Just Call Me Pollyanna: A Lesson in Gratitude

Today, weather-wise, is about as yucky as it gets: the beautiful 8" of snow we got yesterday is melting into muck, mud and slush beneath a steady, 38 degree drizzle. The weather definitely has an effect on me. I feel at my absolute best when it's sunny and warm, and when the darker days slip in and over me, I want to just curl up in bed and hide from it. I'm grumpy. I complain. This is not anything new or unique; the majority of us, I would imagine, tend to feel this way on the bleaker, wetter days of winter.

#nofilter.
As real as it gets, folks.

The first thought I had upon waking this morning was a complaint. Instantly. I had overslept; I felt groggy. I saw that Todd was not in bed and was suddenly angry that he hadn't awoken me. I was irritated at Baby C; I'd actually woken up just after 7:00 feeling great, but she'd been needing to nurse, so I latched her on and then proceeded to fall asleep for two more hours. Clearly, this was her fault for "making" me fall back asleep. Or maybe it was Max's fault for having a hard time falling asleep last night and keeping us up late. I was mostly upset with myself, knowing that it really was my own fault for not just getting up at 7 and taking Baby C with me to nurse in the living room. I felt like the entire day was ruined before it had even begun, all because I was out of it from sleeping too much and had wasted my morning. Besides, the weather was terrible. Obviously, no good could come from this day.

I do this, you guys. I do this and I am owning that I do it. It is something that I detest in myself, this propensity for complaint, for grumpiness, for self-pity and blame. I am so far from the person I want to become, the person I strive to be, the person who spreads cheer and encouragement wherever she goes, that sometimes it seems impossible. Something not even worth trying for.

I lay there in bed for a few moments, staring up at the ceiling despondently, feeling guilty for thinking this way and angry that I seemed unable to change the tendency in myself. Then, for a split second, another thought entered my head, a realization: It said, I don't have to keep feeling this. It dawned on me that I really don't. The tendency is there, yes. But I don't have to give in to it.  This may seem obvious, but it's amazing how hard a concept it is to grasp sometimes, or at least to put into practice.

My priest once put it this way: we have no control over the thoughts that enter our heads. We just don't. But what we DO have control over is what we do with those thoughts. We can allow them further in, dwell on them, entertain them; if we do that, we can still dispel them, but it is harder, and it is easier then for the thoughts to lead to action. But if we put the thoughts from our mind as soon as they try to make themselves known, we will have triumphed over them.

This makes sense to me. It's okay if the thoughts are there; they're there. I don't have to listen to them. I can take them and make them into something better, dispelling the negative, and ushering in the positive. This is true of situations and actions, too, not just thoughts. Take sleeping in, for example. I shouldn't have done it, but I did, and it's too late now to change that. However, that doesn't mean it's going to ruin the day ahead. I can let it, certainly - but I can also refuse to let it. I can get up and charge ahead and spread light and joy all around me, even in the midst of frozen dreariness, in the midst of wet pantlegs and holed up strollers and grogginess.

After I'd come to this realization, it really hit my hard how often I *don't* dispel the complaining and grumpy thoughts. The blame. The irritation. I'm so frequently playing the victim, I find, and I hate that about myself. So, I resolved to change it. 

So I have been. All day. Bam.

Today, my goal has been to not complain, and I have been able to accomplish that by finding the good in every situation. You can't complain about something awesome, right? It started as I lay there in bed, angry that I had slept in. I thought: Yes, I slept in and I didn't intend to, and this changes the layout of the day. And then I thought: You know, I am HERE, lying in a warm bed, in a warm house, with two beautiful little people tucked up against me, slumbering peacefully. Do you know how many people would do anything to have that? In that moment, my complaint turned to gratitude. I was so, so thankful, just like that, that I was able to be here, in this bed, with these children. That I was even able to sleep in - without having to get up and go to a job outside the home, without having to worry about going out and scrounging for food, even without being awoken by bombs and gunfire outside my window. That I and my children were warm and safe. That we were able to sleep soundly and peacefully. Who the heck would complain about something like sleeping in?? I mean, really?? I have seriously needed to evaluate my priorities. And it is starting now.

I've been trying to do this all day, this turn-the-complaint-into-gratitude-thing. And you know what? It's working. It has TURNED MY ENTIRE DAY AROUND. Not only has my day not been horrible, it's been completely full of peace and joy. My life is a FRIGGING CHRISTMAS CARD, PEOPLE. For real. And I am determined to start living it like that.

Behold the following examples.

Complaint: "My kid sucks at nursing." (She really does - she has a little mouth and had a tongue tie and still has a wicked upper lip tie, and doesn't handle her tongue well, and seems to have to fight for everything she is worth to stay on the nipple and get anything out of it. This part isn't a complaint, just fact.) "Every feeding is a complete battle and it's just not fair. Max was such a good nurser. Why can't she be the same?  I just want to be able to cuddle in and RELAX during a feeding, instead of fighting and straining to keep her on and constantly soaking everything within a one yard radius. I want to be able to nurse easily in a sitting positioning. I want to be able to nurse easily in any position. I want to be able to nurse in public without having a baby who makes sucking and clicking noises to wake the dead. I want, I want, I want, I want, I want."

Gratitude: "You know what? I am so, so lucky to be able to nurse this child. A lot of babies with frenulum issues aren't even able to breastfeed. It's not easy, by any means, but that just makes me that much more grateful for what I do have. If any of my future babies are good nursers, I will be able to appreciate it on a level that I never had when I was nursing Max. I'm also so fortunate to have a milk supply that isn't effected by a poor latch and a poor suck; many, many women are not that lucky. A lot of women would give just about anything to be able to nurse their baby at ALL, even if it involved struggle."

Complaint: "My back hurts! Argh! It's driving me crazy! OWWW!"

Gratitude: "Honestly, I am so very fortunate to have a body that is strong and healthy, even if a muscle here or there does wig out on occasion. Honestly, this little bit of back pain is a blessing: it helps remind me that things could be so much worse. Some people have to live with crippling pain, far worse than this, every minute of their lives. Besides that, you know *why* my back hurts? From lugging kids around all day. And having armfuls of kids to lug around all day is the MOST AMAZING BLESSING ever. There are a whole crapload of people out there who would give anything to lug some kids around in exchange for a little back pain."

Complaint: "I can't lose this baby weight. I'm fat."

Gratitude: "See above, re: body. Thank God my body was strong enough and healthy enough to gestate and birth two equally strong and healthy children. Thank God my hips widened to carry them and allow their passage, and are wide enough now to bear some of the brunt of the children propped on them while being carried around. Thank God I have some extra "storage" to make milk for my baby. And you know what else? Thank God I not only have enough food to eat, but have an overabundance. For reals, yo. Let's think about that for a second. People on this planet are dying of starvation. Those fellow human beings would - are you ready for it? - give anything to have even a little extra food - heck, to have barely enough food at all - let alone so much food that they would have to actually worry about eating too much of it. Especially mothers. What I, what we, have here in America when it comes to food is amazing. So it hangs around for awhile after we eat it - that's just a sign that we live in sweet and easy abundance, folks, and that's that."

Complaint: "My baby is teething/my toddler refuses to potty train/I'm tired/I don't get enough time to myself/blah blah blah."
Gratitude: "First of all, chica, this is LIFE. How can you complain about something that is a completely normal part of existence? We humans somehow seem to have come to the conclusion that life should be easy, that we are ENTITLED to ease, but that is simply not the case. Life is hard. Get over it."
 ...Okay, so that's more [well-deserved] self-admonishment than it is gratitude. Here, then, we'll put it this way: "Thank God I even have a baby to teethe/a toddler to potty train/a living body to become tired/so many wonderful people in my life that spend so much time with me." 

Ha. Argue with THAT.

I was trying to think of a title for this post and, of course, "Pollyanna" came to mind; however, I didn't really even know what that name truly represents, aside from the name given to someone who is being a cliche of optimism. So, I looked it up on Wikipedia. (Yes, I have seen the movie - calm down! My childhood wasn't full of sad deprivation, I promise. It's just been so long since I've seen it, even though I watched it regularly, that I couldn't remember what it was actually about.) Anyway, it turns out that Pollyanna was a little girl who'd had a few hard knocks in life. She coped with this by playing "The Glad Game", which involved finding the good in every single negative situation. For example, when she was given crutches instead of a doll in a donation box for Christmas, she was gladdened by the fact that she didn't have to use the crutches.  When her grumpy aunt tried to punish her for being late to dinner by sending her to eat bread and milk in the kitchen with the servant, she was thankful because she liked bread and milk and she enjoyed the servant's company. (If it were me, I would be flipping grateful that I had a servant to begin with, because that would be the BUSINESS. Ha.) When she was given a room in the attic without many furnishings or comforts at all, she extolled the lovely view from the window.
Do you know how that makes me feel?

Humbled.

I am humbled by the fact that there is so much darn goodness and wonder in this world and that I am privy to SO. MUCH. of it. I seriously must be one of the luckiest people alive, when I really stop and take stock of how much of this goodness exists in my own life. I mean really. I have health, food, lodging, a wonderful husband who loves me even in my craziest, most fault-laden hours; I have two smart, healthy, incredible children; I have parents and in-laws who are good and wise people and love me and my family and support us in everything we do. My husband has a job. We have presents under our very large Christmas tree. (The rockin' thing about Maine - one of the many rockin' things - is that our very large Christmas tree (seriously, it barely fit in the house, it's on the verge of ridiculousness) cost us thirty bucks. People in California and places like that have to pay approximately $7,823 dollars for even small fir trees, from what I understand. So, I'm thankful for living somewhere where you can infuse your house with piney goodness and Christmas cheer for CHEAP!)(And I'm thankful for having to vacuum up the pine needles for the SAME GOSH DARNED REASON!) 

I could go on and on.

But these speak for themselves:

I know there have been a large slew of posts out there in the blogosphere about this same topic, and this one may seem to be redundant in light of all of that. But I think these reminders and introspections are warranted, and that each one is not only equally valid but equally helpful. I don't think you can have too many reminders when it comes to gratitude. BE GRATEFUL THAT EVERY SINGLE POST IN YOUR FEED THIS WEEK IS ON THE SAME TOPIC, PEOPLE.

Also, go hug your kids. And your husband. And if you don't have any, hug your parents. Or your coworker. Or your neighbor. And if you don't have any of those, hug yourself (and for heaven's sake go get a dog or something).

Merry Christmas. Over and out.

Courage

Sometimes I can't sleep.

Eyes wide, curled around babies, holding my breath to hear whispers of theirs. Soaking in heartbeats, the tugs on my hair, their reassuring warmth and their beingness here. I love them so hard it grips my throat in ice and my heart stops. My love is wonder and joy and gratitude, it is these filmy flashing breathless nights and the photo-snapped days, the soft milky mornings, the proffered snacks and blonde heads that smell like sunshine, the marvel - and the terrible, terrible fear. The disbelief.

How do I have this? What if I lose it? 

Sometimes I can't sleep.

I'm thinking of towers and planes and storms, and car accidents, flames in the snow, sirens. I'm thinking of fatal diseases and falling bookshelves, of house fires, of accidents with knives and guns and fridges and clothes dryers, of SIDS, of infants abandoned and left to starve and the baby girls in China with pins stabbed through their silky fontanelles, the fontanelles they share in common with my own baby girl. I'm thinking of the children on the news, throats slit by their nanny, their mother who came home and found them, clutching her last living baby and being led away, my brain inventing her screams and playing them on repeat, hour after hour through the night, the gut-wrenching, mind-numbing horror. I can't even breathe, let alone sleep. I am paralyzed. It is too much. I am too little.

Mothers, how do we do this? How do we live, in face of the fear, in face of the possibility? What if we love? What if we lose? Surely life isn't benevolent enough that it will let us be this happy forever - will it? How can we face each day knowing it may be our last, or their last - and live it anyway?

To love is to be brave. Motherhood is courage. Heck, it is distilled courage. It is plunging in and embracing the fear, charging in like a lion and swallowing it whole, acknowledging our fragility, yet being strong; it is having faith in that strength, trusting that it will be there when we need it. Having faith in our love and trusting that it will be there when we need it. It is knowing that we are the luckiest beings in the whole world, to have this love, and that nothing - nothing, not even death - can take it from us. That what we carry within us now we will carry within us always, no matter what shape the future takes, and that we will be okay.

Sometimes I can't sleep. But when the fear grips me hard, when it crushes my organs and clutches my sinews, when I start counting the heartbeats and listening to breaths, I must remind myself: I can do this. I can love these beings with everything I have; I don't have to hold back for fear that I will lose it. If nothing else, I will always, always have this love. I am so, so thankful for what I have been given, even if I don't have the substance of it, as it is now, forever. I can't control what happens to me, and to them, but I can control how I live the life I've been given. For now, I close my eyes and I snuggle my babies.

Courage, mamas.

You've come far, and though you're far from the end

You don't mind where you are, 'cause you know where you've been...

When all of your tears dry, let your troubles roll by

Welcoming Baby Nichols: Thoughts

There’s this amazing thing about babies. It was one thing that really surprised me after Max born. When he was brand new and not doing much, he seemed like the “part of us” that we’d expected – he looked like us and didn’t do a whole lot besides eat, sleep, and be admired. He felt like “our” baby that we had made. As he got older, though, he started turning into an actual person, with a mind and a personality entirely his own. All of the sudden there lived in our household this completely unique human being, different from anyone who has ever existed before, and who will ever exist again. This astonished me. Max may look like us and share traits of ours, but he is as different a person from us as any stranger walking down the street. That’s the incredible thing about having babies. You get to meet this entirely new individual, welcome them to the earth, and help them get their bearings and figure out who and how they’re going to be. Amazing, and very, very humbling – every day, I ask myself: Who am I that I could possibly be worthy enough to shepherd this marvelous little being, to be trusted to care for them and tell them which paths are the best to follow and which are not? How was I, of all people, chosen out of the masses of much better or at least much more qualified folks to incubate, bring forth, protect, and of all things guide this new, complete, separate entity?

I’m very, very glad that God is merciful.

Though I have a lot of doubts about my suitability as a parent, I must admit that I am nonetheless EXTREMELY excited to meet Baby Nichols. I want very badly for this child to feel welcome on the planet – and not only that, but loved and wanted. Even if our family isn’t a paragon of parenting perfection (…masters of alliteration, though, we definitely are ;-p), at the very least, I hope we can provide a warm reception and lots of love. I figure that if a kid gets love and not much else, they’ll hopefully be at least somewhat better off than they would be with no love at all. That’s all I can hope for.

I got off to a rocky start as a welcoming committee this time around. In the first trimester I had two subchorionic hemorrhages (a ruptured clot behind the placenta) and nearly lost the baby. In addition to that, I was so sick and exhausted for the first five months that I could barely eat or function, and it was very difficult to feel excited about the future at that point. I’m fairly certain I had real antenatal depression for a couple of months there. I started feeling much better physically around the 22-23 week point, but then a new challenge set in: a horrible, haunting fear of giving birth. I’d had the fear ever since Max was born, but it didn’t have a chance to really hit me until I was facing doing it again.

The first part of my labor Max was wonderful – I felt strong and confident and like I was really working with my body, and kept laughing and kissing Todd and texting friends even through transition. Once I was fully dilated, though, things became much, much harder than I had anticipated.

Max was two and a half weeks late, and thus a bit on the larger side at 8 lbs, 13 oz; not gigantic, but pretty sizeable nonetheless. The reason for his lateness, we figured out later, was that he’d had his fist stuck up by his temple; during the last weeks of pregnancy he wasn’t able to “drop” and settle down into the pelvis the way first babies are supposed to, and without that pressure on the cervix, there wasn’t much to get the ball rolling on labor. He also had a 15” head, which just exacerbated the problem (average newborn heads run a circumference of about 13”-14”).

So, when the time came to push, all of these factors came unpleasantly into play. Up until that point, labor had been great, as I said before. But once my uterus started trying to work Max’s giant head and his arm and fist through my pelvis and down into the birth canal all at once, things changed – the contractions went from being intense and powerful but not outrightly painful to being awful, grinding sensations of utter misery and horror. (I promise I’m not trying to tell yet another birth horror story here – really, for the most part Max’s birth was lovely, I can’t stress that enough – but I’m just telling it like it was.) After I pushed for awhile with no progress, my midwife discovered a lip of cervix left in the front, so I had to stop pushing and wait for that to recede, which was [insert clichéd phrase denoting extreme pain or possibly a string of expletives followed by ‘awful’]. At one point she reached in and attempted to push the lip back and over his head during contractions, which. was. EXCRUCIATING. And didn’t work anyway, I might add. Nuchal hands are no joke, my friends, especially when they are coupled with freakishly large Nichols boy heads. (Todd had a 16” head when he was born – I told my mother in law later that if I’d known that to begin with, I may have rethought marrying him!)

Anyway. Fast forward about three hours. After horrendously painful pushing in every imaginable position with maddeningly slow progress, we finally got Max into the birth canal and on his way out. By this point I was so far gone and out of my mind and body with the pain that I was only dimly aware that he was even close to crowning. He was still caught up a bit in my bones, so it took his head quite awhile to crown, and then all of a sudden his entire body (with his fist still stubbornly up by his head and his elbow politely tearing a path alongside) shot out like a champagne cork. Like I said, I wasn’t even really aware of it that entire time; my normal Sarah brain had fled the scene in terror long before, leaving only a wild, screaming animal lost in a haze of panic at the sensation of being ripped apart from the inside out (which I was, quite literally – sorry to be graphic, but I tore upwards, downwards, AND side to side, with the downwards/perineal tear going right through the muscle, which took more than a year to heal entirely – that was the polite little elbow I mentioned, being courteous on its way out). Honestly, I don’t even feel like I myself gave birth to him – I feel like I was completely checked out and lost in the panic and the pain for a short eternity, and then suddenly, with no help from me, there was a baby on my stomach.

Now at that point, at the first instant his little warm body landed on mine, I did jolt right back down into my senses and was immediately filled with the standard joy and wonder that accompany meeting one’s offspring for the first time. I admittedly couldn’t sleep those first couple of days because I’d have flashbacks every time I closed my eyes, but besides that (and the difficulty in recovering from childbirth with extremely lacerated and wildly unhappy lady-parts), my postpartum period and the years that followed it were really quite blissful.

So, six months or so along in my second pregnancy, you can see how I was a little preoccupied with the fear of what lay ahead, and thus how I was continuing to have a hard time making the new little creature inside of me feel very welcome. I would hyperventilate and have heart palpitations every time I read a birth story. I stopped keeping track of how many weeks along I was and didn’t feel very dialed in to the whole pregnancy thing, trying to ignore the inevitable for as long as possible, I guess. I thought about going to the hospital and getting an epidural – but what if it didn’t work? and what about the part before I got the epidural? and all of the other reasons I shied away from pain medication the first time around, which are many? – and at one point the thought of scheduling a cesarean even crossed my mind. Now, I have absolutely nothing against epidurals or c-sections, mind you, and absolutely, completely respect and support any woman who chooses one to make the best birth for her; however, in this situation, with this child, I had to ask myself if that was the route that would really be best for me and, more importantly, for Baby Nichols. What I was looking for wasn’t simply pain relief so much as it was a way to hide from the experience, to numb myself away from it. Would that really be a good way to heal from Max’s birth and give this new baby the best, most peaceful start in life that I personally could provide? Would that be the best I could do for this new being who, from among the millions of others on the planet, was by some hard-to-fathom miracle being sent to live with me? After much soul-searching I decided that no, it would not. I needed to embrace this baby’s birth as its own, not let my past experiences take away the best possible experience from him/her. Especially after two trimesters of already less-than-sunnyness on my part.

My midwife suggested I undergo EMDR therapy (“Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing” – it sounds like hokey psychobabble, I know, but just go with me on this; I was skeptical at first too), a type of therapy coupled with counseling that helps a person integrate traumatic events and reprocess them, thus moving past the actual ‘trauma’ experience of the event and storing it simply as a memory. I did eventually start seeing an EMDR specialist, and it ended up being incredibly, wonderfully healing and helpful. Not only did I come to terms with the negative parts of Max’s birth and come to accept it as its own, unique experience separate from this coming one, with its one strengths, I also identified and dealt with many other hung-up issues from my past, which was great.

In addition to the therapy, I’ve spent the last few months going very deeply into myself and really digging around in there to prepare myself to birth and mother this child. I’ve done a LOT of mental preparation, visualization, and also a great deal of spiritual “cleaning up”. I feel like the physical move we just made really mirrors my own recent internal development – throwing out a lot of junk, simplifying, and finally making the leap from an old, dirty, dark house to a bright, clean, new one. Really, the timing of the move could not psychologically have been better. I love my new mindset just as much as I love my new apartment, and you know how much I love my new apartment. 

Finally, I feel like I am ready to welcome Baby Nichols in the best way I possibly can, and that feels great.

Now, there’s the matter of the birth to see to. I’m feeling very, very confident at this point, and excited. I’m honestly not expecting it to be like or unlike Max’s birth, which was an entirely separate event, but to be a new and special story of its own, shared by our family and this interesting person who is coming to meet us and live with us for awhile. The baggage is gone, which feels fantastic, and I am loving being in a place where I am genuinely thrilled about what will be happening here in the next couple of weeks.

We’ve worked so hard to give you the best we possibly can, Baby Nichols! You’re so close now. Please accept my sincerest apologies in advance for letting you watch too much TV and eat more graham crackers than vegetables. Please forgive me for yelling sometimes and for getting too preoccupied in my own activities to pay enough attention to you when you want to play. Please know that I love you already more than I can even express, and that I am really, really trying my very best for you. There are people out there who would make much better parents than we are, but for whatever reason, you are coming to live with us. We have love to offer. I hope it is enough.