11.22.2002

the son in surgery. on tuesday the twelfth, my son went into surgery to have his lip repaired. they took him away as i fussed to keep him happy, and he at the last moment, crying anyway. my husband was hurting there, in anticipation, afraid, but i kept calm and kept everything going as it should, too obsessed with the task of making my son happy for a few seconds to bother to consider fear. but they took him away and we waited for hours, even as i was exhausted from very little sleep, i sat and talked to my mother about liz hurley's birth and she read to me from hope's edge and i drank coffee and looked anxiously at the waiting room door each time movement was made across the room. the surgery took an hour-and-a-half longer than anticipated, though we were assured that nothing was wrong. but i waited and with darting eyes, watched. finally the anesthesiologist came out and gestured for us to follow him back to the recovery room where my son was screaming as the nurses moved hands over him and the surgeon gave me his first tooth in a jar, extracted from his palate where it served no purpose severed from bone. and i started crying as they handed him to me and i didn't recognize his face and he acted so terribly terribly upset. i said to him, "i'm so sorry, i'm so sorry..." over and over, and cried, dropping tears onto his body. his eyes and cheeks were unfamiliar from the swelling and his lip and nose were for once connected properly to his face, so i didn't know who it was that they had handed me. his cries were unfamiliar from a sore throat acquired from being intubated. two shots of morphine didn't do the trick, but eventually he calmed down anyway. upstairs in the peds ward, he didn't wake up but to be bothered by nurses checking his vitals for a day and-a-half. he had trouble breathing from the swelling and the coedine and they had to affix a nipple with the tip cut off as an airway. the doctor estimated a one to two day stay. we were there four days and three nights.

10.18.2002

i went away and had a baby. well, really i didn't go anywhere. but i was pregnant and now i'm not anymore. now i have a son and it is the most important thing i have ever done. he was born with a cleft lip and palate and that makes things harder. especially now because i moved away from my family so my husband could go to grad school and i'm suddenly a stay-at-home mom dealing with a post-partum body and little to no sleep for more than two months now, two thousand miles away from everything i know. but i am in love with my son more than i have ever been in love with anyone. and that makes me a better person. i swear it does.

maybe i will get back to blogging when i can. maybe it will provide the necessary me time and the release that i need sometimes. maybe i'll leave this here until it disappears. but i thought i'd let the world know that i still exist. if you cared to know.

4.08.2002

i am not aching for understanding as perhaps i once was, when i was younger, full of the need for attention. i do not long for the eyes of some other to come evaluate my being. i write here for no other reason but to write. perhaps somehow to share insights or fears, or merely to offer up the commonality of existence and understanding of one's self, or at least the common search for that so hidden in our own brains and typing fingers, yet so exposed by that very continuation of our existence. i do not stretch my fingertips so fiber-optically for your entertainment, or for your enjoyment. i do so for whatever reason - perhaps i myself do not understand. i write because it is in me to write. i write of myself and all the aching detail that includes in brain and in heart because that is what i know and that is what must be gotten out. why expose it here, in false ink on virtual pages? fuck if i know. i am a journalist of my own life. some people somewhere once enjoyed seeing the words that i so carefully or not extracted from this head and placed onto pages, and it seemed thus appropriate to continue with the providing of it. and i leave here for three months merely because i don't know what the hell else to do. i have so little of the passionate left inside of me and everything i read or see scares me half to death for the thing growing deep in my belly. i am huddling within myself, perhaps cowering. and my hormones and all their changes are making me tired all the time. i am too tired to think honestly about what i feel. and i have a life and a future and a husband outside of the web that deserves whatever emotional insight i can offer so much more than the three people who on occasion glance at this page. i need all my strength for my life just now, and i don't have anything left over to talk about. i could stand here and tell you, if you cared, how terrifying the world is just now - how everyday the news scares me so much i cannot spend the time to think on it - how all the changes happening to me and without me and inside of me are confusing and terrifying in their own right. i do not know just now how exactly to view myself and my life as everything is changing slowly and suddenly. i am indeed terribly self-indulgent, spending all this time thinking of myself, writing of myself, posting myself on the internet. but as i said before, i write because i have to and i write about myself because it is the one thing i am constantly dealing with and the one thing i am at all good at articulating. i always thought, somewhere deep inside, that if we all spent more time contemplating ourselves and our actions - particularly outside the realm of religion or psychoanalysis - that we'd maybe come to deeper understandings of ourselves and our actions and how precisely they affect everything in the world around us. i am trying very hard with all of this contemplation and blathering nonsense that i type in furious monologues onto the computer screen to come to some state of thoughtfullness, wherein i might be more gentle with myself and others; wherein i might know how to be more fully human and somehow serene; wherein i might achieve a peace with the world unguarded by human arrogance; wherein i might come to have my actions more correctly reflect my intentions. i am trying to perfect myself, and i arrogantly thought that perhaps a few people might gain something from my experience and my journey.

3.01.2002

there are moments when i feel happy and alive and well. then there are moments where my heart feels heavy with the sorrow of nothingness and i can do nothing but fear my future. i am incapable of articulating that which i feel. i do not have the language for the weight on my thoughts, that thorn in my side. i do not know how to identify, change it, extract it. i can only sit back and wait patiently for the moment to pass or cry and fall asleep. i am no longer lonely with my self, stuck here. i keep myself busy then grow weary and sleep. irrational fears creep in then subside once i've voiced them, float away to wherever thoughts go when they die, become ghosts, still existing yet without importance or weight. i've lost touch with that thing inside me, that worm wriggling, that soul, life, love. i forget it's there yet do not. i am weary from worry. and yet for the first time in my life i cannot worry. i cannot worry about what will happen when i labor. i do not worry about the outcome of the birth. i merely understand the possibilities and allow them to exist outside my brain where they belong. and yet there are other anxieties. they come from nowhere, spring up like ghouls. i am haunted by my own thoughts. they neither stick nor disappear, but float around my brain in undefined shapes, fluttering occasionally to grab my attention without ever fully revealing themselves. i am trapped by smoke and mirrors in my own head. there is an inability to say what it is for the shape is never certain or defined. i am merely saddened, then empowered. then i merely exist, feeding on myself, the thing in my belly holding up my life, supporting it by making my life it's slave. and all these terrible things that come out of my head are stuck here, always, floating and swimming in brain fluid or in amniotic fluid and swallowing me and not letting me drown in the process. and though this has the look of horror written all inside it, i am generally happy, contented though uncomfortable and wallow only when these things attack me - and they do so without warning. perhaps as things of this nature always have. crippling fear and unsubsiding sadness. then moments again of calm and of blue skies. i am myself indefinable, uncertain, unknown, random, expressed by the unseen.

1.09.2002

taking a sabbatical from the internet. please pardon my absence.