well, chances are I would have started to repeat myself now anyway.
here now my last post. maia is all recovered now, btw. (she/we spent two weeks in the hospital)
wrote this in the hospital. it is part of an ongoing letter I am writing to Maia (whenever I have time). Maia is turning five
January 7, 2007 1:30am
I am sitting here next to you while you are sleeping. We are in the hospital because you have pneumonia and weren’t able to keep down the prescribed antibiotics. Every time we administered them you threw it back up (together with the little food you had eaten.) By the end of the day (Friday – before yesterday) you were so weak, your grandfather (the doctor in the family) ordered us to take you to the hospital immediately. You were brought back to your strength with an IV (full of nutrition) but you had to stay here to receive the antibiotics intravenously, as well. I stayed the night and the morning while your dad came for the afternoon into the early evening. Nayla is not allowed on this floor because you are in the infectious disease ward for kids – nice, huh? ;)
Anyway, this is your second night. If we were in the US right now this would probably cost us thousands of Dollars – but we are still here in Austria and it is all part of the free health insurance.
However, as great as the social net might be here (education is free, too…that’s gonna hurt once you go to college – and you BETTER go to college!;) ) we are still planning to return to New York City. It’s a long story but to make it short: I have no more job (first I quit, took it back, but then we actually separated in consensual terms), the tenants in our NY apartment are still not paying, and we are out of options (i.e. money).
We were in NY for a few days over x-mas (you and I), for I had to go to court because of the tenant issue (unfortunately, the judge dismissed the case due to a formality and we have to start all over again, trying to get these people, who are feeding off of our savings, out of our house.) Anyway, you loved being back at your old school and seeing your old friends, so I think (hope) you’ll be happier growing up in the U.S.
Just do me one favor, darling …. Please, please don’t become one of them. What do I mean by that? I mean, please don’t become a statistic. Please don’t become the "average"(?) teenage girl, driven by superficiality and the pressure of what other kids might think of her; who gives sex as if it doesn’t matter at all, who has no self-esteem and doesn’t consider oral sex – well, sex, who cuts herself, tries any drug because everyone else is or who lies as if it were an athletic discipline.
I highly doubt that you will be any of these things, for you are already very defined in who you will be – a strong, sweet, very smart and independent woman. However, I did want to bring to your attention of what fears I carry around with me already (and you are not even five, yet). What I have to remember, and you, too, is also that…NO MATTER WHAT….I will always love you. But, I tell you one thing: honesty is one of my most highly valued principles and that will really always win you the big plus points.
I am probably not supposed to tell you this (especially, since I have no idea when I will be giving you this letter) but just so that you know, I have also been young once and I have learned some things the hard way (or sometimes, I just got lucky….and not everyone can be lucky all the time, so I’d prefer you’d be smarter than I).
One of the worst things I probably ever did was to have unprotected sex. “Just got carried away in the moment” (and mind you, I was 19 already, when I lost my virginity).
Giving in because there is no condom available at the moment is probably THE DUMBEST thing you could do, for the consequences are life-changing. I realized this afterwards, when I was scared to death about pregnancy (your grandmother got pregnant when she was 15 - granted she was a hippie, too...you know...free love and all - but I always was under the impression she felt like she missed out on her youth. Heck, I feel like I missed out and I got pregnant at 26…intentionally! ;)). Anyway, what scared me even more, of course was the fear of having caught AIDS. I was lucky but I didn’t forget those months of fear and that horrible week of waiting for my blood results.
One night is enough. And I could have thrown it all away in that one night.
Ach, it all sounds so dry and cliché when I am writing it down like this and, I guess, you have to learn a lot from your own experiences but just USE your brain and always try to THINK AHEAD, when you do questionable things.
I probably don’t have to tell you about any of these things, for you are a lot like me (careful, thoughtful, never forgetting what you have learned or are being warned of). Unfortunately, growing up without my mother, there were a lot of things I wasn’t warned of, so I had to figure that out by myself. Men and boys for example. A whole story to itself. [I wonder, if my mother has figured that out herself, actually...]
Other things most teenagers think about (but the smart ones hopefully will not consider seriously, for it’s almost as dumb as having unprotected sex):
> suicide (there was a brief time in my life when I thought that would be the easiest way out (until I lived through the suicides of several other friends and realized how sad it would be to throw a life away, which surely won’t always be this dreadful and bad).
> running away (I had whole trips completely planned out – my favorite escape route lead to Canada).
> dropping out of school (I was sixteen when I fought my dad about that issue – I wanted to become either an auto mechanic or a carpenter – HA!) ….
Things I (thankfully) wasn’t ever weak enough to get into: any drugs other than a bit of pot (never got drunk, never took a trip, nothing…and no, I am not a lame prude. Well, what can I say - I am a control-freak, which I am sure you know by now. ;) ….Losing control of my body and mind, would just have been a nightmare for me.
(so, if you ever think you have to do any of this sh*t – make sure you do your research and don’t do it alone….but I prefer, you DON’t …and I can tell you loads of stories why you shouldn’t and why I ultimately didn’t do it…. But to give you a quick glimpse: I once knew a guy who walked around talking to his darts…and all he had done is taken one trip that just messed up his brain somehow…and he kept on having flash-backs.) But given the fact of how much of a control freak you are already (at the tender age of 4), I think, I might not have to fear you going into this stuff either.
So, now that I’ve gotten some of the sex and drugs (I am leaving out Rock n’ Roll) talk into this letter, I guess, I am going to have to give this thing a PG rating. I wonder what this will have to be. Judging from all the stories I hear it would have to be a PG-13, as much as I would like it to be a PG-17….or let’s be honest, a PG-21. ;)
And just so you know where this is all coming from right now: I have been like a sponge about teenage girlhood ever since you were born. Books and movies that have unsettled me: “Thirteen” (movie), “Queen bees and Wannabees” (book – and “Mean Girls”, the movie it was turned into), “The Tenth Circle” (book, I just finished), and countless articles, stories from friends and colleagues, and real-life encounters with today’s teenage kind. ;)
So, dare to be different, baby. Be who you are and not who others expect you to be.
Love you. Love you. Love you.
(and for now – at this moment – get well, so that I can take you home!)
PS: can you give that whole (unprotected) sex, drugs, and other stupidities section to your sister, too? I might copy it over to her letter later but right now it is getting really late and my eyes are falling shut (the doc is going to wake us in a few hours – to give you the next antibiotic shot).
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