I have gone from wanting to be an editor, pursuing that dream, and finding out I couldn’t make enough cash at it, to having a kid, dealing with the life -changing, horrifying, radicalizing birth trauma that is so common in the American system, and wanting to become a midwife, to…wherever I am now.

I don’t know anymore about midwifery, is what I’m trying to say, not because I’m not capable of it (I have enough confidence to think I am) but because it’s just too painful. Nathan is my one and only birth, and will stay so…you don’t know how hard that is for me to write…and for better or worse, I don’t know that I can do birth work for other women if that is my only experience. I don’t really know what “healing” from what happened looks like for me. And while I have always felt that fighting for change in the way birthing women are treated is a big part of that, that’s not precisely what being a midwife is. Midwives serve women who birth, first and foremost, and they have to be able to put aside their own resentments, obsessions, and hurts to do that. I don’t know if I can.

I worry about my own jealousy and resentment of the women I would be serving, about my own un-healed pain; I worry about money, about insurance, about being strong enough for that grind of working for myself. I worry that the business of midwifery in the U.S. is changing to a model that mandates a nursing degree, and that I just don’t have the patience and strength to go through all that, especially to have to work so much inside an industry that I still find so hostile.

I am not strong, not really. I crouch down and endure, but I don’t change myself easily, and I don’t heal quickly from deep hurts. I have been greatly helped by therapy, but it’s not a quick fix, it’s not really a “fix” at all, it’s not supposed to be. It is a safety rail that holds you up, but it doesn’t take away the void that you happen to be looking into.

I have, for the moment, no real plans for my life, the way I always thought I should. I have always believed in having capital-G Goals for my life, but none of mine have come to fruition, for reasons mostly beyond my control.

So I am experimenting with having only small-g goals: some stability, some small rewards to myself, some break from drama. It is not an easy trade-off. It is hard not to think that my existence lacks much in the way of meaning, that I’m just marking time. On my darker days, I think maybe we all are.

But I can’t do anything about that, and it does me no good to be in that place, so I don’t stay there. I just go forward, in the blankness, and wait for something to turn up, and try not to think that it never will.

This post turned out much darker than I planned, and I don’t want that to be my last entry on a blog that has been a joy and a lifesaver to write, so I won’t. That’s a small-g goal I can keep, at least.

And I’m TIRED.

Anyway, being tired, and being snowed in with Life, and needing a change, I am taking a Blogcation until…um…huh. How about June? That sounds about right. When it’ s warm again, I will have more material, and we’ll be moved out of our sad little rent house to a hopefully less-sad little rent house. Baby steps.

Good news is, I got a raise and a bonus today. Raises me from Taco Cabana to…hmm. Chili’s level, maybe.

Anyway, read my ever-excellent blogroll or just hang out with your own selves till June. See you then.

A few years ago, my school’s alumni magazine came my way, and I was surprised to see that Amos had become an insurance underwriter.

As you may know, I work for a Giant Insurance Company (That You’ve Heard Of), in the marketing department. And I had forgotten all about Amos until a week or so ago when I had to talk to a guy in our underwriting department. GICTYHO is so big that I barely know the people on my floor, much less the ones across the complex, so I had never met any of the people I emailed all day. I hardly ever call people, because I hate talking on the phone, and because I am paranoid about getting things in writing when it comes to work. Anyway, I had to call Underwriter Guy to demand he send me something, and instead of being a gruff, actuarial sort, he sounded…friendly. Goofy, eager, and most sad, desperate to talk to someone. I could not get him off the phone, without finally pulling the “wellthanksgottagobye” routine.

Huh, I thought. Weird.

And then today, with a different Underwriter Guy…same thing. Desperate attempts to spin out small talk into smaller talk, anything to keep me from hanging up. And while I do, indeed, have a sexy voice, that wasn’t it. They weren’t asking me for my cell number. They just didn’t want to be alone.

And now I have this vision of the underwriting department as some dim hellish place where no one talks to anyone and life is grim beyond description. So much so that talking to a gruff writer from Marketing is like manna from heaven. And I thought of poor Amos, and realized that he’d either found another job by now, or drunk himself to death.

…and I’ve been the bad absent blogger. I think it’s just that a lot of what’s in my head hasn’t been post-able. We’ve been sick, we’ve been busy, blah blah boring cakes. February is like that though…a long blah month with Valentine’s Day a sort of forced-happy-but-not-really holiday in the middle. Never cared for Valentine’s all that much; I like chocolate, but not creme-filled, and I’m not a huge fan of roses, and pink and lacy isn’t ever me. So we mostly didn’t do much, except Matt did make me a hysterically funny homemade card, which helped.

Nathan is out of all things 2T entirely, and a lot of the 3T shirts. At 27 months old. Yikes. But he is still so cute, as you can see from his photo above. (No, I didn’t take that, wish I did; we hired a professional.) I’ve taught him how to do some dancing, or at least rapid stomping to music, which is of course adorable. Then tonight I grabbed his hands to make him dance *with* me, and he just thought that was hilarious. Two people dancing! Holding hands! Whatever will she think of next, that wacky mama! He laughed so hard he stopped dancing and fell to the floor, hanging from my arms, and of course, that was funny too.

As for me, I’m busy at work and still talking to my therapist, and that’s all I know. I’m pretty depressed at the moment for reasons too complicated to describe, but at least I know I’m trying. For February, that’s usually the best I can do.

Courtesy chippenziedeutch via Flickr Creative Commons license. Not our baby, but cute, no?

Colors: lello, red, boo, geen.

Food: onj, cacker, nomnom* (any tasty food), meeyuk (milk), momaar (more milk, or just more), shee-shee (cheese)

Things: buk (book), pane or ehpane (airplane), fy (fly), A-A-A (ABCs), moon, star, bat (bath), dog or wuff wuff, sock, shoo shoo (shoes), zzzzz (zipper)

Cuteness set to: MAXIMUM

*yes we use too much LOLspeak around the house.

I can see that I have a lot of work ahead, but while scared at having to face unflattering truths about myself, I am also ready to try this new psychotherapy whatsit out.

Anyway, my therapist is an older Jewish lady, not From Here, but been here a while. I don’t know much of her story (that would require her getting a word in edgewise) but that’s fine. She and I are good, after one visit. Ask me again in three months, and we’ll see.

I had a lot of other stuff I was going to say, but you know…I’ll save it for the lady who’s paid to listen to it. My little favor to the Internets. Plus, I have a feeling anything I think I know now about my True Self will look stupid after a while, so…it’ll keep.

The rest of my life is bad and good. My stepfather is back in the hospital after his heart surgery; heart is fine, lungs are acting up and he’s not doing so hot. Good thoughts are welcome. He’s a sweet, loving husband to my mom, and I’d really like him to stick around and be well.

Nathan continues to be hella cute, but also hella two, and it’s like having a tiny semi-mute teenager in the house. You never know what mood you’re going to get. His smiles still make you forgive him, though. And he is actually pretty sweet-tempered compared to a lot of the little monsters I see out there. So far.

Since it was the last Sunday of 2007, they had a little pseudo-Oriental ritual of writing whatever you wanted to reliquish for the next year on a slip of paper and burning it in a big dish. Kind of cheesy, but what I like about Unitarians is that they never try to put any more meaning on a given act than they should. No one claimed burning a piece of paper was going to make your life magically better, but at the same time, there was value in stopping to think about what you needed to let go of. And stepping out of your everday business to consider your life and what you truly need is what ritual is really for anyway.

New years are such hopeful things, if you have the courage to have any hope–and I haven’t always. I recently saw some video of me taken last Christmas, it was sad to see how tired and ill I still looked. And I’m not really all the way well yet, just better. It’s been a hard haul, physically and emotionally, and I’m starting to understand that many of the difficulties I’m in now predate Nathan’s birth and my PPD. They are the things that made me more vulnerable to those who hurt me, the things that kept me from defending or believing in myself.

I’ve got a lot of anger. Not just about stuff I blog here, like Nathan’s birth, but in general. There are a lot of things I resent or feel helpless about, in the past, and recently. And I’ve started to feel that I’m losing my ability to keep them nicely stowed away in the Big Closet of my subconscious.

I started thinking about all this yesterday, which was a rough day that just suddenly became too much, and I fell apart. Outwardly I’m the calmest person you may know, 99% of the time, but all that means is when I do fall to pieces, it’s a lot more devastating.

Ironically, I have the control that I do because my natural state is Extreme Drama. When I was little, before I learned how to deal with my outsize emotions, I cried. All the time. About everything. Or yelled. Or fought, or screamed, or roared. I was not calm, unless I’d just had an outburst. But I was also super-sensitive to what other people thought or told me, and so I developed a paranoia about infringing on others, learning to be super calm, super considerate, super thoughtful instead. But it’s a strain. My particular emotional volume was always turned up to 11–the persona I have now is largely a way of channelling and suppressing that noise.

And it’s worked, really well. I like who I am, in a lot of ways, and I’m not sorry to be considered calm, or reliable, or thoughtful. Those are good things to be. I don’t want to go back to bursting into tears every five minutes, or screaming in rage. I can’t live like that.

But it’s not working as well as it should. Maybe it’s the equivalent of needing an emotional tuneup; maybe I’m not seeing a better way to function. Maybe I need meds, though I still tend to think, if so many of us need meds to function in our society…maybe we should be taking a harder look at how we set up our society. But since that revolution won’t happen in my lifetime, I’ll try meds if that’s the only thing that works.

I don’t want to go to a therapist, in the most basic sense. Do not. Want. To go. I don’t like talking about my problems, maybe because whenever I have, people tend to get wide-eyed and back away. Which I know therapists don’t do, but still. I don’t want to go in the same way I don’t want to clean the cat’s litter box–it takes too long, it’s unpleasant, and I have to deal with a lot of shit. I resent my psyche failing me in this way, and wish it would simply do what I think it should, which is keep me happy and healthy without requiring outside assistance.

At church, the word I wrote on my slip of paper was “fear.” And there isn’t much I could fear more than asking a stranger to help me sort out my soul.

Instead, I dropped Matt off to be our family representative and then to sleep over at his folks, while I drove the desolate Christmas highway back home with our exhausted manger-baby (though you would need an extra-large manger for this one). I was greeted by a house that indeed smelled a little like a stable, since the cat missed the litter box again, but little lord Nathan neither awaked nor made crying, flopping instead into his manger like the passed-out partier that he was. The cattle didn’t low, but the cat meowed frantically for love and food.

It’s one of my stranger Christmas Eves–in fact, I don’t know that I’ve ever been alone on this particular day before. After settling Nathan I brought in the day’s haul of gifts, fed and petted the cat, and watched Antiques Roadshow a little while eating my Christmas bowl of cereal. Just me and Nathan and the cat, alone but warm and fed and relatively ok with the way things are. I’ve had worse.

…teenage boys who had sex education in school were 71 percent less likely to have intercourse before age 15, and teen girls who had sex education were 59 percent less likely to have sex before age 15.

Sex education also increased the likelihood that teen boys would use contraceptives the first time they had sex. . . But sex education appeared to have no effect on whether teen girls used birth control, the researchers found.

Additionally, black teenage girls who received sex ed in school were 91 percent less likely to have sex before age 15.

That 91% figures is pretty amazing.

Now for those who have always opposed sex ed* on the principle that sex magically won’t happen if you don’t talk about it, this poses a dilemma. Do you change your tactics to do something that actually helps teenagers postpone sex? Or do you go “lalalalalalala” and pretend that abstinence-only programs work, despite lots and lots of evidence to the contrary? In other words, what’s more important: being anti-sex-ed, or helping kids?

When kids are ignorant about sex, or only get told weird, negative, one-sided and inaccurate things about it (the way most abstinence-only programs do), bad things happen. Pregnancy rates go up, STD rates go up, and an awful lot of lives get affected.

This is a big issue with me, because what I see is adults letting kids down in a monumental way, because they are uncomfortable with the knowlege that their kids will one day have sex. Being so squeamish or scared to tell your kid about sex or let someone else do so that you keep them in ignorance is BAD PARENTING. Because what your kids don’t know can really hurt them. They need knowledge to protect themselves, because ignorance surely won’t. It’s like putting them behind the wheel without teaching them to drive. Irresponsible.

It’s about control, too. By the time sex becomes an issue, your kid is not under your direct supervision 24/7 anymore. They are at friends’ houses, at school, at parties, on band trips. They are going to have to make decisions about sex without you around to make them be responsible–so if you don’t teach them how to think for themselves and how to protect themselves beforehand, you’ve missed your chance. And you can tell them your preferences for what they do, but ultimately, you can’t make them adhere to those preferences, and as a parent, you have to accept that. Once your teenage son and his girlfriend announce a pregnancy, punishment is a moot point. The best you can do is try to teach him beforehand why he should try to stay out of that situation, for his sake and hers. And then, you have to let them go, and hope for the best. Which is terrifying. But that’s parenting. And for me, if some other adult is able to back up what I teach my son about respect and responsibility, that’s even better.

*All comprehensive sex ed programs I’ve ever heard about, by the way, do tell you that abstinence is in fact the best way to avoid pregnancy, disease, and other complications. Telling someone how condoms work does not equal telling them that they need to have lots and lots of sex, right now.