Anne Nahm

Anxiety is having its way with me lately. My nails are bitten down to horrifying depths.  I can’t seem to sleep well.  I sweat stinky sweat.  I’m cranky.

This bout seems to have been caused a trifecta of small changes.  Only instead of three things, my life is one of those dork cubes you roll in D& D games with infinite and rather mundane but unsettling points.

My little sister called to tell me she is engaged.  My mom promptly told me Little is having no bride entourage, small wedding, butt out.  I was bummed.  Not in my sister’s wedding!  Anxiety!  Did I do something wrong?!

By the time my husband talked me down, (illustrating at great length what a huge pain in the ass bridesmaiding entails if you don’t live in the same city and you have small children and the bride only has an intellectual understanding of how that limits a bridesmaid’s ability to test taste local bakeries, etc.)

(And also reminding me of how Middle’s wedding prep went – brief pictorial here)

Well, by that time, Little called, said she had decided to have a big wedding, and would I be a bridesmaid after all.

So wheeeee!  Bridesmaiding!

Other anxiety points:
Kids went back to school
it’s been too hot lately
I’m channeling the characters in this new story I’ve been writing and they’re all freaks
I’ve been listening to Death Cab for Cutie
I’ve decided I’m going to try to go Vegan for a month after the great Fishstick debacle of last week.  My head says, “Oooh, pick up The Kind Diet!  Make Miso Soup for breakfast!”  And I’m totally nodding my head and psyched in the grocery store.  But when I come home, I find I’ve purchased bacon, lambchops, and ice cream.  Whyyyyy?  I didn’t even want any of those things.  Nom nom nom.

Aren’t you glad you stopped by here today!  Here, have some music:

Hey, thanks for the well wishes and suggestions about my dad.  They were appreciated.

***
Last night, I was in the shower, and a huge black spider poked out from behind the curtain and skittered across the wall behind me.  Apparently, it saw me seeing it and froze.

I have horrible eyesight.  Since I was not wearing corrective lenses of any sort, I had to get my face pretty close to Spidey to see if he was a black widow or more harmless wolf/generic/notblackwidow spider.

However, every time I got my eyeball close enough to try to determine shiny & slick & bulbous or not, the poor guy would panic, fall off the wall, and land down behind the shampoo containers on the ledge.

He was kind of adorable after this happened twice, because then he’d scamper back up the wall all freaked out blurry black blob style, look around, see me, and freeze again.  And also, a little disconcerting he was so fast.  Anyway, I finally got a good enough look to guess he seemed harmless, and since we had bonded over his freak outs, I decided to let him stay there, on the wall, and bother him no more.  Live and let live, I say.  Enjoy the Anne Nekkid Show!

Of course, as soon as I made that decision, I bent to get a shampoo bottle, thereby moving out of the shower spray, which hosed the poor guy down into the tub.  A drowning spider is one of those pitiful but weirdly funny in a horrible way things.  All eight legs thrashed wildly as he circled the drain, all Help Meeeeee!

But I just couldn’t.  He was a spider, yo.  If I’d tried to rescue him, he would have crawled right up whatever limb I had extended him, bit me, made a nest in my hair, laid eggs in that nest, crawled into my ear canal and died.  And I’m not sure the I’m on good enough terms with the neighbors to run screaming out on the lawn, naked and covered in bubbles.  Which would have to happen if there was a dead spider in my ear.  I did feel real bad though.  Spider Eulogy in comments, anyone?  I can’t think of anything appropriate.

Then!  This morning!  Our family was awoken bright and early by the middle child screaming hysterically.  Apparently, she woke up from a Scooby Doo dream to find a Daddy Longlegs spider tiptoeing around on her chest. The kid has never liked spiders, but since around 3 years old, she has tried to play it cool, just eyeballing them and breaking out into toddler sweats and walking backwards to the nearest exit.  Not this morning.  She was full on can’t breath freak out.  To be fair, the spider was huge, and it was busy running the hell away from my kid as fast as it could go.  It was already across the room and headed for the door by the time my husband caught it, proved he had it by showing Middle child the spider’s caught body, and flushed it down the toilet.  My husband is usually the kind of guy who takes creatures to an exit and releases them back to the wilds of suburbia, but I guess it was too early in the morning, or he took personal offense to the spider or something.  Anyway, Nahm Household Piping is now the great repository for wayward spiders.

Finally,  I was in the garden the other evening, and this frog landed on my bare foot and felt like the world’s funkiest, wet-silk toe ring, grabbing on to me with tiny padded limb.

I don’t usually go all Southern Auntie and say how cuuuuuuuuuuuuuute and itty bitty precious things are, but guys?  This frog made me want to have another baby.  I employed my 4 year old to hold it so I could take a picture.

The frog perched perfectly on her fingertip.

But it was too fast for my camera.

I should know by this point that it is never OK to post about how I’m getting extra sleep and I don’t know what to do with myself.

Because now it’s four days later and I’ve had two hours of sleep total.  I’m sitting here after the baby is finally done marathon nursing, examining my poor marbles-in-an-old-tube-sock boobs and seriously considering posting macros of nipple blisters.  For artistic/scientific purposes.  The skin of nipples is so thin, and when it is in blister form, it is translucent – almost beautiful.  They kind of look  like if rock candy, hemorrhoids and a piece of chewed bubblegum went to an orgy and nine months later one of them had a baby, and the father was so undeterminable as to require some kind of genetic testing.

Anyway, after three days of 102 fever and me starting to wonder what the hell was going on, the baby woke up covered in spots this morning.  Signaling she is either a red-headed, red-spotted cheetah shape-shifter OR she has Roseola.

Lately, it feels like these boulders of emotional issues are shifting around inside of me, leaving me off kilter.  My parents left for Texas a few days ago.  My dad turns 70 next year, which means he has to divest retirement money for legal reasons I don’t understand.  Anyway, he ran the numbers on how much the state of California is going to tax him, and suddenly he is dragging my mom around all the various tax shelter states in the country with great enthusiasm.

Every time I have seen him in the last month, he has been pushing TEXAS!  Wouldn’t You Like To Move To TEXAS?!  Have you seen the size of home you could buy in TEXAS?  Also, he has been muttering unpleasant things about California under his breath.

From the time I was ages 6 to 12, I lived in 4 different states.  Hell, since I’ve been 12, I’ve lived in 4 more.  I do not ever want to move again.  I certainly don’t want to uproot my kids and do to them what was done to me.  It is hard to express how much I do not even want to discuss moving without backing up and unloading a dump truck of Childhood Grievances on my dad with a loud Beep-Beep-Beep sound as I do so.  I am old enough to be over those injuries now.

The shiny hook in the shit-bait of moving is that when I was 14, my parents sent me to boarding school.  Of all the moves we made, that was the one in which they jettisoned me personally away from the rest of the family.  And then, for whatever reason, after I was gone, they stopped moving.  It was true/it was untrue that something was wrong with the way our family worked, and when they got rid of me, that chaos evaporated and they became stable.

During that time I was away at boarding school, the movie for Joy Luck Club came out.  I remember watching it on video with my family over the Winter Holiday.  At the end, there is a scene where a mom leaves two babies alone because she believes she is going to die.  My little sister was watching with us.  She did not understand, and she asked what the lady was doing.  After my mom explained, she said, “I would never do that.  We would all live or die together.”

As a teenager, I only remember feeling gut punched.  It took a long time to reconcile the idea that my mom, who loved me, was saying she would never let her kids go, even though she had let me go.  It was true/it was untrue, if you get what I mean.

I’m trying to be cool as my dad looks at all his finances and thrashes about 10%.  I told him to use my part of the inheritance – I would rather my kids have grandparents around than money at the end.  I make sure to say these things in a calm voice and not like some clingy, weepy child.  I try not to point out that for the first time in 15 years, all my dad’s relatives are in the same state, and all he can talk about is leaving.

I don’t even want to think about the idea that maybe this is not the money at all.  My dad gets aggravated I don’t want to consider the idea of moving.  I don’t want to tell him how it feels like there is a caged kindergartner living inside of me, and how when he talks about uprooting my family and going somewhere new, it rattles the bars of the cage until the kid freaks the eff out.  I don’t hardly want to open my mouth, because that kid will scream and sob her way to the surface, and holy shit.  I’m not 5 anymore.  I’m 35.   It gets so old to have the same stupid issues.  It would be nice to wake up one morning and have someone push that button and find out it didn’t work anymore.

My pants – nay! Not only pants, but underwear too – just got doused with hot pee.  And it’s not even my pee.   I’m starting to suspect parenting is one unending What’s Grosser than Gross joke.

PS:  This just happened.

Husband, walking in:  “How’s you’re day going?”

ME: “Great.  I just got urinated on.”

Husband: “Really?  By who?”

BY. WHO.   Do I actually need to clarify?   Is this the life I’m living? BY THE BILL THE VAMPIRE LOOK-ALIKE  WITH WHOM I PLAY WATERSPORTS WHILE YOU ARE AT WORK.   I think I could lose my mind if I didn’t have to address the more pressing issue of washing  someone else’s pee out of my butt crack and off my computer chair.

Just got back from a week in Seattle.  Seattle, you are so cute!  Apparently, our family always chooses the one calendar week that Seattle does not rain, and as a result, I always fall in love with that town a little.  Giant fountains in the park!  Pike’s Place Market!  And all the locals outside, leaping around and doing pirouettes and stuff because they usually only see the sun once every two weeks or something.

It also totally cracks me up that 3/4ths of the people roaming the greater Seattle area are straight up nerd stereotypes.  The horn rimmed glasses!  Everyone walking around with a prominent left side hair part!  Longish arms and short torsos!  Rosebud mouths!  With their little nerdlings in tow!  It’s like Animal Planet if they did a special on the inhabitants of Microsoft.

Also, because of the sun being out, everyone was practically naked – short shorts and tank tops and flip flops – and there was copious amounts of shockingly virginal, unfreckled, untanlined, pale skin everywhere. It looked like they were fetuses or something.  Like maybe down in the underground parking, whole adult humans were being cloned, scantily clothed, and sent up the elevator to mingle in the greater Seattle area.  Like they made those Orc things in the LOTR, except with cute, pale Kurt Cobain knockoffs instead of monsters.

We stayed at relatives for the first four days, and these relatives don’t drink coffee.  And the Diet Coke they keep in the refrigerator for guests tends to go bad.  That’s kind of freakish, right?  It’s like visiting the End of Days every time you open the fridge door, because what else besides The Rapture could make that happen?

Anyway, this trip, they apparently stopped having tea around the house as well, and it took about 48 hours for my husband and I to go total junkie style, cooking up excuses to get out of the house by 7:15 in the morning so we could roam the streets of an unfamiliar town until we came upon a 7-11 in which to swill burnt coffee shots with Red Bull chasers.  Which is harder than it might seem, because Seattle suburbs don’t make any kind of sense, and the whole place is covered in trees.  There could be a village a block away and you’d never know, because you’re on a road going 50 miles an hour and there’s nothing to see but unpenatratable forest, sun-stroked out suicyclers, and a family of beavers.

I’m guessing you have figured out by this paragraph that I am currently bathed in caffeine.  Good guess!

This trip was full of freakish awesomeness, including a trip to a doll museum, which (sadly! horribly!) would not allow photography.  How can I explain 1000 undead eyes staring at you through a wall of glass and dim overhead lighting?!  The moth eaten lace?  The tiny pink cheeks!  The thousands of chipped, porcelain fingers? How none of them are looking right at you, and then suddenly you see, one in the back!  Totally looking at you!  And you can’t look away!  Aghhhh!

Or the 17th century thief doll, in a cage with no hands and bloody stumps?  And the postscript on his card:  Nowadays this punishment might seem severe.  Hahahahahaha!  Might?  Oh anonymous postscriptress, your witty banter was totes lost on my 7 and 4 year old.  But not on me!  But by far the best was that some of the lesser pristine conditioned dolls were kept in a wall of drawers you could pull open and view, if you chose.  Doll Morgue!!  Quite wonderful nightmare fodder for me for weeks to come.

In sum?  I love you, Seattle!  Until you rain.  When that happens, I like to get on a plane and get back to California.