Expectation

We saw the specialist yesterday and he showed us on his portable ultrasound machine where the blood clot still resides. The star of the show was moving about, opening and closing its mouth and flexing its wee little toes. The doctor flicked off the machine, leaned back in his chair and smiled at us. The panic in my chest certainly did not match his calm demeanor.

Andrew and I tag-teamed him with a gunfire of questions and concerns and his response can be summed up like this:

1) The baby is healthy and safe in its amniotic sac, and so we have nothing to grieve.

2) While most women with subchorionic hematomas (blood clots) go on to deliver full-term healthy babies, some do not. The blood can irritate the uterus and sometimes deliver the baby much too early.

3) There is nothing that we can do to control the blood clot (besides take obvious precautions). He looked at us in the eyes and told us to "let go." To stay connected to our baby just as we are connected to our other children, but to let go of the control that we really don't have. And to stop grieving something that hasn't even happened yet.

I guess they use the term "expecting" for pregnancy for a reason: we carry the baby and grow it and our accompanying body to gargantuan proportions until the baby is ready to breathe on its own. We expect these things, because this is how life most often plays out. Yes, there is tragedy, but it's not what *usually* happens. We don't cry in our cereal every morning, fearing the death of our 13, 11, 10, 8 and 7 year-olds (dear lord, that's a lot of kids), so why would we mourn the healthy person inside of me?

We shouldn't. We have our moments when our knees buckle in fear but we vow to hold on to the expectation that all six of our children will live, and be filled with our love.

"Love has nothing to do with what you are expecting to get - only with what you're expecting to give - which is everything."

Katharine Hepburn

Hold On

One lazy teenage summer, a group of us packed into a boat and took turns pulling each other around the lake on an inner tube. With our bellies full of ketchup chips and toaster strudels, one by one, we hopped onto the tube and trusted the driver with our lives for five minutes of delicious torture. Tyler was in charge of my ride and he spared no wave. He showed no mercy. Screaming, I spent every second in that tube debating which was worse: letting go to signal him to stop (and most assuredly causing him to speed up in malicious rebellion) or holding on for dear life until the spine-twisting, spleen-chattering ride was over.

I didn't have to wait too long because I was quickly cartwheeled over the edge of the tube and into the cold water at lightening-speed. Unfortunately, I hit the water in such a compromising position that water was forced into places where it should not be. I climbed back into the boat, eyes burning with tears. I punched Ty in the shoulder and sunk down into my seat and vowed to forgive him never.

On Saturday, we almost lost our baby. I stood between Freddy and Andrew while we watched Kylah's soccer game, and I started hemorrhaging. One second I was fine, the next I had blood pooling into my running shoes. As I waited on the ground for the ambulance, Freddy sat beside my head and I held his hand. With the very same strength that was birthed at each child's conception, I faced him and told him that I will be okay. That the baby probably won't be okay (Freddy nodded...he understood) but that I wasn't going anywhere. He hopped into the back of the ambulance with me and for the second time in his 11 years of life, we listened to the scream of the siren and road the ambulance together.

Despite the rocking boat and tumultuous waves, this baby in my womb remained safe and warm, healthy and vigorous. We rejoiced through sobs of relief. We were confused and sore, but this baby lived. And not only lived, but lived well.

We never really seem to know what kind of ride we're jumping on, do we? Until we're pulled along. We hold onto each other for dear life when the waves are hitting hard and then when we're deposited onto the beach, crumpled and compromised, we look up and squeeze the people we love, who have chosen to ride it out with us.

I'm thankful for my best friend, a man whom I didn't think I could ever love more deeply but do. Oh, I do. For our children, who give us a strength that we would never be able to construct on our own. For our friends and family who held us and cried with us. And for this baby, who is teaching me all over again, about love and letting go.

Sometimes it seems the smaller the gift, the more powerful the message.

The "F" Word

When Jason and I were first married we made a pact to never mention the word "divorce" and if we ever had to talk about it we'd refer to it as "the 'D' word." Looking back, and I can only guess, I'd say that our pact was fear-based rather than founded on the security of our relationship. Like how when we were kids, we'd ask Jesus to forgive our sins each and every night for fear of dying in our sleep and waking up naked at the judgement gates with our sins on the big screen. Was I sorry that by throwing Wes' pants into the pile of sawdust puke I'd be burning the bridges of friendship? No. I just wanted to make sure that me and my pants weren't being thrown into the fiery furnace.

Ignoring the urge to throw up and swallowing back the vomit won't stop the purge. Like, I thought I was done my morning sickness phase as the last time I threw up was about two weeks ago but just this morning my orange juice met porcelain. And I always believed with my whole heart that I wouldn't be a divorce statistic. I'm a non-conformist. Fifty percent of marriages end in divorces? Fuck that, not me! I dug my heels in, but into the wrong foundation.

Fear sucks.

I came into work yesterday with puffy eyes and cry-face. I told Bonnie through pathetic gaspy sobs that I had listened to Lee Ann Womack's song "I Hope You Dance" on the way to work bawling my eyes out, thinking about my kids. It's these lines that get me every time:

I hope you never fear those mountains in the distance, 

Never settle for the path of least resistance.

Living might mean taking chances but they're worth taking, 

Loving might be a mistake but it's worth making.

I think our biggest obstacle in life is fear. I really do. It's not death that kills us. I mean, ultimately death has the last word but it's fear that snuffs our life out before death can even touch us. We're so scared of failure that we don't even look up. We're all just heads down, hands tied behind our backs, two feet in the grave. As if by not looking up at the climb we can pretend that it doesn't even exist. Meanwhile, we're left behind while everyone else digs their heels into the side of the mountain to get to the top to enjoy the view.

I want our kids to shake off fear and face their mountains. Of course I don't want them to feel the pain of the climb. But even more so, I don't want them to miss out on the view at the top. If I truly want this for them then I need to be an example of a fearless leader. Trudging through uncharted territory, often messy with sawdust puke, we'll eventually get to the top. And then we'll all look back down at what we went through, and it will all seem so small from way up here. 

So small from way up here. 

Everybody Dance Now

My baby belly is starting to pooch out a bit so that people are starting to clue in that it might not be the result of too many post-run Coronas at the river with Lora. And that maybe Andrew and I have been up to a little something or other.

It's a bit funny being in our situation. You wouldn't really know unless you're in it, what it's like. We know people who got divorced and then found love again and had babies together, but there's not a whole lot of us. Whenever we do catch eyes with "our people" we tend to glom onto them the way fat girls do at a freshman dance. It's just nice to be understood, right? To be related to. To relate.

People in our immediate circle obviously know our whole situation and so it's easy to just be around them. But often times we run into people whom we haven't seen in a while and I swear it can take us anywhere from 20 minutes to 3 hours to catch them up on everything. Now that my belly is baby-ized, it's become quite the information overload. I found the quickest way to break the ice is to pump my fist in the air and chant, "Jer-ry! Jer-ry!" and then they laugh and relax and we can all catch up with ease.

What we have often said is that we wish we could walk around with a billboard tied around our necks that give people all our basic information so that we can keep eating our dinner or doing whatever we were doing before we ran into them.

But one day something totally different happened. About a month ago I ran into a girl I knew quite well in university. Anna had NO CLUE about anything so I totally thought I'd be giving her a bit of a shock. Know what? She wasn't shocked. Even though her story was nothing like mine she still nodded along with me. Relating, understanding, connecting. She told me a story of her own that shocked me more than mine, and I learned a lesson that day. Again. That we ALL carry emotional billboards around our necks and that we can stay isolated if we really want to with our heads down, faces full, or we can look up and pull up a few chairs and invite other stories in.

I didn't need Anna's story to match mine in order for me to connect with her. Connection just naturally happened when we told our own stories.

Sometime last year Andrew and I went to a real estate awards ceremony and after dinner there was a dance. We watched a super large lady rock out on the dance floor. She owned that space like whip cream on pie. Her limbs were seemingly everywhere all at once and it was a miracle that nobody got carried out in a stretcher. If she waited on the sidelines until enough big ladies agreed to dance out there with her, she'd be waiting a long frigging time. She would have missed out on the dance!

We will share our stories and we'll listen to yours. Even if it takes 3 hours, and even if somebody gets carried out in a stretcher. Because Andrew and I would way rather live a little than sit on the sidelines. Let's cut a rug.