Monday, May 23, 2011

Yes, it's been awhile

No excuses, really, just a simple thing of our computer crashing and our lives going into hyper-drive, fast forward, super-charge mode... whatever you want to call it, really. I usually get behind with my journaling and then I just don't know where to begin again which makes me not want to sit down to write even when I do have that moment, because it's too frustrating. But when I realize that life is NOT going to get out of hyper-drive, like, ever... so here we are.

So I can start from now and go backwards and see how far I get.

I am writing on my iPad, not our computer, which my husband bought me for several belated events this year and last, such as Mother's Day, my 27th birthday, Christmas and last years' anniversary. I just have to realize that although sometimes he takes way too freaking long to get around to doing something, when he does, he usually makes up for it, haha. It's just having that curve of waiting in the meantime, trying not to get too frustrated that he doesn't seem to be doing anything. Yes he's slow; no, I can't change that; no, I don't always love it but I love him and that's just the stinking part of marriage that you don't believe exists until you are, well, married 5 years. I don't think it gets easier the longer you get married either, but at some point I just accept it and move on.

Anyhow, I love my iPad. It just rocks, plain and simple. I wanted the MacBook Pro but finances at this point wouldn't allow that. :)

So here I am, at 1am, writing because currently I am miscarrying for the second time. I never wrote about the first one, which happened over the week of Christmas last year when I was 12 weeks into my pregnancy. I still really cannot write about it much because the emotions are so powerful, so heavy, so devastating that it's really just too hard to get into words as deep as the sorrow goes. After the first miscarriage we were not planning on getting pregnant for awhile, we were in the process of taking a class on becoming adoptive parents for a child from the Hillsborough County foster care system, (another entire story) and we finished the class and began more of the process of becoming adoptive parents, when I discovered that I was pregnant again for the third time. I was truly panicked at first as we truly were not trying. I felt I needed more time to deal with the loss of our second child and all the learning curve it was taking for us as we looked towards being a parent for a child in the system of care. I was drinking caffeinated coffee and not even taking a prenatal, which I instantly went out to get the vitamins and stopped caffeine cold-turkey.

It had taken us three months of "trying" to get pregnant with JJ; it had taken us three months of trying to get pregnant with Baby2. Baby2 was due this year, June 31st. This baby, Baby3, however, we did not try and I truly know we never even had sex near or around the time when I was ovulating, (and I know these things because I'm as regular as clock-work with my cycles) and nevertheless, here we were, pregnant with Baby3. And as the weeks went along, we found ourselves accepting of this unplanned change in our lives and looking forwards to it. I went for an early ultrasound last Monday, because of having had a history of one miscarriage already. During the ultrasound it was discovered that the baby3 did not have a heartbeat and appeared to be the size of a six-week old baby whereas I was supposed to be nine-something weeks along at that point. And here I am, miscarrying yet again at 10 weeks. Baby3 was due this year on December 17th. Causes are still unknown and the grief is all the same. In addition to this, we have been put on hold for a year for us becoming adoptive parents because of having gotten pregnant and miscarrying, which is a "life-changing" circumstance and therefore, ill-advised that we pursue the adoption of a child while we personally are undergoing grief. Understandable, yes, but another form of grief and death of a dream, yes also.

It would be kinda easy to just say that life sucks right now. I have two children in heaven. That is so hard for me to comprehend and accept. I truly cannot wait to meet them someday and I know the instant I see them I will recognize them, being either boy(s) or girl(s) and I am so happy that for eternity I can be with them. I am also glad they have each other now, because even though I can't imagine heaven as a lonely place, I still think having family with you is way more fun than being alone. My babies, my children, I miss them and I love them so very much. My heart could be stabbed repeatedly and ripped out of my chest for the pain I feel every day when I think of how I have to be apart from them, having never met them, named them, held them, felt them, kissed them, hugged them, breathed in the scent of their skin or adored their beauty. And at the same time I realize I've never had more than one living child, now my family of three here on earth feels as if something is missing, because we really are a family of 5. I hate that feeling. I hate having to realize that for the rest of my life I have to feel that parts of me are missing. Again, words just can't describe the grief, so I won't try.

JJ has been so very sweet, and I love him with the deepest sort of love. He saw me crying the day I learned that this baby did not have a heartbeat, and he came up to me and said, "I can kiss you," and came over and gave me this huge hug and kissed me repeatedly. He didn't know what was going on, and he didn't ask why, he just knows that kisses fix everything, so he came over and poured his little boy love all over me. And during those moments that take you the closest to Jesus that you can possibly be while here on earth, are the moments that give you the strength to abide in the depths of the pain no matter how agonizing and grievous they can be.

At the same time, and I'm just being real here, he can drive me to the brink of insanity because of the tremendous amount of sheer WORK it is to parent a child. No matter what is going on, you never get a break. Tonight I had to call James on the phone and I told him, "Come and get your son out of this house before I kill him!" When you mix my sheer stubbornness and James' ability to be creative (not in the good ways, mind you) you have this impossible, indomitable, insurmountable, incomprehensible mix of creative ways to challenge things that should, normally, be accepted as a reasonable response to a directive. But oh no. No, no. And it's not monsterish behavior, it's not tantrums, it's not even just willfulness, see, that would be much more straight-forwards. It's far more complex. I will give you as best of an example as I can.

Asking JJ to take his trucks, which are the ones that belong in the bathtub, and to put them back in the bathtub. He stands up, grabs a truck in each hand, and before he moves a step he starts to groan and grunt, and he exerts every muscle in his body and his entire body tenses up and his face turns bright red, and he has the most excruciating facial expression of pure exertion, and then he stops and says simply, "Mama, my feets are stuck." Yes, stuck. On the carpet. The creativity he used to come up with that entire scenario is amazing, but the end result is that he doesn't go back and put his bath trucks in the bathtub. What the heck am I supposed to do? If I just punish him for not obeying instantly I feel like I am not acknowledging his superior creativity. But on the flip, superior creativity doesn't warrant disobedience, so where's the perfect blend? Still trying to find the answer to that one. Similar responses to these types of things for him has been when he is pretending that he has "run out of gas" and I have had to stop what I was doing, pretend to fill him up with gas again, only for him then to say that he really needed diesel, so I had to drain the gas out of him and re-fill him up with diesel so that he could go on with the task that was directed for him to do. And we make a game out of it. However, when I'm washing dishes or cleaning the house or talking on the phone or going to the bathroom or ANY one of those God-given human rights I have, those are the times I do NOT want to play games of filling him up with gas or diesel or god help me when he learns what ethanol is, I will never get it right, and I simply do not have time to do all that when I just need him to pick up his toys. Or the time it takes to "unglue" his feet from the carpet. There are days when I want to just beat his little butt but I feel that's a very base answer to a more complex question. And if the questioner is brilliant enough to ask complex questions, I think the answerer needs to be able to be complex, too, don't you think? But what the heck does that mean for me, God help me?

And tonight, JJ had a toy semi-truck with a flatbed trailer, and a monster truck was on top of the flatbed. The truck was in the kitchen, and toys typically aren't allowed in the kitchen because it's too small and it drives me insane. I have a huge reserve of sanity that I can dig into when I am dealing with life's crap and the things that drive people crazy, but I know my limits and toys in the kitchen are just one of those few things I enforce for my own sake. And you should know I enforce very few things for my own sake. JJ was already asleep, James and I were straightening up the house before bed. I pointed to the truck that was in the kitchen, which James knew to mean, "It needs to get put up" and his first response was to say, "But it's parked out of the way."

"I don't care, it's in my kitchen." I said. Then I added, "It may be parked out of the way, but it's still parked in a tow-away zone." The next thing I knew was I was walking down the hallway to put something else away and James was in JJ's room, digging through all this toys.

"What in the world are you doing?" I asked him.

He said, "I'm looking for JJ's tow truck!"

"Why are you looking for the tow truck?"

"Because if his semi truck is parked in a tow-away zone, it needs to be towed. And when you need something towed, you have to call a tow truck."

"Why, why, why, whyyyyyyy does this have to be so exhausting with you two?" I moaned.

This is literally like what it's like around here, every day, every minute of every day with these two. JUST GET IT DONE has always been my motto, but with the brains on these boys that come up with this stuff, I just have to remind myself that being different is what makes the world go 'round... right?

Well, I haven't covered very much ground going backwards but I'm too tired now to continue. Later!













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