I’m feeling much better today. I’m feeling completely like myself, mentally and emotionally. Last night I was worried that I would have permanent brain damage, so I was doing crossword puzzles, and knitting, and reading through one of Willem’s math books (nope, still can’t follow the advanced stuff), generally testing myself just to be sure.

Physically, that’s another matter altogether. I feel like I was in a car accident, and then did a 90-minute high-intensity workout without stretching. I suppose both are somewhat accurate. My right leg is particularly bad; I can’t lift it up onto the couch and am limping heavily. I have a handful of weird, inexplicable bruises, and a really good one where the IV went in. And of course my tongue is something to see. If it wasn’t such an effort, I’d go get the camera now; I made Willem take photos last night. You know, to commemorate the big event.

You definitely learn who your friends and loved ones are when stuff like this happens. Happily, nobody let me down, and several people rose to the occasion. My new friend M. arrived here at the same time as the ambulance – it must have been horrifying for her, because her son was here playing with Jacob. She helped Willem throw the stuff from the yard sale back in the house, and then took my kids for the afternoon. She brought banana-chocolate muffins first thing this morning because she knew about the low-potassium thing. She acts like it was no big deal, but we’ve lived here for four years without making many friends, so I get to think it’s a big deal anyway. So there.

And of course my dad came while I was still in the hospital, and Gretchen brought ice cream and company today. Lots of other people have either offered to help, or wished they lived closer so that they could. (I’ve had no communication from my mother-in-law, even though she and her friends visit this site many times a day. This is just as well, and I’m glad Willem didn’t call her in the moment. She’s a nurse, she could’ve told him something that would have just finished me off.)

So, yeah, much excitement. I took it very easy today, rarely getting off the couch, and plan to do the same for at least the next few days. I wasn’t told not to drive, but I won’t until Tuesday at the earliest, and then only short in-town sorts of things. The ER doctor didn’t think this was a medication-related thing, because all I had taken that day was 2 Ultrams (a medication that’s lighter than Vicodin) and 800mg ibuprofen, with Zoloft the night before. Still, I’ll be on the phone with my PCP first thing tomorrow.

And I’ll try to take it easy, I promise… but we have to go apartment-shopping tomorrow morning. Somehow this moving thing still needs to happen, overelectricity (as one woman remarked, I decided to have the 4th of July inside my head instead of out) notwithstanding.

Well, that’s one way to shake things up. As it were.

Today was the first day of our two-day garage sale. We’ve only been planning it for a week, but we had a TON of stuff to get rid of. Mostly kids’ clothing – I saved bins of clothes from both kids, from birth, and hung onto them because we were planning to have another baby. I’ve accepted that that’s not likely to happen, and if it does, I’ll go ahead and buy new clothes, or collect hand-me-downs from one of my more fertile friends.

Everything went fine for the first few hours, and I was taking mental notes so as to craft the blog entry. I wasn’t feeling great for it, but I wasn’t feeling horrible, either – just sort of off, a little spacey, dizzy and a smidge nauseous at times. I shrugged it off, because I had to; we have so much to do before the move, and this was a particularly key step.

At 11:30, I noticed that one of my birdfeeders was growing grass out of the bird-feeding holes… I thought that might be a sign that it wasn’t getting enough use and needed new seed. I started dumping it out, which required a few sticks and a skewer to try and pry loose the mess at the bottom, and was unsuccessful.

Then I had a seizure.

Yes, really. It was horrifying. I’ve never had one in my life, and I hope to never repeat the experience.

The seizure itself is completely lost to my memory. Everything is a complete blank from the birdfeeder to the ambulance crew loading me onto the stretcher, and things remain spotty for the next hour or so in the ER. I realized that I’ve never had true memory loss before; sure, I forget stuff, and I’ve overimbibed and lost chunks of evenings, but I do have scattered memories from those nights and when reminded I can remember even more. This? No, very different from that. Total black, no idea what went on, at all.

Willem was right next to me and watched it all happen. He held my head, and called 911, and attempted to shoo away the oblivious shoppers in our driveway. Both kids watched it happen, too – Emily was a few feet away from me outside, and Jacob was watching out the front window. Jacob had a friend over, and the friend believed I was dead. I’m really glad I was able to stand and walk to the stretcher, to at least prove that that wasn’t the case.

Willem tells me that in those first several minutes, half hour maybe, I had decompensated to the mental capacity of a very small child. I was apparently fascinated with the rocks in the garden, and was smiling and grunting at them, but had no speech. By the time the ambulance crew got there, I had words and was starting to string them together into complete sentences, but I still wasn’t right: I truly believed that the EMTs just happened to be in the neighborhood and stopped by the shop, and wasn’t it lucky that they were there when I needed them? On the ride to the hospital, I was able – with difficulty – to remember my name (THAT is a scary mental search to perform, let me tell you) but I didn’t know where I was and I had no idea of the date – “Late June, maybe?” By that point I was starting to encode memory again, so I can remember the absolute bafflement and confusion because I knew I was supposed to know the answers to these questions, and I simply could not find those answers. Scary, and reminds me that I’d prefer not to experience dementia, thankyouverymuch.

Anyway, long story short – because my head still hurts too much to stay on the computer much longer – I was diagnosed with a grand mal seizure of unknown origin. I just read a and, yes, I had a whole lot of those. I should have a full recovery; mentally, I believe I already have, though I haven’t tried anything more taxing than blogging yet. Physically, my right side is bruised up, because I was standing next to the house, in the garden, when I fell. We can’t figure out the logistics of that, because I was on my left side by the time Willem got there two seconds later. Every muscle in my body hurts like I had an all-day workout. My head throbs, and it’s worse if I try to bend down to pick something up. I was still nauseous and dizzy and sleepy for a while, but that has passed. And my tongue? Oh, my tongue. I’ll get Willem to take a picture: I understand why they used to say to shove something in a person’s mouth so they don’t bite their tongue. (Public Service Announcement: now, you’re not supposed to do that, because people were biting off chunks of whatever was shoved in their mouth and choking on it.)

They told me that they think it was caused by a combination of low potassium, dehydration, “sun poisoning” (which sounds much cooler than “sunstroke”) and stress. I shouldn’t expect it to ever happen again. The low potassium might be due to the dehydration, or might be due to a vitamin deficiency; I’ll eat more bananas and drink lots of Gatorade.

So, yeah. Never a dull moment here. How was your Fourth of July?

I very, very rarely cry.

Part of the reason is that it just seems sort of a useless exercise. It doesn’t change whatever the upsetting situation is, and I invariably feel worse afterward… now I’m sad/upset/whatever, AND my head hurts and I’m stuffed up. Fabulous.

Another part of the reason is that I just don’t cry pretty. I get all splotchy and pale, at the same time, and my eyes are red and my whole face gets puffy. Then everyone knows I was just crying, and as a rule I like to choose whether or not to share my miseries with others.

That third bit, about choosing whether I put my emotions on display, is the major reason why I don’t cry often. I tend to be fairly controlled, and am not typically prone to any wild fluctuations of behavior. I have my moments, of course, but in general, I don’t reach the heights of giddiness and I don’t reach the lows of despair (the past winter notwithstanding). I’ve been told that I’m stoic when it comes to pain, and that applies to psychic pain as well as physical. For all my babbling here, and loquaciousness in person, I’m actually quite private and withdrawn, at least about some topics. It’s not that I have a list of taboos that I refuse to discuss, it’s just that if I don’t want to share something, I can keep it under wraps very well. I suspect it has a lot to do with spending ten years in the throes of PTSD, when I was rocked by the slightest emotional twinge and felt constantly out of control, and even if I have overcorrected now, I like this a lot better.

I think my kids have seen me cry perhaps three times in their lives, and one was when I fell in the driveway and landed flat on my back. Willem has had the pleasure much more often, because back when arguments and very long, drawn-out discussions happened with some regularity around here, I would eventually hit a wall. As a rule, though, it’s not a common thing; to the point that it’s noteworthy when it does happen.

Tonight, I cried.

The causes were various and, each by itself, not particularly outrageous. Emily had a tantrum regarding the open/closed status of her windows; I got my very first “I hate you,” which I was kind of hoping would take a few more years but kids just grow up so fast… (And yes, she did apologize later, without having to be prompted for it.) We got that resolved, following a very long stretch of drama followed by sulking, and she was in a good mood by dinnertime.

Gretchen, being in the running for sainthood, brought over the makings for her amazing baked stuffed fish, and broccoli, and homemade bread, and strawberry pie for dessert. She put it all together, while I puttered around with Jacob, dealt with Emily’s tantrum, and so on. So when we sat down to eat, I was all set to just really enjoy the meal.

That lasted about 30 seconds.

Jacob, Emily and Willem all announced that they don’t like broccoli, and they didn’t want to eat it. The rule in our house is that you have to take one bite of everything served, and then if you don’t want more, don’t take more. This has cut down on an incalculable number of power struggles and meltdowns at mealtimes, so it serves us well. Willem and Emily put their big-kid pants on and took their “no-thank-you bite,” and then moved on to the wonder of the baked fish. Jacob fell apart. Crying, screaming, tantrumming all over the place, insisting that he didn’t like it and he wouldn’t try even one bite. I went through my bag of tricks, nothing worked. I picked him up to talk to him, and try to feed it to him, and that didn’t work either. I decided to take him into the living room so that we were less intrusive on everyone else’s meal, and on the way I said, “I guess I’ll just have to force-feed him.” As soon as I said it, I regretted it; I was angry and upset, true, but I’ve never been that out of control. It’s just not how we roll, here. We sat on the couch for a while, I talked and he maintained his angst (this is all highly unusual for my normally-very-Zen Jacob, by the way – I’m sure it’s the stress of the move for him, too). So I sent him into his room and asked him to come back to the table when he had control of his body and was ready to eat politely.

That was two strikes, and during/after it I was feeling pretty shaky, but I don’t think they would have knocked my legs out from under me, by themselves. The kicker was that, right as Jacob was starting his tantrum, Willem asked if I wanted him to take this one, since I’d fielded Emily’s drama earlier. I declined, since I had already waded in. Willem heard my “force-feed” comment, and followed us into the living room to make sure I knew that he thought that was too extreme. Which, by itself, doesn’t bother me in the least. He’s right, after all, and it’s good to know that he’s ready and willing to stand up for his kids, even if it means taking on their mother. But from there, things escalated, with both of us having to raise our voices over Jacob’s melodic utterings, and me asking twice for him to wait and talk to me later because now was not a good time. He ultimately did hear that, and honored the request – and this whole interaction couldn’t have taken more than two minutes – but having the stress of hearing his voice like that, and feeling judged when I was already judging myself, and so on, and so forth… it was just too much. Especially because it was all in front of Gretchen. She may be family in my heart, but she still holds status as a guest, too, and that means not dragging her into the more unpleasant scenes.

Once Jacob was in his room (where he calmed down in about 4.2 seconds), I tried to return to the dinner table, but just couldn’t do it. I went to my room, locked the door, sat on my bed, and just sobbed.

It was no one’s fault, just the accumulation of stresses and frustrations and angst until I couldn’t keep it all together anymore. Within half an hour, I was back at the table and, after a bumpy start, able to talk with Gretchen and finish my meal. Within an hour, I was feeling pretty much myself again, and within two hours, we were well-ensconced in an orgy of yard-sale pricing and organizing – M. came over, too, which was a treat both because she has a more-than-adequate share of awesome and she helped a lot, and also because it’s just cool making a new friend (she is the mom of the boy Jacob had a playdate with) – and overall, the evening was salvaged. Willem and I talked it through a little, just enough for each to understand where the other was coming from, and the kids settled down and had a decent rest-of-the-evening.

But still.

Ugh.

As if we needed the remotest grain of proof that my 9-year-old daughter is far cooler and more savvy than I, she has taken to saying, “No, seriously,” with just as much inflection and standoffishness as the coolest of all cool teenagers. (She tries to “Whatever” me, too, but she ruins it with giggling, because I thump her on the head with the nearest box top, newspaper or similar painless-but-loud object whenever she does it to me.)

And she pronounces it as though she’s already a Texting Master: “srsly.” It’s a little bit hilarious, and would be more so if it didn’t remind me just how close she actually is to things like texting and teenagerhood and driving and dating…

I think I need to go lie down.

I’m weak, I know. A stronger-willed person would continue to drop obnoxiously cryptic hints and passive-aggressively skirt the issue, and I’m just not made of such stern stuff.

We have big news, and this is my blog, and it’s where I share that which is important to me. And so…

We’re moving to the Boston area.

Within the next month.

Holy crap do we have a lot to do.

The details: Willem got a full-time teaching job in Boston. It’s at a small, private school – on the one hand, it’s not likely you’ve even heard of it if you didn’t grow up in Massachusetts, and on the other hand, his girlfriend went there so it’s not all that tiny – in the heart of the city. The pay isn’t knock-you-breathless amazing, but it’s three times what he would be making as a grad student, and he can still work on his dissertation while at this job. If he didn’t take the job, he could certainly finish his dissertation, but then there’s no guarantee that another job offer, in exactly the area he was hoping to get work, teaching the right subject, at the college level, would appear.

We just found out last Tuesday. We spent the first few days casting about desperately for any solid reasons not to go. We could come up with lots of reasons to do it, but we just couldn’t find any unassailable, cogent reasons to stay put. And it’s very difficult to weigh the pros and cons when you can’t find the cons.

After a while of that, we decided to make the obvious decision and run with it. It’s scary and intimidating and intense, but mostly because after such a long, unpleasant winter, we had forgotten how to deal with good news and positive plans.

And oh, are there plans. We’d already started the process of calling contractors to do some low-grade repairs to the house, with the thoughts that we could spread that out over a few months and be ready to list the house for sale in the spring. I lucked out and found a really nice, solid, professional sort of guy, and he started yesterday, with one day’s notice. We have a new glass sliding door in the breezeway, to replace the old one which was so heavy I could not close it on days when my back hurt a lot. The new one is a thing of beauty, and I will move away from it without a backward glance.

We viewed an apartment on Tuesday, and it really was perfect in a lot of ways: the location could not have been better for each one of our personal preferences and needs, the space itself was nice, and so on. After getting our hopes all kinds of up, we got an email that they’d decided to rent it out as a commercial space instead of residential, because they can ask for more money that way… I’m bitter, Willem is devastated, but the search continues and we’re seeing at least five more places on Monday morning. And, in an odd way, I’m actually greatly encouraged by that first apartment-failure: at the very least, it proved to me that there are good places, that I would like to live in, within our price range and desired area. Now we just need to find another that would work.

Our realtor is coming to the house tomorrow, to list it for sale. When we met with him in January, the options we had as far as list price were depressing and were going to leave us with very little in terms of equity/profit. At the time, that was a problem and became a factor in our decision to put off the sale for a year. Now, all that matters to me is that we get OUT of this place, without making a short sale and owing on the mortgage. That should be well within the realm of possibility, and so we’ll be pricing to sell. Anybody want a single-story ranch-style 4BR house in New Hampshire? The neighborhood is perfect for kids and we’ve done our best with upkeep… and there’s good yarn karma already soaking into the walls.

Let’s see, what else? I still have my typing job, which I have been assured will continue as long as I want/need it – no small factor, in this economy – and so I can work from anywhere that I have a flat surface, electricity and Internet. The kids are doing well with the news; they’ve always known that we would be moving that way eventually, so the only surprise is in the timing. Of course Emily has concerns about leaving her friends, but we’ve set her up with an email address and promised copious sleepovers and visits, and she has always been very quick to make new friends, so I know she’ll bounce. Jacob is surprisingly relaxed about the whole thing; he’s always been my Zen little guy, but I expected him to be showing more anxiety about the process. I think he’s already had time to think it through, because we had taken the kids with us when we started house-shopping over the winter, and as long as he feels we’re all in this together, he’ll just roll with it.

We’re going to have an enormous yard sale on Saturday and Sunday of this weekend – please, if you live anywhere in the area, please come take our stuff. Mention this ad and I’ll hand you stuff for free. Really. So far, I’ve sorted out the playroom, Jacob’s room and the crafts closet, so we have an ungodly amount of baby/kid clothes and toys ready to go, and I’ll be attacking my room, the kitchen, and the office tonight. Emily’s on her own with her room, as her version of “that’s special and I need to keep it” and mine don’t even bear a nodding acquaintance with each other. Gretchen came over on Monday and – bless her heart, how is it that some people just possess so much awesome? – helped me empty out the attic and sort out the literally-more-than-20 bins of clothes and stuff up there. And without a word of complaint, even. She hasn’t decided yet on whether she would rather I start the process of nominating her for sainthood or just find new, creative sexual favors to repay her, but really, I’m grateful enough for anything. [Sudden scrambling as Willem rushes for the camera.]

So, yeah. Crazy, crazy stuff. Scary, true, but also so exciting. I’m so proud of Willem, he’s doing exactly what he set out to do and bringing us all along for the ride.

And as far as my in-laws are concerned, now they know: we’re moving. But I won’t share the new address anytime soon, so that should help satisfy my need for snark, right?

Often, when I take all day to write my own contribution to my own carnival, it’s because I’m just busy. Or I forgot. Or I clicked on “save” instead of “publish.” Something unimpressive and vaguely embarrassing, anyway.

But this week, it’s not about time management or manual dexterity. This week, it’s about writer’s block.

The assigned topic is, “Did that really just happen?” And once upon a time, my life was full of moments that made me stop, look around, blink a few times, shake my head, and wonder if I just accidentally spoke the magic words that sent me into an alternate reality. My first trip to a nude beach, cut short by the plane crash and death of JFK, Jr.? My mother-in-law-to-be bought Willem first-class plane tickets for a planned spring break visit, while seating me in coach? My husband’s aunt attempts a smackdown in the middle of a memorial gathering for our grandfather?

I’ve had a trip or three on the That Was Really Weird roller coaster, and have learned to develop a healthy appreciation for the bizarre and unexpected.

But over the past few years, I’ve also developed a tolerance for it. I’m not sure whether my ability to be shocked and surprised has been sanded down by the sandpapery nonsense of life, or whether my range of expected possibilities has broadened, but I’ve generally stopped being quite as gobsmacked by outrageous nonsense. Even the memorial-service debacle had ceased to seem quite so uncouth and beyond-the-pale by the time the ferry had crossed the Sound, though I was able to draw out the random giggles when I recalled the intense staredown from ten yards that I received while the kids and I were packing to leave. The ever-lightening strain between my mother and I has worn off far more quickly than it could have, even just a few years ago – once upon a time, I’d have felt betrayed and rejected and horrified (and, no, I haven’t blogged details here; I posted elsewhere and purged and that’s good enough) for months or more. Now, I ache a little, but the sharp edge of shock has been dulled down by rationalizations and guesses.

What I think, now that I think about it, is that one is shocked more often when one’s life experiences and expectations hover somewhere close to a baseline. If you expect things to almost-always turn out well, or almost-always suck, or almost-always anything, then you’ll routinely be surprised because things just aren’t well-behaved and predictable.

Too, I’m always more surprised by things that I can’t understand, and as time goes on, I have either learned to understand more points of view, or accepted that some views are from points I just can’t or won’t achieve. Not that I’m wise and mature and crap like that, mind you; just that I’m more able to imagine other people’s perspectives, having survived through a few different perspectives of my own.

See what I mean? Writer’s block. And then, once unplugged, a page’s worth of babbling.

Ah, well. My reality might be a mundane one, or muddled, or whatever, but it’s mine and it’s a good one. Which, all by itself, would have been nearly unbelievable just a few months ago.

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I live in a madhouse every day, but you can always join in on Wednesdays… check the list to see who’s joined in this week:

• JMLC
• Baino
• Heather
• Be This Way
• Alli
• Aitara
• Fraught
• The Three Bucketeers
• Heather
• LeeAnne
• Destiny

I’m still not ready to post details here, but those changes that I ever-so-cryptically referred to on Sunday?

They are rolling right along, and fast.  Holy crap.

You know how sometimes you have to make a big decision, and you hem and haw and deal with all of these conflicting bits of information and a tug-of-war over what the right choice would be, and you feel pulled in several different directions at once?

Yeah, that’s not the case here.  This is a situation where all signs are pointing to not just YES, but YES AND HOW COULD YOU CONSIDER OTHERWISE?  It’s very difficult to weigh the pros and cons when you simply cannot come up with any legitimate cons.

We took another step forward today, and it’s all looking more and more likely and tangible and real.

I watched Willem do a happy dance today.  On a public street.  It was a rare and noteworthy occasion.

I’ll share the details soon, honest.  I just want to wait a little longer, while I wait for this to settle into my brain a bit better (no reason to think I should wait until my head stops spinning, as that could take several months and there simply isn’t tme for that sort of thing).  In the meantime… eek.

I find the catchphrase “BFF” to be greatly intimidating.  Always have, even back in the Dark Ages when we simply referred to someone as our “best friend,” without tagging it with a timeframe or abbreviating it because those extra two syllables were clearly just unreasonably demanding.

First I had to wrap my brain around the idea of friendship, and overcome a nasty, monstrous, pervasive tendency to listen to that constantly looping tape in my head that said, “You don’t have friends.  You like people, but they don’t like you.  They just tolerate you, and that could stop at any given moment. You don’t deserve better.”  It plays with less volume and intensity now, and I’m able to accept that I probably do have a few redeeming characteristics hidden away somewhere because people simply aren’t willing to fake it and tolerate bullshit for all that long, but still.

Once I accepted that, OK, the “friends” part can happen, then I had to struggle with that “best” bit.  How could I choose?  I never had a huge, wide networks of friends, but usually had at least three or four that I spent time with for various reasons.  This one was the most fun to go to Chuck E. Cheese with, that one was the one I liked to giggle with before math class, this other one was just so cool and funny that I so wanted to be more like her except that I could also always see the dangerousness and unhappiness under the surface so I wanted to protect her, too… how could one be “best”?  I was always so grateful that they were willing to spend time with me, seemed to even enjoy it, that the idea of rank-ordering their bestness was horrifying and intimidating.

So I scurried away from that, and worked on enjoying what I had, when I had it.

I never really got around to grappling with the unpleasantness of that new, cool, second F.  “Forever”?  Really?  We can use words like that to describe relationships, casually and not even bothering to say the whole word?

Yeah, no, not for me.  I don’t rely too heavily on the concept of forever, anyway, because it just seems like so much pressure, on both sides.  How do you know that this friendship is still going to be the right thing, ten years from now?  Or, hell, next week?  I’d like to think that good things last, and I don’t put an expiration date on my relationships… but while I am still friendly with several BFF candidates from high school, I wouldn’t consider them to be the people I am now closest to and rely the most on, by any stretch of the imagination.  And, on the flip side, not having known someone forever seems to me to be an unfair reason to take them off the potential BFF list – maybe “forever” is intended to mean, “from this point forward,” but that seems a little shortsighted, somehow.

The moral of the story is, I have friends now.  Real friends, close friends, who will spend their day off from work helping me to clear out the attic or meeting me on a weekday afternoon for lunch just because, without begrudging the four hours in the car with three small children.  But words like “best” and “forever”?  They just make me uncomfortable, because the assignment thereof feels like so much responsibility.

And, you’re right, I’m wayoverthinking this.  It’s my brain’s way of trying not to wallow in the millions of other thoughts in my head right now.

This weekend was a significantly ageing sort of experience.

In a good way, mind you; it wasn’t like the 30 years of gravity that immediately gallumphed about my head and shoulders when I realized that there are people willing to ruin a much-beloved grandfather’s memorial for the sake of being righteous and imperious.  This was, instead, more like the heartbreak that happens when your baby takes his first woozy, velociraptor-stance steps, or when you watch that school bus roll away with your daughter inside it for the first time.

I watched my youngest sister graduate high school – this poor, tiny, small, weak, muscular-dystrophy-laden being whom we were told to expect would never walk or talk.  This sweet, helpless infant that people treated as though her IQ probably resembles that of a mango, because how could someone possibly have an imperfect muscular structure and a keen, sharp brain at the same time?

Yeah, whatever.  This is a kid who has kicked ass from the moment she started swinging those legs, and has caused great delight as we’ve watched her plow through one negative assumption after another.  What’s that?  I’ll never be able to walk?  How’s about I go ahead and join the marching band, how’s that for not walking?  Oh, right, I’ll never be able to succeed in school because the brain is just another muscle, weak and small and unreliable, right?  Or, instead, I could just go ahead and graduate with honors, and continue with my plans to go away to school, to live in the dorms and function on my own.  Got any more doubts and hesitations for me to brush aside before I find some better way of spending my time?

Decidedly a bittersweet and maudlin sort of experience for me, watching the ceremony. Mary has just always lived with such a serene, graceful dignity over this soul of hardcore determination, and at the same time she’s just a cool kid.  Witty, and smart, and quick – someone I can actually, genuinely like, on top of the whole family-so-I-have-to-love-her kind of thing.

So, that added several years onto my weekend, to start.  On top of that,we realized that Emily – my baby, barely 9 years old, practically an infant – will be the next person in our family to graduate high school.  And that Willem is, since the death of Norman, now the oldest male in his direct family line; a patriarch at 33.

Scary, scary stuff, and proof that life does indeed keep rolling along, ready or not.

We have news.

Big news.  Huge changes ahead.  Big surprise, though I’m not sure why it’s a surprise because it was all approached deliberately and planfully.

Still.  It’s a shock, and we’re trying to wrap our heads around it, and we have a ton to do and that right quick.

And, no, I won’t post about it here, just yet.  It’s on Facebook, should you happen to know me over that way, and eventually it’ll come out on the blog, because there’s really no way to avoid it.  But for the moment, I’m not interested in sharing big important life plans with Willem’s mother, aunt and mother’s friend, who have done astonishing things to my blog stats lately but who certainly haven’t made the slightest effort to even acknowledge the inappropriateness of their behavior at the memorial last weekend, much less tried to make any improvements to the damage they’ve done to their relationships with Willem and the kids (we won’t be pretending that they would even want to try and make things better with me).

So, they can wait.  Chances are they’ll find out someday.

In the meantime, no, I’m not pregnant.  Not at all, in the least, tiniest little bit.  The big news has nothing to do with fertility, or with physical health in general.  This is the down-side to letting people know that we’ve been trying to conceive for a while: when I make the slightest mention of words like “news” or “surprise,” the knee-jerk assumption is that my ovaries have suddenly decided to behave themselves.

It’s also a good thing, truly.   Beyond good, heading into great and almost all the way into astounding.

But I’m also scared to death because I have so much to do and so little time and such dreadfully eroded self-confidence after so many months of bad news and difficulty.  So my reticence here is not entirely a matter of in-law-avoidance; I’m also simply not ready to put it all into fully articulated, mapped-out paragraphs.

Anyway.  Stay tuned…