Thoughtful Thursday: An open letter.

To whom it may concern:

I have to send you honest and heartfelt thanks.  Without your duplicity, your psychosis, your abuse, your greed, your jealously... essentially, without all of your best qualities, I would not be where I am today.

Where is that, you ask? I'm delighted to tell you that I'm in the best place anyone who wants a family can be.  I am in the arms of a man who truly fits the cliche "soul mate" bill. I have two beautiful children, one of which was his before he ever had one with you.  We are embarking on a journey together that can only end in good things.  We are no longer encumbered by your lies, or living in fear of retribution.  We sits together at the dinner table over food that we've prepared as a team, with the children helping.  We read to the children, and we send them off to sleep.  Then, at some point thereafter, we sleep soundly in each other's arms.

Don't think that you haven't hurt us; you have.  But by your fabrications, by the hurt you caused, you brought us together in the first place, when we had both long given up and written the other off as someone we were thankful to never know and wished we'd never met to begin with.  We were wrong, plain and simple!  We have laughed over and over that if we had been adult enough to try and continue our friendship when Kinder Major was conceived, that Blueberry Nights would be home with us, safe, no longer subject to your emotional and borderline physical abuse.  Then, the sobering reality not that she could have been, but that there's little extra we can do for her, silences us.  In our home, unlike in yours, there will be no delineation between half and whole.  There will be no step.  There is love, and only love.  She will come to us as though she'd never left, with a snack on the table and some fun surprise planned to celebrate her joyous homecoming.   Joyous.  That is absolutely what it is.  She is my soul mate's daughter, she is my daughter's sister.  She will always, in every way, be welcomed and loved.

I'm unexpectedly bringing this to a close.  I had a lot of other things I thought I wanted to say to you.  Things about your lies, things about the people you've hurt.  I changed my mind.  I said thank you for bringing Pater Puerii and I together, and I told you I will always love his daughter.  His daughter, his daughter, and his son.  Children of my heart.  With all of that said, with you knowing how appreciative I am for your deceit and your cruelty, I find myself done.

P.S. You should never have had the jaw surgery.  At least beforehand, we thought it was the jaw that made you so incredibly unattractive.  Now that it's been broken and moved forward?  Yeah.  You really are ugly, inside and out.

Happy Birthday, Blueberry Nights! (A little bit late.)

Ladies of Light
and
Ladies of Darkness
and 
Ladies 
of 
Never-
You-
Mind-

This is a prayer for a Blueberry Girl.


First, may you Ladies be kind.

Keep 
her 
from 
Spindles 
and 
Sleeps 
at Sixteen

Let her
stay
Waking
and
Wise.


This is a prayer for a Blueberry Girl.


(Poem excerpt from "Blueberry Girl" by Neil Gaiman, Illustrated by Charles Vess)

"This button.  Right here!"

 He's so damn smart.  By the end of the week, he was terrorizing Kinder Major and their cousin, monopolizing the mini John Deere for his own nefarious purposes.

That is where it gets some people.  He doesn't LOOK sick. Most days he isn't.  There are little things that stick out to anyone watching closely, though.  At just a few months shy of his second birthday, he weighs less than his sister did at ten months old.  He is just under the third percentile for height.  His head, however, is charting at a whopping 30%.  See? I told you he's smart.

The newest addition to our cast of misfit characters, we'll call him Pater Pueri, fiercely insists that there is nothing wrong with him, just like he fiercely insists that he is PP's own son, blood be damned.  I love him for many many reasons, but those two may have been what sealed the deal for me all that time ago.

He's not incorrect in that assertion; there is nothing wrong with our son.  Our son seems to be experiencing some... technical difficulties... if you will.

I posted a bit ago about the result of our visit with the genetics team, an appointment that was a year and two months in the making.  There were no definite answers.  That status... remains.  Frustratingly. 

Tonight is no different as frustration goes.  I'm up, feeling unwell myself, and to occupy myself away from my own gastric distress, I sit and play armchair diagnostician, constantly asking myself "Okay, if this is another dead end, where do we go next?  What do we try?  Who do we see?"

My little Bug.  He was conceived under less than stellar circumstances, and he hung with me through my body's silent but bloody coup d'etat, to be delivered unto me purple and surly-faced, leaving me utterly and endlessly smitten.  His young life has been eventful, and will continue to be.  My young life will grow gradually older, striving every minute to do for him what I simultaneously spend every minute doing for his sister: making sure that there is only the shadow of the universe's chaos that could sentence me to watching my little loves whisper away.