Moving Forward

We’re off this weekend moving our son, Dru, back into school. When I say ‘moving’ I really mean he’s letting us come up and be with him for a couple days. Unlike his sister when she was in college, Dru does not need three able-bodied men, a dolly and a cargo van pulling a U-haul. He is a minimalist, as he puts it. So, we get to see his apartment, which he set up himself last week, and we get to stock him up at Best Buy. Then we get to take him to dinner. It’s really more for me than it is for him. There’s so little Mommy-ing left.

It’s crazy how you don’t expect the changes. They just sneak up on you. At first, there is this:

It’s such a major undertaking. A lifetime of commitment. Are we ready? 

Then, before you know it, there’s this:

 Already you can’t remember life before he was there. And you can’t see far enough ahead to imagine that he will ever not be there still. It’s just all one big blur of marvelous discovery for everyone. 

You move along, life picks up speed, and one day there’s this:

Your heart melts with every get-up. He is so adorable and you can’t wait for every last second that is going to come your way. If you’re lucky, it is all wonderful. For us, it was.

And then, one day when you aren’t expecting it, there comes this:

 

I’m sorry, no mother is ever really ready to look over and see a young man standing where the baby used to be. It’s just not right. He’s basically done now. You must move to the sidelines. Hopefully, he will be the kind of guy who loves his parents and still calls, at least when he needs something. Whether he does or not, ownership has transferred. He is no longer ‘yours’. The life is something you gave him and now he’s taking it over. What a crazy mixture of the greatest joy and yet a whimpering sadness.

But, that’s how it goes. Life changes and times change and we all must move along with them.

Right now, in this country, we are facing a Presidential election. We are examining our collective way of life and the state of our common affairs. Just as a little boy grows into a man before his mother's eyes, so do seeds of political discourse quickly become policy and then accepted ways of governing.

I’m not one of these people who gets all up in arms about politics. I have my opinions and I take my right to vote seriously. I do not drag out my soap box and climb up for all to hear. Every once in a while, though, a nuance of public dialogue does catch my attention. This past week, there were two.

I was surprised to learn that a woman’s body has the capability of preventing pregnancy if she is (legitimately) raped. That should come as a relief to us all. This revelation brings with it a host of positive social developments.

From now on we will know that any woman who claims she was raped, but who gets pregnant, is nothing but a damn liar. We won’t need to prosecute the guy because we will know up front he is innocent. Tax dollars saved. What’s more, the alleged rapist can immediately sue the woman for defamation and collect lots of money from her for making up the story.

Also, now that we know about it, we can harness the biological mechanism that kicks in to prevent pregnancy during rape, so we can rid ourselves of the contentious issue of whether or not the use of contraceptives is moral. Here we’ve had the innate capability all along. Who knew?

Finally, we can at last discern the difference between a real rape and a fake one. If a woman doesn’t get pregnant, we’ll assume she is a victim. If she gets pregnant, she’s just a slut.

It’s medical discoveries like this one, and the advancement of social condition that they bring, that really add to the quality of life.

The second chat thread that caught my attention last week was talk of the whole Fat Tax thing. As I understand the idea, people who are overweight are costing the rest of us money and need to be stopped, or at least they should pay for their obesity themselves.

We’ve all heard of New York Mayor Bloomberg’s ban on large size bottles of soda as a way of helping American’s slim down. I was just wondering how he thought that was going to work. Would there also be a ban on buying more than one small soda? And what would keep cheaters from buying one small soda at the 7/11 then going to the grocery store and buying another one?

Maybe they could start a national registry. When you buy a soda, you get entered into the data base. Every outlet that sells soda would have to participate in the data base as a condition of being licensed to sell the product. If you try to buy another soda before the requisite waiting period has elapsed, they will catch you and you will be denied. Maybe they could initiate a penalty for trying to get around the ban. That way, people will take it seriously.

I guess the Fat Tax is just an extension of the big soda ban. The tax would be imposed on foods with a lot of calories. That seems reasonable enough. Except, it doesn’t really seem fair for people who are not heavy. They should be able to have a piece of candy or indulge in a Big Mac now and then to reward them for all their hard work exercising and staying fit. We wouldn’t want too much government interference with our lives.

The base measure of obesity has to do with Body Mass Index (BMI). Maybe stores could be required to bring in height charts and scales. Everyone wanting to buy the offending foods would have to step up to be measured and weighed. If they fall within a certain range, they get the candy. Otherwise, put it back, Fatso, and go do some jogging. Any humiliation they might suffer in front of other customers would be good for them.

If the scales are too bulky to have around, the clerks could be outfitted with a scanner they run over each customer to quickly compute the BMI. Skinny people proceed to check out, everyone else has to return their items to the shelves until they deserve to eat those things.

What’s really exciting is that it appears progress is being made toward implementation of this type of system. According to Dr. Barry Popkin, director of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill's Interdisciplinary Center for Obesity, there are technologies already available that could enable the government to monitor obese people's diets and exercise. 

"We have devices that we could put on your throat that could measure your swallows," Popkin explains. "We have devices now to measure how much you move, so we can see when people are engaged in activity like walking or jogging.” Popkin is also quoted as suggesting that obese people could wear ankle bracelets or collars similar to those used to monitor DUI felons and people on probation. This way they could prove to the government that, despite their high BMI, they're active and eating properly. 

I've always hoped we would get to the point where we had to justify our weight to the government.

Call me cynical, or right wing or left wing, but hasn’t the national dialogue gone a bit off course? Is this really what our forefathers envisioned? They fought against oppression. We’re talking about how big the soda bottle should be, how fat each of us can get, and whether or not a man forcing himself on a woman constitutes legitimate rape. 

I just want to move my son into college and watch him finish growing up.

Afternoon Sun

Last week I couldn’t muster a substantive post. The best I could do was a page about why I wasn’t writing more. I struggled with Should I or Shouldn’t I send around notification that the only thing I was putting up was a weak explanation of why I wasn’t doing anything else. It seemed a waste of people's time to read notification that I wasn't posting much of anything, so I let last Sunday go by.

As it turns out, I heard from quite a few people who were wondering what was going on. So, I learned something about this whole blogging thing. I appreciate those of you who check in each week. Thank you for bothering with me!

This week, I was moved to think ahead by remembering back. It started with a bad day. You know...when you look bad, you feel bad and you probably even smell bad.

It had mostly been a nasty day at work. Dealing with clients in crisis can be so consuming. They are in the throes of divorce, or fighting for custody of their children, and they are needy and sometimes I feel like a lot of them are hanging all over me, clinging like some living thing with claws that won’t let go. Not that I blame them; I don’t. It is my job to untangle their mess and make it better for them. It’s just hard sometimes to remember that their mess is not my own.

And, of course, I do have mess of my own, like everyone else. This was one of those days on which it was hard to feel happy, and even harder to think things would get better.

I decided to lose myself in some writing. Escape is such a friend at times. I threw open the French windows on my sun porch and welcomed the music of birds in our woods. They seemed to be harmonizing with the sound of the pond fountain tumbling and splashing. The lilies—pink and yellow and orange—danced on the water while they settled for the evening. As if on cue, a breeze freshened my face, the way breezes do, and then there it was, the feeling better part.

Off in the dining room, the afternoon sun had cast itself through golden lace and shadows on the floor. This little sliver of beauty reminded me that the doldrums always pass. It could be in the next minute or maybe on the next day, but sooner or later something lovely will happen. When it does, your perspective shifts, your resilience factor notches up a peg or two, and you are able to deal with life's challenges, sometimes even with a smile on your face.

 

Ten years ago, the feds were trying to put Cecil in prison for the rest of his life. We were engaged in battle, consumed by hatred and fear that I thought would never go away. But then it did.

Ten years ago, Cecil was diagnosed with cancer. He lay down to chemotherapy and radiation, and all that goes with both of them. He nearly died, but then there was remission. His remission gave way to relapse, which was followed by another remission. But then came MDS, a secondary anemia.

           

Down again, but lifted up by the news that there was treatment for MDS. Except then we learned the treatment wouldn’t work for long and sure enough it didn’t. Cecil stayed alive only by transfusions, and then they weren’t working anymore either and the only thing left was the death that had been stalking him.

As we readied ourselves for that darkness, a light crept in through some door that hadn’t been completely closed, and there was hope again. If he met an endless list of criteria and, if two suitable donors could be found, he might be a candidate for a stem cell transplant. Before we had even contemplated what all that would entail, they told him to come on; it was time to get started. Another crisis had passed.

This transplant was so scary no one should attempt to reduce it to words, though I have tried a time or two. Let's just say it was all encompassing. Tubes and alarms and sterile gowns and suffering things none of us had ever even thought about. Cecil clung to life’s precarious edge while everyone around him jumped every time he sneezed or coughed, and they had good reason to. The slightest fever could mean he would die before the sun came up. At first, they measured his lifespan in terms of days. Then, people started talking about weeks, and then, cautiously, the word months came back to the vocabulary. When his doctor said something about the end of his first year, we started to think maybe he might make it.

When we were going through this, life seemed to end at our door. There was no promise of anything. I only half slept at night, reaching every hour to touch Cecil’s face, hoping I would not feel the heat from several inches away; hoping there would not be yet another race to the hospital in the middle of the night.

At the time, all of this was all there was, but Cecil fought off one insurgent after another until, finally, they stopped coming at him. Gradually, there was color in his face again and he could walk instead of shuffle and—dare we believe it?— he was stable. Though I never consciously transitioned, suddenly I was looking at him without trying to memorize his face for fear he’d be gone tomorrow. I started leaving the house without worrying I’d come home to find him lying unconscious on the floor. Pillows on the couch are actually in place these days because he is not camping out there all day long. He’s up and taking on projects. 

Cecil is skinny enough to be cast in the part of Dead Man Walking, but I used to complain that he was too heavy. Yesterday, he came with me to a gathering of Valley Writers, a wonderful group of friends and writers who work together to make each other's writing better. Cecil yakked their ears off and was actually even spunky.

A few months ago I didn’t dare look ahead to these sorts of things. Now, I can almost take them for granted again. Best of all, we find ourselves talking about more than just his health, and we actually feel it’s okay to laugh. The other day we learned that his stem cell donor, an infant girl, is black.

I bragged that, not only do I have a same sex marriage, but it’s interracial. We informed the kids they are now biracial, and all of us are walking tall because our interesting factor has shot way up. We’ve readied ourselves to be hounded by both political parties because, with our new DNA, we encompass so many voting blocs. By any measure, that alone should be enough to make us happy.

While we were consumed by Cecil’s failing health, and then his transplant, I found it hard to write, and I completely stopped trying to place my book with an agent to get it sold. There just wasn’t enough time or energy or focus. Though I understood the pullback, it was hard to accept. My book is about things that should never have happened; things that could happen to anyone. If there is some cluster of stories that need to be told, I think this one should be among them. When Cecil came home and stopped trying to die, I got busy again.

I believe things come around when and how they are meant to. I waited until the time was right to go forward with my book. When I reached out, I was looking for an agent who understood the significance of what I had to say. Suddenly, he was there. Within a week, I had found the right person. This agent and I are now working to get a proposal out to publishers. With any luck, the book will be picked up and available to readers before too long.

Within the past two months, a storm destroyed maybe a dozen of our trees and toppled them throughout the yard, my son and I had a blowout on a busy highway as night fell in the middle of nowhere, and a broken valve in the boiler caused a flood in the living room. To make sure we were really having fun, one of the dogs went around the house and peed on several rugs. (Obviously there are some issues here that need to be resolved!)

A little side attraction came to me this morning after I got both a flu shot and a shingles vaccine yesterday. Where was my head? Did I really need to get them both at once? Wasn’t it just last week that I got a damn tetanus shot, with the latest whooping cough piggy-backer cuz there’s a new outbreak of something we all thought went out with the Dark Ages, or at least by the fifties?  My left arm feels like it was blown off at the shoulder and threatens never to be the same.

There was a time when each of these things would have sent me to a therapist, or a meditation guru or some sort of relief just short of the bottle. Today, they are but minor inconveniences. My family has traveled a path so littered with hazard that nothing can rattle me anymore. I have come to trust that, however bleak things might seem, they will move away sooner or later. The afternoon sun will always shine through the window again and bring with it the promise of beauty yet unseen. Tomorrow should never be dreaded. It is, by definition, where possibility begins. 

I am happy to say this will be my last post about Cecil's transplant, barring unforeseen developments. There is no need to talk about it anymore because we have moved on and there is much else to bring perspective. Thank you all for bearing with me, and for supporting us through these difficult months.

The Post That Isn't

There are those times when you’re simply overloaded. You are outputting as much as you’ve got to give and, though you still need to do more, you can’t. This is one of those times for me.

Usually, I spend all week thinking about my next blog post. I don’t go to work on Friday, Saturday or Sunday, so I use those days to pull it together. This week, I also began working on the proposal for my book, tentatively titled Came the Hunter. The book is done. I’ve started working with an agent to write the proposal he will use to shop the manuscript to publishers. We set ourselves a deadline. I had to get crackin’.

Late on Friday, my son, Dru—who leaves today for ‘Beach Week’ with twenty seven of his closest friends—let me know he needs a few things before he goes back to school after the beach. The few things filled my car, plus a shipment of desk and chair directly to school. They cost a thousand dollars and took most of yesterday to get.

As I sat down to write last night after dinner, Dru was on the couch folding his clothes. “Mom, I think the ceiling’s leaking,” he said casually while setting a pair of underwear onto the stack. If you are not a homeowner, such words don’t ring terror in your ears. Otherwise, they do. I jumped up and found the front wall of the living room streaming down with streaks of brown water. Drips came readily from the molding out onto the floor, splashing the couch, and the piano and everything in reach.

We scrambled to get the artwork down. Within five minutes, we had work lights up from the basement, a ladder and tarps from the shed, buckets of soapy water, towels…you get the picture. And so went the rest of my evening. We figured the gutters were clogged and somehow backed up. Need to call a gutter man. 

This morning, I elbowed Cecil at six, that hideous hour when, for some reason, I tend to do all my best thinking.

“Why would gutters at the roof line be leaking all the way down in the living room?” I asked. “They’re three floors up.” I ran to the guest bedroom, which sits directly on top of the living room and, sure enough, the radiator was shooting water into the air from a valve, and had been doing this all night long, since we were too stupid to check it last night. Needless to say, the mess downstairs had grown. Need to call the HVAC guy.

So, the living room wall is crying Help me. Out at my computer, notes for the Proposal pile off to the right; notes for the blog trail to the left. Dru needs to get loaded up and out the door. Somewhere in the day, I should probably wash and brush, pay bills, and head to the office to do paperwork that’s covering my desk there.

“Something’s got to go,” I said out loud, even though it was only me and the dogs. “It has to be the blog.”

And so, my sorry tale is all about why I am not writing anything this week. I miss it already, but other things are calling in louder voices. So, have a great week coming. I’ll be back with a new post next Sunday.

Boy Stepping Up

I had an idea for this week’s post but, sometimes, life hands you a little something and says “Write about this instead.” So, that’s what I’m doing. The other will keep.

My son, Dru, considers himself a computer science nerd. Maybe he is, I don’t know. But I think he’s too cute for that and I am absolutely sure this assessment is unbiased and correct.

Dru is about to start his junior year of college. When he was in high school, he had to take a practical art. Others took Marketing and cool stuff like that. Dru decided to go for Auto Mechanics, which was offered in an out-building on the edge of campus as part of the Vo-Tech program.

This class had a personality all its own. Dru could tell right away he would’ve been better off if he’d belonged to a gang, or spoken in some kind of slang that only slightly resembled English. At a minimum, he needed to let his pants slide down just a tad before he walked into class.

The semester passed. Dru learned to keep his mouth shut and to come and go as blandly as he could manage, hoping not to make eye contact or, God forbid, brush up against someone and make him mad. 

Then came the first exam. On that day, when he walked into class, Dru noticed no one else had taken a seat. As he settled himself at a table in the middle of the room, there was a rush of pushing, and even a little bit of shoving, to get to the seats around him. During the test, Dru could feel eyes spying from every direction. He chuckled to himself. There is always a way to break in. So, he did nothing. He didn't cover his work, or move his seat, or tell the teacher. He took his test, knowing his answers were being copied and spread around the room via some network that had come to life. He knew his test paper would be replicated as many times as there were students in the room. For not turning them in, or shutting them out, he became cool. He was one of them—sort of.

After that day, there was a new respect, an unspoken allegiance. There was no longer a concern about being duct-taped to a chair, or having his lunch run through the parts washer again. In the main hall, auto mechanics guys stepped up when thugs tried to mess with Dru. And, for each test, his classmates waited until Dru had been seated, then sat down themselves. By the end of the semester, Dru was still alive and the others had passed the course.

With his practical art out of the way, Dru returned to being a math and science geek. I dare say he never again had a wrench in hand, or even looked under the hood of his car.

This past May, Dru drove from Virginia to New England and, from there, flew to Asia to travel for the summer. Last week, I met him at my mom’s house on Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire to help him drive his car home.  Our trip was uneventful until we were on the stretch of Rt. 84 that goes from New York into Pennsylvania, through the Pocono Mountains.

The last vestige of civilization was, ironically, a huge prison, surrounded by a rather formidable barbed wire fence that was dotted with even more formidable looking guard towers. After passing the prison, we disappeared into the wilderness. No exits. No gas stations. Certainly, no lights. I’m talkin’ nothing. I might mention there was practically no cell service, either.

As I clipped along at 75 mph in the fast lane, there came that dreaded loud noise that can only mean something really shitty is wrong with your car. I pulled to the edge. There was a steep drop-off on the right shoulder, so we could barely clear the lane. Dru got out to see what was going on. His countenance slumped as he looked at the left rear tire. “It’s all gone. There is no tire…only the wheel,” came the grim report.

A blow-out. You hear about them. You see remnants of tread lying alongside the highway. But, by and large, blow-outs are for trucks. You don’t expect to have to deal with them yourself.

It was 7:30 at night. The sun had already set. In minutes, the Poconos would be ensconced in total darkness. We surveyed the situation. Fortunately, there was a cut-through in the median just opposite us. We scampered across the zipping highway on our three tires and a rim, so we could pull off the active road to safety. Now, when I say safety, I mean from oncoming traffic. This is not to imply any immunity from escaped convicts who might happen along, or wild animals, or the mighty upset of being holed up in the mountainous dark, broken down, with no way to reach anyone.

As I readied myself for the fetal position, maybe a little thumb sucking, Dru hopped out and took over. He found the spare tire and the jack and the lug wrench, all of which were secreted away in places I didn't know existed in the car. The jack was so small it looked like a toy, but there it was cranking the entire vehicle up off the ground. Just as I thought we might be okay, Dru realized he needed a special tool to remove the fifth lug nut, the one meant to prevent theft, but which also prevents you from changing your own tire unless you've got the tool. Where might it be in a ten-year-old car? We unloaded everything onto the pavement and searched. With only moments of daylight left, we found the thing buried among old trading cards and sunglasses and all the junk that usually fills a guy's messy glove box.

I'd never realized how much strength it takes to get a tire off. Dru had to muscle up more than once, and I heard a few grunts and groans as he wrestled with parts that didn't want to be moved. When did the boy get so buff? Where did my little nerd go? Just as daylight slipped behind the mountains, the spare was on and tools had been returned to their secret compartments. Dru ordered me into the car and then drove us out onto the highway, delivering us back into the passing lanes of life-not-in-distress.

Suddenly, my boy was a man. He had taken charge and saved us. I was still wallowing in thoughts like we could have been killed during the blow-out, or necessary tools could so easily have been lacking. It could have happened an hour later in the pitch of dark. And, dare I mention it?...escaped cons could have come and had their way with us. While I was playing the damsel in distress, he was taking care of business.

 

So, the moral of my post is, Thank God for strapping young men and, let's face it, for Auto Mechanics classes. And, also, be sure you've got the tool that removes the fifth lug nut.