It's messy and weird in here.

I've been thinking a lot about pain over the last year. I haven't experienced very much pain, personally. I occasionally get headaches, of course, and I've had a few minor injuries that were painful (fireworks are BAD!!!!), including sports injuries that still occasionally hurt, decades later. I'm not like that lady in Scotland. But pain hasn't really been a feature in my life. When I was a kid, my family didn't really do over-the-counter medicine. We definitely had aspirin or ibuprofen or acetaminophen or something that was occasionally used for things like headaches. And band-aids, I guess? But I don't remember pain or discomfort being really a thing in our life. The sense was that discomfort is a symptom of something that might need to be treated, but the discomfort itself doesn't necessarily or even usually merit treatment. Pain felt (and still mostly feels) like a clear, direct and actionable communication from my physical body to my thinking. Your head hurts? Drink some water. Take a nap. Your stomach hurts? Drink some water. Rest. Wait and see what happens. For now, for me, this mostly works. (Except chest pain associated with anxiety. That's weird and confusing and unproductive.)

For the last few years, Duchess has had lots of experience with discomfort. She was a pretty robust kid who didn't get sick often and rarely complained of pain. Since adolescence rolled around, though, she complains of menstrual pain, knee pain (from ultimate frisbee) and now back pain (from rowing). She has had recurring episodes of dizziness and fatigue (we thought she was anemic, but she wasn't even close - turned out that MY iron levels were low, though). We've vacillated between telling her to just suck it up, and taking her to the doctor, where the diagnosis is always that they're not sure what's going on, but there's nothing seriously wrong. My paradigm isn't working here.

And then there the emotional pain. Duchess frequently talks about how her friends have "hurt" her or other friends. Usually by saying something casually or even accidentally mean. She is very, very upset and righteous when people hurt her. I find most of the the "hurt" she's describing to be far below my threshold for "hurt," even in 14-year-old-adjusted terms, and the grandiosity of it feels off to me. This makes me feel like she (and all her friends) put far too much weight on Being Hurt. My theory is that girls are socialized to feel that being hurt and feeling pain are legitimate emotional experiences for them. Being angry or annoyed or humiliated or indignant aren't okay, because they're more outward-facing, but being hurt and being a victim is.

Some of Duchess's friends are also engaging in self-harming activities like cutting or disordered eating, and I think this aligns with my theory - they're embracing Being Hurt as a way to focus and feel in control of the emotional chaos in which they live. I looked up self-harming on the crisis text line website recently, and was surprised to see on the list of self-harming activities something that Duchess actually does right in front of me, which is hitting herself in the head (with her hands). I've only seen her do this a few times, and never actually hard enough to do damage, but it is shocking every time. She does it when she's upset, and it does seem to be a way to channel her emotions, so I guess it makes sense that it falls into the same category as cutting.

Both my kids do a thing when they're upset that also seems similar, though less controlled - they move around the house in a way (fast, careless, flailing) that makes it inevitable that they'll bang into a doorframe or a table or fall down or hurt themselves physically in some other way. I think they're experiencing an imbalance - an inner storm and an outer calm. I believe that girls, especially girls like mine who are deeply invested in being Good, don't feel entitled to just let out that inner storm into the calm world. So they have to create an outer context that is acting on them that feels like it rationalizes the inner storm. They have to Be Hurt.

I recently listened to an interesting Invisibilia episode about girls and pain, exploring the phenomenon of people (mostly teenage girls, I think) with "amplified pain" who feel unexplained pain, and following a girl who was pursuing a treatment involving doing a lot of painful things to sort of retrain her nervous system not to respond so sensitively. (There was also a kerfuffle of angry responses to the episode, apparently, pointing out that dismissal of women's pain, and particularly girls' pain, is a long and bad tradition and should be vigorously challenged.) I guess what I'm coming to is mostly just an awareness of how little I understand. I can't tell Duchess how she should experience pain, or what she should do when she's experiencing it. It's real pain; she's feeling it. But what it is, how it should be labeled, where it comes from, and what it means, I have no idea. For now, we talk about it with her, and try to help her unpack what she's feeling. She's emotionally wise for an eighth-grader, so she can understand what we're getting at (when she's not in the throes of The Feelings). But none of us have any solutions.

What I think Duchess might have, though, thanks to her ridiculous, masochistic sport, is evidence that if she keeps going, if she moves through pain, she gets through it, and sometimes she also gets something more - in this case, mighty thigh muscles, strong calloused hands, and an improved ability to make boats go fast. Rowing is pretty much entirely the practice of enduring physical discomfort. The coaches set out barf buckets next to the rowing machines. So Duchess experiences something nearly every day that I almost never experience - pushing her body to the point of pain/intense discomfort and having to keep going through that. (Note that I don't necessarily recommend this approach. I have a lot of qualms.)

Discomfort is usually associated with change. If we don't see it for what it is, if we avoid it (hi, Skipper!) or explain it by tying it to external circumstances that are unrelated (hi, Duchess!), we can miss the opportunity that change offers, whether it's physical, intellectual, or emotional. But not all change is good, either, and it's often hard to tell if it's the kind of discomfort that will tear you down or build you up. Basically, I have no idea what we're doing here.

Spring has really sprung.

This is Duchess after returning from her regatta.
























We're dogsitting again! She helped Cook lounge in the hammock, and Duchess do her homework.

It's all about me, part 586

Having my youngest child turn ten feels like a personal milestone in my life. I am officially a Parent of Old Kids. Then there's Parent of Multiple Teenagers, and then there's Parent of a College-Age Kid, and then there's Parent of Adult Children. It's a different place, here, and I like it. (Except for the part where I'm going to die.)

I like that my kids do things themselves. Skipper gets away with us doing a lot more for her than Duchess has, because she gets so ragey when asked to do things that it's just easier to not ask, but even she is stepping up to the plate more, and can of course do most things in a pinch. Duchess requires almost no transportation to anything, and while she resents that her friends all get rides everywhere,* she does like the freedom of being able to take the bus all over the city on her own schedule. Having them both be able to stay home on their own is a great blessing. Having them decide to make pancakes and then make them themselves is lovely.

And I like that they are their own people. Weird, poorly behaved, selfish people, but still.

Duchess is in Canada this week, at a rowing regatta. She's experiencing the Duchess Plateau in rowing right now, and she's struggling with it. As usual, her coachability gave her early success, and she quickly rose to the top of the group of the kids she started rowing with. Now, though, her improvement has flattened out, and some of the other kids are getting better faster than she is. With that, plus the addition of new, good rowers coming from other clubs (Duchess's club is the largest and most competitive in the area), Duchess actually got demoted to a worse boat last week. She was very, very, very upset. It's an interesting moment - I'm not sure if her enjoyment of the sport and of her friends is enough to push her through the discomfort. I thought that when you rowed, you competed at the beginning of the season, got placed in a boat, and rowed with that boat all season. That's not the case at all; you're continually competing with others to protect your place and try to displace the next person in the ranks. She's a sensitive person, and external judgement is very important to her, so this constant evaluation is hard on her, even when she's moving up or holding fast. When she's moving DOWN, it's very hard. And she's also not temperamentally inclined to voluntarily and on her own do the kind of extra work it would take to improve her outcomes. Cook and I are watching with interest - we have no idea if she'll quit and move on to other activities, or if she'll keep doing it and keep being tormented (this is definitely the worst outcome for the rest of the family, since Duchess does NOT suffer in silence), or if she'll keep doing it and develop a reasonable coping strategy. Or if she'll suddenly, magically turn into the kind of person who does extra work on her own. Or if she'll become the largest coxwain in the rowing world. Stay tuned!

I keep interviewing for jobs and not being hired for them. (I actually bought a blazer for my last interview!) I'm trying to learn how to brag more and also blather less, which are both difficult for me. I find that am a self-deprecating but also somehow self-centered windbag, which is a weird combination, and not great for convincing people to hire you.



*This makes me bonkers. Our neighbors drive the .75 miles to the local grocery store, and 1.2 miles to their kids' school. If people can't even manage walking or biking those trips on quiet streets with sidewalks, climate change seems completely unsolveable. 

Skipper turned ten.

Zero

One.

Two.

Three.

Four.

Five.

Six.

Seven.

Eight.

Nine.

Ten.

Impostor/author

I struggle to accurately understand my own accomplishments in a lot of fields. Sometimes I feel like I'm amazingly good and other times I feel like I don't even deserve to be in the room where this work is being done. I am given to understand that the second part of this, impostor syndrome, is common for people who might be considered under-represented, and that women often struggle with it. I don't know why my experience of it alternates with delusions of grandeur, though.

The impostor syndrome side of this really shows up when I'm looking for work. I'm 42, and I still am clicking on entry-level jobs. My coworkers are encouraging me to apply for higher level jobs, managing projects or programs, and I am constantly surprised by this.

Last night I dreamed that a woman who was some sort of semi-famous lifestyle coach invited me to speak about my book at a lecture series. I said "sure, why not!?" and then when I arrived at the venue and was waiting in the wings, prepared to just kind of talk off the cuff,* it occurred to me that I wasn't sure I had actually written a book. I tried to remember, and the first thing I considered was that I couldn't remember getting any royalty checks. Or, you know, actually doing the work of WRITING A BOOK. And then I picked up a copy of the book, and flipped through it, and I started to realize that no, I definitely had not written this book.** I started thinking about how I was going to solve this problem, and then, fortunately, I woke up.




*This actually makes some sense. I'm usually happy to talk off the cuff in public, in spite of my anxiety and mediocre social skills. 
** It was titled "Life is Good," which definitely should have immediately tipped me off that I didn't write it.

Heading to the hospital?

This weekend I read this. And then I started listening to this.

Yikes.

Some desultory photos

Everything's fine around here; we're just tired and fighting off various viruses. Spring break is over. Duchess loved horse camp. Skipper loved reading all the books. Neither of them are very happy to be back at school. Cook got a sinus infection and actually took a full day off work and actually didn't do any work while at home.* So he was probably almost dead. But he's recovering now.

We dug up an old jersey of Cook's. It's very trendy; Duchess might even wear it to school.

*He watched part of a biopic about George W Bush. Because even though he was taking time off, he's still a weirdo who doesn't understand that sick days are for watching things like Parks and Recreation, or superhero movies.

Family viewing

The TV/movies we've been able to watch as a family is a pretty limited universe. Things that we've managed to enjoy together:

• Mythbusters
• Amazing Race
• Horrible Histories
• Great British Baking Show
• Master Chef Junior

And now, the thing we currently most enjoy watching together, the thing that makes Skipper laugh uncontrollably in a way that nothing else ever has...

Total Wipeout

This is a show in which normal British people go through an obstacle course while the hosts mock them. It's really mean, and actually seems like it might be a little dangerous, and it is SO funny. The best thing in our lives is a pizza on Friday night, eaten while laughing at the Total Wipeout contestants as they bounce off giant red balls, get punched in the face and fall in the mud.

In other news, the girls have spring break this week. Duchess is off at hippie horse camp again. Skipper is planning to Do A Lot Of Reading.

Spring, 2019 edition

Hey, it's spring!















































Duchess went to a regatta.









































Cook celebrating his 39th birthday again, insisted that we all play a goddamn game together to celebrate. (It's a really fun game, though the girls were not feeling it at the time.)


















What else is up? Lots of feelings. The girls have lots of social feelings at school. I have I-will-never-have-another-job feelings. Cook has too-much-work feelings.

But it's spring! And we busted out the hammock. It does help with the feelings.

I took the train to Seattle

 It was a nice but brief trip. And I didn't take photos. Except these two.

Three-day weekend! Updates.

1) We had a temporary dog this weekend.

2) Skipper has begun playing futsal. Jury's not out yet on this.
3) Duchess continues to row; they have returned to the water after a winter of indoor rowing and lifting weights. The appeal of this is lost on me, but she still loves it.
4) Cook got promoted, and is now more stressed and slightly richer.
5) My job is going away in July. I have two interviews for other jobs in the next three weeks. I am more stressed and anticipating being poorer.

That's the news!