It has been a whirlwind for me the last several weeks. The gecko is almost 100%, but still needs to be fed formula for the next month while we help him put on weight and ensure he’s getting all the nutirents he needs. His eyes are looking better but still need some attention. I was using drops and now I have an ointment, which he naturally despises. He doesn’t fight the formula much, but he does initially fight the syringe in his mouth. Once I put the ointment in his eyes, he tries to wipe it off on everything in his tank. I hold him for a few seconds if he’s not struggling too much to give it some time to work into his entire eye. The vet showed me how he can pull it back into the eye socket so you can only see a flat black spot. It creeped me out when she showed me and I have paid a ton of attention to his eyes since then. It seems like it’s been mostly rounded since we started the ointment, but his actual eye ball with the color hasn’t reemerged yet.
Then there’s the worms. He’s allowed to start eating bugs again, along with the formula. This seems to be the biggest way to get him to put on weight right now. I started with wax worms and I’ve got black soldier fly larvae ordered. Once that arrives he can have bugs every day. The wax worms are fatty and like junk food for geckos. That’s great for his weight gain, but I don’t want him to refuse everything else that offers more complete nutrition. We have to be aggressive with hydration right now too, which means forced soaks every other evening. Yesterday, when I went to grab him for a soak, he was in the middle of a shed. He’s had some trouble with shedding in the recent past, which is how we knew something wasn’t quite right. He’s supposed to get the skin off himself and then eat it to leave no trace of his presence. He hasn’t been able to eat the last few because he’s been too dry. Last night when I found him, he’d eaten the shed from his head and most of his body. All that remained was on his legs, feet, and tail. I helped him get some off after the soak, but he finished it up at some point last night on his own because he had no shed on him this morning. This is a huge step in his recovery!
The last thing we have to do is get him up to 60 grams. He weighed in at 42 grams at his initial vet visit. He was 45 last week at his follow-up. And last night he was 49 after his soak. So we are getting the weight on him. Tomorrow will be a week since his follow-up and he’s already put on 4 grams in less than a week. This is great news. He goes back again three weeks from tomorrow and I think he will be able to reach his goal weight by then, especially if he keeps gaining at such a fast rate. He seems very hungry and he’s trying to eat independently. We want him to get back to eating completely on his own, with someone just dropping bugs into his tank for him, but I think that will take awhile. I’m not sure if he can see them because his attempts seem a little halfhearted and tentative, like he’s not quite sure that he’s diving at a bug.
Girl was really sick last week after being sick the week before. She was sent home from school because she couldn’t keep her head up. I wish she had told me she felt that terrible. She wasn’t hot when I picked her up, but she got the chills at home. That wasn’t cool so I took her to urgent care because she said her ear really hurt. Boy #3 had also mentioned that she complained about tooth pain, but I didn’t think much of it. At urgent care they had to flush out the ear that hurt and tested her for strep. She had a slightly red ear, no strep, and a fever of 103. So we got antibiotics for her ear. She told me after the visit that when they weighed her, she realized that she had lost 9 lbs. At some point within a day or two, I discovered that what was really going on was that her 12 years molars were coming in on the top, both sides. She’s never had teething pain before, so this was new. She would be ok when taking Motrin and the second it started wearing off, she was a mess. She came home sick on Tuesday, and didn’t make it to back to school until today. They were off Friday and yesterday, but she missed all of Wednesday and Thursday.
She was so clingy and so much, while I am also caring intensively for this gecko. It was like a doctor having two ICU patients at times. It was more than I could handle emotionally and mentally and I found myself falling into a bad place, where things weren’t making sense. It took a lot out of me. I didn’t feel like doing anything relaxing because that just seemed like more work. All I could do in my free time was scroll mindlessly on my phone because it was just too much. I was also fighting a weird battle with my doctor about whether or not I needed a referral for a specialist. I don’t and I knew I didn’t. They wanted me to call my insurance to get the prior authorization done and call them back with the number. Um, it doesn’t work that way. The doctor making the referral is supposed to do that. That took up a lot of mental energy that I just didn’t have and so I checked out on Friday after all that.
Monday of last week I had a great appointment with my therapist, talking about my parents and how I was feeling about them ignoring me recently because I told them my wife and I were going to see a friend that doesn’t live far from them for a couple hours one day while we were there. My mother got short with me and then my father disappeared from contact. This is what happens when there’s a problem. Then yesterday my mom messaged me to say that they have unexpected expenses and were forced to buy a new car, and so cannot afford to come for Boy #2’s graduation in May. Fine. I am not sure how you were “forced to buy a new car” but ok, I get it. This is really about their fear that they somehow don’t matter as much as other family members, and how they finally just figured out a way to avoid coming that seems reasonable to them. To me it feels like their standard bullshit. They go so far out of their way to not be a burden that they feel resentment when I don’t scream for them to be around. It’s a mind fuck that I cannot comply with any longer.
I have been working with my therapist so much on how to exist with these parents. I figured out recently on my own that my attachment style is disorganized attachment, or anxious-avoidant. It all comes from a lack of attachment to your early caregivers, which is THEIR FAULT. There’s so many “funny” stories that they love telling other people about times they were intentionally neglectful or had no regard for my feelings. If I tried to confront them about this hurtful stories, they would make light of it and tell me I was too sensitive to be upset about such a old story.
in studying all of this attachment theory information, I have found actionable things I can do to help myself heal. I have figured out how this has ruined past relationships and how I can improve my relationship with my wife now. There are so many patterns of behavior I have that are directly influenced by my parents’ lack of attachment to me as a child. It’s all really heavy and it hurts more than I wish it did. But on the flip side, I am finally seeing that none of this is because of ME and who I am. There is nothing inherently defective or broken about me, it’s all about them and their emotional immaturity. This would’ve happened to whoever I had been and that the things that are complicated about me have nothing to do with my struggle to connect with people. The distrust I always thought I was born with is because of choices they made when I was a baby. They chose not to prioritize my emotional needs at all. I remember being told more than once that we lived in “an adult centered house where our needs and wants come before the children’s needs and wants.” And this was so, so true. I grew up thinking that I wasn’t worthy of attention or love. I wasn’t worthy of anything, really.
The biggest problem now is that there is an expectation that they can continue to live as my most important priority. I haven’t written my mother back yet. My father wrote today to check in on podcasting and to compliment me on how I have taken care of the gecko. I see what’s happening here. They want to see if I am mad at them. They want to know if we are “okay.”
We are not ok. We were never ok. I will get back to them when I am ready and not busy with what I have going on here. When I feel like it and have something to say. I don’t want to be too emotional and angry in a response, I don’t want to be dismissive (like I really want to on the inside), and I don’t want to give them any kind of energy to feed off of. I want them to feel like a low priority, like they don’t matter as much as the people in my house, which is a house dominated by love and who needs what the most right now. I can’t define that at all. Sometimes one of the kids really needs the focus. Sometimes one of us adults need the focus. Sometimes a couple of us are suffering and need the others to step it up for a period of time. I refuse to sacrifice my wellbeing any longer for their shitty feelings. They never, ever took my feelings into consideration. They never stop to think that maybe they were hurting me as a child. That maybe they fell way short of even trying to meet my needs.
So that’s what’s been taking up all my time since I last wrote. Way too much going on, way too much stress. I am hopeful that this week will be back to normal and I can catch my breath before the shit hits the fan again. I don’t want to spend a ton of time thinking about my parents and their bad behavior. I want to spend my time healing and moving forward with a healthier relationship with myself.
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