So, I've got a bit of stage fright now. It wasn't until this afternoon that I realized that the article was published in the Sydney Morning Herald and all evening I've been watching my blog climb up the rankings list with over 700 hits as I'm writing this.

I've gone out every night this week, dinners and movies, Radiohead at the Hollywood Bowl last night, and finally, for the first time in days am I spending an evening at home alone. I've been procrastinating on posting because now I feel like I have to write something incredibly poignant in order to live up to all the hype but all I've been able to do is laundry and dishes. I've been padding around my little apartment in my little sequined Chinese house slippers, listening to KCRW, petting the cat, stripping my bed and all the while, I'm thinking, Holy shit, someone in Australia is reading my writing right now. Right now, as I'm bitching at myself for washing a blue rug with my two white ones, hence causing a bleeding of colors too intense for a 25 year old woman not to anticipate, someone on the other side of the world is reading about my life. It's really quite strange and it's definitely making me self-conscious. Especially about things like the fact that I've never quite figured out the proper grammatical usage for "it's" - like when you use the apostrophe. I decided when I started this blog that, instead of being a normal person and figuring it out, I would just always use the apostrophe. That way I'd probably be right at least half the time and hopefully not too many people would notice. Oh well, here we go anyway.

Today was a strange day. I hardly got any sleep last night and have taken two naps today, trying to make up for it. My whole day feels fragmented, as though I've lived an entire week in just 24 hours. This afternoon when I finally figured out the whole SMH situation I got pretty excited. I called my friend Holly, with whom I had just had lunch, and we talked about how cool it was but then I hung up with her and stood on my patio smoking a cigarette with no one else to call really.

My mother would just die all over again if she knew about it. She was overly thrilled with anything I ever did in my life. Really simple things like first days of school, my first period, my first date, anything I ever wrote... My Dad would have been really excited as well. He would have emailed and called everyone he knew to let them know that his daughter was mentioned in an Australian newspaper. It would have been incredibly embarrassing but then again, this wouldn't have happened if they both hadn't died.

Yesterday I got another copy of Motherless Daughters in the mail (I had lent out my old one and never got it back). I've cried more in this past week than I have altogether since my Dad died and having this book in my hands didn't help matters. I hadn't looked at it for a couple of years but remembered immediately that there was a chapter on motherless daughters and what it's like when they lose their second parent. I had to read it immediately of course. This is what made me cry:

Losing one parent teaches us about just that--how to lose one parent. It doesn't prepare us for the loss of the second. "The death of the last parent is a whole other dimension," says Therese Rando, who lost both of her parents by the age of eighteen. "When one parent dies, the world is dramatically altered, absolutely, but you still have another one left. When that second parent dies, it's the loss of all ties, and where does that leave you? You lose your history, your sense of connection to the past. You also lose the final buffer between you and death. Even if you're an adult, it's weird to be orphaned."

A daughter's identity changes dramatically when both her parents die. Nobody calls her "daughter" anymore. When she's a young adult, capable of making her own decisions, this second loss pushes her into a phase of individuality where she's accountable only to herself. "I lost both of my parents by the time I was twenty-six," says Christine, now thirty-five. "And suddenly I didn't have anybody telling me what to do. I could do whatever I wanted. That's a scary feeling, when you're suddenly let loose and realize there's nobody to check in with. Nobody to ask, 'What are you doing?' or say 'Maybe you should think about this.' All of a sudden you have all this responsibility for yourself, and you think, What do I do?"

Pretty much everything in those two paragraphs were things I had already thought about and felt, except for one thing. I hadn't yet thought of the fact that no one will ever call me daughter again. Thinking about that made me feel pretty empty and lonely. To read most of the sentiments in the second paragraph was kind of jarring. I've already felt how strange it is to be on my own, to have no one to check in with, no one, but my friends, to tell me when I'm making drastic mistakes in my life, but to read these things in a book, in hard black type-written words, words written by someone else who can verify that this is a true fact and not likely to go away anytime soon, is quite powerful.
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