While My Boyfriend Was Sleeping

What I write after Joe and Henry go to bed

The heaviness of being empty: the crushing reality of a late miscarriage

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full lace wigs

Note: this is a deeply personal story. I’m still struggling to articulate it – in real life and in words. As a writer, I find it impossible to not process my feelings in narrative form. As a journalist, I find it equally impossible to write only for myself, which is why I have a blog and not a journal.

On Dec. 1, I lost my second son due to (still mostly) unexplained reasons. He was 18 weeks old – too early to be considered stillborn, too late to still be a secret. The experience wrecked me in some way. Despite my attempts at maintaining a sunny disposition, I withered.  Despite my naturally steely resolve, I withered. Despite having just grieved the death of my sister’s newborn, I withered. Despite knowing nothing good would come from turning to the internet, I Googled – and withered. The people who knew me best thought I was doing OK. How could I let them think otherwise? No one wants to talk about dead babies, so I put on a nice face, feigned levelheadedness and withered.

Each night, I searched the web for stories like mine in a fruitless attempt to find answers or peace or a crystal ball forecasting that this will never happen again. 

Yet Google never brought me peace. It just made the situation worse. I cursed my luck. I cursed my body. I cursed the shitty misfortune of being born a woman and not a man. It’s always easier for men, or at least it is in the MINDFUCK that is reproduction. I cursed my genes. I held my sister as the doctors pulled her baby off a respirator. I watched in horror as my niece, born full term to loving parents, took her last breath. It was a moment so awful, so cruel and so sad that I vowed I would never write about it. Instead, I channeled this sadness into something positive – an online photo project that went semi viral. I wanted my sister to know that her daughter mattered. Now here I was, exactly six months later, curled up on my bathroom floor, moments away from delivering a boy who wouldn’t matter in the most literal sense. At 18 weeks, he wasn’t even old enough to warrant a birth or death certificate. 

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Mount Rushmore closed, Thomas Jefferson hangs his granite head in shame

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Last week my Oma left Buffalo with a group of senior citizens on a trip to Mount Rushmore.

She has been more excited about this adventure than for anything in the last umpteen years. It was her first big getaway since my Opa died in January. She had to fight to secure a seat on the bus because the trip sold out within weeks of being announced.

One of her friends fell ill and turned her spot over to Oma. It was a bittersweet turn of events, but Oma was grateful for her friend’s ticket. (This woman had also recently lost her husband,  so she knew how important the trip was to Oma, who for the last seven years cared for my grandfather 24 HOURS A DAY.)

This Mount Rushmore journey was a BIG DEAL.

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A thousand of him

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I’m at the grocery store, standing in the produce department. An old Italian woman in a babooshka approaches my cart. She presses her face so close to Henry’s face that for a second his curious mug is eclipsed by her curious mug.

“He is a bootiful,” she says.

“Thank you,” I say.

“His face, it is a bootiful!”

“Thank you,” I say again.

“He is the only one?”

“Yes,” I reply. “He is my only one.”

“He is a so bootiful you could a make a thousand of him.”

I laugh, picturing a thousand Henrys.

“One day,” I say. “I might make another one of him. A thousand seems excessive.”

She kisses him on the top of his head, oblivious to my sarcasm and shuffles away to the cheese section. “Ciao ciao,” she says, her voice carrying over the clang of carts and drone of adult contemporary music.

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A ripe old moment

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|| Note: This is a post for my Opa, whom I’ve written about many times in the past. (See The pitfalls of downhill roller skating or While my Opa was sleeping, or Dies ist Opa.) He died Jan. 6 after suffering for several years with Alzheimer’s disease. He was a jovial, outgoing sprite of a man whom most people describe as a character. He spent as much time creating life stories as he did telling them. Even at his foggiest, he could captivate a small audience, albeit by then most of his tales were wildly embellished or completely untrue. When it became clear that his star in this world was fading, I began the subconscious process of squirreling away memories — both significant and slight. The one you’re about to read falls under the second category. I’m not sure why it floated to the surface. Memories are like dreams sometimes. When they roll in you must abide. ||

A memory: I’m seven, maybe eight years old. I’m holding a coffee can that has two holes punched through the tin. An old shoelace is knotted through each hole to form a kind of coffee can necklace. It’s hot out. July, maybe. I’m in Upstate New York, wearing purple jelly sandals and a tank top. My arms are browning under the midday sun. My tongue is stained with blueberries.

I hand the coffee can to Opa.

I loop it around his neck like I’m crowning him with a gold medal after a long race. It dangles against his chest like a clumsy locket. Inside the can is motor oil, or at least I think it’s motor oil. It’s thick and black and Opa won’t let me touch it.

“Dees is dirty stuff,” he says, as he plucks a beetle from a raspberry bush and drops it into the can.

I trail closely behind him. My sisters too. The air smells like grass and manure. The breeze is subtle, but my hair is fine and flies away easily. We’re in my Oma’s garden, a large unshaded plot divided into neat rows of cucumbers, zucchinis, tomatoes and berries. We’re inching our way through bushes, my sisters and I, our shadows following Opa’s shadow, our legs burning from thorn pricks.

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All hail Josephine the Plumber

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The kitchen sink

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I often give my father credit for tackling most of our home repairs. Whenever he’s down from Buffalo, Joe and I shamelessly hand him a piece of paper listing all the broken crap in our house and within two days he’s crossed off every item.

We’re embarrassingly incompetent when it comes to plumbing, electrical wiring, woodworking and anything beyond changing a light bulb and replacing a dirty A/C filter. Since I grew up in a family that prides itself on self-reliance, my ineptitude is a secret source of shame.

In my family, if it’s broke, we fix it — even if what we’re fixing should really be thrown away.

Take for example my Oma, who uses a plastic laundry basket that my Opa repaired with a steel bracket 20 years ago. Even my sister Heelya is handy. I don’t get it.  We both grew up watching the same ridiculous episodes of Home Improvement. Yet it seems the only surface on which I can build something is paper.

My mother is the most resourceful of them all.

She’s a female MacGyver. Give her a flathead screw driver, a stainless steel ice cream scoop and a coat hanger and she’ll solve most of your household problems.

She’s fixed the toilet in the baby cave back when it was still a man cave. She’s unclogged the bathroom sink, installed cordless window shades and fixed the dumpster in our alley. She’s made curtain rods out of discarded bamboo stalks, used an old candle to remove a stubborn table leaf and twice mended a shattered pig figurine with super glue.

This week during her stay in Florida, she fixed the plumbing under our kitchen sink. I served as her hapless assistant. It took an entire afternoon, during which time Mothership referred to herself as “Josephine the Plumber.”

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The pitfalls of downhill roller skating

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The summer I turned 14, I went camping with my mother, my sisters, my friends June and Ann and their mother Wilma.

It was a girls-only kind of weekend. The dads stayed home.

We rented a cabin in the Pennsylvania woods, all of us girls, piled into one two-story bungalow.

Within five minutes of driving into camp I had surveyed the outlying trails for roller skating routes. And yes, I mean roller skate not roller blade. For years I skated on a pair of hand-me-down quads with bright blue wheels. For some reason I never crossed over to inline skates.

June, however, had a slick pair of roller blades — the newest hottest ones on the market.

As we puttered through the campground in Wilma’s minivan, the two of us peered out the windows, our noses pressed to the glass. When we spotted our Everest, we gasped.

It was the granddaddy of all downhill trails. Paved with crumbling black top, riddled with potholes and ending in a sharp plummet, it was the most treacherous trail we’d ever laid eyes on. If it had been any steeper, it would have been a cliff.

As Wilma’s van rounded the corner, June and I implicitly settled on our first skating route. We were fearless.

As soon as the last sleeping bag had been dragged from the van and carried up to our loft, June and I strapped on our skates and announced that we were hitting the trails.

“Don’t go down that hill by the front gate,” my mother said.

June and I exchanged eye rolls.

“I’m serious,” she continued. “DO NOT go down that hill.”

“You’ll kill yourself,” Wilma said.

“Don’t worry,” I lied. “We wont.”

And off we went. June in her roller blades, me in my skates.

Unconcerned for our safety, we blatantly defied our mothers’ warnings to steer clear of the Everest trail. We made a beeline for the summit.

I was leading the way in my clumsy quads, stumbling over potholes, flying through the campground like a jacked up roller derby girl. June was on my heels, gliding in her neon blades.

We rolled to the top of the hill and paused only briefly to take in the free-fall, before howling with glee and pushing ourselves down the incline.

We began hurtling downhill faster than we imagined. Within seconds, the rush turned to terror. We were on a suicide mission.

Using the back brakes on her blades, June managed to stop herself with remarkable ease.

I was not so lucky.

I was flying down a hill on roller skates at 30 mph and unlike June’s brakes, mine were located on the front of my skates. The toe stop.

The longer I thought about braking, the more out of control I became. I was picking up speed faster than Picabo Street, except instead of snow-plowing my way to a halt, I fell knee-first into the pavement and slid for 10 feet, my shin skidding across the concrete.

The resulting road rash ran from my knee to my ankle.

June started to cry.

I pulled off my skates. Pulled off my socks. As June tiptoed to my side, bawling over my fall, I asked her to give me her socks.

“Wh-wh-why do you need my s-s-s-socks?” She whimpered. “You’re totally b-b-b-bleeding.”

“To stop the bleeding,” I replied.

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At least when voice mail piles up it doesn’t collect dust.

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I’m a recovering pack rat, but sometimes I regress. Tonight I transcribed 14 saved voice mail messages dating back to 2007. It was as much a practical exercise as it was a display of my neurotic compulsion to document everything. I have no space left for voice mails and text messages. My mailbox is always full. I was forced to make room.

But before I purged these 14 messages from my voice mail memory, I decided to post them here. I’ve held onto them for very specific reasons, most of which will be completely meaningless to you:

……

1. “Hey cutie pie, baby pie, sweetums, lovey cakes. I hope this means you’re buying oak tag or poster board. It is 6:30 and I just walked into my house. I’ll be on the road about a quarter-to-seven, so call me back if you like, otherwise I’ll see you when I see you.” ♥

– From Joe when we first started dating. The poster board he’s referring to was used to make two giant Chinese takeout containers for a costume party at a bar in downtown Sarasota.

2. “Hey Heidi. I just got my grades back from my first essay and I got an 85, so I didn’t do as bad as I thought I would. The teacher said I ended the story too abruptly and I had a semi-colon in a place where I should have had a colon, but everything else was great, so thank you very much. I miss the heck outta ya.” ♥

– From my friend Chris, who I worked with at a marble yard during my two-year hiatus from journalism. Not long after I left the marble biz, Chris decided to go to college to pursue an engineering degree. He left me this message after I helped him with an English essay.

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When what to my wondering eyes should appear, but a package from Canada Post filled with holiday cheer.

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The man with no hair who you see in the freeze frame of this YouTube video is my sister Heelya’s boyfriend Brian. He buzzed his head last week.  He says it’s his new Chris Daughtry look. Joe filmed this little segment, among others, on Christmas day as we milled about our house cooking dinner and opening presents before Joe’s parents and siblings arrived for what would be a grand feast in the backyard. (To my family and friends back home in New York: yes we ate dinner outside under the carport in our backyard. It was warm and even a bit humid. Yes, I said humid.)

Before I explain the significance of this video, I should first point out the significance of yesterday.

Yesterday was my first Christmas together with Joe. Sure, it was our first Christmas as husband and wife, but it was also our first Christmas together, logistically speaking. I’m always in Western New York with my family and he’s always in Tampa with his, so the fact that we could celebrate under the same roof, much less the same state, was pretty awesome. I was so grateful for that.

It was also the first time in 16 years that my father has spent Christmas with his parents –– my Oma and Opa, who spend their winters in a retirement community about an hour south of me.

Now, add PK, who also lives in St. Pete, and Heelya and Brian, who live in Myrtle Beach, S.C. and you’ve got a whole bunch of Kurps together for Christmas who might otherwise be scattered up and down the east coast. It was wonderful. Our house was loud and crowded. When Joe’s siblings arrived, followed by his parents and grandfather, it got even louder and more crowded in that colorful bustling warm-energy way. I loved it. Ain’t no Christmas without a ruckus. As I shimmied past pairings of people in the hallway and the living room, carrying trays topped with cheese and veggies, guacamole and hummus, I couldn’t help but think of my Nana and Papa’s Christmas Eve gatherings back home in New York.

(I should also mention that this was the first time ever that my mom didn’t spend Christmas with her parents. Nana: I know you’re reading this. I thought of you the entire night, and now that I have one Christmas dinner under my apron I can finally fully appreciate all those years you hosted Christmas Eve at your house.)

Anyway. Joe and I decided to set up a long table Last Supper-style under the carport in our backyard, which turned out to be a genius idea. My dad strung lights and my mom and I crafted pine and berry napkin ring holders out of garland. Joe fired up the deep fryer and from scratch made better mozzarella sticks and chicken wings than any bar and grill I’ve ever been to.

With my mom’s help, we cooked turkey and ham, mashed sweet potato yams and set out a salad bar. Rosey made corn casserole and Joe’s mom made lasagna. Oma supplied her signature chocolate butter cream cake and so many cookies the tray collapsed when we cleared the table. Three pugs attended the celebration: Cubbie of course, Uncle Homer (my parent’s pug) and Owen (Heelya’s pug), who sadly was suffering from a ruptured ear drum and spent the night with his head cocked lamely to one side.

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Yonder mountain wedding snapshots

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Katebackdrop|Backdrops Sale for Photography

Until I get my photos from kate backdrop Photographer Wendy, these random shots from my dad’s camera will have to do. Here’s me & Joe with my Oma & Opa on the top of HoliMont ski hill in Ellicottville, N.Y. 

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Joe and I with our brilliant officiant Zac Chase – the man who insisted I ask Joe out.

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The wedding party  and the perfect wedding veil– and what a party it was.

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Joe played the guitar when I walked down the aisle. The song was one he had come up with (coincidentally) on the same night we met.

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Papa and Nana with my cousins Reb and Erik. I love this photo. A lot.

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My cousins Krystle and Cory are newlyweds too! They got married in Buffalo a month ago. After the wedding they drove us back to our suite in their yellow Hummer and 15 minutes later brought us back takeout from The Gin Mill. Cory, unable to find salt packets for our french fries, decided to swipe the bar’s glass salt shaker and stick it in the bag with our food. I’m forever grateful for this and thus plan to use the salt shaker forever.

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MEN IN BLACK: Adam (my future brother-in-law), Zipper Boy, Joe’s brother Phil, and of course Joe.

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MY GIRLS: Leilani, Rosey & Ro.

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MY GIRLS, TAKE TWO: Yuuki, Heelya & PK.

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This was the view coming up the hill.

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This was the view coming down the hill.

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And this was the view on the top of the hill: me, Joe, Grandpa Ra and Joe’s mom, MaryAnn.

—–

Anatomy of a refrigerator door

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While Joe watched some snooze-fest on Charlie Rose tonight, I diagrammed our refrigerator door. I’m not necessarily proud of this. In fact, there were a million other more productive things I could’ve, should’ve done. Ah well. At least now you know I have a framed photograph of my fiancé with his dentist and dental hygienist on the fridge. (And yes, they’re posing with balloons.)

Note: This is just the top of my fridge. There’s an entirely different collection of crap on the bottom.