Hello and welcome to An Altitude Problem, where all good things come to an end. Sorry, folks. It seems it takes more than believing and wishy thinking to keep some good things around. And once they are gone, the real challenge is to look around and see all you still have, and have that be enough.

It was a weekend defined by loss, in several different ways. On Thursday, Tom Nightingale, a cousin by marriage, had a fatal heart attack behind the wheel of his semi truck. No one else was injured, but his family- wife and three kids, 10, 13, and 16, had their lives changed forever by that phone call. A young death always turns a community contemplative. Tragedies strike all the time, and like lightening, the ones unaffected feel as though it could have as easily been them- as indeed it could have been.

We had planned to go to the funeral, but that night I started bleeding. The next morning I raced to the clinic, feeling deja vue, hoping against hope but not convinced that I would be more lucky this time and be able to keep this baby. I had blood drawn, and before the results were even back, the heavy bleeding and pain had started and I realized it was already dead. I proceeded to lie on the couch for the next six hours and have a spectacular meltdown, one that had Andy shoving his face against my neck, trying to jostle me out of my distress, and went on for long enough he finally gave up and slept close to me on the floor beside the couch. Bobby came home late that evening and he held me while I spent my hormone-fueled grief and rage on gut-crunching crying and demanding that he explain to me why it had to be that we were only ever allowed a glimpse of how we could be before it was yanked away again. Then, as suddenly as it started, I ran out of tears. With no further comment, in sudden quiet, I got up, took a shower, washed my hair, and in no way felt like putting myself through the discomfort of squeezing out another tear. I had to explain to a shell-shocked Bobby that it was this way last time, too, only last time he hadn't been there for it. This was the part we had to get through before I could readjust to being singular, my body supporting not the future, not our baby, just me. We watched a movie to give our minds a vacation, and I spent the night on the couch so my insomnia-causing headache wouldn't keep us both awake. The next day the cramping pain hit much harder, and that night I moved to the couch again, since the pain was making me toss and squirm and keep him awake. The worst had passed by the next morning, and things were starting to be funny again- at least the funny things. They set my follow-up appointment for this morning, the same time as Tom's funeral, so I ended up opting for going to that and being with the Eicher family in thought and prayer instead of in person.

Altogether, it was not a very good week. I spent the first half of it feeling more pregnant every day- like I awoke every morning with a hangover, and it took me until noon to feel alive. That, I was happy about, since I took it as a good sign that the pregnancy was a stronger one than the last. But it did cut down on productivity. Then I spent two days on bedrest, since that's the usual treatment for a threatened miscarriage, but since I knew it was pointless, it was mostly my excuse for letting myself wallow in self-pity for 48 hours.

In the meantime, Grandpa Weldo has been in the hospital for over a week, bronchitis stressing his body, leading to tachycardia leading to tests and a decision to have open heart surgery to repair a valve. My dad has been working double time at the mill to make up for him being gone. We have been thinking that he would have a surgery in a day or two for a long time now, so I still have not been up there to see him, every day not going because i keep hearing that I should go up tomorrow. I am getting smart. I will be going soon, regardless.

And my car is still in the body shop, which means I have to drive a gas guzzling truck everywhere I go, which keeps me home more. And Bobby is finally working again, which means he has not been able to take me to Hays. They keep telling me that any day, the parts should come in and we should be getting the car back. I am ready. Even though the inside of it smells like tomcat from the unfortunate effects of Marv's surgery in which his little Marvs were removed, leaving him without feeling or muscle control (including bladder control) in his back half until his anesthesia wore off- tomcat urine mixed with cleaning solution makes it smell a little like pine sap, only without the sweet tang to it, just pungent. I miss the little car even though it's not exactly a luxury liner. I miss it and it's ability to take me places on the cheap.

But there's nothing like realizing how good you have it to help you realize how good you have it. I only lost someone I hadn't yet met this weekend. Others lost someone thay had built history with. And I had another reminder this morning of how great my life is, and how insignificant my losses really are. In the last three months in southern Somalia, 30,000 people, many of them perfect, beautiful kids, have starved to death. We are talking kids who were carried to full term, who's parents were overwhelmed by poverty, but cared for them and loved them and watched helplessly as they shrunk inside their skin. If they were even able to be brought to a refugee camp, they were often fed too late for it to make a difference. Kids who survive this latest famine will spend their futures with stunted physical and mental growth. Our baby, lost before it is even born, hardly seems like a tragedy in the shadow of such an enormous waste of healthy, beautiful babies who were already in the world.

I recognize the stages of grief, and know that anger is the one I have been most often returning to these last three days. But it feels good to be able to redirect my anger (made so much worse by the raging hormones of this most recent pregnancy) into rightous anger, anger that while my baby's miscarriage was unavoidable, those deaths aren't. There is enough food in the world to feed them. There is a long and complicated answer to why it can't reach them in time, and why they cannot grow it themselves, but there is enough and it is inexcusable that we can put people into space and crack the human genome and invent particle accelerators and supercomputers before we can put food on every plate in the world.

But thank you for all the support you have given us. I stand by my theory- by keeping you up-to-date with our lives, you know when we need prayers and positive support. Maybe we make ourselves vulnerable, but I like us that way.

We will try again, but not for a while. We are going to test for some of the more obvious reasons I seem to be unable to keep a pregnancy, once my body recovers from this one. In hindsight, this has happened before, more than a few times. There is no reason to think a third one will magically work when the last two confirmed pregnancies did not, nor did any of the suspected ones (obviously). It is time to take a breather and stop putting ourselves through this until we think we have a ghost of a chance of keeping it in there. I can't handle the thought of doing this again right away anyway- the near panic from the moment you find out you are pregnant, fearing you will inevitably lose it, the moment your fears come true, the fallout- it's too much to keep doing.

Until later, faithful few. I'm thankful I have you.

Hello and welcome to An Altitude Problem, where after a few days back at altitude, we are strangely happy to be back down in the low places. I don't know why. It was amazing to be back up in Summit County, perfecting my turns on my skis, in the snow that we apparently took up there with us, as snow seems to follow us wherever we go these days. But now that we are back down where the wind blows a little warmer, where we look out our windows to see the horizon and the sunsets and sunrises, bare tree branches and dry milo stalks, it feels a little more right than looking out our window to see the neighbor's houses, the neighbor's judgment eyes if Andy escapes the house without his leash, a dozen cars, a dozen trash cans, hearing snowplows and sirens and helicopters. Here, we hear the wind. A few times a week, a "neighbor" flies over our house to and from wherever it is he goes in his plane, and sometimes, on quiet mornings when sound carries on crisp air, we hear the neighbor's rooster crow from a mile away, their cows mooing, sometimes a motor revving. The cat Marvin, shortened from Starvin' Marvin, given his state of health when he showed up at our door, now also known as Marvelous Marv, Marvae-larvae, Marv the magnificent, Marv the Large, the Killer of Rugs, Kittymarvie, Marv the Claw, and the Happiest Marv on Earth, sleeps outside on all but the cold, snowy nights. No cars whiz past and endanger his life. We have been told of mountain lion sightings around our house, but he must be a wily sort, to survive as he does outside. We have made him a little more house-friendly by paying the vet to remove his little Marvs, now he has no desire to go a-courting, which makes him lazy and accommodating. He sits on the porch railing and waits for us to come home, waits for us to get out of bed, waits for the endearing names and earmite-scratching and catfood and long naps in the house that are sure to come. Andy explores the yard, dragging things that have no business inside the mouth of any living thing out of hidden places, delightedly showing us his prizes and then sniffing them out again when we take them away. Kansas has been good to us, better than we anticipated. The sturdy old house we live in is a solid shelter, walls permeated with memories that no longer seem surreal.

On Thursday, while B was at work, I packed up all of our ski gear and prepared to be gone for the weekend. B came home in a bit of a bad mood, snapped at me for a few things I felt were not my fault in the least, which led me to pick a raging fight with him, slam several doors, bang dishes around, in general, be a raging hag, which twenty minutes later, I had forgotten about completely and was singing and whistling and cooking dinner while he ducked every time I walked near. Isn't it weird how when you are a hormonal wreck, you never actually realize that your behavior is completely inconsistent until later? One moment, I literally wanted to murder him, and the next, I had completely forgotten to be angry. I fell asleep pondering why I had been in such a blind rage, and decided that hormones or no hormones, I had probably better work on that. The next morning, I awoke early, doing math in my head. I was late. Not really late, just a few days, but still...I got out of bed and dragged myself to the bathroom, squinting in the bright light, and managed to hit the pregnancy test in my stupor. I watched one line turn pink, negative. So I tossed it in the sink, and wondered into the living room. I texted my "pee buddy" (the girlfriend who has agreed to be my accountability buddy to keep me from using home pregnancy tests until absolutely warranted) that it was negative, then wondered back into the bathroom to throw it away...and noticed a faint second line. I still had my phone in my hand, and without thinking, texted- "They weren't kidding about having to wait three minutes. Now there's another line." The second I hit send, the meaning of two lines hit me and I realized I had just told my friend that Bobby was potentially going to be a father before I told him, which seemed a bit unforgivable. So I had to shake him awake him to tell him, and he was massively annoyed, and grunted and told me in a scratchy morning voice "I'm glad you're so happy, 'cause I don't know how we're gonna pay for the dang thing," before pulling the covers back over his head. I sat there, a little crushed, not sure how to respond to this. "I will not be telling your child that the first time you referred to it, you called it "the dang thing". Then the covers came back off, he giggled, woke up enough to realize what I had just said, and the full realization sunk into our sleep-fogged brains that, in our bumbling way, we have another chance at this whole being parents thing. If. If only this one will stay in there about 30 weeks longer than the last one.

We, of course, have known our potential kid's names for quite some time already (when you wait for almost ten years, these things just sort of evolve without you ever really having a discussion about them and you find yourself at an understanding without knowing how you got there), so I am already calling the "thing" by both names indiscriminately, knowing I have a fifty percent chance of being right. If I lose this one, I know it won't be easy. There will be tears. A lot of them. B keeps telling me to not get attached to it, but I am already physically attached to it, so not being mentally attached is just not an option. But I am sticking with my theory- I would rather have people rejoice with me, and then, if I lose it, know what I have lost so they don't just assume my life is exactly how I want it. I want them to know the tests and the tears I have had so they know I will understand theirs. I want them to know that if I seem distracted and sad, it isn't them. It isn't some secret, mysterious pain that they are not allowed to guess at. I will need them if I should lose this baby, and I don't think I can bear telling them I need them, I just need them to know that I do because of what they know has happened to me. And how will they know if I don't tell them- first the good, and, God forbid, the bad, if it should happen? Which is why, at a two days short of five weeks pregnant, I decided that secrets are dumb. There is no way I am taking every one's advice of keeping it a secret until danger of miscarriage is past. I am too deep in feelings already for this tiny bunch of rapidly dividing cells, if I lose it I'm gonna be a wreck, and it's best if the world is forewarned.

after all that, we got up, packed our suitcases, and drove to Summit County. Skiing was good. It was exactly what we needed after several weeks of cabin fever (me) and spending every day in the cab of a loader (B). With the snow, B has been working hard lately, scraping snow and deep, freezing muck from pens, enabling the cows to reach their feed bunks and giving them small places to stand where they are not knee-to-hip-deep in icy sludge. I have been doing...well, not a lot. Keeping the house halfway clean. Doing laundry. Watching movies on streaming Netflix. Walking the dog, when the ground has been frozen enough for us to leave the yard. Digging trenches and attempting to drain the small lake that is our driveway and yard. The house and a small grassy patch sit elevated, and are well drained, but the yard itself has been a bottomless pit of western Kansas muck, which is to say, half glue, half slimy clay that sticks to one's shoes until it pulls shoes off one's feet. The only way to remove the clay slime that dries into concrete is to soak it off of tennis shoes that used to look nice. The tires on B's truck have an enormous radius by the time he gets to the garage, from all the mud layers stuck to them.

As we are forced to take to the groomed ski runs in Colorado for lack of snow this year, I have been soliciting skiing advice from every available source. Last year, as you can tell from various videos, we had the time of our lives in the deep powder...but I sucked at it. I survival skied. I flailed. I spazzed. I face-planted. In the forgiving softness of bottomless fluff that was last winter, that was okay, I did not risk injury as I tumbled and had to dig myself out of snowdrifts higher than my head, out of breath and sweating, with snow inside my clothes, only to make a few more turns and do it again. (by the way, I am fully aware, and fully horrified, that I misspelled a word in my last video. But I did that in a hurry, did not proof it well, and then it took like three hours to publish, so I haven't had the time to fix and republish. Never mind. I choose looking like an idiot over having to do that all again.)

So this year, with dismal snow conditions and skiing off-piste not an option if one values life, limb, or gear, I have become obsessed with finding the perfect turn. I have all sorts of advice coming through my brain now as I ski- a more complete turn. Lead with my ski tips. Sideways extension. Focus on upper body stillness. Lean forward. Flick poles. Hold poles and firmly plant. Pole plants are a thing of the past. Focus on where I want to go and keep it between my shoulders. Shins against my boot tongues.

They tell me I am improving. And I can feel it- a more fluid line. My friend laughed when she saw me ski this time. "Well, you're not twisting like a beginner...you're skiing exactly like Susan K. Fast, energetic and spastic, like you're too impatient to slow down and finish out your turns." I started laughing. "It's true, every time I start to feel resistance, I am over that turn and ready for the next one. I blame the ADD." The rest of our time out, B kept coaching me on how to ski less like Susan K and more like Ingrid Backstrom, who's fluid, effortless, slinky-like turns I so want to have for my own. To Bobby's credit, his turns are also some of the smoothest ones seen on a normal day at a ski resort. He looks relaxed, just hanging out above skis that never stop their side to side arc under him, almost as if they are pulling his feet, and not vice versa. So I make him coach me. This is a win-win for us. I will never be better than him at skiing. Willing to jump off higher rocks and cornices with less experience under my belt, maybe. But I won't have the ease that comes from having learned to ski on skinny, long skis and then transitioned to short, fat, shaped skis. Therefore, we will never come to that awkward place we came to on our snowboards where suddenly the student finds herself attempting to teach the teacher, then the teacher feels emasculated and demoralized and stops wanting to ride with the student. In his defense, by that time, I had caught up with and passed the total amount of time he had spent on his board.

After a few runs in the 4 degree morning nip, we spent a good while sitting inside and warming our toes before going out again. It felt absolutely wonderful spending guilt-free hours up on the hill, never wondering how we were going to pay in future stress for our stolen fun, never worrying that we had missed a phone call and a guest was now furious with us. Nothing to worry about but our icy, numb toes in our unforgiving ski boots, and making each turn a little more fluid and graceful than the last. Unfortunately, the first unhandy pregnancy symptoms manifested about mid-morning in the form of something that felt like low blood sugar and high altitude shakies- I was bone-tired, shaky, faint, headachy, queasy, and my chest burned with the worst heartburn I had ever experienced. As hard as I tried to ski through it, I flat couldn't help but bonk. At 11:00, I finally told B I was done. If he wanted to ski more, that was fine, but I would be inside by the fire. He looked at me like I had lost my marbles, mocked me a bit for not being more die-hard, knowing this would be my last run before we returned to Kansas. But he took me home, back to the friend's house who's loft we commandeered, and I spent the afternoon trying to sleep sitting up, since lying down wasn't an option with the heartburn, while he watched the Bronco's game with a group of friends. We went out for dinner and I managed a few bites from B's plate, then home, where I spent the night propped up and sleeping fitfully.

The next morning we drove home, and the lower the altitude got, the better I felt. The friend we stayed with had predicted this, since she had been sick during her entire pregnancy, except for the Arizona river trip they had taken at fourteen weeks, during which she felt fine. By the time we hit 3,500 feet, our high plains elevation, I was feeling normal. Perhaps that is part of the reason I am so happy to be back home in Kansas. My brain and body really like being dependant on thick air. I still feel a bit crappy, but at manageable proportions.

Plus, I sit here with a Andy's head lying heavily on my arm as he gazes into my face, telepathically beaming to me his sheer adoration and his thinking that while he loves spending time with Grandpa Kevin, he hopes we do not leave him again for a while. Marv lies in the curve of his body, cleaning his own face with a luxuriously curled paw, occasionally stopping to also look up at me, letting me know how much he appreciates the fact that we did not abandon him like the last people he trusted. The sun streams through my south-facing windows and puddles on their matching yellow fur, warming the bottoms of my feet as they are propped on the coffee table in front of me, the only sound is Andy's wheezing, Marv's snorting as he licks himself,the tap of my keyboard and the ticking clock. I think it's going to be a good day. Of course, my house is trashed now, all of our gear dumped just inside the door, the bathroom the scene of a plumbing fix, but I have until four o'clock to fix all that. Then I have to drive to where B is working today, up by Sharon Springs, to pick him up and bring him home. In the meantime, I plan to fill the crock pot with food for dinner. It's a good life, this is. I wonder every day how I became one of the lucky ones, how we became so normal (by the gender role standards with which we were raised). I never saw myself enjoying being a woman in a patriarchal farm community, a stay at home wife, but right now, it seems oddly natural. Well, I would choose an ocean outside my door if I could, but it's still a pretty good life, considering. I have been able to be many things, and have enjoyed being those women, but at this point in my life, it doesn't really feel like I've sold out to enjoy being this one.

Happy 2012! Here is a video collage of a few of 2011's highlights for us. http://youtu.be/gKYHp_XO4pE

Hello and welcome to An Altitude Problem, where there are other things to love. I had a tiny epiphany the other night, when I was asked, once again, how I was adjusting to life in Western Kansas. I have never known quite how to answer that- I miss Colorado, and I miss who I was there. But I am a different person here. It's the only way I can survive the change, by changing myself. It is so hard to explain in a one-line sentence, when all the asker wants to hear is that I love or hate it, and either answer sounds insincere and does not explain how I feel. But I heard myself saying, enthusiastically, that I love it- I love different things about my life here than I loved in Colorado. Then I realized how true that is- and how simple of an answer. I don't hate it here. I am me here, just as I was me there, because the older I get, the more I come to realize that the true me is not defined by what I do, but the enthusiasm with which I do it.

Hiker, mountain biker, runner, skier, snowboarder, friend, wife- these are not who I am, but what I do. Who I am is a soul who loves beautiful things created by forces larger than myself, is connected to other beings, human and animal, through bonds made stronger by a unique ability to understand minute gestures, is driven by a strong urge to prove myself and therefore invites challenge, who loves change but hates uncertainty, who hates waiting and loves surprises. I have a personality that enjoys role-playing, and the physical ability to indulge it- I have pretended to be a mountain bike racer, a ski bum, a park rat, a career woman, a sports-industry insider, a super-wife, a gardener, a farmhand, an artist, a writer, a yogi, a heavy equipment operator, a welder, a health-care professional, an activist. Some of these things I have done well, some not so much. But all of them, I have done pretending that they defined me, if only for as long as I did them. Does that mean that those things are not me? No. They are me, because they are what me delights in doing. However, leaving those outdoorsy, adventurous people that I was in Summit County behind does not mean that I am not remaining true to myself, or that I must now hate living in a place where I cannot indulge my fantasies of being those people. It simply makes room to be other people. The mixing of many people, constant growing and experimenting and discovering is what truly makes me, me.

Do I sound psychotic and unstable? I am suddenly a bit fearful that I do. I have come to realize lately that perhaps other's minds don't work the way mine does. Many of the things I have always been hard on myself for, such as my complete inability to remember what I am doing for long enough to finish it, I have fought for years as a lack of discipline. But my memory has been jogged lately, the memory of me in school, how even back then I simply could not focus on any one thing for longer than a few minutes. How it drove my teachers nuts that I could not work on my math until I was finished, then move onto English, then to spelling, and so on. I had five books on my desk at once, changing subjects at ten minute intervals. If the slightest distraction was happening, someone tapping a pencil, rattling a desk, I simply could not focus on the task at hand. When my teachers reached their wit's end and sent me to the library to study, as a punishment for my lack of self-discipline, I was relieved- in the absence of distraction, I could focus on finishing my studies. My SAT scores indicated that my language skills were at a high-school graduate's level in third and fourth grade, while my math skills lagged behind where they should be for my age and education level. This alerted my parents and the therapists they hired to analyze me to the fact that I was a special-needs student. In the end, they put me on Ritalin during the school year, which left me pleasantly zoned and studious, able to block distractions and focus on finishing my work, which was suddenly flowing from my fingers at an amazing pace, long pages of penmanship, worksheets filled with algebraic diagrams. For the first time since I could remember, I was not taking home piles of homework, not fighting all evening with the distractions at home while I forced myself to finish it, not spending more time coming up with creative ways to not finish than simply finishing it. The margins of my worksheets were no longer filled with doodles, geometric shapes, curlicues, leaves and flowers and kites and faces of Victorian-era beauties with high hairdos and ruffles and cleavage. On the days that I seemed especially distracted, my teachers often asked me, in the middle of class, if I had taken my pills. It's probably a testament to the character of my classmates that I had any friends at all.

All of that background is to illustrate this- adult ADD is a scary and terrible and wonderful thing. It means chaos and spontaneity and fun and chagrin and frusteration and guilt. It means waking up in the morning, washing dishes and putting away groceries from the night before, and suddenly finding oneself elbows-deep in a batch of homemade ricotta cheese by 9 in the morning with no plan of how said cheese is going to be used before it spoils- it just needed to be made because several half-gallons of milk were tasting a little too sour to drink and were needing to be taken out of the fridge to make room for groceries bought last night. It means going online to look up ways to use ricotta cheese, and finding oneself blogging instead while a beautiful ball of creamy ricotta sits on the stove waiting to be stuffed into homemade pasta that I have suddenly lost interest in making. It means that in the meantime, I have batted a tennis ball across the yard for Andy to chase, soaked chia seeds in a glass of soymilk (my daily source of Omega 3's), juiced a grapefruit and made an over-easy egg and two slices of toast for Bobby, packed Bobby's lunch and contorted myself into strange shapes to fit through the crawlspace window to turn off the water to the house so Bobby can fix a plumbing issue. It means that I sit here in my yoga clothes, which is as close as I got to doing yoga this morning. For Bobby, it means that he comes home to the house being rearranged on a regular basis, which infuriates him but makes it feel all shiny and new and exciting to me. Sometimes his clothes are neatly folded, and sometimes they are dumped into his dresser drawers. Sometimes I feed him lavish meals, and sometimes I can barely manage a thrown-together taco. He says he still loves me, but he had no idea I was this crazy when he married me. Back then, all he saw was constant entertainment, fun and spontaneity, and now he never knows what to expect, which stresses him out. It puzzles him that I can manage to mix myriad colors into one cohesive picture, bring the illusion of nature's beautiful chaos and crash of color out of five tubes of paint- red, blue, yellow, black and white, but I cannot spread one gallon of premixed paint on a wall without getting stressed out and in a hurry and ending up with it in my hair, on the floor, and everywhere it should not be. I have been banned from painting walls.

To say that there has never been a small amount of experimentation with herbal self-medication to help with this problem would be a lie. I have lived for almost a decade in a small hippie mountain town that has led the way in promoting natural medication over synthetic prescription drugs. I have many friends who chose to treat chronic pain, insomnia, and other maladies with small amounts of organic, all-natural, home-grown THC over drugs mixed and touted by pharmaceutical companies. I have also just paid the bill for the one time my health-care provider thought I needed prescrition drugs- a $250 anti-nausea pill because the pain of a miscarriage had me thinking I might vomit- a perfectly normal reaction to pain. In hindsight, knowing what that little cherry-flavored bit of pill would cost, I would have chosen to vomit for free. That little experience has lessened my trust of for-profit healthcare a bit.

My observations on the results of such experiments are mixed- when I have desperately needed to get something done, say, an entire house cleaned in a short amount of time, a very small amount has worked like absolute magic. I zone in on what I should be doing just as I did when I was a kid on ritalin. Suddenly, making order out of chaos is soothing for the soul. But if I overdo it just the slightest bit, I become manic. My attention span is shortened even more than normal, and I spin from one thing to the next. My personal theory on mind-altering substances, any mind-altering substances, whether created in a lab and called something like percocet, created in a distillery and called something like rum, created in a field and called something like coffee, tobacco, or weed, or created in our brains and called something like endorphins or a runner's high, these are all things that can be beneficial in certain applications, but not as a permanent fix. Recent research shows that MDMA, or ecstacy, when taken by someone with autism, can help him feel empathy and relate to the people around him. Nobody is suggesting that someone with autism be high on ecstacy all the time. It is decidedly bad for the body. However, those who have tried it say that the memory of that feeling helps them fake it and bring their behavior in line with those around them, making them more approachable, more socially functioning, which made it worth doing once. Do I approve of taking drugs, legal or illegal? Not particularly. But realistically, we all accept on certain levels that our brain chemistry is whacky enough to need chemical, medicinal help, whether it is help waking up in the morning, help scrambling pain signals from our bodies, help seeing the positive side of circumstances. Even the food we eat affects our brain chemistry, simple carbs and sugars lighting up the pleasure-sensors in our brains. We do not know why we like certain foods, but our brains know-they are drugs.

I am thinking about this, and therefore it is what comes out of my fingers while blogging, because I have been doing a lot of thinking lately about how our minds work, and how everyone tends to judge those around them based on their own experience of life. If someone who, above all, values order, someone who hates change, someone who can focus on one task in the middle of loud chaos were to live with me, we would judge each other harshly. I call those people obsessive compulsive, rigid, boring. They call me undisciplined, flighty, manic. But it seems that if we could all just accept each other's unmedicated selves, learn to adapt and make changes to accomodate everyone's strange hang-ups, we would be a much more loving and open-minded society.

And now, I have a messy kitchen, a bowl full of fresh soft cheese sitting on my stove waiting to be used, and various other projects. I do love it out here in the country- it is as quiet as the grave in this house. It is a beautiful, windstill day outside, perfect for a run with Andy later, and I have all day to fail, then fix. With nobody watching my process, I can spend hours down the rabbit hole that is the internet, becoming distracted by everything from cheese-making to youtube, and still have time to have the house looking as though super-wife lives here by the time B gets home. We took yesterday off, in the howling wind, and stayed in the house recharging our internal batteries before braving the weather and venturing to Garden City for groceries, so today B is having to work a bit to make up for it.

Until later, my faithful few. Thank you for staying faithful during my entire month's absense from the blogosphere.

Hello and welcome to An Altitude Problem, where the level of anxiety is high, but we are not sure why. It's all the unknown. It's not having a job. It's that feeling of panic at not knowing where you are headed and if you are making the right decisions.

I quit my job at the lodging company, for reallsies, the other day. The woman who takes reservations and acts as go-between for the owner of the company had some misinformation given her by a new hire that cast me in a less than favorable light, and she called and yelled at me for fifteen minutes before taking enough of a breath to allow me to defend myself. She calmed down after getting the facts, but I suddenly had enough. I wasn't getting much work anymore, and I wasn't getting the benefit of the doubt after having proven for eight years that I have nothing but the best interest of this company in mind. Sudden anger swelled up and spilled over and I told her that she had helped me see that the time had come for me to move on. Which I did. I have not been back since. I feel a little guilty, yes, since I have never quit a job for any reason other than necessity, never told a boss that I am quitting because I am not happy with the job. However, I have also always been on excellent terms with my bosses and never felt taken advantage of, nor have I ever felt as though I have been treated unfairly. It was a new experience for me, and one I was not prepared for. The triumph of exercising my right to refuse my services put me on a bit of a power high and I walked away shaky but giddy. Bobby and I had a long talk, during which he assured me I had done the right thing, and we decided that if we have to cut our losses with this house, fire-sale it, that is okay. It's not worth placing stress on our marriage by living in two separate states all winter. Sure, I could work at the ski shop, but is staying up here worth the wages they pay? Not really. So he made the executive decision that I should go to Kansas. No sooner did I get down there than it rained six inches in two days, and the entire area is a bottomless mud pit. There will be no spreading until the fields dry out. So we packed up the dog and a suitcase and drove back to Colorado for an appointment with the tax accountant.

The first thing we did when we got here was check the mail, and sure enough, a bill from my emergency room visit. $4,000. And neither of us working at the moment. And cold weather, so nothing to do but sit and mull over our lives. I have never needed a bike ride so badly, but the trails are wet. We had hoped we could make a trip to Fruita for a few days, and we still hope to, but it costs money to drive out there. Aint life grand?

Not whining. I know this is the stuff life is made of, and as such, it's a beautiful life. I have love, if no money. I have the promise that everything will get better. In six months, we can move into a beautiful house in the bottom of a peaceful valley, a house with room for friends. So there's no jobs out there that are an option for me, but there is the chance that maybe I will be pregnant, then have a kid, so I can justify not working to my overdeveloped sense of responsibility. B tells me to live in the present, and normally, I would agree, but I'm not really loving the present right now. It's an excellent way to get to the future, and I'm okay with that. But at the same time, I am trying to remember that I am not promised the future, so I need to enjoy the things that are good right now- Bobby and Andy and a really psychotic cat named Marvin with serious abandonment issues who occasionally comes around begging for food and human touch, a warm house and a sense of humor and irony- one of the few things, along with a really ugly couch and a chair that eats things, that we brought with us when we moved. Not complaining. Just wondering at which point it would be justified for me to start. I have to conclude it would need to be pretty bad before I could complain without guilt- we have food and love and shelter and health. To some, we are a little underachieving but to so many millions more, we are wealthy beyond imagination. Life IS grand.

Hello and welcome to An Altitude Problem, where the altitude is certainly not a problem. That is because at 3,400 feet, which is what our elevation is out here in the high plains, the air is thick, although not as thick as that air soup at sea level that makes a mountain dweller's lungs feel as though they will burst through one's ribs and forces shallow breaths.

So much has happened in the last week. After I posted that last post, I packed my bags, swished a token rag about my house, scooped all of the odds and ends from the top of the dresser, desk, etc into my underwear drawer so the house at least looked clean should our realtor get motivated and decide to actually maybe, I don't know, list it? Show it? She seems to have decided to not do a thing with it in the month since we signed the papers agreeing to give her 6 percent of the selling price. I packed the car full, put our road bikes on the roof, loaded up Andy, and hit the road. After a few stops in Denver, I drove out into the endless prairie with the sunset in my rear view mirror. At midnight, I was in a different world, that flat place where churches tower and kids reign and the air reeks of feedlot and rotting corn and freshly applied chemical blows off of fields and ditches and leaves it's oily taste in the back on one's throat. I pulled up to the tiny wheeled box that housed my husband, and let the dog out. Their reunion was joyous and exuberant. We cuddled up together on the couch that folds down into a sort-of bed, me curled around him curled around Andy. It felt so good to melt into a pile of blankets and warm bodies and not be alone, it was worth the five hours in the car through flat darkness, straining my eyes for deer and trying not to speed as the mile markers flashed past.

For two days, I rode with B in his truck. He was hauling manure out of a small private feedlot to a field several miles away, so we spent the day talking in bursts punctuated by his pulling into a pen, jumping from truck to loader, and loading the truck with tons upon tons of caked, rock-hard poop.

It has been years since I have had the chance to observe cows. They amaze and amuse me. B thinks I am nuts, that cows are the dumbest creatures on earth. I beg to differ. They are excellent examples of social hierarchy, habit, and creative ways to cope with a mind-numbing life. Cows live their short, cruel lives with nobody looking out for them, at least not unless someone's dollar is threatened. Nobody cares about a cow's emotional well-being. They stand all day in their own poop, and they eat corn that comes from the back of a feedtruck twice a day. When they arrive in a feedlot from whichever ranch they were born in and lived and romped, they are hearded, terrified, into a squeeze chute and hurt by humans armed with electric prods, their ears are ripped open and tags punched into them. If they thrash, a boot to their jaw. Huge and occasionally dull needles into flanks. They learn that a human one-sixth their size is a terrifying, predatory creature, and they learn that machinery, loaders and feedtrucks, will never run them over, will always stop for them, and their dinner comes from these enormous, noisy, stinking, smoking creatures. And they are bored. A pile of poop and a moving loader provides hours of entertainment in the time that they should spend grazing instead of being forced to stand around in their own poop without a blade of grass in sight. I was explaining this to B after he came back to the truck sputtering about stupid cows and how they cut down on his productivity by standing on top of the pile he was trying to load, following the loader, not moving with any amount of bucket-shaking and engine revving. The next load, I hopped out of the truck and stood on top of the pile myself while he loaded, making eye contact with the bravest cows, the ones who crowded closest. They trotted to safer corners and B loaded his truck in record time. But he said that as helpful as it was to have a scary woman out there scaring the cows away from the pile, it was a little embarrassing. He was pretty sure the cowboys would laugh at him. No normal wife would volunteer to go stand on a pile of poop and frighten cows for her husband, so they would probably assume he had made me do it, which would cause them to question his manliness and all manner of other things. Oh, dear.

After three days of spreading, it rained. We were sleep deprived. It is one thing to cuddle on a bed too narrow for two people and too short to stretch out for one night, but by the third night, we were beginning to snap at each other and fight for our sleeping rights. We decided that we absolutely had to find a house to live in.

Now, we plan on moving into Grandpa and Grandma's farm house in March, when the tenants who are in it now move out. I am so excited I can hardly stand it. A garden plot, pasture to bike in and run a small herd of happy cows, room for Andy to run, space for a chicken house, a barn for goats and cattle, a house empty and begging for sticky fingers and tiny feet. I have all manner of crazy notions running through my mind about building structures on the place, finally experimenting with straw bale construction and eco-sustainable utilities. There can be composting and planting trees and guinea hens. I can be barefoot and pregnant and my hair can get frizzy and my nails dirty and my arms tan. We can live close to the earth, of the earth, our food can come from our own hands and our own soil instead of being processed, poisonous, unrecognizable rubbery lumps of questionable meats and faux vegetables that are wax and miracles of geneticism and chemistry that have travelled thousands of miles from a questionable source to find their way into our bodies, to be called nourishment and to convince us that tomatoes are supposed to be pink and cucumbers are supposed to be shiny.

But before all that can happen, we need to be able to sleep this winter. We need to not get hypothermia spending a winter in a drafty camper heated with a propane bottle. I need to be able to cook so we can live on as real of food as I can manage, not Pop Tarts and Shells&Cheese.

B has spent the last six weeks inquiring, exhausting every channel, exploring every option looking for a house for us. Houses in Western KS are not easy to find. Every little farmhouse has a little farm family in it, a little farm husband providing the money for the little farm wife to buy pretty little curtains and new carpet. Things have changed since we left. Farmers have money now. Rent is still cheap, but not as cheap as it was, and home prices have risen. And the things that are available for rent are not what one might call liveable. I mean, for a meth lab, they work just fine. Mold on the walls and holes in the carpets and linoleum, centipede infestation and mouse poop, a history of murder-suicide, that's just fine if you're junkie who's cookin'. It might even be fine for us, as an alternative to our camper. The problem out here is not that the houses aren't there, it's a booming farm ecomomy and a mindset that only low-class people and transient workers rent, while functioning members of society own homes. The farmers do not need the extra money that would come from renting the old homesteads they aquire in farmland purchases, nor do they want the headache of upkeep, or to have to repair the damage that 15 transient workers can cause to a little farmhouse. With depleted aquifers, many of the wells have dried up. Little farm houses that once held little farm families and cradled little farm babies now crumble from neglect, sad windows watching the weeds grow around them. If it's a really nice place, (I.e. brick construction) a farmer might keep it for his little farm sons to move into, which they do as soon as they are married, and live in it until they can afford to build their own large, nice homes for their little farm brides on their yards surrounded by established trees, at which point they bulldoze the old house. At any rate, it is extrememly difficult to convince a farmer who just purchased another big, shiny green tractor that your rent money is valuable to him, and if you do convince him, one mention of your exuberant Golden Retriever and the deal is off. No inside pets allowed. Western Kansas farmers do not like pets. As a result, pets in Kansas are not the adored, well-behaved, easily forgiven members of society that they are in Colorado. And oddly, as trashy and unloved as the sad little farm houses that have escaped the bulldozer are out here, a slobbering, grinning, shedding house dog is a thing of abject horror to their owners.

At last, however, we heard of a recently vacated house 29 miles from town. In a twist of fate that I am not sure how to feel about yet, it is the same house in which I spent the first 15 years of my life. It is a solid little house, stucco over cinderblock, a tall house because an upstairs was added to a basement house 80 years ago. It stands sturdy agains battering winds. Not a single light apart from a blinking red tower is visible to the north, in spite of the fact that the house sits on a ridge, and only a few hardy souls live in the Smoky Hill River breaks to the north. It survived the dust storms of the 30's. It survived years of farmers battling with a terrible farm economy. A family lived in it, raised children, saw them get married and move away, saw them die. They left letters, postcards, photographs, books and clothes in the crawlspace, which I discovered when I was about 8 and spent days living in the 1930's. They left hay in the hayloft, which I spent a significant part of my childhood in, and in which dozens of kittens were born. I climbed over stanchions and imagined I was anywhere but there. The front porch of the house was the bow of my ship, the undulating waves of wheat surrounging the house my ocean. The grainery out back was my castle and playhouse, as was the much older homestead a mile down the road that I walked to, used the leaning outhouse oblivious to what might be living below the cracked seat, played Pioneer, pretending to draw water out of the frozen pump handle, lazily floating in the stock tank under the windmill, not really sure if the lumps on the bottom were dead birds or bits of sunken tumbleweed. It's really no wonder I had to be dewormed on the same schedule as the animals. My companions, a long line-up of short-lived Chows, Border Collies, Australian Shepherds, Great Pyrenees, and Chihuahuas, watched out for me, barked at rattlesnakes to warn me away, chased jackrabbits, dug goatheads from between their pads with their teeth. I lived outside, barefoot, my feet splaying out until no shoes would fit, the bottoms as hard as a dog's. I carried eggs in my skirt from the far corners of the yards as I found nests hens had hidden. I found bleached deer and cow bones in the pasture and brought them back, as well. I rescued a baby cottontail, a baby barnswallow, baby garter snakes, but all had to eventually be turned loose. I was a busy child, perfectly happy with being alone most of the time. And in hindsight, I know why. While the yard, the neighbor's yard, and the surrounding 3,000 acres of grassland and dry river breaks was the scene of the best parts of my childhood, the house was the scene of the worst. It was here I learned to be who I am, all the good and bad, the beautiful and terrible. All the laughter and tears of my adult life pull strings attached at the other end to this place and the things that happened here. The ghosts that haunt this house are not the usual kind. They are me. They are the things that I have tried to rise above and forget and deny. They are the pain that I have chosen not to feel, begging to be let back in so it can grow. They are the forgiveness that I have chosen to give, to myself and to parents and to friends, thoughtlessly cruel because nobody knew what really happened out there in the white house on the north edge of civilisation. It is the anger at certain adults in my life who punished me beyond my crimes, heaped punishment on top of the punishment I gave myself, because of their lack of understanding. Because they somehow thought they needed to be harder on me because of my parents. Because I was different and an only child. Because I didn't always wear a dress. Because I had seen more ugly life than their kids and it colored how I responded to situations around me, made me less like them and made them like me less.

In the 13 years since I moved away, I have become someone my 15 year old self would envy. I have salvaged all the best parts of her, and have scrubbed away most of the hurt, self-hatred, and insecurity that made her such a target. I have embraced her wild hair and her love of nature and her adventuresome spirit, while banishing most of her painful awkwardness with a constant stream of affirmation. I am thankful to whatever common sense she possessed that in spite of her self-destructive tendancies, she found a boy to share her life with who would let her know that she was his world, that he loved her just the way she was, while helping her try to rid herself of her anger and her depression and her self-hatred. I watched her rip her relationship with him to shreds before she realized what she was doing. I watched it circle the drain. I watched as it dawned on her that her low opinion of herself had caused her to mess things up so badly, he would never look at her in the same way again. Then I let her sob long nights away, wallowing in self-pity, and laughed as one day, she found herself laughing and wondering where the pain was. I watched as they laughed together, him and her, in their new reality and she felt, for the first time, something like self-respect. Something like unconditional love, washing over her as she discovered she could never mess up so badly as to make him stop loving her. Something like a dawning understanding of what the love of God must feel like, and something like joy and reverent gratefulness at the sort of love that would create someone like her and then still find it beautiful. I smiled as she looked at herself in the mirror and was glad for life, her own life, and promised her wild-haired, sad-eyed reflection that she would become more like me.

She's the ghost that eases out of the closet in the middle of the night and walks the hallway. She's the icy breath on the back of my neck as I stand at the kitchen sink and wash dishes the same way my mom did for 15 years. She's the reason I put the tupperware in the utensil drawer, the napkins in the silverware drawer, the silverware in the knife drawer. Every time I open the drawer next to the sink to get a fork, as I did for 15 years, I see napkins instead and I remember that it wasn't yesterday, it was a decade and a half ago, and she isn't me. Then I walk outside and I go for a ramble in the pasture, because that was where she had the least power all those years ago, and she still has less say out there. But still, every corner of this place causes an old emotion to come alive and walk the earth, creeping along in my shadow, ghostly fingers plucking at my heels.

But at the same time, I could move into this house and it was instantly home. No need to feel as though I don't belong, as though I have no roots. I know what every pop, every creak in this sturdy old house means. We speak each other's language. The sunrise through the dead tree branches to the east is the same one I saw every morning as I prepared for school, my steps across the yard trace the ones I took as I fed the calves, chickens, sheep, goats, horses, cats, and dogs, carried water and feed, chopped ice, buried my face in fragrant, hay-scented fur, brushed manes and tails, patted silky noses, stumbled over purring cats twisting around my ankles and greeted doggy kisses with belly rubs. So I think it's a good thing. Maybe it's okay that I revisit those old memories, too. Maybe I can finally put them to rest. Maybe being here will force me to move past my old self for once and for all, and plant the notion deep in my brain that Western Kansas does not have to turn me into anyone I don't want to be.

As soon as we got ourselves moved in, it was time to leave again. Heather, my cousin, snowboarding pal, our occasional winter help in Colorado, has finally found a man. Heather thinks there are those who believe those words deserve lights and a banner, or at least caps and italics, but Heather, bless her, has danced to her own tune and traveled the world and has been an incredible, independant, strong woman while waiting to meet a soulmate, one in several billion, who actually deserved her. And he does treat her like a queen. We love seeing her so very happy and cared for. The wedding was at her home church in Michigan, where she has lived, and I have never been there. We drove for two days to get there, through Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, a corner of Illinios, and the bottom half of Michigan. There were more cornfields than I care to remember. Bobby stayed home, but the car was full- my mom, my friend Laci, and sister-in-law Marci. We slept in Davenport, IA on the way up, and made a quick detour off a random interstate exit which took us through the little town of Sagintauk and ended on the shore of Lake Michigan, so just in case I never get back, I can say I have seen a great lake. We walked down to the water, took off our shoes and dug our toes in the sugar sand, and got back on the road. After arriving on Thursday evening, we met all of Heather's "girls", the group of friends she has collected over the years, all having heard of each other, only a few having met. I found an instant kinship with several, that strange feeling that you most certainly must have known each other well in the past and merely forgotten. The weekend was a long series of fun and giggles, conversations of a nature too intimate to merit having just met. A little Too Much Information a time or two, a few deafening moments as everyone tried to talk over everyone else, an uproar here, a moment of hilarity there, and visuals that may stay with onlookers, in spite of them really wishing they wouldn't. (It seemed all such moments inevitably involved underwear- whether it was a cringe-worthy first impression and introduction made indelible by my own underwear, Superman briefs worn over jeans and dress slacks, striped underwear worn over yoga pants- although that one was definitely more cute-wrong than painful-wrong, an underwear moment that should never leave the cabin, because you just had to be there to appreciate it, or a moment involving a boomerang, cat tails and a green pond, me the damsel in distress- or should I say dis dress?- the pantsless husband of a friend coming to my rescue, and a whole lot of mud.) Uncle Warren and Aunt Silver (a.k.a. Sylvia) fed us well, and took care of us and were beyond hospitable. Heather provided a cabin out on Crystal Lake in the quaint and Dirty-Dancing-ish summer town of Crystal for the overflow, since all of her girls would have been far too many for the house. It was quiet there, being fall, and the mornings were crisp. Once the sun came out, fog hovered over the water. Some of the best parts of the trip happened in the cabin, like the long afternoon Marci, Laci and I spent relaxing in the screened-in back porch, saying whatever came to mind, cracking up over the odd things we delight in finding in common. Swans glided past the end of the long wooden dock that stretched into the water outside, water lapped at the shore, the old woman reading her book on the back porch of the house next door may have wondered if we had lost our minds. We ate an inordinate amount of chocolate and had girltalk like we haven't really had since we married boys.

The Friday night dinner and wedding saturday morning were beautiful affairs, and in spite of all the people attending, the couple kept the tone intimate and relaxed. It proved difficult getting them to leave the church after the wedding, with so many good friends around, and when they did, their car keys had accidentally gone home with the groom's father, who, along with all but maybe 20 people, had grown tired of waiting for the bride and groom to make their grand exit and had left. So the grand exit was made in the back seat of a friend's car, which seems highly appropriate and summarizes the spirit of the entire weekend- the focus on friends and the need for all involved to be flexible and plan on the unplanned.

Although there were those very sad to see Heather leave Michigan, they will be living for the foreseeable future in Brian's house in Copeland, Kansas. Copeland is south and a little east of Scott City. There are definitely those of us excited that they will be in Kansas.

After the bride and groom left, it was late, too late to consider starting home yet that night. We decided instead to get up early and make what turned out to be a 17 hour, 1,100 mile trip the next day. Besides, everyone left who was of a kindred spirit decided to trek out into the woods and build a campfire. Which we did, and it was a wonderful way to unwind after a weekend of activity- leaping flames and dancing shadows on the faces of new friends. We instructed my mom to sleep and prepare to be the driver on the first shift the next day, so we could stay out late. We returned to the cabin about 1:30, were sleeping by 2:00, and our alarm rang at 5. We were on the road by 6, watched a Michigan sunrise, a Nebraska sunset, ate wedding sandwiches and wedding candy out of a soft-sided cooler, stopped for gas four times and a potty break five and a half times (the half-time was a guard rail in the Illinios rain) and home by 10:00 that night, a time zone earlier.

And now I am back in the Land of Odd- I mean Oz. I still experience shock every time I lift my head from my computer and look out the window at the russet heads of milo around my house, at the sky that extra atmosphere and dust have turned a paler shade of blue than I am accustomed to, at the silence I remember from my childhood- the sound of such silence is the faint roar of bloodflow in my ears, my breath whispering in and out, in and out, a meadowlark outside. This house is quiet. The wind can howl and not a sound is heard in here. It feels strange, no barking dogs, no kids playing in the street, no backing garbage trucks or distant hammering, no sounds that one accepts as silence when one lives in a populated area. Just the occasional thwack of a loose piece of tin on the barn roof, a cricket, a meadowlark, a gust of wind rattling a windowpane, then back to loud, loud silence. It's wonderful and terrifying.

Hello and welcome to An Altitude Problem, where life goes on. The chill of fall has arrived, and it won't be long before gold tinges the aspens, which are already losing their deep summer green and looking a little pale. Nights produce heavy frost, afternoons often produce a gray, thick layer of clouds reminiscent of the milk-white winter sky. Drizzling days keep the trails soggy, although the last few have been sunny enough to dry them out again, making it perfect biking weather- a cool nip in the breeze, but warm sun to take off the edge. Only when the sun hides behind a cloud does one realize how close winter is.

This won't be a long post, just a brief update on the lives of me and mine. At least I don't intend for it to be, but we know how these things go.

I had to wait four long, agonizing days to find out if I was still pregnant, but the result was that on Tuesday night (after they fixed the lab- they couldn't get my results to me sooner because the machine they needed to test my blood was broken) my doctor called me to tell me that my HcG levels had dropped, so I had indeed miscarried.

I know the way most people perceive me- as not being very interested in being a mother. There is more I could have said on the subject to persuade them otherwise, but to say more would have made me far more vulnerable than I have already made myself. Although I suppose if one wants to not be vulnerable, one is better off not keeping a blog that talks frankly about the normal joys and sorrows that comprise life, the feelings one assumes others experience as well and do not talk about. Except I don't believe in keeping one's struggles or happiness a secret. I believe that painful honesty shows those around us that they are not alone. I believe that if all of us were painfully honest, we would all be able to connect on a deeper level, and maybe we wouldn't all have to bear so much pain alone. Maybe we would learn from each other's mistakes instead if having to make them ourselves. Maybe we wouldn't misunderstand each other and add rejection to the pain we are already feeling. Maybe we wouldn't just be lone organisms in the same tank. Maybe I should have been more honest all along.

It is hard to articulate the reason tears silently rolled down my cheeks as I went about my business for the next day and a half. The fact is, I have spent years knowing that I want a child, but simultaneously knowing beyond a doubt that it was not a good time.

I should clarify- I still believe that there is no difference between a child one adopts and one that comes from one's own body. The soul is what matters, not the DNA. I know I would love a child that someone else had given up as much as one that was biologically mine (and to say it is yours seems a bit presumptious when you think about it. Do you control what happens to it? It's gender? How he looks? How she feels? The choices he makes? How she chooses to live, and how she dies? You can, and should, try to influence it toward good choices. But while you are responsible for it, it is it's own person, and while it is inextricably linked to you, it does not belong to you. You were merely honored to be trusted with it's well-being and given the right to love it more than anyone else possibly could.) And I still feel it is a bit of a waste making my own when there are kids out there who already exist who need a good home. But adoption is expensive and honestly, more beaurocracy than we can handle at the moment. And B really wants to see his own DNA recreated in a new person. It must be a boy thing. And for me, that dam has broken, and there is no holding back the flood of love and hope. I have waited and agonized for years, already loving that future child of mine so much that I was willing to wait until a time in our lives when we could give it everything it deserved- the full attention of both it's parents, the most formative time in it's life not dictated by it's parent's stress and frusteration and anger at circumstances we could not control and a job that dictated every second of our lives in an industry we don't feel fulfilled in. But in the meantime, as one by one my friends had kids, nobody but Bobby saw me cry, and even he did not understand why I could not just be happy for them.

I was born into a disfunctional situation. My entire adult life has been spent realizing the implications of this. Too late, I have discovered that my deep insecurities have affected every major decision I have made, have made me believe that I did not deserve to be happy. I say this knowing that my parents will read it, and it is nothing that hasn't been addressed before. It isn't their fault. They were overwhelmed and they sacrificed their own well-being many times to see that I did not suffer for them. They told me again and again that what they were going through was not my fault. Their issues got back-burnered and taking care of me became their priority. I have often wondered what they might have been able to resolve, the understanding they might have been able to cultivate for each other had I not been in the picture until after the worst had passed for them. Only now, after I have been out of their house, have they been able to grow together as a couple. I have the opinion that many couples have kids too early, and have to get to know their life's mates through childcare, and every couple knows and is known, and grows together through a series of errors. Many of these are errors that an innocent, sweet, unmarred child should not have to bear the consequences of.

I have lived an adventuresome life while I have waited to be the person I need to be, with the life I need to have in order to completely give myself to a child. When I have that child, it will be my "thing". I won't have the time or inclination for my "own thing". I must be ready for that, and know that I won't resent the temporary loss of my "thing" while I am in the middle of diapers and temper tantrums and sticky fingers. I tried to explain this one day to a young mother who seemed particularly judgemental of my decision to wait to have kids, and obviously failed to make myself understood, because she kept telling me I couldn't just lose my own identity. No, I don't plan to. I plan on my identity shifting from badass mountain biker and skier and tough girl to mother. People who made the desision to have a child simply because it seemed like the thing to do after a few years of marriage, who never agonized over the implications of bringing a new soul into the world, who never wondered if their own shortcomings would affect the future well being and psychological health of their child, seem completely flummoxed over why I would want a child so much and still not have one. In the meantime, I have felt a surge of anger at every comment made by others about how I am so selfish, not wanting kids. How I need to grow up. How I am loving my life too much to want to share it and need to realize what is really important. I bite my tongue to keep from saying the same thing to them. I know I make it look like my reasons are shallow to keep from exposing the dark side of myself that doesn't believe I am a good person, so it is my fault. It seems easier than articulating the deeper, darker emotions behind our waiting for so long. Every time I had reason to believe I was pregnant in the past, I let myself believe that it was fate, that higher powers believed in me, trusted me to not screw this up, so I believed in myself. But then it turned out to be a false alarm, and just like that, the switch flipped and I was back to thinking of myself in the singular, and back to knowing I couldn't handle the amount of responsibility of caring for another human, one who would be totally dependant on me, when I could barely manage to care for myself most days. And back to my heart breaking every time I thought of it and what could have been. And back to tears every time another friend got pregnant and suddenly thought that every other woman should want this, too, and seemed to judge me for not wanting to be just like her.

Which is why, for four days while they kept telling me there most likely hadn't been enough bleeding, that bleeding like this happens in the first trimester, that I was probably still pregnant, I tried so hard to not start to believe it, but I couldn't help it. Getting the news that I had miscarried after all was what it took to rip that fragile hope back out of my hands. I had this brief moment of fierce love and fierce protectiveness over that thing inside me that at that point, still resembled a sea monkey more than a human. I saw it as it would be in seven and a half months and I loved it so much it hurt. And then I spent four days trying to un-love it because it was most likely dead. The day after they told me it hadn't survived, my body varified it by offloading massive amounts of whatever was in there. Disgusting, I know. But common. Sorry, boys. You're in a girl's world now. If it makes you uncomfortable, feel free to not read herein.

That was almost a week ago. I haven't shed any more tears. It seems pointless. It took those days of tears to start to think of myself as a lone organism again. I am especially lone with Bobby back in Kansas. Sure, I share a house with another human, I'm never completely alone, but I am singular. I am no longer we. I feel like me again, not this person I don't know, but like. I am sad that I have to wait to try again, annoyed that we were finally there, I finally decided to trust myself to be the person I needed to be, we finally decided we were in a good enough place to be able to bring someone into the world and provide them with happiness and security, instead of the same insecurities we both deal with. Annoyed that the higher powers didn't see fit to let us just have that dream easily. Annoyed that we have to try and agonize and wait and see. Annoyed that it seems so easy for some others, but nothing can ever be easy for us.

...moving on. I really wanted to skip the last race of the season yesterday morning, but went anyway. I planned on not riding hard. But I pulled away from the pack within a mile of the start, and two girls from Boulder stayed with me, and we battled it out over 16 miles and about 2,900 vertical feet, from Breck to almost treeline up Boreas Pass, and back down. At the top of the climb, I had no hope of catching the girls from Boulder, but it was a descent I have raced down before, so I was prepared. My bike fishtailed under me, but we stayed upright over the washed out trail, babyheads roling under my tires, we caught air over water bars and splashed down a shallow stream that decided to share the trail for a ways, navigated the tight switchbacks that caused me so much time last race, passed the Boulder girls halfway down and crossed the finish line in first place. I probably would not have done so well, but the girl who beats me almost every race did not show up to this one, and "that girl Marlee" decided to move up to Expert. I was tied for second place overall going into the race, so I knew I had gotten second overall. I was a little sad I wold never have another season to try for first overall, never have that pretty plaque with my picture to hang on my wall and remember my glory days, but at least I would get a medal as a consolation prize. I finally got to stand on the tallest podium, and I got a new pair of bike gloves as a prize. After all the awards were handed out for that day's race, they started on the overall awards. I was expecting second, but the race organizer started in on this explanation before he announced my name. "And there was a tie for first place overall. We break the tie by who has the highest score in this race, and since one of the girls was not at this race, the tie goes to..." And suddenly my teammates were cheering and jostling me, and I realized I had won first overall. That was unexpected. I felt bad for the girl I have been neck-and-neck with all season, because she actually did consistantly better than me, I was down one race, up the next, but their rule of taking the best six out of seven scores meant she had to drop more points than I did. I have my getting lost on that second race of the season to thank for my high overall score, as bizarre as that seems. If I had had to drop a higher score, my overall score would have been lower and I would not have been tied for first, but second.

It was a good feeling knowing that while I won't be racing again, at least not for the forseeable future, I did accomplish more than I had hoped to with this season. I could have had more podiums, but I still helped my team win the series, I won the overall championship, and I had fun and didn't miss a race. I was also extremely lucky- not a flat tire, not a broken chain all race season.

The last happening in the lives of me and mine is that my mom has decided to go back in for another surgery. Her last one was a single mastectomy with a lumpectomy on the other side, and at the time, it was important to her to keep as much of her body as she could. She has since become less attached to her girls, and has decided to have the other side removed, as well. Less careful monitoring, more peace of mind knowing that she won't be getting breast cancer again if there are no breasts left to get cancer. It was hard, agonizing, to know that she was losing one of them, but after one has been gone for six months, the other has finally become more of a priority. Her appointment is set for September 30. I hate to see her have to go through that again-the surgery, the pain, the rehab. But I do agree with her decision- I'd like to think if it was me, I would do the same thing.

The month ahead looks like a long series of trips between here and Kansas, with several other trips thrown in, like the one to Michigan for Heather's wedding. It looks like the little Focus will be carrying four girls- Marci, me, Laci, and my mom on a 14 hour road trip Northeast. It's not really a comfy car for traveling, but it does get good gas mileage. In the meantime, I am trying to not think about the future, since we still don't have a house in Kansas, still don't know when I will be moving, don't know if I want to move or not. Out there, I will get to be with Bobby, but there I might lose my mind with boredom, while here, I can at least bike, and after the resort opens this fall, I can still ski. But alone. That just isn't as much fun. When I am out there, I will be spending 16 hour days waiting for Bobby to get home from work so I can see him for a few hours a day, while up here, I can fill my days up with work and play, as long as I don't mind being apart from him. There's really no good solution.

Until later, faithful few. Here's hoping honesty doesn't make you squirm.