Facebook thinks I’m pregnant.

Each time I log-in (no less than 318 times a day) I am bombarded with advertisements for “expecting” mothers.

No matter how many times I click “offensive” they keep coming back.

Like this one:

Which, I might add, is creepy and offensive and not just to those of us who aren’t “expecting”.  (I replaced the actual URL, so as not to give the creepy baby purveyors any free advertising.)

We used to understand each other, Facebook.  You used to share your ads for kitschy Autism swag, Yoga retreats in Honduras, and far-left political organizations.  It was symbiotic, our coexistence.  But it seems that one of us has strayed.

I get it, I really do.  It’s hard to keep up with profiling the hobbies and afflictions of some 500 million people.  I’d get tired too.

But Facebook, you’ve got to stop phoning it in.

I expect some reciprocity here.  I share my most personal thoughts with some 300 odd people I went to high school with 15 years ago.  We have an intimacy here.  I’m disappointed that you, quite frankly, can’t just come out and say “Hey friend, lay off the Sesame Tofu.  Take a walk.  It’s a beautiful day outside.”

This passive-aggressive stuff is so 2007 (I saw The Social Network).

Because I’m not pregnant.  I’m just fat.  Besides, believe me when I tell you that – if I were – you’d be the first to know.

It’s 8 p.m. on a Thursday.

I can hear the faint bickering of Boris and Natasha on the television; it’s a 22 minute show – it started 8 minutes ago – odds are he’s not asleep yet.

I’m in the desk chair that was comfortable for “oh, like a nanosecond” the first week I sat in it for 8 hours a day.  I’m refreshing my work email waiting for…I don’t even remember.

There are post-it notes everywhere.

“Student loan (?)”

“Dr. M for P in C” <–Your guess is as good as mine.

“IEP <something unintelligible> for Tues”

“Milk:  Organic, 1%, Trader Joes”

“Expense Feb Mileage, update flyer, call ECAC”

“2:50 p.m.”

It’s chaos.  I’m shaking.  My hands are literally trembling.  It’s like when you’ve just saved someone from being hit by a bus – and then the adrenaline fades – and you realize “Oh shit, I could’ve died!”  That humbled feeling of mortality, but maybe not quite that serious, because I’m talking post-its and emails, not planes trains and automobiles.

I’m overwhelmed.  I’m lonely.  I’m floundering left and right.  I’ve found myself fraught with ineptitude.  Everything feels insurmountable.

It’s not that my job is too demanding.  It’s not that anything has really changed with Peter – his needs are the same – my capability to handle them is still as competent as it ever has been.  The house is no messier.  The answering machine no fuller.  The pants no tighter (or looser).

It’s status quo.

Clearly what’s changed is me or rather my state of mind.  My ability to cope is shaken and I don’t know why. Or maybe I do and I don’t want to think of it.  My empathy is a gift and a curse.  I find myself relatable but often baring my soul in search of some human connection that is typically not reciprocated – and when it is – it’s a fleeting high.  I feel deeply and ferociously love for my family and friends.  I feel like I must protect them, must pick them up, must be everyones’ everything.  Which is an awful lot to shoulder.

I ache for the families torn apart in Japan and the impending horrors that I dare not speculate about – except in my dreams – in my nightmares.  I’m powerless.  I cannot make it better.  I cannot make others care the way I do.  I find myself enraged by the collective apathy of the masses.  I hate them.  I feel sorry for them.  I love them and I want to fix them.

When you are arrogant enough to believe that the happiness of the world rests on your merits and deeds the only way you can be is disappointed.  When you give and give hoping for love/respect/understanding in return you are destined for loneliness.

And that’s where I am tonight.  Overwhelmed and lonely.  Wishing someone would pull me from the wreckage and nurse me back to health.  Knowing that it’s not my time to fall – not just now – not when there is so much to do.

I’m throwing the post-it notes away.  It’s a start.  I’m turning off the computer too.  I can design and order Birthday party invites tomorrow.  I hear quiet from downstairs.  My raison d’etre has slumbered off into a dreamland of Donkey Kong and silly songs that Daddy sings.   He’ll awake me from my night terrors in the morning with a book and a kiss and we’ll cuddle under the duvet reading and giggling incessantly.  In the light of morning, no matter how brief – he gives me respite, and all is right in the world.

We writers (am I a writer?) are a selfish bunch.  We use our words strategically, we use them to our advantage, and we use them with extreme care.  Our words are our reputation, our work, our soul.

I remember when I was quite young, effortlessly effusing my emotion on paper – taking for  granted the gravity of my gift – believing that easy A’s on term papers were the ultimate reward.

I was wrong.  So very wrong.  As I often have been in life.  Though isn’t that what’s beautiful?  Being wrong.  Owning your own imperfection.

I can say a thousand times over in writing what I could never articulate in person.

Writing is cathartic.  Writing is a comfortable vulnerability.  It allows just enough anonymity that one might actually inherit a false sense of confidence.   The confidence that lends itself to your admittance that you have absolutely no idea what you are doing.

It’s true.  There are situations we cannot write ourselves out of.

Have I mentioned that I’m absolutely terrified right now?  I cannot comprehend how someone who leaves wet towels on 650 thread count sheets and considers Grape Laffy Taffy a serving of fruit is 50% responsible for the future of a human life.

These decisions we’re faced with now, I know that they are nothing in the face of what is to come, but what’s on the line is a child’s (MY CHILD’S) happiness, success, his future.

We are searching for a new Occupational Therapist, after three years in a blissful bubble of ignorance, nodding sympathetically as other parents bemoaned their insurance, therapist, scheduling, financial woes.  We had no idea what it meant to find 1) a clinic-based practice that accepts our insurance (why we are losing our beloved current OT), 2) someone who has availability that can be accommodated into his already hectic schedule, 3 )a clinic that is not a 60 mile round trip we have to make twice weekly during rush hour, 4) a therapist that doesn’t suck.

Not only do we need to meet the prior requirements, but we need someone who will focus on Peter’s specific sensory needs.  Someone with DIR/Floortime experience, that won’t sit him at a table and practice cutting out circles and writing his name (not that those are not important skills) but will actually meet him where he’s at and incorporate the heavy sensory work he needs while being cognizant of how intrinsically linked emotion/anxiety/social struggles are to the approach.

It’s a lot to ask.  It’s a lot to shoulder as parents.  I’m so grateful that Gus is the husband and father that he is.  Despite my control freakishness somehow he always manages to counter my irrational fears and desperately impulsive decisions with levity.  Yet still, neither of us can shake the fact that ultimately we could make the wrong decision.  We could put him in the hands of someone who can’t help  him move forward, or might not understand his unique personality – have the patience required – and maybe we’ll waste precious days, weeks, months, dollars and our child’s future will suffer for it.

This is only a pop quiz in the grand scheme of things though.  It’s not just about finding a new OT.  It’s about the super-big-scary transitions that are coming.  It’s about that looming IEP meeting that will decide his Kindergarten placement and inevitably the trajectory for his educational “career” – and what is right?  Where does inclusion hurt more than it helps?  Where does self-containment thwart his social/emotional growth?  What if we choose the wrong thing?  Is there a do over?

Because we have some very specific  and important decisions to make starting…right now.  We have an amazing support system of family, friends, professionals that we trust dearly:  but for the first time it feels that that we are at a fork in the road, there isn’t a tried and true game plan to follow.  We have to choose which path is right for our child, our family, and our his future.

First we have to figure out what the road less traveled is.  Then we have to decide if taking it will make all the difference.

What would Robert Frost do anyway?

I feel a little disjointed lately.  I’m not quite comfortable in my own skin.   It’s weird.  Kind of schizophrenic.  Not me, I mean, at least I don’t think so…it’s just…

See?  I can’t even describe it.

Maybe it’s the dichotomy in which we live.   A life so ordinary – yet so incredibly extraordinary at the same time.   Maybe we take for granted that our own little space, our own reality, is only semi-permanent.  That as we evolve, grow, learn we invariably leave the present behind.  So we either live in the moment and embrace the uncertain or get lost trying to understand the past/predict the future.

Maybe it’s a holding pattern.  Yes, I think that’s it.  I’m holding on.  Waiting for the certainty of Spring to take hold – the intoxicating smell of honeysuckle and the dusting of yellow that signals my sinuses that indeed I’ve survived the winter.  Or maybe next Sunday when we gain that extra hour of sunlight…maybe then…   Maybe then it will all come seamlessly together.

Or maybe it won’t. But I’d like to think/pray/hope that it will.

So many changes in our lives.  Everybody’s Boy will be going to Kindergarten in the fall.  I’m totally unsure how we (I) will cope.  He’s really becoming a boy now.  His interest  in Sesame Street is waning in favor of Donkey Kong and baseball.  I see him grow and feel both pride and immense pain as each step he takes towards independence renders me a little less…me.  Because “me” is “him” and I don’t know how to separate that.  I don’t even think I want to.  Because for as much as he is Everybody’s Boy, he is also the very breath that sustains me.

And I don’t always live in the moment.  I do fear what the future holds for my precious child.  Because the things that make him most endearing – most spectacular – are also the things that could be his greatest roadblocks to making real and sustainable relationships in our world.

Sometimes it’s impossible to live in the moment.  Sometimes, it might not even be wise, because when we know what might happen we feel some level of empowerment.  Even if we can’t change it.  Sometimes, for me at least, knowing is better.

So I’ll continue in my indescribably schizophrenic holding pattern.  Waiting for some serendipitous moment where I can find some homeostasis in my little world, while savoring these last days of “winter”.

The bright side of that not-knowing “thing” is a blissful acceptance of our mortal limitations that lends our hearts to focus on the possibilities of the here and now. Perhaps there is some beauty to be found in the wait after all.