Mensamom’s Musings

I will preface this by saying that I have been posting on Facebook for a little under a week now, but I realized that the only people who would be able to follow those posts are the people who are my friends or friends with our immediate family. Hopefully, by transferring my Facebook entries to this site, more people can follow Brandon’s progress without me having to add 1,000 people as friends (not that I don’t love you all!).

So, here goes. The following entries will all be related to Brandon Forbis and his current medical condition. I am going to copy and paste Facebook entries, but I will also use this forum to elaborate, as the situation requires.

Tuesday, December 13 – 8:42 p.m.

We have a movie theater in our town that screens only classic films – ones that you are sure would have been amazing to watch on the large screen when they were new, but (at least in my case) they were new before you were born.  This weekend they were screening It’s A Wonderful Life.  Now, I have seen this movie so many times, I could probably recite the lines along with the movie, Rocky Horror style, but it is still the quintessential holiday film.  There are others, of course – A Christmas Story, Miracle on 34th St., and just about any version of A Christmas Carol – but Wonderful Life seems to epitomize that simpler time that we all seem to long for.  The question remains, if given the opportunity, would we really enjoy returning to that kind of existence?  Or can we somehow find a compromise?

I think about all of the technological advances that have come, in a wide variety of fields, and I know that there are many I would be loathe to live without.  At the top of my list would be some of the medical advances that have happened in the past 30 years, particularly in the area of breast cancer research.  When I was 12, my paternal grandmother died of the disease.  At that time, there was no such thing as yearly mammograms, ultrasound to inspect suspected lumps, or even any training on any front for women to self-examine.  My grandmother did not even know she had cancer until it had spread so far into her body that there was not much anyone could do other than to make her comfortable until the end.  Fast forward 25 years.  One day, my mother found a lump.  Within the span of two weeks, she had been examined by her doctor, had mammograms, a sonogram, a needle biopsy and a diagnosis.  Within a week of that she had started treatment.  Last month she met with her oncologist for the last time.  After all, since she has been cancer-free for the last 10 years, he really doesn’t see the need for her ever to come back.

Similarly, the progress that has been made in the area of HIV-AIDS is amazing.  When I was in high school, the worst thing that could happen to you if you had unprotected sex was a disease that required a visit to a doctor’s office and a rather embarrassing discussion that ended with a shot of penicillin.  When I was in college, the worst was a viral disease that you would have for the rest of your life, with some rather unpleasant sores, but there were drugs that would control it.  Toward the end of my college career was the first time I had heard of a sexually transmitted disease that could kill you, but even so, I figured I was immune, as I was never going to be having sex with a gay man.  Today, there are over 30 million people living with HIV.  Part of that statistic is the rampant spread of the disease in sub-Saharan Africa, but the other part is that today, due to medical advances that have occurred in the last 30 years, people are no longer dying of AIDS like they were in the 80’s.  As a matter of fact, with proper treatment and maintenance, an person with HIV can expect to live a normal lifespan, into their 80’s or 90’s, with relatively few HIV-related problems.

I also think about communications.  In Frank Capra’s world, the local police officer had to drive up and down the city streets, looking for George to let him know he was needed at home.  Running out of gas on a lonely stretch of road used to mean hiking for miles or accepting a ride from a stranger.  Clark Kent changed into Superman by ducking into the nearest telephone booth.  Enter the cell phone, and suddenly theses scenarios are obsolete.  And speaking of Superman, no where has there been a better harbinger of things to come than the scene in Superman: The Movie of Christopher Reeve desperately searching for a phone booth, only to discover an open-style pay phone with no enclosure or door.  When cell phones first came into existence, they were big, bulky bricks that were unwieldy tools used only by certain business people.  Today, if you are 12 and your parents haven’t gotten you a phone that allows you to text, surf the net, check your email, play games, take pictures and stream movies (not to mention make calls), you are considered a total dweeb by your peers.  The ability to communicate with almost anyone on the planet at a moments notice is second nature to us now.  I know I have felt lost on those rare occasions that I walk out the door without my phone.  How can I call home to check in?  What if I feel a sudden urge to call my aunt in Seattle while I am waiting in line at the grocery store?  What if there’s an EMERGENCY?  If only cell phone usage was limited to emergency situations . . .

Communication advances have also improved the dissemination of information.  The advent of the 24-hour news channel and the internet makes us all aware of world news any time of the day or night.  I was having a conversation with my husband just the other night about how Nancy Grace’s HLN show anymore seems to be nothing but trying to find the latest missing child.  Now don’t get me wrong, I believe that a missing child, in any situation, is a horrendous tragedy that I would not ever wish on anyone.  But 10 years ago, if a child went missing, it was local news.  They didn’t broadcast it on any national networks, and there certainly wasn’t the attention given to missing children today.  If a child goes missing today, the ability to let the entire country or world know about the situation, post pictures and descriptions, issue Amber Alerts, and get everyone looking for the child greatly improves the probability that that child will be returned home, safe and sound.

The information age has also sounded the death knell for the old door-to-door encyclopedia salesman.  After all, who needs an encyclopedia when one has Google or Wikipedia?  Despite that, when a neighbor held a garage sale several years ago, and had a World Book set from 1987 available for $10, I snatched it up.  It’s not like there is suddenly going to be new information on folks like Beethoven, George Washington, or Elvis Presley.  There is valuable information to be had in an encyclopedia, and even “outdated” ones can be useful.  As a matter of fact, we now have two sets of encyclopedias in our home.  The other set is Encyclopædia Brittanica from the 1880’s.  It belonged to my great-grandparents.  I figure if I am still around in 2080, I will buy another set.  One every 100 years should keep me up to date.  Seriously, having the world at my fingertips is an advance I would not want to give up.  Being able to learn about situations around the world help me to appreciate what I have at home or, conversely, prompt me to try and improve myself and my situation.

In the working world, technology has improved the safety of the work environment, expanded job opportunities to entirely new classes of people, and improved the qualities of the products we buy.  Labor unions gave workers the ability to unite forces and demand better working environments.  Henry Ford’s assembly line revolutionized manufacturing.  The US involvement in World War II introduced women to the manufacturing fields, and equal pay laws helped to level the playing field.  At the same time, child labor laws forced children out of the factory and back into the schools, where, by improving their education, they are able to improve their prospects for employment opportunities in the future.  And in “Research and Design”, the goal of trying to make the latest widget smaller, faster, stronger, cheaper, longer-lasting and more environmentally friendly seems to be never ending.  Computer aided design makes reaching for that goal even easier.  Engineers can “test” virtual models in a simulated environment without the cost of actually making a prototype.  The end result being better products for the consumer at prices that seem to plummet the longer the product is on the market.  Priced a GPS unit or big-screen TV lately?

All of this technology has admittedly improved our lives, but at what price?  I am lucky if I can get my family to unite at the dinner table four nights a week.  Even so, breakfast and lunch are usually in front of the TV, watching something or playing the XBox.  I don’t know most of my kids’ friends because, rather than going to each others’ house’s to play, they party on their gaming systems and text each other late into the night.  If they want to see each other, they wait until they are at school.  Gone are the days of the entire gang descending upon one child’s house to raid the refrigerator and disappear to study or play a game or just “hang out.”  Being able to talk to anyone at the drop of a hat doesn’t mean I am any more connected with those people who are most important in my life.  On the contrary, I think to a certain extent  I take for granted that I can talk to someone at any time, and therefore I don’t talk to them unless there is a pressing need.

For this holiday season, I propose that we all try and take a moment, and make our lives Wonderful.  Take a look at the people around you and really appreciate them for who they are and how they contribute to your happiness.  Look at the value of the quality of your life, not just the quantity of what you have.  Turn off the cell phone and the TV and gather the family for some Christmas caroling in the neighborhood. Invite your friends to join you for Christmas Eve services at church, and repeat the following mantra:

“Every time a bell rings, an angel gets its wings.”

Merry Christmas.

I have often been accused of being fatally optimistic.  I can’t help it.  I truly believe that, for the most part, people are good, kind, honest, and hard-working.  I also believe that many of the societal problems that plague our world could be solved with education, compassion and patience.  It was, therefore, with a very heavy heart, that I read an item in this morning’s local paper about a child in Spain.  More to the point, two children in Spain.  As modern, civilized nations, there is no way something like this should ever happen, but it does.

The headline itself is enough to grab your attention, and on several fronts: Mom in Spain happy that her 10-year-old gave birth.  Let’s look at this for just a minute.  The first thing that really bothered me was the part about a 10-year-old girl giving birth.  I have done this.  It is not easy, even for a woman with a couple of decades under her belt.  But a 10-year-old?  At 10, I was still playing with my Barbies and coloring with crayons (I was not allowed to have markers until later, as they did not have washable markers back in the dark ages).  At 10, I was in 5th and 6th grade.  I knew that the stork did not bring the babies, and they came out of the mother’s tummy, but I was still unclear about how they got there.  I don’t even think we had the “girls only” class at school where they taught us big words like “menstruation” and “chocolate” until 7th grade.  Not knowing exactly how old this girl is, she may have been as young as 9 when she got pregnant.  This, also, is doubly disturbing.  First, I am still trying to wrap my head around a 9-year-old who is physically mature enough to become pregnant.  When did that start happening?  Secondly, any time a 9-year-old engages in sexual intercourse someone should be going to jail, whether it is the abuser who committed the sex act (in this case, the “abuser” is the girl’s 13-year-old ex?) or the parents who allowed the sex to take place.  There will never be any circumstances or evidence that will convince me a 9-year-old is mentally mature enough to handle sex and all that comes with it.  Case in point, did you hear about the 10-year-old who gave birth in Spain this week?

Now, let’s go back to our original headline.  “Mom in Spain happy . . . “ Happy?  Really?  Happy that her daughter has had a child of her own?  Either this mother is completely delusional or she is terribly uneducated (For clarification purposes, from hereon out, I will be referring to this woman as the Grandmother.).  I believe that she may be both an uneducated and delusional woman who just doesn’t know that certain things should never be done.  The story details how this Grandma is a Romanian Gypsy and how these things are commonplace in their culture.  Now, none of the people in this story are actually identified, but the reporter does mention that the Grandmother appears to be in her 30’s.  If this sort of behavior is so common in her culture, shouldn’t she appear to be about 19 or 20?  After all, if she was only 10 when her daughter was born, that would put her at about 20 now.  But she’s not.  She’s in her 30’s, which means that she was at least old enough to know what she was doing when she got pregnant with the new mother.  Or, maybe Grandma was a horrible disappointment to her own parents, having waited so long to have children.  In any case, apparently the 10-year-old had been “married” to the 13-year-old Romanian father, but the couple is now “separated” and Mother and Grandmother moved to Spain about two weeks before the birth of the new baby.  Grandma has indicated that the family is planning on staying in Spain, so it is unlikely that Daddy will have anything to do with his new daughter, not that he would really know what to do with his new daughter.

Which brings us back to the part about someone going to jail.  Spanish authorities are at a bit of a loss regarding how to proceed with this situation.  There are several aspects that have them stymied: 1) The criminal behavior in this case, i.e. the sex act, took place in Romania, not Spain; 2) the “perpetrator” is himself a minor, and therefore also not legally able to engage in sexual behaviors; and 3) the “perpetrator” is still in Romania, not Spain, and with all of the above noted, Spain may not have any jurisdiction over him.  OK, so let’s shift focus to the Grandmother.  Obviously, she became aware sometime in the past 6 months that something unusual was going on with her daughter.  Based upon the body types of your typical tweenager, Mom probably began developing her “baby bump” roughly 15 or 20 minutes after having sex, so Grandma had to know something was up.  For all we know, Grandma was the one who arranged the “marriage” of her daughter to the young Casanova, in which case an argument could be made for her part in child trafficking offenses.  However, again, the offending behavior occurred outside Spanish jurisdiction 8 – 9 months ago, and, even more frightening, situations similar to this are somewhat common in Romania.  The Romanian government seems to have let the cultural “norms” of its Roma Gypsy population drop way down on its priority list, so laws like making sure all children attend school until age 16 are largely left unenforced.  Too bad, because if Romania was keeping a better eye on its children, situations like these could be dealt with much sooner than after one child gives birth to another child.

I want to believe that people are good, kind, honest, and hard-working, but when I hear about things like this, it is like a sucker punch to the gut.  I imagine my niece sitting in a hospital room somewhere clutching a baby and listening to the nurse try and explain the complexities of breast feeding, and it sends chills down my spine.  Global warming and nuclear war are not what will bring an end to civilization as we know it.  It will be a systemic rotting from the inside unless we wake up, smell the coffee, and begin a global campaign to bring human rights and education to every person on the planet.  Only by educating the world population and bringing the awareness of human rights and behavioral expectations to those outside modern society will we be able to end tragedies like this.

* Based on a true story.

Once upon a time, somewhere in Middle America, lived a woman named Mary.  Mary was a wife and mother, with a loving husband and three intelligent and polite children.  She loved to do special things for her family, especially on holidays.  Every year, she would try to get those one-of-a-kind special presents that she knew her family would love.  As the variety of things available on the internet began to grow, she would occasionally look on different web sites to compare prices or see what choices were out there, but for the most part she would do her shopping locally.  She liked to be able to see the thing she was purchasing, feel it, and make a decision based upon all the lovely intangibles that come with shopping in person.  Every once in a while she would buy something online, but usually it was only when she had already seen the thing in a store and could be assured of what she was buying.  The deciding factor always seemed to be cost – if it was significantly cheaper online, then she would get it there.

Last year at Christmas time, she made what she thought was a simple purchase.  She went to a well-known, popular online retailer called “Nile”.  Everyone shopped at Nile.com because they carried just about everything, from books to toys to movies to clothing – anything a person could want could be had at Nile.  She figured it was safe making a purchase at Nile, since they were so well-respected and were known for their exceptional customer service.  She didn’t even mind submitting the personal information Nile.com requested, like her email address.  She knew they would need a certain amount of information in order to ship her purchases.

Mary was looking for a very specific item – a book – based upon a TV series her husband liked to watch.  The show was on one of the cable channels and was all about a former spy who had been fired from his job.  Each week the spy would help a hapless victim get deserved justice, using only his amazing spy skills and the help of two friends – his on-again-off-again pyromaniac girlfriend and a retired spy friend who used to work for a competitor spy agency.  Mary’s husband, John, really liked this show and watched every episode.  John had even bought the first two seasons of the show on DVD so that he could watch it again with cast commentaries and behind-the-scenes features.  Well, when Mary discovered that someone had written a short novel based upon show detailing yet another case of unofficial justice, she knew that John would enjoy reading the book (and she was right).

Several months passed, and Mary did not give any thought to having purchased the book from Nile until the day she opened her email and found a new message from Nile.com.  The message read as follows (this text taken verbatim from Mary’s email):

As someone who has purchased or rated Burn Notice: The Fix by Tod Goldberg, you might like to know that Curious George A Winter’s Nap (CGTV Reader) (Curious George Early Readers) will be released on August 9, 2010.  You can pre-order yours by following the link below.

Now Mary was a smart woman, but no matter how hard she tried, she could not figure out what these two books could possibly have in common, other than the fact that they were books.  It’s not like her toddler son had read the novel or her husband would enjoy reading Curious George as much as he had the novel.  In the end, she came to the conclusion that Nile.com’s targeted marketing program had just gone haywire.  She shared her observations with John.  Once John quit laughing, he suggested she write about it.

So she did.

The moral to the story is “If you shop online, remember – personal service really isn’t personal.”

I feel like I haven’t had a vacation in years.  Actually, the last “vacation” I had was in 2008, and I didn’t even take a whole week, so I don’t know if that even counts (although I did do an entire scrapbook about our four days in Missouri, so I guess that makes it official).  Prior to that was Florida in 2003, but that’s another story.  Anyway, back in 2008, our whole family (and then some) went to Missouri for four days, and it was pleasant, but looking back it seems like we were “doing” every day, and I really didn’t take time to relax.  Since then, I have only taken a couple of days here and there and we have not taken any trips.  All of that is about to change.

As a rule, I don’t recommend “separate” vacations, but I am going to take a week off and leave my husband at home alone.  The teens will stay with their mother for the week, and I am taking the toddler with me.  I will be going “on vacation”, but by virtue of being home alone to do whatever he pleases for 7 whole days, so will my husband.  The trade-off is I will be travelling with my mother and my 97-year-old grandmother.  No sightseeing, no plans, just a week at the lake, relaxing, reading, swimming and eating ice cream.  I am really looking forward to the trip since I am sure we will be building some memories that will last the rest of my life, but it will be somewhat bittersweet.  After all, this will probably be the last vacation my grandmother ever takes.  The fact that I will be able to accompany her on this trip is truly a blessing.  I am planning on taking a ton of pictures so that, in years to come, the 3-year-old will be able to look back at the pictures and try to remember his great-grandmother.  And I do have some very specific plans regarding what I want to “do” on this trip.

I want to read and swim and teach my child about feeling the “stuff” between your toes when you swim in nature’s pool.  It may sound somewhat sadistic, but I want to see his reaction the first time the tiny little fish nibble at the ends of his toes while he is dangling his feet in the water from the dock.  I want to see how he behaves in a boat that he can see both the front and back of at the same time.  I want him to understand the greater cosmic meaning of “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star”, and truly wonder “where you are”.  I want to sit and just “be” with no expectations and no deadlines (Mother suggested bringing a clock with us, as there is not one at the cabin, and, for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why).  I am so close in my mind to this vacation that I can smell the scent of the pine trees, feel the dappled sun on my face and hear the loons calling to one another in the twilight.  The countdown has begun.