OmegaMom

In The Book of the Dun Cow, there is a dog, Mundo Cani, who joins forces with the hero, Chaunticleer the rooster and helps him defeat The Evil.  At times, Mundo Cani erupts into a miserable, lonesome howling of “Marooooooooooned!”  I read the book years and years ago, once, but that image always stuck with me, a sort of archetypal outpouring of grief and mourning and lonesomeness.

I find myself, at times, tempted to just throw my head back and howl to the world, “Maroooooooooned!”

Most of the time this summer, however, I have been merely frozen.

Like a rolypoly bug, I have curled in upon myself, not bothering to write the blog until nagged to by BlogHer’s automatic “We Miss You!” email that explains, sadly, that the ads are being withdrawn until the blog is updated.  Not bothering to look at my email.  Not bothering to respond to emails, or calls.  Not reaching out to local acquaintances.  Just sort of surviving, with a feeling of “One must go through the motions.”  Reading a lot.  Dealing with family things, but mostly with half a mind, or a pane of glass or frozen ice between me and everything else.

Now and then, I pull myself together and do something related to mom’s death.  At which point the ice shatters, and a piece stabs into my belly and I find myself gritting my teeth, pulling my hair, pacing, finally crying.  Afterwards, I carefully retreat back behind the ice, back where it’s safe and it doesn’t hurt.

It was a cold and rainy summer here.  It was sunny and warm here while I was in Arizona, dealing with mom’s hospitalization and death.  But shortly after I returned home, the gray horizon-to-horizon clouds moved in and the temperature dropped and it stayed chilly and drizzly and shadowy.  We broke a weather record for most consecutive days with rain, and the lovely little current-temperatures-versus-average-temperatures graph on Big City’s NOAA weather page showed consistently below average temperatures.  The sun didn’t come out until the first day of OmegaDotter’s new school year…

OmegaDad had his surgery early in the summer, and recuperated slowly.  Then, a week and a half ago, he awoke with a bump on his elbow—which I assumed was some kind of bug or spider bite—which, by the end of the day, had morphed into a horrible angry red baseball-sized swelling.  To give you an idea of how ugly it seemed, I was the one who insisted we go to the emergency room for it, since we had missed closing time at the local urgent care doc-in-a-boxes.  (Normally, I’m the one who wants to wait; OmegaDad accuses me of generally wanting to wait until he’s passed out on the floor before I grudgingly admit that he needs to see a doc.)  Anyway, the thing turned out to be a staph infection (not MRSA, thank heavens for small favors!), and we spent the week traipsing off to the osteopathic surgeon’s office on an almost daily basis to have it drained and bandaged and tut-tutted over.  The prognosis on Friday was if things hadn’t settled down by this Monday, he would have to go to the hospital to have elbow surgery; but, in the meantime, the doc upped his antibiotics.  This, thankfully, turned the tide, and by Monday the doc was most pleased and allowed us to stop packing the wound with gauze and let it start closing naturally.

So this week I finally wrote up an invitation to family and friends to our scattering of mom’s ashes, which we’ll be doing in mid-October.  This, of course, cracked the ice and led to a torrent of tears.  Then I retreated back again.  Tonight, I pulled together email addresses and sent it out.  There are more names and email addresses I need to get, but this is the majority of them, I think.  The ice cracked again.  Since OmegaDad and OmegaDotter are asleep, my outlet is here, at the blog.

OmegaDad wants me to find a grief counselor.  I haven’t the vaguest idea how to start.  As I am not religious in the least, I don’t have—or want—a priest or pastor handy to turn to.  And, as I am not religious in the least, I do not want counseling based in belief of heaven or hell or the afterlife. 

I am at a loss.

In the meantime, the season is rapidly turning towards autumn; trees are yellowing, leaves are falling, blossoms are fading.  Winter is on the way. 

So OmegaDotter is starting third grade today.  Ah, me!  How the time is flying!  We recently looked at some pictures from just two and a half years ago, and she looked so much younger.  Now she’s swiftly moving into the “tweens”.

We finished her new bedroom look, and she is thrilled.  Zebra stripes, bright pink, orcas everywhere, and her most favorite stuffed animals clustered by the headboard of the new bed: 

This is probably the last year I’ll be taking her into her classroom on the first day of school.  I asked her on the drive in (all four minutes of it!) whether she wanted me to keep doing it, and she was rather firm on the subject.  So we marched in, meeting her teacher from last year acting as traffic cop in the hallway; Mr. Snows was pleased that she got the particular teacher she got and amused that her partner in crime and best friend A. was in her class but carefully placed at the opposite end of the room.

Here she is, all dressed in her new teal outfit (it’s more teal-y in person):

You can’t see it, but she is sporting brand new pierced ears.  I had been saying she could do it when she was twelve, but this past weekend, when we were buying new school clothes, we stopped into Claire’s as usual, and another girl about her age was getting her ears pierced, and…well…there you go.

But, while she’s getting bigger and more grown-up by the day, she also still likes to play hard.  She spent the other day “sneaking” around the house as a ninja.  As she’s wearing a pair of my sweats that she begged to have as hers, she looks like a droopy-bottomed gangster:

It’s been a busy few weeks.  Lots of things going on.  I may pull myself together to post on a current “hot issue” over at the Rumor Queen.

Then again, I may not.

The Chinese name request lasted two days, tops.  She’s still interested; there was an interesting discussion about how she figured she would still be her even if she had a different name (Shakespeare, anyone?), but the question of having friends call her OmegaDotter and others call her ChineseName bothered her.  I suggested that when she starts school we could talk with her teacher, and maybe her teacher could call her by her Chinese name.  She’s dubious at this point, but she realizes that we can do this any time she wants.

Maybe that’s all she was after—that reassurance?

Chinese camp was a blast for her.  There was a performance on Saturday that included a demonstration of Chinese yo-yoing by a one-time Taiwanese yo-yo champion (who had been teaching the kids), a variety of dances that were quite well done and very long for 7-10 year olds, and a potluck. 

Here’s the “Happy Farmer” dance the kids performed.  It’s –>six<— minutes long, so only watch if you’re really interested!

I was overjoyed at the prospect of no longer driving an hour to Big City, an hour back, working, then driving another hour to Big City and an hour back.

So now that Chinese camp was over and done with, the next big project began.  OmegaDotter has been agitating for redecoration of her bedroom.  Sunday, she and I went to the local bedroom furniture shop and purchased a new bed and mattress for her, and then went off to Target and bought a zebra-stripe comforter and bright pink sheets…the original plan was to do her bedroom in orcas, but she decided she loved the zebra-stripe and that her stuffed orca collection would go well with it.

Every day since then we have been going through the (HUGE.  MONSTROUS.  APPALLING.) mess conglomeration of stuff in her room, sorting it into “keep”, “donate”, and “throw out” bags, a couple of hours a day.

It has been emotionally wrenching for me.

She put her Polly Pockets into the donate bag.

She said, “None of my friends my age plays with My Little Ponies any more,” and *poof* went the MLP collection into the donation pile.

She went through her collection of horsies with ruthlessness, culling her herd to half its size.

Tonight, we went through a box of her old schoolwork and artwork.  All I can say is: “WAAAAAAH!!!!”

There were kindergarten projects.  Pictures.  Old notes to and from friends.  A sign she had designed for the TV cooking show she and OmegaDad were going to do.  An illustrated “mennyoo” with idiosyncratic spellings.  Various stories.  She was ruthless there, too—keeping much less of it than I had expected.  Some things I grabbed for myself, many she “gave” to me to avoid saying she didn’t want to keep them but sort of did want to keep them at the same time.

The old bed gets listed on Craigslist for this weekend; the new bed gets delivered soon.

Folks, it’s the end of an era…

Early this summer, I signed OmegaDotter up for Chinese Camp in Big City.  When she heard, she pouted—seriously.  She did not want to go, no, no, no!  This came with associated stomping of feet and whining.  This Monday, as we were driving in to Big City early in the morning on the way to her week’s worth of Chinese Camp, she whimpered some more, and I laid down the law:  She was going to Chinese Camp, she was going every year we could do it, and we’d make her do it when she was a teenager, too.

Why?  She whined.

Well, because we want you to get at least a smidgen (I gestured with my fingers less than an inch apart) of an idea of Chinese culture and her heritage.  Oh, and, by the way, adults who were adopted from other Asian countries who didn’t get to go to culture camps as youngsters felt more deprived than those who did.  (Not to say those who did go felt “not deprived”, just a little “less deprived”.)

She flounced in the front seat of the car and “hmphed” and made various unhappy sounds as we pulled into the parking lot.

When I picked her up that afternoon, she was much happier about the whole thing.

Tuesday, she did a performance of the dance she was learning for OmegaDad and me after dinner.

Today, she showed us a (really cool!) “magic” trick with Chinese yo-yos that she has practiced.

And tonight, at dinner, she asked us if she could use her “real name” rather than the name we gave her when we adopted her.

Well.  What a difference a few days makes!

Now, first off, I remember very distinctly being about nine years old and telling my parents—also at dinner time—that I wanted to be called “Elizabeth”.  No real reason—I just liked the name much better than my given name, Katharine.  I also remember my mom and dad acquiescing, and calling me Elizabeth for a week, at which point I begged them to puh-leeze call me Kate again.

However, OmegaDotter has a reason:  SiSi is the name she had before we adopted her.  It’s a connection to China and her past and her heritage.  So we’re going to do our best to remember to call her that all the time, rather than OmegaDotter.  She’s asked to do it for a week to see if she can get used to it.  She wants to be registered at school using that name—I’m not sure we’ll be able to do that, alas, but maybe we can ask her teacher to call her SiSi instead of OmegaDotter.  We did tell her that she would have to get used to telling people how to pronounce it, since any American seeing it will call her “Sissy” instead of “Siih-Siih”.  In fact, OmegaDad and I, who have used her Chinese Name on a semi-regular basis anyway, pronounce it incorrectly, calling her “Ss-Suh”.  (There’s a very small schwa in there after the first S, but I don’t know how to put in a schwa, so just imagine it, please.)

We did, however, tell her that we wouldn’t change it legally for a while, because that requires going before a judge, and we wanted her to be sure.

We’ll see how this goes.

(For those wondering:  I am using her Chinese name in this one post, but will continue to refer to her as OmegaDotter.  Since her legal name is not SiSi, and none of her friends know her as that—so far—I figure one post with her Chinese name is okay.)

Just gloomy and depressed and tired of chilly cloudy days.  OmegaDad’s all healed up now.

I’ve been busy, because two and a half weeks ago OmegaDad suddenly discovered he had a (very typical) middle-aged man’s problem that needed “routine” surgery.  My last blogpost was written while we were waiting for the “routine” surgery.  Need I say that the phrase “routine surgery” has become somewhat…um…tainted for me after the past year?  After all, my mom had “routine” pacemaker surgery, and my dog had “routine” abdominal surgery, and both died.

So it was amazing how the tension went out of my shoulders as soon as I got OmegaDad back home from the outpatient surgery and things went swimmingly well.

Okay, they went swimmingly well from my point of view, not his.  He is still not happy, because the healing is taking longer than a day or two, and thus he can’t do all his normal activities, nor can he sit for very long and veg out at the computer, wandering the twisty, turny passages of the Intartubes.

The nice thing about the whole affair for me is that it has kept me busy.  I’ve been cooking, schlepping out to the chicken coops, mowing the lawn, reminding about pain meds, washing dishes, in addition to handling the dotter’s affairs—all of which is normally split between the two of us (mostly on his end; OmegaDotter’s schedule keeps me plenty busy normally).  The busy-ness has made it so that mom’s death has been pushed into the background of my mind.  Oh, it’s still there, and easily ramps back up when anyone wants to talk about it, but it’s been pleasant not to be constantly feeling like there’s that black hole in the pit of my stomach.

In the meantime, there are two stories I want to mention here that have caught my attention in the past week.

First off, there’s the press-and-blogger viewing of “Wo Ai Ni, Mommy”, a documentary that follows an 8-year-old from China who is adopted by a family from the U.S.  The film will be premiering on PBS in August; this is the trailer:

When I first watched that trailer, many months ago, it broke my heart.  I imagined OmegaDotter—also 8 years old—in that situation, being taken from her family of four years in the U.S. (Faith was living with a foster family for 4 years) to be adopted by a family from China.  I thought about how she would feel, what it would be like for her, and watching Faith cry that she wants to go home to China just…well…words can’t say how much that hurt.

Two bloggers—Malinda and Peach—were invited to the preview.  While I think that the original plan of the documentary was to be a feel-good happy-happy adoption story, they got a different feel from it.  Read their reviews (linked on their names) and see what you think.

The second story is that of the hoo-rah at ScienceBlogs.  The gist:  ScienceBlogs is a collective blog about (surprise!) science, with a stable of about 70 bloggers from all walks of science, including science journalists, medicos, physiologists, professors, physicists, biologists, archeologists, mathematicians, etc.  It started in 2004 2006 and has gained quite a reputation as the go-to place for science on the web.  This week, however, a blog was introduced called “Food Frontiers”, which was an “outreach” of PepsiCo.  It was given the same prominence as all the other blogs (all invited to join), but was obviously a corporate thing bought and paid for, though not explicitly labeled as such.  And, interestingly enough, while previous semi-corporate-linked blogs had been introduced beforehand, this one hit the SB front page with no warning whatsoever.

Well.  The shit hit the fan.  The question of the firewall between editorial and advertising was debated far and wide.  A subset of the bloggers left the site in response, with pretty candid “farewell” posts explaining why.  A number of other bloggers said they were dubious, at best, and were considering leaving.  One blogger sniffed that it was all a bunch of hysteria over nothing in a very disparaging way.  The management (and, probably, PepsiCo) decided that this was a Bad Scene All Around, and removed the corporate blog in question.  All that’s left is the post mortems.

I watched this with great interest.  My immediate response upon reading the original “hi, there!” post on Food Frontiers was, WTF?!  This is an advertorial, damn it!  What’s it doing not being marked as such?!?!  Ewwwwwww!!!!

For those who don’t know, an "advertorial” is what publishing calls advertising posing as editorial.  In the journalism world, such things are (alas) often necessary to pay the bills, but definitely clearly marked as advertising, usually done in a totally different design than the remainder of the magazine.  Including an advertorial in the midst of the magazine, using the same design, giving it the same editorial weight as writing by the staff, and not marking it (clearly, plainly, obviously) as advertising is a big no-no.  I mean, it’s taboo.  Really, truly.  As someone who spent 10 years writing and editing in business journalism, I can tell you (and those bloggers and commenters who think the whole uproar is a tempest in a teapot) that no matter how you feel about journalists and the ethics of mainstream media, when I say “taboo”, I mean totally, utterly, absolutely, no doubt about it, this is a line in the sand, TABOO.  You do not do this.  And if you do this, and someone finds out, and you are called out about it, you lose serious credibility as a journalistic source.

Period.

It’s like, say, having sex with your sister, that’s how taboo it’s considered.

I was appalled, myself.  I guess I have that verboten written upon my subconscious in letters of fire or some such thing; it was such a visceral response.

(Interestingly enough, I think mom’s response would not have been that emotional.  She was very pragmatic and less likely to imbue the journalism biz with idealism.  However, she would definitely have thought it was a sincerely bad idea, and rolled her eyes at how stupid it was for the management at ScienceBlogs to take that approach.)

Anyway, here’s a round-up of all the ScienceBlogger’s takes on the subject, and various commenting from other sources, courtesy of BoraZ (one of the bloggers at SB).  Alas, it’s not in chronological order; every search I’ve done on various search sites hasn’t produced one, so…start at anything dated July 7 and work your way forward.

…about Mom.

Actually, I’ve had two dreams that I remember so far.

In my dreams, she’s been sucked into one of my weird and wacky adventures, but I am so glad to see her.  SO glad.  I wonder puzzledly how we got her out of the hospital…

…And then it strikes me:  OH MY GOD.  Everyone thinks she’s dead!  I told everyone she was dead!  What do I do now?!  How do I tell them?!

Sort of like one of those dreams where you realize you’re about to give a speech, but you’re naked and you haven’t prepared for it, or you’re about to take a final for a class only to realize that you not only don’t know anything about the class, but you don’t even remember where it’s being held!

Important events in my life—new home, new city, new husband, new child—these things typically show up in my dreams about six months to a year after the change.  The sooner it happens, the more important I know it is to my psyche. 

It’s been one month.

There are days when life goes on, when things are okay, and then there are days like this, when I weep and feel like there’s a black hole in the middle of my body that is just sucking everything down.  I wake up and say to myself, “Aw, ma!”; I go to sleep and I think about her; I try to gear myself up to write thank-you notes to everyone on my blog and her blog and emails people have sent me and I can’t, because doing that just brings it all back.  There’s a contract for probate sitting on my desk and I can’t bring myself to fill it out and send it.  There’s an annuity claim and all I can do is read it and say, “I don’t want the damned annuity!  I want my MOM!”

There are bills to pay and subscriptions and utilities to cancel or change into my name and accounting to be done.

I am in a fog.  I say to myself, “Pull yo’self together, child!” like my mom would do, and it doesn’t help, because I can’t.  She was the one who was my anchor back to the shore at times like this.

Aw, damn.  It just hurts so much.  I’ve never hurt like this in my life; it’s like a dramatic broken heart except that even when that happened to me in the past I knew I could always…go to my mom for help.  And now I can’t.

The dotter and I went to the bookstore a week ago; I wanted a specific title.  She kept asking if we could buy her a book, and I kept grumbling that she didn’t bother to read the ones she already had, so why should I buy her a new one?!  But, in the end, I bought her…

A Hannah Montana “what’s your rock star style?” activity book, to wit, the Hannah Montana My Secret Superstar Syle Book.  (This is, interestingly enough, not locatable on the Amazon site by searching on “Hannah Montana Secret Superstar Style” (no quotes), or “Secret Superstar Style” (again, no quotes), but only by searching on “Secret Superstar”.  No, I can’t explain it, but did find it very frustrating.)

Much to my surprise, she is actually wanting to do the things in this book.

One of the activities was (of course) a quiz to determine your rock star style, just like well-known and loved Internet memes!  As I was reading the questions, I knew what her answers would be, though she surprised me with a few.  (For instance, she chose the “golden sling purse shaped like a guitar” over the “pink rhinestone and glitter handbag”.)  She ended up being “Rock Royalty” instead of “Pop Princess”—which, if I had to peg her pre-quiz, would not have been my choice.

So one evening this week, we managed to dig out two single-color T-shirts and do the “Tear ‘Em Up!” “punk” look mixed with the “sassy” look.  I thought it turned out pretty well!  When I wanted to do pics, the dotter insisted on putting on her ratty old capri jeans, which she adores and I refuse to let her wear to school or summer camp.

Here are the results; this pose shows the cute rucked-up sides:

Another view, showing the asymmetrical sleeves (one side was laced, the other side was plain):

And then a third view, where the dotter did a back bend into a bridge, just because:

She wore it to sleep that night.  She wore it to summer camp the next day.

BUT.  She wouldn’t take her sweatshirt off.  By the time I picked her up late in the afternoon, the sweatshirt had come off, and her 20s-ish camp counselor gushed over how rockin’ the style looked.

Anyway, the end result is that the Sekrit Superstar Style book is actually kind of fun.  Who would’a thunk it?

(ETA:  Oh, just an FYI.  The price of the Amazon Kindle has dropped to $189—the result of competition from the Apple iPad.  Anyway, if you’re interested in a Kindle now that it’s almost worth while buying, if you use my Amazon search link, or the links above, I get a leetle referral $$.  Hint, hint.  )

I spent Thursday driving down to Phoenix and flying from there to Big City, Alaska.  A lot of it, I spent just feeling miserable; for some reason, the knowledge that this was the last time I’d be flying to Arizona to see Mom and the last time I’d be flying home from such a visit was just…hard.  Oh, we’ll be going back, lots, I know.  But it was just so…final.

Then I arrived home and—of course—after weeks of beautiful warm, clear weather in Suburban Alaska, it turned cold, grey, and drizzly.  And our furnace was out.  And the house was getting cold.  And—after days of doing, doing, doing, suddenly I had little to do, and the grey drizzlies outside matched the grey drizzlies inside, and it was A Very Bad Day.

But today dawned bright and sunny, and OmegaDad was working in the yard.  I ventured out there pre-shower and pottered around the yard with him, and then noticed a pair of butterflies that were…um…making little baby butterflies together in the bushes near the veggie beds.  I didn’t have the camera, and didn’t think it was possible that the S E X would continue, but every time I peered over there, there they were, cavorting shamelessly in the sun.

The dotter called out the window for something:  “Mom!  MOM!”

I called back, “Yo, OD!  Wanna see some butterflies having sex?!”

(Really, I did!)

She was intrigued, but then wanted me to come inside to see something (cat vomit—oh, my life is so glamorous!), and while I was there, I grabbed the camera and OmegaDotter’s arm, hauling both out to the backyard to see the spectacle.

The dotter had, in the meanwhile, located her brand-new good butterfly net, and determined to capture the butterflies, which neither OmegaDad nor I thought very kosher.  Y’know, there they were, very involved and all that, it just didn’t seem sporting…

She managed to (gently) get the netting over the butterflies, then scooped them up.  And, whaddayaknow, they were still at it.  And I had my camera.  So I managed to get some smutty butterfly pictures, as seen above and below.

Then we demanded the dotter release the butterflies.  This caused some consternation; she wasn’t quite sure how to do it.  So I reached into the net, and the next thing I knew, I had a pair of copulating butterflies crawling on my arm.  The dotter reached out, and they climbed onto her hand.

Right after that, they flew away.

All the time, I was doing the “Oh, wow, Mom just has to see this!” and the associated “Damn.  She can’t.  And I can’t tell her.”

So it goes.

So, yeah, I’m back home.  We’re going to scatter her ashes in early October, a good time weather-wise; Arizona has suddenly entered the very hot season, and our visit out to the place where we scattered Dad’s ashes was already hot enough that we figured all Mom’s more elderly friends would have severe difficulties if we tried during the summer.  I will be contacting friends and family about where and when the event will be…

Thank you all for your kind words and thoughts for my family and me.  Tonight is the last night I will be around a computer for the rest of the week, as we are packing up Mom’s stuff and moving it back to the house tomorrow (this includes the computer), so I wanted to say my generic “thank you” now.  When I get back home to Alaska, I will be sending more personal notes.

It’s been very strange.  The first few days I was on autopilot, and I don’t remember who I talked to or what I said.  But my sister-in-law showed up the evening after Mom died, and OmegaDad showed up the next day, and my brother flew in on Friday, so I’ve been surrounded by family and helped by them–doing things that I found myself simply unable to do.

The box…Well.

In the midst of my daze, I managed to make the arrangements to have Mom’s body picked up and sent for cremation the day after she died.  We picked up her ashes on Friday afternoon.  Since we are going to scatter her ashes where we had Dad’s scattered, I had them give us her ashes in the most basic, simple cardboard box.

It was amazing how light it was.  Back in 2004, when my dad died, and we had him cremated, I was astonished by just how heavy the box of ashes was.  But Mom was so tiny, so wasted away–she weighed less than 100 pounds before she went into the hospital, and the box was just…light, compared to Dad’s.

I found myself petting the box, stroking it like I had been stroking her hair when I put it up into a French braid day after day at the hospital.  It’s just a plain cardboard box, with “TEMPORARY CONTAINER” stenciled on all four sides, and a certificate of cremation in an envelope taped to the side, a label with her name stuck to the top of the box.  But I carried it carefully, hugging it to me, as we took it back to the house.

I told OmegaDad later that evening, “That’s all we have left of her…”  I was weeping.  He pulled me into his arms, hugged me, put his head against mine, and said, “No, that’s not all you have left of her.  You have years of good memories, that’s what’s left of her.  Remember that.”

So, yeah.  Lots of memories.

The way my grief has manifested itself is in a constant state of disconnection.  I find myself wanting to talk to her about things, to tell her about what’s going on, all the time.  ”Hey, Ma, you were born in Riverside, right?”  ”Mom, did you marry Frank before you went to junior college or after?”  ”Mom, how on earth did you manage to keep Grandma from knowing you were living with Dave for seven years?!”  (Mom was Bohemian, very artsy, not constrained by dry social mores!)

We visited a blogging friend of hers, stopped by his art gallery downtown.  I found myself wanted to call her up afterwards to tell her how R. says business is just horrible, even though the media keeps saying “things are getting better!”

We stopped in another art gallery, and there were pieces there that kept making me say to SIL and OmegaDad, “Mom would have loved that!”

We went to the Western Art Show in the square downtown, and there were all these things I wanted to share with her…the dog in a tie-dyed T-shirt with the pink rhinestone collar…all the people…the excellent bronzes…the splendid paintings of Kachinas.

I find myself caught up suddenly, each time one of these things happened.  I wanted to talk to her–but I couldn’t.  And I can’t.

Oh, it’ll get better, slowly but surely.  But there are questions that we can’t answer now, because she’s gone.  There are fun and interesting things I see that I can’t share with her now, because she’s gone.

So that’s where I’m at right now.  Again, thanks for all the caring notes and comments.  They mean a lot to me.

OmegaDad tells me I need to write down memories while I’m indulging in them.

My mom–when I was a child–was into hooking rugs out of a variety of cloth that she scrounged from old clothes at the second hand store.

One of the rugs she created was of the Seven Bridges of Konigsberg.  A classic mathematics problem, it was the start of Graph Theory.  So:  In Konigsberg, there was an island in the middle of a river, and there were seven bridges that led to that island.  Somewhere along the line, someone realized that there was no way to traverse those seven bridges without crossing one of the bridges twice.

My mom, being an odd duck, used the Seven Bridges problem as one of her hooked rug subjects.  I grew up with that rug, with the knowledge–imparted to me by my parents–that you simply couldn’t cross all the bridges once without crossing one twice.  I spent many hours on my tummy on that rug, trying first one route, then another, sure that I could figure out a way to cross those seven bridges without doubling back.

I never could.

Many years later, while in the midst of my final attempt at getting a bachelor’s degree, wherein I discovered that it might be fun to get a minor in mathematics, I took a class in graph theory.  It was the hardest damned class I ever took.  It was made less hard by the fact that I spent so many hours trailing a finger across one bridge, then another, trying to figure out a classic mathematics problem in the form of a hooked rug.

That was mom.  Another of her hooked rug masterpieces was a rug inspired by a flight over Midwestern farms divided by a small river.  The fields of crops were staggered–based on the soils they were on, different crops were in different positions, and it so happened that the river was following the course of an old fault.  So a crop of corn, say, on one side of the river turned into a crop of corn on the other side of the river, but shifted by two crop fields down the river.

Somewhere, I have a picture of Mom and my two aunts, sisters to my father.  It’s from before I was born.  My aunts are dressed in lovely, picture-perfect ’50s cocktail dresses, the full skirts swirling around them.  Mom, on the other hand, is dressed in a black pencil skirt, a dark turtleneck, her hair severely pulled back, a cigarette in her hand.  She looks the utmost urban sophisticate, my aunts look like debutantes.

I remember when my first True Love had to leave, and I was left bereft and heartbroken.  My brother’s graduation from An Illinois University was happening, so we all piled into his mom’s Volkswagen van for the long drive to exurban Illinois for the ceremony.  I was dazed and sobbing from the ending of the dramatic love affair.  I spent the few hours to the ceremony sitting on the floor of the van, with my head in mom’s lap, sobbing my heart out.  She spent those hours stroking my hair and letting me vent my angst.

Mom was born in California, but spent many adolescent and childhood summers in Arizona, trekking to the various mountainous areas in Central and Northern Arizona.  When she grew up, she always remembered those times in the pines of Flagstaff, Prescott, and small town Yarnell.  So when she and Dad were thinking about retiring, she began agitating for retirement to Yarnell, Arizona.  She and Dad subscribed to a realtor’s magazine for northern Arizona, and began daydreaming.  Much to the family’s surprise, one day we were told by Mom that Dad (who hadn’t left Chicago since he returned from the Japanese occupation after WWII) had (OMGWTFBBQ!!!) purchased a ticket to Arizona to view a property they had seen in this realtor’s listing.  Three months later, they were packing all their worldly goods to move to nowhere, Arizona (aka “Wilhoit”).

After they moved, I would visit them there, in this tiny not-town in the middle of nowhere, Arizona.  I would sit at the kitchen table hanging out with them, watching through the sliding glass doors as the sun and the clouds would create ever-changing patterns across the valley between their house and Yarnell, highlighting the small canyon that was a feature of that valley, limning the small hills with light and shadow.

I would return to Chicago, to my city life, with my city friends, and find myself, at times, standing on the beach of Lake Michigan, seeing the sun set on the clouds building up across the lake, looking like the mountains of Arizona, and my heart would break with “home” sickness.

So when Dad needed to have back surgery, I chucked everything to move out to Arizona to be with them, to help out with the driving, the groceries, etc.  They had long since moved into Prescott, once-upon-a-time-state-capitol…So I sojourned in their house in Wilhoit, a town of maybe 250 people, and drove up the twisty-turny White Spar Road to the town of Prescott to hang out with them.

They introduced me to strange, secretive gold miners.  They showed me ancient rock art that few people had ever seen.  I would hang my head back against the back seat of cars at night and watch Cassiopeia and the Scorpion rise (at different times during the year) against the backdrop of the Milky Way, which I could never have seen so brightly and clearly even fifty miles from the city.

Mom would spend the evenings poring over the old USGS topo maps of the area, quick to leap upon any small marking that said “ruins” or “spring” or any other interesting feature.  In the morning, Dad would ask her what was on the agenda, and she would pull out the latest map, point to the feature, and say, “We’re going there…”  And go there they would.

Mom was always looking forward.  Her childhood during the Depression, her father’s search for work, his working for the government as an IRS agent, all made her willing to look Forward, rather than Back.  She was an explorer, always.

There is more.  But now I am drunk, and tired, and sad.  My very best friend in the whole wide world died this afternoon.  I can’t ask her, now, “Ma, am I remembering this right?”  I can’t ask her where they were planning to go on that particular day.  I can’t ask her where the photo is, the one of her with her new sisters-in-law-to-be.  All I can do is be thankful that I was there for her, and that she was there for me.  She was my very best friend in the whole wide world.

I miss her already.

RIP GrannyJ–1927-2010.

It occurred to me this morning that having this picture on that post was a BAD IDEA, given what weird pervos might be searching on the term h@rd-on…So here it is, split out by itself.

A gratuitous shot of the dotter, sitting on my Big Red Lips.  Look at how big she’s gotten!  We had to buy her a new bicycle because she’s grown so much.  Also, because she left her bicycle lying in our neighbor’s driveway and it got smashed when the neighbor backed out of the garage.  (She had to pitch in some of her own hard-earned money to get the replacement.)

Spring has finally arrived Chez OmegaMom.  The snow has completely melted from the yard.  Robins are serenading us in the morning and deep into the “night”.  The gloaming is creeping up; it is 11 p.m. as I write this, and it’s still late twilight outside—sunrise was at 5:51 a.m., sunset at 10:05 p.m.  The trees and shrubbery are filled with leaf buds, which I swear seem to grow as you watch.  You can definitely see the changes from day to day.

Within a few weeks, all the houses on all the streets in our area will be hidden from view again by the riotous abundance of greenery surrounding them.

And, as happens each spring, the rhubarbs get a hard-on.  Thick, red, hard penile stubs emerge from the ground in clumps and look infinitely pornographic for a few days.

Then the hard-ons explode into wildly wrinkled, alien looking baby leaves.  A week or so later, suddenly the plants look like ordinary rhubarbs:  the aliens have vanished.

It’s an amazing transformation.

Alas, the pics we had of the hard-on stage were out of focus, but here we have some aliens emerging from the penile cocoon:

Here’s a more pornographic looking item; imagine it without its crinkled taffeta skirt:

Brains for the vegetarian zombies:

The rhubarb plants give my hubby and me something to giggle about in delayed adolescence.  Then, later in the year, they give my hubby rhubarb to make pies.

I, unfortunately, am not fond of rhubarb pie.  Hopefully we’ll be able to ship one off to OmegaGranny.

Aside from that, I have been walking in the mornings, enjoying the sunshine, the explosion of growth, the rich smells of moist dirt and growing things.  And getting mosquito bites—of course.  And raking—endlessly—the yard, in bits and pieces.

This week, the dotter announced before the weekend that she had been spending too much time with her friends on weekends, and she wanted to Do Nothing this weekend.  This was okay with us, of course—it was, in fact, very gratifying; you mean you want to spend time with your boring old Mom and Dad?!  Well, okie dokie, then!

Yesterday being sunny and warm and beautiful, we did things outside (I picked up a winter’s worth of garbage revealed by melted snow, and began the unending raking of the lawn) and ran errands.  Today being chillier and cloudy, I promised her we’d go to the movies.  So she and I headed out this afternoon to catch “How To Train Your Dragon”.

I loved it.  I thought it was sweet and funny and uplifting, and I do so like movies that have the nerdy type being the hero.  I even—towards the end—got a bit weepy-eyed.

Then we went off to Cold Stone Creamery for a goodie, and then back home.

I settled down at the computer for a bit of late afternoon computing.  An hour later, OmegaDad came in and said, “You have to come see this!  She’s made a dragon.  It’s splendid, and 3-D.  Bring your camera!”

Herewith the dragon, sans wings and rider:

Later, when she was done with the wings and the rider, she brought it down to me in the office, where I was doing laundry.  She asked me to put it on the internet, so here it is:

And another view:

Coincidentally enough, I had been researching local art classes for her.  I think, now that she’s eight, garnering “most creative” votes from her classmates, willing to freak freely with her art, and getting more and more elaborate with her creations, it’s time for her to get a little bit of more formal instruction.  Neither OmegaDad nor I have much—if any—artistic ability, and definitely neither of us has any training in techniques.  And, with the NCLB mandating Readin’, Writin’ and ‘Rithmetic, there’s no funding or time for such frivolities as art; we’re lucky to have a music class (of sorts) once every three days, rotated with library and phys ed.  Which means we’re on our own when it comes to art work.

In my research, I happened upon a listing of local teachers of various sorts who are willing to accept contracts with homeschoolers (local homeschoolers can sign up with the school district for vouchers), and what a goldmine that was!  Listings of art teachers, music teachers, tutoring, Greek teachers, Russian teachers…and on and on.  (Alas, no Chinese teachers, bah, even though Big City has a thriving Mandarin immersion program at one of the public schools…)

Too late for now, but I will definitely be looking into at least one of the art teachers for next school year.

She slides through the water, her body long and slim and straight, her arms curving upward and over, flashing back into the water cleanly, effortlessly, moving swiftly and aimed straight.

It’s as if her body has taken the past three years of gymnastics, and the sporadic dips into swim lessons, put them together and realized, “Ahah!  This is how it goes!”  All the various portions of her body are suddenly working in unison, propelling her through the water like an arrow.

Now, breathing?  That’s a different matter!  But it’s clear to me, watching, that she is getting the hang of that, too, the coordination of the head turn, the arms moving, the legs kicking, the water flowing, the air coming out of the body and breathing back in.

She will become a good swimmer, a fast swimmer, I can tell.

Last night at bedtime, she got off onto a discussion of how we are all related, everyone on earth.

She is coming up with funky, kicky clothes combos—definitely not my style, but very definitely her style.

So there she is, poised, on the brink, transforming while we watch from a little girl to a young lady.  Oh, it takes more time than this, she is still only eight, she goes into silly fits with her best bud, she still stands stock still in shock when she’s spilled something rather than running to get a paper towel to clean it up, she still crows with glee when she wins at a game and pouts when she loses (no matter how many times we talk about “being a good sport” yadda yadda yadda), and many days she just wants to wear a sloppy T-shirt and a pair of my sweat pants pooling around her feet.  But the future her peeks out again and again, more and more often.

The story of Artyom has lured me back into reading adult adoptee blogs again, but now I read them with less of a distance.  It hits me like a punch in the gut, reading about an adult adoptee who has reunited with her parents in Taiwan, and how she feels lost between two worlds, how she mourns her could-have-beens with her birthparents at the same time as she cherishes her did-thats with her adoptive parents.  Here, there, in-between.  Moving toward some vague semblance of the comfort that families should have, realizing it will never truly happen, because back in time, when she was just a babe, she was removed from there and placed here, and “here” and “there” are different cultures, different languages, different families, different behaviors totally.

So I look at my butterfly-in-the-chrysalis, my girl arrowing through the water, and my heart breaks for her.  Is she going to feel like that in the future?  Is my funny, smart, bouncing, athletic, silly girl going to be a 30-year-old staring helplessly at the past and realizing:  This is the Could Have Been, this is the past, this is the Never-Happened, this is my life in microcosm and I can never go back there, and how do I take these two halves that are halfway across the world and put them back together to make a whole that is Me?

Part of me scoffs, saying, “Girl!  She’s not that introspective!  She’s a live-life-full-bore-charging-off-without-consideration type of kid!”  The other part of me says, “She’s eight.  What will she be like when she’s 13?  When she’s 25?  When she’s 31?  Maybe she will slow down and it will hit her then.”  Another part of me listens to her at bedtime asking “why did Kai have to die?” or “Are we all—everyone in the world—related?” and knows that even if she doesn’t obsess over every facet, every particle, every “what-if”, she’s already starting the process of maturation that leads to questions like those.

It’s less academic now, more real.  Day by day, she’s moving towards a more adult way of looking at the world, of thinking about things.  I won’t be able to protect her when things hurt.  I shouldn’t protect her—it’s her life, not mine.  But sometimes it’s an arrow to the heart to think about it.

One thing about the tale of Artyem, the Russian boy adopted then returned, which I have seen only one post directly address, and which has been bothering the hell out of me:

When was some idiot child going to use that tale to be mean to my dotter?  When was someone going to tell her that we were going to send her back, because that’s what people do to adopted kids?

Oh, there were plenty of posts about the feeling of loss and abandonment that some adopted people feel, long into their adult years.  There were plenty of posts about the whys and wherefores of this woman’s case.  There were plenty of posts about the ethical, moral issues.  But not really any specifically saying:  I have an eight-year-old child who was adopted, and I’m terrified that someone is going to use this story to HURT HER.

There was one night last week where she was snuggled up on the Big Chair in the living room.  I was walking by, and she asked me to sit with her because she had something to say to me.  Now, OmegaDotter has a tendency to do this when you’re not paying attention to her, and it always turns out to be something lame, being used an an excuse to Get Attention.  I was dubious.  Then she said, “I’m sad about adoption.”

Oh, boy.  I immediately sat down.  So we talked—a little bit—about what made her sad.  She’s getting better at being able to say these things, but not any better about the whys.  I asked her why she was sad, and how she was sad, and all she could do was say she was sad.

“I know it’s sad for you sometimes.  It’s happy and sad for your dad and me; we’re happy that we adopted you, but sad that you had to lose your birth family for us to adopt you, and sad that it makes you sad.”

So I had to ask her, “Has anyone been teasing you about being adopted?”  She shook her head no.  We snuggled a bit, she bounced up, and that was that.

Um.  Okay.  Was that all?  Hm.

I kept wondering during the week, what do I do?  Do I ask her directly if she’s heard about the story?  Do I just let it sit?  What if I let it sit and someone pulls it out like a trump card in the midst of a kid fight?  Will she talk to us about it or just keep it hidden tight?  What do I do?!

This evening at bedtime, the dam busted.  I was giving her her goodnight kiss, and looking at her I couldn’t just let her be defenseless against this story.  I knew that at some point, someone would pull it and cut with it and it would hurt like a knife.

“Hey, kiddo.  Anyone at school tell you about the boy who was adopted and sent back?”

Hey, I never said I was subtle about these things…

Her eyes widened, and she shook her head.

“Anyone tease you about being sent back to China?”

“No.  Why?”

“Well, there was this story in the news this week about a 7-year-old boy who was adopted by a woman who ended up sending him back.”  I held her by the side of her head and stared into her eyes.  “And I just want you to know:  We would never, ever ‘send you back to China’.  Never, ever.  You’re stuck with us, girl!”  I kind of choked up on the word “stuck” so it came out funny.

“Styuck?!  Ha!  You’re styuck with me!” she giggled.

“I mean it.  You’re stuck with us.  We would never send you back to China, no matter how horribly you behave.”  I gave her the hairy eyeball (my tone and my mugged expression made sure that the “no matter how horribly you behave” was taken as an exaggeration, not a condemnation).  She smiled.  It wasn’t a “haha, that’s funny!” smile.  It wasn’t a “I’m being cute and know it” smile.  It was a big happy smile. 

“No matter how bad I am?!”

“No matter what, kiddo.”

Then she needed the details of the story, so I gave her an abbreviated version.  She asked me when it happened.  I told her.  She got indignant:  “On your birthday!  That’s sucky!”  I mentally blinked—that hadn’t even occurred to me.  She decided she wanted to go KILL the woman.  Oops, nip that in the bud right quick, OmegaMom!  Then she decided she wanted to write a letter telling the woman she was mean and cruel and—bad word alert!—shhhh!—stupid.  She wanted to see a picture of the woman; was she pretty or ugly?  Which was a good opening to OmegaMom’s standard “pretty people can be mean, too; it’s not what’s on the outside that matters, it’s what’s on the inside” shtick.

Which, of course, led to the dotter pretending to rip off her skin (her own skin) to see what was inside (all very dramatic and done in a silly way), which led to “did you know my bladder is right here”, pointing to the middle of her abdomen, “not down here”, pointing to right above the pubic bone.  Which led to the dotter explaining that her teacher had shown a picture of the insides and the bladder was in the middle and did I know the stomach wasn’t round, but was shaped like a banana?

So.  I feel better just getting it out there in the open.  The story itself, and the underlying fear that some adult adoptees say they always had, that they would be “sent back”.

Some posts on the story:  Yoon’s Blur and Harlow’s Monkey ask why adult adoptees are never interviewed about stories like these?  Random Babble talks blunt talk.  Pundit Mom says Children Don’t Come With Return Policies and also doesn’t like the media slant on these stories.  Lisa Belkin talks about the case in the context of whether international adoptions should be done at all.  Patricia Cogen talks about how the mother in the case should have searched for help.  KJ Dell’Antonia says “I Did Not Love My Adopted Child”—the gist of which is that older child adoption can be hard, and adoptive parents should talk about it more openly—but which has rubbed many people the wrong way (see comments on the story and on Twitter).  And John Raible’s post, Learning from Aryom’s plight, was the one that specifically said that adopted children—right here, right now—might be impacted and APs need to be proactive about it.  Thanks, John; I think that spurred me on to bulling through the subject in my blundering way.

The story of the single mom who adopted a 7-year-old from Russia, then sent him back unaccompanied on an international flight with a letter that said—essentially—“I’m sending the defective goods back” has been reverberating through the news and the adoptive community for the past week.

I’m trying to organize my thoughts here, so I think I’ll do it bullet-point wise while I’m organizing.

• They had had the boy for six months.  Um.  Okay; everything I’ve read says that it takes the child being in a family as long as the child has been in an institution for any real attachment to take place.  Six months is no time at all in terms of family growth and re-settlement and stability and and and…
• The adoption agency in the U.S. had been doing the follow-up visits and reported no problems at the last visit, which was about a month ago.
• Russia is angry.  Well, dammit, they’ve been angry about a series of adoption-related issues over the past few years; what does it take to (a) have them realize that good and solid information about a child’s behaviors and issues is needful and necessary for a safe and stable adoption situation; (b) have them decide there are serious problems with the current Russian-international adoption approach and figure out how to change it; (c) have them just decide to shut down the international adoption program entirely?

Now, a lot of folks are faulting the adoption agency for approving this woman for adoption.  The adoption agency in question is actually used quite often by families in Alaska for adoptions from China, and they have always had good “cred” in the Alaska FCC mailing list.

I’ve read their “questions and answers” sheet about the case, and, reading between the lines, it sounds like this woman never asked for help.  In addition, the agency claims that they have always found another family for a child who is not a “good fit” with the family that adopts him/her.

Why didn’t this woman ask for help???

Was she unprepared?

Well, supposedly she had ten hours’ worth of training in the ins and outs of international adoption.

Okay.  First off, ten hours isn’t shit.  It’s what’s required by law, but it’s still not shit.  Not for something like adoption.  Period.  Oh, we had that same ten hours of training ourselves, via videos from our out-of-state adoption agency.  Even so, even though it’s a lick and a swipe at the potential issues that can crop up in adoption, it certainly mentioned the worse-case scenarios multiple times.

At which point, we went online and researched it for ourselves.

Well, actually, we had gone online and researched it for ourselves long before we got those videos.  We joined email lists.  We read up on attachment issues.  We read up on ways to foster attachment.  If we had been adopting an older child, we would have researched ideas for fostering attachment in older children.  We talked and talked and talked about these possibilities.

But y’know, there are a lot of people out there who are…blinded…by their hopes and dreams.  A person who is blinded like that will hear the training, but not listen.  They will fall victim to magical thinking:  “Oh, yes, that sort of thing happens, but it won’t happen to us!”  Or, “Oh, yes, if that happens to us, we will be able to Make It All Better Through True Love!”  Or something.  Probably, we, too, were victims of magical thinking.  But when it became obvious to us that OmegaDotter had some issues, we didn’t cover our ears and sing, “La, la, la, I’m not listening!”  All that prior research made it very easy for me to go to our pediatrician and discuss our worries and specify why we had them, and our selection of a pediatrician with international adoption experience made it so that when I approached her about these issues, she was able to come up with a therapist (occupational therapy) who could help.

Right there, though, is a crucial element:  We asked for help.  When we realized we needed help, we reached out.

While I am fully aware that journalists are incredibly able to twist a story or leave out important details, and that speaking to the grandmother in a case like this is, essentially, relying on hearsay, the grandmother claims that the mother “talked” to psychologists, but did not take the child in for any sort of therapy.

Dudes.  If you’ve adopted, and you’re facing problems with your newly adopted child, you don’t rely on a phone call or two for either diagnosis or therapy.  Period.  You get your child into therapy with a qualified therapist of some type who has experience with children adopted from institutions, experience with attachment disorders, sensory disorders.  To boot, any psychologist who makes a diagnosis over the phone without seeing the person in question is a disgrace to the profession.  (Some of my long-time readers may recall a specific controversial instance where this was done.)

If you are adopting, here’s a word of advice:  Your agency is there to help you.  Not just before the adoption.  Not just during the adoption trip.  If you’re having problems, your agency should be able to help you.  It’s part of what you’re paying them for. 

But because these options are available doesn’t mean all people take advantage of them.  If you’re a person who has been blinded by the “I’m going to rescue a poooor helpless cheee-ild from a cold, loveless, dead-end life in a (::shudder::) orphanage!” spiel, you’re probably not going to be the kind of person who actually listens to the (ain’t shit) ten hours of training.  You’re probably not going to be the kind of person who realizes that, with older children, there’s a honeymoon period, and after the honeymoon period, it takes hard work.  Even if you’ve got a beautiful, innocent, sweet baby girl, being a parent takes hard work once the honeymoon period is over with.

(I’d be very, very interested to find out the percentage of adoption disruptions correlated to age at adoption and country of origin.  It would be nice if this information were actually tracked.  Certainly, it seems that there are a helluva lot more news stories about disruptions or accounts of abuse for children adopted from Russia; is this actually the case, or am I suffering from confirmation bias here?  I find myself wondering if there’s an inherent issue at work, being that people who are adopting from Russia are [typically] adopting from there in hopes of not being a “conspicuous family”, and, not having it in-your-face, as it were, are less likely to internalize the need to confront the less pleasant aspects of older child/international adoption/adopting institutionalized children?)

OmegaDotter bounced in the garage door, letting it slam shut behind her, kicked off her shoes, pulled off her jacket, tossed her book bag on the futon and was talking a mile a minute.

“Mom!  Mom, Joey’s family next door is moving out, and they want to sell the goat, can we buy the goat, please, please, I promise I’ll take care of it and it needs a home, puh-leeeeeze!”

Last fall, Joey’s family moved into the house next door.  We were delighted; the people who had lived there before had Mean Dogs that would chase me and the dotter as we walked back from the bus stop, that had invaded our other next door neighbor’s yard and chewed up one of their dogs, and would regularly raid our garbage can.  They also didn’t clean their yard at all, so it was totally overgrown and weedy—they didn’t even pick up the deck fencing that had fallen down onto the former lawn.  We were so glad to see that family go!  But Joey was a classmate of the dotter’s, he had brothers, they were a quiet(ish) family, and they cleaned up the property right away so it looked…decent…again.

And they bought a goat, Dottie.  The idea, I suppose, was that in time, as she grew, they could milk her.  The dotter was charmed.

At odd times during the winter, I’d be sitting in the dotter’s bedroom reading after we had done our bedtime routine, and hear her going “Maa-aah-aaah!  Maa-aah-aaaah!”  It would startle me until I remembered:  There’s a goat next door.  I’d worry vaguely about how she was doing in the cold, but other than that she didn’t impinge upon my life.

Until yesterday.

“No.  No goat!” I said.

“Moooom!  Puh-leeze!”

“NO GOAT.”  I said.

“Why not?!”

“Because I said so.”  Oh, what a great comeback!

She kept tossing various reasons why we should buy the goat, then reverted to calling me a meanyhead, and then her flighty attention got caught by something else and the subject was dropped.

We bought the first chickens after a bout of OmegaDad and OmegaDotter trying to wheedle me into a goat.  This came after years of OmegaDad trying to wheedle me into a llama.  No llamas, I said for years.  No goats! I reiterated when that particular flight of fancy caught their mutual attention.  But when they finally scaled back to something more reasonable—to wit, chickens—I finally said yes.

A goat, I know, would end up being Yet Another Responsibility.  Yet Another Animal to care for during those long, dark, icy cold winter days and nights.  Yet Another Reason to emerge from the warm house and go trudging across the snowpacked back yard.  Yet Another Expense in terms of food and shelter.  And, oh Kozmik All above use, Yet Another Reason for Vet Bills!

Amazingly enough, OmegaDotter did not mention the goat to her father.  But I knew it would come soon, so at bedtime, when I had crawled into bed and snuggled up against OmegaDad in the dark, I muttered, “Are you awake?”

“Mmm-hmmm,” he mumbled sleepily.

“Joey’s family is moving out and they want to sell their goat.  NO.”  I said.

There was a silence for a moment, then he turned to face me in the darkness.  “Wait a minute.  I’m confused.  If it’s ‘NO’, then why are you telling me about it?!”

“Because I know that the dotter will try the classic end run where she asks you because she knows you’ll say ‘Yes’.  And I’m saying ‘No’.”

“I thought you were telling me because you wanted the goat.”

“NO!  I don’t want the goat!”  O panic.  No, no, NO, that’s not what I meant!

“Oh.  Okay.”  He turned back over and snuggled up against me again.

Then, in the dark, he sharply turned his head back towards me, in a silent version of a comic, “Are you sure?!”

I snickered.

He did it again, as if to say, “Now, y’know, a goat would be cool!”  I snickered again and poked him in the back.  He did it one final time, and I whapped him gently on the head.  “Enough!  No goat!”

We fell asleep.

Goatless.  Thank heavens.

Hail thee, festival day!
Bless’d day that art hallowed forever–
Day whereon Christ arose,
Breaking the kingdom of death!

I am not religious, in any manner whatsoever.  But I have lovely memories of Easter Sundays as a child, going with my grandparents to Easter service at a high Episcopalian church with The.  Most.  Awesome.  Pipe organ.  And singing that particular hymn, which is indelibly engraved on my memory.  The pipe organ would play the deepest notes possible, making the flagstone pavement vibrate, and then…then, when the Joyous!  Triumphant!  part of the hymns was hit, the trumpets making a blaring fanfare to celebrate.  (Much to my dismay, a long, detailed article about that organ is no longer available.)

So today was Easter.  Of course, we had an Easter basket for the dotter…but we had no dotter for the Easter basket!  She spent the night at her friend A.’s house, and blew eggs and dyed them and hunted them there.  So our Easter basket sat on the table, alone and forlorn:

(Note the mini basket up front, for her doll Ling.  Credit for this entire creation goes to OmegaDad.)

While we hung around (in blissful quietude!), OmegaDad was making pita bread, tortillas, and lavosh.  Yum!  The pita bread/lavosh dough produced a lot of gas, so much so that it looked like the rising bowl was going to…well, rise itself!

Eventually the dotter decided she wanted to come home, at which point she dove into the basket:

Inside the basket was a bounty of crinkle-cut paper confetti in many spring colors, in place of the green plastic grass that ends up being eaten by pets the world around on Easter day.  OmegaDad and the dotter decided to pile it on top of my head, topped off with a whirling yellow pinwheel:

Then she and I had to dye eggs, which is always fun.  We had a polka-dotted affair:

We had a starburst:

And we had one that really, truly looked like a planet.  It wasn’t just me who thought so; I was staring at it pensively thinking how much like Jupiter it looked, when OmegaDotter saw it and gasped, “OMG!  It looks just like a planet, Mom!  Let’s make it Saturn!  Let’s paint a ring around it!”  So I did; in fact, I painted two rings:

From this angle, alas, it looks either like the X chromosome or like an elongated infinity sign (the dotter’s notion, again) or an analemma.  (Windows LiveWriter, by the way, does not recognize the word “analemma”, harrumph.)

Our array of eggs:

I hope your day was as fun and filled with confetti as ours!

This past fall and winter, we had two hens die, so now that it is springtime, the husband’s thoughts lightly turned to—of course—new baby chicks.  So, this fine Easter weekend morning, OmegaDad and OmegaDotter trekked off to the local hatchery and brought back a Belgian Bearded d’Uccle Bantam (mille fleurs variety) and a Frizzle, both about two weeks old.  We now have Miss Frizzle:

And Millie:

They are happily ensconced in a heated plastic tub in the garage, and I am, of course, falling in love with them because they are so cute.

Yes, spring is rapidly springing here.  The snow has melted off the north side of our front yard.  Now, you’d expect it to melt off the south side first, but the south side of our yard is shaded by trees, so the north side gets freed up first.  In the back yard, the back two vegetable beds are now snow-free, and we have purchased black plastic to wrap the beds to heat them up and thaw the soil in preparation for planting.

In our rock garden at the foot of the kitchen stairs, one happy Leopard’s Bane is leafing out luxuriantly.  In the garden behind the house, the lilacs are budding their leaves. 

A mama moose and her calf have been wandering the neighborhood eating everything they can find that has sap running through it, so I am planning to cut up strips of Bounce to tie onto the lilac bushes (this is rumored to keep moose away).

The trees have pussy willows bursting out at the tops.

Today it unofficially hit 50F here in Suburban Alaska.

Spring!

We like to play “The Animal Game” at dinnertime.  It’s a variation of Twenty Questions “made up” by OmegaDotter.  Her buddy A. enjoys playing the game when he’s spending the night, which he is doing tonight.  Thus, we had a round of The Animal Game to enjoy.

A. started off, but the dotter guessed his animal in record time—an owl.

“It’s a screech owl!” quoth A.

“Oh, then it’s Lady Gaga!” quoth OmegaDad.

I slapped OmegaDad on the arm.  “She doesn’t screech,” I said.

“She does too!” was the response.

Next up was OmegaDotter.  She always starts with, “This animal has eyes.”  Which makes OmegaDad and I roll our own eyes, because it’s useless as a clue.  But we moved on…does it live on land or sea?…is it bigger than A.?…does it have fur?

“Yes,” answered the dotter.

“Oh, then it’s Lady Gaga!” shouted OmegaDad triumphantly.

I slapped him again.  OmegaDotter rolled her eyes.  A. fell down laughing.  (Hey, it doesn’t take too terribly much to amuse 8-year-olds.  Or fifty-year-olds, for that matter…)

The dotter stumped us with that one, because we forgot to ask if it was extinct or not; it was a mammoth.

She went again, starting—of course—with “this animal has eyes.”  There was a question as to whether it ate other animals.  A. wisely recited their teacher’s rhyme about how to distinguish predators from prey (“Eyes on the side, they like to hide; eyes to the front, they like to hunt”).  Then he took to helping the dotter, because she wasn’t very sure about aspects of her animal.

Somewhere along the line, of course, OmegaDad had to ask if it was Lady Gaga.

OmegaDotter got very frustrated at this point, and proclaimed that he was no longer allowed to use those words together for at least two hours.

OmegaDad won that one, at which point the dotter and A. both grumbled, because they knew his animals are hard to guess, mostly due to tricksy initial clues that send you haring off in the wrong direction.  Luckily, because my husband’s mind is an open book to me, I was able to guess his animal—a pine bark borer beetle.  Both the dotter and A. were disgruntled at this, saying that they had no idea what that animal was.  So OmegaDad got to go again.  But he passed his turn on to me.

I took a cue from the dotter:  “This animal has eyes.”  Hah!

So they asked if it lived on land or sea—land.

They asked if it was a mammal—I said yes.

They asked if it was a wild animal—I had to think about this, but eventually said no.

Did it live in trees?  No.

Did it have fur?  No.

Did it have hair?  Yes.

Was it bigger than A.?  Yes.

Do people own it as a pet?  I answered no.

Are people allowed to own it as a pet?  No.

At which point, OmegaDad, having seen my slight smile while I was debating the “wild animal” question, asked, “Is this animal a human being?”  Yes.

And A. burst out, loudly, “Is it Lady Gaga?!”

Yes.

Har.  That’s my tale of our brush with the Fame Monster, and a slice of (silly, pointless, fun, and boring to those outside the family) life around our dinner table.

When I was but a child—somewhere in the region of 10 or 11 or 12—I had my first sinus infection.  Or, perhaps a better way of putting it, my first memorable sinus infection.

“Memorable” is the definitive word.  For all I know, I had previous ones, but simply don’t remember them.

This one began, as all sinus infections begin for me, with soft, puffy skin by the right side of the nose and above the eye and a mild headache.  But the skin kept swelling and swelling, both beside the eye and above it, until my eye was swollen shut.

Um.  That’s a bit of a sinus infection, wouldn’t you say?

My parents, of course, hauled me off to either the doctor or the emergency room; at this point, looking back into the veils of time, I can’t remember which.  What I do remember is being diagnosed with an acute sinus infection (aka “The Sinus Infection From Hell”) and being ensconced in the hospital for a few days while the medicos took care of it.  In particular, I remember The Machine.

It was square and tall and white.  It had a water tank.  It rolled on wheels.  It had a hose.  It had a bulbous glass end that looked somewhat like a dainty glass minaret (or perhaps a stylized glass p3nis).

–>  WARNING:  TMI GROSSITUDE FOLLOWS! <–

This bulbous glass tube was the nozzle end of great suction power.  It’s purpose was to vacuum out my sinuses, sort of a powered, grown-up sized version of the snot sucker every modern parent is familiar with (even those of us who did not have mild, calm babies who would lie still for the dropper up their noses, but babies that would fight against it like snarly feral kittens with every ounce of strength in their small bodies).  Every few hours, a nurse would wheel The Machine into my room, dig the bulbous end into my nose, and then power it up (it sounded sort of like a home power tool), at which point—o blessed relief!—large quantities of blobby mucous would be removed from my pressure-filled sinuses to be deposited into the water tank like grotesque jellyfish.

It was truly, spectacularly, deliciously gross.  The kind of grossness that pre-teen and teenage boys revel in.  I will admit, pre-teen girls revel in it, too.  Maybe even post-menopausal 50 year olds.  I mean, it was gross, but it was really, truly cool, as well.

After this acute infection, I was plagued with sinus infections all the time.  None of them reached the heights of swelling and pain that that particular incident did, but I became very familiar with the soft, painful feeling of slightly swollen skin next to the bridge of my nose and right below my eyebrow bone, which heralded the coming of a sinus headache.  Bleah.  Luckily, our stay in the dry Southwest seems to have changed the tenor of my sinus infections, so they are more cheekbone-y than forehead-y, and my number of sinus headaches decreased immensely.  (Migraine headaches, however, ramped up as I got older, but have now pretty much vanished since the hormonal roller-coaster has ended, yay!)

Goodness knows if the Power Sucker is the modern standard of care.  There’s probably a totally different protocol to follow now, something with lots o’ drugs shrinking the mucus and computerized tracking.  But there was a certain splendid satisfaction to the Power Sucker:  You knew that the mucus blockage was being reduced, and damned if it didn’t feel like it right away, no delays to have drugs kick in or anything.  Just *blammo!*, five minutes of vacuuming and three to four hours of relief.

It makes me wonder why they don’t sell a Home Power Sucker for those days when people’s sinuses go on a rampage.

All of which is to say, I am dealing with some sort of sinus infection right now, one which is mainly concentrated in my eustachian tubes and leaves me feeling like someone is poking an icepick into my ears.  Bleah.  I don’t think the Power Sucker would even help this kind of problem; the main thing to do is to avoid milk and milk products.  (This is problematic when there are fresh chocolate chip cookies in the house.  Or any kind of cookies.  I am of the mindset that cookies must have milk.  Realizing that milk goops up my eartubes has put a damper on my Girl Scout Cookie rampage.  Now I have to weigh the options:  Drink milk with my cookies, The Way God Meant Us To Eat Cookies, or be an adult and realize that if I do, I will have icepicks in my ears a few days later.  Gah.)

(And, no, I have not tried Neti Pots.  What can I say?  Hey, if I wanted to be waterboarded, I’d have become a jihadist, y’know?!)

(To Noreen and Ms. Vinegar Martinis:  You do realize that even the thought of Olympics of any sort scares the snot out of me???  Hmmm.  Maybe that would be useful, given the topic of this post.  In the meantime, I will just let her do team and see how long it lasts.

To Sarah From Italy:  The snow will be gone soon.  I promise.  Sooner for you than me, though!

To Catalyst:  Yeah, but, see, if I can see Russia from my house, that means I’m looking at Siberia, and Siberia is where exiles go.  Hah!

To Kaz and Sarah (again):  Yeah, she has some fine lines.  I’ve gotten used to seeing girls of various ages and sizes flying all over the place, so the dotter’s flips and handstands and what-not don’t scare me any more.)

So yesterday was the first time I was able to see the dotter at one of her gymnastics meets.  Her first real meet was two days after I headed off to Arizona to help take care of mom, and she had a second one while I was still there.  Being a doting mom, I just have to show off her beam routine:

Her handstand was a thing of beauty.  Everyone around us commented on how long she held it and how straight it was.  Alas, her landing wasn’t that good, which ended up moving her from a 9.0+ to an 8.9, and a red ribbon on the beam as opposed to a blue.  Wah!  And, yes, her split jump isn’t very good, but everything else she does on the beam is generally great.

Of course, since she had filled my camera card up with videos of Newman the cat encountering Wooly the cat, when I went to record other routines, the video card was filled up.  After gnashing my teeth at the small capacity of my memory card, I investigated, and promptly deleted two videos of yowling cats rolling around on my office floor, and was able to record her bar routine, too:

So she may be going up to Level 4 this summer, which is honest-for-goodness’-sake team level.  IF she stays focused and works hard, and doesn’t goof off with her buddy K. all the time, which she tends to do.  Doesn’t matter to me, but she and K. have been bitching and moaning about not moving up to Level 4 and how they want to and, gee, they can do their back handsprings and a Level 4 dismount, and blah, blah, blah.

In the meantime, the planet is blasting onward towards the spring equinox.  Tonight, the sun will set at 8:00.  This throws our entire dinner-time zeitgeist off—OmegaDad spends the winter with dinner being cooked after the sun sets (most often long after the sun sets), and the rapid shifting of the seasonal light takes a while to mesh with his cooking brain. 

All the light does not mean warm weather, alas.  In fact, we had well above average temps for two months—mostly while I was in Arizona—and as we move towards official Spring, the temperature has plunged below normal for the past two weeks.  This leaves me generally grumpy.  I managed to rant and rave and cry at OmegaDad this week about how I HATE Alaska and I just WANT TO GO HOOOOOME!  Um.  What can I say?  Seeing all the pictures around the intertubes of people’s swiftly growing snowdrops, crocuses, daffodils and what-not, and reading about bike rides and lovely weather…well, it just makes me mighty damned jealous.

Ages ago, while living in Small Mountain University Town, I noticed a little massage school next to the pet store we liked to frequent.  I poked my head in, and discovered that they had students doing massages every weekend, and that you could get an hour massage for very small amounts of money.

Later on, Small Mountain University’s classified employee council made an arrangement with that massage school to get an additional percentage off the price for university employees.

I was in heaven.  Maybe once a month, once every six weeks, I’d traipse off to SMUT Massage College and get myself an hour-long massage, emerging limp and noodly and relaxed.

Since moving to Alaska, however, I have been unable to indulge.  Oh, we have massage schools off in Big City, but, hey, it’s an hour-long drive there, and the benefits of the massage would be outweighed by the drive back, in my experience.

When I landed in Arizona again to take care of my mom—which included watching her like a hawk while we were snowbound, preparing small meals and trying not to cry as she barely ate anything, then getting her off to the hospital and being ready to fight anyone who claimed it wasn’t “medically necessary” for her to be admitted to the hospital, then keeping an eye on the staff at the nursing home until it became obvious that they were caring, gentle people who really wanted to help, then spending hours making appointments and visiting and touring assisted living facilities in the area—

Well.  It was, to put it mildly, making me uptight.  Really uptight.  I was finding myself unable to sleep because my shoulders were in knots, and my brain was in overdrive, producing item after item after item to worry about or to remember to take care of the next day.  Something had to be done. 

So I called one of the local massage colleges, to see if they had any student clinics going on.  Lo and behold, though they didn’t have beginning students, they had an “advanced” clinic running for the month.  I signed up.

O what a blessing is a good massage.  What a release of tension.  What a lovely hour or so of mindless bliss, melting into the massage table, feeling the horde of knots loosen—even those that I hadn’t realized were there.  It helped so much that I threw monetary caution to the winds and signed up for one a week while I was there.  I loved every minute of those three hours.

Some specifics:  This was through ASIS, in downtown Prescott.  The masseuse was named Jill H., and she was awesome.  She was gentle, asked questions, sent me a note via mail after the first massage (!!), remembered what I had told her and where all the knots had been on the second and third visits, and was, all around, a boon to me during a tough time.  I highly recommend their services, and especially highly recommend Jill.  (She is also working with a local chiropractor…I have, unfortunately, lost the card she gave me, otherwise I would say which chiropractor.)

::OmegaMom walks into the blog space, blows some dust off the furnishings, looks around…::

Hey there.  It’s been long enough for a post from me that BlogHer advertising sent me a “tsk, tsk” email and turned off the ads.  Hah!

Oh, well; I’ve been busy and tired and uptight enough that blogging (and Twitter) has taken second (third?  Last?) place in the scheme of things.

The good news is that my mom is so, so, so much better.  We moved her into assisted living yesterday; she has all the furniture she needs and today’s chores include moving some plants and paintings and photos so that her space is even more her space.

Every day in the past two weeks has been jam-packed with things related to getting her better, getting the move coordinated, packing, vacuuming, cleaning, packing, vacuuming, cleaning, vacuuming, cleaning.  Twenty-five years at one location does tend to make one accumulate stuff…and much of it, as mom says, “Nothing precious”.  My main learning point–aside from the need for retirement funds, and how expensive assisted living is–is that the investment in a weekly cleaning person is a Must for those who do not have the cleaning gene.  All the dust and the stress has combined to give me a lovely cold with a dollop of super-duper sinus infection on top.  Hah!

Arizona has been irritatingly sunny and beautiful, all the while I have been unable to rest and enjoy it.  Grrr.

My brother arrives today–yay!  Someone else to take the burden!  And I head home on Sunday, to a dotter who finally last night broke down during our nightly phone conversation to say, “I want you to COME HOME!!!”, with her voice cracking into tears on the last two words.  Oh, yes, OmegaDad wants me home, too, but he hasn’t cried–it’s been me bursting into spontaneous tearfests on his long-distance shoulder every few days.  He’s a good dude, y’know?  I’ve done something right to have the Kozmik All let me find him all those years ago.

My main focus with mom’s move–aside from, well, the move–has been to create a colorful and welcoming space for her in her new place.  One of the things I did was taken directly from a blog that my commenter and long-time virtual friend Kaz pointed me to named Attic24.  The lady who writes Attic24 is a lover of all things bright and colorful, and her January 21 post made me re-assess my inward sneer at tulips.

I have always thought that tulips are just too, too niffy-naffy and snooty for words.  Stiff, formal, upright–ptooey.  But in the midst of her posts filled with bright mixes of color, A24 showed a vase jam-packed with multi-colored tulips.  It was bright, springy, the furthest thing from “formal” you could imagine.  So I started searching the local florist shops for tulips.

Of course, none of the local florist shops had gotten the word:  tulips in arrangements meant all one color, all stiff, semi- to very formal, and very little variety in color.  Red was big.  So was white.  And pink.  Never in the same store, though!  Bah.  But Monday I was at the local grocery store, struck by the “manager’s specials” of leftover Valentine’s Day bouquets and tchatchkes, and was lured into their flower cooler.  There, in the corner, was a bucket of tulips, gathered into groups of five stems, each group one color.  But they had orange.  They had red.  They had purple.  Pink.  White.  Yellow.  A riot of colors.  So I cornered the young lady who was putting “for sale!” signs on the manager’s specials, and described what I wanted.

She came through!  One of the nicest things about the move was walking mom into her new place and having her delighted with the (beginnings of) big splashes of color…one of which was a small vase jam-packed with tulips of all different colors, sitting on her dining table.

It’s the small things that make me happy sometimes.  That vase of colorful tulips was a symbol to me, a symbol that mom’s life is not going to shrivel up into a blank nursing home stare, that she’s going to have spring and life and color for time to come.

Since I know some of mom’s regular readers are reading, here’s a quick recap of what’s been going on:

When I got here, she was not herself.  She wasn’t getting enough oxygen, was very weak and tired (couldn’t walk from the front door to the kitchen), and I was very very worried.

And we were sort of socked in by the weather, ugh.  Some parts of Small Mountain University Town got up to five feet of snow last week!  We didn’t get that much, but we did get a fair amount of soggy snow…

Anyway, when we could get out easily on Saturday, I rented a car and we set The Plan into motion.  The Plan was to call 911, get her into the hospital, and see if they couldn’t (a) figure out what was going on, and (b) help, and (c) get her into a nursing home for a month (standard Medicare limit) to rehab her.

At that time she was saying that she didn’t think she could handle assisted living, and should just be put in a nursing home for good.

Well.  At the ER, they found that she had a mild case of pneumonia, which they (luckily) admitted her to treat.  She is feeling much better, says she is breathing better than she has in months, but she is still extremely weak.  I’ve been running errands, running back and forth to the hospital, trying to make various arrangements, and trying to keep her (and my) spirits up.  The hospital is arranging with a local nursing home to take her in, but we’re not sure a bed is available yet.  If so, she’ll be moved there tomorrow; otherwise, maybe Wednesday.

Thank you all for your wonderful comments.  I’ve passed on the comments from her blog to her, printing them out in batches as they come in, and they have been so warm and wonderful and cheering for her.  Kate from HighAltitudeGardening sent her a bouquet of bright and colorful flowers, and they grace her hospital room right now, keeping things cheerful.  Catalyst from Oddball Observations phoned, and just knowing that made her feel special and appreciated (I will call back, just have been busy with family phone calls & emails!).  The outpouring of love for her has been heartwarming.

I will post more later.

Well.

When I wrote that last post, it was going to be followed up by the “And she’s all better now, whew!” post.  But I had things to do that weekend, and places to go, so didn’t write.

But I did notice that mom hadn’t blogged for a few days, and she hadn’t sent me any email.  So I picked up the phone to call her (I previously had been calling her every day, but then thought she was better, so stopped).

At which point, she asked me to come out to Arizona again, saying that things were worse.

So here I am in Arizona, with mom.  I managed to sneak in during a break between the storms that have hit Arizona (and California before that).  The airplane was delayed two hours on the tarmac in Big City due to a malfunction that turned out to be a Ghost In The Machine, and missed my connecting flight in Salt Lake City…but Delta showed how absolutely wonderful it is by automagically rebooking all the people who had missed their flights onto the next available flight.  This was very cool–all we had to do was take our existing boarding pass, run it beneath a scanner, and a brand spanking new boarding pass for the rebooked flight was printed out.

But when I got to Phoenix and got to the car rental place, a snag occurred.  It seems that we didn’t have enough money in our account to cover any car rental (if I had had a credit card, that would have worked, but they automatically block out more money for debit cards, no matter how little an amount of time you want to rent)…paychecks being deposited on Saturday didn’t help.  I was tired.  I just wanted to get up to mom.  So I parked myself on one of the chairs in the middle of the huge car rental complex and proceeded to sob my heart out.

Then I called OmegaDad.

Have I mentioned how much I love OmegaDad?  Well, okay, just thought I’d mention it again.

Anyway, he arranged for the inter-city shuttle to pick me up and get me up to Prescott.  Yay, OmegaDad!

Driving up was an adventure–but the good kind.  See, since I wasn’t driving, I didn’t have to worry about all the water crossing the road, or the high winds, and was perched up nice and high so I could peer out the windows and see over concrete barriers on bridges and wash crossings.  All of which were flooded with rushing water.  Waves.  Crests on the waves.  Waterfalls coming down the rocky roadcuts that we were traveling between.  Snow mixing with the heavy rain when we got to Prescott.

(Up in Small Mountain University Town, they have had something like four feet of snow.  Roofs are collapsing on businesses–the ice rink, the big, comfy used bookstore, the fabric store, more–and the city mayor has declared that all businesses must clear their roofs or face a fine.  The powers that be also closed the main highways around SMUT for 24 hours.)

Anyway, I am here with GrannyJ.  We are working on getting her into a nursing home for a few weeks, to see if they can do anything.  We’re talking about her maybe moving to live with my brother.  Lots of things to talk about.  She is not doing well, but she is–as ever–my sharp-witted, fun, sweet mom.

In the meantime, consider me a poster child for the Sandwich Generation:  OmegaDotter’s birthday is tomorrow, and she is in her first “real” gymnastics meet tomorrow, too, with judges and not every participant getting a trophy.  We had a little birthday dinner Wednesday, and gave her the family presents, but I wasn’t able to arrange her party in time…that’s up to OmegaDad.

I know a lot of bloggers who are having issues with their moms these days.  Kat Kaz (damn, should proofread when I’m posting at midnight!), Laurie, Lorrie, V…I’ve kept so quiet with them about their problems because…well, it’s kind of a “La, la, la, I’m ignoring things!” approach.  But we’re past the ignoring problems part here, and I want to apologize and shout out to all of you to say, “Hang in there, kiddos.”

I will keep all & sundry posted; I wasn’t planning to post tonight, but saw Anon in AV’s comment, and thought I should update.

When you’re a new parent, with a small life depending on you, you find yourself doing strange things sometimes.  One commonality that I’m sure my readers have experienced is how new moms and dads can find themselves stopping by their child’s bed in the night and watching—urgently, because you can’t hear the breathing and you’re afraid that something’s wrong.  You wait, suspended in the moment, your anxiety ramping up, until you see the slow, gentle, up and down movement of your child’s torso in tune with her breathing, and you move on, reassured.

I found myself doing that with my mother while I was visiting over Christmas.

I’d be padding into the bathroom in the middle of the night, and find myself popping in to hover at the side of her bed over her, watching, suspended in the moment, my anxiety ramping up, until I saw that slow, gentle, up and down movement of her torso in time with her breathing.  The anxiety was always there.  I’d find myself sneaking in while she was taking a nap, just to be sure.  The sound of her oxygen machine—which she’s used for years now—receded into the background, becoming part of the everyday noises of the house, but it was still loud enough so that when I’d check her, I’d have to get very close to see the small movements of breathing, to hear anything.  I hovered, just checking.

When we first got there, my brother and family were ensconced in the living room, so we made a nest for OmegaDotter by the side of mom’s bed, and I slept in the bed with her.  It wasn’t reassuring.  She was not her normal self; she was lethargic, quiet, enervated.  We were all worried.  Bro and SIL had taken her on an overnight trip down to Tucson, and from the pictures, it looked like mom hadn’t gotten out of the car much.

So there I would be, in the middle of the night, waking up with one of my infamous hot flashes, and I’d hear mom gasping for breath, with a soft moaning sound that turned into a whimper.  I would sit up and watch her, my brows furrowed, my heart aching.  If it kept on, I would nudge her slightly awake, so that she would close her mouth and breathe from her nose instead, the nose which had the cannula of the oxygen tube.  Then she could breathe, and I would be able to fall asleep again.

Her cardiologist had put her on a huge dose of Lipitor in mid-December.  My brother—at least twice her weight, and with cholesterol levels much, much higher than hers, was on 10 mg per day; she was on 80.  The theory, as we understood it, was that it was a jolt-dose, a purposeful systemic shock—but even so, it was unnerving.  Especially since the medical listings of Lipitor on the web included “enervation”, “exhaustion”, and “weakness” as possible side effects.  We made her promise to go to the doctor after we left to find out exactly why she was put on such a high dose, and see if he wouldn’t lower it.  In the meantime, I suggested that she simply halve the pills and take half the dose.

The day before we were supposed to leave—after my brother and family had left themselves—we went out on a drive to the lake, to see the (vile, mean, odious, scary) geese who had chased me and grabbed my pants legs and pecked the back of my knees in a vain search for bread while I was videotaping them.  It was chilly, but bright.  The dotter and I wandered around, she fed the ducks and geese, I took photographs…and mom stayed in the car.  Yes, it was chilly, but this was not like her.  She said later that day that every day she felt just a little bit worse.  Not a lot.  But enough.  And she was hardly eating at all.

That night, in the kicthen, as I was giving her a hug, I leaned my head on hers and whispered in her ear, “Would you like me to stay a bit longer?”  She reached up her hand to cover mine on her shoulder and said softly, “I think…yes, I would.” 

Science fairs will be in late March, so OmegaDad decided to get started with some experiments with the dotter.  Unfortunately, the experiments are daddy’s ideas, but, hey, get the kid used to doing it, right?

Firstly, she was very possessive about “MY lab!”  In other words, I had to explain to her that real scientists these days were very open about their research (see PLOS) and, if they’re excited about their experiments, they’re very happy to have people in, show them around, tell them what the experiment is about, etc.

Anyway.  Since OmegaDad has been Doing Bread this past year (and very nicely, too!), and trying out sourdough starters with wild yeast, he thought it might be fun to see if you could get a sourdough starter from varying fruits.  He selected grapes and blueberries because both fruits have a blush on them; apples, because they don’t have a blush; and then we had a control of just plain ol’ flour and water.  Herewith the ingredients:

Then there’s the scientist herself:

Note that she is wearing “goggles”.  She was very concerned that everyone in her lab wear goggles, because, as she explained, “You never know when you’re going to get an explosion!”  Then she demonstrated how things would blow up:

Please note the “lab coat”.  Folks!  Let me tell you about this amazing new costume for your kids!  It’s a chef’s coat!  It’s a lab coat!  It’s two—two!—two coats in one!  OmegaDotter received a chef outfit for herself plus a matching chef outfit for her Karito Kids Ling doll, and has since taken to wearing the pink striped black pants as pajama pants or loungewear ever since, and when time came to do the experiment set-up, she decided it would make a fine lab coat.

What followed:  Placing one cup of blueberries into a Mason jar:

Mushing grapes before putting them into a Mason jar (an action shot!):

Explaining what comes next, and how you need to be careful (note the goggles again!):

Adding flour (we got a lot of flour all over everything, including the floor.  There were also a grape or blueberry or two on the floor, sigh.  Not that I really want you to look at our floor; please edit those shots mentally.):

Adding water:

Stirring (please note that we used different spoons for each jar, so that we had no intermixing):

She has the Evil Scientist pose down perfectly—“I have created LIFE!!!  Bwahahaha!”

And then, the finale, a “Ta-da!” pose:

And then she signed off with, “Thanks for watching Weird Science!”

We are home in Alaska.  It has been an interesting few weeks, with its major ups and downs, which I may or may not discuss later.

When we got on our flight home, OmegaDotter was more than ready to be home.  I was, frankly, more than ready for OmegaDad to do some high-quality one-on-one with the dotter; she is high-maintenance at times, very touchy-feely, needing attention, bouncing, chattering, “on” all the time.  I was not looking forward to six hours of her trapped in an airplane.

We didn’t get a window seat.  We were both very sad about this.  We settled into our seats, and I was hoping (hope-hope-hoping) that the last seat wouldn’t be filled, though we had been informed that it was a full flight, so that seemed unlikely.  And then he showed up, with his tattooed arms, his leather jacket, his bald head, and jocular “I don’t follow directions very well!” comment about carry-on luggage stowage.

We took off, OmegaDotter chattering all the way.

He took out a notebook and began sketching.

OmegaDotter, on the other side of me, peered at his sketchbook and whispered, “What’s he drawing?”

I said, “I don’t know.  I think he’s trying to figure it out.”

She whispered excitedly (and loudly), “I think it’s a flower!  See how it swirls and goes around?”  I looked again, and said to her, “Hm.  It’s beginning to look like a rose…”

She got out her travel art box, and her latest version of Pippi Longstocking on her horse, then leaned in and whispered very quietly to me, “Can I show him my picture?  What is he drawing?”

“Maybe you should ask him?”

She squirmed, shyly.  I chivvied her on (I am trying to get her to ask her own questions, request her own interactions).  Finally, she leaned over me and asked, “Do you want to see my drawing?” 

He said he’d love to.  She handed it over, saying shyly, “It’s—“ and he finished, “Pippi Longstocking!  She’s the one with the pigtails that stick out, and the monkey, right?  That’s very good.  You’ve got a lot of detail going on there!”  She pointed to the sign and said, “It’s Villa Villa Coola.”  They talked Pippi for a short while, then he handed it back.  She asked what he was drawing, and he told her about using light blue as a base for sketching, then coloring over it, any mistakes in the light blue being hidden by the darker colors.  He said that he had started out drawing something else, but he heard her say it was a flower, and he went from there.

Both went back to their artwork.  OmegaDotter added a second story.  He added some wording and shaded in the rose.  She handed him her picture again.  He looked at it, and asked what was around the windows.  She replied, “Wood”.  He asked her what color the wood was.  She quickly began coloring in the window frames, then handed it back to him.  He asked what color the gate was.  She said light blue.  He handed back the picture and she quickly filled in the coloring…this back and forth went on for a few more iterations, with him asking what this area was, and what color should it be, and her making decisions and completing more.  He lent her some of his coloring pencils when she was short a color; he helped her figure out how to make new colors when she didn’t have a particular color.

When she was done, he offered a trade:  His picture for hers.  He wanted hers, he said, so that when she was famous, he could say he knew her when…

I want an art teacher like that for her.  Someone who—rather than prescribing or describing—asks questions and guides her.  She was in heaven.  He was patient and inspiring.

So, to Shane Ruggle, aka “Rug”, the Phoenix tattoo artist:  Thank you.  Thank you, thank you.  Love is a gift, yes, and so is the sharing of your knowledge of art.