I have no idea if anyone from the early days pops over here any longer; still, an update feels necessary.

The last time I wrote, we were drowning in a pandemic. I had two kids in middle school, and Gil and I were doing our best to work and monitor their at-home studies. It was an adventure and not the fun kind, but we survived, and I’m happy to report that the boys are thriving. They’re now giant teens who tower over me, consume all the groceries, and are on the path to adulthood. I enjoy teenagers, mostly. Piers just finished tenth grade and has a solid part-time job for the summer. Wallace just finished ninth grade, and he’s less than thrilled to be back at the neighborhood pool snack shack for the summer season; jobs are harder to come by when you’re only fifteen.

The past year has been a challenging one for me. Allow me to back track a year. In June 2023, I went from not sleeping well to not sleeping at all. There was stress as I once again had to figure out the next step in Wallace’s meandering educational path since he was finishing middle school. Wallace is profoundly dyslexic and extremely bright. Some experts call this 2e, short for twice exceptional. He spent a lot of elementary school not getting his needs met because of his intelligence; he was accused more than once of not trying hard enough. I mean, I get it. His vocabulary is massive, and he talks like a small senator, but he writes like a two-year-old. If you don’t understand language disorders, and many educators do not, it’s perplexing to say the least. We finally found a remarkable project-based charter school for him, and for that I am forever grateful. Unfortunately, it only existed through eighth grade, so since he was graduating, we had to make new plans for high school. We bit the bullet and put him in a small private school specifically for dyslexia, ADHD, and other language based disorders for ninth grade, but the evaluations, interviews, and application process did a number on everyone, especially me. I’ll come back to the Wallace situation, but that was the initial stressor that kept me up at night.

I was also still working at the job from hell where I had to get up at 2:30am and be at work by 4am. This job worked well during the pandemic because I could work, Gil could get the kids started on school at home, and then by the time I got off around 10am, Gil could work, and I could take over at-home learning. However, by last spring the kids were back in regular school, AND they had morphed into teens almost overnight, and newsflash, teen body clocks change and they stay up later and later. This was challenging since I needed to be asleep by 7pm. Additionally, Piers was learning to drive around the same time I witnessed a horrible, almost deadly car accident. It was some kinda spring I tell ya!

All this led to me not being able to sleep, and I was not functioning at all. I ended up in the hospital for a large part of last summer. I’m honestly still trying to wrap my head around everything that happened. I was put on a cocktail of medications, none of which worked all that well, and some sent me right into psychosis. It was horrible. This is about all I want to say for now. My hope is to write more about my experience, but I’m still processing a lot of it. The short is that I was finally referred to a wonderful psychiatrist who agreed with me that I could not remain on all the medications the hospital insisted I needed. I ended up in an outpatient program and was there through October. Ultimately, I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder because of the severity of the mania and psychosis. I’m still not sure what to make of all of it, and quite frankly, I don’t know that I agree with the diagnosis. I do however agree that I was both manic and experiencing psychosis, but my gosh, when you don’t sleep for days on end, I’m pretty sure anybody would experience the same thing. I’m currently on a very low dose mood stabilizer that is working well. Getting proper sleep is top priority for me these days, and I’m happy to report that I’m sleeping better than ever.

As if that was not enough, I tore my ACL and meniscus playing tennis in December, SO… I had knee surgery in January 2024. Shall I say it again? It’s been a year, y’all. It has been a year. Overall, my recovery has gone well. I can walk. I can’t squat yet, and somehow I tweaked my left shoulder hoisting myself off the couch at one point, but I am much better.

There’s more, but that’s all I can get in to this evening. I’m feeling the itch to write again, something I wasn’t sure would ever happen. Between the lack of sleep and medication side-effects, I had some severe brain fog. It’s been a harrowing experience for sure, but I am beyond grateful that I am on the path to healing.