Love Perserveres

It's Blogging for LGBT Families Day, which draws me out of my bloggy hiatus. What a year it's been, politically, in the US, for many LGBT families: so many weddings!  It's amazing how fast the political landscape in this country is changing.

I'm spending the day home with a sick child. For the zillionth time, we're watching High School Musical 2.  I've been trying to get her to drink fluids, trying to get her to rest, trying to get her to alternate activities so she doesn't just spend the whole day watching TV (even though, if there's any day to watch TV all day, it's a sick day).  I'm thinking about planning  dinner and watching our garden out the window, while also trying to finish a work report in the way one does when a child is sick and the office calls.  Pretty much, just a regular gay old day around here.

But I've got a story to tell, about love and dementia.  My mom had a stroke last fall, and then she fell getting out of bed a few months later, and the combination of the stroke and the fall and the passage of time has accelerated her dementia (where are the blogs about taking care of aging parents?).  She doesn't always make a lot of sense anymore.  But recently, this happened:

Mom: I'm glad everything worked out with you and Politica. 

Me: Yes, it really has.  It's good.

Mom: You're very happy.

Me: Yes.

Somehow, out of all the confusion, she remembers that we're happy.  And given that she declined to come to our first two ceremonies, and had a really hard time when I came out to her in the first place, I think this is really quick remarkable.  She's watching and listening and growing and learning, even though her brain is weakening.

It's nice to be loved, and it's nice to have love be noticed.  And nice that my very Catholic family has managed, in its own way, with very little explicit talk, and a lot of passage of time, to fold in two happy lesbians and their daughter.  Hurray for all of us.
 

Another Gay Day

Thanks to Dana at Mombian for being the central location for Blogging for LGBT Families Day.


Another week, another Friday: woke up, read in bed for a few minutes, snuggled with Curious Girl, went down for breakfast and wowed her with the new cinnamon sugar shaker I'd put together after my last pilgrimage to King Arthur Flour.  I wrote her a little love note and tucked it inside her homework folder (ordinarily, I put it in her lunchbox, but on Fridays, she gets school lunch). I helped her practice cello (inspired by an acquaintance from a local music program, she's been aiming to keep a cello practice streak going, and is currently at day 107), and then we walked to school.  I went to work, although I left a bit early to come home and shovel mulch around in the garden after Politica called to say that our 3 cubic feet of mulch had arrived.  Then off to pick up CG, and then to gymnastics, where Politica met us and where she and I cheered for each of the girls as they performed their routines on bar, floor, and beam.  Home for dinner, and then out to a marshmallow roast at the neighbors'.  The kids ran around in the cool evening, while the adults talked around the fire.  We talked about aging and failing parents, about school, about kids, about houses, about summer.  We talked about spelling. We walked home.

Such is the life of the homosexual elite. When the Westboro Baptist Church came to town last summer, they said we were headed to hell and destroying society.  Me, I'm more concerned with trying to help my kid figure out how to cope with school projects than I am trying to undermine our neighbors' straight marriages.   In fact, I rather enjoy most of my friends' marriages--straight or gay, legal or not--as I find that most of my friends-with-spouses/partners tend to choose people who are themselves interesting and wonderful. We can all support each other--no one's marriage is a threat to anyone else's.

This is pretty much the kind of post I wrote last year for this occasion: a post chronicling the ordinariness of a day in the Granola household.  We work, we read, we play music, we eat, we garden, we hang with friends.

Tenured Radical writes today that marriage isn't her top political priority, but that the ways in which the Obama administration has worked in stepwise and significant ways to reduce institutionalized homophobia can ultimately work to reduce the power of marriage or other gay rights referenda to serve as get-out-the-vote drives for the far right.  She hopes for a day when marriage will be a purely private matter, not the public moral one it is right now.  Marriage didn't use to be my top political priority--and truth be told, it's probably not my top priority right now either.  But goodness, am I tired of the political initiatives that let voters in various places step up and vote on whether or not to take rights away from me, or to put in place insulting laws or policies that further distance even the possibility of change.  I'm tired of the challenge of remaining hopeful in the face of bigotry, even as I do.  I'm tired of the hypocrisy of a world in which cheating politicians pontificate about the sanctity of marriage.

But here and now, I'm tired from a day of good work and hard parenting.  I'm tired from a week of trying to figure out what sorts of school problems are normal and age appropriate and what sorts of school problems might be more concerning. I'm tired from a week of special events that keep my child up late and run all of us happily ragged.  I'm tired from a week of worrying a bit about aging parents (who seem to be fine now, but still...it's hard to be old).  I'm so tired, I'm not really up to the task of ruining society.  I have enough to do just keeping my little corner of the world working OK.

Good Viewing: Love Makes a Family, and Practice Makes an Eater

Just a short pointer to a very cool documentary made by The Devotion Project.  It's called Listening from the Heart, and it profiles two loving women and their almost four-year-old son.  He's got a feeding tube, and looking at them feeding him, and doing what they call "therapeutic meals" brought back so many memories for me.  The Fitch-Jenetts keep a blog, and I'll be adding it to my feedreader.

The New Normal

Dana is hosting the 5th annual Blogging for LGBT families day, and that seems like a good excuse to get back in the business of blogging again. So here goes....

Hello blog and readers: I've missed you. What have I been doing, you wonder? Probably what many of you have been doing: wrapping up a university semester, looking forward to the end of the elementary school year, figuring how how to help some Daisy Girl Scouts bridge to Brownies, experimenting with different bread recipes and coming to terms with the fact that Politica really can taste the tiniest bit of wheat flour if I try to sneak it into white bread.

I've been sick a fair bit, and was well-cared for by Curious Girl and Politica. They've been sick, too, and I helped take care of them. I've been reading every other week to the first grade, and I had a friend and her daughter come visit in March.

I went to work a lot, and dealt with budget problems. I signed up for a CSA, and I went to CG's spring ice show, applauding for all the children who take lessons and wanted to come out and skate to music.

I visited my parents, and had a lot of fun watching my daughter interact with my parents. We went to the beach, and collected shells, and splashed in the waves, even on the day that CG said she really was very, very sure she didn't want to go in the water and thus didn't wear her bathing suit. We went swimming in the pool every day, too, and loved watching the birds in the palm trees.

We've been eating dinner together every night (except for those terrible weeks where one or the other of us had a GI bug bad enough that it kept us from the table). We read together--Politica and I passing books back and forth between us (read Jo Nesbø's The Redbreast if you want a gripping political/historical mystery), all of us sharing the fun of Curious Girl's explorations of Edward Eager's books about children and magic (Seven-Day Magic is just wonderful).

Still reading? This is not, perhaps, the most elegant blog post I've put up, but this is the life of a lesbian family. Most of what we do is pretty darn unremarkable. Most of what we do looks a lot like what the rest of you are doing.

And most of us lgb parents could be any of your relatives. Some of us come from extended families with gay cousins, parents, aunts/uncles, or siblings; some of us seem to be the only lgb relative around. Any family can be queer. And queer....well, maybe queer will become the new normal.

That's a post for tomorrow, perhaps: how queer families can be read as more queer and less normal. But for today, I want to focus on the ways that queer families can be read as just another kind of normal: we're parents who are doing the best we can, loving our kids, helping them grow, and juggling work and home responsibilities.

Early Morning News (and a translation for she who will help read the postcard when it arrives)

Today's postcard is going out to Young Friend, the youngest child of Friend In Need of Pseudonym. It appears to read: Hi YOung Friend, I MiSS YOU. I BiG GOing To SCHL. I EM OLDR THiG YOU. Curious Girl. Had I a scanner I could more easily capture the layout--the lines slope down on the card, and the THig is right next to SCHL.

For those used to reading more conventional spelling: the two middle sentences are "I been going to school" (after I prompted her, "Tell him something you've been doing lately.") and then "I am older than you" (after she said, "It was his birthday. Is he 5?" and we talked about how no, he is 6 now, but her birthday came first so she is older.")

What passes for news in your houses this morning?

The Updates, they keep coming

• Lists suit me at times like this
• I can't tell you how relieved I am--and how comforted I am--to read the comments on my posts commenting on my own reactions to family events of late. Working out my guilty feelings about considering what I need to do for work and the move and considering the logistics of parental visits isn't easy, and it helps to read your reactions here.
• One of my colleagues said, upon hearing about the surgery, "what are you doing here?" and that probably helped kick my guilty feelings into overdrive for a while.
  
• We are still negotiating on House #2. We asked the seller to address 7 factors (a few relatively clear cut and likely not too expensive, like fixing the garbage disposal and getting the kitchen drain to work, but some others a little bigger, like properly grounding the house's electrical system and fixing the windows that are cracked, inoperable, or have lost their seal). The seller wanted to get estimates on the latter factors, and will have her response figured out by tonight. So Monday, all should be clear Her realtor told our realtor that we would likely be happy with the seller's response. She's already agreed to do the small things, and if she meets us in the middle on everything else, we're happy. In fact, even if she refused everything else we'll probably go ahead.
• I like that I have a good realtor, dealing with another realtor, and a reasonable seller. House #1 sure was nice, but dealing with high maintenance FSBO sellers is stressful.
• We had dinner last night with Historian Friend and her family. One of Curious Girl's latest stress relievers is to say that she is not moving, that she is going to live with Historian Friend (who she has taken to calling Mom, or Historian Mom). Over the past two years CG has gradually been asserting that she is Historian Kid's Big Sister, but this move to identify with a whole 'nother family sure is interesting. "When you move to Germany, tell my school that Curious Girl doesn't live here anymore. Tell them she moved to another family. But we'll come visit you every day!" she said.
• Well, CG is up, so time to spring into breakfast/mothering action. Happy Sunday, all!
  

Success, so far!

• Dad's surgery went well: minor complication (in that the leg veins weren't suitable for the graft, so they used veins in the chest instead), but otherwise, things went great. My mom and sister saw him later and while he's heavily sedated, they did think he knew they were there. The nurses were all very encouraging.
• I'm figuring out a little more of the odd family stresses: they're in the thick of it, getting tired from being at the hospital. So it makes sense that no one particularly wants to be on the phone very long with me (when I called my mom tonight, she basically said, "Dad is great, I'm exhausted, I need to eat dinner and sleep, I'll call you tomorrow.") In my normally chatty family, this sort of move is unusual. But it makes sense, and I remind myself not to take it personally.
• My parents are deferring to my sister a lot, which makes sense. So all the substantive communication to me is running through my sister. This is good, as she retains a lot more of the medical stuff than my mother does (and really, anyone in the midst of a health crisis needs a helper to be the notetaker and rememberer). But my sister's also got a husband and kids there, and they get her primary loyalty--she's not mainly concerned with me and my needs/questions. She's not ignoring them, of course, but it's not her main priority. So it's a little weird, from my self-interested position, when the family dynamic shifts for a moment to put one child in the middle, when for 42 years the dynamic has been one of two equal kids with parents in the middle. this all makes sense, given the situation, but it's a weird adjustment.
• Songbird's comment a post or two ago about the fact that the timing of any visit by me is likely not to feel quite right was so smart. (a blog benefit I'd never imagined: free and excellent pastoral advice!!) That started me thinking about all the ways in which I need to just see this situation as something that isn't going to feel right, all around. And I shouldn't take that personally.
• And after all, there's a lot to be thankful for here. The surgery went well. And a few added insights into the family dynamic can't ever hurt.
  

Little Updates

• Dad's surgery was postponed today. Three emergencies kept his surgeons busy, and now it's probably going to be tomorrow morning (Saturday). I really appreciate all the kind words from readers and friends: thanks.

• It's hard to be a far-away working daughter at a time like this. It's not easy for me to figure out what pressure I'm putting on myself, what stress is working out in weird ways in the family. I think I'll go back to my parents when my dad's out of the hospital, but I'm feeling a little guilty about not going sooner, for the surgery itself (which might be Monday, but then, my sister has a friend whose bypass got bumped off the schedule 4 times). My sister is right there with them, and I think it makes sense for me to go when I can help my mom when dad is home. But I feel a little guilty about waiting. And a little guilty about thinking about my own work and how to get it done in this period. This is an interesting variation on the parenting/work stuff I am much more familiar with balancing. Not sure I have much to say about it yet, but I'm pondering it.
  
• For more wedding happy, head over to Lesbian Dad and read another account of the marriage scene in California that will just make you smile. And after a couple of days of worrying about my dad, I'm happy to relax with a post that makes me smile.
  

In Her Heaven

Curious Girl is busy with thank you notes for her birthday. Tante Mississippi and Curly Haired Cousin gave her a birthstone necklace, and here's what she told them at the end of the note:

I'm glad you're my aunt and Curly Haired Cousin is my cousin, and that Uncle Quiet used to be my uncle. Now he's uncle in my heaven.

We don't really talk much around here about heaven (except when CG is spinning theories about it), but it fascinates me to see CG's ideas about life and death playing out as she gets used to Uncle Quiet's death. Every now and then she'll ask me what Uncle Quiet is doing now, and I usually respond with the parental classic: "what do you think?" She has a lot of answers: "being dead," "taking a bath," or "sleeping" being some recent ones. (Yes, we have had a conversation about whether heaven has bathtubs. Haven't you? For the question of whether heaven is or is not like Facebook, I recommend you to the comments on a fabulous post by Arwen.)

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

One night last week, Curious Girl woke up. As I snuggled her back to sleep, she said, "Do you want to hear a story about Uncle Quiet?" I did, of course. "Once upon a time there was Uncle Quiet. He was very kind. The End." I asked her if I could write that down for Tante Mississippi, telling her that I liked the story very much and that Tante Mississippi would, too. CG said, "Oh, and a joke, too. She needs a joke." She stopped to consider. "The pink tiara, was that at my party or Curly Haired Cousin's?" She was trying to remember where she saw Uncle Quiet playing with her sparkly tiara with pink fur trimming. We have a great photo of them together, being silly. Uncle Quiet had quite the silly side, which is really rather funny, as he was so very unsilly in many respects: he was the snappiest dresser of any male friend I've had, and reserved, and dignified. So the sight of him teasing Curly Haired Cousin and CG with the tiara was pretty funny. "I'll tell her a joke after the story. That will make her more happy." "Knock knock." (all together now..."who's there?") "Tiara." ("tiara who?") "Pink tiara."

She may have more social graces than comedy skills, I grant you. But she is awfully sweet.

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

I miss Quiet Friend. CG's birthday party was the first social event at our house that he missed--Politica and I were always quite touched that he almost always came to events at our house even when he was super tired. But this time, no Quiet Friend. Mississippi Friend came, and we spent part of the party talking about the weather and cooking, trying to remember which was the party where she and Politica were at the grill, one cooking, the other holding an umbrella, and which was the party where Quiet Friend did the cooking in the rain.

Mississippi Friend is having a tough time of it, which is normal, I suppose, but as she points out, it's pretty darn irritating to have people say "Oh, that's normal," when she tells them something about her grief (so let me amend that sentence: what she's experiencing is so.not.normal: there's nothing normal about losing your 43 year old husband whose last 7 years included so much pain, fatigue, and medical procedures. It's not fair, is what it is.). It's clear from Mississippi Friend's stories that even the most well-meaning friends or relatives can say totally wrong-headed things. I've thought a lot about a thoughtful post Snickollet wrote on grief a while back, outlining ways people can do for their grieving friends. It's frustrating, watching a friend grieve: what she really wants is a whole re-do from the Universe, and we can't give her that. I can only hope that Politica, CG, and I are generally more helpful to her than not. I'm working on a letter that simply collects some of my favorite memories of Quiet Friend. One thing I can do, is write. So I write here, and will write privately for Mississippi Friend and Curly Haired Cousin, hoping my words capture some of the love we hold for her and Quiet Friend, here, and in our heavens.

Her Strengths

This post was inspired Magpie's post in response to the call from Parent Bloggers Network and Jenifer Fox for stories about children's strenghts.

Two nights ago, Curious Girl threw a fit in the middle of our (very short) violin practice. She started crying and just couldn't stop. Suddenly, she walked away from me, clearly looking for something. "I can't find it, Mama! My Feeling Box is gone and I can't find it!" She walked around in agitation. I spotted it on the other side of the room, and she ran to it, picked it up, and dumped all the little pieces of paper out. "I"m mad, Mama!"

The Feeling Box is a shoe box, covered with CG- drawn stickers of mad, angry, and sometimes happy faces. It has some crayons in it, and it used to have small pieces of paper for drawing on it. When CG gets angry, she'll get her box--or I'll get it for her--and she'll scribble a drawing to show her feelings. She likes to keep the pictures in the box, although two fits ago, she decided to rip them all up and scatter the pieces on the floor. So now it just has tiny papers in it, suitable for throwing. I love that she has created a box that helps her deal with feelings, and that she's turning to it on her own to process hard situations.

I love that CG can be so in touch with her feelings, that she's experimenting with being wildly out of control and self-regulating all at once. I love that she talks to me about her feelings, wanting me to know just how mad or happy she is. I love that she uses words in a tantrum, and I love that she's experimenting with nonverbal ways to express and process feelings, too.

I love that CG thinks about complicated things--we're bringing dinner to Tante Mississippi and Curly Haired Cousin on Sunday. "Why are we doing that?" she wondered. I said it would help them feel better. "Tante Mississippi is still sad sometimes. I am, too. I miss Uncle Quiet. Do you feel a litle sad still." "Just a little," she said. "I'm thinking about other things, because it's more happier. But that's good that we're going to visit them." I could keep adding to my last post indefinitely, it seems: she continues to talk about her wonderful uncle in ways that make me want to laugh and cry all at once.

I love this feeling of connection I have with her, and I love watching her learn to be more independent of that connection. She does, seemingly naturally, what I've spent hours in therapy to learn to do. Maybe I could do this too, when I was five. I don't know. But she can, and it's pretty darn amazing to watch.

Curious Girl has some hard things in her life to think about. Lately, she's been saying that she wishes she still lived with her birth parents. She's starting to realize that being adopted meant that she wasn't cared for by her first parents, that someone wasn't able to keep her. I don't think she's quite put it all together, but it's coming. One night she said, "Whoever gets to keep me is the luckiest." I'm careful here-I know that she will make her own way through these issues, and I never want her to feel the need to protect me or Politica from her feelings about adoption and family. So I say things like, "I wish you knew them better," or "You are an amazing girl with a very loving heart." I want to keep the conversation going, hard though it may be some day. It's hard for me, juggling all the paradoxes of adoption. I wish CG didn't have to deal with the grief and hurt from her past. I wish CG's parents didn't have the burdens they must have had not to be able to parent. Yet life without CG...hard to imagine at this point. It's mind-boggling, the complications. And she knows that, on some level, and she's making sense of it all at her own pace. She's thinking, she's reaching for words, and she has a box full of little papers to help her with the hard stuff. And tonight, that's worth bragging on.

Thirteen Ways of Losing an Uncle

Updated to add: If you click through the link on IndyAnne's comment below, you can see some beautiful photos of Tante Mississippi and Uncle Quiet, and read some material from the memorial service. Thanks, Anne.

Me: Uncle Quiet is dying, Curious Girl. He is very sick, and his body can't get better anymore.
Curious Girl: That is so sad. I have to tell everyone!

********************
a few minutes later
CG: That is so sad about Uncle Quiet. (She sits down next to me and sits quietly for a few seconds.) I am going to think about something else now. It's much more happier that way.

***********************
In the car, headed to Lisneydand, CG asks, "how do you spell Uncle Quiet?" We tell her, and she starts writing it down. "Do you know what this is? It's a list of people who are dead. Who else should I put on it?" I suggest my predecessor as department chair. "But he's been dead a long time. Uncle Quiet is still getting used to it."
***********************

CG: What is Uncle Quiet doing right now?
me: He's very sick, CG, and he's dying. Tante Misssissippi is taking good care of him, and his mother is there, and Grandaddy J and Grandma L and Curly Haired Cousin and lots of people.
CG: But what is he doing right now? Is he dying right now? Did he already die?
me: I don't know, sweetie. Tante Mississippi is taking good care of him, and he knows we all love him.
CG: But what if he doesn't die?
me: Then Tante Mississippi will keep taking good care of him.

*************************
After Uncle Quiet died

CG: Tell Tante Mississippi that we still love Uncle Quiet and it's going to be OK.

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

CG: I'm going to make something beautiful for where he died. I will draw a picture, a flower. I know! I'll make a garden. Maybe something out of clay.

*******************************
We should get Tante Mississippi a present. Maybe a picture, maybe a picture frame like we got Mommy for her trip. I know! A picture of me! With the princesses! That would make her much more happier.

***********************
on a postcard from Lisneydand

Hi Tante Mississippi and Curly Haired Cousin,

We're sorry Uncle Quiet died.
I miss you.
We're at a friend's house.
We didn't see any airplanes at Lisneydand. (Curly Haired Cousin loves airplanes)
I love you, Curious Girl
***************************
driving from the airport, heading for Tante Mississippi's house
CG: When are we going to be there?
me: Not too long. We get off at the next exit, the same exit we use to get to our house. Tante Mississippi and Uncle Quiet's house is on the way home from the airport to our house.
CG: Not Uncle Quiet anymore.
me: That's right, but it's going to take some time to get used to that.
CG: Especially for Curly Haired Cousin

*************************************
CG: Is Tante Mississippi still sad?
me: Yes, she's still sad.
CG: She might be a little sad forever.
me: she might, in a way, but she will also be happy again. We can all smile when we remember Uncle Quiet even though we miss him.
CG: but she might be a little sad forever. That's OK.

*************************************
CG: Is Uncle Quiet in our family?
me: yes.
CG: Is Tante Mississippi in our family?
me: yes
CG: Is Uncle Quiet still an uncle?
me: yes, honey
CG: but a dead one now.
me: right.
CG: you can be an uncle and be dead?
me: like Cool Uncle.
CG: at least I got to meet him. Did I meet Cool Uncle?
me: no, honey, he died right when you were coming into our family.
CG: and Mormor (Politica's mother). I never got to meet her. That's not fair. But I met Uncle Quiet a lot of times.

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

I think Uncle Quiet has friends already underground. Is he underground already? I think he has friends there.


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

Can he still remember us?

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

I tell Curious Girl that we can remember Uncle Quiet, that we will write things down for Tante Mississippi and Curly Haired Cousin, that Uncle Quiet is part of us because we remember him and tell stories about him. I tell her that we loved him, he loved us, and we all knew we loved each other. I tell her that sometimes, people get so very sick, very, very sick, that their bodies can't get better even though they try and their doctors try. I let her talk, I listen, I take her to Tante Mississippi's often. I really don't know how she's going to make sense of all of it, but for now, this is the best I can come up with. I'm using the lessons from all our adoption talk: I don't keep secrets, I answer the questions she has, I encourage her to talk about it all. Anyone else have any good ideas about helping small children navigate a loss like this?

Hopes, Dreams

Here's one story about today:

We're in the H@ppiest Pl@ce on E@rth right now, happily exhausted from a day spent largely princessing about. Curious Girl's way of approaching any new situation is to decide in advance an activity to focus on (princesses) and then to repeat activities to get herself used to things. So today, while other families were busy trying to cram as many activities into the day as they could, we went on the same few rides multiple times, and spent several hours in the princess area, listening to stories, standing on a ridiculously long line to meet the princesses (but what joy at the end of the line!), and watching various royal ceremonies. The princesses do a great job of storytelling and interacting with little guests, and the emphasis in all the patter is on some basic royal lessons: follow your dreams, tell the truth, use good manners, and have hope. If you do all that, you can face whatever comes. And, of course, you'll find true love and live Happily Ever After. But the big emphasis is on dreams and hope.

Curious Girl is eating it up. She wore her Cinderella dress to the park today, and she got her hair done all princessy fancy, with glitter and little flowers and a bun. She was tickled by the way everyone called her princess (even some other children), and happily pretended her way through the day. The twirling tea cups may be rated a very tame ride by all the guidebooks, but I got a thrill watching my fancy Cinderella daughter exclaiming, "yeah, baby!" as the tea cups spun.

She's beautiful, and she loves being in a place where there are princesses around every corner (if you don't leave the princessy part of the park, that is. Our brief foray into a neighboring park was met with G00fy fear. Go figure. Minnie Mouse, not scary. But G00fy, scary).

I can't tell how much she is actually attending to the stories the princesses tell. She knows the basic outlines of all the princess stories, of course, but as her version of them all is a big princess girl power confab in the castle where all the princes are invariably unavailable (having served their purpose to create a big wedding party at which it is possible to dance with one's mothers, and sometimes to help make a baby), I don't know how much she attends to the messages about hopes, dreams, love.

Here's another story about today: Quiet Friend just passed away. We're surrounded by these messages of hopes, dreams, love conquering all, acutely aware of the ways in Quiet Friend would be happy and healthy today were if possible for hopes, dreams, and love to cure him. He died peacefully, Mississippi Friend tells us, but he died after coming through years of cancers that just wore his body down. His mother never left after his last hospitalization, so the room we helped restore went to good use, even if it never housed the people caring for him after the bone marrow transplant we all had hoped for.

Quiet Friend was a good, good person. Not easy to get to know, but well worth knowing. Smart and classy, he had a self-confidence that carried him through the world. He was great at Taboo--as Mississippi Friend once said, that's how Quiet Friend talked in regular conversations. He had an amazing vocabulary and just loved words. His brain tumor took a lot away, though. Not language so much as motivation. His work history turned spotty after he got sick. For months on end he'd be too sick to work. But the work he did do was wonderful, even when he was too tired after doing all that work to do much at home (which made living with his illness hard for Mississippi Friend). But what strength of will it took to get that work done. Quiet Friend was a force in the world, a force finally worn away by too much illness. But I will remember him, quiet, sharing a picnic with all of us, being on the beach in Florida on a vacation we took together, before Sofia, when Mississippi Friend and Quiet Friend's son (now 7) was an infant, cooking most of the food for Curious Girl's naming celebration, coming out to our holiday party even when his chemo exhausted him. So many memories run through my head tonight.

I'm glad he's no longer in pain, no longer struggling. But I miss him, and Politica and I are both broken-hearted to be so far from Mississippi Friend tonight.

Hope couldn't make him better. I can't decide whether I'm angry at the lights of the resort flickering out my window, or comforted by them. I know I am comforted by Curious Girl's response--surely a subject for another post. I told her a few days ago that Uncle Quiet was dying, and she's been thinking hard about all this. When Politica called Mississippi Friend tonight, CG said, "tell her we still love him, and it will be all right." CG's empathy is a gift.

We do still love him. And Mississippi Friend, whose grief I can only begin to imagine. Life surely isn't fair tonight, not even in the H@ppiest Pl@ce on E@rth.

A Popsicle

Things are looking up, and I am wordlessly grateful for all the comments on the previous post.

Quiet Friend is better today--recognizing more people, more alert, even sat up to eat a popsicle. It may be that the combination of not enough platelets and too much fluid in the body caused weirdness in the brain.

So things are looking up, today. And Mississippi Friend, ever a believer in the kindness of strangers, will be touched by your comments. Thanks for helping us wait this out--today, hope seems more possible.

Love Needed

Quiet Friend (for whom Politica recently organized the room renovation) is in hospital tonight, having been medevaced home from Mississippi last night. He and Mississippi Friend had gone back to their hometown for Christmas, and what had appeared to be some discomfort from a pre-bone-marrow-transplant-spinal-tap blossomed into increasingly painful and complex symptoms. So they ended up on a private plane back to the university hospital here.

Things don't look good--although QF has had some moments of lucidity, and may somehow find the strength to fight back whatever is going wrong, whatever that may be, as doctors have not yet figured out what might actually be causing the current crop of problems. But still, they don't look good, and Mississipi Friend is awash in hopes and feelings. Quiet Friend has been through a lot, medically, in the past seven years, and between the cancers he seems to be prone to, and the cumulative effects of chemo over time, he may simply be worn out. For all he's gone through, this is the first I've seen him looking truly sick. Tired before, fiercely scarred after the brain tumor, but never sick. He looks far away sick, like he's just withdrawn into his body which is busy trying to do what it can.

Politica spent the night at the hospital with him, so that Mississippi Friend could get some sleep. Friends took Curious Girl to a New Year's Eve party so I could slip down to the hospital and sit with them a while. Mississippi Friend is a wonderful friend, and there were a small group of us at the hospital, and more people are coming in from out of town tomorrow. Politica is planning to go a-sabbaticalling on Friday, to somewhere far away for a while. She's wrung out, not sure how she can leave someone who's close as family to us, knowing she has to be doing things with other people in a faraway place next Monday. Mississippi Friend is tired, full of emotions, fears, hopes, grief. She still gets indignant about the fact that the universe just isn't fair. It should be fair, she thinks. It's supposed to be. But it's so clearly not.

We could use some more love in the universe. So could you toss some out for us? I'll collect it for my friends, and share it with all of you.

Holidays for the Inner Child

So I've been back in touch with my inner child lately, which is to say I'm spending too much time feeling too sensitive about things that really shouldn't be that big a deal. I realize that there are far bigger actual problems in the world, and I have the emotional wherewithal to rise about all this. But still. It's not always so easy.

I wrote a bit about our Thanksgiving. I realized, later, that part of my problem that weekend was that I was doing some very particular things that I wanted my parents' approval and endorsement for, and they weren't giving it. Last winter, when my parents were moving out of their New York apartment, I took a box of old family photos and offered to put them into an album, telling my mother it would be a kind of album like I made from our adoption travels (a scrapbook format, with things pasted to the page, all archival-quality materials). I never got around to making the album, and last spring when we went to Florida, I took the photos, and my mom and I organized them by topics and family groups, and she identified people for me. I still didn't have time to do the album, but I thought over Thanksgiving, we'd have time to sit together and put the pages together, and I planned to give Mom some journalling boxes so she could write captions for the photos. It wouldn't be fancy, but it would get everything in a book.

When we sat down to do the album, though, my Dad walked over and said, "but what if you wnat to take the pictures out? Or give some to Other Daughter?" So they decided no, they didn't want the album. Which is fine, but it also means they weren't listening when I had offered to make the album, and it also means I had acquired a bunch of album supplies I didn't need. And my inner child heard all this as "You don't matter." Which I realize is all the product of my inner child's insecurity schtick which my inner child has processed in therapy and I thought had gotten over. But apparently not.

So I went to a photo store and got drop-in archival photo sleeves and a binder to put them in, and we put the photos in pages, with some paper for writing captions, and Mom was happy. Then she wanted to pay me for the materials. Which my inner child also perceived as a huge slight, because I had wanted the picture-organizing to be a gift for them. I tried to say, no, no, it's a gift, but they insisted.

In the meantime, my mother was trying to tell me six ways from Sunday how much she enjoyed all the food I had cooked over the weekend--which is really a pretty big deal as my parents are not vegetarians, and are pretty suspicious of vegetarian cooking. All those compliments didn't really make a big impression, because my inner child was moaning so much about the failure of the photo project.

So really, my mother and I were talking at cross purposes: I am sure that she meant her food compliments to convey her appreciation for all we did to organize the Thanksgiving weekend. I am also sure she has no idea what the photo-organizing project meant to me. And I don't know why I can't, having come to this analysis, just take in the compliments for what she intended and leave the photos behind.

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I have been on the phone with my sister several times today. We're going to her house the day after Christmas, for the Granola family Christmas celebration. Curious Girl, who in years past has been pretty darn terrified of Santa, has this year started to explore a little bit of Santa enthusiasm (she is scared of real Santas dressed up but has been having hysterical conversations with rooftop Santas we've seen around the neighborhood). We've always been rather reserved about the Santa mythology (a topic Dani has had some interesting thoughts about lately), in part because neither Politica nor I are really comfortable with actively building up a story I know to be false (most of our pretend games are driven by CG's imagination, but the Santa story is one we would need to feed to her), in part because we're not celebrating Christmas as a religious holiday even though we do love our Norsk Jul with Politica's father and my family-of-origin celebrates Christmas religiously; in part because we are always on the road. We are the People who Travel to the rest of the family.

But, Santa brings presents for my nieces , and last year, when we were there on Christmas morning, we had a Santa present for CG, too. (I think the year before, I hadn't thought about this at all, and my sister had a spare Santa present for CG. So last year, we organized for Santa, and this year, we had planned to ship a present to my sister's for CG). All fine. Except that UPS isn't cooperating. Our gifts for Politica's dad have arrived, but not our package to my sister's.

So why not just have Santa arrive at Politica's father's, you may be wondering? Well, because CG, in her Santa narratives this year, has been saying to anyone and everyone, "Santa is coming to my cousin's house." And we've just been nodding in agreement. It was a lovely narrative--we got to hitch onto my sister's family's rather extensive Santa mythology without having to do much ourselves to support it. But UPS isn't going to arrive until 12/27, we discovered today. So I suggested that Santa could leave a note saying he'd swing back around on the 27th for CG (we can reallocate some gifts and have a present that was going to be from Politica's dad come from Santa instead, so we'll have it with us when we arrive.) No, my sister says, that won't fit with where her kids think Santa will be on the 27th (at the North Pole). Just have Santa come at Politica's dad's, she says.

Politica and I confer. We like sticking to the CG-generated narrative about Santa coming to the cousins. So I call back. We'll have Santa deliver the present at my parents' house, which is where we'll actually be staying. No, that won't do, because my sister and her kids will be over at my parents' before we arrive, and they will know there is no Santa gift there. So that won't do. Just have Santa come at Politica's dad's, she says again.

My sister also says, "you sound upset at me," and I lie and say I'm not. She presses me, and I continue to lie. This is my deal with my family--I do not like to show my emotions in front of them because I am afraid that they will ignore them. And my sister's continuous suggestions about how we can manage Santa anywhere but near her house are certainly feeding that fear. I had called her a few weeks ago, actually, to talk about Christmas stockings. I'm knitting one for CG now. She's never had one, although my nieces, sister, and brother-in-law all have stockings I knit for them. Last year, CG was in tears on Christmas day because her cousins had a couple of little matching items--hairbows, I think--that had come in their stockings, and she wanted one, too. She didn't really care about the stockings, she just wanted to match her cousins. So I asked my sister if she could pick up three of anything she was getting two of for her girls. I wasn't asking her to fill the stocking, just enable a little matching, I told her. She was surprised. "I thought you'd do the stockings at Politica's dad's," she said. Politica points out now that this was a big hint that she didn't really want our Christmas stuff at her house. We had an awkward conversation that night, and I called her the next day to say not to worry, we'd do the stocking on our own time.

At the moment, Politica and I are both livid. I guess we'll have Santa's gift arrive on Christmas morning, which has the advantage of giving us one more thing to do with Politica's dad in the assisted living facility that morning. There's not going to be a lot of hoopla--our traditional Norsk Jul isn't really possible given that we don't have a kitchen. We're going for Christmas Eve dinner to Graduate School Friends' house, which will be wonderful, joining them for their tradition, which is tamales. Christmas Day we'll be eating at the assisted living facility, and we won't really be able to make the traditional rice pudding (which Politica doesn't like, anyway). So having a stocking and a morning gift will make a little more hoopla, and that will be nice with Politica's dad.

But still, I'm livid. Yes, my sister says, if we had ordered the gift a week earlier it would have been there. Yes, if we had called my sister a week earlier she would have picked something up for us (although my efforts at early coordination didn't really pay off on the stocking). But when you are the People Who Travel, it is hard to craft holiday traditions, and I would think that the People Who Don't Travel would cut us a little slack and help manipulate the narratives to make our lives a little easier. Instead, my sister has all kinds of ideas about how we can change the story we've been telling Curious Girl so that she doesn't have to change a darn thing in her own narrative.

And this bugs me. I know I should be able to let it go. But it's not fading easily. And I wish my inner child weren't so up in arms about this. I've had enough therapy to see the patterns, to understand why all this happens. I don't understand why it's suddenly so hard to react in a more healthy fashion.

Bah, humbug.

But hugs to anyone who's reading my rant: my inner child is happy for supportive readers!

I Wore My Wedding Dress

We had the traditional lesbian vegetarian thanksgiving: mushroom-tofu-leek phyllo pastries, maple pumpkin pie, roasted vegetables, cranberry sauce with a raspberry/orange twist, and a wonderful salad made by Husband of Pseudonymless Friend. The children ran around the house and everyone was happy except for the shy cats. My parents (who are not vegetarians) are here, and Mom asked Politica "Where's the bird?" (we did cook a turkey two years ago for Thanksgiving, but it was a lot of work, I didn't eat it, and the house smelled of turkey for a whole day afterwards. Why do that when the phyllo pastries are so tasty?) But even the meat-loving grandparents were happy with the meal. It was good, and the table was beautiful.

At one point, my mother said to me, "That's a nice outfit you have on." I paused. "It was my wedding dress, " I told her. She doesn't know that because she didn't come to our wedding. She paused. "Cute outfit," she said, and turned away.

I have mostly let that go, that she didn't come to our wedding. Mostly.

I shouldn't dwell on that, when there are happier moments to savor:

• Curious Girl falling asleep on my shoulder, exhausted after a day of playing, giggling, and shrieking
• CG talking to the balloons in the Macy's T-Day Parade. I'm going to miss it when she finally figures out the line between reality and fantasy
• Working in the kitchen with Politica. We were in and out of the kitchen all day, and the food was good.
• Eating bread fresh out of the oven: I made sandwich bread for my parents, and when I offered to cut some for my mother her eyes just opened wide. "Don't you want to save it for the company?" You are the company!
• Watching Politica gradually relax over the course of the day.

Here's hoping all Thanksgiving-celebrating-readers had a good day.

Tremenninger

Every time I travel, I come home amused and jealous about the things that are different in other places. Shop and office hours in the places we visited seemed more geared to balancing family and work, and there was good bread everywhere. TV carried news about the whole world, and cricket match scores appeared in running text at the bottom of the screen. The days in Politica's Ancestral Homeland were gloriously long and light.

But on this trip, mostly what I marveled at is something they have in Ancestral Homeland that we just can't find here: tremenninger, or second cousins for Curious Girl. CG is one of 13 children in her generation of the family. 3 of those 13 live in southeast Asia, but were back in Ancestral Homeland for several weeks while we were there, and 9 of them live within 10 minutes of each other and their grandparents in Ancestral Homeland. CG was just in seventh heaven getting to meet and spend time with these cousins (who range in age from almost 4 to 24). They showered her with affection. I have photos of almost all of them carrying her, pushing her on swings, taking her for walks or bowling trips, holding her on the boat, and just snuggling her. CG turned into a wholly different child, in some respects. She deserted us immediately upon sighting any of the cousins, and she spent hours just following them around, looking up at them adoringly. One of her cousins helped put her to bed almost every night (getting her into her PJs, teeth brushed, story read; a cousin can't replace a mother for the comfort of falling alseep, but can do just about everything else). Another cousin took her on her first solo shopping trip (to a candy store! where she got two packages of gum! with her own money from Politica's first cousin!) and also shared her makeup with CG and fixed her hair in a beautiful bun. At home, Curious Girl looks to us first, middle, and last as a play companion, but over there, we hardly rated.

"I wish we lived in Ancestral Homeland," CG told me this morning. "It's so fun in Ancestral Homeland." A bit of a "nanny state," Politica thinks, what with government regulations about things like having to carry a fluorescent vest in the car for use in tire-changing situations, but still, a state where we have a large and loving extended family: I could get used to that. One night at dinner we had 29 people over, and kids and grownups just circulated around in different groupings, talking and laughing. The kids are in and out of each others' houses. Curious Girl loved it, and some of my best memories from the trip are of seeing her small hand in the hand of a bigger cousin, or seeing her smiling up with admiration and love for the bigger girls she had only imagined until now.

So I have stories to tell about cousins and travel, stories to tell about a new school year about to start, stories to tell about the two-week-old kittens our cousins have. But at the moment, I still have some unpacking to do, and a new resolution to declutter the house, so I am off to put some things away and fill a bag or box with recycling or pass-alongs. It's good to be home, even if I'm partly joining Curious Girl in wishing that we did live a little closer to her tremenninger. I do like our small family, and while the size of our family is something I am mostly happy with, being in a bigger family makes me wistful.

It's a good thing, coming home from holiday with new things to ponder.

Pleader's Pligest Update

I just got off the phone with a customer service representative at Pleader's Pligest, who says that the reason for the tone of the renewal correspondence I mentioned in a previous post is because my father-in-law's bill is overdue. Apparently, a renewal request was processed last fall. As we handle his bills and Pleader's Pligest mail, I know we did not send a renewal request (but later in the conversation, she mentioned that he had set up his subscription with automatic renewal, so I suspect that the subscription was auto-renewed in October).

The thing is, his subscription is currently paid to June of 2009. But because of the auto-renew feature, Pleader's Pligest considered his account to be "overdue" in 2007. What a total crock.

I'm now going to write to the friendly folks at Pleader's Pligest to tell them what I think of this process.

October on the Beach

I grew up on the ocean. My father's family moved to my hometown when he was a teenager, I think, and he and my mother moved back to my hometown when I was three. Even though I left to go to college and never really moved back, and even though I've not been back to my hometown all that much in recent years, the ocean is the place I feel at home. So it was with a sad heart that Curious Girl and I traveled back to my hometown last week, for one last weekend there before my parents move to Massachusetts, to live near my sister.

Curious Girl desperately wanted to put her toes in the ocean. None too surprisingly, putting her toes in the ocean turned into putting her calves in, too, and then once the bottom of her pants got wet there was little reason to worry about the tops getting wet, too. We walked a lot on the beach, we picked up shells, and Curious Girl made up stories about them. "Look! little baby shells! We have to take them home, they're babies, they have no family." I love watching her run on the beach, the same beach I ran on when I was four. We don't have a lot of family traditions in our small and scattered family, and I liked seeing CG in the same place I was, once.

My parents are in their early 80s, and in quite good health. They're active. They're moving, as my dad says, while they still can make their own choices. And I know this is a good thing. Politica's father has been in declining health for several years and it's been hard for us to be so far away from him; it was hard to see him living alone past the point we thought he was really on top of his own needs. My parents will be moving quite close to my sister, and they'll be moving when they're able to make new friends. Rationally, I think it's a great move. But my needy inner child thinks "Ack! They love her more than me!" I'll get over that, I know.

But I'm really going to miss that ocean. I grew up a block from the bay, 8 blocks from the ocean. My grandmother ended up living in an apartment right on the beach, and my parents moved into that apartment after she died. So for the past 10 years they've been living right on the boardwalk, with a terrace and a den that overlooked the ocean. We could see the barges headed for New York's ports, we could see the waves breaking on the jetties, we could see the water changing color, the surfers out in all kinds of weather. It was a great place to grow up. And I'll miss it.