ALL HAIL EMILY RAPP

It was a typical spring night by most standards when I cozied up in bed with the March issue of Vogue magazine.  My thoughts:  Let me look at all the thin, perfect airbrushed people and the reems of advertising for clothes way outside my price range, yet somehow still enjoy it. Isn't that how all of us relax?  Oh, the conundrum.

No sooner had I read the Letter from the Editor and flipped through the first 30 pages of ads when my careless eyes engaged with- wait for it- something really, truly meaningful.  I mean DEEP, people.   Two paragraphs later, the emotional shit hit  the fan and I found myself sobbing.  Seriously, I've been reading Vogue on and off since I was 18, and never (all personal insecurity over waif models aside) has this magazine brought me to tears.

Enter Emily Rapp, an amazing writer with a connection to Austin and a recently deceased son who suffered from the neuro-degenerative disease Tay Sachs.  The excerpt from her memoir The Still Point of the Turning World still has me thinking months later.  I am both hopelessly drawn to this book and Emily's stark, brutal, and jaw-droppingly gorgeous prose, and totally afraid to fall down that rabbit hole.  Of course, deep down I know my respect for this woman's experience and her courage and fortitude to write about it will win out, so I'm putting it on my list for this fall (more on said-list soon) and hope you will too. 

Emily Rapp and her gorgeous son Ronan

Our experiences over the past three years with our daughter have brought us in contact with the most wonderful, most real, and most incredible of people and families.  Childhood illness is a reality, and though few people have the courage to face it, those who walk that path truly live in the holiest and most grace-filled of places, even in the midst of pain most can not and should not have to bear.  I loved this take on the book and all that it entails from Katie Roiphe in Slate.  It seemed very appropriate and spot on in terms of how isolating grief can be in general, and I've seen this again and again with those closest to me who have grieved the loss of children and siblings this past year:

PREGNANCY OVERLOAD

For some reason last week I got this sudden rush of total pregnancy overload.  Like-  it's f***ing 105 degrees outside and I don't want to do anything.  And chasing my toddler around and putting car seats in and out of cars with my 7 month belly is turning me into a real bitch.  And there's so much to do to try and downsize and re-organize before this baby comes, and I'm never happy with how our house looks in the transition.   And then we had a water leak, which took four days to fix so we only had water intermittently.  And then I got a zit.  Then, while trying to thin out and stay cool and be productive in spite of all this, I ran across some old photos from the time of our daughter's birth and I was like-

 

Awwwwwwwwww.  Tiny babies are the best.

 

Seriously, this is your brain on pregnancy hormones.  What the hell?

 

At any rate, while sorting through those photos I found this one, taken by one of my amazing photographer friends on film while I was laboring at home with our first before heading to the hospital.  

It was so surreal at the time, and I love this photo because it really captures that. You can hardly see my face, just my big old fuzzy belly and the baby inside that was steering the ship by that point and about to change my life forever. Becoming a mom really is so awesome, but such a gamechanger. I feel like this photo foreshadows in a real way the brutal reality that becoming a mother truly is an act of submission. An awesome one, and so worth it, and empowering as well, but there is a part of you that truly does recede in the shadows as life, contraction by contraction, takes over.

Another thing I find hilarious about this photo is if you look really hard, you can see in the lower right hand corner the top of my "Pregnancy for Dummies" book.   That is so how I roll-  "Oh crap!  I think I'm in labor.  Somebody look in the Pregnancy for Dummies book and explain to me how this is supposed to work out." 

Three years and seven months of new gestation later, I'm still waiting for a freaking answer.