To being on-line

Aaaaaaaaaah, I just feel like skipping down the street, pointing to random groups of people and gloating, "I'm back on-line, bitches!" Of course, that kind of hubris is probably what caused my computer issues to begin with. Still, my sweet laptop is back in my arms, and I feel much better. Last Wednesday, my computer just ceased being able to get on-line. The geek squad saved me from madness.

It was an incredibly powerful experience to be off-line for a week. I felt utterly bereft. I have set up such an amazingly wonderful community of mothers on-line through blogs, forums, email, facebook...I just felt so down, lonely and sad. A vital part of my support system was instantly gone. I really missed talking to Molly, whose son Colden died four days before Lucia. I can't even catalog the ways in which her emails soothe me. I missed reading everyone's blogs. I miss surfing ridiculously vacuous crap just to silence the inner voice during naptime. I missed Scrabble. I just didn't realize how important it has all been to my sanity. On top of that, being a stay at home mama can be a little alienating and lonely without staying connected to other big people throughout the day. [The only up side was that my house was much cleaner. (So very sad.)]

The day after I took my laptop into the shop, I had a sudden horrifying realization that I hadn't backed up any of my writing, or pictures. I began ticking down all the things I would lose. The only pictures that exist of Lucia were on my laptop. Lucy's birth story. Countless pieces I have written about this time of mourning, and the death of my daughter. I got seriously frantic. I cried on and off thinking of a world without these things. I called the geeks to ask if I could come and back everything up, and they assured me that it not would be necessary. They tried to convince me that they would take care of it, if it came to that. I simply wanted to yell, "But you don't understand, my baby died." In some situations, I would have completely said that, actually, but these are eighteen year old boys working as computer dudes for a while. I didn't want to scare them. I was already being an insane person calling every other day, even though they told me it would be a week. It was a difficult exercise in trying to shake those Type A, controlling parts of my brain. Because despite their assurances, I had strange fantasies of speeding towards the Best Buy, jumping the counter, pushing those black-tied geeks aside, grabbing my laptop, viruses and all, and running home, maniacally laughing. I didn't do that. I waited. Still, I couldn't exactly quiet the anxiety. I spent one naptime writing "lucia paz 12/22/08" sixteen hundred times on a sheet of paper in various hand writings. I just kept thinking about losing my pictures of Lucy. I'm not sure I would have recovered from that. Why do I keep thinking that one more thing will push me over the edge? When the next thing happens, I am still here. I am still surviving. You would think I would have more faith in myself by this point, but maybe subconsciously I realize that it is such a tenuous string that holds my sanity together, I can't imagine it being strong enough to endure any more loss.