Angie Kinghorn

Open letter to new moms (of twins)

Dear new moms of twins,

I am having a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.  And my twins are three and a half.
I would like to tell you that after all the night feedings and spit-up cease, things become a cinch, but I promised my readers that I would give them things straight up.
So, straight up it is.  You may want to sit down.
Motherhood is hard.  And for me, it is not getting easier as the kids get older.  It’s just morphing into a different type of hard.
Before you brand me a wimp, let me tell you that I am actually quite capable, intelligent, up for a challenge, and resilient.  I made it through law school, passed the bar exam, practiced corporate law, jumped out of an airplane, scuba dived on the wreck of an iron-side steamer in 100 feet of water, went parasailing, endured the loss of both my grandfathers and my father to prostate cancer, got through the medical scare of a lifetime after finding out that my brain harbors a small tumor, then weathered a traumatic pregnancy and birth only to end up with postpartum depression.  (Full disclosure: I got through all this, but with the help of my good friend Sam the pharmacist.  Better living through chemistry, I always say.)
There’s no way to be ready for parenthood.  It’s not an experience for which you could adequately prepare, no matter how much time you had.  I hope you’re one of those new moms who exists in a blissful state of pink-tinged cloudy happiness, and if you are, I’m thrilled for you.  But if you’re not, know that you’re not alone.  Even if your friends don’t talk about it, they have days where they sit and cry for no reason.  Some of them hate nursing but feel like they can’t stop without being branded a bad mother.  Some of them hate nursing but feel like they can’t stop because it’s the only reason they’ve lost weight.  They panic and think they’re pregnant again, rushing out to the drugstore to buy a test, then berate themselves when, after peeing all over their hands, they remember that they may not have actually had sex since their last period.  How do I know this?  I’ve talked to a LOT of new moms.  When you ask how they’re doing and take the trouble to get past “fine,” you realize that the experience is hard for everyone.
You’re not the only one who:
  • Wonders at the end of the day whether you remembered to brush your teeth.
  • Goes out in public with Desitin smeared on your shirt.
  • Needs a shower but would rather nap.
  • Looks at your cracked, bleeding nipples and wonders if it’s worth it.
  • Sees your preemie newborns and thinks, “Ugh.  My babies look like aliens!”
  • Stood up in the hospital and had a gush of blood ruin your slippers.
  • Wonders, while holding your screaming, feverish child in a tepid bath at 2:30 in the morning, why you decided to procreate.
  • Falls asleep pumping.
  • Feels like a dairy cow.
Some tips and general things to know:
  • Crying is ok.  If they’re crying, they’re not dying of SIDS.
  • If you don’t already drink alcohol, consider starting.  If you already enjoy the good grape, consider moving up to hard liquor.
  • Understand that you’re going to feel incredibly isolated for the first year or so.  Not only is it hard to get around with twins, but most of your friends will not have twins.  Every time you relate a particularly horrible parenting experience, they’ll sigh and say, “But you had twins!”  As if you didn’t know.
  • Learn to accept help, even when that help is doing your laundry and making fun of the condition of your delicates.  Accept help even when the help is doubled over laughing at your husband’s boxer shorts.
  • With help comes less privacy (see above).  Best to get used to it now.  You won’t be able to go to the bathroom alone for several years.
  • You do NOT have to breastfeed.  If you have to supplement with formula, or for some reason cannot, or choose not to nurse, it’s ok.  Don’t let anyone make you feel like you’re letting your children down.
  • More than likely, you’re not going to see your “old” body again.  And it will take about a year to feel remotely normal.
  • Any time you have an option, go for what makes life easier, even if it isn’t what you’d envisioned pre-twins.  For example, if you always pictured yourself as the cool mom in the SUV, consider that a minivan, while less cool, will make your life significantly easier, and thus happier.
  • If you don’t already have a dog, get one, if for no other reason than to avoid having to sweep and mop under the kitchen table three times a day.  But also because your dog is infinitely more likely to obey you, unconditionally love you, and greet you with enthusiasm than are your own offspring.
  • But don’t take the easy way out.  Take the kids to church, even if they do get sick every time they’re in the nursery.  They need it, and so do you.
  • Pray with your kids, even when it’s the last thing you feel like doing.  Introduce them to God so he’ll know who they are when you complain about them.
  • Don’t avoid discipline because it’s inconvenient.  Someone once told me, with kids, “it’s pay now or pay later.”  Truer words were never spoken.
  • Remember that your job is not to be their friend, but their mother.
And yes, it is worth it.  Even on a day like today, when my kids have pestered me with the same questions time and time again, when they’ve thrown tantrums, screamed and refused to go down for a nap without a fight, even on the days when someone vomits on my shoes and pees on the bathroom floor.
It’s worth it.  Someday you’re going to find yourself engulfed in a huge toddler hug, and a little voice will whisper, “Mommy, I love you.”  And you’ll know what I mean.
Love,
Angie

Vampires have ruined my life

Why, Stephenie Meyer, why?
Why can’t I put Twilight on a shelf and let it sit there like a normal book?  What subliminal messages have you slipped into the angst-filled narratives that compel me to re-read your books ad nauseum?  I have nothing in common with teen vampires or werewolves, and I have a stack of library books waist-high in my study, some of which I’ve been on the wait-list to get for months. 
I also have three year old twins and plenty of things I need to be doing.  Laundry, exercising, cooking, cleaning, showering, figuring out how my daughter got a black eye, etc.  And yet, each spare minute finds me delving deeper into the Edward and Bella saga,  despite the fact that I’ve read the entire series at least five times.  The dialogue annoys me with its simplicity and unrealistic cleanliness.  (These are teenagers, hon, and nobody knows more than they do about how to drop the f-bomb into everyday convo.  They can make the word a noun, verb, adjective, adverb, alliteration, hell, probably even an acronym.  Yet all your characters deliver, despite being tracked by bloodthirsty immortals, is Bella’s not-so-endearing, “Holy crow!”)
I am simply confounded by the degree of my obsession.  Even the movies are addictive, though I look at Robert Pattinson and see only Cedric Diggory in dire need of a hairbrush.  (JK baby, we’ll get to you in another post.  You’ve taken literature as crack rock to a whole other level).  The script (and book) are pretty flimsy on developing the initial relationship between Edward and Bella, but hey, Shakespeare didn’t give Romeo and Juliet a whole lot of time to declare themselves for all eternity, either, and it doesn’t seem to have hurt his sales. 
The entire Twilight phenomenon is enough to drive a person insane.  As I sit typing, the piano melody of Bella’s lullaby from the movie is stuck on repeat in my head.  While better than, say, “Tiptoe through the Tulips,” “Copa Cabana,” or “Sexy Back,” it’s still driving me to distraction.  Why, though?  What is so special about this story?
What elements of the formula for successful literature has dear Stephenie used? Let’s examine:
Denial of self, denial of nature.  Star-crossed lovers.  A vulnerable woman (girl, really) and an invincible man (physically, at least) who is also possessed of an uncommon sensitivity and a sense of honor, duty, and humility that can only have come from an early 20th century upbringing.  We’ve also got fantastic parlor tricks—mind reading, predicting the future, being able to manipulate the emotions in a room.  And these are just the extras, in addition to everyone’s super-human speed, strength, agility, grace, beauty, hearing, and oh, let’s not forget, immortality.  What’s not to like?
She’s also included that all-time favorite device of the writer, the love triangle.  Oh, and in this case, the underdog is actually a, well, dog.  Both guys in the triangle have that other bestselling quality—the bad-guy persona.  Everybody’s gorgeous and either wears designer duds from Paris (the Cullens) or runs around ripped and half-naked (Jacob and pack). 
In the Cullen family, there’s a vampire for everybody.  Carlisle represents culture, perseverance, self-denial, and inherent goodness.  Esme is largely glossed over, but she represents strong maternal urges and a huge heart, and in the movie version, reminds us she’s the chick with amnesia from Grey’s Anatomy.  Rosalie is the classic bitter beauty (though with good reason).  Emmett is the guy’s guy.  I mean, the dude hunts grizzlies.  You can’t get more Bear Grylls than that.  Alice represents the quirky, and Jasper the reformed. 
As for bad guys, they’re present in spades.  The Volturi eat Chuck Norris for breakfast and Jack Bauer for dessert.  ‘Nuff said.
There’s something for the spiritual person, too.  All this talk of souls and whether the vampires will go to hell kind of smacks you in the face with it, but there are some subtler things as well.  Once bitten, it takes three days to make the transformation from human into vampire and then to rise again.  Three days.  Anyone?  Bueller?  Bueller?
Alice’s abilities put her in the role of prophet, and the very nature of the vampires and the wolves inspires thought about the ability of a character to be both fully human and fully other at the same time.  Which leads to thoughts on the nature of Christ. 
Then we have the constant narrative of self-sacrifice threading through the stories, in an especially powerful way for Bella.  Her willingness to quite literally shed her own blood to help those she loves … well, you can’t get much more Christ-like than that. 
Well, hell.  I meant for this to be funny, not to turn into a book report.  Maybe Twilight actually does have some literary merit.  (You can take the English major out of the classroom, but you can’t take the classroom out of the English major.  Sorry!)
Another major theme is abstinence.  At first, it’s from a purely practical perspective, as intimacy with Edward might very well kill Bella, but in the later books, Meyer makes a point of having the characters want to wait for marriage.  Going back to the formula, all this pent-up sexual desire, frustration, romantic angst, and the sheer logistical impossibility of an Edward/Bella pairing versus the relative ease of a Jacob/Bella scenario practically guarantee that readers will want the impossible to happen.
Perhaps Stephenie Meyer just thought of a good story and told it, and I’m blowing it way out of proportion.  But I’d be disappointed to think so.

Also, don’t get me wrong.  I love these books, and I’m not faulting her for being formulaic.  I’m just jealous that I haven’t written a bestselling quartet of vampire books.  And more than slightly ticked off that her appallingly appealing vampires have rendered me incapable of putting her books down long enough to write the bestseller that could possibly be lurking somewhere in my own brain.    

Filed Under: God

The pause before screaming

            Today I forgot my father was dead.
For one glorious second, standing in my bathroom, digging through a cosmetics bag while ruminating about something ridiculous the kids had just done, I thought, “Wow, I can’t wait to tell Dad.  Wonder what he’ll say about that?”
            And then memory hit with a physical pain, and I stared into the mirror and saw a figure clutching her abdomen with one hand and the counter with another.  The abrupt pain of it was such a shock that I actually gasped.
            After a minute or so, the adrenaline drained out of me, along with all my energy, and I felt the familiar, heavy pressure of grief in my belly.  The eyes in the mirror looked old and tired.
            This is not this first time this has happened.  Several times I’ve had the phone in my hand, ready to dial, before I’ve remembered.  I catch myself referring to my father in the present tense or talking about “my parents” instead of simply saying, “my mother.”  Usually in the morning I wake up with the sense that something’s not quite right, but unless I’ve had a nightmare specifically about Dad, it can take me a few minutes to remember why my sheets are tangled from a night of running through buildings trying to find something that isn’t there.
            My father was a sentimental man, though he wasn’t raised to talk about his feelings, preferring instead to stick with small talk about his oral surgery practice, his golf game, or any number of topics that fascinated him throughout his life.   He held his fears close as well, a habit which infuriated me.  I wanted to talk about his cancer.  I wanted him to talk about his cancer.  Because when I’m afraid, that’s what I do: talk.  God made my brain so that it best handles fear by imagining and then speaking about the worst possible scenario, so I can prepare for it.
            My father was wired differently.  He handled fear best through denial.  I wish I’d come to understand this before he died.  Ironically enough, I’ve come to understand the beauty of denial now, as I grieve, experiencing it in those beautiful stolen moments, those unexpected split seconds where my synapses forget to fire and I remember my father as whole, and healthy, and where for just a moment, I can hear him laugh.
            But for me, I’m not sure this denial is worth it.  When the realization hits, it’s like the pause before a baby’s scream, that horrible moment when you know what’s coming, you can hear and see the great intake of breath, yet you can do nothing to stop the onslaught of sound and fury.  That moment finds you cringing, flinching away from an inevitable blow.  Sometimes the anticipation, the pause, is worse than the scream itself.
            In 2000, three years into his cancer battle, I was searching desperately for a present for my father.  Perhaps it was his birthday, or maybe Father’s Day.  I don’t remember.  The usual gifts of cologne, books, magazines, or DVDs didn’t seem appropriate.  I wanted him to have something to hold close, a source of comfort in the dark moments he surely had, even if he didn’t share them.  In short, I wanted him to have the peace of God.
            But how do you put God in a box?
            You can wrap up a Bible, which I did, years later, after he saw me with mine and asked for one.  But without a spiritual Sherpa to guide you over the steep hills and around the treacherous ravines within, the Bible can become an object of frustration rather than comfort.  When I first tried to plow through my beautiful, leather-bound King James version, I started with the first chapter of Genesis and didn’t even make it to Exodus.
            After much thought and research, I bought a silver pendant of Saint Peregrine, the patron saint of cancer.  I made sure it was on a long chain so Dad could wear it under his clothes without it showing, and so it would hang close to his heart.
            Never in my wildest dreams did I think he would wear it.
            But he seemed touched by the gift and put the necklace on that day.  He didn’t take it off again (except for MRIs) until the chain broke.  My mother either had it fixed or got a replacement, I’m not sure which.  It remains the only gift I ever gave him that I’m sure he loved, that he didn’t want to be without.  Perhaps the idea of an intercessor was a comfort, or maybe it was the idea that Peregrine had suffered as he had, and had, through a miracle of Christ, been healed.  I don’t know, because though he wore it constantly, Dad never did talk about it.
            In the emergency room, the doctors and nurses removed his necklace as they worked feverishly over him.  Someone handed it to me in an orange-topped plastic container, and that’s when I started to cry.
            Later, after Dad was stabilized, he asked for his glasses, and to my surprise, his necklace.  The doctors agreed that it was ok for him to wear it, so we fastened it around his neck, and it stayed there for the rest of his life.
            It was there the night we stayed up together watching television and found out that neither of us were smarter than a 5th grader.  It was there when my husband drove to the hospital so he could say goodbye.  It was there, visible on his chest, when his breathing turned agonal, and I can still see it on his pale, waxy skin, heaving up and down with each breath as he fought against leaving.
            After he died, Mom gave me the necklace.  I wore it to his funeral and for several weeks thereafter.  Then it became too painful to wear all the time.  I didn’t need a reminder that he was gone.  Every heartbeat pounded it out.  There was no escaping it.

            Recently I’ve started to wear the necklace again, hoping that the slight weight of it resting above my heart will be a comfort to me as it was to him, a reminder to pray, a reminder to hope.  But I also wear it to help me remember that he’s gone; to protect me from the pause before screaming that follows those exquisitely beautiful moments of forgetting.

Pain

Pain is natural, a byproduct of our human condition.  We sinners are blessed with free will, and with that, license to hurt each other, both physically and mentally.  Our mere existence in this world invites pain.  These frail, human bodies cannot escape the laws of biology and physics, nor their companions, illness and injury. 
If we think about it at all, most of us struggle to place God’s role in our world of pain.  Does he cause us to suffer?  Or does he merely allow it?  If he merely allows it, isn’t that the same thing as causing it, since he has the power to stop it?  Does he punish us with pain?  We watch as bad things happen to good people, and we want to know what God has to do with it.
According to self-help books, people in the psychology business, and what you sometimes hear from the pulpit, pain is God’s way of refining us.  
            Hearing that can flip your world on its head, and if you’re not careful, it can make you angry with God.  It makes more sense that pain would tear us down, and when we turn to the Lord for comfort, we don’t want to think of him as having anything to do with causing our suffering. 
I’m not sure I can form words and sentences sufficient to encompass the experience of losing my father.  The pain was and is multi-faceted, and felt differently by everyone.  The pain of his diagnosis tasted like fear.  Fear of the unknown, fear of loss, fear of the known in the form of twin specters of my grandfathers, both of whom died of prostate cancer.  My mother’s father died a mere two years prior to my father’s diagnosis. My maternal grandfather fought the disease for sixteen years.  I do not remember a time he wasn’t sick.  I do remember the side effects of his treatment, and how it chilled us all to see my father begin to have those same hot flashes and sudden sweats.
            After my father’s surgery, we found out he didn’t have clean margins, meaning parts of the tumors were left in his body.  That pain tasted like dread.  He began radiation therapy, and we felt the pain of hope, but not for long.  Then came the long-term hormone therapy, the pain of watching him suffer as the cancer spread to his bones.  The memory of my grandfather’s metastatic bone pain echoed around my head every time I saw my father wince, and I wanted to weep.  But Dad didn’t want us to cry, so I held back the tears while I was with him, only to dissolve every time I got to the interstate on my way back home.
            Anger.  Oh, how I was angry.  Looking back, I’m not sure the anger had an object.  It was amorphous, the result of my Type A personality trapped in a situation over which I had no control.  I felt the opposite of refined.  I was ready to throw open the window and yell to God, just as I had countless times before, “I’m refined enough already!  Just stop!  I have plenty of character, you don’t need to build any more!”
But the truth is, way back when I first started yammering at God about not needing any more character, thank-you-very-much, I was too young and stupid to realize exactly how much strength and character I didn’t have.  Whenever pain struck, whether in the form of death, illness, depression, or family strife, I found myself shattered, bruised and battered, unable to comprehend how there could still be weddings and parties and newborn babies.  Didn’t people know the world had ended?  I’ve lost count of how many times the world has ended, and yet here we are.  One Sunday I gave my anger to God on an offering plate, and I have never wanted it back.  Instead of anger, I want to understand.  I want to put a reason to suffering, for it to have counted for something.
In total, we spent twelve years watching my father caught in the grip of cancer, edging ever more rapidly and painfully downhill. During this time I never turned away from God, but it took me years to learn to turn towards him.   Six years into Dad’s illness, I married, and it was then I began to study God.  The thirst to know him has been a constant in my life since I was quite small, but in that journey one needs a guide, and I didn’t know enough to go looking for one.  Now I have the blessing of being married to my spiritual teacher, and through Bible studies together, Sunday school, and our own conversations, I began a relationship with God that wasn’t limited to Sundays.
The end of our time with my father came abruptly, with an early morning collapse, an ambulance to the hospital, near death in the ER, and then two weeks of hospital Hospice.  Those two weeks redefined pain for all of us.  I reached for God while bending over the hospital bed, holding his hand and trying to offer comfort and amateur nursing without crushing the central line.  During the nights I spent in his room, on my knees by the bed, I tried to pray but ran out of words, listening to his breathing grow ragged and rough, sprinting to find a nurse every time the pain pump beeped to advertise its emptiness.  I implored God to fill me with strength, and envisioned the Holy Spirit standing behind me, one hand on my shoulder.  As he lay dying an agonizing, traumatic, uncontrollable death, God strengthened me enough to hold his hand and talk to him.  The nurses told us that even though he was unresponsive, he could likely hear, and so I told him it was ok for him to go.  I told him not to be afraid, that God loved him, that through God’s grace he was saved, that he was going to a place where there was no pain, not to worry, that all of us would be ok.  For hours I talked to him and to God.  His agony was so great that I implored God to take him, to release him from his broken body.  I implored my father to let go.  As the hours wore on and the pain seemed worse, I even told him at one point, “Daddy, if you see a light, please, go towards it.  It’s ok.  Please, it’s ok.  You can go.”    
Do I think God caused my father to suffer?  No, I don’t.  Physical pain and illness are a part of life here.  Do I think God used that suffering to produce something positive?  Absolutely.
All this is not to say the pain has been fun, or that it’s gone or ever will be gone. I’ve learned not to run from it, but to face it.  My goal is not to get past, but to get through.  My therapist calls this part “the work of grief.”  It’s horrible work, and there are days when I want to retreat, to pretend it didn’t happen, to hide in that familiar warm place we call Denial.  But when I turn towards the hurt, confront it over and over, it gets infinitesimally less painful each time.  I don’t like this place of grief, this dark, cold place with its stream of images flashing before my eyes, the cruel pictures vivid no matter how many Xanex I throw at them. I know that God will not leave me here forever, but I also know, after grieving for a mere half a year, my stay is far from over.
This week marks six months since my father’s death, and every time I begin to take a breath and think, “ok, I’m fine, it’s all going to be fine now,” something happens.  It’s usually something small; playing ball with my kids outside on that first crisp spring day, the smell of one of his old shirts, or reaching to dial the phone before remembering that I can’t call him anymore.  I had a crisis of grief upon the death of my electric toothbrush, because I couldn’t call my father (an oral surgeon) to ask him what type of replacement to buy.     
Here I have to give God credit.  He has made this pain a gift.  Peeling off the wrappings of suffering, I have uncovered a personal relationship with the Lord and forged a better relationship with my earthly father.  And then there’s the ultimate gift: the certainty that he’s in a better place.
I bought a new toothbrush.  I try to tell my kids about their grandfather.  And sometimes the smell of those old shirts makes me smile instead of cry.