I'd walk a thousand miles if I could just hold you

My beautiful daughter, C, is a mess. C is all of 16 months old and she is a climber. She climbs on anything and everything, smiling broadly as she achieves her lofty heights. C is also a major klutz. Which means that for every lofty height she achieves, it is usually followed by a loud thud and some screaming. Sometimes she is helped along, like when 3 1/2 year old Q pushed her off the chair tonight. Sometimes she does it all by herself, like when she fell off the stepstool earlier today whacking the side of her eye and giving herself a nasty bruise. Much screaming and wailing and gnashing of teeth ensued, though truly it looks worse than it is. So she is basically a walking bruise and I half worry, as I'm sure most parents of toddlers do, that someone is going to look at her and think "what the hell is that mother doing to her?" Really it isn't me. She does it to herself and no amount of keeping an eye on her every second of the day will totally protect her from the occasional bruise.

I was thinking about this as I was reading a bedtime story to her tonight. C is VERY into babies right now. So the other day I picked up this book for her about baby angels. She, not surprisingly, loves it. It is rather cute with adorable little baby angels watching out for this toddler who is obviously a climber who gets herself into trouble. Eventually the baby, unbeknownst to her parents, climbs out of her crib and goes outside. One angel whispers to the baby's dad who then runs after her. It reminds me a lot of C except her angels let her fall way too much.

I'm not sure that I believe in angels, not in the traditional sense anyway. I certainly don't think that there are little baby angels following my children around watching out for them, though I wish there were. But looking at those little angels makes me think about the babies I lost. I had two miscarriages between Q and C.

My first one was the day before Q's first birthday. I only found out that I was pregnant the day before. Having had so many problems getting pregnant with Q, we just assumed we couldn't get pregnant without serious help. Surprise! I was devastated for a variety of reasons. (There are all sorts of horrible things you really don't want to know about going through an actual miscarriage.) It seemed like such a cruel joke to realize we had miraculously gotten pregnant only to lose it the very next day. But we waited a month and a half and managed to get pregnant on the very first try. I had two dreams during this pregnancy. In one I gave birth to a baby boy but realized that he was too small to live. In the other a little blonde girl, perhaps 6 years old, came to me and told me that I would lose this baby but that the third pregnancy would work. Seven weeks into the pregnancy it became clear I would lose this baby too. It was a very difficult time for me. The only thing that kept me going was Q. I have no idea how people who have no children survive multiple miscarriages. Q was my world. As long as I had him it was okay.

When I got pregnant again I seriously thought that if I lost this baby, I would not try again. Q would be enough. But I believed that girl in the dream that said that this pregnancy would be okay and amazingly, she was right. She was my baby angel in a way. And C was born. With time the pain of those miscarriages has faded to a dull ache. And of course I have my two living angels (devils?!) which makes it easier to live through.

My mom had two miscarriages when I was a teenager. She and I had dreams that one baby was a boy and one was a girl. She named those lost babies and I know she still thinks of them. I never really found it useful to name my lost babies. I don't really believe that "life" begins at conception and it seems like both of my babies had serious chromosomal abnormalities and could not have survived if they had come to term. I thought of them more as lost possibilities. To be honest the second miscarriage, where I knew I was pregnant for much longer, was much more difficult and due to my dream, I am convinced that baby would have been a boy. I had always loved the boy's name Riley. Since I never got to use it, I often think of that little boy baby as the Riley I never had. So I guess in a way I did name him. But when I look at those baby angels in my daughter's book, it reminds me of those babies and it makes me smile. Now if only they could keep C out of trouble.

It rips my life away but it's a great escape

Is is really possible that I have not posted since October 3? What the hell happened to this month?!! I have no idea. Sick kids, a trip to visit the parents, and some very busy days equal zero time to post. And oh yeah the Yankees lost. Really is it possible to feel depressed over a baseball team losing? It must be. I hate the Red Sox.

Anyway, I finally got a chance to watch the new ABC drama Desperate Housewives last night. If you've read my profile at all you'll see I am addicted to guilty pleasure escapes like soap operas and trash novels. Because Desperate Housewives is on on Sunday nights, and this is often a fairly busy evening for me, I had not gotten to watch it before. It was advertised like crazy during the ABC soap operas I was watching earlier this fall. I am happy to say that it lived up to its guilty pleasure billing. I laughed. I gasped in horror. I grimaced in sympathy. I plan to watch again next week. Very fun.

This got me to thinking about why guilty pleasures like this are so enjoyable and yet something you try not to admit to enjoying. I have been watching soap operas on and off since I was a pre-teen. My mother watched All My Children and so I started to watch with her. I found Santa Barbara (now canceled) and spent many an afternoon after school watching with a friend and neighbor. We knew all the storylines and characters. I even had a scrapbook I put together of my favorite characters. Makes you sick doesn't it?

Eventually I would watch all three of ABC's afternoon dramas at various times depending on how interested I was in the storylines they were playing out. (IMHO- All My Children needs to end the babyswitching thing NOW, One Life to Live needs to drop the Santi family crap, and General Hospital needs to focus on someone other than Sonny and Carly all the time.) I have not seen much of them lately because their storylines have been weak and I have been way too busy. I also don't like my kids to watch so I usually only either listen to them on my kitchen radio or watch on Soapnet at night. But I still know entirely too much about them.

My other major guilty pleasure is romance novels (aka trash novels). I was 12 or so when I picked up my first one. They're kind of like crack to me. I am very particular about them. I only read historical ones that are mostly set in 1700 or 1800s England. They can't be too formulaic (I love it when the heroine isn't a virgin, especially if she isn't married or a widow.) and it is a big plus if they actually have some historical value attached to them. For years I have toted about my "Hall of Fame" collection as I call them. Only the best books by the best authors. But I probably have about a hundred of them right now. I bought a few new ones a couple of weeks ago and I have given myself permission to read them in small increments. I have been known to sit all day on the couch until I finished one only to start on another one as soon as I was done. (Crack!) That isn't really feasible with two small children around, so I can't allow myself to get so swept away that I forget the world around me. Also with the price of a book now up to $7, I can't afford to be getting a new book every couple of days.

Sometimes, for various reasons, I haven't read a trash novel in awhile and I can feel the need for one sneaking up on me. I start to get depressed. I can't see life beyond the loads of laundry, dirty floor, and dinner that needs to be cooked. I forget that I actually need and want a dynamic exciting relationship with DH. Life gets very grey. And so I stop by the bookstore and find my favorite authors, get a book, and leave this reality. And when I come back (if it was really a good book) life is more worthwhile, more colorful, more fun. And it sounds so pathetic to say that this is all from reading a trash novel, but I think sometimes we need to step outside our lives and immerse ourselves in a world that doesn't exist so that we can begin to see again the possibilities in our world. Life gets so narrow sometimes and it is hard to see your way out. Then you laugh at someone else's life, admire someone else's courage, grapple with someone else's dilemmas, and yes get exited by someone else's incredible sexual escapades, and suddenly (at least for me) it seems possible to fall in love, have great friends, find your calling, enjoy your children, and look beautiful doing it. All hail guilty pleasures! Now hand me that trash novel and will someone please put One Life to Live out if its misery.

Whenever I'm alone with you, you make me feel like I am free again

You can't go back. All yesterday this thought was running through my head. DH and I actually went out to dinner alone last night, finally getting to use a gift certificate my friends gave to me as a birthday present back in April. (This is a huge thing as one of the things I have been terrible about is setting up times for DH and I to go out by ourselves. This of course means getting a babysitter or some other form of childcare, one of the more difficult aspects of parenting as far as I'm concerned. Just think about all those TV shows you see where there are supposed to be children in the family. Somehow it never really keeps any of the characters from doing exactly what they want when they want it. There's a nanny or an ultra reliable babysitter or family around ready and willing to take your babies whenever you don't want them anymore. Oh if only that were true. Listen up those of you without children: This is a fanatsy!!!!! Finding a reliable babysitter is not easy and they cost a ton of money and most people I know have no family around to help them. But anyway, this is beside the point and just my particular rant for today. A good friend of mine, as part of my birthday present, came over to watch the kids while we went out and I am very thankful for good friends like these.) And for the most of the afternoon and throughout this dinner date DH and I talked about times and places we had been in our lives where things were easier or more fun or were just plain times we wish we had again. But you can't go back.

Yes, you say, of course you can't. We all know that. Really? Do we? Or do we spend our lives trying to relive that one perfect moment or series of moments? Recently I have felt myself fighting this tendancy a lot. I would love to go back to a time where I just KNEW my marriage was wonderful, healthy and thriving and I didn't have to worry about it so damn much. I would love to go back to a time where I knew nothing about the world of Autism. Knew nothing of therapy and special education, perseveration and sensory integration. I would like to be able to be free occasionally to read a book when I wanted, grab a cup of coffee at a Starbucks and talk for hours, or take a moonlit walk in a garden. None of these things are possible right now. That's not to say I'll never be happy again. Or even that I'm not happy right now. But it is to say I could spend significant portions of my day trying to live back into a time when those things were possible and become frustrated and bitter that I couldn't go back.

And it is so easy to become stuck. If I believe in a "devil" at all, I would say the devil is that spirit that tells you to think, agonize, daydream, and cry over what was and can never be again. There is value in doing this to some extent. I am a champion wallower when the spirit strikes me. You have to go through the stages of grief to get to the other side. You have to be angry, feel despair, feel your fear, but in the end you have to let those go if you are to move on. And truly moving on often means you have to think outside of the box you've been living in. The box that tells you that you CAN'T do something or the box that WON'T let you begin to see another life where you can in fact be better, just as happy, or even happier than you were in that time of place you so desperately want to get back to.

I know DH would often like to go back to thise days when we were undergrads or graduate students. Times when we had all the time in the world to just think and play and BE. With two kids, a career, a house, and everything else, it just doesn't seem possible to do those sorts of things. And there are ways in which it is not possible to do these things. And so you could easily get lost in simply wishing you could go back to that place in time. You could spend time trying to recreate that exact time and place and those exact feelings only you would NEVER succeed. For nothing is ever how it was. Nothing can ever be exactly experienced again. No moment, no matter how beautiful, can be captured to live again and again. You can only make more moments.

And it is the making of more moments that is most difficult. For you need to let go of the old moments, taking the beauty from them that you can, and think in a new way. This might mean something as simple as finding some reliable childcare so you can get out once in awhile, or as difficult as changing homes, finding a new job, or letting go of a relationship. It isn't easy. But if we try to go back, we will only be dissapointed.

"I never thought you were a fool
But darling look at you
You gotta stand up straight
Carry your own weight
These tears are going nowhere baby


You've got to get yourself together
You've got stuck in a moment
And now you can't get out of it
Don't say that later will be better
Now you're stuck in a moment
And you can't get out of it"
-U2-