Thankful

I know it’s not quite here, but the thought is totally consuming….

This Thanksgiving I’m grateful that there are fewer and fewer nights where I’m terrified I’m going to walk into her room and see her dead. I’m grateful that fear is fading and hope is stronger than anything else.

Cowinkydink

The universe can be a really funny thing sometimes…

Ages ago I wrote a blog post about an old friend, Adrienne, and how I regretted ending my friendship with her because I was too terrified to face how I actually felt about her.  Just as we were adopting Lily, Adrienne found that post, read it and chose to reach out.  Throughout the last 3 months, when things have been tough with Lily, it’s been an endless source of comfort just knowing that she was out there and I could actually talk to her about everything if I wanted to.

Then last night, as I found myself wide awake at 5am, I was thinking about another old friend and decided to reach out.  We, by no means, are on bad terms but simply have drifted apart with our own lives and haven’t connected in a while.  I shot this person an email, as I lost the number when I replaced my broken phone,  only to have the email bounce back because the account is closed.  It made me so sad because I actually couldn’t think of another way to track them down.  Then today, out of the blue, I was looking at Facebook and his name popped up saying that he was now friends with another mutual friend.

This has happened to me quite a bit in my life and I don’t know what to think about it -  I’ll hear a song on the radio and it will take me back to some distant memory and the next day, that person will call.  It’s never someone that I talk to all of the time, but someone random and out of the blue.  I’ll Google someone’s name and the following week I’ll get an email from them.  It’s happened so often that it’s hard not to see it as more than a coincidence – like it’s the universe throwing me a bone when it senses that I’m coming close to the end of my rope; a little reprieve before I realize I even needed one.  I don’t know what it is, but I have to admit that I’m grateful for it.

tiny self pity

this is all I will give in to: my parental leave is up in exactly 1 month and we haven’t even gone to the park yet. i’m ready for her to be home now.

More than Hope

2 months and 2 days. I have been a parent for 2 months and 2 days. We have spent 40 of those days in the hospital with this beautiful tiny girl that we get to call our daughter, our Lily. I knew, with Ben, that it was possible to love someone with every inch of you without even knowing them but what I didn’t know is how that love feels when you’re watching them hurt over and over again, how much you ache to take away their pain or to just have the pain happen to you instead. I didn’t know how protective you could be towards this little person – that you would want to rip the eyeballs out of the person who is just doing “one more finger poke”, even though logically you know that it’s helping this child, because right now it’s just making them hurt more. I didn’t know that you could be so angry at the universe for not giving a child – a perfect, giggly, smelly fart child – just one little break and for throwing more at this tiny person than most adults could handle. I didn’t realize that when looking at a tiny, limp, helpless body that you could think, “if she dies, then I want to go too.”

It’s been a long six weeks and I am more in love with that little perfect, giggly, smelly fart child than I ever thought possible. Every single day she has kept me grounded and inspired me to be strong and calm and polite (as opposed to ripping eyeballs out) so that I can do whatever I can to help make her better.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this – we signed up for a little girl who, had down syndrome and needed a heart surgery, but one that was common and uncomplicated. We are at the end of 40 days later and it is everything but that, and yet, there are no regrets. She, laughably, has become everything we said we didn’t want in a child – the joy of adoption is that you get to pick – and yet, there’s no other child I could ever want. When I lean down to rub her nose with mine and she opens her mouth and squishes her eyes, making her “Lily face”, my heart melts and all those 40 days disappear and I just see our lifetime in front of us. We are so lucky.

Must have been something good

I don’t know what I have done differently in my life over the past year but it must have been something amazing because I have never happier than I have in the past few days. I have an incredible wife who I adore, an adorable baby girl whose smiles make me light up from the inside, and the love and support of some truly amazing people. I am truly blessed.

So it begins….

Life always seems to run in cycles.  4 years (less 4 days) after losing Ben, She and I stood outside a strangers door, knocked and were led in to meet our new daughter.  After all of the adoption madness and the insanity of trying to make our family bigger, within 3 days everything came together and our lovely little girl, Lillian Natalia,  will come home with us for good next week.

Lily is  amazing.  She is 5 months old and has more hair then I have ever seen – it’s thick and dark and dying to be put into clips and ponytails already.  She’s tiny though, only 11lbs 4oz (as measured yesterday) but that’s wrapped up with a lot of other….challenges.  Lily was diagnosed with Down Syndrome at birth and also has AVSD (atrioventricular septal defects – a hole in her heart), which is common in children with Down Syndrome (25%).   She was born a month premature and only weighed 4lbs when the doctors did her first surgery, which was done to buy some time before a more permanent surgery could be done when she was a big older.  Unfortunately, this means that she gets so tired from just everyday activities that she is too tired to drink from a bottle.  She also has issues with reflux (again, common) which has lead to her being exclusively NG tube fed.  With all of this combined, it’s taken her a long time to start to gain weight but it’s happening now (our goal is to turn her into her our Thanksgiving turkey!).  We have an appointment with her cardiologist next week to hopefully book her big surgery and everyone is optimistic that once her heart is beating strong and fast that everything else will fall into place and we can start really looking at how to give her the best resources we can.

I’m mesmerized by her every movement, by every fact that she makes., the fact that she pouts her lips when she cries.  And if I’m mesmerized then  She is entranced – she can’t take her eyes off of her for a minute and is always reaching to pick her up again.  I’ve always known (with some doubting dark moments in there) that I was supposed to be a mother, but now we can clearly see that it is a role that She was made for as well.

The transition period between her foster family and coming home with us seems incredibly long, especially now that we’re in the middle of it.  We’ve done a few visits at her foster home and she’s done an afternoon visit at our home, but we’re ready to bring her home for good.  We have 2 overnight visits this week though and we’re so excited for those.  People are being so kind about trying to balance wanting to meet her with wanting to give us time to bond but we are slowly feeling the pressure building – especially from the grandparents, but I know that they’re excited that they can finally come over and meet this little lady.  We managed to do a drive by of my sister’s house on our way home from Sick Kids (the perk of living downtown) and Lily got to meet her cousin T and that alone made me sob with joy, so I’m sure it’s going to be an emotional week.  Hopefully it will be a fast moving one so that she can be settled into her own crib before we know it.

Love you.

Happy Birthday Ben Bean.  You’ll always be my first.

Dance…

“even if you have nowhere to do it but in your own living room.”

It’s a gorgeous spring day outside.  I’m about to go and meet my sister and cousin for a day of shopping for prom dresses, which inevitably leads to thinking about my own prom and how much life has changed since then, but really it just makes me think about how that night was actually perfect.   I went with a boy who made my heart flutter and who I still love dearly, I almost lost my virginity to said boy(thanks again for interrupting George  – wherever you are) but then was happy that I didn’t because the real thing turned out to be so much better.  But mostly it was just this amazing night spent laughing and dancing and laughing and watching the sun rise and laughing,  Prom may get a lot of hype but really, but for my high school self, it was well deserved.

Balancing friendship and sanity

Right after the adoption fell apart, I wrote an entry about how I was only going to let myself indulge in self-pity for that one entry.  I try really hard to live my life that way as well and not become lost in the frustration of how hard it’s been to build a family.

It took me a while after losing Ben to realize that I wasn’t moving on and not dealing with it was at the root of a number of other problems.  So, I finally spoke to my doctor and he started treating me for depression.  We had started to talk about coming off of the medication when She and I heard about the adoption and I decided that it wasn’t the right time to try and come off of it.  Being treated for depression finally gave me the insight to know my limitations: to know that I would need that extra dose of stability to get through if anything went wrong.  When the adoption fell apart, I was incredibly happy with that decision because in the corners of my mind (and as that entry only highlights) I could feel it creeping back, trying to take over.

The problem is that I had hoped that by treating the depression, the other emotions that come along with this entirely bumpy road would disappear as well and they have not.  While finally being stable has allowed me to focus on handling those emotions with a lot more grace then I had in the past, there are still times that I hit a wall and feel as though I don’t know which way to turn.  2010 and 2011 seem to be the year of the babies – they’re everywhere! Celebrities are announcing pregnancies every other day; family members who are too young to be having babies are popping them out like bunnies; friends (and so so so many acquaintances) are having babies and I’m being asked to celebrate at every turn.  And there becomes the delicate balance of friendship and sanity: does it make me a horrible person if I can’t celebrate your amazing life experience becuase it makes me feel as though I’m being crushed by an elephant?

I want to stress here that I don’t begrudge anyone and when I’m talking about people that I truly love I really am so happy and excited for them.  I’m just struggling with the actual celebrations.  It’s so hard – paralyzingly hard – for me to go to a baby shower and celebrate the fact that this person is getting something that I’ve always longed for and may never get to experience for myself.  And as our road is getting seemingly longer and harder to climb, it’s only become harder for me to put aside my own feelings and just be happy for this other person.  It starts an incredibly hard cycle: I feel bad for not being able to see past myself (and even more so when it’s a close friend because how can I not put them first?), so I force myself to go, but as the day draws closer I can hardly breathe because of the pain so I start looking for reasons not to go, which just brings me back to not being able to see past myself.   And in the end, how do you pick between friendship and sanity?

On friendship….

I was never ever (ever) the cool girl.  I would like to think that I wasn’t entirely unpopular, that I was never the Laney Boggs of any setting, but I have never been the girl who everyone wanted to be friends with and there were certainly times where I felt absolutely and completely socially inept.

But now I’m a grown-up and I’m a little afraid that past experiences are now shying me away from making any new friendships (either that or I totally have undiagnosed Aspergers, which would also make a lot of sense and put a lot of stuff into perspective for me).  I just seem to be completely oblivious when people are reaching out to be friends.  I know that I’m a very kind and friendly person, but apparently I’m also entirely thick.

This entire train of thought is stemming from conversations She and I have been having about a girl that I work with.  R. and I have been working together since our area reorganized about a year and a half ago.   I had known her for years before that but had only heard negative things about her.  It turns out that either she has changed quite a bit in the past few years or her reputation was completely unfounded because she and I are very much alike: we have the same work ethic and views, we share a similar sense of humour and we just generally get along really well.  But R. is cool – she’s pretty and stylish and exudes that confidence that makes cool girls so entirely terrifying – so when we started becoming friendlier, I simply figured that it was because we work together 8 hours a day 5 – 6 days a week and compared to the other people in our office, I’m the best alternative.   More and more lately though she’s been making an attempt to become “real” friends (as opposed to “work” friends) – she’s gone out of her way to pick me up for meetings, we’ve gone shopping together after work – just very nice things.  Then, finally I was telling her about the Adoption Resource Exchange that was happening this weekend and about how She couldn’t come because of work and R. offered to come with me.  I found this entirely bizarre! Why would a work friend offer to come with to something so….personal? So, i went home to talk to Her about it, expecting to hear my own thoughts echoed in Hers and she fully turned it around on me: “She’s trying to be your friend.”  I had totally missed it – completely oblivious.  Here is this woman trying to be kind and genuinely nice and I’m so thick that I interpret it as something entirely odd instead.  It makes me a little sad to think that this is how I see the world, although I can’t fully understand where that view came from.