We are here for a routine visit in a life that has become unroutine by most anyone’s definition. I am in the planning stage for my second six-week course of radiation for a tumor that I was once assured was nothing. It is now the nothing that will kill me someday and so we continue these huge treatments that are no longer huge to us.
I sit, fully clothed, on the exam table, the white paper crackling beneath me. My back is straight, my hands folded daintily in my lap but not because this is my way. Rather it is because I always imagine hidden cameras in these rooms and somewhere in the clinic a wall of monitors and groups of doctors and nurses laughing at patients picking their noses or rummaging through drawers and cabinets full of medical supplies. Sure, this is unlikely given the magnitude of their work here, but sill, I figure it can’t hurt to behave myself.
The doctor comes in unexpectedly and I know in an instant the news is not good. The MRI shows a mass on the back of the forebrain, he says. It is inoperable and now fills a space in my brain where cerebral spinal fluid once washed through unimpeded. They will do something called Gamma Knife Radiosurgery he tells me. Hundreds of separate beams of radiation will be directed into my head where they will intersect at the tumor, killing it. The remnants of this atrophied growth will then liquefy and be reabsorbed. The best case scenario will be an empty black spot that will forever show itself on the MRI like a pair of bunny ears placed over my head by some childhood peer in a class photo.
I sit, alone, on the edge of an exam table at the university hospital in the town of my birth. My husband and children sit out in the waiting room talking, laughing, oblivious to the fact that this appointment that was supposed to be about nothing has rapidly turned into something.
I am 35. I am sick, I am tired, and I am home. And yet, not home.
There are no barricades at the edge of town, no uniformed officers with waving arms signaling no entrance, but just the same, you can’t go home again.
I grew up here and driving back twenty years after having moved away the blue of the mid-summer sky is almost choked from view by crisscrossing tree branches. The town appears overgrown and slightly wild as if an abandoned farmstead instead of a vibrant college town. The twenty years of tree growth makes the town seem smaller somehow, more closed in, as if I have grown a great deal since I left even though, if anything, I feel smaller, worn down a little by life.
This lushness of this river town surprises me in the way that seeing a picture of my childhood home the year my parents bought it surprised me. In the photograph the trees I would climb in the yard are little more than saplings. This idea, that something exists without me, whether before me or in my absence, still gives me pause.
Sitting on the edge of the table, unclear about how much I might be about to lose, I am taken back to the time when I called this town home because when I lived here I lost everything and I’m not sure that I can do that again. I was seventeen when my widowed mother died and my family fell away from me as if my aloneness was something they couldn’t bother to fix and couldn’t bear to witness. The losses weighed heavily and the newness of them was sharp and ragged. I moved away from here then without the trappings of childhood but not at all as an adult. But even still, home has always emitted a siren song, seductive but painful. Come back, it says, there is something for you here. It turns out what is here for me now is the best hospital in the state.
But I can’t go back, barricade or not, because home isn’t here. It isn’t anywhere. While, like the river, so much of it looks the same it is not. Things have been carried away with the current to some far off, distant place. Things we can never get back. The things that remain are changed too: covered in layers of sediment or worn down by the passage to time and water over them. The once sharp edges of loss smoothed by that rush of water, the ache dulled by the joys of marriage and children.
The doctors work long and hard. There are tests and more tests. There is planning and counseling. There is medication given to take the edge off of the day that will include, among other things, four screws being attached to my skull and high-dose beams of radiation that will, if all goes well, kill the tumor.
Friday, March 12, 2010
Friday, June 19, 2009
The published article!
Adopted at 17
What's the most loving memory you have of your dad? For Katie Simonson, orphaned at 17, it was the moment Mike Fieseler took her in and became the new father she so desperately needed.
By Kate Simonson with Meghan Daum
(REAL SIMPLE) -- The summers of my youth were filled with the kinds of activities that were common to every kid in the 80s but are considered almost death-defying these days: tree climbing, bike riding without a helmet, and daylong road trips spent in the backseat of the family car, where we bounced around like Super Balls, nary a seat belt in sight.
Still, my mother was safety-obsessed about some things, like swimming lessons. Year after year, she forced me to take them at our local pool in Iowa City. Having to go against my will seemed all the more unfair to me, since my mother could not swim and was actually afraid of the water.
But my mother reasoned that if water came between her children and their safety, she would be helpless.
"I can't save you," she would calmly state in answer to my pleas to bow out of the lessons. "So I'm going to do everything in my power to make sure you can save yourself."
It's no wonder she embraced this philosophy of self-reliance. She knew how unexpectedly life can rob you of someone you care about. My parents adopted me as an infant and went on to have a biological child -- my brother, Jason -- a couple of years later.
My dad was an electrician, and he died in an accident on the job when I was three. After his death, my mother had to raise us alone, and she was acutely aware that she was truly on her own, with no backup plan. She was fiercely strong and yet constantly fearful.
I have almost no memories of my father. Instead I remember Mike Fieseler. He was a former industrial-arts teacher whom my mother dated off and on for much of my childhood. Jason and I weren't his biggest fans. He was a man of strict rules, while my mom's approach could be more properly deemed overindulgent leniency.
We resented having to share the spotlight with him -- a sentiment that was particularly strong every Christmas morning, when we had to wait for him to arrive before we could open gifts. (There is little a man can do to endear himself to children less than delaying Christmas-morning gratification.) And when they stopped dating, when I was 15, I wasn't unhappy to see him go.
Then, on February 18, 1991, when I was 17, my mother suddenly died of a brain aneurysm. One minute she was laughing with friends, enjoying an evening out; the next, she was unconscious on the floor. She never woke up. Just 19 hours later, she was dead, leaving my 15-year-old brother and me orphans.
In the moments of shock and horror that followed, my relatives all gathered in the hospital, and I went home with only a close friend for company (Jason followed a while later). We spent that night on our own. I was numb; it had all happened so fast. I could barely think beyond the immediate moment.
The next morning, my grandfather, aunts, and uncles were still immersed in their own mourning. Shell-shocked as I was, I knew I had to let people know what had happened. I saw my mother's address book lying where she had set it only days before and started dialing. One of the phone numbers I found was Mike's.
Even though he lived about an hour away, it felt like he was there in an instant. As soon as he walked in, he took charge -- and took care of Jason and me. Among other small kindnesses, he gave me a credit card and said, "Why don't you buy something to wear to the funeral?" He gave me permission to be a 17-year-old -- to focus on the more mundane issue of what I was going to wear instead of weighty adult concerns.
Generally, when children are orphaned, a family member comes forward to take them in. This didn't happen in our case. Everyone had a good reason, I suppose. My mom's father was too old to assume responsibility for us; my mother's sister and her husband had three kids of their own and weren't able to take in any others; her other two siblings were both single and worked long hours. The guardian named in my mother's will was a babysitter that none of us had seen in 15 years.
But I can tell you this: Abandonment, even for very good reasons, feels awful. It was heartbreaking and terrifying to have lost the person we loved most and then to be set adrift.
Months passed and it felt like our relatives could offer no reassurances. The only news we got was that if Jason and I remained without a guardian, we would have to enter foster care. Our mother was gone, and there was nothing we could do to save ourselves.
And, once again, there was Mike. After the funeral, he was a constant presence. He made sure that food filled the cupboards, the bills were paid, and the lawn was mowed. (Mike's adult daughter, Linda, pitched in and took care of his house.) He made sure I went back to school even when it was the last thing I wanted to do. His overbearing personality -- the trait I had hated the most -- is what comforted me the most and got me through those difficult days.
Mike says that Linda came up with the idea to make his role with Jason and me official -- he could become our guardian. He was on board right away. Mike still says he never considered not doing it; caring for us was simply the right thing to do. One day he made us his offer. In a moment where the grief of loss and the pain of being unwanted threatened to capture my very breath, this man, whose only tie to us was having dated my mother, said he would be honored to take us in.
From that moment on, everything was different. His girlfriend, Patty, threw us a "guardian party" when the paperwork became official. It was just a small gathering, but it made us feel special. I received a key chain with my initials, and I remember thinking that the idea behind it was so lovely.
Over the years, Mike has become not merely a legal guardian but a real father to me. When I fell into depression in college, unable to get past thoughts of my mother and all I had lost, he was there to listen.
When my husband, Eric, and I bought our first house, Mike spent weekends installing insulation and repairing our gutters. He never wrote me off as a good, mature kid who could handle everything herself. He walked the line between trusting me and recognizing when I might need help. And what more could you want from a father than that?
His was an unconventional path to parenthood, to say the least. It is not by birth or adoption that I consider this man to be my father; it isn't even through his presence in my childhood. It is rather by sheer good luck on my part.
Before he made that generous offer, I felt as though I had lost my mooring and the waters were flooding in; afterward, I simply felt rescued. If my mother had taught me to be strong and depend on myself, Mike imparted his own lesson -- that the world will provide for you, even when you least expect it.
Eight years after Mike stepped forward, he walked me down the aisle. Four years after that, I gave birth to his first granddaughter, Emily Michl Simonson. (Mike's legal name is Michl.) The name is a reminder of my saved past and a promise for the future, and I hope one day Emily will see that as well. Because as much as I plan to teach her to swim (indeed, she's now six and enrolled in lessons), I also want her to know this: No matter how fast the waters rise, no matter how hard it may be to keep her head above the waves, someone will throw her a line.
What's the most loving memory you have of your dad? For Katie Simonson, orphaned at 17, it was the moment Mike Fieseler took her in and became the new father she so desperately needed.
By Kate Simonson with Meghan Daum
(REAL SIMPLE) -- The summers of my youth were filled with the kinds of activities that were common to every kid in the 80s but are considered almost death-defying these days: tree climbing, bike riding without a helmet, and daylong road trips spent in the backseat of the family car, where we bounced around like Super Balls, nary a seat belt in sight.
Still, my mother was safety-obsessed about some things, like swimming lessons. Year after year, she forced me to take them at our local pool in Iowa City. Having to go against my will seemed all the more unfair to me, since my mother could not swim and was actually afraid of the water.
But my mother reasoned that if water came between her children and their safety, she would be helpless.
"I can't save you," she would calmly state in answer to my pleas to bow out of the lessons. "So I'm going to do everything in my power to make sure you can save yourself."
It's no wonder she embraced this philosophy of self-reliance. She knew how unexpectedly life can rob you of someone you care about. My parents adopted me as an infant and went on to have a biological child -- my brother, Jason -- a couple of years later.
My dad was an electrician, and he died in an accident on the job when I was three. After his death, my mother had to raise us alone, and she was acutely aware that she was truly on her own, with no backup plan. She was fiercely strong and yet constantly fearful.
I have almost no memories of my father. Instead I remember Mike Fieseler. He was a former industrial-arts teacher whom my mother dated off and on for much of my childhood. Jason and I weren't his biggest fans. He was a man of strict rules, while my mom's approach could be more properly deemed overindulgent leniency.
We resented having to share the spotlight with him -- a sentiment that was particularly strong every Christmas morning, when we had to wait for him to arrive before we could open gifts. (There is little a man can do to endear himself to children less than delaying Christmas-morning gratification.) And when they stopped dating, when I was 15, I wasn't unhappy to see him go.
Then, on February 18, 1991, when I was 17, my mother suddenly died of a brain aneurysm. One minute she was laughing with friends, enjoying an evening out; the next, she was unconscious on the floor. She never woke up. Just 19 hours later, she was dead, leaving my 15-year-old brother and me orphans.
In the moments of shock and horror that followed, my relatives all gathered in the hospital, and I went home with only a close friend for company (Jason followed a while later). We spent that night on our own. I was numb; it had all happened so fast. I could barely think beyond the immediate moment.
The next morning, my grandfather, aunts, and uncles were still immersed in their own mourning. Shell-shocked as I was, I knew I had to let people know what had happened. I saw my mother's address book lying where she had set it only days before and started dialing. One of the phone numbers I found was Mike's.
Even though he lived about an hour away, it felt like he was there in an instant. As soon as he walked in, he took charge -- and took care of Jason and me. Among other small kindnesses, he gave me a credit card and said, "Why don't you buy something to wear to the funeral?" He gave me permission to be a 17-year-old -- to focus on the more mundane issue of what I was going to wear instead of weighty adult concerns.
Generally, when children are orphaned, a family member comes forward to take them in. This didn't happen in our case. Everyone had a good reason, I suppose. My mom's father was too old to assume responsibility for us; my mother's sister and her husband had three kids of their own and weren't able to take in any others; her other two siblings were both single and worked long hours. The guardian named in my mother's will was a babysitter that none of us had seen in 15 years.
But I can tell you this: Abandonment, even for very good reasons, feels awful. It was heartbreaking and terrifying to have lost the person we loved most and then to be set adrift.
Months passed and it felt like our relatives could offer no reassurances. The only news we got was that if Jason and I remained without a guardian, we would have to enter foster care. Our mother was gone, and there was nothing we could do to save ourselves.
And, once again, there was Mike. After the funeral, he was a constant presence. He made sure that food filled the cupboards, the bills were paid, and the lawn was mowed. (Mike's adult daughter, Linda, pitched in and took care of his house.) He made sure I went back to school even when it was the last thing I wanted to do. His overbearing personality -- the trait I had hated the most -- is what comforted me the most and got me through those difficult days.
Mike says that Linda came up with the idea to make his role with Jason and me official -- he could become our guardian. He was on board right away. Mike still says he never considered not doing it; caring for us was simply the right thing to do. One day he made us his offer. In a moment where the grief of loss and the pain of being unwanted threatened to capture my very breath, this man, whose only tie to us was having dated my mother, said he would be honored to take us in.
From that moment on, everything was different. His girlfriend, Patty, threw us a "guardian party" when the paperwork became official. It was just a small gathering, but it made us feel special. I received a key chain with my initials, and I remember thinking that the idea behind it was so lovely.
Over the years, Mike has become not merely a legal guardian but a real father to me. When I fell into depression in college, unable to get past thoughts of my mother and all I had lost, he was there to listen.
When my husband, Eric, and I bought our first house, Mike spent weekends installing insulation and repairing our gutters. He never wrote me off as a good, mature kid who could handle everything herself. He walked the line between trusting me and recognizing when I might need help. And what more could you want from a father than that?
His was an unconventional path to parenthood, to say the least. It is not by birth or adoption that I consider this man to be my father; it isn't even through his presence in my childhood. It is rather by sheer good luck on my part.
Before he made that generous offer, I felt as though I had lost my mooring and the waters were flooding in; afterward, I simply felt rescued. If my mother had taught me to be strong and depend on myself, Mike imparted his own lesson -- that the world will provide for you, even when you least expect it.
Eight years after Mike stepped forward, he walked me down the aisle. Four years after that, I gave birth to his first granddaughter, Emily Michl Simonson. (Mike's legal name is Michl.) The name is a reminder of my saved past and a promise for the future, and I hope one day Emily will see that as well. Because as much as I plan to teach her to swim (indeed, she's now six and enrolled in lessons), I also want her to know this: No matter how fast the waters rise, no matter how hard it may be to keep her head above the waves, someone will throw her a line.
Here are the links: Real Simple: http://www.realsimple.com/work-life/life-strategies/inspiration-motivation/adopted-at-17-00000000016015/index.html
CNN.com: http://www.cnn.com/2009/LIVING/personal/06/19/rs.mom.died.boyfriend.adopts/index.html?iref=hpmostpop
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Big news, good and bad....
It was the best of times and the worst of times... has someone already used that?
In any case, the best of times: THE ARTICLE IS OUT! If you are so inclined pick up the July issue of Real Simple and on page 162 you will find my first article in a national magazine! Plus big, full-color photos of me and the family too.
The worst of times: Clearly a blog is not the place to do this but I can't call everyone so here goes for those who don't already know. Last Wednesday I got the results of my latest MRI and, while the tumors on my spinal cord don't seem to have grown or multiplied since last fall, they did find a brain tumor. It is in the center of my brain and therefore surgery is not an option. I will have Gamma Knife Radiosurgery the first week of July. I am mostly okay and I am hopeful that everything will turn out alright. I’m not really sure what else to say but if you have any questions feel free to ask.
Thank you to everyone who has sent me their wishes and prayers. It means the world to me that I have such wonderful friends and such a caring community!
In any case, the best of times: THE ARTICLE IS OUT! If you are so inclined pick up the July issue of Real Simple and on page 162 you will find my first article in a national magazine! Plus big, full-color photos of me and the family too.
The worst of times: Clearly a blog is not the place to do this but I can't call everyone so here goes for those who don't already know. Last Wednesday I got the results of my latest MRI and, while the tumors on my spinal cord don't seem to have grown or multiplied since last fall, they did find a brain tumor. It is in the center of my brain and therefore surgery is not an option. I will have Gamma Knife Radiosurgery the first week of July. I am mostly okay and I am hopeful that everything will turn out alright. I’m not really sure what else to say but if you have any questions feel free to ask.
Thank you to everyone who has sent me their wishes and prayers. It means the world to me that I have such wonderful friends and such a caring community!
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
A personal ad for Eric
I have noticed a husband-bashing backlash lately and it’s not sitting well with me. If I have to hear one more woman tell me that they are blissfully happy with their husbands I think that I might throw up. I mean really, is that what everyone else’s marriages are like? If not I think that we are doing a disservice to just-getting-by wives out there by pretending. Or maybe what I need to do is take a personal ad out on behalf of my husband. Something along the lines of:
MWM seeking WF 35-45. Me: Smart, kind, hard-working, long-suffering. You: Drug and disease free, able to live without piling all belongings on every available horizontal surface in house, also without homicidal thoughts when I mention unwashed dishes. James Taylor fans need not apply.
The first time I saw Eric I was a seventeen-year-old waitress in a dumpy Country Kitchen restaurant in a college town and he was a twenty-five-year-old going-to-be philosophy grad student. He was the high school friend of the boyfriend of a woman that I worked there with.
For weeks before Eric’s arrival in town the other waitress had been telling me that she was dying to have a threesome with her boyfriend and another of their friends, a man I will call Henry. Now it would not be much of a stretch to say that I was significantly more naive than kids seem to be today and the very idea that someone was telling me that they were fantasizing about having sex with two people at the same time was almost more than my sweet little ears could bear to hear. Let me just say that I am over that now... I even have basic cable, so you can just imagine the things I have seen by now.
Anyway, one day the three men came in and sat down with Eric and Henry on one side of the booth facing our waitress station and the boyfriend on the other side, facing away from us. The other waitress came up to me and pointed the table out. “There they are,” she said. “That’s Henry.” She motioned to the two people at the table I hadn’t met before.
I am not kidding when I tell you that my breath literally caught in my chest as I looked up at the men at the table. “Oh,” I said, “I can see why you are so attracted to him. He is the most beautiful man I have ever seen.”
The other waitress looked at me with eyes rolling, sighed and said, “Not him. That’s Eric. Henry is the other one.”
Now, while I find this a sweet story about the first meeting I had the man who would later become my husband and the father of my three children, Henry, who is still a close friend, isn’t a big fan of the story since, as he points out, the other waitress didn’t ask which man I was talking about, she just assumed (correctly) that I was swooning over Eric. I would like to take this opportunity to say that Henry is a wonderful man as well. He is kind and attractive and I don’t really have any reason to believe that he screens my phone calls despite my penchant for talking on and on, which also makes him a good, if not all that bright, friend.
That said, I was thinking of this story today because I was reminded of a funny analogy that I had once seen in a movie. In it one of the characters said that she always pictured marriage like a stick that both people are holding on to. Sometimes, she said, your hands are close enough together that you can look into each other’s eyes, but sometimes you are so far apart that you can hardly see each other, but still, you are both always holding on. If that analogy were Eric and me, I would have to say that each of our ends of the stick are in different states at the moment. I am just so deep in the work and angst of motherhood that I am perfectly useless to him right now. Perhaps worse than that is the fact that I am too tired to care much about my uselessness.
From a distance it seems that I have every reason to be one of those women that waxes on. I mean if I made a pro/con list about Eric the pro side would fill pages and pages. For example:
1. He is a great dad. I mean he has seemingly endless patience for wrestling and lifting giggling kids and outside play that I have no interest it. He never gives you the feeling that he would rather be doing something less “girly” when playing with the girls.
2. He has taken a job making much less than he could get in the private sector in order to do the kind of work he believes is valuable. And there isn’t a day that goes by that he isn’t giving his all to that job.
3. He actually gets notes from victims whose assailants he has prosecuted telling him that he is a hero. Seriously, he is an actual hero to people.
And the list would go on and on and on like that.
And you know what? The con list would be about one item long, but it would be in all capital letters:
1. THAT FACE HE MAKES WHEN HE COMES HOME FROM WORK AND SEES THAT THE DINNER/ DISHES/ LAUNDRY ISN’T DONE.
He may be the most beautiful man I have ever seen (and honestly my breath still catches when I see him out somewhere unexpectedly), and he may be someone’s hero but it is all I can do to not kill him in his sleep when he says a word to me about the house or the ever growing pile of magazines I keep meaning to read but instead insist on keeping on the floor by the couch. I am not saying that he doesn’t have a valid point, anyone that has been to our house knows that without Eric I would become Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout… but still.
I am happy, don’t get me wrong, but not blissfully so. I can’t be the only wife out there who feels that this time in our lives feels more like slogging through with a comrade-in-arms rather than dancing along with my soul mate. I think that he would agree.
Maybe it’s the fact that the balance of power is totally thrown off when one of you does a highly respected job and the other one cooks, cleans, and plays endless rounds of “I Spy” in clinic waiting rooms. Maybe it’s that as a nursing, co-sleeping mom my body isn’t mine and hasn’t been for years.
But the good news is that neither of us is going anywhere-- no personal ads have been placed. After all, that threesome didn’t seem like a good idea then and seems like an even worse idea now. I think we’ll stick it out with each other and our basic cable.
MWM seeking WF 35-45. Me: Smart, kind, hard-working, long-suffering. You: Drug and disease free, able to live without piling all belongings on every available horizontal surface in house, also without homicidal thoughts when I mention unwashed dishes. James Taylor fans need not apply.
The first time I saw Eric I was a seventeen-year-old waitress in a dumpy Country Kitchen restaurant in a college town and he was a twenty-five-year-old going-to-be philosophy grad student. He was the high school friend of the boyfriend of a woman that I worked there with.
For weeks before Eric’s arrival in town the other waitress had been telling me that she was dying to have a threesome with her boyfriend and another of their friends, a man I will call Henry. Now it would not be much of a stretch to say that I was significantly more naive than kids seem to be today and the very idea that someone was telling me that they were fantasizing about having sex with two people at the same time was almost more than my sweet little ears could bear to hear. Let me just say that I am over that now... I even have basic cable, so you can just imagine the things I have seen by now.
Anyway, one day the three men came in and sat down with Eric and Henry on one side of the booth facing our waitress station and the boyfriend on the other side, facing away from us. The other waitress came up to me and pointed the table out. “There they are,” she said. “That’s Henry.” She motioned to the two people at the table I hadn’t met before.
I am not kidding when I tell you that my breath literally caught in my chest as I looked up at the men at the table. “Oh,” I said, “I can see why you are so attracted to him. He is the most beautiful man I have ever seen.”
The other waitress looked at me with eyes rolling, sighed and said, “Not him. That’s Eric. Henry is the other one.”
Now, while I find this a sweet story about the first meeting I had the man who would later become my husband and the father of my three children, Henry, who is still a close friend, isn’t a big fan of the story since, as he points out, the other waitress didn’t ask which man I was talking about, she just assumed (correctly) that I was swooning over Eric. I would like to take this opportunity to say that Henry is a wonderful man as well. He is kind and attractive and I don’t really have any reason to believe that he screens my phone calls despite my penchant for talking on and on, which also makes him a good, if not all that bright, friend.
That said, I was thinking of this story today because I was reminded of a funny analogy that I had once seen in a movie. In it one of the characters said that she always pictured marriage like a stick that both people are holding on to. Sometimes, she said, your hands are close enough together that you can look into each other’s eyes, but sometimes you are so far apart that you can hardly see each other, but still, you are both always holding on. If that analogy were Eric and me, I would have to say that each of our ends of the stick are in different states at the moment. I am just so deep in the work and angst of motherhood that I am perfectly useless to him right now. Perhaps worse than that is the fact that I am too tired to care much about my uselessness.
From a distance it seems that I have every reason to be one of those women that waxes on. I mean if I made a pro/con list about Eric the pro side would fill pages and pages. For example:
1. He is a great dad. I mean he has seemingly endless patience for wrestling and lifting giggling kids and outside play that I have no interest it. He never gives you the feeling that he would rather be doing something less “girly” when playing with the girls.
2. He has taken a job making much less than he could get in the private sector in order to do the kind of work he believes is valuable. And there isn’t a day that goes by that he isn’t giving his all to that job.
3. He actually gets notes from victims whose assailants he has prosecuted telling him that he is a hero. Seriously, he is an actual hero to people.
And the list would go on and on and on like that.
And you know what? The con list would be about one item long, but it would be in all capital letters:
1. THAT FACE HE MAKES WHEN HE COMES HOME FROM WORK AND SEES THAT THE DINNER/ DISHES/ LAUNDRY ISN’T DONE.
He may be the most beautiful man I have ever seen (and honestly my breath still catches when I see him out somewhere unexpectedly), and he may be someone’s hero but it is all I can do to not kill him in his sleep when he says a word to me about the house or the ever growing pile of magazines I keep meaning to read but instead insist on keeping on the floor by the couch. I am not saying that he doesn’t have a valid point, anyone that has been to our house knows that without Eric I would become Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout… but still.
I am happy, don’t get me wrong, but not blissfully so. I can’t be the only wife out there who feels that this time in our lives feels more like slogging through with a comrade-in-arms rather than dancing along with my soul mate. I think that he would agree.
Maybe it’s the fact that the balance of power is totally thrown off when one of you does a highly respected job and the other one cooks, cleans, and plays endless rounds of “I Spy” in clinic waiting rooms. Maybe it’s that as a nursing, co-sleeping mom my body isn’t mine and hasn’t been for years.
But the good news is that neither of us is going anywhere-- no personal ads have been placed. After all, that threesome didn’t seem like a good idea then and seems like an even worse idea now. I think we’ll stick it out with each other and our basic cable.
Sunday, November 11, 2007
Turns out the kids are drunks
Last week the kids and I tagged along with Eric while he was out of town at a County Attorney’s conference. In our family this is what passes for a vacation. In fact, the girls have never been on a “vacation” that didn’t involve Eric being gone during the day for training and the attendance of the state Attorney General.
Anyway, while out to dinner one night with Eric’s assistant, a woman in her 20’s who is expecting her first child in the spring, Eric and I tried to pass along the thimble full of knowledge that these five years of parenting have taught us.
In our defense, when we issued the invitation we warned her that it was too late for her, that she was already pregnant, had announced it to the world, and maybe she would like to stay home instead of eat out with us. After all, she was bound to see things at dinner with our two girls (who had been stuck in a hotel room for four days) that would make her rethink her decision to bring a child into her life. She laughed (fool!) and bravely ventured out with us, her only comfort the lie that every scared pregnant woman tells herself when faced with other people’s children, “Well, my kids won’t be like that.”
Yeah, mine either.
At dinner Eric told her something that, at the time, just seemed funny, but now, with a couple of days to mull it over, has become life changing to me. Eric told her that living with children was like living with a house full of drunk people: they run into things, fall over for no obvious reason, there is vomit and other bodily fluids to clean up, one minute they are laughing hysterically at nothing, the next minute they are sobbing over an imagined slight, then, another moment later they are going on and on about how much they love you.
And my god, he is right: that is what it is like to live with children! In fact, as if to punctuate his theory, Claudia ended the evening in the restaurant lobby having such diarrhea that it spilled through her pants and down Eric’s shirt (something I swear that hasn’t happened since she was an infant more than two years ago.) Who, other than drunks and children, defecate on themselves (and others) in public?
And here’s the thing, my kids are pretty good kids… but they’re still kids. They don’t start fires or shout obscenities. They almost never break things and they, more often than not, remember to say please and thank you. But, that said, even on good days they still act a lot like drunken adults. And while this isn’t the kind of knowledge that is going to change the rest of the world it has made things a little better for me. Somehow I feel less guilty that I do not blissfully love every minute of my life.
Because, honestly, there is a lot of the day that just sucks. I look at all of the people in our lives that are having trouble conceiving and I feel like I am so lucky to have been able to have two healthy children (and counting) without much trouble that I should be thankful for every moment, but it doesn’t work that way. In fact, for me even a near death experience didn’t give me that “every moment is precious” feeling for very long. But now I think: What other frat housemother loves every minute of it?
Yes, I adore my kids, but I do not adore the things that fill our day. Even if, after five years, wiping bottoms and dealing with breakdowns doesn’t faze me, they still aren’t my favorite part of the day, and I guess that’s okay because I maybe these actions are just unlovable. Maybe it’s okay to take my good fortune for granted. No infertile couple out there is going to get pregnant just because I pretended that I love every minute of this. Eric’s assistant isn’t going to buy that it’s a barrel of laughs every moment, even if I lied and told her it was.
And one day my kids will have their own kids and they will probably find parenthood a walk in the park. I can just imagine them turning to one another and marveling at just what a whiner I was. They will get no unrealistic expectations for themselves from me. Here we are just taking each day as it comes and doing the best we can.
And I guess that’s okay because, also like a bunch of drunk people, the girls are unlikely to remember much of the daily goings on here.
Anyway, while out to dinner one night with Eric’s assistant, a woman in her 20’s who is expecting her first child in the spring, Eric and I tried to pass along the thimble full of knowledge that these five years of parenting have taught us.
In our defense, when we issued the invitation we warned her that it was too late for her, that she was already pregnant, had announced it to the world, and maybe she would like to stay home instead of eat out with us. After all, she was bound to see things at dinner with our two girls (who had been stuck in a hotel room for four days) that would make her rethink her decision to bring a child into her life. She laughed (fool!) and bravely ventured out with us, her only comfort the lie that every scared pregnant woman tells herself when faced with other people’s children, “Well, my kids won’t be like that.”
Yeah, mine either.
At dinner Eric told her something that, at the time, just seemed funny, but now, with a couple of days to mull it over, has become life changing to me. Eric told her that living with children was like living with a house full of drunk people: they run into things, fall over for no obvious reason, there is vomit and other bodily fluids to clean up, one minute they are laughing hysterically at nothing, the next minute they are sobbing over an imagined slight, then, another moment later they are going on and on about how much they love you.
And my god, he is right: that is what it is like to live with children! In fact, as if to punctuate his theory, Claudia ended the evening in the restaurant lobby having such diarrhea that it spilled through her pants and down Eric’s shirt (something I swear that hasn’t happened since she was an infant more than two years ago.) Who, other than drunks and children, defecate on themselves (and others) in public?
And here’s the thing, my kids are pretty good kids… but they’re still kids. They don’t start fires or shout obscenities. They almost never break things and they, more often than not, remember to say please and thank you. But, that said, even on good days they still act a lot like drunken adults. And while this isn’t the kind of knowledge that is going to change the rest of the world it has made things a little better for me. Somehow I feel less guilty that I do not blissfully love every minute of my life.
Because, honestly, there is a lot of the day that just sucks. I look at all of the people in our lives that are having trouble conceiving and I feel like I am so lucky to have been able to have two healthy children (and counting) without much trouble that I should be thankful for every moment, but it doesn’t work that way. In fact, for me even a near death experience didn’t give me that “every moment is precious” feeling for very long. But now I think: What other frat housemother loves every minute of it?
Yes, I adore my kids, but I do not adore the things that fill our day. Even if, after five years, wiping bottoms and dealing with breakdowns doesn’t faze me, they still aren’t my favorite part of the day, and I guess that’s okay because I maybe these actions are just unlovable. Maybe it’s okay to take my good fortune for granted. No infertile couple out there is going to get pregnant just because I pretended that I love every minute of this. Eric’s assistant isn’t going to buy that it’s a barrel of laughs every moment, even if I lied and told her it was.
And one day my kids will have their own kids and they will probably find parenthood a walk in the park. I can just imagine them turning to one another and marveling at just what a whiner I was. They will get no unrealistic expectations for themselves from me. Here we are just taking each day as it comes and doing the best we can.
And I guess that’s okay because, also like a bunch of drunk people, the girls are unlikely to remember much of the daily goings on here.
Thursday, November 01, 2007
Sunday, October 28, 2007
Lost
Wednesday morning, on his way to school, a seventeen-year-old local boy was killed in a collision with a school bus.
When I was seventeen, I met and then moved in with the man that would, eight years later, become my husband. I remember feeling at the time that I was such an adult.
Of course, it is clear to me now that I was just a child, but it wasn’t until I looked at the face of that lost boy staring back at me from our local newspaper that I realized just what babies our children still are at seventeen.
Obviously, a big difference between the “me at seventeen” and the “me now” is that I have children of my own: two girls, who are running around me as I write this, and a boy that I am still carrying, but that will one day be driving himself to school, probably in this very same town. Looking at the picture I understand just what has been lost and how thin the thread that tethers our children to the Earth and to us is.
I didn’t know this family very well, in fact it is only through bumping into them around town with Eric, who had business with the family, that I knew them at all. But there is something about being so close to something so awful that has made it hard to even breathe for the last five days. In this small town the sirens of rescue vehicles are rarely heard at all, and when they are the sound carries from one end of the streets to the other. Everyone here knows immediately when something awful has happened.
All day Wednesday, after the cries of the sirens had died down, I looked at the clear blue sky and thought, “This is the day that someone lost their child. I am at the library with my children just like any other day and the world has stopped for someone else in this very town.”
While the loss of even one child is too many, this town has seen more and the losses of those children pile up in my head and in my heart. They change how I move through the world.
Every time I drive down Highway 69, just south of our little town, I feel compelled to look at the marker on the side of the road where a teenage girl lost her life this spring in a car accident.
I do the same when ever I pass the spot on I-35 where, not even two years ago, Megan and I happened by the burned out wreckage of what had been the car of a local 21-year-old and her 4-month-old baby, the empty infant car seat resting on the side of the road. Both were killed in the accident as well as the driver of the other car.
These spots are like talismans to me, like wood I am compelled to knock on to feel some psychic control over my own children’s safety. I look at the spots, I imagine the horror the families felt, and I pray that it doesn’t happen to us.
For better or worse the world will go on, like it always does. As awful as this all is, the human mind continues forward. This Wednesday the town will dress our children up and celebrate Halloween with just a week between this loss and us. Eric and I will continue to plan excitedly for the boy that will soon join our family and hold the girls close.
But today is Sunday, and two hours ago Marty Davis’ family buried their only child and these blessings of ours seem almost too much to hold.
To read a newspaper account of the accident go to:
http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=18952393&BRD=1907&PAG=461&dept_id=133418&rfi=6
When I was seventeen, I met and then moved in with the man that would, eight years later, become my husband. I remember feeling at the time that I was such an adult.
Of course, it is clear to me now that I was just a child, but it wasn’t until I looked at the face of that lost boy staring back at me from our local newspaper that I realized just what babies our children still are at seventeen.
Obviously, a big difference between the “me at seventeen” and the “me now” is that I have children of my own: two girls, who are running around me as I write this, and a boy that I am still carrying, but that will one day be driving himself to school, probably in this very same town. Looking at the picture I understand just what has been lost and how thin the thread that tethers our children to the Earth and to us is.
I didn’t know this family very well, in fact it is only through bumping into them around town with Eric, who had business with the family, that I knew them at all. But there is something about being so close to something so awful that has made it hard to even breathe for the last five days. In this small town the sirens of rescue vehicles are rarely heard at all, and when they are the sound carries from one end of the streets to the other. Everyone here knows immediately when something awful has happened.
All day Wednesday, after the cries of the sirens had died down, I looked at the clear blue sky and thought, “This is the day that someone lost their child. I am at the library with my children just like any other day and the world has stopped for someone else in this very town.”
While the loss of even one child is too many, this town has seen more and the losses of those children pile up in my head and in my heart. They change how I move through the world.
Every time I drive down Highway 69, just south of our little town, I feel compelled to look at the marker on the side of the road where a teenage girl lost her life this spring in a car accident.
I do the same when ever I pass the spot on I-35 where, not even two years ago, Megan and I happened by the burned out wreckage of what had been the car of a local 21-year-old and her 4-month-old baby, the empty infant car seat resting on the side of the road. Both were killed in the accident as well as the driver of the other car.
These spots are like talismans to me, like wood I am compelled to knock on to feel some psychic control over my own children’s safety. I look at the spots, I imagine the horror the families felt, and I pray that it doesn’t happen to us.
For better or worse the world will go on, like it always does. As awful as this all is, the human mind continues forward. This Wednesday the town will dress our children up and celebrate Halloween with just a week between this loss and us. Eric and I will continue to plan excitedly for the boy that will soon join our family and hold the girls close.
But today is Sunday, and two hours ago Marty Davis’ family buried their only child and these blessings of ours seem almost too much to hold.
To read a newspaper account of the accident go to:
http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=18952393&BRD=1907&PAG=461&dept_id=133418&rfi=6
You can be happy and vomiting at the same time, who knew?
I feel a little like I have fallen off of the face of the earth these last few months. Here’s our update.
Eric and I are thrilled to be expecting out third little bundle of joy in January (a boy, they tell us) but it has been a hard road for me this time. With Emily I had no morning sickness, with Claudia just about 12 weeks worth, and with this one it had been a virtual 27-week, non-stop vomit fest!
So much so, in fact, that I lost enough weight from the beginning that even now that the problem has subsided a little I am still not back to my starting weight, let alone carrying any “pregnancy pounds.” Not that I am complaining about that! I haven’t ever been six weeks pregnant and still in my regular jeans, let alone at 27 weeks.
I did however get a prescription for anti-nausea medication and a stern warning from my doctor that if I didn’t knock off all the vomiting, he would have no choice but to put me in the hospital. You’d think if I could stop because of a stern warning I would have stopped weeks ago just form the sheer lack of fun I was having.
So, for those of you that didn’t know anything about this… and that would be most of you, I’m sorry to have taken so much time to announce it. We are thrilled beyond words and can’t wait for the arrival of our newest little baby no name!
Feel free to e-mail name ideas to us at katesimonson@yahoo.com or add them to the comments here on this page. Eric and I are notoriously bad at coming up with baby names in a timely manner and this baby is no exception.
Eric and I are thrilled to be expecting out third little bundle of joy in January (a boy, they tell us) but it has been a hard road for me this time. With Emily I had no morning sickness, with Claudia just about 12 weeks worth, and with this one it had been a virtual 27-week, non-stop vomit fest!
So much so, in fact, that I lost enough weight from the beginning that even now that the problem has subsided a little I am still not back to my starting weight, let alone carrying any “pregnancy pounds.” Not that I am complaining about that! I haven’t ever been six weeks pregnant and still in my regular jeans, let alone at 27 weeks.
I did however get a prescription for anti-nausea medication and a stern warning from my doctor that if I didn’t knock off all the vomiting, he would have no choice but to put me in the hospital. You’d think if I could stop because of a stern warning I would have stopped weeks ago just form the sheer lack of fun I was having.
So, for those of you that didn’t know anything about this… and that would be most of you, I’m sorry to have taken so much time to announce it. We are thrilled beyond words and can’t wait for the arrival of our newest little baby no name!
Feel free to e-mail name ideas to us at katesimonson@yahoo.com or add them to the comments here on this page. Eric and I are notoriously bad at coming up with baby names in a timely manner and this baby is no exception.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)