Toilet Paper Revelation

So I've spent a lot of time thinking about parenting styles lately.  I worry that my own style is somehow damaging the young psyche of my children, and that I'll be responsible for their therapists bills one day.  I'm the "laugh when they are funny, love 'em when they cry, and discipline them when they are naughty" kind of parent.  However, that doesn't always line up with how others parent.  First of all, we all define "naughty" in totally different ways.  I think my definition of naughty is infinitely "more conservative" than others...until it comes to my youngest, and then I feel like that kitten hanging from a high limb praying not to drop...praying we both make it another day.    I love her spunk and her high-spirited ways, but oh my, her spunk and her high-spirited ways might be the death of me...and her!   I think my husband calls us "stubborn."  Hmmm.  Whatever.  Either way, it still makes me think long and hard about HOW I parent this wonderfully unique little girl, along with her older brother and sister with all of their interesting talents, and different personalities.

Anyway, I was thinking about this again today in my, ahem, "office," and I pondered how we quit responding to our children.  Nothing is urgent anymore.  I used to dash off to check on them if I heard even the slightest whimper.  Now, I hear a child scream and I stop and think, "What kind of scream was that?"  I hear a thud and I yell, "Everyone okay?"  I don't leave whatever I'm doing to go see.  I wait a reasonable amount of time to see if anyone responds before heading out to check on them.  My child says, "MOM!  I cut myself!"  And I yell, "Is it gushing or a slow bleed?" Someone cries for me to come and I say, "Not now, I'm busy."  I realized that there's only one thing in our house that causes all of our family members to jump into action.  And I mean, immediately.  It's teamwork all the way.  The big motivating announcement is "There's NO toilet paper in this bathroom!" You suddenly hear everyone scrambling into action and saying, "I'll be right there!"  Then you hear the teamwork..."Did you have any in your bathroom?"  "NO, what about you?"  "No."  "Okay, I'll grab some tissues from upstairs," and then they report back in, "Hey, it's okay - we are getting it!  It's coming!  Hang on!"  As if no toilet paper is the "end all" of events.  It's AS IF someone needs medical attention.  Why?  Why is THIS the "big unifier?"

I decided it's because it crosses all barriers...age, gender, position, etc.  This is the ONE thing we can ALL relate to.  We've ALL been there.  We get it.   When you are done, you are done, and it's time to get up and this is the ONE thing between you and freedom...a roll of toilet paper.  No one wants to be stuck.  And so we are all on the same team.  So how do we re-organize our families so that we get back on the same team in just everyday simple acts of kindness?  How do we begin again to teach our children to be team players, working in unison for a common goal?  Well, it begins with parenting.  We need to start responding again.  We need to re-engage with our children and though the goal is not that we become slaves to their requests, but that we become team members with a common goal of supporting one another.  We have to teach them what love looks like, and teamwork, and selflessness, and kindness.  It's hard work.  We start with how we treat our spouses, and our friends and our neighbors, but we don't reserve our acts of kindness for those next door, we begin, too, with our children.  They must witness, first hand, a love that responds.

After all, we are all on the same team.  One day, with luck, I'll be old and will need someone to hold my hand and wipe my spit and brush my hair.  If I expect my children to be "responders" to that old lady I hope to become, I must teach them what being a "responder" looks like now, while they are young.  They need to learn what the meaning of family is from me.  So today, my "toilet paper revelation" will be to get back in the game and start responding to my children and getting off the couch and out of the kitchen for events MORE important than "no toilet paper."  Maybe they won't need therapy after all...

My Medical Journey

It’s a brave new world we live in with the evolution of the internet to email, facebook and blogging.  This access to the media allows incredible opportunities for keeping people connected.  It also allows an opportunity for “over-sharing,” which is probably what I’m about to do. 

I grew up in a home and an “age” where if a young woman was pregnant, we had to say, “She’s expecting,” and we had to lower our voices when we said it.  We could only whisper the word cancer for fear that the person who had it might find out, or more likely, we might get it.  There were other diseases and illnesses that shouldn’t be mentioned at all, but were only reserved for medical textbooks.  It seems that in this new day, with so much more access and “layman’s knowledge” about medical terminology, the terms are now literally falling off of the page.  With terms floating around like Hashimoto’s Disease, Fibromyalgia, Scleroderma, Grave’s Disease, Celiac Disease, Sjogren’s Disease, and others, we are literally scooping them up and dropping them into our google search engines like pennies in a gumball machine to see what list of symptoms are going to fall out.  We are searching to see if the list of offensive symptoms match our own.  We want to know if anyone else shares our growing list of unusual concerns and was there a solution?  Not just ANY solution, but an easy solution.  At least in the beginning.  Eventually, you decide that if the issues persist, ANY solution would be better than feeling crazy.

We are in a world where we must own our own health. With the increase in medical fees and our doctors spending so much time ushering us like cattle through the doors to cover their own rising costs, something is lost.  We have lost any opportunity to be heard, or for our issues to be investigated.  There is now a pill for nearly everything, and the pharmaceutical companies along with our trigger-happy doctors are happy to oblige, but this doesn’t solve our crisis.  In fact, it often compounds the problems.  And so, we go back to the internet and we search and we talk.  We look for people like us.  We look for answers that don’t come in the form of a pill.  We want answers and we want to be validated.

I can write all of this because it’s my own experience.  I harken back to the birth of my second baby.  My first two children were 14 months apart.  I was in good health when I had each of them.  I gained a reasonable amount of weight and after each c-section I lost nearly all of the weight immediately.  When my son was 6 weeks old, however, I took a birth control shot because it was touted as the “safest” while breast-feeding.  We knew breastfeeding was not a sure form of birth control.  Baby #2 was proof of that.  Within 4 months, I LOOKED pregnant again.  I had gained lots of weight, and I couldn’t understand it.  I didn’t take any more birth control shots, and by the time he was 11 months old, I’d begun a rigorous training of running in order to lose the unwanted pounds.  I also noticed that my hands were falling asleep every time I went to bed.  We were living in Jamaica at the time, but just a few months after I began running, we moved back to Virginia for 9 months of language training.  Things continued to decline.  I recall talking to my sister one day and crying that I was simply too tired to clean our apartment.  It was only 900 sq. feet!  She insisted that I needed to assert myself and how ridiculous that I couldn’t “get it done.”  This was my pep talk. I was getting up at least 3 mornings a week and running on a treadmill, but the weight persisted and my exhaustion remained.  I had another sister who said, “Welcome to motherhood.”  Really?  Was this what I was to expect?  No energy to invest in these two beautiful children?  Were they to spend their formative years sitting in front of Caillou?  I will certainly be forever thankful to PBS for providing educational programming in those days, but seriously?  This was IT?  It was a long 9 months in Virginia while I struggled to remain sane, and my husband, never waivering, walked home each afternoon from long hours of language training and stepped over the piles of laundry to get to the kitchen and cook dinner for the 4 of us. 

It wasn’t until we went to the Medical Unit to have our medical evals for our next overseas assignment that the right doctor asked the right questions and started the ball rolling on this train.  I am thankful to that clinic for “finding it” and validating me.  Turns out, after 3 blood draws in 2 weeks, my numbers were quickly climbing for my thyroid and I was said to be “Hypothyroid.”  Ahhh-HA! I KNEW motherhood couldn’t be so horrible!  The doctors prescribed Synthroid and within 6 weeks, and a new country, I was on top of the world!  My weight went down, my energy levels went up and the fog lifted. 

Fast-forward 10 years and the story hasn’t really changed all that much.  We have been to 3 different countries in that amount of time, and I have had two miscarriages resulting in a D&C, and one more healthy pregnancy.  I have cycled through countless dosages of Synthroid, been offered medication for high-cholesterol, which I refused, and have continued to have symptoms with which I have basically learned to live.  My exercise regimen has been equally sporadic, depending on the country and the opportunities, and my weight has continued to fluctuate up and down the scale. 

Interestingly enough, over the course of these years, the two sisters who had so wisely encouraged me to “hang in there” and “get with the program,” had already been diagnosed with hypothyroidism, and have since continued to struggle with their own similar sets of symptoms.  It’s not surprising, though, that when they shared their snarky advice we simply were not in a place yet that we even considered “comparing symptoms.”   

The breakthrough came when my older sister went through a series of intensive screenings and was discovered to have a gluten intolerance.  WHAT?   That was 5 years ago.  Naturally, we all supported her new discovery, but quickly began to count the reasons that this wouldn’t work in our own lives.  We all know that bread is the vessel that’s to be used to get butter into our system.  How could I ever give that up?  She began quietly whispering, “you are next.”  I would giggle and say, “You are right, but not yet.” 

There wasn’t much research available on the topic, other than what she had gleaned from her own radical doctor.  That’s what we thought…that he was “radical” and “out there” and “fringe.”  This was all of that holistic stuff that bordered on our old conceptions of “new age.”  But we would support her because we’d seen her struggle.  Meanwhile, 2 years after her diagnosis, we watched my father slip away from us with liver cancer.  The doctors scratched their heads and couldn’t figure it out, but it didn’t stop the end from coming.  His fight lasted 9 months.   He didn’t have Hepatitis, or alcoholism, and his weight, though he always struggled, was certainly not so shockingly bad that we would have expected it to cause his total demise.  The doctors still scratched their heads and sent their condolences and said that cancer was one of those diseases we just couldn’t understand.

And this takes us to present day.  In February, I started the same old routine with my current nurse practitioner in Romania at the embassy med unit.  It’s a familiar dance.  “Dr. ____, I am feeling badly again…my hands hurt and tingle at night, I’m tired, I feel angry, my stomach hurts,” and on and on.  In this quiet part of the world, this nurse practitioner decided to run an antibody test and send me for a thyroid scan.  This was new to me.  At the beginning, I even wondered if it was overkill, but who was I to sniff a gift fish when I needed answers and was happy that someone had “read my chart.” 

Surprisingly, the antibodies were elevated, indicating Grave’s Disease, but my thyroid numbers were all normal.  In my scan, my thyroid was “small in size” and therefore an indication of Hashimoto’s Disease.  And so my intense search to “figure things out” began.  I hit the internet, blogs, facebook, every known mechanism I had at my fingertips to figure out if a) this was possible and b) how to fix it!   The question that had not yet entered my mind was “what CAUSED it.”  I saw two different endocrinologists and had countless “over the fence” sessions with my neighbor, the nurse practitioner.  During my research, I began to find a wealth of evidence that kept pointing back to gluten.  In fact, the information was nearly overwhelming.  What was more shocking was that EVERY. SINGLE. SYMPTOM. seemed to coincide with my own Dad’s issues.  I also began to realize that I have also had symptoms dating back to my childhood years. 

The evidence was mounting in favor of going gluten free.  In the course of my research, I also discovered that “gluten free” in the traditional sense meant “wheat free.”  A true gluten free diet was “grain free.”  That was one more step I wasn’t sure I could wrap my head around, so I decided to start small.  On March 4, I cut out wheat from my diet with ASTOUNDING results.  Within 10 days, I had lost 5 lbs, my hands no longer hurt or tingled, no more stomach issues, and I could sleep through the night!  I called my sister and said, “Enough already.  Get off of gluten.”  She argued, but who can truly argue with these kinds of results?  She called me a “gluten nazi,” but she acquiesced and had similar results.  And so began my mission to get all of my extended family off of gluten.  I wasn’t ready to take on my kids.

On my side of the family, I have a first cousin with Rheumatoid Arthritis, a mother with severe stomach complications and no gall bladder, a nephew with no gall bladder (oh, and all 3 of my nephews have tested positive for the gluten sensitivity gene), a father who we know had liver cancer, a sister who has several autoimmune diseases, and two additional sisters who have thyroid issues along with a few other complications.  We all manifest differently with our thyroid, but have some basic complaints in common, including fatigue, foggy brain, muscle and joint pain, sinus issues, etc. 

As part of my research, I discovered the “Gluten Free Society” (www.glutenfreesociety.org) and it’s founder, Dr. Peter Osborne.  He’s based in Sugarland, Texas and since it seemed to be attainable, I made an appointment with him on our trip home this summer.  I’m not particularly susceptive to hero worship, but I’m getting close with this doctor.  He’s a chiropractor and nutritionist, but also the world’s leading expert on issues dealing with gluten sensitivity.  It is through much of his privately funded research that I have found many answers already to my issues.  On July 4, I will have been wheat free for 4 months.  I know when I’ve slipped, and I know that there are possibly other products (be it foods or environmental toxins) that are culprits in my deteriorating health.  I am awaiting the test results now to see what those might be.

In the meantime, I am “all in.”  Gluten, at least in the form of wheat, makes me sick.  I know that most gluten comes in the form of bread and it makes sense that anyone who eats a lot of bread is going to possibly have weight issues, which cause lots of other health issues.  Whether folks choose to avoid gluten as part of a fad diet or for real health related allergies or sensitivities, I think they will feel better.  But for my family, I know the end result of untreated, undiagnosed gluten sensitivity.  I want more for my children.  I don’t want my daughters to give birth and think that motherhood is “too much.”  I don’t want them to wake up with joint pain in their 20’s.  I don’t want them to live with a stomach ache. 

This will not be an easy road…for me or for them.  We will have to first think differently, and then live differently.  Change takes time and it cannot happen without support.  When those around you are discouraging, change your surroundings.  There’s too much evidence to support this growing trend for me to discount its legitimacy.  My own success is equally convincing.  We see slogans constantly in our lives that say, “Live Well,”  “Eat Healthy, live longer.”  We have spent a lifetime ignoring the obvious.  I prefer to live by the old adage, “We are what we eat.” 

It’s baby steps for my own children.  It’s a process of self-discovery for me.  The more I can confirm about my own genetics, the more power I have in my own home to continue to rid my house of the toxins…whatever form they take.  We are on a road to health.  It will not be a smooth road. 

In my journey thus far, I’ve already experienced some of the ups and downs.  In the last 10 weeks alone, my thyroid medication has been increased, sending me, no CATAPULTING me, into a hyperthyroid state.  I have since reduced my dosage by half and have found a new normal.  I might add that despite this change, my weight remained steady, my hands never hurt, and though my stomach experienced the most issues, it, too, has returned to normal since correcting my dosage.  All of this further evidence that it was inflammation, caused by gluten, causing my pain, not necessarily the thyroid itself.  In fact, it’s most likely that the gluten was the very spark that ignited my virtual deterioration of my thyroid.  Eventually, I’d like to be medication free.  My new doctor thinks it’s possible. 

I leave you now with hope that by taking control of your own health, by owning your diet, by confessing that you hold the answers to your problems by making better nutritional choices, we really do have hope for a healthier, longer future.

Parenting, Culture Shock, and turning over the worry...

I keep reading all of these positive things about how difficult, yet rewarding, parenting is or can be.  I believe them all and they make me laugh.  Trouble is it doesn't relieve the sheer overwhelming feeling of "Am I doing it right?"  I've been watching a sermon series by Andy Stanley called, "Why Worry?"  It's fantastic, and he states that "You worry about that which you are most passionate and committed to."  This made me evaluate what I actually worry about.  It's my kids.  It's their well-being, their health, their minds, their self-esteem, their faith, their successes, their failures.  I want them to be happy, but not so happy that they miss the tough lessons of life.  I want them to miss heartache, but not to the degree that they miss having compassion for others.  Once I discovered what I worry about most, and connected that to what I'm most passionate about, I confess I had a moment of "Well, at least maybe I'm not COMPLETELY self-absorbed; and short of being totally and fully committed to Christ and trusting Him with my worries, this isn't the WORST thing to worry about."  It's possible that I momentarily forgot the point of the message.

It's true that I need to turn all of my worries over to a higher authority...to the God that I, in theory, trust implicitly with my every tomorrow.  But these feelings of insecurity and of "being unsettled," continue to creep back into my daily life.  This made me think harder about "why" I feel this way.  And then I remembered..."culture shock."  It's a nasty little thing.  It creeps into your world, and undermines your greatest feelings of accomplishment.  It's silent and like that black web from Spiderman 3, it wraps itself around you and suddenly, you feel black and dark and you don't know why.  I had that feeling throughout my first year in Nairobi.  Once I left for summer and had a "break" from my own daily grind, I returned with a new sense of "home."  I came back and suddenly it was "MY crazy world" and I fit into it so much better.  I was comfortable in my own skin again.  We are getting very close to summer break after nearly a year in Romania...

So doesn't it stand to reason that after this summer, I'll feel better when I return?  I hope so...but like that black web, there are feelings of doubt.  What if I simply DON'T fit in here?  What if I've finally reached that place in my own life and in adulthood where I can't adapt?  I'm done.  I've grown too old to make new friends?  Suddenly this sounds familiar...the old paranoia of transition and culture shock is ringing true.  It simply has to "make it's rounds" in my head in order for me to rationalize it and put it back into it's proper place.  I have to turn that over, too.  To allow God to re-invent my thinking.  To give me peace when I can't find it on my own.  To turn the focus off of myself and back onto those around me...the ones I'm so passionate about.  And then that old worry of "Am I getting it right?" creeps back in...and so is the cycle of life in the Foreign Service...transition, adjusting, re-adjusting, helping your children adjust, feeling settled for about 10 minutes, and then preparing for transition again. I'm presently in search of that "10 minutes."

Sadly, having culture shock doesn't allow us a reprieve from parenting. We can't STOP parenting because we are in transition.  I think in our attempt to be good parents, we have to make difficult decisions that are often not popular with the masses, feeding into the feelings of personal isolation.  Not allowing my 12 year old to have her ears pierced until she's 13, so we'll have something fun to look forward to when we hit our "teens," is wildly unpopular.  Not attending Middle School dances is also  unpopular.  No facebook accounts, no privacy with electronics, no violent Wii games, no electronic games during the week, no walking around the mall alone, no R rated movies, no company in the house while I'm away, you can't play with matches, or knives, wear a helmet and shoes when on your bike, no food in the living room, no dessert until you've eaten your dinner, you can't ask the neighbors for food, you can't knock on anyone's door until after 10 a.m. and noon on Sunday, no cell phones until I see a need, take your plate to the sink, make your bed...I'm a real stickler for following the rules.  Crazy rules, I guess.  When other parents don't share our convictions or our love for rules, then we are suddenly the "strict, unrelenting," parent.  It's less about what someone else might say and more of a "feeling."  My kids tell me I live in the dark ages and that THEIR friends get to do all of these things!  Naturally, I don't always believe them, but I do know it happens.  And in truth, I only like rules because I think they are designed to keep our children safe.  They create natural boundaries so children are not putting themselves at risk both physically and emotionally.  It also develops a sense of respect...for themselves, and for others.  I don't want to rob their joy, or keep them imprisoned, or make them completely dependent on me.  I know they must begin to make their own decisions, and emerge into society as strong, INDEPENDENT people.  I hope the "rules" allow that transition to take place. But I also want them to be free to enjoy being children.  We all know that adulthood is upon us all too soon, with all of it's responsibilities and chores; and suddenly childhood and the pleasures of being young are gone.  I've convinced myself that I'm doing okay, but it's still sometimes a lonely road.

I know I must turn this worry over, too.  I have to seek His face and trust my children's well-being and even my own insecurities over to a higher power...but only after I've done all that I can physically do.  It is then, when I've stood firm in the face of judgement and difficult situations, and hopefully equipped my children to make good decisions, that I can rest and let God handle the rest.  In the meantime, I'm packing for a summer trip. ;-)