Save the Queen

A normal person would be seriously considering the idea that, if every human contact they have results in drama, that they are the cause of all this drama.

But this can't possibly be the case. Right?

"It's almost like you have a social life or something."

She considers this, turning it about in her mind. It doesn't take her long. "Yeah. When I was talking to Mom and Jess - not last Sunday, but the one before - and I told Mom that if I didn't just start talking to her all the time, not to take it personally 'cause I don't talk to anyone?"

He nods.

"I thought about it later. That's not good. I can't just do that."

It's true. She tends to withdraw - it's easier. Easier than putting oneself out there, making oneself open and vulnerable. Easier than dealing with people and their drama. She likes her own company. She might get on her own nerves occasionally - okay, a lot - but that's still easier and somehow preferable than dealing with other people getting on her nerves.

But she feels lonely sometimes. And guilty. Like she's ditched all of her friends and family. She imagines what it would feel like in a reversed situation - and doesn't like it.

She doesn't now and never has liked the friendships most people seem to be interested in having with her - the kind where she's the only one making any sort of effort to keep the friendship alive - but she also recognizes that any friendship requires both parties to make an effort.

And so she's been making an effort. Baby steps, but at least it's something. And when babies learn to walk, it is only baby steps at first, but it becomes steadier and easier and pretty soon the baby's a kid who's running.

She'll never be an extrovert, never a social butterfly... but maybe she'll stop being quite as withdrawn as she is now.

So on Sunday we bought a cow.

Well, half a cow.

Well... a quarter of a cow. Technically.

...

We go up to Temecula...

...I really didn't intend to tell this story right now - someone remind me later - but long story short, we have half a cow's liver.

Let me illustrate something for you here. Half of this cow's damn liver is about the size of my head. What the hell do cows need such ginormous livers for, anyway? All they eat is grass. Honestly.

ANYWAYS

So it falls to me to slice this thing into nice thin slices for consumption. I suppose I could have asked Dave, but... nah, I got this. Except it's really slippery. And unwieldy. And there's still a vein here...

I spent the next half hour hacking this thing into pieces with a running commentary, which Dave found highly amusing, but since he won't get a Twitter all of my hilarious little quips are lost to the sands of time... or something.

Long story short - wow, that was difficult. And gross. And unwieldy. But the organic grass-fed beef is tasty.

Four years.

Four years ago today.

This time four years ago...

...This time four years ago, I was laying in bed with my husband, calling my family in between bouts of crying. Listened to the sympathy pouring out from the phone. Feeling... so alone, like a piece of me had vanished into thin air without any warning.

Four years ago today I lost the Raisin, my little tiny baby. Felt it pass from me with pain I imagine to be that of actual labor - mingled with the pain of loss, of grief. So much possibility, so much potential... gone. Little Catherine would never watch me water marble my nails and beg me to do hers as well, or ask me why Princess Garnet ran away and would she ever go home? I would never get to watch Dave teach little James to shoot a free throw, or watch Hayden impress his small half-brother with parkour and kung-fu, and teach him how to do vaults as well. Little parkouring basketball-playing Jimmy. Never.

Never...

Such a powerful, small, final word.

I had the Raisin with me for a rather short time - I was only aware of him for two months - and yet in that short time that tiny little life became a huge part of my life. I would sing (badly) to it, talk to it, think about it and wonder and hope. And all of that was brutally ripped from me, leaving me bereft, confused, devastated.

I honestly don't know how I dealt with it. I remember that pain, that grief - far worse than when my grandmother or father died... worse than when my beloved Elayne died. (I know Elayne was a cat, but she was my cat... and I think I imbued my hopes of childhood on her.) Like... again, like part of myself had been ripped from me without any warning.

It's been four years, and I still think of the Raisin frequently. Not every day, but lately... a lot. The pain is still there, but it's different now. Faded. A memory of pain. Almost like the entire miscarriage happened to someone else... but I remember it too closely for that to be true. If for no other reason that the endometriosis that has infiltrated my body, a reminder that yes, you were pregnant, and you screwed that up too and hello there! I'm the consequence.

But of course the memory goes way beyond that.

I know people have asked, and probably still wonder, if I'm ever going to try again. The answer is no. No, because the probability of carrying a baby to term with endometriosis thrown into the mix is slim. No, because I don't want a baby... I want the Raisin. No other baby will do. Little Kitty or Jimmy, that's all. No, because I'm afraid of it all happening again, a Groundhog Day of failed pregnancies. No, because... because two people have filled that ache in my heart, the void that the miscarriage left. I know Hayden and Linz are someone else's kids... but I've come to love them as my own, in every way but having given birth to them myself. I know I've only known them a relatively short time, but in that time they've also become part of me and soothed the wound that the Raisin left behind.

That wound, once so open and seething that even seeing another baby would send me into tears, has faded. It's not any longer a pain that makes me want to crawl into bed and huddle into myself and stare at the wall with blank unseeing eyes, or drink until I can't feel anything at all. It's a kind of... wistfulness, almost, a wistfulness that makes me look around the house and think, Three and a half years old. What would little Jimmy be doing right now? And all I have to think about is what Jason and Melanie's Serenity was like when she was three and a half. Would Jimmy/Kitty have been similar? It's a wistfulness that makes me smile a little sadly at babies and small children and their mothers. I was almost you.

Wistfulness does kind of hurt, but it's not the soul-wrenching agony of fresh grief. I'm thankful for that. Because while having the grief fade kind of makes me feel like a bad person, like I should emotionally flagellate myself daily to, I don't know, somehow make up for my body's failure... no one can endure that level of pain for very long. Much as I think I should, I know I couldn't.

And so I feel that wistfulness, and I endure that.

"Why didn't you believe me?"

It comes out small, sad, and plaintive - a surprise to her, as her voice for the past forty-five minutes has been calm, cool, dispassionate. The fact that she's said it at all surprises her - she certainly didn't intend to say it, didn't intend to go anywhere near the topic at all. She hadn't written it down on her list, hadn't even thought of it. Even if she had considered it she probably wouldn't have written it down - too touchy a subject. Which is somewhat laughable, considering the touchiness of everything else on her list. But she chose to shy away from it.

A choice that was remade without her even thinking of it.

She recognizes the small, sad little voice - Little Amara peeking out from her fortress of pillows. That adorable, innocent face, that bowl-cut hair, somewhere between blonde and brown... those sad, hurt little green eyes. All she's ever wanted to know was why Mommy didn't believe her. She sees an opportunity to finally have her most important question answered, and seizes it in her chubby little hands.

"Why didn't you believe me?"

Her voice cracks somewhere around "believe", which is another surprise to her. Those five words cause her more pain to utter than she would have believed, had one told her about it previously. She's never asked it. Never brought it up, that great unspoken shame that has always lurked between them.

She listens to her mother's answer, hears the pain in her mother's voice, the relived fear. It's nothing surprising, nothing she hadn't assumed was the answer before. There was really only one answer that could have been. But somehow hearing it from her... doesn't quite ease the years-old pain, but it... somehow soothes Little Amara's sad, broken little heart... and starts to heal.

So. In an effort to calm myself down from my paranoia-induced spazzing, I have decided on something. I love cosplay. I love the idea of it, I love looking at great cosplays, and I want to do some myself. And for a while I thought that the first cosplay I was going to do was Steena. And don't get me wrong, I still want to do a Steena cosplay someday. Steena's awesome. But who's more awesome? That's right, the God-Emperor Fou-Lu. I hadn't previously considered doing a genderbend cosplay, but - come on, it's freaking Fou-Lu.


I mean, look at this BAMF.

I'm sure you see my point.

So here's my plan:

- Get rid of the endo
- Get a job
- Buy materials and whatnot
- ???
- Be awesome

( Other characters I want to cosplay, no particular order )

Not all that helpful. Must calm down. Ugh.

Apparently I'm talking to Mom tomorrow. FML. I'm oddly terrified. Because I know this is going to cause me some serious pain because I know it's not going to go well. Hell, that's way too positive. I know this is going to go very very badly.

VERY badly.

Yes, 'oddly terrified' seems pretty apt.

UGH. Not cool. Not even close to cool. My sister is lucky that I love her very much, because I don't think she realizes just how much she's asking of me here.

Best case scenario, which will occur only in dreamland: Mom admits responsibility to everything I have to say, apologizes sincerely for screwing me up, and is magically transformed into the perfect mother. (And since I'm dreaming here...) She then tells me that I'm the long-lost princess of some heretofore unknown district country whatever in Germany, and that Dave and I are heirs to a massive fortune. We then dance off into the sunset.

...

Worst case scenario: She... I... I don't even know. Everything I'm envisioning taking place tomorrow is a worst-case scenario. There's no way this goes well. No way at all. I mean, I'll probably die of a heart attack if any part of it at all goes even slightly less than awful. Mom's superemotional and will take all of what I have to say on an emotional level, she'll get hurt and pissy and angry, and - and -

This is such a bad idea. I should not be doing this. My emotional state is far better than it used to be, but even then I'm not sure I can deal with the probable outcome of tomorrow.

Crap!

So I wake up around 1:30 last night. (Early this morning? Whatever.) Lay there in that contented little half-asleep haze for a few minutes. And then BAM. Suddenly, excruciating pain. I haven't always been the most stoic person in the world when it comes to pain, but I've grown into it, as it were - not complaining much when endo comes around, pretty much just stating yeah, I'm in pain. So when I say that this was excruciating pain, I'm serious. Excruciating as in, if this continues for much longer I'm having Dave take me to the hospital. I really thought I was - I don't know, had endo adhesions that were ripping me apart internally. Bleeding out from ebola. Had eaten pieces of glass or sharp plastic that were ripping my stomach to shreds. Dying, at any rate. I'm serious here.

Still in pain, I get up quietly and go to the bathroom. Sit there for about half an hour wondering what the hell is wrong with me. There's no blood. The pain is starting to subside into the more familiar ache of endo. And I'm freezing my ass off. So I get back into bed, lay there, and wonder what caused the pain. As I always do when it comes to endo. If there was a trigger, I wish I knew what it was.

So. Third endo flareup in the last month. I've got to get this crap gone.

ETA: So apparently Dave had this same stomach thing night before last. Does the fact that this makes me feel better make me a horrible person? I'm pretty sure it does.

So I read webcomics a month at a time. Meaning, around the beginning of every month, I go back and read the previous month's archives. I don't even know why this is relevant.

So I'm going back and reading December's "Something Positive" strips, and -

Son of a bitch!

The author has left us at a cliffhanger. A wonderful cliffhanger to be sure, but -

Dammit, I hate cliffhangers.