guppie

Hats off to the current big-sunglasses fashion. While I feel pretty great, I look like an Edward Munch character. With my Jackie O of the late 70's shades, I can pass as a pale Northwesterner in need of a Hawaiian vacation.

Time passes. I am more than halfway into my daily injections. Double the dosage, double the sting this time around, but the same amount of bitter-sweetness: when I'm done with my 42 shots, I'll be halfway to going back to work. For which I'm about as ready as a guppie is ever prepared to leap through a ring of fire.

My current setup of two young children, a nanny a couple hours a day, no local family, and a hubby about to disappear on faraway business trips is common, challenging but pretty enviable. So I am surprised when my grandparents' generation comments that it's a good thing I have a lot of courage. I had gotten used to the common ooh-ahhing over the wonderfully involved and competent new fathers (they burp! they change diapers!). The elders' comments shatter through the conception that moms have it easier today (closely related is the myth that in previous centuries fathers did not parent).

And yet at the end of the week-end come news which I have difficulty placing in the same reality as life with a newborn and its self-centeredness: 3 deaths. A youth, pulmonary embolism. My former piano teacher. And my grand-uncle who was like a grand-father to us. Ouch.