It’s fortunate, in some ways, to be the sort of person who, when faced with a crisis, can deal with things completely head on, without bothering to see the forest for the damn trees. In spite of how I may appear on paper (blog), I rarely am overtaken with emotions, so I am not reduced to the puddle of excess emotional goo ruining your nice shag carpet (nice shag carpet sounds oxymoronic, doesn’t it?) until much, much later.

I’ve spent each and every day since Thursday taking care of the most bizarre things: my Christmas shopping is completed, I’ve written and addressed about half of my Christmas cards, the house DOES NOT look like a tornado ran through it. But each thing I do is a semblence of what I would normally do. I’m like a bundle of nervous energy flitting from thing to thing to thing, attention to details thrown by the wayside in favor of trying to do about 1,797 things at the very same moment.

It seems easier to focus on the superficial motions of TAKING CARE OF BUSINESS than on what has just happened to my father.

But, as all good things are wont to do, it has come to an end, and I can feel every single horrible emotion welling up from within. I am now paying back with 99.9% interest everything that I have repressed. My throat is lumpy, and against all odds, it feels as though my right eyeball has just come back from a wicked battle, so much so that it now hurts to blink (I am not even pretending to understand this).

I’m fine, I will BE fine, because I am as predictable as a tax bill: I am always fine, even when I’m not.

My father himself would like to express his gratitude for all of the well-wishes and prayers that the Internet has offered (he called all of you his “second daughters” which is a high form of praise for him). Although he doesn’t specifically know about my blog (It seems easier that way. It’s not as though he wouldn’t appreciate parts of it, but I think I would feel weird knowing that my father has heard me tell the world about my vagina.), he knows that there are people out there who care about his well being, and that is what matters.

I’d try and be funny right now, but it would seem more forced than I care to be, so I’m just going to leave this as it is and not pretend to suddenly feel jolly and witty and annoying. I’m fairly sure, as I’ve been down this road before, that by tomorrow morning, I should feel far better, and will return with more hilariously stupid crap that I do.

My father is fine, my family is fine, and suddenly, I am no longer fine. I guess this is why God invented Jack Daniels, eh?

Tentatively, so far so good.

My father has undergone his second surgery, and is recovering well, despite having an occlusion in his great vessel that “looked like a bomb had gone off” inside(whatever that means).

I am slowly exhaling. And am now completely exhausted.

Last Sunday, after taking our cheesy holiday pictures at the mall (they are actually so adorable that I wish that I had a scanner to show you), in spite of my exhausted and openly weeping 6 year old son requiring a nap STAT, I was determined to procure an actual Christmas tree. We’ve never been able to have one before (due to various reasons), and it was on my Allmighty Schedule, and by God, we were going to do it. Dave snickered into his puffy gloves as I crazily launched into my diatribe after he suggested that we might want to do this another weekend, you know, when we were all better rested.

“I think you’re all fucked in the head. We’re ten minutes from the fucking Christmas Tree Lot, and you wanna bail out! Well, I’ll tell you something, this is no longer an option . . . it’s a quest! It’s a quest for fun! I’m gonna have fun, and you’re gonna have fun! We’re all gonna have so much fucking fun we’ll need plastic surgery to remove our Goddamn smiles! You’ll be whistling Zip-a-dee-doo-da out of your assholes! I’ve got to be crazy! I’m on a pilgrimage to see a tree! Praise Santa Claus!”

Dave has mentioned before that when I get a bee in my bonnet about something or another, he can always tell, not because my voice is shakingly raised or I begin openly weeping, but because crazy things begin to pour out of my mouth with alarming frequency.

This, of course, was one of those times.

Even the baby felt chastised and stopped chirping merrily until we dutifully pulled the car into the lot and embarked on our journey to get a Motherfucking Christmas tree, smiles stretched fakely across our cheeks. Since I cared only about getting a Christmas tree, any Christmas Tree would suffice, so I allowed Ben and Dave to pick it out, while Alex and I went inside to talk to the parrot that lives on this farm.

(Nothing cheers me up like having a conversation with this parrot, who is in love with me. Now, the conversation revolves around saying hello to each other in various tones, coupled with some laughter, and rounded out with his completely accurate immitation of my cell phone ringer. Then he’ll fan his tail at me, and we’ll start over at the beginning with our hellos. It’s like having an extremely colorful baby.)

(as all of my animals have been rescued from extremely sad and/or bizare situations, I am anxiously awaiting the day that I am given a parrot or another exotic bird to adopt. They are so amazingly awesome, and I am completely dying for one, but I cannot in good conscience go and buy one.

Not only because they are really expensive, but because my own bleeding heart tells me that I should not do this, as these animals were meant to live in their natural habitat. Which I am pretty certain is not a suburban street outside of Chicago, Illinois. Call me nuts, but even on the best days here, the avian life that I come across is more like a cardnial and a couple of finches, not a scarlet macaw or parrot.

So I wait for my exotic bird, just like I waited for my comically large bunny and my geriatric gecko.)

I’m pretty sure they were both more than happy to be allowed to escape the supreme pleasure of my company for awhile (Lord knows why), while the baby was stuck with me for the long haul (to be fair, I am the one who is stuck with HIM all night, every night). I have a feeling I was pretty frightening, because they both began addressing me in their most respectful, sweetest voices, suggesting I relax and maybe eat some McDonalds (yes, they are well versed in knowing the way to my heart well).

When we got the tree home, we realized that the mini tree lights we had gotten had (gasp!) white cords, which looked much stupider on the tree than you’d imagine. So, my mission (less stupid than Mission: ManBand, however) for the week was to pick up some lights with green cords. I bought about twice what I needed so as to avoid future mini Christmas light-less moments (because those happen all of the time, right? Right?), and because I have inherited my father’s OCD need to have backup’s and replacements FOR EVERYTHING.

Yesterday evening, the lights were finally placed on the tree, and today we decorated it. It was afterwards, when I went down to the basement to grab the rest of the Christmas decorations, when I realized that we had several boxes of mini lights down there. And wait! In that bin, there are even MORE lights. And THERE, in the corner, EVEN MORE lights!

It appears that my OCD habits of purchasing mini Christmas lights has spanned the four Christmases that I have celebrated with my own family (completely in spite of the lack of Real Live Christmas Trees, which is even more hilarious, when you think about it. At least to me. Who has had very little sleep these past days. So really strange things are uninentionally hilarious). My friends, I could easily open up one of those fly-by-night Christmas shops that you see in the strip malls with all of the unopened boxes of mini lights that I now own.

With the 27 or 28 boxes of unopened lights that we now own, it all but assures me that I will not have to purchase mini lights for the next 45 years or so, at least until the technology evolves such that my husband will be completely unable to resist the pull (But BECKY, it has a REMOTE and INTERNET CONNECTIONS! WE NEEEEEED THESE LIGHTS, BABY!).

But now I am trying to figure out what on Earth to DO with these lights. I mean, I’m past the days where I feel like mini lights really accentuate a rooms decor for 365 days a year, what with me no longer being a college kid. And it’s currently too snowy for me to string them up outside, lest I get an electrical shock or blow a fuse or something.

I guess I could try to rest easy, knowing that all of my mini light needs will be completely fufilled for the next several decades. Or I suppose that I could donate some to a frat house where I am certain they will be put to good use. The baby loves cords and lights, but I’m thinking with the new lead paint warnings displayed prominently on the label that maybe allowing him to play with those is probably not an option.

Any suggestions?

——————-

Thank you everyone who has kept my family in their thoughts during this time. It means more to me than my ickle black soul can possibly express. My father will be going in for surgery again on Monday morning, and assuming that all goes well, should be home by Wednsday or Thursday (or whenever his insurance company boots him out).

It will be then when I feel like I can breathe again.

I have my father’s eyes, which I passed down to both of my sons.

Since I was a small child, I’ve always been known as Daddy’s Little Girl. All of the best parts of who I am are directly decended from him. My tastes in music, my (terrible) sense of humor, my ability to let most things roll off my back, those are all his traits. My brother had my mother, I had my father.

We went to see him again today up in the ICU, where I was afforded a seat directly in front of the station which his vitals blipped intermittently. They were perfect. He remains in the ICU, flanked by (much) older patients, suffering from far worse fates. The guy next to him with VRE on a vent? Not so good. The lady on the other side, catatonic and covered with decubitus ulcers? Probably not in such good shape. He is there only because the rest of the hospital is full.

One can only remain in crisis mode for 5 or 6 days before they break down. As I slowly start to go about my day, with the crisis winking merrily in my rearview mirror, I am overtaken by the horrible thoughts of what could have happened.

The thrombus that was causing the intermittent angina pectoris, waving jauntily from his great vessel could have dislodged itself, and burrowed somewhere far graver. It easily could have killed him. It didn’t, but it could have.

I try take greater comfort in knowing that for now, for right now, he is sitting in the dimly lit ICU, likely eating the candy bar I bought him, and flipping casually through my copy of The Atlantic (and likely NOT the Tiffany’s catalogue I brought him, to pick stuff out that he could buy for me). The monitors from adjacent rooms are probably occasionally alarming, while the fresh snow accumulates outside his window.

To others, those monitors probably evoke the ominous terror of yet another thing going wrong with someone they desperately love and want to be well again, while to me, they echo endlessly “could have been him, could have been him.”

…well, as comfortably as one can in Critical Care.

He had two blockages in two of the great vessels, and one has had a stent placed. The other stent will be placed on Monday, once he has recovered more sufficiently from his myocardial infarction and his heart becomes less irritable.

Thank you very much to everyone who has kept him in their thoughts. My dad is very, very special to me, and his illness is seriously one of the worst things I can imagine. If I were to lose him, I genuinely do not know what I would do.

It appears as though my mantra only works to fend off would-be murderers.

My father has had a heart attack and is currently in surgery as I write this.

If there is anything other than that to say, I don’t know what it is. For once in my life, I am stunned into silence.

The chordae tendineae, or heart strings, are cord-like tendons that connect the papillary muscles to the tricuspid valve and the mitral valve in the heart. Despite how hokey it sounds, it appears as though one can literally have their heart strings pulled.

My father is in the ER today, after experiencing chest pains since Sunday (he too, is a health care professional, and what did I say about them? OH YEAH, they are always the last to seek medical care).

My mother, who for all of her faults, is as non-alarmist as myself, is pretty certain that this is a panic attack.

The doctors in the ER are, of course, alerted to rush anyone who is experiencing “chest pain” or “shortness of breath” (hilariously abreviated SOB), so I am certain he is currently recieving a battery of tests that will provide some concrete evidence either way.

When I was a small child, I lived in perpetual fear of murderers. Convinced that they would want to sneak in to my bedroom late at night and kill me (for what, I don’t know. My banana clip? My awesome Hypercolor tee-shirt? My insanely large set of headbands? Who knows), I would slip to and from the bathroom like I was being chased, throw my bedroom door closed, hurl myself up onto my bed (it’s one of those enormous antique beds), pull up the covers and start chanting my mantra “It’s never been anything before. It’s never been anything before. It will be all right. It will be all right.”

Thankfully, as I’ve grown, I no longer am terrified of being murdered (but my fears are equally absurd), but it appears that old habits do, indeed, die hard. As I sit here and watch my son, who is named after my father, I am softly whispering to myself “It’s never been anything before. It’ll be okay. It’s never been anything before. It’ll be okay.”

And I can only hope that just as it worked when I was a child, it’ll work again today.

It wasn’t until recently (color me stupid, here, or at the very least, not very introspective) that I realized that the innocuously innocent things that people ask you that inadvertently offend you are the ones that most often offer the greatest insight into your own insecurities. Ask an unhappily unmarried person when they’re getting married, you’ll get the same internal reaction as if you ask a unhappily childless couple when they’re having kids.

The moment I popped Alexander out (but interestingly enough, NEVER before), the barrage of the very same question began to appear: would I have another? And before I could say yay or nay, they would express that I should have another, but this time A GIRL. I assured these Eager Beavers that yes, maybe someday we would have another child, but the sex of said child was completely out of my hands. We’d all have a laugh together and we would each separately move on our way.

(as a complete aside here, should we ever decide that having another child is, in fact, a good idea, it had BETTER be a girl, not because I don’t adore having all boys: I do, but because I have no good boys names left. Between my two sons and their 17 names apiece, as a couple we have no names left that we can agree upon. So, our hypothetical (very strong hypothetical these days) third son would be named “Jack Bauer” (my last name), “Vincent D’Onofrio (my last name) or better yet “Hugh Laurie” (my last name). Yes, my kid would be ranked out and beaten by his peers, and it would be COMPLETELY MY FAULT because I had used up all of the decent names already.)

Now, to painfully highlight MY own inner demons, just ask me “What do you do?” and I assure you that my answer will be stammered out, while looking at my feet and getting progressively misty-eyed and upset.

As much as I adore staying home with my children (and I do, I swear), this was probably the last place in the world I’d have expected to be. I’d always equated staying home with my children with dying a slow painful death (and somedays, I am spot on here), and always assumed that I would be much more a Career Person (you know, the kind with 4 inch heels and power suits COMPLETELY DEVOID of spit up. Possibly with a shirt that was ALWAYS BUTTONED UP.). I’d probably even have a House Husband (or two) and I would TOTALLY have a cabana boy.

Well, heh-heh, WELL, things didn’t exactly go as planned(what does, really?). Despite having the best intentions with getting my degree and license, it’s one of those things that I’ve learned that I simply cannot do. The integral flaw in my reasons behind getting this degree was that I didn’t realize that with nursing, you cannot half-ass it. If you want to do, really do this job, you must be willing to put in 150% at all points in time, a devotion that I was unable to muster. I saw it merely as a means to another end: I would do this until such point as I was able to go back to school, once my small children were older, and pursue my true passion.

But (there’s always a but with me, isn’t there. And not even the GOOD kind of butt), now I must just hurry up and wait. Maybe I’m not always the most amazing mother (CHOCOLATE CHIPS IN HIS LUNCH, SWEET JESUS, KILL ME NOW), but I am not willing to half-ass rearing my children either, at least, not at this moment. Eventually, there will too-soon come a time that I will not be quite as needed as I am now by The Sausage Factory.

I cannot half ass an advanced degree, either (at least for very long. I’d soon get kicked out of the field, and rightly so). When I am ready, I will go balls to the wall with it, kick ass, take names, and occasionally smack a bitch up (well, here and there), and some days this thought is all that keeps me going (especially those days that the baby manages to shit all the way up to his hair. It sounds completely impossible, but I assure you it is not).

Strangers do not want to listen to this. Why? Because it’s fucking boring.

What they’re looking for is a succinct “I am a nurse,” or “I am a doctor,” and possibly even a “I am a telemarketer” (although the last statement might be met with a similar response as I received when I would say “I work for an insurance company. As a nurse.” The responses varied from spitting in my general direction to lobbing nearby objects at me. Not sure that I blame them, especially since they would march away in disgust before I could justify that I never! denied! anyone! EVER! I! EXTENDED! BENEFITS!). Not one soul cares about the justification I have for staying home (my husband works 80+ hours a week! Daycare is damn expensive! I’m breast feeding! I am a leper!), nor do they care IF I stay home at all.

*I* alone am the only one who cares about that sort of thing. And I’m pretty damn certain that I’ve probably freaked out a few strangers with my dissertation. I have since learned to censor myself, give a vague “I’m home with the kids,” and move the hell on with my day.

It has, however, made me FAR more sensitive to what I ask and say to complete strangers. Anyone who knows me well can see right through my idiotic comments to people who I don’t know (somewhere along the lines of “you wear shoes! ME TOO! They’re so good at covering your feet, aren’t they?”), but that, too, is okay with me.

Now that Aunt Becky has aired some of her considerably large pile of dirty laundry, why don’t you tell her what bugs the pants off of you when asked about it? Maybe it’s not just things that highlight insecurities, maybe it’s just how damn PRYING complete strangers can be. Whatever it is, though, I am totally dying to hear it.

Maybe I’m the only person on the planet who will occasionally wonder how other people view me (no, my days are not filled with wondering what people think of me. Most of the time, I could care less. This is why I publicly blog: I don’t much care what people think of me), but somehow I doubt it. I always find it strange when someone has a perception of me varies wildly from who I actually am. Sometimes, it makes me want to correct the misconception, yet other times it tickles me pink to let them think what they want. Life is absolutely filled with more humor that way.

When I got pregnant with my first son, I had a role in my family: The Fuck-Up. Disregarding all of the surrounding circumstances (my mother’s relapse and subsequent torture of me), the blame for all of my actions fell squarely on my shoulders, at least as far as my family was concerned. Although many of my actions were not *ahem* the most mature, my family gave me far less credit than I deserved, especially considering that I was 20 years old.

When my pregnancy was announced, my parents were shockingly supportive of me, well, at least until I found out (much later, of course) that they had asked my brother (who is 10 years my senior) and his future wife if they would adopt my child in the event that I “freaked out.” They had such a low opinion of me that they honestly believed that I wouldn’t assume responsibility for my child (note: I am amazed that the keyboard has not ignited with the fury of a thousand suns as I type this).

As my family (save for me, of course. I get a special CHARGE when I get to confront people who have pissed me off.) is so non-confrontational that one might assume that each member is far meeker than they really are, I rarely heard about what a Fuck-Up I was considered to be. Aside from snide comments here and there about responsibility, everyone was pretty mum.

When I met, and subsequently married The Daver, was the point in which I realized just how poor my family’s opinion of me truly was. You would have thought, by their reactions, that Dave had rescued me literally from the streets, where I was selling crack and dancing badly for spare change (Dance Monkey, DANCE) and somehow turned my life around for me. You would never have guessed that I was at the top of my nursing school class, TA’ing for Organic/BioChem AND tutoring for A & P, while working as a waitress 20 hours a week BEFORE Dave walked into my life.

My brother, who I have a long and sorted history with, decided that if Dave (whom he adored/s) liked me, then I couldn’t be all THAT bad. My parents finally accepted that I had become a more mature and responsible person, although their time line was off by a factor of about a year and a half. In their minds, I only began to turn my life around once I had met my husband.

I do, of course, appreciate that my family loves my husband as one of their own (honestly, if we were to divorce, I have a feeling that holidays would have to be split up into Dave-time and Becky-time, or more likely, just Dave-time. I’d have to find myself a new family to celebrate the holidays), but I just wish that they could see that as wonderful as Dave is, he did nothing to change who I am and what I will do with my life.

It dawned on me, as I prepared my home for hosting Thanksgiving this year, that if asked, my family would probably mention that they were “having dinner at Becky’s house” and something to the effect of “she’s really turned her life around, hasn’t she?” Like I was some sort of street urchin in a Lifetime Original Movie who had some sappy predictable plot line: unmarried, younger girl gives birth to a child out of wedlock, heads down the “wrong path” until she meets “the man of her dreams,” and she miraculously changes her path, learns to cook and clean, and becomes a responsible upstanding citizen with an immaculate home. Who can, and does, crochet platitudes to hang on the wall.

While I can never discount Dave’s role in my life, the Lifetime Original Movie would be completely wrong (and not just the part about crocheting platitudes), but because I never, ever open up to my family about this sort of thing (in my family, despite the mental illness, we almost never talk about our feelings, because that would be too corny), it’s what they think of me. It’s incredibly doubtful that I’ll ever change their misconceptions of me, try as I may or may not to show them my true colors (I see your TRUUUUUUEE COOOOOLLLLLORS, and that’s why I LOOOOOOOOOOOVVVVE you.). I’ll chalk trying to explain who I really am to my family as yet another exercise in futility, because, honestly, it’s probably going to be easier to train my cats to unload the dishwasher or teach the coffeemaker to speak Ebonics than it would be to change their opinion of me.

It just sucks that they have to be so off-base with their perceptions, I mean, why can’t I be mistaken for a Fighter Pilot rather than a Fuck-Up (more accurately now: The Becky Formerly Known As Fuck-Up)?

I know that I’m not alone here. I just can’t be.

What do people think about YOU that is completely inaccurate?

For some computer related reason (read: I have no earthy idea, but my darling geek of a Daver did, which is why I married him. My Internet is always in a row.), my blog was down for about a day and a half. This happened to stress me out FAR more than it should, which reaffirms my stance that I NEED to get out more. MUCH more.

Regardless, my blog got moved (again, no idea what this means in actual terms) so some of the comments that got left yesterday are miraculously missing. Everything should be easy-peasy now, so my apologies.

(The blog being down happened to coincide with the winners of NaBloWhatever being announced, and I randomly got selected to win, but since it couldn’t be verified that I did indeed post each day, I didn’t actually win. This is ALWAYS what happens to me when I am in the position to win something.)

(Side story: when I was about 8, I entered a coloring contest for Easter put on by my local grocery store. I colored my heart out, and when I got the call announcing that I had won, I rushed my mother down to the store to claim my overly large Easter basket. When I went to customer service to claim my gift, which of course, thrilled me to no end, the lady at the counter regretfully informed me that although I had been called, it had been in complete error.

I had not actually won the prize.

Oh, the tears. OH the tears. I wept copiously and hard bitter tears at my loss. So much so that one of the cashiers took pity on my sad self and bought me a candy bar. The candy bar was good, but the whole experience has left me a bit shy of anything relating to contests. I don’t win, therefore I don’t bother.)

—————–

The second blood-letting netted me with a fancy new prescription for a brand spankin’ new dosage of my Synthroid.

What this effectively means, is that I have successfully warded off The Crazy, for awhile longer. Yay for not being full of The Crazy.

—————-

Despite my repeated whining about how slowly my weight loss is going, and complaining about a lack of winter coat, I have lost an additional 2 pounds this week. This brings my total up to 14.5, leaving me .5-5.5 to go by Christmas Eve to hit my goal of 15-20 pounds. My goal will be revamped to lose the additional baby weight by Alex’s first birthday, give or take a month or two.

All whining aside, I’m nothing if not realistic about my weight loss goals.

Let’s see if I can do this.

—————–

On a completely non-selfish note, I’d like to talk about giving this holiday season (and no, not to me).

When I was a child, there was always a huge Christmas tree at the mall that you could pull names off of and buy gifts for a needy family. Each and every year, we did this as a family, and I always thought of it as a nice tradition. The holidays must be a terribly hard time for the destitute, especially the children, and it always reminded us that although we may not have had a home with a moat and servants as I wanted, life was pretty damn fine.

But the trees have disappeared, likely because people would pull names and then not follow through with the gifts, which makes me terribly sad. Kids and animals (all kidding aside here) are some of my favorite creatures on Earth, so much so that I literally cannot watch violence towards them fictional or not, and I don’t believe that any of them should go without during the holidays (or any time, really).

Since the trees have gone the way of the condor, I have yet to find anything to donate toward during the holidays, and this makes me sad, as I’d wanted to pass that tradition down to my children.

One of my favorite bloggers, Baggage, aside from being a kick-ass chick, is a foster parent of several young children, which is awesome. I honestly don’t know how she does all that she does, 2 kids are kicking my ass, but I digress.

Today she posted about a site that you can donate to foster children who otherwise will go without this holiday season. I personally have picked out some things today that I will likely purchase tonight (scroll down to the end of the post to see the link).

I’m asking you guys to do the same. It’s not hard and you can only imagine what this will mean for a child.