Good Day

Today...well, I guess it was actually yesterday now...but it was a really good day. The weather was fantastic, and I spent the day doing fun things with my two fellas. Just the kind of day I love most. We started the day at the March of Dimes March for Babies, which was great, and then hung around at home for a while (nap time for B, mainly) before heading out for an early dinner. Lovely!

I have had a tendency, times in my past, to freak out after a really good day, in a, "Oh my God, something bad is going to happen now!" kind of way. Crazy, I know. But I have. But interestingly, that seems to be one area of my lifelong battle with anxiety that seems to have improved somewhat since getting married and having B. I have gotten better at just appreciating the good days, and treasuring them and being fully present in them. What a nice feeling, since really, truly good days don't usually happen as often as we'd like them to, and really should be enjoyed when they do happen.

Bone Marrow Donation

If this were my precious boy, I would hope desperately for the kindness of strangers, so I'm passing this along. Please consider ordering a kit. It's free.

http://www.matchdevan.com/

FOX 5 Special: Unhealthy Hospitals

FOX 5 Special: Unhealthy Hospitals

This story centers around some friends of mine in Atlanta, who lost their seven week old micro-premie daughter to a MRSA infection in 2007. There is some great stuff with their two surviving daughters, and it's a great piece in terms of making people aware of this infection.

Lovin' Life...

As anyone reading this more or less knows, I suffer from anxiety. As a result, I tend to perseverate on whatever I'm attributing the anxiety to in a given moment. It's a really good time. Among the drawbacks of this is that I sometimes have a tendency to get out of the moment. And when that happens, I fail to appreciate how much I'm ENJOYING a given moment. Good example - I have been sitting here all morning, obsessing on how I can become a better mother and a better sales person at the same time...I was thinking about what B and I will do today and how I'll balance the two, and I was thinking about my days with B, in general. And suddenly, I realized how much I really LOVE my days with him. It's not that they are without their difficulties. He's two, after all. But there is just a genuine enjoyment to my days that I sometimes lose sight of, in favor of worrying. So, I just wanted to record this for future me (a la last night's episode of HIMYM). I love my new gig. There, I said it.

Wayward

I worked almost ten years in a job that I never enjoyed. I mean, I guess I shouldn't say never...there were moments I enjoyed. There were people I enjoyed. There was even a position I enjoyed. One. Out of like five. Six? Something like that. It wasn't that I actively disliked it. Well, there were two or three of the positions I had that I did actively dislike, and two managers I had whom I definitely actively disliked. But for the most part, there was a sort of resigned contentedness. I had a routine, I got a paycheck. The American Way. But as I got older, and as other parts of my life became more fulfilling, the discontent I felt professionally came into sharper and sharper contrast. I worked for this great company who lots of people would've been happy to work for, but...I wasn't one of those people. It got harder and harder to pretend I was.

When I had B, it became virtually impossible to pretend. Sure, I was in a pretty terrible position at that point, but even as it began to improve, I just could not make myself want to be there. And being someone who wants to give my all to an endeavor, I felt increasingly like I was faking it, and as a result, faking myself and the company out. It wasn't a good feeling. And I let it go on long enough that I think it's had a lasting impact on my self esteem. But that's not my point here.

My point here is that this IS the American way. We find "good" jobs with "good" companies, and we just go on autopilot and work ourselves into exhaustion in pursuit of some goal or other. And I don't mean to insult those of you who are truly happy in your professions. That's not what I'm getting at, at all. But there are so many of us who aren't...and particularly in the past couple of years, that really ceased to matter. It was like, "Well, shit. At least I HAVE a job. If they really WANT me to start sleeping at my desk and only seeing my kid for two hours a week, I'll make it work!"

And here's the thing. That DIDN'T work for me. Or my family. We made the decision together that we didn't want that life. We didn't want the life in which I routinely went at least a day a week without seeing my son. We didn't want me working myself into a panic disorder for a paycheck of which we would give fully HALF to childcare. We made a conscious decision to put our family first.

So, why do I feel like such a selfish quitter, so much of the time?

Here Comes the Sun...

How intensely can the sun impact our moods? Pretty intensely. I mean, I think at this point, most of us know this, don't we? It's been studied repeatedly. There are diagnoses such as SAD. There is statistical proof that places with more sunshine tend to be "happier" while places with less tend toward depression. None of this is breaking news. So, why do I mention it? Because I think it's interesting (to me...again with the self absorption) that this has a greater effect on me in non-winter months than it does in winter ones. Maybe it's because crap weather during the winter is to be expected? I'm not even sure. What I do know is that last summer was no summer at all, really, and my psyche suffered for it. And I know that so far this April, we've been pretty lucky. But the past couple days were dreary and WHAM! My mood followed. And today, the sun is out and guess what? I feel better. Some of that is coincidental, I'm sure, and some of it is definitely hormonal, but the weather correlation is to exact to be ignored.

Showing My Age

I was at the library (pronounced lie-bee-bee) with B the other day. We were looking at books, and there were several with check-out dates from the late 1980's. This, obviously, was when I was a kid. Suddenly, it hit me that to HIM, the 1980's will seem as long ago as the 1950's seemed to me as a kid (since my mom was roughly the same ages in the fifties that I was in the eighties). I mean...OUCH. Of course, logically, I knew this already, but sometimes when thoughts like that hit home, it just makes you go, "Whoa."

And then last night, I was watching the SNL special on NBC. And they showed lots of clips of the musical guests, of course. And seeing Dave Grohl and Billie Joe Armstrong made me think about the fact that these two guys (and so many others) were, you know, youngsters when they first came into our consciousness, and now they're...not. Let alone Bono. I mean....So, it's just another one of those things that really highlights the passage of time, you know? It just seems so strange to me that the nineties were so long ago. But they were.