Monthly Archives: December 2017

Calendar Mom Drops the Holiday Ball

December 25, 2017Crisis DuJour, Family Ties, Photographic Memories, Rambling Rose, Self-flagellation, Snow DayHoliday Disasters, Humor, Karma, So This Is Christmas?kirizar

Crass Consumerism Lite Show — IT’S BEGINNING TO LOOK A LOT LIKE LIGHT POLLUTION….

Dear All,

I am spending Christmas Day writing cards to friends because, apparently, I am living the holidays backward. And it started off so promising too…

The cookies were baked and frosted in early December…ready to be handed out to teachers and neighbors instead of requiring exhausting shopping jaunts and wrapping to accomplish. Ta dah!

*She gloated and lo’ the gods of irony did take notice.*

So, of course, the minute I added the last dragée sprinkle, I came down with the worst bubonic nasal funk, like, EVER. I didn’t dare hand out the frosted ones out to anyone…I liked.

We’ve been eating them all in lieu of chicken soup. (Note: I make something like 100 cookies each season.)

As a result of the plague, all shopping was done last minute. Like on Saturday, or as I was calling it, the Eve of Christmas.

I gritted my teeth and plowed through the tinsel strewn madness in a frantic bid not to throttle my fellow man–just so I’d have presents to hand out at the family gathering.*

I stayed up all night Saturday wrapping the last-minute what-nots decorated with frills and furbelows and wondering why BBC America wasn’t showing the much-awaited Dr. Who Christmas special.

*A clue, she has not.*

Dizzy with a stuffy head, thrown by the fact I work from home and days are marked by whether I have to shove my kid on a bus or not, things are spectacularly wonky. Festivities happen in spastic fits and starts if they happen at all. To be perfectly blunt, I’m off! In fact, I am so off in my order of traditional holiday crapola, that we celebrated early.

LIKE…a DAY early.

I woke Sunday thinking that it was Monday because I saw a mail van delivering to the house next door. So, Santa came early. I made the traditional pop-n-fresh, cinnamon rolls from a Pillsbury can baked into the shape of a lumpy Christmas tree the way my mom always made for us when we were kids. My son happily opened his giant tube of popcorn and his Orville Redenbacher fun-fun air popper.

It is only after the morning is gone and all the presents are opened that I realize…oh, wait. It’s only the 24th.

Christmas Comes Early - Cinnamon Roll Tree — No…his shirt says “PUCK”…though I understand why you might be confused.

So, here we are, December 25th with nothing to celebrate. The snowy day precludes the emergency ‘road trip’ that I blankly promised my son yesterday with the caveat “If the weather is good.”**

And we woke to this…

Neon depiction of actual weather event – The Old Man Winter Blow-Out White Sale!

This wouldn’t be so all-fired tragic if it weren’t for the irony of it all.

My kid, the Calendar King, said NOT ONE WORD about the fact mommy was off by a day.*** I guess all kids dreams of Christmas coming early. This does explain the kind of puzzled looks he kept giving me when I told him to keep opening his presents though…

So, Happy Holidays to everyone… and I might as well wish you Happy New Year. I’ll be with you in spirit/s next Saturday as we toast farewell to 2017! Because who in their right mind would put New Years on a Sunday of all things! Am I right?

Asterisk Bedazzled Footnotes:

*I was shocked to find other people shopping and leaving me with no place to park but the butt-end of the parking lot. Seriously, why weren’t they all home with their families and snug in their beds?

**Note: all weather is good weather for travel according to my son. The roads could be melting with lava, hail could be denting the roof and Pteradactyls might be making a bid to return from the primordial ooze from which they sprung and he’d still say, “Car ride?”

***Yeah yeah. I know. Non-verbal autistic. But he could have pointed to a calendar or something!

2017 – A SUCKY Year in Review

December 19, 2017Photographic Memories, Terrifying Transitions, Universal Coverage - In a Bad Way, Welcome To Autismland: Population YOU!2017 In Review, Mental Health, Reflection, Sadnesskirizar

I was going to title this 2017 – A Year in the Crapper and include an appropriate photo, but my friends tell me I overshare.

So, here’s my modified letter to the world:

2017 KINDA SUCKED

Like burnt-pan-of-forgotten-soup-boiled-dry SUCKED.

Recovery is Slow — **How bad a cook am I? I burned soup, people. That’s how bad!**

It took a whole year of bad things happening for me to put my finger on exactly what was wrong…

2017 – LIKE TREE-EATS-ROOF KINDA SUCKS!

Yeah, yeah. Having a tree drop on your house in a sh*t storm was a pretty big effing clue. But you could just chalk that up to really bad luck and shrug it off. If it weren’t for all those bad juju kinda things that kept happening.

I TRIED 2017. I REALLY DID.

I tried traveling to exotic locations and exploring for fun and adventure. I generally learned there is a diminishing return on happiness. The farther away we got from home, the more likely we were going to need an E.R. trip or an intervention. We are now circling the drain of 2017 and sticking mostly to home as a result.

Camp Cadillac — CAMP CADILLAC – For when you finally admit tent camping isn’t for you!

My son loves to go places and sleep outdoors.

Or so I thought.

Instead, what I found was photographic evidence that my son just likes a variety of places he can write calendars–or, if not writing them, he is contemplating it with a fistful of markers or crayons awaiting his next fix.

My son discovered a love of popcorn. That was a new obsession.

This really was his primary food source in 2017

Camping meant lots of time spent popping this way.

But despite the happiness campaign the people at Orville Redenbacher are pitching, popcorn can’t fix everything.

Calendar Man — If you squint you can make out my son’s favorite pastime. Hunting for calendars a thousand years from now.

Not even calendars can do that.

It also took me nearly a year of misery to realize something…

Happiest Places - Water — **Gun Lake Reprieve – Momentary Bliss**

Despite the occasional flashes of joy and happiness I managed to capture…

Pizza Man — **Do you have any idea how hard it was to get him NOT to eat this cookie so I could take this fuzzy image? You can’t!**

In most of the photos I took of my son…he was not smiling.

Camping Ceiling View — **Seriously, he really did love this place. But his face doesn’t show it!**

He was there. But he was an unwilling participant in:

Mommy’s Campaign for Happiness and Symptom Control.

Happy Place - No Smiles — **Millenium Park only reached a tepid level of joy.**

If 2017 were a fairytale–it was the Hans-Christian-Andersen-dark-with-a-side-of-maniacal-laughter kind. And it would have opened with this line…

THERE ONCE WAS A HAPPY BOY…whose mother tried to address his recurring rage-outs with a wave of pharmaceutical fixes.

Quiet Desperation — This was his most common expression–a mixture of **Why?** and **Please Stop**!

We tried several different combinations of psychiatric panaceas. If a drug caused a side effect, we gave a pill to fix the side effect – or in theory, that’s what it was supposed to do. Instead, it produced yet more side effects that, surprise, surprise, we’d try to address with more medication.

It was the loopiest, saddest, roller coaster of a year you can imagine.

There were the bids for happiness that ended in tears.

Not As Pictured — Ten minutes after this faux happy moment was taken, my son had a massive meltdown that had made me feel as if angry mammoths were stomping on my soul.

Then there was the reality check that bounced. HARD!

Part of me wanted to believe this was a transition year. That turning thirteen and becoming a dreaded teenager was the root of this particular evil. But after several incidents of biting in school this fall, I decided to stop the massively medicated merry-go-round–at least in part.

We backed off the majority of his drug trials. He is back on the two drugs that have the fewest complications and I just deal with side effects that only have him crawling up the walls and not sleeping instead of the combo-platter pharmacopeia backlash that produced jittery anxiety, biting, and head bashing, among other things.

I now take comfort in momentary joys–as rare as a solar eclipse and therefore exponentially more cherished in their singularity.

Eclipsed — Does he understand the significance of the earth’s shadow blocking the sun? I do not know. But he enjoyed a day out and that was good enough for me.

But when added up in seconds, the joys of 2017 could not outweigh the sorrows.

Unhappy Solar Eclipse — **Yeah. His face says it all….**

For every golden day in the sun, there were days that drained like pus from a wound.

In this year, I have watched my happy boy transform in a downward spiral of misery and depression, taking me with him.

The Face of Pain — THERE’S NO MAP TO A HAPPY PLACE FROM HERE!

Then I had to leave my job to take care of him. Because, once he outgrew his handlers, I was the only one who could get him off the bus.

I left a good place to work for a life of uncertainty and near-poverty that allows me to work from home in the hours that my son is in school.

The only upside to this stress? I have spent less time developing an ulcer over the toilet tank of a government where The Great Evil and his Cabal of Cackling Soulless Ones are stirring a sh*t stew for the masses to swallow.

So, 2017–that’s it! I am out of it: Out of work. Out of patience. And now, out of time.

I AM DONE, 2017.

SERIOUSLY.

I AM DONE WITH YOU.

I am coasting the rest of this year and hope that 2018 has some upside that I just can’t foresee or imagine. But I doubt it.*

Asterisk Bedazzled Footnote:

*In a traditional end-of-year review, I usually take a light-hearted look at the craziness of my life. 2017 hasn’t been so much crazy-fun as it has been crazy-needs-to-be-committed. I’m not going to pretend otherwise and that’s my gift to you. Some years, all you can give is the honest truth…even if it is wrapped in a craptastic bow.**

**Seriously, though, being sick with cough and congestion this past week may have affected this year’s letter. Perhaps after I finish coughing up a lung, I’ll find my happy place again?

Hack

Hurk…Gag…Harrrung

Ptui!

Or, maybe not.

Sunset Walks — “This is the end, beautiful friend. This is the End…of 2017!”

Freehand Meanderings of a Broken Mind

December 8, 2017From My Brain to Yours, Rambling Rose, WritingInsomnia, Nanowrimokirizar

I have been off for a while now.*

NaNoWriMo had me in its greedy grip. I barely won the 50,000 word marathon which took two intense days of non-stop writing (no bathing or socializing) to catch up the nearly 15,000 word deficit as I fell behind.

I struggled daily to write anything coherent because…

mY SoN HaS sTOpPED SlEePInG

This doesn’t sound like the terrible thing that it truly is. It sounds innocuous and a charming reminder of the sleepless days when we first brought baby from the hospital without a clue as to the insomnia bomb we’d actually welcomed into our home…willingly.**

I’ve been planning on writing about ~~stealing~~…no, ~~liberating~~… uh…adopting, yeah, adopting a pet rock. I even have pictures of the day we unearthed it from a public park and lugged it home.

Too tired to share.

The visit to a restaurant in the middle of nowhere that just has to be experienced to be believed.

Can’t find the energy (or typing skills) to write that one either.

Then there was the whole time I nearly chopped my finger off. (Always with the exaggerations is this one…oh, my, that sure is a lot of BLOOD!)

So, instead, I will stumble like a drunk back onto the blogging stage and beg your forgiveness.

Until the doctor figures out the right tranquilizers***, I will be the babbling mess you are enjoying right now. Unfiltered and unedited and mostly unhinged.

You’re welcome.

Asterisk Bedazzled Footnotes:

*I’m tempted to leave my post at that comment and call it good. But, I am just not that succinct.

**Now, whenever someone tells me they are having a baby, I have to muffle my snickering when I wish them well.

***Go to Amazon and search ‘Elephant Tranquilizers.’ It’s amazing what they offer as an option. Or go to the following link for one of the recommendations they gave me: