First Day of Work: I.E. SO MUCH RESPECT FOR TEACHERS YOU GUYS ARE HEROES SRSLY

Before yesterday, it had been 20 years since I was last in a 4th grade classroom. On Wednesday morning I got in touch with the Human Resources office for the city public school system and found that my paperwork had gone through, I'd been hired, and could enter myself into the substitute teacher system. Enthusiastically, I set myself up and went to look to see what was available for the rest of the week. At the time, there were two assignments listed. One was for a 4th grade classroom not terribly far from where we live, and the other was for a special education class, both for the next day. I didn't feel confident tackling special ed my very first day, so I signed up for the 4th grade.

"How bad can 4th graders be?" I asked myself, blithely forgetting the fact that I got into the most trouble ever in 4th grade, eventually being suspended in February that year. I didn't know much about the school system, or the neighborhood it was in. I was incredibly nervous, but it was mostly an excited kind of nervous. I did ardently hope that I would get into the classroom to find that there had been no instructions left and I'd basically been thrown to the wolves.

When I arrived in the school office, I was told that the teacher I was subbing for had a planning day, so he was in the classroom at the moment. Fantastic, I thought! I'd get a chance to talk with the teacher, get tips, information on the kids, and more information on their daily schedule and curriculum. The teacher was great, I thought he was fantastic, enthusiastic, and easy to talk to. I let him know that it was my first day subbing, and that's when the first bad sign showed up. He paused, his smile faltering before showing up again. He asked, "Well, have you done any orientation or student teaching before?" Nope. Sorry dude, you've got someone completely green here.

So he sat me down and told me that he would try and check in on the class as much as possible, as would the principal, and some of the behavioral counselors for the kids. Uh oh. The demographics of my classroom: 22 boys (no girls), all of which either had an IEP for behavioral conditions, behavioral counselors or some combination thereof. "More of them need counseling than they have, but if their parents don't have insurance or Medicaid and they can't afford it, the kids go without." He said with a frown. He showed me a stack of papers, saying it was the permission slips from their last field trip two weeks ago. He hung on to them because with many of the parents, their phone numbers would change so often that it was hard to keep track of which numbers would work if you needed to call one. Uh oh. He gave me tips on who to keep apart, which students would fight, including two boys whose parents were feuding and who often brought the fights to school. Uh oh.

About half of the class was in and out all day, going either with counselors, tutors, or to the other classroom. There was another sub there for those kids. Apparently the two small classes of boys with behavior problems mixed in and out to try and help them to work in larger groups as well. I felt the kids were behind so much in the curriculum. I'd brought the 4th grade Brain Age with me to have something fun to do with the kids to fill up space during transitions and when we were waiting for them to be dismissed, but I never pulled it out because I felt that they were behind too much. There were a few children who worked well and ahead of the others, but every lesson was like pulling teeth. And as a substitute, the kids didn't respond to me well.

During recess one young man was sitting in the middle of the yard as everyone was lining up, with a look on his face that he had been crying. I went over to him and knelt down, trying to talk to him. He wouldn't tell me why he was upset, who had made him upset, if anyone had made him upset, and only responded to me when I asked, "Do you want to go with me?" He asked where we would go, and I told him we needed to get back to class. He immediately shut down and refused to talk anymore. Eventually I did get him to line up, but he stayed in a poor mood until we got into the classroom and he was kicking desks and chairs. The teacher came to talk to him and he did respond to him much better. I couldn't hear what was going on, but I was quickly distracted by trying to prevent a fight from breaking out between two boys.

Preventing fights and gently (as possible) reminding the boys that we keep our hands to ourselves, not on our neighbors or on their things took up the majority of the day. It was tough, and I felt very ineffectual by the end of it. The teacher encouraged me, told me that it was pretty much a typical day and that some of the boys had been misbehaving all week, that it wasn't me.

But let me focus on the good: There was one boy who was delighted when I showed him he could multiply by 9 using a nifty finger trick I learned in elementary school, one little boy who constantly gave me hugs through the day and a huge missing-tooth smile, and one boy who while I was helping him use lattice squares to multiply large numbers in math, he got frustrated, put down his pencil, crossed his arms and said, "I can't do it, I'm stupid." "But you're doing really well so far," I encouraged with a smile, "I don't think you're stupid at all. Look at how much you got done on your own, that's great!" He jerked his thumb over to a boy he had gotten into a fight with earlier. "He said I was stupid." "Well, why do you care about what other people say? People are always going to say things to try and upset you, but I'm looking at you right now, and I can see that you aren't stupid at all. I think you're really smart and I know you can do this if you focus on you." He smiled and started working again.

The teachers of the school were amazing, and I could see they all cared and believed in these kids, and at the end of the day I'm glad I took that assignment. Being put in a classroom of kids with behavioral problems in an inner city school where most of the kids are living under or just at the poverty line was terrifying but now I see what teachers are up against, and just how much these amazing people care, and just how amazing and how much talent these kids are and have and that they only need someone who is willing to be patient and bring that out of them. Watching the teachers work with the kids made me completely positive that teaching is what I want to do, and I can only hope that when Lorelai gets to school she has teachers who are half as passionate as the ones I worked with yesterday.

Winning at Therapy

So many sessions back in therapy, I had been talking about my anxieties with my health, especially my health during the first month of pregnancy, and how it would affect the baby. I have a lot of problems with my body, the way it fails me, and my ideas about my fitness to breed. I would be stricken with anxiety attacks that would last hours that I wasn't meant to have children,that my body would inevitably do something to harm Lorelai or that she would be unable to develop correctly because of me. We had talked in therapy about the coming anatomy scan, if good news would alleviate my anxiety, and how I felt I might feel afterwards.

I told the therapist honestly that I felt that a good anatomy scan would alleviate these specific fears but that I felt that my constant anxiety would just redirect itself to the next milestone and that I would stop worrying about the development of organs and possible birth defects and that I would start worrying about making it to the date of viability (24 weeks), and the growth of the baby from there.

To tell the truth, I do sometimes worry about Lorelai's growth. When my sugar is high, I chastise myself that if I'm not more careful, I'll be saddling her with prenatal obesity. I am very hard on myself when it comes to my blood sugar and my health, maybe too hard on myself as I'm learning through therapy. However, one thing I haven't worried about is the 24 week milestone. It comes tomorrow.

So here we are, more or less at viability. And I'm not worried about Lorelai. I do sometimes, in the dark of the night when I feel most anxious, have fleeting thoughts that this is all a dream, that it is impossible for me to make it to the point where we have our little girl home in our arms, and that there is so much longer to go that anything could go wrong. I do fear stillbirth. I greatly fear getting through pregnancy and not through labor, knowing that I am at higher risk for a stillbirth because I am diabetic. But I am trying to focus on the good, on the Christmases to come with our child, on seeing her smile and babble, and having her home.

I'm trying to learn to just trust that things will be okay and that here we are, and we've come too far to fail. It's hard, and I'm still struggling to keep a handle on anxiety, but I've had two of the best weeks I've ever had. One of them was even without medication, during one of the most stressful times of the year for me. I'm taking that as a win.

Sweet relief

So it appears that I managed to survive Thanksgiving week. The holidays are always a major point of anxiety and depression for me. Even without the aspect of not having my mom here, I miss my family. We're constantly barraged by messages of family and togetherness and these messages are ramped up around the holidays. It makes me think of my decision to move so far away, and how I'm missing out on spending those moments with my sisters and brother, father, friends, nephew and niece. I want to be able to sit down to dinner with my sister and her kids, have a beer and watch football with my dad, and exhange gifts with my baby sister while we hug and talk about Christmases of our childhood. And while I am welcomed into a fantastic family via my in-laws and Matt, I still spend a lot of time thinking of my mother and how awful that last Christmas that I got to spend with her was, and how the awfulness of it was really my fault.

It's a lot to weigh on my shoulders and the messages of the holiday and the sappy movies and songs just seem to make it so much more. Looking at the first major hit of the season, Thanksgiving, without antidepressants seemed really daunting.

On Wednesday I had gotten a doctor to call in my prescription refill of Prozac. I told her I used the Walmart pharmacy in Mechanicsville. We went up there that evening to pick it up and it hadn't been called in. I tried to call the clinic, but they were already closed by the time I found the number. The next day was Thanksgiving and it looked like it might be Monday before I would be able to get things smoothed out. 

Thanksgiving Matt had to work, so I was going to go with his parents to his aunt's house for their get together. That morning I cried and worried and fretted, and almost begged not to go. I still went, however, though the idea of being surrounded by so many strangers without Matt by my side just seemed like nightmare fuel. At first, it was hard. I found a stool in the corner of the kitchen, out of the way but closeby to Matt's parents. Most of the people I recognized and knew by name were already there, and it wasn't so bad. Then the house began to fill up as families that I didn't know poured into the kitchen, talking, laughing. The world just got so loud. I stayed on my stool, and busied myself with nibbling on cucumbers, counting the number of times I chewed. Eventually as people said their hellos, and then dissippated to the other areas of the house in smaller groups, things got easier. And easier, and easier.

By the time the meal came around, I was able to chat and relax, and I was even a little sad when it was time for us to go. The first hurdle was done and over. At home, as I was alone, it got hard again. Alone in the quiet is when the worst of my thoughts come out and I struggled to keep myself busy and focus on things that would keep my mind away from the dark areas of my thoughts.

The next day on little sleep, Matt and I ventured out for Black Friday shopping. That deserves it's own post, I feel, but it went well enough. I tried to call the clinic again later in the morning, still closed. However, an hour later we got a call from Walgreens saying that I needed to come pick up a prescription today or it would be cancelled. Apparently my doctor had just called it in to the wrong pharmacy. We went up there on our way to Matt's parents house so that he could have some Thanksgiving grub and found that this entire time Walmart hadn't been billing my insurance correctly for my medication. We got my Prozac from Walgreens for free.

I can't even describe how relieved I felt. While  I know that since I went a week and a half without it, I'm likely starting over again and it may be another couple of weeks or more before I get relief from the Prozac, but the doctor attached quite a few refills to this one so I'm happily optimistic that this will not be happening again. Now I need to find out how much the charge for my insulin would be from there and we might just be switching over fully from Walmart.

Return of the Jerk: Black Friday Edition

We found out late in July when we rented this room both that we were expecting and that our landlords and roommates had been trying to conceive and had experienced a miscarriage the year before. My pregnancy has been something I've kept behind the closed doors of the bedroom, trying to keep my voice down in my excitement while on Skype with Jennifer or planning and plotting with Matt. I'm still not really showing, and I don't feel like I look very different, and I've taken care to hide anything pregnancy related from them on Facebook. I really don't want to be a jerk to them, because they are pretty awesome and I honestly don't want to bring any pain to them.

I know what it's like to be surrounded by people all getting pregnant and having babies when it seems like your body just will not do the one thing it was made to do. I've wanted to be a mother for so long now, and as the years with Matt have passed and we've gotten so hopeful and excited every time my period was late only to be disappointed - and oh how my body is so good at disappointing me - my friends and sister kept expanding their families. It would put me in agony with envy, wanting so badly to be among them. The year that it seemed like everyone at Target was spontaneously fertilized was the hardest. I heard the news that my sister was expecting my niece, two friends got pregnant with their due dates within a few days from each other, several random coworkers were pregnant, and then my then-friend working in the fitting room conceived a couple of months later.

"You're next." They would tell me with a laugh. But I wasn't next. Next came a friend (more of an acquaintance than a friend, really) who came to me to talk about watching the baby when she wanted to return to work. During the conversation about my baby-proofing measures, schedule, her questions about what she would need to send every day, and the rates I charged, she kept giving me common knowledge tidbits about pregnancy, patting my knee every so often and reminding me, "Amanda, don't ever get pregnant." "You don't want to be pregnant."

I was floored, because I thought that all of our friends were pretty well aware (and I know that she certainly was) how badly that Matt and I wanted a family of our own. That conversation hurt because I bit my tongue and kept polite and well humored all the while my own doubts were flooding in, telling me that there was nothing to worry about because it was unlikely I would ever have a child of my own. My body has never been cooperative with me, and it just felt that fertility was yet another way in which it was failing.

So today, after carefully crafting a shared world with our roommates in which my pregnancy is not mentioned and I do my best to hide the fact that it exists, we saw them. We had gone to get in on some of the sales on cloth diapers that Franklin Goose was offering for Black Friday, and while were there, I had mentioned that I was interested in baby wearing but was kind of overwhelmed with all the options out there and would like to try some of the different styles of carriers and slings for myself. It seemed like the perfect time since Matt was with me and our day was free, so we could both try a lot of different styles and find what exactly would work for both of us, and likely what wouldn't.

While Matt was being shown how to do the back carry in the mei tei style carrier, he looked across the store and a look of recognition flashed across his face. "Oh hey roomie!" he called, waving and smiling. I looked to where he was looking and there were our roommates, standing at the checkout. Once her eyes saw him, I immediately saw the look of discomfort on her face, and felt like a line had been crossed. It was as if we had broken the fourth wall, and badly, and now this story that we were telling was ruined. And worse, that it was causing pain to someone who doesn't deserve that pain.

And again, I felt like a jerk for being pregnant, for standing there with carriers and holding the fake baby we were using to try them on, and making eye contact. And maybe I shouldn't feel guilt over this. We were in public, we hadn't pushed our way into the privacy of their bedroom with my pregnancy and put it in their faces. But still, somehow I felt that by meeting their gaze and acknowledging that we had a reason to be in a store that sells items for babies and toddlers, that we were the aggressors.

And being The Jerk is never a good feeling. 

Always on my mind...

Today as I am getting ready for my Centering appointment, Matt helpfully tells me, "Don't forget to ask about your medicine."

I ran out of Prozac about a week ago, and have been trying ever since to get the refill order faxed to my pharmacy. I left a couple of messages with the receptionist at my clinic, and the pharmacy says they faxed over a refill request to the clinic as well. Nothing. So I've been counting down the days until my appointment today where I can ask in person with someone who will hopefully be able to help about getting that refill order.

Suddenly being off Prozac has torn up my stomach, and I'm only just now getting over that. While I haven't had any big panic attacks, there has been a dramatic upswing in my foul moods (and I'm talking ones caused by nothing, rather than ones with understandable triggers), and a lot of wibbly wobbly timey wimey things happening to my sleep schedule.

Trust me, my dear, I will not forget to ask.

My therapist expressed some concern that this would be the week that I'd have to go without the medication, as the holidays in general are always very hard on me. The week (and Monday's therapy session) were much harder on me so far than normal, but I'm hoping that we can weather the rest of the week with relatively little stress. Hur hur.

Collector's Edition

Yesterday morning I started the 24 hour urine collection. Today we get to go turn it in at the hospital and it has been slightly surreal. I've felt kind of like a weirdo carefully pouring my pee from the nun's cap into the collection jug every time I've gone to the bathroom. Now I get to go to the lab and walk up to the first unsuspecting person in an MCV uniform and say, "Hey, here's my pee! Have a good day!"

Adventures in diabetes!

Also, I'm pretty sure that I didn't drink much water yesterday so hopefully I won't get yelled at for being a bit dehydrated. I'm also hoping that my kidneys aren't actually damaged. I have a small concern for that, considering I'd gone so long without very good control of my blood sugars before. I already have some nerve damage in my extremities because of it. I really don't need kidney damage!

Gaaah all I can think of is Steel Magnolias.

Marriage: You're doing it wrong

Matt doesn't often do things that hurt my feelings. When he does, he has the best of intentions. I want to preface this by saying that I'm pretty sure he was trying to make a joke this morning, but it just came out insulting.

I woke up early and went downstairs to cook breakfast. I made french toast and brought him up a plate of that with a banana. So far a good start to the day, right? I started putting up laundry, feeling further useful when we were goofing around and I made like I was going to knock him over the head with the laundry basket.

"It's a good thing my aim wasn't off and I didn't really hit you in the face," I joked with a smile.

"Even better that you didn't lose your balance and kill me," he said, and then laughed. "That would be a shame.... wouldn't it?"

I chuckled and nodded and then that's when he said it. Matt's famous verbal vomit.

"After all, if I died, you wouldn't be able to get your hands on the paycheck."

I stopped, and turned to him to stare. What? Suddenly all my insecurities over not working came flooding in. We're still waiting to hear back from the school district after I paid for my background testing, and I'd honestly expected it to come back clean and I'd be working by now. It worries me, and I've been feeling pretty useless by not contributing.

It took a couple of minutes of my staring in disbelief at him before he realized what he'd said. "You know," he added lamely, "to pay bills and stuff..."

I'm still mad over it, but I finished laundry, picked up around the room, cooked lunch and didn't even poison his soup. Because I'm a good little wife, but also apparently a gold digger.