Mi-shay-la

She hated this dress because she
said she had shoulders like a
linebacker.

My daughter.  Her name is Michaela.  That is pronounced Mi-shay-la.  She loved her name but never forgave me for it either.  The idea at the time we named her was for it to be shortened, someday, to simply Chae.  She was named for her father, Michael.  But the pronounciation came from the region of Germany that she was born in, that tends to soften the ch sound rather than harden it to a K sound as in the High German made famous to Americans by JFK in the Ich Bin Ein Berliner speech (I hope that reference is correct).  But as children are never as cooperative as we hope when they are born, she detested Chae and Chala as much of her family called her against her wishes, but ended up with Mich or Mishy. 

I also have an amazing son, David, and two great stepchildren, Brandon and Heather.  They are alive to speak for themselves (and defend themselves against anything I may say), so you will never see a blog devoted to talking abou them.  But my daughter, my firstborn, my baby girl, is not alive to represent herself, so I have the freedom to talk about her all I wish.  Unlike most people seem to think, it isn't talking about her that hurts.  It is the fear of people forgetting that she was and who she was.

It took some practice.

Michaela was a force of personality from the time she was born.  She spoke her first word at Christmas when she was 9 months old.  It was 'pretty'.  We have no idea whether it was about the Christmas tree or the ugly dog decoration she was particularly fascinated with.  She maintained her fascination with ugly tree decorations, so maybe that was it.  She was also walking by then.  The first three or four months of her life, she did nothing but cry and puke.  I know now she cried out of pure frustration against not being able to do for herself.  Once she was able to hold her own bottle (3 months) and then her own spoon (5 months) and push herself around in her walker (5 months), the crying stopped.  She would wake up every morning with a smile and we would find her standing in her crib happy as could be. (lest you think I'm bragging, she wasn't potty trained until she was 3).



Her love of music started young.

 I am not going to go through 21 years month by month.  Although I do it in my mind all the time.  This is just a list of things even people who knew her might not know about Michaela.  Or perhaps it is some things I don't want forgotten.

Her dimples.  She hated them.  She called them craters in her face.  She got them from me :).  Maybe the only physical feature she did.

Her hairy arms.  She also hated them.  She actually asked for laser hair removal for Christmas one year, even though I kept telling her it would go away with time (she may also have gotten this from me).

She loved unconditionally.  Like nobody I have ever met before or since.  Once she loved you, she loved you.  You may disappoint her and by damnit she would tell you about it, but she loved you anyway.  Nobody was ever an 'x' friend of Michaela's, although of course, people came and went as we moved around.  She believed in first, second and 22nd chances.



Dressed as her hero
for spirit week.

 She had a compass for right and wrong that had nothing to do with religion and everything to do with right and wrong. 

She loved to talk about the issues of the world.  She went to college hoping to find like minds (or unlike minds, but someone to talk to either way), but was very disappointed in her fellow students (she felt all they wanted to do was party and find others to do the work), so she became an RA...not to police her fellow students, but to help them.  She was always more mature than her age group and that didn't change until her last year at college when a compromise seemed to be reached...other students caught up with her as she learned to relax just a little bit.

Her first week as RA, she had to turn someone in for smoking pot in the dormitory.  The person she turned in, knowing it was Michaela who turned her in, asked her to accompany her to the police station to help her.  That was the power of Michaela.  It was always that way.


Speaks for itself.

 She loved Disney movies.  I think her favorite was Finding Nemo but there were many she liked.  She loved Ellen DeGeneres as Dori and could do a great imitation of her.  She could do great imitations in general.  Funny accents were a specialty.

She was a perfectionist.  For better and worse.  She was also a packrat.  For worse.  She kept every single card and every single note anyone ever wrote her.

She journalled all of the time, but mostly when she was feeling an emotional extreme, either up or down.  For that reason it is hard for me to read her journals.  Too much down and pain, but punctuated by such highs.



Entertaining Nathan.

 She was an artist, but most of her art was inspired by sadness.  Much of it is very dark.  She also wrote poetry.  Her soul cried for what it could not understand.  She always said when she was happy she couldn't make art.

Every single time she came home from school (college) we would sit up all night talking the first night.  That is how I knew what she wanted to happen when she died.

She loved Thanksgiving the most, but was like a child (always) for a Christmas at home.  She had endless enthusiasm for the little rituals of the holidays.

She hated math.  It just eluded her.  The simplest algebraic equations baffled her.  I don't know if that is a product of her education (she missed the fundamentals because of a wierd experiment they were doing in England when she was in elementary school) or just a matter of how her mind worked.   I couldn't help her because she just got too emotional, so a friend had to tutor her....God bless his patience. 



Loving on Bear.

 She loved her brother more than anyone in the world.  And she seemed to know he was going to live longer than her (but that is another blog).

She won an amatuer "strip" contest once and was so proud of her "guts" to even participate, that she couldn't not tell me about it.  (She was sober both when she did it and when she told me about it.)

She thought I loved her brother more than her.

She loved her stepbrother and stepsister immensely, although they frustrated her.  She wanted them to do well, but they weren't doing it fast enough to suit her purposes.  I guess it is hard to be the oldest.

Once, as a toddler, I let her eat raisins all day long to keep her calm during a softball tournament.  Her babysitter was NOT happy the next day and saved all the diapers to show me.

She wouldn't speak to me on her 16th birthday, even though she got a car.  It was a stick shift.  She didn't know how to drive a stick shift.  She was quite mad.  That was her first of 3 cars.  She never owned anything but a stick shift.  She didn't want to.  She was proud of her ability to drive one and took it upon herself to teach anyone who would participate how to drive one.  (her stepbrother has one now too...hmm, wonder how that happened). 

Once a (young) policeman stopped her and asked if her car was stolen.  She wasn't doing anything wrong.  I don't know why her ran her plates (hot young blond, perhaps?).  Her plate was personalized "M1SHY".  He ran MISHY. 



Must of been a good story.

 She started a family tradition of going to movies on Christmas night...once the presents are open and dinner has been napped off, why not?  One year we saw .....the Barber of Seville?....murder and mayhem.  I was not happy.  But still a good family memory.  I will never see another movie on Christmas...probably.

She did really poorly the first time she took the GRE.  It was heart breaking when she called me in tears, literally howling about her stupidity.  How can a Cum Laude student do bad on the GRE?  Take all the math in the first year (during HS, dual enrollment), then never do math again.  After she had already been accepted into a great program, bad GRE and all, she was scheduled to retake it.  She asked if she should, I hesitated, but told her yes.  What a good decision.  Without the pressure she raised her score 200 points.

Helping me with a project.

Peace, Love, Save the Whales

She couldn't tell time on a regular clock.  Ever.  No matter who tried to teach her.

Fall Out Boy.  Enough Said.

COEXIST...she made the bumpersticker into a huge back window drawing and left it there for a year.  She believed it wholeheartedly.

My biggest disappointment in the Obama administration is that she really believed they could make a change.

She would make lists of what needed to be done...but in her perfectionism, she would include the daily musts (like 'brush my teeth'), so her lists would be ridiculously long.


She loved this picture.

 Once we went to a minor league baseball game and the catcher threw her a ball with his phone number on it.

This could be an endless blog, of course.  But I will end it here.  It is a quiet Sunday afternoon.  Dinner has been eaten.  The Steelers are playing.  I have a good book to read and time to think about my daughter's life.  Peace Out.