Life Can Be Tasteless

 I am in a bit of a rut right now.  Nothing much happening, nothing much doing.  And I got a bit down about it.  And then I had a long philosophical think on the situation and decided to write about it.

We often in our hyper-curated Instagram, Facebook, X, Tik Tok, etc. world often forget that our lives happen in the mundane everyday world.  Life isn't a series of disasters or triumphs endlessly posted about.  Rather 90% of life is really just the day to day grind.  It is this grind and what we do with it that defines our lives and who we are and how we grow.  What do I mean?  Well life isn't all bells and whistles, most of us get up at the crack of dawn and either throw on yesterdays clothes or stay in our pajamas as we get our kids fed and dressed and out the door to the bus - or into the car for the drive to school.  Life is the perpetual search for what food to give the kids in their lunchbox, what to prepare for dinner, get off to work or home office, deal with daily work issues or emergencies (that aren't really ever real emergencies), deciding what to order or what restaurant to go to if the day got away from you and you didn't prepare that dinner mentioned above.  Picking your child up from school, or meeting their bus.  Asking after their day, there homework, etc.  Discussing the day with your partner/spouse or with your kids before getting their teeth scrubbed and getting them off to bed.....so that you can catch a couple of hours of quiet (maybe some TV or reading) before you sleep and start the whole thing over.

Life happens in the above moments rather than in the holidays, graduations,  or festivals we attend.  We shape our world view based on much more intimate conversations with those we love and who are present in our lives. Our politics and worldview are shaped by the community we live in, but more so by the people we share space with day in and day out.

So life can be bland and tasteless or meaningless sometimes.  We need to learn to embrace the grind as it makes us who we are and who we want to become.  Accepting that most of our life will be made up of these moments and the structure it gives us is important.  I spent six years of my life caregiving for my wife and many of those days just blended into the next - rinse repeat.  But all the way up until she passed I know that this experience, those meaningless days made me into the person I am now.

So all of us should recognize that we can't always everyday be the super-hero in our own story.  But through our every day actions no matter how boring (laundry, vacuuming, etc) we build a life that at the end of it is amazing.  How else do we grow our children into adults we are proud of?  How else do we make our own parents proud?  How else do we build a career that we are satisfied with.....even if it isn't the one we have hoped for?  A brick for each day however bland or uneventful the day.

We are each of us heroes in our own lives and we build the huge edifice that our friends and family see on the outside and if lucky on the inside too.  But that heroism isn't from some incredible act or pivotal moment - rather it is the thousands of hours and days strung together over a long life that makes us the heroes of our own story.

Live each day.

On Life Struggles and How We Never Stop Learning

 I planned on writing in this blog all the time, charting new stories as I started a new life after the loss of my wife and then my remarriage and the birth of our daughter.  But as with a lot of things - hardship and struggles come and derail even the most put together person.  And thus my last post inaugurating this blog was from 2017 and now it is 2025.  

Let me explain the gap as best I can.  Our daughter was born at 23 weeks of gestation, what is today called a micro-preemie.  So premature that they told us she may not survive the first 24 hours.  So premature that they told us there was a good chance she would have heart developmental issues or a heart defect.  So premature they told us she may have detached retinas and be blind her whole life.  So premature that they told us there was a possibility of brain bleeds and/or cerebral palsy.  She spent the first 5 months of her life in the NICU, and we spent those first months suffering with all the possibilities that might come....each more horrific to consider than the one previously told to us.

In the end we are eternally grateful that none of these things came to pass.  She survived, her heart was fine, her eyes and eyesight were fine, no brain bleeds or cerebral palsy.  We were blessed with a tiny little girl who was healthy.  Except......she wasn't.  Almost immediately it was clear that there was some things wrong.  When you think of prematurity you think of these above worst case scenarios, nobody thinks about the "secondary" systems like digestion or development.  And so almost from the beginning she would vomit anything and everything given to her.  Breastfeeding, didn't work.  Formula, didn't work.  The doctors had to insert a Nasal Gastro tube through her nose into her belly directly and only then could we feed her.  But even then she was vomiting constantly.  And each time we had to change the NG tube it was like waterboarding your baby - screaming due to the discomfort of it, making sure you got it down into her belly and not into her lungs.  And so we struggled with this from the time we took her home from the hospital until she was 1 year-old - at that time at the behest of her doctor she had her first surgery to install a Mic-Key button.  A hole with a plug directly through her stomach and her belly, allowing us to pump or use syringes to feed her directly into her stomach.

And this is how we grew her from ages 1 through 5 years we had a feeding pump that fed her in the night, and we used syringes to feed her in the day.  Moving from formula into pureed regular food over time.  Any attempt to feed her orally was a complete failure.  Even with this Mic-Key button she was vomiting anywhere from 10 to 15 times in the day - we actually carried a bucket around with us for years.  When she was 5 years old she began to slowly eat small portions, anything large would cause her to vomit.  By the time she was almost 6 we were able to get the Mic-Key button removed.  She was eating, with some difficulty, but eating!

Then another hardship came to visit.  We discovered in Kindergarten and 1st grade that she is "developmentally delayed".  We were concerned and had her evaluated for autism,  and were told thankfully that she was not.  But it was clear to us and the doctors that while she was 6. years old....she was developmentally more like 4 years old.  And this new challenge continues.  She is now 8 years old, but developmentally is more like 6 years old.  The local elementary school is great and has her on an IEP and work with her well.  She is a happy, bubbly, mischievous little girl but we worry about her a lot since she is always behind the other children.  And as they age the innocence of this world (which never lasted long to begin with) will fade.....but will remain for her longer.  This can be a blessing, but also can be quite dangerous.

As if this wasn't all enough, during the same period I was alerted to some outstanding medical bills belonging to my late wife that I was unaware of - apparently in the last year of my wife's life she had tried to deal with them unbeknownst to me but hadn't been able to.  And so I suddenly found myself in possession of a huge medical debt that I wasn't aware of, at a time when I had just invested money in a neighborhood cafe.  Sufficed to say I had to damage myself financially to pay it off and once the COVID pandemic started the cafe failed as well.

Why am I telling this tale of woe?  I think it is to show that I came through hell dealing with my wife's cancer and sickness and ultimate death.  I rebuilt my life and moved forward and found love again and started a new and beautiful family.  But the hardships of this life never stopped, there are always bad things happening to us or to those around us all the time.  We are buffeted by the winds of this world and sometimes the wind never seems to stop blowing.

I have learned one important lesson through all of these hardships - sickness, death, love, premature birth, years of struggle with our daughter's health.........it is that we have no control.  We live with an illusion of control in our lives.  It is necessary to build that illusion and feed it, it is the only way to be comfortable and not live every day in a state of anxiety.  Nevertheless we actually have no control, our lives can end or irreparably change in any moment.  Embracing the lack of control is terrifying, but necessary to move forward.  We as humans do it every time we start something new.  But the true strength is in knowing all along that you are powerless before the furies of life - know it, and then decide to move forward anyway.

The Dangerous Path of Banning Religious Observance

Today in a decision that surprised many the European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled that workplaces could enforce bans on obvious religious garments and/or paraphernalia.  We have gotten used to seeing headlines about local municipalities in France banning the Burkini (the wetsuit that covers the head that religiously observant Muslim women choose to wear when swimming), or a German province ruling that hijab-wearing Muslim women teachers cannot wear hijab in state schools, or the banning of the niqab (or full face veil that some conservative Muslim women choose to wear).  But to have a court of justice whose job it is to protect the rights and freedoms of all European citizens - including the Muslim ones come down in favor of allowing corporations or other workplaces to ban religious items or clothing is shocking.

What we are seeing in Europe today is something we've seen before.  The slow moving train that started with the Dreyfus Affair in France in the late 1800s and moved on to the ban in Germany of outward displays of Jewish clothing and the wearing of fabric stars of David - side locks on the Ultra-Orthodox, tzittzit, kippahs, etc.  To Kristalnacht and the Final Solution.  Am I getting a little worked up and blowing the horn too loudly perhaps?  It seems like everyone and their friends are making Nazi references.  About President Trump, about Steve Bannon, about Turkish President Erdoğan or from him against others.  But since I'm not hearing any other horns going off on this particular issue then please let me blow it.

This is not a high speed train.  Rather just like the 1930s it is a slow moving train that creeps slowly enough that nobody pays a lot of attention.  But we cannot be in any doubt about its destination.  The moves by Le Pen, Wilders, AfD, PiS, UKIP, The Northern League, Fidesz, etc., have one endpoint - the end of Islam and Muslims in Europe to one degree or another.  And if European Jews or Sikhs or other minorities think they will get off without any problem they need to think carefully.  In the 1930s and 1940s it started with the Jews but ended by sweeping up the Roma and homosexuals too.

It is also not just political rhetoric or posturing.  When AfD in Germany rails against refugees, attacks against refugees spike.  When Geert Wilders in the Netherlands calls Moroccans "scum" there is a rise in hate crimes against Arabs.  It means there is a direct correlation between what they are calling for and the outcome they seek.  Thus if Wilders states his goal is to ban the Qur'an and close all mosques in the Netherlands, you had best be assured that this is exactly what he will do - using whatever chicanery he can find.

The push for these rising nationalist parties to leave the EU is not just a nativist urge, I believe that they also wish to exit the EU so they are not beholden to its democratic institutions or human rights courts.  When they begin the process of stripping citizenship from their minority and non-Christian populations and expelling them or worse they do not want to be part of any extra-national entity that may try to check them.  They seek impunity.  You see this also in the Polish nationalist party's moves to weaken their supreme court and curtail press freedoms.

Nor do I see this rising nationalism as only a European phenomena.  Europe is certainly the epicenter right now, but Turkey's movements against press freedom and concentration of power certainly mirrors parties in Europe and in Putin's Russia.  And the increasingly nationalist Myanmar government and their subjugation of ethnic and religious minorities there also flows along this path.

We have a world where the worst types of nationalist right-wing parties and governments having taken a rest from the chaos of 60 years ago are now coming out of the woodwork again.  The United States along with her NATO allies formed a bulwark not only against Communism but also against the type of destructive nationalism that had destroyed the world previously.  But how can it be a bulwark when its original members are the ones with the biggest problems with these parties today?  How can it thwart tyranny, nativism, and autarky when our own President is too busy worried about fighting the last conflict and navel-gazing?

We are in a dangerous situation.  The slow train left the station a while ago.  It is picking up speed.  Who is going to halt it before it brings the destruction it promises?

First there was love, then there was loss, then love again

You never contemplate life from the position of a widow or a widower.  It isn't something you consider in your day to day life.  That is, until the person you love takes their last shuddering breath and you can almost feel the angel coming to take the soul of your loved one.

The death of a spouse, like the death of a child is a wrenching soul destroying experience.  And it leaves you numb and shattered for a long while after.  My wife as she suffered through the last months of her life talked to me insistently about finding love again, about marrying again.  "You are not the type of person to sit alone for the rest of your life." she would tell me.  Or, "Who will look after you when you are old? You should find someone to spend your life with."

For a couple of years after she died the thought of meeting someone of opening my battered heart again was anathema to me.  But in the end it was my love of travel that opened my heart and soul and brought me back to love.  I love to travel and thus set out to see some of the world.  Little did I realize that once I started this journey it would lead me to a new life and new happiness.

It has been 4 years since my wife died.  I never forget her and I am always thankful to have known her, had a son with her....learned valuable lessons from her.  I have been married 2 years now and there isn't a day when I am not thankful for the new love I have in my life.  It is the old love, but with wisdom and heartache that has tempered it and grown it into a strong and powerful tree.

In November we had our first child together.  It is strange to be starting a new family amidst the ashes of an older one.  But my life and the mixed family I have is truly like the phoenix, a terrible thing happened - but a new more robust and beautiful family was born out of that fire and adversity.  I will raise her to be a strong and powerful woman in a world where these things are sometimes not appreciated.  I will tell her stories of that first family so that she appreciates them, and her big brother will look after her and talk to her about the mother he had that she will never know.

I am writing this article and the new ones to follow to talk about many subjects.  But one overarching theme will be about renewal and navigating a world filled with triumph and joy, but also unbelievable heartache and desolation.  I hope you will journey with me.