I Wanna Be Sedated

Here we are, two weeks out from closing on our house, and the word of the day, boys and girls, is STRESS.

Closing on a house is expensive. And to be honest, if we had any money, we'd already own a house. What's worse is that I'm paying the final month's rent on our apartment: $1210. This is not money I really have to spend right now. It's money that needs to go towards a few final costs--like the $900 that Michigan Tech claims that Dan owes from over a decade ago, and we just don't have time to fight with them over. It's gotta come off the credit report before the loan goes through. Not to mention that we have to--absolutely HAVE TO--come up with $7200 for closing. There's that small matter.

Couple that with a month very heavy with guests--my mother, two of my best friends (in a row, not at the same time) and now, Dan's mother and nephew are coming. And staying. Evidently forever. Through closing at least.

I am beginning to feel like my mental health is being compromised. Compromised, people. Like hard to sleep at night, hard to eat, so fucking anxious I can barely string two coherant thoughts together. It's really a great trademark for a writer. I'm sure you can imagine how good I am at my job right now. I'm alternately clingy and snappish with Dan and Max, I am finding it increasingly difficult to be civil to my mother or my mother-in-law.

I have got to find a way to get through the rest of this month without doing any of the following: seriously alienating people who love me with what I'm sure appears to them to be one long-lasting and overwhelmingly bad mood; getting fired from my job for failure to achieve any of the objectives for which I was hired; make myself physically sick; or just simply suffer a meltdown.

Recently we found several toys on the recall list of Chinese-made toys that Max owns, including a set of Baby Einstein soft blocks. One of them has a frog on them, and if you pull the frog's leg, the block vibrates. Max used to pull this frog's leg by placing its leg between his teeth and pulling. My child has been regularly chewing on lead toys for over a year. There's some more good news for me; somewhere in the middle of all of this chaos, I have to find time to get my kid to the doctor to find out if he'll have to take the short bus to college. Does the short bus even go to college? And is my kid already suffering from lead poisoning? From what I understand, the symptoms are decreased attention span, acting out, poor judgement, temper tantrums--so am I to understand that my toddler may not be acting like a toddler because he's a toddler, but because there's something wrong with him? I don't even know what to say about that.

This much anxiety is not good for me. I may need some kind of medication here at some point, people, so if it's true that 1 in 6 professional adults uses drugs recreationally, let me just say to the 1.5 crackheads that are currently reading this post: it's time to share.