Photo Show: Seattle

J and I had the opportunity to spend a night sans kid in a five star hotel, for pretty much free. That doesn't happen too often! I'd like to say I slept 10 hours in a row, but I didn't. I still didn't get any sleep, but not for the reason you may be thinking. J slept 10 hours solid like no one's business. I am just a hopeless insomniac.

We did have a great dinner and I had the chance to break out the long lens. That thing is awesome. Please enjoy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Shelly's 40th Birthday

I found on Facebook out that today is Shelly Baker Butler's 40th birthday. I met Shelly 10 years ago when I hired her to write for a website I was producing. She was beautiful, young, talented, funny, gracious and about to get married. We only worked together for a short while, and then she moved on to a full time job writing for REI.

Thanks to Facebook, I connected with her again a few years ago. I enjoyed seeing photos of her beautiful family on camping trips or family reunions. They looked so happy and together. I didn't communicate with her much, but I admired her from afar, and felt like I still knew her, at least in the fabricated way that Facebook leads you to believe.

I didn't remember seeing her post for awhile, so around December or so, I looked her up to see what she'd been up to. I was shocked to discover, through posts on her page, that she had been struggling with colon cancer, and had lost her fight. She had died just a few days before. She was only 39. She had two little kids, the oldest one was only six.

This news hit me extremely hard. I did a little bit of internet sleuthing and discovered that she had been keeping a blog about her experience with cancer. I read a few of the entries, my heart breaking a little bit with each one. I finally stopped reading when I came to the one where she was telling her daughter that she couldn't play with her before school because she had to go to chemo. I couldn't even formulate words to describe how sad I was to try and imagine what she had gone through, what her babies had gone through, and how her husband is feeling.

How can this kind of thing happen? How can a young, healthy, vibrant woman leave the world when she had two kids who still needed her so much? How do you reconcile your last days in this kind of situation? What happens now? I barely knew Shelly, but I am kind of beside myself with grief that this is possible.

Facebook can be a good thing. It can make you feel like you are still in touch with people and connected to the world. It just gets a little weird when people leave this world, and those traces of them are still here. It could be healing, I guess, in a way, to pay tribute to her life. I didn't know her or her people well enough to be comfortable leaving a message, but today I am reminded that Shelly was here, that she meant so much to so many people. She would have been 40 today. It seems to me that she deserved a lot more time than that.

Not Ready

A loves to look through her baby photos these days. She's got some sense of her growing body now, and some understanding that she used to be a little baby. When she sees photos of herself as a baby, she says really adorable things, like:

Ohhhh, look at how cute I was!

or

Look, Daddy is holding me. He loved me so much when I was a baby.

I have been a huge fan of family photos since I was tiny, too, and I'm so happy to share this lineage with her. I'm also setting her up with an amazing album that she will be able to enjoy as she grows. I have them organized by each month of her life. Photography and album organization is my main hobby these days, and just about the only thing I have extra energy for.

Last night she wanted to look through the Five Months Old folder. When she was five months old, she was just starting to taste solid food, she was sitting up, and she just had a dusting of hair. Her big blue eyes were very expressive. She was small for her age, because of her heart condition, I think. She was just creeping up on 12 pounds.

This was also the month she had open heart surgery.

I did take some photos of her right out of surgery, for documentation more than anything else. There are a few photos of her as she was recovering in the hospital and some of her stitches. There are even a couple of photos of her dad and I with the shocked expression on our faces as we left our baby with the anesthesiologists. I shudder to recall this experience at all. Even though my daughter is fine now, I'm still traumatized by it. The scars are on her body, but I carry my own unseen wounds.

Many parents in this situation will post these kinds of photos for awareness, or for other reasons, but I feel extremely private about it. I don't even like these images in my own mind, and I certainly don't want to share them with the world. I don't even really want to share them with my daughter.

She doesn't even know she has a heart defect. She doesn't know that her chest looks different from other kids. She's not aware of her scars or of how traumatizing this experience was. Maybe deep in her tissues, she does, but she will never remember it consciously. I don't want to keep her from her own history, but I'm just not prepared to explain it to her. I don't know how she would contextualize those pretty harsh photos. I don't know what kinds of things seeing them would plant in her impressionable mind. Someday I will share them with her if she wants to see it, but not just yet.

I don't want to set her up for life believing she's different, or compromised, or not as strong as her peers. I want her to use her experiences as strengths and never be bogged down by her limitations, especially emotionally. I want her to be informed, and therefore armed, for all the challenges she will meet in her life.

I'm just not sure that sharing these photos with her at three years old will accomplish that. I'm 100% for full disclosure, but to do that I need to be ready, and she needs to be able to understand. We have a little ways to go. I am keeping those photos in that folder, but for now, they're tucked away in a subfolder called Surgery. If she happens to be wandering through and I'm not looking, she at least won't accidentally stumble upon something that she, or I, can't handle.