I can’t stick around in the blogosphere any longer than the last stint it seems. I’m still online a lot, on IM, Twitter, Flickr, Etsy, Facebook, Myspace, Cafemom, Plurk, Justin.tv etc. I’ll be around still, just a little quieter. I’ve got knitting and the like to worry about. 
Adios mi compadres. Thank you for reading.
I have been pretty good lately. I am falsely being propped up by my newly affectionate and attentive husband. So everything is falsely great in my world. That is okay with me while I wait to see a psychiatrist and get some more pills.
I feel happy, even if it is for the wrong reasons. That works for me right now.
Although she died when I was 11 I have come to the realization that a lack of a stable maternal figure existed long before her death, possibly never existed at all for me.
I am making it up as I go along. I have no blue print. I am doing this absolutely alone.
My early years as a mother were spent striving for perfection. A goal I never attained and got tired of chasing. While I do have 4 years of early childhood education under my belt, I know that the edge of what I know is looming in the distance.
I really don’t know how to handle older children. What will I do when my children reach the age my sister and I were when my mother died? What will I do when they become teenagers?
I felt alone on so many levels back then, trying to figure out how to be the best mother that I could be and I probably had some kind of experience as someone must have cared for me reasonably well as a baby.
I wonder how much lonelier it will be as a parent of teenagers with absolutely nothing to draw from but the dysfunctional story between me and my last living parent.
I am going to be in therapy forever…
I love the ocean. I hope we’ll get a little place there one day. I love the vastness. I love the roar, the wind, the smell.
I love sweaters and boots and fluffy socks and anything lined with faux fur.
I love old paper. Old books. Old leather journals.
I love all the things that powerful women don’t care about anymore like cooking, baking, quilting, sewing, gardening, and the like. I wish I didn’t really suck at all of those things. I truly am Gen Y.
I love the movies The Lake House and You’ve Got Mail. No matter the shards of dreams on the floor, I guess I really am a sucker for in the words of Ms. Bradshaw “…ridiculous. inconvenient. consuming… can’t live without you love”.
I’m not really sure what that means anymore though… and I don’t know if I have it. I thought I did but then someone told me I didn’t.
I type so much faster than I can write a letter, but I wish I could turn all of my real friends who I only ever talk to online anymore, into pen pals. I wish I could shop for beautiful stationary. I wish I could get more than just bills, junk, and packages in my mailbox.
I almost can’t remember this so I had better write it down.
I took five pregnancy tests the day we found out I was pregnant which was September 17th 2000. The first people to find out we were pregnant was a co worker of Chris’s and his wife. We went to their house for a BBQ that day.
Once we figured out all of the dates, we think that Cody was conceived on Labor Day weekend the day that Chris quit smoking. August 27th I believe.
I had all day sickness in the first few months but was otherwise healthy. Later in the pregnancy I was put on bed rest for 3 months. I went into preterm labor a few times and was hospitalized for a few days at one point. I got those steroid shots in my thigh to develop his lungs. I took some kind of medication to prevent labor as well.
I was taken off of bed rest on a Thursday or Friday (can’t remember anymore). It was the date they thought I was at 37 weeks. His due date was May 23rd 2001.
On Saturday Chris and I went to the mall. That afternoon I started contracting regularly so I called the hospital and they let us come in. At the time I was still dead set on having a natural birth with no epidural. My labor nurse asked me about it and she said she’d help with that goal.
Hours and hours went by. They did let me walk a little but I was made to labor on my back so they could keep me strapped to the baby monitor. Having never done this before, Chris called his family to let them know we were at the hospital. Some of them showed up (even though they were directed not to) only to be told I did not want visitors.
As the evening progressed I sent Chris out to get movies and food. Just as he arrived at some parking lot (don’t remember which anymore) my water broke. I quickly moved into transition phase. I begged my nurse to call him, and she finally did, and he hurried back.
It was all down hill from there. I was in heavy labor flat on my back for about 45 minutes. I begged for an epidural but by the time the anesthesiologist arrived my nurse told him it was too late.
At some point I recall my nurse trying to get me to breath because I wasn’t doing very well, and I think she put an oxygen mask on me. I was in so much pain I couldn’t follow any directions. She did put a little bit of minor pain medication in my IV but it helped for like 10 seconds.
Before that I didn’t want anyone but the vital few in the delivery room but really when you are in that much pain you don’t notice there is a whole crowd of people down there. Nor do you care or remember that you didn’t get to shave your legs.
I couldn’t follow directions to hold my own legs back so Chris held one while I squeezed his hand (thumb apparently turned purple) and my nurse held the other. She told me to push past the pain and that is exactly what I did. I pushed and stopped as directed while a doctor pulled and stretched me as his head was crowning. I wanted to kill her for that. He had the cord wrapped around his neck.
It was traumatic and painful all at once and then it was over. Earlier we had told them to take him away as soon as he was born and clean him off. I had waited nearly 9 months and could wait another minute or two more for him to be cleaned off before he was handed to me.
I had watched too many Lifetime movies and made Chris promise not to leave him unattended so that he didn’t get mixed up with any other babies. For a few hours he had to be under a heat lamp so Chris stayed with him during that time. I was shaking from the adrenaline for the next hour or so.
When I finally held him his cry sounded like a scared cry. He had bright blue eyes and was only 17 inches long. He weighed 5lbs 10oz on April 28th 2001 at 11:56pm.
Motherless sounds so… empty. As much as I appreciate Hope Edelman’s books the first of which I discovered shortly after my own mother died, I really dislike the word motherless.
I’m reading Motherless Mothers and while I am compelled to keep reading, I also have the urge to hurl the book across the room. I totally would except its an eBook on my iPhone. That would be ugly.
There is a good argument for real paper books, you can hurl them across the room and in most cases the book will still be intact so that you can resume reading once you have calmed down.
I don’t really have anything to say except its hard for me to grasp the tiny phone in my hand when I really just want to hurl it at the orange wall across the room.
What is it about the seven year old brain that causes the child to argue?
I theorize that at this point, the amount of nutrients needed for the child’s excessive feet growth deprives the brain of whatever it is that is needed to take in new information from any paternal input units. Therefore argument is simply the seven year old brain rejecting information that it has no room for.
Well at least that is the little lie I tell myself as I repeat all instructions that don’t begin with “Eat your dessert” at least seven times.
I rely on other people to validate my emotions, especially my husband. This is destructive to my soul, to say the least. Trying to figure out how to rely on myself and feed myself is so hard. I spend more time trying to get up then I do actually walking. I fear that I may never learn how to take care of myself emotionally.
Nonetheless this weekend while I spent a lot of time resting due to this cold; I was able to decide that I won’t quit. I worry that I may not be able to figure out how to do this while I am here with my husband in such close proximity. It is simply too easy to fall back on him. I don’t seem to learn when he isn’t there to catch me and I come crashing down to the ground and shattering in a million little pieces. I worry that I need to be away and alone to figure out how to do this.
However like I said, I have decided not to quit. I won’t give up. If this fails, it won’t be because I didn’t die trying. Although I am not yet staying for myself, who really ever does?
Christopher helped me pour the ashes into the urn. I almost couldn’t do it. There were bone fragments in there…
We poured wax up to the top to seal it since it didn’t come with a lid.
Now what?
The urn. It is here. It is just as beautiful in person, if not more so. I took the box of my mom’s ashes out of the spare bedroom and the walmart plastic bag. I set it on the table. That was hard. It was like I was being stabbed in the chest as I attempted to open the velvet bag. I couldn’t. So it is just sitting on my table. I walk by once a day and rest my hand on it for a few seconds. Eventually I hope to be able to open it and deposit the ashes into the urn.
