Back in Black

(Okay, no black. Blame the title on Guitar Hero III, one of our Saint Nick Eve family gifts. It rocks. I was doing my Angus impression earlier--not that I had an Angus impression before GHIII, mind you.)

Anyhoo, I took the blog out of circulation for a while because I just didn't have much more to say. Turns out a lot of folks missed it. Moreover, silly Google told people they needed to be invited, which was not so. I had it set to allow no one access. So if you sent a request, my apologies that Google gave you the impression I was dissing you. Google never let me in on the fact people were requesting access.

A Year Tomorrow

I've been dragging my feet toward this day for weeks. As it nears, I spend more and more time reliving the same days a year ago. On one hand, that's good; therapeutic, appropriate, and it reassures me that I haven't forgotten. On the other hand--well, I'm sure it's as obvious as a magenta cow in a snowy field. It sucks. Sucks like the mother of all Hoovers.

After lots of not wanting to think about it, turned into thinking about it for seconds at a time, turned into audible discussions, I've decided we'll commemorate her death by lighting a candle all day and observing two minutes of silence at dinner (by which time the baby should be asleep). I can't bear to do more, but I'll regret doing nothing.

Strangely enough, I'm afraid it will get harder as the years go by. She wouldn't be that different now if she had lived; in ten years, we'll be commemorating someone she would no longer be. It feels like holding her back, which I know is silly. And it's all we have, so we'll make do with it.

Movin' On Up

To the west side (of the Netherlands). (Anyone else remember The Jeffersons?) After six years in the Dutch south, two of them spent wondering "should we stay or should we go?" (anyone remember The Clash?), we've taken the plunge and are moving back to my husband's roots next March.

By American standards it's just a nice, ordinary house; by Dutch standards it's to drool over. First of all, it's detached, not sandwiched between two other homes like 80% of all Dutch houses. Second, it's got a whopping 205 square meters (about 2230 sq. ft.) of floor space, compared to less than 1500 in an average Dutch home. And after we enclose the second-floor terrace, we'll have another 60 m2 (650 sq. ft.). Third, it has a huge yard (460 m2, or 1/9 acre) compared to our current, average-sized 190 m2.

This is why all our Dutch friends thought we were living the high life in our very-average-middle-class, $ 125,000 home in Durham. That house had 2300 sq. ft. and was, of course, detached. It had way more land (1/3 acre, or 1375 m2) than our new home. All at a mere fraction of the price we're paying for this luxury in the Randstad.

So much for the US perspective: we're delighted with our new home and feeling very much like We've Made It.

Aside from the better digs, this move brings us closer to Oma and Opa, Schiphol airport, and the North Sea. Several major plusses. But no transition is without drawbacks; the kids are sad to be moving, and we're leaving behind a rich social network, nurtured for six years. Yes, yes, we can always visit, but that isn't the same as living right around the corner.

Our eldest son is particularly bummed by the move. He alternates between being angry at us and feeling inconsolably sad. He's leaving behind his very best friend in the universe, the boy he saw on day one of kindergarten and knew was the one for him. (I do not exaggerate; that's exactly how it happened.) We've reassured him that true friendship doesn't die when the friends are apart--witness how close we've stayed with my husband's friends from high school--and listed a dozen ways they can stay in daily communication. He's getting used to the idea, which is not to say he's accepting it, exactly. He refuses to acknowledge even the smallest positive point about the move, to the point of hilarity (for us, anyway).

Our daughter, equally sad to be leaving, has a different approach. She figures it's going to happen, so she'll deal with it when it does. She can see the benefits of a bigger room, bigger yard, shorter distance to Oma and Opa. She knows she'll make new friends. In the meantime she just doesn't think about it. Certainly a more comfortable approach for her than our son's constant lamenting is for him--as long as she isn't stuffing her feelings under a rock, where she'll have to deal with them in therapy years later.

9/11

For thousands, this was a day of mourning in 2001. For me, ten years earlier, it was a day of incredible joy. It was the day I first became a mother, the day I completed a rite of passage I had both feared and anticipated, the day I welcomed my firstborn to the world and marveled over her tiny perfect body as she nursed.

Today, nearly a year after her death, we celebrated her entrance into the world seventeen years ago by making fuse bead creations and playing 10,000 as we ate jellybeans and listened to her favorite music. We dined on steak and salad followed by ice cream. I think she'd be pleased with our activities.

In the days leading up to her birthday, I thought about her more and more often. Yesterday, the day labor began seventeen years ago, and today I thought about her constantly. Now I lost the mucus plug. Now we went out to lunch. Now contractions were so strong we drove to the hospital. Now I peed all over the nurse and doctor with my first push. And more times than I can count, I thanked the universe that I didn't know then all that would later come to pass.

I meant to celebrate her life today, but I couldn't fend off a deep sense of mourning. I remember so clearly how overjoyed I was with her, how happy to be a mother, how much I had looked forward to meeting her. She was as perfect a baby as any other, as perfect as Tilo, and I think his presence brings her babyhood back into focus at moments like these. I mourn the beautiful little life that was born that day, now gone for good.

Babybug

Two weeks ago I took some plant clippings from the yard to root in containers in the window. Yesterday my seven year old cried, "Look! Baby ladybugs are all over these plants!" Sure enough, I spotted five ladybug larvae crawling around on the windowsill and the leaves.

(Click to see a larger version; the ladybug is in the center of the photo.)

Ladybug, ladybug

This year we have an abundance of ladybugs in the yard, so many I find them by the fives and tens without searching on every plant I touch. Red ones with black spots, black ones with red spots, and scads of armadillo-like larvae. I'm happy about this, as they eat the aphids on the rosebushes. As of this morning, I'm also moved to tears by it. Because in an e-mail conversation about something else, my daughter's stepmother commented that Meghan chose the ladybug as her sign to let them know she was around.

Seven Months

The enormity of what happened takes my breath away. Literally. Sometimes I cannot breathe, thinking about the daughter that was, the baby so full of life, the shy young girl terrified to speak up in class, the older girl with such a forceful, even destructive, lust for living; and then the frightened girl in a hospital bed, sick beyond relief from drugs and radiation, and later the passive, paralyzed, bald girl who seemed to have made peace with this turn in her life. Those months were good ones, healing for me, and I hope for her, after years of difficulty. But after them came the weeks of rapid decline, the confused girl, childlike, worn out, increasingly unable to understand or, eventually, make herself understood, who dribbled when she drank and didn't know when she had to pee. Now I see my youngest child making the strides forward that every baby makes, and I think of my firstborn, who made those same strides forward sixteen years ago, and then in reverse sixteen years later.

I suppose it's normal, seven months after her death, to still feel the wound so deeply. This kind of thing is unnatural, is not supposed to happen; just the thought of a sixteen year old--any sixteen year old--dying causes us all to shake our heads in sorrow. And this was my child. Yet when she died it was also welcome. We knew it was coming, and her year of struggle, extreme suffering, and then heart-wrenching decline made her death a relief. Though I knew to be prepared for the feelings I'm having, I thought with the optimistic naïvete of the uninitiated that I'd dealt with her death already, that knowing it was coming and living through her illness so intimately had prepared me. That the worst of the blow had already been processed.

But it stays with me, its power to make me burst into tears undiminished. It hits me when I hear certain songs, see certain photographs, watch Tilo reach baby milestones. Sometimes it hits me without any trigger at all. It feels like it felt when, running to jump my grandmother's ditch, I fell flat, hard, and the wind was knocked completely out of me.

I hope the pain will fade as the years pass, but then I'm terrified that that means I won't remember the details anymore.