Summer holidays always confuse me. Not just because I think the only one worth celebrating is my birthday, which, *ahem* I did change from the actual date of my entrance into the world (July 15) to a day that should be less, well, cursed (July 28) on Facebook, which is kind of like when you say you’re “in a relationship” on there. It means it MATTERS now.
We’re going STEADY, me and my birthday!
With the exception of my national-holiday-birthday, I don’t get summer holidays. I mean, day off, FUCK YEAH, but we’re not like Jello Mold Salad people who burst out the limbo stick and dust off the old camper on Memorial Day or Labor Day. Probably because I don’t HAVE a camper but mostly because my idea of “roughing it” involves staying in a hotel without room service.
I have lots of traditions, but none of them involve setting up a tent in the middle of the woods where there are earwigs and trees and possibly rabid squirrels that might want to eat my face off while I sleep. I mean, if I want to “get back to nature” I can turn on the National Geographic Channel and not immediately flip through to a Law and Order: You’re About To Be Depressed marathon.
I’m all for a good BBQ, don’t get me wrong, so long as it doesn’t involve any additional planning on my end. Encased meats are kind of my thing, so any chance to roast weenies on a grill makes me happy in the pants (GO MEAT!), but if I have to turn a relaxed, “get your ass over, fuckwad,” invite into,
“Miss Rebecca Sherrick Harks kindly requests your presence at Casa de la Sausage at one ‘o’ clock in the afternoon on…”
then I’ve lost something in translation. I don’t want to have to turn a Labor Day BBQ into a LABOR DAY BBQ. Because then I have to clean and make appetizers and put on pants and we all know how much I hate pants.
This Labor Day, I’m torn. Since I’m clearly not going to be camping or hosting a Jello Mold Party, I’ll be doing one of two things (while eating encased meats pantsless, of course). Making Skittles Vodka or designing a proton accelerator.
Or maybe both. Why have or when you can have and?
———
Are you a Summer Holiday Family? If so, can I come over and celebrate with YOU? Even if I’m not wearing pants? Because pants are BULLSHIT.
First, I have to say that I love you all so much that I am thoroughly overwhelmed by all of your love. Thank you.
————–
So when I say that I’m “not a wedding person,” it’s kinda like saying, “I’m a little stupid.” They’re both understatements that lead to things like, oh, losing your best friends and having to go topless, while riding an angry llama down the aisle of a church* as retaliation.
Weddings are bullshit, Pranksters. I’m love a party like I love a parade, but maybe it’s too many years of serving rubbery chicken and listening to the same vows over and over, or maybe it’s attending the same wedding over and over, I don’t know, but I’d rather gnaw off my fingers than go to a wedding.
I need to be clear: marriage, I’m all for marriage. I am also all for parties, open bar, and gatherings that include dressing up and/or humiliation of my best friends. But please, spare me the Funky Chicken. Take back your plate of gelatinous fish. It’s all the same rinse, repeat, cycle over and over again.
As for me, I’d be down with a quickie Vegas wedding, if I had to have one at all. Frankly, I’d get married in a Shut Your Whore Mouth shirt and happy pants at the JOP office. I love Pomp and Circumstance and any chance to drip with diamonds, but not when I have to fake brideliness.
Last weekend, I’d been invited to a wedding for one of my oldest friends, and, oddly (I say oddly because you’ll actually know them, Pranksters), the friends who make my SHUT YOUR WHORE MOUTH SHIRTS.**
I had no freaking idea what to expect out of this wedding other than that it was in Indiana, which is a state (apparently) that borders the state that I live in (no, not chaos. Illinois) where I have never been. I’ve lived in Illinois my whole life and never been to Indiana or *looks at map* Iowa.
So it was going to be an adventure. Especially since shit has been so fucked up that I’ve been more scattered than normal and barely got a babysitter for the kids in time to go. Because I thought the wedding was this weekend. (I also booked the wrong plane tickets for Type A Mom, which goes to show that my mind has really been elsewhere).
Hitting the road Saturday morning, it dawned on me that Indiana is one of those fucked up states that is a different time zone than Illinois, which operates under the superior time zone of Central Standard Time. Quickly, I whipped out my iPhone and googled the name of the teeny town that the wedding was held in and sure enough, there it was, Eastern Standard Time. Which meant that I was now an hour late.
I’m sorry, but states that butt-hump each other should NOT be on different time zones. When I rule the world, along with mandatory naptime I will make sure that this is the law.
Because I can’t keep anything to myself, I told Twitter, who had a hearty laugh at me, patted my head like the good dumbass that I am, and then the open road called to me. Shockingly, through some miracle of space and time, the wedding was NOT on EST and therefore I was early. Huh.
Indiana, oh, Indiana, I have to say that I love you since you are not Wisconsin, the archenemy of Illinois, but really, I’m not sure that you altered my perception of the world. Except that I learned that Air Supply was still touring. Casinos. In Indiana. I got horribly depressed about that, even though I didn’t know any Air Supply songs.
Anyway, back to the wedding.
First thing I noticed was that although the invitation said this would be a wedding in a barn and backyard, it was freaking awesome. I think barn, I think people humping sheep. This was not that kind of barn, Pranksters. THIS barn had stainless steel appliances, a full bar, a full bathroom with a shower, a pool table, slot machines, and immediately I tried to move in.
I probably would have to remove the bar signs, but I was okay with that. It also needed a pinball machine. I desperately require a pinball machine.
I was aghast that a barn could be cool. I’d always assumed that barns were merely used as a place for animal husbandry.
This was the point where I realized that the more pictures I took in the place, the more I could claim that, yes, I did live there. Why the hell else would I have so many pictures of myself there?
It’s also the point where I realized that this barn had a kitchen nicer than my own.
It’s at this point when the homebrew of my Metal Friend Scottie kicked in. Oh, did I mention this was a METAL wedding? And that these people are REALLY why I’m like this? Because it’s true.
The Metal Heads started popping into my pictures. There’s Scottie.
And that would be Evan, one of my BFF’s.
After we got suitably toasty, I watched one of my oldest friends get married. I’ve known him since we were both 14, and it was just so awesome to see, which means that my heart is slowly melting. Shut UP.
Then, the coolest thing I’ve ever seen at a wedding happened: a Moon Bounce was blown up. Dude. Pranksters. At my next wedding, I am SO getting a Moon Bounce AND a Ball Pit (one that hasn’t been peed in by small children) and it’s going to be epically awesome.
During the toasts, which normally are only interesting to the people involved (and then only marginally, because let’s face it, not everyone is a good speech writer, myself included), we toasted to meat. MEAT! Meat is like my third favorite thing on the planet, only beaten by the word “cacophony” and strawberry lip gloss.
Toasting to meat is very serious business, you see.
Metal Weddings are, apparently, the best kinds of weddings. I even remembered all of the stuff I’d learned from strippers over the years. Who knew?
*Okay, it was leading the prayers, but still.
**I’ve been asked about the sizing, and I wanted to tell you that for women, I’d order up a size. They’re SUPER-flattering (in a bizarre twist that I couldn’t even predict), but they do run a little small. For example, I have big boobs, and normally wear a M or L. I wear a L or XL in these shirts. But trust me, you’ll look fucking hot.
Also, colors? I need to reorder shirts and what colors should I order, yo?
P.P.S. If you do buy them, I want to make a Flickr group of Shut Your Whore Mouth Shirts and you should send me a picture of yourself in one. Or doing something weird in one. Because, OBVIOUSLY.
When I pulled up to the hospital yesterday and walked through those sliding doors, whirring officially shut behind Amelia and I with a snap, I was calm. I’m not sure how I paint myself here on my one-dimensional blog, but I’ve never been prone to anxiety or cases of the vapors, and typically in the moment, I’m about as calm and collected as they get. This was no different.
I gripped my phone like a talisman and strode over to the desk where sure enough, a new volunteer greeted me to help me find my way. The scent of lilies was heavy in the air and I tried mouth-breathing (one of the few perks of having been a barfy pregnant lady) to stave off the smell. Calla lilies are one of my favorite flowers, but the rest of them remind me of all of the friends I’ve buried.
Amelia, refusing to be held, led the way through the hospital, past the gift shop where I bought her heart necklace, past the chapel where I prayed for her, past the cafeteria where I remember laughing for the first time, my throat rusty and dry, the laugh unfamiliar, past the NICU and PICU, her little legs chugged along, sturdily running so fast that we had to half-jog to keep up with her.
Finally we reached an unfamiliar corridor and the volunteer whom I’d been handily chatting about tropical plants with bid us adieu. Amelia trucked on ahead, thrilled by the freedom to run up and down the corridors, uninhibited by the ghosts that roamed them.
When we found our way–because Mili always finds her way–I saw the Children’s Memorial Hospital sign on the wall across from her new neurologist’s office. In a bizarre twist of fate, this happens to be a satellite unit of the same hospital that I did my pediatric rotation through years ago. It’s an amazing hospital.
It’s hard to believe that my daughter is now a patient.
In the waiting room, Amelia made a beeline for the crayons and happily dumped them out all over the table. Screw coloring.
Eventually, we went back and met with the neurologist, who I was understandably anxious to meet. Neurologists, for those of you happily unawares, aren’t perhaps the kindest of all doctors. They’re sort of at the top of the doctor heap, only beaten by infectious disease doctors, and what’s more is that they know it. So people skills aren’t exactly important to their profession.
I was prepared to go all Campaign of Terror on him and be all “you DO know who I AM, don’t you?” and not because I am a pitiful blogger who might pathetically attempt to sully his reputation on the internet (I wouldn’t), but because I come from a line of well respected doctors who are well known. My now-middle name would be a dead giveaway, but I was all, you’ve got to know when to hold ‘em and know when to fold ‘em and stuff.
I didn’t even have to whip that out because he was FULL of the awesome. When Amelia took his reflex hammer and started trying to test out MY reflexes, he simply went and got another one rather than try and wrestle it out of her fists of fury.
For any of you not playing along at home, Amelia was born with a midline parietal enecephalocele which is a neural tube defect caused by the failure of the embryonic neural tube (the primitive spinal cord) to close properly. Her skull didn’t fuse and part of her brain, the part right about at the crown of her head (for anyone who doesn’t know where the parietal lobe of your brain is) developed outside of her head. It was a true encephalocele, not a meningeocele, meaning that there was actual brain matter inside of the defect, not just cerebrospinal fluid.
Having an encephalocele reduces the likelihood of survival at birth to 21%. Half of those live-births survive. Of those survivors, 75% have a mental defect. The poorest indicators for survival and associated anomalies are true posterior encephaloceles. Like what my daughter, Amelia, was born with.
At three weeks of age, she underwent massive neurosurgery to repair the bony defect in her skull with a skull implant and to remove the herniated brain tissue that had developed outside of her skull. The surgery was a success.
Mili’s neurologist suggested that we follow up with an EEG to look for any possible seizure activity while she is sleeping, as she displays none of the signs of seizing while she’s awake, because it is the last thing that can be treated. Neither the neuro nor I believe it’s seizures, but it’s worth a shot.
Any other developmental problems are simply a continuing result of her encephalocele and the microscopic neurological problems that they caused when she was developing.
Logically, I knew this. But my heart was filled with darkness as I left the office, my daughter chasing the light shining through the windows in the corridors of the hospital as I trotted to keep up with her. I wanted it to be easier.
I ducked into the gift shop and bought her a necklace. A new necklace for a new battle. And as I strapped it to her brave chest, the tears falling down my face, I whispered, “there’s the light, Princess of the Bells. Now you find your way. Don’t let anyone stop you. Ever.”
And she won’t. She’s her mother’s daughter, and if I can find my way in this crazy fucked up world, my daughter will, too. Her light will guide her, just as mine has. In lumine tuo, videbimus lumen.
Shine on, you crazy baby, shine on.
September 2, 2010
22