Lots of catch up, but thinking about it.
I guess I can't stand the fakey, smiley family pictures with little blurbs about such and such gathering. Fine for a scrapbook but really it gives a disingenuous picture (of my life, at least) and while those are real and treasured moments, and pics of the kids are great to look at and reflect on, I save my "real" writing, my "real" self for my personal journal and maybe a small bit on my single moms board. Or even emails to friends. Wish I could do more here but within the context of protecting my identity and of those close to me, one can only say so much. So I closed up shop and set this to Private for a few months.
But a couple of things recently have had me thinking of making it public and making it more real. If I don't get published (I have an agent but the market is nearly impossible right now and I don't want to exert energy into pursuing publication--only to write and read), well, I still want to share stuff. Not to close friends and family even as much as just the general public, to touch someone in a meaningful way if I can.
Though I haven't read the blog in its entirety, I have read a few posts, and by and large, this is not a blog I would
ever have followed, mostly due to the fact that this woman, prior to the entry I referenced, had a "charmed" and perfect life, a ton of friends, wealth, a supportive husband, lives in a warm climate, is a photographer I believe from what I've read, and had a beautiful daughter. An entry like "It rained today so I went to Barnes & Noble" coupled with gorgeous photos of her child and family was sort of the usual fare until the link I reference above.
But that link was a whopper. She gave birth and found out the minute her 2nd daughter was handed to her, that the baby has Down Syndrome. There were lots of people in the room, and no one else knew but her. The photo above says it all: her friends cheering with champagne as she sat there with her world turned upside down. Later, her sister came to visit; she writes: "My sister arrived the next day.... She told me I swallowed the blue pill. She told me I could never go back. But that I held a key to a door that no one else does." Just. Wow.
It made me cry because, although Liam did not have it, I was told at my 11 week ultrasound that "Baby B" was "not normal" and had an omphalocele, plus a fatal chromosome problem, many markers for a trisomy 13 or 18--at the time I didn't know those terms but my world was falling to pieces. None of my family even knew I was pregnant, and I had to go through all of this on my own, 100%. What could I do but go home to my apartment and grieve and run the shower and lay down in the bathtub with the sliding door shut to avoid the neighbors hearing, and scream over and over, "My son! My son!" as I sobbed my heart out.
Regardless of the fact that Lm was born with perfect health and the surgery for the omphalocele was actually less serious than my c-section, that moment was real, and the worry continued up to the day he was born. One could say my problem was the very OPPOSITE of this woman's--she had friends there, I had no visitors in the hospital other than my mom and a priest a couple of times to administer Last Rites to me as my toxemia grew worse by the day. Mom was the only one with me when I gave birth. No husband, no photographer friends, no champagne. I didn't get to see the twins for 2 days. Unlike this woman, I expected to give birth to a child with many medical problems, and didn't. While she expected a healthy baby, and her child has a trisomy 13. And yet--reading that story, I felt her pain upon finding out the news, felt it viscerally in fact. No wonder she has about 4,000 Followers to her blog--amazing stuff.
The 2nd thing making me reconsider is that my aunt in Colorado is dying of cancer. And I found out just 3 wks ago that my cousin who lives in Kansas and has twins, divorced about 3 years ago. I come from a family where nothing is shared or talked about between the extended group, or even the immediate group. I don't understand why the news was kept from me, but then I realize that only my mom and a couple of friends (plus my single moms board, of course) know the full story of how I came to be a single mom; I certainly wouldn't share that with cousins or relatives--though it begs the question why not. Why not since I'm not the only "black sheep" in my conservative Catholic family anymore, with 3 cousins now divorced. So why not tell the world about things like that.
Anyway it's long past my bedtime. I'll end this with one of my favorite quotes ever, from author Eudora Welty:
“My wish, indeed my continuing passion, would be not to point the finger in judgment but to part a curtain, that invisible shadow that falls between people, the veil of indifference to each other’s presence, each other’s wonder, each other’s human plight.”
