Seuss

My husband has a bit of a bad reputation when it comes to throwing things away.  Pens, pieces of paper, drinks I’m still drinking, plants – they tend to vanish into the ether of our house.  He’s learning to own up to his pitching propensity, but that doesn’t change the rep.  If something goes missing, it’s usually ended up “accidentally” in the trash and is gone before Earl or I notice.

The other day, I asked him where something was.  A simple seeming something.  An odd, stand-outish something.  I asked where my orange pillowcase had gone.  I’ve looked in the linen closet, I explained.  I can’t find it.  I’m starting to panic.

He immediately went upstairs to try to put his hands on the thing and after some thumping and bumping, I heard, “Oh sweet Holy Mother of God I found it!  Thank you, Jesus!”

Such proclamations of extreme faith are not very commonplace in our home.  I was immediately on the verge of tears because that simple declaration told me he knew.  He knew the significance of that garish piece of cloth.  He knew, he understood, and, for once, his insane cleaning-out tendencies had not gotten the best of him.

You see, we have no orange sheets in our house.  This is not a color we use.  This is tacky, bright, obnoxious orange.  But this is also not just any old pillowcase.

When I had Earl, I got very sick.  I got very sick and it happened very fast.  At 10:30 on Tuesday morning, I was a normal pregnancy with a midwife birth plan.  By 10:30 on Wednesday morning, I was getting in extreme danger of bleeding out from even an epidural and my husband was hearing that they had to save someone, and it wouldn’t be mama.

In 24 hours, they watched my BP go from 140/80 (high for me, borderline for most) to 212/110 (insane in the membrane), I developed HELLP Syndrome (scary stuff in and of itself), and my sudden onset preeclampsia blossomed into full blown eclampsia with one small seizure and one long, frightening, vivid full-body seizure.

My doctor had a cool head.  Calmer minds prevailed.  They waited.  He took a chance with low platelets (but slightly on the rise) and the epidural and things calmed down.  It was several more hours after the seizure that Earl was finally delivered by a non-emergency c-section because I had simply stopped dilating.  Which was fine by me.  I’d asked them to go on and take her 36 hours earlier, but no, no, natural would be better for her.  Uh huh.  I just nearly died.

I’m grateful, though.  I don’t begrudge the doctor, nurses, or midwives anything they did.  They were all doing what they thought was in my best interest.  Fortunately, the one who was right won out.  I survived, Earl never missed a beat, and I still have all my womanly female bits.

That’s a bit of a double-edged sword, though.  I have them, but I won’t ever use them again.  The chances of a repeat performance on a grander scale (read: the chances I would die) are far too great and/or far too uncertain for me to risk it.

If you know me in real life, you’ve probably heard this story.  You probably know how I remember little from that time but the seizure.  Yes, I know, I shouldn’t have any memory of that.  But I do, so get over it.  I remember vividly every second, every sensation, every thought, the sound in my head.  It sounds much like a florescent bulb on the fritz, then burning out, if you must know.  A sharp, loudening electrical poppy sizzle of short circuitry that started, for me, as background noise to my acknowledgement that, no, I can’t control my arms and legs, I can feel my neck torquing to the left, oh god I just bit through my tongue, I know I’m not going to die, but this will be my only baby, my only baby, my only baby, I’m done I’m done I’m done, and ends up as a deafening, thought-drowning rush of television static at top volume.

See, this is why I got a PTSD diagnosis instead of PPD.  That last sentence right there.  The one thing that didn’t occur to me in those long seconds was what kind of therapy bill I would rack up in the following years, but I digress.

When I seized, my jaw clenched and my molars went through my tongue.  Have you ever bitten through your tongue?  No?  Did you know your tongue bleeds?  A LOT?  Like, everywhere?  It does.  And during the seizure, there was a gush of blood out of my mouth onto the pillow on which my head rested.

The pillow that was covered by an orange pillowcase.

So you can see now why this isn’t just a normal, everyday pillowcase for me.  It’s a very symbolic, meaningful, sacred pillowcase.

Actually, no, that’s not entirely true.  The one I still have is the sacred one.  It’s the one rife with meaning.  The one that was on that pillow was disposed of, probably scooped by some nurse into a biohazard bin.  Gross as it sounds, I have always wished I still had that pillowcase, stains and all, but in the past few weeks as a counsellor has finally managed to smack me into realizing that I must grieve this loss (of having another baby, not of the pillowcase, although it’s all meshed together), I’ve realized the important one is the one I keep.

That one pillowcase was once a part of a whole – a part of a pair, a set, a complete package.  At that same moment in which I felt my body betray me, the same moment in which I lost something very precious to me, that pillowcase lost its other half.  When someone tossed its bloodstained mate into a bag, to them, it was just another pillowcase.  No big deal.  It was just a pillowcase.  You have another one just like it.  At least you have that.

No big deal.  You have a baby.  One just like any other you could have.  At least you have that.

Right now, I’m on a journey to selfishly reclaim my grief.  To embrace my own personal loss.  Yes, my husband lost the ability to have any more children (with me).  My mother and in-laws lost the possibility of more natural grandchildren.  But to them, someone – probably me – told them, “It’s gone.  This is all you get.  I’m done.”

I, however, held that precious gift of being able to have children in my hands and watched it slip away.  I felt every moment, felt my body’s blessed ability slide from my grip.  I curled around my womb as it gave me my greatest gift, my daughter, then declared itself done.  My uterus, my liver, my kidneys, my heart, my blood, my brain – I heard them all say “no more.”

That is my grief.  My very personal, very individual, very unique loss that no one else but me can claim.  I lived that loss differently than anyone else.  And 7 years later, it’s time I embrace it as such.

For years, I have kept the orange pillowcase as a symbol of what I lost – that other pillowcase was the only physical thing that went with me to the hospital that did not come home.  Today, I keep it as a symbol of what I have – me, redefined, still useful and soft, but far more sacred.  Far more unique.  Unlike anything else in this home.

Not whole in the way it used to be, but whole in a whole new way.

I try to teach Earl about stranger danger. When I was her age, I was acutely aware that even the old man on the walker on the other side of the street could potentially turn into a ninja and swipe me from my mother’s side without anyone noticing. Earl…loves strangers. Will tell them her life story. And mine, too, if she sees fit.

Recently, we’ve had an odd woman going door to door telling whomever answers the she works for the elementary school up the street. She gets nosy about the kids in the house. Too nosy. Most of the people I know who have encountered her have not only been wary, they’ve been weirded out and ended up slamming the door in her face because she’s so dang pushy. We’ve talked to Earl about the woman, about keeping her eyes open when she’s playing with the neighbor kids, about how the authorities don’t think she’s dangerous, but you just never know.=

Earl’s best friend’s father didn’t slam the door in the woman’s face. He invited her in to have dinner with the family. Suddenly, in Earl’s eyes, the women went from a potential threat to “She’s really nice!”

This scares me. We had instilled not terror, but a healthy fear about strangers using this woman as the best example. And now, her friend’s father’s careless (in my eyes, compassionate in other eyes, I’m sure) decision to welcome this complete stranger, this solicitor, this woman asking prying, uncomfortable questions into his home, with his young children, has showed her that, yes, even people we think are bad can sometimes be good. Which is an ideal, isn’t it? But so much more dangerous than the niggling awareness in the back of a brain that sometimes even seemingly good people are bad, sometimes safe seeming things are dangerous.

I’m not positive how to deal with this with Earl.  On one hand, this is her “very best friend,” and I don’t want to be the whiny parent who pulls the girls apart because, seriously, they live right there.  On the other hand, I don’t approve of their choice to invite her in.  Now, do I hold it against them?  No.  Do I judge them?  Not really.  It’s just not a decision I would have made, and I want Earl to understand why.  In a second grader’s mind, however, that’s a tedious line to toe.  “Look, you don’t have to fuss at them or say anything to them or comment or say they’re wrong and you’re right.  You just need to understand why I, your mother, would not have made this same choice.”  In her brain, that would translate to, “I want you to go to their house right now and tell them I said they were wrong and it was a bad decision and you should never ever ever let a stranger into your house, thus sayeth my mother.”

How would you handle the situation with your child?  And how do you guide your children along that path between respecting potential danger but still wanting to see and embrace the good in the world?

Earl, of course, is not her real name. My beautiful, quirky child has simply all but stopped responding to her real name, so my mother and I have started following her unanswered-real-name with, “Earl!”  She immediately pivots, squares her shoulders, huffs, and responds.  She answers simply to ward off embarrassment, but, hey, it works.  Most of the time.

The past few days, she’s insisted on being called “Bella” (When she remembers, that is.  She is, after all, my child who oh hey look something shiny!  Ahem.).  The first time she announced this recent name change, I asked why that particular name.  “You have four perfectly good names with all kinds of nicknames associated with them.  Why BELLA?”  She shrugged and said she feels pretty like a “Bella.”

Well, okay, then. I can’t argue with that, Earl…er…Bella.

Nor can I really fuss.  For years in college, I went by one of my middle names.  No, not “Amanda” which would have be easy.  I’ve never been an easy kind of girl.  Besides, there were 1.6 billion Amandas and Mandys in my school growing up.  No, I went by my other middle name, “True.”  It’s a family surname, and I lay all the blame for my name change on my grandmother who, in a senile moment years before the onset of dementia, randomly wondered aloud why I’d never been asked to be called “True.”

Seeing as I’d never asked to be called anything but my actual name (which I have always disliked), I didn’t have an answer, but a change sounded good.  I went for it.  Very few people ever really latched on to the idea, but I liked it.  I liked the opportunity it gave me to reinvent myself a bit.  And I liked the “Trubie” nickname that went along with it.  I’ve never liked any nicknames, aside from the obvious (hello, blog name) for my first name, but True had “Trubie” and “Trubes” and “Troubador” and “T” and “False,” which is all one particular philosophy professor would call me.  Not that I ever really wanted to adopt that one, but I definitely stood out!  And I found myself many times wondering why I hadn’t insisted on the unique name earlier.  I’d have rocked that name in high school.

Fine.  High school still would have sucked, but let me have my little delusion, ‘kay?

I purposely gave my child names I wouldn’t mind using if she ever decided to up and switch to another built-in option.  I know what it’s like to be stuck with a name and nicknames you hate (call me Susie-Q and you are dead to me), so I’m prepared if she wants a little change down the line.  For now, though, I’ll torment her with “Earl” and indulge her with “Bella” when she insists.  It means she’s trying to figure out who she is.  She’s working out the bugs in her program long before I did, and I can’t help but admire and encourage that.

It’s frightening sometimes to look at Earl and realize I’m raising a new little, hopefully improved and less-buggy version of myself.  Only my mother never had to call me “Harvey” in public to get my attention.

Thank God for small favors.

For about a week now, I’ve felt like I’m sprouting a horn from my forehead.  Inevitably, once it breaks, it will be the biggest, badassest zit I have ever had, but for now, it just hurts.  And it makes me whine.  And push on it because OW.

I’m sure it’s stress.  Everything these days is stress.  Word to the wise: Never mention short-term memory issues and frequent headaches to your overly-cautious doctor.  You’ll end up a week later in a waiting room surrounded by Alzheimer’s patients and their caregivers, and later, because stress has kept you awake, you’ll fall asleep during the 30-minute long MRI of your head.

Y’all, I was so tired, I SLEPT THROUGH A MRI.  OF MY HEAD.  Have you ever had an MRI?  Those things?  Are LOUD.  And BONKY.  And DEAFENING.

I’m pretty sure I snored.

I’ve been very quiet here over the past couple of weeks.  I’ve opened this page many times to write, but haven’t found the words to put in the box.  There are changes going on – major changes.  Mostly good changes.  Some bad.  Family stuff, household stuff, work stuff, school stuff (yes, I’m going back.  Shut it.)  But it’s…a lot.

One day last week, I had the housekeeper, the alarm guy, a carpet guy, the fish tank guy, the dog groomer, and the lawn care company all at my house.  Simultaneously.  Distraction is an art, and I am a master.

There’s a lot I can’t talk about here – not for now.  Later.  At the moment, however, I’m on a bit of a personal break.  I’m nestled in a chair-and-a-half in a big ol’ suite in a cozy little bed and breakfast watching football.  I’m here, by myself, for the entire weekend.  Earl and Hubs are at home having Labor Day weekend fun, I’m sure.  But me?  I strolled around Asheville today, enjoying the light drizzle and then pelting rain that fell as I walked.  I happily waited an hour for an excellent meal I enjoyed at a table by myself while reading a book on my Kindle.  And now, here I sit, English Breakfast tea by my side, my Tide on TV, Kindle quietly recharging.  Like me.  This is my hard reset.

I’m hoping this is the start of a calmer, less-stressed me.  The intensity of the last couple of weeks has been pretty overwhelming.  Hence the second head I seem to be sprouting above my eyebrow.

Oh, and the MRI results came back just fine.  Apparently, there’s a brain, and it’s “normal.”  Obviously, the MRI is judging my book by its cover.  Normal my Aunt Fanny.