Updates and Downdates

 It wasn't my fault. I know that much. Vials and vials of blood. Tests run on me and on him. But the only answer we're left with is... no one really knows why. Women have gone through their whole pregnancies doing drugs and drinking alcohol and smoking and taking multiple sex partners. And they have given birth to healthy babies. Maybe small babies. Maybe addicted babies. But whole, full-term babies who will one day outlive the abuse of living in a mother who didn't care about being pregnant. But here I am, relatively healthy, never tried a single drug, never smoked anything, gave up drinking when my mother-in-law died months before getting pregnant, but never really was much of a drinker to begin with. And my baby is gone. For no real tangible reason. 

    It makes me mad. But it also gives me some peace. I can try to blame myself for drinking caffeine occasionally... taking a single ibuprofen for a raging headache... blame my BMI, perhaps, but I can't hold on to any of those for very long because a thousand other things tell me my baby should have been healthy. I didn't do anything wrong. I just had bad luck. Bad timing. Bad something that I will never know for sure. 

    I find myself turning angry anyway. Angry with myself. My husband. My 3 children. I just want to be peaceful. I want to feel normal. I want to turn my brain off. Why does it burn eternally with a never ending narration? I fall asleep to it and wake up to it. It's negative and repetitive and noisy and obnoxious and it never shuts up. 

I don't have anything to say

 I'm not sure why I feel the need to type, but I just do. I don't really have anything to say. I feel broken, and weirdly normal, and totally devastated. I kind of want to disappear, but I'm also fine with existing. I hate everyone, but I want to be surrounded by people. I hate being alone, but I am so tired of anyone looking at, touching, or talking to me. I don't want to explain. I am dying to tell every detail. I don't wanna talk about it or think about it or be in this moment, but if you don't bring it up, I'll go crazy. I want to curl up and sleep for a year, but I don't want to miss anything with my kids. My kids. My poor children who don't understand why mommy is snapping one second and then begging for cuddles the next. I don't want anyone to be here. But I wish I could snuggle with my sister. 

I don't want to say goodbye. I wanna go back in time to when I was blissfully ignorant. I just want to be pregnant with my perfect baby boy and not live in this moment where its all been ripped away from me. I don't wanna stay home, but I cannot bring myself to leave the house. I need a therapist. I'm terrified it won't help. Can I just go numb for a while? Can I please just have the long sleep that Ava Marie got in Big Stone Gap? I just want to be unconscious for like... a week or two. There's nothing here for anyone else. I just want to be gone mentally. But I feel like that's not good enough. Not for Sarah. Sarah can't recoil from all the things. She has to rally and be a beast... Boss it up and stand tall and talk it through with everyone. She has to praise God for the good things and clean her living room a day after getting out of the hospital. She has to throw birthday parties. She has to be available to talk. 

Fuck you, Sarah. I want to be dead. Not literally. Just enough to heal. Let me be unavailable for a little while. Stop trying to be better and just let me be bad for a while. 

Ruined Summer, Worse Fall

 My mother arrived and two days later I found myself staring at a positive pregnancy test. It was not my plan for the summer. My summer was going to be a hot girl summer with my mom, exploring Europe, losing weight, packing the fun in until the summer exploded with joy. Instead, a wave of nausea washed over me and week after week of me laying in a lump on the couch, wishing there was SOMETHING that would take away the ever-present nausea. But hopes built and despite feeling like I had wasted my mom’s time and money having her come out to visit the limp-lump version that I had become in the throes of the first trimester, I found myself dreaming about this future baby and felt okay with suffering. This is my last time. Last baby. Soak it all up. 

Second trimester, I said goodbye to my mom and hello to the joys of the pregnant glow. We made more announcements, I had a dramatic decrease in nausea, and a whole lot more energy. Soaking it up. This is the last time! 

Midwife appointments brought some joy, hearing the heartbeat, getting comfortable with this person who will see me at my most vulnerable. But some stress… my shy veins resulted in some dramatic bruising… and it was all very expensive. 

I felt so good. I told anyone who cared to listen. My second-born decided he wanted a baby sister. And he was going to name her Treehouse. But I wanted a boy. Two of each. I had the perfect boy named picked out. I had so much hope. And I was soaking it up. Cuz this was going to be my last time. 

I didn’t know it was actually my first time. My first time wiping blood. My first time rushing to my neighbor’s house. My first time driving to the hospital. My first time hearing they couldn’t see a heartbeat, but that my body was already in labor. 

Surrounded by the most loving, decent, hard-working ladies in the world, I cried and joked and hurt and eased a teeny tiny still baby into this world. 7 ounces. A perfect baby boy. He looked like an alien. He was supposed to be the bow that tied up this phase of my life… the last baby. But now I have to sit here holding a version of humanity I never really wanted to witness face to face… he fit in one hand. He wasn’t quite a person. Just an empty vessel where a soul was supposed to be. 

Part of me is sad I did it alone. Part of me is glad my husband wasn’t able to be there. How do you comfort someone else when your grief is so huge? How do you let someone else carry you, when you just want to curl up and disappear. 

I was almost halfway done. I was one day shy of being able to say, “Halfway there!” 19 weeks. And 6 days. Barely even counts as a stillbirth, still young enough to sort of be considered a miscarriage. By one day. 

My milk will still come in. Postpartum depression. But with all the complications of not taking my baby home with me. 

My summer started with a reroute, a sudden change in the direction I had thought I was going. My fall has started so much worse. 

Ranting Religiously

 There are almost 8 billion people in the world. There are 4,000 religions that worship 2500 different versions of gods and God. Of all the times and all the places in the world and all the families and cultures you could have been born into… how can you be so sure that your’s is The Right One?

 People who don’t question it, people who don’t look at themselves and the church they’ve always gone to and don’t reflect on the doctrines and dogmas that their religion teach? Those people are the most close-minded, backwards, hard-hearted people on the planet. 

I believe in God because there is an unshakable faith in me that refuses to let me go, but people and religion and one of hundreds of Holy Books and re-translated Bibles? I have a much harder time committing my whole belief-system around. The religion I grew up in taught us People are the hands and feet and representation of Christ here on earth. And then when you point out hurt and hypocrisy that happens in churches… we’re told not to let that drive us from religion. But in a lot of ways, that’s all we’ve got!!! Someone who is supposed to know more than us, standing on a pulpit, telling us how to love God and love each other. And if he (because it’s ALWAYS A MAN) does it wrong, where does that leave anyone?? Searching for a new church, where you don’t know anyone, feeling like an outsider and always the new guy. 

I’m so tired of feeling like I’m wrong. I’m wrong if I question it. I’m wrong if I accept things the church doesn’t. I’m wrong if I do everything right!! I am wrong for being a woman, for being a human, for having feelings and thoughts and emotions. Pride is sinful. Sloth is sinful. Lust is sinful. But even if your pride is in doing good work. Or singing well. Or just having any self-esteem. You are being prideful. Keep yourself humble! You’re not humble enough! Taking a break is sinful, that’s lazy, that’s slothful. Work yourself to the bone for God. Having a sex-drive is sinful, it keeps you from God. Even if the only person you’ve ever slept with is your spouse.

When everything you do is constantly being measured against an impossible standard, how are you supposed to know and understand the security of God’s love, the GIFT of salvation. There is literally nothing you can DO to earn it. And that doesn’t stop every religion from trying to strip you down… but they NEVER build you back up again. They keep you low, wiggling like a worm, never fully accepting your salvation and gatekeeping it from others who don’t believe exactly as you do. 

God is not looking for reasons to keep anyone out of heaven. There is no gate. And I think God can go by many names. I don’t believe He’s sitting on a thrown, smiling at only the Christians and ready to burn the rest for eternity. 

I’ve been lost for a while. I’ve been told I’m a blasphemer by someone I trust and love. I’ve been told that my questions are pulling me away from salvation. But I don’t believe that. If anything, I feel more convicted of the undeniable truth of God’s love, the fallibility of humanity, but also the deep need we have for community and fellowship. Yes, my faith in the bible has waned, but I continue to search the Bible to make sense of who I am trying to understand… which doesn’t feel like God. He makes sense. His love and fatherhood clicks for me. But who people are? Who I am?? Who we are supposed to be to each other? Maybe that’s in there somewhere. Mistranslated, out-of-context, archaic and often misrepresenting what God meant, but clues left behind. 

Saying Goodbye the Hard Way

 My mother-in-law passed away last Wednesday. I have had a very challenging relationship with her. Since the day we met, she never quite warmed to me. Nor I to her. I have written and deleted many blogs about the little hurts, perceived offenses, and overall poor quality of our communication. When you marry the oldest and favorite son to an undiagnosed narcissist… it’s guaranteed to have some highs and lows. But her choices finally caught up to her and her liver failed a month ago, bringing her in and out of the hospital and finally… took her life just after New Year’s. My husband knew she wasn’t doing well and bought a plane ticket home, realized she was worse than he thought and moved his ticket up… and was in the air when I got the news that she passed away. We kept the news from him while he traveled, but after he landed and was picked up by his brother, he finally heard the news. It was devastating. He didn’t make it in time to say goodbye, but he wasn’t with our little family either. So he was just… at sea in his loss. 

   What do you do when someone you struggled with trusting… is just gone? She was complicated. She loved my husband and our children and loved me in a way as well. She had her traumas and her demons. I think even if she had been a healthy person, our personalities would have clashed anyway. Her sense of humor was different than mine… she was a fan of schadenfreude. Her love languages were different than mine. Her communication style was different than mine. She prided herself on being direct… but I never experienced that. All I experienced were long-held grudges I’d hear about secondhand. 

   But when times were good and she chose to love me instead of resent me, we got along well. And when someone loves your kids, its easy to look past personal slights. Towards what turned out to be the end of her life, she was never really around. She was drunk or hiding a majority of the time. Part of me thought it was me she was avoiding. But really, she was just battling her own demons. 

   Since she’s passed, there’s this expected sense of sadness, but also some anger, which has caught me by surprise. She never let me address anything. We never had a real conversation. We never bridged the gaps. I loved her in a way. She could be very generous. When she wanted to get along, she was fun to be around. She always had the latest family gossip. She’s my kids’ grandmother. She was always available for my husband. But in a lot of ways, it will be easier to visit my husband’s family. No more weird tension and resentment. No more thinly veiled “jokes”. No more boundary-pushing. But no closure either. 

   A family friend of my husband, a woman around my age who grew up with my husband and is practically family, has been posting a lot on facebook about her sorrow over losing my mother-in-law. Beautiful posts about who she was and how loving she was and how much of a mentor and spiritual advisor she could be to this girl. And I can’t help but feel angry.

    I’m angry about this girl’s version of my MIL. I’m angry that she never was that person with me. I’m angry that she never tried to mentor or guide or love me or my sister-in-law in a way that felt genuine. I’m mad that she guarded herself against me when I never wanted to be her enemy. I’m angry that she blamed me for problems that were either her’s, my husband’s, or some combo of all of us. I’m angry that she left behind good memories with people who barely knew her or people used to know her, and left resentment and unaddressed problems with people who were close with her. I’m mad that so many of us have started looking at ourselves as the problem when she wouldn’t let any of us in, not really. I’m mad that I can’t be completely sad. I don’t want to be angry with a dead person. But nothing was ever resolved. She held people who should have been close at arms length. And treated people who were further removed like close friends. 

   I’m mad that she was so secretive, close friends didn’t even know she was sick. No one deserves to lose someone the way we’ve all lost my mother-in-law. 

    I’m mad that my husband never did anything. He never stood up to her for herself or for me. He listened to her when she listed her laundry list of complaints about me. He leaned into her enabling of his selfish behavior. He copped out until he didn’t have to deal with it anymore. I’m mad that he blames himself because even if he HAD said the hard things, she probably wouldn’t have changed. And it makes me so mad that I thought I’d have more time. Why didn’t I just say what needed saying when it needed to be said? Why did I hide or gossip behind her back or smile and overshare until I lost it over stupid shit because I was never really genuine with her… why didn’t I lean into the freedom of being labeled a black sheep in her mind and just be myself and stop trying to conform to her impossible standards? 

    I wish my kids were sad she’s gone. But after we moved to California, she never really engaged with them. And towards the end of her life, for about two years, she barely came around at all and I avoided going to see her. And since we moved to Germany, she never called to talk to them, never video chatted. She would chat with my husband trying to force an emotional connection, secretive phone calls that would end if she knew I was in the room… and she never asked about the kids. So when I told them she was gone… they took it in stride. My oldest only got emotional when she talked with her grandfather and knew he was sad. 

   How do you let someone go… how do you grieve… when you were never allowed to get close? 

I'm not who I want to be today

 I feel at odds with who I want to be and how I want to act. I feel like I have no chill, no patience, no kindness. Any kindness I do give is fake and forced. I want to be alone, disassociated all the time. I stay up way too late and then I'm resentful and grumpy in the morning. I force myself to do too much and then act put upon when someone asks more of me. I don't ask for what I need, because I'm not even sure I know what that is. Ducky is always asking me if she's done something wrong. She apologizes for nothing. And its my fault. I know it is. I snap too quickly. I overreact before I can get a handle on what's actually happening. My unpredictability causes anxiety and clinginess in my kids, which turns around and overwhelms me, so I ping-pong back and forth between too sweet and overly obliging, and a harshness that comes out of nowhere over basically nothing-annoyances. I want too much from my poor husband, who's struggling to understand, but wants so desperately to help. I only feel normal for a few hours out of the day. I have horrible bedtime revenge because I just want to belong to myself again. Disengaged doesn't begin to explain my inability to pay attention to my kids and their self-esteem. I feel like I'm ruining them and my relationship with them because I can't keep it together. I also feel so grossed out its all on me. My husband is here, trying. But ultimately, its all on me. I am their safe-place, their... I don't even know the words to explain everything I'm SUPPOSED to be because I feel so faraway from being that person. And yet they follow me around. I can't ever be alone. even if I'm in the same room with them, its never close enough. I have at least two of them ON MY BODY at all times and I feel so DONE. I don't want to hate this. I know I'm going to miss these years when they're over. But this phase is hard. Not having a home, not having a support system, not feeling comfortable outside of the base. I have no options because I can't drive, I don't have a car, I couldn't feel confident going anywhere alone or with all of the kids. So I'm just stuck here feeling like a failure.

Heartache

 Give up everything. 

Say goodbye to everything. 

God is better at planning than you,

So be ready to give it all up. 

Plan for everything. 

Schedule and hope and wish and build

But be ready for change. 

Be ready for change that rips your heart out. 

Say goodbye to everyone. 

Hold nothing higher than His plan. 

Because when your plans change, 

and your heart breaks…

Don’t blame God. 

Embrace that this was always the plan. 

And something better and more beautiful

Will come from this. 

I’m sorry Frank. I didn’t do right by you. I failed you. And I loves you so much. Lord, please have a better plan for my furry little family member. This hurts, so bad.