Irreverent Eloquence

    Last year, June 2013. A happy family- all present and accounted for, a simple vacation.        I tried to take a vacation from Grief. I thought it wouldn't be so bad to put away the weight of winter, shrug off the sweater I've been pulling over my shoulders for so long, take a spin with the top down and let my hair blow in the breeze of life. After all, isn't it summer soon? Has the sun not been shining and tanning my girls, kissing their cheeks with rosy circles?        I've been hearing the call of the frogs in the pond, mating season started a month ago or more already, and their chirping at dusk begins slowly and rises as we try to sleep, a harmony that only this time of year can bring. My neighbors have begun their weekend routine of driveway campfires and the hoses and sprinklers are slithering their way out of the garage, accompanied by the resounding drone of the lawnmowers. Can you smell the cut grass? I caught the scent of wet dirt and rain and wor

       I've had this day, June 14, 2014, marked on my blog calendar for a post about blood donation. I had read a while ago about today being "World Blood Donor Day" and wanted to pay tribute to the anonymous person whose blood I received the night my son was born. When I opened the website tonight to check the date and collect my thoughts, I was struck by the sentiment on the screen: 'Safe blood for saving mothers.'        Not only is it a day to honor blood donation, it is really a day to recognize the ongoing need for blood for my population of women. I had no intention of ever needing blood in my life, much like the rest of us. I have never been prone to excessive bleeding, never been one to expose myself to much risk of trauma. When it came to birthing my children I gave little thought to the aftermath, assuming my body would "take care of business" and nature would take its course.        For the most part that was true. For my first baby,

       Life has been testing my constitution lately. I have found myself pushed to the limits to check my tolerance for pain and sorrow, each day trying me out for depth, to see how many tears I can hold before I spill them, before I break.        Tonight is no different. I'm home from a brief visit with one of my daughters to the ER. Her two year old sister threw a rock directly at her face, slamming it squarely on the bridge of her nose. The nurse mom in me assessed and said she was fine but my worried husband and pediatrician's office encouraged timely clinical review. The problem is, I know my triggers, and the local ER is a big one. Not more than four months ago I was wheeled in there on a stretcher, my son dead inside my body and my life spinning out of control around me. I knew I would remember, though I was only semi-conscious at the time, and the quick drive was filling   me with dread as I transported my daughter.        It helped that it was quiet, that it

       Personally, I think big girl panties are highly overrated. I don't put much stock in them though I certainly have many a pair. Somewhat like thongs and thigh-high stockings, my big girl panties have a time and place to get put on and they drive me nuts while being worn.        Now I know there is a need for them. Tonight I had to pull them out begrudgingly. I had to sit down to write a letter to the Minnesota Board of Medical Practice on behalf of an acquaintance. I had to write a bit of my story, break it down professionally and discuss the merits of options for women. Women's rights is a soap box of mine so this should not have been a difficult thing to do. Writing the story of my son, though, that was the hard part. Edited down and typed in medical lingo, my plea is less than two pages long, single-spaced. It is not detailed enough to explain or discuss all that happened, though my story is not really what I am writing about anyway so the minutiae do not matter to t

       My 4 year old spilled her fruity pebbles this morning, all over the bench she was sitting on. As she was wiping them away, in a very helpful flourish of smearing sticky milk along the pleather seat and then sweeping the tiny, half soggy pieces to their final resting place on my hardwood floors, she tipped her orange juice cup over onto the table.     I walked to the drawer and grabbed a towel, shook my head and sopped up the pulpy liquid on the table, more shifting the puddle than absorbing it as I went. I moved a stack of papers in the process, glancing at junk mail and bills I had not seen before, thanking my husband with an eyeroll for letting me know he got the mail and never opened it. I stopped short though, juice dripping through the seam in the table, a reprimand halting on my lips about the method of my daughter's cleaning. One large piece of mail caught my eye, a 9x13 envelope from the MN Dept of Health.              My husband rarely gets the mail. When he doe

           I cried today. Nothing new. As a matter of fact, they are the same old tears I have been crying for months. A friend asked me today how much I have been crying lately. Seemed curious to think about it that way, the quantity of tears was really not what she wanted to know. It might have been more along the lines of the duration of the moments when tears visit, in terms of minutes or hours, that she was trying to examine. It wasn't a difficult question but it wasn't an easy answer.         In the beginning of Grief, when tears were always at the ready, I made a comment about being done with crying. I said I'd be glad of a day without tears, thinking that the process of expressing my Grief, not the actual Grief itself, was wearing me out. My friend told me then that it would be a very long time before I had a tear-free day. How long can it be?, I thought. A week or a month? Seems like I will never know. So far, more than four months in, there is not a day withou