Facing Different-ness

There is no such thing as a drama-free day in my house. 

Hubby and I are, again (in my case, still), a little under the weather.  He works under insane pressure and is dedicated to being successful in his career and doing right by his employer and their shareholders.  (Oh, and keeping a roof over our heads and food in the fridge.)  While those are admirable pursuits, they’ve been known to cause significant immune deficiency and stress-related disease.  I believe at this point he’s sparring with just a cold of some sort, but one never quite knows when all the craziness of schedule and workload will force his body into some sort of no-holds-barred ultimate fight that lands him in a hospital bed for a few weeks.  Or worse.  (And really, I’m the glass-is-half-full part of this marriage.  No, I’m not kidding.) 

My cold is better than yesterday, but not great by any means.  I know you were wondering about it, so I just thought I’d get that juicy tidbit out of the way before launching into the exploits of my children.  I spend a lot of quality time with Dayquil, Mucinex, Sudafed, my nebulizer, and my netti pot during these times.  Special, eh?

But who cares about the grown-ups here?  Geez.

So tonight, my Kate was tired.  She fared pretty well for the first couple of hours of being home after a full day of school, but when she saw au gratin potatoes on the supper table, she totally lost it.  Mind you, in the past, she’s been quite fond of this dish.  However, for some reason I surely will never know, this evening those yellowy-orange spuds in their innocent brown casserole dish simply opened the flood gates of all that was wrong with her day.  And she is so stinking tough that when she finally breaks down and tells me that something is bothering her, my heart shatters into ugly, painful shards of sadness and despair. 

What happened was that this morning, there were a few mild flurries as the girls were getting ready for the bus.  Both Claire and Kate were kind of excited about the prospect of the snowy season starting, which in retrospect worked well to offset my anvil-heavy dread of the oncoming cold and months of being indoors.  Kate asked if maybe she should wear her snow pants, and I said, “Well sure, why not.  They’ll help keep you extra warm, honey.  I’ll just go grab them out of the basement.”  So I got them, and she put them on, and she marched happily out the door, ready for blizzard conditions.  And she was smiling so broadly as she headed down the driveway that I think Claire and I forgot, just for a moment, that there wasn’t any sun this morning. 

Well, fast-forward to au gratin potatoes at 6 p.m.  She sobbed, and yelled, and cried, and carried on, and when we could finally get her to start calming down, she put her little arms around my neck and put her little head on my shoulder and shook, telling me that her friends and classmates made fun of her because she wore her snowpants today.  Just thinking about her enduring that – and I know, I know, there will be much, much worse to come – activates my tear ducts and mucous membranes.  Nobody else wore snowpants, only a couple other kids wore boots, and she just felt so different from everybody else.  And she was teased.  What, as a parent, do you do for this?  I rubbed her back and held her close and smelled her little girl smells as I kissed her cheeks and forehead and told her how much I loved her and that she was the smart one for being warm.  But I know that even though she heard me (she nodded a little into my neck), my weak words did nothing to make her feel less ostracized over something that, in her world, was pretty darned important.  This is one of those powerless feelings intrinsic to parenthood that I would really like to excise from the Parenting Package.  Let’s leave in the butterfly kisses and I’ll even endure the dentist visits and umpteen vaccinations, but DANG!  Having your child made fun of and not being able to do squat to stop it or fix it, well, there’s something I could definitely live without.

Speaking of living without, that brings to mind yet another drama this evening. Claire was helping Daddy pick up the main floor and do the dishes while I was upstairs putting Kate, and then Amy to bed.  On her last trip through the front hallway to return something to its rightful place, Claire stubbed her toe on a door stop.  I heard it right as I placed my foot on the top stair and started to come down.  She let out a yelp and ran two steps to fling herself on the couch, crying and wailing in pain.  We’ve all been there, and your pain is as much from the anger at your own clumsiness and stupidity as it is about the physical contact between Object A and your toe.  I ran to comfort her, as did hubby.  After we assessed that it was nothing more than a nasty bump, hubby, attempting to calm her down and transform her anguish into something less miserable, asked if he should go get his hand saw and cut it off.  I looked at them both and agreed that his idea had potential.  “Claire,” I said, “you can live without one toe.  You’ve got nine others, right?”  To which she responded, “But then I’ll never be like the other kids again!!”  Of course, we should have already forseen the obvious:  even the mere thought of any sort of amputation immediately jump-starts tears and automatically raises moaning volume.

Do you see a theme here?  Ironically, it roughly translates to yet another female under this roof. 

I had a bit of a scare earlier this week myself.  I found a lump.  Yep, you read that right, and you know exactly what I mean.  My family history of boob cancer is as ugly as it is far and wide.  For now, I’ve dodged the bullet.  Mammo and ultrasounds looked good, follow up with OB/GYN in a month, yada yada yada. 

Honestly, though, with my risk category so terribly high, whenever I do a BSE or think about relatives and their prostheses, I feel myself, my ME, my WHO I AM shrink away, because I know that one of these times, it will be real.  And after fighting for my life, my next biggest fear will be mastectomy.  Not cuz I have a great chest or anything, because I absolutely don’t.  [And reconstruction holds no appeal for me whatsoever.]  But between that physical feature being so strongly tied to a woman’s identity, and thinking of being the one in your group of friends, neighbors, cohorts, and commiserators to be the one without…. Well, that feeling, not unlike what my girls went through today on a much smaller scale, feels like a freefall into the abyss of the unidentifiable. 

Now if only Amy would be a teensy-weensy bit more concerned about not pooping in her underwear like all the other kids her age that she knows, this whole consciousness-of-what-others-think thing may actually work for us for once.