Christmas Pictures

"Mom? You know how you said God gave me to you as a present?"


"Yes. Yes, he did. It was the best gift I ever got."


"Well, I hope you remembered to send him a thank you card for that."


What she doesn't know is that there are no words that could ever convey the gratitude I feel for her existence.

Nuvaring Bitches

Am I only one who hates these Nuvaring birth control bitches? I seriously loathe these women. It's apparently girls night with three "besties" sitting around a coffee table nary a wine bottle in sight. The TV is on in the background and the old Nuvaring commercial starts playing. The stupid wavy haired one says, "Ooooh, I love this commercial!" and then proceeds to sing along to the most unimaginative jingle ever penned by a human. I mean how untalented do you have to be to come up with these lyrics? Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Everyday, aaaa aaaah. Everytime I see her bob her head back and forth singing along to it I have a strong urge to bash her head into a million tiny pieces of bone and brain matter.

Then her "friend" tries to be all nonchalant, leaning forward pretending to get a snack while asking with a devilish gleam in her dead eyes, "Would you guys try Nuvaring?" But you can just tell that she's been waiting all night for this. This whorebag has some kind of an agenda and it creeps me the fuck out. Like, why is she so invested in her friends sticking a plastic birth control device in their vaginas? The black woman sitting next to her is the least annoying of the bunch but I'd still murder her with my bare hands. That is, if her grotesquely shiny shirt doesn't give me a seizure first. She says, "I don't even know what it is." Don't worry! Because Nuvaring pusher is going to tell you all about it. Her voice gets all weird and affected "It's. A. Monthly. Vaginal. Birth. Control. Ring. That. delivers a low dose of hormones."

Wavy haired, dumb commercial loving woman finally gets it. You can see how it just clicks and she realizes that this is the birth control you have to...Gasp!...put in your vagina! "Don't you have to...put it in" she says while making odd hand gestures. But Nuvaring pusher won't let her go there. Because for her it's easy. "It's small and comfortable, plus" (she leans in conspiratorially) "you don't have to take it every day." And there it is, folks. There you have it. I don't know how feminism has survived all these years, how we women have managed to lead meaningful, productive lives while attached to the oppressive tether that is swallowing a pill every day. But Nuvaring will set us free from this tyranny. Indeed, Nuvaring pusher has declared, "Let my people go." She is Moses parting the Red Sea, except the Red Sea is more like the labial lips of women everywhere.

If Margaret Sanger were alive today she'd be slapping some bitches. Not even a century ago, women weren't allowed to vote for our leaders, obtain a legal and safe abortion, or maintain any control of our own reproductive powers. The Comstock Laws made illegal the dissemination of information on contraception and the distribution of contraceptive devices. That is oppression, Nuvaring pusher. I don't know who you sold your soul to or why, but you are obviously in league with some Satanic element. And if I never see your smug, creepy smile on my TV again, it will be too soon.

Twins in utero

My sweet, baby boy















Girl parts. I'll just take their word for it.

















Money shot: Boy parts

























Twins touching hands through the membrane.

Thankful

Tomorrow I will celebrate Thanksgiving for the 7th time. Out of my 34 years, I have spent only 7 Thanksgivings seated at smooshed together dinner tables over-eating turkey and mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce with my family on the 4th Thursday of November. Only Jehovah's Witnesses could find something satanic about such an innocent celebration - eating delicious food and expressing gratitude for the myriad of life's blessings.

Indeed, my Jehovah's Witness childhood was full of what I could not do. Traditional celebrations were forbidden:

Birthdays
Halloween
Christmas
New Year's Eve
4th of July
Valentine's Day
Easter
St. Patrick's Day
Mother's Day
Father's Day

I could not participate in after-school activities, such as sports or drama. Because my participating in these things would bring me into contact with people who were not of my faith and thus under the influence of Satan and destined for eternal destruction. I could not attend school dances, homecoming, or prom for the very same reason. I was not permitted to go to college because Armageddon was imminent and I needed to concentrate my efforts on preaching the so-called "good news", which was really an ultimatum: join us or die. Saturday mornings I spent out knocking on doors, dreading that the next door I knocked on would have someone from school behind it. When this inevitably happened there are no words for the humiliation I endured, the gut-wrenching shame I experienced.

My thoughts, my feelings, even my dreams did not belong to me. It is so painful to visit that now, the memory of those empty years. I was forced to make so many sacrifices and it was all for nothing. What they called "The Truth" was a complete and total lie.

Who knows what I would have become if it weren't for that fucking cult and it's brutal influence over my family. I struggle with so much anger and grief. I think about the little girl that I was, so full of potential for great things. And then I look in the mirror at what I have become and I want to spit in my own face. I have spent the past 10 years trying to make sense of what happened to me and attempting to undo the damage. I don't know that this is possible. I can't go back and retrieve memories of what never was. I can't have Christmas mornings tearing open presents. I can't have dressing up in a princess costume for Halloween. I can't have exchanging Valentines with secret crushes. I can't have sparklers on the 4th of July. I can't have pictures of me in a terrible, taffeta dress arm in arm with my prom date. I can't have living in a dorm and figuring out how I'm going to change the world over a dozen cheap beers.

What I had was not enough. I feel like I have these huge gaping holes inside of me, paths not taken, wounds that won't heal, abilities never realized. This emptiness is nauseating. I wonder what it would feel like to be a whole person. What does it feel like? Tell me. Somedays I want to crawl into the skull of someone else. Just for a little while. So that I could know.

Tomorrow I will pretend to be whole as I dine with my family, celebrating Thanksgiving as if it always was this way with us. Pretending we are normal and that we have memories tucked inside of us of so many Thanksgivings past. My daughter will never know any different and sometimes I resent her for it. I watch as she circles things in a catalog. "I want all these things for Christmas, mom!" She doesn't notice the tears gathering, the deep breath. "Anything you want sweetie. Santa knows what a good girl you've been."

That's all I can do now - Live through her. And I know that despite my past, I do have the present to be thankful for. My wild Liv, two babies having a party in my womb, a mom who's cancer was caught early enough to treat (stage 2), a husband who loves me despite what I am. I guess most of all, though, I am thankful to have control over my own mind and freedom from psychological tyranny. I know how precious that is. I will never take it for granted.

Happy Thanksgiving to you all.

Kick Me

There's nothing in the realm of my experience that compares to that first swoosh in the womb. I'm not talking about those soft flutters or the quick ticklings or the questionable bubbles. The quickenings. Those can all be explained away in my mind as something else: hunger pangs, gas. I'm talking about the moment, the feeling, the unmistakable proof of life. The rolling and tapping of a tiny life that is moving of its own accord within my body. Before this movement, of course, I was aware of the pregnancy. I had taken the test and seen the plus sign. I suffered through the 1st trimester nausea and fatigue. I took the blood tests, even saw two little human-ish figures flipping me off in black and white ultrasound photos. Twin gestation confirmed. A baby boy and a baby girl.


But everything is different now. The image has come into focus. The lens has been defogged. This is the beginning of a lifetime of knowing. A lifetime of discovering what they like, what they dream, who they are. Two people are alive inside of me. They are attached and dependent, but they are separate from me in every imaginable way. Baby A, the girl, is already making me laugh. She is positioned over my bladder and tickles me with her rolling. Baby B, the boy, can't make up his mind. He is jabbing me on the left one minute and then jabbing me on the right the next. One day he plays hard without rest. The next day he is lazy and making me worry.

I like to shake the twins awake when they are sleeping. This is a sort of pre-revenge for all the sleepless nights that are surely in my future courtesy of the two of them. I grip my uterus on both sides with my hands and shake it firmly, but gently. Without fail those two creatures start up their distinct activity, no doubt flipping me off in the process. Why does it delight me to irritate them? Because it's my way of saying, "I love you". Liv will vouch for that. Everytime I tease her by telling her that I've changed her name to Willis or Barney or Leroy and then proceed to call her that for the rest of the day, I am actually saying, "I love you enough to take this time to irritate the shit out of you." Also it makes me feel powerful to pick on someone smaller.

These sweet fetal movements fuel my optimism for a joyful future. Without them, pregnancy is just a miserable, desolate experience. Before my physical awareness of their existence, I felt cursed. Sickness, exhaustion, heartburn, low back pain, deformity. Yes, deformity. Because let's face it: I look like I have a beach-ball sized tumor growing out the front of my abdomen. I would say, "Men are lucky sons of bitches...no, saints. They are sons of saints." But the fetal movements change everything. They remind me that my body, no matter how deformed, is performing a miracle. The blessing, the privilege of carrying and making human beings far outweighs the discomfort and the agony of pregnancy and childbirth.

The kick and the jab of my unborn babies' feeble limbs are my reward for enduring so much annoying shit. So if I have to wake them up to get my fix, they'll just have to fucking deal with it. They'd better get a thick skin real quick if they are going to be my kids.

Best Case Scenarios

"Do you feel it?"

I'm standing in my mother's kitchen pressing my fingertips against her right breast looking for the thing that left her sleepless the night before. Searching in a circular motion, the way the brochures they hand out at the gynecologist tell you to. At the 2 o'clock position, I find it. Nestled against her breast bone, a tiny object - a cross between a pebble and a marshmallow. I've felt similar things in my own breasts, when I still possessed them. I remember laying supine on my bed, topless, doing this private work. Every ridge or bump causing my heart to beat faster, my mind to orchestrate the worst possible thoughts. In the moment of discovery, I am already in a chair with an IV pumping chemotherapeutic chemicals into my body. I am already composing my last will and testament. I am already the deceased mother of a motherless child.

But for everyone else I offer best case scenarios.

"Yeah, I feel it." My brow furrows. "It feels too soft to be cancer."

"Would you be worried? I mean, if you found this in your breast?"

I almost laugh because when you have a BRCA2 mutation, you don't even need to find something suspicious to worry. You spend every moment of your life waiting for the axe to fall. You are on high alert, tensed and pretending to be ready for the inevitable moment your body betrays you.

"I would definitely get it checked out. I mean, I've had similar lumps that were biopsied and turned out to be nothing. Just get it checked out. It couldn't hurt."

It is October 1st. The first day of Breast Cancer Awareness month. In my family, we don't need a government sponsored month to remind us of the horrors of breast cancer. I don't need to buy a pink kitchen appliance or a ribbon magnet or hot pink M&Ms. Nothing I could see or buy could make me more aware. Because I am constantly made brutally aware of breast cancer by what is not there. My breasts and, more terribly, my sister. The savage memories of Amy's death and my mastectomy linger tenaciously in the brain.

This is why I hate Breast Cancer Awareness month. I don't need more reminders of the things I have lost. I don't need to watch perky women recount how they've conquered breast cancer and reassuring doctors sing-song how early detection saves lives. I don't need to see shelves of pink goods at the grocery stores. It is infuriating that some corporations are exploiting a disease to increase their profits. Breast cancer cannot be represented by a cutesy candy pink Kitchen-Aid. Breast cancer is a horrible, disfiguring disease that destroys lives and the emotional health of families. Fuck Breast Cancer Awareness month. How about living Breast Cancer Awareness life?

In the kitchen, there is a quiet. We are both thinking the same thing, my mom and I. Not this again. Please God, not this again. Cancer has taken his seat at the table. He is sticking his dirty finger in a fresh wound.

"Just call Dr. Kr--sher. Tell her what's going on and I'm sure she'll order a test right away."

"I'm scared."

"Don't be. I'm sure it's nothing. Just for your own peace of mind, get it looked at. You're due for a mammo anyway. You'll get the test and it will be nothing and you'll feel better." Best case scenarios.

But it isn't nothing. It's cancer. Confirmed by biopsy. My mother has breast cancer. My stomach does a sick flip to see that in writing. I had lied to her the way I lied to Amy a million times.

You're going to be fine.

I'm sure it's nothing.

It's probably been caught early.

They have so many medicines and treatments now.

You won't die. You can't die.

Sometimes I lied so well that I even convinced myself. What I want to know is, Why? Why is this disease attacking my family? Why doesn't it leave us the fuck alone already? Haven't we given enough? Haven't we lost enough? Haven't we cried enough? Haven't we watched a beautiful, young woman deteriorate into a sallow, dead shell enough?

For my mom's sake, I will keep spinning out best case scenarios. Maybe this time they'll turn out to be true.