Atomictumor

I look at Pigpen, and he doesn’t seem the same kid he was back on Halloween. Theres nothing really different about him that I can put my finger on, he still looks the same, talks the same, plays the same, but theres something there, and he doesn’t seem like our baby boy anymore, or rather, he doesn’t seem like Mommy’s little baby boy, like he used to be.

I’ve seen this before with MastaG, back when Pigpen was born, and he almost immediately ceased to be our baby boy.

—

BJ and I drove back from our ill-fated Radiohead show in Washington DC, chock full of blah. It totally sucked. We had a crappy nights sleep, crammed in the back of our Subaru. Mojofilter, incidentally, got some sort of evil form of pneumonia, and was dog sick for like 2 weeks or something. It sucked.

We were still trying to have the baby, and getting a little nervous, because the pregnancy tests kept coming up negative. BJ wasn’t due for a period for some time (yes, I have always known when her periods were due… I could tell before she could that they were coming up on account of her being evil and her boobs hurting. TMI, indeed, but I could have made it worse), so we didn’t have that big indication that theres a bun in the oven, but we were still a little nervous that we’d actually have to put some effort into it, and that we’d miss that nice April-May due date that BJ was wanting to hit, to avoid being big ol’ pregnant in the cold of winter or the hot of summer.

While we had the opposite of trouble getting knocked up with Gabe, we were concerned that our fertility then had been a fluke, as BJ’s sister and brother both appear to be infertile. She was kinda concerned that she wasn’t going to be able to have the kid, and that made her want him more.

For the record, I had NO PROBLEM with the extra work involved in having a baby. None at all.

—

I had been working at the same place in town, doing tech support, and was about as high up on the totem pole as I wanted to get (which wasn’t high, unfortunately, but to get higher requires that you sacrifice your home life to a certain extent, and as the home life is the whole point of trying to get a higher place at the office, I didn’t see the point… still don’t). What was more important to me was that I did my job well, and had a reputation for being that way. Theres nothing like being considered talented at what you have to do every day, its a damn good feeling. If you don’t have that feeling at your job, I suggest a different line of work.

Problem was, I hated the job. The hours were good, the co-workers were good, the boss was good, but the work was tedious and irritating. I dealt quite frequently with escalations, and theres something soul sucking about talking to people who are red in the face, blaming you for the inactions of a mega corporation. Thats something nobody should put up with, but I did every day for a while. It started getting to me.
We’ll get back to that, but lets get back to BJ’s uterus first.

At some point in late August, probably a week or so after the Radiohead trip, we discovered that she was pregnant! Yay!

It was such a unique and fascinating feeling to have planned a human life that was now coming to fruition. I’m not one to get into where life begins, whether its when the embryo is created, or when the brain is formed, or maybe just with that first kiss, as somebody once suggested, but I was tickled that it was happening somewhere.

BJ had some ugly bouts with sickness during the first few months, as I recall. She didn’t suffer that much with Gabe, but it sure hit with this one.

As with our first child, we were looking forward to having the kid be either gender, but if we had a choice, we would have chosen a girl. We had our little boy, and with as cute as Gabe was, we were really interested in seeing how cute our little girl child would be. I was a little concerned, knowing BJ’s personality, and the thought of that being rolled up into a daughter of mine, with the appropriate heartstrings and hormones and whatnot made me a little concerned.

Also, as with the first child, the name planning began quickly. I don’t remember off the top of my head all the other names that were on the list. I know for boys, BJ was thinking about Xander, Leo, and several others. For girls, we had kinda given up on the “Anastasia Plum” that Gabe would have been, but still couldn’t come up wiht any great ones.

Shortly after finding out that BJ was pregnant, the whole September 11, 2001 thing happened, and I spent a long time wondering about the kind of world we’re going to be bringing this little creature into. I guess everybody did, back then. As I said before, I’m glad we got the chance to see Washington a month before that happened, when things were a little more simple, and a little less scary.

—

Around that time, also, I had found an escape out of the job I was doing. An old friend of ours was a manager of a structured wiring start up company, and called me up to see if I’d be interested in working for them, installing computer networks, home theater systems, and cable and phone lines. It would pay a little more than I was making, but it was a chance to do something else, and I jumped on it.

Not to dwell on it, because I think the best intentions were out all around, a month later I was quitting, and everybody was very angry at everybody else, because nothing quite met expectations.

Great. So BJ was pregnant, and I was out of a job. Luckily, the boss at the first job, the one I hated, was able to get me right back in. Insurance and all. It was great, and taught me something about burning bridges, and the importance in not doing it unless you had an airplane or could fly or something.

The job still sucked, but I didn’t mind so much anymore.

—

Meanwhile, time passed, and BJ and “Cletus the fetus” kept getting bigger and bigger. We finally went in for that ultrasound, and as we examined the images, the nurse and tech agreed that they were “99% sure that it was a girl.” The nurse added “In 11 years, I’ve not been wrong on this”.

Indeed.

—

Now that we had the sex, the naming began in full blast. We settled on Sadie for the first name, but couldn’t come up with a good second name. We tried and tried, but nothing sounded right. We loved Sadie, and we’re going to change it, but just needed some inspiration for the middle name.

It came, to me, one night. I was in that little twilight zone between sleep and wakefulness, what I suppose would be the first stage of sleep, and it hit me: Blue.

Sadie Blue Kilpatrick.

It was perfect.

—

More time went on, like it normally does, and we had our baby shower. The subaru broke down spectacularly on the way, slipping a belt, which really made it an interesting day.

We got some great gifts, including a blanket and a piggy bank with “Sadie” embroidered on them. I still have ‘em.

BJ kept getting bigger and bigger. As I mentioned before, she’s a small girl, much like Eaves, so when she’s pregnant, she’s PREGNANT.

—

Meanwhile, at home, all three of us were getting excited. Gabe was thrilled at the prospect of being an older brother, and was behind the thing the whole time. In fact, we let him originally tell BJ and my parents that she was pregnant, which made him feel so important!

We had a game, that everytime he did something silly, he’d have to change another diaper. By the time the kid was born, Gabe had gotten up to 124 diapers. He never changed one, the brat.

One day, he came home with some red spots on him, they looked like bug bites. We were at the Blueberry Farm at the time, as I recall.
A few days later, BJ started feeling bad.

A day or two after that, she started getting the red spots.

Do you see where I’m going with this?

BJ had never had chicken pox. Never. To this day, I don’t see how a kid gets through the landmine that is childhood without picking up chicken pox somewhere on the way. It boggles the mind. I had known that she never had it, but also that she never had the flu, and just assumed that she had one of those mighty immune systems.

I mean, she never got sick. Well, other than morning sickness. Ironic, eh?

Anyway, although MastaG had had the chicken pox immunization when he was a kid (which they wouldn’t give to BJ, for whatever reason, telling her that if she didn’t have it yet, she wouldn’t ever get it), he picked up a tiny case of it, that manifested itself as those ‘bug bites’. The boy didn’t even know he had the pox, and neither did we.

But boy howdy, at 8 months along, in March/April, BJ sure knew she had it. It was ugly. She had the welts all over the place. I still have several pictures from that era commerating it, and to her dying day she had a dozen or so scars it left on her. I remember looking at her big pregnant belly, covered with red welts. She had em in her nose, and on her eyelids. She was miserable, but as a testament to her strength, she took it in stride. BJ was a hell of a strong girl. Sure, she loved to be babied, but when it came down to it, she’d be up, looking after Gabe, doing laundry, and playing on the computer while at the peak of her poxness.

As a precaution, she called her OB-GYN, who did a check of the amino fluid to make sure that everything was OK.

I recall that day well. I had to work, couldn’t get out of it, because I was going to take all my vacation when she had the baby, and I was stressing. I had been offhandedly worried the entire pregnancy that something would go wrong, in that way of a husband who has a pregnant wife will, completely impotent to do anything about it, but unable to get it out of the mind.

My phone rang, and it was BJ.

My heart was racing. My hands were shaking. I asked her how it was.

“Ever heard of a girl with balls, Jake?”

“… what?”

“I said, have you ever heard of a girl with BALLS, JAKE?”

“Uh… … … what?”

“Its a BOY, Jake. They fucked up the first ultrasound, and its a boy!”

—

I was shellshocked. In fact, I didn’t know the meaning of the word shellshocked until that very moment. I had to get outside and walk around. My mind was officially blown.

Sadie wasn’t Sadie. I’d been calling the fetus Sadie for months, asking how my little girl was, picking out patterns with BJ for little girly rooms, and generally preparing to be the father of a little girl.

Not another little boy.

—

It took a few days to get around that, and then a few days to get over feeling guilty over fears that I didn’t love the kid as much knowing that it was a boy. Looking back, it seems like such silly emotions, knowing the amazing little guy that he is, but when you’re facing the unknown, I find you tend to overdo the emotions. Or, something about the clarity of hindsight. Whatever.

But damn, we had to come up with a name!

It took some doing, but we came up first with Ash, and then with Asher. I’ll be honest, the decision was somewhat influenced by Bruce Campbell’s legendary Ash Williams, but the truth is we both loved the name Ash. It did not occur to us that the main character of Pokemon is also named Ash, and has hence been the first thought of people asking what our inspiration for the name was.
Friggin Pokemon.

I’m not sure where BJ came up with Asher, I don’t think I’d heard that name before, although I’ve encountered it once or twice since then. I loved it, because I don’t see it as a name that anybody else in his class will have, but at the same time, is a ‘manly’ name. Asher. Just rolls off the tongue, and I still love the name.

Just needed that middle name.

—

By now, the big day, May 7th, was fast approaching. After the difficulties of Gabe’s birth, it was decided all around that a scheduled c-section would be the best way to go. 7 AM on May 7th came in no time. We had no signs of impending labor before that, in fact, BJ barely had any Braxton-Hicks contractions, which means Ash, like Gabe, would have probably hung out in the womb 2 or 3 weeks after the due date. BJ was happy to be evicting the kid.

We dropped off Gabe on May 6th, and enjoyed our last night without a baby. It was nice, because this time we KNEW what we were in for. We knew about the sleepless nights, and the uncompromising nature of these little bastards. We new about the stuggles to get the things to sleep, the frustration, the hopelessness that comes when you have a kid screaming, but we also knew about the first stares, first smiles, first rolls. We couldn’t wait.

May 7th, 5 AM, we were up and heading to the hospital. They found us a room, which was very small (which surprised me, because the rooms for the c-section gals are much smaller than the big birthing rooms for those women who prefer to squeeze out the kids, despite the c-section gals being around for longer periods of time). Seriously, the room was tiny.

BJ had some blood drawn, and I felt the ol’ fight or flight adrenaline raring up. I held her hand, at the side of her bed, being chipper, moving out of the way occasionally for the doctors and nurses, just trying to console and reassure her. I wanted to take her fear and trepidation, and replace it with my hope and excitement. I really had more fear and trepidation than her, but I fancy myself a decent actor.

When they put in the epidural, BJ started blacking out. I panicked inside. She woke up, it was just the stress getting to her, but it set things back a bit. They came back a little later, and were able to get it done. I was seeing those tell-tale twinkles of light which mean that the brain is about to shut down for a little unscheduled neepy-nap, but I wasn’t going to do it while she was still around.

Finally, she got loaded down with the epidural, was sufficiently numbed, and was brought out to the OR for the birth. This time, unlike Gabe’s birth, I was part of the equation.

They gave me some scrubs, with instructions to head to the OR in 5 minutes, which would allow them the prep time they needed. I took that time to go to the bathroom, and promptly started to pass out sitting on the toilet.

After a bit of time I got up, splashed water on my face, and steeled myself again. I stopped by the waiting room to tell BJ’s folks and Gabe that we’re about to start, and headed into the room. They were waiting for me, BJ pretty impatiently.

I was actually pretty excited about seeing the operation itself, seeing the incision be made, and seeing Ash be removed from her. She was concerned, because she’d heard of stories of men not finding their wifes attractive after seeing their guts, so she didn’t want me to. I thought that was silly, she was BJ, she’s the only woman I’ve ever loved, I’m not going to not find her attrractive.

So I snuck a peek, and it was awesome. Yes, I’m weird.

I found BJ to be a gorgeously beautiful woman until her dying day, so neener neener, BJ, I was right.

—

Asher was born around 7:30 AM on May the 7th of 2002. He came out with a big black head of hair, and only got an 8 out of 10 on that ’see how alive the kid is’ scale that they do. He was a bit purple when he came out, and didn’t immediately start crying, but the vacuum took care of that. We got to hold him immediately after birth, and, after he was cleaned off, and with BJ’s and doc’s permission, I was allowed to bring him out to the waiting room to meet Gabe, and BJ’s parents.

Introducing Gabe to Asher was one of the best moments of my life, bar none. Its one of those things that I’ll always be able to look back on and say “That was right. I did that correctly.”

—

We still didn’t have a middle name, and the birth certificate lady was getting twitchy.

—

I went with the doctor to see Ash be circumcised. Now, circumcision was something that we had discussed. We both realized that theres really no reason to circumcise the kid, that the medical reasons for doing it are practically null, but we both agreed that we would. I felt obligated to be there to witness the event, since we were going to put this newborn baby to a knife for reasons that we couldn’t define.

I watched the doctor put the clamp on, and Asher turn purple with screams. I watched as she calmly cut the foreskin, and Asher was hitching with sobs.

I put the salve on, and helped her bandage it.

I’ll never have another child, but if I did, I’d never be able to circumcise him, if he were a boy. Putting a baby, just forming brain synapses, and whatever impressions that blank slates like an infant form, through what amounts to mutilation is not something that I’d do, just so that he’d have a penis like we’re more used to.

I was able to calm him in my arms, and BJ finished the job when I got him back to our room, with the tit.

Asher took to nursing like a fish to water, and I’m so happy for that. BJ and he bonded in that way that she and Gabe weren’t able to, and I fully think thats the reason that Asher has always been more ‘her baby’ than Gabe was.

Eventually, it also got me off the hook for those late, late nights, because he didn’t take to a bottle at all. BJ didn’t consider that quite fair, as I recall.

—

The middle name came to us two days after Ash was born, for reasons we’ve that have been in this post.

James. BJ’s dad’s name.

Asher James Kilpatrick.

Our family was now complete.

So, last night we went out carousling like I mentioned, and this morning, sweet baby Jesus, was I hung over.  Hung over like a logger in the summertime.  Hung over like a sorority girl after a home game.  Hung over like, well, I’m out of analogies, because my head still hurts too damn much.

So, I think its time to go ahead and say “AT, dumbass, seriously.  You had about 3 5 hours of fun, and are now in your 6th hour of penance.  You threw up twice, and were in the bed until 3 PM.  How about we just go ahead and lay off the juice, huh?”

And I’d say

“Damn, me, thats a pretty friggin good idea, where the hell were you this time yesterday?”

—

Friggin future me, thinks he know so damn much…

Sadness has my voice low, and my throat choked up this morning.  I wasn’t really expecting that, but I guess I’m not getting off as easily as I was led to believe last night.

I want to explain something about the sadness, its a hopeful sadness.  I’m sad, but at the same time aware of The Beauty when it happens, aware of the 10 years with her, 10 perfect years, aware of how much she loved me and our family together, aware of how happy she was before she died.

I’m aware that her life could have been worse.  Her death could have been worse.

I’m wondering today what her last words would have been, and thinking how fitting it was that it was me saying them for both of us.  She explained during our wedding ceremony, when she recited the vows she came up with, the ones that made my heart rise and my body sway, that I’ve always been the talker.  Its true, if theres a silent moment, it’d be me to fill it up.  She was pretty introverted, and I always loved that about her.  Evidently she liked my extroversion, or whatever its called, because she’d smile when I’d tell her how much I love her, and all that stuff about moving mountains and whatnot.

I’d kiss the back of her neck as I said it.

Ahh, sadness.  Its OK.  Sadness is a tribute to her, its refreshing.  Today is the anniversary (monthiversary, whatever) of when her body died.  8:37  PM, if I recall correctly.

Or late at night, I guess.

Having good ol’ Nodbob around has gone a ways toward distracting me from the whole monthiversary thing.  While I don’t think I’d have gotten bent out of shape over it, I still haven’t given myself much time to think.  After I retreated to my bedroom tonight, I looked at the picture framed in her great big frame she had for years, of us at the renewal looking away, and thought.

My thinking often turns to where she is, which means this will wind up becoming a theological diatribe.

I know, with very, very little doubt (nothing is certain to me, really ever.  Love (me, her, kids) is, but not much else) that she is extant in some way, because I’ve felt strong sensations of her, in ways that would make my subconscious very clever if these phenomena are self produced.  I don’t think its that clever, myself.  I’ve pretty much described them here, so I won’t do it now, suffice to say, I’m convinced.

If that is the case, I wonder what she’s experiencing it?  I almost feel like theres an anchor in me thats in that other side, simply because of the enormous amount we were invested in each other.  Thats a weird feeling, sometimes.  It completely changes the way I think about death, because for years now, I’ve had a somewhat nihilistic view of death, not necessarily that its a final termination of self, but that theres no organization to the afterlife.

Don’t ask me to explain it at 2:30 in the morning.

Anyway, I don’t think that anymore.  I’m sure that BJ has communicated peace to me, in that same way that I’m sure that she is here, or has been here recently.  If she’s in peace, then that nihilistic view may be off.

Still though, I have a hard time with the whole milk and honey view of death, that theres an eternal reward of peace and harmony.  Purgatorial principles make some sense, but only because I think that human beings have the whole idea of “justice” drilled into their head.  By the same token, the idea of eternal damnation for doing bad things seems even more illogical.

Ahh, the problems with theological musing, because I hit this point, where I understand that logic has nothing to do with it, because I don’t think I can comprehend the logic used by God, or whatever you’d call the thing behind all of this.  I think my agnosticism of my years with BJ was just a way out of working these questions up, just a philosophical throwing up of the hands, and saying “fuck it”.  I don’t really want to do that anymore, because I feel a little like (and I know about the logical thinking of THIS) if I can get a handle on these questions, if I can figure out exactly what I think, or what makes sense, or even what I want to believe (because, deep down, belief is a choice) I’ll be closer to where she is.

I think, in some way, if I can follow that anchor line between me and where she is, I’ll have a glimpse at it.  But I’d only want to see her.

Which means I don’t appear to be over Step 1: Denial yet, huh?

And is my cue to go to bed.

I sure love you, little ghost.

Nodbob showed up around noon today, and we’re watching an Opus Christmas special right now.  I’ve always dug on Bloom County, but not so the much on Outland and whatever the hell today’s Opus strip is.  I like the inclusion of the children in the original strips, I guess.  Binkley and Milo and what not.

Anyway, today’s been alright.  There was a moment earlier today when that bittersweet, overwhelming sadness hit me, while I was folding clothes.  That song from yesterday seems to be the catalyst, it was running through my head, about the memories of love gone.

The sadness is beautiful.  Its a tribute to BJ, I feel.  It hurts, but I’ve never had a problem with pain, and she is certainly in a better place now, as I’ve felt her presence so many times, a presence too sublime and indefinably her to be my imagination.  It doesn’t make it any easier to have her, but now I see the sadness.

Growing up, I would imagine this kind of sadness, in remembering the sweet times.  Remembering the little moments that things were, and aren’t anymore.  I’d think of that, when I’d ponder the loss of loved ones, as I’d do from time to time.  That seems to be the scope of my sadness right now, it seems to be thinking of the sweetness in her.  Her smile (she’d get dimples), her wiggles, her voice.  The way she picked up a little southern twang when she was angry, and how it’d irritate her when I brought it up (sometimes I couldn’t help but smiling at how cute it was, even when I was in the midst of her wrath).

I think of the scar on her foot, that she got years and years before my time, at a water park.  I think of her tiny smile dimples.

I think of her children, growing up with her memory.

I smile, at her sweetness, her gift of herself, and how I was lucky enough to have had the sense to purposefully cherish every single moment.

Thats the sadness, and it is beautiful.