Posts by Alissa Butterfass

A new year is always an appropriate time to reflect on the year that has gone by and to think about our goals, wishes and hopes for the year to come. Last week, as my husband and I went on our last date night of 2015, we toasted to what a good year it had been.

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Back in 2011 I wrote a post for the ACHA Blog around Thanksgiving time. You can read it here, but the gist was that everyone has something; no one’s life is perfect. Sometimes it is easy to know what problem or issue someone is dealing with. Other times on the surface it might look like someone is living the perfect life—but the truth is that person is dealing with something too, you just might not know it. And my lot in life, my issue to deal with, was that I was born with a congenital heart defect.

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First, an update: When I last blogged, it was weeks before an upcoming cardiac catheterization. My doctor was hoping to attain images and measurements not accessible in other tests, and I was hoping to finally get an answer to what my exercise limitations are, and whether I could actually try to take up running or participate in a half marathon walk with my cousin.

The catheterization took place in late April. Even though only diagnostics were performed and no interventions were necessary, the recovery was more difficult than I anticipated—a massive headache for three days, likely due to dehydration, and a sore leg at the site of the catheter placement for a week.

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This is the season when many of us, our friends and our family open our hearts and wallets to donate much-needed funds to those causes most important to us. If you are like me, there are probably several charities and organizations that you want to support—and if our pockets were deep enough we’d give to them all. So today I want to share why ACHA is one well-deserving organization to which I donate year after year—and I hope you will too.

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The other night my husband and I were watching the television show Restaurant: Impossible—Chef Robert Irvine visits a failing restaurant and over two days works with owners, chef and staff to revamp the business. In this episode, the restaurant's owner expressed doubt that her party boy son, who served as the restaurant manager, could change his ways to become the responsible adult necessary for the job. When my husband lamented that the mother didn’t have faith in her son, I said, well, it’s really hard for a person to make such a drastic change. My husband smirked at me asking, “And how would you know?”

I know because I am in the midst of drastic change.

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Recently I read a memoir by a man who was a year ahead of me in high school. At age 19, he was paralyzed when a truck slammed into the bus he was riding. The author decided to write the book as what he termed his “half-life date” approached—the day when he would have lived exactly half of his life pre-accident and half post-accident. Throughout the book, he reflects on what his life was like before the accident, and describes how life has changed for him since then. As I read Half-Life: Reflections from Jerusalem on a Broken Neck by Joshua Prager, a few ideas struck me in particular.

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As I write this, it is 8 p.m. on Monday, January 7. Four years ago tonight, I was in an Atlanta hotel room in anticipation of my gestational carrier’s induction the next morning at her local hospital. Unbeknownst to me at the time, that night in New York my best friend from college unexpectedly fell ill and was taken to her local hospital emergency room, where she died. My husband, parents, brother and friends lovingly kept the shocking and sad news from me—no easy task in an era of email, texts and Facebook—until after my son S.’s birth the next afternoon, January 8.

As a CHD patient, I had often joked that I was “born brokenhearted.” I certainly suffered my share of romantic heartbreaks during my dating years. And I have lost dear, much-loved grandparents whom I miss terribly. But it was when my son was one hour old, and my husband told me that my friend Lisa died (he had to… I was about to try calling her to let her know about S.’s arrival) that I think I really felt “heartbroken” for the first time.

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For those of you who are regular readers of the ACHA Blog, you may have noticed a subtle change in my bio. Two months ago, I left my professional, paying job to stay home with my kids. After 13 years at the same company, six of them as a “working mom” (a term I use only to facilitate writing this post, not to make any implications or judgments about mothers who do or do not have a paying job), it has been an adjustment for me and for my family. But so far, so good. Some thoughts and observations:

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In July my family went on vacation. As usual, I was the designated packer. I was smart enough to make a checklist two days before the trip and organized enough to pack the kids’ stuff the day before we left—remembering everything from bathing suits and goggles to toys and stuffed animals, even Children’s Tylenol, Benadryl, and Motrin.

The day of our trip, I finished packing everything else—clothes for me and Hubby, an assortment of suntan lotion, saline solution, and more. I was a veritable packing machine. By 11 a.m., we were on our way. Woo-hoo!

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This past week, I was inspired by someone I don’t know, never met, and never even heard of until Wednesday. A friend of mine posted on Facebook a link to an article about a friend of hers who worked with a well-known beauty company to launch a limited edition nail polish color in memory of her friend Jennifer Goodman Linn, who passed away from cancer last summer. I saw the Facebook post, clicked the link to Jennifer’s blog and began to read the story. And, I couldn’t stop reading.

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On my first date with my husband, he took me to a restaurant on the Upper West Side of New York, we discussed his upcoming vacation, and he told me he loved to cook homemade pizzas and apple pie (both of which he wouldn’t cook for me for nearly a year, by the way).

But this post isn’t about my first date with my husband. It’s about the last first date I had before I met my husband.

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A few months ago, a Facebook friend posted the following quote (I may be paraphrasing; it’s been a while): If you and your friends could throw all your problems in a pile and could instead pick out anyone else’s problems, you’d always choose your own.

I completely believe that’s true. Everyone is dealing with something. Some people’s problems are more obvious. Others may lie deep beneath the surface. I know women my age who have battled breast cancer. Faced fertility issues. Suffered the death of a parent. Endured divorce. Dealt with a lost job. The list goes on and on. Even those people whose lives seem perfect or who—more annoyingly—tell you their lives are perfect, have issues. I promise.

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This past week I celebrated Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. The holiday service includes many beautiful prayers and many harrowing liturgies, and reciting them makes me think about the year that has passed—my accomplishments, my missed opportunities, my goals—as well as my hopes for the upcoming year. Whether or not you are Jewish, it’s never a bad idea to reflect on the past year and think about the year ahead. Here are some of the thoughts that went through my mind this week.

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This is my seventh posting for the ACHA blog. For the first time outside a class setting, I have committed to and actually followed through on writing regularly. As it says right in my bio below, I’m a wannabe author. The only problem was that I wasn’t writing. Sure, I was great with a rehearsal dinner toast or a 40th birthday roast. I had taken a few fiction and memoir writing classes, loving the short in-class assignments but struggling with larger homework pieces. And, I never really sat down and wrote just to write. I hadn’t even kept a journal since studying abroad my junior year of college.

I was starting to think that maybe I wasn’t meant to be a writer. Maybe being an avid reader and a lover of the written word just wasn’t enough to actually make me a writer. Maybe it wasn’t going to happen.

Certainly of all the things I had imagined writing about, I never imagined that my writing would focus so directly on my heart condition. Yes, in any memoir it would certainly make an appearance, a recurring guest star perhaps, but I didn’t see it as the starring role.

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For those of you considering gestational surrogacy, please know there is no one right way to go about it. Here are just some thoughts I can share based on my own experience (which I blogged about here and here). I am always very open and candid about what I went through, so if you’d like to discuss further, please feel free to contact me through ACHA.

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For Part 1 of Alissa’s story, click here.

Hubby and I agreed that we’d look into surrogacy first (hey, we figured we had made one cute kid, why not try for another?), and if that wasn’t an option, then adoption. But we didn’t know where to even start our research. I was skeptical to look online as I had no idea what information would be valid, accurate and helpful. We didn’t know how to take the first step. We were saddened that pregnancy wasn’t an option and overwhelmed at the thought of trying to figure out what to do next on our own.

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Note: While it is a Thursday, this post was submitted by Alissa on a recent Monday morning.

For my first ACHA blog, Terri had requested I write about my experience with gestational surrogacy—which is how my second son S. was born. As I sat at my computer the past two days, that was my intention. In a separate file I have a couple of paragraphs drafted but I couldn’t focus on them. You see, it’s going to be one of those weeks, and all I can think about is my over-extended so-called life. So, I promise to write about surrogacy in a future post but for now, at 8:52 p.m. on a Sunday evening, I share with you my week ahead.

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