jaysaint Getting it all down on paper…

So many small children — just like mine.

The White House press secretary Jay Carney says that today is not the day to talk about gun control. I will allow that yesterday would have been better. Last year better yet. Failing that possibility, we will have to settle for today.

November isn’t a good month to return to a blog. People are NaBloPoMo -ing (I had to check on that twice to get it right) all over the place and I’m wondering if I can get one post out before winter starts. Why does it even matter? Because I’m happier when I’m getting some personal writing done. Because I will never write a memoir, which means this is at least a partial record of our lives. Because sometimes someone pops in and says something so smart and insightful that it’s worth every minute I’ve ever spent here.

I can point to all the things that normally keep me away from WordPress. I travel quite a bit for work, which is demanding even when I’m home. I may have mentioned my two small children. Damon sometimes likes to talk to me. I want to sleep.

The truth is that what stopped me, though, was getting tangled up in something I wanted to write about my Dad. Or something that wanted to be written. So many deleted drafts. This is me deciding to walk away from that. I’m sure I’ll write it, but now is obviously not the time. I do wonder how many years will go by until I stop thinking, “What on earth am I going to get Dad for Christmas?” for just one moment.

Last Christmas we gave the boys this ant farm.

As is our custom, we popped it in the closet and forgot about it for six months. Summer came around, though, and we started getting crafty. After a very successful run at raising (growing? generating?) butterflies out of caterpillars we were all feeling great about our insect husbandry.

Turns out you can’t just go out into your yard and get ants for your ant farm (Of course you can. I’m a sucker.) We needed the ants with the special mandibles — harvester ants. Also, there was a dire warning about not mixing types of ants. I think if you do that your house burns down.

The first internet order of ants (weird new world) came mostly dead. Not in the funny Princess Bride way. Just in the mostly dead way. I shot an email to the dubiously named AntsAlive.com and, to their credit, they got another shipment out to us right away.

This time they were in it to win it. We had tunnels on day one.

The pamphlet directed us to give them fresh air each week by opening up the top for a few seconds. When I did, all our ants shot for the top. In one moment I went from feeling pretty good about giving these guys a cushy, blue gel paradise to feeling like their captor.

Alden and I sat down and I talked about how the ants have given us so much pleasure, how we should be grateful and considerate of what they want. Don’t we want our them to have a happy life? Finally we came to agreement and I took the boys outside for a graduation ceremony. We laid the farm gently on its side and watched them all jet for the open air. We wished them well, we gave them advice, and when they crawled up on us I told the boys not to sweat it. They’re just ants, right?

Of course one bit Elliot. Of course it did. Why wouldn’t ants with awesome digging mandibles be nasty biters?

Poor Elli screamed and cried. It obviously really hurt. His morning was ruined. But really, it was the ants who were about to have a very bad day. Because in less than an eye blink I changed from their caretaker to the their worse gigantic stomping nightmare. I scooped Alden up with one arm and Elliot with the other, which left my feet free to do their worst before I whisked the boys inside for tea and sympathy. Possibly I was also cursing, but you can’t prove it.

I guess the boys got an intentional lesson in care and consideration for creatures with less power than you have; and then an unintentional lesson in enforcing your limits with extreme prejudice.

After a few minutes of ice and kisses I looked Elliot in the eye and said, “Elli. I am going to go back outside kill all those ants because one of them hurt you. Do you want to watch?” And he did. That was his lesson in having a Sicilian mama.

“When I was in Mexico, this amazing chef made a tequila ice cream, so I had two spoonfuls, just to try it. I definitely did a few extra minutes of cardio the next morning.”

–Stacy Keibler

Stacy Keibler and my boyfriend Tony Dovolani

That was her comment to People Magazine when asked how she splurges.

Stacy Keibler seems like a nice lady. I’m sure she’s happy with her life choices (Hi George Clooney!). But it will be a cold day in hell before I can look back into the mists of the past and tell you how many spooons-ful of ice cream I had while on vacation.

I was letting my thoughts roam the other day while I washed my hair, and what bubbled up was, “What was Alden’s white blood cell count?” This isn’t unusual. Repetitive thoughts wear grooves in our brains, and so we often return to those places outside of need or logic. What stopped me mid-shampoo was… I couldn’t remember the exact number. I’m sure it’s here, if I care to go back in my archive. Knowing isn’t the point, though. Not knowing is a gift.

I still think about the kids in our hallway of the local children’s hospital. So many of the names on the door never changed, which means they were there longer than we were. Maybe their parents are still reciting test results from memory. I remember how sick I felt when I saw they had corrected Alden’s name on his door (first having used his formal first name, which we never do) because it meant they were getting to know him. Which is so kind. I wanted to be long gone before that happened, though.

Last weekend we went to a beautiful wedding. I lounged in an Adirondack chair and watched my kids plunk stones into a lake and felt again that sudden lightening. It comes over me still probably once a week. It’s a heady, slightly dizzy sensation, a little rush of adrenaline. I think these little rushes are akin to that breathless feeling that comes on just after a narrowly-avoided car accident. There’s a palpable difference between that atmospheric anxiety I can feel for my kids and the very clear, specific threat to one of them that we experienced early this year. The general worry is never gone. But the general worry is a creampuff. A marshmallow.

Our story is most remarkable, in retrospect, for what didn’t happen. Alden’s life was never in danger, we just didn’t know that. I know that is dumb luck, and its uncontrollable nature makes me so breathlessly grateful that it went the right way for us. Grateful to whom, if I say it is dumb luck? I don’t even care.

It’s too early to say, but maybe I am permanently changed by this experience. I had a long, hard day at work not long ago. At the end a colleague was following me down the hall trying to engage me in some problem that needed to be solved and I said, “Can we pick this up tomorrow? I’m trying to get to my son’s tennis lesson.” As my co-worker headed back the way he came I found my eyes filled with tears over the profundity of my good fortune in being interested in something mundane, domestic.

This seems like a lot of drama for what turned out fine. I get that. I think, though, that there is your brain before a doctor says words like “leukemia” and “brain tumor” to you, and there is your brain after that. And I will never minimize what Alden went through, because it was repeatedly invasive and horrible.

He went through his own kind of reckoning after all of this was over. He’s still shaking off the effects. Summer, with its total lack of structure or commitments for him, couldn’t have come at a better time.

This is just my message to the universe that I am grateful. First and always most importantly I’m grateful that Alden is okay. These moments, though, are also a gift. Like the forgetting. And I appreciate them too.