The Point

Arlo starts asking to go home immediately. “Umm?” he says.

“No, silly, we just got here,” I say. My sister was almost done with the shrimp tacos. I know Arlo won’t eat them, but she always has something in the fridge that he likes. “You want a hot dog?” I ask him.

“Umm,” he says.

“Not yet, buddy,” I say. “We’ll go home in a little bit.”

“Umm,” he says.

An hour later, the rest of us have eaten, but he hasn’t, and he starts to gag. I whisk him to the bathroom. Because of his Nissen, he can’t throw up, but what’s in must come out, so I pull down his pants and sit him on the potty. 

“You feel better?” I say, after he fills it up. 

“Yah,” he says with a giggle. 

“Good,” I say.

“Cake?” he says.

It’s hard to tell sometimes if he’s sick or if he’s just cleaning himself out after a bout of constipation. I don’t always know exactly how much Miralax he’s had; sometimes he pours his water in the dogs’ bowl. 

But he quits asking to go home and eats a piece of lemon cake. That night, he has a pretty gnarly diaper, but he’s in good spirits, so OK.

Approximately twenty-four hours after Arlo’s request to go umm, sharp pains shoot through my belly, short ones at first, growing into a meteor shower of pain in my midsection. I, alas, have no Nissen, and suffer the resulting indignity. The boys more or less put themselves to bed while I lie on the bathroom floor, telling myself aloud, “It’ll pass… It’ll be OK…”

The following morning, I’m not at 100%, but the pain is gone, and I’m even able to eat a little bit. I guess Arlo and I had the world’s shortest stomach virus.

That afternoon, I pull up in car line. Patrick walks over clutching his belly. “My stomach hurts,” he says. 

I remember barfing at least once a year growing up, but Patrick’s almost 9 and I can think of only two instances in his life, both many years ago. That’s why, despite Arlo’s and my woes, all of us are startled an hour later when Patrick projectile-vomits all over himself, me, the couch, the floor, and the bathroom. “It came out my nnnnooooose,” he wails.

But, again, once I Lysol-wipe all the surfaces and he showers, he is basically no worse for wear. I’ll keep him home the next day, of course, but I guess we’re all on the upswing. Thank god. Between the tree falling on my house during a storm a couple weeks prior, and a fucking German roach infestation in my kitchen–disgusting!–I’m feeling sorry for myself. I deserve a break, I pout.

Except an hour later, my nausea returns. I have very little in my stomach, so once that’s out, it’s water and bile. Then just bile. As each wave rips through me, I retch so hard I wonder if my eyes will rupture. The barfing ends at 1:30am, but I don’t sleep–every muscle in my body feels like a blue bruise. 

I had imagined watching movies and strolling around the block with the boys, but the next day, I am supine. When I simply must get up, I moan a little moan with every step. Patrick plays video games for ten hours. I don’t even know what Arlo does. Surely, tomorrow will be better.

At 4:00am, I write lesson plans and send them to my administration and text my sister and brother-in-law: Any way one of you can take the boys to school?

I spend another day unable to do anything but intermittently shuffle, moaning, from my bed to the bathroom, but by late afternoon, I’ve kept down eight crackers and two Tylenol, and I feel well enough to pick up the dudes. 

My vice principal texts to ask if I need a sub for the next day. “Nah,” I tell her.

At 3:00am, I awake with a shiver. I am freezing. The shivers come every five seconds. I turn on the shower as hot as I can, sit down in the stall, wrap my arms around my bent knees, and let the water pour over me. Eventually, I stand and reach for the corner with the shampoo–might as well wash my hair–but the shelf is not there. The wall extends into seeming infinity. For ten terrifying seconds, I’m in an Escher painting. Turns out, I’ve pivoted and am reaching for the wrong corner.

Arlo wanders into my room. “Ear off,” he says. Oh no. I think he’s asking me to turn the pain off in his ear. 

I text the VP: Gonna need a sub after all

I write more sub plans. By 6:00, I’m burning up. I find my cheap thermometer that reads normal as 97.4 and stick it against my temple… 102. Uh, does that mean I actually have a temperature of 103? I take two Tylenol.

My brother-in-law ferries Patrick to school, and at 8:00, I give myself a rapid COVID test (negative) and start calling doctor’s offices. I secure an 11:30 appointment for Arlo, but my provider doesn’t return my message. Perhaps I shouldn’t be driving… The Tylenol have kicked in, so I do. The doc looks in Arlo’s ears and pronounces them “fine.” Yay! Maybe “ear off” meant he couldn’t hear? But then why do they suddenly look fine? Whatever. I’ll take the win.

The urgent care in the next town over has the shortest wait times, so we drive over there. The nurse gives me another COVID test (negative) and asks if I can give her a urine sample. 

“Of course,” I say, but in the bathroom, only a trickle comes out. And it’s the color of sweet tea. Um. 

The doctor looks at my lab results and pronounces me dehydrated. He listens to my various organ noises with his stethoscope and then palpates my abdomen. “How does this feel?” he says, tapping on my side. 

“Not great,” I say. Other side? Also not great.

He taps right about on my c-section scar, and I nearly bend in half. 

“You need to go directly to the Emergency Department for imaging,” he says. “That should not be happening.” When pressed about possibilities, he offers a litany of -itises. I’m not fond of the sound of any of them.

The ED is relatively quiet, save the poor woman retching violently into a bag and moaning, clearly suffering from whatever I had a few days prior. Within half an hour, I’m taken back to triage.The nurse leaves for 15 minutes in the middle of my check-in for an “unresponsive in the car, possible overdose” call, then tells me it should “only” be a couple hours before I’m seen. There are real emergencies, and then there’s whatever I’ve got. Back in the waiting room, I do notice a startling number of people who look like they’re not currently overdosing, but they’ve probably had a snootful of Narcan at some point, and I send up a little “thanks” to the universe. Considering my family history and mental illness, my lack of drug addiction is attributable only to dumb luck.

My brother-in-law picks up Patrick from school, and my sister swings by to grab Arlo. The nurse was right–about two hours after triage, I’m taken back to a curtained bed in an over-air-conditioned ward. The doc comes across as eminently knowledgeable and personable. We chat. She’ll order two liters of fluids and a CT scan, but she guesses my gut is just “repopulating” after the virus, and that’s what’s causing my abdominal pain. 

The IV cranks fluids into my veins. Even after two bags, I still barely pee at all. I guess I was dehydrated. Several boring hours later, I’m wheeled into an even-more-freezing room for my CT. Like other scans I’ve had–MRI, sonogram–the CT machine seems like something out of Star Trek. How does it know things?! Before they wheel me back to my spot, the nurse covers me in a warm blanket, and I want to kiss her and do her laundry and buy her a spa day.

With the passing hours, I become more bored but more reassured. If there was something startling on the CT, they’d surely have whisked me into surgery by now. …Right?

The doc finally swings back by. “I’m sending you home,” she says. Yahoooooooooo! “But–”

Uh-oh. 

“–there were some incidental findings that you’ll need to get checked out later.” I have a lesion on my liver (MRI) and a big cyst on my right ovary (ultrasound). They’re probably nothing, but I’ll need to keep tabs on them.Great, another thing for my to-do list! Whatever. I walk out of the ED $1,049 poorer than I was at noon and take deep breaths of the cool night air.

At home, the boys jump out of their bunks when they hear me come in the door. Patrick inquires sweetly how I’m feeling, and Arlo points out my “bandaid” (the gauze and bandage from my IV). My sister heads home. The three of us fall into bed. 

It’ll take awhile for my pee to turn yellow, and for two more days, the idea of eating is unappealing, then I’m back to craving Nutty Buddies like usual. 

Whenever I write something like this, I want that to be it. Do I have to have a Point? The Point is that this happened to me. The Point is it sucked. But the rules of literature say I should learn something from it. I should change or develop in some way. I should evolve or devolve as a person. I should deliver to you, the reader, some universal truth or lesson that you can connect with or apply to your own life.

I don’t know. Be thankful for your health? Drink water? Things can always get worse, until they get better? The American healthcare system will eventually bankrupt us all? 

How about you say. What’s the point? Tell me. But do drink water.

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Funmaker

When I was about 8, my brother (10) made up a fantasy game. I can’t remember all the details, but he blindfolded me and my same-aged cousin and led us through a story. It involved walking through an alligator-infested swamp (he snapped at our ankles with kitchen tongs), sailing on a tempestuous sea (he tossed us around in the hammock), and sitting under a magical tree (he climbed up in the branches and rained candy down on us). He did this for absolutely no reason except that, constitutionally, he’s a funmaker. 

One hot day years ago, finding himself without a baby pool, he hauled his canoe out from under the porch and filled it up with the hose so my babies could cool off. On a more recent scorcher, he dragged 40 feet of plastic out of his shed to an incline in his yard, squirted it with Dawn, and set the sprinkler to a narrow parameter. His kids and mine spent an hour slip-n-sliding at Uncle Bruce’s water park. For his kids’ whole lives, our annual trip to New England has involved an elaborate quest involving ciphers, celestial navigation, and treasure–some years it’s literally buried.

He’s a funmaker. 

I, alas, am not. My idea of fun is sitting on my porch talking to grownups. My children, shockingly, do not find my favorite activity fun. And one of them is vocal about how not-fun his life is. 

“What should I doooooooo?” Patrick says, eighty times a day, and then sniffs at my suggestions.

“Go build something with your LEGOs,” I say.

“No. What else?” he says.

“Make a train track.”

“No.”

“OK, if you don’t like your toys, let’s donate them.”

“I like them. I just don’t want to play with them right now.”

During the school year, I can survive the whining by patching together trips to the children’s museum, games of Uno, play dates, and screen time, but after our big trip to Massachusetts in June, I was facing a July of nonstop togetherness. (I recognize the enormous privilege of having a month off with my children… But also <shiver>.)

So I did what parents of my vintage do–I asked my local parent Facebook group for help. Give me ideas, I said. Free or low cost. Little to no prep. 

And they came through! Whole lists of activities, some 5-minute ones, others day-long. At least one person mentioned Pinterest, which I finally joined (what can I say–I’m not an early adopter) and which delivered hundreds of other ideas. The most important comment came from a mom who filled a jar with slips of paper with Things to Do. Most of the Things were fun, but some were chores! A wheel of fortune!

I hoped this was my answer so I scribbled about 100 Things down, a quarter of them chores. I knew, in order to make this work, I had to make the chores tiny, so instead of “clean the bathroom,” I wrote “wipe the bathroom mirror,” “wipe the bathroom sink,” “wipe the toilet,” “scrub the toilet,” and “clean the tub” on separate slips. 

The other stuff ranged from get-your-wiggles-out (“ride your bike to the parking lot and back”) to artistic (“collect leaves and make prints or rubbings”) to sure wins (“30 minutes of extra screen time”).

What an unqualified coup. Here was Day 1:

I figured Patrick would complain about the chores, regardless of how minuscule, but he didn’t! In fact, he said, “Even the chores are fun because I get to pull from the jar.” 

!!!!!!!!!

The next days were a whirl of tiny paper rectangles.

Some items went back in the jar the next day, some the next week, and some were one-time deals.

Arlo got in on many of them, like drawing a Pac-Man board on the driveway:

Any guesses on the slip that prompted this face?:

(It was “go to Pelican’s SnoBalls.”)

So I did it! I made fun! After a couple weeks, the novelty wore off, but Patrick will still pull from the jar every once in a while. And I made it through July without losing my marbles.


Yesterday was the first teacher workday of the new school year. I think one of these years, there will be a shift, but my kids are still little enough that work is a break. During the all-school meeting, the admin team passed around the mic and told us to say one word to describe how we were feeling. I said ‘excited’ because I didn’t want to explain why I was ‘relieved.’

Prenatal Judgment

At the time, I denied worrying about judgment. I said it was my body, my choice, and the fact that I had blazed my twin pregnancy on the internet had no bearing on whether I would abort the “defective” fetus. That was a lie. I shouldn’t have had to worry, but I did.

I was worried, sad, scared, and pissed. Upon learning that the $5,000 selective reduction procedure was not covered by my insurance, I blogged:

I picture the white-haired, conservative Christian senator who I’m sure stuck his dick right in the bill governing what’s covered and what’s not for state employees. “It’s a chiiiiild, not a choice,” I hear him say in my mind. Fuck that guy. That guy who’s never been, and could never be, in this position.

But am I considering selective reduction anyway?

I’m startled to find that I am. I was so sure after the first trimester screening, when it was still hypothetical, that I would just have a Down syndrome baby. Now, I think about the challenges—emotional, physical, financial—and I don’t know.

I don’t know.

Maybe?

Yes.

Yes, I am.

I was. And I was less equivocal than I made it seem. At first, I was desperate to abort Twin A. Over the next couple weeks, things shifted some. I was leaning toward continuing the pregnancy. Part of it was still fear of judgment. The other part was some combination of not having five grand, delusion, and my mom’s reassurance that I would love the baby. 

It baffles me now. The love I feel for Arlo is probably the least complicated love I’ve ever felt. I love Patrick, of course–truly, madly, deeply. I’d take a bullet for him. But his favorite pastime is arguing with me about uncontroversial topics. I just want to love each other and not fight all the time, but right now we love each other and fight all the time. And as much as I’d like to blame his character flaws on the donor, it’s pretty clear he’s my mini-me, and there’s something uniquely irksome about seeing your faults in another person, particularly one you gestated. It’s complicated.

Anyway, Arlo’s first years were difficult, with the surgeries and the feeding issues and whatnot, but once all that got wrapped up (knock wood), loving him became the easiest thing I do every day. Not that I didn’t love him ages 0-3–don’t be an asshole. You know what I mean. But for the last 4½ years, it’s like the only thing on our shared to-do list is love each other. At the school door every morning, he turns back and puckers up for a goodbye smooch; when the bus drops him at home, he spreads his hands, and says, “Mamaaaaaaa!” as if we’re reuniting after a year. He frequently and randomly forms an L with his hand (his approximation of the sign) and says, “Ah lulloo, mama.” I make an L with my pinkie up and say, “I love you too, Arlo.” He says, “Ah lulloo *oo, mama,” clicking the ‘t,’ and I say, “I love you too, Arlo.” We go back and forth like that a few times. He is a better person than I am, and I often feel utterly undeserving.

So how do I explain my ferociously pro-choice stance? After all, I almost feel bad for parents who don’t have a kid with Down syndrome. Iceland and Denmark have practically eradicated trisomy-21 by terminating “deformed” fetuses found on prenatal screenings, and I think, how terribly sad

But I don’t judge them. I still believe in bodily autonomy. I think pregnant people should be able to say exactly if and when they carry and bear children. It’s unfortunate that those people will probably never know an Arlo in their lifetimes, but Arlo was my choice before he was my child. Even though I was afraid, I did choose him. I could’ve had that selective reduction. To avoid judgment, I could’ve told people–“I lost Twin A.” Semantics. Five grand? I have an IRA I started when I was 20. Even with the penalty for early withdrawal, the distribution would’ve covered it. 

And it was all moot once my mom said, of me and my siblings, “I love you three equally and in very different ways. I imagine it’ll be the same for you with the twins.” I didn’t know then, but that was it–the moment I chose Arlo.

For a year or two after their birth, I told people, “I’d have another kid if I met a partner who wanted to have one together.” And then, on a certain day I couldn’t point to on a calendar now, my mind took brick and mortar to that door. I was done. If a paramour wanted a baby together, we could get a dog, or maybe a chinchilla, but any zygote that somehow nestled against my uterine wall would’ve been aborted. 

That’s the main thing, isn’t it? Most people have abortions not because they don’t want that particular baby but because they don’t want a baby at all. Some are too young or too poor; many just don’t want to be mothers; and of course, the majority of women who have abortions are mothers. Like me, they just don’t want any more kids.

And now, Roe v. Wade is going to be overturned. [Ed. note: Post published before SCOTUS decision.] Nearly half the states have trigger laws, which will immediately make it impossible, or nearly so, to end a pregnancy.

At 46 years old, my uterus is likely to shake a fist and yell, “Get off my lawn,” to any egg with a dream and a prayer. Moreover, if I went the rest of my life without interacting with another penis, that’d be okey-dokey-artichokey with me. This legal change will not affect my womb, but I am terrified. For my nieces. For my students. For every person who doesn’t want to have a kid, even an Arlo. For our country which seems to be going in a direction we on the left had nightmared. This very much feels like a slippery slope.

I don’t know when I, as a slowly boiling frog, will decide to jump out of the American pot, but it seems like it could be sooner, rather than later. I speak Spanish, and I used to be fluent in Italian–I could get it back. Maybe learn French or German or Swedish? Perhaps we’ll move to Iceland. Let them see what they’re missing. 

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