I frowned at the infographic. Detailed symptoms and signs for varying stress levels in neat, color-coded columns. As if emotions - life - were that easy to catalog. Green means you and your calm, steady demeanor are thriving, focusing, taking things in stride. If you're feeling yellow, then something isn't quite right but you keep on keeping on. Orange indicates struggle; you feel like you can't continue, you're self-medicating and performing poorly. By the time you get to red - "I can't survive this" - you're experiencing a disabling distress and loss of function.  Mental health and mental wellness (and there is a difference) are not so easily separated into rectangles like jars. Feelings are sloppy and uncooperative, like trying to pour water from a cup but instead it dribbles down the side of the glass and onto the floor.  This list pokes me uncomfortably between the ribs, tells me I have never thrived for more than a month at a time. I hang out in ...

Calling Poison Control was not in my plans, yet here I am. People rarely use rubbing alcohol yet everyone keeps a bottle, typically in the back of a medicine cabinet or under a sink. Yours is probably covered in a layer of dust to rival the ruins of Pompeii, with a label that was printed in a font discontinued when laser printers were invented. That's the way of domestic afterthoughts. Several years ago the bottle I was probably gifted at my christening ran out, and I moseyed up to Target to buy another dusty, leftover bottle from the bottom shelf of the health and beauty aisles. As soon as I got it home, that brittle plastic bottle gave up the ghost and began leaking from its side seam. It threatened to ruin the other forgotten things buried in my linen closet, like the rectal thermometer from when my kids were babies (RECTAL written on it in permanent marker), a pair of eyeglasses missing one screw, and a set of hot rollers that survived the 2001 flash-flood of La Nana Creek whic...

I don't like Christmas.  It's kind of a lot. To begin with, the holiday is so very obtrusive.   It rushes at me from every direction, demanding that I pay attention, saying I should feel joyous and bouncy and excited every waking hour. Christmas wants me to be an inexhaustible toddler, dazzled by everything, rushing around filled with glee.  Amid the lights strung high and low, the incessant holiday songs, and the numerous celebrations on my calendar, I'm drowning in forced merriment.  Every year it overwhelms me. Instead of feeling joy, I'm distressed. Like trying to wade through a kid's ball pit, it looks fun until you can't make any headway through all the obstacles so you sink down and decide this is where you live now.  And then the to-do's come calling.

We're skipping the thankfulness, and I hate it.  Are you only doing one of these things? As the calendar page turned from October to November, Americans pivoted straight from Halloween to Christmas - and largely ignored my favorite holiday, Thanksgiving. This "Christmas creep" - the drift of yuletide season into the months before December - has been in full swing for weeks, and it's getting stronger by the day.  Christmas ornaments shared shelf space with a smattering of discounted Halloween stragglers even before ghosts and goblins hit the streets. A local radio station switched to all-holiday music on November 1. As of a few days ago, a house in my neighborhood is fully decorated with hundreds of glittering Christmas lights...nearly a week before anyone is roasting their turkeys. Sitting alone on the dark street, it's a glaring beacon of premature holidaying. "What's the problem?" you say. "If somebody wants to jingle their bells before Thank...

For the last week my oldest child has been talking about a classmate from school who he says lives in our neighborhood. This is news to me, because he's rarely mentioned this child before and never asked to play with him. He says they have agreed to meet at the neighborhood pool so they can synch up Roblox user names and play together. I'm excited to get him out of my hair, and also for him to have a new friend. Twice now he has gone down to the wide parking lot in front of our neighborhood pool, and stood and waited for this friend. And stood. And waited.  Twice his friend never shows up. Twice he trudges home despondently.  Finally I asked for his friend's last name. In that moms-are-superheroes mentality, I think I can somehow make this situation better. My son says it's Bird or Burn or something, he doesn't remember. Who needs last names anyway? I look up both names in the school directory as well as our neighborhood Facebook group...and find nothing. "Are...

"Who did you play with at recess today?" "We didn't get recess!" my son exclaimed. "Mr. K said he was embarrassed that we were so loud at lunch, so we had to walk five laps around the parking instead of playing."  This year my oldest is in third grade, and third grade is hard. It's changing classes, letter grades, and increased expectations. And we've moved away from motherly teachers toward tougher teachers, it seems.  My son's story took me back to my own elementary days, in a sand-colored building with three cavernous halls ready to swallow me whole. Each classroom ceiling terminated in the point of a triangle, its vertical side featuring a row of windows designed to withstand Gulf hurricanes and tornadoes. But the storm I weathered in fourth grade wasn't wind and water. It was Mr. Meacham, who taught math, science, and social studies - and also educated me in debilitating anxiety.  Fourth-grade me I first became aware of Mr. Meacham...

I was told there'd be handbaskets. I'll concede that no one promised me a rose garden, but I distinctly remember the mention of handbaskets. Since, clearly, everything is going to hell. To be honest, I'm not entirely sure what a handbasket is. Is it similar to picnic baskets of yore, made of smooth woven wicker with two hinged lids and a sturdy handle? That doesn't seem like the best choice of vehicle to transport me through the eternal fires of damnation, being that it's wildly flammable, but at this point I'll take what I can get. This nicely apportioned doom buggy can be found on Amazon . I'd like my handbasket to be woven of rattan imported from Indonesia, preferably an idyllic hilly countryside amid a lush tropical forest. Source the vines from trees near a turquoise lake or Hindu temple, please. Imagining those picturesque scenes will help pass the time while I float in my handbasket down the river, like a modern-day Moses, except to my destruction rat...