.it is later.

Melissa is back!  I can't wait to see her and to go through her photographs and hear her stories.  Israel, Turkey, Greece, Portugal, Spain, Italy, The Balkans...all in four months.

These last four months we've really missed our friend.  We couldn't be happier that she is back in town.

.family history.

Last time Leif and I were at my parents we were able to pilfer their collection of old family photos so we could scan them onto my computer.  We found a lot of really amazing old photographs of my dad's side of the family.

The young girl in the white dress is my great-grandmother Una Chapman.  Later she would marry my great-grandpa and become Una Rider.  They all look so austere.  Nothing like modern family portraiture.

Here is Una again.  The back of the photograph says that she is on the Lusitania.

Una again.

I love that the subject of this postcard is about the Elmore car.  I think the photo was taken around 1904-1908 and again depicts Una's family.

My grandfather as a kid on family vacation.

I think this one is from the same family vacation as the one above.

We also found some old postcards from Oregon and the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics.

Finally I think that this one has to be one of my favorites.  It is of Una's brothers, which makes them my great-uncles, on their iceboat.  I think I love it so much because it reminds me of A Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin, one of my favorite novels of all time. 

I like to imagine these three in the novel, wintering on the frozen lake with dozens of other families, in a slightly more magical time than our own.  

.procreation.

There is a term, an acronym really, used frequently in the infertility world as well as with people who have had a pregnancy end in the death of a child.  It is TTC, or "trying to conceive."  Now before anyone gets unduly excited, we are not TTC.  In fact we are TNTC and we will be on that path for the foreseeable future. But I have been thinking about what TTC means to us in the current version of our lives.

Right after George died we made the decision that we would not start trying to have a second child until well after his due date, at the very earliest.  The reason being that if we were lucky enough to have a child in the future we were wary of being able to reconcile the fact the living child we would have would only be alive because George was not.  That conundrum occurred to me only as I was reading the memoir An Exact Figment of a Replica of my Imagination and came to the point in her story when she outlines that very aspect of her own experience.  Since then the idea has taken up residence in my mind and I don't imagine that it will vacate...ever, which means there will be no trying to get pregnant until I can reasonably justify in my mind that if George had lived it would be plausible that we would be trying to have another baby.

But that hasn't been the only issue we have had to wrestle with in deciding our time frame for our next attempt at procreation.  There is also the matter of my new job (which I don't have yet but I am hopeful that I will in the near future).  Because I am a new grad there is a certain amount of training that I will need to complete before I am profitable to any office or hospital that hires me.  I've been told that is a minimum of six months and because of that I don't want take any kind of maternity leave until I have been there for at least a year. Assuming that I am employed by November that means, and I won't bore you with the math involved, that basically the earliest I feel comfortable starting on the road to pregnancy again is in February or March of next year.  Which if everything goes right, and I am all too aware that there is no guarantee that it will, the soonest we will actually have a live baby in our arms is December 2011.  

That seems so unbearably far away yet it also feels like it is a timeframe that makes the most sense for us.  Before we start down that scary path again I need to finish gathering the pieces of my former self and make an attempt at putting them back together again.  As of now I am not sure what that person will look like and I am not convinced the person I am today would make a very good mother.  Luckily I have a husband who loves me and is willing to give me as much time as I need, even if that means waiting at least another five or six months before we start TTC.

So there it is.  A plan.  One that doesn't even necessarily mean that I have the desire to have another baby because most days I don't think that I do (unless my desire for a baby is disguised as envy, which in that case I totally want a baby).  But really I just want the baby who should be here but isn't.   

.L.

.the gutter.

The only work of Oscar Wilde I've ever read is The Importance of Being Earnest, though The Picture of Dorian Gray and An Ideal Husband are on my mind's list of books (or plays) that I one day want to get around to reading.  But a couple of months ago I found the quote above, attributed to one of the characters in Lady Windermere's Fan, and my interest in the eccentric author piqued.  

The quote, along with quote below from The Little Prince, has since become my mantra, of sorts.  It is what I refer back to in my mind when I feel overwhelmed by how much I wish things had turned out differently for George.

For whatever reason I think we all need something to inspire ourselves; to comfort ourselves.  These two quotes do that for me.  

.home.

From the beginning there was always the assumption that when the time was right we would leave.  We would pack up and say goodbye to the smog, to the helicopters, to the traffic and the never-ending honking of horns and wailing of sirens.  We would leave this place and we would go and make our home back where Leif grew up.  To Oregon.

That was a major reason why I went back to school.  Why I spent the last three years working my ass off to get this degree and why Leif spent the last three years working his ass off to provide us a comfortable living.  It was all for an occupation that was not only recession proof but also location independent.  We could go anywhere and we could always be confident that one of us would have a job.

Our plan was that in the fall of my last year of school we would start trying to have a baby, something we had talked about since we got married.  It happened for us much more quickly than we expected it to and just as soon as we said "go," I was pregnant.  Graduation would come in May, our baby in June and then we would move away from here in the fall...just in time for Leif's parents' arrival back in the States after years abroad.

But then our baby died.

And then I lost myself.

An interesting thing happens when you lose yourself.  You lose those aspects of yourself that you used to shape the outline of your person.  Likes.  Dislikes.  Hopes.  Dreams.  Fears.  They all change.  They all morph into something that is vaguely recognizable but only just enough to make you feel not entirely yourself.

The way you see yourself changes and so does the way you see the world.  The way you see your world changes.  Things seem muffled and colors seem muted.  Paths so clearly delineated become obscure and hard to follow; steeper and more tortuous.  You are left with the distinct impression that at a particular moment in time, a time you can specify to the minute, you side-stepped into a world parallel to the one you were born in.

You become needful of familiar things because even at the best of moments, the familiar things still seem...off.  A different hue.  A different texture.  Just...off.  Just a little.  The thought of surrounding yourself with anything but the (semi)familiar is wholly unnerving.  So you learn to appreciate that which brings with it the strongest sense of familiarity.  A particular route home, a particular dish from a restaurant, a particular walk around the neighborhood.  Maybe the same things you felt were reasons to leave become reasons not to.

At least, that is how it is for this lost person.

For so long we thought that this was the year that we would be moving away from here.  This year we would finally settle in somewhere and begin sending out roots.  Only it took George's death and the thought of an impending move to make me realize that I already have done those things here.

As it turns out it won't be this year.  We are choosing to stay where the surroundings are less alien and more familiar to us.

It is a choice that does not come without some measure of sadness and guilt.  Sadness because there is a sense of losing something else.  Another dream, I guess.  Or maybe it is just the sadness that comes with the acceptance that the dream we had of moving back up to Portland with George is dead too.  Guilt because my parents wanted to move up there as well but now they will not because of our decision to stay.  Guilt because Leif's parents were excited that after many years apart, all their boys would be back in the same city.

Ultimately though, I have to remind myself that it is the best decision that we can make for us (a concept that I am generally unfamiliar with).  Financially and emotionally I think we will be able to live more comfortably here than we would if we were to move.

So for now this is home and we will continue to see a view similar to this one every morning we wake up.

.here.

.stay at home wife.

It is a luxury to be able to stay at home, for sure.  However, I think that there are other people who would probably be better at it than I am.  Something happens to me when I am at home alone for days on end, I wind up spending way too much time on the couch.  I believe the scientific name for the process is "lazification."  This is, of course, in addition to fact that the more time I spend living with just myself the bleaker things around me look.

This is all to say that although I appreciate the fact that Leif has a job that pays well enough for me to take my time in finding a job (although this grace period can only last until December, when my loans are up for repayment), I miss working.  I miss seeing patients.  I miss waking up in the morning and having a purpose to my day that doesn't involve checking my Google Reader a dozen times or organizing spreadsheets for our vacation.  I miss the satisfaction I get from focusing on someone else's problems and working toward finding a solution for them.

Of course, for all the things I miss about working I can't say that I miss the anxiety that comes with the responsibility of handling someone's health.  That is no small thing for me.  In fact, I would go so far as to say that the responsibility I feel when taking care of patients is a huge defining factor of who I am.  My job will never be one that I don't carry home with me every night.

Right now I am in the process of obtaining my license to practice, which, after all the hoops I've had to jump through to get my degree because of my pregnancy (they were seriously going to make me wait an entire year to graduate because I missed a one-day seminar when I was in the hospital getting cardiac medication in the attempt to slow George's heart rate down...one day I will write a post about that nightmare), is surprisingly straightforward.  It does, however, take a few weeks to go through so my hope is that by the time we get back from Honduras I will have my license in my hot little hand and I can start the journey toward finding a job that suits me.  That is a process that I am not looking forward to, simply because I've learned that it will take some hard work and a lot of patience to find a job that is the perfect fit (if there even is such a thing).  And I simply will not compromise on that, considering how much time I will be spending at work the first year of my practice.

No matter how much I dislike the lazy, self-pitying person I am when I am not working I know that in the not too distant future I will look at this time with, not fondness that is for sure, but something akin to wistfulness.

By far and away the best part of having so much free time are my lunch dates, like the one I had today, with the apple of my eye.