Thanks for Showing Up

To all those delightful souls who've emailed or posted, thanks for reading my daily musings. And if I could figure out how to use the damn blogroll function, I'd blogroll you. My sys-op is home from China, so I anticipate having that blogrolling thing up and running ASAP.

Yesterday I made seventy-five latkes, assuming that that would suffice for the two Hanukkah parties we're having this week. Who was I kidding? Last night's guests gobbled up every last greasy potato. So tomorrow I will be waking up a dawn to drench my kitchen in oil one more time. I was complaining to my mother-in-law that my new drugs are making me fat, when she glanced over at the table, and then gently reminded me that I had just consumed my weight in latkes. And that’s in addition to the three Thanksgiving dinners.

For those of you who have read my blog and haven't figured this out yet, I'm bipolar. Damn that Jane Pauley for beating me to the tell-all memoir. I've probably been like this all my life, but only since my last pregnancy has it really been a problem. I'm lucky – I’ve never had a full-fledged manic episode, and my depressions have been pretty mellow. It's mostly that without the drugs, I'm moody as hell and kind of a bitch. You're thinking, "Hey, so's my mother, and she's not on any drugs." Well, a few months ago I had a similar thought (not about my mother, but about half the people I know) and decided to go off the meds. As soon as I did, I lost myself. I became what I used to be, especially around my kids -- MEAN. Just plain old mean. Maybe I suffer from an as-yet-unnamed kind of bipolar disorder -- bipolar III, nasty mother syndrome. Anyway, when my meds are working I'm much more easy-going, I'm productive, my work goes well, and most importantly, I'm a much more pleasant mother.

It's funny, I've always had huge problems thinking of myself as a writer. It seems so unlikely that this type-A trial lawyer would end up writing. I felt like a fraud for so long. In fact, it took three published books before I'd even call myself a writer. I was a "stay-at-home-mother" or I was on the world's longest maternity leave. Having the bipolar diagnosis makes it perversely easier to think of myself as legitimate. I might not have spent my life longing to put pen to paper, but I'm the same kind of crazy as Lord Byron, Ernest Hemingway and Sylvia Plath! Talk about your street-cred!