Melancholy Musings

Sometime around 15 years ago my dad had a tumor removed. It had been growing inside his sinus cavity and was the size of a grapefruit. It was benign. But it was so weird and fucked up that the surgeon requested to have students and other staff witness the operation and went on to write a paper about it. I’m sure the tumor itself resides in a jar somewhere.

On Friday I noticed a strange solid lump under my nostril, deep within my lip tissue. Naturally I immediately went to the paranoid place and thought of my dad’s tumor. Yesterday the doctor assured me it was either another staph outbreak or, more likely, a zit or cold sore type thing that is simply too deep to actually erupt. That would certainly explain the swollen feeling. He called it a furuncle, wrote me up a prescription, and I at least psychologically feel better.

Over the weekend I found myself thinking about my own untimely demise. After the sudden death of a coworker this year I find myself less and less afraid of death itself, which has always been too horrifying for me to even contemplate. It still quickens my pulse to think about too realistically but I’ve come to realize that I won’t actually care when it happens. It’ll be those that are left behind that matter. And that’s made me worry about being remembered by my children.

Luke Skywalker asks Princess Leia if she remembers her mother. She claims that yes, she does. Now obviously, if she means Padme, this is a bunch of bullshit. I can retcon/fanwank it that hey, she’s probably teaming with the Force, too, and so maybe she actually does have a vague recollection of that one image of her mother’s face, minutes after being born. But that’s seems like crossing into Dune territory and Leia is no Alia. It’s far more likely that Leia is talking about her adopted mother, Bail Organa’s wife, who apparently must have died when Leia was still quite young. Now the fact that Luke knows he’s adopted and Leia seems to be unaware is a separate issue that I’ve also spent far too much time pondering.

Kirk is five. He remembers things that I don’t remember. He brings up incidents in his past that once he’s jogged my memory I can recall but I never would have given them a second thought if he hadn’t called attention to them. What about Veronica? She’s 16 months. Even if she was teaming with the Force, would she remember more than a vague impression?

Ronnie and I have been missing each other a lot lately. We somehow came to the mutual realization that we really don’t spend all that much time together. I get home from work, we have dinner, we go for a walk or play outside, then it’s bath, jammies, bottle, bed. I see her only for a couple of hours every day. That’s not enough time and yet I don’t know how to make it more. We’ve spent some long weekends together recently and that’s helped. But I still long for her and she still immediately defers to me once I come home, no matter how much she loves spending the day with her daddy. What would happen to her if she grew up without a mother?

I’ve been keeping this blog since I found out I was pregnant with Kirk, nearly 6 years ago now. In some ways I consider it a text for his future, a record of his early years that’s almost certainly filled with too much information. I don’t think the same can be said for his sister. I write less and less often of late and though I try to give equal time to both kids, there’s just no way to include as much detail about Ronnie because she’s younger and she’s not an only child. She has to deal with being the second kid in so many ways. I haven’t written word one in her baby book. We haven’t gotten portraits of her to send to all her extended family. She has virtually no toys of her own, playing instead with cars and action figures that her brother already acquired. I know she’ll never know any different and so won’t have an issue with that. I know she’ll come into her own with language development and we will get her separate things as she gets older. But will she have a record of what her mama thought? I hope so. I hope she’ll be able to ask me directly. If not, I hope she’ll have as many years of blog entries as her brother. And yet I feel like I’m just about ready to retire this whole blog endeavor. What comes next?