Iowadrift

All Better

So, the rash faded away into the sunset, thank goodness, and my hindquarters have gone back to looking like themselves (or has gone back to looking like itself?) again.  What the hell was that, anyway?  Neither TTD nor I have a clue.

It is hot hot hot hot hot here, proper summer at last.  Today I had to drive about an hour to a homestudy interview, and I actually had the top UP in the Mini because the sun was just too fryingly hot to topless driving.  Heh.  I am a wizard with the puns.

I'm going on another drive tomorrow, to see...dum dum dum...my ex.  We haven't seen each other in eleven years, since the day we went to court for our divorce.  He's living about an hour away from where I live, and is currently around between overseas trips (he has his own outdoor adventure business and leads trips to sea kayak in Baja, work on national parks in Costa Rica, and do I-don't-know-what-all in Siberia).  I don't know what it will be like to see him, but I'm looking forward to it, since he has, of course, his own place in my heart and always will have. 

Hey, speaking of that: any of you out there who have divorced, remarried, and then had kids--how did you explain the concept of an ex-spouse to your children, and when?  I'd love to hear.

Oops, crying child.  Bye.

I Have Got To Get A Grip Here

Oh geez, the guilt.  Here I make all kinds of big promises to myself and others, and totally renege.  Is that how you spell renege? Help.

But it's symptomatic of what's going on with me these days, which is, I think, a big, cosmic sigh of relief after the last six months of Mali and moving.  I am breathing out these days, and my shoulders are slowly retreating from their usual position around my ears, and I am spending whole days just swinging in the hammock with the boys and contemplating the weeds in the vegetable garden.  Or the deer in the vegetable garden; we have a deer couple who stroll on through in the afternoons and eat the corn, the lettuce, and the heads off the hosta.  I am, in short, sliding into my usual summer torpor with even more speed than usual, and blaming it (the torpor, the speed, whatever: I can't even be bothered to match pronouns to antecedents) on let-down from the move.

Problem is, I really need to, like, keep doing laundry and cooking and buying the boys some shoes and getting them haircuts and cleaning the turtle tank and balancing the checkbook and all that good stuff which I usually do almost without thinking about it. Now every action seems to require a great deal of pondering, and even when I do launch on a project, it's liable to founder halfway through as I take off on a snake hunt with Rabbit, or give in to Urplet's demand for cuddles.  All of which is fine, but the refrigerator is starting to look like a New York bachelor's and the boys have run out of clean underpants, and the bittersweet vines (think kudzu) are eating the paddock fence, the apple orchard, the raspberry canes, and the grape arbor. I need to get a move on.

In other news, TTD and I go in for our individual homestudy interviews this week, him on Tuesday and me on Wednesday.  I'm curious about the kinds of questions we'll get asked, and the kinds of answers we'll give (because of course we'll compare notes).  Do you think I should mention the fact that TTD is actually a CIA operative, or should I let him disclose that himself?  Do you think he'll reveal my strange addiction to chewy sugar (SweetTarts, Hot Tamales, Sprees)?  And what do you think they'll make of it all?

Because it's odd in the extreme to contemplate an outside observer stepping into our family and assessing it--assessing US.  The Agency and our social worker are very clear that we are not being "vetted" so much as being invited into a process or on a journey, with The Agency and the MSW as guides who can point out traps and dangerous spots, hand us maps and reference books, and explain the terrain and what kind of shoes we might want to wear.  Still, I find it hard not to be a little anxious that we will somehow be found wanting, pronounced not good enough, declared unfit.  Because isn't that every parent's fear?  That her best will not be good enough for her children?

I know, I know.  I didn't say this was a rational thought (or post); I'm just expounding away as I am wont to do.  But think about it.  How much would you clean up your house for the social worker's visit, for instance, and what kinds of things would you do while she was here?  Humph, said the camel.

I just heard the Rabbit, who's playing with trains in the next room, say, "Mama?"  When I said, "Yes, buddy, I'm right here," he said, "Oh, I know where you are, and I don't have any questions for you.  I just wanted to hear your voice."

Nothing Like Starting A New Decade By Reneging On Promises

Mea culpa, mea culpa...here I announce with abandon that I'll be posting every day for a month, and promptly don't.  I can only plead the most bizarre illness I have ever had, and one that I hope you never get, because it's just STRANGE.  Viz: on Monday I got a rough, red, bumpy rash all over my torso and back and butt and upper legs and forearms.  Kind of itchy but not bad, no other symptoms.  Hmmm, thought I.  I'd had something similar when I was pregnant (which no, I am not now) and figured it must just be a recurrance due to fluctuating hormone levels, some unknown combination of environmental triggers, you name it, who cares, it wasn't bothering me.  I did what every good nurse does when she gets sick: I ignored it and figured it would go away.

Which it refuses to do.  Instead, it has stuck around, and has TURNED MY BUTT RED.  Yes!  This rash has decided to become confluent (i.e. the red dots have merged) all over my butt and upper thighs, and has further insulted me by providing me with swollen, sore bilateral inguinal nodes.  And no, it's not some strange, or even not so strange, STD: I'm not going into details on how I know it isn't, but it isn't.  I mean, we're old, and monogamous, and long married, and that's just not an issue, and as I said, I'm not going into any more details.  I feel OK, though achey and tired and a little like I have a cold, and I'm fever-free, but my whole lower body is annoyingly edematous (as in, my butt doesn't want to fit in my pants, and I know I haven't suddenly gained fifteen pounds or changed my entire shape) and I mean, what the hell? 

TTD and I have batted differential diagnoses around, without coming to the ah-ha conclusions we would have reached were we on a network medical show, and nobody else in the family has caught it and I am, if not improving dramatically, certainly not getting worse, so we're inclined to continue in our practice of ignoring it and seeing if it goes away, but I have to say, HUMPH.  A bug that makes your butt big?  That's insult to injury.

Oh, and in other breaking news, I padded downstairs at three a.m. the other night to make the wakeful Urp a waffle (growth spurt, yada yada) and guess who was back, lounging on the kitchen rug right beside Yellow Boy the cat?  Yes indeedy: your friend and mine, the skunk.  I beat a hasty retreat upstairs and eventually awoke TTD, who went down and followed the skunk at a respectful distance until he (the skunk, not TTD) had meandered through the dining room and the living room and back out the shed door.  Followed by Yellow Boy, who is clearly either friends or smitten with the skunk.

What a ridiculous week.

Forty If She's A Day

I have always had quiet birthdays (except for my 32nd in India, where I was feted and wined and dined and showered with presents, because they are all about over-the-top celebration there).  But here, in the States, things have tended toward family parties, ice cream and cake, a generous and most welcome check from the parentals, and something fabulous from my brother, the World's Best Present-Giver.  I've always enjoyed everything on offer, but I confess that in recent years I'd begun to yearn for something extravagent, something surprising and ridiculous, something really FESTIVE.  And this year, the yearning--a rather shamefaced yearning, because I am not a surprising and ridiculous type, besides which, I am a little old to be so very into, um, presents and, um, parties for, um, me--kind of ratcheted up because I am (or was; it's all over now) turning forty, which feels significant.

Well.  WELL.  WELL!!!  I am here to report that this birthday was, as Rabbit said repeatedly, "the best birthday ever, right Mama!"  It was!  Thank you, dearest Huzzband and Parentals and Brother and Cool Cousins!  Thank you!

First off, TTD let me sleep until noon, literally, on Saturday, which was my actual birthday.  Then he and Da Boyz returned from a bike ride to a nature lecture at the State Park down the road, and Rabbit told me all about worms.  What better way to start your decade than with lots of sleep and an informative session on the reproductive and elimination habits of earthworms?  Rabbit even took the gummy worms he'd scored at the lecture and crafts session and tucked them into the cockpit of his toy plane.  "The Wormidi family is going for a ride," he told me.

Then the TTD family went for a ride to Grandmother and Grandfather's house, where we left the little boys tucked beneath Grandfather's arm, listening to "Old Mother West Wind," and eating crackers, and drove to the local country club for cocktails and the best damn buffet ever.  What could be more entertaining than eating perfect lobster salad, followed by luscious creme brulee, while watching an endless parade of tanned men in bright green slacks dotted with navy lobsters? 

Well, for one thing, a family party with cake and ice cream and presents--Prana yoga pants from Brother, hooray, he has amazing taste and I have been dying for real yoga clothes; a beautiful silver cross on a leather chain from TTD, along with even more beautiful pearl-and-peridot earrings and another set of turquoise flower earrings; a gift certificate for an hour massage from Cousin; a check from Generous Parentals.  The sun was out, we basked, we ate chocolate cake with buttercream frosting, and raspberies and ice cream and chocolate sauce.  I luxuriated, wore earrings, and felt grateful.

But. You haven't heard half of it yet.  Do you know what TTD did before we went to the party on Saturday?  Get this.  Get this!!   Really, did I make it clear you should get this?  Sit up and pay attention, because TTD? 

BOUGHT ME A CONVERTIBLE MINI COOPER FOR MY FORTIETH BIRTHDAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

"Cool Blue," with black racing stripes and heated leather seats.

AAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

New Decade, Anyone?

I know I said I was going to write more PPD-type stuff, but I am feeling like taking a break from that: I can only immerse myself in it for so long, you know?  I'll get back to it, but not right now.  In the meantime, thanks for the comments, which are always so encouraging in making me feel like I am not alone in my wierdness.  You're all wierd with me!  Or wait, that didn't come out quite right...never mind.  You get the picture.

Wow, how was THAT for a substance-free paragraph?  Let's try something else, like I am going to be forty on Saturday. Yes.  You heard me.  On June 9th.  Forty.

I think I'm supposed to rend my garments and beat my breast at this point, but since I like my leopard-print PJ's and anyway have no breasts to speak of, I'll give the lamentations a miss.  Because actually, I am delighted to be turning over a new decade.  I feel more like myself the older I get (which means, I suppose, that I was born middle-aged), and I like the feeling that I've paid some dues and now get to take up space in the world without apologizing as constantly as I felt I needed to in my twenties.  I like that I have finished graduate school (or schools, as the case may be) and worked for long enough to feel confident in my career.  I like--I love--that I have two children and a husband whom I adore.  I love that I can write about something besides what Frank Conroy termed, "the emergency of YOU."  I love having a fresh start in a new town, a new house, a house where I want to stay (with frequent sojourns abroad!) forever.  I love that I start this decade close to my parents and my brother.  I love that I take Lexapro every night and wake up in the morning NOT feeling as though just getting out of bed is going to reduce me to irritable tears and despair.  In short, I am grateful for this birthday and the life surrounding it.

Not that I love everything and everybody, don't get me wrong.  I am Scroogey as ever.  My skin is dry, there's a strange sausage of fat developing around my mouth, as it does around everyone in my family's mouths at forty, and my hair is no-color mixed with gray (OK, my real hair is that.  My visible hair is platinum, and I still love that, embarrassingly much).  My neck has gone all Nora Ephron on me.  I have age spots on my hands, cellulite on my ass, and crepey, post-child-having skin around my belly button.  My back aches, small boys tire me, my arches are falling, my teeth are chipping, and I have to get mammograms.  And let's just not get into the ageing, post-childbirth bladder.

Also, I am sad, the way everyone in middle life is sad, because sad things have happened, and even the joyful things, like healthy children, are shot through with, at best, the poignancy of  impermanence.  I have now lived long enough that my emotions are adulterated: joy carries sadness within it, and sadness carries a kernel of joy.  The intensity and purity of my twenty-year-old emotions has changed--not dwindled, but mellowed and mixed and deepened.  My heart belongs to lots of people besides just me; when I grocery shop, I buy toothpaste and toilet paper for a whole family.  I am not wise, but I am beginning to be experienced in certain things (like, oh, how to keep the cats tick-free; not, sadly, in child-raising or getting books published).  I  have more gravitas than I had in my twenties, and at the same time I am more buoyant.  Which makes me what, a fat swim float?  Now there's a mental image to treasure on my birthday.

There's another image I do treasure, however, and that's the image of three children in our family instead of two.  No, I am not pregnant.  Yes, TTD went and got himself fixed last year.  But we have started the (long, slow) process of trying to adopt a child--a girl, we hope--from Ethiopia.

I thought for a while about whether I wanted to blog about this, and decided that yes, I do.  I want to write about the whole journey, however it ends up and however long it takes, because as I said in an earlier post, I want this blog to be as real a picture as I can make it of my life at any given moment.  I think in my next post I'll write more about how we came to this decision and what the road ahead may entail, but for now, suffice it to say, we hope that in a year or eighteen months or so, the boys will have a little sister from Africa.

And one more thing.  This blog has been languishing of late, but I have a few new-decade resolutions and one of them is to post every day for the next month, and two or three times a week after that.  So starting on Saturday, brace yourself for an avalanche of minutiae and verbiage.  I mean, can you THINK of anything more celebratory?

I can.  I'm going out dancing with my family and TTD on Saturday night, and I have a rockin' new flowered dress and very sexy platforms, and I plan to drink champagne.  Happy Birthday to me!

Bad Blogger, Good Christmas

Whoooo, boy.  We made it.  We got everyone (and the presents) to Boston, we had a fine Christmas, TTD had three interviews in three days (gack), we flew home a day late (thank you, American Airlines),  I went straight from the airport to a ten hour shift in the ER, and Normal Life started up again.

Well, sort of.  I leave for Mali on Sunday the 7th, so there's a lot of Organizing going on, and a lot of Guilt on my part, about the extended leaving of small children.  But today the Rabbit is in preschool and Urp is at toddler storytime at the library with the babysitter, and I am futzing around on the computer, so as I said, Normal Life is back.

Which is kind of nice, because flying with small people through O'Hare at Christmas in bad weather?  Not so good.  The day before we flew, all flights were cancelled out of Cedar Rapids, so the morning we left the airport was full, full, full, and so were the planes.  Ours was two hours late because of weather AND a crew delay (what, one delay wasn't enough?), and we disembarked in Chicago exactly at the departure time for our next flight.  We RACED through the airport, me madly pushing Rabbit in the travel stroller and TTD lugging both Urp and the million-pound diaper bag, and of course the gate we wanted was in Tierra del Fuego and we nearly had heart attacks by the time we got there.  There was the plane...with the jetway just pulling back from it and the door closed for all time.  And we knew, from investigations in Cedar Rapids, that there were no seats to be had on anything until Christmas Eve at the earliest.  I put my head on the desk and heaved a teary sigh of despair.

And the gate attendant had pity!  More than pity: she reached up to heaven and pulled down THREE SEATS ON THE NEXT FLIGHT TO BOSTON, TWO IN FIRST CLASS AND ONE IN THE FIRST ROW OF COACH.  How that happened, with most of the population of Chicago on standby for that flight, I don't know, but I wasn't about to ask irritating questions.  Instead, clutching the tickets to my sweaty breast, I leaned over and kissed TTD.  Then I kissed Urp.  Then I kissed Rabbit, and noticed that he seemed to be on fire.

Oh yes, everyone got sick for Christmas.  Urp and Rabbit both featured fevers, ear aches (Urp with bloody gunk pouring from his tubes), and coughs like sixty year old, three-pack-a-day smokers.  They had a hell of a time sleeping, and were quite pitiful when not dosed with Tylenol, so we did something we don't usually do and called in antibiotics for them ourselves.  I mean, it was Christmas Eve, and I didn't want to spend it in the ER, when I was perfectly capable of diagnosing bronchitis and otitis myself.

So we spent Christmas where it should be spent, with the grandparents, and had presents and a fire in the fireplace and a proper turkey dinner and various friends and relations about, and it was lovely.  Exhausting to the bone, because of the non-sleeping, sick, excited children, but good, because there we all were, crammed into the same house, alive and kicking and mostly compos mentis.  Also, TTD went off on his own and bought me jewelry!  Which he has never done before!  Wow!

Then began the nonstop interview process, about which I don't want to write too much because really that's TTD's story, not mine, to tell.  Suffice it to say, at least one place pretty much came out and made him an offer, and a very generous one at that.  Reasonable schedule, not very stressful practice, start date as soon as he can get his MA license, which, knowing the MA beauracracy, probably means sometime in 2010.  He is currently in the midst of nitty-gritty negotiations with them, and I am trying to sit back and take my sticky fingers off the controls, as Anne Lamott says.  I hope she is better at it than I am.

And then, after all that, we had to fly home.  Bags packed, children stuffed into decent clothes, everyone to the airport, bags checked, everyone through security (shoes off, coats off, stroller folded, computer out, plastic baggie with Tylenol and Motrin bottles out, everyone through, reverse process), everyone fed and watered and tinkled and cleaned up, to gate, flight still showing on-time on the board...and huh?  The sign at the gate, at noon, said something about a flight for DC departing at 11am, and there was a discouraging knot of passengers around one VEEERRRRY SLOOWWWWW gate agent.  Discreet inquiries produced the news that yes, our flight was leaving from this gate; the knot was from a cancelled flight earlier. 

I refrained from shrieking, "Well then move the bloody passengers somewhere else to rebook them, lady!" and returned to the boys, who were playing robots with some other kids.  Our flight didn't board and wasn't called.  Eventually it emerged that the captain was going to be late coming in from another flight, and rather than board us and have the plane ready to go when he arrived, they were going to wait for him, THEN board.  Meaning we would miss our connection in St. Louis.  The gate agent was the opposite of the heaven-sent one on our outward flight from O'Hare: she stared at me as though I were an idiot when I asked about alternate flights and rebooking, and all but said, "Lady, you are wasting my time and I wish you'd spontaneously combust."  So I  cut our losses and rebooked for a 6 am flight the next day, and we called the folks and they sent my brother, bless his heart, to drive through the suddenly-developing snowstorm and pick us up.

So we got up at 3:45 the next morning, did the whole thing all over again, and this time it worked.  We even got an earlier connexion out of O'Hare, because...oh, who cares, at least we got home.  Or the boys got home.  I got home, took a shower, and turned right back around to drive to Cedar Rapids again for ten hours of ER.  I don't think I managed to kill anyone, but it was probably close.  Then I got home at midnight (1 am Boston time) and fell first into the shower, then into bed, after a 22 hour day.

Mali should be no problem.

Or so I tell myself.  Really, I am thrilled to be going myself, and not at all worried about the trip, because this is easy stuff....ten days, a schedule, someone to meet me on the other end, no problem at all.  But leaving the boys for ten days makes my heart ache.  Not for me, because honestly?  After four years I am looking forward to a real break from them.  No, my heart aches for them, because I remember how deeply I missed my mother when she went on trips when I was small.  I remember the long ache of her absence, and how the world was tolerable but not right, and I remember how the day of her homecoming was like Christmas, and how every day of her absence was slow, slow, slow. I am being selfish to ask my children to go through the same thing--and Rabbit will, I know he will, though I think Urp will be fine.  Five days visiting the grandparents with their father is no problem, but ten days at home without me, even though their father and their usual babysitters will be with them the whole time, is big.

Tell me it's going to be OK!

Catch-Up

Have you noticed that this blog is tending toward the lame and skimpy recently?  Yeah, me too.  Apologies.  I do have a few more substantial posts simmering, and it's not that I'm going jaded on the blogosphere or anything; it's just that I'm trying to dial back the busyness of me, which means I'm on the computer a lot less these days.  That,combined with a perennially sick Urplet (poor little thing went from that tummy bug to a cold, and now to a miserable, sleepless virus which has him croaking like a frog) and The Holidays, has led to many Cute Kiddie Vignette posts and a tendency toward anecdote over reflection.  And now, I'm descending even further into the mire: I'm falling back on bullet points. 

• We are going East for Christmas, to my parents' house north of Boston.  This is a matter for rejoicing, or would be if it didn't involve flying through O'Hare on December 22nd.  Pray for us.
• TTD has at least one interview while we're out there, with two other places planning to fly him out in January if they can't swing an interview during Christmas week. 
• Regarding that: I am fighting an urge to be tense and controlling (I know this comes as a shock to those of you who know me in real life), and mostly succeeding.  I always want things to happen faster than is realistic: I was like that with my divorce, and I'm like that with my writing, and I'll be like that, I'm sure, when I'm planning my funeral and wondering why I haven't hurried up and died already.  But in this case, I know that there's no rush to leave Iowa, and we actually don't want to until we find a really good set-up, so I just need to calm down and let the interviewing begin, I guess.
• And regarding that: our set-up now is so good it's silly.  TTD works in the clinic Mon-Wed, all day, and Thurs morning.  Then he's off until the next Monday, though he does paperwork the rest of the day Thursday.  I work Thursday from 1-11pm, and I fill in other days as needed, which isn't much.  Sometimes we wonder how we can even think about leaving here, esp. since TTD has almost no call, and only about 6 weekends a year when he has to round in the hospital.  Cushy, cushy, cushy.
• On the other hand, cushy isn't everything.  So if we can find a set-up we like fairly well--i.e. one which lets us balance two part-time jobs, though realistically the best TTD can hope for is one day off a week, probably--we're still going to go for it.
• Because, you know, grandparents are good.  Oceans and mountains are good.  Uncles and cousins are good.  Boston is good (as long as you're not driving).  Change is good. 
• And I just drove halfway across Iowa today and I'm sorry, IT"S A BORING STATE.   Or, let me rephrase that more delicately, it's not exactly a geographer's dream.
• I drove across the state for a meeting, and the meeting--dum dum dum!--was to plan an upcoming trip to Mali!  Yes, I'm going to Mali for two weeks in January!  Hooray!
• I'm going with a few other people to visit a health project we work with near Kayes, which is..oh, get out a globe, I don't know how to describe where it is.  Anyway, I've been involved with the project for a few years, but have never been there, and now I get to go.
• Which in some ways will be awful, because we'll be the Dreadful American Visiting Dignitaries, than which there is nothing worse (to entertain OR to be).  But on the other hand--gift horses, mouths, etc.  Plus, the idea is that we stay with the project for a decade or so, if it works out, and that means in a few years I can bring the boys, all three of them, and hooray.  Especially hooray because Indielou, the nurse who runs the project, has two kids almost exactly our boys' ages.
• TTD has already been, once, and I have a great picture of him brushing his teeth in the Sahara.
• In other news, we went to the mall and got a Christmas photo taken at one of those chain photo shops where they pose you in front of a backdrop patterned with brushstrokes, or Victorian roses, or woodland mist, then print up everything from wallet photos to eight by tens, all instantly recognizable as The Family Portrait In Which You Look Like You're Wearing Matching Reindeer Sweaters Even If You Aren't.  The Christmas cards have a particular loopy, schoolmarmy script and tend to say, "Merry Christmas from The Whoever Family."  The eight by tens can be done with blurred edges, if you so desire. 
• We did not so desire.  We got this done for TTD's parents, and we went for the straightforward color glossy with no bells and whistles.  But I have to say, it's unnerving to see that any family can become an Olan Mills family if posed and lit correctly.  I, for instance, look like I just graduated from Oral Roberts University in this picture.
• In the spring we are doing proper black-and-whites of the kids, outdoors. 
• But in the meantime, yes, we did get Christmas cards of the Iowa Family Mall-inson photo, so if you receive one, please do not instantly conclude that I have gone completely native.  I'm just lazy...there they were, all these convenient family portraits...and now our Christmas cards are truly frightening.
• But, you know, Merry Christmas anyway!

Five

So, the Motel Manager has tagged me with a meme, which I'm only too happy to do.  You know, because it does the thinking for me, and anyway, who can resist a list?  Or making a rhyme at the end of a sentence?  Evidently not me.  So, called upon to list five things about me you may not already know, I offer the following.

1. I rode horses competitively until I was twenty-two.  I started with hunter-jumpers and moved on to Three-Day Eventing, also known as Combined Training, which has you doing dressage, cross-country jumping, and show jumping within one competition.  I had a pony of my own for a while, but mostly I scammed rides on other people's horses, or leased horses for a season.  I was never very good, but oh, how I loved it.  I still do.  My definition of perfect happiness will always involve galloping through the woods on a good horse and jumping everything in sight.

2. I have a tattoo on my right shoulder.  I know, I know.  But cut me some slack: I got it before every Chi Omega had one.  Also, I'd just gotten divorced and was in that cut-off-all-your-hair, buy-a-new-wardrobe, change-your-look stage of self-reinvention (in my case, I morphed from long-haired, big-earringed, tie-dyed, barefoot hippie to indefinable creature with cropped hair, J. Crew basics, and too-dark lipstick, a mix I wouldn't, even now, try to dignify with a name).  Also, I was living in South Dakota, on a reservation in the Badlands.  So, you know, Sturgis, bikers, tattoo parlors, the whole vibe was there.  I went with it.  Don't regret it, either: I still like my tat.  I was careful to get it in a place which won't sag or wrinkle or stretch out with childbearing, and it only shows when I want it to.  Or when I go swimming.  Which I did when I first met TTD's family, whereupon my dairy-farmer FIL very sweetly and politely asked, "When did you get your, um, brand?"

3.  Today I let Rabbit and Urp eat mini-marshmellows for breakfast.  Just because they asked.

4.  I play the guitar and piano very badly, but with great enthusiasm.  For the last few years the boys have done a little music class at Rabbit's preschool, and for every session they get a CD of the music and a book with guitar chords and the music for each song.  When I'm feeling really Maria Von Trapp, I'll pull out the guitar--or sometimes they instigate the whole thing by dragging the guitar disastrously through several rooms to me--and go through all the books, singing loudly and badly and playing even worse.  We all have a very good time, until Urp gets one foot trapped in the guitar or Bunny sits on it or the cat decides he needs to be in my lap and to hell with this large, silly musical instrument which is in his way.  I don't have a tuner right now, so I just keep tuning the whole thing to what used to be the E string and is now probably a B or something.  I think I'm playing everything in E Flat Minor 7 these days.

5.  I run for exercise, but I wish I had time to swim instead, because I am moderately decent at swimming but a total disaster in running shoes, despite having finished two marathons back in the day.  I run like a mallard flies: flapflapflapflapflap, with a maximum of graceless effort and a minimum of forward momentum.  Amusing to watch, though.  If you ever want a good laugh to get you going in the morning, perch beside the IMU bridge over the Iowa River on a Tuesday, Thursday or Saturday morning, around 7 a.m. and watch for the waddling middle-aged woman.

Now, since you know all about me but I don't know about you, I am tagging TLB of Illiterati , The Deadbeat , and Elswhere of Travels in Booland.  And actually, you know what?  I'm tagging the rest of you too.  If you're reading this, would you please put something about you in the comments?  I'm serious.  I'd like to get to know you better, my friends inside the computer.  Also, after three funerals in two weeks and a rash of child-abuse cases at work, I am feeling the need for a little companionship.  And y'all frequently have such good and wise and funny comments.  Please, tell me more.

Enough With the Shuffling, Already!

First of all, thank you all for your thoughts and prayers for Bill and his family.  I went to the wake and funeral this week, and oh, so sad.  His three beautiful children and his wife sat in the front pew at the funeral.  Everyone in the packed church was in tears.  Fifty-two is just way too young to die.

Unfortunately--no, that's not really the word; what's the word I want here?--anyway, badly, we are continuing the theme this week--the shuffling-off-this-mortal-coil theme, that is.  TTD's grandmother died on Wednesday, at 97.  This was a very different death of course; she's been ill and ailing and miserable for years, riddled with anxiety and dementia, and all her friends are, of course, long dead.  This isn't a sad death, really, except that, of course, it is, because mortality is just...sad.  And it's the end of an era as well.

And wait, there's more!  The wonderful man who used to cut my hair, the bubbly and irrepressible Blond Guy, who'd been living with a malignant brain tumor for eight years, which was about seven and three quarter years longer than predicted, died this week too.  He died at home, with hospice, and he was ready, but damn, he was 38.  THIRTY-EIGHT.  I repeat: mortality sucks.  You hear that, mortality?  Your mother wears army boots!  Your mother was a hamster!  She was a hampster in army boots! 

I of course don't have anything useful to say about any of this.  There's nothing useful to say about death.  It sucks all the oxygen out of a room, or a blog. 

Except that it doesn't.  We're still here.  We're here, and we have memories.  We're here, and we can tell stories.  We're here, and we can still see the sun.

Ten Years, No Less!

It is ten years to the day since I met TTD.  Met, mind you, not married, but still: ten years!  A decade!  My thirties, his forties: a whole era has passed.  We are both thinner and grayer and more fine-drawn than we were when we met; we are the same people we were then, and we are also third entity, one which didn't exist ten years ago: us.  We are, in some ways, one, and in others, very much individuals.  We are ten years of history.  Damn!

I had no idea, when I drove cross-country to South Dakota ten years ago, the court date for my divorce only three weeks past, that I was driving toward my future husband.  I just knew I was driving toward my best friend, The Most Intelligent Woman In The World, who was working as a midwife at the Indian Health Service hospital on the Rez and who had helped me get a temporary job in the hospital's outpatient clinic.  I was fleeing the scene of the crime, as it were, or at least the scene of my first marriage.  I was, in the very best tradition, Going West, and though I didn't have Granny's china and my grand piano packed into the wagon, I did have most of my worldly goods stuffed into my Subaru.  I had a map, which basically told me to get on I-90 and hang a left at the Black Hills, and some new CD's, and four days to get from Boston to the Rez.  Other than that, I had no plans.

I drove and drove, and thought and thought.  It was a quiet and healing trip.  I watched the sky open up as I came onto the Great Plains, and something in my chest relaxed; it was as though I could take a deep breath again.  I reached the hospital on the Sunday of Columbus Day weekend, checked in with Security, and sure enough, they had no idea who I was and no key for the room in the dorm I was supposed to inhabit.  The Most Intelligent Woman, however, had thought this through and had left her house key with Security (she was at a conference), so I could stay at her place until Tuesday, when people would be back at work.  So, I stayed, slept, and talked to her cats.  Then, on Tuesday, I went to work.

I didn't meet TTD until a week into the job.  He was away too, at some other conference, but I knew who he was from hearing people talk--he was The Man, the doctor who'd been there for six years already and who had the place wired.  He was the Chief of Staff, he'd started Habitat for Humanity on the Rez, he had a hugely busy patient load, and he ran a lot of marathons.  This was what I knew, and I was curious to meet him.   

Every morning the whole medical staff, which consisted of two ER doc's, an OB, four or five midwives, three family practice doc's, one or two internists, four pediatricians, four NP's or PA's, four dentists and a Clinical Director, gathered for a quick report of who had been admitted, transferred, born, or pronounced dead in the last 24 hours.  One day, a really tall, mostly bald guy with a greying goatee swept into the room at top speed, his white coat flapping behind him, and sat down at the table.  He had a big, yellow, beaded nametag which said, "The Tall Doctor," and he wore threadbare black jeans, a marigold polyester shirt, a maroon tie, and size 14 white sneakers.  "Whoa," I thought.  "This is the famous Tall Doctor?"  And it was.

In a few days, I discovered more about him.  He was intimidatingly good at what he did; if I came to him with a clinical problem he dropped everything and helped me figure it out; he had light blue eyes like a wolf, and beautiful hands.  He carried a little notebook around in his pocket, with every phone number he or anyone could possibly need in the course of a clinic day.  His patients were crazy sick, but he never lost his cool, at least not visibly--well, except for the time I saw him kick a trash basket down the hall of the clinic.  He had five brothers and sisters, and about twenty nephews and nieces, and he'd grown up on a dairy farm in Iowa, which meant he had an appealing competence with hammers and nails and engines.  He was Christian, like me, but reticient about it, also like me. 

In July of 2000, not quite four years after I met him, I married him.  A lot happened in between: boyfriends (mine), girlfriends (his), India (me), Nepal (us), Ecuador (him, me, and half his family: a post for another day), one novel, a lot of letters, several knockdown-dragout fights, and about a thousand dollars in intercontinental phone calls.  But on July 29, 2000, there he was, waiting for me at the end of the aisle.  And you know, one of the really useful things about divorce is that, having made the wrong match, you tend to be pleasantly surprised when you make the right one.

It was a good wedding, and a better honeymoon.  It has been a busy six years since: a move (us), grad school (me), one new job (him), two new jobs (me), another novel, two children, a mortgage, a minivan, some hormone-induced winters of discontent (me), and a relentlessly increasing busyness.  There have been fights, and bad weeks, and bad months, and hard years.  There has been the move from looking into each others' eyes, to standing together and looking outward at our children.  There has been relentless fatigue.  There have been dates, and quiet evenings when the children are in bed, and sleepless nights when the sick children are in our arms.  In other words, there has been--we have made--a life together.

I don't think about our marriage all that often, really.  I don't think about breathing, either.  But once in a while--like, say, tonight, when TTD had to go upstairs and comfort an uncomfortable Urp, who refused to make shift with Mama--I remember a few things.  Like, it's been ten years and I still like seeing him come into a room.  Like, he's hot.  Like, he says funny things which make me laugh.  Like, by loving me, he is teaching me how to love him in return. 

Happy Anniversary of sorts, my dear.  You're my guy, and always will be.  I love you.