June

June has come.

My idea of this season of life, of what was supposed to happen, has been scrapped. I was supposed to be enormously huge at Freddy's wedding, I was supposed to be building an Ikea crib and figuring out when Elizabeth could get here to be with me during the birth.

None of that is happening now. Now, I am gallivanting around town drinking at breweries, enjoying the heat that comes with the change in seasons for the first time since leaving California, hosting good friends from out of town and staying up late into the night giggling like a child. Now, I am reading a fat Salinger biography and eating baked potatoes, listening incessantly to David Bowie, and back to being bad at bowling (I was only any good when I was pregnant). I am cutting off all my hair and feeling better than I have all year. I thought I'd be a wreck about now.

This is what I have learned about myself: I am obsessively appropriate. Thank-you cards, etiquette, bringing flowers to dinner, observing holidays, celebrating when celebrations are called for, surrounding others when they need a friend. This is how I live my life. But today, we sat and looked online at different urns for our baby's ashes. I did this without feeling anything. I did this as if I was looking online at Amazon to order a new book, or Urban Outfitters to find a birthday gift for Robert. We found one. We checked it off the list. And how do you appropriately send an email to your parents and your brother and sister-in-law, asking them to gather on the baby's due date to bury the ashes by the new tree in your parents' yard? I sat and typed the email to my family, and I added additional information about upcoming events. I added that we've planned our Astoria trip for the end of July and how about we all gather to celebrate my birthday before we leave? I composed an email where I invited my family to the burial of my baby and to attend my birthday party in practically the same breath. Please join us. Just another event in our lives. No biggie. And how can I be thinking of gallivanting and my birthday dinner in light of the other thing we have to face? And am I betraying him by not taking this whole thing more seriously? Am I betraying him by not crying or talking about what's actually happening, by sitting here and simply checking him off the list?

The answer is, I can't do it just yet. I have to think about the trip my mother and I will take next weekend to go antiquing, I have to think about my sister-in-law's graduation party, and about Father's Day, and about the birthdays of loved ones that will arrive before the due date. I have to think about work, and I have to go on walks and be outside and read my fat Salinger biography just a little bit longer.