Sticks and Stars

I’ve been doing this photo-a-day project for 82 days now and I must say, I’m really enjoying it. I know four other people who are doing it (because I inspired them!) and two of them are doing it for the photos (as in, seeing what cool photos they can take each day), while the other two are doing it more for the documentation (as in, documenting a year and trying for cool photos along the way). I’m definitely doing the latter as well, and so far it’s been a great exercise in training myself to pay attention to composition and lighting and color and whatnot.

I have a tiny little no-feature camera, which I thought would be perfect for this project (and is, indeed, what pushed me over the edge to start), but I’m starting to see how more features could be useful and much appreciated. I’ve always wanted a fancy DSLR but deep down I knew it was only because DSLRs are “cool,” certainly much cooler than dinky little point-and-shoots, and if I can buy something that will enhance my coolness well then who am I to not whip out my wallet?!

But seriously, even if I’ve always liked taking photos, I certainly have had no need/justification for more than a minimally featured point-and-shoot. But now that I’m starting to really get into taking photos and really working to make them come out nicely, I’m thinking that maybe something fancier is finally warranted.

I definitely can’t afford to shell out $500 or $600 (minimum!) at the present moment, but maybe after completing this one year project that would be a (pretty damned spectacular) reward. And by then I’ll have a better sense of whether it would be a worthwhile investment.

If you want to see my photo-a-day site and you know my first and last name, it’s firstname-lastname.com (and then you’ll see the link). Otherwise you can just email me or leave a comment and I’ll send it to you.

I’m feeling really great today. It could be that I had a beer with coworkers after work and am merely riding my mild buzz, but I prefer to think that it’s a combination of expressing my concerns about my job to my favorite coworker and seeing her do her best to support my work the rest of today (which will make a huge amount of difference), coming up with a reasonably plausible idea for making my job a hundred times more stressful but a million times better, completing my first three start-a-web-development business goals, and getting to a part in my current school coursework that’s so interesting I can’t wait to stop typing and get back to my reading.

Plus, it’s a three day weekend after just one more day!

I’ve been feeling somewhat dissatisfied with my job lately. Remember how I used to looooooove it? Yeah, not so much anymore. I’ve kind of fallen into a rut where I do the things I know (which also happen to be entirely routine and mindless) and I never have the opportunity to learn more. Or really, more importantly, I never take/make the opportunity to learn more. It would be nice if it were that simple, that I merely have to say, “Damn it, I’m going to learn PHP and you can’t stop me!” but it’s not. It’s hard to just “learn” something without a context (and I’m having a hard time fitting myself into the existing context) and it’s also hard to take the time to learn something when there’s plenty of other no-learning-required work to be done.

I had lunch with my old boss a couple weeks ago and bitched at length about my job (as I warned him, he caught me on a bad week) and it was really good because we talked about lots of tech stuff and he reminded me about what excites me about doing this work. And when I complained about not knowing the stuff I need to know, he said, “Well, you can learn it.” When I made a doubtful face he scoffed and said, “What, you think there’s something that you just can’t learn?” Which made me laugh because of course not. Of course I don’t think there’s stuff I “just can’t learn.” And that really started to put things into perspective.

Yesterday I gained a whole bunch more perspective when I was reading an article about a woman running a web development business who worked to build a community of non-techie women helping each other with tech stuff through her business. After reading the article I sighed with envy and thought about how I would like to build a community of non-techie women helping each other with tech stuff through a web development business, and then I let my brain wander for a minute over joy I get from web development work. After a few minutes of wandering I sighed, shut down those thoughts, and briefly lamented over the fact that I can’t do this work that I love to do because I just don’t know enough/don’t have time/don’t know where to begin/am so far behind others who do know/don’t want to handle billing/blah blah bullshit.

And then it occurred to me that I really can’t go on like this. I am really unhappy with my job, like to the point that I start crying when I tell people that I’m unhappy with it. It could be so much more than it is, but the combination of being stuck in a rut and the change in management that greatly shifted the atmosphere in the department makes me realize the importance of working toward something that is more meaningful and exciting, and that’s not what I have now.

So the end result is that even though I don’t know enough to start my own web development business/don’t have time/don’t know where to begin/am so far behind others who do know/don’t want to handle billing/blah blah bullshit, I have to push past all that and do it anyway. Because that’s really what I want to do and working toward that is going to make me happy.

It’s hard for me to imagine it, it’s hard for me to imagine myself in a place where I could support my family in my expensive city solely off the income from my own little business, it’s hard to imagine so very many aspects of what it would mean to run a business at all, but I can think of small steps, I can think of what I can do right now, and if that makes me feel like I’m moving toward something more productive and interesting, then that’s probably enough to keep the tears at bay for now.

My three initial goals toward starting my own web development business:

1. Subscribe to the feeds of some blogs discussing web development. I know that the blogs I read shape a lot of what I think about during the day and refocusing my thoughts toward current issues in web development can only be a good thing.
2. Clean my office. My office has lately become the landing spot for all manner of crap in my house and it’s entirely unpleasant to spend time in there. Considering that it’s supposed to be my special work space, I really need to realign my priorities toward keeping it clean.
3. Get the tedious assignments done for my current school course so that I can move on to the next, much more promising course. The current coursework is mirroring my tedious day job and it’s taking me a ridiculously long time to force myself to do what feels like busy work.

Those three goals feel small and attainable and possible and it makes me happy to think about getting them accomplished. The whole big picture is hugely overwhelming and it’s not even clear to me whether it’s realistic, but if I just keep taking small steps toward it then maybe I’ll ultimately get there. And if not, then at least I’ll get somewhere…and maybe I’ll be happier along the way.

I’m writing a whole lengthy post about whether or not my desire to escape to the woods with my children is realistic (per Peg’s comment) but it’s not quite done and I didn’t want to write about it anymore at the moment.

Things are a little bit better. I shouldn’t even say that because every time I sit down to write a post and start with that, some big pile of crap falls into my lap, forcing me to delete the “Things are a little bit better” start and change it to “I hate everything.”

I do want to say, though, that I really appreciate your comments. Even just “That sucks!” or “Keep your chin up!” or “Want to find the cheapest viagra online??” They all make me feel so…acknowledged? Validated? Not so fucking alone?? I don’t know, but I know they make me feel better. I never acknowledge them (except that if you ask me a question I will likely post an answer…eventually) but oh how happy they make me.

Anyway, things are a little better. They’re actually not great because my son got kicked out of school for the rest of the year (which is all this week) and I was only able to find alternate care for him for three days and I’m still worried about what this summer will bring, but I did talk to my boss and our HR department and if I run out of vacation time while attending to my son this summer, I can use unpaid FMLA leave, which is a huge relief. Of course, I’d rather not take unpaid time off, but I do have savings that I can use and it’s much more important that I keep my job and keep it on good terms. Really, my boss was actually pretty understanding about the whole thing, much to my surprise. It makes me wonder whether I was just projecting my own anxiety about this whole mess onto him and he never was annoyed by the whole thing at all.

At the moment, I’m working with my six year old’s school to claim that he has a disability so that he can get an aide who will essentially shadow him next year and help intervene when he starts escalating. I think the aide will be a great thing (I think every kid should have one) but it really irritates me that I have to claim that my son is “disabled” because he certainly is not. He’s just one kind of kid among many other kinds of kid, a particular type who needs his space, gets frustrated easily, and is very sensitive to stimuli. I understand that his type of kid isn’t one that fits terribly well into an underfunded, undersupported, understaffed, underresourced American kindergarten classroom, but still, it pisses me off that he’s the one slapped with this label, this huge label, that he will get to wear for the rest of his school career and maybe even his life.

I try to explain to him that the problem is with the system, not with him, that when a system is so overextended and undersupported it can only function with a narrow, narrow amount of allowed behavior, that anything outside of that allowance must be cast out and vilified in order to maintain the tenuous survival of the system, but of course he’s just six, his eyes glaze over at my first mention of “system.”

So instead I just keep whispering it to myself, to remind myself that this is all insanity, that if he were homeschooled I would be entirely oblivious to all of this and I certainly wouldn’t be trying to scrape up a bunch of bullshit that I can carefully package in order to justify the label “disabled.”

As I mentioned, my six year old has been having problems at school lately. This whole process of trying to intervene into the problems has been really involved and drawn out and stressful and at this point the school district is “requesting” that he have a psychiatric evaluation. They tell me it’s so that they can figure out how to serve him best, but both his counselor and his doctor say that it’s so that a psychiatrist can give him a prescription for some medication.

I am not thrilled with the idea of medicating my son, and by “not thrilled,” I mean, there’s no fucking way in hell I’m going to do it.

I’m thinking about quitting my job. I’m thinking about quitting my job and leaving my city and taking my boys to live with my dad in the country where they can play in the woods every day and not go to school and not be threatened with medication because they happen to be sparkly, odd-shaped pegs that don’t fit so well into those stupid boring round holes.

God, I am so fucking tired.

If anyone wants to see the photos from my boys’ recent photo session, you can view them here.

If you don’t want to look through all seventy plus photos, here are my favorites:

• My six year old
• My three year old
• Together (what you don’t see here is the poor, poor potato bug toward which their attentions are directed)

I think this and this are the best photos of their faces…sadly there were really no good smiles from my three year old, and here they are watching the trains, and here they spontaneously launched into, “Swiper, no swiping! Swiper, no swiping!!”

There are so, so many that I love (like this one and this one and this one), I don’t know how I’m going to choose.

It looks like my three year old is going to become a big, grown up preschooler at the end of the month. The preschool teachers at his daycare have lately been broaching the subject with me on a daily basis, and he requests to spend time in the preschool class at every opportunity. His current teachers and the preschool teachers feel that he’s ready and he seems to feel that way too, so when some of the current preschoolers leave at the end of the month, they are going to move him up.

He’s only been going to this daycare since October and it honestly took until February or March for him to get comfortable, in that he stopped telling me hated it and didn’t want to go, and stopped crying or pouting when I’d leave him. For a long time I worried that I made the wrong choice pulling him out of the home where he used to receive care and moving him to a center, but it’s good that I waited him out because he’s so happy there now. He knows the kids, he knows the teachers, he loves his “school.”

I just can’t believe he’s going to be in preschool! Isn’t he just a baby still?? When his brother was littler, he was the only one, all eyes were on him, and every parenting experience was so new. It seemed to take f-o-r-e-v-e-r for him to get bigger, to achieve each new milestone. But with my three year old, it’s all old hat, and my eyes are so busy tracking both boys, my own life, and our various horizons, that the days and months just fly by. I can’t believe how big he is.

I’m feeling better today. The boys and I had an appointment with a photographer this morning (a fellow parent at my six year old’s school), so we spent the morning at my favorite park in our city, where she shot over 300 photos of my boys. Truly, we had the best time. The boys played on the play equipment and swung (swang? swinged?), we hiked through the woods looking for squirrels and caterpillars, we played on the beach and built a dam in a creek, and, probably best of all, stood on a bridge while trains passed beneath us.

The trains still make me choke up a bit to remember. When my six year old realized that the bridge we were taking to the beach passed right over train tracks, he pretty much refused to budge. Mid-photo session as we were, I repeatedly assured him that he could continue to the beach and I would let him know if I saw a train coming (you can see them coming from quite a distance if you’re watching for them — more than enough time to get back to the bridge). He still refused to move so I continued to plead and cajole. Finally I said to him, “Listen, I know how much you love trains. I know how much you want to see a train pass right under this bridge. I know how exciting that is and I want you to see it too. I promise I will not let a train go by without telling you. I will keep watching constantly. I will not let you down.”

He looked at me for a minute and then skipped off to the beach. I didn’t realize it was my words that had convinced him until he caught me looking at him and his brother instead of the horizons from which a train might emerge and anxiously said, “Mom, you aren’t watching!!”

Indeed, the second I saw a train rounding the bend (at least a mile away), I pointed it out to him and he raced back to the bridge. The whole time he stood on the bridge while it was passing beneath him he was totally engrossed, shouting above the screaming cars, “This is so cool!!!” He was also leaping, which I assumed was just a physical manifestation of his excitement, until later when he told me he was pretending to jump from car to car.

It was such a thrill for him. I cannot convey how excited he was, and it makes my heart feel so full to know that I was part of it, that I was there, sharing his happiness, and that he didn’t miss out on one tiny bit of it because I promised him he wouldn’t and made sure that he didn’t.

Later, when we were driving home, both boys were telling me how much fun they had and I commented contentedly that I had had a lot of fun too. My six year asked, puzzled, “How did you have fun?” And then he answered himself, “Because it’s fun for you to watch us having fun.”

Indeed. It’s so fun that it makes my heart hurt.

I know I haven’t posted in a long time. I think about posting but after having been gone so long, it feels like such a major undertaking. But I miss it, and I think about writing all the time.

And today I’m pissed, so I guess that’s enough to get me over my barrier.

Let me start with a little background info…

My six year old has always been…sensitive. He’s very easily frustrated, he hates to be distracted or interrupted, he always has to be moving and touching things, his emotional responses are very big. He’s a charming, smart, funny, engaging kid when he’s happy or excited, but he’s violent and full of huge rage when he’s mad. And generally, he’s more happy than mad, but when he gets mad, it definitely stands out.

Around January or so, his anger started getting out of control. He would get angry because, say, an intricate drawing he was making did not turn out exactly right, so he’d tear it up, throw it down, and if any kid tried to talk to him, he’d hit and yell at them, and when his teacher tried to intervene, he’d kick her and spit at her. As you might imagine, this got old quite quickly. I did everything I could think of — gave him more one-on-one time at home, started taking him to a counselor, took him to his pediatrician to check for physiological issues, etc. — but nothing seemed to make a difference and he only escalated. I was getting calls from the school on a daily basis, he got suspended, I had to attend endless meetings about how to deal with his behavior. At first it was only at school, but then he started acting up at home too. It seemed like he was perpetually angry. Everything set him off and nothing could calm him down.

Both his teacher and his counselor suggested to me that his anger was actually a mask for his deep sadness and confusion over being abandoned by his dad, especially since this anger had started shortly after he saw his dad at Christmas, and I certainly felt that was a reasonable suggestion. Before Christmas, it had been a year since he saw his dad and his only contact with him since was via phone calls that my six year old (who was then four and five) had to initiate. Even when he visited at Christmas, he promised both boys he’d come and see them again before he left, but never did.

Despite my deep dread of doing so (because all this is surely the fault of my terrible, terrible parenting, not anything he did), I finally decided to contact him and explain what was happening and that our six year old really needed to hear from him, really needed him to call on a regular basis (and for him to be the one to initiate the calls) in order to convince him that yes, his dad actually does love and care about him. He replied with lots of thinly veiled suggestions that this is, indeed, all my fault, but agreed to call him every other day.

His (more or less) every-other-day lasted for maybe two weeks and then abruptly stopped with no explanation. I was tempted to contact him and find out what the hell he was doing (especially every time the phone rang and my boys eagerly asked if it was their dad), but his counselor expressed concern about how every time he pulls this shit, it’s just going to rehurt my six year old all over again, and that maybe asking him to make contact wasn’t a good idea, so I started working to accept the idea that yes, their dad is one of those deadbeat types who buys off his obligation to his children with a minimal amount of child support, and that I need to work to help them heal from the hurt that he has already brought and will continue to bring, and that further contact with him is only going to hurt them, not help, since it’s clear that their dad cannot be counted on, even in times when they desperately need him.

That was a month or so ago and things have been getting better. My six year old has mostly stopped hitting and kicking (although the rages and frustration are still as present as ever) and he’s been much, much happier at home. Counseling seems to be helping, as well as the huge amount of effort his school has put into finding ways for him to be successful. It’s not perfect, and I’m very worried about school getting out soon and how much less understanding and sophisticated in possible solutions his summer camp is, but things are definitely better than they were during the first three or four months of the year.

Today, we heard from their dad for the first time since he stopped calling. He sent them a package of souvenirs from what appears to be a recent Caribbean cruise. I am fucking furious.

First, I am furious because of all the fucking lame-ass ways he could acknowledge his sons, sending them souvenirs from a trip they didn’t get to go on seems pretty shitty on many levels. He abruptly stops calling, apparently not giving a shit about how this might hurt his son who is clearly already in a pretty tenuous state, and then, when he finally decides to contact them again, all he can offer is a stupid stuffed animal and a t-shirt?? No phone call, no letter, no “gee, I wish you could have come,” just a stupid box of stupid crap.

And then, I am also furious because I feel like he’s rubbing it in my face all the shit that I don’t get to do. On a daily basis I am faced with the limitations of my life with kids. There are a million things that I don’t get to do that I really want to do, that I dream of being able to do, but can’t, because I have kids and am raising them with no help. On most days, it doesn’t matter. On most days I just focus on the little (and big) sweetnesses of raising my children and put out of my mind all the things I can’t do because I have kids or because I have no help raising my kids. At best, I think about ways to modify the things I want to do so that they include my children, but that’s really not the same (and still, my kids are too young anyway). But really, I know that focusing on those things is only going to make me bitter and angry all the time, so I just don’t think about it. Until, of course, their father slaps me in the face with it. Would I like to go on a Caribbean cruise? Of course. Would I like to go on a cruise at all? Absolutely. Would I like to take a trip anywhere, ever, where I get to do what I want instead of trying to find things my kids want to do and trying to keep them from annoying the other people? Fuck yeah.

These past several months have been really hard. I’ve been so worried about my son and so desperate to find a solution. I’ve had to take a huge amount of time off from work in order to pick my son up on all the days when his behavior is too bad to stay at school, or to attend meetings with various people at his school, or to get him to counseling sessions. I see my boss’ mouth get tight when I tell him I have to leave early or come in late yet again. I have no one to talk to and no one to help me and I feel very, very, very alone. And while I’m dealing with all of this with no support or help, their fucking father is taking a cruise to the fucking Caribbean.

Tonight, when my boys are in bad moods and are having screaming fits over every stupid thing, when they won’t leave me alone for even five minutes (it has taken me hours and hours to write this), when they are complaining about everything, when my house is a mess and I’m worried about money and feeling terribly lonely, I’m fucking bitter indeed.

Want to see a website I just finished for a friend?

Mamaledge

Sorry for not blogging. Between the ongoing drama in my life and my one a day photo project, I’m pretty busy.