i am a butterfly…

Archive for the ‘Thicker Than Water’ Category

I decided I wanted to go to Mercado 28 one morning so we all piled onto the bus and headed downtown. These photos were taken at a little place we stopped in for lunch when I saw the giant sign that said “carnitas.” On a day like that one, sitting in the stifling, airless heat, the custom of having a siesta every day is entirely understandable. We were all like heavy-lidded lizards, barely able to move.

Several of my clients’ Web sites were supposed to be moved to a new server Saturday night. The server they were on kept crashing, and my host’s tech support thought it might be because of a particular very high-volume site they shared my sites shared the server with. So the idea was to move the sites to a new server and see what happened. Most of the sites in question had dynamic IPs and moving them would result in just a few minutes of downtime, but one has a static IP and moving that one was going to result in several hours of downtime. That was why Saturday late night was selected for the move.

Sunday morning, I got up and everything was running along swimmingly. All the sites were up and running and there were no problems at all that needed fixing. I know enough about technology to be suspicious of such a miracle, but I shoved that deep down and tried to pretend it was all good.

As it turns out, the reason the sites were all running along swimmingly was that the switch didn’t happen Saturday night. It happened last night. And when I got up this morning, one site was not running along swimmingly at all. It had a zillion things wrong that needed fixing. However, I took it all in stride and with the support of a simply outstanding tech support guy, we got everything fixed and working and it was good. Seriously, I can’t say enough good things about Nate, who dealt with all of this mishegas and was patient and thorough and a pleasure to work with.

Then, I got email from a client whose site had nothing to do with this mess saying her customers were getting weird security errors on her site when trying to checkout. It turned out that the shared SSL certificate her site used had expired, so I notified my hosting company and asked them to renew it. The reply I got back – not from the aforementioned Nate, I should say – said, in not quite so many words:

“Oh, yeah. We broke your sites 4 days ago without warning, but we’ll be glad to let you pay us for the privilege of getting them working again.”

They decided to discontinue shared SSL, you see, and so they let the shared SSL certificate expire. This would have all been well and good. I’ve no problem with talking this particular client into her own SSL certificate. She’s been in business for a long time and it’s a good step for her. The problem is, they did this with no warning whatsoever. Instead of telling me with 6 or 3 or even 1 month notice, they told me 4 days after the fact when I found out the site was broken.

And now it’s going to stay broken until we can get a the site owner her own SSL certificate, which can take a few days with all the paperwork involved. And not only will her checkout process be broken in that time, but guess who’s going to eat the cost of the first year for the certificate? Yeah. Me. Because I give my clients better customer service than my host is currently giving me.

As I’m dealing with this mess, stressing out that this is going to take a few days of dealing with to get straightened out and knowing that I’m not going to be in my office for the next two days as we spend 12 hours on the road to and from Pittsburgh to see my sick mother-in-law, Scott calls to tell me that his mother has been re-intubated and put into a medically-induced coma, because she couldn’t breathe on her own anymore. The coma is because she kept fighting the tube – and really, who can blame her? – so they had to knock her out so she wouldn’t pull it out. The result of this is that when we got there tomorrow, she wouldn’t even know we were there.

The doctors say they can leave her intubated for 4 more days. Her living will says she doesn’t want to go on like that, so on Friday they take out the tube and see if she can breathe on her own.  This left Scott, and me, in a wash of confusion, trying to figure out what the hell we should do. Do we still go to Pittsburgh tomorrow and have her not know we’re even there, then have her wake up Friday after we’re gone and say, “Where’s Scott?” Or worse, have hew not wake up on Friday and have Scott not be there?

In the end, we decided to postpone the trip until Friday morning. This way, whatever happens, Scott will be there when they pull out the tube. He sounded a lot more peaceful after that decision was made, so I know it’s the right one.

Today has been the most godsawful day from the moment I opened my eyes, going from bad to much worse. Grown up stuff really sucks.

Marley: …and she was a witch!
Me, interrupting: What’s wrong with being a witch?
Marley: …
Me: I’m a witch, religiously speaking.
Miles, excitedly: Are you a Pagan??!?!
Me: I am.

And just like that, I was Cool Aunt Kim. And I stayed Cool Aunt Kim until Marley asked who was my favorite Jonas Brother, which is when I had to confess that I not only don’t have a favorite, but I don’t even know any of their names. Cool Aunt Kim was suddenly no more.

Kids. So fickle.

Last Wednesday, I turned forty. I’ve been vascillating between having a hard time with that and being okay with it, and mostly I’m falling on the side of being okay with it. While my life isn’t where I thought it would be when I hit 40 – the infertility thing rears its head in everything – I’m still pretty happy with my life in general. I have an incredible husband, great friends, and a family that loves me. I have a comfortable, if messy and rented, home in a place I love to live. I don’t really want for anything material. All things considered, I’m doing pretty well.

To celebrate, I told my mother months ago that what she could get me for this birthday was plane tickets to spend the week with her and the rest of the family in Georgia. Since my birthday fell the day before Thanksgiving this year, it worked out perfectly that we would be there for the holiday, too. Those plane tickets were really all I wanted and expected, but she also planned a big birthday dinner with the whole family. Most of the immediate family lives in Georgia now, but my Aunt Melissa and her partner*, Dave, came up from Florida, too, which made it even more special.

Here we all are at the Japanese restaurant where we had dinner:

Don’t mind the weird look on my face. I was still befuddled by the funny hat and the crazy happy birthday drumming that happened right before this photo was taken.

From left to right:
back row: Alex’s girlfriend Beth, my brother Alex, Aunt Melissa, Dave, sister-in-law Michele, Scott, brother Kenny, nephew Miles
front row: my mom’s husband Denny, my mom, me, niece Marley

It’s not very often that we’re all together like this, so it was really great. Marley turned to me at one point, after having looked wide-eyed all around the table, and said, “I had no idea I had such a big family.” And not only are there a lot of us, but we’re loud. We laugh and shout and generally make a scene, but it’s a fun scene.

It was a pretty good way to spend a birthday.

* Partner may sound weird, but they’re too committed to just call him a boyfriend, so partner it is.

And this is mine:

This photo was taken a few years ago at my Great-Aunt Migs’ 75th birthday party, and represents the entire maternal side of my family. The only surviving person missing from this photo is my Great-Aunt Kate, who estranged herself from the family some years ago for reasons I don’t understand.

The back row, from the left: my mom’s husband Denny, me, my mom holding my cousin Darrin’s daughter (who’s name I don’t recall),  Aunt Migs holding my cousin Darrin’s son (who’s name I also don’t recall), Aunt Melissa, cousin Michael
The front row, from the left: Scott, my brother Alex (known around here as the Punk Ass Kid sometimes, even though he’ll be 26 in a month), cousin Denise, her husband Glen, cousin Darrin, his wife Dawn

We used to be a much more tightly knit family than we are these days. I know my mother speaks to Aunt Migs once in a while, but I really only speak to my immediate family. Denise and I were close as kids, but don’t talk at all now. It’s kind of sad, to have such a big extended family and not really be in touch with any of them.

Today I’m really grateful for my mother. When I called her after my doctor appointment last week and told her that the surgery date was set, she asked if I wanted her to come up for the surgery. I asked, “Do you want to come?” And she replied, “It’s up to you, but if you want your mommy there, you’ll have your mommy there.”

And yeah, I really do want my mommy there. Even at nearly 39 years old, when I’m sick or hurt, I still want my mother. So she’s coming up on the 16th and will stay with us that night, then stay in a hotel near the hospital for a couple of days.

I’m really glad she’s coming, and so is Scott, who remembers how her presence during my first surgery helped keep him sane while they sat for 7 hours and waited for news. Hopefully they won’t be sitting with no news for that long this time, but if they are, it’s nice to know they’ll have each other to help keep calm during that time.

And even nicer to know that she’ll be there when I wake up in recovery.

One of the things that drives me crazy is having family members whose interactions with me haven’t evolved from the time I was 13 years old. That was 25 years ago. I think I’ve grown just a little in that time.

And one way in which I’ve grown is that I’m fairly self-aware. I know my own mind and I know what I can handle emotionally and for my stress level. So if I say, for example, that I know I couldn’t handle the stress of being a foster parent while dealing with IVF cycling, you can really trust that I’m saying it because I know myself. If you press it and act as if you know better and keep insisting that I should just take a few days to think about it, you’re not only not helping me, but you’re harming our relationship. I’ll be less likely to discuss my feelings with you in the future and much more likely to shut down when you try to start talking about anything meaningful to me.

I know there are people out there who aren’t self-aware and don’t know their own strengths and/or limitations, but I’m not one of them. I spend plenty of time inside my own head and inside my own heart, examining my feelings and understanding myself. Do I have a perfect understanding? Of course not. Few people do, I imagine. But when it comes to this infertility stuff and things related to children and knowing what I can and can’t handle? Yeah, I’d say I have a pretty good handle on that. That’s not to say that what I can or can’t handle won’t change over time – 5 years ago, I said I’d never try IVF, for example – but those changes take place over years, not after a few days thought.

One thing that should make it apparent to people that Kim-at-38 and Kim-at-13 have little in common is that Kim-at-13 would have thrown a fit when confronted with someone telling her, in kinder words, that she didn’t know her own mind. Kim-at-38 resisted for a few minutes and then gave up. Instead of turning it into an argument, I just said, “Fine. I’ll think about it for a few days.”

I’ve written about this before, about how my family interacts with me expecting me to behave as I did when I was a kid. I just don’t get how they don’t see that my behavior has changed while their expectations have remained the same.

That link, by the way, may be a little intense reading. It’s not really the same as this one, but it’s kind of about the same topic, in a not about the same topic kind of way.

This rambling, all over the place, completely incoherent post brought to you by the letter F.