In the meantime, our teachers have voted to strike if the legislature hasn't acted by next Thursday, which I support 100%. I am surprised it took them this long, considering as a state we are $1 BILLION short of education funding compared to a DECADE AGO. Meaning there has not been an increase in education spending here in my son's LIFETIME. There are reports of rats in some classrooms, buildings are falling apart, and our teachers are grossly underpaid.
So I fully support our educators walking out until our governor signs adequate funding into law, but I will also be at a conference in Chicago starting next Thursday and unable to help with taking care of our children for a few days. SORRY CHRIS'S BOSS.
More on the conference soon, but this post is supposed to be about Noelle.
For the grandparents and great-aunts and uncles reading: at five months, Noelle is still weighing in at the tenth percentile, the little peanut. We adore her, and at least once a week, I get teary-eyed at how lucky we are to have her, at how unlikely and miraculous it is that she's in our lives. Baby girl spends her days giggling at funny sounds, drooling until her shirts are soaked, watching her older brother like a hawk, almost sleeping through the night, and has rolling onto her side down to a science. She'll figure out rolling all the way over one of these days. I'm not worried.
Not about her development, anyway.
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On the other hand, I have been an anxious wreck the past couple of weeks leading up to this time period. At first, I couldn't figure out why. Some people talk about how the changing light around the equinox can exacerbate feelings of darkness or cause a certain tightness in your chest, but we are well past that point in the season. What I've been feeling is more than unease. It's more of a crippling foreboding that something terrible must be about to happen. That somehow, despite our five-year journey shit-show with cancer, we still got off too easy.
That perhaps we don't deserve these incredible moments with our little girl. YES, I KNOW THIS SOUNDS CRAZY. It also makes it really hard to parent happily and with enthusiasm right now. So what's going on with me?
The last time I had a five-month-old infant, I was diagnosed with cancer.
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| Photo of Quinn at almost-5-months-old next to Noelle at the same age, in the same seat. My hand looks like a claw. |
The simple typing of that sentence has me erupting in sobs, so clearly I have some processing left to do. So much for this post being about Noelle. Related: I am actively accepting recommendations for therapists who take our insurance. They are surprisingly difficult to find.
I worry about nearly everything lately, with abandon: violence at public schools, which admittedly is a very real fear shared by many, many parents these days; Quinn choking on an apple while I'm in the other room (hasn't happened, but could); whether my occasional night sweats are normal postpartum or a sign of lymphoma; if the dog has thrombosis (was just a scratch, says the vet, so I can cross this one off my list for now); and all kinds of other scenarios that alert me that my anxiety is on a bender right now. Chris tells me worry is rarely ever productive, which, sure, makes sense if you can consider these things logically.
Is this just some twisted version of survivor's guilt? A fear that history is bound to repeat itself? PTSD? I mean, I can diagnose myself all day long, but sometime soon I've got to stop fearing the past and worrying about the future, right? And contain my worry to very real things like under-funded schools and how to dress for a conference in Chicago this time of year. I mean, plenty of people have five-month-olds without the sky falling, or so I hear. Right?
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