Ten

Today is the tenth anniversary of my brother's death. Ten years. It seems like some kind of accounting error, but then I do the math: Moe is almost 5, Jeff and I are coming up on 7 years of marriage. It all adds up.

I haven't been very emotional about this anniversary in the past: three years, six years, eight--I didn't think too much of it. I thought more about his birthday than about the day he died. But ten years is a long time. It's not that I miss him any more or less today. But he has missed so much.

I realized the other day that Jeff and I met exactly 22 days after my brother died. I don't know why I never thought to count before. In my mind, Bill's death is a clear transition point from the first part of my life to the second. The first part included growing up, going to school, and starting life in general. It started on March 2, 1973 and ended on March 24, 2002. I think of this time as my childhood, even though I was 29 when Bill died and had been fully employed or in graduate school and living on my own since college.

The second part of my life started on April 15, 2002, the day I started my new job at a startup called Danger. I was sitting on the floor on a conference call, my first meeting, and Jeff walked in and the second part of my life began. I'm not sure if the timing is coincidental. It's not that I think I needed my brother to die to move on with life. It's not like he died and suddenly I knew what was important in life. I had already planned to start this job, and I had always wanted to get married and have a family. But I was certainly in a different frame of mind when I returned home after the funeral.

Moe (whose real name starts with a W and I'm sure everyone already knows) is named after my brother, William, though he always went by Billy, and later, Bill. When I was pregnant with Moe, I really wanted a girl, in part because I wanted to avoid the issue of naming my child after my brother. When I found out I was having a boy, I never wanted to name him William, even though the name has become popular again, though these days it is usually shortened to Will or Liam.

I just couldn't imagine calling another child Billy. How could I be angry at Billy? "Billy, you are in time out!" How could I put my dead brother in time out? And I certainly didn't want to be reminded of my brother every time I said my child's name, or worse, stop associating the name with my brother because someone else now inhabited it.

There was another reason I didn't want to have a boy or name him William. I was worried about the expectations that would be put on this new baby, the proverbial shoes he would have to fill. I was worried that people, especially my parents, would put too much significance on the fact that my first child was a boy. Moe's uncle died, but he deserved a clean start, just like any baby. I was thankful that when Moe was born, he looked just like his father. I didn't want there to be any doubt that my son was not sent here not to be a replacement for my brother.

It doesn't take a psychology degree to figure out that although I thought I was worried about my parents' expectations, I was actually worried about my own. I don't know why I'm only just figuring this out. Now that I have almost 5 years of parenting under my belt, I can see that no parent, mine included, would ever think that one child could take the place of another. Even if we tried our hardest to fit a child into a certain mold or set of expectations, kids have a way of being whoever they are going to be. Of course, we have some influence, but in the end, if you kid is going to be shy, or gay, or even (here it comes) autistic, it is ultimately up to them. Or at the very least not up to us.

Moe may be Jeff's little clone, but sometimes I look at him and see a little bit of my brother. My parents say they don't see it. But there is something in his smile, in his small teeth with tiny gaps, that reminds me of my brother. I see it especially when Moe is in the bath, and his curls have temporarily become straight. His fair skin and pink cheeks are exactly like Bill's when he was a little boy. Despite my initial fears, I am thankful for this resemblance, however slight. It's nice to think that something of my brother is still here in a genetic connection that means that, no matter what, we are still family.

All Kids Do That

My friend Jill at Yeah. Good Times. has been running a series of guest posts on her blog called "All Kids Do That." The background to this series is that often autism parents write and tweet about their challenges, and well-meaning friends and followers come back with "all kids do that." And this bothered her.

This is Jill.

So Jill decided that rather than getting defensive, she would try to educate people on why and how certain parenting challenges are different for those of us with kids on the spectrum.

With this weekend's start of President's Week (or "ski week") already putting me into a mild panic, Jill is featuring my post about why Time Off is hard.

So head over there, and give us some love!

One More Voice for Vaccination

This was a piece I wrote on May 7, 2010 for the Silicon Valley Moms Blog. After the yesterday's CNN report about Wakefield, I've decided to post it here.

Six months ago, Jessica Holt's otherwise healthy seven year old boy, Joey, was sent home from school with a fever. What seemed like a typical flu quickly worsened and she called 911. In the ambulance on the way to the hospital, blood pressure dropping, Joey said "I love you mama. Hold my hand." Then, she said, "he was gone." The boy had contracted H1N1 flu, and wasn't vaccinated. She didn't think it would happen to her. Jessica says she lives "every day with that regret."

When I was pregnant with my first child, I read up on the many choices I had to make about my child's care. Cloth diapers or disposable? Hospital or home birth? Circumcise or not? Vaccinate or not? I had no idea that this was a choice. Of course I would vaccinate my son. And I did.

But one year ago, my family had two almost simultaneous life changing events: our baby girl was born and my two year old son was diagnosed with autism. Like so many kids newly diagnosed, he had been happy and engaged just months before. He loved peek-a-boo games, said "banana" and "baby," and could point to his adorable outie belly button. He knew his animal sounds. But soon he stopped gaining new words, and by his second birthday, he wasn't saying anything, not even "mama" or "dada" or his favorite "banana."

So my husband and I researched. We read the pros and cons, and still decided to vaccinate our daughter. But I stayed out of the discussion, wanting to be accepting of others' choices and not get into an emotional debate. I didn't have the energy to fight that battle. But just the other day, even after the Lancet article was retracted, even after Jenny McCarthy admitted that her son didn't have autism at all, I read a blog post about how it was "proven" that her son's autism was caused by a vaccine. That same night, my husband came home and told me about Joey Holt's death and I got so angry. At least once a month, I see messages from people looking for pediatricians who are okay with not vaccinating. I'm tired of it and I don't want to wait to read another story about a child who lost his life to a completely preventable disease.

Why aren't we more afraid of these diseases? In 2002, the World Health Organization estimated that "1.4 million of deaths among children under 5 years were due to diseases that could have been prevented by routine vaccination." Thirty eight percent of those deaths were from measles. That's 532,000 children. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has committed $10 billion over the next 10 years to deliver vaccines to the world's poorest countries, estimating that they'll save 8 million lives.

But that is "over there," right? In this country, we have easy access to vaccines but because we haven't seen these diseases up close in a generation, inoculation seems like a luxury we can forego. Our parents grew up knowing kids who were severely disabled by polio, but I sure didn't. Right now, the fear of autism looms so much larger than the threat of measles or whooping cough. Besides, we have good medical care here. When our kids do get sick, we have doctors who can help cure them. I can see how the choice not to vaccinate might seem like a good one.

Unfortunately, it seems we are going to learn the lesson the hard way. Last year in Minnesota, three cases of Hib, including a death, "were in infants whose parents refused to vaccinate them. Parents of two children objected to vaccines; the parents of the third child were waiting to vaccinate until the child was 5 years old." Even with the best medical care, these children did not stand a chance.

Still, you may think this is a personal decision, made between you, your family and your doctor. Think again. Mariah Bianchi lost her 3 week old son to whooping cough. "To hear about other people who are losing their children that are too young to vaccinate...These babies that are less than 3 months old that are dying never have a chance and it's up to the people around them to protect them." What if my unvaccinated child had exposed her to that disease? Wouldn't I be responsible for that person's death? We have a very clear social and ethical obligation to vaccinate our children, with exceptions only in the most extreme cases.

Vaccinations don't cause autism; the research is there. Gerber and Offit, in their paper "Vaccines and Autism: A Tale of Shifting Hypotheses," note that "Twenty epidemiologic studies have shown that neither thimerosal nor MMR vaccine causes autism." Let's stop using fear to confuse parents into making deadly decisions for their - and our - children. If anyone has something to be scared of, it's me. I have one child with autism, and it is heartbreaking. I'm not sure how I could bear it if my daughter was also on the spectrum. Thankfully, so far, she seems to be developing typically. She's crawling and laughing and starting to talk. But we're just a few months away from when things started to go so wrong with my son. I watch her every move, looking for signs, breathing a tentative sigh of relief every time she points to an object or makes eye contact.

Her MMR vaccine is next week.

Jelly is now 20 months old and developing typically. Paul Offit, who is often criticized by the anti-vaccination movement, has a new book, Deadly Choices: How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens Us All.