I’m finishing the year must as I started it at the moment—nursing Miles and spending time with family.

2013 was a huge, huge year. It started with surgical recovery and the addition of a family member, in the middle it was hard and everything was in transition constantly, and in the end, we had to fix our house a lot and struggled to get to a new normal which is not yet settled.

Forevermore, I will associate the new year with my son. He turns two on Thursday, which is crazytalk, but tomorrow we will fill our living room with two year olds (four of them should do the trick) and they will eat cupcakes and it will be low key and fine.

 

I’ve been struggling with depression. The battle to get respite and to get health care coverage has been demoralizing at best. One of my coping mechanisms, which only parents of violent children will understand, is to know that I have a choice, that if it gets too bad she can live somewhere else. I could think about that choice because foster care through DDS is a very different creature from foster care through CPS, the training is different, it is voluntary, etc. etc. But the same issue that prevents us from getting respite paid for also prevents her from entering that system, so really the ONLY option that would get her out of the house if she really injures someone is basically calling CPS, and that’s not an option for a kid like Shiny. Putting her in therapeutic foster care is one thing, but tossing a medically complex kiddo into “the system” is not happening on my watch.

Feeling trapped is one of my worst, worst triggers for depression. “Acute situational depression” is still situational and acute even when the situation is chronic. The cure is to fix the situation, I just feel like we’ve been slogging against it for so long.

My parents are paying for a couple days of respite this week, one day next week. We’ll get through it. When I can’t use my usual coping methods, we default to “things change, it will be different later.”

That and video games. I treated myself to the second chapter of Starcraft, which actually passes the bechdel test, but has kind of an annoying “heroine”. The game play is fun though, even if the story is (by necessity of the game design) aggravating. When you design a game where you have three factions and you play all three factions, kind of everyone has to suck at some level, and you have to sort of hate everyone. So I am playing the zerg mother and bash smash swarm it’s a decent outlet.

I don’t do new years resolutions. Coincidentally I will be starting my elimination process next week whereby I figure out which foods I tolerate and which I don’t. It is not a “diet” per se for weight loss, but an attempt to figure out if I can feel better by changing my diet. We shall see.