Glutton Button

Last Days and First Days

2010-12-23T09:46:00.000-05:00

I took this job before I thought I could hold down any kind of job, much less one that took both analytical skill and creativity. I would come here, sit at my desk and cry, especially in those first months. I would run off to the bathroom, sit in a stall and cry. I would go to the gym, shower and cry and walk back through the parking garage and cry. Leaving the house, leaving the living facsimile of my dead baby every day gave me the space to finally and fully (?) grieve. So I came here and soaked many tissues, napkins and shirt sleeves. It was what I needed.

Three years later, I am ready to move on. I feel as though I have outgrown this position and it's choking me. I am hungry for more. I am not afraid of anything except neglecting my family.

Four years ago today I was sitting in a hospital bed. Around this time of day, I would have been hooked up to the monitors for my morning NST. My girls were alive in me. Three years ago (almost to the day, I started on the 26th), I started working here. Today is my last day.

I am ready to kick some ass.

Masking Truth

2010-12-10T16:24:00.000-05:00

In the early days of grief I felt that my forehead had been stamped with the words DEAD BABY. How strange to find that in a matter of weeks the feeling changed to its diametric opposite; I felt suffocated by the mask I felt I was almost always wearing in order to appear minimally functional. My face -- with its default impassive expression -- became a kind of scab to staunch the appearance of bleeding, but for a long time after, I was still actively bleeding just below the surface. Though I think the most acute despair of grief is behind me, I have been intermittently bleeding and picking at my scab ever since.

I started a new job 8 months into this altered reality and I had to try to pretend that it wasn't a huge mistake for my new employer to hire me. I was so afraid of who I had become or what my grief had reduced to me to that the job wasn't ideal and it certainly wasn't some great career move, but it got me out of the house and out of my head. I needed that desperately. Left to my own devices, I was digging deeper and deeper into despair, isolation and self-flagellation.

Now four years after that pregnancy that changed everything, I don't know what I am feeling. Stronger and ready to move on from this soft landing spot that has become quicksand in its turn. Grateful that in the time since then I have found people in whose company I feel understood. Sadder because I see now that the masks serve a purpose. Sometimes, without their benefit (that is, of my own mask and the ones others wear), I am overwhelmed by the pain everywhere all around, particularly in this online world where we lower our defenses more readily. I often lack the strength these days to bear necessary witness without succumbing to a paralyzing sorrow. It is one thing to know, even viscerally, that we each have a story. It is another thing to be able to read so many of them in their unvarnished states, even as they are unfolding in some cases. Perhaps this is one form of the collateral damage of the blogosphere and the sense of community it engenders and enables.

D and I watched The Stoning of Soraya M. a couple of nights ago. [This is not a "spoiler" kind of movie, but skip this paragraph if you do not wish to read about the film.] Despite the late hour, I couldn't hit the pause button and though D decidedly does not share my love of (obsession with?) morose foreign film, he couldn't turn away either. This movie left me a sobbing mess, but here's the rub. If anything, the movie flattened out Soraya's story to deal with how she came to one of the most unjust, horrific ends I can imagine. Understandably, it did not deal with other horrors she endured and about which I only later learned. It made no mention that her husband to whom she was bartered away by a father who both jettisoned her at 13 and disowned her on the day she died was a petty thief. The story version of her life reduced her brood to 4 children, from 9, and made no mention of her two stillbirths. It was tragic enough, to be sure, that she was stoned to death at 35 because her husband was a thug whose power over his wife was so complete that he could have her killed by a mob that included her two eldest sons on the breath of suspicion. I am not doing this story justice and it's really not the point of my post. I'm just flattened by the truth of this and am humbled and shamed by -- not simply the relative equality and respect I enjoy, but -- my undeserved privilege by comparison. It is not a story we don't already know. It is just that I have to meditate on it often. I have to remember when I am feeling unfulfilled by my career and at those times when my children are trying my limited patience. I have to both remember and yet somehow keep moving.

I think I am not alone in saying that sometimes I am more inspired to write than other times and there is no simple answer for why that is. So many topics have been swirling in my head that I don't feel able to or have the time to flesh out adequately, giving them their due. It is also true that sometimes I cannot read any more. I am sitting at my desk in my office where other people purportedly work and multiple times today I have switched to my reader to read a blog or an article only to leave with tears in my eyes. I can't do it again. I have to wear the mask sometimes not only to obscure my own pain but also the pain I read and see in the lives of others.

The strange mixture of love, empathy and loyalty that we feel for one another is the product of connection. You see sites everywhere that have little social networking icons and they cheerfully announce "We're social" or something along those lines like it's all song lists, likes and Farmville. I enjoy the entertainment. I really do. Sometimes it is just the thing. But more importantly, part of the reality of being "social" is interacting with people when they decide to take their masks off for a while. It is often sublime. It is stained with blood, too. What a responsibility we bear to each other. What an amazing opportunity it is to banish isolation, to practice compassion. I am so often in awe and I hope for those moments of strength when I can rise to meet this gift.

What Took Me So Long

2010-11-19T15:03:00.000-05:00

I have always loved photography. I have always enjoyed creative pursuits. Alas, I have never had the confidence or the risk tolerance to pursue these things professionally. I haven't even been willing to enter a lousy photography contest. Ever. The first time I shared anything creative that I made (outside of a classroom setting where it was required) was earlier this year on still life 365.

But I could only share pieces of mine because Angie started actively asking for work. As a part of her effort and for the success of this amazing project, I could put aside my own ego/insecurity/vanity and participate, but on my own, I never could. I posted that first submitted piece, a sestina, on this blog months after I wrote it and then only because the blog was visible solely to me at the time. For some reason, on sl365, I don't see the work I submit as about me at all, but rather as a part of a dialog among people who share the experience of babyloss and who use a variety of media to work through that experience. At the same time, it is as though a switch was flipped and I can and want to do more creative stuff! In front of others (potentially)!

From where I sit now, my earlier reticence seems awfully pathetic. Not because I am great at any of this stuff. I recently had a revelation that someone's greatest talent might not actually be that great in the grand scheme of things. We have such a hard on for fame and greatness in our culture that it is easy to lose sight of how truly rare those things are. If the thing I am best at is photography, well, I am keeping my day job.

But I have hampered my own progress along the continuum of mediocrity by not exposing myself to greater scrutiny. That is, until this week! I recently joined the local photography club. One of my neighbors is a member and I like her a great deal. I started going to meetings with her early this year and last month, I joined. This month, I entered the competition. The theme was water.

This image was eliminated in the first round because it did not adhere closely enough to the theme. I wasn't surprised, but I thought I would take the chance. Still, it got a laugh, which was a very nice reaction. I was hoping for a bit more feedback from the judge, but the judge actually didn't do a lot of thoughtful critiquing in my opinion.

The second image, which you may recognize from my masthead is one I have played with -- cropping, adjusting the sharpness, exposure and contrast. This is the most recent incarnation of the shot. I think it is more powerful without the other boats. It got an honorable mention.

And I owe it all to the inspiration I have drawn from others in the community.

On Flying Forks, Momentarily Dodged

2010-11-16T12:00:00.000-05:00

I am sitting right now in the office of a cancer practice alone and I am about to shit a brick. Good thing I brought something to type on. I pound a virtual keyboard with great force.

Now I am in an exam room. I am thinking about forks, the kinds that are in roads, the roads that are metaphorical.

Th Kleenex box is within reach. This has the opposite of its [presumed] intended effect. The room is crammed with vomit- inducing upholstery in a sickly purple. The speckled tile alternate lavender and aqua. There's nothing worse than pastels when they get dingy. Even the baseboard is eggplant and plastic.

Right now it's 50/50. I walk out okay or I don't, ultimately. I know that all too well now.

I am here for something presumed to be benign. Four years ago, almost to the day, I went to the antenatal testing center for something we presumed to be benign also. I walked out of there a different person. So, right now, my face is burning and my hands are freezin

Later...

The hematologist/oncologist walked in as I pounded that last 'n' and we chit-chatted about myriad topics. Strange that in the course of 5 minutes we discussed technology, finance and the most private and profound losses I have experienced. For him, just another day at the office. For me, my heart ripped open, but my face blank and clinical. The grief and panic brain, which are one and the same, wanted so desperately to yell profanities. Still, chatting casually was better than waiting in that room alone.

I have an active fear of cancer. The absence of (much) family history or known risk factors does not assuage my fears. Something about its seeming ubiquity, the sheer numbers, has convinced me that someone close to me will soon be drafted. And perhaps, now that I know better than to believe in balance, I no longer think that I am off the hook, that I have paid my dues in suffering to the coffers of human existence. Quite the contrary, actually. I have seen loss beget loss and so I am attentive to its possibilities, wanting, above all, not to be surprised.

But this time, and for the moment, what was presumed to be benign seemingly still is. Which makes me wonder; do dues collectors charge interest?

Worst Efforts

2010-11-15T15:48:00.000-05:00

For the past few months, I have been losing the battle of focusing on diet and health issues. I am sliding back into a pattern of emotional eating and am largely out of my exercise routine. These things have never been areas of strength for me and yet, it is vitally important to me to set a good example for my children. The truth is, however, that I am a fraud and a hypocrite, not to mention a closet eater. At least, I'm closeted to the kids. D is often my partner in late night snacking, as in everything else (everything, that is, except for exercise where I am a hopeless sloth and he is a disciplined runner).

So, unsurprisingly, I was not looking forward to our local Turkey Trot yesterday. I pretty much convinced myself in the days leading up to it that the fatigue I've been feeling so much lately would overtake me and I would be unable to run the full 5K. But I decided that come what may, I would keep up with my son.

That proved not to be difficult, actually. N made it about half a mile before the complaints started. And the full-throated, high-pitched whining was not too far behind. Now, he's only 6 (almost 7!) and 3 miles is not easy for a 6 year old, but I was really surprised. He did worse than last year, when he at least managed to get close to the turn-around before really letting loose with the vitriol and hot fuss. We don't force races upon him. He ALWAYS expresses interest (and not in the mamby-pamby 1 milers, mind you). And of course, he NEVER paces himself. Despite all the soccer and running and cycling he's done since our last 5K, he was actually less ready, it would seem. Being my son, he had plenty of perfectly legitimate reasons for why he could not possibly finish the race: his leg hurt, we did not feed him before the race, he hates races, we force him to run, he neck hurt, his shoes weren't right, I was embarrassing him (I was running backwards facing him and singing Journey. I call it encouragement.), etc.

n was in the jogging stroller, except for the brief sprints she did. At one point she was outrunning N. Talk about adding insult to injury! He rallied, ever so briefly, if only to establish sibling dominance. He still whined even then. He complained that it wasn't fair that she was running faster than him. We tried to cut deals about alternating walking with running. Frustrated, we even offered him the jogging stroller. No, he preferred martyrdom and even through all the afflictions imposed by his cruel parents, he maintained a degree of vanity.

Finally, belatedly, and for N, begrudgingly, we made a final sprint for the finish line, after which he turned to me and said, "I finished ahead of you."

Day 28 - What's In Your Purse

2010-11-01T12:12:00.000-04:00

Day 16 - A Song that Makes You Cry

2010-10-29T10:39:00.000-04:00

That is the prompt that called to me today (okay, yesterday, when I started the post). Although I like to think of my musical tastes as not too narrow, if there is one little corner of the music world that I go back to repeatedly, it is modern folk/alt-country, especially by women. When I really want to listen to music, that is often what I pick.

Patty Griffin is a brilliant storyteller of tragedies large and small. It's no wonder she and Emmylou Harris collaborate so well together. I could pick any number of her songs, some more subtle perhaps. But "Poor Man's House," from her first album, aptly named Living With Ghosts (recorded essentially as a demo) is spare and hard . It starts:

You know you've done enough

When ev'e'ry bone is sore

You know you've prayed enough

When you don't ask anymore

You know you're coming to some kind of

understanding

When ev'e'ry dream you've dreamed is past

And you're still standing

I could go on, but that last line... There aren't too many people I know who have to live with that kind of sorrow and defeat. "Every dream you've dreamed is past and you're still standing." Why bother standing at all? Is it an act of courage or duty to do so? Or is it because if there is any glimmer of hope at all, it tends to shine. What is left of us if we have no dreams remaining, not even for someone we love?

I think that there was a time when I was so overwhelmed with grief that I had no dreams left. I remember telling my grief counselor that I had nothing to look forward to and that I had squandered my life -- that I would never be successful at anything again. I truly felt that at 34, there was nothing but downhill left. I guess that I had dreams for my children, but they seemed so remote that I couldn't focus on them. And yet, I was duty bound to them so I didn't consider suicide in anything more than a passive sense.

Daddy's been working too much

For days and days and doesn't eat

He never says much

But I think this time it's got him beat

I imagine that what kept him standing was his children, knowing that the alternative would only be worse for them. The more I think about it, the more I think it was purely duty and not hope that kept him going.

Perspective....I got my ability to dream back over time. My ambitions eventually reignited, with a lot of help. And on the other side of that coin, I would go so far as to say that I have less fear now, less inhibition. A year ago this blog was visible only to me. I had never submitted anything I wrote or created (with one exception -- I did submit an essay to This I Believe) to a public forum. Writing and photography both help me work through grief and also give me a feeling of accomplishment. I'm not quitting my day job, but I am okay with that.

There is no video for this song that I could find, but this is the song put to images. At least you can hear it in Patty's voice, rather than a cover.

Gettin' Her Parade On

2010-10-28T09:52:00.000-04:00

Best part of the costume is really not part of the costume; they are her green Reebok high tops, natch!

Day 24 - Where You Live

2010-10-27T13:59:00.000-04:00

I grew up in Northern New Jersey and when my immigrant parents pulled together enough money to move us out to the suburbs from their original landing place (a semi-permanent port of call for many), they bought an awkward house in a town that I am belatedly willing to admit is largely --like the cliche would have you believe-- just an exit, or rather, several exits, depending on which of the highways you're on. The town is what is left over after the highways have had their way with the land. With no sense of irony, we would ask each other which side of what highway the other person lived on. There is no main street to speak of. There is no community there that I could ever find. Maybe some people had a sense of community there, but I doubt it had anything to do with the town.

D and I moved to the DC area, where I went to college and where we had a decent number of friends, a couple of years out of school. Despite the vague idea that we'd go back to NJ someday, we have never left and I don't think we will. Even my mother has instructed us not to return. Home for me now, the home of my and D's making is in direct response to the good (mostly his) and bad (mostly mine) of our hometowns. We're in our third house together and our third city/town. I feel, this time, we may have gotten it right. Sure, we too capitulated and moved to the suburbs like so many middle class capitulators before us, fleeing the city at the first sign of procreation. And yes, most of our friends have now left that city, too. But, and I hope I'm not just making excuses here, we love this stinkin' town. We love that we can walk to the diner and the pediatrician and, most importantly, a Dairy Queen. We never really and truly loved our expensive-yet-still-oddly-transitional first neighborhood. Our second town was too remote and sprawly and that was the house of bad ju-ju, where the bad things happened (another post for another day). What we have now and what I am completely grateful for every time I drive or walk or bike around is a place where there are local businesses, great schools, an exercise trail, recreation/community centers, a main street and holy smokes, a camera club that I just joined (my first evah!). We've always had pretty nice neighbors, but we are in a tight-knit community now, something my parents haven't won in the 25 years they've lived in their house.

Tonight, one of our town's most important events is set to take place (rain or shine): the annual Halloween Parade! Of course, that exacerbates what I consider to be our biggest problem: traffic.

Gripe List - AKA Day 27 - Your Worst Habit

2010-10-25T22:06:00.000-04:00

I am the giant sucking sound at the tail end of this meme. But this is blogging and it's supposed to be fun, cathartic, or generally something other than obligatory. I bristle at obligation. It is one of my passive rebellions against my upbringing.

So, while I hope to circle back around at some of the other topics about which I may have something to say, I have decided to cut to the chase. Here it is, warts and all -- or perhaps, just the warts.

I think I would have said, up until last week, that my worst habit is consuming sweetie treaties after the children have gone to bed. You see how I have tried to gamely deflect from the awfulness of my habit by giving it a cutesie name? Oh, the shame!

But the truth, laid plain by my husband last week, is even worse. We were in the car, on our shared commute (#11 from the "20 Things" post) when D mentioned someone and I replied that while I liked the person (I think it was one of the kid's teachers), I had a reservation. Apparently, I always have, sitting attentively in the front row of my consciousness, a short, but pointed list of the concerns I have about an unsightly proportion of the people that I meet each day. Worse still, I can recall these infractions at a moment's notice. This is precious, precious real estate that might have better served its purpose in learning to balance equations, speak properly in my mother tongue, or win me just one game of Trivial Pursuit in my lifetime. But no, instead, I have a petty yet encyclopedic knowledge of all the ways in which I have disagreed quietly with people I know. Hello, my name is Audrey and I have a gripe list.

Kinship

2010-10-20T22:09:00.003-04:00

It is a very old vinyl bag in caramel brown with about the same capacity as a kid's backpack. It's dusty and there is nothing ergonomic about the strap. I didn't know that it existed or that I would be its new owner until after it all happened.

We have visited D's grandmother twice in the past month. We went last month in a harried trip for grandpa's funeral and this time for a celebration of grandma's hard won achievement -- becoming a Bat Mitzvah in her mid-80s. Since most of the family was there, and those who were not were represented by their proxies, many of grandpa's personal things were distributed.

This was a strange new experience for me, having never met my maternal grandparents who died when my mother was a teenager (and for whom Eva is named, actually) and being an ocean and a half away from my paternal grandparents when they died (I was a small child anyway when my paternal grandfather passed away). Even if I had been there, I am fairly certain that the scene would have unfolded very differently. I imagine that there would have been small precious things (but, what?) unwrapped from small pouches or pieces of fabric or very thin paper. It would have taken place in dimly-lit room. The lighting was never very good in their apartment. I can't help but think that objects would have been pressed deliberately into palms following the unspoken but unwavering boundaries of obligation and tradition. It is all a mystery to me, I'm afraid. My people don't really talk openly about such things. But, I know this much; there would have been no display and no choices in the matter.

They were from another time and place; time was not as generous in allowing people to accumulate their treasures and people simply didn't have very much that was tangible. I never could understand how my grandparents had so many kids in that apartment. I will have to ask my father about that.

In the apartment D's grandparents shared for a quarter century, neither one of us was entirely comfortable with a brightly-lit dining room table and people handling and claiming his things. But this family is more fortunate and there was more than enough to go around. Here there were no obligations and little hierarchy. People could just take what appealed to them, what they felt connected to. In the end, when the most favored of the watches and cufflinks (Grandpa's whole career aside from WWII was about timepieces and jewelry) were claimed, it was the box that held them that I received. And that felt right to me.

Later that morning, I think the luncheon at temple the day before caught up to me and I just wanted to get home. Under the circumstances, there were no goodbyes, let alone time for things to be pressed into palms. Instead, I ended up acting out one of those drunken puking out the car scenes, something I have never done before. So, yeah, I'm all for new experiences. D drove and I tried to be still until, strangely, the whole episode just passed and I felt fine. I think it was then that D told me about the bag.

I didn't want to open the bag right away. I knew it was a camera bag, but until I dragged the zipper's pull from one side to the other, it could have been anything -- a Hasselblad [swoon], a Leica [gasp], a Brownie [a solid nod], anything. Inside were two 35 mm cameras (a Konica and a Minolta) and a third lens -- a telephoto zoom. But what surprised me was that Grandpa had a teleconverter (used to multiply the focal length of a lens, thereby simulating a longer telephoto) and a set of close-up lenses, basically convex glass filters that allow you to focus in closer than you could otherwise, a cheap alternative to a true macro lens and well before such business could be accomplished simply by turning a dial.

I have owned both of those items, but what caught my eye was the set of close-up filters. Just two nights before, I had used one to take this photo of the engraved plate on grandpa's box before I had opened the bag. The Grandpa I knew was a devoted painter. Now I see that at least for a time, he used more than brushes to create. I'll have to dig some film out of the fridge.

Faces of Loss, Faces of Hope

2010-10-15T09:45:00.000-04:00

Our story is up on Faces of Loss, Faces of Hope.

Day 7 - A Photo That Makes You Happy

2010-10-13T21:05:00.000-04:00

Friends, this was a simpler time. Determined to be an active father, D started running during my first pregnancy. This photo was taken on the day of his first race and we entered as a family, he in the 5K and my son and I in the "fun run." Not satisfied with his stroller-based experience, N took off on a run of his own at one point. I love that his tail is aflutter. Because you must also see the front view to fully appreciate this costume, here's another:

I bought this Halloween costume online and was utterly shocked (heh...) to find that the costume lacked a certain authenticity. So, we created our own, ehem, authenticity.

Day 6 - 20 Things

2010-10-12T19:46:00.000-04:00

1. Cooking with wine on a Sunday afternoon (in a glass, not in the food)
2. Writing with a fountain pen
3. Singing along
4. Crisp Fall Days
5. Deep breaths, when I remember to take them
6. A clean house
7. Crossing things off the list
8. Holding them deeply
9. Walking downstairs after putting them to bed
10. Reassurance
11. Sharing the commute
12. The view from the mountains
13. Poetry (or really, anything) read aloud
14. Dark chocolate
15. The moment after the pan has been lifted from a cake, assuming it is intact
16. Girls with guitars
17. My silkie
18. Blowing glass (back in the day)
19. Warm Spring days
20. Acceptance

Day 3 - TV

2010-10-09T15:13:00.000-04:00

Flight of the Conchords was just so much fun to watch. I think that first season was such a surprise, both in that it was as good as it was and in that we were able to enjoy something. Amid all the documentaries, this show was respite. Yes, we bought the album.

The Wire. Simply put, this show is either the best show I've ever seen or a close second to Six Feet Under. I actually think it edges out Six Feet Under because it was, in my opinion, more consistent. The first season started a little slow. But if you give it a chance, this show gains steam. It is just phenomenal.

Day 1 - Song

2010-10-08T15:47:00.000-04:00

Everything on VH1's tiny rotation during the time I was in the hospital (Dec 06 to March 07) brings me right back to that place of uncertainty, that feeling of free fall, particularly "Read My Mind" by The Killers. It is one of the few songs, paradoxically, that I grew to like, though. Even after, we sang that one to cheer ourselves up. My son, 3 at the time, always sang along. I am so grateful for those impromptu karaoke dance parties.

For me, it is generally snippets of songs, or rather it is the longing in so many songs. Every other longing, despite the fact that is usually of the romantic kind, is the longing I feel.

It's not the leaving of Liverpool that grieves me, but my darling when I think of thee.

From "Leaving of Liverpool" No idea who wrote it

When I was sure you'd follow through,
My world was turned to blue.

When you'd hide
your songs would die,
so I'd hide yours with mine.

From "Fair" by Remy Zero

Birds may be singing
In my eyes this day;
Sweet flowers may blossom when i smile;

My soul is stormy
And my heart blows wild;
My sweet heart rides a ship at sea.

From "Birds and Ships" Lyrics by Woody Guthrie. Sung by Natalie Merchant on Mermaid Avenue

But THE song is Amen Omen by Ben Harper. It is the song I used when I made a montage for Eva.

Can I find a place within to live my life without you?

Gah! That line alone gets me. Crap. Can't I just go back to telling embarrassing stories about myself?

Day 2 - Movie

2010-10-06T21:45:00.000-04:00

Yes, I am coming to this late, and starting out of sequence. Can I just pass that off as charming and whimsical instead of what it really is -- disorganized and lazy?

Well, nevermind, on with the show. I went through a heavy Why Does Africa Get Crapped On So Much phase in the first few months. It was decidedly not normal and possibly not healthy. I think my husband put up with it as one of my quirks or part of my grieving process, but needless to say I watched many of these films and countless online episodes of Frontline alone.

Blood Diamond, The Last King of Scotland, Lost Boys of Sudan, Hotel Rwanda, Sometimes in April (which was great and crushing, by the way), Lumumba, The Battle of Algiers, and probably others.

In retrospect, I think I was trying to put my loss in the context of more widespread and senseless tragedies. Call it the "it could have been worse" technique.

Post Script

2010-09-10T15:39:00.000-04:00

I checked my phone this morning and found that I had two new voicemails. The first was from a ranger at the park of perdition. His message was, "I understand you need some directions. Call us back if you still do."

Thanks. For. Nothing.

I promised adventure.

2010-09-09T12:29:00.002-04:00

I have been neglecting writing for a variety of reasons, but this experience begged to be recorded. I wrote it to share with some friends IRL, but I wanted to share it here also. Here's what I've been up to.

We have undertaken a remodeling project. We gutted our kitchen, as well as a small laundry room and butler’s pantry. My FIL built our cabinets and we did most of the work ourselves, with his help. To answer the FAQs on the project up front:

A.      Yes, we are still married
B.      Yes, we have a functional kitchen and laundry room
C.      No, we’re nowhere near done.

. Despite the enormous pile of 30+ year old kitchen detritus sitting at our curb, we did not tear down any walls. We just replaced what was there, though we did take down the old soffits and replace our pantry closet with a cabinet. (You know, our neighbors have been a little nosier than we expected.)

We started demolishing the existing kitchen a few weeks (a month maybe?) ago. D flew to his parents' 2 Fridays ago and drove a U-Haul full of tools and cabinetry up with his dad, while dragging his dad’s van on a trailer behind, which was also full of tools and assorted buildy stuff. Despite some tense moments, things went relatively smoothly. After all, they finished the demo and got us back to a working kitchen with only 6 days of work. On day 2, we used a service to find someone to help carry some of the heavier cabinetry into the house. The person who showed up was about 5 feet tall and weighed 105 lbs. He was working the extra job to make money to buy back the Glock (?!?!?) his ex-girlfriend made him sell for some reason that I couldn’t begin to imagine!

In addition to the short timeframe, we had certain scheduled appointments/deliveries that required us to meet a couple of tight deadlines. We had an appointment Wednesday morning to have final measurements taken for our countertops. That meant the base cabinets had to be in on Day 1 (which should have been work Day 2, but D’s dad was behind schedule: see "tense moments" above). We also had to have our laundry room floor put in on Wednesday in order to get the room ready for the washer/dryer delivery. The counters and floors were what we were relying on contractors to do, and you all know how that goes. After using my “mom voice” with the flooring people, we were able to get the floor in the day they had committed to in the first place. Interestingly, the floor for the laundry room was a remnant from a large commercial job they had done and despite asking about 27 times, it was only on the day of the installation that I got a confirmation on the exact color of the floor. It’s name: Blue.

But none of that is the real point of my story. With all the work going on, I tried to keep the kids busy. Our routine was all hosed and we’re all about routine. I tried to cast our predicament in the light of ADVENTURE! We tried a bunch of new things and some not so new things including, swimming, bowling, mini golf, parks, etc. On Monday, the kids and I had breakfast at IHOP (which N, the elder, called IHOOP) and then drove out to Shenandoah National Park. We went to Skyline Caverns and for $16 all three of us got a 1 hour tour of the caves. We then paid $10 to go into a “dragon maze” that took us about 3 minutes to figure out. Then we went to the park, drove up Skyline Drive, stopped a couple of times before deciding to go on a hike. I thought we would walk for 30-60 minutes and then stop for a late lunch before heading home. I figured the kids might even nap in the car for a bit. We had audio books and the weather was beautiful. As we were heading southbound on Skyline Drive, we passed by hikers and each time we did, N would remind me that we were supposed to be hiking. So I pulled off the next time I saw I parking space. It was a completely random choice.

There were two directions we could go from where we parked. We opted to climb uphill so we could climb down on the way back in case I had to carry n, the younger. We climbed well. n, the younger, had no trouble. We came upon some rocks and decided to go for it. We climbed up the rocks and got a great view of the valley below. I took a couple of pictures and thought that it would be wonderful to share them with D. I was so proud of us!

But, it was too hard to climb down the way we came, so we tried to work our way back a different way. We walked for a while and I started to worry that the trail no longer seemed familiar, but eventually, we started a descent and I felt better. The only problem is that we descended for a loooong time. Too long. Well, it turns out that we jumped trails and we got ourselves lost. We had seen one couple on the way up, before our rock climb and 1 man after our rock climb. That was it, but when we saw him, I still felt reasonably certain we’d find our way. After some time (and my sense of time is completely screwy throughout this whole ADVENTURE), I started to worry. Wait, make that panic. I started to panic. We stopped walking. I started barking at the kids. I stopped barking at the kids long enough to call 911 and while I could hear the dispatcher clearly, she could not hear me well. And of course, I couldn’t tell her exactly where we were. She told me to stay put and we did. For hours. At one point, we started to walk further down the path we’d been heading, but we didn’t see anything familiar or civilized, so we headed back to what we possessively started to call “our rock.” Later still, we back-tracked a bit, saw nothing and returned again to “our rock” – the object of our own personal Stockholm Syndrome. Around dinnertime, eager to bring normalcy to our day, I gave each of the kids exactly 4 Skittles, an artifact of a more successful adventure more than a week earlier (ehem, to an outlet mall, which I am obviously more qualified to explore than the actual woods). After the Skittles, which I was carefully rationing (obviously!), n asked me what I was serving for dessert.

Most of this time we were okay, though N was very worried and told me he wanted to cry and that it was the worst day of his life. He started apportioning blame. He graciously accepted some, acknowledging that he had come up with the hike idea in the first place, but he also pointed out that as the adult, I should have known better than to get us lost. Conversely, n was completely nonplussed. Every so often we yelled for help, which merely served to annoy n, and we did a lot of singing and told stories to keep our spirits up. The kids were WAY better at this than I was. Our recent work in 80’s arena rock served us well in this regard, as did such classics as The Hokey Pokey. Suffice it to say that our voices carried, but not far enough. Eventually, it started to get dark and I had to face the prospect of sleeping under a glorious velvet carpet of stars and I hated every last one. I rued the day.

Nevertheless, I positioned us right under a small break in the canopy so we could see the stars, but mostly in the completely insane hope that there were helicopters out looking for us. I regretted every time I’ve ever judged anyone for anything, but especially real adventurers who’d gotten into trouble and had to be rescued using what I had always assumed were vast amounts of taxpayer dollars. Now I fantasized about a helicopter rescue, logistics and deficit spending be damned. I also thought a lot about Into the Wild. That poor schmuck was now me and I'd brought my kids to ruin along with me for my completely naive and gratuitous desire to "experience life!" We settled in. I was stretched out across the Appalachian Trail, such as it is in that forsaken place. My daughter was sleeping on top of me and my son was in the crook of my left arm. They slept, snoring softly. I figured that sleeping gave them some relief from worry and would help them pass the time more quickly. Me, I worried about the “predators” N had earlier described.

The mosquitoes were biting and the last light was fading when I saw the bluish lights of LEDs approaching from the direction in which we’d been walking. Accustomed as my eyes had grown to the darkness, they were like beacons! What a sight for my sore eyes! I bolted upright and blurted something. I don’t know exactly what, but it was intended to convey the idea that we were lost and needed their help and possibly some comfort. I might have levitated, I was so relieved. The hikers were brothers from Ohio on their annual camping trip. They’d gotten a late start that morning after being dropped off by their parents. It was their first day and they were trying to make up some time. I jostled the kids in my eagerness not to sleep on the ground in the woods with the predators. n was disoriented and promptly threw up all down my right side. Doesn't that scream, "YAY! We're saved!"? The brothers opened their packs to us. Wipes for me, a little food and bug spray for the kids, a jacket for N to wear. They also let us use their phone, which strangely had reception in spots. My phone was on very little battery and had no reception. It was love on our end. We didn’t care where they were going. We were going with them. They had head lamps and that’s all I needed to know. I think the kids agreed because neither one would shut up for a single second. N, who wasn't holding anyone's hand, kept falling and popping back up like the most cheerful weeble. n was holding my hand whether she wanted to or not and all the while told one of the brothers literally every story she knows – not linearly, mind you. After walking with them for about 45 minutes (I’m guessing) – with both kids chattering and stumbling the entire time – we finally made it back to our car. But, the kids were not done telling their stories, so after offering profuse thanks (I had to resist the urge to hug them given my eau de bile and Skittles, though they didn’t really smell much better and it was only their first day!), taking a couple of pictures and getting our rescuers’ address, I dragged the kids away to start our journey home. We called D to let him know we were alive, if not entirely well. I turned the audio book back on (Judy Blume is not appropriate for young kids, by the way. Too much name-calling.), got some heartburn hot dogs from 7-11 and drove home.

The next morning, I called the park’s emergency line to let them know we got out alive (no thanks to them! How are my taxpayer dollars being spent anyway?!? hrrrumph). The person on the phone indicated that there were rangers in the area looking out for cars “and whatnot” but his tone suggested that no helicopter rescue was forthcoming.

Now that some time has passed, I have been thinking that maybe we need to go camping this fall. I think it is important that we not let this past experience define us. Back in the saddle, I say! And by saddle, I mean of course, a well-appointed cabin in a well-lit, accessible spot that happens to have trees in view, but no rocks. Definitely no rocks.

On edit:
D tells me the story is not complete without the inclusion of one additional fact .... about er, the measures one sometimes must take when one is "functioning" under duress and yet is lacking facilities for conventionally handling those needs. Ehem. I think you get my drift. Good thing I almost always carry a crumpled napkin or tissue in my pocket. It was stressful, people!

Lighten Up

2010-07-12T20:39:00.000-04:00

Some time after my last post, I started a post called "Rainbows and Puppies" but couldn't think of a thing to say on those topics.

It occurred to me this weekend...no, let me restate that. I had an epiphany this weekend. I was talking to a mother of another child at my daughter's school. We were at a birthday party for a third child in the same class. Completely unprovoked, I was spouting off on the following:

how commercialism is undermining the relationships between parents and children!
how D and I do not buy our children stuff (nay, GARBAGE!) that is branded with characters (with rare exceptions for PBS characters, which we're begrudgingly willing to support)!
how I am doing my best to vanquish or at least resist the dreaded princess phase!
how more enlightened countries have banned advertising to children!
how screen time must be limited!

All of this, mind you, was in response to a simple question about the doll my daughter was carrying around (not hers, I don't much care for dolls). This defenseless woman, subjected to my ravings, merely asked something about some pink alien-looking doll being loved with abandon by my child (who surely knew the end was nigh). I actually don't remember or perhaps I never heard what this perfectly pleasant woman said because I was deafened by the sound of my own righteous indignation ringing in my ears as I clambered up to my soapbox to deliver my soliloquy.

Ever watch Lost? You know those highly unstable sticks of dynamite that were on that ship that was marooned in the middle of the island or whatever (As an aside to this aside -- don't expect accuracy of recall or even the dimmest understanding of Lost from me. I watched every damn episode of that forsaken show and I'm still clueless)? Conversations with me can be like that. Woe to the person who jostles me even slightly.

On the drive home after the party, I had a few minutes to reflect, not only on this conversation, which I've admittedly exaggerated for effect (hopefully of the comic variety), but also on my disposition more generally. I am playing the defensive disposition, in case it wasn't completely apparent.

I've come to the consideration (not conclusion, necessarily) that maybe I need to lighten up. My son's not getting a DS any time soon, mind you, but maybe I should work harder to keep my opinions to myself. Mustn't...scare off...other... humans...

As an act of good faith, here's a photo of a normal, happy, fun time that we had watching fireworks on the 4th. I am capable of normal happy fun time with other members of the species. Occasionally.

...but you can call me Cerberus

2010-07-06T14:44:00.000-04:00

I moderate a message forum for people who've experienced loss in a mono.chorionic mono.amniotic pregnancy. But we also get people on our site who were misdiagnosed and later found to be carrying mono.chorionic di.amniotic twins. The biggest risk in a Mo.Mo pregnancy is cord accident. The biggest risk in a Di.Mo (or Mo.Di) pregnancy is TT.TS -- twin-to-twin trans.fusion syndrome. It is a disease of the placenta wherein blood and nutrients are unevenly distributed between the twins. It can come on suddenly and severely and it can kill one or both twins.

TT.TS can be caught with vigilant monitoring. Laser surgery can slow its effects, enabling the pregnancy to go to full term or very near. One of the leading experts on TT.TS, Dr. Julian DeLia, advocates drinking 3 cans of a protein drink like Ensure per day and his research suggests that TT.TS may be linked to hypoproteinemia and anemia, particularly in mid-pregnancy. And there are outward signs that the mother can be attuned to, if she knows what to look for.

Recently, I did my daily Loss Forum check in on the Mo.Mo site and found a post by a woman who lost a twin to TT.TS. Her other twin is in the NICU with suspected significant brain damage. In her post she indicated that she had not been to the site much because she didn't want to be scared by sad stories. I understand the need to shut out negative possibilities and just survive. I didn't want to think about the scary stuff when I was pregnant either. I knew I was carrying a ticking time bomb of a pregnancy. The closer I got to the time of delivery the more I felt my grip on the cliff side of sanity loosening. Between that abject fear and the religious tone of the boards, I didn't feel as though I had a place there. But there's something doubly tragic in the idea that maybe had she stuck around and known what to look for, she might have recognized the signs. She might have taken the advice to consume more protein. It wasn't hard to find. It might have helped.

And too, I realize that I am one of those scary stories and it's odd to think of oneself that way.

Really? Me? My life is the tragedy you're trying to avoid?

Well, maybe not your whole life, just this one particularly unenviable situation.

I just found it unnerving to have someone spell it out like that, in the Loss Forum (MY TURF!!). With no hint of irony! Can you believe that?

In our corner of the site, down toward the bottom of the list, there is a family of us. I got all my sisters and me. A sad, sad welcome to you, newcomer.

It seems that despite avoiding the site until well after Eva was gone, I now have a place there. I guard the gates of hell. I welcome each new entrant with a deflated, toothless smile. There's a look of pity in my eyes that I can't help. Because I know.
   I know she didn't really believe it would happen to her.
   I know what she's in for -- at least its general outline.
   I know it is agony.

And she

is about

to find out.

What She Said

2010-06-23T21:10:00.003-04:00

"I have a sister and she's in my heart."

The woman to whom my daughter innocently, even buoyantly, spoke these words looked at me, confused. I stammered apologetically, "she's a twin..." That's as far as I got before she was up, seemingly launched like a rocket from her seat on the low playground equipment. For someone less than a week postpartum, that woman had hustle! She picked up the infant seat holding her six-day old baby, walked over to her other son, and attempted to flee. She didn't make eye contact with me. Her flight was arduous with two in tow and awkward with us trailing behind. Not surprisingly, we were parked in adjacent spaces and there was no pretense of politeness. She pulled that car out as fast as the line of traffic behind her allowed. In the interminable moments of negotiating car seats "cheek-to-cheek", my mind churned and roiled. I had no idea how to interpret the situation clearly and react in a way that would lead to an outcome less shitty -- for either of us. Well into the next day, I'm trying not to think about it, with stunning success as you can see!

If there is any hope of letting it go, I have to write it out. Hey, at least my daughter got off without emotional damage, right? (please agree...) She clearly doesn't understand yet. She has asked me if I am happy that Eva is in my heart. She is fond of telling me that she loves Eva and that Eva is always with her in her heart. Because there are a couple of new babies in our lives, she often mentions wanting to give them baby things and occasionally will add Eva to the list of babies to whom she would like to bequeath some outgrown item. So, no, she doesn't really know what she's lost.

She still has her own hell to pay someday and I dread it like nothing else.

Toward a More Perfect Thirst

2010-06-21T21:04:00.000-04:00

If your eyes are not deceived by the mirage
Do not be proud of the sharpness of your understanding;
It may be your freedom from this optical illusion
Is due to the imperfectness of your thirst.

-Sohrawardi

I feel I am consigned to an exhaustion of thirsts.

So imperfect was my thirst once that I scarcely knew the difference between one emotion and the next -- thought, in fact, that the shadows they cast were interchangeable. Maybe it is because the emotions I excelled at were of the indifferent kind. Maybe they were interchangeable; my 20s were sloppily oozing ennui, despondency, malaise... meh.

Now there is nothing so passive as that. I am never so detached and clinical. I have a kind of clarity that I lacked before, but I am so deeply deceived by mirages. I will them into truth. I have a very full secret life of secret friendships (Bless your heart! You're there!) and hallucinations of the ghost of a 4 pound baby. A flash of light. She is always a flash of light, reflections of glass, blinking LEDs in my peripheral vision. Momentarily, I am deceived and it is not the deception I despise, but the evaporation of the mirage just as I'm getting close.

Reading List

2010-06-16T20:36:00.002-04:00

I finally finished Elizabeth McCracken's secret plan to enable Kleenex to dominate the planet (aka memoir, An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination: A Memoir). I have had the book for I-don't-know-how-long. As in, I have an unedited proof loaned to me by a dear friend who got it from I-don't-know-who-in-the-biz-with-access-to-such-inner-circle-treasures. For vast lengths of time, I couldn't even pick up the book. Nay, I could not even look at the book. I had it hidden in a drawer of my bedside table, buried under potty-training stickers, the useless receipts I can't seem to throw away, and other mangled assorted bits of my life's shrapnel.

Though I wish I were just being poetic or flourishy in saying this, it is no exaggeration to confess that every single time I picked up the book, I cried. I might have read a chapter or a page or a paragraph, but I cried every damn time. I don't think I have always been this blubbering a fool, but what the hell, I am now. So it might not have been the best choice to bring the book on a work trip. It was ill-advised to open the book on a plane shared by 3 coworkers. I narrowly escaped their curious glares by being tucked into a window seat far from them, however, and their view of my weepy mess was further obscured by a matched pair of grandparents (and by matched I mean, the same butter yellow sweaters, white polo shirts and pressed khakis). There is something about McCracken's stoicism that brought me to my knees. I felt like we were partners in this story, the way my husband and I balance out each other's moods and weaknesses. I suspect the strength of her writing and her narrative gave me permission? space? to express what we tend to regard as weakness, the betrayal of those tears.

I know I'm not alone in saying that, Pudding, you are missed. You are loved. And you are remembered by so many.

Now I'm reading KuKd. Who knows where all this reading might lead? In a few years I might be ready for Dr. Davis.

Eva Destruction

2010-05-20T21:01:00.000-04:00

D and I watched Whip It Sunday night. It made me laugh out loud and want to knock people down, but I am decidedly not the type. One of the characters had the roller derby name "Eva Destruction" and while I managed to enjoy the movie rather than consider the myriad entendre, I slept fitfully. Friends visited with their twins earlier in the day. I love their girls and know them and their complicated history, so I do not regard them as I might the nameless enviable twins that just appear out of nowhere all the time. I used to look at those twins wistfully. I try not to look at all anymore.

But I have no explanation for what I am feeling and why. I am tired of feeling like liquid, like all my structure has left me and I am a puddle. Sunday was a beautiful day and usually that is enough. We went to the playground along with every other family in our town (it seemed). The boy scout troop, ever helpful, offered the rest of their brownies to us. It being pre-dinner, we were responsible and politely declined.

While at the park, I was spotted by the wife of a friend of D's. Last year when we first moved to our small town, we all went out to dinner together. It was an unmitigated disaster. Okay, so it wasn't a catastrophic oil spill, but it sucked nonetheless. We didn't know the place had video games and we do our best to avoid them. So my son went a bit haywire at the sight of electronic games. I think we ultimately had to carry him out while he frothed at the mouth. But his behavior was perhaps more tolerable than mine. Imagine, friends, our first "date" (because really, that's what it was; a date to see if we are compatible as family friends, fit for playdates and birthday parties). The other lady was heavily pregnant and I blurted out our whole sad tale. I felt strongly that to know me you must know this fact about me. I felt that there was little more to know than the fact of babyloss. And she very nearly ready to explode! Suffice it to say, our husbands get together every so often for beers at the local dive. And I ~~hate~~ feel embarrassed and resentful towards them, begrudge them their normalcy and all the assumptions I have made about their reasons for quietly, politely ~~avoiding~~ keeping me at arm's length.

There's no winning, it seems. I might tell someone and Eva's story is either received appropriately? warmly? but swept aside or the other person runs for the door. You know the desperate trapped animal look a dead baby story can elicit. Either way, I feel alienated. Alternately, I can stay silent and in some situations I have -- either because the context is too "light" or too many people are around (such as the neighborhood gatherings, of which there are many). In those cases, I agonize over the how and when and what of telling. She's not a secret. She's my baby and talking is the closest thing I have to holding. I guess that is why this place is so important to me.

Pick Up and Drop Off

2010-05-11T22:41:00.001-04:00

My daughter and I have a 2.5 mile drive together from her preschool to our home. Lately on that drive, she has been telling me, every day, only when we are alone, that she is so sad that Eva can't come back. Every day. She said that Eva is her best friend and that she wants her sister. All I can do is validate and agree with her feelings and try not to drive off the road.

Her grief is new in a way. It is expanding and taking shape as her understanding of what she has lost is just beginning to dawn. As knowledge and understanding have spread their weight over me and become a general pall rather than an acute agony, I have grown accustomed to its constant presence. Certain muscles have been conditioned to bear the load, even as others have atrophied. But this three year old wonder of mine is just awakening to the twin she'll never see. She is just starting to map her life knowing that she should be going to the park and playdates and to bed at night with her other half. And my validation is a pity. It's meaningless and feeble, just as my mother's "no one ever said that life was fair," was such a poor substitute for wisdom or comfort.

My grief is new in a way. I have long known that Eva's death would be experienced by each of us in a way unique to us. I knew that the time would come when my twinless twin would really mourn. My grief for her loss and her sadness is like stirring a great cauldron, raising those bits that had sunk to the bottom of the pot and started to burn, nearly but not entirely, forgotten.

And Back Down Again

2010-04-26T22:52:00.002-04:00

(Wherein I expose some of the fetid thoughts in my brain. Consider yourself warned.)

Were you ever told that if you made a silly face, it would stay that way? I wonder if emotions might function in a similar manner.

I have sought to downplay my birthday since I was a child. My birthday was frequently a disappointment to me. Whether that disappointment is justified or not is beside the point I am trying to make. If I was disappointed, it is no doubt because my expectations surpassed the capacity of my parents or whoever is around me to make it whatever it was I secretly wanted. I think I am doomed to this worst of both worlds - not wanting to make it a *thing* and being disappointed that something about it sucked (and suckage seems like an inevitability).

Yesterday was my birthday. Saturday night, the adults went out for a swanky dinner and I had the best meal of my life. It was a long time coming. I am really trying to hold onto that. Really, I am. But this year, what I wanted was a peaceful, pleasant birthday.

As for the actual day ... let's just say that the cake went uneaten and I went to bed at 8 p.m. The kids were uncooperative and D was sick so there was a lot of refereeing and lots of redirection and lots of talking in a slow, deliberate and stern tone of voice. "Look me in the eye. Do You Understand?" And I may have torn up the over-sized birthday card from my coworkers out of frustration when the hellions, er, kids, were fighting over it while I was trying to prepare dinner. Because by then, I. was. done. and counting down to bedtime.

But you know, the truth is that my birthday came downstream of some news with which I am struggling. My kids were probably acting out because they always seem to do so when I am stressed and sad and have little capacity for shenanigans. And too, I overreact and see profound implications in a cup of carelessly spilled milk, like I am reading the proteins for further signs of irreversible disaster. He pees on the toilet seat! A future sociopath! Because I know what we know -- that everything may not, in fact, be alright. May never be alright. With apologies to Leibniz-by-way-of-Voltaire, we do not live in the best of all possible worlds.

My son was diagnosed with AD.HD a few days ago and I am just in that place where I have to integrate this knowledge and I wish I could say I am bouncing right back, but I am not. Intellectually, I know that this diagnosis does not change the fact of who my son is, and in fact, is a positive development in that we will take what are hopefully the right steps to help him. He will finally and as expeditiously as possible get what he needs. But...
This is heaped on top of a pre-existing anxiety condition -- his and mine -- which confounds us and complicates him. Now I can no longer hope that his behavior is normal or a phase or even fallout from my long hospitalization and Eva's death. I can't pretend that the weekly therapy and sticker charts and activities and positive reinforcement and all the accommodations we have already made to our lives to fit his needs are enough. It is time to pay the piper. It's time for a formal plan with his school and for adding a psychiatrist to our growing network of support and [gasp] for the possibility of medication if worse comes to worse. It's time to face ~~one of~~ my greatest fears, that things will go horribly wrong for my remaining children.

So, yesterday I felt beleaguered by their inattention and poor choices. Being an incorrigible brooder, I read into my daughter's defiance and decided that she's probably got the dreaded "it," too. I see hopes dashed and potential squandered. I am, in short, totally wigging out.

But writing helps. Today is my day for wigging. Tomorrow, we start making appointments.

Out of [My] Sight, Out of [Her] Mind

2010-04-21T20:58:00.006-04:00

This is not a post about separation anxiety, although we have had some of that lately, especially at night.

No, this is a post about my daughter who is coo-coo for Cocoa Puffs! She is a charmer, a delight, a curly-headed clown who can cross her eyes at will. She's a committed thumbsucker (and I thought binkies were bad!) and weirder still, she likes to play with her navel. When she's doing both, we call it "double dipping." She has the laugh of a diabolical genius. She may be a diabolical genius.

She breaks my heart every time I look deeply into her eyes of improbable, uncategorizable color. I feel this incomprehensible, indescribable tangle of sorrow and joy that there is probably a word for in another, more emotional language than ours. I swell. I celebrate and mourn for who she is and for the possibilities lost for who she represents. Shared DNA. Shared amnion. But not the life they should be sharing still and beyond.

In utero, she was sedate and impassive, the buddha of the womb. Eva was the tiny wild woman -- twin-climbing, kicking, administering "noogies," practicing rope tricks with her umbilical cord. But Twin A was named for her demeanor at the time, my beautiful, gentle baby. She was meant to be the easy baby my mother promised (eh... not so much, actually).

She is not so gentle anymore. Even (perhaps, especially) in her role as little sister, she gives as good as she gets. I am guessing that this might be part of Eva's legacy. Eva means "giver of life." Okay... but don't go too far with that. I just mean that Eva might have left some of her bad-assedness behind, not that she fulfilled her purpose or anything, 'k? I'm just saying, I am not there yet. And maybe, like the mothers of intact twins on the momo message boards say, they just switch up their personalities. It is probably that simple.

So, last night, we were eating chocolate cake. Cuz screw it. We like chocolate cake and sometimes that is reason enough. And yes, I am having to wear my fat clothes today...thank you for noticing. This child asked me for some of my frosting. Friends, I never thought I would utter these words under any circumstances that did not involve the threat of bodily harm, but I gave her some of my frosting and damned if that isn't pure love. She looked up at me, having just smeared herself silly with chocolate buttercream and breathlessly said, "I lufff you, Mommy."

She has stripped me of all my defenses.

Exercising Diplomacy

2010-04-12T21:18:00.001-04:00

A few weeks ago, I acquired via Craigs.list what is currently my prized possession, an Adams Trail-a-Bike, for a mere $70. Making the deal sweeter still was the fact that I was buying it from Bikes for the World. A few days later, the weather was right to go for a spin and my son, who does not ride a two-wheeler independently yet, did very well. The trail-a-bike has given him confidence, improved his balance, and has made it possible for us to go on longer rides than we could otherwise accomplish -- 8 miles or so before the complaints become deafening. I feel better because I can get some exercise with my son while our daughter naps and at the same time, D can get his run in on the treadmill. It is also a way for our active boy to stay out of trouble and for us to wear him out in order to try to keep him out of trouble (a post, or a book, for another day)!

On our ride this past Saturday, my son made an observation from his perch. You see, he likes to talk during our rides. Apparently, (and unlike me) he has the breath to do so, probably because he's not pedaling. Come to think of it, that might be the cause of the bemused grins I get from other adults while we ride (and here I thought we were somehow charming). I have, in fact, caught him with his head down on the handlebars, resting. Anyway.
He noticed, he [loudly] informed me, "that some adults have large butts."
"Ohhh?" I asked. "Like whom? Whose butts, pray tell, have you been observing lately?" The boy is sitting right behind me.
He starts.
"Like..."
Abrupt stop. Even while we ride, I can practically hear the gears in his head grinding laboriously, trying to divine the correct response. He chooses to be prudent.
"Like Dad. He has a big butt and it is hairy, so that means that when I am big, I will have a big, hairy butt too."
Ever the diplomat.
For the record, D's butt is not big. Ehem.

This is the Day. Let us Rejoice.

2010-04-06T11:34:00.000-04:00

[Regarding the title: What can I say? I did my stint in Catholic school.]
Sometimes peace seems as attainable as my goal weight, which is to say (need I say it?) not very. But there are times -- and I don't know it's coming until it's upon me -- that my chest is lighter and more open. My breath is a little fuller and deeper. There it is for a fleeting moment -- the feeling that ~~all~~ 90% is right with the world. 90% is my maximum capacity for joy and rightness, but what I've lost in joy, I have more than recovered in other capacities, which is a paradox of loss, but one that has taken me 3 years to understand. 90% is as good as it gets, but it is more than welcome when it arrives. I am always surprised to feel "rightness," but I didn't chase it off this time. Instead, I let D drive the car. I let the kids eat as many Munchkins as they could stuff into their faces. I looked up through the moon roof and smiled back to the tree limbs that swayed at me in greeting.

We spent Eva's day in the mountains, closer to the sky and to her. In quiet. In the muted browns of the woods before Spring arrives at that elevation. We saw Red Buds throughout the day. Eva's tree is a Red Bud. Seeing so many of them, those violet buds set to unfurl... sigh... I want to imbue that experience with some forced spirituality and meaning. But we picked a native tree quite deliberately, so it is no wonder that we would find this tree in our native land. And anyway, it's not necessary. It is good enough that we were all together. It is better still that everyone was peaceful. It was enough.

Having performed my rituals of love and memory, I was and for now remain, at peace. Now, I just need to hit the gym.

Eva's Day

2010-04-04T00:00:00.002-04:00

I want to mark this day in some way. I want to parent her, so these rituals are a proxy for holding her, raising her. I had wanted to have this finished last year, but couldn't. I fell to pieces each time I tried. This year, I could face this project and finally finish it, though seeing the picture of my husband reading Goodnight Moon to Eva just about guts me.

Knowing

2010-03-22T14:23:00.001-04:00

Tomorrow will be the anniversary, not of Eva's death, but of her first operation. On this day, three years ago at right about this time of day, I sat by her isolette, crying. Those tears came as a surprise, but once they started, I couldn't stop them for a long time. I didn't know why I was crying at the time, and I have only scarcely a clue now. I think it was just nerves, the mounting pressure, postpartum hormones and the sheer effort of having held my breath in anticipation and fear for those many months. I remember that I was sitting next to a woman who seemed kind and chipper. She was with her eighth child, I believe, a boy who had been in the NICU for months and months. I felt self-conscious crying next to this woman, and weak, while from her phone she doled out chores to her older children with pleasant efficiency and matter-of-factness. The other possibility for why I was crying is that somehow I knew that rather than being at the nadir of this road, as I had consciously believed, some part of my being suspected that I had not yet learned what a nadir truly was.

On this evening three years ago, I held my daughter. Her head was in the crook of my left arm. The cords were draped over my forearm. She was a heavy 4lb 9oz baby (though by then she probably was a little less). I was surprised at how she seemed to sink into me when I held her. I was smiling, beaming really. I was confident. She was holding her stats steady, so I was allowed to continue to hold her as the doctors stood over us and informed us that her surgery would take place the next morning, first case. They would be doing a less invasive surgery because they, too, were confident about her chances. We were relieved and excited. We would finally start our climb to higher ground and put the nightmare behind us.

We never believed in anything other than a full recovery for Eva. We fantasized about bringing her home. It was all we fantasized about. I've never felt complete conviction like that before and I probably never will again.

Last night, our carefree Pro.ject Run.way viewing was interrupted by a commercial that rehashed the well-worn "fighter" conceit. You know how it goes. We're fighters, so we win. We beat [choose your disaster]. We conquer [fill in the calamity]. It reminded me of how one of Eva's doctors in the PICU called her that -- a fighter-- said he'd never seen a baby so small fight so hard. And that word and that commercial became a trap door that I fell through last night, because calling her a fighter meant fuck all in the end. In the meantime, here, all around us, are fighters who did win/conquer/succeed/overcome. I am attacked by those stories of gut-listening, those gloating successes that pose as cautionary tales and I want to do violence, but of course, I am not enough of a fighter. I just didn't need any further reminders.

The dark clouds brewing within think that all the fighting and listening and advocating are probably unrelated or at best only tangentially related to one's outcome. The universe is random and cruel. Faith is a waste of time and energy. We have no control and we do not understand. I have no control and I do not understand. In this case, with this child, we did not conquer. We were conquered. All that remains is what we do now.

Fun and its Antithesis

2010-03-17T13:30:00.000-04:00

Parenting's best moments are the carefree ones. Unbridled joy, discovery and wonder. Being childlike. Existing in a pure moment. That purity means a kind of blindness to larger patterns, themes, realities, reactions, obligations, consequences, histories. Just a moment and an emotion without regard for what came before and what it might mean for the future.

I am so hung up on sorting, organizing, connecting, understanding, that I am not so good at childlike. My response, pathetically, is to want to work at it. I am earnest if nothing else, but I think it might be hopeless.

I can watch, though, and I can try to record it and I can try in my cerebral and impotent way to let go. I can, as my husband says, try to be more duck-like.

File under progress: We survived the tea party. But really, actually, and somewhat surprisingly, it went well. I might go so far as to say that it was a success. No, they did not let me finish my forensics-style reading of Perfectly Arugula, which was the inspiration for this event. And mostly they just ran in a crazed, locomotive procession of 2 and 3 year-old girls (led by one 6 year-old boy) in a loud and tireless loop through the main floor of the house. But I think everyone was happy. Food was eaten, crafts were made. Eager not to drink alone, I plied the ladies with wine. Silently, a candle was burning for Eva on the family room mantel. When the candle wicks stopped smoldering and the insulin was cresting in the children's bloodstreams, we said our relieved and pleasant goodbyes.

Waddaya know, it would appear that the third time was the charm.

In Response To Death (and kate)

2010-03-10T14:14:00.000-05:00

My mother lives
in another state.
She does not want me
to move there.
It lacks quality of life
she says.
She is right
about that.

My mother stays
in that state.
She is held there
by my brother.
Her grief
is in that man
who lives
but not well.

That is a death
that does not quit dying.
She hates blood
But prefers it
to 36 years
of limbo. She said
Eva's death is better
than my brother's life.

Rant Time

2010-03-05T22:15:00.000-05:00

I waste time. Every damn day, I waste time. But you know what, I do it on my own terms. I waste time on things in which I am or could potentially be interested. I don't have any spare time, therefore, to donate to hopeless causes about which I care not a whit.

I donate my time willingly and dutifully to children because there's hope for them.

I do not like to give my time to trifling people over the age of say, 22. I believe that if you are over 22 and your mind is still trifling, then well, go in peace, but not with me.

So, you can imagine my outrage at have just spent 10 perfectly good minutes of my life discussing with a coworker the optimal number of beverage cans that should be cooling in our community fridge at any one time. Let's pause while this thought washes over you. Consider how hair was falling out, cells were dying and synapses became permanently disconnected, collapsing in a withered heap within my cranium while this conversation took place.

Oh, it would be one thing if we were having a light-hearted, enjoyable conversation, punctuated with a knowing shrug, a giggle, a roll of the eyes, maybe. But that was not the case. It was, rather, the kind of stultifying diatribe of beleaguered martyrdom that affects your lifespan, or at least your precious, irreplaceable today.

The Charm?

2010-03-04T11:44:00.000-05:00

My first and second attempts at throwing birthday parties for our daughter were frantic affairs utterly lacking in the qualities that are supposed to define a party -- you know, like fun, for example. If one were to witness these exhausted, cooped-up, late winter birthday parties at our house, one would feel rather sorry for the child being, "celebrated." And one might suggest prescription meds to the host.

But you can cue the Rocky theme music because this year will be different! I have been baking and I have been shopping and I have been planning.

There will be a tea party.

There will be crafts
and scones
and cucumber sandwiches
and hats!

And if those aren't the ingredients in the recipe for three year-old fun, I don't know what is! Gentle reader, does "scone" not equal "fun" in your world?

I'm not fooling anyone, am I?

Do I know what I'm doing? Hell, no. But I am going to feign some confidence, even as I second-guess my every choice and decision:

Am I sending the wrong message to my daughter about gender roles? Will the girls sit still and do a craft? What do I do for Eva? What happens when someone asks about Eva's pictures? Where will I find the watermelon tea that the birthday girl requested? How can I make a handle for the teacup cake I've imagined?
Mainly:

Will I hold it together or will I be deported back to Angstganistan from whence I came never to return to HappyPartyFunLand again?

Missing

2010-02-24T09:50:00.000-05:00

My daughter woke up today screaming, "I miss my sister. I need my sister."
I figured that she had had a nightmare and I figured this was a long time coming.

My living children have made more frequent mention recently of their dead sibling. This day was bound to come. In some ways I have willed it here because I want Eva to be a part of our family, not just my private thoughts and fantasies.

Recently, my older daughter (well, by a minute, anyway and just now I realize how strange an idea that really is) came running, exclaiming, "I found Eva! I FOUND EVA!" and brought with her a doll with no face dressed in a hospital gown. The social workers gave our son two of these dolls to prepare him for his twin sisters' birth and NICU stay (the other doll is in Eva's box).

My son, ever-obsessed with and taunted by villains in his cut and dried world of good vs. evil recently chided his sister because he does not like to talk about real death, which makes him sad. Last month, we resurfaced his worry dolls and he told them that he wanted them to help him not think about "villains, sharks, Eva and death."

But then my daughter, who is not yet 3, told me that she wants to die so that she can cuddle her twin. I have no response for her. I am utterly bereft.

And my son told me that he wants to find a scientist who can turn him into a wizard so he can bring her back, and that one kind of made me smile.

All this was scrolling through my mind as I walked down the hall to my daughter where I found her, "looking everywhere" for her ... slipper.

Stations of the Cross to Bear

2010-02-17T08:40:00.000-05:00

The process of getting to you was both one of steps taken individually and one of seeing nothing but the destination, which was your broken body lying in a cold place without your family.

To see you each day, I would get in the car, buckle the seat belt, pull out of the driveway, K-turn to the street heading in the right direction -- towards, away. I was always headed in the wrong direction for one of my babies and the right one for the other. Each step required sure footing (impossible) and my thoughts were both a precise recipe leading to you and an eye chart too far to make out, such was the state of my postpartum brain in survival mode.

Traffic lights were excruciating. Speed up to make the yellow. Force the car to stop for a red. Merging was an act of stoicism. No one needed their destination as much as I needed mine. If they could hear me crying, they would have known that. If they heard me screaming, they would have pulled over. I was the ambulance, such was my urgency.

And then, after elongated minutes of hurling myself around the ring road at destruction speeds, I could see the building. Here was the final test. Pull in to the parking garage. Get a ticket. Maneuver around other scared people in this obscurity -- the dimness of this structure, darkened by the smoked glass of the cars and the people inside could see even less, such was their anguish.

Around and around until I found a hole in which to leave my machine. Find that bridge from the parking structure to the place where some are getting sicker and where others are healed. Cross the bridge, and hurry down the stairs, incision burning, to the hall, to the elevator, up to the floor for very sick children, wait at the call box for admittance, briskly enter, wash my raw hands, ignore the stinging because it is a price and at least I have found one to pay. I want to pay, to make a deal (will you take my limbs?) and that burning is nothing, really, such is the futility of my negotiations.

To your bed and your sweet face. I am useless and this shames me, but I am with you now.

I would have paid but in the matter of your life and death, I had no form of currency.

Too Much Sorrow

2010-02-12T23:54:00.001-05:00

In another place, I try to support women who have been through loss in a mono.amniotic twin pregnancy. In most of these cases of loss, the women lose both babies to a cord accident in utero. Then they must deliver. And whenever that happens, I feel my chest constrict for all the women I know who have had to go through labor knowing their babies are dead already. Labor's reward and justification? There is none for these women.

I just think about that and I feel my skin go cold and my eyes sting. and my nose. How could it not? I just have to sit with that every so often. How does one come back from that place of horror?

At other times, the circumstances are less finite. Lately two women have come into our circle who have each lost one of their twins in utero and have each been given such horrendous information, such shoddy care that I want to rage at their incompetent doctors. I want to spit nails. Into their faces. One woman was told to abort her surviving twin because the baby may end up with the same defects that the lost twin has.

The other woman was told that she didn't need to see a specialist because she only had one viable baby now, so it was essentially a singleton pregnancy.

Wait. What??

Yes, yes, pay no attention to the dead baby in the uterus. Don't worry about the extra set of umbilical cords. It's nothing. really.

I have to write this here because there is no other place to express my disgust . I try to remain measured and constructive over "there" but they don't know about this. So, here, I can bubble over with fury at these shitty, dismissive so-called professionals who with their ignorance and neglect alter the trajectory of lives from this point to infinity. Those babies are never coming back. Those mothers are never coming back.

Even from my own small vantage point, I, too, am never coming back.

Changes and Challenges

2010-02-05T00:05:00.000-05:00

One of the many things with which I credit Eva is my modest workout regimen. I am no gym rat, nor am I completely new to exercise, but I value my health in ways I did not before losing her, so I go. And perhaps more importantly, I need that space and the catharsis that I get from channeling my anger constructively. I can't tell how many times I have cried for her on the way back to the office after a workout. I actually do a little running (though perhaps "running" is an overstatement), which in my chubby, misspent youth was nothing short of unthinkable. I was always the penultimate (yeah, cuz I'm about vocabulary) person to come in from a PE-mandated run in high school (I want a paper bag to breathe into just thinking about it). The one person behind me probably had a good 40 or 50 pounds on me. Well, thirty, at least!

Sadly, I get the most movement from the front torso region (more on that later), especially if I get to the bottom of my sports bra stack, like I did a couple of days ago. And lest my reader (no, that's not a typo) think I am utterly hopeless in this endeavor, let me share this: I have a talent, actually, for one part of the whole exercise thing. I am excellent at sweating. I sweat profusely and with abandon. I sweat when I tie my shoes. I turn purple when I reach around to do battle with my bra clasps. I, dear reader, am a world-class perspiration machine. If there was a cost-effective and portable desalination solution, I could irrigate California's Central Valley and solve their problems. No need to thank me.

But it's not all Nobel-worthy. There, too, is the dilemma of undressing and showering at the gym. Books could surely be written about this -- the timing, the strategizing, the order of clothing removal and textile reCOVERy. Angles! As I scurried today from the shower to my locker, I noted mentally that I had a very short window to dress before someone came out of one of the other shower stalls. I had to decide if I should maneuver the dressing-while-toweled approach, which is modest, but clumsy and potentially injurious, versus the dropping the towel and speed-dressing while still damp method, which is riskier but faster. I went with the latter and was yanking my sweater down victoriously just as the other woman emerged. She, incidentally, is a towel-dresser (better balance). The worst part of this for me is changing bras. At the risk of getting too graphic, pregnancy and breast-feeding and yo-yoing weight have taken their toll on the old ta-tas. Frankly, I need to do a little scooping action when applying the brassiere garment and that's putting it mildly. Sometimes it feels more like origami to tuck the girls in properly. I am a little self-conscious about this, if you must know.

So there you have it, the weepy, the drippy, and the droopy.

Despite Our Best Intentions

2010-01-26T13:19:00.001-05:00

We recently replaced a very aged Mac and doing so gave me occasion to look through our photo collection as I ported the library of photos over to the new machine. Because I love photography, I couldn't help but pour over the photos. As I moved backward through time marked in images, I anticipated seeing our precious few photographs of Eva. But I didn't get that far because it is a photo that was taken after her death that gave me pause.

***

I didn't take the girls' survival for granted. Before entering the hospital at 24 weeks, I bought 2 preemie outfits to bring them home in. That's it. With MoMo twins, you can't help but be aware that there are no guarantees. Even at viability, even when you're being monitored, losses can happen. Throwing a heart defect into the mix of my already cautious nature and let's just say that I was, at a minimum, guarding against hubris. All this sounds so strange and foreign to me now, but I felt that humility and pragmatism and well-managed expectations required me to wait on the exuberant pink spending orgy.

Nevertheless, during those eleven weeks in a hospital room I had a little time on my hands. In addition to a love of terrible-yet-entertaining VH1 shows, I found a great deal on Craig's List for a double snap n' go and 2 Snug.Ride infant seats. All for $100! That's pragmatic, right? I wasn't tempting anything, was I? It wasn't even pink. My dear friend went and picked up the gear for me.

The day my surviving daughter was discharged from the NICU we brought one of the car seats to the hospital and found that although she met the weight minimum, the straps were nonetheless too loose even at their tightest setting. Par for the NICU course, they sent us on our way in late afternoon and told us that our daughter was discharged and they would not keep her another night. Nor would they let us take her home in our Snug.Ride. We spent that evening going from one store to another until we found a seat that would accommodate her puniness. At that point, we had no fewer than 4 infant seats.

So, when the reality that we would not be needing our double snap n go set in, we paid the deal forward. I took this photo for the post.

A woman brought her young daughter, pregnant with twins, to look at the gear. D handled the transaction, while I sat out of sight, but within earshot, nursing (and you'd be right to wonder what, exactly). Grandma asked why we were selling the gear. Silence, hushed tones and shortly thereafter, I could hear her asking if she could give us more money. It was one of those bewildering/well-meaning/clueless interactions. Seeing the picture brought back a complicated set of emotions (pain... guilt... hopelessness) and the memory of one of those surreal moments -- a clear moment like a splinter in the fog of early grief.

What Your Mother and the Broken Treadmill Have in Common

2010-01-25T13:56:00.000-05:00

If the broken treadmill in the gym were on Facebook, I would friend it. And that is saying something.

Today, I rendezvoused with the broken treadmill at 1200 hours for a quickie. At least, the treadmill told me it was a quickie -- sub-7:00 miles at times. That treadmill is like my mother, telling me I'm fast, when all other evidence suggests otherwise. The broken treadmill insists that I am worthy even as it screeches and groans under my ponderous waddle, even as the mirrored wall shivers and the very laws of physics mock us. Like my mother, I go to this treadmill when I want to feel good about myself. But if I want the truth, I have to go elsewhere.

The Mommy Track

2010-01-21T21:41:00.000-05:00

Back in the day I used to say, "I'm not motivated by money." You could practically hear me sniffing with self-satisfaction. It was easy to be unconcerned with money at the time. I didn't have kids and I made more than I needed. But there was plenty that work didn't offer me and adhering closely to my normal pattern, I focused on how I was different from my coworkers, how I didn't fit into my work environment rather than what I was getting and how I was similar. In any case, I may not have been motivated by money, but I was sure held in check (ha!) by it. I didn't leave until an acquisition and lay-off ended the wild swings of opinion on whether or not I would grow a pair (of mammaries, sha!) and get out.

When I finally started working again, it was on a contract basis and the "dream" job quickly revealed itself to be notevenremotely serious/career-enhancing/likely to exist for long. So we thought maybe it would be a good time to get on with the second child thing. And voila, 9 months later Eva died. For all the times and ways I've turned those two words over in my mind, I've never before today really thought about the fact that from the time we decided to have our second child to the time we lost our third was nine months. We are so lucky in so many ways. I feel so damned sometimes.

But this was about the outside the house kind of work. After a few months of being at home with my surviving twin, I got to a point where it became essential that I go back to work. I took the first job I was offered. It was a big pay cut and a lot less of a challenge, but in my grief and eagerness to discount myself, I took it. I told myself that I needed a soft place to land and that I couldn't afford to fail. Both were true, but two years later, the place on which I landed feels so soft that I can't quite get my footing. It's starting to feel like quicksand. It neither provides me with the flexibility I would like to be available to the children nor does it reward me in the ways I need now.

But it wasn't until a good friend was effectively jettisoned by her employer after she returned from maternity leave that I realized that she and I had been mommy-tracked, she by her boss and me by, well... me.

Diminishing Returns

2010-01-08T11:48:00.000-05:00

My thinner, neater, and just-generally-better half has been gone all week for mandatory work fun (MWF). I shall hereby take this moment to wax insanely bitter about it... and then I shall get on with the show.

MWF is called "kickoff" and implies a certain organizational collaborative strategory planning orgy of business readiness and profit margin fireworks. In reality, it is drinking, eating, lectures, drinking, eating, lectures, free time, drinking, eating, drinking, fun and games, drinking, eating, lecture, free time, eating, drinking, eating, free time, fun, fun and drinking. I think I have pretty well summarized the week's itinerary. In these winter escapades (note how easily that word turns into escape), I mean "kickoffs," which are always the first week in January (you know, right after the holidays, first week back at work and school, just to keep the whole funness thing happening...for them), activities have included, bowling, deep sea fishing, super long zip fly through a canyon and other distinctly profitless (ad)ventures. In the meantime, we have been at home in sub-freezing temperatures trying to get back into the swing of things. Sniff. He comes home tonight and that's a good thing, cuz the house needs to be cleaned. And he's good at that.

Here's how we have fared without him:

Monday: D leaves and I resolve that we will have a peaceful and unharried week. Nutritious meals will be eaten and voices will not be raised. There will be no occasion for time-outs. The wine in the fridge will not be consumed.
Monday night: Reasonably healthy dinner is consumed, thanks to the spinach I snuck into a tray of baked ziti (with brown rice pasta - thank you Tra.der J.oe's!) made on Sunday. Children are relatively kempt and peace, however tentative, is maintained.

But, sleep is scarce. Son worries loudly to his worry dolls about "villains, sharks, Eva and death" but seems relieved and unburdened thereafter.

Tuesday: Alarm does not go off in the morning for the second day in a row. I thought I fixed this problem (yeah, apparently I did not suspect the pesky volume culprit)! I wake to the sound of the children playing by themselves because they do not want to "bother" me. All, however, is not lost. Nutritious breakfast (organic vanilla yogurt, with lowfat granola and fruit) is still prepared. We manage to rally and work together and we are fed, caffeinated (um, just me) cleaned, dressed, bundled and strapped into our car in under an hour. We are champions and we know this. Son asks, "Is this a record?" Satisfied, I tell him that it just might be.
Tuesday night: Pickup motorcade is a slog. Both children have gotten less than stellar reports from school. Disagreements between the children occur regarding dinner and the right of the other child to continue to exist. Mother compromises by offering a mix of Asian and Italian favorites on the same plate (a state of affairs that WOULD NOT STAND were D present). Hidden spinach is still nobly appearing in the roll of vegetable and I hope against hope that the shu mai has some cabbage or something mixed in there. Mother consumes wine. Highly anxious son ends up in mom and dad's room that night.

Wednesday: Mother is required to appear at place of employment at 7:30 a.m. Breakfast is coffee cake because there is no dilly or dally over delicious baked goods in this house. I think there may have been some bruised fruit also. We three stoicly trudge to the car at an unreasonable hour only to arrive at son's school before the morning care program starts. Trudge back to car and wait with heater on full blast. Daughter tells teacher at dropoff that she had cake for breakfast. Mother avoids eye contact with teacher and scurries away, arriving only 15 minutes late for work.
Wednesday night: Welcome reprieve from normal commute. Son is sullen as always when going to his sibling's school, suspicious and on the lookout for any potential injustice in the distribution of familial resources. Dinner is tater tots and chicken burgers. Vegetable = ketchup. Mother ponders beverage options. Voices may have been slightly elevated but only so as to make my meaning Quite. Clear. My dear friend visits, leaves at midnight.

Thursday: No alarm snafus as children cheerily wake me at 6 a.m. Based on the forensic evidence found later, they were probably fed fruit leather in the car on the way to school, but I can't guarantee that.
Thursday night: Back to the long slog commute. I can't remember what was for dinner other than the terrible Muscat I choked down with seltzer. You can be quite certain there was no vegetable...

Friday: I woke up with a cold and my son sleeping next to me. Saw snow on the ground and skipped the caffeine. Experienced palpable relief on the discovery that schools were open.
But then I got to work and saw an e-mail from my boss in which he indicated that he was going to be late because [the same system as my son's] school was delayed. What? Where is my son? I remember dropping him off! With an adult! I think! A quick check of the appropriate (read: not the one I checked from home) website revealed... PHEWW... we were both right. School was delayed, but the before-school care program was only slightly delayed. My son is probably playing shoot 'em up games on the computer as I type.

All this is to say, we really missed you, better half.

Vanquishing Platitudes Wherever They May Cower or Everything Will Revert to the Mean

2010-01-05T22:22:00.000-05:00

I heard that song, "Rocka.bye" or "Lullabye" by Shawn Mull.ins on the radio today. I'm not complaining, mind you. Anything beyond the core rotation of 4 songs on the average radio station is most welcome. Anyway, digression off... The line in the chorus, "Ev.er.y.thing's gonna be alright..." got me thinking about one of my favorite bones of contention -- the feeble platitude. I have written about this topic before. It's become a little obsession, actually. One of the ways I have changed as a person as a direct result of what we went through with the twins and with losing Eva is a renunciation, a lack of patience with these insipid throwaway words. Maybe it's because we heard so many of them and they were so hollow.
That which doesn't kill you...
Everything happens for a reason...
It'll be okay/alright/fine...
Forgetting the expressions of blind faith, which leave me cold.

I want to know what that line means. On some level, I should accept it as meaningless, as all platitudes are, by definition. But what if there is some truth to it. After all, the phrase isn't "everything will be great" or "nothing will change" just that everything will be alright. Maybe it is a more humble and truthful expression than I give it credit for and it does account for the possibility of the unexpected even if the unexpected sucks. Maybe it is my understanding of what 'alright' means that needed an adjustment and the expression was right all along.

Further, "everything's gonna be alright" doesn't imply a deadline and so maybe over long horizons the majority of us survive what befalls us, even if some of us are slightly more diminished and some of us are slightly enhanced (a topic for another day). Is there some profound truth that over time everything and everyone -- including those who've experienced tragedies -- will revert to our mean, give or take a standard deviation? Is that what it means to have hope and to "be alright?"

Don't Tread on Me

2009-12-28T11:48:00.000-05:00

There is a cute little girl who goes to my daughter's school. She is in the room next door to my daughter. They share the same [relatively uncommon] first name. Prior to starting at this school in September, my daughter and I had last "seen" this child when she was in utero. My then infant daughter and I had gone back to visit the staff at the Antenatal Testing Center where we had had between 35 and 40 ultrasounds -- just me and my girls getting to know each other in this unorthodox way.

This baby and her mother were there waiting for their ultrasound. I knew her mother, who was a neonatologist at that same hospital and we made brief and awkward small talk. This particular neonatologist is really the only one I clearly remember from our harried, desperate days in the NICU. I had met her before I delivered. She was the one who came to my room in the hospital where I spent 80 days to give me a consultation on the risks that 28-weekers face, even though I was already at 30. And she was the one who first uttered the phrase "myocardial thickening" in reference to my daughter, the one I had, until then, believed to be healthy. She was the one who, failing to notice that I hung from sanity's cliff side with only my fingertips, stepped on my hands -- carelessly, not meaning to hurt, but doing so nonetheless. She rattled through our life's circumstances like she was confirming a takeout order. She ticked off all our exotic ingredients like they were common condiments or ho-hum pizza toppings. Our heart defects were mundane, our rare flukes pedestrian.

Okay...Let's see ... that'll be two monochorionic monoamniotic twins, one with hypoplastic left heart syndrome, the other with myocardial thickening. Maybe a couple of VSDs on the side. Do you want to order open heart surgery with that? How about some breathing assistance? Yeah? Would you like that through CPAP or a ventilator?

Okay, I know ... That was really crass and self-indulgent and morbid. The point I am trying to make is that sometimes, just sometimes, your life, your very existence and that of your family feels reduced to a set of labels and discrete transactions. And when that happens, the sum of the parts does not equal the whole. Ironically, I think it was only Eva who managed to transcend the transactional orientation of our hospital experience. They pulled out all the stops for her and she died anyway. I can't help but wonder if anyone comes out without diminishment. This healing place, does it heal without scaring?

So... encountering the doctor brings me back to that desperation. When I see her now (which is a mercifully an infrequent occurrence), it feels as though I am still gripping a cliff side and she still doesn't see where she's walking.

Scary

2009-12-22T22:25:00.000-05:00

Lately every time I see a new pharmaceutical commercial, I lose a moment's sleep or few minutes off my total lifespan. I also sprout some stress-induced acne, but I am quick to just pop those suckas. These ads are alternately hilarious; picture utopic vision with a just a wee smidgen of earthly comeuppance and terrifying (as in, people, the cure is worse than the disease!!). We're so unused to... how you say?... truth in advertising. These things seem not to go together too well.

Witness the Bro.oke Shields informational spot for La.tisse. That is some crazy, crazy. Because no matter how desperate I am for thicker, fuller, longer lashes, I am just not willing to suffer the travesty of redness, itching, weird hair growth wherever La.tisse comes into contact with my face or a permanent change in eye color. Cuz if you're going to head on up to your eyelid anyway, why not just go the extra step and apply the mascara if it is so stinking important? What am I missing here? It's not like the medication has a permanent impact, unless of course, you counting the increased brown pigmentation to your eyes. That is permanent. The eyelash growth, not so much.

So what's with the tirade, you wonder? A few years ago, as D and I were about to get married, I started to feel fatigued and I noticed my pee was the color of iced tea so I went to the doctor. Long story short, I was destroying my liver... with my acne medication. My liver enzymes suggested that I was close to liver failure, but hey, my skin never looked better.

Atonement

2009-12-17T09:52:00.003-05:00

There was someone in high school with whom I had a close but unequal friendship. I was desperately insecure and she, well, she did not suffer this particular affliction. In one memorable, er.. memory, we went into one of those recording shops in the mall where you could get a tape (yesss, a tape, remember?) of yourself singing along with an instrumental version of a hideous song. She chose "Wind Beneath My Wings" because that, she said, was what I was for her.

Ehem.

So by the time we were seniors, with me enabling her the whole way, she was soaring above whatever I managed to feebly huff and puff below. Finally in the Spring of our senior year and on the heels of college acceptances (which I mention because I think it played a role), I started to come into my own ever so slightly. It's funny what a little acceptance letter from a school you really want to go to can do for the spirit. Suddenly I realized a certainly reality of our friendship and my role in it. And I didn't want it anymore. I didn't need it. I had the envelope. I was leaving and starting a new life in another state and [here's the rub] there was little consequence to my decision. So, I left her pretty unceremoniously. I came to the abrupt conclusion that I did not need that relationship anymore and that she would not change and I was done. I did not attempt to resolve or discuss. I actually remember feeling free.

It was not a shining moment of friendship or emotional maturity on my part. I went from being long-suffering to not being at all. I know that my sudden abandonment hurt her and I regret that. In fact, I know because she told me so at the wedding of a mutual friend a few years ago. It was such a dramatic moment for me that I am convinced I had a dream about it before it happened and I could scarcely sleep the night after. But even then, I didn't fully recognize my own shabby role. My response to her was a non-committal, "it goes both ways."

I hope that by now the universe has offset my bad behavior and that we're better friends to others than we were to each other.

Separation

2009-12-08T15:21:00.000-05:00

I found this [profound, genius; sorry I can't avoid adjectives under the circumstances even though I know good writing need not lean on them] three line poem when I was in high school, before it could really mean anything to me, before I had lost or gained much of anything. I loved this poem then as a series of words that amounted to beauty. Now I love it as the brutal, plain truth. I came across one of the "prayer cards" from Eva's service, on which we'd printed this poem. I hate how those cards turned out. They are so plain, so artless. She deserved better and so did Merwin. But of course, nothing is enough of anything when it comes to her. And she is everything when it comes to me.

Separation

by W. S. Merwin

Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.

Faith and Reciprocity

2009-12-04T12:20:00.001-05:00

This blog has been my private refuge, my dark, safe space for a long time. Although I didn't give much thought to "audience" when I started it well before *everything* happened, I went private (and when I say private, I mean only I could read it) after the collision of fan and feces because, stupidly, I didn't want to burden anyone with my grief and I didn't want to feel obliged to hold anything back. But I have slowly come to realize that as I have come to regularly read other people's blogs (I'm down with OPB...), I have come to form attachments. I have cried and been comforted. I am opening this blog as an act of faith and reciprocity.

There. Done.

Pretense

2009-12-04T11:50:00.000-05:00

In adolescence I always took notice of the appearance of other women and girls. Not consciously, mind you, but perhaps in the second or third row of consciousness I would size females up and categorize them -- fat/thin, pretty/not, etc. I don't think it was all about evaluating them independently, but rather trying to ascertain where I sat in the ever-changing ranked list in my head. I was always seemingly sizing myself up in comparison and I was always finding myself lacking.

Thank goodness I never have to be an adolescent again, cuz that kind of thinking is a travesty of self-respect and (at least as important) a highly inefficient use of finite brain power. Think of what I could have learned if I hadn't wasted so much time worrying about the size my butt compared with the next person's! Misspent youth, indeed.

[whisper] I do it now, though...

I size everyone up, but not according to their physical attributes (at least, not always). I am always calculating the level of pretense I must prop up on my shoulders. How okay does this person expect me to be? How deeply must I bury it? At times it feels (and I've used this metaphor before) like a piece of rotting meat that I have to carry and that I have to hide. The few people and places where the pretense of okayness is abated for a time enable me to just put it down. The relief is real. The change is palpable. Because hiding it is hard. It stinks, after all and so the schemes are often elaborate and the effect... odd and odoriferous. Come to think of it, that's me in a nutshell.

It's as exhausting as always believing that you are the fattest and ugliest (....and most broken....) person in a room and always checking to make sure.

Panic and the Sublime

2009-11-10T09:14:00.004-05:00

Yesterday, for a brief period, D wasn't sure where the boy was. I was on the phone with him and he was distracted and lost track of the boy while they were at the doctor's office. He was fine, but for those few minutes, we were not.

I was abruptly brought back to that moment of weightlessness, when your child's life is out of your hands. It's a fork in the road. Your child can be returned to you or the very worst thing can happen. Those are basically the options. In the life BE (before Eva), I always knew that latter prospect was out there in the mist of possibility and yet my reaction in those moments was to basically believe in a good outcome. But yesterday, I remembered the last big fork and I couldn't ... despite the fact that surely most panics end well.

I was thinking about this fork-in-the-road idea last night as I was frosting D's birthday cake and later as I was falling asleep. Maybe for that reason, a merciful thing happened: I had a sublime, euphoric dream about Eva surviving. In the way of dreams, she just was discovered after being dead a few weeks. She might have even been under the bed, not sure. In any case, I picked her up, put her to my breast and, given the effort of raising herself from the dead, she was hungry and nursed beautifully on her first try. But because I had so much milk for her, I did overwhelm her a bit. She sputtered and I burped her. But after that, she was all smiles, beauty, pure light and unqualified joy. It was a gift and I overslept trying to get back to it, to her.

The Right-Born King of England

2009-10-30T10:54:00.005-04:00

At the 37 second mark, you can see "Arthur, the right-born king of England."

A few months ago I wrote about the a stressful time we were having with the boy. In the Spring it looked as though he had ADHD and we struggled mightily with what the ramifications of that diagnosis would be for him. At the time he was in a Montessori program. At the time he was seeing a counselor. Well, he got kicked out of that school and we found a new therapist for him once it was clear that his former therapist was in favor of medication as an immediate recourse despite our feelings that meds were not yet called for given his age and our belief that underlying his behavior was some serious anxiety. At the very least, we felt grief and anxiety should be ruled out completely and other techniques applied before moving on to medication, which seemed extreme to us (even as our nerves were fraying from the stress of it all).

All through the Spring and Summer I wondered (okay fretted) what the Fall would bring for the boy. We enrolled him in our neighborhood public elementary school for Kindergarten. We shifted our schedules to accommodate his activities and to limit daycare. He would have Karate 3 times per week after school and would also be in our town's soccer league. The boy was excited about going to his "big school" ever since his first visit in May (incidentally that was just days after he was kicked out of his Montessori). And the boy loves playing soccer. And he seems to be getting a lot out of Karate, even if he is sometimes ambivalent about it. And his visits with his doctor, well yesterday he asked if he could start going twice a week (oy! my calendar and my wallet ache at the thought).

So yesterday, when the man went to the boy's parent-teacher conference at school, I had occasion to reflect on the past few months, on that diagnosis, on the pain and anger I still feel when I think about how his former school dealt with us. Because here it is -- our children are the best of what we have to offer (at least, I believe that my children are the best of what the man and I have to offer), so when the boy was jettisoned by his school after we did everything we could think to do to engage with the school and improve the situation, it hurt me deeply. Not only was my fragile hope dissolved, but my son's potential was dismissed. I'm still not over it all these months later. I think frequently about the boy's teacher looking me in the face and telling me that Eva's death was "in the past" and I shudder at the callousness and stupidity of such a statement. Babyloss brings some cruel garbage even from the well-meaning, but it sometimes it reveals that some people (and I'm going to try to show some restraint) are, in fact, not well-meaning. For me, particularly coming from a teacher, that was the worst thing. And while I'm on this particular nerve, why would a head of school tell a parent that a teacher came to him to complain about the parent's child? What possible purpose would that serve? Perhaps it was just context for the words that followed -- don't bring him back.

In contrast to the unresponsiveness of our private school, every call made to our public school was returned within 24 hours, before we were ever enrolled. And the boy's teacher? Hallelujah! We hit the jackpot. When the man told her about Eva, she said, "I'm so sorry" and "I'm glad you told me. Thank you for being so open." So, 6 months ago, the professionals around the boy wanted to medicate him. Now, those around him do not think he has ADHD (though clearly he is impulsive) and agree that 5 year-olds should not be medicated. For once, we listened to our shared gut. For once, it seems, we were ... right? Okay, at least we did not make a horrible mistake. We think...

8 Years of Married Bliss

2009-10-29T09:52:00.001-04:00

And did you know that socks are a customary gift on that auspicious occasion?

Yeah, me neither.

Pressure Cooker

2009-10-28T10:20:00.003-04:00

My mother's pressure cooker was the stuff of nightmares, one of her many seemingly medieval implements of torture (or cooking or haircare or yogurt-making for that matter). I don't know where or when she got it. I do know that it was red once, but that was long before its form was burned into the deep recesses where my childhood fears live still. Her admonitions never to touch it, never to pick up the ...???... "thingy" while it was on the pot left no room for doubt. If I disobeyed, I would blow our house to confetti (aside: that would have been a highlight of an otherwise cheer-challenged childhood). And had there been doubt, the shh, shh, shh, shh that accompanied the thingy's menacing swing would serve as further warning.

Shh, shh, shh, shh is the sound also of my longing escaping when I can no longer contain it in this body. When my knuckles are sore and my eyes are bleary from the effort of punching down my desire for Eva, sometimes I just have to say something. Today I asked D if he wonders what it would have been like. What a bore I am! What a tedious refrain that one is! He says, "it would be harder." Yes, it would be physically and financially harder, but emotionally... you'd never hear me shh, shh, shh, shh again. And maybe my red paint would stop peeling off.

Softness against the smell of plastic

2009-09-03T11:04:00.004-04:00

(I wrote this last week)

Some days I can't imagine that I will have to live without you for another 35-50 years or more. 29 days is not nearly enough. I wish you were here still. Where is the miracle of your survival?

I tried to talk about you last night to your twin. I love you and I don't want you to be forgotten. Daddy said you're too young, your sister is too young to be saddled with my grief. Maybe I am trying to get her to carry it with me. I am permanently diminished by your absence. My soul had an accident, a horrible disfigurement. Small strokes, tiny seizures, imperceptible shadows of death... in the NICU, PICU. I didn't go to the burners, to the morgue. I will never touch your sweet skin again. Softness against the smell of blood and plastic.

2 years, 4 months, 9 days

2009-08-13T11:42:00.005-04:00

I have recently come to learn of a community of "babyloss." It is both a blessing and a curse. I am reminded of Sartre's wisdom: Hell is other people. But I guess that I would add that hell is their presence and their absence. Hell is the isolation I feel in a crowd and the darkness I inhabit in broad daylight. Loss is a new language that most people don't speak and have no interest in. It is sand in the throat.

I am waiting for that moment of trancedence that somehow justifies or mitigates this impossible state of being. The pain is renewed so often by so many innocuous situations that I wonder how much longer this can continue before my despair smashes everything around me.

Recently my coworker's triplet grandsons were admitted to the hospital with a mysterious presumed virus. She related that her daughter saved one of the boys by recognizing he was unwell and taking him straight to the hospital. My friend, who is no stranger to stuggle, also managed to save her sick child by insisting that her babies co-bed and by never leaving her side. Although no one intended to suggest that my parenting was inadequate, I have not been able to shake the feeling of abject, fetid failure. And that's all I can say about that right now.

Close the window

2009-08-10T14:31:00.005-04:00

Sometimes I read the tragedies of others and I feel as though I am a part of something. Sometimes their sorrow draws out my own and attacks me. The part of me interested in self-preservation begs to close the window. For the first time in a long time, I find myself desperate to leave.

Lately, two stories about mothers who saved their babies have revived my despair and guilt. I was such a shabby, useless person. Maybe if I wasn't she would have lived. Maybe there's is an evolutionary component to this whole thing. If I had been a stronger member of the species...things might have been different.

The thoughts that come unbidden

2009-06-01T16:14:00.002-04:00

The funk is rising to meet me lately or maybe I'm descending again. In either case, I am utterly useless in a time requiring a high degree of utility. Maybe a refreshing mint would help? Or maybe I could do some violence to a skinny girl. I feel strong enough and angry enough to snap one over my knee. At the very least, I should break some crockery.

What now?

2009-05-06T15:56:00.004-04:00

For the past few months we've had some ups and downs with the boy that have been more difficult than previous challenges. I used to say that the boy has always been a "willful" child. Now we're struggling with the possibility that it might be something more than that. The boy has been seeing a therapist since January. It was perhaps something we should have started a long time ago, but things came to a head for him at school and it became abundantly clear that we needed help. Initially, we thought that the help we needed related to the trauma of losing Eva and of the events and circumstances surrounding that pregnancy. So we sought a play therapist who has experience with trauma.

But after seeing the boy for a few months now and after doing 2 different sets of evaluations with him, including one with a school psychologist, it seems we're headed for an ADHD diagnosis. It's a bit of a shock, but we've been hearing the term suggested to us for a few weeks now. The surprise is that the boy's therapist went to school to observe the boy in the classroom. She called the man and told him that the boy's behavior at school was terrible. After several weeks of an upswing and not getting bad reports, we feel knocked down by this. We have had no indication from the school that his behavior had deteriorated, but then again, they are non-responsive, to put it politely. The boy's behavior at home is generally not bad, but lately we've seen the difficulties pick up there also. So it's not totally out of the blue that he's having more trouble at school but the severity is surprising. And the therapist said that the other kids avoid him. She seems to be suggesting that we get him medication, which we are loathe to do. She seems to imply that his self-esteem will suffer because he will be ostracized if he's left to continue without meds. But we don't want to deaden his creativity and ability. I don't know... I feel afraid. I feel as though we can handle home, but we're not always going to be at home. He will have to find a way to get along at school. somehow.

New Beginnings and Endings

2009-05-01T16:30:00.004-04:00

First, the beginnings:
The boy has started bringing home readers from school and reading to us, which is a really wonderful thing to see. In so doing, he is taking another step toward independence. But he's not quite ready to fly the coop just yet. On Wednesday, I went to our monthly neighborhood ladies' event for the first time. We just moved January 30th. I wasn't invited in February. I couldn't make it in March, but this time I was sure to go. The boy bravely let me leave and told me that he wasn't too worried that I was going to Ms. S's house, as long as I came back, gave him a hug and kiss and woke him up to tell him I was home. The next day, he told me that when I leave, he worries that I will die. As hard as it is to hear that and to know all too well from where it stems, that he can articulate his anxieties is a new and wonderful thing.

Now, for the "endings":
The girl, who has had vague interest in and access to a potty for several months, has finally made a *product*ion of it. Until this week, she would see the potty, and occasionally she would sit, we would cheer, and she would stand to start the process over. Clearly, we had misplaced the emphasis.

Well, while we have a potty seat that she has easy access to because it is on the floor, we also have a portable seat that can be used over an adult potty. This one has the added appeal of being festively festooned with Sesame Street characters -- Elmo, "Big Birdy," Cookie Monster and Ernie, to be precise. We have tried to play it cool on the potty front, so this folding seat sits atop the tank in the kids' bathroom waiting for inspiration to strike. Well, it struck the other day! The girl requested the seat to be opened and we placed her on it. She tinkled! Not enough to darken the water at all, but we heard it! Honest! A day or two later, her confidence bolstered, she tried the floor model. She made a little noise. We cheered! She made a little more! We expressed our pride, our adulation, our glee at all that emerged (mostly it was gas, mind you) and we're very much hoping to make a habit of it. No pressure...

Certainty in a time of turmoil

2009-04-17T16:26:00.003-04:00

I do research for a living. I like data. I like gathering, organizing, spreading it out and basking in, all to lull myself into a sense of greater certainty. I don't know that I have the conviction of my youth any longer, so beliefs and conclusions need something to be anchored to. The sea floor is data. We may not be touching it, but we can throw down the anchor when we need to.

And sometimes, when you're floating along, you need to. But then again, sometimes the data is too general and what happens to you, too specific. It's binary, not a probability.

Facing Facebook

2009-04-17T15:50:00.004-04:00

It is a topic worthy of some contemplation and I've tried, but I can't seem to understand my aversion to Facebook. On the surface, I recognize that I feel defined by Eva's death and any interactions that don't enable me to deal with that reality head-on feel fraudulent to me. But somehow entering into my status bar "yeah, I am just sitting here... thinking about my dead baby" doesn't feel right. Nor does it feel right to pretend that that is not what I am doing. When I am...

Maybe on another layer, I don't feel successful and being "found" at this point in my life is disappointing to me. I don't know where I am. I don't really know what's next and I feel as though I have wasted so much time.

But I joined. I entered as little information about myself as possible. I just joined so that I could see pictures of B's new baby. Maybe I'll deactivate my account after that. Or maybe I'll face the fear. Hey, maybe I'll learn something along the way. After all, the MoMo site has been very good for me. Maybe another toe is ready to dip.

Sestina for Eva, Two Years On

2009-04-04T10:23:00.001-04:00

I wrote this to mark 2 years without Eva. A sestina is hard to write and that felt appropriate.

Sestina for Eva, Two Years On

Two years have passed since you were born with your twin
On every day since I have cradled your heart
A garnet sliver inside your open chest sewn together in blue
Plastic which was your world – isolette, tubing, the smell. I mourn
For all that we came so close to having -- the memory?
A lump of sand I can’t choke down. Naomi, your other half

Thrives but too there is the howling hollow spaces your absence, your half
Leaves unwhole. At 18 weeks we first learned of our twins!
You lived only 21 more and how I wish I could have more memories
Of your beauty, more than just that night before open heart
Surgery (the first), before the car accident, before cardiac arrest that morning
Before your body swelled, called for mercy and released you to the blue

On the good days, relatively, I imagine that you are soaring in the blue
Sky, your bright eyes free of pain and plastic. The other half
Of the time, I think I would take you in any form and mourn
The lost chance to hold you with your brother and your twin
for even one moment as the family of five that is my heart’s
very beat if not the picture in my addled memory.

One part of me is pulled to you in memory
One part to hope, the pieces of my cracked soul in red and blue
The veins and arteries that are tentacles originating from my heart
boring through everything everywhere, splitting into halves
and dividing against themselves creating more twins
multiplying, amplifying all that we’ve celebrated and mourned

Only now can I finally see a morning
Bird soaring and I erect it on my shoulders into a tower in your memory.
In time we will tell Naomi that her twin
Flies so that she will never feel alone as long as the sky is blue
We spin and weave mythologies of you in trying to fill this cup to half
Fullness --for a start-- and grow the left ventricle of your heart

In another universe or dimension perhaps your heart
Is whole and beating. And in that place, I need not mourn
We are complete with both halves
That were never divided. There a book of memories
Is written about two girls with my curls and eyes a kind of blue
Touching as they were for 34 weeks, 6 days, inside one amnion, twins.

I will, to eternity, hold the memory of your heart,
Covered in the blue of an infinite sky in morning
You are half of my world, twin to the earth on which we continue.

2009-01-08T16:20:00.003-05:00

Eva,

It has been 21 months now, without you. When your tiny body finally quit, you broke my heart, my sweet and beautiful girl. Every day I claw at the injustice of life without you. But when you broke my heart, you opened it also, driving me relentlessly to want to be worthy of you. If I couldn't be your mother for more than 29 days, maybe I could keep you alive in other ways -- in my soul, for certain.

Moving wrong along?

2008-08-11T13:30:00.005-04:00

The boy is going to be attending a Montessori program starting this fall. It is pretty costly and I can't help but wonder if we could have pulled this off if Eva had survived. Almost certainly, we could not. We're starting to look at houses a little closer to this school and to work, another prospect that would have been both dimmer and more necessary with our third child living.

While most of my brain recognizes that the boy is one of the children who did survive and thus deserves to be able to take advantage of opportunities that arise, there is a small part of my brain, dedicated to the proposition that all children are created equal, that is tortured just a little by the fact that we're making this lemonade. I feel disloyal to my girl. If I had the choice, I might choose differently. I don't have the choice.

Oh no! A budding fashionista?!?

2008-08-06T16:04:00.003-04:00

The girls would have been 17 months old today. We're very proud.

To celebrate the occasion, the girl showed off her exploding vocabulary (which now includes yes, no, ball, duck, bye-bye -- all exclaimed with passion and emphasis -- if not the correct pronunciation) with a new word. As we were getting ready to leave this morning, I took the girl to the living room and she clearly anticipated my intentions because she pointed to her bin of footwear and exclaimed "Sthoo!" which could only mean one thing. Baby needs a new pair of ... [word of the day]

This I [Don’t] Believe: The disempowering nature of “bootstrap” cliché

2008-08-06T10:15:00.000-04:00

(I wrote this and submitted it to This I Believe. It was not selected for broadcast and I am okay with that.)

Whenever life challenged me as a child and young person, I went to my closet of “go-to” aphorisms and wrapped myself tightly in one or more, depending on the situation, the depth of its chill. Through every setback or disappointment, I would bury my face in the softness of “it is for the best” or “everything happens for a reason” or the truly heroic, full body cashmere sweater of “that which doesn’t kill you, only makes you stronger.” Those cloaks stood me in good stead until now.

Then last year I watched one of my identical twin daughters die in the aftermath of 2 open-heart surgeries. It was the last and worst trauma in a very complicated pregnancy and a doozy of a short life. Over a year later, I keep trying to go to that closet but none of those platitudes fit anymore. They’re garish and abrasive in the light of the “new normal” as bereaved mothers call it. I can’t take comfort in “think of what you DO have” and won’t even touch “well, at least you still have one.”

But it is “that which doesn’t kill you, only makes you stronger” that I keep going back to, keep trying to use to cover the rawness of my new skin. I want it to be so. A little strength would come in very handy, in fact. I want a heroic happy ending wherein the devastated but persevering mother goes on to channel her agony into something that makes the world a better place. The problem is that I am not stronger, not yet anyway, and all I have to show the world thus far is this essay. So, for now at least, I am donating a closet full of easy-care clichés for something more minimal.

The new garments, the ones that seem to fit after shock and anguish have abated somewhat are not as thick and not as soft, nothing ever will be again. But though the chill still passes through, one can find a little warmth in “be as well as possible,” “I am thinking of you” and most importantly “I have not forgotten her.”

Long in the Tooth

2008-04-25T10:45:00.003-04:00

I'm 34 today. Gettin' oooooooooold. But it's cool. I have the rest of my life to fight off aging, having retired my uterus for the duration.

I am and have been to varying degrees of success (and failure! I am the rare woman who's actually managed to GAIN weight since delivering the girls) trying to get back to my fighting weight. I am a long way off. I guess an unexpected consequence of having babies and losing baby is that I have almost no vanity left. Who cares about cute clothes and saggy deflated body parts under the circumstances. It's a little freeing, at least. I care to the extent that D has gotten into very good shape and I want to hold up my end of the bargain, but clearly the circumstances are a little different for me. Nevertheless, a good restrictive diet seems to be in order and will add the benefit of just a little bit of self-torture, which is called for!

Loss Begets Loss

2008-04-11T10:28:00.002-04:00

Today is the original due date for the twins - one year later, of course. This date is probably not remembered by anyone but me, but it nevertheless looms in my consciousness as a symbol of normalcy, something -- one of the things -- that was lost in all this. The losses mount, the baby, the life itself and the avalanche of things, emotions, relationships, HOPE and POSSIBILITY that suffered unceremonious diminishment and demise along with Eva, who is in a way, eve.ry.thing.

Ironically, that realization (that loss begets loss) is something I've gained, something that has emerged from the vacuum. And it is this understanding that is enabling me (among other things) to make a little modest progress. Credit must given to the wise mothers I've started to meet in the virtual vacuum, which it must be said, is something I had not placed my value in. It is only hard-won humility and utter desperation that brought me to open myself up to others in this way. But in the absence of any other alternatives, I spent the time to find others still coping. I have been impressed and moved by the grace and thoughtfulness I've found on the CLIMB message board, eLimbo. How about that?

Lessons Seeped In

2008-03-27T10:49:00.004-04:00

A year now and most of the time my brain has been a bowl of pudding. But I think I have learned a couple of small things

1. A sure way to lose friends and alienate people is to mention your dead baby. Grief is inconvenient and unwieldy and you should really try to keep the cover on it. It's not that they don't care. They do, but they want you to get the whole thing over with so everyone can go back to the way things used to be. And didn't they show up for your service? Didn't they graciously accept your misery before you even understood enough about the situation to be miserable? Whose fault is it that you were so in shock for the first months that loss had not yet come to define you, settle into your very bones until long after all the friends and neighbors had packed up and left?

2. Loss is a menacing trickster. One day you may feel the weight lifting ever so slightly, but just as suddenly (and surprisingly) as that feeling appeared, the tractor of trailer of sorrow will hunt you down and level you at full speed.

3. Time is linear but grief is not. Time may heal most wounds but the death of a child is surprisingly immune to this form of treatment.

4. Right after Eva's death, a nurse told me that men and women grieve differently. At the time I thought, "she doesn't know us." Apparently, she does.

5. I thought I cared about my child's "quality of life." I don't. I care about her life period and know that I am no judge of its quality or lack thereof.

6. No matter what choices I made, I would have regrets. Regret is one way of pretending I had some real control or say in what happened. If I could go back and undo or redo, I would only replace my current list of regrets with new ones. This is seemingly the natural course of motherhood.

At this moment

2008-03-26T15:11:00.004-04:00

The surest way to repel people it seems is to tell them that I lost my child and that I'm hurting. Close friends, long-lost acquaintances, my mother -- I am honestly surprised by the roaring silence around me.

Almost a year on, I can almost smell the plastic tubing and the blood. I can feel your warm soft skin, your wisps of hair. There has been nothing worse for me than this feeling. It used to be that I cared about quality of life. Now I only care about life. I would take you in any form. Not that I want you to suffer, but I want you here and I am no closer to peace and understanding, no closer to resolution.

10 months

2008-02-04T15:03:00.001-05:00

Dear Eva,

I miss you still. I don't feel as though I can talk to anyone about you without feeling guilty. I'm not sure where I can turn, so I'm turning to you directly. Maybe the energy of you and my love for you have combined somewhere in the universe. If only. Eva, when I see your name, I am paralyzed. Eva, when I think of you, my throat constricts. I am sitting at my desk at work and I cannot do anything but long for you and try not to let that longing crush me.

This weekend, I baked cookies and ran for the first time with your brother and crawled around the floor with your sister, teaching her to walk. We watched the Superbowl (or part of it) together. Every good thing is diminished without you.

This weekend, I kept thinking of our drive to the hospital while you were dying. Your absence is the worst sort of violence.

Big Days

2008-01-22T11:57:00.003-05:00

Saturday, January 19th, was a big day for the girl. Her first tooth finally broke through (beating her brother by 7 months). She finally figured out how to crawl forward on her knees to where she'd actually like to go. And, she went to her first Hoyas basketball game. It was not her first sporting event. That was a minor league baseball game in September. But our annual Hoyas game is a tradition that we enjoy. And she lasted almost through the whole game. We have yet to make it to the bitter end...

The girl started daycare full time today. After weeks and weeks of looking for a nanny, we finally accepted the fact that we needed to expand our search. We found Ms. E and her home daycare. She has 3 other kids -- her daughter and two siblings. I hope the girl does well there, but I suspect that we will be the disease vector, not the other kids. We'll just have to see. I hope perhaps we make it until the girl can go to Win.wood. Otherwise, we may have to go back to the drawing board.

Life is for the Living

2008-01-22T11:44:00.001-05:00

And today, the boy marks the end of his 4th year on "Earf," as he would say. He's a smart and funny kid. He is high-strung, energetic and naughty. His memory is crazy. And he's quite intuitive. Last night he was hitting his head a little with the heel of his hand, as (I admit sheepishly) I have done out of frustration a few times. Yes, I am totally batshit, but that's another post. We asked him about what he was doing and he said, "Mom does this when she's very upset." and we probed him further for how he feels about that. He replied, "I feel very sorry for Mom."

Well, last year the boy's birthday party was a few weak cupcakes eaten in my hospital room and if that doesn't suck, I don't know what does. So this year....

Fancy-pants cupcakes from a bakery in a superhero theme at school. Thereafter, we'll be painting t-shirts. He will then be taken out to dinner at a restaurant of his choice. He chose Red Ro.bin. At some point, he'll get his present from us, a digital camera and when we get home, he'll hopefully see a big box on the doorstep -- a new blue electric guitar. And, on Saturday, we'll have a dinosaur-themed party at home. Unfortunately it will be mostly grown-ups and babies, but so be it. I hope it will be a birthday worth keeping in that steel-trap of a brain he's got.

We're all about onward and upward.

You don't know the half of it

2008-01-15T16:38:00.000-05:00

Everything everywhere Eva-related can stop me [dead] in my tracks. I'm not "out" at work yet as a grieving mother. The truth is that for everyone but me it is old news. At least, that's how it feels. Even with my mother, on whom I have leaned so heavily, the welcome is worn too thin to hold this weight. Even my own mother has told me in not so many words that it's time to get on with life as it is.

So making it news, disclosing to new people that Eva lived and lives still in me is difficult, if not impossible.

So when a new coworker told me that she does not envy me in my working motherhood, I couldn't help but think, you don't know the half of it. I am trying to mother a dead girl.

Your Eyes and Mine

2008-01-09T16:03:00.001-05:00

My mother says I'm torturing myself by not letting go. Maybe that's true. But I keep finding new ways to unfold the soul of you that I carry. I keep raking through new and old forms of grief and I don't want to let you go. I want to finally peel back the covers to the place where you are and I cannot accept that it doesn't exist. It is harder to live without you than it was 6 months ago. I didn't know when you died that I would never see your real eye color. I didn't realize that we 5 people, my precious family were never physically together. I never had that precious moment of holding both my babies together.

Monday, I realized that I have a photo of you on my phone, which would be lost if the phone were ever lost. So, I e-mailed it to myself and I found that in that photo, your precious eyes were open. It is probably the only photo of you with your eyes open. I want to dissolve into its pixels.

Today I saw an article that said that the US ranks last amongst industrialized nations in healthcare. I wanted to read it but couldn't. All I could think of was you. Today I also learned that a coworker's daughter is named Evelyn. I immediately thought....Evalyn.

My mom always tries to suggest that you would not have been healthy if you'd lived. NONSENSE! In my heart, you would have been the beauty and light that the girl is. It is nothing short of cruelty and misery that has taken you from us. And anyway, maybe it's not logical but I would do anything to have you in any form. I didn't think that before, but ...

I wonder what the purpose of your life was and what good will come of it. Part of me thinks that nothing good can come of your death. But you did live for a time and nothing bad can come of that.

9 months and counting

2008-01-07T10:32:00.000-05:00

The further from Eva's death I get, the harder it seems to become reconciled to it. Yesterday was one of the worst days I've had. I feel as though I will slowly become engulfed by despair. I am struggling mightily with the two who remain, with work, with managing a family and a house and trying to earn my keep, but no matter. She's who I want.

Eva, what I wouldn't do to have you back. I finally sent myself a photo of you that I took on my phone. Your eyes are open and I am afraid I might lose the phone and thus lose forever the one picture of your open eyes that I think we have. I've never felt so close to the edge of breaking.

2007-12-31T23:48:00.001-05:00

Goodbye, 2007. Don't let the door hit you on your way out.

A few of my regrets

2007-12-19T11:37:00.000-05:00

1. I didn't wait until 37 weeks to deliver.
2. I didn't get to hold both my babies at the same time.
3. We were never all in the same room together.
4. I didn't bring you home alive.
5. I didn't hold you while you died.

The American Idea

2007-10-19T10:24:00.001-04:00

I am looking at the American Idea through a long lens trained on the life of my daughter, which lasted 29 days, and its aftereffects.
My parents are immigrants and when they got here, they (like all immigrants) hit the ground running. In raising me, they imbued my consciousness with all the things we all assume when we think of this singular idea of our country. It is, after all, the essence of the American identity, which I embodied for them. They told me I'd be the first woman president of the US (though mercifully it seems I might be beaten to that punch). I was told in school as evidence of my specialness that "God don't make no Junk!" For me, the takeaway was that a future dutifully-planned and carefully-examined would lead to a good (i.e. stable, prosperous and happy) life.
In the wake of my daughter's death, I think that my utter disbelief and disappointment is in part a response to the horrible realization that I won't have a straightforward happy life. The most basic assumption about my path, no matter what equivocating I might have done on the surface of my consciousness is shattered.

For the Memorial I didn't know existed

2007-10-17T20:27:00.001-04:00

Here's the draft as it stood on Sunday, the day I was supposed to give the talk that I thought I was giving in two weeks....sigh...

Hi. I'm Audrey. I would like to share the story of my daughter Eva with you.

In this place of white-knuckled anticipation, I spent the last 11 weeks of my pregnancy waiting for the birth of my daughters. They were monochorionic monoamniotic twins, meaning they shared an amniotic sac, which is a dangerous, albeit cozy way to spend the prenatal period. Complicating matters further, Eva was diagnosed with a complex heart defect called Hypoplastic left heart syndrome, meaning her left ventricle was underdeveloped, which is fatal if left untreated.

In this place of redemption, my daughters were born at 34 weeks, 6 days gestation, a time of my choosing, offering a tenuous balance of risks. They were smaller than we thought they would be, but they surprised us in other ways as well. Most notably, Eva's heart was in far better shape than anyone anticipated in utero. She was not treated as a hypoplast and the 3-stage surgery that seemed a certainty no longer was. Over the first days of their lives unfolding, we received the best diagnosis possible, short of "Oops, did we say there was a heart defect? Our bad." That said, Eva's heart was not normal and she still required a surgical repair, but a less drastic one than we'd been prepared for. We were eager for her surgery. In the days leading up to it, Eva was starting to struggle to breathe and we wanted to get past that phase and have her on the road to recovery. Onward and upward! The night before, Dave and I were with her in the NICU, there were a number of people there surrounding us, we were all so positive and happy. I was holding Eva and she was happy to be held by me, I think. We had been at the nadir for so long, that we were anticipating relief at the upswing we thought we'd be starting.

Then the next morning, day of surgery, I had a minor car accident and failed to make it to the hospital in time to walk Eva to surgery. I was calm about it because I never seriously considered that there might not be a happy ending. After all, the doctors had never seemed as confident about Eva's chances as they had the night before.

But, in this place of avalanches, Eva arrested on the operating table before any repair had been done. It was, of course, one of those terrifying transformative moments. The happy calm of the staff surrounding and supporting us became the sounds and the sights of the center ceasing to hold in an outcome we never suspected. I will never understand why but with that catastrophe we began the process of losing Eva and the discovery of what a nadir really feels like.

Later, there was another arrest, another operation, blood, kidney failure, lung collapse, horrible swelling. Torture, in other words. We just didn't see it. We just believed our baby was a fighter and would make it and so we didn't do our basic job. We didn't protect her or save her or even hold her while she died. Only after.

And in what now feels like another spectacular failure of mothering, I stayed home the day before she died. I had gotten a cold and I didn't want to risk getting Eva sicker. She had a long road ahead of her (we thought) and infection was her biggest risk (we thought). So, I stayed home. Dave was there and reported back that she had had her best day post-surgery. Until.

"I don't think we can get her back" were the few words that ushered in the vast hollow of life without Eva. Once we got the phone call summoning us to the hospital on that night, I felt as though I was standing between two sets of train tracks. At the moment of her death, I felt as though trains were passing on either side of me, overwhelming me, threatening to level everything in our life.

In her 29 days here, in this place of possibilities, Eva fought like hell. Even before she was born, she revealed herself to be a tough little kid. She was the one who pushed and kicked and squirmed during all the sonograms and non stress tests. She climbed over her sister at one point, not content to keep to her side of the uterus. Once she was born, the precious few times we held her she sank into our arms, telling us that she needed us and causing us to recognize that she was more than her tiny mass. She was 4lbs 9oz at birth and never really got any bigger. She endured so much and I regret it all. We never questioned the path we committed her to until its futility became clear to us only after she succumbed to trauma after trauma. But we were just accepting what had to be done to have her home with us. We believed absolutely in her recovery, so much so that it was 3 or more months before the shock of her absence finally gave way to despair. I remember saying to Dave the day she died, or maybe the day after, "I miss Eva" as though she were away at camp or visiting Grandma.

In solitude, I wake every morning attempting to map the boundaries and terrain of grief, looking for its edges which don't seem to exist. I am trying, have been trying to put words to a situation in which words fail utterly, and yet I want to talk and could talk for hours. There are so few opportunities to celebrate and mourn Eva openly. At first, our friends and families surrounded us with love and support. Basking in that warmth, we initially sought out people to see and talk with. But we had no idea how quickly time would force us to close the book on Eva, at least outside our closest circle. We've become marked people, the ones with the dead child and few if any dare breach the wide perimeter of pain surrounding us. Eva's absence is a tangible thing, a large piece of cold, raw and rotting meat. I can't cook it and I can't eat it. It's an albatross that is to be carried.

If you didn't know about Eva, if she'd never existed, we would appear to be the American ideal of the nuclear family -- 2 parents who love each other, who've had a long and relatively uncomplicated relationship, with their 2 kids - 1 boy and 1 girl, healthy. We got exactly what we wanted but there's hell to pay. I feel as though I walked out of a Greek tragedy meant to warn against hubris and the folly of thinking you're in control of your life. And now we can spend eternity longing for Eva, wishing things had been different, willing to suffer any ruin to have her back, the presence of her identical twin amplifying everything - giving comfort and underscoring our loss in equal measure.

In this place of beginnings and endings, what we all share is the ultimate disappointment, the nuclear weapon of outrageous fortune -- that our children will not all survive us. Our babies – the best of what we offered of ourselves to the world-- are gone and we're a little diminished. I can only hope that while this sorrow is permanent, it doesn't crowd out all else. Over time, we must try to scratch out a place of peace, however tentative and uncertain.

Disappointments

2007-10-17T20:16:00.001-04:00

The memorial at which I was to speak took place on Sunday. I didn't speak because I didn't know that it was on Sunday. I was upset, to say the least. I still don't know if the fault lies with me or someone else, but it hardly matters. I was mortified and hurt and disappointed and so on. It sucks because it was a missed opportunity and because I let people down (albeit unintentionally), but so be it. There's not much more to say.

I did make it to the hospital, though. The man had hernia surgery today and I made a quick visit to HRP, my heart in my throat as I did. I saw one of Eva's neonatologists, Dr. W. She was being seen at the Antenatal Testing Center and was like a fish when I saw her regarding Eva. But at least she remembered us. That's something.

I didn't get to see many people I would have liked to have seen. And today I feel more wistful for Eva than despairing. The boy told me this evening that he dreams about Eva every day and he asked me if she will grow. If only.

But hey, at least the man's surgery went well.

Draft for memorial

2007-09-11T20:42:00.001-04:00

The last time we were here, in this place of avalanches, we'd just laid eyes and hands on our daughter, Eva, for the last time. It was April 4th and our daughters were 29 days old. I'd always intended to come back here and get Closure with this place, in which I spent 79 days before being released on my own recognizance. In times like these, Closure, like control, is a mirage that evaporates as you get too close.

Here are the facts: After a false positive screening for neural tube defects, I was diagnosed at 18 weeks of pregnancy with monochorionic monoamniotic twins - meaning my girls shared an amniotic sac, one merciful step shy of conjoined twins. At 20 weeks, I found out that Baby B also had a heart defect -- Hypoplastic left heart syndrome, meaning her left ventricle was underdeveloped, which is fatal if left untreated. Because of the rare form of twinning we had, which could result in cord accident and death for both girls, I was kept in the hospital for monitoring of the babies after they achieved viability at 24 weeks. Once they were born, however, it looked as though Eva's heart was in far better shape than anyone anticipated in utero. She was not treated as a hypoplast and the 3-stage surgery that seemed a certainty no longer was. We received the best diagnosis possible, short of "Oops, did we say there was a heart defect? Our bad."

But there was still a defect and its effects would become more apparent over the coming days. So, we were eager for her surgery. In the days leading up to it, Eva was starting to struggle to breathe and we wanted to get past that phase and have her on the road to recovery. Onward and upward! The night before, my husband and I were with her in the NICU, there were a number of people there surrounding us, we were all so positive and happy. I was holding Eva and she was happy to be held by me, I think. We had been at the nadir for so long, that we were anticipating relief at the upswing we thought we'd be starting.

Then the next morning, day of surgery, I had a minor car accident and failed to make it to the hospital in time to walk Eva to surgery. I was calm about it because I never considered that there might not be a happy ending. She arrested on the table before any repair had been done. Everything changed. The happy calm of the staff surrounding and supporting us became the sounds and the sights of the center ceasing to hold in an outcome we never suspected. I will never understand why but with that catastrophe we began the process of losing Eva and the discovery of what a nadir really feels like.

Later, there was another arrest, another operation, blood, kidney failure, lung collapse, horrible swelling. Torture, in other words. We just didn't see it. We just believed our baby was a fighter and would make it and so we didn't do our basic job. We didn't protect her or save her or even hold her while she died. Only after.

And in what now feels like another spectacular failure of mothering, I stayed home the day before she died. I had gotten a cold and I didn't want to risk getting Eva sicker. She had a long road ahead of her (we thought) and infection was her biggest risk (we thought). So, I stayed home. Dave was there and reported back that she was finally making urine and had had her best day post-surgery. Until.

"I don't think we can get her back" were the few words that ushered in the vast hollow of life without Eva. Once we got the phone call summoning us to the hospital on that night, I felt as though I was standing between two sets of train tracks. At the moment of her death, trains passed on either side of me, overwhelming me, threatening to level everything in our life.

In her 29 days here, Eva fought like hell. Even before she was born, she revealed herself to be a tough little kid. She was the one who pushed and kicked and squirmed during all the sonograms and non stress tests. She climbed on her sister at one point, not content to keep to her side of the uterus. Once she was born, the precious few times we held her she sank into our arms, telling us that she needed us and causing us to recognize that she was more than her tiny mass. She was 4lbs 9oz at birth and never really got any bigger. She endured so much and I regret it all. We never questioned the path we committed her to until its futility became clear to us only after she succumbed to trauma after trauma. But we were just accepting what had to be done to have her home with us. We believed absolutely in her recovery, so much so that it was 3 months before the shock of her absence finally gave way to despair. I remember saying to Dave the day she died, or maybe the day after, "I miss Eva" as though she were away at camp or visiting Grandma.

We're here to try to put words to a situation in which words fail utterly, and yet I want to talk and could talk for hours. There are so few opportunities to celebrate and mourn Eva openly. At first, our friends and families surrounded us with love and support. Basking in that warmth, we initially sought out people to see and talk with. But we had no idea how quickly time would force us to close the book on Eva, at least outside our closest circle. We've become marked people, the ones with the dead child and few if any dare breach the wide perimeter of pain surrounding us, no matter how much we might want them to. Eva's absence is a tangible thing, a large piece of cold, raw and rotting meat. I can't cook it and I can't eat it. It's an albatross that is to be carried.

If you didn't know about Eva, if she'd never existed, we would appear to be the American ideal of the nuclear family -- 2 parents who love each other, who've had a long and relatively uncomplicated relationship dating back to their teens, with their 2 kids - 1 boy and 1 girl, healthy. We got exactly what we wanted but there's hell to pay. I feel as though I walked out of a Greek tragedy meant to warn against hubris and the folly of thinking you're in control of your life. And now we can spend eternity longing for Eva, wishing things had been different, willing to suffer any ruin to have her back, the presence of her identical twin amplifying everything - giving comfort and underscoring our loss in equal measure.

I wake every morning attempting to map the boundaries and terrain of grief, looking for its edges which don't seem to exist. I saw a couple in their 90s on TV recently, crying over their daughter who lived for mere hours more than 60 years ago. They haven't found the edge of grief either, apparently.

More than 6 months on, I have good days (when we're together and happy) and bad ones (when cheerfully worded medical bills arrive at home long after her, weighing now more than her),. Like an adolescent trying to make accommodations for some disappointment, I still fantasize that it was a mistake and Eva will somehow find her way back to us, but I held her dead body until it turned cold and blue. Finality it its purest form.

What we all share is the ultimate disappointment -- that our children will not all survive us. Hope in the form of our child has been crushed and the future is diminished permanently. I can only hope for now that while this piece of sorrow is permanent, it doesn't crowd out all else. Permanently, but not completely.

train of thought

2007-08-29T11:53:00.000-04:00

On your best day we got the call that doesn't honor bed time protocol.
I handed your twin to Teta, said you were not well, and left in my frayed pajamas.

I was between two train tracks, the ground started to rumble beneath me.
We drove to the hospital, that place of avalanches, running red lights and chanting
It can't end this way.

We ran to you, the place where you exited my body a horizontal burn radiating
Men compressing your chest and nurses calling out the numbers read on your blood
The tea leaves of your X-ray

Chaos as the rumble grew louder, trains coming in on either side of me
Your father paced outside of your room and I stared dumbly at the scene of your
death unfolding

I don't think we can get her back, your surgeon said.
in the moment that the trains passed me simultaneously
Pulling in opposite directions at the center, not holding.

Opening doors down the dark corridor

2007-08-27T10:18:00.000-04:00

I feel as though I've become aware of dimensions of consciousness that were previously unknown to me. There's a darkness I've come to wear on my soul.

Mapping it Out

2007-08-14T19:19:00.000-04:00

Every day, I spend hours thinking about Eva. Each day I awake with a single desire -- to fully map the terrain and boundaries of my grief. I just want to know where it begins ... and where it ends. So on a daily basis I run my fingers through it. I go over it and through it. I come up with daily metaphors to try to understand it. But I always come up with very little. Almost nothing.

I want to create something good out of loss. I would endure any ruin to have her back, but short of that, I am desperate to have something good in her name and memory.

call all good things Eva

A Cancer

2007-07-18T16:13:00.002-04:00

I know now that Eva's death will be my slow metastasizing cancer. It will be my undoing. What started on April 4th and what will finally end when I do. That's what this pain feels like. That's what I fear I am becoming. I walk through every day deadened by this pain. I think thoughts that eventually lead me back to the chair I sat in while holding Eva's dead body. I marvel at the person who went through 29 days in a blind rush and panic from one child to the next, hoping to give each one his or her due. Eva will never fucking get her due. I should have been with her every moment she was alive. Would it have many any difference in the duration of her life? I wish I could just understand why she died.

I want to tear my eyes out, but mainly I want to carve holes into my left arm for Eva. For the side of my body she lived in. Should I have waited to deliver? Why did she arrest on the operating table? Did someone's negligence cause her death? If they'd given her anticoagulants on April 3rd, would she be alive today?

At so many moments her course could have changed. At so many moments she clung to life by a thread. So we shouldn't have been surprised when she died. But we were.

I'm disgusted with myself for writing this pity party like a goddamn teenager.

On Pain and Suffering

2007-07-15T10:05:00.002-04:00

In the hospital, when I was in pain, a nurse would always ask me to quantify my pain on a scale of 1-to-10. I found that to be a very weird and confusing exercise. I had to call up all my experience with pain and what I could only imagine the extremes of physical pain might be, and then chart myself along that continuum somehow. Putting a number to it seemed to give the pain a definite value, but that value was meaningless in the face of my own subjectivity, inexperience and the complete inadequacy of the right side of my brain.

My friend sent me an email in which she claimed (in so many words) that what she's going through pales to my suffering. That statement, albeit well-meaning, is utterly futile. I can't a) know the boundaries of suffering in my own life, much less understand its possibilities in an empirical sense, b) quantify this payload of pain to any other in my own life, much less to any in the life of another human being. So how much pain am I in on a scale of 1-to-10? Go f**k yourself.

The interminable march of days ahead

2007-07-14T19:25:00.000-04:00

When Eva first died, I thought I could handle the grief. The initial pain was searing, a great shock, but I felt that I could make room for the weight of my grief. It could find a space in which to settle in. But I had people around me then. They knew I was grieving and expected and nurtured my grief. It's been 3 months and 10 days. It's harder now in some ways. I feel as though my window to grieve is closing. The time to "move on" has come. I have nowhere to move on to without this beautiful baby of mine who will never grow.

July Update

2007-07-13T13:38:00.001-04:00

The girl has made great progress in physical strength in the past few days. She's doing great with trunk strength, managing to hold her self at nearly a 90 degree angle. She's even started to roll over, from stomach to back. She really doesn't like tummy time I guess! I've come to realize, though, that we will likely face some challenges with her. I think she's going to be very attached to me and it won't be easy to start her in daycare, which we're currently looking to do at about 10 months (or January, if all pans out).

The boy also continues to amaze, but on the cognitive front. The other day, he told me he wanted to move because our garage is too messy.
Today at the park, a parent said he was taking his son to get I-C-E-C-R-E-A-M. The boy immediately responded, "Why is Willy going to get ice cream?" Our tools are quickly being diminished...

Therapy

2007-06-28T20:06:00.001-04:00

I am starting to come around to the idea that this is a free form of therapy for me. And it is a way to make something of this experience and all the resulting pain. Sure, I could go to a support group but they meet during the precious short hours that we are all together as a family. I could try to see a therapist, but when? I have the girl all the time and cost is a factor. My luxury is staying home with her, since we're skimming savings every month to do it.

So this will have to do, a place where I can let it all hang out.

My sweet girl is sitting beside me as I type this, trying to sit up.

My Eva... well, she's in a malachite box on a shelf over my headboard.

I was thinking of the night of their birth, how my favorite nurse, G, asked one of the NICU nurses to take pictures of the babies so I could see them. The resulting polaroids were wholly unsatisfying, but the thought was wonderful.

I remember the NICU, the long corridor between where each of the girls were. It killed me that they couldn't even be next to each other. The NICU was such a cold place. My hands were so dry from all the washing that they burned when I used the anti-bacterial foam.

I remember the few times I got to hold Eva, how heavy she felt, how completely she sank into my arms. I knew she needed me.

Changes a' Comin'

2007-06-27T20:29:00.001-04:00

I've noticed in the past few days that the girl's eyes are changing color. They are starting to look a little more yellow, which is to be expected, considering her parents and brother all have some variation on brown eyes.

In other news, she has a double ear infection.

A Daughter's Worth

2007-06-13T16:13:00.001-04:00

I think that I provided my mother with some consolation. Living with the daily challenge that my autistic brother posed made me special to my mother. I was the good kid, I always knew, with all the benefits and pain that that entailed. She recently told me that she saw me as more of a peer, a co-mother than a daughter.

My living girl is my consolation in Eva's loss, but as I've written, she is also a daily reminder of just how precious Eva is to us. Eva and her twin would have been more than their sum, I can't help but feel. Yet, I would hate to imply that my survivor is diminished in her twin's absence -- that her potential is impacted. Quite the contrary, she is what's left of what I think of as a vast treasure and I clutch her more tightly because of it. But surely, her trajectory has changed. I know mine has. What will become of this good kid's good kid?

A Twin's Loss

2007-06-11T13:51:00.001-04:00

The girls are two months old today, in gestational terms, anyway.
As time passes, I am filled with joy and sadness in equal measure, for the person my living daughter is becoming and for the person Eva would have been. The more I grow to love my survivor, the deeper my pain for Eva burrows into me. The ones who are here make clear what we're missing.

But what I truly dread for our future is our daughter's realization of what she has lost. Some day, we'll start the conversation with her about her identical twin. I try to imagine what it would be like to know that someone with exactly my DNA and exactly my start in life will never be known to me again. It's inconceivable. I just hope her loss doesn't define her and our hope our loss doesn't define us.

Standing on Ceremony

2007-06-08T15:11:00.001-04:00

I have found that while I naturally resist ceremoniousness, I have developed a newfound respect for ceremonies. They, when embarked upon judiciously, turn the book of one's life from a paperback to a hardcover.

It seems silly now, but before we were married, the man and I dreaded the idea of a wedding. Part of it was the ridiculous wedding-industrial complex that we wished to avoid, but part of it was a real fear of bringing our very different families together. But what became apparent to me almost as soon as the day was done was that the experience of the wedding created a bond between us all. It enabled our relatives (especially the more socially conservative ones) to recognize us as a family unit. Never mind the fact that this man had been in my life for more than seven years by that point. That day made "US" real and definite to our loved ones and remains a threshold, a part of our shared history.

With Eva's service, we were able to put another distinct marker in our lives and the back cover on hers. The ceremony enabled us to honor her life and recognize and mourn its untimely end. It served many purposes, actually. For those in attendance, it provided a window into our lives and perhaps made Eva's story more real and definite to those who never had a chance to meet her. It has not given me total peace, but I think the best I can hope for is a tentative one.

Be Careful What You Wish For

2007-06-05T22:50:00.000-04:00

When we planned our family, we decided we wanted 2 kids, about 3 years apart. Though I am not sure we ever discussed it, I think we both wanted to have 1 of each -- a boy and a girl.

We have what we wanted. We just never knew how painful it would be to get here. It feels like a Greek myth wherein the dumb mortals are taught a wretched, powerful lesson by the gods.

I don't know whether I should feel humbled or just beaten down.

The Itch I Can't Scratch (to Satisfaction)

2007-06-05T15:44:00.001-04:00

I have a problem that I am hoping will subside. I want to bake. Sure, I want to eat what I bake, but I have been really enjoying the baking process and seeing the results of my efforts, Making a great cake and seeing others enjoy it is really cool, particularly because I think I've made some tasty stuff lately. Oh, and I like to eat treats, too! But, it's impossible to manage one's weight with too many decadent foods around. Even the man, who runs a whole lotta miles every week can't seem to run enough to run off all the sugary calories we eat.

So, I promised the man that I would do no baking until this weekend, for B's baby shower. It's going to be a tough few days. And how will I limit myself to just one or two things?? Perhaps, however, I should turn my energies to all the funky grains I came home with yesterday.

Wheatberry, here I come.

Refrain

2007-05-03T16:05:00.001-04:00

Since Eva died, I've been schizophrenic.
I have seventeen different thoughts every second, but some thoughts have become refrains.

Grief is a relentless predator.
My third child died three weeks before my thirty-third birthday.
There is no "survivor" without Eva.
The FACT of her suffering...
What if I'd waited to deliver?

Invisible and Unspoken bonds

2007-03-01T11:46:00.000-05:00

About a year ago, a heard of a former co-worker whose wife was due to deliver their first child. Tragically the baby was stillborn due to a cord accident. I had never been very close to this colleague, but the story of this baby really stuck with me. How could one not empathize with someone in these circumstances. All these months later, we've been through our own scare related to cord accident. We lost one of our beautiful babies. We're bonded now in a way, though he likely doesn't know it and we haven't even been in touch in many years.