Lola....is doing great

Lola is doing great, thank you…….

My cell phone is ringing.... well not really ringing, it’s playing the theme from “Hotel for Dogs”. (It’s down loadable!) Sticky note in brain: do they have parental controls on iphones? “Barry, you’re breaking up”… “More eye contact?????” “What….helloooo???” “Talking in sentences…???” This is amazing.
I think it must be the methyl b12, the taurine, possibly the splash of vitamin A. More verbal skills, more eye contact!! I can hardly believe it!!!
The rub? The copious commentary was on Lola. Lola is our dog.

Seems the pooch has a hankering for Sophie’s supplements and pilfered the entire concoction………………………great. Our autistic daughter may not be making strides, but our cockapoo is multi-lingual.

Sophie unlike Lola, slowly takes the glass of apple juice from my hand…skillfully holds it up to the light, as if to scientifically discern the ingredients. She moves it left, she moves it right, and she jiggles it to and fro. “No fank you” (she has the polite form of autism). The glass has been returned…denied…sent back to the kitchen………..NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

Until today, the supplements have done a rather neat disappearing trick into the organic apple juice. Easy... this supplement thing, easy. Open capsules, drip the droplets, smush the ingredients into a pulverized state (BTW the “smusher” can costs a mere four hundred bucks). We opted for the one you see on the info. commercial at three a clock in the morning. THE MAGIC BULLET. Well…. not so magic today. Call UPS.

You see our daily repertoire has become like a well-rehearsed dance. The cream goes on her back, the salts go in the tub, the shot…well you know where that goes…but the supplements, well....THEY GO IN THE APLE JUICE!

So today I realized. It’s not that clear nor that easy. It’s an unexplained dichotomy…and those words are oddly familiar.

“Your infertility is kind of an unexplained dichotomy.” The OBGYN in $800 Gucci loafers delivers the long awaited decree.

“You and your husband both check out. We call this unexplained infertility.” That’s the diagnosis? “ But the good news is we have a smorgasbord of options to help you have a baby…many have least a 35% success rate!!!!” Groovy.

The color drained from my perpetually pale skin…. ok, does he mean, one from column A and two from column B? I hate smorgasbords. True, everyone in 1999 was on something it seemed…. shots…pills…legs up in the air for a prescribed time frame, IU, GIFT, IVF. But I digress to blog 3.

I rise and give Barry “the look”… “Ok... so we’ll get back to you on the brunch idea.” (The smorgasbord metaphor oddly conjured up a vision of clomid, amidst lox and bagels.)

We walk to the car silently. The engine remains still. “I just want a baby…not a 35% success rate” (Quite self talk: I hate to lose…I hate bad odds… “I WANT TO BE IN CONTROL OF THIS” “Let’s adopt”.

Now it’s not as If this idea had never been brought up. True- there are two types of couples. The ones that talk about babies and baby names while they are dating and the ones that talk about babies and baby names while they’re pushing. We were the former.
Actually- truth be known, I had hundreds of children by age 23.

I sometimes believe the yellow brick road to Sophie began over 20 years ago. In a children’s theater that was my very soul. I ate, slept and breathed the air of the oldest children’s theater in the U.S…. and got paid to do it.

“So I’ll need all 47 munchkins in these four shades of purple, yellow and orange” I say rather dryly to costumer # 63. (Seamstresses to the stars are hard to come by) “I can’t costume 47 munchkins in three weeks…. not with your budget.” Ha! My biggest problem of the week was not naked munchkins. Dorothy had laryngitis, the Tin Man couldn’t walk down the Emerald City steps in his costume, and it was looking more and more like the booming voice of Oz was to be played by a teenage boy whose voice decided to begin it’s adventurous descent into manhood just prior to opening night.

I am the surrogate mother of hundreds, and for a while it fills me up…. it’s enough.
It was enough for almost 15 years…then our lives changed…overnight.

Our first daughter came into our lives at six weeks old. Her birth mother handed her to me in a soft yellow blanket saying; “I know you’ll be a wonderful mother.” She walked out of the room and from the window, I could see her drop to her knees and sob. My happiness was tinged with an overwhelming sense of sadness. Her saddest day was my happiest. Another dichotomy. I’m beginning to see a pattern.

I know in my heart, one day, I will read a book with out a highlighter in my hand. One day I will see a 12-month-old baby and not be self-injurious to my tongue for fear I will go on a vaccine rampage. Some day Sophie will not answer the question “How are you today Sophie?” with “I’m 8.”

So for now, I will highlight, micellize, mix, empty, rub, schlep and puncture…..for you see today the update is not on Lola, but Sophie.
“Say it for daddy Soph”.
“Mama, I love you big.”