2012. The year after the big year, the one where we quit our jobs and moved to a different state for new ones, got pregnant, started fresh. Separate from our support systems and from much of what we’d known, the year we learned to rely on each other completely. The year the mister and I truly, truly became best friends. A lot happens in one spin around the sun.
It was the year where we were forced to admit to ourselves that Kid A’s struggles might have a name, and that name might be a diagnosis. He is brilliant (pretty much literally) and loving and caring and curious and loves comic books and his brothers more than just about anything. He has Asperger’s. And while we are still trying to figure out the ways his mind works, and how to give him the skills he needs to survive childhood and adolescence and thrive and grow into the man I know he will be, we will get there. This was the year we started trying.
It was the year Kid B turned three. For my money in the early developmental stages, three is the worst. It’s like you have this mini-teenager in the house, learning how to assert their independence, moody and temperamental. And for all that, despite not being my snuggler he is the one who in the morning is the emo-est kid in the history of emo if he doesn’t get to tuck in with me with milk and cartoons. He loves books and trains and dinosaurs and his brothers.
And then there is Kid C, the youngest, my baby. 2012 was the year of his birth, and afforded me the scariest moments of my life thus far. From the get-go he was set to make sure he was the last, the kid who turned cartwheels daily in utero and was breach until the last possible moment. I will never, ever forget what it felt like to hold this perfect baby in my arms and then, a week later at our first peds appointment, be told that he’d popped a flag on the newborn screen. Kid C carried at least one mutation for cystic fibrosis. Weeks of uncertainty (you can search the blog for the CRMS tag for the full story) and nine months later and we still don’t really know what lies ahead, but we’ve had a really healthy baby for those nine months and will just keep moving forward with that as our reality. He’s the best baby, all smiles and learning to walk and trying desperately to do everything that his brothers do already. Boy, am I in trouble there.
It was a year of searching, professionally, spiritually, and I don’t expect that to change much moving forward. It’s just how I’m wired, restless and ready and always looking for what’s next. Jury’s still out on whether it’s a desirable trait or a character flaw.
It was a year, it was a year with more good than bad, more promise than pain, more hope than misery and I guess when you do your accounting that’s what really matters, in the end. So so long, 2012, the year my family became complete. I don’t know what tomorrow will bring, but I’m ready for 2013.
12/31/12
12/20/12
merry, merry
I exchanged emails super early this morning with someone I have a great deal of admiration for, and was moved beyond the telling by the response I got, and I’ve been thinking, ever since, about the small ways in which we touch each other’s lives. In the midst of all the stories that break your heart are stories that remind you that most of us spend the small amount of time we have here trying to make things better, seeking love and laughter and joy in the world around us and the people that matter most.
Christmas can be really hard. There’s so much pressure, intentional or not, and I think sometimes that’s amplified being a parent. I didn’t grow up in a house of plenty, but I grew up in a house of enough. My parents weren’t wealthy, but I have so many amazing memories growing up, and while I’m sure they scraped and scrimped, and while I’m sure there were things I wanted that I didn’t get, I don’t remember a single one. I remember Santa coming to my grandma’s house on Garfield Avenue on Christmas Eve. I remember the magic of creeping out of bed at 5 in the morning on Christmas Day to see gifts that had miraculously appeared, always more gifts than there should have been, looking back.
But my favorite memory, hands down, the one Christmas that stands out heads and tails above the others, was when we lived in Madison. I couldn’t tell you how old I was, I’m guessing nine or ten, but we had just settled in to start opening presents when there was a knock on the front door. A city worker was standing there, looking both apologetic and wistful. A water main had busted, and they were turning off the water shortly. He wished us a Merry Christmas and headed up to the next house.
Present opening was delayed. My dad went to put coffee on right away, and my mom piled donuts on a plate while my sister and I bundled up. Up the street we went, her with the donuts in hand and me juggling cups filled with coffee, to where the men were working up the block. It was cold, I remember that, and I remember thinking how glad I was to be home, where it was warm.
I think about that every Christmas. There was no lecture from my parents about how it was the right thing to do, or important, they just did it, because here were people pulled away from their own celebrations, from their own family. Virtually all of the really important things I learned from my folks about being a parent weren’t things they ever stopped to explain to me. They just did them, and I learned from their example, and I was better because of what they taught me. Random acts before that was a thing. Random acts just because that’s what you did for your neighbor, whether they lived next door or on the other side of town.
There is so much good out there. So much. Light in the dark. Cup your hands around it, fan the flame, make it brighter. One cup of coffee at a time.
Christmas can be really hard. There’s so much pressure, intentional or not, and I think sometimes that’s amplified being a parent. I didn’t grow up in a house of plenty, but I grew up in a house of enough. My parents weren’t wealthy, but I have so many amazing memories growing up, and while I’m sure they scraped and scrimped, and while I’m sure there were things I wanted that I didn’t get, I don’t remember a single one. I remember Santa coming to my grandma’s house on Garfield Avenue on Christmas Eve. I remember the magic of creeping out of bed at 5 in the morning on Christmas Day to see gifts that had miraculously appeared, always more gifts than there should have been, looking back.
But my favorite memory, hands down, the one Christmas that stands out heads and tails above the others, was when we lived in Madison. I couldn’t tell you how old I was, I’m guessing nine or ten, but we had just settled in to start opening presents when there was a knock on the front door. A city worker was standing there, looking both apologetic and wistful. A water main had busted, and they were turning off the water shortly. He wished us a Merry Christmas and headed up to the next house.
Present opening was delayed. My dad went to put coffee on right away, and my mom piled donuts on a plate while my sister and I bundled up. Up the street we went, her with the donuts in hand and me juggling cups filled with coffee, to where the men were working up the block. It was cold, I remember that, and I remember thinking how glad I was to be home, where it was warm.
I think about that every Christmas. There was no lecture from my parents about how it was the right thing to do, or important, they just did it, because here were people pulled away from their own celebrations, from their own family. Virtually all of the really important things I learned from my folks about being a parent weren’t things they ever stopped to explain to me. They just did them, and I learned from their example, and I was better because of what they taught me. Random acts before that was a thing. Random acts just because that’s what you did for your neighbor, whether they lived next door or on the other side of town.
There is so much good out there. So much. Light in the dark. Cup your hands around it, fan the flame, make it brighter. One cup of coffee at a time.
12/11/12
until there was you.
Kid A’s seven in a few days, and he was born before I was doing this blogging thing. Here, anyway. So. For posterity, or something.
This is how it went. I was 28, miserable in my job, very recently single. And then I was 28, pregnant, and unemployed. My life was everything I never expected it to be.
I looked at all the angles. I didn’t sleep. I told pretty much no one.
I sat in the parking lot of a women’s clinic for two hours one mild May day, stared at the entrance and cried, deep, hiccupping sobs as my fingers clenched and unclenched on the door handle. I gave up, eventually, and drove away. I looked at my dwindling back account, empty of any real cushion like all the financial planners tell you should have because hey, I was bright and ambitious and successful and never, ever going to be stuck unexpectedly without a job, right? Hah.
I feverishly applied for jobs everywhere, anywhere. I had a couple months grace period on my insurance. I had a stomach that was going to start expanding at any moment and legal or not, every day made finding something permanent more difficult. I realized I’d made up my mind. I told my parents then. My dad was great that night, hugged me and told me everything would be okay and I thought maybe it would except that he barely spoke to me for the next six months. My mom was my mom, always there to hold my hand.
No job, no real prospects, enough money for one month’s more rent and I will never forget sitting on the stoop of the apartment I had in Madison watching a storm roll in. It started to rain and I stared up into it, hands over a belly that wasn’t yet swelling, and asked what it was I was supposed to do. I asked for help, screamed back at the thunder and the pouring rain, angry and scared and just done.
A few days later, I had a temp job offer that ended up being permanent in less than a month. I paid off the rest of my lease with my first paycheck and moved home.
I don’t ever remember not being scared. But I would lay there in bed at night and whisper to the creature starting to move under my fingertips, that alien bump, that everything was going to be okay. That I could make it so by force of will alone.
I had preeclampsia, with Kid A, terrible horrible swelling and headaches and a couple of bouts of bed rest and I was terrified that I was going to lose my job, one way or the other, but to their credit they stuck with me. I was just barely 38 weeks when I was induced. It was just my mom and me in the delivery room. Just her, holding my hand and feeding me ice chips. My sister and I were both c-sections – she’d never been through a natural birth and when A finally arrived it was she that cut the cord.
He looked at me with those big dark eyes and nestled in like he’s always belonged there and my heart broke all over again and healed in the next instant. My mom went home that night and it was just he and I, lonely and terrifying and I will never forget the kindness of the nurse who came in and sat with me, spent time teaching me how to nurse, encouraging me when I was uncertain.
I’d been Strep B positive so we had to stay in the hospital longer than I otherwise would have as a precaution and there were no visitors, for Kid A and I. And it sucked, but it was also perfect, in its own way, the two of us curled up together in the hospital bed and he watched me while I talked, those eyes following me even though everyone tells you they don’t really see all that well that young. And when we left, to return to my parents’ home, my father took one look at him and no matter how difficult everything was between us he’d found his new best friend and to this day they are so special to one another and I am grateful for that, too.
Everything changed, with him. All my dreams, all my ambitions, the person that I thought I was. And there have been so many moments, between then and now, that I think about all those little choices that led up to him becoming the center of who I am, and whatever I let go to become his mother pales in comparison to who I am when he looks at me.
In a few days he will be seven, and this is the story of his birth. It is also the story of mine.
This is how it went. I was 28, miserable in my job, very recently single. And then I was 28, pregnant, and unemployed. My life was everything I never expected it to be.
I looked at all the angles. I didn’t sleep. I told pretty much no one.
I sat in the parking lot of a women’s clinic for two hours one mild May day, stared at the entrance and cried, deep, hiccupping sobs as my fingers clenched and unclenched on the door handle. I gave up, eventually, and drove away. I looked at my dwindling back account, empty of any real cushion like all the financial planners tell you should have because hey, I was bright and ambitious and successful and never, ever going to be stuck unexpectedly without a job, right? Hah.
I feverishly applied for jobs everywhere, anywhere. I had a couple months grace period on my insurance. I had a stomach that was going to start expanding at any moment and legal or not, every day made finding something permanent more difficult. I realized I’d made up my mind. I told my parents then. My dad was great that night, hugged me and told me everything would be okay and I thought maybe it would except that he barely spoke to me for the next six months. My mom was my mom, always there to hold my hand.
No job, no real prospects, enough money for one month’s more rent and I will never forget sitting on the stoop of the apartment I had in Madison watching a storm roll in. It started to rain and I stared up into it, hands over a belly that wasn’t yet swelling, and asked what it was I was supposed to do. I asked for help, screamed back at the thunder and the pouring rain, angry and scared and just done.
A few days later, I had a temp job offer that ended up being permanent in less than a month. I paid off the rest of my lease with my first paycheck and moved home.
I don’t ever remember not being scared. But I would lay there in bed at night and whisper to the creature starting to move under my fingertips, that alien bump, that everything was going to be okay. That I could make it so by force of will alone.
I had preeclampsia, with Kid A, terrible horrible swelling and headaches and a couple of bouts of bed rest and I was terrified that I was going to lose my job, one way or the other, but to their credit they stuck with me. I was just barely 38 weeks when I was induced. It was just my mom and me in the delivery room. Just her, holding my hand and feeding me ice chips. My sister and I were both c-sections – she’d never been through a natural birth and when A finally arrived it was she that cut the cord.
He looked at me with those big dark eyes and nestled in like he’s always belonged there and my heart broke all over again and healed in the next instant. My mom went home that night and it was just he and I, lonely and terrifying and I will never forget the kindness of the nurse who came in and sat with me, spent time teaching me how to nurse, encouraging me when I was uncertain.
I’d been Strep B positive so we had to stay in the hospital longer than I otherwise would have as a precaution and there were no visitors, for Kid A and I. And it sucked, but it was also perfect, in its own way, the two of us curled up together in the hospital bed and he watched me while I talked, those eyes following me even though everyone tells you they don’t really see all that well that young. And when we left, to return to my parents’ home, my father took one look at him and no matter how difficult everything was between us he’d found his new best friend and to this day they are so special to one another and I am grateful for that, too.
Everything changed, with him. All my dreams, all my ambitions, the person that I thought I was. And there have been so many moments, between then and now, that I think about all those little choices that led up to him becoming the center of who I am, and whatever I let go to become his mother pales in comparison to who I am when he looks at me.
In a few days he will be seven, and this is the story of his birth. It is also the story of mine.
12/4/12
to the moon and back
When you first have a baby, you make a million promises. Someone hands you that wonderful, terrifying, amazing bundle of joy, lays him on your stomach and in those moments you make pacts with whomever is listening. I will keep you safe, you say. I will protect you. I will make a better life for you. I promise. I promise. You whisper it into his skin, into his hair, along his belly, behind his knees, between his toes as if those prayers will somehow be absorbed, form some layer between him and the rest of the world.
You can’t. Of course you can’t. You can only do your best and hope that the universe will do you a solid, which is asking a lot of an inanimate object. If you’re the praying sort, you do that, but that’s also asking a lot of a being that has His fingers on the pulse of, well, everything. Most of us hate being micromanaged anyway.
This has been a humbling year, as far as being a mother goes, in so many ways. There was Kid C’s arrival and the ensuing health scare in the weeks and months that followed, a cold, hard reminder of how little control I really have over anything. That no matter what I do, there are limits to what I can provide for my child.
But tonight I am thinking about Kid A, my fiery one. We have been through so much together, he and I. He is super smart, scary smart, test scores that are wicked high and a photographic memory which basically means that he sees or hears something once and he knows it, can repeat it back. Which is a blessing and a curse. Unless we’re talking about reciting episodes of “Super Hero Squad” from start to finish, ad nauseam. Then it’s mostly a curse.
Anyway, he is funny, and bright, and sensitive, curious about the world around him and as much as he wants to know about it there’s a part of him that is overwhelmed by it. He had a rough summer at camp - kids picking on him because he’s a little awkward, and he has a really hard time picking up social cues so where others might get a hint he just tries harder to be liked. Which, yeah, that backfires, generally speaking.
4K was awful, kindergarten (here in the boonies, after we’d moved) was mostly good, but first grade has been somewhat of a struggle. I feel so, so lucky to be in a district with such amazing teachers, to have him working with someone who recognizes a good kid with some cognitive hurdles, not behavioral ones. He goes under the tables when he gets overwhelmed, he takes a walk. He gets frustrated at himself when he doesn’t get it right the first time, he says things out of context and repeats them, to the confusion of those around him.
He saw a therapist when we were in Milwaukee, and we started back up as he was starting school this fall. The struggle has always been how to help him process what his brain is inputting, to make sense of those cues when his brain has already demonstrated just how capable it is. I don’t want him to be the butt of jokes, I don’t want him to be picked on. I’m not worried about the academic piece, not even remotely because he taught himself to read when he was three. But I lose sleep over the social piece, already, because kids can be real dicks, and it only gets worse the closer to puberty you get.
The bottom line is that we’re moving closer and closer to a diagnosis. Asperger’s, except for how the folks in charge of such things have apparently decided to get rid of the term and push all those kids into the Autism spectrum. We’re not quite there yet but so many of his behaviors are there it doesn’t take someone with multiple years of medical training to connect those dots and honestly it’s almost a relief.
Except for how it makes me feel inside. I’m his mom. I’m supposed to be able to fix things, to kiss a scrape or bandage a cut, tell a dumb joke to make him smile and this is going to be a challenge for both of us. All of us, our family.
We talk all the time about the good things, the great things, my kid is the best, etc., and all of those things are absolutely true but we all have those moments where we feel like a fraud for all the promises we make we may not be able to deliver on and I guess I’m just having a night where that feels uncomfortably close to the truth. I’m being reminded that I overreached, and that there’s only so much I can do.
Long post is long, and the bottom line, of course, is that everything I ever promised him in those moments after we met - hell, before we met, even, my hands over the swell of my stomach and my feet propped up on my bedroom wall - mean no less to me now than they did then. Probably more, seven years and two more kids later. We are parents, we are human, and I guess I am reminding myself that as much as I want to think otherwise I am more the cruise director than the captain on this ride, and I just have to do the best I can to get us all where we’re going, to ride those waves and have faith that if we’re a little banged up when we get to our destination that we’re better for it.
He is such a great kid. The best kid. I want the world for him. I want him to find his way, and I want the patience and faith to believe that it may take a little longer, but we’ll get there.
I will keep you safe. I will protect you. I will make a better life for you. I promise.
I promise.
You can’t. Of course you can’t. You can only do your best and hope that the universe will do you a solid, which is asking a lot of an inanimate object. If you’re the praying sort, you do that, but that’s also asking a lot of a being that has His fingers on the pulse of, well, everything. Most of us hate being micromanaged anyway.
This has been a humbling year, as far as being a mother goes, in so many ways. There was Kid C’s arrival and the ensuing health scare in the weeks and months that followed, a cold, hard reminder of how little control I really have over anything. That no matter what I do, there are limits to what I can provide for my child.
But tonight I am thinking about Kid A, my fiery one. We have been through so much together, he and I. He is super smart, scary smart, test scores that are wicked high and a photographic memory which basically means that he sees or hears something once and he knows it, can repeat it back. Which is a blessing and a curse. Unless we’re talking about reciting episodes of “Super Hero Squad” from start to finish, ad nauseam. Then it’s mostly a curse.
Anyway, he is funny, and bright, and sensitive, curious about the world around him and as much as he wants to know about it there’s a part of him that is overwhelmed by it. He had a rough summer at camp - kids picking on him because he’s a little awkward, and he has a really hard time picking up social cues so where others might get a hint he just tries harder to be liked. Which, yeah, that backfires, generally speaking.
4K was awful, kindergarten (here in the boonies, after we’d moved) was mostly good, but first grade has been somewhat of a struggle. I feel so, so lucky to be in a district with such amazing teachers, to have him working with someone who recognizes a good kid with some cognitive hurdles, not behavioral ones. He goes under the tables when he gets overwhelmed, he takes a walk. He gets frustrated at himself when he doesn’t get it right the first time, he says things out of context and repeats them, to the confusion of those around him.
He saw a therapist when we were in Milwaukee, and we started back up as he was starting school this fall. The struggle has always been how to help him process what his brain is inputting, to make sense of those cues when his brain has already demonstrated just how capable it is. I don’t want him to be the butt of jokes, I don’t want him to be picked on. I’m not worried about the academic piece, not even remotely because he taught himself to read when he was three. But I lose sleep over the social piece, already, because kids can be real dicks, and it only gets worse the closer to puberty you get.
The bottom line is that we’re moving closer and closer to a diagnosis. Asperger’s, except for how the folks in charge of such things have apparently decided to get rid of the term and push all those kids into the Autism spectrum. We’re not quite there yet but so many of his behaviors are there it doesn’t take someone with multiple years of medical training to connect those dots and honestly it’s almost a relief.
Except for how it makes me feel inside. I’m his mom. I’m supposed to be able to fix things, to kiss a scrape or bandage a cut, tell a dumb joke to make him smile and this is going to be a challenge for both of us. All of us, our family.
We talk all the time about the good things, the great things, my kid is the best, etc., and all of those things are absolutely true but we all have those moments where we feel like a fraud for all the promises we make we may not be able to deliver on and I guess I’m just having a night where that feels uncomfortably close to the truth. I’m being reminded that I overreached, and that there’s only so much I can do.
Long post is long, and the bottom line, of course, is that everything I ever promised him in those moments after we met - hell, before we met, even, my hands over the swell of my stomach and my feet propped up on my bedroom wall - mean no less to me now than they did then. Probably more, seven years and two more kids later. We are parents, we are human, and I guess I am reminding myself that as much as I want to think otherwise I am more the cruise director than the captain on this ride, and I just have to do the best I can to get us all where we’re going, to ride those waves and have faith that if we’re a little banged up when we get to our destination that we’re better for it.
He is such a great kid. The best kid. I want the world for him. I want him to find his way, and I want the patience and faith to believe that it may take a little longer, but we’ll get there.
I will keep you safe. I will protect you. I will make a better life for you. I promise.
I promise.
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