Labels: artistic, artistic daughter, By Dawn Yun, camping, East Coast Jewish girl, godparents, hotel, love ununconditionally, rock star, Seattle, second mother

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Labels: artistic daughter, Bravo, breast cancer, By Dawn Yun, clinical medical trial, ego boost, first grade, hugging, kindergarten, Parents' Night

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My stomach was reeling from a mixture of too much Chardonnay and too much pumpkin pie, when I realized there’s no room in my living room for a Christmas tree.

I had to have a tree, my mother was coming for the holiday and she was bringing presents. A tree was the necessary showcase for her beautifully wrapped gifts. And what of my daughter? Miranda couldn’t be the only one in her public school with no tree.

I slowly spun around the room looking for what furniture we might tuck into the garage until the relatives leave. There’s a couch, a chair, a coffee table, a bookshelf, all necessary for social and familial functions.

Then my eyes landed on my daughter’s worktable. It had started innocently enough, with a plastic container full of paper and a bucket of Crayola crayons. Now the worktable has taken over about a third of the living room. Plain paper, stickers, beads, Pokemon cards, glue sticks, paint brushes, glitter pens, small and large markers have spilled off the table and made incursions under the table.

As I gazed at the mess in my living room, I pondered joining a religion that doesn’t celebrate Christmas. My first choice was Buddhism, but I’m lousy at meditation. My second was Hinduism, but it’s hard enough for me to remember my daughter’s and husband’s names much less a pantheon of Gods and Goddesses.

So I decided on buying the biggest storage bins I could find. I know I could just throw stuff out, but that would require negotiating with my daughter. I tried that once, asking if we could throw some stuff out. My daughter, who is 5, looked up at me with clear blue eyes, her hands on her hips, and said in an offended tone, “I love everything I make.”

That’s how I found myself in Target on the weekend after Thanksgiving looking at storage bins. I found three that stack and will fit in my garage. So, tonight, after my daughter has gone to bed, I will strategically cull the worktable leaving enough mess so she won’t notice what’s gone. I know someday I’ll have to toss stuff and risk her displeasure. But that’s not until I run out of room in the garage.

I hope she’s off to college by then.

By Georgie Craig

Labels: artistic daughter, birth mother, Buddhism, Chardonnay, Christmas trees, Crayola, Georgie Craig, Gifts, Hinduism, meditation, Pokemon, pumpkin pie, Target

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Subsequents was a term I learned from my online searches the week after Aaron died. I guess it was an easier way of saying “having another child after losing a child.”

But there was something about this clinical-sounding label that lent a controversial tone to the chat rooms in the various bereaved parent sites.

I never weighed in on any of these conversations. I’m not the online chatting kind of person, frankly, which makes this site a bit ironic for me.

The issue of subsequents had a long response chain, with parents, mostly mothers, offering their perspectives on how they were preparing for (and worrying about) their next child, and on their process behind considering the “right amount of time” after their child’s death.

There were also practical considerations: what to do with their baby’s clothes, the crib, their fears, the statistics of having it happen again in the same family.

And then there were the naysayers. The ones who interrupted these discussions with haughty, holier than thou (can you hear my bias?) diatribes against their decision against having a “replacement child.” I wondered how families whose firstborns died from SIDS felt about that.

Part of the grieving process is coming to terms with your own changes as a mother, as a family, as a woman.

We were a family of five and then we weren’t. Not technically, anyway. Aaron still held his position in our family, and we loved to rehash the special moments with him: his perfectly timed grunts in church, the magical effects of “Yellow Submarine” that would stop his screams in his car seat.

We talked about how much we missed him, but we acknowledged this loss as a move to a different location, not as a removal from our family. Tyler, who was only three when his brother died, was Aaron’s ardent supporter and would quietly correct me with, “Mommy, you have two boys” when people asked about our family.

But Aaron’s memories didn’t count when we were in line for movie tickets or planning a family vacation. I couldn’t let go of the reality that we were supposed to be a family with three children gathered around the Christmas tree, driving to Disneyland, arguing in the grocery store about who could sit in the cart.

Call it zone defense, call it one man down, call it slightly out of control -- I was desperate to return. I felt like a fraudulent mother of two.

By Kimberley Kwok

Labels: a child's death, artistic daughter, cute son, Disneyland, family, first-time mother, grieving, grieving process, Kimberley Kwok, SIDS, subsequents, Yellow Submarine

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Whenever people tell me how artistic my four-year-old daughter, Olivia, is, I instinctively think, “Anything but that.”

Maybe during the Renaissance, when artists had patrons and kings commissioned portraits; cathedral ceilings were blank canvases, literally, and manor houses had wall space to spare. Or even during the WPA: Sure it was a Depression and everyone was hungry, but at least the government was keeping a handful of muralists and photographers gainfully employed.

But to be an artist today is to suffer.

No job security, no career ladder, no 401(k). While everyone else is socking away a retirement, the painter is scrimping to buy art supplies and the writer is saving for a laptop; the performer is maxing out his credit cards to take classes in singing or acting or dance.

Unless one is lucky enough to be born into a trust fund, or marry a rich and generous spouse, all artists face a future of too-small apartments, necessary day jobs and daily, unending compromise. Why would I wish that on anyone, much less the girl I love more than any other in the world?

I spent ten years in New York City chasing my own artistic dreams. I wanted to dance on Broadway or at least in regional theater and write the Great American Novel on the side.

Instead, I slept on fold-out sofas in other people’s living rooms and supported myself as a legal proofreader on the night shift; I walked everywhere to save on subway fare and discovered that you could eat cereal for months on end and still survive.

By the time I woke up, exhausted, at thirty, everyone else I knew was married and living in the suburbs, a baby in arms and another one on the way.

But Olivia is sensitive, and I see that.

“Look at the moon,” was her first full sentence, as she patted a spot beside her on our front steps and pointed to the sky. “See pink” she said as the sun was setting. Once I observed that a shade of blue crayon looked happy and she nodded as she rolled it between her palms. “There are so many blues that are sad.”

Olivia is adopted so she hasn’t inherited my genes. But she’s my daughter, with the soul of a poet.

By Jessica O’Dwyer

Labels: 401(k), artistic, artistic daughter, By Jessica O'Dwyer, dancer, Great American Novel, New York City, poet, suffering artist

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