Barnmaven

My dragon has polka dot wings

The mother of my first husband was the embodiment of the term "crafter."  She could make a basket out of leftover yard clippings, a doll out of cardboard toilet rolls, and cook a five-course meal from a refrigerator with nothing more in it than old butter and a couple of moldy apples.  Everytime she visited she wanted to go to the craft store.  From those excursions, I developed a serious case of craft-store guilt.  I couldn't go into a craft store without feeling like I should be doing something with the things they sold there.  But I could never settle on just one craft.  I toyed with jewelry-making a few times, I had this great idea a couple of years ago to start making things with wine corks.  I've tried scrapbooking, knitting, origami, rug-making, macrame, crocheting and painting wooden knick-knacks.  Not a damn thing has stuck. 

I don't really suck at crafts, I just never finish them.  Or I do one or two projects, they turn out really nice, but my interest in them is over. 

My pregnancies were mostly unremarkable, with the possible exception of the size of my gargantuan butt, but they were a time that will always be unforgettable and special to me.  After I knew I was having first my daughter, and then my son, my craftiness revived itself for a brief time.  I hand-made both of their birth announcements with heavy card-stock, stamps, ribbon, knick-knacks and a glue gun.  After each birth, during my maternity leave, I made a shadow box for them.  In it I put their hospital picture and their birth announcement, their baby booties and caps, and some blue or pink baby things from the scrapbooking section of the craft store.  I loved making them.  Loved making them for my children to have.

My children will leave me with far more physical mementos of their presence in my life than I will ever leave with them.  My office is covered with drawings, pictures, school craft projects, magnets, hand-made frames.  Colored pieces of paper cut into the shape of hearts and tied together with yarn.  Paintings and crayon drawings.  A beautiful picture of a dragon and a story to go with it from a second grade art project.

 

I have one wall at home that I use as an art gallery.  I bought some clear acrylic frames, and every couple of months or so I pick out the most colorful and interesting drawings or art projects and I place them inside the frame and put them up on the wall.  The old drawings go into a steam trunk that used to belong to my grandfather.  Its the same trunk where my own mother kept the best of my drawings from preschool through high school graduation.  Someday my children will go through this trunk and relive their childhood.   They will, if they want to, get to have some of those pictures and report cards and craft projects to show their own children.  But there will always be a box of their things with me, for as long as I breathe.  A box where I can look through my treasures, read their words, see their smiling faces.  At 10 and 7 they have already given me a lifetime of memories.

My ex finally collected his things from my home this week.  I had forgotten that the list of things we agreed on splitting included those shadow boxes.  It bothered me at the time that he wanted one of them, but so much else was going on, I was tired and worn out from the stress and conflict and I forgot to address it.  So the movers were taking the piano and the last of his things from my garage, and he asked about the box.  I didn't know what to say.  I went and got one of them.  I gave it to him.  Tried not to cry in front of him.

I was finally able  to put into words what I couldn't say then. 

That shadow box was never meant for you or for I to keep.  I didn't put my heart into making them only to keep them for myself.  Please put C's box in a safe place so that someday when he grows up he will have it. 

To remember that he once was very small and that his mama loved him very much.

Traumatic

I have always loved words.  I grasped the concept of reading at the age of three and I never looked back.  Through the bright afternoons of my childhood and the impossibly dark years of puberty and college, reading provided me with a way to escape, an avenue of avoidance.  My life has never been so bad, but I did have a lot to avoid.

That early grasp of language earned me a boot uphill, out of kindergarten and into the first grade.  Academically I was more than ready, and it feels sometimes that I got average grades in school simply because I was always three steps ahead of where the rest of the class was learning, and so distractible if I couldn't be challenged, that I just got bored and stopped trying.  Academics were never really the issue, but social skills were for most of my childhood the crisis du jour.  Its one thing to say that I was a precocious little girl who easily got along with most adults and never met a stranger.  Its another to say that I had, then and now, difficulty making friends within my peer group.  Then, it was hard to be the child who wasn't socially mature, who was sensitive, who cried easily.  Whether it was that they sensed in me an easy type of prey or whether they resented me for being smart or just because they loathed me on sight, the girls in my classes from elementary school all the way up were not kind to me.  I had few friends, none of them from my class in school.  The older I got and the more aware of it I was, the worse it felt. 

When I started fifth grade we had a new teacher at my school.  She and I did not click well, she seemed to resent the time that I was pulled from her class for advanced learning modules, and I didn't have any respect for her.  I sensed clearly that she did not like me, and I simply refused to perform.  My mother met with the teacher a few times, and then with the principal.  When it became clear that we were going nowhere fast, my mom applied to the district to put me in a different school.

This meant Mom had to pick me up and drop me off at school every day, but apparently she felt this was worth the effort. 

It was in fifth grade that I started to develop, somewhat.  I got my first bra that year. 

They didn't make stretchy little cotton training bras back in 1975.  They made torture ensembles of heavy straps and heavy cups, or so it seemed to me.  But I was proud of my new bra.  I thought it made me very grown up.

My first day at my new school with my new bra, I showed it to one of the girls in the bathroom.  "What size is it?" she asked.  "32A," I proudly replied.

That was the last moment I was proud of my boobs for a number of years.  Because the minute I walked out of the girls bathroom into the hallway and onto the playground for recess, my new classmates had cleverly concocted a little chant just for my benefit:

Roses are red, Violets are blue - Mary wears a bra sized THIRTY TWO!

I wanted the pavement to crack open and swallow me whole.  I spent recesses for the next few weeks inside the classroom or in the library, reading books and making every effort to escape my classmates.  They would find me, though, and the chanting would begin, until I think finally some teachers and playground duties cracked the whip and the taunting stopped. 

By the time I started my first menstrual cycle in junior high I knew WAY better than to tell anyone.

Of course, it wasn't easy to hide those bulky kotex pads that you had to pin inside of your underwear.  It would have been less obvious to wear a diaper.  Fortunately by then, most of us girls were menstruating and the girls that weren't didn't want to make it obvious that the rest of us were more "mature" than they were, so they kept their mouths shut.   We were all old enough to be horribly embarrassed by our rapidly changing bodies, and topics of menstruation and "female things" were mercifully left untouched.  Besides, there were plenty of other things to find fault with.

Thankfully I've recovered from the horror of those early days of development.  I've learned to appreciate my bosom and to not feel embarrassed when other people (visibly, verbally, whatever) appreciate it too.

Two weeks ago my daughter came home from her dad's wearing a cute new outfit.  The top has patterned sleeves and a hoodie, but the part over her chest and torso are thin white cotton.  Looking at her twirl and preen in front of the mirror, I was smiling under my hand when the awful realization struck me.    I wanted to throw up.

My baby girl needs a bra.

Its different for her, thankfully.  She's not the first one in her class, not by far, and the selection of bras for budding girls is by far superior than what we had available to us thirty-odd years ago.

We went shopping.  She picked out three - one gray, one pink, one turquoise.  She looks adorable.  Not once has she come home in tears having been teased by her peers for wearing one.

Do you know what's more traumatic than being teased for wearing a bra to school?

Being the mother of a girl who is now old enough to need a bra.

 

Dragging

I spent Thursday and Friday over on the Wet Side of the state to join a small group of report writers to learn our new reporting software.  The program we've been using since I started at my job is being phased out.  Even though I'm a manager now and no longer an analyst, I still keep my hands fresh writing ad-hoc reports and working with our project manager to put new reports up on the portal. 

Training classes are frustrating to me.  Instructors have a script to follow, and they spend (to me) an inordinate amount of time talking about structure and theory.  Dude, I know why I'm writing this report, I know when to use a chart, when to use a list report, when to use a crosstab, blah blah blah blah blah.  Just show me how this new software works with my data and let me have at it.  Please.  So I spend the first part of the day busting through all of the exercises in the material and the rest of the day twiddling my thumbs.  Its really exhausting. 

The nice part was getting to have dinner with my friend Julie and her man and check out their new digs.  I'm in love with their house and I assume they won't notice if I sort of quietly move in.  I also got to see my brother, which doesn't happen often enough.  We had a lovely dinner and caught up on things. 

I got home after a four hour drive over the mountains late last night and then got up while the moon was still out this morning to head up to the Blues with Michelle for the last orienteering ride of the season.  9 miles round trip, I think we came in second this time.  Bugs had an excellent day, with the possible exception of the fact that he hates water.  We had to cross two small streams and when I say small, I mean they were little trickles of water, inches wide and less than that deep.  But it was water and therefore he didn't want to cross it.  His final resort, after it being explained to him that across was where he was headed, and no, I wasn't going to get off and walk him over the terribly frightening water, was to LEAP ACROSS.  Like a 15-hand mule deer jumping a 6 foot fence.  On the upside, if he's ever a wash as a trail horse he may have a career in the jumping ring.   Silly nag.

I have one more trip over the mountains for work on Monday and back here again on Tuesday and a week full of meetings after that.  I say all this only as a way of letting you know that if I don't manage to post anything for the next week or so, its only because I'm frantically trying to find time to sleep.

On a bright note, one of my posts was syndicated on BlogHer this week. Go check it out! 

Lonely

^{Public Domain Photo Credit: Valerie}

 

SG is gone until either March or June.  He might get to come home in late October for a few days or maybe even a week or two, but he might not.  He is hoping to pick up a plant in Arizona after he gets done in Florida in March.  That would be a good one to snag as it would put him there for his son's college graduation in May.

Right now his focus is on getting work while there is work to be had; Road Techs are seasonal workers, and the best way to make a good living is to line up the jobs you can get while the season is on.  I understand this.  I really do.  And I keep saying (maybe as much for myself as for anyone else) that I have been on my own before and I know how to do that, and of course that's true.

But as we talk on the phone about our days and what's coming up, I notice there is a distinct difference.  I am focused on when we can see each other again, and he's focused on getting through the job. 

Does that mean he doesn't love me?  Of course not.  Does he miss me?  Yes, he does.  But we approach loving and missing and being apart with a difference in depth, I think.

He says "I might be a single standard deviation from the mean, but underneath it all, I'm still a guy." 

Is there a fundamental difference between the way men and women view relationships and time apart and the value of time together?  Does it mean that it is more important to women to be together with their partner than it does to men?

A very old study (Pollack and Gilligan, 1982) revealed that men and women perceive certain situations differently.  Analysis showed that men perceive danger in intmacy and women perceive isolation from relationships as frightening.  In the study, men perceived the most danger in situations where people were touching physically and women perceived the most danger in situations where a person was totally alone. 

Its not that they don't want to have relationships.  A 1983 study by Wheeler, et. al. found that both men and women require the qualities of disclosure, intimacy, pleasantness, and satisfaction in order to avoid loneliness. 

While I'm not a big fan of gender roles, I do think that our culture influences us greatly.  I think its safe to say that as a general rule, while men and women can both be practical, women tend to have somewhat more emotion around that which they must be practical.  Practicality to me is doing what must be done, like it or no, and then periodically sitting down and having a good cry over how much I hate having to be practical.  To SG, practicality means there's no use crying over spilt milk.  Or there's no crying in baseball.  Or boys don't cry.  (That is SO not true.  They do.  I saw one once, in 1987.)

When I think of the benefits of having a relationship, the tangible benefits are so easy to indentify.  Love in and of itself, that feeling of warmth and belonging.  Someone to spend time with, to share with.  Helping each other.  Enjoying family and travel and time spent doing nothing at all. 

If he is gone until June he will be gone nine months.

That's a long time. 

Its a long time to be alone when you're with someone.

Its a long time to consider when you aren't yet able to make plans to see each other.

We talk on the phone.  I cry.  It makes him uncomfortable, but he hangs in there.  He's learned that even if he can't find words of comfort that I need his silent presence sometimes.  I get past it.  We talk some more until its time for him, two hours ahead of me, to hit the hay.  "I love you, sweetheart," he says. 

I love you too.  Come home soon.

 

Alpha Female

Having big dogs definitely comes with challenges.

They eat more.  They knock things over.  Medications and surgeries cost more.  They have more hair to shed all over your house and your clothes.  They can reach food on the counter far too easily.

However, there are a lot of things I really like about having big dogs.  They can be intimidating to strangers.  No one in their right mind is going to enter my home uninvited.  They are substantial enough that when I'm lonely and I really need someone to hug, they will suffice quite adequately if no human is available. 

And lets get right to it:  There is something empowering about looking your 95-pound Rottie mix in the eye and saying in a slightly sinister tone, "Down."  And watching him hit the floor in abject submission to your authority.

*****

Today my daughter is officially transferred to C's school. 

Logistically, having kids in two different schools that begin and end at the same time, is a nightmare.  You are practically forced into a situation where you must pay aftercare costs for at least one of them on the days that you are actually available to pick them up from school.  And if you get delayed picking one of them up because of traffic, there is nothing that compensates for the trauma of a child who thinks they've been forgotten.

Add to that the extra half hour morning and evening that stopping at two different before/aftercare centers adds to my commute thereby turning what should be two hours into the car into three...its just not that workable.  Its not that it can't be done -- its that I don't want to do it.

I went to C's school last Monday to see about requesting the transfer.  I had taken vacation days and was doing yard/house stuff, so of course I was dressed casually.  Capri's, an old t-shirt, flip-flops.  No makeup.  To my credit, I did wear deodorant and I had brushed my teeth.  No, really.  I asked the secretary about the transfer and she said I would need to talk to the principal.

The principal at our old school was so approachable, so friendly.  She was also efficient and clearly in charge, but she would smile and ask how you were, inquire about how things were in a sincere way.  I always felt she was really invested in the success of all of the students at the school. 

Hence my shattered expectations.

I sat and waited, because I didn't have an appointment and because it being the second week of school, things are naturally busy.  I didn't mind waiting. 

She swept out of her office in her three-inch high heels, her expensive and form-fitted dress, her clearly gym-sculpted figure, her dark tank, immaculate nails, perfect makeup and sculpted hairdo.  The secretary pointed her out to me, she made eye contact with me - and did not smile.  She indicated the paperwork that I would need to fill out and advised me she was not making any decisions on transfer for several days as she needed to see how many new students she had and how much room there were in classes.  Her tone of voice clearly implied "I don't wish to tell you yes.  I am the Person In Charge here, understand?"  OK, fine.  I smiled at her in a friendly way:  nothing.

Over the course of the week there was a little back and forth - special services wouldn't recommend that A ride C's bus, and of course with his aftercare outside of the boundaries for both schools, it wouldn't be workable for the transfer, so the transfer was initially denied. 

Never understimate the willpower of a special needs mom.

After a morning well-spent on the phone with both the special needs director and the transportation office, the transportation director agreed that A could ride the bus with her brother.  Keep in mind, we're not displacing anyone.  There are four or five children on this bus, and its a full-size bus.  We're not adding any extra stop- or drop-offs.  Logistically, its pretty much a wash. 

So after I talk with the transportation group, I get a call from the principal.

"I understand you've spoken with the transportation department."

"That's correct."

Coolly I am informed that based on their agreement to transport her, my daughter can transfer to my son's school and start the following Monday - today.  Awesome! 

"Thank you so much, I really appreciate your help."

What do people normally say when thanked?  What, it's not, "I must advise you that if the special services bus were to become full then your daughter would be unable to ride it and would need to transfer back to _______ .  Do you understand this?"   Whatever happened to saying "You're welcome?"

Dang.   Its easy to recognize an alpha female, but rarely have I met any human being, alpha or not, that I couldn't establish a rapport with.  Clearly my skills need honing.

Now I know all the special needs moms - and probably most of the moms of school aged kids - understand that your school staff are your most important and valuable allies when it comes to getting needs met and things done.  I couldn't have survived the last few years without the help of the secretaries and the school nurse and our wonderful, lovely teachers - and of course, our principal.

All I need to do is to get her to crack a smile.  Just one genuine smile. 

I have my work cut out for me.

 

Eye of the Hurricane

On reading it, I realize my last post sounded sad.  But really, I wasn't sad when I wrote it.  I was thinking what a positive experience I'd had, reclaiming my inner foster baby.  I had spent years thinking of that little girl as a separate person from me.  She had a different name, a temporary set of parents.  I separated her off and regarded her as a distinct individual who had nothing whatsoever to do with me.  As it turns out, that wasn't really true, and changing my perception of that was a very powerful thing.  There is more work I have to do, integrating and healing so that I can leave the past behind me and get on with the important job of living in the now. 

I'm remarkably calm right now.  I have a million things to do, and now that SG has hit the road, I've got no one to help me do it.  But I know I can do this thing called living my life because I've done it before.  I'm capable.  I'm strong.  And I have lots of support, both near and far, including SG, who is always just at the other end of the phone if I need him. 

Getting everyone out the door this morning was remarkably easy.  I made myself a checklist for every evening and every morning.  Lunches.  Meds.  Dogs, horses, chickens, cats.  Coffee.  Laptop.  All the essentials - and I still had time for makeup (thank you short hair for taking only seconds to be done).  And I was so relaxed I had to keep double checking myself to figure out if I was still me.  Because this is not the me I remember being before.

The me I used to be would have created so much drama around her man leaving her for an extended period of time.  I would have clung and cried and wailed.  His leaving would have been so stressful and miserable for him because I would have been all undone.  It would have been all about ME ME ME ME ME.  And sure, some of its about how I'm feeling.  Sad, missing him.  Lonely sometimes when I want to feel his touch and I know I will need to wait.  But its also about how HE feels and what HE needs.  No guilt, he's not leaving me, he's heading to his job.  He deserves to have a smile and a kiss and a loving sendoff, not a crap bunch of emotional mama drama.  My children (especially) deserve to have a mother who isn't sobbing in a corner because oh God I'm going to have to be alone!  They need a mother who is fully present and engaged. 

I don't think I'm feeling this way simply because its the logical way to be.  I think it has to do with love, faith, letting go of fear and the need to control the things that scare me, trust, and a whole lot of healing.  And its not that fear and hurt aren't there - of course they are.  But we can let go of our fear when we understand that we don't really have any control of the things that we are afraid of anyway. 

Fighting things, trying to make everything go the way we need it to is a terrible waste of our time and our energy.  It depletes our spirit, steals our joy, saps our strength.  Buddha said, "The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, not to worry about the future, or not to anticipate troubles, but to live in the present moment wisely and earnestly."  If I am worrying about situations I cannot change, how can I live in the moment?   If I am afraid of how certain things are going to make me feel, how can I recognize the small joys of just being where I am right now?

In the hurricane's eye is stillness.  In the center of yourself, there is stillness as well.  Sometimes you have to stop listening to the rest of everything else, get out of the wind of your angst and your troubles, to find it.

It takes work, but it is so worth it.  My life isn't perfect or easy, but it doesn't have to be as hard as I used to make it.

Two of me hold hands and try to reach the rest of me

There are three of me.

There is the before, the in utero, the swimmer trying to escape a reality that is untenable.

There is the in-between, the foster child, the little girl named Bobbi whose foster mother wrote down feeding schedules and diaper details and who didn't dare attach to a baby who would move on.

There is the after, the child who came from nowhere, from nothing, without lineage.  Outside of time and space, I emerged from a black hole, a rip in the fabric of yesterday, without a name or a past.  Loved selflessly and nurtured into adulthood by a family though not of flesh and blood, but intertwined by the heartstrings of love and need.

Today I claim the in-between.  I pull her into myself and gaze on her infant face.  She is me.  I am her.  She has languished, apart from me, and I need only own her, accept her, take her in to myself, to nurture her back to the whole. 

The other, I am not yet ready to embrace.  The one who was an unhappy surprise.  The one who swam nine months, nearly ten, in a toxic soup, a place where she was not welcome.  Who drank what she drank, ate what she ate, heard what she said.  Who emerged, finally, not into the loving embrace of a mother but into the competent and dispassionate arms of a nurse.  Who disappeared, climbed into a cocoon and emerged as someone completely different - a child bereft of family, of lineage, of kith and kin.  A child rescued, to be sure, but yet an orphan.  Abandoned, then saved.  Lost, then found.  Loved, finally, but only after being cut loose from blood ties and family lines.

I'm not ready to reach her yet.

Maybe soon.

Maybe not ever.

36

No, not the age I was when I became a parent for the first time...but close.

It is approximatlely the number of hours until he leaves.  Hits the road.  Vamooses.  Drives off into the sunset.  (OK, not the sunset, technically, he's heading East.  Everyone knows the sun sets in the West.)

I don't have the words right now.

I want to be poignant.  I want to be meaningful.  I want to be lighthearted. 

I'm not finding any of those things easily right now.

We had good friends over for a wonderful dinner after a day of hard work and much accomplished.  It felt good to relax and enjoy our company.  And periodically, my chest would seize up with a feeling like someone lashed a boulder to my heart.  Enjoy it now. 

 

He's not going forever.

It just feels like it sometimes.

Mutation!

I remember when I was trying to get pregnant many years ago, and I read several articles that encouraged me to increase my intake of folic acid.  Folic Acid, or Vitamin B9, is an essential compound that our bodies use to synthesisze and repair DNA, grow babies and produce healthy red blood cells, among other things. Folic Acid is not only good for you but it is a necessary compound for health and life.

The finished product that our bodies create from Folate is an enzyme called methylenetetrahydrofolate reductase,(Say THAT ten times fast!) and the gene that provides the instructions for processing the folate is also called methylenetetrahydrofolate reductas (NAD(P)H).  I just call it the "motherfucker" gene because its official symbol - MTHFR - begs me to do so. 

When the MTHFR gene is functioning properly, all is well.  When it's not, all hell breaks loose. 

Mutations in the MTHFR gene cause problems like homocystinuria, anencephaly and spina bifida. ( I have a mild form of spina bifida known as spina bifida occulta.  Basically, this means I have a hole in one of my lower vertebra, but there is no compromise to the spinal cord.)  Pregnant women with mutations in the MTHFR gene have difficulty carrying pregnancies to term.  

Researchers have discovered that two particular polymorphisms of the MTHFR gene (C677T and A1298C) are associated with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and depression.  Sources here and here.  These mutations which prevent the body from taking up and processing the folate into the final enzyme, seem to have an effect on mood and brain function.

This is relevant to me and my kids in so many ways.  I haven't had the blood test done to determine if I have one or both of the mutations - but I would say that my own bipolar illness and spina bifida occulta are evidential.  My kids' other parent has been tested.  And my son has been tested. 

Getting our pediatrician to test him was a challenge. When I broached the subject he had never even heardof the MTHFR gene issue.  I think he thought (as I'm sure he often does) that I'm off my rocker.  To his credit, he did the research, and agreed to request the blood test.  When the results indicated that he has one of the gene mutations I was not in the least surprised.  However, our doctor was unconvinced that he needed to have the medication that is usually prescribed for this, a concentrated form of L-methylfolate. 

At our appointment this week, reviewing the rating scales we always fill out, he suggested a change in the ADD meds.  I countered with a request that we consider trying the L-methylfolate.  And he agreed.

L-methylfolate in high dosages depletes B-12 in the body as the methylation process utilizes B-12 as a coenzyme.  Once B-12 is depleted, the folate gets stuck and then the supplement becomes less effective.  Even worse, B-12 deficiency causes other problems like pernicious anemia, which untreated can become fatal.  B-12 absorbs poorly via the stomach, so only B-12 shots or sub-lingual B-12 supplements are recommended.

Do I think this will work?  I'm cautiously optimistic.  I know at least two people who started taking L-methylfolate and successfully control their bipolar disorder without the addition of any other prescription medication.  I'm not excited about introducing two new pills to a child who pretty much refuses to take pills, but we'll cope. We always have.

Cross your fingers for us.

 

 

Where I wasn't on 9/11/01

I listened to an interview yesterday on NPR with Carrie Lemack, who lost her mother in the September 11, 2001 attacks.  She runs Families of September 11 and Global Surivors Network.  She produced a documentary film called Killing in the Name, which profiles a Jordanian Muslim who lost 27 members of his family when a suicide bomber blew themselves up at his wedding.  I was struck profoundly by something Lemack said.  She talked about how often people, after learning that she lost her mother on September 11, share with her their stories of where they were on that day. 

"Its just hard.  Its like telling Jackie Kennedy where you were when her husband was shot.  You just wouldn't do that."

Lots of us are blogging this week about where we were on September 11, 2001.  Like most people I remember where I was.  I remember what I saw, what I felt.  And on this decade anniversary of the attacks, I need to remember that what I felt and experienced matters little.   I wasn't there. 

 The people who escaped the buildings inthe midst of fire and carnage, with injuries or memories that will impact them for the remainder of their lives - they don't care where I was.  The people who lost a husband, wife, partner, lover, child, parent, sibling - they don't care where I was.   Their lives were changed in ways I can't begin to imagine.

9/11 has been capitalized to death.  By our media, by our politicians, by authors and musicians and talk show hosts and pastors and pundits.  We've all of us, every one of us, used the date to some extent to garner attention, capital or comfort.   God knows comfort is something we are all much in need of these days, and it is expected that anyone's response to such an enormous loss of human life and potential would be visceral enough to be this keenly felt some ten years after the fact.  But God, even in the writing of this piece I can't escape the fact that I'm in a way just as guilty as everyone else of capitalizing from tragedy.  Enough, I say.

In the blogosphere much of the time people rally around events and issues in a way that adds to the greater context and discussion at large, and I love that.  But there are times where the writing around some issues take on a center focus, and I feel a little uncomfortable about that.  I feel uncomfortable about me doing that.  And I know I've done it.  I'm guilty.

I say this not to take issue with what anyone else is writing or saying about 9/11, but to remind myself that when it comes to this subject, there are several thousand stories far more important than mine.