I am having an attack of insecurity. There are (currently) four things I can blame, I think: 1. My husband is on call, and when he is on call we spend less time together and I feel ignored and needy. 2. My primary client, for the first time ever, returned a project to me and asked me to redo it. Not minor edits, but a complete redo because I had so completely missed the mark. 3. I have been ordering cute bikinis from amazon because the summery weather (which has since retreated) has me dreaming of time by the pool, and NOT A ONE has looked remotely reasonable on me and only emphasizes the weird shape of my hips and thighs. 4. My poor kid is homesick for our old house and cannot fall asleep (it is currently 1:11 in the morning egads) and I cannot help her feel better (which I know isn’t always the goal! she should feel her feelings!) or help her fall asleep.
To sum up: I am unlovable, my work performance sucks, I look terrible in a bathing suit and probably in all clothing, and I am a terrible mother.
Should I perhaps be focusing on the fact that my husband is lovely and warm and attentive 6/7 of the time, and that he is not ignoring me but is instead focusing all his energy on the very difficult work of keeping dangerously sick people alive? Should I perhaps be remembering that this client mostly asks for very small edits, if any, and also it seems statistically improbable that I would write exactly what they want every single time and also one miss does not negate all the hits, nor does it preclude me from writing well in the future? Should I perhaps stop pressing my finger into the tender bruise of body imperfection when I have a perfectly good, rear-end covering skirted suit already? Should I perhaps recall the many, many nights when I was a child that I cried myself to sleep over something or other and the many, many nights as a child and an adult when I couldn’t sleep and how none of those nights had anything to do with my parents or their parenting ability?
Should does not equal AM DOING, let me tell you that.
Insecurity can REALLY spiral if I let it get going, so I have been reading articles titled “Top Ten Things Therapists Recommend You Do When You’re Feeling Insecure!” and “How to Conquer Feelings of Insecurity.” The thing is that I know how to stop feeling insecure. I mean, I am aware of the techniques. But most of them are long-term kinds of things (replace negative self-talk with positive self-talk; focus on your strengths; talk to a therapist) and I am working on those things, but I want a quick fix. Is there a quick fix for feeling insecure?
What I really want is to say something negative about myself and have someone refute it with convincing evidence backed by reliable sources. My husband is not good at providing reassurance of this type; he is impatient with insecurity and seems to operate under the belief that there is no need to tell a person something that they should already know about themselves. (I also worry that, if I am too insecure around him, he will stop wanting to be married to me how’s THAT for insecurity catastrophizing, hmmm?????)
Reassurance is best sought from friends, I find. But it’s too late to call or text any of my analog-world friends, so I am writing to you. This makes it sound like I am demanding compliments, which I am not because that would be embarrassing and stupid. (Also, you aren’t married to me, you don’t know my work writing and you don’t know what I look like in a bikini, so, lovely and brilliant as you are, you cannot possibly make an honest evaluation of any of those things.) What I’m hoping for, I guess, is commiseration and solidarity. I would also accept The Key to Real Confidence, if you have it.
Do you ever feel insecure? If so, what do you do when you feel that way? My negative self-talk is so loud right now, even my strategies for combatting it (talking out loud to myself; pretending my concerns belong to my best friend and saying to myself what I would say to her; referring to myself as honey and acknowledging that my feelings are valid) are inaudible over the din.
Gah. Being a person is so stupid and exhausting sometimes.
Well, I suppose the next best thing to writing a blog post about it is going to sleep. Sleep helps most things.
Tomatoes. Tomatoes are everywhere, in everything. Life would be so much easier if I liked them.
Speaking out loud in groups of more than two people. Most people seem capable of speaking up in groups – whether out at coffee with a few friends or in a meeting or standing in an elevator. NOT ME. My heart pounds and my head swims just at the thought that I might open my mouth. And if I do manage to say something, my words come out all wrong and sometimes I stutter and my face gets all red and I rush through whatever it was I was trying to say, eliminating key context that would help make my point. Oh how I wish I could have even just a LITTLE CHILL when speaking to more than two people!
Dogs. *HEAR ME OUT* I hope you know that I love YOUR dog. I do. I want to see all the photos of your dog, and hear all the anecdotes, and if I visited you I would pet and snuggle your dog. I show my daughter pictures of your dog so often she can now differentiate them: “Is that Rex?” “Oh, is that Hannah?” “Charlie is so cute!” I have a soft spot in my heart for all animals, cockroaches excluded. And maybe snakes. But I don’t love dogs. I can appreciate them, I can admire them, I can enjoy them through their owners’ eyes or the eyes of my dog-crazy child. But I don’t love them. I don’t like licking. I don’t like wet noses. I don’t like drooling. I don’t like the idea of an outside creature bringing the outdoors into my home. I don’t like the idea of picking up poop. I think when you love dogs, these things become part of the package. And I just don’t love them. But oh, how I wish I did. If I loved dogs, we could own a dog and I would be happy about it.
Pedicures. I think pedicures are such a fun, luxurious indulgence. But I find them so uncomfortable! My feet are very sensitive, and pretty much everything except the warm water soak and the warm towel wrap are verging on painful for me. Plus, I find myself worrying all the time about dangerous bacteria and whether I’m going to develop gangrene or pick up a flesh eating bacterium or something equally horrific from inadequately cleansed tools.
Group events. Most people I know love parties and gatherings. But I find even smallish groups to be thoroughly exhausting. I overanalyze everything about them from what I will wear to who I can talk to, to where to park and whether there will be food. And then I spend the whole time feeling like I’m on the fringe of conversation, that no one wants to talk to me, that I have nothing interesting to say, that I look weird and stand awkwardly and can’t move my arms in a human manner. I get overstimulated and overwhelmed and have no idea how to keep up with the pace of conversation. It is awful. And then afterward I feel drained and reeling and want to crawl into a cave for days until everything feels calm and safe again.
Letting other people cook in my kitchen. I am a control enthusiast in the extreme and prefer that things in my kitchen happen MY way. I am insufferable, I know. My kind and generous mother-in-law, for whom “making food” is a love language, will be eternally baffled by this facet of my personality. “Just let her make you dinner!” you may be thinking. But the very thought of it fills me with anxiety.
Sharing food.JOEY DOESN’T SHARE FOOD and neither do I. And people who do share food find this personally offensive. It would just be easier if I didn’t care.
The beach. Sand adheres to me like a persistent infection. Everything is hot. The sand and ocean stink. Too many people. Things lurking unseen in the watery depths. NO THANK YOU times a million. But the beach is such a quintessential summer experience, and it would be nice if I didn’t feel angry and grumbly every time it’s broached.
Bridgerton, Yellowstone, and West Wing. Since this list is rapidly devolving into a catalog of my anxieties, I will switch to TV. These shows are universally beloved, and I just cannot get into any of them. I have total pop culture FOMO, and would love to love these shows.
Do you and I share any wish-I-liked items? What’s one thing that would make your life easier if you liked it?
I am kinda sorta attempting to complete NaBloPoMo, with the full expectation that life will make it impossible any day now. If you want to follow along, or join the fun, check out San’s blog here.
Some of my biggest failings as a human include a predisposition toward extreme ambivalence, a tendency to catastrophize, a habit of worrying that a good thing happening means an equally bad thing will follow to balance out the universe, and a pattern of endlessly overthinking a decision once it’s already been made. All of these tendencies are rallying together right now, as we prepare to sell our current house and move into the new home we just purchased. I am a wreck of nerves and anxieties. I have not had a solid night of sleep in… three weeks??? (Hello, 3:00 am my old friend.) (WHY IS IT ALWAYS 3:00 AM?!?)
Let’s see if the old “get it out of your brain and onto the page” trick works today.
I am worried that:
we will move in and end up hating the new house for unforeseen reasons.
my eye will never stop twitching and I will never have a full night’s sleep again.
we will never sell our current house, will be stuck paying two mortgages until all our savings drains away, and then be forced to sell our new house at a loss.
our realtor will tell us the ONLY WAY to sell our house is if we move the majority of our belongings into storage and we have to do that and then move those things into the new house. (My husband and I did a double move when we moved into our first apartment together prior to me starting grad school. IT WAS AWFUL.)
I will not be able to find a handyman to do the work I want to do on our house and will have to do it myself (which I am WILLING to do, it will just be subpar work).
none of our furniture will look good in the new house and we will have to spend gajillions of dollars on new furniture.
encouraging my daughter to donate/give up [beloved baby toy] will ruin her life and she will hate me forever because of it.
we will all hate the commute and feel like we are in the car all the time and it will ruin our lives. (The new house is QUADRUPLE our current commute to both school and work [although this is because our current commute is six minutes].)
Carla will be consumed with grief over leaving our neighbors and their dogs and will never forgive us for doing this to her.
I will (continue to) be so consumed by The New House that I will (continue to) ignore the work of my heart, which is my writing, and ruin my life and future prospects as a mediocre writer.
we will end up hating the flooring we have chosen (and ordered) and cannot reverse without significant financial burden.
dander from the sellers’ pets will have seeped into the walls of the new house and I will be Extremely Allergic for all of my days.
my mother-in-law’s prediction of “there will be mice!” will come to fruition.
some horrific calamity will befall us because we have been too fortunate in all other areas of our lives.
there won’t be enough wall space for all the bookcases we want/need.
we will end up hating our new neighbors.
the new house will have some hidden deficit that the inspection didn’t find, and it will be costly and burdensome to ameliorate.
(relatedly) our air conditioner will decide that now is the ideal time to die.
the primary bedroom, which is most definitely MUCH smaller than our current capacious bedroom, will feel TOO SMALL and I will hate it.
I will fail to transform into the casual entertainer that the new house kind of demands I become and waste our fabulous outdoor space.
prospective buyers who come to look at our house will TOUCH my STUFF with their HANDS and other BODY PARTS.
my failure to be purely excited about a circumstance that is objectively exciting indicates something awful and irredeemable about my personality.
Part of me believes (hopes) that this is a normal response to making a big, life-changing decision. Moving is a big deal, and so I am expending a lot of mental energy thinking about it. I hope, with time, I feel better about all these things.
The last time you made a major decision, did you have similar anxieties? What was the biggest thing you worried about that turned out to be a non-issue? Were any of your concerns realized?
We have houseguests this week. I think it’s well established at this point that I am both an anxious host and a control enthusiast, and that doesn’t make for the easiest time when having guests.
My particular brand of control enthusiasm is particularly evident in the kitchen. I am weird about food. I am weird about germs. I am weird about lots of things, and I can control those things when it’s me cooking. But when it’s someone else in my kitchen, doing their own thing in their own way, I get very uncomfortable. So, while I know this makes sense to NO ONE but me, I cannot stand to have help in the kitchen, especially from one particular houseguest. This guest is a wonderful, loving, generous, and thoughtful person and I want you to know I understand this, and understand that I am being ridiculous. And yet I am incapable of change in this area. I have tried! This particular houseguest does things so differently from me – I find it excruciating. Unbearably uncomfortable. I feel so guilty typing this out. IT IS NOT LOGICAL. I know this. And yet. For instance, on a previous visit, this guest ended up (very kindly and thoughtfully) making dinner for the family one night. The anxiety I felt – and still feel, at the very memory! – was so intense that I cannot do it again. I cannot. And I don’t know how to convey to this person just how awful it makes me feel. I have tried, in varying levels of firmness, and it doesn’t seem to get through. (Either this person’s own anxiety at “being a good guest = making a meal” trumps the desire to respect the boundaries I try to set… or my boundary-setting just doesn’t register with this person… I don’t know.)
Anyway. I am pre-anxious about making food for the houseguests because a) I don’t want to fend off (lovely! thoughtful!) advances to “help” and b) it is also complicated and slightly stressful to plan meals for these houseguests because they often have last minute changes in plans and c) we still have all of the normal evening activities that make dinnertime a challenge even for my immediate family.
Dinners for the Week of June 19-26
Sheet Pan Tandoori Chicken and Cauliflower: Colleen mentioned that she made this recently, and I had forgotten just how much I enjoyed it the last time I made it, so I put it on the meal plan IMMEDIATELY. It is so good. I think it will be perfect for houseguests, too, because it’s fairly easy to prep in advance and easy to cook.
Slow Cooker Chipotle Chicken Tacos: The slow cooker is my best friend when I want to prep a meal without interference from others. “Oh, sorry! It’s already in the slow cooker!” is a good excuse.
Soy-Ginger Pulled Pork with Tangy Sesame Slaw: Another slow cooker favorite! The only issue here is that I like to serve the pork/slaw on steamed bao buns, but I haven’t had great luck with steaming them myself. I wonder if I could buy some at a local restaurant???
Takeout/Leftovers/Out: Since, as I mentioned, these houseguests sometimes have other plans, I will not plan any more than four meals. We can get takeout if there’s a night where we don’t have dinner planned, or my husband and Carla and I can eat leftovers, or we can all go out to eat.
Do you have any really weird kitchen/meal planning related issues? I am feeling SO ANXIOUS AND GUILTY about what an ungrateful control freak I am being. But please trust me when I tell you this is better than the anxiety and discomfort I feel if I relinquish control.
My usual methods for lulling the worry hamsters to sleep are not working.
I have tried making lists: seems to awaken additional worry hamsters, plus I keep forgetting about the lists I’ve already made and making new ones.
I have tried long solitary walks: more time for thinking and worrying!
I have tried distraction via TV, book, and endless scrolling of the internet: these work with varying degrees of success, but leave me feeling yucky.
I have tried comfort eating: see above re yucky.
I have tried retail therapy, which is certainly fun. (By the way, Stitch Fix is KILLING it right now. I have liked nearly every single item they have sent me recently and I keep clicking, “yes, send me a new fix!” as soon as I pay for whatever I just bought.) I have a bunch of new clothes, including severalnewdresses and a very long skirt I love but have yet to wear. I dislike how people say “you’re so dressed up!” when I wear a sundress. Also, is age 42 too old to wear a shirt that might once in a while show a small sliver of your stomach? Kae influencered me to buy this shirt, but I have a very long torso and so the shirt doesn’t go quite to the top of my high-waisted jeans. My daughter and, I’m sure, my mother would say an emphatic YES, 42 is too old, or more particularly, I am too old (my husband’s take: “just don’t raise your arms”), but I have a friend who is in her later 40s who says WEAR IT and I’ve already taken off the tags and purchased a second shirt in a different color so I guess I’m a belly-shirt wearing person now. My mom and my daughter can go shake their heads sadly about me in another room. I did, however, return the dress to which my husband’s response was *a very tender and carefully worded version of* “I think you might be in an age range where a dress this short no longer looks appropriate.” But I didn’t return it because of that; I returned it because I hate my knees. And this dress – well, you know how some dresses are designed to showcase your décolletage or your back or whatever? This dress was designed to showcase your knees. And my knees get me around and do a great job of getting me up stairs but they are not show-worthy knees, you know? So I returned the dress, which was otherwise adorable and extremely comfortable.
Oh right, I was listing things that I have tried to help prevent all the endless anxieties that keep scurrying around my brain.
I have tried complaining to my husband, who has limited patience with reassuring people; why did he marry me when I need near-constant reassurance about everything????
I have tried sending ridiculous hyperventilatey emails to blog friends, whom I hope have enough of an existing familiarity with my all-caps style of hyperbole to not think that I have completely unhinged. I am still semi-hinged. For now.
I have not yet tried therapy, although I have broached the topic with my husband and have asked some offline friends for recommendations. Who has time for therapy, though?!?!?
The only thing that works even slightly is exercise – strenuous HIIT or strength training – but the downside is that the worry hamsters wake up immediately upon my heart rate returning to normal. And I just cannot exercise every second of the day.
Speaking of exercise: do you have, as I do, Flayed Face Syndrome? (Which is a totally made-up non-disease that is not to be confused with Scalded Skin Syndrome, which is a real and horrifying thing.)
Every time I do something that raises my heart rate for a prolonged amount of time, I end up looking like a character in Game of Thrones whose facial skin has been peeled away to reveal the tomato-pulp flesh beneath it. Is Game of Thrones still a relevant reference point? Feels like a million years ago that it was the hot thing, but then again I don’t consume a lot of other media where “peeling off someone’s face” would be a reasonable plot point.
The effect is quite alarming, let me assure you. Every time I have exercised in public to the point of my skin scarleting itself, people approach me to ask if I am okay. It is highly embarrassing. The redness lasts for a long time; I am writing this an hour after I finished a very heart-pumping exercise routine with Tracy Steen (this 45-minute HIIT workout) and my face is only just now cooling off to the “moderate to severe sunburn” level of redness.
One of my friends keeps asking me to go to barre class with her. I would love to – I used to love barre, and haven’t been back since March of 2020, hmm wonder why, but I am pre-embarrassed about my tomato-y complexion.
(Also keeping me from barre class: I am an extremely sweaty exerciser. And while that is tolerable at home in my own house, at least to me; I have not asked the other members of my household, I feel super self-conscious about it in public.)
I have been like this – a deskinned tomato person – for as long as I can remember. I don’t think there’s anything to be done about it, but maybe YOU have a solution? Perhaps that solution is simply, “avoid exertion,” which makes sense to me.
Recently, Lauren shared some rules to live by. One of them is that everyone deserves flowers. And even though buying flowers doesn’t soothe the worry hamsters, it does bring me a little ping of joy every time I see said flowers. So I am buying the flowers and I hope you are too.
Currently, my dinner table has some lilies and some delphinium (at least, I think it’s delphinium) in a vase. But I also bought a bunch of flowers for outside my house. Including two hanging baskets of bright magenta petunias. There’s nothing like a basket of magenta petunias to lift a mood, if temporarily.
Of course, one of them fell from the little hook that dangles the basket above my porch, and the basket broke. I transferred it into a pot and it seemed to be doing okay. Then I forgot to water both pot and basket for two days – two days during which we got significant rain, by the way – and when I went to check on them, the flowers had all wilted in an extremely distressing manner. I couldn’t bear to throw them out, so I watered them. And it turns out they were just being melodramatic. They look glorious once again. (Phew.)
In a fun twist, these petunias are the same hue my face turns after intense exercise.
My mind is such a jumble right now. Picture a tiny spare room into which you keep shoving old rocking chairs and boxes of books and a pile of ancient coats alongside a bigger pile of plastic and wire hangers and a music stand and a dusty couch and something covered in a tarp that looks vaguely threatening and some scarves and a stack of binders that keep sliding all over, spilling paper this way and that, and some dumbbells and a bunch of puzzle pieces and board game accessories that have come loose from their homes and a few pairs of stinky sneakers and hell, throw in a tuba and a bunch of bananas and maybe a volleyball net. You know. That’s what’s happening in my brain right now.
It feels full. Not just metaphorically so, but physically. I can feel all those brain furnishings jabbing against the corners of my mind. It may thus come as no surprise that I cannot focus on anything lately. Nothing. I start to do one thing and then another thought intrudes – maybe, “oh! you must write this email before you forget!” – but before I can get through that entire thought, something else has jumped in, waving its arms to be seen, and I can’t remember what I was supposed to be doing in the first, second, or third place.
I am in full frazz. FULL. FRAZZ.
“What can I do to help?” asked my sweet husband, fresh off call week and just wanting to Not Do Things for awhile. And he CAN help with some things, but only a few right now and a few more but not until the weekend.
“Make a list!” he suggested, which is always smart. Except once I made the list, I kept thinking of more things to ADD to the list. I’ll be (supposedly) doing something, and think of something to add to the list, and then by the time I get TO the list, I’ve forgotten it and ruined my concentration on the thing I was already doing. Plus, the list is a nice handy way to keep everything together, but the items are not at all equivalent, and there are some items that have a bunch of sub-steps to be completed and I didn’t list those out. Should I list those out? The other problem is that, now I’m in List Mode, I’ll think of something beyond the immediate needs bulleted on the list – you know, like Christmas shopping or dealing with the annual grief bomb of the anniversary of my friend’s death or summer camp (which I am ALREADY getting emails about WHY). And I’ll get very stressed out thinking about those not-at-all-priorities-right-now because I know they are lurking in the near distance, waiting for me. I have stopped short of putting them on the list, but they are still there. The list is out of control. Everything is out of control.
The only thing that is getting me to complete ANYTHING is adrenaline and a mortal fear of missing deadlines. This is not a healthy way to operate.
I have added so many more items to this list since I photographed it. Deeply depressing.
(And again! It is mainly good stuff! I should not be complaining! My list does not include things like “find potable water” or “seek shelter” because my home has been ravaged by a hurricane! Life is good! I am lucky!)
Strategies I am testing out, with little to no success:
Making a list. This did not cure all my problems in the LEAST, but at least I no longer have to frantically catalog everything I have to do in my mind.
Doing ANYTHING ON THE LIST AT ALL. Even if it’s small, even if it’s the lowest priority thing. Let’s get some momentum going. (The momentum is not interested in joining me.)
Getting extra sleep. I have been heading to bed at 9:30 lately. I do feel rested, I think? Or, as rested as I ever feel?
Getting up early. I am not good at this at all. I still feel frazzled but also resentful about being awake?
Doing something that is not on the list at all. Something that is OPPOSITE of the list, like reading or going for a walk or writing a blog post.
Procrastinating until the literal last second.
Buying things. To be fair, a lot of these things are on the list. But some are not. Like the therapeutic pair of pants I ordered from Loft yesterday.
Complaining to my husband. And now to you.
Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s any actual solution to this current spate of frazz. I just need to grit my teeth and chip away at the list and hope my brain fullness subsides as I complete things.
I need a root canal. Deciding that the tooth pain was bad enough to warrant a dental appointment wasn’t super fun. Confirming that I needed a root canal – first at my dentist’s office, then at the endodontist – was agony.
The dentist kept saying he was sorry for causing me pain, even though the whole point of the tests he was doing was to elicit pain. It was kind, but I have that reflex where I say, “that’s okay” or “it’s not that bad” in response to someone apologizing, which felt a) silly and b) untrue.
The endodontist did not apologize; not in a sadist-y way; he was kind, but just sort of stood there watching me clutch at my jaw as tears leaked from my eyes. He also offered me an Advil. His tests – which were very similar to the ones my dentist had done, just 30 minutes earlier – elicited a MUCH higher pain response. One test – he put liquid nitrogen or something on a swab and swabbed my tooth – hurt so bad that I cried. And then I felt ridiculous for crying. I tried to comfort myself by thinking that I couldn’t be the ONLY person to ever cry in that office; that must be why the assistant had tissues at the ready for me to dry my tears.
My dentist thinks, based on how nervous I get for dental work, that I need some sort of extra medication. Either something like V@lium or @tivan prior to the appointment, or conscious sedation during the procedure. He said, kindly, “That’s what I would recommend for my wife; she gets nervous about dental work. But I’m just telling you the options – you don’t need it. I wouldn’t do it, myself. Dental work doesn’t bother me.” Which made me wonder: ARE there people who are unbothered by dental work??????? This was a wholly novel concept to me. I figured that there was a spectrum, of course, from moderately nervous to requiring sedation just for a simple cleaning. But I never once imagined that there exist human beings who don’t mind dental work.
(As for my spot on the spectrum: I get nervous for a simple dental cleaning; I clench my hands into fists, my arms and legs are rigid the entire time, I have to do anti-anxiety breathing while I’m in the chair, waiting for the exam to begin. I did a LOT of focused breathing today, let me tell you. And then cried in my car all the way home.)
The thing is, for me to do any sort of pre-medication, I need someone to drive me to and from the appointment. And my husband is unlikely to be able to do that anytime in the near future, if at all. And I don’t know that I have any friends who I would feel comfortable asking. So I am feeling very sorry for myself indeed. I suppose there is always Uber, but I have never once used Uber so that’s another hurdle to surmount.
Part of the reason I cried in the car (aside from the lingering tooth pain following the swab) was that I felt so ridiculous about crying. The crying was bad enough on its own. But then I couldn’t stop crying. And even when I finally got the actual tears under control, I still had Wobbly Voice. Ugh. I couldn’t stop thinking of that awful anesthesiologist who commented on my ability to withstand pain when I was in labor. Maybe I have a very low pain threshold, and other people are going around dealing with similar or worse pain without being fazed one bit. And maybe everyone thinks I am a huge baby who is making a mountain out of a molar pain. And I am FORTY YEARS OLD for floss sake, why can I not just GET IT TOGETHER like the adult I supposedly am instead of acting like a whiny child?
This is just the latest in a run of negative self-talk that I can’t seem to squash. It started with my writing and has since spilled over into every other aspect of my life.
I am suspecting – and hoping – that it has at least something to do with the calendar: both the monthly calendar, which has spun right around to canker sores and chocolate cravings, and the annual calendar, which has turned once again to the anniversary of my friend’s death. Not to mention, we are now sliding down the dark slope of fewer hours of sunshine each day and facing the looming pressures of the holiday season.
While I do my focused breathing and wait for the calendar to flip a few pages forward, if you have any advice for how you pull yourself out of this kind of self-talk tailspin, I would greatly appreciate it. For now, I have self-medicated with Trader Joe’s macaroni and cheese and some of my only-on-the-weekends good tea. And, of course, I am blabbering it all to you. (Thank you for listening.)
Important note: Carla has recently discovered that she likes sourdough bread, and especially so if it is toasted and coated in butter. She refers to this as “sour toast” which is its name henceforth and forevermore.
This morning I helped myself to two (2) healthy slabs of sour toast, which was small compensation for a night that was not in the least bit restful.
The troubles began at tennish when my husband and I were laughing heartily along to Derry Girls – if you, like me, are very behind on Good Shows, please note that so far this one is Very Good – and my daughter poked her head into the kitchen to inform us that she was (metaphorical ironic jazz hands) still! awake!
First, we allowed her to come snuggle with us on the couch. We carried on a silent conversation with our eyes about whether we should turn the TV back on and see if she would simply fall asleep there; that has worked exactly once in the past. (We decided against it. Not only has it only ever worked once, but this show also uses curse words with great gusto and Carla is at an age where she loves to say, “Did that person say the f-word Mommy? Why did they say the f-word?” except she likes to USE the f-word because it is a Sanctioned Circumvention of the no-cursing rule.) In the end, we took her back to her room and did all the soothing, get-back-to-bed things – set up a lamp that shed more light than a nightlight but less light than the one on her bedside table, adjusted her covers for optimum temperature, played some spa music on her ipad, lots of hugs and kisses and reassurance that she could leave her room if she was still asleep in half an hour – and went back to Derry Girls.
As a totally unnecessary aside, that I still feel I need to share as Important Background, the “you can come tell us in thirty minutes if you are still awake” directive stems from a night earlier this year. Carla woke up at midnight and then proceeded to try to get herself back to sleep – which I commend! – for TWO HOURS until she finally came to me for help. At that point, I didn’t think it was advisable to give her melatonin (why? because it was the middle of the night and my reasoning faculties were sleep-logged), PLUS she was already so awake that there was no getting back to sleep at all. I tried ALL my get-back-to-sleep techniques (including rubbing her back and singing her lullabies) for an hour before we finally gave up and went downstairs and turned on the TV. If she had come to me at midnight when she first woke up, or at 12:30 when she’d given getting back to sleep a good solid go, a) I would have been more likely to be awake and b) I would definitely have given her melatonin. Anyway. Now she has a thirty minute limit to how long she needs to lie awake by herself.
She did indeed return after thirty minutes. It was by now eleven.
This time, I gave her melatonin and crawled into bed with her and rubbed her back. She was very chatty for a child who should have been asleep for three hours at that point. It was upsetting to hear her have the same thoughts that I have when I can’t sleep: if I don’t sleep NOW, I will only get X hours of sleep! What if I never fall asleep? What if I am tired tomorrow? I tried to reassure her that it totally doesn’t matter if she doesn’t even sleep at ALL (no school), and that she will feel tired but that’s okay. We can have a low-key day and/or take a nap and/or go to bed early. That seemed to smooth out some of the rumply anxious feelings, so I went to bed and read and tried not to worry that every sound was Carla popping out of bed to tell me she was still awake (semi-frantic metaphorical jazz hands).
At around midnight, the thunder started, so of course Carla popped into our room, this time awake but also Scared Of Thunder and worrying about power outages and whether we would have to relocate to the basement.
(Did you do this, growing up? Pretty much any time we had a thunderstorm when I was a kid, we’d load up armfuls of blankets and pillows and stuffed animals and flashlights and head into the basement to wait it out. This may be because of Tornado Concern, although my memory is fuzzy on the details. Anyway, it’s still my immediate response to a severe storm: get to the basement!) (My husband did not have the same childhood experience of storms, nor is he remotely concerned about weather, so we occasionally have Heated Discussions about whether we need to go to the basement or not. Carla has probably overheard those discussions, which is probably why she was so concerned about it.) (Our current, finished, carpeted-with-couches-and-a-TV basement is a MUCH nicer place to wait out a storm. My childhood basement was unfinished and we used to gather in the exercise room, which had a concrete floor, a Nordic Track, a stationary bike, and a set of weight lifting equipment. It did have a small, old-fashioned-even-for-the-time black-and-white-TV.)
Carla set up a little nest of blankets on our bedroom floor and eventually we all fell asleep. But I was awakened throughout the night by very obnoxious wind.
Possibly because of Tornado Fear, I really hate wind. And I know that some parts of the country experienced tornadoes last night, which is devastating, and my heart goes out to the people who lost their property and homes and loved one. I feel deeply grateful for (currently) being safe in my own home, with my family, and working electricity. But I also know that the whims of catastrophe could descend upon us at any time – it is purely luck that we haven’t encountered a devastating event yet.
So every time the wind shook the gate next to my bedroom, or sent a bucket of rain slamming into the window, I would jerk into wakefulness and lie there, shaking, desperately scrolling through the radar section of my weather app, trying to determine from the little moving blobs of color whether we were nearing the end of the storm or whether tornadoes were imminent, and wondering if we have a local tornado siren, and wondering if the neighbor’s tree – which scrapes shriekingly against their siding in even a gentle breeze – is going to snap off and pierce the wall beside my bed, and, if so, would it reach my husband and leave Carla an orphan or just impale me.
Of course, today also happens to be Trash Day, so I would wake up at any sound of the trash bins flapping, alert to the possibility that the recycling bin would topple over and spill cans and bottles and cardboard boxes all over the street. Would I emerge from my house to find my neighbors judging the number of pickle jars and wine bottles and cans of tomato puree I use in a week? And just how many Target boxes does one person need, really? (Not as many as Target thinks I need, that’s for sure.) Would I be chasing down soda cans and peeling soggy medical journals off my driveway all morning?
The arrhythmic crescendo and decrescendo of the wind – plus the addition of the normal slam and clang of the garbage trucks making their rounds – finally tore me away from any semblance of sleep at about six. I lay there worrying about things like power outages (mainly, the prospect of losing all the frozen meat and veggies in my freezer) and insurance coverage (based on previous snow/wind destruction, we are already pretty sure insurance doesn’t cover damage to our arborvitae, but would it pay to replace the swingset?) and the possibility of tornadoes and some additional really dark, upsetting things until seven when a particularly lusty gust sent the now-empty garbage bins tumbling down the street. Ours were in the middle of the road and had to be moved immediately, which gave me an excuse (as opposed to doing something healthy like getting up to write or exercise or ANYTHING else besides worry endlessly) to get out of bed and start the day.
We have a huge oak in the backyard that is perfect roof-crushing size and distance from our house. Until recently, I had never considered that it posed a threat to our neighbors’ homes as well – I suppose it could do some damage, but I don’t think it would crush the entire roof right over the sleeping inhabitants’ heads as it would if it fell on our house. In any case, earlier this month, we had an arborist come out and prune it. We’d set this appointment up in August, although I don’t have the faintest idea whether that’s a reasonable timeframe for securing the services of an arborist.
On the long-awaited day, two giant trucks arrived, carrying at least four people. But only two people emerged from the trucks – one to talk to me about the plan, and the other to execute the plan. The plan executor used a series of ropes and pulleys to climb up our tree, seemingly on his own – the other three people were nowhere in sight during his ascent or descent or pretty much at all in between; I guess mainly they moved the cut branches from our backyard to the front yard – and somehow carrying a chainsaw, and it all made me deeply uncomfortable. The entire time he was here, I kept darting from window to window, taking photographs and marveling at how many branches he extracted and trying to keep him firmly in the tree with the power of my brain.
This is an objectively terrible photo but it DOES capture a) man in tree, b) CHAINSAW, c) DANGLING, d) no one around to offer any sort of support, moral or otherwise, e) all the branches. And it gives you some sense of how tall the tree is, with a good thirty percent of the tree missing from the top of the photo..
I sent one of the photos to my husband – a photo of the man in the tree – and made a dumb joke about how the squirrels were really out of control this spring, har har. But then later, when the human arborist told me that our backyard squirrel (Howard, we call the squirrel Howard) was quite irate with him (human) for tampering with HIS (squirrel) tree, and I passed that information along to my husband (human), he (husband) was very confused about which squirrels in which situations were real or human. I didn’t think it was that confusing, but I was the one relaying the story. And the one referring to a human person (arborist) as a squirrel.
The arborist cut off a LOT of dead branches. That’s what one of the two giant trucks was for – turning the branches into woodchips and hauling them away. (I have no idea what the other truck was for. Medical supplies, in case the arborist fell out of the tree?) With the oak being so tall, the size of the branches is disguised by distance. But once they were on the ground, it was clear just how enormous and abundant they were. I wish I had taken better photographs of just how many branches there were. (I felt ridiculous, scurrying around from window to window, trying to get good shots without alerting the arborist to my paparazzing.)
After he was done pruning, the arborist also “sounded” (?) the trunk and examined any wounds on the tree, and declared that the tree was healthy and not in danger of falling on my house and crushing me while I sleep. That was, as you might imagine, a relief.
But it turns out that even a healthy, de-branched oak does not prevent me from hating the wind.
I keep wanting to find out exactly how gusty these gusts are, and then find out what the typical gusts were during my childhood, and compare them. As though I could say, in a tone of slightly-exasperated reassurance, “Okay, Self, these are only 60-mile-per-hour gusts, when the typical gales you experienced in childhood were 75 miles per hour.” and that would completely soothe my galloping pulse and send me immediately into a deep, untroubled slumber.
When, in fact, it’s just different. We live in a crowded suburb surrounded by lots of large trees and other potential projectiles (lawn furniture, standing umbrellas, garbage bins, mailboxes) while then I was in my lone house on top of a barren hill, with only a handful of immature pines nearby. Plus, then I was a child, and I had the luxury of parents who could offer comfort, who could also carry the burden of worrying whether we would lose power and two freezers full of food, and of hoping fervently that our insurance covers wind damage, and of listening to the weather station with an ear out for the portent of tornadoes, and of deciding whether it was time to gather in the basement. Now I am the adult, with all of those anxieties to shoulder, while still maintaining an outward expression of competent calm, for the sake of the child who is already beset by so many hand-me-down worries she can’t sleep even before the wind starts blowing.
Well, yesterday’s sunshine has been washed away by an hours-long thunderstorm that woke me at 6:00 am and seems to have settled right over my house for the duration. It is very dark and wet with intermittent startling bursts of lightning and the grumpy follow-up of growling thunder and I am trying Very Hard to tamp down my School Is Actually Starting Anxiety. So I am retreating into happy memories – forcibly, this time – and still dreamily eating my way through my childhood summers. The food nostalgia is real strong, folks.
Let’s talk about food!
Today, for Labor Day, we are having ribs (it will be very fun and soggy to grill them if the downpour continues) and lemony potato salad.
(As an aside, potato salad is one of my Family Tradition Foods. We had it several times a year when I was growing up: New Year’s Day, Super Bowl Sunday, Fourth of July, Labor Day. My mom makes the BEST potato salad – it’s got a mustard base so it’s a nice sunny yellow, and it’s speckled with little bits of pickles and celery and red peppers and also – hork – hard boiled egg. My mom performs some sort of magical chopping technique on the egg so that it becomes dust and I barely even notice it. The potato salad is amazing and when I go to visit her, she makes a big batch of it and I eat it for breakfast. There is NOTHING that beats my mom’s cold potato salad for breakfast, you have to trust me. But even though she hand-wrote a copy of the recipe for me, I cannot make it so that it tastes the way her potato salad tastes. There must be something special she does, or maybe she doesn’t measure the ingredients as exactly as the recipe implies, or maybe she includes some sort of special ingredient like – hork – love. Whatever it is, I cannot replicate the flavor. So I have found my own potato salad recipe that I love but which tastes NOTHING like my mom’s. So even though it is Tradition to eat potato salad on Labor Day, it doesn’t really feel like tradition, because we’re not eating the traditional potato salad. Have I used the words tradition and potato salad often enough to create semantic satiation?)
(My family is still sort of floundering to find our own Family Tradition Foods. Even for Thanksgiving and Christmas, we haven’t really settled on specific meals that are so good we want to eat them every year forever and ever amen. And that’s okay! I think variety is wonderful! But I also have such fond food-related memories of holidays growing up. The foods we ate at specific times throughout the year took on such significance – and eating something like my mom’s potato salad can bring so much warmth and happiness flooding back that I would love to create the same kind of thing for Carla. Of course, there’s the added hiccup that Carla doesn’t EAT anything, so…)
(Family Tradition Foods must be a thing for other families, too, yes? Do you have any that you remember with fondness? Or horkitude, I suppose – I’d be interested to know about the Special Food your dad made every September First that only he liked to eat, or, like, the hot dish Aunt Violetta used to bring to every family barbecue that you all pretended to love, but would dump behind the shrubbery at the earliest opportunity, or whatever.)
Back to the Labor Day holiday pigging: my husband made these AMAZING brownie crinkle cookies for dessert. We may have eaten some yesterday already. You know. To make sure they weren’t poisonous, and weren’t going to ruin the holiday or anything. They are so fudgy and delicious. You should make them immediately.
Here’s what else is on this week’s menu. Spoiler alert: it’s full of comfort food.
As I have already mentioned, several times, Carla is starting in-person school this week. She goes to a very small private school that has expended significant money and thought into how to make in-person school work safely for all involved. We feel hopeful and grateful and that this is the best decision we can make for our family at this time… but I am still nervous. Any and all distractions, especially but not limited to food-related memories or your dinner plans for this week, would be MOST welcome and appreciated.
Yesterday, I parted my hair on the opposite side. It felt and looked very weird and I do not think I will repeat that particular experiment.
One of the remarkable things about These Unprecedented Times is that going to the grocery store has now become such a major source of stress. I realize this is not a new topic nor a concern specific to me. But I am Right In It now and it’s so odd. I literally had stress dreams about the grocery store last night – where I discovered at the last minute that the store was open a whole hour before I thought it would be and I was able to dash in and grab some half-and-half. I mean, this is causing Major Anxiety these days which is absolutely ridiculous.
It’s been about twenty days since I last set foot in the grocery store, and a little less than two weeks since I picked up a curbside order (which did NOT contain half-and-half). I was supposed to go to the grocery store yesterday, a plan I’d been working toward for many days. Our store opens at eight and has seniors/immunocompromised shoppers hours until nine. My plan was to arrive right at nine and get in and get out quickly. But my husband actually had patients that morning (which is A Good Thing) and had to go into the office, so I couldn’t go. He has patients this morning, too (also A Good Thing). So yesterday we decided I would go later in the afternoon, once my husband got home.
I ordered a mask, which is supposed to arrive sometime later this week. So I fashioned a mask out of an old baby blanket and hair ties. And I got all dressed — in actual Real Clothes — put my hair in a bun, even put my contacts in, and drove to the grocery store. And then I chickened out. The parking lot was SO FULL. And there was a line of people outside stretching along the entire side of the building. Which I know is a good, smart innovation. And yet it made me feel all panicky and trembly so I turned around and came home.
But we obviously still need groceries. So I filled a virtual cart at the grocery store that offers curbside pickup. Curbside pickup is not ideal – for one thing, I worry that I am taking a spot from someone who has limited mobility or is immunocompromised or for whom going into an actual store is otherwise difficult/impossible. Plus, on a selfish level, it’s so much easier to be able to decide on the fly that the store doesn’t have fresh strawberries so I am going to get frozen berries or blueberries instead, rather than counting on the grocery store shopper to find an appropriate substitution. Curbside pickup is not something I am relying on, is what I’m saying. But it worked fairly well the first time I did it. And I figured it would be good to have a backup if I can’t get to the store myself, or if I do get to the store but they are out of half-and-half.
The app for curbside pickup allows you to choose a date and time from a selection of five upcoming days. At least, that’s the idea. These days, all the spots are full. This means that the earliest possible date I could hope to pick up my order would be this coming Sunday. And that’s only if I happen to open the app at the exact right time and catch the new pickup times before they fill.
This happened last time, too. I stalked the app for three days at all hours of the day. The timeslots opened up one morning and I was able to grab one. So I tried it at midnight last night… and then woke up at five to try it… and then seven… and then kept checking all through the eight o’clock hour… At nine o’clock, the app added Sunday as an option… But all the timeslots were full.
This is not anything to be Truly Panicked about. We still have plenty of food. But we are down to our last package of ground beef. We have only one remaining can of chickpeas. We have no eggs. And we are going to run out of half-and-half ANY MINUTE NOW which makes me feel very anxious.
This is all SO RIDICULOUS. I know that I am in a very, very privileged situation. I think of the news footage of miles and miles of cars lined up at food banks across the country and I feel ashamed. We can OF COURSE survive just fine without ground beef and without half-and-half. We have PLENTY of food. Obviously, we are FINE. But it turns out that running out of half-and-half is my personal grocery store breaking point.
Can I also say that my husband and I are having… disagreements about grocery shopping? We have always been on opposite ends of the preparedness spectrum. Even in The Time Before, I have always been the type of person who prefers to have a backup ready to go before I even start to run out of something. For instance, Carla eats a lot of frozen pancakes, so I always have two boxes in the freezer. When we get down to the last two or three of the first box, I put pancakes on the list. That kind of thing. (I also grew up in a remote, cold place where it was prudent to never allow your gas tank to be under half full; even today when I have a gas station within walking distance of my house, I still get very nervous if the gas dips below the half-full point. Maybe the food thing is related.)
Yesterday when I went to mix the ingredients for chili powder, I discovered that we are nearly out of paprika (which I use A Lot), and that we are – for me – uncomfortably low on garlic powder, oregano, and cumin. My husband sees that the (admittedly giant) canisters are still about a third full and says we don’t need the spices urgently. But to ME, I don’t WANT to need them urgently. I want to have backups ready to go.
The same goes for tortillas and chickpeas and sour cream and cheddar cheese and pancakes and iceberg lettuce and carrots and ranch dressing and chicken breasts and black beans and taco shells and hot sauce and onions and all the other things that make me feel like I can put together a normal and/or comforting meal. Do we need cheddar cheese to survive? Of course not. But does it make me feel better to have a backup in the fridge? Yes.
This is how I would feel in Normal Times, too. But I feel it even more acutely now, when a) who knows when I will be a store where I can purchase these things and b) who knows if the store will even HAVE these items when I do manage to get there.
So my husband and I are experiencing a little friction on the groceries/necessities front, I have to say.
Part of it is that he is frugal and doesn’t see the point of spending money on something that you don’t actually NEED. (To which I say, but we WILL need this thing. Or, if not need, WANT.) Part of it is that he is not the designated shopper, neither now nor in Normal Times, and so doesn’t really fully understand the current shopping situation. I would guess he hasn’t set foot in a grocery store since late February, so he just doesn’t get how different it is. And/or he is in denial about how quickly the situation is going to improve. (Possibly never, says my doomsday brain.) He was surprised when I said that our online options for ordering spices (Costco and Penzeys are the ones I checked) were experiencing delays. (Not to mention that Costco’s website reacted as though oregano is a concept I made up out of thin air.) And yet, even when I point these things out – shortages and delays – he still seems to believe that we can just get whatever we want whenever want it. When I told him I was going to order curbside pickup, he said, “Oh great. Are you going to have it ready to pick up tomorrow?” and I had to temper my incredulous tone when I responded, “Of COURSE NOT, it will be Sunday AT THE EARLIEST before I can hope to pick up the things we ordered, and even then it is HIGHLY LIKELY that we will not get all of what we wanted.”
I would think that he would defer to me in this case, WOULDN’T YOU AGREE?
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life of a doctor's wife 