Back in Black

It’s a brand new year. Huzzah.

So, let me explain, dear readers, where the hell I have been for the past few months. Sadly, I have been in a drug-fueled haze. I’d love to say that I was touring with a band ala Penny Lane, or doing something amazingly cool, but let’s be real; I’m a mom with kids, so I really was just having a truly horrible reaction to prescription medication. Boring, yet true.

The end goal is weight loss. However, all of my minor medical conditions combine into one monster medical condition that laughs in the face of actual weight loss. Trust me. I spent six full months eating well and going to the gym religiously only to lose exactly five pounds. No one can remain motivated at that rate. It’s just too depressing. Bring on the drugs!

However, I had no idea that the side effects would be so, well, awful. How exactly could I get to the gym six days a week, when I couldn’t feel my feet or hands anymore? When I spent most days in a fog of exhaustion, barely able to handle the basic functions of motherhood and often took naps with my son in the afternoon just to get through dinner and bath time? The normal SAHM job of laundry, grocery shopping, cooking, cleaning, etc., was hard enough, but the additional work of putting the new house together and getting Christmas together made it hard for me to get out of bed some days. (I’d play the smallest violin in the world, but I’m pretty sure I sat on it.) Normally, a member of the book a week club (sometimes two, even three), I couldn’t even follow a recipe. Magazines piled up and it had to be a good day before I could even get through US Weekly let alone TIME. My husband was dethroned as the king of the couch as I couldn’t stay awake past 8, even if I DID take a nap. You would think not being able to read was the worst part. At first I thought it was, but then I realized, it was not being able to write or think that was even harder.

It took a week or two to notice, but I started having problems finishing my sentences. Everyone has that problem occasionally. You start a sentence, lose your train of thought, laugh it off, and then carry on. The problem was that I wasn’t losing the train; I was losing the station, the people inside, the whole bloody concept of transportation entirely. Sometimes I could picture it in my head, see the steam coming out of it, the black gleam off the tracks, even hear the sound of it chugging along, but could not actually get the word “train” to come out of my mouth. Frustration is a good word but it does not even begin to explain the experience fully. My husband called it a “word balloon” and would just start calling out words like a game show host until he either guessed it or it would come back to me. But it was embarrassing when it happened in public. I knew that I was speaking much slower, using much smaller words, and taking a lot longer pauses between words when I spoke to other people but it was the only way I knew to keep them from noticing that I had lost half my brain cells.

Speaking was hard, writing was harder. I just didn’t have the words anymore. They were gone. The humor was gone, the snark was gone, the bitchiness was gone. My theory is that when you are struggling just to get any word out, getting a rude one out is just a waste of time. I’d have a thought, or even a paragraph, but never a whole blog.

But, my friends, I do believe that the clouds have finally broken and the sun is starting to shine again. It may have taken a full three months for the side effects to balance out enough (or for my natural bitchiness to claw its way back out), but the blog has returned. I may not be quite back up to full speed, but I’m at least close enough for it to count. So, bring on the celebriting divorce, the Golden Globes, the reviews of bad movies, and all the other pop culture stuff I have not been able to handle for lack of ability.