{Original post by Kelly of Ordinary Art}

In pre-school, my daughter is learning about opposites. Up. Down. Right. Wrong. Full. Empty. Everything neat and tidy. The teacher sends home a note. Practice. Teaching the concept of opposites is a great way for your child to understand his or her world.

Bullshit.

My mother has a friend who is wheel chair bound and dying of brain cancer. This sick woman has a 10-year-old daughter. The daughter does not understand why God is robbing her mother of her legs and her life. All she wants is for her mother to rise from that chair and go for a walk. What is the direct opposite of wanting?

Is life the direct opposite of death? We have to be grateful for what we have. My own mother moralizes. Her idea of happiness is not having brain cancer. I’m not sure it takes fully into account the grief of a 10-year old girl.

A former student of mine once wrote a beautiful poem. It went,

We are a matched set, you and I. A fork in the road. A knife in my heart.

She read the poem aloud to the class. She tossed her hair and laughed when someone in the back of the room raised their hand and asked about the spoon. I counted her poet teeth and hoped that someday, someone would come along and fall in love with the religion of her mouth. She was 13 and beautiful. I cannot remember her name. Forgetting is not the same thing as letting go.

I practice with my daughter. Hot. Cold. Big. Small. Love. Hate. Sad. Happy. These words never tell the entire story. Sometimes mothers die and leave their daughters to go for walks alone. Sometimes mothers live but their daughters still feel lonely.

{by Melody at Brave Girls Club}

After a dear friend telling me about a hurtful experience she’d had this week…..I began thinking again about a story I have told a few times….a story that my children will tell to their children, and maybe even beyond that… because it was such a learning experience in our family….maybe even a turning point…it’s a story that I think about often because we were the main characters in it 3 or 4 years ago, and even though it was something that lasted less than 15 minutes….it changed all of us….and now I see others differently, especially when it seems that they might be main characters in the same story…or one a lot like it. I used to be too embarrassed to tell this story….but I am not anymore. This is a human story that everyone needs to hear, I truly believe this…I hope you will stay with it, it’s kinda long.

by Elizabeth of Boy Crazy [Clarity-Chaos]

For reasons unknown or unanalyzed, an old friend popped into my mind today.

My friend J was a quiet guy. He was an artist and a musician. In high school, these attributes do not necessarily make you the coolest of kids. But he was smart and sweet and funny and shy, and when I took his arm and played his date at stage right in a musical with a name I can’t recall, I crushed hard for J. I always liked the uncool kids. (They were always the coolest.)

I, a boy crazy sophomore, was the first kiss for this shy senior boy. He, all kindness and blue eyes, was the nicest, sweetest boy I had ever kissed.

But this was highschool, where fickleness and frivolity reign. And after he ended one of our dates with a run through Taco Bell drivethru, sending me shrinking to the far side of his parent’s giant blue station wagon in angst over how bad his breath would be when he walked me to my front door, it was over.

And the next week when I introduced my dad to G, who sat on our livingroom couch, arm slung around my shoulders, my father summed it up just right when he humiliated me in his befuddlement, “G? What happened to J? What is this – boyfriend of the week??!”

And it was. It was how I rolled, nothing personal, J.

But I always felt badly about how abruptly I ended things. The poor guy had no clue it was just about the Taco Bell, no idea about the fickleness, the frivolity of teenage girls. He let it end without drama, and he stepped quietly aside as I finished out the school year as G’s girl.

He was such a nice guy and I was the only girl he ever kissed.

A couple of years later I bumped into J at a summer concert in our hometown. He was home from college, and I was genuinely excited to see him. We laughed that War was headlining the show, twenty years past their peak; and we chatted for a while. After rocking out to Low Rider, I gave him another big hug and told him that it was really, really good to see him again and that I was so glad he was doing well. He stayed at the stage and I ran off with my friends. I turned back and waved goodbye one more time. He was smiling.

One week later J died of an asthma attack. He was 21 years old.

At his funeral, a college friend brought along a letter J had mailed him just that week. In it, J had written how he had bumped into a girl he used to date…

{Originally published on Chicken and Cheese.}

Not too long ago, we bathed The Poo while chatting about all the people who love her.

We listed off all her grandparents, and then spent time explaining how we, her parents, were also children.

“Your grandma and grandpa are my mommy and daddy,” Mr. Chicken told her, as he sluiced shampoo from her hair using a small container of water. “And meema is Mommy’s mommy.”

Suddenly, without warning, The Poo realized a new truth about our extended family.

“Mommy!” she exclaimed, the gears in her head grinding away. “You don’t have a daddy!”

I winced, her words hitting me as hard as any blow. My father’s been on my mind of late.

This is, you see, my season of loss.

*****

Even as we welcome a new soul to our household, my mind wanders – dreadfully – to this date on the calendar. Four years ago today, at 3:30 in the afternoon, my father drew his last breath.

Each year I think the hours will come and go like any other, just a pair of numbers and nothing more. I believe I will keep house and tend children, spending my time as I would on an ordinary day.

But this day, this terrible day, will never be ordinary again.

The immediacy of my grief has faded; that much is true. No longer do I wake in the heart of the night, veins pounding with dreams the color of blood. No longer do I wake each Aug. 26 precisely at 4 a.m., the time my telephone rang with the news that an ambulance was ferrying my father to the emergency room.

But when August begins to wane, a bruise rises to the surface, tender and easily irritated. The warm weather and the slant of the sun prompt recollections I’d rather forget – walking my parents’ dog in the late afternoon the week before my dad died, while they were away at The Mayo Clinic; the hope I felt when the doctors reported that the cancer was dead; the terrible tremor in my dad’s voice the last time I spoke to him on the phone.

I called to tell my mother I wanted to come out to Minnesota. I was on vacation, and something inside urged me to get on a plane and be with them.

{Originally published on Sarcastic Mom}

Several nights ago I was sitting in the dark of Braden’s room; he was cradled in my arms, breathing quietly. As we slowly swayed back and forth in the rocking chair together, lullabies playing peacefully on the CD player, my mind jumped back and forth. It climbed mountains torturously, then lept off of the summits and plummeted into the valleys below. My face was slack, but my thoughts rumbled and tumbled below the surface while I felt the warm, soft life in my embrace cuddle deeper into sleep.

Suddenly, I burst out crying. Crying for the tiny life that I wasn’t able to hold onto in this way. I sobbed – quietly, so as not to disturb Braden – for a few long moments. Then I placed him in his crib and left the room. As suddenly as it had come upon me, the weeping was gone.

It’s been like that for weeks now. Since the miscarriage.

The extreme dichotomy of my feelings and thoughts lately has been a confusion at times, to me. At others, it has made no less than perfect sense. See what I mean?

I was pregnant one day. Then, suddenly, I wasn’t.

Riding the roller coasters at this Carnival From Hell that no woman wants to go to, but that is packed full of people, nonetheless, has been strange.

Some days, hearing about how many others have gone through this, multiple times, even, is a great comfort. I am actually incredibly buoyed by the scores of other women who feel somewhat betrayed by their bodies, or maybe even by God. By women who have experienced this same thing and are floating alongside me in this sea of uncertainty.

It means that I am not really standing out in the middle of a barren wasteland, alone, while a relentless wind tears and rips at my exposure-ravaged limbs, muffling my cries and carrying them silently away into the vast nothingness surrounding me, where they will mean nothing and no one will ever respond to them.

{Originally posted on Slouching Past 40}

How does it happen that a sixteen-month-old girl with eyes that managed to reflect all of the abundant colors of the ocean at once and with a smile containing such joy that strangers couldn’t help but smile with her, a girl with all of it before her (only 500 days under her belt, give or take), might be here one moment and gone the next?

*********************

I do not know. I am one of the lucky ones. My son comes home with a sore throat and later spikes a fever. His temperature soars, and I fret. I take him to the doctor, who diagnoses strep throat and hands me a prescription for penicillin. Eighteen hours and three pills later, my child looks and feels remarkably better. He is no longer pale with a slightly greenish cast. He is not hot to the touch. Fatigue does not ring his eyes. I can’t believe how well this medicine works!, he grins. I could almost have gone to school today! And then he glances at me. Worry has crossed his face. He amends: Well, not almost… I’ll be ready tomorrow, though.

All of us wanted Maddie’s story to go like this, and most of us expected that it would.

But a few of you know better. Experience has taught you different and cruel lessons. You were cast out of Eden some time ago. The rest of us bite our lips and hold our children closer, huddling up against one another, afraid that we, too, might be called on, might have to forsake the complacence we clutch as tightly as we do those children of ours, might have to bump up against the fact that our children are mortal, no different from us, from our parents, from their parents and all the parents before them, too. What hubris we show when we congratulate ourselves on how well we’ve managed to protect our offspring when the reality is that we have so little to do with it.

{Originally published on uuMomma.}

Earlier in the week my neighbor said she had a wedding to go to Thursday night. I wondered, who would plan a wedding on a Thursday night? Fast forward to Thursday night when my husband and I are having a late dinner at a very nice restaurant in town, surrounded by young couples and one older couple with their 9 year old son. Doh! It’s Valentine’s Day, that’s why someone would have a wedding on a Thursday night, same reason we would have dinner at 8:30 on a Thursday (okay, wait, that’s not so unusual).

So I pictured the young couple getting married on Valentine’s Day, people I’ve never met and may never meet. Knowing this neighbor as I do, I was able to spin out a fictional representation of that wedding that was startlingly uninteresting. I pictured a pink face surrounded by white lace. I knew she must be a virgin (as this IS what the church dictates for this group) which actually could be an interesting twist to weddings today. I pictured the groom in a black tux and the pink face, white lace and ruddy red and eager-face of the groom show off strikingly against a giant red heart in the background.

So that’s the image that floated to my head as I had my Homer Simpson moment of realization that some couples do get married or engaged on Valentine’s Day. This unknown bride’s presumed virginity caused me to remember something someone once said to me about why she married a man she had known only a few months. “I wanted to have sex with him,” she said, “and back then, you got married if you wanted to do that.”

It was a naive notion, even back in the 50s, but she was a good girl and so she got married. More than 50 years later, this woman is still married to that man and they continue to have a relationship founded not on their desire to have sex (the thought of which causes me to stick my fingers in my ears and go ‘la la la la la’), but to be in love with each other enough to wait for commitment in the first place, and to stay in love through all the trials that that commitment has laid at their collective door.

{Originally published on Hope4Peyton}

I lost a child already.

When I was 21, before I met Peter, I miscarried a baby that I hadn’t even known that I wanted until the moment the choice was taken away from me. My first instinct was to get rid of that baby, that I wasn’t ready, I wasn’t prepared. I spent days planning to make this inconvenience go away. Then the clarity came that I might never BE ready for a baby, but I had one now and I was going to do my best to be a mother. I told the father. I cried when I told my mom. But I was sure I was making the right decision.

Three days later I lay in the hospital, as the child I was just starting to anticipate was lost to me forever. I cried tears from a place inside me I never knew existed. I mourned the baby that was never to be in my arms. I spent weeks laying on my bed, unable to make myself get up, move, bathe, want to live. I felt the most incredible guilt I think a person could feel because I knew in my heart that I had wished that baby away in my days of uncertainty. And now it was gone.

I spent years waking from dreams of a crying baby, me wandering halls, searching frantically for that child. I spent months unable to even bear looking at a pregnant woman or a baby snuggled in its stroller. My best friend had a newborn and I was angry and resentful that she got to have her baby. There aren’t words to describe how I felt after my miscarriage: devastated, destroyed, incomplete.

And this was a child I’d never even seen. Let alone cuddled in my arms. I’d never stared into its eyes, felt it’s silky skin against mine, soothed its cry with the touch of my lips to its brow. I still grieved for that child with every fiber of my being.

{Originally Posted at Bring the Rain}

Take off your sandals, for the place
where you are standing is
holy ground…

Exodus 3:5

The funeral home called a few days ago (7/8) to tell us that Audrey’s grave marker was in.

This
week has been hard, and for some reason, this pushed me over the edge
emotionally. I don’t even know if I could say it was sadness, because
I have been waiting for weeks for this call. I wanted her to have more
than the little plastic placeholder with the piece of paper in it. I
was relieved that it was finally there, but it took my breath away to
hear the words. It feels so final.

Immediately,
I told Todd I wanted to go over and see it. We only have one car right
now (I kind of wrecked the other one a little bit, but I contend that
it was the pile of cement’s fault. It practically jumped out and
ripped off my bumper) and the twins had a friend over, so I started out
the door. Kate saw me grab my keys and she started screaming and
begging to come with me. I told her that I was going to see Audrey and
then to the grocery store, and that I didn’t think she would have as
much fun as if she stayed and played with all the girls. She
protested. And then she started putting on her shoes and saying over
and over, “Ona go, momma. Ona go.” When Kate says she “wants to” go,
she is pretty persistent. I didn’t have the strength to fight her, so
I told her she could come. She ran to the playroom and grabbed the back
page of a princess magazine they had been reading, wiped her eyes, and
said “let’s go, momma. I go wif you, just you and kate, momma. just
us, right?”

“Just you and me, Kate. We’re going to go see Audrey.” She climbed in her car seat, clinging on to the magazine page.

The
whole way to the cemetery, I watched her smile in the rear-view mirror.
I love taking each of my girl’s out for “alone time,” because we get
to connect in a different way than when we are all together, and I
think it helps them to know they are each so special to me. Kate
really needs this time, especially lately.

We
got to the cemetery and I grabbed my camera to take pictures so Todd
could see Audrey’s marker. I obliged when Kate asked to take off her
shoes. She loves the feeling of grass in her toes; she is the kind of
kid who wants to “feel” everything fully. She wants to touch the
flowers (pluck mercilessly), sort my purse (turn upside-down and use up
my new lipstick), and to enjoy her food (shove fistfuls of it into her
mouth while closing her eyes and purring “mmm-mmm.”). She doesn’t know
how to do life halfway, and I love that about her.

She
grabbed her little page and started walking around the cemetery with
this big grin. I spent some time talking to Audrey, and then asked her
if she wanted to come over with me (she had discovered the joy of
stealing the little flags from several vases….don’t worry, they have
been returned…).

She looked up at me, confused.

“Ona see Audrey.”

“She’s
right here, honey. They just gave her a special new plaque that tells
about her. It has her name on it.” I ran my fingers along the letters
and she took a step in my direction, then stopped.

(click title for more)

After Hurricane Katrina, there developed something of a hierarchy of suffering along the Gulf Coast:

* You lost the bottom floor of your house? I lost my whole house.
* You lost your whole house? I lost my house and my job.
* You lost your house and your job? I lost my sister.
* You lost your sister? I lost my whole family.
* You lost your whole family? I am dead.

That’s right, the ghosts of the dead walk the streets of the Gulf Coast. Their presence is always there, reminding us that it could be worse. We could be dead.

Bullshit.