thank you, and good night

yesterday was our second bloggiversary, which seems like as good a point as any to bring this thing into the barn. i think we've had a good run, considering the average blog lasts six days.* i do appreciate the suggestion that what is published here is sometimes helpful to other people, but (1) this blog was first an outlet for our raw and immediate grief, and we're in a different place now, and (2) judging from the feedback we've gotten over the last two years, enough help has been distributed to allow us to walk away without any guilt.

*i have no idea what the average blog life is. i made it up. it just seems like it, okay?

so, tomorrow we leave for prague, and in a couple of weeks when we get back i'm starting a milo blog under this user name, which i'll launch when we're done tearing down this one; justin will probably be a co-contributor. and i'm going to start another, solo blog under a new user name - this blog will be the one in which i air my stained and dingy laundry. i plan for it to be a collection of well-thought-out and carefully edited essays, posted once or twice a week, with an occasional shocking revelation of my darkest self; in reality, it will probably mostly be my off-the-cuff thoughts hurriedly dashed off, with an occasional post on which i spent more than ten minutes.

i'm not going to restrict access to either blog, at least for now, but i request respectful handling if you decide to visit both blogs. if you wish to be notified of the launch and address of the milo blog or the navel-gazing blog, please e-mail me and tell me:

1. your name
2. your blog address
3. whether you want the milo, the navel, or the combo

please don't be offended if i ask you a few questions to determine who you are before i redirect you. and please don't make any anonymous requests.

thank you to everyone who has read, commented, encouraged us, and shared their blog back with us. we would not be here now without you.

most of all, thank you for acknowledging johannes - hans - our beloved firstborn. he's the reason we've written these two years. he deserves much more than this blog, and i like to think that some day his story will be told to an even broader audience. my face and neck are wet with tears as i think of him, of our plans for him to be a well-traveled and multi-lingual kid, of our gut-feeling that he would be a musician, of our visions of lazy saturday mornings spent playing with him in our bed. i miss his tentative kicks, his sweet calm, and all that he will never be. if i could, i would give him a thousand kisses right this very minute. god, i hope he had some perception, some inkling, of how much he was loved.

a fork

this blog sucks.

sure, there have been some high points, and some low points, and some of the low points have even been high points, blog-wise. but this blog has become incredibly uninteresting, at least as far as being a diary of life in the wake of stillbirth. and while in the early days of milo-hood, time was a huge factor in the frequency of posting and in my ability to contruct a coherent thought, it's not the issue now. it's not like i have time to kill, but i have enough i want to post badly enough to make the time for it. i have these big hairy constructions brewing about pregnancy and about adulthood and about fear that just won't work here.

here's the problem, kids: this blog is too public to write what's really on my mind. and it's too private to make it a life-of-milo blog. my real and virtual lives have come to overlap to the point that i can't fulfill either function properly. i want to do both things, though.

the proposed, three-step solution:

1. take this thing down. i think it may be time to put it to rest, anyway, and it's not like justin is using it as a regular outlet, either. btw, i could use some pointers from those of you who are technical smarty-pants as to how to save this text for my personal use without having it published online.
2. start a new, public blog, featuring all milo, all the time, except for an occasional musing about what might have been. suitable for all audiences including moms, grandmas, aunts, friend's moms, etc.
3. start a new, private blog, featuring my deepest, darkest thoughts. all names and pictures would be expunged to protect the innocent. news would be minimal. navel gazing would abound.

my concern about a double blog life is that the two blogs could eventually bleed into each other again, via fellow bloggers who comment on the public blog attracting the attention of the great-aunts, et al, who would then visit loss blogs and link to the private blog there. i don't want that scenario to develop. if i make that kind of effort, i want to be able to be completely uncensored on the private blog - a ship that has long ago sailed in this forum.

so i'm looking for some feedback from the three of you still checking in here: would you mind being exposed to only one blog and forgoing the other? if so, to which blog would you want access? if not, what alternate solution would you suggest? feel free to be completely honest. if you are sick to death of fluffy baby pictures, you will not hurt my feelings. if you find it absurd that anyone would voluntarily subject themselves to my navel-gazing without compensatory pictures of miloliciousness, just say so; the private blog would be for my benefit first and foremost; feedback to it would be welcome but secondary.

well?

a milo monday

too many sad things - among them, justin leaves on business for several days today - so i'm trying to focus on happier things, like milo's fabulousness, and i stayed home to be with justin and to stay close to the place wherein i deal with the leftover montezuma's revenge. here: photographic evidence of milo's fabulousness: pictures from saturday - his first swim lesson, going to his uncle's new apartment - and this morning, when we dressed him in the sailor suit that was my brother's 24 years ago:

milo can't sleep, he's so excited about starting swimming lessons.

he takes to the water like, well, the fish on his trunks.

drinking all that pool water made him thirsty.
plus, drinking out of a big person's cup is the height of grooviness to him.

let's go already!

milo kicks back with pizza and a beer to watch the game.

i waited too long to try it on him, so it's already too small -
as you can see from the giant gap in his britches.

this is the one where he looks so - too - grown up.

this is the one where he looks like me.

no respecter of persons

stillbirth strikes again, strangely close to home for us. [pardon my numbered spelling, but i don't wish to attract unwanted attention here.] 2ydruna5 1lgauska5, the center for the cl3v3land cavali3rs, our favorite player, and the inspiration for calling milo "little z", went missing for four games due to a family emergency. we knew his wife, j3nnif3r, was pregnant, with twins, and we've held our breath, hoping that it wasn't a pregnancy problem. big z was back today, and early in the game the reporter on the floor announced that z had told her earlier today that his wife had gone into premature labor and delivered stillborn twins. the worst, confirmed. fuck.

if you've followed this blog, you know that when milo was the little zygote, we shortened it to "little z" because it wasn't quite so clinical/cynical and to honor our beloved center. throughout the horrible anxiety of that pregnancy, whenever big z would score or do something fantastic, we would take it as a sign for milo's success, too. z was our lucky charm. and now he knows the same horror. not so lucky any more.

i'm unbearably sad.

justin and i have discussed reaching out. we don't want to be weird stalker fans, but this isn't about some celebrity fantasy. we actually see then out from time to time, in our neighborhood brew pub, although we've never approached them out of respect for their privacy. but no matter who you are, being stillborn parents is to be part of a small and mostly lonely club. so i think we're going to write them a note tonight, to let them know how sorry we are, and to thank z for being our own ray of hope. i don't know what else to do, or what else i can do, without being weird.

2

so we made it. when we woke up yesterday, we talked to milo about his brother and showed him the pictures in the little flip album we brought with us. we had a nice dinner by the pool, watching the sunset and the waves, and then we took back to our casita a piece of pay de limon, the local dessert (at least for tourists) that's similar to key lime pie, only with coconut added, i think. on our porch, we set out hans's picture next to the special bouquet the housekeeper made at our request, with tiny sweetheart roses in between honeysuckle and something exotic and tropical-looking. we lit the "2" candle and put it in our pie, then we sent our thoughts to hans and blew out his candle. we cried some, and i thought about how much i just wanted to hold him close. it was the first time i had looked at all of his pictures since milo was born.

today, in the pool, i lounged against the side, looking out at the ocean, and i was struck by the thought of hans jumping off that side and into my arms, laughing, wanting to do it over and over again.

milo brought me back to reality by having a colossal, wet poo in his stroller, which i first mistook for prune spit-up when i saw it on his toy key ring. not until it was all over his legs, and between his fingers, and deep in the grooves of his seatbelt did justin return from our rental house and discover that it was full on fecalmania. we ended up throwing away a little, inexpensive flannel blanket i had brought along as extra coverage for him, and about a million wet wipes, but we got him and the stroller cleaned up in extraordinary fashion in almost no time at all. we deserve parenting medals. we could teach classes in it, we were so good.

while we're grateful for the free wi-fi at the beach club, the connection isn't constant enough to upload any pictures, so those will have to wait until we get home.

hola from troncones

sun is good. i knew i missed it, but i didn't realize how much. what we've done today: made breakfast. ate breakfast. fed milo. cleaned up breakfast. sat on the beach. sat in an oceanfront bar. read. made lunch. fed milo. ate lunch. took showers. read some more. walked down the beach to the local club. drank. ate. watched the sunset. and now here we are. more on hans's birthday later, which we're still commemorating. i've been trying to load pictures of other, non-hans-related highlights, but the wifi at the beach club, while free, is slow, too slow to finish the process, so more later. off to put milo to bed. after all, we need a good night's sleep to keep up with our hectic schedule.

my valentine's sweeties

this valentine's day has been a significant upgrade from the last couple. two years ago, we went out for mexican food and then i laid on the couch, miserable, depressed, despairing that hans was never going to be born...and he was probably making his last gasps about then, as we learned a day and a half later.

last year, we were getting ready to go to new york to get away for hans's birthday. with apologies to justin, i don't even remember what we did for valentine's day. i was medicated to deal with the overwhelming anxiety over little z's prospects, and a fresh wave of grief for hans was rolling over us.

this year, it's as though all the joy we've piled up over milo was hiding an infected, oozing swamp monster of grief, and the monster has escaped. how we're going to survive hans's birthday saturday is a big unknown. we'll be in mexico saturday, away, which seems important. tonight my brother is coming in his enormous truck to carry me through the snow to do some last minute trip shopping, and i'll be getting a "2" candle for hans, and we'll arrange to have a cake saturday, but we haven't made any other plans yet.

but then. there's valentiney goodness all around me. i am married to the love of my life, who gave me the decemberists' "the crane wife" for valentine's day. and a pair of chocolate lips. because he's just that fabulous. and i have milo, little z, sunshine of my soul, a little man in red monkey shoes who's been blowing tsunami-force raspberries of love at me all day on our snow day at home together.