Expect the Unexpected

"Expect the Unexpected" was the theme to my prom senior year, which I got a real kick out of at the time...like was someone going to jump out and scare us?  Should we show up with a survival kit?

Despite the hype, I don't think anything "unexpected" happened at prom that year (except maybe someone having a little too much fun at the pre-prom party, and I don't think was entirely unexpected).  Lately though, that is the phrase that has been running through my head.

This time of year snuck up on me.  October 6th through November 18th is what I will always think of as Rip's time I guess.  The day I went in the hospital through the day he went to heaven. 

I feel like last year, I knew what to expect.  It was the dreaded year of firsts...I was prepared to feel sad, to cry, to remember.

This year it snuck up on me, which isn't necessarily a bad thing.  I didn't know how I would feel this year, as I've said many times before I miss Rip every day so why should this time of year be any different?  It just is.  I feel more tender, cry more easily.  I think about where I was two years ago more often.  Everything is just more.

But I do mean everything.  Trips to the pumpkin patch with Gracie mean more.  A long walk means more.  The comfort of home means more.  The fact that I had a little boy and what I choose to do with my life will be a reflection of his, that means a lot more.

I've come to expect the unexpected.  In light of Rip's birth and death, that may seem like a bad thing-but truly it is not.  Because whether or not we choose to admit it, a lot of the time it is human nature to expect the worst.  The unexpected comes when we get to rock our babies to sleep at night or kiss our husbands or remember what it was like to feel that baby kick for the first time.  Yes, some of those memories, the ones to do with my baby in heaven, are and probably always will be bittersweet.  But of all the ways I expected my life to be those unexpected moments make it all worthwhile.

So if you see me in the next month, and the tears come a little easier or the memories a little bit faster, just know that I am okay.  It's just that sometimes one of God's littlest angels blows a kiss my way (unexpectedly).

Bad Mama

Somebody's Mama clearly didn't get the memo that snacks were being sent to school.

Somebody's Mama also thought this was hilarious and framed the note (but did, however, send puffs to school today).

It's the little things

This morning I said a little prayer, some days I just need a sign that Rip is okay and that God is really listening.  When I signed into Blogger this morning, I noticed the number of people who have viewed my blog:

 111111 pageviews

Sometimes it really is the littlest things.

What to Remember

A few days ago, a sweet friend sent me the essay below by Anna Quindlen.  As a mom, maybe especially a mom who has lost a child-as this friend has as well, you want to appreciate every moment you have with your baby.  I know after we lost Rip I told myself that I would do just that with every second if I was ever lucky enough to have another chance.  But then life is life and it starts moving fast. You wake up and XYZ needs to be done, you go to work, you come home, and XYZ needs to be done. The baby cries and well, you start to forget what you promised yourself you would never forget. 

So last night, when I was putting Gracie down for the night, I was really glad to have read this essay.  Because, as she has started doing more often lately, even though she seemed to be exhausted she started screaming and reaching for me the moment her head touched the crib.  Sobbing hysterically (real tears).  And yes, I needed to take a shower.  And I wanted to watch something on TV (Modern Family).  And I needed to pack my lunch and find my cell phone and feed the dog.  Instead, I picked up my baby and we rocked.  She felt safe in my arms and I felt better with hers around me.

Because one day soon she is going to go to bed all by herself.  And a few years after that the days when I can get my arms around her are going to be few and farther in between.  I don't need to remember what happened on some TV show, but I sure better remember what it felt like to rock my baby to sleep.


On Being Mom

by Anna Quindlen,

Newsweek Columnist and Author


If not for the photographs, I might have a hard time believing they ever existed. The pensive infant with the swipe of dark bangs and the black button eyes of a Raggedy Andy doll. The placid baby with the yellow ringlets and the high piping voice. The sturdy toddler with the lower lip that curled into an apostrophe above her chin.

All my babies are gone now. I say this not in sorrow but in disbelief. I take great satisfaction in what I have today: three almost-adults, two taller than I am, one closing in fast. Three people who read the same books I do and have learned not to be afraid of disagreeing with me in their opinion of them, who sometimes tell vulgar jokes that make me laugh until I choke and cry, who need razor blades and shower gel and privacy, who want to keep their doors closed more than I like.

Who, miraculously, go to the bathroom, zip up their jackets and move food from plate to mouth all by themselves. Like the trick soap I bought for the bathroom with a rubber ducky at its center, the baby is buried deep within each, barely discernible except through the unreliable haze of the past.

Everything in all the books I once pored over is finished for me now. Penelope Leach., T. Berry Brazelton., Dr. Spock. The ones on sibling rivalry and sleeping through the night and early-childhood education, all grown obsolete. Along with Goodnight Moon and Where the Wild Things Are, they are battered, spotted, well used. But I suspect that if you flipped the pages dust would rise like memories.

What those books taught me, finally, and what the women on the playground taught me, and the well-meaning relations --what they taught me, was that they couldn't really teach me very much at all. Raising children is presented at first as a true-false test, then becomes multiple choice, until finally, far along, you realize that it is an endless essay. No one knows anything. One child responds well to positive reinforcement, another can be managed only with a stern voice and a timeout. One child is toilet trained at 3, his sibling at 2.

When my first child was born, parents were told to put baby to bed on his belly so that he would not choke on his own spit-up. By the time my last arrived, babies were put down on their backs because of research on sudden infant death syndrome. To a new parent this ever-shifting certainty is terrifying, and then soothing.

Eventually you must learn to trust yourself. Eventually the research will follow. I remember 15 years ago poring over one of Dr. Brazelton's wonderful books on child development, in which he describes three different sorts of infants: average, quiet, and active. I was looking for a sub-quiet codicil for an 18-month old who did not walk. Was there something wrong with his fat little legs? Was there something wrong with his tiny little mind? Was he developmentally delayed, physically challenged? Was I insane? Last year he went to China. Next year he goes to college. He can talk just fine. He can walk, too.

Every part of raising children is humbling, too. Believe me, mistakes were made. They have all been enshrined in the, "Remember-When-Mom-Did Hall of Fame." The outbursts, the temper tantrums, the bad language, mine, not theirs. The times the baby fell off the bed. The times I arrived late for preschool pickup. The nightmare sleepover. The horrible summer camp. The day when the youngest came barreling out of the classroom with a 98 on her geography test, and I responded, What did you get wrong? (She insisted I include that.) The time I ordered food at the McDonald's drive-through speaker and then drove away without picking it up from the window. (They all insisted I include that.) I did not allow them to watch the Simpsons for the first two seasons. What was I thinking?

But the biggest mistake I made is the one that most of us make while doing this. I did not live in the moment enough. This is particularly clear now that the moment is gone, captured only in photographs.

There is one picture of the three of them, sitting in the grass on a quilt in the shadow of the swing set on a summer day, ages 6, 4 and 1. And I wish I could remember what we ate, and what we talked about, and how they sounded, and how they looked when they slept that night. I wish I had not been in such a hurry to get on to the next thing: dinner, bath, book, bed. I wish I had treasured the doing a little more and the getting it done a little less.

Even today I'm not sure what worked and what didn't, what was me and what was simply life. When they were very small, I suppose I thought someday they would become who they were because of what I'd done. Now I suspect they simply grew into their true selves because they demanded in a thousand ways that I back off and let them be.

The books said to be relaxed and I was often tense, matter-of-fact and I was sometimes over the top. And look how it all turned out. I wound up with the three people I like best in the world, who have done more than anyone to excavate my essential humanity.

That's what the books never told me. I was bound and determined to learn from the experts. It just took me a while to figure out who the experts were....

The One Where I Compare a Kitchen Drawer to Life

In our old house, we had this drawer in the kitchen and, for or the longest time, it had nothing in it (which, if you know me, you realize is something of a miracle).  After Rip died we were flooded with medical bills and sympathy cards.  Both were things I knew I needed to keep (for different reasons) but didn't have the strength to look at on a daily basis and so the drawer began to fill...and fill.

Little notes I wrote to Parke, soon some ultrasound pictures of Gracie, topped off by some in-the-flesh pictures of Gracie, hospital bracelets, Baptism notices, and Mother's Day cards.  That drawer became like a little archaeological dig of our lives over the last two years.  I knew just how deep to go before hitting something I wasn't ready to face.

Then we moved.  This weekend, I opened the box I'd (creatively) labeled "kitchen drawer" for the first time.  Right on top there was an "Explanation of Benefits" for one of Rip's bills (one that I have memories of a particularly unpleasant phone call with the insurance company over), a lovely, handwritten sympathy note from a friend that I haven't seen in probably 15 years, Gracie's baptism announcement, and my Mother's Day card from Parke this year.

And it hit me (you know I love a good metaphor) that isn't that really how life is?  You can try to keep your good, bad, and your ugly in a kitchen drawer in nice neat layers but eventually you are going to move and they are going to get all jumbled together.  I sat there for a while sifting through the little mess that was my last two years, there was so much good that came out of so much bad.  It's a (life) lesson I've learned over and over again...this time from my kitchen drawer.

Second is Best

I have always been a teensy bit needy in the love department.  You know the saying "If you love something, let it go"...that's not me.  I probably subscribe more to the Elmyra (you know, of Tiny Tunes fame, I am really on a role with these 90's references lately) philosophy on love, "I'm gonna hug you and kiss you and love your forever!" So when Gracie was born, my needy little self thought I had it ready made in the love department.  I would love her the most, she would love me the most-perfect!

I should have seen it coming, those helpful, eerily accurate weekly emails changed their tune from "your baby loves your face and smell more than anything ever put on this earth" to "your baby is starting to notice others in her life".  Still, the first time Gracie gave me the Heisman in order to get to Parke, it stung a little.  Okay, a lot.  Yep, I've got a Daddy's girl.

Don't get me wrong, I'm thrilled for him.  Of all fathers, Parke Harris deserves to be adored.  No worries, I didn't mind not eating turkey, cheese, drinking wine, running, practically living in bubble for ten months or being sliced open afterwards or the 3 am feedings or the...okay, so a few snarky comments, but in all seriousness, I am glad my baby loves her daddy (really, I am).

Because it dawned on me that yes, my job as her Mama is to love her unconditionally, but that does not mean I am always going to come first in her world.  Part of being a mom is pushing my neediness aside.  No matter what, Gracie will always come first for me but sometimes I will be second, third, or fourth (in the teenage years I may be much, much lower..but let's not go there yet). 

 

Last night Parke had to work late.  Gracie and I had a proper "Girl's Night".  After some giggles and drinks (of milk, of course) it was times to go to sleep. Just before she dropped off she reached up and put that chubby little hand on my cheek. Sometimes, second really is best.

Hello, Pot

This morning as I was walking into work, I heard a couple of girls behind me talking about their days.  I work at a college, so the conversation I overheard is something I hear a lot...it went something like, "I have FOUR classes today.  OMG, I don't know HOW I am going to make it.  I am like SO tired.  I like, totally HATE days like this."

And of course I was sitting there thinking to myself how these were the best days of her life, she has no idea, blah blah blah, until that little voice popped into my head and said "Hello Pot, This is Kettle!" (which is a phrase I heard on Friends in approximately 1996 and remains firmly ensconced in my vocabulary).

Because I am sure I did the exact same thing when I was her age, and almost every day since.  It is really, really hard to appreciate what you have when you have it. 

I have been trying to wrap my head around the concept of choosing to be happy lately.  I think, in the months since we lost Rip, that it is only recently that I could have consciously made this choice.  But some days I will find myself down about this or that and a little voice (probably the same one with the radical vocab from the 90's) will remind me that I can choose to be happy.  And most of the time it is like a weight has been lifted off of my chest.

I've spent most of my life waiting on the next best thing to come along.  It's not that I want to stop looking forward to what is to come, its just that I don't want to lose out on what is right now.  Because some day I will be walking in front of a young mama complaining about how her baby didn't sleep the night before or how she packed her turkey sandwich but forgot the turkey (yep, cheese sandwich for lunch today folks) and I want to be able to smile, remembering the days and knowing I lived them for all that they were.