Mamazen

Grace in small things 52/365

I think I've started more than one of these this year, saying that it's hard to find things to be grateful for, that it's hard to find the grace in the mundane... but I'm here again saying that it's hard, in my life right now to find that grace. It's so easy to see the negative, to point out the ugly, the painful, the heartbreaking.  I joined GIST because I wanted to find the grace in every day to get through the difficult things that may lay ahead of us this year... and sure enough, it was a shit of a year. I didn't keep my my end of the bargain, finding the grace in the mundane, waging the battle against embitterment. Truth be told, I'm pretty bitter. 

I started 2009 with the fervent wish I'd end it with a new baby in my arms. Now, we're near the end, and not only am I not nursing a newborn, I'm not pregnant, and realized this week that due to the state of the economy, we don't have access to funds to even consider trying again. I know these may not seem like big complaints to some, but when conceiving a child isn't easy, it's expensive. The thing is, I'm only 38, but all of a sudden, on top of male factor infertility issues, we also have secondary female factor... aka, my ovaries are giving up the ghost. So we have a small window of time to have a biological child, before we talk about the next set of options. This is, believe it or not, a really difficult thing to let go of, something we won't be letting go of without a lot of therapy. 

So here we are, heading into the winter holidays. Empty arms, empty womb, empty bank account. Time to find the grace in the small things.

1. An extra hour of sleep in the morning, even if it only came because a certain 3 year old was up for 2 hours in the middle of the night. There is something lovely about waking up at 8 am instead of 6:30.
2. Coffee and There's  a wocket in my pocket by the heat vent in the kitchen. Not a bad way to start the day.
3. A fabulous new hair cut and color. A splash of maroon can brighten any crabby old lady!
4. Pizza and a movie with my two favorite humans.
5. Kissing my sweet girl good night, and holding her hand as she drifts back to sleep after an bad dream. 

Women Who Cook

I've mentioned before that I'm a woman who cooks. When my dear friend Lyn's mother was dying, I can't tell you how many baked zitis I made, filled with cheese and love trying to fill the cracks forming in our hearts as she slipped further and further away. When Celeste's water broke at 1 am when she was only 28 weeks  pregnant and she ended up in the hospital for a month, I baked muffins, made spaghetti and delivered food to her daily to keep those babies growing on something other than bad hospital food. 

When the shit hits the fan, this mama hits the kitchen. I'm not a gourmet cook, I don't make fancy food that you can't pronounce. I like simple healthy comfort foods that fill the belly, feed the mind and nourish the soul. I love to make soups, and lasagnas and fresh baked bread. I love knowing that someone with an aching back, a weepy heart or a challenged soul will have one less thing to think about. 

Amazingly, I am lucky enough to live in a community of women who cook. Babies are born, and meal trains are started. A family is struck with the flu and our community rallies to keep them fed. Someone's little boy needs brain surgery and before they are home from the hospital the freezer is stocked and the kitchen is cleaned. This is a community to love and be loved in. 

Sometimes I am lucky enough to be on the receiving end of such love and cooking. This morning a beautiful, kind, and loving friend (who endured her own painful and grief filled summer) delivered this:

beautiful, delicious, delectable nectarine galette. Nectarines are my most favorite fruit, and this, is quite a treat. With this beautiful baked plate of love was a poem, and perfectly describes why I am a Woman Who Cooks. 

Women Who Cook

Anita Skeen

When, this incredible thing, the principal of the junior high,

surprised by a blast from an M-1A rifle, slumps

a few feet from his office door, or the woman

out jogging in the Saturday morning snow, jubilant

as confetti, gets beaten and raped, or the son

does not recover from the ache in his side, we are left,

hands fumbling in pockets for more

than just words.

The doorbell rings. A woman appears, offering
an aluminum pan wrapped in foil. I wanted to make something
chocolate, she says, but there isn't anything chocolate 
I can make really well. A later hour, another ring:
She made you these rolls, he says, extending the sack 
like a drowned cat. Still later, a glass dish
held out like a crystal ball: We had this extra ham,
she says. We thought you could use it now.

I remember February's worst blizzard since 1912
when my grandmother, who made cornbread when Stevie's mother
did not return from the trip and the blackberry cobbler
when Earle stayed down in the mine, chose
to die. A four wheel drive took the body
and brought beans. Friends plowed through snow
with potato salad and stew. Wherever I turned,
I was handed a dish. My hands steamed for days.

Some of us women still bake, she says, when we don't know
what else to do. I take the butterscotch pie, meringue
frothy and deep as that February snow, and turn toward the kitchen,
thinking of women who turn on their stoves, take town their bowls. 
I lift this gift, this tangible sorrow, to the shelf.
Right now, in this town, a woman beats eggs, each stroke
a blow against something out there, something
only a neighbor away. 

There is grace in the small things of life. (51/365)

1. A kiss placed perfectly where it hurts, or where you wish love to grow.
2. Nectarine galette delivered with words of heartbreaking wisdom and truth 
3. Forging friendships from the strangest of connections, including random blogs
4. Butter filled crust 
5. Patience, faith and hope. (not necessarily in that order) 

Grace in small things 50/365

Some weekends are busy busy busy, others lazy lazy lazy. This one was a combination, busy for some moments lazy for others. The kind of weekend where you didn't really do anything exciting, but got a lot done. We've become the kind of people who rarely do anything social.  Hearing about other people's weekend dates, picnics, parties make me wonder if I'm missing anything... but then I realize that for our family, right now this is what we need. I'm sure someday we'll hire a sitter and go out again, or start planning events with families we know, but it's not this summer. Someday we'll host bbqs again, or fun, lavish (haha) dinner parties with games afterward, but it's not this summer. This summer is for sleeping in, for household projects and family focus, for quiet mornings and noisy afternoons. 

1. Cool mornings filled with snuggles and long 3 year old kisses  
2. 3 types of olives 
3. Blessings and baby pictures 
4. Turkey noodle soup and cupycakes. 
5. Bedroom doors long awaited finally installed! 

 

Yesterday

Yesterday I had a birthday. I'm 38. Thirty Eight. It's not very old, yet it sure sounds old when you realize i'm trying to get pregnant right before my 20th high school reunion. It feels old when your 3 year old wakes up at 5 am raring to go after you barely crashed at midnight. It feels old when you're running a business and a family and a household while injecting synthetic hormones into your belly in the hopes of being granted one. more. baby. But 38 really isn't that old. Tell my ovaries that, Ok? 

Yesterday was a long day of tired mama, tired and cranky toddler and counting the minutes till bedtime. Still we manage to eek out several moments of pure grace.

1. Kisses under the blankets while wild laughter fills the room
2. Spending the morning at her new preschool and settling a little bit more. 
3. Facebook birthday wishes every 10 minutes from friends near and far, new and old. 
4. An afternoon of t-ball and wading pools and eating tomatoes off the vine  
5. A long hot birthday bath with a glass of wine whilst my husband made the birthday dinner of honey mustard pork chops and roasted root vegetables. 
6. Finishing the day with Cupycakes, while the sweet girl slumbers. She'll get her cupycake for breakfast  

GIST 49/365 

long time no grace

It's been a cruel, cruel summer. Well, not completely, but it's been a rough one. Not that I haven't had a lot to be grateful for, but many days I'm hard pressed to see them. However, it's been a week of incredibly graceful moments, and I need to shake off this funk and revive this blog. 

1. Seeing your child in a new light, and feeling your heart sing because of it.
2. Tricycles and t-ball 
3. Bowl after bowl of delicious spaghetti
4. Campfires and toasted marshmallows  
5. Feeling hopeful, so welcome after feeling hopeless for so long.  

Grace in small things 47/365

My daughter is going to be three in 2 days. Just typing the phrase 'my daughter' is still sometimes shocking to me, so the fact that she is going to be THREE is blowing my mind. wow. I'm going to be the mother of a three year old girl. preschooler. crazy crazy shit, I tell you. In my mind she's still just this tiny little peanut who wakes up every 2 hours to nurse all night long... and oh how I miss that tiny little nursling. 

Anyway, I digress... Ruby is going to be three in just a couple of days, and we have family in town, so time is short for blogging and me time. However, moments of grace are huge. 

1. Having grandma in town, so that when little person wakes up at 6:45 after being awake from 4-5:30... mama gets to snooze till 8:30. yay.
2. Having a zoo pass. Nothing better than a perfect (almost) summer day wasting 2 hours watching birds, bears and sea lions.  
3. Ice water.  
4. A bff that lives 4 blocks away. Close enough for an impromptu stop over for scones after dinner when you need a cry, a hug or a laugh. Or a scone. 
5. Loving my work. This week I was honored enough to treat a mama who had a stillbirth 2 weeks ago. It was one of the most incredibly tender and painful moments of my career, placing my hands on this mamas belly, and feeling the exquisite peace of what had transpired. What is even more amazing, is that this mama is pumping milk to donate. Talk about a moment of grace in something SO not small. She lost her baby. Her baby died. And yet, she still has the capacity to be so gracious and generous. I can only hope and pray that I would have that kind of heart if I were ever to be in her shoes, although I hope and pray that I never am. 

The kindness of strangers, and friends aka Grace in not so small things 46/365

When people get sick, or have babies, or a death in the family I am one of the first people on their doorstep with a lasagna, an offer to do the laundry or to help in any way I can. Sick kid? I'll make you soup. Out of diapers and you have pneumonia? I'm on my way! Whole family have the double dragon? I've got a trunk full of toilet paper and a case of ginger ale.... I like to help, I'm good at being of service to others... you get the picture. 

What I'm not good at is asking for, or accepting help when it's offered. When I'm sick and people want to make food, I have every excuse in the book to keep them from making us a pot of soup. When people want to do nice things for me, I feel so guilty and unworthy of their generosity. But I'm trying, very hard to get over this, and sometimes you're forced to.

As I posted a while back infertility struck this family with a vengeance and conceiving a child is hard and stupidly expensive. Insurance companies will pay for you to get a new liver after you drink yourself to death, but won't put a penny toward helping you achieve parenthood (through medical treatment OR adoption). SO when you end up needing IVF to have a baby (cause you sure as shit ain't getting pregnant with your husbands baby any other way) you have to spend a lot of money. A lot of money that you just don't have lying around the house ifyouknowhatimean. The first time around we refinanced the house. Sure, it was a pain in the arse, but trust me when I tell you it was so very worth it.

This year, we had put the money aside for the one FET that we were stupidly sure would work... and it did. Then it didn't after all. So we scrounged around for the money to do the second one, and again... didn't remotely work. Now, here we are, back and ground zero trying to figure a way to make it happen someone showed up with a pot of soup. Or at least the potential for a pot of really awesome helpful soup. Lesley (whom I 'know' online from a mothering board and facebook and have met in real life only once) took it upon herself to raise money for our fresh IVF cycle this summer. I feel humbled, honored and guilty. I couldn't stop Lesley if I tried, but I'm not going to try. I'm going to sit back and be the one who accepts help. Cause I know I will pay it back 10 fold to the universe in my lifetime. It doesn't feel like that long ago (although it's well over 4 years now) that Lesley and I started an internet campaign to raise money for another friend who was going through IVF. We managed to raise enough for some plane tickets (she did her cycle in a state different from where she was living) but every penny counts.

I've always been 'out' about my infertility. I will tell anyone who walks by me on the street that my child is the product of medical brilliance and pure magic combined. I'm not shy about the facts, but have kept most of the emotional hardship to myself and a small circle of online and real life friends. Posting about it here, and linking to facebook was  a huge step, and it was both highly satisfying and horribly anxiety producing at the same time. I have colleagues and patients on facebook who would now know the full extent of my sadness and frustration (well not full as I still keep a private journal that has all the gritty details).

Since I posted it out there for the whole world to know, I have received so many thoughtful comments, and even a card from a patient that brought tears to my eyes. Sometimes the kindness of strangers, and those not so strange can truly open your heart and help heal old and new wounds.

Grace in small things 44/365

I won't lie to you. Things have been tough lately. The economy is rough, and running your own business in an crap economy is trying. My wonderful husband is stressed beyond his limits with work, yet soldiers on as everyone does, because he is grateful he has a job. My dear sweetest Ruby is almost three and clearly has a language learning delay, and as a mother this is the hardest thing I've yet to face. I may blog about that some other time, but for now I will say just that. 

I want more than anything to have another child. I yearn to feel the sweetness of a baby growing within me again, to feel the tossing, turning, kicking, growing. I desperately want to have another chance to give birth. I want to give birth on my terms. I want another chance to push a baby out, instead of have it cut out of me with violence and sadness. I long to feel a tiny sweet nursling nuzzled in my arms as the hours go by with a baby at my breast. I want to experience another human in my life, and share that human with ryan and Ruby. 

One of my biggest fears is that this won't happen. Ruby was a lucky InVitro Fertilization baby. I say lucky because we got pregnant and stayed pregnant on our first shot of IVF, and we had 6 embryos to freeze.  We ended up doing IVF after 7 IUI (intra-uterine insemination) and years of trying to conceive the way regular people do. To say I felt lucky, is an understatement. I knew the other possibilities. I know (way too) many people who have done multiple IVFs to no avail. I also know (way way way too many) people who have gotten pregnant and lost babies at every stage of the game. I know what that heartache looks like, and hell yes I felt lucky to have brought home a healthy living baby after one round of IVF. 

When we decided we were ready to have another child, we (arrogantly) assumed it would be easy. We had 6 embryo's in great condition frozen. Statistically that should have given us a decent chance at bringing home another live baby. I went into my first FET in january thinking about estimated due dates, maternity clothes and midwife appointments. I got pregnant for 15 minutes and had my heart broken. We had 3 embryos left, and went forward with another transfer, hoping against hope that we'd get an embryo that would want to stick around for longer than 15 minutes.... Nope, what we got was bupkis. Nothing, negative, nada.  We were out of embryos. Back to square one.

I'll let that sink in a little. For those of you who have no experience with the trials and tribulations of infertility... a fresh IVF cycle is something like this... 

• 2-3 weeks of mind numbing and crazy making birth control pills to down regulate your ovaries.
• 10-14 days of 2-3 shots a day in the abdomen (sub-cutaneous for those who like big words) to stimulate your ovaries to produce multiple eggs. I was a lucky one who's ovaries swelled up to the size of grapefruits and made it feel like my insides were going to fall out of my vagina. (yeah, try to get that image out of your mind now!)
•  Egg retrieval - aka transvaginal oocyte retrival. yeah. they (thankfully) knock you out (yay versied!)and stick a very long needle.... yeah. thats all I want to say. ::shudder::
• Then you wait a day while they fertilize the eggs with your partners sperm (or whomever's sperm you'd like) either by dimming the lights in the petrie dish room, or IntraCytoplasmic Sperm Injection if you have male factor infertility, and a few extra thousand dollars. 
• More waiting, while you hope and pray your fertilized eggs divide and multiply.  
• After a few days (3 or 5 depending on your age and embryo quality) they dope you up on valium, and pop a couple of those puppies back up in there and you pray for implantation, aka pregnancy.  All the while getting a 3 inch needle in the butt cheek each night filled with more fun infused hormones. 
• Any embryos you have left get frozen for future use, hopefully... or to dash your hopes against the rocks 3 years later.  

So... this is how it goes. And this is what I may or may not be doing sometime in my near future. Infertility will suck the life out of you, but one day you may get the win and you realize that it was worth every second of it, worth every shot in the ass, every bruise on your belly and ounce of misery... because one day you wake up and you have this:

And your heart cracks wide open and things pour into it and spill out of it that you never imagined were possible. 

For the past three years, Ruby has been rocking my world and filling me up with an amazing amount of love. I want more than anything to give her a sibling, to share her, and to allow her to share herself. I want more than anything to have another child. My heart aches to mother another child. 

However, a week ago we were at the zoo and I saw my sweet girl running across the grass, enjoying the sun, just being herself... and I realized with a full heart that if we do a fresh cycle of IVF and it doesn't work... if we do all we can and can't have another child... if we run the gauntlet again and don't get lucky... I know we already have. 

If this is all I get, it is more than enough. 

I haven't forgotten... 44/365

It's been a busy time. Stuff has happened. My heart was too achey to write witty or grateful blog posts. 

But spring is here in full force, the sun is out every day (even today when it rained off an on!) and there are many moments of grace to be found every day.

1. A toddler who is back to sleeping till 6:30 AM (yes, this is a decent time to wake up when you think about the alternative) and going to bed at 7:30 PM (yes she's up for 13 hours with no nap.)

2. Shortbread cookies that are divine. Both gluten free and gluten filled... so everyone in the house gets a cookie!

3. Babies with sunglasses on.

4.Having this moment on film. 

 5. Watching your best friend feed her long awaited for and dreamed of babies the first apricot of the season.

 6. Cowgirls with pointy chins. 

 7. Drooley chins in tunnels. 

 8. Sunday bike rides and french fries.

9. Lunch dates with girlfriends that include champagne in the sun and pedicures.

10. Having someone who gets you. Really gets you. Yeah, you. I'm talking to you. Thanks for the moments of grace. Thanks for holding my hand and reminding me I'll get through this. That I've done it before and I'll do it again and it will make me all the stronger. I love you too. 

Grace in small things 43/365

Oh it's been a while, hasn't it? A week, and I haven't had any moments of grace? No not really. Just a busy week with little time or energy left for my computer at the end of the day. I have had many many moments of grace this past week. 

1. Seeing a change in Ruby's behavior and talking after cutting gluten out of her diet.
2. Turning the heel on my sock (even tho there are definite mistakes). 
3. Harry Potter Audiobook on the iPhone. Nothing like hearing an old fave as you drift off to sleep. 
4. SUNSHINE. 
5. Watching Ruby peel a clementine in the sun with dirty toddler fingers.  
6. Listening to Ruby sing her two favorite songs, 'cookie cookie cookie' or 'haaaapeeeee buuuday' 
7. Singing 'Spaghetti Face' to her as she's completely enamored with eating it. 
8. Toddler belly peeking out of a new bathing suit. 
9. Coffee and Muffins with friends.  
10. Going to a networking event, and realizing that what I've created with my office is pretty amazing, and feeling pretty proud of myself.