My dear friend Jackie just won a sports Emmy. Jackie, this post is for you–this is how we feel inside about your awesome accomplishment!
These pics are from Chihuly Garden and Glass in Seattle (they had free professional photographers!). Find more great pics from Seattle with ideas for what to do/where to go, here.
I’m currently hiding in our guest room.
It’s the end of nap time. Normally nap time is this awesome time when I get to detox after a morning of getting things thrown at me or watching things get thrown at other people.
These days I need nap time. We’re going through a period of disequilibrium. And it’s not pretty when mama doesn’t get some down time.
But it didn’t happen today.
Lesson: NEVER do errands during nap time. You let down yourself and the errands.
I went to the grocery store and then FedEx. I needed to mail two prayer shawls to friends. These are awesome shawls that women at our church knit to provide comfort to anyone who may need it. The pray as they knit. That is awesome. I picked out shawls for two lovely friends who are going through some sh*tty times. The shawls were blessed today by our fantastic priest, who gave this rockin’ sermon about her time as a mentee of one of the first Episcopal woman priests. I digress….
Point being: I was upbeat. Because women priests rock.
Lesson: Never be upbeat when going on errands. High expectations only lead to broken bones hearts.
So I get to FedEx all gung-ho: Let’s get this sh*t mailed!
Oh wait. No one is available to help me because you’re all on the phone? No worries! I’ll just grab boxes and forms, and fill these suckers out so I’m all set!
Ten minutes later the Lady comes over: “I see you’re shipping these Express Air.”
NO! Who ships personal stuff Express Air? Seriously, Lady? I did not fly here in my private plane.
It leads one to wonder: Why are the only boxes within reach of the peasants the Express Air boxes? Well, we peasants do like to steal cheap stuff, so better keep the Ground boxes out of reach….
The Ground boxes are behind the desk. But FedEx Lady can’t figure out what size I’ll need. She’s “not good with numbers,” she says.
Why don’t you bring a couple boxes over here and we can try them out??
She thinks this is a good idea. I mean, Lady, we are mailing shawls here. They can squish into anything.
Then she gets to my forms.
“Oh, I should have come over earlier and told you to fill out these forms.”
Yes, you damn well should have. Because all your f*&king FedEx forms are varying shades of pastel purple with pale gray writing.
Lesson: Never, NEVER, fill out a FedEx form without first waving it in an employee’s face and yelling, “U-S-A! Ground! Cheapest ship! This form!”
At that point I lost it. My nap time detox window was closing in on me. I was going to spend the rest of my time filling out forms while FedEx Lady tried to punch numbers into her monkey computer.
Not good. I put my head in my hands. Not good at all.
And that’s when I ended up in my car, shawls on the passenger seat, headed home, crying terrible cries and gnashing terrible teeth, with snot and tears streaming down my face.
Lesson: Driving in the car is a great place to have an over-the-top and cathartic ugly-cry because you’re in a soundproof container and everyone else is paying attention to the road.
I’m at an emotional place at this particular moment in my life when wasting my me-time is treacherous. I need it. I really, really need it. Like, do you have any? Because I’ll buy it from you. How much do you want for it?
Luckily my husband is home because it’s Sunday. And when I got back, defeated by bureaucracy and barely able to speak, he suggested I hole away in our bedroom.
But they’ll find me. The children will find me.
“How about the guest room?”
Yes! They won’t know I’m there!
So here I am. Hiding away, refilling my tank before going back up for another round.
It’s hard to get into the mind of the toddler gremlin, but give him an iPhone….
My dear friend Lauren, or Chee Chee as we call her around these parts, recently suffered a miscarriage.
Up to 25% of pregnancies end in miscarriage. And I have more friends than I’d like to count who’ve suffered at least one.
Miscarriage is a funny thing–it’s grief that no one knows how to talk about.
We’re supposed to wait to announce pregnancies until the second trimester, when risks of something going wrong are lower. That means women need to keep possibly the most exciting news of their lives secret, so they can be protected.
From what?
If something goes wrong, they’re isolated, and dealing with a tragic loss without the support of community.
Women may tell a few trusted friends or family, but the experience still leaves you feeling like an alien in a foreign land. You go on trying to function in a world that’s just the same, but you are different.
Well Lauren is a wonderful writer, and she started a brave new blog called On Fecund Thought that’s both a forum and a very poignant place to visit for anyone who has suffered a miscarriage or known someone who has.
Lauren recently wrote about waiting in the OB/GYN’s waiting room for a loss support group to start, amidst regular patients:
There was an air of murmuring happiness — most of these women were at least 6 months along. I envied them their happy confidence that nothing would go wrong. I tried to remind myself that I don’t know their fertility story, but another voice reminded me of the words my friend, L., a therapist whose first pregnancy ended in a missed miscarriage, told me: I felt cheated. I couldn’t enjoy my next pregnancy with [my daughter]. Even though everything was going fine and we ended up having a healthy baby, I felt robbed of my innocence.*
If you’ve known someone who’s suffered a miscarriage, or you have, or your spouse has, go over and visit On Fecund Thought.
Lauren’s words are often poetic, and her list of resources and suggestions for how to support someone going through miscarriage are right on.
Not sure where to begin? Start with this post about ten things not to say, and ten suggestions for how to support someone going through miscarriage.
Hugs, EvPosted in Something to think about
Tagged fertility, grief, loss, miscarriage, miscarriage support, On Fecund Thought blog
If any town can get behind women’s professional soccer, it’s P-Town. I asked for tix to another game for my birthday. It’s that kickin’. Get there.
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Follow the Thorns on Twitter (@ThornsFC) and Facebook.
You might also like Visiting Oregon: Choose Your Own Adventure and Portland’s 4T’s Adventure Route in Pictures
Scott Brennan is a friend and wonderful writer. Or a wonderful friend and writer. In either case, I think he would tell you that first he’s a husband and father (he and his wife Mary Elizabeth have a teenage daughter and preteen twins). I consider him a mentor parent.
I was blessed–truly blessed–to cross paths with him at Trinity Church Wall Street in Manhattan and I thank the Internet for keeping us connected.
In 2009, Scott’s wife Mary Elizabeth collapsed on a train platform in London, while Scott, Mary Elizabeth, and their oldest daughter Charlotte were on a trip. Mary Elizabeth suffered an internal bleed in her brainstem that she miraculously survived. But it put her in a coma for two months, and Mary Elizabeth and Scott have been adjusting to life on the recovery path ever since.
Scott writes at Get Better Mary Elizabeth about their story. His posts can be raw and open and I’m always thrilled by his candor.
Today he’s here at Momsicle talking about parenting after one parent changes.
Several weeks before she gave birth to our first child, Mary Elizabeth shared with me the very serious concern that I would be a lousy parent and that she would have to do everything. While it would be easy to chalk this up to hormones, or pregnancy jitters, she had a point.
I was adopted at 3 months old, and raised by two alcoholics, with at best, very poor parenting skills, and at worst, abusive and schizophrenic behavior. My life as an only child was filled with neglect, rage, and situations that no child should have to endure.
But still, I turned out ok, and was a reasonable spouse, colleague and friend.
But I understood Mary Elizabeth’s fear: With role models like my parents, how would I be as a parent? Would I be capable of providing the tenderness which was withheld from me while growing up? Could I cope with the stresses of parenthood without reaching for a bottle?
As it turned out, her fears were unfounded.
I took to parenting like a fish takes to water. I doted on Charlotte, getting up in the night, bathing, swaddling, and diapering like a pro. She was our light and joy and we showered love on her in rich abundance. Two years later, we found out we were having twins–a wonderful surprise that unnerved us a bit given the prospect of being outnumbered.
We had a few harrowing years where we didn’t go out much except to work and church, and would more than likely have a patch of spit-up somewhere on our clothes no matter how hard we tried to avoid it.
But our kids were happy and healthy and again I rose to the occasion, despite my difficult upbringing. We led a hectic, but happy and fairly conventional family life–filled with good humor and love.
All that changed late in 2009 when Mary Elizabeth collapsed on a train platform in London while she and Charlotte and I were there for a week.
She was rushed to Royal London Hospital and diagnosed with what the doctors thought was a fatal bleed in her brainstem. It was indeed a bleed in her brainstem, but it wasn’t fatal. After being in a coma for two months and hospitalized for another two months, she came home to us and is an integral part of our family life.
But that rainy dark night changed everything. Standing in that grimy little family room in Royal London Hospital, as the nurse handed me my wife’s engagement ring and wedding band taped together and the doctor gave us the dire prognosis, my parental status changed dramatically–and forever.
As soon as an hour after we got that news, Charlotte turned her tear-stained face to me and uttered the plangent cry, “Don’t you die, too!”
Suddenly there was a lot more on the line.
I had almost immediately felt Mary Elizabeth’s absence since we relied on one another in situations like this, but it hadn’t hit me until Charlotte spoke that this family now depended on me and me alone. While before, one of us could always relieve the other one–or even take a day off–that was now a much more difficult prospect.
Several days later, while breaking the news over the phone to eight-year-olds Clark and Louisa who were back in New York, I felt the enormity and surrealism of the situation overwhelm me again. These poor kids, lacking at least for the time being a mother, have one parent, and that parent is me.
After I sent Charlotte home a week later, and stayed on in London for 3-and-a-half more months, I became a parent without children. Family and community at home enveloped them in warm and loving arms and when I spoke to them, they seemed absolutely fine–happy to speak to me, but not apparently needing me so much.
I on the other hand was not fine, as I realized poignantly that perhaps I needed them more than they needed me.
Keeping a nightly vigil by my sometimes-conscious-but-mostly-unresponsive wife in a hospital 3,000 miles away from home, I felt disconnected, adrift and most certainly bereft.
And part of that void was not being able to take care of my kids, or my wife–those responsibilities taken up by family, friends, and nursing staff. Thank God for my old and new friends in London who embraced me with good cheer, kept me busy and supported me through those dark cold London winter months.
But soon enough, it was springtime and Mary Elizabeth recovered sufficiently to travel back to the States, and then rehabilitated enough to come home.
It was of course awkward at first and as I found out from attending several caregiver support groups, ours was a fairly unique demographic. Children taking care of their elderly parents, or elderly spouses caring for each other were common scenarios at these groups. But a middle-aged husband, caring for his incapacitated wife and three school-aged children wasn’t a model that I had seen anywhere.
But I was used to living at the far edges of the bell curve.
Shortly after I turned 40, Mary Elizabeth and I found my birthmother and reunited with her, along with a half brother and two half sisters. It turned out to be joyful, fulfilling, and ultimately redemptive–but again not a common situation.
There was no blueprint for this kind of relationship–we had to feel our way, and in essence do what felt right for the situation.
As anyone who has read my blog knows, I’ve struggled to accept our situation and have had a hard time feeling good about what happened to us, and where we are.
While Mary Elizabeth’s intellect and memory are completely intact and anybody who hasn’t seen her since before the stroke will see in her the old Mary Elizabeth, there have been significant changes. She is physically dependent on other people, and likely will always be–to an extent. She is not easily understood by strangers, and while her new aspiration is being a stay-at-home mother, she can’t drive, cook, or do many of the things commonly associated with that role.
Our family dynamic has changed. What had been shared responsibilities are now completely on my shoulders.
Like any family, there have been significant challenges, which are now borne by me alone. I’ve done a good job meeting them, but at time feel wracked by the uncertainty that I’m doing a bad job, and the guilt of resenting that I’m overburdened.
This is difficult to say, but sometimes I feel like I am the parent of four kids–two 11-year-olds, a 14-year-old, and a 51-year-old who requires more support than the other three.
But that’s ultimately an unfair and shallow assessment because if I look beyond Mary Elizabeth’s physical and cognitive disabilities, I see the vibrant, independent, and loving woman I married 20 years ago.
Our kids have taken all of this in stride, but I think their relationships with me as their father have changed as well in unexpected ways.
They’ve become much more aware of the needs of others, and have learned through necessity to be helpful and solicitous. I recognize this when comments come home from school about how helpful they are in class. There’s a maturity that has been thrust upon them–particularly on Charlotte–and there’s a candor in our relationship which I didn’t see before.
I am the first to admit to them that I’m struggling and need help–not in a pathetic or even weak way–but in a straightforward, honest way. I think they respect that I’m not all-knowing and omnipotent and admitting that I make mistakes robs them (the mistakes, not the children) of their power.
At the same time, I have to maintain some authority and dominion over them, since they are still kids–although my 14-year-old might be reluctant to recognize this.
It’s incredibly poignant and touching to see my kids interacting with Mary Elizabeth in a perfectly natural way, although I think the dynamics of that relationship have changed as well.
Mary Elizabeth feels that the kids don’t listen to her, or don’t take her seriously because of her limitations. This may be true, but I’m not entirely sure that they listen to me any more than they listen to her. But I do sense frustration sometimes from the kids that communication isn’t what it used to be, and that Mary Elizabeth can sometimes seem demanding. I am hopeful that this frustration will give way to a deeper understanding of compassion and empathy as they get older, and that they continue to listen to their hearts.
So thinking of Mary Elizabeth’s fears expressed to me in 1993…
I think that I’ve turned out to be a reasonable father, tempering love and affection with guidance and yes, discipline–ever more conscious of the new context of our family life.
I do the best I can as a parent–acknowledging the bare truth that I am neither an angel nor a devil–but a human, through and through.
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Thank you, Scott! I hope you’ll be back on the blog again.
Scott also collaborated with me on a travel post about road trips with kids. You can find his great tips here.
Posted in Guest Posts, Parenting, Something to think about
Tagged family dynamic changes, fatherhood, Parenting, raising children, stroke
But it’s hard. Real hard.
