{"id":1351,"date":"2016-10-24T07:34:02","date_gmt":"2016-10-24T11:34:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/robinbotie.com\/blog\/?p=1351"},"modified":"2016-10-24T10:14:04","modified_gmt":"2016-10-24T14:14:04","slug":"standing-rain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/robinbotie.com\/blog\/standing-rain\/","title":{"rendered":"Standing Out in the Rain"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"RobinMonths ago, when we were still in the middle of a drought, I had Staples print up two large vinyl banners, photos of my daughter, to be strung together and worn sandwich-board style for the Cancer Resource Center of the Finger Lakes\u2019 <\/a>Annual Walkathon. It seemed like a good idea back then. That was before I\u2019d had time to consider how conspicuous I would be, sandwiched in bright colors, shoulders to knees. It never occurred to me that the dry spell could finally end in a three-day downpour concurrent with the October Walkathon. The banners\u2019 colors would hold up in rain. But could I?<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t stand out as much as the guy in the Tony-the-Tiger costume. I stood with him until the rain picked up and people ducked into the tents. Then I stood alone in the rain, waiting for my friend to show up. People passing by nodded with sympathetic smiles.
\n\u201cCan I take your photograph?\u201d I was asked several times.
\n\u201cYes, please. Take pictures. I\u2019d like that,\u201d I said, smiling into the cameras. Whoa! Was that really me? I hate being photographed. And I hate being conspicuous. It\u2019s bad enough feeling folks\u2019 eyes taking in \u201cthe woman who lost her daughter.\u201d Before my loss, I\u2019d tried hard not to stare at the one woman I knew whose child had died, as I wondered what kept her from disintegrating into millions of miserable molecules. Now I was that woman. And I was standing in the rain. Standing out. Alone. In costume.<\/p>\n

High school girls\u2019 teams came by. They wore tight wet jeans, soaked sneakers without socks, drenched jackets. My daughter would have fit right in. \u201cThat\u2019s what you\u2019re wearing in this torrential downpour?\u201d I\u2019d often said to her. She liked rain. She played soccer in the rain, wrote a song about rain. She even looked good wet. Whereas I was told once, coming in from the damp, I looked like a drowned rat. She\u2019d be mortified to be seen with me now in my knee-high heavy-gauge rubber boots and clear plastic hooded raincoat.<\/p>\n

\u201cOh. Marika!\u201d her former teachers and an old friend pointed at me sandwiched in the photos. It felt good to hear my daughter\u2019s name and have her remembered. And I realized that I wasn\u2019t a drowned rat. I wasn\u2019t simply a bereaved mother. Just then I was Marika. I was wearing her smiling face from shoulders to knees. And she loved being photographed. She wanted to be seen. So I shamelessly approached a small group, a young man in a tutu, and asked if they would take my picture with Tony-the-Tiger.<\/p>\n

When my friend finally arrived and offered me space under her rainbow umbrella, I said, \u201cNo thanks. I\u2019m completely waterproof.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Robin<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Months ago, when we were still in the middle of a drought, I had Staples print up two large vinyl banners, photos of my daughter, to be strung together and worn sandwich-board style for the Cancer Resource Center of the Finger Lakes’ Annual Walkathon. It seemed like a good idea back then. That was before […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[702],"tags":[258,1000,1002,999,247,784,388,998,1001],"class_list":["post-1351","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-702","tag-bereaved-mother","tag-cancer-resource-center","tag-cancer-resource-center-of-the-finger-lakes","tag-drought","tag-grief","tag-healing","tag-loss","tag-standing-out-in-the-rain","tag-walkathon"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/robinbotie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1351","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/robinbotie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/robinbotie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/robinbotie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/robinbotie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1351"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/robinbotie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1351\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/robinbotie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1351"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/robinbotie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1351"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/robinbotie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1351"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}