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.

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."

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.

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.

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????

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A week or so ago, my son's bus driver called me at an obscenely early hour on one of the last few days of our holiday vacation to ask me if my son needed to be picked up. I screamed at him, then hung up on him without another word. I was homicidally furious about being woken early on a vacation day and vowed to have his job for being too stupid to know when school started again. I hated him for scaring me - how do I trust my child to a driver who is running around on the road, driving from home to home, asking for kids who don't go back to school for a week or more?

Once I got some sleep and woke up on my own, I no longer had the desire to feel his facial bones grinding under my heel and I didn't bother to report him for not knowing the schedule. After all, he's a lowly bus driver and I am the superior mom who produced the child he is lucky to be allowed to transport. I could be a little generous.

When school did start again, he showed up on time and picked up my son and I waved to him cheerily, ignoring his snotty flip of the hand at me. "Fuck you, buddy" I thought. I knew I was superior to him in every way, could crush him with a few well and easily chosen sentences and, knowing this, didn't need to do it.

Reflecting on all this now, I consider his snotty flip a mild response to my having hung up on him. Three guesses when school started and who was wrong.

I was in a retro kind of mood. You can grab both desktops here. The text reads "Made it through another holiday!" I liked "Thank Fuck Christmas is over!" but I didn't want to be hunted down and killed by a bunch of pissed-off Southern Baptists. I'll probably make matching PDA themes, but my head is killing me, so maybe not. The backgrounds were scrapbook papers I scanned. I'm not sure where the lady came from and the font is, of course, 'Font Diner Sparkly' from Font Diner.

Is anyone else just craving Chinese food tonight?

Oh! By the way, I have the BEST EVER cooking tip for you. My sister gave it to me. Tired of burnt cookie bottoms? When you make cookies, don't use a cookie sheet. Instead, take the oven rack out, cover it with aluminum foil, put the dough directly on that and bake. Your cookies will come out of the oven store-bought perfect every time. I thought she was loony toons, but it worked beautifully for me. It's a little more work, but worth it. Aluminum pans don't work the same way - I tried.
. . .
Now watch - one of her docs will be found slaughtered on one of those nights I take a two hundred mile drive up the coast, and I won't be able to prove it wasn't me. In fact, I'm going to remove that whole paragraph, leaving this one behind for you to try to puzzle out. The point is, my kid had a bad night.

In other news, my oldest scored a 3.25 GPA for her fall semester. That's from being on academic probation the semester before. Yea, kid!

In fact, Yea all my kids! Just because.

My children tied one of Murmy's mice to this Lego train, and set it spinning around the track. The little rabbit fur mouse was actually being dragged behind this train.

We now call Ichabod 'the big mousie'. I mean, come on. My cat's mice are made out of rabbit fur - of COURSE he wants the rabbit. The rabbit, by the way, has been healthy as a horse since his brush with death a few months back.

I am thinking of trying an animated desktop. It shall have twinkling holiday lights. Or it shall not. We will see.

I am almost done with the shopping. Right now, I am in the middle of:

• Moving furniture from one room to the next
  
• Making a family cookbook for my mother in law
  
• Making some jewelry as gifts
  
• Making tree ornaments out of little frames and pics of Xmases past
  
• Life

I found out my son may be covered on our insurance ad infinitum, if he is found to be disabled by autism or epilepsy. This is a bittersweet discovery. I am thrilled to find he may not lose his insurance, but do not want him defined as disabled. In fact, all three kids have disabilities which may qualify them for medical insurance of one kind or another. In fact, I do not want my children defined by their various medical issues.

I don't know. Medical coverage is nothing to sneeze at and critical to their survivals. I am unsure if my husband and I could cut back enough to pay out of pocket for three kids who aged out of their insurance. But oh, I want my children to be seen first as the sparkling, wonderful, talented and so able people they are. I want their health issues to be a footnote, not stamped on their foreheads. I especially do not want my children to be reminded of their health issues at every turn, because I want them to self-identify as strong and capable. I do not want them to feel too sick to expect much.

For my children, I want. For them, I ache and bleed and worry and lay in bed, sleepless. For them, I sacrifice in a million ways. And for them, every minute of every day, I am so grateful I sometimes can't breathe.

I can barely breathe. I'm in the middle of one of those "oh god, what did I just DO??" moments and I am unsure if I am handling it very well.

See, my oldest girl wants to see "Wicked" really bad when it comes to Los Angeles. And I wanted very much to give that to her. So - well, after spending an hour online going over seats and etc., I just spent TWO HUNDRED dollars to make sure she got two good tickets. I could have gotten her better ones for a sooner show, but she would have had to go alone, and no one should have to see their first major stage play alone, right? So we'll have to see who goes with her. Believe it or not, I am almost loathe to see the show. On the other hand, what a moment for her to remember, right?

Two hundred dollars - god, what am I thinking? Right now, that is such an incredibly big fucking deal.

I'm a lunatic.

Someone should stop me, lock me up for my own good.

My oldest girl teaching her brother to read music and play the piano. He now has the opening notes of the "Star Wars" theme down, man. Watching them like this makes every moment of my entire life make sense.

Today my son and I put the plastic, light up tree in its spot on the balcony and he decorated it with tiny ornaments and candy canes. I would have put the tree out anyway, but we had to put the tree out there, because this is when we Put The Tree Out There. It's an autism thing for him, the routine and ritual of it. Doing this with him made me think of a recent Newsweek article I haven't been able to finish reading yet. I end up crying each time I try. I think of this stuff all the time, the million unanswerable questions that keep me up nights. Will he be OK? Will he be safe? What about when our insurance runs out? Will the doctors California has to provide him be good? Will they care? If not, will we be able to afford to pay for good ones? And what about the medical needs of his sisters?

Scary old world out there. It's all my fault, really - I keep meaning to win the lottery then just forget. Money won't fix everything, of course, but it would be nice not to have to worry about their medical needs or whether they would have a safe space in this world if something happened to me. There is also a truth that cannot be avoided: doors would open faster for my children if there were a lot of money behind them, doors which may open too slowly or not at all without it.

Oh well. I started the cards today, too. Designed the address labels (both to and from), picked and laid out the graphics, font and text, printed them up, stuck them on envelopes, set aside which cards I had to enclose letters with vs. the ones I add simple notes to (those are usually the people I am in such constant contact with they don't need any updates), picked out the ink color with which I would write the notes for the latter and picked out the paper upon which I will print the letters for the former, wrote the notes, stamped and sealed those envelopes, set aside the ones I needed to add letters to, thought about writing the basic part of the letter that goes to each addressee before I add those bits which need to be personalized for the individual addressee, decided it was too much work to get into tonight, set the whole thing aside and took the pic above.

And now, my dears, I am going to go watch Alien Resurrection as I fall off to sleep. Oh wait, no I'm not. I'm going to go make my son's bed for him, then I am going to go watch Alien Resurrection as I fall asleep.

Nighters.

If you're hoping to hear some really good dirt on the behind-the-scenes- shenanigans at Scrubs, you've come to the wrong place. There are no behind-the-scenes- shenanigans. What there is is an amazing group of people who extended themselves to my daughter today and were nothing but sweet, funny and gracious.

She got to go to the set where they film. She got to watch them shooting, she got to tour the sets, she got to meet the stars and creators of the show. She was asked back to be an extra. Zach Braff was utterly adorable with her. He hugged her, talked to her, took her to his office and gave her cool, one of a kind stuff. He let her play with his dog. He was so open and genuine and giving - they all were. If you could put how sweet they were in a bottle and give it to sick kids, they'd get better.

I was kind of amazed by how much time and preparation goes into the shooting of a scene. It takes an hour or so to set up a scene that takes five minutes to shoot, tops. No wonder those guys are there till two or three in the morning. I was impressed too by the lack of pretension - I expected it to be the way you see it on TV, egos and back-stabbing abounding, but nope. They all seemed to get along really well, actors and set decorators and craft services people hanging around talking between scenes.

So I'm sorry, world. There is no pit of toothy sharks behind Scrubs - just a bunch of really adorable, goofy, sweet people who were nice to my kid and thus good guys (and girls) forever.

At the same time, there was a bittersweet undercurrent to this day. This is the kind of thing they do for the Make-A-Wish kids. Some terminally ill child's last wish is to go to the set of their favorite TV show and meet the cast. Maybe do a walk-on. All the people involved, all the cast members know the child is dying and they are really sweet to them and the parents spend the day trying really hard not to cry because they know that, however wonderful this moment is, it is one of the last moments. Maybe the last one, the one the kid hung on for.

My daughter isn't dying, thank heaven. I am so grateful. Still, as grateful as I am, moments like this frighten me because they are too close to the Make-A-Wish thing. I don't want this to be her big moment, her light flaring just before it goes out.

I wonder also about her own hopes. Working behind the scenes in film or TV is what she had planned to do. Her older sister wants to be an actress but my middle girl wants to write the scripts and direct the shoots. She was on track for that when she got sick. How far from that dream has being sick pushed her? If she has an opportunity to work as an intern on this set (not out of the realm of possibility), should I let her do that instead of push her to finish high school? If she has a chance to start the life she was on track for when she got sick (and how I hate that phrase "when she got sick"), isn't it better for her to go for it than to force herself to finish high school right now, something she can always do in pieces later on?

There are so many unknowns, so many possibilities and all I want in the world is to see them happy, healthy and safe. You think if I were dying, I could go to the Make-A-Wish people and ask them to insure that my children would always be happy, healthy and safe? I'd die for that. I would.
. . .
I'm making themes, but I have NO good images for Thanksgiving. If you have something you want me to try to work with, send it along. Otherwise, what you all are going to end up with is lots of themes with sunflowers and amber leaves for fall. Actually, sunflowers and red and gold leaves sound really good . . .

My husband and I were throwing out some old furniture the other day and I found a roll of film I hadn't developed. I took it to the photo shop, hoping, because when you find it like that you never know how old it is or what shape the pics will turn out to be in, but I lucked out some. The film was from December 1989. My oldest girl was two and a half, her sister just one and I was three months pregnant with their brother. The pics were in pretty bad shape and these are the best they could do:





That first is the middle girl with a Rocking Pooh Bear they just loved (somewhere there is a pic of oldest girl asleep under Rocking Dumbo) and the other is the oldest with a piano, I think. You may not be able to see it in these pics, but they were glorious. They were glorious, glowing little Goddettes and they were so happy.

I looked a while at the pic of the older girl, seeing how small and helpless she looked with her little tiny toes peeking out from under her nightgown and I was filled with such a bloody fierce wish to be able to go back. To go back and undo every hurt, every slight, every bad moment. I think - no I know that I would kill for that chance, the chance to do it all better. To pick that little girl up and hold her and never put her down and never yell at her and make her eat her veggies.

I want to hold her in my arms, again. I want to hold her after a bath and run my fingers through her hair as I blow it dry and pat her back while she fell asleep in my arms and I would *never* put her down and I would slice open anyone who tried to take her from me or reject her or be mean to her.

A house not far from where I live.
. . .
Well, I now have two children who are legal adults. This is not why I feel crappy, but I thought it merited attention.

More when I don't feel like I'm being digested by an anaconda.

My kids have wanted a dog for a long time. A long time. A long time ago, I promised them that when we got a house, we could get a dog. There just isn't room in this apartment for five people, three cats, assorted birds, a rabbit AND a dog, even the little rat kind of dog they wanted.

When my middle girl got sick, she kept asking for a puppy, but we just couldn't do it. Part of me wanted to give it to her, the way I wanted to give her anything that might help. Part of me was angry at being manipulated. Mostly, there just wasn't the money, room or attention left over every month for a dog.

So I would take them to pet stores and let them play with the puppies there, always with the caveat that we were NOT going to bring this dog home and, if pushed, we wouldn't come back to look at puppies anymore, either. It may sound cruel to let them play with dogs they couldn't keep, but it was the best I could do. Playing with the puppies made them happy and always, always distracted her from hurting.

You probably think you know where this is going, and in a way you would be right. For her eighteenth birthday, I got my middle girl a Siberian Husky puppy. Not just any puppy, but a Nintendog. Nintendogs are virtual puppies you play with and feed and walk and etc. You wouldn't think this would be as much fun, but this kid squeals and oohs and ahs every bit as loudly as she ever has over any real puppy and, in fairness, they are kind of cute. It responds to her voice and the touch screen, so she can scratch its belly and it shakes its little puppy legs and wags its little puppy tail. It chases the Frisbee she throws and is appropriately puppy-fierce as it rips things up.

She just loves it and of the last twenty four hours, I think she has been playing with her puppy half the time. It's been a heck of a distraction from the pain that seems to have made a reappearance in her life.