Thank Yous

Wow. I am overcome with the kindness and love from you guys. That is one thing that has come out of this: really seeing that there are great people in the world who care about others. So, I am going to pretend I just won an award (which, apparently, involved throwing up all night last night) and thank some people.

First, I must thank my husband who was so mellow and loving and has been taking care of me throughout this whole thing. We brought his laptop to the hospital, and during all of the waiting we watched a rented DVD of "Bridesmaids." So, I also must thank the amazing women of that movie for keeping me distracted and laughing out loud when I could have been panicking.

I need to thank my mom for picking up my slack and sickness in the mom department for Romy. She is downstairs as we speak, probably trying on one of Romy's 700 costumes (this kid gets a new costume every single day, I swear. Hilarious side note: when shown this crazy expensive costume catalog that came in the mail, Romy chose the one she liked best. Mind you, the catalog was filled with fancy princesses and butterflies and all sorts of pretty costumes. Romy selected this one:

Makes me laugh every time.)

I also want to thank my friends who talked me through this, those who have had the same experience and those who just made me feel better.

This next thank you is one that was so pleasantly surprising, I tear up when I think about it. At the hospital yesterday, every single person was nice to me, particularly the nurse who had to put in the IV. That has never happened! (Although, the anesthesiologist was SO WEIRD and definitely inappropriate in a socially awkward way. After he asked why I was there, which is what they have to do, he then started complaining about his knee. Dude, I just told you I'm having a dead baby taken out of me. Then, he asked what movie we were watching, and when I told him "Bridesmaids," he was all, "Um, okay." As though I was supposed to be watching a sad, dead baby movie or something.)

And finally, I need to thank my friend, Tracy, who escorted me to Scarefest and kept my mind off of things, let me nap when I wanted to, ate when I wanted to, and allowed me to watch one and a half "Fast and Furious" movies.

Hopefully my blogging will resume with some normalcy, in both regularity and content. Thanks again for your kindness!

I'm a Mom, I'm an Author, and I'm Pissed

I've been writing this post in my head every night for a while now. It started out as very bitter, turned angry as hell, and now it's a combination of the two, with an added dash of relief and perspective.

So why did I stop blogging? For all two of you who noticed or asked? The first answer was that I was pregnant. Pregnant and nauseous and tired and trying to be a good mom to my daughter while I could barely keep my food in my stomach. That's the long-term answer.

But there's more. I also stopped blogging because I wasn't enjoying what I was finding on the interweb. Particularly having to do with YA literature, and most specifically my YA literature. As an author, I once found it fun to do a google search of my name and read reviews. However, there has been a rash of, how shall I say it, dumb as fuck, poorly written, useless reviews that I am forced to look at if I also want to happen across the good ones. I will not give you specific examples of actual reviews or reviewers because I have no interest in revisiting crap or wasting what little time I have on their negative bullshit, but I will rehash a few of the choice suggestions of these reviews. The first is the delightful notion that some reviewers have that they could write my books better than I could. I would have written the ending this way... Oh yeah? Fuck you. You would not. Because YOU ARE NOT ME. I write in my voice, my style, with my chosen words. You would never have written the book I wrote, so how do you suppose you have any right to write the ending the way you want to write it? Secondly, I love the all-encompassing I liked the book until [blah blah blah], but then you included a TERRIBLE MESSAGE FOR TEENAGERS so now your book sucks. Oh, because it's my job to write advice books for every single teenager who reads my novels? Because teenagers are so stupid that they can't possibly recognize characters, as, oh, I don't know, human beings with flaws? Also, as an author, it is riveting to sit around for months at a time writing books containing the smartest people in the world doing all the perfect things that real people do. I apologize that I screwed that bit up. Lastly, to reviewers who haphazardly write unhelpful (to writers and readers)shit about books, anyone's books, I have this to say: Go write your own fucking book. I'll wait. Don't worry. I'm sure all of your reviews will be glowing. It's a shame that I have no desire to read reviews of my books anymore because there are many thoughtful, well-written reviews, even ones with (constructive) criticism, by smart, creative, intelligent reviewers. Maybe I won't care so much at some point in the future, but unfortunately, all of my previous caring has made me stop caring at all.

Now for the final reason I haven't blogged: my pregnancy, at around nine weeks, ended. Well, it didn't quite end, but the baby stopped living. In fact, I just got back from my D&C at the hospital, and boy is my uterus tired! All is fine, or at least as fine as it can be when I count up the number of babies I've lost (three, if you're wondering). I am not bitter about that due to the fact that I have the most wonderful human being on Earth (and beyond) as my daughter, but it certainly does wear on a person. Not to mention I had to have, you know, surgery and all. Because the surgery went so well, and it is over, I don't have quite the rant that ran through my head night after night. I do, however, have a collection of ironies I must share. The first ironic bit: this past weekend, as a magical respite from my terrified brain, I traveled to Lexington, Kentucky to attend Scarefest with my best friend from high school, Tracy (of Get Well Soon fame). It struck me as a little humorous that here were all of these people dressed as the living dead, and here I was with, well, a dead baby inside of me (cue the hilarious cymbal smash). The second bit of irony: My insurance does not cover maternity, but I applied for and received an Illinois government program to help with the birth costs. The card arrived after the baby was no longer alive, and for some reason the card was on my kitchen floor. My daughter, who had her first bout of stomach flu yesterday, projectile vomited (in a delightful spray of orange) all over that insurance card. Which was perfectly fine, since I won't be needing it anymore anyway. The final bit of irony, and, really, the scariest and funniest of them all, is this man dressed up at the Scarefest (standing next to Freddy Krueger):

Yes, I was terrorized by a giant baby all weekend. Oh, God, you are so fucking funny.

Maybe this post was too random. Maybe it was too brutally honest. But it's been a while since I've blogged. Perhaps I'm just a little rusty.