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.

regarding abby, if that IS her real name

i've been out of it and have just had the dear abby stillbirth photo controversy brought to my attention by laura. i haven't written about the issue in a long time, and not much even then, but laura's post has brought to the surface what i've been meaning to say for a while, which is:

yes, of course, almost everyone who hasn't lost a child is uncomfortable with pictures of stillborn children. i remember going to deadbabymama's house and about passing out with the shock of seeing a picture of her husband holding strummer, right there on the shelf in their front room. justin, who knew her better and had spent some time traveling with her and talking about baby-anxiety stuff, thought it was perfectly normal, but i was bothered about it for months.

about three months to the day, actually. because that's when we lost hans. we took dozens of pictures of him before we let him go, and those pictures of him became the most precious things i owned. we looked at those pictures a dozen times a day, printed them out and framed some, put them in a small album which we included on a table at hans's memorial service along with the spanish books justin had gotten for him for christmas and the calendar we had gotten for him in belgium and the little alpaca sweater and hat our friend mike had brought him from peru and other things. we wondered how the pictures would be received, but we decided they were important to us, and we wanted them there for people who loved him to see. if anyone didn't want to see them, they didn't have to look at them; they were in a flip-album with a cover.

i often wanted to put hans's picture on my desk at work, but i never figured out how to do it in a way that would let me cherish him and show him to people who genuinely wanted to see him without exposing him to people who would disrespect him with their lack of understanding, so i never did it. that the mother in the letter that started this whole conversation was brave enough to do what i never had the ovaries to do blows me away. she deserves the purple heart or whatever the medal is they give for bravery. i hope she knows it.

so here's the thing: while i understand that most people are uncomfortable with pictures of stillborn babies, it doesn't make it okay. discomfort is not indicative of righteousness.

for much of our nation's history, a large percentage of people who identified as white were supremely uncomfortable at the thought of equality for blacks, much less frequenting the same businesses or sitting in the same section of the train or bus or - god forbid - their children socializing with black children. was that prejudice, that phobia, okay? no.

my late father was a minister, and while he did much to support and encourage younger ministers, he was extremely disparaging of women who attempted to enter the clergy. he was uncomfortable with women penetrating the ranks of pastors. it was okay for them to be children's pastors, or to direct a church-run preschool, or to maybe direct the missionary society, but not to be the senior pastor or - gasp - to preach. he saved special venom for a woman who rose to the top rank in his denomination, one of a board of six people who govern the denomination; he went out of his way to badmouth her at church conventions, to campaign against her eventual election. [at his funeral, the condolence letter that came from that board and was read out loud was signed by none other than that woman he hated. i had to smile.] was his treatment of her, and his opinion of women invading his profession okay? is the institutionalized discomfort with the equality of women in most of the world's religions okay? no, of course not.

i'm not equating my first son's worth with abolitionism or the equal rights amendment. but there are plenty of ways in which people are uncomfortable because of ignorance, and only after ignorance is dispelled does society in general learn to deal with the former bogeyman. it will take people like deadbabymama displaying strummer's picture alongside owen's. it will take me not giving into the pressure to say "yes" every time a restaurant server smiles at milo and asks me, "is he your first?" it will take the people who put those big pink and blue magnetic ribbons for infant loss on the backs of their cars to keep doing it until there are so many of those that every driver knows what they mean, as well-understood a symbol as yellow or red ribbons. it will take the international stillbirth society and other groups like it getting the kind of marketing savvy that the SIDS campaign has. it will take people like the woman in the letter to have the beans to display their child's picture on their desk.

p.s. strummer, i owe you an apology. the next time i see your picture, i'll be sure to give you your due.

mizuko

flush gordon

that blur you just saw whiz by was my life. milo is already 6+ months old, and gigantic. he's 26 inches and 16 lbs 6 oz and has a ginormous head, covered in blonde(!) hair. he's surpassed his cousin who's seven weeks older. he's wearing the same size diapers as his second cousin who's seven months older. his constant chattering has given way to screams and grunts and hurricane raspberries and more time observing and less time vocalizing. behold milo: he sees all, knows all. he is pure magic.

meanwhile, there are more things going on than i can keep up with. the good things: we're going to mexico next week to decompress for a few days on the beach. next month, we're headed to prague, and then in april we're taking the great american road trip (which might involve planes and trains, too). and i'm about to make a major life change - but more on that later, so that no one who shouldn't know now finds out until it's time.

internally, things are just as busy. i need to write about those things, too, but there's not time now. i'm hoping that while we're cooling off and staying out of the peak sun hours for milo's benefit that i can get some writing done. or maybe i'll just be the queen of siestas. either way is okay with me.

wonderland

i shoveled snow for the first time the other night, but not before i stood in the middle of the street like a madman and took pictures. with enough snow coverage, everything looks so...unsullied. snow covers the fall leaves our neighbor never bagged and the chipped paint spots on our porch steps and the poo left by the dogs walked by the crazy woman (or maybe man - i'm not sure, frankly) who lives on the street behind us but brings her dogs to our street to relieve themselves. snow even makes the horrible evergreen bushes in front of our house look beautiful. although this is absolutely the last winter they will be snow-covered on our property, because we are replacing them this year if i have to dig them out by hand myself. i mean it. i hate them with the burning intensity of a thousand suns. but don't they look pretty dressed in snow?


i have always been able to avoid shoveling until now. when i was a kid, the only time we lived in a snow climate was when i was aged 8 to 11, and that duty fell to my dad. from the time i left home for college until we bought this house 2 1/2 years ago, i've either lived in the south or in a setting where i wasn't responsible for snow removal (dorm, apartment, condo), and the first two winters in this house i was able to claim the pregnancy exemption [thanks, boys, for your help in that department]. but tuesday night i had no excuse, and if i didn't shovel i was going to have to either (a) go down to the scary, scary basement to deal with the laundry justin had started or (b) pack up the more fragile christmas ornaments [yes, our tree is still up. because we're just that classy.], so i bundled up and headed out.


and you know, it's kind of fun. i wouldn't want to do it for a living or anything, but i did the front walks and curbs and around the cars while justin did the side, around the carriage house, and the porch, which made quick work of it, and i got the satisfaction of meaningful physical labor that i don't get from the treadmill at the y or from pushing a pile of paper on my desk. it absolved me of my guilt for not keeping our appointment at the y that night. my inner compulsive freak enjoyed making straight lines of snow banks along the edges of the sidewalks and my inner aesthete loved arranging the shoveled snow i heaped on the tree lawn into rolling alps for stuart little-sized skiiers. i could picture milo in a couple more winters playing in the snow we piled up into mountains for him to jump in, and making snow angels, and writing his name in the snow in whiz [maybe just in the backyard, though], and it kept me warm.

*****

milo is six months old today. we sang him "happy birthday" and he grinned. i almost can't believe we've made it this far.