Insecurity

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. 

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Pestilence & Power Hour

Happy Leap Day, Internet! I am spending this extra day trying to decide whether the benefits of cold medicine (reduced headache, mild cough suppression, drying of the sinuses) outweigh the ill effects (drowsiness, zombie brain).

We had a good run of it, Internet. And by “it” I mean good health. Carla’s class has apparently been stricken by a boatload of illnesses and, after volunteering at a school event last week, I have brought one home. 

It started Sunday with a sore throat, then moved along through the normal URI progression, so I thought I was getting better. But today I woke up with no voice and a fever of 101.5. I feel like someone is trying to escape the inside of my skull by hacking at it with a pickaxe and he’s standing right on my lungs while he hammers away.

Carla was fine at first, but woke up with a fever yesterday, so she is home with me for the second day. So far it doesn’t seem to have hit her quite as hard. She’s feverish but cheerful. And sniffly. I hope her illness goes in the proper direction, though. 

I am bummed because I had weekend plans, but even if I do feel better by then, I am sure to be hacking up a lung which doesn’t sound pleasant for me or those around me. 

This post is not about me whining about being sick though. It is a celebration of productivity!

I know you are dying to know whether the internet magic of mentioning something on my blog made it happen, and it did! Via the power of public humiliation (although you made me feel understood rather than humiliated), I have made some progress on my to-do list.

While my preference would have been for Suz to come over and tackle my to-do list for me (you DID offer, Suz), I decided to take Jenny’s advice and do a Power Hour.

In my house, a Power Hour is a way to gamify a to-do list. I have heretofore only used it on my daughter, and pretty much only as a cleaning challenge. Although, to be fair, she will not do a Power Hour unless I am also doing a Power Hour – she is a competitive being – so I end up doing one alongside her. We haven’t done one in a while. But I have never really made myself do a Power Hour. 

Monday, I came home from school drop-off and took a nap until 11:00, then allowed my guilt for napping to propel me into a Power Hour. I will tell you, first, that the Power Hour is a misnomer because it took THREE HOURS.

1. First, I made a list on my new custom notepads that my husband and daughter got me for my birthday. 

2. Instead of calling the landscaper, I instead looked up an email she’d sent me in August with a recommendation for a tree trimming/removal company. I had called them, around that time; there’d been a storm that wreaked havoc on a lot of local trees, so the tree service said they would call me back and then never did. 

I called the tree company and someone is coming out to look at the tree in question and offer an estimate. Should I call someone else to come give a second estimate? Probably. 

3. Gigi said I needed to handle the rot in my siding sooner rather than later, so that was next on my list. She’d suggested calling a general contractor, so I spent some time looking at previous texts with friends whom I’d asked for contractor suggestions. None of them seemed right, and one of them mysteriously has NO Internet presence at all. Like… his name doesn’t exist on the internet. And it’s an odd name with an unusual spelling – something like Grygg – and I know the spelling I used was accurate because the friend who’d recommended him said, “Oh, I spelled his name wrong in the contact I shared; it’s Grygg instead of Gryyg.” Nonetheless, neither spelling came up with ANY hits online. 

So I turned instead to people who deal with gutters. This is what Marg had to do, at an approximate cost of $1500 for a similar issue. (THANK YOU, Marg, for the benchmark pricing!) We had our gutters cleaned regularly at our old house, and it was fairly reasonable price-wise, but the REAL price was in future phone and text spam from the company. So I didn’t want to call them. Moving has been a nice excuse to part ways with some companies I felt bad about parting ways with. I looked up some highly rated gutter service companies in our area and then called. 

The person who answered at the first place was so kind. I said that I had no idea whether she could help me, and she said, “Well, let’s just see!” and I explained my problem, and it WAS something she seemed familiar with. She even gave me an estimate for replacing that rotted wood right off the top of her head ($475 in case you are wondering). But then she told me that sometimes getting all of your gutters cleaned can help address the problem, and that adjusting the gutter would be part of the cost of that ($495 in case you are wondering). I don’t think replacing the rotted wood would necessarily have been part of the gutter cleaning cost, but then again, I’d be getting ALL the gutters cleaned, which needs to be done anyway. She was so warm and knowledgeable that I wanted to book her right then and there, but… well, I have been swayed by warm and knowledgeable people before (I’m looking at you, Guy Who Said I Needed to Replace My Garage Doors When Really They Only Needed a Small Much-Less-Costly Adjustment), so I told her I would talk it over with my husband and call her back. 

Gutter person number two was also very nice. He immediately asked if I could text him pictures of the issue and I did. But then he wanted to continue the conversation via text, which was a little less satisfying than being on the phone? I think, mainly, because a) we were discussing terms I wasn’t familiar with and b) the guy is not quite so wordy as I am (shocker) nor as wordy as I would prefer he be in responses. He said he thinks the issue is that “it” (the gutter?) just needs to be “pitched toward the downspout,” all of which are words I think I understand, but am not 100% sure I know exactly what that means? He can also replace the rotted wood and he is coming out to look more closely and give me an estimate. 

4. On to the pool service task! I had one recommendation from a friend, one company my husband had suggested, and another company the previous owners’ pool guy had suggested (note: we used the previous owners’ pool guy last year and he does not provide the cleaning/maintenance we are looking for, plus he is impossible to deal with – like, he will just show up unannounced in the backyard). I called and left messages at each company. I believe I have left messages with each of these companies before; only the friend-recommended guy ever called me back, and then said his brother would be in touch, and then the brother never got in touch. WHY IS THIS IMPOSSIBLE? 

5. There is a drip in our furnace. Plus, I got a text that said this was my LAST CHANCE to schedule the free furnace maintenance that comes with my membership to the HVAC company. I was confused, because I am SURE that we had someone come out last fall to look at the furnace; I remember very clearly because he told me that I was still eligible to get the extended warranty on the furnace, and then I called the warranty company and they needed my title within 90 days of the home sale, and the title hadn’t arrived, and I went back and forth with the title company and eventually we got the title but it was after the 90 days. So. No extended warranty on the furnace.

But I looked in my calendar, and it said the same company did an air conditioner inspection last September, so perhaps that’s what I was thinking of? So I called the HVAC company (my god this is a VERY BORING POST but somehow I cannot curb my desire to write out all the tiresome details) and the cheery gal I spoke to said yes, it had been an A/C checkup. So we scheduled a furnace inspection. Whew. 

6. Next! I first updated our family calendar with all the important dates from my daughter’s 2024-25 school calendar. Good lord, there are a lot of days off. Like, so many days off. Then I called the dentist and scheduled her next checkup. This, if you are keeping track, is the only actual task I have completed. 

7. Then I turned to the electrician, which has a very convoluted backstory. The TL;DR version is that I successfully scheduled an appointment for the electrician to come out and address multiple issues. The slightly longer version is that the company that we use has a very complex system that probably makes a lot of sense to them but is difficult to deal with. One person comes out to see what’s wrong, another person prepares an estimate for you and works with you to figure out exactly what work you want to do, then a whole other person schedules the appointment with you. On the day of the Power Hour, it took me multiple phone calls and multiple emails across multiple hours to finalize the work order and schedule a day for someone to come out. 

8. I wrote a check to the orthodontist and put it in my car. I still need to take the check to the orthodontist’s office, but that can be done at a later time.

9. I followed up on a work email (and have still not heard back siiiighhhhhh).

10. Bonus task! I talked to Carla’s teacher on the phone and then made a follow-up phone call based on our conversation.

These were the tasks I got through before it was time to pick up Carla from school. (Although I did exchange three separate phone calls, two texts, and an email with the electrician and the estimate person while in the car, so that was fun.) (The email and texts I handled while in the car line, not while driving.)

All in all, it was a productive Power Hour. But do you see, Internet? DO YOU SEE WHY I HATE THESE TASKS? 

I would like to note once again for the record that I spent THREE HOURS Power Houring my way through all these phone calls and emails and to-do lists and I accomplished one thing. Yes, yes, I got a lot of other things underway. But NOTHING ELSE is complete.         

And there are still so many, many items at which to pick away.  

One of those tasks is to call the hair salon and schedule an appointment for my husband. Since I have no voice, Carla is going to get to learn how to schedule an appointment today. Which is clearly a crucial skill every human must master. 

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Dental Work and Negative Self-Talk

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.)

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Dinners This Week

We are somehow nearly halfway through January and I feel simultaneously as though the month has FLOWN by and also that it has lasted six million years. Much of it – at least the past week – has been extremely dreary and fretful, both for external reasons (what is HAPPENING with our democracy) and internal ones. But even though I am feeling down and worried and unsettled, I feel like my complaints are so small and insignificant that they aren’t worth sharing. There is SO MUCH going on in the world right now, my dumb complaints sound even more out-of-touch than normal. 

Like for instance how my return key does not work unless I press down on it with all my weight. Or how I am FINALLY getting to clean my oven (with the self-clean function) and so my house is filled with the acrid scent of imminent doom and also a soupçon of pizza essence. Or how I had to wait for more than an hour in the gynecologist’s crowded waiting room yesterday which a) I am SURE was the reason my blood pressure reading was much higher than normal and b) is making me Very Anxious about the likely unrelated fact that I have a scratchy throat today. Or how I have been working extra hard on revising my book and the whole thing is stupid and I am wasting my life. I really need to suck it up and stop wallowing.

I hope YOU and your loved ones are doing okay. And, honestly, if you had a small, insignificant gripe to share with me, it would make me feel better. Or not, that’s fine too. If you just want to scroll listlessly through my dinner options, trying valiantly to get up the motivation to think about making Yet Another Meal, that is a-okay with me.

Dinners for the Week of January 12-18

Over the weekend, I tried these Sheet Pan Cuban Chicken and Black Bean Rice Bowls (which Ernie mentioned recently), and they were delicious and a 100% keeper. They got me in a mango mood, so I have a bowl of mangoes ripening on the counter which is one good thing to look forward to, I suppose.

• Sweet and Fiery Pork Tenderloin with Mango Salsa: Speaking of mangoes, this is what we’re eating tonight. I have made it several times in the past and have always found the pork to be a little… weak in flavor. Today, I threw all the ingredients in the crockpot, added a bit of soy sauce and some minced ginger and garlic, and we’ll see if that does anything. 
•  Fish Taco Bowls 
• Fire Fry 
• Chicken Shawarma with Steamed Broccoli
• Tacos: The regular ground beef kind, per Carla’s request. I am going to have her make them, since she has been voicing some disappointment about the meals on offer lately. She seemed pretty pleased at the thought.

I also have some zucchini and asparagus in the crisper, for spur-of-the-moment stir fries or protein-and-a-veggie-side options.

What are you most looking forward to eating this week?

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An Unappetizing Topic

Three posts about food in one week? This blog really needs re-branding to reflect my All Food All the Time subject matter.

To be fair, today’s subject is more about marriage/homemaking/problem solving/I’m not sure what than about food. But it’s still food-adjacent. Food. No wonder my pants are all too tight.

You know that I have been a little… listless lately, about meal planning and cooking. If you make food for your own family on a regular basis, I am guessing that you know the feeling. It’s so relentless and so wearying… and, maybe worst of all, it’s so thankless.

I suppose I can understand, with an eyeroll and a sigh, why Carla scrunches up her face and says “ew” to some things. The child Ews a piece of chicken, so it’s not super shocking when she Ews roasted salmon or butternut squash soup, right? And it’s all part of the plan, teaching her to try new things, teaching her to be polite, teaching her basic table manners like not Ewing the food that someone lovingly or at least begrudgingly prepared.

And I can totally understand that not every meal I make is going to be a winner. We can’t have tacos and pizza all the time. Some things are going to be less exciting. And, yes, there are going to be some attempts that fall flat. Flavors that don’t work together or measuring mistakes or a miscalculation on how long to cook something, resulting in dry meat. It happens.

But Internet, these misses are becoming the rule rather than the exception. It doesn’t seem to matter whether I try something I’ve made a million times before, or something brand new, I keep flubbing them. The shrimp scampi with zucchini noodles, which is one of my favorites? I made it last week and it was AWFUL. Like, I could barely force myself to eat half of what was on my plate awful. I blame the parmesan – even though it was a brand new container and even though I sniffed it and it smelled fine and there was no visible mold, it seemed off.

And then I made my tried-and-true butternut squash soup recipe… And the soup was super thin, and my husband said it didn’t really taste like anything.

And then I made salmon with roasted veggies last night… and even though I checked the salmon’s temperature every five minutes, I managed to overcook it. Plus, my husband’s piece had pin bones in it. He found three or four before he gave up on eating his salmon. (I grew up eating salmon all the time, and my memory is that finding little bones in your salmon fillet just happens. It’s not a huge deal. To me. But my husband HATES it.) (Of courseit had to be my husband’s piece; my piece had no bones in it.) And Carla claimed that she HATES salmon, and wouldn’t eat more than a single bite.

And this is just in the past week, you guys! This kind of repeated meal failure is happening more and more often.

Have I lost my touch?

My husband is usually very supportive of my cooking. He says, every night, “Thank you so much for making dinner.” Sometimes, the dishes are things he doesn’t love – anything with shrimp in it, he could do without – but he eats the meals anyway because he knows it’s not easy to be in charge of meal planning and because he appreciates the work that went into it. And he says he doesn’t have to eat his absolute favorite meal every night.

But, man, lately, everything I make seems to have something to criticize.

I don’t want to make food he doesn’t like! (That’s different from making food he doesn’t love.) If there’s a problem with some recipe, I want to know so I can fix it!

But I also can’t keep plodding through the meal planning and preparing process if it’s met with criticism every night. It makes me want to cry.

The other thing is that… I’ve been having a lot of Down Days lately. It started when my friend got sick, back in August. But then really ramped up when she died. And there have been some other stressful unbloggable things, too – nothing serious, but things that have me feeling anxious and sad and stressed a lot of the time. When life is going great, it’s much easier to brush off some failures in the kitchen, you know? When life is not as good, those same failures feel magnified. Like… I can’t even succeed at something so simple as making dinner. It’s adding to the Down Feeling, is what I’m saying.

I am SO OVER IT. So very over it. All the pleasure has been sucked out of something that I take pride in, something that – sometimes – I really enjoy doing. I want to just throw up my hands and quit.

And yet, my family needs to eat. Every night. This is a problem I MUST solve.

The alternatives, as I see it, are as follows:

1. My husband shuts his trap and eats what I serve and pretends to like it even if it’s gross.This option makes me sad. I don’t want him to dislike eating. I don’t want him to feel like he has to lie to me. When he does have a criticism of the food I make, he is always super careful and gentle; he’s not screwing up his face and Ewing things (take notes, Carla). Plus, silly as it may be, I WANT him to think of me as a good cook. I definitely don’t want him to think of me as a BAD cook, or even a mediocre one. I am good at so few things in life, I really want to be good at this. Okay. This is not a viable option.
2. My husband takes over the meal planning and preparation.This is unlikely to happen. He’s just too busy at work. We’d never eat until ten pm. This option probably needs to come off the table.
3. We buy prepared food and/or go out to restaurants every night.This sounds less healthful than eating homemade meals, and expensive, not to mention time-consuming, so I’m going to say this is off the table as well.
4. We stick to known quantities. Spaghetti. Stir fry. Crockpot barbeque pork. Chili. Variations on protein-with-veggie. (Although, thinking about the mediocre butternut squash soup and the shrimp scampi disaster, I don’t even know if that’s safe! What if I’ve just lost my ability to cook???) I’ve written beforeabout how I would LOVE to simplify… or to emulate Nicole, and make each day of the week its own type of food (tacos, stir fries, pizzas, etc.). The main problem with this is boredom. First, my family gets tired of eating the same thing. We tried doing Taco Tuesday for a while, and it didn’t take long for my family to be SO SICK of tacos that we’ve had them maybe once or twice since? (My earliest reference to implementing a weekly Taco Tuesday was early August, and my family was sick of it by September 3.) Second, I get tired of making the same thing. I LIKE to try new things, I LIKE to experiment. This is probably the best option, though.
5. Letting everyone fend for themselves.I am very tempted by this option, I have to tell you. My husband can make himself some Bolognese or turkey chili on a weekend, and then eat that every night. And I can make my own food. (Carla, of course, will have the same rotation of foods she will eat/tolerate that she always does.)
6. Probably the real answer is some combination of the above. I wonder if I can make my husband responsible for one meal a week, at least on weeks when he isn’t on call. Maybe a weekend meal. And we already usually go out to eat one night a week. Maybe we make it A Thing. And maybe on our after-school activity nights, we do something prepared from the grocery store. And then the other three nights, we can do old standbys. That sounds possibly doable. We’ll see how it goes in practice.

Are there ideas I’m missing? Have you ever had a cooking slump like this before? And, if yes, how did you climb out of it? Do you and your spouse divide cooking duty, and, if so, how?

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Social Ineptitude and Resulting Pity Party

Yesterday we had a Parent Appreciation Luncheon at Carla’s school and I am still reeling from the experience.  Reeling may not be the right word. Perhaps “steeped in self pity” is more accurate, I’m not sure, I am destined to fail at all things including appropriate word choice.

At the top of the luncheon, all the kids in the entire grade got up and did a little song and dance routine. It was very cute. And then they got to usher us to our seats in the cafeteria and then we all ate lunch(eon) together. There was a lot of down time at the beginning while the teachers corralled all the kiddos and got them pointed in the right direction. Which meant that there was plenty of time for me to be SUPER socially awkward and inept and anxious about it.

Let’s just get one frustrating thing out of the way right up front, which is that my husband wasn’t able to make it to the luncheon. And yes, he’s on call, and yes, I’m sure there were single parents in the mix, and even in the case of two-parent households, I’m sure that other parents weren’t able to make it, and/or they have been at their jobs longer than my husband has been at his and feel more comfortable taking off in the middle of the day and/or have spouses who were more persistent about reminding them to find some way to take the time off, but it SEEMED like every child there had two parents except Carla, including two other physicians, which at baseline made me a) feel guilty and b) feel lonely. If my husband had been there, I could have at least talked exclusively to him, instead of sitting there mentally rending my garments as I tried desperately to gather the courage to go talk to someone.

While we were waiting for the kids to set up, I saw another mom that I have been friendly with in the past. If I’m being honest, I wish she were my best friend: she’s so lovely and put together and smart and friendly and kind. She started talking to me, which was nice. But then one of her friends came up to us, and the two of them started talking, and I started to panic. Was I supposed to join in the conversation, about things they have in common and about which I know nothing? Was I supposed to excuse myself and go… stand in a corner? I ended up doing neither, and just stood there silently with what I hoped was a calm, friendly, I’m-a-good-listener smile plastered on my face and nodded along with them. They were nice about it, making eye contact with me occasionally as though I were part of the conversation. It’s not like I was entirely mute; I tried to make interested-sounding noises even though I was much too panicked to focus on what they were saying. And then another friend of theirs came up and joined in and I just kept standing there, my anxiety flinging itself against the inside of my brain like a fish trying to escape its tank, and I tried to ask questions where I could – but they were obviously “I am making conversation” questions and not “I’m part of the conversation” questions, you know? – and tried to laugh and continue to make “I’m totally taking part in this discussion” noises. And the cafeteria was super hot and I started sweating and I became uncomfortably aware of the inside of my mouth and how my breath could not be great even though I definitely brushed and flossed before I came. And I didn’t know the other moms at all, or who their kids were, and – as is always the case anyway – I couldn’t figure out the rhythm of the conversation well enough to interject with a new subject or a related anecdote or a pertinent question. Not that I could properly follow along with the conversation anyway; as I mentioned before, I was too focused on all the THINGS going on in my head to focus on what they were saying.

Finally, a teacher called us to attention and we got to watch the kids’ little performance, which was a nice break. The ladies I’d been “talking with” drifted off to find their spouses and I stood by myself, clutching my sweater (why had I brought a sweater when clearly I’d entered one of the flaming hottest circles of hell???) and my purse and my desire to leave immediately and/or melt into the floor.

And then it was “luncheon” time, and once again I had to navigate the extreme horror of talking to a parent I don’t know that well. This time, across the table. Unfortunately, this parent was either as shy/uncomfortable as I am, or she had already written me off as no use to her. So my lame attempts at conversation were met with single word answers and apparent disinterest. You’d think this would be a good thing! Lets me off the hook, right? But instead, I kept trying to make lame small talk because I wanted her to like me. Obviously she wasn’t talking to me because she’d written me off as Not Worthy of Her Time, right? Okay, okay, so possibly she was having her own inner freak out about having to talk to me and fending off similar worries. Either way, I don’t hold it against her.

Fortunately, Carla was with me at this point, so I could direct most of my attention to her. But as we lunched, I was very aware of all the other parents in the room, laughing and chatting and having a great time. I mean, I’m pretty sure I wasn’t the only person in the room who doesn’t like groups/crowds/forcible mingling. But it never FEELS like there are others. Instead, it feels like everyone else finds social interaction super easy, and, not only that, but fun, which I find incomprehensible. I long for “easy.” Fun is a pipe dream.

Finally, when I was able to escape, I ran into a couple of familiar couples on the way down the hall. They are all super nice and friendly, but they were in couples, and seemed to be talking to each other, and plus one of the women was the woman whose friend-group I’d horned in on earlier and she was almost certainly done with conversational babysitting, so I tried to smile and make nice friendly noises, but then I motored on past to leave the school and get in my car and go far far away. And as I was doing that, I was mentally chiding myself for avoiding them instead of trying to interact with them. You can’t make friends with people if you dart past them every time you see them! Friendships are not built on awkward smiles and waves and “have a great day”s tossed over your shoulder! (Why not, though?)

And I DO wish I were friends with more of the parents at Carla’s school. So many of them seem great! But the way you get to know people is by talking to them during these school events, and I get so flustered and self-conscious that I just can’t do it. It’s moderately okay one on one, but when there are two or more people, I stop being able to think. I have no idea how to join the flow of conversation. I have no idea what to say. I often walk past little clusters of moms in the hallway after drop off and wonder what in the hell are they talking about?!?! I have no clue, absolutely none.

And then I go home and feel horrible, as I did yesterday. And the bad feelings remain. I feel lonely and isolated, which are terrible feelings to begin with. But then I also feel culpable, because it’s my own fault I don’t have friends. It can’t be THAT hard! Other people do it all the time! There must be something wrong with me that I am always and forever on the outside.

Hence the pity party.

We have a big Parent Breakfast coming up, as part of the kids’ transition into kindergarten. (KINDERGARTEN. Let’s reserve that panic attack for another post.) So I anticipate more of the same sweaty awkwardness and wallflowering and self-loathing to follow in a few short days! Yay!

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