December 29, 2016

Paper and Breath

I have spent most of the last two weeks in the grips of a terrible asthma flare, brought on by whatever powerful viral misery has a hold on the country right now. Though I’m not immune to illness — I get what I assume is the average number of colds each year — this one was particularly frightening for me, and I am convinced that it sent cosmic signals out into my community, since three separate friends left bottles of juice on my porch and ran like heck. As I curled under an enormous down blanket and drowned my tickling throat — which threatened constantly to send me into another bizarre, high-pitched coughing fit reminiscent of someone stepping on a puppy — I did little more than watch hours of television and poke half-heartedly at my phone from time to time.

This is not my normal position in the world. My normal life since children has been a patchwork of several kinds of activity: my part-time business in web site design and development (hire me!), childrearing, and housewifery. In the two weeks I spent on hiatus nursing my lungs along, I was able to pull a laptop onto the couch from time to time to douse the fires of my business, and my children managed to handle their own rearing at their ripe ages of 14 and 11. The housewifery, however, fell into the crevices between couch cushions, where it waited, growing funky and fuzzy with neglect.

Of course, I have a partner, a fantastic husband who is always ready to help — and he did. The dishes got done and the lizard got fed; children were driven where they needed to go when I could not summon the strength. However, there were several administrative tasks that I had intended to manage before the end of the year, and they began to weigh as heavily on my chest as the infection I was fighting. When I finally felt up to tackling them, I found it was literally The Last Minute, which, of course, is the most productive minute of any project. The most pressing of these tasks was the one billing-related job I’ve managed in our marriage since our younger daughter, Sammi, was born. This task, coincidentally, was born with her. Continue Reading…

December 15, 2016

Breathing Fine

Yesterday, I drove through salt-bleached, frozen streets on my way to retrieve my daughter and her friends from school. The temperatures here have been dangerously cold; I am regularly rescuing my children from the frigid walk home.

As I drove my empty car past the grey of filthy alley snow under a colorless sky, I half-listened to the music playing through my speakers. I believe in the Oracle of the Random Playlist, my name for the theory that whatever plays when I hit “random” is a coded message from the universe. Several fiddle tunes and a standup comedy bit from Ellen DeGenerous later, I heard the opening piano chords from John Legend’s song “All of Me.”

I’m not much of a pop music fan, as any of my friends can tell you, but parenting brings surprising gifts. Beginning with Owl City when my older daughter was in elementary school, I found myself reluctantly led back to paying attention to the radio when my daughters started singing it at home. In 2014, as my husband and I waited for months to tell our younger daughter Sammi that she would soon be facing a second cardiac surgery, she came home from her school’s chorus practice one day singing “All of Me.” I listened from the front seat as she hummed, then asked her what she was singing. She opened her mouth and sang,

What’s going on in that beautiful mind?
I’m on your magical mystery ride,
and I’m so dizzy,
don’t know what hit me,
but I’ll be all right…

“That’s so pretty, sweetheart!,” I said then. “What’s it called?”

Her big sister told me the name of the song, and I looked it up later. I remember sitting crosslegged on the floor of my kitchen, listening to the song online, and feeling the earth underneath me roll and undulate like waves. It felt personal. It felt cruelly perfect. Continue Reading…

December 7, 2016

Huddle Up

Every day, there’s something new happening that scares me.

In fact, every day, there are multiple things — here in the US, and other places in the world. It feels to me like we are balanced on a saucer held on the index finger of someone walking barefoot across a sea of marbles, and — moment by moment — people are plummeting over the edge. I wake up from my spot nearer to the middle of that saucer than 90% of the people on this planet, and I look at the news and try to decide where I will throw my tiny threads of possibility today.

It feels desperate. On the worst days, it feels ridiculous.

As this year ends, I am reminded of the years that my friends and family made contributions to causes that would likely never, ever affect them. Though I tried not to be a broken record, I did occasionally reach out to friends and family via social media and other means to support the charities working on research, advocacy and support for the conditions with which my daughter suffered. When her primary diagnosis was eosinophilic esophagitis, I asked for support for APFED, The American Partnership for Eosinophilic Disorders. After she had her second cardiac surgery, we suggested people make donations to Mended Little Hearts. These were good causes — they are good causes, and I’ll continue to support them even though my daughter’s health is no longer affected by these conditions — but the people we asked to contribute or share stories or raise awareness were likely largely oblivious to their existence before my daughter’s diagnosis awakened them.

In the last few weeks, the pitched voices of a number of needs in the wider world and in my community seem to have amplified. Part of that is due to #GivingTuesday, a campaign to encourage charitable giving after the materialistic trifecta of Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, and Cyber Monday. Part of the onslaught of need has also come out of the recent US presidential election, which has given rise to a level of societal panic I can’t remember seeing ever before in my adult life. Causes about which I care deeply — civil rights, women’s health, the social safety net, immigration and international diplomacy among others — seem to need support more than ever. I find my personal politics pinpointed perfectly as my friends add me to Facebook groups daily, my email inbox fills with requests, and every news story seems to offer me an action item.

This holiday season, there are so many bigger needs than those that affect my family. This holiday season, the needs affect my whole world.

I’m doing a few things differently this season, and while I don’t dare tell anyone reading this that my plan should be theirs, I’m finding it useful to think about what I can do to help in three ways:

Actions that help the world
Actions that help my community
Actions that help my family

December 2, 2016

The Boy in the Next Bed

When my daughter Sammi was just over a year old, she had surgery to repair a congenital heart defect. After the worst of it was over and she was nearly — but not quite — ready to go home, they moved us from the ICU to the general ward of the children’s hospital.

In the ICU, each child has her own tiny room — about twice as wide as a twin bed — with a glass partition at the end of it. On the other side of that partition sits the child’s personal nurse, up on a stool next to a computer that monitors a host of vital signs and other measurements. That nurse has no other patients. When shifts change, two nurses fill that tiny space for thirty minutes, conferring and learning so that the new nurse has all the information necessary to sit vigil for the next shift.

In the general wards, the supervision is quite different. So are the rooms. When we got to the door, I went in and dropped all our stuff unceremoniously on the nearest chair, then stopped in my tracks.

“There’s someone already in this room,” I whispered to the nurse, pointing at the curtain and then at the loud tv tuned to cartoons. Continue Reading…

Swallow, My Sunshine

Feeding a Family in Medical Uncertainty

Monthly Archives: December 2016

Paper and Breath

Breathing Fine

Huddle Up

The Boy in the Next Bed