Woman at a Crossroads

Collateral Damage

2012-02-01T17:56:00.000-08:00

I have been considering whether or not this blog has played itself out. Maybe, I think to myself, I am ready to move on to a happier blog such as "What Crazy Thing I Saw a Yinzer Do Today." Or, maybe I'm ready to take another stab at writing short stories that end up not being very short and therefore never finished. Maybe I should revert to an actual journal where I can write the petty little things that pop into one's head like, "Saw my neighbor when I went to get the mail today. She won't say hi no matter what. What a jerk." (Not a real example, my neighbors with the exception of The Mikes are exceptionally lovely people.) And, as it happens, I've been on the road a lot lately, so there has not been a lot of opportunity to sit down and write anything, so for a brief while it looked as though I had by default sent it off gently into the night. However, certain events have pulled me back here for now. And, as with my last post, I hope this helps someone else someday because it's a crying shame if the participants in my recent dramas stumbled through all of this for nothing more than the sum of our experience.

If I have said it before, I will say it again because it bears repeating: if, as a parent, you ever say, "At least I don't have to worry about [insert name here]..." then you really need to worry about [insert name here]. That is exactly the position I found myself in a decade ago. I had one child sliding into a hell I didn't understand. I had another child watching all of this, way too young to process what was taking place. And, still trying to maintain a career, I abdicated a lot of responsibility for her older sister to my youngest daughter. She had to call the ambulance once. She had to help Kelsey up the stairs more than once for various reasons. She had to make me dinner or lead me off to bed countless times when I was so overcome with fear and frustration, I failed to take care of myself. I've since seen this in other households: where the child becomes the parent. It's not the way it's meant to be. There will be consequences when it happens.

I don't tell my youngest daughter's story often or in great detail because she is still capable of voicing it herself - as much or as little as she cares to. That doesn't mean I'm not sensitive to it, and that I don't realize the role I played in it. And I am extremely aware of the hard work she put forth to overcome her own eating and addiction issues. I am proud of her. She has had to battle her own demons while battling her deep grief, as well as all the other normal young adult garbage everyone struggles with: the pressure of college, the bumps and grinds of young relationships, trying to define oneself as an adult, trying to have some fun while you're young, but on a budget. We had remained close through this process.

And I was grateful for that because some of the reading I had done indicated that was not the norm. That surprised me a little at first, but if you think about it, there is some logic to it. The knee-jerk reaction is to either smother the surviving child or abandon them as the parents lose themselves in a blanket of grief. At the least, the dynamics of the familial relationships have to shift some. What I am finding now is that it is myopic not to examine that. It is so hard to do it right, though. How do you let your surviving children know that you love them as much as ever even though you're hurting? How do you let them live their lives without smothering them with your fears?

I have been made aware recently that I have not answered those questions well, so I have to get back to you about that. What I will tell you now is that everyone walks away from deep trauma a different individual. That means the family unit is forever changed as well. Ignoring it does not change the fact of it. My advice in that case? Talk to your children about how you feel and listen to them when they respond in kind. Understand one another as much as you can and also understand there will be times where you just will not be on the same page. Understand that trauma does not release you from your duty as a parent. Conversely, it does not give a sibling a blank check to act out. And, above all, be careful with your words and do not wield them as weapons, because they can cut deeper than the sharpest blade and some cuts do not heal easily.

Above all else: love one another.

The College of Hard Knocks

2012-01-20T00:00:00.000-08:00

“…A permanent lesson was etched into my mind when I firstmoved there, in January, 2000, and was riding back from a motorcycle journey toDeath Valley. Winding down through Malibu Canyon, framed in rocky walls andchaparral green after the winter rains, the Pacific glittered before me, and Ithought, ‘It’s the last day of January. I’m on my motorcycle. And I live here.’ ” – Neil Peart

“Home is where the heart is,” Gaius Plinius Secundus (Pliny the Elder)

I said I would tell you what Pittsburgh has taught me. As I considered what that is exactly, I realized that I have indeed learned a lot over the last year, but it wasn't really the city that taught it to me. It was just time and experience. Life was the teacher, it turns out, Pittsburgh was just the campus.

I have a vision - an admittedly vain vision - that someday someone deep in the throes of grief will stumble upon this blog and take some comfort from it. It's vanity because who am I to think I really have anything insightful to offer anyone else? And haven't I said over and over that grief is a very individual journey? Besides, I have days still where I can barely get by, I get so bogged down in my loss, and on those days I think it is the height of hypocrisy to think I can steer anyone else through anything. But, still I have this wish that someone will read through the steps and the progressions I have taken and gather something up that can help them. It is for that person that I write this really.

There were those who were bold enough to tell me moving was tantamount to running away, and that it is impossible to run away from your sorrows. Others probably thought it. I denied vehemently that we were running away from our pain, and that was sincere; I knew we would bring it with us. And we have. But I confess I did initially wonder when I would return to feeling "normal" and thought moving here would hasten that. After a year here, I am struck by the realization that there is no finite definition of "normal" and what I really wanted to know is when would I feel the way I used to? And the answer to that question is never. So, the way I feel now may be my new "normal". Maybe just the current "normal", to be replaced by some other state of being later. How I feel now is a bit hard to explain, but here goes: like there is a constant weight inside me. Not on my shoulders because one can peel that off with some effort, but deep inside like a tumor. It is ever-present. There are moments when I find that I am not thinking about it: during the frenzied pace of a hockey game when the only thought is to follow the course of the puck, or during a quiet moment at the zoo when one of the kangaroos comes up to greet me and we share a moment of connection that is only between us. But, those moments are just that: momentary. The challenge therefore is to accept that state of being. Accept the loss, the depth of the loss, and the fact that it will never be made whole. Then learn to live with it because that is the only choice there is. Take it and do something noble with it if you have the strength to do it, move across the country, maybe just across town, or remodel the house you live in if it helps, but the loss is now a part of you for the balance of your days no matter what you do.

Now, know that is okay. I don't want my sorrow to define me, but neither do I want to fail to heed the lessons I should take from it. I will love my daughter always. It is a thing that is in the present tense. The love lives on even though she does not. I do not want her to fade from me. Perhaps not least of all, feeling something, even if it is bad, is better, I have come to believe, than feeling nothing at all.

Maybe what Pittsburgh has taught me is how to have a measure of fun again, and a little bit of joy here and there. I was so struck recently when I read Neil Peart's blog and read his statement about driving along a winding California road and the sensation hitting him that "..I live here." As I read it, snow swirled outside my window. In many ways, our idea of the ideal environment is worlds apart, but I knew just what he meant by that comment. So many times I have been driving into town and see the skyline opening up before me and think, "Wow, this is my home now." Or sitting inside a chilly arena looking down on Evgeni Malkin and thinking, "Wow, he plays for my home team." Or watching Marc Andre Fleury make an incredible save and being able to say, "Glad he's my goalie." And don't even get me started about the wonder of being a member of the home crowd at a Steelers game. Pittsburgh didn't teach me that, but it has given me that.

Sometimes I feel guilty about those moments. Do I really deserve to live in this city? That's a tougher nut to crack, and more time will need to pass before I can justify that one to you. But, for now I think I remain on earth for a purpose. To shut out the experience of life would be to miss somewhere along the way what that purpose is. If you are reading this and think that laughter or any measure of happiness in light of your loss is a sin, I understand why you say that. I have so often felt that exact same way. But, here you are. Nothing will bring your loved one back. So, decide to live. Celebrate the time you had with your loved one. Keep him or her close to your heart, but do not allow that heart to become frozen.

As I write, a soft layer of snow has descended on the landscape outside my window. My dogs lay contented at my feet. The house is quiet. Tonight there is hockey. Wow, I live here.

Four Seasons in the 'Burgh - Part Two

2012-01-17T04:00:00.000-08:00

Fireworks over Point State Park on July 4th

Summer: What we grow up with tends to become our "normal". Normal for me is the dry air in Montana. Which is great until you touch the handle on the freezer case in the grocery store and feel like you just stuck your finger in a light socket, pull a sweater over your head only to find that half your air is now standing straight up, or you're giving yourself moisturizing facials at 17. But, there are a lot of advantages to it, primarily that when it's hot it's just hot, not boiling, and cold doesn't chill you straight through to the bone. So, when I came to Austin, I spent the first few weeks feeling as though I had constantly just stepped out of the shower and everything I touched felt wet. So, when Mother moved back to Pennsylvania and would call to complain about the humidity, Greg and I would just shake our heads and have a good laugh. Well, Mother, I owe you an apology. The humidity in the City of Rivers is a killer in the summer. I should have figured that out actually - there really are major bodies of water all around here - they didn't just build all these bridges to confound me. But, for all I thought I knew about Pittsburgh before moving here, that one caught me by unpleasant surprise. And it does get hot here. As sticky miserable as I was on occasion, at least I was not galavanting around town in a rubber bat suit. I cannot even imagine what hell the cast and crew of The Dark Knight Rises had to go through. But, my cousin had told me there would be about two weeks during both the summer and winter where the weather is hard to handle, and that seemed to be born out, it just so happened that during that time was when Marissa and I had to go pretend to be sitting at a winter sport and spend 12 hours in black wool under a blazing sun. However, hopefully that will result in my being a small part of something historic. And, two weeks of sauna hot weather is nothing compared to months of it back in Texas. So, now I know and will be mentally prepared for it next year.

From MTV.com: Batman is saying, "I am SO hot, that's not snow it's sweat!"

And next year I hopefully won't be standing on the precipice of financial ruin. Because if I was fearful in the winter, I was terrified in the summer. The drain of trying to maintain two households and then fund the requisite repairs and expenses to get the house in Texas closed finally caught up to us in July. I often think of that time and realize how extraordinarily lucky we were, but it didn't feel like it at the time. We were well served by two terrific Realtors, both here to find this house and in Texas when our Realtor, Cella Lancaster, had to try and broker the deal with us clear across the country. I got sick one weekend, had my phone off and didn't check my email, and nearly blew the deal. There were so many twists and turns like that, with the buyers wanting expensive repairs (that I don't blame them for - I would've done the same), that it was incredible that the deal went off. And to have a buyer that fast at all was nothing short of a little miracle. A beautiful house just down the road from us went on the market months before I left. It is still for sale. I know we had angels on our shoulders, but that was a stressful, stressful time that strained all of us. I was happy, frankly, to get summer behind us.

Best Part of Summer: Training Camp

Marissa, me and 65K of our neighbors

Fall: And besides, I was chomping at the bit to experience my first fall in three decades. And, in the Steeler Nation, autumn is not really a season, football is. The other stressor of summer was the lock-out. Would I have moved all this way only to find myself thwarted? What truly cruel irony that would be. But, fortunately, it ended. And in time for a full training camp. I think we all saw fallout from the lack of mini-camps and coordinated work-outs: injuries in training camps that were unusual, the timing between QB's and their receivers was rusty at first, rookies in particular were behind the eight-ball, but we had a full season in front of us. And, for the first time in my very long tenure as a die hard fan, I was in the midst of it from start to finish. Of course, if one wants to participate in an expensive sport, one must either work for a living or win the lottery. So, initially, I would find myself pouting because I was missing this appearance or that one, and I wanted to be wherever the players were. Finally, I settled in to where I think most local fans are mentally: there are enough appearances and events that I could get my fill and still actually do my job. And some of the stardust wore off a little after a while, I confess, and I didn't feel the need to see them outside the stadium. I was content to see them play on Sunday. Of all the things I have come to love in this city, feeling comfortable inside Heinz Field because I've been there so many times is among the greatest.

For Greg, it was different. He is the opposite of me in many respects. For instance, I have put all my emotions out here for anyone to see. I don't even really know what he thinks about being so far away from the only home he's known; he really won't elaborate. I look for clues and make guesses, but that's all they are. Whatever he's feeling, he's the only one who can say for absolute certainty. But, one thing I can say: life without his football teams being a sure view was not to his liking. He thought he could do it. Moreover, I think he really bought into that whole America's Team thing and thought Dallas would be on most weeks. Not here, bub. Missing the Longhorns was probably worse. They were actually on air more than I thought they would be, but not always - even at sports bars. I think one of the things we all love about our sports affiliations is that it connects us back to our roots, so he was a tree with no roots. How long can one last like that? Well, he's made it through one season... But, at least he didn't have to worry about his team being torn asunder by earth-shattering controversy.

I have not blogged about the whole Penn State situation because it is beyond tragic and my feelings were complicated. I have, however, shed many a tear over it. I have wept for the victims, I have wept for the young men on the team now who paid a heavy price for something they had no hand in. I wept for the families whose lives have been shattered, and I have wept for Joe Paterno. I am not affiliated with Penn State in any way, but I have always loved JoePa. I never knew a time when he wasn't on the sideline for Penn State, and I have watched them since I was young because I loved that tradition and loyalty. When life was so nightmarish for me over the last decade, this was stability personified. So, I wept a little about that too I guess. We talked about going to a game, knowing that I would have limited time to see him coach in person. Lesson in life: don't wait too long to pursue your bucket list, because you never know when the bucket will get tipped over. I would have cried those tears no matter where I lived, but this was near Ground Zero and you could practically feel the earth shake when the story broke. The tremors will likely continue for some time. Nothing will be as it was. An era has passed, but not passed so much as been flung violently into flames.

Early fall at the cemetery

Life is forever like that, ebbs and flows, peaks and valleys. They seemed particularly steep and wild this year, sometimes I felt as though I was just hanging on for dear life, but it was quite the unique ride. Next post: what 2011 taught me.

The Four Seasons of the Burgh, Part One

2012-01-13T00:00:00.000-08:00

When my actual first anniversary of living in the capital of Steeler Nation comes up I will actually be in another state altogether celebrating the marriage of my Lovely Philly friend whom I've mentioned many times before, so I'll give you a glance back at the year in the life of a city from my point of view a bit early if you don't mind.

Winter 2011: When Cheyenne and I pulled into the empty little house toward the end of January, snow dominated the landscape and new snow was falling. I remember standing at the kitchen window for the first time as an actual occupant of the house and thinking that it was just as I remember it and experiencing something akin to joy. There is something magical and comforting about falling snow when you're safely watching it from a cozy interior. Then I had to go out in it. My first order of business was to go to the grocery store. I made a wrong turn and ended up getting lost right out of the gate, got a little panicked, had a few bad moments, turned myself around and eventually found it (keep in mind that you could realistically walk to our grocery store, it is that close), and a tradition seemingly was born. If I had a nickel for every time I made a wrong turn, ended up getting lost, panicking about it, but eventually found my way, I'd be able to retire my credit card debt. Many things about living here have changed for me over the last year, but that, sadly, does not seem to be one of them.

Thinking back on it, my memories of that time are tinted in fear - not of being here on my own with only Cheyenne by my side, but just by finding my way around. Maybe timidity is a better word for it. I've often marveled at my own silliness. Here I was: the woman who fearlessly uprooted her whole family to come to a strange city and once she got here, just going to the grocery store took a monumental act of courage. Maybe I spent all the courage I owned on the move, who knows. But, if not for my Lovely Philly Friend, coming clear across the state several times to drag me out and about, I would have been officially a hermit.

Before

During

After - All's Well That Ends Well?

Of course, it wasn't like there wasn't adventure enough at my little house to keep me occupied. Beginning with moving day when three young men had a miserable day of it in bitterly cold, wet sloppy snow trying to jam way too much stuff into the house, trying to work around carpet cleaners who were trying to save the carpet after I had spilled a gallon of trim paint, panicking Cheyenne in the process, who had proceeded to run through it and then on through the house, leaving rust colored paw prints all over the celery carpet only an hour or so before the movers showed up! There is still evidence of that fateful day in various places throughout the house, in the garage, on a couple pair of my boots, in the driveway, and on the outside trim (long story). I can say this about myself: when I make a mess, I do not half-ass it. Then there was the time I locked myself out of the house after walking the dog without my reading glasses, had to call Greg in Austin to call a locksmith here because I couldn't see to do it, and it took the poor man an hour and a half and an expensive drill bit to get me in. The moral to that story is that I certainly feel secure here.

The Beauty of Winter

Then the long days that followed trying to sort all of our books, clothes, furniture, Star Wars toys and whatever else I just couldn't live without largely by myself, realizing that nothing was fitting in like I thought it would, so Plan A gave way to Plan B, C and sometimes D. But, gradually it came together. I confess that I sometimes look around and marvel that I did it. It was nothing compared to the transformation Greg and his friends were making on the house back in Texas, but I still take some pride in slamming this much crap in this little of a house and still having room to walk around.

The Ugly Part

Spring: And that was how winter passed for me and Cheyenne. Some days were lonely, but a routine developed and gradually the snow gave way to rain and the days lengthened and the roads cleared. I took some tentative steps out into my new world and got to see native Pittsburghers out and about, and not just when they were coming to rescue me from whatever situation I had created for myself. It helped that I had some company: friends from Michigan came for a weekend and my sister-in-law from Arlington flew in, so that took the edge off the solitude and forced me to stretch beyond the four walls just a bit. As a matter of fact, my sister-in-law was still here when Greg and his friend drove straight through with my zoo in tow and the second round of "stuff". And, as was no real surprise to me, sadly, Greg and his friend navigated the city neither had spent any time in immediately better than I still could after four months here. Alas, I am a lost cause...

But, from what I did get out to see and do, I made the observation that spring seems to be a hopeful time here. Like bears crawling out from hibernation, we turn off our TV's, the hockey season over and football long done, and we re-introduce ourselves to nature. Walk the dog, go to outdoor art festivals, have friends over to sit by the outdoor fire pit and drink some Iron City or Yuengling. We begin working in the yard and getting the outdoor furniture out and look forward to summer. When I look back, it was the only time I can think of that the culture is not dominated by one sport or another. There is baseball, but the season is just beginning during the spring, and, while I was struck at the level of loyalty the city shows to the Pirates, the expectations are exceedingly low. Baseball is a third tier sport here, that is just the truth of it. Yet, I learned what lots of sports fans from here already knew: it's still fun to go to the game.

Pulling weeds in the front bed after the snow uncovered what a year's worth of no lawn maintenance means

But, in the spring, life is a celebration for its own sake. Saint Patrick's Day being the Mardi Gras of the East and Easter being the day of atonement a couple of weeks later when the hangovers have worn off. Whatever disappointment fans have over the Steelers or the Pens is behind them, the annual disappointment they will experience about the Pirates is some time off in the future, so spring - at least in my Catholic-dominated part of the world - is about beginning anew.

The Pirates on Easter - they may not be all that good, but check out that view

But, it's easy to be optimistic when you can open your windows and enjoy the breeze. Next comes summer...

The Day After

2012-01-09T19:42:00.000-08:00

Many of my friends are wondering how I'm faring after the events of the weekend. Well, I'll tell you. I'm glad I have a low profile right now because I have to confess that there seems to be some karmic correlation to my arriving in Pennsylvania and the sports icons in the state going to hell in a hand basket. If you're of the paranoid or superstitious ilk, you might suggest that I'm the reason for all of this chaos. Like I ripped the fabric of time and space by making such a dramatic move. I might even tend to believe it myself, because the laundry list of woes is rather extensive. Among the calamities to visit various sports teams:

The Steelers lose the Super Bowl to the Packers thanks in large part to turnovers.
The Eagles put together what is deemed a "Dream Team" by a certain former Longhorn, but fail to even make the playoffs.
Sid the Kid returns only to leave again with no word on when - or if - he will be able to play again. Along with him are a plethora of other marquis names. The Pens are struggling just to dress a full team and are in danger of missing the playoffs for the first time since 2006.
Penn State. If I need to expand on that for you, you may need to crawl out from under that rock you're living under.
Todd Graham in his freshman year as head coach of the Pitt Panther football team, with their bowl game ahead of them, takes a job with ASU and informs his players via text message. Not that anyone is sad he's gone, but the pure douche-baggery of the move sent shock waves through us all.
Pitt sports fans got no relief once basketball season started. Normally a NCAA powerhouse, having lost only 11 times at home in the past nine seasons combined, they've lost three at home already and are 0-2 in conference play (maybe worse by now, this was as of the January 2nd when I stopped even pretending to pay attention).
For those Pennsylvania pro basketball fans, the only team to follow are the 76'ers, but their season was cut dramatically short by the NBA lock-out.
The Pirates flirt with success for the first time in nearly two decades in 2011, but are dashed once more on the rocks of mediocrity.
The Flyers are doing fine, but I hate them, so that's actually a bad thing.

Now add it to yesterday's expulsion of the Steelers in the first round of the playoffs by the 10-point underdog Broncos and one would have to be a little worried about what space-time continuum I disturbed in coming here. But, what is worse than simply losing the game is the drama surrounding it, most notably the injury of the running backs coach, Kirby Wilson, who was badly injured in a house fire the Friday before the game. There was a strong air of mystery surrounding the fire right from the beginning, but, whatever happened notwithstanding, it is tragic. This is a small market town - people know the Steelers, the Pens and the Pirates. You see them around town or end up interacting with some of them here or there (well, I don't, but people who actually leave their house do). As an example, my hairdresser is friends with Coach Kirb. It means that fans take both the teams' successes, failures and drama personally. In good times, that's all great. In times like these, these inevitable dark days, it turns ugly, like family dynamics sometimes do. Therefore, if in some weird way I brought any of this down on the teams housed in this state, I should be expelled violently from here - and I'm sure there would be no shortage of people willing to do the deed. The only thing to redeem me is to have the Steelers come back and claim that 7th Lombardi next season. If only parenting solutions had been that clear cut and easy maybe I would have never felt the deep loss that drove me here...

I Hereby Resolve To...

2012-01-04T06:14:00.000-08:00

The New Year has officially begun. And in Pittsburgh it began with a bang. Not only with the big First Night fireworks display, but with Old Man Winter showing up with a flourish and seeming to think that the way to make up for being so late was to hit the area with everything he has in stock and plenty of it. The city was slammed with plummeting temperatures, winds the paper said were gusts of up to 30 MPH, (seemingly forgetting that normally the definition of "gusts" is short blasts), and driving rain that turned to driving snow, as if he wanted to make sure we all knew he still existed. And winter has established itself now as if it means to stay, with the low tonight expected to be eight degrees. However, the forecast for Friday is calling for sunny skies and a high of 49 (always subject to change)! For those individuals who think we're on a short count for the end of the world, the weather seems to be playing into that theory with crazy fluctuations, as if the world is in its death throes, convulsing violently from one extreme to another as it tries to shake off the disease of mankind.

I don't know if I believe the end of the world is coming or not, but I watch out my windows as intense stormy weather descends, then makes way for calm and sun, only to have the sun chased away by another round of storms an hour later, and think that we, the tenants of this planet, have broken the terms of our lease and the world is doing its best to evict us. And we probably deserve it. The low hiss of a remediation device in my house as it cycles on, scrubbing my little space of radiation seeping back up from the soil, reminds me of that occasionally. But, I'm not really banking on going poof on December 21 either. Therefore, as I look forward to my second year here, I have to think about the things that have happened, what I should take from them and translate them into my goals and aspirations for the upcoming year. I have to think about the things I did not like, myself included, and look to change them. I, like millions of others, have to take stock of myself and make some resolutions. Here's mine:

1) Reclaim the afternoon walk. For the first several months Cheyenne and I were here we had no fence, so she was outside only at the end of the leash, and necessity dictated at least three walks a day, sometimes more. She got used to it. So did I. Once the fence made that irrelevant, she still wanted the routine, so we continued on with a quick turn around the block in the morning, along with Chappy (not sure how he ever insinuated himself into the picture, but he did somehow) and a longer, slower paced ramble in the afternoons, geared more toward just getting out and stretching our legs and checking out different areas of our neighborhood. She had the timing of it down, knowing when the shadows in the room fell just right to indicate that it was time to go, and she would get up and begin to nudge me and whine until I stopped what I was doing and paid attention to her. At some point, work swallowed me whole, and the afternoon walks were impossible, or so I thought. She continued to look forward to them for a long while, and it broke my heart to deny the both of us, but deadlines pressed. Finally she gave up expecting it, occasionally still trying to coax one out of me. I miss those walks - I had a little quest going to find the tombstone I know exists in the neighborhood cemetery of a man born in the 1700's. I miss coming upon a group of does grazing in neighborhood yards at sunset. I miss seeing the red and orange blaze in the sky as the sun sets behind the hills. I miss most of all just being me, not a worker, for a few minutes out of the day. I resolve to take that back. Again, this is about work-life balance. If the world does end in December, am I going to be glad I worked more or that I gazed upon the sunset on a lovely spring day?

2) Accept who I am, but not be afraid to change what I can. The tricky thing for any person is to find that delicate balance of accepting certain things about yourself that you simply cannot alter, but not giving up on improving oneself, learning more, becoming more compassionate, or letting go of long held fears or hatreds. This is all harder to do than it is to say. To look in the mirror and accept what you see is oh so hard, as I've written about before. But, I was never a Heidi Klum lookalike, so it stands to reason that as I grow older I don't look like I could be Heidi Klum's mom either. If I want others to accept what's inside the cover instead of shelving me for a more glamorous issue, then I have to start by accepting myself first. I resolve to do it - how is the part I'm still working on. On the other hand, I never want to stop improving that inner content. There are things about my personality I don't like. When you meet someone you don't like, you can choose to forgo that friendship, but you're stuck with yourself so you might as well strive to be a better person so that you can walk around in your own company and be satisfied with it. That's what I resolve for myself this year.

3) Finally, I resolve to embrace the people who love me and let go of worrying over those who do not. When I was younger I employed what unfortunately can only be called a chameleon-like personality. I tried to emulate whatever likes and dislikes the group around me had so I'd fit in. When I realized the folly in that, I went too far the other way and become rigid and forceful about throwing all my quirks out there, daring people almost to take me at my whole and like it. I'd like to think I've mellowed some and come back to some middle ground: I am who I am, but I don't have to toss that full in your face anymore. You can like me, and I hope you do, but maybe you won't. I resolve not to worry as much about it as I always have in the past. If you fall into the latter category and we're stuck together through work or other situations, let's both resolve to treat each other with respect and some degree of empathy, but I don't need to be friends with the world. I just need to love and treasure the ones I have.

Those are my New Year's Resolutions. Let's see how I do with them. What are yours?

The Black and Gold Christmas

2011-12-29T05:43:00.000-08:00

What is it they say? If life hands you lemons, make lemonade? Well, in Pittsburgh my guess is that the saying goes more like this: if Mother Nature denies you a white Christmas, have a Black and Gold one instead. But, I don't think they've had to say it all that often before this year. It's as though we brought some of Texas with us and spoiled this winter wonderland.

Greg, who has to pay close attention to the weather since he drives out in it every night, reported the other day that Pittsburgh was headed for an all-time low in snowfall for December, with that total being essentially none. There have been a few days when snow danced around the air like little white fairies, teasing the locals, and once or twice an actual dusting of white remained on the ground for a few hours, but in terms of measurable snow: nada. Part of me is okay with it. I've worried about Greg driving on winding, narrow streets covered in black ice hidden under a blanket of snow for months now, and I have to confess it was challenging enough sitting on cold, hard plastic at the last two Steeler games I went to despite three layers of clothing and some natural insulation in the posterior region without adding moisture to the mix. But, let's face it, if there is no snow, then there are no scenes like this one:

Varykino, the Gromeko's dacah from David Lean's Dr. Zhivago

Of course, with no snow there are no scenes like this one either:

Blizzard in Boston in 2005

Life is full of trade-offs. Do you want to shovel your car out from under a mountain of snow in sub-zero temperatures every so often to be able to stand outside in the morning after a night of fresh snowfall and feel the crisp air on your face and see the blinking of thousands of tiny diamonds hidden in a blanket of white under the winter sun? And, truth be told, twenty-six degrees in snow feels a lot warmer than twenty-six degrees without snow. There is just something almost insulating about the snow. Twenty-six without it is just gray and depressing. Bottom line: snow is both wonderful and terrible. A lot like life itself. I was hoping to embrace its wonder on my first Christmas here. Alas, it was not meant to be.

However, if the weather was a little Texas-like, that was about all that was. Whatever our absence meant for the family left behind, it also meant a major change for us, no matter how much of the old trappings I had placed around the house or how many customs I tried to replicate. And that seemed evident at first. We - maybe just me - seemed a little lost as to how to begin without the familiar structure and pattern that had long been established in Greg's family - whether at his boyhood home or once things shifted to our house. There was an order that was followed, a menu that was presented year after year, and always an incident or two of family dysfunction - someone was horribly late, or having a meltdown, or simply sick- that threatened that order, as though it were as much a part of the tradition as anything. But, for us, this quiet little family of three plus a mini-zoo, the slate was completely clean now: we could do anything and on any pace. We had no one else to answer to but ourselves.

Sometimes it's hard to know how to begin the story when confronted with a blank page. And whatever awkwardness was caused by being characters in this unwritten story, it was - and likely always will be - complicated by the individual not with us as much as anything. Greg in particular wears his grief like a heavy cloak, and it can feel uncomfortable and almost disrespectful to experience any happiness in the face of it. Whether this will always be the case or not, who can say, but it is a larger elephant in a smaller room when it is just the three of us; that seemed evident early on in the day. Everything seemed in doubt at first. Do I serve breakfast first or let Marissa open her stocking first? Do we do that in the living room and then move into the sun room where I had set the tree? Do I clear the dining room table, which seems to be the natural collector for all manner of this and that, and set up the china, or do we just grab plates from the cabinet and balance them on our knees around the tree? And where do we all sit in the crowded little sun room anyway? How is Greg, tired from a night of work, going to handle all of this? Sounds silly, but it's all the things you just naturally do in a family with strong traditions - you don't think about it really. Now it's completely up to you to begin anew, and that can be a little daunting. What you do when writing is just set the pen to the paper and begin. Write anything. You can change it later, but just get started. Because once you do the words will tend to come, eventually flowing and forming into a story. And so it was with us. A little trial and error to be sure that will be refined with the next year's event, but once we just got moving, psychics took over and we remained in motion. Presents were unwrapped, cider was consumed (by me), pictures were taken, the mess was made and then cleaned up, and we retired to the basement to watch Star Wars on Blu-Ray, not worried any longer by the lack of snow because we were transported to a galaxy far, far away.

All in all, if you try not to focus on the acting, Episode I is not all that bad - certainly worth the viewing for the pod race and the duel at the end with Darth Maul if nothing else. And so it was with us. Not a perfect day. There may never be a perfect holiday again - there will always be that void. Always. But, a day in which the balance of this little band of travelers were together as a family. That was worth the price of admission.

Steel Gray

2011-12-22T00:00:00.000-08:00

The sky is a steel gray, a fitting cover for the city nicknamed the Steel City I guess, but it is the harbinger of more rain, not snow. It's not the kind of sky that gives you snow. It's just the kind of sky that presses in on you, oppressive and dark. For those locals I follow in social media, either on Twitter or Facebook, the atmosphere seems to be getting to them, the stress of the holidays made worse by a midday sky that casts long shadows in homes and offices. Of course, most of these individuals are people I have connected with as fellow Steeler fans, so we're all licking our wounds from a horrendous walloping on Monday night and they would be surly in any weather. We all hope the team rebounds on Christmas Eve Day or else it will likely not be a Merry Christmas in the 'Burgh. For all the times I've tried to tell myself to gain some perspective and accept that it's just a game, I can now rest assured that I am far from alone in taking this sport way too seriously. As a matter of fact, I'm on the sane side of the fence compared to some of the Steeler Nation. It's one of the many things I've learned in my time here. But, I digress, because the Steelers, while always on my mind, are not what are weighing me down this day.

This will be the third holiday without Kelsey. We have others who aren't with us: Greg's father, whose birthday was on Christmas Eve, and both my parents. But, let's just face the truth of it, there is a cycle of life that one accepts, perhaps with sadness, but with a stalwart determination to continue on in the face of losing a parent because that's what they want and would expect of us. I expected my children to survive me and maybe spare a thought about me on the anniversary of my birth and on the big holidays maybe. I hoped that they would carry on my memory by baking pumpkin cookies at Thanksgiving and spritz cookies at Christmas and teaching their kids how to do it, telling them stories about baking in the little narrow kitchen back on Applewood Drive in Austin when they were little. I envisioned that my two daughters would get together around one of their kitchen tables, drinking strong coffee, maybe something stronger altogether, and tell stories about me. Some I know would be critical ("Remember how loud she snored!?"), some hopefully endearing ("I remember the first time she took me to see Star Wars..."), some a mixture of both. I hoped that they would be able, with a little distance, to see some of my failures as a parent not for lack of love or intent on my part, but just as a result of my being all-too-human. Like my parents, like Greg's dad, and like most of us, I would hope that they would see me for a flawed, but well-intentioned individual and remember me fondly to their children. That is how we all live on, through our progeny - taking little pieces of the traditions we have taught them and having them in turn teach their children. Are they sad that we are no longer with them? Yes, but we hope that they mix that with the gladness in their hearts for what we gave them, and we trust that they are able to carry on. And, so, with my parents, that is the case. On Sunday, I will take out Mother's china and finest tableware, I will set them on linens Greg's mom has given us, and I will prepare food that mixes a little of what both Greg and I grew up with. Mother will be on my mind, as will Dad - he was such a child around Christmas, this serious veteran of two wars reduced to such innocent wonder - but, all would be well and natural except...

And of course, that's a big exception. How does one carry on, even after time has passed, when the natural order of the world has been so egregiously torn asunder? Here we are, in this new city, trying to establish new traditions, and we circle back to the same old place, which is there is a member of our family that should be here and is not. One would think it gets easier over time, and undoubtedly it will. But now is not that time. As I baked dozens of cookies over the last few weeks, trying to build up a stockpile for Greg to take to his co-workers, I was struck by the thought that Kelsey would have been the age I was when I had her and realizing my loss includes not only my daughter but any grandchildren who I might have had at my side, being able to teach them to bake, having them wait to be able to lick the beaters, like I had done, like my kids had done. I would never have those kids to introduce Star Wars or Willow to. I will never read Kelsey's children The Hobbit. I will never have the chance to sit around a table with my daughter and tell stories about Mom or Christmases at the Veldman house as her children listen and learn about their heritage.

Grief is a selfish emotion, I guess. And it's a lonely one. For Kelsey's relationship with each of us was unique, so the loss of her means something different to each of us. Therefore, speaking strictly for myself, what I struggle to work through on this particular holiday is how to step across that big void and reach out for what I have remaining, which is quite a lot. I'm guessing the parents who lose a child and are "successful" at piecing their lives back together do so by focusing on that, not getting lost in the vortex that is our grief. I think it takes a little practice and a lot of patience. So, while I had hoped, in the grand scheme of things, to put together a post around this time on tips to help parents cope with grief and loss at the holidays based on personal experience, I realized that I'm not there yet. Unfortunately I feel as gray as the sky. The best I can do is to tell you this: hug your family tight, do not take them for granted. Remember the holidays is not about getting Star Wars on Blu-Ray (although that would be nice...), try and celebrate what you have, even as you grieve over what you do not. Every year I want to tip that scale a bit. That's my personal goal.

Musings on the Importance of Family

2011-12-18T09:13:00.000-08:00

So, my hopes and plans to go to Pirates Fest dashed by my husband's exhaustion, I find myself with a rare quiet moment. Marissa downstairs asleep, Greg upstairs asleep, I sat down in the sun room to watch the last of the snow dance around the air as the sun chased the last flakes away and began working on dispelling those bold enough to try and stick around. Finally, albeit very briefly, I can look outside my window and see wintry white in the trees and on the rooftops. I better enjoy it while I can, as the temperatures climb back to balmy mid-40's with a chance of rain, and it seriously looks like my hopes for my first white Christmas since I was in my teens may be fading. Of course, on the other hand, it is a lot easier to drive around when it is like this than when the roads and bridges are covered in snow and ice, so I won't whine too badly. On the other, other hand, I don't drive around too much as it is, which is why I was looking forward to going to a mid-winter event about a summer sport put on by a team who hasn't had a winning season in two decades (I mean, why else would I?!). It was somewhere that was not here. I may love my little cottage, but the walls can tend to close in on you when you spend as much time inside of them as I do.

However, as far as that goes, I've actually had a fairly adventurous weekend. Greg and I went down to Washington, PA. on Friday to my cousin's Christmas party. It was a lovely time. I like her home no matter the season, but it was resplendent in its holiday attire, and she had a full dinner - which I didn't expect - that was beyond excellent. But, more than that, the party was populated by good people. A mixture of relatives, some friends of hers dating all the way back to her school days, neighbors, ladies from her book club and co-workers. Some I knew, some I didn't, but it was a mellow, easy time and conversation ran freely. But, what you notice in the threads of the conversation, as I have observed in the past, is the sharing of memories and experiences. There are always funny stories to tell because, let's just face it, in a family with such strong personalities, those personalities will generate some tales. Gradually I thread together pieces of my mother's life that I never knew - some because she didn't want me to (and I realize more and more how editorialized what she did share actually was), and some because she just never thought to share it - she wouldn't have seen the humor in it that the rest of us do. And that makes me so sad that I could not get her back here to share her last days with this family around her. These are good people and they all love one another. They loved her. And I didn't really appreciate the full extent of those statements until I moved here and began to see them more.

I don't feel guilty about the choices I made at the end for Mom. It's not the same thing as being sad about it. There really was no realistic choice to bring her home to end her days. Even if her doctors in Texas would have released her, no one here would have taken her. She was too sick, too demented and too fragile to be moved. No, I may not have been an ideal daughter at the end, sick with grief and short with patience, but I sleep easy at night knowing I managed her care like I had to. But, I know now why she wanted so badly to be back among these good people.

It makes you wonder why she ever moved to Texas in the first place, and I have my suspicions about that. She fell back in the mid-nineties and broke an ankle. I couldn't take off work to come back east - I had just taken a week off to see her right before it happened and there was no allowance in our little company for emergency leave. But it made me realize that she was becoming more fragile and the distance between was us was becoming more problematic, so we offered to move. She refused to accept it. She told me there were no jobs here. I told her all we needed were two: surely we could find something. But, in the end, Greg was committed to Austin and didn't really want to move, the kids were little and had their friends there, Mother didn't want me to come, and I didn't push it. And she did okay for a few years, with some help and support from the family here. But things began to erode. She was less steady on her feet, she wasn't able to care for the condo on her own, and my Aunt Ginny was no spring chicken herself and less able to watch over Mom. So when Mom announced her decision to move close to me, I thought it was a concession to her physical condition. And, to a certain extent it was, but she remained fiercely independent once she got here, refusing help and wanting her own space and friends. I have wondered more than once, but really wonder it more and more, if she was just that adamant that I not be too exposed to the family lest the secret of my adoption leak out. She seemed completely committed to me going to my grave being none the wiser. There are a hundred questions I would like to ask her about all of that, but instead, she was able to go to her grave never knowing that this closely held secret had ever been leaked, and as a result of her own hoarding tendencies to boot. (Makes one wonder who exactly my birth parents were and if I should Google serial killers named McGuigan...it's probably about time I find out, but more on that later.)

As we drove home from the party, I thought about all of that and how I wished I could have assured her that it didn't matter. Whatever it is she didn't want me to know would not change how I felt about her, and she should have been allowed to stay here among her family where she belonged. Then I realize that the man in driver's seat next to me is clear across the country from his. And I've been thinking about that since.

But for now I'm off to troll the Internet for nefarious McGuigans.

Mother and all her siblings

The Bi-football Couple

2011-12-14T00:00:00.000-08:00

Courtesy of www.Steelers.com

Oh. My. God. I have been listening to fall out from Thursday night's Steeler game for days now. I am so sick of hearing about it, both from inside my own house and from the media and various fan bases, that I cannot even begin to tell you. The outside chatter is whether James Harrison deserved that suspension for a hit on Colt McCoy (pretend you hear angels singing at the mention of his name). Not surprisingly, most Ohio residents are calling for his head and think he got off easy, most of us east of the border are incensed that he even got flagged for the play. The rest of the country is sort of split depending upon how badly the individual hates or loves the Steelers. The inside-the-four-walls chatter is about that plus just in general what thugs we members of the Steeler Nation are.

Here's what happened: Greg went to his first - and likely last - Steeler game in Heinz Field Thursday night. I had gotten him tickets for his birthday so he could see his boy Colt McCoy (again, queue the angels singing) play. I stretched the plastic on the credit card until it screamed and got us great seats! I was a little worried about the weather - a December night game - but it turned out to be cold, but not too cold. Crisp and clear. We rode a ferry across from our parking space downtown ($6.00 baby - try getting parking in Dallas for a game for just $6.00!) and joined a happy throng of people milling around in that oblivious pre-game glow where everybody is happy because nobody has lost yet, and for a while everything looked like it was primed for a great night. I had cautioned Greg that wearing Browns gear was not advisable, and he's not a Browns fan anyway, he's just all about Colt (angels on high...), so he settled for a Longhorn jersey and some people actually flashed him a Hook-'Em sign on the way to the stadium. Others joked good-naturedly with him, but it was all fairly innocent and friendly. So far, so good.

Well, then the game started. And, if you'll pardon the pun, it turned out to be a dog fight (if you have to ask why that's a pun, you're not really into AFC North football, so don't worry about it and just skip to the end). Suddenly that euphoria of everyone walking in thinking the home team was going to steam roll over the lowly Browns gave way to grave concern on behalf of the home crowd and gave rise to some actual tense hope by the few thousand Browns fans brave enough to show themselves (the woman sitting next to Greg actually was one, but she was incognito). Now add to that the fact that the season ticket holders for the seats in our section had long ago looked at this game and said, "Oh, hell no, I'm not going to the Browns game in December on a work night," and the results were that we were not surrounded by the cream of Pittsburgh society. Those enviable seats were occupied generally by a group of young, rowdy, mostly very drunk people who had shelled out way more than they could comfortably afford to see the Steelers and, by God, had paid to be there and would act like they damned well please, too young and drunk to know better. Most of them had probably started drinking as soon as it hit 5:00 and were hammered well before kick off. Those who weren't soon found themselves caught up in the mob mentality as tensions rose. Now add to that our Pro Bowl center and Pro Bowl quarterback getting injured and things began to really turn. You could feel it like an electric current, and Greg caught some of it himself. What he will leave out in his version of the story was that at one point he was vehemently yelling at the Steelers. Now mind you, I've heard the Steeler Nation say some insulting and often ignorant things about and to their own players, but it's all keeping it in the family, so the mentality seems to be that it's allowed. Let someone else try it, well...at one point, I turned to Greg, a bit panicked, and said, "Shut up! Remember where you are!" I was pretty sure if he'd kept going at that clip, we were not going to make it out of there without police protection. To my great relief, he did shut up, but he was sullen about it. Then, of course, came the hit heard round the world: that high hit James Harrison put on Colt McCoy that lead to the suspension. James touched the precious Colt (queue angels), so Greg has been all over that hit all week. He did have the good graces to let up yesterday when the one game suspension came down. Already devastated by the bad news about Sidney Crosby being back out indefinitely and heading into what turned out to be super bad workday, I wasn't in the mood, and I'll give him credit for realizing that and letting whatever he wanted to say drop.

But, by the end of the night we had been pelted by ice, the Browns had been pelted by our defense and their inability to catch passes, Greg was miserable and pissed, I had my feelings hurt because this was supposed to be such a grand birthday present and he so clearly hated it, our quarterback could barely walk, but we had a division win. I'll take it. I will grant you the Steeler Nation misbehaved that night. I've spent the days since being reminded how much classier Packer fans are. I have to acquiesce, they are. But, neither the Cowboys nor the Steelers are a division opponent. Who knows what happens when Minnesota comes to town. I'm not proud of how the mob behaved, but I weigh it against what all my other experiences with native 'Burghers have been, and I recall how I had ice thrown on me in Irving when I was pregnant no less, so whatever. Now we know first hand how intense the division rivalries are around here. For Greg, he seems intent on using that night to pass damning judgment on all of us as a collective group, and I've pondered over the last several days what he's really working over in his head. I worry that he's homesick, too deeply entrenched in the town he was born and raised in, and where his family and friends still are, to put down roots in such different soil. I worry that he's realized that the depth of his sorrow and anger over losing Kelsey was in no way mitigated by picking it up and moving it 1,200 miles. I worry that he'll use that crowd's bad behavior as an excuse to throw in the towel - again, if you'll pardon the pun - and go back. And, of course, I worry that if he does, he'll find that he just picked up that anger and sorrow and moved it back across 1,200 miles. So, ever since that fateful night, my mind has been troubled, and I'm not sure what to do to help either of us. And, I'm struck yet again by how The Beast just can't seem to let go of us and let us have some peace.

Funny. All I wanted to do was take my husband to a football game.

Cinema Takes a Holiday

2011-12-07T04:53:00.001-08:00

HA! What shall we hang... theholly, or each other?

- Henry II, The Lion in Winter

So I'm sitting here staring at my bank balance, trying to figure out the vanishing act it seems to have taken, while trying to ignore the panic attack swirling around in my chest trying to break free because I am so far behind at work that I'm practically in the next county, while thinking that if I work all weekend I can maybe get a bit caught up, but how in the world will I be able to bake cookies for the neighbors and Greg's co-workers...when it hits me that I should just ignore it all and enforce some Christmas cheer on myself. The only way I can think to do that is by putting myself outside my own head, and movies have always been my outlet for that, so I've been trotting out every seasonal movie I own trying to convince myself that the holidays do anything more than just plain suck. I don't own an extensive collection of Christmas films, mind you. If you think Christmas stinks, it naturally follows that you tend to think Christmas movies do as well. Sticky sweet, happy family oriented crap geared to make a fast buck and be forgotten for the most part. But, there are exceptions, and even an old Scrooge like me can fall in love with the spirit of the season through the mastery of film. I thought I would share my favorites with you and ask you to tell me yours. Maybe I'll find a new fave among any you share...maybe you will do the same.

6. The Alien Anthology. What's that you say? Those aren't holiday movies? They are to me, brother. Blame Bravo or Spike or one of those networks for showing an Alien movie marathon two years running when I was up at 2:00 in the morning trying to wrap what seemed like a mountain of presents. And, trust me, after four solid hours of sitting on the hard, cold floor wrapping gifts that people may or may not like, Aliens 3's primary dialogue - a highly liberal use the "f" bomb - seems just about perfect. So, it became a Christmas tradition. A little hot cider mixed in with a lot of Sigourney Weaver being a bad ass, and I'm good to go. Favorite line: "Get away from her, you bitch!"

5. The Bishop's Wife. Who wouldn't want to leave their stuffy husband for a suave angel who looks just like Cary Grant? But, it's David Niven that makes that movie for me. He does a great job of balancing what he believes is his duty and carrying himself the way he's supposed to with the inner unhappiness and loss of faith that torments him, sprinkled with a great deal of humor as the fall guy for a lot of the conflict that happens in the film. Cary Grant just gets to float around and look wholesome and handsome, which he does very well, but it's by far the easier of the roles. Favorite line: "Nobody expects him be normal; he's a bishop. "

4. The Lion in Winter. Dysfunctional families take note: this is the gold standard. Everybody trying to out cross and double cross one another in a bid for power and land set against Henry II's Christmas court. Never before or since have so many zingers been delivered in a two hour span. Growing up, this was the perfect film as it bundled a lot of things I loved: Katherine Hepburn, medieval history and clever film making. Trying to pick just one line as a favorite took some time, but here goes: "Iknow. You know I know. I know you know I know. We know Henry knows, and Henryknows we know it. We're aknowledgeable family. "

3. The Thin Man. Sure it's a Christmas movie. It's set at Christmas. Don't believe me? Watch it and you'll see. And you'll be entertained in the process. What could possibly make Christmas better than a little murder mystery unraveled by Nick and Nora, aided by Scotch and Rye. It holds a higher spot in other movie lists of mine, but for a holiday flick, it's still just dandy. Favorite line (again, a hard one - lots of choices): "Waiter, will you serve the nuts? I mean, will you serve the guests the nuts?"

2. While You Were Sleeping. I know, odd choice for someone like me. Sentimental romantic comedy, no one drinks too much, tries to kill anyone else with a broadsword, or have things explode out of their stomach. But the fact that none of those things happen, and I still ended up liking it is a testament to the power of the film and all the actors. There's something about the easy chemistry everyone has with one another that just sucks you in. If everyone were like those people, the world would be a better place. Elsie: "I could never make a good pot roast." Saul: "You need good beef. Argentina has great beef: beef, and Nazis. "

1. And the winner is...A Christmas Story. I saw this movie totally by accident the first time. I was pregnant with Kelsey, it was on a Saturday afternoon. Greg was out working, so I was alone. Not sure why I even remember that. I had been putting around our little rent house trying to do Christmas stuff and had worn myself out. I was in that stage where I still felt the possibility that I would lose my lunch at any given moment, but the baby had started to grow, so I was also getting the sensation of having a bowling ball inside me along with whatever lunch I wasn't losing, so I had to take a break and sat down just as it was starting. I had never heard of it, but it looked like it was set in the 40's - maybe there would be some war references in there, so I thought I would give it a try. Oh my Lord. For two hours I didn't think about alien bowling balls pressing on bladders or stomach acid churning like a geyser waiting to explode. I laughed until I thought I would cry. And I've laughed every time I've seen it since, which has been at least once a season without fail. Just a little B movie no one had ever heard of when it first hit the theaters and look at it now - a cultural icon. Funny how that happens sometimes. But, can you ever look at Chinese duck the same? Can you hear "You'll shoot your eye out!" in your sleep? Do you dream of wearing a bunny suit on Halloween? Yeah, we all do. I can't even decide on a favorite line - there are just too many. If you're reading this and have never seen it, fix that problem right away! Life is too short not to know the beauty of electric sex gleaming from the window.

So, what are some of your favorites and why?

Up in Flames

2011-12-04T00:00:00.000-08:00

Courtesy of 123MyCodes

I fell asleep at my computer Thursday night. I woke up to find that it had slid off my lap onto the couch next to me and the cat had crawled in to take its place (probably having helped its exit along). Andy Reid was doing a post-game press conference after the Eagles' loss to the Seahawks. He arguably had a worse day than I did, but he gets paid a lot more, so I reserved my pity, and watched him bleary-eyed for a minute, mustering enough comprehension to realize that this is what a broken man looks like. Then I shut the computer down and flopped over sideways on the couch, unable to muster the will to climb the two sets of stairs to the bed. My husband found me there when he got up to go to work and shoo'ed me upstairs.

This is not the first time I've literally fallen asleep at my work. But, this week is the first week I have looked out the second story window and tried to gauge whether or not flinging myself from it would put me out of my misery. I've stomped around in a funk all week. Ironic, if you consider I just had four days off, but those were whirlwind days where I was up early and to bed late, actually more physically active than usual. So, I realize I came back to work on Monday more tired than I had left it the previous Friday, so - now four days behind to boot - everything just seems particularly aggravating. I feel imprisoned by these four walls, I am royally peeved at the husband because he has been less than my definition of helpful, my definition of helpful has been altered to where no matter what he did he would not meet it, I've yelled at the dogs, glowered at the cats and just in general been a Royal Bitch. But, it really wasn't until this morning that I realized: I just have a bad case of burn out. So, I took a step back to really consider why I feel the way I do.

This is a relatively new job, I tell myself - I have only been doing it since February - hardly within a normal burn out window, so buck it up and quit being a baby. Truthfully, it's not really the job. Work is just the easy thing to blame. In my particular case, this is the end of a very long, wild year. There have been a lot of major changes, and whether good or bad, they have turned my world on end. For someone like myself, who would practically go apocalyptic when I couldn't get the same parking space everyday, all of this upheaval has just taken its toll. I'm tired at the moment. Of everything. At the same time I realize this, I feel guilty about it because I know I am just lucky to have a job, a roof over my head that is not in danger of foreclosure, food on the table and Blue Moon in the fridge for today's game. I would imagine I am not alone on this see-saw. But, in truth, it is just the pace of everything over the last few months that have worn me out.

So, I sit here sort of mentally ping-ponging between feeling sorry for myself and feeling guilty about feeling sorry for myself, and decided that about the only thing to do about it is come up with an agenda to deal with it. I did a little research to start. I'm a lazy researcher, but it is clearly not a situation unique to me because it took very little effort to find some online sites that were interesting:

http://www.helpguide.org/mental/burnout_signs_symptoms.htm

http://nymag.com/news/features/24757/ (but be careful of this one, it's so long it will burn you out just to read it, but it is interesting if you can make it through)

http://www.mindtools.com/stress/Brn/CopeWithBurnout.htm

There were a lot of others. What I noticed about all of them is that they all deal with work burnout. Some mention caregiver burnout. What if you just have Life Burnout? What if the whirlwind has been blowing around you so hard for so long you're looking out windows for fall zones or making multiple trips to the state store for libations to artificially cope. I took what I read and came up with this blueprint:

1) Take a bubble bath. I love baths. I never get to take them anymore because they are the ultimate time suck. So, I have determined that once a week, I get a bath. Probably on a weekend, but I have to allow myself that indulgence and consider that I am killing two birds with one bubbly stone: relaxing and cleaning myself. Whatever your version of Bubble Bath Therapy is, consider allowing yourself a little time at least once a week to indulge it. Cheaper than a therapist...

2) "Retail therapy" is nice until the bills come in, and, trust me on this, more stuff does not equate to more happiness. Paying off the credit cards, now that is another story. So, pass on that pair of Bearpaw moccasins that look so comfy just because they are on sale and use that $39.99 toward your Visa bill. If you do that every time some tempting offer hits your Inbox, over time it will add up. No debt: that has to be what real freedom feels like. I don't know yet, but I'm working on it. I'll get back to you on that.

3) Watch at least the third period of the hockey game without working through it, folding laundry, wrapping presents or addressing holiday cards (or fill in your favorite show here). Television may be mindless, but sometimes that's okay. I have fallen head over heels in love with Penguins hockey for a number of reasons that I'll detail some other time (crashing people into the boards on purpose at 40 miles an hour is definitely among them), but with an 82 game season it is incongruous with my work schedule. So, I have it on almost like background noise, and I've missed some incredible hockey that has gone on right before my eyes as a result. Just adds to the resentment. So, I've determined to set the computer down for the third period (unless it's a blow out) of each game. This is my version of just letting the mind rest for 20 minutes worth of game time. Find out what your favorite off switch is and do the same.

4) Ask for help if you need it. This is open ended - it can mean quite a lot of things. For me, my martyr complex along with my spouse's limited scope of independent housekeeping skills without specific instruction have added up to a great deal of stress on my part. He is willing to do just about anything I ask, but I have to ask. He has specifically said on a number of occasions, "make me a list". I have refused to do so, thinking to myself, "So, what are you - 12? It should be obvious." Well, I have finally reasoned that the problem is mine and by being so stubborn, the only loser is me.

5) Okay, maybe one trip to the state store so you have a nice glass of wine to have with that bubble bath. But, moderation is the key here or else there becomes a whole other list of issues...

The Monday Blues

2011-11-28T10:15:00.001-08:00

Blech. Is it just me, or is everyone having a hard time getting back into the swing of work today? I actually had no intention originally of taking all four days of the Thanksgiving break off, but life sometimes has a funny way of making you do what it wants and not what you intend, and so, here I am, all the unfinished work I had on Wednesday evening still staring up at me along with the new deadlines pressing in, trying to get my head wrapped around what I need to do, but feeling fidgety and confined sitting at my desk again after such a break, and just in general fumbling around what is normally a fairly rigid and set work schedule. One more reason that the holidays are just chaos to be endured. Of course, I realize that is the workaholic in me talking. Because the family person in me had a robust and fulfilling Thanksgiving break. Not only did we spend time with my family - thanks to not one, but two gracious invitations from my mother's family - but most (not quite all) the Christmas decorations are up, most (but not quite all) of the gifts are bought, and many (but not nearly all) of them are wrapped and ready to mail. All in all, I should be taking stock of the holiday break and feeling very, very satisfied. But, of course, holidays for us are complicated. And likely will be for a while.

I woke up Thanksgiving morning to the same routine I do everyday. Chappy, Cheyenne and I walk around the block, then they help themselves to dog biscuits and watch me do a little jaunt on the treadmill while the coffee brews. Same almost every day. Rain, shine, wind or - soon - snow. But, as I trudged away on the treadmill, I felt as though something was crushing on my heart. I just couldn't quite imagine suddenly that here we were - at the dawn of another holiday without one of our children. For a minute I thought it would overwhelm me. It didn't, and I actually managed to push that thought to the back of my mind for the rest of the day. I didn't mention her. To anyone. But it was there. For all the days I get up, get to work, watch hockey, watch football, eat, drink or whatever else I do, there is a difference in how the Now What feels when it's on a holiday. Holidays are, as I said myself in my last blog, about family. It is naturally hard when when part of that family is missing.

There were other signs that all was not right as the weekend wore on. My mood swings were wild - I was up, then very far down. I was enjoying myself, then irritated to the point of fury. Poor Marissa had to keep me in check. Looking back on it, I can only surmise that every time I was having some fun trying to figure out where all the holiday things should go in the new little house, part of me would begin to feel guilty and sabotage the moment. But, I soldiered on. The worst moment is always opening up the ornament box and finding the Baby's First Ornament that Mother gave me. I really should just take it out of there and put it somewhere else with Kelsey's things. I won't hang it on the tree, but I'll certainly never get rid of it - but it's a reminder of a double loss. A time so far removed that it doesn't even seem real: when I had a healthy baby girl and a mother who doted on her first grandchild. As long as I leave it with all the other silly little ornaments I've collected over the years, I'll forever feel that pain when I come across it.

For Greg it was clearly, undeniably harder. He really wants no part of Christmas. He helped me pull the holiday decorations down from the attic, but his participation stopped there. He bordered on pouty at times as Marissa and I worried over where this or that would go, and he camped out in the basement, far from the melee. At the moments I felt the best, he seemed to pull further in and down. A little piece of me sat above it all and observed the complex melodrama our collective emotions put on over the weekend and wondered, "Will it always be like this, or will we someday actually have our lives back and be able to participate in the holidays like normal people?" I am not sure. But, really, what is normal anyway? And certainly what is normal for us?

I can tell you that, for my part, I want to take some inspiration from my cousin who hosted us on Thanksgiving day. She has had her own losses and, as I found out that day, right around the holidays to boot. Yet, quite spontaneously at one point as she prepared an excellent feast for us, she turned to me and exclaimed, "I love the holidays!" And I know she means that. She has learned to honor her loved ones and not forget them while not losing sight of the remaining joys in her life - her son and daughter, her grandchildren, her friends and extended family, her lovely home. She seems to have found that magic word that is so very elusive for many of us: contentment. When she said it, I thought to myself, "Wow, these Pennsylvania women are made of hardy stuff!" And they are. My fervent wish is that there is a little Pennsylvania stock in all of us.

In the meantime, I will do what I can. My little cottage is, if I say so myself, adorable in its holiday best. The one thing about cottages is that they seem ideally suited to dressing up in garland and bows. That's a start - the rest time will have to tell...

Welcome to the Mean Season

2011-11-21T06:08:00.001-08:00

Norman Rockwell

As I have mentioned before, our family therapist coined the phrase "mean season" in reference to the holidays for those who suffer from an eating disorder. Welcome to the Mean Season.

As we all finalize our plans and menus for the Thanksgiving holiday, we officially enter into a month and a half roughly of what is often a sheer nightmare for some of us. So, this post is for the friends and families of the men and women struggling with an eating disorder. Understand that I write it from a position of complete empathy, love for the people who try and support an individual with ED, and respect for the hard choices we face ourselves during this time of the year. But, I saw a Facebook post from another mother yesterday that bothered me to the point where I really felt that I had to address this. Because we can make this minefield better for our loved ones, or we can make it far worse. And if you ever doubt what the consequences of your choices are, just think of Kelsey and the others like her who are not with us this holiday. Then take a look at your loved one and imagine life without them. Ready now to hear me out? Okay, let's go...

First of all, read this article for some quick pointers on helping your loved ones through the holiday. Simple advice, but, trust me, I've seen the fallout of not following these simple, straightforward tips. Secondly, make the rest of the family members read it too. As I've written about before, there is a tightrope many of us have to walk: countering the needs of our suffering children with the demands and expectations of the rest of our family. And, when you have an older individual involved - like, say, a grandmother who grew up in the Depression and thinks that having a table laden with high caloric food is a status symbol of conquering that time - it can be hard to make them understand. But, it's important to try. I would say that if you have someone who cannot behave themselves and not say things like, "You need to eat more, you're skin and bones," that you need to just have them stay away from your table, but how can you tell your elderly mother or father they are not welcome? I get that conundrum. So, have the conversation ahead of time about the delicacy of the situation.

Have foods available that are not as threatening. I have some specialty dishes that were traditions for us at Thanksgiving, but even the vegetables were heavy. For example, I make a corn dish that is almost like a souffle with heavy cream. It's good, but it's threatening to someone with ED. Kelsey specifically had to ask me at one point to also have some simple, healthy vegetables without any additions to them available. Don't make your loved one ask.

Talk to your loved one in advance so they know you're aware of their anxiety and listen to what they have to say about what would make it easier for them. Help them with some references they can use. The Something Fishy site has a whole list of related articles.

Remember what a therapist once said to me: it's not about you. You're a parent first and foremost. Most of you would tell me you would die for your child. It doesn't need to be that extreme, but it does sometimes mean setting aside your own ego and vanity to help your child through this disease. What caught my attention was a post from a mother about her own diet of 500 calories a day. I know she loves her daughter desperately, but wow, what a message to send to her! Not to mention which I cannot imagine that a diet that extreme is healthy for that mother. The research on restricting calories to that level was controversial to say the least. I found a lot of posts and articles on both sides of the fence while looking for a definitive response on what caloric intake someone of average height and weight needs to remain healthy. But, just speaking as an untrained individual, I am concerned that level of restricting is not healthy, and I hope the individual consults a nutritionist to find a better way to achieve her goals. Obsessing over one's own weight and body image is so hard not to do - we're all subject to the same social stigmas our children are after all - but we have to remember that we are the biggest influences on our children, for better or for worse. They watch what we do and how we are way more than they listen to the words we say to them about their own bodies. How can someone tell their child not to worry about body image when they are participating in the same destructive behavior? Don't fail to take care of yourself in the process of helping your loved one, but be mindful of how you are going about it. Maybe for now don't worry about getting into that slinky holiday party dress. Eat healthy, exercise and accept yourself as a beautiful woman just as you are. If you need to lose weight for health reasons, go about it the right way. Not just for your loved one, but for yourself as well.

Finally, let's all remember what this holiday should really be about: family. Oh, and football. Not food.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone, may it be Beast free.

To My Dear Little Cottage

2011-11-15T08:28:00.001-08:00

Our house is a very, very fine house

With two cats in the yard

Life used to be so hard

- Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young

My first week here, this is what you looked like

I met you, my dear little house, a year ago this weekend. I stood in the living room for the first time two days before I was set to close and become your owner. That term strikes me as a little ironic actually. Who really owns who in these situations? I was leafing through my mother's photos today looking for one to re-print for my Aunt Ginny's birthday and saw a photo of a relative's house from 1952. It could be any number of houses in my neighborhood today, and it made me think about the other souls who have spent time in your walls and the people who will come after me. You will stand long after I can no longer. I am just a temporary caretaker, I realize that. Probably more so in an area like this one, where history lives comfortably with the present. But, for now, you offer us shelter and a place to begin this new life, and we in turn owe you our allegiance and the obligation to care for you while you are "ours". With that in mind, I am therefore very sorry that a whole year later that horrible floral wallpaper still adorns the walls of the downstairs bathroom, but I hope you will be patient with me. You do, after all, have a lot of time on your hands. For us, it has been a tumultuous year, and just getting here and working to adjust to what I call the Now What has been a lot to do and process. Hopefully, as we enter our second year together, things can smooth out and that wallpaper can finally come down.

A houseguest sleeps over

In the meantime, let's pause to reflect on our year together. For my part, I will never forget that first moment, standing in the empty, cold house a little after sunset after a long, hard day of traveling to see what I had gambled on. And hating it. For a full ten minutes I thought I had screwed up royally. Everything seemed so little. The walls were low compared to the vaulted ceiling of my house in Texas. The rooms broken up into little spaces, the staircases narrow. Then, after the initial culture shock, for lack of a better term, wore off, I was able to see the possibilities instead of the drawbacks, and I would spend the next two months plotting and planning where all of our things would fit into your little spaces - all the while forgetting to take into account the floor vents, which threw a lot of that out of the window, if you'll pardon that pun. And, then of course, I failed to think about measuring doorway widths and stairways to make sure everything would even fit inside, let alone where I envisioned it. Needless to say, that lack of foresight meant that I had to do some mean improvising once I got here with a crammed truckload worth of stuff. As a result bedroom furniture is in the dining room, kitchen stuff is in the sunroom and a bunch of everything else is jammed up in the attic - which once seemed to be a cavernous space, now fairly crowded with a lot of things I swore I couldn't live without. But, as I look around, I have to admit I get a little puffed up with pride at the work I did here alone those first few months. If I say so myself, I made the most of your little spaces. It may pale in comparison to the work that Greg and his friends were doing to re-hab the house back in Texas, but I think you and I have coupled to make a really comfortable little space here. Good job, Cottage!

The Final Wave: Marissa's Dorm Room Stuff Arrives

And we did it three separate times really. After the initial push, you had to endure two more loads worth of stuff, including my personal little zoo. I sometimes wonder, if walls could talk, what you would have to say about all these four-legged animals invading your space. Or maybe the walls would just be screaming, "NOOOOOOO!" Just think, at one point, I had twice as many... You got off lucky, my friend.

But, you're gamely housing them as well as three humans, and, despite my complaints about the tiny kitchen (which, I am sorry, I still struggle with), the really important things are here: which is my little family.

You have witnessed a lot of collective angst over these months as we struggled to find our way, literally and figuratively, in this new world. But, at the end of each day, your stout walls envelope us and keep us protected. For that, no matter what happens going forward, I will always hold a special place for you in my heart. And I will, as a reward, take that horrible wallpaper down. Soon.

11-11-11 (A Life Summarized in Five Easy Steps)

2011-11-11T05:27:00.000-08:00

I pulled my old journal from high school to open to the entry I made on 7/7/77. I remember sitting down at the dining room table to make it. I just didn't remember what I wrote. Wow. It was underwhelming to say the least. "Note the date. Actually nothing splendiforous happened, but I promised I'd write on this momentous date. It won't happen again until 11 years, one month and a day - TADAH! I'll be - [l'es] see - 28. Aren't you thrilled?" Then it goes on to note that I had a check-up earlier in the day and something stalkerish about the boy I had a mad crush on. Nothing deep, nothing to hint at a intelligent person buried in there somewhere. Certainly nothing to hint at a dark future. Or a bright one for that matter. Just a teenage kid being a teenage kid.

When 8/8/88 came around, I was a wife, a mother, a worker, a college student, a dog owner, and not a journal writer any longer - who had time!? So there is no record of how I passed that day or what my mindset was. However, it had been a heady 11 years, one month and a day. That was for sure. Out of high school, out of college and then back into college, out of Montana and into Texas, finding one serious, but highly dysfunctional relationship and only having the courage to break from it by leaping to another relationship. Less dysfunctional, that one was, but I brought all my baggage with me, so still a little rough around the edges. Nonetheless, that one married me and we brought a kid into the mix while still trying to figure all of that other stuff out. One can look back at that time and have little wonder that our poor child would develop issues. But in the hot summer days of 1988, that was far from my mind. What was on my mind was trying for another child. I remember that almost painful biological imperative was at its height at that time. I would watch Kelsey play alone in our backyard and nearly ache to give her a sibling. It would only be about a month from that August day that we were on our way to another family member, still trying to figure out what it was to be adults, let alone effective parents. I am sure if I had made a journal entry on that day, I would be equally underwhelmed with it. In all those 11 years, was I really any better, smarter, more mature than the 17 year old who spent most of her waking moments dreaming of boys she would never know? Sort of doubting it.

Nor would I hold out much hope for the person who met the morning of 9/9/99. By then, Mother had moved to Texas, but was still fairly independent and had her own circle of friends and we saw one another once a week or so, but she savored her independence, and I mine. I had my two kids, my perfect house with a pool, a career. I had a satellite dish with NFL Sunday Ticket and was working on the streak that still exists of never missing a Steeler game. I had a fancy title and part ownership in my company. I would have thought I had it all figured out, of that I have no doubt. But, the fact of the matter is, as I was about to find out, I had my eye on all the wrong balls.

I knew that by 10/10/10. Kelsey was gone, Mother was gone, and all my illusions of being a success at life gone with them. Because I knew by then that being successful isn't about having NFL Sunday Ticket - it's about being present for your children and family. I could tell you by then that I hadn't been. And, the life I thought I had put together for all of us was shot to hell, and we were trying to figure out how to pick up the pieces. By then, we were looking to Pittsburgh as the place to start that process. I didn't write that day. I was busy at Austin City Limits - trying to say a fond farewell to the city I had begrudgingly called home for thirty years.

So, here I am in Pittsburgh (well, close enough) a year, one month and a day later. So, what do I have to say about myself on this day? Well, in some respects, I'm not that much different from the girl who wrote in her journal back in 1977. On this day, I was all a flutter with the news that Sidney Crosby might play tonight against the Dallas Stars and crushed when I saw that he won't. We'll be in attendance - all of my little family. What a thrill that would have been. So, I guess I still get sort of twitter-pated over boys I'll never actually meet, just for different reasons and with a different agenda. And, I listen to the same music. I all but guarantee I was listening to the Moody Blues when I wrote that journal entry back in '77. I still do. Just a little harder to hear it now - thirty plus years of loud rock and roll later have taken their toll. But, in other ways, I'm so utterly different, it's hard to recognize me. What would I say to that silly teenager sitting there at my parent's dining room table? Besides the fact that I would someday listen to Rush, that is. So much. Oh so much. I'm not sure she would listen, full of hope, ambition and dreams about her future. Like many kids her age, she was pretty sure she had it all figured out and could handle anything. I envy her confidence. I regret her short sightedness.

Where will I be on 12/12/12? The future has yet to be written. Hopefully it will include Sidney Crosby in some form or fashion.

Geography Lesson

2011-11-04T05:21:00.000-07:00

Courtesy of Craig Del Grande, Bozeman Broker

Several years ago I tried my hand at a novel. I was pretty disciplined about it too. I worked on that sucker every day, but I never finished it, and now it lives only somewhere in the innards of my first Macintosh - may it rest in peace wherever it is. I simply couldn't figure out the right ending for it.

They say one's first novel is autobiographical, and I guess mine had elements of that. Here's the premise: a native Chicagoan has an aunt and uncle who live in Bozeman, Montana (where I grew up). She grew up spending her vacations there, went to college there and when her relationship with a local boy she was expected to marry goes bad, she moves there permanently. She loves it there - despite having to live with a roommate to make ends meet. She has met a new man and is engaged to him, a young professional from Billings, and things seem set until she meets a handsome, sad stranger from Texas (yeah, I know - but it's where I was familiar with). The mysterious stranger's brother is going to graduate school at MSU and he comes to stay with him after a bad episode with his wife's lover. He has a young son he has left behind. Long story short, of course, they meet, fall in love, but he has to go back because that's where his life and son are. She has to choose.

I got to that climatic point in the book and couldn't finish. I couldn't decide what she should do. One day I would decide that she would stay in the mountains I had so lovingly described. The next I thought she would sacrifice them to be with the man she determined was her soul mate (she of course had a nasty, violent break up with the Yuppie from Billings, the roommate ended up leaving - I can't remember how I wrote that other than I think she originally had the thing for Tex, so she felt she had been betrayed and so on and so on - all meant to show how my heroine had fallen hard for this sad, broken man).

Maybe that conundrum was the most autobiographical part. I love my husband, I chose to stay with him even though he was firmly rooted in a place I did not love, but my heart always yearned to go home to those Rocky Mountain sunsets I spent pages describing. So I created a character to explore that choice anew and tried to get her to make the definitive decision maybe to test my own.

I could re-write it now if I wanted to, and I think about that from time-to-time - it would give me an excuse to go back home for a while to get the local environment down once more. The Bacchus Pub was a central location in the novel - is it still as awesome as it once was? But, I'd probably come up against the same wall. If you meet someone you think you love, but they aren't where you want to be, what is the right thing to do?

There is a school of thought that you should be content with wherever you find yourself and that happiness comes from within. I follow that, but I notice that anyone who has ever said that to me is not saying it from a location that could generally be considered unlivable. And, I doubt anyone who has ever said it to me when the ghosts of their past float around every where they go. Sometimes breaking free of a place is the way to find that inner peace. For that school of thought, just check in with any addiction counselor. They will tell you that going back to old haunts is highly ill-advised. Bottom line: you can debate place v. person all day. That it is an individual decision, and every decision with this much heft carries a price.

This is on my mind lately because I know two people whom I care for deeply who have called a long distance relationship quits. And I'm trying to decide how to think about it. I was originally extremely angry with the individual who did the leaving, but can I see that point of view? If they are both committed to staying where they are, did they have a future?

You may think I'm asking if long distance relationships can last. Ask me twenty years ago, and I would have said no. Ask me now, and I would tell you it depends. It depends on the two individuals in the relationship, their maturity, why they are apart, and their own sense of self. The reason I would have said no twenty years ago is because I could not have done it then. I had none of the requisites to pull it off: ample maturity or self esteem. We all gain those things at different places in our lives - I'm a bit of a late bloomer.

Now I think they're possible: under the right circumstances. I think once a relationship transcends the need for physical contact and if there is ample trust on both people's part, then, with some real serious commitment, it can happen. But, at some point, you expect to be together. Or at least you expect to have periods of time when you are together. However, what if it the distance and circumstances are such that spending real quality time together would likely never happen? That is not a long distance relationship any longer really. It is two separate lives that collide occasionally. Where, it is fair to ask, is the relationship part in that? So, is it better to face the reality of the situation in that case and call it quits sooner rather than later?

These are complicated questions to complicated situations. I have no easy answers. I only know that two young people I love were hurt because they tried to walk in my long ago heroine's shoes and couldn't find the right answers either.

I can tell you, however, that, in my mind, more often than not, my young heroine would sit out on her aunt and uncle's patio with a view of the Rocky Mountains in front of her and think about how there is only one Bozeman, but men? Well, like fish in the sea, there are a few more of them out there.

Montana State University School of Bison Study (I kid you not)

The Survivor's Burden

2011-10-31T09:50:00.000-07:00

"This Ryan better be worth it. He'd better go home and cure some disease or invent a longer-lasting lightbulb or something."

- Capt. John Miller, Saving Private Ryan

Think of Private Ryan for a minute as though he were an actual person. What a burden he had to carry all his life: the unrealized hopes and aspirations of all his brothers. The guilt he must have felt that he survived and they did not, and what all that those men who were sent to find him who didn't make it back with him? I would think about that every time I watched that movie when the older Ryan kneels down in front of John Miller's headstone and tells him, "Every day I think about what you said to me that day on the bridge. I tried to live my life the best that I could. I hope that was enough. I hope that, at least in your eyes, I've earned what all of you have done for me." And I would ball my eyes out. Not sure why, but that always really got to me. That actor did the most with his small part, I thought, with the anxiety of trying to live a life worth saving registering even in his eyes - like maybe the real person knew a little bit about what his character was supposedly experiencing.

Now, however, I can feel for that poor man on an even deeper level because I know individuals who have the burden of being survivors. No one trudged through wartime France to rescue them, but they know about carrying the weight and responsibility of not being quite able to live their lives for their own sake. There is always that little extra thought creeping into almost anything they do. If you have a great day, a little voice inside your head needles you and asks, "So, why am I allowed to be here for this great day?" If you get a unique opportunity, that same voice comes back around and whispers, "You got this and your [sister, brother, father...] didn't. Are you sure you deserve it?"

And, then there's always the burden to account for yourself. Any where from the teensy-tiny little details about not freaking your family out by not being late for anything, to the larger issue of not screwing up and placing yourself at risk. I've mentioned before, I get paranoid when I don't know where the rest of my family is at any given time. Greg, who works in the middle of the night, has to text me if he's going to be late after a few tense days when he wasn't back home at the usual time. For Marissa, the burden is harder and larger, and I recognize that and try so hard not to add to it, but I think it's always right there, bubbling below the surface. She is young, and this is the time in her life where she's supposed to do young people things and make young adult mistakes. It's how you learn. But, when she inevitably tests that water, the anxiety for everybody shoots through the roof.

What you realize is that not only do you have to fight through your own personal grief, a family dynamic naturally shifts and there is an added intertwining responsibility that everybody has to shoulder and figure out how to adjust to. Suddenly, there is no illusion that life is anything more than horribly fragile. You look at your children or your spouse and know that at any moment, one of them could be gone. You knew it before on a purely intellectual level. But, now you know it deep in your heart and in your bones. You feel it like a painful ache every time one of them walks out the door without you. So, how do you react to that? What is the right way to react to that? Hard, complicated questions to answer.

The irony is, the increased concern over the family strains the family dynamic, so you have to guard against over-reacting. I've read so many stories about surviving children being estranged from their parents, which initially struck me as odd. Now I get it - the parent maybe gets too clingy and the child can't take that added to the natural survivor's guilt, so they break away. And, from the parent/other spouse perspective, it's easier when they're not right there. When I came up here alone for the first few months, I worried constantly, but I wasn't right there to needle them, so Greg and Marissa had some breathing room to live their lives. Ignorance sometimes really is bliss. I'm sure there are other extremes: those cases where the parent can no longer parent at all - too lost in their own grief.

For us, the best way I can describe life as it is now is that someone came along and shook our world like it was a snow-globe. And they shook that sucker hard. When all the little flakes finally settle back down they are in different places from where they were before. And we can't change that back. So, after that major shake-up we're left a little dizzy and disoriented for a time, and getting that balance back is a constant challenge. This is one more aspect to that challenge: how to allow each of us to live a life without guilt and shame because we carry on and Kelsey does not.

To my mind, it's not fair to add that burden onto your loved ones. They don't owe you anything extra because they are alive and another family member is not. For whatever reason. But, on the other hand, if you're a member of a family who has suffered a loss, be gentle and understanding with them and understand the depth of their concern and be careful to check in a little more often than you otherwise would. And maybe take it easy on any bungee jumping, snowboarding or Nascar racing for a while.

Saving Private Ryan, 1998 (Amblin Entertainment, DreamWorks SKG)

Chipmunk Face

2011-10-25T21:00:00.000-07:00

After Kelsey died, I spent quite a few posts ruminating over our history with her eating disorder and trying to look at the mistakes we made as parents. After I exhausted that topic, I have spent a lot of my energy of just stepping through the processes of surviving a deep, shocking grief and the daily challenges we've faced trying to square ourselves with what happened and what happens next. But now I'd like to step back into the past a bit once more and look at an aspect of the whole thing that I didn't address, which is taking care of yourself as parents in the process. This is unabashedly meant as a cautionary tale for anyone who is a caretaker of another individual: young child, ill family member, aging parent, etc. And the lesson is simple: don't do as I do, do as I say.

Going back to the body image issues I'm struggling with and blogged about recently, there are some other issues I'm contending with that are directly related to how the last few years of my life played out. And, after a while, the hole you dig for yourself is so deep that it is hard to climb back out. What brought it to mind was that I woke up yesterday morning with half a chipmunk face. I've got a bad tooth that I've had for a while and it causes me issues. It got that way because I grind my teeth at night, which I've been doing a lot lately for some reason. Finally, I just aggravated it so badly it is swollen to the point where it looks like I'm storing nuts for the winter in half my face. If you try and touch me, bad things are likely to happen. To both of us. My body seems to be screaming at me that I need to go back to the dentist, but I am fairly adept at turning a deaf ear to my body's messages, so I'm trying to ignore this and hope it goes away before Saturday when Marissa and I are supposed to go to the ballet. That would be fun - I'll scare all of the rich socialites.

The biggest issue I have is my own fear. Not of doctors or needles or even pain. It's the fear of walking in to a dentist or doctor and having to say to them I haven't had a check-up in ____ years and not being judged. Because I tried to right the ship after Kelsey died and went to a dentist. Let me just say it was not a good experience. And what am I supposed to say? Look, I took care of two daughters through their troubled teenage years and then my mother in her final years, so back the [bleep] off? I know they mean well. But I don't need their sanctimonious humiliation. I need their help. If I can't get the one without the other, I can't deal.

I am not alone. Far from it. I found this on http://www.nfcacares.org/:

Nearly three quarters (72%) of family caregivers report not going to the doctor as often as they should and 55% say they skip doctor appointments for themselves. 63% of caregivers report having poor eating habits than non-caregivers and 58% indicate worse exercise habits than before caregiving responsibilities.

Evercare Study of Caregivers in Decline: A Close-Up Look at Health Risks of Caring for a Loved One.
National Alliance for Caregiving and Evercare. 2006.

I could be their poster child. And it happens without your really realizing it. It's not necessarily because you're being a martyr (although I have that personality), but it's because this is rarely how you envision your life going, so you don't have a life plan that includes handling a family in crisis while finding time to go to the gym each morning and get your hair and nails done each week. Instead, it comes upon you like a Tsunami that lasts for years and you're so busy trying not to drown in it, you don't think about anything else.

Speaking just for me, there were days where we'd have as many as three doctor's appointments in one day. There was never a week where they weren't at least a few. Doctors, therapists, nutritionists. Inpatient treatment. Outpatient treatment. I spent so much time in various waiting rooms that I just sort of lost sight of the fact that none of those appointments were for me. And, had I really thought about it, I would have said that I could not take the time to go.

When it does suddenly hit you that it's been a while - like when you wake up with a face that's twice the size it was the night before - you really don't know what to do about it.

I may have said this before, but one of the things a therapist said to me early on is, "It's not about you." And it's not. But, I probably took that a little too far. Because at some point, the tide turns and someone will have to take care of the wreck that I could potentially become, and that is not my intent: for myself or for whomever is unlucky enough to have to deal with my adult diapers.

The moral to the story is two-fold: taking care of yourself while taking care of others will benefit your eventual caregivers, so remember to take some time out to change your own oil occasionally. Secondly, don't touch my face!

The Post about Random Political Stuff

2011-10-22T17:59:00.000-07:00

So, for all my pontificating about working to live, I spend most of my days lately working. I get up in the morning, walk a dog around the block, drink some coffee, maybe shower, sit down at the computer and get up only to do some rudimentary physical functions during the day until my brain is fried, and I allow myself to go to bed. I work during hockey, I work during meals. I would work in the shower, but Apple has yet to invent a waterproof computer, so I get a bit of a break there.

I do not, however, work during Steeler games. That remains an area too sacred to intrude upon. You may recall my tale of sneaking out of the emergency room where Mother had been taken with heart palpitations one Sunday to watch the Steeler-Vikings game, Greg covering for me and telling Mother I would be "right back". If I would pull that stunt, then I am certainly not going to let something like a job get in the way. But, other than that, life has devolved into one big Work Fest. It's just what the job requires at the moment, and I am grateful to have it, so I labor on. The only reason I am not working now is because I can't: I am having trouble logging in. So, while I wait to see if the system will reset itself and let me in, I decided to keep my mind off the deadlines that are rapidly slipping out of my grasp and write about something. However, life as it is currently has left me with a void of things to talk about. So, here's just some random thoughts about various things as the Presidential campaign begins to heat up.

From Glory!Blog

The Mormon Card
Greg continues to dive pretty deeply into the social progressive pool. He's left me far, far behind. I have some theories about why, after a lot of years of being mildly liberal and mostly indifferent, he's sudden a total zealot, so I try to be patient. But, I am admittedly hypocritical in that I'm good at sharing my opinions, but I get a little testy when someone else's opinions are thrust onto me. So, while I hate to dampen his enthusiasm, I would just like him to go enthuse elsewhere sometimes. True believers can be exhausting. But anyway, as part and parcel to all of that, he was reading an op-ed piece about Mormons, which was meant to lay down the religion card against Mitt Romney. Greg and I both know several members of the Mormon faith and have for years, but I guess he's never really given much thought about what the particulars of the faith are. He asked me about some of the things he read. I knew them all (except for the one about the church posthumously baptizing Anne Frank; that was new). He seemed shocked. I reminded him that he and I were brought up to believe that Moses parted the Red Sea, a virgin conceived and gave birth, that Jesus turned water into wine and then topped that by rising from the dead (of course Mormons also believe these things). All things that, if they were being discussed outside of the guise of Christianity, would sound sort of nutty. Of course, as I'm debating this, I'm thinking to myself that I'm talking out of my butt because I am totally creeped out by Scientology and personally suspect anyone who believes it is completely nuts. Tom Cruise is a Scientologist, as many of you know. That only seems to prove my point. Yet, I had to admit to myself, that to be true to the point I was trying to make, (which is if it doesn't hurt you or infringe on your rights in anyway, what does it matter what someone believes), I would need to rethink that position and open my mind a bit.

However, I don't like that people of my general politician persuasion have chosen to play the Mormon card. I'm sure the Tea Party at some point would get all squeamish about it, but to have Democrats do it first bothers me. Aren't we supposed to be the party of tolerance? C'mon, boys and girls. take a look at the man's policies and whether or not you think he could run the country. How he worships, as long as he does not impinge how you worship, should not be a concern. Think about it: many of our ancestors came here to escape religious persecution. So honor your forefathers and cut it out, gosh darn it.

Sports and Politics
Part of the Koolaid Greg seems to be drinking currently is mixed by a group of television pundits who have nightly shows that are unabashedly one-sided. That's all fine, it's my side too after all. But, seriously, how many times a night do you need the exact same headlines spun the exact same way? I thought I would crawl straight out of my skin after four SOLID hours of hearing the same story about the latest Republican debate over and over and over again, with only the backdrop and the sound of the person doing the talking changing. They all use the same clips even. But, Greg's very studious about all of them, and for him, each one has something subtly new to add. I'll stay up in my office or use the upstairs TV when it gets to be too much. The one without HD, pause or rewind. I think that hurts his feelings sometimes, we spend a lot of time away from one another due to work. I'd prefer to be downstairs after hours anyway: hockey looks so much better in HD. Problem is it's an 82 game season. There are games three or four times a week, and that's if I only watch the Penguins. Greg got tired of hockey after the first week. We both try to compromise, but we've already both gotten a little testy already in this young season. Come April, who knows how contentious it will be unless we can figure something out. And this is with the benefit of DVR technology. I've wondered how my parent's generation did it. I guess they bowed to the head of the house. I can say there were a lot of Westerns on at night, while soap operas ruled the day. I got Saturday mornings and the one time a week Lassie Come Home was on. No discussions about it that I recall. I guess there was more order from the chaos that way, but less freewill for the homemaker. But, this is now, and now I've got control over the remote and the Pens are up 1 goal after two periods. So - boo-yah.

The moral to these stories is that neither side of the political fence holds a moral high ground, it would seem. That makes me sad. We are all Americans. We love our country. We try to be good people - how we go about that may be different, but does that really matter? I am beginning to despair the species. So, it is small wonder that I prefer watching young men smash one another against the boards in pursuit of a rapidly sliding disc of vulcanized rubber. It seems so pure and peaceful in comparison.

Body Image is a Beast

2011-10-16T18:33:00.000-07:00

I have been struggling with this issue for a while now, so when Greg mentioned that he thinks about his weight in light of our family experience (aka, he feels guilty about worrying over gaining pounds), I decided it's probably time to address it. Here's the thing: those of us who have been impacted by ED, either directly or indirectly, are taught that we need to fight against focusing on body image. The professionals who fight the disease spend a lot of time convincing us that how we look does not matter. However, as we all know, it's like trying to drain the sea a teaspoon at a time while it's raining. There are a lot of others trying to tell us the exact opposite. Just look at the fall line-up on TV and tell me that women in particular are not being told that flat tummies, large chests and perfect smiles are how we should all look if we are to be successful and happy in life. We fought that battle with Kelsey. We lost. She had a stash of fashion magazines and photos she had downloaded off the Internet of Kate Moss that she squirreled away like a junkie with her stash. So, struggling against the larger issues society was throwing at my daughters, it was a struggle not to add to it by whining about my own weight or body image issues. Harder to do than to say. Particularly for a woman who was once known as Cheryl the Barrel as a little girl.

Now, I look at the mirror and simply HATE what I see. From tip to toe. It's been a little over three years now since mother crashed her van, but for me, life as I knew it was part of that wreckage. The months since that fateful day have not been kind. I can see it all on my face when I look in the mirror. I feel it in my bones. I'm much older than my years in every way. That's what the mirror tells me everyday. And, it doesn't help when I see others my age or older who look incredible - with a little (or a lot) of cosmetic help, no doubt, but...

Courtesy of Fox Sports

Jane Seymour was introduced at the beginning of the Steelers home opener. I am not exactly sure why she was in town, but had my husband known in advance, he probably would have made me get him a ticket. He has had a thing for her for years. I don't blame him. I confess to being enthralled with her as well, she is quite simply gorgeous and that accent can melt butter. Besides, how can I get all giggly like a bad schoolgirl every time I see a Wahlberg or Adrien Brody and then turn around and be bothered if his eyes light up at the mention of an actress here or there? But, I was close to being dismayed at the sight of her. She's still perfectly and seemingly effortlessly beautiful at 60. Good for her, but, after nearly needing to be airlifted up to our seats, I was so winded, I came home with my ego decidedly tweaked. It got kicked a bit harder when I saw a photo of Paul McCartney's new wife, a woman my age who looks most definitely not my age. And, they say things come in threes, so as Greg has gotten caught up in the X-Factor, I am constantly assaulted with Paula Abdul in her super high heels and super tight dresses. I go upstairs and catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror, greying hair pulled back in a ponytail, this part flabby, that part drooping, another part pooching out, and it gets overwhelming and depressing. If I can't get past it and not let it bother me, how is a 14-year old girl with insecurities supposed to do it?

X-Factor, Fox

But, really, how are any of us supposed to not consider body image? Like asking us not to think about elephants, it is natural then to immediately think of elephants - and think about them a lot. The more someone tells me I should just be okay with my looks and my weight, the more I worry about it and am not. I wonder, as my husband smiles at the sideline cheerleaders every Sunday, what he thinks of my ever-increasing imperfections. I wonder more about what other women think as they look at me whenever I'm out - females can be harsh judges - and maybe for the first time, I can get a sense of what my daughter had been up against. And it's a Beast.

I know full well that I should just concentrate on being healthy and the rest doesn't matter. That's an intellectual knowledge. Unfortunately, like a lot of women, how we think of ourselves is not intellectual, it's emotional. And I've got no answer for it.

With a Little Help from Your Friends: Get a Life

2011-10-09T04:39:00.000-07:00

"And the days went by like paper in the wind. Everything changed, then changed again. It's hard to find a friend. It's hard to find a friend."

- Tom Petty

Here's the question: Are real friends still a necessity in a digital age?

When I am feeling sorry for myself, which happens more than I would like to admit, I worry that if I ever want to make a friend again it is going to be of the invisible kind. This is mainly because I am under house arrest here most of the week, glued to the computer and my little "corner office" for a lot of hours everyday with my only office mates being hairy, smelly and generally not the greatest conversationalists. My friends back in Texas are still my friends, but I'm not right there anymore and we live divergent lives now. I forget to check in with them. They forget to check in with me. It's the way it goes in a fast paced world. I am far more guilty of it than the reverse. When I chatted with a friend on the phone the other day, the first time we had actually spoken since I got here, I found out that her life had been rather dramatic in the months since I came east. I had no idea, and I felt so badly that I had allowed us to lose touch to that degree, and that she had to go through all those things without any moral support from me. How could I not know all of this, I wondered?

Facebook gives you a false sense of connection I think. One of the many conundrums of social networking - you are connected, yet you aren't. I could reach out to her at any time through that media, but because she is my "friend" on FB, there is sort of a complacency about it that causes you not to actually touch base with people themselves, but to get your information and base your assumptions on their well being from your news feed. One is likely not going to change one's Facebook status to say, "My husband left me today for a much younger woman and took the dog with him, and because I cried about it at work, I got fired." (DISCLAIMER: That is NOT what happened to my friend, not even close - it's just a fictional example.) You still have to actually communicate with your friends to get the real details of their lives, their loves, their fears and worries, and their needs. And I don't mean Tweeting or texting when I say "communicate". One can check in with one's friend via text, but I would challenge the notion that one can really effectively communicate that way. I've watched people try to carry on rather in depth "conversations" via text and let me just say, the subtext gets lost in the text. Sometimes you need to hear the inflection in one's voice to really understand them. Trying to make major decisions in 140 character little snippets is just mind boggling to me. But, I'm old, so just take that into account.

Anyway, I digress. As I was saying originally, people are so busy with their work and their families that there is precious little time to remember to drop a note to someone or call just to say hi. So, you naturally tend to hear less and less often from those you left behind. And in corresponding order to where they existed in your circle of friends. Casual acquaintances drop off first and so on until you're left with the hard core and long established close friends. The people you would take a bullet for and vice-versa. They stay in touch, but even they have lives outside of you now that you're not right there. That's all well and good. Because you do too.

Unless you're me that is. I have lived in this town for nearly ten months now and can honestly tell you I have not made one single friend (my lovely Philly friend does not count - we knew her already). I can claim a fair number of acquaintances. Some I know better than others. But, there is not a single person I could call up at midnight and tell them to come get me and expect them to actually do it without really wondering what in world is wrong with me and then promptly losing my number. So, I've been thinking about that some lately. I am potentially in a unique position to answer the question, "Does a [relatively] normal individual actually have to have friends to go and do things with to be whole and happy?" I think I would have answered that question back in January as no, not really. I would have told you that I could live very comfortably for a long period of time with no one but my family - both the two and four legged ones. And so I have. But, every so often, and more often lately, I think there is a large value in having someone else to do things with.

As an example, Greg doesn't like hockey. I'll drag him to a game or two. He'll concede to record some of his socially progressive talk shows so I can watch the Pens real time in high definition, but it is just not his scene. So, at midnight on opening night of the season, I was talking to the cat about that shot and this amazing save and then bemoaning the fact that it was going into overtime. The cat stared at me intently like I had lost my mind. He apparently does not like hockey either. At least he didn't leave. And that's when it struck me: I really need to make some friends. And they better like hockey. I'm sure my family would appreciate it if I would. Then the responsibility to entertain me wouldn't be squarely and wholly on their shoulders.

I'm not an easy person to like. It's not just me saying this, I've been told as much before. But, I don't think I'm a monster either. I think I'm friend-worthy. The challenge is just to get out in the world to meet people. Volunteering is still the best plan for that, but that is problematic with work being what it is. All of that is more or less beside the point. I know what I need to do to fix it. I am just fascinated by the fact that I created this little social experiment for myself and learned that John Lennon was really right, you get by with a little help from your friends.

Zombieland

2011-10-05T06:20:00.000-07:00

The mood was solemn around the house on the first Monday in October. The weather turned cold and rainy on the previous Friday and had remained that way all weekend. It seemed odd to look at people's Facebook pictures from the weekend and see sunny skies - it was as though the whole world should be blanketed in grey along with us. We had relented on Saturday and turned the heat on. We had held out that long because this was just a temporary cold front. Consistently, the weather sites and channels were predicting a rise back up to perfect fall temperatures after the weekend. But, in the meantime, the cold and damp permeated through the brick walls with overnight temperatures dipping into the 30's. Here we go, I thought to myself, the first real test for all of these native Southerners. It was one thing to be out of the 100 plus degree, drought ridden state of Texas in July. It is another to be away from it when the weather turns cold and wet here. And sure enough, the other occupants of the house seemed more concerned than excited. Even the dogs weren't liking it. The sound of the air cleaner's "arcing" when it was first turned on completely freaked them out and even after that settled down, they became jumpy every time the heater cycled on after that. And, come Monday, the day seemed darker than the weekend if anything. The front didn't seem in a hurry to move out.

Of course, one reason it seemed dark was because both the Steelers and the Cowboys lost in ignoble fashion. Steeler fans are left wondering if there is a season to be had after bodies - and bodies attached to marquis names - went off the field with injuries in a brutal, gut wrenching loss. And, as that agony was unfolding before our eyes in High Definition, Greg spent the afternoon watching his team's 27-3 lead evaporate in updates scrolling along the bottom of the screen. By the time the late games kicked off, the mood was definitely as dark as the weather. Steeler fans have a tendency to think the sky is falling even when it isn't - I've mentioned that before I know - but this time it really does look bad, and I have to say I'm not particularly optimistic about our chances. Watching the Patriots and Baltimore ripping their way through teams like they are alien beasts who can't be killed doesn't help the mood any. Trying to tell myself it is just a game does not seem to be helping.

I am observing that all of us, not just me, are a bit reliant currently on outside forces to keep us engaged. The Steelers, the Cowboys, the Longhorns, moving across country, throwing oneself into progressive causes, finding new and interesting places to eat. All tools in the art of distraction. When that doesn't work, you have to face your naked reality, and that's not all that easy to do. I won't be able to say we're onto the other side of living with grief and guilt, out the long tunnel if you will, until we can take a losing season and place it in its proper perspective. Until we can, in other words, live life without a dependence on other factors to feel whole and fulfilled. You have to wonder if a horrible, ugly season of football isn't just what the doctor ordered maybe. I really don't want to find out.

But, without the Steelers to bolster my sense of well-being, temporarily anyway, I began the work week feeling tired and depressed. Before I gave up on that book on grieving I read that it is typical for people in my situation to not necessarily be suicidal but to not particularly care if they live or die. I believe that. I have felt that way often. Moving to where I'm six miles from Heinz Field doesn't always change that. You pull yourself out of bed in the morning because you have to. Because people rely on you to be there for whatever reason. And sometimes that's the only reason you do. It's like being a zombie. You don't really feel anything and just live to live because your body hasn't shut down yet, but you would be okay if it did. You might not even notice. After two plus years one would kind of hope not to feel that way anymore, but there are days when you do. Maybe the days stretch into weeks. And, looking outside at leaden skies with a damp chill in the air probably doesn't help much. So, why bother, I ask myself? Because, eventually the skies will clear, and the air will take on that fresh feeling of fall that I remember from my childhood, and it would be a shame to miss it. And, besides, hockey season starts tomorrow.

Zombieland, Columbia Pictures (2009)

Cats and Dogs

2011-10-02T16:32:00.000-07:00

I am trying to distract myself after the Steelers loss in Houston this afternoon (terrible for several reasons, among them the fact that our quarterback is questionable for next week's game), so I decided that I will tell you the story of my two little Etsy Miracles, which are about as far away from football as you can possibly get.

This is a story that has to be told with a note of caution, because it is the story of the power of inanimate objects and what they come to represent to us. Taken too far, that can lead to a starring role in a reality show about hoarders. Growing up with a mother who hoarded, I have to fight a tendency to be too much of a collector myself. Living now in a much smaller house, that I have come to think of as "The Cottage" because it makes it seem quaint as opposed to simply little, I really, really have to fight not to regather loads of random items that I worked very hard to separate myself from when I moved here. Additionally, I think we all have to keep the value of our things in perspective. How many families in Europe in the early 30's ever would have thought they could survive without their fine china and family heirlooms, but how many of them had to as war raged across the continent? Stuff is just that: stuff. It can be replaced. The people in your life cannot. However, sometimes that stuff comes to remind you of those people and is therefore very dear.

This is the story of some objects that are precious to me (Gollum) because I look at them and am taken back to a time in my life when things were simple, my love for my parents, and theirs for me, was whole and untainted, and all the trials and sorrows of life were ahead of me and therefore unknown. Quite simply, I look at these things and they make me smile.

So, with that drawn out introduction, allow me to give you some background.

The Cats

Growing up, my mother had these porcelain cat salt and pepper shakers. White Siamese cats - a girl with a pink ribbon and a boy with a blue one. I was fascinated with them as a little girl. Not only because of their Mona Lisa smiles making them look like they were in cahoots in some mischievous plan, but because when you shook them there was a sound maker in the bottom of each one that made it sound as though they were meowing. Every few months, Mother would let me take them out of the curio cabinet and play with them, always keeping a watchful eye on me so I wouldn't get too rambunctious and break them. Of all the things I ended up doing as a child - I never did take them out without her permission and without her right there. I always accepted one day I would inherit them. But, they never apparently made it out of Montana. When Mother moved back to Pennsylvania the year after my dad died, they weren't among her things. I asked her about them and she gave me a little shrug and said she didn't know. This is a woman who knew when we threw away an outdated circular, so I never believed that. I always thought she gave them to someone or let them go in the auction and didn't want to tell me. I let it go, but I was sad about it and always held out a little hope they were just in some of the boxes that never got unpacked. But they weren't. When we went through all her things after she died, that last hope of ever seeing them again or knowing what happened to them faded.

The Dog

My mom was always the one with too many things, some of them had stories connected to them, some of them did not. My dad's life was much more streamlined. Whatever he did have, it had meaning. Even though I did not always know what it was because he could be guarded about his emotions. Among those things was a sad eyed ceramic hound dog planter that he kept on his dresser to hold his cufflinks and tie clips. I don't know where he got it or why it was special, but he was fond of it. After he was gone, Mother gave it to me. I have had it ever since, usually holding business cards - for a long time, it housed a note from Kelsey thanking me for my patience and one from Marissa. It moved around with my parents, then from their home in Montana to Texas, and it made it safely back to Pennsylvania where it sat on the dresser in my office. Then, on that awful day in April when Greg called to tell me Noelle had died, a gust of wind pushed in through the open window, knocked a framed photo over into it and sent it crashing to the hardwood floor, shattering it beyond any hope of repair. I was devastated. I had allowed this piece of my father to be destroyed so casually.

The Miracle Part

If you've gotten a gift from me, or if you do at some point, chances are I bought it on Etsy. Marissa introduced it to me last year during a boring Longhorn game, and I've been hooked ever since. Already a long post, I won't belabor why, but there is a bit of everything on it. I use it a lot. Which means I get a lot of email from them tempting me to use it even more. In full holiday shopping mode, I usually will look, and a couple of weeks ago, I was peeking at some of the items in a promotional email and happened upon a "vintage" shop that had a lot of salt and pepper shakers. So, I thought I'd give it a shot and searched for cat shakers. The results were the exact shakers Mother had. Ironically, the vendor is from Pittsburgh (and, yes, it has occurred to me that these are the same ones, but I doubt it). But, I immediately bought them. Then, thinking why not, I had already gotten extraordinarily lucky, I searched the site for "ceramic hound dog" and, lo and behold, found the exact same thing as my Dad's old hound dog. And, not just one, but a pair! I bought them too. Both packages arrived last week. They're just old stuff. But, for me, they represent little pieces of my parents, little flashes of my childhood, and a more innocent time gone by. The cats have taken their place in my curio cabinet, and one dog is on my dresser in my bedroom, the other in my office - none of them are any where close to a window. Every time I look at them they make me smile.

I have never really felt my parents presence since they died. That otherworldly sense that people sometimes talk about where they feel their loved ones are with them. I yearned for it now and again - I guess because of all the things we never said to one another - all the unresolved things that would remain that way forever. But, as I look at my silly little ceramic cats and dogs, I have to wonder...

Now What?

2011-09-26T09:42:00.000-07:00

I should be working, and I'll pay for this later, but I'm watching leaves float by outside my window instead, fascinated by the signs of real fall. It seems incredible to me that, with the advent of autumn, I am about to experience the last of the four seasons here as a newbie. How can that possibly be? It seems like yesterday that I was standing in a living room that was wall-to-wall boxes wondering how I was going to fit it all in (I didn't - as the full attic can attest). Depending upon what lens I am trying to view my experiences here through, it seems like time has gone by in the blink of an eye or has been an incredulously slow struggle.

The house has taken on that "lived in" look that a house does when people and pets cram into a space and then don't have copious amounts of time to care for it. Sadly, I have never had my envisioned "meet and greet" where I had planned on inviting the neighbors and my family to come see the house while everything was still fresh and new. There are three basic reasons for that: 1) I was intent on handling some of the maintenance items I inherited first, like the shutters on the back of the house that need painted and the hideous floral wallpaper in the downstairs bathroom and both still are not done, 2) work was more intense than I had imagined it would be, and 3) I drastically under-estimated the struggle we would have to assimilate - not with the place, but with our situation and with one another.

What I mean is: there has been a struggle to find our way in this new world that transcends geography. I've been thinking about why that is over the last few weeks and finally decided that it might be because we made the decision to move here in the late spring of last year, and the next months were full of planning and packing. Our days were absorbed with looking at thousands of photos of houses with other people's stuff in them in areas we knew nothing about, trying to figure out what our stuff would look like in them and how to get it here. If you think about it - the logistics of moving three humans, what we thought would be six dogs and two cats, and a literal lifetime worth of belongings is enormous. It took some doing and kept us occupied and distracted. But now it's done. Now, we find ourselves here, we know the basics about the city - where the good movie theatre is, how to get to the zoo, and if puck drop is scheduled for 7:00, you better leave for the arena at 5:30 - so we are left with trying to figure out the Now What.

Now what do we do with the rest of our lives? Because they are here. And now. Not some place in the future across the country. I underestimated the difficulty of trying to figure that out. Or, more to the point, I didn't stop to think about it. Maybe because I couldn't or shouldn't, but as I was packing away Mother's silver, Dad's old slides, Greg's father's books, and the girls' old school projects, I never really thought about the fact that I was just postponing the inevitable. That someday we would just have to face the fact of a future that will forever be colored by our past. You can't avoid it forever, and you have to make some peace with it eventually in order to carry on. Intellectually, I was probably always aware of that, but sometimes our mind talks to our heart, sometimes it doesn't. Looking back on it, I think this summer was about us bumping up against that reality. Whether or not it was made easier or harder with new surroundings, I'm not sure. And what's more: I don't think we're done with the process yet. But, we're getting there, that I do think is true.

Marissa and I went to see The Foo Fighters Friday night. They rank as a Top Five favorite band for me. Kelsey introduced me to them, buying me The Colour and The Shape several years ago for my birthday. We saw them as a trio - Marissa, Kelsey and myself - twice. You may recall me mentioning them playing in Salt Lake City in an earlier blog. It was not lost on me that Marissa wore my old Asia shirt that I had given to Kelsey at one point, whereupon she proceeded to wear it nearly into the ground, much to my dismay. That way we took a little bit of Kelsey into the arena with us. That's what life is now: living with what we have, but not forgetting who we lost. I hope Kelsey was with us somewhere because Dave Grohl really rocked the house. She would have loved it.

Courtesy of www.monstersandcritics.com from Wembley Stadium 2008 (trust me, my pictures weren't this good)

Song on the Radio (the Nobility of the Compromise)

2011-09-22T19:17:00.000-07:00

Breathe deep the gathering gloom,

Watch lights fade from every room.

Bedsitter people look back and lament,

Another day's useless energy spent,

Impassioned lovers wrestle as one,

Lonely man cries for love and has none.

New mother picks up and suckles her son,

Senior citizens wish they were young.

Cold hearted orb that rules the night,

Removes the colours from our sight,

Red is grey and yellow white,

But we decide which is right,

And which is an illusion?

- Late Lament, the Moody Blues

I was sitting in my office one night with the radio tuned to some oldie station. Oldies as in when I was in High School, which is pretty old actually. I normally keep it on sports talk, but the normal sportscaster mind cast around here seems to be gloom and doom all the time, like it's a reverse psychology thing - be critical of the team no matter what and they will always be better than you think they are. So, after about a minute of listening to them bash various components of the Steelers 24-0 win the weekend before, I decided I'd had enough and went surfing. I stopped at a Fleetwood Mac song, noticing that the reception carried a bit of static, kind of like the old transistor radio days, but I stopped there anyway because I liked that song. The follow-up was old John Mellencamp - back when he was a Cougar - which rolled into Steely Dan's Peg. Wow, I thought to myself, it's like this station raided my iPod. I suddenly found myself with a really wild sense of déjà vu, sitting there listening to all these old songs that I listened to as a young girl with a hint of static as the leaves turn to shades of brown and red signaling the end of summer outside my window, just as though I were back in my parent's home and my life was ahead of me. As Greg called me to come downstairs to dinner Peter Frampton was asking Do You Feel Like I Do? and that weird time warp feeling was complete.

And, like I tend to do when I get triggered like that, I began to over-think things. I wondered what happened to that girl who listened to static-ridden radio hour after hour while doing homework? It doesn't seem like a lifetime ago, but it has been. Aside from my horror that my older self not only listens to Rush, but nearly worships them, what would I think of the person I became? This is the stuff of raging middle age crisis's, to be sure - questioning where you ended up in life versus where you once dreamed you would be.

Where did I dream I would be? That's easy to answer: I dreamed I would be a published writer. Not to say I won't ever be, and I do get to "publish" a few times a month here, so it is not like I sold out on the dream, I just delayed it by a few decades. And, I planned on a larger audience - envision Stephen King. Or at least Peter Straub. If you're going to dream, might as well dream big. But can I accept this compromise? Can I be okay with just writing to all of you and maybe never reaching past that?

The thing about mid-life crises: it's your mind's way of grappling with what is, what could still be, and what never will be. This process is undoubtedly a little more poignant for someone who lost a child along the way. The trick is to make peace with all these aspects and be realistic about the future. So, I want to be careful about what I'm about to say: I don't want to make it seem as though I'm saying that people should not reach for the stars. They should. But, I also they should be okay if they only get to stargaze. There is no disgrace in that.

My husband is all about the new show The X-Factor. He pulled me out of my office today to watch this young man's audition. He's a garbage man currently, pretty fresh out of rehab with bad teeth and less than Hollywood hunk looks. He's got some talent, but he's not the next Justin Timberlake. He's got a great story so that'll take him a ways in the competition. I doubt he's the one who ends up with a $5M contract frankly, but he'll get something. And something is more than he had before, so hopefully he will know to make the most of the chance he's getting and be able to run with that opportunity. But, for all his co-workers who sit at home and watch, feeling bad that they collect garbage for a living, I would say, "Don't." There is honor in working hard, no matter at what it is that you work at. I respect the dudes who collect my trash - a lot. Collecting my trash has got to be less than lovely - it's mostly pet poop. Yet, they do it every week without fail. Where would I be without them? And by collecting my week's worth of dog and cat crap they keep a roof over their family's collective heads. They shouldn't be ashamed of that. That is the noblest of pursuits. Providing for your family.

Circling back around to my own personal midlife crisis and what I would say to others in my same position, it is this: I have to accept that my life isn't exactly what I had envisioned when Aja was a new album, and I need to make peace with that. As do all of us in the same position. I need to realize that I may still have a purpose to serve with my writing, but it's okay that I'm never going to win a Nobel Prize for Literature. I compromised my dreams to make a living, there is no doubt. But, as they say, it is what it is. Dwelling on it won't make it three decades ago and won't make it my Mother's old radio that I'm listening to. It won't turn me 17 again. All I have is now.

But, for now, I'm back to listening to sports talk - my brain can't take all the depth of classic rock...

The All-Sports Weekend (or Six Flags Over Pittsburgh)

2011-09-19T05:50:00.000-07:00

The logos for the six Super Bowls the Steelers have won flutter above Heinz Field on a beautiful fall day

My work-life balance had tipped the scale to all work, no real life over the last few weeks. This is not, I should point out, because my employers were pressuring me to work harder - even though I am a long way from the worker I once was in terms of sheer hours - but because there are certain deadlines and expectations to meet, and, frankly, because I work a little scared all the time. In a down economy, the major breadwinner has that extra little worry nipping at their heels: finding another job isn't a given. And, as I've oft lamented, in my case: literally finding another job might prove to be a real challenge for me unless it is in one of about four places in the city I can now find easily through mass repetition. But, if you go at that pace for too long you end up not doing anyone a favor, including the people you work for, because workers are like any other kind of machinery, they need to re-charge occasionally to operate at maximum efficiency. So, I had carved out this weekend for a long time as the "re-charge" weekend. I had envisioned it as a lazy, sit around the house, read a book and watch some football kind of an affair, but it evolved into something quite different.

For one thing, did you know that professional hockey training camp is generally NOT open to the public? Did you ever even think about it? No, neither had I really. But, as it turns out, it's not. Now, what you may know is that arguably the best hockey player on the planet, Sidney Crosby, plays for Pittsburgh and was recently cleared for non-contact workouts after months off the ice recovering from a concussion. So, when the Penguins opened the first two practices to the public, it seemed like an event I couldn't miss. Greg patiently packed up a book and a crossword puzzle and accompanied me to Consol Energy Center at 8:45 on a beautiful Saturday morning and sat there with me and a few thousand others in the cold arena as groups of skaters - recognizable veterans mixed in with newly drafted unknowns - took to the ice to chase pucks around until at last the final group came out, and there he was: skating out to thunderous applause and a standing ovation, Sidney Crosby. So, I watched him skate around for about an hour, amusing myself with the wailing, screaming teenage girls who were trying to catch his attention and his single-minded resolve not to look at them or acknowledge them in anyway until finally I was satiated and told Greg we could go if he was ready. I've never seen him move that fast. He was more than ready. We walked back out into the sunshine of a gorgeous fall day over four hours later, me thinking I had just had the most amazing experience, Greg surely thinking that's four hours he'd never get back.

But, the best was yet to come. Also courtesy of the husband, who came home Thursday morning to tell me he had heard on the radio that visiting west coast teams that cannot sell all the allotted tickets the Steelers send them, will release them back and they are then made available to us at face value. The Steelers home opener was against the Seahawks. It doesn't get any more west coast than that. I popped online and, lo and behold, he was right! The seats weren't very good, but whatever: they were in the stadium - binoculars and a jumbotron will take care of the rest. So, Marissa and I pulled out of the house at 10:00 yesterday morning for a 1:00 kick-off and made it home at about 6:45 last night (and, yes, I did get lost coming home). But, we had stored up in our collective experience a home shut-out on a simply beautiful fall day. She'll have to tell you what it was like from her own viewpoint, but, for me, sitting there in those crappy seats high above the enclosed end zone, it was a little like heaven. This is where I live now, I thought to myself at one point, I am one of those people I've spent years watching on TV. When the announcer talks about places to go for Steeler merchandise, I know where he's referring to. It was a bit surreal actually. To be truly one of the home crowd.

Now on Monday morning, fifteen minutes away from logging back into the work week, I am processing what had to be close to an ideal weekend and a few thoughts come to mind: we work to live. When we tip that scale and live to work some things happen, and not that many of them are good. For one thing, my brain was fried. I was becoming tired and resentful, and I could tell my attention to the little details was slipping. I feel more up to the task this morning, ready to get back at it and a bit more rested. But, I also thought about people who maybe throw themselves into their work to avoid their grief. I have signed up recently to volunteer to be like a peer counselor for others who have lost loved ones to ED. And it occurred to me that I might very well come across someone who uses workaholism to escape from the pain of losing someone they love. What would I say to that person? That's complicated because on the one hand, each of us in our family have done what we had to do to get through the day in the last two plus years. If it helps, then why knock it? But, on the other hand, I think about all the moments like the ones I had this weekend and realize that you don't get those locked in an office 20 hours a day. There's more to this, and I'm not done processing it all, but it's time to log back in and let the scale tip back to the work side of the equation...

Taxing

2011-09-13T07:02:00.000-07:00

I've spent what little spare time I've had in the last couple of weeks trying to get our taxes ready for the CPA. It has for years now been a last minute ordeal for us because our taxes are incredibly complicated and because I had an interest in a commercial partnership, so I have to wait on a Schedule K-1 every year that makes an extension inevitable. So, come late August and on into September, I sit down with a literal mountain of data, sort through it, organize it, create spreadsheets and calculate mileage allowances, etc. It is never an easy process, and every year I tell myself next year I will do all this as I go along, and then, every year, I never do.

This year was by far the worst. Sitting here right now, at the midway point of September, I am still chasing two critical documents I need - no doubt the originals were lost somewhere in the mail in the forwarding process. I had receipts here, there and every where because of the move - despite trying very hard to get it all together when I packed. And I have Mother's final return and information to deal with. I thought I had most of it together finally Sunday as I licked my wounds from the awful season football opener (I figured I was already royally pissed off - might as well really seal the deal and finish prepping my taxes), only to realize I still had items missing Monday morning when the beer and frustration wore off a little.

At one point Sunday as I scrambled to find where I put the packet of original death certificates for Mother, I had to thumb through all our critical documents and came across Kelsey's birth and death certificates and several documents of Mom's - her nursing license, her marriage license, my doctored birth certificate and the original one where I was still listed as Baby McGuigan (no one puts Baby in a corner...or a lock box, as the case may be). I collapsed into Greg's arms at one point sobbing, just overcome by having to touch all those documents again just to be able to file a stupid tax return. I didn't tell him that I would have likely handled that better if the Steelers had given me a win. My guess is he probably knows that and doesn't hold it against me. For all the things that have tugged at our union over the last couple of years, maybe that is why it has held up: there are things we accept about one another that no one else would understand or tolerate.

But, even as that awful Sunday dawned into a beautiful Monday and now a crisp fall Tuesday, it is like trudging through quicksand to get the last finishing touches on the packet. I want it out of my house like it's a poison. I mean no one likes doing taxes, but for me this year has been particularly excruciating. Last year, with three returns to handle - Kelsey's final return and Mom's right after she died plus our own, I think I was just too numb to react. The woman who had worked on Mom's return for years was very kind and took care of Kelsey's and Mom's without me having to do much. Now, a year later, that numbness has worn off and I am left with reliving what tax season means to a family battling illness. It means facing just how horribly expensive and complicated it is. I'm remembering all of that. And hating every second of it.

As most families battling an eating disorder can tell you, the disease has multiple tentacles that reach into all areas of your life and attach themselves there. Because most insurance plans in most states offer very little coverage for issues directly related to its treatment, it means - as I've talked about before - you have to pay out of pocket for doctors and resources and then fight with the insurance companies to get reimbursed. You will likely lose the fight and then be left with trying to get some relief as deductions on your tax return. Of course, as you add all that up at the end of the year, you are faced with the reality of exactly how much you spent. I've mentioned before, I think, raiding the change jar to be able to afford groceries at one point. Every penny I earned went to medical expenses for a couple of years running. Our retirement was gone, we had a second mortgage on the house to pay for expenses, and, in the end, we simply couldn't afford to help Kelsey any longer and so her death certificate sits next to her birth certificate in a strong box downstairs. These are all the things, all the struggles, I have to relive when I touch the receipts and prep the spreadsheets I have to in order to fulfill my obligation as a taxpaying citizen of this country without getting completely screwed in the process.

One more thing to think about as I consider what role I should play in the eating disorder community. I think about all the parents or spouses of individuals struggling with the disease now, and think about them trying to juggle just the stress of the disease with trying to find a way to pay for it. And how alone they surely feel at times. I get that. I was there. Sometimes I feel like I can't abandon them to that fate, but sometimes I feel that all I want to do is live my simple life in my little house and aspire to only have to file a 1040EZ once again...

Ten Years On: What I Remember

2011-09-10T05:49:00.000-07:00

Growing up, all the adults I knew could tell you down to the most precise details where they were when Kennedy was shot. It was the defining moment for that generation. Even Mother would get a rather faraway look in her face whenever she would talk about it, as though she was reliving it again, and be able to tell you where she was, who she was with and what she was doing when she heard the news. And, if you think about it, she was alive through the Wall Street crash in '29, Pearl Harbor, the dropping of the first atomic bomb, VE and VJ Day, and almost obliterated by total nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis. So, for this single event in a string of dramatic world events in her lifetime to be the one she would talk about over and over again as I was growing up says something both about the power of the then new-ish medium of television, but also how much that single act gripped this country.

I thought my generation had that moment when the Challenger Space Shuttle blew up. I can tell you about that day even now. Little did I know that it would be dwarfed years later by a day so dark that it has cast a shadow on all our days since. So, here we are, on the precipice of its tenth anniversary, and I bet there is not a single individual who will read this who cannot tell you precisely where they were and what they were doing on September 11, 2001.

The thing is, I can indeed remember exactly what I was doing when I first heard about the attacks, and I can remember much about the first hours. After that, the day becomes hazy for me - the next several do actually. I remember the natural instinct to glue oneself to the TV to watch as thousands of New Yorkers posted pictures on makeshift bulletin boards and light poles looking for loved ones. Loved ones you knew they would never find. I remember feeling so helpless against that. I remember struggling to know how much I should tell my kids and trying to gauge their reactions to make sure they weren't too scared. I read articles about it - but I'm not sure any of us got it right. All of the parents I know were in shock and just struggling to make sense of it themselves. Sitting here now I wonder if any of that played a small part in Kelsey's disease: in a world gone mad, some small thing she could control. Who knows?

I remember trying to worry over the staff I supervised who all had different reactions to 9/11 against just the ongoing rush of work. I can't remember if we let the office close the actual afternoon of 9/11 or not - I think I probably let anyone who wanted to go home leave and kept a skeleton staff, but I honestly don't remember. I do remember one of the managers struggling with a homeowner who called multiple times that day to complain about her neighbor's dog barking. Clearly the caller had no idea what had happened, and her complaint felt so pitifully lame against the magnitude of the day that it was hard to handle her diplomatically. I remember in the days that followed having to worry about Anthrax in the mail, and getting protective gear for the lovely woman who was our receptionist. How bizarre that was. I remember other bits and pieces of people's reactions over the days and weeks that followed - some of the more highly strung individuals had a hard time dealing with it and became disruptive. Looking back on it now, I understand the post-traumatic stress reaction a bit better. At the time, I was just a little incredulous. Everyone was on edge - our sense of security had come crashing down around us, someone whining at me about observing moments of silence when I've got phones ringing and people waiting to ask me questions just made me want to silence her. That I remember.

I remember worrying about a cousin who works in Washington. She was fine, but in the first hours of the attacks when cell phone towers not destroyed were overloaded, no one could find her. The first call I made was to my mother, I thought she would be scared. I underestimated her: all those dramatic events in her life made her stoic in the face of tragedy. But, she immediately called her sister to ask about my cousin. My poor aunt. At the time, I didn't realize another cousin worked at a nuclear power plant that had immediately gone on high alert. She had two children in harm's way that day. I can only imagine what those first hours were like for her.

I remember at one point that first night, exhausted from watching hours of footage of the most awful images, thinking that more people would die as a direct result of this day. Sadly, I was very right about that.

All I want to remember on this anniversary is that roughly 3,000 souls would not live to see September 12, and each of them had names and families who loved them and miss them still. Others who did survive struggle with disease and injury as a direct result of the attacks. Young men and women from all across the country currently are in service trying to protect us from other 9/11's and put their lives at risk every moment of every day for that purpose. Whether or not I observed a moment of silence at work ten years ago is nothing compared to that. My worrying over long lines at airport security checkpoints now is nothing compared to that. Whether the Steelers beat the Ravens is nothing compared to that. I am glad I live in the country I do: despite all its flaws and petty bickering between political factions, we have continued on in the face of this tragedy, so I hope everyone remembers the things that I do.

So It Begins

2011-09-05T05:03:00.000-07:00

And finally it is here. September. Which means one thing around here. Football. I knew this already: you watch football three days a week (high school, college and Steelers), and talk about it the other four. The Pirates must be so relieved, the spotlight suddenly and irrevocably turned off their stunning slide from first to worst. The Penguins will get some press when training camp starts later this month, but for this brief moment, it is all about the pigskin.

And, of course, this is what I have waited for all of my life. To be here and part of this. I worried that I would miss being the big Black and Gold fish in a Cowboy pond, and there is no denying there is nothing whatsoever that stands out about me until I open my mouth to a Texan-like drawl. I drive the same car about one in four people do here, it even now has a Pennsylvania plate on the back and a stunning Six Time Super Bowl decorative plate on the front, I dress like EVERYBODY else, in one of the "oldest" counties in the country I'm about the median age, and I love my team. Nothing special here. But, I find I am, so far anyway, happy to be a member of the herd, because at least I am close to the action.

I do feel the inner competitiveness creeping in with this strong urge to out black and gold my neighbor, however. When I first moved in, I thought we had the potential to be great friends, as I may have mentioned before. He had his house decked out in equal parts Steeler and Penguins, he is about my age and has an adult child that lives at home. With so much in common, I figured we were sure to click. Wrong. We call them The Mikes. Mike, Mike Jr. and Mrs. Mike. We call them that because the husband, Mike, is the only one any of us have been truly introduced to. Mike was cordial enough initially. Mike Jr. can be fairly nice in passing, which he should be since we didn't call the cops on his beer pong party that got a little out of hand a few weeks ago, but Mrs. Mike? Well, she's a stone cold [deleted]. I would put it down to them not liking the dogs, which I don't think they do, or being upset about the fence, which I think they might be, but they were like that in the four months before the fence went up and the dogs got here. And, I understand they were not too warm and fuzzy with the woman who lived here before. Of course everyone in the neighborhood talks about her by saying, "well, she was really old." Or, "she really didn't want to give up the house." I always picture someone who was pretty much like Mom in her later years - stubborn, proud and senile enough to be infuriating. Nonetheless, I don't particularly take their snubs personally, they are just less-than-friendly people. But, there can be no denying that the two male Mikes are big sports fans. So, at one point during the summer they acquired wind chimes like my little Steelers ones, only theirs are about four times as big. So, now his big ass wind chimes sit out there next to his gas grill cover that looks like a Steeler jersey and just sing to me to meet the challenge. I am trying to fight the urge to try and outdo them in their Steeler-ishness and just accept it takes all kinds to make up a nation and his bigger wind chimes don't make me less of a fan, but I will probably lose the fight to some regard. I already decorate the front of the house pretty elaborately on game days, and I have naturally gathered up some new swag during the off season. My guess is that I will have enough of a chip on my shoulder that I will feel compelled to make sure that, whatever the Mikes put up as of next week, I've got one more banner flying than he does.

From the PPG Zoo and Aquarium Blog

But, for me, banners and wind chimes aside, as the fall begins to enter the area and slowly the leaves on the trees begin to turn, deciding what to do balanced out with work may be the biggest worry. I've written about the battle of pulling myself out the door and allowing myself some fun. As the festivities of an NFL town that loves its team ramped up this weekend, the city seemed to have answered me and made it impossible to stay cooped up. It's like an orgy of activity: we had the Steelers Pep Rally at the zoo on Saturday, Pitt opened its season that night, the Steelers 5K was the next morning. Going forward, there will be player appearances and other little charity events during the week and, of course, real, live football on Sunday. I'm like a kid in a candy store suddenly, some of the weight of a tough summer falls away with the promise of this new season.

For Greg it is completely different. This fall may be the true litmus test if he can make it here, or if he even really wants to. On Saturday, as he and Marissa struggled to find a feed on the Internet of the Texas-Rice game, I think we all had a taste of how hard it will be for him to be away from what he knows and loves. He's spent the summer telling me it doesn't matter to him, he was ready to leave. He said it because he believed it. But, the rubber is now hitting the road. I'm not sure he won't feel the sting of homesickness more poignantly than he thought he would. I don't know if it is really football he will miss, but everything that has defined him for a half century, which includes Longhorn and Cowboy football. The game, or rather the lack of it, will bring all of that cascading down on him.

I have to try and be sensitive to that as we move forward, me reveling in the newness of being at the heart of the Steeler Nation and him finding himself an outsider in a foreign land. Maybe he'll end up relishing the role of being the Blue and Silver fish in the Steeler pond, and then my only worry is making sure no one beats him up because they really don't like the Cowboys around here. But, for now, I think as I dress up the house for the opening weekend, I will need to remember to hang a Cowboy flag alongside my four Steeler ones.

And, Comcast, you could help a little if you'd only offer the Longhorn Network...

Courtesy of Steelers.com (it was better than anything I took)

On Days Like These

2011-09-01T04:00:00.000-07:00

Hard to imagine a more perfect day. Whether sitting in the sun or in the shade, it was comfortable. The sky was a crystal blue, only marred by the soft wisps of white clouds and the darting of song birds. Squirrels frolicked in the trees and butterflies traveled on the breeze. These are the days that are made to carry us through darker times. These are the days we live for. Hard to imagine any sorrow surviving against a day like this one. Yet they do.

One thing that has struck me on more than one occasion is my attitude in the face of a bad day in the last two years. We all have them. Days when it just seems you would have been better off not getting out of bed. And doesn't it seem that when it begins to unravel, it just keeps on going? Like an avalanche that you are standing directly in front of. I always used to tell myself, "Oh well, just get it all out of the way at once," not stopping to think if it all becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, and that once one negative thing happens we somehow set ourselves up for more. If I had ever just said, "Okay, that's it for today. The rest of the day will be great," maybe it actually would be. That might work some of the time actually. But sometimes it does just sort of seem like Life is taking a big, fat dump on your head. And, that's just part of the gig. I used to sort of rationalize it by telling myself it is the bad days that make you appreciate the good ones. And, if I were particularly bad tempered over a day's worth of crap, I could work up a good case of guilt on top of it by reminding myself of all the people in the world living in squalor or imprisoned and tortured because of their religious or political beliefs, and I should just suck it up. That one generally worked to take the edge off a little.

That was then. Now, I tend to be almost incredulous that bad days roll my way. I cannot believe I am having to deal with this or that, doesn't Life realize I've been through enough? The other day was a good case in point. It was just a standard Bad Day set against a backdrop of a gorgeous one. Somehow that makes it worse because you breathe in the sweet morning air and feel somewhat optimistic, so when things begin to go awry, it seems so off kilter in comparison to the beauty of the day. Without going into boring details, things just sort of took off on a downhill roll, and by about 9:00 that night, as I was locked out of my work program after it timed out when I had left it open to deal with a bill collector (long story, that involved a perfect storm of situations, including trying to switch banks so some money is here, some is over there and all of it is chaos), I reached the inevitable conclusion that I was having a Really Bad Day. And that same resentful cry to the Karma Gods rose up from me, "Really? I think I've given enough and you should cut me a break."

Rationally, I know that's silly. Just as I know it's silly to feel guilt over the good days. Because I have those too. Particularly since coming here where any outing is an adventure because it's new and different. But, I do very often. Not every time, but that allowance has come with some effort. There is a natural tendency as a surviving parent to think that you cannot possibly deserve any happiness if your child isn't around to be able to experience the same emotion. It takes a real effort to work past that.

Yet, both good and bad days just keep on coming. To deny them is to live a life in limbo. I would imagine many people who experience great loss try to live in that middle ground, shut off from all real emotion good and bad.

That night, after getting off the phone with the bill collector, frustrated and in tears because I couldn't get her to waive the late fee even though it was my first time ever being late and I was exactly 20 days past due, I took Cheyenne for a long walk. We walked up the cemetery that dominates the landscape here. I will write more about it at some point; it actually is an amazing place, both eerie and peaceful, a little history lesson of the township set up on a hill overlooking the entire area. The dead keeping an eye on the living. I like walking in the older section and looking over the tombstones and imagining what the people resting below them were like in life. One thing that strikes you as you wander amongst stones set literally a century and a half ago in many cases is what impermanent fixtures we are, all of us. It seems a little silly to obsess over an $18 late fee and waste what time you are given over things like that. (Greg got it waived the next day, a man talking to a man, as an opposed to my conversation with a woman - there are some implications there that I'm not sure I like, but whatever...) So, I tried to take in the glory of the day as it closed out, the crystal blue of the sky fading to a faint pink, then to dusty grey, the last of the summer fireflies blinking lazily along the way like little diamonds in the oncoming night. To deny myself some pleasure in such simple beauty won't bring my daughter back. It will only waste the moment. And, trying to live in limbo doesn't mean the bad days won't find me, it just means the better ones won't either.

Maybe the hardest thing of all in learning to live with loss is learning to accept that it is okay to live your own life. Good days and bad.

Back to School: Lessons in Life

2011-08-28T04:30:00.000-07:00

I started this four days ago:
Marissa and her dad just left in the rain to drive her off to school. I stayed behind, with strongly mixed emotions about that, to work. As it turns out, I cannot log into my company's software, so I can't work currently, which is horribly bad since I am very far behind after two days straight of having my butt chewed by various sources over various things. Awesome. Noticing that my teeth were clenched tight and my breath was shallow, I realized I was on the verge of a horrible hissy fit, so I decided to blog instead of sitting and stewing because that reaction is fairly germane to the topic at hand. So here goes...

Wow, what a long, strange summer it's been. You know, everyone makes so much fun of the well worn Dickens line, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,..." but how often has it applied to someplace you are or something you are experiencing? The sweet and sour of life has been evident throughout our first summer here. We've had some amazing experiences - being extras in The Dark Knight Rises, joining a friend who speaks Chinese at a Chinese restaurant where the owner's wife kept us heartily entertained for hours, swapping stories and asking questions about the cultural differences between the two countries. I've never had so much fun eating a meal. We've gone to the museum, the zoo, Pirates games back when they were actually winning, which had an energy that was palatable, and training camp for my beloved Steelers, not once, but twice. We've seen fireworks from Point State Park and been there for art festivals. I've eaten cheese fries from Primanti Brothers and potato pancakes from the Hoffbrau Haus on the Southside. I've discovered that Yuengling beer is better than IC Light in and of itself, but IC Light has a summer beer with mango that cannot be beat. While that last part is hardly life changing, it is sort of fun. We've endeavored to experience this new place we now call home and haven't even scratched the surface, which in and of itself is exciting because there is so much more to look forward to.

On the flip side, there are the things I've blogged about before: the crushing worries about income that make being fussed at by my bosses nearly heart attack material because I get so freaked out that I'm on the chopping block. I have no idea how much of that is healthy worry and how much is just wild paranoia. Of course, as they add more things onto my plate, our world closes in, as I am constantly attached to this computer - so things remain undone, like our taxes, and dusting, and poop scooping. Greg, not knowing anyone besides Marissa and me, finds himself stuck in the house and a gradual resentment grows between us. I would like him to help more, but he's tired, working part-time now in the middle of the night. He would like me to detach from the computer once in a while and go back out into the city and explore more. We find ourselves angry at one another over stupid little stuff. And that brings me to what I actually sat down the blog about.

At one point last night, desperately far behind at work and tired, I walked downstairs to a wet carpet. This is the second time the basement has flooded. This time it was because of AC condensation. I was immediately over-the-top pissed and remained that way for hours. Greg and I started barking at one another. Why exactly? I have no idea. It is not anyone's fault. It was just that it was probably the last thing I needed at the moment. Later, as the storm currently harassing the area woke me up in the middle of the night, I realized that

I got that far before I got back into my system and have been working ever since except for a block of time yesterday when Marissa and spent some time looking for dorm room stuff and watching the Steelers all get injured (or so it seems). So, let me regroup here a bit...

The area is now calm, sort of ironic when a hurricane is on the other side of a relatively small state creating havoc. And I seem calmer as well. The AC is fixed with only a relatively minor expense compared to what I worried it would be, and we learned how to care for a system that is radically different than what we are used to. The lesson to take away from this is that if you get your panties in a wad over every little thing, all you get is wrinkled panties. If you take a breath and deal with it, you get results. Which brings me back to the point...

Marissa made the observation a few days before she took off for dorm life that she didn't think her dad wanted her to leave. I was a little surprised by that, because I feel a sense of excitement that she is getting a chance to finally get out in the New World and actually meet some people and thought he would feel the same, but upon some independent observation, I think she was right. I found myself wondering if part of that reason is he didn't want to be stuck here alone with me. We found ourselves snapping at one another so often I almost wanted to instinctively cringe when I walked past him, and when I wasn't snapping directly at him, I was fuming over something, and I could tell he often was too. Marissa was the calming influence; we tried, with mixed success, to tone it down around her. In the couple of days she was gone - to return to spend the night so we could watch the game together - we did fine. Somehow, not having to maintain our tempers helped us not really have any. People are funny.

But, the real puzzle was why we were so irritable to begin with - it's not like I can blame it on the heat. The days are uneven now - still hot and miserably humid some days, crisp and simply gorgeous on others, but hardly unbearable on any of them. It's not like we can blame it on money. We will spend months digging out from the hole this move dropped us into, but with the sale of the house in Texas behind us, that goal seems realistic now. The hole certainly has stopped getting deeper. The answer is found in that night when I spent hours stewing because of the AC. I was tired, granted, but my reaction was still extreme, and I found myself at one point, laundry listing all the deficiencies I perceived in my life and realized I was mad at Kelsey in part. I'm not saying it was rational, I am just saying that is how I felt. Then I thought about what she would say to me at that moment. She would say that even in death, we confuse her with the disease, and that would hurt her because she didn't want to be the disease.

Later, when that storm woke me, I had made the journey back to reality and realized something that is important to understand. I've looked up the stages of grief before - it's sort of interesting in a non-helpful kind of way. Some will tell you there are five stages, some will tell you there are seven. They are inconsistent on what they are, but they generally will tell you what you will feel going through them and not much else. I guess that is helpful to an outside observer, but I, of course, was looking to jump over all of that, and I at least wanted to understand WHY. I know what I'm feeling, you idiots, now tell me why I feel it. I guess you can't really answer either of those questions, you have to work your way through all the stages - however many there really are - and it's just how it works. One thing that seems consistent is that anger is part of the package. Maybe one would have expected us to get past that part already. Maybe we did, and we're coming back around for another pass at it. All I know is we've been suffering from a consistent case of the irritables since July. But one thing struck me as I poked around again the other night on the various websites. A couple of places mentioned/cautioned to make sure you're mad at the right thing. There was an example of a person lashing out at an innocent bystander - I've done that actually. But, it struck me how true that really is. So, what am I really mad at? Not Kelsey surely. The real victim in this whole horrible story. It's the Beast. I'm angry at the monster that literally ate away at my daughter. I need to attack it and stop attacking my husband, my daughter's memory and everything else that has caught my wrath in the last six weeks.

Now that I know that, I have to figure out what to do about it.

Paradise Lost

2011-08-21T07:13:00.000-07:00

Wednesday afternoon I heard the mournful wail of the fire station about a half mile up the road from my house. I had learned over time it's a forewarning to any vehicles on the busy, winding street that it fronts that an emergency vehicle is about to come bounding forth. But, it's an eerie sound that almost sounds like the harbinger of the end of the world. And, sure enough, a couple of minutes after the siren from the station house itself stopped, I could hear the higher pitched wail of the fire truck as it rushed out onto the street. After a number of months here, I hear these sounds as just part of the noise of the city, they barely give me pause. But, this seemed different because sirens kept on coming, one after another, rushing up the main street of our area. And then the same mournful wail of the other fire station, about a mile and a half down the road going the other way as it belched forth its engines. Whatever was happening was big. Then I heard a helicopter, and I finally went outside to look. Black smoke was visible over the roof line of the same house where the eagle had perched many months ago now, and my eyes and nose were stung by the smell of burning. Boy, I think to myself, that seems really close. As it turns out, it was three blocks away. A house was completely destroyed when fire fighters were prevented from getting too close due to the excessive number of firearms kept there and the potential for explosion. No people were hurt, but two dogs inside the house perished. Marissa tried to keep that last part from me. She knew it would upset me. It does: I hope those ignorant, gun toting bastards spend their eternity, when they finally meet it, feeling the fright and agony of their poor pets in their last moments.

Death did not seem satiated however with the sacrifice of two helpless canines. Friday saw storms roll into the area, which is nothing unusual. Systems will generate out over Lake Erie and then make their way through Pittsburgh routinely. Also not unusual is that they will pass through, seem to double back around and take another shot at it. So, the skies darkened to almost black mid-morning, the rumble of thunder a constant soundtrack to my work and some rain fell. Not a lot, not a little, just a late summer shower. Then the clouds cleared, the sun came out and the humidity hit the roof. Late afternoon, the clouds decided we'd had enough sunshine, so they rolled back in, casting the house in such deep shadow, I had to turn all the lights on in my little office to see what I was working on. Once more, thunder rumbled and a steady rain fell for about twenty minutes when it seemingly decided this was not fun anymore and the clouds broke up once more, this time leaving us for good. I was glad for the rain, and I like stormy days, so - aside from the miserable humidity of the midday - I was pretty satisfied. Little did I know that less than six miles from me along a roadway I've traveled many times before, a deluge was happening, causing the designed drainage to fail and resulting in flash floods that would take the lives of four individuals: a mother and her two young daughters and an older woman. A number of others had to be rescued from the tops of their cars, completely submerged in water. I read an account in this morning's paper of a young woman rescuing another older cancer patient who would have otherwise drowned. The paper began the article pondering the question how a flash flood of that magnitude could happen in a major American city. I am sure the father of those two lost girls must be wondering the same thing. I can only imagine the lawsuits that will be filed over this, as it apparently is not the first time that street has flooded, and this is an area where a lot of rain is not unusual. For my family, this is the roadway most logically traveled back and forth to Marissa's college and many other areas of the city we frequent. Now I'm afraid for her to use it, already a little paranoid anytime she's out of my sight.

So, you realize that there is no such thing as a perfect place to live. And aside from the petty little complaints one could have - I can't seem to win the mildew battle in my bathroom during the heavy humidity of the summer, and oh, the fleas(!) that love the warm bodies I brought them and seem resistant to every type of remedy we've spent hundreds of dollars and hours of time fighting, only to have just picked one off Tum-Tum's face - I realize I have probably spent a number of months idealizing this city. Well, it's far from perfect. There are areas of the city I dare not go. It's not necessarily because I'm white, it's because anyone, including those individuals who live there, spend time there at their peril. There are other areas of town I'd love to go to more, but fighting traffic gridlock to get there is hardly worth it. There is real poverty, crime, idiocy and infrastructure issues here. Pittsburgh is not another name for Paradise.

Another thing Pittsburgh cannot do is bring an end to our sense of grief, and heal the wounds our little family has endured. Only time can do that. Maybe I over sold this place. Maybe, when I brought us here, I presented it as a place where all our sorrows would not be able to find us. But they can, and they have. But, as I sit here, watching a shower of golden leaves fall outside my window, as summer begins to give way to fall, I personally think I have found my home. This is where I will stake my claim and hopefully live out my days. I accept this place, with all its flaws, so now it is perhaps time to begin to dive in and figure out ways to help alleviate some of those flaws. In the meantime, I hope my family, shaken a little by the events of the week, and realizing the weight of missing Kelsey remains just as heavy here as anywhere, will join me in that quest. In the meantime, I am off to try and clean mildew off my bathroom ceiling as rain clouds begin to gather outside, and I can hear a siren not far off racing to some unknown encounter.

Meeting the Beast Again

2011-08-17T05:55:00.000-07:00

When I got to Pittsburgh, my lovely Philly friend sent me a link to a site that lists volunteer opportunities. I scanned it for two things: eating disorder groups and animal causes. I found plenty of the latter, none of the former. After considering my options, I concluded that might be okay. Perhaps I needed to take a break from a disease that I had lived with for the past decade. (Because make no mistake about it, ED is a disease that impacts every family member in some way.) I had been constantly conflicted when I served with AFED. I felt a draw to be involved in the work to eradicate the disease that took my daughter and impacted all of our lives forever, but I lived with it night and day for so long that I was exhausted and wanted to shed it like a snake sheds its skin, slithering away from anything that contained the words bulimia, anorexia, ED, Ana, treatment and/or recovery in a sentence. Discussing it with a couple of my friends and my daughter, I decided allowing myself to work with four legged beasts was something I had earned. Of course, as I pointed out in the last post, working at least some of most weekends has delayed me even doing that much. Then again, I look around at my feet, crowded by lounging dogs, and I think that's probably best for now too - I'd be too tempted to bring a warm, fuzzy beast home. So, for now, I spend my spare time in selfish pursuits - a little bit of baseball, a lot of preseason football, a museum visit here and there. And so it was on a glorious late summer Sunday that my husband and I drove the hour and change to Steeler training camp. And there it was that I was confronted with the disease again, which has got me thinking about it ever since.

I am not sure I can tell you definitively how someone like me knows an ED sufferer on sight as opposed to the number of other things that will emaciate a body: another kind of illness such as cancer, drug addiction, or even just a extremely high metabolism. Some of it is in the skin, drawn and taut like parchment. Some of it is in how the individual carries herself (or himself). Some of it is the fact that they aren't dressing to cover any needle marks maybe. But, somehow there is a series of telltale signs that you have seen intimately in your own family that allows you to know it beyond a reasonable doubt to be able to label it occasionally. And that's what my husband and I were confronted with not long after arriving at camp.

Among the crowd lining up to watch the players come down to practice was a young woman who was dressed in a Steeler-logo halter top and very short white shorts with a bandanna tied around them and not much else. So it was easy to see the vertebrae in her back protruding and the bones in her shoulders standing above her skin. She had raven colored hair, which accentuated her pale tone, not white exactly, more like a slightly yellowish tinged shade of pale, like dying skin. She was tall, so her long, thin legs were hard to miss although it was hard to see how they were managing to hold her up, let alone allow her to sprint around as she was doing - constantly, like a frenzied bee. There was no missing her; she really didn't want anyone to. Unlike most of the individuals I have come across before in the ED community, who at least understand they have the disease even if they are not at the point where they can actively try and fight it, this young woman was in full denial. She was not only proud of her looks, she was flaunting them. I thought of taking a photo to try and illustrate what I saw - she would have liked that actually, because she at one point jumped onto the steps where the players would soon be coming down, waving her thin arms and posing for anyone who would look. But there was no way I was going to indulge her. Once the players began trickling out, she really went into high gear, trying desperately for their attention. The ones that spared her a glance were polite, but you could see it in their faces - I've seen those looks before. They may not have really understood the disease that envelopes her, but they saw her far differently than she sees herself. For me, that remains an oddity that I do not understand: how does that young woman not see how they look at her? Granted, everyone else in the crowd around us with the exception of her friends was clearly uncomfortable with her as well, but she wasn't worried about them. She was there to catch the attention of the virile young men in black and gold. But, she couldn't read them. She couldn't see their discomfort with her appearance. To me, it was obvious. Is she really that self absorbed? Greg at one point said he wanted to take her and shake some sense into her. For my part, I was just glad that once the crowd broke up to move down to the practice fields I lost sight of her and didn't see her again while we were there. I managed to put her out of my mind as I considered the practice, concentrating on trying to read my coach's reactions to the players and trying to guess which rookies were making the team and which ones weren't. Football: the great salve for heartache.

Maybe all of this sounds cruel and harsh, like I hold this individual in disdain. That's not the case. Quite the opposite. What I hold in disdain is the Beast that possesses her, but I do marvel at her inability to see it. The person I saw on Sunday is very ill. The fact that she had energy enough to prance around like she did was belying her true condition; it doesn't take an expert to know that. And she won't have that energy long-term. Whatever zest for life she has will be zapped in short order and sometimes looking at that straight on and honestly seems ugly and mean.

Yet, back home, I have spent a lot of time thinking about this unknown young woman. Honestly, I have rarely met her personality type in the ED world. Most of the individuals I know afflicted with the disease are more introspective, and their personalities come across differently - less brash, I guess. But, it is a disease that strikes all manner of people with all manner of personalities, and the one thing I can say for sure, I know what I saw. She, on the other hand, has no idea what she has done to her body. And what I was left with is wondering about her family and friends. Do they see what I saw? Or do they see what she does when she looks in a mirror? How do her parents interact with her? Do they even? Bottom line, I cannot get this individual out of my head. Was I somehow meant to see her to remind myself that I cannot extricate myself from this disease? Were we meant to briefly collide so that I put myself back on a course to do something about it? To keep others from sharing the same fate as Kelsey? And, if that is the case, can I somehow begin to atone for my inability to recognize it for the beast that it is early on?

Or was it just the law of averages that, in a crowded city, eventually someone actively anorexic is going to end up in the same place as someone who has lost a daughter to ED and it means no more than that?

Homework

2011-08-14T07:52:00.000-07:00

I got caught a little off guard the other day when a co-worker who was clearly trying to gather evidence for her case to be allowed to work from home asked me about my work situation during a meeting. I caught what she was doing, and I learned that her supervisor had already told her she needed to be in the office, so how do I answer her honestly without placing myself in the middle of a situation I want no part in? I understand her situation - she told me that when they move their offices soon she will have more than an hour commute each way. But I get her boss's position too, and that likely would be the same stance I would take in his place. So I rattled off the downsides of my situation, which I can do fairly easily, and downplayed the upsides. Then I immediately told my bosses about the conversation in my post-meeting summary report and hope the matter will die there. But, I've often thought the subject would make an interesting post, so it seemed timely, and here goes...

As I told my co-worker I am rather uniquely suited to a work situation like mine as an only child. I was used to spending long hours playing by myself as a child, so I can work that way now as an adult. However, it keeps me socially isolated to a large extent, which, new to the city and having my relatives at least an hour away, has not been ideal. Think about it: who are your friends and how did you meet them? Not the people you keep in contact through Facebook who are scattered all over the country that you've known since high school or college. I mean the people you meet for happy hour and go to movies with, and gossip about this or that with? The people you have real face time with. You met most of them at work, right? I meant to combat that by doing volunteer work, but I work most weekends (more on that later) so that has not come to pass. I'm friendly with some of my neighbors, but none of us are at the true friend stage yet. If I hadn't had the unique upbringing I did, that would be far more oppressive than it is. To most people, that lack of social connection would be completely stifling.

On the upside, on the couple of occasions I have had to drive into the downtown area during the work day, I thank everything holy that I don't have to do that on a daily basis. The bizarre twisting roadways around here that I've often lamented are no better in the heart of the city and whoever timed the streetlights down there had a horrid, sick sense of humor and should probably be slapped. There is mass transportation as an alternative. Sort of. Some of the people around the neighborhood use the bus. I see them hurrying to make it at 6:30 in the morning when I'm walking Cheyenne. For the females among us, think about getting dressed and ready to make that bus to be on it for an hour to travel the six miles downtown for a 8:00 work day. Then remember everything is an hour later here (than what I'm used to anyway), so Monday Night Football isn't finishing until after midnight and those people are faced with getting up a scant five hours later. There is a subway into downtown, but not that runs north of the city. For those of living north, it's an hour long bus ride before the sun comes up or brave the traffic snarl. Yeah, having my car sitting in the garage all week long is a big upside all right!

Of course a lot of supervisors are worried about the trust issue. There is no Big Brother watching to make sure you do your work. We have "dashboards" on our system that help track to a certain extent what someone is doing, and some of the individuals who work from home are paid based on their production. But some positions, like mine, are too open ended to handle that way, so there has to be a leap of faith on someone's part that I will do what I am supposed to do. For my part, I know myself pretty well. My attention will wander if I let it, so I set my deliverables on a tight schedule. I force myself to keep to a calendar that my boss's have access to. It actually makes for some pretty long days that stretch into the weekends, but it keeps me focused on the task at hand. I've already written about having to have background noise. Now with football back on the horizon and hockey not far behind, I've rediscovered sports talk radio. So, with the two morning DJ idiots droning on and on (I disagree with them about half the time and occasionally I know things about the team hours before they do, so I am NOT listening to it for the news value), I can have my talking buzz in the background. Talk radio: a helpful workplace tool.

I did some research on working from home successfully and talked to people who had done it. The key is to tell yourself you are "at work". One man told me he literally left the house every morning and drove around to simulate the commute experience to trick his head into getting geared up for work. I had read about that; leaving the house to get coffee or driving around the block is an oft-suggested mind trick. I get it, but at nearly $4.00 a gallon for the gas and the hole in the ozone layer getting bigger, not smaller, I prefer just to take my office assistant, Cheyenne, around the block on foot every morning, watching people make a run for the bus. I had also read dressing like one normally would for an office setting was advisable. I tried that. For about a week. The first time I had to walk Cheyenne in the snow in a dress was the last time. I read recently that Pittsburgh was named the third worst dressed city by GQ Magazine, citing its population as consistently dressing "game day casual". Guilty as charged. I will give you 14 hours at the computer if you give me shorts and an oversized Troy Polamalu t-shirt as an acceptable attire to do so in. And maybe that's the biggest advantage of all: no make-up, no torturing of the hair with a flat iron, no pantyhose to rip at a horribly inopportune time. I didn't even open the ironing board I bought for the first four months I was here. And when I did it was to get ready for a social occasion. We use a virtual meeting program to hold most of our meetings. If they ever add a video component so we can see one another not just our computer screens, I'm screwed. But, until that day comes, I am single-handedly keeping the city on that worst dressed list (actually, that's not true - as I was out this weekend, I paid attention: the label is well deserved, I am sorry to say).

I do, however, maintain a formal office setting and, for the most part, I stay there during the day. That segregated space helps keep your mind on the fact that you're at work, not "at home". I come downstairs to grab lunch or a snack, but not much else. On the flip side, when I'm not working, that room is generally vacant. That is the one thing I would tell someone else about to start working from home that is critical: keep a separate space. There does have to be that sense that you are at the workplace to be able to get your head in the right place.

But, on the negative side once more, it makes your world shrink down to your own four walls and not much more. Sometimes I will suddenly realize that the only time I've left the house for days on end is for Cheyenne's daily walk. And when that happens, it's time to go somewhere. Today we venture back out to Latrobe for my last chance to see training camp before the four walls close back in again.

Bottom line, for every upside, there is a countering downside. Much like work itself. My work situation is not for everyone. More people would like to try it than would be good at it. More people think they would like it than actually really would. For my part, I do like it. A lot. Downsides and all. So, hopefully I work hard enough to continue to earn the right to keep doing it. Otherwise, I guess I'll be jogging for that bus before the sun comes up...

Postcards from the Road

2011-08-11T05:38:00.000-07:00

I talk a lot about being on the road or the "journey" of grief. Probably because I am not clever enough to come up with a more original analogy, but it seems to fit. It feels like trudging along on foot on a gradual uphill climb. You sort of wonder if there is an end to the road sometimes, or if it just keeps on going until you're so utterly exhausted you just drop dead. The funny thing is, somewhere along the line I realized that I can have entire days where I'm not bogged down by that grief now. The Dark Knight Rises set was an example. I thought about Kelsey during that long, hot day - I think about her everyday - but it wasn't the same as it would have been a year ago. I felt free to just to savor the experience. Later, a few days later, I got hit with this wave of guilt that I got to have that experience and she didn't, but even that was different than it would have been a year ago. A year ago I got the same guilty feeling if I laughed at a joke, and it would devastate me for hours. The other day, it was a few hard minutes and a panic attack, and I was able to move on. It is in this way that you measure the mile markers, I guess.

But the other thing I wear out is my analogy that you are on the road alone. Again, not particularly clever, but pretty apt. Every one of us is an individual and every one of us had a different relationship with the one we've lost, so to an extent there just isn't a way to share our grief. And that is part, I realize, of why the first book on grief I read talked about so many families breaking apart. As I've often said, that terrified me, so I set the book aside and vowed to beat those odds. But you realize after some time has past that it is harder than you think it is going to be. I would be interested to take a look at the twenty percent or so that make it. I would be willing to wager one or the other of the partners is a nurturer by nature and managed their own grief by caring for their spouse.

I am not a particularly nurturing individual. No surprise - it is a part of what got us to this place to begin with. My dad's military stance of "snap out of" is pretty ingrained in me. It made me drive my kids, and it made me slow to take what was happening with them as something more than a rebellious teenage phase. The irony (another word I use too much) is that this attitude has seen me through. Like a bull crashing through a loaded china shop, I've just powered my way through the past two years, which if you think about it have been pretty jam packed with obstacles: caring for Mother in her dementia, losing Mother, losing four dogs, having a husband walk away from his job, buying one house, selling another, dragging all of us literally across the country (with the help of some very supportive friends), and then going through the culture shock of learning a very different place (although that's a bit of a cheat, because I love it here, so that part has been more intriguing than hard). I have no doubt it is the legacy my dad left me that allowed me to do all that and remain standing in the process.

The downside is it does not allow me a lot of sympathy for someone who is traveling at a different pace. I found myself wondering yesterday if I was not that different from the woman who told me to "just get over it" one day. Am I just as monstrous because I'm losing patience with someone else who is lagging behind? Or am I justified because it leaves me trying to pick up all these pieces on my own (or so I perceive anyway)? And then you truly come to the realization why the statistics are what they are: we need, each of us, support, patience and love to successfully travel the road of grief. The problem is that the people that we would turn to naturally to get it are in the same spot and are the least able to provide it. I can't care for someone else the way I need to because I'm grieving too, so it is my nature to eventually lose patience with the situation like a petulant child.

I am thinking about all of this because I had this moment last night where I just lost it. In a way I really haven't in a long time (but am ashamed to say I certainly have done before). I took one of our plates that I was trying unsuccessfully to put in the dishwasher and just smashed it against the counter sending it into hundreds of pieces scattered all across the kitchen (which isn't that far in that tiny little space). The tipping point is that I couldn't get the dishwasher open. The handle is broken. Marissa is the only one who can successfully open it, and she's a couple of weeks away from moving to the dorm. This ended a long day of frustration, with one little thing adding on top of another, and all of it just culminated in that pent up annoyance needing some sort of outlet. I'm not proud of it. Furthermore, I really love my dishes, so now I get to add to my laundry list of woes that I'm down one plate. But, the best way I know to handle it because it's done and can't be undone, is to examine it and understand what exactly I was trying to smash, because it wasn't really my plate.

Actually, if the truth be told, it was someone's head that I probably wanted to bop. If you had asked me yesterday, I would have self righteously told you that was because I feel like I am in this alone and then I would have rattled off a long list of wrongs I feel I've been dealt. I'll skip to the end: I'm trying to work some pretty intense hours and care for an older house that requires more work now because, with three humans, four dogs and two cats living in it, that's a lot of wear and tear. I'm tired, I'm financially strung out with the last of the bills from the Texas house still just rolling in, and I could use a little help around the house. Today, with a little time to consider it, I can see the other side. I've got this other grieving person who's just trying to get through each day to see the next day and that takes all his energy. He needs a support he's not getting from his spouse (yes, that would be me), and all his friends are 1,400 miles away thanks to me. It's small wonder he can't manage to help around the house more. He's concentrating just on existing and finding that hard enough. So, the logic would be to do the best I can and if things are a little less than perfect here or there, just let it go and not worry about it. Problem is, that just adds to my stress. And that all just leads me back to those dire statistics I read about. It's damn hard to reconcile all these competing needs. It's small wonder most people just stop trying after a while.

What is the right thing to do here? I don't know exactly. All I can say right now is that I need to channel that sense of purpose my dad instilled in me once more because he would not have turned away and given up. That is not how wars are won.

Dark Knights and Dog Days

2011-08-07T05:58:00.000-07:00

From Collider.com

I became a Batman fan by accident. I don't read comic books. I've never seen any of the previous Batman movies all the way through - I came close with the one Val Kilmer was in - but in the summer of 2005 Marissa and I would use movies as the port in the storm so I convinced her to go try this new version I'd read good reviews about, Batman Begins. It took a little coaxing, as I recall, it wasn't our kind of super hero movie, and it starred Katie Holmes. No offense to the young lady, but we're not fans. And, if I remember it correctly, the movie came out just days before Tom Cruise proposed to her in what has to be one of the more bizarre Hollywood couplings, and it sort of cast an additional pall over our already lackluster opinion of her as a serious actress. But, there was so much good buzz about it, and we had seen everything else below an R rating (Marissa had just turned 16), so she gave in. Probably more to get a quiet two hours in the dark than to really expect anything decent to watch in the process. What we saw pleasantly surprised us and reeled me in. Katie Holmes was not even much of a distraction, which I credited to good directing. So, when The Dark Knight came out, this time with a lead actress we do both like, I was excited enough to score us tickets to an opening night Imax viewing. I would end up seeing that movie five more times in the theatre, even closing down my group's office for the afternoon so we could all go see it. It resides on my computer, my iPod, and I have it on an oft-used Blu Ray. I was blown away, pardon the pun, by the film. I could spend paragraphs telling you why, but it works on all levels for me, from the set direction, to the subtle concepts about Big Brother government and good v. evil being espoused throughout the film, to the brilliance of the acting, to the simple fact that lots of stuff blows up. Film can be art and this is, in this layman's opinion, a masterpiece.

So, one Sunday spring morning I sat in my rocking chair in the sun room of my new home, reading over the paper and what do I see but the announcement that The Dark Knight Rises would be filming in Pittsburgh. I hyperventilated. Seriously, I did. I knew I wanted to be a part of it. Just to see what a genius looks like when he's working. Well, thanks to my Lovely Philly Friend tipping me off, Marissa and I were.

Watch closely when the movie comes out, we'll be the two little black and gold dots in with all the other black and gold dots during the football scene. That's all I can tell you really. We all signed non-disclosures, and I wouldn't violate it anyway, because I have way too much respect for this film franchise to do that, plus what fun would that be? And, truth be told, I actually don't know how the scene ends up. It's a fragmented process, so our part was just a slice of an overall scene that will take days to film.

What I can tell you is that there are approximately 15,000 people, not all of them from here (we spent a large part of a very long day sitting next to a mother and son from Michigan and in front of a group of young men from Ohio), who are today a little worse for wear. Marissa and I both have horrible sunburns despite taking an umbrella for shade. The only black coat I had without a Steeler logo, a vintage wool affair that is very heavy, will need the lining repaired because it pulled when it stuck to my sweating skin as I pulled it on and off dozens of times to simulate a winter scene in what was in fact shot during the height of the summer heat. For my part, I have a dehydration headache (for a while they ran out of water for our section), but that's probably the least of it for some people who were getting sick and requiring medical treatment right there. We were up at 4:30 yesterday morning and got home about 8:30 that night, so we're tired with a full agenda today. And it combined some of the worse things about Pittsburgh summers: downtown traffic gridlock and random rain showers that lead to stifling heat and humidity when the clouds burn off. By the end of the day, tempers were short and body odor was long. But, for the rest of our lives, we can say we were a small part of Christopher Nolan's vision. And that makes it all worthwhile for me.

However, as the day wore down, the company that coordinated our group for the film, was taking names and contact information for opportunities in other films. Marissa and I declined to submit ours. I may submit to one long, hot day of being drug around from one place to another carrying ten pounds of winter clothing for the sake of Gotham. I'm not doing it for The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh II.

Good Morning, Myrna Loy. Goodbye Dear House. Hello New Home.

2011-08-02T04:28:00.000-07:00

Myrna Loy and William Powell

Once again, I reach the anniversary of Myrna Loy's birth date. As you know if you've been reading this for a while, I adore Myrna Loy. Not only did she star in one of the greatest movies of all time, in my humble opinion, The Best Years of Our Lives, she starred in one of my favorite movie series to-date, The Thin Man series, but she and I share some things in common, so I've always felt drawn to her. So, today, lovely Myrna, I will tip a glass to you and watch one or two of my favorites from your extensive body of work, and I will ask that you, in your turn, check in and say hello to the new residents of wherever it is that you are: heaven or simply the cosmos somewhere, because, unfortunately, once more this has been a year that has seen the loss of good people too soon.

But there is reason to hope for a brighter year to come. For me, personally, the biggest accomplishment to celebrate on this occasion is the fact that we are no longer encumbered by a home in Texas. As of yesterday, that obligation belongs to someone else. I am both overjoyed by that and a little sad. I am overjoyed that we no longer have to pay two sets of bills and can maybe begin a long road back to some semblance of financial stability. But, of course, we did a lot of living in that house, good and bad, and so the emotions are a little more complex than that. And, despite it becoming the symbol of our great failure to save our daughter, it was not the house that did all that, it just sat as silent witness to the tragedy that unfolded within its walls and therefore, somewhere along the way, became the temple from which our unhappiness grew. I hope, for the new owners' sakes, that the aura of all of that time was washed away in the gallons of new paint and varnish. I hope it shelters them well and they have a happy life there. Hard to say, as hard times befall us all at some point. But, one can hope.

I think back to the days when we first moved in, and how amazing the house seemed, and how optimistic we were about our lives there. That first summer, the kids still young and fascinated by having a big house with a pool, was magical. I remember coming down the stairs our first night there, and noticing that Greg's brother had turned the light on in the pool and seeing that inviting body of water (still too cold too actually swim in at that point in the year) and feeling so amazingly fortunate to be there. I remember, not long after we moved in, Kelsey asking me if I were to get rich whether I would still want to live in that house. I said without hesitation that I would, and she seemed to be satisfied with that answer. I remember the first time a deer came up to me and ate from my hand. I remember watching the Steelers beat all odds and become Super Bowl champions again, not once, but twice, from that living room. I remember family gatherings on Memorial Day where all the Veldman kids were together and laughing. It's the moments like those that I feel emotional about. But those moments I packed away and brought with me. They are in my heart. And my heart is here, in Pittsburgh. Where it belongs.

Preparing for Super Bowl XLIII

And so we begin anew, my little family and me. For better, maybe for worse. But here is where we take our stand, and here is where I will always stay. And, I greet this day with the knowledge that we are getting ready for some football! For, if anything, Myrna Loy's birthday is the gateway to the end of the summer offseason and the beginning of the football preseason, now post-lockout, and can the real season be far behind? No, boys and girls, it cannot. So, on this very momentous of days, I will celebrate not only Myrna Loy's life, but that fact as well, and I will be grateful I saw the dark days of July through to their end. I will not be mournful of what could have been in the house I leave behind. I am going to try and make new and treasured memories in the one I have here (tiny kitchen and all). I am going to make this home.

Another Dose of Perspective (Ode to a Good Man)

2011-07-27T17:30:00.000-07:00

Wow, I have spent the entire month of July throwing myself one hell of a pity party. I knew it was going to be a trying few weeks going into it. Trying is probably a bit of an understatement actually, it's been a real bitch. But, then, suddenly, everything changed and some of that almighty drug Perspective got jammed downed my throat, and now I look at all of it in a somewhat different light. Still all sucks, but a lot of the litany of whines seem like small potatoes compared to the news that someone I have known for a long time is now newly on her own journey of grief.

In the nearly ten years I knew her as a medical receptionist, we were on a first name basis, I chatted with her, watched nervously one time as she dealt with a clearly out of control patient, and had her hold me tight at my daughter's funeral. But, in all that time, I never ever knew she was married to the man behind the office door, talking softly to one or the other of my family members, trying to elicit from them what ailed them and trying to treat it. I never knew the woman I was casually friendly with would someday, in the not-so-distant future, be a young widow. But here I am, 1,400 miles away from her, unable to return the favor and hold her tight as she says goodbye to her husband, one of the many doctors who tried to battle The Beast head on. All this other shit seems sort of far away now.

Greg knew their relationship, maybe not fully, but he saw them come to Kelsey's funeral arm in arm. I didn't notice, too shell shocked I guess to pay any attention to who did what (other than Mother telling everyone she was going to drive again, that I remember). And, I had to realize, looking back on it, there were other signs I would have once upon a time easily picked up on. It was a reminder how all encompassing The Beast was. There was a level of self absorption there. Putting blinders on to plough through the days, that seemed like the only way to survive.

But, what I didn't miss about the young doctor was the unmistakable signs that he was a good psychiatrist because he knew first hand what his patients were experiencing. Now he's suddenly gone, dead at the age of 43. I was trying to read between the lines to see what happened, but my theories are speculation. I don't actually know.

So, let me tell you what I do know of the young man who leaves a kind hearted widow. When we first found him through a referral for Kelsey, we had burned through one shrink already and had been unsuccessfully searching for a replacement for some time. People were not accepting new patients at all or would not treat adolescents. I would come to understand that better in time, but I was still living in my Dark Ages, far from what I hope eventually became my Enlightenment Period, and all I knew was I had a kid in crisis, was being told talk therapy wasn't enough, and I couldn't get a regular doctor to deal with it. We tried regular family practices just to get something done. Disaster. We had one appointment with the girls' pediatrician to try and get some initial meds - this was at her therapist's urging. As soon as I explained why we there, he went tense and cold and acted, quite obviously, like suddenly she was a contagion of some sort. I shudder to think of it now. Another GP right next door to him who showed dogs as an avocation (so I thought I'd have a great rapport with him) was so completely awful with her, it left her jaded and afraid of medical treatment for years. Maybe there was something in the air vents of that complex that just sucked all the compassion out of these guys. But, it wasn't just them. We learned early on that doctors are just people, which means some of them are ignorant, biased assholes who did well in chemistry, but aren't doing well in the higher calling of being decent human beings.

So, along comes this guy. Clearly young. I wondered when I first laid eyes on him how many minutes he'd been out of med school. He had a limp handshake and wouldn't meet my gaze. I immediately didn't like him, but I was desperate, so we stayed with him. Then, maybe two or three appointments in when he would bring me in to catch me up to speed with what he wanted to try or do, something hit me. He suffered from something himself. Anxiety maybe, but that's why he couldn't look me in the eye all the time. I let my own guard down at that point, and that seemed to help. He would gradually be able to look at me when he talked, but he would never be more than mild and soft spoken. Later, when Marissa was a patient and he was refining an initial diagnosis, I caught him. His eyes actually lit up when he arrived at the new label, and he slipped and said "we" instead of "patients" or "they". He was almost excited that she was like he was, and he could clearly know what to do to help her. I don't think he ever caught that he did that, but by then it didn't matter. We were pretty loyal by then.

The thing about that profession is: it's not like an episode of House where you take a list of concrete symptoms, vials of blood and bodily fluid samples that you study to see what's wrong. You have to take what someone says about how they feel, realizing that they are not probably in full touch with themselves, and make a judgment based on the medical knowledge you possess. And then you have to figure out biological reactions, dosage, side effects, other medications, environmental factors, etc. etc. and in the end, take a stab in the dark at what the right medication is. If it's wrong, you go back and try something else until it's fine tuned. Now do that with a teenage brain. Less cogent communication with the patient added to fluxing brain chemistry. Now do that with a teenage brain who's body chemistry is whacked due to ED. It's trial and error, and the errors can be earth shattering. But, as Marissa said yesterday, he was the one doctor who never, not once, gave up on us. He stuck with both my daughters, was kind to them, listened to them, treated them with respect and with genuine concern. He understood it because he lived it himself. They had biological issues. That did not make them less human. If anything, they were more human.

I realized yesterday when I got the news that I loved him for that. We all did. And how it just totally sucks that his lovely receptionist-bride is now deprived of that good man. How all of us are. So, if there's a heaven, open up and take him in. You're getting someone who was already nearly a saint here on earth.

Depressing

2011-07-25T04:48:00.000-07:00

My parents both became adults during the height of the depression. But even before the country was blanketed in the cloak of economic chaos, they were both being raised in blue collar families where the income was modest and earned by genuine sweat equity (my paternal grandfather worked on the railroad and my maternal grandfather did a number of jobs, among them mining coal). They both came away from it deeply impacted, and their Depression experiences would form a blueprint for how they lived their lives for the remainder of their days. But, perhaps ironically, they diverged in how they processed it and dealt with it.

Mother, as I've chronicled before, was a hoarder. A habit that became decidedly worse as she got older, when it was no longer kept in check by being moved constantly from base to base, and when their income allowed she began to gather possessions at a rate that alarmed my father and would trouble my days. While she gathered everything and anything, food stores in particular seemed to be her urgency. Even as a widow living alone, she bought groceries as though she was preparing to cook for the 101st Airborne. And throw anything away? No, never. We had to sneak it out and risk her wrath if she caught us.

Dad, on the other hand, was frugal and highly organized. There were things he allowed himself, no doubt. I have his custom made hunting rifle, a beautiful thing of burnished blond wood. I remember him taking a couple of trips to Canada to hunt or fish. They bought the cabin - hardly a resort, but still a whole second dwelling. But, financial matters were a predominant concern of his, that was clear. He kept careful track of their finances and worried over the bills, as I do now. He was laid off from his job at the university when I was about 10 or 11. I didn't really understand it at the time, but I can look back now and realize the torment he went through during that time. And, even at my age I saw the despair in his eyes when he took a job at the downtown liquor store to keep us going while he studied for his Real Estate license. He hated working there, I could see it even as a little girl. But, he would rather swallow his pride and work at a job he clearly was humiliated to do rather than not pay his bills, or deprive his only daughter of a Christmas.

I can respect and love him for that now, but for a long time we butted heads on just about everything and the worst of it was the night of my high school graduation, as we were walking back to the parking lot, when he announced to me that he would not pay for my college. WTF?! I had grown up believing that was a given. To tell me now, about two and a half months before I was due to start at the college he dictated I go to, and on the night of my graduation nonetheless. That was a blow. I think the move to Texas began right then, just neither of us realized it at the time. Some many years later, I decided he did it to toughen me up, and that he thought it would better prepare me for the real world. A little bit like putting me through my own personal version of the Depression. He had worked his way through college, I think he thought it would be a good life lesson if I did too. But, Jeezus-Pleezus, I was a 17-year old girl who hadn't worked during her senior year because we weren't allowed to if we were on the paper or yearbook staff (I was copy editor of the yearbook). I think I had something like $3,000 in savings. That was probably more than a lot of my friends, but certainly not tuition for four years of college. If you think about it, that was a defining moment for me, and a lot of the decisions that I would make that have led me to this little home office in Glenshaw, PA started in that moment, in a crowded parking lot of the Montana State University Fieldhouse.

I don't know that I can tell you that I've ever completely forgiven him for that. Bringing me up to expect to earn my own tuition money would have been the better path, I think. Failing that, maybe - while not in the parking lot leaving my graduation - telling me that their economic situation had changed so they could only pay for my freshman year and after that I would be on my own. Those are things I could have swallowed easier. I'll never know exactly what prompted that exchange at that moment; we never talked about it.

But I do know that for Dad the glass was always half empty. He saw potential financial distress around every corner. Mother was different. She had grown up in a large family with a working class father, and she wanted to break from that. She wasn't ashamed of it. She just wanted to show how far she had come from it. Community status was important to her. For Mother, no matter how much was in the glass, she was going to portray that it was way more than half full. I think that has gotten me into some trouble long after they are both gone because she wanted people - some of whom I still am associated with - to think she was very well off.

I am clearly an interesting hybrid of both personalities. I absorbed what I saw of both of them and they both exhibit themselves in how I conduct myself. As I've often chronicled, the ghost of my father drove my work habits, and I worry obsessively over money as he did, but, and highly unfortunately, I've had to worry over it in part because I have some of the impetuous nature of my mother. Just look at my overflowing jewelry chest and you can tell I didn't really deny myself much at one point in my life. I doubt Dad would have made a move like this, it's been highly expensive and financially disastrous. Mother would have in a heartbeat.

Now I feel as though I am standing on the edge of a very steep cliff that is eroding under my feet, and I wonder how long it will be before it just all comes crashing down. The panic attacks have lessened since I sat down and wrote about them. Of course, that is why I did it. No great psychology going on there: face your fears and call them out for what they are and they lose some power over you, but the worry is still oppressive. If we had stayed in Texas, we could have been okay for longer, but eventually that would have changed. I made less and it costs more to live down there, but I had savings that I used on this move, and we would not have to have done all the remodeling on that house. But, I look around me and am so glad to be here, and I think back to how horrible it was to be there - the Beast's ghost lurking around every corner - and I don't regret what I've done. Just probably could have managed it all a little better. But, even if I did have regrets: what's done is done. Now all there can be is moving forward.

However, for anyone who clings to the notion that I am some sort of Leprechaun sitting on a pot of gold, I have news for you: there are no such thing as Leprechauns. And while I may be Irish, there's no magic rainbow I know of to make the situation I'm in now any different. The only thing that's going to is a little American hard work and ingenuity.

Warwick Davis, Leprechaun, 1993

Family Affair

2011-07-21T05:42:00.000-07:00

Davidson Family, Circa 1951

The Davidson Family Reunion was this past weekend. (My mother's father was John Davidson, who had his lineage somewhere in the Scottish Davidson clan.) Like all my encounters with my mother's side of the family, I came away with that great sense of camaraderie and shared experiences that they exhibit that both draws me to them always and makes me a little sad. Sad because I was kept from it by distance and now always by birthright and life experience. I've wondered in the time since I found the evidence of my adoption and placed it against some of the things Mother would say from time-to-time if she kept us as isolated from her family as she did because she was afraid someone would spill the beans about my lineage. Because, of all the mysteries that still surround my true start in this world, the one thing I know for sure is that it was never her intent that I find out. She fully intended me to go to my grave being none the wiser. (Of course, here's a little life's lesson for natural born hoarders who try to keep secrets: you can't keep documents around that incriminate you if you don't want to get caught!)

But, my trepidation around these good people is strictly mine because I'm naturally a little awkward socially around any group, and this is an odd dynamic: family who are almost strangers. (In some cases complete strangers. My favorite line from the reunion was when Marissa and I were looking at one rather brawny man who appeared to be in his forties, and I was puzzling who he was. My Aunt Ginny leaned to Marissa and asked, "You don't know who he is?" Marissa shook her head. My Aunt Ginny smiled that little smile I've seen on my own mother's face a million times and replied, "Good. I don't either.") But, aside from that man - I never did find out who he was - they've been nothing but lovely and open to me. They seem to genuinely accept me as family. And I always come away a little regretful that I moved so far north of them, so I'm limited in the time I can spend around them. Then I remember I'm only twelve minutes from the zoo, and realize how bad it sucks driving through the tunnels into the city in the morning, and then return to the thought process that somehow I divinely ended up about where I should be for now.

The thing is they share stories and a common thread that I can never know. I share a minute fraction of what they have together. I know who some of the people are when names of older relatives are mentioned, but some I don't. Occasionally they'll strike upon a situation I either knew about or was actually present for, but that's fairly rare. Their stories are, in short, not really my stories. Their familiarity with one another is something I missed out on: knowing how to tease one another without offending, what stories are embarrassing enough to be entertaining, but not so bad as to be humiliating, and the clear love and easy affection they have for one another that comes with time.

I longed for that growing up. As I've said before, I hated being an only child, not understanding, of course, the effort it took my parents just to get me. I've often regretted how I harangued my mother for a sibling, but I know I was just little and had no clue. I've forgiven myself for that because at some point I could have been told the truth and understood it enough to back off (of course, I probably would have whined about how they didn't adopt more than one child; I didn't really understand my parents were older than average until high school when, of course, they suddenly seemed ancient and completely out of touch).

I had a painful, yawning ache for what I saw at the reunion this weekend growing up. So much so, it colors what I am and do as an adult to this day. I'm drawn to pow-wows because I see that sense of family there. I had too many dogs because I was surrounding myself with instant, loving family members. And, the big one: I married into a larger, nuclear family. I've written about that before. And it doesn't take a genius to see it, but, as I was contemplating the reunion, I was drawn back to thinking about Greg's family, which naturally is also Marissa and my family, and realized I've now done exactly what my mother did to me: pulled away from the extended family. Of course, Marissa, brought up in the age of Facebook, Skype and Qwerty keyboards, probably talks to her cousins more now than she did before. And, I strongly believe it would be a mistake for someone who is so young and with such promise to always be stuck in one place. She needs to get out and experience life from a different perspective. To truly learn what part of the world feels like home you have to experience it. If she chooses, she can return to be closer to her cousins at some point. If she doesn't, then she can text with a rapidity that would make a Nascar driver jealous. I don't worry about her - at least not about this. She'll find what's right for her, and she'll remain connected to her relatives in the process. Greg, on the other hand, I don't know about. For me, it's an hour down to this newly discovered family. For Greg, it's two hard day's drive back to his. He doesn't Facebook, not sure if he even knows what Skype is, and he sure doesn't text any better than I do, so, in other words, not well at all.

Problem is: was he close to them when he was right there? Not really. It's not geography, in the end analysis, that matters when it comes to knitting a family together. The pull of his grief had frayed at this family quilt long before the physical distance pulled on the strings.

Of course, at some point at the reunion the subject of my mother's famous falling out with my Aunt Merle came up. I hated that they took that to their graves and hope that someone, St. Peter himself maybe, knocked their heads together and made them kiss and make up. I always hated that Mother didn't relish what she had in her siblings well enough (although that is way more complicated than I can write here) and tossed part of it away with one stupid fight, but that got me to thinking that Greg needs to reconnect with his siblings while he still has them all if he is ever going to come through this loss and feel whole again. He needs what I saw on Saturday. It almost was like a force field of common bonding and affection. There were plenty of people sitting out on my cousin's inviting back porch who had experienced sadness and loss. But they were laughing easily and comfortably, secure in the love of the family around them. Better than all the therapy and little white pills in the world maybe. So, if I'm right, what can I and should I do about helping to restore the family dynamic? Could I if I wanted to? These are the things I'm left still thinking about...

The Sky Fell While I Was at Work

2011-07-16T07:30:00.000-07:00

Bear with me, there is a long wind up coming before I get to where I'm trying to go on this one, but I've been contemplating the work v. life balance conundrum lately. This is what I've been thinking about it...

Falling Skies, Dark Horse Comics

There was a human interest article in the paper the other day about this guy who looks to be about my age who hasn't taken a day off in almost 2,000 days. He's gunning for one on day 2,001. When asked why he does it, he said something about wanting to use it to illustrate to his grandkids that you can achieve what you set your mind to. Wow, I thought I was read it. What exactly should they set their mind to? No quality of life? A mind numbing existence? A loss of sense of self? A dumbing down of the senses since there would be no time to go to plays or read a book or even take in a Pirates game every now and again? You want your grandkids to aspire to that, really? Shame on the Pittsburgh Post Gazette for glamorizing this man who apparently even worked before and after he had some minor surgery one day. Granted it was day surgery and he runs two little cafes, not an aerospace division at Carnegie Mellon, but I can't imagine he was in top form afterwards and you've got to wonder how productive he was. And, you've got to wonder what all of this drive has done to his prospects for a long life. Granted, people around here are as tough as nails, so he might live to be a ripe old age, but on the other hand, if I see his obituary in five years, I'm not going to be all that surprised. Speaking from experience, when your work ethic is that far into hyper-drive, your sense of self-preservation and well-being is on the other end of the pendulum.

And this disdain is coming from a woman who once had a reputation as a work-alcoholic. But even at my worst, I took most Sundays off. Of course that was generally so I could clean house and do laundry, leading me also to conclude that this man definitely does not do much around the house. I got the impression that his wife works at the cafes too - she must be loving life. And, yes, I am joking.

At the same time as this article comes out, the fate of Dale Barbara now known to me, I moved on to finally reading Flyboys by James Bradley, which chronicles a little known World War II story about Navy pilots captured and killed in the battle for Chichi Jima. It's a brutal story, but what sets is apart from many other tales of the Pacific theatre, which was a brutal war, is the background James Bradley provides before he launches into a tale of the enemy doing horrible things to innocent, upstanding Americans. That's all true, they did. But, how did a noble, civilized people like the Japanese become so barbaric and how innocent is America as a country anyway? The author clearly felt we needed to understand that background to fairly judge what would take place on the small island all those years ago. It's an unflinching look, albeit brief, of brutality that will turn even a hardened stomach like mine. So, I sat in my comfortable rocking chair reading about the Rape of Nanking and thought that working 2,000 straight days is nothing compared to the horrors that some people have endured over the span of human existence, and any of us who have jobs in a city not racked by war and brutality should be damn grateful for them and should work hard to earn that peace of mind.

Of course, then it occurs to me that if Pittsburgh was suddenly overrun by some alien hoard a la Falling Skies and we were all scrambling for our very lives, what would that man have to show for all his hard work? As his life flashes before his eyes as some slimy, beastly alien reaches down to rip his face off, what would he conclude? Would he like what he saw or would he regret not spending more time with his family? (The fact that aliens are suddenly all portrayed as horrid, ooze producing monsters who speak in guttural monster noises, yet possess high enough intelligence to travel through space and conquer an entire planet is a whole other topic...)

All of this is bouncing around in my brain because I'm a little worried about my job stability currently. There are reasons for it as rumors about some bad news reached me all the way up here this week, but if I were to get laid off, we're in deep, super deep, shit. Hence the panic attacks which strike for a number of reasons, and sometimes no real reason at all. I'm smart enough to know that they all stem back to that predominant fear. No one's told me I'm in line for a layoff. As far as I know, no one is. It may be a totally irrational fear. But, let's just take it on faith that there is good cause to be nervous in the current economic climate. Remember that I've been laid off before. So, it's not like it can't happen. I respect who I work for. They will do what they have to for the good of the company. Therefore the question is: do I do work that's valuable enough to fit that goal? Do I work hard enough? Can I step up so that I do? If I can't, at my age can I reasonably go out and compete with young, hungry, attractive college graduates and find other work? To compensate for skills and youth I don't have, can I be like that man and work 2,000 straight days? But, if I can and if I do, is that the kind of life I moved to Pittsburgh to have? And really, at the end of the day, if some snot-nosed alien comes looking to suck my face off, will it matter?

As I explained to a friend the other day, now I get the stress that people like my dad carried around with them as the sole breadwinners back in the day. One more reason I was so super pissed at Hines Ward, I guess. What does an Astin Martin sell for, do you think? Enough to keep my bills paid for a pretty long while, I would imagine. And there he is, out driving it like a dumbass. If he wants to throw that kind of money away, throw it in my direction at least.

The bottom line is that I have to live life assuming that there will not be any face-sucking aliens coming along anytime soon. I have to worry about bills and planning for the future, but I have to balance that against what my family needs emotionally from me, and I need to do to be emotionally able to provide it to them. I've got to remember that I worked obsessively once upon a time and look where it got me. The money I earned and saved from that period is long gone toward trying to save my children from the fallout of that neglect. There is enough of my reputation left to have landed me this job to begin with, but it wouldn't save me if the economic best interests of the company are to cut me loose. So, I tell myself to stop worrying, do a good and honest job, but don't buy back into the notion that the man working toward his 2,000th straight day at work is a hero because he's not.

More Dumbassery

2011-07-13T05:08:00.000-07:00

Hines Ward pre-dumbass

I suppose some people are waiting for my reaction to Hines Ward's arrest. I appreciate those of you who are Facebook friends with me for not harassing me about it there. It was not a happy moment, only minutes away from recovering from a fairly substantial panic attack, when Greg came outside to tell me, a happy, shit-eating grin on his face, that my favorite wide receiver had been arrested for DUI. I told him to quit smiling, it wasn't funny. He told me to [bleep!] myself and that was pretty much the majority of our discussions about anything that day. I doubt Hines Ward really had much to do with that actually, he was just a straw on an over-burdened camel's back. So it goes sometimes in marriage.

However, in the wake of the news, I resisted the temptation to run in and turn on the NFL Network or jump online. I stayed where I was, a flutter dancing around in my stomach threatening to turn into panic attack number two for the day, and just pondered how rich, powerful people sometimes forget they are still human like the rest of us, and worried how Hine's attack of hubris would impact the team. I reasoned if he came out and did the right thing, it would all be fine. He would survive it, the team wouldn't really be impacted by it much, and the Steeler Nation would forgive him, allow him to learn from the mistake and move on. I had faith that's what he would do.

The flutter began to lessen a bit and finally calm down to nothingness as I read the last 20 pages of my book to at last learn the fate of Dale Barbara. I realized, however, that I cried a little harder at the end of the book (I always get upset when animals die in books and movies, I was a wreck for days after Old Yeller) because I was agitated about the arrest. After all, I'm not a Cincinnati fan, I'm not used to all this drama. And it's not just some guy from the roster. It's Hines Ward, a long time favorite of mine on and off the field.

I realize he's not up for sainthood. I know his divorce was ugly. It got over-shadowed by Big Ben's arrest last year and wasn't wave-worthy enough to ripple its way all the way to Texas, but it's all still floating out there on the Internet and apparently was a larger scandal around here, so I've seen little things pop up about it here and there since moving here. And I know he was probably doing things out in L.A. while he was competing in Dancing with the Stars that someone (almost) old enough to be his mother would probably not approve of, but for the most part, he's good to the fans, he does charitable work, he's a hell of an athlete and a loyal Steeler, and he just oozes charm. What's not to love? Yes, I tell myself, looking around at the neighbors houses trying to make sure no one caught me sitting out there crying over a work of fiction, Hines will step up and do the right thing.

But, that would be too simple wouldn't it? Instead of stepping forward, admitting he had made a terrible error in judgment that put others in danger, he said he was not impaired, but had been texting. Okay and maybe he was. But he was drunk texting is my guess. I've read the reports, and I grant you there are still some things that need to be sorted out: did he hit the curb, did he not? And I haven't seen the state administered breathalyzer test results yet, but c'mon, just because I'm blindly loyal to the Steelers doesn't mean I lost all independent thought capacity.

I was insulted by his response to try and redeem his reputation. Someone should have shut him up until he had some sleep and a chance to reflect. His "gosh, boys and girls, I was only texting while driving, which I shouldn't have done" aw-shucks routine came out in the hours after he got home. I understand the compulsion to get something out to his fans, but his handlers (agent, publicist, whomever) should have tempered what he said because I think to excuse it with the facts overwhelmingly against what he was saying just made him look bad. Either like a man in severe denial, or a man so cocky he assumes he'll skate by on a serious offense. One that could have hurt other people. That's what always freaks me out about situations like that. And he's not 15 and stupid. He's 35 and hardly stupid. He should have known better.

These guys don't get it. Whether they want to be or not, they are role models. Lots of 15 year old stupid kids are watching to see what happens here. If Hines can get away with it, it can't be that bad, right?

I expected more from him is the bottom line. I expected him to step up and actually maybe use this as an opportunity to show those 15 year old idiots what a real man does when he makes a life changing mistake. That's not what I got. We all make them. I mean, c'mon, look at me, I can barely make it through an hour without making at least one. And it stands to reason that his life is larger, his mistakes will be that way too. It's what we do with them that defines us (and if that sounds vaguely Batman-ish, it probably is).

I'll wait to cast a final judgment. I'll assume that with some reflection he'll do a little better with the situation. With the lockout continuing, the owners and players raising our hopes only to dash them back on the rocks on a daily basis, he may have a long time to ponder it.

But, Hines, Mr. Rooney may be barred from contacting you, but I'm not: quit being a dumbass!

Hines Ward and Pacman Jones in their post-dumbass pose (from The Washington Post)

Not Worth Watching

2011-07-10T20:22:00.000-07:00

Every morning as my fellow workers and I open up the proprietary software program from which most of us navigate our work we are greeted by a little inspirational saying for the day. Sort of a thumbnail version of those posters you often see in countless corporate offices across the country. Occasionally, our CFO and IT team who work together to choose them will get creative or funny. One morning during the playoffs it was directed at me, and they had found a picture of a face painted, bewigged Steeler fan to use. A week later, they used a Jets fan since one of the department heads is a huge fan. But, for the most part, they are fairly standard inspirational fare. Probably by this time most of the staff are sort of numb to their message, but it is visually something interesting to look at everyday, so your eye is drawn to it regardless. Friday's read, "Welcome Cheryl! One day your life will flash before your eyes. Make sure it's worth watching."

Holy cow, you're kidding me, right? I think to myself, realizing that this is a general message that someone pulled out of some list of inane inspirational snippets, but still somehow managing to be offended right out of the gate. Really, I think to myself? You really think, having watched my daughter slowly destroy herself over nearly a decade and my other daughter nearly follow her down the rabbit hole, that I can ever look back at my life and want to watch it? To take any pride in it? I've destroyed so much and built nothing. But then I take a breath and realize it's just what it is: some little saying. Sticks and stones, right? And this isn't even really directed at me, it's just a random saying. Thin skin has always been an affliction from which I suffer. So, I take another breath and the dark clouds part, and it's all good. I can almost feel the skin grow a little thicker, at least momentarily, and take some satisfaction in it.

Then I take it a step further. Why not? Here's another stupid little oft-used saying, "Today is the first day of the rest of your life." Why can't I just decide to cut the chord of the past? Not forget it, but forgive myself for it (you've heard me mention this before) and move on to whatever is ahead of me in life. Why can't I take what I've experienced and turn it around and do something noble with it?

Well, that sounds good in theory, but the last couple of weeks have been all about trying to keep it together. Easier said than done suddenly, so I'm not sure I can step up to the lofty goals of making my life one that's worth watching. People won't understand after all this time has past why I'm struggling. My husband doesn't understand, there's no question of that. I'm not sure I do. It's been over two years, and I functioned fairly well, all things considered, in that time. Sure I exploded my relationship with my sister-in-law. Sure I uprooted us and pulled us across country. Sure I lost it a time or two at work when people looked at me wrong or did something off track. Sure I cried plenty and have poured my heart out in this blog many a time. But, I did what I needed to do and kept things going. Now suddenly, just existing is a little too hard. I wonder how my dad, witness to horrors far worse than anything I will ever know, would react to such weakness. I think about the woman who told me a year ago to "get over it" and how pitiful she would think me. Yet, here I am, panicked, exhausted and very alone. Not the stuff greatness is made of.

I don't know if this is typical of the grief process or not. Maybe it's a delayed reaction in my case because there was so much to push toward initially: caring for Mother, then plotting and deploying the move. Now that I'm here, ironically in a place where I find great joy, my body finally is taking its time to freak out. Maybe the genetics that pushed my daughter toward an eating disorder and surely lives somewhere inside of me is finally bubbling to the surface. Maybe the weight of the financial burden is what's crushing my chest and causing the problem. Maybe it's all of it. Whatever the cause, I'm struggling at the moment. Panic attacks swell up easily, a few times a day minimum. And not just a flutter. The full blown kind. One knocked me off my feet the other day. And I mean that literally. It hit me like a punch, knocking the breath out of me and then it felt like an ogre was standing on top of me, not allowing any air to get through. I was so oxygen deprived for a minute, my brain was exploding in white hot flashes of pain. Lovely. About ten minutes later it was done. And that was when I realized what it was. They start out in the stomach and seem to rise up into the chest, crushing the air out of it and not allowing any more in. I can feel them when they start and sometimes stop them from taking completely over, but if something triggers one - like bad news on the pending Texas house sale, or a work issue - all I can do is hang on for dear life.

I can't tell you honestly that I'm a total stranger to panic attacks. I'm not. I had a bad period about nine years ago when we finally caught on that Kelsey's crisis was not "just a phase". My husband and I were not in sync yet, Marissa was beginning to act out in reaction to the trauma, and Kelsey...well, she was most likely scared to death, but it was manifesting as anger, and that's all I saw, not the pain underneath it. Think Linda Blair in The Exorcist and you've got a pretty good picture of what family therapy sessions were like initially. Having your own flesh and blood be so angry and hateful toward you is hard as a parent, especially at first when you don't see it for what it is. Realizing that they are in a real and genuine crisis that you don't understand or know how to fix is far, far worse. I couldn't quite believe this was happening to us initially, and when I finally realized that yes indeed it was, I didn't take the realization all that well. It took a couple of months, but I finally grasped what was happening to me and reasoned through what to do about it. They dissipated after that. The despair didn't necessarily go away, but the strong physical reaction to it did. I'm hoping that's the case here.

Yet, I've been to this rodeo before, so you'd think I'd know how to ride it out of the gate. Not so. They come, they go, they come around again. They're forever fluttering nearby, waiting for something, anything really, to go amiss to rise like a ghost from its grave and smash the air right on out of my lungs. Nope, I realize, this is not the stuff worth watching at all. That is, unless you like a good train wreck.

The Summer of Our Discontent

2011-07-06T06:13:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure how you'd categorize me regionally. I'm not technically a Yankee, although when I lived in Texas I would often stubbornly claim that I was. I grew up in the north, but Montana is not traditional Yankee territory. I was born in New Mexico of unknown parentage, and I have some vague memories of my brief life there. Just flashes really. Images of the control tower on base where my father was stationed, a red stained concrete floor in base housing, a flat dessert vista. Not much more. Nothing to root me to a southwestern heritage. I donned the Yankee label because of what I believed to be my Pennsylvanian ties, which I learned not-so-long-ago is not actually mine to claim. Most of my life was spent in the Lone Star State, but if you call me a Texan, I'm likely to deck you and true Texans would rail at the offense. So, I'm sort of lost in limbo, not really belonging anywhere. Maybe that's why I like Ben Affleck's movies so much. He celebrates his Bostonian ties and sense of family with such love and reverence, even the ugly side of it, that it's compelling. I long for that. I long to belong to something.

Why I am worrying over this, you ask? Well, my mind was wandering yesterday morning as we took Cheyenne for her early morning walk around the block, the haze from the prolific fireworks from the night before still lingering lazily below the tree line, and I was pondering over my impressions of the summer so far and realized that I couldn't label my perceptions of summer in the northeast. Do I look at things from a Southerner's point of view, like the man walking next to me must? Surely not. But, what am I then? Does it matter? It does, I answer to myself, because our background colors how we process the things surrounding us and happening to us, and I am not wholly objective. None of us are. So, I felt compelled to understand what prejudices I bring to my observations about people, places, and very confusing roadways. And, somewhat reluctantly, I conclude that I see things mostly as an Austinite. It's the norm for which everything around me is now judged. I moved there when I was barely 19. My entire adult experience was forged in Austin. So, like it or not, as I go around town now and watch people, a favorite pastime, it's through the eyes of Austin that I see things. By this time next year, however, I vow to myself, I want my thoughts of "these people" from Pittsburgh to be "we". And I'm getting there. Gradually, I no longer see Pittsburghers as a collective group, but am able to have the people I meet stand out as individuals, both good and bad, the way I did in Austin. Of course, you do that and you don't always like what you see, but it's more real that way. And I want for the only real math I need to know is Pittsburgh = Home (and what the tax and handling fees on Steeler tickets is). That is gradually beginning to happen too. The house and I have come to an understanding, and it's now home. I feel comfortable here, not like I'm living in someone else's house. The area around it seems familiar, and increasingly we can find things and are beginning to find better routes than Google shows us. That's a big one: I have longed for the day when I am confident enough of my surroundings to venture off the Google Map app.

Yet, for now, I'm still gathering data. As we rounded the quiet block in the aftermath of the raucous Independence Day, and I looked around at the green lawns laden with summer flowers and smelling of lavender, it struck me that I'm now in my third season here. How is that possible? It seems as though I just got here. But, I moved here in the heart of winter, stayed afloat during the heavy rains of spring and now am on the downhill roll of summer. I've long thought of July 4th as the tipping point in the summer season. After that point, back in Austin, parents begin turning their attention to getting ready for back-to-school. Kids who could hardly wait to spend time in the pool tire of it and the long, hot days. Things slow down. It's too hot to be outside in Texas, and being outside during the day is like living in a blast furnace, so tempers wear a little short. But here, I don't know what it's going to be like. Here this morning I was a little bit chilly and debated whether I should have worn long sleeves. School is still two months away. In other words, for an elementary school child, light years away. (Probably seems that way for some of the mothers too.) The dog days are still ahead of us, but close enough that we're all nervously watching the news of the lockout to see if we'll be making the trek to Latrobe for training camp or not or having to find another way to amuse ourselves. But, aside from the familiar call of training camp and Pirates baseball, what do people around here do to spend their late summer days? They go to Kennywood I guess, take hikes along the park trails or ride bikes, and have cook outs or go boating. All outdoorsy things that it's way too hot to consider back in Austin. But, I don't know for sure. Those observations are still ahead of me.

Of course, you're wondering what the point of any of this is. Well, as I ponder all of this silently as we finally round the last bend home for the morning, I conclude there isn't one really. It's just the processing of data. Casual mind traveling as I try and shake off the sleepies. Then last night, as Greg and I cross the Roberto Clemente Bridge toward PNC Park, he shakes his head somewhat incredulously and says something about not being able to get used to the fact that he lives here, then motions to all the people on the bridge surrounding us and says, "It's their city, not my city." And it strikes me how oddly timed the comment was, given my morning deliberations. Then I realize all those fears I had when Greg first came to stay were about moments like that. Moments when he feels so foreign and lost. And, if I still feel that way occasionally when I love it here so much, how must it be for him? And then I realize it's not a matter of him wondering what he's doing here, but many times in a day he must wonder it.

And at last I come to the point: can Pittsburgh and I win this man over and make him feel at home and, more importantly, at peace with this destination? Or did I just move his grieving heart from one place to the next and remove the only life support for it that he had? Time will tell, surely. And maybe if I just leave it be, he will be gradually enfolded into the pulse of the town much like I was with Austin. Maybe not ever quite feeling like he truly belongs, but comfortable enough to proceed with life. Yet, I worry, and worry nearly constantly, about his state of mind in the meantime. I worry, but have no answers. And how much responsibility should I shoulder if he cannot acclimate here? Would that be my fault, or is it just the fallout I've read about in the books about grieving? I am just so constantly struck by how hard it has been to regain some semblance of normalcy since that fateful day two years ago. Have I made it harder by jerking us so violently away from what we knew? When I think about being twelve minutes from the zoo and twenty from Heinz Field, I know the answer for me is "Oh hell no I didn't!", but Greg has no siren's call to any of this.

Maybe, at long last, I come to the real point: does worrying over these things really accomplish anything? Should I just try and accept where we all are at the moment, let time do its job and relax, enjoy the balance of the summer, the urgent blinking of fireflies in the trees at night, and the smell of lavender in the air in the morning for now and take the rest as it comes?

And the Road Goes Ever On

2011-07-01T05:51:00.000-07:00

"My dear Sam, you can not always be torn in two: you will have to be one and whole for many years. You have so much to enjoy, and to be, and to do. Your part in this story will go on."

- Frodo Baggins, The Return of the King (film)

Orlando Bloom and Elijah Wood

I made a huge step onto the road back to normalcy Tuesday night. I went to a movie. Now, I've been to dozens of movies in the last two years. I've always loved movies, so when football is in short supply and thoughts are long and hard, it is the natural diversion, and this was true long before The Beast came to live with us. There's nothing like a Jerry Bruckheimer blow-'em-up thin-plotted cinema extravaganza to calm one's nerves. It went to another level when The Beast left. I was digging pretty deep into the movie queue last summer trying to find anything that would distract me. But, there were certain movies that I just couldn't do. Movies that I loved and are part of the very fabric of our lives.

First some background: I am not the biggest LOTR/Star Wars Fangirl on the face of the planet. Not even close. As a matter of fact, gather up a random sampling of say 100 professed Superfans, and I probably wouldn't even rank in the top 50. I count myself a lesser member of a deeply dedicated group with memories for things like what the name of Grima Wormtongue's father is. (Like, who cares, but in case you're curious, it's Gálmód.) But, I'm admittedly pretty far out there if you stack me up against the general public. And I took my kids along with me. They almost couldn't help but become steeped in the ways of the Force living with me as their mother. As a matter of fact, Marissa is the only person to have beat me at Star Wars Trivial Pursuit (I was having an off day). But, as much as Marissa may like them, Kelsey bordered on being in the top 50 in that room with both franchises. They were a Big Deal for her. She stopped short of reading the Star Wars novels like I do, but I probably could have brought her around to them at some point, because some of them are genuinely good fiction.

Silly as it may sound, it was some semblance of the glue that kept us bonded when there wasn't much else between us. Some of my best memories as a mother and some of my worst have either Star Wars or Lord of the Rings somewhere in the telling. Willow probably is in there somewhere too. That held a pretty high place in our collective esteem as well. And, of course, without her here, those memories still linger. So, I hadn't watched any of either movie series since before Kelsey's death.

At first, I wasn't really conscious of what was happening. I knew, in the immediate days following her death, when every moment was an agony and you'd do anything to pull yourself out of your own head, that, despite there being a lot of hours worth of material there, I couldn't do it. I picked up The Fellowship of the Ring in those first few days, looked at the box, then tucked it safely back on the shelf. But, after that, as Mother's situation worsened and I went back to work, I didn't think too much about it. There wasn't enough time to watch any of those films anyway. Then Mother died, and time opened up just a bit. I still didn't opt for a LOTR movie night.

I picked through my toys and collectibles, gave away some things, but kept most (currently sitting patiently in their boxes in my attic, waiting for a larger house with a dedicated Nerd-room), but it still didn't prompt me to pull out one of the DVD's and watch it. But, I didn't really think about it as a decision. I just didn't watch them. Then I moved here, my boxes and boxes of Star Wars and LOTR toys along with me, and I had the time if I wanted it. And that's when I realized: I couldn't watch them. They were too steeped in the memory of my daughter and my life with her.

And that's also when I determined that I needed to work to get that part of my life back at some point. I couldn't let The Beast take that from me too. I needed to celebrate that connection with Kelsey, not lose it. I was ready to fight for it, but it wasn't that easy really. Spike TV seems to be an All-Star-Wars-all-the-time network lately, so I'd watch maybe a half hour (most of which is commercials) here and there, or catch bits and pieces of the LOTR on TNT, but that's all I could handle. I no longer get the email alerts I used to. I don't visit the fan sites anymore. I miss all that. I revel in being a dork when it comes to stuff like that. There has been such joy from it. But, I just couldn't do it. However, both franchises are releasing Blu-Ray versions (LOTR came out on Tuesday and Star Wars will follow in September), so it's been on my mind a lot more than usual lately and, as often happens, Fate took my hand.

We found another good movie theater quite by accident one day when we were lost. That's our default now, so as we were there to see Super 8 not too long ago I saw the poster for the one night release of each of the Lord of the Rings films. We had missed the first one already, but The Two Towers (my personal favorite) was coming up in a few days. I discussed it with Marissa and debated what to do. I chickened out and we opted for a baseball game instead. That left The Return of the King. My last chance. Only showing on one screen that one night. We decided to take the plunge. And I did it. I sat through all four hours and 25 minutes (no potty breaks, thank you very much), cried at the end like I always do, and enjoyed it when Marissa told me I wasn't close to the only one in the theater doing so. Kelsey was on my mind through much of it, but I like to think she was happy that we were there, not mad that she wasn't. I like to think she wants me to be one and whole for however many years and wants the Force to be with me. I hope so anyway.

"It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to."

- Bilbo Baggins

The Fellowship of the Ring, NewLine Cinema

What Would the Chief Do?

2011-06-28T04:54:00.000-07:00

Today is Day 108 of the NFL Lockout.

Art Rooney, Sr.

I am a typical middle American forging ahead in a down economy. I sit at this computer a few times a month and try to juggle which bill is going to get paid now, which has to wait, and I nurse a sore jaw while I do it because I really need to go to the dentist, but it's hundreds, maybe thousands, of dollars for the work I need done and time away from the job, and I really can't spare either (although I started this during work hours because I couldn't log in - working from home is a truly interesting double-edged sword that deserves its own post), and I know this predicament is of my own making because I voluntarily drug us across country at a time when gas nearly tipped the $4.00/gallon mark, so I just try to hang on and hope the house back in Texas sells soon, and take some comfort in the fact that in modest little houses all over the area, many men and women are doing the same juggling act for different reasons and, all things considered, we've done pretty well. I've still managed to start squirreling away for Christmas, we've gone to a few baseball games (the advantage to living in a market with a perennially crappy team is the cheap seats are $11), and we've got a full pantry. Still, it's tight. Just like it is in all those other little red brick houses where the same worries keep my neighbors awake at night. Yet, on Saturday morning at 10 AM most of them were on their computers or on the phone doing the exact same thing I was doing: trying to nab up individual game day tickets to the Steelers home games for 2011. Not an expert at working the system, I made some rookie mistakes that ended up costing me, and I only got one game, and it's a lousy one at the tail end of the season when it might not matter, and starters might be sitting to ready themselves for the playoffs, and it's almost certain to be cold, maybe miserably so. But, I took it and took it gladly. Happy to get box office prices for a home game, I didn't hesitate. I don't feel guilty either. Maybe I will in the next few days when the next round of bills is due, but for now I'm just excited I got any tickets at all, reasoning that I didn't come all this way to NOT go see my beloved team play in person.

But, I'm pretty nervous. What if there is no season? What if the game I just shelled out precious money for never gets played? The rumors, a friend was quick to point out, is that owners won't refund fans for tickets to games that might not get played. For a lot of the fans in Fox Chapel or Sewickley maybe that's just a chance they have to take and, although aggravating, is just another investment loss, and they'll move on. For others of the Steeler Nation, just getting to a real game is a much bigger deal that involves real sacrifice. They still scrambled to their phones and computers, just like I did, to nab up those precious limited individual game tickets, but if they just flushed money down the proverbial toilet with me, they will really feel it. The damage will be real. The anger will be real. And it should be.

Tour of Heinz Field

You can't go anywhere in this town, church included, without seeing people decked out in Steeler gear. They're good hockey fans, one of the largest consistent television audiences south of Canada, and holding a 200+ home sell out run. They even love their Pirates, doggedly determined to stand by their team, assuming that at some point there will be light at end of what has been a very long, dark tunnel and their loyalty will be rewarded. But, above all else, this is a Steel City. For a lot of reasons, the tough blue collar mystique of the town is personified by the tough, smash-mouth Steelers in a way the other teams cannot match. So, at the Pirates games there are as many Polamalu jerseys being sported around as anything else. Go to the zoo and take a poll: more than half the patrons are wearing Pittsburgh sports gear and 70% of that is Steelers wear (I've done a little unscientific monitoring). The Super Bowl, as I've noted before, was treated like a national holiday here, houses decked in Steeler Black and Gold. Businesses closed early, others warned their staff not to dare call in sick. Some probably did anyway. When they lost, it was like a day of mourning had been pronounced. This is all stuff I've written about before. If you've known me for a while, you know a little about it anyway just by osmosis probably. But, as I've watched all that merchandise wandering around, knowing full well what each item costs (because I've got plenty of it myself), I think about all the reasons we're loyal to our respective teams and love our football, but how we've paid for that loyalty. It didn't come to us freely. We've bought the jerseys, hats and t-shirts, gone to the games, patronized the sports bars, decorated our cars and homes, and even branded ourselves for life with tattoos. We watch the ads that provide the revenue to the owners. We buy their products as a result. I may bleed black and gold, but there's some green seeping out of there as well. As a result. I've been thinking about who the real losers in the lockout really are. The fans.

I'm not the first to think about the economic impact of the game. Months ago, the Pittsburgh Post Gazette ran the numbers and came up with $123.2 million in this area alone. Another site estimated $160 million on average per NFL city. That's just regular season. What about poor little Latrobe and all the revenue that small town receives from training camp? The economic impact is immeasurable. To everyone but the owners. NFLLockout.com doesn't paint a pretty picture of the owners, who it claims will make out like bandits if the season doesn't happen. The players have done a better job of protecting their image, I personally think, during the ordeal. But, I have spared a little ire for them as well. The top players live pretty well off all our patronage. They need to remember that. It's hard to sit in my tiny little house with my throbbing jaw and feel all too sorry for Terrell Owens. But, I do hope they hold fast to their goal of protecting the rights of former players who have sacrificed their long-term health to entertain me every Sunday. I respect that part of this whole jumbled mess, even if sometimes wondering how much that aspect of the player's position is window dressing in the larger fight to retain their revenue sharing.

200th Military Police Command

I don't know. Many don't. It's big business at its biggest and ugliest. Lost in the mighty clash of these titans are people like me and Marissa who used football as the three hours a week the burden of our sorrow was lifted from our shoulders. It's the guy at the end of the street with the Iraqi war veteran plates and the bumper sticker that reads "My other vehicle is a Blackhawk". He's not a Steeler fan actually, one of his other bumper stickers professes his loyalty to some inferior franchise, but he served our country, doesn't he deserve to relax now and enjoy the game? What about the family that lives just a few houses down from him with the star banner hanging in their front door, indicating they have a family member in active service? Haven't they earned the right to forget about the worries they must have constantly? What about their son or daughter who tucked a Terrible Towel away in their belongings and carries it with them in Afghanistan? Those are the more intangible losses to calculate. There have to be millions of stories like mine. I want football, but I need it as well. It's important enough to me that it factored heavily into moving all the way here. I wish I had the millions of stories to lay at the feet of the owners and could force them to remember us "little folk". It's not all about the money. But without us, ultimately, there is no money.

I tend to think The Chief (Art Rooney, Sr.) knew that and must be looking down on all of these proceedings, maybe a celestial cigar in hand, and shaking his head sadly.

I never wanted 18 games. Right now, I'm just praying I get 16. Please don't forget about us.

The Dumbass Jackass

2011-06-23T05:53:00.000-07:00

Marissa came upstairs late Tuesday night to give me the news that one of the Jackass actors, Ryan Dunn, had been killed in a car crash. Sticky with sweat from the baseball game we had just come home from and about to slink back into my office to get back to work on a report that was due the next morning, I didn't give it much thought really after she told me it wasn't related to the show/movies - he was just driving too fast. But the next morning, there was a sizable obituary for the Pennsylvania resident that I sat down to read, and I realized he had someone in the car with him, and I got to thinking it over...and then I got mad.

They say you shouldn't speak ill of the dead, and I do feel badly for him. I could not help but imagine what their last moment's were like, and what must have been going through their minds. I understand the trauma to the bodies was pretty severe, so I hope they didn't feel much, that it was all too quick for real pain to set in. And I definitely am not in agreement with the fringe Christian group that has come out with plans to protest his funeral and proclaimed that he is in hell. But, the longer trauma and the never-ending pain now begins for his family, and that sort of pisses me off.

Here's the thing: I've thought a lot over the last two years about the responsibility we have to one another as human-beings, particularly and most especially to our families. At 34, Mr. Dunn was no child, but he was a son, he was a brother, and he was a friend. I don't know if he was a husband or father, I tend to think not or the column would have said, and who could have tolerated raising a child with a daredevil like that? But, regardless: he was not isolated in the world. He flirted with danger as a career. I am sure that is a high like no other to a Type A personality. And I am sure he rationalized that he was an adult, he wasn't hurting anybody else (besides other consenting adults who were more extreme), and he could therefore do as he pleased. But, is that true? Ask his family today if he was the only one hurt. Hell, ask the family of the person riding with him. And for what? What possible purpose did his death serve? (Actually, I hope it scared some crazy-ass teenager who has seen the movies a few too many times into not following in his footsteps...but who knows.)

I'm familiar with the show. It was in its hey-day when my kids were in the target demographic. I didn't like that they watched it, but unlike a lot of parents, I picked certain battles to fight and conceded to some others. What I did believe is that I needed to understand the culture to pick which battles to wage. So I would listen to the music, watch the shows, read some of the magazines and look at the websites, figure out what they were likely to sneak around to listen/watch anyway and then cast my judgments. That's why I have Linkin Park and Fall Out Boy in my iPod - sometimes I found I liked what was popular. I was a teenager once with difficult parental relationships - I understood the lyrics. I was sort of fascinated that they were now directed at people like me. Sometimes, however, what I saw and heard just made me despair for the human race (The Real World, Korn and The Spice Girls as examples). Jackass falls into that latter group. What purpose that show served is considerably beyond my ability to grasp. I know young men like to pull stunts. This is as old as time. My dad had some stories that were actually somewhat shocking (the fact that he would tell me about them is probably more shocking still, but I was a girl, so I think he thought I was immune to the setting-things-on-fire phase and was a safe audience). So maybe you could argue that watching other idiots do it on TV is safer than trying it yourself. My guess: not really. Just fuel to the adolescent fire. I wonder how many amateur versions of Jackass-ian stunts have pimply faced boys aged 14-17 pulled without benefit of fire trucks and ambulances standing by?

But the actors survived it all and to the tune of considerable bank. Seems like they would have wizened with age and slowed it down. Apparently not so. And two men are now dead as a result of that mindset. I think, at 34, Dunn was old enough to understand that free will is a good thing, a thing to be protected, but you have to temper that against being a member of society and realizing how your actions impact others. Have the freewill not to be a total idiot, in other words. He owed it to the parents who coddled him through chicken pox and his first broken heart, who paid for his skateboard shoes and tolerated what I am sure was a nightmare teenager. I don't know that much about the man personally, but I'm sure I could go on. He definitely owed it to whoever else might have been in his path that fateful night.

I've been on both sides of the fence here. I've felt the yawning, black hole of loss that having a child die before you brings. I've know the feeling, as a result, of not really caring much what happens to you. But, I had to buck it up because I have responsibilities to my loved ones. And, honestly, there were some days that it was the only reason I did. This guy, which I hope is not truly hell-bound, did play cards with the devil all the time it seems. Sometimes the devil wins the hand. How stupid do you have to be not to realize that? And, if he simply didn't care, then shame on him for shirking the love of his friends and family. And maybe shame on them for not understanding what might have been underlying all that stupid stunt stuff. Whatever it is, two people are dead today. Two families are devastated. What a waste.

If you can save someone from pain, you should do it in my humble opinion. And pain comes in all manner of packages. If you're reading this and you have a dare devil streak in you, just remember that it's not all about you. Just walking out the door in the morning is a risk, so I'm not saying to hide in fear. Allow yourself to experience life and have some adventures, just temper them with common sense. Just please don't be a Jackass.

www.Dickhouse.com

Dear Kelsey Part III

2011-06-20T04:56:00.000-07:00

I write to you today, the second anniversary of your death, in a very different place than I did last year. Both emotionally and physically. Emotionally, I'm a jumble actually. Hard to put it into words. Words that I think you would have understood while you were alive anyway. Or maybe accepted is the better word. I've often wondered if, assuming there is an afterlife, we gain more insight, shed from our outer shells and the concerns of the world. If so, then maybe I can say these things to you, and you will know what I mean without fearing your judgment. You were hard to talk to a lot of the time, just to be honest. The Beast did most of your talking. I wish I had been better at reaching the girl inside.

But, anyway, that's not really how I meant to start off. I imagine you are aware that we now are all together in Pittsburgh. We owe this move to all the events of the last couple of years. And the irony of that strikes me a lot. But, the house you left was haunted for us. No one wanted to go upstairs at all. Even Tum-Tum rarely went there after a while. All those horrible memories just hang around it, no matter what we did to change up the house. That's too bad too, because I loved that house. I looked out into our new backyard last night and remembered how the full moon used to shine onto the pool at night, bathing it in a kind of werelight that I just loved. Now someone else will see that.

They can have it though because the whole city just carried the weight of the last several years for us. We would be near places you had lived or worked, or places where we had fought the battle of all the demons inside you, and that is all we could think about. There was just very little of the city that was not corrupted for us. I hate that those are the memories we have. Not so much the memories of Austin, but the memories of you as a young adult. That there never was a time you could enjoy just being old enough to do things on your own and young enough to enjoy them in the carefree way only budding adults can do.

So, we came here. The native city of one of the people you held most dear. I see her often, you know. I love her as you did. She is truly one of the best people I have ever met. Marissa loves her too. And I wonder sometimes what you do or would think of all of that. Would it make you mad or jealous, or is all of that behind you now? You know, you had some wonderful friends. Some of them keep in touch with us. I wish you had known how much they loved you. I think The Beast clouded all of that for you. It kept you from accepting the fact that people loved you because you didn't love yourself.

But anyway, this is an awesome city, regardless of why we are here. I mean, it has its ugly side like anyplace. But none of that matters as much as what is right and wonderful about it. You would love it here, I've said so before. So, I waffle between allowing myself to be happy because I am where I think I was always meant to be, and guilty because of what it took, what price you paid, to make it happen.

Hard to tell what your dad will think long term of living in the Iron City. This is so vastly different from Austin, it really is like living in another country. For me, I'm almost to the point where I feel totally at home here however. I think if I can just find my way around a little better it would seal the deal, but gradually that is coming. But, for your Dad, I worry. Now he's walked away from the only things he's known all his life, and no matter where he is, you're still not there. I think that's the big difference between us right now. I'm looking for something, he's just running from something. I think I said this last year, I wish you could whisper in his ear and tell him to let his sorrow go just a little. He does not feel your presence or accept that your suffering is over. He does not believe you are free and in a better place, so that keeps him imprisoned in his sorrow. It's hard to watch. It's frightening. Even without that weight, I'm not sure what he would think of living with all these Yankees, but for right now, I'm not sure it matters to him where he is, he is just so unhappy without you.

For my part, I don't know what to think about where you are. What happens to us when we die? Can you tell me? But would I really want you to? What if the answer is horrific? Maybe your dad has the right idea. Maybe believing that it is just a nothingness is the kindest thing. These are the weird things I think about these days.

And I think about whether you can forgive me. I imagine every parent of a lost child wonders that. But, I know we made so many mistakes as parents. It's a wonder we did anything right at all. I think we tried, but it took a while. I've been thinking lately that it's time for me to start trying to forgive myself. Allow myself some happiness here. But, then I think that's not right. I can't do that until you forgive me first, and how can you? Would I be able to know if you did?

Just selfishly, these aren't the things I wanted to think about now. I wanted to be fretting over how I was going to pay for your wedding, and if wearing black and gold as the mother of the bride is too tacky (just kidding, I would do lavender), and becoming a grandmother for the first time. I hope that all my friends who do wrestle with all of these things know how lucky they actually are. But, it's not my loss I really worry about. I don't need to be a grandmother to feel whole. I need to have both my daughters to feel whole. But it's the loss of your potential - the amazing person I know you were somewhere beneath the disease - that keeps me weighted down personally. How do I get past that?

At the end of the second year, things are more muted - I can't think of another word for it - than they were in the past, but not really any more clear or less painful. I miss you. I don't miss the disease. Maybe above all else, I wonder if that's what you can forgive me for. The fact that I lost sight of you and It as separate things sometimes. Who were you? Did I even ever really know? I hate, just absolutely hate, that I can never find out.

All we ever want for our children is their contentment. I pray that you are content.

Love,
Mom

Breaking the Speed Barrier (or How Darryl Hannah Caused a Crisis)

2011-06-15T05:27:00.000-07:00

Roxanne, Columbia Pictures, 1987

Okay, in order to tell this story, I have to confess something first. I found that I do better at my job with some chatter in the background. Without it, I found my mind would wander, or I'd feel tired pretty quickly (tedium can wear you out). Before Marissa was here to have some real human interaction, I also felt terribly isolated at times. I listen to my iPod, but it is too in-the-background to be much help sometimes. So, I experimented a little and found that if I play something spoken in the background, I can feel completely in the zone, and can hunker down and get a lot more done. Marissa said there are actually studies to back up what I'm experiencing. That because I have traditionally been in a chaotic, noisy work environment, my brain seeks that as the best setting for me to concentrate when I'm working. So, I don't feel like I'm cheating, I'm just trying to get the job done and not fall asleep at my desk in the process. To work, though, it has to fit certain criteria. Audio books won't do: I'd be paying attention to the story and not the work. On Demand won't either; I'd be watching the television because it'd be something I hadn't seen, not using it as white noise. No, it has to be something I've seen so many times, it's just comfortable buzzing somewhere in the back of my brain. Law and Order is best. Not only have I seen every episode a hundred times (an exaggeration, but probably not by that much) so I don't have to even glance up at it, it is actually people working. The last half, the "Order" part of the show, is really ideal. I almost feel as though Jack McCoy is my office mate. But, the problem is: it's not on 24/7. It's on a lot, and I have some DVD's, but I have to fill in the gaps with some other things. Action flicks are completely counter-productive. I put in Gladiator one rainy Saturday when I needed to finish a report. I was still working on it on Sunday. All that glorious carnage, one just cannot look away. So, court room dramas and romcom's are the next best because they are talk-centric, there may be some quirky visuals like the ones sprinkled throughout 500 Days of Summer, but that's not really the norm. Problem is, romance is not really my genre, so my supply is highly limited and generally dated. All of this is a really long way around to tell you why I had Roxanne playing the other day. And, the reason I had to confess to watching it is because it ushered in what I would call the genuine beginning to my mid-life crisis. They say 50 is the new 40, well then, bring it on. Where's my sports car with the convertible top? I'm ready to be in full freak out mode. I know I've flirted with it before, but this is the real deal. Everything before it was false labor, now I'm birthing a full blown "OMG!" crisis.

The reason I like that movie well enough to add it to my collection are all the reasons it triggered me into such a state. It was filmed in British Columbia, which never failed to make me completely homesick when I would watch it. If anything, the little town of Nelson is more picture perfect than my native neck of the woods, and the filmmakers showcase it well. And then the carefree lifestyle of all the main characters - how they would meet up for coffee and lunches during the day and at the local hot spot at night, and their largest worry was catching the eye of someone interesting - always reminded me of the all-too-brief summer between high school and college when life had been much like that and how much fun it had been. And then there is Darryl Hannah, who is actually a few months younger than I am in real life. I blame it all on her. I wondered what became of her and looked her up. I found a recent photo and thought to myself, "Man, she looks old." (My apologies to Ms. Hannah - keep in mind, it was just my reaction, not necessarily a point of fact. So don't sue me or anything.) And that's when it hit me. If a beautiful woman like that who has undoubtedly taken care to have a little nip here and tuck there can engender a reaction like that, then what do people see when they look at me? I shudder to think.

But, really, it was the realization that she and I were 26 when that movie came out. Life was in full swing, most of it ahead of us. The promise it held was boundless. The days were full and long. I remember the movie being released. I remember Steve Martin promoting it. How is it that it's that old now? How is that I am? Where did all the time go? And if it went that fast, how quickly will the rest of my days fly?

That's probably normal stuff everyone wrestles with on some level at some point. My problem has always been that I ruminate a little more on certain things than most before I come to the realization that others reach more efficiently than I do: why worry over what you can't control? Exercise, eat right, and just live life while you can. The days move forward for everyone, and there's no stopping it. But, first I have to try and get my brain to catch up with my body. Because there is still the part of me thinking I am the person I was when I would watch that movie all those years ago. I have a mental image of me with good teeth, healthy skin, flat tummy, perky (if small) breasts and healthy hair, whose body is not her enemy yet, and I have a hard time letting that go and looking in the mirror to see what is real and embracing it. I could still go to law school if I wanted to in my mind, then I have to stop and realize that's not all that practical or likely at this point. The choices I made along the line have shut certain doors and made others hard to pry open.

But, I think, for those of us who have lost a child, the midlife freak out takes on another level. It's wrestling with all those minute little choices made along the way that brought your child to the juncture she was at. If I had stayed at school in Montana, say, or come here to Pitt like I once considered, how different would life had been? And even if I hadn't done either of those things, but had not worked so much or enrolled Kelsey in soccer instead of figure skating (that's Greg's big one), would she have had a better shot at a healthy life? All those little what-ifs dance around your head, taunting you and reminding you that you'll spend your golden years living with regret. It's stupid, you know, because you can't change the past. It does absolutely no good to anyone, but I am willing to bet quite a bit most of us do it, at least for a while. It's like looking at the accident on the other side of the highway, you know you're not supposed to, but you just can't stop yourself.

It is just somehow incredulous that, in what seems like a blink of an eye, I went from someone whose biggest worry is flirting with the cute boy over across the room to sitting in an upstairs room in a tiny little house in Pennsylvania where I fled with my tiny little family to escape the ghost of all those bad choices that my daughter paid the ultimate price for. Time not only flies, it crashes speed barriers. Maybe if I'd had a little more of it to consider my options and the consequences of my choices, things would be different, but I really don't have time to think about that right now, it's back to work for me.

What Stephen King Character Would You Be?

2011-06-10T13:15:00.000-07:00

I became a Stephen King fan somewhat reluctantly. My best friend in high school more or less forced him on me. She chided, cajoled, insisted, and all but tied me up and jammed the book down my throat, but she finally got me to read Salem's Lot. I resisted so strongly because I have always been a little reluctant to be told what to do. I guess that's why she's now a lawyer, and I once ran the daily operations of a company. We are both stubborn, and she is persuasive. Even back then, because she prevailed, and I read it, but not without a fight. But, not only did I read it, I did it in the way she told me to: which is to read it at night in bed with just the bedside lamp on. I did this with some initial disdain. The whole reason I hadn't read the book in the first place was because I was sure I was so jaded by a lifetime (all 16 years or whatever) of reading and watching horror stories that I figured nothing on the written page could scare me. She was adamant that this could, particularly if I followed her instructions about the ambience while I read. (She did the same thing with Elton John by the way - not convince me that he was scary, but force me to listen to him until I finally acquired a taste for him.)

I confess. She was completely right. On both the book and Elton John. By the time I finished the book - more like devoured it in marathon reading sessions - I was so completely terrified, I was keeping a crucifix hanging over my bed and refusing to even turn in the direction of either of my two windows, the curtains drawn very tight. Forget about moving out of the dead center of the double sized bed to go to the bathroom, I'd wet myself first. And, with that thrilling experience, I was hooked. My freshman year in college The Stand was published. I remember reading it IN French class. It came out when Kelsey was an infant, and I was still in that you-should-be-sleeping-every-chance-you-get phase. Instead I would stay up to read until 3:00 in the morning, then get up and have to be at work at 8:00. Being a Stephen King fan was like being an addict. Long before the Internet and text alerts and all the other savvy media tools used now, I knew when the next book was due to be published, and I was there at the bookstore On.That.Day.

Then Marissa came along, and then my job with my company, and even an addict couldn't get her fix as easily. I remember reading Thinner on the plane on the way to see my dad only days before he died, grateful for the few hours of peace and quiet to be able to devour it, if you will, no matter the severity of the reason. I finally got to the point where I couldn't keep up with his prolific writing, but I wasn't all that concerned about it after all those years. Because, after a long, full career, the master tended to use some of the same basic parameters multiple times. He was not a one trick pony, but he did fall back to some of the same plot devices often. Among them, a group of New Englanders would find themselves somehow isolated and naturally split like an atom into two groups: good v. evil while they battle to survive. So, I would tell myself, "Been there, read that." So, I would wait and get the books on the bargain shelf and not be in a particular hurry to read them. As a result, I have a backlog. Yet, every so often, I'll pick one up and immediately get sucked back in: losing sleep, working a hour or two less every day (no worries co-workers: still putting in full-plus days), and sneaking an often over sized book in everywhere I go and reading every spare minute I have.

There is nothing particularly new about the premises he uses. As a matter of fact, many are age old with a supernatural twist. And even the twists are the old scary standbys: aliens, vampires, government experiments gone awry. But, Stephen King's genius is making you care, one way or the other, for each and every one of those characters. None of them are one dimensional, good guys or bad guys. The good guys have inner demons they are fighting. Bad guys have sensitive sides and flashes of compassion or are sympathetic for some reason. And, no matter when they meet their end, within the first 20 pages or the last, you will know something about them and you will not be reading about strangers. These will be characters who resemble people you might know, whether you're actually in New England, or Colorado, Montana, Texas or maybe even France. Maybe you see yourself in one of them. It almost doesn't matter what supernatural force they're fighting, the reason you turn the pages just as fast as you can is to see what happens to people you've come to have feelings for, forgetting that they don't actually exist. This is what has made him my favorite author - and unashamedly so. It may be somewhat low brow, to count a contemporary best selling author as your favorite writer above all. People who know me a little might me to at least expect me to reach for J.R.R. Tolkien, but nope, it's Stephen King. He's laid a few eggs over the years, but who hasn't?

So, what has that got to do with the price of rice in China, as my mother might ask? Well, as it happens, I'm currently reading Under the Dome, and need to hurry and finish this post and then my work so I can get back to it. I am once more totally sucked into the little fictional world he has created, hoping he won't kill off the hero, Dale Barbara, but worrying that he eventually will (and if you know, don't you dare tell me...), and I got to thinking the other night, "I'm the kind of person who would end up in a Stephen King book. I have a complicated psyche. I like to think I'm a good person, but I've mortally pissed off two long-term relationships (Greg's oldest sister and his best friend), my marriage is strained through the veil of grief, and I have my fair share of skeletons in my closet. Maybe I'm not a shoe-in to be one of the good guys." Not like I murdered someone with an axe, mind you, but suffice it to say, I highly doubt I would ever survive the vetting process if I wanted to run for public office. Of course, I say that and then think about all the recent sex scandals, so maybe I would be considered squeaky clean by modern political standards. Not sure that's all that much of an accomplishment though: I'm at least not as scummy as John Edwards. Bully for me.

So, what side of the good v. evil fence would I truly stride? In my early Stephen King-reading days, there was no doubt in my mind that I would be in Boulder, not Las Vegas (that's a Stand reference to anyone not fortunate enough to have read it), but now I'm just not so sure. Life is complicated. I am complicated. Things are rarely quite as neat and clear as they seem when you're reading about them on the clean, white pages of a book in the comfort of your living room sofa. In a real time event, would you see things clearly enough to choose the righteous side? Would you even want to, or would it be more fun to be the rowdy bad boys in town? These are fun things to think about. Less fun to ever be in a situation to actually have to make a choice like that - like people have to in times of war, for instance. But, for now, have a little fun with it: what kind of Stephen King character would you be?

Unsettling In

2011-06-06T05:16:00.000-07:00

I would imagine some are curious as to how it's going a week into Greg and Marissa's arrival to their brave new world. Hard to say really. How's that for an answer? As I write this (Sunday morning), Marissa is sleeping in on her birthday morning. When she's up and ready, we will begin a new birthday tradition and take her to Pamela's (yum yum yum) for breakfast, but then - not knowing the city beyond the surface touristy stuff, it was hard for her to say how she would like to spend her day. I feel for her, stuck her with her parents with no friends here yet. At 12, that might be cool, to be doted on by the elders and taken to do whatever you want. At 22, probably not so much. Yet, she is the picture of grace and patience with her situation, and by this time next year, I presume her social circle will have widened past these tiny four walls, and we will all know the city on a deeper level.

As for Greg, it's hard to judge if the heaviness he carries is a result of his overwhelming grief or his discomfiture about finding himself in such unfamiliar territory, or both. My money is on both. But, it's just a guess because, like a lot of males, he's not exactly forthcoming. I think that's in part because he really doesn't know. He just feels out of place, or that's what I believe. And, as it turns out, navigating for him isn't all that much easier than it is for me, and that has to add to his feeling of southern fish floundering outside northern waters.

I've worried that he feels lost even within his own home. I set the house up and know where things are, he's had to constantly ask me where this or that is and how things work. In four months here by myself certain routines developed that are new to him. I developed a love for pierogies and potato pancakes, and he'd prefer southern barbecue. He's worried how he'll do in the winter - both commuting and just surviving the cold. And, lost in a confusing city, knowing only Marissa and me, he doesn't have the activity that he's had to keep his mind off the things that brought us here in the first place. My worry is that he's dwelling on it more now than before even when the ghost of the Beast was so close. Maybe it's just fated to follow us around always. Maybe we'll never be rid of it. But, I still think we have to try.

It doesn't help that he's met at least two people in passing who have told him flat out he'll absolutely hate it here (one Texas native and one Jersey boy). Again, that Rust Belt bluntness (that the two men clearly adopted about Pittsburgh even if they rejected everything else). Takes some getting used to.

I know it's only been a week, so these are all just initial impressions. I also remember going through some of these same emotions myself. I still have them really, as much as I completely love it here. Oddly, the house still almost feels like a rental. It's my residence, I have my things, but I feel like it doesn't belong to me. At first, I tried to tell myself that's because I was so worried about not doing anything that would hurt the resale value, this being the way station to a - hopefully - larger place later on (even just a larger kitchen with a full size dishwasher - that would so be heaven). But, I think it's because I spent so many years at our other house, and this house has spent so many years housing other people, that we're still feeling one another out. It hasn't fully accepted me as its owner, and I haven't fully taken ownership. If that makes any sense at all. But, for Greg, I think these feelings are more pronounced.

And, finally, in our time apart, I think we began to take divergent paths to process our grief. It took me a day or two to figure that out, but my evidence for it is a book he read recently by the author of Helter Skelter that, in short, states that no one can prove the existence of God. He was very impressed by this book and wants me to read it. My own reaction surprised me. I look at it almost like it's coated in acid. I want nothing to do with it. Finally, it occurred to me: he's looking for answers to the question if there is a God why did He take our child from us. I'm hanging onto the belief that she's in a better place somewhere and her suffering is not only at an end, but she has peace now. If you take that from me, well...let me just say, I need that belief. In the end analysis, that's why they call it faith. I really don't need a book to tell me there's no proof. If there was, then we'd all worship - or protest against in some cases - one God anyway, wouldn't we?

That doesn't make Greg wrong. Doesn't make me wrong either. We're just trying to find our way through this unbelievable mess we find ourselves in anyway we know how. Grief is such an individualized thing, as I've said many times before, and we have not been around one another for a while to see what it has done to each of us respectively. This is the journey of a lifetime, let me tell you. No one who is on it remains unchanged. We have to learn who we are again, I guess. That's an additional challenge to learning where you are and how to find the good movie theatre (it's on the south side, by the way - I've been there, I just can't find it again).

He actually leaves at the end of the week to go back to Austin and pick up his car, still at the old house. I wonder if, in the back of his mind the idea, even just fleetingly, of just staying once he got back there entered his mind. If it did, it's gone now, but this isn't home for him yet. It's just a place that's new and strange. I hope he gives Pittsburgh a fair shot. It takes some time, when you've tossed your entire life up in the air, to have it settle back down into place again. I think that is true no matter when, why or where you move to. I think for our circumstances, it is just a little further of a toss so the landing is a bit more of a jolt.

Love Story

2011-06-02T20:31:00.000-07:00

Late in the day on Kelsey's birthday, we were finally united again as a family. Now, in the final round of chaos, Marissa and Greg work to settle in with the last of our things - mainly Marissa's things - while I work. There has been little time to worry over sightseeing and acclimating themselves to the very different world they now suddenly find themselves. Greg goes with Cheyenne and me on our daily walks, now deferred to the evenings in deference to the sudden heat that descended upon the area briefly, and in that way he gets to see the neighborhood a block or two at a time, but there is a whole city out there they have yet to experience. Like me when I first got here, my husband seems to be taking it in baby steps. Walking around the block at first, then a jaunt to the store, then a slightly longer jaunt to the Lowe's on McKnight Road (I practically lived on McKnight Road when I first got here - the commercial center of the north side where most of the mega-stores that we all know are, so there was a familiarity to it). Eventually maybe he'll want to stretch his wings a little and try something more adventurous, but for now, that seems to be where his limits are. Much like me at first. He'll move to the next step faster than I did, of that I have little doubt. For one thing, there are not winter roads to intimidate the Southern driver. For another, he's just bolder in that regard. But for now, he seems vaguely uneasy about it all, this very different world, and he stays in somewhat familiar territory. This morning, as we walked Cheyenne around the block as the day dawned around us, he asked me how long it took before I felt like I belonged. I thought about that and then decided I'm not entirely sure I feel that way still. I drawl like a Texan and can't find my way around to save my life. I'm not a full fledged 'Burgher yet, that's for sure.

But, I'll get there. And in short order, I think. The old skin is shedding off, and I'll be more comfortable in this one, I think. Trying to describe why is a bit hard. Not one to usually be at a loss for words, it's not really that I couldn't find the right words, but I couldn't be succinct enough to put it all in a reasonably short post. And, truthfully, the right words are a bit elusive. It's a sense of a place, it's sights and sounds and smells. It's things that bring back memories of childhood. It's looking out at the

giant maple in the backyard and remembering sitting under the shade of one very much like it during long ago summers reading tales of knights and round tables and realizing you might not be able to go home again, but you can find a new sense of home and rediscover once more the things that you loved. It's smelling lilac and sweet grass as you walk down the street. It's being able to actually walk down the street because the temperature is not at the century mark. It's watching ducks in your front yard and deer in your back, and realizing you didn't have to give up things green or furry to live within twenty minutes of world class museums and the sports teams you love (and I can find the stadium, thank you very much). It's having people be so friendly and accommodating that when someone isn't it actually is sort of surprising. It's waking up in the morning and looking around and thinking, "This feels right."

Home is a feeling more than a place maybe. And feelings aren't always that easy to put into words.