Finit

My heart is very heavy today. Yesterday I taught my final three yoga classes, and today I trained a client at the Y for the last time and taught my last class at Twin Lakes. I've managed not to let my guard completely down and begin weeping, but it will come later.

As much as I'm ready to go ahead and start our new lives together in Mt. Airy, it is so painful to leave friends and students behind. As we all know, no matter the promises to keep in touch and visit, we rarely do. Facebook makes things a little easier to stay somewhat connected, but it's not the same. It's on to making new friends, finding a new church family, starting a new business.

I remember feeling exactly like this when we moved from Cary. As much as Burlington frustrates me with its conservative attitudes, I'm not nearly as itchy to get out of Burlington as I was to leave Cary. But even then, I remember grieving for quite a while over my lost classes and clients. I really didn't work hard at developing friendships there, so it was more of a professional loss than a personal loss, but as what I do is so very personal, it was kind of the same.

Along those lines, I have to say that if I start really thinking about the people I'm leaving behind, I'll fall into a snotty cry-fest. There is not a better bunch of people in the world than my yoga students, both at church and at Elon. Watching them become stronger and more confident in their practice has been a thrill for me, and I am humbled that I have been allowed to be a part of their yoga journeys. I have been blessed with a group of friends who are smart and funny and strong and have become like sisters to me. I have laughed more here in Burlington than at any other time in my adult life, hanging with my peeps. I will miss those birthday dinners! My church family is this great big wacky family of individuals who band together and support each other through thick and thin. Back when the room mothers and PTA dictators at Oren's first school refused to give me the time of day, our church welcomed me as a partner with open arms and were happy to see me and my family walk through the doors. Our church convinced me to give the infamous West Burlington crowd a chance, and for that I'll be forever grateful.

I am happy to report that Oren's new school feels in some ways like our church here, open-hearted and gracious, happy to see us. That will be a big change, and I look forward to watching Oren blossom in a smaller school. Having grown up in a town of less than 300 people, I'm looking forward to a smaller town. And we're all excited to be in a town that is so close to the mountains and lots of recreational opportunities.

We still have to find a house to buy, but starting next Tuesday we'll have a rental house for Rick to start enjoying during the week and all of us, including the monster kitties and stinky pup, to start enjoying in mid-June.

But for now, I'm wallowing a bit in my sadness. This afternoon, I'll pack up my blankets, straps, blocks, and mats, to be put away until I can begin new classes. There may be some tears, and there will be some lonely moments, but I have a strong feeling that this will end up being a fabulous change not only for me, but for our family as a whole.

Falling in love

Our house sold, start to finish, in 36 days. Unheard of in this market, I know, and yes, we HAVE thought that maybe we should have asked for more money, BUT I'd rather have sold it and wonder if we charged enough than be sitting on it for months and wondering if we asked too much.

So the hard part has turned out to be the easy part. We sold our house, we moved everything out (only one storage unit this time as opposed to five the last time we moved!), and we're officially not homeowners right now.

So now what is supposed to be the fun part, the easier part, has turned into the hard part. We cannot find a house to buy. We made an offer on a spectacular house, one I still hope we will get, but the owners had to take it off the market due to some challenges, so we had to start over. The day we saw that house, I walked in and fell in love. Actually, that's not true. I saw it online and fell in love, much like our house here in Burlington. I could imagine us having Christmas dinner there, eating breakfast in the kitchen, sitting on the front porch. I still can, which is why I haven't let go of the dream quite yet.

But we do need to find a house to buy, and since the earliest this house will be back on the market, if it ever does go back on, will be September, we are still looking. But we are very limited in terms of where we want to buy, and what type of house we like, which makes it tough in a town of 10,000 people where the housing inventory is, well, nearly nil. We drove up to Mt. Airy yesterday to look at what online appeared to be very much like our house here, but brick and with a full front porch.

The house itself was about 80% there as far as the way it looked and felt. Great floors (all pine, which we know from experience is not ideal), high ceilings, plaster walls (I would have to install picture rail moldings, but I love those), a good-sized kitchen (without a dishwasher or disposal, in need of lots of updating), nice yard, five bedrooms, odd baths (a corner shower was installed in the middle of the floor of the upstairs bath), nearly non-existent closets (but a full basement). Lots to love, lots to work with, but there was this feel in the neighborhood, not helped at all by the snarling dogs next door, their fence butting right up to the property line, which was just a driveway's distance from the house on that side.

Rick and I talked a lot about it on the way home, and we agreed that house hunting is a lot like dating. You go out on a date, and the guy is nice-looking, polite, confident, pulls your chair out for you, laughs at your jokes, doesn't smell, but there is just something that bothers you about him. You sit and eat and talk, and the whole time you're thinking, "What is it?" There isn't anything obviously wrong, but you just feel a little bit antsy. When he takes you home, you hope that he won't try to kiss you.

And then you go out with someone else, but this time, you think he's gorgeous despite the fact that his teeth aren't perfect, you pray that he'll kiss you even with that weird moustache, and you find it charming that he seems nervous. You just don't care. You notice, but you don't care, because when you're sitting across from him during dinner, you just know that there is something special, something that just feels right. On paper he might not be up to par with the date you had last weekend, but in your heart it's a whole different story.

And that's how it is to buy a house. Yes, the walls are smooth and the kitchen is updated, yes the bathroom is nice and the basement is dry, but if there's no spark, if you can't envision yourself around the table playing Scrabble on a windy winter night, it just isn't the house for you, resale value and square footage be damned.

When you find the right house, you can't imagine living anywhere else. Sure there is a big crack in the ceiling, but the house is solid, you're sure of it. No, the bathroom isn't big enough for one person, let alone two, but you don't mind brushing your teeth in the hallway. You love the house, and barring any major structural issues, you're going to buy it. It's an emotional connection that is much like the one you might have with a love partner.

And that's what makes this whole process so challenging. We loved our old house. Really loved it. The closets were inadequate, the basement was a disaster, the kitchen was so small that I could make dinner and reach all the pots and pans, the stove, the sink, and the kitchen door without moving my feet, but we adored the feel of the place, the moldings, the hardwoods, the tile, that wonderful raspberry foyer. And we won't be happy until we find a place that makes us feel that way again. And the house we offered on makes us feel that way. So on June 1st, we'll plan to move into our rental house while we wait for a house to come on the market that is just right for us. It's not the plan we had, but what's that saying about when we make plans, God laughs?

She's probably rolling on the floor over this one.

Letting go (just a little bit)

The Invisalign saga continues. After several days of great fear of ripping the trays every time I tried to pry them from my teeth, I settled into the new world of having plastic trays in my mouth 21/7. I'm now on my third and final set of trays before I see my ortho again, and it's Christmas, which in my world means pajamas and lots of cookies.

So have I been good about keeping them in 21 hours a day? Well, not really. Whereas on Thanksgiving I skipped breakfast in order to buy myself an additional hour in the trays so that I could relax and enjoy a leisurely Thanksgiving lunch, this Saturday when I had friends over, I took the trays out and enjoyed myself. I've got three weeks on this set of trays before I get re-checked, so I figure I've got an extra week to be good.

And my teeth are most definitely moving, especially the lower middle ones, the reason I got the Invisaligns in the first place.

This whole thing has once again reminded me of what a control freak I am. Although I know that the longer I keep the trays in every day, the faster my teeth will move, I also know that if I'm bad for a couple of days here and again, it's not a crisis. I might delay the treatment a little bit, but I waited for 20 years to fix my teeth once they shifted after braces, so what does it really matter if it takes another month or two to finish my treatment?

I've made my life miserable on days when I really wanted to eat a snack before class and chose not to because I'd miss a few minutes in the trays. I'm one of those people who can sit in the dentist chair with a nail poking into my thigh and I can tolerate it for an hour or two simply by dealing with it. I have often thought that aside from the smelling really bad, I'd be a great Survivor player, because I have the patience to withstand a lot of discomfort before I crack. But this ability to sublimate my physical reality in order to make things simpler for other people and to make myself look better (yes, it's a kind of vanity, being the "best patient") creates a controlling monster in my psyche.

So this morning after yoga I went and got a cup of coffee, popped out the trays, and enjoyed it. And yes, I brushed my teeth AGAIN, which is fine, but that coffee sure was wprth it. Did I miss 30 minutes of treatment time? Yup. Did the world stop turning? Nope.

I'm still learning.

Invisalign!

Today was the day. I just returned from the orthodontist with my new Invisalign trays. After a quick REALLY unhealthy lunch (I can't eat until dinner--no snacks, so I wanted to be really bad), I brushed and flossed, and they're in.

Putting them in is a breeze, but taking them out is a nightmare. I did manage to take them out at the orthodontist office, but in the process I broke off one of the little button things on one of my back teeth. The tray is still fitting well, so the ortho said not to worry.

I look like I've been in a fight. My mouth is red and my cheeks swollen from all of the manipulation, but I'm really excited. These lower teeth have been bothering me for over 20 years, and it was time to DO something about them. This way, I can still floss easily, and within six to seven months, I'll be done. No snacking between meals, though, which is freaking me out, since I need them to be in 21 hours a day at least. But I'll get over it.

And the lisp isn't so bad right now. We'll see if I adjust. One thing I know will happen is even more vigilant brushing and flossing on my part. These trays cover the entire tooth, so anything that gets trapped there will be a most uncomfortable and unhealthy state of affairs. And maybe I can break my habit of biting my lips, since I don't have biting edges to my teeth anymore.

Now to distract myself, I need to get back to work!

Birthdays

We are now the proud parents/brother of two new delicious baby monster kittens. They are the sweetest kitties I've ever encountered, bar none. Both of them, and both in different ways, are loving and sweet, curious and playful. Last night Minerva spent many hours in my bed, curled up next to me, her head nuzzling my throat, her little paws kneading my side, purring up a storm. As I type this, little Luna is in my lap, drifting in and out of sleep (I can tell that she's asleep when she stops purring) making it slightly awkward to maintain the proper posture that I'm so anal about maintaining when I'm at my computer. So sweet. We still and always will miss Puff, just like we still reminisce about our our babies, Harriet and Ozzie. But these two monkeys are just what this house and our hearts needed.

This morning, as I was waking, I thought about the birthdays of our girls, and came to a realization.

Our 8-year-old Basset Hound, Angel, was born on June 10, the same day as my adoptive father. Minerva and Luna were born on June 1, the same day my biological father died in Vietnam 42 years ago. Odd.

Yesterday, I attended the surprise birthday party of my grandmother, my biological father's mother, Irene. She turns 88 today, two months after my adoptive mother turned 88. The party was really nice, and she was surprised and very pleased. Four of my six Simpson first cousins were there, one I'd not met, and that was nice but it's always so strange to be around other people who, had things been different, I might have grown up with. There is this automatic intimacy and a total lack of recognition at the same time.

At one point during lunch yesterday, my grandmother's hands were worn out. She has horrible arthritis and has a tough time holding a fork. I was sitting beside her, and she asked me to help her finish her cake. I fed her a few bites, which was a nice feeling, but still, strange. Because even though she is my biological grandmother, I don't know her at all. Buying her a birthday card was a challenge, since all of the grandmother birthday cards said things like, "I remember how you baked me treats when I was a child..." or "Here's to the memories we share."

Fact is, we don't share ANY memories.

I still feel that my head is going to explode at any minute. And things have gone so very well. I don't want to imagine how I'd be if they'd gone badly. My uncle Don's wife asked yesterday how I was coping with all of the discoveries and new relatives, and I said I'm just taking it as it comes, which is true. I am still realizing how very lucky I am, and acknowledging that the bubble that I've always felt surrounds me and keeps me from the worst of harm has done its job once again. Everyone I've met has been someone I would be proud to befriend. The integration of these new people into my heart is tougher than I thought it would be, especially since I believed that I would encounter at least some resistance. Oh, I was ready for that. But this?

Blessings are sometimes hard to accept. But I'm trying. Happy birthday, Grandma Simpson.

Good-bye

On Tuesday, August 25th, 2009, at about 5:45pm, we said good-bye to our dear, sweet Puff. After over two weeks of eating nothing--and I mean NOTHING AT ALL except for about 3ml of food we fed her with a syringe--she was nearing the end. We did the subcutaneous fluids for about six days, along with daily injections of Pepcid, but she never did take a bite of food. She did her famous water dance, as she's done for years, but only took in an ounce or two of water over the course of many days, all of that from her favorite cup that we brought back from Williamsburg. The last three days of her little life found her hiding under the bed and occasionally coming downstairs to soak up some sun in the living room or into the guest room or along the front wall of our bedroom to pee on the floor, something she had never done before.

She purred up until the very end, and when we took her outside those last two days--her first time outside except to go to the vet--she sniffed and listened, her little pegged feet wobbling in the grass as she explored. We took her up into Oren's treehouse, where she sat and smiled and surveyed the back yard, purring up a storm. It was her body that failed her, not her spirit. We buried her under that tree, in an old black shirt that Oren had outgrown. It was his suggestion to bury her in something dark, since her favorite clothing to sleep on or rub against was always dark, better to showcase her beautiful white fur.

We were together, three humans and one kitty, as she took her last breaths in the vet's office. It was horrendously sad and yet peaceful. Rick held her and Oren and I spoke softly to her as the medicine went into her vein and we said our farewells.

What an incredible blessing she was in our lives. Contrary and recalcitrant, she was never a lap kitty. She resisted being held or carried, but would plop down just beyond our reach so that we would have to bend over or change positions to pet her. She went through phases where she would sleep under the bed, on the bed, on my pillow, on the couch, at the top of the stairs, and then she would hide away for hours when we couldn't find her at all. She couldn't tolerate the dog or the vacuum cleaner, and would not swallow a pill unless we were really, really sly about it. Nothing that anyone ever suggested made that process easier, and even toward the end of her life when her energy level was practically nil, putting a pill into her was like fitting a bowling ball into a wiggly sink drain. "Not gonna happen, not now, not ever, so just give it up, Mom!"

The cat-shaped hole in our hearts insists on being re-filled, but we will try to wait a little while so that we might fully grieve our little girl. Her spirit is in the house, her fur still lining the baseboards, still woven into every garment any of us own (especially the black ones!). When the house settles, I think it's Puff walking down the hall. This morning when the tag on my hair dryer moved, I expected the movement to be Puff walking into the bathroom. I swear I can hear her purring as I lie down to sleep at night. For a tiny puff ball of a kitty, she filled up a very big space for her 15 years.

So as this chapter closes, another one opens. We will never find another kitty like Puff, but that's OK. We were privileged to be her humans for so long, and there can never be a creature like her. But, there is another (or maybe more than one...) little fuzzy feline ready to crawl into our hearts, and I look forward to the adventure.

Doing the right thing

Our 15-year-old kitty, Puff the Magic Kitty, hasn't been herself for the last couple of days. She is our oldest baby, about a year older than our son, and we adore her. She is white, medium-hair, with a bobbed tail (an accident at birth, perhaps), and has dark markings on her back and sides that look exactly like a little poodle is riding piggy-back. She is THE most beautiful cat in the universe. Not the most cuddly cat in the world, Puff adores being petted but not carried. She is not a lap kitty, but when I had my foot surgery a couple of years back, she slept beside me every night as long as I was on pain meds, as if to make sure I was still breathing. When Oren was a baby, she and her sister Harriet (who died nine years ago from kidney failure) would crawl into his stroller and sleep, and when Oren was sleeping in his bouncy/vibrating seat, they would watch him, silent sentinels observing the baby human.

Several months ago, we were sure we were losing our Puff. She started throwing up, not just her normal couple-times-a-week purging, but everything in her stomach and then some. She stopped eating and drinking, and then she started wobbling and looking unbalanced and dissheveled. The most distressing symptom was the lack of purring. Puff is a purr box. You look at her, smile, and her engines start humming. But for a day or so, not a purr was to be found. We knew it was the end. We took her to the vet, who couldn't diagnose anything acutely wrong, and then took her back home, prepared to lose her. Rick and I even walked in the yard looking for a good burial plot. I haven't cried that hard since.

And then miraculously, Puff felt just fine, thank you very much. We figure a couple of things happened. First, she probably heard us talking about digging a hole, and snapped out of it. Second, during all of this drama, we completely changed her food from a tiny bit of wet food in the evenings (for her heart meds) and dry the rest of the time to an all-wet diet.

Yeah, she probably played us a little bit...

But regardless, we had our Puff back and we were glad. She gave us another scare a month or so later, but never stopped purring, so we felt like she would be OK. And then day before yesterday, she started throwing up and stopped eating. I cleaned up ten or more puddles of vomit on the floor (this is why we don't have and will never voluntarily have carpet in a house). I had scheduled a nail trim anyway, so yesterday I took her in and had the vet examine her.

Once again, nothing startlingly acute came back, but Puff's kidneys aren't completely healthy, and she may have an infection. Both issues can be helped with meds, but one of them is an oral medication, which scares me to death. Giving a cat a pill or a tincture is a nightmare, and Puff gets so stressed out that I wonder if we'll do more harm than good. There are other things we can do as well, including injections of anti-acid medication and subcutaneous fluids, which we can also administer at home.

But how much is too much? While the notion of giving her an injection or two isn't abhorrent in any way to me (probably because I have no problem with needles and have never thought shots of any kind were all that painful), I wonder how she would feel. Would she start to hide whenever I approached? Or would she feel so much better that it would be worth it? I just don't know.

I want to do the right thing by her, and I feel like she has a lot of life left in her, but she is a kitty and by virtue of her feline status, I believe she deserves to be treated as kindly and humanely as possible, which precludes anything unnecessarily invasive just to make us humans feel better and less guilty.

Yesterday at the vet (thankfully I got the good vet instead of the fresh-out-of-vet-school-vet who wants to do every test and every intervention known to man), I asked Puff if she would please tell me when it is time for her to go. I've never had to put a pet down for old age, so I don't know if I'll recognize the signs. Even the vet said that she didn't think Puff was there yet. Maybe if she stops purring completely we'll recognize it as a sign.

When we thought we were going to lose her back in December, I told Rick that no matter what sort of pain we would experience by her loss, it was worth it as a tiny payment for the enormity of joy that little creature has brought into our world.

This is the price we pay for love.