marthespot

[marthespot]

Mar the Spot

I haven't done this in a while, so bear with me; the brain doesn't work like it used to, and some of the ways that it does work are not in ways that I want it to be working. A long time ago, I wrote by the Bradbury Prescription, but it's been fifteen years since I felt the need to set down my day with structure and to explore what I thought and felt about it. It's eminently and inarguably more proper to do so in an untargeted - though technically public - form than it is to make someone's eyes glaze over in texts or DMs, and since the need appears to exist, here I am. The name I used for hundreds of thousands of words isn't present in Google results anymore, because it's a series of locked pages on a low-traffic blogging site that was only the second or third most popular blogging site available, even fifteen years ago. Looking at the other people currently using it, I'm glad it's not mine anymore; they don't look like good literary neighbors. I've been drinking heavily for eight years, now, ever since she showed me three positive pregnancy tests. I wouldn't give back the time I've spent parenting, and I can't imagine life without my child, but it was very much a thing that I assumed there would be some discussion about before a pregnancy occurred. Instead, ADHD appears to have caused some skips in birth control pill dosing. Since then, it was pregnancy, partial miscarriage (it may have been twins, originally?), marriage, home ownership on short notice with all of the attendant and still-parading maintenance issues that you could expect from a home built in 1912 and being sold as part of an acrimonious divorce by the landlord-owners, and so, so much. Parenting has been better the longer it goes on. It was both incredibly difficult and incredibly unfulfilling when the child was an infant, because they were functionally a very loud plant that rapidly excreted waste substances. The most helpful thing that anyone told me when we had a newborn was a person helping on a meal train, who walked in with the food, looked and the baby, and said "Aw, it's been so long since I've had one that they're almost cute again!" I have no idea how single parents survive at any phase, but particularly with a newborn.

For several years after infancy, it seems like every time your child Levels Up in terms of ability, all they've really done is unlocked a new way for them to cause severe damage to their own skull or internal organs. Everything dangerous looks delicious, every hard corner is right at head level, and with any luck, YOUR child will also have the gleeful obsession with pulling safety covers off of things that want very much to go Bonk on little heads.

And then, at long last, words start to come. and you start getting to talk to an extremely low-resolution edition of the human that you hope you'll get to continue getting to know and helping out for the rest of your life. It's not that you couldn't get to know them prior, but that it was more difficult to know exactly what they thought of things; you'd know they didn't like a food or an experience, but not the specifics of what it was like on their end of things.

They spend the pandemic isolated from other people, as is not unusual for children their age, and it didn't seem to bother them much, presumably because they weren't old enough to remember things being particularly different. Mom and Dad were always around, thanks to dad's switch to telework, and we were always glued to screens because that's what there was to do in pandemic isolation, so it didn't seem like much of a hardship until it started getting to be time to start school.

They sobbed on the way to their first day, but bucked up and bravely stepped out of the car at drop off, still crying. They forced a smile and gave a tiny-thumbed Thumbs Up gesture before trudging away with that huge-looking backpack. All the frustrating of coping with what I see as an over-response to the simple process of going somewhere that Mom and Dad aren't bled away, and I cried a bit, myself, because .. well, they were temporarily not there, and that'd never been the case in their entire life.

The first year of school was a constant, sleep-deprived nightmare. Our child had never been substantially sick, and none of us had so much as a cold for the two years we spent almost completely isolated and N95'd on the occasion that we actually had to go somewhere; drop that immune system into kindergarten and you have the recipe for some respiratory wildness. They woke up coughing at least once or twice, almost every night; woke up coughing and crying hard enough to throw up maybe once or twice a week, all school year.

Funny story, looking back at the nightmare, is that they were finally diagnosed with asthma at the tail end of kindergarten and given an albuterol inhaler, which shut down the worst of the coughing. Corticosteroids, prescribed later, eventually made for a dramatic improvement in lung function and an equally dramatic reduction in coughing. Even while sleeping! Even while sick!

I recently went sober after those years of drinking because the cumulative unhappiness with the states of my body and my mind, along with the presumed impact on my life expectancy, finally coupled with a conversation that I couldn't keep up with while hung over to push me over the edge and just quit. And that conversational buddy has continued - as good ones do - to make me think, whether deliberately or inadvertently; since I don't think they should be punished for that with the unexpected unleashing of literary floodgates, again .. here I am.