March 30, 2009

time travel is exhausting

This weekend, I flew to Pittsburgh for a family funeral; my 92-year-old great aunt passed away last week. This was the good kind of funeral, if there is such a thing, the kind of funeral where mourning the deceased means laughing until you cry about that time that you and your brother nearly got into a fight in the restaurant parking lot because neither of you wanted to ride in the front seat if Aunt Ish was driving.

That sort of thing.

My aunt was a beautician (does anyone even use that word any more?) in a small town outside of Pittsburgh. For years, she did the hair on the corpses at the funeral home, before they were laid out for the viewing. The mortician (is that word still around?) told my mother that Ish would come to the funeral home for a 20 minute job and sit around and visit for an hour afterward. He also said she used to joke with him: “When I die, you’d better make me look beautiful.” They did.

Ish left my mother a diamond ring; the men at the funeral home remembered Ish wearing it, all those years ago. “You know where she got the money to buy herself that big diamond?” they asked my mother. “Working here!”

Funerals are like traveling through time; you spend a day or two reviving this just-ended life, talking about other long-dead family and friends, and piecing together one story, about the deceased, which of course is really so many different stories, all tangled up together. This weekend the story was about my mother’s aunt Ish, but then of course it was also about Ish’s brother, Huck, who was my mother’s father and who died when she was nine, and about Ish’s husband, George, who helped my grandmother raise my mother and her siblings after their father died, and about my mother’s sister, Sue, who lived through all that with my mother and then died very suddenly nine years ago.

This weekend was also like traveling back in time because Butler, the little Pennsylvania town where my aunt lived for so many years, has the air of being frozen in the past, somewhere in the 1950s. The funeral home looks like something out of a John O’Hara short story, with floral wallpaper and white wainscotting and elaborate crown molding. On Saturday, before the funeral, my brother and I walked up Main Street, to pass the time before the viewing (a very 1950-something tradition, I think) and we stopped in an antique store, him in his jacket and tie and me in my Audrey Hepburn LBD, and browsed furniture and pictures and nick nacks as though we were just out for the day shopping and strolling, but all dressed up for church. We must have looked like something from the 50s there, too.

I have some funny stories from the weekend, because my family is always good for the funny, but I’m tired from going all the way back to 1950, to my aunt’s youth. It was a long trip.

And a sad one, in the end, although in a good way.

March 24, 2009

pushing a turkey through a cheerio

This is one of those stories that will most likely make you all hate me, but it’s the truth so I feel compelled to share it. Also I don’t want you to get any ideas about what kind of wife I am, or what kind of wimp husband Wade is.

I’ve only ever had two stitches in my entire life. One was on my arm, when I was probably eleven or twelve; I had a mole removed. And one was when Henry was born.

One suture. That was it. Admit it, you kind of hate me now.

Henry was six weeks premature; he weighed just under five pounds. He was so teeny, all skin and bones. We called him Chicken Baby because he looked like a chicken. My mother-in-law loved that.

I had an easy labor; I was eight centimeters dilated before anyone realized I was actually in labor (eh, it didn’t hurt that much — see, you HATE ME) and the whole pushing part took twenty minutes. It would have gone faster but I wasted one whole contraction laughing at some joke Wade was telling. It’s hard to laugh and push at the same time (all you girls who have not had babies yet write that down).

I was induced with Charlie, because after the totally unplanned and chaotic arrival of my firstborn, I wanted some control over the second birth. Also I did not want to be dragging my crazy toddler with me to the labor and delivery unit because honestly I was going to need my whole concentration to push the baby out, or something like that. I went to the hospital at 6:00 am and they hooked me up to the Pitocin at 7:00, then they unhooked the drugs for an hour because I can’t tolerate an IV in the back of my hand, only in my arm, but I never remember that until my entire hand has swollen to twice it’s normal size and I can no longer make a fist. They put my IV back in at 9:00 but didn’t give me any more Pitocin because I was moving along just fine, and at 12:15 Charlie was born.

This time Wade remembered not to tell any jokes.

Charlie weighed six and a half pounds — he seemed gigantic compared to Henry. We called him the Big Lump of Charlie. Again, a big hit with the grandmothers. But even though he was a big lump, no sutures. At all.

Okay so how much do you hate me now?

My doctor sent me home after both deliveries with prescription strength Ibuprofen, because that was really all I needed. The morning after Henry was born, the doctor came to check me, and told me that I could go home; Henry was in the NICU and I had already spent three days in the hospital, so I took her up on that. I got up and got dressed, and when the social worker came with the paperwork for Henry’s birth certificate, I was sitting up in the rocking chair. She looked around the room and said, “Oh, I’m sorry, I need the mother’s signature on some things — I’ll come back.”

Because what crazy woman who just had a baby is up and dressed twenty four hours later?

Since you already hate me at this point (at least those of you who have had babies, because the rest of you LOVE me, right? with my suture-free birth stories!) I’ll tell you one more really fun thing: When Henry was born, my water broke, unexpectedly, at 34 weeks. Wade and I raced off to the emergency room and the nice nurse asked if I was having contractions. No, I said, no contractions. She hooked me up to a fetal monitor and a contraction monitor and left the room.

And came back twenty minutes later to tell me that I was having contractions every four minutes! and they were lasting sixty seconds! Which was great because I couldn’t feel them!

When I went into the hospital to have Charlie, they hooked me up to the monitors again, and before they shot me up with Pitocin, the nurse happily reported that I was having contractions! every six minutes! lasting almost a minute each! Again, great, because I couldn’t feel them!

So when I try to bring up childbirth as an example of a time I have Suffered Greatly, I don’t really get much mileage out of it. And no Vicodin at all, sadly.

March 23, 2009

put some damn sunscreen on already

Many years ago, when he was a much younger man, my husband spent a summer working in an oil field here in Oklahoma. Those of you who have actually met Wade will find that appropriately hysterical, but it gets better: Because he was a College Boy and not a roughneck, his job apparently consisted primarily of throwing rocks at a herd of cows to keep them from drinking out of a contaminated pond. And doing some painting, too, I guess.

(Also he lived, for a week, in a motor home, but then he and his friend decided that they weren’t cut out for motor home living and relocated to a Motel 6. College Boys. Sheesh.)

Wade spent most of that summer covered in oil; he would bathe in turpentine to get it off his skin. And then go out in the sun, where he was burned to a blistered crisp for twelve consecutive weeks.

You can guess where this is going, can’t you?

Wade goes regularly to the dermatologist, just to have things checked out. He’s had a bunch of moles removed over the last fifteen years. Maybe ten years ago, he had two spots removed, one on his abdomen and one on his back; both required stitches (seven in one incision, five in the other, I think). He still likes to show the kids the scars and tell them that they are from where he was run through in a sword fight. The kids are pretty sure he’s kidding.

A couple of weeks ago, he went in for a regularly scheduled Mole Check and the dermatologist saw a spot right between Wade’s shoulder blades that he didn’t really like, so he sliced it off. Just like that! And then I had to attend to the band aid for a week. Eew.

Of course — OF COURSE! — that was not the end of it. The pathologist didn’t like what he saw (avoiding the joke about how he was looking at a big flap of my husband’s skin and EEEW) and the dermatologist decided that he needed to have another procedure.

Aside: The dermatologist called and left Wade the NICEST message ever, about how he shouldn’t worry and the procedure would be really simple but he might not want to plan to play golf or go to the batting cages for a few days afterward, two things Wade never done in his ENTIRE LIFE. I thought it was sweet, but Wade thinks I have a crush on our dermatologist (which I just might because he is kind of cute, and thanks to him my skin has never looked better).

Wade had his procedure today; he called me on his way back to the office and when I said, “How did it go?” he said, “Well, the surgery took two hours, and I have twenty stitches in my back — five subcutaneous, and fifteen more at the surface.”

WHOA.

The cute dermatologist sent him on his way with instructions for cleaning the incision (which apparently I will be doing EEW) and a prescription for Vicodin. When I complained that no one ever sends me home with Vicodin, Wade said, “I have TWENTY STITCHES IN MY BACK.”

“I gave birth to your CHILDREN and came home with ibuprofen,” I reminded him.

And he said, “TWENTY STITCHES.”

Eh, he’s got a point.