Literally a 5 tissue post. You've been warned. (YMMV)

There's a lot of things I'm in charge of here that I could not care less about: Making sure NLYNephew (now 14.11 yrs old, thank you very much) takes out the trash is one of these responsibilities.  I hate Thursdays, because it is a constant refrain, from the time he comes home after school until he finally takes the trash out (tonight he did it about 10 minutes ago, a little bit after 9 pm). Not from me - I really only remind him the once, or - if I feel like he's closing up shop for the night and it has slipped his mind - maybe right before he goes to bed (which always earns me a huge groan, no question). He knows it's trash night; his dad knows it's trash night; EVERYBODY knows it's trash night.  Why it has to be a big battle every week is a mystery to me, but somehow it always is.


--

I don't know why I started this post that way.  I really just wanted to say that sometimes things here are still really freaking hard.  Hard in ways I didn't expect - I really miss the jokey, sweet relationship that my nephew and I had before I became the one he has to check with to see if he can run to Dunkin Donuts with his friends after school.  Before I became the one who puts corn on his plate and expects him to eat it. 

Before I became the woman-shaped-person who's taking up space next to the giant gaping hole his mother left behind.

--

Do you ever write other people's stories in your head and try to figure out how they'd sound? Especially ones that include you? I've been doing that a lot lately, trying to look forward and backwards at the same time for the kids so suddenly in my charge.  Trying to use our experiences as predictors for theirs, when I know that won't work, but I don't have any other grand ideas.  Trying to see into the future and prevent their damaged hearts from being crushed, as if by magic.

 I wonder, sometimes, what role they've casted me in, or will cast me in, in their eventual memories.

  Is that a normal thing to wonder? I don't even know.

 But I can't help it: sometimes snippets of things pop into my head and I wonder: Is that the truth of how they see me now? Is that the story playing in their head?

 Recently, I had this moment of - I don't know - disconnect and not deja vu but an equally awkward "how is this my real life?" kind of feeling that left me off balance. And when my niece and her cousin walked in at half past eight, tumbling in all loudness and loopy from their grandparents' house down the road, I had this piece of narration that just popped into my head, as if I were seeing the scene from the outside.


"We were a few minutes late, and I could tell by the look on Auntie's face that she had noticed. She always noticed things like that, especially when you hoped she wouldn't. She was a constant looming presence now, with Mum gone, and seeing her there - usually spread across the couch with her laptop at a right angle, or twisted up as best she could to squeeze into our one, lone armchair: three pillows, a heating pad and the laptop's glow on her face - gave me the jolt every time I walked through the door. It wasn't her fault, really, but she wouldn't have been camped out at our house otherwise, and we all knew it. If Mum were around, she'd be back at Grammy's and our twice monthly sleepovers would still be something to look forward to, a nice change of pace where we played games all day and ate tacos. But here she was, and here Mum wasn't, and just like a switch, I remembered it all over again."



I realize the scene itself isn't particularly charitable to me - although I don't feel it's unjustly harsh either - it's just that sometimes I can see it on their faces, the re-realization, and I h a t e being the impetus for that, the thing that highlights their loss all over again.
 --


 I'm having a rough couple of days here - It's not just me: there's a lot going on in our family that's good and bad and horrible and up-heaving and life-altering.  And I feel a little lost, sitting here on this couch, with my charges in bed - one of them upset with me because I'm making him do chores, the other listening to her TV because she finds the quiet unnerving, even all these months later. My brother, snoring away upstairs as he's been since right after supper, and he'll probably be awake at three in the morning, and off to work, and another day will start all over again.

 And I wish that the end of the day felt like I'd accomplished something more than surviving.  I wish that I was able to make them happier, or healing, or at least not argue with them about stupid shit that neither of us really cares about except Oh My God Why Do You Have To Act Like A Teenager Right Now??? Could You Not Be Jerk To Me For 10 Minutes, Please???

And the thing is, my nephew is a sweetheart, and I KNOW that. And most of the time, he continues to be that - he's a good kid, with a good heart, and he's doing so great and trying so hard.  And neither of us really understands my role here or our new boundaries and ... it's fucking hard.  It's hard for me, and I'm a grown-up woman, who lost her sister-in-law and misses her, but who won't ever understand what it's like to be 14 and have your mom taken away from you so brutally. 

I know he doesn't blame me, but he kind of also does.

Because I moved in when she got sicker, and she just never got better, and I just never left, and I'm the one who told him it was never going to get better, and I'm the one who made him understand that that was her last day and he'd regret it if he didn't say goodbye, and I'm the one who's STILL HERE and his mom is NOT.  And sure, he's 14 and he's smart enough to know (in his brain) that that doesn't make sense, that I wasn't a cause for that effect, but I also know it doesn't feel wrong, because sometimes he looks at me like he hates me, and it breaks every little piece of my heart.

And I can't show it, because I know that grief doesn't make sense, and I know that he doesn't like feeling it any more than I like seeing it, but, god, what I'd give to go back to a time when looking at me didn't hurt him.

 I know he loves me, and I hope - with all my heart - that this is one of those things that time can fix - because I've loved this boy with my whole heart since the day he was born, and yes: I'm the one who told him his mom was gone, but I'm also the one who snuggled with him through every nap-time and sick day; the one who taught him about the joy of pretzels dipped in fluff; the one who showed him the miracle of bubbles; Who gave him sink baths and solar systems and learned the name of every maritime disaster in the last 100 years; the one he used to call when his parents were fighting and he was frightened. 

I know, eventually, he'll remember those things too, but right now, on a night when he looks at me and sees all that he's missing, what I wouldn't give to trade places with his mum, to let him have her back, to let her fight with him over the damned trash.


---
Well, now that I've bawled my way through that... I gotta go turn on the dishwasher, and lock us all up safe for the night.  Hope whoever is reading, wherever you are, that you're safe and sound tonight too. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hulking Out (BADD 2014)

So I knew BADD 2014 was coming up, and my brain has been... uncooperative.  In fact, it has been pretty uncooperative for anything besides reading Marvel fanfiction and carving out random hours of time to spend with my family for about a month now. :shrug: It happens. But a confluence of all three of these things happened over the weekend, and it seemed like too much of a good thing to pass up, so here we are.  Please be warned that this is completely ridiculous and that I KNOW I am stretching the metaphor a little bit too far - OK SO FAR - but... :shrug: It happens. (Also: some spoilers for The Avengers & maybe random comic book knowledge?)

----

During a sleepover with my niece and nephew this weekend, my (soon to be 8 year old) niece and I were playing with modeling clay while I was making dinner. Mostly, this consisted of her making a thing, showing it to me, and then setting it aside, or asking for help with a particularly difficult part of the construction (making a Bruins 'B' for her brother required a cookie cutter, as neither of us could make a B that would suffice, for example).  But, at a certain point, I'd gotten all the ingredients cooking and was just sort of waiting for things do be done, and so I sat at the table with her and started to make a figure of my own.

I chose the Hulk because a) I know how to make basic figures in clay, b) the green was closest to me, and c) LilGirl and I had been talking & reading about The Avengers just prior to dinner-time. We chatted a bit about Hulk and how he'd become the Hulk (origin stories - not always appropriate for children!), and how he's usually a 'normal' guy, except if he gets hurt or angry or there's dangerous situations going on. She remembered that her favorite part of The Avengers movie is when Hulk  smashes "the bad god-brother" and laughs "Puny god". She even demonstrated for me with the clay in her hand.  I told her how the old TV show of The Incredible Hulk used to make me so frightened I'd hide behind the couch every time poor Bruce Banner changed into the unbelievably large (to then 5 year old me) Lou Ferrigno, but that once he WAS the Hulk, he seemed ok; even nice, mostly... If you were nice to him. And how he always seemed so sad, at the end of the show, walking off down that highway, twinkly, piano-theme music playing behind him, which led us to talk about how hard it would be to make friends if you were the Hulk. I finished up my Hulk as best I could - his face was still not great, but at least his arms stopped falling off - and she finished her sculpture, which she then gave to me. She'd made her brother a Bruins 'B', herself a smiley faced self-portrait, and me, a copy of my wheelchair. I oohed and ahhed over it, and then the next steps of dinner took over, and I asked her to start clearing off the table while I got the rest of the food together and found her brother.

A couple of hours later, when we were finished eating, cleaning up, and playing games, she went to give her brother the B, and I was going to show off my new clay wheelchair, when I looked to where she'd put them aside, and found Hulk, standing in the chair. LilGirl explained to her brother that she'd made the chair, and I'd made Hulk, and when he asked, "Why's he in the wheelchair - he's a superhero...?" She made a face like he was being ridiculous and answered "So? Superheroes can have wheelchairs -" When he went to say something else she looked to me "Can't they Auntie?"

Before I could respond her brother butt in (the two of them are not great at letting each other finish sentences, but that's what siblings are for), rolling his eyes: "Of course SUPERHEROES can, but HULK doesn't use a wheelchair, because then he wouldn't be Hulk." Now they were both looking at me. Um... OK.

"Yeah, I mean, of course: Superheroes DO use wheelchairs" I rolled into my room and brought out my Oracle trading card, showing her the lovely and super-amazing Barbara Gordon in all her technological splendor. "We've talked about Oracle before, right, how she used to be -" "Batgirl" her brother put in. "Right." LilGirl took the card, gave it back - "Yup, I remember. But Batgirl is not an Avenger, right?"

I laughed and thought about explaining how Batgirl isn't even in the same universe as the Avengers (mostly), but... thought better of pushing my luck. "Right. But... Um Hawkeye - in some versions of the comics: He's deaf, so he has a disability and is an Avenger. And... " Nope: not going to explain PTSD to an almost 8-year-old, but... "And Iron-Man, in the movies he has a panic attack, and sometimes that can be a disability - anxiety disorders."

"And I guess it isn't exactly super-normal that you change into a big green monster when you're angry either" suggested her brother, ALMOST apologetically. "Well, I'm not sure disabled and normal are exact opposites there, bud" I corrected him gently (because you try and correct a 14 year-old any other way), "but yeah, I think maybe Hulking out could stretch into the disability category if we really tried, because it's something in his body that he's not always got control over and a lot of disabilities -" I gestured to myself "are kind of like that. Cousin Sara once called her seizures Hulking out." (Our cousin has epilepsy.)

"Plus, how you said that sometimes the Hulk - or the doctor who is the Hulk - gets so sad because people don't understand him? That's the same, right?" Lil Girl offered and I was kind of stunned. Because -although we talk about it a lot, how people don't always understand about me or how much it can hurt when you want to do things but you just physically can't - I wasn't sure she really ever got that part of it before. Shows what I get for underestimating her. "Um, yeah, kiddo - I guess that would be the same kind of thing, really. Sometimes being sick can be wicked lonely." Her super-sweet brother shoved his chair closer to mine and put his head on my shoulder.

"So see: Hulk could need the wheelchair." LilGirl gloated at her brother, never one to let an opportunity to best him pass. I rolled my eyes at him, because he's older and we share the experience of little sisters, if nothing else. And then I said "He could: but even if he didn't use the chair, he could have a disability. Lots of people do. You can't always tell." 

"Well, this Hulk needs a wheelchair." she said, showing it off. "He looks good in it too," I agreed, "although you probably could have told me that before I spent so long making his legs strong enough to hold him up, you  fruit loop."  She laughed, and we got ready to watch a movie and call it a night.

While I realize that not everyone will be on board with the whole Hulking out/disability metaphor (and I'm not sure I'm 100% behind it myself, as my brain cells would need MUCH better focusing skills then they are currently capable of), when I was thinking of BADD, and what the hell I was going to write about, it was this conversation that I just kept coming back to.  There's a lot I could say about it - I could talk about the power of representation, and having books and media that accurately portray characters with disabilities in a way that helps CHILDREN especially create a more realistic view of their actual world.  I could go on and on about how great it feels that some of what I'm actually hoping these children in particular are learning is actually getting through (Empathy! We can haz it!).  I could definitely ramble at length about how much I miss Oracle even though I love the current run of Batgirl. 

But really, I think, for me, this was about how often we underestimate what kids can understand, and how they understand it. To LilGirl, there was no reason that Hulk couldn't both be canonically Hulk and use a wheelchair: at eight, that limit doesn't exist for her. By 14, her brother, on the other hand, has more experience with the actual Hulk's story, and knows that (in canon) Hulk would never need a wheelchair. Which was also fine, because, to him, having no control over your body whenever you get angry seemed like a disability in and of itself. Sure, neither used exactly the terminology I would have preferred (normal =/= non-disabled, for example), but that's small potatoes compared to the big stuff. The big stuff here being that neither one of them thought it was even the tiniest bit absurd that Hulk - whatever his disability might have been - would be a superhero. There was just enough "Well why the hell not" in both of their attitudes to make me proud. (And not enough "But they're special BECAUSE OF their disability" to make me worry about running headfirst into super-crip territory.)

Because WHY THE HELL NOT??? is basically how kids work, and we should do a better job of living up to that, all around.

PS: Here is our Hulk, complete with his chair. My favorite is the push handles in the back of the chair, because I like to picture Captain American rushing into battle, pushing Hulk's chair while Hulk smashes with Cap's shield.

PPS: In case you haven't heard it, here is a link to The Lonely Man, which is the actual title to the theme song from The Incredible Hulk, which I didn't know until right now. The song still gives me the sads, though.

A tiny update on some not so tiny kiddos

It's been a while since you've since some of my littles, and you would not believe how they've grown.  I wish I had a group photo I could post of the whole lot of them - they're multiplying and growing more quickly than seems normal to me.

Honestly: No Longer Youngest Nephew/Neph2's voice is changing... Cracking in mid sentence so that he looks as confused as the rest of us...it's scary.  He's turning 13 in less than a month (which he informs me of on a fairly regular basis), and is all about hockey and baseball right now.  Which is better than being all about girls, so I'll take it, even if I couldn't care less about either of those two things.

Oldest Nephew should be trying for his license soon and posted a picture on Instagram of the girl he asked to the Junior Prom. (Remember that bit I said yesterday about someone whose diapers I changed having babies of their own and the unreality of that all?  Well I was a junior in high school when Oldest Nephew was born, so that's officially just wrong.  ALL KINDS OF WRONG.)  I was super sick and missed out on my Junior prom, while SisterS was pregnant with Oldest Nephew, and she called me a couple of days later to commiserate.  So yeah: Officially weird and NOT RIGHT.

Lil Girl has always thought (and acted) like she was a teenager anyways, but now she's going to be seven next month, and seven is... no longer little, at least not in my mind.  You can't pretend a 7-year-old is a little kid - they're right on the cusp of knowing stuff that little kids don't know, right on the edge of figuring out ways the world works that you wish you could protect them from.  She's wise and not always kind (which we're working on) and sassy as all hell, but also sometimes the sweetest thing on two feet.

 And Baby B is a big boy now, preparing for preschool and such, which is also... not right?  He's the only baby that's been born into our family that I feel like I didn't get a chance to bond with before school started, and that's too bad... hopefully, as he gets older, his mother will bring him down more often.

And SisterCh's Boys - who don't even have proper blog names, I don't think, but have been seen here before: I should Blog Christen them, right, before too long?  It's already been so long,  I don't even know how that happened.  So NephewJ and NephewT (because the numbers just don't work anymore, but I can't go back and undo them) are growing by leaps and bounds as well... one is all over Facebook and skating and guitar playing, the other is into the Marvel Universe and may have been converted to the Dark Side (of always wanting to play games) when Mom and I introduced him to War over Christmas break ;).

And, come the fall, we'll have another Baby (Sex as yet unknown) to add to the our ever-growing clan.  It's really exciting to be one of the lucky auntie's to this rag-tag bunch... my brother and sisters have the coolest little people, and I'm looking forward to all the new additions as they come. 

Also: Note to self: when the kiddos are down for Spring Break, take group photo, cuz the last one was nearly 3 years ago, and that's just pathetic, y'all.

Also, also: interesting postscript - I don't think I quite realized how much the gender tables have turned in this generation of our family: in my dad's generation it was 7 boys, 2 girls; in my siblings & my generation, girls outnumbered the boys by 2:1 ratio (generally, each of my uncles and my dad had a boy and then at least two girls... any other kids that followed were also girls); but this generation in our family seems to be a complete turn around.  Interesting (probably to nobody but me and the few cousins I can chat about genealogy with), but we'll have to see how the pattern evolves as my younger sisters start their families.  (And if I ever get around to it.) 

NephTwo

Yesterday's life was full of nothing in the morning, a long game of Life Twist and Turns in the afternoon, a little Addams Family at night, and reading an outdated atlas with one of my favorite, favorite boys. I loved how he was able to identify just how out of date the atlas must have been to include things like the USSR and to exclude all the -stans. Never mind the half of Africa that was all confusingly different. Today we compared a current world map with the atlas from 1984 and we came up with 34 new or differently shaped countries in the past 27 years. That's pretty outrageous, especially considering that I was alive for all of those 27 years, and I knew about maybe 10 of them off the top of my head. (Germany as opposed to East/West Germany and the USSR being the major ones.) It was one of those experiences, though, that made me wish I could homeschool him, instead of him getting sent to public school: it was just such an authentic and child directed learning experience, the kind teachers are always searching for but the harder you try to manufacture it the further away it goes.

NephTwo (As I've decided to call No Longer Youngest Nephew) is such a smart kid, and he's genuinely interested in so many diverse subjects: When he was a baby it was cars, to the point where he'd point out the window and name the type of car and I'd have to say "Yes?" because I knew nothing about cars. At all. After that, we learned about dinosaurs. And not just "Oh, this is a T-Rex" kind of dinosaur learning, but "Well the Oviraptor was called ovi because he's an egg stealer and ovi means egg" and "All the ceratops named dinosaurs were herbivores which means they only ate veggies, which I don't like." When he was 2. Dinosaurs lasted for a good long time, and I had to memorize more than an entire era full of creatures that I really had no interest in.

Somewhere around the same time, he watched A Night to Remember with his Grandpa, and it lit something up in his brain. All of the sudden we had to learn about ships. About the Titanic specifically, but about any ship that ever sank. I had happened to go through a Titanic phase myself, way back when - when the original National Geographic documentary aired, my Nana taped it off the TV and we watched it over and over again that summer. I don't know why, but it sparked something in the seven-year-old me, too, so I was kind of excited when NephTwo was so interested in it.

Of course he was only 2 or 3, so we had to adapt somethings along the way. We read Robert Ballad's Discovery of the Titanic, and learned about the Knorr 's search and how Alvin and Jason Jr managed to get down there and take pictures of the wreck. We saw all the pictures of broken china and suitcases covered with algae, shoes with no matches and bathtubs encrusted with rust. We watched any version of the sinking that we could find (fast-forwarding through the little naked parts in the Winslet/DiCaprio version, of course). He managed to learn all the details, and would often play "Saptain Smith" and order everyone into our lifeboats, being a stickler and not allowing his dad on them, because he was not "a girl or a baby". He would recite the tragic tale to all of us, every day, or, if we were out and about, even to people in lines at stores.

Eventually, the Titanic wasn't enough, and we had to learn about other shipwrecks and sea disasters.
I ordered a ton of books on shipwrecks off of Amazon, and he surprised our local librarian by reciting all the facts about how the "Californian was there, but they thought the rockets were for happy reasons, and so they didn't come, and then the Carpathia showed up and fished out the people in the icy cold water" when we went searching for even more information. He knew about Titanic's twin sister, Olympic, and the Stockholm and the Andrea Doria. He knew about underwater mines and missile strikes and the dangers of drifting in the fog.

After the shipwreck stage came trains (and Thomas the Train specifically, and let me tell you I did not enjoy that nearly as much as the ships), then space (he used to build little models of the galaxy and memorize the order of the planets and how many moons they had. He was crushed when Pluto lost its planetary status), and then, eventually his interest shifted to things on our planet. The geography of the world, the history of certain places, which countries did what and whose land was in a cold area and whose land had oil and which groups of people didn't necessarily get along with each other.

The geography thing has been high on his list for a few years now, and during most of our sleepovers, he drags out the giant world map we found at Costco for $3 and and DryErase markers and redraws the boundaries of the world. Sometimes he expands the United States into a true empire, conquering Canada and absorbing Europe; other times he usurps Mother Nature and decides it will snow in the desert and freeze in the tropics. Often, he tests my knowledge of the world, making a game of matching flags to countries or having me guess the capitals of places like Djibuti and Honduras (stuff I used to know, but my brain now protests trying to remember). It's amazing to watch him interact with the world this way, and it makes both the auntie and the teacher parts of me gleeful.

Today's experiment in finding the differences between the way the world looked when that book was published and the way the world looks now was only the beginning: We wound up talking about the revolution taking place in Egypt, and the recent voting in the Sudan on divvying up their country. (I swear, knowing that he will ask these type of questions is half of the reason I pay attention to what's going on out there.) He told me that he knew more than his teacher about something we'd been discussing two weeks ago when he was here last, and how the teacher had to Google it to check if he was right. How awesome is that?

Anyways, I've been doing a lot of (probably necessary) complaining about and assessing of the current status of my life, so I thought it would do me - and my loyal readers - some good to remember that I've still got some pretty bright spots here and there.

And this boy (seen here with his super ball version of our galaxy) is definitely one of them.