Runnin' On

It was a pleasant evening here. Warm and balmy and such. Nathan and I walked outside and met the neighbor's baby for the first time as we all started emerging from our winter hibernation. My friend T. from across the street stopped over with her baby who is slightly older than Nathan.

If you recall, T. announced to me, with great love and concern, that she was pregnant just as we were beginning injections for the third in vitro, the one that brought us Nathan. T. and I have been running partners since she and her husband moved in a few years ago. (I should say she's one of my two dear running partners and friends, but more on that in a bit.) I was heartbroken at the thought of losing her as a partner. Then I got pregnant and we rejoiced together, spent last year pregnant and having babies together, and spent the fall together on maternity leave taking long stroller walks in the park. We've exchanged sleep horror stories, shared breastfeeding and baby food tips, and cooed over each other's babies. We talked about how our boys would play together. I showed her the wagon my dad bought Nathan for Christmas and looked forward to pulling them both in it in the park next to our houses.

So tonight, T. said she wanted to talk to me because she and her dh are probably moving, probably putting the house up for sale in May, probably traveling for a while, eventually buying another house.

I was in shock, but it didn't really hit me until I went back home.

Then I fell apart. (Poor Nathan probably thinks Mommy's insane.) You see, my other dear friend and running partner, MJ, is moving to California in a couple weeks. I've managed to be nothing but happy for her and her cross-country job promotion, as well as excited about the upcoming October marathon plans we've now laid. I've managed to keep my head firmly in the sand and ignore the fact that I will now run alone at lunchtime. But tonight's news was the straw that broke my back and right now I can hardly breathe. The world is spinning.

These are two very wonderful women. Wonderful friends. Wonderful, caring, Christian women who have shared so much themselves with me. Over miles and miles we've lived our lives together, with MJ for nearly 10 years, with T. for just a few, but the results are the same: they both have a big piece of my heart and my life. There's something about being outside, side by side, sweating it out together, that really shows you what someone is made of. And they are both made of beautiful things.

Right now my heart is breaking with the emptiness that's about to be left in both their wakes -- at nearly the same time. My feet will hit the pavement alone. I will breathe alone. I will be out there with only my thoughts, not hearing anyone else's, not bouncing mine off of them. I will be hearing my own feet, swamped in my own fatigue.

With the thought of MJ moving across the country, I at least hoped that T. and I would resume our runs together as we got more accustomed to our new post-partum and back-to-work lives. If we didn't, we'd still have our walks. Now my body will move alone. Really, truly alone.

I love my park. I love my solitary runs and my headphone runs and my intense painful runs. But I also love my partner runs, that time when I connect, reconnect, support, and receive support. I love the brief cooldown walks afterwards when we breathe easy, chat, and know that we have done something good for ourselves and for each other.

How do I run when I can't even breathe?

I just received my weekly Baby Zone news letter with an article on 10 ways to feel sexy again. It gives helpful information about why my libido might be busted (sleep deprivation, body image, the usual stuff). It also gives helpful hints, like catching him off-guard, trying something new, surprising him after Nathan's bedtime with dessert and drinks (actually, the article recommends "desert," which is entirely too uncomfortable for lovemaking in my estimation) in the bedroom, or surprising him by having the grandparents babysit overnight ("Hey, Mom and Dad, could you take Nathan overnight so Mike and I can get freaky?") ...

I'm sorry, but while those might be nice ideas, they're way too advanced for our current stage of baby development. When most waking moments at home are taken up by teaching Nathan to play in his jumper, tickling him, calming him when he's crying, and desperately folding laundry when he takes one of his micro-naps, trying something different or announcing -- though not in so many words -- to the grandparents that we need a good lay, is off the radar. While those things might be nice, I'm not even to the point of feeling sexy enough to take advantage of Nathan sleeping off-site.

I decided I need a more basic list of ways to feel sexy so that someday I might take advantage of Baby Zone's helpful, though logistical, list:

1) Get enough fucking sleep.
But since Nathan wakes up over and over at night (as delightful and friendly as he might be during the day), I'm not sure when that's going to happen. My boss frowns on naptime at my desk when I'm supposed to be working. Picky, picky.

2) Lose some fucking weight.
Oh yeah, that comes after you get enough fucking sleep because there's no energy left to exercise.

3) Hire the grandparents to babysit so you can take 20 minutes to shave your fucking legs.
Nothing says make love to me like a three-week-old forest. And you might even lose a half-pound toward goal #2.

4) Use some lotion.
At least in this part of the country in the winter with the heat on, nothing says make love to me like leg dandruff.

5) Comb your fucking hair.
I look like a mop every day, and it doesn't help that I haven't managed to get a hair cut since October.

6) Cut your toenails, but forget about toenail polish.
Trimming those daggers hanging off the end of your feet will be enough of an accomplishment. Giving your pedicure time to dry before your baby drools on the fresh paint?Impossible.

7) Laugh a little.
Maybe you'll burn a few extra calories. Just make sure your laughter doesn't turn into exhausted tears.

8) Do your laundry.
While this is nearly impossible, at least make sure you have clean underwear. Nothing says make love to me like peeling off old skanky drawers.

9) Kiss each other several times per day.
Do this even though you look like shit, you haven't flossed, and you're wearing puke-stained clothes. It might be the only thing to keep you connected during dry spells.

10) Always say I love you.
Ditto #9.

Here are some haiku snapshots of life with my five-month-old pumpkin:

Watch you discover ...
How did you learn to put your
fingers in my nose?

That wide, gummy smile,
so happy, so unable
to contain the drool.

Butt cheek compression?
How exactly do you poop
up your entire back?

I cherish your squeals,
the way they pierce my eardrums
when I hold you close.

Your laughter: your joy
overflows and gushes forth
along with some puke.

And one last haiku. I might be venting just a tad:
"Does he sleep all night?"
they ask. Demoralizing
jerks with ugly kids.

This is my first blog entry from my palm pilot. I'm actually writing this while riding the bus.

First of all, I want to say thanks to you all for your good wishes toward my stepmother. She has started chemo, though she had a setback in January with an abscess and was in the hospital because they had to take her off of her blood thinners, drain the abscess, and then re-titrate said blood thinners. Then she got a second blood clot -- the first one being after her surgery -- and the fun just continued from there.

And may I just interrupt myself long enough to say that good God does this bus driver like to use his fucking brake pedal?

Anyway, thank you. She seems to be in good spirits and feeling positive, which is more than I can say for me because I've seen this shit before. Still, she got news that her liver tumors are shrinking after just two treatments, which is good.

So, if you're wondering why I've been gone so long (hell, if you've noticed that I've been gone so long), I started back to work December 5th and it's all been crazy since.

Here's a look at how pretty much every day goes (and I wouldn't have it any other way):

1) Wake up between 5:00 and 5:30 a.m.
2) Feed Nathan or pump, depending on how the night went.
3) Shower, eat (maybe), pack up pumping equipment and bottles to pump at work.
4) Swear about not being more organized.
5) Run out the door to the bus.
6) Work all day.
7) Never really take a break because I pump during my breaks and lunch. (When I can get out the door early enough in the morning I can take a long lunch and work out after I pump, but you're probably starting to see why I might be having trouble getting up early enough to do that very often.)
8) Ride the bus home.
9) Hop off bus, walk to house, hop in car.
10) Drive up the street to daycare. (Mike does the morning dropoff.)
11) Spend two to three hours with Nathan: feeding, playing, bathing ... also trying to eat our own dinner.
12) Put Nathan to bed around 8:00.
13) Wash bottles and pump equipment. Fill bottles for next day.
14) Decide to pack lunch, run the dishwasher, lay out clothes for the next day, straighten up, etc.
15) Collapse into a heap after about five minutes of above.
16) (and here's the painful part) wake up anywhere from three to twelve times in the night because we've created a binky addiction and Nathan hasn't figured out yet how to retrieve it for himself. In the middle of the night after 5-1/2 months of sleeping in one- to two-hour snatches, it's easier to trudge across the hall and plunk it back into his mouth, while at the same time understanding on some exhausted level that we're only compounding the problem.

It's just been too hard to let him cry it out. And both the cry-it-out advocates and the attachment parenting advocates use scare tactics, leaving sleep-deprived parents who are no longer capable of making a well-reasoned decision in the middle of the night to cry it out themselves instead.

The cry-it-out camp tries to convince you that if you don't leave your baby to cry and figure it out for himself, he'll never, ever learn to sleep on his own and he'll go to college with his teddy bear and his nightlight and will have insomnia that will make his mind foggy and his grades below their potential and he'll never get a good job.

The attachment parenting camp tries to scare you into responding to pretty much all of your baby's cries (once you've distinguished between the waking cries and the sleeping ones) because if you don't, your baby will learn that his cries aren't important, he'll stop trusting his instincts in crying (the only way he knows to communicate), his six-month-old self esteem will crumble, and he'll grow up to go to jail instead of college.

What the hell am I supposed to do with that? I reinsert the binky. It's simple, has an instant result, and isn't confusing. And I sleep in tiny spurts, praying for the day when he finds it for himself.

And yet through all this, through my bleary eyes, through my own exhausted cries in the night, I am so blissfully happy to have him. (I just wish he were a little sleepier.) In the middle of the night I want to both gouge out my own eyes with an ice pick and I want to squeeze and cuddle and coo. And that's really fucking confusing. I could never have predicted feeling this way: to be so in love with such a little person and yet to have to physically restrain myself from repeatedly bashing my forehead against our headboard when Nathan wakes up crying for the eighth time in three hours (no, I am not exaggerating). I dread the night.

And yet, when I see those eyes beaming and those gums flashing just for me during the day, all is forgiven. And that's where I am: sleep-deprived, unable to fix it, and head over heels.
I'm still trying to get the hang of pictures here. If it works, here's a recent one. Did I mention that he's huge? He turned five months old on Jan 27th. At his four-month appointment he was 17 lbs. 11.5 oz. and 26.5 inches long. That was 90th percentile for weight and 95th for length. The picture is from a week ago, at 5-1/2 months. I must be feeding him something good.

My mom died almost 13 years ago, on New Year's Day 1993. She had fought cancer for almost four years, with multiple surgeries, chemotherapy, and radiation. The cancer would go away, and then it would come back. By the time all was said and done, she was also sporting a colostomy and a urostomy. The colostomy was supposed to be reversible if she went a year with no relapse, but that never happened. Her death at age 49 seemed ridculous for a kind-hearted woman who ate healthy foods and didn't drink or smoke and had no history of cancer in her family. The holidays were unbearable for a long time. By Christmas she was clearly not going to last much longer, on New Year's Eve she stopped responding, causing my brother to go on a drunken rampage in the woods across the street, and at lunch time on New Year's Day, after I spent a silent morning of taking down the Christmas decorations with my dad, she died.

About a year and a half after she died, my dad remarried a great lady and was happy again. After a 27-year loving marriage with my mom, he has now enjoyed 10 years with my stepmother.

So, just like in the soap operas, we can't let that last, can we?

My stepmother was diagnosed with colon cancer for Thanksgiving. By Saturday, she was sporting her own colostomy, again, hopefully reversible, and has a brand spanking new diagnosis of cancer in her liver as of yesterday, based on the biopsy during surgery.

Pardon me, but didn't my family already fucking do this once? And why do we have to ruin all the big, family-oriented holidays? Why couldn't it be Arbor Day? Or George Washington's birthday?

They did semi-emergency surgery because the tumor was close to causing a blockage in her colon. Now they have to wait several weeks to start chemotherapy so she can completely heal from the surgery. She's actually in good spirits and keeps saying it's in God's hands. Me, I choose to be in denial and make inappropriate jokes about the luck in our family. I think my brother is with me on that one.

What's disturbing about the whole thing is that she has been in pain since late summer. She went to the GP who said she had strained a back muscle. (Turns out in surgery the tumor was embedded in the muscle, which explains the pain she's had for MONTHS!) He gave her some pain medicine. When that didn't work, she went back but got a different doctor that day, who diagnosed her with a kidney infection without any other symptoms of one and without taking a urine sample. He gave her antibiotics. When those ran out they gave her more. She was still in pain. They did an ultrasound of her kidneys, which looked fine, and told her she had a "fatty liver," something the oncologist at the big-city hospital (hmmm...can't imagine why they chose to go to big city hospital after the Thanksgiving diagnosis ... can you?) said isn't even a term they use and looked puzzled.

She started having bleeding so they did a colonoscopy the day before Thanksgiving and found the tumor, which had infiltrated the intestinal wall. The biospy results were supposed to be released Monday. But on Thanksgiving night, while we were in the Detroit area staying at my brother's house during blizzards (therefore, neither of us could be there) she started having uncontrollable vomiting. They went to the local hospital, who diagnosed the cancer. That was when she requested to go to the Cleveland Clinic and was in surgery within 24 hours. They removed the part of the intestine with the tumor and the part of the back muscle that was involved. They also removed an ovary and a fallopian tube which had adhesions and may have been involved. They found other tumors in the fatty layer of the abdomen and removed what they could find. And they biopsied the liver.

Maybe the chemo will do wonders and she'll live for 10 or 20 more years. But I'm currently assuming the worst. I'm assuming a carbon copy of watching my mom wither away and die younger than she should in unbearable pain. I'm assuming that now there will be two grandmas on my side that Nathan will never have had a chance to know. I'm assuming that my dad's heart will be broken again.

How is any of this fair?

On Monday, my friend was coming home from out of town with her husband after visiting her parents. They got a phone call on the road that her parents had been in a minor car accident. It didn't seem that there were any physical injuries. However, her mom lost consciousness and was taken to the hospital. Needless to say, they turned around and went back.

When her mom awoke, she had amnesia. She knew her first name but thought she was single, it was 1974, and she was living in another state. She didn't know her family at all. She didn't remember the accident and believed she had fallen. Tests didn't reveal a brain injury or stroke. There seemed to be no explanation. They believed it was temporary but there was no telling when she would be okay again.

I found out about this in the middle of the night when I got up to feed Nathan and checked my e-mail, which I never do (because I usually want to go back to bed). I was horrified when I read about it. My mom died of cancer in 1993 when I was 22 years old. But she knew me. I can't imagine the horror of your mom not recognizing you or knowing you ever existed, not from the slow progress of Alzheimer's but in a sudden moment when you don't even have the chance to adjust to the idea. I can't imagine what my friend was going through. I just prayed her mom would come out of it and be fine.

The next day, Tuesday, I received a couple of e-mails saying that there had been no change and that there still was no clinical explanation. Then, yesterday, the family's prayers were answered. This time, there was nothing mysterious about it. God just worked in bizarre ways here.

Yesterday, she lost her balance in her hospital bathroom, bumped her head on the wall...

... and got her memory back. Every last bit, up to and including the accident. And nothing between the accident and that moment.

So everyone is shouting, "Praise God!" And I'm shouting right along. But I'm a little lost on the specifics. Praise Him for making my friend's mom clumsy in bathrooms? Praise Him for wiping out what would definitely be troubling to remember -- her errant jumble of memories during those two days? Praise Him for making the brain such an amazingly complex thing?

I suppose it doesn't matter. She was clumsy in the bathroom and it helped restore her mind and her life, even if it was in a soap-opera-esque way. So praise God for that!

9:15 a.m.

Me: I want to put him in the swing and see if he'll take a nap but I feel like I'm putting him away.

Mike (grunting): Who cares? Put him away.