this is finally sinking in, a week later
I still can’t believe I heard it.
I think my birth control pills are giving me candida problems. No, not ‘down there’. That’s just about the only place it isn’t bothering me, thankyouverymuch. But it’s a problem just about everywhere else, and I’ve read that candida can even cause depression and all sorts of other cumulatively debilitating and serious maladies. We have a propensity to this problem, and its darker side, diabetes, in my family. We luvs our sugar and carbs. And on top of that, birth control pills are famous for suppressing immunity.
So I talked to my husband about this, and other problems allegedly caused by birth control pills and– he’s okay with natural family planning.
WHAT?
Maybe the tears are what got him, I don’t know.
Natural family planning fails. It fails all the time. It’s what got my sister in law (with beautiful results, it is true, but it was totally a life change she hadn’t planned on). You may can get away with it for quite some time, but not forever.
He’s okay with that!
This is what precipitated the eight things I want to accomplish in the next year post. Because if a natural family planning failure is okay with him that would add sooo much complexity that I couldn’t possibly accomplish some of the other things. At least, a trip to China with my existing baby would be out of the question. The other things might be doable… in fact they may actually lend themselves to being combined with a pregnancy.
Well… I’m going to try to remain centered and intentional. By that I mean, I’m just going to try to stick with my life rather than abdicating and letting chance fix it for me, as it did with my pregnancy with shaky baby. And oooohhh what a fix! She’s the most beautiful little moon fish rainbaby child ever. But intention is what my life is supposed to be about these days.
I’ll keep you posted. No, I won’t, because probably it’s too much information. Just the thought of, er, having a family is pretty squeamish territory. Well just assume that no news is, um, no news, that I’m trucking away trying to accomplish financial and educational goals– and actually believing my husband said this– I’m trying not to get too excited about it, for fear he’ll take it back– before having another one.
too many choices
As I was sitting up in the mountains this morning trying to talk to myself about why I really will be happier with smoking completely out of the picture (more or less) (my desire to really do the healing school work being the most important reason to quit, honestly), my trail of thoughts led off into the various things I’d like to do in the next couple of years, subsequent to quitting smoking and/or my job.
Which of these things could possibly go together? Because any one of them could possibly take up every bit of my hope, joy, energy, flexibility and earning power for the next several years. How on earth can I get all of this done? In what order? Can you help me?
In no particular order of importance, I would like to quit my job to:
1. Have another baby
2. Take my existing child to China for several months in lieu of kindergarten (which won’t work if I am pregnant or have a newborn, so the newborn will have to wait)
3. Start my healing practice (which I am able to work on even while holding down my day job, but come May I’ll be a *graduate!* and which may or may not could be done while pregnant/caring for a nursling and certainly can’t be done while I’m in China although I could probably hook into some serious Chinese medicine wisdom while there)
4. Write
5. Just stay home because I want to because I am so very existentially to the very core of my being TIRED
6. Host (and spoil shamefully) a girl Chinese exchange student (We’d have to commit, economically and emotionally, to another school year in the same place, and we’ve already missed it for this year which would mean waiting for another year, and can I really have an exchange student AND a baby AND my healing practice?)
7. Move to Houston or at least somewhere in Texas close to my step kids (a tremendous financial and logistical move which would cause me to have to start all over with building my healing clientele and would be a stressful thing to do while having a baby and would put off the goal of having a Chinese exchange student another year while we settled in although if we were technically homeless anyway it might be cool for my husband to bachelor it for a while and look for places to live while shaky baby and I are in China…)
See what I mean?
blather
I call this post blather because I haven’t a single braincell left, I swear. I am so freaking tired.
My husband and I mapped out our plans for our back yard, as far as raised beds for veggies and, as I put it, a vista, a path, a resting place, and a destination. Now, our yard probably isn’t 200 feet long. Anyway, while it seems huge when it’s time to mow or think about planting and tending it, it’s not nearly big enough for a real vista, or path, or destination. But that’s what I see in my head, and that’s what we’re going to have. We’ll have places to stop and ‘rest’ on our way to the ‘destination’ at the far end, and I’d like to have some herbs and a wild area that will attract bugs and birds and butterflies. I’d also like to let some portion of it grow wild, but we have to leave enough room to play croquet, which needs 100 feet or so, so we may not have enough room for much of a, er, meadow.
Then, we busted our asses tidying up the house and mowing the yard and so were exhausted when our guests began arriving around four.
Tonight we provided the house for a party for a friend of my husband’s, who’d just been promoted. It was a small party, nothing on the scale of the housewarming, but nice. We grilled out and drank beer and the guys played horseshoes for hours– score! Finally someone got some use out of the pits my husband worked so hard to measure out and dig and build. It was hot, but not unbearable, especially with a cold beer in hand. It is soooooo nice to have a place I feel comfortable inviting people. I’m not saying it’s a palace, I’m just saying I am proud of it and enjoy opening my home so that folks can socialize. And… we have worked hard to have a place we feel like sharing.
We didn’t cook or anything. After busting my ass cooking for my vegetarian father last week, I just didn’t have it in me, and we really didn’t want to spend the money on one of my extravagant dos. I felt a bit weird– have friends over without piles of home cookin’ over which I slaved for hours and which broke our grocery budget? But… it was kinda nice. We provided chips and dip, soda, ice, some beer, some hotdogs, just a few basics. A friend brought over his industrial food-service looking gas grill and the promoted guy’s wife brought pasta salad and baked beans. Yum.
One of my husband’s friends just had a baby in May. I was ecstatic to see the baby, I hadn’t seen her since she was a newborn and the mommy was still in the hospital and– I can’t tell you how thrilled I was when the mom said she had to run home to get a pacifier, and casually asked, would I hold her? WOULD I??? Jeez, who did she think she was talking to? That kid was so good, and so precious.
Then later when the baby was fussy and her mom couldn’t calm her, I took her and put the clamp on her, the clamp that used to put my baby to sleep, gripped snugly to my chest with, you know, the bouncy walk? I kicked off the platforms so I wouldn’t fall over holding her and off we went. She conked right out. She stirred a bit and lay her fat dimpled little hand on my chest– I *knew* that low cut sweater was a good idea! That little bit passed right out and I felt sooo proud, and so grateful for the opportunity. There’s just nothing better. I wrapped her in one of my child’s plush Raggedy Ann and Andy blankets and lay her on my bed. It just felt soooo good to fuss over a baby. I got this little jingle of pride when her mom kept her wrapped in the Raggedy Ann blanket the rest of the afternoon.
When the baby woke later and, after an hour or two of adorableness, got fussy again, I had to restrain myself, twisting my hands together to keep from being a bossy grabby mom. I knew I had to let her handle this in a way that was right for her. I want her to like me, and to come back. She gave me a hug when she left. Snif!
I just want to be useful to my friends with babies. Are you reading this, M? I wanted to tell you and our other friend with a birthday this month that for your birthday you each get two free hours of housecleaning and two (or as many as you want, dinner and a movie?) free hours of babysitting from me, good absolutely any time you want. I just didn’t want to tell you in front of people.
The word is out among the friends that I want another one. I guess my husband has talked with them about it, or at least to the new daddy who talked to his wife the new mommy. I had to clarify, did my husband say he wanted one? No, he said I wanted one. I’m not a bit embarassed about it, thankfully. It’s just a fact. I want to stay home and have another one, even though I know I have some spiritual work to do first– not work, like I haven’t earned it yet, but work, like, get in the frame of mind I want to be in.
We, the wives present, talked about it briefly– the politics of our marriage making it just, well, easier for me to work so I can say, I work too, dammit, so help me with this. We’ll see.
As the party wound down– a couple of hours of poker ensued once it was too dark to hurl heavy pieces of iron through the air– I was thinking about my birthday party, which will be in October when the weather will probably be lovely. It’s two months away, my birthday, but I’ve already started thinking about what sort of theme I want and what I want to serve. I’m not a tea party girl, but for some reason the idea of a tea party popped into my head, maybe from thinking about playing with my child and her little girlfriend who was over tonight, so maybe I’ll do a bad girls tea party or a moms on the lam tea party. But no, I want a house buster like our housewarming was, so I will have to invite spouses and guys in general as well as girlfriends… Anyway, one item will be wonderful tiny sandwiches on white bread– cream cheese, herbs, a paper thin slice of onion, cucumber or tomato, salt and pepper. Mmmmm. Isn’t that an odd choice, and an odd thing to be thinking about?
Blather, I tell you.
Oh I cannot tell you how happy I am that it’s Saturday night and tomorrow is Sunday.
I have to be on the road Monday through Wednesday this week, and Sunday through Wednesday the following. I’ll be travelling a lot more for my job, from now on. It will make it harder to blog, I think, but it may actually make it easier for me to write, lots of time alone. That is, if hours on the road driving and being nice to people don’t rob me of my few remaining brain cells.
Speaking of time alone, guess where I get to stay in my travels? When on business, I get half off at our state’s parks– I can get a ‘cabin’ or chalet, an entire house really, for fifty five dollars a night. All to myself! Out in the middle of lovely Appalachian foothill nature nowhere, ALONE. How nice will that be????? I forgot to make my reservation today, worrying about the party, but the lady assured me on the phone that they have plenty of room. Oh it’s going to be soooo nice.
more on today
Today’s my mother’s sixtieth birthday. That’s why I busted ass to make the vegan kake.
I also figured out, with my husband, what we could get her sixty of– roses. The Fresh Market sells roses (no doubt farmed by underpaid, terribly taken advantage of migrants or indigenous people) for 6.99 a dozen. I got her five dozen and was frantic that I wouldn’t get them arranged before she arrived. The vase I envisioned using was too small! Dammit!!! I stood them up in a soup pot full of water, tied together to keep them supported. I had the baby decorate the brown paper bag I brought the roses home in, stuck the soup pot right down in the brown paper bag, and stuck it on our hearth. Fabulous!!
My parents did not have one single mean comment to make about the disarray of my house. I was actually making excuses to them in my head! I don’t know whether this says more about them, or about me. My mom did point out that the color in the foyer is all wrong… but heck, I knew that, and she offered to re paint it to make it right.
My child spent the evening picking at her food, eating chocolate, refusing the Kake– probably too damn nutritious, sigh– demanding attention and whining. I just tried to pacify her, within reason, and my mom played with her for hours. I hope we can get her into a more reasonable, less volatile frame of mind tomorrow.
I have passed yet another month without an unintended pregnancy. I may have mentioned in my introduction that I miscarried twins early in the pregnancy about a year and a half ago. I go on and on about this, pretty regularly. I was soooo devastated, and I haven’t gotten over it yet– it’s a grisly thing, but it’s also such a disappointment, to have my longed-for twins and then lose them, sensible comments about nature knowing its business and whatnot, not withstanding. I regularly search the internet for information about increasing chances for twins and such, to this day.
So after the D and C I resolved to go try for another baby right away. But the three months the OB advised morphed into six, and then I went back to work, and then just this weekend my husband and I sat down and added up all the debt we’ve managed to rack up (after getting all our damn debt paid off about the time we moved into this house four months ago dammit) the savings we want, and the furniture and other things we want for our house… and it looks like I’ll be working for a while. This doesn’t bother me in terms of having babies– the longer I wait the better my chance of having twins, and women have babies in their late thirties and early forties all the time. The longer I wait the better position I believe I will be, emotionally, spiritually, and financially, to parent a newborn again. It bothers me only because I don’t like my job much and have much better things to do.
But when I told my husband the good news about no unintended pregnancy and reaffirmed that I need to work for a long time, he said, you know things are never perfect. It would be nice if we could do the savings but lots of families don’t and they have babies. It was a shocking turnaround on his part. Usually when I talk about having another one he gets a frightened look on his face– frightened of telling me how he really feels about another baby since he is now already up to three. In fact, the last time I found myself obsessively talking to him about it, he said, you know a baby isn’t going to heal our marriage– a very gentle, insightful way to remind me of the stress we’re already under and that we don’t need more. Still, this time around it was very sweet to hear him say that.
I still have some spiritual work to do, insofar as two lady professional types have told me that they traced their miscarriages to a sense that deep down they didn’t deserve the wild joy of that pregnancy and the promise it held– not to insinuate that they or any woman having a miscarriage would be to blame, but to say, that miscarriage prompted me to work hard to love myself better and let my personal decisions reflect more of my true values, desires, and essential self. I look forward to doing some of that work… but for now I really gotta get back on the birth control.
I ran my ass off getting supper cooked, getting beds made and clean towels out. I am tired as shit. But the baby and the rest of the fam are asleep… that quiet is golden, and I’m going in to work late tomorrow. Still… I don’t think I can make it even one more step.
