Zap.

And the brain started churning with the thoughts I had most carefully avoided by reading National Geographic and refusing to allow my conscious brain to wander over into ‘real life’ territory.

By ‘real life’ (and I so want to put that in air quotes) I mean the day-to-day events and people who make my brain swirl as I try to put 2 and 2 together and come up with something resembling “4″ rather than just “ick.”

Things like this tend to float around in my subconscious a long time before they suddenly coalesce into a concrete idea. Then suddenly (like now) I find myself getting out of bed to try and put them into words. Have to get it down before I forget and the morning finds the realizations paler and somewhat muddied.

2009 was a challenging year for me on one particular front — I found myself wondering why basically good people could see bad things being done and not speak out.

I’m not speaking of global atrocities or some great conspiracy. I’m just talking about what happens on the every day, personal, small-scale interactions.

You know what I mean

One guy is dishonest in his dealings with everyone. Good people who have reason to know talk amongst themselves as to how awful his behavior is. But they only talk amongst themselves. Only as members of some bizarre club of people who have been taken in by him or who have narrowly avoided it. They don’t speak out against him publicly. A woman is known to show two faces to everyone with whom she deals. The same people speak amongst themselves as to how she is whomever she thinks her audience wants her to be as long as she thinks it will get her ahead. But when her name comes up in ‘non-insider’ conversation those who talk amongst themselves say nothing to those who would most appreciate the warning. A company is clearly scamming its clients – talking a good game but in the end its nothing but talk.  Still the clients are paying money thinking that it must be a good company or surely someone would say something. Again, the basically good people who know? Nary a peep.

It just didn’t jibe with my world view.

Why didn’t those people who I knew to be honest, caring, moral people speak up? Especially when they knew that to stay silent was to imply that the liars, swindlers, and dishonest folks were okay, as they were busy churning through the unwary?

Then I looked around more carefully

I realized that there are some folks I know who do speak up. They live out loud. They put their feet forward and say with passion and certainty what they believe.  Whether it’s about a person, a company, or an event that has ignited their passion, they speak up.

I have to say that I don’t always agree with my friend Erin Kotecki Vest (aka @QueenofSpain). But damn how I wish I had her courage. I’ve never seen Erin back down from a fight. You want to know if she thinks someone is good people or bad? Ask her. She’ll tell you outright. Then again, you don’t always have to ask. She’s out there putting it black & white for people to read. She doesn’t hide behind a persona. She is who she is. Trust me – the first time I met her in person it was like just finally sharing oxygen with someone I’d known for a long time.

And Micah Baldwin (@micah)… another one of those people who is about as fearless and open as anyone you could imagine. Moreso, actually. Micah puts things out there that consistently blow me away. His fearlessness when it comes to stating what he experiences and believes publicly and standing behind his words is a little terrifying, to be honest. The first time I met him I rather expected him to growl instead of grinning like he did.

So why then are there folks like these two (and believe me, I could start listing more, but they’re extremely good examples!) but also so many who seem so afraid to speak out?

I didn’t get it

Again – my subconscious went quietly (and sometimes noisily) about working on the puzzle. It started breaking things down a little further. There were folks like Erin and Micah who don’t pull the punches. There were folks who were “in the know” about the men, women, and companies that were dishonest but didn’t say anything while personally avoiding working with them. And then there were folks who knew, but still went along as if they didn’t. Working with, being pleasant to, and even tacitly endorsing those ‘bad eggs.’

Suddenly as I lay in my bed thinking that I needed something more distracting than iPhone games to keep my brain from working on this it clicked.

Mostly because I finally examined my own silence.

You see, I figured out that I fall in the “publicly silent but unwilling to endorse the bad guys by pretending they aren’t” group.

Why? Fear mostly. Fear that is based on past experience.

In the past, when I’ve called someone out for dishonesty, disreputable behavior, and being unethical it’s just proven to be something that was used against me. “Oh, well, Lucretia… you know. She can be a problem.” The problem? That I didn’t go along with the charade. The people I thought might appreciate the warning didn’t. Either they convinced themselves that things would be different for them, or they convinced themselves that the problem really lay with me.

The inevitable “wow, I should’ve listened to you” conversation just hasn’t been worth the personal cost of being someone who spoke out.  In fact, altogether too often, I had friends who told me I really ought to quit speaking out.

So if it happens that way with me, why not with those others? Of course it does. They don’t risk it either because they know that the potential negative impact to their own reputation isn’t worth trying to ’save’ those who don’t want to be saved… those who want you to be wrong because it benefits them if you are.

Which kind of brings up that last group. Those who know, but are still working with, endorsing, and engaging with the ‘bad eggs’ despite their knowledge.

What motivates them? In a word: money

Okay two words. Money *and* pride. That last group thinks they can dance with the Devil, skirt the danger, and come out unscathed with money in their pockets. They think that they’re smarter, savvier, wiser, and somehow will avoid the fate of everyone else who has been burned by the individuals and companies that are no good.

Yes. There’s money to be had if you deal with the crooks, liars, and cheats. But the thing so many of the last group don’t get is that unless you *are* a crook, liar, and cheat? They’ll always get the better of you. You can’t come out unscathed. You can’t take money from a thief and turn it into honest money. You can’t align yourself with a cheat and not end up cheating someone else.

There is no honor among thieves

So then, back to my friends Erin & Micah and others like them. What makes them so fearless? I don’t know. But I intend to find out. Because I’m tired of being the person who is afraid to point out the Emperor’s lack of clothing lest the rest of the court shun me.

I’d rather be genuine.
I’d rather be moral.
I’d rather live my life out loud.

Despite late nights at extended family birthday dinners and emotionally exhausting (despite satisfying) days for everyone in the GeekFamily, the kidlet and I have had a couple of serious heart-to-hearts right before bedtime in an attempt to process some of the more perplexing parts of behavior of other kids.

It seems my daughter comes honestly by the tendency to process the day’s events not as they happen but in one huge data dump right before sleep just like her mother.  While GeekDaddy has a tendency to wish the overly-chatty women could not attempt to discuss every nuance of their days moments before unconsciousness, the kidlet and I are often incapable of achieving sleep if events are not processed to a certain point beforehand.

For me, this has resulted in many a late night sitting in coffee shops with a good friend or on the phone with them trying to work through a flow-chart of “what-ifs” and probabilities.  It even led to my blogging habits and my initial Twitter forays – as there’s always *someone* to talk to on the Internet.

But when you’re 7 years old and in first grade, you’re sort of stuck hoping that one or the other of your parents is the sort who will work through things with you or relegating yourself to  just not sleeping well a lot.

The really cool thing as her Mother though?  Sometimes when I’m helping her work through stuff, I realize how parallel our situations are and how much I need to remember the particular lesson I’m trying to help her work through.

One of tonight’s themes was about caring about the opinions of those you respect or love while learning how not to take to heart negative words from those who fall in neither category.

Easier said than done, isn’t it?

So many of us are equipped with the standard, vulnerable and fragile human ego.  We learn early that we’re not supposed to care about the cruel words of bullies, strangers, or the spiteful — all the while secretly wondering if perhaps there’s truth to what they say and if we just can’t trust the people we should trust if they don’t agree.

This makes the average person susceptible to those few who actually are trying to make them insecure or hurt out of some misguided sense of power or revenge.   And it leads to a LOT of therapy for insecurities and trust issues and neuroses.  And a lot of people who could benefit from the therapy but will never go because secretly they’re sure that their worthlessness will be exposed.

I tend to feel more empowered when I remind myself that the weight of 1,000,000 random strangers telling me I’m not ‘worthy’ holds no candle to the weight of just one person whose opinions I respect, and who has truly taken the time to get to know me, saying ‘yes you are.’

]]> http://geekmommy.net/2010/01/26/taking-my-own-advice/feed/ 4 http://geekmommy.net/2010/01/25/oh-where-oh-where-has-my-little-blog-gone/ http://geekmommy.net/2010/01/25/oh-where-oh-where-has-my-little-blog-gone/#comments Mon, 25 Jan 2010 12:20:58 +0000 GeekMommy http://geekmommy.net/?p=841 As I slog through the 2000+ unread emails in my inbox at 4 a.m. it occurs to me that the emotional well I’ve been falling into for the past two months is much, much deeper than I’ve been admitting to myself.

I’m about 1/3 the way through December and pausing to write this because I need to do it right now or it will simply be another blog post that I’ve thought about and haven’t written.

I haven’t really looked at my inbox since December 1st, 2009.

No, really.  From December 1st through today, January 25th, I have let everything in my online life pretty much do the metaphoric equivalent of “Go To Voicemail.”  I didn’t even know I was capable of doing that.

What happened?

Oh, I suppose I could say it was a combination of seasonal depression, a series of disappointing revelations about other people and relationships, the feeling that somehow I failed miserably at my last job, and a dozen other issues piled one on top of the other until it just snowballed into me ‘checking out.’

But the end result was pretty much that I hit a level of apathy and depression that let me just walk away.

The thing is – it’s this horrible spiral.  You don’t let people know that it’s not just their emails you aren’t answering because you’re not seeing those emails at all.  And they start to think there’s something wrong that is specific to them.  Then there are repercussions.

Too many things fall through the cracks.  You realize even from a huge emotional distance that there are probably things sitting in your inbox that are long past the point of “easy fixes” so you just avoid the inbox with more determination than ever and more things & people fall through the cracks.

I’ve never really experienced this sort of thing before.

I’ve been wired for so many years that it’s second nature to me to open up the computer and close out the rest of the world when I’m withdrawing into myself… In the past, it was phone calls, social events, and in person contact that fell by the wayside.  I’ve never just ignored my email for weeks.

Then there’s the blog thing.

Oh, the blog thing.

It’s another “I just can’t face it today, I’ll try again tomorrow” area.  Why?  In my head, blogging but ignoring email is sort of the same as not showing up for work, not calling, not explaining why – but sitting in the coffee shop in the lobby of the building where you work pretending that there’s nothing out of the ordinary.

How could I write here when there are people who have sent me dozens of emails without so much as a “Lucretia is out of the universe right now, please leave a message at the sound of the beep and she’ll get back to you when she stops spiraling out of control” response?

So no email, no blogging. What else fell into the apathy well?

Twitter.  Meaningful interactions online.  Work.  Projects I’d committed myself to but haven’t even touched.  Pretty much everything that had to do with the computer except, oddly, mindless Facebook games.  Oddly, if it was something that consisted of repetition without strategy or conversation, I’ve been fanatical about it.  Given that I’m usually attracted to the opposite, I’m still trying to figure that one out.

What didn’t fall into the well?

My family.  My daughter and my husband – and a number of my extended family.  A few good friends.  Getting up out of bed, eating, getting through the bits of the day that are really necessary if you’re not going to live in a dark closet.

What a switch that is, I tell you.  As far back as I can recall, when I’ve had to drop some of the balls we all juggle in life, work, family and everything else, I’d retreat into either books or my online world.  Then again, those were usually much shorter periods of time.  A few days, a couple of weeks.  Never before has it been quite this extended.

But today I’m unleashing my secret weapon against my own apathy & depression: anxiety.

No really.  It turns out that if you let anxiety out of the box you’ve been stuffing it into for so many years you find that a good, solid panic attack can do wonders toward getting you back in the game.

I say this because I’m at 1443 unread and working my way down.  I’m deleting outright the things that I know don’t need my time… I’m letting myself know that I have to face the music in a lot of cases and that some of the things that fell through the cracks will be unrecoverable.  I’m using fear of what happens if I don’t do it nownownow outweigh the wall of apathy that has let me pretend that I’d “start doing things right tomorrow” only to ignore it again.

I’m not sure what that means for this blog, honestly.  I really have a lot of stuff I want to write about – just as soon as I take care of the things that I absolutely must address first.  But here? I’m not sure.  I’ve clearly got some stuff to work out in my life before this ball can definitely be picked up and put back in the ones that I’m keeping in the air right now.

But at the moment, I have to get back to that inbox.  Those 1443 unread emails are not going to magically disappear if I don’t.  And I want my online life back.  So first things first.

If you’re reading this and you’ve emailed me since December 1st? I apologize – expect to hear from me shortly, part of which will include a personal apology.  And thanks for bearing with me long enough to read this despite my resounding silence in the other arena.

If you’re reading this and you want to email me? Can you hold off a bit?  I promise not to make you listen to nasty, homogenized, crackly hold music if you can’t – but I’m not promising I won’t hum ‘Girl From Ipanema‘ if you insist on hanging on the line.

It was far too early. 

I’m not a morning person by nature… usually, if I’m seeing the dawn it’s because I stayed up too late, not because I got up too early.  Traveling eastward is somewhat nightmarish for me, as it puts me getting up even earlier than usual… whereas westward is soothing since I get an excuse to stay up later and the morning lets me sleep in just a bit.

My darling husband usually takes Buttercup to school in the mornings.  This is good – because really, even when I am awake, I’m not sure driving at that hour is my best bet.  But with enough coffee, a 5 Hour Energy, and a good reason, I can be “she who braves the cross-town rush hour traffic” and get my daughter safely there.

Of course, GeekDaddy being out of town usually provides the good reason.

This week he has been in New York and Philadelphia on business, so I’ve been on morning, afternoon, and night duty.  This explains to those who know me why I fell down the stairs.  I’m ten times more accident prone when my husband is out of town.  He claims this is because I’m trying to get him to come home.  I think perhaps my subconcious agrees with him.  Because it seems to throw me down stairs, drop things on my head, sprain things, burn and cut and bruise things, and generally leave me in sorry shape whenever he is gone.  He gets back tonight.  I’m glad, because that means I’m less likely to end up in the E.R. before the weekend.

Where was I before I started rambling?

Oh yes, I woke up.  I hurt.  I got up anyways. 

I got ready and got the kidlet ready 20 minutes earlier than usual.  I say “than usual” because I was following GeekDaddy’s morning routine schedule with her.  It usually gets them out of the house just in time to make it to school on time.  I’ve discovered however that part of the issue with his routine is that it involves great stretches of a zombielike kidlet sitting on her bathroom rug staring off into space or playing with toys.  It turns out that the right motivation gets her moving faster.

So, we managed to get one game of Mario Kart for the Wii* in before leaving for school (*cough* the right motivation) and then we took off with both of us just a little more awake than usual.  It seems that crashing cars into each other and off cliffs does something for the adrenaline factor in the morning. Huh. Who knew?

As I drove her the 30+ minute drive to school, the sun was up.  I was on my second cup of coffee.  We chatted a bit.  I ended up on a call with my best friend.

I dropped the kidlet off in her class, chatted with a few parents, headed out and got into my car… but before I started the engine, I looked out the window.

There, off to the West, were the snow-covered caps of the Rocky Mountains that rise up from the plains to eventually meet the Great Divide – where water flows mindlessly toward either the Atlantic or the Pacific oceans.  There, off to the East, the sun was well on her way up into the morning sky… still low enough to cause drivers to need their sunglasses and to prove flipped-down visors useless, but turning the sky the most amazing shade of blue.  The clouds overhead were not omenous or looming, just puffy little white sheep slowing drifting in their airy pastures.

I stopped.

I took a deep breath and expelled it with a somewhat more satisfied sigh of relief than I had expected from myself at such an early hour.

I thought about the world around me and my place in it.  I thought about the changes that are looming by choice and those that were looming whether I desired them or not.  I thought about the possibilities that each new day brings and the metaphors for the dawn and what the rising sun reveals.  I thought about all the cliches that time has worn familiar: “the dawning of a new day” and “it’s always darkest just before the dawn” and “tomorrow is another day”…

And just for a moment – a mere moment of time – I was a “morning person.”  I was optimistic and ready to go and carpe any diem I could find!

Then I laughed at myself for feeling a bit too much like a heroine in a badly written novel (no Jane Austen narrating my existence, thank you.)  I started the engine, called my friend back, and drove home to tackle the dozen mundane tasks of work and life that hold no place in a novel of any sort.

But despite that… Here I am, writing about how sometimes, in the midst of the average day? It helps to just stop. And breathe.  And think of all the possibilities…

*administrative note: this post was not made in conjunction with any brand or advertiser.  No product was supplied or compensation of any sort given to the author.  My daughter just happens to be currently hooked on the game MarioKart, so I’m putting it in here.  But for the record? I fully endorse it – it’s a good game.  I just happen to endorse it of my own free will.

And then I promptly fell off the face of the blogging planet.

I’ve been really busy working a lot since then. I’ve also been really busy learning a lot since then. Mostly, I’ve learned more about the traditional side of marketing. But there were some unexpected lessons as well.

One of the most important lessons I’ve learned I should’ve probably figured out somewhere in my twenties, but seemed to have missed in the quest to acquire such useful skills as casting bronze and living in a tent.* It seems that having two totally diverse visions only works well in collaboration if you are John Lennon & Paul McCartney (and even that didn’t last forever.)

In Plain English

Let me just ditch my tendency toward metaphor for a bit and put things down here as clearly as I can.

Over the past four and a half months, I’ve had the privilege to be the Director of Social Media for Collective Bias. But increasingly it’s been evident to both John Andrews (managing partner) and I that we weren’t heading in the same direction.

John and I have known each other since July of 2008 when he started the Walmart ElevenMoms program and asked me to be a part of it. We worked well together on that program and became friends along the way, so when he asked me to join his newly formed Social Media agency? It seemed like a natural fit for both of us.

But in a startup, the pressures are different than they are in an established company. Leadership really must be on the same page and the vision has to be pretty clear. You don’t have the luxury of spending a lot of time negotiating every little detail – there’s a lot of work to be done if you want to make it past the startup phase. And there are always too few people to do that work even in a well-funded startup. No man hours can afford to be wasted on anything that isn’t going to help the company move forward.

Striking the Wrong Chord

It didn’t take John and me very long to figure out that we weren’t harmonizing well. (Yes, we’re back to the music metaphor. I can’t help myself, it fits!) It’s not that we weren’t both accomplished artists, it’s that we were singing entirely different tunes. It was confusing the rest of the band… it was making things sound horrible to the audience… it was generally just not working for anyone.

When John first suggested to me that we really needed to re-evaluate the nature of my role in the company, I couldn’t hear what he was saying. After all, except in the fast-paced world of the Internet, we had barely started.  I heard instead that he didn’t like my tune. So I resisted and kept insisting that we could figure it out if we just tried harder.

I was wrong. Trying harder isn’t always the solution.

It’s kind of like singing louder – it doesn’t make the tune any more pleasant, it just means that you either drown someone else out or you end up shrieking trying to be heard.Neither makes sense.

So a couple of weeks ago, I came to the same conclusion John had already reached. Something had to change. Someone had to back down. And honestly? It had to be me.

I had to realize that just because the band wasn’t going to sing the tunes I have in my head didn’t mean that those tunes weren’t good, and just because they weren’t mine didn’t mean that the ones John was creating weren’t good either. But I’ve been the metaphorical equivalent of a jazz singer trying to fit into a rock band.

Yeah, it took mere months & not years for me to figure out that this band wasn’t the right band for me and for John to figure out that I wasn’t the right singer for his band. So sue us. Maybe we don’t need to have a Yoko Ono to bear the blame. Maybe we’re smart enough to figure it out before we end up only talking through our press agents.

Whether or not anyone else thinks it was enough time to figure it out? We do. So after much conversation, we’ve worked out a transition plan that works best for us.

A Long, Lingering Note

So, at the end of November, I’ll be leaving Collective Bias as their Director of Social Media. We decided to take our time and do it right, so we can get everything transitioned and get the right person/people in place that will help John and his company to move forward with his vision.

If you’ll forgive me for sticking to my band metaphor past the point of prudence? I’ll be finishing a few gigs we already had agreed to while Collective Bias auditions my replacement and s/he learns their songs. I may even sit in from time-to-time down the road if they need me and I’m available (we call that ‘working contractually’ or ‘consulting’ in the non-music world.)

So, was it my dream job? Yes. And No.

But it was definitely worth pursuing to find out – as are all such dreams – and I would do it all over again. I was privileged to work with an amazing team of people and I learned a lot from each of them. I consider myself very fortunate to be given the opportunity.

Are we “breaking up the band” as I said in my title? No, not really. Collective Bias will go on to make their own Social Media music without me.But, after next month? I’ll be able to hang out in the audience enjoying their performances, while I keep working on the songs that are in my own heart.

*Those skills are real, but that’s a post for another day.

Are you back up off of the floor yet?  Yeah, I know, it knocked me for a loop too.

I’ve been saying for a very long time now (months really) that I was going to get back in the saddle and start posting regularly.  But I think it started being sort of a running joke amongst my friends and a bit of a lie that I told myself so that I could pretend that I wasn’t suffering from blogging burn-out.

Why lie to myself?  Well, I think it’s kind of like a mid-life crisis — you don’t want to admit that you’re buying the Porsche and shopping at the hipster clothing stores because you caught a glimpse of yourself in the mirror and it seems you’re a little soft around the middle and crow’s-feetish around the eyes.

I expect I’ll see a large number of my friends over the next couple of years going through it themselves.  There’s a point in your blogging career where you have to tell yourself that one post a day is actually sufficient (thank heavens Twitter seems to have helped a lot of folks burn off the excess urges!) and a point where you feel like a day isn’t complete unless you’ve blogged.  Then there’s the point where you start wondering if you’re running out of interesting things to say.  Then the point where you wonder if anyone would notice if you skipped a day.

And then…

The mid-bloggylife crisis comes when you get to a point where you start arguing with yourself that the reason you aren’t posting today is because you were too busy, too tired, too uninspired, too something… But that you’ll totally post tomorrow.  Or maybe Monday.  Or maybe you’ll take a hiatus and come back fresh and ready to post.  Or maybe it’s just that blog – if you closed it and started a new one…

But the truth is that like anything creative? No matter how much you love doing it – it’s possible to burn  yourself out and need recharging.  And no amount of resolution or self-deception is going to change that.

So here’s what I did — about a year and a half ago, I closed down multiple blogs I’d had for 7 or more years — claimed this one as my primary blog, and spent all of my time on Twitter.

What’s that? Oh, I spent all of my time on Twitter because it was a different type of creative outlet.  A new shiny toy.  If I had been a musician instead of a word-chick? Blogging would’ve been my guitar and Twitter would’ve been my side-trip being obsessed by sitar.  (If you’re not Beatles obsessed or old enough or  to remember? I’m invoking George Harrison here.)

Where am I now?

I think I’m over my burnout.  I’m hesitant to say that, because let’s be honest, 3 days in a row does not a regular habit make.  But it’s a start.  So is admitting that I seem to have rediscovered the joy of writing something that doesn’t limit me to 140 characters and lets me have really in-depth conversations with folks in the comments section.

Okay, so I’m a little squidgy around the middle, and I have “laugh lines” so deep that you have to wonder what the heck is so darn funny.  But there’s nothing wrong keeping the Porsche and having a mini-van that sits beside it in the driveway, is there?

Before we get too lost in metaphorland, what I’m trying to say is that I believe I’m back to blogging and twittering at the same time.  Yeah, I know that doesn’t seem so amazing to some of you, because you’ve been doing that all along.  But I promise to be sympathetic and not tell you “I told you so” when you hit your own mid-bloggylife crises.

After all,  sometimes a few months of metaphorical sitar lessons are good for the soul…

A week long battle with the Flu in our house followed by 8 days on the road – oh yes, there are blogs coming from those 3 events as well!! – meant that the first time I could even think about blogging something coherently was this past weekend. Annnnd I didn’t.

But on Friday May 8th I got the most unexpected and welcome surprise. I woke up to find I was on the Nielsen Top 50 Power Moms in Digital Media list. (page 5 under Tech Moms – it’s an MS PowerPoint presentation – if you need a free viewer go here)

What does that mean? Well, according to the report:

Nielsen Online’s Power Mom 50 is a collection of leading voices in the mom blogosphere based on a blend of blog posts, comments and link love developed through ongoing monitoring of more than 10,000 mom and parenting blogs as tracked by Nielsen Buzzmetrics. In addition to site engagement, number of Twitter followers, ratings and other metrics were included in the calibration to provide a comprehensive sphere of authority and influence.

I was a little stunned, truth be told.  Because I have been so absent from this space of late.  But then looking at the stats clearly shows that… In fact, it was just the push I needed to get blogging again.

Then while I was perusing the list of other Moms, two things occurred to me:

1. I know a lot of those women.  Most of them, in fact.  And I’m completely in agreement with Nielsen that they are amazing, influential, insightful Moms and social media voices.  It’s just an amazing honor to be listed amongst them.  Almost as much of an honor as it is to know them and to work with them in this space.
2. This isn’t really about me – it’s about you.  Without those connections I have through this blog, through Twitter, and through other Social Networking sites, I might as well be standing in an empty field shouting to myself.  This is really not just about me… it’s about US. You and me together, and all of the people we interact with all over the Internet.  I’m in awe of the power of technology to bring us all together and give us this voice.

So I want to take a minute right NOW (before writing another post or updating another status) to Thank You.  Whether you’re a reader, a fellow blogger, one of the companies I work with or even just someone who Googled your way here?  This would never have happened if it weren’t for you too.

You are amazing – and I aspire to live up to your faith in me.  Thank you.

Radio silence.

Yeah, I know.  I probably just forgot or got too busy again, right?

Nope.  I deliberately didn’t post because of the date.  Not because I was afraid that anything I said might be read through the filter of “hey, it’s April 1st – was this a joke?” But because I really, truly, honestly don’t like 99.9% of the stuff I’ve ever seen or heard when it comes to April Fools Day.

I’ve never quite liked it.  But this year I spent a lot of time thinking about why.  For a long time I thought it was because I just wasn’t clever enough to come up with a really good April Fools Day prank.  Then I realized that almost no one comes up with really good pranks.  Usually what they come up with is really mean, nasty pranks that play on the gullibility of others, or mock others, and then use the phrase “April Fools!” to excuse it away as if it were funny.

The butt of these “jokes” usually tries to laugh along with the perpetrator saying “oooh! Good one! Ya got me!” as if to deflect any criticism that s/he is somehow lacking in a sense of humor… but the truth is that no one likes to be played for a fool.

The best reaction I’ve ever seen to well done April Fools pranks or jokes was “Wow. That was amazing.  I totally didn’t even catch that…” and sort of an awestruck silence.  But usually that’s when the joke doesn’t really make anyone look that foolish because everyone missed it… or because there really wasn’t a victim.

This whole thing was brought home to me again when I picked up my daughter from school.  It seems that kindergartners truly get the sense of this tradition better than most.  They do mean spirited things to each other – then say “April Fools!” where they’d normally say “Just Kidding!“

And no, before you go there, my darling daughter wasn’t immune from either side – she ran afoul of her own gullibility and was also more than willing to exploit her classmates’ gullibity as well.  But she did at least ask me why I hated April Fools Day so much.  And she thought about it long and hard when I said “because I think it’s just kind of a way of being mean to each other while making it seem like it should be a lot of fun.”

I do love to look at sites like Google and Thinkgeek.com to see what they’re going to put up.  But part of the reason for that is that I’m trying to spot the joke.  Then I can laugh because I knew going in that there was a joke.  Most April Fools jokes aren’t quite so widely anticipated.  And I can’t help but believe there are a few folks who fall prey to the online pranks and “funny lies” who find themselves feeling embarrassed or stupid for not catching it in advance.  Hence the fool part.  No one likes to feel like a fool, do they?

So why does the “holiday” persist?  It’s ritualized bullying in a sense – but where the victim can’t complain or s/he will be thought a poor sport or mocked worse for having ‘no sense of humor.’  And worse? It’s the bullying of the smarter, not the stronger.  A successful AFD prank indicates that the person who crafted it was more clever than his target – or it would’ve not needed the “April Fools!” reveal.  But what it also indicates is someone who is willing to abuse the trust that the other person has placed in him for the sake of “being witty.”

So I’ve opted out.  You might hear me opine sometimes “it would be funny if…” but I gave up pranking long ago.  Because even when it’s between 2 good friends? It starts being about one-upping the other guy pretty quickly and saying “but it’s all in good fun!” if anyone complains.

So no more April Fools Day participation from me.  Even in blog form.  I think it will be my one day off every year from here on out – no matter what other days I do or don’t post.  Or maybe I’ll just link this post every year right beforehand… who knows.  It’s another 364 days before I have to worry about it again.

That’s me though – what about you?

Do you think I’m over-reacting?  Did you pull the “World’s Best April Fools Day Joke” and want to tell me how wrong I am and why it was funny?  Or were you on the end of one and wished you could say all of this without looking like a stick in the mud?  What do you think about yesterday’s institutionalized “just kidding!” day?

But who’s counting aside from me?

The rest of you are busy counting your own minutes and obligations, I expect.  Time doesn’t wait for intentions.  You’ve probably been surging right along getting your own ducks quacking in a row rather than wondering why the sudden surge of noise from this corner.

For me – 4 out of 6 makes for a fabulous day.

Altogether too often, I’ve been batting zero time and time again.  I wake up, tell myself today’s the day I’ll get it all done annnnnnnd go to bed at last convincing myself that tomorrow will be different.

Because I’ve been so social by necessity of late – I kind of missed the signs.  It is, after all, more than likely that I’ve been suffering from a deep bout of Seasonal Depression.  It wouldn’t be the first time.  It would only be the first time that it took me this long to identify it.  My seasonal depression isn’t the same as my usual depression.  It’s not like snow and gloom make me all full of self-doubt.  It’s that I get maudlin and melancholy and reminisce and dream too much – and the normal stuff that makes up each day keeps getting buried into this dark hole that I keep digging for it.  Sooner or later, too much stuff piles up and I realize I’m down there with it… and that the only way out is to cut steps into the walls and haul all of that stuff out, load by load, and take care of it in the sunshine.

So I’m doing it. I’m cutting steps, dredging out unintentionally buried things & trying to set everything right.

If you want a perkier metaphor you can say that I’m working in my garden while it’s still cold and icy so that things bloom when they’re supposed to.

I really want to type “No More Excuses!” here and mean it.  But that one is a bit too heavy to drag up just now… So I guess I’ll stick with “I’m doing better already… I only have to keep it up!”

If for some reason you’re reading this and wondering why I haven’t posted that story you were expecting me to? Take a couple minutes and email me.  Give me a chance to see which crack it fell through and how we can breathe new life into it.

I’m breathing new life into me… I can certainly do that for my blog!

]]> http://geekmommy.net/2009/03/31/cutting-steps-in-the-wall-of-the-hole/feed/ 3 http://geekmommy.net/2009/01/23/how-i-learned-to-stand-up-for-myself-and-to-say-no-too/ http://geekmommy.net/2009/01/23/how-i-learned-to-stand-up-for-myself-and-to-say-no-too/#comments Sat, 24 Jan 2009 00:31:13 +0000 GeekMommy http://geekmommy.net/?p=450 The following post contains some details that may disturb some readers. Death, trauma, and pregnancy complications are discussed in some detail.  If you are pregnant – stop reading this. Now.  You can always read it later – but you don’t need this in your mind right now.  Trust me.  If you are sensitive to situations that involve medical complications or blood – stop reading this. Just figure that whatever happened from here? It taught me to stand up for myself.

Six years ago today, I was waiting around to check into Rose Medical Center in Denver for my inducement to have my baby girl.  GeekDaddy and I kept calling the hospital to find out when I could come in, because seriously – 1/23… what a cool date for a birthday!

But apparently, there was some sort of “post-9-eleven” baby boom going on, so the Labor & Delivery floors of pretty much every hospital in town were overly full and there were women laboring in gurneys lining the hallway at the time.  Something that just makes the whole experience joyous, I’m sure.

I was happy I had an induction scheduled, because otherwise they would’ve sent me home to “wait it out”  despite the fact that I had been in non-productive labor for 72+ hours by the point I actually got checked into the hospital.

What’s “non-productive labor”? Oh, it means I was in full-on contraction mode… but my timing betweeen contractions was erratic.  They tell you “come in when your contractions are 5 minutes apart.”  Mine were along the mode of “5 mins, 5 mins, 20 mins, 5 mins, 5 mins, 16 mins, 5 mins, 4 mins, 18 mins…” For nearly 3 days.

This wasn’t exactly unexpected by me.  My mother never went into labor “naturally” with either my brother or I either.  I had told my OBs this and been reassured that they would “deal with that if it came to it.”

Their lax attitude should’ve been a huge red flag to me, but for some reason, wasn’t.  I blame it on pregnancy hormones and an aversion to actual confrontation.  You see, I should’ve been scheduled for a c-section, not an inducement.  My due date had been pushed back from 1/6 to 1/11 and finally to 1/14.  They finally scheduled me for the 23rd to be induced strictly because I had gotten so whiny.  You know, given that I had such severe Hyperemesis Gravidarum that I had been on two different anti-emetics the whole way through my pregnancy and had been so sick for months that my students thought I must have cancer and be going through chemo… until I started showing.

Here’s the thing… my OB practice, which consisted of 5 doctors at the time, dropped the ball bigtime.  Over the course of 8 months, I cycled through all 5 doctors – so I got to see everyone at least once.  Since they rotated their on-call so they wanted to make sure you’d seen the person doing your delivery at least once.  Every single one of them I went over my “history” with.  I’m not going to burden you with details – let’s just suffice to say that at 36/37 I was extremely high risk for the complication that happened.  I retold my concerns to every single one of those doctors and wasn’t listened to.  I know, because they wrote it down several times in my chart – and it would’ve been a devestating blow if I had filed a malpractice suit.* (Reasons I didn’t are below.)

What complication?  A condition called placenta accreta – which is the medical term for saying that the placenta attaches ‘abnormally’ or too firmly to the uterine wall.  In my case, I had the rarest form of it, placenta percreta.  Which means that my daughter’s placenta had actually grown through the uterine wall.

When I checked into the Emergency Room at 2 a.m. on the 24th (when they finally called us to come in) the guy doing the check in watched as I was rocked by a strong contraction more than once and said “I don’t understand, you are checking in for an induction, but you look like you’re already in labor…” Breathing shallowly, I said “I am.”

“Then why are you checking in for an induction?” he asked.  “Because my contractions are not consistent and haven’t been for 3 days and you’d just send me home otherwise.”  I replied trying not to bite my lip until it bled.  “Oh… well, that makes sense – let’s get you up there then, how about we get you a wheelchair?”  Fabulous!

I had to retell my story to the L&D folks upstairs, who gave me a room (with a pullout sofa for my husband) and said “well, your induction won’t start until the morning… your doctor should see you in about 5 hours… but you look like you’re in pain.  When was the last time you slept? Would you like us to give you some Morphine so you can sleep for a bit?”

“Yes, please?” I said and then threw up on the floor… an action that I repeated but with “liter jars” repeatedly for the next 17 hours.  Of course, past a certain point, they wouldn’t let me have water, so I just repeatedly vomited stomach acid.  Because there’s some bizarre logic that says it’s better not to aspirate water into a breathing tube if you need surgery than it is stomach acid.  Personally, I found the diluted stomach acid less painful.

So I slept for 5 hours and my poor husband didn’t – because some woman down the hall sounded as if they were torturing her repeatedly.  In my morphine sleep, I kept thinking they should put that woman out of her misery and “put her down” gently.  I guess I thought she was a wounded animal?

At 7:30 a.m. we wanted to know where the doc was.  The nurse said she was just down the hall finishing another delivery, she’d go get her for us.  The doctor who came in – whose name I will not reveal – had seen me only 1 time.  Her first question was “who scheduled you for an induction?!”  Um, the office?

It seems no one had told her.  So instead of prepping by reading my file the night before, she just had to wing it.  She wasn’t pleased.  She had them ’start’ the induction with promises to be back “later that afternoon” after sleeping a bit.  If you don’t know what an induction entails, you can Google it. I’ll spare you the details and the controversy.  In fact, I’ll spare you most of the details until after the birth of my beautiful daughter at 6:50pm on January 24th… Six years ago tomorrow!  The only thing I’ll say is “remember the liter jars I was using for the repetitive stomach acid upheavals – they will come in to play again.”

GeekDaddy accompanied Buttercup down to the nursery for the usual procedures while I stayed in the room with my epidural and my semi-delirium and my doula and the OB who had just delivered my daughter.  We were chatting and I kept thinking “when will they bring the baby back? Why are these women looking so serious?“  What I didn’t know was that it had been 20 minutes and no placenta.  I didn’t even know enough to know what they were waiting for.  Finally, the doc said “I’m just going to reach in and get that placenta out manually…” and then all Hell broke loose.

Somewhere in the midst of the realization that the placenta was coming out in pieces and that I was now bleeding uncontrollably, the doc managed to get me to blurt out a simplified version of my medical history. She was rapidly being covered in blood and right after telling my doula to ‘push the button, scream if you have to, we need help!’ she started swearing.  I can look up in my head right now and remember her saying “F**k! Why weren’t you scheduled for a c-section!?!” and then going on to describe in graphic terms the conditions of the placenta, my uterus, and the now gaping hole that was in the side of it.  Trust me when I say you never want to hear an OB tell you that your uterine wall is “all ratty in there!” – but there’s some humor to it this many years later.  I wonder if there’s a technical medical term for a ‘ratty uterine wall’?

Anyhow, I think I’ll kind of slide over the next bit.  Because it’s getting more detailed than I usually feel comfortable with when I recount it to folks.  Over the next several hours, I received super-human efforts and amazing care in the effort to save my life.  9 pints of blood transfusions – they based the amount needed by the volume of blood that nurses had “sponged and scooped up off of the floor” into the 2 different liter jars that I previously mentioned.  They came to the conclusion that I was going to die without surgery.

My husband briefly held up my daughter once, so I could see her, just in case it was the only time I did.  16 nurses, doctors, and other hospital personnel were with me at one point… I had 6 IVs in, 3 in each arm.  Then the OB, whom I blame for none of this, did something astounding for a doctor in my experience.  She asked if “anyone in the room” had any ideas on how to save me other than getting me into an OR for an emergency hysterectomy?  The Deck Doc (a young woman going through her OB rotation) piped up that she had seen a (then) experimental surgery a couple of weeks before that was a radiological procedure called Uterine Artery Embolization – usually used for Fibroid treatment, it entails threading a tube up the femoral artery and injecting polyvinyl microbeads into the artery that supplies the blood to the uterus, blocking off the blood flow.  In this case, I was the 5th person ever at Rose to undergo the surgery rather than emergency hysterectomy.  I know because I was awake throughout the procedure… and half of the hospital apparently came in & out of the observation room to see.  There were so many who wanted to, they took turns.  I was really well known for the next 5 days that I was there.

I keep vacillating on sharing more details here.  This is already long enough to be a short-story and yet too short to even begin to encompass what I and my family went through over the course of my time in that hospital following my daughter’s birth… But there’s a title above that says “how I learned to stand up for myself and to say no, too” and so far, all you’ve heard are horrific details about my daughter’s birth and my near-death.

So let me skip the minute gory details and get to the end of the story.

Those doctors and physicians assistants and personnel at my OB’s office? They didn’t listen to me.  As a result, I almost died and I suffered irreparable damage to my reproductive system that required a tubal ligation.  Since getting pregnant again would be a death sentence for both me and the baby.

Death is always a risk in childbirth – even in 1st world countries.  But if even ONE person at my OB’s office had listened to my concerns? I would’ve been scheduled for a c-section, given late-term ultrasounds to see if the placenta was an issue, and treated as the high-risk patient I was.

Why didn’t they listen?

Because I didn’t demand it.  I should’ve walked out of that practice the first time someone dismissed my concerns and found doctors who would listen.  I should’ve stood up for myself repeatedly and didn’t.  I should’ve been my own best advocate and if not listened to refused to put up with it until heard. Instead, I nearly lost my life because I entrusted it to people who weren’t paying attention.

I didn’t file a malpractice suit because I talked to the top malpractice attorney in the state and he said “Look, let’s be frank here… you could file a suit.  There were so many instances of malpractice here that it’s amazing.  Clear cut.  Undeniable.  Even in writing.  But… you’ll waste your time and you’ll lose.  Because you are alive, you have a beautiful, healthy baby girl, and you are 37 years old.  I’m not going to smoke-screen you… no jury will award you damages because the defensive attorneys will argue that they saved your life, you have a child already, and your eggs are old.”

It was an awful thing to hear. Your eggs are old.  Your uterine lining is ratty.  They messed up, nearly killed you, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

But it was the truth and I knew it when I heard it.  He could’ve filed a suit, charged me tons of money, and had the same result – but he was far more helpful… he was truthful.

So here’s another truth: that OB did save my life.  I’m here.  Every day I get to spend with my daughter is a blessing.  A gift that I almost didn’t get.  Six years tomorrow of days I almost didn’t have with her or my husband.

And the hardest truth?  If I had believed in myself enough, had believed in my right to say “No, stop. Now listen… I have valid concerns and you are dismissing them without even thinking about it.  Stop and listen or I’ll go find someone who will” she wouldn’t have had to save my life.  I wouldn’t have had to see her covered from the neck down in my own blood.  I wouldn’t have had to see my husband holding up my daughter ‘just in case it was the only time I ever saw her.’

Because as much as those doctors failed me – I failed me.

So for 6 years now, I’ve said what I need to say, done what I need to do, and had absolutely no fear of saying “no” because I never want to go through anything like that again.

Sometimes, I have to remind myself.  Because old habits die hard.  But that’s why I wrote this post.  Because maybe it will help me remember.  And maybe it will help you too.

Tomorrow I’m celebrating my daughter’s sixth birthday… But I’m also celebrating the beginning of the point where I became the best advocate for me that I can be.  How about you?  What’s it going to take for you?  I hope it’s not as extreme as what it took for me.