My Christmas Wish

A friend of mine messaged me on Facebook today and mentioned that she was sad that the new newsfeed settings didn’t allow her to see my posts. She had missed out on seeing all of Jet’s hilarious antics on Facebook because of it. I explained a workaround for that to her and hopefully she will start seeing my posts again soon. She mentioned a funny story about her Dad in her message that made me smile from ear to ear. Her dad passed away earlier this year and it was good to see her relate funny stories about him that I could tell were making her smile too. This is what Christmas is for. It’s about making memories with the people we love so that when the time comes that all we are is a memory, they have some wonderful stories to pass on.

This year has been tough for all of us in its own ways, but I’ve finally come to a place where I have made peace with all of the bad things that happened this year. My son officially became an adult. He’s legally not my problem anymore and I can’t tell you how much it hurts to know that when Christmas morning comes for him, all of the childhood magic will be gone from that tree.

I remember waking up on Christmas morning after I turned 18 and feeling like it was the end of an era, like everything had changed and it was true. Everything had changed. I couldn’t sit there in denial of my status and I felt everything that I had loved as a kid just slipped right out of my fingers during that 18^th year of my life.  I didn’t get that magic back until I had my son and now that my kids are nearly grown, I wonder how I will keep the Christmas magic alive.

I miss Lucy still, all the time. This has been a hard Christmas because she’s not here to smile at me when I get home. I still cry when I think about her licking her chops while slowly parking her butt on the floor as I took a piece of string cheese out of the fridge. Or good grief, that hoodie we put her in last January because her belly had been shaved and it was so cold that you felt it seep into your very bones, so we refused to send Lucy outside “naked” and my daughter improvised with a short sleeved hoodie that she never wore. Dear God did Lucy ever look adorable in that hoodie. When I think of her in that ridiculous get up with a big goofy grin on her face, I can’t help but smile, even though I have to reach for the kleenex while I’m doing it. There are so many good memories mixed in with all of the sadness here.

The thing that saddens me most though, at this time of year, is not what I have lost or what I have gained. It’s that I have a unique perspective on the lives of others and sometimes I see them miss opportunities that cause me to sit back and shake my head.

Having children young is a bit of a double edged sword. On the one hand, I’m done raising my kids and I’m not even 40. I can now go out and spend my days being wild and crazy and carefree while I’m still young enough to enjoy doing all of that stuff. On the other, I see all of my friends sitting around with their kids still young and still at home and occasionally, I want to smack them for being selfish and stupid.

Supposedly, maturity, and responsible behavior too, are things that comes with being a parent, but it doesn’t seem like these things always go hand in hand. Being a parent for me meant sacrificing a lot of things. I wasn’t always the perfect picture of responsibility, but I never dumped my kids off on my parents for weeks on end to spend time hanging out with my friends. The simple concept of not seeing my children every single day was enough to send me into panic attacks. The kids went with me if I wanted to hang out with my friends or my husband or I stayed home so the other could go out and have fun. Honestly, I wouldn’t have made it through those early years of raising children without a spouse to lean on and help take some of the pressure off.  When the right man came along, I knew him when I found him because he wanted nothing to do with anything that came between me and my child.

I was a single parent for about a year and it sucked! The hardest part of it was that my son had to go with me absolutely everywhere. In some ways, that was very good because everywhere I went, we were together. If he wasn’t attached to my hip, he was sleeping in his carseat or his stroller or at home in his crib and I was never more than three feet from him. I never left the raising of my child up to a daycare center or someone else. My friends would come over on weekends, sure, but when they went home, guess who stayed and continued to raise the kids?

You guessed it!

So to all of my friends out there this Christmas, those of you that are wonderful parents, and you know who you are, give yourselves a big pat on the back and hug your children tonight. Those of you that aren’t doing such a good job know who you are too, and you need to do better. You should be spending time with your child, not your new friends or your new boyfriend/girlfriend, or even me.

Your kids will not be children forever. The time you have with them right now is so precious and I would love to smack you upside your big fat head for squandering it.

Some day, that little kid that looks up at you with adoration no matter how stupid you are right now, is going to walk out the front door with all of his stuff packed up in his car and he’s going to hug you and say good bye and go out there and live his life and he’s going to do it without your permission.

I’m not kidding. He is going to do this. You will not like it and there will not be one single thing you can do to stop it.

All you will be able to do is watch him go.

You will want every single moment of this time that you chose to waste back and guess what?

Ain’t gonna happen.

For your sake, and that of these kids, I have only one wish for Christmas.

It’s that every parent on the face of this planet gets their head out of their ass and puts their children first, because Christmas is about them and for them. It’s about creating memories and making every single minute count, because we only have so many minutes to spend loving the people we love and our children should always receive every single speck of love that we can give them. This should always come before everything else.

So, I say this with all the love in my heart. Get your head out of your ass. Love your KIDS. If you are personally responsible for doing something that is preventing you from spending every single day with your child outside of having a court order that prevents you from doing so, you’re doing it WRONG. So stop being such a selfish douche!

Go pick up your kids and love them, because they deserve everything you have to give and more.

This is my message of love, to my friends and family, I know it sounds cold and harsh, but it really is motivated by seasonal feelings and a desire to spread love, joy and cheer. Maybe not to you, but to your kids? For sure.

Merry Christmas.

A Christmas Gift from the Geeky Gemini Girl

I think about marriage and divorce a lot. In part, because I am married and have been with my husband now for 20 years. Ours is the longest running, happiest and most stable relationship I know besides that of some of our friends’ parents. I have plenty of friends who are in good, stable and happy relationships, but they are still in the process of raising their young families. Bill and I now really get the time to spend with each other, being who we are and we’re finding that we still like each other after all this time. Right now, we really are the happiest couple I know, but that’s only because we have a slight time advantage on the others what with our kids nearly being grown and the stress of whether our kids are going to turn out like normal adults is off the table. Our relationship has also outlasted more than a few that we have encountered over the years. Several of our friends have gotten divorced, one just recently.

At the same time while I’m seeing all of this, I’m watching my brother and his girlfriend struggle with their relationship. They’re trying to figure out who they are as a couple while having all the challenges of being new parents and this is probably the most difficult time in any relationship. Many, many relationships begin and end in this phase. So, every time I see one of them say something on Facebook that lets me know that they are arguing, I think about my friends who have been getting divorced and the utter hell their children have been put through during the process and I think about my little niece, who is only 2 months old, living her life without either one of her wonderful parents as a daily participant in every moment and it breaks my heart. She deserves to have both of her parents, every kid does.

I doubt that my brother and his girlfriend are heading for a breakup, but being a writer, my mind tends to wander to the most dramatic outcome possible. So I do tend to see the worst, even if I don’t expect it to occur. I just wish I could express to them that I really get it. I am 13 years older than my brother, we have a generation gap between us, so I’m almost like another parent in some respects as far as he’s concerned. Often, what I say goes in one ear and out the other, but I remember how hard it was for my husband and I. We had kids first and got married when our daughter was six months old. We spent the first five years of our marriage figuring out how to be parents and we absolutely hated each other. We fought constantly and righteously for our causes and we were both right to stand our ground on the things we stood our ground on, but we were also both horribly wrong for being so stubborn about it.

That really was the biggest downfall of our early years in marriage. Bill and I are both bullheaded and as stubborn as they come. I’m just a little bit more stubborn than Bill, which meant that I usually won the arguments and Bill felt downtrodden a lot. It took so long for me to open my eyes to what I was doing to Bill, that I almost lost him and then when I opened my eyes and really saw who we were and how miserable we both were and was ready to make the step to not being that person anymore and choosing to be happy with what we had, Bill had such a hard time believing it that he almost lost me.

It took ten years of us saying to ourselves every morning, “I chose to spend the rest of my life with this one person. I hate who we are right now, but this WILL get better.” For us to believe it and for that dream to become a reality. And now, here we are, 18 years later and we are still very much in love, just as much as we were when we first met and we are very happy with each other and who we are and who we have become and the lives we have built on that foundation of constantly fighting with and for each other.

The difference between us and so many other couples out there that have chosen not to stay together, is just that. We made a choice.

Having a child is a choice.

Having a family is a choice.

Getting married is a choice.

Loving someone and making that love last through the ages is a choice, it’s not something that happens to you by some strange twist of fate. It’s something that you carefully select, place into the earth and spend hours every single day cultivating it until all of your hard work blooms into something so precious and so beautiful that people who walk past the two of you, when you’re holding hands in public, blush because they feel as though they just intruded on a private moment.

It also helps, if you decide from the very beginning that leaving is not an option. You have to make that promise to each other from day one that you are in this relationship for the long haul. You have to say to yourself that come hell or high water, you will stay, even if some days, you only stay because you know the person you married is a good parent and your kids would be miserable without them.

I won’t lie to you about this, the early years of any marriage are hell, especially when you’re new to parenting and most marriages don’t survive the stress that comes with evolving from care-free adult, to responsible parent, but if you really want it to, it can. You just have to choose it.

So my Christmas gift to all of the couples I know is the above gem. Marriage is not about true love or flower petals on satin sheets. It is about farting under the covers and staying with the person you are with, no matter how crazy they make you, because in order to find the truly good things in a person’s soul, you have to first see all of the bad and when we are changing and becoming something different, we are at our very worst. On the other side of that change though, we are at our very best and that is always worth waiting for. There are some days now, when I wake up beside Bill and think, “Good God, I love this man. How in the hell could I have ever hated him as much as I did back then? What was I thinking?”

And I know the answer, I was younger and far less wise and I was so stressed out by being a parent to two young children that I did not see what I had right in front of me and neither did Bill. So tell the person you’re with that you love them and try to remember how you got to where you are in the first place and don’t forget that it was love that brought you together and if you really love someone, it is most definitely enough.

Merry Christmas.

Run Free Lucy.

‘I gather my strength and I start off and it feels good, like I have no age at all, like I am timeless. I pick up speed. I run.” – Garth Stein The Art of Racing in the Rain

Many of you already know, that Miss Lucy is gone. I posted a longer version of the above quote on Facebook the day after she passed, but this is the part that stays with me when I think about the days after she died and when I think of what I know happened next for her. It doesn’t make it easier and I keep thinking that if I just believe hard enough that she is happy and she is free, it will get easier, but it doesn’t.

I have been reluctant to tell the story of how she died because I was saving it to publish in the novel I have been working on about Lucy. I came to a decision this morning that the story of my life with Lucy is not something I am ready to share with the world just yet. It is too personal and too private. My grief is too new and I don’t know that I will ever manage it well enough to discuss my girl on a casual basis without massive quantities of alcohol flowing through my veins. I also came to the decision that I need the closure that I know will come with writing about how we let her go. I hate how things ended. I hate it so much that I didn’t want to write this post, but she deserves a eulogy and I have put off writing it for far too long, so here goes.

On Monday, August 8, 2011, Lucy had trouble getting up and preferred to stay laying down. She was still able to go outside to the bathroom, but stairs were hard for her. We took her out front on lead to let her do her thing that day and I figured that she’d just injured her shoulder somehow so I chose to do conservative management and then we’d see how it went.

Tuesday, things were a little better and I thought I saw her improving until later that night. When Lucy was laying on the floor, I saw massive bruising in between her front legs. I called the emergency vet and we went in. He told me she was not bleeding internally, they ran her blood work again and her platelet count was recovering to a level that lifted my hopes a bit. He sent us home with advice to return to WSU.

Things were fine again until Wednesday morning. Lucy could not get up. I called the regular vet and got her in with them. Lucy’s regular vet was unavailable so we saw a different vet, whom we had seen before and I felt comfortable with. She examined Lucy’s shoulder, did x-rays and found no cause for the massive lump in her shoulder. They did not think it was internal bleeding and suspected that a mast cell tumor had formed inside the joint but were reluctant to do an aspirate. We went home again with pain medication and she went potty at the vet before we left. That was the last time we were able to get her to walk under her own power. That night, after I gave her the pain meds, she laid down in the kitchen tile and I knew something was wrong. I thought maybe it was the pain pills, even though I’d only given her half the amount prescribed. She also refused her dinner.

Wednesday night, I slept in the living room while Lucy laid in the dining room floor and slept. Bright and early at 5:30 she woke me up with a few barks. I got up and offered her some of her dinner, which she refused. I asked her if she wanted to go potty and she looked away, so I brought her a bowl of water and she drank it down. I had my husband help me get her up when he came downstairs and tried to get her outside, but something was wrong with her back legs and she fell down. He asked me if I needed him to stay and I told him to go to work and that I would figure something out. Lucy did not get up from that spot again that day.
By 11:30 that morning, I knew. I looked at Lucy and I said to myself, “This is not the life I want for her. This is not the life we have been fighting for.”

I hated that truth. I hated it so much, but I couldn’t ignore it. So I sat down in the floor with Lucy and we looked at each other and I saw her love for me there and I saw how tired she was and my heart sank.

It was time.

I called my husband and told him to come home.

By 3 pm on August 11, 2011, Lucy was safely at Rainbow Bridge with all of the other dogs that I have loved. She went peacefully, in my arms while we stood around her telling her how much we loved her. There was not a dry eye in that room and the wonderful staff at the vet’s office hugged us and took good care of us and even shed a few tears of their own for our sweet girl.

It gives me comfort to know that Reilly and Duchess are with her and that my grandparents are watching over her, probably loving her as much as I did and still do. I was numb as we left the vet’s office. I couldn’t believe that it was over. I had wanted so much more than 21 months spent fighting cancer and wrangling with vets and debating over how to give her the best quality of life, but ultimately, that is what it came down to. There was no quality in life left for Lucy. Her spirit would have carried her so much farther than her body could.

I hate that. I hate that I held her in my arms and kissed her good-bye and that I had to choose for her. I now completely understand what a gift it was that Reilly chose his own time and that I didn’t have to make that decision for him.

I was okay for the remainder of the day, but the next day, when I picked up her blanket and her ashes, it was like someone had taken all of the worth and the beauty out of my life. She was everything to me and I have struggled with moving on. I haven’t wanted to admit to myself that she’s gone and when I think about it, when I really think about the fact that she isn’t here and that I won’t see her smiling at me for cheese… well I have a hard time reaching into the drawer to grab that stick of string cheese now.

What keeps me going, is remembering that some things will never change.

She will always be our pretty yellow dog. We will always remember our last summer together as The Summer of Cheese. We only had 21 months together, but no one can take that time away from us and we do not regret a single moment. They were some of the most wonderful months of our lives and I believe that they were the best months of hers. She was so easy to love, but she is impossible to forget. We are very blessed to have had her in our lives at all. I said it every day that she was alive and I still believe it now. Lucy was a gift to us from heaven. I pray that everyone has the chance to have that kind of love in their lives because Lucy made our world a better place to be and made us better human beings. I will always be grateful for her love.

Run free my beautiful Miss Lucy Girl, until we meet again.

A Note on Humility

I got into a discussion on Facebook yesterday about immigration and why I am not okay with illegal immigrants benefitting from government programs. The response to that comment really surprised me, because one of the commenters was a green card holder and he found no problem at all with the idea that people who were not paying into the system were taking advantage of it, because the system was broken.

That thought outraged me. Two wrongs do not make a right, but I wasn’t sure how to respond because this argument feeds into the core of my political beliefs. I am a centrist, not a conservative. I believe in saving our planet. I recycle. I drive a car that gets 30 MPG. I conserve energy and reduce and reuse items where I can. I believe in social programs that give those in need a hand up, not a hand out.

I do not feel that our current welfare system helps those that are truly in need, but rather, it props up a class of people who are unwilling to help themselves. If you are genuinely down on your luck, I have no problem with you asking the taxpayers around you to help shoulder your burden for a little while. But it’s help. Not a meal ticket. You should be your own meal ticket.

When I think of all of these things and the general attitude of the blame game, and how it’s okay to blame one person for a war that he didn’t choose, that was brought to our doorstep and broadcast on national television, but it’s NOT okay to blame congress for making poor budget decisions and instead, we should discredit the agencies which are taking our lawmakers to task for their shoddy representation of us, I get sick to my stomach.

Unlike these self serving people, I remember where we came from. I remember the devastation. I remember the terror in my own heart and how I needed our president to respond by hunting those sons of bitches down and bringing them to justice and that is precisely what he did.

I disagree with many decisions that President Bush made, but on this one thing, I will never disagree. Hunting down terrorists and taking the fight to where they lived was the right thing to do for the American people. He prioritized OUR needs. He made me feel like we were in control of our destiny.

President Obama makes me feel afraid and uncertain, unconfident and unsure. There is no course to stay, because the course is erratic and involves spending more money than our country can ever make. President Obama inspires me to want to live somewhere else, because the America I see right now is an America that is not taking care of itself on the most basic levels. I feel like this nation is drowning in a sea of debt that it will never be able to dig itself back out of, because we simply do not make as much money as we’re spending.

That’s how I was feeling, until I saw images of Onagawa, Japan. It has been five months since the Tohoku Kanto Earthquake, and subsequent tsunami, devastated the Kanto region. Some areas will never recover and will never be rebuilt. In the grand scheme of things, politics and posturing do not matter. I don’t care what side of the aisle you are on, tragedy affects us all the same.

After seeing an entire city laid to waste, weather that city is in Japan, or in New York, how can you not find enough compassion in your heart to set aside differences and work toward the best interests of your nation? Why must we punish those who succeed for the sake of those who refuse to try? And why can we not help those people who genuinely need assistance when they need it? More worrisome to me, is why we find it acceptable for other people to take advantage of us, simply because it’s easy to do.

Just because it’s easy, doesn’t make it right.

Many of us remember September 11th and the feeling of unity that swept this nation afterward. It took some terrorists flying planes into skyscrapers in New York City to get us to put those differences aside long enough to agree on anything. The division between the political parties now is worse than I have ever seen it.

What will it take this time? How many people have to die before we get our heads out of our asses and see that what we are doing is not working? What will it take for us to see that the politicians we hired to do a job for us are failing *us*.

I pray that it will not take a tragedy of this magnitude for us to wake up.

My prayers and my heart go out to the people of Onagawa, who have lost their livelihood, their home and their lives as they knew them to a single force of nature and I pray that America will wise up and choose to no longer be a force for its own destruction.

Danny Choo’s Images of Onagawa, Japan after the Tohoku Kanto Earthquake.

Thanks go to Chuck Gaffney for posting this link on Twitter this morning.

Finer Things

“A dog has no use for fancy cars or big homes or designer clothes. Status symbols mean nothing to him. A water-logged stick will do just fine. A dog judges others not by their color or creed or class but by who they are inside. A dog doesn’t care if you are rich or poor, educated or illiterate, clever or dull. Give him your heart and he will give you his.” – John Grogan

Someone I know posted this quote from the final pages of Marley and Me on Facebook this morning. It was written from the heart, out of love for a yellow Lab that was not entirely unlike my Lucy, who is pictured above, with my other best friend, Mugen. They look so serious, because they are begging for cheese. They’re Labs. They take their food very, very seriously.

Just in case the picture above isn’t enough of an indicator of how much I love my dogs, and Labrador Retrievers in particular, I’ll share with you the fact that Marley and Me is one of my favorite books. I remember it now, not only for its wisdom, humor and excellent story telling, but for how it healed me when I was so badly broken. You see, I read Marley and Me for the first time about a week after my first Lab died. John Grogan’s book reminded me of the joys of dog ownership at a time when I was missing them so badly. I do think I cried harder than I would have, if I’d read Marley and Me before then, but the timing was just what it was. I am grateful now, that I read it when I did because, in spite of the fact that I felt every moment so deeply, I remembered similar things that I had done with my own dog, and at the end, when Marley was gone and the family was remembering him with all of the love in their hearts, I felt that too. It gave me closure and the strength to carry on because I knew when it was over, that I had given my old man a great life filled with love.

We loved him so much that even when other people told us to put him down because he’d done this dangerous thing or that dangerous thing, we didn’t. We chose training over death. We chose obedience over abuse. We made a promise to him and we kept that promise. We made choices as a family that kept him with us until the day came when he was ready to go. It wasn’t always easy, but it was always worth it. I will always remember Reilly’s face the moment that he passed away. He looked right into my eyes as I turned around when I heard him fall. The look on his face said to me, “It’s time, but Oh! How I love you! It pains me to leave you behind.”

Every time I think of that look on his face, I cry, not out of regret, or remorse or any particular pain, but because there was something so beautiful in him in that moment, so perfect and pure. His devotion to me never wavered, not even in his final moments. He gave me so much more than I deserved. I gave him my heart, for sure, but he gave me his heart and his life. The enormity of the trust that it took for him to do that still astounds me two years later.

What also never fails to amaze is the idea that there are so many dog owners out there, like the ones who owned my dogs before they were rescued from shelters, who are undeserving of that kind of devotion and receive it anyway with no concept of what it is that they are being given. The very idea of living a life with the love of a dog and not appreciating that love for the simple thing that it is seems criminal to me, particularly in light of my current situation.

Lucy will leave us someday soon. I hope that it is not for a very long time. I no longer have the illusion that it will be years and years before cancer takes our sweet yellow dog from us. We are stopping her cancer treatment because the drugs are killing her faster than the disease at this point and I hate feeling like we’re giving up, but at the same time I have always known that her time with me was never going to be long enough for me. I knew that when I decided to adopt her. I hoped and prayed for more. I love her so much that I want to keep her here forever, but I know now that this isn’t possible. Lucy would stay with me forever if her body could keep up with her spirit, but that’s just not how things are going to play out. I have learned though that for Lucy, the time she has had with us has been enough.

She knows that she is loved here, she knows that she is safe here and that her needs have always been a priority. She will always have a place at the table, a warm bed to sleep in and someone to hug her and hold her when she is hurting and someone to rub her belly when she is happy and the world is filled with light and joy. Here, she is never, ever alone. I don’t know that she has ever had the ability to count on another human being the way she has been able to count on our family, and I can see it in her eyes every time she smiles at me, that our love for her matters.

It took the love of so many wonderful people to bring her to us, but that love changed her life. It made her life better. It took a broken and sad creature and made her whole. If Lucy takes one thing with her to the bridge ahead of me, I pray that it is the notion that not all human beings are cruel, that there are those of us who love dogs unconditionally and will always return their love, even if they have an accident in the floor or bark at the neighbors’ golden retriever. There are things in this life that matter so much more than annoyed strangers and carpeting. One of those things, is the love of a dog. Some of us are in on the secret, that there is nothing better and we know that each and every one of us, who is lucky enough to be loved by a dog, is completely unworthy of his or her devotion.

Knowing that you are unworthy of the kind of love and devotion is a great place to begin. The world would truly be a better place if we tried to live up to being the sort of person that our dogs think we are or, at the very least, took a page from our dogs and placed less value on material wealth and took a look at the wealth that we can already claim right inside our own little lives.

So, the next time you find yourself staring at a picture of a fancy car or flipping through a fashion magazine in a doctor’s office, remember that your best friend is at home waiting for you and all he needs is you, and a stick, to make his day complete. Let that thought fill you up inside and make you smile, because that, my friend, is the finest thing in life.

I Am A Scripting Warrior

I’ve hit a place with my script where I am in the doldrums. It’s just barely the beginning of week two of Script Frenzy and I’m bored with my script. My characters seem somehow less sparkly and beautiful. They seem flat and lackluster. Every time I sit down in front of my laptop to write, I have pondered the concept of becoming a Script Frenzy rebel and writing a novel instead because, while dialog seems to flow forth from my fingertips, this is my first script. That means only one thing and there is no doubt about this in my mind.

My script sucks.

Before my first NaNo, I had made a previous attempt at novelling and managed to get to 24,000 words on my own. It was a completed piece. It blew and I knew it, but the first one of anything that I write always sucks at least a little and I’m okay with that. That first novella is sitting in my personal slush pile. I think I have a printed copy of it somewhere, but I had forgotten about it entirely until my husband asked me about it a few days ago. I searched my document archives and I was shocked to find that I still had every single draft stored safely on our server.

What I wrote in the summer of 2001 serves as proof that while I can write stuff that sucks, I have the ambition and the drive to see a project through to its end. The problem is, I haven’t finished a single project since then.

A lot of what kept me moving forward during NaNo, was our wonderful MLs. There was a write in nearly every night. If there wasn’t a write in, there was always someone in the chat room ready to word war to keep me motivated. I was heavily dependent upon that to keep me writing and for the last three years that I participated in NaNo, I have won the challenge, but I have not taken a single one of those novels to completion.

I do believe that Script Frenzy has just taught me why.

When I look back on those ridiculous sentences that I put to paper ten years ago, I remember how I felt when I was writing it. I felt whole and complete. When I researched farm equipment so that I could make magical versions of it, I felt like what I was doing had purpose. I felt like *I* had purpose.

During the last three NaNos, my purpose has been to accomplish a very specific task set before me by someone else. I was able to hammer out word after word and chapter after chapter time and again. Sometimes I would get side tracked, but I would hack my way through it to the other side and manage to carve out some prose that seemed to be related to my novel. It was all stream of consciousness chatter though and often, I would find myself working completely off task on some other scene that was being created in a place where it did not belong. Hell, during my first NaNo, I managed to concoct a medieval Japanese Samurai that asked the girl working the Clinique counter at Macy’s out on a date. Figure that one out for me, please.

Amidst all of that noise, I lost sight of what really mattered. I let the story take control and I wrote for its own sake, which can be a really powerful thing at times but, at some point, you have to take the wheel. You have to stop letting the story drive you and force yourself to become the driving force behind your story.

That’s exactly where I’m at right now. We’re at the start of week 2 and I am frustrated and I am angry because I’m only on page 26 and I wanted to be at page 40 by now. Every little thing is a distraction for me. I mean every little thing, from the dogs barking, to the phone ringing, to the wind blowing through the trees outside. Any single one of those things can derail my train of thought and cause me to stop writing for at least an hour before I can get the train rolling again. I have been working on page 27 for almost a week now and that makes me even more crazy.

I want to beat this challenge, but this little story of mine, this little stage play that has been rolling around in my head for years is a lot more important to me than I thought. I realize now, that what I hoped to accomplish here is so much more than to just put down 100 pages worth of dialog, stage direction and scene descriptions. It’s not about sparring with other people or meeting some arbitrary goal, not for me. I could throw out tons of pointless banter about mindless things and get to 100 pages in nothing flat, but I’m not letting my story get away with that this time.

Instead of taking the easy path, I am having to fight this script tooth and nail to keep it on track. I am fighting to save my story. I am arguing with the pointless chatter and carefully sculpting it into something that is not pointless. After all of this battling, I’m still only hoping that I will write something that will have more meaning for me than the napkin I just tossed into the garbage can.

It’s hard, but I’ve done it before. I finished that little novella that I wrote in the summer of 2001, that I thought I had lost completely several computers ago. And yet, somehow, it’s still here. It’s horrible, poorly written, but complete and whole. It’s small and it’s rough, but I fought hard for that story. I had a lot to prove to myself back then, but now things are different.

Now, I know that I can do it again.

So here I go. Page 27… and counting.

That Beginning of the End Place.

Sometime over the weekend (Friday or Saturday, but I am not sure which day exactly because I forgot to log it), I bent down to hold Lucy’s face in my hands and kiss her nose. My fingers are usually on her neck when I do this, with my thumbs on her cheeks. This maneuver serves a dual purpose for me. It holds her head still so I can kiss her and it affords me a low stress opportunity to check her for lumps and bumps. I thought I felt something, but I wasn’t sure. So I compared notes with Mugen and found a lymph node in his cheek in, what I thought, was a similar location. So I let it go.

Sunday night, I was watching TV with hubby and I pulled the same trick on Lucy. I took her head in my hands and went to kiss her nose and the thing was big and felt hard as a rock. There was no denying that I’d found a lump that time and I was sure it wasn’t a lymph node because it was way too large and too far away from where I’d found Mugen’s lymph nodes. I freaked out, I cried a lot and I called the vet.

Dr. Katie saw us on Wednesday and said “I don’t like it.” again when she took the aspirates and did the smears, measured the mass at 2 cm by 3 cm and commented that it was egg shaped and I agreed that that sounded right. She frowned at the thing and told Lucy that she couldn’t make it any more difficult on us if she’d tried.

After the business side of thing was done, she joked that she had considered calling into work because she hates watching us go through this. I love Dr. Katie because she hates to see us. I hate to see her too. I wish I only had to see her twice a year, tops. Instead… the entire staff at the vet’s office knows Lucy and me by name. The other patients there look at us funny when they hear “Hi! How’s Miss Lucy doing?” My God those people have no idea how bad I wish that my Lucy were there for kennel cough or shots. As a matter of fact, I’m not sure that the staff at the vet’s office is even aware that I have another dog and when I do have to bring the poor pupster in, they’re not sure how to pronounce his name. (It’s moo-GEN, not MUH-gin).

I stressed out so bad that I ate Tums like candy yesterday and prayed for a lipoma, even though it’s a really shitty place to have a lipoma, and this morning, I received the cytology report. It’s a mast cell tumor. It’s higher grade, a 2 or possibly a 3. Knowing Lucy’s cancer, it’s a 3. The tumor is sitting on top of her jugular vein. At this point, Lucy’s oncologist has returned an email to let us know that she feels that there is no point in putting Lucy through surgery for this tumor and our best hope, and remaining option, is Palladia or Masitinib (also known as Kinavet).

The real problem comes in here.

These drugs, called TKIs, only work in about 40% of the canine population. There is a test to determine if Lucy is in that 40% so I want to have her tested first. There’s no sense in using Palladia or Masitinib, both of which will make Lucy sick to her stomach, if it won’t even work on her.

Failing that, we love her as hard as we can for as long as we can.

Both of these choices are painful because Palladia is not an option that I’m thrilled with and I refused this drug when we were offered it in December because the agony of holding Lucy while she was sick to her stomach at three am after chemo was very fresh in my mind. This situation is different though, the alternative is Lucy having a stroke, which I am also not particularly thrilled about.

That’s where we’re at. Either way… we’ve hit that beginning of the end place, I know it now… and I hate it very much.

Good Morning Old Friend

This morning, I was sitting here working on re-drafting the outline for a novel that I began in 2009. That story has never really left my mind and it is crying out to be finished. We’ll see what happens with it when I get back into it, but it needs some work and the amount of material that I have left after culling the dreck that spewed out of my brain during word wars is, sadly, not much. Where the story sits right now, it’s not even a novella. It’s a short story.

Outlining, for me, is work. Writing is something I can slap down when I have twenty minutes and feel creative, but the work part of writing a story, is doing the outline. It requires that the entire length of my six foot long dining room table be available to me. I clear everything off of it and I actually grab pens and paper and I organize notes based on my “talking points”. It’s an involved process that ends with my hands covered in paper cuts and filled up plastic pages designed for storing baseball cards. Each pocket contains slips of paper that have a sentence or two meant to describe a third of a chapter… and several sheets, will eventually contain the gist of my novel.

This process can take a couple of days to complete.

I was in the frame of mind to begin that process this morning, but I had some things getting in my way. My dogs, and I write about them a lot so I know that they need no introduction, were wrestling under the dining room table where I was setting up shop. The dining room table is my writing spot. This is where I am creative, it’s where I get things done. I love this room and no one ever eats in there anyway. We don’t even eat in there on Christmas.

It is also Lucy’s favorite spot. I suspect that Lucy likes this spot for the same reasons that I do. It’s out of the way of the rest of the family and yet still within line of sight of everything, so it’s possible to be left alone and not get stepped on, or in my case interrupted, and still be a part of the family activity. Unfortunately, Mugen is quite aware that this is Lucy’s favorite hiding spot. He knows that this is where he can expect to find Lucy when he wants to wrestle and he wants to wrestle every single morning without fail.

Mugen and Lucy used to wrestle with almost no noise made. It didn’t bother me too much, there was the occasional growl or snarl and when it annoyed me, I broke up the wrestling and sent them to their corners. Now, they make a LOT of noise. Lucy is prone to growling and snarling, Mugen is prone to barking at her when she disengages from the fray.

I love watching her walk away from him. It’s at times like this that I wonder if her last name used to be “Princess”, because she wanders off looking like Queen Elizabeth as she’s walking toward some event of state with her nose held ever so slightly in the air. Her movement is full of purpose and importance but her foot steps are still ladylike and elegant. She ignores Mugen completely when she walks off, and he doesn’t like it. He lets her know by barking at her as though she were the enemy at the gates.

While all of this was going on beneath my dining room table, as I was trying to work out where I’d put my post-it notes, I heard a gentle, but distinct knocking sound just to my left. I glanced over and a tiny yellow head bobbed at me from behind the bars of a cage, then it whistled at me.

I smiled.

Graybird has been our constant companion for as long as my husband and I have been married. He was around even before that. He and my husband were a package deal. Graybird has outlived the expectations for most cockatiels, being somewhere between 24 and 26 years old. His plumage is still in full color, faded somewhat from when we first met, but still beautiful. He still does the hokey pokey with me at least once a week and he and I sing to Japanese pop music almost every single morning.

Today, I had skipped our usual singing and Graybird was quietly letting me know that its absence was noted. He was also telling me that his food bowl was empty.

Ignoring the dogs, I got up from my chair and as I stood, Graybird climbed off of his food bowl and back onto his perch and waited for me to take the bowl, fill it with pellets, some dried fruit and half a peanut and then I put it back and he blew kisses at me before he proceeded to dine.

Mugen and Lucy stopped wrestling and stared at me as I talked quietly with Graybird and we exchanged a few more kisses, then I went on with my morning. Graybird used to sit on my shoulder while I wrote. He would blow kisses into my ear and chew on my hair, but Graybird will not let me handle him for very long these days. Not since his partner, Babe, passed away in 2003.

I’ve missed having him whisper in my ear while I work. I think, sometimes, that he still holds it against me, that I took Babe away from him when she died. My husband has to put him on my shoulder for me, he won’t sit on my fingers unless my husband puts him there and it does break my heart, just a little bit. I miss my feathered friend.

But, he has not snubbed me completely.

Every morning, when the house is quiet, Graybird and I exchange a few words, blow a few kisses and he flirts with me a bit. I know that my husband trained Graybird to do all of these things long before I ever met them both, but it still seems to me like this is our routine, a quiet moment, for just the two of us.

Having him in the dining room now, sitting in his cage just over my shoulder has been a nice visit back to the past, when my world was a little less dark and a little more wide. He blows kisses in my ear again when I am writing. He whistles at me like I’m a hot goddess when I come downstairs in my bathrobe and my hair sticking up in such glorious fashion as to make Edward Cullen’s stylist smile with glee and pride. I know the days ahead with the little guy are short and even though he is very small, so very much smaller than my dogs who take up so much more of my time, he will always have a very large place in my heart.

Until then, the sun is warm and shining brightly and when he sings, the world is beautiful.

Christmas Garland

When I was a little girl, my mom and dad bought this beautiful garland for our tree. Well, I was eight and I thought it was beautiful. It was red with a red and white gingham check pattern in the middle. It wasn’t like all the other garland that everyone else had and I loved it. On Christmas morning that year, I don’t remember the presents that were under the tree at all. I remember how beautiful it was, I remember that Santa had been there and turned on the lights and made everything look like magic. I remember the awe and the wonder and believing that miracles could happen.

I think I might have gotten a cabbage patch kid that year.

The presents are not important to my thirty something year old mind. I remember the magic the wonder and the love and how the tree was really all about that.

My mother decorates the most beautiful Christmas trees. I have always endeavored to follow in her footsteps, but I have never received a single compliment about my tree from anyone other than my husband. I try hard, but I don’t know that anyone ever really understands the components of a Christmas tree. What puts it together for me and makes it beautiful and perfect, is not the same for someone else.

Mine developed like this:

When I first moved out, I had a small box filled maybe five ornaments that belonged to me from the family Christmas tree. I still have those five ornaments. They have stood the test of time. There’s the little holly hobby girl in her white dress and red checked apron. I’m not sure who got her for me, but I love her, I had holly hobby quilts in my bedroom growing up that my grandmother gave me. There are a lot of memories attached to that little ornament. There is also a little mouse my grandmother cross stitched for me when I was 13 years old, the year my brother was born, and a couple of hallmark ornaments purchased for my tree that year.

When my great grandmother passed away, I was gifted with a box of her Christmas ornaments. She had copies of some of my favorite ornaments on my mother’s Christmas tree. I was so grateful to receive them, and still have every one of the ornaments from my great grandmother’s tree, and hang them on my own tree every single year. I miss her, she was a weird lady to me, but she was also a truly lovely human being. I think of her every year on Christmas and say a prayer to God to keep her safe in heaven while I’m trimming the tree.

There was more sentiment to come, of course.

Every year, my mother and grandmother sent me Christmas ornaments, just one or two here and there. I loved them and still treasure each one. When my daughter was born, my grandmother began collecting Barbie hallmark ornaments for her. These line the top of my tree every year. There are mice sitting on floppy disks and computer themed ornaments galore, because, you know, we’re nerds. All sorts of brick-a-brack was sent to me with an obvious idea or thought of it being perfect for my tree and every single one of these odd, quirky little things, is perfect. Absolutely perfect.

This trend continued until one year when my mother went through a weird carpentry phase and she manufactured a box full of wooden, hand-painted ornaments for my tree. That was the year my husband and I bought our house and we celebrated by buying ourselves a brand new, gigantic Christmas tree and a bunch of hand blown glass ornaments.

Those of you who have read my blog over the years, will recall that tree as being the one that tried to kill me every Christmas for the first five years that we lived in this house, but it was ours. It was the first tree that we really did together and when it was finished, I knew that it was finished. I called my mother and grandmother and said, “Stop sending me ornaments now. I had to buy an 8 foot tall tree to hold them all and I can’t carry the thing up the stairs by myself. I think we can call it good now.”

Such things are never, really a finished work though, are they? Every year since I left home, the job of decorating the family christmas tree has fallen to me. My husband now breaks the tree out of the box and sets it up for me so that I don’t injure myself on the tree. The kids help too. I hang the ornaments initially and then I have them go around and spread things out. Over the course of the month, the ornaments fall off and get broken and replaced, or get put back. The tree doesn’t really look right until some time around Christmas Day, when it will be at its most photogenic.

On Christmas Day, I really believe that Christmas trees have their own magic. There is an aura about them that is filled with light and laughter and most importantly the love that it took to carefully craft them into a thing of beauty. I can’t wait to see what my Christmas tree will become this year and how beautiful it’s going to be.

But, I never thought of it like that when I was eight. I used to think that those Christmas trees when I was little, that were so beautifully decorated, belonged only to my mother. She was the mistress of all of that beauty and joy and Santa simply added to that beauty and made it great and Dad and I were the spectators who stood back in awe of their amazing work.

Really though, it was never all about my mother. It was about our little family. I remember now, that I was the one who pointed out that garland in the store. I begged for us to have it on our tree. I painted and folded and cut and drew ornaments for that tree and my parents and grandparents and aunts all contributed a little piece of love to those trees.

I texted my mom today and told her that I remembered that garland and that I loved it. She texted me back with a smile and said, “It was pretty.” I told her I was going to try to find it again today and I looked. I called several different stores. No one had anything even close.

It’s all right though.

That garland is still alive inside my memories. I keep it tucked carefully inside a little box and let it come alive for me every year when I decorate my tree. For maybe twenty minutes, once a year, I am an eight year old little girl who is sitting happily with her mom and dad in a tiny little house, who never realized she was loved. The 36 year old woman that the little girl grew up to be, looks back and smiles, because she knows that she’s still loved, without a doubt.

The garland may be gone, but the love never is.

The Morning Routine

The morning routine in this house doesn’t get deviated from, even on weekends. This is why I was up at 6:30 am this morning. Mugen must be let out, must have breakfast and must have a play time while I read my forums and drink my coffee.

It will take me 20 or 30 minutes to write this post in between sips of coffee and finding where Mugen’s lost his wubba this time and tossing it for him, but it wears him down so he will take a short nap in his crate while I shower… and then the fun begins.

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