1/9/02
Still
fishin ' ...
I'm not here.
Seriously.
I'm still on hiatus. I promise you. See these words on your screen right now? Not me. Some robot or something wrote all this.
The thing is, I asked my friend Michelle to write a guest entry for Terribly Happy after she gave birth to her presumably beautiful baby boy (I say presumably because I haven't seen him in person yet. I plan to do that soon, I hope, but I'm not one to go by pictures. That's how I ended up dating RuPaul by accident years ago). She gave me her guest entry this week, and rather than let it wither and fade because of my self-imposed exile, I thought I should post it, and pretend like I'm not here, all stealthy like.
Did it work?
Obviously not.
Michelle is one of my best friends, and I put her in the category of an extra special friend because in one way or another she "put up with me." I'm sure you all have friends like that. People who indulge your stupidity and don't get mad when you're obtuse and just typically let you be who you are through times of great stress and turmoil.
I'll never forget this: I had just gone through maybe the worst break-up of my life. I couldn't eat. I couldn't sleep. I had dreams that I was dating RuPaul again. So Michelle sees how bad a shape I'm in and she takes me to Arby's and makes me eat a triple cheese sub (I believe the cheeses were cheddar, parmesan and some kind of cheesy sauce), and let me just blather on about my broken heart. Michelle has indulged me like this on countless occasions and it's not something I can ever forget. So here she is. My friend, the mommy.
Oh, by the way — this is really funny: Something that happened at Lord of the Rings. You should be reading this site regularly.
Now, here's Michelle:
I never personally knew how much a person’s life could change in the course of a year. I’ve heard of people having "light-bulb moments," forks in the road, life-changing moments and so on. I even thought I had experienced some of those moments.
Well, I guess I had experienced some of those moments. But if you want to really talk about a major life-changing moment, I had it happen to me on Oct. 28, 2001.
In some ways the moment had lots of time to build. It wasn’t a surprise when it happened. In fact I had planned for it for my whole life. And even then, when I knew when the moment would come, I started digging in and spending nearly every waking thought planning for it and for my life afterward.
My friends and family — even total strangers — had told me about this all-powerful, all-encompassing, all-emotions moment. But at 4:20 p.m. on that Sunday afternoon, when I met my son for the first time, I finally knew.
And the thing is, I feel a little silly writing about it. You see, there are no words possible to describe what it feels like to give birth to a child that you and the person you love most in the world created together. I’ve had a lot of time to think about this and think of an angle or a way to try to tell you, but truly, I can’t.
Some of you already know what I mean. You’ve had children. You’re one of those people who would look at my face, then at my swollen belly and then deep into my eyes and tell me that it’s the most amazing experience in the world. I stared back every time desperate to know what you were talking about. And when I thought I knew, I would close my eyes and try to image it, but I couldn’t.
I found out I was pregnant at the first possible moment that I could. I had no reason to suspect that I was pregnant, except that my husband, Brad, and I had been "trying" for about three months. I had taken pregnancy tests the two months before, and each one left me disappointed.
So this February night I sat at my computer and surfed the Web for pregnancy calculators. Those are the things where you punch in the date you conceived and it would tell you your due date. I had taken a pregnancy test earlier that night before I logged on and it also left me disappointed.
If I had gotten pregnant that month, my due date would have been Nov. 7, 2001. As I grew weary, I decided to go to bed. Brad was already asleep. For some reason, I wanted to look at the negative pregnancy test one more time just to make sure nothing had changed. Instead of the one blue line as I had left it, now there were two.
My heart raced as I began to wonder if it was a mistake or if I could really be pregnant. Being a prepared sort of person, I had another pregnancy test and took it. I sat in the small bathroom with the light on as I stared at the stick. One line, one line, still one line. Hmmmmmm.
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Clip
Art Corner
Not a lot of people know this, but Big Ben used to suffer from premature midnight dysfunction.