The finger

On Wednesday, I was on the phone with my friend Marta, when all of the sudden I heard an enormous CRASH in the dining room. I hung up the phone and found Eliza on top of a knocked-over chair, screaming. I pulled her out and saw blood... lots of it. It took me a minute to realize it was coming from her finger, and once I had grabbed a towel and gotten the bleeding somewhat under control, I realized that her right middle finger was shorter. Oh, fuck.

Ben called me right at that moment and told me to head to the emergency room. I had to change a poopy Eliza diaper before we left -- amazing that there isn't a huge blood stain on the carpet where I did it -- and I realized that if her finger was shorter, that meant that the rest of her finger was somewhere. Dragging Eliza by her bloody hand, I found the little tip of her finger and entire fingernail, picked it up with a Ziploc bag, nested it in some blue ice, wrapped it all into a Hobby Lobby bag and sped off to our pediatrician, running a red light and not giving a damn.

Our pediatrician is just down the street, and they took one look at her finger and said we had to go to the ER, but were able to wrap up her finger so she wasn't bleeding all over herself anymore. I was crying and I'm pretty sure they felt like they were dealing with a crazy person, because they asked me a few times if I would like someone to drive with me to the hospital. But I was okay beyond being a sobbing sniveling wreck over watching my little girl all hurt and scared.

We drove to the ER and only waited in triage for 10 or 15 minutes until we were taken back to the pediatric ER. Eliza's biggest problem didn't seem to be pain, but incorporating new people and potentially more stressful/scary situations. She didn't protest a 2+ hour hand soak in an iodine solution, but freaked out when a man came by to get our insurance info. That kind of thing.

A social worker came by with a big bag of toys and videos to help calm Eliza down before they reattached the finger. We watched four Elmos and a Thomas, I believe, before the doctor finally came in to do the procedure. Eliza had to be strapped down in a baby papoose, AKA baby straitjacket, so that she wouldn't flail about while the doctor worked. She cried the whole time, but Ben, who watched the whole procedure, said she never once tried to resist the doctor while he reattached her fingertip.

When it was all over and she was released from her straitjacket, I held Eliza while she pounded on my chest for a few minutes, shouting "NO NO NO NO!" over and over again. At first we thought there was something wrong, but we realized that she was probably working out all her anger from being so helpless and scared. We were discharged shortly thereafter and she came home and slept like a rock all night.

The finger doesn't look like it is going to reattach itself right now, but the orthopedic surgeon we met with the following morning has assured us that whether it takes or doesn't take, her finger will heal normally without a problem. I'm so grateful that she'll be fine and won't remember any of this. Me, on the other hand... well, I'm slightly traumatized by the whole ordeal. Picking up your kid's body part, no matter how small, just totally sucks, and the night after it happened I had a hard time getting that image out of my mind. I had trouble sleeping that night and the next -- just difficult to calm my mind down enough to fall asleep -- and since then I've just been exhausted. It's a small trauma in the grand scheme of things, thank God, but it's a trauma nonetheless to my mind, and it's interesting to step back and see how I am processing all of this. I've had trouble finding and pronouncing words, which is a major sign of fatigue for me. Today I left a gallon of milk in the shopping cart (or somewhere... after Eliza wakes up from her nap we have to go in search of it). It takes a lot of energy to emotionally deal with emergencies, and it certainly makes me empathize with people who are in crisis and are struggling to function from day-to-day. Not that things are that bad here at all -- I just see a glimpse of how hard it must be.

Anyway, Eliza is going to be fine and all is well in our happy home again. Stitches come out in two weeks, and this mama needs a nap and a drink in a bad way.

How I came to work at the Wendy's

The crime against this generation is the theft of opportunity (stolen from a commenter on Reddit).

http://imgur.com/a/mTWpc

Easter

I have addressed some of the below in previous entries, but I had a pretty powerful spiritual awakening over the weekend that I wanted to share here. I wrote this as an email, though interestingly enough I haven't sent it yet! I'm not yet done processing it for myself. Additionally, this post has undergone some editing from my original writing, as I want to keep some details to myself should I ever make this blog public.

Over the past few weeks I have had this yearning ache in my heart. I knew it was attached to something, but I couldn't figure out what. Recently springs have been like this for me... some kind of longing, some sense of something waiting to be born. I've also felt the need to connect to other mothers right now. So I've done a lot of work around these feelings -- reading, prayer, meditation, journaling, tarot cards, the whole nine. But nothing was coming through.

Two weekends ago I went to my dream group. I was telling the women there about this feeling of rebirth, how I feel connected to the seasons now, and how I've been at a place where I've been treading water spiritually for a while, but I'm about to go back underwater, and how that feels like a good thing. Karol, the woman who runs the group, said, "Holy Week is coming up, maybe you're also feeling the downward pull of that weight." She knows I'm not Christian, but knows that I was raised Lutheran and said that perhaps I was feeling that from my childhood. I didn't really agree with that, but I like the whole idea of Easter being a celebration of rebirth.

On Thursday I saw Katie and told her that I felt like my heart chakra was opening up, but I didn't know what it was all about.

Friday comes. Good Friday. Ben had the day off, and we had talked about me having a "Meghan's Day Off" that day, and he would take care of Eliza while I did whatever I wanted. When I got up I realized I had started spotting. I was really upset about it, because I was only a week past ovulation and my cycle is being a bitch and I'm probably going to need supplemental progesterone. I decided to do some yoga to clear my head, and I'm half-crying through the first bunch of the poses and start asking God for a sign. I tell God to send me a sign in a book of symbols I have, and as I'm praying this prayer asking for clarity, a cardinal shows up right outside my window. It sits there for a while and then flies off, and I realize that the cardinal has a message for me as well.

When I'm done with yoga, I grab the symbols book and my finger lands on a picture of sage. The book says that people have used it to connect with the Virgin Mary. As I'm asking God for clarity with the whole pregnancy thing, I'm thinking, okay, so Mary had a baby... but I'm still pretty clueless. Then I go to my animal signs book. One of the meanings of having a cardinal show up is to look back on your religious past and revisit it, maybe find some once-discarded truths that might be useful to you again.

And suddenly I get it... holy shit, Mary is coming through to me.

It makes SO MUCH sense. As I've grown older my spirituality had evolved to one of seeking out divine mothering. I directed much of those prayers to the Goddess, but I never fully felt connected -- my idea of the Goddess felt too ethereal. Mary walked on earth, had a baby, held her dead son when he was pulled off the cross. She has been here, she knows our suffering. She's an angel with muddy feet, to paraphrase one of my professors. I can connect with that.

Even little things become clear with this insight: I have had an idea for years about a book that alludes to Mary. I LOVE nuns in kind of a crazy way (and went to a Catholic grad school with a bunch of them). A few days before I had this revelation I wrote a note to my aunt Mary just to say how I much I missed her. (I do miss my aunt, but it was an out-of-the-blue thing for me to have done.) And there's my middle name, Mary, staring at me all these years! All this in my life, and I NEVER thought to look in her direction!

Later that day I head to this awesome metaphysical bookstore that has this yummy incense smell and just always brings so much peace to my soul. I find this book called The Return of the Mother with a picture of a statue of Mary on the cover. It's all about how we need more divine feminine in our spirituality, and I'm a little bit jaded by the premise because I have like 17 similar books like this at home, but there is a chapter on Mary (and the book is 40% off) so I decide to buy it. Later that night in the bathtub I start reading the chapter. The author used to be into a lot of Eastern spiritualities, but he had a falling out with his twat of a guru and in this whole process he discovered Mary.

He writes that as one begins to connect with Mary, your chakras begin to realign. You begin to operate out of your heart chakra, and your heart undergoes an opening so that you, like Mary, can better connect to and work toward ending the suffering of the world.

I feel like I'm in a very joyful place knowing that I have finally made this connection with Mary. I love that she has been in my life for ages, just waiting for me to be ready for her. And I love that I can relate to her as a mother myself; in fact, maybe I needed to become a mother before I could truly connect with her. But I feel how I imagine an adopted child must feel connecting with a birth parent. Like you have this really huge connection, but where do you start the conversation? How do you start the conversation? I have this need to have an image of her with me. I've ordered this necklace with a picture of her holding Jesus, and in front of the picture is a rose. I like how the rose is opening up, just like my heart.

And that was my Easter weekend.

An afternoon with Aunt Tatie

My dear friend Katie came over this afternoon with her 3 1/2-month-old daughter Kaylee. We looked forward to a quiet afternoon full of conversation, possibly a cocktail, and sleeping babies. What we got were two girls who refused to nap, lots of big tears and screaming, and a long walk with bulky strollers to try to get children to calm down. Still, we had a wonderful time. It was so nice to spend an afternoon with someone who is as tired as I am, whose attention is just as easily diverted as mine is, and who just basically understands how much motherhood throws life for a loop. Plus, she and I have been friends for half our lives now, and having that deep history with each other is so delightfully easy.

So even though I have a crabby toddler on my lap who only wants to watch Sesame Street videos online (she was so excited that "Tatie" came over that she couldn't calm herself down to nap), it was worth it to have an afternoon with my friend, fighting the good fight in the trenches next to me.

My Lenten resolution

My first entry on this blog was about how I planned on giving up reading other people's blogs for Lent, and instead devoting that time to writing my own blog. We are just a few days before the close of Lent, and I'm happy to say that I have done well keeping up my own blog, even if I totally broke that resolution a while ago and went back to reading some of my favorite intertubes writers. Oh fricking well. I am pleased with the results of this little experiment, even though I have yet to make this blog public. Beyond a few close friends, I'm really not comfortable sharing the getting pregnant stuff with the world. Once I am pregnant, and that baby is safely growing inside my belly and making me crave McDonald's entirely too much, well, that's a different story. But I don't envision making this public until I'd be close to the second trimester. Who knows how far away that will be!

We're in the waiting game again here to see if I am in fact pregnant this month. I don't really have a feeling about it one way or the other. I have had every pregnancy symptom in the book and not actually been pregnant, so I don't put too much stock in what my body says until I see the second line on the test. And I'm trying not to obsess about it. I think I am at a place where I'll be okay and not really disappointed if I am not pregnant this month, but in the mean time it's really hard not to give those "symptoms" any attention.

The weather here has been alcohol-inducing and we are back to being stuck inside again. Yesterday I took Eliza to Pump It Up, an indoor bouncy castle kind of place, just to get her to burn off some steam. For her first time there she was much less intimidated than I thought she would be -- she even went down a 15-foot-tall slide by herself. Unfortunately for her mom, there were a lot of activities she insisted on doing even though she couldn't figure out how to maneuver on her own, so I had to go through one too many inflatable obstacle courses yesterday.

Even after all this time

This is brave

And I am so not anywhere near the place she describes. If something happened to Eliza I would melt away.

http://www.mamalode.com/blog/2011/04/18/mama-digs-to-be/

Surrender

I've been thinking a lot about the concept of surrender lately, especially when it comes to having another baby. It's so easy to be in a place of control with the whole baby-making thing. You can take your temperature and figure out when you ovulate and overdose yourself with supplements that might make your womb a more hospitable environment for a tiny person. You can get to a really obsessive, crazy-making place with the whole process. I have spent time in that place, and it's not at all fun.

I have realized that once you get to a place of surrender about having another child, and have given up any attachment to it, the magic seems to happen. Time and time again this has proven true, both for me and for people I know. I have a friend who had tried for over two years to get pregnant. It turned out she had fibroids that were probably causing the problem, and she got to a place of acceptance that she needed the surgery before she could conceive. Two weeks before she was supposed to go under the knife, she found out she was pregnant. No medical intervention necessary. I have another friend who couldn't get pregnant, so she and her husband decided to adopt. They had been in the waiting pool with her adoption agency for almost a year. She started posting on the message board where we got to know each other that she was so done with the adoption process and was starting to look at donor embryos to try to get pregnant. She posted messages about this all week. On Friday afternoon, her adoption agency called. They had been matched. She and her husband are expecting a baby girl next month.

My first pregnancy ended in a miscarriage at six weeks. I was devastated. I think the fear of potentially having to endure that again got me to a place of surrender with the whole trying to conceive process, and I was okay with it taking a while and physically and emotionally healing from that sad place. And as it turned out, I got pregnant on my miscarriage cycle. I let go, and there she was.

So I'm trying to get myself to that place with this baby. I think you authentically have to get yourself to surrendering any attachment to having another baby, rather than saying "Oh, I'm surrendering all this" and then checking your chart for the seventeenth time that day, and I'm not quite at that authentic point yet. I haven't obsessed about getting pregnant this cycle, and I'm not going to be devastated if I'm not pregnant this month, but I think I still have some letting go work to do. It's hard when I am absolutely certain there is another little one who is ready to enter our family. I just have to accept that God knows far better than I do about perfect timing. Baby, I hope you come soon, but I know you'll find the best time to be born!

Escape

I am dreaming of flying to Rome and spending a few days there doing nothing but eating and drinking. Screw the Coliseum, bring me another chianti.

When I have escapist fantasies like this, I know something in me needs attention, care, and nourishment. I have tried to discern what this ache is for a while now and still feel very in the dark. It's been very hard to retreat from the obligations of family life this past week, and even though Ben does his best to give me breaks, I need Rome. How do I disconnect when staying at home is more than just my job, it is my whole life? And if I need something else new and exotic to feed me, well, what the hell is it?

Finally, spring

We had a beautiful weekend here, and it was so nice to get outside and not have to wear a jacket. The grass is green, flowers are blooming, robins are singing on my lawn, and I could go on and on with this spring crap. I get the whole Easter thing now. I mean, I am not theologically on the same page as Christianity, but I understand celebrating death and resurrection, waiting and rebirth. I resonate with this each spring. In fact, I have these animal spirit cards (and you sigh and point me in the direction of the new age bookstore), and yesterday I pulled a card that had a turtle on it that said Mother Earth. And I was like, no, don't get all environmentalist on me, animal cards, but when I bothered to read the interpretation of the card, it said that the turtle lays her eggs in the sand, and then the baby turtles are "born again" as they hatch out of the eggs and come out of the sand. It said that this card means rebirth, that I am primed for a rebirth. I have been saying this word a lot over the past few days, and I wonder so much what is waiting to be born in me.

Searching for the soulful

I feel like every spring something cracks open within me. I am yearning for spiritual conversation and connection this afternoon. I want to be a part of a group of women, a group of mothers, who have those Big Conversations with each other over laughter and wine. Being home all day with Eliza, I don't usually feel lonely, but I definitely recognize how isolated our days are and I am yearning to have a conversation with someone who understands this afternoon. Maybe after the hibernation of winter, I feel like connecting and creating again. I don't know. I feel this longing every year around this time, and then life gets in the way again and I don't do anything about it.

I am brainstorming about how to start a real group like the one I dream about, because I'm fairly certain no one in this area has something like this going on. Maybe that's how to connect my creativity, my search for work, and this overpowering afternoon yearning.

Making something

After two and a half years of a lot of work and a lot of student loans, I received my master's degree in pastoral counseling. Unfortunately, when it came time to find a job, the economy downturned into a recession, and of course, when times are tough, human services tend to get the ax. It took me almost six months to find a part-time, non-counseling position (it was a religious education position at a church), and then about two seconds after that for me to get pregnant with Eliza. I quit that job when she was three months old, vowing to get back into counseling and work toward counseling licensure when I decided to return to work.

These days I'm not thinking about returning to work, at least not in the immediate future. Money will always be a bit tight as long as I'm staying at home, but we're very fortunate that I am able to be here, where I want to be, with my daughter. But when I think about returning to work, I do not feel like I am being pulled toward counseling. Instead, my fantasies of work generally revolve around being creative, getting my hands dirty, making something. I think this is in part a reaction to all that "head work" of counseling and not being able to see any tangible results of your efforts, but also, I realize upon reflection that I have always enjoyed seeing the finished product. I used to work in textbook publishing, and I cannot begin to describe the thrill of holding one of my college-level finance textbooks in my hands. I helped create this very real object into being. I loved that feeling.

I feel drawn toward such work again these days. I am frustrated that I don't have an artistic or technical skill that I can showcase. I have visions of quiltmaking or sculpting in my spare time, and then selling my works for a little extra cash. Things like that. Perhaps this blog is growing out of that need to create, too. It's not tangible, but I can see that I have a dozen entries written now -- my work is growing and becoming something. That matters to me, even if I am the only person still reading this.

No matter where I go in life, I am grateful for my counseling degree, because I think it gives me a tremendous perspective on the world. Perhaps I will come back to that type of work when I am in a different place in my life. But for now, I don't have the energy to invest in my clients like I used to be able to. My energy stays here, at home, and the limited candlelight I have left must be directed towards people and passions I care about. I love my life, and right now I am looking to add the thrill of creating back into it.

What Mothers Do Especially When It Looks Like Nothing

I am in the middle of What Mothers Do Especially When It Looks Like Nothing by Naomi Stadlen, and it is the most validating piece I have read about motherhood since becoming a mother. Since making the decision to stay at home with Eliza, I have been plagued with the idea that I am not "doing enough," and this book addresses how my house may be a disaster and I never got to the laundry today, but I am most certainly doing enough when I am mothering a baby. It also talks how there are no words to describe the types of work that mothers do with babies -- that multifocused attention, the multitasking of shopping with a toddler (you're not just shopping, you're socializing a toddler to the world by communicating with them about their surroundings and enforcing social norms), the communication with a pre-verbal child. She names plenty of work that mothers do, and certainly is validating to hear why I can still be so tired after a day at home with Eliza.

What I also really appreciate about this book is the naming of the identity shift that mothers go through after having a child. I remember going over to watch the 2010 Rose Bowl at a friends' house. They have a little boy a few months older than Eliza. Not that I care about football, but the whole time I was there I did nothing but care for Eliza, making bottles, feeding her, changing her diaper, making sure she was entertained. If I talked, it was about my child. We drove home that night and I just couldn't believe what my life had become. No longer would I be carefree or travel lightly. I didn't want to go back to who I was pre-baby, but I also realized that there wasn't a way back. That door slammed shut when my child was born.

It has taken me a while to really incorporate this mama piece of myself. For a while I felt like I couldn't connect all the pieces of my personality together, that they were all separate and disjointed and impossible to integrate... perhaps to make room for this mama piece; I don't know. But I remember thinking that it was impossible for Carefree, Silly Meghan to co-exist with Mama Meghan. And I didn't know which of those pieces I was when I was all alone, doing whatever it was I wanted. I wasn't all of them, and I wasn't none of them, either. While I'm still not sure how I'd primarily define myself, my psyche is capable of owning and integrating that mama piece these days. I recognize that I wear many hats and have many personalities, and it feels less like chaos and more like I have a well-equipped toolbox at my disposal. I am so happy to see a book actually naming, or at least describing, this struggle -- my only wish is that I had read it when I was going through this identity shift.

Eliza is napping; the house is quiet. I have been feeling the need for some spiritual centering in my life lately, and I think I'm going to attempt to right myself in the cosmic realm while I have a few blessed quiet moments alone.