Eleven years

Eleven years ago today -- which was also a Wednesday -- the road I was travelling on -- toward the family we had waited so long for, we thought -- took another surprising turn. Six months pregnant, I went to my ob-gyn's for my monthly checkup, only to learn that my baby girl's heart had stopped beating.

Two days later, I went to the hospital to be induced, but learned I was already in labour. I delivered my tiny daughter -- our first and only child -- later that evening. The photo here is one of the six Polaroids (now scanned) the nurses took that night. (Combing my hair was obviously not a priority at that monent.)

I'm at home this week. The "anniversary" dates were one reason why I decided to extend my vacation for a third week, particularly when I realized the dates fell on Wednesday & Friday again. Some years, I am OK & hardly even cry at all. Other years, I'm not. The problem being that I never know exactly how I will feel until the day arrives. So if August 5th &/or 7th don't fall on a weekend, I will usually try to take at least one of those days off. (If it's not possible, I slog through as best I can.)

Last year, being that milestone 10 year mark, was very difficult. I retold the entire story of my pregnancy from start to finish on my blog in minute detail (you can find those posts under "1998 memories" in the "Labels" section in the sidebar at right), and felt like I was reliving it all as I wrote.

This year will be different, I think. (I hope.) It was actually a bit of a shock to return home from vacationing at my parents' & realize with a start, "Eeek, it's this week!" I knew it was coming, of course, but it kind of crept up on me -- especially being on vacation the past two weeks & having only a hazy idea of exactly what day it was.

I am actually heading out to lunch today with a friend/retired coworker -- whose birthday is also August 7th (and who is also childless, although she is a stepmother & grandmother via her ex-husband and current longtime partner). She's been a big support to me over the years when it comes to Katie, so if I want to talk about my daughter at all, I know she'll be up for it.

Friday after dh gets home from work, he & I will visit the cemetery with some pink roses, & then order in Chinese food for dinner, as is our tradition. And so long as I have some time on one of these two days to go through Katie's box of things & spend some "quality time" thinking about her, I think I will be OK. After all, she is with me, and I think of her (and miss her), every single day.

By most measures, I have a good life today, on this road less travelled. But I can't help but think and wonder about the life I might have had with my little girl, on the road that ended so abruptly in August 1998. :(

Grandparents grieve too

In the spare bedroom at my parents' house, where dh & I sleep when we visit, there is a small wooden chest that my dad won in a raffle at a Ducks Unlimited banquet. It appeared there a few years ago, and I had a suspicion about what it was for and what it was doing in "my" bedroom. I peeked inside & saw something fuzzy & white.

When I was pregnant, my mom told me she saw the cutest little bunting bag/snowsuit on sale at a great price & bought it for my baby. I knew she had bought other stuff for the baby, and that some of her friends & neighbours had given her baby gifts to pass along, too. I had never seen any of these things, but I knew right away when I peeked inside that the "something fuzzy & white" was the bunting bag. I poked around a little & there are other baby things inside. Some outfits, some knitted items, a "Bunnykins" bowl and cup.

My first inclination was, "Hey, this is MINE!"

But on second thought, I realized that I have a box of Katie's things at home already. Why shouldn't my mother have a few mementos of her only grandchild too? They will all come to me, eventually.

I've never gone through the chest thoroughly, or really talked about it with Mom. Right after Katie was stillborn, I can remember sitting at my kitchen table with her, & how she wiped her eyes & said sadly, "Someday, I'll show you all the little things I bought."

I suppose she was hoping those things would be used by another grandchild someday. Sorry, Mom. :(

I'm still hoping she will sit down with me someday & show me those things, & tell me what came from whom. I know she said that her neighbour (who hosted a bridal shower for me) had knit something. She's gone now, & I would love to see her handiwork.

Someday.

*** *** ***

Mom went to her 50th class reunion just before dh & I got there, in the same little Minnesota town where she (and nearly all of her classmates) was born, grew up & graduated. They've been having reunions every five years since then (my observation as a Canadian is that Americans are much more enthusiastic about these sorts of things) -- but 50, of course, is a big one, and Mom & several of her friends have spent months coordinating all the details. About 28 of her 41 classmates were on hand (a half dozen have already died).

The organizers put together a booklet with contact info & updates on what everyone has been doing since 1959. There was a place to list family members, and I winced as I noticed how many of Mom's friends had grandchildren (& even great-grandchildren!) listed, and raved in their writeups about how much they were enjoying spending time with them.

Sorry, Mom (again). :(

*** *** ***

While I was home, my mom was on the phone with my uncle (her brother) & his wife. She was talking about how busy they'd been, and will be -- they're heading west to one of my cousins' weddings in a couple of weeks, and from there to the west coast to visit my mother's own ailing cousin.

My uncle & aunt are very involved with their grandchildren & great-grandchildren -- and my mom said later that my aunt made a comment to the effect of, "Well, it must be nice, you can just pick up & go." Mom replied that well, it's kind of hard to do that in the summer, because there's always so much yardwork & gardening to take care of (they have a big yard & they are very meticulous about mowing & weeding, etc.).

When she hung up, and began recapping the conversation to the rest of us, she mentioned this & then added in annoyance, "Just because we don't have grandchildren to babysit and chauffeur to soccer games... it doesn't mean we're not busy & don't have responsibilities and things to do!"

My first (private) reaction: "OUCH. Gee, thanks, Mom." :(

My second reaction: "Hey, welcome to the club, Mom!" How many times have people said or hinted to me &/or dh about how much free time, money, flexibility, etc., we must have (because we don't have kids)??

It may be true, of course. But what wouldn't we have given for a few more kids and a little less free time & money in our lives?

Enquiring minds want to know...

OK, here's a (potentially) dumb question for you, inspired by a conversation I had with dh this afternoon while listening to (& singing along with) "Hey Jude" on the classic rock radio station we listen to. When I was in jr high (back in the mid-70s), "Hey Jude" by the Beatles was always the last song played at every school dance I ever went to. As soon as you heard Paul sing "Hey Jude..." you knew the night was over.

In high school, we "graduated" to "Stairway to Heaven" by Led Zeppelin, lol.

What was the unofficial "last dance" song when you went to high school? Were there regional variations??

And what's the last song played at high school dances these days? (IS there an unofficial "last dance" song these days?) Anyone have teenagers in their life and know? (I'm going to try to remember to ask our nephew, next time we see him.)

I'm baaaaaack....

(Umm... you DID notice I was gone... didn't you??)

I've been away for the past two weeks, visiting my parents. Happily, although dh is heading back to work tomorrow (today is a civic holiday in Ontario, and many other Canadian provinces), I have another week of vacation still to go. : ) By the time I head back to work on Aug. 11th, I will have been away three (count 'em) weeks.

As I tell everyone, I can't remember the last time I had three weeks off in a row. Actually I do remember -- I was off work for eight weeks after Katie was stillborn, 11 (eek) years ago this very week. But I don't consider that time as "vacation." (Although some people apparently do. Dh took three weeks off -- we originally had two of them scheduled as vacation. When he returned to work, he was told bereavement leave was officially three days, but they would let him take a week... the two weeks of vacation would still count as vacation. Some "vacation," huh??)

I am hoping to get some cleaning/organizing done around the house, indulge a day or two in some scrapbooking, and perhaps do a blog cleanup (my blogroll & some of the links in the sidebar are sadly outdated). And catch up on some blog writing, reading and commenting. My parents have a computer & Internet access, and while I tried to do a little reading & commenting every day, I was forever being interrupted ("Turn that noisy computer off, your father is trying to nap"... "You spend too much time on that thing"... "Would you come help me with..." etc. etc.) I currently have more than 400 unread posts in my reader, and try as I might while I was away, I never managed to get it down to fewer than 200.

Watch for potential upcoming posts on the following topics (among others):

• my mother, her recent 50th class reunion & her sarcastic comment after a phone conversation with my uncle;
• cleaning out the crawl space (well, a big chunk of it, anyway) under my parents' house and the treasures (& junk) we found;
• Katie's upcoming "anniversary" dates later this week;
• assorted great articles that I've read & thought "I should blog about that;"
• the five (count 'em!) books I read in the two weeks I was away (including "Moose" by Stephanie Klein, the next Barren B*tches Book Tour selection).

More to come soon...

Eight years of childless/free living

This weekend marks a very special "anniversary" in my personal history -- the day I consider to be the true beginning of my childless/free life. Of course, I've lived without children my entire life (aside from the six months I was pregnant in 1998) -- but July 18th was a special day, an initial milestone marking the beginning, or at least the earliest stage, of my journey down the road less travelled. (I'll be otherwise occupied on July 18th, so I thought I'd blog about it early!)

It was the summer of 2001. Our third & final injectable/IUI cycle had failed in late May: we had reached the previously agreed-upon end of the fertility treatment road, & were embarking on the new & scary path of permanent childless/free living. In mid-June, I began having a series of frightening, debilitating anxiety attacks. I went to my family dr, was prescribed some Ativan, and endured a battery of tests (at my insistence) to satisfy myself that I hadn't had a heart attack, as I had initially feared. We went back to see the infertility counsellor we'd seen earlier for some guidance on this new path we were taking, & started getting ready for a much-needed family holiday on the Pacific Coast.

As I had when our daughter was stillborn in 1998, I began searching the Internet for resources -- something, ANYTHING, that would tell me I wasn't alone in facing this scary situation.

And I wasn't. Blogs hadn't been invented yet (or if they were, they weren't very well known), but I found a recently created message board that seemed custom-made for women like me. Women who had hoped to have children but, for a variety of reasons, hadn't. Some were like me, with a history of lost pregnancies and failed infertility treatments. Some were married to men who had families with previous partners & didn't want more children. Some were still hoping for a miracle, but trying on childfree living for size.

I made my first post on the board on June 18, 2001. I immediately felt accepted and understood. I began to look forward to logging on every day & finding out what everyone was doing and how everyone was feeling. It was a virtual support group. We got to know each other by posting "Two for Tuesday," "Wednesday woes & woohoos" and a "Friday Five." I found a few (very few) other boards for women in my situation (some listed in the sidebar of this blog), but most of them were not very active, and the bonds among the members not as strong as the ones I had formed with these women.

In the spring of 2003, the site underwent an "upgrade." Suddenly, I couldn't access the board anymore. PANIC!!! I had e-mail addresses for a few of the girls, & one day, I received an invitation: one of the members had created a private Yahoo group where we could reconnect. Eight of us eventually gathered over there and picked up the conversation where we had left off before we had been so rudely interrupted. : )

Eventually, I was able to access the old board again. But things were never quite the same there after that. There were many people we just never heard from again. A few of us "oldtimers" hung around to answer questions from newcomers. While the number of active posters slowed considerably, our threads continued to receive lots of views, indicating we had a lot of lurkers.

Last year in June, the hosting site shut the board down because of a lack of activity. The archived board is still there (although not, sadly, the posts from its earliest days -- so I can't link to my original post from 2001), but you can no longer post or respond to posts there, & it is not listed on the main site index of message boards. I blogged about the board closing here.

Only four or five of us still post on the Yahoo group now, not quite as often as we used to in the early days, when childless living was still a new & scary thing. But there is a bond and a common history we share that I treasure enormously. I've met two of these women in real life & it was simultaneously a weird & wonderful thing, to have someone step off the computer screen and into your arms for a hug. We've joked that that when we grow old & grey & widowed, without kids to "take care" of us, we'll move into a house together like the Golden Girls and take care of each other. (Or maybe we're not joking.)

Girls (I know some of you read this blog), I've never met most of you, but I can't imagine what the last eight years would have been like without all of you to vent to, cry with, laugh with and celebrate with. Thank you, thank you, thank you. To the extent that I have "accepted" my childless/free life, you all deserve much of the credit. I couldn't have done it without you. : )

Show & Tell: Our anniversary weekend in Stratford

(Apologies in advance for the wonky formatting -- trying to get the photos & text in the right places has been an exercise in frustration...!)

Thank you for all your good wishes on our wedding anniversary. Most years, we've fallen into the pattern of just going out for dinner, & then doing something special on the anniversaries that are divisible by 5. Even though this wasn't one of those years, we decided we wanted to do something a little more.

We've realized that we've fallen into a bit of a rut these past few years. Because we don't have any kids, we're obviously free to take off whenever we want -- and yet, we rarely do, especially the past 10 years. When you factor in commuting, we're out of the house for 11-12 hours every day, & we're pretty tired when we get home (how on earth do working parents do it???). It's very easy to fall into a rut & wind up laying on the couch watching TV (or mesmerized by a computer screen…!).

We decided that really needs to change! I recently started working on a scrapbook that will include at least one two-page layout for each year we've been married, with a selection of photos & highlights from that year, including vacations we took, shows we saw and what we did on our anniversary that year. (Hopefully, it will be finished in time for our 25th anniversary next year.) Anyway, going through my old datebooks, I realized, "Boy, we used to get out & about a LOT more!" Yes, I know we're 24 years older than when we were first married… but we're not THAT old, not yet…!!

We tossed around a few ideas. We considered going to Niagara on the Lake, one of our favourite getaway spots -- home to the Shaw Festival, as well as some fabulous wineries, & only a half-hour drive from Niagara Falls. We've been to NOTL many times before, though, most recently for our 20th anniversary. (I must blog about NOTL some other time.)

And so, we decided to head to Stratford -- home of Canada's Stratford Shakespeare Festival. (How lucky are we to have two such fabulous summer theatre festivals so close to us?) We've only been to Stratford three times (twice for the theatre, once just to look around) -- never overnight, & the last time was 20 years ago -- so we decided it was about time for a return visit.

And we are so glad we did. All weekend long, we kept looking at each other & saying, "WHY don't we do stuff like this more often??" lol


Stratford is about a two-hour drive west from Toronto, population around 30,000. It's a very pretty town, first settled in the 1830s, with some very well preserved Victorian-era houses & buildings, lots of gorgeous trees and parks, etc. The only thing I really didn't like is that almost ALL the parking downtown is metered -- 2 hours max -- & the parking lots are expensive (captive audience, I guess). Most plays run well over two hours, so dh had to leave the Sunday matinee at intermission to put more money in the meter. Be forewarned & bring lots of quarters, loonies & toonies!

(At left: Stratford City Hall.)

Ontario Street (Main Street)

Downie Street (I think?)

The world-famous Shakespeare Festival began in 1953, with performances in a tent. Over the years, it has expanded to four theatres and broadened its repertoire beyond just Shakespearean plays, with performances by renowned actors such as Alec Guinness, Christopher Plummer, Peter Ustinov, Dame Maggie Smith and William Shatner.

Both the Shaw & Stratford Festivals are heavily dependent on tourists (from both sides of the border) -- and both are hurting this year, because of the economy as well as the new rules requiring passports to cross the U.S.-Canada border. The Saturday night play we attended was fairly full, but not a sellout, as you might expect on a holiday weekend for both Canada and the U.S. We heard one hotel employee saying that when the Canadian dollar was at around 60 cents U.S., they used to get retired Americans coming & staying for two or three WEEKS, because it was such a cheap vacation for them. Not these days, unfortunately.

Nobody we talked to had been to Stratford recently & could recommend accommodations for us, so we scoured the Internet looking at hotel reviews. (Stratford has tons of B&Bs, but dh is more comfortable in a hotel setting -- preferably something fairly modern, lol.) We settled on the Arden Park Hotel -- a nice, clean, relatively modern, 5-storey hotel that had been recently renovated -- big room with a king-sized bed, flat screen TV, etc. -- new(er) carpeting, new tiles & fixtures in the bathroom, etc., located directly across the street from a Williams Coffee Pub and a Dairy Queen. It is a 20-30 minute hike downtown, but just a 5-10 minute walk down the side street & through a beautiful park to the Festival Theatre, the festival's largest venue.


We had better luck asking for recommendations on where to eat. Dovetailing nicely with its status as a tourist mecca, Stratford is home to a chef's school. There's a wide variety of very good restaurants to suit every taste & budget.

While visiting friends recently in nearby Waterloo, we asked whether they knew of any good places to eat. The husband works with a woman who has lived in Stratford all her life, & she had given him the names of two good restaurants to try. So we made reservations for one, Foster's Inn, on Saturday night. It's known for its steaks, so we both had steak & it was very good.

The restaurant is actually just a few doors down from the Avon Theatre -- however, the play we were seeing Saturday night was at the Festival Theatre, so we decided to return to our hotel, park the car & walk. The play was "Cyrano de Bergerac" which was wonderful. I saw it at Manitoba Theatre Centre years & years ago, when I was about 14 -- Len Cariou, a Winnipeg-born actor who has won Tonys on Broadway, played Cyrano then.

This time, Cyrano was played by Colm Feore, who is probably one of the better known stage actors in Canada (his wife directed the production & their son had a minor part in it too). I don't watch "24" but the program said he's on it! -- so you might recognize him. Some reviews I've read say he was a better Cyrano in a 1996 Stratford production. I don't know about that, but I thought he was wonderful, as was the young actor who played the tongue-tied Christian.

The next day we had brunch at the hotel, which was OK. It was served buffet style -- however, you had to go to one of the ballrooms to load up your plate at the buffet & then walk with it back down the hallway to the restaurant!! Kind of strange. Also, the hotel had hosted a wedding the night before & many of the guests were staying at the hotel, so it was very busy.

After brunch, we took a walk back to the park to look around (since we'd been in a hurry the night before), crossed the street from the theatre & took a walk along the beautiful Avon River (got some great photos of people feeding the swans).


Waterfall in the park -- when we were walking through on Saturday night, there was a whole family here having their portrait taken. Very cool setting!


Garden with a sundial & statue of Shakespeare on the grounds of the Festival Theatre.


Swans on the Avon River.

Another view of the river.

Returned to the hotel, got the car & headed back downtown for a Sunday matinee performance of "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum" at the Avon Theatre. OH MY GOSH -- it was hysterical!!! I was honestly getting weak from laughing so hard. Really, really funny & very well done! It's gotten great reviews. Dh saw the movie years ago (with Zero Mostel & Phil Silvers) but it was all new to me (except for the opening number, "Comedy Tonight"). I understand Nathan Lane starred in a revival on Broadway about 10 years ago (I could definitely see him in the role!).

We had hoped to go to dinner at the other restaurant our friends had recommended -- but when we went to call for reservations, we realized it was closed on Sundays. A lot of the restaurants in Stratford are, it seems. Very long story short -- after some wrangling with dh over what to do, we wound up at the hotel dining room. We looked at the menu in our room upstairs, picked out what wanted & headed downstairs & were seated. Only to find out that they didn't serve the regular menu on Sunday nights. We had a choice of three main courses, plus the salad bar & dessert bar (leftovers from brunch! -- which didn't appeal to me, so we didn't have any of that).

I had the prime rib & dh had broiled whitefish (the other choice was pineapple chicken). It was OK, but nothing special. Lesson learned for next time! Later, we walked across the street to the Dairy Queen & I had a Skor Bar Blizzard. : )

We got up the next morning (Monday, which was our actual anniversary), had breakfast, checked out before 10, & were back home again by noon. Went out for dinner again later that night.

We will definitely be doing this more often in the future. : )

To see what others are showing & telling, hop over to this week's Show & Tell post at Stirrup Queens.

And they lived happily ever after...

I know, I know -- happily ever after??

Well, actually... yeah. Despite the infertility, stillbirth, involuntary childlessness, health worries, anxiety (both of us) & other stresses that come with being human in the 21st century -- I am so glad I married this man 24 years ago today. : ) Happy anniversary to us!