Hello, Darkness

You know how it is, the first few days go by. You’re nervous, hesitant. You’re still on guard.

Where is it? Your hands tumble past bottles. One crashes to the ground, but you don’t even care for once that you might wake up the sleeping toddler. Where is it? There’s not enough time, you’re already too late, you know your attempts are futile. You look anyhow.

The days turn into weeks. Do you dare hope? The weeks turn into months and you get really lazy. You get lax in your ways. You forget the old, scary routines. The things that were once so second nature. The things that were always in sight, always in the same place, get shuffled around. Get misplaced, pushed to the back, pushed underneath, packed and never unpacked. You just don’t need them anymore. It’s such a sweet relief. Who knows when you’ll need them next! Will you ever need them again? Who knows! You’re so carefree.

Your hands knock random toiletries into the sink. Hairspray. Perfume. Toothpaste. That’s not it, that’s not it. Where was it? Where could it be? It took it to Boston. I took it to the beach. Was that it? Was that the last time? When did I last see it? A sob catches in your throat. Don’t cry! You hiss at yourself angrily. That will just make it worse, don’t cry. But you cry anyhow, unbidden and unwanted.

How did it come to this? You know exactly how it came to this. You started messing around with your dosage. You thought you knew better than the nice doctor who wrote your prescription. You figured things were going pretty well, other than that whole little problem. But was that one nasty little side effect worse than this? To be fair, non-stop diarrhea is pretty lousy. But was it worth this? Was it worth the chills and the shakes, the pain and the aches that you’ll have tomorrow, the time that you’ll lose, the lack of sleep and ensuing irritation that you’ll have with Jelly?

You finally stop yourself. Just stop. And think. You close your eyes and try to remember where you saw it. Your dresser. Your messy, messy dresser top. Strewn with clothes, toys, jewelry, a plastic toy baby bottle. You run to the bedroom, but you know it’s already too late. You stand there for a moment with the pill bottle in your hand, one brief moment of success, then turn around and run back to the bathroom, the bile already in your throat, the dinner you just finished eating less than 20 minutes ago ready to escape. You crash to your knees and heave into the toilet, splashing vomit into your hair like it’s the first time you’ve done this.

You heave until nothing else comes up. You wipe your mouth, your forehead, and crawl down the stairs. You repeat the familiar old process that you haven’t done in so long. Hands shaking and teeth chattering, you force yourself to go through the motions, reminding yourself that doing it now will make all the difference later. You pour yourself some ice water, drag the almost-forgotten electric blanket from underneath the couch, dim the lights, quiet the television, and curl yourself into a ball. The headache is roaring now, an angry monster. You can’t believe you didn’t recognize it earlier, at Jenny’s first soccer practice. Maybe you just didn’t want to.

The good news is, this time it’s not as bad. It doesn’t seem to last as long, or be as awful. You tell yourself that no matter what the side effects are, to go back to the regular dosage immediately. You are NOT a doctor.

And now –

SOCCER.

It's the socks. They do it to me, too

She's so sporty! She gets that from neither her mother, nor her biological father.

Mostly she was just happy to run around, which is why I signed her up. Yay!

That kid in the pink and I are going to have a fight. She kept kicking her own ball onto the other side, then would take Jelly's instead of getting hers. She's also a whiner. I think she might generally just be an a-hole, her parents certainly seemed that way. She's going to get accidentally knocked down one of these evenings. Not that I would ever do that to a four-year old. Nope, not me.

One quick note. This is soccer skills. I am not one of those crazy people who puts their very young child in soccer where they are expected to compete in games where a coach screams at them to ‘Get their head in the game!’ and that kind of thing. Although I did totally screw up right out of the gate, because I didn’t realize they had mistaken Jellybean for a four-year old. Yes, a FOUR YEAR OLD. So they kind of had some high expectations for her at the first class. But she did great, and will have even MORE fun at this week’s class because, you know, she’ll actually do two-year old stuff.

Also, I believe this qualifies me as a soccer mom. Please send me bumper stickers, for I am officially true evil. Srsly, you should have seen some of those other parents. I'm not ready for that.