Stress and My Body

My body, like many bodies, tends to manifest stress. There is always something (shingles, autoimmune responses like the Scleritis of 2017), and this past week was yet another adventure. 

This school year is particularly stressful. There were a handful of really difficult situations that cropped up after we got back from break, and I felt ragged and worn down -- both physically and emotionally. 

I woke up Saturday morning with a migraine, and had breakfast then pretty much went back to bed, in the dark(ish). Later I had lunch with Bryce, and then my stomach started acting weird. 

My stomach is not a calm entity on a good day. Celiac disease makes my GI tract feel like an always-ticking time bomb, and I have suspected for a while that there could be something else going on because of flare-ups of severe gastrointestinal distress that seem to come out of nowhere. 

Well, I thought I had experienced severe gastrointestinal distress before, but Saturday evening was a whole new level. I had cramping. I had diarrhea. I felt like I was prepping for a colonoscopy. But then, there was blood. Not a little. A LOT. 

I have never experienced this before. And nope, didn't eat any beets in my lunch salad. It was not negligible. It was clearly, unmistakably bright red blood, as if I'd gotten my period in a deluge. 

It freaked me out. 

So, we arrived at the Emergency Department at 11:00 pm, and I was a mess. They put me on an IV. They gave me a small dose of morphine for the pain. And they did a CT scan with contrast dye. If you've never had that experience, when the dye goes in it is the WEIRDEST experience. You feel a heat run down your torso and pool in your pelvis, and it almost feels like you are going to pee yourself. 

It was colitis, unspecified type, possibly food poisoning (although I doubt it because I ate EXACTLY the same meals as Bryce 3x in a row and he was fine), but I had significant inflammation in a section of my colon and my blood markers for inflammation were elevated. I was super dehydrated, and felt completely wrung out. They sent us home at 4 am, and said to set up a colonoscopy so they can figure out what the heck is going on. 

Ooof. I felt like absolute hot garbage for the next several days. I called in for Monday, which was good because the gastroenterology department called and could see me Monday afternoon for a follow-up. They were amazing! I have a colonoscopy set for February 18th, and they put me on the waiting list to see if they can get me in sooner. No stress there, not knowing if I'll need to take two days in a row off at short notice and hope for a good sub. (Those of you not in teaching/never been in teaching, the worst part of being out as a teacher is sub plans. It is often far easier to just go in feeling crappy, unless obviously you are contagious. When I worked in industry, I never had to write up an account of every minute of my day so someone else could do it in my stead, and hope I didn't get a weirdo in who would traumatize my kids.)

February 18th is right in the middle of February break. So, I guess good thing we were behind in making our plans for a short getaway to our favorite place in Vermont, because that's clearly off the table. 

Monday night I had severe cramping again and had to call in, in tears, for a second day. There was no way I was going to be in some kind of bathroom disaster at school if I could help it (because I have not been able to help it before, and it is THE WORST). For the first time in a long, long time one of my sub plans was "watch a movie, any movie, preferably PIXAR." Oh, the shame! 

I did go to school Wednesday with my lunch box full of beige food (plain rotisserie chicken, GF crackers, a banana) and apparently I didn't look awesome because people kept saying "um, should you be here?" to which I said, "I give myself a B-, so yeah?" The truth was Wednesday was the dreaded NWEA testing, which had me running a session (hard to have a sub do) and we have over 2 hours scheduled for a test that on average takes my students 12-30 minutes, so to have a sub have so much unstructured time would be torture. We also had the Special Ed Department meeting that is the Annual Review season kick-off (all things IEP writing and meetings). Aaaand, I missed my kids, obviously, and didn't want to miss more time. One of the best things in teaching is when you come back after an absence and your kids surround you and yell "THANK GOD YOU'RE BACK! WE MISSED YOU!" which, no joke, happens. Except for the one time a student abjectly hated my guts and told me once, "remember when you were sick for a week? That was THE BEST WEEK OF MY LIFE" and then followed it up with some choice vocabulary that even I wouldn't use. Sigh, can't win them all. 

Then Wednesday afternoon our Winter Weather Advisory turned into a Winter Storm Warning, and everyone was abuzz with the glorious possibility of a snow day. We never get one unless it's a Winter Storm Warning, and it is rare that we have one of those that says travel will be treacherous and we DON'T get a snow day. We've had years with no snow days, but the weather patterns have been favorable lately! 

Lo and behold, at 10:00 at night, we got the call! (It was during the Verizon outage, so actually I got the email, not the call, and was doing the old-school look at the news website to see the school closings list, feverishly refreshing every minute or so). Snow days are another wonderful part of teaching -- an unexpected day to rest with ABSOLUTELY NO SUB PLANS. 

So I soaked up a free day to recuperate further, but then had a different GI problem. I was supposed to let the doctor know when I had a bowel movement, but since Sunday early morning... nothing. I sent a message asking when THAT became an issue given all the inflammation, and they said to get myself a super gross 10 oz bottle of magnesium citrate and down it. That stuff is supposed to liquefy your bowels a la colonoscopy prep, and you're supposed to be very near a toilet after taking it, because according to the label blast off should be within 30 minutes to 6 hours from guzzling. 

Can you guess what happened next? 

NOTHING. Absolutely no movement. Some upper abdominal cramping, but no being chained to the bathroom. Which is bad. Very bad. 

Ugh. I had to call in on Friday so I could, yet again, go to the Emergency Department for repeat imaging, to make sure I didn't have a blockage or obstruction of some sort. 

Good news: I was not nearly in as much pain or distress as last time. 

Bad news: they were surprisingly WAY busier during the day than the Saturday overnight, with tons of flu, a waiting-room-puker, multiple strokes, and ambulance arrivals. I was there for 8 hours. And, like over the weekend, I was masked up and threw all my clothes in the wash when I got home, and showered. NO FLU NO THANK YOU. 

Good news: My friend and Pilates instructor, who deals with inflammatory bowel disease, joined me for a few hours to help with asking questions.

The CT scan showed that the inflammation from the previous weekend had resolved, which was good. My bloodwork was back to normal. They were concerned because, as the Nurse Practitioner said, "you've had a lot of abdominal surgeries," and that can breed scar tissue in your abdomen. I never really considered all the gynecological stuff abdominal surgeries, so that was interesting to know. But, everything showed up normal; I was just stopped up. 

Apparently, after a scary and super traumatic GI event like the first ED visit, your nervous system can take over and say NOPE, WE ARE NOT DOING ANY OF THAT NONSENSE FOR A WHILE. There can be no physical blockage, but your system is just...stalled. 

So they sent me home with an enema. They actually wanted me to do it there, in an ED room, but the room had no bathroom. So either I was going to a) do it in a commode which is humiliating, gross, and  smelly (it's amazing what toilet water does to combat stench), or b) run to one of two PUBLIC bathrooms on either end of the ED. Both of which were occupied the last time I'd gone to pee. So, um, nope.

It worked. I will not share details of that experience, but I'm glad it worked because they said if it didn't, I could come to the Emergency Department AGAIN and they could do an intense warm milk and molasses enema.  Everything about that sounded terrible (and weirdly delicious for a hot half second). So grateful I didn't end up with an ass that smelled like snickerdoodles. 

I am on the mend, and slowly introducing non-beige foods into my diet. The doctors were glad my imaging was improved, but we still don't know WHY or WHAT was truly going on. I did share my horrible colonoscopy experience I had last time, because I definitely want to be out for the count, and this new practice was horrified. So I can rest assured that I will be loopy loo and not aware this time around. 

Several people said, "you need to figure out your stress management." I don't disagree, but I'm really not sure what I can do right now. I am working hard to leave at a somewhat reasonable time (I give myself one day a week to stay late), and I am doing my Pilates and my walking (when not in GI distress clearly), I'm taking time to read and do NYT games and puzzle, so I'm not really sure what else I could do. I guess I could take advantage of the treadmill that lives in the garage utility room (it's cozier than it sounds, I've avoided it because....spiders, but Bryce actually has it tricked out nicely) more. When it's cold and dark the walking tends to go by the wayside. 

As stressful as it is, I love my job, warts and all. So I guess I better figure out a way to have more balance, or my body will do it for me.

Goodbye, Glider

We found a home for the glider. It left the house last Friday while I was at school. 

Over the break we went to Goodwill to drop off a bunch of things from our cleanout, and decided to check out the furniture to see if the glider was in good enough condition. Um, it was apparently PRISTINE comparatively speaking -- no stains, no rips, not 70s plaid, just a few errant untrimmed strings from where the cats have naughtily used it as a scratching post. 

We left Goodwill and thought, I don't think that's the place for such an important piece of furniture. 

The thought of leaving this chair at Goodwill that was supposed to be where I bottle fed and rocked our mythical baby, a gift from Bryce's mom that we picked out together once upon a hopeful time...it just didn't sit right. Now, would it have been an amazing find for someone? Yes. Would we feel guilty? Also yes. 

There's another store, Once Upon A Child, that is a consignment shop. You can get clothes, strollers, pretty much anything you would need for a baby at really great prices, gently used. They also pay you on the spot if you bring things in and they accept them -- and they would take a glider. 

But then the thought of disassembling it into two pieces and bringing it to a place like that had too many echoes of peeling nursery decals off the wall and making a pile of nursery things by the door to be donated, and it didn't feel right either. I feel like any money we would get would have to be donated to a children's charity or domestic violence shelter, because that ALSO didn't feel right. 

Our wonderful cleaning lady has taken baby things before, as her sister had a baby recently and needed pretty much everything. So we thought, maybe we'll hang on to it just until she comes to see if she wants it. 

While I was at school, she saw the chair and said, "Oh wow, this is a really great chair! I will totally take this chair!" She was super appreciative and shooed Bryce away when he tried to help carry it down to her minivan. 

But that meant that it was gone before I got home. 

I was caught off guard by my reaction when Bryce told me on my way home from school that the glider was gone. I was glad, so glad, that it was going to someone who would appreciate it (and I suspect it may be her downtime chair, which is also joy-giving). But... it was also the last big thing that really had a specific purpose. The last "this was bought for a baby that never was, and we really can't see it without thinking about what it was meant for." 

I cried the rest of the way home. It made me (un)surprisingly sad. 

I am not sad about my life now. I am not sad that our house is not made for babies. I'm not going to lie, I sometimes have the guilty feeling that I'm grateful not to be raising a child in these times. It doesn't mean I didn't want it, desperately, at the time. It doesn't negate the love that I had for a nonexistent, completely elusive child. 

But there was something about that glider being gone that reopened a long-shiny scar, at least for a couple of hours. 

The room is so much more functional and roomy now that the glider isn't there anymore. I got an area rug that's coming this week to cozy it up a bit, and at some point Bryce will hang his guitars on the wall... and then there will be nothing recognizable left. I really wonder sometimes why we moved with it to the new house... but it really was a great chair. I'm glad someone is going to use it and enjoy it without the history and ghosts of what could have been.

A Hunt for Delights

In 2022, I read The Book of Delights by Ross Gay. It was my evangelical book of the year (I could not stop talking about it!). I reviewed it here, but basically he is a poet who decided that he was going to write about a delight a day, every day, starting on his birthday and ending on his next birthday. (He admits that was ambitious, he did skip a bunch of days throughout the year.) The other thing is that he had to handwrite the delights and write them quickly. 

I loved this book, and loved the concept behind the book even more. And, percolating in the back of my mind was an idea to use it in the classroom. 

So, in this new year, I decided to do two weeks of delights with my self contained 7th grade English class. I flagged some more appropriate "essayettes" as he calls them, and read the preface and two of the delights. There were so many I wanted to read, but they had too much swearing and a little sauciness that wouldn't be the best in the classroom. 

I found these little paperboard journals that I'd purchased for a club, and I had exactly the right amount to give one to each student, me, and the teacher's assistant. Today, we looked at some examples of my delights, and decorated the covers of the journals. Their homework was to brainstorm a list of possible delights to look for, knowing that sometimes delights find YOU. Tomorrow, we start a delight a day. 

My thought is that we all find a delight each day to chronicle on a page in the journal, and then we'll share our delights at the start of class. I'll weave some figurative language in for the describing, and then we'll pick a couple delights over the course of the two weeks to turn into more finished writing pieces through the editing and revising process. 

I am so stinking proud of this idea. The world is super yucky right now, and it's the dark, cold, dead of winter, so who couldn't use a hunt for and meditation on delights? 

The icicles and full moon made my bathroom window look like it had teeth.

.

The first batch of flower/seed catalogs to get me dreaming of spring.

Over the break we reorganized the coat closet, and these clear plastic drawer boxes brought me a tremendous amount of delight because now I can SEE everything! 

We reorganized the craft room/guest room/puzzle room/soon-to-be-musical-instrument room, and while the number of puzzles I have is kind of embarrassing, now all my supplies are in one place in the closet and it is soooooo satisfying to look at. 

This was NOT a delight when I saw it the first time, but it IS a delight because it's a giant plastic bee that Bryce loves to hide in weird places (in the bed, in the refrigerator, etc) and it's ridiculous childish fun.

And this oldie but goodie, a rogue pansy that sprouted form the gross pavers of our old house's stoop, that was perfectly in tandem with one of Ross Gay's delights about a flower growing up out of a curb.

The Books of 2025

This was a pretty darn good year for reading. I chalk some of that up to recovery time from my knee replacement, although the month I had the surgery my reading was down (because I was loopy from all the medications and had Goldfish Brain). 

I read 102 books this year with a total of 31,501 pages. Bryce looked up how thick a printed stack of those pages would be (book paper, not thick paper). I guessed 2 feet. 

I was wrong. 

It's 8.5 feet tall! That's a lot of words, a lot of stories, a lot of knowledge. Here's my Storygraph cover collage that is way smaller than I thought it was (I'll include my notebook pages with the list per month at the end that will be infinitely more readable): 

In figuring out my breakdowns for genres, I always struggle a little. There are so many books that cross genres, so some are in multiple categories. Also, I looked at Storygraph to see how my books were classified by genre, and discovered that I do not agree with all their assessments. So, I did the best I could. 

First, the split between fiction and nonfiction was 85 fiction, 17 nonfiction (a mix of essays, memoir, natural history, poetic essays), 

I read 15 books this year that were given to me by Bryce. That's way up! More than one per month, which was my goal for this year. 

My most voluminous genre was horror, at 24, followed by thriller/mystery at 20. (So if you lump those together into mysteriously thrilling horror, as it was kind of a squishy category to differentiate between, it's 44.)

Next was contemporary/literary fiction at 13, followed by fantasy/sci fi with 12 books, historical fiction at 10, and speculative fiction at 5. 

I read 14 young adult/middle grade books. 

Diverse books challenges my categorization skills, but I landed on windows into different experiences, spanning race, ethnic background, disability, LGBTQIA+. I counted 28, with 12 specifically LGBTQIA+. 

Now, for the bests! It was a very wide-ranging year of reading, and so there wasn't an automatic standout for Book of the Year. After reviewing them all, I did come up with 10, and a Book of the Year. Oddly, this was the Year of the Witch (I read four books about witches and they were all quite different.)

My Best Books of 2025: 

10) Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V.E. Schwab. 
This is an expansive vampire story that tracks multiple women through their transformations, loves, and time periods. It is so, so good and the ending is worth discussing with people! This was not a predictable book in the least. 

9) ADHD is Awesome: A Guide to (mostly) Thriving with ADHD by Penn Holderness. 
I wrote lots about this book here, but a quick sum up: the format/design is ADHD-friendly, and it had practical strategies and aha moments galore. I also loved that it was by someone with ADHD, and included sidebars that were from his wife's point of view, which was great for the perspective of someone who lives with someone with ADHD. 

8) Tilt by Emma Pattee.
This book snuck into my subconsciousness and lived there, rent-free, for a long time. It's a bit of an odd duck, imagining a world where a major fault in Oregon produces a catastrophic earthquake. The character at the center is a hugely pregnant woman who was in an IKEA to finally buy her crib when the earthquake hits, and follows her through her journey to reach her husband, who was across town at the time of the quake. It is such an interesting string of what-ifs to sift through. Very well-written, and I loved that it was absolutely never cheesy. And the hugely pregnant lady didn't bother me as it may have years ago... her pregnancy is central to the book (wow does it complicate travel) and so if that is a trigger, maybe skip this one. 

7) The Bookish Life of Nina Hill by Abbi Waxman.
What a completely delightful book. I picked it up at my favorite independent bookstore because the cover nabbed me, and how could I resist a book about a bookseller who loves books way more than than people? It's a love letter to books and readers, it's a story of found family and finding the courage to be vulnerable. It was funny, it was sweet, it wasn't cheesy...I loved it. 

6) I'm Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy.
This book was darkly hilarious. It was heartbreaking. The title seems to be the literary equivalent of clickbait -- it's a shocking, harsh statement but not really true. This memoir is an eye-opening look at the horrors of child stardom, an overbearing and narcissistic Show Mom, dysfunctional family in general, surviving substance abuse, and disordered eating. Which does not sound funny at all, but Jennette approaches the insane challenges in her life with such a sense of humor that you can't help but laugh. You also feel a bit like you're watching someone circle down the drain, but it is somehow not a depressing book. It just has a number of very dark moments, but ultimately, it's uplifting. 

5) Knife: Meditations on an Attempted Murder by Salman Rushdie.
This is Salman Rushdie writing about what happened when he was savagely attacked by a man with a knife at a speaking engagement at Chautauqua in Western NY, his physical and mental recovery, and his thoughts on his assailant. He is such an incredible writer, and really approaches this difficult event and how it changed everything moving forward with such honesty and rawness. 

4) Compound Fracture by Joseph Andrew White. 
This was an eye-opening, gripping, and vengeful story. A trans teen in Appalachia looks to put to rest a family blood feud, faces people who are hateful, violent monsters, and he seeks revenge and justice. Technically horror, and there's some graphic violence, but it is such a satisfying story and you just love Miles. I love this in the author's bio: "Andrew writes about trans folks with claws and fangs, and what happens when they bite back." I look forward to reading more by this author!

3) The Witches of New York by Ami McKay.
Oh, was this a rich and lush world to submerge into! Turn of the century, three women's lives intersect in NY where they run a tea and spell shop. There are dark forces afoot, an Egyptian obelisk, and magical powers, but it is never cheesy and it had me gripped all the way through. It's in Storygraph as "Witches of New York #1" which made me think maybe it's a series, but then there wasn't a #2 that I'm aware of. Sigh.

2) Hex by Thomas Olde Heuvelt. 
This is another witch story, but holy wow, it is so original. A small Hudson Valley town has a resident witch who is kind of like a ghost, because she roams the town and shows up randomly in your house, but has her eyes and mouth sewn shut and NOTHING SHOULD EVER CHANGE THAT. The town has to try to keep outsiders away, because if people wander into town, they can't leave. They become a part of this odd curse. Obviously things go awry, and it was terrifying and just so well done. Also, the author is Dutch and originally wrote the book in Dutch, set in a small Dutch town in the woods, and when he rewrote it in English, he set it in the Hudson Valley (feels like actual Sleepy Hollow), and decided he wanted to make the ending scarier. I wish I could read Dutch! 

1) Red Rabbit by Alex Grecian.
Yep, another witch book, but like NOTHING I've ever read before. This book is an adventure! The town has a resident witch and people (mostly men) want to hunt her down because of an altercation with some folks that ended poorly (for them). She is super un-huntable, but a small party ends up picking up ghosts, and animals, and mysterious children... and there's a seriously evil force who would love nothing more than to destroy the witch and the witch hunters, and is just deliciously vile. It's so good. Like, I would re-read it good. 

Honorable Mentions: 

Definitely Better Now by Ava Robinson
A funny and heartbreaking novel about the after-one-year sobriety experience, dating while sober, and grief. It was so good at bouncing between hilarity and literally making me sob. 

Margo's Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe
I love this book, but it's not for everyone. It is funny and also shines a light on how easy it is to fall on desperate times as a young, single mother, and how society judges efforts to climb back up out of that hole. I learned a LOT about professional wrestling AND OnlyFans. 

The Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon
Awesome historical fiction that is sometimes called "historical fiction biography" -- the story of a real midwife in post-Revolutionary War Massachusetts (the part that's now Maine), a murdered body found in the frozen Kennebec River, how male doctors tried to delegitimize midwives (often with disastrous results), and how the justice system at that time dealt with sexual assault. Fiercely feminist and fascinating. 

Momentous Events in the Life of a Cactus by Dusti Bowling
This is the second book about Aven Green and her friends and family, and if you haven't read these, even if you're an adult and not a middle-schooler, please go do it. Aven was born without arms, and in the first book her family moves to a dusty theme park in Arizona, far away from the school and people who have known Aven forever and don't think twice about how she does so much with her feet. Aven is also adopted, and I felt the books did a great job of the need to find origins and birth family, and a family supportive of that quest. In this one Aven has survived 8th grade in the new space with her amazing friend group, but now she faces the frontier of high school, and her best friend Connor has moved away. It's hilarious, and touching, and... like so many books this year...made me laugh and cry.

The Worsts, Disappointing, Boooo: 

The Housemaid by Freida McFadden: Yes, I know this is insanely popular and there's a new movie coming out. I hated it. If you want to read something similar that's way better written, read The Last Mrs. Parrish by Liv Constantine. 

Then She Was Gone by Lisa Jewell: I read this right after my second knee replacement, and I can't remember exactly why I hated it so much but I really, really did. 

Best Offer Wins by Marisa Kashino: I wanted to like this, the premise sounded interesting (woman becomes increasingly unhinged in her pursuit of a house in the DC area in a difficult market), but it had a subplot that had me almost abandon it early on and then towards the end it completely jumps the shark. 

Books that are Hard to Classify/Weird as Hell

I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman. A delightfully strange and thinky book I reviewed here. 

Poor Deer by Claire Oshetsky. On my special shelf, amazing but deeply, deeply weird.

This is How You Lose the Time War by Max Gladstone & Amal El-Mohtar. An odd futuristic rivalry/love story with jumping times and Red vs Blue (and sometimes I had a hard time telling them apart). Good, but strange. 

The Last Word by Taylor Adams. A totally bonkers, completely unhinged thriller/horror book about a woman who is housesitting in a remote beach location when she gives a one star review to a horror writer... who then utterly terrorizes her. Several mysteries within, but also one of those amazing Final Girl type stories. But utterly bonkers and when you lend it to people they may think slightly less of you, haha. 

Bunny by Mona Awad. This kept coming up in lists and I read it in October, but holy wow is it strange. It's a fever dream, has some similarities to Black Swan,  and leaves you completely confuzzled as to what the hell you just read. I lent it to my best friend, who was like "WHAT IS THIS BOOK????" There's a follow-up, We Love You, Bunny, which I will probably read out of sheer curiosity and my best friend informed me I can tell her about but she won't read. SO WEIRD. 

The Probability of Everything by Sarah Everett. Middle-grade YA, a girl who loves math and the sense of control figuring out probabilities gives her decides to make a time capsule of family memories as an asteroid is hurtling toward Earth. It's beautiful, heartbreaking, and you have to read it to see why it's hard to classify. Beautiful portrayal of grief, and if you wish to read it, DO NOT GOOGLE IT. There are secrets that will ruin it if you know ahead of time. Our school librarian did this for Young Adult Book Club last year, and it blew everyone's mind. Highly recommend.

That's it! Here are my notebook pages with all the titles and authors by month. What did you read in 2025?