Implant / Tooth Replacement: FINAL STEP!

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My new replacement tooth is finally, finally, finally in place. The implant is healed; the crown is on; it is over.

The procedure to install the crown was a little icky and unpleasant, but endurable. I would have enjoyed a tranquilizer or vodka tonic first, but it was okay without. First the dentist unscrewed the little screw in the center of the implant (the implant, if you remember, is the part under the gums); that little screw was only there while the implant was healing, and could now be removed. In its place the dentist screwed in the abutment, which if I’m following this correctly is the piece that sticks out from the gums and is for the crown (the part that looks like a tooth) to attach to. In between removing the screw and putting in the abutment, they disinfected the center of the implant, and there was the unpleasant taste of whatever they used for that. After the abutment was in, they took an x-ray to make sure it was in there correctly.

The abutment has to be locked permanently into place, and this was one of my least favorite parts: the dentist has to screw it in until it snaps twice, which means it’s locked. So there was a lot of weird intense pressure (no pain, but it wasn’t comfortable) that felt really clearly like it was Inside the Bones of My Face (it didn’t hurt in a GUMS way at all), and then I had to anticipate a SNAP, which was indeed startling when it arrived but I’m sure glad the dentist mentioned it ahead of time or I would have thought something had broken. Then we repeated the pressure/anticipation/snap. He gave me a mirror and I could see a teensy metal paddle-thing sticking out where my fake tooth was going to be. I looked very odd, like a James Bond villain.

The dentist and assistant spent some time making sure the crown would fit, was the right color, etc. Ahead of time the assistant told me that it does occasionally happen that a crown arrives and it won’t fit or it’s the wrong color, so I was not getting my hopes entirely up that things would go well, but they did: everything fit right and looked nice. The dentist had to press HARD on the crown to make sure it fit right; this was gums-painful, exactly as you’d expect if someone pressed something hard against your gums. He also used one of those pointy little metal tools to trace all the way around the crown to make sure the gums weren’t getting pinched underneath, and this was painful enough that I think he should have warned about it, but maybe he didn’t know. It was like when they use the pointy thing that measures the depth of your gum pockets, except it was sliding along the gum instead of just poking down and back out.

Then there was some messing around with whatever adhesive they needed to use. Then the dentist put the crown in place for real, and there was a repeat of the pressing-hard-on-gums pain and also the tracing-around-with-pointy-thing pain, twice, plus sharp picking sensations as, I suspect, he was removing traces of extra adhesive. Really, it was quite uncomfortable, but I was bolstered by the knowledge that we were WRAPPING THIS UP and the whole lengthy process would soon be complete.

He gave me a mirror, and I had a TOOTH. The gums around the tooth were startlingly white; he said that would fade very soon and it did. He said it might be slightly sore for a day or so and it was, but nothing that really bothered me or was a problem for eating—more like An Awareness of the area. I still have an Awareness feeling even a week later, but less.

Then the part I wasn’t expecting: the assistant had me bite down on that paper stuff that shows them how accurate your bite is, and then the dentist had to spend some time drilling to make my bite fit right again. He took some off my front BOTTOM teeth, which surprised me. He also took some off the new crown. It didn’t hurt, but if you hate even non-painful drilling then you know what it was like, and it was a particularly screamy drill, and then I had to keep re-biting the paper, and my mouth was trembling enough to make this difficult, and I was not having a good time.

But then it was done! It was done and I walked out without having to make any more appointments!

The tooth felt very weird in my mouth for awhile, and still feels a little weird nearly a week later. My tongue keeps exploring it as a foreign object, but each day it feels a little less foreign. I am not used to biting with it, since I’ve been biting without it for nine months; when I do bite with it, it feels weird, like there is something in between my tooth and what I’m biting—but it is feeling less weird each day. It feels odd to brush it, and a little unpleasant—again, like I’m brushing something in between my tooth and the toothbrush. I hate flossing it: the floss has to go much further up under the gumline than usual. But I will get used to that.

I had a little lisp/whistle the first few days, but Paul said no one could hear it but me. I’d gotten used to talking without the tooth or with a flipper (the temporary/removable fake tooth) that has a section covering part of the roof of my mouth, so talking with regular teeth again was strange. When I go out somewhere, I keep thinking “Oh no! I forgot my tooth!”—and then realizing the “forgot my tooth” feeling (from having nothing against the roof of my mouth) is now invalid.

I am very happy it’s done, and I’m glad I had it done, but is there no way technology could advance in this area? That took a REALLY LONG TIME. I had the tooth pulled LAST SEPTEMBER. It is now JUNE. That’s a whole SCHOOL YEAR.

Books: My Ex-Life; Lincoln in the Bardo

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I made the mistake of reading other books before reviewing these, so already they fade in my memory.

(image from Amazon.com)

My Ex-Life, by Stephen McCauley

The plot of this book is exactly my kind of thing: David, a gay man whose life is in a bit of upheaval, goes to stay with his ex-wife Julie and her daughter Mandy for a little while to help them with some stuff, and things go really nicely and companionably and appealingly. But the book was written in a style I don’t like: the author almost couldn’t write a sentence without making a snarky/clever/witty add-on:

David guessed him to be in his late thirties or early forties, but boyishness still clung to him, as it often does to men with good hair or unresolved relationships with their fathers. He was tidily dressed in short pants and a green polo shirt, and he wore around his neck a lanyard with a heavy set of keys attached, a little like a gym teacher or an obstreperous camp counselor.

I found it extremely tiring to read in fiction, because there is no way to get absorbed in the story if the author is constantly drawing your attention to the way he’s writing it. It was like getting constantly nudged.

Also, it was the kind of book that confirms your fears that everyone is thinking mean things about everyone else:

Carol had a high, girlish voice. She took superb care of herself–her skin appeared to be polished–but she had the hard face of someone who could stand to eat a cupcake once or twice a year. The bones were too prominent, and the muscles around her jaw flexed visibly when she spoke. As was to be expected, she was pretty. But it was the flat prettiness of a sorority sister who wears pastels, subscribes to Self magazine, and actually reads the articles. She punctuated her comments with a dry, nervous laugh that reminded David of the panting of a dog eager to be petted.

and:

If Carol was making an exhausting effort to please, Henry was aiming for a stern demeanor that gave away nothing. David had noted this deportment in strong-willed men overcompensating for the fact that their lives are controlled by their wives or girlfriends. He had a dark suntan, an attractive affectation, but one that these days looked somehow vintage, like a dial telephone or an electric carving knife.

It’s vivid, creative, descriptive writing, but I didn’t like it and it made me feel yucky to read it. Despite that, I read to the end because I wanted to know what would happen with the plot, which I liked very much. And because of charming passages like this one, where David and Mandy walk Mandy’s dog deliberately past a shop where the shopkeeper always comes out with a dog biscuit:

After a few minutes, a small man emerged holding something in his hands. “Please don’t pretend you’re not expecting a snack,” he said. “We’re beyond that charade.”

The author then interjects to say it wasn’t clear if he was speaking to Mandy or to the dog, but it is 100% endearing if he’s talking to the dog, and otherwise it is not, so I wish he had just let us assume it was addressed to the dog (which it absolutely was, and you cannot tell me otherwise).

It is hard to say if I recommend the book or not. I guess I do, especially since people have different tastes in writing styles and you might LOVE what I found tiring/depressing.

 

(image from Amazon.com)

Lincoln in the Bardo, by George Saunders

I read this after reading Shelf Love’s review, which I highly recommend you read as well, because it explains it very well with the appropriate warnings. Even with the warnings, I spent the first 50 pages or so thinking the book might be too experimental/confusing for me to get through (and sighing at the body-part crudity and bathroom crudity). But sometime after that, I went from uncertain to enchanted, and spent the rest of the book thinking things such as “Why are there not MORE books like this??” and getting bowled over by new plot points. (And skimming some of the chapters full of quotes from Lincoln resources. They were good, and they contributed to the story, but there were TOO MANY BY HALF.) I really, really liked it, and added several more books by this author to my library list.

What it Was Like To Be Interviewed for TSA Pre-Check

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I mentioned a couple of days ago that I applied online for TSA Pre-Check. Today I went in for the interview portion.

I’d made an appointment, though walk-ins were allowed; I could make the appointment online from pull-down menus (first choose a date, then an available time on that date), which I greatly appreciated. I checked in at the desk, and they asked what identification I’d brought, and I said “Driver’s license and passport,” and she said I would only need the passport, and she asked to see it. Then she asked what payment I’d brought (the site says they very much prefer credit cards), and I said “Credit card,” and she asked to see it. She typed a few things into her computer. Then she handed me back the passport and credit card along with a little dry-erase card on which she’d written my arrival time, and she told me to keep all three of those things together and handy. She led me to a waiting room, and I sat down. I was the only one there, but in the next ten minutes two more people arrived, both walk-ins.

I found I was more nervous than I needed to be. I was a little shaky. I had the “near a police officer” feeling, where even though you are completely innocent you feel like you might get in trouble unexpectedly, or get barked at for doing something wrong. (I have that same feeling going through airport security, which is one reason I want to get Pre-Check: to make that experience shorter and easier, with less time waiting in line feeling anxious beforehand.)

I waited about ten minutes, but that meant I was called in right at my appointment time; I’d arrived a little early. The man who called me in was friendly-looking, in his 60s or so, not intimidating in stature or manner. He asked for my passport and credit card and praised me for having them ready; I gave credit for that to the woman at the front desk who’d told me to keep them out. He said my information aloud as he entered it into the computer, and he said my date of birth with the wrong year; I don’t know if that was a mistake or a test, but I corrected him. Then he asked about my middle initials, but he did it in a slightly odd way; like, say my initials were A. and B., what he said was “What’s A.B.?”—and more like “What’s aybee?” Not “What do A. and B. stand for?” or “What are your middle names?,” so I wondered if that was another little test; either way, I knew the answer and gave it.

There was a screen facing me, and he had me confirm my address, confirm the answers I’d given on the online part of the application (had I been convicted of a crime, had I lived at my address at least five years, was I a U.S. citizen, etc.), confirm my previously-used names, and enter my Social Security number. The email address field was filled in, but hidden (like when you type in a password and it only shows dots); he asked me to tell him my email address and he entered it in the “confirm email” field.

I’d been worried about the fingerprinting part of the test. Long ago when I wanted to work at a daycare, I had to go get fingerprinted at the police station and they had a terrible time getting good prints: they did it again and again, used up sheet after sheet of paper, called in someone more experienced, consulted a supervisor, pressed my fingertips so hard they hurt, and they STILL didn’t seem satisfied with what they got. For the TSA Pre-Check, they had a little screen for me to press my fingers against—no ink. First I pressed my thumbs on the screen, and he said we were waiting for a green light and two beeps, and we got a green light and two beeps. But then I had to put the four fingers of my right hand on the screen, and we tried again and again and couldn’t get the green light and the beeps. He had me press down harder; use my other fingers to help press; move them to slightly different positions; hold my hand flatter—all to no avail. Then we tried the left hand, and it was the same thing over again. He said it would be okay, because we did get good thumb prints and those are the important thing; he said at worst the failure to get good fingerprints might mean a small delay in the application being approved, but shouldn’t result in a rejection or anything.

Then he ran the credit card (TSA Pre-Check is $85 for five years) and had me sign for the charge and also to say I had not told any lies in the interview. He gave me back the credit card and my passport, and said I should receive an email with my Known Traveler Number (KTN) in about a week; he gave me a receipt with information on it in case I didn’t hear back in a week. He said the email would be the only thing I’d get: no card or anything, just an emailed number; so I should print out the email and put it in a safe place when it arrived.

So! Not terrible at all. I think the whole thing took a little over ten minutes, and quite a bit of that was the part where we were struggling with my fingerprints. There was no trouble with my middle names/initials—but they only looked at the passport, not the driver’s license AND passport.

TSA Pre-Check Application: It’s Okay if Your Identifying Documents Have Middle Names on One and Middle Initials on the Other

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I had another morning of cursing my sleep conscience: I dreamed I turned down a dinner date with a really great guy (“I’m married,” I said; “I don’t mind married,” he said, charming as all heck; “I really CAN’T,” I said), and I dreamed I turned down a dozen different foods I really wanted to eat. Why. Why have I not mastered lucid dreaming. I turned down a chance to eat brownies and not-forsake-all-others and EAT BROWNIES.

I am applying for TSA Pre-Check, which is that thing that lets you get through airport security faster and more easily and without all the instructions that make me frazzled and anxious. I kept starting the application process and then stopping it, because it said that it was CRUCIAL that your name be EXACTLY THE SAME on all the documents you brought to the interview to prove your identity. But my driver’s license shows just my two middle initials, and my passport has my middle names spelled out. Those are not matching, but not something I can easily fix. And I couldn’t find anything about it in the FAQ; and to get to the interview portion I have to drive 45 minutes away to a city I hate driving in, so it wasn’t something I wanted to take a chance on, either.

BUT ALSO, I have found while researching it for the baby name blog that at least for Social Security purposes, the U.S. government doesn’t consider middle names part of your legal name. (Suffixes such as Jr., III, etc., are also not part of the legal name. The post where I said so gets regular comments from pissed-off men who want to explain to me JUST HOW MUCH those suffixes ARE part of their names, and want to prove it to me with multiple not-at-all-proving-it examples. YAWN.)

(screenshot from SSA.gov)

So my hope was that this would be the same situation for the TSA Pre-Check thing, since that’s the government too, and I finally just proceeded with the application. Mid-application, I got to this line:

(screenshot from TSA.gov)

HOPE CONFIRMED. In case you too have been fretting about this.

Home From College, Part 2

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Suzanne wrote on the home from college post:

If you are interested in sharing more, I am curious about how the year went in general… how the kids adjusted to life without Rob at home… how it was for you and Paul with only four kids — was there a noticeable difference in… anything? … how William felt about being the oldest… Well, those seem like potentially boring things that you might not want to talk about, but *I* think it would be interesting. I am so fascinated by changing family dynamics, especially when it comes to multi-kid families.

I noticed it was easier to make meals. William started a job this year working two dinnertimes per week, and they were both MY dinnertimes (Paul cooks two days a week), so twice a week I was only cooking for three kids. That’s WAY fewer English muffin pizzas. But even on nights William isn’t working, four kids feels like significantly fewer kids to cook for, and there’s a lot more leftover taco meat.

There were grocery items that apparently Rob uses more of than anyone else: tortilla chips, shredded cheese, bread, lunch meat. For awhile after he left, I was buying things at the usual rate and they were really building up. Now that he’s home, I notice I’m having trouble keeping the supply up again.

I noticed William was a lot more chatty. When Rob is home, he talks a lot with Rob. When Rob wasn’t here, he started talking with us and interacting more with the younger kids. It’s been nice. The first few times he came up and started a conversation, I almost didn’t know what to do!

William definitely missed Rob, and is happy to have him home. The younger kids didn’t seem to notice or care that Rob wasn’t here or is now home. I mentioned this to Elizabeth, who said it’s not like they interact with him much when he’s here, so *big shrug*. I think that can definitely be a thing with big age gaps between siblings: he’s six years older than the twins and eight years older than Henry. I wonder if they’ll miss William more, since the age gaps are smaller.

We’d wondered if we’d want to rearrange the bedrooms. I don’t know if you remember, but long ago we had one big kid and one little kid in each room. (Elizabeth has her own room.) This was because Rob and William used to not get along at all, but both of them got along fine with the younger kids. So Rob and Edward were in one room, and William and Henry were in the other. Awhile back (two years? three?), Rob and William were getting along GREAT, but Henry was driving William crazy, so we rearranged: big kids in one room, little kids in the other. This meant it was theoretically perfect when Rob left for school: the new eldest kid had his own room. But we did ask William if he’d LIKE to share with a younger brother, for loneliness reasons. He declined.

Paul thought maybe we could put all three remaining boys in one room and put storage in the other room so that he could expand his workshop into the part of the basement we currently use for storage, but I thought that was nuts. Even with a kid “off to college,” that kid was still home a LOT: half a week at Thanksgiving, several weeks at Christmas, a week in spring, and now May-August. Maybe that will change next year, but right now he is still using his bedroom for nearly five months out of the year.

I noticed the household was overall more peaceful. Rob is [Good Kid and We Love Him Disclaimer], but he can also be tiring to live with. Long ago, the school system wanted him referred for testing to see if he might have Asperger’s Syndrome; the neurologist said Rob did not qualify for the diagnosis, but that he was close enough to that area of the spectrum that we should expect similar issues. He’s also a 19-year-old college boy. He can be the kind of conversationalist who asks you a question you have a partially emotional answer to, and then tries to poke holes in your logic to show you how irrational you are. He’ll pick away at your argument without furthering his own argument. He sometimes WILDLY misinterprets behaviors and emotions and statements, leaving me uncertain how to even EXPLAIN how wrong he is. He is driven crazy by the sound of other people chewing, and he tries to solve it by forcing everyone around him to chew in a way he can’t hear, which turns out to be impossible but that doesn’t stop him from trying. (I’m sympathetic to a point, but he thinks of this as OUR problem rather than his, and that’s when he loses my sympathies.) He can be rigid and critical; he is not good at understanding that different people have different strengths and abilities. He doesn’t always consider other people’s strengths/abilities to BE strengths. It can be, as I say, tiring. I have hopes that this will improve with time: I think of the “arguing for the fun of it” stage as being particularly intense during the college years. Plus, it’s easier to deal with tiring behavior when it’s for shorter periods of time. And back to the disclaimer, which is actually true: he can also be talkative and pleasant and funny, and he’s nice to his younger siblings, and he’s responsible and he does chores uncomplainingly, and so forth. So it’s not like he’s NOTHING BUT tiring to live with.

At first it was noticeable that we’d lost a driver. Even though William got his license at around the same time Rob left, I felt a lot more comfortable having Rob drive younger siblings than having William do it—and not only because Rob had two extra years of driving experience. Rob is one of those kids who was a full-grown adult even when he was an infant, very interested in Safety Rules as a toddler, etc.; it didn’t feel weird to have him driving siblings after the initial weirdness of it wore off. It’s not that William isn’t a careful driver, it’s just that he seems more like a CHILD than Rob ever did. But we got used to not being able to have Rob drive anymore, and we got used to sometimes asking William to do it (though I still prefer not to have to).

Before Rob left for college, we had two clumps of children: the Bigs and the Littles. We frequently divided them that way: “Okay, the Bigs work on X, and the Littles work on Y,” or one parent might take the Bigs somewhere while the other parent does something with the Littles, or the Bigs take turns helping with dinner but the Littles take turns unloading the dishwasher, or the Bigs have one bedtime but the Littles have an earlier bedtime. The gap between one group of kids and the next made for a natural change in rules/responsibilities/activities. With Rob gone, it felt like that fell apart. It made it so uneven to have one Big and three Littles, it stopped being a thing. Well, or I guess we might still say “Okay, which of you Littles wants to come along to the library?” (because we never asked the Bigs because they’re not up at that time of day anyway), and William still has a later bedtime than the others, but it’s just not as much of a thing. And with Rob gone and William working two dinnertimes a week, we needed the twins to start being dinner helpers, and that further blurred the gap. I’m interested to know if it’ll start being a thing again over the summer.

Home From College

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Rob has finished his first year of college. I had a wonderful road-trip to go pick him up: it’s about a 7-hour drive, which to me is the perfect distance to feel like A Road Trip without being too far and getting boring, and is also far enough to justify staying in a hotel overnight before heading home, and I love to stay in hotels. I brought William with me so he could take a tour of Rob’s college (William thinks he’d probably like to go there too, if he gets in) and because I thought Rob would be pleased to have William there on the way home, and I got a second hotel room so they could hang out and stay up late and watch their own TV shows or whatever. I picked up William from school mid-day (he had a test he had to take), and we went through the Wendy’s drive-through on our way out of town, which is a very fun way to start a road trip.

And the whole trip was such a success except that when we got there Rob was busy and couldn’t join us for dinner. And then he was getting together with friends to play a game, and then he wanted to practice piano, and then he claimed complete obliviousness of the plan that he would stay in the hotel, even though I had emailed him about the plan AND sent a reminder that when he packed up his dorm room he should remember to leave out what he’d need in the hotel. And he hadn’t packed up his dorm room, either.

It would be a dramatic understatement to say I was pissed. It did not quite ruin the trip, but it came perilously close. Like, at the VERY LEAST, he needed to inform us ahead of time that he was busy that evening, since the plan was that he would give William his own tour of the college and/or that we would load all his stuff into the car. And DEFINITELY his room should have already been packed up. And William had been SUPER looking forward to them getting to hang out at the hotel. And…he wanted to PRACTICE PIANO? That is not even a decent excuse. “Is she insisting?,” he texted William, to my enormous annoyance. As if I were the one changing our plans without warning, and being unreasonable about doing it my new way.

Well. We salvaged it. I managed not to flip out or say anything regrettable. William and I went out to dinner on our own, and eating a good dinner was a big step toward feeling better. We went back to the hotel and I stayed up watching a TV show comparing Diana/Kate/Meghan, and a show about brides choosing wedding dresses. I ate Little Debbie cakes, and Mike & Ikes, and Harvest Cheddar Sun Chips, and caramel M&Ms. I slept in a big bed all by myself with the room’s temperature set just the way I like it. In the morning there was a really good breakfast bar with waffles, and good coffee, and scrambled eggs with ham and cheese in them. We checked out and drove over to the college. I gave Rob the car keys and said that we’d planned to help load up all his stuff, but since he’d been busy the previous evening we were not going to have time for that, and that he could pack and load his own stuff while William and I went on the tour. OH SNAP ROB.

I said nothing else on the subject, and this made Rob so uncomfortable that on the way home he brought the topic up and gave a lame excuse that nevertheless indicated he knew he’d messed up, and he was noticeably sheepish about it. The trip home was nice except for the last part when it was dark and we had trouble finding a gas station, and then we found one and it was full-serve but I didn’t realize that and so I nearly hit the attendant with my car door, and then I quickly closed the door but the window was up so I cut off his greeting, and then I had to start the car to get the window down, and anyway I am not used to full-service. We stopped for pizza for dinner after about an hour of looking for pizza places and not being able to find any, and it was very good pizza, and we recognized the place as the same place we’d stopped on our way home from visiting the college back when Rob was doing college tours.

It has been odd having Rob home. I’d gotten used to him not being here. Also, now he is in this weird in-between stage of life where he’s been living on his own without parental supervision, but on the other hand right now he is a child-role person living in my house. Right now he’s getting up each day at about the time his siblings come home from school. He’s working full-time at a fast-food place, and he works the closing shift so he gets home after we go to bed. He doesn’t seem super happy to be home; perhaps this will motivate him next summer to make other plans.

I’m not sure what else it would be helpful to include. I guess the information that it DOES all start to feel normal. Like, during the college-selection process, it feels BIZARRE to imagine that the child will be LIVING ELSEWHERE. But then when it happens, it’s less bizarre than it seems like it would be, and also it feels like the natural next step—especially if you yourself went to college. The overlap is odd: my own college memories don’t feel THAT distant, and I keep comparing where he is to where I remember myself being. I absolutely had my dorm room packed up without my parents telling me to do it, for example.

I asked Rob if he felt he’d made the right decision on where to go to school, and he said it was impossible to compare (yes, yes, thank you for pointing that out), but that it didn’t feel like the WRONG decision. He is contented there. I worry that he doesn’t seem to have much of a social life, but he’s never been very social, and he does have people he plays games with, so it’s not as if he’s sad and isolated.

It feels a little sad to sense that he finds home-life pretty boring, but I remember finding it boring too when I came home from college, and it’s not as if that boredom meant anything bad. We WANT our kids to find the outside world more interesting than their childhood room. It feels a little sad to be looking forward to him going back to college, but again, this is the GOOD way for things to happen: we don’t want to be devastated by our children growing up and moving out.

Octavia Butler; New Pillow

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I am reading The Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler, and I would like to say that this is just the kind of thing I used to like to read before the possibility of this exact kind of future (no contraceptives! clean water is too scarce for most people to afford! all education is private and too expensive for most people to afford! police/firefighters are private and have to be paid for directly by the citizen who summons them! women and children can’t go outside safely except in a group including armed men!) went from “oooh, kind of thrillingly creepy to think of the effects of that kind of unlikely societal collapse!” to “our political leaders are right this minute working on achieving those very goals.” I want to finish the book, but it’s setting my baseline level of panic way too high for daily life, so I think after this one book I’m done (it’s a series).

I’d like to veer into another topic, which is my new pillow. This story begins when I was doing my in-home eldercare job, and one of the houses I went to had the TV set to a station that played a pillow commercial again and again and again and again until I was about to lose my fool mind but also kind of wanted to try the pillow. Then I read some reviews, and the reviews said the pillow was nothing but one of those egg-carton memory foam things you put under a sleeping bag, but all ripped up into chunks and stuffed into a sack.

I was at Target earlier this week, and their whole pillow aisle was full of the new yellow clearance stickers (I HATE the new yellow clearance stickers). I found a pillow labeled “Shredded Foam Pillow: Shapeable memory foam designed to fit your ideal sleep position.” Definitely hinting at it being a knock-off of the one in the commercial, and I squeezed it and it felt like it was full of ripped-up chunks of memory foam, so I bought it.

This would be a much better story if I loved the pillow, but I don’t. It seems like it might be good for me: when I lie on my side using the pillow, I can just SEE the part of the commercial that shows the side-sleeper’s spine aligning correctly. But I am also a stomach-sleeper, and a half-stomach-half-side sleeper, and this pillow doesn’t CHANGE enough for that. It’s the firmest pillow I have ever used: there is almost no GIVE to it at all. I am accustomed to a down-filled pillow, which had too MUCH give (I had to keep plumping it up and squishing it into a half-pillow-sized lump in the pillow case), but this is too far the other way. When I squeeze the pillow with my hand, it feels as if it would squoosh down nicely, but my head is not heavy enough to make it do that, so I feel as if my head is resting on a stable little shelf. In the reviews for the pillow on TV, reviewers wrote that foam chunks could be removed from the pillow to make it more adjustable; I may see if I can do that.

Books, Movies, Television, Web Comics

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Let’s see. I saw the movie Life of the Party, and I saw it with friends which is I think the best way to see it.

I will see pretty much anything Melissa McCarthy does. And I want YOU to, too, because I want Things Melissa McCarthy Does to be profitable and therefore abundant. This movie was as good as I expected, though not quite as good as I’d hoped. It is a nice fantasy movie, like Bad Moms.

I also watched the royal wedding, and I hope for that hugely publicized event we were all remembering that it adds nothing to the world to volunteer one’s own scornful lack of interest in something other people are happy and enthusiastic about. My interest levels were much lower than for the Will & Kate wedding, and I wasn’t even sure I was going to get up early to watch it—but I DID get up, and I was so glad I did, because it turned out to be a MUCH MORE INTERESTING wedding. There was this strong thread of “Oh, you don’t think the monarchy should be including a biracial American? Huh! LOOKIT WHAT WE’RE GOING RIGHT AHEAD AND DOING ANYWAY!”—with a sweet, sweet smile.

I read Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, The Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer, by Barbara Ehrenreich.

(image from Amazon.com)

There was a lengthy middle section I found a little sloggy to get through (something about cells, and it seemed important but it also seemed like it went on forever and at a much lower entertainment-value level than the rest of the book), but I liked the first part and the last part. Do you remember awhile back, when a lot of people were writing really interesting articles about how Fitness/Food has become something much more like Religion for a lot of people: rituals, superstitions, purity/sin values, righteousness rankings, warding off fears of death? This book is along those lines.

I read American Gods, by Neil Gaiman, at Paul’s suggestion.

(image from Amazon.com)

I read something somewhere about why did some website/store have a Women’s Fiction category but not a Men’s Fiction category, so I will make a point of saying that this is Men’s Fiction: more talk about pissing and penises than I would think anyone in the world could possibly be interested in. TONS of fighting. A fair amount of grossness. Plenty of unlikely fantasy sex. But a really good book anyway, I thought, with interesting themes and ideas. I felt like about 90% of the particulars about gods/goddesses was going right past my limited knowledge, but the book was entirely readable without that knowledge: the author helps the reader get the gist of what they need to know.

Breaking Cat News is a huge hit at my house:

(image from gocomics.com)

We are all reading it. Also, Henry is getting the book for his birthday. There will be jealousy.

Fading Pique: Second Mother’s Day Update

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I find it difficult to maintain high levels of pique for long. After writing yesterday’s update, I found that even just the writing-it-out of the whole thing brought me down another level or two, and the rest of the day I was feeling markedly better: forgetting about it, feeling like it didn’t matter so much, feeling sheepishly like I’d built a mountain out of a molehill, feeling things slipping back into normal. It was hard to tell which feelings/thoughts were the Right Ones: the earlier ones, when I was thinking this incident (and others like it) could be THE BEGINNING OF THE END? Or the later ones, when I was thinking this incident (and others like it) were the routine disappointments of sharing life with others, and just meant I needed to tweak things a bit in the future? Or maybe some of each? It is so hard to tell.

Anyway, I wasn’t sure how to approach it with Paul, but then there was a sort of perfect set-up of quiet children and the right sort of moods and me Feeling Able, and I pounced on the chance. And even just in the first few minutes, seeing his open uncomprehending face, I could see what this was going to be: more work than I wanted to do. I finished expressing how sad I’d been; I told him what it was like seeing my Facebook feed ALL DAY full of other families doing things to celebrate; I told him that the whole thing had been so inexplicable, I’d considered explanations such as him having brain tumor, or him wanting a divorce, or the children thinking I was a crummy mother.

And he was just so baffled by it all. He couldn’t even respond except with a sort of soothing patting. He was listening, he was paying attention, he wasn’t defensive or making excuses—but I could see that it was going to take SO MUCH WORK to get him from seeing things his way to understanding my point of view. I would need metaphors and similes and relevant examples from the world of computers. I would need to work HARD, and it would be EXHAUSTING, and it would involve frustration and fighting and tears—and at the end of it he would briefly understand, and that understanding would last for about a day, and then without endless shoring up it would drop away again and I’d have to start at the very beginning next time. And after more than 20 years of this, I am tired of it. I don’t think I want to do any more of it. I don’t think I can change this about him. I am Sisyphus deciding to leave the rock at the bottom of the hill this time and maybe put that energy into country line-dancing or my friendships or something.

The thing I realized last night as I was deciding NOT to take on that workload is that he really does not care. I don’t think he can help it. I think with huge effort on his part and mine he can get to the point where he understands what it would be LIKE to care or why OTHER PEOPLE care, but it doesn’t make HIM care. He cares about my feelings only to the extent that they affect him: if I’m sad or angry, he wants to fix that because it’s uncomfortable for him if I’m sad or angry. But he’s not thinking, like, “I wish I could KNOW HER MIND better! I want to UNDERSTAND her! I wish I knew what she was feeling!” At all. And he’s not going to. He is willing to sit and listen to me try to explain it to him, but it’s similar to the way I am willing to let him explain the computer problem he’s trying to solve at work: I don’t care about it at all, and I don’t really understand it either, but I don’t mind if he wants to tell me about it.

I realized I do a lot of routine system checks to see how I’m doing as a person/mother/wife: things like, this isn’t working, what can I think of to fix it or improve it? Or: this is a temperament flaw of mine; can I fix the flaw, or do I need to find a way to work with it, or do I need to find a way to keep it from harming others? What are some relatively easy ways I could make the kids’ lives happier? What are some things I could do to keep myself from getting frustrated or yelling at them? What are some things I could do to make Paul feel happier at home? What are the things that seem to make him feel more content, and are there any of those I could improve on? Are there things I could do (sock-pairing, bed-making) that would be small and easy for me but make him feel a lot happier? Things like that are routine things for me to be thinking about.

What has occurred to me is that Paul does not do this at all, and that is part of what is hurting my feelings and confusing me. He is not evaluating his own behavior, wondering what he could do to be a better father or husband and then working on those things. He is not wondering what he could do to to make our marriage better. Because of the way language works, it sounds harsh to say he “doesn’t care” about those things, or that those things are “not priorities,” though I think both statements are accurate. It would be fairer to say something more along the lines of those issues not being on his radar, or not being part of his own systems-scan, or not being included in his pre-sets, or whatever. It’s not that he thinks “Be a better husband? Who cares about THAT?,” it’s that he never analyzes himself in that way or wonders about things like that. He cares about being a better programmer, and he cares about acquiring more knowledge about things, and he cares about being a better gardener. (I would have to use all of this in a conversation trying to make him care about caring about being a better husband, and then I would have to draw careful parallels, and we’d still only just be getting started on a long, long road.)

I don’t want to treat him like a child or like someone who is just soooooooo rational he needs irrational woman-things explained to him carefully, and I don’t want to buy into the idea that he needs me to tell him what to do because he can’t figure this stuff out—but it seems like what is needed here is a way to cope with this gap for the duration of our relationship, considering the gap IS THERE. Like, am I willing, in exchange for a happier, more peaceful life, to say things to him such as, “This upcoming event is important to me. It will make me sad if you do x or y. It will make me happy if you do anything within the category z, with z defined as ‘thoughtful things that show appreciation/caring’. Some candy and/or a non-browning supermarket bouquet would also be pleasing, but not necessary. I like tulips, btw, or mixed bouquets.”

This all just SMACKS of being his personal puppeteer. It’s not that I don’t think I could do this; it’s that it’s hard to see the results being satisfying: if I’m going to program him through the actions, why not save myself the time/effort and do it myself? How is “he” doing it if I’m the one writing the script and the stage directions? Why, in this relationship of two adults, am I in charge of how both of us behave? And I suppose the answer is “Because I care about that” and/or “Because his behavior affects me, and he evidently can’t/won’t handle his own.” Honestly, who DID think marriage was a good idea? Two people who can’t figure each other out or get what they need from each other, living together for decades until one of them LITERALLY DIES AND THEIR LIFE IS OVER? What a great plan!

Well. Despite getting a little ranty just now, this morning I am feeling even less pique than yesterday. I feel like I can talk to the children about what happened and make them feel the right amount of bad without there being any weeping or overdoing it on my part. I feel like I can continue living with Paul and allow things to go back to normal (with tweaks and preventative tweaks as things go along), and I am no longer thinking things like “Let’s see, what makes most sense is if I stay in the house with the kids and we get him a condo in the same neighborhood…,” and I will be alert for signs of mental deterioration, hearing loss, mental issues, mid-life crisis, etc., that could be having their own effects. I liked a LOT of the things you guys said that I hadn’t even thought of, like life changes and stressors and so forth. On one hand it’s hard to see those things having an affect on how he treats me on Mother’s Day; on the other hand, thinking back to my OWN times of stress and/or despair, I know there were things where I would think “I just can’t deal with that right now”—and they often were things unrelated to the source of stress. Like, I’d be stressed about something happening with politics, and it would give me that panicky “I just CAN’T” feeling about sending in stuff for a bake sale. That’s not a good comparison because no one person is personally neglected by me if I don’t contribute to the bake sale, but I’m having trouble thinking of a better one. BECAUSE I WOULD NOT HAVE DROPPED SOMETHING THAT WOULD MAKE ANOTHER PERSON FEEL PERSONALLY NEGLECTED BY ME, I WOULD HAVE DROPPED SOMETHING ELSE.

Mother’s Day Partial Update

104 Replies

You guys were unbelievable on the whole Mother’s Day situation. Comments and tweets have been pouring in for days. It is hard to know how to adequately thank for something like that. But: thank you. It was balm to the wound.

I emailed some non-online friends, friends who have been even more in the loop over the years on Paul Stuff good and bad (I don’t like to overdo it on the blog), and they feel the same as you do. One question they asked, as some of you asked, was whether Paul might be mad about something. Another question they asked, as some of you might have wanted to ask but didn’t feel you could, was whether Paul might, perhaps subconsciously, want out of the marriage, and be pulling crap like this to make it happen. It’s a possibility I’ve been forced to add to the list along with brain tumor and early-onset dementia. As one friend put it, Paul has done his share of Jerk Moves over the years, as ANY human does, but she says in the last few years there has been a shift in the kind of things he’s been doing—as if he has actually changed as a person, in a concerning way that seems to require SOME sort of explanation.

It’s very hard to know how much of this to discuss here, as you can probably well imagine. My parents raised me in a sort of “What happens in the marriage stays in the marriage” environment, but I found that really backfired when my first marriage ended: no one could believe it had been bad, because I hadn’t talked about how bad it was; and because I continued not to talk about it as things were wrapping up, everyone assumed that meant it must have been my fault, and/or that I was a flighty person who would ditch a marriage at the very first non-blissful moment. And because my soon-to-be-ex husband had no trouble talking about it, he soon had the ear and sympathy of everyone involved. If things DO go badly this time, I’d prefer it not to go that way.

On the other hand, there are solid reasons for the “What happens in the marriage stays in the marriage” concept. As Judith Viorst says in Love & Guilt & The Meaning of Life, Etc., “One advantage of marriage, it seems to me, is that when you fall out of love with him, or he falls out of love with you, it keeps you together until you maybe fall in again.” Marriages go through bleak times, and if you come OUT of the bleak time, then it’s nice not to have everyone knowing your business and casting side-eyes at your spouse (or at you, if it’s your spouse who’s been talking); also, it’s easy to overstate things when upset, and harder to walk them back when things are okay again. But…then if there comes an insurmountable bleak time and you finally decide it’s time to put everyone out of their misery, you have people saying you’re ditching the marriage at the very first sign of bleakness, and that any stories you tell of the earlier bad times are just you rewriting history to justify your bailing. Plus, who wants to act as if their marriage is perfect all the time? But of course you also don’t want to tell Every Single Little Bad Thing That Ever Happens, as if creating a record for the court. So it’s a pickle.

It’s even more of a pickle with online things. I can email my friends and vent freely about Paul, because we have long-established relationships with each other and know that a vent does not mean anything is seriously wrong. My friend M can tell me how her husband has recently been an idiot, and I answer back that husbands are idiots, and if possible I add a reassuringly similar husband-was-an-idiot story of my own, and we go on with our lives, feeling better and more able to cope and less panicky that maybe we married the wrong people. Neither of us think that husbands in general or either of our husbands in particular are literally, actually idiots, or that there is any real need for concern, and we both feel better for the interaction, both of us thinking this kind of stuff just falls into that not-really-serious category where EVERYONE is sometimes an idiot.

Online, that whole thing is less clear. You have probably seen it before: someone will vent about something that’s clearly being told at least 75% for the amusing entertainment value of the story, by someone who is clearly in love with the idiot they’re ranting about, and yet there will be commenters either going Full Concern and suggesting marriage counseling “to deal with your anger issues” or whatever, or else saying, “You should be grateful he’s not DEAD” or “You should just be glad he’s not CHEATING ON YOU” or whatever. It can be difficult online, speaking to an extraordinarily mixed group (from strangers on their first visit to the blog all the way up to people you’ve been friends with for years), to get across that tone of “just venting about an otherwise normal and satisfactory marriage.” It’s even more complicated when it’s NOT just that.

A long time ago there was a blogger whose blog I didn’t usually read, but I was aware of her and would sometimes go read a post if someone else linked to it. One reason I didn’t like to routinely read her blog was that she so often wrote things about how she and her husband were more in love every day, or how she fell more in love with him every year, or how she never knew how much their previously large amount of love could have gotten so much LARGER. That’s not how I feel about things in my own relationship, and so reading things like that made me understandably nervous: did I marry the wrong person or what? I mean, there are all those studies that say the fluttery-lovey feeling lasts, what, two years, and then it’s more a matter of shared experiences and mutual goals and growing trust/dependence and so forth. But then you see people talking about how the flutter-love has gotten EVEN MORE FLUTTERY and it can make you wonder. Look: you can tell it makes me nervous because I switched into second-person.

Anyway, when this blogger whose love for her husband was more intense with every passing day announced that she and her husband were divorcing, and that all her earlier words on the topic of love were because she was hoping that saying those things would make them true, it was hard to know what to feel. Relief, because maybe my earlier nervousness was unfounded (at least in this case) and most marriages DON’T keep reaching for higher and higher levels of ecstatic, heart-pounding love? Anger, because she had lied with reckless disregard for how those lies might make others feel about their own relationships, and because I am probably not the only reader who thought, “Uh oh…” as a result? Sympathy, because this stuff is hard and no one knows what they’re doing and it’s easy to make a mistake you think will reflect only on yourself but in fact has much further-reaching effects?

In my own case, with my own situation, I am not sure which way to go with this, and I think it’s quite possible to choose one direction and then decide later that that was wrong. But I am able to edit and/or delete posts, and you have shown yourselves to be unfussed by previous mistakes. Also, we are all in this life thing together, and it doesn’t help any of us to read a lot of posts about how blissful someone else’s life is, but it can help TREMENDOUSLY to read about someone else’s struggles. One of the best parts of a blogging network is that “I’m not the only one!!!” feeling. There is nothing as lonely as thinking you’re the only one who manages to be depressed even when you have this beautiful perfect new baby and everything went fine and nothing is wrong, or that you’re the only one who sometimes has to resist the temptation to get in your car and keep driving, or that you’re the only one whose marriage is having troubles that don’t make funny stories, or that you’re the only one whose kids are having worrisome issues, or that you’re the only one who isn’t finding at-home motherhood particularly #blessed #MomLife #HappyMama, or that you’re the only one finding it hard to make friends, or that you’re the only one who regrets some of your life choices, or that you’re the only one who doesn’t know what to do about a situation, or WHATEVER.

All this is to say that I plan to continue discussing what’s going on, at least for now, at least in general, though of course not alllll the details. And I will try to keep in mind the goal of representing things with reasonable fairness—or in a way that shows you clearly that I am feeling too mad at that moment to be fair, so you know to take it with a grain of salt, and so I know I can walk it back later when I’ve calmed down.

I am still thinking about how I want to handle things with Paul/kids; it takes me a long time to think such things out. Right now my loose plan is to address it with the kids as part of the Father’s Day preparations. I don’t want a do-over of Mother’s Day; I thought that was a really good idea, but I find I don’t WANT it. I will use the frame of Father’s Day preparations to explain how I felt when there were no Mother’s Day preparations. Then next Mother’s Day I may do a little refresher course ahead of time, or I may make my OWN Mother’s Day plans; we’ll see.

Paul and I have had one brief talk: it made me think he might be reading my blog even though he has agreed not to, because he seemed totally fine all weekend and Monday evening, and then Monday night came to me acting very sad and saying he had felt very sad for the past few days over the Mother’s Day thing, but that on Mother’s Day he just hadn’t known what to do. I’m not sure I can explain what a baffling thing this was to hear. It would have made SOME sense from a new father on his first failed Mother’s Day; it makes zero sense from a man on his 20th Mother’s Day, when the previous 19 went fine, and when he knows from extensive experience that I am not sitting there waiting to be WOWED by something BIG and IMPRESSIVE. Also: he felt sad? HE felt sad??? I didn’t know what to do with that. He seemed to want ME to comfort and reassure HIM, for something that HE had done to ME. Which. Again, this is something I would have expected from him 20 years ago, when he was young; it is absolutely not something I was expecting to start from scratch on at this stage of our relationship, when we have already covered this amply in the past. I seriously don’t understand what is going on. This is why I am not kidding when I say I have considered options such as brain tumor and early-onset dementia. It’s not that these behaviors are out of character, it’s that they’re back full-strength as if it’s 20 years ago and we’ve never done any work on them. Why are they back? Why are they back with no seeming recollection of having been dealt with before? Where did the work go? Where did the progress go?

Furthermore, he seemed to think that interaction, in which he said he felt sad and I said yeah that day really sucked, was the end of it. He has been cheery, and seems to think it’s all over now and everything is fine. So clearly there needs to be more talking, which I am dreading, especially because I am wondering which OTHER behaviors/attitudes from the distant past are going to show up. Will it even be possible to have a reasonable discussion, or is this going to immediately dissolve into more baffling events?

There’s one more thing I think you and I should discuss, if I’m going to give occasional updates on this topic. I think that if you try to keep giving sympathetic and supportive feedback, you are going to get quite tired of doing so, and also I will start to feel as if I shouldn’t tell you anything else because I’ll worry it’ll seem like I’m begging for another fix of sweet, sweet commiseration. If this goes on long enough, you may start feeling that I expect you to keep propping me up emotionally, and I may start feeling like I need to explain that actually I am ALSO really hard to live with. Let’s see if we can avoid all that. It is of course always, always, ALWAYS fine not to comment on ANY post of ANY kind, OBVIOUSLY, but I want to explicitly state that it is fine to take all future updates on this subject as the sort of thing where you read it and nod and go on your way: you have ALREADY expressed sympathy and/or outrage and/or support on this topic, and you should not feel you need to keep feeding me that. And of course this is not to say you MAY NOT keep discussing it with me if you WANT to.