We're not in Kansas Anymore, Toto.

disconnected.

*I started writing this a couple of years ago as a coping device I think it’s finally time to post it.

In the fall of 1983, when I was 11 years old, a young friend of mine went turkey hunting with his father in the woods of Northeast Arkansas. There was some kind of commotion, and the man stashed his young son in a bush while he went to check things out. Meantime, another hunter came along, saw something moving in the bush, and shot it. The boy died instantly. At the time of the incident he was wearing an orange vest, and general hunting protocols suggest that you don’t shoot unless you actually see what it is you are aiming for. But my parents had to deliver this news to me, nonetheless. A wire in my brain disconnected.  

In early October of 1992, I was in college at TCU in Ft Worth, Texas. My best friend left a guttural, unintelligible message on my answering machine. The comical part of this story is that my roommate at the time was also named Jen, and her best friend from home was also named Laura, and the message was so discombobulated that we couldn’t figure out which of our dear friends had left it. She got a hold of her friend first, who confirmed she had not called and everything was fine on her end, thus the message must have been meant for me. I couldn’t reach my friend after several attempts, so I finally called her parents at home. In what must have been one of the most dreaded conversations of his life, her father shared with me the news; one of our friends was dead, and it appeared to be suicide; a self-inflicted gunshot wound. A wire in my brain disconnected. 

I grieved. It was a deep, visceral grief that fell out of my bones like ash from the tip of a cigarette. I screamed and cried in between gulps of air as my roommate held me. I bought a plane ticket home, and went to the memorial service. I watched his mother shake hands and give hugs and smile warmly as people filed out of the church, offering their condolences. It was an unfair thing to ask of her, but it was what society expected. I watched the recent ex-girlfriend collapse at her feet, until the girl’s father scooped her up from the floor like a baby and carried her, soggy and screaming, to the car. Another wire in my brain disconnected. I flew back to Ft. Worth Sunday evening. 

The next morning, I learned of another friend there at college who had killed himself over the weekend, also with a gun. I had traveled to bear witness to the life cut short of one friend, only to miss another. A wire in my brain disconnected. 

In April 1995 I was working in a corporate high rise in Dallas when Timothy McVeigh parked a yellow Ryder rental truck in front of the Edward F. Murray Federal Building in Oklahoma City, and blew the face off the entire structure. These details and names are embedded in my memory like my childhood address and phone number. By 10am that morning the local news was reporting that there had been a bomb in Oklahoma City, and that the bombers were in a car driving for Dallas to do more damage (incorrect, but it was reported this way early on.) My coworkers and I huddled around a TV trying to comprehend the details. We were scared, but we didn’t have enough information to be truly terrified. Then the power to the building went out. Someone screamed. We scattered like roaches. A wire in my brain disconnected. 

The power had gone out because there was a construction crew installing a new street light in the intersection next to us, and they had accidentally cut a line under the street. But we didn’t know that until several days later. It was coincidental. What I knew at that moment was that I was leaving, regardless of my job expectations. I grabbed my purse and went to my car and drove home to my apartment. It was the first time that I can remember allowing my flight response to overrule my rational brain. 

Back at the apartment, my fiance was working from home, and we watched TV for the next 20 hours straight. It was then I first saw the image that many of us associate with that event: the firefighter carrying the tiny, lifeless body of an infant girl, her little legs and arms cradled so gently but also hanging loose. Another wire in my brain disconnected. 

Four years later to the day, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold planned and carried out their revenge saga at Columbine High School. I lived in Charlotte, North Carolina then. It seemed so much further away, and yet I understood it. I was bullied so much as a child, and suddenly those memories resurfaced in the days that followed, as news anchors interviewed locals and experts alike, desperate for answers to why or how this could happen. But I didn’t wonder. Bullying, bullying, bullies, more bullying, the news anchors cried out. In the back of my mind I understood how a kid could get to that place. “That place” was a black hole beneath a cobwebbed, dusty trap door in an old abandoned mineshaft in my brain. I couldn’t open that trap door myself, but I knew about the place, and the door. I knew it existed. I couldn’t reconcile this fact with the horror of what they had done, and it bothered me greatly. A wire in my brain disconnected. 

Then 9/11 happened. 

I was a mother by then, living in Kansas City. My little boy was not quite 14 months old. I had Good Morning America on the TV in the kitchen, just playing in the background of our morning routine. We were heading out the door when I realized something major was happening (I left the TV on for the dog most days.) I stopped and stood in the kitchen watching with my baby on my hip as the second plane hit the building and Diane Sawyer sucked in her breath. I heard her words as she tried to make sense of what was happening and maintain her composure on National Television. 

At that point, it occurred to me that my parents had taken the first international vacation of their lives the day prior, and were in London, England. Several wires disconnected in my brain. I took the baby to his babysitter. All morning long, I sat at work, in my office alone, watching television, trying to make sense of what was happening. Finally after lunch I went and picked up the baby and went back home. I sat with him in my lap and watched CNN, as wires kept disconnecting. I finally heard from my parents, when they were able to find an Internet cafe and send me an email. 

The mass shootings kept happening, of course. Schools and movie theaters, on and on. A wire in my brain disconnected, every single time. 

Over time as these events kept happening, the wires in my brain stopped simply disconnecting, and began disintegrating, like spent sparklers on the 4th of July. Nothing to reconnect someday in the future. 

When Sandy Hook happened, I had changed careers back to teaching. My youngest son was in the fourth grade classroom across the hall from mine. I stood alone in the middle of my classroom in a daze, spinning around and staring hard into every corner, trying to imagine, where would I hide their little bodies? How quickly could I truly get the lights off and keep them quiet as someone walks down the hall with an automatic weapon? If I used myself as a distraction, would they actually run when I told them to? And let's be real. When all this might be going down, would I leave them and run for my son anyway? Isn’t that what a mother is supposed to do? Would it be a Sophie's choice scenario?

And with that thought, the switchboard went dark. 

I had a full blown panic attack. 

See, the wires in the brain work like an old fashioned telephone switchboard of memories and experiences connecting, disconnecting and reconnecting to meanings and feelings of safety or fear. 

Like when I was 12 and I burned my arm on the 375° oven removing a cookie sheet, a wire in my brain that connected baking cookies to a feeling that was soft and safe and smelled wonderful, disconnected. It reconnected to a different memory. A new memory. This one held the slightly acrid smell of sizzling skin, pain, and a tidal wave of fear. But that is an acceptable trade off, you say. These are lessons we learn the hard way, and the next time you were probably more careful. Except, there was no next time. I never made cookies in that particular oven again, because we moved house shortly thereafter. It was disconnected. The new memory was sealed. 

This doesn't mean that I never baked cookies again. What it means is that I didn't allow my own children near a hot stove. I didn't let them help me bake or cook. Instead I put them in front of the TV, so they'd be safely entertained far away from the oven. They didn't learn safe cooking skills until they were much older, because of my fear memory. It never occurred to me to bring them into the kitchen with me when cooking to connect food prep to healthy habits. And this connection never occurred to me until I started writing this paper. 

After I melted down in my classroom trying to decide if I would choose my students over my son if there was an active shooter in the building, it was not just a single wire that disconnected. The switchboard fell completely silent. It lost power. And something broke in another part of my body. Because the switchboard was down, there was nothing to stop the fight or flight response, the adrenaline just kept going. It was like an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, nothing you can do except watch it surge out into the ocean and wait for it to stop burning off. 

I operated in full fight or flight mode, quivering and looking over my shoulder at every single odd noise, for almost two full weeks. The switchboard finally came back online, but many, many wires remained disconnected, permanently. My body began to break down from the stress of trying to function with so many disconnected wires. I started having fits of vertigo, migraines, chronic pain, and other miscellaneous health issues that were unexplainable by  my doctors. I was eventually diagnosed with fibromyalgia and autoimmune diseases which may or may not have been influenced by that stress. 

Less than two years later, a neo-Nazi former KKK leader shot and killed three people at the Jewish Community Center in the city where I live, and was apprehended by police in the parking lot of the elementary school where I was teaching at the time. I don’t remember his name. I remember the names of the people he murdered, but not him. This happened practically in my backyard, my school was involved, though it was on a weekend not a school day. But it was no longer something that happened to other people in other cities, under other circumstances. Once again, as it did when I was a child, this had happened to people I knew. A new wire in my fragile, constantly overloaded brain disconnected. 

I started a new job in a different school in fall of 2016, on the campus of that particular shooting event. Once during a staff meeting, we were run through a series of active shooter training exercises. One of the teachers walked around with a nerf gun, slow and expressionless, and shot nerf bullets at the principals as they demonstrated ways to use furniture to hide behind. Many people laughed nervously at the absurdity as the principals tried to keep from being hit by nerf bullets. I did not laugh, because I was trying to keep my heart from exploding out of my chest. 

Poof. 

The switchboard went down again, right there in that meeting, and I bolted before I broke down in front of an audience of my peers. By this time in my life, the switchboard was having regular outages, sometimes triggered and sometimes random, and the physical toll it was taking on my body overall was becoming harder and harder to hide. I was seeing rheumatologists, neurologists, and going to regular physical therapy to try to figure out and fix what was wrong with me. 

During a summer school session around this time, when I work with special education elementary students, we went into a real lockdown because of a shooting at another school nearby. Two construction workers had gotten into an argument and one pulled a gun on the other. Do you have any idea what lockdown does to Sped kids? How changing their expected schedule throws them into absolute chaos? How terrified their parents were to get a text? Many left work and came to pick up their kids instead of letting them ride the bus home. I focused on pretending to be calm for the kid’s sake, but my heart didn’t stop pounding for hours afterward. 

Parkland. The shooting at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Florida happened late in the afternoon on Valentine’s Day. It was on the news all evening, and the next morning. 

This one was different. Rather than go into the building shooting, the shooter pulled the fire alarm, and then began picking off students like a carnival game as they exited the building. So now we are supposed to teach our kids to ignore the fire alarms we’ve been warning them about their entire lives, override their natural instincts, and not go outside, because it could be a trap? A wire in my brain disconnected. In fact, several wires just sparked out. 

The morning after the shooting, I drove myself to school against every fiber in my being telling me not to do so. I turned up the radio, smacked my hands against the steering wheel and screamed inside my car to try and ride through the adrenaline rush that I could not stop from coming. That was just driving to work. Upon arrival in my classroom, I shut the door and cried at my desk. It took days for the adrenaline to die down. I had finally found a doctor who understood my pain, and was giving me methods to wrangle these adrenaline surges that controlled my life and wreaked havoc on my body. Together we were reconnecting wires where we could. But, I still didn't understand my trigger. 

Then in the fall of 2018, the school held an entire day of active intruder training for teachers. My disconnected wires and barely managed adrenaline could not keep a lid on things, and the switchboard went out again. Apparently, my panicked behavior was unacceptable to others. I was later called into my principal's office and told that I needed to work on not being so easily triggered. I was admonished for being rude to others. I had very little memory of the things I was accused of. But it was clear that it never occurred to anyone around me that I was in need of assistance, despite the attendance of several people with trauma training. 

Trauma. All my disconnected wires, switchboard overloads, physical manifestations and systems- these are all signs of trauma in the brain. As teachers we are trained to spot trauma in our students, but apparently not in each other. 

Also that fall, a parent of children at my school committed suicide. My linked triggers collided, and I fell into a vast, deep space of depression. I was in fight or flight mode 24/7, my switchboard stayed down for weeks at a time, and I became completely unable to cope with my day to day life. I zombie walked through my days, I came down with Shingles for the third time in my life, I fell asleep crying and spinning in an abyss of vertigo almost every night. With my husband traveling most of the weekdays for work, my teenage youngest son raised himself for about six months. 

Just reliving these experiences as I write them here has caused my heart rate to explode. My adrenaline still rises and overflows just thinking of it, remembering. Later, the pain and stiffness will come. 

These days, I have medications and calming, self-regulating tools that help me manage what is now a diagnosed Panic Disorder, along with Anxiety, Migraines, Fibromyalgia, and an autoimmune condition. All of which came along because of my brain's inability to handle the trauma of gun and terrorism incidents over the course of my life. And I am not even someone with a direct relationship to gun violence. Everything I've sorted out through therapy that is tied to my panic and anxiety is secondhand relational, at best. Imagine the trauma of someone directly affected by losing a family member, or surviving a school shooting, or even having to evacuate a building. 

Now ask yourself if you really don’t understand why teachers are leaving the field. Why we need common sense gun control measures at the federal level. Why we need better mental healthcare, because as a reminder, therapy is often not covered by major insurance. Try to understand the trauma of these situations, and you know in your heart, as we all do, that a good guy with a gun cannot stop that trauma from forming. Fewer dead children in any active intruder scenario will not stop the trauma of everyone in that building. Trauma is trauma, and we will all suffer it if we don’t change something. 

Be sure the pot is big enough.

 

A couple of weeks ago a friend of mine posted this recipe on Facebook. It is, of course, hilarious. We think it’s from a military cookbook, something where feeding a lot of people and having a recipe like this wouldn’t really stand out. But for most of us, it stands out as not just hilarious but ridiculous. The kind of thing you would see on one of those slapstick comedy TV shows of the 70s and 80s with Carol Burnett and Tim Conway, or maybe an old episode of I Love Lucy. 

But this is 2020, and we have elevated the ridiculous to the sublime. 

And the more I look at this recipe, the more I realize, this is the metaphor. This is the exact metaphor I’ve been looking for to describe my job, a teacher in the American education system in this, the year of the Covid-19. 

We have been asked to cook an entire camel, with an entire lamb, 20 chickens, 60 eggs and 110 gallons of water, in a pot that is not large enough. It needs to feed a bunch of people, and it needs to feed them well. There is a recipe. There is an idea of a plan. And there are ingredients. It should be okay, right?

The problem is, when you cook something in a pot that isn’t large enough, not everything gets mixed together correctly. There might be too much pepper over on this side, or too many eggs over here, or the chickens in this corner might not be cooked all the way through, so some people might get sick, who knows? You do the best you can, with what you have. 

Be sure your pot is big enough. FOR A CAMEL. Or, teaching remotely to students too traumatized to care. Or teaching in person, wearing a mask and standing behind plexiglass, while other students are on a computer from home at the same time. Make sure you are prepared to deal with your own mental and physical health at the same time, plus that of your own family, friends, and students and their families. Be sure you are teaching through the syllabus at the same expected pace as a normal year, regardless of whether anyone is keeping up. Be sure you communicate with parents in 6 different ways so that if they can’t figure out how to get their kids online and into your classes it won’t be your fault, but it won’t be theirs either. Don’t drink too much wine, get some exercise, eat right. Brush your teeth. Maybe take a shower. 

Be sure your pot is big enough. 

Nobody has a pot that big, I assure you.

Mad World.

I realize I haven't posted here in a while. Most of my quarantine thoughts have played out on Facebook. But recently I hit my wall of "this is ridiculous, what is even happening?" So, here we are.

 

 

Last summer I was preparing to go on a trip to France as a chaperone with my son's high school band. I was shopping at our local Bag & Baggage store, looking for a good crossbody bag that could hold all of my goodies, but not be super heavy. I was there late in the evening, close to closing time, and it was just me and the manager in the store. We started chatting about my trip, just conversation as she showed me some options then left me to browse.

Somehow we got on the topic of someone I know who has a thing for Tumi briefcases. Now this person has a whole selection of really nice leather briefcases in a bin in the basement. Things he doesn't use anymore, but can't seem to get rid of. I was complaining because I know these things take up space and they're never going to get used again, they should be donated, some of them are broken, they would need to be fixed before they could be used again. But this guy just can't let them go. In fact, if you bring it up, an absolute temper tantrum will ensue. And as she was walking around the store tidying up her racks, she started telling me stories of people that she knows that love their Tumi bags, they are after all very high quality and can last forever if cared for properly. But then she mentioned people get attached to their things, it's hard to let go.

And as she said that, I absentmindedly mentioned that it might be because his parents divorced when he was away at college, and got rid of all his stuff when they sold the family home and split up their households.

She stopped what she was doing and turned to look at me.

"Honey." She said softly. I looked up at the change in tone. "He has baggage."

It gave me goosebumps.

Oh my God. He literally has emotional baggage manifesting in his baggage.

 

Now, watch as I tie this into teachers returning to school this fall.

 

We've been through a lot to be teachers. We go through a specific teacher education program, with a rosy outlook plan to love and teach young minds to prepare them for the real world. And then we get into the classroom where we discover that over half of that gets thrown out, because technology changes constantly, districts update guidelines, reading programs and new math every 2 years. Then throw out the other half of what we learned about student engagement, because our biggest worry will be keeping our little loves alive.

 

Every time there is a school shooting, teachers get a little more PTSD. In fact, the rise in school shootings have completely changed how we teach and function in schools. Our biggest fear used to be tornadoes that might hit before we could get everyone into the safe place. Now it's that we may have to choose to die throwing our bodies in front of our roomful of children.

These are split second decisions. Decisions we all know we could make in the fraction of a second. It's a terrible ask, but it would also be over immediately.

Now you want us to plan to die, while learning, juggling and managing completely new teaching methods. Maybe. But not on purpose. Some may get sick and die immediately, some possibly further down the road. You want us to traumatize our kids in the process in the name of prevention by hiding our expressions that helo convey safety and love. And you want us to do this every single day, for months on end, not knowing if these new procedures will or won't keep us protected.

 

Maslow's hierarchy details how the brain can't learn unless basic needs are met. Basic needs include food, shelter, safety. We all learned this in our teacher training, including district administrators. We apply this ti students every day. Yet, teachers are being asked- no, told - to function without their safety needs met.

 

Our desire to be healthy and our will to live has become baggage. Many have already drawn that line and said no, this is too much. Many will try to make it work. Though I plan to give this a shot, I'd like to hang on to what health I have left, I have already given up so much in terms of my personal health. I am someone for whom this disease could potentially be more dangerous. 

 

We should all be ashamed it has come to this. But if you've been online lately, you know the savagery directed at teachers who have tried to raise alarms doesn't remotely show that. 

 

Bitches be bonkers. Pt 1.

Wow. I didn't intend to stop writing here for six months. I thought about writing, fairly often, but like many thoughts I have these days, it would just flit away into the sky like the dandelion puffs that will soon fill my yard, replaced by another, probably more urgent thought, and on and on until something came across my brain that actually required action. Thoughts like I have to pee, or hey, the bell rang, I probably have kids in my classroom, I should go there. I even wrote some thoughts down in my the Quick Notes app on my phone, things I didn't want to forget, that might be worthy of writing here. Nestled in between the grocery lists and migraines and low blood pressure drop attack tracking memos that I keep, there are some things I might consider writing about. But I never do. Because if I do that, then I have to explain why it's taken me so long to actually come here and write. And I haven't wanted to talk about that. 

Against my better judgement, here we go. 

Last summer I fell into a pretty deep depressive episode, the type I haven't had in maybe 12 or 15 years. A big, bottomless pit I could not visualize a way out of, nor could I avoid it with my usual tricks of changing things up when I felt the storm coming. You know - diet, sleep, exercise, slow down and relax, drop some things from my busy schedule, etc. See, I've learned manage the beast, so to speak, with that bag of tricks, and it almost always works. I had stopped drinking the winter previous due to some new meds, so I didn't have to worry about that one.

Oh hello, the meds. For migraine of course, after I spent three days in the hospital last spring with a vertigo migraine that did not resolve, I was put on a new regimen of meds to keep the migraines at bay, and it worked, mostly. I can live with one or two migraine headaches here and there. But spinning for weeks at a time, no. The meds worked, but possibly contributed to the depressive episode, even though one part of the cocktail is specifically an anxiety suppressant. I digress. 

So I've been depressed. It was at it's worse in October, which I've written before is a rough month for me in general. I finally got on an antidepressant, which made things worse before they got better, but now seems to have evened back out. It's a shitty cycle, feeling this depressed, when you know that some exercise and maybe a decent meal would help but that's just one of several impossible tasks, and you had a shower yesterday thank you very much, we're doing pretty good here, okay mate? As we come around into spring, I am better, but I am not 100%. I'm trying. But I'm tired. 

When it first started I was also have anxiety attacks daily, the kind where I had would have to leave my cart and run suddenly out of a store and get into my car so I could hyperventilate and cry, triggered by something as simple as a memory. I'm not really sure when that started, but a number of things happened around the same time: we moved house, we dropped our oldest son at the airport to fly to college in California, and my mother had surgery to remove a supposedly benign tumor camped out on top of her brain that was pressing on a nerve. I'm pretty sure that one is the proverbial straw.

I think I could have handled the first two, it was really the third one that broke me. My mom is the family caregiver. And though I take that role as well, I was not prepared to see her in such a vulnerable state. I spent the day at the hospital with my dad while she was in surgery. It went fine, though all day, and finally we were able to get into see her in ICU. She was lucid and starving for ice cream (which is apparently a thing, post surgery,) and super shaky, but in good shape. I left and headed home. And this is where I have to stop and explain some things. 

****************************************************

In February 2015, I was doing my student teaching in 7th grade social studies, when I got a phone call I had always expected to get, but was still unprepared for. You know the one. That friend that everyone has, who was crazy and fun when you were teenagers, but who somehow never managed to grow up and made bad decisions. That friend who was still acting crazy and doing too many drugs for a woman over 40 with a kid, still taking advantage of everyone who would listen and constantly take and take and take while you give and give and give until you just cut the cord, unable and unwilling to support toxic people in your life anymore. That friend? She had a heart attack and was brain dead, but on life support until her parents could get back to town from their vacation. It was time to say goodbye. 

And of course I went. I dropped everything and went, and stayed all evening at the hospital, with old and new friends, her parents who had come straight from the airport, her husband. I made the calls to the out of town friends who couldn't come. I was the one with the battery pack in my purse so her dad could charge his phone, I was the one who could answer the questions about the specific countries we visited on our trip to Europe after high school that the organ donor people wanted to know about, so they could determine if she was a safe donor. (I have no idea about the drugs, I wasn't asked that question, I assume it would have shown in her blood if it was an issue. I hadn't spoken to her for about a year at that point, it's possible she had stopped, but given the heart attack and an astonishing weight loss, unlikely.) I was the one who drove her parents home after all the supports were removed and she was wheeled off to give her organs to others who could use them. I was in crisis mode, I was in problem-solving mode, I was in caretaker mode. I was not in goodbye mode. I did spend a few minutes alone with her, though. And as I sat there and brushed strands of hair out of her face, I ran my fingers along her eyebrows and thought, well, it's a good thing she got her brows done recently because if she knew all these people would be getting so close in her face with her brows all raggedy, she'd be super pissed. And then I really understood she was gone. But I didn't cry. I couldn't. 

The following weekend there was a funeral and then a luncheon at her parent's home. It was lovely and so many people came and we all got to tell stories and be silly and sad together. But at one point I went to check on her mom. I found her in her study, with some friends, chatting nicely about her grandson. "Oh Jenny!" She cried out as I entered. "I desperately need your help. Would you please fix my phone." My tech savvy precedes me, I supposed. She knew I was teaching computers when not student teaching in social studies, I had told her that in the car, as we struggled to find something to talk about on the drive home from the hospital. 

"Please take my daughter's number out of my phone. I can't stand to see it anymore. I don't know how to delete it."

I was not prepared for that. I wasn't ready for her mother to want to delete her from her life, or mine. It almost took the wind out of me. I smiled tightly, did as she asked, and returned it to her. "Thank you, darling. You've been such a gift." I hugged her and turned to leave the room. I barely got through the doorway before the sobs began to choke me. I ducked into the closest door and thank God, it was the bathroom. I sobbed and cried as quietly as possible for a good ten minutes before someone else came in and helped me compose myself to leave. 

I tell you this story for a few reasons. One, I needed to get it out. I needed to admit that it hurt me to lose this friend, that I still feel guilty that I chose to cut her out of my life for my own sake, because she was toxic, even as I know I needed to do that. I gave up on her. It hurts me that I never got to say to goodbye to her, or tell her I loved her. 

Two, that evening was the first time I had ever watched someone die, for real, this is really happening, not on TV or in a movie. It is not the same. It is devastating, no matter who you are or how you are connected to that person. Even though she was already brain dead, the machines kept her chest heaving and her pulse beeping, her heart pumping. But when they turned off the machines there was nothing. It was the most horrible silence I have ever heard, except the time I visited the Dachau concentration camp, with her at my side. The silence of that place felt evil, it made your hands clammy and the hairs on your arm stand up. This just felt empty. Hollow. 

*********************************************************************

Last summer, seeing my mother in the ICU with all the machines beeping, even as she sat there speaking and giggling about her cute male nurse and eating ice cream, the memories of that evening in 2015 came over me like a tsunami wave. I couldn't breathe. I was terrified, and for two solid days I vacillated between hyperventilating and sitting in my closet crying where nobody could hear me. I didn't understand what was happening, I knew I was having anxiety but had never experienced anything that crippling for so long. Usually I have an anxiety attack and it goes away in a few minutes or hours, tops. This lasted for days. I did not go back to the hospital to see my mom. I couldn't. I was paralyzed with fear. I told my dad that I came down with a cold and didn't want to expose her. I didn't see them again until she was back at home a few days later. I completely disregarded any caregiver duties I thought I would be doing to help them while this was all happening because, total shut down. 

I finally went to my doctor and said, please help me. I need to function. She gave me a short term anxiety prescription to interrupt the cycle, and then also wrote me a prescription for the anti-depressant. Which I didn't fill, because I didn't think I needed it. Yet.  

More later.

**The title refers to the Netflix show On My Block, which if you haven't seen the first season, you should. Second season drops in a couple of weeks. 

 

Oh, The Places You'll Go!

Eighteen years ago this morning, around 2 a.m., I waddled into the birthing center lobby at Menorah Medical Center to have a baby. They tried to send me home. My husband tried to say I told you so, then thought better of it and shut his fat mouth. Because I had had enough of these shenanigans, 24 solid hours of being squeezed like some giant hand was wringing out my guts like a wet washcloth was enough. I planted my feet and said with quivering lip, "I AM NOT LEAVING HERE WITHOUT A BABY." The night nurse sighed heavily and checked her watch, glanced at my husband who was quietly retreating further away from the desk, then said fine, we have rooms, I guess you can stay. 

Drew was born later that morning shortly after 11 a.m. He was perfect. 

As a toddler he put himself to bed at 7:45 p.m. every night, and fed himself from a baggie of Cheerios and an apple juice box and watched cartoons while we slept in on Saturday mornings. (Under the watchful eye of his dog, Cady the german shepherd, his second mother. Having following me around for nine months like a blind assistant dog, constantly underfoot practically tripping me every single day, now she ignored me completely and only had eyes for Drew. Unless I was letting him cry it out, in which case she came to me with disapproving stares, small yelps, and even low growls until I would retrieve him. She was not having this Dr. Ferber bullshit.) 

As a preschooler he talked early and often. Constantly, in fact. (Shocking, I know, that an offspring of mine would talk to a fencepost. Who knew.) He spoke in full, grammatically correct sentences by age three, and at age four would carry on conversations with strangers about the differences between a regular tractor, a back hoe, and a combine. God Forbid he spot an older man wearing a John Deer trucker hat. Be prepared to sit a while, sir. 

Much of his younger years are already documented here on this blog. I stopped writing here about my kids several years ago for a few reasons, time being one-I got busy. But also for their privacy. Birthdays are a little different, though. 

Today he is eighteen. We've disrupted his world this summer by moving house, and now are preparing to send him off to California to attend San Diego State University. He can't wait. He's excited to join the marching band, live in a dorm, and continue being the independent, level headed, don't look back kid he has always been. I've said it many times, in many places, and I've said to him as well: my son has never looked back to see if I was still standing there. I know this, because I am always still standing there, at least for a few more minutes. He is always just moving forward, on to the next thing.

He only ever looked back once, when he was six, and realized he was lost among the throngs of people at Disneyland. For five terrifying minutes of my life I had lost my kid in a giant theme park. But he found a safe, mommy-looking woman with a cell phone and she called me, and we had him back in less than ten minutes total. Lesson learned: he could get lost for a few minutes, and be okay. Moving on. 

He'll do just fine all the way out in California. He's comfortable there, after living there a few years and visiting so many more. We have friends he can reach out to for anything, surrogate family, if you will. He knows what to do if he gets lost. 

Happy birthday, Drew Boo. You're an adult, you even got a voter registration card in the mail. Use it.

Go as far as you want to go, buddy. You know how to find us.  

 

It Comes and Goes in Waves.

I tend not to be an openly emotional person, when I’m not spinning and exhausted from the vertigo, that is. I think I’ve written before about how I prefer to be the caregiver not the care receiver, and emotion indicates need, to me. I’m not a stoic, don’t get me wrong, I just prefer not to lose my shit in public. It isn’t that I’m not sensitive, I’m actually quite sensitive, I just don’t like to show it. It’s also because I don’t just cry a few tears to smudge my makeup, when I lose it, I LOSE IT HARD. I ugly cry, and it usually involves waves of sobbing and hyperventilating. Like, it freaks people out. Ergo, do not want. But I’m smart enough to know you can’t stop an avalanche, so I make an extended effort to make sure that when I feel an emotional response welling up that I can find a place where I can hide and do that privately. 

Interestingly, the new meds that I’m on to hold back the vertigo have had a side-effect of managing my moods and emotional responses, and as we’ve slid into May and my son’s graduation from high school, I’ve found that situations that would normally have sent me looking around in a panic for a place to hide and bawl have not bothered me much. Hmm. This is okay. I can work with that. It’s so much better than the crying that came every day with the vertigo earlier in the spring. So, so much better.

Last night was the last high school band concert my oldest son will participate in, and it was fun and bittersweet. And while I managed not to cry without too much effort, I could feel little rumblings of powdery snow shake loose from the snow-packed mountain of my carefully managed emotional stability.

Today, though. Today I didn’t make it. This morning, as happens on many a Thursday morning at the school where I teach, we celebrated a Bar Mitzvah of one of my adorable 7th grade students. And after he read his prayers, the rabbi gave his blessing. And today he really swung for the fences. He spoke of how special this child is, because of his sensitivity, and that in fact, the degree of his sensitivity is his gift, his service, to the world. It was lovely and sweet, and reminded me of my own son. Whoops. 

As I sat in the back listening, I could feel the heavy rumbling, setting off that avalanche as waves of snow started roaring down the mountain. I got up and snuck out the back, and began looking for a place to hide. I wasn’t going to be able to stop it. As it happens, I found my way into the office of our school psychologist, who, bless her heart, “went to a meeting” so I could lose my shit in peace for a few minutes.  

I’m good now. My in-laws arrive tomorrow evening, graduation is on Saturday, Mother’s Day is Sunday. Now that I’ve given myself a chance to let it out, the mountain is safe again.

Onward. 

 

 

Far From the Madding Crowd.

You know that scene in Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd where Gabriel Oak realizes his entire herd of “madding” sheep is running for the cliffs? He chases them, trying to catch up, but knowing there is nothing he can do, he isn’t fast enough to get ahead of them and turn the herd, they will all jump off. And he is right, of course, as he makes it to the cliff he can see them all dead at the bottom. It is his entire livelihood and all of his investment, lying in the sand 300 feet below.

That is a little bit what it feels like when all of your spinning Mom plates come crashing to the ground. Once it goes bad, at that very first plate careening off the edge of the stick, you know, you just know, there is no saving this disaster. There is nothing you can do but wait it out. It will be a total loss.

I lost five weeks to the vertigo, almost six, if you count this last week where I finally started feeling better but am still exhausted and adjusting to the new meds, and have had a couple of small, minor spin spells that didn’t last long. But in feeling better, because my brain is no longer spinning and I’m not spending all my energy and focus gripping the edge of the table just trying to move around the room, I’ve begun to realize what I’ve lost. Five weeks is a lot of time to lose. I lost the entire month of March and a week of April. I lost, essentially, the entire season of Lent, not that I worry too much about that. In that time, I didn’t fix any dinners for my family, I think they lived off of Hot Pockets and Panda Express take out. I have no idea what their homework looked like, no idea what school work was getting turned in (or not,) no idea what band concert due dates I missed, graduation due dates passed.

The thing is, now that I’m not spinning anymore, and I have this diagnosis of vestibular migraine, which in some cases can be considered chronic vertigo, I am, frankly, pissed off. I’m fucking angry at the five weeks I lost. I’m mad that I didn’t get to spend my spring break subbing in the public school district, making money that I was looking forward to since my kid is going to college next year. I’m angry that I missed all the things my kids needed me to do like make sure they got the spirit wear ordered for track & field (nope,) and make sure they got signed up for something for band that they wanted to participate in (didn’t happen,) and get the health forms delivered to the pediatrician’s office to be filled out (dad did that, thankfully,) and drive them to soccer practice and drum lessons and oh, feed them. You’re supposed to feed your children once in a while, even when they’re teenagers.

Today I did laundry, took a two hour nap, cooked dinner and cleaned up the kitchen. And then I cried in the shower for a while, because I’m mad, and it has hit me, all of these Mom Fails. I think I’m grieving. First I was just not functioning, and now I’m pissed. Maybe acceptance is next. I don’t want to lose any more sheep. But I don’t know what’s around the corner. It’s five weeks to graduation, and seven to the end of the school year. I’m restacking my plates. We’ll see how it goes.

Stop the World: I Want to Get Off.

On March 2nd, I was sitting in a teacher inservice meeting, about 10:30 am, when vertigo hit me like a brick to the face. I was just sitting there, kind of bored, listening to this (actually delightful) woman tell us things we mostly already knew about disciplining children without damaging their psyche, when everything started to spin. This isn't a new feeling to me, but it had been a while. I had gone all of January and February feeling great, strong and healthy. I hadn't missed it. 

But here it was. I snuck out and took some migraine meds, since for me that is usually what causes the vertigo, and after lunch I started to feel a little better. By late afternoon I was mostly back to normal with just a little bit of residiual visual disruption, like a trail of stars when I turn my head to focus on something else.

But throughout the rest of the week, the vertigo kind of hung around. I had a couple of classic migraine headaches as well - I get both, though not usually at the same time. I went into the doctor thinking I had a sinus infection, got some antibiotics and steroids, expecting to feel better within 24 hours, the usual scenario. That...didn't happen. In fact, the vertigo and dizziness got worse. Most days I had what I call "functional vertigo" or the feeling of walking on a wobbly dock on a lake. I can work with that, most of the time. I move slowly and don't turn my head much, but I can function. But sometimes it would be the full on, knock me on my ass, spinning inside a gyroscope like I'm a load of towels in the dryer kind of vertigo. That kind comes on hard and fast and usually brings with it a panic attack, because I know I'm screwed and can't do anything about it except try to get somewhere away from my students where nobody can see me breakdown into a hyperventilating, crying mess. I don't always make it. My husband had to come pick me up. Its humiliating and scary and I hate it. But I can't stop it. The migraine meds don't work. Nothing works, except going to bed. 

Even though the doctors (so many different doctors) all seem to agree it's a form of migraine, it isn't pain that gets me with the vertigo. It's being overwhelmed. It's not being able to stop the turning in my brain. When you ride a roller coaster, you have a harness you can hold onto, some leverage to hold your body against while you whip through the air. Plus it all comes to a halt after a few minutes and you can get off. I don't have that with the vertigo - because I'm not technically whipping through the air on a ride at Disneyland, even though my brain thinks I am. I used to love riding roller coasters, but not anymore. Sometimes when it comes up hard and fast like this I put myself on the floor, you can't fall down if you're already on the floor, you see. Sometimes I try to wedge myself into a corner of a wall, using my sense of touch I can orient myself physically, so that I know I'm not really moving, and it helps to override the spinning messages my brain is receiving. Sometimes that doesn't work. It stuns me, every time, how hard it spins. It takes my breath away. Sometimes all I can do is cry until it backs down again, as it comes in wave after wave. Sometimes I spin so hard that I pass out - another reason I put myself on the floor. Thankfully, these hard and fast acute attacks are much more rare, it's usually the functional kind.

 

Sometimes, after a long, exhausting day of forcing myself to focus through my day just feeling slightly tipsy but functional, I come home and lay down and relax, close my eyes and let the abyss take over, and just spin. I can't function in the abyss, but if i don't have to, I can relax for a few minutes and just let it spin around. Lately, this is the best that it gets. 

Sometimes I can see my heartbeat in the visual distortions, like soundwaves on a monitor. It sounds kinda cool, but it really isn't. 

 

It has now been a month since this particular bout of vertigo began. I've never had it for a month straight, and I've never had it completely unresponsive to meds. None of my usual drug protocols have worked, including migraine meds and multiple high dose prednisone tapers. I spent a couple of days in the hospital on IV meds, it didn't kick it.

 

I've seen two ENT doctors, a neurologist, my general practitioner, two vestibular physical therapists and my regular physical therapist (my neck is so screwed up from not turning my head it's ridiculous.) I spent my birthday on the couch, dizzy. So far I've spent most of my spring break in bed or on the couch. I can't go to the grocery store, I can't walk the dog around the block, I can't stand in the kitchen long enough to cook something for dinner, much less sit down with my family and eat it. I don't drive except within my super comfortable three square mile zone, and not at night. Any outing I try requires a lay down rest and maybe a nap afterwards. 

 

 

I'm on some new meds, that three different doctors agree are my best option for kicking this, one of which is an anti-seizure drug that is prescribed off-label for migraines as a preventative. Whether it works to stop something already in progress is anyone's guess. I think that I'm feeling better than I was a couple of weeks ago, but it's hard to tell. I may just be adapting to my new normal. 

 

I do not want this to be my new normal. Yet, here we are. Like a record, baby...

 

Live Through This.

On Thursday morning, February 15, 2018, I had a hard time going to work. My heart was beating so fast that I had to crank up the music and scream to blow off some of the adrenaline that flooded me as traffic carried me down my usual route. Once I arrived, I barely made it into my classroom and locked myself in before I lost it. I sat at my desk and sobbed for a few minutes. Thankfully, it was a block day and I didn't have a first period class. I had some time to pull myself together. 

It wasn't fear, really. I feel pretty safe at my school. And I wont lie, part of that feeling of safety is taking small comfort in statistics. We've already had a shooting event on our property, before I came to teach there. Lightning doesn't strike twice in the same spot. I tell myself this, regularly.

But. Still.

It was an overwhelming sense of helplessness. It was imagining my own students, all of whom I adore and would lay down my life for, laying injured on the floor, or dead. Envisioning the same of my friends on staff, knowing who would be in the hallway giving directions in a crisis. It was the realization that the lockdown/intruder drill we held just the FUCKING DAY BEFORE would be meaningless based on what happened in Florida. He pulled the fire alarm and waited for people to come to him.

(Side note: don't talk to me about mental illness right now. Premeditated. Planned. He's not insane.)

I cannot wrap my leather belt around the hinge of the door when the fire alarm goes off. I can't push a table in front of the door and turn off the lights and say we stay here until we get the All Clear.

I cannot retrain my kids to erase the muscle memory reaction we've taught them since the age of five to exit the building when they hear the alarm. I will not do that. I will not ask them to override their natural instincts. Or mine.

We are sitting ducks. And I can't fix that.

You have no idea how powerless this feels.

When Sandy Hook happened I was in a low-boil panic for days, maybe weeks. My Fight or Flight response was dialed up to 11 all day, every day, while I forced myself to appear calm and functional to the point of total exhaustion. I spent all my free time standing in the middle of my classroom imagining the various scenarios of where would I hide children when he came for me. How could I arrange my classroom footprint to ensure the most survivors? I cleaned a bunch of junk out of my storage cabinets to make room for little bodies.

My youngest son was in the classroom across the hall at the time, in fourth grade. Would I run for him first? Or second to whomever was in my room at the time? How would I choose? I didn't have an answer. But I wondered constantly. 

It has occured to me that this event may have been a catalyst in my adrenal system overload which resulted in Fibromyalgia diagnosis, or at the very least, the final straw. You can't imagine the stress this puts in teachers everywhere. How many teachers in this country operate daily with PTSD? And I mean just those of us who have yet to live through a real event. This is the point of view I have. I cannot speak for the survivors. 

That we have accepted that a massacre of innocents like this in our schools or churches is a When, not an If and that we must prepare, is mind-boggling. And it breaks my heart.

Like the time of Sandy Hook, I have avoided the news. I have not read the articles, not read the names, turned the channel, watched only coverage of the Olympics. I am unable to let myself process this. I've turned off the spigot of that emotional water pipe. I can't get to angry in the grief cycle, because I cannot start the process. I'm too afraid I won't be able to stop crying once I begin. I won't be able to get out of bed. I won't be able to go into my classroom. I won't be able to face my students without trembling at the slightest noise. (I already jump out of my skin when somebody pops a balloon. Did I mention my Fight or Flight response is broken?) It may not be healthy, turning completely away, but it's keeping me functioning on some level.

But I have not been able to stop the scenarios that run on a loop inside my very imaginative brain. During a five day week I teach classes that include all grades of students K-12. How would I manage the situation with my high schoolers differently than my kindergarteners? They all have phones, they could help each other since they're more mature, perhaps we really could be stone silent and wait to be saved. Have you ever seen a group of kindergarteners be stone silent?

Some don't even include me, some of these scenarios are about my own children. What would happen at their school, a public high school just down the block from where I teach, not unlike the one in Florida? What if they're in the band room - it has an outside exit and doors that connect to other classrooms, plus doors that look like closets. Their English and math classes are at the end of the farthest hallway, they'd have more time there.

The scenarios in my brain run as both a teacher and parent.

How are we supposed to get past this?

And why do we have to? 

 

 

 

Babel.

Babel (n.) a confused noise, typically that made by a number of voices. "the babel of voices on the road." synonyms:clamor, din, racket, confused noise, tumult, uproar, hubbub; More a scene of noisy confusion.

********

Monday morning, I resigned my volunteer job. It was a job that took maybe 30% of my time on a regular basis, sometimes more, sometimes less. But as a volunteer I was probably putting way more into it than I was getting out.

 

I actually wrote the email to resign on Sunday evening. I wrote it out and edited it maybe 15 times, before I decided to sleep on it. But when I awoke Monday morning and I still had the same constantly flipping stomach that I've learned to recognize as a sign that things need to change, I did some edits one last time and then I hit send.

 

I don't know what I was expecting to happen, but I didn't expect the radio silence that came for the rest of the day. When you donate all of your free time to something and then you leave it suddenly and without warning you expect on some level, that somebody is going to at least respond to your email or call you and say, Hey wow, are you okay? Or at the very least, Hey, can you send all your stuff so we can pick up where you left off. But I got nothing. No response at all.

 

I guess that's okay. It was as stress-inducing as leaving an actual paid job. In fact, leaving this volunteer position was almost the most stressful thing I have ever done, second only to the time that I left my job at church. The situations are eerily similar. I gave too much, I gave up other parts of my life for it, and in the end I left because another person had made me so uncomfortable that I couldn't stand it anymore.

 

The difference is, this time, it didn't take me a year to decide that I was so uncomfortable that I needed to make a change. It didn't take me an extended length of time to recognize that the situation was unhealthy, and that some of the people around me were toxic. In fact, this time it all happened within a 48-hour period. I honestly have not yet figured out if that's because I'm smarter and I've grown personally, or if things really did go to hell in a handbasket that quickly. It's very possibly a combination of both.

I'm generally not a quitter when the going gets tough, but this time I knew. I listened to my brain going OH HELL NO and to my body, recognizing and giving credence to the physical response of my stomach turning itself inside out every single time my phone beeped. My fight or flight response operates at 11 on a 1-10 scale every day anyway (thanks for nothing, Fibromyalgia, you asshole,) so I don't always figure out what it's responding to. But this I felt loud and clear with every beat of my heart: Run. Go now. 

 

I didn't try to rationalize what was happening by telling myself, oh, it's fine, that person's just really upset right now. It will all blow over in a couple of days and everything will go back to being fine. No, when the shit hit the fan, I said to myself, nope. I'm out. And though I feel a little bit guilty that there was no tapout person waiting in the wings to step in for me and in this case it probably means the downfall of this little group that I worked so hard to preserve, it was still the right thing to do, for me.

 

I guess I'm a real grown-up now. At 45 years old I managed to follow my instincts, when the instincts actually kicked in. And though it probably looks to those both within the organization and on the outside as though I just couldn't hack it, I'm okay with that. There will be plenty of people talking about me after the situation blows over.  I know that I will be blamed for everything since I'm not there to fix it or defend my actions. That's the breaks of quitting, kid. Move on.

 

In the week since this all went down, I knew that the person who made me feel uncomfortable without my permission would respond one of two possible ways: apologetically horrified at his own behavior; or double down. I gave it 50/50, because overall, I want to believe people are good.

 

For the record, he's doubled down.

 

People suck, sometimes. Love them anyway. But keep in mind, it's okay to love them from afar.