Happy birthday?

I awoke a little while ago, and lay awake thinking for a time before it struck me I had wakened right at the time that Asher was born a year ago. I didn't know why I was lying there, feeling angry that my son has a terrible dairy allergy, and one or two medical personnel have implied that this may well be because he was given dairy formula even though I wanted to breastfeed, when his whole system was under attack and he was on the hardest-core antibiotics one can find...

How can Asher's birthday be happy? We celebrated on Saturday, and I was happy, but the day of his birth was awful. The birth: too fast, too hard. And then we almost lost him. The next few days were this whirlwind of fear, anger, tears. I wasn't allowed to hold him because they told me he was too unstable, and they told me he probably wouldn't want to be touched anyway, since he felt so awful. In truth, when I put my hand inside his incubator, he always calmed, always. He couldn't learn to breastfeed, in part because they insisted on feeding him unnatural amounts so he'd grow before any baby ever grows, while most babies still lose weight, but also because he always fell asleep the moment I took him to breast; he was so, so stressed and tired, and when I held him, the comfort overtook any desire to feed.

My baby boy, when will your birthday be a time of joy? When will I not think of you hooked up to tubes? I both can't remember what happened and can't forget. But I don't think I knew I would be awake at 3 a.m. and so sad on your special day. You are the happiest baby I've ever known, the happiest baby lots of people we meet say they've encountered. You are funny, and beautiful, and you make kissy noises to call our cat. I can't believe how close we came to losing that.

Forgive my terrible, middle of the night post, but I just don't know what to do with the surprise of this grief and anger.

Okay, not doing a stellar job of keeping up the ol' blog

I have been putting off adding to my blog as if it were homework someone assigned to me, but that's more or less true of everything I want to do other than work or do dishes: see friends, get organized, spend meaningful time with my spouse...

This last month and a half or so has pretty much been a fiasco. I took on an online teaching position, which is a blessing in that it is consistent, but it greatly added to my workload, especially starting out, as I have had a fairly steep learning curve. I was also trying to finish up editing a (good) book manuscript written by a lady in Idaho, and juggling all of my tasks seems to have been more than my social life and sanity can bear.

However, I am done with my editing project, and I think this second school module will be easier, now that I (sort of) know what I am doing, so now I need to start remembering how to live again. And gosh darn it, I am going to do a better job of posting to my blog!! Now, your job is to hold me to it.