Technology is out to get us

This announcement will come as a total non-shock to many of you who follow me on Twitter, as I recently inadvertently publicly tweeted what was supposed to be a direct message. I blame my phone. You see, I was replying to a DM from someone and forgot that when you reply by phone, it is a TEXT MESSAGE so it replies to TWITTER, not to the person who messaged you. You still need to type the “DM @person” unless you want to broadcast what seems like a weird sideways hint to the entire internet, like maybe a tweet referencing mysterious “home tests” that were “all negative.”

Incidentally, I learned something recently, and it is that cheap pregnancy test strips bulk ordered from Amazon apparently have a shelf life.

Yes, folks, we’re going to have another baby. Sometime in December. I’m tennish weeks along. I’d know more precisely, but I don’t have the exact date of my LMP. This makes me sound like I have a breezy/irresponsible devil-may-care attitude towards such things, but in actuality, I have charts and graphs and observations. I don’t HAVE to remember the date of my LMP because it’s on the chart. You know? The chart? The one Nora found and stole and put somewhere? Else? I’m sure I’ll find it in late December some time.

Yeah, so about five weeks ago I went to the doctor to find out what in the holy hell was wrong with me, because something was not right. Not right at all. And the home tests! Were negative! In fact, I think I deserve some kudos for restraining myself and not googling “early menopause.” Unless maybe I did. Yeah, I probably did. The doctor’s office spends a bit more on test kits, however, so everything was cleared right up. Things were still kind of terrible for a while, though, because the stuff that was not right? Was in my brain. It was like I had post-partum depression early. Partum depression, I guess. So while it was somewhat helpful to know that there was a simple biological explanation and I had only gone mad temporarily, I was still in the midst of it sitting there in the doctor’s office, and the news did not exactly make me jump up with joy. There’s not a lot of jumping for joy when everything about life is totally awful.

I remained in the midst of it until about a week ago, and I have to tell you it feels so good to be ME again. I no longer storm around the house every morning, slamming cabinets and resenting the entire world for not sending in someone ELSE to clean the bathroom for a change and do you think that another person in this house could deign to sweep the goddamn floor once in a while? It was awful. And the worst part of that was how my kids could not even look cross-eyed at me without my taking it as a personal attack on my sanity. They could do nothing right. It felt like they were just pick-pick-picking at me every second of the day. I was just so angry, all the time.

To name one specific example, in the throes of this depression I took the kids to my niece’s birthday party, and I had some trouble finding the location. It was in a play center in an office park, and there was a sign at the entrance to the lot, but no second sign pointing the way to the waaaay back of the lot. I drove around that stupid lot for about five minutes and could not find the place to save my life. I had to call my brother, who directed me back out onto the main road – a BUSY road that I now had to take a LEFT TURN onto – around the corner and back IN to the stupid office park where I found that had I only kept going straight to the back in the FIRST place I would have FOUND the stupid playspace FIVE MINUTES AGO.

I seethed about that for at least thirty minutes. I seethed at the people who decided to put something like that at the BACK of the lot, I seethed at whoever was in charge of signage for not including a second sign, I seethed at the traffic on the busy road, and I seethed at my brother for making me take a LEFT TURN onto a BUSY ROAD. It was an extremely rational and reasonable response to a few minutes of inconvenience, obviously.

When I wasn’t angry at everyone and everything, I was crying from sadness or loneliness or guilty feelings over being a hateful person or a combination of all three. Or else I was dry heaving, and feeling sad and angry and resentful about it. I was pure joy to live with, believe me.

I did consider antidepressants, but I was trying to give my hormones a few weeks to settle down a bit. My doctor and I discussed it, and had I not been feeling better by twelve weeks I would have tried them, because nine months is a helluva long time to feel like that. But the fog lifted during the past week, and I have been in a good mood even though the weather is dark and rainy and cold, I still have to clean the bathroom and sweep the floor, and I continue to spend a lot of quality time dry heaving over the toilet. On the upside, I clean the toilet much more often seeing as I have to stare into it several times a day. (To clarify, the upside there is not that I clean the toilet much more often, it’s that we more often have a clean toilet.)

Best of all, I am once again enjoying my kids. My kids who are not, as it turns out, evilly conspiring to drive me crazy. In fact, they’re actually pretty cute. I kind of like them. Another one seems like a great idea to me.