It has been so much harder than I expected. I assumed since we have been through losing a child we'd be old pros and breeze through this. I assumed since she was so small so would be the pain.
The days are long and exhausting. At night I am able to lay my head down to sleep. But the wee hours have to be navigated with caution. DH find comfort in touching my skin in the night. But for me that touch is enough to set off a landmine that can decimate sleep. I try to crush the thoughts with a pillow and can usually find slumber again. But mornings... Mornings are hell. The reality of living without her is my alarm clock. I can't hit snooze. It doesn't allow for a few extra minutes. It's deafening and demands immediate attention. Any extra minutes spent trying to ignore it causes sickness and anxiety. So the day starts. It physically feels like prison. Like this oppressive fog. It keeps me from understanding spoken words. It keeps me from forming words of my own. I can read my Bible but nothing is retained. The short term memory has me running in circles. Then there's moments when I find myself on the right side of the prison walls. I've found a task or purpose that allows a few minutes of freedom. There's fear of going anywhere. The landmines outside the prison. Running into someone who doesn't know we've lost and having to explain, running in to someone who does know and receiving condolences. Having a completely clueless person ask if your having a good day or if your doing anything fun. Do you face it and get it over with? Do you hide behind the prison walls until you're a little stronger? Worship music seems to bring more comfort than the scriptures that I can't comprehend. But inside the prison walls there's so much pressure and noise any more isn't welcome. In the moments I find myself on the other side of the walls the music can offer a little more free time but can occasionally come with an unexpected landmine of its own. Grief is an oppressive warden. I know I'll get out. And I know I'll be changed. It's always brought good fruit before but I always fear it's just going to make me so weird I'll never be compatible with other people again. I'm already so freaking weird. After Jeffrey died I just wasn't the same person and couldn't relate to the same people. Will I have to find new people again? For now hearing their troubles seems so rediculous and insensitive for them to even think of telling me about them. But how selfish is that? What are they supposed to say? I get mad when they talk and hurt when they don't. I want to be left alone but so desperately want someone to reach me. To be able to stick out their hand and actually touch the place I'm in. It's so lonely here. Please help.
Saturday, June 30, 2018
Friday, June 29, 2018
Losing a child
There are so many ways to lose a child. And then even with similar circumstances, the story is unique for each individual that endures it. Here's my mom story. Not to be exploited. Not to bring attention to myself. But to try to put into words what I'm carrying in hopes of calming my own spirit and maybe that of someone who stumbles on this post. It's kind of hard to start because where it begins I've had to hide and repress. Most people have children they can talk about and brag on. I have those. Then I have others. This is mainly about the others. The ones that it makes others uncomfortable to talk about. No one knows what to say. It just makes things awkward and they come to exist only in your head and your heart. But I'm tired of hiding them there. Some days it's too heavy to carry alone. I know there are thousands if not millions of Mama's that can relate to one or more of these stories. I just want you to know you aren't alone. You don't have to feel shame, loneliness, hurt, fear, anger, resentment, guilt. But it's okay if you do. It's also okay to get to a place where you feel okay, even joyful, peaceful. You can laugh again, go on vacation again, love again, enjoy the sunshine and birds singing, the wind, the waves. And it's okay to feel every bit of that all in the same day. You do you Mama! Don't let anyone tell you you're doing it wrong. Don't let them say you should be over it already. They mean well. But they don't know. This is your battle, your mountain and it's the biggest one there's ever been because it's happening to you right now. And sometimes you can't breathe, and sometimes you are lonely but don't want to talk to anyone, you want to stay busy but you don't want to go anywhere, the thoughts in your head are so loud you want to drown them out but any more noise would be overwhelming. Ugh where is the answer!? For me, the answer is always Jesus. And these babies missing from my arms are a large part of how I learned that answer. So here we go.
I was 16 for real. I was foolish for real. And I was in love, or so my adolescent heart said. But at that age I didn't know how to love myself, much less anyone else. I was about to go to an intense "Having your heart wander around outside your body 101" class though as I learned I was 16 and pregnant.
Talk about fear! And shame. Regret. Foolishness. And at the same time the miracle of life. The obvious answer was to go get an abortion. I was too young. I couldn't possibly let anyone find out. What would people think. I went to the clinic. Checked in. Sat down. Sick and overwhelmed by the atmosphere around me. The literature. The people. I left. I couldn't. Regardless of the circumstances, that was my baby in there. But now what? Turns out the adults around me didn't seem to have much more wisdom than I did. And honestly how could they. This wasn't their decision. Not their baby. Not a choice they had to live with. That coupled with my incredible stubbornness and the fact that I knew everything. (Did I mention I was 16?) Enter an angel of a counselor who would end up becoming one of my best friends and biggest role models. She allowed me to come into her office once a week and basically have an external internal dialog and then sometimes call her in a panic in the wee hours of the morning. She never told me what to do, never judged me, she just loved me and listened to me explore all the possibilities until I settled on the one I could live with. I decided to keep the baby. A girl. I thought up names. I bought clothes. I would have someone to love and love me back. We would be two peas in a pod and I would do anything for this baby girl that I already loved so much. I thought of how much I would work to support her....and how much time she would spend with a babysitter because of it. I thought of how much I'd Love her... But how she would grow up without a dad or at very least without parents that loved each other. But I'd be enough, right? But I knew how it was to have divorced parents, to have step parents, to be tossed around from family member to family member, add in a few day cares and baby sitters. I didn't want her to grow up like that. 💔 So I looked through files of parents looking to adopt. I wanted her to be an only child and not have to compete with natural siblings that would steal the attention from her. I wanted to meet them and I wanted to get pictures and updates. I settled on a beautiful couple that I knew would be perfect and I did what I thought was best for her. I delivered a beautiful baby girl. 7 lbs 8 oz. I held her and kissed her and told her how much I love her and handed her to someone else to raise. I went home with empty arms for the first time. But I was convinced I had done the right thing for her happiness.
Now looking back I can't say if I did the right thing or not. Unfortunate circumstances led to her not being raised how I had hoped for her and it has caused me much sorrow and guilt. I could let that eat me up, and have from time to time. I wish things had been different but it's hard to say I wish I would have done something different because of how profoundly this shaped my life. I had quickly grown from a clueless 16 year old aimlessly going through life and honestly not headed in the right direction, to a driven 17 year old, while still selfish and foolish, who knew what she wanted in life. She made me want to be a better person. I wanted to be someone she would be proud of one day if she ever wanted to meet me. And I wanted to be a stay at home mom and to give my kids a kind of consistency and stability that I had never known. And here's where Jesus starts coming in. I had a great desire to go to church but was also painfully shy and had no idea where to start looking. And keeping with the theme of good coming out of trials, I was having car trouble and met a guy who said he'd fix my car if I'd sit next to him in church. Little did I know at that moment that would become a lifelong commitment. Within a month I had given my heart to Jesus and within 3 months was married. We both came from childhoods that were not the most stable. And both very much desired a normal stable family life so we set out to create one. He supported my desire to stay at home and raise babies so they would never be shuffled around. I was 18 and he was 16 and off we went. A year into our marriage we had a baby girl. Throughout the pregnancy he seemed tolerable to me comparing it to my first pregnancy but it became clear that he wanted to leave my baggage behind. It was shameful and had no place in our new life. So I did. It was hard for me, but really who could blame him? He didnt have the emotional attachment that I did or the ability to understand mine. He had only seen the hurt it caused me and why would anyone want to hang on to that?
Our new baby girl was healthy but the baggage I had of leaving my last baby at the hospital caused irrational fear of something happening to her. Thankfully that was never substantiated but was a struggle nonetheless.
2 and a 1/2 years later we had another beautiful healthy girl and we were still striving to create that stable home. We were faithful in church even teaching youth classes. He worked and I stayed home with our girls. I was pretty sure our family was complete and when we were about 22 and 24 I started pressuring him to get a vasectomy. I mean our second daughter came out with red hair and everyone know red means stop right!?
Then I turned up pregnant. Not planned. I was not too happy. I didn't think I could handle another one. But time went by and I fell in love with the new life growing inside of me just as I has with the others. We dreamed and made plans and I bounced in to see my Dr. at 12 weeks only to be stunned by the absence of a heartbeat. I was devastated. Completely taken by surprise. Why had no one ever told me that 1 in 4 pregnancies ends in a miscarriage? I mean I was young and healthy and why in the world would this happen to me!? My doctor told me the baby had stopped growing at 9 or 10 weeks. There was just a little jellybean on the ultrasound screen. I was too far along to pass the baby at home so he scheduled me for a d&c. I was a wreck and intantly went from being done having kids to wanting to get pregnant again right away to fill my empty arms that desperately yearned for a baby. But again dh and I found ourselves to be on opposite sides of the fence. He was thinking more that he never wanted to go through that again. So we didn't.
Years passed and I finally wore him down. We were a little older and it took a year or so before we were able to become pregnant. We welcomed a third little girl. We were 28 and 30 with our other girls being 8 and 10. Wow! Were we in for a change!? This was the physically hardest delivery and recovery for me I assume because it had been so long. I felt guilty for taking so much time away from the big girls to learn to care for a completely dependent baby again. This time we were definitely done!
But then as I was wrapping up a year of nursing (a time when I have never had to use bc) I found myself missing a period. Although I was a little nervous to tell dh, we were both excited to welcome one more. And oh how the excitement grew when we found out we were finally expecting a boy!!! I was so proud to give my husband a boy and what a boy he was. Entering the world at 10 lbs and 3 oz he was half grown and oh so handsome! We were all living our best life! And we're definitely done having kids now! I mean who needs more than 4 right? So dh went to get a vasectomy.
Then on January 2nd, 2011, I woke up with an unsettling feeling. Far beyond my worst nightmares had become a reality as I found our big healthy 17 month old son cold and lifeless in his crib. I can't even begin to describe that initial feeling nor the years that followed. Shock. Horror. Hopelessness. Panic. Guilt. But the one thing that shaped my life the most was the humbleness. I was so incredibly broken and humbled. I had realized how I had absolutely no control over life or death. I laid my baby boy down in the safety of his bed. IN HIS BED! Isn't that where every mother feels like her children are safe!? Life and death are in the hands of God and Him alone. No life can exist without him breathing breath into it and to each of those there is appointed a time to die. It was Jeffrey's time. That's it. It didn't matter how or why. I had to just accept it as my new reality.
So if I thought the miscarriage left me with empty arms, how much worse was this!? I went from being a stay at home mom of 4 kids to losing the one that still rode around on my hip all day. That feeling of loss was crippling. Thankfully, this time, my husband's heart was as empty as mine and he wanted to get his vasectomy reversed. Of course that's no easy process and there are no guarantees it will work. The physical aspect of that along with the detriment that grief had done to our bodies made it a long road. There was lot of waiting and a couple of early 6 week miscarriages. We thought our fertile days may be behind us. But, 3 years after our loss we welcomed another healthy baby girl into our home. At that time my husband was done but I wasn't so convinced. I still had that mentality that decision wasn't up to me. I have a terrible conviction about using any kind of bc and limiting what God wants to bless us with. But knowing he wasn't on board I struggled. One time a year for 3 years I became pregnant. Twice there was early spotting with an eventual miscarriage around 6 or 7 weeks. And then another one at 10 weeks. That was it. I had turned 40. My eggs weren't good anymore. At times I wondered if it was being irresponsible with my body by continuing to put it through this but it is still more natural than bc and I just can't find peace with any of the options or even just the general idea of taking it back into my hands. So I would resolve to just continue to endure an occasional miscarriage until my body quits releasing the eggs. And then it happened. We passed 6 weeks. No spotting. We passed 10 weeks. We heard and saw the heartbeat. We passed 12 weeks up and up. But just as it seemed all was good, I just had this feeling. My belly seemed to feel suddenly soft. Granted I definitely have fears after all the loss but something felt wrong. One Sunday while getting ready for church with a sick feeling all to similar to ones I've had before, I zipped my pants after using the bathroom. And then had a meltdown. I hadn't been zipping my pants. I had been using a belly band to cover the zipper but just of old habit I tried and succeeded. It may seem like a small thing but enough for me to head to the ER of the local women's hospital. The doppler and ultrasound confirmed my fears. The baby had stopped growing. Probably a week earlier at 15 1/2 weeks gestation. A d&c would be dangerous. Our best option would be to deliver the baby. Two days later I checked in to the hospital to deliver my stillborn child. The nurses, bless their hearts, were wonderful. I'm a naturally awkward person. And I like to know the answer to every question and this was no different. I wanted to know everything that was happening and was going to happen. I had Googled pictures of stillborn babies to know what to expect. I had sewn a blanket and a hat according to the approximate gestational age. The blanket was great especially not knowing whether to expect a boy or girl. I had just made white. The hats were not as functional. I had made them out of baby socks and while they were the perfect size I did not expect the body to be so gelatenous and not suseptible to adorning with a hat. They gave me a different thinner softer hat at the hospital that I personalized with a ribbon and flower. It was still not really easy to put or keep on. But just FYI consider white when making such things. 1. At such an early gestation gender is not easy to tell. I thought I delivered a boy but the nurses all said it was a girl. And 2. The whole process is SO overwhelming that all the cute patterns and colors can be too much stimulation for a mama. So they started me on some Cyatec pills for dialation and after arriving at 6 am I delivered almost 12 hours later at 5:37 p.m. If you have ever sent a kid to college or married one off, this is similar in that you go into it thinking it just has to be done. You prepare everything and then get to the "moment of delivery" and think Oh crap what have I done!!? As the contactions got more intense (they were never awful since my uterus was still relatively small) I found myself wanting to run away, to put everything back in, to somehow just calcify that little baby in there and carry it around forever. I panicked thinking I had felt it kick and had made a big mistake. Then my water broke and the contractions stopped. Total panic. And out she came, so quietly. The umbilical cord had been tangled around her little legs and neck. She just couldn't grow. No wonder I never felt a kick. She looked like a tiny sleeping Buddha in her little meditation pose. A face only a mother could love but oh how I love it. Pictures no one will ever want to see but I can't stop looking and again I find myself with empty arms and what most would call a rediculous desire to try again. When it goes wrong it's so devastating but when it goes right oh what joy. And I'm here to tell you in the midst of my pain. 3 days after delivering my sleeping angel. God is good. He is faithful. And he loves me! He's not my genie in a bottle. He's my God. He's my rock. He's my deliverer. And even though I don't understand, I trust. Even though my heart is crushed, I have peace. Even though all I can see is despair, I have hope. There will be more trials. Maybe or maybe not more babies. But no one can take away the one thing I need in life or death and that's simply Jesus. Please believe He is the same for you. It's the gospel truth!
I was 16 for real. I was foolish for real. And I was in love, or so my adolescent heart said. But at that age I didn't know how to love myself, much less anyone else. I was about to go to an intense "Having your heart wander around outside your body 101" class though as I learned I was 16 and pregnant.
Talk about fear! And shame. Regret. Foolishness. And at the same time the miracle of life. The obvious answer was to go get an abortion. I was too young. I couldn't possibly let anyone find out. What would people think. I went to the clinic. Checked in. Sat down. Sick and overwhelmed by the atmosphere around me. The literature. The people. I left. I couldn't. Regardless of the circumstances, that was my baby in there. But now what? Turns out the adults around me didn't seem to have much more wisdom than I did. And honestly how could they. This wasn't their decision. Not their baby. Not a choice they had to live with. That coupled with my incredible stubbornness and the fact that I knew everything. (Did I mention I was 16?) Enter an angel of a counselor who would end up becoming one of my best friends and biggest role models. She allowed me to come into her office once a week and basically have an external internal dialog and then sometimes call her in a panic in the wee hours of the morning. She never told me what to do, never judged me, she just loved me and listened to me explore all the possibilities until I settled on the one I could live with. I decided to keep the baby. A girl. I thought up names. I bought clothes. I would have someone to love and love me back. We would be two peas in a pod and I would do anything for this baby girl that I already loved so much. I thought of how much I would work to support her....and how much time she would spend with a babysitter because of it. I thought of how much I'd Love her... But how she would grow up without a dad or at very least without parents that loved each other. But I'd be enough, right? But I knew how it was to have divorced parents, to have step parents, to be tossed around from family member to family member, add in a few day cares and baby sitters. I didn't want her to grow up like that. 💔 So I looked through files of parents looking to adopt. I wanted her to be an only child and not have to compete with natural siblings that would steal the attention from her. I wanted to meet them and I wanted to get pictures and updates. I settled on a beautiful couple that I knew would be perfect and I did what I thought was best for her. I delivered a beautiful baby girl. 7 lbs 8 oz. I held her and kissed her and told her how much I love her and handed her to someone else to raise. I went home with empty arms for the first time. But I was convinced I had done the right thing for her happiness.
Now looking back I can't say if I did the right thing or not. Unfortunate circumstances led to her not being raised how I had hoped for her and it has caused me much sorrow and guilt. I could let that eat me up, and have from time to time. I wish things had been different but it's hard to say I wish I would have done something different because of how profoundly this shaped my life. I had quickly grown from a clueless 16 year old aimlessly going through life and honestly not headed in the right direction, to a driven 17 year old, while still selfish and foolish, who knew what she wanted in life. She made me want to be a better person. I wanted to be someone she would be proud of one day if she ever wanted to meet me. And I wanted to be a stay at home mom and to give my kids a kind of consistency and stability that I had never known. And here's where Jesus starts coming in. I had a great desire to go to church but was also painfully shy and had no idea where to start looking. And keeping with the theme of good coming out of trials, I was having car trouble and met a guy who said he'd fix my car if I'd sit next to him in church. Little did I know at that moment that would become a lifelong commitment. Within a month I had given my heart to Jesus and within 3 months was married. We both came from childhoods that were not the most stable. And both very much desired a normal stable family life so we set out to create one. He supported my desire to stay at home and raise babies so they would never be shuffled around. I was 18 and he was 16 and off we went. A year into our marriage we had a baby girl. Throughout the pregnancy he seemed tolerable to me comparing it to my first pregnancy but it became clear that he wanted to leave my baggage behind. It was shameful and had no place in our new life. So I did. It was hard for me, but really who could blame him? He didnt have the emotional attachment that I did or the ability to understand mine. He had only seen the hurt it caused me and why would anyone want to hang on to that?
Our new baby girl was healthy but the baggage I had of leaving my last baby at the hospital caused irrational fear of something happening to her. Thankfully that was never substantiated but was a struggle nonetheless.
2 and a 1/2 years later we had another beautiful healthy girl and we were still striving to create that stable home. We were faithful in church even teaching youth classes. He worked and I stayed home with our girls. I was pretty sure our family was complete and when we were about 22 and 24 I started pressuring him to get a vasectomy. I mean our second daughter came out with red hair and everyone know red means stop right!?
Then I turned up pregnant. Not planned. I was not too happy. I didn't think I could handle another one. But time went by and I fell in love with the new life growing inside of me just as I has with the others. We dreamed and made plans and I bounced in to see my Dr. at 12 weeks only to be stunned by the absence of a heartbeat. I was devastated. Completely taken by surprise. Why had no one ever told me that 1 in 4 pregnancies ends in a miscarriage? I mean I was young and healthy and why in the world would this happen to me!? My doctor told me the baby had stopped growing at 9 or 10 weeks. There was just a little jellybean on the ultrasound screen. I was too far along to pass the baby at home so he scheduled me for a d&c. I was a wreck and intantly went from being done having kids to wanting to get pregnant again right away to fill my empty arms that desperately yearned for a baby. But again dh and I found ourselves to be on opposite sides of the fence. He was thinking more that he never wanted to go through that again. So we didn't.
Years passed and I finally wore him down. We were a little older and it took a year or so before we were able to become pregnant. We welcomed a third little girl. We were 28 and 30 with our other girls being 8 and 10. Wow! Were we in for a change!? This was the physically hardest delivery and recovery for me I assume because it had been so long. I felt guilty for taking so much time away from the big girls to learn to care for a completely dependent baby again. This time we were definitely done!
But then as I was wrapping up a year of nursing (a time when I have never had to use bc) I found myself missing a period. Although I was a little nervous to tell dh, we were both excited to welcome one more. And oh how the excitement grew when we found out we were finally expecting a boy!!! I was so proud to give my husband a boy and what a boy he was. Entering the world at 10 lbs and 3 oz he was half grown and oh so handsome! We were all living our best life! And we're definitely done having kids now! I mean who needs more than 4 right? So dh went to get a vasectomy.
Then on January 2nd, 2011, I woke up with an unsettling feeling. Far beyond my worst nightmares had become a reality as I found our big healthy 17 month old son cold and lifeless in his crib. I can't even begin to describe that initial feeling nor the years that followed. Shock. Horror. Hopelessness. Panic. Guilt. But the one thing that shaped my life the most was the humbleness. I was so incredibly broken and humbled. I had realized how I had absolutely no control over life or death. I laid my baby boy down in the safety of his bed. IN HIS BED! Isn't that where every mother feels like her children are safe!? Life and death are in the hands of God and Him alone. No life can exist without him breathing breath into it and to each of those there is appointed a time to die. It was Jeffrey's time. That's it. It didn't matter how or why. I had to just accept it as my new reality.
So if I thought the miscarriage left me with empty arms, how much worse was this!? I went from being a stay at home mom of 4 kids to losing the one that still rode around on my hip all day. That feeling of loss was crippling. Thankfully, this time, my husband's heart was as empty as mine and he wanted to get his vasectomy reversed. Of course that's no easy process and there are no guarantees it will work. The physical aspect of that along with the detriment that grief had done to our bodies made it a long road. There was lot of waiting and a couple of early 6 week miscarriages. We thought our fertile days may be behind us. But, 3 years after our loss we welcomed another healthy baby girl into our home. At that time my husband was done but I wasn't so convinced. I still had that mentality that decision wasn't up to me. I have a terrible conviction about using any kind of bc and limiting what God wants to bless us with. But knowing he wasn't on board I struggled. One time a year for 3 years I became pregnant. Twice there was early spotting with an eventual miscarriage around 6 or 7 weeks. And then another one at 10 weeks. That was it. I had turned 40. My eggs weren't good anymore. At times I wondered if it was being irresponsible with my body by continuing to put it through this but it is still more natural than bc and I just can't find peace with any of the options or even just the general idea of taking it back into my hands. So I would resolve to just continue to endure an occasional miscarriage until my body quits releasing the eggs. And then it happened. We passed 6 weeks. No spotting. We passed 10 weeks. We heard and saw the heartbeat. We passed 12 weeks up and up. But just as it seemed all was good, I just had this feeling. My belly seemed to feel suddenly soft. Granted I definitely have fears after all the loss but something felt wrong. One Sunday while getting ready for church with a sick feeling all to similar to ones I've had before, I zipped my pants after using the bathroom. And then had a meltdown. I hadn't been zipping my pants. I had been using a belly band to cover the zipper but just of old habit I tried and succeeded. It may seem like a small thing but enough for me to head to the ER of the local women's hospital. The doppler and ultrasound confirmed my fears. The baby had stopped growing. Probably a week earlier at 15 1/2 weeks gestation. A d&c would be dangerous. Our best option would be to deliver the baby. Two days later I checked in to the hospital to deliver my stillborn child. The nurses, bless their hearts, were wonderful. I'm a naturally awkward person. And I like to know the answer to every question and this was no different. I wanted to know everything that was happening and was going to happen. I had Googled pictures of stillborn babies to know what to expect. I had sewn a blanket and a hat according to the approximate gestational age. The blanket was great especially not knowing whether to expect a boy or girl. I had just made white. The hats were not as functional. I had made them out of baby socks and while they were the perfect size I did not expect the body to be so gelatenous and not suseptible to adorning with a hat. They gave me a different thinner softer hat at the hospital that I personalized with a ribbon and flower. It was still not really easy to put or keep on. But just FYI consider white when making such things. 1. At such an early gestation gender is not easy to tell. I thought I delivered a boy but the nurses all said it was a girl. And 2. The whole process is SO overwhelming that all the cute patterns and colors can be too much stimulation for a mama. So they started me on some Cyatec pills for dialation and after arriving at 6 am I delivered almost 12 hours later at 5:37 p.m. If you have ever sent a kid to college or married one off, this is similar in that you go into it thinking it just has to be done. You prepare everything and then get to the "moment of delivery" and think Oh crap what have I done!!? As the contactions got more intense (they were never awful since my uterus was still relatively small) I found myself wanting to run away, to put everything back in, to somehow just calcify that little baby in there and carry it around forever. I panicked thinking I had felt it kick and had made a big mistake. Then my water broke and the contractions stopped. Total panic. And out she came, so quietly. The umbilical cord had been tangled around her little legs and neck. She just couldn't grow. No wonder I never felt a kick. She looked like a tiny sleeping Buddha in her little meditation pose. A face only a mother could love but oh how I love it. Pictures no one will ever want to see but I can't stop looking and again I find myself with empty arms and what most would call a rediculous desire to try again. When it goes wrong it's so devastating but when it goes right oh what joy. And I'm here to tell you in the midst of my pain. 3 days after delivering my sleeping angel. God is good. He is faithful. And he loves me! He's not my genie in a bottle. He's my God. He's my rock. He's my deliverer. And even though I don't understand, I trust. Even though my heart is crushed, I have peace. Even though all I can see is despair, I have hope. There will be more trials. Maybe or maybe not more babies. But no one can take away the one thing I need in life or death and that's simply Jesus. Please believe He is the same for you. It's the gospel truth!
Monday, August 24, 2015
What no one told me about sending a first child off to college
So as far as parenting goes, this is starting late in the game. But, eight days ago we dropped Ashley off at college 2 1/2 hours away from home. We had spent two years visiting colleges, reading up on all of the how to's and applying for scholarships. We finally narrowed it down to three schools and decided it would come down to who could offer the most money and also that if her room and board was not covered, she would have to live at home. Because although we were willing to do whatever it would take to help her get a college education, it did not make good financial sense to go into debt for room and board and have nothing to show for it. Thankfully, we were blessed in that, (after many many scholarship applications and countless essays) she received a full ride scholarship. Unfortunately, it was to the school farthest from home. But, how could I not be super proud of her!? Not to mention the huge looming financial burden that lifted off of us! One of her best friends from school was going to be her roommate, which gave me a lot of peace about her going to a new city alone. So, the quest began to gather up the things that she would need to manage her own little household. This is something I really spent a lot of time on because I felt like it was really the last big project I was going to get to help her with. (Or they would at least be much more sparse.) So, all summer we created a stockpile of dishes and toiletries and decorations and other necessities. And as time drew closer, the excitement turned into anxiety. All of our planning was drawing way too close to doing. I stayed distracted making a last minute tshirt quilt and game day overalls. By now I could feel the anticipated sadness and emptiness setting in. When the big move in day came, I had been told not to let them see you cry. And I was proud that I made it all the way home and got everyone in bed before I shed one tear. I was, after all, excited for her and had 3 more kids at home to get adjusted to their new school year. So I just set off to stay busy and get used to another new normal. I missed her a lot, the house felt empty, I worried she might be having a tough adjustment too. Everything I had expected. But, as the week wore on, a new feeling crept in. One of anger. Towards ALL of the kids. I felt left, unappreciated and.... betrayed. For 18 1/2 years, I had wiped poop and snot, cleaned up vomit and messy rooms, done laundry and dishes, driven carpool and run fundraisers, stayed up late nights with sickness and homework and broken hearts, delivered forgotten luches and homework, planned parties and made last minute get ups for game days or other functions, and given up trips and functions of my own because I felt guilty about leaving the kids. I had loved and served in every way possible until I was reduced to ashes and THRIVED ON IT! I wouldn't trade being able to stay home with my kids for anything! But with her just up and gone, I just felt like it was a slap in the face and soon enough, I was going to experience this 3 more times. The best way I can articulate this is to imagine after 20 years of marriage, I told my husband that after all we've been through and shared there's some adventures for me in another city. I am just going to go up there foe 4-6 years and get an apartment and check out the restaurants and farmers market and take in some museums and shows and I might call or text in between all those outings if I get a chance. I may come home occasionally if a better offer doesn't come up, but he's still my husband and despite my apparent lack of concern for him, or the fact I wont be around much, we should maintain our current relationship. And the best part is he gets to foot the bill for it all! Shouldn't he be excited about that!? People would think I was a lunatic. So, I understand we raise our kids to fly away. And wow! She is a great one! And I really am SO proud of her and SO excited for her and I can't wait to see the things she will accomplish. But to me to just send someone you love away after spending 18 years with them seems a LOT crazy right now, and I am having a hard time wrapping my head around it. I am guessing maybe this experience is similar to death as it feels very similar as far as the loss but also the stages of emotions, from shock of its really happening, to sadness over she's gone, and now anger over she left me. I know acceptance must be coming soon. But just as baffled as I was to bring home a newborn baby for the first time and be charged with raising her to be healthy and happy and well rounded, I feel equally confused and unfit to now just send her off into the world. And I feel so duped that no one ever mentioned that I would feel anything more than sad.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)