All 7 lbs, 19 inches of Kyera 2 days after she was born.
Just had to borrow the title of one my favorite Rush songs. Geddy Lee sings about the swift passage of time and how important it is to savor each moment in Time Stand Still.
(Time stand still)
I’m not looking back
But I want to look around me now
(Time stand still)
See more of the people and the places that surround me now
Time stand still
Freeze this moment a little bit longer
Make each sensation a little bit stronger
I’m a fallen human who was destined to die until an afternoon in August of 1991 when my boss at KISS FM, Al Torres, asked me two questions that changed my life forever:
If you were to die today, where do you think you would go?
If you died and faced God, and He were to ask you why He should let you into His heaven, what would you tell Him?
My feeble attempts at logical answers revolved around me being a good person and not a murderer or thief, and that at best, being a practicing Roman Catholic, I’d end up in purgatory and hopefully would get prayed up to heaven with each rosary, mass, or prayer said on my behalf.
I’ve been blogging a little too much about So You Think You Can Dance lately and neglecting the other parts that The Pseudo Expat is about: single parenting and Christianity. There was a Filipina on SYTYCD though up until last night so that sort of covered the Filipina-American thoughts.
Some things are a bit too private to talk about so I avoided it until I learned from it and can now discuss it here.
I was driving down Old Hickory Boulevard, admiring the leaves in their different stages of death — explosions of deep reds, yellows, greens, and oranges — as if holding on to dear life in bursts of color defying the inevitable, their shouts of, “We live! We live! We live! Look at us!” falling on the deaf ears of their fallen comrades littering the ground, brown and dry, when the prosaic cycle of life came to mind. It is a beautiful death, this being born a leaf: to be birthed, to live, to color, to wither, and then to die, not unlike us humans.
We come into this world, we live for but a sliver of time, bursting with life, and then we slip into eternity. Something I’ve been thinking of a lot these days. It probably has to do with my turning a new decade last July. I’m thinking more and more in terms of “the rest of my life” and “the second half of my life”; thinking more about the impact, if any, my life has had; thinking about how good, or bad, a parent I’ve been.
8AM on December 28, 1989 I underwent a C-Section to deliver a healthy, 6.15 1/2 lb, 19 inch baby girl. It was an anti-climactic delivery to the preparation I had put into the nine months I was infanticipating – child birth classes, Lamaze books, Leboyer books, active birth books – you name it, I knew it.
But a visit to my OB-GYN coupled with a possible miscalculation on my part – plus a nervous mother who didn’t want anything bad to happen to her daughter (me) or grandchild (Kyera) – left me and my then-husband with no choice but to agree to the expensive operation.
Seeing that we were twenty, both unemployed at the time, and living under my mother’s roof, we didn’t have much of a say in the matter. So we went home to pick up my and the baby’s diaper bag, said good-bye to our bedroom, and promised it we would return with a baby. I turned to my husband and said, “Our lives will never be the same again. The next time we come home, we’ll be parents.” Continue reading
I freelance as a writer for hire these days. I get gigs outside of work because I have editor and writer friends here and there. The real job though is a priority so I have had to turn down some pretty cool assignments. A motoring media challenge in Baguio was among the most recent.
My last gig involved reviewing Creative and Olympus products for their local distributor. Too bad all the photos I took of the NU 107 Rock Awards disappeared along with the rest of my stolen iBook last December. The E-330 was the coolest camera I ever laid my hands on. Thank God it wasn’t taken along with my laptop. Continue reading
K just got promoted to the Advanced Class at her Ballet School. I am so proud of her! What makes this such a tremendous accomplishment is the fact that she just started taking class last September 4, 2006.
I enrolled her when she was three but she hated it and gave up after a lesson. She asked to enroll again at the age of eight and lasted six weeks and one recital.
So when she asked me for lessons at the age of sixteen, I was hesitant. But wanting to be supportive, I had her do research on whether it was not too late for her to start.
She was told it wasn’t and enrolled the first Monday of September. Continue reading
