Eight More

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I am bone tired.

Not just because my husband and I enjoyed a crazy, whirlwind weekend- our first ever away from the kids.

Not just because we missed our flight home and stayed up all night, flying standby and finally coming back to our home in time for our children to rise and begin their day. Not just because today is a day to them like any other, and they don't understand or care that I'm sleep deprived and suffering the repercussions of twelve hours of airport food and wharf fudge.

I am bone tired because I made a conscious choice while I was on vacation- my first vacation since my honeymoon.

I decided to ignore the news.

This was particularly difficult, as I was vacationing in beautiful Santa Barbara, California. Where this weekend's tragedy occurred.

I say "this weekend's tragedy" to clarify, because I am so damn tired I'm afraid I might confuse myself. Because roughly twice a month for what feels like as long as I can remember, there's been something else like it. Some other person who took their guns to town, despite Johnny Cash's old advice, and slaughtered human beings.

I also say "this weekend's tragedy" because if I were only to say, "A confused, angry man decided to take his rage out on women he saw as having wronged him, and took lives in his fury," I could be talking about the three women who are murdered by their husbands or boyfriends or exes every single day.

So "this weekend's tragedy" it is.

Seven people killed. A gigantic tome of a manifesto by the murderer, who took his own life. A dozen more injured.

Why? Because he believed those women owed him something. Sex, attention, affection, something. He believed those women wronged him just by not seeing in him what he saw in himself- that he deserved them. That he had somehow already won them. That they were not people, but the objects of his desire, and as such he already owned them.

That's what he saw. And so instead of seeking therapy, instead of moving to a country where women legally aren't people with their own rights and own stories and own lives to run as they choose, he targeted and killed them.

He put videos on the internet of himself ranting, blaming his victims for imagined crimes against his fragile ego. It's the same rant you can find in court testimonies in domestic violence cases across the country. It's the same narrative you see in movie after movie, in book after book. "I was there for her, she owed me. She lied to me when she smiled and didn't put out. She led me on. She deserved what she got."

And I am exhausted.

I'm exhausted because #YesAllWomen is trending on twitter, it's trending everywhere, and I can't look away. I'm not on vacation anymore. I can't look at my husband and say, "It's our second honeymoon- it's a special trip- I'm not thinking of sadness or rage or any of it. Let's get in the hot tub and drink margaritas while the sun sets over the ocean." I can't do that, because I can't take my eyes away.

I'm tired of saying over and over again "I'm a feminist" and having people react as though I walked into bar mitzvah with a "Jews for Jesus" t-shirt. I'm tired of saying over and over again that I advocate for victims of sexual assault, but it's not because I'm a survivor. Or not only because.

I'm tired of having to use phrases like, "I'm married," to get men to leave me alone. I'm tired of having to use phrases like, "I'm a rape survivor" to get airport security to stop leering and digital images of my artificially nude body.

I'm tired of drafting conversations in my head I won't need to have for years, to tell my daughters how much I love them but that they need to protect themselves, because even though it's not their job to avoid being raped they will be blamed if they are raped. Not by me, I'll tell them. But it will happen. And I can't stop it.

I'm tired of knowing that I alone can't stop it.

I'm tired of signs and ads and facebook memes reminding people that every woman is somebody's daughter, or wife, or mother, or sister... as though she's not her own person regardless.

I'm tired of sitting in front of my computer, watching picture after picture of victim and villain appear on my screen, and feel the need to make excuses for everyone. To apologize for everyone. To apologize to everyone.

I'm tired of feeling responsible, responsible for my own victimization, and responsible for the fact that it continues.

I'm tired of tragedies. But when they come so fast and so often, it's hard to remember they're tragedies. It's hard not to simply see them as life. As life in a country where women are technically given equal rights, even if our lawmakers refuse to extend them to pay, workplace protections, or healthcare. It's easy to say, "Oh dear, another mass shooting, another murder spree, another bunch of anonymous victims- dead and gone. Somebody should do something to make it stop. Too bad there's nothing to be done."

There's always something to be done.

I'm sorry. I'm sorry I buried my head in the sand and allowed myself the luxury of a weekend. I'm sorry I intentionally closed my eyes and ears to the news happening literally all around me, and drank icy beverages and wandered the beach and gazed at the mountains. I'm sorry.

And I'm pissed as hell that I have to be sorry for that. Because I deserve a few days of happiness and relaxation, don't I?

And I'm miserable at feeling so selfish and self entitled that I could actually dismiss the tragedy of eight families, shrug them off and tell myself I'd feel their pain later.

That's what we all do, all the time. We all say we're too busy. We've got important things to do that don't involve mourning.

Mourning is never on the agenda.

So I'm tired. And I know you're tired, too.

But that's just too bad. Because there is no such thing as being too tired for empathy.

There is only the selfishness in all of us that doesn't want to feel it, because we have more important things to feel.

There is nothing more important to feel than empathy. And I'm ashamed of myself for forgetting that, even for a weekend.

I'm so sorry.

And I'm tired of it.

The Meaning of Life

M turned 31 three days ago. Happy Birthday, my love.

What do you do when your doctor tells you you're going to die? I asked my husband this question, once.

"Well, I don't really know. He never told me."

And that's true, because my husband made it very clear he didn't want to hear those words. He was twenty four, we'd been engaged for six days, and he had just started coming out of the sedated haze of his brain surgery.

I knew, of course. While M lay in recovery, slowly regaining consciousness under the close supervision of a team of nurses and anesthesiologists, I was sitting with his surgeon in a tiny consultation room, listening to phrases like, "stage four multiform glioma," "eighteen months," and, "You don't often see people five or ten years out."

But M didn't want to know, so I didn't tell him. Instead, I planned our wedding.

Because what would you do if you knew you were supposed to die, and soon? You would do whatever you had wanted to do, but might have been too frightened to. You would live life as though whatever was most important to you was your top priority. And marrying me, well, that was his top priority.

Besides, we were in love with each other. Getting married is what you do when you're in love.

The happiest day of our lives.

And something miraculous happened. He didn't die. Instead, the experimental trial his doctor has put him in worked. He didn't get better at first, exactly, but he didn't get worse. And nobody knew what that meant.

So eighteen months became a giant question mark, and we were married, and we did what married people do. We talked about whether or not we wanted to have kids.

I had always known I'd wanted to be a mom. There was never any doubt in my mind. M had always known he wanted to be a dad, it was a sure thing. But... should we?

Every young person with cancer has been through this. Recovery isn't black and white. Recovery is forever. Every year that you live, the likelihood that the cancer is coming back is diminished, but not gone. Never gone. It's something that you'll have on your radar for the rest of your life, and it never ends.

Remission feels inevitable. You don't let it run your life, but every time something feels even the slightest bit off, you wonder... is this it?

So when you're twenty five and in love, newly married, should you have kids?

M and I decided to. We decided that if you don't know how long you have, why waste time not doing the things that you know will give you the most joy? We decided to get pregnant immediately, because not knowing how long he had didn't mean he had no time at all. If he had ten years, he would have ten years with children who could grow up knowing him, loving him, and understanding him. If he died in twenty years, he would get to coach softball and chaperone middle school dances and go on college visits. If he died in five years, at least he would have experienced the happiness of holding his children in his arms while they slept.

During M's last round of chemotherapy, I got pregnant.

And here we are, four and a half years later, three children on and he's still with us.

Three spectacular children.

We're not alone in our choice. We have known many young people to fight cancer, and beat it. And we have also known those who lost.

I've watched my friend holding his infant daughter after his wife succumbed to the cancer that infiltrated her bones during her pregnancy. It rocked my soul, left me shattered and weeping, imagining what was and what could be. I stared at her photograph, with her husband and daughter by her bedside, her eyes filled with longing and love as she gazed at the child who would never know her.

There is no right answer. There is no wrong answer. There is only knowing what will make you happy. What will give your life meaning.

For us, it was parenthood. It isn't for everyone.

And every year that passes is another gift, another promise. We try never to take them for granted.

We would all do well to remember that.

Dual Religion Reality Check

There are internet cats for everything.

When M and I were first engaged, I was talking to my sister about our plans to have children. "Would they be Jewish?" she asked me.

"Well, I'm Jewish," I hedged.
"Yeah, fine. But will they be raised Jewish?"
"They'll be raised both."
"Do you really think that's going to work?"
"What do you mean?"
"I mean- can they really be Jewish if they're raised half Christian?"
"Well, they can make a choice when they're old enough. If they want to."
"But you'll want them to."
"Probably."
"And if they're raised with a Christmas tree, if they're raised learning that Jesus is the messiah, can they ever really be Jewish?
"I don't know."

And I didn't know. And M and I had a lot of long talks about religion, about what parts of it were important to us, and why. I put my foot down on Hebrew school. I told M, I don't always believe in God, I don't always know that I believe in God, and I am certain that I don't believe in God the way he's described by the majority of religious people, but I believe in my culture.

And I tried, vainly, to explain that Judaism isn't really a religion. Or isn't only a religion. That it's a community and a heritage and a birthright. That being Jewish doesn't mean speaking Hebrew or making aliyah, but that those things are important because they help Jews connect to each other.

And M was perplexed and exasperated, but understanding.

And then we had kids, and now they go to Hebrew school, and things are a little different. They're different because our children play Shabbat, light their little wooden candles and mumble their Hebrew prayers, and sing silly songs about challah on the sabbath.




And M feels that this has nothing to do with his own culture, his own heritage.

At first, he tried to tell himself that Judaism is the precursor to Christianity, and therefore anything that Jews did was in some way related to what Christians do. He has quickly learned how incorrect that assumption was.

Shortly after Channukah, we had a conversation that seemed eerily familiar to me. The kids were all sleeping in the back of the car, and M and I had started talking about his desire for the girls to go to Sunday school. He said he wanted them to go, but he didn't know why.

"Is it because the girls go to Hebrew school?"
"Yes, sort of."
"They can do both."
"That's not what I want. It's just... hard, to feel like there's something important in their lives, and in your life, that I don't have any connection to."
"Yes, you do."
"No, I don't. For you, it's a culture. It's your identity- and I don't have anything like that. I'm just... sort of boring. I don't have any traditions. I don't have any culture."
"You're not culture-less. You're American."
"Gee, thanks for that."
"Really. You can't know what it's like to grow up Jewish, because you've never been part of a minority. You're a white, Christian, American male. Your culture is THE culture. You don't know what it's like to feel like an outsider in your own community. No matter how many Jewish people I knew, every time Nickelodeon played a Christmas special, I felt weird and different. Every time the teachers handed out candy canes, every time I went to a friend's house and they had Christmas lights or a Christmas tree, every time Christmas songs came over the radio, every time they put up a Christmas tree downtown, I felt like I didn't belong. Like I wasn't welcome. You might not have any sort of cultural identity that you SEE, but I see it. And because of that, your kids will never feel as alien as I did. And maybe that will make them less Jewish. Maybe part of being Jewish is cultivating that feeling that you're not the same as everyone else. It's the whole "chosen people" business. But it sucks feeling like you don't belong in your home.
"Your kids are going to grow up with a Christmas tree, with a dad who watches claymation specials or whatever it is you do, with a sense that the phrase 'Merry Christmas' isn't actually a subtle way to say 'Fuck you if you don't celebrate Christmas.'"
"That's kind of harsh..."
"Yeah, but it can feel that way. More and more it feels that way."
"I'm sorry."
"I don't want to make you feel bad, I want to make you feel better. I might be giving our kids a sense of cultural identity that you don't have, but you can give them something that I never had, and that's feeling safe and welcome in their own country. I can never give them that. I can never make them feel that way."

Then we carried our three sleeping children up to bed.

Lighting candles

The thing is, neither M nor I is particularly religious, but we're both fairly spiritual people. And the problem with religion in general is that it's divisive.

Most Jewish kids in the United States are familiar with a short conversation. It starts with the Jewish kid doing/saying/having something foreign to the other, and the other asking why. The Jewish kid answers, "Because I'm Jewish," and the other kid says something like, "Oh, I guess that you're going to Hell, huh?" because that's what they've been taught- that without belief in Jesus you go to Hell.

This year, I googled "Channukah Cookies" and found a site completely dedicated to trashing Jews who were trying to "cash in" on the "Christmas tradition" of making cookies. This isn't an isolated incident. This is what it's like to be Jewish in America. This is what it's always been like to be Jewish- to always be a minority.

Jews are all about history. We can trace our family tree back to which son of Jacob we were descended from. We can trace our direct lineages back hundreds of years. Our shared history and shared culture is what is important to us.

We know that the Passion Play was a tool to rile up mobs to attack Jews hundreds of years ago. That's history, but when the news is covering the local churches' performances, it still makes me worry that my Catholic neighbors are getting ready to enact some sort of punishment against me. Because I'm Jewish, and the lesson that used to be taught about the Passion is that all Jews are responsible for Christ's crucifixion.

M will never know what that feels like, but our kids will.

Every time I see a Confederate flag, I think about the people attacked by White Supremacists, and I worry for my children.

I don't know if M has ever felt that fear from those symbols.

Right now, my children are watching Lambchop's Passover special. Shari and Dom DeLouise are singing about the items that go on the seder plate, and my kids are playing with their very strange baby Moses story book doll.

Here's the thing- around Christmas, there are HUNDREDS of movies to choose from about the holiday. And another three or four come out every year in movie theaters. 

Every year M can take his children to go look at Christmas light displays at the zoo, and harbor no resentment that his tax dollars are paying for something that is fundamentally denied to a minority- a minority he isn't a part of.

M doesn't feel that he has a culture to share with his children, but he does. It's a culture of inclusivity, despite my own exclusion.

So I have no idea if my kids can really be Jewish if they've grown up being included. Being part of the Christian mass of the American public. Trimming their Christmas trees, going on Easter Egg hunts, being told by their parents that there is such a thing as Santa Claus, having Santa Claus play any kind of role in the story of their childhood. They'll grow up ingesting the constant messages about Christ and Christianity and especially Christmas that America is utterly saturated with.

Visit from Santa

Most Americans don't see it. They don't see how Christianity is fundamentally a part of American culture. They decry the "War on Christmas" because they don't understand how thoroughly it is already won. Already, to be an American, really an American, you have to be intimately familiar with a subtle language that pervades everything. The "War on Christmas" is non-Christians asking not to be forced to participate in Christmas, that their children not be forced to participate in Christmas, that they can live one day of their lives between October and the New Year without having to know what "the reason for the season" is.

But my kids? They will never feel that way. My kids are part of this, thanks to their father. And that makes me feel distant, alien.

I don't like that feeling. Just as I know that M doesn't like the feeling that the girls and I are part of a culture that he can't share.

The fact is, M and I will never really be able to ignore our cultural differences. M will always have the culture of his family, his childhood, his nation. I will always have mine.

But our kids? Who knows. Who knows what happens when you teach your kids they are members of a group that is fundamentally separate from all others, and when you simultaneously teach them they are members of the collective whole.

Who knows?

I don't. I don't know what it's like to be Jewish and to feel completely included in the culture of the majority.

I don't know if it's possible to be Jewish and to feel that American culture isn't constantly attacking you.

But I suppose we're going to find out. And no matter what, M and I always address these issues the same way- with love and kindness and open minds.

Maybe watching us struggle to explain Passover and Easter in the same week will teach our kids something greater than religion. Maybe it will teach them to transcend religious divisions. Maybe it will teach them to cherish their heritage and cultivate their sense of history on both sides. Maybe they'll become militant atheists, who knows.

What we know, M and I, is that we really don't care about religion. What matters to us is the peripheral stuff. For us, it's about us, nobody else. So if the girls grow up with a sense of awe for the universe, respect for life in its myriad forms, and a strong moral compass... we've done a good job.

We just need to keep that in mind as we try to teach them our own histories, our own faiths, with consideration and respect for each other's.

You'd be amazed how little of an example is out there for how people can do that.

Thinking About Tomorrow

Me and my favorite girls

Today, my little RH is seven months old.

I know, I've been a terrible blogger.  You all hardly know anything about her.

RH- 7 months

You don't know about how she laughs, trilling and purring and puffing.  A friend of mine started calling her "Helga Hufflepuff."  It's accurate.  And adorable.

You don't know about how she's finally realized the benefit of tummy time, how she wriggles around like she's maybe actually thinking about crawling, how she rolls around the room to get to contraband items, how when she arches her back and whines her big sisters will roll her over so she doesn't have to.

She's a wonderful little person.  She loves to grab my (or daddy's) face in fistfuls, pull me close to her, and plant big, open mouthed kisses all over me.  How her gums are filled with little teeth getting ready to just bust through.

She's amazing.  I feel like I'm really relishing these baby moments more now than when DD and SI were so small.  Maybe because there were two of them to distract me from each other, maybe because now I truly know how fleeting they are.  Hell, this time next year RH will be walking and talking.  Potty training.

DD- 3 1/4 years

And my big girls... my big, big, big, big girls.  I don't know how it happened.  Suddenly they're on the verge of wearing 5t clothing.  Suddenly they have all of these vocal opinions, and make jokes, and have bad dreams and need hugs.  Sometimes they even read.  They are dedicated big sisters, reading to RH, giving her toys, playing with her... they're her favorite people in the world.

DD told me today that her favorite word is "idea."  I like that.  She told me that shortly before she had a meltdown about not wanting to eat a sandwich, and then ten minutes later walked up to me and gave me a giant hug and said, "I'm sorry."

She's FINALLY mastered the potty.  Yeah, sometimes she still poos in her pull-ups after her nap, but last weekend she woke up, got out of bed, went to the bathroom, and pooed in the potty without even bothering to wake me or M up.  She's so competent.

SI sings.  Like, she really almost sort of actually sings.  Look:



I taught her nothing.  She just loves to sing along with Annie.

She gives so many hugs, so freely.  Her laugh is infectious.  She learns so quickly- she's constantly working on her speech.  You may notice in the video- she doesn't make a lot of sounds properly.  But she tries so hard, and with a little help the changes happen quickly.  You'd never know that two months ago the "k" sound was completely beyond her repertoire.

They both love to sing.  And they have excellent taste.



I can have conversations with these people.  They're self-centered, fairly superficial conversations... but still.  They tell me stories.  They tell me about their likes and dislikes, their plans, their ideas.  SI likes to tell me about how she'll get bigger and bigger and bigger and then do something to be like me.  It melts my heart.

And so, I have been thinking a lot about the future.  Not just because it's so hard to imagine RH becoming a child the size of DD and SI- not just because I have no idea how it happened the first time. Not just because they've reached a growth rate differential that means I actually have to consider parceling out their clothes into DD's and SI's, and figuring out how one does hand-me-downs to twins without new clothes feeling preferential...

M had his every-six-months MRI again on Monday.

Such an awesome daddy.

This one was a little different.  Before you start worrying, you should know M is fine.  Not just in the "just fine" way I meant when he was going through treatment, but in the truly moment to moment way that people mean it in general.  There are no changes.  At least, not to him.

For the first time since July of 2007, M has a new neuro-oncologist.  His old doctor, the one with the silly name, is gone.  Moved on to greener pastures.  So we got to start from scratch with a new doctor.

She's charming and sweet and competent, all you could ask in a bedside manner and attitude and human being in general, but also eminently practical.  And that meant none of the sugar coating that Dr. Grimm used to have.  None of the old friends, constant optimism, we're-all-in-this-together-ness.  You can't go into a meeting with somebody who has inoperable masses in their brain with that kind of attitude.  You have to go in with caution.  And that is what the new doctor did.

She sat us down and talked to us, straight off the bat, about when.  Not if, when.  As far as she's concerned, that's a foregone conclusion.  It's not *if* M's cancer comes back, it's not *if* there's new growth, new contrasting areas on his MRIs.  It's when.

This is my happy place I go when things seem bad.

And in the thirty seconds it took for that icicle of a thought to slide down my spine, settle in my stomach, and imprint itself permanently and horribly inside of my ears forever, she moved on to all the good news.  The good news that Dr. Grimm never would have thought to tell us.

In the beginning, when M was getting ready to start radiation and chemotherapy and his experimental protocol, the doctors told us about what we would do if the treatment failed.  What the options would be if there was a recurrence.

A second round of radiation was off the table.  Unless M survived "a really, really long time."

We'd have to dig deeper, find more aggressive, more harmful treatments.  But there would be options.

Now?  Apparently, that "really, really long time" was incredibly relative.  So relative that M has doubled it.

The who SuperMommy family, partying down.

It's been so long, a paltry five and a half years is so long, that when there is a recurrence we can do exactly what we did the first time.  Do exactly what we know worked for M.

It's been so long that so much more is known about M's cancer that we can be confident there's no genetic element, that the children won't need any kind of extra screening.  (Not that it will stop me.)

When we cross that bridge, we'll cross at full strength, as though the first time had never happened.

But we won't.  It won't really be like that.  Because we'll be older, because I don't know if I still have the unfailing optimism and conviction that I did when I was 23 and newly engaged and fundamentally certain that M was going to be just fine.  Because on top of being M's rock and dedicated helpmeet and nurse and advocate and everything else he might need, I'll have another three people who need me for more than everything, who need me to help them cope with this sort of illness in their father.

When is scaring the everliving shit out of me.

And I know what when means.  It means inevitably, it doesn't mean tomorrow.  It means down the road, somewhere.

We did this on purpose.

But we can't know when when is.  And we knew that the first time we got pregnant.  We had babies when we did so that when M got sick again, they would have had the most years possible with him.  That when he inevitably passed away, they would have meaningful memories.  They would know who he was, and how much he loved them.

And so, in a way, I really was prepared for that talk.  I really was prepared to hear it out loud, that all those fears we had addressed were still real.  That they hadn't just faded into memory.  That we were still living with them.

The new doctor didn't say, "tomorrow."  She didn't say, "next year," or "in ten years," or "in fifty years."  She knows exactly what we know.

Nothing.

None of us have a clue what kind of timeline M has.  Nobody does.  People haven't been surviving brain cancer long enough to know what survival rates look like.  What recurrence rates look like.  M is already so far out on the bell curve that there's no way to know whether or not he's just plain off of it.

Here's to another day.

But I suppose we're ready now.  We're reminded that M isn't free from his diagnosis, he's still living with it every day.  We're reminded that we're doing this together, this family building, baby having, life experiencing thing, and we're doing it on purpose.  We're doing it because we want to milk every last drop of joy that we possibly can from our lives.

I'm going to go hug my children and make a keugle.  Because M and I love keugle, and I love hugging my children.  I'm going to eat Cherry Garcia for dessert with M, right out of the carton, and we're going to watch Community and the Daily Show.  And I might cry a little and pass it off as hormones, but I'll bury my face in his furry, furry chest, and feel overwhelmed with gratitude that I have my life for another day.  For another six months.  Until his next MRI comes and I go through it over again.

Just Like Starting Over

This is how we entertain ourselves when we figure out we're all wearing purple.

These last few months have been like living in somebody else's life.  I'm serious- every scrap of our routine went out the window.  Every shred of normalcy deteriorated as we traveled, packed, had house guests, shared flus, shared colds, stopped sleeping, started sleeping again, and began experimenting with new grocery routines.

It's amazing how off it can throw you to go two weeks without cloth diapers.

This last week I have been desperately struggling to establish "normal" again.  Reintroducing the nap, enforcing regular bed and bath times, even finally taking down the Christmas tree.  This means stepping back while my kids watch "Yellow Submarine" and "Annie" ad nauseum.  (By the way, the girls LOVE John Lennon.  They refer to the Beatles as "John and his friends," and SI's favorite song is "Power to the People."  My kids are awesome.)  While the girls watch the movies, RH rolls around the floor, and I abandon my children to the electronic babysitter and attempt to reclaim my house.

RH: Six months old

It's not just cleaning, in fact it's very little cleaning.  It is the epic putting away of things.  The things are everywhere.  You start by dislodging a whole category of goods by turning your "spare room" into a "nursery."  Then you turn your "linen closet" into a "coat closet," and turn your "hardware cupboard" into your "linen cupboard" (although it doesn't come CLOSE to containing all your linens).  Then the baby goes up another size and the new things take up more space so your "first aid cupboard" once again becomes the "baby food cupboard," and baskets of bibs are switched with other baskets of bibs, and plans must be made for changing car seats- which is too daunting to even consider.  Then the holidays come, and before you can put all the things away, you're baking up a storm.  In the interest of time, food items line up in cans and boxes along the path to the pantry, to keep open the access to the molasses and vanilla.  And then comes the travel.  And then comes the desperate adjusting of toys, where the heap of outgrown clothes must become a heap of stuffed animals, and the "stuffed animal box" becomes the "dress ups box," and the "holiday toys bin" becomes the "RH toys bin," and you realize that you actually have enough things that you really like but don't actually need to necessitate both a Christmas and a Channukah storage bin to go back to the basement.  And then comes the weeks of passing around illness.  And then, because you're just finished a gift-giving season and now you've spent a ton of money and exchanged lovely things with everyone, all sorts of things that you kind of maybe need start breaking.  Things like your coat rack.  Or things fill up.  Things like your startup disc.  And suddenly you find yourself in need of buying all sorts of crap that must be built and housed in order to hold all your other things that maybe you sort of need.  And then you visit the brand new Costco and buy a million pounds of potatoes.  And suddenly you don't know where anything goes because it doesn't go anywhere, and you are quite literally losing your mind because you are wading through what feels like endless fields of random crap that you maybe kind of sort of need.

My house full of chaos.

Which is why I find myself over a month after the crazy holiday bonanza began installing shelves and hooks, filling bag after bag with things that we really DON'T need, letting them pile up in the hall to become yet another obstacle to believing that my house will ever really be under control, while watching the pile of blankets that don't fit in the linen cupboard collect dust bunnies in the corner.

I have a simple goal: To be able to decide to mop the floor in any given room without spending an hour finding where things have to go first.  Not putting them away, just figuring out where the hell I can put them.

Every vertical surface in my home was, until a few days ago, covered in crap.  Unknown, possibly important, indecipherable crap.  Two days of hard work and the addition of some shelving has yielded a kitchen that I can actually clean now.  Where everything has a place to go.  The dining room is next.

If I look at my home dispassionately, really, I'm just this side of a hoarder.

Know what I found in the dining room?  A fondue pot.  I didn't even remember that I had a fondue pot.  It's still in the box.  I could be using that space to stash the linens hanging out on top of the photo albums.

So how are my kids coping with all of this?  Simple.  Without me.

Grandmommy in my personal chaos zone

Without me, my remarkable three year olds have learned pretty much all the words to "Tomorrow," and the chorus of "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds."  (Granted, those are all of the lyrics of the chorus of "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.")  RH has figured out that by rolling, she can cross an entire room.  I am missing most of this, because I am trying to dig what I think must be my turntable out from the detritus on my desk.  I figure if I can eliminate the clutter on top of the second "linen cupboard" I might be able to squeeze the linens onto a "linen shelf."

I am eagerly awaiting the day that I reach the living room.  On that day, I will unroll my probably spider infested yoga mat, and I will do a sun salutation.

Because I have had it with my current lifestyle.  The lifestyle of a person wallowing in the collected detritus of self pity.

I wander around my home, looking forlornly at puddles of dried playdough with wooden and velcro eggs embedded in them, sighing and thinking to myself, "I'm going to get to that..."

Screw it.  I'm getting to that.  And then I am getting to me.  I'm tired of carrying around this spare tire from making three babies.  I'm tired of just telling my friends to cram the crap on the table just anywhere when they graciously come over for dinner.  I am getting my life into the kind of order where it might be functional.  Where I could dance with my kids if I wanted to.  Where the pre-dance party cleaning isn't just a stashing things out of reach because they have nowhere to go.

Now picture them singing "Tomorrow."

And yeah, it's going to mean getting rid of a lot of crap.

But with a little elbow grease and determination, I think that soon I'll have a functional coat rack, linens that don't live on the floor, and a routine that allows me to actually mop once in a while.

It's amazing how out of control things can get in just six months.

Six and a half months ago, I had a baby.  My third baby.

And, because I'm not an idiot, I prioritized me and the baby and the girls and M over just about everything else.

But now it's time to start acting like I run this show.  Because, as it turns out, I do.  And I'm good at it.

And with that mantra in mind, I think I can lock up about two thirds of the marzipan hiding in my sock drawer, put away the plastic dishes, and make my home my home again.

Wish me luck, lovely readers.

Sometimes I think I'll need it.

Bully Shaming

This is not a funny post.  In fact, this may be a deeply unsettling post.  So, be forewarned before you decide to read on.  It is written as part of Toulouse and Tonic's Bully Shaming Project.  I'm also linking up with Pour Your Heart Out.

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I was bullied horribly when I was a kid, starting in first grade.

See, I was a nose picker.  Not that kids really need an excuse to bully somebody, but the moment they have one... all bets are off.  During preschool and kindergarten I had been well liked, social, happy to make friends.  And then one day, the whole world changed.

Kids laughed at me and pointed and said all sorts of things I can hardly remember now.

Suddenly, other children on the playground were offering to pay me to touch other kids.  It was the meanest thing they could think of to do... to each other.

I wasn't even a person to them, I was an object of ridicule, at the very best.

And so I retreated into myself.  By the time I was in third grade, I was writing horror stories that featured the meanest kids in my school being found dead in a closet, Murder She Wrote style.  In all of those stories, they were my friends, and I solved the mystery and received the love and adoration of all my classmates as a reward.

The summer after fourth grade, I decided to make a change.  I cut my hair, I started wearing things I though Claudia from the Babysitter's Club books would like.  I decided I just didn't care about what people thought of me anymore.  I was lying to myself, but it helped me cope.

In fifth grade, the bullying peaked.  My fifth grade teacher was practically a non-entity.  Her class went wild around her.  So wild in fact, that one girl, Veronica, would halt the class, march the front of the room, and to the raucous applause of her friends, point out each unworthy person in the room, mocking them publicly.  Our teacher, Mrs. Burton, would sit on the sidelines with her head in her hands.  She didn't even try to stop it.  She wasn't the first teacher I had felt ought to do something, who ought to at least try to help.

Veronica went down the line, accusing people of smelling bad, of being stupid, whatever.  When she got to me, she burst out laughing.

"You're just a alien.  You're not even like a person.  You're so weird."

When the class had started laughing, she got started on a "You're SO weird" routine.  "You're so weird,  your hair has hair.  You're so weird, you're from another planet.  You're so weird, your whole family lives is a science experiment...." and so on.

I just sat there, eyes down.  I didn't cry, I didn't do anything.  That was always the advice when you said somebody picked on you- if you don't react, they'll stop.

They never stopped.  But after that day, it just got worse.  All the kids in the class who had been deemed "good enough" by Veronica felt free to just... let me have it.

I did ridiculous, juvenile things to avoid being bullied.  When one girl was made fun of for sweating, I began covering my whole body in antiperspirant.  I quietly catalogued all the "wrong" things I could do, and tried to avoid them.  It was utterly pointless.

One day, a girl named Kim smashed a wooden wreath across my head.  I didn't move.  I stayed in my desk. and broke all of my pencils.  My teacher, who I still believe was totally complicit in my bullying, sent me to the school councilor's office for my "troubling" behavior.

I began begging my parents to take me out of school.  They didn't.  Instead, they did something I thought would be even better.  They moved to a different state.

I was thrilled to be moving.  I was going to start all over.  I changed my hair again, I changed my clothes, I changed my name.  I was going to be a different person.  Somebody who wasn't an object of ridicule.  Somebody who wasn't universally loathed.  Somebody who's mere presence wasn't a punishment to other people.

And so, on the first day of middle school, knowing nobody, I walked into what I imagined was my new life.

As I walked up to the doors of the school, the students all milling around, waiting for them to open and for the day to begin, people froze and stared at me.

They all looked so... normal.

And here, my parents had promised me that we'd moved to the land of the weirdos, and I was wearing a gold, floor length silk skirt, and a blue faux turtleneck cropped t-shirt.

Having just moved to Ann Arbor, I had no idea I'd walked in as a Maize n' Blue billboard.

During attendance in my homeroom, my teacher said I wasn't on her list.  I went to the principal's office to clear it up.  He sent me to another classroom.  That teacher claimed I didn't belong either.  And so on.

By the end of the day, I had spent fifteen minutes being gawked at in every single classroom for sixth grade.

By the end of the week, it became perfectly clear that my life wasn't going to be different at all.  People knocked me into my locker, asked me if I was wearing strange clothes because I was a lesbian (it took me a while to figure out that was an insult), called me names.

True story- my dog ate this project before we could turn it in.  It was a disaster.

I was mocked for my glasses, my hair, for always knowing the answer, for not having any friends.  One of the ring leaders was a girl named Narissah.  During art class one day, she dumped a tub of glue into my hair.  She and her friends laughed and laughed as I tried to wipe it off my glasses and out of my eyes, and the principal ended up letting me walk home to get clean clothes and take a shower.  I told my mom I was sick, and I didn't go back.

There were a few people who took the time to get to know me.  They are all in the picture above.

But something else happened during that first week.  I genuinely stopped giving a crap about those people who made fun of me.

I cultivated an interior life.  I read constantly, I wrote constantly, my poetry improved dramatically and then become incredibly dark and self involved.  I began to paint.  And most importantly of all, I decided that I did. not. need. anyone.

The next year, I began to make friends with the other outcasts.  The other people who were beat up or made fun of for being in any way different.  In sixth grade, I was a strange kid with a 50's style bob and a notebook full of poetry about imaginary places, and by the end of seventh grade....

That was me, the goth kid with the necklaces.

I home schooled for eighth grade, but by then I had some friends.

I was determined to just do whatever the hell I wanted, because who gave a crap about what other people thought?  It made me selfish, but it kept me from being hurt.  But strangers, kids in school, kids from other schools, friends of friends, and worst of all my so-called "best friend"... they still made fun of me.  The "best friend" worse than anybody.

She made fun of me for growing body hair.  For the clothes I wore.  For the people I knew.  For the music I listened to.  She did so in the guise of "teaching" me to be a good person.  A better person.  A popular person.  And in the few instances I managed to excel at her lessons, to collect friends or even boyfriends, she would come swooping in and shatter my confidence.  Annihilate my self esteem.

I had a boyfriend, and after advising me to cut it off, she took the incredibly drastic step (at 14) of going down on him at a party, so he would start dating her.  When I finally confessed to her how incredibly hurt I had been, she started having sex with him- again, a very big deal when you're talking about fourteen year olds..  As she confessed to me later, this was to keep him from being interested in me again.  This was my best friend.  That boy, he and I would silently commiserate with each other from across the room, the trapped victims of her intense bullying.

I started cutting myself.  My left arm is still covered in the scars.

When I tried to kill myself as a teenager, it wasn't just the sexual assault that had done it.  It was years of planning, years of waiting for that final straw to break the camel's back.

The thing is, I did care.  I always cared.  I just also believed that never, never for the rest of my life, would people accept or love me.  That they wouldn't view me as an object of ridicule, as something to be despised.  Growing breasts and hips didn't help- strangers would catcall at me.  To me, it was more of the same.  More anonymous hate and rage headed towards me because I just simply did not belong.  Not in New Jersey, not in Ann Arbor, not anywhere.

I was always sure that as nice as my friends, it was despite my inherent unloveableness.  My de-facto strangeness.  The fact that I was just plain unworthy, and that I always would be.

I embraced my strangeness so fully, because it was a sign of my survival, despite being taught so thoroughly in middle school how truly pointless my existence in the world of "normal" people was.

Part of me really believed that until I met M, and he managed to convince me that he actually thought I was wonderful.  Part of me still believes that now.

So whenever I hear about teenagers killing themselves because of bullies, my heart breaks.  I can feel an emptiness in my chest made of the pain that I know.  I feel the raised lines on my arm, my own battle with surviving the incredible cruelty of adolescents, and I just wish I could go back in time a few days, or weeks, and let those kids know that their value isn't determined by the "normal" kids.  That no kid is "normal."  That those people don't know them, let alone have any basis of comparison to judge their value.

But that's the thing about bullies.  You assume that if they're bullying you, they do know.  They know how worthless you are.  That it's what gives them the freedom to point it out.

So, I'm an adult now, and I'm mostly over it.  But I'm never going to be totally over it.  I still assume that "normal" looking adults will shun me, will talk about me behind my back, will mock me.  I still assume that I am not inherently "normal," that I am somehow flawed.  It is a huge impediment to making and building friendships with other adults, out here in the real world.

And I will never, not for an instant, encourage or accept bullying behavior from my kids.  I would rather comfort them through their tears and their fears and their pain a million times over than to have the blood on my hands of my children becoming the bullies that I knew, the kids who make a child miserable enough to take their own life.

So, shame on you, bullies of Tappan Middle School and Thomas Jefferson Elementary School.  Shame on you.

I hope you're as disgusted with yourselves as I am.

I Can't Pour My Heart Out

SI and RH

It's been a really hard week.  Month.  Year.

And I want to bare my soul and weep onto the page, but I can't.

I can't simply air me and my husband's dirty laundry all over the internet.  I don't want to make things worse during the hardest time my husband and I have faced in our relationship.  Yes, harder than brain cancer.  Harder than newborn, preemie twins.  This is the hardest it has ever been.  But I can't talk about it here.

I can't bemoan the loss of my friends or past friends or whoever and whatever they are publicly.  I don't want to burn any bridges.  I want the people who I love, who are angry at me because I'm wrapped up in my own world, trapped inside my own depressed thoughts, to be able to forgive me my selfish self pity and come back someday.

I can't pour my heart out, empty it of all the pain and grief and confusion, because I truly fear that if I do, I'm just going to make things worse.

It's a helpless, trapped feeling.  And I've spent so much time feeling helpless and trapped.

They tell you that having kids is hard.  But you never really stop and think that maybe, just maybe, it's just as hard as they say... but for all the unsaid reasons.

That it's so hard because everybody knows, but it all happens inside your own head.

It's not being "stuck at home" with the kids.  It's having the kids be the only people you spend time with.

It's not being needed 24/7, it's the sociopathic need- the moment to moment total obliviousness as you as a human being, and not just as the provider of all their earthly needs.

My children are wonderful, and I love them so much... every day they do something new, something wonderful, something hilarious.  Every day I am overwhelmed by how deeply I can care for them.

But that is a trap too- an emotionally exhausting cycle that never ends.  You never get to idle in neutral, you're always running through extremes- jumping straight from first into fifth and then suddenly dropping it into reverse.

It kills your transmission.  Or, if you don't like that metaphor, you just get totally burnt out.  Worn down.

And for some reason I believe that most moms have other mom friends.  That they have other people they can talk to about it.

I have so few other mom friends.  And like me, they're too busy to talk about it.  It's hard to have a conversation when any second you might need to nurse, or wipe a butt, or kiss a boo-boo.  When on top of the childcare, there's laundry to be done, and food to be made, and floors to be swept, and somehow in all of that you need to find time to do something as simple as make yourself a cup of tea and some toast.

It doesn't matter if you have a three day migraine, or if you have a cold, or if you're queasy and tired, you don't get to stop.  You still have to feed the baby, clean up the oatmeal from the floor, moderate battles over who gets to play with the ninja.

And you still want to do all of it- to give your kids the best possible childhood they can remember.

Because they will remember.  They will remember you yelling.  And they will remember you crying.

And while they might not remember the details, you will.  You'll remember sitting on the floor and weeping while your children take turns hugging you, kissing you, wiping your cheeks, and asking you not to be sad anymore.

You'll remember that.  Until the day you die, you'll remember that.

Because that is not their damn job.  That is your job.  It is your job as the adult to suck it up and be a fucking parent.

It is not their job to parent you.

And so I'm not going to tell you about how hard it's been.

Instead I'm going to say how desperately grateful I am to the friends who have reached out to me in the last week.  Offered to meet me for lunch with my kids, offered to come by with a bottle of wine, offered to come crash on my couch and have some fun with me.  Offered to let me come and stay with them, if it came to that.

I am so, so incredibly grateful.

And getting those texts, those emails... the occasional phone call... the note on facebook suggestion a play date...

The comments from strangers on my blog, telling me that my lovely readers care, that they might not know me, but that they care.

These things mean so much more to me that I can say.  These things make it kind of okay.

These things make me feel so much less alone.  So much less lost.  So much closer to putting this very, very hard time behind me.

This time that I can't really talk about, but that I am grateful to have somebody willing to listen to.

Thank you.

 

Don't Cry

RH

The thing about depression is that it's only invisible when you're outside of it.  When you're inside the depression bubble, it's more than visible- it's tangible.  It's a cloying, noxious cloud of mud.

Everything that you see, you're seeing through that depression.

I know, because I have a lot of experience with it.  I was seriously depressed from the time I was eight until I was in my twenties.  I also didn't sleep.  I began contemplating suicide at eight and a half.  I tried once, at fourteen.  Nearly succeeded, too.

Depression?  It comes in a million different flavors, and they are not mutually exclusive.

So when I realized that I had been feeling depressed- truly, genuinely, severely depressed- I did my best to explain it away.  To come up with reasons that I wasn't depressed, I was just... something-else-not-nearly-so-bad.

And I had lots of convenient scapegoats.  The best of which was a little something called D-MER.

D-MER is, for me anyway, a pretty severe problem I'm experiencing but had never heard of until recently.  That acronym stands for "Disphoric Milk Ejection Reflex."

Basically, every time I'm about to have a let-down, I have a panic attack.  A crying, panting, sweating, freaking-out panic attack.

Every. single. time.

And, as other nursing mothers of three months old know, that means that I'm having all-out panic attacks as often as ten or twelve times a day.

They're blessedly brief, all things considered, but it's made life more than a bit hellish.  Every few hours, a panic attack.  And then the adrenaline rush wears off, and I'm exhausted.  Or antsy.  Or both.

I coped with it pretty well for about six weeks.  And then, the depression kicked in.

I have a confession to make.  It was so bad, one of those dancing videos I put up?  I edited out a bit where I stopped dancing with my daughters to just sit down and weep.

It was awful.  Their concern, their fear, their sadness, that all made it worse.  But when they would ignore my crying and go about their business, that just made it worse too.

I felt constantly judged but other mothers.  By comments about how being a mom is the greatest job in the world, about how lucky we mothers are, about how we chose to have children, about how some women would give anything to be in our shoes.  I was overwhelmed by guilt at feeling so completely trapped, and I did feel trapped.

I found myself thinking awful things, I realized how close I was to actually considering (not causing, but considering) some sort of self inflicted harm.

And I know that this is probably going to sound totally implausible, but I'm doing much better now.  You know, one week later.

I can tell you what shook me out of it, too.  It was Ani Difranco.  At her show, she sang "Joyful Girl," and it was like I heard the lyrics for the very first time.  Or like she was actually talking directly to me.  In the song, she's talking to her reflection in the mirror, and says, "Would you prefer the easy way? No, well okay then, don't cry."

How can I have been listening to that song for more than fifteen years without really hearing that one line?  Those last two words?  I swear, I had never heard Ani sing those last two words to me before.  And for some reason, it worked.

The fact of the matter is, life is hard.  And parenthood is hard.

And you know what?  Parenthood isn't what you expect it to be.  And life isn't what you expect it to be.

I always knew I wanted to be a mom.  I always knew I wanted to have children.  But in my head, they were always... older.  Between three and eight.  Those magic years when they're still so young that much of the world is an amazing place, but old enough that you can talk to them about it.

And children don't emerge from the womb ready to play make-believe and visit the zoo.

When I was pregnant with the twins, I prepared myself for what I thought would be six months of purgatory. Six months of wee little babies.  And I wasn't particularly fond of babies.  But I was pleasantly surprised- I actually enjoyed them as babies.  I actually enjoyed cleaning all the poo and nursing and rocking them to sleep.

And now they've reached that stage, that dream age I always wanted my children to be, and they are every bit as wonderful as I could have hoped.  But I wasn't happy.

And here I was, with another baby.  An amazing baby.  Big, healthy, and easy.  Good lord is that kid easy.  She'll just lay swaddled under her mobile, smiling at the little owls, and put herself to sleep.

I'd watch my incredibly wonderful children playing together, and I'd feel an intense sadness.  A hurt so strong, and so deep, it was a physical pain.

I was depressed.  And, for now, I've sort of snapped out of it.

I'm still not back at 100%, but I'm finding joy in my day to day again.  I'm not just dragging myself from chore to chore, I'm making priorities and actually enjoying myself.  Pretty much every day.

Just like that, one day I woke up ready to crawl into a hole and never again.

And last week I woke up, ready to try to be me again.

Depression is awful.  Depression hurts, even physically.  It's something nearly impossible to explain.

But it does get better.  Knowing that I survived depression, once upon a time, helped me get through this bout.  Knowing that I've been through this, or something like it, before... it's not so much a comfort as it is a promise.

I know it's going to come back.  It always comes back.  I know I'll find myself weeping openly into unmatched socks, just wishing I wasn't so dreadfully alone.

But I did something really important, something new.  I saw that I was depressed, and I acknowledged it.  I let it be visible- I let my friends and my husband and my children know.  I didn't hide it.

Depression is like an abusive boyfriend, keeping you from your friends, and telling you that you need it.  And once it gets its claws in you like that...

I didn't let my depression become my secret addiction.  Not this time.

This time, I listened to Ani.

My loves

I didn't want my life to be easy, but what I wanted wasn't real.  What I wanted was a fantasy that only existed in my mind.  A fantasy where I played with my littles, and where I lived in the woods, and my life was totally impossible.

And the thing is, I knew that.  Of course I knew that.  But the desire to start a family is about more than wanting your genes to carry on, or wanting family pictures on the wall.

It's about moments.  Moments where your life is utterly full to the brim of meaning.  Where every little action seems to matter, but not to be full of dire consequence.

Moments like today, when I snuggled up with my three daughters on the bed and read No Roses for Harry.

I'm not better yet.  But I'm getting there.

Today was a good day.  Yesterday was a good day.

I'm pretty optimistic about tomorrow.

Blindsided

M and RH

It doesn't happen very often, but once in a while I find myself at a complete and total loss for words.

Not just words, but thoughts.  Sometimes something happens, and it's as though my brain just... shuts down.

I just can't process everything going through my head all at once.  And so I stop processing altogether.

I'm sure that many of you have experienced something similar.  You're just minding your own business, and BAM!  It happens.

That happened to me last week.  And I've been dwelling on it.

It's made me go back and think a lot about the last time it happened.  That was five years ago.

...if the phrase "five years ago" is familiar to you from recent posts, you're going to know immediately what this is about.

While M was going through his treatments at that time, while there was still so much fear and uncertainty, my family did all that they could to support me.  To keep me going.

Aunt Genocide was a rock for me.  She lived in Chicago at the time, albeit on the other side of town, and she was constantly letting me know she was there for me.  She came over for dinner, cooked for us, she volunteered to make our wedding cake for God's sake.  And that meant that every few weeks, we went to her place to taste a test cake.

Her coconut tres leches cake?  It's to die for.  But not a practical choice to sit out during a wedding reception.  M and I lived on Aunt Genocides cakes for a time.

Yeah, Aunt Genocide made this.

She was amazing.

At any rate, another one of the super nice things that she did for me was to keep me reading.  Not that it's ever been difficult, but she was the queen of the comic book shop.  She was always on top of the best new books, the worst new books... she knew exactly what I liked, and what I would like.  And with that in mind, she got me started on the books, "Strangers in Paradise."

She thought the timing was perfect.  The author had announced that there was an end to the story line coming up.  She hadn't read the last volume that had been published, and there would only be two trade paperbacks left.  She'd get me hooked, let me read everything up to date, I'd get to the penultimate book right after she did, and then we could wait for the series finale together.

See?  Super thoughtful.

So when she finished reading that penultimate book, I was waiting for it.  I had just gobbled up the previous seventeen books.

Seventeen.

She brought it to my house, and then she started hedging.

"I don't think you want to read this," she said.

She wouldn't tell me why, she just strongly encouraged me to give up the series.  Like hell I was giving up the series!  I was LOVING the series!  I loved the characters, I loved the development, the maturity... I was really ROOTING for Francine and Katchoo!  I really wanted to know what would happen with David!

No matter what she said, and she refused to give plot points away (always dedicated to not spoiling things for anybody), I was adamant.  And Aunt Genocide loaned me the book.

And I read most of it.

David, who had been sort of missing, came back.  And in painstaking detail, told the other characters about his terminal brain tumor.

...his inoperable glioma.

The malignant astrocyte that invaded his white matter.

I knew what all that vocabulary meant.  Terry Moore, the author, had done his research.

There were these illustrations...

Images I was so familiar with.  I knew what they were.  They could have been M's MRIs.

I put the book down.

I didn't think.  I didn't talk.  I gave it back to Aunt Genocide, who cried and apologized, and who I assured had nothing to feel bad about.  How was she supposed to know?  How COULD she have known that the very thing she was attempting to engage me with to keep me going would take that kind of a turn?  That specific of a turn?

I didn't read the final installation of the story.  I don't know what happened to David.  I'm going to assume he died- Terry Moore was making it pretty clear that he didn't intend to let David survive.

Let me remind you- this was September of 2007.  Two months after M's diagnosis.

I happen to know that Aunt Genocide still feels horrible for this whole thing.

So last week (September again... why?), I was surfing around some of my favorite websites.  And I found...

This.  "He Took A Polaroid Every Day, Until the Day He Died."

Of course I clicked on that link.  The headline was too cool.  I had no idea what to expect, but I was completely won over by the idea.

I thought it might be a little sad, of course, but I didn't expect what I saw.

Here was this guy...

This fascinating guy...

And then there was the photo of him, in his hospital bed, recovering from brain surgery.

There was the picture of his stapled together skull, hair still on his head, just like M.

There was the picture of his chemo/radiation hair loss.

There was the picture of his hair growing back.

...there was the picture of the wedding ring.

...of the wedding.

This guy, he could have been M.  He loved music and baseball.  He had brain cancer.  And still, there he was, surviving.  Getting married.  Living his life.

And then there he was, in the hospital again.

And then he was dead.

Of course he was dead.

I had known from the minute I clicked the link that he was dead.

But it was not okay.  It is just NOT OKAY.  Because M is alive, and he is JUST FINE, THANK YOU.

But that story... that real, true story about another man...

Another beloved human being with friends and family, with ambitions and dreams ideas and a life...

That man is dead.  And that man could have been my husband.  In that wedding picture, there's even a glimpse at the chuppah.  There are so many little things, here and there, that connect me and my husband even closer to this man who has been dead for fifteen years and who's name I don't even know.

Just... living.

I don't really have a moral here.  I don't have a happy way to wrap all of this up like I usually do- to put a bow on it and show you how wonderful life is, and how lucky we are to experience it together, and how grateful I am.

Because shit like that?  It scares me.

I know M has to die someday.  We all have to die someday.

Me, my children, my parents... none of us are immortal.

When I learn about somebody's death, or illness.. I hold my family a little closer.  A little tighter.  I weep for those friends and family who have lost, and I silently say a prayer of thanks for what I have.

But when faced with the bleakness of what might have been...

When I'm blindsided like this...

I have nothing at all to say.  Nothing to think.

All I can do is cry.