Blogoversary: In the Course of One Year

Below is an excerpt from my journal entry of April 25, 2007 – one year ago today. I was 6 days post miscarriage #2. I had just posted my first blog entry on That Was The Plan. I kept this entry private at the time because I did not want to start out my blog with too much negativism. Clearly, I needed an outlet. Big time.

April 25, 2007

My whole freaking soul hurts. I am scared. I have that sick feeling in my stomach. I look at my future and it seems so bleak and scary. I want to punch something so hard. I want to throw my laptop out the window. I mean, hurl the damn thing. (I never thought I would have anything in common with Denise Richards, but there you go).

And with this feeling, I am supposed to be networking and being helpful to might-be-influential people and looking for a new job. Oh yes, did I mention that the job I have had for 6 years and love is going away in September because my company is moving to Utah. I mean, UTAH! WTF!

And – guess what, because life wasn’t fun enough – that Cowboy had $4 million in deals fall out of his pipeline yesterday, which means that all of the hard work and long hours he has put in recently, that despite all valiant efforts, his job is in jeopardy, too.

Which puts the anxiety level up to here. And the sadness level up to there. And all of a sudden I can’t see so clearly.

I feel like Cowboy and I are in boat looking at each other like, "I thought you brought the freaking life preservers!" I seriously don’t know if we will survive this: his job, my job, IF. Somebody, please. Somebody cut us a break.

# # #

Whenever I go through hard times, I try to remind myself of their impermanence. "Life will look so much different in six months," I’d say. I said that back in December 2006 when I was still sad about my first miscarriage and the jury was still out as to if we would be moving to a new state with my job.

Cowboy had stepped up to a vacant position in the bank that needed to be filled. We didn’t know if it was going to pan out either.

Flash forward to late April 2007 and boy how things had changed. Only now they were worse. Where before we had uncertainty, now seemed to face a series of dead ends. I'd turned down a promotion with my company in Utah and would be out of a job come end of summer; we realized that Cowboy's new gig at the bank was of the churn-and-burn variety; not only were we not pregnant, but we were staring down the barrel of recurrent pregnancy loss testing and whatever those results might bring.

For the first time in my life, the 6-month rule hadn’t worked in the positive way I’d always meant it to. I felt duped. And terrified. The above journal entry clearly reflects the space we were in.

Last night, a full year later, I woke just before the alarm. Cowboy was asleep with his bedside lamp still on. The Birth Partner book lay open across the duvet. He had been reading it since waking at 2:30 a.m. (he always wakes at this time). I note this and smile because it is the first I’m-having-a-kid book that Cowboy has cracked.

He woke up because he is feeling guilty and nervous. I know this because he has just found out he is the front runner candidate for his dream job. I mean, dream with a capital D. This is the kind of job that he set his sights on back in business school. This is the kind of job that kept him hanging on at the bank for 8 years. Because of some bank regulations that govern his dealings with three new clients, today he has to face his boss with the news that he may be leaving. If nothing, Cowboy is a loyal employee. He has only worked for 2 companies since graduating high school.

I woke up because I have to go to the bathroom. Again. Because while last year I was reeling from m/c #2, now I am 8 months pregnant with a by-all-accounts healthy baby. I, too, have just found out that a local creative agency is interested in hiring me for freelance marketing consulting, which means I can continue to work from home for the remainder of the year.

The word grateful springs to mind. But it feels so inadequate. This is so beyond simply being grateful. This almost feels like a different life. But it is not. It is our life. Our life last year replete with all of its sadness and worry. Our life this year at 180 degrees opposite with breathing room to spare.

I try to be perfectly content. But I am on edge. Because I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop. Because we don’t deserve this much good fortune. The fates will surely punish this much good fortune by taking something we counted on away.

Which, I know, is both completely paranoid and glass-is-half-empty.

That I have such thoughts shames me. It leaves me to ponder how can I ever pay this much good fortune forward. How can I pass it on so I don’t hold it too tightly and lose it.

This is what can happen in the course of a year.

Week of April 21: 8 months, 8 weeks to go.

Busy, busy week ahead.

Sun: L&D tour at the hospital. Hang head when Cowboy asks if we can bring Gus into the waiting room. In his defense, the lady giving the tour made a big deal about our ability to invite as many family members and friends into the waiting room as we want. Find out that they have flatscreens in the labor/delivery/rest rooms. And cable. Neither of which we have. Is it wrong to kind of hope that Missy will oblige her mama and come late in the week so I can watch "What Not to Wear" on TLC?

Mon: Interview pediatrician. Decide I like her when she says she doesn't mind if I space out vaccinations so Missy won't get several in one day. Bonus points for her saying that she believes that rising rates in autism are probably linked to bad things in the environment.

Mon: Texas Independence Day. Hang out Lone Star flag. Check.

Tues: Earth Day. For the past several years, I celebrate by adding one thing each year to minimize our impact on the environment. This year it is going paper towel-less. We've been paper towel free in our house since January and it hasn't been that hard at all.

Wed: My birthday! Last year I celebrated by recovering from miscarriage #2. Am hoping for a much better day this year.

Thurs: nothing.

Friday: My one year blog-a-versary! What a difference a year makes. I've been thinking a lot about how changed my life is from last year to this year. Will post my thoughts as soon as I suss them all out.

Would love to hear from others as to how you celebrate Earth Day. Do you celebrate it? What, if any, are some things you've done this year to contribute in a positive way to the environment.

Or you can post a "shut up, you hippie" comment if you want to instead. It will make me laugh. I love that word. Hippie. It's funny.

Dear Diary

What the fuck am I going to do? I am going to mother a daughter. And recent events have made it quite clear that I am in way over my head.

Current exploits to acquire childhood toys and books from my parents' storage shed also yielded not one but two diaries.

The first, started when I was 8. Here is an excerpt from the second entry: Today in school Bryan M**** atted (sic) very serious about kissing me. You can tell when he feels like kissing you. When he runs around and atts crazy, that means he loves you and wants to kiss you, BUT he doesn't.

WTF!! I am 8 and writing about boys already. Kissing boys. I can't even properly spell "acted" (for some reason, however, I can spell "serious" correctly). Although I should point out that I didn't technically, really kiss a boy until I was like in the tenth grade. It was all wishful thinking up until that point.

Oh, it gets better. Every few entries begin, "Dear Diary, Now I think I have a crush on so-and-so." Sheesh. I was an 8-year-old jezebel.

The second diary - with Hello Kitty on the cover - gets even better. Started in junior high, it goes all the way up to my senior year in high school.

In it, I went through my mean phase with harshly written critiques about everyone and everything. Although I had just read Harriet the Spy and I remember deliberately trying to copy the prose from the book.

There is the awful, awkward phase of comparing myself to other girls: the pretty, popular ones and the not-so-pretty, not-so-popular ones. It is hard to read now. There is the ridiculous, trying-on-other- personalities phase whereby my friends and I referred to each other by names and persona other than our own.

There is the entry written toward the end of my junior year that begins, "Dear Diary, I think about sex all the time..." Mind you, I hadn't had sex yet either, but still. Oy.

Does anyone else think it ironic you can find a sentence like that one in a diary with Hello Kitty on its cover?

I AM IN WAY OVER MY HEAD.

The most disturbing entries are in the back of the awkward-years-Hello-Kitty diary. It is a food and weight diary, which I began in 8th grade and kept up sporadically during times of *crisis*. Daily, I listed my current weight, my desired weight and everything I ate that day - along with supportive comments like, "pigged out" and "gross. must eat less tomorrow." In the 8th grade, at age 14, I weighed 79 lbs but wanted to get down to 72.

Okay, I should point out that I am short to begin with and was from ages 7 to 20 involved in a sport that dictated small-ness. But desiring to be 72 lbs. as a 14-year-old ?!? WTF?

Old habits die hard. I still keep food diaries from time to time. Although I have not done so while pregnant (too dangerous for me to do). I can't even keep a scale in my house as an adult. I am totally not in the position to pass along good body issues to my daughter. Or, for that matter, equipped to handle the crushes of an 8-year-old or god knows what else of a teenage girl. Holy frick!

Good Lord. I AM SERIOUSLY IN WAY OVER MY HEAD.

I 've got to save these diaries, although kept under lock and key, so I can refer to them when Missy is 8 and then in junior high and so on. That way I can remember what I was going though. It's the only way I can think to put them to good use as a mom.

Any ideas for a terrific hiding place?

It's not all bad

Just when I was bitching about the cold and the rain, today and tomorrow are calling for sunny and warm. Finally, a taste of spring up here.

I feel like the countdown has begun. And even though I still have days of doubt and terror, each day finds me feeling a wee bit happier about Missy’s arrival.

Last week brought it all home – literally and figuratively. I went to Texas to visit my parents. It was wonderful. Great food. Good weather. A fantastic pedicure. My brother visited, too, and we spent an entire day going through my parents’ storage shed, which contained 40+ years of family history in the form of scrapbooks, baby books and favorite story books and treasured toys from when we were young.

My mom, Mrs. Super Planner, had each large box labeled by child. Inside each box was a list of the contents. Items were carefully wrapped in paper. I don’t call her Mrs. Super Planner for nothing. Our goal was to purge items: keep things we wanted for our children or prep items for a mega-collectibles tag sale my mom will hold in the fall.

It was like going through a time capsule of your life. There were the two baby dolls I received as gifts when my sister and then my brother came home from the hospital (replete with entire wardrobes of doll clothes sewn by my grandma). A Depression-era handmade doll cradle used by my grandmother when she was a girl. My first kiddie rocking chair. Hardbound Dr. Suess books (do you have any idea how much those cost now?). A vintage – at 30+ years old, they sure are vintage now – Fisher-Price barn and schoolhouse with all the non-toxic, Made-in-the-USA plastic animals and wooden people intact. My collection of Little House on the Prairie books.

Missy scored.

I love that she’ll be playing with some of the toys and reading some of the books that we spent hours with. And I appreciate that my family is re-using these toys so we don’t have to buy new. Some people might freak that they are older toys but I feel safer having a few pre-made-in-China pieces around.

Missy received some of her first gifts as well, including a pale pink felt cowgirl hat. By a few days into the visit, I actually felt happy and confident enough for Missy’s Nana (that would be Mrs. Super Planner) to buy a sweet little coming-home-from-the-hospital-outfit from Janie & Jack. I went into Pottery Barn Kids for the first time since I started trying to become pregnant. It was a new me, for sure.

I guess my point in all of this is that I am glad that I’ve let those who love and care for me into this process. At first, I was so paranoid and scared about everything. I put off every kind of celebrating. I didn’t want to lose another pregnancy and then be ashamed to face everyone with my sadness.

But the more I open up and let others celebrate – where sometimes I still cannot yet – is absolutely healing to the soul and affirming to my spirit.

The Crabbiest Month

After living in the Northwest for 8 years, I've come to realize that April is the crabbiest month. It's still cold. It's still rainy. The beginning of April is like Ground Hog Day for us - minus the ground hog. We don't need one because we flat out know to expect shitty weather for the next 6 weeks.

The cold and damp imbue every living thing. It makes Gus sulk. It makes people crabby and rude.

Or maybe it is just that I returned from a trip to Texas, where people call you ma'am (and not because they think you are old) and hold doors for you. Unlike the airport parking security asshole at PDX who threatened to write Cowboy a ticket because he left his car for 5 seconds to help open the door to the airport exit for me as I struggled with 2 suitcases, a carry-on and a big belly. Sigh. Because no one else offered to help hold the door.

For as much as I love where I live, the everyone-is-free-do-to-his-own-thing-and-I'm-content-to-be-in-my-own-world ethos is one thing that gets me down when it takes the form of aloofness.

I am just being old-fashioned that I think it is simply a nice gesture for men to hold doors for women? Or that it bothers me that our friends and neighbors let their kids call me by my first name. I do not like a five-year-old calling me Ms. Planner. I prefer Miss Ms. Planner or Mrs. Ms. Planner.

Poor Missy. She'll be the only freak in the neighborhood referring to grown-ups as Mr. & Mrs. and routinely using "Yes, ma'am" and "No, sir."

Now who's crabby? Hormonal, maybe?

In other news, you can tell how great snow season has been by how long it takes Cowboy to file our taxes. We still haven't done them yet.

Our snowpack is like 200% of normal. I didn't mind being the snow sacrifice this season. Really, I didn't.

I have ten weeks to go.

It was our third anniversary yesterday. Because the traditional gift for a third anniversary is leather, I hope Cowboy wasn't embarassed in front of the other restaurant patrons when he opened the leather riding crop I bought for him. Just kidding. I didn't buy such a thing.

But I thought about it.