Today, and May.

Greetings and Salutations.

No sign of crankiness today. I had a good mother day. I really did. I felt like all my interactions with my kids were calm, thoughtful, and productive. I don't really feel that way on most days, even though I usually do feel that I tried my best.

The ironic part is, we could have had a doozer of a day. I made an appointment to take them to be photographed at JC Penney. I actually love the cheezy, posed pictures, which of course I only get around to doing about every year, but somehow having the line-up of posed, thoughtful photos with pure white backgrounds appeals to my sense of tracking time. So off we went to... THE MALL. Which the children probably haven't been to since last February (the last photo shoot). I brought them, shamelessly, lots of junk food. It worked like a charm. When Aoife started to melt down and didn't want to stand on the red light, I took Charlotte's little stuffed bunny which I had brought and hid a little M&M in his ear. She knelt down and searched for it, and looked up, delighted, when she found it. Voila. When the shoot was over we had to wait half an hour so I went up to Target to buy some white T-shirts, which I am planning to decorate for Charlotte's birthday. (each family member will get one, stating the relationship: Charlotte's little sister, Charlotte's daddy, etc.) When we returned, I had to look at the photos on the computer and choose and order them. Lollipops did the trick. Half an hour strapped into the carriage with four big, round, blue eyes staring at me in amazement while they sucked desparately at the coveted sugar product in their hand, as if it might be taken away at any moment. I love candy for this reason. It so serves its purpose when I choose to use it. So it all went well. No real tantrums. Aoife is getting her 2 year molars, and she is an awful, slow teether. It took 5 months for her to completely cut all 4 of her first molars so this could be the beginning of a long summer.

Not that I am complaining. You realize this, though, don't you.



Now, here is the truth. Already two people have mentioned this to me. I woke up this morning, looked up at the same ceiling, the fan, out the window into the treetops, but something felt different.

It is May. May, May, May.

Starting on Saturday, I can tell you everything I did five years ago for the entire month. And not because I wrote it down. Because it got burned into my head. This year the days of the week are actually coordinated with the days in 2003 so it is going to be so completely and awfully obvious to me what I was doing (and not doing) as each day passes leading up to the day when it will be too late, and all will be lost, and my daughter will be dead once again. In a bizarre way this chunk of May represents hope, it was the time when she could have been saved. By my period calculations May 1st would have been my due date, although since I had a longer cycle then they adjusted it to the 5th, so here we are, really actually exactly 40 weeks already from LMP, and she's in there, still alive, and I have no idea that she is about to die. I always think about that, about how they adjusted my due date, and if they hadn't, I would have gotten to have my non-stress test the week before and maybe they would have seen something. Maybe. And maybe not. And whenever I think stuff like that, I can feel my brain just turning and running, fast and hard, away from that thought, because the thought that actually, something might have been done to save her, is almost awful at this point. To think that something might have been done, and wasn't, is almost worse than thinking that there was nothing that could have been done. It is preferable to be helpless, than to be at fault or negligent.