{by Erika from Be Gay About It}

The holiday season serves as a lap marker for me, that pristine line on the track where time is measured and recorded, where, at the end of the race, the ribbon snaps against the heaving torso of the runner, his arms splayed in euphoric victory, holding up the world.

We expect the race to end because that’s what races do.

*****

Five years ago, my brother began to swell. Fluid filled him from the bottom up, an army of ounces colonizing territory after territory in

his feet, his ankles, his calves,

his thighs, his waste, his abdomen, his chest.

Before he entered the hospital the first time, he visited me at my apartment, a sort of willful last act of normalcy and wellness. I remember that we sat on the floor because that was the only place comfortable enough for the sixty pounds of fluid that had inflated his trim, athletic frame. I don’t remember what we talked about that morning, just that we spent the time together.

That was before we knew what was happening. Before I knew the starting gun had fired.

In the weeks that followed, so did the tests and the doctors and the questions until, ultimately, our family lexicon had no choice but to admit cirrhosis, terminal, and transplant into membership. He spent four days in the hospital that first time and all I could do was try to cheer him up. I wheeled around his room in his wheelchair, crashing clownishly into the vinyl visitor chairs and tray table at every pivot. When he slept, I watched him, my eyes squinted in the flannel light of the over-the-sink fluorescent, wondering why he had been drafted for this particular marathon, while I had been spared.

{by Sugar Jones from Sugar in the Raw}

Sometimes, we’re so far beyond done. We run out of hope. It’s in those times that we need others to remind us that there is still good in the world. That there is a sun in the sky and that we must lift our faces to it.

The other night, my son cut me to the quick. I had been so busy that I had ignored all his pleas for some family time. He finally looked up at me with glassy eyes, trying to stoically hold back tears, and said, “Sometimes, people say they love you but they don’t really love you if they don’t show you they love you. You have to show people you love them.”

You know that within thirty seconds I was on the floor hugging him and playing the game he had set up hours earlier hoping for a little time together.

His words sat with me all night. While I was nodding off to bed, I thought of a time when I had love, not merely spoken to me, but demonstrated. It was a time in my life that I had not yet realized what you could live through. I was too young to understand that, if I held out long enough, things would indeed change. I was tired and had lost all hope that things would ever be any different.

When I was a young single mother, I had plenty of struggles. Some seasons were tougher than others, but it was during the holidays that I saw the cold, harsh reality of my circumstances. One year in particular, I wasn’t really sure we were going to have a Christmas. During that time, my oldest daughter wore a uniform to her public school. It was a uniform-optional school. It sounded like a good idea until the school year started and I realized that only the poor families had opted for a uniform. My daughter didn’t mind. She thought her dress was pretty and loved the matching bow. Every day, I would dress my younger daughter in her uniform of hand-me-downs. She didn’t mind because she saw her big sister’s clothes as new to her. And every day, I would put on my waitress uniform. I didn’t mind because I didn’t have to worry about what to wear.

{by Grace Davis from State of Grace}

Before she lived in her safe and snug redwood house by the sea; before she met a man who loves her from the top of her head to her toes; before she birthed and raised and set free into the world her beautiful and bright brown eyed daughter, before 20 years of work in a series of rewarding occupations; before she labored at two sometimes three jobs in a big city as she put herself through college; before the richness, goodness and accomplishments of her life today, she was a 17 year old girl with just $200 and a backpack full of books and some clothes to her name.

She was on her own three days before she turned 18 and her high school graduation. She missed the ceremony to find work. On her birthday she found a job in the mountains, in the loving caress of nature. Though she was young, she intuitively knew that the embrace of twig, stone, river, mountain and sky would help her heal from the carnage she had known all her life in her parents’ household.

She had fled from domestic violence. She left, knowing she had to save herself. All on her own, at 17, she began her journey to recovery and wholeness.

Such a journey almost always involves hard work. In that first year on her own, this meant hard manual labor. A strong and sturdy young woman, she was part of the crew that maintained the grounds and buildings of a lodge. She moved, pushed and placed furniture and equipment around the property. She scrubbed, scoured and swept the rooms and cabins. She toiled in a restaurant, busing tables and balancing large trays of dishes and glasses on one arm over her head.

She opened a checking account in the village bank. Her savings grew. Her goal was to save money for college.

That summer, on her days off, she hiked deep into wooded canyons and ascended steep switchbacks to the tops of granite peaks and shimmering waterfalls…

{by Amy Turn Sharp from doobleh-vay}

This year is different. Each year as we turn around the sun and land smack into a new holiday everything is really relative to the places we have just come from.
My husband lost his father this summer.
Thick in the summer morning heat at the end of July I got a phone call quiet from England.
Joe’s sweet sister shaky with tears told me that dad had died.
I wrote about telling Joe this news:

You never write the narrative of yr own sadness until the moment it happens.

Joe’s father died last night.

It’s like there is a giant hole in England now
in his town
in Joe’s heart

And when I had to put my arms around him
to hold him and tell him
it was like he wasn’t all there
like he had shrunk to the size of a boy
and even my strong strong arms
wrapped right around him
couldn’t do enough

It has marked me. Like tracks we all have across our souls from the biggest imprints of our lives.
From horrible events to the most exquisite blissful times we have ever known and not the little in between.
The big things that freeze a life and spin it.

{Originally published on Velveteen Mind as Victor Vito}

Laurie Berkner’s song “Victor Vito” came on and I felt three seconds of pure happiness, and then I could not breathe. It was like the exhilaration of jumping into a wave, then realizing too late that it’s too high and too deep. Before you know it, you are going under. It felt like that wave.

No. More like a storm surge.

Two years ago this month, I was still unpacking boxes. We had been moved in for a month already, but I had been taking my time unpacking all of the decorations because I wanted everything to be just right. Although we didn’t plan to stay in this new beach apartment for long, it was going to be just the change of pace we needed while we looked for our new home. The home where we hoped to stay for years this time. In the meantime, let’s have some fun in the sun!

Pants’s room was done and it looked suitable for a Pottery Barn Kids catalog shoot, only for a really cool kid with some fantastically groovy stuff. After waiting over a year to bring in the ceramic giraffes inherited from my great-aunt (which I had admired since I was little), we had finally displayed them on the wall with the rest of his mish-mash of funky stuff and it couldn’t have looked cooler. So eclectic. So pulled together. So him.

The living room was coming together and I was so excited that I would sometimes just lie on the couch at night after Pants was in bed, turn off all the lights except for a warm lamp or two, and look around at our home. Everything was coming together. Everything just fit here, even if it was only temporary.

I don’t always tell people that the home we lost in Hurricane Katrina was an apartment we were renting. For some reason, they seem to sort of turn off when I tell them that. As though “oh, it was just a rental” means that it wasn’t a home. That our stuff wasn’t real.

Only the walls were rented. The home was ours…

{Originally published on John T. Unger Studio}

The best thing that ever happened to me was the night an angry, messed up cab driver pulled me into the back room of a 24 hour diner and held a huge handgun to my head for over ten minutes, all the while describing in intricately fetishistic detail exactly what would happen when he pulled the trigger.

Why? Because it changes you, staring down a nutjob holding a gun. After that, the small stuff just doesn’t get sweated. You either break, or break through to a mandatory satori of keeping things in proportion that most people never get to walk away from. It’s an ice calm I wouldn’t trade for anything.

The second best thing that ever happened to me was when the dot com crash of 2000 wiped out most of the design industry at the peak of my career as a freelance print designer. I went from turning away work every week to working exactly 7 days of the next year. I lost my girl. I lost my loft. I lost part of my thumb in an accident moving out of the loft. I pretty much lost it all.

Of course, the only reason I was working in offices was to fund the art career I wanted… materials, space, tools, etc. I worked eight hours in the office and ten in the studio, sleeping when I passed out involuntarily. I decided that if my industry had tanked, I was damned if I was gonna retrain to do something else I didn’t want to do. I chose to make the art be my sole means of support. I built some monumentally scaled commissions working out of borrowed shop space, with borrowed gear, sleeping on borrowed couches.

It worked. I’ve been making my living as an artist ever since, and these days I earn triple the income I ever did from the best corporate gigs.

The third best thing that ever happened was the day my studio building collapsed under a load of snow while I was standing on the roof shoveling. I rode that roof to the ground like a gut-shot rodeo pony. The building and some pricey tools were completely destroyed, but I was unharmed… until I spent the next three months (December, January and February) without heat, running water or a stove because the natural gas line into the house had been severed in the collapse. The gas company refused to fix the line until they could bury it in the spring. I lost a few brain cells, I’m sure, by running an unvented kerosene heater inside the house to stay alive.

{Originally published on Chicken and Cheese.}

Not too long ago, we bathed The Poo while chatting about all the people who love her.

We listed off all her grandparents, and then spent time explaining how we, her parents, were also children.

“Your grandma and grandpa are my mommy and daddy,” Mr. Chicken told her, as he sluiced shampoo from her hair using a small container of water. “And meema is Mommy’s mommy.”

Suddenly, without warning, The Poo realized a new truth about our extended family.

“Mommy!” she exclaimed, the gears in her head grinding away. “You don’t have a daddy!”

I winced, her words hitting me as hard as any blow. My father’s been on my mind of late.

This is, you see, my season of loss.

*****

Even as we welcome a new soul to our household, my mind wanders - dreadfully - to this date on the calendar. Four years ago today, at 3:30 in the afternoon, my father drew his last breath.

Each year I think the hours will come and go like any other, just a pair of numbers and nothing more. I believe I will keep house and tend children, spending my time as I would on an ordinary day.

But this day, this terrible day, will never be ordinary again.

The immediacy of my grief has faded; that much is true. No longer do I wake in the heart of the night, veins pounding with dreams the color of blood. No longer do I wake each Aug. 26 precisely at 4 a.m., the time my telephone rang with the news that an ambulance was ferrying my father to the emergency room.

But when August begins to wane, a bruise rises to the surface, tender and easily irritated. The warm weather and the slant of the sun prompt recollections I’d rather forget - walking my parents’ dog in the late afternoon the week before my dad died, while they were away at The Mayo Clinic; the hope I felt when the doctors reported that the cancer was dead; the terrible tremor in my dad’s voice the last time I spoke to him on the phone.

I called to tell my mother I wanted to come out to Minnesota. I was on vacation, and something inside urged me to get on a plane and be with them.

{Originally published on Pensieve}

She will haunt me, this I know.

“I am happy,” she says, and she means it. Even if she did not speak those words, her countenance belies this simple truth: She is happy.

Kiran invited us to her home today, a 4′ x 6′ shoebox in the heart of Kolkata’s slums, blocks away from the glow and lure of proverbial red lights and painted women. Girls, actually, some even younger than Kiran. Simple math tells me 175 of her houses could fit into mine.

She is the only Compassion International sponsored child we visited this week who didn’t have a parent home with her.

{Originally published on Loralee’s Looney Tunes}

This was not the post I thought I would be writing today. I actually didn’t think I would be writing any post today as my computer isn’t coming until tomorrow, but my heart, head and eyes are so full I bundled myself up late at night and went in search of a computer, any computer I could use to get my feelings out.

I was at the hospital in the middle of an icky 4-hour ultrasound and OBGYN appointment when I got a call from Casey that shattered my heart.

Maddie Spohr passed away yesterday.

She was 17-months old.

Have you ever seen such a spunky, lively, beautiful little angel? I know when I first saw this photo, my heart MELTED. She’s always been such a beautiful little elf that seemed to get more gorgeous with each passing photo I saw.

Maddie’s mom, Heather is a dear friend and I love her. She has always been there to lend an ear, be a dork with me on Twitter late into the night and she listened to me talk about my son Matthew that passed away. Maddie was 11 wks premature and though she was still with Heather, she could understand much of what I went through because a very ill baby gives you much more insight than most people.