A Mother's Musings and Mumblings

Friday. The day that the witchlets return to me from WF’s house. Thing 2 arrives hoarse but otherwise well. Her theory is that she may be allergic to the horse she’s been riding all week. Good guess so I pack her up and bring her home to give her the Dr. Mom treatment.

Well-hydrated child in no apparent distress. Voice is raspy but she denies sore throat. Lymphadenopathy present in the posterior cervical and sub-mandibular chains but non-tender and moble nodes all. Ear drums both slightly dull but no fluid noted. Nasal mucosa normal. Posterior oropharynx normal with no drainage or erythema. So prolly allergies.

Now, all first year med students and other students of Dr. Google – tell me what’s wrong with my approach. Yup. I didn’t look at a damn thing below the neck.

So as we’re wrapping this up, Thing 2 says “This doesn’t have anything to do with the bruise on my leg, does it?” I love immediate feedback on exams, don’t you? Too bad I’m an idiot.

Thing 2 drops her drawers and shows me the “bruise” on her leg. Kinda a bruise, kinda burst blood vessels. And no matter how I asked, she swore that she did NOT injure herself. “No, mom, that part of my leg never touched the horse.”

I decide to go with my first impression, call this allergies and ignore the bruise as something that happens to children who don’t quit moving.

Fast forward to this morning when Thing 2 is ready to head to the pool and I get a look at her arms. (Told you I was an idiot. Yup, even with the hint the size of a former Soviet Republic I still didn’t look her over head to toe.) She has the same bruise/blood vessel thing on her arms. Worse on one side than the other but still there on both.

Stepping out of her swimsuit and back into my office I instruct my child that no physician should ever ask you to completely strip. Except me. Now strip. She does and the ONLY spots I see are her arms and leg. Nothing anywhere else. No other findings. No abdominal pain or masses, no murmur, lungs are clear, adenopathy is stable. And most importantly, she’s acting fine. Perfectly normally. For Thing 2.

At this point Dr. Mom is asking herself: “WTF?”

I’ve asked this kid every way I can about injury and she denies anything – so bruising/purpura without trauma opens up a can of worms. I start to run through the list, ruling out most of the infectious things. Somewhere in the middle of my monologue, I see the scrape on her arm.

No trauma? Scrape? Back this train up.

WM: How did that happen?
T2: Getting out of the pool?
~pause~
T2: Doing 53 belly flops wouldn’t have anything to do with this, would it?
WM: Go to your room.

You know. It’s hard to generate an accurate differential diagnosis without a good history. I wonder if anyone has told Dr. Google that?

I’ve been seeing a lot of wildlife lately including some quite impressive up close and personal sightings of a fawn or two. It’s always the same – I unexpectedly come up on an unsuspecting creature who neither knows nor cares how interested I am in getting a closer look and at that moment I’m faced with a split-second decision on what to do next. If I keep going exactly as I had been, the encounter will be over as quickly as it began and yet any change in my course of action may draw attention and scare off the timid creature that I am so interested in.

That’s exactly the feeling that i had last night while tucking in Thing 2. She and I were chatting and she made some comment or another about the future. You know, the kind of innocent thing that Mommies and Little Girls talk about at bed time – how she’ll always be my baby even when she’s old enough to have her own babies. It was late, I was ambling along and reflexively came back with a comment about WF. Basically, I asked her if she had this conversation with him, too.

Those of you who do not know Thing 2, allow me to explain that this child is Drama incarnate. Nothing with her is small or insignificant. NOTHING. Her kindergarten teacher once said: “That’s our kid, everything is larger than life!” and that’s about the best summary I’ve heard.

So when Thing 2 very matter-of-factly came back with reply: “No. He’ll be dead too soon to ask him that. Unless they cure cancer he’ll be dead while I’m still a kid.” I froze. Literally. I was afraid to physically move for fear of shattering that moment.

I’d been laboring under the misconception that her silence on the subject meant that she hadn’t absorbed it or had and was just rejecting it. But she very clearly spelled out exactly what her understanding was with chilling accuracy. What is a Pagan Queen to do?

We chatted for a good bit after that. We talked about what she was feeling (a little sad) and how I was there if she wanted to talk about it (she doesn’t) and what kinds of questions she had. She’s the literal child of the two so it shouldn’t surprise me that he questions were very concrete: What happens to WF’s house when he dies? Where does that money go? Do I get to keep the things in my room at his house?

By the end of that I was feeling a bit bolder so we talked about losing my Grandpa when I was 15. I didn’t go into much detail, there’s stuff there that people my age struggle with when they lose a parent as adults that is just plain hard and I still don’t have the heart to warn her. I did tell her that I’d always be there for her and that we’d get through it because I’d always be her Mommy. And that brings us full circle on this conversation.

WF gets home in just over 48 hours. It will do Thing 2 good to have him back and it will do me good to be able to talk to him about some of this stuff and see if we can get on the same page. Because right now, I’m starting to feel like the deer in the headlights myself. I know this is coming and I’m powerless to stop it. I’m not sure what I can do to prepare myself or my girls for the trauma and I suspect that WF isn’t prepared to talk about that at all. I’m not sure I could if I were him.

But this week as I was trying to wrap my brain around how I would ever manage to get us through this, I turned on the radio and heard an ad for the local Hospice. WF isn’t ready for Hospice care at this point by any stretch of the imagination but I wonder if it wouldn’t be worth talking to the folks there who, sadly, have more experience with children in these circumstances than I do. A little information might just save us all from becoming road kill.

A friend of mine just got a puppy and is in the midst of the decision to crate or not to crate. This is a process that I’m unfamiliar with as I never really viewed it as a choice – dogs get crated. They learn that their crate is their den. My Old Man is nearly 11 and he still goes to his crate if a storm is coming. If he can’t get to his crate, he destroys the house trying to find a small enough space to simulate a crate.

All creatures need their places of comfort in times of crisis.

Iggy’s girls are with us this week and yesterday it was discovered that the youngest needed an item of clothing that she didn’t have with her. No worries, Thing 1 has just the item! Trouble is, it’s at WF’s house. No worries, I have the keys!

Thing 2 simultaneously levitated, announced “I’ll go” and was at the door with her shoes on. This would be less impressive it wasn’t already her bedtime and she’d been half asleep when I stood up. She was at the front door before I was and opened it so we could head off to WF’s house in search of a random article of her sister’s clothing.

The search was unsuccessful. I did find all three bottles of my missing sun block, both lost soccer bags, the swim bag with gear, a missing lunch box and two of my tote bags. Don’t worry, I left them all there. For now.

But when I was done and had given up the quest, I realized I’d lost something else at WF’s house. Thing 2. She was gone. Now I figured she’d get bored with the search so this wasn’t a huge shock. I walked back up to her bedroom and there she was.

Thing 2 was sitting on the floor in front of a pile of stuff next to her bed. She wasn’t doing anything – and that’s a big deal for this kid. I asked what was going on and she said: “Wasn’t dad nice? I didn’t clean my room so he put my stuff in piles near where it goes for me to go through.”

All creatures need their places of comfort in times of crisis.

Thing 2 and I went home, my home, and she got ready for bed. Even though it was after her bedtime, she couldn’t (or wouldn’t) go to sleep until I got upstairs. So I curled up in bed next to her and we chatted a bit about nothing in particular and fell asleep like that. Curled up with one another in her little twin bed. Two creatures seeking out a a place of comfort in a time of crisis.

Thing 1 is really gone now. She’s been in Norway for weeks but has been checking in by phone pretty much daily. But now she and WF are on a boat on their way to Svalbard. Look it up. It’s half way to the North Pole. Needless to say, I think the prospects of a phone call are pretty much nil until they get back to Oslo and are ready to board the plane home.

Thing 1 is loving the trip. Her vacation responder reads:

Hello, i am very sorry that i cannot reply to your messages seeing that i am in Norway, today i will be at the hotel and MIGHT be able to get access to the hotel computer but until then I cannot respond. Also the next 2 weeks I will be in Svalbard (look it up it is a really cool place.) and i will not have access to a computer, but i will reply as soon as i return…assuming i am not eaten by ice bears (they are so cute!!) well i shall try to respond a.s.a.p. bye bye (also look up the Besseggen, a hike i did, the ridge was really hard)
–
\~/   My NORWEGIAN glass looks half full to me!

She’s having a blast. But back home, not so much.

Thing 2 has developed several sudden, unexplained fears of things that go bump that cause her to turn to flypaper and cling to me. I’ve tried talking to her about why this might be the case, but she shuts down.

My best guess? She’s feeding off of me again. Because I’m stressed.

The original plan was for WF and Thing 1 to do some hiking by themselves for a week. That lasted a day. They had to scale back because the weather wasn’t cooperating and the hiking was longer and harder than they anticipated. This tells me a couple of things. First is that WF is being reasonable and not pushing too hard. This is a good thing. Second is that there is the potential for more trouble ahead. The temperature in Svalbard is going to be at least as cold as what they bailed out on so they have to face that weather eventually. But what about the hiking?

The last phone call was from the boat so Thing 1 had already met up with the group they’d be hiking with and had survived their first hike together. It was a short hike but with some fairly steep vertical and Thing 1 was the youngest member of the 15 person team by at least a decade. She hiked right up front with the leader – on purpose – to prove herself. That’s my girl! But when I asked where her father was I was informed that he was bringing up the rear.

He confirmed that, as well as informed me that he was using medication for motion sickness and had been paying attention to his medication. He’s been very good about my overt intrusions into his privacy recently regarding medical matters. In fact, he’s called me promptly every time he’s received his PSA results this year. He gets that checked every month. And yet, I haven’t heard a test result since summer started.

I know I’ve been traveling and that I tend toward “borrowing” trouble. But with my eldest above the Arctic Circle out of contact for over a week, it’s easy to think of things that might go wrong under the best of circumstances. And these are NOT the best of circumstances. Throw in a bit of uncertainty about who I’m most worried about and there’s plenty of trouble to borrow.

So if Thing 2 has random fears of things that go bump I guess I have to accept that she may have come by this naturally. I seem to share those fears.

Flypaper it is.

Thing 1 went to summer camp today. She’s there for two weeks. Two full weeks. There are not words for how excited she’s been about this – her chat status has been about waiting for camp since April. She couldn’t wait to get there, once there she couldn’t wait to get set up in her bunk and bound off to meet folks.

I did my best to fade quietly away. I didn’t cling…..much. And I only teared up twice. The first time was on the drive down there. I realized, in a mad panic, that she’d done nearly all her packing herself. What if she’d forgotten something? What if she didn’t have her name on everything? What if something got lost? What if…..

All I could do was to take a nice deep breath and tell her that I needed 3 minutes alone with her before I left the camp. She’s still young enough to be compliant, and agreed to let me have the time. But separating her from the herd was difficult – I had to follow her to the bathroom to have a private word with her.

I told her that this was hard on me because I was letting her go – packing without me, going off without me for two weeks, all on her own. I explained that while I was concerned about all the dozens of little things that could happen, the bottom line was that WF and I have raised her to be an independent problem solver. I told her that I was sure she’d forgotten something or would lose something, but that I was equally confident that she’d keep her head and find a solution. Looking into the blue-green eyes of my eldest child, I told her how proud I was of her and how confident I was that she’d be fine. And I confessed that those feelings didn’t mean that I’d miss her any less.

Then, on the heels of boosting the ego of my tween, I did something that is nearly unforgivable. I hugged her. In public. And held on a second or two longer than I needed to.

But she’s a problem solver. She’ll figure out how to do damage control on her reputation. And I’ll figure out how not to cry.

I have a new mantra with Thing 2: “Shut up and go to law school.” Seriously. We went out today for a girls’ day out and I just stood back and watched. My favorite came at the end of the day. All I could do was to watch the floor and try not to laugh as Thing 2 had this conversation with her unsuspecting victim:

UV: Are you in school?
T2: Technically no because it’s Saturday.
UV: Technically you are because you’re still enrolled.
T2: I guess that’s right. Actually I go to TinySchool.
UV: What is your favorite class?
T2: I can only tell you what my favorite has been so far. They have lots better classes as you get older so I think it will change.

Small talk really is an art form. Do you think it can be taught or should I just give up now?

WF and Thing 1 get back from their trip this weekend. That means that my two-week block with Thing 2 is coming to an end. We’re having a really fantastic time but I have to confess that I’m looking forward to WF having the girls for a little while so that I can get caught up a bit at work. I’ve fallen into this routine of working late when WF has the girls and not doing that for two weeks has taken a toll on my to do list.

Which brings me to today’s topic.

WF won’t always be around to take the girls half the time. I guess in some ways I’ve known that for a while. Five years sounds about right – that’s how long it’s been since he was diagnosed and the prognosis then was 5-8 years. It wasn’t exactly higher math to figure out that his cancer meant that the girls most likely wouldn’t have him there for their high school graduation. Still, four years of the subject being off limits gave me ample opportunity to build up a buffer of denial. Soft, fluffy, comfie denial. I can see why it’s so popular.

Three months ago WF told me that his cancer was back – had been back for 18 months in fact – and was gaining momentum. It had found a way around every treatment they’d thrown at it so far and they were down to the last two options. Not only was the prognosis bad enough that he needed to tell the girls, he needed to tell me. I’m not sure which he thought was worse.

Needless to say, the girls are processing each in their own way. I can see if even when he can’t – even when they can’t. Thing 1 throws me subtle messages here and there that let me know she’s got some part of her psyche devoted to the concept. Thing 2 is doing her best to take over the nest of denial that I build. She likes it there but comes screaming out of it once in a while and hits me from left field with something so seemingly innocent that I could almost forget to ask her why she was thinking about that. Almost.

All of this is very predictable. And y’all know how much I like to be predictable. But what is the expected way to react? In the end it doesn’t matter because I’m just a bundle of mixed emotions anyway – all over the map in a million places at once. It’s not that I don’t know how to feel, it’s that I don’t know how not to feel. I’m not sure what part of this I’m supposed to filter out.

I won’t have to coparent with him. That’s a blessing, right? I mean, coparenting is so hard that it keeps lawyers, counselors and mediators in business by the score. And I’m going to be one of the “lucky” moms who won’t ever have to worry about Dad saying yes behind my back. Or blasting me for saying yes. Or, or, or. At least that’s what I heard this week from someone who was speaking without thinking. It’s a “Blessing” to be the only living parent. And I’ll be blessed to not have to coparent with WF.

But that also means that I won’t have him to co-parent with. Not only will I have to figure everything out by myself but I’ll be figuring it out for a couple of girls in pain. Pain from losing their father and reacting to that in ways that will make them different from the girls that I parent now. They will, at whatever tender age this happens, have lived through something that many of my peers have not. And I’ll be there to watch them suffer.

I’ll have to parent differently just by virtue of solo parenting. Years of dealing with WF has allowed us to settle into our respective roles. We have a “dance” if you will. He heads toward one extreme, I pull back toward the other. We each fight for our side and then compromise in the middle. It works. But it won’t work with just me pulling to one extreme. I’m going to have to find middle on my own, without WF pulling me in that direction. And I’ll have to find that middle through a cloud of any guilt that I have. Guilt I will forever carry for the ill thoughts I had toward him during all the darkest days of the divorce. Guilt for any time that I failed to protect my children from pain. Guilt for any benefit I gain by WF not being there for them.

And just to round out the mix of emotion, let me really cloud things. I have known WF for 21 years now. In that time I have been his student, colleague, girlfriend, wife, enemy combatant and coparent. Throughout most of that time I have been his friend. I don’t hate him (see: student, enemy combatant) nor do I love him (see: girlfriend, wife). In many ways, what is in my children’s best interest is also what is in his. And of course, the fundamental truth of coparenting is that the better we get along the easier it is – our little “dance” from the last paragraph could easily look more like a duel if we didn’t. So the question I find myself wondering about is: If we didn’t have children together, would I miss him?

The answer, unlike anything else in this situation, is simple. We have children together, so the point is moot. I will miss him because we have children together. The children are the only Blessings in this situation. Anyone who says otherwise needs to take a closer look at my girls and tell me how Blessed they would be to tell the Witchlets that their father is dead.

Thing 1 is in France with WF right now on a ski trip. Sounds great, right? It must be great to be her! I wish my family had taken me skiing in France when I was a kid. If he wants to adopt another kid, just let me know. Must be nice.

Trust me, we’ve heard it all. Recently.

The trouble with hearing it all is that Thing 1 and I both know the truth about this trip. We both know this trip isn’t about her or even her getting to spend time with her father. WF has admitted to me that this trip is about him and his desire to ski Europe before he dies. And Thing 1 has told me that she knows that. She knows that it’s about him and she knows that he’s dying. Fairly acutely aware of both of those little tidbits.

So when total strangers in the optical shop start telling my daughter how lucky she is that he father is taking her skiing in France and going on and on and on about how they wish they got to do such things life gets interesting: Thing 1 shuts down. She pulls in and tunes everyone out – I can see her eyes glass over as she just quits hearing the words. The natural reaction to that is people looking to me for some explanation. Clearly there is something wrong with my child and these total strangers have a right to know what it is. Specifically, they want to know if she is really so spoiled that she thinks that little of a trip to Europe. So they ask me as directly as they can: “Do you travel abroad often?”

What’s a witch to say? There are so many ways I can sell my child out that it becomes difficult to choose just one. Should I go with: “Yes. We go to Europe at least once a year.” and let her sound spoiled or do I go with the more direct: “Not really. She’s just tuning you out because her father is dying and she doesn’t like to think about their last ‘world tour’.” That one would make her cry but would be perversely gratifying.

So what did I do?

Yup. You guessed it.

Mumbled something vaguely like the first option.

We finished ordering her new glasses and left in silence. Outside, I apologized to her for my contribution to her genetics – the vision, the introversion, the overly sensitive nature, the works. Basically I told her it sucked being a clone. She hugged me and said “It has it’s benefits.” I guess that means I didn’t totally mess this one up.

Don’t worry. There’s still time.

Hello. My name is Witchlets’ Mom and I have a problem.

For nearly the last 12 years, I have kept my obsession at bay. Sure, there was that one 3-week lapse in 2002 but I quit cold-turkey right after I saw what was going on. Seriously – less than a month in over a decade. That’s pretty good control.

I know. I’m making excuses. Truth is, I’m falling off the wagon here. I see it coming and like a B-horror film in slow motion I can’t stop it.

It’s hard for me to trace back to the beginning of my fall from Grace. It would be easy to blame Iggy but, truth be told, this started before he arrived on the scene. I think that it began sitting in the waiting room at my Neurologist’s office. I’d brought a friend with to drive me and she’d brought her iPod. She pulled it out and began to watch something, giggling out loud.

Curiosity killed the cat and it didn’t do wonders for my self-control, either. I had to ask. I had to see. It was shiny. It was funny. It was Californication. It had David Duchovny. And the entire season was available on iTunes.

Can you say “Gateway Drug”? I knew you could.

I watched the entire season. There was no more. And slowly, oh so slowly, I began to forget about this “television” thing again. My decade of abstinence had given me some measure of self-control – or at least denial. There was no “habit” to be broken. I didn’t “need” to entertain myself watching pretty pictures on little boxes. At least not pretty pictures that come and go in episodic waves with recurrent characters facing similar problems penned by the same writers week after week.

You know it’s coming. Wait for it.

Then Iggy brought over “Firefly.” Just a couple of episodes, it’ll make the movie more comprehensible. Sure. And speed just helps you get through finals. I’d say “tell me another bedtime story” but my bedtime has been late enough for a while that I don’t need a story to get to sleep. Or rather, I don’t need another story. By the time I go to bed I’d already watched an episode or three of Firefly.

Yup, past tense. I’ve burned through Firefly now (great series, btw) and we’ve moved on to Dexter. I know full well where this is going. It’s September now and I expect that by the conclusion of 2008 the Witchlet home will have some form of broadcast television. You know, more than the kind we’ve been able to pick up with the rabbit ears for the last 12 years.

I’ve known this day would come. When I banished broadcast at Thing 1′s birth I knew that someday the educational benefits of the talking box would outweigh the evils. Two years ago I nearly gave in when I realized that there was a large, third-world country size hole in the witchlets’ knowledge base where most kids had an understanding of broadcast television. That realization came when Thing 1 couldn’t answer a question about TV news because she’d never seen it (and what is wrong with NPR?) during the same week when Thing 2 asked a friend to pause the TV show so she could go to the bathroom. But cultural literacy be damned – we were not about to have broadcast TV in our house!

So did I really change my mind over a sci-fi western and a show about a serial killer? Not really. Blockbuster has rented us their collection of Mythbusters and the witchlets keep wanting to watch again (and again, and again). The other day, Thing 1 couldn’t answer a very basic question on history. There’s educational programming out there that didn’t exist when she was born. Besides, it’s an election year – what better time to let the witchlets learn about fiction on broadcast television?

To say that I “am not a morning person” would be a gross understatement. Of the order of magnitude of saying that the Pope “has read the Bible”. So it should be no great surprise that morning in our home is not the most pleasant time of the day. Y’all have heard the question: “If a tree falls in the woods where no one can hear does it still make a sound?” right? Well, if an alarm clock sounds in our house where no morning people can hear I am quite convinced that it really makes no sound. That or I’ve trained myself to turn it off in my sleep. This would be why “Good morning” in my house tends to sound much more like “Oh crap! We’re late!!”

“Crap” is the operative word, in case there was confusion.

So it was this morning, the second day of school for the year. The first day adrenaline has worn off and we’re back in our comfortable routine of cutting it just as close as possible in our quest for those last 3 nanoseconds of sleep. Naturally, the Wonder Dog picked up on this and chose this morning to run out the gate as we were collectively sleepwalking to the car. And unlike prior excursions, Wonder Dog elected not to return promptly this morning and stood in the road and taunted us for running so late.

Luckily, the school bus had only just left and there was a group of mothers hanging around the corner near our house who saw the whole thing. One of them called out to me and said that she’d catch the renegade mutt and that I should go on. In my rear view mirror I could see her heading up my driveway with Wonder Dog in tow and I said a heartfelt blessing for her as I went to work.

Now, I don’t consider myself to have a job so much as I have a career. Thing 1 went with me this year to a professional conference and the look on her face when she said to me “You’re really well respected, aren’t you?” was worth every hour I’ve had to spend away from her and her sister over the years. I’ve maintained that part of the reason I value my career so much is because I have daughters and I want to be the kind of role model who shows them that you can be a mom and a valuable, contributing member of society at the same time. It isn’t that I don’t value stay at home moms (SAHM), I just would never choose to be one.

But this morning I had to stop and think about this for a bit. The group of women at the bus stop were all SAHMs. The one who retrieved Wonder Dog was a SAHM. Over the years many of the “room moms” and school volunteers my girls have known have been SAHMs. The parents who drive for field trips often are as are many of the parents who pick up the slack in our various carpools. And it isn’t just SAHMs that do all this work – there are dads and work-at-home parents of both genders.

If everyone I know shared my values and beliefs on the subject then I’d have been running after Wonder Dog in my suit this morning late for a meeting. My girls would have fewer school activities and field trips because there would be fewer volunteer hours to go around. Basically, there would be no slack in my life or schedule of the kind afforded to me because others have chosen a different path from mine.

So I guess when I start to get all uppity about what makes a “valuable, contributing member of society” I need to stop and remember that what allows me to be a mom while having my career is the willingness of others to be parents at the expense of careers that take them away from home and family.

And we’ll end it there before I mention the whole single mother thing……..