I met someone

No not like that, a friend! Seriously just a friend. 

 

But first a quick update.  The past three months after going back to work have been rough.  I was home by happenstance for a year with Jonah and when I went back to work, I was ready. I have not been ready with the baby.  At four months old and returning to work, I feel like I have lost my baby.  I have become bitter, irritable, and emotionally labile.  All I had to do was think about my baby and my lost time with her and I would start bawling.  All I had to do was walk in my house and I could pick a fight with the husband.  I resented people who simply wanted to love on us.  Oddly work was okay as it served as a distraction from my rage, and I like my job. 

 

I felt like I was on a hamster wheel grabbing the kids and getting them to daycare everyday, working a long day, then coming home to a husband that left for night classes, and then to collapse every night by 9.  To say I felt overwhelmed is accurate.  And I was fucking pissed.  Pissed that I was missing out on being with my baby.  That I felt like I had no quality time with her, or for myself, or my laundry, or anything by the way.  A two year old tends to dominate so when I was home with the kids there was no quality baby time. 

 

I finally got myself evaluated for post-partum depression to be told that no I don’t have it and that I needed to stop working or work part-time, that is the only way I would feel better. Um, not helpful. At this point I cannot simply reverse the choices we have made that have led to me working full-time.  So I have been slowly working at working through my anger and being happier. This working full time is my choice and I have to make the best of it.  As the husband said, why did we work so hard to get to this place just to be miserable?  I can say after a month I do not cry every time I think of being away from the baby, we are carving out time for me to have quality time with the baby, I have told many people how unhappy I was and the support and understanding has lessened my bitterness, and I work hard at being happier.  So far it is working.

 

Also I made a new friend.  And granted we have only had two dates, but I feel really optimistic.  We have been in California for two years now and I have only made one friend.  And while this one friend is awesome we are very different and I don’t actually relate to her that much.  She is rich and lives a pretty opulent lifestyle, skinny blond tits on a stick, and works part-time with lots domestic help.  I just don’t feel comfortable talking about my woes.  In these two years I have felt like I am so different from most people I have met.  Then I met her.  She was a speaker at a professional development activity and as I listened to her, I kept thinking, wow I would like to be friends with this person. She is a professor of psychology with a private practice. I didn’t really know how to make a pass at her. So I decided after her presentation I would ask for her private practice info so perhaps I could refer clients to her.  She said she wasn’t taking new clients right now.  As we were talking one of my colleagues who also attended the presentation shtupped in-“You should be friends, you have a lot in common.”  We both realized we had kids around the same age, she mentioned a playdate, and I got her number.

 

I waited a few days because I didn’t want to appear desperate, because I am. I sent her a text message but never heard back.  The there was a professional happy hour and my colleague was like you should go, she is gonna be there.  But I couldn’t go. So I called the number and learned it was her office at the University so she couldn’t have gotten the text.  So I left a voicemail.  But I didn’t hear back.  Then two weeks later my colleague told me she had asked for my email and he gave it to her. Then I got an email explaining that she was on maternity leave and didn’t regularly check her messages but she would love to get together!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  Does this sound like being single and dating to you????

 

Anyhow we finally got together and I found out that we have so so so much in common.  We are both psychologists specializing in children, our husbands are both former military and we both dated long distance (including deployments), she is jewish her husband is not, we are both the major bread earners, we have two years olds and babies within two months of each other, and we are both BITTER!!!!!!!!!

 

Distracted Living

I am going on three weeks from changing my relationship with facebook and I gotta say this was a brilliant move for me. I never got hooked on twitter or instagram, so my social media addiction was limited to facebook. I go on once, maybe twice a day, for maybe 10 minutes. Some days not at all. It is quality time when I do go on. And when it is over, I think wow that is all it took to get what I needed. I was wasting so much time. Time that I could be looking at my kids, or getting my job done.  Of course since I decided to make this move, I have read a number  of articles that have wrote about much of what I was experiencing. They say it better of course.  4/11 of the babies due between September and January are here, and I love that I can go on facebook and see all the cute faces.  And I have not felt the urge to post anything nasty.  

Unplugging

Being a full time working mom of two is kicking my ass. Big time.  But today the ass kicking is a little too acute to blog about. I want to blog about it and I will, on another day that I won’t start crying.  I am struggling. So I am making some changes to make life a bit easier and enjoyable. One of those things is unplugging from facebook.

 

I have been having a love/hate relationship with facebook.  I have read about studies that report that the more time you spend on facebook the less happy you are.  I have read about how distracted we are by our smart phones. I was especially shocked by the recent incident that took place on a bus in SF. A suspected murderer waved a gun around, wiped his nose with it, put it away, took it out, and then later shot someone dead. A surveillance camera captured that no one noticed because everyone was looking at their phones. Our phones have changed us. 

 

I do not like the changes that have occurred within me.

 

A few weeks ago an acquaintance from my another stage in my life posted on facebook that a week after giving birth she was back to her pre-pregnancy weight. I was disgusted and immediately posted about her bragbooking.  In the hour following I watched how others agreed/liked/commented on/with my post. One good blog friend suggested I be more understanding, that perhaps this was a new mommy who was struggling. Well, I replied, this was NOT a new mommy, this was her second child. Another person from my high school days posted that it happened to her too and I shouldn’t hate on her. But, this commenter had previously shared with me that she didn’t know she was pregnant until she was 8 months gestation and she happens to be very overweight. I was like, how did you even know what you weighed!!! All this was going on in my head at 9:00 pm as I sat alone in my house. I was raging about the bragbooking and fakebooking. 

 

I realized I didn’t like how I was behaving .I was reacting poorly on facebook. I removed my post. Because the truth was I know the original poster struggled with a significant eating disorder. So her post had way more context than just merely bragging. And the commenter that didn’t know she was pregnant, she struggled with infertility and weight her entire life. Who was I to judge? But I totally was. In my facebook haze I was letting facebook get the better of me and spur me to be a person I didn’t want to be. 

 

I had been thinking about facebook a lot lately.  Something was going wrong with facebook and I. It was fun when I was first on it. It kept me connected to others, especially when I moved away.  I liked reading interesting links that others posted.  But increasingly the negative feelings I have while surfing facebook have more than outweighed the positive. I get annoyed and agitated by other’s posts. And I am not talking about the political stuff. What I deemed to be bragging, or gratuitous complaining bothered me. Or even worse were the posts that were inciting feelings of jealousy. I would post and look for validation through likes and comments.  And the most egregious influence is the distraction that facebook is for me. 

 

I have such limited time with my kids these days.  The time that I do have is not as quality as I yearn for. (I am not going to start crying.)  And what am I doing when I am with them? Staring at my phone, posting on facebook-feeling negative emotions.  This is not how I want to spend my time. 

 

Facebook has begun to feel toxic to me and like an addiction. When I am at work, when I should be working, I am checking facebook. When I am a passenger in the car when I should be looking out the window, or talking to the people in the car, I am looking at my phone.  I needed to do something about it.

 

I had about 380 facebook friends. I now have about 175. I unfriended  everyone that wasn’t actually a friend to me at some point in my life. All those acquaintances from different periods of my life-unfriended.  High school people who I was never friends with in the first place-unfriended.  I kept all my actual friends, my blog friends (there are only like five), and family members.  The people who I worried I might offend if I unfriended  them, because well I knew they were going through tough times-I didn’t want to inadvertently make them feel rejected by me-even though they probably wouldn’t notice-I hid them.  Family members who annoy the crap out of me, I hide their posts. 

 

Look I do not need to read about my cousin-in-law who during my work day is now making her own granola bars because store bought ones ar unhealthy-and then I rage about it. That really happened.  I had to make some changes. I kept everyone that I genuinely cared about and who I felt genuinely cared about me.  I am actually surprised that I kept 175 facebook friends. And of those 200 that I unfriended-have any noticed and contacted me?  Zero.

 

Then I took facebook off my iphone. Of course I could put it back on at any time.  But so far I have stayed on the facebook iphone wagon.  I do miss it. I do think about it. I do jones for it.  Those feelings confirm for me that I did the right thing. I do not want my children to see me staring at my phone rather than staring at or interacting with them.  Now if my children are sleeping and I have the time and energy, I go to facebook on our desktop computer at home.  I see what my real friends and family members have posted.  I don’t have the same negative feelings. I have consistently gone on facebook every evening since the purge.  Because I do want to see what is going on in the lives of those I care about-and apparently there are 175 people I truly and genuinely care about!

I have felt, freed.

Seriously, totally a good decision. 

Yep things have been rough. 

Good-bye to summer

I head back to work in 10 days after four months off to have a baby, complete a ludicrous toddler summer bucket list, and three months of all four family members together EVERYDAY (that has been both good and bad). I am hoping for some peace and quiet to blog. I miss it. I am also excited to wear a real bra. Two pregnancies later these suckers have moved south.  

When they ask...

And they will ask.

When did your alcoholism first start?

I will look them squarely in the eye and reply,

"When I took a driving family vacation with my two year old and newborn."

Bye bye google reader hello bloglovin

Google reader is soon to be no more, if you are one of the 7 official followers and want to continue to follow my shenanigans, see the button to the right, and follow via bloglovin.  Thanks for caring.

So long Army

This morning at the crack of dawn Josh ACU’d up and left for his last day of drill.  We are very close to being officially out of the Army.  After the green weanie dick dance of the last couple of months we are done.  It does make me laugh that he signed a contract for a year, but due to a technicality (he supposedly failed a PT (physical training) test-that never actually happened) and the contract was voided.  We then found out that that during the next contract there was a possibility of him being sent to another unit and being deployed.  I didn't even pause before-GET OUT-came flying out of my mouth.

While it certainly does make me a bit nervous that the healthcare safety net of Josh being an Army reservist is gone-truth is if all hell breaks loose and I am laid off, healthcare will be just one of the many problems we will have to deal with.  Some might say all the more reason to stay in the reserves.  Well I refuse to live in fear. Fear that I will lose my job. Fear that Josh will be deployed.  Fear that something will happen to him while deployed. 

Instead we are going to hope for the best.  We have made it this far, despite the crazy lady at the FRG tea telling me we were “CRAZY” to be getting out.  Seriously I think it is crazy not to believe in yourself and your own power to make your dreams come true.  We are the most important persons to believe.  So while there is a voice in my head crossing my fingers, I know we made the right decision.

Now this part cracks me up.  Josh’s contract ended 30 May.  Of course his out processing paperwork was not ready and he had to go to drill this weekend.  I was like you better be getting paid! (By the way I came down with a cold this weekend too, Army timing once again.)  On Monday 1 June I began nagging Josh to call Tricare to verify that he still had health insurance.  He kept saying they since he had to go to drill he was sure he did.  By Wednesday he couldn't take my nagging any longer and called. Yep they dropped him. Fortunately I had prepped with my employer and knew what we needed to do get him covered.  We got the DOD to fax us a letter showing he no longer had health coverage and got him enrolled on mine. 

My shoulders feel a bit larger knowing I am carrying this additional responsibility.  But I also feel pretty proud of myself for being able to support my family in this way.  As I looked at Josh this morning walk out in his ACU’s I still find him hot in uniform, but I also feel extremely proud of us that we boldly walked into civilian life and we are doing so awesome.