LuLu's Land of the Fey

Every time someone tells me how much they loved being pregnant, I want to punch her in the face.

Really? You liked not being able to bend at the waist and having to go into a sumo stance just to pick something up off the floor? You thought indigestion and heartburn were fun? And let’s not forget the joyride that is the never ending bladder—immediately after peeing, you can already feel the pressure to go again! Personally, I would almost be willing to sell a non-vital organ just to get rid of the back pain and the nasal congestion.

I hate being told that someone never felt as good as she did when she was pregnant. I think women who say that are suffering the same delusions my MIL was suffering when she told me—in between the screeches of my poor son who was cutting a particularly nasty tooth—“I don’t think my kids ever had any teething pain.”

I was reading this insipid once-a-month ‘ladies’ magazine’ that comes in our local newspaper the other day. An article that was supposed to be telling how great prenatal massage opened with the following sentence:

Glamour was never a feeling that I experienced. Maybe I’m doing this pregnancy thing wrong?

Forty-four more days to go. My great-grandma did this fourteen times. I think we’ll stop with two and call it good.

.: posted by amy 2:00 PM

Sunday, January 06, 2008

"When I was a boy my grandfather died, and he was a sculptor. He was also a very kind man who had a lot of love to give the world, and he helped clean up the slum in our town; and he made toys for us and he did a million things in his lifetime; he was always busy with his hands. And when he died, I suddenly realized I wasn't crying for him at all, but for all the things he did. I cried because he would never do them again, he would never carve another piece of wood or help us raise doves and pigeons in the backyard or play the violin the way he did, or tell us jokes the way he did. He was part of us and when he died, all the actions stopped dead and there was no one to do them just the way he did. He was individual. He was an important man. I've never gotten over his death. Often I think what wonderful carvings never came to birth because he died. How many jokes are missing from the world, and how many homing pigeons untouched by his hands. He shaped the world. He did things to the world. The world was bankrupted of ten million fine actions the night he passed on....
Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there. It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn cutter might just as well have not been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime....
Grandfather's been dead for all these years, but if you lifted my skull, by God, in the convolutions of my brain you'd find the big ridges of his thumbprint."
--Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451

I have to learn, now, to live without either of my dad's parents. I can feel their thumbprints burning me, but I'm not sure what to do with this feeling. I like to imagine them dancing a slow waltz, young, vibrant, beautiful. Happy.
I miss you Granny. Have for a while, really. Tell Grandpa hello for me and I'll see you guys again eventually.