Currently This

2010-07-12T17:54:00.000-07:00

Malibu. In all the time I have spent at the beach, this is the first time I have ever seen a dead jellyfish. 7-10

2010-07-07T09:03:00.000-07:00

You know why lying is bad? Because it makes the person you are lying to question their instincts. When someone lies to me, they are telling me I am not competent to judge character and I can't trust my instincts.

I mention this because doctors lie all the time. Well, they don't lie directly, but they lie by being indirect, by assuming you can't understand what they're saying and so dumbing it down or omitting info altogether. They tell you that you are wrong to question them, they tell you the way your body is behaving is normal and suggest you simply need to get a grip or stop paying so much attention to yourself or even go see a psychiatrist because, I guess, you would ONLY question their judgment as the result of mental instability and it doesn't matter if later you find you were right to keep pushing (right around the time you find you need more surgery or find the surgery you had was botched somehow or you are having an 'adverse reaction' of some kind) - they still suggest your instincts are wrong and you just need a chill pill (which they can prescribe for you if only you will give them some peace, already). Then they get upset because you don't seem to trust them.

Doctors can't handle not knowing the answer. The ones who really care about you (and I have one of these - I would cheerfully recommend him to anyone who needs a good doctor) want to figure out what is wrong with you because they want you to feel better (and they want you off their back). I have one of those systems that has always been susceptible to rare or unlikely problems. I get diseases people my age or gender aren't supposed to get, I'm allergic to things most people aren't, my body just does things that confound doctors and it takes them a while, if ever, to figure out what is wrong. I've learned to listen to my body and know when something is not right and it gets tiring having to fight doctors to make them hear me. Even the kindest doctor tells me that I am more likely to need a psychiatrist than believe me that something is really off and at this point, I do need a psychiatrist, but not because I am a hypochondriac.

I'm usually right when it comes to my instincts. They told me my son was ADHD and I knew, I just knew they were wrong and we were eventually proven right when he was diagnosed with Asperger's. They told me my oldest daughter was having migraines and I knew, just knew they were wrong. My husband got on the internet, researched her symptoms and we went to the doctors and said hey, have you considered Pseudo-Tumor? They took a look at her optic nerve and said hey, by golly, you're right. They told me I had indigestion until they looked at my stomach and told me they had never seen anything as bad as the inside of my stomach and had to remove things and fix things and etc. They told me I was addicted to painkillers when I said hey, there's something wrong and even after they found out my gallbladder had stopped working, they still said I was just drug-seeking. I told the doctors I was having trouble breathing, they told me I was an addict and tried to commit me to rehab. That night they found blood clots in my lungs. They told me I was probably addicted to drugs and my husband and I kept looking and instead I probably have scar tissue gluing everything together in there (though we are still trying to get someone to hear us on that one).

I'm not dependent on opiates, docs. I'm dependent on not hurting. If you have a way to make it stop hurting that doesn't involve drugs, I'm there. I'll try the psychiatrist and I'll do acupuncture or Chinese herbs or buy expensive teas at upscale malls if you want. I'll keep losing weight (too slowly), I'll rub my tummy and pat my head while standing on one foot if you want, but stop telling me how wrong I am or how crazy I am and stop asking me to trust you when you won't trust me. I want my fucking life back - do you honestly believe you want that for me more than I do or that you have more invested in my wellness than I do?

2010-07-06T00:12:00.000-07:00

This morning, while I was trying to sleep and the bunny was trying to dig through the plastic bottom of her cage to China, I was laying there craving eggs. Thinking sunny-side-up, maybe scrambled with toast, but eggs.

I eventually fell asleep because my husband had covered the bunny so she would go to sleep and stop making all that noise. When I woke up again, he had made me an egg sandwich. I never mentioned wanting eggs - he just knew somehow.

We don't have time for romance these days. I do miss it, kissing for hours and not being able to get close enough to someone. I miss the tease of romance, the ache of needing someone's touch and dying to run my fingers through their hair. Waiting for them to please, please touch me already, all that. Kids and work and living paycheck to paycheck takes its toll.

When people rationalize affairs by saying they miss romance, I think of the way my husband works a job he hates to raise another man's kids or how on the 29th of every single month for the last ten years he has wished me a happy anniversary. I don't get love letters anymore, but I get egg sandwiches. It's as breathless a gesture as that first kiss, it really is.

2010-07-04T07:47:00.000-07:00

Oh, so I said the doctor is cute. I'm married. I would never in a million years break my husband's heart, certainly not for a cute Russian doctor (with hair any woman would scalp him for) who is himself married. If Harrison Ford rode down here in his leather jacket, tipped his fedora to me and offered to take me away from it all, I'd have to deny him (he's still sexier than most men in their thirties, if you're willing to overlook the perplexing attraction to Calista Flockhart, who must have a really good personality because as an actress, she's fluff.)

Shoot, now I'll get a note from Harrison telling me to "fuck off" because I said his wife was fluff. I'm sorry, Harrison, but she is - it's not like her star turn in "The Birdcage" broke any emotional ground. But ok, I apologize and hold no grudge. If Malibu gets hit by a giant tsunami, I'll zip on over in a motorboat and get the family and I'll be nice to Calista, ok? I'll try to delve the depths of the "Dancing Baby" bit, which I'm sure will one day hold great historical significance, if only as one of the first viral videos. I'll ask what it's like to be one of many actresses to do Laura and I won't chuckle when I think of the local radio station that held a food drive for her.

But I digress.

2010-07-03T23:34:00.000-07:00

One of Booty's babies, Smudge. Can you tell how abused she is?

I fell apart. Me, who survived my parents and rape and incest, who successfully ended a generations-long cycle of child abuse in our family, who fought and clawed and beat up every doctor, every teacher or bureaucrat who stood in the way of my children's needs, when it came to me, I just had nothing left. And the doctors I most need to believe in my strength see me as a weak, whiny twit maybe looking for her next fix, certainly not doing enough to fix herself.

There are times when I want to beat them for not knowing better, for the weak thinking that allows them the luxury of blaming my situation on me. Other times I want to beat myself for trusting them (one in particular) so implicitly. Guess who got beat up and ended up back in the old nutbarn? You got it. I soaked up their low opinion of me as though it were a chocolate sauce and I a sponge cake. I laid back and let them blame me for - god, for everything. Their so low opinion of my character and strength, not remotely concealed behind a tissue thin layer of bonhomie and good natured tolerance of my wacky character mirrored exactly the feelings I have been fighting in myself all my life and I bought it. I almost died and it was all my fault. I am in constant pain and that is due to some deep failing in the insubstantial center of me. If only I would lose a little more weight, if only I were made of tougher stuff and smiled through the pain, if only I were not so sick all the time we would not be on the brink of bankruptcy and wouldn't it be best for all if I just - weren't a burden anymore?

And you know, nearly dying is no cake walk, but that isn't what really did it to me. It was that the people I most needed to see how strong I have been, how hard and savagely I have fought for an identity of my own, to raise my beautiful children, all they saw was the weakest possible image of me and they felt more than disdain. They wrote me off with disgust.

Now I don't know who to trust, who to talk to, whether to talk to anyone at all. Maybe I should embrace the pain for my husband's sake. Certainly I need never to look at another damned opiate. And all involved, the doctor who has no real idea what is wrong with me and my darling husband - all have pinned their hopes for my rehabilitation on yet another doctor who I will go to see not because I believe he can help, but only so that no one can accuse me later on of not doing all I can to reclaim that healthy rosy glow.

God, I'm so angry.

2010-05-02T23:24:00.000-07:00

My son took this pic a few days ago. Not bad for forty-six, huh?

2010-04-19T21:46:00.000-07:00

It's been seven months since I last wrote in here. There have been a lot of surgeries, a lot of doctors and a lot of bills and I remain as sick as I was when it all started. I'd tell you what was wrong, but I don't know. A dozen doctors, three hospitals and I still don't know because they don't know.

Least I can admit that - I don't know what is wrong.

I can tell you I am close to getting to go home again, after they put a filter in my vein or artery to prevent any more clots from making their way to my lungs. Of the last eight weeks, I have only been home three days. I ache to go home. Home sweet mess. I want to be home with my husband and kids and cats and rabbits and birds and all the noise and fuss and mess. It's my mess. Frustrating as it is to note someone who did not do their chores, if nothing else, it is our mess. It belongs to me. It's normal, all that fuss and noise. But when you have been in the hospital long enough - and on the meds long enough - you get to where you feel, walking into the house, like you're a guest and don't really belong anywhere.

I belong at home. I want to go home.

2009-09-05T10:48:00.000-07:00

On my balcony. They're everywhere this year.

2009-08-30T19:28:00.000-07:00

In my sister's tree.

I'm going back and forth between her new place and mine, keeping an eye while she tends to my ever-worsening mother. This has been mostly ok, except that I miss the kids when I'm not around. The quiet has been good and I have slept better than I did at home (my cat stayed home, so the three AM insistence on my attention has been absent). The only real problem has been that we're on fire again out here, and her new place isn't far enough away to spare us all the heebie jeebies.

Last October, she lost her home, all her animals and two of mine in the arson fires that ravaged Sylmar. Hers was one of four hundred homes lost over a few days. I watched on the news - we watched her home burn. When I got to her, she was in a motel room with my mother and her husband. She hadn't seen her home go up, because she was still trying to find a way to get back into the park to try to rescue the animals. They wouldn't let us in to check, they said it was too dangerous. We got them to agree to put out food and water for the animals, in case any had gotten out.

The next day, she rented a truck and we drove from one pet store to another buying pet carriers. At the Porter Hills PetCo, the fire burning there almost got us evacuated before we could pay for the things. But we got them, dozens of them, and drove back to Sylmar, where we begged and pled with the firefighters to please please, just let us check. They eventually got someone willing to take us up, but only if we promised not to get out of the car if they thought it was still too bad. Deep inside I knew - I had seen her house burning and I knew nothing could have survived that, but her need to hope, to believe somehow that her babies were ok, that they hadn't died the worst kind of death, frightened and wondering why she wasn't coming to save them, it was hard not to hope with her.

So we got up the hill and we didn't have to go far - you could see from the end of the row that the house was gone. They wouldn't let us get out to see if any had survived. They turned around and I spent the next few days trying to keep my sister from killing herself. She tried so hard to get the animals out but they gave them no time - there was just no time. My mother is elderly - between that and all the medical equipment that had to go with her, there was just no time. She felt and always will feel responsible and that it was arson only makes it worse. Me, I'll always feel awful for the two I sent up there and be so grateful I didn't send the others - a new litter had sown up with an orphaned cat I took in just a few months before the fire and there was talk for a while of my sister taking them.

When they finally let everyone back in, we spent weeks up there, calling for the animals. The firefighters only ever found two alive. One is alive today. The other was my sister's favorite - he lasted long enough for her to find him at a vet and sit with him till he died. His paws and lungs were burned badly and he held on for her. He started purring when he saw her and she sat with him every minute - that hope again, and all she could do was be there to make dying easier.

I wanted to believe the animals all found their way out. But we found remains, you see - we know how they died. There's no fooling ourselves that the smoke put them to sleep before the fire could get them.

Now here we are, almost a year later and the sky is dirty yellow with smoke from someone else's home going up, someone else's things being lost. It's hard not to remember the frantic drive looking for pet carriers. The new fire is miles from where she is - but it's burned miles away from where it started. They're funny, fires - they have a mind of their own and they think rings around the firefighters. So here we are again, glued to the news stations, calling back and forth for updates, aware we're probably safe but staying vigilant because we know how high a price will be paid if we look away at the wrong minute.

2009-08-17T17:17:00.000-07:00

I'm letting myself be dragged down by everyone else's needs. I've been roped into something by my sister who, though she has only the best possible intentions, can't hear me screaming no (in part because I sometimes mean yes). I'm being fairly drowned in guilt by my twenty-two year old, who has reverted to her first day of kindergarten. At the heart of all this, I am supposed to be taking care of me and find myself doing anything but. There has to be some pathology there, something about using their stuff to avoid my own, or self-esteem issues, but it all evades me.

The thing I wonder most about right now is do I really need all the work the surgeons suggest I need? Do I need it or am I acquiescing because it would mean a break from the guilt at home? There is no denying that the best part of being in a hospital is their only focus is you - you are suddenly the highest point on the totem pole, they'll be strong for you and you can go ahead and close your eyes without first wondering what everyone else is up to. I could go to a spa, but it wouldn't be the same - to be truly guilt-free, the separation needs to be beyond my control, not a choice I am making.

I love them, would not trade a day I've spent with them, but twenty-two years of special needs kids can make you yearn for babying. I'm not the kind of mother who easily steps back - I have to be yanked, nails gouging the walls, away from my kids before I allow that taking care of myself is maybe the priority, right now.

2009-08-09T08:51:00.000-07:00

My tattoo and the image I took it from. I had to photoshop out the extra ducklings (I have three kids) and fix the areas where they were - I think the guy who did it did a terrific job with detail. It's perfect- I've always called the kids 'my little ducklings,' and I adore the Stitch character. Got Stitch toys and coffee mugs and little figures. Stitch all over the place. Fell in love with him from the first frame.

2009-08-04T22:19:00.001-07:00

At a nearby park.

My oldest daughter got her first, paid, acting gig. Once she gets paid, she gets to join AGVA, a bona fide actors union with benefits. It's been a tense week since her audition - she was so afraid she wouldn't get it. She auditioned for the same part last year and didn't make it, but I had a good feeling this time. No anxiety over how her self esteem would handle another rejection (why do people with shaky self-esteems always seem to choose professions like acting?)

In any case, I was in awe of her courage - where did she get the self-confidence to put herself out there that way? To put away the defenses and masks she has acquired over the years and let her best self shine through? What a strong, vulnerable thing to do. It's not that I am surprised she could do this, it's that I'm surprised I raised someone who could. How did she learn such bravery from me, who put on her masks long ago and never took them back off?

Then I realized that she has watched me be brave and strong in other areas. She's watched me try to start two businesses and work like a dog over them. She's watch me have to fight like hell to get her and her sibs the care and treatment they need for years. She watched me lose eighty pounds and bounce back from a couple near-death hospital experiences, only to be cheerful and pragmatic about the next one. And she's seen me be the backbone of this family, the strength for everyone else when they couldn't find their own.

That's a nice thing to realize. I'm reminded of the way she has always watched me, all her life. The way she would study me when she was little, the way she would try to be my opposite in her teens, but always, always watching. I was so afraid that she would learn to be afraid of life, because I always have been, but she saw something else and took that, instead. I just fucking love my beautiful, strong, discerning kid, you know?

2009-08-03T00:55:00.000-07:00

I was feeling pretty hopeless when I started writing here, again. I felt like every door I needed to go through had been closed, locked and nailed shut. I was thinking in terms of how to settle my shit so my kids would be ok. Some of that was melodrama, fair enough. Some of it exhaustion, some of it feeling sorry for myself. But no small part of it was being very ill and not having any more energy to fight the insurance company.

Then help came from a very unexpected source. My dad, who I love but have been at odds with all my life, took one look at me, put his arms around me and said "where do I sign?" Didn't even ask me what I needed the money for - just said sure, I'll put my house up as collateral and can I get you a soda? It's entirely out of character for the man I've known all my life and it makes me wonder, all over again, if he and I would have had a chance if my mother hadn't been such a damaged woman.

I haven't forgotten everything that has passed between my father and I. I still bear the scars, am still colored in everything I do by his influence and choices. But this man, who just found out he's almost certainly lost his pension to the economy, who still has a scar on his leg that I put there (the last time he ever hit me) and filled us all with such dread just by coming home a little too late after work (little too late meant he stopped at the bar), he took the same arms he once used to throw me through a wall, put them around me and offered his own security with no questions asked.

2009-07-29T11:58:00.000-07:00

Doesn't it look like the roots are dangling their feet in the water?

My younger daughter is struggling so much right now - she's been living with debilitating pain for years, pain none of the bastards treating her have been able to change or fix or anything else. We've seen neurologists and pain specialists and endocrinologists and psychologists and Chinese herbalists and all of them may as well have been voodoo doctors sticking pins in her for all the relief they provided.

She's had to quit school and hasn't been able to work for years because it was just too much for her system. I've pushed her gently to keep trying, but not too hard because I don't know how much is too much, what is fair to expect of her, what is fair to ask her to endure in the name of what just seems an endless series of hoops she has to jump through in the name of proving what a trooper she's trying to be.

Still. if they can't put a name to her pain beyond 'pain thing' and can offer no hope that it will end (not knowing what triggered the thing they can't diagnose, they can't tell us when or if it will ever stop), she has to find a way to have a life with pain. Millions of people do it - millions of people with terrible afflictions manage to have jobs and families, etc.

The truth is, she's scared. She's afraid of going back to the way it was when the pain was at its worst and she would lay on the couch begging me to do something to help. Just as pointedly, I'm afraid of it. I have never, ever felt so useless and impotent as when I sat, not even able to stroke her hair because my touch hurt, and had to tell her I couldn't take her back to the ER because the narcotics that made the pain go away were messing up her organs. There's nothing worse than watching your child beg you for help that you cannot give. It sometimes feels like watching her die would have been easier, because at least she wouldn't be hurting.

I'm afraid to go back to that. To those days when she hurt so bad and was so terribly sick and getting sicker and no one could tell us why or help me figure out how to tell her no to the things that made the pain go away because they were also going to eventually kill her. To having to say no when she hurts, not be able to help her and sit listening to her cry, raging against the useless cunting doctors and the universe and our genetics and buying books and scouring the internet and lighting candles and trying to learn how to cast spells so I could make her better or trying to visualize sucking her pain from her into me, signing over everything I have to give to the devil or God or the universe if it would just make her feel better. Just a little relief, even just a little, just a night's pain-free sleep.

I learned to live with the self-loathing that comes from failing your child so completely. In fact, I castigate myself happily, willingly, because the punishment is the only relief I get from the guilt. She has to learn what her life is going to be if there is always going to be pain. So when she came to me and suggested she just couldn't take the stress because her head hurt worse than it had in years, I tightened the cilice on my thigh and reminded her that this happens every time she has to start a new semester, or think about getting a job. Suddenly her pain becomes nearly unbearable. I tell her that I know her pain is real, that there is a physical reason for it, but that there is also no denying the psychological component - when she is afraid, she hurts more. She's afraid to try to have a life and get cut down by being sick again, so her body ratchets up the ante in an attempt to avoid the risk.

I tell her that the truth is, this is going to happen every single time she tries to start a new job or school until she forces her way through it and makes her body get used to the idea that she can safely study or work and she won't end up back in the hospital because of it. She has to fight for her life, force her body to get through this or it never will. I tell her that she has already gone through the first five days - if she quits now, she'll just try again later and have to go through those five days all over again. I tell her you've got those first five behind you and if you just force yourself, I swear to God every day you go will get a little bit easier, hurt a little less. I promise her, because every instinct in my body tells me I am right. I tell her that she came to me for absolution - she wants me to tell her that it's ok not to go to work the next day and that I won't do it this time. I tell her she is an adult, now - she has to make this choice for herself, that I will love her no matter what she chooses, but that I believe in my heart quitting again is something she will regret forever.

Then I kiss her and tell her to go back to bed.

And the next morning, she got up and went to work and she hurt less at the end of the day and that night, she hurt less than the night before and she got up and went to work again. I take no credit for her courage or her choice - I told her the truth, that's all. And in the moment, when it felt like I was fighting her for her life, telling her the truth (instead of telling her to quit) was just as hard as telling her she couldn't have the pain pills. What I get to take from it is knowing that, in that single minute - when I found the strength to tell her the truth - I did not fail my daughter.

2009-07-28T20:58:00.000-07:00

Another flower at Disneyland. Don't know what kind.

Everyone I know - all my offline people, all my online people - we've all moved from Starbucks and forums to Facebook. Well, they all did, anyway. I have a Facebook account, but I rarely use it for the same reason I rarely call my friends or hang out in my forums, anymore. Everyone wants to chat and be silly and I don't these days. I love knowing that I can read about what my cousin did today, but I don't want to have to write about what I did.

Well, here. Here, I can say anything I want and not have to connect with anyone. Nothing at all is expected of me. I don't have to respond to anything - I have no responses in me right now. Except for a very trusted few (who understand my silence), no one in the world who really matters to me sees these pages so they can't be offended or disappointed by them.

I miss my people. I want to know they are ok. I want to be there if they aren't. I just don't want to put on my game face to get there.

2009-07-27T06:31:00.000-07:00

At first I thought they were a homeless couple, but maybe not. Maybe just hanging out at the park. The photo works better if they're homeless, though - doesn't it? There's a romance that seems diminished without the painful struggle.

I've been working steadily for the last nine months. It's the longest I've been able to hold a job for years and I'm very good at what I do. I've gotten so good that my boss has essentially handed one division of his company to my watch and I'm just loving it. Not the minutiae of it, but the competency. I've been battling impotence for so long - not being able to make my son whole, not being able to make my daughter's pain stop - I had forgotten what it felt like to be able to make something happen.

Too, I had forgotten what it was like to think of my own worth. For more than twenty years, my self worth has been wrapped up in my performance as a mother and I have judged myself very harshly. Suddenly, there's another measuring stick and while I'm not quite ready to stop castigating myself over the ways I have been unable to help the kids, I am ready to note that I deserve more money for what I do at work.

2009-07-21T08:11:00.000-07:00

Near my dad's place in Tulare County, Ca. The beginnings of the wide strip of farmland that funds and separates the Californias (north and south).

So hey, turns out my tonsils are too big, my tongue too large for a small jaw (and oh shut up about that one, will you?), my uvula does strange things and my upper palate needs reshaping. More surgery, another overnight stay at Chez Hospital, all because I stop breathing when I sleep. For minutes at a time, there is no oxygen being delivered to my brain (or heart or lungs or anywhere else). The oxygenation of my blood should be around 98, 99 percent but during these apneic periods, it drops into the 70's for minutes at a time, until my brain finally sends out this !!!!YOUREGOINGTODIE!!!! signal that wakes me up, forcefully. I sit straight up in bed, gasping like I just came up too fast from several fathoms too deep, my body saturated with adrenaline and trying to combat the feeling I am in grave danger. I never know when I stop breathing, but I always know when I start again.

This happens five or six times, over an hour or so, until I give up and get out of bed. I rarely get more than an hour of sleep a night and I regularly go five days or more with none at all. My nights are spent watching the clock (to see if I slept and for how long) and reminding myself that, whatever my body may be insisting, I am not dying, everything is ok.

During the day, I fall into naps, alot. Short, useless naps that produce nothing more useful than another reminder that the old 'fight or flight' response is alive and doing well, thanks. I fall asleep when I am typing. You can see the evidence of my sleepiness when I write - letters or punctuation trail down the side of the page, the pen slipping as I fall into a nap, slipping and leaving a trail behind it that shows exactly when I started to nod. The course can be charted. I fall asleep when I am reading, or watching TV, or playing a video game or talking directly to you or driving down the street. I spend half my day nodding off and jerking myself back. My sister reminds me they use sleep deprivation as a torture technique. I can see why. All I want is to lay down - I remember only vaguely the feeling of falling into sleep.

I don't know yet if the oxygen deprivation has caused any long term brain damage (oh shut UP, will you??), but the doctors think there may be minor things with memory that may or may not resolve when I get some sleep (read: surgery). I know it has damaged my heart and lungs, which is why I'm taking on water like the Titanic, why I can't walk from one room to the next without having to stop to catch my breath, why I have angina. All of this may or may not resolve when I start to sleep, again. I'll either get better or I won't. I do know that between this and a couple of other, private things happening, if something doesn't change, I'll die. The doctor told me that last February - if something doesn't change, I'll be dead in a year.

I've always thought I would wake myself up when it happens, but it turns out that I might not one of these days. It can kill you - you can go to sleep, stop breathing, and simply just not start again.

I fell asleep writing this post.

2009-07-20T07:34:00.000-07:00

Gift for my Father-in-Law.

My boss has given me a new duty- I now call the account holders whose cards were declined for their charges and say "hey - what's the deal with that?" This is not a job I want but it is a job I turned out to be good at. I don't think that says anything good about me at all. I may have a broad mean streak I can count on in a pinch, but it doesn't come naturally to me to embarrass anyone.

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

Privacy and control aren't all they're cracked up to be. I can't seem to confide in the people I want to talk to. Cathy, KC, deb, Baba - all of them have been sent to my emotional Siberia, where the fabric of our relationship is being worn thin and dingy by the elements - and you know they don't have Woolite out there. There's a part of me that wants to lay my head in a lap and cry out the whole stupid story, and I know they want to hear it, would be exactly as sympathetic as I need them to be. I know I can trust them with the truth and that, when they try to pry it out of me, they genuinely want to know what they can do.

But needing them feels gross to me. Needing anyone make me feel fat and slow and plodding and stupid. The truth is, most people really only want to hear your story once - very few people have the emotional toughness to involve themselves, to offer to be the ear you scream into at three in the morning. What most people really want is for you to have your flaws, but the kind that don't really require more than soothing platitudes from them. And therein lies my fear - I take them up on their generous offer to be my ear, and they get so sick of hearing my story they distance themselves with rolls of their eyes or little, barely concealed snickers.

Again, better to have you scoff at the useless minutiae that is diagnostics than to know my truths and reject me as whiny. So, much as I love them, much as I need them right now, I have pushed them into the farthest unreachable corners of my mind where they can't scorch me with their comfort or disinterest.

2009-07-16T12:40:00.000-07:00

On my balcony. It was a kind of gift - gift in the way some teenagers drop their babies off at fire stations. It was dying on my neighbor's balcony and I agreed to adopt him.

Five months ago, my doctor told me that I would be dead in a year if something didn't change. A lot needs to change that is beyond my control. The stuff within my control is - well, has always been out of my control. I realized a few weeks ago that I've been preparing to die. Every day I make sure my legs and pits are shaved, in case this is another day I end up in the ER. I've been thinking about making a 'Mommy Manual' full of all the ways I do all the things I do that keep things running without anyone really knowing how, but I keep not getting to it. Every time I try to turn my mind in that direction, my mind simply and slowly fades to static. Instead, I spend my time doing stupid things online like trivia quizzes, etc.

The truth is, I think part of me is trying to sabotage me, trying to kill me off.

This all sounds mysterious in a way I don't mean it to. It's not my intention to keep you guessing. It's an exercise in privacy and control. I want to keep some things private and this is one more way I can control a situation that often seems to have spun way beyond mine. When they stick a tube up your ass and pump your intestines full of gunk, you start placing a pretty high premium on privacy.

I'd rather have someone laugh at the diagnostics than sympathize (or scoff) over the diagnosis.

2009-07-14T01:14:00.000-07:00

Took this at Disneyland a few weeks ago.

Been working, got a tattoo, been sick, had my son graduate high school, both girls have jobs. There's lots of stuff to say, but I still struggle with why it should be said here. Is it valuable to vomit my life into the void in order to see who can identify what I had to live that life - is this a piece of corn? a piece of momhood? meatcake? If I tell a new story about heart disease or sleep apnea or even emptying nest syndrome, is there anyone out there who still looks to blogs for answers or comfort or camaraderie? What's the point to relating another tale of illness or inevitability or impotence?

On the other hand, it's always been through the act of regurgitation here that I figured all the best stuff out. Also, I can't discount the value of being able to help people through the relating of my own experience.

Then again, there's nothing all that interesting about me of late.

Of course, there doesn't need to be. It's the garden variety sameness of experience that makes telling the tale so valuable.

I see a new surgeon, tomorrow. I'm hoping this one will have some better answers to my dilemma. What dilemma? Does it matter? That I want answers is universal to any problem, right? I don't feel like talking about it, tonight. Grab a pen and some paper and ask your kids to give you some nouns and verbs and adjectives - make it a game, a MadLib. Fill in the blanks with any old words or problems you want, because the specifics don't matter that much for right now. What matters is whether or not my talking about it has any value. Like a piece of candy rejected because it doesn't taste good enough to justify the calories, I'm not sure there is enough help to be found in talking that it would off set the involvement with the net that talking entails.

2009-04-27T09:21:00.000-07:00

My passion flower bloomed!!! I thought the last winter's frost had killed it off, but no - look at that weird-ass thing!

Ok - been gone because I've been sick and focusing my energies on flame wars. Nothing like a good flame war to re-focus your energies. Anyway. one of the people involved link to an old post here and reminded me hey- I have a blog. I should go say something.

2008-11-22T10:46:00.001-08:00

It's been a long time since I wrote here. I know, that happens a lot. I disappear for months at a time then come back, contrite but filled with stories of what I was doing or why I wasn't doing it. Maybe I have pictures.

Things are different, now. Something has shifted. Not in a tectonic plate way, more subtle. It isn't that I don't know what to say - I even know where to start - I don't know. I don't feel like the same person. I feel narcoleptic and when I'm awake, I feel more aware of things around me. Maybe that's why I keep falling asleep, but I've never been one for inaction. Anytime something happened in my life, I've countered it by doing something. Cleaning, designing, creating, making phone calls, being proactive. Not now. Right now, when I don't have to be awake, I'm asleep.

I'm sure it's a response to shock. Been in overdrive for months.

It started in June, when I almost died after the surgery. Then I adopt a sick cat who later turned out to be pregnant, and the battle over the kittens has been something of a strain on the old marriage. Shortly after, my son was denied SSI benefits and we have to fight the state, but first I had to convince a lawyer to take our case. In October I was betrayed by someone I thought was a friend and my sister's home burned to the ground in that Sylmar fire, with all her cats in it. The stock market crashed and took our savings with it . . .

. . . it's been a weird season.

More later. I'll probably add stuff I wrote about it later. Till then, feel free to peruse the wonderful new widgets to the left over there.

2008-09-05T17:01:00.001-07:00

Like most everyone else, I watched with great interest the other night as Sarah Palin accepted the nomination for Vice President at the Republican convention. I wanted to like her - not enough to change parties and vote for her, but enough that I could say she represented my gender with integrity and intelligence. Unfortunately, beyond the aging beauty queen cuteness of her, there's not much to like.

She said "I told the Congress "thanks, but no thanks," for that Bridge to Nowhere." Not quite - she supported it fully until it became clear how unpopular it was and then changed her tune. She never gave back the money congress gave her to build it, either. Never mind that, though.

She crows about saving the taxpayers money by selling the Governor's private jet on eBay (at a profit, McCain tells us). She said "While I was at it, I got rid of a few things in the governor's office that I didn't believe our citizens should have to pay for. That luxury jet was over the top. I put it on eBay." Not quite true. She tried to sell it on eBay, but no one wanted it and they ended up selling it to a private bidder for six hundred thousand dollars less than it originally cost to buy it. Never mind that, too.

What gets me is her claim that those of us with special needs kids will have a friend in Washington if she is elected. Her sister, who also has a special needs child, tells us that having a child and a nephew with special needs makes Palin aware of how hard we all struggle and we need her in Washington, on our side.

One has to wonder how much Palin has had to struggle, as her child is an infant and she has a full time nanny. Can't have been much of a struggle so far. For the sake of her child, let's hope it stays that way, because services for special needs children in her state are hard to come by since Palin slashed funding for those services by 62% over the last three years. (Budgets: 2007, 2008, 2009).

Lying bitch. Oh, you lying, manipulative bitch. None of my friends, most of whom I met through our special needs children, would ever think to slash funding for the programs that are so critical to our families. Of course, none of us have nannies, either. We've all actually raised our kids and we have fought and clawed for every bit of help we have needed for our children. Without those programs, the quality of our children's lives would have been greatly diminished.

Palin won't know what I'm talking about. Her child is an infant and she has a nanny so her personal experience as a mother of a special needs child is pretty scant. I wonder if she asked her sister, whose son is special needs, what she thinks? What conversations went on at the Thanksgiving table every year after the budget came out and her sister found that there would be even fewer services for her child than the year before? Is dissention allowed? Would there have been any? Does her sister have lots of money and a nanny, too?

Sarah Palin will never need the services that she cut. She has enough money to buy her son all the help he'll never need. We're not all that lucky, but we the people don't really matter and haven't for a long time. Getting into the White House is no longer a matter of public service but of positioning ones self to enjoy the perks of power. It's been a very long time since anyone in the White House gave a tinker's damn about any of us out here.

My family needs those services, though. We don't have a lot of money, or a nanny. We live paycheck to paycheck in an expensive state and although we could live a lot higher on the hog in a different place, we stay in California because California is our son's safety net. California has a law that provides doctors, prescriptions, job training, living assistance, affordable housing, in-home support services . . . anything he will need to survive if something should ever happen to us. He is eligible for these services because he is autistic and epileptic, but he only gets this help as long as he lives in Ca. and because he has lived here for so long. We move out of state, and he has no safety net at all.

Our Governor (also one of the Compassionate Conservatives) has already cut special education funding by $480,000,000 this year. We've spent years terrified that one too many cuts will mean my son no longer is able to attend the special education school we believe saved his life. Too many families are hanging on by their fingernails to trust Sarah Palin who, despite her family being touched by the same special needs issues the rest of us are struggling with, has already shown an alarming lack of concern for these families - her own family, for that matter, by cutting special education funding in Alaska by more than sixty percent.

Any woman with children who votes for this woman ought to be strung up by their ovaries.

2008-09-02T20:44:00.000-07:00

Sparrow at Redondo Beach, Ca.

2008-08-12T21:04:00.000-07:00

Taken at Sea World in July.

2008-04-30T11:11:00.001-07:00

Hundreds, maybe thousands of roses, lilies and birds of paradise strewn up the beach to the base of the cliff. A path for a bride and groom at the beginning of something? Or blooms tossed after the spreading of someone's ashes, a last gift to the dead and the sea? Were they a signal to me of celebration or remembrance? Is the solemnity, evoked in me without explanation or satisfaction, appropriate as I watch the tide wash them away?

2008-04-24T16:49:00.000-07:00

Took the kids out to Malibu and hiked up to the top of Point Dume. Caught this ladybug there.

2008-04-19T16:38:00.000-07:00

So, my oldest daughter and I went to see "Up In Smoke" when it was screened at our local Arclight theater. I normally would never have watched the movie, me not being a stoner kind of gal, or even a stoner movie kind of gal. But Cheech and Chong were supposed to be there together for the first time in I don't know how long to do an after-show Q and A, and I like Cheech a lot and it seemed a one of a kind experience to have with one's oldest daughter, so I went.

I guess a lot of people are stoner kind of people, because they had to add a second show, the one we caught. Unfortunately, Cheech couldn't stay for that one and Chong couldn't stay much longer than that, but he did give us a little something at the beginning. I caught almost all of it before the theater nazis, who didn't mind the people next to me blazing up, told me to stop taping. I wouldn't mind one of my kids bringing home a Chong kind of person. And to be honest, the movie had some very funny bits. We sat there with our drinks, breathing in the smoke from the people next to us and laughed - and I wondered when it happened that I went from shrieking "just say no!" at her to this.

2008-04-14T21:25:00.001-07:00

Our happy, bonding bunnies.

Our family has been given three free sets of tickets to Disneyland in the last two years, all recompense for various transgressions this squeaky wheel refused to let quietly pass. Someone got hurt or scared or was treated badly, that kind of thing. I mention this because I overheard the kids discussing a news story they heard about a family suing a water park after their little girl got hurt on a water slide.

The kids were suggesting that perhaps "pushing a jellybean size person down a fifty foot water drop" wasn't the smartest of moves and I agree. Contact Children's Protective Services. Then call a lawyer. Opportunistic? Hell yes - the parents were dumb, but so was the ride operator, where the buck is supposed to make its last stop before being shot down a fifty foot water slide.

It's like I tell my kids - I don't encourage anyone putting their hands in the water on Pirates of the Caribbean or standing up on California Screaming. However, if one of them does it and gets hurt, the very first thing I will do, after turning to my child and calling them a dumbass, will be to turn to the ride operator and tell them they'll be hearing from our lawyer.

Then again, my retirement plan depends heavily on hoping to be hit by a city fire truck.

2008-04-13T13:27:00.000-07:00

I've been busy with the jewelry thing. Found that flea markets are not my venue and am seriously thinking of making a catalog that I leave in doctor's offices who specialize in geriatrics, maybe assisted living centers for seniors. I like the arthritis friendly aspect and am wondering how to expand on that - allergy free, maybe? Hm.

My son was asked to the prom by the love of his life - a girl who, to this point, had only wanted to be friends with him. I'm happy for him, and scared. If this girl trifles with his heart, I'll have to break her little legs, which will make being friends with her mom impossible. Shame, because I liked her mom.

Want to know what I've been up to when I'm not doing the jewelry thing? I've become addicted to Plant Tycoon, a game that lets you grow and design plants in real time. I love sim games like this. Remember when Sim City first hit the shelves? I'd spend hours in front of the screen with that one. That's what I've been doing this weekend - cleaning and every now and then, checking on my plants to see who is doing what.

I'd tell you to try it out, but there'd be a bit of a malicious element to it. It feels like offering heroin to someone for the first time. I'll be your pusher and you can be my junkie.

2008-03-27T06:36:00.000-07:00

Roosters. At the lake. As promised. Stop bitching.

I think I am going to opt for surgery to cure my sleep apnea. I've had it since I was a baby, so it isn't weight related. Still, because I have sleep apnea, I could get the stomach surgery without waiting if I wanted it. I don't. I want to do the nasal kind - or whatever they do in the nose or throat that makes sleep apnea stop.

2008-03-26T07:53:00.000-07:00

My husband and I went to the lake early this morning in hopes of fitting in some exercise/together time before the kids got up. This is how we were greeted, by hundreds of these little black water birds and their few duck friends. I guess the ducks wait a little longer to get up. They've posted signs saying not to feed the birds at the lake - they don't learn to forage for themselves, the food people give them is too high in fat and the birds won't go to the gym, the entire environment will collapse if people insist on feeding the birds at Lake Balboa, etc - but I ignore them and feed them surreptitiously. This is not an easy thing to do, but I found it's easier first thing in the morning, when it's still dark and the lake Gestapo is still too groggy to notice us.

They can go poo on themselves. People have been feeding those birds for roughly twenty years. The birds are fine, if a little complacent, arrogant and yeah, maybe chubby. I don't think the polar ice caps will melt any faster if we keep feeding them crackers.

So - in the time since I last wrote anything here, my oldest girl turned twenty-one, my mother in law had an angioplasty, I started going back to the gym and world peace ensued. I would have been able to spend more time here if not for the world peace, thing. It takes an awful lot of my time to instill peace throughout the whole world. My balcony is a riot of color and blooms. I may even get the passion flower to bloom this year. If so, I'll take pics.

Most of my time has been spent setting up the Etsy and South Park shops. It's a lot of work. What I really need is a small business loan and a room I can dedicate to my work space. Well, ok, what I really need is a small business loan, a mini van, a house with five or six bedrooms (one of which I can use for an office), a new camera and a laptop. A really killer laptop that makes other laptop owners wither with shame and envy.

In other news, my mother in law is ok now. My oldest girl went out with her aunt and I and had her first drink with us - a Cosmopolitan that she hated. Likewise the White Russian. She found the strawberry daiquiri tolerable. I think it's safe to say that alcoholism is not in her future. It will be interesting to see what she orders with her dinner next time we go out, though.

The other two kids are doing fine. We all went back to Disneyland over spring break and took more photos - yes, more photos of the Magical Kingdom. There is no excess in the Magical Kingdom. Neither are there calories, fat or diets. Or self-control, for that matter. I shot video of the new Nemo ride for you, but don't know yet how well it turned out. How about Soarin Over California? Or Star Tours? I tell you what - buy me all that other stuff and I'll show all four videos!

Have a magical day.

2008-03-18T07:49:00.000-07:00

ANNETTE!!!!!

You didn't leave an e mail address or link back to you! Do that immediately. Quicker, if you can!

2008-03-04T22:24:00.000-08:00

I finished this yesterday - took me a whole day and a half to do it.

The two places I applied to wanted me after all. One of them is a fairly prestigious place and I am one of several hundred who wanted in and got picked. It's been raved about in my local paper, even. It's the kind of place where I might be able to get away with charging what my stuff is really worth. I can't believe they want me and I suddenly have a lot more to do. I have to buy one of those tent canopy jobs, for one thing. I have to do a lot more signage and I need to make more stuff. A lot more stuff.

The other one- look, I really don't want to look a gift horse in the mouth. I'm grateful they liked my stuff. But it had been billed to me as a 'high traffic' spot very near a local blocks-wide shopping hotspot. I went to check out the location and the street itself is nowhere near the local hotspots and there was almost no traffic. No one entered the store the entire time we were there. The signage needed work because there was no reason at all for anyone to enter that store if they walked past it on the street. Inside, it was a little dingy and depressing, one step above a thrift shop. It was a long, skinny room with incomplete shelving on the wall and I was supposed to pay eighty dollars a month, plus twenty five percent of my sales, for a couple of those shelves. I'm glad I checked it out and now I have to find a graceful way of declining.

I can't believe I am in a position to pick and choose. What is happening to me?

2008-03-02T16:21:00.001-08:00

Yeah, thought there would be a picture EVERY time, didn't you?? I didn't want you too complacent. Besides, I left you a video a few minutes ago, so stop complaining.

I'm terrified. The jewelry I thought was so pretty and which was selling so well at craft shows is NOTHING compared to some of the things the people are making on the rest of that site. I suddenly feel completely sophomoric and want to roll up my tent and go home.

What I did instead was apply to two more shows to be a vendor. The best possible role model for the kids is to plow ahead and face my fears. Plus, bonus check is in a week and I can afford some really exquisite stuff to work with. My biggest problem is in figuring how to price things - am I selling myself short or thinking too much of myself? I found the most incredible vintage glass beads at Beadniks in Santa Monica, where they were gracious enough to put them opn hold for me, but at eleven to forty five dollars a bead, I can hardly charge as little as I normally do for the stuff I make.

I don't know what I was thinking. Nothing I have put in the store at Etsy really showcases anything I do, none of my really favorite things (except the fishie one - I like that one a lot). Is it that I am afraid my taste would be too weird to really market or is it that I know, somewhere deep down, that I suck? Am I a frustrated artist priced out of her medium or am I just another mother of special needs kids looking for proof that there is more to her life?

2008-03-02T16:10:00.000-08:00

I don't know what they're doing here at first. I think calling out to friends. I know what they were up to at the end, though. That goose wanted to kill me. Don't be fooled by their adorable, fluffy facades - geese have serrated beaks and are extremely territorial. I guess if I want to be friends with them I'll have to be there when they're born, then raise them with our kids and cats and bunnies and birds. In our apartment.

Not that there is all that much raising left to do here. My youngest is going to be eighteen very soon. He was only nine when I started this blog and he hadn't yet been diagnosed with Aspergers. He's earning his own money now through his school's workability program. It's not much, but it's his and is motivating him to go to school every day better than the other rewards he's earned for attendance. Nonetheless, my husband and I are seriously considering setting up a conservatorship of him, so no one can trick my beautiful, naive son into signing anything like, oh say, a military contract. Does the military take autistic kids? They don't, do they?

Right?

2008-02-29T04:03:00.000-08:00

More of the unlikely stream. I may never say another word ever again about anything but the wildlife preserve. I may never say anything again at all. I may only post pictures.

Well, maybe I'll say something brief. Just to have a little more text to wrap around the pic, you think? Ok.

Maybe I'll start that in a separate paragraph, just to take a little more space.

Maybe not.

Any of you watching In Treatment? I get HBO in demand, so I get to watch the whole week's worth of episodes on Monday afternoon. I'm utterly addicted. You should watch it. Or read what I'm reading right now. The Almost Moon by Alice Sebold.

2008-02-24T01:45:00.000-08:00

Another moon you can barely see. I can't believe this is less than a mile from my place, my place on its noisy boulevard with its myriad, smelly cars. I want to move into the wildlife preserve. I'm alive. I'm wild. It could work.

2008-02-21T23:14:00.000-08:00

My hand shakes too much to get a really good shot, but we had a complete lunar eclipse the other night. The earth, sun and moon aligned just right, a shadow spilled across the surface of the moon, people danced in the streets with flowers in their hair and openly smoked pot while conceiving love children to be named things like "Star" and "Moonbeam" later on.

Hey - you have your eclipse, I'll have mine, ok?

2008-02-20T08:07:00.001-08:00

I've lived in Encino for fourteeen years or so, a mile from the Sepulveda Wildlife Preserves, but I never went down into them until last week. I spent four hours over two days and shot more than a thousand pictures. There's an unlikely little creek that runs alongside and eventually empties into the L.A. river, and built into it here and there along its banks are these little dugouts. I don't know how they develop but later on I saw baby cranes in one. I wanted to get close enough to shoot but I didn't want to scare the birds.

There are a lot of cranes out there.

Jessica - ONE of my kids' eight or nine essential textbooks this semester cost $129 at the student store, but at Amazon I got that one, plus another PLUS expedited shipping for $103. Just another option for the rest of you struggling students out there.

2008-02-19T08:11:00.001-08:00

2008-02-17T10:24:00.001-08:00

My daughter and I were at Universal Studios this weekend. A perfect, sunny day made all the better by this rainbow which showed up during the Waterworld show (water mist from gun meets sunshine). Doesn't it look like it's pouring directly into the water? Am I the ONLY one who roots for the bad guy? He's hot.

So, I have stuff up at Etsy. No one is buying, though. Where are all you people out there who want to buy my crap?? I have kids, people! Tuition and textbooks to pay for!!

Oh! I've started playing with polyclays to make my own focal beads. So expect to . . uh . . see some of that. Yup.

I'm bored. I shouldn't be, because the house needs to be dusted, bits and pieces of paperwork and various crafts need to be filed and put away. it's a perfectly gorgeous day outside and I could take the kids out (husband at work) but I am. I'm bored. I blame you personally for not entertaining me.

2008-02-13T14:46:00.002-08:00

I now have a shop on Etsy. Five whole pieces listed, the photos are wrong and it's too hard to mess with it right now. I'm tired, headachy, pissy and bitter because I am trying to lose weight again. I figured that now would be a good time, since I'm starting a new business and all. My life wasn't quite stressful enough, see.

So here I go again. I lost eighty pounds last time, gained it back and developed a phobia of trying again. But I've been watching The Biggest Loser with the kids every week and I feel inspired. Wish me luck - I am really scared to lose weight because I don't want to gain it back.

2008-02-13T11:27:00.000-08:00

Cinny found a bunny in the glass. She and Ichabod get along fine, by the way. For a while there, before Cinny was spayed, she was pretty aggressive in her desire to have baby buns and poor Icky, having been neutered, had no idea what she wanted. She wanted babies so bad she convinced herself she was pregnant anyways, and started pulling out her hair to make a nest. Help me. But now all is well and a whole bunch of yucky bunny behaviors disappeared with her utuerus and my four hundred and fifty dollars.

2008-02-12T22:16:00.000-08:00

The sale was abysmal. The area was downtown Los Angeles, near but not in either the Jewelry or Fashion districts, in a part of town where you have ninety year old buildings that were once grand hotels but which now house mostly people who are one step above indigent. It's being redeveloped and will, one day, be kind of SoHo funky, but right now the people walking up and down the street were mostly homeless or fast on their way out of the neighborhood.

The store in which we had the sale was on the bottom floor of one of those hotels – retail on the bottom floor, rooms above. It was once a coffee shop but was now empty, gutted and being remodeled. NO signage outside to indicate what was going on inside, except one handwritten note on the door, which offered the only glimpse into the room because all the windows were painted over.

I usually walk away from a sale with three to five hundred bucks. That day I made a whole twenty dollars, almost the cost of the space I rented. But I did meet some nice, enviably creative people. I bought fishie beads from this woman (I like fish, alright??) and made this above necklace from them. I'm not quite happy with it - something seems to be missing, more of a seaweedy presence to it. Maybe I should have bubbles interspersed along the chains? Did I get the fish in the water feel right? Let me know. I have to get more fish from her. I have to have all the fish beads in the world.

I also traded a pair of earrings for a Grump. You either get them right away or you never will. I want a house full of them.

In other news, I now have a once a month contract to have a sale at a nearby assisted living center. I think I am going to approach several other centers in the area. At first I felt like I was taking advantage, but it was explained to me that these are lucid people who can't get out easily and that I would be preforming a service for them. Okaaaaayyyy - anyone else agree with that? Is it right to sell at assisted living centers or is it preying on the elderly? Even if they are lucid?

2008-02-06T22:57:00.001-08:00

Tree.

I'm stressed six ways to Sunday. I've somehow become the favorite child of a little old lady who, though genuinely sweet and filled with nothing but good intentions, is co-opting my jewelry business. To be fair, it han't been without profit to me, but at the same time, not the profit it should be. She asked me to leave a bunch of my inventory with her so she could sell it for me and I gave her the prices, but, being a little old lady, she kept forgetting so I didn't get what I should have.

I don't even know how it happened! One of her friends liked the gift I gave her and wanted to buy one, so I brought a bunch with me the next time I went to see her and she insisted I leave it all with her. I didn't want to but I just didn't know how to say no to her.

Well, I guess that's how it happened.

The director of the center wants me to have a sale there once a month.

Groan.

She has half my bracelet inventory and I have a show downtown this weekend, so I've frantically been trying to restock. I've made ten or eleven bracelets in the last two days and I have thirteen or fourteen more to do, as well as earrings and necklaces before Saturday.

AARRGGHH!

2008-01-29T00:35:00.000-08:00

The Los Angeles River from the 101 freeway, Midnight, 1-28-08

I've decided to try to write a book without classes. If a publisher wants it, they can clean it up any way they want. Long as they pay me.

I have a story to tell. Maybe it’s important to write it. Maybe it will help someone. Or maybe I just need to vomit it all up once and for all into the ether, just to help me. A lot of the people involved will tell you how I’m really good at that, doing what’s best for me no matter what the consequences, but it isn’t true. Most of them are the people who did what was best for them and I am the consequences.

They’ll tell you I remember it all wrong, even the parts they weren’t there for. They’ll tell you about a child’s memory, or how terrible emotion can color a memory and maybe all that’s true. I know that’s true. Nonetheless, of the five or six versions of the truth there are, one for each of us, I know mine is the truest one. I‘m the unflinching one and I've never been willing to rewrite the history in order to stay in favor. They had to compromise, I wouldn't. I remember everything the way it really was.

In any case, they won’t have much to bitch about. If I do this right, most of them will never know I wrote it. I won’t tell them it got published, not even to rub their noses in it. This is mine – let them write their own story. This is mine and there are people I love that I want to protect from what happened to me and what happens when you tell the truth.

2008-01-24T16:42:00.000-08:00

A sunset I stole.

I can't afford to take a class right now. Between books and tuition, it's going to cost us about twelve hundred dollars for our girls to stay in school this semester. I sent their ratfuck sperm donor an e-mail asking him to pay just a quarter of that amount. I want to be hopeful, but I can hear him laughing four hundred miles away.

He's taken up with the woman he left me for so many years ago. This does not bother me as much as it did then, or as much as it would have if the kids were still small enough to be influenced by her. I'm ashamed to say it bothers me at all. That ego, boy. What a killer.

I would make jokes about his demise but as soon as I did he would die and, just to spite me, all the evidence would point to me. If I were in Rome for the six months prior to his death, if I were at the knee of the Pope at the moment of his death, still, somehow, all the evidence would point to me.

That's the kind of relationship we have.

Not that I don't try. I'm nice to him until my stomach bleeds. I try to bend until my discs grind. For the kids. For the kids, I will break, if I need to.

But please, not over or in front of him.

2008-01-21T10:32:00.000-08:00

Murmur, drinking my daughter's milk.

2008-01-20T23:05:00.001-08:00

Storm coming in.

I was going back and forth this afternoon about whether or not to try a creative writing class. If I try that, I would probably have to take a very basic English class, first. I can't write a book if I don't know where to stick my commas and semi-colons, etc. Would one English class be enough? Would I need to read some books I don't want to read just to refresh my knowledge of how to structure a sentence and where not to stick a preposition? How would I afford to take the class and get the books and still pay for the girls' semesters? Would it be a better role model to go? In the end, why bother when they are all too old to really benefit from the proceeds of the book which will no doubt be a best seller?

Then I had a startling thought - they may be too old to benefit from it, but any money I made would benefit Lyle and I when we retired.

That's the first time I have ever really thought about us in the afterlife as people who would still need money. I mean, of course I worry about how we will live when he retires, but this is the first time I have ever really thought of us as existing beyond the kids.

Now I feel really guilty.

In any case, I think I'll take a basic English course.

2008-01-20T17:26:00.000-08:00

The third men's room on that stretch of beach?

I've made about seven hundred dollars selling the jewelry I make. Give or take. I sell at church boutiques and craft fairs. I'm getting orders from people who saw my stuff on someone else. It's all a little heady and scary. I really enjoy doing it and at the same time, any time I have to do something, I rebel. It seems instinctive, this need to refuse to do what I must do. I want to lay it down to being afraid of success but I think there is more to it than that, an almost pathological fear of expectations of me.

2008-01-19T23:06:00.001-08:00

There were dozens of dolphins out that day, right up against the shore in the surf. Still, I had to shoot four hundred times to get this one, fuzzy picture.
**********************************

So, I went to work on the archives and - heh heh - can't find them. I'll have to dig through dozens of discs. I will because some of the stuff is still relevant to the point of this thing. All the stuff about cancer, the time I went loony tunes, etc.

How many people with blogs let people they know offline read them? My blog was never intended to be read by anyone I would ever have to look in the eye, with the exception of those people I had met online, mostly through the blog. But the people in my offline world - friends, family - who ever intends that they see the kind of things we talk about in blogs like mine? It was intended mostly for me as therapy - I worked through almost everything via the anonymity of the web and the feedback of kind but faceless others. I would never have invited friends or family into my therapy and, had they been reading, the blog would have been useless to me in that ragard.

I ask because I have allowed someone I know offline to read the blog, if they want to. I rather doubt they will read it all, so they may well miss most of the worst stuff. But it worries me, people seeing me so naked in so many ways, people I will still want to have coffee with later on. It makes things unbalanced, that they can conceivably learn so much about me and I know almost nothing about them and it makes me wonder why I gave out the URL in the first place.

2008-01-18T18:16:00.000-08:00

I was reading the blog of a friend of a new friend (yes, I made one, so what?? - oh, that's right. You don't know how social I have been lately. We'll come back to that later.) who is discussing her surprise at the importance of an engagement ring.

It surprised me, too. When I married my husband, we couldn't afford an engagement ring. We could barely afford wedding rings. We decided that since he was the one who spent most of his time in an office and I most of mine at home, he should get the better ring. At the time, I told myself that it didn't matter what kind of ring I had, as long as the fucker was on my finger. It was a symbol, after all, not the whole enchilada. I settled for a simple, five dollar silver band. We spent a little over three hundred dollars on his gold band.

It took eight years for us to be able to afford a real wedding ring for me and it wasn't until I put it on my hand, all just over a carat of its sparkly little self, that I realized how I had earlier devalued myself and how much the ring was supposed to be symbolizing. I worry about what five dollars says about the value we both placed on me at the time.

I know better now, of course. More about marriage and what that ring means and I certainly place more value on me and my own worth. If I could have, I would spent five or six thousand this time around and you can bet that, eight years from now, I am going to expect one hell of an expensive anniversary ring.

2008-01-18T16:55:00.001-08:00

Malibu California 1-13-08

2008-01-17T16:20:00.000-08:00

Reasons I stopped writing in my blog

#1: So much was happening that it all blended together in my head and ended up word soup. I couldn't pick out the individual ingredients anymore without being tainted by the flavors on either side of them.

#2: No time. For a while, there was sick kid number one, two or three and I was too tired to post and kind enough not to post every day that my child still hurts (you really ought to thank me for this - Starbucks gift cards are always nice). When there was time, the last thing I wanted to do was sit here and feel dumb because I was daunted by the word soup I would need to wade through to get to what I really wanted to say.

#3: I couldn't figure out what I really wanted to say. Did I talk about my fears for my son? My fears for my children in general? My concern that having fears for one's children makes you a really bad mother? Should I talk about middle age? What I was doing with my time? What I felt I should be doing with it? Should I talk about the day I realized that I no longer needed to have my phone with me every time I walked away from my house because there were no real crises there at the moment? Maybe I should have talked about what I thought I should do when the day came that my kids didn't need me so much anymore - or should I talk about my fears that that day will never really come or, worse, my HOPE that that day will never really come? Should I talk about what I did with my day? What I didn't do with it? My desire to lose weight or the pounds I had gained that week? My fears for my marriage or my fear that I was being too hard on myself (and him) by worrying so much about it all?

Should I post a photo every day? Which photos? Is it bad that I really love water shots? Would people be getting bored of water shots? Would they be bored by stories of my kids? Should I finish archiving the blog? Do I keep the blog or not and if I don't, why should I finish the archives? What if nobody is reading me anymore? Do I want to go back to the days when I had several thousand hits a day? Should I promote the site in the hope that I can sell my photos? Do I have a responsibility to keep writing? Do I love to write anymore? When was the last time I was really turned on by anything? What the hell is happening to me? What if nothing is wrong with me? What if something is so wrong it bleeds into my work and no wants to see it or read it or wear it?

Should I take a creative writing class? Should I take digital photography classes so I can photograph the jewelry and sell it on eBay? What if I list something on eBay and someone steals the design? What if a million people want to buy my jewelry? What if I get a lot of offers for my photos? What if I stop futzing around and face the fact that I am talented and WASTING it? Is there an imperative not to waste talent? Do I have a responsibility to market anything I can in order to take some of the financial burden off my husband? What if I did well enough to support myself one day?

Is it really the worst thing in the world to make your own holiday cards and want the address labels to match? To obsess over the tiniest detail of everything you do so that no one can possibly find fault with you? To have been so afraid of being found guilty of something that I had because obsequious in order to avoid making anyone unhappy? Do I write about how I sometimes hate to think about the ways I have had to bend over backwards or my fear that I never really needed to in the first place?

So, you see, it all gets to where no matter what I start with, it immediately becomes a jumble of something else. I seemed to have lost the self discipline of my earlier stuff, maybe because I was so focused on so many things that I lost focus of everything. I hated the output, so I stopped putting out.

Heh. That's a good line, though.

2007-08-11T16:49:00.000-07:00

I've been gone a long time, I know. I've been off learning new skills and - don't laugh - I forgot my login details for my blogger account. Took me the longest time to remember it. I couldn't ask them to send it to me because I had cancelled the old e mail addresses associated with the account.

Doy.

2007-06-11T11:46:00.000-07:00

Hey - look what my cacti are doing!

This Christmas cactus hasn't bloomed once in the several years I've had him. Now he's spilling all over the place.

I'm sure there's a name for this cactus, but I don't know what it is. We'll just call it a Fred. This exotic Fred cactus is putting out a ton of gorgeous flowers. Between the two, they make me want to ditch my geraniums and hibiscus and cover the balcony in cacti. I wonder if this is what the desert looks like right now? Maybe I should take the kids out this weekend to see.

2007-06-11T07:13:00.000-07:00

A few years back, my sister was looking through my son's first year baby calendar and noted that my remarks about his development were all 'normal' and 'perfect' until he got his first set of shots, and THEN I started noting funny stuff. This was right around the time that the whole thing about thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative that used to be used in kid vaccines, and the possibility that it was causing autism in our kids, came to a head.

Of course, the government immediately pooh poohed the idea that they would allow our children to be deliberately injected with chemicals which could harm them, by golly, and they were offended - offended, I tell you, at the mere suggestion. But it wouldn't be the first time the government told us a chemical was safe to use only to find later that it had horrific consequences for our kids. 'Thimerosal' even sounds like 'Thalidomide', doesn't it?

A flurry of studies on both sides of the controversy ensued, each stating unequivocally that their side was right. In the middle, you have parents of kids with various degrees of autism who are trying to live with the probability that we injected our kids with their disorder. That we took them to the doctor, told them it would 'just be a little pinch', injected them with autism, impaired them for life, then gave them a lollipop. Behind us, you have all the parents of kids who are told that their child cannot attend public (and most private) schools unless they have their immunizations.

The government says they no longer use thimerosal in kid vaccines.

No, really. Stop laughing. They told us they did and by golly that's good enough for several rednecks out in ButtFuck County, USA.

But not me. And not for a lot of us still trying to find out why the incidence of autism related disorders rose in California 270% between 1987 and 1998. And god help them all if the courts vote that they lied to us. Hell hath no fury like a mother.

"Court to Focus on Vaccine-Autism Link
From Associated Press
June 11, 2007 8:38 AM EDT

WASHINGTON - Thousands of families that allege vaccines caused their children's autism are preparing for their day in court, which could bring them vindication and compensation.

Since 1999, more than 4,800 families have filed claims with the government alleging their children developed autism as a result of routine vaccinations. Most contend that a preservative called thimerosal is to blame for the impaired social interaction typical of the disorder.

Previously, large scientific studies have found no association between autism and vaccines containing thimerosal.

But many parents say their children's symptoms did not show up until after their children received the vaccines, required by many states for admission to school. If they prevail in the courts, the families are entitled to compensation from a multibillion-dollar trust fund.

The first of what eventually could be nine test cases from those claims is the subject of the hearing opening Monday in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims. Three special masters appointed by the court will preside over the hearing, expected to last through June 29.

The court is being asked to decide whether there is a link between autism and childhood vaccines. If it finds one exists, the families could be eligible for compensation under the Vaccine Injury Compensation Fund, a program established by Congress to ensure an adequate supply of vaccines by safeguarding manufacturers from lawsuits. Under the program, people injured by vaccines receive compensation through a special trust fund.

Autism is characterized by impaired social interaction. Those affected often have trouble communicating, and they exhibit unusual or severely limited activities and interests. Classic symptoms of mercury poisoning include anxiety, fatigue and abnormal irritation, as well as cognitive and motor dysfunction.

Monday's case addresses the theory that the cause of autism is the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine in combination with other vaccines containing thimerosal. The preservative, about 50 percent mercury by weight, is no longer found in routine childhood vaccines but is used in some flu shots.

In July 1999, the U.S. government asked vaccine manufacturers to eliminate or reduce, as expeditiously as possible, the mercury content of their vaccines to avoid any possibility of infants who receive vaccines being exposed to more mercury than is recommended by federal guidelines."

2007-06-09T22:57:00.000-07:00

Newsweek recently ran a story interviewing several of the people I work with at the pain foundation. One of them sent me an e-mail with a link to a response to that story which worries that comments made in the Newsweek piece about new, addiction-resistant pain meds somehow sets us back in the struggle to differentiate between ‘addiction’ and ‘dependence’.

Excluding a brief, sadly unrequited correspondence with Edward Albert when I was a teen and hopelessly in love with him, I don’t send fan mail. I don’t write letters to my favorite stars and despite having a lot to say, I don’t write letters to the editor. I almost never respond to magazine articles. However, the Stats piece seemed to me to be missing the point.

So.

“Dear Sirs and/or Madams,

Re: your recent story “Newsweek’s Painful War on Pain”, I agree that there is a difference between ‘addicted’ and ‘dependent’ and that we need to work hard to disabuse doctors and lay people of the notion that one equals the other or we will never remove the stigma of drug-seeking, self-indulgent whininess so many pain patients face when trying to get some relief. As the mother of a child with a pervasive pain disorder, I’ve watched doctors who should know better apply those stigmas and labels to my child, suggesting she was an addict when all she wanted was to stop hurting. The way pain patients are treated today, if my daughter had become ill as a small child and I asked for Dilaudid or Vicodin, I would likely have been branded with Munchausen’s Syndrome and investigated. Lucky us – my daughter was a teen so it was naturally assumed she was just a junkie and often left to suffer with nearly unbearable pain. So trust me. I KNOW how important it is to educate about the difference between addiction and dependency.

However, it is important to note that being dependent on a drug rather than addicted to it does not necessarily protect a patient from the physical or emotional effects of addiction. It doesn’t always. My teen age daughter first became sick in December of 2004. She was a good student, in honors in some subjects, tutoring kids in others and active in school clubs and activities. Despite nearly daily calls from me asking if there was an opening, a cancellation, anything, we would take anything at all, it wasn’t until October of the following year that we were able to get her in with a pediatric pain clinic. During that time, as she was shuffled from one doctor to the next, one hospital stay to the next, as we tried one less benign med after another with no effect, she became dependent on the only medications which stopped the pain, all narcotics.

In the months it took us to get her to the right specialist and in the months of trial and error that followed as we tried to find out why she hurt, my daughter took a lot of narcotics. It was a miracle to watch my daughter stop hurting when she took one of the pills, but it was a miracle that came with a high price tag. First, as her disease progressed, it took more and more pills to see the look in her eyes that signaled pain relief, because the longer you take the med, the more you need of it to get any effect. What started as one pill soon became two and four. Then there was the toll it took on her digestive system. On top of her initial disease, she developed problems with her stomach and colon, problems which caused terrible pain of their own and which came with solutions that could best be described as humiliating. You get more narcotics for that, too.

Then there was the emotional effect of being told, in words and oh, the endless gestures, that she’s a junkie, that nothing is really wrong with her but self indulgence and addiction. Being told that if she really cared about her family, she would stop ‘acting out’ or that if she really wanted to stop hurting, she could make herself stop hurting. You can’t imagine what it’s like to watch your child try to force herself out of hurting, only to be unable to and, as she reaches for the pills, tell you she’s sorry she’s a junkie. She’s sorry she’s ruining your life. She’ll try harder not to hurt. Never mind that she had a real disease and she wasn’t drug seeking or a junkie and certainly not ruining anyone’s life. The doctors told her so, see. “You’re my Mom,” she tells me – “you have to tell me I’m not a junkie.” She trusted the doctors to give her the truth unvarnished by love for her and what she got was a bunch of prejudiced malarkey that did as much harm as the disease itself was doing.

Eventually, at the pain clinic, we found a terrific doctor with experience and sense and compassion and humor. She had us try every alternative, non-medication therapy you can think of: acupuncture, bio-feedback, cranio-sacral therapy, hypno-therapy and Chinese herbalists and when those didn’t work, it took months more to find a new med that relieved my daughter’s pain and wasn’t a narcotic. When we succeeded in that, we had to wean her off the ‘junkie’ drugs and she went through the same withdrawal symptoms any real addict in rehab does as they detox. We got her through that but she is still, two and a half years after she first got sick, battling the stomach and emotional problems the narcotics caused her. Worse, she tends to think in terms of a pill for every twitch her body makes. I worry about possible addiction issues for her down the line.

So let the drug companies make new, better, more effective addiction-resistant drugs. New addiction resistant meds are important not primarily because of the addict but to protect the dependent patient who may later need to be weaned from them. I laud any company who can find a way to give pain patients relief that won’t cause as much harm as the conditions they are trying to treat."

2007-06-04T08:52:00.000-07:00

A mourning dove and her babies, nesting in the eaves above my in-laws porch.

So, yeah, I've been gone most of April and all of May. I haven't had anything much to say about the stuff going on. On the one hand, that's good - better to be in the world doing than writing about doing. On the other hand, I miss the old days when I could sit here and every thought I ever had would just rush out of me and pour all over the pages. I feel a certain writer's constipation. It isn't that I don't think, it's that I'm not writing much and what I do write is, well, you can see that for yourself. Part of that, of course, is the nearly daily migraines of late. Whose idea was that?

Oh, well. Tis always a trade off, no? I'm not sitting here writing, but I am out and about getting more done. I've been fairly manic about spring cleaning and there's the photography. Someone has approached me about partnering my themes for sale with her website and there's always the kid and husband stuff.

I can't get rid of the feeling that something is happening and I am either missing it or ignoring it willfully. The only thing I seem to be able to focus on is cleaning. I clean and feel good that I am getting something done, but when I'm cleaning I feel like I'm letting everything else slide and everyone else down. If I'm cleaning, I'm not doing my still mostly undefined job with the pain people. I'm not being a perfect mother - baking cookies, sewing clothes the kids wouldn't wear if I did or, for chuckles, curing my kids. I'm not crock potting the perfect roast.

I wish I could put my finger on what it is and organize it all so I am doing every single thing I am supposed to do part of in every single day. But if I did that, wouldn't I be in the middle of a manic phase and, as such, on the way to a hospital? Can bi-polar people do it all without being in a manic phase?

Yeah, yeah, blah blah. I have to go do the carpets.

2007-04-19T19:42:00.000-07:00

On the lawn outside my balcony. I thought maybe she had hurt herself but when I reached to pick her up, she zipped off, right as rain. I guess she was just getting some sun.

I'm still trying to find funny ways to talk about pain. Does it count if, when my middle girl was in the hospital, we would joke about going up to the eating disorders floor and call the anorexics fat? Or pretending to have code blues? Or that I made earrings for all the nurses because I knew they would be better for my kid if they liked me?

I don't know. I do a lot of funny things to distract her when she hurts but mostly it's just watching her hurt. I'm not seeing the humorous side of that. It may be a failing of mine, maybe I am singularly morose and lack vision, but I see no funny side to my kid laying in bed, hooked up to tubes and wires and begging for something to make the pain stop.

I don't know what I'm supposed to tell them.

2007-04-19T12:01:00.000-07:00

An aging hibiscus on someone else's property, shot while I was taking insurance photos.

2007-04-14T20:34:00.000-07:00

Can you see the bee in this flower? While I stood there, trying to get a good bee pic, they noticed me in a way that made me very nervous. They didn't sting me, but they did kind of hang around my hair and smell me. I read somewhere that because of global warming, the pollen the bees are getting is substandard, and the way the flowers get pollinated is off because flowers are opening too early or late in the season. Is it bad of me to hope that bottle brush trees go, if any have to? I see no point to bottle brush trees and they leave those nasty, pointy things on the ground when they shed.

The pain people want me to be witty on the subject of pain for their newsletter. I don't know how to be witty about pain, though. When I write about my child's pain it feels more like I'm aiming a flamethrower at the screen and burning the words into the program than that I am writing anything and I don't know how it comes off funny.

But they think I am funny in general (thanks, guys). Maybe I can find something funny about my own pain, but I never really think about my own. I am so focused on everyone else that, except to note it and swallow a couple of pills, I don't pay attention to my own pain anymore.

2007-04-13T20:23:00.000-07:00

This greeted me when I opened the balcony blinds the other morning. He (she?) sat there the whole time I cleaned and only got nervous when I opened the balcony door. He (she?) was eating the wild bird seed I left out for them. Since I started putting seed out there, we have doves and blue jays with our sparrows and hummingbirds.

I don't know where this guy got the peanut - I don't put them out there. I really enjoy the birds. I especially enjoy wild birds I am not personally responsible for.

I haven't updated you on the new bunny. Turns out it's a girl bun (good thing we just got Icky neutered). With her mommie, my middle girl:

At first, Icky was kind of aggressive. My daughter swears he growled at the new bunny. I didn't know rabbits could growl, but I have seen him jump at her and take bits of fur. He's mostly calmed down at this point, though, and they are learning to be bunny friends:

As long as Cinnabun remembers that Ichabod is the Head Bun, I think we'll be fine.

2007-04-11T11:21:00.001-07:00

Today I did my first conference call with the pain people and was reminded why I stepped out of the world in the first place. It brings back every nasty memory of every time I had to speak publicly in high school and flubbed it. I know I can be great for them if I can just do it via this format, but if I am going to need to open my mouth, they 're going to think I'm an ignorant hick. Especially if I don't answer every need they have right out of the gate.

Argh.

Further, my child still hurts. I realized, half way through this call, that every move I make is designed to make my kid stop hurting. Under everything else, my sincere desire to help other people not withstanding, my immediate and insistent need is to make my child stop hurting. If I help the world and she still hurts, what good am I doing? What right do I have to help someone else if I haven't first helped her? Do I have a right to do anything to ease the pain of someone else if my child continues to hurt?

Do I have the right to breathe if my child still hurts?

WHY DOES MY KID STILL HURT????

2007-04-08T17:17:00.000-07:00

My daughters, who have recently bonded sweetly over their shared bunny stuff, spent the better part of this holiday trying to out-insult each other. Overheard:

"Body by Nautilus, brain by Mattel"

"When you were born, they said "Oh what a treasure. Go bury it""

"You have issues." "Oh, yeah? You have a subscription."

And something about being an aborted spider crawling back out of the bucket, but I missed all of that one.

2007-04-08T12:56:00.000-07:00

This is me screaming into the ether:

AARRGGHH!

I have bunny, bird and cat homes to get cleaned, laundry to fold, toilets to scrub AND several dozen pineapple drop cookies my mother in law must have for dessert this evening. I'm stressed and ready to kill the next person who hesitates when I say "move."

2007-03-28T15:49:00.000-07:00

Next to my middle girl's orthodontist is a pet store. We regularly visit the pet store after seeing Dr. M, because we like to look at cute animals. The kids usually swear not to ask for the animals and then swear to give up their first born children if I just let them have the kitten/puppy/parrot/rat they inevitably fall in love with. I tell them no every time and every time I swear that this is the last time we are going into the pet store after seeing Dr. M.

I'm utterly unreliable.

This is Cinnabun, and Cinnabun is three months old. We do not yet know if Cinnabun is a boy or a girl, but it is definitely a bunny. I fell in love with Cinnabun when he/she came running up to greet us as we entered the store. I'd never seen a bunny do that - usually they are tolerant of the profuse attention we bestow, but they don't seek it out.

That's all it took, really. That and picking it up and having it fall asleep in my hands. I called our vet and explained the situation, that I had fallen in love with a new bunny and would it be safe to introduce it to our older bunny (who just cost us THREE HUNDRED DOLLARS to neuter, by the way, as if bunny balls were somehow more complicated than a cat's, which usually costs about fifty bucks, but I digress) and they told me that as long as I gave the new bun an initial home of its own rather than plopping it into the middle of Ichabod's established territory, we ought to be fine and the buns should be fast friends in a few weeks or they wouldn't be and Icky would try to kill the new bun.

Well, what more ringing, unequivocal endorsement for buying the bunny than having the vet tell me that things will either be OK or my bunny will die? So I bought him/her.

And a new water bottle/litterbox/assorted treats.

And a new cage, which I purchased in one place but which I had to pick up at another, where I almost came home with the bengal kitten who was ripping up one hand and the chihuahua puppy ripping up the other.

I can't be trusted.

You'll probably be glad to know that Ichabod has not yet killed Cinnabun, but this is probably because we separated them. We let Icky out of his cage and put Cinnabun on the floor and let them run around. Icky's never paid attention to the cats and he paid none to Cinnabun until he realized that Cinnabun was a bun, at which point Icky got twitchy and ran away from him every time he/she got close. Then Icky got twitchier and jumped on Cinnabun, so we put them both in their separate cages, put the cages right next to each other and are hoping for the best. Worst case scenario, we have two buns in separate cages forever. But I'm hoping that Icky will come around as he gets used to Cinnabun and they can move in together and be best friends forever.

Frankly, Cinnabun has a bigger problem with Murmy, who still doesn't understand why he is allowed to rip up rabbit-fur mice toys but not rabbit fur rabbits.

2007-03-27T08:04:00.000-07:00

Hi,

I'm out here. It's just one of those times. If you've read me a while, you know what I mean.

2007-03-12T08:50:00.000-07:00

It's been two weeks since I was here. Wow. Gotta stay on top of that, Tran.

Let's see - what have I been up to? Well, I cleaned under my bed. There is now NOTHING under our bed. Except under the bed. Duh. We're getting a new bed. A BIGGER bed. Bigger than yours, I bet. Ha ha. So there. Too bad, you snooze you lose. Us, when WE snooze, we're supposed to get more restorative sleep.

No, not a Sleep Number bed (why does Lindsey Wagner always insist on being shot through a gauze filter?). We tried dozens of different sets and settled on a Sealy Posturepedic that I would fuck if I were built differently. And not that much differently, either.

2007-02-28T20:50:00.000-08:00

Click it to get it. E-mail me for custom work.

2007-02-27T08:50:00.000-08:00

Click it to get it. E-mail me for custom work.

As we wind our way down to mid March and the annual bonus check, I am slowly but surely clearing this place of all the crap we never use. It's a small place and we've lived here for fourteen years. You get a lot of stuff in that time and there's no room for anything else, so I am going room to room and getting rid of everything that has laid around for a year without being touched, no matter how expensive it was. I do this every year around this time. If you go back through the archives (admittedly imperfect and unfinished, so don't bother) you'll see similar entries this time every year.

I guess I can take some comfort in that. It's certainly better than pain and doctors and sadness. Maybe we should take some comfort any time we can find benign, consistent threads in our lives that tie one year to the next. The older I get, the more I look for things like that and what once would have been unbearably boring is starting to feel very comfortable to me.

2007-02-26T22:07:00.000-08:00

Sparrows on the hummingbird feeder on our balcony. I wouldn't have thought they could get their beaks in the little holes, but they do.

One of the hummingbirds. We have babies, too. They were out there with Daddingbird the other day, but they take off too quickly to photograph.

2007-02-25T22:10:00.000-08:00

Click em to get em. As always, e mail me for custom work.

I'm tired. Is anyone else tired? I feel almost wiped-out, almost overwhelmed by the weight of the things people are going to ask me to do this week. I feel like all I do these days is turn obediently here or there as instructed by the people positioning me for their benefit.

I'm not really complaining about that. I'm not. This is the life I sought and I take great pride in being able to take care of my family well. More, I take great pride in being able to do it all better than it was done by the women in my family who came before me. I take pleasure in that the way I would in orchestrating the humiliating downfall of a hated enemy in the middle of the schoolyard at recess.

That doesn't say anything good about me and it doesn't even say what I really mean about the load I carry or how I carry it. I say this without a wink - my goal has always been to raise my kids with love and to never give up on them no matter how tough being a parent can be (as I was given up on). I've done that. I've raised kids who know I love them, who are better, stronger people than I am, tougher and less afraid. They don't steal or cheat people. They stand up for what they believe is right and they are the kind of people who will befriend the least popular kid on the block. I love my kids and I take tremendous pride and pleasure in them. If I do nothing else in my life, I did that and however tough it has been, I wouldn't change it for the world.

But underneath my pride in being a fairly good mother, there is always that undercurrent, that whispering nyah-nyah-nyah at my mother who did it so badly and who I am still so angry with. My mother and her mother before her. Inside me, the perpetually confused, hurt little girl has been joined by a spiteful woman who wants to flick my mother off her shoulder like a speck of dandruff. "How hard was it, really?" I want to ask. I know if I go back through my journals, I will find evidence of times when I felt desperate and on the verge of collapse, but ultimately, it isn't hard to love your children.

Stephen King, in his book about writing, says you should write the first draft without ever stopping to proof it. He says let it all come out the way it wants and fine tune it later because if you stop, you lose your rhythm. I wonder, if I let it all come out here, how it will end up, how I'll be able to fix it or fine tune it so it doesn't sound as awful as it does right now. I started out just whining about being tired and feeling pissy and it turned into this snotty tirade against Mom. I think it happened when I felt I had to justify feeling tired or overwhelmed, which, it seems to me, is a singularly female thing to need to do. Men are never asked to justify how tired they are.

2007-02-23T11:44:00.000-08:00

Nothing terribly exciting is happening here. I finally heard from the Pain Foundation people, and they asked me to serve on their advisory council. I agreed, thinking it would be about pediatric pain but so far there is no focus on peds pain. That means it's up to me to make the focus myself, so I am to work with them on that section to their informational bulletin board for patients and doctors.

That's a lot of responsibility, though. Do I want to be responsible for dealing with frightened parents worried about their children? What could I possibly have to say to a doctor that he doesn't already know they would hear? Did I handle my own experience with sick kids and doctors so well that I can advise anyone else? I'd have to search the net for answers for parents. What if I can't find them? There were so many I couldn't find for us.

That would mean I would just console them - do I have any energy or emotion left over for that?

Lord.

2007-02-23T11:21:00.000-08:00

Click on the theme to grab it. E-mail me for custom themes, five dollars each.

2007-02-22T21:32:00.000-08:00

I know it's bad, but it's also dead-on.

2007-02-20T16:30:00.000-08:00

Get them here. Want a favorite photo themed? Five dollars for custom work, E-mail me for details.

2007-02-19T14:39:00.000-08:00

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2007-02-14T15:59:00.000-08:00

Get em here. Want a custom theme? Five bucks. E-mail me for details.

2007-02-13T13:26:00.000-08:00

I am so mad. I am too mad to think of intelligent, erudite ways to say I AM SO FUCKING MAD!

I'm sitting around, trying to think of something to do for my husband for V Day (that rat trap holiday). We're broke, so my options are few. I think and I think and it comes to me: I'll do all the chores I HATE to do, the ones he normally does because I hate them so much.

This means cleaning the litter boxes and bird cages. Two litter boxes, four bird cages. Now, I know going in this will be hard. I hate doing these chores - it's stupid for a woman with the zoo I have, but I hate cleaning animal waste. I can clean a toilet with the best of them in my pearls and high heels and with a smile on my face, but something about animal waste sets me off badly enough that I end up crying. It goes back to being raised in my mother's house with forty cats and NO ONE cleaning up after them except when she yelled at one of us to do it, but with that many cats, it was never really clean and the smell was in everything and I was ashamed and embarrassed and . . . well. These days, I am pretty picky that, if we are to have a zoo, it be a clean zoo. So this is a BIG deal present for me to give him.

I gird my loins and stuff toilet paper up my nose to keep from getting the sneezes and off I go. I take apart the cages (ignoring the now loose birds who have made their last ditch, ill fated attempt at freedom), thinking it isn't fair that I never do this for him, only to find that rather than really cleaning the fucking things, he tosses out the old bird littler and puts fresh paper ON TOP OF THE OLD, CLINGING BIRDSHIT, ETC. This shit is caked to the plastic - nuclear weapons couldn't get this shit off this plastic.

And I am suddenly FURIOUS! Fair enough, maybe we should share this chore, but this is bullshit. How can he have just left those cages like that?? The cat litter boxes? Same thing - oh, he'll scoop with the best of them, but he won't clean off the old stuff caked to the boxes.

That, you see, in his lovingly passive-aggressive manner, is his way of leaving the worst of it to me without telling me outright he is doing it. This is his way of trying to do the job so badly I'll do it myself. And I almost did - I almost did it all. But in the end, I did a marginally better job for him than he does for me. I will sweetly present this offering to him - then tell him that what I want for V Day is for him to really take the cages apart and hose them off.

I'm just supremely pissed that I was sitting here thinking of something I could do to show him how much I love him, I come up with this great idea, and just end up shit on. LITERALLY. Covered in old shit dust. So I immediately cleaned the carpets and wiped off everything in the surrounding areas with bleach. AND had to catch the fucking birds.

Whose idea were birds, anyway?

Growl. Snarl. Rip tear maim.

2007-02-12T16:49:00.000-08:00

My middle girl and her latest fifteen minutes as an extra on "Scrubs". She got to play a nurse, but I can't say anything else because I promised not to say anything about the script. She had the usual ball. They asked her back and it would be nice if it turned into something good for her.

My oldest, having recovered from her near-fatal ostrich encounter.

2007-02-12T08:00:00.000-08:00

An ostrich at a nearby farm. He was pecking at the fence a few minutes before, so I told my daughter to offer him her sunglasses to peck at, assuming he would taste the ear pieces and move on. Without the glasses. Weirdo Jurassic bird.

2007-02-11T11:33:00.000-08:00

Not a moment too soon, romance is blossoming at Chez Transient. You can get them all here.

Want a favorite photo turned into a theme? I do custom themes for five dollars each. E-mail me for details.

2007-02-09T22:16:00.000-08:00

At the clinic where my daughter sees her pain doc, kids are given a variety of crafty kinds of things to do while they wait for their turn to be called. Consequently, you have dozens of colorful, sparkly pictures of families and houses and Disney characters and sick kids holding happy doc hands covering every inch of wall space.

This one gets us every time we go there. You know some of those kids aren't around anymore. Some of them never felt good enough to make a picture.

2007-02-06T08:45:00.000-08:00

2007-02-05T13:07:00.000-08:00

2007-01-29T23:18:00.000-08:00

Get them here. Custom themes available for five dollars each. E-mail me for details.

2007-01-28T20:01:00.000-08:00

I watched this little sandpiper for an hour and a half. I must have taken 200 shots of him, trying to get one of him flying.

With a baby sandpiper . . .

And what do you make of these?

2007-01-28T12:47:00.000-08:00

A leaf my son gave me, sitting on my dashboard and reflected in the windshield.

Flowers at Zuma. The brown on the petal is from the recent cold spell here in Ca. These fared fairly well - my cherished morning glories were frozen and killed.

I have the post labeling done from November 2005 to the present. I think I'll havr to do sub-labeling as in "Health: Headaches" or "Common Sense: None".

2007-01-27T10:42:00.001-08:00

Magnolia tree.

Birds bathing near leaky pipe.

Beach.

2007-01-25T07:51:00.001-08:00

2007-01-23T08:25:00.000-08:00

Convo between my middle girl and I while we waited in the doc's office this afternoon . . .

Me: You want some of my Zinger?

Middle Girl: Ok, Mommy. Thanks!

Me: Zingers are the best. The raspberry ones. The chocolate ones are just chocolate cake wannabees. You only eat them when you can't get to chocolate cake.

MG: Mm hmm.

Me: You think that chocolate Zingers are happy with their fate? You think they wake up every day, happy to be chocolate Zingers or do you think they aspire to be chocolate cake?

MG: What?

Me: Chocolate Zingers. Do you think they are satisfied with their lot in life?

MG: I don't like chocolate Zingers.

Me: That's the point. No one likes chocolate Zingers. They only eat them when they can't get to chocolate cake.

MG: I don't know . . .

Me: Would you rather have a chocolate Zinger or a piece of moist chocolate cake with fluffy frosting?

MG: Cake.

Me: There you go. Everyone would rather have cake and the only reason chocolate Zingers are still on the market is their portability. You have a chocolate Zinger when you can't carry around a piece of chocolate cake. My question is, do you think this is ok with chocolate Zingers? Do you think they are pleased just to be chocolate Zingers, with all that implies, or do you think they long to be chocolate cake, their little noses forever pressed to the window of True Bakery Goodness, looking in and wishing they too could be cake?

MG: I think you have issues.

Me: I was just wondering.

My daughter notices something across the wall from her.

MG: Oh My God.

Me: What??

MG: I was just looking at the box that says 'used needles'. I hate needles.

Me: Are you planning to run face first into the box? Are you planning to jump up and down in the box in your bare feet?

MG: They did that in 'Saw'!

Me: They ran head first into a box of used needles?

MG: No, they were poisoned and the antidote was at the bottom of a bunch of used needles they had to dig through to get out.

Me: 'Saw' is a kind of glorified 'Fear Factor', isn't it?

MG: Yeah, but you get to live at the end if you win.

ME: You get to live at the end of 'Fear Factor' too, and if you win you get fifty thousand dollars. Then again, if you live long enough, you're sure to earn fifty thousand dollars at some point in your life, so I guess as prizes go, 'Saw' wins.

Then we went on to say something about babies and needles I don't quite remember and probably shouldn't repeat if I did.

I began to wonder whether or not it would be worth the trouble to tear off the informational posters they have in the doctor's office, take them home, scan and then subtly alter them. I envisioned posters about allergies informing kids that asthma is always fatal. Maybe I could replace the little Dymo-labels on the paper trays that said "Girls - birth to 11" and "Boys - 12 to 18" , the ones that hold blank growth charts, and re-label them "Naked Pics Girls: birth to 11" or maybe just redo the charts so that a sixteen year old girl who weighs 130 would fall squarely into the normal growth chart ranges.

That's when my daughter told me I wasn't allowed to leave the house anymore.

Then her doc showed up and, in the course of their convo, I was again reminded that my baby is eighteen and can, if she wants, see the doctor on her own without me in the room. I always offer her that option anyway, but that's the real 'Fear Factor' for me, the time when I have to trust that my kid can advocate for herself and won't need me there to bully the docs into treating her well. I won't have all the info anymore, won't know all the details and won't be able to keep my eye out as easily for the symptoms that, if missed, will surely be the end of her and which were only missed because I wasn't in the room to hear everything.

I don't suppose I get fifty thousand for that, though.

2007-01-23T07:00:00.000-08:00

Get it here.

Want a custom theme? Your baby's first pic, your pet, etc? I do custom themes for five dollars each. Write me for details.

2007-01-22T10:42:00.000-08:00

Cardiac trying to kill Murmur. Note the space heater near the cat tower? Our central heating has been broken for the last month and Cardiac has spent all her time near the space heater. She's one of those cats that is always cold. Then again, she's twelve. That eighty-four to you and me. We'll probably always be cold then, too. But doesn't it seem this is a thing only lady cats do, the always cold thing? Note, too, the pieces of mice toys in the tower.

My middle girl caught Murmy yawning. Do we look this jolly when we yawn?

2007-01-21T23:01:00.000-08:00

Katy Towell's latest is up. May have been for some time, which just goes to show how out of the loop I am these days.

30 Second Bunny Theater does Borat.

Foamy has a bunch of new stuff up. If you haven't been there before, watch Kevorkian Scarf and Squirrel Songs 1 first.

2007-01-20T19:58:00.000-08:00

A sparrow at our hummingbird feeder. My husband cooks up this noxious looking potion all the birds just love and it's gotten to the point where we had four sparrows out there today ganging up on hummingbirds. I'll have to hang more of them. Feeders, not birds.

Ha ha.

I'm in a foul mood. A bi-polar thing. I felt myself crashing earlier, too. I was actually grateful to get home and get in bed, so I wouldn't dissociate in front of the kids. I stayed there and finished one of the worst novels I have ever read: Everyone Worth Knowing, by the woman who wrote Devil Wears Prada. I'm supremely pissed at her because Prada wasn't half-bad and this one was all-bad. I don't have so much money these days that I easily forgive spending it on a shitty novel. That's probably what I get for not reading something meatier like Meaty Thoughts on Solutions for the Planet.

Don't Google that. I made it up.

I've finished labeling posts through September of last year, working backwards from January of this one. In case you were wondering.

Growl.

Whine.

2007-01-19T15:49:00.000-08:00

Gingerale.

2007-01-15T19:51:00.000-08:00

My son holding the only known evidence of global warming. Shortly after this photo was taken, the Secret Service showed up, confiscated the ice and erased our memories with a little flashy thingie. It's a shame, because without that evidence, there is no way to link the record lows here in So. Cal and the record highs in Moscow to global warming.

Oh, well.

More of the last vestiges of ice left outside by the time I got out there. My husband, silly man, tells me he had no idea that I would want to take pictures of the GOOD ice that was out there early in the morning.

Oh, well.

Not only has this stupid cold front killed the morning glory vine I have nurtured so carefully, but our place has been without heat for almost a month. I am too cold and pissy to write anything inteligent.

2007-01-11T08:58:00.000-08:00

The pharmacy window in the medical building we were in yesterday. At first, I thought "wow - that's beautiful", then I assumed that some guy's meds hadn't been ready on time. Upon further reflection, my new, better guesses are that A: someone got very bad news from their doctor or (and more likely) B: someone's doc messed up somehow.

You will be happy to know my oldest girl's heart is just fine, though speedy. And my middle girl got through the whole day yesterday. Got an A on her Geometry quiz. That's after missing a year and a half of high school and not being there for several of the classes this year. They better throw a parade for her.
. . .
I am TOO working on all the post labeling and archives! Why do you keep bugging me about that?? Get off my back, already! Why don't YOU label them, if it's such a big deal??

Wait, no. I know you people. Posts on politics will end up labelled "Kiddie Porn' and cat pics will be labelled "Al Qaeda Affiliations". Just never mind. I'll do it after I clean the bedroom.