Welcome home, Elinore Irene. My beautiful granddaughter was born at 8:24 AM on May 10. She weighed in at a precise 6 lbs and measured exactly 18″ tall. She is an incredible being of light and love and joy (as are all babies, of course). She is also a magickal symbol of life and hope and healing.
She is healthy and whole and happy as are her parents and grandparents. She is also a breastfeeding pro and cuddlebug extraordinaire!
On a separate but related note, Thornie is coming a bit back to herself since this happy event. I plan to be around here a bit more often. I have a new (to me) truck and some plans and movement in the works that I’ll be posting. Say hi if you’re still around, oh bloggy buddies!
Peace, out!

Remember that movie?  With Robin Williams.  Man, that movie kicked my emotional ass.  It came out within a year or so of my Jerry’s passing.  My Soulmale; my husband.  Well, anyway.  Last night and early this morning was a time like that.

I couldn’t sleep, but I was emotionally fine.  Bloghopping and playing computer games while watching Gorilla’s in the Mist (another great movie!).  Before I knew it, it was 3 AM and I knew if I didn’t get a lil sleep I’d be fucked today.  So, wide awake, I whined a lil as I shut down my Mac, turned the light off and tried to get comfy for sleep.

Bam!

It was like a light switch turned on in my head!  All of a sudden it was as if every one of the recent horrible moments of my life began playing like a video loop in my head.  I saw myself at the Integratron the moment my daughter called and told me our Lil Pharoah had stopped breathing… felt myself driving 120 miles an hour over a winding desert highway, with my mouth so dry I felt like I was choking on dust and a knot in my stomach that felt like ten tons of radioactive waste.

Flash forward to my baby… my precious daughter on her knees retching and dry heaving and crying and screaming “Noooo…. I want my son back.  Give him back to me”, while we knelt beside her, her husband and I stroking her hair and sobbing.

To his tiny cremains…

To my daughter’s beautiful face that now wears the shadow of this loss.

Fuck!  I was like, what the fuck is going on?  Where did this come from?  I struggled with my mind and heart, tried to divert myself with meditation, with to-do lists for today, with what I would make for dinner, the next blog post I would write…

It was no good.  My head just kept playing those awful tapes, along with a couple more that are too awful to even write.  Playing them over and over and over.

This used to happen to me after Jerry died, too.  But somehow last night, and my daughter’s pain, made it so much worse.

The last time I looked at the clock it was about 4:30, so I finally went to sleep.  I awakened this morning around 9AM, with echoes of the nights visions, but they were distant and foggy; much more like the memories of those awful days that I have been accustomed to living with.

At 10AM my daughter called me on her break.  “Mom, me n A. had a hella night!” she said. “We went to bed early but we tossed and turned, both of us, all night.  When we woke up this morning we both felt like we hadn’t slept at all- like we’d had bad dreams all night but couldn’t remember them”.

I’m so fucking grateful that they couldn’t remember them.

Or: A New Grandmother’s Musings

Thorne’s world is soooo tiny today, and so big all at the same time. I seem to have (like Billy Pilgrim, or was it Kilgore Trout?) come unstuck in time. I look at the picture I posted of my baby, my Fawn – with her baby, and I see a young Thorne with her new daughter some 28 years ago. Fawn tells me of her feelings, her experiences in post operative healing and new motherness and suddenly I am awash in the memory of those very feelings. I sit here this morning, naked blogging with coffee as I am wont to do, and out of nowhere (and apropos of nothing obvious) the scent of fresh, clean menstrual blood fills my nostrils, and my long non menstrual uterus contracts with a remembered ache.

Songs chase each other through my mind. This morning it’s the theme from Disney’s Lion King, performed by Elton John (corny, I know; but there it is), followed by the recurring Garth Brooks melody
The Change

Every time I look at that precious baby, at our Bishop, our little prince, I can’t help but think of this world and what his legacy might be. It’s strange how indubitably a new life will lead the mind and heart toward hope and joy and potential and possibility. For a moment all fear and despair is banished. For a moment all I can feel is joy that this little man has a whole life ahead of him. All the beauty and joy inherent in the simple act of living. Of being. Of sunlight and moonlight, of the scent of growing things, the texture of a loving hand on his new skin, of a soft breeze, of rain to come and visions of sparkling snow and raging stormswept oceans…

Yes. Today Thorne’s world is small and huge. Filled with a tiny pinpoint of light at the center that is this new and precious life, and expanded to encompass all the beauty and wonder that each life can contain. “For all its sham and drudgery…” a line from Desiderata, maybe??

Oh, beauty. Oh, Gods and Goddesses and Love and Light. I am afloat today, on the seas of gratitude.

*edited # 1:47 AM on Thursday, April 26 to add the .MP3 player thanks to Betmo