Pending Departure

This girl....

is not so very happy that this guy...

will be leaving for South Africa on her 11th birthday.


This other guy, the mischievous looking one there on the left?

I'm not sure he's going to miss the big guy quite as much.

Not really. We're all going to miss him terribly. A whole, whole, whole, whole lot.

But, we're glad he's going. And can't wait to hear all about his first encounter with a rhino. And Charlize Theron.

He flies out Aug. 30 and arrives in Johannesburg two days later. Where he'll stay for two whole years.

And call his mother four times: Christmas Day 2011, Mother's Day 2012, Christmas Day 2012, Mother's Day 2013.

Four times.

In two years.

On those four days? Don't be looking for me. I'll be staring at my phone, waiting for it to ring. Then, after it rings and I hear him say, "Hey, Mama!" and talk to him for awhile? Yeah, after that, I'll be in a puddle in a quiet room making a mess out of a whole box of tissues. Fair warning.

Dear Karlie, I'm sorry that your Mom will be a bawling mess for your birthday and the next two years' worth of Christmases and Mother's Day. A nice pretty thing in a pale blue box from a certain jeweler in New York just might cheer me up. Love, Mama

(Don't worry, we get to email weekly. I'll be fine. I'm sure he'll be fine, too. For Pete's sake, he'll be in South Africa, what'll he care? And, that's as it should be.)

Love from the farm,
Teri

(P.S. Also don't worry. Tanner's curly-Q mohawk is history. Praise the electric razor. Amen.)

Ta Da!

Scandalous. I teased it here and a little bit at the end here, then.....never related the connection between the mysterious photos.

Here we have this tremendous news and I delay the big reveal.

Don't think it's because it's not that big of news or that it's because I'm not very excited. Neither could be further from the truth. It is big news and I'm very excited.

Maybe not as excited as Adam, but excited nonetheless.

Did you catch that big, fat clue? That Adam might be more excited than me?

What could be up with Adam? What could be the big mystery? What does Adam have to do with giraffes, elephants and beautiful actresses?  Have you figured it out? (By the way, would you agree the photographer who took Adam's senior pictures was a visionary? I mean, how could he have known this photo would have fit this little post perfectly? Genius.)
OK, so here it is. Here's the big announcement...

My sweet firstborn baby, who can't possibly be old enough to venture out on his own, will be venturing far across the world, to serve a volunteer mission for our church in South Africa!

That's right - SOUTH AFRICA!!

He will be flying out of the Flagstaff airport on August 30 and will arrive in Johannesburg on September 1, where he'll live for 2 years. We're beginning the passport application process and the rounds of immunizations, and burning up Google with queries about food, tourist locales, cultural icons and the geographic distribution of political unrest (which is far from where Adam will be, thank heavens.)

As you can imagine, we're in the midst of digesting the whole shebang, figuring out whether there's any chance Charlize Theron will visit her home country during the time that Adam's there and the attendant odds that Adam and his companion just might happen to run into her, and anticipating Adam coming home with that really cool South African accent.

OK, now I have to go research thick-seated suit pants that won't wear out from riding thousands of miles on bicycles.

Love from the farm,
Teri

Sistah Friend

Most of you know that I'm part of a matched set.

My parents, who both came from large families, (Dad 1 of 12 Kentucky born; Mom, 1 of 7 kids raised in the logging, fishing and agriculture environs of Idaho) opted to have 2 kids. Just 2. Just me and Lynda, my sister, who is 19 months older than me.

Now that we're adults, everyone thinks I'm older because I have 4 kids and she has 1; and because my oldest is going on 20 and 6-foot-2, and her little one is 5 and almost up to your hip. Lynda is shamelessly exploitive of this misperception, by the way. She perpetuates it. She lies and says she is younger. She gloats. I hate when she gloats. And I'm at a loss to understand how, just because of my being an early achiever, a get-down-to-brass-tacks kinda gal who grew up, got married in college (good grief) and got straight to the kid producing, that somehow I'm being punished for my expeditiousness. Oh, well, she'll get hers. She'll be 55 when Ellie graduates from high school. Ha. Ha. Ha.

But, I've skipped ahead. Let me back up. My earliest memories are of Lynda and me growing up on the Lake Erie shore. Feeding stale popcorn to the seagulls in the winter. (She doesn't remember doing this.) Burying the dead fish that washed up on the shore. (She doesn't remember this either.) The neighbors riding by on their tandem bicycle with funny little elf shoes with curled up toes. (She also claims not to remember the elf shoes. I can't account for her dreadful memory. Must be age.) Playing in the woods across the street from our house, where I uttered my first cuss word (I was 6; it was the "d" word and she threatened to tell Mom, but promised she wouldn't if I would go wash my mouth out with soap. Oh, I ran for the house and shoved that big bar of soap in my mouth gratefully, gratefully praising Lynda's mercy for not telling on me.) Washing Dad's grey Nova in our swimsuits. Piling leaves and jumping in them. Walking to the candy store on Saturday mornings. Fighting over whose turn it was to turn off the light in our room at night. Fighting over whose turn it was to use the record player. Going to see Donny and Marie. Hating it when she made us watch the Mike Douglas Show. (I mean, really. Mike Douglas?! She was 8, not 80.)

Lynda and I began performing together at an early age. We choreographed back up dances to our friend who would impersonate Elvis. (While Elvis was still alive, mind you.) Oh, the choreography was divine, complete with springing from closets with fantastic foreword somersaults ending in energetic jumps with arms splayed, legs split high, then dropping to the floor and executing the oh, so graceful bicycle move. Picture it: we would prop our hips on our hands, elbows balancing us with our shoulders pressed to the floor and bicycling energetically while J.D. (aka Elvis), sang along to "Blue Suede Shoes." Then, we'd sway and spin expressively as we slowed it down for a rousing, sorrowful rendition of "In the Ghetto," which I couldn't help but sing along to, full-voiced, with J.D./Elvis, in spite of being a background singer/dancer. When you feel it, you just can't hold back.

Lyn and I had our big group productions, then we had the small skits that just the two of us would put on. At Easter one year, we donned our dance leotards and tights and cut out cardboard bunny ears to attach to our swimming caps, then we taped wads of cotton balls to our hineys. Actually, there were only enough cotton balls for one respectable bunny tail, so I was chosen to wear it. Which means the person immortalized in the cotton ball butt photo is yours truly. Kodak gold, that's what that is.

I don't remember what the content of the Easter skit was, but the costuming was fabulous. We would charge Mom and Dad a dime to enter our room to watch our productions, where we would serve watered down Kool Aid and stale crescent rolls leftover from dinner. Food they had bought, mind you. But it didn't matter. It was art, and art comes with a price.

At night, like every other American child, we'd sneak flashlights under our blankets and read after we'd been told to go to bed, then tremble in fear when we'd hear Dad coming down the hall, because he had had to call out to us to quit giggling one too many times and we knew we had it coming. Not that "it" was usually anything more than that awful, stern look Dad could give that I swear would make you think you were going to wet your pants.

He did try spanking us a few times over the years, but that didn't work out so well. Primarily because my response to fear is nervous laughter that sounds an awful lot like regular laughter, and that doesn't go over real well with a dad that's already good and mad. Poor Lynda. We'd hear Dad coming down the hall after already having warned us that a spanking was going to be the punishment for the umpty-ump times he'd told us to be quiet and go to sleep, and I'd start giggling. Lynda would plead with me to stop laughing because it was just going to make Dad madder, but I couldn't help myself. Even as he'd spank her, I'd be laughing. I'd bury my face in my pillow and try to stop the shaking while he made his way over to my bed to give me a swat or two, and I tried as hard as I could to keep him from knowing that I was laughing my head off.

Finally, it'd be over and Lynda would be looking at me with confusion and anger and betrayal, tears streaming down her face after Dad left the room, and I'd be helplessly shaking in my bed, having flipped over onto my back, and clamping both hands over my mouth working so hard to keep my gales of laughter silent until Dad was far enough back down the hall that he wouldn't hear me. Oh, Lynda wanted to kill me.

That wasn't the only time I laughed inappropriately when Lynda was in distress. The last time I remember doing it at a really inappropriate moment, there were far more witnesses and it wasn't Lynda staring at me like I was nuts. She would have, I'm sure, but couldn't because she was unconscious. See, a whole group of friends and our church youth group had gone to Snowflake to the roller rink to do that rollerskating/ dance thing that was all the rage in the mid-80s. There was a fast song and a big group of kids linked hands and had one of those long snakes going, and Lynda was at the tail end. Well, that snake came whipping around one end of the rink and somehow Lynda broke free, but the velocity was so great that she found herself rolling out of control towards a bank of video games lining the rink and there was nothing to stop her from crashing headlong into those games and slamming to the floor unconscious. I, who wasn't part of the snake, came skating up just as she bounced back off the big black video game and was horrified as I heard her head smack the concrete rink; so of course, I did what any horrified sister would do in such a situation.

I began laughing uncontrollably.

And the friends standing in a circle around Lynda, and those kneeling next to her, cradling her head, trying to bring her around, all looked over at me with the same look of incredulity and disgust -- the very expression that every 12-year-old girl hopes to elicit from a group of 15 or so older kids that she had been desperately trying to impress roughly 24 hours of every day of every week prior to this night. It was my shining moment. (Lynda was fine, by the way. Probably had a mild concussion, but since no grown up witnessed the fall, Lynda and the rest of us weren't willing to let a little thing like a possible brain injury cut the night short.)

I can't explain why I always laughed at inappropriate times and I felt so bad that it caused Lynda so much consternation, but I couldn't help it. Unfortunately, I still can't. I am mortified when something serious is going on and I get a fit of giggles. What is that? And why on earth have I not been able to master it, yet?? I heard a spunky 70-year-old woman admit in church this morning that she still had some growing up to do; oh, I'm right there with you, sistah.

Lynda and I were each other's built-in friends when we moved from Ohio to Arizona the year or so after Elvis and our Grandpa Fraley died. We had each other, so it kept worry about whether we'd make friends in our new life a less anxious prospect than it might otherwise have been. We had many good years, exploring the Arizona high desert together.

Of course, eventually we became teenagers, so that meant we had to start resenting each other over boyfriends, intrusion on each other's time with friends, and other silly things that those gross early teen years amplify. We mostly left each other alone and led separate lives while getting along OK during high school, and that was fine.

My going off to college was a lot less anxiety-ridden than Lyn's experience because she'd already been there a year by the time I showed up, so she had the 411, which made my first year away from home a piece of cake.

At some point, I'll probably go into the amazing aunt she's been to my kiddos, the adventures we've had as adults and the great friendship we now share, still riddled with all of my bratty little sister tendencies that must annoy her to no end, but a great friendship all the same. But I'll go into that another time.

What I will say now, though, is that during times of trial, we pull together, and we become ever more attuned to one another. And, boy, am I attuned to her right now. Lately, I resist the urge to call her up constantly and text her constantly to see how she's doing or regale her with some stupid anecdote. (Oh, Lyn, trust me, I've been exercising restraint. It could be so much worse.)

I'm especially attuned to her right now because we'll be heading to the Valley with Mom in 2 weeks for a little shopping, dining and surgery to remove Lynda's cancerous thyroid.

Frankly, we weren't all that surprised to find out Lyn has cancer. We all knew something was going on, and it had been taking awhile to figure it out, but we all 3 knew that Lyn needed to keep at it until we got to the bottom of her illnesses. Mom rather prophetically pronounced in January that she felt like this was going to be an important year for our family, and we all felt she was right. We didn't feel like it was going to be tragic, just important. Now we understand why.

It's reassuring that collectively, the 3 of us feel peaceful about the whole thing, like everything is going to be just fine. We're hearing a lot of "If you gotta have cancer, thyroid's the one to have...." and have talked with so many thyroid cancer survivors and friends and families of thyroid cancer survivors, that our peace feels well founded.

But I'm also feeling fiercely protective of Lyn through the whole thing - I am grateful for the peace, I know she'll be OK, but it doesn't alter the fact that the disease has already made her feel lousy, she's still going to be going through surgery and radiation, and as good as we feel about it, I don't expect we'll breathe completely freely until we're on the other side of this and get the "no evidence of disease" pronouncement.

I am so grateful, though, for a Heavenly Father who grants peace. And grants sisterly relationships, which means Lyn can say things like, "Hey, you HAVE to go out to the car and get that book for me...I have cancer," or, "Pleeeeeeeeeeeeze will you go get me a soda? I have cancer." And I can say things like, "Hey, if you die, can I have your jewelry?" only because I know she's going to be just fine. Well, actually, knowing us, we'd be saying these inappropriate things even if we knew one of us had one foot in the grave. (Just not in front of Dad, because I bet after 35 years, he could still muster "the look" if he had to.)

The thing is, Lyn's not crying in fear, and I'm not giggling nervously, so I'm sure we'll get through this threatening little episode just fine. But you can bet, during that 3 days that she's glowing from the radiation pill she'll be taking, we'll both be filing away all of the terribly inappropriate jokes we can muster to share as soon as it's safe to be in the same room together.

Who am I kidding? We'll be hollering them through the door while she's quarantined.

We're sisters. That's just how we roll.

Love from the farm,
Teri

When It All Stops

I was cleaning out my Inbox tonight because every time I opened it, it screamed that it was full to bursting. I stumbled upon this email to and from a friend, and realized I'd forgotten all about it.

Sort of. Because the stuff I wrote in that old email is etched into my sinews and scratched into my bones, so even if it's not on my mind, it's in me.

Everything is so good with our youngest son Tanner right now. He's holding his own with his kidney disease. And I love living in the moment of well being. That's why, right now, when I'm feeling safe and happy and full of hope, might be the best time to share this.

Since this was written (and settle in, it's a long read....) we've dodged chemo, blessedly turned around a long relapse, and have brought all Tan's important readings into the "normal" range. I love normal. It's a lovely juxtaposition against the alternative.

You think you're OK...and in the thick of the bad times, we really are lifted up so we can be OK...but sometimes everything stops and things we didn't even know were there come spilling out. I actually drafted the below a couple of years ago, but only shared it with my friend last Spring, at a time when I had ground to a halt and couldn't function, though I was trying to keep that to myself, as well. As I said to her in my email, "I think of nothing for hours. I feel bereft of spirit....In short, I'm not myself. And the me that's left behind is no one I know."

Referring to the post below, I said, "Finding out that when I think I'm thinking of one thing, but I'm really filled to the brim with stuff like this, it's no wonder that everything is getting stymied and that I'm just not able to connect anywhere."

Here's the post that was never posted.... (Remember, all is good and happy now. Sometimes, having a chronically ill child just gets rough.)

NO TV? Not a Problem (draft)

When I sat down to write this little ditty the other day, I wrote the headline first. Because that's what this post was supposed to be about. I was going to write - humorously, I hoped - about how when we got home from a hospital stay with Tanner, after a long month of running around the state trying to figure out what was wrong with him, we found the cable had been disconnected because I forgot to pay the bill.

That was August 2008 and we decided, hey, let's try not having TV awhile. It's been OK; we haven't missed it TOO often. Then, I turned on Fox 10 News this morning at my Mom's while trying to write for a client, and after hearing the anchors (both male and female) tease a segment on the proper way to pluck your eyebrows no less than 6 times in the hour prior to the segment actually running, I decided that I really didn't miss TV. So, I tuned the TV to a music station and sat back down to my writing assignment.

That was it. That is what I intended to write about, dressed up with all sorts of witticisms and no-TV kid anecdotes, of course.

So, I wrote my headline and started writing what I thought would be that post. This is what came out instead. I guess this must have been waiting around back there in the nooks and crannies of my mind, waiting to be heard. As it unfolded, and I realized there was no way to bring this back around to my intended topic, I decided to just give in. So here it goes. While you read this, know that all is really well. Tanner's doing great. I even ran into his teacher the other day at lunchtime and she told me he'd had 3 points taken away so far that day for chit-chatting. We were both delighted, then I was obliged to tell her to tell him that his mom said to quit talking. She laughed and said she would, then we both agreed again that it felt good to have him feeling good enough to misbehave in class.

So, he's fine. I'm fine. But stuff like this is still sunk into the fibre of my being, as I'm sure it is in Tanner's. And Mike's. And Adam's. And my Mom's and Dad's. And my sister's. And the girls'. And Mike's mom. And all who love Tan and us. Memories are a tricky thing. They can hijack your heart for a little while. I've learned to let them roll over me rather than fighting them, and then move on. Letting a remembrance wash over me unencumbered by trying to stifle it somehow allows the joy to edge back in a little sooner.

All that said, here's how I approached writing about not missing TV. Imagine my surprise:

After we'd spent a month going from doctor to doctor, putting Tanner through test after test; watched him wasting away before our eyes, too weak to sit up or hold his head up, or even talk much of the time, we spent 10 days in the hospital in Flagstaff. Specialists in the Valley were consulted; a pediatric gastroenterologist from Phoenix Children's Hospital visited, tested, probed painfully, and pronounced that the tests on Tanner's internal systems showed he had endured an unidentified traumatic illness, but there was evidence of initial healing in his colon. Finally, after he'd been on IV nutrition for 7 days, and had been able to hold down liquid without throwing up or being thrown into prolonged bouts of desperately clenched, fetal-position agony, we were allowed to take him home. He was skeletal. He'd been one month without a meal.

The last few days in the hospital, they finally allowed us to let him try Saltine crackers. He couldn't tolerate them at first. The above-described, so-hard-to-watch agony would ensue. As the days went on, however, he could finally nibble a half a cracker without pain. Then, the day before he went home, he WANTED the crackers. And, after coaxing and pleading with him to try to eat during the past month, I had to hold back.

We were allowed to feed him one cracker, wait for 45 minutes to see if he reacted, then give him another one. It was horribly ironic that after all this time, watching him grow weaker and sicker and quieter, when he couldn't tolerate food or drink, that now I had to firmly deny him when he would beg me for another cracker during the waiting period; pleading because he was so hungry. And I had to deny him. After about 6 hours of this, when it was evident that he actually was finally able to tolerate food in his digestive system, we were allowed to let him eat the crackers as he wanted them. He was in heaven.

It was a hard 6 hours. It was a hard month. It had been a hard summer, and it became a hard fall. We returned from the Flagstaff hospital sometime in August, but Tanner was never quite well. Then November came and we finally got a diagnosis after a tense ambulance ride to the Valley from Flagstaff, when Tanner showed symptoms of an often fatal condition. While the ride was taut with the strain of the unknown, there had been a blessing given in the examination room of the pediatrician's office that promised peace and calm, and the promise was granted; so Tan and I were no longer fearful, just intent. Part of the strain for me came from Tan and I being engaged in something so big and dangerous, and Mike being home asleep after a long night's work, completely unaware of the dramatic scene unfolding with our youngest son. I felt somehow guilty that he, who is so in love with his kids, should be oblivious to the severity of the situation. Knowing Mike sleeps like a log, and wouldn't be roused by the phone, I called a friend who lives down the road and asked her to please go to the house, to go into our bedroom and wake Mike and tell him what was going on. I knew that was an awkward thing to ask someone to do, but I couldn't stand him not knowing. It wasn't fair that he might wake hours later to find he'd missed something so important.

Not long after that request of my friend, I got the groggy, confused call from Mike as he struggled to climb out of the deep furrows of sleep and comprehend the gravity of what I was sharing with him. How do you get pulled from sleep to hear the words, "They told us that the fact that Tanner is still with us is a very good sign. Usually, if someone is going to die from this, it will happen in the first 24 to 48 hours of onset."

Onset. A word that would come to figure boldly in our lives.

While Tan didn't have the dire disease they initially thought, he was experiencing a pretty severe relapse of another kidney disease that had gone undiagnosed. It turns our that the onset of this condition that would turn all of our lives, but especially Tanner's, on edge, was a key to how he would fare in the long run. The onset, though we didn't know it at the time, had been a scary, sudden bout of crippling arthritis just a few weeks after school let out for summer. The severe arthritis landed him on crutches for a week, then went away.

The 1st relapse, we now learned, had been the long month of desperate pain described above. The copious amounts of bleeding and protein spilling (another phrase that now plays a leading role in our lives) that put Tanner in the ambulance was another flare. The relapses in a relatively short period of time with such a dramatic onset of severe symptoms put Tanner outside of the group of patients with his condition that experience a relatively benign (albeit painful) and limited duration of the disease. Tanner's brand of onset means lifelong care under a kidney specialist.

His onset means he will likely have continued relapses, times when his kidneys are at great risk of failing. Days when we'll diligently monitor his blood pressure, his protein output, the amount of blood in his urine, whether he's swelling, whether he's nauseated or vomiting. If 5 days go by and the tricky symptoms abate, then we can go back to normal. If he goes longer than 5 days, then it's increased treatments with toxic meds and perhaps more serious medical interventions.

Those toxic meds. They keep kidney patients off dialysis, which most would agree is a pretty unpleasant life condition. So, we're grateful for these risky meds. Still, it's a little bit anxiety producing each month when we have his blood drawn to check his kidney function, yes; but also to check how his bone marrow is faring. See, the immunosuppressive drugs he's on include anti-rejection medication - the same that people who have already had an organ or bone marrow transplant take. Only Tan takes it at about 6 times the dosage of many transplant patients. And one of the more serious risks involved with this medication is that it can cause bone marrow to fail. So, monthly, we check those all-important platelet counts and other markers to make sure the treatment for his kidneys isn't the trigger of other threatening illnesses.

We wish Tanner's disease had been milder - both to have spared him many harrowing experiences and because it might have pointed to an easier future path for Tan. But, we've had lots of blessings along the way. With such a severe onset, his kidney doctor expected to find signs of great damage to important systems in Tanner's kidneys; a biopsy revealed surprisingly little damage. Also, in spite of tough relapses in the past year, Tan's kidneys right themselves and don't show signs of additional scarring or loss of function. That's a tremendous and unexpected blessing. And, during our last visit, the doctor spoke of real reason to hope that we might not have to go down that path to dialysis and transplant that his onset could have otherwise set him up for. That's a tremendous blessing, too.

And speaking of blessings, there have been literal blessings given to Tanner in critical moments by holders of the priesthood, which promised peace. And one blessing even said the time would come that Tanner would put this behind him.

Can your heart gasp? It feels, every time I think of those words, that my heart actually gasps as I wonder, "Did that mean that the acute illness he was experiencing at that moment would be put behind him?" (It was.) Or, "Does it mean that ALL of this will be left behind at some point?"

I don't know the answer to that. I know what I hope. I feel like I don't dare utter the words or some pinched little creature will take my hope and rip it and stomp on it and grind it into dust. But, oh, what I hope.

Do these musings belabour me every day? Absolutely not. I'm getting good at living in the moment, at least in this regard, and appreciating - even expecting - every good day. Am I surprised when these musings tumble forth in the most unexpected moments - when I'm pondering the ridiculousness of a news segment about eyebrow plucking, for instance?

Yes, sometimes the intensity of memories and wonderings shock me. But, I have learned that while we are not lifted out of these trials - as much as we might wish to be - we are never left alone as we work our way through them. And that is a gift.

I don't know what the rest of this journey will be like. I don't know what Tanner or we will be called to endure. I don't know if one day it will be a memory of the trial before the blessing of healing, or a lifetime of appreciating every blessing that guides us through the difficulties. I know the experiences have changed us in ways we may not yet understand. I pray that someday Tanner will look back on a long, healthy, strong life and use this experience to bless others. To give hope to others who may need it. To say, "I overcame this. So can you."

I hope. I pray. And, then I get back to work. Which, now that all of that has tumbled out and quit taking up space, maybe I can do.

Love from the farm,
Teri