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April 9, 2012 by Farewell Stranger ·

The last couple of weeks have been rough. After Michael’s accident we had family members flying all over the place, which my anxiety really didn’t like (especially when it involved putting my 72-year-old father on a plane for a 24-hour trip to Australia). He got there all right, but then Michael passed away and we started an overwhelming game of Should We or Shouldn’t We Go to Australia for the Funeral.

We didn’t go.

It was agonizing. I couldn’t imagine not going, and yet I couldn’t quite figure out how we’d make it work either. I’ve been so sick so far this pregnancy that a 24-hour trip seemed like the World’s Worst Idea. I could have gone, of course, and would have, but we also didn’t want to totally overwhelm everyone by showing up a day before the funeral with a three-year-old in tow.

In the end, we decided we will be the second wave of support and go down in a few weeks (with my other sister) when things have calmed down and my sister and brother-in-law are trying to adjust to their new normal. In the meantime, we’ve sent texts and messages—by the hundreds, it seems—and if waves of love can reach that far they’ll have had an ocean’s worth.

Now the funeral is done. Friends and family have spoken words of love and Michael’s school mates formed an honour guard for him as he left the cemetery. Those of us here have had our own moment to remember him and we now exist in that space between blessed closure and enduring disbelief. We continue to ask why, but an answer never comes.

Until today, half of my family was in Australia (more than half, actually). My brother also went for a quick down-and-back to help my dad and youngest sister travel comfortably home. (Working for an airline has its benefits.) Much to everyone’s relief, they’re just arriving home after another 24-hour trip in a very short span of time.

There is no pause button in this life. And try as I might, I haven’t been able to find any sort of rewind button either. So for the moment, I have chosen to hit reset. Instead of being in perpetual limbo—waiting for what?—I declared Easter weekend a weekend to go out of town. We got out of the house, where we’ve been sitting waiting for the phone to ring or the next text message to wing its way across the world, and spent some time in the mountains.

More on that later, but in the meantime I’ll say this: It helped.

Filed Under: Hard things · Tagged With: anxiety, family, perspective, The Universe, weekends

Pregnancy is an Evolutionary Oops

April 1, 2012 by Farewell Stranger ·

Warning: This is a rant. And I wrote it before this happened, so I can’t even blame it on that. Apparently being pregnant just makes me cranky.

The whole concept of pregnancy was not well thought out.

There are so many things that make evolutionary sense. You know, like opposable thumbs and eyebrows and…stuff like that. And yes, pregnancy is a miracle and all that but why does this particular miracle have to be so freaking hard?!

When I was pregnant with Connor I was a little nauseated and more tired than usual, but I could deal with that by closing my office door if I needed to and coming home to lie peacefully on the couch. This time I’ve been so unbelievably sick I can barely stand it and exhaustion has hit like nothing I’ve ever felt before. I feel awful. And this time I have no office door to close and a new team and a 45-minute commute to and from work. Oh, and a three-year-old.

Did I mention I feel awful?

Maybe it’s just anxiety settling in and making itself at home, but I’m looking ahead to the next several months and thinking This is not going to be good. I hope I’ll feel better relatively soon (please God let me feel better soon) but then it’s just that lull before the wow-am-I-ever-uncomfortable stage that leads to poor sleep. I mean, seriously. Who designed this process?! Being tired right before having a baby? Really?!

(And don’t even get me started on how totally dependent human babies are. Not that I’d prefer we make like turtles and leave our young to figure it out themselves, but shouldn’t there be a middle ground? Like puppies. Puppies open their eyes, learn to nurse and then start stumbling around and falling over their own too-big paws. Yeah, the whole housebreaking thing is a total disaster, but if I’d been in charge of evolution I would have made human babies a little more like puppies in the dependency department.)

Image credit: notsogoodphotography on Flickr

But back to being tired. We go from being tired and uncomfortable to being in pain and tired. Even if you have a relatively easy labour, it still takes time to recover and heal. If you have a C-section, however, you spend the first few days needing significant help taking care of your own baby and then the better part of six weeks healing from major abdominal surgery. And all this while having to take care of a baby and learn to nurse (if you choose or are able to do so), and don’t tell me that’s not painful and exhausting too.

Meanwhile, the male (or any other partner, in fact) has no pregnancy woes (aside from listening to his, ahem, whiny wife) and no part of his body is traumatized during the birth. He doesn’t have to deal with engorged breasts or stitches or bleeding. His hair doesn’t start falling out in clumps. He doesn’t have night sweats so bad he has to sleep on a towel for several months. No, all of this joy – pregnancy, birth, the postpartum period – is relegated to one person in the process and it happens to be the person who is also the one who tends to do a lot of the baby care in the early days.

Like I said, pregnancy was not well thought out.

12 weeks down, 28 to go.

Filed Under: Hard things, Pregnancy · Tagged With: rants

Minus One

March 30, 2012 by Farewell Stranger ·

Rest in peace, Michael. You are so, so loved.

Thank you, friends, for all your kind words of support.

Filed Under: Hard things · Tagged With: family, meltdown

On Life, Loss and the Universe’s Math

March 28, 2012 by Farewell Stranger ·

My nephew Michael was born a little while after my Nana passed away in the early 90s. I remember at the time thinking it was an odd minus-one, plus-one situation. Some sort of weird cosmic math where one is taken away to make room for another.

When I was pregnant with Connor, my cousin took her own life. It was shocking. Horrifying. But, maybe because of the overlap (I was already pregnant), that time I didn’t think about the math.

Yesterday, Michael was in a serious car accident and he’s now in a coma. He and his family—my sister—live in Australia and they feel so very far away. They are so very, very far away. And I sit here, three months pregnant, feeling helpless and wondering why the universe seems to require things to be just so perfectly balanced.

Michael is young, having just finished high school. He’s smart, athletic, and cute. He’s also a really, really nice kid. Why does he have to have his life threatened when others are allowed to live on and contribute nothing to the world except pain and anguish? Why does that perfectly balanced math have to come from within my own family?

It just makes me think. Connor climbed into bed with me early this morning, curving his small body into mine. He was restless, though, as was I after a night of lying awake and wondering about things bigger than I that I don’t understand. My small boy pressed his cool cheek against mine and rubbed my wrist. I felt his soft hair and his little fingers and the in-and-out of his quiet breathing.

I kept him with me there in the quiet darkness of a day not yet begun and wondered how I can keep him safe. But I can’t. Ultimately—ironically, unfairly—none of us can do that for our children.

We just have to hope the universe isn’t quite so picky with the math.

Filed Under: Hard things · Tagged With: anxiety, family, hope, The Universe

Pride in the Name of Doing It All Again

March 18, 2012 by Farewell Stranger ·

A few days ago I read a post by my friend Jenn. She wrote about how being a mom with depression can sometimes suck and when I saw the title of her post I thought, You bet it does. And it does, there’s no doubt about it. But Jenn’s post was actually about more than that.

…this post is not about parenting with depression it is about parenting after getting help for it. You see, there are still days that I can feel the effects of my depression on my parenting.

Oh lady, I so know what you mean.

As I sit here, nauseated and with a burgeoning belly, I think back to my last pregnancy. I remember thinking how amazing it was going to be to have a child and what a wonderful mother I would be. I thought about soft blankets and small toes and a warm baby asleep on my chest. I thought about how romantic it would be to get up with a tiny baby in the stillness of the night.

I thought, in other words, about all the things most about-to-be-mothers think about. What I did not think about, however, was how it might not be like that and how I would not be able to control how I responded to all that hard.

I did not think about how I actually don’t always get to choose the kind of mother I want to be.

Like Jenn said, I feel as though my experience with PPD has forever altered the type of mom I am.

I thought I would spend time dreaming up activities to do with my kids instead of being scared to plan something only to have it go sideways and not be able to cope with that.

I thought I’d be attentive to their nutritional needs, always ensuring they got a wide variety of things to eat, not making Kraft Dinner with ketchup on the side because it’s the only thing I have the energy to make.

I thought I’d be good at playing and didn’t expect to be left with a post-PPD desire for me time that kicks and flails and insists on being acknowledged to the detriment of “good mother” priorities.

However… that’s all just for context and not really what this post is about. I’ve been doing okay (better, anyway) in some areas so today I figured I’d link up with Charity for her Mother’s Pride Blog Carnival and acknowledge some of the things I think are going well. Or better than before, anyway.

I’ve been doing bath time without feeling like it’s a major energy suck and something I have to work up to doing.

I’ve been doing better at redirecting behaviour like yelling or throwing things without feeling like I’m going to snap.

I’m a little better at playing. Sometimes.

I’m pretty good at doing countdowns so we can eat lunch/leave an activity/get to bed without any meltdowns.

I’m better at asking for help.

And while I’m on the subject of pride, I’m very proud of my son for adapting well to his new school and for his insatiable curiosity and inspiring confidence when it comes to Lego, and very proud of my husband for picking up the slack while I focus on not puking everywhere.

So that’s what I’m proud of, even though I’m not the mom I thought I was going to be. But is any of us? Are you?