Perceptions

Five clay figurines in assorted colors, representing emotions.

August is hard for us.

Everyone who knows us knows this.

In fact, even people who only know us through this blog, on Facebook, or whatever know this.

Aside from the anniversary of Laston's death (on his oldest kid's 16th birthday, no less, poor Lee), there are a bunch of other August issues. There's the ramp-up to school, the not-working because I work for the schools & side gigs are tough to find this year and usually unbearable (for Seattleites) weather.

At least this year we do not (at the moment, anyway) have super extra crappy air quality from forest fires started by asshats declaring their newborn has a penis via blowing shit up in the woods.

Silver linings, I guess.

In past Augusts, my therapist has said it's perfectly okay to have hard days or even a hard month, as long as we're aware of it and not letting it consume us to the exclusion of all else. So we are doing our usual thing (though generally staying off the more contentious parts of the internet lest we let our grief and stress and basic argggghhhh consume us or hurt others), which for Lizzy (Abby is working) involves a lot of LEGO and arts & crafts and reading and video games. 

She made some little clay figurines and painted them. They are intended to be representative of emotions (a la Inside Out, but slightly different ones; she initially designed these on paper for one of her pediatric grief counseling sessions about six and a half years ago. Anger is red and orange and spiky, Fear is green and "shaking like a leaf," and so on. The one for sadness is blue and sort of a very basic figure of someone with a bulbous nose and their hands in front of their chest, as though they were wringing their hands.

“It’s that stim you do when you’re sad Mom. Where your hands get closer and closer to your face the sadder you are.”

“I think it’s upset in general, not just sadness.”

“Well… you do it a lot in August.”

Oof.

She's not wrong.

Irritation

Grumpyjenn is Grumpy.

The Grump started today because every July (the month before the anniversary of my husband's death), Facebook sends me a fresh batch of Widowed Christian Doctors Overseas Who Like My Looks and Want Me to Care for Their Poor Motherless Children and (by the way) have one picture, none with kids, are generally in a military or police uniform that should by rights be falling off their bodies from the weight of all the ribbons and awards and medals (honestly, I swear, these guys are always high ranking, and still show their awards for BSc and SSc). And they love God and Country and Dogs and Their Poor Motherless Children and they don't seem to have noticed that my profile picture is almost always a cartoon version of me.

A woman in a progress flag T-shirt, with
folded arms, an annoyed expression,
and the caption HMPH! in big purple letters

Anyway, so that set the stage for Grumpiness, which I am trying to get out of by Making a List of irritants I've seen or experienced today. 

You know, the random little things that make me want to smack people. 

Writing these out almost always makes me feel better. So here goes.

• I do not grok Star Trek fans who hate change.

• I also do not grok Star Trek fans who think NuTrek is "too woke."

• Or people who want to ban books. It reminds me of Abby's line when she was in Seussical the Musical a few years back. "Oh, Jojo, I fear you've been thinking again!" (Evidently, today I am the Sour Kangaroo, in mood if not in outlook)

• And the cognitive dissonance of "pro-life" and "pro-gun" in the same people.

• Oooo - people who call me a liberal snowflake and imply that I am afraid of everything, who also can't go to the grocery store without bringing an arsenal

• Or who are still setting off fireworks on July 23

• Or my own I-want-to-but-I-can't-get-started executive dysfunction

• Or the fact that I am allergic/sensitive to more than one of my favorite foods

• Grammarly should understand my casual writing style by now

• That the GOP thinks the electorate is massively gullible... and that sometimes they're right

See? That's helped. Possibly because I got all the sarcastic bitchiness out of the way.

Saving up Dopamine

A Bitmori cartoon of me, a fair-skinned,
green-eyed, ponytailed brunette-with-grey
person wearing a blue tee with a progress-
flag heart and exhibiting heart-shaped fireworks.

Look, anyone who has been reading my blog - any of my several blogs - knows a few things about us. I'm a widowed mom of two, one of them 20 and the other 15. The 15 (Lizzy) is AuDHD (that's autistic and ADHD for people who don't sling that particular lingo), I probably am as well, and the 20 (Abby) is almost certainly dyslexic and possibly ADHD (theater is a socially acceptable way of channeling that). 

You know that I'm fat, that I hurt my knee a few months ago and I'm in physical therapy for it, and that I loathe the hypocrisy of so-called patriots. You know that Lizzy is not a great student, although she's hyperlexic and an avid learner if she can do it her own way. You know that Abby is a bit shy unless she's bursting into song and dance or telling you about anime characters.

In general, we are an anxious bunch, really.

And - as with Thanksgiving - we try not to be hypocritical assholes around other national holidays.

This isn't easy, you know. I'm not feeling super patriotic in our oligarchy-that-is-headed-toward theocracy; it's not safe to be anything but a cishet white dude. I disapprove of fireworks that are illegal, super noisy boomy ones, and/or are let off by amateurs outside of the hours approved by law (and by extension, a sheriff's office that won't enforce those hours any more than it enforced mask mandates). I kind of despise the sort of folks who think it's their God-given right to BSU just for funsies, and f*ck the pets, veterans, or others who just want to feel safe in their own homes. 

Unkindness pisses me off.

You'll have to excuse my tone; my fitness apps are unhappy with the amount of sleep (very little) that I've gotten in the past two nights. And I suspect tonight as well.

But here's the thing: I don't really want to celebrate the big ol' US of A right now because a lot of folks I love are not safe here, but I do want to celebrate summer and hanging out with friendly neighbors and healthy kiddos. And as in that Thanksgiving link above, I think it's important to celebrate the small things, even if I really hate most of the big things right now.

And I like the pretty lights, if not the booms and whistles.

So here's what we did. We went to the safe-n-sane fireworks shop and got small things - ground bloom flowers, sparklers, a couple little fountains, and a bigger fountain or two. Nothing that sends flaming balls into the trees, nothing that makes us flinch away from the sound, and nothing that shakes the ground. We'll be setting those off (sparklers just before dark), with our neighbors across the street, as we have done for years. It's the sort of thing we even did at the height of the pandemic because it was outside. I'll keep a mask on me because the smoke is usually too much for the asthma.

But we are an anxious bunch, so I've also been running the sprinkler on my lawn for three days and nights straight, and the first step when we actually go out to light things is to fill up the kiddie pool with water. And...

And we have spent the day doing comfort activities - playing video games, reading, making cookies, even folding laundry, having spaghetti for dinner, etc - so as to be as calm as possible this evening because we feel safe.

So we're saving up dopamine by doing the familiar and comfortable. It helps us enjoy the peopleing and flashing lights, and even helps us tolerate the house-shaking thuds of the illegal stuff. 

And enjoying a celebration - even if I'm celebrating something a little off on a tangent - is important.

Death of a Thousand Paper Cuts

Lizzy is sick.

A photo of a curly-top toddler asleep on a
blue-striped couch and a green pillow.

It's nothing serious; she has the sniffles, a scratchy throat, a stuffy nose, fatigue, and a little bit of a headache. She has no fever and her covid test was negative.

She is, of course, absolutely wretched and miserable.

I mean, it's not the flu or covid or a bacterial infection of any sort. Those would cause a fever and/or a positive covid test. It's just a summer cold (yeah, yeah, it's not summer yet; there are three days to go).

But it's the first time she's been sick-sick since before covid started. She's had hay fever symptoms or an earache a couple of times, mild reactions to medications or vaccines, and only the Woodinville Evergreen Urgent Care knows how many injuries, the little Mad Scientist.

She's always had Really Big Problems with head colds, though, and this is no exception.

Part of the problem is that she has a number of sensory issues as an autism quirk, and evidently a stuffy nose is a really big one for her. Always has been, as noted above, even before she was diagnosed.

Like since she was a baby.

But the time I remember most clearly was when she was nearly four, at Grandma's house for the day because it's bad form to attend preschool or daycare with a head cold, and Grandma made her blueberry tea (nothing fancy; just True Blueberry from Celestial Seasonings and honey). 

You would've thought someone handed her the moon.

We generally keep it on hand, even though it isn't available at our local grocery stores on its own; it's only there in the mixed fruit teas box.

But we didn't have any today and we were out of honey (we have agave nectar but it's "just not the same"), and we didn't have any of her homemade chicken-veggie soup,  and she couldn't find any tissues, and since she couldn't sleep it all cascaded into her more-or-less devolving into that coldy toddler-that-was. Death of a thousand papercuts.

She's doing okay now that Grandma and Abby and I between us have provided the proper soup, blueberry tea (only four bags because locally they come in the multi-flavor pack only), extra blueberry herbal tea from Stash instead of Celestial Seasonings to see if it's a viable substitute (verdict is that yes! It is!), tissues, and a raspberry-filled donut.

And we're taking it easy today. We have the whole (three-day) weekend to machete the blackberry bush and plant the tomatoes and tidy up the yard.

Today is for comfort food and TV and books and tea and video games.

Random Thoughts Around Neurospiciness

A rainbow "color-picker" infinity symbol with the phrase
Why light it up blue... when we have a whole spectrum?

I was responding to a Facebook post about infantilizing autistic people and the evidently obsessive need of some adults to label autism (and other neuro stuff) with functioning or mental-age labels for ease of categorization.

I ended up writing a small novel on the topic, so I am copy-and-pasting it below:

I have a 15yo AuDHD daughter (I probably am as well, but they weren't calling it that in 1983 when I was tested).

She loves chaotic characters in her fantasy fiction, magnets, Minecraft, beading, knowing ridiculous amounts of FNaF lore, acrylic paint, her older sister, shucking corn, and showing off her encyclopedic knowledge of random trivia.

She hates being infantilized, people expecting her to keep up "because she doesn't look autistic," unrealistic expectations, adults not explaining why, and bigotry.

Are these because she's autistic? Or ADHD? Or fifteen years old? Or because we lost her father when she was eight? Or is she just a child of the 21st century? Who knows?

It's silly (and ableist) to put people in tiny little boxes to make it easier to categorize them, as though they were so many left-handed socket wrenches or something.

My motto - and that of her best teachers, thank goodness - is "Meet the kid where they are."

And also, please let them speak for themselves when they can. I mean, you can help them, support them, advocate for them... but it's about them, not about you.

This is Too Much

I am perhaps a bit on edge today because I just got a call that clearly came from my kid's high school and I actually started to cry. 

Out of sheer worry.

Because, you know, the world is falling apart and a bunch of people are more worried about whether a drag queen is reading Doctor Seuss to kids than whether the whole school gets shot up by a former student with a gun and a grudge.

"Hi, Ms. Kirkland, this is TeacherName from the SchoolName Social Studies department, and I have your name on a list of theme readers (note: folks who help teachers grade papers) and wondered if you have availability."

I don't, right now, but a simple call from a number I recognize should not inspire dread. He was very apologetic, and said he should have led with everything-is-fine, but he didn't know I was a parent for that school too.

The fact that they even think they should have to worry about that phrasing - I mean, he's not the school nurse in charge of my anaphylactic kiddo - being the first thing when they call a helper, is terribly disheartening.