Hubby and I got a bit of late start on having kids, not entirely by design. I found out I had PCOS when I was 22, it was mildly disturbing to hear, but not devastating. Yet.

So we knew going in that it may take us a little longer to get pregnant, but we didn’t know it would take us FIVE YEARS!!!!! Five years of tests, treatments, pills, shots, daily temperature taking, procedures, optimism, pessimism, defeatism. I gave up. I didn’t actually tell anyone else that I had given up, but my heart was tired of disappointment and giving up was a hedge against more of it.

Lot’s of other things happened during those five years: changing jobs, buying a house, moving to Chicago, moving back. All the while, I had that giving-up as an insurance policy against getting too invested in all the things that weren’t happening in my body. One of the things that happened in the course of moving was changing doctors.

In Chicago, I starting going to a doctor affiliated with Northwestern Healthcare in Evanston. The beautiful, wonderful, miracle-working Dr. Jennifer Kim put me on Metformin, a drug commonly used to treat Type II diabetes. When we moved back to Oklahoma, my new doctor here approved of that treatment and kept me on it.

Eventually, after some other bumps in the road, we got pregnant with Monkey. It was officially a high-risk pregnancy, but I suffered only the usual annoyances plus gestational diabetes. After the level hormonal playing field of PCOS, I was completely unprepared for the wild fluctuations pregnancy brought. Day after day, I would come home from the bank and tell Hubby, “I hate everyone but you.” And then Monkey was born.

His birth story is one for another day. What is important here is what happened afterwards. If the hormonal changes of the pregnancy threw me around like a rag doll, the ones postpartum were expontentially worse. And I had no idea what was happening to me. You see, no one told me that I was going to be sick and crazy for a year.

Oh, everyone knew about the “baby blues”; and postpartum depression and psychosis had been in the media but I never applied these things to myself. I could get out of bed in the morning and function like a normal person. There were no crying jags, no dramatic weight loss or gain, no sadness. But there was an underlying current of anger. Sleep disturbances come with the territory when there’s an infant the House, so does a loss of interest in sex. I was never suicidal and never thought about harming myself or others; I was just…crazy.

I was so angry at everything and everybody and I did feel worthless. Since the age of 18, I had worked full time, gone to school full time, or some combination of the two. After Monkey, I stayed home, something with which I had no experience. There was this huge chunk of who I used to be that was now missing. And a terrible isolation took over. With Hubby at work every day, no other SAHM’s that I knew, and only a drooling infant for company, I was starved for grown-up interaction.

Every day, I felt like I was at the bottom of a dry well or that I was twisting in the wind, alone. The twisting-in-the-wind days were bad; I was the last dead leaf left, buffeted about by the weather, clinging desperately to the end of the thinnest, driest branch on the tree. The dry-well days were oh so much worse. I could taste and feel the fetid, stale air like a noxious slime at the back of my throat. That well was too dark and close and deep for even an echo of my voice to escape. And even if I could’ve spoken aloud, I wouldn’t have had the words to describe it. Weeks passed, then months. Monkey turned 1, then Thanksgiving, then Christmas, then the new year all passed me by. Then one day, in the Spring, I came back. The person that I had been before, that I hadn’t been for so long, came back. I could, again, feel the familiar curvature of my mind. The dark, jagged, bitter thing that it had become was gone and once again my mind took on its usual gentle hills and valleys. Oh, my temper was still there, but the fury was gone. I bid adieu to the alien thing that had taken up residence in my brain and never saw it again.

I may never know why I was hit so hard. Perhaps it was the years of trying and disappointment and anticipation, followed by a cold splash of reality. Maybe it was my utter inexperience with hormonal changes due to the PCOS. Whatever it was, I didn’t have those problems with Pumpkin. All my problems with that one happened during the pregnancy. But that, too, is a tale for a different day.

There was one major self-discovery that came of all this: I’m not cut out to be a housewife. Don’t get me wrong, I love my babies and I like being a mom. But that can’t be all that I am. Once, before I had kids, I read one mother’s tale of much the same discovery of self. She came to the realization that she was a better mother to her children when she worked outside the home. Of course, being a pre-parent, I knew absolutely everything there was to know about raising kids. I simply couldn’t understand what she meant. But I do now.

It is an ongoing process, but every day, every semester, I get closer to my goals. And that makes me a happier, better person and mother-day by day and semester by semester.

As some of you may know, I am incredibly busy. Just how busy? Let’s see: Monkey is 5 and started school this year, Pumpkin is 2 and the less said about that the better, I’m taking 11 hours in school this semester, I have 3 blogs (how did that happen?), and I have 1 house to care for.

Because of all the different things going on in my life I decided a long time ago that New Year’s resolutions were just not going to work for me. I love the idea of a fresh start every year, a fresh chance to get it right. But we all know that New Year’s resolutions usually don’t last very long. I needed something with more heft, some kind of resolve that I could live with beyond the new year.

A couple of years ago, with a toddler and an infant in the House, I looked at my life and realized that even with all that I had, I wasn’t satisfied. I felt like I wasn’t doing all I could for myself and, therefore, for my family. There was a missing piece, a neglected corner of my life, something I should have done a long time before. I needed a Bachelor’s degree, but saying that and actually making it happen are two different things.

That’s the way it is with most things we want to do, that’s why every year we make New Year’s resolutions and every year we don’t follow through on them. It’s too easy to say, “I need to lose weight” or “This year I’ll stick to a budget” or “This is the year my house will stay organized”. But we never mean it, these declarations are half-hearted at best. They’re the socially expected lip-service we pay to the ideals of positive change. I think the problem is not that most people don’t want to make positive changes, but that people don’t know which are the best positive changes for them. So each year they sit down and write a list totally unsuited to their lives and then, unsurprisingly, fail to follow through.

There are all these things just screaming at us to be done: things we want to do, need to do, don’t want to do, things other people want us to do, things society as a whole tells us we should do. How do we figure out what is right for us? I had to figure out what was right for me, nobody else, me. Like everyone else I had a long list of things to do: lose weight, get a degree (in what?), budget, organize my messy House, quit yelling, be more patient, speak up for myself, be a better mom (whatever that means), dress better, write a book, get it published, eat out less, cook more, try to stay on top of the daily Household chores, quit saving every piece of paper that makes it to my hands.

OK, that’s a long list and I can’t do everything all at once, nor would I want to. How do I winnow it down to just things that are really right for me? The crucial things, the major things, the things that are absolutely essential to my continued happiness. How do I figure out, from the bewildering array of choices, what direction my life should take? Well, I came up with a plan that works for me and I hope that maybe it will help someone else with a bewildering array of choices before them. But right now I have to go pretend I know what I’m doing with this mothering-thingy. More tomorrow.

Hello friends, welcome to The House of The Burning Prairie! I started this blog as a record of all our many messes and what we’re doing about them. There all kinds of messes: real, physical ones that you can step in, and less tangible ones that are even harder to clean up.

Today, on this second day of the new year, I took yet another step in cleaning up my longest-standing mess. I paid my tuition and bought my books for Spring Semester. You see, somehow I made it to 39 years of age without a bachelor’s degree. Call it a lack of focus, or a lack of support, whatever you call it, I never finished school. Oh, I have a ridiculous number of credit hours and have attended school off and on for the last 20-odd years at an embarrassing number of schools, I just never could push it over the edge and graduate.

I didn’t come from one of those families where getting a degree is just a given. “Of course you’ll go to college!” “Of course you’ll get your degree!” Never heard those things. And I am the all-time champ of “not living up to my potential”. These two factors make a perfect storm of not-finishing-college. Some people seem born knowing which directions their lives will take-doctor, architect, teacher… Not me. Was the problem, or at least part of it, that there were too many things that I wanted to do, or was capable of doing? I know that when I expressed interest in being a writer, my parents bought me a typewriter…so I could become a secretary when I couldn’t make a living as a writer. When I expressed interest in going into medicine, someone (you know who you are) said that I didn’t make good enough grades and that I should just “go to hair-school”. So I have to lay at least part of the blame at the doorstep of familial support issues. (disclaimer-I did not then and do not now think that going to cosmetology school is in any way “less than”, it was simply not for me.)

But even in environments where parents are totally unsupportive and even completely opposed to higher education, plenty of people buckle down and finish college. So I have to admit that the biggest contributor to this particular mess was definitely…..me. I could not make the decision, and therefore, the commitment to finish my degree. Finally, after years of feeling incomplete and buffeted about, I realized that it was the array of choices open to me that was literally freezing my decision-making processes. What I needed was a new process.

So, I came up with one. My new process helped me to narrow my choices and, thus, my focus. Using my process, I now have a degree goal and a way to achieve that goal. After figuring that out, I also realized that the process could help me with my other messes. But that’s a post for another day.