Sticky Side of Heaven


Please feel free to respond to any of my thoughts. I love interactive discussion!
My e-mail is liltoad2000@aol.com.

 
Hey All! Just thot I'd send along a noe to say that this is the unofficial "Foster Candice's Personal Growth" week. Apparently that is the theme anyway. I wish I had exicitng words to explain it all. To boil it all down into a nutshell here: I learned this week that I seek out rigidity in other people and actively try to loosen them up. Think back on all the conversations I've had with you. Doesn't it seem that I tend to play devil's advocate alot? That I always have to say something outrageous to try to shock you into thinking of another perspective? It doesn't always work and can be downright annoying when I disagree with everything. This is deeply engrained into my psyche and I am trying to figure out why I do this. I have a few hypotheses that I won't list here but if you want to call me, I'll tell you.

Will is becoming a true CODA, I'm a little shocked as I thought it would be a few more years before it manifested. What is a CODA? It's a Child of a Deaf Adult, this moniker generally is applied to hearing children rather than deaf children of deaf adults. This is a unique life situation that tends to shape a person's life in similar ways. They have their own national association and get together to share the 'burdens' of their existence. I say that 'toungue-in-cheek' but in my view the existence of having a parent that to some degree is dependent on the child can be a burden at times, depending on how the parent approaches it. Let me tell you my example and then I'll elaborate more on older kids.

Will and I were playing upstairs when, suddenly, he sat up and said 'what's that?' i listened and heard a loud car "That's a loud car driving by." Will looked at me and said "No, telephone!" I ran downstairs and sure enough, the phone was ringing. The kid just turned two!!! I was thinking he'd be 5 or 6 was when this would start, I guess not. Other examples include asking hearing children to make phone calls, interpret overhead announcements, or interpreting the waiter's specials of the day. I have promised myself that I will not force Will into the interpreter role. He may willingly volunteer, but I don't ever want him to feel a sense of obligation. That's not something a young child should have to bear.

News flash!! Will went potty in his potty chair for the first time tonight!!!!! He looked very nonchalant until he saw mommy jumping up and down, then he got excited!!

Well, it's midnight and I am officially a pumpkin, g'night all, sweet dreams!
posted by Candice at 9:03 PM

 
The things that go through my mind when it roams...goood grief! When I put Will to bed tonight he was rolling around and quite uncomfortably, maybe even painfully, rolled over on my bony elbow...and it got me thinking. Elbows are seriously inconvenient items. Often overlooked except when causing pain, elbows are highly maligned. Anyway, I couldn't think of any romantic, artistic, or poetic references to the elbow so I thought I'd hop online and do a quick search and come up with something, for sure I'd come up with something. Goodness, even knees get more acclaim, ugly things that they are. There are a million poems and songs regarding a lover's lips, their hair, their bellybuttons, but I couldn't find a single reference to the beautiful, knobbly elbow :(

Among the things I did find:
a site that tested to see if you could tell your arse from your elbow - http://www.assotron.com/arse-or-elbow/#
a guide to the 'Elbow Maneuver' which is a roll-over move in kayaking invented by some famous maverick
an online travel guide to elbow etiquette in airplanes
a rock band named, you guessed it 'Elbow', Dave Barry would be so proud
of course, numerous sites relating to golfer's elbow, tennis elbow, skater's elbow, toothbrushing elbow
a glorious site advertising elbow grease for lonely adults, those of you with delicate sensibilities don't want to know more
apparently there are quite a few places named 'Elbow': a town in Canada, an inn, a Cay, a pool bar, and a horse in Elmira
elbow pads for gardeners and cowboys
a site called "Elbows with Teeth"...don't ask me, I have no clue
a disturbing site called Elbow World that talks about the 'Flight of Stairs Driver’s-Ed Coarse' [sic]
didn't see anything relating to the funny bone but I think it is relevant here and quite painful!
posted by Candice at 7:14 PM

 
Every night when I put Will to bed, I stay with him until he falls asleep. I still convince myself that he's not big enough to face the scary dark all by himself (never mind that he's not afraid of the dark...his mom is!) Anyway, I use that hour to just be quiet and let my thoughts roam...kind of a western style meditation that I'm really good at. For some reason, my thoughts lit onto what I would do if I met a famous movie star. I was trying to use all my psychological knowledge to get inside the head and psyche of a famous person. I have all these ideas of the typical profile of a star and basically I decided that there was nothing I could say that would make me stand out from every other fan they've probably encountered. I am every other fan, just not as crazed as most. And I kinda thought, well how could I make myself special, what if I was dying of a terminal cancer and...well...my thoughts got kinda silly, I guess, but in the end I realized that there really wasn't anything special about me that wasn't also true for many other people. It seems that when young, many people dream of being something or someone, or doing something outrageously incredible and as time passes you come to the growing realization that your personal 'big bang' isn't coming, that you are going to live your life out in relative obscurity. It can be sad, maybe. It certainly makes me feel the incredible smallness of being a lone human in the great infinite universe, like a single dust speck in the Grand Canyon. All of a sudden the room felt like it was whirling and tilting through space and time with nothing to hold onto, I was a victim of my own insignificance in the great scheme of things. Who knows how long I would have wallowed in the tides of dusty universal throes, but at that utter sinking moment, my son stirred in his sleep and nestled deeper into my side. My brain turned itself inside out and considered the opposite end of the spectrum. To this tiny bundle next to me, I was the entire world. For a brief, all too brief, moment in time, no one will be more special to him than his mommy. [Currently, he won't let any other kid in daycare come near me. "That's MY mommy!" he says in the bulldog-fierce voice of a two year old]. What a paradox to simultaneously feel like universal small fry on one hand and on the other...well...Goddess of tickles and airplane rides, Creator of yummy fruit shakes. How tremendous is the responsibility of meaning EVERYTHING in the world to someone. Whatif, whatif, whatif? Yikes, I have scary thoughts I don't want to type out, there's no wood to knock on in cyberspace. Soon enough, my son will grow up and won't even want to acknowledge my existence and I'll be reduced to an insignificant speck again. That's when I'll adopt a dog.

Funnies:
- Will has decided that pulling his pants down is his new skill to practice (he is currently potty training), unfortunately he decided to practice in the produce section. I hid in the beets so no one could see me and laughed myself silly. I'm afraid I reinforced the behavior, he now thinks it's hysterical.
- He sings to me often "A b c d e f g h j l p q r t e u d v r s twinkle twinkle twinkle dee mana nana deena doo ere is umkin ere is umkin." He will do this for 15 minutes at a time.
-Tonight we went to Barnes and Noble to look for a psychology treatment book and Will discovered the escalators. We rode up and down a few times while he laughed and laughed. We get a lot of smiles from strangers. One of the attendants even demonstrated his scanner gadget thingamajig for Will.

Ooooff! Me ty ty, time to go ny ny. Hope all is well in your respective corners of the worlds! G'night folks.
posted by Candice at 8:02 PM

 
Hi!

I'm feeling a little shy about getting back on here :) It has been a long time, hasn't it. Much as I know you all love keeping up with me, this is a lower priority on my list of things to do (like job applications and dissertations). I'm mainly hopping back on here cause I've got feelings again, bothersome things, and need to blow a few of them off. Let's see how should I present them all?? I can list them: frustration, hopelessness, sheer panic, depression, anger, stupidity. There's also good stuff like love, joy, satisfaction, success, happiness but those aren't as interesting for me right now and I'm not in the mood to be funny :-P Maybe I should explain things by situation: school, job, applications, terrible two's, sleep, bills.

Gosh, I don't know.

Hmmm.

It would help if I wasn't so tired at the moment, I should go to bed. It's not unusual for me to go to bed at 8:30pm anymore. However, I started a meal in the crock pot and now I have to wait for it to finish (Beef brisket in a lemon/garlic/mushroom cream sauce...sorry Jenn). I'm doing pretty good with the food stuff. You have probably heard that I lost a few pounds, 30 or so. Funny how I thought it would make me feel better, and it does but it certainly doesn't change any of the things that I'm dealing with. I guess the most draining, even more than working 50 hours a week, is the constant battles that I do with Will, every morning and night. Almost from the moment I wake him up in the morning he doesn't want to do anything that I need him to do to get ready to go to school (even though he LOVES going there). So it ends up being a battle and he screams until I drop him off. It is such a relief to go to work. I ended up at work this week in tears because I out-shouted him for the first time ever. He had battled and cried nonstop from 6:30am when I woke him up allllllllllllll the way to the car. I gave up trying to get him into his coat and put him in the car without it (it was warm that day). Turns out the lack of coat gave him enough wiggle room to get out of his seat while I was driving. I yelled at him louder than he was screaming. That shut him up, I don't think he's ever heard me scream. We pulled over and I got him back in his seat and went to school. When I took him out he wouldn't look at me, talk to me and was as stiff as could be when I carried him in and tried to give him a hug. That evening he cried when I picked him up and didn't want to go with me. I feel like such a horrible mother that my son doesn't even want to come home with me.
posted by Candice at 7:01 PM