Confessions of chaos at our house

Above we find several pictures of the adorable, well-adjusted Carmack children. See how their mother attends to them with such care. We are also highlighting her cute hair here. This is to help keep alive the perception that we are a perfect little family. I have had people return from watching the kids the last couple of weeks who have used the words cute, delightful, easy, and perfect. I have also had several requests that we have ten children. (Why ten? I guess it's a really large, nice round number or something.) So while I do agree that their superior cuteness cannot be disputed, and generally they do delight and they are pretty well-behaved, the remainder of this post will reveal that things are rather, well, not perfect around here at times. As we dispel the myth, just keep referring to the photos to help you rebuild your perception of us while it comes crashing down all around you....

After several days of being completely doped up on Benadryl, my rash finally went away this weekend and I hoped Monday would be a pretty normal day. I have been stressing out over the PET scan I have to have done Tuesday at 11 a.m. This thing sounds nuts--I have to sit perfectly still for 45 minutes while the tracer goes throughout my body. The instructions say, "No talking, chewing, or moving" and my doctor added blinking. How is this possible? After that, they take the actual scan, where you have to lie still for another 45 minutes. In preparation for the scan, I could basically only eat meat and vegetables all day Monday and was not allowed to exercise. After the scan I will be "slightly radioactive for 6 hours" and "should not stand directly next to infants or pregnant women for at least 4 hours." I am encouraged to sit in the back seat of the car if I'm not driving and am not to go to any other section of the medical center when I am through. I called them to see if sleeping through the whole thing is okay and they did say that I can sleep through a lot of it, so my plan is to stay up very late so that I will actually be able to do so. Thus I am posting this in the wee hours of the morning.

Anyway, Fiona slept in past 10 a.m. Monday morning, which should have been an immediate red flag, particularly because she did throw up Sunday morning....we simply thought she had overeaten the night before because she was so perky. I convinced myself I was just lucky that she overslept by three hours. This is what we call denial in mothering. She got up, ate very little, was somewhat clingy, and still I am somehow thinking that everything is ay-okay. When we got to lunch time, I noticed she seemed a little warm but she was eating pretty well; that is, eating well until the whole thing came out all over her high chair. I am one of these people who is not going to do you a lot of good at the onset of an emergency. When unexpected things happen, I just stand there, frozen like a statue. Paralyzed, I watch everything happen around me and don't move. The vomit just kept coming and coming and coming....and before I even went near her I picked up the phone to tell Tom he'd better get the day off tomorrow, because I don't think it would be nice to go with the whole let-your-friend-watch-a-sick-baby plan.

Eventually I scooped her up and we both got in the shower after my standard "I'm taking a shower and no one answer the door" lecture. I sat there on the shower floor with my now calm baby and finally let my thoughts run wild. This tends to happen to me in the shower because I have this sense of being by myself (even with the infant in there). I started thinking through how I am pretty good at having a long-term perspective and wow people keep telling me they are impressed with my attitude and yes that's so great, but I have this very real problem with actually living my life amongst all the racing thoughts I have about what is going to happen to me and how I have to just be cheerful and get through it.

I can stay positive and do a lot of smiling on the outside, and as a complete extrovert I do particularly well at it when surrounded by other people, but here at home I sometimes struggle with the sheer magnitude of the whole situation stretching out before me and it manifests itself a little bit similarly to the paralyzed mother watching her child puke. I am aware of everything going on and I can think perfectly well in my mind what I should be doing, but I can't seem to force myself to do it. I flit about and do a lot of laundry and nervously eat lots of goodies that have been brought to me, but I'm not really focused on the regular routine and I don't fully follow through on a lot of tasks. It is that same lack of a plan on a smaller scale. I am so very relieved to know my prognosis, but I still haven't started treatment and don't have all the answers to the when, where and how of all this and it is a constant worry for me. I think the anxiety of anticipation is going to be worse than actually going through it.

I feel badly that I'm not better able to shelf my emotions until the kids are in bed. Instead, I feel like I'm in and out of the moments with them, very intensely engaging in conversation at times and then hardly listening the next minute. Then when Tom gets home, without saying a word, I think I kind of shut down and delegate all responsibility to him. I'm never aware of this happening, it's just that suddenly I realize we've eaten and the stories have been read and the prayers have been said and he's in there singing lullabies and I'd better hurry up and join in the end before the boys get upset. It doesn't really seem fair, because I know if this were happening to him I would be ten times more upset. If I'm making him spend all of his free time taking care of me and the kids, when is he supposed to take a break to deal with what is happening to him?

As I sat in the shower thinking all of this it occurred to me about every thirty seconds or so that I was wasting an awful lot of water and my father would be rolling over in his grave. I figured maybe he'd be forgiving because I visited his grave for his birthday on Saturday. He would have been 61 years old. I told him I miss him a lot, but I'm not ready to see him yet so could he please arrange for that to take a long time? I'm going to need a while to prove to myself that I've made him proud. Miles reminds me so much of my father these days. He is kind and responsible and he has a smile that makes me think of Dad. I asked him the other day if he was worried about me and he said, "Just a tiny little bit." Then he started coming up with all kinds of ideas as to how I could effectively combine a very short wig with a really pretty scarf and a hat.

I have complained far too much about my hair. Philip had a tantrum the other day because he had wanted to go to the mailbox with me. After holding him for a while, I finally asked, "Are you worried about Mom?" remembering that earlier in the day I'd told him I was feeling better from the rash and he had asked if my sickness was all gone. He nodded his head and I told him he didn't need to worry because the medicine would make me all well. He burst back into tears and cried, "But I don't want you to lose your hair!"

I really do think it is a family curse from both sides of my family, this love of hair. Miles loves styling his with gel and whatnot. But no one, not anyone, was so fixated on her hair as my maternal grandmother was. She was a beautiful redhead and she never did let her hair go gray. For Thanksgiving and Christmas she insisted we had these little talent shows and I remember one year my family rewrote the words to "Over the River and Through the Woods" so that it was "Over the highways and through the streets to Grandmother's house we go...." At the end my dad wanted the words to be "now Grandmother's hair I spy." That bright red hair on a 70-year-old woman was hard to miss. But I was pretty nervous about referencing her hair so casually like that. It could send you into a half hour discussion of whether it "looked alright." It seemed sort of disrespectful too. I can't remember if we ended up keeping those lyrics. When Grandma got cancer, she was too old for chemo. That was probably for the best. I can't imagine what she would have done without her hair, and luckily surgery did the trick in her case anyway.

A friend of mine mentioned that he isn't scared of being bald, just the process. It made me realize I should have a better attitude. As a woman, I'm disconcerted by the fact that the hair will be here one day, gone the next, and women just aren't bald in our society unless they are going through cancer treatment. So I feel like I will be a walking billboard that screams, "Yup, I've got that sickness you're all scared of." Lindsay says just put a sign on my back that reads, "It's not that bad, really." Thinking about my very philosophical friend and his perspective though, I realized that my hair will grow back eventually, and for a male losing his hair it is a slow, drawn-out process that makes him feel like he is getting old--and the hair doesn't grow back. Maybe that is more traumatic, but it is so common that all these men are just supposed to buck up and endure it well. Kudos to all the wonderful men in my life with receding hairlines.

The water came down and the time passed, and the phone rang, and I could hear the boys screaming briefly at each other every so often, and I just didn't want to move because this whole upcoming ordeal saps a lot of energy out of me. I don't like facing my normal daily tasks, like changing diapers and making peanut butter sandwiches. I'm grateful that we have good routines, so I can at least half follow them without thinking, and the kids are good at reminding me what comes next. I keep thinking of a line from a hymn my mother quoted in church yesterday: "In the quiet heart is hidden sorrow that the eye can't see." There are so many people going through so many things that are so much worse. My problem happens to be out in the open and I'm getting a lot of cherished attention for it. What about people going through more private, more difficult struggles like reoccurring depression, infertility, heartbreak, divorce, financial distress, or truly chronic illness? I don't think I'm the only person who feels distracted and overwhelmed by a difficult situation but has no choice really but to keep marching right on through. These are really common circumstances that affect a whole lot of people. It makes me feel a lot more compassionate when I realize how many heroic people just keep getting out of bed every day and functioning despite whatever it is they are dealing with.

Right when I was considering staying there on the shower floor for the duration of the afternoon, the boys came running in to cheer me up. Philip opened the shower door to give me a kiss and Miles asked, "Did you know that today was Dr. Seuss' birthday?" That got me really excited. I told him how I loved Dr. Seuss and I always celebrated his birthday when I was a school teacher and we read Dr. Seuss books. That guy can really make a statement with a kid's book. He's got opinions about loyalty and true parenting (Horton Hatches the Egg), trying new things (Green Eggs and Ham), war (The Butter Battle Book), the environment (The Lorax), revolution (Yertle the Turtle), prejudice (The Sneetches), the power of one (Horton Hears a Who), jealousy & vanity (Gertrude McFuzz) and unwarranted stubbornness (The Zax). The man was a genius. Miles told me they watched a movie and I asked which one. Pretty soon I was singing music from "The Sneetches." A good shower is never complete without singing. Then Miles said he was going to fix his Lego fish.

Suddenly I screamed, "Fish! Fish! We haven't fed the fish! Go check the fish!" The boys came back and reported that the daddy fish was dead. I said, "Are you sure? How do you know? Is he floating? Go check again." They came back and said actually, he was hiding before, he is fine. I asked Miles is he could feed them and he paused a bit and said, "No. There's bugs in the food."

It is all too true. After going a year between fish, weevils have hatched and were thriving in the fish food. We keep meaning to buy new food but, well, we keep forgetting because we are focused on other things. I hurriedly got out to see if any of the baby guppies were still alive. At first I could only see one, but considered it a triumph. Eventually I could see nine. I breathed a sigh of relief.

After putting Fiona down for her nap I went to re-warm my delicious lunch of hot dog and tomato, wishing I could instead eat the Girl Scout cookies or the lemon meringue pie or the little mini cheesecakes or the cereally s'mores. We have an awful lot of friends bringing us delicious sugary things that you can't eat the day before a PET scan. I then saw that there was still throw-up all over the high chair and I didn't even know where to begin cleaning it up. So I pushed it out into the back yard to soak in the rain. Tom offered to hose it off later.

You marry somebody and you figure you've made a good choice because you're young and you're madly in love and then I can't possibly count how many times I've thought to myself, "Wow, never even thought of that scenario! Lucked out on that one!" Who knew that he would be so amazing at seeing me through school trouble, job trouble, miscarriage, pregnancy, childbirth, middle of the night feedings, parental loss, tears and spit up and throw up and dirty diapers and plenty of times when I felt lost, angry, insecure, mistreated, misjudged, left out, disappointed or just plain tired? This man is so good to me I ought never to complain about anything that goes wrong in my life. Our marriage has always been very strong, and I have always felt we have a deep love and mutual appreciation for each other, but I will say that there is nothing like the possibility of dying that makes you express it a lot more often. If ten years, a hefty law career, and three children had any intention of stealing away some of the romance, it ain't gonna happen now.

After lunch I committed the cardinal parental sin. I parked the boys in front of the big-screen TV for nearly two hours of Toy Story 2 so I could have some computer time in peace. (I think they must have wondered whether it was Christmas or if I was pregnant again.) It mostly worked, although Superman had to come back multiple times to have me refill his power supply by pouring imaginary power/gasoline into a hidden compartment in his arm. Apparently when you wear your Superman suit in the rain to pick up your brother from kindergarten, you lose some of the power. His new thing is that he chronicles his day in song, and it is all to the tune of the actual Superman theme. For example, he'll sing, "I'm getting dressed now, I'm getting dressed now," over and over with pretty good pitch. It is definitely recognizable as the Superman music.

I feel a lot better tonight after watching Back to the Future Part III with Tom, who brought home new fish food and cleaned the tank too. We have re-watched the whole trilogy this past week for the first time in years. We find ourselves watching more movies because we just feel a need to do something kind of mindless, and to be together while we do it. Life is a funny thing. Look at Michael J. Fox. That guy was a legendary actor at a young age. Parkinson's. I'm going to have to look him up tomorrow and see how he is doing.

Writing is very therapeutic. My brother-in-law says I write like I talk. He probably means that there are a lot of words. I started talking at seven months, and I know I have a tendency to keep going......He seems to like me anyway. I mean, how could he not when we named our kid after him?

One of my favorite Dr. Seuss books is Oh, the Places You'll Go! It's all about how life is not always what you planned or what you expected-- "I'm sorry to say so but, sadly it's true that Bang-ups and Hang-ups can happen to you;"--but it's a great journey and it's what you make of it--"On and on you will hike, and I know you'll hike far and face up to your problems whatever they are." One of my church young women's leaders gave it to me when I went off to college. She wrote a note in the front cover that said "I know you'll do great things." I think we all do great things with the help of our friends and Dr. Seuss.