You would have been fifty years old today. I would have loved to share this day with you. I become so angry when I hear women at work gripe about their age...don't they realize what an accomplishment it is to make it as far as they have? No, they don't. They didn't know you. They didn't lose you.

Gosh, Charlie and I look so young in that picture from your 48^th. I think he and I did years of aging during that last week of your life. We were so torn between wanting to hold you to us forever, yet knowing we had to tell you to let go. You'd be so proud of him, Mom. He's everything you always knew he was capable of becoming and nothing that everyone else thought he was. From his patient eyes to his gentle hands, he is you. I love him to pieces. I wish you could see. Perhaps you do.

I am sad that you're not here.

The Queen Anne's Lace is embroidering the edges of modernity, and I can't help but remember the daintiness you spread around me and the imagination you inspired. You named me after Laura Ingalls Wilder and Louisa May Alcott's Beth, two of your favorite heroins of all time because they were quiet in their strength and deafening in their love—I always hoped that I would live up to such a tall name. I always hoped that I would make you proud.

I still do. You were a woman worthy of being impressed.

I love you.

It didn't seem to impress anybody else that I mentioned it to today, but a year ago I had surgery. It was the first surgery of my life, and I remember mostly wanting Mom, whose absence I still hadn't grown accustomed to. I don't even remember the pain all that keenly, only an outside awareness that it existed—this was mostly how I dealt with the pain as well, seeing as how "pain management" seems to be an oxymoron in my body's dictionary.

My family, so recently ravaged by my mother's death, were gathering in her hospital, the one with the Comprehensive Cancer Center, to cross fingers and pray that this was not happening all over again. I was so lucky, so lucky. Everything was raw—my emotions, my body, my spirit—but I was alive and I was going to be okay. My mother's surgeon fixed me in a way that she would have liked to have fixed Mom.

My mother's oncologist never had to meet with me.

They were gathered in an exam room across from mine in the general surgery clinic before I was admitted—I was there for a consultation with no idea I would find myself stuck in the hospital for a week. There must have been 10 them standing in that room across from mine, long white coats and low, detached voices...holding up films and seeming very mechanical. I saw him in that room, her oncologist, and it didn't occur to me until days later that it had been MY films they were all reviewing.

I know it's gone now, all of that...and I'm whole again. I know that it isn't a great practice to look back at bad times because it almost puts you right back in the place where it started and you're miserable all over again. But that is not the reason this event is earmarked in my history.

After Mom died, and even that last month when she was fading so quickly, I felt very alone. Falling asleep at night—what little I was sleeping in those days—would only be a chaser to hours of silent sobbing and feeling so utterly hollow. Who but your mother comes looking for you in the middle of the night when you don't answer their call? Who hurts when you hurt if not her?

I was so taken with what I had lost that I had forgotten what I had. Thank you to those of you who stood by my side even when I wasn't great company (or when I tried to break up with you, depending who you are) and for reminding me that I am loved.

I love you, too.

I had a pelvic ultrasound yesterday which was ordered primarily for the purpose of a "parts count". Waking up from surgery just shy of a year ago, my surgeon notified me that I had a didelphys uterus, another piece of the genetic disorder that I inherited from Mom. My doctor yesterday told me that it is an autosomal dominant disorder but was not as quick to say that children weren't a possibility—only that the fetus would likely be in breech position, it would have to be by cesarean section, and it is likely that it would be a pre-term birth.

Good or bad, I've gotten the hang of accepting what life gives me. I guess I don't have a strong opinion on the matter either way.

I went to these set of doctors after my last physical in May, when my physician still, even looking for it, could not detect an anomaly in my reproductive bits. I was sent to an OB/GYN, and similarly, it took her awhile to find it. I felt so foolish for awhile, because it was like I was pleading my case that I was abnormal. At one point, I told the latest doctor, "Look, I was told about this after I had surgery. I am pretty sure my surgeon physically SAW something out of place. I just want some information about it."

The ultrasound technician was very kind, and said at once that she agreed with my surgeon. Also, that I had two of everything that I was supposed to have two of—which had been a concern with the kidneys—and two of some things that I was only supposed to have one of. I had her draw pictures for Nick because he's very interested in all of this...but I lost them. He is understandably upset.

The next step is sending me to another geneticist. In a complex that often represents itself as incomplete, apparently I demonstrate nearly all of the syndrome's features: sacral agenesis, anorectal malformation, presacral mass, urogenital malformations, and in the slew of "other malformations", I have flat feet and that pesky leak in my spinal cord fluid.

From there, with supposedly more information at my door, I can make an informed decision about permanent birth control. I am concerned that while (fingers crossed), my disorder is not deadly like Mom's wound up being, I do have more of the malformations...and, if it was her mother that gave it to her, which we suspect, Mom certainly had a broader mutation off of hers. Would my child take a step further—if I can even carry to a late enough term—have spina bifida? Have a tumor that develops into Cancer just like Mom's? Is that a pair of dice I want to roll with?

Man, my father must be disappointed: my brother does not want to have children because he doesn't want a child to be like him and here I am pondering the same. And like that, a family name ends.

While going through things at Dad's on Saturday, I found photo albums with an abbreviated assortment of photos capturing yours truly...years ago. Not many pictures of me...years ago actually exist. I learned camera dodging early-on, and even took up my mother's habit of going through pictures as soon as we got the developed prints back and tossing the ones of myself that I didn't like—all of them. Nick has never really been shown the former me.

I'm sure he's wondered at the many times I'll see someone in passing and murmur, "I know them," never actually greeting them. They wouldn't recognize me, and the situation would feel very awkward, me having to explain who I am. The first time I flew home, half-way through my weight loss progress, my own aunt didn't even recognize me in the airport. It's a little lonely at times.

Years ago, a friend who struggled with their weight told us of a visitation she attended for a dear relative. She felt rejected and ignored looking at the poster boards of photos because there were so few of her and the aunt that she always felt closer to than her own mother. A while later, a family member came up to her all teary-eyed and apologizing profusely. "I'm sorry. I could barely find any pictures of you!" She had avoided cameras all her life.

Well, after a lot of deliberation, I decided to show Nick the pictures. He seemed to recognize my cousin Michelle quickly enough, my friends Sarah and Anna—all people he has met in person—but looking at my image, which I found myself having to point out to him, he could only say that I looked really different.

I told him just last night that it's difficult to be proud of what you accomplished when you're so ashamed of where you started. I'm almost shy to bring up my lifestyle change—even though I'd wager that I am healthier than those who have been thin naturally their entire lives—because you worry that the stamp of who you were will obliterate who you became. Ghosts.

Jared, the Subway© guy, said in interview once that when people saw him eating out, they would stare at him, waiting for him to overeat, overly eager to warn him not to finish his plate. It angered me when I read it. Ignorance...pft. Those who have been inducted to the "100 pounds club" know what it takes.

But I've done it now, shown Nick the barely recognizable face that he looks into every day. I guess I wanted to make sure he knew me first. I had nothing to worry about.