Life Happens

Contrary to all indications to the contrary, the blog has not died.

Christmas was so swamped with projects and commissions that we didn't even decorate, which is a first for me.  The only thing we did put out was the Advent wreath, and it's still out.

After all the chaos died down, we realized I had accidently turned up pregnant.  January crawled by in a haze of relentless morning (and noon and evening) sickness, finally resolving itself in one distinct bleeding episode and two weeks of blood tests and cryptic ultrasounds.  Eventually it was determined that I had miscarried very early but that the placenta was alive and well and determined to make me sick indefinitely.  A D&C was successfully completed yesterday afternoon.

That is basically what has been consuming our lives.  My OBGYN group wants to finally do some follow-up to try to pinpoint what the problem is, but frankly I can't be bothered to care anymore.  I really don't care.  If I could have my way, I would never be pregnant again.  I'll humor the doctors for a while, but if they want me to do months and months of charting and testing and injections and procedures, I'm going to beg off.  I'm not going to cross state lines; I'm not going to invest excessive amounts of time or money.  I refuse to let the best years of my life be consumed by wasted efforts to make my decrepit reproductive system function normally.  Life is too short for that much pointless vomit.  Hope is dead.  Hope makes us miserable.  We're done.  We've accepted it.  Now, let's adopt some kids and get on with our lives.  Finito.

Florian Casimir
January, 2014
5-6 weeks

Our Concert Adventure

We're off to see our first concert today.  So long as we're forced to live the childless life, we might as well do something crazy and fun.  On the menu tonight are Kamelot, Delain and Eklipse, three of our favorite (what I believe are called) symphonic metal bands.  Being cautious people, we're going to take to heart all the advice we get, namely to not sit too close and to bring ear plugs.

My new favorite song is a collaboration between Kamelot, the head-banging guys, and Eklipse, the lovely ladies of the string quartet.  It looks darker than it really is.  I find the lyrics grimly encouraging, and thankfully not theologically problematic.

Give me a sign.

Sing the words of innocence and broken pride.

Make my conclusions fail.

Send me a sign, heal this broken melody,

'Cause each night I die in hell.

My God has shown His sympathy for all the spirits lost.

I'll pray for salvation and peace for ages.

Standing in the summer breeze, inhaling life again.

A new day has come,

A chance to relive,

Forget and forgive.

Somehow I wasted all.

They sealed my voice and wisdom,

But my soul was born on the battleground.

Justice in blood, long awaited victory,

And tonight you die in hell.

My God has shown His sympathy for all the spirits lost.

I'll pray for salvation and peace for ages.

Standing in the summer breeze inhaling life again.

A new day has come,

A chance to relive,

Forget and forgive.

Somebody hides inside my mind.

We're bound together,

But this is my confession.

Soulmate or enemy,

A thorn in my religion.

Release my heart, unfold my tongue.

Save a place for me in heaven.  We'll meet another day.

I found forgiveness and the meaning of it all.

My fear is gone.

Gone.

My God has shown His sympathy for all the spirits lost.

I'll pray for salvation and peace for ages.

Standing in the summer breeze inhaling life again.

A new day has come,

A chance to relive,

Forget and forgive.

So Over It

This deployment is going to put me back on blood pressure medication.  For being so brief (as deployments go) it has been WRETCHED, and I'm not even entirely sure why.  I would like very much to walk away from my life right now, thank you.

New Routine

I finally took a job.  I really couldn't justify not trying given my wide open schedule.  It's one of those thankless and faceless part time retail jobs, but I wanted something disposable.  The real miracle is that they were still willing to hire me after I demanded never to work weekends or any later than 4 PM on weekdays.  That should nicely coincide with the husband's schedule, so there shouldn't be any real disruption of our home life.  That is, when we have a home life.

Deployment is every bit as sterile an existence as I remember.  The only thing to do is to somehow make the time go by without being terribly conscious of it, because if I were I'd be twice as miserable.  On the other hand, not having anyone to spend time with has allowed me to get a remarkable amount of work done on those Christmas stockings commissioned this year.  Despite an earlier bout of despair, I might actually get them all done in time.

But, speaking of deployments and general loneliness, I've been realizing just how vulnerable I am.  Living alone anywhere is still very new to me, and more than a little unsettling, especially with the strange characters we've had knocking on the door lately.  I've started making an effort to brush up on my target practice when I visit the old homestead, but that doesn't do me much good in the meantime.  So, in the interest of taking at least minimal precautions, I swung by Target after work today and picked up an old fashioned, wireless, all-purpose offensive weapon with built in fire escape.

Best of all, it doesn't require a license.  Yet.

New Year's Resolutions and Catholic Guilt

I've finally started taking the Christmas tree down, probably six weeks sooner than the last time.  At least this time it won't have a hand in inducing labor, as I suspect it did last year.

I want this year to be better than last year.  Lots of good things happened last year, particularly for Dave's career, but it was an emotional train wreck.  It was much like 2010, actually, but more so.  It started on a hopeful note, then crashed and burned, and the nine months following March 8 were engulfed in a kind of Trauma Recovery Mode.  I don't believe I'm functioning at the level Dave deserves of a wife and homemaker while constantly in Trauma Recovery Mode.  (He hates that I think that, because he's awesome and thinks I'm perfect, often though I've tried to disabuse him of this notion.)

Now it's a new year all over again, and everyone is going on about resolutions.  I really want to get my life back on track, but what does that even mean?  Where is my track?  What am I supposed to be doing with myself?  I love being a wife, but it seems to me that there should be something else I should be doing besides sitting at home being a wife, doing laundry, dishes, writing fanfiction and playing online computer games.  My first choice was motherhood, but obviously the traditional approach isn't working.  Whenever I haven't been in Trauma Recovery Mode, I've been in Pregnancy Mode, which in my case is every bit as miserable.  Pregnancy Mode excludes every other type of activity, and of course leads to Trauma Recovery Mode, and the cycle begins again.  Remember the kid from Despicable Me who had his balloon animal popped?  That was me last year.

So now what do I do with myself?  My new year's resolution was to start functioning at 100% again.  As a result of the 2010-11 cycle of pregnancy and recovery I've gained all my college weight back and my running shoes and I aren't on the best of terms.  I always promised myself I would never be that overweight military wife with a host of emotional problems.  I want to stop being a black hole sucking down inordinate levels of Dave's attention, sympathy, and time.  All this would involve avoiding pregnancy, and that's where the Catholic guilt comes in.

Are we allowed to stop trying?  It's not like we're going to start using contraception or anything, but I can't decide whether the risks to my health and well-being are grave enough to justify the indefinite use of NFP.  Does this mean I have trust issues?  If I could just live a normal life during pregnancy, or if it were only about losing the children over and over again, it would be another story.  I would beat my head against that wall for the rest of my childbearing years if that were the case.  But, since I have to play the hand God dealt me, any pregnancy would automatically be high risk and require immediate and complete bed rest.  The original prognosis was a 25% chance of miscarriage just due to my condition.  Now that my already faulty system has been scarred by biopsies and a cesarean, the odds are rather worse.  Not being able to take care of myself is certainly not an ideal circumstance, particularly now that Dave is likely to be gone more often for the next three years.  I know I have several friends in the general area who would be more than happy to help, but they don't exactly live in the neighborhood and almost all of them are pregnant themselves.

I got the usual vague recommendations from the doctors and specialists.  The classic, "It could be nothing, or it could be life-threatening."  Not exactly helpful, but I suppose it was the best they could do.  There was a phase during which I was willing to take the risk, but we tried for four months and got nothing.

Now Dave is gone and I'm here alone trying to sort out my life.  The more I sit and think about it, the more I'm inclined to believe we're just one of those families who were meant to adopt.  But it seems like such a simple answer that I start second guessing myself, and wondering whether I'm interpreting the facts to suit my needs.

What are my needs?  I want to lose twenty pounds and fit into all the old clothes hanging in my closet.  I want to be free to go running, healthy enough to look after myself and stay out of the emergency room.  I don't want to be constantly stressed about the possibility of disappointing Dave and all the family again, about every little cramp being the beginning of the end.  I want to get out of this apartment now and then.  I want to be free to do my own grocery shopping, to vacuum, to walk a dog,  to dig my cars out of the snow, to function like a normal person.  Is that something to feel guilty about?  I do.

It's not that I want to simply "have a life" for myself, I'd like to have enough of a life to share it with someone else.  I'm useless to everyone while I'm pregnant, and it always comes to nothing.  "Always" is perhaps a strong word for only two failures, but each time feels like tempting fate.  Instead of spending "the best years" of my life as an invalid, alone and feeling sorry for myself, can't we just adopt and make some other poor kid's life better?  Is that so wrong?

That's what I want to do, regardless; but I can't help feeling that I'm just wimping out.  I've always needed someone to tell me what to do, because if I make up my own mind, I always suspect my conclusion is biased.  I feel like I need some kind of dispensation.  I used to tell myself I'd rack up four or five miscarriages before I'd call quits, but at this point I'm more worried about surviving to fight another day.  I want to have our own kids in the worst way, so much so that I still get physically nauseated around my pregnant friends.  But I'd rather give that up if it means being able to function as a healthy parent for two or three kids who would have otherwise have been stuck in foster care.

Anyway, I have a few more weeks of being alone to think about it.

Hanging in There

I finally got a doctor's appointment to check my blood pressure after more than a month of trying.  I was late despite my best efforts because the gate I needed was very closed when I got there.  The verdict is that they want to do more blood work, keep me on the medication for another three months, and would very much like me to check my blood pressure daily and keep a log.  I refuse to shell out $$$ for my own personal machine, so they'll just have to be happy with a weekly check, if I can find some pharmacy somewhere.  It's like a self-perpetuating nightmare.

I also had to explain the sordid details of my recent medical history to two separate individuals, and give brutally honest answers to questions like, "How old is your baby now?", and "Is it a boy or a girl?"

Nothing else I did today seemed to go exactly according to plan, either.  All of a sudden, despite being unemployed and having no children, I have a thousand places to be.  But while I was sitting in traffic, watching my eggs and yogurt spoil, I heard this song on the radio.  It didn't actually help much, but it did put things in some perspective.

And I am very thankful at least that we haven't been blown away by tornados or flooded out of the neighborhood.  I'm starting to develop a phobia of natural disasters.

Getting Some Traction

I think I've finally made a full phycological recovery. I can actually get up and make a dent in the list of long overdue house chores, scrub the bathroom, clean the kitchen, sweep and mop the floor and keep the dishes done, all instead of lying around in a sweatshirt with my hair in a knot watching crap on YouTube. I can look at Gerber commercials without going to pieces, and I don't hate the sight of mothers walking through the neighborhood with strollers. I can even visit Facebook once in a while to read about my friends and their new kids.

Meredith came down for a visit yesterday while she was still in town. We went out for lunch and spent the rest of the afternoon on the beach and rocks at Lover's Point having long overdue candid conversation. We even spotted a few whales in the bay. I'll have to take my sister out there when she comes; she'll love the squirrels everywhere. But next time I'll actually remember to bring some sunscreen. Ouch.

David is taking his mock finals this week, and it's looking more and more like he'll actually get the rollback we've been waiting for. The paperwork in question seems to be making good time through the proper channels. We're not sure exactly how long that will extend our stay out here, but we should know more in a week or two.

Once he actually joins his new class, we'll move our things out here and make this house some semblance of a home. Just cleaning the floor and picking up all the crap that was piled in the corners made it feel less like living in a garage. I put the guest bedroom together for Bev, and it already looks cozy, or as much as it can with just the "bed" (air mattress) and three small pictures from the dollar store. It would be nice to just have a few posters in poster frames to lighten the monotony, but nobody sells posters of anything we'd bother to hang on our walls. I used to swear by Allposters.com, but now they're more about pricy art prints.

The IRS is still mucking around with my tax return, which I filed 16 weeks ago. The first time I called them they gave me some line about it taking eight weeks to process a paper return, which wasn't really relevant, because I filed electronically. The website told me they had deposited it a few weeks ago, but now they've changed their minds and say they might possibly mail it by Friday. I will believe it when I see $705.70 appear in the bank. Maybe this was an act of God, making sure we didn't spend it before we could put it toward hiring a moving truck.