Friday, January 28, 2011

No Blood, No Problem

No blood, no problem. For years this was my motto. It may sound cold, it may sound neglectful but when you are one of 8 children and then have five of your own it only makes sense.

None of my siblings or I ever believed in minor tumbles or the sniffles. My mom did not wipe a boo-boo gently with antibiotic and then put on a cartoon Band-Aid and give us a kiss and walk away with it all better. When we hurt ourselves we went all out, no holds barred, in for a penny in for a pound… when we got hurt, we got hurt bad, blood-broken limb-missing teeth-concussion bad. When we got sick it was mass vomiting, raging fevers, near comas, hospitalizations, specialists, no-one-ever-had-this-before bad. We did ourselves proud.

My first experience with truly disgusting injury or illness came at a very early age. I awoke to my sister leaning over me shrieking “MOM’ while she held me at arms length with a truly frightened look on her face and blood all over… well,  everything. I felt fine, sort of, would have felt better if she had quit yelling in my immediate vicinity and didn’t look like a figure in my brothers’ comics, covered in gore, hair wild, arms akimbo. My parents rushed in and I was bundled up and whisked into the night in the vast silence of my terrified mother’s iron grip. At the ripe old age of 2 I had developed a bleeding ulcer and I had been doing just that, ulcerating and bleeding. I was put in a crib (infuriating) and my mother had to leave (terrifying). A week later I was back home, coddled, fussed over and allowed to drink as much milk a day as I wanted. It was heaven for a tot.

I continued my spate of self mutilation by using a packet of silica gel from the inside of a shoe box as sugar in my pretend tea cup. Stomach pumped that time. Shortly there after I fell while pretending to be a brave and mighty soldier and my father’s swagger stick went straight up one nostril and stopped just short of my brain. More blood, black eyes, x-rays. I was piling up quite an impressive group of injuries and though young probably could have pulled ahead of my siblings in time, but they picked up the slack and tried their hardest to maim themselves too.

One brother got hit in the mouth with a baseball bat, knocking out quite a few teeth and mangling his face, one sister took a hit in the mouth with a field hockey stick, more teeth gone, one sister, sliding on ice just fine, found herself in a terrible tumble when it abruptly changed back to pavement, throwing her on her face … more teeth. We pretty much put the tooth fairy on the brink of bankruptcy. Another brother, thinking he saw something in the OPEN back of a Slurpy machine, put his hand in and immediately lost the end of one finger. The store owner marched us to our house, yelling at my mother about how bad we were while my brother stood with his hand in the air, wrapped in blood soaked rags and tearfully apologized over and over to the man. I thought my mother was going to kill the store owner. I know she could have taken him out but she had to get my now permanently deformed (sisterly love word) brother to the emergency room so she left him alive

We had falls through second story windows, scurvy (yes, like old sailors), rattlesnake and horse bites, broken arms, broken legs, black eyes, cracked heads, and broken noses. We drank furniture polish, detergent, bleach and alcohol. If there was a flu, we caught it, a stomach bug, we incubated it. We fell off bikes, roofs, diving boards, horses, out of trees, off of jungle gyms, and into bee’s nests, holes, creeks, rivers and lakes. We went through the gamut of known echo viruses, measles, mumps, chicken pox, whooping cough, colic, appendicitis, mononucleosis and pneumonia. In short, if we could break it burn it, knock it out or scar it permanently we did. If you could catch it we volunteered and gladly shared the misery with our siblings. We were a lot of people with evidently poor coordination living in very close quarters and for that reason I thought (wrongly) that my trips to the emergency room were finished when I left home.

I was snapped back to reality when my first born caught a horrible virus, raging fevers, swelling of her joints, blood red eyes…. It turned out to be an echo virus, one of the few discovered after I had left home. This was quickly followed by a slip on our tile floor, cracking her head and leaving an egg the size of New Jersey on her perfect brow. Just when the now magenta topographical depiction of Mt. Everest started to go down she got her fat little baby fingers on half a peanut. What harm can half a peanut do you might ask? When inhaled into the lung, apparently, it can do a lot. She whistled like a tea kettle on every breath, but other than that she seemed to be fine. We rushed her to the emergency room (hi, yes, it IS me again, how are you?) just because babies are not generally meant to sound like boiling water under pressure and they sent her to x-ray forthwith. She was hospitalized, placed in a crib (infuriating) and we had to leave (terrifying) until the next morning. By the time I got to the hospital they had finished vacuuming out her little lungs and she was awake. While previously she whistled she was now hoarse. The anesthesia had settled in one foot, making it twice the size of the other, Her face was red, her eyes were bloodshot, she was hungry and she was PISSED OFF.

Her little brother quickly made his presence known at the ER as well. His head must have been terribly heavy because he fell on it every chance he got. He tried sucking his new baby sister up with a vacuum and instead had four fingers on both hands beat to hell by the rotating brush inside. Beautiful babies everywhere and mine had eight fingers in splints and stitches in his noodle. He stepped on a soldering iron in his bare feet, he caught pneumonia twice a year, he wrecked on his big-wheel, his trike, then his bike. When he got bigger he broke both ankles (at different times) skateboarding and tried to peel his chin off in one fell swoop all while trying to impress his friends or girls with how smooth he was. Even I, who thought my trips to the emergency room would always be for someone else in the future, woke up in an ER after a bad wreck while a stranger proclaimed my left breast too much bosom to handle and taped it tightly under my chin so he could insert a chest tube unencumbered by mammaries.

No blood, no problem is more than a motto, it is a mantra. I use it to ward off the terrible injuries, the life changing illnesses. I use it to stop myself from yelling WHAT DID YOU DO?, which is a natural reaction but hurtful to the one bleeding all over the place and on deaths door. I use it to reassure myself that this illness, crash, tumble, break, burn or cut won’t be the one that takes away someone I don’t know how to live without.

Thursday, January 20, 2011

A Star Is Born- Redux

The March of Dimes is gearing up their annual fundraiser and, as every year at this time, I find myself digging deep, giving cash but also harassing friends, co-workers and family to do the same. I want to let these poor beleaguered souls know why this means enough to me that I don’t mind at all harassing people I normally treat with care and respect.

My daughter’s blog is linked off this page, entitled A Star Is Born

Like me, she found that expressing unwieldy emotions through prose makes them easier to carry, easier to store away. While I try to write about the funny, the quirky and the ironic side of life as often as I can, she wrote about one subject only, her dear sweet daughter born four months early and weighing in at just over 2 lbs.

My daughter spent a month in the hospital, most of it on her back in a bed with monitors measuring out her prayers for the child within her in steady beeps and pulses. For a reason only God knows a perfectly healthy baby inside a perfectly healthy mother was being forced into this cool, noisy, brightly lit and terrifying world months before it was time. Laying in the bed (to thwart gravities insidious pull) and holding on for dear life while the world around her spun on she became a hero, a saint, a martyr and an awe inspiring model for all who know her. A furious battle that was fought in silence, waged for 30 straight days without respite or relief consuming all of her energy and most of her focus was won, so to speak, when the baby was born one day shy of the line marking a greater than 50% chance of survival.

The next two months were spent in an endless round of Neonatal Intensive Care visits and frazzled hours at home trying to reassure her two older children that life would someday be a type of normal again. Because of her devotion, unbelievable stamina and sheer grit our little star came home and became a vital part of the family. Today, at 23 months Star is walking, talking, fighting and playing in turn with her sister and brother and in general being a normal little toddler with all that entails.

While I have lost two of my own children, given them to the universe unwillingly and with much turmoil, I never had to deal with a constant, daily fear that this one would be their last. I had the chance to hold my boys, to watch them come into this world full of fight and moxie without ever seeing them get a blood transfusion through their umbilical cord or knowing that they would have to grow into doll clothes or hearing the alarms go off when they quit breathing, their tiny chests too small to see moving or stopped and have no choice but to watch strangers literally hold my blue lipped child’s life in their hands while I was shoved back into a corner.

I can’t express how proud I am of my daughter, of her daughter, of her husband and two older children. They aren’t extraordinary; they do normal suburban family things in a normal suburban family way. Star gets fussed at as much as she gets fussed over, they encourage her to try things, lavish praise when she succeeds and encouragement when she doesn’t. In a year or two you won’t be able to tell she came into this world in any different fashion than the other two, and this is what makes her, and my daughter, a star.

Monday, January 17, 2011

A Veritable String Of Pearls

There used to be a show on TV called Kids Say The Darndest Things and it was full of kids saying just that, the darndest things. Children are people, I know this, but they are special people, insightful, humorous, loving, not timid, and sometimes, I will admit it, even mine, crass people.

A couple of weeks ago, my twin granddaughters were telling me about their newly understood ‘special-ness’ of being twins, my head swiveling like at a tennis match.
Liza: “Everywhere we go people point”
Lorna: “their finger at us”
Lisa: “and say look”
Lorna: “Are they twins?”
Lisa: “It’s like”
Lorna: “we’re famous”
In unison: “or sumpin!” then to each other in unison “It’s crazy”

I also heard them discussing privately what would happen if they wore identical outfits… who would be able to tell them apart? They were very disappointed that we all could, but they have no idea how hard it was. Even their brother Guru said “Well I sorta knew and I was sorta guessing, but I got it right.”

My grandson Mario was talking about his relatives in another state. He described his aunt as old, then turned to me and clarified the statement “Not as old as you grandma but still REALLY old”

His sister GiGi, after being up literally until five in the morning told me”Actually Grandma, I just don’t sleep all that much” Ya’ think???

These keen observers of the human dilemma come from a long line of children who love to vocalize and therefore say fascinating things quite often. When I married my husband, my daughter Polly, then in 8th grade caught us in a simple embrace in the kitchen. “Eeewww you can’t hug each other! You’re related now!” Wow.

My son Henry, who had been upside down and backwards in the womb, was delivered by emergency C-Section. He loved to tell the story, saying he had been stepping on his “Ability cord” so they had to take him out. Another favorite Henryism came in 92 when he was still just four years old. Our house was damaged and most of our personal possessions destroyed by a tornado. We went back the following day to see if anything was salvageable. Henry, being Henry cut right to the heart of the matter. Upon seeing the wreckage of our home and those surrounding it, seeing people picking through once prized possessions, now trash, he snatched up the top half of a GI Joe figure and shouted “I’m getting my stuff and getting the hell out of here!” He was known to use the whole tornado incident to his advantage though. 3 months later sidling up to a pretty woman at a 4th of July event, saying “I am just four and a tornado hit my house, I lost everything except for half a GI Joe man.” She was appropriately saddened by this and handed over a Popsicle he had had his eye on with a “you poor baby”.

My son Peter, at age 3, batting his long lashes told a lady who commented on his lovely blonde curly hair “And I have nice eyes, too”. He once earned the ire of his big sister by telling a potential beau who called that she couldn’t come to the phone because “she was poopin’” Another day was marked by shrieks of laughter from the two littler darlings following him as he came running in to tell me that a boy his sister was “in loooooovveee with” had kissed her, hot on his heels came an extremely embarrassed and furious and recently bussed Anna swinging at him and wailing over and over, “It was a peck! It was just a peck!” (Aside: When visiting the home of your new (you can only hope) girlfriend the day after a first date to a chaperoned dance DO NOT wear a shirt that says Party Naked With Me and then kiss the girl while her mom and siblings are home)

There was the day my son came charging in, breathless and shouted “Have you done the laundry yet” I leapt up and shouted back “No” not sure what the drama was, he replied with “Whew, I forgot to take the worms outta my pockets”. Needless to say, that was the day I decided they were old enough to start doing their own laundry…

I wish I could remember more of these pearls, string them together into a necklace of funny memories to wear when I am feeling blue. I should have written them down, taken a moment to memorialize them but I didn’t for one simple reason. When life is happening it is hard to stop and say whoa, funny moment, let me grab a pencil and just jot this down. Even if I had they would have all been in my illegible hand on the back of long tossed envelopes, so I treasure these that stay embedded.

Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Snowpacolypse 2011

Day three draws to a close… we are all still with the living. This has been an adventure of the indoor kind.

As happens every few years here in the Deep South, we have been iced in. From the view out the living room window, children sledding and pretty forest-scape, one would think that this is a lovely winter wonderland full of opportunities for rarely enjoyed activities like the afore mentioned sledding and snowball throwing and snowman building. The reality is quite different, the view is misleading. The kids aren’t sledding, they are slipping and sliding across the yards on ice, the snowballs are hard as rock and could kill a person and there are NO snowmen, anywhere around. A movie could be made-- Ice Age V (Will This Shit Ever Melt), or Super Size It II-- but neither of them would capture the drama of 72 hours in a house with NOWHERE to go and the same 3 people to look at. This is why I live in Atlanta. Once every ten years is enough. I would never last in a place where this is an annual occurrence.

Snowpacolypse –T - 24 and counting:
Thanks to some phenomenally accurate weather forecasting we knew that the ice and snow were moving towards us and roughly when it would get here. We bought groceries, we got fake logs for the fireplace, gassed the car up, checked for candles, flashlights and batteries and waited, expecting the worst. People up north like to make fun of us southerners for being so disenchanted with cold weather. They love to tell us that 23 degrees isn’t cold, they know cold, they love to tell us that we can’t drive in snow, they love to laugh at our snow forecast inspired  trips to the grocery store to get water, bread and milk. We just smile at them and go about our business. They will learn, as we all did at some point or another what happens when you aren’t ready.

Snowpacolypse-T -12 and counting:
A gorgeous snow began to fall about 7 PM (right on schedule, go Weather Channel!) Beautiful, for about an hour, then sleet, the freezing rain, then snow, then sleet, then freezing rain… you get the picture. I decide about 3 hours into it that yes, damn it, 23 is really cold and that my gas bill will be outrageous. The power flickers once or twice but stays on. This one is already shaping up to be better than the last one, spent in a freezing house with no power for 4 days running and the little old neighbor lady snuggled up on a warm chair right in front of our fireplace. By 1 AM we have settled into a steady pattern, sleet for an hour followed by one of freezing rain. Yuck.

Snowpacolypse Day 1
YAY!! A snow day!! Even most displaced Yankees are riding this one out inside their warm cozy houses. Major interstates are shut down with an inch or more of ice sheeting them and jack-knifed tractor trailers blocking all lanes. Northerners may know how to drive in snow, but no one is good at driving on ice. We watch on the news as many people try to prove themselves right about their abilities only to be found wanting, sitting in crumpled cars on the side of the road. We smile smugly, shake our heads and say ‘Dumb-asses, and they thought we were stupid.’

Left over home made beef vegetable soup simmers on the stove while we watch movies, read and nap. People keep their children indoors as freezing rain and snow flurries continue to mark the passing of time outside. Lasagna is set to bake and then devoured, the fireplace cranked up and day one slides to a sleepy close.


Snowpacolypse- Day 2
I am sick of watching pictures of people sliding all over hells half acre on the TV and my current book just isn’t doing it for me. I flip through the channels and find every old movie I am glad I never watched. All of my facebook friends are sleeping, the spam outnumbers the people on twitter, and my email holds nothing new for me. I log in some hours doing work stuff I had left unfinished on Friday, bake a batch of brownies, do some dishes and watch 25 year old episodes of Cops. The neighbors have tossed their kids out the door and they entertain themselves by hitting my car trying to knock chunks of ice off with sticks. Their parents are no doubt hiding inside just glad that the kids are burning off some energy somewhere other than in their faces. Excitement comes in the form of watching another neighbor try to get their car out of the cul-de-sac only to slide back again and again finally leaving it cockeyed in the middle of the road.  Roast beef and salad and French fries with brownies and ice cream for dessert finish the day. The cold weather has created some sort of Cro-Magnon like need for thousands of calories and the richer the food the better

Snowpacolypse- Day 3
Day three arrives with some sunshine (YAY) cold temps (BOO) news that highways are at least passable in one lane (YAY) but neighborhoods will not be salted for a few more days (BOO). I have slept 10 hours, which probably hasn’t happened since the last ice storm, my butt feels two sizes larger, my head hurts and I am bored to death. The office is still closed so I have no new work to do. The dishes are done in two minutes and even making a pot of chili takes no more than 30. While my son bundles up to face the great outdoors and an 8 mile walk to the store for smokes and thrills, driven by the same cabin fever as I, my husband knocks ice off the front walk and I trudge upstairs with iPod and headphones to log in some miles and burn some calories on the treadmill. If possible, the shows on the TV are even worse than the day before. Even the reporters are sick of standing outside, freezing their collective patooties off and saying look, there goes someone else sliding into the same ditch where five others car-carcasses are resting. Bright sunshine slowly warms up the surfaces and despite 27 degree temperatures the ice melts a bit, allowing cars to slowly skitter and slide out of the middle of the road and kids to once again attack the ice boogers on my car.

Tomorrow roads will be a bit better, offices will open even if a few hours late, some new man-made tragedy or natural phenomenon will take the place of sledders in Piedmont Park at 2 AM or jack-knifed trucks causing a snow-jam twenty miles long. I will be glad this is finished on one hand, I miss the normal, but saddened by it too. Adventures are best shared and this has been a good one.

Monday, January 10, 2011

Lunchtime In China

One of the things I like about the new “social networks” is that I am  reminded that other people are out there, living there lives, doing different things than I in a different place and probably in a different way than I would.

It is so easy to get caught up in our own day to day dramas that we (or at least I) do tend to get a sort of tunnel vision. I, or my family members are, seemingly the only ones I can picture leading a life of any intensity. It is not that I don’t care about others. It is just that for me, out of sight is sometimes out of mind, and that is a shame.

While I am sitting up at midnight listening to the sleet hit the chimney top my cousin is in China on his lunch break the following day. While I have been cozy in my living room watching the drama of the ice storm on television both my sister-in-law and my son-in-law have been slogging their way through city streets and country roads trying to get home to their families before the only way available is two days later in a tow truck. Another sister-in-law, in Kentucky is saddened that they just have a minor dusting while Atlanta is expecting 6 or more inches of snow and ice. My friends in Minnesota or Brussels Belgium are probably amused by our consternation caused by the small amounts of snow without considering that a city in the Deep South is not nearly as well equipped for this as a city in the north. I have a friend talking about being on the beach in Hawaii (how unfair is that?) while I hunt down a second pair of socks. Gumbo is cooking in Louisiana while friends ten miles away are building a snowman in their front yard.

These aren’t events of a world shattering nature. God knows there are enough of those covered ad infinitum by every professional and hack journalistic enterprise in the country. These aren’t events that change lives like births and deaths and marriages. I would hear about those anyway, with a phone call or a card in the mail. These are just the day to day, a slice of life, a picture offered to me with short, often humorous, descriptions and a few photos of other people’s existence. People are eating and joking and fighting and playing and relaxing all over the world. These are the tidbits that remind me that I am not alone, that my small life is not so trivial after all.

Thursday, January 6, 2011

Lips Like Strawberry Twizzlers

I have been faced with a lot of poetry lately, watching it fly by on twitter at 140 characters max. Some of it is lovely, some of it is unfathomable, and some I am sorry to say is just terrible.

I know I am not a poet. My most famous line was probably go to sleep, go to sleep, go to sleep little baby repeated over and over again while I banged my head (quietly) into the mattress at four in the morning. Dr. Seuss is the only poet I can quote (i.e. would you, could you, in a box? Would you, could you, with a fox?). Even as a child, I was pulled more toward the mystery, the suspense that is Are You My Mother? than the lyrical yet epic saga Horton Hears A Who (now a major motion picture).

Every ten years or so I decide to give poetry one more try. I have lived a full emotional life, have loved and lost and loved some more, I am tuned into nature and spirituality and I am good at finding words that rhyme so why not? I will start with loss, always a good basis for wrenching words torn from ones very soul. I think, I think, I think, and all I can come up with is “I wasn’t done with you yet you asshole! Cool sunset, thanks. I love you” Somehow I don’t see that being quoted on the evening news when someone leaves this world too early.

Love, love is grand! I can do love, surely? Love is wonderful, Love is good, thank you God, for our food. Yikes, I know that is paraphrasing bordering on plagiarism as well as blasphemy and I apologize for that, but how can one expect to capture all the ‘oomph’ of a really great love? How can someone plumb the depths of this most unwieldy of emotions when true love just keeps getting deeper? Higher than the mountains, deeper than the sea… it has all been said and people are still trying to capture the essence of oneness that is love.

Poets tend to do better at describing people that they love than love itself. Countless artists have lyricised the beauty they behold, beautiful dreamer, stardust in your eyes of blue, she’s got legs, hot for teacher… (Hey, don’t blame me, I didn’t write them). Poets have waxed… um… poetic for centuries. Shelley said “Art thou pale for weariness “, which I find terribly touching, and Masefield wrote “But the loveliest things of beauty God ever has showed to me Are her voice, and her hair, and eyes, and the dear red curve of her lips” which I think about sums it all up nice and neatly.

I tried to write a romantic poetic homily to my beloved once, but lips like strawberry Twizzlers and eyes like limpid pools of rich chocolate melting over the low heat of our eternal passion just reminded me that I was hungry so I made a really delicious cake instead.

That said, I have decided that writing (or even reading most) poetry is not for me. I can pour all that emotion into a really great soup or luscious cookies, or enjoy the act of bringing a cup of coffee to my dear heart in the morning when it is dark and cold and 5:30 AM. I can rhyme with Dr. Seuss while my sweet young progeny snuggle on the couch with me. We can all be poets, maybe not that of the written word, but poets of the soul, poets of life and, yes, poets of love.