The Ornament

My Mom gave me this ornament back in High School.  It was a porcelain(ish) white Angel, holding a basketful of stars.  Shortly after she gave it to me and we put it on the tree, I read Madeleine L’Engle’s A Ring of Endless Light in which the protagonist, Vicki, grapples with light and darkness and life and death.  I was going through my first real dose of the same struggle, and both the book and the ornament became a tangible symbol for me signifying that like Vicki, I was charged to choose light, and to bear light.  Since we’ve been married that ornament has gone at the top of our tree as a reminder to me.  After Mom died it took on even greater significance. 

This December has been a dark one.  December 2 I started bleeding and I soon discovered I was having a miscarriage.  The baby was planned for and wanted and hoped for.  I took 9 pregnancy tests (the last 4 of them had lines, the first two faint, the last two more solid).  The miscarriage happened very early before anyone but us even knew I was pregnant.  It was, unquestionably a blow.  Since then my heart has felt hollow.  The Christmas Season which I love even at the darkest times has seemed only a cruel reminder of what I had hoped for and prayed for and wanted.  I’ve always loved Advent because it meant the whole church was pregnant in anticipation of the Christ Child.  Obviously that metaphor is a painful one this year. 

I have held tenaciously to my conviction that Christmas is about a light in the darkness.  I’ve spent time each day covering myself with that thought.  I reread A Ring of Endless Light.  I accepted the charge anew.  I looked at the ornament each time I passed the tree and remembered what it meant even as I struggled against the darkness and the sadness. 

So when an exuberant game of tag tipped over the Christmas tree, and I heard the shattering of glass, and we righted the tree and I saw the white fragments of angel all over my floor, I was a devastated all over again.  It wasn’t just that the ornament was special.  It wasn’t just that my Mom gave it to me.  It was that this symbol of light in the darkness was shattered at a time when I was fighting with everything in me to hold onto that light. 

And then I saw the gift in what happened:  My husband swept up the fragments, and knelt down and painstakingly sifted through the glass to find the pieces of the angel.  He’s swept it into a bag.  Tonight he plans to pick up some Super Glue and try to piece it back together. 

This is the new picture I have to cling to.  In his loving actions my husband showed me Christ.  I am shattered.  The light seems shattered.  The joy and the hope of the season are like shards of glass on my dining room floor.  But Christ is kneeling down, sifting through the sharp, tiny pieces, and putting me back together.  Broken China is stronger when it’s mended.  Light seeps through cracks.  There is light in this darkness.  And I’ve been given the grace to see it. 

This is my Christmas.

The Notebook

Sometimes I still cry.

While we were cleaning out the ‘we don’t know where to put it so we’ll just put it in this extra room’ room that needs to become the ‘sparish’ room, I came upon a couple of notebooks.

The first one had some journaling, some grocery lists, some C doodling.  I tore out a few pages to keep.  The rest went to the recycle pile.

The second one took my breath away.

The first page began with a list of meds in my Mom’s handwriting.  Underneath that, a new and separate thought, were the words, “rapidly fatal.”  On another page there were the words “adenocarcinoma,” and “lymph nodes.”  There were words like, “Insurance Company,” and “MRI.”

In handwriting that goes back and forth between my mother’s and my father’s–often on the same page–I found the book that accompanied them to appointments.  That asked their questions.  That voiced their fears.  The book they carried with them after Mom was diagnosed with Lung Cancer.

There are test names and drug names and bold-faced facts that standing alone would elicit no emotion. 

And then there are the words that show me chinks in the armor that I rarely saw.  That maybe I was too scared to even look hard on. 

It was the fear.

“How do I manage the pain which is so bad now? (already….  at diagnosis)”

“Will I be paralyzed from this?”

“What can I expect?”

There are stark scribblings like “9-24 months.”  (We had 8 almost to the day when all was said and done). 

I wonder how alone my Mom felt in those fears.  I know I was just trying to be ‘the bearer of hope,’ and say only things my Mom could grab onto and hold with all her might.  But sometimes when you do that you deny a person their need to speak the truth about their feelings.  About their fears.  Which are real from the start.  I hope Mom didn’t feel too alone in her darkness as I stood desperately hoping to shine some light.  I hope that she knew she wasn’t alone in her fears.  I hope I did a better job than I remember of listening.

But what killed me in this notebook–what brought the tears pricking and overflowing and bewildering my husband who was sorting a few feet away–was what I read two pages later.

In Dad’s handwriting:  “Carolyn Helen, 8 lb. 1 oz.  20 1/2 in,” and the name of the hospital in which she was born and the number of days we’d be staying.  It was an empty page all by itself surrounded by all of this fear and pain and starkness.  It WAS the hope that I DID provide for them to hang onto.  It was the joy in the starkness.  Remembering that superimposed joy and starkness was overwhelming.  Remembering that year of newness and joy and pain and loss and the hugeness of it all, took my breath away.

The notebook also has the notes I scribbled after I called the Red Cross to let Husband know that Hospice thought she had two or three days at best.   Those notes were a lifeline of hope that I held onto.  They represented precious time I took away from being at my Mom’s side to tell my husband what was going on and to shoot a flare that might bring him home.  It did.  Mom held on, waited, lingered until Husband was by my side.  He came in late a day later.  She heard me say, “I love you Mom, Goodnight” and him say, “See you tomorrow Carol,” and a few hours later she was gone.   Such few words in that little notebook bookmarking moments and hours that I’ll never forget.

Further on, the notebook has notes of homes for rent that I scouted out that spring after staying with Dad during deployment when C and I went back to Washington for Husband’s coming home. 

It has scribblings I left for a babysitter during those six months as I tried to regain my footing. 

It has a years worth of experience and emotion and pain and joy all within a few pages of one another. 

And I cried.  And I held the notebook like it was something alive and real.  Like it was a link to those days and a way to hold my Mom’s hand again.

I thought about that year and the hugeness of all we lived through.  I didn’t minimize it or rush it away.  I sat there with it for a moment and remembered what it was like to have a baby.  Nurse my Mom.  Lose my  Mom.  Say goodbye to Husband as he left on deployment.  And live through the subsequent months of grief and aloneness while trying to piece back together the life I’d return to in another state.

It made me remember when I learned to take things a day at a time and to look only at “what is” and “what’s next.”

It made me miss my Mom and relive those days.

Sometimes I still cry.

Embracing The Muddling

Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas

The year after Mom died, “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” became my holiday theme.  Not surprisingly, as the Holidays draw near again, it’s resurfacing for me.

Husband and I watched The Family Stone last week during a cheap-skate date (dinner and a movie in, free babysitter–gotta love that!).  I’d kind of forgotten that it had the whole ‘terminally ill woman spends Christmas with her family’ theme going on with it.  I’d never seen it before.

I would have been fine with the whole thing if “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” hadn’t been prominently featured in the film.  I really would have.  But there was Judy Garland singing her heart out, crying those beautiful vintage tears and bringing me back to reflect on the Muddling of it all.

“Someday soon we all will be together, if the fates allow….  Until then we’ll have to muddle through somehow….”  (I’ve quoted that line here before….  It’s a recurring theme, what can I say?)

I laid there that night, after we watched the movie, after I heard the song that packs such an emotional punch for me and all I could think was how prominent the concept of “muddling” has been to us.  And I cried and bawled and wailed, and poor Husband didn’t know what to do with me.

Muddling.  I feel like my whole marriage with Husband has been muddling.  Not because of Husband of course.  Our marriage has played out against the backdrop of a Navy lifestyle, the death of my mother, five grandparents, and several other significant friends and family members.  We’ve experienced the stress of raisingn two young children while enduring the yo-yoing of separating and coming together again with deployments and detachments.    Maybe it’s because I’m codependent and I like to create my own chaos, or maybe it’s because life has really been bits and pieces of chaos.  I just always feel like we’re muddling.  Just doing what we can to make the best of it.  Trying to embrace the beauty and the mess of it all. 

This year, the mess is me.  It’s us.  The mess is our healing.  The mess is Husband and I trying to reconnect as Husband and wife in the wake of all the previous mudding.  It’s the exhaustion and the frustration and the stress and the joy and the exquisite tenderness and the pure amazement of raising our two beautiful children. 

Muddling feels something akin to just surviving.  And my ideal is to do more than survive, but to really live.

But it occurs to me that maybe muddling IS living.  It is part of living life abundant.  Of feeling the heights of the joy and the depths of the pain.  Of facing the messiness that is you. 

It’s not that all has been joyless.  There has been much joy–exquisite joy.  Discovery, and abundant love, and wonder and amazement.  It’s not that the difficulties we’ve faced have been so extraordinary.  We have a very ordinary set of troubles.  We do.

This Christmas song that I love so much isn’t about muddling.  It’s a song about looking forward with hope despite less than ideal circumstances…  and living fully in the joy of the present in the meantime.   It’s not about having joy because of an absence of muddling, but about holding onto the light of now in the midst of it.

I want to learn to, or remember to, or continue to joyfully embrace my muddling.  I want to continue to look forward with hope…  to days of being together with people that I love, both on this side of Heaven and beyond…  to days of feeling together and not like an unraveling mess…  Days of sinking in solidly to the feel of my husband’s arms around me without a burden of cares and worries and disconnections between us.  In the mess and the muddling in the meantime, I want to grasp the reality of the joy of right now with both hands and hold on tight.

Sad

I don’t even know what to type about life right now.  Certainly it’s been worse.  Certainly it’s been better.  Certainly in the grand scheme of things it’s just normal bumps and bruises and heartaches. 

Have I any right to be this exhausted by these normal little shake ups?  I’m sure that it only feels like we’ve had more than our share in our first five years as a family…  like they always stack themselves up.  I’m sure it only feels like I’m constantly trying to turn myself inside out to be all the places that I need to be. 

This is how it is for everyone right?  Maybe we really haven’t been through all that much in the past five years since we’ve been married?  The things we’ve survived haven’t been that extraordinary, and it’s probably just my imagination that the volume of it has been so great.  It’s just that I’m slow to recuperate.  And that I have a martyr complex or something. 

I really want my Gram to hang in there for just 13 more days so the girls and I can see her. 

I really hate that one of my best friends is moving to the other side of the country.

I really ache for my Daddy knowing that HE is now dealing with extra health concerns of his own AND our wonderful Nonna is having chest pains on top of all of this.  And I want to be there with him, with them.  I want to beam myself there.  And I also want to be here….  To do the things that lie in front of us as a family.

And so I’m sad, and worried, and anxious.  And of course it feels like deja vu.  It feels like we’re always doing this.  But really it’s the reality of life in a fallen world.  It’s the normal bumps and bruises of life.  It’s like this for everyone right?

I guess it doesn’t matter if it’s like this for everyone…  Right now it’s us going through it.  And all we can do is do the best we can with it.

Pray for my Gram.  Pray for us.  Pray that if she has to leave us soon that we can get back in time to see her, and kiss her silken cheek, and tell her that we love her. 

And pray that my no-more-battered-than-ordinary heart might be encouraged…  might be buoyed…  might weather these normal sorts of bumps and bruises with strength and grace, maintaining it’s tenderness, and not shrinking back in these windstorms that come to us all.

3 Things on My Mind

1.  Husband’s air wing lost a pilot last weekend in a mid-air collision.  Husband attended his first memorial for a fallen comrade this week.  Two planes collided mid-air during a routine training mission over the desert of Nevada where this current detachment is.  The two pilots in the other plane ejected and sustained minor injuries.  There wasn’t time for this gentleman to do so before impact.  He was the father of a two year old, and he lost his life two days before Father’s Day.

I think the thing that gets me most is that it was on a training mission.  Despite the relative ‘safety’ of being in the Navy compared to being army infantry…  Despite the odds that are truly in our favor….  every time that Husband leaves the shadow of, “What if I get that knock on the door” comes over me.  Maybe it’s just because he’s so far out of my sight.   Most of the time I brush it off and tell myself how ridiculous I’m being.  But anything can happen.  Anytime.  Husband could be hit by a beer truck walking off a base, he could get bitten by a rattlesnake on a hike during his off time, or the dangerous nature of Husband’s job–being on the flightline around planes landing and taking off, climbing up on top of slippery birds–could catch up with him at any moment–and I could live that scenario.  A wife on the other side of the country (the rest of the Airwing is based in Virginia), lived that reality this weekend because of a training mission right here over US soil.  And that haunts me. 

2.  My 92 year old Grandma fell this week.  She laid in her tub for 36 hours before her Home Health Aide showed up to take care of some normal tasks, found her there, and called an ambulance (that is the part that hurts my heart the most).  She didn’t break any bones, and despite the ordeal her health seems to remain relatively stable.  But she will be in the hospital for a few more days, and will be moving into a nursing home after that.  We’ve been so lucky to have had her with us for so long, and for her to have been able to live alone for so long.  It will be a very hard transition for her to go into a nursing home, however. 

3.  The daughter of some dear friends of ours will be having heart surgery next Monday.  We met M&K when Husband and M were in A School in Pensacola.  K and I randomly met while doing laundry in the laundry facility of our apartment complex.  We both kept bugging our husbands about whether or not they knew one another, and eventually they met and became friends.  We got orders to come to the Northwest at the same time, and they graciously suffered through some pretty awful homemade cake and ice cream during our first months here, and became some very good friends to us before they left the Navy last summer.

While Little Miss and I were living in IL after Mom’s illness, K had a little baby girl.  She is a gorgeous, bright, active, and sweet little thing, and while they lived here she and Little Miss were great playmates.  Before she was born, she was diagnosed with Hypoplastic Left Heart Syndrome.    Before she was six months old, Little S underwent 2 open-heart surgeries.  She’ll have another heart surgery on Monday, which, if I understand correctly is outside of the normal surgery schedule for HLHS, but will hopefully improve S’s heart function.  We worry with them, and we pray for them.

Positive Shmositive

You might have noticed by now that I am, on some basic level, greatly offended anytime I get the impression that someone is trying to tell me how I should be feeling.  I don’t know when this mindset became mine.  Even now it seems I’m always battling the, “But this is how I’m supposed to feel,” issues in my life (hello–Postpartum Depression anyone?), but I know that during and after my Mom’s fight with Lung Cancer, I struggled with it all a lot. 

Someone posted this transcript on the Lung Cancer board that I still participate on:  Positive Thinking Does Not Help Fight Cancer.  Now, we have some incredibly positive people over there.  At LCSC Hope almost always gets the last word.  Immediately the question was raised, “What’s this study matter?  I don’t have anything to LOSE by being positive.  I can only gain that way.”  I see this line of thinking, and I agree!  I really do!  But I guess I say, “This news isn’t for you then.  Obviously you’ve got the positive attitude.” 

This study IS good news for those who don’t always land in a ‘positive thinking frame of mind’ naturally.  This message to always be positive brings with it an unspoken message:  If your treatment fails, if the cancer gets the upper hand, you didn’t fight hard enough.  You weren’t positive enough.  You weren’t as great as a warrior if your battle against cancer lasted only 3 months, as the guy whose went on to live another 30 years.  It’s another game of ‘blame the patient.’

This article in the New York Times very eloquently gets that point accross.

One reason this all hits so close to home for me (aside from my own personal struggles with ‘how I should be feeling’ messages), is the emotions I was left to deal with after my Mom’s very short battle with Lung Cancer.

When my Mom was diagnosed I told her, “Mama…  You are meaner than this cancer.  You can beat this.”  I didn’t understand it then, but she looked at me a little bit bewildered and said, “Everybody keeps saying that.  I don’t understand that.  I don’t FEEL courageous.  I don’t FEEL brave.”  Early in her journey I can remember wanting to ‘infuse her with hope’ and ‘help her to see how many things she had to live for.’  What I failed to see, what I failed to have compassion toward Mom in during those moments, was where she was at.  She was scared shitless.  She was in pain.  Her body was being taken over by a monster that she couldn’t control no matter how much gumption she had or how many positive thinking mantras she repeated to herself. 

After she died only 8 months after diagnosis, the battle terminology always got to me.  I would hear someone congratulate a long term survivor by saying, “You’re such a warrior!”  And I would think–My Mama was a FIGHTER.  Did she not fight hard enough?  Was she NOT a warrior? 

And then it dawned on me.  The men who died in the first minutes of Normandy weren’t any less warriors than those who fought that day and went on to survive til the end of World War II.  They were simply in a battle so big, and so brutal that it was inevitable that it would end in tragedy for some. 

My mother was no less a warrior than the person who beats cancer for 2 years or 4 or 20.  She was just hit with a demon of a disease that moved too quickly and too fiercely for any amount of positive thinking to sway.

So I guess the bottom line is, whenever you encounter a person with cancer, be careful with your language.  It’s true, there is NOTHING to lose with positive thinking, as long as it’s not forced stoicism.  In a battle as all consuming as cancer, a person needs permission to simply be where they are.

And in the larger sense, we all need that.  We’re all fighting our own battles day in and day out.  Some are huge, some aren’t so big.  But we’re not always going to be able to paste on a smile and trudge through the sewage with smiles on our faces.  Sometimes, we’re going to need to crumple up and cry.  We ALL need permission to simply be where we are.  To feel what we feel.  And to know that our problems are not always a direct result of our lack of positivity in a given moment. 

We are where we are, and sometimes that’s where we need to be.

Turning a Corner

Despite my last couple of days being a little bit ‘blah,’ I think I’ve turned a corner on the PPD front.  I am so grateful for that.

It seems like a few different things have shaken loose and suddenly I find myself on an upswing instead of a down.

For this cynical, jaded, faithless believer, I was surprised to find that the first breakthrough was spiritual.  (This might begin to sound a little Christianesey.  I’m not typically a Christianesey kind of girl, and I know that not all of my readers appreciate Christianesiness.  Hang in there.)  It occurred to me while I was reading some great stuff by John Eldredge, that there is an enemy of my heart.  There is someone who wishes for me to be taken out…  To be rendered useless and thus incapable of being truly who I am as Val and of doing those things that Val is truly meant to do.  Suddenly I saw so very clearly that I was being beaten up.  I saw myself just being sucker-punched and pummelled over and over and over again by lies:  I’m stupid, I’m a bad Mom, I’m a bad wife, I’ll never get it together, I’m worthless, I’m powerless, I’m incapable, No one cares, I am a burden, I cannot depend on anyone, I am meant to handle life alone, and on and on and on…. 

Seeing this clicked so many things into place.  First of all, I realized that this truly was a battle.  This wasn’t just something I could sit down and skate through.  I had to stand up and fight.  I suddenly had compassion for myself and my situation for the first time in a long time.  I was being BEATEN.  Brutally BEATEN.  No wonder life felt so awful.  You don’t blame the victim of a beating.  You don’t shake her and say, “Why are you bleeding?  Why can’t you just get it together you dummy?”  You realize that brutality was done to this person and you see her with compassion.  For the first time, I was able to see myself that way.  Not as a Mom and a woman who just couldn’t hack it, but as someone who had sustained a brutality to the soul and to the spirit. 

And if I was being  beaten, there was a reason.  Something or someone wanted to neutralize me.  If something or someone was fighting so hard to take me out, then surely that meant I was WORTH something.  Surely it MEANS there is SOMETHING in me to contribute, to bring forth into this world.  The darkness at work in the world has been working to extinguish the light within me.  Call it good verses evil, call it The Spirit at work in me verses the one at work in the world.  Whatever you call it, something clicked.  Since then, I’ve been soaking deeply in this paradigm shift finally understanding that my heart is good.  And firmly believing in a DEEP way in the goodness of God’s heart toward me, and His desire to be involved in my life.  Pretty heady stuff. 

The other stuff has been simple technical tweakings:  The sun is out more.  How I glory in the sunshine!  I love the colors it brings to the world.  My favorite thing lately has been soaking in the warmness of it.  And then shortly after the crazy God-stuff changes, I had a slight change with my meds–nothing more than my pharmacy changing manufacturers, and suddenly the ‘lightbulb’ that came on earlier in my journey came on again.

So I’m turning a corner.  And I’m experiencing more joy in my life than I have in ages.  Literally.  I feel better in a way that I haven’t since long before Mom died or the whole Navy adventure began.  I feel like a whole different person.  And I love it.

Life is turning a corner too.  This week will mark the beginning of our last longish stretch of Husband being away.  And there is a good chance that it will be THE last stretch of awayness for a very long time.  We’re heading into Shore Duty.  For so long I felt so guilty about that…  That our Sea Duty days were over.  That it wasn’t going to be US doing the deployments.  I felt like *we* hadn’t given enough.  Like our time doing deployments and detachments weren’t worthy enough sacrifices.  I’m beginning to realize, though, that shore duty is a built in part of a Naval career.  And it’s ok for us to experience it too.  We’ve done separations for five years.  We will have spent a full two of them apart.  It’s time for our family to experience stability.  It’s time for us to have some togetherness.  It’s time for Husband and I to learn how to function as a unit without a looming separation changing the dynamics up constantly.  After three more years and this stint of Shore Duty, our plan at this point is to get out.  This is our stepping stone to civilian life.  Things are really changing. 

And it is good.  I pray that it will continue to be good.  I pray that no matter the circumstances, that we are on the cusp of a sweet chapter of our lives:  One full of learning, and growing, and stretching, and one full of this abiding joy that I’m just beginning to rediscover.

What Does Postpartum Depression Look Like?

After speaking with another woman who has been through PPD yesterday, I got to thinking about what people think that postpartum depression looks like.  It’s talked about…  Sure–but generally in extremes.  We hear crackpot quotes by Tom Cruise.  We think of Andrea Yates or at least of women who absolutely can’t function.  I hurt for the women living through the extremes of PPD and I know that is the experience of some, but my experience was different.

When I thought about PPD before my diagnosis I thought of a woman who couldn’t get dressed, who stayed in bed every day, who couldn’t function, and cried at the drop of a hat.  When I took the screening tests at Well-baby checks, I didn’t necessarily test in a range that was alarming (which is probably partly because I’m good at taking tests). 

And so I assumed that I couldn’t have postpartum depression.  I blamed the way I was feeling on other things:  My husband’s impending deployment, the two-year anniversary of Mom’s death, the grief that splashed up at me as a result of having a baby in my arms that Mom would never see and reliving the memories of Little Miss’s first four months superimposed on Mom’s last four months.  Then I blamed it on the deployment, and the difficulty of parenting an infant and a toddler by myself for 3 months. 

And then those things faded into the background.  Husband came home.  I got into the ‘easier’ part of the calendar that was less filled with trigger points for missing Mom…  And I still felt “off.” 

But I could function.  I got up and got dressed every day.  I hardly cried.  I ordered my eating habits for probably the first time ever so I neither lost weight or gained weight because of the depression.  I managed to keep up with my commitments.  I even spearheaded a few new efforts in our church, and began leading a ministry for Moms.  If I could do all of that, surely I wasn’t depressed, right?

So was it real?  I asked myself that a lot. 

It was.  It is.

For me, PPD looked (looks) like this:

• Feeling off.  Just off.
• Feeling disconnected–from my life, from my kids, from my husband
• Feeling like I’m in a ‘fog.’
• Lacking joy.  Lacking joy in being a Mom, in little things that I normally love, in life in general.
• Guilt, guilt, and more guilt. 
• Just feeling down
• Having my ‘default’ attitude be negative and pessimistic rather than fairly optimistic
• Wanting to run away.  To sleep, to hide, to curl up in a ball.
• Shrinking when my children cried.
• Inability to focus
• “Escaping” often.  To the computer, to phone calls, to books, to anything to get me out of my ‘real life’ and my feelings.
• Snapping at my children very, very easily
• Feeling overwhelmed all the time
• Feeling like no matter what I just couldn’t get it all together.

Interestingly enough, I felt different immediately.  I can remember feeling very distressed in the Labor and Delivery room after Baboo was born because she felt like a stranger.  I didn’t know what to do with her.  I was so shaky I was afraid to hold her.  I couldn’t figure out how to move my own body.  I didn’t feel right.  After Little Miss’s birth this tremendous euphoric feeling of empowerment took over me.  After Baboo’s birth I just felt fuzziness and confusion and exhaustion. 

I wouldn’t say that I had trouble bonding with my youngest…  But for certain, those first couple of months especially, the only time I felt anywhere near happy or content was when I was holding her.  I can remember just wanting to burrow into a spot on the couch with her snuggled in my arms to breathe her in and do nothing else.  Everything else seemed like too much. I just wanted to hide away and snuggle her and pretend that nothing else existed.

There is still such a stigma attached to PPD.  And so much guilt involved.  Plus there seems to be a very fuzzy understanding of the spectrum of ways that it can present itself.  Not everyone is Andrea Yates.  Not everyone ceases to shower and cries all the time.  But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a problem.  That doesn’t mean that a woman shouldn’t seek help. 

So, just in case someone out there is looking for someone’s story to relate to, as I was…  I wanted to share what it looked like for me.  It took reading two or three accounts of different people whose experiences sounded like mine for me to realize that I needed help too. 

Should you be that person, help is out there.  A good resource to start with is Postpartum Support International.  You can overcome this.  Motherhood doesn’t have to be like this.  You can break through the fog and reclaim your joy.  I believe that, and I’m reaching for it.

And as a postscript, as I was thinking over this post I happened to go read the latest post at Finally Getting Somewhere.  She relates her experience with depression and postpartum depression as well (And it’s not surprising to me that we both happened to do this today…  We seem to be in some sort of weird parallel universe at times ;)). 

And as a second postscript:  I know that I have some special ladies reading who are expecting kiddos any moment, or who have just had a new little bundle.  I hope that reading posts about  PPD doesn’t scare you.  That is not my intent.  Be aware, but please don’t worry.

The Goodbye Days

Husband left this a.m. for another detachment.  As detachments go, this one is a longish one.  He’ll be out for a month (Detachments are ‘short’ trips that are taken, usually in preparation for deployments).  Taking him to the air terminal always stings even if he’s only going to be gone for a couple of weeks.  It’s even more heart-wrenching the older Little Miss gets.  Each time she understands a little more deeply what the “gone” part means, but she still has very little concept of WHY Daddy has to be gone.  The rapid-fire comings and goings of the work-up cycles make it even more confusing for my babies and can be just plain emotionally confusing and exhausting for all of us.

The goodbyes are ALWAYS bittersweet.  So much love is shown as you sneak in every last hug and kiss and hand-squeeze that you possibly can.  The tenderness of it all wraps around you and brings you that much more comfort when the goodbye actually happens, but also that much more pain for what you are already missing.

I hate the goodbye days.

Still, they are strangely normal for us.  So, after dropping Husband off, we headed into town for a little retail therapy.  We all got new books.  Little Miss got new PJs and…  We might have accidentally gotten some jelly beans too. 

The second part of the “Goodbye Day” wasn’t so much about me.  A friend of mine–my very first friend out here in Washington–had a little baby girl this morning.  It was a “Hello Day” for her, but also a “Goodbye Day.”  Her husband deployed today.  He missed the birth of their precious baby girl by mere hours. 

I’ve thought and thought and thought of her today.  And prayed and prayed and prayed.  To have your husband miss the birth of a child and the first months of her life is terrible always, but to have him miss it by a few measly hours just seems like a cruel trick of life. 

My friend is amazing.  I was able to visit her today.  She is revelling in the preciousness of her new baby girl, and she says that even though the circumstances were so much less than they should be, that she is happy for the blessing in her arms.

I hate goodbye days.  But we get through them.  We get through the days that come after them.  And so many times we get through those days because we have these beautiful blessings to spur us on and to remind us to laugh and to distract us from our own loneliness.  And whether they come in a month or seven months, I hope that the “Welcome Home Days” are quick in coming.

More Next Location Frustration

Well…  we didn’t get those orders to Japan.  Or to the other four places that we put in for.

We’ve hit a whole lot of SNAFUs with the whole orders process.  To explain more is simply too laborious. 

But basically we’re down to the wire.  And the people who are supposed to be helping Husband aren’t. 

It’s very frustrating.  Very anxiety producing.

So…  we may go through part of another deployment (our third in the five years he’s been in btw) after this long string of work-ups and be done with the Navy for good.

We may work back channels and stay here for three more years.

A miracle could occur and we might find some decent orders.

And basically that’s the same place we’ve been for months.  Except  now we REALLY NEED to get answers.  Now we are out of time.  And now all those people who told us we had plenty of time are officially wrong.  And all of those people who were supposed to help us all along but didn’t still aren’t. 

I just. want. to. know.  When I know I can start to wrap my head around it.  For a while Husband was gung-ho for getting out….  So I started getting comfortable with that idea.  Then that didn’t look like such a good idea.  Then it looked like we were going to stay here.  At first I was disappointed with that prospect, but then I started making peace with it.  Then it sounded like we might get to transfer somewhere new, which….  bizarrely excited and energized me. 

Now we have no clue which way this thing is gonna go.  None.  Zippo.

Husband and I are both on edge about it.  He is so frustrated he doesn’t want to talk about it.  I am so anxious I need to talk about it.  That doesn’t really work out so well.

But…  eventually we will get answers.  They might not be answers that we like, but we will get them one way or another.  And then I CAN wrap my head around it.  And we will do what comes next.  Whatever that may be.

I’m just ready to know.