Posts from — March 2011

I would probably classify myself as an “initial optimist.”  During the first few hours, days, even weeks of a wait (completely dependent upon the expected wait time.  If I expect to hear something by the end of the day, I’m optimistic for a few hours.  If I don’t expect to hear something for months, I’m optimistic for a few weeks), I am extremely positive.  I’m daydreaming about the goal, I’m fully expecting to hear good news, I believe all the facts I have on-hand.

Maybe even the most hardcore optimists go through moments of doubt, but I call myself specifically an “initial optimist” because I am also a “secondary pessimist.”  I literally do a 180, lose all sense of hope, and immediately go into a place mentally where things won’t work out, where I won’t hear good news, where I will be disappointed or devastated.  Even when my worst fears aren’t realized, it does nothing to change the cycle during the next wait or even to process the wait that just happened differently.

For me, these two phases go hand-in-hand: initial optimism/secondary pessimism.

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I am usually waiting on a whole host of items at the same time.  Some of them are long-range goals that don’t have a set delivery date, such as family building.  Other items are less emotional in nature such as freelance work that I’m waiting to hear about by a certain date or an answer to a question that you’d expect to receive within a time frame.

There is no rhyme or reason to whether the waiting bothers me.  I can be extremely busy and simultaneously anxious about the wait.  And I can be extremely busy and not paying attention to the wait.  And of course, all other options are equally true.  Compartmentalizing seems wholly out of my control — I can’t stop myself from being anxious some days and more than I can make myself anxious when I’m not feeling particularly worried about something.

I’m not sure why we think emotions can be controlled towards one direction (not being anxious) if we know they can’t be controlled towards the other (making ourselves anxious when we’re not worried).  I mean, if I can’t force myself to be anxious, then why do people believe that we can just deep breathe and make ourselves calm?

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You know there are all those what ifs where you talk about the things you’d do to get one more hour, one more day, one more week of life?  We obviously cherish life because people are willing to do some pretty insane things in order to gain even a few more minutes of time with people they love.

And what do we do with that time?  We wish it away.  We wish time would hurry up and bring us whatever we’re waiting for.  We wish time would speed by so we can have the answer and be out of limbo.

Perhaps it would be more helpful if we could defrag life like a hard drive, eliminating out all the waits and shoving moments together in order to clear up space for more productive things.

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What are you waiting for specifically right now?

Something happens and you’re left staring at the news on the computer screen, absolutely dumbfounded even though the events are all fathomable.  We are not talking about aliens coming down and wiping out whole cities.  We are talking about news that shakes our world but allows the rest of the earth to keep revolving as if nothing has ever happened.  You should be able to wrap your mind around life and death.  Around love and loss.  These things happen everyday.

And that’s what you tell yourself when you are still sitting in the chair, staring at the screen minutes later.

There is nothing you can do.  If you were physically close to the person, you could make them dinner, do a load of laundry, offer to watch their child.  If you were family, you could make phone calls, schedule a visit, help with the planning.  But if you are far away, on the other end of a computer screen, you can send an email.  You can rally the troops.  You can stare at the computer screen.

You can go in the kitchen and bake a dozen cookies.  You can wrap them carefully and label the box.  You can walk them to the post office, tell the postmaster the story of why you are sending cookies.  You can hope that when they arrive, they are a small good thing; a figurative hug for when arms can’t reach.

What do you do to show love?

Thank you to everyone who shared their thoughts on the birth/death post last week — especially the people who shared personal stories about death.  I don’t know many people who wake up in the morning wanting to think about death beyond goth teenagers, but I do think it’s important to bring up the topic from time to time.  To remember that every single day, there are people grieving even if we’re lucky enough to not be in that group at the moment.  By which I mean, even if you’re not actively grieving, all people are holding that thread that link us to one another.  Even if we’re not actively grieving, all of us are passively grieving in the sense that we can be mindful of another person’s grief and not leave them alone in it.

The twins have returned recently to the topic of death after a fairly long hiatus from it.  With all difficult topics, the twins move close to the edge and then jump backwards and edge closer and jump back until they finally reach the information.

Prior to recently, they believed that people died for three reasons: stopped eating, ran into the street without looking and were hit by a car, or turned 100. (It’s an on-going joke with our friends who say, “and then President Lincoln instantly turned 100 at Fords Theater…”)

I let them hold onto this idea and didn’t point out the various other ways people die because they seemed to be at a point where they were moving back from the edge again.  They had all the information they wanted for the moment.

And then Harry Potter sparked that idea of parental death.  That it will happen one day — either I’ll be in my thirties or I’ll be in my nineties or somewhere in between, but it will happen.  That it won’t be by Lord Voldemort (we established that), but one day, every person will lose their parents.

And then, of course, they overheard news about the earthquake in Japan and there were suddenly more ways to die — if there were 5 ways (eating, car, 100, evil magic dictator, and earthquakes), could there be even more ways?  And then the trigger that brought all of this together was that we were watching a concert video and the singer started crying while he sang a song.  The twins asked why he was crying, sort of giggling about it, and I said, “he’s crying because his father died when he was little and this song is about that.”

I said it without really thinking.  It was late.  My mind was in two places at that moment, half working and half with them.  I realized after a moment that they weren’t really watching the screen anymore; they were watching me.

So we turned off the video and had a long talk about how unusual this was that his father had a problem that a doctor couldn’t fix.  We spoke about the fact that while he was crying during this song, they had seen that he had performed a host of other songs with a big smile on his face, and that life does indeed go on.  That the hurt wells up, but also recedes.

I think what struck them the most was the time gap between the death and the song.  They asked if it had just happened, and I said no, it had probably been almost 30 years since his father died.  And the ChickieNob said, “and he still cries about it?”  It opened this door in her mind that there exists these enormous hurts that still have the ability to affect us long down the road.  That this person has never “gotten over” it in the way that the twins are asked constantly to get over the little hurts that mark their day.  And I think this terrified them; this mixture of the crying singer and Harry Potter staring at his parents in the mirror and the earthquake in Japan.

Sometimes, when we talk about death, I picture the idea of loss as this house.   It’s that curious house that every neighbourhood has — the one that somehow draws everyone’s attention, the one you avoid on Halloween when you’re already scared, and yet you can’t help but wonder what it looks like inside.  Except, instead of being owned by one creepy old cat lady (apologies to all cat-ladies; if I weren’t allergic to cats, I would most definitely be one), we all walk past that house with the understanding that one day, we’re going to have to live there for a bit.  In this unfamiliar house.  With none of our familiar possessions.  And it’s going to suck while we’re there.  And it’s going to change who we are even after we leave it.

The only way I can shake having that figurative house have a hold on me and change the way I walk to school so I don’t have to pass it, is to simply confront it, much in the way the children in Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles go and ring the doorbell of their neighbourhood’s creepy house in order to release their fear.

What gets me to that door, what gets me over the threshold, what makes me look at the inhabitants is the fact that all of us will live in that house at some point.  That we are all forced into that space, and so it behooves us to take a deep breath and peek inside to speak to the current inhabitant while we still have the choice to be standing outside rather than living inside that house of grief.

I couldn’t see anyone choosing to live there; what they would get out of it.  But I think even places we hate — such as the fertility clinic — can become familiar enough that when we peel away the fear, the hatred of the space, the dread, what we get is this strange sensation that defies language — we simply don’t have a word that sums up the familiarity that can be found in a dreaded space.  I certainly felt it at the fertility clinic — this place I never wanted to be, yet felt so familiar that I could walk between the blood lab and the sonogram room with my eyes closed and muscle memory would tell me when to pause, when to turn.

I felt that way with the NICU too.  I asked every single day when we could leave.  I didn’t want to be there; I certainly didn’t want the twins in there.  But one day, as I was washing my hands and arms up to the elbow with the disinfecting soap prior to entering their NICU room, I was thinking about how much this had become routine.  How it no longer felt heart-pounding scary, but now was merely a sigh of fear.  A well of sadness.  One that I could navigate with pauses in the day to eat lunch or send an email or even joke with Josh.  We couldn’t do that the first few days.  I was a fucking wreck the first days; I cried like an animal.  But humans can get used to anything.

And, unfortunately, all of us will have to get used to living in that house.  We will probably have to enter there several times.  We may never have a soft entrance.  I have a feeling I will spend the first days, weeks, months, perhaps lifetime, kicking the walls and screaming while I’m in there.  But while that is happening, I don’t want the people on the outside to be racing past the house, trying not to notice it or think about their own time in there.  I want someone to be ringing the doorbell.

So that’s why I do it, and in turn, hope that by gently talking to the kids about it, I get them to a place where they can ring the doorbell too.  Not all the time; no one is perfect and we don’t always know just how much the other person needs us to visit.  And not every person can be expected to visit every inhabitant of that house.  But if everyone was willing to knock on the door, each person would have a few visitors.  And that’s important.

That is the only thing I can think to do to make that loss any easier on them; to give them the tools they’ll need in order to live in that house.  And they’re flimsy, paltry tools at best, that will have little impact on their time in that house.  But what else can I give them considering that I can’t circumvent what will happen one day?  And that thought and the flimsiness of those tools, fills me with enormous grief even if, at the very same time, I am also filled with enormous love.

I am quite a fan of posts with bullets.  I know, it sort of bucks the trend — most people would think I would like lengthy, contemplative posts.  And I do, but I am also a fan of posts that simply dump a lot of ideas on your plate and you can pick and choose which ones you feel like snacking on.

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This week was St. Patrick’s Day and the ChickieNob was extremely anxious about what she would do about wearing green.  She has some green summer clothes, but nothing suitable for winter.

I remember in elementary school that there was a contest for who could wear the most green and in third grade, I tried to win.  The problem was that if you wanted the green on your underwear to be counted, you had to go to the bathroom with a fellow student and prove its greenness.  Which upon reflection today, totally wouldn’t fly.  I mean, how would you react to your child being told by a teacher to show someone their underwear?

So, I remember sitting there in third grade during class meeting, where people were counting their green items and we’re trying to discern who has the most green, and even though I knew I had underpants on that had green on them (they were dotted with flowers, but the stems and leaves were green), I didn’t go to the bathroom to show a fellow student.

And the reason was that one of my best friends as a child was a boy (he later became my first date!) and at camp, I had shown him my underpants.  Not only had I gotten in trouble, but some girls had teased me for having a boy as a friend.  And I remember sitting there on the carpet, desperate to win the St. Patrick’s Day green count but unwilling to show another girl my underpants because all I could think of were these bratty twins from camp who would run by me on the playground and tell me that no one wanted to play with a girl who would show a boy her underpants.  But I had been so curious about boy’s underpants and he had been curious about mine.

Every time the ChickieNob would fret about being pinched, I would think back to how I lost the green count even though I would have won if I had shown someone my underpants as proof.  I’m still bitter about it to this day.

Please do not worry — the ChickieNob was saved by Julie who gave the ChickieNob a green shirt a few weeks ago when I saw her that said, “Eat More Kale.”  So no pinching.

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I got the first batch of Purim packages off with only one hitch.  I don’t know why — my heart wasn’t into Purim this year.  I had the theme set for months, but I dragged my heels in picking what I wanted in the box.  And I didn’t make new costumes for the kids.  Usually, it’s this huge sigh of happiness when I get the first packages out.  But this year, it was sort of a sigh of relief and a feeling of crossing something off my list.  I’m not sure why the blue Purim.

The hitch came on Sunday while Josh and the twins were running errands and I was at home, making lollipops.  I was completely in my own world, which is the only explanation for how I poured super-heated sugar over my hand.  I was trying to slosh the remains out of the pot into the sink, and my hand got in the way.  Luckily, since I was right at the sink, I immediately turned on the cold water and thrust my hand under.  And I had a topical ointment for burns with lidocaine that I put on afterward.

My hand looks fine now, but I was in mind-numbing pain through most of Sunday afternoon.  The sort that blots everything around you out.

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Earlier that day, since the kids were out of the house and I was baking (pre-lollipop; nothing was made post-lollipop), I tweeted that I turned on the Violent Femmes.  Kate asked why I don’t play the Femmes in front of the kids, and it comes down to our philosophy on curse words.

Namely, we want them to own them and we believe that in order for a person to really be able to own a curse word and use it properly in the future, they need to find it themselves, preferably written on a bathroom wall rather than being overheard in your parent’s music.

I remember exactly where I was the first time I saw the word “fuck.”  I was in the bathroom at elementary school and someone had written it on a piece of toilet paper.  I tore off the toilet paper and brought it out of the stall to an older girl who was doing her hair by the mirror and asked her what it meant.  And she told me.  And now I own that word and use it comfortably, albeit sparingly (much to my mother’s chagrin).

I don’t want my kids to be using the word in the future and have this niggling thought of their parents in the back of their head as they say it.  It’s all about roots and wings.  Or something like that.

So, we are those parents who censor the music we play, and I’m sure many musicians would be horrified to know that we play their music and mute the curse words in songs (I have a mute button on my steering wheel).  The kids know exactly what we’re doing and we’ve told them why we do it.  But the Femmes are just too much work.  My thumb would cramp from hitting the mute button.

I’m not of the mindset that all censorship is bad.  I think censorship when used for a clear reason (in this case, so that curse words aren’t ruined for them) can actually be a good thing.  I know many disagree with me and they can even present a good argument, but I frankly don’t care.  Nor would I be offended if someone told me that they ripped the sex scenes out of my book before they let their daughter read it.

It’s how we walk that fine line between letting them listen to the music they gravitate towards and keeping it still age-appropriate.  And not ruining a good curse word for them since you can’t unring that bell.

I’m finding it difficult this week to get any traction on work.  Part of me feels like it would be better to just let it go, stop stressing, release myself from any feeling of pressure and try again next week.  Part of me knows that it’s really a waste of time to not be getting work done AND to spend the time beating myself up about it.  That part of me knows that if I’m not going to get anything accomplished the least I can do is count it as a mental vacation and take the time to read a book or watch a movie.  De-stress.

But instead of doing that, I spend all my time arguing with myself about the fact that I don’t deserve a break.  That I’m an idiot for wasting time when I could be working.  I am really hating my internal voice right now.

I wish I could slap her sometimes.

Please tell me it was something in the air and not my own fault.  Did you have trouble focusing this week?

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I haven’t gotten a chance to see the book yet, but Michael Barr, a blogger, put out a book about infertility from the male perspective called Swimming in Circles.  From the book information on Amazon:

Swimming in Circles provides an all-access pass into the private life of a couple faced with situations ranging from the embarrassing to the absurd, and decisions that are impossible one moment and incomprehensible the next. This truly unique memoir is told from the usually neglected male perspective and is filled with gallows humor peppered in between the depths of disappointment and the peaks of possibility.

It just feels like there’s a real dearth of the male perspective out there, so I thought I’d put this out there.

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The Weekly What If: What if you could read, internalize, and have a complete understanding of any work of literature without having to actually sit down and read it simply by touching the cover?  You could only do this with one book.  Which one would you choose?

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And now, the blogs…

Baby, Interrupted had a post about an accident that was avoided though the residue of what could have been still remains.  I read the post with my hand over my mouth.  She writes, “If I had been looking down, changing the radio station.  If I had been reaching into the back seat to retrieve her teething ring.  If I had taken the moment to glance at my phone.  If, if, if…”  The post will make your heart stop.

Sugar Donor had a post last Thursday that I didn’t read until Friday about a horrible, irreversible mistake with the doctor’s office.  I sat on commenting because it was so raw that I couldn’t pull my thoughts together; and I still can’t now.  She calls it a small part of the whole, but it’s not just the mistake, it’s what it represents.  She writes so heartbreakingly at the end of the post: “I literally have nothing from this pregnancy, nothing. No pictures, no connections, nothing.”  It’s the repetition of all the times the letters N and O come together in those two sentences that makes me want to scream for her.  Losing that information is both part of the whole and its own loss.  And my heart just went out to her.

Flotsam often asks good questions, and this post is about drawing your personal lines.  She promises this question ties into a specific post, one that hints that her line has been pushed (perhaps I’m reading too much into that?), and says, “How much do you let others dictate what remains private and what becomes public?”  The discussion is interesting as well.

Lastly, The Road Less Travelled has a post that made me smile about the pregnancy of fictive kin.  Maybe it’s because she captured in words the love and fear and longing and hope and excitement that she feels about this impending birth.  About how it will change things.

The roundup to the Roundup: Absolutely no ability to concentrate this week.  Book about the male perspective with infertility.  Answer the Weekly What If.  And lots of great posts to read.