Planet 174 to Planet 41

Greetings, Guests-n-KuKd/TTC'ers!

Ahhhhh, the 174 and the 41. Everyone knows what I'm talking about, right? I'm talking, of course, about the #174 and #41 Seattle city busses. They look the same (like busses). They act the same (like busses). Yet, they may as well be vehicles from two separate planets, given the vast differences in their purposes, the clientel that they serve, and the sorts of daily adventures I have on them going to and from work.

The 41 - the first segment on my trip to work - is the express bus to downtown from the northern edge of the city. You step on that bus and ZOOM - off you go, straight down the interstate with no other stops. Five minutes later, you step into Seattle's thick downtown-scape of noise and skyscrapers and urban excitement. Everyone looks and acts proper on this bus, sitting quietly and reading the newspaper or typing on their laptops until arrival. Nobody talks or passes gas, or tries to sneak on board without paying. People get on and off quickly and seamlessly, whipping out their shiny bus passes furnished by their corporate or government jobs. And at the end of their 9-5 jobs, the calm and lovely 41 whisks them effortlessly back out of that urban grit, into moderately suburban serenity and the exurbs beyond.

And then there's the 174: the second part of my commute. Now the 174 is the salt-of-the-earth sort of bus where the REAL PEOPLE ride, baby! We keep it REAL on the 174! This bus runs up and down Pacific Highway, two and around the airport, past grungy strip malls into pseudo-urban and dilapidated suburban hell. Here, you've got more than just oh-so-environmentally-conscious commuters dipping one safe little toe into downtown life. Here, you've got real people who rely on the bus to get around. Mommas with three kids hauling grocery bags; crazies talking to themselves; immigrants dressed in a million different ethnic garbs; hoards of teenagers - mostly black and Hispanic - talking loudly (and profanely, even!) while blasting their boom boxes.

When you ride this bus, you better not have issues with personal space - because it's pretty much guaranteed: people are going to cuss in your ear, shout into their cell phones, body slam you when they sit down, and fart loudly. And this bus will always, ALWAYS be late - because nobody every has bus passes to quickly flash at the drive. People only have crumpled bills and coins, and usually not enough.

* * *

I've got so many stories from the past few years of cruising around on these two busses that I could write a full book of vignettes. But I'll start with one from last week, because it relates - kinda - to the subject of babies. And I've got another even juicier one, too - one from this very evening - which I'll save for later.

This one has to do with me in my white, puffy Michelin-Man-looking winter coat that my mom lent me. It's stuffed with fake feathers or something, and very, very, puffy-n-fluffy. Now, at nearly 6-months preggers, I'm already fairly rotund. With my mom's white coat on, snapped around my chin with a gigantic fur-ringed hood enveloping my face, I truly look like the Pilsbury Dough Boy crossed with Big Foot. And, I forgot to remind my mom that I + White Colors = Disaster, given my tendency to spill everything on myself.

So, I was wearing my coat on the 174 on my way to work one morning last week, innocently grading essays, when BAM - it happened: blood started pouring from my nose in rivulets. It happens a lot these days: random bloody noses. My whole body is just engorged with blood. It happens in class, it happens at night, it happens while I'm in the grocery store - so I should have known it would happen right then when I had no Kleenex or anything even similar to Kleenex, AND had my mom's gleaming puffy white coat snapped around my chin.

First, of course, I yanked off that coat, examining it briefly for blood stains - of which I saw just a small one near the bottom seam. Then, I tried sucking down my nosebleed for a while - making these deep, gutteral, disgusting snorting sounds in an effort to swallow all that metallic-y, bloody, snotty, spitty goodness. It sort of sounded like I was hawking a loogie, but a backwards one. And, being already closely surrounded by weird, old, bad-smelling men making similar phlegmy coughing sounds (and even spitting directly onto the floor of the bus, I might add), I didn't feel so bad about joining the chorus of 174-sounds.

But sucking down a bloody nose can only get you so far, as all you chronic nosebleed-havers can attest. I really, really, really needed a tissue.

There was a brief break in the blood flow, so I used that time to rummage frantically through my bag for an old napkin or a piece of cloth, an antique American flag, a Maxi-pad, a banana peel, an envelope, a magazine, SOMETHING I could use to catch blood from my nose. But there was nothing but pens, a jump drive, a tube of chapstick, and a bunch of keys on a key chain. Nothing that would do me much good. And with my newly cropped hair cut, I couldn't even use my dark brown tresses of hair as a makeshift hankerchief (ahhh, how I miss the days when I could use my hair as emergency dental floss!).

With a long while still to go on my trip, I had to resort to the one and only thing that could be used to scrape blood off my upper lip: my student essays, of course. I rifled through them and found one with just half a sentence or so on the last page, ripped it out of its staped position, crumpled it up, and there it was. My pointy, sharp, totally uncomfortable excuse for a Kleenex.

But hey, it worked. And I'm pretty sure that student didn't know what he was missing.

Oh, one of the coughing, stringy-haired men sidled up beside me did give me a couple of long stares - I could feel his eyes on me. But I didn't mind. I felt like one of them: part of the proud, gritty 174 crew!

* * *

Coming soon: tonight's completely and utterly different encounter on that OTHER bus, the 41.

Hot Soldier Stillbirth Dad

Greetings, KuKd/TTCers and Inquistive Guests!

This post is about me being a self-serving little bitch. Sort of.

But first, I was trying to find the perfect representative image of a man whose oft-knocked-down-wife is pregnant once again. Pregnancy! What was once a safe and happy cake-walk is now a landmine-filled endeavor fraught with hidden dangers that even the most intellectully keen, foresightful, specially trained elite army forces can't predict or control!

Man becomes military scout on the constant lookout for danger:



Or maybe this:



(I don't know about you, but I'm going with image number 2. That's him, my Hot Soldier Stillbirth Daddy-O! Notice his manly package, powerfully capable of producing mass quantites of offspring (ahem, non-viable offpsring - but we'll ignore that detail for now). So enormous that even the whatever-you-call-that-thing on a machine gun can hardly hide it!)

To this particular man of mine, even the most seemingly ordinary and obvious information - like "the fetus just kicked" or "the ultrasound showed that he's alive and has the appropriate number of eye sockets" - is reassuring. When I tell him those things, I feel like the colonel relaying good news to the general: "Sir, we've secured stability in that one random little dusty town in northern Iraq!"

These conversations give me some selfish satisfaction, not just because I like seeing my man happy, but because for some reason it always feels good to be extra-nice to a soldier. You want to...like...send him a care package with fresh-baked cookies and glossy porn mags or other happy-making fodder. You're so grateful for his protective and manly abilities, his sacrifices, that you want to protect him in return - in whatever lame-ass way that you can.

Part of that means protecting him from negative information. Does anyone else have memories of your parents or grandparents protecting you from bad news, particularly when it hasn't been verified yet? Like deaths and illnesses in the family - I mean real bad news? My mom does it, K's mom does it. Always have. To me, that's what it means to be a seasoned, mature handler of bad news. You could succumb to your own fear and emotion, immediately calling everyone on the planet to rope others into your pool of anxiety. Or, you could wait until you have all the facts before you jump to conclusions and freak out your loved ones (potentially unnecessarily).

* * *

I like to think of my KuKdx3 status, my ripe old age of 33, as an opportunity to be like my and K's mothers are, and have always been. To be a wise and seasoned handler of potentially scary news. But ya know what?

I'm failing miserably at it.

It came up a few days ago, when there was blood in the toilet, twice. It was one of those things where I looked down at the water and went FUCK, with little alarm bells going off loudly inside my head. K was at the gym playing b-ball and had a fun night planned with his guy-friends after that. So it was kind of like: do I call him or not? Do I chill the hell out until I have some facts straight, or succumb to the almost overpowering urge call him to babble about this possible deadly sign, knowing it will worry him to pieces?

I tried for a while to be the mature, level-headed, Zen-like wife. I tried to wait it out for a day or two before calling the doctor, even. Honestly, I tried. But after about an hour or so, I was like fuck Zen! and impulsively the consulting nurse, who of course ordered me to come in right away "to get monitored," as I knew she would. And once that happened: BAM! I simply HAD to call up K, left without any choice but to inform him of my whereabouts!

"Hey dude," I said. "EVERYTHING IS OKAY, but I'm heading into the hospital so they can take a look at my cervix. I'M SURE THAT EVERYTHING IS OKAY, so don't worry. SINCE EVERYTHING IS OKAY, don't bother coming over here - just go do your guys' night as planned."

That led to him calling every fifteen minutes to check in as I lay there with little suction-cup thingies all over my belly and a monitor showing peaks and valleys of fetal heartbeats, even in the midst of his guys' night out.

Now, here's the part that makes me a self-serving little bitch, REALLY unlike my mother, or K's mother, or any other normal mature female who puts others before herself and looks after her "brood" if you could call it that: I actually kinda liked that he was getting up and leaving his guy-friends every so often to call, that he was using this particular worried-man voice that makes my heart go pitter patter. It's this kind of taut, serious male voice with undertones of concern. Not flipping out and bawling into the phone or anything, just this checking-in voice. I find it awesomely sexy. Awesomely awesome, actually, to be paid attention to.

What I really learned that night is this: as seasoned and wise and mature I'd like to think my KuKd past has made me, really I'm just as much the attention-loving fiend as I always was. I wonder if I'll ever be able to keep my own anxieties in check, setting aside my needs for the sake of others.

Oh, and one more thing this made me ponder: maybe the only reason people REALLY ever send care-packages to soldiers overseas is to make ourselves feel better. ;-)

(For the record, everything was OK, fetas-wise anyway. I discovered this morning that the blood is in my stools, not coming from "that other canal." I ran into the kitchen to announce this groundbreaking news to K, just so that - yes - so that someone else on the planet could be mildly concerned right alongside me. He was concerned, as I knew and hoped he'd be, and immediately Googled "blood stools during second trimester." Seems like it could be nothing, so I'm keeping an eye on it for now. It felt good, nonetheless, to have someone Googling on my behalf. See? See how self-serving I am?)

Comfort Zones and Cock-Blockers

Greetings, KuKd/TTC'ers Tribespeople and Inquisitive Guests!

Sometimes on this blog, I find myself tripping over words, wondering if certain feelings are okay to talk about. Like the great big pink box with the word "YAY!" on my last post. It was how I felt: yay. Holy yay, batman. But was it cool to be so yay-ish and all in public? Was it obnoxious of me? There was a point in writing that post when I sort of paused and looked out the window at Seattle's slate-gray sky, and thought: I'm tired of this post already. So I did myself a favor, at the very least, and kept it short. Ish.

A couple of weeks ago, some friends and I were sitting around the dining room table. One guy started to tell about some event coming up next week, stopped after the third word, and said: "Never mind. I'm already tired of my own story."

There are several things that make me feel that exact way whenever I talk about them in mixed company, and numero uno is my knocked-up-ness. Just plain tired my own story, like my lips are moving but really I'm thinking about bacon-wrapped bacon. Which is why I can't bring myself to say much about it here (pregnancy, not bacon), unless something really noteworthy is going on, like last week's first big heart test.

Oh, of course there are a very few key people I can vomit out words to about it for hours on end. I'm talking people like parents, husband, and two or three best-est of best-est friends who deliberately ask and want to know about the current condition of my uterus. And prego-buddies and their accompanying sperm-producers, who want to talk shop about names-n-stuff. To them, I can gladly give a shameless earful. But pregnancy? Here on this blog? With 99% of people in my life?

Nah.

Here's my current theory as to why that's the case.

This past weekend I caught up on some much-neglected blog-o-reading. And let me tell you, not that you don't know this already: there is a lot of sad, painful stuff going on out there among this great big group of KuKd/TTC blog-o-peeps. Perfectly decent, wonderful, goregous, goodhearted and intelligent women miscarrying - people who want nothing more than the one thing that so many others produce so easily: a biological child. People's IVF treatments failing. People realizing that they might not ever get this thing they want. People grappling with huge issues that force them to really take stock of their lives, make hard decisions, and come to terms with loss in their own way.

Now, I simply can't read about...say...Shaz's or Parenthood for Me's stories, feel intensely sad about that - which I do - and then plop down on the sofa with a big smile on my face and crank out some story about: "WOO-HOO BABY! LOOK AT ME AND MY PREGNANT SELF! GOD, MY BOOBS ARE JUST ACHING AND ENGORGED WITH PRE-MILKY PLEASURE! MY VAGINA IS RIPE AND ACHING TO BE STRETCHED TO DIAMETER OF A SOCCER BALL!"

Totally oustide my comfort zone. The words don't come to me. Instead, what comes to me are things like: is it okay for me to feel this one thing? And write about it here? Or will I be throwing myself irrevocably off that tightrope-walk that us KuKd-prego-gals have to walk, that we all are faced with when our cervical mucus vaccums up sperm unexpectedly and suddenly - KABOOM - we have that "it" that others don't have, but want? How in the name of hellfucked hell does one pay homage to their own excitements and other people's non-excitements at the same time? And can I do it here?

Not that my comfort zone is the right zone or the wrong zone (more likely wrong, which I usually am). And not that I don't enjoy reading about others' pregnancy ups-n-downs and pregnancy ticker-like updates, living vicariously through them even.

It's just that for me, personally, to post on and on about my knocked-uppage would give me this icky, yucky feeling of having forgotten my roots, forgotten about the core group of people who read this blog regularly, who have supported me since day one and beyond even through their own continued ups and downs. It would be as though I've left my impoverished hometown and won the lottery, only to return in a brand new Escalade with all my fance schmancy jewelry and gadgets. That's how it would feel.

So I remain humble as I feel, keeping my feet planted in the firm, damp, root-filled earth:



rooted alongside the KuKd Tribe I had so much trouble finding in "real life," and - was lucky enough to discover here.

(By the way, just to hammer in this point again: please don't take that as this preachy-ass "would all you happy pregnant people stop talking about it, please?" sort of message. Dude, I'm the last person to give out messages about anything in particular. It's just like, this is my comfort zone. That's it. Just like eating bacon: in my comfort zone. Tofu-loaf: not.)

* * *

For the record, even if I WERE to post something prego-related, it would be something really superficial that nobody in their right mind wants to hear about, like how Kevin recently accused my pregnancy pillow (see image below) of being a cock-blocker.

A cock blocker!

Look, I really don't see how a gigantic Great-Wall-of-China-sized pillow, firmly enclosing my multiple-layers-of-flannel-clothing-over-Texas-sized-Hanes-bloomers-underwear body, preventing me and Kevin from coming within 15 inches of one another before, during, and after bedtime, would be considered a cock-blocker!

Seems a bit of an extreme accusation to make.

Feeling Big

Dear Mother Nature:



We're in the lead so far, bee-yatch! Us: one. You: zero. Despite your tetonic-plate forces shoving people's lives around, Fetus Causing my Torso to Swell (MFCTS) has thus far avoided your sneaky X-linked tricks (good job passing the first heart-test of your fetushood, MFCTS).

I feel big, bigger than this earth, bigger than the tsunami-hail-storm causing forces around me, bigger than my own huge belly. That's me: Big Fat Marge, Large and In-Charge. We humans are all the shit! We are all that and then some - in control of our destinies provided we eat our bran flakes, exercise for 30 minutes a day, brush our teeth, and occasionally do voluntary good works for society. Right? Right! Nothing can stop us from conquering the earth - not even you, Mother Nature! We are winning, you are losing!

* * *

Wait a minute. Isn't it you, Ma' Nature, that makes life in the first place? Aren't you the reason behind the MFCTS' current state of alive-n-thrivingness, thwarting your own tendency to randomly snuff out life? So...um...that must mean you're beating yourself! You're fighting yourself, and beating yourself! Ha ha! Joke's on you!

(?)

(thinking myself in circles)

* * *

Anyway. I'm happy. Kevin's happy. We had great sex today (the decadent rainy-afternoon kind) and now we're off to happy hour, if that's any indication. I'm ordering mozzerella sticks, too - deep fried-n-all. So there!

I don't want a KuKdx4 badge. Keep it, dude. KuKdx3 makes me a reproductive freak as it is. So x4, nuh nuh no. Beating Mother Nature so far makes me feel big, strong, arrogant, triumpant - more powerful than I know I really am. But I'm going to ignore that little bit of Debbie-Downer knowledge creeping in the back of my mind, and feel all artifically high on myself, high on that Fetus, surely a pro-football quarterback in the making. The fact that a Buddist scholar would tell me otherwise, remind me that WE HUMANS ARE PIDDLY LITTLE PAWNS AND NOT AS BIG-ASS BIG AS WE THINK WE ARE, well, I'm ignoring it for a sec. Because losing what you want makes you feel like a beaten down fool, so I'm reveling in the gloating for a minute.

Just for a minute anyway, until the next test comes around. ;-)

Feeling Small

Dear Male Fetus Causing my Torso to Swell (MFCTS):

This week, you will go on a field trip to the Fetal Medicine department to have exotic machines pressed up against the roof of your current dwelling. We will get to watch colored waves of whatever move toward and away from our your heart in green, red and blue spurts of tiny dots. Those green, red and blue spurts of dots will get transferred to a moving line on monitor, which we will stare at dumbly alongside a bunch of people who are WAAAAYYYY smarter than you and me combined. And from that monitor, a bunch of crazy numbers will be generated, which will be charted and reviewed by even SMARTER people, if you can imagine. And then, someone will call us into a fluorsecent-lit room and tell us you're either okay, or you're not.

Why go through all of this? Well, look downward. See that tiny clump of appendages? Those are called your penis-n-balls, otherwise known as your Package, otherwise known as your Family Jewels. Cherish them, because they could end up getting you lots of girls in the future and possibly even a starring role in a porn flick. On the other hand, feel free to hate them, because they are what makes you a Male Fetus. And because you are a Male Fetus, you have high odds of being the keeper of an X-linked genetic heart problem. X-linked means it came from me, a fact about which you can give me flak for later (just know that for every bit of flak that you give, I'll put one dollar less in your college savings fund).

So, the machine pressed against the top roof of your current dwelling is simply something that the smarter-than-us people said we need to do, to check to see how the waves of whatever are going in and out of your heart. We'll do it now, and several times in the future - so get used to it.

Goodness, how terribly I, and everyone in our cautious family, want the news to be: everything is okay. If it's not, the contingency plan is to ditch work for a week, fly to wherever, and try to imagine life without you. Right now, as hard as I'm trying to be cautious about your existence, you're a part of my life - and I hope you stay.

Feeling small, like a tiny, teensy part of a huge world with tetonic plates and other natural forces that move beyond my control. Hopefully they won't push my family over again, swallow us up.

Arright, MFCTS! Machine coming to the roof of your house very soon - get ready! ;-)

Ode to the Baby Makers

Greetings, KuKd Strong'Uns and Inquisitive Guests!

This post is about our perceptions, about how we view our baby-making friends. It's a post in honor of both ourselves and those friends who successfully make babies, and whose mere babies - mere milk-spurting boobs and casual comments about daycare or sleepless nights - cause many of us go ouch. It's an ouch moment because KuKd/TTC hurts women so awfully that it turns us into into alien lifeforms who don't feel the same joy around babies as normal people do (or as we ourselves used to do). For a while, anyway. We become like the ones who didn't get selected for the school drill team with all the popular girls, and we're forced - as mature adults - to do as our mothers would have told us to do back when we were awkward pre-teens: suck it up and be a good sport.

Now, just roll with me on this image here: picture that ONE blond, popular girl - the head of the drill team, so easy to hate because of all the things she has, all the parties you just know she gets invited to, how pretty she is, how she can do a full split in the air and land on her feet. You want to just shrivel up and just hate her to pieces because she's perfect, and she has it all:



The one in the middle. Yeah, that one.

And then, low and behold, she does the unthinkable: she comes up and acts nice to you, treating you like a human being, like a friend - almost unaware, it seems, of the many things she has that you don't, of how treacherous it is to talk to you, of how easily she could say something that would hurt your feelings. It's like, her pure goodness and niceness transcend the fact that she got it, whatever that "it" might be, and you didn't. And then you feel like an insecure shmuck for hating her in the first place.

So, you might already see where I'm going with this analogy (for the record, I was never ever ever brave enough - or even remotely able to imagine myself cool enough - to try out for the middle school drill team), and what the hell that pretty middle girl has to do with *DEAD BABIES!*DEAD BABIES!* (topic of this blog; please picture that phrase in flashing neon lights).

I'll get there, I swear. But first, brief diversion -the kind that people with mild to moderate attention deficit disorder despise. Some necessary background, and then back to the show.

* * *

The past month, I've been bedgrudgingly delving back into my book manuscript. For those of you who are kinda new here: about 4 months after Zach's dirth, I was sitting by myself on a stone ledge in Eduador's teeming capital of Quito feeling like a fat, dead-baby loser with an unnecessarily stretched vagina. It was here, in a small soggy notebook, that I started writing a memoir-ish thing. Not to publish, not because I viewed myself as a *real writer* - just something to write and read and keep and show my grandkids later. If I ever had grandkids. Which I probably wouldn't because my uterus was cursed and the thought of sex made me cringe. Fucker.

Anyway, when you start doing something like that, your mom - who is conditioned to love everything you do, even if it's crapola - goes, "Honey, this is great! You should try to publish it!" So you half-believe her and keep writing, having fun as you do it because it feel so damned good to get these stories out of your system. Next thing you know, a small press says, "Hey, this looks arright. I'll take it." Good timing, because by this point the therapeutic value of writing the story has long dried up, and you're now about so sick of your manuscript that you start calling it a "fuckyouscript" and toy with the idea of lighting it on fire.

But you can't move on yet, even if you're ready , because the publisher comes back and goes: "But wait! Fix these things, and then it'll be ready to go." So you sigh and whine to your husband, feeling like a college student trying to revise a great big project due next week when you'd rather get drunk and go cow-tipping. But finally you do it because you know you'd be screwing yourself if you didn't.

You go back to the beginning of your own story, back to the moment of "miscarriage" first becomes something other than a vague, bad thing that happens only to other people, or back when it first dawned on you that making a baby wasn't going to be as easy as your Catholic nun-teachers made it out to be.

And you start re-feeling those things that you felt at the time.


* * *

OK, back to the real post. Attention deficit disorder people, you can now turn off the cartoons and start listening again.

Right now, as I go back into past moments of my "fuckyouscript," I'm re-feeling old things, remembering what my (warped) perceptions were at the time. It's kind of trippy to do this, to jump out of my current mindset of here, back to a former mindset of there. It's not unlike reading an old handwritten journal from ten or twenty years ago, marveling at the things you thought and felt, how wrong you were in some ways, how insightful you were in others, how ridiculous you sounded in some regards.

I remember feeling like that kid who didn't make the drill team after miscarriage numero uno. Four months to have a miscarriage seemed wholly, stupidly wrong - and everyone else who made it past that 4-month gestation mark suddenly seemed reproductively better and luckier than me. Just out of spite, I wanted to start a KuKd goth club with other gals who "got it" - all of us wear black t-shirts that said something like "Screw You World! We Didn't Want Kids Anyway!" We would pierce our labia and wear black eyeliner and hang out at Denny's with angst-filled, pissed-off expressions on our faces. It would've been cool. I had it all planned out.

But the only friend I knew to invite into my club was J. I knew she'd had a miscarriage somewhere along the line. But it turned out she was hugely pregnant again- which automatically disqualified her from joining my now one-woman club. Dang it.

Later, when pregnant with Zachary, I met other amazing friends - N and C - who of course went on to have their babies (ie: made it to the school drill team!!) after Zach died. Classic story, right? J eventually had another baby, too. So my KuKd goth club remained a one-woman, lonesome affair, with me as president, treasurer, and secretary.

But here's what amazing, what I didn't understand back in during the time when my manuscript takes place, but what I now know through pure hindsight. They all stuck around fearlessly, fiercely, sweetly, confidently, and continued to view me as a friend and human being. Which is to say: they trusted themselves - even in this strange, foreign new reality that was filled with potential land-mines for all of us - to just be there. They were, in fact, like that pretty blond head of the drill team that still comes up and talks to you, even when you slink away with a bit L sign on your forehead.

Just think for a second about much courage it must take for a woman with kids or a kid-in-utero to come up and talk to a KuKd or even TTC woman, to be there for that person as a real friend, even knowing she has something that other person wants so desperately. Imagine how awkward and treacherous it must be for her, and how much easier it would be to run away and hide in Babyland forever. Think of how many opportunities there are to colassally fuck up and say something hurtful without even meaning to (does anyone EVER mean to say hurtful things?), something that will cause that KuKd/TTC woman to post a big'ol rant on her blog about "you'll never guess what insensitive thing so-and-so said to me!"

And why not rant about it? Losing a baby, not getting the baby you want to create, hurts like hell. Totally, undeniably valid feeling. I felt it myself. And I mean, god. All N had to do was like...look at me in a certain way, or mention her son's name once, and I'd go off into a depressed funk for the rest of the day. One offhanded comment from C about baby food or breastfeeding, and BOOM - hurt. I was like this hypersensitive sad person who you could touch with a light index finger and create this huge bruise for days, even weeks.

In hindsight, who in their right minds wants to be around someone like that?

* * *

Good, brave friends. That's who. So my point is this. I look back at my fuckyouscript and see this tug-of-war that was going on in my head back then: needed my baby-maker friends, but at the same time couldn't bear to be near them. For me, now, I need to give utmost credit to N, J and C who - although couldn't be a part of my doomed KuKd goth club, had the pure goodness of heart, courage, comfort in their own skins to not back away from me and Kevin, but keep being our absurdly supportive friends. They had the trust in me to someday return to a relatively normal mental state, one in which I could reciprocate the friendship and support them in return. And, although I'm sure they knew that some things they said - the kids they had - were hurtful to me just because of the way things were, they had faith in me as a human being to someday, one day, see beyond those little unavoidable thorns and embrace, accept the very real friendship lying beneath.

So yeah. I retreated for a bit, but held on. And looking back now, I was nowhere near the baby-supportive friend that they, in turn, needed in these huge moments of their own lives. But they all give me space and time to do that, forgiving me for sinking into my own mind-spaces and uber-neediness for a year-and-a-half or so. THANK GOD, too, because now we have dinner plans coming up - and I get to catch up with my amazing, brave, baby-making friends.

So, Ode to the Baby Maker friends who stick by.

Space, Cleaniness, and Human Feces

Greetings, Mommas-n-Daddas-n-Guests...

Those of you who have been floating around the KuKd/TTC blog-o-planet for a while know that every so often, we talking-blogheads occasionally get awarded certain...um...awards by one another. It's actually a cool and amazing honor to be recognized by a fellow blogger in this way, and kind of makes me feel all glowing inside like an elementary student who just got a shiny star sticker on her quiz. Even though I dig such awards, I'm a terrible award recipient, because - rather than being grateful and doing what I'm supposed to do with those awards - which primarily involves posting answers to a certain question - I sort of let the awards sit on my "to do" list until it's pretty much too late to do'em. Same with most things in my life.

A common theme of a lot of these awards is that you get to list random things about yourself. To pay homage to the dusty and neglected heap-o-awards sitting around on my computer, I thought I'd crank out a few of these random tidbits. Which is hard - trust me - because I'm not the most exciting person and don't have any more juicy random tidbits than anyone else out there. Still, for what they're worth, here's a short and not very exciting list.

1) Personal Spacebox = Zilch.

A while ago, Murgan posted something about the general discomfort and irritation she feels with random people coming up and touching her pregnant stomach. Well, that post - coupled with my own husband's recent stitches in the crook of his right arm (will explain in sec) - gave me the sudden epiphany a few weeks ago: I have zero sense of personal space. Which is to say, I'm the exact opposite of Murgan. Anyone - I mean any old whoever - can come up and touch my belly, play with my hair, give me a bear hug, grab my ass - whatEVer - and I couldn't care less (unless, of course, it's an obviously sleazy person like the stringy-haired, pee-scented dude who sometimes sidles up next to me at the bus stop on 240th street).

Kevin's arm stitches are a case in point. I keep forgetting that they're there, those still-raw-and-painful arm stitches, which means I tend to accost his right arm without thinking - even when he loudly shrieks FUUCKKK! every time. I should learn by now. But I have no concept of space between humans, so I don't. Ah well, he's used to it.

2) Clean Gene= Zilch.

You know that gene that humans have - or at least, I've decided based on wholly unscientific research that most normal humans have - that causes us to feel uncomfortable and disturbed when we are surrounded by dirtiness? That gene that compels us to clean the house? I don't have that gene.

Which is to say, our house can be in a state of total disarray - dishes piled up, trails of my clothing and belongings scattered everywhere and left in piles in the bathroom, dust gathering on the floors, spaghetti sauce stains on the walls near the stove - and it's practically invisible to me. Kevin shakes his head in disbelief when I tell him our house looks fine . Likewise, I react the same way - shaking my head in disbelief - whenever Kevin vacuums the floors or washes the sheets. Frankly, I don't see the point of doing such things - because I simply don't SEE any dirt on the sheets or floors. I could go months, even years, without washing sheets or vacumming floors.

I don't have that Clean Gene.

3) I was covered in human shit when my husband fell in love with me.

Well, not exactly but pretty darned close - and somehow the first two random tidbits above seem like a nice segue into this. You might know this story already, but in case you don't, here's the nutshell version:

Boy meets girl while teaching English in Uzbekistan ("Ickistan," as the foreign service workers called this drab post-Communist country). Boy and girl are still "just friends" when they get completely trashed on cheap Uzbek vodka one night with a group of fellow Americans. Girl is squatting over a pit toilet to pee, foot slips as she's standing up, and entire leg goes "SPLOMFFFF!!" right into the heap of Uzbek/American-mixed human feces (yes - Uzbek pit toilets are THAT FULL -to where as you squat, you know your butt is like 2 inches above the top of the waste heap).

"GAHHHHHHH!" screams drunk girl.

"I'll save you!" screams gallant knight-boy, who rushes to her side and pulls girl, covered in human shit from toe to hip, from the toilet. Within a few weeks, boy and girl have kissed (with tongue!), and soon they're dating. Girl knows long before boy does: they'll get married someday, as soon as he realizes she's the one for him. Afterall, where on earth will she find another guy willing to go out with her after such a "shitty incident," no pun intended? Eventually he does, and they do. :-)

That's all, folks.

Pieces of Aliveness

Howdy, KuKd/TTC-ers and Inquisitive Guests...

I was cleaning out the bedroom closet over the weekend, and came across a large paper grocery bag full of objects. It had "ZACHARY" written on it in big black marker, and was folded down at the top - I guess to keep dust from drifting into it. Or, maybe to give myself some sense of closing the lid on something, safekeeping something, protecting something.

I've known the bag was in there, underneath a pile of coats. Not purposefully underneath a pile of coats, just accidentally underneath a pile of coats because it seemed like a good place to toss coats. For the first time in...well...months, maybe? a year?...I pulled out some of the contents of this bag and examined them next to the natural light coming in through the window.

Mostly what's in here are "Zachary artifacts" that were placed into a decorative box, and then into a bigger bag, and given to us by the hospital staff. All you stillbirth mommas out there, you know what I'm talking about. Kevin and I called the whole package our consolation prize, as if we were losers on a game show.

We brought them home and spread them out on the bed, trying to figure out what we were supposed to do with them. Because, we all know dead-baby-land doesn't have any real rules or norms to follow. It's not like a wedding or a bar mitzvah, where all you have to do is type a few key words in Google and boom - out comes a bulleted list of social conventions. With stillbirth, you just kind of muddle along and make up shit to do.
It's not like the bag contained body parts or anything horrid. Just some locks of hair, some footprints, a charred and numbered disc of metal from the cremation service, a blanket, some other things.

I don't know. If he were a real live baby, we would have displayed them on the fireplace mantel (actually, never mind - we wouldn't have done that). But in this case, we just sort of looked at them up close - on the off-chance that they might make us feel better about the situation (which they didn't), then put them in a bag. In the closet. Which wound up under a pile of coats. Maybe to pull out later - ten or fifty years later, when some grandkid or nephew asks about "that one baby that didn't make it." Then we'd have something to show for this baby, preserved in a time capsule of sorts.

There were some other things in there, I discovered this weekend while reexamining the contents of this grocery bag full-o-sentimental goodies. There were some pages torn out of a spiral notebook with drawings I had scrawled, random things I wrote down, and for some reason felt compelled to save. One of those things was a list of what I called "Pieces of Aliveness," written on wrinkled lined paper and stained with a ring of coffee. So cliche, I know, but it was. The "Pieces of Aliveness" heading was in large block letters in black ballpoint pen, pressed hard on the page. This was a caffeinated little piece of prose, for sure. I swear, the handwriting almost looked wavey in parts, as though produced by a trembling and coffeed-up hand. Which it probably was.

ANYWAY. It was a list, which I recall writing in the middle of the night from our corner hospital room while Kevin snoozed on the floral sofa. We were waiting to deliver Zachary, who we knew was already gone. All those late-night informercials were only making me more depressed (there is something oddly alienating about watching grinning old people with their dentures, or hyperactive Asian dudes marketing their cooking knives at 3:00 in the morning), so I wrote my "Pieces of Aliveness" list in part to pass the time.

Basically, it was a list of ordinary little things that had always made me happy (well, at least since I was old enough to think about such things), and that I was hoping would contine to serve as sources of joy. Mostly I just wanted a reminder of these things that make me a living, normal human. I found it comforting to make a list of them.

Here's a abridged sampling of my Pieces of Aliveness:

"the satisfying 'stsssssss' of a cushiony toilet seat releasing air when you stand back up"



"the 'rrraaaarr' of sinking your teeth into a sugar, frostingy cupcake"



"the 'sheeeeoooop' of blue painters tape being ripped off after a paint job"



"the 'mmmmrrrrphhh' of a Q-Tip being swirled around in the inner ear canal, where it's not supposed to be"



"the strip of shaven skin left after a razor is dragged up the calf"



"the sizzle of an egg cooking to perfection"



"the 'thunk' and feel of a nail clipper on toenails"



"the 'yoosh-yoosh' of mascara being perfectly applied, and the way it looks afterward"



"the 'eeet! eeet! eeet!" of wiping Windex on glass, and the subsequent sparkle"

"the 'aaaahhhh' of a cute man playing with my feet"




"the euporic 'yaaaaaa' of immediately after a good puking session"



"the 'zing-bap-bow!' of purposely annoying the crap out of grumpy old men, and eventually winning their hearts'




* * *

I think I might stuff this list, and some of the other things from the Zachary bag, and bury them in the back yard as a time capsule. Or, I could just make it easy on myself and keep it in the closet. I'm pretty sure that all of these still apply, thankfully. The last one: well, of course I still love annoying old cranks. I don't think the dude in that picture would make the cut, though. To me, he looks a little bit creepy, like Lester the Molester.

Veggie Burritos and Scary Memos

Greetings, KuKd/TTC Mommas, Daddas and Guests!

This is a two-part "story" with an upbeat, bean-related ending. Got that?

First, how do you explain the relationship a woman has with her growing fetus? Intimate, strong, kindred, private? It's such a mother-fetus partnership, the immense job of growing a clump of cells into a living, breathing human. Doesn't matter who else is involved -husbands, parents, siblings, friends, doctors. At the end of the day, it's you and fetus hanging out together - and that's it.

Which means - for me - that things going on with the fetus are fodder for my most private anxieties, joys, and imaginings every day. This particular bugger is an active fetus for the most part, much more active than Zachary ever was. He bumbles around in there all day, doing whatever fetuses do. I don't question what he's up to, or spy on him with a home-ultrasound device to check for beer and bongs in his "room." I just trust that he's having an okay time.

Without even requesting it, I was given the job of raising and protecting this particular fetus. It came like a memo from Mother Nature, out of the blue: "This notice is to inform you that you have been tranferred from the Booze-Guzzling, Sex-Having Workaholic Department to the Responsible Baby-Growing Department, effective immediately. Please report to your new post starting today. And for fuck's sake, quit drinking so much coffee."

I feel like somethings just come to us that way: grim medical news, happy medical news. Things just hit us by surprise and boom, we're expected to deal with it. Now that it's my nature-imposed duty to keep watch over this fetus, I have no choice but to take my job seriously. Well, as seriously as a serious slacker like me can possibly take something.

There were several days in a row last week when I stopped feeling the fetus kickin' it in the womb. Oh, I could've gone in to the doctor for a fetal-aliveness check, but I'm trying so hard not to be the sort that goes in for aliveness-checks all the time. Instead, I decided to sit this one out before jumping to conclusions, which cast a film of dull, translucent fear on my mood - probably not unlike what it must feel like to work for a big company and then hear rumors of massive lay-offs. You just go through the motions of the day - in this case, the pregnancy, knock on wood and hope that everything isn't about to end. Even breakfast at Denny's didn't taste as splendid as it usually does, because usually, I can feel little fetal flips while I chewing on my prime-rib-n-eggs special. Somehow that makes the food taste extra-good.

I was missing those flips, man.

Then, this bizarre picture unfolded in my mind, a scene of myself getting yet another surprise memo from Mother Nature. A little, heavenly-white colored sheet of paper folded into a square, suddenly dropping out of the sky and fluttering directly into my hands. I saw myself unfolding the sheet of paper and reading its contents:

“Due to a company-wide reduction in force, you have been demoted from Baby-Grower to a lower-grade position, effective immediately.”

That “lower-grade” position was different every time I thought about this absurd scenario, but always something horrible that I’d never want to do. Something like telemarketing sub-prime loans, or soliciting Green Peace signatures on the street corner. And it never involved the enigmatic, fluttering little fetus I’ve been raising in my pelvis for the past 19 weeks.

Hey, knowing Mother Nature, I wouldn't put it past her to pull some shit like that.

* * *

Plot shift! Plot shift! Things returned to normal on Thursday, when BOOM - the fetus returned to his normal, ever-wiggling self. Who knows what accounted for that brief period of stillness. Anyway, I felt the world had been set right.

Which leads me to the promised bean-related ending. With fetus back in full swing and my fears of getting laid-off from the Baby-Growing department alleviated, I was able to relax and shift my attention to the cooking experiment I'd had lined up all week. I wasn't in the mood to try it earlier, because when I'm nervous, I lose all inspiration to cook - subsisting instead on bowls of cereal.

This particular cook-job had to do with a bag of Trader Joe's pre-sliced strips of sweet potato, which I'd bought on a whim but was suddenly clueless about what to do with them.



I'd decided to try high-fiber vegetarian burritos from scratch, not just to use up those sweet potatoes, but also to lend a helping hand to the Poop Elves in my colon. You may recall my earlier reference to Poop Elves, the little men who I imagine living inside everyone's colons, pushing waste out of your body with synchronized chants of "heave-ho!" They need help, sometimes - and there's nothing like a high-fiber meal to give them the support they need to do their bowel-moving job.

First, I sauteed some onions in a great big pan with olive oil.



Next, I added the sweet potato strips, plus some cut-up zucchini for some extra je-ne-sais-quoi, sauteeing everyting together.



Of course, beans had a starring role reserved in this dish, just for them! No high-fiber burrito is complete without a heaping helping of "fart-causers," as Kevin affectionately calls them.



I decided to throw in the rest of this bag of sweet roasted corn, which had been lurning in my freezer for an unknown number of months (or years?).



All of that got tossed in the great sautee, along with the juice of a full fresh lemon, cut-up tomatoes, a bit of frozen spinach, plus vast quantities of cumin, chili powder, and garlic salt.



After all this fibery goodness had been sufficiently sauteed, I had mine over a bed of rice with sour cream and guacamole on the side, and fresh cilantro sprinkled on top. Even Kevin, the ultimate skeptic of all-veggie dinners, enjoyed this one - opting to eat his like a real burrito, stuffed into a great big tortilla. I decided not to tell him about the high fiber content. Best he (and his Pool Elves) figure that one out on his own, which I'm sure would happen during his next run to the bathroom.



* * *

And now: Poop Elves happy, fetus happy, Monica happy. And no unexpected memos from Mother Nature. How simple is that? :-)

Lightening Up

Greetings, Guests-n-Mommas!

Lately, I've been in the mood to lighten up.

That mood creeps up on me with inordinate frequency, an inexplicable urge to giggle at something otherwise terrible or disgusting. I'm not sure if it's an Irish thing or just some weird, psychological inability to deal with trauma in a normal way. I do know that even on the very day when shit went down with little Zachary, I was wandering around the radiology floor on Kevin's arm, laughing at something silly. (For the record, Kevin was laughing too, and he's my barometer for what behavior is within the limits of social and societal normalcy, I figured it was okay. If a Catholic-bred son of a Marine Corps colonel can do it, I can do it.)

Anyway, this particular recent urge to "lighten up" has been related more to my physical appearance and my house than to my actual mood (although I suppose "mood" is probably intertwined with that somehow).

Let's start with the hair. Mine has been about this length for year and years, give or take a few inches:



Heavy, boring, blah. Guys like to brush it off your face, and kids like to touch it with their snotty swine-flu-infested fingers, but otherwise it's pretty useless. The past few weeks, I was in the mood to lighten up that part of myself. Low and behold, the perfect opportunity came up over the weekend, when I was invited to a "haircut brunch" at a friend's house. I was skeptical at first, because it sounded like one of those things that housewives do, like hosting a Tupperware party or a jewelry exchange. Not that there's anything wrong with either of those events - just not my cup of tea.

But I sucked it up and went because I knew the people there would be cool, and because - after all- this was a chance to lighten up.

A "haircut brunch" goes like this, in case you aren't sure:

Some peeps get together for brunch, and one of the gals at the brunch is supposedly a professional hair cutter, and you don't have any proof of this but you take her word for it, and you sit in a chair while scarfing down pieces of fried bacon, and she goes snip-snip-snip directly onto your dry (and in my case, several-days-unwashed) hair, and lots and lots of your hair falls straight onto the living room floor, and everybody laughs and says you look great, and you nervously ask for more bacon and pray that you aren't going to walk out of that house looking like Sinead O'Connor.

But you don't end up looking like that. You end up looking like this:




And you walk out of there feeling all layered and choppy and sassy, with the cool autumn breeze on the nape of your neck and a bellyful of bacon, and your husband touches it right away and tells you how good you look. And then you beam proudly - because in the end it's still those immediate reactions that matter most - and give him a kiss, flip your head upside-down and flip it back up just to give it some extra volume, and say a quick "thanks" to the Great Being Above that you live in a contemporary society in which women can get haircuts like this at their every whim and not be viewed as some kind of rebel-prostitute-freak.

* * *

Next, lightening up of the house. There's only so much you can do with a tiny house in the city. And one of those things is: paint.

Sometime while biking through Eastern Europe last summer with all those drab post-Communist buildings whizzing by, I felt suddenly inspired to paint everything in the house a dark marigold-yellow color. I want bold, exotic, international, exciting! I told Kevin over a dinner of hot beef gristle and 9% alcohol beer. Bright, goldspun yellow the color of an Indian spice market! He had his doubts, but - that being...oh, about a year after Zach's death - I found myself still position to legitimately pull the dead-baby-momma-gets-whatever-dead-baby-momma-wants card.

"Okay," he said, "but that's all you."

So in a caffeine-induced frenzy, the walls got painted soon after our return:






Well, over the past two weeks I began to feel weighed down by that bold marigold-yellow. I know, I know; I only threw that paint up there a year ago, and really it should have a chance to sit there on the walls, fester a bit longer and enjoy itself. But once I got it in my head that I was sick of the color, there was no stopping me. In fact, it wasn't just the yellow I was tired of: I was done with colored walls of any sort. Time to return to something more...um...virginal.

"Let's switch over to white," I told Kevin. Plain old, ho-hum white trim with slightly off-white walls. We need to lighten the whole house up."

I wanted to feel like I was floating up into a cloud of lightness inside this house. Kevin did cast me the glance of "here we go again," but refrained from making some typically rational comment about how we "can't keep repainting every wall year after year" as I half expected he would. I think that's because this new painting endeavor happened to coincide perfectly with an existing plan, which was to:

1) "lighten up" our hardwood floors by getting them refinished
2) "lighten up" our furnishings by replacing old/clunky with new/slim
3) get rid of our kitchen table and replace it with a small bistro set

So, adding a bit of painting to all that didn't seem like such a big deal, I guess. Yippeee! So, within a few weeks, our house got as light as my new hair-do:







I know, it's so...um....white! So Ikea! So metrosexual condominium! But having that marigold yellow gone like five inches of heavy brown hair is, in fact, like a great superficial weight off my shoulders.

Ahhhhhhhhh.

Phase two in Operation Lighten Up: the paunch belly and rapidly increasing thigh-diameter. That's a whole new beast of a phase, though. If only I didn't love food so very, very, very much...

Relapsing

Greetings, KuKd/TTCers and Guests Alike!

There's something else that inward-sucking "hee-yoop" sound is, other than the insane suckosity of my cervix and the roar of an airplane toilet:

It's the sound of...drumroll please...taking a drag off some big'ol joint of negativity, sucking up that juicy awfulness until you're high. High on pain, that is.

Anyone can be a Pain-a-Holic. Just take any condition, any stressful event: diabetes. Food allergies. Death in the family. Loss of a job. Depression. Weight problems. Marriage problems. Money problems. Infertility. Baby loss. Now, think of someone you know who wears that condition like a comfy bathrobe: it comes up in every conversation. It colors everything they say or do or think. It prevents them from risking this or that, from feeling happy about whatever. It's like a friend to them, this ailment or event or condition, and anchors them to some rut in the ground, keeping them from drifting upward. They could let it go, but that's a scary prospect; think of the withdrawal symptoms that would invoke! No wonder they keep it around like an old annoying-but-loved friend.

Take it from me: once you get that first taste of aching awful pain, it's a hard habit to kick. After the stillbirth, I got used to that particular "condition" of being a dead-baby momma. It hung around, that smoky pain-smell saturating my clothes and hair and skin, and I clung to it like a raggity old comfy bathrobe. It protected me from a lot of things, giving me a gloriously rightful reason to burst into tears at odd times, and provided a safe excuse for avoiding dangerous situations. Six months, a year later: of course I couldn't be around babies, around pregnant women. Of course, of course, of course.

Then I started feeling insecure about my grief at one point, maybe a year or so after the Event, as though the real down-n-dirty shock and sadness had passed, and what was left was some kind of drugged-out, candy-coated, corrupt form of leftover backwash grief. Almost this fake, high-feeling, grief-like sensation that wasn't really grief, more just like I'd sniffed gasoline and was doing crazy things as a result. Like breaking down suddenly or snapping at Kevin and blaming it on the stillbirth. Always the stillbirth's fault. I was a classic Pain-a-holic.

In early spring this year, I started feeling...freed somehow, as though this vague weight was being lifted gradually off my shoulders. I began to notice that I wasn't really talking about dead babies anymore, or thinking about Zachary every hour like I used to. With a few exceptions, being around babies and knocked-up ladies didn't bother me anymore, for the most part.

(For the record, I credit this "recovery," I guess, to the simple passage of time, for it certainly had nothing to do with anything I was doing. I was never one to actually work on healing or recovering, or even grieving properly. I just took hits blindly and emoted haphazzardly, skipped the support groups and books and yoga and what-nots, drank a shit-ton of coffee and beer, and hoped for the best.)

So yeah, time was what it took. I felt I had sobered up.

* * *

These past few weeks, I've felt like I'm relapsing. It's coming back, creepy crawly stillbirth-momma-condition clinging to me, like an old drug buddy just offered me a bong hit "just for the fun of it" and I said what the hell. Now it's back - that pain-high. It's the pregnancy that does it, I'm pretty sure, for that's the only variable that's really changed as of late.

Here was my first clue: a buddy at work whose wife is 12 weeks pregnant e-mailed to see if Kev and I had talked about baby names yet. I could've just said "no" like a normal, sober, clear-minded human being. But I just had to gussy up my reply with more dramatic than that, something like this:

"No, we haven't started thinking about names, since this is our fourth pregnancy. There's a 50% chance this won't work out anyway since it's a boy, so we're just keeping our fingers crossed and hoping a living baby will come out of it. Then we'll name him."

Immediately after hitting "send," I felt bad. I wished I could have taken it back. It was like this old-me coming through all of a sudden, the gloom-n-doom me who was high on pain for a year-and-a-half, dredging it up and wearing it boldly, daring anyone to challenge it.

Why couldn't I give this guy just a simple, friendly response without bringing up that whole bitter truth? Why not just let him have his innocent and happy little e-mail exchange with a fellow expecting parent? What was I hoping for - some kind of sympathetic response? I felt like one of those people I've always been afraid to become: putting it out there all the time - I'M A DEAD-BABY MOMMA AND DON'T YOU FORGET IT! - to the point where the world grows tired of the subject, and, even worse, to the point where I'm really just clinging to this pain-crutch as an excuse to not engage in normal discourse with another human.

Here's where I was hoping all of that old emotion would go, once I started feeling something toward this current pregnancy other than "oh fuck:"

Yup, shed to the floor like a snake skin. What I want to be is this: an innocent, perky, fresh-faced, fresh-minded knocked-up gal whose eyes light up at Motherhood Maternity, who can in fact indulge the pesky cashier with personal information and due dates without becoming a hypersensitive bitch from hell, who can eagerly engage in e-mail conversations with other expecting parents about car seats and slings other baby-related crap. I was that preggo person once, way back when.

But now, the old sludge follows me around and I can't seem to shake it: a darkened arc of anxiety rising up sometimes, eclipsing the turquoise arc of happy hopefulness that comes when I feel little fetal feet fluttering against my insides. There IS that 50% risk thing for this boy fetus, too dreadful and incomprensible for my own mind to process, and best saved for another post when I'm really on a pain-high.

For now, I'm going to focus on being a normal, sober person with a naked, hopeful heart.

And cheeseburgers. I'm focusing on cheeseburgers.

Laughing Through the Pissed-ness

Howdy KuKd/TTCers and Inquisitive Guests,

Boy, am I pissed! And boy, am I smiling through the pissedness!

But before I dive into smiling-rant-mode, let me start with the warm-n-fuzzy: thanks - of course - for the outpouring of support and congrats and all the wonderful things that I was hoping I'd manage to milk from the crowd. I love that stuff. I inhaled it like a cocaine-dusted cappucino cupcake. And thanks for not thinking of me as a completely insane freak, or - if you did think of me as such - withholding that information for now. I like knowing that other people have their fingers crossed for this maybe-baby. It makes me feel less alone inside my head.


You are now hoping this will now become a pregnancy-ticker kind of blog, aren't you? Complete with dancing infant-cherub graphics circling in loops around the text, and a flashing time-counter displaying the precise number of days and minutes until the due date? You want weekly (or daily!) ultrasound images displayed, specifically those 3-D kind that make a fetus resemble a Claymation alien, with genetalia enthusiastically circled in white marker. After my last post, you ran off to tell your friends and neighbors: GUESS WHAT! This blogger named Monica is this thing called 'pregnant' - it's a really unique and exotic condition that, nobody else on earth ever experiences! I hope she narrates every living second of it in great detail!

Right?

Well, sorry to be the breaker of bad news, but this isn't going to be a pregnancy-ticker kind of blog. Hell, you might not even hear a single solitary peep out of me about this "Normal Male" (direct quote from the laboratory) until he/it emerges from my pelvis in one form or another - not unless something extraordinarily interesting or hilarious happens. Not because I'm specifically avoiding the topic, but because what's there to say, really?


It's a fetus. It's a pregnancy. It's a condition that - just by being what it is - stings to hear about if you're a TTC/infertility-fighting sister. I realize that. It's a pregnancy just like any other of the godzillions of pregnancies that occur all over the world. It resulted from two people boinking like bunnies. It might result in a baby. It might not. I hope it does. I fear it won't. I'm getting fat. I eat lots of red meat and pickles. I still drink coffee, just about 1/200th of what I used to. I had a few deliciously naughty sips of Kevin's Curveball Ale in bed the other afternoon, where we were lying in a naked state after some deliciously naughty (if not slightly cumbersome) sex. I sleep during the day, and wake up fretfully at night. I get nosebleeds throughout the day. I feel flutters that could be fetal twig-limbs, or just gas from prune-overdose. That's it.


See how boring that is? There's SO much more riveting stuff to talk about, such as the fact that:

I'M PISSED!


* * *


Did I mention that I'm pissed? Did I say that at the beginning of this post, or did I forget? In case I forget, let me repeat:

I'M PISSED!

It it has to do with a corporate chain store, specifically this one hulking bitch called Motherhood Maternity, which preys on excited pregnant ladies ready to spend their cash. I went there yesterday, braving the Saturday afternoon mall-crowds, despite my better judgment, despite the knowledge that the employees there are ravenously sales-oriented, fake-perky, relentless about soliciting personal contact information and baby due dates so they can "keep track" of such things and send you lots of crap in the mail forever. At least they did back when I shopped there a few times in 2007, a fact about which I was grimly reminded for about 1.5 years after Zach's death with monthly formula samples and "your child just turned one! here's a 50%-off coupon for blah-blah-blah!" (I did call to stop these mailings, but was ignored - so I began using them as toilet paper and snot-scrapers).

I had a goal when I went back to Motherhood Maternity yesterday: to buy one simple item, an elastic band that you wear around the top of your regular pants when you start looking like this, and can no longer button your jeans:

Muffin top, muffin top.
Lovely beautiful muffin top.
I know it's the burgers, not being knocked up.
But eating is great, and I shall not stop!

ANYWAY.

I brought my elastic tummy-band to the counter and handed over my credit card. Predictably, the perky cashier asked when my due date was so she could put it "in the system."

Now, most pregnant girls, I realize, would eagerly and excitedly squeal something like: MARCH 15th! It's a boy! His name is going to be Snuffy! We're so excited! Thanks so much for asking, for wondering, for CARING about me! You must really care about your customers! I LOVE this store! You guys are like my best friend! I'll be back here LOTS of times! With my money! So we can talk about my due date again and you can help me by cute clothes!!!!

"Um, I actually don't like giving out that kind of information, " I said.

She sort of blinked at me and then narrowed her eyes a bit, probably thinking by now: ah. One of THOSE tight-assed, tight-walleted, tight-lipped customers. Not the type of gushing, bubbling shopper we like and expect in here.

"Well, I'll just pick a random date for you, then," she said, "just so we have something in the system. Have you been here before, so I can look you up?"

"No," I lied. Really, it was in the best interest of everyone to withhold the truth: her interest, my interest, and the interest of the growing line of silent women forming directly behind me. No need to bring up my prior shopping experiences there, that little reminder of a past...era, you could call it.

"Really? You haven't been here before?" She was eyeing me suspiciously. "What's your phone number?"

"I'd rather not say," I said. For in saying my phone number, she might in fact find me in the system, which would give away my bold-faced lie.

"Address, then?"

"We've moved around a lot, and we're moving again soon. So I don't, um, really have an address."

This was beginning to feel like a police interrogation session, not a shopping experience at the mall. You know, the big goof-up that interrogated criminals always make in movies is that they say too much, and then they end up saying something that contradicts something they said earlier, getting themselves deeper and deeper into a web of lies. I should have known that, but instead, I muttered: "Last time I did that, you guys sent me junk mail and baby formula samples for like...a year and a half. Anyway, what's the total? I'm kind of in a hurry."

"So you HAVE been here before!" she said. "I knew it!"

She ran credit card through the little machine, and I heard a little affirmative beeping sound, cringing at the sound of it.

"See? You're right here! Monica LeMoine. You came in here...let's see....2007 with a baby due in October. So this is your second child! Your other one must be...what...just two years old now? How exciting is that!!!"

Well, fuck. ExACTly what I was afraid of, that it would lead to this awkward and staticky moment, the women behind me silently waiting and overhearing our every word, not even any background music to talk beneath. Didn't I call it? So what do ya do? You have four options.

1) Grin and lie, just to save everybody face. "Yeah! The kid is fine! Just turned two! This is my second kid I'm pregnant with now! You're so right! It's like, so exciting I'm about to shit my motherfucking pants! WOO-HOO BABY!"

2) Get a steely look and hit her with the truth: the hardcore, sludgy, emotional, gloppity-gloop truth. Just put it right out there for everybody to feel awkard about. She sort of deserved to have that particular mudpie thrown in her face, wouldn't you say?

3) Pretend to have a seizure and suddenly collapse on the floor so the mall security has to come and cart you away. That way, you get to avoid answering her question. You don't get your muffin-top stopper, but no big deal - they have them at Target.

4) Change the subject abruptly to something completely random. "Oh, by the way, do you have any advice for excessive vaginal discharge? I mean, I know you're a sales associate and not a doctor, but I thought that...since...you're like my best friend all of a sudden, you might be able to give me some girlfriend-wisdom."

* * *

I went with option two. I hindsight, I wished I'd had the ingenuity and/or calmness of spirit to go with 1, 3, or 4. But two was the one that happened.

"Um, that kid was stillborn. Which is why I don't like giving out my mailing address - because you kept sending me stuff for a like eighteen months afterward even though I called to have that stopped."

And ya know what? She reacted the way I guess any old schmuck might have:

SHE LAUGHED!!! Kind of a smirky chuckle, rather, and said: "Noooo."

It was the sort of "noooo" you say when someone tells you something and you can't tell if they're being sarcastic, or you flat-out think they're pulling the wool over your eyes. As if you're listening to someone who lies and jokes about stuff all the time, lying as I'd lied just now, so you don't trust them to tell the truth. Or, perhaps it was it just too much for her little pea-brain to handle, the brutal notion that something *bad* might happen (gasp!), even in the midst of the happy bouncy fluorescent retail lighting and the happy bouncy maternity clothes and posters of happy bouncy pregnant women gracing the walls! Even in happy bouncy Motherhood Maternity land, where EVERYone yammers about due dates and stocks up on clothes and is just thrilled to be a part of this awesome world!

"I'm serious. He died."

The quiet line of ladies behind me suddenly got quieter, and somebody coughed. The lipsticked cashier kind of looked at me in this strange way, as if seriously debating whether to believe me or not - I could see this little mental machine behind her narrowed eyes, ticking away.

"Well, okay then. That'll be $16.99, please." (overpriced, yes, but a necessary accessory)

And it was all business from there on out. Print receipt, sign, simple nod of "thanks," and then "NEXT PLEASE!"

As I was scurrying out of there clutching my bag, I hear her ask perkily and with great hopes for a return to normalcy: "So! When's YOUR due date?"

* * *

It was one of those experiences that felt like I'd been sucked up into an alternate universe, forced to engage in awkward discourse with a stranger who spoke a totally different language, and then spit back out into the mall parking lot. I guess she had a right to laugh disbelievingly, for I was being a bit of a pill, after all, what with all my cranky withholding of personal information AND straight-up lying to her face. I cranked up the hip-hop station and jammed to Jay-Z on my drive home, and it wasn't until I pulled up in front of our house and turned off the engine that it came, as it sometimes does: an awareness.

Awareness, suddenly, of something not being there. Hollow shell of a child, invisible yet with a glassy outline like Wonder Woman's cartoon airplane, toodling around my feet and cramming Cheerios into his mouth. A two-year-old, not there. You'd think you wouldn't notice somebody not being there any more, two years later. I mean, it's not like I still miss my Smashing Pumpkins Gish CD years years after I accidentally tossed it into the garbage pile when we left Arkansas. But I guess CDs are babies are different. Who knew.

Fortunately - happy ending, happy ending! - my muffin-top is now happily contained, and last night I hit a night club with my brother and a gaggle of friends. We shook our booties to a hip-hop DJ, and - the best part - even Kevin made it out to the dance floor. After a few shots of tequilla, that is.

Who said mommies of invisible glass-outlined kids who aren't really there can't dance! :-)

Tales of Sucking Sounds, And More

Greetings, Y'all!

Well, shit. This is a post I've been dreading writing.

Don't get all excited - nothing juicily awful is happening. Well, I guess some might think it's juicy in certain ways. I've just had some serious writer's block and can't seem to coax the words out regarding this particular...thing. It's like being linguistically constipated. But I'll give it a shot right now, and hope that whatever streams out onto the keyboard makes at least moderate sense. Oh, and it does have to do with that inhaled "hee-yoop" sucking sound from a few posts back, so hooray.

Where to begin?

I know: let's take it back to one sunny day in the middle of July, this past July, about a month after I'd posted about my grating tocophobia - that was, intense fear of having a child. On this particular sunny July day while Kevin was at work, I found myself lying on the soft grass beneath a tree at the neighborhood park, crying probably more uncontrollably than I have in a long time, and watching big fluffy clouds roll across the sky through a blurry film of tears. I had a crying-headache and I'd forgotten a Kleenex, so I blew my nose on a leaf.

(Leaves are not the best snot-absorbers, for the record).

The whole day felt like an out-of-body experience. My legs propelled me home from the park, straight to the phonebook, as I sobbed intermittently like a kid who'd been bullied at the school yard. In fact, that's kind of how I felt: bullied around. I felt like life or God or someone up above - that big Darth Vader being controlling the gears - was fucking with me. My hands flipped through the white pages, easily finding what I needed: Planned Parenthood. My fingers dialed, my mouth asked:

"How much does the abortion pill cost, and how long do I have to take it?"

"Six-hundred dollars. You have until eight weeks after conception."

"Cool. Thanks."

Click.

Which brings me to the hee-yoop sucking sound. In a bizarre twist of reproductive fate, it had to have been THAT VERY WEEK in June - one month earlier when I'd posted about my tocophobia - during which (as my doctor put so elegantly) a wee-bit of spooge got near my crotch and my cervix eagerly went:

HEE-YOOP! Sluuuurp! Sucking up that sperm like a starved camel in the desert. In fact, I may very well have been pregnant when I WROTE that post!

"But...I can't be knocked up!" I told my doctor after skeptically providing a pee-test. "We were diligently doing the pull-n-pray method! My friend Jen's sister said that method works! And she has...like...a degree in public health or something, for fuck's sake! I. Can. Not. Be. Pregnant."

"Monica, you're pregnant."

Crap, I thought.

Followed by:

"Infertility sisters of the blog-o-sphere: I'm sorry that my cervix did an inward sucking hee-yoop. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. If I could give you my eagerly sperm-eating cervix with it's apparently gloriously raw-eggwhite-textured, soul-sucking stickiness, I would. I'd fed-ex it to you overnight. Something cosmically warped and unfair is happening right now, and I can't stop it. I'm sorry."

Look. I have no idea why I wanted to stop this pregnancy, why my first instinct was to slam on the breaks. Never claimed to know how the human mind works, the post-KuKd mind works, where fear comes from, how fear extends its roots deep into the mind and morphs into something bigger and scary than it really is. All I know is that when I suddenly got nauseous and puked that morning in July, I knew I was knocked up - and I was. But there wasn't any joy in this - only terror and weirdness.

* * *

Remember that post about plans, back in late July? About my going to see a shrink, about how having a child simply didn't fit into my new *plan* of living a kid-free life with all the unfettered joys and liberties that entails?

"What are plans, anyway?" She told me, that blond therapist. "They're a defense mechanism we create inside our heads to make us feel like we have control over something. But we don't. Forget about your notion of plans, because it's a made-up concept."

So yeah, the shrink. That was a few weeks after I'd stared, disbelievingly, at the pink plus-sign in the bathroom. Kevin was undecided, open to whatever - but I think he knew, as I did, that I was...well...not acting exactly rationally. Before rushing into Planned Parenthood, he said, maybe going to see a therapist would be a good idea - just to sort out things in my head. So that visit was really about this:

ME, toting strong black tea in a mug: "I'm knocked up and feeling really scared and resentful about it. This is my 4th time getting knocked up and I've never, ever, ever felt this way. I've got another week or two to decide if I want that abortion pill. What in the name of god is wrong with me?"

"You've had a history of miscarriage and stillbirth," she said. "It's normal to feel cautious."

"I really didn't want a baby right now. Wasn't a part of the plan. The *plan*," I told her, "was to drink and travel and have lots of sex for the next five years. Then maybe - maybe - revisit the babymaking idea. We already have our tix to Ireland, even."

That's where I got the whole plan-lecture. Sigh. She was right.

* * *

Crazy things: that's what she asked me to do as part of my...um.."therapy." But then again, I deserved to be asked to do crazy things, since I was kind of acting...well...crazy scared, crazy impulsive. Namely, she asked me to write a letter to the fetus.

"What? Why? This is weird."

"Go on. Here's a notebook. Try writing 'Dear Fetus.'"

I felt really self-conscious doing this fucktarded activity, but I cooperated like a submissive resident of a mental hospital, and I wrote it: Dear Fetus.

"Good. Now, write: I'm afraid of having something come into my life that I can't control. I'm afraid of having my plans burned yet again. I'm afraid of attaching to you, because I might lose you. If I were really connected to you, here's what I would do differently."

It was a lot to write, but I did it.

"Good, now make a list of some things. For example, you told me you would have told your parents by now, your friends."

"Yeah."

"You wouldn't care about giving up your Guinness while you're in Ireland. That wouldn't bother you so much."

"Yeah."

There were a few more things, and my "homework" was to finish that list later on, at home. I told her I would, but I never did. I don't like getting tasks from people.

* * *

The universe inside my head began to subtly shift as the summer went on. The abortion urge fizzled away, the fear - lots of it - fizzled away, too. I got distracted with life's little things - traveling, biking, working, that damned rash on my lower back. And gradually, low and behold, a feeling I hardly expected began to settle in - quiet, hesitant, shy, barely perceptible:

excitement.

It crept up on me unexpectedly like a tide lapping in, pushing fear and insanity out: vague thoughts of baby-related stuff, imaginings of a warm infant to come.

* * *

So, there's a grapefruit-sized fetus inside my pelvis right now. I'm four months along. It's a boy, this one, which we know from early testing. I could name him something just for reference purposes - like a holding card for developing infants - something cutesy and fun like I've seen other people do - Baby Boo-Ya or Lil' Pumpkin. But I'd kinda rather just ride this tide out for a while longer, takin' things day by day around here. That's how we roll.

Third boy in three years, fourth pregnancy of my life. Cautiously optimistic? God, that sounds so cliche and over-said. But yeah: I'm telling the gatekeepers up at the MTV Realworld Penthouse for Bitchin' Stillborn Babes not to keep the lights on for this particular little bugger, but maybe just hang around to let the door open, just in case.

Man, a whiskey would taste good right now. Do they make any kind of O'Douls equivalent of the hard stuff? :-)

Neighborly Loveliness

Greetings, Potlucky Types!

I'll explain that reference in a minute. First, excerpt from an e-mail from my mother via an Internet cafe in Croatia, in my response to my earlier message about looking for a certain kind of futon. This sort of thing makes me laugh, so I thought I'd share it. Starts off sounding fairly normal, but then...

Hi Monica,

I have seen that futon on Craigs list, so check there. Alwazs a pain to trz to transport stuff but sometimes price good, as zou know. Bz the waz, the z kez is where y kez should be, so starting now let;s saz that whenever zou see the letter z it is probablz a y. And the y kez is where the z should be. Also, ć is where apostrophe kez should be, so if zou see ć it is probablz an apostrophe. LetĆs see if zou can read this now. Ićm tired of trzing to delete and tzpe over all mz mistakes on this Croation kezboard. Saz hi to Kevin and pet Teebow for me.

Love, Mom

That's it. That's all I get to hear about their 3-week European sojourn so far, the only imagining I'm blessed with: that of clunkity-old Croatian keyboards with letters in all the wrong places. It was enough to elicit a Sunday morning chuckle.

* * *

Now onto the serious stuff! Time to straighten up in your chairs and fold your hands solemnly in your laps, boys and girls. Let's talk about neighborly love!



These past few weeks, or maybe months, or maybe years, I've found myself feeling oddly disconnected to the world. Lots and lots of people in my life, new friends and projects and acquaintences filtering in, yet this increasing feeling of being over-stretched, under-supported, perpetually stressed out. It's hard to explain what it IS exactly, this sort of overfull and unpleasant sensation. It comes from...not sure...being busy and tired almost constantly? Making social plans to the point where there simply isn't any time left to just chill? Making too many personal connections, yet not devoting enough energy to maintain any of them in a quality way?

It's an odd and counter-intuitive thing to feel, especially considering the proliferation of blogs and Facebook and e-mail and what-nots, all of which - I thought - were supposed to make us feel more connected, not less. Right? I mean, isn't that why so many of us, in this day and age, gravitate toward these social tools? In terms of this blog and the millions of others like it out there, isn't finding connection with other humans who "get it" the whole point, whether that "it" is KuKd or infertility or any other particular experience?

So, if that's the case, then why is it that the more time I spend on these things, the more out of my mind I sometimes feel?

I don't have any hardcore proof, which is to say I've not gone to the library to look up "maternal grieving traditions" or anything. Nonetheless, I've got these storybook images flitting through my mind about how women dealt with the death of a child, born or unborn, back before all these electronic social interfaces existed, back when the only way to connect with humans was to physically go over to someone's house. Or write them a letter, I guess. Or run into them at the general store or the bakery.

In my storybook image of history, I picture a whole bunch of women coming together in their pleated skirts and bonnets - whatever Little-House-On-The-Prairie-esque clothing women wore back in the day - and just being this tight-knit wall of support. Older women, younger women, all gathering around the poor girl who lost the child, bringing her fresh baked bread and tea, distracting her, talking to her, all of them sitting around and talking and crying.

I picture the pastor of the local church (a cute, white-clapboard church with a perfect little steeple) collecting a bunch of extra money in the donations box and ordering flowers for her. Maybe sending a gaggle of church ladies over to help do the laundry or sing her some church hymns. I picture all of the neighbors showing up to bring her some homemade...I don't know...corn fritters or apple pie or something. I picture the grocer giving her a free chicken or a box of cookies as a sign of sympathy.

Now, that big, unified wave of community support isn't something I ever got, or - to be honest - consciously even wanted, I don't think, during my darkest KuKd days. It isn't that Kev and I were short on friends and family, short on phone calls and flowers and cards. We got those. I just didn't feel, really at any point, this whole connected sense of the community - the world around me - really knowing what to do with me, what to do with the death of an unborn and unseen baby.

People didn't seem to know intuitively how to come together and form a wall of support, the way I would have expected it - maybe - back in the olden days. Everything felt like a game of connect-the-dots. A friend here, a friend there, a smattering of visits, an awkward bit of discourse, a random casserole appearing on the doorstep. Some friends had the intuition to throw themselves in my direction. Others groped around for words, stumbling and not knowing how to act. I myself felt uncomfortable with visitors, preferring at times to retreat like a hermit crab and watch movies with Kevin.

Fragmented grieving culture: that's what I called it.

* * *

Fast forward to now.

Tonight I had one of those experiences that sticks with you and makes you think. I'm still thinking about it now. Nothing exciting in and of itself, just an ordinary potluck at the house of our neighbors Josh and Jessica, an annual thing designated specifically for the residents of this block and our immediate vicinity. It's the first time we've attended. Loads of homemade food and about fifteen people milling about the foliage-filled backyard among tiki torches and clinking beer bottles. Kind of a mixed crowd - crunchy, long-haired younger types; a couple of lesbians alternately sitting on each others' laps; a handful of old-timers who've grown up on this street.

Now, Josh and Jessica are two of the nicest people you could meet. You know those people who are so damned nice, so open and warm and friendly, that they make you feel like an asshole just for being you and not them? Like, those people who say hello from the beginning and talk to you as though you're old friends, without judgement or suspicious looks, without shyness or awkwardness or selfishness? Josh and Jessica are those people, and have been for a long time. I so often wish I were one of those gems of a human being, that I were really that kind and selflessly, effervescently wonderful.

Being around them, their happy loving aura, was just soothing. But what's more, we got to meet - not just meet, but have lengthy conversation with - even MORE neighbors! Imagine that! Actually having more than just a cursory exchange of "good mornings" with the people who live on our block, more than a mere FB status swap, a one-sentence e-mail! Let's see. We only bought this house...oh...two-and-a-half years ago. One would think we'd have the balls, the social grace, the whatever it takes, to actually go outside and connect with the people who live a mere stones throw from any given direction from our house.

I like to blame my anti-social behavior on the stillbirth. Check out how well it fits: when we bought the house, I was preggers. Big belly, neighbors waving and asking when the baby was due. No time to socialize when you've got a baby on the way! So much pre-baby Googlinating to do!

Then, suddenly no more belly, but no baby in sight. And - just a few weeks later - boom! A puppy! I really didn't feel like going around and explaining what had happened, that no, I'd not just given birth to a dog, and that no, I'd not sold my baby into the child slavery trade in exchange for a gourmet poodle mix. Normally that would be the job of "that friend" or "that neighbor" - the one who knows you well enough to be the purveyor of such information to others on the street. The problem was, I didn't have a "that friend" or "that neighbor" on the block, someone who I could count on to spread the word to the others.

But there's the real truth, of course, which is...who has time to talk to the neighbors when I'm so busy futzing around on the computer? Editing a manuscript that I'm deadly sick of? Talking to my dog? Being busy? Overscheduling myself? Nobody has time to..say...sit on the old couple's porch with them across the way and sip lemon tea. Nope, nope, nope.

So, back to tonight's potluck. There were neigbhors there, old and young, and we talked. FINALLY, we just talked - about what it used to be like on the block, about stories, about ailments, about kids and family, about the rats that like to run along everyone's fences at night around here. We talked about the sink hole that supposedly exists in the middle of our street (who knew!), about what it was like before the freeway was built, about the lake that used to sit where the mall is now. We talked about little stuff and big stuff - us and all these neighbors. The old folks said to us, "so nice to meet you, another nice young couple on the block!"

I was beaming, and felt full of good food, and full of good old-fashioned human connectedness.

And I knew, suddenly, that had these people been my friends back in the midst of my sudden KuKd awfulness, that these old ladies and young'uns alike - Josh and Jessica and everyone else there - would have come together to be like this old-school wall of support, had things been different. Which is, had I been more open to letting them into our twisted lives. Had I known them for longer, and not had my face in the computer all these years. It made me kinda sad, nostaglic for someting, I'm not sure what. Maybe for a bygone era, a time when people came together more naturally and felt more connected. Or mabye we never really did? Maybe I'm just imagining it after watching too many romantic movies? Maybe humans are secretly anti-social creatures, all of us?

* * *

That's all - no big moral of the story here. Just that this potluck made me really happy, and reminded me to go over to sip lemon tea on Mike and Claudia's porch from time to time, even though it's easier to nestle into the futon and gobble up people's Facebook status-bytes. Or, go over to the other neighbors' yard to pet their pygmy goats (which I had no idea existed). In the end, it's these lovely old people - and all those gems of friends and neighbors and family members who I perpetually take for granted - who matter most when the shit hits the fan.

(OH, and by the way. I started writing earlier about that inhaled "hee-yoop" sound, which - yes - IS indeed a sucking sound, as identified correctly by several astute readers. Contrary to all logic, it is NOT intended to sound like an airplane toilet, although I can see why you might think that, given its close proximity to toilet-related musings in one post. And in fact, it kind of does sound like a toilet! It could be any sucking sound, really. I do have a specific thing in mind, however, which I'll divulge later. This neighborly loveliness thought-fest was just clawing to get out!

On Toilets and Strange Sounds

Greetings, Folks!

Please allow me to indulge in a bit of Sunday-evening silliness. It's a buzzy and nervous night for me. I need to scrape some of this sugary thought-fluff out of my head in preparation for my Big Day tomorrow: the very first day back at school! Summer's over, baby. That's right: no more lounging around in my moose slippers, sloppy ponytail and crusty breakfast-food-stained t-shirt. Nope: tomorrow I'll be putting on something teacherly and wholesome - a long skirt, maybe? - and running a brush through my hair, all in honor of standing up before college students for three solid hours and being...well...their English instructor. Gotta look and act the part.

No force-feeling for me today: this evening's post is on toilets and strange sounds. I've been meaning to talk about this important combination of topics for some time, and tonight seems like just the night.

First, the strange sounds. Well, just one sound, actually. I need your help in determining if I'm explaining a particular sound in precisely the right way.

Please attempt the following:

1) Whisper the sound: "hee-yoop," emphasizing the syllable "yoop."

2) Now, do it again but this time, inhale your whisper instead of exhaling.

3) Repeat step 2 again, but this time sort of close the back of your mouth a bit so that air traveling through there (as you inhale) has to pass through a smaller space.

OK - GOOD! Now, tell me: what does that sound like to you when you do #3 (the inhaled, slightly-closed-back-of-mouth whisper of "hee-yoop?") C'mon, what does it sound like? Tell me! I'm hoping that one person - one would make me happy, but more would be even better - says that it sounds like the thing I'm trying to make it sound like. I like to think of myself as reasonably adept wordsmith, yet when I tested this out on my friend M, it completely bombed - which I fear might mean I really suck at explaining things. So let me try on you astute readers to see if I find more success. I need this sound for a future blog post, in case you're wondering.

* * *

Moving on: toilets. I've been thinking about toilets lately, and feel the need to vent for a second. A surprising number of toilet varieties - including the ones that are supposedly the most technologically advanced - bother the shit out of me (no pun intended), and I couldn't seem to escape the most bothersome ones during my recent foray into the Irish homeland.

*

First, there's the automatic-flush toilets found in many airports today, and in fact found on the very college campus where I teach.



Who thought of these? Seriously: they're wrong. Morally, ethically, physically, cosmically just wrong. I understand the basic premise: enable us to flush away our sorrows without ever having to come in contact with a germ-infested handle touched by many an excrement-molecule-laden hand. But this auto-flush feature is so overboard, so...well...unthinkingly automatic, that I find it ends up being more of a pain than a useful toilet-trait.

Anytime I'm stuck using an auto-flush toilet, the thing inevitably either:

a) Flushes inexplicably while I'm still sitting there. Just what I need: a sudden blast of cool, human-waste-infused mist spraying up against my butt while I'm trying to relieve myself in peace.

b) Doesn't flush when I need it to flush. Which is to say: I'm done with the deed and ready to go, but the thing won't flush - sometimes not even when I wave my hand frantically over the purported "motion sensor" to incite some flush-age. Then I'm stuck with a choice: exit the stall anyway, leaving some poor hapless victim to walk in on my unflushed "gift of bodily self" in the toilet, or simply hang out and wait - with growing irritation - for the toilet to independently decide it's time to flush? Of course, this always happens when there's a long line for the restroom.

Talk about innovation taken to such an extreme that it becomes...no longer innovative. Look. Give me the good old-fashioned toilet with the long metal handle, the kind you can flush with your foot. I'll take that any day over this!

*

Airplane toilets are next on my toilet hit-list.



Dude, these scare me. Is it really necessary to make such a god-awful, mind-blowing sound every time they flush? When I was a kid, I remember thinking that was the sound of the contents of the toilet being forcibly sucked right out of a hole in the bottom of the airplane, straight into the atmosphere, where it got caught in a spinning mass of blue-antiseptic-chemical-stained poop and pee and toilet paper from OTHER airplane toilets, eventually drifting upward into outer space or plummeting into the ocean.

I sensed that if I left the lid up, or stood too near, that I might get sucked down there too. I still feel that way sometimes. At least, I felt that way on my United flight from Chicago, where the airplane toilets seemed particularly, unnervingly loud. Why are they so loud? Why, why, why?

*

Next is the self-covering toilet:



Look. If I want a protective covering between the backs of my thighs and the toilet seat, I'll just put together a nice little mosaic-sheath of toilet paper to sit on, thank you very much. The issue with these self-covering deals is that the plastic is presumably supposed to move over automatically, allowing new and unused plastic covering to take the place of the older used segment. The problem is that I never actually see the thing move, so I really don't know if it IS in fact a fresh, clean plastic sheath.

Which sort of takes away the whole point, doesn't it?

*

So, I've decided that the toilet industry has lately gotten overly fixated on automation as the be-all, end-all solution to everything. But ya know, sometimes it's good to be in control of the situation. We all have enough to worry about regarding the task of releasing bodily waste; who needs the added complications of automated toilet systems that don't really work?

(Although someone should really get in there to make those airplane toilets less frightening - and if that means a bit of automation, I'll take it).

;-)

* * *

NOW, back to that noise you're supposed to make - scroll up to the top of this post if you somehow missed it. Go ahead and try it! Now, what does that sound like?

KuKd Word: FORCE-FEEL

Greetings, KuKd Strong Mommas/Daddas and Inquisitive Guests!

I've only lost one meaningful grown-up human in my life, and that was Granny back in 5th grade. She was in her sixties when her heart stopped suddenly. This particular granny - my mom's mom - was a jolly, slightly heavy-set woman with painted fingernails and a kick-ass condominimum overlooking downtown Seattle. This woman knew how to live, let me tell you. She picked me up from school and babysat me every afternoon, and gave me Kraft caramels from her kitchen drawer and petite-four cakes from her freezer. Sometimes she dragged me around to visit her old-lady friends, and I liked nestling into the white leather backseat of her huge Monte Carlo. Granny laughed a lot and always had big-band jazz and swing music playing somewhere, and loved me so fiercely that I could feel it through her perfumed hugs. She was like this happy, lovey, personality-filled blast from the past. My mom told me her arteries had clogged up from all the butter and Beef Wellington and sweets that she ate.

What an honorable way to die.

I don't remember what all I felt as a child attempting to process her death. I do remember watching on in horror and astonishment as my parents both cried on and off (because...you know...parents just don't do that sort of thing), especially my mom, and following suit to join in on the crying. But I think I was mostly crying because I was confused, because watching the adults who form the hulking walls around your safe little childhood-world break apart into tears is a definite moment of WTF??? for a 5th grader. I was also crying because right around that time, my big brother and his friends walked into my carefully constructed Barbie city in on the basement floor, knocking over my Barbie McDonalds and making little plastic cheeseburgers and fries go flying in every direction. Oddly, I remember that just as clearly as Dad telling me in a shakey voice that Granny was gone.

Mom told me several months later, "Nobody is ever really dead until people stop talking about them." And our family did, for a while, make it a point to talk about Granny from time to time. That was Granny's favorite restaurant! That's where Granny got her car washed! Granny would have loved this casserole! We moved to Buffalo NY, and there I recall lying on the lawn of our suburban house with my hair spread around me like a halo, looking up at clouds, and trying to channel thoughts to Granny - especially on sad days when I felt lonely (which was a lot of days).

But after a while, the conversation about Granny - the lying there and consciously trying to imagine her, the memories of her death itself - sort of melted away. Time passed, my brother and I grew up, my parents moved on. We all went in different directions. Does this just happen with death? Like, will Patrick Swayze disappear from the front news headlines in a few days or weeks like Michael Jackson did? Does it happen with real people in our lives, like parents and friends and spouses? I don't really know, since I only have Granny to go by.

It's frustrating how little I actually remember about how and when and where she died; about what I was doing and thinking when it happened. Even everything I just mentioned could be a figment of my imagination; was it really THEN that the Barbie McDonald's got attacked? Or was that an earlier year? Am I confusing that with the My Little Pony town that got demolished, or the head of my Cabbage Patch Kid preemie doll that got squashed? Those petite-four cakes - were they really in the freezer? Or the cupboard? What did my Dad say, exactly, to announce her passing away? And where was Mom when he said them?

And Granny's body. I have this picture in my mind of her lying on her bed in that condominium, face-up in a black velvet jogging-suit type of thing, lipstick on and nails painted, my mother opening the door and walking in, finding her there, her body cold, Frank Sinatra playing softly in the background. Mom letting out some sort of piercing cry and running down the hall, fumbling for a phone, dialing 911. Where do I get this image from?

I wasn't even there.

* * *

Fast forward to 2006, hot and buzzy summer in rural Arkansas. When the first fetus (also known as Boy Fetus or Grapefruit, since he was grapefruit-sized), my mom saw me lying in a hospital bed while I waited for my body to kick into labor. I was a pathetic little strand of a person under that white blanket, having dropped a bunch of pounds and shat a bunch of watery shit because the hospital would only feed me Popcicles and chicken broth (don't get all excited; I gained it all back and then some).

Her face crumpled and she said, "Don't worry. That little baby is with Granny now."

I kind of squirmed and felt awkward when she said it, because it just seemed like one of those kind of silly things that parents say when they don't know what else to say. Uh, nice try to make me feel better, Mom, what with the fairytale of Granny up there with my little Grapefruit, feeding him petite-four cakes and rocking out to Bing Crosby in some smoky jazz club. But later I thought about it more, realizing it was comforting to imagine that there might be something in it for this almost-child who never set foot on the planet, something worthwhile after his or her death.

It also made me think back to what my mom had told me back in 5th grade: nobody is ever really dead until people stop talking about them. And right then, twenty-or-whatever years later, we had talked about Granny - boom, just like that. Weird, how easily she came easily to the surface of our minds at a time like this. Maybe the dead only make an appearance when we need them the most; maybe gas prices from heaven are astronomical so those spirits up there have to economize.

On a few occasions since then and even before, I've found myself wanting to return to the horror of Granny's death, fly down that cylindrical tunnel of time through years and months and days, just to be there and live it again, no matter how painful and awful. Force-feeling, I call it - kind of like force feeding, but with feelings instead of food. And low and behold, I've done the same thing with you know who: that feisty little disappearing Zachary.

And why? For what? To remember them both alive? Can't be that, since the part I long to return to is the time when they became dead, not living. To remember them dead? Perhaps, but again...why? To dredge up old memories to make sense of my confused, 5th-grade thoughts and later, my even more confused 31-year-old thoughts? Because, when a shit bomb gets dropped on my head, I guess I tend to check out for a while, and it's only later when I'm ready that I long to check back in?

Come on, Shitty Moment. Take me back! I know I sort of bailed when you were happening. Just let me back in for a second so I can see what you were really like before you're gone forever.

* * *

Introducing today's KuKd word:

FORCE-FEEL (v): the act of purposely reliving a negative experience, just because it feels good in a sort of masochistic way. Noun: force-feelage. Adjective: force-feely. ("Don't look at those old medical records. That's such a force-feely thing to do.")

Example:

"Honey, why are you sitting there bawling and eating ice cream straight from the carton?"

"Because I spent the morning force-feeling. Leave me alone for a while; I'm trying to be depressed and you're distracting me!"

Now, force-feeling with a death that happened when you were a child: that's a tough one. So much time as gone by that you've got little memory-molecules left in your brain to work with. And that was before all of the technological means we have these days that keep a virtual "footprint" of such events. E-mails, blogs, Facebook, etc.

Fortunately today we've got so many tools for force-feeling! Stuff just doesn't go away! Which - if you're a force-feeler - is a good thing. I've done this with Zachary a few times, and did it just recently after seeing the movie Up, which brought up more sobby, gutwrenchy bawling than any movie I've ever seen since Schindler's List. A good time to force-feel, when the emotions are already churned up like a good, fluffy meringue for a lemon pie.

Force-Feeling: Here's how the pro's do it, ready?

The best way is to make use of technology. E-mail, specifically. If you're like me, your Yahoo inbox contains some 20,000 some-odd messages dating back to 2003 or earlier. It's easy to do a search for messages sent on or around the EXACT DATE of the horror. Perfect for reliving the moment! So you get a cuppa joe, unhook the phone, snuggle into a big comfy chair with a box of Kleenex, and start reading. The moment, the thoughts you were thinking and the feelings you were feeling, and the impressions that other people were getting, will flood back to you so fast that pretty soon, you'll be feeling up a storm.

Force-feeling up a storm, that is.

Here's a sampling of my own.


August 15th (day before the horror)

Darren, Jayson, Jared:

Are any of you free, strong, awake, and potentially hungry this Sunday morning at 9:30? We need some strong sexy studly men to help move some big, pain-in-the-ass stuff in our house. And, as prego princess, I have no choice but to stand by idly, nibble on pastries and just watch. We'll be done with most of the basement semi-finishing project and need to shift stuff around to get the baby room ready. Free breakfast included, so come hungry!

xoxo - monica

*

August 16th (oh fuck - but don't worry, I sound just fine)

Hi all,

Very sorry for the semi-mass e-mail and be the breaker of bad news, but i'll be away from the computer for a few days so thought i'd give you an update.

Our baby boy (it's a boy, it turns out) is dying from heart failure - some rare congenital defect we just found out about this morning. He's not expected to survive more than a few days. A bunch of top cardio specialists and what-nots confirmed this at UW hospital today -nothing we expected at all, just something they discovered in a routine check-up this morning.

Anyway, we're going into UW medical center Friday morning to induce labor, probably will be there thru Sunday -expect a stillborn or baby to live less than an hour after being born. We're actually doing OK at the moment, appreciating each other more than ever, looking at it as another "not meant to be" situation, and preparing to move on with our lives. Anyhoo, sorry for the shitty news, nothing anyone can say or do so don't worry about it. we'll keep you posted in the meantime and have our cells at the hospital.

-m/k

*

August 17th (from a guy-friend)

Hi, Monica.

I'm very sorry to hear about this. Let me know if there's any way I can help with anything (well, you know, not with any medical procedures, but, say, helping you move heavy things or buying you cups of coffee).

Jared

*

August 24th: (from Mom in Europe)

Hi Monica, we never got to an internet cafe in Oslo, ran out of time. But guess what, we found out that in many cities you can hop on for 1-2 hour free at a library, so that's where we are today. Smallish town Norway. It'll take time for the pain of your loss to subside. Allow yourself to grieve. Your life will have so many happy times, but some sad times, too. What you experienced was such a significant loss that don't be surprised if some corner of your heart always feel that loss, but the pain of it will diminish and you'll feel joy again, I promise. If you feel even an inkling of the need, please talk to your doctor or Group Health and get ahold of a grief counseler to help you with this. OK? You know intellectually that there are many wonderful things that will come your way, but you'll need to work through the feelings of loss, so do whatever you need to. Whether it's painting the walls or playing spades or talking to a counseler, do what you need to do. We love you.

About travel stuff, change of topic, did you know in Denmark there is a 180% tax on cars and a twice a year property tax on cars? That puts people on buses and bikes!

Love, Mom

*

August 19th (from my older brother)

I just returned from the beach, where watched the sun set and cried for probably the first time in two years. It truly broke my heart to think that this was a baby who was about to become part of our family...your son, my nephew. I must tell you that it also feels good to me on some level to feel this emotional about you and the baby. I struggle sometimes to find relevance in my world when it can sometimes seem kind of shallow. To feel this emotional about you and the baby made me feel more human.

There's a famous quote that I can't recall but it says something about the difference between the people who sit on the sidelines and critique and those who compete in the ring of life. It's sort of macho, something about a bloodied gladiator emerging victorious, but I think it kind of applies in this case. You and Kevin are living life to the fullest and whatever the outcome you should both be proud of that.

Love, Paul

* * *

So, they're just snippets, like little flashbacks of various episodes. But I save these e-mails and treasure them, and thank the corporate yahoos over at Yahoo for creating a natural holding place for memories, because these relics that preserve a dead creature in my mind. I wish we had some such things for Granny, too. And yeah, it's sad to reread those things - but I do it anyway - because that's what Force-Feeling is all about.

Especially useful for stubborn asses like me - who can't "feel" on command. I think I finally got the counselors and social workers to understand this: I'll feel when I...um...feel like feeling, okay?

OH - and by the way! THIS IS IMPORTANT! I *strongly* recommend Force-Feeling only when your husband or other male-counterpart not around. If he's typically or stereotpyically guy-ish like mine is, he'll say something ridiculously rational like, "Why are you reading those old e-mails if they upset you so much?"

Ah, men. Some things they just weren't meant to get. ;-)

Incredible-Hulk-Bitch Gallery

Greetings Once Again!

Apologies for burning everybody out, including myself, by indulging in a rare "two-days-since-the-last-post" post. I realize it's a bit much for all of us, so feel free to simply think: "enough of you already!" and X right out of this post without reading further. I won't be offended if you return to whatever important thing you were doing, your fruitless Google-searching for grown-up pictures of that kidnapped Jaycee girl who was just found alive with two pale children some 20-or-whatever years later. (Good luck on that one. Believe me - I've tried finding such pictures to no avail. Personally, I'm beginining to wonder if the whole thing was made up.)

Requests - all TWO of them! - for Ireland pictures have been flooding in from eager readers! Now that I've pulled my camera from the inch of water accumlated at the bottom of my backpack, and air-dried it on the sunny deck, I thought I'd post a few pictures here while the subject of that rainy, pricey, yet peculiarly wonderful country is still fresh on my mind.

Let us begin with beautiful Cork City, our very first night in ye old Irish homeland. Gorgeous lighting, isn't it? Despite the look on my face (which sort of reminds me of the purse-lipped woman in that old TV commercial for shampoo: "Pantene Pro-V. Brilliant."), I have not yet morphed into Incredible Hulk-Bitch at this point. Actually I'm just so exhausted from jetlag that I can't even muster the effort to turn my head and look at that beautiful river behind me. No no. I'm already thinking about bed and food. Luckily, I have this photo to remember Cork by:

Setting off on our ride to the southern coast, my sprits are high. There's a wee bit o' drizzle, but so what! God made rain for earthly gain. That's my motto. After picking up a stylish blue poncho for a mere four euros, I'm ready to attack this moist day of cycling.


The poncho turned out to act more like a sail, billowing behind me and yanking me backward no matter how hard I peddled, so eventually switched to my more aerodynamic (yet less water-resistant) jacket. Three hours of steep uphill riding and gushing rain later: "Screw it. I'm walking." It's the first sign of metamorphosis into Incredible-Hulk-Bitch. I changed this picture into black-and-white to symbolize the mood change:

But wait: a scenic detour down the hill in the rain...weeeeeeee!!! Oh wait - you mean this road dead-ends into the ocean? The map didn't show that! That means we have to turn around and go back up the....never mind. Damn Irish map-makers, those sadistic assholes. You only did that to mess with the minds of innocent tourists!


There was a wee bit-o-sun from time to time, yet the Hulk-Bitch was still in full force. Behold the fake-smile of thinly masked irritation ("I'll look at the scenery after we stop somewhere to eat and I've had a chance to air-dry my thoroughly soaked underwear, which are hiked uncomfortably up my arse"):



After checking in to our Clonakilty hotel: the tone of the evening has already been set. Monica is in bitch-mode with aching ass and still-cold extremities despite hot shower. There will be no silly sex tonight, no rolling around on the bed and doing frivolous things. This will be a night of staring grumpily and silently at the TV or laptop or whatever while I allow my resentment of the rain, the hills, and the Euro to fester like a puss-filled wound. Tonight, we will act like an old, burned-out couple that's been married 50 years and doesn't talk anymore - so don't even THINK about turning toward me trying to get it on!

You won't get far with this cranky spinster at the moment.

Sorry, can't converse with anyone right now or look up at the stunning, hulking medieval castle looming before us. All that matters right now is that this food makes its away into my mouth as fast as humanly possible.

So what if a car comes: they can move. This Hulk-Bitch is taking a nap, right here and now.

BUT...so much good stuff too! Fortunately for everyone, especially Kevin, the Hulk-Bitch didn't last too long. The Irish wonderfulness came through in so many ways, starting with walk in the sparkly post-rain countryside of Sheeps Head Peninsula:


Sun and sea.


Why do these people get to live somewhere so beautiful? I want this to be my life.




Woo-hoo baby! Downhill!



Mmmmm, food at the Bantry market. Doesn't this look so...French? For some reason I like the way Kevin looks reaching for his wallet.


Below, a typical breakfast: this one consists of potato cakes, a fresh scone on the side, some Weetabix cereal (one of my favorites), a beautiful poached egg in an intriguing cup-shape (how DO they do it, those Irish?), AND - the absolute best part - THE BACON. Ahh, wonderful Irish bacon.

Take a moment and just look at that bacon. Even if you're a vegetarian, just look at that bacon. Thick cut, not marbled with fat - much more meaty and substantial than what we have in the states. Almost ham-like in quality, but with a thin, golden salty "frame" of fat around the edges, just enough to melt in your mouth and make you glad you're not a Muslim. I could eat plates of the bacon all day and not get tired of it, ever!

If you haven't looked at the bacon, look at it now: zoom in on it if you like, and examine and admire its fine fibrous texture. By the way, I do like pigs, as I've said before. I like them for their intellect, their personalities, their endearing fatness. Still, somehow I have absolutely no trouble eating them. Whenever I eat bacon, I try to pretend that it's not pig flesh, but rather, just this little shred of goodness that fell from Heaven and landed into a frying pan in some kitchen before arriving at my plate:


Bantry cove - the village where I spent a solo night. I did finally leave my guest house to meander around and take pictures. Look at this soulful, poetic sky:



My sunny solo walk in the hills. I ate salty, oil-cured olives during this walk and thought about not much of anything. Imagine living in that house, right there!








In the end, these Irish eyes were smilin'!

Just a Silly Superstition

Greetings, Guests and Regulars!

Back on U.S. soil, my underwear - what's left of it - still damp with Irish mist. Anytime I travel overseas, my socks and undies seem to disappear. I'm sure it has to do with my packing and unpacking method: wad everything up and stuff hastily into backpack; dump backpack upside down on hotel floor upon arrival; kick crumpled clothing mass over into a designated "Monica's Mess" corner of the room; then gather it all back up and re-stuff into backpack upon depature. Not exactly conducive to keeping track of underwear.

(Kevin, on the other hand, folds everything neatly into rectangles and sets, not crams but sets, them into his own backpack. He puts his socks together into sock balls, which never ceases to amaze me. He never loses socks or underwear. Thank god he has whatever gene makes us notice and care about things like wrinkled clothing and dirt and general disarray, or our house would be wreck, and thank god he forgives my own lack of this gene.)

* * *

Speaking of genes, did you know that 75% of the genetic make-up of a child comes from the father, and not the mother? It's true, according to the old Irish man who approached me and Kevin to chat while we were shivering underneath a covered bus-stop in Bantry. He was a farmer with white hair, a few missing teeth, that slightly moth-ball-ish old-person smell, and a thick country-Irish accent I could hardly understand (but of course found endearing).

He asked if we had children and we said "no," to which he responded by peering closely into our faces, looking us up and down, and remarking that he could tell we had "good stock for a strong brood." I decided not to burst this adorable man's bubble by divulging how, um, weak our stock-n-brood really was, historically and statistically speaking anyhow.

Then he asked how old I was, and when I told him thirty-three, his slightly-cloudy eyes got wide with genuine concern. Time is running out! Better start now, he said: have one boy (since the boys are the ones that spread 75% of the family genes down the line) and then a girl. Oh, and I should be eating plenty of fresh meat and dairy produce everyday to for the "strongest stock." I felt oddly happy to be able to emphatically say, "I already do!," and the old man looked pleased as well. I can't imagine what he would have thought if I'd told him not only my shocking age, but that I'm a vegetarian. He probably would have shaken his head in dismay and thought, poor little lassie. She'll never have her strong brood.

Just before toodling off in the rain, he told us he had twelve grown children of his own, and that he and his wife had gotten started producing their "brood" when she was just seventeen years old. Then, when a sort of sad and faraway look in his eyes, he told us she had died fifteen years ago from something-or-other. Now he lived alone on the farm.

* * *

Our bus to Dublin pulled up just then, and Kevin and clamored on to find two seats together.

"Twelve kids?" he said. "No wonder she died early from something-or-other."

What a funny old man with his accent and his outdated beliefs about where our genes come from, about meat and dairy making a strong brood. It was as though he'd stepped out of a medieval storybook page. What nonsense, this man was spewing forth! I know plenty of vegetarians - well, a few anyway - with kids in hand or on the way. And suggesting in semi-seriousness that we just"have a boy and then a girl," just like that? How simple and lovely life would be if it were this easy to come up with a plan - "eat steak and milkshakes, have a boy, and then a girl" - and for such plans to work out flawlessly. Clearly he's out milking cows and not on the Internet reading infertility and KuKd blogs. He just doesn't understand what it's really like out here in the brutal, dog-eat-dog world of 30-plus women trying to make babies.

(And by the way, as if I would want twelve kids. As if Kevin would want me churning out babies all my life, and for what? So I could wear out my poor vaginal canal and die young like this guy's wife did, leaving him alone in the soaked hills of County Cork?)

Kevin and I both chuckled and shook our heads. What a funny old man. Kind of refreshing, actually, his innocent naivety about the whole thing.

Still, on our transatlantic flight home, I found myself unthinkingly asking for an extra pat of butter for my scone. Asking for a carton of milk instead of my usual tomato juice when the beverage cart came rattling by. Digging around first for the ground beef in my pasta, making sure that it had number one priority on its way down my esophagus before the less-brood-enhancing spiral noodles.

Wanting, sort of sheepishly, to shed the foul-mouthed cynicism for a moment and believe. Believe this old man's medieval storybook advice, believe that Kevin and I have some "good stock" in us, that we could somehow produce a "strong brood" that doesn't wither in utero; that eating blue-cheese-stuffed-bacon-wrapped fillet mignon might help with that; that any brood we produce might in fact be comprised 75% of rational and organized Kevin and just 25% of irrational and disorganized me. Daring to want, for just a fleeting second, to carry out this old farmer's perfectly logical plan: have a boy next year. And then a girl. Simple.

But then again, believing just seems so...tiring sometimes.

Flowing Irish Spring of Thoughts

Top-o-the-Mornin' To Ya, KuKd'ers and Inquisitive Guests!

Time to churn out some rambling thoughts from this tiny fishing village, nestled between the green cliffs and choppy gray ocean of Sheeps Head Peninsula. Ireland, that is.

* * *

Dear Euro: I hate you. You are an insensitive, pompous, bloated bastard. You make my dollar look like crap. Everytime I think about you, how many of my pathetic little dollars it takes to match your swollen strength, I want to punch you in the face. You are the reason for which it costs $8 for a beer, $10 for a scone and a cup of tea, $8 an hour to sit in this Internet cafe. You need to lose weight, fatso, and come back to earth. You're not as great as you think you are.

* * *

Not far from Cork City is the Blarney Castle, upon which is perched the Blarney Stone, which hoards of gawking tourists flock to in great big busses. I had heard that kissing the Blarney Stone brings good luck. It's one of those things in Ireland that you're supposed to do, and check off on your list of "things you did in Ireland" - like visiting the Louvre in Paris, or the Statue of Liberty in New York. That alone - the simple fact of it being something that everybody supposedly does - would normally be reason enough to avoid doing it. Kevin and I have always agreed on that point when it comes to traveling.

But this time, I suggested to Kevin that we break or cardinal rule of avoiding anything on the tour-bus circuit. Feeling that my uterus was in need of a dose of good luck, I told him I ought to lift up my shirt and press my abdomen against that stone (hoping that the stone itself wouldn't transmit some strange form of herpes to my tummy skin from so many internationals touching it with their moist, pursed lips).

Kevin agreed that it might be a prudent thing to do.

But when we looked it up in our guidebook to find directions, we discovered that the Blarney Stone doesn't actually bestow good luck, contrary to popular ill-informed belief. In fact, it bestows the "gift of gab."

Shit. The last thing I or my uterus needs is more gift of gab. If I had any more gabbing ability, I'd surely scare away everyone important in my life. So we canceled our Blarney Stone visit and ducked into a pub instead.

* * *

I am alone.

Not alone in the sense that there aren't any other people around. There are other people, of course: milky-skinned, freckle-faced families with accents to die for, farmers that look like such stereotypical Irish farmers that I can't help but stare (rubber boots, knee-length green pants, plaid wool vests, those Irish beret-like hats), butchers and bakers and candlestick makers.

It's just that I'm alone, without Kevin - and slept decadently in the shape of a sprawled-out starfish on my queen-size bed last night. The idea to part paths came about as I sensed myself turning into what I call the Incredible Hulk-Bitch, and - for the sake of marital/personal/psychological health - thought it best to separate, me going off to do "my thing" and Kevin doing "his thing." For those of you who live in remote fishing villages and therefore haven't seen the Incredible Hulk, a quick lesson: it's an old show from the 70s or 80s about an ordinary guy who- whenever he gets angry - turns into this big, green, mean, angry monster-like thing (with awesome arm-muscles, if my memory serves me right) who throws stuff at people and breaks things. His grave warning to others was always: "Don't make me angry. You won't like me when I'm angry."

Here's what my grave warning to others should be, and Kevin would probably agree with this: "Don't make me hungry, cold, wet and tired. You won't like me when I'm hungry, cold, wet and tired."

There have been several times in our relationship when I've found myself turning into this person I'm embarrassed to be: a thoroughly bitchy, whiny, sulky, petulant, passive-aggressive, blaming-everything-on-Kevin, openly-complaining Incredible Hulk-Bitch. This is one of those times. It pretty much always has to do with physically pushing myself beyond my comfort zone - biking, hiking, what have you - and growing unbearably hungry and tired. Everything then becomes Kevin's fault, of course, for not predicting this would happen and suggesting a different activity from the very beginning; for not showing sufficient empathy; for not producing a warm scone from his coat pocket when I desperately need food.

Poor Kevin could not have known that cycling in Ireland - for me anyway - was a doomed prospect from the get-go. First, we brought our bikes here, even though I knew - deep down inside I knew - that my ass was completely tired of being on a bike. I didn't want to admit that - after our east-coast biking escapade - I'd almost rather eat stale cow shit than spend another day on bumping around on my rump and getting blisters on my palms. Well maybe not, but still. You get the picture.

To make matters worse, we quickly discovered the big, bad dilemma of cycling in Ireland: once you get into the countryside, there are no street names, no street signs, no landmarks, anywhere. Just lots of forks and multi-pronged sporks in the road where a whole bunch of identical sheep-strewn, single-lane roads branch off each other toward identical, sheep-strewn hills. So if you're trying to get to, say, a certain town 20 kilometers away, you repeatedly find yourself at an unmarked crossroad with no choice but to take a wild guess as to which way to turn. You think to yourself: hmmm, this looks southwest-ish. I'll turn here. Inevitibly, it turns out you're in fact going northeast, which you discover 45 minutes later, and have to then backtrack to that same 3-pronged spork in the road, and take a different prong. Because you're a blindly bumbling Yank (and a Murphy, no less, toting around all of the bad luck which being a Murphy entails) with zero farm-road instinct, chances are your second guess is wrong too.

So, needless to say, much of our last three days were spent backtracking and looping and circling and staring hopelessly at our useless and inaccurate road map. Oh - and did I mention that Ireland is full of steep, steep hills - so that all of this wrong-turning and backtracking involved retracing our steps up and down those monstrous hills - AND that this was happening in the face of gale-force winds and driving rain?

"Just enjoy the adventure of all this!" said Kevin with what I perceived as forced optimism.

"I might enjoy it if I could feel my extremities!" I replied through gritted teeth, my blue plastic poncho whipping behind me like a sail, holding me back as I peddled against the wind. Busted: my pissy attitude revealed, as if Kevin hadn't already sensed my spirits plummeting. "Who the hell built this hilly, rainy country without road names," I said.

"But look at the farm houses. You like farm houses."

"I don't give a damn about the farm houses. I need food and we were supposed to get to Clonakilty like five hours ago and there's no end in sight and I'm freezing cold and my ass hurts!"

"Be like how you were in Uzbekistan," he said, "when you didn't mind stuff like this! Remember how carefree you were all the time, even when it was hard?"

Ahhhhhh, "how I was in Uzbekistan."

Is it really possible to eternally be the exact same person you are when somebody first meets and falls in love with you? To always show your best, best side - the side that enchanted them and drew them into you at the very beginning? Of COURSE I would never show Kevin my Incredible Hulk-Bitch side during our courtship days. No, no, no. Some things - like your rotten moods and the "signature stench" of your farts - are best left kept secret until...well...until you're married. :-)

Anyway, I knew he wanted to keep riding that bike, so - rather than force myself to do something that directly causes my mood to drop to its lowest point, I decided to hop a bus to our next destination and meet him in a few days. Kevin agreed more readily than I was hoping: this sounded like a good plan. So off we went, separate ways. I was relieved to be off the bike, but secretly nervous about being alone.

* * *

We live alone inside our heads for so much of the time; why is being actually, physically alone so unnerving sometimes? Being alone in a strange land: it makes me uncomfortable at first, a little bit scared. It's been so long since I've slept alone, eaten alone, meandered through unknown streets alone. I've only done this once since Zach's dirth, and that was in Ecuador. It was good for me in some self-helpy spiritual way, I suppose. But secretly it depressed me to be alone.

This time, as I stepped off the bus into the driving rain in the village of Bantry, at first I didn't know what to do with myself - so I just stood there with my great big bike-suitcase (yes, mine is a special bike that comes apart and fits into a suitcase) and backpack, rain pouring directly onto my head and dripping down my chin, looking pathetic and taking out my damp, dog-eared guidebook to find a place to stay. Even after checking in to a cold, crumbling Victorian bed-and-breakfast, I still felt at odds. What to do as an anonymous visitor in this remote village, as rain poured from the slate gray sky? Duck into a pub and sidle up next to a stranger? Somehow the thought depressed me.

So I took a long shower instead and settled in bed to read a book I'd picked up along the way, sheets of rain beating against my rippled windows.

This book is called "The Adultress" by some famous British author who now lives in Ireland. I was instantly sucked into this book, and forgot about the rain and the hills and the aloneness. It's about...well...several generations of Irish/English women cheating on their husbands for various reasons. There's more to it than that, of course - ghosts and haunted apple orchards and World War II and lemon cakes and things like that. I was fascinated by several things in this novel.

First, the way in which the book ultimately portrays adultery on the part of men and women as happening for different reasons, and that - when women do it - it isn't always entirely her fault. Or, rather, it's for reasons far more complicated - even perhaps understandable - than simple, selfish betrayal of a husband. As for what those reasons are, well, you just have to read the book.

Second, a very large percentage of the adultery that took place in this story unexpectedly had to with...drumroll please...KuKd! That is, there was a pattern in several of these women: pregnancy loss, or a string of losses, occurred. Then came the adultery. There were reasons for this - the isolation of KuKd grief, the way it can push a man away - but that's a whole 'nother post.

* * *

Falling headfirst into a good novel was exactly what I needed to kickstart this alone-time. Just me, my thoughts, my little Ireland-world. I've noticed the rain here stops around mid-afternoon when the frustrated sun breaks through scattered clouds, casting this ephemeral sparkly light all over everything. It's what makes Ireland one of the most beautiful places I've ever seen, this time of day, when the green hills turn emerald and the ocean is flecked with glimmering sunlight.

When this happened yesterday I finally set down my book (reluctantly) and went for a walk by myself along a lonesone, rocky ridge over the sea. I had stopped at a little gourmet food shop and bought an entire tub of oil-cured olives coated in salt, which I munched on contentedly as I walked. God, I love olives. I wasn't really thinking about anything or having epiphanies every five minutes - just taking in the scenery, my mind at peace, feeling really calm.

Despite the Euros (fucking fatso fucktarded currency), the hills, the rain - Ireland is a country which, as my friend Al says about certain bars in Seattle, "speaks to me." The people are the friendliest I have ever met. The landscape is rugged and brooding, and even the climate I enjoy - just not while cycling uphill. I like feeling cool and gray and having to bundle up. And the bread! That Irish brown bread made without yeast, dense and yummy and biscuity and sconey? With slabs of cold salted butter on top? Christ, I could eat that all day every day.

And I like this little burst of alone time. Ireland is a perfect place to do it. Now I'm off for my second ridge-walk, after which I get to come "home" to my dimpled hotel bed and finish my novel, and wait for Kevin to show up. Tonight we get to eat out, together! - and each tell the stories of our separate journeys. I can't wait to hear about his. I just hope his ballsack and taint are still in tact after all that cycling.

As his wife, I do have a stake in his ballsack and taint, afterall.

It All Began with Bean Salad

Hello, KuKd'ers and Inquisitive Guests!

First, let me reassure (or disappoint?) you: despite the title, this post is not about farting.

According to a smudged red-ink blurb on our calendar, Kevin and I are scheduled to fly to Ireland with our bikes in...oh...seventeen hours. And what have we done to prepare for this trip? Zero. Zilch. Nada.

It's an embarrassment, really, how little thought I've given to this trip. I'm a Murphy, for fuck's sake, born and bred! Kevin is 99% Irish too, with a tiny sliver of French "LeMoine" sperm thrown in the mix several generations ago - nobody knows how or where that occurred. Shouldn't we take this "grand return to the Irish homeland" a bit more seriously? I'm sure I'm the first American-born "Murphy" who has EVER bumbled eagerly around County Cork in search of long lost relatives from ten generations ago, right? I ought to be prepared for the fanfare with which I am sure to be greeted by my weathered ancestors still living in stone houses nestled in the emerald hillside.

The thing is, our bags from our recent 10-day east-coast bike trip are still unpacked, it having been just a few short days ago that returned bleary-eyed and bruised-arsed from THAT trip. Nobody in this household, except for maybe our dog Tebow who is currently snoozing and farting contentedly on the futon, has time to do things like dig around for passports, reserve a hotel in Dublin, make some sort of "plan" for this Ireland trip. So the "plan" for now is to stuff a bunch of still-dirty clothing into backpacks, arrive in Dublin jet-lagged and dazed, and hop a train immediately to somewhere else.

County Cork, probably. You know, where all the weathered-faced Murphy ancestors will be waiting for me outside their stone houses.

BUT, before I traverse the Atlantic Ocean, a few thoughts from our last sojourn, during which we cycled for 7 days from Washington, D.C. to Pittsburgh along a bumpy, butt-busting bike path dotted with trees and primitive campsites.

First, let me start with the subject that dominated my thoughts for much of the trip, and continues to haunt me as I sit here sipping Dark Elixir, its caffeinated goodness making my blood veins vibrate. It all began with an innocent jar of bean salad:




The bean salad itself, which I purchased giddily from a local farm market along the Allegheny bike trail, was ho-hum (as Kevin grumpily predicted it would be). I wanted it to be much more than it was. But I quickly forgot about the mediocre taste, for it was more the label that drew me in, causing all sorts of harebrained schemes to swirl around in my head as we bumped along the rest of our week-long, ass-bruising bike journey. These thoughts still haunt me to this very day.

Now, notice the two strapping, healthy young hunks on the front of the jar: Jake and Amos, each with a hefty basket of produce on his arm, their fresh-scrubbed faces bright against a sunlit backdrop. Definitely an Amish gay couple. Just look at them. What else could they be?

I've always had a deep fascination with people of that ilk - religious groups who wear starchy, old-fashioned clothing and live a traditional, farming, bread-baking, cow-milking, bonnet-wearing, horse-n-carriage-driving lifestyle. That would include Amish folks and "ites" of various sorts, like Mennonites and "Hutterites," who apparently live in colonies in parts of eastern Washington (I only recently found out about the latter from my friend M).

Here is a picture of some Hutterites:


Aren't they awesome?

The thing that fascinates me is the lifestyle, not the religious aspect of these groups of people. The flat-out, in-your-face rejection of many modern advancements of the digital age. I like that they make their food from scratch, and do so many things the old-fashioned way. Something about this sort of existence seems so refreshingly, romantically... real compared to the totally easy, order-everything-online sort of life that I and most of my friends have.

I grew up in various suburbs of various cities. Just a regular, mainstream life. But starting back in high school, I began constantly seeking out rustic-lifestyle, farm-ish experiences, because I somehow developed this notion of that as something real and want-worthy. In college, I spent a summer on a communal farm in West Virginia, and later as a sheep-herder in Switzerland. In Uzbekistan, I got to help my host father feed the family flock of sheep, which I enjoyed. After moving to Seattle, I began volunteering at a farm for abused animals. I stopped doing that when I was well into my pregnancy with Zachary, for fear that I might get head-butted in the belly by a pygmie goat.

Here's Oliver, the piglet who was under my care every Saturday morning:



Anyway, inertia takes over eventually, and sucks most of us non-farmers back into a non-farming life, even if we think frequently about things like animals and bread-baking and cow-milking and rubber-boot wearing fun. I live in a city neighborhood, and drive to work and back. I go to bars and restaurants. Seattle is surrounded by fantastically gorgeous nature - including awesome farmlands hemmed in by mountains - and yet I find it all oddly inaccessible at times, myself locked down into city life by imaginary constraints. I don't get out into the mountains nearly as much as I'd like, and not for any tangible reason that I can think of other than little mental excuses that crop up.

So, back to the label of bean salad.

When you're on a 7-day bike trip along a nature trail, you have a lot of time to talk, and think, and talk, and think. So this label on the bean salad got me thinking about something that I occasionally think about with great passion and fervor, about once every six months or so:

I want to live on a farm.

I don't know how to be a real farmer, the kind who relies on farming as a sole source of income. I want to be hobby-farmer, if such a thing is possible: to live on a piece of land that inspires me, somewhere quiet and earthy and green, and to live a semi-Mennonite-ish, Hutterite-ish, Amish-ish lifestyle, minus the religion. I want to keep chickens and collect their eggs, and kill one or two of them each year and have a big stuffed-bird eating fest with all my friends around our wooden farm table. I want a cow to milk, more maybe two cows, to make my own yogurt and cream. I want to plant a small garden and learn how to jar and can stuff. That's about it.

At the same time, I love my teaching job, and don't want to give that up - not now anyway. So I want both things: my real-life job, and my farm-life life.

As I said, this mode of thinking is cyclical for me, and lasts for about a week of mad-talking with Kevin, searching on real estate listings, and making lists of things on cocktail napkins in hopes of devising a plan to realize this teenage-girlhood dream. So we talked about it on this trip, whether it's possible (it isn't, concluded Kevin - at least not at the moment).

Still, upon arriving home (indeed, one of the reasons why I still haven't unpacked from our last trip or given much thought ot Ireland) is that I spend half the day on Monday searching, yes, real-estate adds. And it just so happened that I found the PERFECT HOBBY FARM:




There's a 1940s house here too, but it's not as interesting as the land itself. This particular farm is perfect because it's 40 minutes from the school where I teach, so I could technically keep my current job, AND it's closer to Mount Rainer than we are now, so we could do more hiking than we normally do! See? Perfect!

Oh, I forgot to mention that it's $380,000 in money that we, um, don't exactly have. Minor detail - but certainly not one that escaped Kevin's financially-minded, marine-corps mind.

"Money shmoney!" I argued. "Who ever said you need MONEY to buy a farm?"

"Not now, Mon. Won't work. Plus, I guarantee you're going to hate having a 40-minute drive to work AND being away from all your friends, who aren't going to be as eager to make the hour-and-a-half drive from Seattle to come to your country-farm-disco-parties as you might think."

He's right, I know. Disco parties at the farm house was definitely a part of the picture (the non-Amish part), and yeah. Can't have a disco party if nobody comes. Still, I felt crestfallen. It was mildly consoling when he then said, "let's revisit the farm-concept in five years or so."

Oh, all right. I'm not good at waiting. I get petulant at certain times. This is one of those times. Luckily, I'm married to a man who listens, thinks, and THEN says "it won't work" - instead of just immediately jumping to the "no" part. At least there's that. And besides, I'm going to Ireland tomorrow, where I'm sure to get a good dose of sheepy, farmy goodness.

* * *

A few more quick updates before I think about thinking about thinking about packing for Ireland.

First, a bit of rash footage, for any doubters out there. I figured the top-inch of my butt crack has already made its way into this public space, so why be shy:


Here's me with my classy cinched-shirt outfit, giving Kevin that cranky-wife look: "Dude, you'd better not be including any of my midsection in this picture" (he KNEW the white mid-section was off photographic limits, but that didn't seem to matter):


The rash is basically gone now, thank the lord.

Next, the ice cream cake. Now look, nobody ever said that it would be decorated in a professional manner. "Yay" exclaimed the cake, in celebration to our friend G's successful completion of a triathalon AND his EMT-training course:


A cake-toast: to G!


Cuttin' it up.


The cake was of perfect, Baskin-Robbins-like consistency. I'm not sure if I'd do the organic cake next time, though: chemically Duncan Hines ultimately tastes better, in my opinion. Next time I'm doing vanilla cake with strawberry ice cream. The possibilities are endless!

OK, next post will be from the Land-o-the-Irish. Adios!

Glad I Have ______!

Greetings, KuKd-ers and Inquisitive Guests!

So much to say, so little Internet speed in my pleasantly air-conditioned airport hotel outside of Pittsburgh, where K and I are preparing for our return flight to Seattle. Bikes are packed up, legs finally shaven, hair washed, bruised arse still bruised, mandatory post-shaving-post-showering hotel-sex had, supposedly canned- ravioli-induced rash still present but less noticeable (honestly, I don't think it was the ravioli; what could possibly be harmful about ingesting the mass quantities of things like disodium guan-itch-icide and monosodium glut-a-rash that Chef Boy-R-Dee can't seem to leave out of his recipes?).

I have some pictures of certain things I want to highlight about our trip - such as a close-up shot of a jar of bean salad with two cartoon Amish men on the front, picked up at a farmers market off the bike trail. But I'm going to leap backward instead, and talk about the little psychological "game" I found myself playing at the start of our trip. Gotta process this now before it disappears like a foggy dream.

It's called: "Glad I Have ____."

Some necessary background: we began this trip in Washington, D.C. at an annual reunion of friends who were all in Peace Corps Uzbekistan with us over a decade ago. Which is to say that for 2.5 years we all got really dirty together, taught Uzbek youngsters how to say "book" and "tree" in English (for the humanitarian betterment of the entire world, of course), got drunk on vodka made of fermented onions and motor oil and did lots of subsequent hooking up, learned a strange Turkic language that never ever comes in handy in the real world, and grimly ate foul-tasting sheep-ass cooked in sheep-ass fat. All funded by American tax-payers. Woo-hoo!

As with any reunion, there was a lot of catching up to do. Lots of questions asked and answered about work and family status. Of course, there were pregnant women and lots of formerly-infant kids running around, too, and with that came some internal musing about my own "status," if you will, juxtaposed against everyone else's. So who/where/what/how am I now, eleven years after returning hairy, dirty, broke, and unemployed from Uzbekistan? What's this life that I have?

Which brings me to the dialogue I found myself having inside my head as I chewed thoughtfully on nan-bread with butter while conversing with others. Not so much of a dialogue, really, but more a bold new assertion that kept swinging itself out of my mind and back to me, like a boomerang: "Glad I have ____."

* * *

Not long ago, oh...say...a year or more ago, I was in a distinct place of longing for something better. It wasn't about "glad I have." It was about: "wish I had." I recall there being a little kernel of bitterness lodged in my brain, flashing a single toxic statement across my frontal lobe whenever I was near women expressing their pregnancy/parenthood-related complaints: sure, your nipples might be sore and what-not, BUT I WISH I HAD WHAT YOU HAVE. A terrible and bitchy and unfair thing to think, but I'm embarrassed to say, I thought such vile things anyway.

Sometimes this"wish I had" mode of thinking (well...pining, actually) even spilled over into other areas of life. At least you make six-figures. At least you have a big kitchen. At least you didn't stupidly buy your home at the peak of its market value. At least you know how to bake good bread. At least your spouse makes so much money that you don't have to work. At least you know five different languages fluently. At least you can eat as much fried chicken as you want and never gain a pound. At least you have a Harvard degree. At least you get to live on a farm, in a farm house, with farm animals, and do farm-like things.

Got all that? Well get this: reasons unbeknownst to man, THIS trip was different somehow. Don't ask me why. Passage of time, maybe? East-coast coffee instead of west-coast? Even with the pregnant bellies popping out, the growing children racing around everyone's legs and squealing - things that should have cast that cloud of gloom over my soul - that little phrase "wish I had" instead became, barely perceptibly even to myself: "Glad I have______."

* * *

Let's start with the phenomenon of being a single, intelligent, thirty-something person who may WANT a child, but hasn't met Mr. or Mrs. Right yet to shoot / soak-up the spooge respectively. Or maybe not thinking about kids at all - just wanting a long-term relationship with a loved best friend who has sex with you on demand. Not a bad or outlandish thing to want, is it? You might be one of those very people, or know people like that.

I have a lot of very good friends who fit into that exact category - several of whom attended this very reunion, and at least one of whom I happen to know would like a child. It's just the man-component of the equation that's missing. This makes me terribly sad, and I don't mean to sound condescending about this; these friends of mine are all brilliant people, doing fine and living productive and amazing lives. It's just that being with someone you love is so...rewarding....and of course, you want the best for your friends. You want them to reap the relationship-rewards that you've already discovered - kind of like sharing your favorite recipe or restaurant. It makes me wish there were some magical marriage-making ravioli that people could eat from a can and POOF - meet the sexy person of their dreams.

But even more than that, it makes me grateful for what I've got. I'm talking consciously, viscerally grateful - more than I've been in some time. Several time during the course of this gathering with friends, the sentence shot through my frontal lobe like a message dragged by a small airplane:

I'm glad I have Kevin.

For as uncannily shitty luck I've had with creating a child, my fortune has been equally awesome in falling into a relationship that works. Kids or no kids, house or no house, farm or no farm, money or none, I'm just glad I have Kevin. And not for anything that I did better than anyone else; no real reason other than happening to have been in the right place, right time, with a man whose needs and wants and values matched mine in precisely the right way. (Please don't tell him I said that or his cheeks will turn red; he hates this sort of talk.)

* * *

It didn't stop there, this onslaught of unforeseen gladness. There were friends with kids ages two-and-up, all the way to one couple with a seven-year-old daughter. Most haven't traveled overseas in years, or even gotten any alone time away from their offspring to just cuddle and screw and eat French onion soup in candle-lit restaurants and drink wine and take road-trips and do other romantic couple-stuff (not that there's much more romantic than the three things I just mentioned). Not that they were complaining about this overtly; it just came up in conversation. And for the first time, instead of thinking I WANT WHAT YOU HAVE, my dominant thought was:

I'm glad I've gotten to do everything I just mentioned - and a lot of it - over this past decade. And I'm not sensing an end to it anytime soon.

* * *

There was more, much more. I'm glad I'm basically healthy, and that all of my terminal ailments until this point seem to exist primarily in my head. I'm glad I live in a city surrounded by mountains - I mean, real West-coast mountains- and water. I'm glad I have a basically awesome, sane, intelligent, joke-making family AND family-in-law (see? luck-o-the-Irish!). I'm glad I have a dog who supports me, and who loves me even when I'm gassy and burpy. I'm glad I love my job.

Now, none of this is to brag or boast about how my life is better than anyone else's. There are still plenty of things about my life that I wish were different, gaps that I'd like to fill.

It simply came as a refreshing shock to me that I could suddenly see, without the haze of grief that weighs a person down so hard and fiercely, what I have. I'm going to be bold here and put a generalization out there: losing something - not getting what we want so badly - makes us wiser in some ways, but blind in others. At least, for me it's done that at certain times in my life: made the deaths themselves eclipse the good parts of life like a big, black round moon - making me lose sight of what I have that others might be mourning themselves, the very "I WISH I HAD WHAT YOU HAVE" mantra that could be going through my own friends' minds when they look at me, those thoughts unspoken because we never really say such things out loud.

Maybe we all have things that others wish they had; we just sort of forget to think about those things. It's much easier to focus on what we're missing.

OK, I'd better sign off before I accidentally give the false impression that I actually know what I'm talking about, that I'm not just the bumbling, babbling gnome in a forest trying to navigate my way around. Oh, it's also time to lift up my shirt and demand that Kevin examine my rash and assert that it's still there, and that it "looks like it's really uncomfortable." That's been our twice-daily routine since this whole rash-brouhaha started.

And why break a good routine.

(For the record, I AM NOT GLAD about this rash).

I'm Not Really Here, But...

Hello, Ice Cream Cake Enthusiasts:

I'm out of the web-o-sphere through early next week due to being sequestered for a week in the Allegheny "Mountains" of Pennsylvania (well, except for right now, as I managed to drag Kevin to bed-and-breakfast in rural Maryland for a single evening), so I apologize for slacking in the blog-visiting and blog-updating department. More on this later. A few deets in the meantime:

1) Riding a bike and pulling a 50-lb. trailer for 50 miles a day = my ass feels like a Ichiro tried to spank me with a baseball bat all night.

2) Kevin and I ate unheated Chef Boy-R-Dee beef ravioli straight from a can last night. First time I've eaten that since I was about 12. Goddamn, that stuff is good.

3) Today I broke out in a mysterious rash on my back that stings whenever anything comes into contact with it. As a result, I have to ride with my blue tank top cinched up around my boobs and tied into a knot (not pretty), feeling like a pasty flabby white-trash Confederate-flag-toting biker as I ride along. OH - and I'm wearing a fanny pack around my waste, too. Classy! Goes great with the belly folds.

4) A lot of people have Confederate flags on display around here. Weird. Isn't that...like...so 1800s? Aren't there better causes to join, more relevant and current things to wave flags for?

5) Kevin and I jumped in a river, swam around, and then had good tent-sex last night. I think some 12-year-old boys from the next campsite over - plus a couple of groundhogs nesting nearby - might have been eavesdropping, but I didn't care. They'll never see me again, the little rascals. That was before I got the rash this morning. Blegh.

6) Oh, and today is...what...the 18th? Today or tomorrow is the 2-year anniversary of Zachary's dirth. Not sure what to do with that information inside my mind, except look up at the big black star-filled sky from my campsite, listen to wind rustling in the trees, squeeze Kevin's hand because we're both thinking the same thing, and remember. Sadly, fondly, with wonderment of what's comprised our shared history.

And gratefully - grateful for what we do have, and for how quiet and huge the earth is around us. Bigger than ourselves, bigger than we'll ever be - just like pregnancy and birth and death and everything else made by nature.

That's all the deep thoughts I can dredge up for now - "see" you next week. Time to go see if I can score some more sympathy points from Kevin for this dang rash! OH - and I had MEATLOAF for dinner tonight! At a restaurant! It was like canned ravioli times 20 on the scale of culinary delight.

Over and out.

Inner-Kid Moment

Greetings, Inner-Kiddies!

First, one day left to vote on this summer's Knocked Down Hunk Contest. Quick: send me your man's (or your self's) pics for our next contest, which will happen as soon as I've amassed sufficient mouthwatering male images. As for the current race, looks like our man Double-D is still in the lead. Which isn't surprising, because let's face it: there's something automatically sexy about soldiers, cops, fire fighters, anyone who engages in activities that involve physical activity and putting one's own life in danger. Pro-sports players also count as combatant hunks of man, as evidenced by Tuesday's bench-clearing, mouthwatering brawl between Boston's Kevin Youkilis and Detroit's scrawny ball-beaning pitcher Porcello (probably just grumpy that he has to live in Detroit). I've watched a crappy homemade replay of that I'm not sure how many times, marveling at this festival of chaotic manly hotness.

ANYWAY, just because I put a link there doesn't mean you should click on it. Stay here! I've got more important things to discuss.

As the current, self-proclaimed reigning Thinker-Upper-of-Snooty-Snobby-Reasons-Why-I'm-Better-Off-Without-Poopy-Barfy-Kids, I still have moments (plenty of them, actually) when I wistfully think: DAMN. Having a child of my own, poop and barf and all, would be / could be / might be actually enjoyable. Moments of looking back at the time when, during the acid-trippy months after Zach's dirth, I frantically gathered packets on international adoption and foster care, nail-chompingly desperate to be a mother. Didn't care how it happened, or how much cash it took, or how out-there my kid-acquisition measures might seem to others (including my own husband).

I wanted offspring, and I wanted it now.

Thank god, though: that feeling of maternal desperation passed for the most part. Keep in mind, folks, I've got nearly two years of Dead-Baby Mommahood under my belt to smooth out (some of) those rough edges of insanity.

Even still, I've got longings sometimes, reasons for multiplying that sometimes express themselves in the form of little conversations inside my head. And one of those reasons, among others, is: having a kid means getting to do, and get excited about, those things I used to do, and get excited about as a kid. Things like Christmas, for example. Getting a tree. Having sing-alongs. Going to the pumpkin patch. Jumping into a pile of red and orange leaves. Watching Saturday morning cartoons. Getting dressed up in a pink frilly dress and going to fancy Easter brunch with my grandparents.

Ann and Lis have kids, and they do fun stuff with them. And ya know what? Much of it is the kind of stuff that, if you were to attempt it with a handful of your adult thirty- or forty-something buddies, you'd eventually stop and look at each other and go, "Why the hell are we doing this? Let's go hit the tavern. " On the other hand, imagine if you have child with you, a giddily enthusiastic child enjoying these things! Then you might change your stick-in-the-mud, grown-up-old-scroogy attitude, now wouldn't you. I certainly would. At least I think I would.

Anyway, lately I've had several conversations with friends about "foods that remind me of childhood." That is: foods that taste EXACTLY the way they did when I was seven or eight years old, and that I sometimes ate, and that I loved. The main ones I can think of are:

1) grape Kool-Aid
2) McDonald's cheeseburgers (just the simple basic ones without any lettuce and tomato)
3) Baskin-Robbins ice cream cake

We never, ever had these things in the house, of course. They were all reserved for special occasions like birthdays and such.

In the course of remembering these delicious food-items, I got fixated on the Baskin-Robbins ice cream cake. Now, the ones I ate as a child never were this fancy, but here's a contemporary example of one:

See that top one? Layer of chocolate cake. Layer of ice cream. Layer of frosting.

I decided to do something which, if I were a child, I would simply go ga-ga over: attempt to make a home-made Baskin Robbins ice cream cake. Now look. I know that "mom's homemade replicas of chain-restaurant food items" are NEVER as good as the chain-restaurant food-items. Sorry, but mom's pan-fried cheese burger simply isn't a McDonald's one, not even if the ingredients are technically the same. Still, I had this sudden inexplicible longing to do something fun and nostalgic to make in the kitchen, something which I would have gotten excited about if my own mother had tried it. And if I HAD a child, that child would certainly stand on a chair beside me and "help."

It went like this:

First, I started with boxed vanilla cake. Sorry, but this DB-Momma is way too lazy to make the real thing from scratch. I used organic, for what it's worth, and not chocolate, because it seemed like that might be chocolate overkill. Kevin disagrees, but whatev. This was MY ridiculous, messy endeavor, not his!


Tebow took great interest in the baked, rectangular vanilla cake that emerged from the oven after 30 minutes at 350 degrees. Watch him stare in canine wonderment, unsure of what that steaming rectangle is exactly, but praying to the God of Dogs that a tender morsel will fall directly onto his snout!



After I'd allowed it to cool, it was time to flip the fucker over onto a piece of tin foil. But the fucker wouldn't flip, even though I'd put about...oh...three inches of canola oil on the bottom of the pan. Viktoria, baker betty, if you're reading this...help! I had to go to drastic measures to get the thing out of its firmly ensconced position inside the pan.




Worked like a charm. Nobody would ever know my amature-chef secret cake-transferring method!


NOW, drumroll please, came the BESTEST, FUNNEST, AWESOMEST, KICK-ASSEST, AMAZINGEST, BITCHIN'EST part of the whole thing. Check this out:


You got that right, honey child! Slicing directly through a box of ice cream. Seriously, I get to do this in my adult life? This looks like something we only got to do in kindergarden. Boy oh boy, you should have seen the perma-grin on my face as I sawed through this rectangular-version-of-a-cube (whatever the word for that is) of Cookies-n-Cream ice cream.

Tebow diligently patrolled for falling ice-cream molecules, of course.




TAH-DAH! Tell me how freakin' cool that is! Go on, tell me!


The ice cream was gingerly transferred to the cake-brick level.


Of course, no self-respecting Baskin Robbins ice cream cake would have ledges of cake jutting out from the sides. So I had to do some trimming.


Now, there are probably saint-like people out there who take trimmed cake-slivers and simply throw them into the trash. But not me. No, no, no - not when I paid...what...$3.50 for that box of cake mix! See that great big hunk-o-trimmed-cake, the one closest to the camera? Yeah, that one. I ate that one with a glass of milk, and chased it with salt-n-vinager potato chips. That's what I love about being an adult: you can do that shit, EVEN RIGHT BEFORE DINNERTIME, and nobody's going to chastise you for it.


So, the trimmed cake went into the freezer to... I don't know...just chill for a while. Next, I had to Google what exactly IS the "frosting" that Baskin Robbins uses on its cakes, so that I could precisely duplicate it. Turns out, much to my disbelief (and slight disappointment) that it's nothing but vanilla ice cream! Just plain old vanilla ice cream, which supposedly first gets softened to "frosting consistency." I was skeptical that a cake could be frosted with half-melted ice cream, but had to set my doubts aside if I ever hoped to finish this project.

So I let some vanilla sit on the counter for about a half-hour, and then got to work frantically trying to whip it up into something frosting-like. This was not a leisurely, pause-in-the-middle-to-sip-tea kind of affair. Especially not since the "recipe" online fwarned repeatedly in italics: "WORK FAST SO THAT EVERYTHING DOESN'T MELT INTO A GIGANTIC PUDDLE OF MELTED ICE-CREAMY GOO!"


So I stirred, stirred, stirred. Glad I wore deodorant that day; this was a bit of an arm-workout.


Lo and behold, it DID turn into something frosting-like! I was thrilled. Out came my trimmed icecream cake-rectangle, and on went my vanilla-icecream "frosting."






Then came the final, magical embellishment. No skimping here: this is the first part of the cake that will be viewed by others, and I wasn't about to settle for less than an absolutely fantastic impression! I went with Double Stuff Oreos - no Paul Newman fruit-juice sweetened fake Oreos or single-stuff. It was double or nothin'.


Unexpectedly difficult to chop into rough pieces, these things were. The "stuff" in the middle kept squishing out the sides. But in the end, with perseverance and a positive attitude, I managed. Check out this Oreo-Cookie-scape:


Onto the cake they went. Fast, fast, before everything turned to liquid!


Then boom: the 99%-finalized product. I was proud of my achievement.


Now, this goes into the freezer to get good and frozen and Baskin-Robbins-y, after which it will eventually get adorned with blue swirls from a tube of frosting, and brought to a party for a certain someone.

AHHHH, I love inner-kid moments!

Pulling the Emotional Trigger

Greetings, KuKd'ers and Inquisitive Guests!

Sunday morning: today is a bound to be decent day. The plan (see? making plans again!) is brunch with friends followed by a bike ride along a closed-off section of road near Lake Washington. It's a Pacific Northwest thing: you eat something organicky like free-range bacon from pigs that were hugged at least once a day, and then you do something outdoorsy. Then you come home and take a well-deserved nap.

And then if you're lucky, you get to have a post-nap bout of sex in the bedroom while your mother leaves a lengthy message on the answering machine about the new futon she just bought from Dania. You ignore her sing-songy voice and bite your lower lip, attempting to concentrate on that latest sexual fantasy instead, hoping you're not a bad person for not frantincally disentangling yourself from your partner and running naked into the other room to pick up the phone. It's your own mother, for god's sake! You can have intercourse any old time, but your parents are getting OLD! They might be dead soon! And then, you'll look back and wish you'd taken every opportunity to talk to them in person....

Anyway. Don't ask me where THAT tangent came from. I really am going breakfast-eating and bike-riding with friends today, but sort of made up the sex-and-mother-on-phone bit. I think my brain is on overdrive this morning.

* * *

Moving on to the pre-point point of this post (not the real point):

As a handful of you might vaguely recall, about four months after Zachary's dirth, Kevin and I went to Ecuador to "reconnect with our backpacking, beer-drinking, foreign-travelling" selves (you should see my updated passport photo, which was taken a mere six-weeks after The Death: I look like one of those "after" pictures from Faces of Meth. One of these days I'll scan it and show it to you for laughs).

As all you bloggers out there know, writing is one of the best, most cathartically awesome activities that a person can possibly do when hit with something traumatic. Am I right or am I right? So while in Ecuador, I started keeping a journal-like thingy on a scrap of lined paper. Over the next year, I drank a shit-ton of coffee and wrote more and more. That scrap of paper turned into lots of scraps of paper, which turned into a gigantic Microsoft Word document, which somehow morphed into a full-fledged memoir about dead-baby-motherhood. Astoundingly, somebody thought it was decent, and last week I signed a contract to have it published through Catalyst Press, small publisher in San Fransisco.

The thing with the memoir is, honestly I don't even care if it sells. Well, that's not totally true: if I can make up my cost of replacing laser ink cartridges and bring in enough to take myself and Kevin out to dinner at a fancy restaurant to celebrate - that would be nice. But I didn't write it for money. I wrote it because it felt good to write, and because I needed to generate some raunchy humor about the whole mess before I died of sadness. When the book comes out in 2010, I think I'll like having some closure to that year of highly caffeinated writing, and something to hand over to my parents, who are going to be proud of me.

And ya know, even as we all creep into our 30s and 40s and beyond, isn't making our parents proud of us STILL about the grandest feelings on earth? For me it is.


* * *

Now, here's the REAL point:

I've already got aNOTHER cool book concept up my sleeve (thanks, caffeine!), and I'm going to be tapping your brains about it from time to time. Truthfully, it's not something I can even attempt to do without input from other dead-baby mommas (can I just say DBM from now on?). So it's really going to be more of a collaborative effort, the way I see it. And hey: if you articulate an idea brilliantly, I might even quote you directly in the book, which I can't imagine you not enjoying.

Essentially, my next book idea is a slim, down-and-dirty KuKd survival manual written in a tone and style that "speaks" to a young(ish), smart/savvy/cynical/pissed/saddened audience of women and men (ok fine, mostly women) who have just undergone miscarriage or stillbirth.

Right now, Empty Cradle, Broken Heart is about the closest thing there is these days to a KuKd survival guide. I'm picturing something about half that size, written in a younger, more girl-talky, gritty tone, with a military girl-scout cover like something you'd carry around if you were lost in the woods. Its a book that will require lots of research, and I picture it having some similar sections as Empty Cradle - things like "you may be feeling _______" with various survival tips scattered throughout.

I don't have a catchy title yet, but for now I'm just going to lamely and boringly refer to it as "The KuKd Survival Manual." As I said, you'll likely get tapped for ideas here from time to time. I'm going to need other seasoned, wise DBM's like you to gather quotes for the book and help me sure that what we tell the audience of this book (our poor friends who are JUST NOW going through what we've gone through) isn't completely off the wall.

And guess what: that starts right here, this very Sunday morning! Here we go.

DBMs, put your thinking caps on and help me out: Do you think it's beneficial to expose yourself to sad, even baby-laden situations sometimes during the year or so after KuKd, for the purpose of deliberately opening the crying/feeling floodgates?

As in, is that something you'd ever recommend to a friend who just lost her baby? I know I know I know. It seems like a completely out-there and sadistic idea. But before you scream out NOOOOOO, read on -and then you can still scream out NOOOOO if you want to:

Recently, somebody wrote to me with an Ask a Dead Baby Momma question: "What are some tips for avoiding baby showers?" A perfectly valid question. Why would you ever want to expose yourself to something that's going to be upsetting? As queen of baby-shower avoidance back in the day, I know that feeling well.

Even more recently, fellow blogger Tina pointed out this blurb from Empty Cradle:

"There is research showing that tears are a biologically necessary way of relieving stress-there is evidence that tears remove stress-induced toxins from the body. Holding back tears can induce stress, resulting in a variety of psychological and physical symptoms, including exacerbation of preexisting conditions ..."

So true, isn't it? Crying is good. It's healthy. It feels right. There just isn't anything but a good, hard cry. The problem is - for me at least - there are times when you know you should be crying because you're still sad, but the tears just don't come. One of my DBM friends in Seattle was just lamenting to me about this peculiar condition - when that post-KuKd numb sensation takes over and you just can't seem to...well...feel. It's frustrating to know there's something in there, a great big scary ball of grief, and yet you can't seem to access it in a productive and helpful way.

It made me think of the times when, about eight months after Zachary's dirth, I did - in fact- start reluctantly going to stuff: baby b-day parties, gatherings with babies. Not all the time, just once in a while. Nothing triggered me to feel quite like those events. The drives home from those were always soaked in tears, with me having to pull over to blow my nose on my hair. For all of the obvious reasons, they made me sad. The reminded me of what was lost, what could have been, what wasn't.

But somehow, deep down, I also remember enjoying releasing that floodgate of emotion so easily, that visceral sense of being reminded, poked and prodded, as though Zachary was with me at that moment saying: "Remember me? I was here, and now I'm not."

So I'm wondering, could it be GOOD to expose yourself to shit like that? Four months, eight months, a year after you lose your own child? I mean, not right away, but months later? Or is that so potentially harmful that it isn't worth it? Is it best to skillfully avoid hurtful situations to keep yourself in-tact, or is it OK to let yourself fall apart from time to time?

OK, I'm thinking so hard in circles right now that I need to take a break. Off to change into my biking attire; looking forward to thoughts from the peanut gallery!

Fight! Fight! Fight!

Greeetings, Weepsters!

Goodness, I didn't realize that last post was going to turn on the waterworks for so many readers. Well, what would life be without a good cry every now and again, right? I even watered up while writing that one. It's funny; I showed that post to Kevin (who, incidentally, stopped reading my blog a long time ago - the dastardly bastard), and his response was: "I don't get why this one is making your readers get all sappy and emotional. It's just...a post about my school reunion." Sigh. Men.

Moving on...I was going to talk about something lighthearted and silly this morning in the spirit of balance and contrast. But then good old Stirrup Queen brought my attention to a recent article in the Washington Post, in which staff writer Alan Goldenbach laments society's apparent inability to talk about stillbirth. My gut reaction to this article was surprising even to myself, so I'll share that here and save the fluff for next time.

Here's the thing (sound familiar?): Goldenbach wanted answers about his own son's dirth, but his doctors pretty much dismissed his questions and were reluctant to look more deeply into possible preventable causes. Cord accident or something similarly, unnervingly vague. Shit happens, they basically told him. Goldenbach's point was that everyone, even doctors, are unable to talk about stillbirth and its causes and possible prevention measures, and that this was...well...frustrating to say the least.

But what really caught my attention wasn't the article itself, but the eye-popping comments that were posted by readers in response. Check out these zingers:

"Oh, for pete's sake, people. I'm a mother, so I understand how crushed you all must be if you have lost a fetus or child. Nobody should have to go through it, but surely you realize it is a fact of life that people die at every stage of development and life from causes that are nobody's fault. Some of the bits of this article and the comments are ridiculous. Everyone should be told of all the miniscule risks that nobody can do anything about?"

"Our planet has 7 billion selfish dolts running around on it already, with projections for 9 billion by mid-century. So when Mother Nature occasionally decides to cull or limit our human herd, it's best that we not overanalyze her judgment or resist it to any great degree. Instead, let's learn to embrace Nature's judgment and properly resolve that, when our number is up, we go quickly and courageously for the good of the whole."

"I hate self-indulgent first person pieces like this that have come to define the health section."


Yowsers! Seething, searing verbage! Sounds like some shit is going down, if you ask me. Doesn't that make you want to gather around the hallway in highschool and start shouting FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT!? The Black-Clad, Pierced-Genitalia KuKd Fighters verus Pale-Moon-Faced Anonymous and Insensitive Commenters Who Clearly Don't Get It. Fist-swinging, hair-pulling action:

Let me start by saying that as a (god, I hate this word) blogger (actually, I'd prefer to be on the called a Caffeinated Talkaholic with a Laptop Stuck to the Tops of My Thighs) with a couple of dead babies under my belt, I initially felt this odd sense of reponsibility for "defending the KuKd tribe," so to speak. That is, springing out of my butt-imprinted chair, arms flailing, and screaming out the most obvious response that others might expect:

THOSE INSENSITIVE, DICK-HEADED COMMENTERS!

In fact, we might all feel better if we stood up together and said it. Come on, everybody now. One, two, three: THOSE INSENSITIVE, DICK-HEADED COMMENTERS!

Good. We can all breathe easy now and settle down.

* * *

But I'll be honest here. Philosophically, I agree with the core meaning of those comments. Don't sue me for this; I just do. I think Jesus would agree they're true (and nobody knows Jesus better than I do). I think Mother Theresa and Ghandi and the ancient Greek gods would agree they're true. Those comments could very well be posted by people in my own circle of highly opinionated friends.

Now, do I agree that these things said by commenters are 100% right 100% of the time for 100% of people in the world? No. Do I agree with how/when/where/to whom they were presented? No. Were there about eight million better ways for these commenters to get their points across than sharing them in an irritated tone of voice with a man who has JUST lost his baby? Yes. Are these comments likely to do any good whatsoever in the grand scheme of things, change anyone's mind about anything, make the fact of death any less horrible for anyone? No - not in the way they were channeled. Wrong place, wrong tone, wrong time. Too bad for those commenters, and too bad for Goldenbach who as to suffer through reading them.

* * *

There was a post I did a long ago, back when I first started this blog, when my brain was still like a fragile 1,000-piece puzzle thrown hastily together and not quite in tact. I can't seem to find this old post, probably because I deleted it, fearful that I might offend someone in this emotionally charged, dead-baby blog-o-realm. This post was about the various societies and associations and organizations and what-nots "for the prevention of stillbirth" that I'd come across during my post-stillbirth Googling spree.

They were filled with lots of bold red fonts, grave and terror-inducing warnings about how often the Evil Stillbirth Monster really can be stopped! If only we know what signs to look for! If only our government understood, and would fund the research for this! If only our doctors weren't uncaring jerks, they'd stand behind us on our question for more facts! Join the fight against the evil nameless, faceless Dictator of Stillbirth today! He's up there like Darth Vador, controlling the gears as he looks downward at YOU, innocent and unsuspecting pregnant woman, ready to snatch your infant with the flick of a dark gloved hand!

BE AFRAID! BE VERY AFRAID!

These sorts of things didn't get me revved up in any way. On the contrary, they made me immediately click the "X" in the top right-hand corner and run into the other room. They seemed like dangerous pitfalls, beckoning me to come in to grope around bits of illusional control: "Moooonnicaaa! You could have done something diffeeerrentlyyyy! If only you'd been counting kiiiicccckkks....asking more questionnnnnss...You could be doing something nowwww....to prevent this in the futureeeee...if you sit here and Google enough shiiiiitttt....if you call your doctor enough tiiiiimmmmesss...."

And why NOT leap right into those websites, start making Excel spreadsheets showing every factor that has ever been correlated with baby-loss in the world so I could ensure I'd do everything right next time, and maybe even pinpoint the cause of Zachary's death - from breathing in urban areas, to petting a stray dog, to washing my hands fewer than 20 times a day, to eating a molecule of Brie cheese, to not instantly calling my doctor in a panic when I didn't feel the baby do at least ten full-on rounds of gymnastics inside my belly? Why not follow my doctors around the hallways and demand that they give me some answers, which they obviously had but were withholding, or simply weren't digging deeply enough to find them on my behalf?

It would have been completely natural for me to do so, to make that spreadsheet, even to start a stillbirth-prevention research group of my own. Just like with Washington Post writer Alan Goldenbach: it's a natural article for him to write, a natural frustration to have about our medical system, where he's looking for answers and not finding any. I looked this up, just to make sure I'm not pulling this out of my arse. Here's what a University of Indiana professor says:

"The bereaved feel a strong need to regain the feeling that their life, somehow, is normal. Unfortunately, the "normal" they now experience is no longer normal as they knew it before. They are caught in a paradox of needing a normalcy that is predictable and understandable while seeing a world that is neither. One example of the coping that results from this quandary...is an effort to reclaim normal by actively seeking out and processing information about the loss. It focuses on regaining a sense of structure in the parents' lives, attributing meaning to the loss and events surrounding the loss, and the gathering of information that would provide a context for understanding."

So, regarding Goldenbach. I'm pretty sure that's the psychological place where his article comes from, where a lot of blogs in the KuKd blog-o-sphere come from, where a lot of frantic post-Kukd Googling comes from, where genetic counseling comes from, where switching doctors altogether comes from, where suing doctors for malpractice comes from, where years of infertility treatment comes from, where our incredible urge to research and plan and fix things comes from. And you know, in a lot of ways it's probably good that human brains are programmed to react to trauma like that, because sometimes - not always, but sometimes - all of that answer-seeking and researching and planning does have positive results, right?

That's the part those commenters were obviously not seeing or understanding. They were falling into the classic trap of viewing reality with blinders on, the way we so often do with all kinds of things. Analyzing death and looking for ways to prevent it, as Goldenbach was doing: it's either just plain brilliant or just plain idiotic, totally right or totally wrong, regardless of multiple perspectives or various nuanced sides of the issue. Same with abortion, the Iraq War, choosing plastic bags over paper, or any other political or cultural or social issue on this whole huge planet: people get into this ridgid, righteous mode of claiming that everything can be defined as either right or wrong, good or bad, in a binary way. It gets us in trouble sometimes. It makes us come across as assholes, as these commenters did.

And what a shame - because, as I've said, these commenters make perfectly legitimate points, in my opinion! All that good thought gone to waste because they couldn't step outside their own minds and see things differently, and respect where Goldenbach was coming from, and recognize that their comments wouldn't do any good in the context of this article. They couldn't change their tones a bit into something more helpful and positive for people who are grieving.

* * *

By the way, it's not that I didn't have my frantic-researching bonanza a-la Goldenbach. Calling the docs over at fetal medicine every day, making folders of information on fetal heart calcification, all that helped me initially, giving me this weird illusion that I had control, which somehow soothed me at the time. But I realized soon enough that this was pretty much just eye-candy, or soul-candy, sweet and caloric but not very nutritious, and not any real way to recover in the long-term.

Not to get all hippy-dippy, but in the end I sort of saw myself as a fluttering leaf on a great big maple tree of humanity. My baby was up there too as a leaf on that tree, one baby-leaf out of godtrillions. And when his number came up, his leaf was plucked and poof - he was gone. There were some genetics involved, but nothing conclusive. In the end, I felt OK with that, because to me, this never seemed like a preventable something. It seemed like a part of the cycle of life and death, a meant-to-be sort of occurance. What made me so special as to deserve anything more - more answers, less senseless death - than the hundreds of thousands killed in any given recent disaster? The answer I came up with was: nothing.

That's just me. I'm not saying that my perspective is the be-all and end-all way that everyone should view their own baby-deaths or fetus-deaths or even difficulty making babies in the first place. It was just what was healthy and best for me and my cynical, over-thinking brain.

So, going back to the Washington Post article (you knew I'd return to that, right?): would I go out for coffee with a group of those commenters? Sure. They've got strong opinions that I happen to agree with. I'd be curious to see how they changed their words, their tones, maybe even their viewpoints altogether, while actually sitting face-to-face with someone who has lost a child and not casting out comments from the safe and anonymous world of the Internet. Would I go out for coffee with Goldenbach? Sure. I can sympathize with his situation at the most basic level.

Maybe we could all get together in a park one day - a bunch of people from all sides -and have a potluck/share-a-thon.

Or not. :-)

A Strange Kind of Daddyhood

Last night, I was Kevin’s date for his grade-school reunion at a fancy-ish restaurant on northern California's rugged coast. This was Kevin's night, not mine: his core group of mostly Hispanic buddies from Catholic school looked up and shouted "KEEVVV!!!" when we walked in fashionably late. These were the old friends he threw spitballs with from the back of Sister Bernice's classroom, shot baskets with, bumped heads with in Pop Warner football, loitered outside the convenience store with in hopes of scoring porn magazines from the immigrant artichoke farmers. I spent much of the evening sitting back, munching thoughtfully on my plateful of crab cakes and roasted artichokes, and just plain listening with amusement to these childhood tales while Kevin did the talking on our behalf.

As with any group that hasn't seen each other in twenty-some-odd years, there was a lot of leaning into the table and summing up the key details that had helped shape the full-fledged adults that these former grade-schoolers had become: marriages, deaths, births, graduations, job status. When inevitably asked: "So what have YOU been up to since age 13,” the version Kevin spun out was that we're a couple of non-church-going, world-traveling college teachers with one dog.

No kids?

When someone asked that reasonable follow-up question, Kevin took a swig of beer and said, simply: “nope.” Verb-tense-wise, it's a perfectly accurate answer: nope. We don't have - present-tense have - kids. I wouldn't say I have a grandfather either, given that both of mine are long gone. And Kevin certainly isn't the type to lower his voice and gratuitously clarify, “Well, we had a son, but he died as a four-month fetus, and another son after that named Zachary, but he was stillborn two years ago.”

No way, Jose.

As the night progressed and the fourth round of strong cocktails came out, the conversation moved beyond mere superficial life summaries, and the deeper tragic, more grown-up dirt began to emerge. I'm talking about the tear-jerking events that carve us into wiser, more weathered people than the children we were in 5th grade. One example was Sana, the woman sitting across from me: single. No kids. Mother died young of breast cancer when she was 16. Sister died later as a homeless druggie in San Francisco. Everybody nodded and said, “ohhhh. I’m so sorry.”

As it was, Kevin's own story of grown-up dirt never did come up.

But with everyone talking about their kids, their tragedies, marriages and non-marriages, their jobs, their achievements, I felt his grade-school friends should know - and would probably find it interesting if they knew to ask: Kevin did father a full-term baby son who died. Maybe two, depending on what you call baby - but definitely one. Doesn't this fact of his past make him much more of a complex person than mere kid-free, lanky white dude in jeans and flip-flops with a beer in one hand, other hand resting on brunette wife's knee - the way he appeared last night?

I wanted there to be a place for him to talk about his brief and surreal experience of fatherhood, a way to give this more complete picture of his life loves and losses, his history. But the thing about stillbirth and miscarriage is that there just isn't always a smooth segue, a comfortable and natural opportunity to bring it up, as with born-living humans who developed into thinking, talking people who are known by others. Who would think to ask Kevin, "how's the baby?" when nobody even knows there ever was a baby in the first place?

So it went untold, that piece of Kevin's life, buried beneath like a cherry pit in the ground. He didn't think anything of it, but I drove us home with my brow slightly furrowed, bothered by it, then bothered that I was bothered by it.

* * *

The last bit of Sana's story was that as she sat there holding her dying, still-young mother’s hand, her mom told her not to worry. She was going off to be with the two babies that had existed before Sana, she said; both late miscarriages from several decades ago.

"I love those two babies as much as you, and it's their turn to be with me now," her mom told her.

I'll admit - this part got me, and I felt my voice catch a bit, tears prick just barely at my eyes. How amazing, how powerful, that on her death bed, her mother would remember two miscarried babies of all things - that those little children-to-be would be at the forefront of her mind at a god-awful, cancer-ridden, terrifying time on the brink of death.

It made me stare pensively the motel ceiling that night as I tried to fall asleep, thinking about Kevin, about how fatherhood fits in with his history; about our son Zachary himself, floating around somewhere in space. It made me wonder who I'll think of if I'm ever in the unfathomable predicament of consciously dying; if I'll think of Zachary, of the fetus before him, or be instead hoping desperately that there are bacon, coffee, white wine, French food, and decent people to hang out with in the afterlife.

What's more, it made me feel bad that Zachary, our pregnancy with him, hadn't even gotten honorable mention at the dinner table that night. I wanted suddenly and desperately to be able to e-mail him directly. I'd start with Hey Kiddo, and then I'd tell him:

You may have noticed that you didn't come up in conversation at tonight's reunion gathering in which everyone was spilling out major details about their lives. It wasn't because you were not a major recent detail in your father's life, or because your father's spooge was not involved in your creation, or because in the final hours of your life he didn't press the side of his face against my belly to feel your last slow kicks, or because you aren't thought of every waking day by both of us, or because he isn't a tender-hearted man who loves you and me both fiercely.

It's because he'd rather keep you inside of him, safe and protected, and only bring you out among the most special select few people who he really, really knows and trusts. Not a bunch of grown-up kids he threw spitballs with twenty years ago and is only seeing for the first time in two decades. What makes them so special that they should get to hear your story? Take it as a compliment, that your dad has high standards regarding what he discloses to whom, and that he isn't whoring you out to any old gossip-mongers (believe me, I do enough of that).

I hope you're drinking your milk and eating plenty of green leafy vegetables up there.

Love, Mom

I think he would've gotten the point, probably even rolled his eyes at my usual over-thinking. "It's FINE, Mom," he would've called out over his shoulder, already distracted and disappearing out the door to play T-ball, or whatever they play up in infant heaven.

When Plans are Screwed

Greetings, Synthesizers!

In this post, I'm going to try to do what I'm constantly imploring my students to do: synthesize. That is: take multiple sources -

1) Revolutionary Road, the film
2) yesterday's trip to see a mental health counselor

- think about what singular new pattern arises from them, and write about that pattern in a coherent way. Fueled on several gulps of coffee, the summer temperature having not yet soared into the gag-worthy 90s, I feel ready to attack this monstrous critical-thinking task.

Let's start with the film, Revolutionary Road. There were so many things about this movie that struck me as compelling and profoundly thought-provoking. One of those things - the thing I'm going to focus on here - was the PLANS element (there's a reason I'm bolding and capitalizing "PLANS" - wait for it). Kate Winslet is essentially your classic antsy, depressed, bored 1950s housewife, craving adventure and the life she used to have. So she and Leonardo Hottie DiCaprio they make a PLAN to ditch everything, sell the house, pack up their two kids and go to France - not for any particular reason - just for the sake of adventure (I'm sort of picturing Leonardo licking Nutella off of Kate's stomach - now THAT would be the ultimate aventure francaise).

But it turns out - uh oh - Kate is knocked up with PLAN-ruiner number three (er, um, excuse me - I mean child number three). And because Paris is oh-so-primitive, and people just don't HAVE babies in places like Europe, Leonardo decides they can't go. He's going to stay at his ho-hum sales job and Kate isn't going to get her aventure francaise, and they're going to continue living their boring suburban kid-filled lives. They argue about it (well, it's a bit more than "arguing" - think screwing other people and throwing shit at each other), and Kate feels trapped, panicked, all of that - to the point where she ends up creating a dramatic, tragic, last-ditch new PLAN to save her...well...self.

Plans, plans, plans. Making plans, those plans not working out. Making new plans to fill the space where the old plans were. This resonated with me because I am a goddess of plan-making. I also connected with Kate's feeling of trappedness, her need for that France plan, her frantic scramble to another plan to replace that one. Murgdan, everyone's favorite infertility blog-o-beeyatch, wrote a recent post ending with a most insightful line: "That is what I hate about infertility. No planning is possible in the midst of the greatest planned event ever."

When the kid you had PLANNED for doesn't come, you can keep hoping and planning for that damned kid. But how long do you keep up that mode of thinking? At what point do you give up and switch PLANS?

* * *

This is a decent segue into the second item in part of my synthesizing effort this morning: my trip yesterday to see a shrink.

Some background: I have only seen a shrink one other time in the past decade. That was just after Zachary's dirth, and it only made me realize how little I enjoy sitting across from someone smarter than me and feeling dissected like a quivering, psychologically weak, naked little pearl onion on a cutting board. By the end of that meeting back in 2007, I filed "Seeing a Shrink" away into the "Never Do It Again" compartment inside my head, right alongside "Cooking Indian Food" (face it: making Indian food that actually tastes like real Indian food, as in the $8.99 chicken tikka marsala from the fluorescent-lit Indian take-out place up the street, is near impossible. Tried it, sucked, will never try it again. Same with seeing a shrink.)

Then a month ago, in the midst of my angst over whether or not to go on birth control, I reluctantly scheduled an appointment with a mental health counselor. That was yesterday's "trip to the shrink." I sauntered into the office waiting room breezily and feeling high on myself. Everyone else there looked like people who actually needed psychological help, eyes downcast, those poor sops. I, on the other hand, clearly have my shit together - thank you very much - and was only doing this because my insurance covered it (right? RIGHT?).

Really, I just needed to sort out three few chronic anxieties that have been weighing heavy on my mind lately, and that Kevin's grown tired of hearing about (for the record, he hasn't actually said that - I just can't imagine he can't possibly be already bored with the topic).

I laid these things out for my assigned trim blond counselor, sitting across from her in a large office with sweeping views of downtown:

• Fear of having a baby.
• Fear of not having a baby.
• Recurring nightmare in which I'm lying in a darkened radiology room with an image of my own uterus on the screen, and the Grim Reaper appears with a curved knife and informs me that I'm about to die. 2-3 times a week, at least, and I wake up panting and choking on air.

We never got to the nightmare part. We never even got to the second item: fear of not having a baby. Everything seemed to boil down to that first one: fear of having one. I'm talking intense, borderline irrational terror at the mere thought of a loud, poopy, attention-sucking creature bumping into my feet, tying me down, crushing my soul.

I actually liked this woman right away, even though she was blond and skinny with a great big diamond on her ring finger and all sorts of prestigious plaques on the wall. She gave off a good vibe, and her office walls were a soothing color. I told her the full deal: for the past three years, the PLAN had been to create a child. Not create a child and enter into boring, stay-at-home suburban life, but create a child to drag into my and Kevin's globetrotting, happy-hour loving, rustic-vacationing lifestyle. We felt we could do it, defy all conventions that having a child means you never get to do fun, adult things anymore.

But after February's third pregnancy mishap, I starting undergoing some sweeping mental shift. Suddenly, I saw myself as having a new life PLAN, and that PLAN was to be forever childless, embracing that life instead of the old life with kids that had been the earlier PLAN. Kevin and I both started getting into this concept of being forever childfree. During our road trip to Idaho, we started noticing out at restaurants that anytime you saw a table with two parents and kids, the parents looked like these unhappy husks of human beings, not talking to each other, not smiling, just focusing wearily on "getting through the meal" without some major kid-induced catastrophe. Why would we ever want that? We were enjoying our drinking when we felt like it, screwing when we felt like it, packing up and hitting the road when we felt like it, cussing when we felt like it. And as for this seemlingly prevailing current culture of NEVER hiring a babysitter, NEVER separating from your toddler? All seemed like bullshit to me and Kevin.

So we started excitedly making new PLANS - plans that didn't involve kids. Plans like renting out the main floor of our house to vacationers to make some money. Buying a farm. Getting a second dog. Going to Spain for the summer. And other stuff too. The fear of having a baby came from just that: fear of having our new PLANS interruped, similiarly to how my earlier PLANS - the plans to actually have a baby - were interrupted three times in the past. Thrice, as we say. In short, I was tired of having my PLANS ruined.

So this shrink looked at me and said: "What are 'PLANS' anyway?"

Fucking rhetorical question. For a minute I was worried that this was going to be the type of thing where I have to conjure up some muddled answer on my own, where she doesn't actually tell me anything useful and concrete, and I've wasted my $15 co-pay. But fortunately, she went on, and put this out there:

"You're making plans because you're afraid. PLANS are nothing but a psychological coping mechanism for dealing with trauma. They're a made up concept in our imaginations. There's been a lot of research done on the remarkable ability of the human brain to shut down all feeling, and let analytical, logical, plan-making take over. It's a way to distract yourself. You make plans because they seem like something you can control, and they give you something to focus on besides grief and pain. You got burned on your plans to have kids, so you're making new plans to fill that space in your heart. You resent the idea of a baby shattering these new plans. That's why you're afraid of having a baby."

Obviously, I'm paraphrasing here. That's the basic gist of what she said, over the course of the hour. There were other things that came out too, WAAAAYYY too much to bore you with in one post. Things like: I never properly dealt with that first miscarriage. I'm apparently a queen of dissociation - letting my analytical, PLANNING, computer-sciencey brain-half totally trump my emotional-feeling-hippy-English-teacher brain half because I'm afraid to really feel anything, yada yada.

But it was the making PLANS thing that really stuck with me the most, because it made sense: THAT'S why I'm suddenly so afraid of a baby coming into my life. That would ruin my PLANS, again - these carefully laid-out, childfree PLANS which happily don't involve the risk of losing a child, and which mercifully take my mind off the deeper sludge of unresolved grief still lurking around inside my soul.

A Cliff-Notes version of what's happening inside my head - not bad for a $15 co-pay. I'd say it was worth it this time. Not that I have a clue as to what it all means; I still have the plans, the fears. But it at least gives me clue as to what's happening.

Anyway, see? It's all related: Revolutionary Road, Murgdan's post, and my trip to the shrink. Now I'm off to implement today's PLAN of shaving my armpits and maybe even give those meditation exercises my shrink recommended another try. She told me to repeat the mantra: "I will not be afraid to feel -" which, she claims - is the root cause of my frantic plan-making and fear-of-plan-breaking. I attempted it briefly this morning, sitting on the living rooms floor with my coffee mug balanced on one knee for focus, but all I could think about was bacon double cheeseburgers.

God, I suck at meditating. I think I might be screwed.

Feel the Peanutbutter, Baby!

Greetings, Guests and Mommas!

It's hot, and I'm drinking strong Irish black tea with blue agave sweetner, which is supposed to be better for your body than real sugar in some vague way. The plan today was to do a long, introspective post on the movie Revolutionary Road, which I saw 48 whole hours ago and still can't stop thinking about. For those of you who haven't see it, this one brings together everyone's favorite lovers: Leonardo DiCaprio (the totally cliche hottie who nobody can deny is hot) and Kate Winslet (and arguably the most luciously gorgeous woman on the planet; if I could leap through the movie screen and devour her whole, I would). The movie has to do with babies and dead babies, parenthood and dead parenthood, and other amazing things. It resonated with me, and with Kevin too.

But honestly, I'm just too hot and woozy right now to really focus my thoughts and give Revolutionary Road the philosophical and analytical attention it deserves. Plus, who wants to think about something so deep on this hot, sweat-rash-on-inner-thighs-inducing day.

So I'll save that one for next time, and instead share my most recent Costco shopping escapade(for the handful of you connected to me on Facebook, this is a repeat, so please ignore). Remember we talked about that big tee-pee construct that's left when the baby goes away - the roof, the walls, the finances, the jobs, the security, all that? It's moments like these that fill those empty spaces, that make me aggravated yet ultimately reassured that I'm alive, that I can - and do - still feel peanutbutter molecules caressing my pores.

For those of you internationals who might not know, Costco is a huge-ass chain store where huge-ass people go in their huge-ass cars to push huge-ass shopping carts through huge-ass aisles stocked with huge-ass quantities of edibles and non-edibles. Need a roll of toilet paper? Too bad. At Costco, you're buying 30 packed together. Need a knifeful of mayonnaise for your deli sandwich? Too bad - you're buying a 3-gallon jug of mayo, so you'd better start brainstorming now for future uses. Supposedly it saves you money to buy in this manner - gigantic quantities for a lower cost per unit. Which is why I went there with my mom one day, and stocked up on the goods.

Among those goods was a gigantic, supposedly cheaper-than-the-small-size tub of peanutbutter - Adam's All-Natural. You know: the kind in which the oil separates on top, and you have to stir to mix it with the hardened, dry peanutbutter-matter on the bottom.



Normally, you can easily mix the oil in with a few stirs. But it turns out that with a super-human size jug of the stuff, normal mixing mechanisms don't work so well.





Now, Kevin - who was against purchasing such an obscenely large quantity of peanut butter from the beginning (but it's SUCH A GOOD DEAL, I assured him!), had his morning bread toasted and ready to get nutter-buttered. And you can believe it - I was most certainly getting the told-you-so look from across the kitchen. So I decided to take matters into my own hands, literally.

First, I dumped the oil and some of its peanutty accoutrements into a bowl.



Next, I took the plunge, fancying myself as a human-mixer and cursing Costco for false advertising. Nobody warned me it would come to this!

Tebow looked on with great interest, as you can imagine. And after a bit of elbow grease, it was finally ready to go.







And with a small amount of hesitation, Kevin proceeded to spread a wee bit of this well-mixed peanut goodness onto his toast. The product of my labor.

I felt triumphant, and alive!

Hallucinations

Howdy, Readers!


It's another one of those hallucinatory weeks, I guess.

You know that last post I did? The one about KuKd and marriage? Well, apparently I totally made that whole thing up. My apologies. Either that, or it's just further proof that my brain exists on a separate planet from Kevin's, a planet swirling with imaginary clouds of drama and evil little mice whose primary function is to run around and stir up anxiety inside my brain.

The other day, we had a conversation that went something like this, as Kevin scanned the ESPN website on his laptop (primarily paying attention to me, of course - just halfheartedly glancing through the scores out of habit):

Me: "I did a blog post about patching up cracks in our relationship."

K: "What cracks?"

Me: "You know, all of our relationship problems. Like the fact that I haven't been paying enough attention to your job woes. The fact that were aren't totally clinging to each other as we used to. The fact that I have other friends at work and go out for beers with them, without you. The fact that I can't seem to keep the house clean! The fact that I'm not a good, clingy wife! All of those things bother you, remember?"

K: "They do? Hmm. That's news to me. Oh, sweet!"

Me: "Sweet? Sweet what?"

K: "The Mariners won five to three."

Me: "Kevin! This is serious! So you mean, nothing's bothering you about our relationship? You aren't wishing I were sitting at home staring at the door in a French maid outfit each night and a fresh prime-rib dinner already made?"

K: "Nothing's bothering me. You're overthinking. Not that the French made outfit with prime-rib wouldn't be half bad. Fuck."

Me: "Fuck? Fuck what?" (thinking, in a state of mild panic, that he just remembered that big thing that's been bothering him lately)

K: "We're gonna be out of town when the Mariners play Chicago."

Sigh.

KuKd and Marriage: Patching Up Cracks

Greetings, Inquisitive Guests and KuKd-ers!

I'm suddenly feeling in a girl-talky mood, like we should all be sitting in a circle in our pajamas, drinking wine and lighting candles and sharing deep stories. Let's talk about relationships, shall we?

I think it's worthwhile to talk about marriage in the context of KuKd, because there is NO WAY - I mean no serious way - that the death of a baby can occur without having some effect on the two people who made that baby. I remember reading lots of warnings in the many (ultimately not very helpful) self-help books that people sent me after Zachary died: stillbirth can have a dramatic negative effect on marital relationships.

But those parts of the books - like most parts of those books, in fact - always seemed to be about somebody else entirely, someone less stable than me, someone with a weaker relationship than mine and Kevin's, someone less psychologically grounded and wonderful and reasonable than us. We're solid! I thought. Quit putting ideas into my fragile brain that somehow this crappity-crapola is going to drive a stake through our marriage! Stop angstigating me!

For us, it's always been just go-go-go with our heads up, smiles on. It's an Irish thing, a family thing: no point in slowing down, pausing, and taking a serious analytical look at a marital relationship, especially when everything seems pretty much fine. And self-help books are, more often than not, "fucktarded" (to quote a favorite word of my linguistically brilliant friend Ben) - so why bother listening to them. But lately, these past six months or so, we've had reason to do just that: slow down, pause, and take a serious analytical look at our relationship.

Looking backward into the tunnel of life behind me, focusing specifically on the Monica-Kevin element of it , here's what I see:

First, two years of heady, earthy, happy existence. We met as sweaty Peace Corps volunteers, back when my nails were permanetly crusted with black dirt, underwear consisted entirely of high-rising Hanes bloomers, hair was a permanently tangled mess piled up on my head.

I was instantly attracted to Kevin, because he was SO not what I called a "Josh." That is, a person like Josh - the patchouli-scented, dreadlocked pot-head who I dated in college, and who characterized the general sort of guy I was attracted to in my younger days. Josh (not Kevin, to be clear) was an artsy English major, and insisted on reading his bad poetry out loud to me while I pretended to react with great interest. I didn't have sex in college, ultimately being a bit of a prude in that regard, and deep down in my subconscious growing progressivey tired of the very guys I proclaimed to "like."

So I was thrilled to meet Kevin. Unlike the "Joshes" of the world, Kevin was free-spirited and yet goal-oriented, adventurous and yet just ambitious and logical enough to take him out of the aimless-loser category. His fingernails were clean, his teeth were white, he folded his clothes neatly, he said reasonable things, and he exuded common sense. He was everything I wasn't, and I loved him instantly, feeling more insecure than I'd ever felt, melted into a puddle of goo. I knew I wanted to marry him. Not have babies or anything, just be with him forever, because he was a beacon of manly perfection in my eyes.

I worked really hard to get him, which I finally did. Those two years turned into marriage at a beer garden in Austin -and four subsequent years of traipsing around the globe, backpacking here and there, teaching kids in Kenya, not thinking or brooding or analyzing or worrying - just living. Drinking. Screwing. Traveling. Laughing. Being best friends. I was on the pill the whole time, because kids weren't a part of the picture (yet).

* * *

So, miscarriage at nearly four months gestation (all the ladies in the house who get that, lemme hear you say HOOOOH!), July 2006. This one drew us together, not apart. I repeat: TOGETHER, NOT APART. See? I was right! Self-help books were wrong! Joke's on you, Deborah Whats-Your-Name and your Self-Help Book in Garamond Font. I became the neediest person on the planet, clinging to Kevin, fearful that something heavy and large would fall on his head and kill him. I also became obsessed with getting pregnant again instantly, hoping that a second pregnancy would erase this first little "dead-fetus blip." I distinctly remember waking up wide-eyed in the middle of the night and shaking Kevin awake:

"GET UP! TIME TO SCREW!" (panicked whisper)

"Mmmm?"

"LET'S HAVE SEX RIGHT NOW SO I'M LYING DOWN SLEEPING AFTERWARD AND THE SPERM STAYS UP IN THERE! IF WE DON'T, THEN I MIGHT NEVER GET PREGNANT AGAIN AND I'LL HAVE TO ACTUALLY THINK ABOUT THIS MISCARRIAGE!"'

"Mon, it's two in the morning. Go back to sleep."

I'd even try pressing my backside against his crotch, spooning into him in hopes that it would generate some "midnight wood," but it rarely worked. I think he got a little bit tired of that part, the irriationally pining for a baby just weeks after losing a fetus, but didn't mind the clinginess so much. He's a guy. If there's another thing I've picked up on, it's that guys (even the most progressive-minded Obama-voter types) secretly like it when women eagerly fawn over them.

* * *

Months later, all of that clinging and pining after Kevin finally did result in a sperm-meet-egg situation (enter Zachary). And when Zachary died in August 2007, guess what: still no chasm in the marriage! Quite the opposite. We were drawn together even closer, pure and simple (once again: Monica = right, self-help books = wrong). I was glued to Kevin like a magnet to a fridge. Oh, things weren't perfect by any means. He was working evenings almost every weeknight, and I resented that fact, spending many a lonely night eating cereal with my dog on the front porch, turning on Jane's Addiction and crying on the futon, wishing as hard as I could wish that things were different.

It wasn't until right around August 2008, almost exactly a year later, that things changed. I suddently felt more okay than I'd felt that entire year, as though I'd shed some kind of snakeskin of depression and emerged as a sparkly new person, revved up and ready to embrace life. I didn't mind Kevin's work schedule anymore, wasn't up waiting for him upon his return, staring at the door and drooling.

Maybe it was a timing thing; perhaps "one year" marks some sort of psychological finishline where the hurt gets buried another few feet inside, the surface less raw. Quite simply, I had adapted to this unwanted-and-yet-pretty-darned-good-life-in-its-own-way- throwing myself headfirst into writing (including, yes, this very blog), filling up my social calendar with beers and outings and dinners and late nights at the office.

And low and behold, that's right around the time when some barely perceptible cracks began to form in our relationship, like tiny branching threads on an otherwise smooth drywall surface. We sort of stopped seeing each other. I mean, physically, we saw each other. I saw him walk in the door at 10pm, five minutes before my own bedtime, and briely saw him breathing the darkness as I got up at six the next morning to go to work. But we kind of stopped being attuned to each others' needs, really paying attention to each other.

For example, he was hating his job. It was wearing him down - the job itself, the commute, everything. He was trying to write a book, and not getting very far. These things were getting him down, and I wasn't noticing and supporting as much as I should have noticed and supported. There were things I needed from him too - I won't go into all of those - and he wasn't noticing and giving as much as I wanted him to.

And how does this all fit into KuKd? Well, I'm not going to pretend that I'm clinical psychologist with all the answers to everything. What I will say is this: KuKd switched me over into serious, hardcore survival mode - which is actually a pretty solitary mode when you think about it. And when I wasn't hanging with Kevin on weeknights, I had to turn to other passions to help me make it through - things like writing, like blogging, like drinking with other friends. Which, subsequently, made me rely on Kevin less for my basic psychological needs, and just generally not be there for him as I was in the past. I got distracted with life, with surviving, with thriving in my now childless world.

Oh, we're not getting divorced or anything. It's not the end of the world. It's just that we've had to lately take out those little spackling tools for drywalling, and patch things up, catching cracks early, fixing them before they can grow into deeper chasms. This is a first for us, having to work at our relationship. It was so easy in the past, the drywall of our marriage so smooth (okay, I'm already annoying myself with overuse of that euphemism). We've had some conversations here and there, communicating not a hundred-percent but much more than we used to. Not saying everything, but saying the things that matter.

I'll end this post with an upbeat anecdote, one of those little moments that remind me that through it all, Kevin and I are still best friends; that, in spite of myself, my VAST imperfections as a wife and human being, we still know and love each other as only a husband and wife can:

Last week, I was feeling incredibly frustrated by my writing project, by my inability to weave my 3-year KuKd odessy into a coherent story with a beginning and end, by my growing tired of editing and revising and dipping back into this ultimately painful segment of my life. An agent that I really thought would accept my book project, that had sent me a really eager and hopeful letter, ultimately turned it down. It might seem like a small deal to others, but to me, it was huge -because writing a story has filled this tremendous gap in my hear these past 1.5 years, and to have it go nowhere was too much to bear. I felt like a sucker for believing she would believe in it.

So I e-mailed Kevin this long, rambling, whiney, gloomy message about it, and what I got back was the loveliest, most perfectly crafted and supportive words I could possibly get - not too long, just saying the right amout:

Wish I had more time to write. All I can say is that the whole process fucking sucks. You need to relax and put the book aside. Don't touch it, look at it, or pitch it to anyone for three months. Then let's revisit it. Gotta go - let's hit the tavern tonight for beers. I love you, and you've written a beautiful story.

heart, me

And, what's more, he showed up that night with a bouquet of lillies.

See? Perfect combation of rational (he's right - I need to relax and put the writing aside) and friviolous-but-needed (flowers). Setting his own needs aside - his shitty-ass job - and paying attention to me when I really need it. All of those things made me feel instantly better, reminding me not only that things are okay deep down, but that it's worth making sure they stay that way. That is, it's worth patching up those cracks as they surface, even in spite of myself, ever-consumed with filling up spaces in my soul with beautiful projects and people and thoughts. I need to slow that part down and make sure I'm there for Kevin when he needs me too.

Because I'm sure not going to be one of those statistics that proves the self-help books are right.

Two Years...And Why?

Greetings, Blog-o-Readers...

Reporting to you live from the thrilling environs of...my living room! My dog is snoring; can you hear him? I'll try to talk over him.

Tonight, I had beers with three other dead-baby mommas. We met at a dimly lit tavern with rock-n-roll blaring in the background, and drank amber-colored beers while telling tidbits of our stories. We all experienced an infant's dirth (birth + death) at various times. Mine was the longest ago, I realized during the course of the evening: in August it will have been two years. This chronological fact hit me, or sort of sank into me slowly like bad Uzbek vodka made of fermented onions (I only know that beverage from intimate, unsavory experience), and three words dragged themselves across my frontal lobe:

Holy freakin' wow.

Two years? How can time melt away so quickly, propelling us forward (and memories backward) so imperceptibly? At one point during the evening, I distinctly heard myself using the past tense more than I used to, while the other gals were using more present. Me saying something sucked, them saying something sucks. As a writing teacher, perhaps I'm just more aware of things like verb usage than I used to be. Just a simple, subtle difference in grammatical choice, and yet - to me - a significant one.

I had this sudden, crystal clear sense of being not where I was a year ago, two years ago, even six months ago. Something has pushed me forward and away, dulling my sense of past loss. Thank goodness, really, our brains are designed that way. Can you imagine if we were all permanently stuck in Shitty-Moodville for the rest of our lives?

On the other hand, I felt that same magical, emotional whoosh that comes whenever I meet a fellow dead-baby-momma, that electifying sense of connection. It's how I imagine it must feel to be a soldier having just returned from the Iraq War, then to run into another fellow soldier in the sporting goods aisle at Wal-Mart. You look up and sense an instant, kindred bond: we both get it. As the evening progressed, I found comfort, as I have before, in hearing stories of realities that almost precisely mirrored (SEE? I just did it again! Past tense!) mine: the fear of personal extinction. The convoluted, mysterious nature of grief as an emotion, how it really isn't an emotion in and of itself - like happiness or sadness - but rather a term coined by someone long ago to encapsulate that big, messy ball of unpredictable mental and emotional glop that comes after a traumatic event.

It's just different from how it was last year, and the year before that. Death isn't such a big, heavy bowling ball inside me, but now broken up into tiny shards and absorbed into system, pricking me at odd times, changing me in ways that I can't define just yet. I mean, I can speculate on how KuKd has changed me, but it's all just that: speculation.

Then, during my uphill-but-beer-tinged-and-therefore-not-so-bad bike ride home, I began thinking about why I do this blog, two years later. Why?

Oh, it's a thought that's crossed my mind before. This blog won't/can't last forever. Those big-time bloggers who blog for the sake of...well...blogging? People like Stirrup Queen who create these immense blog-o-empires, again for the sake of...well...creating a blog-o-empire? I couldn't do that. I'd get tired of hearing myself talk, fed up with thinking of meaningful things to say. Kevin said it nicely during our sojourn in Idaho: "It's good we don't have Internet in this cabin, detracting us from just living our lives." Deep down, I know he's right: there comes a point when you spend so much time talking about living, that you cease to live.

So, this blog, and the question of: why?

I do this blog because the truth is - although baby-death takes up a mere fraction of the brain space it used to, it's certainly still in there, in me. The effects are long-term and mysterious, and I think worth dissecting and analyzing for the glorious sake of overthinking (if nothing else). Also maybe - just maybe - for the sake of reflecting some realities that are more common that everybody thinks, therefore helping somebody else feel less isolated and alone out there. If I can reach out and do that for a KuKd momma or two, then the whole dang blog is worth it to me. Honestly, I had trouble finding a sounding board that made sense to me back in the days of doom, when I really needed it. I sort of felt like a KuKd outsider, even being KuKd myself.

Just as a small, quick example of something I can easily and readily still talk about: marital relationships. I could do a whole post, even a series of posts, on how baby-death affects marriage in the long-term. Specifically, how it has affected my relationship with Kevin, brought us together in some ways and yet put a strain on us in others, and made us have to work harder than ever before at keeping ourselves intact (that very post will be coming soon-ish, because I'm actually curious to know others' views on this scintillating subject).

Sexuality, too. You KNOW I can talk about that 'till the cows come home.

So, my plan is to keep spewing out thoughts here until I'm dry as the Sahara desert. The time will come - I'm just not sure when.

Oh, and tonight I was greeted with the most entertaining comment on my blog guestbook I've had in a long time, second only to another post entitled "Jesus is Abled" (that's a whole 'nother post):

"My non-juicy tidbit is I really want you to get pregnant and have a live baby. Really bad."

For some reason, I just loved that comment. It seemed so innocently, unabashedly, purely hopeful and excited. And to have someone wanting you to get pregnant, somebody besides your near-retirement-aged-mother-who-doesn't-have-grandkids, well - it tickled my spirit. For the record, pregnancy: it's not out of the picture, just off to the side for a bit. Off the map. Off the Map of Hawaii, no pun intended.

I'm just hoping the person who left this guest-book post can come over to babysit from time to time, because given the hardcore caffeine and booze habits I've picked up over the past few years (and that I suspect would readily bounce back even after being a Good Pregnant Mormon-like Girl for 10 months of potentially doomed gestation), I'm going to need my nights out. Alone. Without a baby.

Oh, and hey - a few logistical announcements for anyone who cares:

1) If you'd like to show off your knocked-down hunk, e-mail me his photo for the next gallery: monica@exhalezine. It's a risk to have your hunk's hotness compared to others, I'll admit that. But look: I'm a firm believer in taking an already twisted and dangerous reality and making it even twisted-er and dangerous-er. And don't think I'm not keenly, achingly, resentfully aware that my OWN precious hunk is practically in last place in the current gallery. We're both dealing with that with the help of an expensive therapist and lots of hard liquor. As long as he has more votes than Mister Absolute Penis, then I'm cool.

2) For the Knockalicious Blogs list, if you have a blog or website to add - or a description of one of those, send that my way too. I'll be updating that after I finish watching the entire first season of The Wire. This isn't any kind of fancy or offical list of blogs-sanctioned-by-the-Mother-Virgin-Mary. It's just a way to spread the word and share the love, that's all.

Hey Babylost Mommas! Read This!

Hey Mommas!

Some of you old-timers might recall me writing about a "healing retreat for infant loss" that I reluctantly attended over a year ago, about eight or nine months after my Ultimate Shitty Event. This was for women who had experienced stillbirth or infant death-after-birth. I went into it with this cynical attitude, somehow pre-convinced that "retreats" are generally lame and weird - like with summer-camp slop for dinner and people doing teambuilding games. I've never been into all that support-groupy-touchy-feely hogwash.

But man oh goddamn man, was I ever glad I did.

A babylost friend of mine here in Seattle couldn't have said it any better: losing a baby is an isolating experience, period. Doesn't matter what you read or who you talk to: it's still just you inside of your head, swimming around in there, trying to find your way. So, to be suddenly thrown into a goregous, intimate setting with a group of similar-aged, similar-minded women WHO TOTALLY 100% GET WHAT THE FUCK EACH OTHER IS TALKING ABOUT (that's key) was...well...it was remarkable. It's what the retreat was all about: connecting and understanding.

We did what most women love to do: talked a lot. Cried a bit too, to a cathartic (not nauseating) degree. We shared our stories, and took as much time as we needed to do it. We listened. We ate together. Slept. Wandered. Did yoga. Relaxed. Thought. Looked at the mountains. The best part was that it was mildly structured, but not overly, annoyingly structured. It wasn't a facilitator-led, counselor type of thing run by some woman with a PhD in clinical psychology. It was just a bunch of equals - women coming together - connecting and forming awesome friendships, and just mellowing out in this goregous and peaceful place.

Of course, at the time I was a follower, just going along for the (what turned out to be amazing) ride. Little did I know that I would eventually be compelled to spearhead the next one. Of the original group from last year, some people have had babies, and are in different places in their lives. I on the other hand, have a dog and new espresso machine, neither of which is as much of a distraction as baby would surely be. So, I'm in more of position to organize a second retreat this year. I feel passionate about it, the goodness of it.

SO...that aforementioned babylost friend of mine - the one who made the comment about stillbirth being isolating - is teaming up with me to organize the second (maybe annual?) healing retreat for this year. It's coming up in October. ANYONE CAN COME - not just people from Seattle - EVEN YOU!!!

Well, almost anyone. This retreat is for women who have recently (as in the last five years or so?) lost an infant just before or after birth. That is loosely defined as having lost a baby to stillbirth or post-birth death, for lack of a better phrase. This is not at all to say that the infertility and miscarriage sets shouldn't have and don't deserve the retreat experience - but we wanted to keep this retreat small, and decided to make those our so-called "requirements." If this year's goes well, we could think about expanding it next year to include miscarriage and infertility subgroups. Don't hold me to that - I'm just saying, the possibility is out there.

It's not just for us Pacific Northwesters, either. It is my sincere hope that some of you regulars out there -you know who you are - think about attending, even if you have to fly out here to Seattle. IT'S WORTH IT. I repeat: IT'S WORTH IT. And if you can help get the word out to other babylost mommas, even better. Check out the retreat deets, buy your ticket and c'mon out!

Kukd Folk Music Series: Tracks 2-3

Greetings, Peeps!

Sorry for the double-whammy, two-day-in-a-row posting spree. Overwhelming, I know. Fear not; there will be a several-day hiatus after this as I turn my brain away to other things for a few days.

First, track 2-3 of the KuKd Folk Music Series have been oh-so-professionally recorded using my extra special sound equipment (aka: cheap digital camera balanced on top of a stack of notebooks) and are now available. There are 4 total songs floating around in my head - and I'm thinkin' that's PO-LENTY for getting my point(s) across. Track 4 will emerge later on. After that, I'm betting I will have scraped all dead-baby-related musical configurations out of my system and be ready to move onto other topics. From then on, it's going to be odes to Cosco, an anti-arm-fat campaign tune, and other musical randomness as I continue to brush up on my guitar twanging skills.

A bit of background on these tracks. Each of 1 through 3 presents a very different angle, I guess you could call it - a different thought pattern that did/does go through my head at some point during my KuKd journey. Track 1 was very much about the baby, and Track 4 will be too. Messages to him, I suppose; to all of our lost babies living up in the Baby Heaven Penthouse.

Tracks 2-3, what I'm posting here, are very much about me, and not so much about the baby. Because really - going back to that empty tee-pee syndrome, what's left when the baby is gone? YOU. Or in this case, me. You're sitting there blind-sided and you have to just deal with it. No crying baby to distract you, sorry.

As for me, I spent a lot of time dealing with the void by turning my focus inward, back to me - and not always in a good and productive way. I started assaulting my body with more caffeine and booze than I know to be healthy - and still do. I also threw myself headfirst into all sorts of random, time-consuming, wholly me-focused and unnecessary projects (you're lookin' at one of them, dahling), putting up a wall of forced bravado that lingers to this day. Really, I couldn't imagine being not fine forever, so I told myself all sorts of stories about really being fine - about how I wasn't meant to be a mother anyway (yes, the very things we don't allow OTHERS to tell us. As I've said before, I think self-ASSvice is acceptable; isn't it?).

Hence these tunes.

TRACK 2: "What I Told Myself"
Track 3: "Coffee and Vino"

Enjoy, or don't enjoy. Either way, OH, AND HEY! You know that Knockalicious Blogs tab at the top? Look up there. See it? Yeah, that. That's a big old list of cool blogs and websites that I haven't updated in a while. I'd like to actually organize those things by topic, and add more to the list. I've gotten a few requests lately for that - and what the hey, why not.

SO, if you'd like your blog/website to be added there, E-MAIL ME at monica at exhalezine dot com, and up it will go. It can be knockalicious in anyway, but should relate (even tenuously) to...well, ya know...whatever the hell this blog is about. So, no cooking blogs or hairy-male-butt-photo-gallery blogs.

Happy listening!

Boundaries

Greetings, Naked and Clothed Ones!

Thank you, world, for your overwhelmingly positive and supportive response to my Pocahontas-Traipsing-Around-The-Wilderness gallery. I should go in there on Photo Shop and draw myself a bathing suit made of twigs and mud. It's really how I felt: as though I were living some primitive fantasy in which K and I are cave dwellers, hunting fish from the lake with our bare hands and sleeping on a bed of pine needles (ouch).

There were a few mildly-raised eyebrows that resulted from the photos posted there, as best characterized best by a good friend of mine: "I can't beLIEVE you posted NAked PICtures of yourself on the INternet! You better save them in a secret file in case your PARents find them on your comPUTer!"

Ahhh, a shocked and cautionary reaction that only those closest to you - your mother and your best friends - can comfortably express. Where would we be without those sorts of friends? Kind of like one of those, "your nipple is showing, my dear" comments. As with a lot of things, that particular post - and my friend's goodhearted remark - did get me thinking about deeper philosophical things.

Allow me to explain. But first, put on your scuba diving gear, folks, or pull up a chair at your favorite French cafe with a philosophical beret on your head, and get yourself a strong espresso. THIS IS DEEP, man. Deep.

To me, my friend's reaction was a reminder of two things:

1) The deep thread of moral conservatism that runs through America (seriously! It's everywhere!) and that I tend to forget about; and

2) The fixation our society has on rules, on constructs, on expectations that we live within those boundaries we've been taught to believe in. I say that not in a bad way (well, sometimes-sort-of), just in a way-it-is kind of way. Ours is a rules-hungry culture, with long-held beliefs about what men and women should and shouldn't do.

And yes - when you push those boundaries, you're going to raise some eyebrows.

One thing I've come to realize about myself is that I am not a person who hungers for rules. For better or worse, I like to push the envelope, bang against the glass walls of expectation - the "rules" - that hover around in certain social settings, and I don't have much of a problem with raising eyebrows when I do it. It's a trait that has also colored the way I've dealt with watching my parenthood-dreams melt away down the drain-pipe over the last three years.

At the time when Kevin and I begin thinking of having children, we were living entirely within what I refer to as "the boundaries." That is, we were doing precisely what everyone around us – our families, our friends, society at large – expected: married. Solvent. Master's degrees. Progressive-minded. Great jobs supposedly doing good things for the world. Fun, loving relationship. Attempting to multiply - which EVERYONE approves of. Our sex life was what I imagine the vast majority of American married couples have: neither rip-roaringly adventurous nor achingly dull. Conventional, predictable, and sometimes repetitive, but not bad.

And you know what? Life within this reality felt unquestionably fine.

But when the baby prospects disappeared, suddenly here we were - sitting gloomily and shell-shocked within the construct of marriage and financial stability that we'd worked so hard to build around ourselves. And for what? For whom? If not for raising a brood of equally progressive-minded and educated children like ourselves, devoting our lives to them from this point forward, then why?

It's this sense of being inside of an empty tee-pee, a perfectly stable construction of baby-happy reality with no baby to show for it, that's led me to fill that space with other things in life (like this blog, and the pictures on it). It's one of the common empty feelings felt, I would imagine, by KuKd and infertility-fighting mommas around the world, I would bet. This experience has showed me that the ever-touted marriage/parenthood/solvency equation doesn't always equal eternal satisfaction, no matter how fervently and religiously our world tells says it does. I also discovered how little control we really have over biological forces, and how bad things can happen to anyone - even supposedly "good" people who live within the boundaries our society has set up.

More important, from my KuKd experience I took away a more deeply resonating message that I carry with me still: that our lives are short and precious, and that every day of life should be lived as one's last. That - despite the losses of my past - it is up to me to make the most of what I have, seeking joy and vitality where I can, shedding my own fears for the sake of living. It's this principle of living life to its fullest - even when that means taking risks - that guided my initially reluctant decision to: 1) get naked; 2) get photographed; and 3) post my arse-crack online.

Who's going to come after me for that? Jesus? My grandmother? I doubt it. Morally conservative people who believe that a naked woman is something to get squeamish about? Maybe. I'll keep a look-out for them.

Posting arse-pics on the Internet is a risk. It's a risk that I accept, because it feels good - and because getting comfortable with my own body and sexuality has been part of what's filled that empty "tee-pee" I mentioned earlier. I could give you a long list of big and small examples of this anti-conventional-behavior pattern of mine has both helped and hurt me over the years. In this case, I'm going with it.

Now, for the record - I DO have a job, and it's a job that I love, with people that I love. I have mixed feelings about people at my workplace seeing my arse-crack online. Not a complete and terrifying concern, but enough of a kernel of risk-awareness to know not to leave that particular post up forever. So I'll let it sit there and soak up the sun for a bit longer, and then take it down for a while, perhaps letting it reemerge in a year or so. ;-)

Now, off to see what other boundaries I can tinker with.

Nudity Alert!

Greetings, Sexies!

Now approaching the three-year anniversary of my thrilling initiation into the KuKd club, I've lately been in the mood to...shall we say...rediscover my sensuality. Not that there ever was much to speak of. We crunchy Peace Corps women don't DO sensuality. No, no, no. We wear comfortable and economical Hanes briefs that mercifully swallow up our love handles, and Birkenstock sandals on our feet. We don't shave our bodies; what on earth for? We are hairy women; hear us roar! We clunk around the world and do practical, organic, non-sexual things.

And when your body then becomes the equivalent of a dead-baby factory, when a roomful of people (including your husband - yeah, that guy who was initially attracted to you for SOMEthing) then witness a six-pound stillborn infant and all of this infant's liquidy accoutrements emerge from your vagina, you REALLY drift away from any notion of yourself as something of or related to...well...sex.

This past month, though, I've taken some baby-steps toward feeling non-dead-baby-factory-ish. First, I tried out something that struck me as a pleasantly balanced mix of Peace-Corps-Crunchy-Practical and GIRLY: an OLIVE OIL BATH. A few of you may have seen this on my Facebook page already, and if so, I suggest you skip this part and scroll down the juicier segment of this post.

Now, I had heard through the grapevine: a mere TEASPOON of extra-virgin olive oil would do the trick for sensual skin. That seemed a bit woosy to me, so I added several. As Kevin grumpily predicted, the oil initially formed little floating blobs on the surface.



Not very appealing. But I braved it and jumped in, swirling my limbs around to create a warm, oily, sufficiently integrated "soup" - which our dog Tebow took great pleasure in sipping:



Needless to say, everything was slicked with oil afterward - towels, the tub, the floor, walls, Tebow's nose, my body, everything. But still, it gave me a taste of what it's like to do something frivolous for the sake of supple, sensual skin!

* * *

NOW, BE WARNED: The next part of this post involves nakedness. I'm serious. Nothing serious, just a bit of ass-crack here and there. So if you can't handle nakedness, as in - if you are seriously made uncomfortable by the sight of an inch or two of ass-crack, you should click out of this post right now. Steer your children away. Go do something comfy and familiar and wholesome. Make a cup of decaf tea and munch on a scone while knitting a scarf for your neighbor.

On the other hand, if you're OK with nakedness, keep reading.

Let me start by saying, I AM NOT A PERSON WHO IS COMFORTABLE (yet) in a naked state. I'm just not. You know, you always have those 5-10 pounds you wish you could lose. Nakedness is usually neither practical nor appropriate in our stuffy, boundary-filled society.

But this past week, as part of our 2-week road trip, Kevin and I did a hot, grueling hike to a remote alpine lake. This hike sucked balls. It was one of those never-ending uphill deals where you keep praying the purported lake is right around the next ridge or corner or whatever, and it never is. By the time we finally reached this lake after 4 hours of uphill, I was in a semi-delirious state of relief and exhaustion. For reasons unbeknownst to man, I did something I'd never done before: I yanked off all of my clothes and jumped right in. The lake was frigidly cold, and when I jumped out, I felt totally rejuvenated and alive, and I started doing a little naked dance right there on the banks of this lake.

Sure, there might have been some campers or hunters or whatever roaming around (highly unlikely) Sure, I was technically in a public place. Sure, some horny deer or elk could be watching us from a clump of shrubbery. But you know what? I DIDN'T GIVE A DAMN! And Kevin, with his characteristic military caution, initially reacted by glancing furtively around. When he didn't see any fat orange-capped hunters pointing their rifles at us, he took out the camera instead, and started taking pictures.

OF ME! NAKED!

Again: something I would normally never, ever allow - but this time, once again - I DIDN'T GIVE A DAMN! It was liberating, just throwing caution to the wind like this.

Now, I did crop out some of the racier bits of these photos, of course. If Zachary is watching from the Stillborn Babe Penthouse up above, I wouldn't want him to think is mommy is some kind of porn star. But I would want him to know that sometimes it feels good to just live and let go of fear - which is something that's been so hard for me to do these past few years.

So here ya go. Oh, and KuKd Folk Music Series Tracks 2-3 (there will be 4 total) are shittily recorded and ready go go. Coming later this week!

Weaving a Story

Greetings, Coffee-Sippers!

This is Monica, thoroughly buzzed and reporting to you live from a cozy coffee shop in McCall, Idaho. Kevin and I are in the midst of road-tripping to various mountainous locales - some of which have - gasp! - no Internet connection. This is proving to be a source of faux-frustration. Not only does it prevent me from jumping online at every whim to Google pointless things like "sexy cowboys" and "cupcakes" - but also it forces me to do this thing called "living my life free of distractions" - something Kevin and I used to do all the time.

Last night, for example, we played Scrabble. There are way too many vowel tiles in Scrabble - especially the letter "i." Our balcony overlooks a turquoise blue lake fringed with pine trees. The people next door argue all the time. I have a hangnail on my toe. Kevin looks good when he doesn't shave for a week. I might not have noticed any of these things had I been Googling "sexy cowboys" and "cupcakes."

Oh, there is one big distraction I have that doesn't involve the Internet, and that's putting together the next issue of Exhale. You know, I realized this past week that one of these days, sometime over the next year or so, I won't be suitable for Exhale anymore. I'm already wondering if I'm still suitable for it.

Let me explain. Here's a big part of what "putting together Exhale" involves: kicking back with a cup of tea, reading through the heaps of submissions in my e-mail inbox, and doing something with them. That means either accepting them to publish, or rejecting them. Now, I love that people write things and send them in to Exhale. I believe in writing as a cathartic and teaching tool, and it always makes me feel thoroughly honored and glowing inside that anybody feels compelled to write about such personal things in their lives and allow me to read them. It takes such courage and involves huge risk; I know this because - in my search to put my OWN dead-baby story out there, I've had my share of rejection.

Yet, what I'm finding lately is that I'm having trouble...well...feeling anything anymore when I read these incredibly poignant and sad stories. They don't move me like they used to. More and more of these submissions end up in the "rejection" pile as time goes on, and this makes me feel sometimes like a bad person. I guess when I started Exhale, I didn't realize that accepting and rejecting sad stories would be a part of my job as editor. Not that I knew who on earth would be doing that if not me; it just didn't dawn on me that any rejection would be required.

When I do get a piece that brings tears to my eyes - which in fact happened just a few days ago (and you can bet this piece is going into the next issue) - here's what it has that the others don't: a deeper story.

What I mean is this: they don't just narrate the event in a minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour description, without any greater meaning or underlying theme (first I started bleeding, then I started cramping, then the doctor told me, then I started crying. the end.) They don't just tell me exactly what happened and assume that their story is naturally so different from the others, so dramatically and unusually poignant that it will stand out in a readers' mind as particularly enlightening and unique. They dig deeper than that, and look for some great greater meaning or lesson. Or, they provide such a strong voice that they convey that event in a way that moves me, simply by the way that it's told.

The truth is that pregnancy and infant losses - and even infertility journeys - happen in more-or-less the same way. Sure, there are medical and personal details that set one person's story apart from someone else's. But by and large, the physical and biological event itself is not a unique story. Which makes it especially challenging to write about it in a way that's unique and compelling, that teaches us something, that truly makes a mark on the world.

Really, isn't that what we look for in all good writing? Writing about anything? Take describing a battle, a death of a loved one, a bad break-up, a dining experience at a new restaurant. What draws you in as a reader and impacts you is the deeper story you can weave from it, and/or the voice with which you tell it.

That's what I look for in Exhale. The submission that brought tears to my eyes began like this:

One night not too long ago, my brother Dean and I were helping my mother up my front steps in the darkness, jockeying her suitcases, a get-well balloon, and her walker. She had endured a lengthy surgery to correct severe spinal stenosis, a condition that had caused her chronic pain, and would be staying with me for a couple weeks to convalesce. As a Vietnamese woman, she has always been petite, but I was shocked to see that the surgery had diminished her still. She seemed vulnerable and small, curled up on herself like a fern before dawn. I was tired too, nearly 12 weeks into my first trimester of pregnancy, and looked forward to the end of what had been a long ordeal of visits and consultations related to my mother’s care.

Inside my tiny kitchen, my father—my mother’s ex-husband, who had fallen for her when he was a soldier fighting the war—was helping out by preparing dinner. It was the kind of bachelor meal he was always preparing: store-bought rotisserie chicken, canned green beans, and instant rice. We sat and ate, silently. It occurred to me that this was the first time my family had been in the same room in more than 20 years.

Now, I wont tell you the rest. You'll have to read this issue to find out. But I will say that as I began reading this, right away I was drawn in, and compelled to keep reading. That's because - although I knew this story is about miscarriage - notice the total lack of anything miscarriage-related in the entire beginning of this story. That already told me this particular miscarriage story would be couched in something greater and universal. Something about family, about tradition, about food.

And sure enough, by the end of this piece, I was snivelling in the passenger seat of our car going 60 miles an hour down a mountain road as Kevin drove, wiping my nose on my wrist. Kevin reached over and touched my knee. He knew I was reading a doozy of an Exhale submission; didn't have to ask.

I don't know. Maybe I'm getting jaded and cranky in my ripe old age of 33. Maybe I'm reading too many sad stories and they're losing their meaning. If I were a person who really had clout in the world, like a political pundit or a world famous author, I'd put out some sort of "call to action" to all of the writers and talkers and thinkers out there: look deeper than the surface of the thing that happened, and ask yourself what more universal meaning you can draw from it. Spin that story out, because that's what will make a mark on the world. If bad things happen for a reason, there must be something we can learn from it. Find that thing and tell it well.

But, who the hell am I to boss people around - especially given that I'm about the furthest person from a "writing expert" (or an anything-expert, for that matter) on the face of the planet. Actually, I take that back. I do consider myself an expert on HUNKS. Knocked down hunks, that is.

If you haven't voted yet, get over there and do it! The hunk voting deadline looms large! Better yet, get me your picture for the next gallery.

Ask a Dead Baby Momma: Sugar Egg Sensation

Dear Dead-Baby Momma,

Yesterday I was out with a bunch of people and slipped into a total dead-baby funk. Why didn't everybody sense that, drop what they were doing, and come over to give me a group hug, those insensitive fuckers?

Funked Out Amid Insensitive Fuckers


Dear Funked Out Amid Insensitive Fuckers:

Dead Baby Mommas understands. You, alone and funked-out inside your head while the rest of the world spins convivially and unaware. I call that the Sugar-Egg Sensation.

Remember sugar eggs?



A hard decorated sugar-shell surrounding an edible panoramic scene made of hardened frosting, usually involving something juvenile like bunnies or ducks (how often I have tried unsuccessfully to explain to others what sugar eggs are and why they are cool!). The Sugar-Egg Sensation is simply when the outside of your body is like a hard sugar shell, and the inside is a totally different hidden scene that few people can detect. And your inner scene isn't a pleasant one of ducks and bunnies either: more like grumpy little trolls eating handfuls of mud and glaring at one another.

And yes, Funked-Out: few people can - or will - detect that unsavory inner scene.

But there is hope!

Let me digress into a brief, related anecdote. Not long ago, I was at a happy hour gathering with friends from work. One guy's mucho-prego wife came along, her belly popping out at the seams. We were all drinking sangria and munching on Spanish tapas while sunlight poured through the tall open windows. From the corner of my eye, I kept noticing the mucho-prego wife having these contemplative, intimate moments that I recognized: those miraculous instances of feeling your baby kick you hard on the insides. She was in her own sugar-egg world, the mommy-baby-connection-world that nobody else has access to, stroking her tummy and gazing out the window with a slight smile on her face. I got that, remembered it.

When the entire group conversation suddenly drifted toward this woman's belly and the subject of "what it feels like to have a baby move inside you," everybody was instantly excited, because blossoming babies are a community interest, an intriguing and much-loved subject by all. The mucho-prego wife's eyes lit up as she explained the sensation, imitating it, punching someone on the upper arm to show what a foot or a knee or an elbow feels like against your inner walls. Again, I got that, and I couldn't bear to look in her direction, the reminder too visceral, sudden sadness too intense. I could almost feel a baby moving inside me, the magical "whoosh" that I'd felt so often during my drive to work that summer, two years ago, or standing up in front of students. A shadow cast itself instantly across my mood, consuming me with the barren sense of being alone inside my sugar-egg world. And yeah, my little funk went unnoticed to *most* people at the table (*most* is a key word here; keep reading).

Now back to you, Funked-Out. What to do about it?

Let's start with what NOT to do about it: expect those "insensitve fuckers" to change, or resent them for not seeing into your world. In their defense, allow Dead Baby Momma to gently point out: most people in the world are neither "fuckers" nor "insensitive" in the truest sense (and if they are, you shouldn't be hanging out with them anyway). Most people are rightfully too busy tending to their own psychological worlds to notice your internal (and totally valid) shit-storm, and quite plausibly may be wrestling with their OWN Sugar-Egg Sensations to which others are equally blind. So forget that.

Instead, let's focus on what you CAN do. Dead Baby Momma recommends a patent-pending, two-step strategy.

STEP 1:

The first step is the hard part - akin to swallowing a vegetable that you hate while singing the Chinese national anthem: respect your internal world, while respecting others' internal worlds at the same time. That is: as you peer out at the world from your lonely hidden sugar-egg scene, you embrace your dead-baby funk (for fuck's sake, you lost a baby - or a baby-like entity- and funks are to be expected! If you didn't have funks, Dead Baby Momma would be concerned for your psychological health!) and - at the same time - be a gracious member of the human community, one with dignity, wisdom, and empathy for others' conditions. Say something nice to the prego woman at the table, even if it hurts. Fake a smile if you have to, or politely excuse yourself to use the restroom.

By practicing this skill, you learn to let go of the things you can't change; namely the fact that the world moves on, even as you still get stuck in your Sugar-Egg scene. Plus, you take your traumatic past and channel it in a positive and outward manner (okay, Dead Baby Momma has no idea what that second part means, but it sure sounds good).


STEP 2:

This is a very important step, so listen up, Funked-Out. There are very likely one or two (or more!) keenly perceptive people who know you, who get it, whose sensitivity and ability to understand things beyond their own worlds far transcend what others are capable of. They sense your retreat into your Sugar-Egg world and try to reach you there (even despite potentially grappling with their own internal turmoil), letting you know you aren't alone. Once you know who they are, cull them deeper into your life and don't let them go, and be sure to let them know in clear, blunt terms how grateful you to have them nearby. They're a rarity, and they will help keep you safe and sound as you continue down this strange, lonely, funk-laden road of grief.

Dead Baby Momma recognizes steps 1 and 2 aren't always easy. Quick return to my happy-hour funk at the Spanish tapas bar, just to illustrate. I would give myself...oh...about a C+ in achieving Step 1. I tried to be a good sport - man, did I try - but this particular funk was more of a doozy than what I was used to, blindsiding me. Next time I'll do better. As for Step 2, I was lucky to have two such friends at the table - M and S - sensing my funky little retreat into my own head, and just being there for me in a subtle, real way: a knowing kick under the table, a hand on my forearm, a glance into my eyes, an abrupt and strategic attempt to change the subject. They got it, and they were with me in my universe when I most needed help. Although I couldn't bring myself react or jump all over their presence, being too consumed by my own self, I am ever-grateful to have such friends in my life. They're those hoard-worthy types you never want to let go of. I don't think I ever mentioned to either of them how much those gestures meant to me (which would lead to a grade of about B-), but I will.

So there's what you do, Funked Out. Oh, and there's a Step 3, too: go out and find a sugar egg and buy one, so that you can revel in the pleasure of breaking apart the outside, eating it and getting your face all sticky with pure sugar residue, and then biting the ass off the bunny on the inside. Zany pleasure!

The Hunks are Up!

Good Morning, Caffeinators!

I'm heading to our not-very-exciting state capitol today to sit at a table with a bunch of people in suits and talk about our college education system. Then I'm coming home to continue working diligently on tracks 2-3 of the KuKd Folk Series...coming very soon.

If you didn't just fall backwards out of your chair from pure envy, check out Knocked-Down Hunk Gallery #2 and vote for your fave! Next hunk-submission deadline is September 1st.

A Tocophobia Sandwich

Greetings, Fellow Travelers on the Road of Life!

Today, this sunny Saturday in Seattle, I had a specific plan to take control of a specific fear in my life. But that original fear got trumped by another fear - fear of the plan itself - so I ditched the plan altogether.

Regarding this fear, have I mentioned my post-KuKd Tocophobia? Surely I've alluded to it, and of course know that that word means. But in case you don't, let me explain:

Tocophobia is simply another word for Maleusiophobia, which - as anybody with first-grade-or-higher vocabulary level understands - is a synonym for Parturiphobia, which - as even your Amish grandmother living in a rural cave with no TV or Internet will inform you - is no different from Lockiophobia. Which - as indexed in the bible of all bibles of phobia lists - means: "fear of childbirth or pregnancy."

Ahhhh, pregnancy. Remember the days when it looked like this?



Just a lovely ten-month journey fringed with foliage, a hopeful springtime breeze caressing your ears, a shining light at the end of the tunnel beckoning you. Come, Fertile Princess of Motherly Nectar! it said. Come to the Land of Ever-Flowing Breast Milk and Shimmering Sense of Purposefulness, Warm Rosy-Cheeked Child Awaits the Love Pressing Against the Walls of Your Soul! It looked like that for me the first time, and even the second time.

Then came my third stint at being knocked up. Gone was serene foliage, the peaceful silence, the safe and inviting passageway calling my name. Nuh-nuh-no. For me, pregnancy kind of looked like this:



Yes: like a strange acid trip, swirling with hallucinations and spinning unknowns, where nothing was as it seems. And in fact, it wasn't. Just a blighted ovum (Mother Nature's greatest mind-fuck).

So where does that leave me? It leaves me as a bona fide Tocophobe, certifiably and nail-chompingly afraid of looking up (or down at that pink plus-sign) and seeing yet ANOTHER ten-month pregnancy tunnel stretching out before my eyes, looking more or less like this:



That would be me, flailing around in the air, propelled through this shadowy tunnel of horrors with the evil Dead Baby Goddess's face floating in the background. And each of those doors off to the side represents a potential danger - a radiologist jumping out with a clipboard and a grim expression, relaying some awful news:

your baby has five heads and webbed feet!


Or: there is no baby!

Or: the baby is dead and seeping into your bloodstream, which has already caused widespread gangrene, which means we will immediately have to amputate all four of your limbs!

Or: you're pregnant with a thriving fetus, but it's not a human fetus; it's some genetic cross between a flying Mexican wombat, a platypus, a Tazmanian devil, and an ear of corn.

Aggghhhhh!!!

You think I must be kidding, but I'm not. I know it sounds crazy, and it is. But nobody ever said that phobias are normal and rational things.

* * *

ANYWAY.

Kevin and I both decided last week that my haphazard shrieks of "PULL OUT! MAKE A MAP OF HAWAII ON MY STOMACH FOR ALL I CARE! JUST PULL OUT! NOW!" would not be an effective long-term way to deal with this gnawing, nagging fear of pregnancy. No, no. The real way, the best way, the grown-up way, the responsible way, was to go on the pill. Not forever, ya know. Just for the next year or so, while I sorted things out in my head. Just a way to bide myself some time for deciding if I really want to embark down that tunnel again.

So, I told my doctor I really needed this drug to maintain sanity, and she wrote up a prescription for a few months' worth of low-dose birth control pills, the name of which I've already pushed violently out of my mind (keep reading). I was told to start them this Sunday. Today is Saturday. The pharmacy closes at 1pm. And the one, single meaningful errand I had to run today was to pick up my first pill pack.

But then, I made the mistake of Googling this particular pill, which - according to drug-review blogs apparently filled with ranty, hormonal women - comes with some side effects that made me pause:

-weight gain of 10 to 15 pounds
-sharp mood swings and depression
-acne outbreaks

Hmmmmmm.

Now, am I the only person who finds it difficult to justify popping a pill (one pill a day, actually) that could potentially turn me into fat, zitty person with an attitude problem? Believe me, I already have days when I perceive myself as such. So why would I want to inch myself even closer - quite literally- to that unwanted physical and mental state?

So I paced back and forth a bit, asking Kevin what he thought, feeling wholly unsatisfied with the polite, respectful-of-my-female-power vagueness of his answers that civilized modern-day men are trained to give ("It's your body, honey - totally up to you! I'll go along with whatever.") Seriously, sometimes I wish I had a dominant, caveman-like husband who bossed me around: "YOU WILL GO ON THE PILL." or "YOU WILL NOT GO ON THE PILL." God, that would make life so much easier sometimes. (Actually, "YOU WILL TAKE OFF YOUR BRA" might be something I could get into...hmmm.) Anyway, I digress.

So, tocophobia then got trumped by...what...Dysmorphophobia (fear of deformity or unattractive body image)? Badmoodophobia (OK, I made that one up). Whatever. I was caught in a conundrum, trapped between phobias. A "fear sandwich" of sorts!



In the end, Fat-Zitty-Bitch-O-Phobia took over, and I skipped the pill, opting instead to do something totally unrelated to fears: ride my bike to the market with Kevin. We sat out in the sunshine and gorged ourselves on stuffed cabbage rolls from the Russian ladies and strong Americanos with lots of cream. I also made some loud obnoxious animal noises that caused Kevin to glance around nervously to see if people were staring (I LOVE getting him to react that way!) Let me tell you, this was much more fun than taking the responsible path of dealing with my tocophobia. Just don't tell any BOGS I said that.

In the end, although Kevin doesn't know this yet (as an intelligent human, however, he probably senses it coming like a dark thundercloud on the horizon): the new Tocophobia-busting plan will probably end up involving the help of you know who:



Not that Kevin remembers what one of those looks like, or how to use one. My gut tells me he'll catch on pretty fast. Which means that the only risk involved would really be



Hey, I can handle that over the other "side effects" any old day.

KuKd Folk Music Series, Track 1

Hello, Janis Joplins and Bob Dylans!

I've always liked to sing in the shower, but I've never been a songwriter. At least, I wasn't until I got embroiled in the KuKd shit storm of 2006-2007, when I finally had something to write songs about.

One day, I began writing folk songs in my head. I don't even like folk music that much - I'm more of a bass-thumping-booty-shaking-hip-hop kind of person. Still, the words came to me during my long drive to work, gelling in my brain without much thought, as though propelled by some sort of cosmic force of nature. As green freeway signs and Mount Rainier and shiny Mini Coopers whizzed by, I began belting these songs out to myself while going 70 miles an hour - mouth wide open and eyebrows scrunched together - not caring if the person in the lane beside me thought I looked like was having a solo orgasm in the car.

Then, a few weeks ago, Kevin and I were in Portland, Oregon for a spades-playing-and-beer-drinking excursion with friends, when we passed by this:



Standing there outside the store window, I suddenly remembered my folk songs. I could see those songs hovering inside my head like dusty little blobs of music notes, bored and wishing somebody would pay attention to them. I had this fleeting image of myself as Janis Joplin, sitting up on stage with a spotlight on me, singing my little ditties with Zachary applauding wildly from the MTV Realworld Penthouse for Bitchin' Stillborn Babes up above. I knew right then and there: I had to buy a guitar.

Not that I had any freakin' clue about HOW to play a guitar, but still. That was a minor detail that I figured would work itself out later. So I dragged Kevin into that store and asked if they had any lefty guitars on sale, and they did. So out came the credit card, and boom - suddenly I owned this instrument that I had no idea how to play.

Now, I should say that I did take piano lessons growing up and sang in school choir on and off, and lord knows I love to talk and yell (loudly), so I felt that turning myself into an overnight Dead Baby folk sensation wasn't nearly as implausible as it might seem.

So far, I've learned three chords. And - surprise, surprise - it is those exact three chords (whatever they are) that I decided do turn into the accompaniment for my very first song, "For Sure." I'm going to give you a sneak peek of my song, which I'm calling this Track 1 in the Knocked Up Knocked Down Folk Series.

IMPORTANT DISCLAIMERS: PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE GOING ANY FARTHER! IF YOU DO NOT READ THESE DISCLAIMERS LISTED BELOW, YOUR SHOES WILL CATCH ON FIRE IN FIVE MINUTES!

1) I just have to make clear that in real life, I don't have a lisp. NOT THAT THERE'S ANYTHING WRONG WITH THAT; I'm just saying that I personally don't have one. Because I made this video using not a video camera but a crappy regular old digital camera that happens to have a video feature, it sounds a little fucked up. I wouldn't even have put forth this disclaimer if Kevin hadn't burst out laughing while watching the video, that adorable jerk.

2) I suck at guitar. Seriously, I do - especially the rhythm of it. I'm taking lessons and working on it, okay? So cut this Dead Baby Momma some slack. Even if it's just because I'm a Dead Baby Momma (that is, under ordinary circumstances you wouldn't feel sorry for me at all but rather admonish me for daring to put my twangy, out-of-tune chords out there for the public to be embarrassed by), feel sorry for me and forgive the twang. If I ever get to use my KuKd Sympathy Card for some...yeah, sympathy (ding ding ding! I sense a new word for our Knocktionary!), it's now.

3) Apologies in advance for dropping the F-bomb. To all you stillborn babes listening from up there, it's only okay to do that if you're a grown-up, and only under appropriate circumstances. Got that?

All right, boys and girls. CLICK HERE for the video.

Oh, and in case you're the type of person who likes to read the lyrics on the CD cover and sing along, here you go.

"For Sure"

You might have been a bratty toddler,
Screamin' and throwin' your food.
You might have been a horrible speller,
With bad punctuation too.
You might have been a high school drop-out,
thinking school was only a bore.
You might have turned into a druggie,
living dirty and jobless and poor.

But I don't care what you might have been...
I just wish I could've known for sure.

You might have been obsessive compulsive,
counting every step that you took.
You might have been a Bill O'Reilly fan,
reading every one of his books.
You might have had issues with anger,
getting pissed off and slammin' the door,
You might have been a cleptomanic
stealin' money from my drawer.

But I don't care what you might have been...
I just wish I could've known for sure.

You might have been valedictorian,
president of your school.
You might have been a hottie like your dad,
making all the girlies drool.
You might have been a famous scientist,
discovering all kinds of cures,
You might have been idealistic,
Running off to join the Peace Corps.

But I don't care what you might have been
I'm tired of imaging what you might have been
I don't give a fuck what you might have been

I just wish I could've known for sure.

Pollyanna Versus the Bitch

Greetings, Cheerfuls and Grumpies Alike! All are welcome here.

It's 2:04 AM as I begin this post - time hit the sack. But my brain and belly are full of chilled Sauvignon Blanc, a few sips of coffee, and lots and lots of handfuls of Fritos corn chips. So once again, Kevin snoozes while Tebow and I remain awake, the living room windows looking out over nighttime blackness and the occasional whoosh of a car going by. It's OK though. Right now, I'm in the mood to spew forth a stream of honest pieces of thought.

Don't get all excited; I don't have any over-the-top, shocking things for you today that will make your jaw drop. I am not knocked up with septuplets, nor did I suddenly discover that I have a penis tucked up inside my body (I do have a small third nipple, my proudest biological achievement, but that's a separate post), nor am I becoming a vegan, nor am I about to slit my wrists because my hunk didn't win first place (DAMN YOU, SNOWDUDE!). No, no, and no.

This is more like a general observation about different ways to think about death and life, and about how blogging can symbolize which conscious-thinking route we choose to take. I should warn you, before I explain myself further, that I'm going to have to take up the persona of



for a few minutes here. But don't worry; before long, I'll alternate back to



That's right: if KuKd doesn't lead to an identity crisis, I don't know what does.

Anyway, I remember at various points in my KuKd journey coming into a conversation, a situation, where I had a choice of two paths to take. First, there was what I imagined as the Low Path, the one in which I would turn into a big ball of pissed-off sentiment, a pregnant-woman-bashing, nobody-understands-me-and-my-wretched-problems, fuck-you-for-having-a-baby-without-me-and/or-not-asking-me-enough-times-in-quick-succession-how-I'm-doing kind of person. You know, just the kind of person you want to have over for tea.

Then, there was the High Path (the more difficult one, of course), which was the route of...well...civility, I guess. Grace, calm under pressure, strength, good things, forgiveness, Mother Theresa-esque. From the very beginning I saw this High Path - literally, I could picture it in the reddish blackness behind my closed eyelids as I was lying on the futon one day, feeling pinpricks of resentment toward certain friends for ridiculously petty things like not saying EXACTLY what I wanted to hear EXACTLY when I wanted it (how dare they not predict my needs with precision, showing utmost empathy for a circumstance they knew nothing about! Assholes!). I knew I wanted to somehow get to this path, escape the dreadful self-pity and anger that was lapping at my ankles, threatening to swallow me up (can you picture it? Like dark maple syrup, but with a nasty taste).

Brace yourself - here she comes:



So I had a conscious choice to make: high path or low path. It didn't necessarily have to do with what I said or how I acted around other people. Well, that was part of it. But it more a way of thinking about the world, about death in general, and about my place in the fabric of humanity.

Taking the High Path meant forgiving the people in my life for not achieving the impossible (ie: climbing inside my brain and going through this with me). It meant viewing my losses not even really as "losses," as "unfair" versus "fair," but as just a neutral part of the great cycle of Mother Nature. Death happens. Things don't work out. I'm no less deserving of this fate than anyone else. That was part of how I viewed this High Path thinking.

Here's another part of thinking along that High Path, the part that is perhaps the weirdest: accepting that my KuKd experiences have been good for me. I know how obnoxiously Pollyanna that sounds, so if you want to smack me right now, feel free. It's taken me a while to get to where I believe this: that as we go through shit in life, the stronger and more seasoned human beings we become, and the more we can therefore contribute to the greater good. We have more to say to others who face loss themselves. We get to feel something. There are a lot of people in their 20s, 30s, and 40s who never GET to experience real, hardcore sadness over something meaningful. They don't know what it's all about. And DUDE! Just admit now satisfying it is to have a good, hard cry over something meaningful, to have the world look at you and think: this person went through something and survived, and is therefore mad cool. They're so cool, I want to do shots of tequila with them right now. If they can go through a shit storm like that, I can too.

Arright, time to go back to:



Let me clarify: I'm not saying that I am Miss Queen of High Path Thinking. God no. There will be no preachy self-help book filled with bulleted Pollyanna points, my obnoxious smiling lipsticked face on the cover, with some overly long title like "Taking the High Path: A Positive Thinking Guide for People Who Have Been Bitch-Slapped By Mother Nature," or worse: "Time to Get High: A Fucked-Up Person's Guide to Making Your Thoughts Soar."

It's just something I strive for, sort of like losing five or more pounds, or eating more vegetables, or maintaining a clean car. Walking this "High Path" has been a constant, obsessive effort for me, and it hasn't come without a price. In my attempts to remain ultimately optimistic, I think I overreached - maintaining this forced wall of bravado that felt really fake sometimes. I swear, I told more dead baby jokes and dropped more F-bombs during the days and weeks after the stillbirth than I ever have in my life. I probably should have taken more time to actively confront my own pain. I should have blasted that one Aerosmith song I can never remember the name of ("don't know what it takes to let you goooooooooo") and had more emotional moments. But I was a late bloomer in that regard. It took me a long time to deal with my losses in a deeper psychological sense, to accept Zach's death as something involving a real human being, to give him a name other than "that baby."

To this day still, if somebody asks me how I am - not in a superficial way, but a deeper, "no REALLY, how ARE you?" sort of way with their eyes boring into mine, I tend to clam up and get nervous, stuttering "fine!" in a fake tone. I have trouble peeling back the layers of my own self and offering a deeply truthful answer.

* * *

All of this points to the difficulty of blogging about dead babies. A treacherous job, this is! I do write this blog - sometimes, anyway - readers in mind (that is, when I'm not just randomly, selfishly entertaining myself here with my own musings on what spooge smells like). I mean, it's about me (of course), but it's also about the people who bother to read this. When you put your thoughts out in public space, you have to have a wee bit of audience awareness; I think this just comes naturally.

So, knowing my audience, I understand that people come here at various stages of grief, at times in their lives when the last thing they need to hear is the hippy-dippy, Pollyanna shit described above. HIGH PATH MY ASS! That's what I would say if I were you. Sometimes, what you need to hear is not that somebody is doing oh-so-irritatingly-well, all lofty and sitting pretty on their High Path (or even trying to be), but that someone is just as down in the shit-filled trenches as you are. I was there for a looonnggg time, seeking out the gloomiest, doomiest, bitchiest blogs and books in the universe. Seriously, I wanted to start a KuKd goth club where we all wear black eyeliner and black KuKd t-shirts, pierce our tongues and labia and go around chanting some message of muddled negativity: "Screw you, world! You don't understand our problems, and we didn't want babies anyway!"

(Still looking into that - not sure it would fly)

Anyway. So on this blog, and in my life, and in the people I surround myself with, I'm aiming for balance. That is: balance between



and

And the Reigning Champion Is...

SNOWDUDE!

Everybody reach toward the computer screen and give Snowdude a congratulatory stroke on the lovely, morning-shadow-sandpapery cheek! As the first place winner of our prestigious debut gallery of Knocked Down Hunks, he deserves it.



It was a riveting race up until the very end! With earlier doubts about his hunky stamina squashed (drug tests during training showed no measurable quantity of hunk steroid Real Bean in his blood), Snowdude started off strong and hopeful. As his wife cheered him on from the sideline, he scored a slew of votes within minutes of taking off from the starting line. But despite this momentum, victory wasn't quite in reach - not with opponents Sleepyhead and Scout lapping hunkily and hungrily at his heels. Alas, Snowdude pulled in enough votes close to the finish line to keep him in the lead, clocking in at first place!

CONGRATULATIONS, SNOWDUDE!

To view the runners up and all nominees for this gallery, or to submit your own hunk for Gallery #2 by the June 15th deadline, visit the Hunk Gallery.

Insomnia Thoughts

Greetings, Sleeping Beauties!



Ahhhhh...a loopy, insomnia-spurred, 2:59 am post. Sitting in the living room in T-shirt, undies and moose slippers, hair piled on top of my head, a half-eaten bowl of ice cream on balanced on one armrest. I must look like a woman who just underwent a bad break-up. Which I sort of did, actually: a break-up from sleep. The dim corner lamp is on and Tebow is glaring at me, wondering why I'm typing loudly and disturbing his sleep. Sorry, dog. You'll survive.

Why am I awake right now?

Perhaps it's because K, about an hour after we had crawled into bed at 11:30 (and just as I was entering the throes of sleep), randomly and abruptly turned toward me and asked if I wanted to have sex.

I suppose this must be some remnant of his 13-year-old self, or whatever age it is when boys wake up at night with hard-ons? Who knows. I thought it polite of him to ask, though, and - although a bit half-asleep - was up for some midnight action nonetheless. So aforementioned action took place, and I did my customary shriek of "PULL OUT!" - my current preferred (and highly scientific!) method of birth control. The whole event - from brief foreplay, to sex itself, to panicked shouting, to post-sex clean-up with a t-shirt (not the t-shirt I'm wearing now, thank you very much) - successfully kicked me out of sleep mode, leaving me wide awake and staring grumpily into the darkness.

K, his spooge happily released into the wild, fell instantly - and irritatingly - back to sleep. Fine, whatever. I'm happy for him, glad to know he's now in the bedroom breathing rhythmically and dreaming of sugar plums while I sit here in my moose slippers, the clock ticking agonizingly toward the time when I'm supposed to get up.

Fucker.


* * *

Can I just say: why is middle-of-the-night TV so unilaterally awful? Denture and sleep aide commercials, mostly. Reruns of bad sitcoms, like Full House. It's disturbing, because it gives me a glimpse into what the world must be like for certain people out there, awake like me at this very moment, yet way worse off. Like, people in hospitals, for example. People in the cancer ward, up at night while somebody comes in to replenish their anti-nausea pills. People in old folks homes. People losing their minds. People without any friends. I remember reading somewhere that "the unhappier people are, the more TV they watch." There were scientific studies to show this, of course, as there are studies to show (and not show) everything that matters.

I honestly hope I don't become a frail 90-year-old lady sitting alone in a rocking chair in a single wide trailer, eating mushy food straight from a can, awake at night with the soft blue light of the TV casting a haunting glow on my face, Kevin long gone because the men usually seem to go first, no grown children checking in on me to make sure I've taken my medications. I hope I've got some well-cemented friendships to keep me alive during those elder years, people to drink martinis with and play bridge.

Tonight, I hereby make a pact with myself: I'm going to look out for my friends, and not let anybody grow old alone. I'm going to start an old folks commune where we all move in together and eat meals and a bit wooden table with candles and a checkered tablecloth, play jazz music, and sleep in a pile on the living room floor.


* * *

Another possible reason for my awakeness. Tonight (I guess I should be calling it last night, actually) I had drinks and N and C, my Baby Lady friends. That is, the gals who were pregnant with me, and whose babies are now nearly two years old. N is preggers again with a girl, due in a month or so. I always enjoy my time with them, because we connect. We laughed and cussed and ate bacon cheeseburgers. We talked about men and sex and just nonsensical things, normal girl-talky things.

Still, it always produces in me a wave of dark unsettledness, usually somewhere in the middle of our conversation, a combination of craving pregnancy once again, combined with insane longing for bygone days. I get annoyed with myself for carrying around this "thing" that won't dissipate, an ever-present cloud of something. It makes me feel self-conscious and high-maintenance, self-pitying, not the kind of person I want to be.

Afterward, I met K at the tavern. As I always do after my get-togethers with N and C, downed half a glass of wine in one gulp and launched into the dull pang of sadness that had settled down onto my insides, about how perhaps we SHOULD get knocked up again, because that would bring back the life that once was, erasing all of the crud in my system. Pregnancy: the answer to everything! Riiiight.

He always listens and nods because he loves me, but I stop after a few sentences, tired of hearing myself talk about this dull subject, and remembering what I already know: there's only so much a person can hear the same thing over and over again, so much giving & listening & sympathizing that one person in a relationship can do. That's what KuKd does to a woman, or at least what it did to me: turned me into a taker, needer, over-thinker, talker. Well, it's probably the case that I was those things already - stillbirth only magnified those (not so great) qualities.


* * *

Going back to the communal old-folks house one last time: when we start this thing, however-many-years from now, let's treat ourselves to a Clapper for the dining room. The Clapper is one of those products that has always intrigued me, yet that seems like something you're not supposed to buy until you're a senior citizen. We'll use our house Clapper to celebrate our oldness, and to entertain ourselves by clapping stuff on and off.

* * *

Attempt to carve out a hour or two of sleep before waking-up time? Or just brew a pot of coffee and head in early, pausing for a mid-day nap on my office floor? Decisions, decisions. It's getting light out. Insomnia sucks nuts.

Abundant Bible Madness

Greetings, KuKd Strong Mommas/Daddas and Inquisitive Guests!

See this link?

http://www.knockedupknockeddown.blogpsot.com/

See it? It's the link to this blog, right? Right? Isn't it? Well, click on it to find out for sure. Go ahead, do it and see where it takes you. DON'T GET SUCKED IN, THOUGH! I expect you to return here right away, so that I can finish my story! You're MY FRIEND, not theirs! Got it?

Okay. Did you click on it?

And, I mean, wasn't it fucking WEIRD?

(Let's see who's really smart! Anyone who can tell me the difference between that website address and MY blog address gets two smart points!)

So, this morning I went over there and clicked on the "Contact Us" form. I just couldn't help myself. Here is exactly what I wrote, copied and pasted:

Greetings, Abundant Bible!

My name is Monica, and I am founder of the stillbirth and miscarriage blog, Knocked-Up-Knocked-Down, which lives at the URL http://www.knockedupknockeddown.blogspot.com/.

Several of my astute readers have recently brought it to my attention that if you accidentally type "blogpsot" instead of "blogspot" when trying to visit my blog,
you arrive here instead: http://www.knockedupknockeddown.blogpsot.com/,
which is THIS site - Abundant Bible! Isn't that amazing? What a serendipitous and perplexing discovery, a puzzling phenomenon!

I simply couldn't help but write to you and ask you how and why this occurs - if you have any insight on that. Is it simply sheer coincidence? Or is it intentional? If intentional, what compelled you to make http://www.knockedupknockeddown.blogpsot.com/ one of your URL addresses? Or was it I, perhaps, who somehow - acting subconsciously through the will of God, naming MY blog after YOU? Was it my destiny, maybe?

I did take the liberty of perusing your site for a few minutes, just to see if there WAS - in fact - any connection (even a tenuous one) between Abundant Bible and my blog content, so that I could perhaps steer my readers to your highly informative website. Unfortunately, I was not able to find anything on your site regarding pregnancy or pregnacy loss (other than abortion), at least not that I could tell. Is there something here that I might be missing, something that could be useful to me or my blog readers? If so, please do let me know! Even something on medical termination might be related - that is, abortion when done for medical purposes.

(I did read up on the "Drinking, Swearing, and Drugs" section, but mostly for myself, since I am certainly guilty of the first two. And the drugs, if Claritin counts. There was a bit of Mary Jane, but that was when I was young and stupid. My readers aren't the types to drink or swear, and would never go near mind-altering substances, so I won't bother referring them to that section. Thank you though - I do feel enlightened after reading it.)

ANYWAY, going back to the original purpose of this message, please let me know if you have any thoughts on wny our URL addresses are so uncannily similar. Looking forward to hearing from you!

Peace and Sunshine,
Monica L., Founder/EditorKnocked Up, Knocked Down
http://www.knockedupknockeddown.blogspot.com/

After clicking "Submit," I was instantly swept over to a screen that said this:

Dear Visitor,

Thank you for contacting us. We enjoy hearing from our visitors, but regret that we may not be able to reply, though we try to read all correspondence. The Bible says in Mt 9:37,38-THE HARVEST TRULY IS PLENTEOUS, BUT THE LABOURERS ARE FEW. PRAY YE THEREFORE THE LORD OF THE HARVEST, THAT HE WILL SEND FORTH LABOURERS INTO HIS HARVEST. We apologize—we do not have enough helpers to be able to respond to most emails.

If you have repented and asked Jesus to be your Lord and Savior as a result of this
website, please tell us and ask for the free booklet to help you get started in the right direction. To do this, we will need your postal address. For those looking for additional information on Bible prophecy, we recommend http://www.whatliesahead.com/.

The Bible Desk Staff

OK, I'll admit I was mildly disappointed to learn that I might not get a response AT ALL. Who knew that there were so many people contacting Abundant Bible! At least they promise to *try* to read my message, and provided what seems like a valid excuse for not always being able to reply. Nobody is going to argue with Mt 9:37,38. Certainly not me, anyway. (I was thinking, though, if somebody DID ask Jesus to be their Lord and Savior as a result of that website, and they requested their free booklet to get them started, it would kind of suck to be ignored altogether. I think I would feel cheated somehow, and be like, where the fuck is my booklet!)

I'll keep you posted on whether I ever hear back. Don't cross your fingers, though.

Pipeline of Healing

Greetings, KuKd Strong Mommas and Inquisitive Guests!

Okay, all you visual learners out there! This one's for you.

A couple of months ago, I went out for a drink with a momma - let's call her Susan - whose daughter had just been stillborn. Susan needed to talk to somebody who "gets it." And boy - if stillbirth isn't something I at least sort of "get" by now, well, I may as well throw in the towel and give up trying to understand anything in life.

We got connected through a variety of circumstances that aren't important. At the time, I was knocked up x3. I did not divulge to Susan my reasons for ordering a gin-and-tonic-without-the-gin, because I didn't feel it prudent or sensitive to tell this to a woman whose baby-loss was still so fresh and hurtful. Nobody needs that, thank you very much.

She talked, and I listened. I preferred it this way, because I'm generally bad at knowing what to say, even when it involves something that hits so close to my heart. It was surreal, hearing my former self reflected in Susan's words, recognizing her perception of reality as the EXACT WAY in which I saw the world during that dark and brutal time in my own life, just weeks and months after losing my son. Still in shock, hypersensitive to others' comments, crushingly disappointed. At one point, she asked me if I ever had trouble "feeling." She said she felt this strange sensation of numbness, and was waiting on edge for the inevitible tidalwave of emotion and sadness to hit. All I could do was just nod my head and mumble heartfelt-but-not-very-helpful responses, things like: "Yeah, I felt that, and still feel it sometimes. So yeah, you have lots of numbness to look forward to." or: "Yeah, your life pretty much sucks right now."

I'm sure those are the exact kind of uplifting things she needed to hear. See? I told you it was better to just kick back and listen.

During our conversation, and on the drive home, I had this sudden, strange image of myself being in a very different place than she. Her: just a few weeks after her loss. Me: about a year-and-a-half after mine, and knocked up again. It was one of those moments where you don't quite know where/how/who you are, until you see yourself juxtaposed against somebody else. Sitting across that table from Susan made me see how far I've come since 1.5 years ago. And I don't mean it in a bragging and obnoxious, "look how I have my shit together!" kind of way. It's more just a, "look how much my perception of reality has changed since then" kind of way.

This led to my newfound mental picture of what I call the Tunnel of Recovery, where KuKd mommas/daddas - and even our infertility-fighting counterparts - coexist.

It looks like this:



Way up front, in the closer (and therefore bigger-looking) part of the tunnel, is the event itself - the loss. The loss of a baby, of a fetus, of a vision of oneself as a parent at all. As time goes by, you start to heal, and you move along that pipeline - off into the distance. You're still there, in that same tunnel, and you can still communicate with people in different segments of that tunnel - just like Susan and I were conversing. It's just that your own segment - wherever in that tunnel you happen to be- looks and feels totally different from how it used to feel, back when you were in a different place.

(Being a classic visual learner, these are just the sorts of bizarre things that pop into my brain on long car rides, so just indulge me and roll with it, dawg)

I'd say that Susan was way up there toward the front, in that close-up part of the tunnel. As for me, well, I'm off in the distance, over that first little bunny hill you see in the picture, where the tunnel turns small and squiggly and faint. I'm not saying there's a light at the end of that tunnel, either, as in a definite way out of it for good. I gave up hope for that a long time ago, kids. It's just that time really is the thing that heals, pushing you along, up and over various obstacles, to where everything gets easier.

I should also point out this blog as a solid example. This blog was started...oh...almost a year after Zach's death, somewhere in the middle of that pipeline. There's no way I could have started it any sooner, found anything remotely interesting or tongue-n-cheeky to say about the death of a baby. No way, Jose. I was too busy looking down at my empty body, feeling pissed off at the world. It's taken lots of time and hindsight for me to get to where I am today, looking back, analyzing what happened, drawing out truths and laughs where I can see them. It's like picking up rocks in a forest, looking for cool bugs underneath them. Susan will get to that point too.

To finish up this bit of philosophizing, I leave you with one of the few pictures I have of myself when I was in Susan's place - WAAAAY up at that godawful front of the pipeline - a month or so after Zach's death. Acquiring Tebow the Westi-poodle was a very conscious and deliberate move - I needed something to mother, and damn it, I needed it NOW!! Kevin certainly wasn't going to argue.

God, I looked like crap back then - I probably hadn't showered in days when this picture was taken (why didn't anybody offer me a comb, at the very least?), and my smile the fake and brittle kind, because even though I liked this small furry mammal okay, he wasn't the real deal. Oh, and I was always wearing Kevin's sweatshirt, because it mercifully swallowed up my body and smelled like Kevin.

Now that I'm thinking about it, I really hope I was at least wearing deodorant.

Something from Nothing

Greetings, KuKd Strong'uns and Inquisitive Guests!

A few oh-so-important updates before my real post: 

FIRST, the lingerie saga. Scroll down to my last post if you aren't in on this...shall we say...little mishap.  For the record, the lingerie did eventually get worn again, utlized in a snot-free manner, appreciated in a way that Victoria herself would approve of.  I just had to make sure the world knew that the ending to that chapter was a happy and delectable one. 

(KuKd Mommas, get out there and buy something sexylicious if you haven't already! My current sense is that your man will like you in it, no matter how theatrical/self-conscious/fat/ridiculous it makes you feel, and no matter how far from a Maxim supermodel you consider yourself to be. This comes from a person who is very, very far from being a Maxim supermodel. If I can do it, you can do it! And of course, I expect a full report afterward.)

SECOND, regarding the lovely, spine-tingling, mouthwatering KuKd HUNK GALLERY: Because the Blogger poll is silly, I cannot simply add new KuKd Hunks to the gallery at random, and then add those lucious Hunks' names to the poll to be voted upon in droves. I had hoped that this would be something I could do, but alas, it is not.

SO.....

Every month or two, I'll announce the winner of the current gallery - which should not be a surprise, since anyone can see on the righthand side of this blog who is the current reigning champion. Note the number of days you have left to vote. (Listen up, SNOWDUDE! On the one hand, I hate you for beating my own Hunk thus far. On the other hand, I love you for being such a scrumptious, snowy, snuggleworthy ball of knocked-down sexiness. Truly, you are an achingly mysterious man who draws out a conflicting array of emotions in this poor girl's troubled heart.)

Once the current gallery closes and winner announced (damn you, Snowdude!), I will then start a new gallery with a new deadline to submit your Hunk, and I will make that announcement. As soon as I have at least THREE (3) Hunk submissions, the new gallery and accompanying poll will begin. You can - AND SHOULD! - resubmit your Hunk each time! Don't feel shy or vain or weird for doing this. You can bet that I'll be submitting MY personal Hunk each time. My only request is that it be a different photo. Seriously, let's get some variety here. Send your hunk-o-picture with a caption and a nickname to monica@exhalezine.com.  

With that, let me set JUNE 15th as the next Hunk deadline, giving us all a bit of time to scramble around and dig up those hot pictures of you-know-who. Don't worry, I'll remind you of this later.

Moving on.

* * *

Have you read Eat, Pray, Love like everybody else and their grandmother has? I remember tossing it begrudgingly into my backpack just as K and I were leaving for Ecuador, four months after Zachary's stillbirth. It was one of those books that I had refused to read for the longest time, similar to refusing to watch Titanic, because everybody was buzzing about it. Which meant it couldn't possibly be any good. Finally, I succumbed to the hype, toting it along as a mindless "beach read."

If you haven't read it, here is what I recall being the gist, from the sandy/beachy/sunny/cocktaily cobwebs of my memory: it's a memoir, written by heroine Elizabeth Gilbert, chronicling her own traveling around the world in order to heal from a nasty divorce. She is an obnoxiously pretty, blond, rich, talented person who gets paid lots of money to embark on this culinary, spiritual, and romantic journey self-discovery (and write about it), which makes me insanely jealous. But anyway.

I read most of it, skimmed through the boring parts, neither loving nor hating it, finding certain parts compelling. There was one part in particular that I felt was compelling, and that has stuck with me ever since. I was pretty sure I loved this little gem of insight so profoundly that I e-mailed a friend about it from a guesthouse in Quito (certainly with Kevin's hand on my bare knee and one or two or three rum-n-Cokes in my system). Sifting through my old e-mails, trying to remember what exactly that little bit of wisdom was and why I loved it, here is what I found, excerpted from a December 2007 e-mail:

There's a book called "Eat, Pray, Love" by Elizabeth Gilbert, and I speed-read it during our week on the coast.  The book annoyed me on some levels but one important message I carried away is how the Italians worship the art of doing nothing - or, of taking some very simple ingredients or circumstances and making fun, festive merriment out of it. That is, of being in the moment, being where you are, not constantly planning and worrying. I really want to make sure I achieve this, which I think I can do and have done before, but I want to keep doing it. So, when we get back, I want to have a handful of close friends including you over, put out a red checkered table cloth and lots of wine, make pasta and just ¨make merriment out of nothing¨- that is, out of just a handful of friends, simple food, and wine. Can we do that?

xoxo, Monica

That was it.  I was thinking of that now, because...well...this past month or two have been characterized by my own attempts to do just that: make merriment out of nothing.  Lately, I've gotten totally obsessed with taking this childfree life, and doing things with it that I wouldn't ordinary be able to do.  A shrink would probably tell me there is some psychological term for this - Stage 12 of the Grieving Process.  Who knows. 

It's not even a bitter, begrudging, brittle sensation.  It's a real, vibrating, life-filled feeling of just enjoying the moment (apologies for sounding so cliche), not longing or hoping or yearning for something better, but rather creating happy moments in the spaces that would otherwise have been taken up by babies #1, 2, or 3.   Let me illustrate with some examples:

• Lingerie in a hotel room (snot or no snot).  Sipping wine in bed with sunlight slanting in and a finelooking man by my side. 
• Dinner parties with friends - several of them.  Setting the table with placemats, candles, and silverware!  Bringing out food arranged on plates: meat, vegetable, starch, in perfect symmetry. 
• Collecting good people in dark taverns for drinking beers and talking about our personal lives.  
• Sitting barefoot on a piece of driftwood at the beach with Kevin, each sipping a chilled Corona with lime.  Getting sunburned but not caring so much.  It'll peel off. 
• BBQed pork ribs for dinner, juices dripping down my forearms. 
• Wearing sundresses.  Haven't worn those in a while.  
• Taking a bath with lavender-scented salts.  Soooo girly, but soooo nice. 
• Coffee with lots of milk and sugar on the balcony. 
• Breakfast with friends before work: once a week, yummy social-ness.  
• Writing folksongs in my head during my drive to work, and belting them out in the car.

There are other things.  This is just a sampling.   Yes, I'll say it: I'm valuing the little bit of philosophy that blond Elizabeth Gilbert picked up in Italy (while she was getting paid to travel, eat procuttio, and take Italian lessons with hot men, let me remind you.   I'll bet she's the type that would vote for SNOWDUDE, too!  That beeyatch!). 

Oh, don't worry: it's not as though I'm Polyanna-cheerful all the time.  You can still count on me to be your partner-in-gloom.  For fuck's sake, we all know a KuKd momma can't act TOO happy, or society will get suspicious of you for getting over your losses too quickly!  It's just that right now, at this time in my life, I'm liking the kid-free-ness, and the moments and feelings that spring from that.  

I'll even end on a reassuringly gloomy note: all of this happy-go-lucky-reveling-in-kidfree-life doesn't come without consequence.  I've got a crimson sunburn on my shoulders and chest right now from baseball and beach-combing in the sun today, and a mild headache still from last night's wine.  

(Zachary: please send Mommy a care package from the Realworld Penthouse for Bitchin' Stillborn Babes ASAP containing heavenly elixirs for the sun/booze combo hangover.   Eagerly waiting to hear from you, my wise son!)

Snot and Lingerie

I am not a lingerie-wearing type of person. I'm just not. Buying some expensive, impractical, lacey little thing made out of silk (that HAS to be dry cleaned, of course) is not something that would ever normally cross my mind, especially not in recent years. The fact of having positively ZERO libido during the months before and after Zachary's stillbirth pushed the concept of sexy undergarments even farther into the reaches of my mind. Poor Kevin went months and months without getting laid. I felt sorry for him, sort of.

Then, not long ago, Kevin hinted semi-jokingly that he thought it would be lovely if he came home from work to find me - AND I QUOTE: "wearing lingerie and scrubbing the kitchen floor." Later, he added: "...or doing dishes."

I laughed at first, of course. We both did. What an absurdly stereotypical, male-dominant, anti-feminist, caveman-like fantasy to have! Coming home to find your highly independent, boldly headstrong, reasonably intelligent wife (who has a Master's degree!!) doing something as subservient as scrubbing the floor? In lingerie? And ME, of all people, doing such a thing? I am about the biggest slob-o-phile that ever existed, hardly noticing or caring if we go five years without washing the bed sheets or vacuuming. Dirt doesn't bother me, so I wouldn't be caught dead scrubbing the floor.

But yesterday morning, I woke up feeling strangely inspired to run over to Victoria's Secret, which I knew was situated somewhere in the bowels of the crowded shopping mall down the street, to at least see if anything there was on sale. No harm in doing that, is there?

The timing was perfect, because this was to be the weekend of our customary, monthly "urban getaway.” We had put in a low Priceline bid for a fancy-shmancy 4-star hotel in downtown Seattle for one night, where we would gorge ourselves on a sinfully vegetable-less, butter-infused dinner at a French restaurant, drink lots of wine, and...well...you know the rest. This also happened to be Mother’s Day weekend, a time which – as we all know – is usually fraught with emotional peril for the millions of miscarriage-and-stillbirth “mommies” out there. “Mommies” like me, grappling with the surreal fact of having briefly been a mother in the scientific sense, yet with no real living child to show for it.

What better way to embrace my newly baby-less life by boldly surprising Kevin with my first piece of real lingerie, waiting for him on our hotel bed in my slinky outfit as he stepped out of the shower?

So I told Kevin I was off to run some boring errands, and drove to the mall instead, my heart going pitter-patter. I felt oddly as though I were doing something illegal, something that might land me in hell, something my prune-faced 4th grade teacher Sister Estelle would surely frown upon. I guarantee you, she would give me a hard whack with her rule if she knew what naughty number I tried on. It looked like this: