My Level of Awareness

My son is righteously pissed at me.  I had the temerity, the sheer unmitigated GALL, to go on a business trip without him.  On the same week that he started at daycare.  I am now, in his estimation, a Bad Mommy.

We didn’t really plan it that way.  But my husband’s part-time return to the working world just happened to coincide with a site visit to one of my animal labs.  The visit was unavoidable.  It’s part of my job.  However, the only economics Harry understands at this age is how much of his dinner he has to eat to get cookies afterward, and his grasp on that is a bit tenuous. 

Now, he understands I have to go to work each day, and that I come home every night.  He sends me off in the morning with sugars and bye-by waves.  He greets me at night with little spinning dances and happy smiles.  But, in HIS version of the social contract, I have reneged on a few parts of the deal.

1.  While I am gone, he gets free reign of the house, his toys and cookies.

2.  I come home, if not promptly at 6:30 pm, then shortly enough thereafter to give him his dinner, his bath and a game of tag, and a video or book. 

3.  I am there when he wakes up in the morning, to give him kisses, breakfast bars, bananas and milk.  Mostly kisses.

4.  I am NOT, under ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, to leave him with a roomful of strange children who share toys (SHARE? TOYS? BLASPHEMY, I TELL YOU!) and run off for a fun-filled three days of horse pee and paperwork.  Just what kind of mother are you anyway?

Therefore, with our mother-son compact broken irrevocably on my part, he is under no obligation whatsoever to greet me with kisses, dances, or, for that matter, even civility.  “How could you?” stares, head turning, and flat-out tantrums are the only just punishment for oathbreakers.  I am a pariah.  Just hand out the cookies and go sit in your chair, if-you-please.

The prodigal mother has returned, and nobody is throwing any parties.

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If you set your coffee cup down to steady a horse, never set it lower than the level of the horse’s back.

They will pee in it.

Trust me on this one.

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…was graciously supplied by Sheila, who also was nice enough to reiterate the rules and the history of the quote challenge at her site, so I will not repeat them here.  I almost opted out of the challenge this week.  First, I have been on vacation - since I sit on a computer all day at work, vacations generally mean I do not look at a computer for the duration.  Second, I have been in the middle of acephalgic migraines, and, among other annoying side effects, they tend to make me feel stupid and slow.  So, if this response is lacking my usual scintillating wit (and are in violation of most rules of educated grammar) - blame the brain for taking a longer vacation than I intended.  Chances are, you aren’t going to notice the difference, and the main effect of the migraines is a breakdown in my own powers of self-deception. 

 “If stories come to you, care for them. And learn to give them away where they are needed. Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive.”
~Barry Lopez, Crow and Weasel

When I think on this, I think of stories, not in the more conventional way, not in their ability to entertain, or even in their ability to teach or to inform.  I think of stories in a more visceral, basic way.  Stories are the stuff of our lives, they are the mechanism by which we define ourselves and order our place in the universe.  Our personal history is our story - as series of vignettes we relive in the telling to make sense of who we are.  We connect these slices of our life in a narrative that grows with the telling. 

When we tell our stories, we are, in essence, proclaiming our existence.  We are saying “I am, I have been, I have a place”.  Our stories become more true with remembrance as time passes, not less.  Perhaps the factual nature of the story is less reflective of objective events, but as we see our stories with the filter of time, and with our growing self-identity, they become truer representatives of the person we have become.  The stories shape us, and we shape the stories, in an endless cycle of continuity from birth to the grave.

Food and water may keep alive the flesh of our body, but our stories form the essence of who we are as the person inhabiting that flesh.  They give us our very identity, our dignity, our history as a unique ONE.  Cherish your own story.  Respect and honor those of others.  They are the birthright of humanity.

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I actually love Thanksgiving.  Not really for the food part, but for the blessings part.  I know it sounds horribly corny, but I do much more reflection over the past year of my life on Thanksgiving than on New Year’s Eve.  The New Year is for looking forward.  Thanksgiving is for looking back.

Among the usual things I am grateful for this year (my husband (as always, on the top of the list), family, and friends), I am grateful for certain things that the events of the last year have taught me never to take for granted.

The greatest of my blessings is a given:

My son really is a miracle gift from God.  Daily he teaches me to take joy in simple pleasures, to slow down and smell the flowers (or squish the cookies, they taste the same after all the fun, don’t they?).  No matter how dismally every other aspect of my life is going, waking up to see one more glimpse of the person he is becoming has been worth the trip through life.  I have heard people tell of the sacrifices they have made for their children.  Me?  I haven’t noticed.  I am having too much fun.  Exactly one year ago, I was taking my son to my hometown to have him baptized in the same little church I was baptized in.  I was grateful to be able to make the trip, and that my pastor, in poor health, could perform this last ministry to my family before he retired.

I am grateful to have a home.  One year ago today, I was living in a tiny one-bedroom, fully furnished apartment with my rather large husband, a new baby, and a Jack Russell Terrier.  Nothing in it was my own.   I ate on somebody else’s dishes, slept on somebody else’s sheets, used someone else’s towels, and answered someone else’s phone.  And yet, last year at Thanksgiving, I was giving thanks that I was no longer living crammed in a friend’s guest room with the husband, baby and dog, or, God forbid, living in the room at the Motel 6 where I spent my 41st Birthday. 

I am grateful to have my own clothes, and the money to put food on my table.  This time last year, as we traveled to my hometown, we still did not know if our insurance would cover all of our losses.  We did not know if would be able to purchase a home we could afford to replace the one we had lost, now that we had on only one income.   We did not know if we could sell the remains of our property in Louisiana for enough to get out from under the mortgage on the house that we could no longer inhabit.  But we were grateful that, unlike so many of our neighbors, we were insured and we would likely be saved from financial ruin.  We were grateful that one of our jobs survived and we would not be jobless, as well as homeless.  We were grateful to have a new future we could look forward to.

I am grateful for human generosity, both of the hand and of the spirit.  Without good friends and benevolent strangers to fill in the gaps, we never would have made it.  Never.

I am grateful for the times I have spent with my family, who gathered around us one year ago, less than ten miles from where I was born, and told embarrassing stories of our childhood, and who welcomed my in-laws with open arms, laughter, and tables laden with food.  I will miss their presence this year, as I spend my holiday with my friends, my “family of addition” as we make new memories and trade stories less familiar.

I am grateful the oceans have spared us this year from the storms of last year, that the city I love has been granted one more reprieve to recover.  I am grateful that some who have left have found their way home again, and those who cannot have found shelter far away from the wind and the tide.

I am grateful for the beauty and vibrant color of autumn leaves and the smell of wood fires that I have always associated with fall, and which I have missed during my years on the Gulf Coast.  I am grateful that the great diaspora gave me at least that comfort.

And, perhaps most, I am grateful to my God, for hearing the prayers of a new mother, afraid and with an uncertain future, and holding me in the palm of his hand until the storm, and all its aftermath, had passed.  Thank you for answering faith with infinite blessings.

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If I have only one piece of personal wisdom that I have gleaned over the years, it is this - sometimes, it is far, far harder to walk away than it is to stay and fight.  And sometimes walking away is the sanest choice to make.

I am not a person who walks away easily.  My mother, the astrology afficianado, tells me it is because I am an Aries Rising.  These are people who stay in a struggle long after they stopped remembering what exactly it was that they were fighting for.  That’s what those big, thick horns are for - to keep you from flattening your forehead when you bash it against that wall repeatedly.

Me?  I think it’s because I am a redhead.  Goes with the hair.

My life is littered with examples of my failure to follow my own advice.  I stayed in my first serious, and abusive, relationship far beyond the point where I could even be pitied.  I stayed in my first marriage for ten years, likely two years beyond the point where it could be considered a marriage in any true sense of the term.  Only in the last five years of my life have I been able to shrug and walk away from an argument when it is patently obvious that it had ceased to be anything winnable, or even subject to compromise.

Well, I have since learned to cut my losses.  And this latest has been the unkindest cut of all.  Today, I walked away from our dream of another child. 

Because I put off the whole having-a-kid business until over 37, we had a struggle to have Harry.  Two years with no birth control, followed by six months of really trying gave no results, until at last, at the ripe old age of 39, I went to an OB, who sent me (without passing “Go”, and on an emergency consult), to a reproductive endocrinologist.  After four months of tedious, expensive, and often unpronounceable tests, and having my blood drawn so often I seriously considered inserting a spigot in my elbow, the news was grim.  I had a less than 5% chance of having my own children even with medical intervention.  The RE recommended going straight to using an egg donor (again, without passing “Go”).  I went home and cried for three days. 

When the swelling in my eyes went down, and I could speak without my voice wavering, I called the doctor back and I told her I wanted to try three rounds of IUI (I will spare you the details, go look it up) with follicle-stimulating drugs and my very own eggs, thank you.  My logic being that in three months, my chances with donor eggs would be exactly the same.  I wanted to keep fighting.  I wanted my chance.  In our very first month, exactly one week after my 40th birthday, we conceived Harry.  My doctor couldn’t believe it.  Nine months later, our little miracle gift from God arrived with his Daddy’s brown eyes and sense of humor, and his mother’s red hair and temper.  Poor kid.  I will warn him later.

We had never intended on stopping our family there.  Two was always the number - nice, even, companionable.  I am of the philosophy that when the number of kids outstrips the number of parental units, you are borrowing trouble, but two seems just right.  However, spacing these two was proving to be a bit problematic.   Because I developed pre-eclampsia in the final weeks of my pregnancy with Harry (again, I will spare you the details, google it), my OB didn’t want me even thinking of another pregnancy until after Harry was a year old and my liver was happy again.  But I was 41 and those ovaries were on the fast-track to menopause.  We didn’t bother attempting on our own what we knew took a professional to do.  We went straight to the RE clinic shortly after Harry’s first birthday.

Despite my dismal numbers, past performance breeds hopefulness, even in trained professionals.  My new doctors, two states away from the RE that gave me Harry, sounded confident after looking over my charts and my bloodwork.  My intitial response to the drugs was surprisingly good, and despite delays from a cervical cancer scare that ended in a blessedly negative culposcopy (more google), we got two good rounds of IUI that we had every reason to hope for success.  With Harry to alleviate the pressure the fear of childlessness places on you, we were more relaxed than in 2004, and we set ourselves a line we would not cross.  Three IUI’s.  Three rounds of uninsured drugs.  $6000.   We could not justify wagering Harry’s future college education against a brother that would borrow his clothes and steal his halloween candy.

The first two rounds ended uneventfully and unfruitfully.  Not a complete shock - even in a perfectly healthy, 20-year-old, chances are only 20%-25% per round.  We staked our hopes on the last round, told the RE to up the drugs, and went for broke.

I have managed, at 42, to have the skin of a 30 year old and the attitude of a 25 year old.  But my ovaries know I am faking it.  They went from hopefully responsive to full-stop protest, even after two full dose increases on the follitropins (Google is your friend, really).  Our job is done here, folks.  Elvis has left the building.  Out with a whimper, not a bang.  After a honest conversation with our RE, we simply decided there is no point in throwing good money after bad, and we are stopping the treatments and not pursuing another IUI.  “Three’s a charm” just turned into “Two and Oh…”.  The fighter in my heart was screaming “BRING IT ON! MORE DRUGS! ONE MORE SHOT!”, and for once, the sane, rational adult voice in my head stepped in and said gently “Enough.  Time to stop.  Time to walk away.”

I told myself back in June that, if the worst happened, I would see it as chance to get on with the next phase of my life.  No more counting days by my three-ultrasounds a month.  No more needle marks in my belly.  Don’t need to worry about gaining back the 14 pounds I have lost on my diet.  No more birth control (now there’s added value for you).  I can plan long-term now.  I can get rid of those outgrown baby clothes and toys that I carefully stored in hopeful self-deception and make more room in the garage.  Those nursing bras can be finally thrown away in recognition that my already baby-ravaged breasts are going to get a break.  A permanent one.

Funny how I don’t feel so liberated.

Instead I will go home, and I will hug my one baby-turned-toddler in my lap and watch yet another round of “Elmo’s Favorites” without one complaint.  I will pull out those tiny baby creepers that he wore on his first day as as separate, individual, human being, and I put them to my face and inhale the still-sweet smell clinging to them.  And will I put them back in the box, back in the tiny crawlspace beside Harry’s room.  I will pass them on some day.  Some other time. 

Not today.

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Sorry to wait so long to respond to my own quote.  My reticence to throw in my own “quote post” is in part due to my desire to see how other people interpreted Iron Maggie’s words first.  But a chunk of the delay just comes from having other things on my mind lately.  More on that later, but suffice to say that it has left me struggling to slip this one in under the wire, while simultaneously juggling the joy of Harry-the-wonder-toddler trashing my office and trying to renegotiate an analytical chemistry contract with a pissed-off chemist.  Yep.  I’m a multitasker.

 Being powerful is like being a lady; if you have to tell people you are,
you aren’t.   ~ Margaret Thatcher

When I picked the quote what was on my mind was namedropping.  Specifically, SCA namedropping.  I had a person that popped to mind when I first saw it, but I don’t think there’s a message going out to anyone in particular.  Every one of us knows that person who has to fit their association with a well-known personage into every other sentence of a conversation, when they are not listing their own good attributes and touting martyrdom.  Cliches are cliches for a reason.

Now, I am not going to refer to the concept of power in the SCA as imaginary. If by power, we mean the ability to influence people and change their behavior, no “power” is really imaginary, is it?

But we are talking about power in an organization whose basis is pretty escapist in nature and limited in scope.  We can’t stop war in the Middle East, change the price of gas, or even get first in line for a coveted TMX Elmo.  Okay, well, I have gotten that last bit based on SCA contacts, but it’s a long story.  Sorry, toddler-mommyhood took over my brain priorities there for a moment. 

So, we have a organization where perceived power is fairly limited to the internal structure, and an organization that is largely based on imaginary constructs.  Now, you add the once-removed referent power exhibited in NAME DROPPING, for crying out loud.  This is basically, an enhancement of one’s perceived influence by who they associate with (and I have seen the concept of “association” used pretty damned loosely).  You can see where this is leading.  It has a sad humor not far off of the infamous Reno 911 “Boots of Escaping” video.

So every time I hear “I was just chatting with Duke So-and-so the other day” noticeably dropped into a casual conversation, I have to fight the urge to either drop giggling to the floor or (more dignified, but not nearly as sastifying) just roll my eyes.  Sometimes it’s because one of the name-droppees has gotten blue-blind paralytic drunk and passed out in my catbox.  It’s hard to get impressed by an association with somebody you have seen with drool and kitty litter covering one side of their face.  There you go, that’s MY kind of name dropping.  If it’s not embarrassing and image debunking, what good purpose can it possibly serve?  If I ever start feeling my own ego, I always have Stephan behind me to tell the story of me coming out of the shower, half naked and oblivious, calling for court business and a towel simultaneously.  What can I say - I get distracted easily. 

But, the name-dropping itself is only a symptom of something sadder - the need, if not to BE somebody, then to at least touch shoulders with somebody who is somebody.  People who are comfortable with who they are, don’t feel the need to advertise it quite so insistently.  People who are content with their accomplishments don’t need to run around staking their claim on every remote aspect of them.  It’s called self-contentment and self-awareness.  And it isn’t nearly as smug as it sounds. 

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Today, two young boys lost their mother.  And their father lost the love of his life.  She was 29 years old.  She was healthy and vibrant and alive three weeks before.  There wasn’t time for her to say goodbye.

I know this woman only through the words of her husband, who shared his story of love and loss openly.  In his sorrow, he gave us a gift by showing us a glimpse of a love that transcends crisis, that took doubt and human frailty and turned it into something beautiful.  He had the courage to share his pain.  And he reminded us how very fragile our passage through this life can be.

There are no words of comfort I can offer to ease his pain or to fill the hole left in his heart.  There is nothing that will compensate her sons for the loss of her love and her wisdom as they find their way through the paths of childhood. The only thing useful I can do is to hold even closer those I hold precious, and take away the message never to wait to say the things we want, we need, to say to the people we love.

To my family - However dysfunctional our interactions seem at times, I would not be who I am without the foundation I was given.  We never had much, but we had everything we needed.  I learned everything about hard work and integrity and self-respect that has allowed me to navigate this insane world, and in today’s modern times, that’s saying a lot.  I love everyone of you, even though the distance that separates us keeps us from sharing the table often enough. 

To my friends - I consider myself truly blessed by the people that have seen past my socially incompetent, rigid, linear-thinking, harsh-wit outside and managed to not only tolerate me, but even seem to like my company.  I have debts to many of you that I will live my lifetime unable to repay.  You have seen me through the hardest times of my life, and made sure that at no point during them did I feel abandoned or alone.  Thank you for the laughter, the tears, the hugs, the campfire stories, and the drunken songs.  Thank you for holding my hand, for watching my son, for sheltering my head in a storm.  Thanks for the hard work, the sacrifice, the beatings when I needed it, and the love when I didn’t deserve it.  Believe me, it is returned 110%.

To my husband - I feel I have loved you for an eternity.  Somedays I still can’t believe that somebody so wonderful loves me back.  Sometimes, I look across the field to find you, and you still take my breath away.  I have never known another soul so beautiful or another heart so full.  You are the half of me that has given me my whole life, and there isn’t enough love in the universe to fill the hole you would make if I lost you.  MTAMTE baby, Forever and ever.

To my son - it is a parent’s curse to know that their children will never fully understand how completely they are loved, until they have children of their own.  Harry - I never knew the meaning of unconditional love until I saw your sweet face and realized I would die to protect you.   I never tire of hearing your tiny sing-songing voice in the morning, and seeing your little spinning dance when you greet me at the door.  If I could hold a moment in time, I would freeze a minute of your innocent babyhood, so I could take it out and re-experience it forever.  My love for you is like a pressure in my chest that expands until the pain and the joy of it fills my eyes and I can barely breathe because there is no room for my lungs to expand around the feeling.  Though my arms cannot reach forward to embrace the entirety of your life, my soul will never leave you.  “Mommy loves you” does not even begin to describe the depth of my emotion.  You are a part of my very being, and I pray every morning that I am granted one more day to see the wonder that you will become, and I thank God for sending me my little miracle.  Always remember that I am there.

Never take for granted each day that you are given.  Seize it with both hands and squeeze every drop of life out of it.  Dance just as fast as you can.

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Did you ever look at your family and seriously wonder if gypsies left you at the doorstep?

Sigh.

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It’s time to touch back to why I started blogging. 

As I have mentioned multiple times, blogging for me is a form of cheap therapy.  I had this discussion with one of my friends recently who said that she just didn’t “get” the whole blogging thing.  She didn’t understand the point.  When I told them it was just a way for me to get things off my chest, test out ideas, or just plain talk with my friends, she said, “Well, I do that every day over my kitchen table…”

Well, yeah.

I used to do that, too. 

Back when I lived close enough to my friends that they could drop by for a cup of coffee, grill some sausages and watch some movies. 

Even though I had a blog pre-Katrina (pre-K and post-K from now on, because I can’t even stand writing the name or hearing it in my head anymore), I didn’t really keep it on a particularly regular basis.  I started it originally as a kind of pregnancy-diary, but my main pregnancy side effect was extreme (and I mean extreme) fatigue, so there was an inherent problem with keeping it updated.  It was not unheard of for me to be asleep by 8 o’clock at night.

It was only post-K that I took to blogging like a duck to water.  And yes, I am sure that the feeling of displacement had a lot to do with that. 

Probably 85% of the time, I think we took the whole episode in our lives relatively well.  The remaining 15% of the time, I don’t feel okay with it AT ALL.  One of the most psychologically difficult things about the whole post-K experience, is the guilt that results from cutting yourself one bit of slack on the self-pity front.  I have talked to others about this, and I think it is a universal thing.   The whole thing was so incredibly huge that, no matter how bad off you were, no matter how much you lost, somebody else was ten times worse off than you were.   There is no feeling that you can legitimately grieve over your losses.  I tell myself that I should be allowed, but that little nagging voice in my head pipes up every time I try to have a pity-party and tells me “Quityerbitchin’ - you have a job, a house, and everyone you love survived, what’s your PROBLEM?”

I would like to say that if I found the bitch with the little voice I would kill her, but fundamentally, I realize that is the one thing that kept me going forward without wavering through the worst of the first months post-K; those numbing months spent on the road going from one city to the next when the question “what’s your zip code” asked by an unsuspecting store clerk got met with a vacant stare.

But right now, I am in 15% mode.  Right now, I am not okay with it.

Likely there are a lot of reasons why now, fourteen months later, I am getting the funk.  First of all, my new job, which is the best-paying of my career, is also the most challenging.  It is challenging in a way I have not been trained to handle.  The skill-set required is not scientific or technical, it’s administrative. Many of you know my record with tact and diplomacy.  I come by my red hair honestly.  I am in unfamiliar waters and having to learn a whole new set of rules regarding the expectations of my job.   This wasn’t a planned career change.  It’s pretty much the only option I had at the time, and I felt damned lucky that it landed in my lap.

Second, Kris is not finding work up here.  It’s not for a lack of trying, but a combination of factors is making it a problem.  Tulane paid him a salary that places him at the top of the local market for his type of work.  And the market here for his type of work is slim - there are lots of programming positions, but the pickings are more slender for user analysts.  We can survive on my salary, but it doesn’t leave a lot of room for extras.  And Kris doesn’t get a lot of adult interaction or the opportunity to make friends.  However, considering that we lost our nanny when the evacuation was permanent, we felt damned lucky at the time to be able to keep Kris home with Harry in unfamiliar territory.

Third, is that we just don’t own anything over a year old.  There is still this persistent feeling that something came along and wiped out your past and reset the clock to August 29, 2005.  The memories are there, but nothing tangible really survives that connects us to our pre-K life - the life we built together in the home we built together, with the family we built together.  We have a very nice house, but it really isn’t OUR house.  It’s a house that we decorated, and really haven’t been able to do much more than get furniture in it.  It looks both more like “us” and less like we live in it at the same time.  More of our taste, but less of our imprint.  The same goes for our clothes.  It’s a bit surreal.  But we were insured and we voluntarily chose that once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to trade in all of our stuff to be debt-free (aside from one mortgage and one car payment).  We considered ourselves lucky to come out of the whole affair about as financially stable, if not more so, than we went in.

But the biggest problem is the lingering feeling of social displacement.  As nice as the folks are up here, these people are not OUR people.  We are not used to having to make proactive social contact.  We are not used to “inviting” people over.  The one, single, biggest way that we “fit” with the Louisiana culture, the thing we feel the loss of most acutely, is the social “fluidity” of life in New Orleans.  People floated in and out of our house like extended family.  My refrigerator was their refrigerator.  My table was their table.  We had so many keys distributed to our house, we literally forgot who had them.  Here, the feeling of isolation is a low-level persistant ache.  But, even though we had to leave our Louisiana “family”, we considered ourselves lucky that everyone survived intact.  We also considered ourselves lucky that we ended up in a place that was not entirely unfamiliar, with at least a few phone numbers we could call in an emergency. 

Call me ungrateful.  Call me a whiner.  I do not regret my choices, but I am not sure I can take anymore luck.

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As the self-appointed President of the GAMBLE steering committee, I am abashed.  ABASHED, I tell you.  Y’all were so prompt in getting your reviews of Star in and I am late in oh-so-many ways…

1. My last two reviews were shamefully late
2. I still have not updated the reviews links on the main GAMBLE page.
3. And, WORST OF ALL, I have not introduced this month’s book and half the month is gone.

My only defense, is, well, what can you expect from unpaid labor, really?  Occasionally I do have to concentrate on my payin’ gig.  And the payin’ gig has been a rather demanding taskmistress lately.

So, I can’t really rectifiy #1.

I will work over the next week on #2.

And #3 I will remediate right this second.  I present to you, November’s GAMBLE read - Sabine’s infamous Penis book:

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