The Web That Is My Own

The spam was getting hard to keep up with, so I have made a minor change to the settings.

I want to have another baby. It is a crazy desire. I feel so strong and confident right now, I want to feel that with a baby. Farewell to the hesitant, unsure, lost mother I once was. Oh the bliss of cuddling a baby!

Then I remember the lack of sleep, and how close I am to having independent people under my roof...

Maybe when my friends stop having babies the feeling will pass...

This is probably a good thing to do no matter what, but if you're a guest blogger here, please change your email password. Someone has been autospamming the blog with drugstore posts; I'm removing them as I see them but it is a bit annoying.

I don't think there is any other way to deal with the problem except by shutting off the post-by-email feature, which is really the entire point of the blog. :)

I've started planning my funeral. Hopefully it is not for a LONG time. I've had my wedding, I've had my baby, I'm content with my home - what is left? For me, my funeral.

My father died of cancer, this week I have a test scheduled for the very same cancer. The test could also find a couple of other things but my fear is that they will find cancer and I will go through awful treatments and still die in a couple short years. What will my kids do without me? Loved ones? Everyone I know? My work that is finally going in a good direction? My pets? Eight days between when the test was scheduled and the test itself - fast by any standard for a "non-urgent" test. I'm up to day 4 and it is already getting hard to keep myself together. I want to curl up in a ball and cry. Instead I keep myself very busy and distracted, my house will be clean by the time the test happens. In a weird way, cancer is familiar and them finding something else is foreign and scary too. More scary still is that they find nothing and I go on feeling rotten as I have the past 6 months - wow, it's getting to be a LONG time... it is likely that whatever the result I still need a more invasive test soon too, more waiting, more fear.

I was watching a program about 9/11 and the memorials built to remember it and the speaker described it as being history that is still a part of current events, today - in 2013, and I was wondering, when does that shift from current to historic happen?

The first significant event I remember understanding (there were others before it that I could not understand as well) was when the Berlin Wall fell. I was in ninth grade and studying communism, we received the news mid-day (this was before the internet so I'm not sure how the news made it to us, I suspect by someone's office radio) and all other subjects were set aside for the day, we talked only of this and what it would mean for the people experiencing it, I went home and the discussion continued.

At some point the event lost centre stage and we spoke of it and thought of it less and less.

I remember 9/11 as a similar experience for me, I did not know anyone personally, I saw and heard so much about it on the news and discussed it at length with people I know. For me 9/11 quickly passed into the category of an historic event.

My children were born after 9/11, for them it is historic, it will be something to read in a text book one day just as the fall of the Berlin Wall will be.

In the last several years of my own life there have been many significant personal events - funerals, divorce. Though "historic" does not seem to be the right word, the effects on my life were significant and the strong feelings lingered much longer than a globally historic event.

Does how strongly we feel about an event define its status as a "current" event?

For the survivors of any trauma, for every significant event we experience, that event continues to influence our current feelings for a very long time, in some cases, our entire lives. Yet still we refer to them as past or historical. We do our best to live in the present, to have hope for the future.

I wonder if treating 9/11 a historic event as current, prolongs the strong feelings of loss? Vengeance? The fear of terrorism?