Mourning

Ever grieve people who are still alive?  They are here in body and spirit and they love you and you talk to them and mourn what was, what they once were? Or at least, what you grew up imagining them to be?

My parents are unrecognizable from the people who raised me. They are down a rabbit hole of disinformation and hatred and it's a fucking horror story. Every now and then there's a glimmer of the people I recognize, but it fades into ether too quickly to grasp onto.

I brought my daughters home to NYC to spend four days with them - we had the option for five, but honestly, I knew we wouldn't make it that long. My oldest daughter had enough after the night where their racism was in such full throttle that she had to walk away from them mid-sentence. I've never seen her so shook. I was able to make a graceful exit without acrimony because Sammi's terrible sleep habits in NYC gave me the excuse. Oh now, we have to leave really. Oh no, we don't need Dad to drive us home we'll take the train, because she's the worst on road trips.  All true. Just leaving out the "Oh no, we can't spend 4 hours in a car with you, or another night, because every other sentence out of your mouth is more unhinged and venomous."

I explained to Niblet that my grandfather was a racist who constantly used the Yiddish version of the n-word, and refused to stop even when as a teenager I asked him to stop. He generally said terrible things and I came to accept he would never change. I hold on to all memories of him. They guy who I liked to watch TV with in Montreal and listen to old jazz records was the same guy who was would say insulting things to my obese grandmother about her weight. 

I like to say the algorithm got my parents. But they're not so unusual. Look, there are maybe 70 million people in the US who view the world as they do. A world where economic equity is a grievance and fuck, the word equity is actually a Communist plot. What's difference about my parents is that until 2016, they viewed the world through an entirely different lens. They're not evangelical Christians. They've always supported abortion rights. But they're blinded into a hateful distortion of reality and they were captured by the algorithm as a result of deeply held racism that perhaps I was too eager to ignore or wish away.   

The Viking has tried to make me feel better by noting that his own father could very easily have gone down the same path - had he been a few years younger and more inclined to go into youtube spaces where mendacious podcasters propagandize and the algorithm bounces you further into a deep sea of disinformation.

So, no, my parents are not so different from tens of millions of Americans.  But, the betrayal I feel at their willingness to support the sacrifice the lives of the most vulnerable people in the country - such as the millions women who don't have their abortions covered by health insurance - it's just acute. It's the same betrayal that one of my trans friends feels when he visits his parents and they feed him and then say "we love you" and then vote for people who are trying to eliminate him off the face of the earth.

Did you know how many subreddits and online support groups there are for kids like me? Google "parents and fox news" oh, you'll learn. It's a comfort, I suppose, finding your people. My sister-in-law is one of them too. I recently told her I want her to come over here if she can ever get a day off, we'll relax on the back porch and stare at the trees and mourn our parents together.

I've got to admit, I hesitated to even draft this blog entry.  More than one of you readers has noted that this is a journal of sorts, a diary of love to my children. It feels wrong to write these words in this space. But after the awakening my 13 year old has been forced to grapple with, well, if I hold the expectation that they may one day learn about some of the horrors I had to experience, surely they can absorb this.

New year new circus

 I'm finally inspired to write again, as we near the close of January. what a month.

This is the month that I am truly grappling with the high and lows of aging.  

On the one hand, the wisdom, man, the wisdom. I am realizing that I am excelling in my professional life because I actually have a lot to offer. I'm up for a promotion, and I just received an appointment to a position on a City Commission because I earned it (no for real, someone addressed me the other day as "Commissioner"). Sure, I still have a lot to learn (don't we always?), but a decade at my current workplace has led me to a place where I can call myself an expert in my field. It's a heavy word, expertise, but I've fucking earned it. I don't relate much to feelings about imposter syndrome that some people I know describe. I know what I'm doing (at least, I know enough to ask the right questions when I don't know the answer), and I'm much more willing to hold myself out into the universe as an "expert."  No false modesty here. I cram all kinds of information into my brain on a daily basis to help healthcare workers assert their rights, and you bet your ass I'm going to do everything I can to elevate them while they're being eaten alive in a country that treats them as disposable. If being the expert gets me in the room to make any kind of positive change, that's how I'm gonna get in the room.

On the other hand, I feel physically more adrift than ever. My back is out again because I am not diligent about my PT exercises. My perimenopausal brain is foggy in all things not work (to the point where I freak out regularly that it will bleed into work). I've needed to lose the same 8 pounds for over a year. I don't drink enough water. I'm finally accepting that I'm lactose intolerant and possibly have some other food reactions that suck. With all of this I snap too easily.

How much of this is the pandemic, how much is it being on the darker side of my forties? Unclear. 

I don't think humans were ever built for the kind of information consumption required of us right now. Excuse me if I can't respond to your email right away, I've had to become an armchair epidemiologist to keep my family alive.

In the midst of all of this, tonight we took a trip to a PETCO to look at kittens that we learned were up for adoption. They were fuzzy and soft and playful and we fell in love and submitted an application. On the one hand, this means more creatures to keep alive. On the other, my love for Princess still leaves open spaces I need filled BY KITTENS.

 

Yes the sky is falling

 Last week I attended a rally at the Supreme Court of the United States in DC to stand up for abortion. 

Look, I'm in my 40s now, I have been attending these things since I was a teenager in the 90s. I need everyone who still reads my words to understand that this one was different.

Yes, we have a conservative majority in the Supreme Court that will likely overturn the viability standard of Casey vs Planned Parenthood and the rights afforded by Roe v Wade. But what I am here to report on is the crowd.

For decades, you could reliably count on pro-choice women to outnumber religious zealots at a protest like this, like 2:1. 

Not so last Wednesday. The crowd was "evenly" divided between sides, allowing for the media to present dumb-ass narratives about how "divided" we are as a country. Bullshit. Voters in the US overwhelmingly support the right to an abortion. But you wouldn't know it from the optics of this event and that's bad. I know too many people - lawyers even - who had no idea that the SCOTUS was even hearing oral arguments on an abortion rights case.

Furthermore, the opposing side was truly, insanely mask off. I had a guy yell at me with my little handwritten "Abortion is Healthcare" sign, about how I was a devil whore. There wasn't a whole lot of rhetoric around protecting women from this crowd, it was full-throated religious zealotry. 

Y'ALL. 

Don't get me started on the 6 foot signs with photoshopped pictures of fetuses that were held by these creepers - I call them creepers because they would creep behind you when you were just chatting with someone, then get in your space, demanding, "why do you think it's ok to murder babies?"

I know people who showed up who felt so uncomfortable, like, physically uncomfortable. Well, now imagine yourself as a scared person who needs to enter a clinic. You're uncomfortable with crazed people shouting at you, invading your space, with the explicit goal of making you turn around to get away from them, in a public space surrounded by law enforcement? Well, put yourselves in the shoes of someone seeking an abortion in the deep south or midwest.

Things are bad. Worse than I could have ever imagined, and I am someone who actually follows organizations who track dwindling abortion access in states. The fire is burning right now.

We have to be honest about what we are facing: These motherfuckers in attendance absolutely included the kinds of terrorists who murder doctors and bomb clinics. This crowd was hateful, and let me repeat, filled with zealots.

I don't have any answers.  My union - we represent healthcare workers - were out to show our support, and I think it was appreciated. I saw too many grandmas, fuck, they were great-grandmas, tiny little nanas who had been fucking marching for too damn long. 

What do I ask of you? The only coherent plan I have, is to donate as much as I am able to abortion funds. These funds help women who can't afford to cross state lines, who need to book hotels and planes and busses. These funds pay for visits to the clinic, or god forbid, the hospital if they need an abortion that is farther alone.  https://abortionfunds.org

desperation

Last week I had a colonoscopy and aside from the fasting and prepping of my colon, it was the most relaxation I've had in months. A bag of fluids and then sedation? Sign me up for more, please.

This month shit is heavy. October. Celine. Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month. Debt.

That last one is hitting me hard. I no longer have the expense of a nanny, we are in a much more affordable stage of nursery school. But:

I am now trying to pull myself out of a double-digit hole of credit card debt (employing a nanny with benefits and paying for everything else by credit card has caught up to me). It's slow-going, if my car breaks down again I'm completely fucked. 

Just breathe. We will be ok.

What feels unsustainable on the other hand, is the new sleep method I've had to employ on S these past few months. Singing to her until she goes down, lying on the floor waiting to hear her heavy breathing... it's a long night.  Niblet really was one of those babies that we perfected the "leave the room and shut the door when they're drowsy but not completely asleep" advice of sleep trainers.  

I'm so fucking tired. I'm so unhinged by the precipitous drop in estrogen surging through my body. I get irrationally angry and cry with little provocation.

Mothering a tween and a toddler while perimenopausal is not for the faint of heart.

Mothering In the Menopause

One day I’m gonna emerge from the pit I’m in to tell the tale of mothering a toddler and pubescent tween while in the midst of perimenopausal depressive episodes. 

Today is not that day. I’m on five hours of sleep, just wept for 45 minutes and have to erase my Google searches because I know my kid will find them and freak the fuck out, as one might when the encounter the word suicide. 

(I am not suicidal. I have had fleeting thoughts of imploding off the earth which my Google search validated as pretty normal in my current hormonal state)  

Golly, do I miss Princess. She would have totally understood.

All of this is to say that I need to take a melatonin and melt into sleep. 

Buoy

I took a summer hiatus from writing because after we lost Princess, I wasn't sure I had anything left i me to say.

And here I am. Staring at the Handmaids Tale in Texas that's headed to roughly 15 other states in the next year. My close friends in New Orleans have fled for Marietta GA with their 11 year old because who knows when they'll have power restored. Philly and Hoboken are underwater. Niblet is back at school, masked and vaxxed and waiting to be quarantined anyway because it's inevitable.

We are saying good bye to our Nanny today - she's moving on to a new family, Samantha will move on to full day nursery school. C will always be in our lives, but it will surely be a massive upheaval for Samantha. With this, my childcare expenses will be cut by roughly 3/4, I will eventually pull myself out of the massive credit sinkhole I am in. I am not one of the millions of USians about to be evicted. Our 107 year old house is still standing. We live on a hill overseeing the tributary that will surely wash away the cars below one day.

Some of my closest family members have been propagandized to believe that masks are signs of an impending crush of freedoms and that critical race theory is teaching my white daughter in a predominately black public school to hate herself. If I don't numb myself to what we are facing I can't function. 

It is with this last sentence that I pour out the following: the ONLY thing tethering me to sanity, to the ability to get up every day, are my daughters. They are the buoy that is saving me from downing in my rage and tears. I hate the burden that I am placing on them, they don't deserve it. No child does. But here we are.

A boost and a conflict

 Today I had a little boost.

I shared the medium essay with Princess' former owner - a dear friend who also happens to be a prolific - and highly published - non-fiction writer.

She asked that I remove the essay from medium and try to get it published in the NYT Modern Love section.

It's hard. Mr. Viking is not in favor of my going any more public with "our personal medical issues." For what it's worth, I am confident that my parents would feel the same way. I posted the Medium link on my somewhat more anonymous twitter page, but not on facebook, where ironically, I know it would reach more readers (for demographic reasons, and because my twitter account is pretty limited to union and labor related things, with a little bit of Baltimore community stuff thrown in).

Writing about your miscarriages is hard, and writing about your miscarriages in a way that doesn't pull your family into your story can be even harder.

One of the reasons I'm always hesitant to discuss Samantha being a donor egg baby is that her origin story is hers to tell. Personally, I am at a place of comfort with her origin story, I would shout it to the hilltops if I could.  'Samantha is biologically mine, but genetically not mine! And she is the most tremendous gift we have ever been given!" 

My TFMR is still entwined in my grief. Not sure I could go there amongst strangers. I am hugely vocal (and generous) with my support of the reproductive rights movement. Going public about Celine? I'm not there yet.

But the miscarriages, these are in many ways the easiest to disentangle from my fertility story. I want to write about them so badly. I want to make women feel less alone. SO. BADLY. I want to validate the grief of women who are hiding in their showers. I want to be a voice for family leave policies where woman can use sick leave and bereavement leave if they're fortunate enough to even have it in the US. I want to take my activism and expand it. 

I need to get my husband on my page.