Skin To Skin

The other night I went to bed, slid into my tiny space next to my baby and my husband, and couldn’t get to sleep.  This is not necessarily something new for me, but that night was different.  I put my cheek on my baby’s arm and just took in his milky, perfect skin.  I caressed his head and cheek and wrist and hand and fingers.  Gently, so as not to wake him (I’m not crazy!).  I was overwhelmed with gratitude for him, for all my children, for all my friends and family.  For this life.

I had just watched a documentary on HBO called White Light/Black Rain: The Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  They used  lengthy interviews and archival footage to tell the story of the survivors of the A-bomb that the U.S. dropped on them on August 6, 1945, to end WWII.

You can imagine, just from the title, that the movie was not a feel good flick (see an interview with the filmmaker here).  Most of the movie has subtitles, because it is the actual survivors speaking japanese, telling what they experienced, talking about all they endured.

It shook me.  I shake still.

So much of that whole event has been glossed over for us.  We barely study it in history class in school, and we certainly don’t hear anything about that pesky death and destruction part.  It seems that this documentary alone should be required viewing (for older aged teens, because it shows graphic images of the dead and wounded), just so that we can teach people the truth and consequences of our actions, no matter if those actions are necessary or not. The beginning of the movie is of the filmmakers roaming the streets, asking people what happened on August 6, 1945.  No one knew the answer.

Whether we agree with our actions on that day or not, the victims should not be forgotten simply because it’s inconvenient, yucky or upsetting.

It needs to never happen again.

If you listen to any of the international news, the “nuclear” word is thrown around daily, by many countries, including our own. Don’t be fooled into thinking this issue is not a current one, because it is.  Sticking our head in the sand is not a defense.

Most of the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki lost all their siblings and their parents.  One man said, “the only things that moved in Hiroshima were the flies over the dead”.  Another said, “I realized there are two kinds of courage.  The courage to die, and the courage to live.  I chose the courage to live, even if I was alone.”  She was 10 at the time the bomb hit.

The death toll between the two cities was over 200,000 people the day of the bomb, with over 160,000 more dying from injuries or radiation toxicity (those stats are from the documentary).  Today, over 60 years later, the survivors still have severe health problems.  Tumors, pain, cancer, it goes on and on and on.  At the time, when they were all showing up with “atomic bomb disease”, or radiation poisoning, no one knew it existed.  We hadn’t studied that part yet.

The survivors carried around a stigma, were shunned from society and treated like the radiation symptoms they exhibited were contagious.  No one wanted to be by them or marry them.  If they did marry and have children, their own children were also shunned.

One survivor said, “even though we survived, we couldn’t live or die like human beings”.

They were almost all children, and had no where to go.  They lived on the streets, eating radiated food or animals that they could catch.  Their government did nothing, our government did nothing.

So as I lay there thinking of my baby’s skin, and all the images of the children with burned and charred skin, I remembered that life is so beautiful for us.  No matter the struggles, the hard days, the financial woes.  My children are not orphans.  They aren’t wandering the streets looking for food so they don’t starve.  They aren’t enduring agonizing pain from burns allover their body.

Can you even imagine?

The status of things with our government and military, and our enemies, is very fragile right now.  When it feels as though there’s nothing we moms can do, one thing we can remember is how precious our love and life is.  We can teach our children the same, and hope and pray that these stories stay in history and don’t become a part of our future.

The Explanation

This past week I went on an unplanned and unintended hiatus.  I had no intention of leaving you all high and dry for a week, had no intention of taking a week off work, and no intention in general of being out of contact.  I made no preparations, lined up no guest bloggers, left no goodbye post.

If you follow me on Twitter, you know a bit about why I went MIA and what’s been going on.  Tomorrow I will be home, late, but home.  The rogue internet that I lassoed to get this post up is so slow that I can’t upload anything, so this week’s Favorite Tweets post will be up later in the week.  It’s a good one, so I hope you’ll come back and check it out.

The hardest part of being gone is not only that I haven’t been posting, but it’s that I haven’t been writing.  Writing is like breathing to me, and I feel like I’m suffocating.

We’ve gone through so much this past week, it’s horrifying and also solidifying.  It’s taught us much, opened our eyes even more, and brought my husband and my kids and I closer than ever.  For that, we are grateful.

See ya real soon…

Weekly Twitterings: My Favorite Tweets

If you are a new reader, and don’t follow me on Twitter, you may not know that I’m not always gloom and doom.  I think my lighter side comes out more effortlessly in tiny bursts, which is one reason I love Tweeting.  I decided to keep track of my favorite tweets for posterity, and of course just KNEW you’d want me to share them here. I know, how did you live without this until now?

Here’s the first installment of this week’s Weekly Twitterings:

Like this post?  Subscribe to my RSS feed and follow me on Twitter.

Weathering The Storm

This morning I woke up with a start.  My heart racing, I immediately tried to get BACK to sleep to finish the dream I had been having.  To try to give it a happy ending.  I got halfway there, giving myself a little relief, but then got out of bed to calm down, to stop shaking, and to go hug my family.

The dream that I had was that the world, literally, was closing in on me.  I was in some sort of building, and the walls were leaning inward, and out the window I could see only dirt.  The Earth was swallowing us up.  Windows were cracking, and we were all (my husband, children, and random other people I didn’t know) running around this building trying to figure out how to save ourselves.  Have you ever literally ran for your life?

I had the feeling that I had been holding up the walls, but it was too much for me to do alone.  And no one would help me.  I remember feeling abandoned.  Finally, I abandoned the wall, and was running around trying to find my children.  Hysterically I called their names, seeing them way up ahead and unable to reach them. That part was the worst.

At some point I had the sense that they were lost, and I needed to just hope someone had grabbed them and go for cover.  There was an ambulance in the building (this part is really random, so just go with it), and a bunch of us decided that it was made of steel and was our best chance of survival.  I jumped into the ambulance with no where else to go.  Inside the ambulance I found two of my three boys, huddled and sobbing.  I ran to them.

And this is the part where I woke up for just a moment.  Unable to breathe.  Feeling the weight of the whole world literally on my chest.  This is also when I tried to go back to sleep to give the dream a “happy” ending, and after I slightly drifted off, my husband came running into the ambulance with our baby in arms as another man slammed the ambulance door and sealed it shut.  We heard loud noises of metal and concrete crushing and bending, everyone was screaming.

And then I really woke up.

As I told my husband about this dream, we shrugged our shoulders and agreed that it doesn’t take a lot of dream analysis to figure this one out.  We DO feel like the world is crashing in on us lately.  We DO feel abandoned.  We DO feel powerless.

Most of the time when I have these crazy vivid dreams, I try to figure out the lesson.  I feel like my dreams have meaning, and it might not always be possible to figure out that meaning, but I like to try.

This dream seemed more of a way to visualize how my heart feels, than a lesson in how to handle it.  I know the ways I can handle it, but I don’t feel strong enough to do it.  Everything is in chaos.

I know that we will get through this, and maybe that was the lesson.  That even though things could not seem more dire, there is always a respite.  Always a place to go for safety.  A place to weather the storm.

If you need me, that’s where I’ll be.

The Stay At Home Mom-Worker

Through my years of being a mom (my eldest is almost 6 now) my role has continued to evolve and change along with me.  When I was in college, I had a difficult time picking a major, because all I wanted to do or be in life (as far as career ambitions go) was a mother.  I felt like I was made for the job, and couldn’t wait to begin my new “career”.

Once I was pregnant with my first baby, I did constant research.  What kind of birth would we have?  What kind of parents would we be like?  Would I let him wear little sailor outfits?  All of it was extremely important to me.

My husband and I had planned on me being a stay-at-home-mom, so the job I had longed for was finally going to begin.  I was ecstatic.

And then I had that first baby.  He was more wonderful and more difficult than I had ever prepared for.  He was one of a kind, and he took my perfect little Rule Book to be a Perfect Mom I had created for myself, and promptly threw it out the window.  Hard.

So my role as a stay-at-home-mom slowly, but surely, turned into a stay-at-home-mom-therapist-psychologist-dietitian-advocate.  Autism became a member of the family, and no matter how unwelcome, we had to accept it’s presence in our lives.

I embraced these new roles most days, however on the other days I questioned my own qualifications.  How did I know what I was doing?  Why didn’t I feel like I was doing a better job?  It was all I could do to just accept what is, and what may not ever be, and move forward.

So fast-forward several years, and you have present day.  My role has been evolving yet again, and while it’s all for the good, it’s still unexpected and intriguing.  I have expanded my role to being a stay-at-home-mom-therapist-psychologist-dietitian-advocate-writer-blogger-work-at-home-mom.  I would love to add gardener, baker and urban homesteader to that list, but for now those have to wait.

We all know that most people consider stay-at-home-moms (SAHMs) to be in a different category as work-at-home-moms.  We SAHMs often pick up plenty of odd jobs, in addition to our every day battles with the “insurgents” at home, but yet no one changes my category on all those surveys I’m sent.  And for me personally, with my many deadlines and writing projects I have spinning, I am still considered a SAHM by most accounts.  This is just not accurate anymore, and  I don’t think I can say “Work-At-Home-Mom”, because it typically is referring to moms who are in the general (i.e. corporate) work force, but telecommute from home.

So what’s my category on such a survey?  Mom At Home That Works But Is Never Really “Staying” Anywhere?  A Stay At Home Mom Who Is Only Home When She’s Working?  What do you think?

I’m a little partial to Stay At Home Mom-Worker. Because I am “at home”, I’m a mom, and I’m most definitely working.  Come to think of it, we are all, ALL those things.  Ah, labels.  Aren’t they fun?

Big Pimpin

Fast and furious is how I would describe my life lately.  Barely letting my head hit the pillow at night, I’m working working and oh yeah, working.  I’m not complaining, because I’m choosing to do all that I am doing.  I like it, I’m passionate about it, and I don’t want to be doing anything else.

However, this–all this (picture me waving my hands around gesturing at all the places I write and work, there on your right)–is way more than just a blog.  Or just a diary of my thoughts.  Yes, it happens to be a blog and yes it does include my thoughts, but it’s also my brand.  My product–or, my business.  I do this as a career, and like any smart business person–I promote my product.  Why wouldn’t I?  It would be silly for me to work hard on all these things and then keep them a secret from you all.

Yesterday I received an email saying “all you do anymore is self-promotion, I’m tired of coming to your blog and being told to click somewhere else“.  I won’t lie–that sentiment took a little bit of the wind out of my sails.  For about 2 seconds I thought, “oh great, tomorrow I’m linking to a post I wrote at BlahBlah’s website, I guess that’s more self-promotion!.”

But then I realized, of COURSE it’s ok to link to my work.  Why would I want to keep my writing a secret from all of you?  That wouldn’t be fair to you and it would be just plain dumb on my part.  I know when I have people whom I enjoy reading, I am GLAD to find more places I can read their writing.  I can’t get enough.  My secret hope is that you all feel that way about me, too.  Or if you don’t, that’s ok (well it’s not ok, tell me how I can win you over), and I will move on.  But to tell me that I should not be promoting my product?  If an artist completed a collection and was having a showing at a gallery, would he be accused of shameless self-promotion if he told people about it?  When bands go on concert tours, is it simply shameless self-promotion, or are they promoting their product and giving their audience what it wants?

I love what I do, and want to be successful, and even though I don’t think I’m “selling out” (another part of that email in question) by working with companies and PR people, I know that there is a fine line.  Writers, and any artists for that matter, have a job that is intimately tied to their person.  My work is my heart and soul, and I do need to protect it.  I only associate myself with companies and brands that I believe in, and whose ethics are in line with me.  I would never represent anyone just for exposure or just for a buck.  However, dismissing any and all of that less than glamorous part of writing, simply because of a desire for “free and pure” content, is misguided at best.

In the end, I know that part of who I am is a “to each his own” free thinker, so I know that I’m not going to harbor these feelings too long today.  There’s mouths to feed, laundry to be folded, writing to be published and sponsors to correspond with.  So I leave you with this link, to my new baby that I’m so very proud of, and I hope that you’ll keep coming back for more of this crazy blawg, and ride this wave as long as we can, together.

MommyVlogger?

I’ve been spending time on NewBaby.com today, perusing the cute home videos and enjoying the “experts” and product reviews.  It’s so nice to have a place to go where I know I won’t have to worry about my kids looking over my shoulder and accidentally catching a glimpse of a nasty comment or two (I’m looking at you, YouTube).  I even caught a great blurb about dispelling the “mommy wars” and some great info on pretend play.

Have you checked out NewBaby yet?  Here’s what they say about themselves:

NewBaby.com is the online video resource for moms featuring thousands of mom generated videos, product Vcasts and Expert solutions segments.  It’s an online community where moms can learn, share and create videos in a safe, secure and Free environment.  Come Vlog with us at NewBaby.com (www.NewBaby.com)!

They also have a 30 Day Giveaway going on, where all you have to do is register on the site and set up a profile.

I’m thinking that it might be fun to start doing some vlogging in the near future, and NewBaby.com is a great place to host those v-casts.  I’m thinking up some fun ideas now.  Taking my garden gnome on a tour of the city?  Testing him out in our new car seat?  Decisions, decisions…

Another Decade

Ever since yesterday’s post “I Get Lost“, I’ve had that song in my head.  Debbie Gibson.  1989.  I get weak, in a glance…

The 80’s.  I can’t get enough.  Walk like an Egyptian, Manic Monday.  Hot pink and black.  80’s mod clothing.  Atari. Bon Jovi with the hair.

I love it all.  It’s not like I want to start hair-spraying my bangs straight up again or wearing shoulder pads, but today’s version of the 80’s.  I’m slightly obsessed.

My friends make fun of me.  I think I may be alone in this love.

However, when I decorate my home (well, in my head at least…) it’s all mid-century modern, 60’s and 70’s mod.  Eames, simplistic, black, orange, white, brown.  Vintage.  It makes me swoon.

So where am I?  I’m stuck somewhere, or perhaps not stuck but happily resting, and I wonder who’s there with me.

Where are you?

Simma Down, Mamas

Just so all you fine people are in the loop…we mommybloggers won’t let the crabs drag us back down into the pot (aka “crab mentality“).

Go read here.  Spread love, not war.

What I’m Up To

The business of trying to prop up two fledgling new careers (mine and hub’s), on top of working really hard at not losing our minds each day as we battle back and forth with autism and it’s havoc on our home, does not leave much time for writing most days.

Especially today.

So I figured I’d tell you about what I’m up to, what I’m reading, who I’ve got my eye on today.

I’m reading about Growing Your Traffic over at Rocks in my Dryer, great info for veteran or newbie bloggers.

Fussy is reminding us all to Stop Poisoning Ourselves, at her Fussypants blog.  Don’t even think about walking into your house with your shoes on after reading her post.

Steph at Adventures in Babywearing has posted belly pic of the painting that Ashlee and I created this weekend.  The Tree of Life, like you’ve never seen it before.

I’m still enjoying the sugar high off our Cookies By Design treats that they so generously donated to Steph’s baby shower this weekend.  They were a hit, so look for more about them in an upcoming Baby Shower guide from Mama Speaks.

Also, have you checked out NewBaby.com yet?  They are like a YouTube for moms, where you can post videos, create playlists and connect with other moms of kids of all ages.  You can archive your videos (to keep your hard drive purring) and share them with family and friends.  A safe place to go when those nasty YouTubers are getting you down.

That should all keep you busy for a while…check back tomorrow when I’ll have a huge giveaway to tell you about!