Eleven

So I've been thinking about the Anniversary in Burnstopia lately, and all I can hear is that guy from Spinal Tap saying, "ours go up to ELEVEN."  I don't know why, I'm pretty tired, so maybe that's it.

This year marks 11 years that Chris and I have been married.  Or as he so romantically puts it, "that I have been putting up with his crap."  Which is true, but still makes me laugh.  What really cracks me up and exasperates me all at the same time is his superhuman ability to SNEAK enormous things into our house without me noticing.  I went down to clean up the basement on Monday, and there was this huge storage cart on wheels just sitting there.  I called him to come down and said, "Dude.  What is THIS and how long has it been in our house?!"  At which point he laughed and said, "I didn't want you to think I was taking advantage of you being incapacitated post-c-section."  At which point I laughed and said, "But you totally WERE!"

Anyway...

We've been having an Honest Week around here, wherein he and I are probably a little too honest about our levels of stress, lack of sleep, frustration and discouragement.  But for all that, it usually brings us closer and makes us appreciate each other a little more.  I have to say, he's much more persistent and tenacious than I thought he was when I married him.  Maybe that's why I expected him to leave me for so long.  I figured, Life would get hard and he would leave.  But he hasn't.  And I haven't.  We stay and we keep working and we keep trying and after 11 years we've built a life together.  Some days it feels like it's built out of straw and the big bad wolf could come along any minute and blow us to smithereens, but I also know that if that happens, we'll dust each other off and build the Life again.  Which, now that I think about it, is what marriage is all about.

 

I tried to find a picture of us together, but there really aren't any.  All of our pictures are of the kids, or one of us with the kids.  Which, in a very genetic sense, is a picture of us together.

Growing a Miracle

I've really struggled with this story.  I'm still not quite sure how to tell it, and maybe it's one of those things you only learn by doing, so I'll just try.  I'll probably hate it, but I'm going to try all the same.

Why try?  Because infertility is one of those things that is so deeply personal and painful that no one really talks about it, but strangely, the more others talk about it, the more reassuring it is for the people going through it.

Some background:

Chris and I have what is known as secondary infertility, which means that we were fine getting pregnant with the Boy, but something shifted after his birth which pushed us into Infertile Grounds.  It took us about 2 years to get pregnant with the Girl, and then more than 2 years to get pregnant with t'other Girl. 

During my Girl's delivery, the doctor made note of an excess of scar tissue all around my uterus and fallopian tubes, and it was significant enough that he mentioned it to us in recovery.  He recommended that we not wait for so long before seeking medical attention, there were tests that could be done and minimally invasive procedures that might help. 

So we concentrated on our two darling babes and tried not to worry too much about the future.

Time passed, about a year and a half, and I started to worry more because I'm not gettin' any younger over here.  So in the fall of 2013, I finally screwed up my courage to go to the doctor.  I started with my OB/GYN and she referred me to the Fertility Clinic (because they're the people with the necessary equipment to run the requisite tests etc. etc. etc.).

Then came January.  January of 2014 was when things started to fall apart.  My Grandma passed away on the 21st, and then 2 days later I had to go to the Fertility clinic for a decidedly unpleasant HsG. 

Let's not talk about the specifics of that particular procedure, but rather the results.  They got some lovely images of just how messed up I am on the inside.  It was a banner day for my self-esteem, let me just assure you of that.  And with those images, came rather concrete proof that statistically we weren't likely to ever have any more children.

And when we met with our physician, he expressed a considerable degree of surprise that we had ever conceived our Girl, which is nice.  We already saw her as a miracle, and to have that confirmed by a fertility specialist is nice.  But it's not very reassuring when you're hoping to have more children.  Chris and I stepped on to the elevator to leave the clinic and I cried and cried and cried.

We had consented to have a laproscopic procedure to "attempt" to "restore anatomy" (I revised it to "Fix or Evict") to my ineffective tubes in the hopes that they would indeed be able to make them functional again (or at least not painful).  It was scheduled for March 20th.  And because Chris is occasionally crazy, he used our credit card reward points to book us on a cruise the weekend BEFORE that charming procedure.

So we spent the weekend in the Caribbean, and then came home and I had that little surgery.   

After the surgery, the physician (whom I have come to think of as my own personal Dementor, because he sucked all the hope and happiness out of me) informed us that they were NOT able to restore anatomy, but rather had to remove the offending tube.  The other tube was in tact, but whether it was functional remained to be seen.  He was very honest about the likelihood that we would become pregnant without IVF or some such other intervention, but the odds were absolutely against us.

Now, Chris and I have no moral problem with IVF, or other treatments for infertility.  We just didn't feel like they were good choices for our family.  So we resigned ourselves to our small family, we tried to be grateful for the two amazing kids that we have, and we tried to let go.  I sank into a funk of fairly epic proportions, that wasn't helped by packing up our entire apartment and shifting it into a storage unit and then shuffling around to various locations all summer long.  But oddly, it was helped by Chris' decision to reapply to med school.  It gave us this Big Thing to work towards together.  It focused our attention and gave us a measurable goal to work towards.

And then at the end of July, I was trying to organize everything for our mortgage, and trying to keep my kids from making my sister and her kids crazy, and I was weird.  Grouchy, depressed, tired, anxious and just...weird.  My sister asked me one morning, "Are you pregnant?"  And I scoffed and snorted and said, "Not likely."  But then realized that my period was 4 days late, and I'm never late.  But I chalked it up to stress and took the kids hiking in the hopes that fresh air and dirt and rocks and trees would clear my head.

Two days later I bought a test because...well, I needed to know.  I didn't feel particularly pregnant.  I knew that statistically, it wasn't likely, but also not strictly impossible.  We were taking care of Hogan, so I got up early one morning and took it, and then couldn't decide whether to laugh or cry that it was positive.

***

I know that everyone believes different things, but this is my blog, and my story and so I'm going to do something that I don't often do.  I'm going to tell you outright that there is no other word for this particular pregnancy, than a Miracle.  I know there are people who don't believe in God, or if they do, they don't believe that He works miracles any more.  And to those people, I say, I have some lovely pictures of what my insides look like and the testimony of people who have gone to school for 15 years to study pregnancy and childbirth and they say this Baby wouldn't couldn't shouldn't happen.  And yet.  She did.   We've known from the very beginning that she is a miracle.

***

This pregnancy has been a strange burden to carry.  We moved a week after we found out that we were pregnant, and I've never moved pregnant before.  Sherry kept bossing me around and telling me not to lift anything, not to carry anything, to sit down, to take it easy.  And she could tell you, women in my family don't take it easy gracefully.  So I had some issues early on and we worried that we were miscarrying, but then things got better. 

And 12 weeks later we heard her heartbeat.

And a couple of weeks after that, they told us we were having another daughter.

I kept waiting for the anxiety to dissipate, to feel confident that everything would be fine, but I never have.  I have been more anxious and fearful through this pregnancy than I was in either of the others (and that's saying something because I'm a rather anxious person).  The only explanation I can think of, is that we're so aware that her existence is a miracle, I feel this weight of responsibility to NOT screw this up.

It is a strange thing to be so aware that you're carrying a miracle under your own skin.  And believe me, we know enough about the fragility of human reproduction to believe that all of our kids are miracles, but with cold, hard photographs of what we're working with, she's just different. 

I find it strange that she's due the week after the year mark of that sad, little surgery.  It's been such a strange year, such a strange journey that we've been on.  In some ways I feel like this Girl has already made our family a stronger and more unified force, which is strange since she isn't technically HERE yet.

I fully expected Chris to be distant and uninvolved in this pregnancy (he was absolutely convinced with the Girl that something or everything would go wrong and we would lose her.  To the extent that it wasn't until the delivery room that he said, "Holy cow!  We're going to have TWO kids!"), but he hasn't been.  He's thoroughly enjoyed talking to her and feeling her move.  He loves to come home at night and poke and prod her to wake her up and get her moving and then he laughs at her acrobatics.  Acrobatics that are becoming increasingly painful for the Mama since space is limited in there.  He loves to tease the kids and throw out these truly strange names and ask them if that's what we should name their baby sister.  And they laugh and say, "NO!"

The kids are so excited you would think that Christmas has come all over again.  The Girl shouts (at least once a day), "MY BABY SISTER IS ALMOST HERE!"  She loves to remind me of all the things she's excited to share with her sister, her stuffies and lollypops and cookies and blackberries.  (I try to gently remind her that it will be a while before her sister will need ANY of those things.) And my Boy tells me all the things he's going to do for her, things he's going to teach her and ways he's going to look out for her.  It really is the sweetest thing.

I'm still worried.  As painful as her acrobatics are, I'm grateful for them because I know it means she's still alive and ok.  I want to see her.  I want to hold her and watch her breathing in and out.  I want to know that she's ok.  I want to know that we'll get to take her home and watch her grow up.  And I think part of what makes me so anxious is that, I can't know those things.  Love is a gamble.  It's always a gamble.  Sometimes it works out beautifully and it transforms who we are and the life we lead and the choices we make.  And sometimes it destroys everything in its wake, it breaks hearts and bones and lives and homes. 

For now, I'm trying to breathe deeply and have faith.

Decade

Ten years ago today, Chris and I got married.

I confess that I look back on myself then and cringe a bit.  I thought I was so smart and I really thought that I loved this man.

But knowing what I know now, I realize that I was so dumb.  That feeling wasn't really love, it was a vague inclination.  After 10 years, 3 degrees, 5 moves and 2 major surgeries, I know that what we feel now is much closer to love than what we felt then.  My consolation is that in 10 more years, I know that the feeling will be deeper still, and that by the time we get to the end of our lives here on Earth we might actually get to that feeling we all so flippantly call Love.

For now, this just about sums it up, "I sometimes have a queer feeling with regard to you - especially when you are near me, as now: it is as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar string situated in the corresponding quarter of your little frame...I am afraid that cord of communion will be snapt; and then I've a nervous notion I should take to bleeding inwardly" (Charlotte Bronte).

9 Years, Still Here

Nine years ago today, Chris and I got married.

And if I had to pick just one thing, one, single, solitary thing that is the most significant event of my life, it would be THAT.  Everything else that means anything at all, hinges on that moment.  But perhaps that's too simplistic a view, because a marriage isn't made in a day.  It's made every day.  It's made over and over and over again.

I suppose the occurrence of our anniversary has me feeling more sentimental than normal, because I took down Jane Austen's Persuasion to reread.  All of her novels center on characters who make mistakes, human mistakes, they rectify those errors and then move on.  But in Persuasion, you have perhaps the greatest acknowledgement and apology for those errors ever written in the English language. 

Now, if you'll recall, Captain Wentworth has overheard his long-time love Anne tell a friend of his that Men will always forget the women they love before Women forget them, and since he cannot speak openly to her, he writes her this letter (I'm truncating it, you really should read the whole book, if you haven't yet, it is perfection from beginning to end, a true masterpiece):

...Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone forever.  I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own, than when you almost broke it eight years a half ago.  Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death.  I have loved none but you.  Unjust I may have been, weak and resentful I have been, but never inconstant...

 I love that.  I suppose because I feel like that's how our marriage works.  We're two flawed, imperfect human beings.  We make mistakes.  We occasionally act selfishly, arrogantly, or blindly.  We are sometimes weak and resentful and unjust.  But we apologize, we forgive, we try again.  Never inconstant.  After 9 years, I am more certain of this one thing:  He is Mine, and I am His. 

Well, there went the last of my dignity...

We're in North Carolina, y'all, so you know I'm happy.

My brother and his lovely family drove down from Maryland and Chris and the Boy and I drove up from Georgia and we all converged on my Sister and her family to celebrate my Dad's birthday and New Year's.  It's lovely being back here so soon, I hadn't expected it, but Chris was in need of a break so here's where we are.

We spent most of yesterday at my Sister's.  We all contributed some fingery foods and sat and talked and snacked most of the day.  The Boy bounced like a ping pong ball between his EIGHT cousins until, in a fit of over-stimulation and exhaustion, I hauled him upstairs for a bath and his bed time routine.  At the time we intended to get him ready for bed and then get on the road.   (We're staying with my parents who live about an hour away from my sister so we were hoping to get him winding down in the car and then he'd go to sleep that much easier when we got back...HAHAHAHA!  This is the tale of the best laid plans of Mice and M and how they often go astray.)

I had the Boy upstairs and I stripped him and Chris was helping me to bathe him, so once he was in the tub, I took his dirty clothes and dirty diaper and started to trot DOWNSTAIRS to where I had left the diaper bag.  In a fit of over-confidence in my ability to oh, descend the stairs, I missed the bottom step, slipped on the hardwood floor, tripped on the rug and landed rather forcefully on my right knee.  As I lay there, SPLAT, on the floor all I could think was, "Well, there went the last of my dignity.  The last few slender pieces I had remaining after pregnancy and childbirth, they're laying about me like tattered pieces of confetti.  Now, do I attempt to pick them up, or do I just leave them where they lay and attempt to reconstruct my dignity once we're done with our family?"  It was a very exhistential moment for me.

I left my dignity there.

I scraped myself up, put the dirty clothes and dirty diaper away.  Had a few moments of histerical laughter and then trudged back upstairs where my child was screaming through his bath time.  I dried, diapered and dressed him and much more carefully descended the stairs again. 

Then, I proceeded to get caught up in my brother and sister's conversation...which lingered...and lingered...and then was permeated by this stench which seemed to be eminating from my child.  I looked at him and inquired,

"Did you poop AGAIN?"

No comment from the accused. 

I lingered with the conversation until the stench became un-ignorable, at which point I picked him up and schlepped back to the bathroom to address the crisis.

Oh dear, bless us and save us.  It seems my child's entire gastrointestinal track exploded in that diaper.  It was EVERYWHERE.  Suffice it to say I'm still a little shaken up by it.  The grossness of it was such that I was able to acknowledge that situations such as these might be why people wrinkle up their noses at cloth diapers.

But left with no alternative, I cleaned him up, changed his clothes (AGAIN) and this time I was fleeing the scene, sans dignity, sans bed-ready Boy, sans any remaining sense of smell.  I'm telling you, it was a SCARRING experience.

And yet, like the band playing on the Titanic as the ship goes down, my family was awesome.  Totally unphased by any of it, the stories continued, the jokes continued, the conversation continued.

We're heading back today.  It's family dinner, and the last one we'll have all together until June.  Tomorrow my nephew returns to college, my Brother and his family return to Maryland and on Sunday we'll be returning to Georgia.  As for today, I'm going to wallow in the familial love.

Linkage to better write-age

I am shamelessly linking this post from Sweet Juniper!

For he is awesome.  And also a better writer than I am today.  Click and enjoy!

Also.  My sister, who is a parenting veteran, kept a stock of empty plastic shopping bags in her car for those unpredictable pukers.  It's an idea...