Decaf Mocha, Quaffle, or Breaking Alert -- Happiness Found in Food!

Quaffle? Isn't that something out of Harry Potter? Some quidditch thing?

Hmmm.

I am not sure but I had one for breakfast today. A new coffee shop Anchorhead opened across the street from the condo. There was a "Coffee" flag outside the door where a Tully's used to be. Since it is my personal mission to keep coffee shops alive during COVID (and sometimes baristas are the only people I see during the week), I have been bouncing around to all of the coffee shops in my neighborhood within a three block radius. Plus I had some insomnia last night and needed some caffeine to get through the day.

At one point, I had thought of creating a blog called "Decaf Mocha" where I would visit a different coffee shop, have a mocha, and post about it. That would have been much more exciting to share pictures of coffee in a ceramic mug at a nice table instead of a paper to-go cup, which is what I am stuck with now in COVID.

So what is a quaffle? I walked into this newly opened coffee shop at eight a.m. and my nose lead the way. I smelled a delicious baked good. I am trying the Keto diet where I am cutting down on carbs and sugar so I can hopefully avoid putting on more quarantine weight. At the same time, I am watching "The Great British Baking Show" which is a show dedicated to the many ways can people prepare flour, sugar, butter and salt with extra flavors.

The barista/owner said the aroma was a quaffle, a waffle made out of croissant dough with cinnamon.

After trying to avoid the smell smoke all weekend, the quaffle smelled lovely, but I had no intentions of getting food. I was at the coffee shop purely for caffeine. I was planning to go home and makes eggs for breakfast I swear to god. I got the quaffle, hoping it would be terrible and that I would never want another one ever again, that my quasi-Keto diet had cured me of carbs forever.

But no.

The quaffle was awesome. It was a slice of sunshine and bliss in the middle of this smoke and COVID shitshow.  It was truly amazing and why hadn't anyone thought to do this before? It was getting a little depressed this weekend as the only thing to do in COVID time is GO OUTSIDE AND NOW WE CAN'T EVEN DO THAT? C'MON!!!! WTF? AARRRGGHHH!!!!

And then a very good friend who is young and idealistic beautifully said, "You know I feel kind bad sitting in my apartment working while the world literally burns. I feel like I should be doing something."

Nothing like a healthy dose of perspective to get me out of my self-induced pity-party. It is really icky and gross in Seattle, but how are these people in Portland surviving? And then I flip through my weather app, checking the air quality of other cities and I am jealous. Until like two days ago, I didn't even know there was an air quality index on my weather app. London is 2. New York is 21. San Francisco is 13. "Air Quality" is below "Visibility" and "UV Index," which I didn't know where there either. In Seattle we are holding tight at 269: Very Unhealthy.

I don't know if I would have tried the quaffle today if I hadn't been so depressed this weekend. I don't know if I would have enjoyed it so much if I hadn't been locked inside and needed something to cheer me up. But I am grateful for how much joy it has brought me today.

Ferries and Hummingbirds

This morning I woke up and it was quiet. Very, very quiet. There were no sounds of birds or cars, airplanes overhead. I looked out my window and today looks worse than yesterday.

My phone told me today isn't worse than yesterday. Maybe the smoke picked up some humidity as it crossed the ocean to come back to shore.

Earlier this morning, I put my mask on to take Fox outside, not to protect myself from COVID, but to protect myself from smoke. When I came back in, I forgot to take my mask off. I felt better with it on. Fox, however, has been coughing.

If Fox is coughing, what will happen to the hummingbirds? Three or four live in my courtyard and I watch them from my window as I work.

Yesterday I went to the market. The most heartiest of souls were out, and a bunch of them were smoking. Are smokers immune to this wildfire smoke? How bad does it have to get that even smokers can't breathe? What about Portland? Last night, their air quality was around 516. 

Now, I hear the ferries continually blasting their horns and it is freaking me out a little bit (even though I am on land.) The visibility is so low. I feel sorry and I am afraid for these ferry drivers who are trying to shuttle people back and forth to safety when they can't see ahead of them. It reminds me of an episode of The Crown that depicted the London Smog in 1952 (not to be confused with Smaug, the dragon in Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit.)

Until this past year, most of the drama in my life was personal, not a shared public crisis. Even with COVID, I had to work from home but still kept my job. I didn't personally get sick, but my mom did. The wildfires, while not destroying my home or town, are impacting the entire Western part of the United States with unsafe air.

Air. 

Humans and animals need food and water to live, but first we need air.

"Lauren, You are 100% Wrong" and Meditation

This week, I have been meditating, which has been a good thing. I've tapped into the Open Sky meditation podcasts from the Boy's Wilderness Therapy. One of the benefits of meditation is emotional resilience.

Friday, I had meeting at 7:00 a.m., two hours earlier than I normally start work. After the meeting, I took a break, eat breakfast and decided to meditate.

That was a very good call because at nine I was called into a meeting to represent me team to a half dozen of out internal stakeholders. The first forty-five minutes of the meeting were tough, but the last fifteen minutes "blew chunks" to use a metaphor from sixth grade.

"Lauren, you are 100% wrong," said one of the stakeholders.

Yeah.

Thanks to meditation, I didn't completely lose my shit. I was able to focus on the rest of the day and be fairly productive. It wasn't that I stuffed down my feelings of rage and self-righteous indignation. Rather, I didn't pick up the bullshit that this guy laid at my feet. I left it there in the meeting. Meditation gave me a layer of protection from the slings and arrows of others. Kind of like a turtle's shell, or slime on a slug.

Aside from that one giant cluster-fuck, I've noticed since I've been meditating that people are nicer to me. My teammates were exceptionally kind to me all afternoon.

It's the End of the World as We Know It, and Rain Dance

Nineteen years ago, the Twin Towers collapsed after a terrorist attack. Nearly three thousand people died and 25,000 people were injured.

That was considered a really bad time, and it was.

I thought about 9/11/2001 yesterday, and how on 9/11/2020, we are experience more a slow, drawn out form of suffering instead of an accute blast of tragedy.

Seattle, as much of the world, has taken a beating in 2020. 

• In March, we were the first place in the U.S. to have documented COVID cases. We have been in some form of quarantine since then.
• In June, we had protests turn into riots over racial inequity.
• In September, we are living in a city dangerously filled with smoke from wildfires in Eastern Washington, Oregon and California.

A friend of mine from the Midwest texted me and asked how the smoke is in Seattle. I said when I am wearing my COVID mask I don't even really notice it that much.

I have to admit I am feeling a little trapped right now. If the air quality got really bad, where would I go that I could drive? I can't drive east because I'd have to drive through areas hit by fires. I can't drive south because Portland and California are on fire as well. I can't drive north because Americans aren't allowed into Canada because of COVID. West is water: Elliot Bay and the Puget Sound.

What's left?

Pray for rain.

Thursday evening downtown

Thursday evening

Yesterday afternoon

This morning

Typical view in the spring and summer (above and below)

Sober and The Plan: What Plan? Whose Plan?

Jack has started to "sober up" from his workaholism. 

I should be thrilled, right?

Nope.

Instead, I am finding myself angry, frustrated and annoyed. Why did it take so long for him to get his head out of his ass? Why didn't he listen to me before? What am I, chopped liver? Why did he sober up after both kids were out of the house and I left? Why did he wait until it was "too late"? The kids will never be kids again. He recently admitted that he "deferred" parenting to me. As a married couple, we divided tasks like managing money (me) and insurance and taking care of the cars (him). Parenting isn't a task to be assigned. Parenting is a purpose, where you hope to raise and nurture a little person into a big person who has their own hopes, dreams, goals, affections, talents and values.

You can't delegate parenting. You either are a parent or you are not. Sure, you can be super-engaged, over engaged, under-engaged, minimally engaged and so on. There is a range, but at some point you have to decide if you are in the game or not.

Of course, there are some exceptions, like military parents described in this beautiful article written by Dana Canedy, a Gold Star spouse. For so long, I thought of Jack's work as being like the military--sacred and worthy of his absence. 

But then Jack never really came home, even when he was home. He was always at work, even when he was at dinner at home, sitting with Claire-Adele, the Boy and I.

On another note, the Boy started his senior year of high school this week in Montana. He is going to a large public high school in northwest Montana while he is living in a house with three other guys and two house leaders.

I haven't fully let myself feel those feelings, and those feelings are complicated. I can live in the present, but part of what makes me live in the moment is accepting those other feelings that are hard and not stuffing them aside. In the past few weeks, I've talked to multiple therapeutic boarding school/inpatient treatment parents. One just found out that the wilderness therapy team recommended his son go into longer-term care. I cried when I heard his story, even though I had been there myself. I don't think I cried when the Boy's team told me they recommended sending him away for another year. I think I said, "Uh-huh, sure. Okay." I didn't cry for my kid, but I cried for someone else's. 

But this week, I was sad. I got an email from the Boy's kindergarten teacher. Mr. Jones emailed all of his kids a note wishing them well on their last first day of school. It was bittersweet to read, as the boy almost didn't make it to his senior year. My friend Cara summed it up perfectly: I am happy the Boy is doing better, but I am sad for you he isn't here."

I was thinking about this dad whose kid kid is going to be sent away for a year. I wanted to tell him the hard part for me is over. The hard part--the fucking hell--was when the Boy didn't get out of bed for six months, when he stopped going to school, when he stopped joining us for dinner, when skiing was possibly the only thing keeping him alive according to his psychiatrist. Deciding my kid wasn't going to get better without an epic intervention was the hard part.

That was the dark time.

This wasn't my plan. It wasn't my ideal vision for my kid to spend his senior year in Montana, living with other kids. But what is a plan? My friend Melissa has an expression, "Man plans. God laughs." When I heard it years ago, I had thought that was a trite little expression, a cliche. Now I understand. There are trajectories and likelihoods, but life offers no promises for anything.

I guess I do disagree with one part of that expression. I don't think God is laughing right now. I think God is holding the Boy, keeping him safe, giving him a soft landing place in Montana instead of crashing to the ground.

Defiant Little Shit, or the Pit of Despair, Part II, and the Bear

Now that I feel like I am on more emotionally stable ground with the Boy, I can look back and see how challenging the past four years were. I wrote earlier this week about the Boy's walk to the Ravenna footbridge in May 2016. 

That was first time.

There were numerous trips to the footbridge between then and when he went to treatment. The Boy had low grade suicidality for a few years. He never had a trip to the ER where we found him half dead or he needed his stomach pumped, but there were lots of time I feared he'd impulsively take his like by walking in front of a bus, jumping from a bridge, or riding his bike down a steep hill and crashing into traffic.

When the Boy was admitted to the PBMU (Psychiatric and Behavioral Monitoring Unit) at Seattle Children's in 8th grade, Jack and I attended parent education where they showed us a graph like this one to describe the mental state of a kid like ours:

The Green Zone is a peaceful, normal state. The Red Zone is where the kid gets agitated and loses control. The Black Zone is where the kid crashes down from the Red Zone into depression. This is where they have clarity about their previous actions, and they often feel remorse, shame and embarrassment that they lost control. 

The Red Zone is where kids risking hurting other people. 

The Black Zone is where they risk hurting themselves.

Neither is fun.

The hard part is when kids repeatedly go through this cycle. It is agonizing to watch your child struggle through this again and again.

So, as a mom, my first job was to make sure the Boy avoided the cycle as much as possible, which ironically is not what you are supposed to do. Here is where life sucks.

I was talking to another friend whose kid was in rehab. "They told us we had to throw everything about being a good parent out the window and do the opposite." That doesn't mean screaming at your kid like a maniac. It means detaching. It means when you see them slowing destroying their life, not to nag and tell them they are ruining their life. It means watching them crash. It means letting them fail. It means not enabling them. 

In this case, I am dealing with a minor, not a grown adult. I am still a responsible parent.

All the while, my heart is breaking.

Now the Boy is in a safe and supported place where he will get to practice his new coping skills. He will be living with three other guys who had similar struggles. He will live in Montana where he can ski, mountain bike, fly fish, hike and swim in lakes.* This weekend, the kids went floating down a river on inner-tubes in Glacier National Park.

"We saw a bear," the Boy said. "It was about thirty-five yards and across the river."

I had never thought there'd be a day where I'd be excited my son encountered a bear in the wild. After the past four years, I am glad his is exactly where he is.

* I asked the Boy if the school ever takes the kids hunting, as hunting is a major outdoor activity in Montana. "Mom," he said, "Do you really think they are going to take a bunch of trouble youth into the woods and given them guns?" Fair point.

Defiant Little Shit, or the Pit of Despair

I was talking to a parent with a kid in residential treatment (PKRT) recently about the Boy. Her son knew my son somewhere along the way so when she read Jack's article, she reached out to me to commiserate. I told her a story about when the Boy was a defiant little shit.

"'Defiant little shit' is a technical term," I said. She laughed.

All kids reach a stage in their lives when they become a defiant little shit (DLS). If a kid doesn't become a DLS at some point, they are either 

a) too young (but just wait), or

b) there is something wrong with a kid who can't stand up for themselves or have boundaries by time they are eighteen, or

c) the parents are super controlling or drunk and the kid is afraid to act out. 

I remember a vivid incident when the Boy was a DLS. It was May 2016 and we had tickets to Billy Elliot. Two months prior, the Boy saw a flier for the show that came in the mail and asked if we could see it. 

"Sure," I said and ordered the tickets. I ordered them early enough to get seats in the third row. Jack and I had been taking the kids to the Seattle Children's Theatre for years, so it made sense they would show interest in theatre for adults.

The day of the show came and the Boy was in a bad place. He was grouchy and tired and probably hungry. He was in no mood to see the play I had bought tickets to months earlier, but fuck it, we were going.

The Boy sulked in the car on the way there. He had a tantrum in the restaurant before the show, triggered by very mild rudeness from his sister. He stormed out the restaurant, didn't eat and was texting Jack "Fuck you!" when he was asked to return to the table. 

The show was about to start, and the Boy settled down. I was anxious during the most of the show as we were in the third row. What if the Boy had a fit and disturbed the performers? I had a flashback to a Northwestern v Washington basketball game where he punched his sister for leaving him behind at the concession stand. The Boy was lost for twenty minutes. When he came back to our seats, he slugged Claire-Adele. We were sitting four rows behind the Northwestern bench. The security guard gave us the stink eye and watched us for the rest of the game, ready to eject my family if the situation got out of hand.

Fortunately, the Boy was fine during Billy Elliot.

After the show was another story. Here he was a defiant little shit. He sat in the front seat of the car where I usually sit. I told him to turn his phone off in the car, and he didn't. 

When we got home, Jack walked the dog and the Boy melted down. He raged and threatened to smash his computer against the floor.

"Don't you dare!" I said.

"It won't break!" he yelled back as he chucked it against the floor.

The screen was demolished. Shattered.

"What the fuck were you thinking?" I screamed. I was pissed after being on edge for the previous five hours.

The Boy's anger flipped on a dime to sorrow. The gross realization of the damage -- physical and emotional -- hit home. He left the house. I texted Jack that the Boy was on the loose. I was glad he was gone. He needed to cool down.

Except he didn't cool down. He walked to the footbridge in Ravenna and looked over the edge. Jack was there with the dog, talking him off the edge, both literally and figuratively.

This week, after talking to this new mom with a kid in treatment, I realized that for the past four years, I have lived in fear that my son might kill himself, a fear that grew until the Boy was sent to treatment. It became more tangible as the Boy receded from the world, escaping into Netflix and Youtube and Instagram.

This week, the Boy called from Montana. He is been given the green light to run from his physical therapist since his ACL surgery. 

"Mom, I ran on the track instead of the treadmill. I hate treadmills. I hate them so much I couldn't do it. I couldn't do it and these treadmills had Netflix," he said. He paused.

"I passed up Netflix to run on the track," he said. He knew meaning of this was not lost on me, that this was a major development. A sober alcoholic can pass by a bar and not walk in. The Boy passed a screen and didn't watch.

I finally feel like I can breathe. After four years, my fear of my son killing himself is abating. 

Now that my fear is receding, I can step back and see the pit of despair that I was living in. I had glimpses of it before and it terrified me. Now, I can see the hole for what it was. I am starting to recover from the trauma.

In my recovery group, there are lots of people who became lost their sanity themselves after living with someone with addiction. 

Why is it that we who live with someone with mental health issues or addiction become so sick ourselves? Why?

If my son had cancer and I dropped everything to save his life, I'd be considered heroic? Yet, when I tried to save my son from anxiety, depression, suicidality and screen addiction, I became just as crazy?

Bandwidth

This weekend, my dad commented that I haven't posted recently on my blog.

This past summer has been crazy, with two trips to Montana, the Boy coming home, Claire-Adele coming home, layoffs at the company where I work and the Boy transitioning to the next phase of his program where he will attend a public high school in Montana while living with a handful of his peers from the boarding school (residential treatment? in-patient treatment?) in a house in town.*

This weekend, I was super tired. I slept a lot on Sunday, which was good. I'm still tired, but I will make it through the week, I hope.

As I am recovering from a busy few months and a very intense two years, I am taking time to take care of myself. The bandwidth I have to take care of myself is expanding, and I am almost feeling flooded by the need to attend a bunch of stuff that has been unattended for years. I feel like I moved into a house years ago, and then a bunch of unwanted guests moved in a trashed the place. Now, the unwanted guests are out and I am assessing the damage. Do I think of my family as unwanted guests? No, but rather I didn't have the appropriate boundaries in place to keep myself sane, and to keep my inner space clean and calm.

No wonder I am exhausted.

The good news is, I actually am looking forward to cleaning up the mess. I am looking forward to having a clean, calm inner space. I am feeling better as I address these issues that have been festering. I am re-learning to stand up for myself. I used to stand up for myself, but somewhere it got lost along the way.

I am glad to be finding my way back.

* Saturday night, the Boy called. It had been his turn to make dinner. He made chili and was exceptionally proud of his homemade cornbread.

"I don't care"

I went for a walk today with one of my former work colleagues. He is gay and originally from a conservative part of the country.

"When people in my hometown see me with my boyfriend and figure out we are a couple, they act all super sweet. It is performative," he said. "When people see us in Seattle, they don't care if we are gay or not."

I don't care. What does that mean? There are so many ways those three words can be interpreted. It is like the expression "Too bad" where tone matters. The French have multiple ways to say "too bad" ranging in meaning from "my deepest condolences your grandmother died" (je suis desolee) to "I am sorry your car broke down (quel domage). Tant pis, like "I don't care," can be kind or cruel, meaning either "oh well" or "tough shit" depending on the context and tone.

My friend H from college lived in Taiwan until moved to the US when she was seven. While her English is undistinguishable from a native born American, she was missing a few idioms.

"Lauren," she asked me once, years ago, "where do you want to go for dinner?"

"I don't care," I replied.

"How can you not care? You should care where we go to dinner!" she replied. 

Uh...I thought I was giving her space to chose the restaurant. Fortunately, I realized she was having a glitch in her internal American dictionary. I recovered with "I am open and flexible with where we go."

Still, "I don't care" is tricky. It can seen as belittling or dismissive. "I don't care that the former police chief in Seattle was a Black woman" can mean I am simply tolerant. I could mean I am apathetic. I could mean that I am embracing a non-white man leading the city's police force. 

At best, "I don't care" is imprecise. Sometimes imprecise can be fine, but other times, it matters. Like all other language, half of communication is what the other person hears. My friend H's feelings were hurt when I told her I don't care, which of course was not at all my intension. 

I apologized because I care more about her feelings than I did about where we ate dinner.

The Kids are Back, or Boarding School Boy and Poker

And all is well.

For the most part.

Eh.

Families are hard.

I wish my family was easy

but is it not.

I wish I was relaxed

not anxious about everything.

I am trying to change

but is it hard. 

Earlier this week I was going to write about how splendid and wonderful it was to have my family all together, and how fantastic and wonderful the Boy is doing. He is doing so much better. I feel like he is out of the woods in so many ways. He understands what his anxiety is, and he's learning tools to help him manage it himself. One of our family's many therapists said "Emotional maturity is being honest with yourself." The Boy is getting there, and I am so grateful and relieved.

Saturday, the kids taught Jack and I how to play Texas Hold 'Em poker. Both kids play regularly at school. The Boy plays one a week at school. (Replacing drug, alcohol and screen addictions with gambling addictions, or just a fun, social game? Anyhow...) Claire-Adele plays with friends in the dorm. The Boy in some ways is living the college life, minus the freedom to make his own schedule. He hangs with friends and peers 24/7, from brushing his teeth to every meal to all entertainment to sleeping in the same room. Layer in fifteen months of residential therapy, and the Boy is so mature. He seemed more like a twenty-three year old than a seventeen year old. He is learning self-mastery, the ability to manage himself instead of needing an authority figure to do it for him. Some people need someone to give them rules, then they can follow the rules. That is not self-mastery. That is rule following.

As a parent, I feel tremendous relief.

Then, the bickering started. 

Oy.

I hate bickering.

It makes me stressed.

I need to detach

and look at the positive sides of 

my kids.

Loneliness from Working and Living Remotely, or Four Months Left til the Zombie Apocalypse

Along with millions of Americans, I am officially five months into working remotely. 

How's it going?

A few weeks ago while I was in a coffee shop waiting for my barista to make my mocha, I read an article in the Wall Street Journal by Chip Cutter Companies Start to Think Remote Work Isn’t So Great After All.

Now, as the work-from-home experiment stretches on, some cracks are starting to emerge. Projects take longer. Training is tougher. Hiring and integrating new employees, more complicated. Some employers say their workers appear less connected and bosses fear that younger professionals aren’t developing at the same rate as they would in offices, sitting next to colleagues and absorbing how they do their jobs.

Months into a pandemic that rapidly reshaped how companies operate, an increasing number of executives now say that remote work, while necessary for safety much of this year, is not their preferred long-term solution once the coronavirus crisis passes.

“There’s sort of an emerging sense behind the scenes of executives saying, ‘This is not going to be sustainable,’” said Laszlo Bock, chief executive of human-resources startup Humu and the former HR chief at Google. No CEO should be surprised that the early productivity gains companies witnessed as remote work took hold have peaked and leveled off, he adds, because workers left offices in March armed with laptops and a sense of doom.

There are lots of other reasons why working remotely has its challenges for some types of work. There aren't spontaneous conversations. Young people don't get the mentoring they need. Teamwork diminishes. Some people feel more productive, but ask their bosses. Do they feel the same? Sometimes not.

I read another article from the Wall Street Journal that said people become lonely after working remotely for nine months. When I read that, I thought that is so true. I thought about myself working remotely when I moved from Chicago to St. Louis from for Jack's job years ago. We moved to St. Louis in June and I kept the job I had in Chicago. Everyday, I went to my cube in the St. Louis office where I had no peers. For nine months, I had no one to eat lunch with (except when I was on the road). I quit my job the following February. I had another friend/co-worker who moved to another state a few years ago in July to follow a girlfriend. The next spring, he was showing signs of anxiety. By the summer, he checked himself into a hospital for mental health treatment.

When I told my friend Ellen that after nine months of isolation people become lonely, she said, "So in around the holidays we all are going to collapse?"

Yes and no. Not everyone will collapse, but some of us will. Social connection is a very important part of living a healthy life. It is like diet and exercise: some people eat crap, smoke, drink never exercise, and then live to be 86 with very few health issues (see: Auntie Chris). Other people who do the same die of a heart attack when they are forty-three. Likewise, some people can live an isolated life and are fine. Others not so much.

How can we stay connected to society, to our friends, our peers?

I don't have an answer or plan, but at least I have a goal of staying connected.

High Heels & Lipstick

I was getting ready to go out and get my haircut today and I put on lipstick, rouge and powdered my nose.

Why? 

No one can see my face, so what is the point? All you can see are my eyes and forehead. I don't wear eye makeup because I had an eye injury as a child. Will makeup evolve into forehead makeup, where we will decorate everything above our eyebrows?

And I looooove my new shoes, but I haven't worn heels in months and my legs and feet got a little sore. Heck with high heels -- somedays I don't wear shoes at all expect to go to the lobby of my building to get my newspaper.