“Congratulations!”

“What a blessing!”

“It’s meant to be! God doesn’t give you more than you can handle!”

Yeesh.

It’s been almost 2 months since I found out about our impending Wee Thing and what a ride it’s been! I’d say that if we’re going by the stages of grief, I’ve been working my way through denial, anger and grief.  The question, “how’re you feeling?” elicits a perfect combined response in me of 1) “I feel like crap, how the hell do you THINK I feel?”, 2) “Please let’s just not talk about it and gee, look over there! Dust bunnies!”and finally 3) “Oh god, why did you have to bring it up? I need to go cry in a dark place now”.

As much as I appreciate all the attempts to put a bright spin on this unexpected baby, I’m just not there yet. Reality? Ok, yeah, I’ve come to accept that much. Christmas miracle, child of destiny gifted to me from on high? Ummm… no. I don’t go in for “meant to be”. Free will and chance rule the world, bad AND good things happen to bad AND good people and it’s got nothing to do with some massive puppeteer.  Stuff just happens. The trick is how you handle it.

 I’m working on that bit. 

However, as the worst nausea seems to be letting up, with it goes some of my bitterest feelings and fears. Three kids will definitely be a challenge, but you know what? I think I’ll do ok. I can learn to maneuver a minivan (probably). The grocery store will be a trick, but I’ll figure it out. (On a side note, one of my favorite things I’ve heard is how easy it will be with the baby because Anna’s starting kindergarten in the fall and will practically not exist. She’s going to school part of the day, my friends, not getting her own apartment. I will still have three children.) The hardest part to come to terms with is what this does to my life, long term. MY life, not the family, not my husband, not even my kids, just ME.

Everything’s on hold again, everything’s set back. That famed Next Phase of motherhood where independence and personal goals would become more attainable… that’s all going to have to wait. Starting over again is a real blow. The spectre of a relapse of PPD in subsequent pregnancies is a documented reality.  We are trying not to focus on it too much while at the same time making sure to take necessary steps to be prepared, but it still kind of sucks to have it be an issue again at all. I like my psychiatrist and all, but I was happy with seeing him once or twice a year as opposed to the every 4-6 weeks he’s recommended starting in my third trimester.

But I’m not so angry anymore (except when I have to get up and put on the super-stretchy pants).  Maybe I’ve moved on to acceptance? It is exciting to think about a baby. The girls are thrilled and that is contagious. While Christmas shopping I wandered through the baby clothes section at Target and felt giddy at the tiny cuteness of it all. At night I fall asleep with my hands resting on the growing curve of my belly. It’s getting easier to see what I’m gaining instead of just what I’m losing. I’m really looking forward to that moment when I can feel that baby move, as if to say, ”hello, we’re gonna be just fine. See? KICK!”.

Until then, I think I’ve got bargaining to work through. However, if this case it’s working in my favor… “OK, well, if I really am going to do this thing, then it’s ok for me to eat this huge bowl of french fries, right? If I have to wear stretchy pants, anyway, I mean…”

Maybe that’s the real Christmas miracle here– finding out that it isn’t all quite so desperate as it seemed.

Sometimes life is, quite literally, what happens when you’re making other plans.

As far as early memories go, I’m not one to dig deep.  There are some foggy images of snow-covered yards and brightly colored shoes. (yes, shoes.  I have a distinct memory of looking at all my shoes lined up. Perhaps this is why Payless sets me all a-twitter.) I can still taste the butterscotch hard candy my grandmother handed me when my brother and I first moved to El Paso.  I was about 4. Other than that, things are pleasantly misty, just a mishmash of images, sounds, feelings.

Then, smack dab in the middle of all that fuzziness, comes a real rock-solid memory.  I am sitting in our kitchen and it’s raining.  HARD. The light coming through the windows can’t even really be called that, it’s more just a bare step up from gray dawn. It feels cold. My mom is off to my right somewhere, probably getting cereal. It is my 5th birthday.

I am crying. Bawling. Having a big ol’ fashioned screaming, messy fit. ” I. WANT. TO. GO. TO. THE. ZOOOOOO!”. I even remember my mom muttering something like, “It’s not like I made it rain, I can’t control the weather, how is it my fault it’s raining?”.

I am a mother now myself and my oldest daughter just turned 5. Thinking back to my own tempest that day, I felt this persistent urge to make sure Anna’s fifth birthday would not involve hysterics before 8 A.M. Because yesterday it really struck me– she’s going to REMEMBER THIS STUFF. Anna’s past the blurry fuzziness of her early years.  Now, what I do, what I say, how I react to her in whatever situation, it’s all going down in her log for later reference.  (You know, for her therapist.)

To say I had a moment of utter panic does not cut it.  I got up at 5 yesterday morning and for about 20 seconds as the realization hit me I just couldn’t breathe. uh-oh. UH-OH. The way I slammed the door getting her into the car last week, screaming at her to stop screaming at her sister and use a nice voice, putting her in time-out because “you are just getting my nerves, that’s two minutes on the timer”.  A picture of a mother as seen through her velvet brown all-seeing eyes formed before me and I just stopped functioning.

But then, the air returned. Because I knew, in that instant, that I am a good mom. I’m not perfect. I yell, hell yes. But I don’t ALWAYS yell.  I lose my temper to the point of making no sense, but not every time. For all the times I say, “No, I can’t do a craft, I don’t like crafts, can’t you just color by yourself?” there are an equal number of times that I sit and read stories by request for hours.

When Anna came down for breakfast the morning of her fifth birthday, there was a donut at her seat with a candle in it.  We walked her over and sang Happy Birthday and clapped when she made her wish. Maybe she’ll remember that, I don’t know.  Maybe she’ll just remember me saying to her in my No Nonsense Voice about 2 hours later, “It may be your birthday, young lady, but that doesn’t mean I won’t put you in time out until the sun sets, you understand me?”.

I don’t know if her version of events will blame me for the rain.

I can’t choose what will stand out in her swirl of moments, images and feelings over time. But I know, at least for just this one moment in my head, I am a good mom. Hopefully, in the general mix all her memories to come, that will come through– ideally, right after the part where puberty lets loose its violent hold over her cerebral cortex.

My pantry is stacked with cans, boxes, bags of rice.  The spice rack seems to multiply, spilling forth little colorful bottles every time we open the door even though it already takes up an entire cabinet. The door of the fridge is crammed with little jars and anonymous bottles.  The shelves in the freezer are about to collapse beneath their burdens of heavy blocks of leftovers and mystery bundles tucked into every nook. 

But there is nothing for dinner. NOTHING. Tonight I will stand in the kitchen at 4 P.M. with a vague feeling of panic gnawing at my diaphragm.  Moving from pantry to open fridge to open freezer in a rhythmic dance, all the containers will develop a blurred quality of total uselessness. 

I resorted, one weekend long ago, to taking a written inventory of all the miscellany crowding the shelves, even going so far as to organize the contents by main dish and sides.  It seemed so logical, it felt so freeing to actually see that I could, in fact, make a meal with only the food in my kitchen.

But there is STILL nothing for dinner. The universe has assigned evil pixies to my kitchen who transform the bounty into total uselessness at 3:55 P.M. every single day, leaving nothing but peanut butter and jelly and 3 bags of bread with only the end crusts left.

Perhaps that seems a little unhinged, but as the saying goes, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t really after you.

This weekend it was freezing cold and icy and generally unpleasant in the out-of-doors. While it’s always fun to curl up with book and blanket on days like that the children running amok with cabin fever can really put a damper on my relaxation. The day passed in interludes of silence, as the girls settled down to coloring and make-believe in the playroom, interspersed with total explosive havoc as their energy blew up in fits of temper, crying and whining. I watched all this in resignation, knowing that my days of being stuck in the house with the kids were on the rise as surely as the temperature was beginning to fall for the season.

Half-way through Saturday (that’s less than one day into Cabin Fever snowbound madness) Kurt, interrupted from his computer again, sighed and said, “I wish there was something we could go DO, but we’re just stuck in here all day and they’re driving me CRAZY.”

I stared. I gave him The Look. I generally sent massively incredulous and sarcastic waves of energy in his direction. Seriously, man? You’re going to complain after only FIVE HOURS!? I have at least SIX MONTHS of these kind of days awaiting me! I will spend the entire winter tearing my hair out trying to think of something, anything, to do to pass the time and let off steam. I will spend days and days and days in the mall just so they can run around somewhere warm while I’m beaten down with screams for treats and toys on display. We will invade the library until the librarian kicks us out because they cannot be silenced. I will play seven hundred thousand games of Candyland and Memory and Chutes and Ladders. Countless hours will go into bundling them up to play outside only to come back in 10 minutes later because it’s too cold or someone has to pee.  I will have to say “NO” all day long as they beg to watch TV until my nerves crack and I throw on something long enough to let me drink a cup of tea sweetened with rum.

And it still won’t be enough. Their cooped up energy will never be spent. And you have the nerve to moan tragically about five measly little hours?

All I said, though, was, “Yeah, honey. This is what it’s like at home in the winter.”

Am I a super-model of restraint or what?