Tomorrow, snip snip snip on the tubes

red pail on the beach
Originally uploaded by Liz Henry.

I’ve been thinking about getting my tubes tied for a while now. The IUD didn’t work out, and I don’t want to have any more babies.

Just the other day I was thinking how much I love Random Encounters. I was trying to describe how a person I barely know was asking me to come to her house and do something, writing-related, and I felt like anything could happen… not like, universes ending and being born “anything”… but more like, something cool could come of this, it would be unexpected, it would be an Experience. It’s the attitude to have while travelling – it might not go how you expected but you roll with it, you welcome the weird random things that turn out to be the point of the trip after all. My realization was that *not* getting my tubes tied would be playing that game too hard. That if I don’t then in the back of my mind it’s like I’m saying, “Oh well, but if I *did* accidentally get knocked up, well then…” But, that’s not how I feel about my life at this point, so I should act.

It’s a drastic change from years ago when I was so desperate to get pregnant, and the miscarriages…

Some people lay it on thick about how Moomin will grow up lonely and I owe it to him to whelp out a sibling. That’s such utter crap!

It gives me a beautiful feeling of control over my fate.

I also realized I should not spend the day before surgery (even minor surgery) doing dull errands. So Moomin and I went to the beach. I talked it up to him, in the way that makes him very suspicious that we are not about to have a fabulous adventure but instead will be miserable. Luckily it was sunny, warm, the beach was lovely, we built sand castles and battled the incoming tide, digging and building & carrying rocks. Moomin can be very finicky about dirt, sand, water, or anything uncivilized touching his skin. It took me 2 hours to break him down to the point where he was covered in sand, his pant legs were wet, and he was running like a crazy wild beast, lugging boulders to shore up the front line of our complex of sea walls. The excitement was too much for him as the waves kept crashing through. Actually, it is the perfect activity for anyone who (like Moomin) has “control issues”. Waves threaten, dramatic tension builds, sand is crumbling & eroding, you keep thinking that if you just extend that wall out a little bit higher around the side, you might beat the entire ocean! He bought into it. We pretended we were giants and the people in the castle (by now, behind a maze of 4 or 5 walls and moats, decorated with seaweed, feathers, sticks, and rocks) were begging us to save them. “We’re giants, but we’re friendly,” I suggested. “Yeah. And, I guess, even though we’re so huge, we don’t mind being bossed?” Right! The grateful people of the castle promised us a banquet of fish, chocolate, and beer, which I declared were the favorite foods of giants.

Off to Barbara’s Fish Shack, overlooking the water, in fact it’s built out on piers over the water in a lonely spot in the harbor. It’s gratifyingly un-mall-like. Has been there forever, not part of a foul “development”.

I then scarfed an entire pot of fresh clams while Moomin read comic books and nibbled on fish & chips. The taste of clams and mussels sends me immediately straight back to Bonnet Shores and Camden Road, both the salty all-day-at-the-beach feeling and the actual memory, very solid, of scrubbing the mussels I had picked, sticking rubber bands on them, and then sitting at the 70s-looking table dipping them in butter and eating them, grossed out but also overcome with deliciousness. Plus I had read many books like Kidnapped and liked to imagine that I was surviving a shipwreck only on shellfish. It’s weird to time-travel so strongly and be sitting at that table in my bathing suit, watching my Grandma Hen’s absentminded pottering.

It’s been a really wonderful few weeks since school ended for me! And today was beautiful!

I can’t help feeling that I’m being horrible and bad by tying it off tomorrow and that something will go horribly wrong with the surgery, so I should live it up. Quick, one more hour till bedtime, I’ve got to squash in a lot of exciting living before then. The suggestion to go out in a blaze of rainbow sequins while handing out feminist tracts and $20 bills was just perfect.