The FULL extended cut of the Pensacon Commercial!!

We spent a LOT of time in this field helping with this.  It was so worth it!  It looks great, and if you wait through the whole thing you'll see Claire and Eric doing their bits, and they are listed at the end.  Y'all come to Pensacon...it's gonna be a blast!

Ch-ch-ch-changes! Or...Reverting to Normal?

So, once upon a time, we had a living room that functioned like a living room.  For a variety of reasons, it ceased to do so, and then became an OT room...once it was used primarily for OT, it stopped being remotely useful for anything else.  Yesterday, we put it all back together again.  Once I buy a couple of lamps and lap blankets, we're back in business.

When it was an OT room, it looked like this....

Now, I am pleased to say, all he really needs to do each day is a much more space-friendly amount of PT which he must do to maintain to his balance and keep his heel cords stretched out.
 

So....we now have a living room again:

And, because da Grampa and Grandma were so generous at Christmas, we have been able to move the old old old old old television into the living room and put all the ancient game systems with it, so there will be much easier times playing with the ancient historical Nintendo devices...  The even older tv that WAS in that space did not have VGA plugs.  It's in the garage now.  This is better.  Enjoying our successes, one victory at a time.  :D

All the Good You Find Along the Way

At the Alligator Ranch, OF COURSE they'd suggest he stick his head in its mouth!

This year was full of good.  Some of it is hiding in those posts further down the page, but most of it was just simple and quiet and persistent and existed mostly in the often invisible and unnoticed march toward helping Eric conquer his impulse control issues that still divide him from his peers and make life harder than it has to be.

We will never achieve 100% control, it's not possible, and we may have reached a plateau at this point in time, due to the onset of elongation of certain body parts and changing pitch depth and the ordinary complete loss of impulse control that comes with all of that (yay, puberty AND autism...this looks like FUN!), but that's okay.  Where we are is okay.

When he's not saying he's sorry, and looking down at his feet scared someone is going to correct him again for picking his nose, or chewing his toes, or using his whole face to eat, he's pretty happy, and that's a win.

Playing Munchkin with a vengeance

He LOVES playing games.  Munchkin, Monopoly, Risk, Chess, Donkey Kong, every single one of the Papa's Donuteria/Hot Dogaria/Pastaria, etc. games on NotDoppler, he cannot get enough of Star Wars Lego's, Star Wars books, and his love of Gilbert and Sullivan remains quite intact.  He likes penne pasta with meatballs and "jar sauce," mushroom omelettes, steamed broccoli, and would sell his sister for a good piece of tilapia, so his tastes are evolving, finally.  No more is it "fruit, meat, fries."  Now it's "cool fruit, differing meats, sometimes fries, and more and more variety in all things."  Winning!

My larger child has done amazing things...she is on course to finish her Honors' Thesis, she works as a lab teacher for the Biology department when they need her, she's an Anatomy and Physiology tutor, and a Biology tutor, employed by the school in their tutoring center, she found a boyfriend, he's nice, and she still comes home like a champ to help out as much as possible.

She works hard, she gets weird awards she isn't expecting!

Their Royal Highnesses, Claire and Bryan of Kings' Landing...'cause that's not creepy at all

She had a LOT of fun dressing up this year, making costumes with me, and working her ass off ALL the damn time so she could maintain that perfect 4.0 every semester like she mostly always does.  We'll never speak of the Art Department again, because that was just unjust and gross, and honestly, at this point that one "B" is just splitting a tiny hair off the hundredths place in her GPA.  She will yet again work at Cheley (which she has gotten rather good at, btw) and next year she will begin her two semesters of internship for her Kinesiotherapy Degree.  She still sings like angel fire, but had to finally bid a bittersweet adieu to the Music Department because, well, life moves on, and so has she.

For me?  I have pursued the cure for Hep C like a Honey Badger.  It took waiting eight months to make it even begin, and I am five months in to the whole six month course.  All I can do now is cross my fingers, hope, and wait.

Costumer Extraordinaire, Clay!

As a family, we made incredible new friends this year, some as a result of the Wizard World mess, and some we met as we traveled and played in costume at conventions.  My favorite thing I discovered this year was that comic book art is SUPER COOL, and the people who devote so much of their lives to those drawings are fascinating, driven, passionate humans and my suspicions about art turned out to be 100% true.  Whatever formal art has become (I'm looking at you, USM ART DEPT and the whole museum scene), it has in many ways lost its ability to connect with people.  I find more things to laugh at, cry at, challenge me, and entertain me on Deviant Art than I have found in a museum in twenty five years.  I LOVE the internet, and I LOVE the people I meet there and this year has taught me so very very much.  My favorite thing I own right now is that original drawing of the girl named only "Red" above, By Tess Fowler Gutierrez, a comic book artist out of Los Angeles.  You can find a much better photo of it here.  Thank you, convention goers, costumers, comic book artists, prop makers, CGI artists, pepakura creators, people who tried EVA, people who succeeded with EVA, and all the people making real, walking art and taking it on the road.  You guys rock.  And 99% are also the kindest, coolest, and most compassionate people I've met in a long, long time (I'm looking at YOU, Clay le Brun, and YOU Paul Patacek, and YOU Rafe White and especially YOU, Tess Fowler Gutierrez).

There are others, of course, but their life and support has been quiet and constant and more back-channelish and I wouldn't want to risk embarrassing them in a blog post, but LauraSplat, you and our army of friends have gotten me through some super dark days.  Roll call...if you want to be named, I do, in fact, appreciate you all, and all you have to do is PM me and I'll add you to the list.  :D

Apples and Trees

Finally, a note about my real life that few people "get."  Living with two versions of men with Asperger's (a large, engineering version who was never helped, never treated, never taught the necessary skills to really adapt socially), and a small one who is getting the benefit of ALL THE THINGS is a difficult life.  I could not do this without the help of the people who found me and I found them through this weird window on the universe called "the internet."  I'm a dreadful introvert, preferring the silence of my fortress to the chaos of face-to-face interactions, yet I find that the balance of "out at conventions" and "home to the internet" has been a valuable, life-healing journey this past two years.

Thank you all.

Toodles 2014

Could someone now follow me around and whisper "2015" every time I write a check please?  I hate having to cross out the previous year and scribble the new one across it for five months.... 

When People Judge You and then Gossip---It's Pretty Damn Destructive

I have had Hepatitis C for nearly 40 years, with no hope of surviving it once it was clearly diagnosed as what it REALLY was in 1991 (before then, it had been a series of "well, that's weird" and "are you a heavy drinker?" "NO," and "you can't have this insurance because of your drinking problem" (WTF?) and then it was labled "non A/non B hepatitis", etc.  PS--I didn't drink, except for occasional high school experimenting and my first two semesters at college, and even then, it was no fun, so not a big attractive thing to do, so I quit doing it entirely.  Since I was properly diagnosed, I've had two glasses of champagne at each of my weddings and nothing else, because...I LIKE LIVING)...

So, since I'm delving into topics that never really made the light of day in the "old days" when I was working for the Church, I'm going to take on one that I should have done something about YEARS ago.

Gossip.

There were women where I worked did not like me and treated me like garbage.  There's no two ways around it, and anyone who knew anything at the time knew how hard one of them was working to get rid of me.  I'm sure she's really proud of herself ever since I left, but I find it super ironic that in the end, she had nothing to do with me leaving.  I left because of all the other stuff I blogged about yesterday.

She (and a few core of people who also disliked me for reasons that I will NEVER really understand) liked to gossip about me occasionally.  I know this because I would hear about it from my boss, among others.  One of the things she liked to tell people is that I was lying when I occasionally referenced there being something wrong with me that was most likely going to kill me (usually on dark days when I was feeling pretty sick, things would slip out in the quiet private of the office environment)---you know, like the Hepatitis C I have had since a blood transfusion saved my life when I was eleven years old.

I guess since I hid it so well, I should forgive her and the others involved for those wrong assumptions, but should they be automatically forgiven for the spread of poison and hatred? Nope.  You can't be forgiven until you ASK to be, so step right up, I'm really ready to move on.  What?  No?  Well, then, okay, I guess I'll let it go, stop praying for all of you, and get on with my life without your permission or blessing.

Once upon a time, I used to console myself with the thought "you better hope I'm more than you think of me, because some day, MY prayers may be the only thing standing between you and damnation."  That was super defensive, but at the time, it helped me manage my own rage at being sabotaged, talked about, and sabotaged more.

But, back to the Hepatitis C.


After nearly forty years of battling the consequences of Hep C silently, quietly, behind the scenes, fighting through the fear that my children would be left with no memory of their mother, other than end-stage Cirrhosis and Liver Cancer, and being told by doctors REPEATEDLY that I would die if I didn't do this, that, or the other thing RIGHT THIS INSTANT.... and instead deciding not to because it would mean wrecking my ability to parent (and I had no back up plan, no extended family, no husband at the time, no one to really help me so the onus was MINE and mine alone), having to choke back all of that so that I could parent my kids while they were little because that's when it REALLY matters... (think about it...if all you have left in ancient age, dementia, or Alzheimer's are your childhood memories, those are probably more important than the other ones, right?), they finally developed a cure.

That's right.  A Cure.

So, for five months now, I've worked through all the hellish fun of the toxic soup of meds that has an 88% chance of killing the virus forever.  Before, due to the specific genotype of Hep C that I have (1a), there was a mere 5% chance of killing the virus, but a 100% chance of destroying me (which is why no doctor after the first one ever really suggested the triple combo again once I decided 5% wasn't worth a year lost for my youngest children's memories), there had been nothing I could do but wait and pray.  The first doctor told me angrily that I'd be dead in five years because I was a fool and that my decision was going to result in my imminent death.  However, the transplant doc agreed with me, so I chose to wait and white knuckle it.  The real statistics, as they started to scientifically emerge, were pretty grim...30-50 years after initial infection, even if nothing major had happened to you yet, there was an increasing likelihood of an imminent prolonged, horrifying death.  At 41, I hit the thirty year mark.  By 49, at the beginning of this past year, I was nearing the 40 year mark.  Sobering thoughts indeed.

So...Gossiping bitchlets of doom...here is your shame---wear it wisely and remember to be a little more humble should our paths ever cross again, because I promise you I will NOT bend again and hide in shame that *I* did something to deserve your scorn---I was, in fact, sick, and probably well on my way to dying.  It changed the criteria upon which I made decisions.  If I seemed a little intense to you, or whatever you justified your particular dislike of me with, maybe, just maybe, it was because I knew my time was limited and I needed to DO something useful with it while I had it.

I understand now that there will always be gossip and sabotage in any work environment, I've figured that out finally, after a naive lifetime of watching it wreak havoc in people's lives.  I was just super surprised to find it in an environment I felt like ought to be immune from that sort of viciousness, seeing as we weren't really dogs fighting for scraps in a junkyard after all.  We were the servants of the servants of God.  Oh well...as one nun friend once told me "working for the church is just like working anywhere else".  Yeppers.

By the way...did you know this cure costs $178,000?  Just FYI, since I've got the bad genotype and it's six months of the meds, not the three-month course which is a bargain at $84,000.  Apparently the pills cost about 30 cents each to manufacture, and the cost is for "development" and probably the fact that it's a CURE, not a treatment and wiping out Hep C isn't good enough for investors, but, I digress.  Google it and be horrified.

So, as I near the final countdown of days to see if I'm in the 88% that are cured and not the 12% who have to try again, I start to ruminate about what the next thirty years of my life might look like.  I start to hope again.  Mostly, I reject all the inappropriate shame that I wore like a mantle for all those years.  An eleven year old child who nearly died and was given a prophylactic blood transfusion on the day she left the hospital did nothing immoral or illicit to incur a long, slow death sentence.  Whatever else I do wrong with my life, whatever other sins I commit along the way, that was NOT ONE OF THEM.

The decisions I made while under that pall were completely reasonable.  The actions I took make sense in retrospect, if you give it a bit of compassionate consideration.  For my intensity, I apologize.  For whatever you think I did to you...I do not apologize, because I know my heart and I know I did the very best I could do at all times.  I worked HARD, and I learned constantly, and whatever ill will you chose to spew about and at me is your shame.

Now, I'm going to go and rearrange the furniture in my house (it's also a metaphor for me working through the past 40 years of pretending in public), try not to barf, try not to have massive medicine-induced panic attacks, try not to pass out from anemia, and hope I get to sleep some extra tonight.  Then, for the next 29 days, I'm going to hang like a lemur from a cliff face, praying and hoping I get to live long enough to try again to make friends, make a difference, and give something back to the world I LOVE LIVING IN.  Life wasn't something I was expecting to have, so this new opportunity is fascinating, overwhelming, exciting, joyful, and hopeful (emotions I have never allowed myself, btw, because I needed to stay focused on making life better for my children). 

Prayers appreciated.  Good thoughts appreciated.  When I finally decide what to do with the rest of my life, networking and opportunity for work (volunteer and paid) help would be appreciated.  What do you get in return?  I will let you in on a secret:  you get to feel good about the universe because you brought peace and joy and happiness back into a life wrecked by a shame that should never have been mine to bear in the first place.

Toodles

What I Did Wrong in My Son's Early Years with Autism, in Excruciating Detail, So if You Prefer Buzzfeed Style Blog Posts, Don't Bother Reading This

I was a choir director.

First, I was a choir director in an Episcopal Church while I worked my two years waiting to go to Seminary per our Diocese's new Bishop's instructions to me.  Along the way in those two years, I was also at some point a choir director at the Methodist Church across the street.  Clearly, I was good at this, or all these people wouldn't have kept paying me to do it, right?  So, I learned how to conduct, I learned how to choose music, I learned more about liturgy in THREE DENOMINATIONS (because that quirky Episcopal church decided to partner up with a Lutheran Church while I was there) than anyone should know in their whole lifetime if they're not planning to be a liturgist.

I got married, my husband tried to kill me while I was pregnant, and I decided for the sake of my unborn child I would come back to my home town and make a life here again for her and me and meanwhile the D.A. only charged him with aggravated battery because, after all, it was "just a domestic squabble".  I still have the scar inside my lip where my teeth nearly cut through when he choked me into unconsciousness, so, sure...whatever...it wasn't really attempted murder.  I mean, he was a nice guy, right?

I digress.

I was a good choir director.

So, back in my home town, I went back to grad school and started over again (one of many times in my life) so I could afford to raise my child AND be at home for her when she wasn't in school.  That went about as well as you'd expect in Mississippi since I chose effing teaching as a thing to do... but, still, in the end...

I was a good teacher.

As a grad student, though, I found myself in the truly bizarre situation of having an assistantship, and teaching English 101 to two sections, rocking along, doing well, making A's, impressing people with my mad skills in what I can only refer to now as professional bullshit manufacture (English is such a stupid degree), until one fall, I decided privately to convert to Catholicism.  The call had been clear, and had lasted for ages, and had even overcome my hatred for obedience and Popes and my mistrust of the whole "Mary stuff" that seemed so ridiculously human-created, a prequel, as it were, for the Christ story, and written clearly by someone who didn't have the skills at bullshit that I did, but...I submitted to the call and delved with ALL MY HEART into what I had finally come to believe was the true, authentic Church that Jesus himself intended us to be part of.  MY.  WHOLE.  HEART.  AND. LIFE.  Guess what?  In a Baptist College, they fire you for becoming Catholic.  No shit.

I did RCIA, and cried for six months because I couldn't take communion (you can't be part of the club until you're initiated, so "suck it Episcopalian girl who came looking for authenticity of Eucharist and had been taking communion passionately HER WHOLE LIFE...you're gonna have to watch for a while without being part of this...").  I started reading the Pope's writings, trying so hard to reconcile the notion of obedience with my distrust of human beings and power and let go of my need for democratic polity in the Church and threw myself into doing whatever was needed, wherever it was needed.  Oh, and hey...I can sing and file music and I don't mind doing a LOT of that shit since nobody else seems to want to...

I was a faithful choir member...

Which led, inevitably, as these things do, because my work ethic seems to be an anomaly and people keep hiring me to do things because I actually do them (which is bizarre from my perspective...don't the people you hire USUALLY do the thing you hired them to do?!?), to me finding myself a choir director.  AGAIN.

Nine years had passed since I had had my beautiful baby girl, whose voice rang like angel fire when she sang and who didn't mind sleeping on the floors of churches and choir rooms while I did the work.  It was work that brought me there early and kept me late, and our world was filled with worship and work and I was teaching, then I wasn't, and then I had a nervous breakdown, married a loser (the likes of which you CANNOT imagine), divorced said loser, got in trouble with the Catholics for it, had to get an annulment for every single marriage I'd ever mistakenly stumbled into (those issues are the things I had to conquer around the edges of the work I did every day to make the Church I served better by my presence and not harmed by it in the least).

What has this got to do with the Autistic Child, you must SURELY be asking by now....  well, START HERE if you skimmed the whole back story part of this post:

I got annulments for all the crazy violent abusive jerks I had married out of desperation of various sorts, just like I was told to by the Church I was trying REALLY hard to trust knew what was best for me, mine, and life in general.

Then I got married.  (Don't ask, the answer won't surprise you in the end, though it looked like maybe I had done a better job this time).

We had a son.

I knew from the very beginning he wasn't okay.  The screaming.  The failure to nurse properly which took SIX MONTHS of pumping, medicine to improve supply, and teaching him to suck in order to rectify, the lack of eye contact.  The SCREAMING.  The never sleeping.  Did I mention the screaming?

He slept 2 out of every 24 hours.  No joke, no hyperbole.  2 hours only.  The rest?  He screamed, like people were poking knives into his eyes and he could see them about to do it, all day, all the time.  When he nursed, he wasn't screaming as often, but he would claw at me til he drew blood so I had to figure out how to clip his nails, which involved screaming.

Had it not been for the firstborn, happy, contented, well-adjusted child I had already raised, I'd have lost hope and committed suicide.  This new baby was impossible.  Truly, deeply impossible.  The firstborn never gave up, and worked alongside me to give him the best chance possible.  She got eye contact at 18 months, though we were being told already to never expect that, and she got it by never giving up, grabbing his face, and not letting him look away.  She was a very determined big sister, and according to her "he was going to play with her, dammit".  She got laughter at 22 months, another impossibility according to the experts.

Oh...did I quit the never-ending work of choir directing during this time?

NO.

Should I have quit?  Probably.  But remember, I was deeply devoted by now to the choir I had built from scratch and had devoted so much of my life to making the best it could be.  I hired a baby sitter for one choir, and had the firstborn take care of him during the second and put him in the nursery for the third every Wednesday and Sunday.  I still worked fifty hour weeks in the music department.  Guess how much they paid me?  $200 a month. 

Did it get better as he got older?  Nope.  Nope.  Nope.

Eventually, they kicked him out of the nursery, as soon as they could do it on a technicality, because nobody in there could handle the screaming.  Then...I had to spend thousands of dollars to provide private baby-sitting for all rehearsals and liturgies I was still expected to provide for the church, including Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter.  Do you have ANY IDEA how hard it is to find a baby-sitter for those holidays who will take a child who never stops screaming and is a constant danger to himself and his surroundings and even if you find one that you are pretty sure won't kill him or let him wander off, do you have ANY IDEA how much you have to pay them?  $10-$15 an hour. 

Guess how much I spent on average, in a given year, for my $200 a month hobby job I did out of devotion to an ideal, a spiritual belief that I SHOULD be doing these things, and a devotion to the children entrusted to me by their parents to teach them music and make Church meaningful?   About $3,000 a year.

I was a GOOD choir director. 

Out of my 15 choir members, we regularly placed 8 of them in State honor choir and 3-4 in National Honor Choir.  I signed us up for the International Federation Pueri Cantores and quickly we became known as the traveling choir, as we sang at festival Masses all over the country and eventually went to Rome even to sing with the BIG International Festival.

Where was the screaming, difficult child who could not sit in the Church with the 14 second reverb for more than a couple of minutes without screaming more and more and more?  With increasingly dubious sitters.

I did a good job with him when I wasn't working. 

Doing a good job with him was all I did, actually, when I wasn't doing choir stuff.  But, there was a LOT of choir stuff---fund raising, dinner theatres, Masses all the time, getting stuck with Masses the Music Director didn't want to do because they were annoying (Thanksgiving, Christmas morning some times, Easter at 8 AM, etc.).  There was State Honor choir music to learn, and National Honor Choir music to learn and there was Pueri music to learn and ALL THAT TRAVELING to deal with.

My thoughts were that I had begun this work, and it needed doing, so I would honor the comittments made to them, and that my son clearly didn't understand anyway, so he would be okay and as he got older, I'd make it up to him when he could understand.

I COULDN'T HAVE BEEN MORE WRONG ABOUT EVERYTHING.

So, here's the real point of this giant rambling post:

Two nights ago, on Christmas Eve, he came in my room late because he needed to pee.  Now that I don't work at the church anymore (eventually, if you hit a puppy in the face with a two-by-four long enough, even the very blindest puppy figures out not to keep running to you expecting to be petted), there is more time on Christmas Eve.  No more 12 hour days and sleeping through Christmas dinner at the table at my dad's like a brain dead zombie.  No more undecorated house or unwrapped presents.  No more post-Christmas hatred of being used by so many people because I signed up for it somehow while trying to be a GOOD CATHOLIC.  So, he came in my room and was about to head back to his when I stopped him and asked him if he wanted to snuggle cuddle like old times.

I asked him why he liked Christmas.  He said presents.  I was horrified.

After all I had believed, and all I had devoted my life to, this beautiful, sweet, child thought the purpose of Christmas was the three or four presents he got on Christmas morning and it finally, heart-wrenchingly, gut-kicked me once and for all.

He had never been to Christmas or Easter Mass.

He had ALWAYS been shoved to the side because his outbursts were disruptive and people didn't understand and even the year I tried I had some bitch come up to me and tell me that my choir was talking and she could hear them over the microphones and I should make them stop.  What was happening was that my oldest firstborn was trying to whisper to her little brother instructions to keep him focused and calm enough to make it through the offertory and communion anthems because my DAMN BABY SITTER had cancelled an hour before Mass that day...

He did not know the Christmas story.  I cry now, every time my mind drags across that.  It's been two days since I discovered this, and I weep at night, because that is MY FAULT.

He does not know the Easter story.

He knows what he has read in his books, and what little we told him, but mostly, he knows who he was left with while we did these things.

He bears the Church some ill will, understandably.  Maybe that's why he hated Mass so much.  Maybe it was really the noise and that damn 14 second reverb that even the sound tiles only cut down to 11 seconds.  If you have sensory processing disorder and are required to be still and quiet for an hour and a half after having been still and quiet and alone playing video games during the hour and a half of rehearsal beforehand, you're probably not going to like Mass very much.

Two nights ago, we stayed up late in the dark and I told him the story.  It's amazing how much of Luke's Gospel I have memorized.  I didn't want to break the mood by getting up and getting the Bible out of the nightstand, he wouldn't have been as close and it wouldn't have mattered as much to him that way.  I told him some of all of my journey and WHY I devoted my life to an ideal.  Why it mattered.  Why, in the end, I quit (by the way...if you wrench your head around the idea of a Pope's authority, and devote every waking minute of your life to following obediently trying to replicate his ideas about liturgy for your hometown church that doesn't give a fuck about liturgy being proper or right or in sync with the Pope's ideas and then that Pope suddenly---on your fucking birthday, no less---RETIRES, you sort of don't have a clue what to do next, especially given the fact the new Pope is the anti-old-Pope and the headspin was unacceptable to my tiny ex-Episcopalian brain).  Why I still believe in the story and why I think the story has the power to save lives, regardless of it's historicity or logical validity or lack of validity.  Why I would still be going to church if I didn't hate what it did to him so much (that part didn't escape my notice, btw...they did NOT want to put up with him, with his noises, his head banging, his outbursts, his unique brand of finishing prayers a second or two after everyone in a booming voice, his wiggling, his complaining, his occasional screaming and they weren't even a little compassionate about his lack of welcome), and how deeply, humiliatingly, horrifyingly sorry I am that I never once shared the wonder and beauty I had been seeking the in first place with him.

There is no happy ending here, folks.

There is regret only, and the power to completely change my life.  AGAIN.  What form with that take?  Beats the hell out of me, but I can guarantee you this...I will never let the CHURCH take advantage of my devotion and love of the Gospel and use me as cheap slave labor ever again.  NEVER again.  Whatever I do with my son's relationship with Jesus is between the three of us, for the next three years until he is of age to start making up his own mind. 

Criticize me all you like.  Be rude.  I don't care.  You did not walk this path, and you have NO RIGHT to be ugly.  Autism is hard, harder than most people ever get up close and personal with.  Being a musician in the Church is impossible.  Nobody's doing it because it's making them rich.  The combination was nearly lethal for me, and my son suffered along the way.

I will make it up to him.  The time has come.  I will tell the story.  I will tell MY story.  I will listen to his.  Truly, deeply listen.  I will let his sister tell him hers, how the music taught her about life and liturgy, and how the old Mass brought her to a deeper understanding of Eucharist and how the betrayal felt after Benedict XVI's retirement left us bereft and empty and outside and how much it hurt.  Then, and only then, will we decide what to do next.












THIS POST APPEARED FIRST ON  CARLEIGH's CATASTROPHES.