A new beginning

I haven’t written lately because I have been trying to keep a big secret. I am pregnant. Almost 11 weeks. Almost out of my first trimester. We are so happy and excited!!

 

Turn! Turn! Turn!

Today was the day I was expected to give birth.
I’ve spent the last several months (8, tomorrow, to be exact) trying to move on, trying to think of anything but what wouldn’t happen today (and failing miserably). Bible verses, emails and long conversations with friends, prayer, holding on to my husband, EATING…all things I have used to get through the bad days. Those things have served me well, but I’ve still had a very difficult time moving forward.

Today, perhaps by coincidence but perhaps by God’s hand, is the day that I got a smiley on my ovulation test pee stick.
I couldn’t help but think that perhaps it is a sign.
The old song by The Byrds has been stuck in my head for a considerable number of hours today. You know the one. It’s based on this passage from the Bible:

Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 (New Living Translation)

 ¹ For everything there is a season,
      a time for every activity under heaven.
 ² A time to be born and a time to die.
      A time to plant and a time to harvest.
 ³ A time to kill and a time to heal.
      A time to tear down and a time to build up.
 ⁴ A time to cry and a time to laugh.
      A time to grieve and a time to dance.
 ⁵ A time to scatter stones and a time to gather stones.
      A time to embrace and a time to turn away.
 ⁶ A time to search and a time to quit searching.
      A time to keep and a time to throw away.
 ⁷ A time to tear and a time to mend.
      A time to be quiet and a time to speak.
 ⁸ A time to love and a time to hate.
      A time for war and a time for peace.

 

Maybe I am finally moving into my time to heal, build up, laugh, dance, to quit searching (for answers, reasons), to mend…

 

Where troubles melt like lemon drops...

This verse was omitted from Judy Garland’s recording of Over The Rainbow used in The Wizard of Oz, but I just read it and needed to post it:

 

Someday I'll wake and rub my eyes
And in that land beyond the skies,
You'll find me
I'll be a laughing daffodil
And leave the silly cares that fill
My mind behind me

 

Tears on my pillow*

So, Saturday’s baby shower was fine. I had a rough start, mostly due to not being able to disguise my emotions well enough and it upsetting my mother. But after a little while I was able to fake smile my way through it. It wasn’t as horribly uncomfortable as I had imagined, but it wasn’t exactly my idea of a stellar afternoon.

Friday evening I went out to buy a couple more outfits to go with my gift. I felt a little stupid for feeling so melancholy, but the whole time I was looking at baby clothes, I couldn’t stop the barrage of thoughts about what it would have been like to have been shopping for my baby. Would Austin be there with me? Would we sigh and smile at the cute little outfits? Would we be shopping for a boy or a girl? I picked out some cute girly outfits for their baby and then perused the clearance rack and found a gender-neutral set of footie pajamas, size 3 months, and bough them for our baby would-be and/or future baby. I went home and cried so much that I had to change the sheets on our bed because of my mascara running off onto them (but, I needed to change the sheets anyway, SO..)… I still feel a little stupid for being so emotional over the whole thing, but, there you have it. I had been doing mostly well for a few weeks up until that point, so I think twenty-minutes of violent sobbing while alone in my own bed are acceptable. Right?

 

*As an aside, completely unrelated to miscarriage: This song will forever remind me of a boy named Michael Salisbury, three years my senior and from Kentucky, with whom I had a brief but sweet summer fling (at a Baptist church convention!) when I was 15. Those were awesome kisses at the time, although I can honestly say (and not just because I am obliged) that my husband’s kisses are much, much better. :) The reason for the connection between him and the song is that we heard it on an oldies station and he made up some alternate words to it – “Tears on my pillow, food in my hand, if I don’t drop this sandwich, I’ll be an even bigger man.” So. Ha. Ha. Ha.

 

 

heart burn

It’s been a difficult couple of weeks. Several people – at least five that I can think of – have announced their pregnancies. While these are people I like and care about and I genuinely want to be happy for them, it still stings to hear and see them being all excited…It’s hard not to think “We never got to share that excitement with anyone.”

And then, on top of that, my brother’s girlfriend’s baby shower is tomorrow. I am helping. Not sure how I feel about it. And she’s having a c-section on Monday, the 19^th. My best friend said that would give me time to get ready. But I’m not sure I’ll be ready until it’s over. I’m glad it’s not next Thursday. That was my due date. I’m also glad it’s happening on a Monday – I will have to go to class immediately after work. We’ll have counseling the next night. Assuming they go home Wednesday, I might get to skip the hospital altogether. I hope that being a little thankful for that doesn’t make me a jerk.

It’s not that I’m not happy for them, but it’s so hard to see my mom go crazy and be excited when I know that if It hadn’t happened, I would be going into labor literally any day now. I know that obviously my baby wasn’t supposed to be born this week or next, or I’d be sitting here with a giant belly and bad heartburn. It’s just hard not to think “it should be this certain way because that’s how it was supposed to be originally”…It’s so hard to not think about the things I didn’t get to do or have…like, how I know FIVE people who have announced their pregnancies in the last like, two weeks and I just think “I didn’t get to tell anyone,”  and “no one got excited for us.” It’s stupid to dwell on it but…it’s there.

Some weeks, it’s like I’m reliving August 16^th over and over.

 

Emotional Eating Wins Again!

Today there was a baby shower at work.

I went, I stayed for a few minutes, held the baby (they waited for the shower until after the birth because Mom and Dad wanted the gender to be a surprise), then I had to come back to my desk. I feel kind of guilty for saying that I am kind of glad I got out of there. I just hate how everyone is always “SO WHEN ARE YOU GOING TO HAVE ONE!?” and “Doesn’t this just make you want a baby!?”

If they only knew! But I’m really good at faking it when I need to, so it was natural for me to just smile and laugh and kind of play (coyly) along with everyone.

I ate too many M&Ms, too many mixed nuts, and while I had intended to only eat the top half of my cake (you know, the part with the frosting), EE got the best of me and I snarfed it all down. And I don’t even care.

---

In TTC news, well, we’re TTC again. I have been taking ClearBlue Easy ovulation tests every day. There’s a different pee stick every day for 20 days. The pee sticks click into a digital “reader” and if the proper hormones are present in the urine, the reader shows a little smiley face. No smiley face on my pee sticks yet. But if anyone was watching me do these things in the morning, I’m sure they’d get a kick out of it. I stumble to the bathroom, half asleep, fight with the package of the little tester stick, fumble trying to get it “clicked” into the digital reader thing, and by the time I get all that done and start pulling my panties down to sit on the toity, I’m literally about to wet myself.

Baby blue.

I didn’t realize it had been so long since my last post.

I don’t know why it matters; no one is reading anyway.

For some reason, I’ve really been struggling again this week. It’s frustrating because I keep thinking that I’ve been able to let go, only to find out that, nope, my grip is as tight as ever.

Actually, part of the reason is that I spent all of last week thinking I might be pregnant again. I was starting to get sort of excited. Last Friday night, my sister-in-law and her family were over and I held their 7-month-old girl, gave her a bottle, watched her sweet little face as she ate, her eyelids getting heavy as she got “milk drunk,” almost falling asleep and flashing a sleepy, milky little grin when the bottle was empty. I was thinking, this will be our baby in a few months. Then, a little while later, I went to the bathroom and discovered that nature’s pregnancy test was showing a big fat negative. Stupid. Period. JERK.

Sunday, we had a baby shower for our pastor and his wife, who adopted a newborn baby boy a month ago. I was completely fine with it until just before it started, when I got choked up over something else. Once the tears came (for something COMPETELY unrelated to babies), I had to excuse myself to the ladies room, and I couldn’t make them stop. My string of thoughts went from the thing that had made me cry in the first place to “OH CRAP, there is a baby shower today” to “OH CRAP, I just started and I am not pregnant” to “OH CRAP. REMEMBER that miscarriage a few months ago!?”

I would be 35 weeks this week. My belly would be touching my keyboard tray right now. I’d have to scoot my chair way back.

I hate having to pretend to be “okay” all the time. Okay with my job. Okay when I’m angry. Okay when other people’s big, pregnant bellies are in my face. Okay when someone asks me to hold their baby. Okay at baby showers. Okay giving my 7-month-old niece her bottle. Okay with everything else.

I don’t want my life to be just “okay.”

I’m trying really hard to CHOOSE happiness, and some days I am successful at it. This week has just been difficult.

 

Stuck in a Moment*

This sounds crazy, but sometimes I imagine my mind being a vast forest, with a meadow and a lake and lots of beautiful trees. And sometimes I imagine a person walking through this forest and finding things deep in the recesses of my mind.

Last night, as I tucked my daughter in, I felt the wanderer walking about in my head, touching on several things but finally resting on a memory that I think of as the last time that my life could be described as easy.

August 15, 2009. The day before my miscarriage. I don’t recall exactly what I did for the better part of that Saturday, but I know that at around 3:30 I took a shower and got myself ready to go to a wedding shower for my best friend's sister. I wore the same dress that I'd worn for our anniversary dinner, the same shoes even. I ate only vegetables and the tiniest piece of cake, and was careful to remember to drink water and not tea because I didn't want the caffeine. It took quite a lot of strength not to tell my BFF what we were planning on telling our families the very next day. I was so excited I almost couldn't contain it! I think before I left I said something like, "I'm going to call you tomorrow and tell you something." She, probably rightly suspecting, asked if it was big news. I just smiled and said "I'll tell you tomorrow." I went home that night and had some special time with my husband. Saturday, August 15, 2009 honestly could be described as having been a perfect day.

Sometimes it almost seems like that was the last perfect day. Don't get me wrong, there have been lots of good days since then, but overall it seems the gray days have outnumbered the sunny. Sure, I'd given birth at age 18, grew up super fast and lived a very grown-up life while most of my friends and peers were in college or at parties. I'd dealt with the loss of my brother and grandma within two years of each other. But August 16, 2009 seems like the day I truly became an adult. Since then, our struggles seem to have increased tenfold. It was like a dark day came and stayed.

Mr. Me assures me that we’ll get back to where we were five and a half months ago, that we will be able to reclaim that innocence and that excitement and joy about life. I know he’s right, but it seems like it will never happen.

 

*U2

It gets easier to deal with, but it doesn't go away.

People still constantly ask when we’re going to have a baby. If they only knew what we’ve been through! Maybe then they wouldn’t ask.

 

But I don’t want the attention. I don’t want anyone to know because I don’t want their sympathy. I don’t want them to say “Oh I’m so sorry” while I nod and say “It’s okay” and follow it up with a moment or two of uncomfortable silence, after which they’ll say one of the insensitive comments I’ve gotten used to hearing from some of the few people who do know what happened.

 

Still, it seems as though people just expect me to be completely over it. Well, I don’t know if that will ever happen. And truthfully, I worry about what it will be like if this should ever happen again.

 

***

 

It’s been five months and two days since we lost our precious baby. In the days that followed, as we held hands and cried in bed together, we resolved to plant a memorial apple tree somewhere on our four acres. We had a place picked out in our back yard, but the proposed privacy fence will get in the way of the sun on our little tree, and then a greenhouse employee informed us that apple trees should be planted as far away from cedars as possible because of something called “cedar rust,” a tree disease that will kill pretty much any apple tree with which it comes in contact. Given the number of cedars on our property, well…then the planting season passed. It looks like we might finally get to plant our tree this spring. I have a feeling we’ll buy our tree from either Lowe’s or a local greenhouse, and I’m quite excited by the knowledge that in a few short months they’ll have their baby trees out.