first fruits

Wednesday, March 14, 2012

loss: one year

Adapted from my "just in case this is my last chance to tell you" letter to A, March 15th, last year. (It was.)

Someone asked me today if the reason you and I got so close, even though we were 7 years apart, was all the interests we had in common. I said I don't think that was it. I don't think it would have mattered what I was into. I think the reason you're so easy for me to be with is that you accept me for whoever I am.

I think you do that for everyone. I think that's one of your gifts. But you were the first person in our family to do that for me; and I don't even know how to tell you what that meant to me back then, or what it still means.

With all of the dread hanging over us these days, I still feel lighter every time I walk into a room and see you.

I love you so much.

P.

Monday, January 9, 2012

I had my own Amalah moment last Friday. On the subway, carrying a letter to the DOE proving Bet is now a danger to himself and others without 1:1 supervision, I...froze.

I'm the one who asked for this letter; in fact it was composed right in front of me. "Are you sure this is okay? I can change any of it," the preschool director wrung her hands, typing the phrase violent tendencies. I turned my own hands up, helplessly. "Be careful not to make it sound worse than it is," my mother fretted to me on the phone the night before. "What if they...I don't know, send him to juvenile court?"

He's a goodhearted little boy and he's not going to be that difficult to help and no, I don't want it to sound worse than it is. But I can't allow it to get any worse than it is. He almost did something terrifying last week, and I am not waiting until he actually does.

And yet. You know this is what your child desperately needs - and this is your job, this is the whole reason you're here on earth parenting this child, to get him the help he needs. You know the alternative is far, far worse. Most importantly, you know that it will work. He will be okay someday. If you do this, he will be okay.

And still you sit on the train, tears in your eyes. I can't do this, you think. I can't do this. I can't do this. I just did.

Thursday, October 27, 2011

ceci n'est pas un blog post

So. It's come to this, eh? Too much to tweet; I'm going to have to actually blog just to catch up?

My sister's birthday: started out pretty hard, but got a little easier as it went along. I've been so agitated lately, like I have all this restless energy I need to put into...something. Something to do because of her, something to make because of her? I didn't know what. But SOMEthing.

I think it's turning out to be a blanket. Last winter, I brought home a lot of yarn I had sent my sister the year before. She wanted to crochet something for my boys, who'd outgrown the baby blankets she made them, and she wanted to try something she'd never done before. We settled on a new hat pattern. The first one came out too small for them to wear, but it is gorgeous, and the last handmade thing I have from her. She never got as far as trying a bigger one. An open-ended project was too overwhelming, I think, as her world started to close in on her. And in the end, it was too painful to use her hands.

I took the yarn home back then mostly so she would stop feeling like it was hanging over her head. But I knew at some point I was going to have to face it myself. This was the right time to start: thinking of her while I crochet is both heartbreaking and comforting, which seemed exactly right. And keeping my hands busy - and the music on loud - was not a bad way to get myself through the day.

Bet and the bullying: has also hit a heartbreaking point. The director pulled me aside after school yesterday to tell me four classmates had ganged up on him together; one of them hit him. She came down on them pretty hard. She called them into her office and talked to them about how terrible they must have made him feel (3 of the boys were so sorry they cried, she said. the 4th just shrugged and stared her down). They had to make him a card saying "I'm sorry, Bet. I want to be your friend," and give it to him in front of the rest of the class. They had to stay inside for recess.

When they gave him the card Bet easily said he forgave them. But he also said "I knew it was going to be me. When something like this happens, it's always me."

[Insert knife in heart; twist.]

Postscript: Aleph, on hearing that all the boys said "I want to be your friend," said "Oh, [boy with no remorse] doesn't want to be his friend. He's been mean to both of us for a long time." Well then. That shoe does appear to fit.

Aleph and the allergies: I am still not sure what we accomplished today but I think we basically went around in a circle. The skin test for mustard was, as it was last time, negative. The blood test results won't come back until next week. But if they come back negative too, the final step would be a food challenge EXCEPT the doctor says a food challenge for mustard is tricky, because it's spicy, and a child could report symptoms because of that, rather than because he's allergic. So it might not be worth doing it. Which leaves us...what? Avoiding mustard anyway??

But the other potential major change is that, even if his allergies stay the same, we might start expanding the list of brands we allow him to eat. Like, a lot.

See, they apparently did a study [ETA: actually, looks like two of them] where they looked at whether items with a "may contain traces" warning actually do contain traces, and whether the items without a warning do not. For some allergens - milk, especially - the assumption we've been operating with holds true: presence or absence of a warning was not a safe way to tell whether it's contaminated. But for nuts, it actually was. They think nut allergies are high-profile enough that major manufacturers (even the asshole ones, like ahemKraftcoughUnilever,) are being pretty careful about cross-contamination. So if it's made by a major manufacturer, and there's no warning on the label...as far as our doctor is concerned, Aleph can eat it.

In addition, they told us, there are categories of packaged food we don't need to worry about altogether, major manufacturer or not. Because most likely, there would not be nuts anywhere near production. So we can trust those labels too. No need to call.

I know, right???

We'll definitely be starting slow, because we don't want to find we regret it and/or have a stroke. First on the list is mayonnaise, because omg, my mother in law will be SO HAPPY to have her favorite brand back. After that? I don't know. We'll see what happens.

The one thing I know for sure happened at the appointment was a lot of screaming; either because Aleph's terror of allergy testing is unavoidable, or because I didn't do a good enough job brainstorming ways to help him cope, and as you know, I prefer to blame myself whenever possible. So: shellshocked child/mother, CHECK.

Unexpectedly, I found myself telling him about infertility treatment as a sympathy measure. "Eema, did you ever have a blood draw?" "A lot of blood draws." "How about shots?" "Omg, too many shots to count." "And you didn't like them, but it was worth it, because you got a baby faster?"

And there you have it: the TL;DR version of my old blog! The end.

Monday, October 3, 2011

anger: six months

If you're looking for my Rosh Hashana post, you might want to try last year's. I'm not doing much stock-taking of the spiritual kind, this year; I'm finding when I turn to Gd, I run into a solid wall of my own anger. So I'm...not.

Instead, some navel-gazing of a different kind.

"It's no help to know this is a beautiful portrait of grief", Jody wrote me three months ago. But it does help, actually.

Last summer I had the extreme pleasure of talking to Julie about why she blogged, and to Anna H. about why she didn't. If I'm not wildly misquoting them, Anna said at one point, Does it help you make sense of things? and Julie said, Yes. Definitely.

But I remember thinking: No, it doesn't. Not for me. I'm never sure I'm making sense, before or after writing. In fact I think I always assume, in the back of my mind, that I might look back on what I wrote a year ago and completely disagree with it.

It's probably one reason I don't look back, too often. It might even be one reason I took down my old blog.

So what am I in this for?

When I started talk therapy, years and years ago, my therapist asked me at the first session: Do you know why we do this? I was a psychology grad student at the time, so you'd think I would have had an answer ready. But I just blundered around, till she took pity on me and said: Because if we talk about it, we might find a pattern. And it can be a comfort to say, Ah. I recognize this. This kind of thing has happened to me before.

Maybe that is 'making sense of things', in a way? I don't know. I don't really see it that way. I think it's just that my overwhelming confusion is a little less hard to take, when I can...find a thread to follow my way through. When I can find a voice, in telling my own story.

So I do that. With the funny things I'm confused about, sure, but especially with the painful things: I try to tell those, not in prose, but in poetry. Because I can't stop it from happening; I can't understand why it had to happen; but…if it's a story, instead of just a series of senseless events, maybe it will turn out to have its own coherence.

And if I can wring some beauty out of ugliness - yes, there is a small solace in that. I'll take it.

I guess it's a very old instinct. No matter how powerless we humans are, we can still scrawl a defiant mark on the wall. Persephone was here in '11. This is my voice. This is my story.

Sunday, September 11, 2011

the thing is

I've been a lot better. But these days, facing my first trip to Israel where I won't see my sister at the other end, I'm worse again.

I know today I'm not the only one grieving.

I went back to read Emma's post from January, when we knew what lay ahead. I thought you might want to read it again too.

The Thing Is

to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you’ve held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.

- Ellen Bass

Tuesday, July 19, 2011

last fruits

Hey, you guys. Thank you more than I can say for your thoughtful, kind comments on my last post.

Fair warning for anyone struggling with infertility: this may be hard for you to read. Please know that I hesitated for years before writing about this, not wanting to hurt you. And I wouldn't write about it now either, unless I needed to.

I am sad again today. Today we signed the agreement to thaw our remaining embryos.

I won't go into details, because they concern other people besides me. But I will say that we worked long & hard to donate these embryos, and we've finally hit an obstacle none of us can surmount.

I'm kind of stunned, after all the obstacles we did surmount.

I'm kind of angry: there are so many families out there besides ours, grieving the loss of a child or sibling to forces beyond their control - illness, accident, murder - you read the papers, I'm sure you know what I'm talking about. And this is something we COULD have done. We could have brought some life into the world, instead of all this death. To have that chance taken out of our hands too feels a little like another death. Such a pointless waste.

And I'm just, well, sad. I made my peace with not having more children long ago...in theory. This is a lot more concrete. And final. And hard.

So I'm thanking Gd for the gifts I've been given. And hoping He understands if I cry a little, while turning the rest of them away.

Friday, July 8, 2011

grief: three months

The hardest part is remembering what she looked like, that week when she was barely alive. The hardest part is remembering what she used to look like before that. The hardest part is when I can't remember something from before that, when I say something was A's favorite and someone else says no, that wasn't A, that was you, and we'll never be able to ask her and it's just gone. The hardest part is when something was gone years ago but resurfaces in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of playing with my kids, and I'm in tears with no control over them. The hardest part is walking around feeling raw in a way no one can see, like I have no skin. The hardest part is the edge of sadness that underlies everything. Everything.

I have a husband I love and adorable kids and I want to be happy, for them. I can't picture when I ever will.