Life with the Possessed | velvetverbosity.com

Where Did She Come From?

Nick — Tue, 27 Oct 2020 09:23:05 +0000

I gave birth, almost fourteen years ago, to an unbelievable life force. Loud, forceful, funny, outgoing, athletic, brave-as-all-hell, thoughtful, organized, and stunningly beautiful. Everything I’m not. How does that happen?

Today, she and I were driving around looking for a parking spot, and in one of the few parking lots, there was a car just sitting, idling. The first time we drove by, we looked in and took note that the occupants of the car were a young, good-looking couple. As I drove past the car several minutes later, for the second time, I wondered aloud what they were doing just sitting there. It was annoying me for no particular reason. I thought maybe they knew something I didn’t, like that in two minutes half the stuffed parking lot would clear out, and they were just patiently waiting for some prime downtown parkage.

After I grumbled to myself, “what the heck are they doing?”, my daughter promptly replied, “They’re being hot…just give them a minute”.

Out of the mouths of babes…

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A Primal Scream

Nick — Fri, 23 Oct 2020 09:36:19 +0000

Two weeks ago, about two hours later than now, I received the phone call no parent wants to receive. Some would say I co-created that reality through my incessant worry that I would receive that phone call one day and it would be about my son. He has been on an addictive self-destructive path that has been increasing in intensity. The story is so long, so full of sorrow, desperation, anxiety, worry, love and anger. Last year, after several years of an ever tightening battle, I found a treatment for EK (I sometimes refer to him as Evil Knievel, but I don’t want to keep typing that because then I get traffic to my blog that should never find its way here) that worked. Neurofeedback. It worked to quiet his brain in places where things were on fire and causing him to feel and act crazy and self-destructive. After a month, I felt myself exhale. It was really working, and things weren’t perfect, but they were so much better. We all felt life was more manageable again.

Then my insurance denied me. I was making too much money, but not enough to buy my own. I had to reapply, and in that window of insurancelessness, our neurofeedback provider and awesome therapist filled up her schedule book and wouldn’t be able to get EK in for months. She was good, and word got around (partly thanks to me). I searched around for a new provider, but most wouldn’t work with teenagers, and the rest either didn’t take insurance or were full.

Things started ramping up with EK, and we all felt it. A month and a half ago, I was just getting ready to put my head to my pillow when EK walked in to my room and said, “Mom, I need to get back into treatment or be on meds or something. I’m starting to not feel well again. I feel like I’m slipping back to where I was before.” The room was dark, lit only by the hall light, but I could see the tension in his face. It was a look I knew all too well. The look of my son struggling with an inner chaos that he didn’t know how to right, how to control, how to stop. I was scared for him, and I knew if I didn’t find someone soon that things were going to get really out of control again and there wouldn’t be anything I could do to stop it or help it. I told him I would make another round of calls the next day, first thing.

I spent the next several days calling every provider. Every one told me the same thing I had heard before. They were full, didn’t work with teenagers, didn’t take my insurance. But each time I was given another number, and eventually that chain of numbers led to The Meek One. The Meek One was a long time therapist but new to neurofeedback. She was connected to Mother Hen (our previous provider), and was training under the area’s foremost expert in the field. She could get the protocols from Mother Hen and would not only take EK, but she would provide intensive treatment (three times a week) for free.

It was a miracle. But with all the set up, the conversations, the equipment not working right and her being too green to know how to correct it, time ran out. EK self-destructed. A series of unfortunate events, rising tensions in the house, a fight with a stranger, and feeling like a simple legal case was going to come down hard on him, he got himself good and worked up. For legal reasons I can’t disclose details. What I can tell you is that he is lucky to be alive and through his pain, and his fear, he asked to go into inpatient treatment. His assessment was yesterday and we are keeping our fingers crossed that he will get in and that it will help. I’m worried. Worried that after seven years of trying everything that this might be yet another patch that doesn’t hold him together and might make him worse. Worried that really the neurofeedback is the only thing that really works, and he won’t be able to get it while he’s “in”. Unfortunately, things have reached such a crescendo that those decisions are now out of my hands. Out of my wringing worried hands.

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Because She’s A Teenager, That’s Why

Nick — Thu, 16 Jan 2020 09:27:27 +0000

There’s a little morning ritual that my daughter likes to go through. It’s called “Not Getting Up if My Life Depended On it”. This morning, I wake her up several times, each time my assertions getting firmer and louder. Finally, she throws off the covers, pops out of the bed and brushes past me heading for the bathroom. I smile a little victory smile and go back to my room to get dressed for the day.

Several minutes into my morning prep, I realize something doesn’t feel right. Things are too…still. Too quiet.

I knock on the bathroom door. No answer. I knock again, still with no answer. There is not a sound coming from behind that bathroom door. Could it be…? I open the door and right there, on the floor, is the Mad Sister curled up on the bathroom rug! And because she’s a teenager, she is actually PUT OUT when I wake her up.

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That Was Then, This is Now

Nick — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 09:35:17 +0000

I was woken up this morning by someone’s emergency somewhere. A line of emergency vehicles sailed past my house with sirens blaring. Fire trucks I think. I buried my head deep under my pillows and pulled the comforter over my head. I wasn’t ready to be awake.

It briefly passed through my mind that whoever was the source of these emergency vehicles rushing around our hazy small town morning probably would like to be sleeping peacefully too. I felt a tinge of sorrow pass through my stomach. Then I remembered that there was a time, not that long ago, when the sound of sirens would have set my teeth on edge from the surge of adrenaline that sound immediately invoked. Back then, my son was in his “angry phase” (as he calls it). He was certainly angry, but there was more going on and it took four years of a good fight to finally land on the doorstep of the right therapist and a novel treatment called neurofeedback. Things are better now. Now I can hear a siren and feel a little irritation, and a little sympathy. Back then, a siren might be followed by a phone call; “Your son is hurt”, or “Your son is in trouble”.

Those years taxed my adrenaline system so much that I started to have responses without any triggers. I would wake up in the middle of the night drenched in sweat and terrified of something that wasn’t there. I tried meditation, therapy, and finally drugs (prescribed of course) to quiet my body’s physical response to danger that had gone haywire. It was understandable. My beloved child was drowning in a dark pond with a rescue team standing all around watching, shaking their heads and telling me they were out of options. They didn’t know what to do. It was up to me, but all of my attempts to save him only served to make him duck and dodge and go under faster. He was like a wounded wild animal, biting and thrashing against the approach of salvation.

So as I listened to the sirens fade into the morning on their way to who knows what personal despair, I could feel some sadness for a stranger that tragedy had visited, but my body was ok. It didn’t rise to fight. I knew my son was downstairs sleeping and he was ok. That was then, this is now.

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Libraries and Motherhood

Nick — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 09:32:16 +0000

I miss libraries. There are few times in my life that I miss, probably because there have been many hard times, but I loved when my children were young and I stayed home with them. I love the term, “stay at home mom”, as though “mom” needs any sort of qualifier. During those years that I “stayed at home”, I and my two children did little staying home. We did a lot of biking, walking, park visiting, people visiting, exploration of the world, and lots and lots of library visits. We were library junkies. Or rather, I was a library junkie and I dragged my kids along to get my fix.

Even though I was a young mother, and quite adamant before having children that I would NEVER have children, I found motherhood almost entirely blissful. Particularly all those hours when it was just the three of us, wandering around our life in a seemingly close to perfect symbiosis. Each day stretched out before us with infinite potential. I don’t judge it, but I’ve never understood parents who put their children in front of the television and walk away for hours at a time. I suppose it’s so they can keep the house clean. But for what? In the end, what real purpose will that have served? You bet our dishes were going to wait when there were probably caterpillars turning into butterflies right outside our door and right that very second. Life was all around us, and I didn’t want to miss a second of living through the eyes of my children as they discovered it. I was so in love with them.

So tonight, when I walked into a public library for the first time in three years, I was washed over with that melancholy nostalgia we feel when life hasn’t gone as we thought it would and we are suddenly reminded of a time that was full of blind hope. Back then, I was so sure that by sharing the world with my children that it was all going to turn out well for them, if not downright perfect. I would feel confident and satisfied as I tucked them each under one arm and read story after story out loud, complete with animated character voices. Everything, back then, was going to be alright. All those days at the library, curled in corners and chairs and beanbags and nooks reading was all the evidence I needed that life was kind and good.

As I walked through the children’s section of the library looking for my, now teenaged, son who was supposed to be there somewhere for community service to make amends for some trouble he got tangled up in, I couldn’t escape those waves of bittersweet sadness and longing. How did everything go wrong? How could it have? Why wasn’t I strong enough for my children, to keep them forever safe, forever in my lap with a book, forever ok?

When I found him finally, I wanted to be happy and carefree and beam that mother-love smile onto his face, but instead my face crumpled into haggard worry and I berated him for being late, for taking chances he shouldn’t, for making me worry, and for not being responsible. Who is this other mother that keeps eclipsing the mother I was and still want to be? How could I know then to let the dishes go, but now I lecture and nag and obsess and worry? How could I know then to not interfere with the unfolding of these two little sentient beings, but now I’ve let the hammer of cultural pressure knock me into senselessness as I hear that other mother tell them what they’ve got to be? How could I have so much grace, patience, strength and compassion back then, and now be reduced to tears, or yelling, or pleading, at the drop of a hat or a forgotten chore?

I’m going back to the library tomorrow, and every day after that until I find her again. The mother I was and still want to be. I know she’s there somewhere.

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You Know You Live with Teenagers When…

Nick — Wed, 19 Apr 2006 09:14:14 +0000

…you step out of the shower, dripping wet, and grope for a towel from the stack you just neatly folded last night, and your hand comes up empty.

No, there isn’t a single one hanging either. You can either (a) dry off with a hand towel, (b) pull your clothes on over your wet skin, or (c) run naked through the house, traumatizing the evil teenagers who used 10 towels in 24 hours.

…you buy ice cream at 9 a.m. At 10 p.m. when the house is finally quiet, you open the ice cream box (you’ve been so looking forward to this) and there is one half melted scoop left, sadly clinging to the bottom corner of the box.

…you’ve just finished lugging 20 bags of groceries into the house and spent an hour trying to find space for all the food and collapse onto the couch only to hear a voice from the kitchen, “there’s NOTHING to eat in this house!”

…socks in your house seem to live everywhere but drawers and hampers. You suspect they might walk on their own, but you can’t confirm this.

…spoons disappear. (Where DO they go?) So you have to eat your cereal with chopsticks, and that one last half-melted scoop of ice cream with a butter knife.

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Confessions of a Teenage Mother OR Velvet Verbosity Suffers from Ephebiphobia

Nick — Thu, 19 Dec 2002 09:26:43 +0000

Ephebiphobia – the fear of teenagers.

I have a confession to make. No, as the title implies, I am not a teenage mother. I am, however, a mother to two teenagers. TWO. Teenagers. That makes two of them and one of me. This is not a good ratio, in case you were wondering. In fact, if for no other reason, this is why you all who have young children should stay married. Not for the sake of the children, but for the sake of your sanity. Otherwise, after a brutal tag-team session where one teenager screams hateful things at you that would make the self-esteem of the next three generations curl up and crawl into the nearest spider web infested corner and the other teenager is two hours late and hasn’t bothered to call even though he moves through a world FULL OF CELL PHONES you will lose your grasp on sanity. It helps to have another adult around to keep it all in perspective. It helps even more if this other adult likes you and finds your breathing adorable.

The Surgeon General warns that teenagers can be hazardous to your sanity. Only you’ve never seen this warning because it’s branded onto their backsides and even though the boys wear their pants around their knees and girls’ low-rise jeans reveal more than a thong bikini, you, their parent, will never have the right to look there again. And that would be fine and good if it wasn’t that you also aren’t allowed to look directly at their face for more than .5 seconds, you’re not allowed to expect that your favorite shirts won’t disappear, to have any of the snackfood in the house, or to breathe in the wrong way because you’re annoying them. If you’re wondering why you didn’t ever notice the Surgeon General’s warning when they were still in diapers, that’s because it’s kind of like that etching on the One Ring. The warning only shows up under conditions of extreme hormonal fluctuation. And that, my friends, is the real truth about why they wear through their jeans so fast.

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100 Words on Anger

Nick — Mon, 16 Dec 2002 09:36:31 +0000

I finally got to sleep, at about 5:00 a.m. Up at 6:30 to stand outside Alba’s door to play my favorite morning game with her. Lately Alba has taken to telling me that she’s going to drop out of school. This makes me sigh an “I’m exhausted with teenagers” sigh. This makes me want to say things like, “you know, I was stupid when I was your age too, I understand.” Somehow I think the humor would not be appreciated. What it comes down to anyway is that everyone in our household has sleep problems, AND the school system is obviously cruel. The only time I saw Alba watch public access television was the time the school board was hearing arguments for and against pushing school start times up to a later hour. She watched with the same anticipation and hope as we all watched the 2008 elections. Too bad she hadn’t accepted the school system as a system of torture.

Think about it. In elementary school, when kids are up before the sun jumping on your head because they’ve been awake five minutes already and they’re bored, you look at the clock and curse the schools for not opening for another FOUR hours. Then adolescence hits, that time period of hormone induced insanity and altered sleep requirements, and the schools want you to drag your teens out of their warm beds even though they won’t wake up until just about the time school is ending. Cruelty I tell you.

It’s enough to make you angry. Good think we can live anger vicariously through my readers submissions. This week I tag Sleep Deprivation Ninja (I’m not biased or anything. Just because he’s sleep deprived has nothing to do with my pick. Honest.) Powerful piece this one:

It’s the bleeding hearts that get me, the screaming, thrashing, singing, dissident crowds, holding firm in the face of adversity. Break free from tyranny, they scream. The lollipop laggards stand back, mocking, laughing, squirreling away hidden admiration for the ones who stand. Crypto kids clap hands in code and shrink away in silence, live another day, anonymously blending with the passersby, watching from the sidelines as the riot gear cops push in.

Someone throws an apple and gets a beanbag bullet in the face.

You don’t know anger until you see it bleed out the nose of a rebel with a cause.

What’s that? You want more? Get your click on and be sure to spread the comment lurve.

Night Blogger is making sense of it all.
Follow the unfolding drama at Losing Myself.
Mama Bear on anger and forgiveness (welcome back MB!!).
I think I might be Frank Talbert.
Patsy and painful words.
Lceel does a very good impression of God.

Ok, I can’t avoid it. Let’s do something festive, shall we? Oh, and I have a surprise for you next week.

Merry

With love,

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37 Minute Countdown to Post OR How Not to Turn Nurses Into Serial Killers Like Kristen Gilbert

Nick — Tue, 19 Nov 2002 09:25:30 +0000

I just realized that even though I posted twice yesterday that it doesn’t excuse me from not posting today, and now I only have 37 MINUTES before the clock strikes midnight! I’m a little behind the ball since I spent SIX HOURS in the ER this afternoon-evening. My son, henceforth referred to as Evil Knievel, got into an accident on a friend’s dirt-bike.

“This is why I didn’t have boys!”, my mother would say.

I think it’s a little late for that.

I learned some things about emergency rooms. What else was I going to do for six hours? My laptop died after two and Evil Knievel fell asleep after three. But first, a question. Why do they call it the Emergency Room? It is not a rooooom. It is a maze of hallways, and desks, and yes, rooms. ROOMssssssss. Plural.

Now for what I’ve observed.

Our small town ER was pretty busy this afternoon. Since Evil Knievel only had three broken bones he was not a priority for a room, so we were given a nice hallway bed. Actually, he got the bed, I got the wall to lean on, until I accosted a housekeeper and asked where the nearest chair was so I could get it myself.

As I stood/sat there in the hallway I saw several nurses walk by. The same nurses, over and over. Nurses who had taken Evil Knievel’s vital signs, asked questions, examined all his sore places, and set up his paperwork. They knew us, and as the hours ticked on, they knew just how long we had been there. They were all well-seasoned, experienced nurses. Then, there was the new guy. The new guy made eye contact when he walked by. The experienced nurses did not make eye contact. They knew, when you work in the ER where no one really knows how long you’ll be waiting? DO NOT MAKE EYE CONTACT! It will only slow you down to have to answer questions that you do not have answers to. Poor new guy. He’ll learn.

I also learned that the old adage that the squeaky wheel gets the oil is true. I saw it in action. It was the most annoying patients that got out of there in under three hours. Yeah. Like the guy in the room next to our hallway? He had been waiting an hour and a half (we were well on three at that point) when I overheard this.

Nurse: I know you’ve been waiting a while but you’re next in line.

Cranky McCranky Pants: No I’m not. Don’t lie to me.

Nurse: No, you are. I don’t know how long it will be but you are next.

“I’m miserable and so shall you be”: Whatever.

Nurse: Can I get you a blanket?

What a Jerk: No. Don’t worry about me. I’m just in pain. I’m not important.

He was outta there within the next 30 minutes. Him and the little old lady who kept moaning like a scorned sea demoness, and the 20-something who wanted narcotics and cursed at the doctor when he wouldn’t deliver.

The final thing I learned is that when you sit in the hallway for six hours, not uttering a single complaint, but inquiring kindly now and then as to when you might expect a doctor, you get the best treatment they can give you. You get a free cup of coffee with four sugars and lots of cream. You get people wishing you well when you leave. You get a little bit of extra attention when they can give it because they’re just so grateful that you’re not screaming obscenities or having the gall to almost die on them. And you don’t turn them into serial nurse killers like Kristen Gilbert. And that’s a good thing.

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Sleeping In His Talk

Nick — Tue, 12 Nov 2002 09:25:11 +0000

Sleep talking is uniquely entertaining. It’s like hearing one side of a conversation. A dream-scape conversation that ends up sounding slightly psychotic, or drug-induced. My son talks in his sleep and this morning when I went to his room to wake him up, before I could say a word, he… Continue Reading Sleeping In His Talk

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