Angie Kinghorn

Persona non grata

Writer’s workshop prompt #3: Who are you giving a timeout to?
She is in trouble.  Big time. Forget timeout, we’re talking about permanent banishment and exile.  I’ve put up with her mess for far too long.  I’ve lost too many years to her criticisms and longings to be something that I’m not, and as of this week, enough.  I’m done.  She is out of my life.  And this time, I mean it.
But it’s not that easy.  I know, because I’ve been through this countless times.
“She” is me.  She’s the part of me that looks in the mirror and sees a water buffalo.  She’s the part of me that makes every bite I take feel like failure, a surrender to my cravings.  I heard someone talking about how many calories a person needs per day to live, and realized that She had completely obliterated from my mind the idea of food as a necessity.  In She-world, food is Public Enemy Number One, and the idea that it is required to sustain life is completely alien.
She came to be at an early age, raised on a steady diet of pop culture, fashion magazines, and despair at the blossoming of my athletic adolescent body into a classic curvy hourglass.
She knows my body, studies it like a map.  She can give you the latitude and longitude of all my stretch marks and scars.  She knows where the skin isn’t tight, and She berates me.  Why am I too lazy to stop eating and run marathons?  If I had any self respect at all, I’d look like Kate Moss instead of Lizzie Miller.
She hangs out in my closet and loves to taunt me with dresses I can’t bear to part with, but will never fit my post-baby body.
On the many previous occasions I’ve vowed to exile this poisonous She, to get her out of my head and my life, it’s been because I am tired of feeling bad about myself.  Now, I have a different, more urgent reason.
That reason is my daughter.  This week, my baby girl made me realize that I have to do everything in my power to get She out of here.  You see, my daughter got a new swimsuit, a darling yellow one piece with ruffles on the bottom.  When I brought it home for her to try, she was simply ecstatic.  The suit was such a hit that she wore it all day.  Watching her chubby legs as she pranced around the house, I saw that she doesn’t have her own She.
Yet.
My little girl is unselfconscious, completely at home in her own skin, thinking about her body only in terms of what it can do, not how it looks.
And I desperately want her to stay that way.  If she’s going to have any chance at all, her mommy can’t be held hostage by She demons.  Even at the age of three, it wouldn’t take my daughter long to pick up on the fact that Mommy harbors a long-standing poisonous well of hate directed at her own body.
So I am renewing my vows to no longer tolerate her emotional abuse, the insults that cut to the bone, the sideways glances, backhanded compliments, or her constant whispered stream of poisonous drivel.
I will not welcome her back home after a week’s exile, no matter what kind of pretty pictures she paints, no matter what promises she makes, no matter how much she tells me I need her.  And if she does slip in unnoticed, I’m going to throw her right back out.
It’s not about me anymore.  If I want my daughter to have a healthy body image, to spend her college years eagerly reaching for a bikini when someone invites her to the pool instead of cowering in the shade refusing to take off her shorts, if I want her to use her math prowess to take calculus instead of counting calories and points, if I want her to love herself and deem herself worthy of being loved by someone else for who she is rather than who she could be if she were only 10 pounds lighter, then I have to show her how it’s done.  Like it or not, I am my daughter’s example.
For years, I’ve been trying to make peace with my body for my own sake.  I talk a good game, but inside, She still rules the day, tearing at my confidence with constant criticism and never-ending negativity.
She needs a good, long, timeout.  I’ve not been able to do it for me, but, God willing, perhaps I can do it for my daughter.
It would be the greatest gift I could give her.

Better living through chemistry

Writer’s workshop prompt: What was your medicine?  Write about a time you remember being ill.

What was my medicine?  The better question would be, what wasn’t my medicine.  At some point during each visit with a new doctor, the nurse taking my history usually asks me what I do in the medical field.  Nothing, I tell her, I’ve just taken a whole lot o’ drugs.
When it comes to medical luck, I have none.  Or rather, I have tons, it’s just all bad.  If it can happen, it happens to me.  Whenever I’m in the office, my OB eyes me warily, looks sideways at my 6 inch thick chart, and says, “Well, normally I wouldn’t worry about it, but since it’s you … I think we should do an ultrasound, some blood work …”
It’s to the point of ridiculousness.  Really, it is.
As in, I’m resistant to anesthetic.  Telling doctors you’re resistant to anesthetic, anesthesia and pain meds in general is not a fun thing to do.  They hear your words and immediately label you “junkie.”  Or, if they’re particularly kind, “wimp.”  Before my c-section, I tried to explain to the anesthesiologist that pain meds just don’t last on me.  Oh, the patronizing look in his eyes as he explained to me that the spinal he was going to administer would be enough to numb me for two and half times the length of the surgery.
Oh, how I wish he’d still been in the OR when the spinal wore off.  Yes, you read that correctly.  My spinal wore off during my c-section.  Once the nurses figured out that yes, my skyrocketing blood pressure meant that I wasn’t faking, that I really was in excruciating pain, they began to administer morphine.  Lots of morphine.  Which is how I ended up with an ileus.  (Google at your own risk.)
I told this story to a physician friend of mine, who looked at me, incredulously, and said, “Nobody gets an ileus after a c-section!  You would be my nightmare patient!”
If I could do math, it would be great fun to figure out what number I am in a million.  After my recent surgery to fix the abdominal muscles the twins ripped apart while in the womb, I had horrible complications from the general anesthesia.  My surgeon told me I was in the 1% of the population to have these complications.  Then, I started to accumulate pockets of fluid around the surgical site, which had to be drained no less than four times.  My surgeon told me I was in the 2% of the population to have this particular complication. 
Seriously, I don’t know how to do the math, but that tells me I should be buying lottery tickets. 
Over the years, migraine headaches, a small brain tumor, four shoulder surgeries, and a host of other maladies have led me to exchange one of those 80’s BFF pendants with my pharmacist, Sam. 
But my medicine is not limited to what’s on Sam’s shelves.  If it’s out there, I’ve tried it.  Massage therapy is delicious and effective, therefore insurance won’t cover it.  They will, however, cover acupuncture.  Blue Cross logic escapes me.  As do the mechanics of acupuncture.  I only know that the first time I tried it, the acupuncturist had only put in about three needles when my body felt like it had been strung up on a power line.  I was burning hot, sweating like crazy, and I almost vomited on his shoes.  He stood back, awestruck, and said, “I’ve never seen anyone react to acupuncture like this before.  You must have had a major blockage in your energy flow.” 
Then there was my experiment with hypnosis.  It was very relaxing, and I learned how to self-hypnotize, which has been useful.  But the hypnotist shot her credibility all to hell when she tried to get me to try her version of biofeedback, which was “based on quantum physics” and involved a machine that could tell you everything about your body, including where you might have imbalances or cancer.  I’m thinking that if this were anything but quackery, it would be at the Mayo Clinic and all over CNN.  The best part was when she told me each of us has the equivalent of a unique radio signal, and that once she’s acquired it, she can treat a person from as far away as necessary, by dialing into their unique frequency, using (natch) quantum physics. 
She knew I was a lawyer and not a physicist, but I couldn’t resist confronting this obvious quackery.  I started asking her questions about how her magic machine worked.  It was obvious that her clients don’t often ask questions.  She stuttered a few explanations, littered with big, impressive sounding words, and ended with, “but it’s all about quantum physics, so I can’t really explain it since you don’t know quantum physics.”
Forgive me, Lord, but I had to do it.  I said, “Oh, I took all kinds of physics in college when I was thinking about going to med school.  Loved my quantum physics course.  So tell me how this thing works?”
And suddenly, we were out of time.
My health issues have also prompted me to try meditation classes, which I loved, but the practice has been hard to keep up.  You can’t see well with your inner eye when your inner ear is being bombarded with “MOMMY!  He just hit me!”
And then there’s the physical therapy.  Oh, the PT.  And the TENS unit.  And the look on my dentist’s face when my incessant tooth-grinding cracked my new Kevlar nightguard, and the even more despairing look a few months later when he figured out I’d cracked an actual tooth while wearing my new (stronger) nightguard. 
However, the doc at the pain clinic has me figured out.  Each time he sees me to administer my trigger point injections, he says, “You have too much stress!  This would all be better if you could just get a Type B personality.”
Anybody know where I can pick one of those up?

Reflections on motherhood

Today is Mother’s Day, and as I’ve enjoyed my day off, I’ve been ruminating over how three and a half years of motherhood has changed me.
There’s the obvious: my body is now the shape of a mother.  I bear scars and stretch marks, and yes, at first, I resented them bitterly.  As bathing suit season approaches, part of me still resents them bitterly.  I see new moms looking like Kate Moss and my subconscious wonders what deal with the devil they struck.  But outside of dressing rooms with their evil lighting and three-way mirrors, in a world where more women look like me than like Gisele, I mostly see these changes as God’s tattoos, branding “mommy” on my skin as clearly as if he’d spelled out the word.  I have soft places that will likely never be buff and toned, but when my children lay their heads in my lap and sigh with pleasure, it pleases me that Mommy is a comfort and a soft place to land.
Motherhood has made me stronger in ways I never fathomed.  Law school didn’t teach me how long I could go without sleep, but two infants sure as hell did.  Several shoulder reconstructions didn’t teach me how much physical pain I could endure, but my pregnancy and complicated c-section definitely did.  For these babies, I’m stronger than I thought, and far stronger than if it were just for me.  In a true miracle, I have acquired some small amount of patience.  Three months of bed rest will do that for you.  As will three years of twins, approximately 542 ear infections, 689 middle-of-the-night fevers, and 301 cases of croup.  Not to mention countless trips to the pediatrician, one memorable visit to the pediatric dentist, one year of speech therapy, and two visits to the pediatric ER.
Yet while motherhood has made me stronger, it has also made me vulnerable in a way only other mothers can understand.  When the doctor plucked my little babies from my womb, pieces of my heart splintered off and went with them.  Gone from the confines of my chest to the brutal environment outside, my heart was no longer safe and sheltered.  My children are pieces of me, and when they hurt, their pain stabs at me, too.  Then there’s the constant worry, knowing they are out in the world and subject to hurt, loss, and pain, and that they will eventually meet all these things.  This is the world in which we live, and nothing can protect them from it, especially if they are to go out and enjoy all it has to offer.  It’s a bittersweet pain, a constant anxiety that feels as much a permanent part of me as they are.
This Type A girl has yet to become Type B, but I have learned to let go of some things.  My house will never look like a museum, but that’s ok.  It looks like a home.  There will always be laundry waiting, and my children will never allow themselves to be dressed and coiffed to smocked perfection.  They prefer Target play clothes to boutique clothing, and that’s ok.  They’re happy, and I don’t have to iron.
Motherhood has deepened my connection to God, at least, when I don’t fall asleep in the middle of my prayers.  It has made me conscious of the things I do, because those little eyes and ears don’t miss anything, and they imitate everything.  So I find myself trying to be the best person I can be so that my children will follow suit.  Some days the best person I can be is a mommy in her pajamas who parks her kids in front of Nick Jr. and begs them to be quiet because mommy has a migraine.  They don’t know what a migraine is, and I pray they never do.  But it’s the best I can do, and I’ve learned that the best you can do is absolutely enough.
However, there remains a lot for me to learn.
For instance, my son is potty trained, yet I still find myself mopping up puddles on the bathroom floor on a regular basis.  This, I do not understand.  The penis simply does not look that complicated.  Point and shoot. Look down at what you’re doing.  Voila!  (Or so one would think.)  I’ve learned never to talk to him while he’s going, because he’ll turn around, mid-pee, and soak the bathroom.
And what am I supposed to do about my children’s honesty?  Last week I asked my son, “Did you hit your sister?” and he looked at me and said, looking slightly offended, “No.  I not hit her.”  Pause.  “I push her.”
Two cheers for honesty, but really, should I have punished him for telling the truth?  I think I said (while trying not to bray like a donkey) something along the lines of, “Thank you for telling me the truth, but we do not hit.  Do not hit your sister again.”
Since she’s been sporting a mysterious black eye this week, I’m not convinced he got the message.
Happy Mother’s Day to all the wonderful women out there who make it their work to raise children.  May your children grow up with all the best parts of you.

Open letter to new moms (of twins)

Dear new moms of twins,

I am having a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.  And my twins are three and a half.
I would like to tell you that after all the night feedings and spit-up cease, things become a cinch, but I promised my readers that I would give them things straight up.
So, straight up it is.  You may want to sit down.
Motherhood is hard.  And for me, it is not getting easier as the kids get older.  It’s just morphing into a different type of hard.
Before you brand me a wimp, let me tell you that I am actually quite capable, intelligent, up for a challenge, and resilient.  I made it through law school, passed the bar exam, practiced corporate law, jumped out of an airplane, scuba dived on the wreck of an iron-side steamer in 100 feet of water, went parasailing, endured the loss of both my grandfathers and my father to prostate cancer, got through the medical scare of a lifetime after finding out that my brain harbors a small tumor, then weathered a traumatic pregnancy and birth only to end up with postpartum depression.  (Full disclosure: I got through all this, but with the help of my good friend Sam the pharmacist.  Better living through chemistry, I always say.)
There’s no way to be ready for parenthood.  It’s not an experience for which you could adequately prepare, no matter how much time you had.  I hope you’re one of those new moms who exists in a blissful state of pink-tinged cloudy happiness, and if you are, I’m thrilled for you.  But if you’re not, know that you’re not alone.  Even if your friends don’t talk about it, they have days where they sit and cry for no reason.  Some of them hate nursing but feel like they can’t stop without being branded a bad mother.  Some of them hate nursing but feel like they can’t stop because it’s the only reason they’ve lost weight.  They panic and think they’re pregnant again, rushing out to the drugstore to buy a test, then berate themselves when, after peeing all over their hands, they remember that they may not have actually had sex since their last period.  How do I know this?  I’ve talked to a LOT of new moms.  When you ask how they’re doing and take the trouble to get past “fine,” you realize that the experience is hard for everyone.
You’re not the only one who:
  • Wonders at the end of the day whether you remembered to brush your teeth.
  • Goes out in public with Desitin smeared on your shirt.
  • Needs a shower but would rather nap.
  • Looks at your cracked, bleeding nipples and wonders if it’s worth it.
  • Sees your preemie newborns and thinks, “Ugh.  My babies look like aliens!”
  • Stood up in the hospital and had a gush of blood ruin your slippers.
  • Wonders, while holding your screaming, feverish child in a tepid bath at 2:30 in the morning, why you decided to procreate.
  • Falls asleep pumping.
  • Feels like a dairy cow.
Some tips and general things to know:
  • Crying is ok.  If they’re crying, they’re not dying of SIDS.
  • If you don’t already drink alcohol, consider starting.  If you already enjoy the good grape, consider moving up to hard liquor.
  • Understand that you’re going to feel incredibly isolated for the first year or so.  Not only is it hard to get around with twins, but most of your friends will not have twins.  Every time you relate a particularly horrible parenting experience, they’ll sigh and say, “But you had twins!”  As if you didn’t know.
  • Learn to accept help, even when that help is doing your laundry and making fun of the condition of your delicates.  Accept help even when the help is doubled over laughing at your husband’s boxer shorts.
  • With help comes less privacy (see above).  Best to get used to it now.  You won’t be able to go to the bathroom alone for several years.
  • You do NOT have to breastfeed.  If you have to supplement with formula, or for some reason cannot, or choose not to nurse, it’s ok.  Don’t let anyone make you feel like you’re letting your children down.
  • More than likely, you’re not going to see your “old” body again.  And it will take about a year to feel remotely normal.
  • Any time you have an option, go for what makes life easier, even if it isn’t what you’d envisioned pre-twins.  For example, if you always pictured yourself as the cool mom in the SUV, consider that a minivan, while less cool, will make your life significantly easier, and thus happier.
  • If you don’t already have a dog, get one, if for no other reason than to avoid having to sweep and mop under the kitchen table three times a day.  But also because your dog is infinitely more likely to obey you, unconditionally love you, and greet you with enthusiasm than are your own offspring.
  • But don’t take the easy way out.  Take the kids to church, even if they do get sick every time they’re in the nursery.  They need it, and so do you.
  • Pray with your kids, even when it’s the last thing you feel like doing.  Introduce them to God so he’ll know who they are when you complain about them.
  • Don’t avoid discipline because it’s inconvenient.  Someone once told me, with kids, “it’s pay now or pay later.”  Truer words were never spoken.
  • Remember that your job is not to be their friend, but their mother.
And yes, it is worth it.  Even on a day like today, when my kids have pestered me with the same questions time and time again, when they’ve thrown tantrums, screamed and refused to go down for a nap without a fight, even on the days when someone vomits on my shoes and pees on the bathroom floor.
It’s worth it.  Someday you’re going to find yourself engulfed in a huge toddler hug, and a little voice will whisper, “Mommy, I love you.”  And you’ll know what I mean.
Love,
Angie