, "wow, you look a lot better, now that you're sleeping." YEAH! I feel a lot better too! I can concentrate for more than five minutes! Who knew sleep was so indispensable? | | |
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