Barely tenured

Reframing

Miss T. was having a hard day today. The crayons had to stay in the center room, her stick fell through the porch stairs, and Miss A. at day care wouldn't let her color with markers on the table, only on PAPER, and it all was just cramping her nearly-two-year-old style.

I didn't want to cook, but taking her to a restaurant was clearly a poor idea. So I sent Beaker to pick up takeout. Miss T. was upset. She was upset about everything today, so she was upset about Dada leaving too. She stood at the door screaming "MY DADDY! MY DADDY!", only occasionally consenting to a brief hug, until he came back.

It was very, very hard to hear and watch. The father of two tiny little children at Miss T.'s daycare died suddenly a few days ago. I'd only met him once, at the playground with his kids. He dressed all rawk-n-roll but seemed young and sweet, and we talked about our toddlers' development (Miss T. barely walking, his boy barely talking) while he sat cross-legged on top of a giant concrete mushroom and gave the baby a bottle. They'd just moved to Granolaton. He was taking care of both kids while his wife worked, since they were still on the waitlist for Box-o-Tots, and it sounded like they were maybe having a sort of rough and transient time. After the conversation I felt old and bourgeois, but also very secure, and very grateful for that security.

His boy is just past two now, only a little older than Miss T. I'm all in a lather because Beaker will be away for four nights next week, and how will Miss T. (who wants Dada to read her bedtime stories now) react? And she was all in a lather over Dada leaving for ten minutes tonight. But that little boy (oh, and that baby, and that hardworking mama)... he's old enough to hurt.

Letters from Annajane to Ray

November 21, 1997

Envelope: the outside envelope from a phone bill.
Paper: pieces of the phone bill itself.

Ms (R. M.) Raynaud:

I do hope you'll put me
on the bank's Easter mailing
list - yep, I know its too too
late for Christmas.

Here's my address:

[what follows is half her childhood address, crossed out, replaced with most of her then-current address, except that she's put New Hope, PA -- then crossed out the PA and replaced it with an NY]

A.M.

November 22, 1997

Envelope: the payment envelope for a phone bill. A slip of paper has been taped to the inside so that Ray's address is visible.

Paper: a shred of a New York Times bill.

R.M.

Today on GMA, Paul
Simon says:
Bridge Over Troubled
Waters was
originally
conceived as
a tribute to
a drunk +
his moll.

Fancy that

A.J.

November 24, 1997

Envelope: a photograph print envelope (remember those?) folded over and taped down to letter proportions.

Contents: half of a picture from my wedding. Beaker's been cut out, except for the hand I'm holding and the end of his nose. Plus a negative strip; I think the three pictures are of me and her last dog, on the balcony of Nanna's apartment.

June 19, 1998.

Envelope: letterhead from ZZZ Hospital, which I didn't know she'd ever been in.
Paper: a yellowed "about the author" page from a Marion Zimmer Bradley novel.

R.M.

Take the number XXX train
to the end of the line.
(YYYth St.)

Then walk 1 block
west to ZZZ Hospital.

Ask for Me in
Ward 2 North

Love,

A.J.

My brain is bleeding, too

So: Dr. Data's assistant told me, when I called a few months ago, that they wanted "two normal cycles, after you stop nursing," before anything got underway.

My first cycle entirely post-nursing: 24 days.

Let me repeat that, louder: 24 DAYS.

Now, I was on the short side before. 26 was normal, back in the day, which was a while ago. And the two cycles while I was still nursing were both 26 days. But!

First of all, is it gonna be that often for the rest of my "fertile" years? Every three-and-a-half weeks?! Crap!

Second of all, wait, I am going to be trying to actually be fertile again, trying very expensively, and I really don't need any scary potentially perimenopausal symptoms like this going on now, okay?

I have a hard time voluntarily collecting quantitative data that might burst bubbles of denial. (For example, I haven't weighed myself since about March 2006.) Yet I'm going to have to start doing OPK's again^*. Before my short cycles were all about an abbreviated luteal phase; I clung to my late ovulations as a sign that I wasn't yet out of the game. I don't want to find out otherwise.

Not to mention that I've never heard an honest day 3 FSH number. The local clinic didn't do them; Cornell gave me a number on some funny scale that they said was good enough, and which I promptly forgot. The do-it-yourself "am I in menopause?" test kits at the drugstore are much scarier than the Target maternity section ever was (and is becoming again).

^* Why? Because they'll need to know when I ovulate in order to schedule the co-culture biopsy, and I am hoping to get that done fairly soon.