Pick your favorite on Rant night.
Hives, no, not as in those things that wasps and bees build. I'm talking about those things that you get when you have a severe allergic reaction to something. And I've got them...and I know that some of you are saying "again?" Yup, again...but this time I haven't been eating Tyson Chicken..in fact, I haven't tried anything new in the last 9 months or so.
The place that they're really driving me nuts is on my scalp..and after suffering through them for a week I finally buckle and go to an urgent care center. This is after attempting to make an appointment with my family doctor and told that the earliest appointment I can get is May 10. Of course, I decide at about 9 am that I'm going and start getting prepared to do so.
Wait, we need an interlude here to explain why this goes from miserable to total meltdown here. I didn't tell mom that I had them until about three or four days after they appeared. And once I did, she insists that I call her every hour while she's at work. *sigh* alright, fine I'll humor her. Upon the second day of this is when I decided to go to Urgent Care mainly because I wake up wheezing. For those that didn't know, I have asthma and allergic reactions sometimes causes asthma to flare up.
So here we go, now that everyone's all caught up...I call mom and tell her that I'm going to urgent care, they'll give me a shot (which is usually Cortizone, and I'm allergic to that too, so then they'll give me a breathing treatment to even out the reaction to that and what's already going on with my asthma). Clara can be in the room with me the entire time and the problem will be solved.
But no...mom insists on going with us, and driving. Never mind that I bring up that while waiting for her (because at this point she's at work and I will be waiting for her to drive back home, not to mention all the semantics involved with her leaving the office for a "family emergency") I could go into a full blown asthma attack and not be able to reach a phone to call for help...and even provided that I can reach a phone there's this whole airway constriction involved with an asthma attack and it's not very condusive to talking...you know, the process in which sound is created by passing air over the vocal chords. Yeahhhhhhh, so she finally gets here, Clara takes and hour long nap and then we leave to go and get me treatment.
First we go to one Urgent Care Center and I'm told that they don't take the health insurance I have...so we go just down the street (and actually closer to home) to another one where it takes them all of five minutes to get me checking in, into a room and seeing a doctor; Clara and mom stay out in the admitting room. I now love this place. I explain that this has happened before, and how that resolved itself, i.e. cortizone shot and resulting asthma attack. So the doc orders a different kind of shot, they give it to me and wait 20 minutes to see if I have any kind of reactions to it. After the "all-clear" he then gives me 4 medications to make sure that it gets all cleared up, no matter what could be causing it since we can't seem to find any reasonable explanation for it to come up in the first place.
Wa-hoo! I have meds now, and they don't interfere with my asthma...down side? Are you kidding me? There's always a downside, these drugs now tear up the lining of my stomach and make me sleepy..like tired to the point where it says "do not drive" on the bottle. And to top it all off, Clara has now gone into this funky sleeping pattern where she wakes up for four hours in the middle of the night..not what I want to be dealing with on meds like this. So the day after I start meds I finally get a chance to take a cat nap while Clara is napping. Within the span of half an hour my mother calls me, gets no answer, calls her friend Sharon to come over and check on me, and Sharon is waking me up...Arrrrgh! Never mind that I had attempted to pound into mom that the reason that I was on these specific medications was because they didn't interfere with my asthma.
Here we go again. Another topic that is for the most part completely unrelated to the first, and I'm sure this one will evolve, so just try to hang with me for as long as you can.
Have you ever known that no matter what you said you knew that someone wasn't going to understand you and for the most part you knew it was becuase they didn't want to understand you? Tonight we're sitting on the frontroom floor watching Clara attempt to crawl and sit up and other myriads of baby accomplishments when mom says something to the effect of "oh, I'm going to have to get a playpen so that she can't get to anything." To which I respond "we have got to move out soon." Mom reacts as if I'm threatening her with taking away her granddaughter. I'm not suggesting that we move back to Indy right away, I'm merely stating that I'm tired of not being comfortable where I live. Here's where it's going to get jumbled...
Nothing in the house that I currently reside in is mine...lemmie restate: Nothing in the house that I currently reside in feels like mine. Even the bed I sleep in was a cast off from my mother years ago, my bed is still in Indianapolis in a friend's basement. I want my own house, I can't let my daughter grow up in a house that I do not support..she needs to understand that I am the one that makes her safe, secure and happy. She needs to understand that the reason that the diningroom is purple is because that's the color that mommy wants it to be. There would be nothing that she could reach that would be able to hurt her, or that I would be upset that she broke. My house would not become a museum, where you can look but never touch. I would have heavy furniture, comfy things that are soft yet strong and in dark colors that it wouldn't matter what got spilled on them. That goes for all the carpets too. I want something that she can run into the house with muddy tennis shoes on to show me the frog she caught. All of the antiques, glass collectiables and ecru carpet in here makes me feel like I'm in a straightjacket and I will not raise my daughter that way. I will teach her there's things you do not touch, like electrical sockets and hot stoves or someone else's personal items, but the things on "display" in my house should be there for two reasons: function and fun... and fun can translate into several different things.
And I want her to know that her room can be any color she wants it to...be that black, red, green, pink, or a myriad of seventeen different shades of yellow. If that's what makes her at peace in that space, then that's what I'll make it look like (at least once a year I will) because it's her space. Growing up I always felt that it was never really my room, because it was mom's house. I'm not going to care how many holes are put in the drywall while Clara chases her dreams. I can replace sheetrock, I can never recover squashing my daughter's hope. I might own the house, but that room will always be hers to do with what she will. I don't care how many gallons of paint we go through or how many colors, I will never be too busy or too tired to make her feel welcome and comfortable. I know that there are rough years ahead and there are times when I won't be able to make her feel alright in her own skin, but I can at least make sure he feels that way in her own room.
Don't get me wrong, I'd be happy to have my mother's input in how to raise my daughter, I'd even be willing to let her live with us..but on my terms, not hers. She would not be allowed to spank my daughter. My house would not be the museum of do-not-touch, and there would be lots and lots of playing both indoors and out. I can always vacuum up whatever we track in, I can't take back the time I lost ignoring my daughter to make sure the windows are spotless. It always seemed to me that what we accomplished was more important that the fact that we were spending time together, and that just being together wasn't considered an accomplishment at all. I promise right here and now that I will never be too busy or too concerned with moping the floor to hear the short story my Clara wrote in English class, or to blow off watering the lawn to catch lightening bugs with her and marvel at the fact that she's here at all, let alone doing something that mundane with me.
Mom never hears me though. All that she can get gleam out of all this is that I'm taking Clara away from her because I don't want her to control everything anymore, or that we're leaving as a punishement to her. She can't seem to grasp that this is more about me and Clara than it is about her. Yes, I do want to get away from her need to control everything, and her insistance that everything be done her way. But I also want to develop things of my own, and my relationship with my daughter. We need something healthy, and seeing her mother domineered or hearing her grandmother constantly call herself fat is not healthy. I need to be able to direct my daughter toward self-assuredness, and independance, and I simply cannot do that here with mom constantly standing over me and telling me what to do and how to do it. The real thing that I can't get passed is that she will never understand that this is more about what I need to build for Clara then what I need to escape from her. To my mother it will always be me shunning her and never about me coming into my own and becoming to person that I need to be so that Clara can become what she was meant to be. Don't ask me what that is, but I'm positive it's something great. I just wish I could make mom see this from my perspective, but that will never happen unless I can get her to listen to me and I haven't clue one on how to do that.
There's just so much more that I'd like to express about this and simply don't have the capacity to do so. I guess it just boils down to that I want her to be happy and secure. I want to be able to build something for her that shows her that she can do anything, and to me that's what the home in my mind represents, this kind of visual reminder that "mommy did this so you can accomplish anything."
Now I guess my ultimate conundrum is where do I find a house that is large enough to hold all our hopes and dreams, yet small enough to keep clean by myself?
I feel very depressed because of what I don't have right now. But I also feel a sense of renewal becuase I have finally nailed down at least part of what is missing, and have a goal, or rather three attainable goals that will get me to a milestone goal that will eventually lead me to a life goal.