This Marriage and Chronic Illness

                         I talk openly about the fact that I suffer from a couple of chronic illnesses. I talk openly about how those illnesses affect me, probably too much, I don't know. One thing I think I don't give much voice to, is how those chronic illnesses have affected my marriage, or how when one half of a long term relationship gets struck down by an illness that changes them in a profound way, how the dynamic in the relationship can change and how then, the real struggle for survival can begin.  

                         Leslie and I were married for about eighteen or nineteen years, chugging along just fine and minding our own business when I was struck by my migraines and my thyroid decided to stop functioning. We lived in New Jersey at the time, all on our own, far from any real support system and when I got sick, even though my Mom came to care for me for a several visits, for the most part, Les was left to deal with everything pretty much all on his own. I was very sick. I needed hospitalizations for the month long Status Migrainosis that was attacking my body, I needed HEAVY psych drugs to flood my system to help bust out that headache. Drugs that made me a shambling mound of a human, drugs that completely shut down my personality and took away every ounce of energy I had. On top of that, I was dealing with the fact that my thyroid was malfunctioning and I wasn't getting enough medication for that. This was just the tip of the ice berg.

                       It is now four years later and we are just beginning to emerge from the worst of the hell that has been these illnesses that have eaten away at our lives. I am still on meds that affect my personality. I am still dealing with sub-par energy levels thanks to the Hashimoto's. I have migraines on a daily basis. I go for Botox treatments every three months. Things are much better though. I am almost myself for most of the time. I have returned from the edge.Though there are more bad days than I care to think about.

                        Through it all, my husband has stood by my side. He has cared for the kids, helped with dinners, made hundreds of trips to the grocery store, he has held me while I cried, he has made hundreds of pharmacy runs...just... so much stuff you can't even imagine, we have even managed to homeschool the kids through this but mostly because of the strength and dedication of my husband. Most of all though? He has shown a love and a spirit of grace and patience towards a chronically ill partner that is rare to see. 

You can't possibly know when you marry someone at the age of twenty, what will come down the road to meet you in the dark. You can't know the monsters that might be waiting for you. You can only hope that your love and friendship will get you through the years to come. I am a very lucky woman, my husband is kind and considerate, patient, funny, and dedicated. He has loved me through these long years of sickness. He has loved me on my worst days. I guess I'll keep him around for another few years or so.

End of the Season

          The competition season for gymnastics has come and gone. We have all done our part. Ev has practiced and worked hard and done her best. Les and I have opened up our wallets. Liam has sat patiently at the various meets and practices.
          Saturday was the Florida State Championships for USAGC Levels 4&5. Ev had 2 competitions this season and qualified! So yeah... we went. Her group started at 8 am, so thankfully the comp took place in Fort Myers, only a 22 minute drive away. She competed well, had fun and ended her season on a high note with her best All Around score of the season (33.175)and brought home a trophy for ninth in her age group. I know, I know, I say it all of the time but, I am truly very proud of her and all of her hard work. She has fun and really enjoys what she does. I was especially proud yesterday when her coach told me that Ev was such a great representative for their gym.
          I made up a little video of her best performances this year, take a look if you want.
                                                                    Gymnastics 2015

On Being Big, Bold and Beautiful

                This is a recent picture of me, it's a pretty good representation of how I look right now at my current weight. My current weight, I will admit, is not really ideal. When I step on a scale, the numbers that roll around and pop up are not ones that I particularly wish would happen...however, I suffer from PCOS, Hashimoto's Hypothyroidism and Chronic Migraines. The first two conditions keep my hormones out of whack and that last one keeps me on maintenance meds that mess with your weight (gain weight-not loose weight -no, dear God, never loose weight). These are all things I try to keep in mind when I look in the mirror, or when the self dis-like or hate start to creep in. 

                I had to go to the doctor on Friday, the OB/GYN. It was a visit to establish care, set up new birth control pills for hormonal control of the PCOS and a few other issues. The visit was going well, and I was really liking the Doctor and her thoroughness, until, that is, she decided, to bring over the little diagram of "the plate", you know, the modern version of the food pyramid, and start telling me about how I should be making my dinner plate look, about how, I should be using more control since I just moved down here and remember that I wasn't on vacation all of the time so I should stay out of the restaurants that are on every corner, how I should really consider looking at ....... she really didn't get much farther.

           I understand that, as a medical professional people feel that they have a job to do and discussing "obesity" with at risk patients is one of them. Fine. However you just spent about 40 minutes with me going over my medical history and I think it should have been apparent I have about 12,000 legit reasons I might be overweight, especially that one time at band camp when I told you I had been under-medicated with my thyroid for at least three years (probably) and I was just now on a dosage that seemed to be helping my body. I spoke up for myself, right then and there. I refused to let her make me feel bad about being overweight. I refused to walk out of that room thinking that it was my eating that put me in this position. Do I eat like a health nut? No. But I don't eat a complete slob either. I eat sane foods at sane portions and I know about "the plate" thank you very much. I try as hard as I can to be comfortable in this flawed body and I do not need the help of random medical people beating me down, so I just wouldn't allow it. Not conversationally, not in my head. 

                  I can't afford to feel bad about who I am anymore. I have a daughter and she needs to see that I like who I am so that as she moves forward with her life, she can like who she is. Plus, I don't want to walk around not liking myself anymore, it's no fun and if you don't like yourself, no one else will like you either. 

The Boy That Ate the World

This is a picture of Liam, when he was known only Ao Zhuang and he had no family to call his own. He looks pretty good in this picture, some chub on the cheeks, a little hair on his head...but this picture was taken right before he went to surgery for his cleft lip repair. As his mother, I have been able to put a few things from his story together and all I will say here is that he had to have intensive care from an American non-profit foundation called Love Without Boundaries to help him gain the weight necessary to meet the safety requirements for surgery.  And then things get crazy for this little guy...healing homes and foster care and back to the orphanage to wait for months for some strangers to come pick him up....not an easy start on life, not by any stretch of the imagination. But he came home with us and we all did the work and we started to see this wonderful boy emerge from the trauma and the wreckage of his beginnings.

He just fought and fought and worked hard. And believe me, he had to work hard. He was cleft affected with an open palate that affected his speech, he was adopted at a time where the brain looses its first language before it begins to acquire the new language, he had no idea how to do anything but survive in an orphanage and now he was expected to fit into a family, he had to undergo surgeries...even though he now had a family, still life was tougher on this kid at that young age than most people ever have to face and we were seeing this great kid emerge and thanking our lucky stars that he was our son.

And time passed...we have faced may things together as a family since Liam has been with us. All of the regular, garden variety stuff that families face but also all of the stuff adoptive families take on; questions about birth families, bad dreams, feelings of abandonment, stress and anxiety that link directly back to the loss of your first family, issues of being a post-institutionalized child...but most of these things were about emotions linked to abandonment and birth families. Little did I know he was struggling with something else, something just as elemental and fundamental to the human spirit, something that post-institutionalized children deal with but I thought Liam was unaffected by because  well...here's the deal:

I knew as an adoptive Mom going in, adopting an older child (Liam was 22 months old when we met him), that one trigger issue might be food, and it was initially. We would have to watch this kid like a hawk or he would cram so much food into his mouth, that he would choke himself because with a 4th degree cleft palate he could get LOTS of food in there- like lots. I had to out him on an infant regime of being fed, every two hours or so- I still had him on a bottle, with snacks. I also fed him first, before anyone in the house, so he would see that he was going to get his share. I let him sit near me in the kitchen while I was cooking or on the counter so he could be around food more. I would give him little baggies of small snacky things to carry. My plan worked and gradually his food anxieties left and he stopped cramming food into his mouth and stopped inhaling his meals and stopped trying to fight Ev for food. And eventually he became relaxed about food and a really good eater like Ev, he will eat what he needs and pass up on things, even say,  "No thank you" to dessert if he is full, he will just stop eating anything if he thinks he has had enough, he can tell you what healthy foods are versus junk foods and prefers the healthy stuff. 

 The other night at the dinner table when Liam asked me how much a human could eat at one time and I answered him with a technical answer that he didn't like and he got serious, alarm bells started going off in my head. (klang! klang! klang!) I asked him why he asked me that and with his answer I fell into a rabbit hole of heartbreak. He said that sometimes he thinks about eating up the whole world, all of the food in it, all of the trees, all of the cars, all of the houses, drinking up everything but then leaving just one slice of cheese to eat later. I asked him if he knew why he thought about this. His answer was sure and immediate, he told me that he has dreams of being hungry, "hungry, mama, very hungry and thirsty and not being able to find food or drinks and no one helping me" These are the moments my friends when I would almost trade being an adoptive parent with anyone, because to sit there and realize fully the pain and trauma your children have that you are almost incapable of healing for them is absolutely unbearable. I inhaled deeply and tried, the best I could to gently help Liam face, head on, the reasons why he was having these dreams, why he was feeling this way and to reassure him that he would never, ever again in his life have a hungry day-not as long as I was his Mama (and how long am I going to be your Mama? -forever! he shouts in response). This too, is hard, to take their past and put it into words, to SAY that facts right into their sweet faces, the faces that make up your whole world. But I know no other way. Truth, communication, love, togetherness-these are the things I hope will be the things my children need from me to make a bridge from that past through this loving now to a bright and blinding future.

*Liam knows that I was going to write about this, I talked about it with him and he gave me his permission. He thinks its ok for people to read this because he knows that we have lots of adoptive friends and he thinks this might help someone.

Writing Challenge

My friend Nicole put me onto this blog writing challenge for the rest of the year and I thought it might be a nice way to finish out 2015 and a good way to kick-start the old blogging juices. It's pretty simple, the challenge is to just blog once a day for each day in December. The point is not to stress about it, not to beat yourself up if you miss a day, just do your best and blog as much as you can.

Blogging Challenge!

The above is a link that you can go to, to check out some of the other blogs that are participating in the challenge. And I'm off.....

So There's This Thing Called Facebook

     I have recently started this blogging thing again and I have quickly realized why I ever started it in the first place. I just like to have a place to out my thoughts down and maybe put in a picture or two and blogging was a way to do that and also let my family that lived a few states away keep in touch. Then Facebook came along and I started doing that, so blogging felt a bit redundant at times, so I slowly moved away from it. Now I'm back bitches!!!!
     Some of that is because on here I tend to behave myself a bit more, I am consciously aware that this space is more for my entire family unit and our memories and I won't be as prone to put political stuff on here, but it's mostly because I like having a bit more space to talk about the subject I'm blathering on about and a bit more time to use for adding pictures and maybe some video.
In the recent past that old FB has given me grief. I do tend to be opinionated and I just can't seem to stop putting things on my wall about my political views or issues that get my blood boiling, no matter how many times I promise myself I will keep things light and about me and my family. Then, I go ahead and post something and invariably someone forgets the number one FB rule, "If you don't like it, you just don't leave a comment" and I just sort of black out and either start defending myself (which leads to HUGE issues) or I just start un-friending people. Listen, I started the whole un-friending after a huge personal issue came up over FB and a political view got way out of hand so now, I just tell myself, "If this person and I are that diametrically opposed and they can't keep their fingers off of their keyboard, then they don't need to be looking in on my life."
     On the positive side of FB, I have 133 friends on there that I have contact with. They make me laugh, wish me well when I am sick, wish me Happy Birthday, watch my children grow, laugh at my stupid jokes, tolerate my political crap, listen to me rant about animal cruelty, put up with my extreme geekery, love me despite my back yard water feature, support me in dark times. Some of my FB friends are real life friends, some are family and some are just people I met online and never met in real life but whom I have been online with now for so long, that I would just walk right up and hug and start chatting away with (you know who you are).
     I'm going to keep doing both, blogging and Facebooking. You will more than likely get an overlap of pictures, because my kids are old and sodded and will only allow me to take so many anymore (the ingrates). Read along if you want. I'll just be here doing my thing, because it makes me happy. You know, like a room without a roof.

Liam and His Kung-Fu

When we moved here, we realized it was time to start Liam in a year round activity. For awhile he wavered between martial arts and gymnastics but, eventually his love of fighting and whooping ass took over and he chose Kung-Fu. I wasn't sure, at first, how it was going to go, he is Liam after all. A bit clumsy, a little goofy, sometimes a bit difficult to focus...but, to my surprise he is thriving! He loves it.
He goes into class, behaves himself, focuses and really enjoys the things he is learning there. He too works hard at his chosen craft. In October, he tested for, and passed for his yellow stripe on his belt. That was quite a moment for him, his first big solo achievement in life. He had worked hard for it, practicing kicks and blocks every night, making sure he knew his bow and the stretch routine. You know that is all very hard work and dedication for a little guy but he did it and he was happy about it.
Sometimes his Si-fu Mr. Yes even tells me that he uses Liam as an example to the other boys as to how they should be behaving in class! He goes three nights a week and he is always happy to go. I am also happy about the fact that he has made a gaggle of friends that he calls his "peeps" and they all get along and seem to help each other out and have fun in class and after.

USAGC 4

We moved to Florida 6 months ago and in that time, my little gymnast has had to work hard. You see, there was a gap in her training due to the move and that is hard for a gymnast anyway. Then when we started at her gym, we learned that they did not have the program she was used to being in, in New Jersey, that she would have to train and compete in the USAGC branch. USAGC, for those of you who don't know, just really means that the judging is more picky, that every little wobble or bounce gets a deduction, every little turn of the foot they don't like gets a deduction, if your hands aren't held right they give you a deduction...It also means that there is no longer the luxury of picking your own music for floor routines, or designing your own floor routine-everyone does the same thing. It's tougher all around. Also, she just had to catch up on skills.
Well, she has worked and worked and worked. She has listened to her coaches, she has tried and failed and tried again. She has made us proud by managing to work so hard but still have fun and keep loving her sport. She comes home after every practice completely worn out but smiling and laughing and telling us stories of her gym mates and tales of her training. She leaves that gym exhausted and sweaty, smiling and ready to get back in there the next practice. The thing I love most? When she goes to a competition, even if she falls on the beam, or she doesn't get her squat on, she says, "That was a great competition! I had fun. Thanks for letting me go." Every time.
I still remember taking her to her very first gym practice, she was three years old, a very shy and still chubby little thing that refused to go out onto the mats unless I went with her. She would reluctantly go through the motions for the first few times but soon enough, she started to really just want to get there and get out on the mats and start jumping and tumbling. She never looked back. I can't tell you how many less we have gone through but I can tell you this, I hope we have hundreds more because she loves this and even if she never makes it to the Olympics, it has been good for her spirit and it has made her strong in her body and her mind. I have to give credit to gymnastics for helping my little daughter go from being a tiny, weak baby to the strong muscled young lady with an 8 pack that can haul in more groceries than I can.

Yesterday Was National Adoption Day

The Saturday before Thanksgiving every year is known as National Adoption Day. If you are an adoptive family, like mine, this is something you just kind of know. If you are an adoptive Mom, similar to me, this day can fill you with mixed feelings. Those mixed feelings stem from the fact that most people take this day and use it as a big advertisement for Adoption, almost as if to say, "Hey! Look, this is what everyone with a beating heart in their chest SHOULD be doing." I am here to say though, that adoption is not something that everyone should be doing.
Adoption is something that you should do only if you have considered it carefully and purposefully. Because, you see, the end result of adoption is having a child, and being that child's parent forever, no matter what, and that is quite a big deal. The biggest deal of all, as far as I'm concerned.
Adoption is rough. Adoption is messy. Adoption takes time, lots and lots of time. Adoption is expensive. Adoption has issues with bonding, both child to parent, and parent to child. Adoption is amazing. Adoption is life changing. Adoption is life. Adoption is love. Adoption is the miracle in my life that gave me the two greatest kids on the planet. In short, adoption is just like making a family in any other way, messy and full of growth and love for everyone involved and you, nor I would have it any other way.
Even though I feel this way about adoption and being a parent, I do not feel that adoption should be advertised and pushed off on everyone on Adoption Day. And I have an even greater problem with Orphan Sunday. I feel that a greater purpose would be served if we could just show adoptive families as we are.

Families just like everyone else, just with a different start. Let's just let people know that if biology isn't working, there is something else out there that can work for them. And at the end of the adoption road there is love eternal. That is what National Adoption Day means to me. 

My Tumbling Bean

Evelyn has been in gymnastics since about, oh….. yea high….
   

Actually, this was taken after she had been tumbling around for about 18 months or so. When I first put her in gymnastics, I had no clear idea of what I was doing, we lived in North Carolina and that was the only program that she would deem to go to. It was a big gym that had all of the big mats laid out and the girls were so little and chubby that the coaches would just run them through these little obstacle courses. 

Then we moved to Ohio and her second gym, in the picture above, was where she really got moving, little cartwheels, and jumping, holding onto the uneven bars…I could watch her muscles getting stronger! She loved it. We kept going. She kept growing.

Then we had to move to New Jersey and she thought she would just die. Little did she know that Blake's Gymnastic's and Miss Tracey were just about to enter her life and make gymnastics EVEN BETTER. Ev' love of gym is so great that, before we even had furniture here, we had her signed up for gym and she was going. 

All I can say about gymnastics for her as a person is this, there have been no negatives. She is a strong minded person and I believe that gymnastics help her learn how to develop that side of herself in a positive way. She has to come up with the determination to go to practice day after day and week after week, on her own- and she does. Gymnastics comes with a lot of disappointments, a lot of falling as your muscles learn these tricks over the years and you have to be tough to keep taking that kind of beating. Still, she keeps it fun, she is always smiling and ready to go. 

As her Mom, I love it because I see the teen girls in gym who are dedicated being in a group together and they have no time for shenanigans, nor do they want shenanigans in their lives as that would make their scores drop and who wants that?

I have compiled some slide shows of Ev's meets from her years as a gymnast. Feel free to watch as many or as few as you like. Please keep in mind that these skills are works in progress. Also with things like her vault? For this year she just moved up to a new level so she had to switch over to "the big vault" and if you watch close through the videos, you can see her improvement. I have been very proud of her, watching her work hard getting strong enough to get over that thing! First off, you have to remember that she only weighs 47 pounds so she has had to learn how to really pound the spring board to get any bounce and then she has to get those legs back together and over the back end and nail the landing!! And never once has she cried or thrown a fit or refused to go to gym, she eats up the challenge, she wants to go. I love her. 

                                                                Her First Show Ever
                                                                       

                                                                      NJ States 2013

NJ States 2014

Already Looking Back On This One

As I am experiencing this Christmas with my husband and children, I am aware of the fact that I will look back on it as one of the best Christmases ever. Somehow, we are right at that junction where everything is just right and I have been trying to take the time and be conscious of that fact.

Evelyn is 9 and still believes. Liam is 5 and so, he is a firm believer and will remember the way things go next year. Ev and I are baking cookies together. The tree seems perfect in its imperfections. Les is a wonderful Papa and keeps all of the traditions alive.

The things I have loved watching my children do or be excited about this year are: paper chains to count down the days, the traditional movies, going to Grandmas, hearing Liam trying to figure out which a morrow HoHoHo will be coming on, dis wom or de utter a morrow, watching Ev write a whole story book for her Papa including an "about the Author" page, and just the general feeling of innocent near psychotic joy as they progress through the countdown to Christmas. They were both locked in their rooms alone for a time today, wrapping gifts for the family, though it is uncertain where Liam procured his give-aways.

I hope that everyone I know is enjoying their family as much as I am this year, it is all I could wish for any man or woman.

Just Watch It

There's a documentary going around the adoption community. I was not going to watch it, I mean, every one said it made them cry and MY adoptions have been completed so… then some adoptive moms I really respect mentioned that they watched it and I started remembering our trips to China and our first days with Fu Mei and Ao Zhuang. I queued it up o Netflix Watch Instantly. I watched it. I cried. I remembered. Oh I remembered so many things.





So many other things came into focus though. The impotent rage Les and I experienced during the wait for our children. Our inability to adequately express to family and friends just exactly what we were waiting for and maybe why those specific little face were THE faces we would now fight hell and The Devil himself to bring home.

Abandonment alone is the single most devastating thing that can happen to a child, even if that child is found and cared for very quickly, that loss of the birth mother leaves a gap, a black hole of pain that will stay with a child as they mature forever. Add to that the indifferent care of an institution in any country and now the heavy hand of the US Government---these children have very little or no chance at all to find love or security or opportunities food a day or week with adequate food even. They will know hunger and neglect of every kind for every single moment of their lives. I am not exaggerating this. Please take one hour and 22 minutes, watch this video and see what you think about the US Hague Convention Laws that deal with International Adoption and how they strong arm third world countries. Then you can just BE AWARE, spread the word, sign petitions, look for this issue when voting.

As an adoptive parent, you are never quite done with the issue of adoption. The adoptive country becomes apart of your daily life, the recipes creep into your cooking. For Les and I we really have Ev because of China's politics and we have Liam because of certain beliefs the Chinese people hold about a medical condition. As stated above, the abandoned, institutionalized child will remain traumatized for their entire life and we do deal with that, each child on a different level and in their own way- but it IS there. During the movie, I was particularly drawn to the family that adopted a boy and a little girl from Ethiopia because their experience was so very similar to ours; older boy, younger girl and the way the mother spoke of waiting for her son to emerge from the institutionalized behavior gave me chills of recognition.

 Don't watch this and grieve for my children, they are here, they have made it! Celebrate that fact!! Evelyn and Liam and all of the children here are thriving and doing well and they are regular American kids and don't ever tell them how lucky they are. Their parents are the lucky ones, we truly are. I would have died if that Ayi had not placed that tiny 14 pounds of nothing into my arms that sweltering day in May in the middle of Jiangxi province, I just would have died without my Evelyn. And we would not be complete without our jokester of a son, our Liam.

The parents need the children. The children need the parents. Its really quite simple in the end.

Blogging vs Facebook

Sometimes it is hard to sit down and write a blog after you have jotted a few quick sentences about your day on fb. You think, "aw, they got the jist", and tend to be lazy and leave it at that so that is one reason my blogging has fallen off a bit - okay- a lot- lately. The other reason is that I have honestly just been depressed. Just back to the wall depressed and I have had no energy or desire to do anything other than maybe exist.

If any of you out there have ever dealt with depression…it's just a…you can't describe it. It's like being in outer space. No sound, no movement. Nothingness. You just fight against black nothingness. And the blackness wins. Day after day after day. Until one day you see a spark. The spark is different for each person, but is makes you start to pull and fight. It's work. I'm trying.

 I'm still on a lot of meds that don't really help because they keep me overweight and sleepy. I have had quite a few issues with my Neurologist and keeping in touch with him as he made a move from one facility to another. I need Botox every three months so I can get off of these oral meds and then I won't feel so bad physically and that will help oh so much! So I am in touch with him now and he is arranging the Botox at his new office.

Meanwhile…The kids are terrific!
Ev is thriving at public school. She has friends, loves math, loves her teacher and eats up having homework. In gymnastics she has moved up a level and her competition season this year should be much more nerve wracking for me to watch. At home, she is nearly the dream child except that she is driven nuts by Liam and she is a bit nasty to him so we are dealing with that issue but I expect that will all settle out when Liam figures out that she didn't hang the moon.

Liam is still evolving as a little person and as a part of the family. This is amazing to me because the evolution that we are seeing is not subtle. It's a daily thing. I'm talking about an adoption thing here, about more and more native personality coming out. Les and I thought we were nuts until we went to Parent Teacher Conferences and the teacher that had him last year said the same thing! He is doing well in school, soaking up learning there and here at home. He loves to play board games and cards. He ca not wait to play baseball in the Spring. He is a very snuggly wuggly little man and I can't get enough of that.

Les is working and working and doing more than his fair share of things here at home to help me keep up. I just do not know how I could manage without him.