Tagged

I have so much to write about - return to work, the all day perinatal loss seminar we went to on Saturday, whether reading blogs about loss is a double-edged sword - I don't know where to start. So I will instead respond to Artblog's tag, which was already days ago.

The tag was to tell you five things about me that you don't already know. I am going to cheat a bit here and assume that only Kate and Delphi read my 100 things post before I took the 100 things down from fear of losing anonymity.

So here goes:

1. I have vitiligo. Vitiligo is a non-life threatening, not physically painful, auto-immune skin disease in which the cells which produce melanin, which produces skin colour, somehow die off in patches. Being of Indian origin, I have brown skin. I have one patch of vitiligo - on my face. That means I have a white patch of skin on my brown face. It's on my forehead. It appeared when I was 23. Since then it hasn't really changed much. No-one really knows what causes vitiligo (although they think there is a gene that causes it) and there isn't really an easily available, reliable treatment. Since it is considered to be a "cosmetic" condition, and isn't all that common, it has difficulty getting research funding.
   
   It caused me a lot of anguish at the time. It's like losing a part of yourself when you look in the mirror and see a different face. You need to re-evaluate your relationship with how you look and lose a lot of confidence. Since it is on my forehead, I had a fringe cut so I could hide it without using make-up, and over ten years I think a lot less about it. I can't really say I came to terms with it because I only don't think about it as it hasn't spread to other parts of my body. If I were to start having a patch on my nose, which I couldn't hide without carefully applying tons of makeup every day, then I would probably crumble. I told my husband about it about 3 or 4 months after we met and he told me he loved me more because of my hidden vulnerability. (He's great like that). People with white skin can also suffer because of vitiligo - it becomes more obvious in the summer when the parts of their skin that still have melanin cells get tanned, even slightly. If you follow the link above, then you will see a picture of what vitiligo can look like.
   
   
2. I met my husband whilst backpacking in South America, when I was 26. I was terrified about going to South America on my own. But I felt like life was going nowhere. When I was an undergraduate student, I used to go out drinking with my mates. I graduated, got a job in London and went out drinking with new mates (except I had more money because I had a job). When I first moved to London, I lived in a house-share with three other people who were all around 29 - 30. I was 22. They used to go out drinking with their mates. I did think to myself at the time, that's pretty sad, I hope that's not all I'm still doing when I'm 29. 3 years later, I pretty much was still doing that. I don't mean to imply I was a drunk, just that my social life revolved around going out to pubs and not really a lot else. And I was single and had been for about 2 years. So I decided to take a sabbatical and left alone to go backpacking around Latin America.
   
   As the departure time got closer, I became more and more scared about doing this but I did it anyway. This is one of the things I've done in my life which I consider brave, since I had a choice and did it anyway, despite being scared. I met my husband in a restaurant in Quito, Ecuador. He had been in Quito for 3-4 months already. He was so confident and I was scared. You get the picture! 6 years and continents later, we got married.
   
   
3. I'm not seeing my therapist any more. We didn't click and the sessions ceased really helping. I said in a previous post that several people had said to me, "Maybe the baby didn't want to come." The comments I got were on the surprised side. Well, my therapist was one of those people. She said, "some babies just don't cling on to life." I think people say that because they are trying to take away some the mother's guilt feelings by placing some responsibility for staying alive on the baby. I thought and still think this is bullshit. It insulted Moksha by accusing him of being weak and by proxy, as his mother, I was insulted too. I also don't believe that a little baby has any responsibility to bear. That said, I couldn't tell you how old a child is when it has to accept some responsibility - I would guess that a two year old starts having some responsibility, as it starts to understand the concepts of right and wrong.
   
   
4. In NYC, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, we bought some very pretty Christmas cards. (I think that in the US, you can get much better and cheaper designs of all types of cards that in Europe, and I usually stock up on cards when I go there). But I told my husband that they were too joyful to send out this year. I said maybe next year. This year I've got a small number of Christmas cards from SANDS UK. I mean what are we going to say in them? 2006 sucked, roll on 2007? And actually I can't say that 2006 sucked, since that was 2/3rds of Moksha's short life. And I was happy for more than half of 2006.
   
   
5. Despite having an engineering degree (which I guess should imply good spatial reasoning), I do not instinctively know my left from my right. I have to take a second to think about it when someone tells me to turn right. DH thinks this is a man-woman difference. The other day we were watching a DVD and there was a guy in a helicopter with another guy on his right and one on his left. DH said something about the guy on the right. I had to mentally turn myself around, imagine myself in the helicopter and think, where's my right? It only takes a second, but I just don't know it automatically.
   
   For some reason, I always think of my knees when I'm figuring out right and left. I think it's because when I was little I scraped one knee quite badly and was left with a scar, and used the scar to know that that was my right knee. I don't exactly do that now, since I have scars on both knees now, but maybe that's why I think of my knees. Does this happen to you? Do you think it's a man-woman thing?
   

There you go! Hope it wasn't too boring. I think I only cheated on one thing from my 100 things post. Thanks for the tag, Artblog