Notes to self.

I know that I am overly focused on moving.  I think about it, plan for it and look forward to it.  I am also fixated on Ella starting Kindergarten.  School is a big deal to me.  School supplies are already out in the stores (somewhere, my sister, the teacher, is appalled).  I want my girls to do well in school; I could care less if they play club soccer or ever dance in a recital.

I see all of these events as milestones.  Time markers.  The little guy in Pitfall (remember Atari?) jumping on the alligators’ heads.

I remember Stephen walking Ella into her first day of preschool.  And wishing that he would be alive to walk her down the aisle as well.  I remember, realistically, hoping for kindergarten.  We all know how that ended.

Tomorrow is another, overlooked, milestone.

I am taking the girls to University hospital to see the first of a string of specialists who are watching their NF-1 closely.  Stephen had NF.  It is a dominant genetic condition but his was a spontaneous mutation.  Nobody in his family has it.  Both of our girls do.  Ironically, Will didn’t.  Most of the time statistically, a complication like Stephen’s is rare.  Relatively.  Which is why, in part, that his cancer was incurable.  It is so rare that almost nobody knows what to do with it.  I am convinced that if our insurance would have covered doctors at Mayo, he might have had more time.  Or not.  I am not convinced of much at all.

I should have taken them a year ago.  It’s been a while since they’ve been assessed.  Well, Amelia never has been officially diagnosed but she has all the markers.  I couldn’t do it.  I couldn’t make the call.  I didn’t want to talk to the medical community that had already failed my family.

I get angry when I see pharmaceutical commercials for something as dumb as a drug to make you have thicker eyelashes.  Really?  Is this what we’re spending our money on?

Another overlooked milestone is realizing, just today I think, that I am not alone.  I have found in the span of a few weeks at least 10 other families affected by the death of a spouse.  Other mamas that are getting up every day just like I do.  Daddies who are doing remarkably well considering that society casts most fathers as bumbling at best and completely absent and incompetent at worst.  It is the daddy of the little girl that touches my heart the most.

I am not alone.  That’s big.  For me.

I could have looked sooner.  I knew they were out there.  I have always known that there is no way that I’m alone in this. 

It’s like the moving thing.  And the hospital thing for the girls.  The time was right and I didn’t know it.  I just did it.  I am doing it.

And I’m not alone.  My girls…they aren’t alone either.