This Day

First, I’ve made a New Year’s resolution to be a better blogger. If I can’t keep up with this sucker how the heck am I going to keep up on a dissertation.

That said, my probelm is that I over-think my posts and, hence, they never get written. Those of you who know me will say, “What? You? Over-think?” Quite.

In that spirit I write here a non-pre-meditated blog entry (can I really use a hyphen twice like that?)

I sat in my living room this morning feeding Jo a jar of blueberries and apples trying to explain to her the significance of this day. I told her she would not remember sitting in her high chair and watching Obama be sworn in as her mother slobbered and slurped over the tray. But I will tell her that she witnessed it with me.

I tried to explain to her that this moment would effect her life profoundly, I believe, for the better. I told her that 2009 was a huge shift in our family’s life. The inauguration drove home my hope that the cosmos/God/the goddess/fate has shifted suddenly in our lives. I also reminded her, as my friend Gil just posted, that the real hard work actually begins now. Words like sacrifice, responsibility, and perseverance will take on new meaning. But, like I think many Americans, those words have permeated much of my existence these last couple years. It’s comforting to hear those words spoken in a national context that doesn’t involve having a president pledge my support as a citizen for a cause I do not believe in.

Jo listened well, touching my face as I spoke between mouth-fulls of cereal and fruit, as if to say, “No worries, mama.” For her the inauguration was all about screams and excitement. She shrieked several times during the inaugural address. Of course, her favorite moments were the quartet and the chorus singing the national anthem. She was pretty damn stoked…so stoked she is refusing to eat or nap at the moment. Clearly Jo is already committed to Obama’s new ethic of responsibility and sacrifice.

“You’re the man Mr. President,” she says.

Family Body

Smiley Jo

My daughter started smiling at me this week.  As the weeks go by it astounds me to watch my body and my husband’s body appear in our child’s developing body.  Not only do I see the two of us in her, but I see aspects of both of our families as well.  For instance, she has my father-in-law’s eyes.  Additionally, my body continues to help her body grow.  Every day I think to myself, “Wow, I’m still growing a baby.”  It’s just now I can actually view the result of my efforts.  I am a walking vending machine…with only one kind of snack.

Pregnancy was tough for me.  Three and a half of the nine months I was pregnant I bled.  During that entire time I worried I was going to lose her.  December was the absolute bottom after two incredibly scary incidents both requiring trips to emergency care.  Perhaps even scarier was the doctors’ bafflement at the cause of the bleeding.  I’ve always been very conscious of my body.  Always in control of it.  Now I wasn’t and no matter how I changed my behavior, bodily, it didn’t matter.  The most terrifying aspect of this whole chain of events was that it was not just my body that was suffering.  I couldn’t bear the thought that my child’s body might also be suffering.  My body was no longer singular, but plural.  Pregnancy is an amazing rehearsal for the responsibility of being a parent.  You can no longer be irresponsible about your body when you’re pregnant.  For me I gave up not only alcohol and lots of caffeine (I still drank one cup in the morning) but due to the bleeding I also gave up exercising, baths, and sex, blindly grasping at anything that might make the bleeding stop.  None of it worked.

On the pregnancy online group I am a part of I asked one mother of five how she managed to be pregnant and still take care of her other five children.  She told me it was her faith in God and to get used to worrying all the time about my children.  My response to her was that was all fine and dandy, but to me there is a huge difference between being pregnant constantly fearing a miscarriage and having children fearing for their safety.  The difference is my body’s interaction with the child’s body.  I told her that at least at the end of a long day coping with my two-year-old I could sip some wine.  Or if I became frustrated or needed to cry I could leave the room.  My body could be physically separate from my child’s.  During pregnancy that separation of bodies doesn’t quite work.  I was never alone.  My mother-in-law kept telling me I would miss having Jo inside me, constantly feeling her move and being reassured of her presence.  I haven’t missed it once.

While I haven’t missed being pregnant, having a baby certainly is not what I expected as far as my body’s relationship to her’s.  My relationship to my own body completely shifted after labor.  No matter what I was told I have to say that at a certain point I stopped being in the driver’s seat.  Rather than spending tons of time sharing the whole story I’ll just share this one piece.  My contractions went from relatively minor to ridiculously intense in a very short amount of time.  I was one half centimeter away from being fully dilated.  The nurse decided to wait to see if we could get that last bit taken care of and she told me we’d wait like fifteen minutes of so before starting to push.  After five minutes my own body gave me no choice.  It started pushing on its own to the point where I started trying to hold it back.  Yeah right.  While I do take some credit for helping push her out I definitely think my body did a good deal of the work on its own. 

When she finally flopped out and they put her on my chest I think some kind of Freaky Friday thing happened.  I can really only describe it as an out-of-body experience.  Like I’m more a part of her body than my own.  Only this has lasted since she was born.  I’ve always really liked taking care of my body, especially with lotions and yummy things like that.  I’m incredibly diligent about weird things like keeping my eyebrows groomed.  No more.  I could pawn this off on the lack of time I have to do such things, however, I really don’t think this is the case.  I am much more conscious of her body than I am of my own.  Her cries ellicit a much more visceral reaction from my body than my own cries.  When she squirms in the night it’s my body that wakes up.  When she smiles my body gets much more of a rush than any beer or cappuccino could possibly give me.

Through my daughter I’m beginning to understand my own mother’s obsession with her daughters.  I don’t exagerrate when I say a truly believe my sister and I probably saved my mom’s life.  My mom has never really cared much for her own body.  As a young adult I watched her take the anger and rage left by years of horrific abuse out on her own body because she could not express it to those who hurt her.  She abused her own body, but she always survived.  She survived, she says, for my sister and I.  I never felt a lack of love or support from my mom.  She never had any qualms about expressing it.  However, it was never really expressed physically.  The terror exacted on her body, I think, somehow always kept the door to physical attention closed.  But I always knew I was loved.  This kind of love, where a mother lives for her children, is a difficult road to hoe sometimes.  While I never felt unloved I grew up bearing the burden of my mother’s happiness.  See, when my sister and I came into her life she passed her consciousness into our bodies to the point where I think my mother lives more through our bodies than she does her own.  While this transfer allows her to take great joy and pride in our achievements, it enables her to continue her own abuse towards her body.  Now, her body has finally begun to give out.

My mom was diagnosed with stage 3a ovarian cancer a few weeks ago.  Now she cannot escape her own body and she clearly feels trapped.  I seem to be dealing with the news well, but I think it’s because I can’t actually see the toll it is already taking on her body; we just speak over the phone.  As she can’t come to see her grandaughter, my sister and her husband have given me a plane ticket and we’ll be going to see her this week.  I want her to see that pieces of her are written across not only my face but my daughter’s as well.  My mom has a very unique nose; she calls it a ski jump.  It’s long and skinny and at the very end it turns up slightly like a ski jump.  On her nose the cartilege is so pronounced it’s almost like the tracks of the last skier have been etched into the skin.  I have her nose.  The turn-up is not as pronounced and my nose (unfortunately) is much fatter, but it is definitely there.  My daughter’s most prominent feature in her first days of life in the world was her nose.  It’s much more in proportion now, but the turn-up is still there.  Her nose was so prominent after birth that it came out squished against her tiny face.  The womb could not make room for such a unique feature.  The feature my grandpa had, my mother has, I have, and now my daughter has.

The Nose

In marriage it is said that two bodies become one.  In childbirth one body becomes two, but it doesn’t end there.  I considered my grandma a matriarch.  She could rattle off the names of her many, close to a dozen, great-grandchildren all the way to her last days.  I’m beginning to realize that my body not only splits when I have a child, but will continue to split when she has a child.  In death, the body rots, but the soul, in most faiths, continues on.  I say the body achieves immortality through our children.  While my mother’s body begins to break down it gets stronger through her daughter and granddaughter.

The 9 Month Road Trip

I’ve never been a good journey-woman.  The quicker I can get to my final destination the better.  In college I dated this guy who was one of those professional road-trippers.  He was all about taking the road less travelled.  One summer in an effort to bond a bit more I suggested a road trip from Colorado to Ocean City, Maryland, one of my favorite places in the world.  We took my Honda Civic hatchback and were off.  Needless to say, the trip did not turn me into a road-tripper.  We stopped a few places along the way, but never took anything but the interstate.  I just wanted to get there.  As a result the trip back loomed before us for days and was a race to the finish:  home.

It wasn’t until after I graduated and was dumped by said boyfriend that I took another road trip.  Still in the Honda, but this time by myself.  I drove from Colorado to Santa Cruz to be a camp counselor for the summer.  By the time I hit Wyoming I was already panicking.  This was a time before I had a cell phone and fear overwhelmed me.  What if my car broke down?  What if I was assaulted at a rest stop?  Who would come help me?  I felt utterly alone.  I had no choice, but to keep going.  As the trip moved on I felt more and more confident.  I hit the Great Salt Lake at dusk and I remember being in awe of the landscape I drove through.  My windows were down, I had Indigo Girls blaring.  Fear shifted into euphoria and I was suddenly so excited that it was just me in this moment seeing this sight.  I checked into a hotel that night for the first time on my own and felt totally free.  I could sleep as long as I wanted and leave when I wanted and do whatever I wanted to.

My whole summer that year was a road trip.  I continued on to California and stayed with one of my best friends before going to the camp.  The camp is a story in itself, but I discovered wheel pottery there and also had the epiphany that I wanted a PhD in theatre.  My safe/power place, the one I go to in my mind when things get rough, is a little beach we discovered along the coast on one of our days off.  I moved past my heartache.  I visited UC Berkeley.  Then I started the trip back, but this time I had no home to go home to.  All my belongings were in a storage unit so I lived with my sister and her now husband for 2 weeks until I found a place to live.  I never had a final destination, the journey created one for me.  On the other side of that journey I was a different and stronger person.

When Scott and I decided to begin trying to get pregnant I now realize I was rather focused on the final destination.  I saw us with a child.  I imagined and fantasized about us being parents, I say actually, we both probably fantasized about being parents.  Pregnancy was just the car ride there.  In my mind pregnancy was one long celebration occassionally interrupted by discomfort and maybe morning sickness.  Hence, it should be no problem for me to have the most difficult semester right in my first trimester.  I could cram in all my program requirements while pregnant so I wouldn’t have to worry about them once I had the baby; once I reached the final destination.

Oops.

The Journey So Far

Well, the in-laws left and we had a day to get ready for our good friends’ wedding along the North Shore.  It was beautiful there and we so needed the break.  The day after we arrived we found out that the dog we were watching was in the vet hospital.  We left the festivities early and spent the next several days getting in touch with her owners on the Appalacian Trail and shelling out our entire savings in vet bills (which were soon reimbursed).  The owners decide to have their parents come pick up Elly.  Scott and I spend a night and a day sobbing over the sick dog and trying to make her comfortable.  The owner’s dad comes to pick her up and we say goodbye for what I know will be the last time.  Elly passes away within the week.  The next day after Elly leaves I take my first pregnancy test.  It’s a faint line, but it’s there.  I take two more on subsequent days.  The line gets darker.

In my mind this is fate.  It was our first try.  It was really impossible for us to get pregnant considering all the falderall in our lives.  This baby is going to be feisty for sure.  For almost eight weeks pregnancy is exactly how I imagined it would be.  I sleep a lot more, but I mange to miss morning sickness and just have lingering bouts of nausea.  My waistline starts to expand immediatly and I’m in full-on maternity clothes by week six.  I buy tons of books and get in an online pregnancy buddy group.  Happy, happy, joy, joy.

Week 8:  I fail my subfield exams.  I’m totally shocked.  I cry.  That evening I begin to spot.  The next morning it gets worse.  I call in to work and go to the ER because it’s Saturday.  Everything looks fine.  They take lots of blood, do an internal exam, and an ultrasound.  On the ultrasound the baby is measuring exactly as it should and has a strong heartbeat.  They tell me to come back if it gets worse and to “save the remnants of conception” should I miscarry at home.  The next day it gets worse, but I’m afraid to go back to the ER.  I wait it out till Monday and go to my clinic.  The doc there checks my hormone levels again and calls me that evening to tell me there is no indication that I’m miscarrying.  Wednesday is my official first prenatal appointment.  My doctor looks at all my tests and tells me it looks to her like I may be miscarrying.  She does an internal exam and takes more blood.  I get the whole deal on how if it happens I will be fine and it’s still early.  She will rush the test results and call me that afternoon to tell me if she thinks it’s imminent or not.  I have a class presentation that day.  I stumble through it.  She calls to tell me everything looks fine and to relax.  For some reason I have a hard time believing her.

I continue spotting on and off and sometimes constantly for the next five weeks.  Mentally and emotionally it was the hardest few weeks I’ve been through in my entire life.  We went to the doctor every week and received only reassuring news, but the continued presence of blood just did not jive in my mind of how things were supposed to go.  The researcher in me made things worse by researching miscarriage and first trimester bleeding.  I became obsessed.  I lost my appetite.  On multiple occassions it was easier for me to believe I was going to lose the baby than continue in this place of not knowing.  I was depressed.  My usual faith and hope lost out.  I kept searching for something to hold onto, to get me through.  The pragmatist in me tried to tell me that I would be fine either way.  Unfortunately, I knew that wasn’t really true.  The thing I held to actually was that either way I still had Scott and he had hope even if I didn’t.

To be honest, this baby has also been quite outspoken about the situation already.  At my 10 week ultrasound s/he decided we needed reassurance and waved at us through the screen.  S/he was bopping around like crazy in case we didn’t know that at least s/he was having a good time.  S/he also gave us a great profile shot.  We’ve seen his/her beautiful face already.

 

The next week my doc decided to check for a heartbeat via doppler, this crazy Fisher Price lookin’ radio and microphone thingy they use on your belly to hear the baby.  My doc tells me not to be worried if we don’t hear it because it’s still early.  Sure enough, we hear it, beating strongly just below my belly button.  At my last appointment last week, week 13, she uses the doppler again.  This time s/he actually kicks at the thing, but still a strong heartbeat.

The spotting has tapered off, but remains.  It also remains a mystery.  They can never find its source, not on the ultrasounds, not during my exams, nothing.  The only thing they can suggest is that it has something to do with my slight bicorneate uterus.  If you’re really interested in that particular term, look it up.  It was on an episode of Grey’s Anatomy a while back.

I’ve been trying to embrace this as a journey.  This means I can’t keep hoping to go back to the way my life was before I got pregnant or even back to the first six weeks of my pregnant euphoria.  I’ve passed those landmarks and I have to keep going.  Just like my California trip, home has become an elusive idea.  It hasn’t been created yet because it’s the journey that forms and formulates what that home will be.  I’m not necessarily talking about my house here.  However, I do have to say that my house as a space has changed and is journeying, too, because it has morphed in my perception as my body has changed.  My bathroom has become this space of comfort and terror as it’s usually where I find out how the spotting is going, but also where I take my baths and showers, the two things that keep my body relaxed.  Our bedroom has also had to become a different space because I spend so much time there these days.  I’ve had to adjust the entire geography of our bed.  I now sleep with four pillows:  two under my head, one between my legs to keep my hips from aching, and one held against my chest to keep me from rolling onto my back or front and to press against my growing belly.  I have nightlights that illuminate my way to the bathroom at night, which I visit nocturnally at least three times.  I recently realized that in my third trimester the bed is going to have to move downstairs because our narrow stairs to the bedroom just aren’t going to work in the middle of the night when I have to pee and I’ve got a watermelon attached to my front.  So, even house/home isn’t stable any more.  The things is there’s no expressway on this journey.  I don’t get to choose to take the quick route.  I highly recommend pregnancy for all those out there trying to cope with issues of control.  It’s a sure fire cure for the control freak.

In Memoriam: A Clown Tale

I am no expert on clowning and I could have done a ton of research before writing this, but chose not to so forgive me if my thoughts are askew.  Clowns for most people seem to occupy a liminal space of uncertainty.  I think that’s because we laugh at them, but they are truly sad.  Sometimes we laugh at them because they are sad.  I have a few friends who have delved into clowning, not Barnum and Bailey clowning, although related, but developing a particular mask (hence the nose) that is a clown.  From what I’ve seen these masks are not like characters in a play, but a particular creative creation on the part of the person performing and they all carry pieces of that person into the light.  It’s like taking a small piece of yourself that rarely sees public life and asking it to sing “Baby Got Back” at a massive karoake bar.

Over the past few weeks I think I’ve developed a new “mask.”  I don’t have a nose for her yet, but I’m working on it.  I also haven’t figured out a name for her yet, but this is her story. 

On the eve of her first trip to Vegas our clown receives the news that her grandma is in the hospital dying. Does she go?  Does she stay?  She is ripped apart by grief, but unfortunately, grief is never a straight-forward emotion.  Her first response is divine calm.  Her grandma will finally pass into the arms of her waiting, loving relatives.  Then rage washes over her.  How can she even consider going to Vegas?  Then happiness.  Grandma would want her to go.  Then resignation.  She has to go.  Then, at last, pain.  Wracking sobs well into the night.

Boarding the plane the next morning our clown is indeed a sad clown.  She puts on various masks to disguise her unease, but she is truly a sad clown.  In the plane she flies over the Rocky Mountains, her home, and into the beautiful desert, dry, parched and cracking.  Suddenly, bright blue water appears as if conjured out of thin air and then buildings that glint silver in the hot desert sun.  This place is totally nuts.  The next three days are filled with a surreal mixture of money, sex, alcohol, heat, bodies, sleep, and death.  Our clown breathes in the ridiculousness of it and lets it course through her veins until insanity becomes her state of mind.  She laughs and stumbles, no tears are shed.  This is the clown we laugh at.

On the morning of her last day in Sin City reality seeps back in.  Her grandmother has passed away.  A volley of phone calls to and from family follows.  Our clown breathes in her insanity.  Her grandma did not want a funeral.  “Preposterous,” the rest of the family says.  The arguments between the family begin, but the clown becomes the telephone line, pulsing with the anger and resentment of those speaking into her.  But before the messages reach the other parties our clown ingests them, eats them whole like snakes swallowing their dinner.  The ringing phone is silent.  Another lung full of insanity and our clown enters the casino for the last time to play Craps.  For hours she sits at the table with her husband imagining herself in some Rat Pack movie.  She’s winning, the free drinks are flowing.  She is a happy clown.  Then the phone begins to ring.  But, as they say, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.  Our clown deposits her zen insanity into a slot machine at the airport with her last quarter and boards the plane for home.

The plane rises into a rare Las Vegas storm.  Thunder shakes the plane.  Lightning flashes past the windows.  People on the plane gasp.  Then they break free.  Outside the window, burnt orange delirium.  The sun pushes through the clouds and the landscape looks like something from Mars.  The rain runs in spirdering rivulets, turned the color of lightning by the setting sun.

After a short night’s sleep a new insanity begins for our clown.  Take the husband to a root canal appointment.  Drop-off happy husband.  Pick up the dog from a friend’s house.  Pick-up numb husband.  Talk to relatives on the phone.  As our clown’s numbness sets in, her husbands pain increases.  The doctor forgot to give him pain medicine and antibiotics.  Must clean house.  There is a stranger coming.  By night our clown’s husband is pulling at his hair in pain.  A restless night.  Morning.  Frantic calls to dentists and pharmacists.  Pick-up pain meds, drop-off pain meds, pick up clown at the airport.  A real clown, nose and all.  Our clown says…well, I’ll paraphrase:

“Hi!  Had a good flight?  We’re happy you’re here.  You totally don’t know us, as a friend of a friend.  Our life’s a little crazy right now.  My grandma just died.  My husband had a root canal.  Our house has odd vibes, but we are so happy to have you with us.”

The real clown seems to take this news in stride.  She’s a clown, of course.  Home.  Her husband is sleeping very soundly.  He cleaned a bit while she was gone.  We show the clown to her digs, make lunch, chat, figure out her transportation.  Then our clown drops THE clown off at her space for her tech rehearsal.  Our clown comes home and crawls into bed next to her husband.  After a brief nap she opens her laptop to find a bridge has collapsed five minutes away.  Images flash across her computer screen:  dust, sirens, crushed cars, fire, injured, dead.  People are dead.  People are dead who live in our city.  “Husband, look.”  Her husband is teetering and warm.  She takes his temperature.  It’s 103 degrees.  The emergency rooms are full.  She fetches bags of ice to put under his armpits, cool towels for his forehead.  He sleeps.  She looks at her computer again.  Where there was a bridge there is no bridge.  Death.  She’s a sad clown again as tears drip onto the space bar of her keyboard.

Our clown’s life drifts back into a reasonable pace, gliding through blips of grief.  She buries herself in news coverage on the bridge, obsessing over those who died or are missing.  Her husband goes through the second of three appointments on his tooth.  His pain cools and he goes back to work.  The real clown flits in and out of the house.  Our clown also goes back to work, staring numbly through the store entrance feeling utterly disconnected from the travelers passing in and out of the doors.  The phone calls slow down.  The family’s grief, anger, and resentment drift off into a calmness punctuated by occasional gasps of unfulfilled sobs.  Her mother is being haunted by her grandma’s ghost.  We are going to try to have a baby.  The river releases more bodies.

Our clown goes to Wisconsin.  Three hours in the car with the Indigo Girls (our clown’s idea of heaven).  Her grandma isn’t waiting for her in the window this time, but she looks anyway.  Grandma’s room has been hastily converted into a workout/office room.  The artifice of this move shines through in the obviously unused look of the equipment.  Grandma’s stuff is in boxes in the closet.  Her uncle brings them out into the dining room where two weeks before our clown enjoyed lunch with her grandma, sister, and nephew.  Two weeks before that she sat with her husband for hours contentedly watching her grandma work on wordfind puzzles.  Hours pass as she sifts through her grandma’s archive, pulling out items she thinks members of her family would like.  Her aunt goes through the pictures with her.  Invites her to stay for dinner.  They remember together.  Her aunt thinks she’s being haunted as well.  “Why doesn’t she want to haunt me?” our clown wonders.  She packs up her “Grandma Box” and begins the trip home.  She stops at the casino.  A bit of the Vegas zen insanity creeps back into her lungs with the smoke in the casino.  She plays some slots, wins some money, and hops back in the car with the Indigo Girls for the trip home.  No tears were shed this day.  She is a thinking clown.

At home she reads her grandma’s diary.  It begins in January 2004:

“My Grandaughter Shannon and Scott gave me this beautiful Journal.  I enjoyed their visit before Christmas.  They will see me again next year.  They are two special people to me.”

It ends in November 2005:

“Wish all my family could be together.  Pen ran out of ink.  There isn’t much to write about this time.  I hope to finish this Journal.  God willing.”

Our clown closes it, puts it away and falls asleep.  No tears are shed.

The next evening our clown has hit her “Fridays.”  She must open her store at 5:30am on Saturday so Friday night is always a struggle for sleep.  To occupy herself she grabs her grandma’s wordfind book.  Our clown always loved wordfinds just like her grandma.  She opens to the first puzzle.  Her grandma already started it.  The words are awkwardly looped with a shaky pen.  She looks over the puzzle and loops a couple words.  Then she discovers that her grandma forgot to loop the second S at the end of “sweetness.”  Our clown pulls the pen over the shaky writing and extends her own straight, definite pen loop around the S.  Then our clown feels her stomach flip over like the loop on the S and begins to cry in earnest.  She cries until she’s in a stupor.  Her husband walks in, shocked and eager to help.  “What happened?”  Our clown’s first few attmpets to explain to him the cause of her sobbing are completely impossible to decipher through the crying.  Finally she manages to get out, “She forgot the S.”  Her husband stares at her confused and slightly worried at her utter lack of clarity.  After several minutes of our clown attempting to explain it to him, finally needing to show him the puzzle and demonstrate the extra loop, he understands, but is clearly still at a loss for why this incident caused such a waterfall.  He offers to make some tea.  Our clown falls asleep before she can drink it.

The end.

It’s weird when you wake up one morning and you can suddenly feel that your life is back to “normal.”  I’m back to being me, but with a few modifications.  I’m not exactly sure what those modifications may be, but I’ll know as they appear I suppose.  Right now we’re getting ready for my in-laws to visit and I’m working on making up for some of the time I lost to study for subfield exams.  Studying.  That’s what I’m doing today as you can see from this enormously long blog.  Once my finger stops tapping on these letter keys and moves to the mouse pad to “publish” it, I will have to get dressed and start studying…after I walk the dog. 

Vegas Baby!

Okay, so totally not about academics at all.  Scott and I are going to Vegas this weekend to celebrate our fifth anniversary.  I have a new phone that takes pictures now, so I set up an album online where you, my dear friends can come watch our progress through pictures.  We’ll see how this goes.  When I get back I might try to assemble it into some kind of narrative blog entry.  However, the pictures might end up speaking for themselves.

To view my Vegas album click on the following link.  https://www.t-mobilepictures.com/slmwalsh/Vegas

Sanctuary

In the Series of Unfortunate Events series of books the author is constantly throwing out big twelve dollar words and defining them through the action in the book.  In the first book he uses ”sanctuary” to describe the tent the orphans set up in the house of the bad guy.  I suppose my affinity for this word might have to do with the fact that in the movie Jude Law narrates, but this word, “santuary,” with Jude Law’s delicious accent, always comes back into my head in my really stressful moments.  It’s become a sort of mantra for me really.

It popped in there last night when I was thinking about my grandma.  My grandma and I are very close, always have been.  She took care of my sister and I on a regular basis when we were kids because my parents couldn’t always afford childcare.  Most of the comforts I seek in my life were inspired by my time with my grandma.  I love swimming, they always had a pool at their apartments and took us all the time.  I still crave potato buds, Stove Top stuffing, and Spaghetti-Os as comfort foods.  I think of her pots of flowers now when I work in my garden.  She would rub my back until I fell asleep as a kid.  In the stressful environment I grew up in, my grandma was a sanctuary.

This week I found out my grandma went into congestive heart failure.  This is the third time in her life that her heart has failed her.  She’s already had two triple by-pass surgeries.  Surviving physical set-backs is my grandma’s forte.  She had to leave Colorado when I was in high school because her heart could no longer handle the altitude.  Shortly after moving back to the east coast my grandpa passed away.  She moved into several assisted living complexes before eventually moving in with my uncle and his wife.  For years I had to hear about my grandma’s battles to survive via my mom.  As per her usual, every physical problem my grandma went through was a sure sign of her impending death for my mom.  Weeding out the truth through the forests of my mom’s anxieties and exaggerations was an exhausting process.  I, unfortunately, only got to see my grandma every other year or so.

My belief in fate was restored when, as Scott and I were preparing to move to Minneapolis, my grandma told me she, my uncle and his wife, would be moving to Wisconsin, my grandma’s childhood home.  They are about a three hour drive from us.  I visit her regularly now.

 I invited my whole family here this past Christmas largely for her.  My uncle and my mom haven’t been on speaking terms for years so, acting as a mediator, I convinced them to let my grandma spend the holidays with us.  Her 90th birthday was also December 29th.  The difficulty here is that since September my grandma has begun sufferring from demetia.  Her usually sharp memory is fading rather quickly.  I tried to prep my family, especially my mom, for this, but the holidays still ended up being difficult.  My family had a really difficut time dealing with my grandma’s new state of being.  While she still jokes and has moments of lucidity, she was cognizant of when her mind would go and as a result spent much of her time quiet or sleeping.  

Since the holidays she has slipped further, hanging up the phone when relatives call or falling asleep while they talk to her.  Faces and names of those closest to her have begun to slip away from her.  While everyone around me mourns this, I have attempted to embrace it, encouraging her to tell me her thoughts and dreams, supporting her trips across multiple places and times as she talks to me, coupling her loss of a sense of time with an open acceptance of her new reality, whether it’s this present reality or not.  She’s been my sanctuary, it’s my turn to be her’s.

When I called earlier this week to schedule a time to visit and my uncle’s wife told me she had been in the hospital I went to Wisconsin the next day to visit her.  Paula, my uncle’s wife, had talked for some time about the deteriorating condition of my grandma’s mental health.  On Paula’s last visit to my grandma in the rehabilitation center my grandma had fortgotten who she was.  She’s lived with Paula for almost a decade now.  While my grandma expressed a desire to come home, she wasn’t making an effort in the center.  She was sleeping most of the time, refusing to eat, and making no effort to do anything on her own.  Paula had tried everything to cheer her up, brought her their family dog to visit, and nothing seemed to be working.  So maybe I was the ticket.

It’s a strange thing to try to prepare yourself for someone not remembering you.  I sat in the car, a teddy bear and one of my grandma’s sweaters in my hand, trying to prepare myself for that possibility.  I don’t think I ever really believed it would happen, ( do you ever really believe it will happen?) but I definitely was afraid she might not know me.  We walked in, she was sleeping, so I knelt down by the side of her bed and woke her up.  She opened her eyes, looked at me, and this huge smile crossed her face.  “Shannon?”  Then the smile faded.  “Are you really here?”  She doubted my presence in her reality.  She looked confused.  “Yep.  I’m here.”  The smile came back and she bit her bottom lip like a kid who just got a piece of candy.  “I didn’t know if I’d see you again.”  It took every ounce of strength I had to not cry at that moment.

I gave her the teddy bear and my uncle and Paula went to get a wheelchair so we could take her for a walk.  I sat there holding her hand and watching her slip in and out of sleep.  The nurse came and asked us to step out of the room while she got her in the chair.  When she opened the door my grandma was sitting there still clutching the teddy bear in her lap.  We took her outside.  It was a gorgeous day.  She fell asleep a few times as we walked.  When we came back to the entrance near the hanging flowers I asked her to tell me all the names of the flowers.  She did and for a brief few moments allowed herself to fall back into her past and talk about planting flowers.  I showed her some pictures from Christmas.  She named Scott and I and could remember kissing my nephew, but it was clear the other people in the pictures, my aunt, her eldest, and my dad were more fuzzy.  She asked to go back inside.  I didn’t wait for the nurse, but looked at my grandma when we got to her room and said, “Okay, you’re going to get out of this chair on your own with my help.”  She stood up and walked to her bed, still clutching the teddy bear, and laid back down.  I whispered to her to be feisty with the nurses and tell them she could do everything on her own.  She smiled, the lights wents out again, and she fell back to sleep.

Now I’m the one who has to pass information about my grandma to the rest of my family.  I spoke with my mom and totally understood the frustration in her voice at not being able to be with my grandma and having to hear about it from her daughter.  I suddenly realized I’ll be the one to call them when she passes away.  I spend a long time on the phone with my mom as she quickly breezes through anger, frustration, sadness and a myriad of other emotions.  I talk to my sister who feels helpless and sad.  Twenty-four hours after my visit I finally have a space to take it in myself.  I get ready to write this blog and I’m interupted by life.  Now, forty-eight hours later I finally have my time.  Sanctuary.

What’s in a name?

Apparently quite a lot.  I’m not a Dr. yet, but this blog will chronicle my way there and hopefully help motivate me on the way.  If all goes as planned I will really be Dr. Walsh in about three years.

 So my journey.  In a nutshell spliced together through fragments.  I was a high school theatre geek.  I was actually a high school theatre-choir-orchestra-stuco-AP-NHS geek, but theatre always ran first on that list.  For the moment, I’ll skip the high school details and move on.  I went to a liberal arts school on the east coast, Maine to be exact, where I doubled majored in biology and theatre, theatre being quite an unpractical profession in my mind at that point.  I am practical, occassionally.  Failure there.  Transferred to Colorado State where a double major in biology and theatre was impossible. 

Fragment:  I sat on my couch at home talking to my mom about my decision.  I had agonized over it for weeks.  Spent time talking to people from both programs.  I had already made my decision, but hadn’t yet vocalized it.  “I can’t not do theatre.”  My mom, always supportive, fully agreed with me.  A rarity as parents go.

Fragment:  My boyfriend and I, after both transferring back to Colorado, go back to our high school to talk to our teachers.  Mrs. APEnglish teacher.  You know, the one you always tried to impress, but managed to always fall short.  I tell her my choice.  “What a disappointment.  What a waste of talent.”  The words stamped themselves on my being.  I will prove her wrong, I thought.

The program at CSU was small, but fierce.  As I moved through the other activities I chose to hang on to fell away, cello, and eventually singing (the end of my relationship with musical theatre). 

Fragment:  I’m in the design studio at CSU.  Three years of class work is being persued by the faculty, set designs, costume designs, and a massive pile of papers.  “So, what do you want to do for you senior project?”  “I want to write a thesis.”  Pause.  “I don’t think anyone’s ever done that here.”

I graduated early (thought I graduated anyway, another story I may or may not re-live here) and there I was with a BA in performing arts.

Whoop-dee-friggin-do.  As any theatre BA graduate will tell you, this particular degree does not buy much in the real world.  Let me re-frame that statement.  A BA in performing arts from CSU doesn’t buy you much.  However, as with any degree, it’s what you make of it.  Initially I didn’t make much of it.  I thought at the time I wanted to be an actor.  I worked in town in community theatre and dinner theatre shows and worked full-time (as actors do) during the day at a daycare and the mall.  I toyed with the idea of grad school. 

Fragment:  I’m standing on a slope next to I think a bell tower at UC Berkeley.  To my right is the library.  Stretched out in front of me is San Francisco bay at sunset.  I want to be here. 

I always sent for the applications, filled them out halfway and never sent them.  A few years passed, three I think.  I did plays in town.  I fell in love with my husband.  Before we got married I told him I wanted to go to grad school and that it probably meant leaving Colorado.  He was cool with that.  He got a job that was easily transferrable.  We got married and I applied for schools in the fall. 

Fragment:  I’m sitting in the library at CSU on Valentine’s Day.  An e-mail pops up from a professor at Florida State.  “Call me so we can chat about the program, it says.”  I have to leave the library to shout out loud.

My master’s program at FSU was amazing.  After one semester I knew I wanted to get my PhD. 

Fragment:  I’m at Smoky Bones having beer and watching the first night of Monday Night Football.  I’m a few beers in.  The sideline reporter, Lisa Guererro comes on wearing a light purple chiffon dress and heels to interview players on the sideline.  Jesus!  What the hell is wrong here?  She looks ridiculous, like eye-candy.  I rant about it.

 I write a paper about women in sports, particularly focused on football.  I present it at my first conference.  It turns into my thesis on women’s performance in sports.  I apply for the FSU PhD program.  At my faculty’s urging I also apply to UT Austin and UMN. 

Fragment:  I leave Sonja’s office.  I walk outside.  It’s mid-March and fairly freezing.  I have to go somewhere to cry.  I walk behind what I now know is the music building, look across the river and sob.  How can they not want me?  Why did they let me come here?  Maybe this is fate.  We’re not supposed to be here.  I call Scott and tell him about my meeting.  He tells me to turn around and tell them I want the spot and whatever I need to do to get it, I’ll do it.

I write Sonja an e-mail.  I want a position in your program, is in essence what the e-mail says.  Three agonizing weeks pass.  I finally get my acceptance letter from UMN.  The PhD program at FSU folds.

Here I am, though.  Two years in and still going.

This blog has a specific purpose.  I’m getting ready to begin work, allbeit preliminary work, on my dissertation.  I’m also reading a book called How to Write Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day.  In it she says that writing has to become a way of thinking for you.  You have to do it everyday; a lesson my advisor from FSU also told me.  So, this blog will contain my daily dose of writing.  I’m not sure how interesting it will be for other to read.  It will chronicle….well, definitely my dissertation process.  Who knows what else.  “It’s a mystery really.”