this is why i hate numbers
i had my obgyn appointment friday. everything is fine. i’m fine. the baby is fine. the appointment was quite uneventful.
pee in the cup. smiley face the cup. weigh in. don’t register the number on the scale in your mind because all that’s on your mind is the ice cream that’s in your freezer (ps- i gained 2 lbs this month). meet with doctor. ask questions. measure belly. listen to heartbeat on doppler. listen to pickle kick the shit out of doppler. laugh. schedule next visit. peace out.
i came home from the appointment questioning everything about life. when you’re 24+ weeks pregnant with a husband who is 7 weeks away from deploying, the LAST thing you want to do is be questioning life and all of its components.
“so we’re still waiting on your surgical notes from your first c-section…”
“oh. sorry. is there anything i can do to get them to you faster?”
“no, we’ll resubmit the fax. but seeing that had me wondering… HOW LARGE OF A FAMILY DO YOU INTEND ON HAVING?”
“…………………..uh, i’m not sure. i’m just coming to grips with the fact that i will be a mother of 2 in a couple of months. why do you ask?”
“well, risks are higher with each subsequent c-section and with this baby being a girl, chances are she may be smaller than you first child was and we should consider a VBAC.”
(i’ll pause right there just to let you know that this in no way is a c-section vs. VBAC kind of post and if you’re looking to pick a fight about that topic, go elsewhere. there are plenty of parenting blogs and posts created to stir controversy and piss people off with regards to HOW your child enters the world. this is not one of those.)
moving on… i told my doctor that i had been researching VBACs and was aware of the risks on both sides, having a repeat c-section and having a VBAC. (hello, childbirth in itself poses risks, what else ya got?) then, i told her that my husband will be deployed when miss pickle enters the world, and that “i selfishly may not want to experience a different kind of birth, knowing he will not be a part of it, ya know? that will suck.”
and cue STINK EYE.
(it should be noted that this appointment was with the last of the 4 doctors who rotate within this practice. from my next visit on through delivery, who i see is my choice.)
the doctor rattled off a shit ton of stats and facts and VBACs to me that are all kind of fuzzy now that i think back on it. i was just stuck on the look of death she had given me, which made it difficult to grasp the words that were coming out of her mouth. something about subsequent c-sections and higher risk of stuff and “IF YOU WANT MORE PREGNANCIES BEYOND THIS ONE, THIS BABY SHOULD BE A VBAC BABY.”
::record screech::
hold the iphone. so, not only do i get to think about my husband being gone for the birth of this child, but now you want me to think about how large of a family i want to have and how that number of children will determine the way in which i should deliver this baby?
apparently that’s what she wanted. dr. dead eyes wanted me to put a number to it.
i don’t know how many children i want to have. i don’t know the amount of chaos this second child will bring to our already chaotic lives. i don’t know where we will be financially years from now and whether or not we’ll be able to support 5 hypothetical children, or 3 hypothetical children… even the 2 children we will shortly be responsible for. i don’t know if i’ll get the baby bug immediately after delivering this child.
I DON’T KNOW WHAT DAY IT IS OR IF I BRUSHED MY TEETH THIS MORNING.
what i do know is that my husband will be gone for the birth of this child. that is the only thing i know. i do not know how i am delivering miss pickle in to this world, nor do i know how many children i will one day end up with. all i know is that my husband, who so desperately wants to be here when his first daughter cries for the first time, will be on the other side of the world. and yes, i need to consider what is best for my health and the health of the baby… but i’d be a straight up asshole not to consider my partner and the current situation we are in with him being deployed.
i may be an idiot when it comes to numbers, people… but i am no asshole.
i left my appointment friday morning having felt bullied into making a decision that i am not ready or equipped to make yet. i felt judged for thinking of doing a repeat c-section. and i felt sad.
there’s a lot on our plate right now. and yeah, i’m taking things in stride as much as one crazy pregnant person possibly can. but don’t ask me questions about LIFE that cause me to doubt myself. don’t look at me with dead eyes.
and don’t ever ask me anything about numbers. i was an english major for shit’s sake. numbers upset me more than katy perry and russell brand’s divorce.
deploy the baby shit
a funny thing happens when your spouse is preparing to leave the country for an extended period of time. you start to plan. the two of you sit down together (or stand, depending on how your aching joints are on that particular day) and sort some shit out. get your ducks in a row. prepare for things. talk about the future.
for us, this usually revolves around a calendar. not the ones on our iphones, but real, pen and paper, square boxes with dates inside calendars. which means that our planning conversation took place as we drove home from our holiday vacation, each with a brand spankin new 2012 calendar from santa/my mom.
i used to be one of those kids who gets disgustingly excited about school supplies. (let it be known, i am this same way as an adult and certainly as a former school teacher, however, this quirk seems to be quite trendy amongst the mom-population, so i feel the need to claim it at its true inception, which for me was in grade school, thankyouverymuch.) the end of the summer would draw near, office max would run commercials on loop, and i would practice my handwriting, label the dividers in my 3-ring binder, and organize erasers to fit in my pencil box going from tallest to shortest.
you can only imagine what a new calendar, wrapped in plastic is like for me on christmas morning. instantly doctors appointments are notated, days off school are marked down in BLOOD RED, and no sooner do i flip to the next month, when it dawns on me that my husband is leaving.
now, i have a few of paul’s deployments under my belt. i don’t say that with any emotion, grandeur, or martyrdom. it’s just a fact of the matter. our son, on the other hand, will be experiencing deployment for the first time when paul leaves in march.
and with the baby arriving in april, paul and i decide, during our hot, sexy calendar talk, that we should probably start to transition the baby stuff out of storage and back in to our lives as a way to prepare jackson for his baby sister’s arrival that will take place when “daddy’s on a long trip.”
and then we decide that this should happen when we bring down the christmas tree and holiday decor.
which all occurred in spurts over the last few days.
like most things, when this taking-down-of-and-putting-back certain household things happened, it snowballed, and before you know it, you’re questioning the paint color of your living room walls and why you gave your son the bigger bedroom (for the record, we didn’t… i’m just saying, those conversations happen when attempting to reorganize ones life).
so the lights have been wrapped back up, the wreath has come down from the front door, and the christmas tree has been boxed up and taken to storage. (also, it came to our attention when taking down the tree that our dog ate 3 of our ’12 days of christmas’ ornaments, so he saved us the trouble of packing up additional ornaments. thank you, red.)
jackson’s old toys have been donated to make room for his loot from santa, and we have felt like the last few days have been extremely productive for a family who really just wanted a few days back at home to hang on the couch and eat an abundance of rich foods before the work week started up again.
it was during all of this sorting and packing and storing that we began to assess our current living situation and how it will change over the next year, specifically how it will change once we have this other small human with female parts living with us come spring time.
our original plan was to combine what will be the baby’s nursery with jackson’s current bedroom. i never shared a room with my brother, but always wanted to. so now i have this INSANE dream of having my two children living blissfully in the same space, co-habitating in peace. (save your laughter for when the baby actually arrives.) what we have since decided is to forgo this little miss pickle having a crib until we are back in our old house.
oh, did i not mention that? we have been renting a house that is a few blocks away from the house we own because we have renters living in that house and their lease is not up until may. and then we have until september on our lease in this house, so that gives us a few months, after the baby has been born and the current renters have moved out, to demolish the house we own, add another bathroom, and redesign the currently shitty excuse for a kitchen before we move back in as a fully functioning family of four.
and all of this will take place with an infant in my arms (breast feeding like a champion with no issues like her brother had), with my husband safely back stateside, no hiccups in our renovation plans, and glorious smiles upon all of our rosy cheeked faces.
it will be then, roughly in the early fall, when our two children will share a bedroom. until then, miss pickle will spend the days of newbornhood in a bassinet, a swing, on my boob, in a pack-n-play, cooing and nuzzling like an angel.
because that’s how planning works, right? you set a plan in place, commit to it, and it all happens with military-like precision and accuracy.
the publicly acceptable profession
paul accompanied jackson to school this morning to speak to his class for career week. apparently paul’s profession is so cool that jackson’s teacher asked him to speak to the 4 year old class too.
WAY TO GIVE HIM A BIGGER HEAD THAN HE ALREADY HAS.
i guess it’s good that i didn’t go… being a “mommy blogger” and all.
Hindsight
I originally wrote this post to run over at Band Back Together, which it will tomorrow, along with many others who will share their memories and honor 9/11 in their own way.
**********
Paul and I had been together for 3 years when 9/11 took place. Long distance relationships are hard, but we did it all through college and grad school (flight school for him). I’d like to think it made us stronger over the years.
A lot of things have made us stronger over the 12 + years that we have been together.
I woke up that Tuesday morning, a junior in college, searching for a clean pair of jeans to wear to a composition class that I was already late for. I lived with 3 other girls, 1 of whom was already in class, the other two were making coffee and watching Matt Lauer.
My bedroom was in the back of the apartment. I had the smallest bedroom, because I was the last roommate to join in on the living arrangements. I had more privacy but much less space. My dresser had to go out in the hallway so I could have room to walk in my room.
When I went in the hallway that morning to get my jeans, I heard one of my roommates repeating “ohmygod. ohmygod. ohmygod.” Granted, my roommate had a tendency to be a bit dramatic, but the tone of her voice concerned me. I’ve received enough middle-of-the-night phone calls with bad news to know what her tone meant as she said, “ohmygod” over and over again.
Zipping up my jeans, I made my way into the kitchen, which opened up to our living room, our main communal space. One roommate was watching the coffee drip into the pot, while the other roommate (the “ohmygod” roommate) sat on the couch with a box of Kleenex and an empty mug.
Not much was being said on tv at that time. The first tower had been hit. Everyone was stunned, shocked, confused. I curled up on the couch next to my roommate and we held hands. I didn’t ask any questions because what I saw on the television was more than my brain was able to compute at that moment. So we just sat with each other, hand in hand, with tears running down our cheeks.
My roommate who had been waiting for the next pot of coffee, sniffled and wiped her face before coming over to us on the couch and filling up all of our mugs. She then left for class.
It was shortly after she began her walk to class that the second tower was hit. Our gasps were audible. Loud even. As we sat on the couch, nearly in one another’s laps, we cried hard together. The phone in our apartment started to ring, but neither of us answered it. It was like we were waiting for a third plane.
I had not seen the first tower get hit at 8:52 that morning, but I witnessed the second tower being hit on live tv, and as I watched people leap from windows of the towers to their death, I felt physically ill with helplessness.
People tell you that there’s always something you can do. Something that can be done… whether it’s to right a wrong or fix something that has been broken. I grew up being taught to keep trying. There’s always something that can be done. But on this day, there was nothing. Absolutely nothing that any of us could do at that moment in time. And that is a horrific feeling.
I called my mom as my roommate and I kept our eyes glued to the television, waiting to see what would happen next. I remember worrying about my dad who travels during the work week. I could never keep track of what major city he was in when. Thankfully my dad not in NYC that day and was safe.
I emailed Paul as soon as I saw that the Pentagon had been hit. Our long distance relationship and the sheer horror of that morning had my anxiety through the roof. While I was at school in Auburn, Alabama, Paul was in school in Maryland, at the US Naval Academy.
For a while, my thoughts bounced back and forth from watching the live coverage on tv, witnessing the gravity of what was taking place in NYC, and then panicking that Paul’s safety was in jeopardy being at a military academy. After the Pentagon was hit, I worried for him in ways that my heart was not prepared for as a 20 year old kid.
Eventually Paul was able to call me from a payphone. He reassured me that he was safe. The Academy had been on lock-down and all gates were barricaded with armed guards. The reality of what was happening that day finally hit during that phone call with him.
The terror that I had witnessed that morning while sitting on the couch with my roommate had been brought directly into my life when the Pentagon was hit and the love of my life was a mere 45 minutes away, in Annapolis.
My heart broke for the families who searched for missing loved ones… families forced to bury those who were much too young to be taken. My soul grew with pride when I later heard of the sacrifices made by the passengers on United 93. And my body ached to hug Paul and tangibly feel that he was safe.
As paralyzing as that day was 10 years ago, I credit 9/11 for solidifying in my heart who I was meant to spend the rest of my life with. I suppose sometimes it literally takes a world tragedy to make you realize what you want out of life.
my love affair with spanish moss
it feels so incredibly fantastic to know that we are going home, for good, in mere weeks.
Have a Sip
