oh baby

The genius and I dated happily for seven months before we conceived a child. We were mushy, sappy, goofy, young and stupid; we didn’t stop to ask the all-important questions about ourselves or each other. We both wanted children; we agreed on many principles and we saw our lives taking shape as a singular entity rather than the two very different human beings that we were. I made my decision about him rather early — that I wanted to spend my life with him; not such a smart idea, but I was living intuitively.

We weren’t ready to jump immediately into having a family, but we weren’t careful enough. We really wanted to be more financially stable with a couple of graduate degrees to our names before there were any babies, but we weren’t committed enough to ourselves to ensure that pregnancy wouldn’t happen. I fault myself for not implementing any kind of contraceptive measures. I was too accommodating to insist he help me out in that regard, and he was one to actually drop the line that every girl is warned of.  You know the one, don’t you? Of course you do! There are even commercials about it on every kind of media, for crying out loud.

Ready or not, a tiny life was created. I knew within days . There were the usual symptoms of the monthly ordeal exquisite joy of being a woman, but there were other symptoms, too. I did minor research about the body weirdness, then proceeded to the nearest store for their stock of pee-stick tests. The test results were all positive, of course. When I shared the news with the genius, he was quietly happy. He assured me that he would not run away from the responsibility. He asked me to marry him shortly after I told him about the baby. We decided to get married because our respective upbringings dictated that this was how an unmarried couple should handle pregnancy.

I was terrified of what my parents would think of me. I knew it would break their hearts that their only child (and only daughter) had gone against their will and against their God, and conceived a child in her iniquitous living. I kept the pregnancy from my parents for three months because I was delaying the inevitable. I was in shock and still dealing with the magnitude of suddenly having a family of my own; I wasn’t ready for the disappointment that I knew I would cause my parents, and the unbearable guilt I knew I would feel when their unhappy faces saw the truth in me. The news wasn’t met with celebration when we finally did fess up. It didn’t take them long to get excited about the coming of their first grandchild, but that first night was a big upset. Mom had a few questions and choice comments, but Dad simply crossed his arms and frowned.

Dad had recently been ordained as a deacon at the church, and all through the ceremony I was burning with the knowledge that I was a blemish on his record as a father (in this particular belief, that means head of household who should be in control of the actions of the family). Truth be told, mom is really the one who has always worn the pants in the family, so it was her disapproval and pain that burrowed deepest into me. The guilt of being a blight to my family reputation burned in me like seering coals. I cried rather harder than maybe I would have at the ordination if there hadn’t been a tiny human growing in my unwed womb. I have since come to terms with why I felt so guilty, and I’ve let go of the severe expectation upon myself to be perfect and live by such a hampering set of rules. To hem myself in with all those crazy Do’s and Don’t’s is to set myself up for failure on too many levels. I now embrace my humanity, which is not to say that I’m purposefully Living In Sin; I’m taking a page from Sally’s book of wisdom — I’m being empathetic to myself. I’m taking loving care of me (or at least trying my damnedest to), which I haven’t done in a long time, if ever I did to begin with. 

Dad and I don’t have to verbalize our thoughts to communicate with each other. It has always been this way. Subtle facial expressions, or eye contact alone is how most of our personal communication goes. When dad shored himself up that day (Father’s Day!) behind folded arms, the sadness in his eyes made me want to run and hide. He was hurt. And mad. And disappointed. And afraid for me. I had become accustomed to being a big disappointment to my mother because she’s always had such high hopes and expectations for me. At some point in time I accepted the fact that I could either do everything she wants me to do, and possibly still have her want and expect more for/ from me, or I could live with being the constant disappointment. I love my mother dearly (love you mom), but I’ve had to draw personal boundaries that I’m learning to live by so I can be sure I’m doing what’s right for me. I hate to make it sound like me, Me, ME, but right now I’m working on finding my center. I still take into consideration my responsibilities and the expectations put upon me, but I’m learning to make my decisions for me – not based on how someone else will react or judge. This is my one life; I can’t waste any more time scrambling in circles trying please everyone else. If ever I get back to biblical living, this self-love, self-care thing will benefit others, in terms of “love your neighbor as you love yourself.” I’m not trying to go about this in a selfish way, but I do want to be happy. Isn’t that a basic need?

Looking up into dad’s hurt eyes was exactly why I waited to tell my parents about the baby. It may, in fact, have been the biggest Facing The Music moment in my life. We all lived to tell.

the way things were

The tail-spin began when I was a sophomore in college. Flannery was right when she said everything that rises must converge. A mass of tiny little pieces joined over me and crushed me with their weight. Against warnings of many a concerned adult, I studied Christianity at my university of choice. Not the umbrella of “religion,” but specifically Christianity. Until then I was a faithful Baptist — a Bible Belt Baptist at that. As a compliant person by nature, it was easy to plug in and be herded. The blindness of the faith (that by the faithful is considered a positive) was a blindness that covered more areas of my life than I was aware needed awakening. Delving into the classes taught by alleged heretics, I became bogged down and befuddled by the politics of religion. We dissected dogma, we devil’s-advocated ourselves silly, we waxed poetic and theoretic on all things above and below (and whether those above and below places even exist). There were too many questions, options, and political institutions. Christianity became more about social control or acceptance, and the faith wasn’t enough for my mind to hang onto. I became simultaneously apathetic and burnt-out. I was two classes away from having that Christianity degree when I graduated with a studio art degree.

Shortly after the big burn-out in that sophomore year, I started dating someone. We had our good moments and he had some very endearing qualities, but mom was right when she called him “The Evil Presence.” Even though he and my parents got along very poorly, and knowing he had an open disrespect for women, I continued dating him. Two years into our relationship I allowed myself unblinkingly to be engaged to this person. You know it’s a bad sign when the bride-to-be hesitates on setting the wedding date. I kept giving generalized projections like, “maybe the fall after I graduate college,” or “maybe the following spring.” A very great friend, at the thought of my eventual marriage to this person, told me that she would be the one to come yelling and screaming at the “speak now, or forever hold your peace” bit of the ceremony. That was a major wake-up call.  The next epiphany was when I made a phone call and reached the husband of the woman I was trying to call. He sounded just like her. They were a middle-aged couple, and listening to his voice — the tone, the cadence, the annunciation — made me think about being married to The Evil Presence and growing to be like him and sound like him over the years. My instinct was “I don’t want to be like him!!” I didn’t immediately end the relationship like I should have; we fizzled miserably for another six months.

Three weeks after I graduated college, my father flew off a tin roof and met a landing that required rods, screws, and replacement joints for all his broken (or obliterated) bones. The fiance was jealous of all the time I spent at the hospital with my father. He was an absolute snot about visiting his fiance’s (my) father in the hospital after the major accident. If that wasn’t flabbergasting enough, he also started behaving suspiciously. He began using a pass-code to get into his mobile phone (hmm, something to hide?). The way he kissed me changed drastically. He was more moody than usual. Then someone in my network of acquaintances reported seeing my fiance sharing an intimate lunch with another woman. The town is so small that you can’t go anywhere without seeing someone you know, and the fiance had a history of finding a new fling before letting go of the previous one. I knew without doubt he was cheating. That’s when I had no problem ending the relationship with that guy.

As a new graduate, I hadn’t sought full-time work. Through the last year of college I’d worked weekends running the office of a medical staffing agency — two twelve hour days together. The weekend job was perfect in allowing me to get my work done in two days so I could be a full-time student and focus on my studies during the week. After dad’s accident, the weekend job let me take care of dad during the week when he came home from the rehab hospital. My mother was able to care for him over the weekends, and we alternated thusly for as long as he needed us.

Fast-forward a few months, and I’m working a second part-time job. When I wasn’t working the weekend medical staffing agency job, I worked in the frame shop of the local art mart. [Framing is a lucrative business if you don't mind the manual labor of creating the moulding and building the frames. The rest is a breeze, but I digress.] I averaged about 25 hours a week at the frame shop. A week-day employee in the staffing office was becoming increasingly disabled due to a mounting case of carpel tunnel syndrome added to the high stress level of the office. The staffing office was in the middle of the hospital, amidst two nursing stations and across the hall from an intensive care unit. Medical personnel see a lot of high-stress *stuff* at their jobs, and when our employees needed a place to vent, the office was the perfect place — most times, the closest. Many times we were chewed on by the medical staff simply because we were their first contact after leaving a severely stressful situation. The staffing office also required acute attention to detail (nothing went undocumented), critical thinking skills always at the ready, and double-time speed and accuracy in everything. Amplifying the stress was our tyrant director who expected everyone to read her mind, and the woman had zero consideration for others’ perspectives or feelings. [I swear, I myself was never without heartburn during the five years I worked there. Even thinking now about those crazy days, my chest gathers tension and my adrenaline is up!] When the staffer with the deteriorating health missed work, nine times out of ten I was the one filling her shift. Between the two jobs I worked upwards of 80 hours some weeks.

Working weekends, I had been out of church for two years. Being so busy with work and decompression after work, I never made time to deal with my uncertainty regarding religion, God, spirituality, etc. My psyche was still reeling with the bitterness of the break-up months before. Even though I despised him and knew that I was so much better off without him, I still missed all the details that make a relationship. I missed him a little bit, too — the scoundrel. Wading through those emotions drained my motivation for any other kind of psychological reckoning. Just when I was starting to be open to the possibility of dating again, a co-worker at the frame shop took pity on my single status and suggested emphatically that I should meet a buddy of hers.

Enter: The Genius. My co-worker brought her friend by the shop one day to introduce him to me. His face was familiar and I placed him immediately — the psychology student who was always hanging around the psychology building any hour of the day or night. I took one psychology class during my time in college, and that was the same semester that I recoiled from religion and lost my sanity. It was all I could do to keep fair marks that semester. I spent odd hours at the psychology lab studying and making up for lost time. Sometimes this guy was in the lab, too — usually he was asleep with a funny note saying, “please wake me up at suchandsuch time.” I remembered thinking he was good-looking — he had the dark hair and eyes that always catch my attention. He was just a background character in the life I lived then; we never even so much as said hello. I officially met him when my co-worker introduced us at the frame shop a couple of years later.

And so it was that I was adopted as the newest member of a bong-happy clan. My co-worker, her boyfriend, and the Genius were a close-knit crew who loved to while the hours away in the inebriated glow of marijuana (and god knows what else). I was hesitant to partake of the high; in fact, it was months before I even dabbled, which I only did because I gave in to the curiosity and the awkwardness of being the one in the group who abstained. It wasn’t for me — I care about my brain cells and my lungs, thank you. And the smoke isn’t friendly to the sensitive sinuses I’ve inherited from my mother. I continued hanging around with the laid-back crew because I liked the genius.

He is incredibly brilliant, the genius. His aptitude for math and scientific logic are well above average. He has a silver tongue and can easily convince lesser minds of anything at all. For three months he remained aloof, but when July rolled around he suddenly saw me as more than a friend. Those first few months I was so taken with his smooth talking and his seemingly endless depth of knowledge. He’s romantic far beyond 95% of the male population, I guarantee. On the weekends he would sometimes walk from his apartment close by just to visit me at the medical staffing office. On these occasions he usually brought me a flower he had plucked along the way.

It’s amazing the things we let slide when we think we’re in love. We were so over the moon that our flaws were invisible among the fervent love we had for one another. We talked of marriage and children; we shared views on many different aspects of life at the time. [I've since learned that principles in theory can be vastly different from principles in practice.] In his favor was the fact that my parents didn’t (openly) disapprove of him. There wasn’t a single thought in our minds that we should really assess ourselves as individuals and as a pair. Before the honeymoon period was over, we were rushed into more commitment and responsibility than we were prepared for. In March I was with child.

Birth of a son

A few days ago my friend JRas gave birth to her daughter, Elena Faith–spitting image of her mommy, and very adorable! The brief account of Elena’s birth by C-section brought vivid memories of the day my son was born…

My OB allowed me to go only one day past my baby’s estimated due date because I had gestational diabetes. He insisted on inducing labor, which increases the risk of C-section delivery. Around 8:30am on November 16, 2005 is when the nurses began attaching straps to my pregnant belly to hold contraction and fetal heart monitors in place. Once the monitors were positioned, they were plugged into a tower of machines that had knobs, graph paper, and a chart screen on top. When the nurse adjusted the volume, the baby’s heartbeat echoed its constant chug-chug around the room and the screen showed a line that signified progress of the baby’s heart tones. An I.V. was started that slowly dripped pitocin into my system, and shortly thereafter the contractions began. My husband and our parents hovered in and outside of the room as the medical staff needed access throughout the day.

For a couple of hours there were mild contractions, and the doctor stripped the membranes of my womb, freeing the amniotic fluid. Soon after the fluid loss is when the contractions increased their intensity and I called for an epidural. Enduring the incorrect insertion of an epidural was excruciating, and there was nothing I could do about it except insist that the resident was perforating my vertebrae doing something wrong. “There is supposed to be pressure, ” she said flatly. “This is very much pain,” I gritted. Luckily, the experienced anesthetist was standing by and quickly budged the resident aside when he finally determined that I really was in the wrong kind of pain. The nurse who stood by me for the epidural was like an angel. I knew there was really nothing she could do besides keep me from falling into the floor, but her presence was more than just her body and mind standing there. I had already spent most of the morning listening to her coaching me on all the things that could happen, and through her conveyance of anecdotes and helpful advice, I had decided that this woman was one of the sweetest people I’d ever met. During the epidural, it was her spirit that stayed  me through the awful pain.

Sweet surrender. The only way I can describe the feeling of an epidural taking effect is this: when you drink a shot of very strong liquor, a warm buzzing sensation spreads in every direction from the esophagus. The epidural was a secondary drip of medication directly into the spinal cord, and everything that was below that point began to slowly feel cold and buzzy. After everything went numb is when I felt like I needed to run a marathon (exactly how your nose becomes terribly itchy when you’re told not to scratch your nose). I wanted to change positions or even just twitch a foot, but had zero control. I couldn’t even keep my own leg from lolling off the hospital bed! My husband was so loyal that whole morning. He fed me ice chips and held my hand when I needed him close. We never got to the coaching, pushing part, but I’m sure he would have been a golden champ.

As the day progressed, the baby’s heartbeat became drastically low with each contraction–the chug-chugs silenced for a few seconds, followed each time by the baby making an uncomfortable squirm in my belly. I know now that he was fighting for his little life. The doctor had an increasingly furrowed brow with each visit to my room; the creeping suspicion that things were not at all going smoothly began to loom larger. At some point the nurses brought in an oxygen mask and told me to stay calm; I could do anything but. My parents and parents-in-law were shooed from the room. During the escalation of dangerous contractions, the nurses were coaching me on what would happen if the doctor decided to call an emergency C-section–all I could do was hold the oxygen mask in place and nod anxiously while prickly tears filled my eyes. I kept looking to my husband for some sort of grounding, but overwhelming fear kept me from feeling comforted by his presence. When the doctor came back in the room to explain all the disastrous possibilities that surgery can entail, I could barely contain my urge to completely freak out. He left after I signed the papers–the yes-yes-I-know-I-could-die-from-surgery papers; not long after that was an ominously prolonged silence during a very strong contraction. The chug-chugs had stopped, and so did the line on the screen beside the bed.

The nurses didn’t even wait for the doctor. In a fraction of a second there were straps flying from my belly, cords being ripped from machines, a path to the door was hurriedly cleared as the bed lurched forward, and someone came into the room and shoved a small cup under my nose, “drink this.” The contents of that cup should be called Liquid Death–it tastes like a super glue and gasoline mixture, with a hint of cough syrup. What seemed like an eternity must have only been a minute or two, but every second of my wheeled rush down the hall to the Operation Room was another second that I couldn’t hear or feel my baby!

In addition to my fear for my baby’s life and my own were the random phrases all the OR staff were blurting (“Why are we using this room?” “This one doesn’t have anything prepared!” “Does the doctor know to come to this one?” “Where are the ___?” “I don’t think the anesthetist has been called…”). Primal fear took over, and I began shaking uncontrollably–earth quaking tremors, chattering teeth, every muscle in my body screaming in terror. I was strapped to the operating table with my arms out from my body, like a “T.” A glowing saucer hovered above me while people in scrubs scurried this way and that.

“Where is my husband,” I begged to the room at large.

“We’ll get him in a minute,” someone said from behind a green mask.

A large blue cloth was clipped in front of me, blocking my view of the impending surgery and also the reflection of all in the saucer of light. The doctor finally came in; I vaguely remember thanking him for “sticking around” (exact words). He immediately disappeared behind the blue curtain and I felt a fluttering sensation on my skin that must have been the orange disinfectant being swabbed all around my midsection. Pressure in the vicinity of my pelvis let me know that the surgery had begun.

“Where is my husband??” I did not want to do this without him.

Promptly he appeared, engulfed in white protective gear with only his eyes and hands visible. That’s all I needed. He looked over the blue curtain and looked into my eyes, and I saw the assurance. His mere presence brought wave of peace that calmed the tremors, the chattering teeth, and the unspeakable fear. My husband is usually the type of person to give every minute detail of what’s happening, but I didn’t want to see, hear, or know anything about the gory details. All I could say was, “I don’t want to know,” and (thankfully) that was enough for him to use some discretion in his whispered descriptions. He let me know when they were clipping through muscle, slicing into the uterus, and when the baby’s head was pulled out of the hole on my abdomen. I heard the doctor say that the umbilical cord was around my baby’s neck, which is the probable cause of the lack of heart beat during the contractions earlier in the day. A tiny gurgling noise and then a tiny cry sounded. I looked into my husband’s eyes, asking silently, “That’s him?” His smiling eyes met mine with an emotional “yes.” The continued narration of what was happening to the baby drew my mind away from the horror of the previous few moments.

My husband accompanied the baby to his first bath and weighing, and brought him back to the OR to visit me while the doctor was sewing me back together. It wasn’t until I was in the recovery room that I was able to hold my baby for the first time. My husband had remembered his camera and took a photo of his wife adoring his sleeping newborn son.

Lost

All my religious energy is spent for the time being. I grew up in a Southern Baptist Church, which means I was steeped in the preaching of the Gospel from a young age. When I was a child, there were no encroaching skepticisms to cast ugly shadows of doubt and uncertainty on the church’s teaching. I absorbed every last bit of the Bible from Genesis to Revelations; not once did I waver from what I was taught. Throughout my teenage years, I allowed myself to be swept into the fervor of Christianity that catches young people unawares. I joined ministry teams, and I went on mission trips to save souls for Jesus. I never felt right about “leading someone to salvation,” but I was resolute about the rest. It seems like I was at the church every time the door was open. I was the epitome of what it meant to be a “good girl;” no parties with alcohol, didn’t even think about sex because I was a True Love Waits member. I didn’t even kiss any boys until I was twenty! When I was eighteen years old, I was convinced I was being called by God to be a minister’s wife—I thought then that there were few who were more Godly than those in ministry.

Spring semester of my sophomore year in college is when my faith started to crumble. I began undergraduate studies as an undecided major at Mercer University. Despite disapproval and warnings about the dangers of attending Christianity classes at Mercer, I signed up for them anyway. After joining the Baptist Student Union my freshman year, I quickly rose through the ranks of prominence within the BSU—I even became an officer in the council. I decided at some point that I would get my degree in Christianity (it’s not general religion at Mercer; it’s specifically Christianity—Mercer would get all the dollars from the Baptist Association if there were other religions taught!). I took so many Christianity classes and wrote so many papers that I probably could have shat a Bible if I’d tried. There frequently comes a moment when following all the politics, theories, and tangents in these classes that one regularly has to revisit what one even came in believing in the first place. I never found my way back to the beginning. I became extremely burnt out on all things Jesus. Other circumstances piled in with the disillusionment to send me packing on a one-way trip to official depression. Somehow I managed to keep a 3.0+ GPA that semester. Two classes away from completing my major in my senior year, I withdrew from the Christianity classes and dropped the major (luckily I had chosen to double-major, so I had something else to put on my degree—though equally as useless without further schooling: studio art). No longer could I tolerate the rules or terminology of Christianity, or the ever-spiraling discussions and nit-picking that came from the classes and spewed from the minds of the students.

If I had to classify myself right now in terms of Christianity, I would say I’m lost. Wandering. Bordering on agnostic. Since the rift that happened in 2000, I have been in a numb, dry, detached state of spiritual mind. I want to believe in God, and in mercy beyond justice. I need to be able to pray; I want to know that my prayers, though currently few and far between, aren’t just meandering off into the universe with no purpose or destination. I definitely want to be a more spiritual person. Spirituality, in my mind, is much deeper and has a broader impact than religion. I want peace, harmony and all that basic hippie stuff—I really do. It’s a tight-rope walk, Christianity, and I feel so incompetent and hypocritical now when I see myself in light of what a true Christian is supposed to be. No one is perfect, of course, but I’ve been away from it for so long now that I’m wondering if Christianity is more of a social phenomenon than truth. I’m not ready to stamp Been There, Done That on my “faith” and move on to the next dogma, but I’m definitely not ready to jump right back in.