Why I Stopped Writing

When I graduated college, degree in hand, I realised that knowing how to write was only part of the process. Living a life worth writing about, knowing about something well enough to write about it, and experiencing anything at all, learning a trade, creating a family, building a house.....anything at all was a critical part that was missing.

I didn't want to be a journalist. I didn't know how to write fiction. I was stuck. I dropped my pen and walked out into the world.

I went to graduate school for non-fiction writing, history, and architecture. I was going to learn a trade, know to inside and out. We were struggling with infertility, restoring a historic house, studying historic preservation made sense. We refinanced to build better inside the house, I worked at a museum, and I played the young professional sell your own portfolio of talents to the folks in charge game. I wore suits, curled my hair, lipstick charmed my way into meetings.

In the middle of it, I became pregnant with Lily.

Lily changed everything.

She changed the core of everything I was or lived or thought. Not overnight, but slowly. I had entered a foreign land and it took time to learn the language and customs. My days and nights became a blur, work became a daily exercise in futility and longing. Grad school drug at my heels. Daycare, pumping, diapers, crying (mine, not Lily's). It all spun around me in a brilliant vortex, tearing down to the core of who or what I thought I was. Not like some brilliant chrysalis, but like a hurricane. I survived.

I survived. I changed.

I quit my job and took up teaching at our local community college. I finished grad school, but put my book in a box and taped it shut. Driving through the Iowa landscape to and from the rural campus, the dreaming fog drifted in. Dreaming of leaving the city.....a dream I had held so close to my heart since I was ten years old and my family moved south of Chicago from rural Colorado, then to Des Moines, Iowa. The rolling hills, windows down so the country air could pull back my hair and take the tears away, the longing that was building in me. The dream I had of living on a farm, raising cows and chickens and dreaming under a million stars in a silky back night was coming alive again.

I could not put my finger on it though. It was just an ember. A needling.

In the months that followed the neighbour children set our fence on fire, there was a drive by on our block, and a man was murdered in our front yard. I became pregnant with Holly. The dream became a desperation, a longing, a need.  My mind was constantly wrapped around this irrational fear that if we stayed in the city, my girls would be harmed, shot, assaulted, or some other worse degradation. I distracted myself the best that I could with play dates, art classes, mommy meet ups. Nothing got my mind off this horrible fear, was it irrational? A man was murdered in my front yard, his junkie's head blown off by a mugger. That was the neighbourhood we lived in, in our magical beautiful house surrounded by a war zone of violence, drug use, and prostitution.

Then, Holly was born. She turned up the vortex again, sent our world spinning. At a berry farm when she was 3 weeks old, the summer breeze tickled her face and she smiled and then laughed for the first time. It was that day I knew. I came home with a basket of strawberries, my two beautiful daughters, and called the Realtor. I told Chad we'd move to a farm by the end of 2008. Maybe not sell our city house, but we'd be on the farm no matter what. I started packing.

I blogged.

Every single time I took up a pen to write a poem or a story, it fell out of my hand. A baby cried.

We moved to the farm.

Isaac was born.

I bought new notebooks that ended up being used for vet supply lists, grocery lists, doctors appointments and schedules. The vortex consumed me. Slowly, I also stopped really blogging. I wrote about farm stuff, posted cute pictures, once a month or so. Not everyday. I lost my spark, the need to write.

......to be continued.

Little Potter Sunshine

Lily insisted that I show the series of pictures I took art class night.  She talked me into trying the wheel too. Never again. That stuff is HARD. I ended up with an exploded ball of clay over and over, that is, when it wasn't flying off the wheel and whap thudding onto the wall or the classmate next to me. No pictures of that hilarity, which is a good thing I guess! Seriously, it was like art class bloopers, staring Danelle. Ugh.

My point it, Lily has a very real talent for this and it comes naturally to her. She isn't  perfect at it yet, but she's working very hard to gain precision. I love watching her make art. I love being a part of her passion as she discovers it. I love that she wants me there, by her side. I love love love love being her Mama.

Fried Green Tomatoes with Sweet Tea

Fried Green Tomatoes: 

• 3-4 green firm tomatoes, cut into 1/4 - 1/2 inch slices. 
• buttermilk
• fish fry breading (like Zatarain's Cajun Fish Fri, but a corn flour base with seasoning works too)
• frying oil (lard, coconut, peanut)

Dunk slices in buttermilk, dredge in breading, fry until brown, drain on plate.

Easy if you know how to fry things. That part is critical. Practice that. If you have the temp to high you'll set the kitchen on fire, too low and you get greasy soggy yuck that no one can eat. Fried green tomatoes are just to delicious to ruin, so make sure you or someone who can help knows how to fry food.

Sweet tea is the only appropriate drink to go with this. Some say glass bottle Coca-cola is acceptable, and I can maybe support that. Maybe.

Perspective, Immunity Part 2

One of the things that being in the between of these worlds affords me is a perspective that is different from either extreme. This perspective is bias, but also educated. Recently there was a round of chickenpox in our community, pox parties were thrown, people rejoiced at the spots. I contemplated attending with my kids, one set of docs had ok'd it for Isaac. The timing was right as far as activities and work schedules go.  Still, I decided that the time was not exactly right. Not just yet. Then, there was an expo being held and one of the online mums asked flippantly if it was ok that her pox'd 4 year old came with her to the very public event. After all, everyone wanted some of the itch action.

Yeah. No. That is irresponsible. What if she had not asked? How many people like her would just bring the infected kid on out to the grocery store. After all, those who don't want it are vaccinated, right? Wrong. I have to be extra careful, I have to speak up and make sure that this kind of foolishness is stopped. Yes, I intend to infect my kid with chickenpox naturally, but I need the timing to be right, not for the infection to happen because some fool of a non-vaccinating family decides to create an outbreak. If you choose, like we do, to not vaccinate for some contagious diseases, you must, for the love of God, be responsible and mindful of your choices and not inflict them on other people. It is actions like these that give mindful parents a bad rap. Most of us research and study and know our diseases. Most of us know better than to take a sick kid into a room with a 1000 other people, many who are or work with or have babies. Recently a fully vaccinated child in our community contracted chicken pox unwillingly. How did that happen? May very well have been vaccine shed, but we don't know. Vaccinating families can be just as irresponsible post vaccination.

This is the fragile edge that I walk with my children. I have to take up the slack. I have to be twice as vigilant. I have to read so much more and understand and be able to explain and constantly justify my choices to doctors, to family, to random Internet strangers, to hostile asshats who decide that this is their crusade. I do this while wiping noses, examining the colour of snot, of poop, of ear goo. If there an infection, what is the viscosity, how much how often, then what? Constant. Always. On the clock. Listening to breathing patterns, heart rates, fingernail colour.

I get tired and run down. I have to keep myself healthy too. I am the primary caregiver and there is no vacation, no lunch break, no respite. We are in the middle of not just two worlds, not just between normal and medical needs, but in the medical needs world between the kind of needs that get extra services and nursing services and the kind that are just enough to be noticeable and require constant vigilance and care on our part to stay on that side of the rope. Like a giant Venn diagram, of NICU and normal and genetics and special needs, we fall in the grey area off to one side with the constant threat of shifting to the left. It is often a very lonely place that our family inhabits, where the naysayers say we are irresponsibly not doing enough or they say we are overreacting and nothing is wrong.

****

Last year a friend I have never met in real life had an idea and brought me on as moderator to bring forth a fantastic online support group, Natural Parenting of the Child with Special Needs. 

The link is to the gateway for the group. The privacy setting are set to secret to protect the privacy of the members (closed status lists names of members, secret does not), so new members send an add request to the message function of the gateway page.

This group of families and parents all over the world has helped me not feel so alone in this foggy grey area. Some have diagnosis for their children, others do not but have a vast array of symptoms that they deal with daily. There are families sharing recipes for special diets, others helping direct parents to other support groups (blenderised diets and the Natural Parenting Downs groups come to mind). So far, this particular group has been one of the most respectful, information sharing groups I have ever been blessed to participate in. I am grateful to be involved and a part of something so special. Discussions have included how to babywear a g-tube baby, how to ditch miralax and use real food for better results, benefits of donor breastmilk and how to re-lactate, what PANDAS is, and how to lessen post surgery PSTD for a child.

The very first week this group was up and running I knew it was something many of us desperately needed to be a part of, that we are not alone on this rugged unmapped island. That is my constant gratitude, that this group exists and has done good in my life. Through this group I have made friends in the 22q community that otherwise would have slipped through my newsfeed. I have made local friends, deepened relationships with friends I already had, connected with childhood friends who are now raising special needs children too. Amazing and wonderful.