Today I’m 36, which has affected me more than turning 18, 21 or 30 put together.  36 means I’m closer to 40 than 30 (although Jennifer would argue that since I love to round up, I’ve been closer to 40 since I was 29).  What’s the big deal with 40?  I have no idea.  It’s just that 36 seems a bit, well, I don’t know - closer to middle-aged.

Throughout the week I’ve been doing some self-analysis to determine what is really bugging me about this birthday.  I’ve broken it into some nice bullety-points:

Where am I? 

This birthday coincides with a particularly low point in my career.  While Mike’s has taken off, mine is sort of stalled at the moment as I completely switch gears and begin to process of extricating myself from the consulting world into something that makes me a lot happier and provides me with more time and energy for my children.  My feeling of gloom about my current status is temporary, because I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.  However, I never expected to feel this way at 36, 16 (gulp) years into a career filled with a lot of hard work and intense struggle to get where I thought I should be.  Switching gears mid-stream means making no money right now and dealing with debt and staying focused on the positive.  However, for my birthday, I’d like the gift of wallowing for one day so I can fully experience the absolute terror I manage to squash the other 364 days of the year.  To remember what it was like to contribute financially to my household instead of dragging it down.  To be able to buy some new clothes without feeling guilty.  To not freak out when our air-conditioning unit coil craps out and we get an unexpected bill for $1044 and it has to go where everything else as of late has gone - the credit card.  On the bright side, I sure am earning lots of Amazon.com gift certificates with my Amazon Chase Card!  Thanks, Chase!  Perhaps I can buy a book on surviving a career shift in mid-life with those coupons. 

Fudgie the Whale Goes to the Gym

It’s not a secret that I take Zoloft for a long battle with depression and an eating disorder that reared its thin little body throughout my college years and my 20’s.  Zoloft has radically changed my life by smoothing out the ridiculous high and low points of my mood swings, and making me generally more accepting of my body and all of its little imperfections.  It’s allowed me to live a mostly happy, mostly content life, and it has definitely helped me be a better mother (take that, Tom Cruise). 

One of the things I don’t like about Zoloft, however, is that this is the second time in my life where the drug has made me so “accepting” of my body that I’ve just sort of let it all go.  The first time was after my senior year in college, and I was living with a boyfriend who hadn’t figured out he was gay yet (this really wreaked havoc on my self-esteem, I might add), working for a company falling into bankruptcy, and taking a very high dosage of an antidepressant while simultaneously not being seen on a regular basis by any kind of doctor, let alone a psychiatrist.  I woke up one year after my college graduation in the dressing room at a department store, where I was shopping for interview suits after being laid off from the afore-mentioned company and told by my boyfriend that he didn’t love me anymore, but could I please still pay half the rent?  I felt like that allergy commercial where everything was fuzzy, but then the film is removed, and everything is brutally clear and well-defined.  I realized I couldn’t fit into the size of clothing I thought I still wore, and that I had gained close to 40 pounds, and I was really quite unlike what I thought I looked like. 

All my stories have happy endings, however.  I went to the doctor.  We adjusted my dosage.  I moved to the Southeast (sometimes I still wonder what I was thinking).  I lost a bunch of weight. I went to the gym a lot.  I rock climbed, hiked, ran, biked, did yoga, and had a lot of friends into the same thing as me.  I was in the best shape physically and mentally of my life.  Although I would never be as thin again as my senior year of college (anorexia has a way of slimming you down quickly), I understood finally that being less than 100 pounds was not the same thing as being healthy. 

Then I met Mike, got married, and here the cliches begin.  I had two children.  I had a heinous first pregnancy where my OB/GYN limited my exercise at 7 weeks.  I was ridiculously sick.  My average day at work consisted of “This is Cristina, can you hold please?” while I ralphed into a garbage can under my desk.  When I could get the food down, I ate anything and everything.  If I wanted Taco Bell at 4 AM, I got it.  It was like a food orgy - all those years of watching carefully what went in my mouth were tossed into the wind with abandon.  Cake for breakfast?  Why the hell not?  After Lily was born, it took another year just for me to stop wanting to sleep with all my free time.  As I started to get back into more healthful patterns and lose some of the weight I’d gained with Lily, I got pregnant with Arden.  I didn’t gain nearly the weight with Arden as I did with Lily (thank you, campylobacter, for making me incredibly ill for 2 months, and thank you, kidney stone for doing the same), but she’s now 2+ years old and it’s time.

It happened again - I looked in a FULL-LENGTH mirror, took a fat analysis test, and a hard look at my lifestyle. I made a lot of excuses, and some of them are even valid - I work like a maniac, I have two small children, I am self-employed, we are on a limited budget, blah blah blah - but the fact of the matter is that I had let myself go, big-time.

So Fudgie the Whale is back in the gym.  Happy Birthday - I weighed myself today.  It appears I may have lost 4 pounds for all the sweating and grunting and calorie-limiting and fat-restricting I’ve done, but I keep reminding myself it took years to get to this point.  I’d just like to not look like a stuffed sausage at Mike’s dad’s wedding in June.  I have realistic expectations - I don’t think I’ll ever be like I was pre-children.  I’ve got some nice scars to show for birthing them, including my widened hips and sturdy back.  I don’t have bird-bones like my mother; I’m more like my dad.  I’d just like to be able to look at myself and honestly say, I’m good. I’m okay.  I’m content. 

——

So am I aging gracefully?  I’m not sure anyone does.  I think I’ve finally hit the point in my life where I can start to focus on myself again - at least a little bit.  I can take care of myself while still taking care of my family.  I can stop doing things that inspire misery, and focus on things that help me be more centered and happy.  A long time ago, a freaky girl I worked with read my tarot cards.  She told me my 20’s would be fraught with turmoil and drama and that I would make a decision about being with someone that made me insane or being with someone that truly supported and love me, and my 30s would be the happiest time of my life.  So far, she’s been right on.  I chose Mike over all that Michigan drama.  I let go of the things, people, and jobs that made me feel crazy.  Turning 36 isn’t the end of the world, but it is a wake up call for me that I need to continue down the road I’m on right now so I stay physically and mentally healthy for my children, friends, family, and most importantly (yes, I just said most importantly), myself. 

I’m glad this weekend will be filled with frantic activity. As usual, there is yet another kid’s birthday party to attend.  I’ve had to seriously budget money to afford birthday parties every weekend.  With two kids in preschool, it seems like there is one every weekend.  Cristin arrived tonight for the usual Easter festivities and Anja’s baby shower.  Tomorrow we’ll be dyeing (dying?) eggs at Christine’s house and Saturday we’ll be bouncing around at Pump It Up (which Mike always says in his best SNL Hans and Franz voice:  Ve are comink to Paaaaamp you Ahhp . . . ).  Sunday is the shower and Easter dinner. 

I need some distraction right now.  If I had to wear a badge this week, it would announce my weight struggles and frustration, a nasty argument with a member of my extended family that resulted in me feeling like the worst mother, daughter-in-law, and wife on the planet, and the ugly reality that my relationship with my own brother is going to be strained for the foreseeable future.  For some reason I still balk at writing publicly about what is going on with my family.  It’s not like he or his wife read the blog, but I guess I still feel like the skeletons we still have in our family need to be contained.  And I’ve been forbidden to speak about anything regarding Mike’s family, and I even got my hand slapped with the proverbial ruler lately because of my inability to be a good fake and act like everything is peachy even when the house is burning down around you. 

Jennifer and I were definitely on a high at the end of the show last weekend.  We had great results and we really needed it.  We turned over a bunch of inventory, we met some great people, and had a lot of fun inbetween working our butts off (well, I still very much have my butt but it’s just an expression).  Under my glossy exterior of joy and drive, I am still very much insecure about a lot of things.  Additionally, show me a working mother who feels no guilt about working and I’ll show you a liar.  Being called on the carpet about a variety of things, and having all of your hot buttons pushed (sometimes simultaneously) after a week of ridiculous hours and no sleep didn’t help at all. 

At lunch with Sara and Jennifer today we talked about how difficult it is to be married sometimes, and what a weird thing marriage is.  You get married and suddenly you have this new “family”.  You have to adjust to all their own weird quirks and customs, and your partner has to do the same.  Things that are totally acceptable in my family (and I’m not talking about anything crazy, like farting at the table or something) are totally unacceptable in Mike’s family.  Holidays are treated differently.  Even little things, like the fact that in Mike’s family, anniversaries are a big deal and in mine we don’t even bother with a card, create little tiny problems where you would think there shouldn’t be any.  This week, I’m tired of feeling bad about who I am, how I was raised, or what kind of person I am today. I used to be a little proud of the fact that I would speak up for myself, and especially for the underdog (or my perception of the underdog).  The most current strife in Mike’s family is that I don’t fit.  I communicate completely differently than they do, I find things funny that they really don’t, and I have gotten to the point where I have accepted that I am better served to repeat the same 4 phrases over and over again.  Those phrases are:

“I’m great, how are you?”
and
“Love the necklace!”
and
“How’s the weather there?”
and
“How’s the job?”

Regardless of the answer, when the question is politely returned to me, the only answer I need to say is,

“Great!  Couldn’t be better!  Thanks for asking.”

Actually, it makes my life more simple.  Nothing to think about or worry about.  And hey, I’m all about simplifying my life.

My big problem has been that I’m black or white.  I either have meaningful relationships with people, or I have no relationship at all.  I don’t have “kind of” friends.  That means we either talk about what’s really going on with us, good or bad, or we aren’t friends.  I’m lucky enough to have a few great friends who don’t waste time trying to be fake or pretend like everything is perfect.  Nothing is. There’s no shame in admitting your life is hard at times or it’s difficult to be in business or that worrying about money can really suck the joy out of you or that a little tiny blue ribbon, like the one from last weekend, could mean so much. 

As for my brother, I miss him.  I know that someday in the future, his daughter is going to want to know why none of us were there for her during this time in her life.  Why they weren’t with us on holidays or birthdays.  And I’m going to have to explain where I was coming from and why we did the things we did and hope that she can understand.  Maybe I’ll get lucky and she won’t ask me, or maybe she already knows the answer.  In the meantime, knowing that I have a brother and niece 20 minutes away physically but not accessible is a tough thing to swallow.  I feel even worse for my dad, who at 82 is dealing with things that he really shouldn’t have to deal with. 

When we moved into our house last July, we ran out of money while doing the fence.  Even with the great discount Troy and Travis gave us, we could only afford to fence three sides of our back yard.  We figured that our 12 year old mutt would have no desire to wander beyond the wooded area behind the house, so what was the point?

We were wrong.

She’s not stupid, Delilah.  She always comes home, but she enjoys hanging out with the neighbors behind us.  They probably don’t enjoy it as much as she does, especially when they are trying to eat on their deck and she visits and breathes her rotten fish breath on them or farts in their general vicinity. 

Tonight we let her out for one of her usual pee breaks (she has the need to go every 15 minutes – old age really does suck!) and she returned to the door looking like this:

Note the leaf still stuck in the loaf of bread.  Where did it come from, you ask?  No idea.  She apparently stole it from the neighbors or rooted around in someone’s garbage.  She’s such a dork – she didn’t even know what to do with it.  She just sat there with it in her mouth, probably fantasizing about it being a dead squirrel or something. The one other time in her life she caught something, it happened to be a duckling (don’t worry, the duckling was fine).  She saw them swimming in the pond near Mike’s old apartment and decided to go for a dip and catch herself a duck.  When to her amazement she managed to get one, she had NO IDEA what to do with it, and ran toward me with a frightened look. I beat her until she dropped the duck, and the duckling ran off to its mother.  Delilah’s lucky the mother duck didn’t go after her – this is the same dog that had her butt kicked by a neighborhood cat.  Thankfully we didn’t buy her for protection. 

Other updates that are semi-interesting:

- Bizarre Bazaar is coming along.  I never thought it could take this many hours to price and label things, let alone deal with the space issues arising from trying to display 15 manufacturer’s stuff in a 10 x 10 booth, but we are managing.  Troy built the booth and it is fabulous.  We’ll post pictures at some point.  Jennifer’s been documenting our struggles and triumphs.  If you are one of my friends, and have heard nothing from me in weeks, it is because a.) I am not so hot as a friend right now and b.) we have been working non-stop for about a month. 

-  Lily had a play date Saturday with her friend Emma, and they had a fabulous time.  I like Emma’s mom a lot, and enjoy hanging out with her. It’s very cool to see my eldest daughter learning to interact with her friends, and sharing, and creating weird games and saying hilarious things.  Since I got her the Rodney Copperbottom plush toy from ebay, Lily carries it with her everywhere, so it was interesting seeing how she incorporated it into her games with Emma.  Emma and Lily are quite the precocious bunch of 4 year olds. Listening to the two of them talk blows my mind. 

-  Sunday, Lily went to her favorite boy’s party.  I’ve written about him a lot but took pictures of him off the blog because his mother was a bit freaked out by it, and I understand. If you missed the pictures of him, you will just have to take my word for it that he is one of the cutest and sweetest boys on the planet, and if I could be assured that I would have one just like him, I’d beg Mike to reverse his vasectomy.  Since there is no such thing, we’ll just call it over at 2 girls. 

Lily and Patrick hadn’t seen each other in about 2 months, but he just ran up to her and hugged her while she pretended she was a piece of wood.  After 5 minutes, she was hugging, chasing and playing with Patrick at the Maymont Nature Center.  When we walked down through the park to see the bears, the two of them held hands and chatted.  Patrick’s mom invited Lily up to Northern VA where they moved to spend the night and have an extended playdate.  He misses her a lot, and his entire family had been told all about the infamous Lily D. by Patrick.  It really touched me that even at this young age, they can establish relationships with others and show compassion and feeling for each other.  She was sad to leave him but had a great time at the party.  She still doesn’t understand why he lives so far away, and why we can’t just pick up and move. 

-  Arden at 2 may not know what flipping me the bird looks like, but she sure does it anyway – sans middle finger.  When she’s not getting in trouble for being overly “sensitive” and being sent to the director’s office twice in one day, she’s full of personality and funny stories.  Last week she insisted on telling the entire Red Room that her “rump hurt” and she needed “cream on my rump”.  This stems from me trying not to call it a butt, since I got in trouble from Lily’s teachers (they had “Silent Lunch” last week because Lily and other members of her group at school were adding words to “butt”, like “buttface”, “buttbrain”, “butthead” and my personal favorite, “buttbreath”, which frankly I found hilarious but apparently the teachers didn’t . . . ). 

I digress.  Anyway, Arden was angry with me this morning because she doesn’t like her routine changed, and I ended up taking them to school today instead of Mike.  She was mad as a hornet from the time she woke up til I dropped her off.  When we arrived at Red Room, everyone was having snack, so Windsor tried to get her to hang out with them, and I tried to get her to hug and kiss me goodbye.  She gave me her most wicked look, turned her back to me and walked to the corner of the room and faced the wall.  If she could have said the words “F You, Mommy”, and shot me the bird, she would have.  She wouldn’t look at me or Windsor, and stood with her back to everyone until well after I had left. Then she finally relaxed and acted nicely. 

Mike and I often say that while Lily can push our buttons, Arden just scares us.  I said, “Can you imagine what life will be like when Lily and 16 and Arden is 14?”  The hair on the back of my neck stood straight up. Arden is, dare I say it, more strong willed than I am.  Phew.  I am going to need to take a lot of sedatives in order to deal with her. 

-  On the home front, we are in the process of getting a water garden put in the backyard, and Mike has declared the last week of April his “Landscape Challenge” week.  I’ll post pictures as we take them.  Hopefully I will be able to take that week off as well. More importantly, I’m hopeful we can bribe my Uncle Richard with beer and food so he will come up here and help.

That’s about it, and there will be no more blog entries until after Bizarre Bazaar.  If you’re in Richmond, come by and see us in the Forehead Kisses booth. 

It has been interesting in the Del Bueno household.  Lily and Arden have passed on their funky germs to us.  First Mike got some sort of cold, then I got what we affectionately called “Burning Blistered Tongue Syndrome”, which then turned into a cold that is kicking my butt.  Lily got gunky eye along with her cold and a pus-filled left ear - Arden seems to be just hanging in there with a runny nose and a still-ugly black and purple (and green) eye from where she was bashed in the face with a wooden block.  That’ll teach her to sass her friends! 

My burning tongue thing would have been funny if it hadn’t been so painful.  It felt like my tongue was on fire, like I had scalded it with the hottest tea known to man, only it lasted for nearly a week complete with white raised angry bumps. Mike enjoyed telling me it was probably an STD from making out with someone, but after shooting him about 52 dirty looks he eventually stopped giggling about it.  And by the way, it was NOT an STD.  I finally went to the doctor and he said that it was some sort of weird, run-down immune system reaction to fighting off a cold. At least he didn’t laugh at me like my midwife did when I told her I had pica while pregnant with Arden (I’ve never been so thankful to lose the urge to eat something in all my life - especially when what I was craving was Ivory soap!!!). 

So what has happened in the last two weeks?  Here’s a basic list to get you updated.

- Lily insisting obsessively on being called “Rodney”.  Rodney is the funky blue robot from the imaginatively-named movie “Robots”.  In addition to the insistance on being called Rodney, everything out of her mouth ends with “and later, when I’m five, I’m going to go through the tv into the Robots movie.” 
- Arden getting beaten up.  4 days later we’re still hearing “NOT NICE!” and “AIDAN HIT ME! NOT NICE!” She still manages to look cute, even with a shiner.
- Numerous temper tantrums that have included one or both children face down on floors, parking lots or sidewalks refusing to do things, like walk or put on coats.  My demands as their mother are apparently out of line to them. 
- Our house being infected with TongueFunk and ColdFunk (Mike told me if he ever starts a band, he’s going to call it “TongueFunk” and put an umlaut over the “o” to make it look official . . . )
- A Board Meeting (“Bored” Meeting) between Mike, Troy, Jennifer and myself about the status of our three businesses, include the financial reality of what the next year has in store for us.
- Jennifer, cursed with something like Norovirus, bringing anal-retention to a new level after finding some cool space planning software:  she designed our tradeshow booth down to the holes in the wall with this stuff.  Aside from the fact that the illustrations of potted plants look like huge marijuana trees, it is pretty cool . . . and seeing Jennifer getting all geeky with it was really funny. 
- Our house is now 98.5% painted.  Mike finished the dining room yesterday.  All that’s left is the hallway on the third floor.  Very low priority.
- I haven’t blogged on any of the 3 work sites in like a month. I suck. 
- Lily has developed a new habit of waking 2-3 times a night, wandering into our room, and chatting with us.  This new habit has kept me awake and I think I hit the wall today.  I fell asleep at Jennifer’s house for a short period of time (we were confined to her house today due to her Norovirus outbreak), and I actually snored in front of her.  How humiliating.  We threatened Lily tonight. I mean Rodney.  Let’s all hope for no midnight visitors. 

That’s all, folks.  For those of you who have asked - Steve is doing better.  I don’t know when we’ll have the chance to see him due to our family’s situation right now, and I miss him, but I am less stressed out because I know he is at least physically doing much better than he has in a long time.  I’m hopeful, though not positive, that his situation will get better over time and eventually we can spend more time together. 

Every time I go through a rough patch in my life, I try to remind myself that usually before things get better, they are usually much worse.  Offsetting the frequent rumblings of tantrums from Arden, Steve’s second admittance to the hospital when his heart rate went cuckoo, the loss of one of our biggest clients (yes, yes, by choice), and lots of other random and icky things was one big preschool we signed as our first real nap mat affiliate program.  That was pretty exciting.  Jennifer is working on doing some preemie gear for March of Dimes; if that happens we’ll have a whopping two corporate clients.  Two is enough for us right now. 

I also forced my mom to cook dinner for my family last night; she’s a little burned out on the cooking front, but I asked nicely and she ended up marinating a delicious flank steak.  The girls didn’t care for it much but they did enjoy her twice baked potatoes very much.  After they destroyed her bathroom with their bathtub crayons and their love of splashing.  She was good-natured about their mess. 

Lily had a complete meltdown at school today when I picked her up.  It’s a little embarassing for me; that majority of her meltdowns (and they aren’t very frequent anymore) happen inevitably within the first five minutes after I arrive.  Today she saw that one of Arden’s friends had given her a chocolate candy, and she immediately started throwing a hissy fit which ended with her yelling, “I don’t LOVE my SISTER ANYMORE AND YOU ARE NOT MY BEST MAMA!!!”  This, because I tried to explain that Arden sometimes gets things Lily doesn’t, just like Lily goes to birthday parties and gets things from her friends that Arden doesn’t.  Wow.  I know that the substitute teacher in Lily’s class was trying to be helpful, but telling working moms that your child is “acting out because she misses you” doesn’t really help.  Especially when she says things like, “She’s such a perfect child for us - she must just miss you a lot” and “No, we never have issues with Lily yelling or crying.”  I did finally say, “Do other kids do this, or is it just mine?”  She looked shocked and said, “Oh yes, they ALL do it.”  Oh.  Okay.  For the past few months I was just assuming that Lily was lashing out at me because I’m a bad mom, not because it’s usual as part of the transition routine from teacher to parent.  Fabulous.

Sara came over on Saturday - she said she missed the girls.  She also insanely commented that being around them “relaxed her”.  Hmmmm.  We took them to the park and exchanged advice about work and life.  We even made Sara hang out while we fed the girls.  They were more annoyed that she had the audacity to leave and go back to her husband. . . they assume that anyone visiting our house must spend the night and entertain them. 

Steve is out of the hospital and home.  They were able to shock his heart and get his heartrate back in the 80s (instead of 160s - as in 160 beats per minute).  He is not sure when, or if, he’ll be able to work again.  I’m not sure when I’ll see him as I’m probably not Vicki’s favorite person these days, and even when I was, none of us were exactly welcomed into their house (apparently it’s a “mess” or a “hovel” or a “disaster” all of the time).  That situation is one that I can’t do anything about, and I’m really burned out trying to figure out a way around it Everyone has some part of their family that is dysfunctional - it’s just that it’s rare to hear anyone talking about it.  When I think about my close friends, they all have their stories.  I remember having dinner on Sara’s 30th birthday and one of the women who came along just blurted out that her mom, and entire family really, were pyschos and alcoholics, and how insane visiting them was.  Later I think she regretted saying it, but I really appreciated her honesty and her ability to laugh instead of cry about her family’s situation. 

On another topic entirely, I am watching the news and someone in North Carolina just came out with a caffeinated donut!  That’s so awesome!  Donuts are definitely my guilty pleasure, so I don’t indulge very often, but killing two birds with one stone is a fantastic idea.  I can eat a greasy, fried piece of dough and get my caffeine injection simultaneously.  I love America!