Closing Doors

Someone I know is pregnant. This statement is becoming increasingly rare as the years keep marching on in my life.  It used to be that everyone I knew was in a couple.  Then, couple by couple, everyone seemed to be getting engaged, and then married.  Back in “my day” (intone the Old Lady In Me [...]

Michael Turns 2

After Christmas, I spent all of my available time on my computer getting the Shock Street Team up and running in advance for Rick’s new CD release in late February.  I decided to divide up the duties geographically, since most of the tasks I’d delineated required local people on the ground to visit stores, call [...]

Look Who’s Not Talking

“Is he walking?” Michael’s pediatrician asked, one of the long litany of questions she posed from a written list on the computer screen. I answered the questions distractedly.  It was warm and Michael was fussy; Melinda was crawling on the floor rifling through the diaper bag for the stash of Cheerios she knew was in [...]

Little Boys and Big Tests

“But what did he say?” I groaned into the phone. I couldn’t believe it when I had started vomiting the night before Michael’s scheduled hydrocephalus check at the Children’s Hospital.  I had never felt so ill in all of my life.  I spent the evening on the sofa in order to not infect R, who [...]

What Had I Missed?

I sat there, with my baby in my arms, wondering. Had I missed something?  Nothing seemed wrong with him.  He smiled, he ate, he held my finger as he nursed, he sat up in his high chair just like my other two children had.  Nothing seemed different to me, nothing seemed out of the ordinary. [...]

Real Problems

Watching the nasty messages go back and forth between Team Elizabeth and Team Vivian/Amy on our internet mailing list made my stomach churn in the days that followed Elizabeth’s tirade.  Rick himself weighed in, first with a typed message scanned and sent to us to share, and then a second handwritten one (his handwriting is [...]

Instant Messages

“I can’t believe you’re even seriously asking me that,” was what popped up in my instant message screen a few weeks later. As the weeks wore on, I went about trying to get back into what passed for normal in our household.  I completed a redesign of the RS website while my baby slept, I [...]

Houston, We Might Have a Problem

“Trouble in paradise?” asked my friend Kim, who had recently started to work with me on some new graphics for the two Rick Springfield fan websites.  We were chatting on the phone while I nursed Michael and Melinda played with toys on the floor of the family room.  The room was an absolute wreck with [...]

Sucked Back In

I was staring at my computer screen, finally back home and mostly recovered from my case of “childbed fever”. My baby was quietly slumbering next to me in his stroller; I had actually put him in it awake after I’d put his older sister down for her afternoon nap.  I had a million things to [...]

An Odd Intimacy

R’s father joked, “Just think…if you’d been alive a hundred years ago, you’d be dead.” I looked up at him, from my hospital bed with my breast half exposed while my baby nursed happily away, taken aback by his harsh words. I adored R’s father, a European emigre from Croatia.  He had a sunny disposition, [...]