"I don't think she smiles like that"

Caroline is in North Dakota with Tyler for Christmas. She will be there for about 2.5 weeks total.

Sucks. A lot.

I'm trying not to be depressed about it and to take advantage of the time to study for the next part of the boards, which are coming up in January, and to sleep in and spend time with friends. Spending the holidays without your child, though... well, I don't even really like to think about it, much less write about it, so I won't.

I miss her. I don't want a whole lot of things in life, other than to be a good dentist and to be a good mom. When half of that is missing, I feel... at a loss. Empty. Purposeless. I keep the door to her room shut. I don't turn on the Christmas tree. The holidays aren't happy for me this year.

I can't wait until she comes home.

But anyway. That is not the purpose of this post. This is:

I have a close friend who also recently got divorced. I was spending the night at her place a few days ago (when I had no heat and then a gas leak in my apartment, which is a whole nother story) and we were laying around chatting and looking at pictures from a Christmas party last week. She said, "hey, can I tell you something? This is going to sound so lame. But when I've looked at pictures of you from a long time ago, you have this really big, big smile and it almost doesn't even look like you. I thought, I don't think she smiles like that. But when I look at these pics from Friday, you have that same smile again."

And she is right. I do.

I have to remember that. That even though it's sad, this first divorced Christmas without my baby, I am me again. I am happy again, in the big picture. I can drag myself up out of this unhappy marriage and all the things we did to each other and all the pain and sadness can be lifted.

I can be me again. I can smile like that again.

In fact, I guess I already do.

Stop googling that.

I always enjoy tracking the google searches that lead to my blog. Usually it's a whole lot of searches along the lines of "unexpectedly expecting blog" or "unexpectedly expecting julia" and whatnot. Sometimes there are a few extremely creative spellings of "unexpectedly" (get it together, people).

But aside from those, the most common search terms to lead to this page are "paper cut on eye" (thank you, breastfeeding) and "how to make a woman cry" (thank you, pumping).

(Okay, there also was once a search for "grown woman in diper" [sic] but we just won't even go there. No, we won't go there. Because I don't even want to know.)

Seriously? Who are these men (I assume they are men) searching for how to make a woman cry? WTF? Stop googling that. We are doing enough crying all on our own, probably already because of you, thanks very much. We don't need you looking for instructions on how to make us do that.

And now that I've made a whole post about it, I've probably just perpetuated the problem. That's okay. At least now when they search for it, they'll get here and be scolded. You're welcome.

And for those of you googling "paper cut on eye", well, I'm sorry for you, because that just sounds like it really sucks. Good luck with that.

Fried

So, my short Thanksgiving break was pretty awesome. I got to hang out at home with Caroline and just relax and spend time with her. Our days are hectic, so it was nice to "catch up". But I don't think the break was quite long enough, because my brain appears to be totally fried. Luckily, Christmas vacation is just two weeks away...

I keep losing my school ID, which I need to get to my desk and into the labs. I also keep putting things down around the clinic and then realizing they are missing a couple minutes later, and then running all over trying to find them. Basically I am just leaving pieces of myself all over the place and being really scatterbrained. I never used to be like this! I guess I am just a little overwhelmed and need a vacation. But the worst happened yesterday...

I was in the lab working over the weekend because I am pretty much drowning in dentures, which is actually a disgusting mental image and I am truly sorry for inflicting it on you. I had a bunch of projects going on at once, trying to be efficient because I had to pick Caro up from Tyler's place (an hour away) at 3:45. The last thing I had to do was make a shell for a temporary bridge, around 1:30. I put a sheet of plastic in this plastic-melting machine that gets extremely hot, and went to gather up my stuff to leave while it was heating. I'm sure that any of you stretched-too-thin mothers can guess what happened then. I picked up my stuff and walked out of the lab, completely forgetting that I had turned on that machine.

All was well until about 10pm, when I sat bolt upright on the couch and remembered. That machine gets HOT. It totally would be capable of burning down the building. I frantically texted everyone I knew who might be at school. No one. I called public safety and told a cop there what I had done and asked him to go make sure someone had shut off the machine, because I couldn't drag my sleeping baby a half hour to school to do it myself. Ohmylord he was so annoyed with me. Understandably. I guess.

I didn't know the room number to the lab and I am the worst direction-giver ever, so these cops were wandering all over the hospital (which is huge) trying to find the lab. I didn't know the technical name for the machine. (We just call it a "suck-down machine", to which the cop said "is this a prank call?") I didn't know anything, really, except that I would probably be in a little bit of trouble if I burned down the entire health center. They found it eventually and of course it was already shut off. The cop was going on and on about it so finally I said "look, do you want me to stop in at public safety tomorrow morning to help you fill out this report? Or maybe pick up some kind of scarlet letter to wear on my chest?" and he was all "well you don't have to be rude" and I was all "well I'm sorry but neither do you sir" and I'm pretty sure public safety is going to key my car tomorrow.

Then of course I was wishing the damn place had burned while I suffered through a terrible morning in clinic, but that's neither here nor there.

So. Long story short (way too late for that), I could use a week of vacation or two!