Aila
It's raining out as I write this. When it rains, I feel such a sense of peace, probably because it reminds me of being in the East.
It's Friday, and somehow we made it through another very hard week. I haven't written all week, but that's only because we had no time! My last post was last Friday, when we took the kids to a Halloween party at Brian's work in San Francisco. Aila had had a chemotherapy infusion earlier in the week, but she was in good spirits at the party. We didn't think much of her playing with the other kids and legoes at Pinterest. And maybe we should have...
This afternoon, I left work at about 3pm and picked the kids up at home for a drive up to Pinterest, where Brian works. They were hosting a Halloween party, where the kids could carve pumpkins, get their faces painted, and generally have fun. Zander was dressed as a pirate and Aila as a superhero with a cape. Declan was dressed as the third child, in sweats and a hand-me-down Gap shirt of Zander's. Sorry, Dec! It took forever to drive the 25 miles up there because of accident after accident along the way, but we finally made it. Compared with the austere yuckiness of my office building, Pinterest's headquarters are like an amusement park. Music was blasting. Help yourself to a soda or a cookie! A large lego wall is right at the main entrance.
It's always been easy to identify the qualities that make it uniquely difficult to parent our oldest son, Zander Silas. From birth, he yelled. And yelled and yelled. I remember when he was about two- or three-days old, and we were still in the hospital. He was yelling so loudly and for so long that the nurses came by to make sure that Brian and I were not neglecting him. Instead, we'd been rocking and swaying him, trying to soothe him, for a very long time.
I always feel an overwhelming need to post something positive when I post to Facebook. I imagine that I'm not alone with this sentiment. The problem I have with this is that it shortsightedly spotlights positive sentiment (or negative events respun with a positive flavor) as the only ways which humans are able to connect with one another. I understand that we don't all want to sit around and have a "Gripebook," where we talk about the horrible and painful events that we have experienced in our lives. But I wish we could have more of a neutral experience, where good and bad and everything in between could exist together. At least that's my experience of the world these days.