Strawberryland Forum

Stella Grapes Wrote:Everybody's favorite overworked caregiver (that'd be me) has been having mental health problems. She's more optimistic and closer to recovery now, though, and has more kids to care for. Simply put, I'm operating a one-woman nanny business and I've become a foster parent. I'm good with kids, so this is very successful so far! Very busy organizing my time between work and family and combining the two, though, and my (lack of) mental health has been killing me whenever I do have downtime. (I cry, shake, and lose my breath in panic at night when James is too busy to be with me. The kids don't know.)

I do think I am close to getting a lot better. Things just need to keep going right.

It's great to hear from you after so long. I was worried about you, especially after your last post.

As it stands, I am done with my college education for now. I have a two year Associates in Computer Technology, and now the biggest obstacle is finding a job in my small town. I may have to go with a basic, starter job such as courtesy worker at the local grocery store as there aren't that many computer jobs around here. In the next few months, I also plan on looking for my own place to live, but before that, I really need to get rid of much of the junk I have accumulated over the years. These two tasks alone don't do enough to depress me. What does are the massive amount of student loans that I now have to pay back. I believe secondary education should be free for some students, but that is another post.

Stella Grapes Wrote:Everybody's favorite overworked caregiver (that'd be me) has been having mental health problems. She's more optimistic and closer to recovery now, though, and has more kids to care for. Simply put, I'm operating a one-woman nanny business and I've become a foster parent. I'm good with kids, so this is very successful so far! Very busy organizing my time between work and family and combining the two, though, and my (lack of) mental health has been killing me whenever I do have downtime. (I cry, shake, and lose my breath in panic at night when James is too busy to be with me. The kids don't know.)

I do think I am close to getting a lot better. Things just need to keep going right.

Keep up your positive attitude and things will turn out fine. Glad to know that you're (More or less) doing fine.

cpd2009 Wrote:I believe secondary education should be free for some students, but that is another post.

I believe it should be free for all. There are a lot of things I'd change about government if I could.

My life ... has been bizarre. I put on The Sweet Dreams Movie and the Let's Dance episodes for the younger kids this morning, and oh my. You know, in the timeline I made, Sweet Dreams Movie was very close to ten whole years ago. Will be ten years in five and six days on my timeline, come to think of it. Benita's 9th birthday is this coming Thursday. My brother's birthday is this coming Wednesday. In real life, my life was weirdly overworked in 2003 and it's weirdly overworked now in a very different way, and I've never had career stability in the way most people have.

I think everyone should be entitled to free secondary education and I think everyone should be entitled to career stability. My life would have been totally different if such things were guaranteed. So many people would be better off. I'd be mentally healthier, too.

(Granted, my kids wouldn't exist and I'd go through everything all over for them to exist. On the other hand, had my husband not had easier access to his goals in life than I had, we would never have been able to financially afford children. Yes, I would have by now tried to adopt a child if I were still single anyway. It would have been a huge financial stretch, however. There's a reason my brother had only one child, as opposed to mine and my husband's many. Money. And on my own, I make less than my brother and his wife as individuals. I'm just lucky with my husband.)

A lot of people think I'm very, very strange. There are people who look down on me. There are people who look up to me. My husband says, "To be able to just pick up and go different places made you a brave person who's seen things other people spend their lives on their hamster wheels wishing they could see. Your lifestyle is how people join the Peace Corps; and the more you decide to do on your own and the more we do together, the more evident it is that you're made of the heart the Peace Corps is designed for."

If you wonder what he sees in me, that's some of the type of stuff he sees in me.

When I'm as stretched and sick as I am now, I find it wondrous I'm still alive. Wow. How amazing.

What I want more than anything is for my kids to look back on their childhoods and know their mother loved them, and I want them to be hopeful for the future. James will pay for their college, if they want to go to college. I remember he told me that on our first date. ("If I have kids, I want to be able to give them everything," was what he said.)

I want them to be hopeful, though. I want them to feel they can change the world, and I want myself to have been an example of hopefulness despite my psychological conditions. I so want them to have better lives than I've had. I wonder what James will think if any of them have my side of the family's wanderlust. I suppose he'd encourage them to volunteer for the Peace Corps.

Mango and Persimmons are strange. They were playing with dolls with another little girl, and they had their dolls tell her doll, "You're not wearing shoes." "We must pray to God to destroy your life - " " - Because you're not wearing shoes."

Their dolls weren't wearing shoes, either.

Then they ran out of their bedroom, saying, "GOD IS GOING TO DESTROY HER LIFE!" "SHE'S GOING TO EXPLODE!" "RUUUUN - " " - SO YOU DON'T GET EXPLODED ON!"

"You went boom! You're dead!"

The other girl threw things and said, "NO, SHE AIN'T, YOU WEIRDOS!", and that's why I had them calm down and watch movies.

What my kids have learned from church:
If you ask God to make people explode, God will make people explode.

We started going to church this summer. People in our church often pray over other people for all types of healing. The church is Pentecostal, and personally I fit in with the excited atmosphere of the Pentecostal church, so people have acted like they've "exploded". Just ... positively, not dropping dead!

... I'm kind of worried about my four year old girls.

Honestly, if I had a daughter and she said things like that, she's going to be in for an earful.

Also, I'd start monitoring what they're seeing on TV and online. Sounds like they're picking up bad influences...

Stella Grapes Wrote:I think everyone should be entitled to free secondary education and I think everyone should be entitled to career stability. My life would have been totally different if such things were guaranteed. So many people would be better off. I'd be mentally healthier, too.

And, I wouldn't have to fuss about with about five different loan providers with forbearances and deferments because I need to set my footing before beginning the years-long repayment process. However, I try not to think about it too much and only when necessary. I can never stay depressed for too long.

Not wanting to go political, but if the politics of my country weren't so messed up, I'm sure we could have had free secondary education. No one deserves to drown in debt because of school. Lets hope that in the future, free secondary education will become a reality and the students and leaders of our future won't have to worry about massive debt from their educational endeavors. It's going to be a tough battle though convincing our government though.


Now, about Macs...

Prue, I do wonder what will eventually become of your old Macbook. It's old, yes, but still useable. It seems to be have made at a time when Apple didn't really care much about locking things down that much. Sure, the iPod was basically tethered to iTunes back then as it is now, but it wasn't that much of a deal to most people as MP3 players with expandable memory weren't as popular yet. Tablet PCs as we know them now didn't exist either.

I'm about ready to consider Lilly, my mid-2011 Mac Mini a failed experiment. It seems that Apple now wants to tightly integrate Mac OSX and iOS (iPhone) together by introducing features that are of no use to me, like Messages, AirPlay, and iCloud. Those features in themselves are great, but only if you own other Apple products like the iPad or iPhone. Without them, they are just bloat. Another bad thing Apple seems to be doing is locking down their newest computers to prevent people from upgrading anything at a later time without taking it in to an Apple Store.

Another thing that lead me to partially replace Lilly with Audrey (my new Windows 8 PC) is that Lilly always seemed to be slow, despite having a reasonably good processor and large amounts of RAM. It seemed that every time I run iMovie or iPhoto, it would take ages to load up Safari, or even switch between apps. The slowness was tolerable in Lion, but it got worse with Mountain Lion.

I still believe Apple makes great products, but with their lack of upgradeability, locking down of things, and the introduction of features that you can only use with other Apple products, they are no longer conforming to my style of computing. I'm holding out for OSX Mavericks, the next version of Mac OSX coming out in the fall that is supposed to improve performance, though I'm skeptical.

Regarding my four year old girls, I don't know what to say. I don't remember if I said things like that when I was a child. I do know that if I did, I would have been physically and mentally abused for it. I've been meaning to discuss it with James, who doesn't yet know. We haven't both had the time. I hand over this type of thing to James, usually, because I don't know what to say other than "Don't do that". He's good at gentle talks about why not. I'm more likely to sound irritated or too surprised or tired, and I want better for my kids than that.

I grew up with a mother who was always nagging and screaming. I inherited or learned from that tendency. I just don't want to be like that to my kids, or my husband. It's not like nagging and screaming does anything positive.

My Mac is just sitting in its laptop case in my bedroom. "I buried it," is what I once said to some teenage girls who took me literally. (Megan was the only person in the group who knew me well enough to not take that literally. "I knew you guys would try to look outside! Ha ha!")

James has offered to take it in somewhere to get it fixed. I've declined the offer out of nervousness. The last time it was fixed, it came back with all its previous information erased. There is no way to prevent that from happening again. I literally cannot see the screen at all.

Well, they could just back up whatever stuff you have on your old Mac and keep it in another hard drive.

Oh, that reminds me Prue.. how has your Windows 8 laptop been so far?

I have actually warmed up quite a bit to Windows 8 since getting Audrey. It's not perfect, but definitely not as bad as I thought it was going to be. I'm actually debated upgrading Greta to Windows 8 as well, but since decided to leave her as is with Windows 7.

Stella Grapes Wrote:Regarding my four year old girls, I don't know what to say.

Well, you should definitely tell James. As for the girls, you can explain that god doesn't like blowing up things, and is very unhappy when people say that god will hurt people or when people hurt other people in the name of god.

Stella Grapes Wrote:James has offered to take it in somewhere to get it fixed. I've declined the offer out of nervousness. The last time it was fixed, it came back with all its previous information erased. There is no way to prevent that from happening again. I literally cannot see the screen at all.

Well, there is one way. Ask James to pull the hard drive out before sending it in for repairs. I did that with my laptop, Violette II, when I broke her by upgrading her BIOS (startup instructions) the wrong way and she can't power up at all. When she came back, all I did was plug the hard drive back in and she's back to her old self.