August 31, 2007

Just

I am not in great shape. I feel pretty depressed about it all, too. I donÂ’t really know what I thought pregnancy would be like, I suppose I didnÂ’t really have any preconceived notions other than a vague, Hollywood induced hope that it would include walking through leaf-strewn parks with a small bump sticking out and an amber glow cast over my face. I maybe hoped it would be stomach rubbings by people on the Approved Stomach Touching list, and feelings of being so close to the babies every time they moved that a small, maternal smile would appear. I pictured happily buying things for a nursery and being ready for the time when baby would come. Oh, sure, I figured that the end of the pregnancy would be hard, that the weight would be heavy and I would walk like a Sim just before they gave birth, but I never saw some of what IÂ’ve been dealing with.

For starters, I never imagined there would be two. I’ll be honest – I didn’t want twins. I really didn’t. I read a blogger once who spoke of having her twins, and while she loves them madly she spoke of grieving the loss of the specialness that is having one baby. Don’t misunderstand – I love them both and always will. I do not wish the loss of one of them. It’s just an adjustment, and a very big one. It’s easier for me as I have nothing to compare it with, there are two and I’ve never experienced anything else. It’s harder for Angus, who has had two children before and knows the work involved. It doesn’t help when we run into people and family who constantly tell us of the work and exhaustion ahead – is that supposed to be helpful? What, you think you need to be my voice of fucking reality? Of course we’ll cope. Of course we’ll find a way. But I do feel for Angus, as the shock to him is greater than the shock to me.

I figured morning sickness might strike, but I never knew it would feel like 10 weeks of feeling permanently seasick at the slightest smell. I thought there might be worries, but I didnÂ’t suspect IÂ’d have a routine screening show one of the babies at a high risk for DownÂ’s, and then a second screening show an even higher risk. I certainly never saw me having a needle plunged through my abdomen to do a CVS to prove the baby was ok. And now I worry that we didnÂ’t test the other one, and what happens if despite the huge odds that the baby is fine (1:692), the baby (the boy) is born with DownÂ’s?

Most of all I had no idea that one of the babies would pinch off one of my ureters, forcing bladder and kidney infections. I never once imagined me screaming and writhing around on the toilet, or me taking one of one hundred baths in an attempt to ease urine out. I didn’t imagine two pre-term labor scares, complete with steroid shots to “up their chances of survival” and contractions that prove my body was heading down the path to Labor Way. I never pictured the possibility of long stays in SBCU (NICU) for my children.

I didnÂ’t know it got hard to breathe as they got bigger and moved on to my lungs. I didnÂ’t know that my stomach would start to feel tight and ripe, like a huge melon that could split at any moment. I didn't know that as I got nearer to the end it would feel like I had a giant bowling ball perched precariously over my cervix, weighing down heavily. I didnÂ’t know that my girlie parts would swell before they disappeared from sight altogether, I didnÂ’t know that even wiping would become a contortionist challenge. I didnÂ’t know my freckles and moles would all darken, and I didnÂ’t know that what I imagined was the gentle push of a baby inside the stomach was really more of a ringing whack that would have me doubled over with nausea each time they did it.

I didnÂ’t know anything, I think.

I’m still carrying small, and have gained about 26 pounds. My next scan is on Tuesday next week, where hopefully the babies weigh about 4 pounds each. But there are weeks to go still, and I’ll be honest-I wonder how I’ll ever get my body back to where it was. I’m kicking myself for not valuing how I used to look more. I feel enormous, just getting out of bed is a monumental task that takes the coordinated use of elbows, rolling, and defying physics to get up. I don’t feel cute and pregnant. I just feel clumsy, uncoordinated. I bump into things all the time and if I whack into anything with my stomach – which happens often – I have to wait a moment for nausea to subside (luckily the Lemonheads come equipped with their own airbags, so they’re not in danger.) Yes, I know that this is all for the benefit of the babies, I am not that selfish, and I know that "feeling attractive" is not remotely important in the big scheme of things. But it all feels wildly out of control, and even more than that, I am hosting my babies in a warehouse that is far from medically sound, my warehouse is riddled with infectious asbestos and I hate knowing that I can't even pull off the "nurturing uterus" side of things very well.

None of this is even taking into account the incredible emotional roller coaster weÂ’ve had with family and loved ones, which I've been through so many times before I don't want to go into again now.

There is a very English saying – “Mustn’t grumble”. It’s true there is a stereotype that the English, they aren’t a complaining lot, that in general they don’t revel a lot of their cards. In general, I have found that it’s an accurate description-in general, the English really don’t complain much, they just get on with things. I feel I should be complying with this as well. Mustn’t grumble. I chose this. I wanted to have a family. I fucked everything up. I have infections because I wanted this. I didn’t want infections, that’s for sure. But yes, I wanted a baby.

I want to feel like this is just a new chapter in life. That travel doesnÂ’t stop (I accept that travel will be different for a while, but I donÂ’t accept that it will stop altogether). That laughter and happiness arenÂ’t gone. That there are moments of incalculable bliss and love. That I will be part of a family, with all of its joy and stress and love and noise and laundry and gardens and hope. Maybe it's true what I've seen in the comments-it will all feel so much better when they're here, when I have them.

But what if it doesn't?

I feel exhausted. I feel worn out. My insides are fucked up, my arm has a large cyst on it from one of IV cannulas gone wrong (which will get absorbed by my body at some point, but which currently hurts like hell), and I feel so generally uncomfortable in ways I could never have anticipated. I feel like I will never be considered attractive again. I feel emotionally empty. I feel lonely and I am deeply craving reassurance and affection of the "crashing waves, swelling violins" variety, and fuck anyone who tries to tell me romantic love stops being so giddy because it doesn't have to. I feel like I am letting the Lemonheads down – they chose me, and in return I give them a shoddy system in which they're expected to incubate.

I guess I just feel blue.

I didn't know that pregnant women get the blues.

And I’m closing comments because I can see it now – the comments of being ungrateful, the “you asked for this”, the "your infertility is your choice", the “you don’t deserve them” slants. Maybe it’s true, I don’t deserve them. But what’s even more true is sometimes (like today) I feel they don’t deserve me. They deserve better. Mostly I'm just closing them because I just need to get this off my chest. I know this reads as one big self-pity party, but I need to say just once how this is one million times harder than I thought it would be, that I want so much for everything to be ok but I can't see it for myself right now.

-H.

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August 30, 2007

Busted Out

I'm home now - was busted out at about 4 pm today as there isn't anything more we can do besides stay on antibiotics for the remainder of the pregnancy, take it easier, (am on "light duties" now), hope I don't go into labor, and try to sleep. Oh, and take copious amounts of pills as not only do I need to fight infection, but I'm anemic now, too. Good times, my friends, good times.

More from me later, for now I'm absolutely exhausted and am going to bed.

This was me on Tuesday, looking like...well...[insert description of something bad here].


Before they gave me good drugs

-H.

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August 28, 2007

Round Two

Good thing I was so paranoid I got a bridge of antibiotics.

I am back in the hospital, after a night of bathtub screaming razor blade peeing. I was admitted as this time I was having contractions, to the tune of 1 every 3 minutes (which in labor speak means 'baby coming NOW'). I also had fluid leaking out of me, and the doctor thought it might be that my waters broke. It was very dicey for a short while, as the SBCU (special baby care unit, like the NICU) in my hospital is currently full, so it appeared I would be transported by ambulance to another hospital, where I would deliver the babies.

My waters haven't broken, luckily-my bladder is currently so badly infected I just randomly leak, so I am gusseted in enormous maxi pads and am extremely embarassed. I'm on a new and aggressive course of IV drugs treatment, and the good news is, this time the doctor offered me painkillers.

I am so grateful I would give him a kidney, although they're not worth much just now.

My contractions continue, anywhere from 5 to 15 minutes apart. It's apparently my uterus stressing out over the infection, and my body going through 'fake labor' can send me into real labor. The goal now is to get the contractions down and avoid labor while fighting the inection, which may or may not be in the kidney, too.

The babies are ok. They are uncooperative with heart monitoring but on the scans they look great. At 31 weeks as of tomorrow, though, it's still too early for them to be here.

As long as they keep me on drugs, I'm ok too-I hadn't slept in two days but I've been out for about 4 hours. It was sleep I desperately needed.

But I'm back in the hospital for a few days now.

I'm exhausted.

Angus is being fabulous.

-H.

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August 27, 2007

Ebay and a Name Game

I have a new thing that pregnant women shouldn't be allowed to do - oh sure, you've probably heard that pregnant women shouldn't drink or smoke, that unpasteurized cheese is probably not a good idea and that whole "bungee jumping" idea should be shelved for a few months. But in my personal experience, there is more to the list than that. I've already found that pregnant women shouldn't deal too much with the public, as we have quick tempers and a very low tolerance to stupidity. I've also found pregnancy makes one forgetful (I asked Caltech Girl to post pictures of her lovely new house, and then utterly forgot to check her site and tell her how lovely her new house is. Not because I don't care, but because I clean forgot I'd asked for pictures.)

But I have found a new "no-no": Pregnant women shouldn't be allowed to sell shit on ebay.

We have one ebay account, which is Angus', but which we share. Last week I listed a load of stuff to get rid of-Buffy DVDs, the entire collection of Sex and the City on DVD (which was a good move, as Kim Cattrall was on TV the other night and it sparked a lot of interest in my DVDs), Gorby's old dog kennel, all my hockey stuff, and my old scuba kit, among a load of other things. My hockey career, she is over. And as for scuba, well - I find it a hassle to bring my own kit with me when I go on holiday. I'd rather just rent locally.

I find ebay to be both cool and a pain in the ass. As I'd never sold anything on ebay before, I had no idea the sheer and total amount of muppetry available online. I had some of the most ridiculous questions from sellers that I had ever seen in my life. One chap asked me about my hockey goalie stuff - he asked "would I be prepared to drive 2 hours and meet him halfway, as he has a very fuel inefficient car and doesn't want to pay for petrol". His log-in was something like "Gearhead69", which implies both "car dork" and "I'd love to have lots of sex but no one will fuck me so I stare at my poster of the red Corvette hanging over my bed and masturbate a lot." I told him no, sorry, I won't meet him halfway, and Angus had to physically restrain me from replying in depth about the damage his car is doing to the environment.

In the end, despite massive interest in my hockey goalie gear, it only sold for £50, when I paid well over $1500 for it (and it even had an actual pair of goalie pants used by the Hartford Whalers but I didn't have any certificates of authenticity regarding that). England isn't big on ice hockey, and I couldn't realistically send the kit to the States to sell, as it's one seriously heavy bag. I'd refused a number of buy-it-now offers, too, and am kicking myself, but at least it's all going out the door now. It's for the best. Space in this house is at an absolute premium, a massive 40 pound hockey bag full of equipment I haven't used in 8 years is a bit of a luxury.

The good news is, I made £300 on things I had purchased years and years ago.

The bad news is, the PayPal email address I had in all of the ads was missing the "m" off the end of ".com". So people were sending in payment to an email address that didn't exist. So I emailed my buyers asking them to, if they hadn't already paid, please use the email address using ".com", and many apologies for the inconvenience.

Then we test sent money to the wrong address and saw that PayPal would give you the option of cancelling the payment, as it registered that the email address supplied wasn't real. And so I had to email each and every one of them again with huge apologies, asking them to cancel their payment and please re-direct it to the email with the ".com" on the end. And then I realized that I had cut and pasted one reply to one buyer and sent it to all of my buyers, and what I had done was officially instruct all the buyers to send money for their hockey equipment to the ".com" address, even if they were the ones who'd bought DVDs.

I was apoplectic with rage at this point.

"I can't email them again," I tell Angus. "They're going to think I'm stalking them."

"No, they'll just assume you've been drinking," he replied sagely. "But you have to email them as it'll be confusing if they haven't bought hockey gear off you."

So off I go, emailing my buyers for the 3rd time in ten minutes, apologizing again and swearing I'm not stalking them and/or drunk, but I had just cut and pasted.

12 hours later, most of the buyers bar one are sorted out now, and I'm bracing myself for the bad feedback on my incredible incompetence.

We are meeting up with one buyer this morning to pass off Gorby's old dog kennel. It's much too large to post, and so we requested buyer collect. I was talking to Angus about it this morning.

"We need to meet her about 5 miles away, she doesn't know our area," I tell him over coffee.

"How do you know it's a her?" he asks.

"The person wrote that they want to use the kennel to hold their 10 cats when they move house next week. How many blokes do you know with 10 cats?" I ask.

He concedes it's a fair point.

Angus cleaned out the garage this weekend and has a whole raft of tools to go on ebay today. I found a few more things in the garage this weekend to sell (also found this weekend? My diploma! In a box I looked in! Because I am a buttmonkey and cannot find my ass these days!) but I'm going to let him do it.

I clearly shouldn't be around ebay just now.

And about the name game - it was suggested by someone in a previous post (I can't find who it was! Like I couldn't find my diploma! So surely I'll find out who it was while looking in a box full of old photos and boxes of Crayola Millenium Crayons!) that since the babies' names on the blog will not be their real names, why not let you help choose the names?

OK then.

So go for it.

Angus and I thought it was a good idea. So if you want to suggest a girl's name and a boy's name in the comments, we'll round up a list of 20 or so names from the suggestions (we are rounding up the list to 20 or so names from the pool in case there are some suggestions of names that are actually on our top ten list or are names of people we actually know or work with in real life, because I don't want to get Googled, but otherwise have at it) and let people vote on them later this week. If you're feeling a bit shy, you can also email me, by clicking the "contact" link at the top of the page. The highest vote names for the boy and girl will then be the names we use on the blog for them (which again will not be their real names, but will be the names used for the rest of their bloggy lives).

Suggestions being compiled now.

It's your chance to name the Lemonheads.

If you want, that is.

And...action.

-H.

UPDATE - Based on some comments and emails I've gotten, I think there's some confusion, likely due to the fact that I'm not at all clear these days (see the above ebay story for proof). The name suggestions for the babies are only for my website. As I've said, I won't be blogging the babies' real names, but I need fake names for them to use on this site. The babies' real names are something that Angus and I are already at work on, and we're not discussing the list with anyone apart from Melissa and Jeff. But both Helen and Angus are not our real names, just pseudonyms I use for this website to protect our identity. I need two pseudonyms for the babies, too, to keep them anonymous, so what our real last names are isn't really important, since the names I'll use on the blog won't be their real names. So say, for example, we've already picked out the name "Jan" to name our daughter in real life, that "Jan" is what is going on her birth certificate and everything. While "Jan" may be what her name is in life, on this blog I couldn't call her "Jan" since I won't blog their real names-but we can't figure out what name to use instead of "Jan" for the blog. That's what I'm asking help for, since Angus and I can't think of any "not real" names that the babies will be called from here on out on this blog, and since I imagine I'll be talking about babies in the future, they're going to need some names I can use here.

Make sense, or did I fuck this up even more?

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August 24, 2007

Paranoia and Preparation

This morning I finish off the last of my antibiotics. I’ve been on antibiotics for nearly a month now, and a test proved that I am, currently, infection-free. But despite being without the fun of a kidney/UTI infection, I wrote to my doctor and asked him if he could please phone in a prescription for a few days of the antibiotic, so that I could have it around prophylactically. This gave me much angst. Not writing to him asking for medication, no I had grief because “prophylactically” is not a word. But I couldn’t see any word that would suffice in the “I don’t need it now, I just want it for prevention, so would you be a dear and get that little prescription pad out for me now, hmm?”

I call the doctorÂ’s office yesterday to ensure the prescription had been written. I felt a bit weird about it, as though they would tag me as a drug addict, which is something IÂ’m familiar with-in college whenever I had a migraine that got out of control and necessitated a hospital visit IÂ’d invariably get asked about my possible narcotics addiction. I would always have to explain that the drug I needed to kill the migraine wasnÂ’t a narcotic, and that IÂ’d had migraines since I was 5, thank you very much, now can you please make it go away? But I was only asking for a few days worth of antibiotics, I didnÂ’t want any painkillers. ItÂ’s not like I could grind up the antibiotics and have a fun time with them or anything.

I get the receptionist on the phone, and she is of the “My GOD I work for a doctor, do you have any idea how busy and important I am, you sick diseased little bug?” variety. She tells me that my prescription is ready. I ask if I can pick it up in the morning and she sniffs haughtily and says in an “I can out-piss any pissy attitude you have” tone of voice that I can pick up the prescription any time I so choose.

I choose today then.

Perhaps it’s nothing. Perhaps I’m being paranoid over something small. But my mood isn’t great today, I’ll be honest, and so I apologize if this post is all over the place. I’m pretty fucked off about this guy. I’m a pacifist and I don’t support any of that “eye for an eye” business, but there’s some kind of broken switch inside of me somewhere whereby still I don’t do “eye for an eye”….unless there are animals involved. Then I become unglued. Sitting here and writing this post, I have Gorby on the floor of the living room, rolling around with his toys. Maggie is snoring on the couch beside me. My two rescue babies are a little slice of heaven, and I want to grab that fucking asshole and scream at him “Think you’re a big shot now, huh? You have such a big dick, right, you're a real man? You get dogs to maul each other to death and you yourself have hung a number of ‘underperformers’ and in my world, you bastard, that gets punished, and that includes losing your precious career that is supposed to make you a role model.” We all have our triggers. Animal abuse is a big one of mine.

The home PC – which is in the process of being moved from my study to the living room - has suddenly fallen over and died with the new BIOS that Angus installed, and a broken computer always sends Angus over the brink of depression, and he won’t return from said brink until the PC is working again (which may be a while as the BIOS isn't letting him roll back to the previous version). We still are stressed about Jeff. The weather is bleak and grim. The house is a wreck (which I’ll deal with today).

But the antibiotics were non-negotiable.

Because this weekend is our last 3-day weekend until Christmas. ItÂ’s no specific holiday on Monday, itÂ’s just a bank holiday weekend, but things go wrong for me on bank holiday weekends. If things go pear-shaped, then it will get all fruity on 3 day weekends where things are closed. And IÂ’m almost certainly being superstitious, but this weekend (above all bank holiday weekends) is the worst one.

On this Friday, one year ago, I started to bleed.

I was about 6 weeks pregnant, and the week after I was due to go in for a scan and (hopefully) see the heartbeat. The bleeding on that Friday was brown blood, which is seen in pregnancies and can be one of many things, some of them good, some of them bad. The brown blood turned to red blood, which tends to mean bad things in early pregnancy. We went to the A&E a few times, and were shown one fetal sac hanging in there. The ultrasound technician was inexperienced and couldnÂ’t make out details. We had to come back on Tuesday, after the bank holiday, to see what we could see. The bleeding was torrential by Sunday evening, and great fist-sized blood clots came out of me on Monday.

I think we knew where it was all going.

They confirmed it on Tuesday. My body had gone through what was called a complete miscarriage. All signs of the fetus were gone. Nature had cleaned me out.

Thus started a very dark month. Months, even. I was completely down in the dumps for a long while, and it would hit me from time to time that my body had betrayed me. Perhaps I took it harder than I should have. I certainly seemed to have taken it harder than a lot of the infertile bloggers I would come across.

But then I started to recover. By the end of the year, I was happy again. I remember being in Canada and skiing and laughing and feeling fantastic, feeling like me again. It remains my single most favorite holiday of all of my holidays, ever.

IÂ’m not tormented by what happened last year - it's not like it was ok that it happened, it wasn't a good thing, but it doesn't eat me anymore. I miscarried the one I called Dr. Seuss Baby. I tell myself that the child I lost was not meant to be for us, and somehow it helps me. I will never, ever forget what happened or how I felt or everything around it, not ever. That baby would have been born in April this year, and my map of the world would have looked incredibly different had it worked out. But itÂ’s one of those things that has occurred in my life, one of those no-good-rotten-very-bad-things, and maybe the blow of that miscarriage has been mitigated over time by my own recovery, or the emergence of the Lemonheads, or therapy, or who knows what.

When I go into a church I still light a candle for Dr. Seuss baby when I can. The candle is lit for Kim, my grandpa, Egg and Bacon, and the Little Embryo That CouldnÂ’t. I owe them all that, that little gesture, that symbol which maybe comforts only me.

This is not one of those introspective dark moments for me, where I look back and say “That was a different Helen, the old Helen.” It’s not like that. That Helen last August, that Helen was me. I went through that. I even had a similar scare with the Lemonheads over a three day weekend in my early pregnancy this time, but I just felt a foot whack against my right lung and I am reminded that this time, things are different. I am me, and I am present for it, and even though I am being paranoid I will have a little box of pills in my kitchen cupboard, just in case.

Not everything has to be a pattern.

This could be my new mantra.

It's a bank holiday weekend. And I will think of that weekend last year. I will say goodbye. And life, it goes on.

HereÂ’s to Dr. Seuss Baby for choosing me for as long as it did.

IÂ’ll see you on the other side, sweetheart.

-H.

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August 23, 2007

The Decade Game

So I lay in bed last night, tossing and turning, because this is what I do. I only get about 5 hours of sleep a night, despite needing to sleep so badly I'm prepared to wipe out entire urban planning centers in order to get some. I imagine it'll be like I'm Mike Brady, and I get to rip out enormous chunks of fluffy architectural fake hedges, and I will throw them off my scaled architectural model and roar, kinda' like Mothra.

But Mothra-like aspirations aside, last night the tossing and turning started to get the better of me. Angus was fast asleep, the babies were wide awake (and rehearsing the uterine version of Starlight Express), I couldn't get my hips and shoulders comfortable, what with the two bowling balls I'm packing inside of me, and my restless leg syndrome was killing me, despite having eaten all those fucking bananas.

So while all this external noise went on, I started to think about age.

You know. As you do.

I'm 33 now. I remember once 33 seemed like being older than the goddamn hills. I think I even told Kim once that I had no interest in living past 30 (although this was in my "Seriously, what's the point of life?" stage). Melissa and I were talking about ages the other day, and she even said "You're 33, right Helen? Well that's not that old, I guess."

Thanks kid. What was that talk we were having about allowances again?

33 doesn't actually feel old. 33 just is. Saying I'm 33 is no different to saying "Hi, I'm a brunette," or "Hi, I DID used to roll the Fruit Roll-Up around my finger and eat it that way, while pretending to be Morticia Adams." 33 is just one of those things.

Ages are a funny thing. One of my good friends' at work just celebrated his wife's 40th birthday, only she was so freaked out about turning 40 that they didn't really celebrate. It was more like looking out of the corner of their eyes and handing off gifts behind their backs, all while whistling and chattering "Nothing to see here! Move along!" It was a non-celebration celebration.

Time keeps on slipping, slipping into the future and all that.

I think 40 might wig me a little bit, but I don't know why. Maybe it's because I never really expected to make it that far. Not every woman can hit 40 and look like Sela Ward or Courtney Cox but I'm prepared to give it a try, all while bathing in anti-wrinkle cream. Oh sure, you may want to tell me that I'm about to have twins, looking good will be the least of my worries, but truthfully I can be vain, albeit it's vanity with foresight. One of my vanities is wanting to not look like an elephant's ankle when I'm in my 40's and 50's. I may be knackered coming up, but I can guarantee you that I will be moisturizing.

Angus has a woman 12 years younger than him but it's not actually something he's pleased about. He's not keen on people that do trophy wives. I, however, am a bit of a bitch and am happy to continue to make some of the wives of his friends as uncomfortable as they continue to make me - I've never been allowed into their "gather in the kitchen and talk about childbirth" reindeer games. I think it’s only a matter of time, I think, before someone gets drunk and throws the word “Home-wrecker!” at me. I have one ready in my reserves for that kind of shit, though. I have “Menopausal!” loaded up and ready to go. They see me as a threat to the sanctity of same-age marriage. Even though I am not said threat and it would never cross my mind to ever hit on their husbands, ever (and in fact, I find that it's the older-than-the-men wives who flirt shamelessly. One of Angus' friends is with a woman in her 50's, and she always feels the need to sit on the men's laps and flirt with them, perhaps as an attempt to still feel pretty. You are pretty, lady. So stop acting like a fornicator (hah!)), I do feel like it's a fun game to keep up appearances, if only to help reiterate that yes, I am younger, and I'm ok with that. Would you like some coleslaw with that?

When I was a kid the first decade of my life was spent reading Nancy Drew, sitting in the backseat wondering if really, would we ever actually get there, and basically trying to get that rabbit to see that truly, Trix are for kids. Now fuck off rabbit. And while youÂ’re at it, get that Pac Man chap to accept that heÂ’s my bitch.

My teens are a haze of drama and angst. Moving around, never fitting in, never really having any friends, never quite right inside of my skin. The teens, theyÂ’re a whirlwind of emotion, the majority of them not good. I do not look back on my teens as those wild days that you see in the films and I never will. IÂ’m just glad theyÂ’re over.

My twenties were a continuation of the drama of my teens. I look back at my twenties and thank Christ that they’re over, too. I never had the cool dorm college experience. I never went to a tailgating party. I didn't have a cluster of close friends, there will be no Big Chill for me. I didn’t attend a rave. I didn't try any funny cigarettes. If anything, my twenties are marked by a feeling of polyester, with me speaking into a patchy microphone asking “Hi my name is Helen, welcome to Mental Illness, can I take your order please?” I was a mess.

My thirties have been, on the whole, the true part of me being real. It has definitely sucked at times but at least I’m present and accounted for during the suckage. It’s like I’m human now, and when I look at my thirties so far I see a brightly lit grocery store. The real me treads in and sees how the mental illnesses of my twenties have trashed the place. “Jesus Christ,” my 30 year-old self mutters. “What the fuck happened in here? Irv! Clean-up on aisle 5!”

(Irv, I was never in aisle 5!)

If you’re approaching 30, don’t freak out. The thirties are a pretty great place to be. I see people in their 40’s and think – Yeah, you know, that doesn’t look too bad either. That could be ok. These people need to get over their devotion to the 80’s, perhaps, but they’re good people.

I think about the decades that have passed, and I fall asleep.

Finally.

Only I then have Kafka dreams that my visa extension is rejected and Gorby and I have to leave and go live in Mexico, where I work as a waitress in a pink stucco nightclub and we wait around in a very hot and un-air conditioned apartment for Angus to show up with some rose champagne.

I tell Angus about my bad dream this morning.

His reply – “Gorby wouldn’t go with you, he’d stay here.”

Good thing he was kidding. IÂ’d hate to have to get my twenties out and spank his bottom with it.

-H.

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August 22, 2007

The Word of the Day

Yesterday I was reading a news article on-line (this is our morning tradition, really. We're both pathetic and sad and we drink our coffee and read the morning news online, he in the study and me on my work laptop with my feet up on the couch. One of us will make breakfast and we will eat it while we read, and then at some point a calendar reminder lights a fire under our asses and we get to work. We may need to get out more.) Anyway, while reading said news article I saw a word: fornicator. This was as said by a very conservative Christian nutter who used the word in context with other very religious terms such as "serpent of Eden", "moral values" (which I felt was definitely overkill) and, of course, the words "Christ our savior". My eyes glazed over for most of it, but that one word caught me: fornicator. I drew it out on my tongue - forrrrrrrrr-ni-ca-torrrrrrrrr.

I decided it needs to be my new word. It's a great word. It doesn't get used enough. I'm going to use it all the time.

I poke my head into Angus' office later in the morning. "So, I was reading this article and I came across a new word."

"Really?" he asks. "What's the word?"

"Fornicator," I reply, savoring the feel of the word rolling out of my mouth.

He looks at me. "Surely you've heard of this word before."

"Oh yes! Yes I have. It's just I've never really used it. It's a neglected word. It needs using. It's going to be my new word."

"It's a good word."

"Thanks! You can use it too!" I chirp.

"I might. I'll let you use it first, though. You can try it out."

So benevolent, my boy. So giving.

It's August, which means it's holiday season here in the UK. Most people are out of work as school's still out and this weekend is a 3-day weekend (the last until Christmas). You would expect that work would be dead, but instead it got a bit manic yesterday, made slightly more manic by a fellow project manager I have to work with. I got an email from this project manager (he manages the customer, I manage technical projects. I wouldn't want his job and he wouldn't want mine, but we work together just fine.) This project manager wants me to take my technical implementation document and re-write it for a 6 year-old level.

Seriously.

I write back - Do you mean you want me to re-write this in layman's terms?

His reply - No. I need it written as though written for 6 year-olds. A manager wants this.

I think about this. Seriously? 6 year-olds? I smack my forehead with self-disgust as I realize that maybe we have a new person on the project who is a bit special, who maybe nas a lower reading level due to developmental problems, and how could I be so mean to not think of their needs? I ask the project manager if this is the case. He replies - No, everyone is just fine. They just want it written as though for a 6 year-old.

I write back - I will certainly try, however I am a grown-up and I tend to write technical documents for grown-ups. If it helps, I'll give Dr. Seuss a call and see if he can add some talking animals and some rhymes, maybe that'll liven things up.

Then I try to do this.

Without going into too much detail about what I do, let's assume that I sometimes have to write documents about how to make candy. This, because candy is good and, well, it's way more interesting than what I actually do. So say I write a document on how to make the latest color of M&M. If you use fidgety widgets to make M&Ms and the industry has always used fidgety-widgets to make M&Ms, anyone who works in this industry has spent time with a fidgety-widget because you cannot possibly make candy without a fidgety-widget, ever, so I tend to not define the fidgety-widgets too much. So I look at my document with a critical eye. I picture a 6 year-old trying to read my document.

There's no fucking way a 6 year-old could follow this document, or any document like it.

I don't care if you're Doogie Howser, Yo-Yo Ma or Richie Rich. A 6 year-old would not get this because 6 year-olds have better things to do than be the audience for technical implementation documents.

So I start to steam up and write. "Imagine, children, that a man wants to make candy. Candy is good, even though it rots your teeth and so you shouldn't eat very much of it. Maybe you'd like a carrot, instead? But let's pretend candy is healthy, and let's make some candy! Yeah, candy! The man puts candy on the conveyor belt moving walkway to paint the candy. Go candy, go! Watch the candy get colored in paint mixture RT-782 IPT Compliant pretty pink rainbows. Whee, candy, whee! So pretty!"

I realize at that point that most women stop working before the birth of their babies not because they are tired, but because they can't keep their hormones in control to deal with people.

I tell the project manager that I simply cannot dial down the language in the document without losing the ability to explain the actual implementation, that if 6 year-old language is needed then he needs to do it. He does ask me for a glossary, which I help with. I even define M&Ms (as "melts in your mouth, not in your hands"). Maybe my inability to write a document for a 6 year-old means I'm inflexible. I'm ok with that. It's not like many 6 year-olds are in my line of business, after all. I'm really pissed off during this whole interchange, and I forgot to use my new word once. How could this happen? I was so annoyed all day and I didn't even use my new favorite word!

I wearily go upstairs to wee. I do so, flush, and then see, there on the floor, an enormous beetle. I grab some toilet paper and wing the beetle into the toilet. The beetle stares at me. I freak out. Our English toilet tank is still filling up so I cannot flush the fucker down yet. I squirt it with bathroom cleaner for measure, mostly so it will stop looking at me on the slowly sinking toilet paper island. I could leave the beetle there and flush later, only I'm very conscious of the film Ghoulies ("They'll get you in the end!") and what happens if this is a rare Amazonian Ass-Biting Beetle, one that can jump and seize a mouthful of my porcelian-white butt in its pincers? I can't have that. The beetle and I stare each other down until I hear the small click meaning that the toilet tank is full.

I flush the toilet, somewhat worried that the beetle is not just an Amazonian Ass-Biting Beetle but a Hurdling Whimper Beetle that can launch itself into the air and clamp on to the white underside of my arm. I snake my arm around to the side to flush the toilet just in case. You can never be too careful with the athletic beetles.

"Fornicator!" I shout, pointing to the beetle, who is now swirling around the tank still precariously perched on its toilet paper iceberg and headed for the great unknown.

The new word, it feels good.

-H.

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August 20, 2007

And I would have stayed up with you all night/Had I known how to save a life.*

Today I made my way up to London, dredging myself through the station and up the wide streets of the suburbs. Autumn is definitely on its way – summer completely passed us by, and I had to pull my sweater close around me to keep the chill off. Inside I was warm, content with the contents of a large cup of coffee that had been funded by a lucky find of a crumpled £5 on the floor of Waterloo Station. No one was around who could possibly have dropped it, so it found its way into my pocket.

I went to London to see my therapist.

Based on how completely physically exhausted it made me – I had to take a bath and a nap upon getting home and am still so utterly tired now, to say nothing of the hours of contractions it brought on – I think my therapy days are now on hold until well after the babies arrive.

I needed to talk to him about how things were. About Jeff’s visit, which never got any better, but simply alternated between “The old Jeff we know and love” to “The new Jeff we want to throw over the side of the bridge”. Some moments were good – during one of his tantrums I went and got out a puzzle, which I quietly did at the kitchen table until he joined me, and we didn’t talk about anything serious. Some moments were bad – he was abusive, abrasive, and when my Dad and Stepmom called and asked me to say hi from Grandma and Grandpa from them, Jeff – who heretofore had been calling them his Grandma and Grandpa – coldly informed me that they weren’t his grandparents.

The worst of it came during the puzzle, actually. He was being kind of a dick but I ignored it and just tried to be even keel. We talked about the eye surgery his dad had when he was an infant – Angus was born with a wonky eye and it had to be operated on, so although he has vision in both eyes he has no depth perception and he cannot catch things if you throw them at him, because he cannot track them. Jeff too had surgery as an infant – he had a stomach problem that necessitated surgery. We talked about this surgery, and then Jeff said, looking out the window, “Dad’s surgery wasn’t serious. My surgery was serious. I could have died.” He stared off into the distance, and continued. “I wish I had died then. Everything would be easier.”

Whoa.

WHOA.

I went about it calmly, but inside I wanted to call all hands on deck. “Well,” I said snapping a puzzle piece into place in a voice as calm and soothing as a nutcase like me can muster. “It’s true you could have died when you were a baby. But you survived and I’m very glad you did. I know your dad is, too. We would miss you terribly if anything happened to you.”

He looked at me.

I donÂ’t know if I reached him.

When they left, we were emotionally spent. I feel like such a shit for admitting it, but I was kind of glad to see him go, simply because the chaos that surrounded him was unbearable. Sunday we did absolutely nothing, and we needed that recovery time. Angus, I know, is deeply upset by his son's confusion and upset. It's eating him. I can hear it from here. I have many faults. He has many faults. One thing he cannot be faulted with, however, is not being a loving father - when the kids are here he's often so happy it's amazing.

I mention the puzzle surgery conversation to my therapist. “I worry,” I say softly. “I thought that way, too. I thought that way, and look what happened to me.”

“He could turn out the same as you did,” my therapist agreed. “What he said was very serious and indicative of a lot of confusion that’s in his mind. But there is every chance that he could wind up differently, that he doesn’t have to stay in the same pattern.”

I find this hard to believe. It doesn’t compute. When moms go on the poison warpath, the relationships with the dads disappear. Mine did. Angus’ did. In fact, although I love my father massively and he’s a huge part of my life, Angus’ (and his brothers’) relationship with their dad never recovered. They aren’t close, and truly, that ship has sailed. In my mind, it all gets a thousand times worse from here, with Jeff heading towards addictions and obsessions, suicide attempts and self-abuse the likes of which no one can comprehend. He’s already struggling – he has a nervous tick and it’s gotten worse over the past month. His mood swings are powerful. His anger is fierce. Now he believes life would be better without him. I want to stop this, I want to fix it, I know this path and I don't want anyone else to walk it.

“You can’t fix this, Helen,” my therapist says kindly. “You need to provide support to Angus and you need to trust in life, that life will handle things differently.”

“I can’t sit back and watch someone turn out like me,” I reply. “That’s the worst case scenario.”

“Angus’ ex is hurting, and Jeff is going to need a scapegoat for his mother’s pain. The best person for that, I’m afraid, is you. You will probably need to be the bad guy for a while, and let him understand someday that you are not a bad person.”

This I understand. Jeff needs to believe in the infallibility of his parents. He needs to believe that they love and adore him and would never hurt him, because believing otherwise makes for an unstable place. I support this completely. It hurts like hell, but I support it. I hate feeling like the bad person, I hate the lies, the untruths, the drama...but if it helps, if it prevents Jeff from veering down the path I was on, then I'll do it. It's about a father and son. That's all it needs to be about. Comments on Thursday supported being ourselves, being consistent, being a refuge, and that's exactly what we're going to do.

“Only one person can save Jeff,” he continues. “That person is Angus. You and Angus need to provide a calm, consistent household. If Jeff crosses the line, he needs to be punished.”

“If we punish him, he’ll stop coming,” I tell him. It’s true. Jeff is incredibly stubborn like that-it happened once before, we didn't see him for months.

“It's true, he might stop coming to visit,” he replies. “But he needs to think of your home as a place with rules. He will need those rules someday. He needs your home to be a place of rules, of normalcy, and of complete emotional calm and support. In turn, you need to support Angus completely as he works to help his son.”

And this I will do.

I will step back and try to stop fighting the fight. There is no fight. The only thing I can do is love the people involved and to see if I can follow some simple advice - "trust in life".

Whatever that means.

I tell him that Jeff was the cheerleader in my life for the babies. I needed his joy and his excitement, his love for two babies heÂ’d not met yet. He was an uncomplicated kindness to the two most contentious little beings to ever enter my world.

My therapist knows everything there is to know about my past and present, or at least all of the parts that I myself remember. Besides Angus, he's the only person to really see how I don't always have it together, how I fail often and spectacularly, how more than anything I want any little people in my life - whether they're biologically mine or illogically mine - to be safe from any storm.

He smiles kindly at me. "Men have a harder time understanding the depth of emotion a mother has for her child. It's something that we can't understand, as we don't carry the baby. It doesn't mean that fathers don't love their babies, and it doesn't mean that babies who are not always eagerly awaited don't become adored children. It just means that the relationship between a child and a mother - especially in the beginning - is a relationship that already exists, while the fathers take a bit of time to build the relationship. You as the mother have a symbiosis. You, to some extent, know each other. It sounds like Angus is a good father, and he will almost certainly be a good father to the two new babies."

He goes on. "As far as anyone else in your life is concerned, this is the time when you need to start blocking them out and preparing for the babies. Not blocking them out to the point of exclusion, but once the babies arrive most people find it very difficult, if not impossible, to not love them. You may find that people will change their negative views of the babies when they get here."

"I really hope so. It's all so hard, I can't bear knowing that they're coming with all this resentment aimed at them. It's like they don't stand a chance," I reply.

"They do stand a chance," he said. "I hear in you an absolute love and desire to protect them. Jeff needs only one person to save him - Angus. And the babies, at least in the very beginning, need one person to love them. That person is you."

And just like that, the noise drowns away a bit. The anger the Lemonheads have caused people all over Angus' side of the family and my side of the family fades away. It doesn't block Jeff out and remove my worries for him, but I cling to the hope that he'll love them once they're here, that what he faces at home melts a bit to the promised love, support and normalcy we're going to try to give.

And I will be there for the Lemonheads, and I will keep them safe.

For the forseeable future, Angus and I are two parents fighting to protect the children that we love, and I will support him in every way I can.

There's no one else in the world I'd rather try to fight alongside than him.

And now, I think we'll move on.

-H.

*Song lyrics from The Fray's "How to Save a Life".

PS-I got a lovely box from a wonderful benefactor. Amazon didn't have any note of the sender on it so I have no idea who sent the lovely gifts, but I got two fantastic Gro-bags and two perfect books, which I am so happy about. Thank you so much for the gifts. if you meant to remain anonymous then just know how fabulous your timing was and how special the gifts are to me (and once they're here, to the Lemonheads). If you want to let me know who you are, I'd love to send you a thank-you card.

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August 17, 2007

That Bloody Woman Has Cost Us a Wii, and I Want to Invoice Her For It

One of the projects I am running has a team of engineers installing equipment in a very dark physical location. I imagine what it's like to be in their space sometimes, and when I imagine it, I can feel it all. The spark of the drill as they lay it on the stone. The sound of their work boots grating on the metal ladder. The intensity of the work that they do, and the pitch black in which they do it.

That darkness, that's what I've been feeling.

Jeff has been poisoned by his mother.

It was a house of cards all day. Jeff would alternate between clearly being very uncomfortable with me to being his usual self around me. He changed from being gung ho on his last visit to no, he most definitely did not want to see Harry Potter in the theatre with me. Even though I bunked off work to watch TV with him, he still struggled. It was fragile all day, with Jeff reacting negatively to things with a swift response, to a jutting lip with all the hallmarks of "Oh no, why can't I?" written all over it. I bought him a computer game last week, it should arrive tomorrow. His reaction was complete disdain and dismissal, when ordinarily a computer game would be brilliant fun and he'd give me chapter and verse of how fun it actually was. I feel like a complete idiot for even trying.

It all went horribly wrong this afternoon. Jeff had dragged out the Nintendo GameCube and was playing on it, when as a joke Angus stood in front of the screen. Jeff's reaction was to throw the controller across the room and go into a right temper tantrum. We tolerated it for a while, but when he banged up the stairs and slammed the door upstairs, it was all too much for Angus.

The house of cards came tumbling down.

Angus went tearing up the stairs and a blistering argument could be heard. Melissa came flying downstairs and she and Gorby and I shut ourselves in the study to continue the Helen purge as I blitzed the bookcases of their wares, all bound for charity. Melissa and I have been getting on very, very well since our heart to heart talk in Scotland, which I'll tell you about later. It seems to have resolved something between us, and now we sit easily in each others' lives.

We whispered back and forth in the study. She wanted to know what was going on. I told her I was worried that maybe her mother had been feeling very hurt, and perhaps Jeff had absorbed a lot of it and it was affecting him negatively. We talked about the tickets we've booked for them to fly out in September, and how we all thought Jeff was going to refuse to come visit.

Melissa, Gorby and I stayed in the study all afternoon.

Angus and Jeff came to some kind of happy conclusion and they disappeared to the shops for a long while, during which Melissa and I watched a film (Babel. Very weird. Very, very weird.) When they returned we were the proud owners of a Nintendo Wii (perfectly fine with me, although I do want to invoice the Swunt for it) and two much better moods were had by the menfolk. Jeff was clinging to Angus in every way, and it felt like he didn't really want to talk to either Melissa or I. Jeff did speak to me though, and even told me he'd bought me my favorite fruit smoothie mix. I had high hopes.

But it was clear that there was some fragility to it all, some wisp of walking a tenacious tightrope. There were signs that cracks were still larger than the Grand Canyon - he wouldn't meet my eyes when I offered him a chest of drawers that we have for his things. I feel very definitely that he doesn't want to be around me.

Jeff and I have been friends for some time now, as Melissa and her father have always been extremely close and the introduction of me was hard for her. Jeff was the one on the motor bike with me in the Cook Islands. He and I spent all our time together in Mexico. We laugh like idiots to episodes of The Simpsons. He drives me crazy sometimes and he's so sensitive that you get headaches watching what you say to him, but I care about him. He's become a large part of what I know.

Angus curled up beside me in bed and told me, finally, of some of the talks that were had earlier.

And it's for that reason that at 2 am - despite being bone-weary tired, despite needing more rest than I ever have needed in my life before - that I can't sleep.

Jeff won't tell Angus exactly what's going on, but Angus has done some basic 1+1=2. What basically seems to have occurred is in the past week that Melissa has been here, the Swunt has really gone for it. It appears I have been painted as the worst kind of human being imaginable - dangerous, cruel, home-wrecking, devastating, evil, what have you. I am the epitome of bad, and it seems a lot of emphasis has been put on the "she's dangerous and crazy" side of me. A lot of damage was done to Angus as well, but as his father and with their history, he's weathering it pretty well.

And Jeff's struggling with it, but it seems like he's buying it.

It makes me want to go to bed and not come back out for a long, long while.

Jeff said that Angus could fix all this, but he wouldn't like the suggestion Jeff has for fixing it. Angus did more digging, and it is strongly suggested that perhaps what Jeff was alluding to is that we need to get rid of the babies.

Perhaps more than him fearing me, that hurts the most.

Jeff has always been the biggest fan of the Lemonheads since he found out about them. He talked about them the most, and he even talked to them the most, using my stomach as his microphone. He's the only one to talk to them, apart from me. He was so keen on them it lifted me up each and every time he visited.

But not anymore. Regardless of if Angus' assumption about getting rid of the babies is right or not, it's very definite that the Lemonheads are viewed with distinct darkness on Jeff's part. Now, thanks to the damage, he's on the same list as I feel everyone else is on-the Lemonheads are a problem. They're something to dread. They're the wreckers of all that was good. Angus' family fear them for the upset they cause to his ex. My dad gets in trouble with my estranged family for caring too much about his unborn grandbabies, and I'm always conscious of that and of how wrong it seems to be for him to love them. Now Jeff views them as something bad and actually took real exception to giving up his room for them temporarily (until his room is done in the extension), a complete change from his previous stance. It makes me feel like I am sinking, and sinking fast.

Angus has spent the day telling Jeff how much he loves him and always will, no matter what. How nothing changes emotionally in this house, there will simply be two more people here. How I'm not dangerous or crazy but just quirky and different, but that I care about Jeff and Melissa a lot. This will be a mantra he will repeat all Friday and Saturday, until they leave. Angus and Jeff are running errands tomorrow while I take Melissa to the movies. Angus is working as All Hands on Deck trying to salvage his son's soul, and I will lie low and simply support from the background.

I want to scream. I want to cry. I want to hug Angus close and tell him I'm so sorry, so sorry for all of it, so sorry for him and for Jeff and for Melissa. I've ruined everything and I'm so sorry.

I want to get in touch with the Swunt and tell her - You're his mother. Always, you always will be. You have his undying love and loyalty, and that's how it should be. I am not a threat to his affection for you. I will never try to take your kids from you. Of course you worry I may try to replace you, if Angus ever left me I'd worry about that with our kids, but I promise you I respect and support you as their mother. I am so sorry that you hurt, I really am. We show you nothing but respect in front of the kids in this house, we would never degrade you before them. We don't have to like each other, but we don't have to hurt your kids due to our issues. You are his mother and his heart, I will never, ever try to take that away from you. BUT YOU HAVE TO STOP POISONING YOUR CHILDREN, YOU ANGRY, HURTING BITCH.

We're now on reassurance mode to try to make sure that Angus doesn't lose his son. The relationship between Angus and Jeff is much better after their talk (and the Nintendo Wii doesn't hurt, either), but it's clear Jeff is very uncomfortable around me. I would sit down with Jeff and try to talk to him, but he's someone that you have to approach as slowly as you would a spooked horse. Things go into him and they go deep, you have to tread carefully and he has to be in the right frame of mind. I am not exaggerating when I say that I have never met anyone as sensitive (or as stubborn) as he is. It's because of his sensitivity that I think his mother's actions are so heinous.

This is not about me. This is about a 10 year-old boy and his feelings. I don't want this for him. I don't want this for Angus. I don't want this for any of us.

I cried myself nearly to sleep before giving up on slumber and coming here to write it all out. I don't even want to write about it, I'm sure you're as sick of reading it as I am of living it, but all I can do is toss and turn and long for the kind of emotional freedom I can only get in a pill form, but sleeping tablets and tranquilizers are out so all I can do is sit here in the dark and hope a little boy can look into his heart and hold on to his father, because his father will save him if he only lets him.

-H.

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August 16, 2007

The Destructor

Things keep getting destroyed around me.

I have been going through a bit of a thing lately. I find I’m going up and down more than I’d like to be, and one element of the down is my need to purge. Not purge as in “traditional visit to the toilet to control my weight”, I’m not in that frame of mind. But purge as in throw away, eliminate, rid.

We had an argument a month or so ago, and the result saw me head for the garage and hit my storage hard. Into the recycling bin went many things from my past. I didnÂ’t want them anymore. I donÂ’t need them anymore. All I kept were photos and my wedding dress. The wedding dress-a size 8, I was surprised to note-is packed with my veil and a few other bits and pieces. IÂ’m not very sentimental about it, but thought maybe someday Melissa or one of the Lemonheads might want to use it, so itÂ’s kept in my closet upstairs, quietly hiding.

The 150 year-old rocking chair that I brought over from Sweden started falling apart. We tried to fix it, but to no avail. The chair was so riddled with woodworm that the entire chair needed to be re-built, a job that the rocker wasnÂ’t worth. One of the rockers split. Then one of the braces. Then one of the back braces. Angus kept telling me the rocker had to go, that it couldnÂ’t be fixed, that itÂ’s fit only for the fireplace, but I resisted-I absolutely love the chair.

That night we argued I pulled the chair out of the garage and set it on the back porch.

I left it there.

I needed it to sit outside and fall apart.

The rain got to it immediately, and the water pried apart the already weakened structure. Within days the entire structure of the rocker came apart. Still it sits outside, as daily I check on the ruin that has become of a fucking rocking chair that I loved so much.

I guess it’s like Fight Club – I needed to destroy something beautiful.

Other parts of my past are going, too. With a shortage of space and, once the babies arrive, a tightening of belts, some changes had to be made. WeÂ’re assembled a massive pile for ebay, which we took photos of the other night and will list shortly. Some of the items include my Buffy the Vampire Slayer box sets (all but Season 1, which I canÂ’t find). Some electronics that need to go. And my dive bag full of the first dive kit I ever owned. I was a poor, broke student when I bought the set and used it to get certified. I dove with the kit in Lake Travis one hot sunny days. The octopus went to Belize with Kim and I. ItÂ’s outdated and I donÂ’t travel with it anymore, instead I rent kit where I go. ThatÂ’ll suffice for me now. The kit has to go.

And last but not least, my entire ice hockey kit bag and kit is going. I painstakingly bought each piece one at a time, as I had little money. I wore the kit when I played as goalie on KimÂ’s team. Inside the hockey bag I found my hockey jersey from KimÂ’s team, the Comets. I was flushed full of memories, all of them tasting like metallic ice on the tip of my tongue. The smell of athletic tape filled my nose. I recognized all of my kit, even though I havenÂ’t worn any of it in 8 years.

And it needs to go.

ThereÂ’s no ice hockey in our area, the hockey bag is enormous andÂ…wellÂ…that Helen is gone. ItÂ’s time.

Jeff arrived yesterday evening. Angus and I were worried that he’d been “gotten to” by the Swunt, as he’s been on his own with her for a week now. Once Jeff walked into the house, he descended into a sea of silence. It appeared our fears were correct.

Discussions with him yesterday were hard work. When Angus and Melissa went to get the takeaway curry last night I sat and tried to talk to Jeff. I asked him if he’d like to see Harry Potter with me. His response? “Whatever.” I asked him if he was looking forward to going skiing over New Year’s, something we’ve been planning. We’re going to fly in to Seattle to visit my Dad again, then off to Canada with the 4 kids.

He looks at me. “I don’t want to go right after Christmas. I always get one big present in Sweden, and lots of little ones. I want time to play with them.”

I look at him. This is new. “Well, we were thinking of going directly after Christmas. What if you brought your presents with you and you can play with them there?”

“I want at least a week with my things before we go to the States,” he replied.

UmÂ…ok.

And this, amongst other things, indicated to both Angus and I that things are not ok in the House of Mirth.

And we donÂ’t know the best way of handling things. Previously, Jeff has been really keen on the Lemonheads and talked about them constantly. A box of amazing and beautiful baby clothes arrived yesterday from the fabulous Donna, and while Melissa and I went through them, exclaiming and thrilled, Jeff was clearly uncomfortable, so we stopped looking at the clothes until later when we were alone. The babies are now a relatively contentious issue. Again. As they have been since their inception.

Angus and I discuss our options-we want to make him comfortable and happy, but we know there’s only so much we can do, and only so much time. We will do everything we can, inlcuding extra reassurance and extra attention, which is a bit of a teeter totter as then we have to be careful we don't alienate Melissa, even though we did explain that maybe he needed some extra attention just now. Angus is very sure that the next step will be reduced visits from Jeff, as suggested by the ex. The impact the Swunt is having on Jeff is massive and I can understand why – she’s his mother. He trusts her. Angus and I discuss trying to go back to court for custody, but there are a few issues with that-for starters, we don’t stand a chance in a Swedish court. If we involve English courts, it will be a long drawn out process while the courts battle it out, and we worry that the damage will be worse on the children if they get confronted by custody battles. Jeff is doing slightly better today and is a little more upbeat, I think some sleep helped, but it’s such a fucking tightrope that I feel like I can never get the balance right.

What drives me most wild is that while Angus’ ex goes around using her children as pawns in her anger, Angus’ family is running around worrying about her happiness and wringing their hands, saying “Poor woman.” We continue to not comment about the ex in front of the kids, but I want to grab her by the shoulders and tell her that the damage she is doing cannot be undone, and it cannot be forgiven. I’m sure she wants to do worse to me.

I continue to feel like my desire to add to our family means I have destroyed another one.

Yesterday my beautiful new Le Creuset pan arrived. IÂ’d ordered it months ago, an almond colored cast iron pan. It finally arrived yesterday morning, and as I love cooking I was excited as hell, so I got the pot ready and washed it. Le Cresuet costs a fortune but the pots last foreverÂ…unless you have wet hands and you drop it on the stone floor.

Then it gets destroyed.

I was bereft. My new pot ruined and I'd never even used it. I'd waited for ages to buy it until I saw it on sale, and I knew it was the best price I could ever find. And now? Nothing. And I don't have credit card purchase protection either, so it's well and truly lost (lesson learned on that one, too.)

After the day that had been had, I went up and took a bath. It seemed like the best option, really, to just remove myself for a little while. I had problems sleeping all night and random bits of baby came poking out of my stomach all night and continues today. I wish I knew how to fix things, but I just donÂ’t. I canÂ’t fix rocking chairs. I canÂ’t fix hockey pasts. And I canÂ’t fix kids, no matter how much I want to.

-H.

PS-many huge thanks for the sci fi help. I put together a list of the suggestions that I’d had before we went to bed for Melissa, and so far she’s narrowed it down to ones she’s really interested in. They include “Under Plum Lake", the Pullman “His Dark Materials” series, Ursula LeGuin's "Earthsea Trilogy", Jonathan Stroud's "Bartimaeus" triology and “Doomsday Book”. I’ll get the suggestions that came in last night (Zimmer Bradley was a good suggestion, I remember reading her myself) and see what she thinks about those. Thanks a lot, I really owe you all for the suggestions-hopefully it helps you to know that you made her day as she discovered huge amounts of books that will make her happy.

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August 15, 2007

The Averages

Beach Girl recently sent me a few articles on names. Now, I find names to be very, very interesting, and not just because IÂ’m baking two buns in the oven. Names (to me) are a characteristic of a person, theyÂ’re a catch-all for the bits that are going on beneath the surface.

Ironically there are some names where the patterns repeat themselves, at least in my world. AngusÂ’ exÂ’s name is one name that I genuinely associate with people that make life hard, because IÂ’ve known three women with that name and all three of them whipped me. Maybe itÂ’s a name pattern thing. Every woman I know named Angus' ex's name (and variants thereof) has had a touch of evil to her. Every "Donna" I've known has been very nurturing. Every "Sara/Sarah" I've ever known is strong and independent, even if they can't see it themselves. Every "Michael" I've dated - and there have been a few - have been trainwrecks of relationships, but perhaps it's the combo of "Helen"+"Michael" that made the relationships so tragic, perhaps Michaels are ok with, for example, Ellens. Maybe there's some deeper science to it all, who the hell knows.

I think we all know of a name urban legend as well-while I was working in a hospital many years ago, I was told by one of the midwives of a woman who delivered her daughter and then chose a name for her based on a word she saw on a medical form. Despite the midwives desperately urging her not to make the perilous mistake of naming her kid this, the woman went ahead with it, and thus right now somewhere in Texas is a girl with the unfortunate name of Chlamydia.

The Lemonheads get called all kinds of things. While I call them The Lemonheads, Melissa and Jeff call them Wayne and Krusty (although Jeff has lately started to insist itÂ’s Wayne and Krustina as Wayne is clearly not a female name, and presumably Krustina is. Things just get weirder in my life on a daily basis.) AngusÂ’ Mum calls them Mack and Mabel. My dad calls them Pebbles and Bam-Bam. They go by many names, none of them what theyÂ’re going to be called when theyÂ’re born, but that's ok. In my heart, they'll always be the Lemonheads.

As far as the babies go we absolutely have no idea what to name them, so any questions to me about naming them isnÂ’t prying to find out what theyÂ’ll be called, as we havenÂ’t a clue what the names will be. We also think you need to see the kids before you give them the ultimate label for life. We sat down with Melissa and Jeff in April while we were in Mexico and came up with a list. There are maybe 30-40 names for boys and girls on that list, and much paring down needs to be done (I would, for example, rather not give birth than name our child Wayne. IÂ’m just saying.)

Whatever we decide to name them, the babies will be called something else on this blog. I donÂ’t do real names on this site. Helen, Angus, Melissa, and Jeff are all pseudonyms, as are all the names of any people I talk about-neighbors, Angus' family colleagues, etc. The only names that are real on this blog are Gorby, Maggie, and Mumin, because I think chances of anyone in our lives Googling them are slim and my furry companions have little interest in vanity Googling themselves. The only other real name on this blog is KimÂ’s because he died, and because he changed his name when he was an adult anyway.

IÂ’m fiercely private in real life, actually.

Although nothing I write about is untrue, specifics that could help people twig who I am are changed-the name of our house, for one. I donÂ’t like details getting out.

But IÂ’ll lay a few real details on the line for you today, anyway.

Trends lately are for baby names to be unusual and unique. Looking at the list of most popular baby names today reads to me like a car catalog. I apologize in advance if I offend anyone, but some names just don't make sense to me. The name "Braeden" sounds like it should have "Hyundai" before it. The same goes for "Aaralyn", it makes me think "Can I buy a consonant, please?" I just don't get modern naming, really. And choosing alliteration for naming (I'm looking at you, Kate Hudson, the four P children on Desperate Housewives, and don't even get me started on the crazy Duggar "J"s.) is wrong on so many levels. Equally, Angus is very not keen on naming kids after parents, so there won't be any Angus II or Angus Juniors in our house.

As far as names go Angus and I are both huge, huge fans of what you might call the average, everyday, ordinary names. Maybe itÂ’s because we both have unusual first names in real life that makes us crave normalcy-my real first name is generally a boyÂ’s name (and I have met more men with my name than women), and Angus' real first name is very Scottish. While chances are youÂ’ve heard of our names before, chances are even greater that you donÂ’t personally know anyone with these names. Our real first names are on the long side, and both of our last names are long as well. In addition, my name can be spelled a few ways and AngusÂ’ real name can be spelled one of 400,000 ways. The way his is spelled, thanks to his Mum, is very unusual, and it's generally always misspelled on mail we receive. Perhaps because of our unusual and long first names, weÂ’re fans of short, simple, old-fashioned names. Mary works for us. PeteÂ’s ok. Elizabeth is nice (but a bit too long, we think, cursed as we are with the long last names.) We wonÂ’t win any points for originality but we wonÂ’t condemn our kids to a lifetime of spelling their name out for people, something we have to do.

In contrast, both of us have completely average middle names, but they’re names neither of us like. In a stroke of honesty, I’ll go ahead and whip them out (because we never, ever use them. Ever.) My real middle name is Christina. I hate it. I’ve always hated it. Apologies to anyone named Christina, but the name just doesn’t suit me. I used to hate my first name, too, but it's grown on me and I like it now, but my hatred for my middle name has been life-long. Angus’ real-life middle name is Mark (or as I like to point out, it's pronounced over here as "Mahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhk"). He’s not so keen on that one, either. Our names mean “follower of Christ” and “warlike”, respectively, neither of which are true. Now if "Christina" meant "follower of cheese products" and "Mark" meant "lover of lightbulbs", we'd be getting somewhere. But we hold great stock in middle names as well.

“Melissa” and “Jeff” are names that I just pulled out of the air-we have no real association with the names and they're nothing like the kids' real names. In real life both of them have completely average first names as well, only Melissa’s first name is a common Swedish name and pretty much completely unheard of outside of Northern Europe. As they have one English and one Swedish parent they were given an English name and a Swedish name, so that they could choose if they wanted to be called by one of them over the other later in life, depending on where they lived.

The babies, equipped as they will be with one English parent and one American parent, would have the same only the names, theyÂ’re not so different.
Angus loves girls’ names that start with K, so that’s getting analysis. Angus’ family has long had a bit of a thing going with Scottish names, so we’ve been looking at Scottish names as we both like them. But we’re not sticklers on this one-we’re anxious to have names that suit the babies and suit something being “new”.

We have a bit of a tradition in my mother’s line-for as far back as I can see, the second girl born gets the middle name “Marie”. I know this goes back at least four generations, maybe more, but it’s something that’s done. But while I have no problem with the name Marie and am absolutely not against passing names down in families, I do have a problem with traditions and cycles not being broken with regards to patterns I see with this pattern in particular, so even though – in this generation, that is – our girl will be the second girl born, there’s no way in hell her middle name is going to be Marie. We may like the name, but we’re anxious for everything to be different.

We might be taking superstition too far.

IÂ’m ok with that.

In general, names are important to me. I want the names to be right. Strangely, Jeff said a name in the car last month as we wound our way through Scotland, and it twigged with me on a major level. I just thought: "That's it. That's the name for our daughter." In my head, despite my protestations that we not only need to see the baby first and that the name doesn't start with a K, I've been thinking of her as that name ever since. Maybe it sticks, maybe it doesn't.

But I have to admit-it's pretty fun thinking of the possibilities.

-H.

PS-Sci-fi fans! I need your help! 15 year-old Melissa is a huge, huge fan of Tolkein, and she's now read every one of his she can get her hands on including his "new" one, the Children of Hurin one. I'd like to get her some more books, but not sure how to proceed. She's read all of the Narnia books, Harry Potter books, Wrinkle in Time books, and as she tends to lean towards liking sci fi/fantasy more than any other genre, I'm now wondering where to go from here. Any tips?

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August 14, 2007

Almost 29 Weeks of Lemony Goodness

Today we trooped to the hospital for our 28 week scan (even though I'm 29 weeks tomorrow. Somehow, we got off track by a week. I blame society.) and to meet our consultant and the one who will deliver the twins, the one we call Dr. Charisma, the IVF doctor who, peering at me above the sheet of my be-draped pink taco declared that we should put back two embryos based on my history and the overwhelmingly averageness that were the two embryos, that twins in this situation were extremely unlikely. I have some choice words for Dr. Charisma. Don't get me wrong-he's an excellent doctor and I have no doubts about his qualifications, he's just not the kind of guy you'd go rushing up to for a hug. At all. Ever.

Anyway, we're late to the appointment as we always are, and by the time we get in to the hospital the antenatal room is one giant swelling of progesterone. There are so many heavily pregnant women in there that I wonder if Angus is going to get knocked up. We wait for ages-this never bodes well, Angus is many things but he is not a Patient Waitee-and then we head in for the scan.

We spent the entire morning at the hospital.

Angus is pretty pleased about that.

So the Lemonheads-they're doing just fine. These days the sonographer doesn't have to do much searching for the babies, they're large enough that they show up right away. Both babies are measuring over 1200 grams, which is just over 2.5 pounds. So they're small. Still within normal limits, but small.

First up-Twin 1. Twin 1 is head down and raring to go. Twin 1 is the little hooligan that kicks the shit out of me on a regular basis. I had understood that Twin 1 was the little girl, but I got that one wrong (not surprisingly, as neither of us can understand any ultrasound we ever see.) Twin 1 is on my left hand side, and it's the boy. The sonographer said that without a doubt Twin 1 is a boy, and even pointed out his man bits. Neither Angus nor I had any idea whatsoever what we were looking at, so either our son is going to be under-endowed or we're just hopeless at all this (I know without a doubt that we're hopeless at this, so I'll go with that one.) He's a big boy, though, with a large head and very, very long legs. All the better to kick me with, I guess.

Here he is-it's a profile shot of his head, with a little elbow in the air next to his noggin.


28wTwin 1a.jpg


The sonographer then checked out Twin 2, who is the quieter baby, the CVS baby, and apparently is the little girl (the sonographer is very sure about that, too, and showed us the baby's lady bits as well. We didn't see anything. You might now be seeing a pattern here when it comes to Angus, me, and ultrasounds). The technician looked at me and asked me if I was having trouble breathing. I confirmed that why yes, I do spend my time breathing like a bulldog and debating a possible professional career in telephonic heavy breathing pranks. Truthfully, the breathing is getting so bad the only way I can breathe is either standing up or at a small incline-sitting for any period of time means I can't draw my breath, and I try to avoid the phone as I get too breathless and wind up sounding like my great-grandpa, who had Black Lung. The reason? The little girl, in breech position, has her head and upper torso nestled across both of my lungs, pressing hard. Her bum is squashing the ureter from my right kidney and her legs are extended, bouncing on the bottom of my cavernous uterus.

Oh yeah. She's going to be a handful.

Here's apparently a picture of her. She's pretty camera shy (and always has been) and like her parents prefers likes to sleep on her stomach. The sonographer printed these out and handed them to us proudly. Apparently, these are pictures of her face, which we were dutifully grateful about.

We don't see anything that resembles anything in the pictures.

It looks like I'll be giving birth to a Rorschach Test.

If you can see it, let me know.


28wTwin 2a.jpg


She also has very long legs, although she's a lot smaller than her brother.

The rest of the visit went ok-Dr. Charisma was out so we met with his stand-in, who discussed the position the babies are in. Right now, he said, a vaginal birth is still possible as the first baby is head down, which would mean they could turn the other baby in utero and deliver her. This, to me, sounds awfully squicky and all kinds of levels of painful. True, I'm planning on being on every possible drug known to man when I go into labor, but it doesn't mean I want hands stuffed in me pulling out the plastic bags of gizzard, neck and kidneys. We'll cross that bridge when we get there-while I like the recovery time of a vaginal birth better than a C-section, I'd also like to not imagine my hooch getting stretched to the size of a Hungry Man TV dinner.

He also discussed due dates with us and even said that if the babies are ok, it's not uncommon to take the pregnancy to 39 weeks. Sitting there, I had to fight with every ounce of willpower I had not to burst into tears and shout "Not in THIS cargo hold, buddy!" Dr. Charisma says we'll deliver latest 37 weeks. I'm going with that one. While it's much, much better than the threat of 32 weeks we face with my infections, the idea of not being able to breathe like this for another 10 weeks is something I'd rather not think about without a stiff drink in my hand. Not to mention that twins have a higher risk of stillbirth after week 37 as they just completely run out of room in there. Also not tempting. I hear all the time "The longer you keep them in, the healthier they'll be," which is true and I know it, but at the same time when you're pissing razorblades and can't draw enough air, you start to think: 36 weeks works. Maybe we can't even try for 35 weeks.

Kidney infection/UTI are still under monitoring, and I'm on antibiotics for another 12 days. At this point you'll be able to slice open my veins and pour my blood on the moldy bread in order to clear it up. Only that's icky. On so many levels.

We go back in 3 weeks for another scan, and then we begin the hardcore monitoring for the rest of the pregnancy.

In the meantime, Melissa's still here, Jeff arrives tomorrow (with a newfound sense of stress as it appears the Swunt may have gotten to him, so it's a bit touch and go right now) and not a fucking thing has been done on the nursery.

We're so organized.

-H.

PS-many huge thanks to the Physics Geek, who gave the babies and I this book and this DVD. Both are hugely appreciated, as the book will help me figure out a pattern for them, and the DVD, well...I'm a well-known sucker for Christmas. Thank you, Geek. I love them both.

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August 10, 2007

Bodily Functions

I was reading in bed last night, curled on my side with my very attractive nursing pillow propping my shoulders up (nursing pillows are shaped like horseshoes and have a secondary feature which makes them rock-they go between the legs to try to keep you laying on your side. Somehow I wind up on my back anyway (insert joke here) but in general it's a good thing. Plus? Best. Reading. Pillow. Ever.) when I felt moisture on my arm. Wearily, I reached up to my face. If there's water flowing, chances are it's coming from my nose. I've suffered a whole lifetime of bloody noses anyway, pregnancy has simply made them worse (along with the tinnitus and back ache. Fun times, my friend. Fun times.) Only my nose was dry. I wasn't having a nosebleed. So I look up at the ceilling figuring we have a leak somewhere, only that's dry, too. I put my book down and start investigating.

I find where the water's coming from.

It's coming from my breasts.

My reaction was swift: HOLY FUCKING SHIT, I'M LACTATING.

That's right-my colostrum has come in.

Now, you might think that a pregnant chick finding a milk bar around her ribcage is a normal thing and, well, you'd be pretty well-versed on biology. But here's the thing - many, many years ago I had a radical breast reduction. They took my enormous fun bags from a DD to a B cup in one day. I was in the hospital for days, in bandages for weeks, I had hundreds of stitches and I lost 2/3 of my breasts. I had my nipples removed, re-sized (they were the size of teacups prior to the surgery. I know, that's so hot, isn't it?) and sewn back on. I have Frankennipples.

Frankennipples which I was told would never, ever produce milk ever because not only were the majority of the milk glands gone, but the nipples had been surgically removed. My little nubbins were re-sized on a stainless steel tray and then put back on (I know this, I even have a slight puckering on one of them where they pulled the stitches too tight). My Porsche-driving plastic surgeon breezily informed me that Hades would enjoy a light dusting of snowfall before I'd ever have breastmilk flowing from these babies.

So...what? The nipples sought company? They spontaneously grew ducts to the handful of milk glands I have left?

I have a doctor's appointment on Tuesday, where I'll ask if I am, indeed, a big heifer who's got her own dairy substitute coming out of the boobage or if I just have some kind of infection. I'm kinda' doubting I have an infection because 1) the breasts feel fine and 2) both of my breasts are leaking (admittedly one more than the other). But I'm shocked beyond compare-it's like finding out that you've spent your life walking on two legs because you were told you would never fly, and then discovering one evening that those things on your back, they're wings after all, so you have a choice of walking or flying after all.

Whose body is this?

I have to confess here that while I absolutely accept, understand and agree that breastfeeding is the best choice for baby and the healthiest option for both mom and baby, it's something I've never been a fan of. This is not me judging other women here, I think women that breastfeed are following their own personal choice and I applaud them. I also think people that get uptight about breastfeeding mothers in public are ridiculous-breasts are indeed a sexual object but they are also a nurturing object. Breastfeeding falls under that "nurturing" side of things, let's pack up the prudism here. I personally have never wanted to breastfeed, and I have spent nearly half my life believing that I couldn't, anyway, so nothing to dwell on.

But now maybe there is something to dwell on.

I discussed it with Angus last night-he's of the "it's best for baby" frame of mind, which makes me feel like one very rotten mom indeed. It is best for baby. But I don't want to do it. Truthfully, I doubt very much I'll be able to, anyway-I'm sure the limited amount of glands I have left won't feed one baby, let alone two.

But the real reason why I don't want to do it is because of the stress-I read so many things and hear from so many moms about the discomfort and stress that breastfeeding brings. I've seen blogs of heartbroken moms who can't understand why they don't make enough milk/make too much milk/get impacted ducts/get crusty nipples/have to spend their free time pumping/you name it. The stress seems to be absolutely enormous.

And I am already stressed to maximum fucking limits, even before I read this. Now, the pressure feels enormous.

Anyway, it's one of many things I'm handling here.

Yesterday I just didn't feel well. I felt off all day long and I never figured out why. The kidney infection rages on, despite the antibiotics I'm on. I don't know if or when the infection will ever leave but it's draining me horribly. I am trying to get renal scans booked and Foggy recommended stenting, which sounds horrible but at this point if it'll help I say we go for it.

From all the infection fun I lost 3 kilos (6.6 pounds), and although I've put on half a kilo since the hospital, I'm in my third trimester now, which for twins means that any weight gain I have now will be water weight. My stomach is squished and compacted so I can't eat much. The average recommended weight gain for twins is about 45 pounds. I've gained a grand total of 22 pounds. If the babies weren't so active all the time, I'd be more worried, but I'm definitely baking future athletes in there. Currently, my intestines are being used for football practice.

I cannot sleep. I get uncomfortable easily and I have to run to the toilet and squeeze whatever drops of horrible wee I can get from my battered bladder and ureter. I have looked longingly at the sleeping tablets in our bathroom cabinet and thought Well, I need to get the kids used to a Valley of the Dolls lifestyle sooner or later anyway. But I won't take sleeping tablets (no really, I won't-I may be desperate for sleep but it's not good for the babies and I'd rather not be Postcards From the Edge) and instead I just toss and turn. I am so tired you wouldn't believe it. That, and I get contractions. Contractions hurt. I am not a fan of the contractions.

So I'm tired and moody - last night had a round of me nearly wailing to Angus about how fucking unattractive and huge I feel. He was very sweet and told me that I am still very attractive and that yes, I am large, but the hugeness will disappear. I know there's a limit to how much of me wigging out he can take, though, so I need to try to handle things.

I'm sorry if I seem really complain-y on my blog lately. I'm not ungrateful that I get to be a mother, I'm really not, and I do truly love the two passengers I've not met yet. I confess I did think pregnancy would be easier than this, though. I knew that birthing part was hard and that there was great discomfort in the end, but I hadn't understood the exhaustion, the aching, the pains, the kicking, and above all the kidney infections. I thought pregnancy would be warm and glowy, a touchy-feely extravaganza and something where I would feel one with Angus and one with nature, the discomfort coming only during the last few weeks and during that messy birthing business.

I'll pause a moment here and wait for you experienced mothers and fathers to wipe the tears of laughter from your eyes.

In short-I have absolutely no control over my body right now. It's as mystifying as the reponse "Nothing," that men give when you ask them what they're thinking. It's all really fun here.

But at least I have backup if I run out of milk for my coffee.

-H.

PS-many huge thanks to Sophie, who sent an amazing mobile for the babies' wall. I love it, thank you so much.

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August 09, 2007

My Dirty Little Secret

It's a bright sunny day outside (finally!) and Melissa's curled up on the couch, watching the end of Braveheart. Angus is upstairs doing some work, but my email is being uncooperative and the VPN isn't letting me log in for long.

And I am not feeling very well at all today.

Something else has been eating me up inside as well, and I haven't really found a good way of saying what it is, so I'm just going to blurt it all out in a Ramona the Pest kind of way and let what happens happen.

For a long, long time I've had problems with secrets. I've made no secret here that, surprisingly, I'm a very private person in my real life. People in my real life have no idea about any of my past, really, and very little insight into any details of who I am. I like it like that. I've never been fond of people getting too close to me, of people learning the ins and outs of what makes me tick. It's too personal, it's too near. I wallow in my secrets.

As time (and therapy) have progressed, I stripped myself of one of my former pasttimes, which was lying to people. I'd make something up before I'd let someone get to know me, I was always conscious of the act at the time but I was never able to stop myself. These days I don't lie to people. I don't volunteer information, but I'm happy to listen to people talk about themselves, my colleagues. My "real life" friends and acquaintances and Angus' family would probably tell you I'm a good listener, but if pressed they'd maybe admit they don't know so much about me.

And I'm ok with that.

One thing I've learned about myself is that I had no boundaries. None at all. The every detail and splash of my life was something I had to reveal to my family. And by family, I mean mother and sister. My sister is someone I don't think twice about anymore, she's not a part of my life at all now and never, ever will be again. My mother, on the other hand, is a presence I'm trying to reckon with.

In my family secrets were not ok. The details had to be attended to. My mother had to know, she had to know everything. Once I moved out if I didn't speak to her on the phone every few days the angry phone calls would start. Opinions were issued on everything. If I did not listen to opinions, it would be bad.

And it never occurred to me to be any different, that people had to have space. My mother, she was a good mother in many areas, she raised us and sacrificed and did the best she could and above all, she loved us. But she also made a lot of mistakes, as mothers do, as people do. I made mistakes, too, I know that, but some part of me tugs and whispers that I was the kid in this. I couldn't have known better.

I never had any secrets.

I was never allowed to have any secrets but the family's. You never talked about what was going on with the family, not with anyone, not ever. I still remember when I kicked off seeing a therapist, my mother admonishing me that I was never to talk about her. That all of the things that I was so fucked up about had to do with my adult life, nothing came from my childhood. That it didn't matter how profoundly broken I felt I was, every crack and split came from me alone, and in talking about me I was never, ever to talk about her or the family.

I was so screwed up that after attempting suicide, I wouldn't talk about my past unless my therapist could prove to me that he wasn't tape recording our conversations and sending them to my mother. I made him swear to me that he wasn't emailing her every single thing I said. Once I even checked behind pictures hung on the wall. I fell way on the other side of the batshit crazy fence, I took paranoia to a whole new level.

But I had a reason, see.

I was never allowed to have any secrets from my mother in my life.

I had to tell her everything.

My diary was read.

On at least one occasion, a letter I was posting to a friend was opened and read. In it, I talked about the family. I got some things in it wrong, but it didn't matter-I had broken the code of silence. I got the shit knocked out of me for that one.

I learned my lesson though.

I became a vault, a walled garden, something welded shut so tightly you couldn't have pried things out of me if you tried. Things went in and never went out again. I became a habitual liar, all the while hoping someone would call me on my shit, hoping someone would see through it all and make me sit down and try to string a sequence of anything remotely coherent out of me. My 8mm memory flapped and hid behind moldy walls and my soul stunk of mildew. If I didn't make any secrets I wouldn't have to know that I couldn't have any. I never talked about my feelings because it would come back to haunt me, my thoughts were mistakes I would pay for again and again and again.

You can't keep things from her.

It's not ok.

And it's all just the way it was, you see. This is how life was. I had no secrets and I had no voice and I got everything wrong all the time.

But once I started having secrets and not telling her everything, it all blew up. Someone told me that I didn't need her approval on everything. I told someone that she shouted at me on the phone and told me how disappointed she was in me not telling her everything. This person replied, "Why didn't you tell her how disappointed you are in her?" And it was a shock-I couldn't talk like that. It would be bad. I would pay. I couldn't say that...could I? Well...why couldn't I?

And so I did.

We don't talk now, but she's out there. She's still circling my life, reading it, trying to manage the ticking bomb that is me. I love her very much and I always will, but she can't know everything about me always, that's not how life works. I can't run my every option by her for her say, I can't be an open book when I've had to be one all my life. I don't want to make her out to be an ogre but right now I feel so hugely, incredibly angry that it's spilling over into my real life. Combine my anger with my hormones and my incredible, huge fears that I will make the same mistakes raising my children as mothers before me made, and it's spilling out the seams.

When I started a new blog to write about my infertility, I tried to be anonymous. I tried to hide. I naively thought I'd be able to be free, although a part of me always knew she'd find me.

And she did.

She and my sister both did. They had to know, you see. They had to keep tabs, they had to judge. They had to be included, even when I was clear that absolutely no one in my real life, apart from Angus, would have access to that site. They couldn't let me have my diary to myself, they couldn't let me write an unopened letter. I'm now hyper-conscious of the fact that they're reading, I want to write everything out but I can't because they're here. It's even affecting how I write about my pregnancy and what happens afterwards-I may want to post baby pictures, but it makes me angry to know that they get included in the baby pictures when I don't feel comfortable with it.

And the ridiculous thing is, I write anonymously. No one knows my family. No one knows who they are or what they look like or where they live. They could be anyone. I am no one. But still I am bound and gagged.

Quiet words from quiet people have told me more about some things that have transpired in the background, things which outrage me so severely that my anger is becoming too great a ball for me to handle. These things are so massive and monstrous I can't even believe they're real, but they are. These sins are bigger than childhood diaries being read and sealed letters being opeend. They took the lines you crossed and made whole earthquakes out of the latest.

And now I do have a secret, which I am blowing out of the water today.

I'm not a good person. I'm really not. If you knew how I currently feel you'd think I was a bad person, too. Because I'm so violently, viciously angry with the latest invasion of privacy that I want to make my mother cry. Good, decent people don't want to make their mother cry. I want to hurt her feelings like she's hurt mine. I want her to know that I think I'm owed an apology this time. For all the times before, for all the invasions and fuck-ups and mistakes, I don't care about those, I'll deal with that myself. But now, finally, I've had enough. I've made mistakes and I get reminded of them but I apologized for them again and again, to the point where Angus tells me I'm the most apologetic person he knows.

But not this time.

She went too far.

The site being found and the things I have learnt since then...it's too much for me.

I love you very much, mom and I always will. You're not a bad person. But I'm not either. And I can let you in my life but I need to have a say in how far you get to go. I have to have boundaries. I have to have privacy.

I don't forgive you, which is ironic since you're not asking forgiveness and for as long as I've known you, you've never once said you're sorry to me, not once. I'm sure there's plenty you don't forgive me about. I'm the bad child. I always was and always will be.

This is in the public space because it's too big for me to hold inside anymore, and since we're not talking anyway and I know you're reading here, this should find you. Not like it will make any difference. It's all my fault you think, and maybe it is. Maybe everything is all my fault. I'm the perennial bad guy and it fits and it's ok, but I'm sick of it all, so sick it makes my heart bleed.

Enough.

-H.

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August 08, 2007

Macaroni and Cheese Theory

As I've blogged before I have a completely pointless Bachelor's Degree in anthropology. I loved my courses but there's nothing less useful in the real world than the ability to recite the names and reigns of all of the Egyptian pharoahs or the origins of the australopithecines. Cool to study and it means you can go to class in your boxer shorts and be considered bohemian, but not so practical if you want to make enough money to eat.

I've long been interested in biological anthropology (termed "the study of the monkeys", it always makes me think of going to the zoo and watching them swing on a tire swing) and the link to human behavior. To this point, my papers and my research tended to be along the lines of biological imperatives and human socialization, or "why we can blame genetics for how we act", which is always a fun game and often involves the use of hand puppets. In other words, I was the poster child for "get a life".

Stay with me here-I do have a point.

One of the studies that I loved doing, besides gender studies, is the understanding of monogamy and romantic emotion in humans. You could argue that this is also tied with gender and I would tend to agree with you, but I find it very, very interesting that the whole notion of romance, sex, love, and marriage is perhaps an evolved form of our australopithecine ancestors picking lice off of each other. Besides, I hate lice, so anything that gets the little bastards off the planet is ok with me.

I recently bought a book by an author named Dan Savage called The Commitment. I bought it because I had read Savage's The Kid and loved it, I had never heard of him but it appears he's a sex advice columnist in the States, and he makes me laugh, which I sorely need these days. The Kid was about Savage and his boyfriend adopting a child and about the angles of gays adopting (which I am pro.) The Commitment is about gay marriage (which I am also pro), the debate about gay marriage, and if he and his boyfriend should get married.

This post isn't to debate views on gay rights, gay adoption or gay marriage.

This post is about the chapter I read last night.

This post is about monogamy.

In all of my pencil-chewing library studies in college, the one clear thing I kept seeing was that human beings are not by nature monogamous. It's not in the best interest of the species, actually-the males shouldn't spread so much as spray their seed in order to ensure their lines survive, and the females should choose the fittest of the species to try to ensure survivaly. But all of this is if we really were acting like the monkeys, and I'd like to think that although we share 99% of the same DNA as the bonobo, we don't need to go about flinging our feces and acting like them.

Monogamy is a social construct that we have placed on ourselves by really fun things like religion, society, tradition, and our neighbors frowning upon not being monogamous. Human beings, like our good buddies the monkeys, are actually programmed for one thing-reproduction. We're biologically coded to spend time making baby Us so that the baby Us can inherit the world and actually continue in it. Of course, in our modern iPod, airplane flying, overpopulated, no more Yangtze River Dolphin society, we don't really need to breed to survive. Now the only thing we need to survive is a high thread count sheet and the ability for the weatherman to tell us what's going to be outside our window in the morning.

The studies I did also used to state that monogamy is harder for men than women. In general, I would agree with that, but use it in an argument with me of why you tripped and your dick fell into someone else and chances are I'm going to come unglued in a very big way. I may agree with your biological imperative to spread your little soldiers, but there's such a thing as willpower, buddy. Try it on. I also actually think that women sometimes need a physical representation of "Wow, I find you hot" to make them feel good. It's not just men that feel the need to get physical, only men sleeping around are "just being men". Women sleeping around are "whores". Show me a guy who's slept with 100 women and I'll show you an NBA star who is idolized. Show me a woman who's slept with 100 men and I'll show you their porn star credentials. It's a nice double-standard.

The reason I agree with the idea that men find monogamy harder is simple - in general studies, men find the idea of their partner having sex with someone else to be more disturbing than the idea of their partner falling in love with someone else. For men, the "biological imperative" is stronger in that, from the monkey point of view, they need to know the progeny that springs forth from the loins of their beloved is their own. That, and I think men get more obsessed with the "Was he better than me?" worry than women do.

With women, it's the opposite-we tend to get more wildly upset if our boys fall in love than get pissed out of their heads and shag someone. This is not to say that we're not upset if you sleep with someone else, but there are degrees of hurt. True, this isn't for everyone. But overall, the idea of our partner betraying us on a one-off is much harder to take than knowing our partner betrayed us due to some perceived emotional deficiency that may have been brewing in our relationship. Both types of cheating hurt like hell. Maybe one of them is much harder to live with than the other.

But I actually feel the way the study says.

Say Angus were to sleep with another woman. Let's pretend he had a work do in another city and he and his workmates went drinking (which is what happens when one has work dos in over cities) and he picked up a chick in a drunken state of mind and slept with her. The next morning, in that typical Catholic-like fit of remorse (which feels a lot like a hangover and is, in fact, often combined with one) he calls me and apologetically tells me the whole thing. Sordid details to emerge at a later time, because at that time in the morning I'd have a hard time hearing about the ins and outs of the evening (no pun intended). Then, once he arrived home shame-faced and we sat across the kitchen table while he poured his heart and soul out and begged forgiveness, well...depending on the circumstances, he'd probably get it (but talk about the making up that would be needed). Not because I feel it's his "biological imperative" to sleep around, but because he came clean. Because I've been on those business trips where the booze is flowing and someone's making your ego feel good. Because I do actually know that sometimes when cheating happens, it's not because of the person that you love not being there, it's in spite of it. I'm not excusing the cads of the world out there, and I'm not saying it's ok, but I am saying that I understand how the circumstances can be.

That, and because of my Macaroni and Cheese Theory.

While I love macaroni and cheese with all of my heart and soul, I don't want it every day for the rest of my life. Along the same lines, I think that the idea of having sex with the same person for the rest of your life makes one think "Hmmmm....I wonder where I can get some fish and chips around here." You may love macaroni and cheese, but it doesn't mean it's all you want from now until death you do part. Whenever I find people that say "No way. I love macaroni and cheese. It's never even once crossed my mind ever to think of anything else, not once. Never. Uh-uh. Where's my fork?" I think: Either you're not being honest with yourself, or you don't get out much.

I think it's human nature to wonder about other people. Whether or not you act on it has to do with your social constructs (I'm married and cheating is wrong), your values (God/society tells me cheating is wrong), your relationship (nothing is worth hurting my partner) and even opportunity (working as a groundskeeper in this monastery sure sucks). But naughty thoughts, well, there's no stopping those. I love Angus madly and I think he's the best lover ever, but I'd be lying if I said I never fantastized about someone else and never wondered what someone new would be like in bed. But I talk to him about these things and together we keep it honest. I'm not excusing people that do have affairs because they have a responsibility to their partners, and that responsibility entails being honest, discussing things, and keeping their johnson in their shorts/their legs closed if that's what they know is important to their partners.

But that's "just" sex. And I'm not saying that finding out he'd slept with someone else wouldn't bother me at all because it certainly would. But what would bother me much, much more was finding out he had a strong emotional and romantic attachment to someone else. If he was going out of his way to send kind or loving emails, texts, or gifts I'd really come unhinged. Why? Because the way I see it is this-sleeping with someone is a fuck up. All it takes is alcohol and a sudden dearth of willpower. Romancing someone takes effort. You have to want to spend time with someone to work that hard. You have to want another person to feel good. Feeling good takes time whereas an orgasm takes 15 seconds. It's all about the investment case here. And forgive me for being very female and bitchy about this one, but as far as I see it, I should be enough of a needy, loving, worthy woman that I take up all the resources for romance. You should be so busy ensuring I get the loving emails, texts, and sentiments that you don't have the time or the inclination to give them to someone else.

Maybe that's selfish.

I'm ok with that.

Dan Savage states in this chapter that he and his boyfriend have a way of working to handle "extracurricular activities", which rang a bell because Angus and I have exactly the same thing. We're grown-ups with a complicated relationship history, and we knew going into this that we'd have to be honest with each other or we'd face the same problems our relationships had in the past. We both agree that monogamy is a hard goddamn game to play, and that at points in our lives there will be opportunities. Because we're pretty matter of fact about it, we agreed our own way of working, whereby we would handle situations as they came up. We tend to be brutally honest when it comes to some areas of our lives. This is one of them. We both love macaroni and cheese, but an all-you-can-eat Alaskan snow crab buffet can be pretty fucking tempting.

It doesn't hurt my feelings if Angus were to tell me that someone fancies him. In fact, I think it's kinda' cute and makes me think: Someone finds him hot and I own him, how cool is that? It also doesn't hurt my feelings if he tells me he saw a hot chick today, because he's not saying he doesn't find me hot, he's saying he found another person attractive, too (although with me currently feeling like something that winds up washed up and beached on shorelines, he should tread carefully in this area just now.)

One area where I am a stickler (and Angus is a stickler in return) is this-if Angus ever did act on an opportunity, I'd better know about it. Pronto. Because I've been the Chick Who Was Cheated On by previous partners (three times, actually, although I can only prove two times.) In those situations, I didn't want to know about the affairs, I turned a blind eye. But in those situations, I also didn't love and invest as much into the relationship as I have done here. There is no room for looking the other way and covering up in my relationship with Angus. Things get dealt with, or they fester and ooze. This would extend to if he ever did sleep with someone.

Being cheated on hurts like a sonofabitch. I've been cheated on. I've also cheated as a knee-jerk response to being messed around with, which honestly makes me no better. If you've been cheated on you also know how unbearable it can feel. Relationships have rules and those rules need to be followed, or else people can get hurt in ways that one cannot imagine. I'm not excusing partners that fuck up or saying that it's ok that they do this. I'm just saying that in some situations I can understand some of the background to how it happens, which is not the same thing as saying "Sure, go and follow your biological male imperative! Wheeee! Isn't it fun? Go ahead and sleep with a beautiful thin 20-something with a flat navel-ringed stomach and a bedroom routine that makes Jenna Jameson look like an amateur! I don't mind, it's your genetic coding talking here!"

Relax-I'm writing about this only because I read a chapter about it last night, not because it's something I'm facing in my real life. Angus isn't about to go sleep with someone on a business trip. Or he'd better not do because I'm one of those pregnant chicks that drew the "very horny" straw which means I want some all the time, although with various health issues we haven't been having any. That and I'm currently feeling so insecure I make Glenn Close's character in Fatal Attraction look like a pillar of stability, so I currently need so much reassurance I imagine Angus is too tired to even swivel his head 90 degrees to look at someone else.

But monogamy, it makes me think. Maybe your relationship works differently, maybe I'm too cyncial, I dunno. I just understand when I read the sentiment "Monogamy is hard". Because for some it is.

And now I want macaroni and cheese.

-H.

PS-first, we're in the flood zone (but we didn't get flooded.) Now, we're in the surveillance zone for foot and mouth. It's literally in our backyard, as one of the farms on our lane is sealed off. Last year we had draught. This year floods. Now cattle are being slaughtered. I'm wondering if I should take a hint here.

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August 07, 2007

Worrywart

Some mornings you wake up and things just go wrong from the moment you sit up in bed. Maybe itÂ’s something obvious, like you leave the house wearing two different shoes. Maybe you accidentally use your lipliner as your eyeliner (something I confess I did, which explains why someone asked me if I had pink eye). But most of the time, itÂ’s something a little less noticeable, itÂ’s a bad day just because itÂ’s your time to have a bad day.

Here in my world, itÂ’s a bad day today.

There’s no clear cut reason why it’s a bad day, although it doesn’t help that I spilled coffee on my dress and it won’t wash off, leaving me too look like I drizzled some kind of oil down the front of my dress. It doesn’t help that I grabbed the wrong tank top to wear under the dress, and I grabbed one that keeps rolling itself up over my stomach like a scrunchy 1980’s tube sock. It also doesn’t help that I had Kafka dreams all night and woke up feeling absolutely shattered, like I hadn’t slept a wink even though I got a good 7.5 hours worth. It further doesn’t help that I’m bloody furious with someone, which I’ll go into later, but it’s eating up (too much) energy, energy that I don’t really have to spare. Above all, it doesn’t help that I feel my body is letting me down – I’ve been one of those “model Clydesdale horse” pregnant chicks, one in which I’ve been perfectly healthy and looking at whipping out two full-term healthy babies, only to suddenly find that I’m on a very short leash as my body, it obstinately refuses to cooperate.

Mostly, itÂ’s a bad day because the logistics of the world are whipping me.

My visa application went in on Saturday. I still donÂ’t have a diploma but I sent in my academic transcript (signed, sealed, notarized). I donÂ’t have a letter from my university (although IÂ’m still pursuing it) confirming I was taught in English, but in a flash of either inspiration or desperation, I found a report card from my high school years, reflecting courses I was taught in English (and the failing grade I got in honors AP physics. Hey - no oneÂ’s perfect.) All I can do is hope.

I had to head to London to attend a few meetings, and there are no words to describe how tired I am, how stupidly fragile I feel. I feel like IÂ’m on the verge of tears, that any minute now IÂ’m going to topple over the other side. ThereÂ’s nothing specific thatÂ’s set me off, I just feel like an incredible wimp today. IÂ’m a Wimpy Burger. You can pay me Wednesday for a hamburger today.

I was supposed to go to the U.S. Embassy today because my social security card is registered under my maiden name and IÂ’m concerned that I need it in my current name to register the babies as American citizens. Turns out the Embassy closes well before I can get there today, and anyway they cannot change my social security info without my passport which the Home Office has (not to mention I canÂ’t get into the Embassy anyway-I have my phone, my laptop and my Blackberry with me, none of which are allowed in the Embassy. Nice.) But IÂ’m still lacking info from my marriage in Sweden, so I canÂ’t change the name and number anyway.

Between my visa, my kidneys, my pure and total exhaustion and now the social security issues, I had a minor meltdown.

It necessitated in me calling Angus and him talking me back from the ledge.

And it’s all ridiculous – social security may have nothing to do with anything right now, it’s just one of those things I realized in my visa work that I never bothered with, and I’m in my “get the little quacking things all in a row” right now. The visa doesn’t expire for months, enough time to bribe/beg/steal a letter from UTA, as well as get a replacement diploma. It’s not like I’m getting chucked out of the country tomorrow, it’s just easier to file for my visa without dependants.

I’m just clean out of resources. Things that never really bother me, which I usually shrug about and say “Eh…no big deal.”, well, they are bothering me. I can’t handle a lot today. I feel under-equipped. My mind is swamped – babies! Melissa and Jeff! Angus! Work! Visa! Family! Kidneys! Money! House extension! Garden! Logistics! Making sure everyone’s happy! Is everyone happy? Why aren’t they happy? All of these things and more, and not necessarily in the order I listed. I’m blowing a gasket over little things, which is ridiculous – I tend to be a lot lower key. I need to dial it down. I need to…but I can’t. It’s like everything’s come to a head, and it’s doing it today.

Maybe I just need a night of Kafka-free sleep.

Maybe I just need to stop bloody worrying and let things be.

That must be it.

Que sera sera, baby.

-H.

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August 06, 2007

I Had to Walk Uphills Both Ways in the Snow

I had a post ready to go today about the extension (betcha' you're glad I didn't have that one ready yet) but the weekend threw me a curveball.

Saturday night - less than 36 hours after completing my prescribed round of antibiotics - a new infection came back and took me down. I was hit with it all - screaming kidney back pain, bleeding, pleading to god on the toilet - along with new symptoms like ferocious diarrhea, nausea and heavy fatigue (I emerged from the bathroom at one point and wearily announced to Angus: "This house? It's clean." He didn't get it. Obscure reference maybe.)

I stayed in the bath for hours Saturday night as the midwives had recommended bathing because it soothes the insides and actually encourages said compromised insides to wee. So I did. I'm a 33 year-old woman who kept peeing in the bathtub. I was hurting so much that I'm not even remotely embarassed, although suffice to say both myself and the bathtub had a good scrubbing down afterwards.

I went back on antibiotics and am doing better.

I headed into the doctor's office today, where I am on a new regime of antibiotics - this time for 10 days - to fight the infection. The doctor says this is most likely a new infection as all of the antibiotics we threw at the last kidney infection/cystitis would have killed it off.

They told me I would be prone to infections the rest of this pregnancy.

I didn't know they meant that I would be prone to infections within 36 hours of being off of antibiotics from the last infection.

I can't stay on antibiotics for the next 8 weeks, it's not good for me and not so good for the Lemonheads, plus at some point I risk building up a resistance to the antibiotic, at which point I'm fucked. I have to stay on treatment for the infections as I'm at high risk of pre-term labor and septicemia, and kidney infections are the Big Momma of bad news. I also worry about kidney stones coming back, as there's nothing in the whole wide world worse than kidney stones-apparently the top 3 most painful things a person can have is 1) childbirth, 2) kidney stones, and 3) slipped discs. I'm all about the overachieving, but I'm hoping 2007 isn't going to be the year I go all out.

What this all boils down to is this - Melissa arrives tomorrow and we'd planned a trip to Ikea this coming weekend with her to buy picture frames and a few odds and ends. We'll also be buying a crib after all.

Because now even though the babies' estimated due date is the 31st of October, I was told that with twins I'll only make it to 36 weeks, which is the week beginning the 1st of October. But with these kinds of infections I'll be lucky to make it very far at all into September. We're basically looking at the Lemonheads arriving soon. I'm pushing for 32 weeks. Let's try to get to 32 weeks.

They say the third trimester is hard.

They're not kidding.

We haven't really discussed if we'd tell the kids they were IVF babies or not, but it's not really important to either of us that they be told one way or another. I'm sure they'll stumble across paperwork at some point and have some questions, so we may be honest, I dunno. I certainly would never use it against them in a court of "you made my life a living hell". I don't plan on using anything* against them in that way because I've seen what that kind of guilt can do to a person. I may mention that carrying them totalled one of my kidneys temporarily, but I'd never point fingers (even though it's our son that's causing this. I can see I'm going to need to childproof the house from birth for him.)

Sorry about the bitching but I'm not very happy about the latest developments.

-H.

* Except for one instance-the restless leg syndrome has gotten so bad I broke down and bought a bunch of bananas this weekend, which I have been eating. Apparently, they are high in potassium and that battles RLS. I can say it does indeed seem to help, and I blend them into smoothies. But of all foods in the world, one of my most hated foods is bananas. I am eating bananas because of the Lemonheads. So yes, they will be told this one-"Mama loves you so much she ate bananas for you. BANANAS! Now stop complaining about having to watch Adventures in Babysitting, because Mummy wants to relive her youth for a moment."

PS-Many huge, huge thanks to two women who I consider sister-types. To Margi, who along with her family sent the Lemonheads this rattle and this Rainforest Bouncer, which made me cry (in a good way). And to Caltechgirl, who with ZTZCheese sent a box (pics of the contents uploaded here, here, here and here). I love it all, the Lemonheads love it all, and you both made me squeal and cry. Thank you-I love you both.

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August 03, 2007

Bullet Me This

It's one of those awful Friday bullet point days, which you probably hate but I'm not doing "stream of consciousness" very well today, so...um...sorry.


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My visa application is doing my head in, for two big reasons:

1) I cannot find my college diploma anywhere, and unfortunately I kinda' need to send it in. You would think it'd be easy to find, seeing as in typical Texas style the diploma is roughly the size of a small houseboat. I tore the house apart yesterday and am going for it again today. The good news is I do have a sealed official academic transcript proving I graduated and which may or may not suffice, but the fact I can't find my diploma-it's not in the handy box I have, the one under the bed of those documents I will need for a long time still-is whipping me.

2) There are specific visa requirements to "prove" I speak English, and wouldn't you know it, I cannot fulfill one of them.

Seriously.

The Home Office need an official letter from my university stating that my courses and my degree were taught to me in English. This, despite the fact that my degree is from the States, because I still need the letter as the HSMP guidelines dictate "they need this evidence regardless of whether or not the main language from your home country is English."

I complain about this to Angus.

"I got my degree from the University of Texas at Arlington! What the fuck language do they expect I was taught in?" I moan.

"Spanish?" he asks.

"I don't think they teach any courses other than Spanish language and literature courses in Spanish," I reply. "Anyway, I don't speak Spanish. I was too busy learning Russian to try to impress a guy."

I call UTA anyway. It's weird calling the registrar's office there, it seems like a million years ago I went there. I ask about ordering a replacement diploma, which is going to be a complicated procedure as I need to go to a bank here and have them draft me a check for $25, for which I get to pay a £20 fee, meaning I'm paying more in fees than the check is worth all because UTA fear the almighty credit card. I then ask if they can write me an official letter stating that my courses and my degree were given to me in English so that I can fulfill my immigrant criteria in England.

This proves too much for the registrar.

"You want whut?" she asks. I'd forgotten that Texas twang, but I slide right back into it.

"I know it's crazy. I'm sorry. I just need an official letter from you stating the university teaches most of it's classes in English."

"But we have foreign language classes."

"Yes, well, except for those."

"I don't think we can write this letter."

I want to slap people. "Why not?"

"Well, we've never done that before."

I take a deep breath. "Let's think outside of the box, shall we? Just because you've never done this before, why should this mean you can't do it?"

"Well....we just can't. Don't ya'll speak English in England?"

"You would think so, wouldn't you?"

So now I'm waiting to speak to a manager there.

I rang the HSMP helpline and finally, after trying for hours, I get through.

"Hi, I'm struggling a bit with this proving I speak English bit," I say hesitantly. "I've got the diploma," - somewhere - "and I was born and raised in the States. What do I need to do?"

"Do you speak English?" asks the HSMP guy.

Oh. My. Christ. No. No I don't speak English. We're actually in the new The Last Starfighter film and I've just stuck a translator on your collar, I speak Neo-Galactican. Good luck, Starfighter!

"Well, considering we are speaking English on this phone call, I'd tick that box as a yes," I reply.

"Where'd you get your diploma?" he asks.

"The University of Texas at Arlington," I reply.

"They don't teach in Spanish there?" he asks.

Yes! Yes maybe they do! Maybe they all run around calling each other Senor and Senora and all celebrate the Day of the Dead and any other fucking stereotype that you think should apply here, ok? Texas is not one big hotbed of Spanish! I know very little Spanish! If you want, I'll take classes to fix that, but otherwise NO-no my classes weren't taught to me in Spanish!

I'm going to write a cover letter for my application asking the caseworker to please feel free to call me and we can discuss my English qualifications. In English. Then maybe I can prove I speak the language.

Que?


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GOD.

Her uterus must be more stretchy than a Slinky.


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You maybe saw the picture a few days ago of Gorby and I attempting to put together a baby swing that I bought off of ebay.


"Do you know how to put this together? Because I don't."


I asked Angus to take a look at it this morning and I timed him. He put it together in under 3 minutes. Honestly.

Gorby keeps eyeing the swing nervously. I think he thinks we have plans for him with the swing. What he doesn't know is that he'll clear the swing fears just fine, but as soon as I get a diaper big enough to fit the dog all hell will break loose.

Just don't tell the RSPCA.


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


We got hit by a terrific raft of spam the other day, so email is just now sorting itself out. If you've sent a mail and I haven't replied, I should find it today through the hundreds of offers of Viagra (we have some, thanks) and notifications that I've won the lottery (Angus and I have a running tally to see whose email account gets the most money in these. So far he's winning, but I'm hoping the Nigerian emails I'm getting start kicking up the money count.)


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


We have officially entered the third trimester, and all I keep thinking is How the hell did I make it this far?

Maybe you're tired of hearing about the Lemonheads, but they're a big part of my mindset right now. This isn't going to be a Mommy Blog but it is a blog about whatever it is I think or feel needs to come out, and right now, perhaps with health scares, perhaps because we've reached the point where they have odds for survival if they arrive, they're on my mind a fair amount.

Next week is one of those banner weeks-I'll be 28 weeks pregnant then. 28 weeks is one of those theoreticals for twins in that theoretically if you hit 28 weeks the babies have a 90% chance of surviving. The fact that they've had massive doses of steroids to develop their lungs will help those statistics. And yes, it doesn't mean that all babies apply to this, it's a general, but there's some kind of comfort in knowing that should it all go pear-shaped, they may make it. They're incredibly active babies (especially the girl) and I wonder how this translates to when they're born-will they be as active out as they are in?

The reality is we're looking at them arriving in about 8 weeks time.

8 weeks.

That's it.

As far as Angus and I, we're both still sometimes struggling with the absolute enormity of what's coming. We're nervous and scared. But there are small signs that we're beginning to prepare ourselves for what's coming. I know-you're probably thinking "You have 8 weeks to go, you're just now preparing yourselves?" but we're maybe not an ordinary couple. So far we have the twin stroller, two Fisher Price Aquarium swings I bought on ebay, a bathtub, blankets courtesy of Angela and Statia and clothes/diapers courtesy of Statia, April, and my sister-in-law. Maybe that's plenty, I dunno, but the nursery hasn't even been started let alone posture itself as ready. We don't have the crib or the bedding. We've agreed to buy a travel crib to have around just in case they come early, but we'd rather not tempt fate just yet.

A long time ago I bought one of these. Moulin Roty is a French company with the world's softest, most incredible-feeling toys ever . I bought this rabbit, which has remained hidden under the bed with a green pen and various other bits and pieces, and I promised myself that the bunny (called Lola) would get used. And she will, when the babies come. I also promised myself that I would get this one to accompany Lola so that there will be one for each baby. I haven't bought the toy yet but I will, when I feel confident. Each baby will have one. And maybe it's something that will mean something only to me, I don't know, but it feels important to me.

Angus, for his part, has been looking at Angus-like things for the babies. He's figured out how he's going to do the lighting for the nursery. And he's ordered an IP tilt and pan webcam that will go on the babies wall above their crib, so that family members can log in via a very secure, heavily protected site and can see the babies whenever they want.

We have different ways of acceptance.

Yesterday Angus was on Skype to Jill, and he called me as she wanted to see my stomach. I agreed to show it on the webcam on the proviso that no fat jokes were made (you'd be shocked how many fat jokes I get, it really wears me out). She agreed and so I went on camera. Angus smiled and showed me, and he put his hands out and held my stomach. "It's really firm and very neat and tidy, isn't it?" he asked, holding my very round stomach. He was smiling. I'm not a big one for having people touch my stomach, but it's one of the first times he's voluntarily touched my bump since it appeared.

Sitting here in front of millions of lit-up pixels, I cannot tell you how absolutely amazing it felt to have him touch me like that. It made something inside of me glow, and I've been holding the glow all night now. Maybe I'm not as tightly bound inside as I thought I was.

I wouldn't say that we've become completely one with the idea of being parents to two babies, it's not cigars in the waiting room and me prancing around showing off my stomach to all and sundry, he hasn't "come around" and I'm not composing an iterative list of baby names in my head. But maybe we have small things we want for the babies, and those small things may become big things in time, and for now we talk about how to handle things when they arrive and that, for us, is the biggest step yet.


Still Working Towards Acceptance.

-H.

Posted by: Everydaystranger at 09:13 AM | Comments (23) | Add Comment
Post contains 1834 words, total size 11 kb.

August 02, 2007

Ordinary Life

Life for me is not all grand, exciting trips around the Scottish Hebrides, black tie dinners, and dramatic hospital recoveries. The black tie dinners have dried up now that I'm on much less prestigious projects - but less prestigious means far less stress and less having to work 6 days a week for 16 hours a day, and that was a change I embrace whole-heartedly. The hospital recovery had damn well better be a one-off. And although we do get to have trips around the Hebrides which I am hideously grateful for, we're now settled in for a summer of being at home.

My life really is generally about the day-to-day logistics-daily life, making dinner, serving my function in life as She Who Must Throw the Gorby Squeaky Toy Because It's a Game He Never Tires Of, and working. Work in itself is ok-my new projects are a bit busy but not stupid busy. I should work harder than I have been in the past few weeks (my colleague called me yesterday asking if I'd completed my technical requirements document. The truth is, I haven't even written the damn thing. I told him it needed proof-reading and I'd send it to him later today. My lie has bought me time enough to whip something up, which doesn't explain why I'm drinking cranberry juice and writing this blog post instead of writing my requirements doc.)

I really tend to lead a pretty normal, day-to-day life. I've been taking a lot of baths as they help ease my aches. My growing stomach doesn't go underwater anymore, not in any way, shape or form. I know how Dolly Parton must feel now when she floats on her back. I light up some vanilla incense. which always makes Angus comment about our 190's love child flower power pad and we resort to calling the bathroom "Helen's Opium Den" for a short while, and if Angus is upstairs, as he has been lately while he rebuilds one of our three computers, then we talk back and forth. I always read a book in the bath, and sometimes chat about it with Angus.

"Hey! Wanna hear a vegetarian joke?" I call from the bathtub, having just read a joke in the book I'm reading.

"Is there such a thing?" he replies.

"Yeah! OK, so here it is! How many vegetarians does it take to screw in a lightbulb?" I call.

"UmmmÂ…two. One to screw it in and the other to talk about their feelings?"

I pause, then bust out laughing. "No, actually, that's not it. Your answer was funnier. The answer is: 'I don't know, but where do you get your protein?'"

Silence.

Crickets.

Then from him: "Lightbulbs are a very serious matter, you know. Nothing to be joked about."

See? Ordinary life. Ordinary life includes getting the house extension going (more on that later, I'm sure you're hanging on with bated breath). It includes drying out from the never-ending rain that has been called our summer. Although we live 30 minutes from some of the flood areas we're on a slightly higher elevation and are nowhere near any water. Because of this we didn't get any flooding at our house but in one corner of the living room we have some hearty water damage as our poor little gutters just couldn't take the onslaught of water. Luckily that will be dealt with in the extension.

Two big logistical issues I'm dealing with are the aforementioned house plans, and my visa extension.

My work visa (an HSMP visa) expires in February, but since we're not going to be travelling for some months now it's a good time to send in my application. That, and I confess-the situation gets more difficult once I have dependants. As I don't currently have dependants, my case is cut and dried, so it's a good time to get it done.

Only wouldn't you know it-the government changed the rules last year (because I'm an immigrant, and as we all know, immigrants are BAD. We're a drain on society. We serve no purpose, even ones like me who are unfortunately in the UK's highest tax bracket, which makes me shudder because seriously-I'm no JK Rowling here. I'm definitely not earning money hand over fist.) Where I should now have something called Unlimited Leave to Remain in March 2008 (also known as permanent residency), I new get the pleasure of having to extend my visa for one more year, meaning I have a 17 page form to fill out (new this year), I have a host of documents to send in (new this year) and I get to pay £350 (also new this year, up from the £100 I paid before.) Plus I have to prove that I speak English, either in the form of sending in proof that I went to a school taught in English or I have to sit an English exam. Angus is keen that I sit the exam, as he says it will waste the government's time and money and he would like nothing more than getting his own back at them, but I'm keen to just get the process done.

So I've printed out the 17 page visa extension application with an eye to getting it off in the post tomorrow, as I have to get some passport sized photos of me to include in the application. I'm a little nervous, mostly because anything this serious makes me nervous, but not overwhelmngly so-I did a quick tally of the points and I qualified again under the HSMP details. It's demoralizing though-I was hoping to finally get to be a human being but really, I'm just an amalgamation of points.

The whole thing is very, very tiring and intrusive. I also have to send in my passport and be without it while my application is being considered, and I know it doesn't seem like a big deal, but my passport has been a major factor in my life for the past 9 years. It's stupid - and I swear I'm not being pretentious here - but I feel naked without it. I'm a foreigner here, and that blue embossed passport is one of my anchors to who I am and where I can go. The questions on the form are detailed and need back-up evidence everywhere you turn. An example of some of the questions:

Name: Helen Adelaide

Age: 33, but I'm told I'm a youthful 33.

Do you own your home: Not yet. You making me an offer here?

Are you employed: Yes. And Satan has not yet come to collect my soul on that count.

Please describe your educational background: I got me some learning. I went to school. I mostly remember my college years no less, and we're talking a haze of estrogen-related rage here, people. OK, so the degree is in anthropology and French. You never specified it had to be a useful degree, not at all.

Do you have any dependants: I have the world's dumbest but most lovable dog and the Angriest Cat Known to Man. Also, Angus is very dependant on me. He can never find his reading glasses, if you get rid of me he'll die in the confines of the hallway, never having found his glasses so unable to read if the lock says "Locked" or "Unlocked". And he's a British citizen! Do you want to contribute to a loss of one of the Queen's own? Huh? DO YOU?

What color is your wee: Not applicable.

Have you ever been convicted of genocide: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

This is serious!: Sorry, I wasn't making light, I just couldn't believe you have that on the form. What, did Milosevic try to get in the country a lot to work as an accountant or something? But no. No I haven't been convicted. Or even tried genocide, actually. But there are a few anthills I knocked out in the front garden, I'm pretty sure that the Antz population are up in arms. Does that count?

Do you fantasize about being in a Harry Potter novel: No, but I confess I nearly fantastized about Harry Potter once I saw those Equus posters, but then I remembered how old he was.

Please submit evidence of financial activity in the UK, such as official bank statements: Actually, most banks (including mine) do online statements, which I choose as I want to save the environment. What, am I going to be penalized because I'm a tree hugger? Is that it? Save the planet, save the world! Wanna' hear a vegetarian joke?

-H.

PS-Some folks have been kindly asking about a wishlist. It's proven to be a logistical nightmare too, so I've simply updated my own wishlist at the top of my webpage, and I think it should be working ok. I am not trying to pimp myself here, honest (although I can be bought. These days all it takes is some Fig Newtons and I'm your girl.)

Posted by: Everydaystranger at 09:25 AM | Comments (10) | Add Comment
Post contains 1502 words, total size 8 kb.

August 01, 2007

The End

OK, this is the non-spoiler part. This part, above the jump. So no spoilers here, promise.

Melissa and I bought our copies of Harry Potter at the world's tiniest bookshop on the Isle of Mull. Truthfully, we hadn't expected to be able to buy them until we made our way out of the Hebrides, but lo and behold opposite the Isle of Iona there is a tiny bookshop. Said bookshop had Harry Potter-they had, in fact, opened at midnight the night before to sell it, and we got stamped verification of the book number we bought (I got book #55 from Fingal Arts and Crafts, Fionnphort. I think that's kinda' cool.)

Melissa started reading immediately but due to the fact that I am a grown-up who gets carsick I had to wait until the evenings. That night Melissa and I read our books and Jeff watched Star Wars movies on DVD. Angus declared us very boring indeed.

Melissa and I agreed from the start-we would not discuss the book until we'd both finished, neither of us would indicate where we were in the book or what was going on, and neither of us would discuss details until done. Angus had other ideas-bored off his rocker with us he'd grill us about the book, despite being one of the "I Can't Stand Harry Potter Club". So Melissa and I got sneaky.

We made shit up.

"What's just happened?" Angus would ask Melissa in the rearview mirror.

"Hermione's turned into a giant!" she said excitedly (relax-this is not a spoiler. This is the stuff we made up to throw Angus.)

"I haven't gotten to that part yet!" I'd reply.

"What part are you at?"

"Harry is teaching Ron and Hagrid Mermish!" I'd lie.

"Mermish? What the hell is that?" Angus would ask.

"Mermaid language," I'd explain.

"Oooh, very complicated," Melissa would intone.

"Isn't the book getting far-fetched now?" Angus would ask, confused.

We did this a lot. Throughout our lies, the following happened: Hermione died, Dumbledore died ("Didn't he die in the last one?" Angus asked. "No, Daddy, he died, was resurrected, then died again," Melissa explained), Hogwarts burnt to the ground, and Ron became a merman (or merperson. Whichever.) It was a fun game.

But then came the point where we both finished the book, and Melissa took it apart piece by piece (actually past the point of interesting in some ways but when you're 15, in a car, and in love with Harry Potter, I think there is no such thing as too much Harry Potter discussion). Which we can do here, below the jump-I have yet to see a site where people are discussing the book, so we can do it here if you'd like as I've read it and Angus (who also reads my blog and comments) could care less about the book.

So warning-don't click on the link "Want more?" if you do not want to know about the book. This also applies to the comments-comments will open up the extended entry. So I am warning you-below are spoilers. Click at your own risk*.

Seriously.

Don't click on the below if you haven't finished the book, as I go into some detail.

*This level of warning means I am free and clear, I have indemnity (at least in the state of Maryland).
more...

Posted by: Everydaystranger at 09:55 AM | Comments (18) | Add Comment
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