Separated at Birth?

Adam Lambert

Jason Bateman

Benny doesn't see it....do you?

Five is the new thirteen

Must be, because the drama and mood swings I saw from my five year old today were something I wasn't quite expecting until closer to adolescence. The child had the audacity to stick her tongue out at me and run away, into the maze of McDonald's playland tunnels. The engineers behind this playplace are truly my friends because, unlike most of their counterparts, these tunnels can actually be navigated by an adult. I captured Ruthie with little effort. She refused to put on her coat or her shoes, so she walked to the car wearing neither in the 35 degree weather. She screamed at the top of her lungs that she was cold. But I refused to be swayed by the horrified looks of the drive-thru patrons as they stared in disbelief at the pitiful, neglected child. Lucky for her it wasn't as windy as yesterday.
After a nap and a relatively peaceful late afternoon and early evening, (during which a favorite toy was confiscated for a week) the drama began again with the disapproval of tonight's dinner offerings. After carrying Ruthie to the the steps to cool off, where the screaming continued, I left her fate in the capable hands of Benny, since I was completely spent. This from having navigated the day's dramatics without beating her, or even raising my voice. Kudos to me If only I was drinker. I'd toast myself.

Could be nowhere

What to blog about today?? I really have no idea. I had several thoughts running through my head throughout the morning, when I wasn't home. And it figures....they've all escaped me. So we'll see where this post goes....could be nowhere.

I've been reading a lot of really sad blogs today, since we got home. I don't know why I do this. I seem drawn to them. I'm a big fan of Uppercase Woman. It's author, Cecily, lost her twin sons at 22 weeks, over four years ago. It's a community that's pretty tight in the blogging world, mothers who have lost their children. I've found a few through links on her site. So I've taken to following a couple of them. I feel a sort of kinship with them, having lost a baby myself. But I feel like I don't really belong there, because my baby was lost much earlier than most of these mothers. Like posting about the baby I lost wouldn't quite count.

I remember vividly the emotional pain of miscarrying and how completely desperate I felt. It is always defined as a loss, and it is, in more ways then just the actual loss of a child. My baby was lost, and all of my dreams for that baby, but I was lost too. I had no purpose that I could define, except maybe "not a mother". I wanted no part in this life anymore, only the comfort of my husband's arms. I remember thinking I would never, ever be able to dig my way out of the pain I was in. Thinking I would never ever feel joy again in any meaningful capacity. But I did, and I do, and I have no idea how I came to this. I think it really wasn't until Ruthie was born, and really until she came home, that I began to see a light. I remember my thoughts as I was delivering her. At the very moment I was pushing her fragile body out of mine, I thought that if she didn't make it, I would never ever do this again. By "this" I meant try to have another baby. I knew that if she didn't survive, I would be plunging into a depth of grief from which there was no foreseeable escape. I was sure of it. And I dangled there on the edge, white knuckles and all, until she came home. Even after that, I was sure something would go wrong with her. I'd walk over to the lip of that tremendous abyss and peer in, even though I didn't want to. But it seemed as if the moment I was no longer vigilant, it would sneak up on me...it would suck me in....like the little girl in Poltergeist, sucked into that TV.
Even after Ruthie seemed more stable in the NICU, I just couldn't shake it. I'd watch her cry and remember how sure I was that our first baby had felt some kind of pain, and that as the mother of that baby, I had failed. Failed to save him, failed to comfort him when he needed me most. I had this horribly haunting thought for a long long time after the miscarriage that my baby died alone and in pain, with the knowledge that I, his mother, wasn't there. So to watch poor Ruthie, hooked up to all kinds of machinery, crying her feeble cry, sometimes audible, sometimes obscured by machinery, was agony. To stand helplessly next to her bed, was nearly unbearable to me. I remember crying myself and a nurse saying "Oh, honey they all cry." I wanted to scream at that nurse. I wanted to beat my fists against her chest and yell "Yes, maybe they do, but that is MY baby, and I am supposed to be the one who comforts her. And she can smell me and hear me, and she knows that I'm here and that I'm not helping her. And I am finding it really hard to live with that. And I am being suffocated by the guilt of failing her. Not keeping her safely inside of me for as long as she was supposed to be there. I didn't fail those other babies that are crying. I failed her. So when she cries, it's my heart that's crushing itself in my chest. My knees are the ones that go weak. And I am sure I can never make it up to her. " But I said none of that. I shook my head and said "I know."
So where am I going with this? I'm not sure, but I feel like I am minimizing the pain of those mothers who have lost their babies, by comparing it to the pain of my miscarriage, or God forbid, the pain of having a sick child who lived. Their babies, whose faces they saw, whose still bodies they held. I wish there were something I could say to help them, but I know that I can't. My pain is different. My baby that died will always be "the baby that I lost." I don't know if it was a boy or a girl. It never had a name. I never saw its hazy profile in an ultrasound picture. I never bought that baby a homecoming outfit. So maybe over time it's been easier for me to let the pain go. Without those things, I didn't have the same dreams. I had dreams for that baby, for sure, but they were so much more vague. It didn't feel like that 6 years ago though.
I had always felt a bit of regret that I didn't know the baby's gender. Now, I think, I'm grateful for it. It might have made me dream more, and that would have been more that I needed to let go of. More that I had lost. I have no doubt that the year following the miscarriage, when our efforts at conceiving again repeatedly failed us, plunged me further into despair and was the hardest year of my life. Harder than my year in rehab. It changed me, as really difficult things tend to do. At first I didn't like who I had become, but I felt that letting go if it would mean abandoning my baby. Disowning him. Failing him again. And I read about these mothers, and sometimes fathers, who blog about the child they've lost. And they talk about how they've changed. I get it a little. But I don't get it all. Because they have more dreams they'd imagined coming true. They had names for their babies. Names that, if they hear them when some other mother called her little girl or boy, break their hearts all over again. Babies who would be just the ages of theirs. I am at peace with how I've changed, because in the end I think it's served me well. The pain of the miscarriage, and the pain of my daughters' births, has opened some doors for me that I never would have seen. But I don't know if that's how it works when your baby is born still at 36 weeks, or dies when she is 6 weeks old. When she has a name, and a face and you have so many, many more dreams than I'd ever dared to dream. And so I don't want to assume that I know what they're going through. Yes, I lost a child. But in a different way. I guess you could say that about every loss.

Night Out

I'm headed out for the evening. My ride is picking me up in about 20 minutes and I am not yet dressed, contacts not in, teeth not brushed, makeup not refreshed, but I didn't want to miss two days in a row here. That would leave me no leeway for the rest of the week. I'm going to a reunion of former officers for the Student Association at my alma mater. Not necessarily a whooping hollering kind of good time, but it is a night out with food, possibly people I haven't seen in a long time (which could go either way) and NO KIDS!!! (No husband either. My friend from college is picking me up, which is good because I hate to go to events like this and walk in alone. I have a crippling fear of not recognizing anyone and standing there like a fool, unable to find whomever it is I am supposed to be meeting. Silly. But real. I will go way far out of my way to pick someone up so I don't have to arrive anywhere alone.
So I am excited to be going out. But exhausted. Benny's snoring kept me up a good part of the night. He has those throat strips but wasn't able to remember if he'd taken one. He claims he didn't get any sleep because I kept nudging him. THAT'S BECAUSE YOU KEPT SNORING, DUMBASS. If he "forgets" his snore thingy tonight, he is invited to sleep on the couch.
On a side note, Helen is under my computer chair eating M & Ms off the sloor....that were dropped there two days ago. That will probably be her dinner. And y'know...I don't care. Cuz I'm pretty much considering myself off duty.
Okay, seven minutes til ride arrives....gotta go.

"Alexis Falls From Grace"

That headline has appeared in many places today. Bet they all thought they were being so cute. Last night, little Alexis Grace was eliminated from American Idol. She sang a mellower-than-she-usually-is version of Dolly Parton's "Jolene." I liked it. Benny didn't. He didn't think there was enough power in her fourth "Jolene" whenever she sang that part. I actually appreciated a weaker final "Jolene." It evoked a beat-down kind of desperation. It wasn't good enough to get the votes or to get saved by the ju7dges, so she's gone. I liked her, and I'll miss her, but I never thought she would win. You can listen to her here, but there isn't much to watch. AI...youtube...rules...whatever..



I decided to check out some covers on the song on iTunes and found this one by Mindy Smith ...I had never heard of her. I really, really like it. Enough to have downloaded it:







Seeing as Dolly herself is in the video, and that's her singing on the chorus towards the end, I'd bet she approved of this cover. But I wonder what she thought of Strawberry Switchblade's version:



Or this one by The White Stripes:





I've only recently started paying any attention to The White Stripes. They're intense. I kinda like em.

If you're a sucker for the original "Jolene", here's that for you:



Got a fave? I wanna hear!

I got a brand new pair of rollerskates...

I was going to post about my exciting trip to traffic court today (caught in a speed trap back in January) but when I got home I found my new toy in the mailbox!!!



My iPod....an obsolete mini handed down form my niece, has been having battery problems for a couple of months now. I thought long and hard about buying a new one before I finally decided I really should or I'd never get any spring cleaning done. A twenty minute charge wasn't going to help me gut the basement at all.
Of course, that was the easy part, because then there was the whole issue of which color to get.

The girls, naturally, picked pink. I vetoed that one. I've grown to love pink, but not for my iPod, and that pink reminds me way too much of a bridesmaids dress I wore in the early nineties. I thought about purple...and red...and orange....and blue... but finally narrowed it down to yellow or green. The yellow didn't look nearly as nice in the store as it did on the webiste, so green it was. I got a pretty good deal with web discounts, free shipping, etc., and free earbuds to boot. And can I tell you.....I LOVE THIS IPOD!! It sounds great and has all kinds of cool stuff my other one didn't have (of course, that one was way old, but it served its purpose.) I love the Genius playlist feature that's been availaible in iTunes for a while now. And I love that I can shake to shuffle. In all honestly, just having a video screen is making me giddy. Now, it's not a Touch...it's only a Nano and I only got 8G, but that is way more than enough to make me happy.
And just to amuse myself, I downloaded Tweeter and the Monkey Man. So if you see me out and about and you think I'm ignoring you, I probably just haven't yet been able to tear those earbuds from my ears.

RuPaul's toothbrush

Helen loves Cinderella. Well, really she loves all Disney princesses, despite my best efforts early on to keep the Disney princesses out of our house. I failed miserably, thanks to whomever gave Ruthie the Disney princess baseball cap when Helen was born. So now, we embrace the princesses in all their unrealistically proportioned, glittering glory. Recently, thanks to a combination of coupons and a really good sale, I was able to score several power toothbrushes for FREE, including two featuring Disney princesses. This is Helen's toothbrush:

And a lovely side view. Look at that profile!

Are you ready for your close-up?

We like to refer to this ambiguous little gem as "Cinderfella"

In a league of its own

So, today I knew it was time to write, but I really had nothing pertinent to tell you (unless you care that I passed Friday's kidney stone). So I checked out Uppercase Woman, and Cecily wants to hear about our first cars. Yay! Something to blog about!
My first car was a beaut. My parents bought it for me just before I started my senior year in high school (1986), since I had finished almost all of my requirements and got out at 1 p.m. every day, after typing class and Death and Dying (yes, I did indeed take a class called Death and Dying, and it was really quite fascinating). I needed to get home, so this was it.
Let me preface my description of my car by telling you that I grew up in Westchester County and went to a private Catholic girls' school. A lot of my classmates were rich kids. And some were really stinkin rich. It was not the least bit uncommon for seniors and sometimes juniors, to show up driving Daddy's Benz, or some other car I will never be able to afford. One classmate was actually given a brand new Porsche for her 16th birthday, so she drove that baby to school. And then, there was my car. My Car.
Well, my car was in a completely different league. MY car cost $200. Total. My parents bought it from friends of theirs. It was a lovely gray 1976 Dodge Aspen with burgundy interior. It had a fabulous AM radio and a propensity to overheat if it idled for more than about 90 seconds. And since the two juniors I picked up every moring were never on time, my car was always overheating. The floor was rusted out between the gas and brake pedals, so my right foot was always wet when it rained. So was my shoulder, because there was a leak somewhere in the top of the passenger side door. There were holes rusted in the trunk, so if you stored anything back there, it had to be bigger than the holes or it would no longer be there the next time you opened the trunk. But this was my favorite feature: if you failed to lock the rear passenger side door, it would swing open every time your made a left hand turn. It was really and truly a gem of a car. My parents sold it right after I left for college and my understanding is that it burst into flames on the highway shortly thereafter Poor little car.

Blog thievery

Sounds like some thing a pirate would do.
Alas, I am linking you to another blog today. It's a blog post from a local "celebrity" blog. I'll not say how we know her, or who those people are. Just in case you have no idea.
I swear I don't know these people.

Parlez vous francais? Non

So I'm trying to figure out how to get to France this summer. There are two reasons I want to go. My sister will be there for the summer, which is the common denominator for both reasons. First, she plans to bring my father with her. He's dead. So she'll be bringing his ashes. He passed away suddenly in 2004, and for the last 4 1/2 years, his cremated remains have spent the majority of their time in Sis's closet or my basement. We won't give them to our brother because of the very high likelihood that his wife would throw them away. She is a neat freak. We never purchased an urn or anything. Really, we had no clue AT ALL what we were supposed to do when he died. My parents divorced years ago, and it was left to his historically underachieving and irreverent offspring to find him a final resting place. We had him cremated because we had no idea what else to do with him and had to make a quick decision. I've felt guilty about him being in my basement, but I did bring him up for the 2008 Super Bowl to see the last quarter of a TOTALLY FANTASTIC GAME (won by his fave team, the NY Giants, in case you were living under a rock that year). And I don't even really like football. But I digress.
My dad was a huge cycling fan and my sis's idea was that, since she'll be in France anyway, she'll scatter some of his ashes on the route when the Tour de France is in Paris. Totally brilliant idea (thought that same feeling may not be shared by the cyclists or spectators who would run the risk of inhaling the bone fragments of my deceased pere...that's french for dad...I think.). I'd really like to be there for that (the scattering, not the inhaling), but I have no money. Sigh. Benny tells me to stop shaving my armpits becasue that's the closest I'm getting to France anytime soon. Fermez la bouche, buddy.
But the other, more pressing reason I want to go to France is because my sister is spending the ENTIRE summer living with a French family doing God knows what in a country where the primary language spoken is one she has consistently proven herself inept at speaking and understanding. My sister SUCKS at French. She's failed graduate level French a couple of times I believe, primarily becasue she couldn't pass the final exam. And this semester she tried to audit the class and I think they asked her not to come back. So she is under the potentially catrastrophic impression that completely inmmersing herself in French language will make her a natural. Too f'ing funny.
I'm not sure this poor host family has any idea that she is so lacking when it comes to basic communication in French. Seriously, it'll be like having a five foot four inch infant in their house. She might need to resort to crying when she is hungry. Or maybe she should just practice her pictionary skills. That's universal right? So I just want to be there to watch all this because I would find it really, really funny. I means seriously funny. Funny enough that instead of underwear, I would pack Depends because I think I would be wetting myself on a regular basis. It would be like a weeklong overseas comedy show. And I know my sister well enough to know that my hysteria over her lack of fluency would produce equivalent fits of hysteria in her as well. We would be like two mentally ill Americans walking around in Paris, doubled over and crying, possibly curled up in the fetal positon at the base of the Eiffel Tower. That would do so much to improve foreign relations, because they love us already. And honestly, think of the blog posts. Just think of it!! So to all of you readers who want to spend the summer reading hilarious posts about two noncommuniucative American tourists in France, consider donating cash or frequent flier miles, in the interest of entertainment. For now, I'm going to set up a lemonade stand. In the 30 degree weather. Au revoir!