Angie Kinghorn

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.

My verdict: iPad=epic FAIL

          I love Apple.
          Not the fruit, the computer company.  It’s something about the way their machines are easy to use.  That they tend to avoid viruses, and that I don’t have to constantly be telling Norton what to allow or block.  Something about how printers and cameras and things tend to simply work, without complicated drivers and things.  Oh, and all their customer service representatives are based in North America.  With English as a first language.
          For a former Dell customer, this is as close to  heaven as you can get.
          However, my love affair with Apple is not idyllic.  For starters, Apple has an irritating tendency to make my products obsolete approximately five minutes after I’ve fallen in love with them.  They consider my trusty 2006 MacBook to be “vintage,” and I’m pretty sure none of their current “Geniuses” have ever seen a first generation iPod Nano like mine (bare-bones memory, but still more than any sported by my computers until then).
          Like the rest of the civilized world, I have been eagerly awaiting the arrival of the iPad.  With its starting price of $499 and its impressive list of features and capabilities, I was secretly hoping it would be a half-price laptop replacement.
         Today, I happened to be in the mall, and the Apple store pulled me in with all the efficiency of a black hole.  I thought it would be more crowded, but to my shock, not only was I able to walk in the door, but I was able to find an empty demo iPad right in the front of the store, just waiting for me.

          The rumors are true.  It is a gorgeous device.  Somehow it feels silky in your hands, with a slightly curved back, an unbelievably trim profile, and a glossy screen just waiting to respond to your most subtle command.
          And therein lies the problem.  That damn screen.
          It’s so responsive that surfing the web is a dream.  This is a device meant to consume content.  But if any of you had in mind this might be an appropriate machine to create content, be assured that it is not.
          The iPad lacks a traditional keyboard, but when turned horizontally, has a virtual keyboard.  It looks really cool in all the Apple ads.
          But it is completely useless.  You cannot use it to type anything of substance.
          If you’re looking to text, this might be your thing.  But if you’re a writer or anyone who might need to send a serious email, forget it.
         The iPad’s miraculous touch screen is so sensitive that you cannot rest your fingers on the keyboard’s home keys without it registering it as typing.  Add Apple’s auto-fill feature, and you suddenly cannot type anything.  I spent five minutes trying to type the sentence about the small red fox jumping over the lazy brown dog, but I never even got one word to come out correctly.  There is no tactile component to the keyboard at all, so in order to type, you have to be looking at your hands.  Most of us who’ve grown up typing look at the screen while we work, not at our hands.  This model is simply unworkable.
          Once you consider that, in addition to the keyboard woes, the iPad will not run multiple applications simultaneously, has no USB port, and is unable to print, its potential usefulness as anything approaching a laptop replacement is practically nil.
          I say all this with great sadness.  I wanted to like the iPad enough to buy one.  It is a streamlined object of beauty and functionality.  But I can’t figure out what it does, other than possess a gorgeous screen and amazing advertising.

What not to say to a mother of twins

Twin infants (or twinfants, as I like to call them) are evidently the closest thing most people will ever see to zoo animals in a grocery store or other public place.
            There is simply no other explanation for what people say. 
            They stare as if they’ve never seen a baby before, much less two.  And then the barrage of questions begins.  For me, it usually started with,
“Are they twins?” 
Despite temptation, I usually just nodded, and never did say what I really wanted to, which was something along the lines of, “No, I thought it would be fun to borrow a friend’s baby and put it in a car seat that matched my baby’s for a fun-filled morning trip to the Teeter.”
            Sometimes they would skip the twin question and start with,
“Which one’s older?”
I’d say, “He’s a minute older.”  Inevitably, there was a huge pause, and you could see the proverbial wheels turning.  And then, “Oh, so they’re twins?” 
      I know.  Hard to believe, but true.   
            After the initial scrutiny comes the inquisition.
            “How old are they?”
            “Were they born early?”
And then it starts to get kinda personal.
“Did you have a vaginal birth?”
I’m not exactly shy, but asking a stranger about the state of her “parts” is a bit intrusive.  I have no room to talk, though, since during the last part of my pregnancy I was discussing the length of my cervix with anybody who would listen.  While we’re on the subject of personal stuff and anatomy, the next one was often,
“Are you breastfeeding?”
I gave the babies a combo of formula and breast milk for 4 ½ months before switching exclusively to formula, so I usually answered this question with, “Yes.”  I tried not to mention their formula consumption to strangers, because many breastfeeding activists feel compelled to berate new moms about the evils of formula.  But that’s a separate post. 
“Wow, do you nurse them both at once?  How do you do that?”
If it were one of my close girlfriends asking, I’d have no problem with this.  But randoms?  Did they really think I was going to give them a demo of the double football hold?
“Did you take fertility drugs?”
            Yes, you read that last one correctly.  I have been interrogated many times by total strangers in the produce section as to whether I took Clomid (no), did IUI (no), or maybe IVF (no).
“Really?  No fertility drugs?  Then twins must run in your family.”
            Sigh.  What do you say to such logic?  I usually said no, that twins do not run in our family (which I thought was true until my father’s funeral, when a distant relative mentioned that someone way back on my mother’s side had a pair of fraternal twins). 
“If they don’t run in your family, how did you end up having twins?”
            Again, I’ve never given the answer which is sooooo tempting, “Oh, we must have had sex twice that day.”  So tempting, but I just can’t do it.  My mama raised me right. 
            We’ve only touched the tip of the iceberg here as far as things not to say, though.  Some others that have infuriated and amazed me:
“Are you sure you didn’t take any fertility drugs?”  Positive, thanks.  And if I had, don’t you think that might be a touchy, emotional kind of subject?
“Which side of your family do twins run on?”  This question comes when someone isn’t comfortable asking directly whether you were on fertility drugs.  It’s the backdoor question, if you will.  I suppose it’s never occurred to any of these questioners that there has to be a first person in a family to have twins. 
“Are they natural?”  No, we’re not referencing the potato chips in my cart, but my babies.  I was always tempted to snap, “No, they’re androids.”  But we all know I have admirable restraint, so I didn’t.  But I know what question these people were trying to ask, which is whether the babies were the result of fertility treatments or whether they were conceived spontaneously.  That’s the key (and correct) word here, people.  Spontaneous.  All babies are natural. 
For this next question, keep in mind that I have boy/girl twins.  They also look nothing alike.  My son is blonde with blue eyes and built like a nose tackle.  My daughter is a brunette with brown eyes and the body of a ballerina.  He’s as pale as Casper, and she has a gorgeous natural tan.  Got the mental picture?  Good.  Oh, and I never dressed them in gender-ambiguous clothing. 
“Are they identical?” 
No, I’m not kidding.  This is the question I get the most often.  The response I wish I could give is, “Did you skip biology class in high school?” 
Instead, I usually say, “No, he’s a boy and she’s a girl.”  Which, amazingly enough, does not clear things up for at least 50% of the people asking questions.  Sometimes you’ll see a light bulb go off in their heads and they’ll say something like, “Oh, then they must be paternal.” 
I’ve tried to gently set them straight by saying, “They’re fraternal.”  But I stopped correcting people after one lady said, “Oh, I was gonna say fraternal, I don’t know what I was thinking, maybe about fraternities or something.  Of course, it’s paternal.” 
At the risk of sounding like Dave Barry, I am not making this up.  
One time, a saleslady peered over the counter at Ulta, scrutinizing the kids in their double stroller.  “They sure do look alike,” she mused.  “Are you sure they’re not identical?”
    “Yes, I’m sure,” I said.  “Because it’s impossible for boy/girl twins to be identical.”
    “Oh, well, I’ve known lots of boy/girl twins who were identical.”
    What, dear reader, do you say to that?  I thought about explaining the mechanics of eggs splitting to form identical twins versus two eggs producing fraternal twins, but decided it was hopeless and left.  And you know what’s sad?  I’ll bet that woman votes.
“Oh, you sure do have your hands full.”  (I usually got this while pushing the kids in the stroller and pulling a grocery cart behind me.)  Thanks.  I hadn’t noticed. 
“I wouldn’t want to be you!” 
It’s really hard not to yell back, “Hey, I wouldn’t want to be you, either!” 
And then there are the things that people say when you’re pregnant and they find out you’re having twins.  In addition to being quizzed about how I got myself into my condition (see questions pertaining to fertility treatments above), I was confronted with the following:
“You’re having twins?  Ohmigod, my condolences.  I’m so sorry.” 
I was so shocked by that one that I was, for once, speechless.  It’s not like I was an unwed teen with an unwanted baby.  I was a happily married woman who was excited to be having any baby at all, and thrilled to be having two! 
“You’re having twins?  Oh, wow, I’m glad that’s you and not me.”  Yep, me, too.
“You’re having twins?  That’s so cool!  Two for the price of one!” 
Let me tell you about two for the price of one.  Ain’t no thing.  Twins means two cribs, two pack-n-plays, five billion diapers, four potties at last count, two baptismal gowns, six car seats (two infant, two regular for my car, two regular for my husband’s car), two high chairs, two booster seats, two swings, two bouncy seats, two exersaucers, ad nauseum.  Then there’s the stuff to come:  in a few years they’ll need booster seats for the car, so at least two of those.  Plus twin beds.  And then college for two at the same time.  Not exactly a blue-light special.   
“You’re on bed rest?  That must be so awesome, to get to just lay there all day and do nothing.”
Every time someone said that to me, they should have been thankful I wasn’t allowed to get up.  Though it’s highly unlikely I could have delivered the beating I would have liked without also delivering two babies.
Oh, yeah, bed rest is fun.  Those anti-contraction drugs that make your resting heart rate go over 120 beats per minute?  Better than a roller coaster!  Those other anti-contraction drugs you have to self-administer via a pump in your leg?  Way cool.  I mean, how often do you get to stick yourself with a needle and walk around with tubing hanging out of your body? 
There’s a lot more to that can of worms, but I sense a separate post later, so I’ll shut up for now.
And so I’ll leave you with my number one, yes this actually happened to me, don’t you dare say it to anyone you know with multiples:
“They sure do look different.  Are you sure they have the same father?”

Rethinking the “Good Mommy”

          New moms get bombarded with parenting advice, both from “experts” in the field and from other mommies.  Many new mothers are stepping off the corporate ladder or out of competitive fields, and their ambitious natures are often channeled into their new endeavor:  becoming a Good Mommy.  Unfortunately, in our culture, people tend to measure the degree to which one is a Good Mommy based on how completely the mother in question has subjugated herself to her children.  Tending to the needs of your children is laudable, but becoming a slave to them at the expense of your self, your marriage, and ultimately, their own well-being, is not.           
Please don’t misunderstand and think I’m criticizing stay-at-home mothers who have given up their careers.  I’m not.  In fact, I am a stay-at-home mother, and have given up my career.  To be perfectly honest, were it not for my extended bed rest, having twins, the twins’ serious acid reflux, plus postpartum depression, I may well have taken my Type A self down the road to Good Mommyhood.  Instead, our early struggles meant that from the start, I was behind on all the things that Good Mommies are supposed to do.  The twins’ room was minimally decorated, and certainly never touched by a professional designer.  I didn’t take cute baby outfits to the hospital for them to wear in the nursery.  From the very beginning they drank formula as well as breast milk.  Despite all the encouragement to have them “room in” during my hospital stay, we chose to send the babies to the nursery at night so we could get some sleep.  We didn’t invite everyone we knew to the hospital to see the newborns.  I was hardly the picture of glowing maternal peace and joy.  Rather, I was vomiting every five minutes and trying to recover from an ileus (a truly heinous postoperative complication.  Trust me, you don’t want to know).  I didn’t pick out elaborate smocked duds for them to wear on the short trip home, either.  Being wheeled out of the hospital, I felt my subconscious hiss for the first time, “Bad mommy.” 
            The first time my kids sat for a professional photographer, they were over a year old.  Almost everyone else I know did professional portraits of their newborns, then more portraits every three months.  I didn’t come up for air from the three hour long pump-feed-change-clean pump-sleep-get up again cycle for about three months, and then I thought about photography for all of thirty seconds before dismissing the idea.  My kids’ reflux was so bad that even with medication, they were constantly spewing.  Not just a little spit-up, mind you, but Poltergeist-style projectile vomiting.  One memorable day my daughter went through nine onesies.  Before lunch.  So a trip to a photographer would have required about a dozen photo-worthy outfits for each child, plus either raincoats or multiple outfits for both mommy and daddy. 
            I decided we could live with snapshots, but I envy the gorgeous artistic shots gracing most of my friends’ walls.  Even now, we have some great pictures, but I never seem to find the time to frame and display them.  My inner self clucks at me whenever we see friends’ photos.  “Bad mother,” she says. 
            When the twins’ first birthday rolled around, we didn’t throw a party.  I couldn’t begin to wrap my mind around invitations and decorations and favors and entertainment.  It was all I could do to get dressed and not cry.  We invited about five friends over for champagne and cake, and all I could think was, “Wow, we did it.  We kept them alive for an entire year!”  Naturally, when they were massacring their cake, I burst into tears.  It was a short party.           
Postpartum depression changed my parenting philosophy in a hurry.  Before the twins were born, I envisioned an idyllic “what to expect” world in which they played educational games instead of watching television.  But reality crashed that party in the form of infants that cried and cried and cried and could be calmed only via Baby Einstein DVDs.  Clifford the Big Red Dog and Dragon Tales provided my only opportunities to shower.  So, television it was.  Cartoons seemed a decent price to pay for a clean, sane-ish mommy.  Believe it or not, television actually has some redeeming qualities.  Both of my kids learned about hibernation from Curious George, and they learned the alphabet from a combination of Super Why and foam letters that stick to the tile around the bathtub.  But that still didn’t stop the inner voice from berating me, “Bad mommy,” it said.
There were also days when the crying and the diapers and the spit-up and life in general got to be so much that I couldn’t take it.  Thankfully, when that happened, I was strong enough to put the babies in their cribs and leave the room.  Several times I ended up sitting on the front porch with the dog, baby monitor in hand but turned down low so the flashing lights would alert me if the kids were screaming.  I would never intentionally hurt my children, but experiencing postpartum depression showed me how easily it could happen, especially if an affected new mother didn’t seek the appropriate help.  Let me tell you, when I was sitting on that front porch because I simply had to get away from my children, my inner voice shrieked her disapproval.  “Horrible mother!  What do you mean, you need to step away from the children!”    
Never did I think I would look upon postpartum depression as a gift, but lately I do.  It shook a lot of the Type A-ness out of me in my early parenting days, and I’m a better parent and wife for it.  It’s counterintuitive, but with parenting, sometimes less is more, and feeling bad means you’re doing good.  As I write this, I’m listening to my son cry in his room.  Not because I’m a masochist and get my kicks from tormenting small children, but because he broke several rules and I sent him to his room.  Even now, there’s a small voice inside, quieted to a whisper, “Bad mommy.  Be nice and let him come play.”
But if I gave in, if I decided to be nice and let him come play, he would learn nothing.  He might be happier this afternoon, but that does not a good mother make.           
            I watch other mothers swab every available surface their tots might touch with Clorox wipes, and I remember the many times I found the twins eating spider webs on the floor by our bay window.  At various times they also ate rug lint, crayons, pieces of the foam cushion on the bottom of the dog crate, stuffing from a couch pillow, yard debris tracked in by the dog, dryer lint, one copy of “The Velveteen Rabbit,” and two copies of “Goodnight Moon.”  My son drank stagnant water from a bird bath using half a plastic Easter egg during an egg hunt, and on one memorable day, tried to eat a used rectal thermometer probe cover.  The recent articles about dirt consumption promoting a healthy immune system in children quieted my self-deprecating voice, just a bit.  Enough that it can concede that perhaps this explains why my children don’t suffer from allergies.     
             The gift postpartum depression has given me has taken a while to see, and even longer to be able to articulate.  In a nutshell, it’s this:  I’ve learned that the Good Mommy my children need is a happy, healthy mother in a healthy marriage, and for that to happen, the children cannot be the center of my life.  My health, and my relationships with God and my husband must be in harmony and must take priority.  (See, doesn’t that make you want to instinctually yell, “Bad mommy!  Putting yourself before your children, what are you thinking?”)  The kids do not need to be micromanaged, and they are happier when they are well disciplined and well behaved, no matter how un-fun discipline may be, and no matter how much I don’t enjoy it.
            My children are cherished and adored.  They want hugs and kisses every day, and they want to pray every night.  Things aren’t perfect, and most days I am not at all sure of what I’m doing or how it will turn out.  Twenty years from now, my kids won’t have professional baby portraits of themselves at 3, 6, and 9 months, but I hope and pray that if you ask them, they will tell you that I was, in fact, a good mommy.  
So if you see my subconscious wandering around, please tell her to shut up, already.