I want to write.

I really do.

I want to tell you about how my new reader has been learning about silent e’s, and so this morning he looked at the can on the kitchen and said, “Hey! That says ‘Diet Coke!’ If you took off the silent ‘e’ it would be Diet Cock! (singing) Die-eeeet Cock, Die-eeeeet Cock, DIET COCK!!!”

I want to tell you about how the mother-daughter push-pull between Funk and myself has finally arrived, with the stomp of a little foot, a daring pout and glare, the slam of a door. How I love her fiercely even as I find myself disliking her immensely at times.

I want to tell you about how I want to gobble up this soft soft baby boy, who rarely cries and really only wants to be loved, to be gazed at, to be held. How Hubs and I marvel at each other each day about how difficult it is to keep your mouth off of him.

I want to tell you that I read the Twilight books and they were decent but I don’t get the craze. That I saw the movie and wondered why they couldn’t afford better actors. And yet I want to see the next one.

I want to tell you that I met a new mom friend and that I can’t stop making fresh pico de gallo and that it’s giving me terrible breath and even worse gas and that I’ve been Shredding and that it’s almost Kindergarten time and that my husband comes home every day for lunch just to give me an adult to talk to and that I haven’t shed the baby weight and and and.

But I have a blockage, and that blockage is making everything else seem kind of… irrelevant here lately. And I haven’t talked about that blockage for fear of sounding like I don’t have faith or that I am making it about myself or making my mother worry that I can’t handle it and she’s got enough people she’s holding up right now.

My blockage is Jamie. Her specifically, of course, but also all of the old issues that I have mentioned here before. The low level of anxiety I feel about our collective lack of permanence on this earth. The idea that any mother ever ever loses a child. The abject terror that that could ever happen to us.

Jamie isn’t doing all that hot. It’s just one thing after another, and everyone at home is exhausted from the emotional roller-coaster, the fear and the longing. I told you her kidneys weren’t doing so well, and that has persisted. Her lungs are not functioning– her pulmonologist thinks it’s from severe pneumonia from being on a vent. Her liver is getting in on the act too now, accumulating damage which given her young age might be reversible… but might not.

When they put her on the transplant list, she was so critical that she went straight to #1. She is off the transplant list now, because she would not be stable enough to operate on. Not because she doesn’t need the heart– she so desperately does– but organs don’t wait and if one comes it needs to go to the patient with the greatest need who can survive the surgery. Any indication that Jamie wouldn’t be strong enough means she cannot be on the list.

And I am of course terrified for her, sad for her family, praying every chance I get that something improves, she gets a chance at a new heart, and that a year from now we can be bitching about paying for her medical bills while she’s playing Wii in the next room.

But I can’t help myself from trying on her mother’s panic like a borrowed coat, and I can smell the fabric, feel its texture, and own its weight. I can imagine walking my daughter into the hospital, with a broken but functioning heart– making the choice to finally do something I have dreaded for twelve years, so that my daughter can have the best chance of surviving for another seventy years– and then watching desperately as every thing that could go wrong began to occur before my eyes. That panic is so real to me that I can taste it on my tongue, and feel my heart beating faster with dread.

I feel guilt every time I yell at my kids, or get exasperated with them, because how lucky am I for fuck’s sake that I get to be angry about their stupid little transgressions and not sitting at their hospital bedsides and then I tell myself that of course, it is normal to be exasperated by your children and it’s worse to pretend like it isn’t there. But the guilt and anger orbit around anxiety that is ever-present, two opposing moons to a planet of fear.

It’s made it hard to write. But I need to write. Now, more than ever, I need it. Because I don’t see as many adults now that I am home, because it’s healthy to write it out, because it (and my happy mommy pills) helps me get a handle on it all.

But how do I write around such a tall wall? How can anything be relevant next to its ginormity? I have yet to figure that out.