parenting

Battling with Anxiety

By / September 8, 2015 / 1 Comment

“I’m scared of earthquakes.” Gleek launched into this statement almost before she cleared the door to enter my room. Her face was pale, wide-eyed, and a little teary.

“Okay.” I said putting down my book and scooting over so there was room for her next to me on my bed. “What makes you scared about earthquakes today?” I always ask questions when my kids are mired in anxiety. Additional information helps me figure out which flavor of anxiety we’re attempting to manage. It matters because sometimes the anxiety needs to be laughed at and sometimes it needs to be sympathized with.

“I’ve been scared for days. My history teacher says there is a huge fault here in Utah and it is sixty years overdue for an earthquake. And now I’m scared that the earthquake will come and knock down our house and destroy everything.”

So we talked at length about earthquakes. I grew up in California and lived in the Bay Area during the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake which knocked down a section of the Bay Bridge and collapsed a long section of the Cypress freeway. That quake had more than a dozen aftershocks over the next two years. I also remember the Livermore quake and its aftershocks. I was able to tell her what an earthquake feels like and that humans are much smarter about building structures that are earthquake safe. I told her about many different earthquakes and how mostly it was just an interesting (if unnerving) experience with little or no damage done. Then we talked about her anxiety disorder and how it makes her more afraid than she needs to be. Yes an earthquake might strike, but beyond some basic emergency preparedness there is nothing we can do about it. We certainly shouldn’t let our daily lives be affected by fear of earthquakes.

Gleek acknowledged all of this and said “Usually when I’m scared of things and the scared won’t go away, I have to talk it out.” I loved hearing the self awareness in her voice. She has grown so much and has developed a solid set of coping strategies. Her fourteen year old strategies are worlds better than the ones she was employing at twelve.

This is a thing I need to remember when Patch responds to stress by becoming uncommunicative instead of engaging with me to figure out where the stress is coming from. When he finally spoke with me (after missing his bus) we were able to determine a specific problem that could be easily fixed. Patch is still acquiring good strategies. I just need to put structural support in place and give him time.

Gleek wound down from her outpouring of earthquake fear. Oddly, the most comforting thing I said was that sometimes I’d only know there was an earthquake because I’d see the lights swaying on the ceiling. Gleek now has plans to hang some things from her bedroom ceiling so she’ll be able to see if there is an an earthquake and get under her desk. On one level she knows that this warning system does little to protect her from the real possibility of an earthquake, but it is a small tool she can use to quell the anxiety. “See the hanging things aren’t moving. We’re fine.”

The other thing I’ll do is go have a word with Gleek’s teacher and let her know that while I understand she has the responsibility to teach about hazards in our area, maybe she could do so in a way that isn’t going to trigger anxiety for the anxiety prone kids.

Parenting and Creative Life

By / September 7, 2015

I recently read an online article from Amanda Palmer talking about her creative life and her impending motherhood. My life has been so different from hers. I dove into parenting while still in college, so adulthood and motherhood were all tangled up together. For a long time all my creativity was absorbed into my parenting and homemaking efforts. It was only later that I began to create in ways that were shareable outside the walls of my house. Palmer’s fears about the impact of motherhood on her life are valid. All anyone can say for certain is that what comes afterward will be different than what came before.

I’m thinking much about the impact of parenting on creativity. I think about it often as I contemplate the novel I’m still writing years after I began it. I spiraled down into depression thinking about this over the past year or more as the needs of my children loomed and my creative spaces vanished. I thought about it now during the second week of school where we’d not yet had any emotional crises and I’d had several good work days in a row. I thought about it again after the third week of school where I did not have any good work days and emotional stuff spilled all over the place. I’m not fully able to judge if teens with mental health crises is more problematic for a creative life than infants or toddlers, (I wasn’t trying to maintain a separate creative existence during those hands-on early years) but I can attest the the toll that mental health during the teen years has taken. Though truthfully it was likely my own depression and anxiety which impacted my creativity more than the time taken by my children. Of course, my depression and anxiety were triggered by my children, so it comes to the same thing really.

I wish I had answers for this. Perhaps someday I’ll be able to look back and see how it all went together. From a distance I’ll be able to explain how all the things affected each other and maybe I’ll be able to draw a useful conclusion from it. Or maybe I won’t. Maybe being creative is always messy and complicated by the details of living. Either way, summarizing is not my job now. My job now is to make sure that I don’t hide from my creative work merely because I’m tired. I have to remember that creative time gives energy back to me in a way that down time does not. I have take time each day to pause and listen deep into my soul and ask the question “What is the work I should be doing today?” The answer to that question matters.

Finding the Right Therapist, or How to Recognize You Have the Wrong One

By / August 31, 2015 / 7 Comments

“It takes a few tries to find the right therapist. Don’t give up.”

I was told variations of this multiple times by multiple people. They were people who had struggled in similar ways, so I believed them. Except that it was repeated often, in almost the same words. Following this seemingly simple instruction turned out to be very difficult that I began to wonder. Is this just a platitude? A thing we say to offer hope in a hopeless situation? Ultimately I’ve come to the conclusion that it is not just a platitude. It is a fact and a necessary process. By the end of this post it will be clear why.

I had no good methodology for finding the “right” therapist. Sometimes I went on recommendations from friends, neighbors, or primary care doctors. Though most of those recommendations were “I’ve heard of this therapist and have a vaguely positive impression attached to the name.” The few times I got an extremely specific recommendation from someone who had worked extensively with that therapist, the therapist was invariably closed to new patients.

I was left with trial and error, which is not a great process for someone who is struggling with feeling hopeless. Unfortunately this mirrors the medication treatment process for mental health as well. So we spent a couple of years trying this therapist and that medicine before switching things around. One kid got better, but not in any way I could relate to the therapy sessions she’d had. Two other kids got much worse. Until lately they’ve been better at least partially because of our experiences with therapy.

I’ve now had direct experience with seven different therapy relationships across four family members. At this point I can tell you far more about how to tell when you have the wrong therapist than I can about finding the right one. It finally occurred to me that this is actually useful information. No one told me what should constitute “not working” and so I stayed in several of the therapy situations much longer than I should have. It is hard to make good judgement calls in the midst of emotional chaos. It is even harder to abandon groundwork that you’ve spent effort, time, and money to establish in order to start over with yet another complete unknown. The thought of having to start over kept me doing “one more session” for weeks. So I’m going to tell you the knowledge I gathered from my experiences. Then I’m going to tell you the stories of how the therapists we had were wrong. From the combination you may be able to glean information to inform your decisions.

Knowledge

My experiences are not universal, some of what I say here may not apply in your situation or may be wrong for you. Listen to your own instincts, which can be hard in the midst of emotional chaos, I know. Listen anyway. Only take the pieces of advice that help you. Discard the rest.

It should only take 4-6 sessions for you to build a rapport with a therapist and start doing emotional work that is beneficial. If you don’t feel these things, move on.

It is not rude to abandon a therapy relationship. You don’t have to apologize or even explain. You can say “this isn’t working” or you can simply cancel your appointment and go elsewhere. Therapy professionals will not be offended or hurt. They understand that some relationships just don’t click.

Your therapist should never make you feel judged. If you feel judged you are not safe to find out what you really think and feel.

If you’re helping someone else with their therapy, how they feel about the therapist matters more than how you feel about the therapist.

It is normal to sometimes resent your therapist, but if that is happening week after week, it is time for a different one. Resentment is a sign that you feel attacked, which means you don’t feel safe with the therapist.

It is easier to have a regularly scheduled appointment than to have as-needed appointments. If you need a non-regular schedule, don’t leave the therapist’s office without scheduling your next appointment.

A sign of a good therapist is that they’re willing to change tactics when one is not working.

One of the reasons it may take several tries to find the right therapist is because you don’t know what you need until you start dealing with one. It is an iterative process.

There are different methodologies in therapy, what helps one person will be ineffective with another. Sometimes the therapist is a mis-match because they’re most comfortable with a methodology that doesn’t work for you. (IE: cognitive behavioral therapy when what you need is PTSD focused therapy or dialectical behavioral therapy.)

The financial cost matters. Sometimes a therapist can be wrong for financial reasons, because high cost can give your brain yet another argument not to go. This stinks, but it is true. Many universities have low-cost clinics where their grad students get to practice being therapists.

The therapist should be respectful of the anxiety and emotional energy that goes into admitting help is needed. One who doesn’t answer phone calls or drops you as a client is the wrong therapist, no matter how good they might be when you actually have an appointment.

Stories

Therapist #1: For Gleek. The therapist was young, a grad student. I thought this would help her build a relationship with Gleek. But all the sessions ended up with me and Gleek together sitting on the couch. The therapist spent most of her time dissecting the parent/child relationship rather than digging in to find out the inner workings of Gleek’s thoughts which Gleek hid behind a shield of chatter. I came away from most of those sessions feeling resentful and judged. It is likely I was projecting my own self-judgements onto the therapist, but she wasn’t sensing or solving that. The therapy relationship ended because the therapist graduated and moved away.

Hindsight: The therapy format was wrong for what we needed. It was set up to treat the parent/child system and ended up giving me lots of parenting advice that I already knew and had already applied. The next time I set up therapy I specified individual therapy.
*

Therapist #2: For Gleek. She was a woman in her fifties with a long practice dealing with children. I deliberately sought that out because I wondered if my reaction to the other therapist had been an inexperience problem. This therapist was recommended to me by Gleek’s church leader, specifically because the therapist did art and play therapy. I found the therapist good and easy to talk to, but Gleek became increasingly resistant to going. “I don’t like how nosey she is.” Gleek said. Ultimately Gleek was doing so much better (because of medication and changes at school) that the therapist and I agreed we could stop therapy for a time.

Hindsight: Gleek did not have the right rapport with the therapist, so the therapy was not working as it should. It is possible that the therapist and I could have banded together to push through her resistance. Instead we opted to give her some control. That turned out to be the right call. We did establish that if life gets hard again, back to therapy we’ll go. But we’ll pick a different one.
*

Therapist #3: For Link. I chose to go through the comprehensive clinic at BYU in part because it was far less expensive than other options and we were paying out of pocket for everything. I also thought that a young male therapist might have a better chance to connect with Link. This meant a grad student therapist again. By week four the therapist was having trouble getting Link to open up, so he brought me in for a joint session. It went really well. Unfortunately this meant that the therapist always brought me in for all the sessions. It became relationship therapy between Link and I rather than the individual therapy that Link needed. He needed solutions which did not include me. Also I think that speaking with me was more emotionally rewarding for the therapist than speaking to Link. The therapist could poke at my pain and induce me to open up. He was completely unable to do the same for Link. I kept trying to keep him focused on Link, but we ended up talking about me half the time anyway. It took weeks of me being increasingly stressed and resentful of the therapy, and Link feeling the same way, before I recognized the problem and called the clinic to request a different therapist.

Hindsight: This was a similar problem to the one with therapist #1. We had different visions for what the troubles were. I probably could have had a meeting with the therapist and re-calibrated the treatment, but starting over was less work and Link was more likely to cooperate. Continuing to make Link go to a therapist he didn’t like would have damaged my relationship with Link.
*

Therapist #4: For Sandra. This was actually the same therapist as #2. She hadn’t worked for Gleek, but I’d enjoyed talking with her. The interactions with Therapist #3 had forced me to see that I was struggling, so I made an appointment. It went well. So did another one. Unfortunately she was by far the most expensive therapist we’d gone to and everything was out of pocket. We finally got onto an insurance plan which covered mental health care (Yay Affordable Care Act!) and she wasn’t listed on the plan. I’d paid her prices for Gleek, but it was harder to justify paying her prices for me. So I’d delay between sessions until I was in crisis. Then I’d call for an appointment…and she’d fail to call back. I’d call again and she texted two days later saying “I have an appointment available in two hours, does that work?” It did not work. Also, I’d requested a phone call to make the appointment, not a text. Ultimately these communication issues were the reason I dropped her. If I gathered the emotional energy necessary to call and set up an appointment, I needed the process to go smoothly rather than stretch out for days adding stress to my life.

Hindsight: She was a good therapist, but her business running skills interfered with my willingness to go to her. My next attempt at therapy for me will be an office with multiple therapists and a full time secretary who handles appointments.
*

Therapist #5: For Link. This was the therapist we were assigned after therapist #4 went badly. I’d considered changing away from grad students, but decided to give it one more shot. By this time I’d been told the advice about giving a therapist 4-6 sessions to connect, so that was the plan. Right around session four, the new therapist ran aground in almost exactly the same way as the prior one had. Link wasn’t opening up. He’d give answers, but they were mostly shrugs or “I don’t know.” This therapist met with me separate from Link and hammered out a new plan. He started playing games with Link. The whole goal was to connect first and then gradually use that connection to teach Link how to connect without games. Then they could get at emotional issues. It was a brilliant plan. I approved. I think it would have worked. Unfortunately about a month later the therapist made a personal decision that took him out of the grad school program. He worked to hand us off to another therapist, and was as conscientious as he could be, but it was still a big blow to Link and to me.

Hindsight: Not much useful to offer here, except that this process can be hard in unexpected ways.
*

Therapist #6: For Link. This was the therapist that therapist #5 handed us over to. They had this nice transitional plan where the new therapist would attend sessions with Link and the prior therapist. She was a young and pretty grad student. Link met with her twice and told me that he wasn’t comfortable with her. I wasn’t surprised. There had been a young pretty female math teacher at school that Link had refused to go to for help. Talking to people is hard for Link. Talking to girls is even harder. I called off the appointments and put Link on a therapeutic hiatus while some other things settled down in our lives.

Hindsight: Link needed an older brother/ role model and a young female therapist was not going to work in the same way. An older, motherly or grandmotherly woman would probably be fine. Any future therapist selections for him will keep this in mind. I’m also likely to try a therapist with a different approach, such as dialectical behavioral therapy instead of cognitive behavioral therapy.
*

Therapist #7: For Patch. I think we began seeing this therapist before Link’s good therapist quit, but I’ve put her last on the list because she’s the only one whom we’re still seeing. She’s a grad student at the same clinic as Link’s therapy. She and Patch hit it off right away. It helped a lot that I recommended that games be part of the therapy. (Having learned from Link’s experience that this can foster connection.) I can tell the therapy is working because Patch doesn’t resist going. Often he is excited or happy to go. Also the therapist usually brings me in for the last few minutes to let me know what they talked through and what would be a good focus for the week ahead. I know that they really are beginning to dig down in and untangle some of the emotional knots that Patch has been carrying around.

Hindsight: This is how you know when therapy is working, life feels easier. It is subtly easier so that you may not even be sure if it being easier is because of the therapy.
*

I don’t have many concluding thoughts, except to say that writing up this post helped me to see why it is sometimes necessary to try multiple therapists before settling. Each therapy relationship helps you learn more about what you need and want in a therapy relationship. It is not a failure to need to ditch one therapist and try out another one, it is a refining process. I wish I’d known that when I first started, it would have made the process easier.

Evaluation

By / August 20, 2015 / 3 Comments

“How is it not having the afternoon pick up?”
“Do you like having all the kids out the door earlier in the morning?”
“How is it all going?”

Kiki’s questions were good ones, appropriate to our relationship and to her interest in family at home. Yet I struggled to answer them. I could easily tell her stories about events. I told her about her siblings coming home. I described things that happened. But these questions all asked for evaluation and I was coming up blank. It took me until this morning to figure out why. I’m semi-consciously trying to avoid assigning value to the beginning of school experiences we’re having. The fact that Link came home from his first day of school happy does not mean I should plan on that continuing. Gleek came home and was a little grouchy at my desire for interaction. After being social at school she only wanted to be left alone with her book. Patch was increasingly hard to wake up each morning. These things are mere data points. I don’t have enough information to see patterns yet. Also, I’m trying very hard not to tell myself stories about what the beginning of school events mean. I don’t want to spin small events into huge anxiety as I imagine catastrophic failure of all things education. Neither do I want to believe that all will be well only to be plunged into grief later when reality does not match expectation. Perhaps I’ll be able to evaluate next week, but even then the only point is to make daily adjustments in how things work, not make predictions for the future.

Four First Days

By / August 19, 2015 / 1 Comment

1.
The apartment was clean and neat, but definitely showed some wear from years of prior tenants. It felt empty, devoid of personality with no roommates at home and few personal items in the shared living space. Kiki and I hauled her belongings up three flights of stairs in the hot afternoon and stacked them in piles by the door of her new bedroom. Shopping came next to fill her fridge with the food she will eat and to buy a desk/table for her to work on. We carried those loads up as well.

Then it was time for me to go. I had a three hour drive back home. We sat for a moment in silence, in the empty apartment, with Kiki’s things in piles before us. Last year I’d dropped her off into a crowd of familiar roommates. She’d been immediately swallowed up in continuing friendships and chatter. This time we both remembered a little too clearly the hard parts of the semester before. The emptiness of the apartment left space for those memories to bounce around and become worries.

In a small voice Kiki asked “Will you help me assemble my desk and chair?”
I stayed an extra two hours helping with assembly and buying pizza for dinner. On our return from fetching pizza, we pulled in at the same time as one of Kiki’s roommates. Having a friend banished the emptiness. I bid Kiki goodbye without feeling like I was abandoning her to loneliness. This was confirmed later in the evening via Skype when Kiki was cheerful and partially moved in.

***
2.
Patch was headed out the door for his first day of junior high. He asked me where his hoodie was. I answered and watched as his fingers twisted the hem of his shirt. The twisting was a small sign of the anxiety he felt, as was him asking for his hoodie. It wasn’t cold outside, he felt safer with the hood wrapped around his head. Gleek walked him to the bus stop. School for her didn’t start until the next day. This was an orientation day for seventh graders only. I watched them walk off together, Patch taller than his sister by a good two inches. Last fall Gleek was still taller. I’d been carefully biting my tongue for the last two days. I’d wanted to ask Patch a bunch of questions, to talk through all the things which might cause him stress or anxiety. My mind reviewed all those worries as he walked away. Would it be too overwhelming? Would he ratchet up in anxiety? Would he have panic attacks? I hoped not. But I knew that obsessively talking it through was more likely to create anxiety than to relieve it. Anxiety is a transmissible ailment for those who are prone to it. I did my best to keep mine to myself. We were much better off treating this departure for school as routine.

He came home carrying his hoodie, not wearing it. At some point he felt safe enough to take it off. I limited my after school questions to three. How was it? Good. Anything stressful or anxious? Not really. Anything exciting? His German teacher. The ease of his answers was as reassuring as the answers themselves. He met my eyes with his shoulders and arms relaxed. One day is not a useful measure to evaluate a school year, but it was a good start.

***
3.
Link was already awake when I came to his room to turn on the light. He grabbed his clothes and headed for the bathroom. I was glad of this. I like the mornings when he is self-propelled much better than the mornings where I feel like I’m pushing against a mountain to keep him moving. I expect those mornings will come, but not on this first day of school. Link came to prayer and scripture time far more alert than either of his siblings. Patch was dragging and sleepy, not yet adjusted to the early rising. Noting his schedule written on a note card attached to the fridge, Link said “3D graphics? Cool!” This was his only commentary on the classes he has for today. I drove him to the school building and watched him walk toward it. This is his senior year. Sort of. He didn’t finish half the school work from his junior year, so he’ll have to hustle if he wants to graduate with his class. That is a conversation I need to have with him in the next couple of weeks. He has to decide whether the cap and gown ceremony is important to him. There are other conversations to have. So much growing he needs to do. I would really like to see that growth. It feels like I spent most of last year watching him shrink. None of us know what this year will bring, but the first day started well.

***
4.
Gleek was out of bed before I entered her room. She had night-before-Christmas type anticipation about the beginning of school. She typed up her morning journal, only getting momentarily distracted by YouTube. I hardly had to pay attention to her at all as she dressed and readied her pile of things for school. “It’s nice to have a schedule.” she said as she loaded a dozen writing implements into a zip bag. The bag went on top of her stack of five notebooks. She was defended against boredom and the need for drawing supplies. When time came to leave she told Patch it was time to go and they walked out together.

***
Coda: The parents
I was grouchy this morning, though I wasn’t conscious of it until a minor frustration had me tossing a spatula into the sink rather harder than was necessary. Part of it was pure fatigue. My body is not accustomed to being awake at 6:30am. That long string of school mornings stretched ahead of me filled with 6:30ams. The weight of responsibility chafed as I prepared breakfasts on a timed schedule. I remembered how to do it all, but I didn’t want any of it. I know that school is the best way for my kids to grow right now, but I’m still tired from last year. I’m still too aware of how hard it all got.

The kids were all out the door by 7:45 and the house was quiet. The quiet felt empty, substantially different than the quiet of people doing their own quiet things. “I miss summer. I don’t want to go to work today. I miss Kiki” Howard said, echoing my unspoken sentiments. Of course we will go to work anyway, because the work is important and we love the work enough to do it even on a day when we’d rather not expend effort.

The school year has begun. Thus far the only unpleasant things have been in my head. One day at a time we’ll proceed.

On the Desire to Hold Still

By / August 8, 2015 / 2 Comments

It is a strange space when things are suddenly better after they’ve been very hard. The slide downward was so slow and inexorable. I turned myself inside out trying to figure out how to help my children. I configured and re-configured schedules. I lowered the bar trying to make things possible for my son who was struggling. Time and again he went under the just-lowered bar. Everything hurt for months. He hurt. I hurt. Howard hurt. After all of that, to have things suddenly better is disorienting. I don’t trust it. Surely the climb back out should take as long as the slide downward. Also, we’re on summer schedule where stresses are next to none. There is every possibility that the advent of school will mean a return of emotional pain. So I’d like to rejoice when my children easily manage something that was a source of conflict or meltdown. I’d like to be happy that the son who moves through my house now is the one that I remember from before things got hard. Instead I feel like I’m holding very still, as if a wrong move from me could scare away the current good state of things. I’m afraid, but I know that hold-still-forever is not a viable life strategy. So I try to take each day as it’s own capsule, like a glass ball with a scene in it. If today is a good place, I hold it in my mind like a small treasure. No matter what comes next it can’t change the good I had today.

Projects in Process

By / July 4, 2015 / 2 Comments

It appears that more than a week has passed since I last posted. I was wondering how that could happen, then I made the following list of my projects in process:

Pioneer Trek
Preparing for this has been an endeavor which has required multiple shopping trips and lots of thinking. We aren’t a camping family, so there was quite a lot of gear that we didn’t already have. Or at least we didn’t have enough of. On top of that, Howard has been working hard to make sure that his work is far enough ahead that he can go internet silent for four days. So have I. This will be our longest trip away from the internet since we started running an internet based business. Also this will be the first trip since we got our cat where both us and our backyard neighbors are absent at the same time. They usually take care of her while we’re gone. So I’ve had to do quite a bit of thinking about who would care for her and what instructions I should give for the care of a cat who is accustomed to going in and out of the house as often as she can convince a human to open the door.

And then there has been a full load of anxiety attached to all of the above. I’ve spent quite a lot of energy telling myself that everything will be fine. The truth is that trek may very well be an entirely miserable experience. Or it could be a fantastic one. I don’t know how this will turn out, I just know that it is an important experience for our family to have. We felt that strongly when we agreed to go. I’ll admit that I’d like to come home and help my kids process and learn from amazing experiences instead of helping them process miserable ones. I have to remind myself that my job isn’t to make sure that my kids only have good experiences. My job is to help them learn and grow from whatever experiences they have. It is really stressful spending so much time and energy preparing for a thing without knowing how much emotional clean up we’ll have to do afterward. We leave at o’dark thirty on Tuesday.

Planet Mercenary
Howard and I have been figuring out how the workflow needs to go. He’s been doing art direction. I’ve been handling contracts. We started the process for manufacturing cards and dice. Alan continues to run playtests and tweak the rule set. I’m putting together the structural skeleton for the book, deciding how many pages will be devoted to each section.

Mental Health Management
I’ve been driving at least three and a half hours each week taking my kids to various appointments, therapy sessions, and classes. This does not include the time that I sit and wait for them while they are in these things. Though I don’t do as much sitting around as I’d expect because I tend to drop one off, drive another one, then pick one up, then pick up the other one. It is hard for me to tell if any of it is producing increased emotional stability and coping skills. I think I won’t know the results of this summer until school starts. I do know that we just revised our plan for Link. His therapist (the second one we’ve tried, and the one I thought might be able to help) is leaving. Instead of handing Link off to a new therapist, we’ve decided to take a break for a bit. We’ll let him process the classes he’s taking. And let him process the experiences he has during Trek. And let him process going to visit his grandparents without his parents also there. In addition to all of that, we’ve been doing some medicine switches. Changing mental health medicine is a slow process which requires observation. I think that things are improving. The kids are negotiating their frustrations in ways that are more productive. And that is not for lack of conflict over video games, food, space, etc. I sometimes feel guilty that I’m not providing more summer outings, but the kids are bonding over shared games, and I have to remember that is worthwhile.

GenCon
Out past the trek, Howard and I will both be going to GenCon. I’m very excited about this. I’ll get to go and be with other writers. I’ll get to dwell in a professional space and put down much of the parenting things. We run a booth at GenCon, so there are lots of preparatory things we need to do. I did the big shipment of merchandise to our crew there. This past week Howard and I ordered new pins, bags, and badge holders which will be at the show. That required decisions and design time. We’re actually a bit later on ordering those than we wanted to be. Some of them will be shipped direct to us and we’ll haul them to the show in suitcases. Also in my GenCon planning was figuring out child care while we were gone. I finally decided to send the kids to stay with their grandparents. This will mean they get to fly as unaccompanied minors (direct flight, only one hour long). The boys get their trip while I’m at GenCon. The girls get their trip a week earlier. Thus I’ve arranged for the house and cat to be tended at all times. There will be more GenCon scrambling after I get back from trek, I’m sure.

Schlock Mercenary / Regular business
The usual operation of things does not stop. There are orders to fill, email to answer, and accounting to do. We’ve also got the next Schlock book in process. There are more design decisions to make with this book because it is the first of the next set.

Household
Just like regular business does not stop, neither to regular household tasks. People need food, which requires shopping. We have defaulted into eating quite a lot of frozen food or eating out. This is hard on the budget, but does solve the problem of hunger. Though the kids are starting to talk wistfully of foods that are not microwaved. I’m hopeful that post-trek we’ll get back to meal planning and cooking more often. The other house project that is in process is preparing to paint Gleek’s room. She’s the only kid who didn’t shift rooms earlier this year, so she’s the only one who still has dingy white walls. This week Kiki and I have been helping her organize and sort her things. Gleek is old enough now that she’s ready to give away things she’s outgrown or at least store them instead of having them out. After trek we’ll pull things down from the walls, wash walls, and prepare to paint.

Writing
Blogging has been sporadic, obviously. Yet I’ve gotten started working on the revision of House in the Hollow. My goal is to have it submittable this fall. Writing is beginning to come back, which is always nice.

So that’s what I’ve been up to and what I’ll be doing in the next few weeks. I’m sure I’ll return from trek with stories to tell. Though if the stories are hard, telling them may wait a while.

Walking Away from an Event

By / May 26, 2015

“Mom, I don’t want to do this.” Patch said the words into my shoulder. We were sitting on the floor in the school hallway side by side, his head snuggled up to my shoulder. The snuggling took some creative hunching on his part since he’s taller than me these days. I looked down at his combed hair, his white shirt, and cool bow tie. (Bow ties are cool.) He was dressed to take part in his 6th grade graduation ceremony and that was exactly what he didn’t want to do.

I thought about Kiki and Link sitting in the audience, waiting to see their brother’s ceremony. I thought about Patch’s teacher who has loved him through his recent difficulties with anxiety and panic attacks. She certainly hoped that he would at least be able to walk with his classmates. I thought of the reasons that humans arrange for ceremonies, their emotional purposes. Then I kissed the top of my boy’s head and thought about how much of his anxiety stems from the fact that he’s an instinctive people pleaser. He never wants to disappoint anyone. Ever. And if he thinks he has, his stress levels rise tremendously. My boy knew that deciding not to walk could make other people sad, yet he found the courage to say “I don’t want to do this.” It is huge progress for him to be able to be aware that his desires conflict with what is expected, to be able to speak those desires in a calm way instead of being caught between what he wants and what he feels he ought to do until he curls into a panicked ball.

While I was thinking these thoughts, I heard the principal begin to welcome everyone to the ceremony. I had a choice. I could probably coax my son into a partial participation. I could try to help him match what was expected by the structure of the event. Or I could listen to him and back him up in his desire to opt out. Ideally we would have made this choice in time to have explanatory conversations with school staff. It was too late for that. Patch’s teacher was on the stage in front of everyone. No way to consult her. I pictured them calling his name on the list and being confused when he was not in his place in line. I’ll never know how they handled that moment.

“Of course we can go.” I said. Then I waded past the crowds of other parents and grandparents. I gestured to Kiki and Link to gather their things and mine. I saw the confusion in their faces, but they came. And once in the hallway with Patch, they completely and happily accepted his decision. Maybe Patch’s teacher saw us leave. I left a note on her desk to explain. I checked Patch out through the office, so that school personnel would know where he had gone and with whom. Then the four of us went out for lunch. Patch lost the hunched-shoulder sad-faced look he’d been carrying. Instead he laughed with siblings and ate chocolate cake. In the end he will be more glad of that lunch than with sitting through speeches and walking in a line to shake hands.

Patch has growing and healing to do in the next months. He’ll be better able to do that if his family listens to him when he says what he feels. Even if doing so creates awkwardness for us.

Medication is Complicated

By / May 11, 2015 / 2 Comments

It was a routine trip to the pharmacy. I had seven prescriptions to pick up. That right there says something. Somehow a seven prescription pharmacy trip has become “routine.” Three of them had been called in over the phone. Four required me to hand signed pieces of paper to the pharmacy staff. I understand the reasoning behind requiring paper with signatures, yet the need for it adds layers of complication to my life. Any time the prescription needs a refill, I have to call the doctor’s office and either physically go get a piece of paper or plan ahead to allow time for them to mail the paper to me. Add in the fact that the insurance companies keep track of when they last filled the prescription and they won’t fill early, so there is a window of only a few days during which I’m allowed to refill a prescription before we run out. I always try to hit the early end of this window because sometimes the pharmacy doesn’t have the pills on hand and they have to be ordered in. Tracking all of this has become routine. I’d done the math, calculated the windows of time, and taken myself down to the pharmacy to pick things up.

Then the pharmacy register rang up at $500 instead of the $35 I was expecting.

When I picked a healthcare plan last November, I paid close attention to the prescription copays. I picked a plan with $5 copays for their Tier 1 medicines. Tier 2 costs $35 and Tier 3 is $175. It is a system designed to encourage people to switch to the Tier 1 medicines. I don’t really know all the reasons that medicines get assigned to various Tiers. We had some stress in January because my kids had to be switched to a different form of their medicine because capsules were Tier 3, but caplets were Tier 1. Then we had to get special permission for Howard to be on the same medicine because anyone over the age of 18 needs a doctor’s approval, but under that age the insurance company doesn’t require preauthorization. So we jumped through hoops, and settled everyone onto their medicines. And all was well for a couple of months. I was relieved each time I picked up a prescription and it cost only $5. We’d paid much more than that in years past and it had been a financial burden on our family.

“That price can’t be right.” I said.
“You can call your insurance company” the pharmacist said. So I stepped over to a bench and called the customer support number on the back of my insurance card. It was a long phone call with multiple waits on hold while I watched my frozen groceries in my cart slowly thawing.

The systems around health insurance are arcane and complicated. I have to make far too many phone calls because automated systems aren’t as automated as they should be. Yet any time I’ve talked to an actual person on the phone, both for my insurance company and for the government healthcare marketplace, they have been very kind and helpful. The pharmacists are helpful. I end up with this sense that we’re all tangled up together in some weird bureaucracy where the key focus is not on best treatment, but on appeasing the computer system so that treatment can be extracted.

The customer support lady looked up the pharmacy order and found that I’d been billed at a Tier 3 rate. She looked up the medicines and they were all listed as Tier 1. Then she looked at another place and they were listed at Tier 3. Ultimately she had to put in a support ticket to…somebody… to figure out which Tier is accurate. There might have been a change in the formulary listing for these medicines or maybe it was just a mistake. She says she’ll call me back once she hears back. I have her name and number, because I fully expect that in a day or two I’ll have to call her because she hasn’t yet called me.

In the meantime my kids are taking medicine once per day and we’re running out of pills. It may be that the insurance company has changed these meds to Tier 3, which would mean that I have to research and figure out which medicines are comparable and are Tier 1. Then I have to call their doctor and discuss a med change with him, discussing the options and what possible consequences there might be from switching medicines. Then I would either have to drive to Salt Lake City (2 hours round trip) or wait two days for the prescriptions to be mailed to me. After which I then have to make another trip to the pharmacy (40 minutes round trip).

Just today my “routine” trip to the pharmacy cost me 2 hours and significant emotional distress. And I still don’t know how much more time it is going to cost.

So when people accuse parents of putting kids on meds for the parents’ convenience, excuse me if I laugh out loud in derision. There is nothing convenient about this. I would dearly love to be able to skip it all. I wish that willpower, diet, and exercise had worked for us. That would have been lovely. I track and manage all of this medical mess only because I can see that the medicines make a positive difference in the lives of my family. As an ancillary effect, my life is better too, for which I’m grateful. But better is not the same as easy and it definitely isn’t the same as convenient. The minute my family members don’t need medicine anymore I will ditch the stress and expense. I think that some of them will reach that. I suspect that others will need medicine for most of their lives. For this week, I’ll be tracking remaining medicine, waiting for phone calls, and making phone calls. Again.

UPDATE: The insurance company called me back the next day. It was a glitch in their system. The pharmacy re-ran the prescriptions and they came up at the correct $5 rate.

Memories of a Room

By / June 24, 2023 / 2 Comments

The end goal for the construction we endured a week ago was to create a room large enough for my two boys to share. They’ve been sharing a room for twelve years, ever since Patch was born, and it worked reasonably well when they had a bunk bed. But a few years ago they felt done with bunk beds. The result was a room that had an aisle for walking, two beds and two dressers. There really wasn’t any space for playing or hanging out. It was where they slept and where they stored their stuff. And they kept getting bigger until we had the largest person in our house and the rapidly growing one crammed together in the smallest bedroom. So I wiggled the finances around and we finished the basement room which used to be my shipping room. When we learned that the carpet would not arrive until mid-May, the boys decided to move into the new room and live with a concrete floor for a few weeks. We moved the essentials and boxed the rest in order to minimize the amount of stuff we’ll have to move back out for carpet install. By noon the furniture was in and the boys were already enjoying their new space.

A strange thing happened as the upstairs room began to empty out, I traveled back in time. The last time I saw the room so empty was when it held a crib and a mattress on the floor for my two little boys. I stood among the boxes and read the history writ on the walls. There were the circles Link drew on the wall and ceiling when he had the top bunk and planned out orbits for his glow-in-the-dark solar system. Next to them was the shadow of a Blues Clues wall sticker, beloved for years and then removed when it became embarrassing. The spot where Link decided to keep score in a game by writing it on the wall. A hundred pin holes because the boy’s default mechanism for hanging things was to steal push pins from my corkboard. My flow of memory was only enhanced by the fact that we dug into the very back corners of their closet. It was an archeological dig back to Link’s much younger years. I had him sort things he wanted to keep into boxes and the rest we discarded or gave away.

I kept it together until Link left his jar of eraser buddies for me to get rid of. I held it up and said “what about these.” He shook his head and said “nah.” I held the little jar in my hand. It had been so important to him eight years ago. I wrote a blog post about the games he played with them during homework time. That was half his lifetime ago and he has become someone else. I sat in the room after Link had gone downstairs. I looked around the room where my little boy used to live. I held one of his treasures in my hands and a wave of sadness rolled over me. I grieve sometimes for the children that are gone. They transformed and became new people. I like who they are. I certainly don’t want them to stop. But sometimes, like today, I cry for a while. And I keep the eraser buddies, even though I know that is a little bit silly.

The new room is so much better for the boys. They have space to be teenagers together. They’ve made plans to acquire a small couch and a monitor so that they can play video games with friends in their room. Link walked with me through IKEA and I could see him thinking about an adult living space. He’s getting excited about chairs they way he used to get excited about toys. Time marches onward. We change and we change our spaces to match our new selves. Next week Kiki will come home and move into the room that was vacated by the boys. She will hang things on the walls and turn that room into something it has never been before. In the near future, probably after Kiki has vacated to return to college, the room will get a new coat of paint and a new carpet. The room my little boy grew up in will transform, just as he did.

(Eraser buddies post: https://www.onecobble.com/2007/10/18/eraser-buddies/