| Writer's Block: Let freedom ring |
[Jul. 5th, 2011|01:10 pm] |
I count my blessings that I've made it to New Zealand, that's how. Freedom from a lot of the stress and desperation of America--poverty, violence, insecurity, etc.--means the freedom for me to more happily live my life among other people more happily living theirs.
But to be honest, I also spend the 4th missing my family, friends, and the other irreplaceable things about America. I can sit in my quiet home playing with my children, thinking about our very positive future while looking out the window at some of New Zealand's beautiful scenery, and not be able to help missing the blazing hot summer days, water fights, fireworks, barbecues, and all the other things I miss from my home in the American South.
One of the things you learn when you leave home, and learn over and over again, is that most of the things you left behind, no matter what value you used to put on them, are irreplaceable. The food you eat, the dialect you speak, the flora and fauna, they're never the same when you cross any significant border. |
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| Long-overdue update |
[Dec. 21st, 2010|09:29 pm] |
Things are going well.
That's all, really. :p
Haha!
Anyone still out there in readerville?
-Philip |
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| Ker-pow! |
[Sep. 12th, 2010|10:58 am] |
Hello friends.
I've been home with the kids for a week now, barring one day of work last Tuesday. Unfortunately I'm not getting paid for this time off, as my job isn't quite organized enough to help its employees out when they can't work.
I'm home only because the kids' daycare is closed, following a decision by the Ministry of Education after the earthquake 8 days ago. Schools and ECE's (Early Childhood Education centers) should be open again on Monday, which will mean back to work for me.
The time has passed pretty well around the house. Rose and Ian have been brilliant, doing lots of good playing with each other, leaving Papa alone when need be (and in fact most of the time,) being polite, following requests, and throwing me random affection every so often to boot. Well done, guys! :) The first day or two were a bit rough, since they are used to Mummy bring their primary, but we all quickly adapted and learned what to expect from each other. And that's something you have to re-learn often, by the way, since they change so rapidly; you can really fall behind after not seeing much of your kids for only a week.( More ahead, including martial arts stuff... ) |
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| Just another day |
[Sep. 5th, 2010|09:48 am] |
The older kids are in Timaru, and Michelle is at work. I'm sitting around in my boxers hanging out with River (my four-month-old daughter) watching Asian tv, contemplating a shower and some housework, waiting for further aftershocks after yesterday's quake, waiting for the gales we're supposed to get today, and (after reading plenty of FB, LJ, and American news articles linked to in the aforementioned) feeling very lucky to be in New Zealand.
That's pretty much it. :) |
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| Hello hello hello!!! |
[Aug. 20th, 2010|06:50 pm] |
Hey everyone! I'm back! :D
No, not back in America. Just back on the internet and on LJ. For the first time since May of 2009, I have a working computer that I can consider my own; and for the first time since November of last year, I have internet access at home.
So let the good times roll! (again)
Seriously, I intend to post here as much as a house fulla children and two jobs will allow me to. There's a lot to tell, and LJ has always been a good place for me to tell it. This place, and you guys, are like a great friend crossed with a diary crossed with a therapist (and further crosed with a novel, considering the length of some of my entries.)
My life has taken quite a different turn in the last year, and I gotta get it down here for my own records if nothing else. You guys who still have me on your flist and are interested in reading, holler at me so I can adjust my filters.
I have missed the internet, and lj, and writing, and you guys most of all. I hope many of you have stuck around; I haven't even had the chance to check my friends page yet, that's how recently I finally got online. (It's been about an hour, now.)
love to all!
-Phil |
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| Big Life Changes |
[Apr. 15th, 2010|04:56 pm] |
We saw the baby on the ultrasound again today. This time we left the other kids at home (whew!) and Nana got to come along instead. She's gotten a lot bigger since the first time we saw her; bigger since the last time, even. :) She went from being a tiny break-dancing alien to a chubby, squished-up little baby seemingly overnight. And you should see the size of Michelle's belly--my god!
I've known that we're in our 38th week of pregnancy. I've also known that she's due on the 28th. But somehow it was still a shock when the doctor said at the end, "We'll make an appointment for two weeks and I'll see you then if you haven't had the baby." Somehow, rational knowledge of that stuff hadn't really sunken in. It was a surprise to realize "Holy shit, these next two weeks will be the last ones without the baby."
Up until now it's always seemed like we had forever until she was here, or like she'd never get here. It's been a far-off event for so long that to think of it truly being so near today was a really strange mental moment. Hehe, I guess you'd have to have been there though. :)
Off for now, gotta handle some things. See y'all!
-Philip |
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| (no subject) |
[Nov. 3rd, 2009|08:19 am] |
"They say you never know what you got til it's gone.
I know I got it, I don't know what y'all on."
--Kanye West
As everyone knows, it's been a huge year for me. One year ago, last November, I started feeling a healthy sense of dissatisfaction with my life (rather than the numb, bleak despair of the previous year), and I started trying to plan and look forward to something better. Fast forward a year and here I am with: a wonderful, god-sent partner, my own apartment, my own car and insurance, complete freedom from my parents and their abuse, a new set of ideas about the world, and a baby on the way.
I think the only way I could be farther removed from my former life is to move clean across the world.
Which I'm about to do.
Yes, life with Michelle has truly been a dream. I've never felt so fiercely loved in all my life, and I've never loved anyone so completely. Being here on our own in our wee apartment with our fish and frogs and weekend adventures has been such a fulfilling life, and bringing a child into it felt (for the first time) completely right and wonderful. In fact I'll never forget the day at the warehouse when Michelle called me and told me she was pregnant; I walked around all day (all week, really) high as a kite, with a smile you couldn't have wiped off even if you showed me a whole stack of dead kittens.
Anticipating the arrival of that child and Michelle's two other children has been a wonderful time. But in addition to all the wonderfulness, stress started to slowly creep in. It took us a while, but it dawned on us that our situation wasn't ideal. We both worked full time and had erratic schedules that didn't match; often we only got one weekend together a month, which was far from the lifestyle we wanted. In addition, it was clear that the only way we were gonna make it was to keep both of us working full time, at least until one of us found a bad-ass job that could allow the other to go part-time or quit. And with only us here in Houston for the kids--no family, friends, etc.--the kids would have been raised by day care.
Think about it. We would have all been a family under one roof, yes, but Michelle and I would be getting home anywhere from 7 to 10 p.m.; home would have been a place for late dinners, crashing out together, and breakfast. Not a place for the family life we wanted.
It got increasingly frustrating for us to feel like all we could do was continue in our normal lives with work rather than starting to make our nest together. It made the baby feel less real, somehow; we'd sometimes start to forget we were even having one. And our prospects for doing anything OTHER than work as we had been doing were small. My degree is worth little, and Michelle's degree in New Zealand wasn't finished. Trying to pay for school and our wee family of five--not so wee, really--would have been stretching things just a bit, and without school we didn't have the world's greatest job prospects, and without that we didn't see a way to have our family properly. We could get by but little else; we'd be stuck in our jobs for our livelihood, our bills, and our medical security. (A point extremely well-made in Michael Moore's Sicko.)
And before I move on, I should talk a little bit about what our "medical security" was like.
We never made one OB appointment without some kind of snafu. Not one. There was always endless paperwork, mix-ups with insurance, and then when we finally got medical care it was often pretty poor.
The first OB we saw was a real downer. She never once said "congratulations" or even cracked a smile. Instead she treated our pregnancy like a disease, asking endless questions about our birth control methods of all things. I think she may have missed her called as an epidemiologist, 'cuz she was treating our joyful event like an unfortunate, preventable medical circumstance.
(Bitch.)
The second OB was really nice, but she wouldn't take us because we were a "high-risk pregnancy." Same story with the next 10 obstetricians we called. Michelle got really scared and frustrated by how everyone was turning us away, so for a while it fell to me to try to find medical care for her. In the end I had to sit down with a list of every OB in her network and call them one-by-one, asking of they accepted high-risk patients. We finally found one and by coincidence she was close by, but when Michelle went there for her first appointment the nurse stressed her out by first saying that they didn't take her insurance (they did, though) and then saying they didn't take high-risk clients (they did that too.) If that doctor hadn't turned out to be decent, Michelle might very well have given up on the American medical system and just gotten a midwife or showed up in the emergency room for the labor. >_< Not ideal.
This is just the beginning of our story of how shitty American medicine is. The latest episode happened on Saturday, when we almost lost our baby.
I was at home selling everything I own so I could move us across the world (I'll get to that here in a minute, I promise, hang in there) and I got a call from her. She said "Phil I need you to come get me. I'm bleeding really badly and I think I've lost the baby." I rushed around trying to find her insurance card in our apartment and when I couldn't after a minute or two I said "fuck it, every second counts" and ran out of the door.
My drive to pick her up didn't go as hoped. I sped down our streets, but once I got on the highway I got stalled in traffic. I don't know if you've ever been in such a position, and in fact I'm getting tears just remembering it...stuck in traffic, no way to move or get off the highway, while the love of my life and the child that our love was bringing into the world may have been dying, not knowing if I'd even get to say good-bye to her before my whole world was swallowed in darkness. I'll never forget that horrible trip, tears streaming down my face (as they are now), pounding the steering wheel and begging Michelle and our baby not to leave me alone and hopeless in a world I couldn't face without them.
In fact I'm crying like a little bitch and I have to get ready for work, so I better leave you guys here and go take a shower to compose myself. Sorry for the cliffhanger, if anyone's reading. I promise things are ok now, for the moment anyway. |
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