I went a whole week last week without posting. I think that’s the longest that I’ve ever gone, with the exception of that one time that we went camping for a week, and even then I had friends post in my absence. I’ve posted through holidays and vacations (such as those are), through births and deaths and triumphs and tragedies. I’ve posted from halfway around the world; I’ve posted from halfway across the country; I’ve posted from 30,000 feet in the air; I’ve posted from just around the corner. I’ve posted a lot in the six years that I’ve blogging. Posting – crafting a few words or a whole lot of words and publishing them on the Internet – has been as much a part of my life as breathing.

And then, last week, I stopped. Actually, it was the week before last. I posted a picture of Emilia in the snow and made a joke riffing on a line from Richard III, in a weak effort to post something, anything, other than ‘god, oh god, I am FLAILING, you guys, HELP.’ That was Wednesday. I’d been wringing my hands about whether I had it in me to post something substantive, something about how although I love New York, and I love my job, it’s been hard, really hard, because it’s been such a big transition, and it’s been so busy, I have been so busy, and it’s been hard on my family in a million little ways that pile up and add up and add up some more, and also, have you ever lived in a loft with small children? I DO NOT RECOMMEND IT. And that’s before I even get to the part where I’m worrying about all the things that I have to worry about but am too busy to keep track of, and how not-so-little things like loved ones attempting suicide, and bullying, and death, and fear, get pushed aside and are left outside of the narrative, mostly, because I haven’t the emotional bandwidth to reflect upon them, to sort through them in words and sentences and paragraphs and put them in their proper place, because I haven’t been spending enough time in the space in which I ordinarily place them, in the place in which I reflect. And I miss that, but even though I miss that, it’s hard to even just own that, as they say, because there are so many other things to do and sort through and how indulgent would it be if I just demanded that there be time in my life for that?

And so on, and so forth.

This is one of those posts that will cause people to wonder whether my marriage is in trouble, whether my family is in trouble, whether I am headed toward some unstated crisis, some disaster on the horizon that I can see clearly but choose to not describe, and that’s not the case, not really, by which I mean to say, we are not in trouble, we are struggling, but in ways that we are equipped to manage, and this might be clearer if I wrote more about how challenging it can be to go from being one kind household to another kind of household entirely, and in another country to boot. And I might even be better equipped to deal with these challenges more effectively, if I wrote about them more, because hasn’t that been my saving power, my super power, my escape? Hasn’t that been my magic wand, my Patronus charm – writing, writing, writing (Expecto Lingua!) – wielded and executed against depression, frustration, grief, fear? It has. But then again, it also kept me tied to those experiences, those struggles; it has kept them close, and closer, and there’s a part of me right now that feels ill-equipped to – unwilling to – dwell in my frustrations, to gaze upon them and caress them and hold them close, even if doing so is part of what allows me to move toward letting them go.

All of which is a very vague and convoluted way of saying: I miss writing daily, and also, I don’t. Not writing is allowing my soul to breathe in a different way, in a way that doesn’t carry an incantation of words upon its every exhalation. What I need to get to is the intermediate condition of breathing with words, and without words, and with words, and without words, and with and without, as my soul wants.

And maybe that will take time.

In the meantime, there are always pictures.

Which are worth, as we know, some variable number of words.

My husband’s summary assessment of his solo camping trip with the badgers, from his Facebook page:

“Lessons from camping:

1) Hot dogs go with everything.

2) The five year old girl is really in charge.

3) One parent, two kids is a sub-optimal ratio.”

I’d like to say that I didn’t say ‘I TOLD YOU SO,’ but I can’t.

Wild rumpus: pending

Because I totally said I TOLD YOU SO.

The old saying that ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’ has always struck me as really misleading. Most pictures you can describe in, like, 140 characters, otherwise why would there be TwitPic and Instagram? And anyway, why ‘a thousand’? If that number is meant to signify ‘lots,’ it kind of misses the mark. A thousand words is not a lot of words. I can easily bang out a thousand words just on the topic of cat barf, about which I know much, having stepped in it three mornings in a row now. And trust me, you wouldn’t want to see a picture of that.

Anyway. I was thinking about the stories that pictures tell as I reviewed my Instagram stream from this weekend and realized that anyone scrolling through those pictures would think that I’m raising my children in the wild and letting them drive cars and possibly also putting them to work as psychics. Which is totally not true. I only keep them out of doors in daylight hours – they’re free range – and they only work as psychics when they want to.

There’s probably a lot of money to be made in toddler clairvoyance, but I’m totally not interested in my exploiting my kids like that, and I would totally expect you guys to get that. Still. I thought that it was worth clarifying.

Anyway. So that took about 100 words, explaining that the picture of my toddler grasping a Psychic! Deals! advertising sign was in no way a solicitation of business for his spiritual advisory services. Which puts paid to that whole ‘thousand words’ thing, I think.

I should know by now that when my sister posts on my Facebook wall, it’s a bad sign, because my sister – bless her – believes that Facebook is the best way to reach me when there’s something urgent to communicate. That she could also reach me by phone or email – I’ll grant that I do not always answer my phone, but I do check my email regularly, and in fact only get Facebook messages through email, because I ALMOST NEVER GO ON FACEBOOK – is a detail of modern telecommunications that she has chosen to ignore. She alerted me through Facebook that I needed to call her when my grandfather died, and then again when my dad died, and – here we get to the thing that I really want to talk about – again last night when I needed to be informed that our mom has an aneurysm that is growing at an alarming rate and needs to be surgically removed at the earliest opportunity but, oh god, the doctors aren’t sure her heart can handle it and all of this was signaled to me by a public Facebook posting of CATHY YOU NEED TO CALL ME OR MOM. And then: LIKE, TONIGHT.

So, yeah. This is why I don’t like getting Facebook messages from my sister, who I otherwise adore. When those messages landed in my inbox, my heart dropped, and it dropped hard.

I called my mom immediately. I knew that the news had something to do with her – if the news pertained to Tanner, Chrissie would have just said CALL ME – and because I knew that she’d had a CT scan late last week, I knew that it had to do with the aneurysm, which we had all been hoping was not growing and not going to pose any threat to her life. So I knew that if my sister was freaking out on Facebook about me needing to call Mom, it was because the aneurysm was now posing a threat to her life. As I said, my heart dropped.

“Mom.”

“Sweetie! I was just thinking about you! And I was just opening my computer right this minute!” Presumably to log on to Facebook. Or post her prognosis to Twitter, or to her blog. God, my family.

My mother is probably one of the funnest people on the planet. Even when life takes its grimmest turns, my mother can always find some point of humor. Even when she’s angry, she makes jokes, and cracks herself up, and it was one of the banes of my teenage existence that every time I was mad about something, she would make faces at me until I laughed and forgot what I was mad about, which usually made me madder. It was complicated. She’s complicated. I adore her

“Mom, if I’d gotten an email from you that said oh, hey sweetie, things have taken a turn for the worse and I’m facing life-threatening surgery, but don’t worry! I’d have had to never speak to you again. These are things you call about. Like, immediately.”

“Oh, Catherine Ann.” My mother is able to communicate the rolling of her eyes over the telephone. She did so.

“Oh, Mother.”

My mom and I have gotten to a stage in our relationship wherein our roles are more often than not reversed. I nag her and pester her and give her unsolicited advice. I complain that she doesn’t tell me anything. I complain that she doesn’t call. I say things like, you know I worry. I said it last night. I said it, like, five or six times. You know I worry so you need to promise me that you’ll call when you get news like this. You know I worry so you need to let me know the minute you hear from the doctor again. You know I worry so you need to promise me that you’ll take it easy.

You know I worry so you need to promise me that you’ll be okay.

You need to be okay.

You know I worry.

I do worry. I worry relentlessly about my mother, and have done since my dad died. When my dad died, it was the realization of my worst fear, the fear that I knew would be realized someday but had nonetheless managed to stay in denial about because, god, it is just easier on the heart and soul to believe that your parents are immortal. It doesn’t matter if death is already your shadowy companion, a persistence presence in your life, because even when you know, you know, that death is inevitable, you can still deny it, and you do, because death is just not conceivable until it happens. So it is that we all of us in our family live with Tanner’s prognosis in a manner that is best described as ‘mindful denial;’ we know that his death is inevitable and proximate, but we live with him in the spirit of death’s impossibility. The Tanner-less future is inconceivable. Or, rather, has been inconceivable. It is more and more difficult to deny that future. That’s a crushing thing, and it’s because it is a crushing thing that we’ve compartmentalized it for so long.

My dad’s death made all these things more complicated, because his death, as I said, was the realization of my fear of his death, and the confirmation that, yes, death happens, which is to say, it made death conceivable in a way that it just never before had been for me, not even with the death of my grandparents or my beloved cat Sam or that one baby bird that I saw get run over by a car that one time. It made death real. It showed me what the world looked like without my dad, a world that had heretofore been unimaginable to me. And it made it possible for me to imagine a world without other people that I love. It made it possible for me to imagine a world without my mom.

My mom and me, in our world, back when it was still black and white.

I am terrified of that world. Terrified. I don’t even have words for that terror. It’s a terror that makes me feel small, that takes me back to being six or seven years old and slipping into my parents’ room in the middle of the night, blanket in hand, to sleep on their floor so that I could make sure that nothing happened to them, that they didn’t just somehow disappear.

But I know that the day will come when I will have to live in that world. I know that because I am already living in a world without my dad. I know that it’s inevitable, unless something happens to me first, which, god, is a whole other bag of soul-rattling anxiety related to fears concerning my children and my own role as a parent. So I have to live with that knowledge, that fear. I have to live with it, but not let it get in the way of living and loving, and living with and loving my mom. I have to not let it get in the way of celebrating my mom. I have to let it be a reason – to be more reason – to always celebrate my mom, to exult in the wonderfulness of my life with her.

Because she is awesome, and I am lucky to have her, and that’s all that matters.

I just need to keep her off Facebook.

(I had intended to write a post today about how my mom was and is my mentor mom – she’s the original bad mother – but I’ve been so rattled by the news from last night and all I can think about when I think about my mom is all the hand-wringy stuff that I rambled on about above, which is entirely against the spirit of the last few lines of that post, but this is a process, people, okay?

Anyway. I made a dedication to her here, at the mothers2mothers Tree Of Hope. You can make a dedication to your own mentor mom. Celebrating moms is a good thing. Celebration is a good thing, full stop. I need some of that spirit today.)

Being a parent means never having to say you’re sorry for making your children pose with giant dead-eyed Furries.

For all my talk of the world-changing power of sharing our stories, there are some stories that I have trouble sharing, because they’re too hard to write about, or because I worry about the impact of sharing them, or because they’re not my stories, and even if I have permission to share someone else’s story – like, say, Tanner’s – sharing someone else’s story is always an enterprise that pitches me into a state of anxiety. What if I tell it wrong? What if I don’t do it justice? What if it provokes the kind of ugly reaction that I’m comfortable receiving on my own behalf but which sends me into emotional turmoil when it involves others, and especially those whom I love?

I’ve had these worries about sharing my sister’s story, the story of what it’s like to be the mother of a disabled and dying child. I still have those worries. And so there is much that I haven’t told, haven’t shared, even though Chrissie has said that it would be okay, even though so much of that story is so important, so worth being shared. Because I am, sometimes, not so brave. But my mom is. She decided (with the blessing of my sister) to tell the parts of the story that I haven’t been able to, the parts about guilt and shame and anger and mental and emotional breakdowns and how when you have a suffering child the suffering extends beyond what you can imagine and how that’s hard to talk about because shouldn’t you contain your suffering on your child’s behalf? Shouldn’t you be able to hold it together?

This is a story about not holding it together. It’s a hard one.

(Meanwhile, there’s this, which is is happier. You could join me to stand for Tanner and all boys with Duchennes and, for that matter, all the children – and people – who can’t stand and speak for themselves.)

Her (via Skype): I’ve been thinking about when we were little.

Me: Yeah?

Her: About how we used to sneak into each others’ beds when we were scared, and cuddle up together in the dark.

Me: Mom and Dad kept telling us that we didn’t need our own bedrooms, because we always wanted to share one bed.

Her: When I was really scared, you used to scratch my back. You’d gently scratch out the shape of a letter, and make me guess what it was…

Me: … and it was always love or happy or…

Her: … or my name, or your name. And it always worked, it always made me less scared, it always helped me fall asleep.

Me: <3 <3 <3

Her: I think of your letters every night now. When I’m scared or sad. I think back to when we were little, and you scratching out your letters on my back. H-A-P-P-Y. L-O-V-E. C-H-R-I-S-S-I-E.

Me: I’ll always be here, curled up next to you, scratching little words of love when you need them most.

Her: I know.

Me: L-O-V-E. Y-O-U. C-H-R-I-S-S-I-E.

Her: L-O-V-E. Y-O-U. C-A-T-H.

(Go scratch/tickle/trace a word or two of love onto the back of someone you love. Let the words linger a moment. Then hug them hard, for punctuation. Repeat as necessary.)

My eyes already touch the sunny hill.
going far ahead of the road I have begun.
So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;
it has inner light, even from a distance-

and changes us, even if we do not reach it,
into something else, which, hardly sensing it,
we already are; a gesture waves us on
answering our own wave…
but what we feel is the wind in our faces.

– Rainier Maria Rilke, A Walk.

A wish for the new year, for myself, and my loved ones, and everyone: to answer our own waves, all of us. And to grasp, or seek to grasp, that which we cannot grasp, and to let ourselves be changed. And through all of it, always, to feel the wind on our faces, to let it blow our hair and kiss our cheeks and to love it, to welcome it, even when it stings.

… he rested.

Merry Christmas, you guys. Here’s some joy for you:

(This was two years ago, which, it should be noted, was one year before Glee debuted. Emilia, obviously, was ahead of the curve.) (This year she did ‘Oh Holy Night’ with synthesizers, but unfortunately, I didn’t get it on video. You’ll just have to use your imagination.)

(We’re in British Columbia for the holiday – we arrived, nerve-rattled but safe, mostly, yesterday – and are hunkering down with family and drinking rum and eggnog. I hope that you’re doing something comparably heart-nourishing.)

(Happy, happy, holidays to you. The happiest.)