How about a post of a different kind

I am on the road for work in some lovely upstate mountainous paradise.  Upon waking in my hotel room, I remember I have to stop by the OB-GYN.  (Work with me, people.. I was dreaming).   When I get there the receptionist puts me in a chair and my doctor comes in with a folder and then some other doctor came in with some other folder and lifted some lab work out of it and started to chuckle.  There was a big H somewhere on it.  

I thought of Lisa and said, "Oh, fuck.  Do I have ovarian cancer?"

The doctor started belly laughing, sort of like Santa Clause in a pocket protector.  

"Look again."

I looked.   And looked.  And then I found a number :  beta HCG 826. * 

And then we both started laughing but only for about two seconds because then I started to cry so hard I had to be ushered into a private little padded area to compose myself, which took hours.  During this time, as I was sobbing uncontrollably, I confessed to the doctor that I'd had a few beers at my dad's funeral.  And that there might have been some anti-depressants.  And that - and this is the most serious thing - I had not been having sex. 

In fact, I had been having so much NOT sex that this could not be true. 

"You are pregnant," he said. 

"Is it because of that guy at the office who always comes into the office in assless pants and a leather jacket and rides away on his motorcycle just as soon as he has picked up his paycheck??  Everyone hates him."  

I pondered a moment.  "But could it be?"

"Does it really matter?" replied the doctor. 

"No," I said.  And then I cried some more.  I had fleeting moments of bringing shame and disgrace on my family.  They were super fleeting.   Then I had moments of terror that my child would hate me because it would be fatherless.  Then I remembered being born is better than not having a father.  And then I cried for several more hours because I was so happy and I wanted to be a mother so damned badly and...  826!  

Now it's 9am and I am awake and very sad to think I'll never be a mother or even have a beta or a man in assless pants to unwittingly get me pregnant.  Moral:  dreams are mostly useless, but sometimes they tell you what you really, really want.  

This post is for Ellie and Maggie, who have the guts to do what I could never even think of.  And for me Julie, who has her six week ultrasound today.  

Heartbeat, anyone?  I'll continue smearing my family's unpleasantness all over the internet tomorrow.  

Love, 

Nina 

* for those of you unacquainted with the world of reproductive medicine, your beta indicates pregnancy or lack thereof.  A beta of 826 is very, very pregnant.  

Commonly asked questions

a) There was no lawyer involved. They printed the wills off of Will.com and filled in their names. I would offer a pdf copy to you all but it would be, um, a bit grotesque? An invasion of their privacy at the very least.


b) my step mother got Total Power Of Attorney from my father when he got sick. And when she got it, she transferred all the assets into HER name.

c) this is then a moral battle, not a financial one. We fight it in the name of our mother, who lived and died for this family.



I regret that my poor judgment has been the undoing of my entire family legacy. How could she ever forgive me?


So there will be no attorneys. Only carefully worded emails and I suspect, finally, a severing of all ties that leaves that vampire of a wife he married not four years ago a millionaire many times over - even while I move into my friend's parents' house who permit this our of pure charity. Something we normally associate with good Christian people. Tonight, they are celebrating Rosh Hoshanah. Say a whatever you say for them. I would be living under a bridge without their generosity.

Is this even interesting?

I got an email back from my step mother stating that her will and my father's are "boilerplate" wills common to married couples and that the entire estate is left to her to be divided among her "five" children upon her death.

The problem she does not address is that such boilerplate wills are common to people in FIRST marriages - where assets have been jointly gained and all children natural children.

Not really an appropriate way to manage your affairs if you were married to one woman for 35 years, had three children with her - and then a second wife entered the arrangement - a penniless one - and was only married to the man who amassed those assets before he ever met her.

The problem now is to point out to her the iniquity of this. She seems not to have noticed it.

Or I could just stick a boilerplate under my ass and feel the full misery inflicted on my brother, sister and me have been invited to sit upon.

No decision has been made as to what our response to this will be. It ain't gonna be pretty, I can tell you.

Read and Rate

Herewith, an email I have composed to my stepmother, who has sent a request via email, the import of which will become clear as you read my drafted response.

My question to you, reader, is whether the response is

A) snappish
B) mean
C) whiny
D) appropriate
E) oh shut up already. You got fucked. Deal with it.

Here is what I intend to say to her:

Erika,

You said recently that your home had died when my father died. I am sure you realize that the only home I have ever had died with him, too. Everyone else in this family has a spouse – or children - or both. I am the only person left without a soul to call my own. Dad was my home plate, and I am not only without a home, but without a family as well.

My father kept my things and my mother's in storage for me all these years because he dearly hoped that one day my circumstances would change, and that I could provide a proper household in which to keep and use those things that are so precious to our family’s history. That wish never materialized. This fact saddened my dad and it saddens me daily that I am, at this late stage, so unsettled in life.

That is how the matter of the furniture and its upkeep stands and I do not expect anything to change. However, your inquiry about your own responsibility or lack thereof in the matter does give me reason to ask some questions regarding our family.

My brother, sister and I have not been informed as to whether my father made any provision for his natural children – or his grandchild - in his will. Did my father make any provision for Buzz, Chiara, and I in his will?

If he did, it would be a good time for you to let us know what those provisions are. I have hesitated, out of respect for the grief we are experiencing, to ask - because it seemed best to let you take the lead, being the only person with the entirety of the information. So far, you have not said much at all.

Aside from sending me a check recently, (for which I am grateful, truly) you have given me no information about the state of the family finances – or whether my brother, sister and I are in any way entitled to any part of those assets. However, your suggestion that it is time for me to pay my own furniture storage fees leads me to believe that my father intended for you to be unencumbered by this recurring bill after his death – and that none of his money or property had been set aside for me, my brother and my sister.

Is this the case? Some good clear communication of these facts would be most welcome to me, and I am sure my brother and sister (though I do not speak for them) would like the information as well.

Love,
Nina







Puzzling

Not one of you had the same wish as mine: time. I want the last ten years of my life back, and I want them badly. Or is that bad?

Anything

Break my comment record.

If you could have anything - I mean anything at all, what would it be? A Lincoln Towncar? A brownstone in Gramercy? A carton of Twinkies? A hundred bashful virgins? A cure for cancer? A monument to your greatness?

What would you choose if you could have absolutely anything. Genie in the lamp.. but only one thing.

What would it be?

The serpent beguiled me

The way to my heart... is.... apparently.... green apples. Not the mushy fuji ones but the rock hard, speckled green ones you can only get if you to go the orchard.



Very recently, a man lured me into going on an date with him and he accomplished this by producing an apple of the above description and offering it to me at a moment when I was, well, vulnerable. I wanted the apple. He wanted... me. So we drove all over the city together and some other day when I am feeling less ashamed, I will tell you all we did and all we saw. (Relax. There was no kissing).


Love,
Nina

The sweetness of the twisted apple

Once in a while I have days - yesterday was one of them. For the duration of these days I see nothing but beauty. It happens on the train most often: everywhere I look and in every face I see, there is something to notice and whatever the detail, it is always beautiful. I see a child in a stroller and the particular lift of the child's eyebrows or the wonderful perfect roundness of his fingers has me enraptured. Then there are the others. Teenage boys, awkward and too thin and yet something about them - perhaps in the awkward, not yet grown face there is a color unlike any I have ever seen. Or in the haggard, old men, the evidence remains of their own youthful prosperity and they look handsome to me. And don't get me started on the women. Even the most misshapen* and miserable woman has about her the air of a queen.

I seldom have days like this - when everyone and all around me presents an opportunity to be delighted by whatever is best to see. Yesterday was one of them. I loved it.

* 100 points to anyone who knows (without looking it up) what is meant by the apple title.

Standing at the piano

Is that what they call it when you sit around and think about yourself a lot?

I posted recently that I have been trying to figure out what the second half of my life is supposed to be like, and at the time I had some answers. But then something happened that make me realize that ridiculous list of things I want to do are things that I can't just do all at once, simultaneously - and that the list is rather arbitrary. I just don't know. I also realized that my anxiety about the future is complicated by the fact that I am 38. The kind of directionless, strange, unmoored, financially ruined, romantically unattached, career indifference is the stuff that is supposed to trouble people who are, say, 25 or even 30. By 38, peoples lives are supposed to be defined already. I can't even have a proper mid life crisis because all my LOOK AT MY BELLY BUTTON! is about shit that any normal person would have figured out already.

A proper mid-life crisis is supposed to be about trying to change your life - shirking your marital obligations, indulging in wild spending sprees, committing ill-advised wardrobe crimes, glaring.. woefully and with great disappointment at your offspring who turned into exactly the people you hoped they wouldn't - in short more like you than you had hoped.

Instead I have before me... nothing.. Just a whole lot of blankness and lack of any proper instinct as to what should happen next. It's rather like standing at the piano and not knowing how to play. Or if I did, what would be the song?

So if you don't hear from me, blog wise,* for a few days, be assured I am just fine. Alive. Breathing. Eating cheese. It just so happens that short of simply staying alive, I have no idea what to do, and that will often mean that I don't know what to say.

*be assured also that if anything amusing happens - say if I smack anyone in the face with my boob by accident - or trip and fall at the train station and bruise my knees - in short, if I have a story to tell that might amuse anyone, you will have it. Promise.

Not a real post

Those gangsters at Blog 365 are going to arrest me, for sure.

It has been a busy, half conscious few days.

I'll catch you up soon.

Uninteresting, certainly

Recently my doctors readjusted my medication. In the upward direction. This is good news because I need less and less of the addictive variety - but the change has the added complication of making me prone to sleep. A lot.

Last night, I went to bed at 10pm and did not awaken until 9am. HM.

At 10am. I fell asleep while reading a book. For teaching purposes - not just for fun. I did not awaken until 2:30pm. And right now, if it not for caffeine, I would be out cold.

Can anyone explain this to me? Well, don't bother. It's the insomnia leaving my person (nothing left to fear, and yet nothing left to hope for) and catch up for all these years I have been a walking psychotic mess.

Or it could be the meds. Or both. Either way, this is what you get from me today: a whole lot of nothing about how very seldom I am conscious these days.

Oh... that and the fact that in the practice of clearing out and packing, I have unearthed several relics of my childhood, things I had thought gone forever. I am thinking to post pictures of them so that you know (as if you didn't) what sort of people my parents were. At any rate, who doesn't love a post including pictures? Of dresses my mother made me when I was 4? And of dolls she made me when I was younger than that? There might be, too, some pictures of quilts: my mother made me several. And of the things my dad left for me? There are some of those, too.

Love,

Nina

Go ahead. Laugh.

I have been doing a fair amount of housework these days - in part because of the general grossness, but also in preparation for the move. I went down to fetch the mail this afternoon and found everyone - men and women alike - staring at my boobs. I thought nothing of this at the time, since boob gazing is not against the law. When I arrived upstairs with the usual stack of garbagey mail, I discovered the following astonishing fact:

The underwire system of the right side of my bra had come unmoored and was sticking up out of my shirt. Yes indeedy.

Since all my other bras are dirty, this unhappy wardrobe malfunction forces me to do laundry. I'll leave you now to haul my wash down to the machines. Tomorrow, perhaps, I will be well groomed enough not to have my underwear literally impaling my shirt.

Whee,

Nina

Damnit of the week

David Foster Wallace is gone. If you knew who he was, you know why this is important and a terrible loss.

If you don't know why, read The Broom of the System, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and above all, Infinite Jest. Woodrow, that book is in that box I manage to keep never sending you. Maybe now I will get off my butt and get to it.

Also, head over to Joel's and congratulate him on becoming a grandfather.

But Dave is gone and I am ___________. (Unhappy about it).


Everybody say a prayer or whatever you do. For the baby, but also the lost one. He was the real thing.

Dig, if you will

The lack of posting.

Have I been busy? Uh huh.

I am getting ready to move and it's arduous. I also have work and a fair amount of to be expected death of father crying to do. I am not complaining. It's normal and in the department of tears, I have a balance fairly large to pay. So I pay some every day. OW.


Today, out of nowhere, someone leaned out of a cab and screamed "FUCK YOU" at me. I did not recognize him. Perhaps he thought I was someone else?

Knitting season is upon us. Who wants mittens?

Love,

Nina

New Blogroll

What the hell is wrong with me?

I need to update my blogroll. Please comment if you would like you are not included and would like to be. I read a lot of blogs that I am not linking to, as I should be.

Give me a shout if you are not properly represented.

Love,

Nina