Postcards from the Mothership

Did you know April 18 to 22 is National Organ Donor week in Canada?

In late October of 2001, I was just about five months pregnant with my first son. I had been over at the grocery store buying Halloween candy for us — er, I mean, the neighbourhood kids. When I came in the door, before I could even get my coat off, Beloved approached me with tears in his eyes. “Your mom called,” he said, and the world stopped turning for the briefest instant. Thankfully, it was not what I was expecting. “They got the call. Your dad is getting his liver transplant.”

In 2003, 124 of every million Canadians — or almost 4,000 people — were waiting for new organs. But the rate of donations was a fraction of that, at just 13.5 organs per million in population.

My dad got Hepatitis C from a blood transfusion in the early 1980s. We didn’t find out he was sick until much later. Aside from becoming increasingly weak and frail, one of the most disturbing results of my dad’s cirrhosis was how it affected his cognitive processes. The gist of it is that the liver filters toxins like ammonia out of your blood, and when it isn’t working properly, the toxins can build up, leading to serious cognitive impairment. It really messes with your memory, your moods, and your mental stamina, among other things. In a lot of ways, it is similar to Alzheimer’s disease. It made me so very sad to see him struggling, because my father is one of the smartest people I know, and I aspired as a child to be as funny, as charming and as quick of wit as him.

We have been blessed. After the transplant, it wasn’t long before I had my ‘old’ dad back. There have been some setbacks, and there are ongoing troubles. But every time I see him interact with Tristan and Simon, my heart soars. Simon especially has a thing for his “Papa Lou” and even as I type this, I am grinning as I imagine how his face lights up when my dad catches his eye.

Overall, 250 Canadians — about five each week — died in 2003 while waiting for new organs. Among them were 82 waiting for a kidney, 100 for a liver, 30 needing a heart, 26 a lung and 12 needing other organs or a combination transplant.

I don’t have the words to express how the pain of some family’s loss can be so intimately bound to our family’s joy. I wish I could let them know what a difference their donation has made in our lives.

Within about 18 months of receiving his transplant, my folks moved across the province to live in the same city as us. Some days, when my dad is out and about, he calls me and offers me a ride home from work. They live just a few blocks from us, and when I was home on maternity leave, he would sometimes wander over in midafternoon while taking the dog for an extended walk.

It’s these tiny moments that are the gift we’ve received from an organ donation. How do you say thank you for the joy of a happy life with someone you love? How do you thank someone for the look in a baby’s eyes as his face lights up with excited recognition?

In the US, more than 87,000 people are waiting for the gift of life. Each day, about 74 people receive an organ transplant. However, 17 people die each day waiting for transplants that can’t take place because of the shortage of donated organs.

Discuss organ donation with your loved ones. Complete an organ donor card (American version). If you can’t take it with you, why not make sure it lives on as the best of you?

(statistics are from the Canadian Institute for Health Information and organdonor.gov)

You know what I don’t get? Okay, okay, you’re right, the list of things I don’t get is long indeed, including how magnets work, why guys don’t use the instructions when assembling Ikea furniture, and why my mother is still to this day afraid I will be kidnapped and sold into white slavery. But what I don’t get today, what we’ll be considering right here in blog, is perfume.

Now, a nice scented soap or lotion, that’s a great smell. That fruity stuff from the Body Shop – mmmmm. Good old fashioned Dove soap is just plain sexy on a guy. Speaking of menfolk, I guess I understand the after-shave thing is as much about cauterizing your shredded pores as anything, but it sure doesn’t look like it feels very good.

But why does everybody want to smell like what Calvin Klein thinks you should smell like? Why spend scads of cash just so you can smell like everybody else?

I just don’t get it. I’m not one of those chemically (and often emotionally) overly sensitive people who are bothered by your cologne, and I will admit that until moderately recently, I only wore makeup when it occured to me and even then sporadically. I’m not too hip with the girlie-girl stuff.

I tried. Many years ago, somebody bought me a Perry Ellis gift set, and while it was quite a pleasant scent and I used it on and off, it used to freak me out when I’d smell somebody else wearing it. I’d immediately evaluate them, wondering what kind of person they were, if they were like me, if they were somebody I wanted to share a smell with.

Do you wear perfume or cologne? How did you decide what scent you wanted as your olfactory signature? Does perfume or cologne affect your opinion of someone of the opposite sex? Educate me, I must be missing something!

Jen over at MUBAR has written a lovely story about how she chose her as-yet unborn baby son’s name on the spot after being forced to provide a name to an airline reservation clerk. It’s a cute story, you should read it.

I love name stories. We knew we would name our son Tristan long before we managed to conceive him. He is named after the hero in the classic story Tristan and Iseult, but it doesn’t hurt that Brad Pitt struck just the right combination of sexy, wild and vulnerable as Tristan in Legends of the Fall (right, SnackMommy?)

Simon we had more trouble with, and although I liked the name all along, we weren’t completely sure until we met him that we had the name right. And now that Tristan calls him Simey, I begin to second-guess our choice. Sorry to saddle you with that one, big guy!

If you like to play with names, check out the Baby Name Wizard. Just type in any name in the top left corner and it shows you its popularity through the last 100 years or so. Or, just drag your cursor around the screen and watch what pops up.

For us, the challenge was not first names but family names. When I got married the first time, aka “the practice marriage,” I changed my name to his, and I think that’s a huge part of the reason I cried for hours the night of our wedding. (I’ll take “hints that maybe you weren’t ready to get married” for $300, Alex.) Even before we split, I had begun thinking about taking back my maiden name. So when Beloved and I got married, keeping my name was a non-issue.

(As an aside, it amazes me that the majority of women continue choose to change their name to their husband’s surname when they get married. I don’t know why this astonishes me, but it does. My name is such a deeply ingrained part of my identity, I couldn’t imagine giving it up.)

When we started talking about having kids, I was fine with the idea of having my surname as a second middle name, but as I got more and more pregnant, I became increasingly agitated at the idea of the kids not sharing my name. Beloved, on the other hand, was morally opposed to hyphenated names. It got so bad that we couldn’t leave the hospital after Tristan was born because we weren’t allowed to leave until we filled out his health card application, and we couldn’t decide what his name would be. We sat in the hospital room with bags packed, baby dressed, and arms crossed, each not looking at the other until Beloved eventually caved and we hyphenated Tristan’s family name. If they keep the applications on file, you can probably still see the tear stains from me trying to fill out the form while sobbing with relief.

So here it is, three years later, and every single time I have to spell out the whole damn name for a pharmacist, or to register with a city program, or just about any other time I give out the boys’ names, I cringe. It’s a lot of name. It’s only 13 letters, but it’s four bumpy syllables in unharmonious Dutch and French, and I’m starting to feel just a little bit regretful for saddling them with it. However, it’s damn cute to hear Tristan pronounce it all.

Once the boys are of an age that they are using their full names regularly, I’ll probably relax and let them use their paternal surname for every day stuff. And I’ll just hope that when they grow up, fall in love and get married, they have the sense not to marry a girl with a hyphenated name who is as stubborn as their mother.

Do you have any name stories to share?

We had some friends over on the weekend for dinner. No no, we didn’t have them à la Hannibal Lecter, we had the grilled chicken fajitas you told me I couldn’t have on Friday when I had to have takeout. Did I thank you for that yet?

So we had these terrific friends of ours over, and they brought their baby daughter. Okay, I can see it’s going to take me forever to tell this story, because I already have to correct myself again. What really happened is, we really really wanted to see, hold, cuddle, play with and otherwise fawn over their beautiful two-month-old baby daughter, and since she isn’t getting out much without a chaperone these days, we had to invite them along for the ride.

So anyway, they all three come over for cuddles and fawning and some dinner on the side. They are there exactly long enough for me to serve them each a drink when J (aka the guest who might not want to be named on the Internet) caught Simon with his hand submersed up to his wrist in J’s drink. This is the first of many times I will think throughout the evening that I am incredibly glad these are very good and patient friends of ours who genuinely love our boys and who are on the cusp of some major parenting foibles themselves. So J is pretty good about the whole thing, gets a towel and wipes off Simon’s hand and the drink spilled all over the end table and doesn’t even mention the fact that I totally didn’t offer to get him a new drink. Can you believe I only just NOW thought of that?

Now, you’d think that with the ratio of parents to children rising from 2:2 to 4:3, the odds would be improving in our favour over your average level of household mischief. Not so much. Beloved is so completely enthralled with beautiful baby girl that he forgets he even has boys, let alone that said boys are running rampant through the house. Not even 10 minutes after the Simon-as-stir-stick event, somehow Simon gets into the bathroom, closes the door behind him, and makes his way – in the pitch black, mind you – to the toilet, lifts the lid, and begins washing his pop-soaked hands in the toilet water. Beloved intercedes and washes Simon’s hands, I go back to making dinner, and within five – I’m guessing it wasn’t even three – minutes, Simon was back with his hand up to his wrist in J’s drink. God bless J, who only asked Beloved, “Are you sure you did a good job washing his hands?” And you know what? I honestly can’t remember if I got him a fresh drink even then.

So we have dinner, and it’s the usual chaos of dinner with Tristan not wanting to eat (a blog for another day) and it’s too late for Simon who passed through hungry the previous hour and had arrived at too-famished-to-do-anything-but-holler-and-throw-food, and JJ (as opposed to J) has to leave the table mid-meal to be a meal to her baby girl, and I remember the days we used to have dinner when it was just the four of us and we’d linger over dinner and dessert and conversation for hours. Or was that somebody else’s life?

You’d think having his very own baby in the house for the past 14 1/2 months would have left Tristan jaded on the concept of babies in general, but just the opposite is true. He really had no use for Simon as a baby, but he is fascinated by the new babies in our life, particularly his almost six-month old cousin Noah and beautiful baby girl. Beautiful baby girl is particularly special, however, because she is the only baby girl in any of our lives. My brother has a son, my closest friends have sons, my cousin has a son – even the day care provider has nothing but sons. So you can see why beautiful baby girl is a princess in all of our lives. On the way home in the car from our first visit to introduce beautiful baby girl to the boys, Tristan pronouced (with no prompting from us) that beautiful baby girl is his girlfriend. (pauses to let you “awwwwww” properly)

So anyway, JJ finishes feeding beautiful baby girl while we clean up the kitchen, and of course the next thing on the agenda is a diaper change. Tristan, who hasn’t really moved more than a foot away from beautiful baby girl all afternoon, is ‘helping’ and JJ is extremely patient with him. As she removes beautiful baby girl’s diaper, Tristan begins to howl with laughter, and I am mortified when he exclaims “Look at how small her penis is!”

Needless to say, we won’t be hosting too many more dinner parties this decade. We might even have to hold off until the engagement party of Tristan and beautiful baby girl…

As if I weren’t already demanding too much of my seriously overtaxed neural networks, I have signed up for French lessons. Ours is an officially bilingual country, and I’ve reached a point in my government career where I need to achieve at least rudimentary second language skills. Plus, they pay you an extra $800 a year if you can pass the test every five years. In 2000, I managed to convince them I was of sufficient linguistic mediocrity to be classified of intermediate ability, but with two full years of maternity leave under my belt since then, my second language skills have slipped to at least sub-par, if not abyssmal.

So for four hours each week, I sit in our little class of eight, struck dumb in both senses of the word and unable to form a coherent thought in either official language. French class has become a lesson in humility perhaps long overdue.

How can I say this without sounding horribly conceited? I’m used to being — to being just a little bit smarter than the average bear. I’m used to being ahead of the curve, and I’m used to finding learning easy. I’m used to being clever. French classes are doing a very good job of disabusing me of that notion.

Each class begins with everyone taking a turn talking about what we did on the weekend or telling a bit of a story about ourselves – something to display our conversational prowess. As I listen to the others, I try to simultaneously hear their narratives, translate them back into English for comprehension, come up with something worth saying myself and translate that back into French, all the while feeling my stomach knotting and flop sweat forming on my brow as my turn approaches.

Rather than relating long, colourful and detailed anecdotes like this one, I find myself reduced such feats of conversational daring as “I ate dinner”, “I read a book” and “I saw a brown dog.” Me, whose compulsion to talk, to elaborate, to construct fabulous run-on sentences with no end in sight – reduced to earnest and empathetic nods and one-word grunted replies. It’s killing me! I have so much to say, a captive audience, and an anxiety attack every time I open my mouth.

I would write more, but I really should spend some time trying to master the conjugation of the future anterior – or to find a polite way of saying, “I have no comment” in French.

Categories: Canadianisms

I’ve always liked the idea of daylight savings time. In my pre-children life (there was such a thing?) I argued that gaining an hour of daylight for the entire summer was worth the shock of having to get up in the dark again for a while, and losing that hour of sleep. I would have said that if I were able to change anything, it would be nice if we could lose the hour in the middle of the afternoon on Friday while I’m at work, rather than in the middle of the night on a weekend.

This year, I have been nothing short of pathetic in my anticipation of daylight savings time. The boys have been waking up on average around 5:30 am every day, going so far as to wake at 4:30 am (for the day, mind you) two days this week. For weeks, I have had daylight savings day circled on my calendar with stars, happy faces and bouncy trails of Zzzzzzzs painted in the little square. For one magical day, I would be heaved into the day to see a perfectly reasonable 6:00 or 6:15 am on the digital readout of my bedside clock, and I would be satisfied with the sham. For that magical day, I would not glance up at the clock after my fourth cup of coffee, our third viewing of The Knights of Sir Fix-A-Lot, and after chasing Simon out of the cupboards for the ninth time, and weep to see it was not even 7:00 am yet.

Not friggin’ likely.

I guess it was partially my own doing. I went out to dinner with some friends last night, and I didn’t get home until nearly 11:00 pm. By the time I reset the clocks and crawled into bed, it was already after midnight EDT. But, I remained optimistic that I would get at least 6 hours sleep. Optimism sucks.

4:30 am EDT (that’s 3:30 EST, if you’ve lost track already), Simon wakes crying. I tell him in no uncertain terms that we are NOT getting up. After 20 minutes of rocking, he goes back to sleep.

5:30 am EDT, Tristan wanders in. Too pathetic to protest, I simply open the covers and invite him in. He has had a fever on and off for the last two days, and since our scare with a febrile seizure in December, we don’t mess around with fevers. He is hot, and I stagger off in search of some tylenol for him. By the time I crawl back into bed we are both wide awake. After much snuggling, we are both on the cusp of drowsy when…

5:50 am EDT, Simon calls out. He hasn’t mastered the words yet, but it is quite clear he is placing his room service order for some lait de mama.

Let me do the math (takes off socks and counts on fingers and toes) – that’s 5, maybe 5 and a 1/4 hours sleep in total, give or take. Ugh. Safe to say, the daylight savings renewal plan was a bust. Anybody have any other bright ideas on how to keep a one year old and a three year old from waking at ungodly hours?

I’m feeling a little cranky today. If you have a penis and you’re reading this, you might want to move along. Consider yourself warned, there be girlie stuff ahead.

So, as I was saying, I’m feeling a little cranky today. Rather than having my knickers in a twist, I’ve got my boobies in a bind. For the first time since the second or third trimester of my pregnancy, I’m wearing a real bra instead of a nursing bra. Okay, another caveat before we begin, just so you know where I’m coming from. I’m no A cup. I aspire to a C cup. Last I checked, I was somewhere in the netherworld the far side of a DD cup, at which point I stopped measuring. Damn breastfeeding.

I have a love-hate relationship with bras. I know some women who peel them off the moment they are in the privacy of home (Mom, are your ears burning?) and some women who don’t even bother. Personally, that’s just a little bit too much freedom for me. I’m like a toddler that way; I need boundaries. But bras are evil! If they don’t have enough give, you are likely fidgeting all day trying to get comfortable in them or, worse, bulging over the edges. Not a pretty sight. If they’re too loose, you might as well go commando – the bra isn’t accomplishing anything.

For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure, let me say that to me nursing bras the fuzzy slippers of bras – nice and stretchy and comfy, but not incredibly supportive. Fine, if you don’t mind your nipples in the vicinity of your navel. Underwire bras, the industrial strength kind you need to defy gravity with anything larger than a C cup, are like stiletto heels. They make an outfit look fabulous, but they are uncomfortable as hell.

Which brings me back to my crankiness. I can’t pull a full breath without having some epoxy-coated wire digging into my armpit, I’m all chafed in the chest, and I think the straps are digging a permanent groove into my shoulder. All things considered, I’m not a happy camper. But at least I can run down the stairs without crossing my arms in front of me!

So tell me, which do you value more – comfort or fashion?