Josh sent me this piece about a final conversation that a grandmother got to have with her grandchild when she was in the NICU because it combined two things he said that I knew a lot about: the NICU and Dumbledore.

It is a gorgeous piece, written by a new father, about opening the letter his mother wrote to her future grandchild — the one she wouldn’t get to meet.  The letter sat in a safe deposit box, waiting for this moment when he would become a father.  He finally opened it and read aloud his mother’s words to his daughter while she was in the NICU, with an “uncertain grasp on this world.”

He admits: “I was scared to open it. My mother and I used to talk for hours, about everything and nothing. Now there was one conversation left.”

On Wednesday I brought the letter to the NICU, unsealed it and began reading out loud. “I am with you.”

The words sounded odd; they were not my mother’s phrasing. But I knew them from somewhere. I searched my memory until it hit me: Harry Potter. My mother bought each book the day it came out and read them all again and again, especially after she got sick. When she didn’t have the energy to hold them, she lay in the hammock and listened on tape. Most of all she loved Dumbledore, who serves as the father Harry never had.

For everyone who won’t get a chance to have a conversation with your mother tomorrow, my heart is with you.  I wish you could have one last conversation too.

Please read the piece in full at the New York Times.

I have developed an intense Picmonkey addiction.  To the point where my dreams have text floating across opaque banners.  The thing I love most about Picmonkey: no one taught me how to use it.  It’s that intuitive.

I avoided it at first because it felt like one more piece of software to learn.  But then one day, I needed to add words to an image like so.

Then I realized that I could give myself a snowman lover.

And finally, it fulfills all my drooling blood needs without me needing to actually get blood pooling on my chin.

Apologies in advance for the slew of zombified photos coming down the pike.

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I am having a reading renaissance.  I was in a valley, taking weeks to finish a book.  Which meant I wasn’t reading many books overall when I looked at my year.  I couldn’t complete one of the numerous reading challenges floating around the Internet because I was too slow.

And then suddenly, I started reading a lot.  Finishing books in a few days.

Here is the odd thing: I didn’t gain more time or trade reading for something else.  I just started going through books at a faster pace.  Non-fiction, literary fiction, young adult novels.  In paper.  On the iPad.  It didn’t matter the content or the medium: I just started reading faster.

Thank you, eyes.

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And now the blogs…

But first, second helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week.  In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• “The Pail Sea” (Stupid Stork)
• “Boys Can’t Be Princesses: Thoughts on Gender Norms” (Stumbling Gracefully)
• “Some Reminders for Later in Life for When I Need Them” (Real Life & Thereafter)
• “It’s Okay to Give up on Your Dreams” (The Five Year Plan)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Persnickety Chickadee has a post that resonated with me about mild depression.  She tells an interesting fact about how stress affects serotonin levels that made sense.  The post moves in anything but aimless circles.  Contemplative circles, yes.  Aimless, no.

On a weekend that contains Mother’s Day, I want to highlight Bionic Mamas post about six months out from losing her mother.  She writes, “Six months in, everything about having a dead mother is still awful. In case you were wondering. Someone remarked today that there is no proper timeline, take as long as you need, but I think the truth might be that there is no timeline at all, that this just continues to suck, world without end.”  Holding her in my heart on a very hard weekend.

Lastly, The Road Less Travelled has a post about seeing her freshman year roommate on the street, but walking past without stopping.  The story of their friendship unfolds in the post, and it’s both familiar and unique at the same time.  I love friendship stories, so perhaps that’s what drew me to the post.

The roundup to the Roundup: I have a Picmonkey addiction.  Reading a lot.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between May 2nd and May 9th) and not the blog’s main url. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week?  Read the original open thread post here.

One last one.  Truman graduating from elementary school. (He’s like 11 in human years.)

After I finished The Husband’s Secret, Ana suggested Liane Moriarty’s book, What Alice Forgot.  I love Moriarty’s writing style, so I quickly jumped into the new book without looking at what it was about.

Answer: a lot of infertility and loss.

But I’m not ready to unpack that part of the book yet.

The general plot line is that Alice sustains a head injury during an exercise class and loses the last ten years of her life.  She comes to thinking that she’s newly married and pregnant only to discover that she’s getting divorced and is parenting three children.  The only people she remembers are the people who were in her life 10 years ago.

In one scene, her sister mentions that Alice baked her brother-in-law banana muffins, and Alice muses that she doesn’t know how to bake banana muffins and wonders what recipe she used.

I started panicking as I read this.  There is so much information that exists solely in my head, that has never been written down.  It’s like never backing up your computer; you could lose all your documents.  I need to back up my brain.

There’s my chocolate chip cookie recipe.  I make them for everyone.  People request these cookies.  What if I got bonked on the head and forgot how to make them and no one could ever eat them again?  What if they coveted them, sighing, “I wish we could eat Melissa’s cookies one last time…”  But they couldn’t.  Because of the head bonk.

But those are just cookies.  What about all the memories I’m holding for other people?  I have thousands of stories from the twins’ childhood, funny things they said or did, or touching moments that they’ll want to hear about down the road.  I am the memory keeper for large chunks of my marriage to Josh.  My job depends upon my memory.  Let’s say that I need to write a scene where someone is acting awkward at a party.  I go through my mental file cabinet and take out the figurative folder under “A” for “awkwardness at parties” where I’ve filed away moments that I noticed while once at a party and observed someone uncomfortably clinging to the wall.  And I use that as a template for creating my awkward character.

What would I do if I lost my memories?  And how does one back up a brain that is constantly in flux, being filled with information every single second of the day?

This book is freaking me out.

Thanks a lot, Liane Moriarty.*

* I’m only saying that semi-sarcastically.  I’m enjoying the book, and you’re a skillful, engaging writer.

It’s staring at you like a fish eye in the glass case at Whole Foods; dead, unseeing eyes, watching you walk past like a challenge.  It fills me with the same sort of dread as those red snapper corpses.  Mother’s Day is coming.

Image: Vintagedept via Flickr

This weekend is the dreaded/eagerly anticipated holiday of Mother’s Day in the US.  I love my mother very very much, and I need to apologize to her for messing up on the yearly Mother’s Day gift.  If I was a smarter woman, I would have taken care of the gifts last month when I had more time vs. waiting until the busiest time of year which coincides with a new book coming out.  So know that I love you dearly, even if you don’t get your plate until June.

As for being celebrated, well, my plan is to read The 5th Wave in one sitting and freak myself out.  Coffee will be brought to me vs. having to go down the stairs to fetch my own coffee.  I’ll spend the day with family, and for 24 hours, I won’t cook.  Mother’s Day will pass without too much fanfare; just the right mix of thank you and recognition and eye-rolling.

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This is how I think of Mother’s Day.

When we were little, we went to River Country in Disney.  It looked like a lake.  It felt like a lake.  But I was stunned when my parents told me that it was a man-made creation.

(This is because I saw a goldfish in the water, which made me think that just maybe there could be a shark in there as well.  I wasn’t very knowledgeable about where sharks lived beyond “water.”  So they needed to reassure me that (1) no sharks could exist in a lake and (2) this was a man-made lake, therefore, Disney would not stock said-amusement park with sharks.  Little did they know that years later, Disney would create Typhoon Lagoon, where you could SWIM WITH SHARKS!  So there… mum and dad.)

Finding out that a person dug a huge hole in the ground and filled it with water was a bit of a let-down.  This wasn’t like the Potomac River, a completely out-of-control, natural body of water snaking across the landscape.  This was a commercialized, unnatural water-filled hole.  It felt like a lake; but this wasn’t a real lake.

That’s how I feel about Mother’s Day.  When the ChickieNob makes me a card on a random Tuesday, leaving it on my pillow, telling me that I’m her favourite mother, it’s a spontaneous, unbridled act of love.  It’s the real lake.  When the ChickieNob makes me a card for Mother’s Day, it’s still an act of love.  But it’s now an obligation.  A checkmark on a to-do list.  It’s that ersatz body of water, imagineered by Disney for our pleasure.

Maybe I just prefer wild over processed emotions.  It’s all good; it’s all love.  But it’s the difference between someone saying, “I love you” and someone saying, “I love you” after you’ve said, “tell me you love me.”

As much as some people look forward to Mother’s Day, the holiday also stresses out a lot of people.  But if we recognize it for what it is — a person-made holiday (I guess like all holidays) — then it begs the question why we’re not molding it to fit us rather than trying to fit ourselves into the current shape of Mother’s Day.  We’re allowed to bend it.  Hallmark and Flowers.com don’t have the final say on how you spend Sunday.

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I was at an EMILY’s List event, and I started talking with this woman who told me about the Mama’s Day initiative by Strong Families.  It’s a wonderful idea, and I’d like to take it a step further.  Motherhood comes in all shapes, sizes, ages, and colours, so we also need to recognize invisible mothers this Sunday.

There are women who have been making parenting choices for their children as they attempt to bring them into the world, yet the world doesn’t recognize them as mothers.

There are women who have filled out tons of paperwork and have been judged by social workers, but because they don’t have a child yet, they aren’t considered mothers.

There are women who wanted to be mothers and took that journey emotionally, but due to circumstances could not reach physical parenthood.

There are women who were mothers, either secretly or visibly for weeks or months, but lost their children before birth.

There are women who were mothers and got to hold their child before they lost them forever, and those women are still mothers who carry their children inside their heart.

And then there are the invisible motherless.  Those people who no longer have their mother.

This Mother’s Day, rather than only looking to celebrate the obvious mothers, the ones that are clearly, visibly parenting, dig deep and use the day to also reach out to someone who is an invisible mother; not recognized by society as such but a type of mother nonetheless.  Reach out to the invisible motherless who may be struggling on a day that is meant to celebrate someone who is out of their life or dead.

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The apology section.

I wondered if it was intelligent to put an image of dead fish at the top of this post.  And maybe it repulsed you, but it’s also truthful.  Really, can you think of anything more honest and exposed than a glass case of dead fish?  Maybe we need a picture like that to wake us up, to take a good hard look at how we structure our holidays.

Maybe we need a reminder to look at the water in front of us and consider whether it’s natural or ersatz.  Because if it’s person-made, that means that we can build it and bend it to fit us.  I’m bending Mother’s Day.

* You may note that this post has no mention of Gwyneth Paltrow.  I noticed this to.  I realized recently — based on a multitude of articles on Jezebel — that the number one way to get people outside our community to read what you have to say is to mention Gwyneth Paltrow.  A cheap trick.  I’m sorry to use you like that, Gwyneth (oh, and Happy Mother’s Day if you celebrate it).  But here’s the thing: When I write here, I’m preaching to the choir; so many of us are invisible mothers or were invisible mothers.  You know I’m thinking about you this weekend.  I want people outside our community to think about invisible mothers too.

I’ve put back on 11 of the 30+ pounds I lost two years ago.  I stopped exercising and really thinking about how many calories I was consuming, and lookie there, it turns out that your body retains the excess.  I actually thought I had put on more weight than that, so the strange part was that I felt a sense of relief as I looked at the scale.  11 pounds?  That isn’t so bad, right?  I can take back off 11 pounds and fit in my favourite jeans again.

It feels as if I have two sets of conflicting habits.  On one hand, I have the ones that got me into this situation; the habits that pile all my calories late into the night and skive off exercising and eat the wrong things and too much of everything at that.  And then I have the habits that I’ve slipped back into this week.  The daily yoga or running in the morning, measuring portions, recording every morsel of food that passes over my lips on My Fitness Pal.  The two sets of habits each grab an arm and tug at me as if I’m the rope connecting them.

Right now, the healthier habits are winning just because I want to fit back into those jeans.

It’s almost summer; it feels like the right time to let things go.

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Beyond losing weight, we are trying to trim down the house.  Get it back to its fighting size in regards to clutter.

Every time we do this, it makes sense to get rid of more baby things, especially the ones that don’t hold sentimental value or are easily replaceable if our life changes in the future.  We have limited space, why are we holding onto things for a what if?

Especially things that make me cry every time I have to enter the storage room.

I told the twins over dinner that we were getting rid of things; old toys and clothing and books.  They were upset — not because of what getting rid of those things meant (at least, in my brain), but because they didn’t want to part with their old things.  We eased the idea by writing out a list of what we’d do with the money from selling those items; the fun places we could go by getting rid of these things.

That part is easy to do.  The preparing of objects is easy to do.  The only hard part is remembering the twins in each article of clothing; how upset they would get if paint got onto their sleeves.  Or the toys that they played with.  They pretended to be parents over the doll crib and swing, taking care of their boy-girl twin dolls.  The puzzles and the blocks and the fake cell phones.

Someone had the brilliant idea of photographing everything we gave away or sold, that way, we could always look back on the picture.  So that is what I am doing.  Maybe one day I will also be able to delete all the images, cleanly cut away the less important tangible objects from their childhood.  But right now, I need to be able to look back and see that once upon a time, these objects held meaning.  They were important to us.  They were emblems of how far we had come.  And sometimes it hurts to get rid of those less obvious trophies; especially from a game where the only form of winning is a life well lived.

What do you need to let go?