The Birthday Bitch

So it's my birthday. I'm not a kid, so it's not like I anticipate it all month and get giggly and try to spy out my gifts. I don't. I don't really expect that much, and am so touched and surprised every year when my family and friends acknowledge that I mean something to them, that they love me and enjoy my company. Especially my husband. He goes above and beyond in getting me gifts I want. My girlfriends also go to great lengths to make me feel special. And my daughter, of course, gets so excited that she can barely contain what I'm getting for my birthday and tries to give me hints about it. Even my mother-in-law did a nice job this year, and she usually gets me a book on how to clean. Or a new vacuum. Subtle, she is.

So, why am I now, as in years past, feeling so very pissy and put-upon and acting like a petulant child?

My parents house is being painted, so instead of dinner there, they offered to take me out wherever I wanted. I love the Silver Fork lodge in the canyon, so I asked for brunch there. They make the best eggs benedict ever. But Mom called yesterday and said we'd need to do it at 10:30 so they can be home in time for the painter at 2. Which meant I had to forego sleeping in til I wanted to get out of bed (which my sweet husband lets me do on my birthday--he always takes it off work), and had to get up early so I could satisfy my daughter's need for me to open my gifts in the morning. Then we had to rush rush rush to get out of the house in time to get to the restaurant, which is a 45 minute drive up the canyon from here. I hate rushing, especially in the morning, I am so NOT a morning person, and getting the daughter ready is sometimes like pulling teeth from a hippo with tweezers. She doesn't really understand the "hurry" thing; time is very different for a 6-year-old, which is fine, but the rest of the world doesn't run on kid time. We finally get her ready to go, my hair is very very bad today as I didn't have the 20 minutes it normally takes to tame it into any kind of down-style, and wouldn't stay in its pins.
Brunch was lovely, the restaurant was surrounded by 7 feet of snow and cozy and rustic and yummy. But the daughter, due in part to the close proximity of her favorite person, my mom, and because no one was paying enough attention to her (only child syndrome, compounded by only grandchild syndrome) started to whine and interrupt and generally make it stressful. She continued this on the way home, and by the time we got here, I'm ready to run away. Far, far away. I tried to be patient, I tried to be gentle, I tried paying as much attention to her as I could when she was being appropriate, and she just got more and more irate. She's been wanting to decorate for Easter, so I offered to do that with her when we got home, but she was more interested in getting the neighbor girl to play. Fine, fine. I'm glad she has a friend she so loves, B is definitely a godsend sometimes. It just ticked me off because when she helped my mom decorate for Easter, it was the funnest thing EVER. I guess I'm tired of being shown up by my mom. So I turned into BItchMom. And BitchWife, just for kicks. I didn't mean to, I didn't want to, I wanted to just let it roll off my back and be appreciative that I have what I have. But fuck, I'm tired of the drama. And the husband was so worried that he wasn't doing enough for me that he started pouting and making me feel guilty.
So I shooed him off to the gym, telling him I needed some time to myself and that's really what I want on my birthday. I love to be alone, always have, and he hates that. My wonderful girlfriends also saved the day by offering to get the daughter and take her to play with their kids.
So, now I'm alone, drinking a crappy martini (I can't make a martini to save my life, but I love them and keep trying to beat that dead horse), and I bought cigarettes (which I've quit but sneak now and then and shouldn't) and I don't know what to do with myself for the next hour. So I'm sitting here bitching.

How lame is that? Be careful what you wish for.

The Other Side of Me, Giving In to the Pain

So, I've had this headache since last Thanksgiving, and I think it might be starting to affect my sanity.

I've been diagnosed with occipital neuralgia and the muscles in my neck, causing the pinched nerve to radiate pain throughout my skull, simply won't relax. I've tried drugs that relax muscles and stop nerve transduction, I've tried exercise and heat and some massage. I'm going to try to convince my husband that it might be worth it to try acupuncture and intensive massage therapy, but I think he's frightened and resentful of the cost, as those aren't covered by insurance. Does that sound shitty? Maybe. But it's his reality and I have to live with it, because it's his money. I don't work, I don't generate income, so all the financial everything is up to him.

I wrote another blog about the headache, on my Domestic Goddess blog on MySpace. It's a funny, sarcastic, lighthearted look at the pain I've been in and how I've tried to get out of it, and it's true. MySpace is where I go to have fun, my blog there is semi-popular and I have a great audience, who leave great comments and most of whom I consider friends, even though I haven't met them. But I am very careful to keep that blog light and fun, even while writing about complex issues. I consider it practice for writing my fiction. Plus, I don't want to be viewed as a dramatic, dark, whiny girl who wants fawning and delicacy and sympathy. I don't want that to be my persona.
So I've brought it here.
Because I need to get out what this pain is, really. And you people, if anyone is reading this, don't know my MySpace persona, which is a real part of me. But not the whole of me. This is where I will come to be the other part of me, the one who is weak and hurting and not very funny or clever at all. Consider yourself warned.

This pain, while bearable, is now wearing away who I am. It is waves of torment, smashing against the rocks of my psyche, turning them into sand as it bashes and foams and swirls along my nerves. My head is a stone, wedged in the vise of a crack in the earth, slowly being squeezed by incalculable pressure of the tectonic movement, and soon it will begin to shatter and crack and it will implode, taking my personality with it. I will become the pain. That is all I will be. I will no longer be Vanessa, the wife and mom, the sarcastic one in my group of girlfriends, the room mom who constantly invades my daughter's classroom to see what's going on, the writer, the reader, the cook who loves to try new recipes. I will simply exist; I will be one with the pain and I will not fight it anymore. I will give in to the need to curl up and weep, head clutched in fingers weakened by a drug that might be killing me.
I am fighting this urge, the urge to just give up; give in and be the pain. It is not who I want to be. But, can I continue? Is this pain just going to be something I have, or will it become who I am?