July 2007

My migraine is gone! GONE! Gooooooooone!

Since I blamed it on YOU in the first place, I must now thank YOU for all the fabulous love you sent in this direction. Clearly it made it all the way over here and smacked that migraine right out of my head.

Of course, now I’m going to have to blame YOU for every single migraine for the rest of forever. I’m sorry, but you brought that one on yourself. :)

Goddess, Bless the power of the Internet!

CANCER (June 21-July 22): “Dear Rob: I like to take my daughters to the playground. While they hang out in the sandbox, I’ve often tried to make it across the monkey bars — you know, those overhead bars where you go hand over hand while your body dangles below. In hundreds of attempts, I’ve failed every time. My hands hurt, I feel heavy and out of shape, and I give up quickly. But last Saturday the spell was broken. I asked the gods of the playground to help me out. As I jumped up to grab the monkey bars, the idea popped into my head that I should bend my legs instead of leaving them dangling down. I got a swinging motion going, and made it across easily. After all those years of frustration, I couldn’t believe such a little change made such a big difference. -Cancerian Reporting from the Trenches.” Dear Cancerian: Thanks for your testimony. I think it’s exactly what your fellow Crabs need to hear.

(Freewill Astrology.)

I’m in the process of upgrading my WordPress installation and fixing some little glitches, so please don’t freak out if I disappear and reappear a bit in the next while.

Edited to add: The upgrade is now complete, a few new plugins have been added to my side of things, and everything should be back to normal again. Hopefully. Maybe?

Over the past few days, I’ve spent more time with a migraine than without. I don’t know whether to blame this on some sort of hormonal thing, the Doritos I ate yesterday or just some pressurized weather moving in/out/around the area.

So, instead, I am blaming YOU.

Yes indeedy, it’s YOUR fault that I have a migraine and/or the trailing nausea that often marks the day-after-a-migraine.

And HOW is it your fault? I’ll tell you. It’s your fault for not giving me enough LOVE.

Perhaps you’re now wondering how, exactly, you could give me MORE love than you already do. I don’t know. I mean, that’s YOUR thing to figure out, quite frankly. Maybe you’re not thinking about me often enough during the day? Perhaps you were just thinking about showering me with gifts and trinkets? Whatever your thing is, I need MORE.

Because if I don’t stop feeling BLEH and if my head keeps pounding like this, I am totally going to whine until your ears bleed. And you’ll then wish you had given me ALL THE LOVE IN THE WORLD.

Be proactive, people. Be proactive.

(Link courtesy of Ms. Scotchneat.ca)

Whenever I start to feel uncomfortable with my world – that nagging, unhappy, vague feeling of discomfort – it inevitably stems from my reluctance to let go of something or someone. An unhealthy attachment, perhaps, or one that’s simply single-sided. A desire for something that’s unattainable for any number of reasons but which my brain is still seeking to grab.

I’m in the process of letting go of several things. This does not mean I’ll be totally detached, of course, it simply means that I will let that thing happen in the way that it happens (or doesn’t). I won’t struggle against it or try to drag it back to the (proverbial) place in which I’m most comfortable.

In other words, I will try very hard to work against my own damned self for a while.

We had a wonderful weekend – we always do, really – and I managed to stop thinking about the adoption process and where we’re resting in that line-up. It felt wonderful to not be focused on that goal.

This is a conscious choice, of course. I am reminding myself over and over that it will happen when it happens and there is absolutely nothing I can do – nothing in the entire world – to make this go faster and so, dammit, I need to just STOP TRYING. LET GO.

Someone I adore, very much in fact, has mostly disappeared from my world through a series of events. For a while, I turned myself inside and out in an attempt to figure out how I had caused this shift and how I could remedy it. Last night, like a sharp smack to the face, I realized that it is NOT ABOUT ME and that I need to just LET GO. And so, I am.

There are so many other examples of me – ME! MYSELF! – driving myself absolutely insane by running my little mind in circles trying to cling tightly to things that need space and air and, in some instances, external nourishment beyond what I can offer. Quite frankly, it’s a bit of a theme in my life.

My goal for this week is to LET GO.

LET GO! LET GO! LET GO!

Letting go often leaves me feeling hollow, as I’ve noted recently, and so I am going to pick up some other things that I can cling to for a while. Things that are controlled BY ME and ONLY ME. No disappointments from relying on someone else and no plans to be spoiled by a last-minute cancellation and no clingingclingingclinging.

If you happen to notice me clinging in the next while, please feel free to shake me off of your pantleg, slap me in the back of the head and shout, “LET GO, YOU DINK!” No, really.

• Today is Kelly‘s birthday! Go forth and wish her well!
• The smell of (my own) birthday cake baking in the kitchen is totally delicious.
• I have the world’s best husband. Not just because of the cake, either.
• Beautiful, bright, wonderful sunshine.
• There are few things funnier than an itchy beagle.
• Coffee watched “Victoria Beckham: Coming to America” with me last night.
• The Rose of Sharon plants (trees?) in our yard are so bloom covered that they’re falling over!
• Everyone – including the animals – in this house is happy and healthy.
• We’re making progress on the purchase and building of our fence!
• I am emotionally supported by some really amazing people.
• It’s still the weekend, y’all.
• Yesterday’s A&W rootbeer was as spectacular as the last one. Mmmm. Good indulgence.
• Making plans – good plans! – is never a bad thing.
• I am so very loved. And I love so very many others.

In the meantime (before the kids arrive, I mean) I’ve decided to look into a few things that I’ve been wanting to accomplish. No use wallowing in my own misery, right? Right.

First up is some formal sewing lessons. My friend Melissa took a course at Mohawk College (in Hamilton) and had a great time learning how to do the various things she wanted to do and gaining some confidence. For me, I’m pretty certain that it’s going to take a “real class” for me to get motivated enough to tackle anything more than a basic sewing project – I’ll need some homework assignments, someone to slap the crap out of me when I screw up and, well, yeah. I figure that knowing how to sew, at least a bit, will come in handy with kids.

Second is my desire to explore more of the parks in KW. With the weather so nice and polite lately, I don’t really have a good excuse NOT to wander around a bit. If Coffee and I can get the seat cover and the harnesses working with the dogs (oh, ha ha ha hahahahaa!) I may even take them with me. Maybe I can “lose” the beagle in the woods somewhere? (Ha, again, on that one.) There are some nice parks (apparently) near to our house that I have not yet investigated fully.

Third is that I might as well take some of my savings and put those dollars toward my tattoo collection. I’ve been itching – not literally, of course – to get my half-sleeve done and, without kids around to smack the crap out of the painful skin, I might as well get started on the healing process. This one is going to involve a bit of legwork since I’ll need to make an appointment to consult with my favourite tattoo artist ahead of time and then return to Hamilton later to get the actual work done.

But right now, this very moment, I’m going to go and vacuum. Coffee will be home in about half an hour and then the weekend will OFFICIALLY begin and there are few things worse than a weekend spent with dog hair clinging to your bare feet.

After asking our adoption worker for a “rough idea” as to when our homestudy “might” be started, I was rather dismayed to get her response of “January”. She admitted that she’s hoping it’ll happen sooner as a nice surprise, but that we really shouldn’t get our hopes up.

The reason, in a nutshell, is the change in adoption legislation that hit at the start of 2007. There are a lot of new files to deal with, a lot of new restrictions and guidelines and court-details to be worked out. Everything is taking longer and there are way more people in line than there were previously. Most of those new people take priority over our homestudy simply because of urgency.

My rational self understands all of this very well. While we’re wanting to form our family – and while that’s important to us – the only reason the adoption system exists is for the good of the children. And there are children who are in situations that require assistance and attention NOW. For good reason, those children take priority over us and that’s exactly how it should be.

Having said that, my emotional and less-rational side is having a really hard time with the new schedule of events.

We’ve gone as far as we can in our preparations for the kids. Until we know the age and gender and other details, we can’t purchase anything else or get anything else ready. All of our paperwork has been submitted and our references have been offered up and our training is completed. The only thing we can do now is.. wait.

(Here comes the pity party..)

Knowing, now, that there at least six months sitting blankly in front of me, waiting and waiting and waiting, I don’t know what to do with myself. I feel like I’m drifting and it’s difficult to put my finger on a solution. The six months feel hollow from this side of things.

And I’m lonely. Instead of feeling good about my time-to-myself and about getting some good reading and napping done before the kids arrive, I’m feeling lost. There’s no one to talk to all day long and no one to play with other than the dogs.

Jobs aren’t exactly plentiful in the areas I’m qualified – and I’d be quitting in less than a year, anyway. Minimum wage is not worth getting out of bed for when I’d need to buy new clothes and re-dye my hair to a ‘normal’ colour and pay for gas..

Volunteer positions that I’m interested in require a one year commitment that I cannot make.

The renovations we’re working on require 2 people at the present time (though that will shift soon and I’ll be able to get started on some of my work) and much of it requires consultation with Coffee before any major decisions are made.

I know it’s probably just a matter of readjusting the timeline and re-working the plans we’ve already made. I know that right now I’m feeling lost because that “in sight” goal has been dragged backward and out of sight again. And I know, too, that in a few days I’ll be feeling a lot better about the whole thing and, perhaps, grateful for a few more months with Coffee’s attention focused solely on me and my attention focused solely on him.

For now, however, I just feel like I’m drifting aimlessly and without purpose.

I had been joking with Coffee for a few days about the idea of our adoption worker calling on my birthday to say she was dropping off our kids. What a great birthday gift, right? But alas, that call did not come. Nor did it come yesterday.

And before you get excited, that call did not come today either.

But we did get an email ‘update’ letting us know that she had not forgotten about us and our lack of a completed (or even started) homestudy. She reassured us that we were fabulously well-qualified and that our desire to bring home older kids – and more than one – was very much in our favour for getting things expedited. The delay is nothing to do with us (which we already knew).

The bad news which is also good news, sorta’-kinda’, is that she’s putting our name on the agency’s “open list” after acknowledging that she’s still working on doing homestudies with people who completed the training in the session BEFORE ours. While she’d like to do our homestudy herself, she’s admitted that she may not get to it any time soon – and thus, we are now on the list for any other adoption worker to pick up if they happen to have some spare time.

The only thing I can say here is.. well, actually, it’s just one big SIGH.

That, and what do you suppose the chances are of ANY adoption worker having some ‘spare time’… EVER?!

It’s not terrible news – but it’s difficult for my very impatient self to deal with nonetheless. Sure, we still have some renovations to complete. Sure, we can use the next while to further pay down our debts and wrangle our expenses a bit more. Sure, we can relax and enjoy the summer a bit more – our last summer as a married couple without kids.

But.. YARGH!

I’m glad she emailed and I’m glad we’re on that open list, just in case someone does have some spare time to spend with us before 2010 rolls around. But my prediction of December for a placement is starting to drift away from even my own optimistic daydreams and, well, that sucks.

Meh.