Cranky Fibro Girl

Harnessing the healing power of snark

Things That Make You Say, “What?!”: Christmas 2005

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1. My husband and I spent the Christmas holiday with his parents, in their newly renovated mountain home. We were all gathered in the living room on Christmas Eve, in that nice, mellow, semi-hypnotic stupor that comes from knowing that there is nothing left to prepare for the next day, and that all of your loved ones are together in one place.

As we were discussing the arrangements for attending Midnight Mass, I saw my mother-in-law look over her assembled family and prepare to speak. I thought she was going to talk about how nice it was to have everyone all together, or discuss what a pleasant holiday it had been so far. Instead, we all witnessed the following exchange:

My mother-in-law: (to my husband) “So, what do you think about cremation?”

My husband: “You mean, as an alternative to going to church? Um, I’d like to go to church.”

2. Christmas Eve is also my husband’s birthday, so my family and his family got together for brunch to celebrate with him. As I was walking back to the table from the restroom I heard someone say, “Well, for that you really need your own bazooka.” I was afraid to inquire any further.

3. A new acquaintance explaining their entry into the world: “I wasn’t born. I was gifted down to people from the gods.”

The Outsiders

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We’re pretty excited here in blog land because this is our very first post that we’ve ever done from a remote location, and not sitting at home in our office. But despite my new feelings of technological mastery I clearly have some more work to do before I reach the levels at which my husband and father-in-law are currently residing.

Here is the conversation that my mother-in-law and I were having on the way home from dinner:

My MIL: “See how they’ve decorated all the lamp posts in town with those white lights.”
Me: “That’s really pretty. Remember when they used to have those really big multicolored lights? I really miss those.”

Here is the conversation that was taking place between my husband and my father-in-law in the backseat.

My husband: “Tonight after the movie we need to get started on that black belt level Sudoku puzzle.”
My FIL: “What we really need is a copier so we have enough sheets to try out different possibilities.”
My husband: “We could generate a spread sheet in Excel to do that for us.”
My FIL: “I bet we could even create it so that it checked to make sure that all of our totals were correct.”
My husband: “What is the total?”
My FIL: “What’s 9 factorial? Is that it?”
My husband: “No! 9 factorial is huge!”
My FIL: “Oh, you’re right. What was I thinking?!”
(Snorts and chortling laughter as they realize their mathematical gaffe.)

Clearly, I cannot start drinking eggnog soon enough.

Ye Olde Tyme Traditions

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Image courtesy of Free Photo.

Well, it’s that time of year again. The time when families come together to celebrate the holidays and strengthen family ties by participating in cherished, long-standing family rituals. And if I were going to sum up the essence evoked by my own family’s holiday rituals in one word, that word would definitely have to be…”speed”. Here’s what I mean.

Take, for example, the cherished tradition of the Christmas tree. Sure, there are many people who go out immediately after Thanksgiving, comparison shop to find The Perfect Tree, lovingly position it in the best spot in the house, and then create beautiful holiday memories of decorating the tree filled with homemade foods, holiday music, warmth, and laughter. Not us.

We prefer the thrill of the hunt. When Christmas trees are readily available at every home improvement store, grocery store, drug store, and church parking lot, well then we’re just not interested. Where is the challenge in that? But you just try and find a viable tree on Christmas Eve afternoon; that’ll get your adrenaline pumping.

Then of course there’s the Christmas shopping, and I can think of no better example to illustrate this than that of my brother. Every year he rolls into town about two days before Christmas. Up until this point he has completed exactly 0% of his Christmas preparations. But is he worried? Absolutely not. Because we are speedy.

He just grabs my mom and any other random family members who happen to be milling around at that moment and off they go. His personal goal is to go to one store, purchase presents for the 9 family members with whom we celebrate Christmas, and complete all of his shopping and wrapping (thank goodness for charities who raise money by wrapping gifts for crazed shoppers like us) in less time than it took him the year before. And somehow he always does.

(I decided to go along on the shopping trip last year, and because this is my blog I feel that I can TOTALLY take credit for the fact that last year, he beat his record by 50%. It now stands at under 30 minutes.)

Finally it is time for us to decorate the tree that we have so lovingly chosen speedily salvaged from the Christmas tree lot guy as he was closing down his business for the year. And here’s where the real fun begins, because in our house there are no rules. This stems from my mom’s childhood experiences of having a parent who forced her and her siblings to hang the tinsel on the tree strand by tiny, slippery, individual strand. (Even writing that sentence makes my head hurt in the place where my migraines start.)

So now that she is a grownup and can have her own Christmas tree, she has declared that anything goes. Anyone can put anything they want on her tree. If you can find a way to get it onto an ornament hook, it’s going up on the tree. This results in a unique, eclectic decorating style that I like to refer to as “Visual Anarchy As Staged On A Christmas Tree”.

I remember one year in particular where, in addition to the ornaments, our tree featured construction paper garlands made by my brother in elementary school, red, gold, and white tinsel garlands, at least 2 packages of individual tinsel strands, one tree’s worth of multicolored strands of lights that shone constantly, and one tree’s worth of blinking white strands of light hooked up to a variable-speed remote control. It was AWESOME! (Unless you are someone who prefers things like balance and visual harmony over absolute personal freedom. Then you probably wouldn’t like it very much. When I asked my engineer husband what he thought when he first experienced one of our Christmas trees he described it this way: “I felt the part of my head between my eyes and the rest of my brain shut down so I didn’t have to process what I was seeing.”)

So clearly our methods of celebration are not for everyone. But they work well for us. And so, on the eve (almost) of the 2005 holidays, I wish you a holiday that works well for you, or at the very least, a funny story to share afterwards.

Things That Make You Say,”What?!”: Thanksgiving ’05

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Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net.

Well, here we are once again, smack dab in the middle of another holiday season. And I don’t know about you, but I think that for me personally, my ability to see things in a slightly quirky way and find humor everywhere is one of the main ways that I keep myself sane during this time.

So in that vein, I offer you these “What?!” moments from my family’s Thanksgiving experience this year.

1. You know how all those commercials on TV show families getting together for the holidays, and everyone is having all of these deep, meaningful, emotional moments? Well, that really doesn’t happen in my family. When my family gets together it seems to bring out our Giant Collective Family Smart Ass. Here’s an example of what I mean.

On the day before Thanksgiving my mom took me, my husband, and my brother out to lunch. We were going to a restaurant that we hadn’t been to in a while, and my mom wanted us to see if we noticed anything different about the shopping center in which it was located.

My mom: “So, can you tell what has changed?”

All of us: “Hm, no.”

My Mom: “Look! All the trees are gone. They were having a crime wave, so they cut down all the trees!”

My brother and my husband: “Those darn trees! If you’re not watching them every minute they’re out mugging you, or stealing your purse, or something! It’s a good thing they got rid of all of them!”

2. Another good things about getting together with family for the holidays is that it gives you a chance to see that, no matter how regular or normal you think you are, to someone else the things you do will seem like the strangest things that they’ve ever heard of. And here’s an example of that.

On Thanksgiving evening during a break in our family card game I had to use my parents’ downstairs bathroom. As it turned out, this particular bathroom was having some flushing issues, and none of the “tricks” I knew were fixing it.

When I reported this to my parents they said, “Oh, yeah. What you have to do is to fill up the trash can with a little bit of water, throw the water into the toilet, and then flush it.”

They might as well have said, “What you have to do is spin around in a circle three times, and then hop up and down on one foot while patting the top of your head and chanting a special hymn to the god of plumbing.” Because there was as much chance of my coming up with that little routine as there was of my intuiting the whole water-in-the-trash-can solution.

3. But my favorite part of getting together with other people are the times when something so unexpected happens that everything comes to a screeching halt. That is the epitome of a “What?!” moment, and is exactly what happened to my family in the following example.

In all outward appearances, it looked like a storybook holiday moment. It was Thanksgiving evening, and we’d all enjoyed a nice dinner together as a family. We were all gathered around the kitchen table, chatting and sharing stories, while my husband made homemade ice cream.

Then all of a sudden my mom, who grew up in the 50’s and 60’s when women still wore gloves, whose family discussed the finer points of etiquette at the dinner table, who I’ve never once heard swear or curse, who is always pleasant to everyone and is the epitome of “being a good example” said to me:

“You know how you were talking about crap earlier?”

Me and The Whole Entire Universe: “What?!”

And for the record, I still have no idea what she was referring to. I have a hazy memory of someone trying to introduce bat guano as a topic of conversation, but that’s it. (Don’t ask).

Let’s Get Physical

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So we had a little excitement here this morning, when my husband called me into the bathroom to show me how one of his eyes was bleeding.

As I believe I’ve mentioned before, normally in our marriage my husband is The Person In Charge Of Being Calm, and I am The Person Who Gets To Freak Out. But clearly that arrangement wasn’t going to work for us today. So I dug down deep inside myself, and was able to come up with a tiny reservoir of calm. In this way I followed the wonderful example of my mother who, I believe, developed her inner reservoir of calm as a result of Raising A Son.

My brother is a chemist, and one of the things that makes him such an excellent scientist is his curious, inquisitive mind. However, what that meant for him as a child was that he was totally unafraid to try anything. And who had to be there to deal with the results? My mom.

When my brother decided that it would be really cool to have a pet snake, who was in charge of feeding the snake and cleaning out its cage? My mom. When he decided to start lifting weights and built his own personal gym in our attic, who was his spotter? My mom. When he needed to be taken to the emergency room so many times that we joked that he had his own frequent visitor card, who was always there to play Florence Nightingale? My mom.

In retrospect, despite all of his various injuries my brother might actually have been an easier child to deal with than I was. All of his stuff was pretty straightforward-blood, bruises, and broken bones. I, however, was the child who, at age seven, asked my mother to explain to me how it was that a person could have a body that would die, but also have a soul that would live forever. I was also the child who came to her in tears at age twelve, caught up in an existential crisis triggered by the fact that I had just realized that I was powerless to stop the passage of time. So in comparison, dealing with a child who had a concussion after falling off a bike without a helmet on might actually have been a refreshing change.

But for me, having to deal with any kind of physical problem is always a challenge. I think it’s because I just forget about my body until something hurts really badly. Then I am always surprised to remember that I am, in fact, a physical being, and not just a giant disembodied mind, moving through the world and pondering The Meaning Of Life.

So that was my other problem today. In addition to just being really squeamish, I was also experiencing a burning arm agony so intense that all of my waking moments were spent fantasizing about hurling my body into something extremely sharp, like a jagged pane of glass or a harpoon, in a desperate attempt to relieve the pain.

Happily this did not prove necessary, and after visits to our respective doctors my husband and I are convalescing at home, waiting for the pizza guy to deliver our generation’s comfort food, and receiving the well-wishes of our three cats.

“I heard you were sick, so I threw up this hairball just for you.”

“In sympathy for your illness, I stole this place mat from the porch and chewed it into submission.”

“I’m so sorry you don’t feel well: Here’s my ass.”

Florence Nightingale’s got nothing on them.

Family Highs

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The blog has been a little quiet lately due to my being on vacation, part of which involved attending a family reunion for my mom’s side of the family. And while I picked up various random bits of information on my travels, such as the fact that there are people who apparently feel that it is totally appropriate to have long, involved, personal conversations on their cell phones while using a public restroom, no matter how much that may creep out the other people also using the facilities, I wanted to share the insights I received while I was interacting with my family.

1. Men and women are so different that sometimes it’s amazing that they are ever able to find enough common ground to have a conversation, much less get married, have a family, share a life together, etc.

Sometimes these differences really come in handy and allow men and women to work together as an efficient team, like when the women of my family were able to clean house and prepare party food their way while the men gathered digital cameras, memory sticks, flash drives, and laptops and were able to provide each family with a complete set of all pictures taken over the entire weekend.

But then there are The Other Times.

Just to provide a little background, the reason for this family reunion was to celebrate my uncle’s retirement after 26 years of service to our country, and his transition into civilian life. So one of the highlights of this weekend was an official ceremony that involved uniforms, sabers, salutes, “piping ashore”, reading of orders, awarding of medals, and the celebration of an illustrious and distinguished career.

So of course it was only natural that in the middle of all of this pomp and circumstance that we women were moved to go out into the foyer in order to better to be able to try on each other’s shoes.

2. When entering a group of mixed genders and mixed ages, people will group together according to which Bodily Ailment they are currently experiencing.

I was instantly alerted that this portion of the weekend had begun when I heard my mom ask her sisters the following question: “So, have you gotten to the stage yet where you can’t get cool enough?”

Like a deer alerted to the presence of humans I immediately wanted to flee. But I was in the middle of making my sandwich, so I was stuck in the kitchen until I was finished. I worked as fast as I could but not fast enough to miss comments like, “I have reached the stage where I have to be careful when I cough, sneeze or laugh”, and before I knew it, with absolutely No Warning Whatsoever, we had zoomed right through sleep apnea and had landed smack in the middle of colonoscopies.

3. Nothing beats a good plan.

As anyone with a family knows, there is always a little element of uncertainty and potential for chaos when you gather a large group of people who are all related to one another in a small space. So in order to prepare for this time my plan was to spend a week at the beach beforehand with my husband.

That was a fabulous plan, and it worked great. However, unbeknownst to me my body decided to come up with its own Surprise Emergency Backup Plan, which it would enact whenever it felt like things might be getting to be too much for me to handle. This plan involved keeping a constant, low-level migraine in place at the base of my skull at all times, ready to burst into full-blown status at any moment. Since I was coming from a week of near-comatose levels of relaxation into a weekend of near-constant interaction with 12 other relatives, this plan felt the need to deploy itself A Lot, without actually consulting me first to see what I thought.

On the plus side, being under the influence of powerful migraine medications did help me fit right in with the people whose plan involved liberal applications of Mike’s Hard Lemonade and tropical pink drinks featuring coconut rum. I can only imagine what this plan might have involved had all 25 of us been there together. Probably some sort of spontaneous internal combustion, followed by an extensive period of unconsciousness.

4. No matter what, my family loves me (even when they know I will be writing about them in my blog).

Thanks guys! Love you! Jen

Ms. Direction

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One of the things that impresses me the most about my husband is the fact that no matter where we go, even if it’s a place he’s never been to before, it takes him all of about five seconds to figure out exactly where he is, and then, exactly how to get to where he wants to go next. As a matter of fact, if you watch very carefully as we arrive in a new location, you can actually see a 3-D holographic image of the city lift up off of the ground, hover briefly in the air , and then settle right down onto his brain.

My dad and my brother are exactly the same way, so I always know that if I am ever out with any one of these three men I am always OK. (I also know that I don’t actually have to pay attention to pesky little details like street names, street signs, the name of the actual city or country in which we are currently located, etc. because they will take care of all of that for me.) Plus, if the three of them are all together then it is like their navigational powers are amplified, so not only do we get where we’re going more quickly and more efficiently, but we also always have a parking spot waiting for us right by the door.

In contrast, I myself am never entirely sure of where I am in any given moment, and if you ask me how to get from one place to another there’s a very good chance that at least part of my answer is going to involve the phrase “by magic”. My husband has learned in giving me directions to avoid such tricky technical terms as “north” or “east”, and instead to stick to simple instructions like, “turn left by the big chicken”.

Unfortunately, this lack of navigational ability only increases if my mom and I take a trip by ourselves. Last fall she and I drove together to another state to stay with a relative who was ill. Every. Single. Day. we had the exact same conversation: “Do we turn left out of the hotel parking lot, or do we turn right?”  Every. Day. Not only did we not have a virtual map in our minds, nor could we remember from one day to the next in which direction we needed to turn, but it also never once occurred to us to write down the correct answer at the moment in which this decision occurred so that we would have that Critically Important Information to refer to the next time we needed it.

This Vortex of Spatial Dislocation only intensified the night that she, I, and another relative had to go to the grocery store by ourselves all by ourselves in this town which was not our own. (And I don’t mean to perpetuate unfortunate gender stereotypes here, but this particular relative was also of the female persuasion.) The three of us got in the car, set off on the very same road ON WHICH WE HAD  JUST DRIVEN on our way back from the hospital mere moments earlier, and , you guessed it, turned the wrong way. And it took the three of us AT LEAST ten minutes to recognize this fact.

The good news is that we all did survive this trip and somehow managed to get back home, and I discovered that if I really, really HAVE to I can reach down and tap into hitherto undiscovered navigational abilities. But if it has to come to that, be warned: we will definitely be taking the scenic (read: WRONG) route.

Missed Communication

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Sometimes I think it would be nice if all personal interactions were as easily understood as those between me and my cats.

When they are happy they rub their head against my leg. When they are put out or indignant they poo in the tub. When they want attention they insert themselves in between me and whatever else I’m doing, and stick their furry little hiney right in my face to make sure that I inhale the maximum amount of fur possible and am unable to focus on anything but them. When they’re really angry they come and sit on my desk while I’m working, but facing away from me with their tail switching back and forth angrily, while aiming a malevolent glare in my direction. (Well, as malevolent as a 6 pound ball of grey fluff can be).

But when humans get involved, communication gets a lot more complicated.

I was thinking about that earlier this week as I was having lunch with my husband. He was upset about a news story he’d recently heard. It involved a “hot button” issue, the kind that causes all connections to the rational, logical part of your brain to shut down and instead leads you directly into highly charged, emotional (over)reacting. Which then leads to conversations where the people around you, who are not directly involved in your conversation, could accidentally overhear certain words or phrases and give you concerned looks as they begin to edge cautiously toward the door.

About six years ago I found myself in a similar situation, but due to the extremely different emotional climate in which we were all living back then, this time it was really funny rather than a cause for concern. But it won’t seem so at first, so just bear with me.

Six years ago this summer my family gathered to say goodbye to my grandmother, who was dying of cancer. Her wish was that when she died, she simply be wrapped in a white sheet before she was placed in her coffin. This was simple, and beautiful, and did not at all take into consideration the fact that this would require there to be A Person In Charge Of Sheets. Since my mom is the oldest child in her family, and I am the oldest child in my family, this duty fell to the two of us.

So we headed off to the local Giant Shopping Mart, but unfortunately there was no section labeled, “Linens for the Soon-To-Be-Deceased”, or, “Easy Coffin Accessories”, so we were forced to stand in the middle of the sheet and towel aisle and have the following conversation:

“Do you think a queen sized sheet will be big enough to wrap all the way around her?”

“I don’t know. I think it depends on whether the body is laid end-to-end or diagonally.”

“Will a top sheet be enough to wrap the body in, or do you think we need a fitted sheet too?”

Are you imagining what you would be thinking if you overheard this conversation? Because my mom and I sure were. As if the situation weren’t stressful enough already, we decided to go ahead and come up with a list of all the ways someone could misinterpret what they were hearing and decide to report us to the authorities. (Sometimes being an avid reader with a powerful imagination can actually be a disadvantage).

I’m happy to say that we did survive that shopping trip, but maybe you can see why I sometimes envy cats their simple, direct method of communication. Although I somehow doubt that coughing up a hairball and then rolling over to lick my private parts would really have been an appropriate response to this situation.

The Telltale Tock

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Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net.

I’m at an age now where I’m apparently supposed to be feeling the “pull” of my biological clock. But I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, and I’m pretty sure I was absent the day those were passed out.

Since this same time last summer 10 of our friends, family members, and co-workers have either gotten pregnant, had a baby, or begun the adoption process. And every time a new baby shows up, I truly believe that this time, I’m going to”get” it. I’ll be around this precious new life, and my own maternal whatever-it-is will finally just kick right in.

Instead, it usually goes something like this:

Someone sends out pictures of their new baby.
Other people’s response: “Oh, what a sweet baby.”
My response: “Wow! That looks just like a tiny, enraged monkey.”

Or, someone has brought their new baby over to show it off.
Everyone else thinks, “Oh, I want to hold the baby!”
I think…Nothing. Because I am frozen in panic. Because I know the second I touch that child everyone in the room will see that being around a baby isn’t making me want one of my own. And then my secret will be out. I am a girl, and I don’t want a baby.

Although truthfully, it really isn’t that much of a secret. Even babies know I’m not a baby person.

Once when I was in my early 20’s my then-boyfriend (now husband) and I were visiting friends who were in the process of moving. Because I was a girl (and, admittedly, not much help in the heavy lifting area), I got elected to stay with the couple’s 2-year-old daughter. Everything was fine at first but then she needed her diaper changed, and despite being a competent, college-educated young adult, I had never before changed anyone’s diaper. As a matter of fact, I am 32 years old and I have STILL never changed anyone’s diaper. (I know; some people are just lucky).

Anyway, this poor child was so desperate to have her diaper changed that she spent the last 30 minutes or so before her parents got home walking into her room, pulling diapers out of the bag herself, and bringing them to me in an effort to get the process started. Those were some of the longest 30 minutes of my life. It’s a pretty low day when your personal competency is exceeded by that of a 2-year-old.

So the fact that I’m well into my 30’s and this baby thing just isn’t kicking in for me has got me to thinking: what if I just don’t have it? What if, just like there are some people who can’t see certain colors, or some people who can’t hear certain tones, or some people who are missing the gene that allows you to curl your tongue, there are just some people who are born not wanting to have babies? What if, instead of spending all of my time worrying that I am some kind of aberrant freak of nature because I’m female yet have no desire to reproduce, I could let myself off the hook about this, and start noticing what I AM good at?

Because the truly ironic part of this story is that, while I get brain-freeze around anyone under 12 years old, I am TERRIFIC with teenagers. Just at the point when most people throw up their hands and no longer have any idea what to do, that is exactly the point where I have become somewhat of a pro-a natural, if you will.

I suspect that the reason I was missing from the biological clock line was that I was first in line at the “Talking To Teens” station. After seeing everyone who was waiting over in that other line, I knew that one day they were all really going to need my help.