My friend Deb called me last October.  I hadn’t seen her in about seven years.  Our 35^th high school reunion was coming up and she wondered if I’d want to go with her.  I was thrilled to hear her voice although I’d been hurt and confused during the past several years, wondering why she’d let our friendship wither.  I’d long considered her one of my closest friends, but calls and cards had gone unanswered for a few years before I’d stopped contacting her. 

Toughest to digest was that our friendship moved from the slow lane to the exit ramp when she was diagnosed with breast cancer at age forty-four.  I so wanted to support her through her treatments but she did not need me.  She had her husband, her sisters and other friends who lived closer.  I heard enough to know she’d survived, but her not needing or wanting my support forced me to realize our friendship had eroded more than I’d been willing to admit.  A few years later, my holiday card was returned with a red stamp of No Forwarding Address.  I took this as the final signal that I should let the relationship go.

The high school reunion was a blast.  Deb spent the weekend at my house.  We gabbed for hours.  She made no mention of her silence over the years and I’d decided beforehand that I would welcome her back, no questions asked.  I honestly don’t think the years of silence were anything personal – probably more to do with living one-hundred miles away, raising two teenagers and finding time with a husband who worked long hours.  I can’t say I felt no resentment but mostly I was glad to have her back.

And she is back.  She initiated my family’s spending a weekend at her home.  We’ve met for lunch.  She sent me a lovely bouquet of pink roses when I hit a tough patch at work along with a card saying how happy she is that we’re back in touch.

She also asked me to join her this July in the Avon Walk for Breast Cancer.  We’ll trek twenty-six miles in San Francisco over two days.  We met for a twelve-mile training walk last week.  We exchanged fundraising tips, sock recommendations and organic snacks.  I’ll be there for her on July 11^th and 12^th.    We’ll walk together to honor her ten years as a breast cancer survivor and our thirty-eight years of friendship.

By Marianne Lonsdale

Labels: Avon Walk for Breast Cancer, breast cancer, Breast Cancer Survivor, By Marianne Lonsdale, close friends, high school reunion, lost friendship, reunited, San Francisco, survived

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I want something. Something good. And important. For Children.

It costs $200 million dollars.

Impossible, right?

The Buddha said, "Love each person as if they were your own child.”

What if each mom reading this believed that the amount of juicy, unwavering love they feel for their child could in fact translate into a focused laser of goodwill that facilitated a miracle.

What would you want to see happen?

I want to see a children's hospital come into being.

There are three amazing pediatric hospitals in the Bay Area that have saved countless children's lives -- kids just like yours. Many kids have been transported here or their families brought them here from all over the world for help with conditions and diseases untold.

One of these hospitals is a training center for some of the most promising young surgeons and pediatric specialists in the world.

And that hospital is housed in an ancient, exhausted building in San Francisco. Parts of it look like a third-world structure.

There will be no improvements made. The rates of infection and cross-contamination are highly affected by crowding and sluggish ventilation.

A new hospital has been decided on, so no funding will improve what is already there.

Here's the hitch: No hospital will be built until at least $200 million dollars in private funding is accumulated. One young administrator told me, "I will be retired before they break ground on that hospital.”

Here is my wish, my hope that good conquers avarice and love for children creates miracles. San Francisco built a baseball stadium downtown against a few odds. Little big deal. Moveon.org got people to boot the administration's congressional minions. Bigger deal.

Maybe I can help. I don't know anyone very wealthy. But I am good at phone trees and writing and have lost a good deal of social inhibition. I am going to find out where the money could come from and what I can do to help. I am going to believe that what the Buddha asks of the world is possible, to varying degress, for all of us.

I'd like to hear what other moms wish for, against the odds or not.

Just imagining the combined love for our dear children makes me think we're unstoppable.

By Avvy Mar

Labels: Avvy Mar, Buddha, children's hospital, miracles, raising money, San Francisco

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For three years I’ve been petitioning the Department of Homeland Security for the return of my daughter Olivia’s sealed adoption file. First, with forms to Immigration in Los Angeles, then with letters to Immigration in San Francisco, and finally, with appeals to the behemoth keeper-of-all-records in Lee’s Summit, Missouri.

Access to that file is my right as a United States citizen, guaranteed under the Freedom of Information Act. Which doesn’t mean they make it easy.

Parents like us who adopt children from Guatemala are handed a sealed envelope at the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala City and instructed to surrender it sealed and intact at the first point of entry, which for us was L.A. The temptation is to steam the envelope open and make copies of everything in it: original photographs, birth certificates, foster care facts, birth mother information. But who would dare take that risk? It took almost two years to get our daughter home, and that only happened after I moved there for six months and learned enough Spanish to plead our case myself.

January 5, 2004, the day we touched ground with Olivia in our arms, was the day I started the paperwork to retrieve the file. My next-to-last communication with Homeland Security was dated January 9, 2007. The case had gone on for so long they wanted to know if we were still interested. Yes, I responded via fax, certified-mail, and telephone message left in the director’s office. Still emphatically interested.

Tuesday night I didn’t get out to the mailbox until 10 p.m. The children were finally asleep, and my husband was dozing over the newspaper at the kitchen table. I thought the file when it came would be another envelope. But with technology, everything’s on CD.

I ran downstairs and turned on my computer without even pausing to wake up my husband. They say knowledge is power, but right now it feels like a gift.

By Jessica O’Dwyer

Labels: birth mother, By Jessica O'Dwyer, Department of Homeland Security, Freedom of Information Act, Guatemala City, Los Angeles, Missouri, San Francisco, Spanish

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Yesterday, I saw an orange "Baby on Board" diamond dangling in a minivan. I remembered seeing lots of those signs in the eighties, but I thought "Baby on Board" had disappeared, like torn Flashdance clothing, excess black eyeliner and fluffy hair.

As a twenty-something, I thought the signs insinuated that I had some control as to whether I collided into the parents' car. "Oh no, they have a baby on board," I would tell my college friends as we drove to the I-Beam nightclub. "We'll have to rear-end someone else!"

Now, I can see the point of a baby on board sign. It is not a warning FOR others drivers, it is a warning TO other drivers. I'm ashamed to admit that I've held the wheel with my left hand as I reached back with my right hand to locate and then stuff a pacifier into my screaming infant son's mouth while driving sixty miles an hour.

While navigating the steep hills of San Francisco, I have inserted the “Lilo and Stitch” CD and read the cover to locate the "Hawaiian Roller Coaster Ride" track to sooth my irrational, but inconsolable, three-year old daughter. Driving across the Richmond Bridge, I've torn open a bag of Goldfish with my teeth, only momentarily taking my eyes off the road.

Now, my kids are six and eight, but they still affect my driving in a negative way. My son and daughter recently started arguing whether the Easter bunny is married like Santa Claus. After their disagreement escalated to punches, I had to arbitrate, while signaling to make a left turn off Sir Francis Drake Blvd.

Occasionally, on the way back from school, my children say titillating phrases like, "My knee bled all over the place today." or "Nobody is my friend anymore." I get to be a counselor at thirty mph.

Anyway, may be I should get one of those "Baby or Kid on Board" signs. Of course, I'll only hang up my diamond when cell phone users, tooth flossers and make-up artists display their own symbols as well.

By Beth Touchette

Labels: Baby on Board, Beth Touchette, cell phones, Easter bunny, eighties, Flashdance, Lilo and Stitch, San Francisco, Santa Claus

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I know my way around San Francisco's 450 Sutter, an art deco building that I frequently haunted in my drug-peddling days with Parke-Davis. On every floor you’ll find doctors’ offices stacked like building blocks, and a stream of patients with bad teeth, intestines, hearts, arteries, bad breath, poor eyesight, permanent acne.

In the dermatologist’s office I fill out a form for my son, Alex, who at six months has been afflicted a mosaic of skin problems -- baby acne, hives, heat rash, and cradle cap. I sit cross from two men, one stout and dark, the other tall and stiff, each menacing in their quiet way.

“Mr. Alexander Lovett,” the medical assistant announces, looking down at my baby. I’m embarrassed by the white flakes of cradle cap, the tender pink spot on his temple that he keeps rubbing every morning with his fists. How do I tell the lady that he’s really a congenial baby that I couldn’t have passed on any of my compulsive tendencies to my little cherub?

She just smiles and waves at Alex, and I proceed behind her down the hallway.

We sit in a sterile room where the only color is the kaleidoscope red and purple of the stroller, and the pink cheeks and oozing spot on my son’s head. The wait is mind numbing as Novocain when you’re afraid of the dentist’s drill.

When the doctor comes in, I meet his gaze and shake his spider-veined hands.

“He’s had four kind of rashes,” I say, “starting with hives, really bad. Now it’s this.” I point to my son’s forehead. “What do you…”

The venerable doctor cuts me off, “Now it’s not so bad.”

Except that my son’s head is festooned with patches like lily pads in a pond. “I know you’ve seen it all,” I say politely, but inside I’m crying out at the beast that has turned my young prince into a warty frog. “He had a terrible heat rash when we took him to Las Vegas to see my parents.”

“But he doesn’t have it now, does he? What’s to worry about?” The doctor gave a knowing smile, and turned around before I could “but” him back. As he walks out of the room, I realize that he’s the mad-scientist Billy Crystal character who has walked right out of “Princess Bride” with wooden clogs and a shock of white hair.

Somehow I’d become a moving shadow on his wall. After sixty years in practice his patients and their moms must have turned into streaming video, put on mute. I could jump up and down like an unwanted pop-up ad, and he would only come back with, “Bad skin, no problem!” Or, better yet, “No insurance, no service!”

When he hobbles back into the exam room, he leans over Alex in the stroller. Right away, my congenial son erupts into a wail.

“He doesn’t like doctors,” the old fellow chuckles.

Now I’m not so sure I like them, either. Certainly not the kind that pats you on the head when you’re recounting your firstborn’s troubles. In my early twenties, I knew that doctors were at the top of the totem pole, while we sales reps in our slick pantsuits -- who pestered them with freebies and questionable claims -- were at the bottom. With the dreaded dermatologist, it didn’t matter if I was a parent, patient or pesky salesperson; he was the esteemed doctor, no questions asked or allowed.

The doctor hands me a prescription, but I can’t make out his scribbles. I slink out of the office before my son can shed more cradle cap on that polished floor.

Flash forward six weeks. It turns out that the medicine prescribed by Dr. Dread has worked, although it’s so potent that I have to wash my hands of the steroid-containing stuff, or else they might lock me up with Barry Bonds. I haven’t told our pediatrician about this experience, but we’re grateful that he’s easygoing and respectful, the antithesis of the old-school dermatologist. Next time, though, I think I’ll try some aloe vera for my baby and, if I can muster it, a thicker layer of skin for mom.

By Li Miao Lovett

Labels: Barry Bonds, cradle cap, dermatologists, doctors, heat rash, Li Miao Lovett, San Francisco, steroid

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She still has all her teeth except for one. The gap occupies the upper corner of her mouth. It’s a dark space that can be easily missed if you weren’t looking closely for missing teeth, the way I am.

Her skin is good. There are no sores, no blemishes. She has the skin of a thirty year old, I have the skin of a fourty-three year old, but we are both thirty-nine.

How can she have such creamy skin and how can she look so young after everything she’s be through? I feel jealous and bewildered by her skin, then ashamed. Do I need to begrudge her this? This is the very least she is entitled to, good skin and youthful looks.

A few theories tick off in my mind; she has good skin because of her Greek heritage. Mediterranean’s are known for aging better than say, Celts.

Maybe it’s because I drink too much and she rarely does. She especially doesn’t like to drink when she is doing methamphetamine, which is often.

Perhaps it’s because I wake up every morning way before I am ready, answering the surprisingly well-articulated demands of my toddler who likes to rise at six a.m. or even earlier. Every morning, when I meet those demands, I feel that I am losing years of my life. Isn’t that what they say in Chinese medicine? That every child takes five years off your life?

She has another theory.

“It’s because I was dead, three times. I’ve stopped aging and that is why. Because I died three times last year, and was in a coma for twenty-eight days”

Now seems like a good time to ask her about what happened, so I do. After some tangential meandering she gets around to telling me. And then we end up talking for more than three hours straight, though it feels as if only twenty minutes have passed.

She was eight months pregnant, and wished she could stop using meth, but she couldn’t. Her neighbor urged her to go for pre-natal care, but she didn’t. She was ashamed of being fat and ashamed of her inability to keep a prenatal appointment.

“I didn’t realize it was a child,” she said.

After doing some speed one night, she felt pains. The possible father of her child urged her not to call an ambulance. They will test your urine, he said. You will go to jail. CPS will take your baby. They will take our baby.

Another friend who was there disagreed. An ambulance was called and she was taken to UCSF, where they had to hold her down because she was scared and thrashing around, calling the nurses around her “a bunch of dykes” and demanding that they get off her.

“The last thing I remembered was a needle going in my vein. After that I was in a coma for twenty-eight days.”

When she woke up she was told her baby had died, and she had nearly died, too. She had three heart attacks while unconscious. Her uterus had been removed. She would never bear children again.

She showed me the scar on her abdomen where they had cut her open. I have seen many caesarian scars before, but none remotely like this. There is a deep and vertical, jagged crevice running from the top of her belly down to the bottom. It doesn’t look like a surgeon made an incision, but rather a greedy or angry person who haphazardly pulled out chunks of flesh by the fistful. The only scars I’ve seen similar to this one are the scars of heroin users who had contracted a horrible disease called “flesh-eating bacteria.”

Many bits about her ordeal don’t make sense and I find myself becoming frustrated and stuck on the small details.

“What do you mean; they wouldn’t let you see the baby in the morgue? They still had the baby in the morgue twenty-eight days later?” Eventually I have to let go of my desire to get the details. Talking to Stacy is like this. Her narratives convey a truth through fantastical stories.

That she lost the child I am certain. I am also certain that she is not lying when she says she’s been homeless for many months. She was released form the hospital soon after waking from her coma, her muscles atrophied and weak. She had nowhere to go.

Then a request for a favor. She believes they stole the baby from her and handed him over to her former neighbor, the same one who urged her to get care. She begs me to take down the address and knock on the woman’s door to check if the baby is there.

“I'm going to want to think about that,” I tell her. I am surprised to discover a small part of me is willing to believe that maybe they did hide the baby from her. Stacy always had the ability to be persuasive. She may not have made it this far if she didn’t have that quality.

I am also surprised that throughout our conversation this child of hers has remained an abstraction to me, which is only natural since he is an abstraction to her.

“I didn’t realize it was a child.”

I gather my things to leave. “Do you have a picture of your kid?” she asks.

I do. I open my wallet and show it to her. He is two months shy of being two years old. Her child would have been 18 months old.

“Doesn’t he look exactly like Don and me?” I ask.

It is not accidental that I point this out. There’s a good chance that her story will change and I will be cast as the villain, the one who conspired to take her child, the one raising her child. I’ve been the object of her paranoid delusions before. It’s one of the reasons why I’ve found it impossible to remain friends with her and hadn’t seen her for two years before spotting her with her pit bull on the express line at the Safeway on Potrero and 16th streets.

You are probably reading this and wondering how I know this person. You may even be wondering why I would associate with such a person.

The truth is she and I am not as different as you may think. We’ve known each other for twenty-two years. We went to the same college together in New Jersey. We both come from middle-class suburban homes.

Fate has been exceptionally good to me, and I continuously reap enormous blessings.

Fate and, well, luck, have not been very good to her at all. Since leaving college she’s experienced some incredible “hard knocks.”

We hug and I leave. I don’t know when I will see her again, or if I will see her again.

By Ellen Catalina

Labels: Ellen Catalina, San Francisco

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Today I find myself in the unenviable position of having to entertain guests in my home. These are not just any guests, but guests I haven’t yet personally met.

Three weeks ago I placed in ad on craigslist announcing my intention to start a parent-run childcare co-operative. At the time, I felt at the end of my rope parenting my toddler alone day after day. I suspected there were others out there who felt similarly and that they would be as reluctant as I am to pay for a daycare service. Through the Internet my suspicions were confirmed and I was able to electronically communicate with parents who responded to my ad and who were interested in building this thing with me.

Tonight is the night we will meet in my home, and there is only one problem: I don’t feel ready.

For one thing, there are dirty dishes in my sink. Also, my carpets are grimy and overdue for a steam cleaning. Oh, and there is a basket of laundry I wanted to fold and put away before welcoming strangers into my abode. And I stink. Did I mention I didn’t have the chance to take a shower today? Which means that in addition to stinking, I also have greasy hair.

What will happen when these mothers come to my house and see my greasy hair and dirty carpets? Will they feel that they couldn’t trust their children with me?

When it comes to art, my aesthetic is to value that which isn’t perfect. I adore the handmade ceramic bowl with an out-of place blob of color that splashed up when the potter lowered the bowl into the glaze. Sculptures crafted from rusty, decaying bedsprings that have been ‘reclaimed’ and reborn as art. Abstract paintings that look so primitive and simple, a child may have painted them.

But when it comes to my home and my appearance, my aesthetic takes a radical departure. I envy the washboard-flat; slightly concave abdomen flashed by a supermodel over the tire that is my own abdomen. I lust after the light, airy, and uncluttered homes I see in “Sunset” magazine, complete with rooms painted in impeccably matched earth tones. I voyeuristically observe the dinner parties featured on its pages, the Pacific Rim cuisine looking delicious, the napkins on the table matching the ceramic “accent” vase poised on the mantelpiece. This is how entertaining should be.

Yet, I’ve rarely been entertained this way. I’m sure the food at such a gathering would be amazing, but would I be able to tell an off-color joke? Drink one too many glasses of wine? Break into an arm-wresting match with my husband and son, bystanders shouting their bets over us? In short, would it be that much fun?

There is a simple remedy for all my imperfections-throwing money at the problem. A housecleaner can sterilize my home and put it into order. Laser treatments can zap the errant hairs from my chin, and a tummy-tuck can help me approximate the concavity of a movie star’s belly. So I can work, and spend, and become perfect, but to what end? Would there be a medal at the end of it all, or a spread in Sunset? Would I win the envy of my peers? Because “perfect” is only perfect when there is imperfection out there.

A perfect home is only enviable because most homes aren’t that way. Most people at some point value their time, their relationships with others, and their lives too much to spend all their time, and money, on making their bodies and homes appear perfect.

The truth is -- I’ve never been close to those who are perfect. I find it impossible to enjoy intimacy with some one unless I can see that they are imperfect, human, and vulnerable. In turn, I cannot expect others to feel intimate with me unless I am willing to be vulnerable with them. Which may mean I have to let them see a dirty dish in the sink. Or notice that when I smile, my teeth are stained yellow.

Tonight I hope to embark on an imperfect relationship with imperfect people. I expect to feel nervous when they enter my living room and see the carpet. But I hope that despite their own imperfections, they are able to sense that I am really nervous because I want them to like me, I want this co-op to work, and I want to like them, too.

And from there we will move forward.

Ellen Catalina

Labels: Ellen Catalina, San Francisco

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What do you do when you run into the man you had an abortion with, and you’re with your new baby?

His hair looked greyer, and he had gained some weight. It was clearly him, though, and he was coming towards me. There was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. There was a look of recognition on his face, and a look of resignation on mine.

I was about to run into a man I’d had an abortion with thirteen years ago. And I had my eighteen-month-old baby with me.

I realize that for some people this situation might not feel quite so awkward. Many people have relationships -- most of those relationships don’t work out. Sometimes an unwanted pregnancy happens, some of those pregnancies end in abortion. Couples break up, they hurt, they feel bitter or lonely and then they heal. They meet someone new, they move on. With some luck they marry or move in with a more compatible mate.

Life continues.

The story of this relationship is different. I did find my mate in the ever after, but I’m not so sure my ex-boyfriend ever will. Diego (not his real name) is a paranoid schizophrenic, a man who lives on a limited income provided by Social Security. When off his medications, he is given to paranoid delusions, believes that people are sending him secret signals, when in fact they are merely picking up a pencil that they dropped on the ground or cleaning their eyeglasses with a bit of tissue.

While a smart and kind person, Diego often suffers from poor judgment and insight. Friendships are difficult for him to maintain. So are romantic relationships. Although it’s difficult to connect with people, he has a strong desire to make those connections, to get married, have kids: lead a “normal” life. He is not alone in experiencing these problems. Many schizophrenics complain of similar difficulties, and some are driven by their loneliness to commit suicide.

Diego did not want me to have an abortion when we learned of my pregnancy. He clearly hoped that we would raise a child together in subsidized government housing, supported by Social Security and welfare payments. He argued for us to begin a family, tried hard to reassure me that it would all turn out okay, that we could get by. There was no genetic history of schizophrenia in his family, he said, reading my mind, because I was afraid to say, “I don’t want to have my children live like you do.”

Then I did a thing that many people would consider cruel and unethical: I moved unilaterally. I had two close girlfriends pick me up and take me to the clinic, where I endured a cheap, and therefore painful, abortion without general anesthesia or sedatives. Afterwards, we drove to the Mission where they bought me burritos while I sat on the curb, cradling my head in my hands over the gutter, ready to vomit if it came, but hoping the nausea would pass and I wouldn’t have to. I never did puke that day, nor did I touch my burrito. They ate theirs, gave me hugs, and dropped me off at my apartment shared with two male roommates, where I changed my Maxi Pad, took my antibiotic, and curled up on my bed.

I don’t remember exactly when I told him, but at some point I did, and he responded with the sadness and disappointment one would expect of a man who had clearly stated that he wanted to be a father and had been denied the opportunity. There was no slamming of doors, no raised voices. This was not the first time this had happened to him and I don’t think he was terribly surprised. He was obviously sad, though. An opportunity lost not just to be a father, but to be “normal.” To do what the world has been doing since the dawn of time: bringing forth and nurturing a future generation.

On the street I pled my case for early release. “It’s good to see you! Where are you living now? So sorry, but I’m in a big rush. I really, really have to go.” He would have liked to linger longer, but let me go on, forever powerless to control the people around him, forever doomed to believe that they are controlling him.

By Ellen Catalina

Labels: Ellen Catalina, San Francisco

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