Sometimes Growing Up Hurts

Today was a rough day for Katie and me.

One of the "special needs" issues that Katie deals with is congenital hypothyroidism.  Somehow, inexplicably, Katie was born without a thyroid gland.  Because of this, since she was only about a week old, she has had to take thyroid hormones to keep her functioning.  And because of this, she has had to have bloodwork done periodically, to make sure that these hormones are balanced.

Today was a bloodwork day.

When Katie has to have blood drawn, we always go to the Nationwide Children's Hospital "Close to Home" center in Hilliard.  When Katie was released from the hospital that first time, after we figured out what was going on and got her started on the medicine, we went there, and the phlebotomist there, Kristy, was so compassionate and so skilled, that she is the reason we keep coming back.  One day we had to do a draw at the hospital downtown, and the service was exactly opposite what I was used to receiving from Kristy.  I won't go there any more, even though I'm sure the fellow who traumatized me is probably long gone.

Each time we went to Kristy, she would warn me that one day, Katie wouldn't be happy to see her and would fight us.

Today was that day.

Don't get me wrong; Katie didn't put up a big fight.  But when I pulled up in front of their door and went to unstrap her car seat, she started begging me to go home instead.  We went inside, and instead of rushing to the play area or the book area, the way she used to, she stood by my side, whimpering.  When we went to the lab, she froze at the door.  I got her on my lap, but she was squirming, and my lap wasn't big enough to compensate.  I got up to let her sit in the chair all by herself, and she began to plead again to go.

She sat, a little big girl in the big chair, sobbing, while I knelt in front of her, holding her little hand and telling her I understood.  "No, Mommy, no!" she said.

Kristy called Kris in from the x-ray lab to help us, and the three of us helped Katie through the horrible routine.  She did just fine, of course; Kristy always "gets it" on the first stick.  (This, despite the fact that Katie inherited my incredible "disappearing" veins.)  She got a pretty Band-Aid with butterflies and ladybugs, and afterward we went to Target and got her a cheese pretzel.

Hopefully her hormones will still be on-target enough this time that we don't have to repeat the labs any time soon.

A Precious Memory

September 12, 2012: I don't remember any more what day I started writing this, and I don't know why I never went back and finished it...

This evening, I turned on my Facebook account and skimmed through the news feed. There was a post from Melissa, my little Katie's former teacher in the Easter Seals Early Intervention School, telling about some children in her class who demonstrated new skills today. Her post instantly took me back in time, a little over two years. The tears began to flow anew, and now I can't get that beautiful day out of my mind. Often when that happens, I'll post some little bit of it on Facebook and it is enough. But today, I think I'll journey a little deeper into my memories and try to share it here.

Katie is a special little girl. I remember as a child liking to be told I was special, and then, when I got older, it took on a less appealing meaning, connected to "special education." I remember a friend in high school who drew a cartoon of two women. One wore a t-shirt that said, "I'm special." The other (more attractively drawn) wore one that said, "I'd rather be dead than special." I laughed then. Well, my Katie is special. To me, she is the most beautiful, amazing girl in the world, and I'm so honored to be her mom. (She interrupts me now, "Mommy! A mingamail!" She has a snaggy fingernail; I "fix" it for her. "Thank you!" she says, running off.)

Well, I don't want to go into all the challenges she has faced, or faces. Suffice it to say that when she was quite small, and showing more and more delays, I finally accepted that I needed more help. Ohio's "Help Me Grow" program referred us to Early Intervention schools, giving me a choice of locations. I chose Easter Seals because of their location, which is less than 2 miles from our house. I figured they were close enough that I could drive her; I could not bear the thought of carrying her out to the bus and handing her over to the bus driver. We were lucky; they had an opening right away. It was only a couple of months before the end of the school year. I would drive Katie to the school, we would hang out together in the lobby until the teachers came out to get the children. Ms. Pam had the youngest class, and she and her assistant brought out wagons every day to gather the non-walkers and all the backpacks. I would cheerfully say goodbye and wave as they pulled her down the hall. For the first couple of weeks, I walked out to the car and cried my eyes out for a few minutes, and then drove home.

You see, even now, it is unbelievably hard for me to accept that I was not the best teacher for my daughter. That I am not the best teacher.

At the end of that school year, Katie had made some progress. By no means was she "catching up," but she was learning some new skills. I used her progress as a way to beat myself up regularly. I told myself that if she had those teachers earlier, maybe she wouldn't even be delayed now. Maybe it wasn't that she was delayed at all, just that I wasn't enriching her enough. (I'm not known for having a lot of self-esteem.)

We had to take the summer off, and then Katie went back for her "second" year. She had new classmates, a new teacher, Ms. Melissa.  She loved it. After a while, I was able to drop her off and go without crying, but I was always so happy to see her after school. Best of all, she was always happy to see me. It was definitely the best part of the day, when I would come in and see her face light up.

Dropping her off and picking her up every day, I got to know some of the other children and moms. One day in early December, I had gotten there a few minutes early to pick up Katie after school. Brian's grandmother was there to pick him up, too. What a little cutie he was, riding in the wagon to and from Ms. Pam's class! But this particular day, when the electronic doors opened, there stood Brian, grinning from ear to ear. He was strapped into a little walker, and with the help of the physical therapist, he came through that doorway laughing. His grandmother laughed and cried, and standing behind her, so did I. It was a beautiful thing to witness. At the same time, I was painfully jealous.

Being Katie's mom is simultaneously the most fabulous thing I've ever done, and the most gut-wrenching. Seeing smaller children reach milestones beyond her capabilities, I will catch myself staring.  I don't remember what is "normal" development any more, so these babies toddling around at church seem terribly precocious!  I look around at the faces of the mothers and they don't seem amazed, so I try to just smile, but I keep staring.  I think Katie might have been sitting up alone by that size, but I'm not sure.

The next day, when I came to pick up Katie, I was a minute to two late.  As I walked up to the door, I saw one of the other teachers running back into the building from the bus, and heard her call, "Here she comes, Katie!"  Since the buses were still there, I knew I wasn't overly late, but I walked a little faster, worried that Katie might be upset.

I think everyone from the Easter Seals staff had come out that day to watch.  There was Katie, strapped into a walker, hands on the grips, laughing and smiling.  She walked two or three steps toward me, and the walker turned to the right; she wasn't quite strong enough to keep it going straight yet.  Someone pointed her toward me again and she took a few more steps.  It was all I could do to not rush to her and scoop her up, walker and all!  The delight and pride on her face as she walked to me, to her mommy, was so perfectly beautiful.  I cheered and sobbed, and cheered again, and sobbed again.

The next day, I had my oldest son with me, and Richard had the presence of mind to suggest I pull out my cell phone and record some video.  Unfortunately, I didn't know how to override the phone's default timer, so I have very little of the actual walking recorded.  However, I am very thankful that my phone has a camera.

(Apparently the video is saved on our other computer, and not this one, so I'll link this to my FB account for now and download the real thing later.)

Katie Walking at Easter Seals

September 11th

September 11th, 2001.  Eleven years ago, today.  It is hard to believe that eleven years of sunrises and sunsets, breathing and eating and drinking and sleeping, eleven years of actual every-day living has actually followed that day.  It was a day that felt like the end of the world.

I don't remember what I was doing that day.  Everybody says they remember what they were doing when the first plane hit the World Trade Center; I don't.  It was just a day for me, and for my two boys.  They were still so little.  Can that be true?  R was only 3-and-3/4 years old, and B was only 1-and-a-half.  Yes, they were little.  I was doing something.  Maybe I was making them breakfast.  Maybe I was cleaning it up.  Did we eat that day?  We must have.  I don't remember.

My phone rang.

Most people that I know found out about the disaster through television.  They were watching this, or that, and the news broke in that a plane had hit one of the towers of the World Trade Center.  They were watching the reports, looking at that awful gash in the side of the building, when another plane crossed the screen and smashed into the other tower.  They spent the day watching horrible images -- images that only became the thing of nightmares after 9/11, because they were too unbelievable to have been imagined beforehand.

I answered my phone.

It was my friend, Diane.  She was one of those people watching television, and when the first plane hit she thought of me, because she knew we didn't have television reception at our house.  She had called to let me know what was on the news.  She didn't sound terribly upset at first.  We didn't really know enough yet to be upset.  We talked about what a terrible accident it must have been, wondered how big the plane was, if there were any passengers aboard.  We assumed it was a really inexperienced pilot, or that something had malfunctioned in the plane.  How sad, we said.  We hoped there were few injuries in the building.

And then, suddenly, Diane's tone changed.  She was agitated, almost gasping for air.  "Another plane!" she said.  "I just watched another plane hit the other tower!"

My mind reeled.  "It wasn't an accident," I said.

"It wasn't an accident," she agreed.  "And it wasn't a little plane.  It was a passenger jet."

I didn't know what to say.  She didn't either.  She told me goodbye; she was going to call her husband.  I don't remember if I called mine; if I did, he wasn't at his desk.  I hung up the phone and turned on the radio.

It was a difficult day.  I had to limit myself to only a few minutes of radio at a time.  The boys are too little to deal with this, I thought.  They don't need to hear it all day, even if I do.  I remember praying a lot, praying for the victims, for their families, for the rescue workers.  I tried to smile and have a normal family day with the boys.  We watched a video, read books, played with blocks and cars together.  I heard about a plane striking the Pentagon.  I worried what would be next.  I think I was listening to the radio when the first tower fell.  I think I was listening when the second fell.  I heard there was a crash in Pennsylvania.

I was alone in a fragile bubble, waiting for the next horror to drop from the sky and smash into our little house, probably to take my precious sons and leave me entirely broken.  I read with the children and my voice seemed to echo inside my head, while other sounds seemed distant and muffled.  I kept going to the front window and looking out into the empty cul-de-sac, wondering if my neighbors were watching what was happening.

I didn't know what it all meant.  Someone had done this, planned this, carried it out.  Someone hated the America I love, so much that they hated "generic" Americans enough to blindly kill them.  They hated me.  Not me specifically, but if they were told they could push a button and kill a mother of two in Indiana, they would do it.  I'd known there were terrorists in the world, but I'd never known the terror of being one of the little metal targets in the carnival shooting booth.  The wheel turns and here comes that mother duck followed by one, two little ducklings.  Sh-ping!  Sh-ping!  If I quack, will my ducklings answer back?  I'm afraid to find out.

I remember as a child hearing that my grandfather had died.  I remember feeling guilty for getting hungry and thirsty, even for using the bathroom, when he never would again.  I told myself it was silly to feel guilty, but it is an emotion that still comes back with other losses.  I felt guilty that night for going to bed, knowing there were people buried in the rubble -- maybe some of them alive! -- and I wasn't doing anything to help them.  I felt guilty for kissing my husband when he came home that day, and the next, and the next...

I didn't feel guilty for being an American, by the way, and for loving my country.  For that, I have never felt guilty, or ashamed.

I just felt guilty for going on living my everyday life when for so many... it was over.  People who had lives as simply American as mine were dead, simply because they lived their American lives in a different place than I did.



I just took a long, deep breath.  And another.  And another.  It has been eleven years.  My boys don't remember that day at all, and in my more rational moments that makes sense...  But memory isn't totally rational, and I keep thinking that they will grow into the memory, like somehow aging now makes them older when it happened, or like the American collective will teach them to remember events they did not experience.

Several of my friends blogged about their 9/11 memories today, and I thought I'd come back here to my neglected blog and read what I've said about it before.  Imagine my surprise to discover I'd written nothing about it here.

Well, now I have.

Motorcycle Envy

I was driving home Saturday evening after a lovely visit with family in West Virginia, and following a motorcycle. The woman riding on the back of the bike was in a black tank top, and her skin was bronzed by the sun. My first thought was that if it was me, I would be sunburned beyond recognition; I have fair skin that burns very quickly. I turned to Jim and shared that thought, and he laughed, and we both returned to our own thoughts. Yeah, I told myself. Motorcycles are not for me.

The bike was ahead of me for some time. I thought about how uncomfortable it would be to ride on a seat like that for a long time. I thought about how it would be, riding on the back, and shifting my position to ease my constant back pain, thus throwing the bike off balance and causing a painful, perhaps deadly accident. Yeah, motorcycles are not for me.

I thought about the time when I was about 12 and wanted to learn to ride one. One of my cousins spent an hour trying to teach me the basics, but I was so terrified that I never managed to actually go anywhere. Yeah, motorcycles are not for me.

That thought took me ahead a decade plus, to a summer when we went to a family reunion in Wyoming. My Uncle John had brought his family's four-wheelers, and again I got the urge to try to ride despite my abject terror. I talked myself out of it a number of times, but finally, I found myself sitting on one of the four-wheelers, the engine making my legs vibrate at nearly the same frequency as my fluttering heart. I moved the machine slowly, jerkily; I couldn't relax enough to do anything else. Talking to myself to steady my nerves, I said, "We'll do one little loop, then get off calmly, say thank you, and then just breathe for a while." But just as I was coming around the front of the yard, my mother jumped on the back, shouting "Wahoo! Let's go!" Every muscle in my body froze solid, and I screamed, "NO!! Get OFF!!" There was a light pole about fifteen feet away, directly in front of me. Directly. In. Front. Of. Me. I could not turn the handlebars. I could not release the gas. I was totally helpless. SMACK. I jumped off the four- wheeler, bawling like a baby, and ran into the house. I wasn't going fast enough to do any damage, but I knew then and there, four-wheelers (and motorcycles) are seriously not for me.

More years passed. My Seester, Michelle, bought a motorcycle. It was a nice bike. But I thought she was crazy. She was talking about doing these big cross-country rides, where you have only so many days to make it a certain distance... She was so excited about her bike. Me, well, I could appreciate the beauty of the bike, but no, no, thank you. Motorcycles are really not for me.

Michelle went with me somewhere -- in a car -- one day after she'd had the bike for awhile. We were driving south on I-80, a little north of Salt Lake, as I recall. There was someone on a motorcycle in front of us. Another biker passed on the other side of the freeway, going the other way. My sister sighed. "What?" I asked.

"One of the things I love about riding my bike," she said. She pointed out that when bikers meet on the road, each driver drops his or her left hand off the handlebar, sticking it out slightly at about the hip, like a cool motorcyclist "low five" without touching. I'd never noticed it, but after that, I watched the guy on the bike ahead of us. It was true. It was like they were a secret club, and suddenly I was feeling desperately left out. Motorcycles are not... are not...

Flash forward to 2011, to my "van-without-air-conditioning," on the road to Columbus. There is that universal biker salute again, and I sigh. Mini-van drivers don't have any such thing. Remember the Suzuki Samurai commercials, where they did the "beep-beep, HI!" thing? They were trying to make themselves out to be "cool like that." We used to laugh about that, but I wonder if it worked. (I wonder if anyone out there still HAS a Suzuki Samurai?)

No, motorcycles aren't for me. Sigh.

While the Cat's Away...

Shame on me, seriously.

I know Jim won't be thrilled when he returns from China to find that I have, once again, bought a back yard wading pool. How many have there been in the 14 summers since we had our first child? And he has hated every one. For a simple, $15 purchase, I wouldn't bug Jim on his business trip, now would I? So, of course, it will be a lovely surprise for him when he gets home.

And, of course, it is the biggest wading pool I've ever bought. I think. There was that one inflatable one I bought, the one that stayed too cold for wading until it was so full of mosquito maggots I couldn't bear to let the kids into it. This one may be bigger than that one. Of course, this time, it is going to be different. It will get warm enough, quickly enough that we will have a blast with it. We will get $60 of fun out of it, and Jim will say it was a wonderful investment in childhood. Yep.

So I'm a Chicken at Heart

At one point last year, a friend on Facebook (do I have any other kind?) posted that she was looking for blogs to follow, and asked if anyone had one she hadn't found yet. I replied with something like, "Yes, I do, but you'll never find it!!" And then I sat there, with the arrow poised over the "reply" button...

...

...

... and I deleted the reply. After all, if someone KNEW I had one and wanted to find it, would it be challenging to find it? I didn't know. Did I want someone to read it? Well, yes, and yet...

Last week, after writing a new post that had been weighing on my mind for some time, I took the plunge and posted a link to this blog on my FB page. Then I worried. What if no one bothered to read it? What if someone did? What if they didn't like it? What if they made fun of me? What if??

And this time, I left it. And suddenly, my blog says that I have three followers. Wow! One seems to be following it privately, so I don't know who it is, but three (3) is three times as many as I had last year.

Now, do I dare ever write anything else?

Mom, Why Do You Hate Boosts?

My eldest son, R, asked me this week, "Mom, why do you hate boosts?" I was playing a game on Facebook, Zuma Blitz, which I let my younger son, B, play on my account frequently. When B plays, he turns on the maximum number of "boosts" -- special powers that boost his ability to win. When I play, I turn them all off. Yep, I hate boosts.

The fact is, for almost a month I have been trying to write a blog entry about this very topic. Why do I hate boosts? Well, first of all, let's call them what they are: cheats. They are little, socially accepted cheats, to help you get around the rules in order to score higher in computer games. It used to be that such things were straight-out called "cheat codes," but I guess they have softened that name to make it sound less dishonest. But you know, I miss the days when people simply played games by the rules. I think of my grandfather, during World War II on his battleship, playing checkers. He placed second in the ship-wide competition. He didn't use any boosts. There was no, "I'll spend 5,000 checkers-points for the ability to move directly ahead," or such. Can you imagine?

My boys have tried unsuccessfully to convince me to buy them some device that plugs into the Nintendo DS. They gave up asking, so I have forgotten what it is called. Apparently this device carries cheat codes for a number of DS games. They borrowed one from a friend at one time, and B delightedly told me about how his character in one game had now obtained unlimited lives, and could jump higher, and could swim. I listened to him boast, but I asked, "Where is the fun in that?" He looked at me like I was crazy, and went to tell his brother about it.

Isn't most of the fun in a game found in legitimately beating the challenge? Where is the challenge, if your character no longer is bound by the rules?

One of my former favorite Facebook games, Bejeweled Blitz, started off as a great challenge. Two of my friends were fantastic at it, and every week I fought hard to try to match their scores. I could never stay at the top of the leaderboard for long, though, as one or both would inevitably outdo my score.

Then they released a new "beta" version, in which each round allowed you to win "coins," which could be redeemed to purchase... BOOSTS. Start the round with a 2x score multiplier! Add a few seconds to the game! If you wanted, you could spend actual money and buy more coins. I played the new game for a day or two. Once, when I didn't have enough coins to purchase any boosts, I was playing the old way, with just my own skills, and I beat my high score. I was so excited, and when I posted my score, I wrote that I "hadn't even used any boosts" and suddenly I had an epiphany. My high score, for which I had "worked" so hard, looked the same as any other score from outside. I looked at my friends' high scores, and wondered how many boosts they were using, and which ones. And right then I realized that a boost was a "clean" name for a cheat.

I sent a message to the developers, complaining that boosts ruined the fun of the game. I saw on their wall several comments from other players with the same complaint. But soon the old clean version of the game disappeared, replaced by the new one. I refused to use the boosts, letting the useless "coins" accumulate. Sometimes I would see the high scores others had, and would succumb to the unspoken peer pressure for a few games, but it always made me feel sick.

Last week, I broke the 3,000,000 coin mark. I haven't played anywhere near as regularly as I once did, or I'd probably have double that. But I decided that I'd finally had enough. Just for the fun of it, I decided to spend all those useless coins and leave the game in a blaze of glory. Sure enough, I got the high score for my team last week. But it was such an empty victory. It has taken me a lot of wasted time to drop the balance below 2,000,000. And frankly, I don't care enough to keep trying.

My awareness of cheats has increased because of it. Yesterday, I caught part of a reality TV show where three teams of bakers were trying to make the best decorated cake. As the teams worked, they pulled the team leaders aside for two events. The first event -- which I missed, actually -- seemed to involve making a cake that looked like a poster. The second was a taste test, from their special cake. Now, if the competition is about making a fantastic cake, I could see the point of the second "minor" event; a gorgeous cake that tastes awful isn't worth the sugar rush. The first event, however, seemed kind of forced. ANYWAY, the point was that the winners of these two events got to pick a team to penalize in the main competition -- by taking away 30 minutes of work time from that team. The same team won both events, and the leader chose to penalize the same team both times. Now I don't know how much time they had in all, but to lose a full hour of competition time? How can that count as anything other than a cheat? Now by this time, I was pretty "into" the program, rooting with all my heart for the team that had been so unfairly hindered -- and that team won, by the way. But I am so disgusted by the way the competition was dirtied that I will not watch it again.

If you want the "minor" events included, that is just fine with me. The taste test, in particular, should be part of the final score of the cake, absolutely! But to give any team an unfair advantage, or disadvantage, based on the whims of a winner... No. How does that get everyone to do their best? How does it encourage good sportsmanship?

Suppose that my team had lost the competition, perhaps by a narrow margin. (I believe they may have won by a narrow margin; it is hard to say.) What would they walk away saying? "If they hadn't stolen an hour's labor from us, we would have had them." "We were robbed!" (Yes, they were.) There might have been cordial congratulations, but "unfair" would have been seething under their smiles.

A friend of mine asked on Facebook about another reality show tonight; "Who was eliminated?" Another friend responded that the person eliminated was "saved" by the judges, so would be going on in the competition after all. The judges on this show didn't used to have the power to "save" a favorite, to essentially say, "The rules won't apply this time." They do now.

Why do we settle for this in our society today? Have we become so competitive -- no, that isn't fair to the term "competition." Have we become so determined to win at all costs that we've given up on honesty and fairness? Why is it so acceptable to bend the rules here, and break them there? Why do we put up with it in our computer and video games and on reality shows, and then act so shocked when people expect to get away with cheating in other areas?

I believe in being honest. THAT is why I hate boosts.