Life's Jest-Book

...and the whole general mish-mash

Extra points to you if you know where that line is from.

LB is out of the hospital, and was put on a place yesterday to European City Where He Lives, where he was met by his wife and will spend today in the company of many learned doctors who will hopefully medicate, medicate, medicate and treat and help him. Unfortunately, both he and his wife tend to share Tom Cru*ise's views on psychiatrists and anti-depressants (if not, thank goodness for small mercies, religion), so there may be some way to go, but I understand that after this latest series of fun episodes LB at least is changing his mind about this.

In other, much happier, not to say joyous, news, yesterday we celebrated Polly's and JQ's birthdays together and it was pretty awesome. Polly was RADIANT - and if you know Polly in real life you know she is not one of nature's smilers. Well, she was smiling a lot yesterday. And, if you know Polly in real life you know that she is emphatically NOT one of nature's huggers/gushers (unlike her momma), so I was almost knocked to the ground when she leapt into my arms, wrapped her arms and legs around me and said in my ear "I'm SO happy, Mommy!" There should be a word for the asexual orgasmic feeling one gets when feeling extreme joy and pleasure at contemplating the joy of one's child. Rapture? Can we go with rapture? OK, then. It was a rapturous moment.

Joy and pain, relief and worry, all in the same day, all intense, all founded in love.

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I'll give you a moment to recover and then I have a question for you.

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OK, so I have purchased the blueprints for an awesome corrugated cardboard kitchen and now need to get...corrugated cardboard. So here is your challenge:

1. Tell me where I can get large pieces (between 3 and 4 feet tall, 2 feet wide) of corrugated cardboard in the Philadelphia area.

2. Tell me where I can get someone to cut said pieces in the appropriate shapes, as am NOTORIOUSLY (and I mean NOTORIOUSLY) useless with box-cutters.

3. This place (or places) must both be easily accessible by public transportation as I do not have a car, or a cab ride that is under $20 from Philadelphia city hall.

Go for it.

Rain in Southern California

Text message from SIL (good SIL): LB* being released from hospital today maybe. Not sure when he fly home. More news ASAP.

He's in LA, after two attempts to…do away with himself in three days (one in LA, one in San Francisco – the San Francisco one is a funny story actually – Golden Gate Bridge is waaaaay prepared for these things – poor LB, thwarted by a sign and a barrier and the night).

Oh God.

*as in "Little Brother," people

She's 3

Well, she's been 3 for nearly a week, but you know how life gets in the way of posting, no?

She's 3, and just seems to get more glorious with each passing day, each hour. She is infinitely variable yet always herself. It amazes me how like herself she is - how, since the moment she was born, there has always been an unassailable core of Pollyness in her.

She is serious, and determined, and kind. She is funny, intense, creative, observant. She is dramatic, emotional, sensitive. Her affections run deep, as do her dislikes. She is wicked smart and has a very good dress sense. She needs to work on her critiquing skills ("you gonna wear DAT, mommy?") but at least she is not shy. She loves music and dancing and her red tricycle and her little brother (she adores her little brother).

I love you Polly, forever and ever and deep and high and wide and around and everywhere and always.

Little Brother

He was my best friend through ten years of nomadic life, and in the next ten years of violence and madness he often was my shield, diverting attention from me, target of that madness, with his golden boy charm. He was my best friend. We could understand each other without speaking, without looking at each other. No matter what else failed, we had each other's back. I took care of him as best I could, all those times my mother did not. He told me, many years later, that what amazed him most about me when we were growing up was that I could make food appear when he didn't see any. "We would come home from school, and it would be dinnertime, and I would think "there's nothing here to eat," and you would go to the pantry, get a few cans, and cook us a meal," he said. The period he recalls was when he was 7 to 10 years old, I was 9 to 12.

At the same age I made sure his clothes were clean. Then, and until he was around 12, I would set aside part of my allowance to buy him the matchbox cards he loved, first of all. I adored him, and he adored me. I was painfully shy, and he would hold my hand, and step in for me when it was just too painful for me to move.

When he got married he asked me to be his matron of honor (something always reserved in our Latin American society for the mother of the groom). "You were much more of a mother and sacrificed much more for me than she ever did," he said, and I wept, because I would have done it all the same way regardless.

But when the worst of the horror happened, those years in both our early twenties, something snapped, and I lost him. He never lost me, but I felt him drift further and further away from me. In the years since we have come together infrequently, and when we do, it is clear that the love is still there. But somehow the communication has been broken. I felt him, I felt him get further away. It was just that all this time I was willing to wait him out, wait until he was ready to heal from what the horror had done to him and to us. When I saw him this weekend, I had not seen him for three years, and that was for two hours. Before that, I had seen him five years ago, but with little chance to talk.

About a month ago my SIL (an awesome one) emailed me to tell me that things were going very wrong. As the days passed, the tone of her emails became more and more distraught, while my brother evaded every single one of my emails and phone calls.

Finally D and I decided that I had to go, both to help and support my SIL and to help him and the children as well. In the three days I spent with them I was shocked, stunned to discover that what I had thought was merely a relationship crisis was really a steep descent into mental illness, the kind that makes you recommend to the sane people involved that they open a secret bank account and have an escape plan ready. It's not at the worst that it could be, but it is shockingly worse than I had ever expected. He is going to get help, but I am concerned that in the six weeks it will take for the NHS therapist to see him that he will change his mind.

For the moment I am giving my SIL as much emotional support as I possibly can. She is doing an amazing job of shielding the children from what is going on but I am not sure for how long she'll be able to sustain it. As for him…I spent a day with him, the two of us, alone together. The pain, the darkness that emanated from him were almost palpable. Yet he is in a place where I could only reach him occasionally, and then only for a brief moment.

Oh what of that, oh what of that,

What is there left to say?

 

 

You give me fever

Dude, have you guys ever seen a febrile seizure? It is scaaaaaaaaaary. Luckily it is also harmless (to the child, although it ages the parents about 10 years).

Jack has been pretty sick, nearly five days of temperatures wavering between 103.5 and 104.5 and, in one horrifying moment, 105.5, with a febrile seizure.

Yesterday afternoon his fever finally broke and he was back to his old tricks, but it was an exhausting series of nights and days. D and I have come up with a system when the kids are sick enough to ensure a miserable night: one of us sleeps in the home office cum guest room cum dump, far away from the sounds of the kids' room, and the other sleeps in our bedroom with the baby monitor on. That way one of us can get some decent sleep each night, and it works out pretty well. The knowledge that one night may be awful but that the next night you are guaranteed sleep is pretty sweet.

Poor Jack. He's such a sturdy little man, that when he gets sick he gets really sick.

The night we his doctor had us take him to the emergency room at our local children's hospital D and I weren't sure what to do about Polly. I wanted to call her afternoon babysitter and ask if she could come back, D wanted to take her. This I thought was insanity – not only was is late, but she would be a healthy little girl in an emergency room full of sick kids, and, most importantly, her little brother would be crying and people would be poking and prodding him, and she'd probably fly to his "defense." At a party recently a little kid took Jack's pacifier from his mouth. Polly chased the kid down, took the paci from him, and scolded him very sternly about how it belonged to Jack, then walked back calmly and inserted it into her brother's mouth and gave him a hug.

I called my beloved friend and neighbor, who came over, stats book in hand, and took over Polly's care with a smile and a reassuring hug. I am writing this here because I have not thanked her properly at all. She is immensely busy yet unfailingly cheerful, and her solidarity and kindness know no bounds. Earlier, she'd comforted me over the phone, both initially diagnosing and reassuring me about the seizure. She's going to be an awesome nurse.

Healthy kids, happy family, adorable friend. Lucky, ducky.