thoughts on pregnancy

November 10, 2011 / emmykay / 6 Comments

… very post partum!

The girls will be nine months old next week and I find it interesting how frequently I think back on my pregnancy, the delivery and the weeks following. I suppose the fact that my dear friend VIcky is going through some pregnancy concerns may have triggered some of these thoughts (if you pray, please pray for her and sweet baby Bubbles and her husband Tim and their little boy Caleb). But anyway, in no particular order, the things I think about are:

How strangely calming it was to be on hospital bed rest. Perhaps that’s where the phrase “peace that passes human understanding” comes from. And while I’m sure I was not always peaceful about it, the way that I remember it was that I didn’t have much anxiety about the situation most of the time. I remember being alone in my room a lot, looking out the window at the office of my childhood pediatrician. The memories of my childhood pediatrician are pleasant, although most memories involve being home from school sick.

Aside from actually being sick, I usually liked being home from school sick because it afforded a sneak peek into a world I didn’t usually get to enjoy. It put the world into a new context for me – a glimpse into what adults did while I was at school. Often I would look at the clock and think of what I should be doing in class and compare it to what was going on in the world around me – the mailman delivering mail, neighbors out walking, adults going to the store and so on. I would hear my bus stopping near my house, dropping off all of the other students who had gone to class and I wondered what it would be like if I had been at school that day and was disembarking the bus at that moment, instead of tucked away in my bed.

And really, that’s what it was like on hospital bed rest. The world was going on around me and I was watching it happen from my adjustable hospital bed. I tried not to think too much about work, although I checked in frequently to make sure that everything was OK. It was as though if I could just make it another day and just stay pregnant a little bit longer, it would be so much better for our girls. I made it ten days.

I also think a lot about the labor and delivery. I remember it like I was watching things happen to me and not actively doing something about the situation. As a matter of fact, I spent much of my mental energy trying to stop the freight train of labor so that Frank could be there for the delivery.

I was apprehensive about delivery because I felt like there was a big question mark hanging over the outcome. I wondered, somewhat fearfully, what my children would look like. I wondered if they would look like real babies and if the image of alien-looking babies would follow me for my entire life. It made me sad to think that their birth wouldn’t be “normal” – that a trip to the NICU was a certainty.

I remember the doctor announcing I was “complete” (ready to deliver), but was only measuring 9 cm (normally you measure 10 cm before you push). Then I realized that the reason I was “complete” was because they were expecting me to deliver very, very small babies. I was filled with dread.

When they wheeled me into the operating room to deliver and told me to start pushing, I was suddenly confused and unsure of how to do it. I had thought about this moment over and over in my head, but I found myself afraid to push. Not because I was afraid of pain, but I was afraid I’d push too hard and hurt the babies. Silly, right?

I pushed anyway. The girls were born within 20 minutes. I remember wondering, as I was pushing, whether they would cry when they were born. When Ellie was born, I found myself holding my breath, waiting for her to take her first breath. Oh, and when she cried, it was the sweetest sound I’d ever heard.

And when just three minutes later, Carrie was born, screaming and all angry, I was flooded with relief.

Yes, they were small, but OH! they looked like real life babies! I was so relieved.

I did get to hold Ellie in the operating room for a few seconds – long enough to snap a picture. I think about that moment a lot – how surreal it felt. How different that moment felt than I had ever imagined.

I also think pretty frequently about getting to go see my girls in the NICU after I spent time in recovery. My entire pregnancy, the thing I couldn’t wait for was hearing the lullaby played over the intercom system at the hospital. But all the times I had imagined it, I was holding my babies with my husband. Instead, the first strains of the song rang out as I was being wheeled to the NICU through a long, winding hallway. The doors of the NICU ward opened and directly ahead of me painted on the wall was an excerpt from the poem “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers” by Emily Dickinson:

“Hope” is the thing with feathers—
That perches in the soul—
And sings the tune without the words—
And never stops—at all—

And oh, how those words chilled me. I remember seeing those words when we toured the hospital two months earlier. I remember seeing those words on our tour and saying a quiet prayer in my head that I wouldn’t see them again.

There I was, facing those words and hearing the song playing over intercom and my heart was so sad. “This is not how I imagined it!” I wanted to say. But there were no words.

As they wheeled me into Ellie’s room, the second lullaby started playing for Carrie. They wheeled me up to her incubator, a glass box, and there was my very small, but very beautiful, baby girl. She was hooked up to monitors and an IV and wearing only a diaper.

They placed her in my arms and I think about that moment, too. I was so sorry. I felt like she was hooked up to monitors and IV’s and I didn’t do everything possible to stop it. I came up short and she had only been alive for a few hours.

Carrie hadn’t been cleaned up yet or fully observed, so I didn’t get to hold her. I looked at her through the glass, marveling at her tiny, perfect features.

I think a lot about going back to my hospital room on the Mother & Baby floor. All of those rooms, in my mind, were full of babies and their mommies. And I was going back empty and alone.

I think about swallowing all of those feelings and thoughts when I saw my little girls. They needed me to be strong. They needed me to be happy when I saw them and to cover them in love. This whole thing wasn’t about me any more.

I think about the next day when they explained to us that the girls would need feeding tubes. While we were sitting in Carrie’s room, they ran her feeding tube through her nose and into her tummy. She screamed these fragile, tiny baby cries that broke our hearts.

I remember the sound of the breath leaving Frank as he watched them run the feeding tube. The “oomph” was like he had been punched in the gut.

I think a lot about the nights when we first had them at home. The nights sort of blurred together. On the morning that Prince William and Catherine Middleton married, Carrie woke up at 3 a.m. Frank and I wound up watching the entire wedding, thanks to Carrie.

I turn these moments over in my head, over and over. I think about what they mean, how they changed me, and wonder what would’ve happened if things went differently.

But what happened is what happened, as un-profound as that is. Months and months later, the girls are doing great. They are healthy, vibrant, active little girls. They laugh and squeal and chatter. It’s hard to imagine that they were born a minute before they were meant to.

The more I talk to people and hear their stories, the more I realize that life rarely turns out as expected or planned. Perhaps that’s what John Lennon meant when he said, “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”

Life is fragile and delicate and rough and sharp and beautiful.

on being pete campbell

September 1, 2010 / emmykay / Leave a comment

For those of you who are not Mad Men fanatics, this will take a bit of ‘splainin’. Pete Campbell is an Account Executive/Partner at Sterling, Cooper, Draper, Price – a fictional 1960’s ad agency. If you’ve watched all of the seasons of Mad Men, Pete’s slimy ways have probably made you feel uncomfortable or dirty at least once – possibly twice – an episode for the past four seasons.

Here’s the thing about Pete: Pete knows what he wants and he goes after it. He doesn’t always take a path that you or I would prefer – he sometimes turns to manipulation or blackmail – but everything he does is because he wants to be The Ad Man. The other thing to know about Pete is that he is an account executive (basically a client schmoozer) who fancies himself as a creative. He is NOT a creative.

That all being said, here are my thoughts on Pete:

On Trying Too Hard: Pete wants to be an Ad Man. Desperately. He “acquires” all of the things that he thinks he needs to portray the image (wife, apartment downtown, etc), he reads all of the “right” books, he does all of the networking. But at the end of the day, he often just comes across as trying too hard. It’s awkward to watch and difficult to like. It conjures up at least a half dozen memories of stupid things I’ve done or witnessed other people doing. I think about my first presentations when I worked in advertising or remember terrible sales pitches someone delivered to me. I shudder at the memories. And I watch Pete and think, “Am I trying too hard? Am I making myself into a person I wish I could be or am I becoming a person that I am meant to be?”

On Taking Shortcuts: Pete regularly tries to find shortcuts, but his shortcuts always come at a much-too-high cost. Sometimes it’s his own integrity that takes a hit, and sometimes he even jeopardizes family relationships for the sake of authenticating his place in the ad world. I’m all for taking risks, but the things he’s willing to risk sometimes seem too great considering what he is hoping to accomplish. How often do I sacrifice a long-term item for a short-term goal? What are my trade-offs?

On Being Authentic: Pete says a lot of crap to get what he wants and hides a lot of things he does. There are a lot of things Pete sweeps under the rug, including affairs and a baby with another woman. Watching his character operate, the amount of baggage he’s carrying around is almost palpable. It’s like he’s teetering, on the verge of falling over under the baggage’s oppressive weight. And yet, if you asked him, he’d probably ask, “Baggage? What baggage?”

framing

July 6, 2010 / emmykay / 1 Comment

I had some posters in college that I bought at hole-in-the-wall poster store on Belmont near the El stop. We liked to go in this store to just poke around and find funny or interesting artwork or kitschy posters. It was the kind of store where they let you sift through their posters for hours and never bothered you about it. Just a few shops west of the poster store is the locally (perhaps nationally?) famous restaurant Ann Sathers (yuummmmy cinnamon rolls!) and across the street is Igor’s Dungeon (tawdry sex and drug paraphernalia). While I was in school, I bought 4 posters from this poster store. The posters were Romeo and Juliet, Jack Vettriano’s the Singing Butler, the VJ Day Kiss and another with a couple hugging at the train station. These pictures hung frame-less on the walls of my apartments in college for several years before I moved home after graduation.

When I was moving home, Mom asked me if I had any artwork that I might want framed. I hesitated when she asked and had to think about it before I remembered these four posters – I guess I hadn’t thought much about framing the posters. I mean, they were the posters that I sticky-tacked up to the wall in my college apartment. They were the posters that were part of a bigger wall-collage of sorority paddles and random pictures with friends and inspirational quotes. I had never thought about these posters as art, but when my mom asked me if I had any artwork, I thought, “yeah, I guess I do!”

My mom does an excellent job decorating, but I was still surprised at what an awesome job she did picking out frames for the posters. While I would have done something more ordinary (and well, lets’ be real – plain) – she picked out these gorgeous ornate frames. The pictures that I looked at for years on my apartment wall looked COMPLETELY different in the frames she picked out. They went from being college dorm-room blah to grown-up chic in less than five minutes. I smile whenever I look at them because they reminded me of something very important:

How an image is framed changes how you see that image. We talk about this concept in our culture a lot using phrases like “Perception is reality” and “Attitude is everything.” The way the pictures were framed changed how I interacted with the pictures, where I place them in my current home and how others saw them. Artists play with this concept by taking ordinary objects and “framing” those objects differently so that the ordinary objects are perceived as art.

I talked in my previous post about the different themes running through my life right now and that definition is one of those themes. When I think about how I am defined, I realize that the context is just as important as the content. I am well aware that the same word in different contexts can mean so many different things. The question, “Why?” can be insulting, intriguing, lamenting, fatiguing and energizing, all dependent on how the question is asked.

I have a lot of different contexts that I exist in. Sure, I am a wife and a family member and a friend and a coworker, but what kind of person do I want to be in each of these contexts? I mean, yes, there are things that will be consistent in each area – I am a Christian in all of these areas. But what kind of wife, family member, friend and worker do I want to be? And how do I feel about how each of these categories is shaping up?

I like to say “yes” to everything. It has been an epic battle for me to say “no” more often. I think when I was younger, it was probably wise to say yes to a lot of things so that I could have a wider experience, but perhaps it is time to become more selective, picking the projects and paths that are of more interest to me.

I lamented the other day that there was nothing that I am passionate about. I feel that have spent so much time trying lots of different things that I never really specialized in one area. Today I was thinking on this topic a little bit more and a few patterns of behavior are emerging that give me a few clues about more dominant personality/skill areas that I could work on.

So yeah. I know I started rambling, but I guess in a nutshell: I’ve got a lot to work on. And I will probably write more on this because I feel like I didn’t say everything I wanted to. But it is late and if I don’t go to sleep my context tomorrow will be viewed through sleep deprived eyes…

discipline

May 29, 2010 / emmykay / 1 Comment

I’m not a very disciplined person in a lot of respects. I try very hard, but because it is not ingrained in my character, I often FORGET to be disciplined.

And last week was a week of discipline.

Something I’ve had drilled into me in my professional life is to nip things in the bud. The minute something goes down a wrong path, and before it becomes a habit, you have to nip it in the bud. Because I don’t like conflict, this was a hard one for me to learn both as a manager and as coworker. But I have found that people respect you more for speaking up early rather than letting something carry on. Not saying anything is often viewed as permission-granting.

I’m not perfect at this skill, but I work on it. And because it runs counter to how I would prefer to live, it takes a certain amount of emotional energy.

The other thing I’ve had to get better at is disciplining my thoughts. This has been on-going since I was little. When I first started working on this, I was struggling with anxiety in school. I would get the syllabus on the first day of school, and see that on the last day of the class there would be a… gasp… FINAL EXAM and I would start wondering how I was going to pass that test. Seriously? I hadn’t even been through the course yet.

As I’ve gotten older, and hormones have gotten crazier, I’ve had to work on disciplining where I let my thoughts go. For example, my dear husband has a horrid schedule for the next 3 weeks. I’m not going to get into the details for safety issues, but it is TERRIBLE. Plus, he is supposed to get awarded a base closer to home, but the guy who posts the final awards WENT HOME EARLY on Friday, even though the company stated that it would post the results on Friday at 4 p.m. CST.

My natural bent is to go down the, “We will never have another holiday together. We will never have another lazy Saturday together. We will never …” And I definitely start down that road, but then I make myself remember that in a few years I will have mostly forgotten this time that we are going through and that it WILL get better. Sometimes it takes a huge amount of emotional effort to turn this attitude around.

But it is always worth the effort.

the one where i use an aviation metaphor

May 9, 2010 / emmykay / 3 Comments

Physically, mentally and emotionally, it’s been rough. It hasn’t been a crisis of faith, per se, but rather a crisis of HOW to have faith.

I believe in God, check.

I believe that His son Jesus is my Savior, check.

I have found, though, that I sometimes have a hard time figuring out how to look at our recent heartbreak and ongoing struggles to become parents and understand how to deal with it as a Christian.

When I am worked up about everything, I find myself tossed about by these storms and unable to find my bearings.

Which brings me to my aviation metaphor. Ahem.

As a pilot, Frank has trained extensively. When he first trained, he learned how to fly visually. Flying visually is exactly what it sounds like – he would fly only in conditions (clear days, generally) that allowed him to identify landmarks and (most importantly) airports by sight. Flying on clear days is lovely, especially in small planes.

But as a committed pilot with aspirations to fly for airlines, Frank had to take his aviation training to the next level. He had to learn to fly using only the instruments on the dashboard of the plane. As part of his training, he actually wore a hood that didn’t allow him to see anything except the instruments in front of him. He had to do this for two reasons: 1) because sometimes what you think you are seeing is not the whole picture and 2) because sometimes he has to fly in conditions where he won’t be able to visually see landmarks.

One night Frank took me flying. It was a gorgeous night with a layer of low white clouds under a dome of shimmering stars. Since there are controls on both sides of the plane, Frank let me take the “wheel” and instructed me to orient the plane so that it would be level with the horizon. After a few minutes, Frank pointed at one of the instruments that showed how level the plane was relative to the earth. Even though I thought I had the plane level with the horizon, I was very wrong. The horizon I thought I was following was really a cloud, not the actual curve of the earth.

It is not enough, sometimes, to fly on sight alone.

Frank’s aviation training is a great metaphor for the grossly uncomfortable position that I am in right now.

Most of the time I can walk in my faith by “sight” alone; I either hear from God or I see landmarks from Him that point the way. The answers are, for the most part, obvious.

Right now, though, we are stuck in the midst of storms and can’t see the ground or familiar landmarks. Flying visually is not an option. We have to rely on faith and the tools that God has given us.

I guess it’s a good idea to keep my seatbelt securely fastened, eh?

2.2 miles of therapy

August 4, 2009 / emmykay / Leave a comment

I think running is therapy for me.

It’s me, proving to myself, that I can run. I can make it each quarter mile further.

Each step is me not caving.

Each step reminds me of the verses in the Bible that say to rejoice in suffering and trials.

Each step reminds me that because I took one step, the next time it will be easier and faster and lighter.

People have said that you run against no one but yourself.

And that’s true.

But you also run for no one but yourself and because God gave us the ability to choose to run.

I run for me and to be closer to God. Even if I say nothing and He says nothing, it’s sort of like an aligning of me with His Spirit.

I run as fast as I can mentally and physically and emotionally.

Tonight I started crying while I was running, but I kept going. I ran through the tears and found a good pace and felt better.

I was crying because the thought occurred to me that the saddest and hardest part of what we are going through is the thought that if we don’t have children, who will tell future generations how much Frank and I loved eachother? Who will tell future generations the great things that God has done in our lives?

And you know, I don’t have anything else to say about that. It’s just sad. And yeah, maybe we will have kids. And maybe we won’t. I think I’m just sad.

The cool thing about running is that sometimes it gets really hard. Sometimes I think, “I just can’t go on, I’ll never make the next mile.” And then, I push and I make it. That gives me a lot of hope.

So maybe right now it’s hard and I’m just sad, but I will persevere. And God’s Word says that perseverance builds character and character gives us hope.

In sadness I can have hope. And that is awesome.