#fishtankmailbox

That’s well thought out and sounds like it works for you, and I’m glad. :)

The posts today on beauty and brains by monkeyfrog and new-naimhe were so spot on. I didn’t want to hijack either post because each was beautifully said but I’ve just got to add: that kind of talk can damage generations. Lately, my mom has been reading comments made about my sister and I from posts on her Facebook feed along the lines of “they are both so beautiful and they look just like you!” Do you know what she said to me after relaying this info? “I wish I had known I was beautiful growing up.” That sound you hear is my heart breaking into a million tiny pieces for my beautiful, strong, vibrant mother who, to this day, can only see her flaws. It’s maddening. 

Related to above: for years (and years) I never trusted people who said I was pretty or beautiful because most of my life I was fat. Not just fat - I was smart and fat. Or talented but fat. Or “you’d be sooo pretty if you’d only lose weight!” It’s very hard to believe someone who’s telling you you’re beautiful when not 10 minutes ago they were berating you for being fat. Like, you just made it clear that those things are clearly mutually exclusive so what the actual fuck?

fishtankmailbox posted about karma today and that also pinged onto something that’s been going on in my life. Here’s what I’ve learned and I’m hoping it applies to a current situation: all I can do is live my life the best way I know how and be true to myself and my values and hopefully that will get me through. Because fuck a bunch of monkeys if I’m not having revenge fantasies that would make Die Hard look like Anne of Green Gables.

painedbrain‘s naughty coffee post spurred my craving for a naughty coffee. I’m easily influenced when it comes to coffee OH SHIT I JUST REALIZED I DIDN’T GET DECAF! Welp, guess I’ll see most of you here at oh-my-god-it’s-so-late-why-am-I-still-awake-thirty. Crap.

It’s not an easy day, for sure, but I prefer to mark his birthday.  I’ll let the anniversary of his death go by next month silently as I always do, keeping the keening stifled down under my tongue.  Grief and remembering often brings ritual, large or small.

Mine is to open the box of things he had when we spent those days in the hospital.  It contains a collection of things: a diary that I kept, writing to him and making notes about progress and marking the visitors or the milestones, the card that was taped to the bottom of his isolette, the bracelet I had to wear as ID.  The things that I look for are the little gown and hat I dressed him in after I bathed him and sent him off to be ... I never know what word to use here.  The clinical one is autopsied.  I don’t like to use that one, but I can’t think of a gentler one.  Seen to is perhaps the phrase I want.

It was the only real chance I got to mother him, that bathing and dressing, finally free from medical intrusions on his tiny wee body, no glass or gloves or moist heated air separating us.  Just he and I.  I’m sure one year that little gown won’t smell like the bath soap that I used, and that will be sad, a loss on its very own.  But the scent is still there this year, and for that I’m grateful.

I drive to Toronto.  I place flowers on the spot he’s buried, a little depression in the earth.  It’s always me, by myself.  I prefer it like that; I hate crying in front of other people.

When I see boys - well, I guess I ought to start saying young men now - that are the age he would have been, I often wonder what it’s like to parent them. Especially blonde ones with glasses, which is how I see him.  I picture him tall and gangly and awkward, all knobby knees and jutting collarbone.  Maybe voice cracking, maybe peach fuzz catching morning sunlight.  Snickering over stupid stuff that boys do.  Standing in front of the fridge, eating me out of house and home.  Tormenting his little sister.