Summer-Lover

Growing up I didn't much care for the summer. I hated being hot, sweaty, and sticky. I was convinced my sweat glands were clinically overactive. I felt self-conscious in warm weather clothes that didn't fit quite right. I saw less of my friends from school. I didn't like the beach. Summer was merely the precursor to the best season of them all: fall.

Now I am realizing I am a summer-lover. Long days full of sunshine. Sarah home visiting. Cheap produce and sticky sweet cherries and blueberries and peaches in season. My husband and my baby's birthdays. Knocking off work early on a Friday. Trips to the beach, which I now enjoy. 

This September was tinged with sadness as the leaves on Bedford Street started to turn yellow and fall. The gory Halloween decorations and scary movie trailers took over public spaces. I lost Peter to endless football (and somehow also baseball??) on the television--something I used to enjoy watching with him, but now it reminded that summer was gone. 

I was thrilled to escape to Rio de Janeiro during October. For a week I had summer back. The shorts and crop tops and sandals that hadn't seen use since August were back in the rotation. I got a tan. The days were still relatively short compared to summer in New England, but we stayed up late eating dinner on a Brazilian schedule. I went to the beach every day. 

Now I am back in Connecticut and the fall foliage is at its peak. It is chilly enough for me to dig out my ankle booties and slouchy tops. There is a smoky crispness in the air. Our first day back, I made Debie Peck's pumpkin chocolate chip muffins, which my mom used to make and freeze every fall. Coming out of the oven, the scent of nutmeg and ginger confirmed that fall is here and I am okay with that. 

A Year of Val

More than ever before in my life, time has flown. The cliches make me cringe, but also I can't stop repeating them because they are so completely true. Val has been on the outside for a year now and I have such mixed feelings on concluding this chapter of his life! My baby! 

Having a toddler--not an infant, but a toddler!--on my hands is surreal. I am not sure I am mentally or emotionally prepared to set and enforce boundaries. Today I went to go lift him out of his highchair, but he was fixated on the buckle and he shrieked and squirmed in protest until I assented and placed him back in the chair for him to continue his buckle examination. (I stood there and watched him and questioned, "Am I being too permissive???") Up until this point I have really only had to love him and keep him alive, but now I have to teach him how to behave. I am worried I am not up for the task! 

The shrieking and protesting when he doesn't get his way is a problem and something we will just have to work through with consistent boundaries, but I confess I am absolutely tickled to see him asserting his sense of self. When he sees us eating with forks, he wants to eat with a fork. When we get into the elevator, he has to press the button. My heart melted when my mom plopped Val on the counter and had him "help" her make a batch of biscuits--he was thrilled to dump the measuring cups and stir the batter. 

The older he gets the more fun he gets. Yesterday I threw a blanket over his head and called out, "Val! Where are you? I don't see you?" He pushed the blankets off and laughed uproariously at this game. He was never big into peekaboo, but apparently he loves hide and seek! Making him laugh is one of my favorite things. Having these moments of fun with him makes my heart feel like it's filling my whole chest. It is that delicious combination of delight and affection. 

Seeing my sisters with their babies does give me a little ache in my heart, remembering when Val was that age and that size. Peter and I compulsively watch videos from the past year. Val wriggling his arms out of his swaddle. Val protesting tummy time. Val waking up from a nap. Val trying blueberries for the first time. I felt nostalgic for newborn Val when Val was 8 months. Now I am nostalgic even for 8-month-old Val! I am thankful for all photos and videos we have--I have thousands and honestly I wish I had more. We can't put time in a bottle. But these images are little bit like that. Like a perfume, a whiff brings me back to that moment. 

An acquaintance of mine lost her daughter to cancer last fall. She was 16 months old. My acquaintance shared openly on social media about the treatment process, prognosis, and grieving, and I followed their story with my heart in my throat. It is a strange thing to ache so much for someone you don't know very well, but I hope sharing in their pain and grief was in a small way a comfort to them. I was blessed by their story, because it is good to remember that tomorrow is not guaranteed. It is good to celebrate often. 

Bodily Function TMI

I have the tiniest bit of boob leaking. Not a big deal at all. Some of the ladies in my due date Facebook group have been stashing colostrum for weeks, lots of other ladies haven't seen a drop. There is a continuum of human experience. 

Still, I found it to be very, very exciting! I did absolutely nothing to make that happen. It happened on its own. My body is doing its own set of preparations while my conscious mind is just out here living my life as normal (or worse, to be honest, my nutrition has a little bit, um, lapsed recently). 

Then I had a few dribbles of fluid down my leg. I mean, could be anything. Pee, vaginal discharge, bath water, or . . . amniotic fluid??? Once the thought had arisen, my conscious mind was playing things out. WHAT IF THIS WAS IT???

On the one hand, I would be so happy to have him in my arms tomorrow. I worry about him in there. I wish there was a portal that I could peek into his space to check on him. Part of me wants him to exit ASAP because I have it in my head that I will worry about him less when he is on the outside--but of course that is a fallacy. I can't keep him alive; God sustains him. 

The other hand, the wiser part of me acknowledges how much easier he is to care for on the inside: no crying, no diapers, no feedings. He deserves the warm, comforting enclosure of his womb for as many more weeks as I can give him. And I am in no hurry for the trial of labor. 

But this is what the leaking and the dribbling taught me--first the dribble. It made me imagine with sincerity, for the first time, that moment when my water actually does break. And I realized I am sooooo not mentally ready. (Well, of course not, I am 34 weeks, after all.) My prevailing emotion was panic. 

Then I remembered the leaking, and it made me realize, my body can do all kinds of things without me. When I read in my birth book that pushing is quite involuntary, I have to suppress the impulse to scoff at that--it can't be true, right? But the leaky nips really reassured me--some things really can happen on their own. 

That is not to say there isn't corruption in our DNA. There is a reason I struggle to trust my body. It has let me down before. In His mercy to humanity, He gave us science and medicine and hospitals, because there is a need for them. But the fallenness of the world does not mean it is good or right or true to assume that my body will wholly stop functioning as it was designed. 

On nights that I don't sleep well, I wake up with the overwhelming fear that my baby died in the middle of the night. That I slept too long on my back and the restricted blood flow suffocated him. That all of the meds I took all these times I got sick during the pregnancy created a developmental abnormality not detectable on the ultrasounds. Or that it's just a freak tragedy. I woke up on Sunday feeling that way. 

I focused on my womb willing him to move, and while the briefest rustle confirmed he was still in there, it was not robust enough to clear the cobwebs. I was so tired and feeling nauseated from being so tired, Peter questioned whether I felt up for going to church. The entire ride I perseverated over my morbid anxiety--what could I do to get some relief? We arrived a little late, but we were in time to join the congregation in the hymn that closed out the worship set:

'Tis so sweet to trust in Jesus

Just to take Him at His Word

Just to rest upon His promise

Just to know, "Thus saith the Lord"

O for grace to trust Him more

In a rush I felt a release, a comfort, a peace. It's not that God has said to me that my baby will live. We are not promised our earthly preservation, although I think I have permission to expect that! But I felt the anxiety drop away. Because whatever happens, it cannot change who Jesus is and what He has promised. 

The pastor taught on the passage where, after Lot was kidnapped and Abraham rescued him, Abraham gave a tithe to Melchizedek, and how Melchizedek is a Christ figure from the Old Testament. While the exposition was interesting, I wasn't sure how the tithe connected until the very end, when the pastor gently reminded us--every single thing we have is from God and we are freed so that we can give it back to God. 

He is Your baby, God. I feel so responsible, because my body is hosting him for a time and my actions and choices affect him. But my responsibility does not change the prevailing truth that his fate is more in Your hands than in mine. You designed human reproduction. You put the blueprint for growth in his DNA. You placed his soul in his cells and You have already seen his whole life. 

My hands feel more open. My heart is comforted. 

Toughening Up

Last night Peter and I watched a sample birthing class where the instructor taught a hypnobirthing technique for pain management. I am considering a natural birth because of my fear of needles (and forget about needles in my freaking spine!), so I have been watching a lot of birthing stories and reading a lot of blog posts about how to cope with a natural birth. Ironically, what I have found has not inspired a lot of self-confidence. 

On Sunday, Peter and I also attempted a 60 second cold shower on the advice of Dr. Andrew Huberman and I was appalled by how challenging that was for me. I joked before I got in that this would be a coaching tool for natural birth, practicing relaxing through discomfort for the approximate duration of a contraction. I regretted drawing the comparison almost immediately. I finished the 60 seconds feeling demoralized. It was so hard! And that was only cold! Not pain! 

So when our birthing class instructor told us to grab some ice, I knew what was coming. As I squeezed the ice cube in my palm, I did my best to go to Station 18 1/2 at Sullivan's Island beach. I tried to remember dodging the jellyfish as I ran, I tried to remember watching the freight coming in and out of the harbor, I tried to remember sitting in the shallows while it thundered and lightning, I tried to remember hiding my frose in the sand . . . but I couldn't go there. I was sitting on my couch with little stabs of cold shooting up my arm. Meanwhile Peter was on the side of me radiating bliss. "I'm in Hawaii!" 

It's been a while since I have embraced physical discomfort. Marathon training is a well I go back to as I try to hype myself up for what my body can do, but the truth is that it's been months since I've been on a really good run. Even the road race we did last spring was a struggle, not triumphant. The nausea of the first trimester felt intolerable, unbearable--I slept during the day, something I hate doing, just to get some escape from it. I even stopped taking the stairs! (I am back on my stairs-only wagon now, but it is so much harder than it once was!) 

I feel like a weaker, softer version of myself. I don't think of myself as a mentally tough or particularly disciplined person, but I thought I was stronger than this! I thought I could power through the feeling of my body quitting on me, but I remember that it took two marathons, not one, and hours and hours of training to be fit enough to do that, and it was still really, really hard. I used to be able to smell the salt coming off Shem's Creek and the sugar drifting out of the praline shop, but now when I need those memories, they are out of reach and all that is in front of me is the unpleasantness, discomfort, and pain.

And if you are thinking I sound dramatic right now, I would tell you I am not being dramatic enough. If I feel this way now, how am I supposed to handle it when I actually do feel like my insides are being ripped apart??? Feels like it might be more realistic to mentally train to cope with an epidural than mentally train to cope with a natural labor. 

The one thing that comforts me: I still have time to prepare. I have time to prepare my body physically with walking, and stairs, and strength training, and endurance training, and raspberry leaf tea. I have time to prepare my mind to focus on the beach instead of the contractions. I can learn all the Lamaze breaths and the other hypnobirthing strategies and maybe even successfully meditate. I think I have a lot of cold showers ahead of me. (Today I cheated and only put my legs and arms in, and it STILL hurt!) 

I tell myself this decision is about my fear of needles, but I think it is also about my desire to challenge myself, to feel accomplished. Of course, I think I will feel accomplished whichever way this baby gets out of me. I already feel accomplished. Hayley 10 years ago thought she would never be able to tolerate the discomfort and indignities of hosting a person inside her body. Yet here I am. And Hayley of 10 years ago is still with me in this ethos of chose the hard thing. 

Finally getting pregnant after one miscarriage and 30 months of trying does not cancel out or somehow negate the pain of those experiences. Even standing in my doctor's office with a sonogram photo after just being reassured that, yes, my baby had a heartbeat, even then I cried for the baby I never got to meet. 

Thinking now about who we want to tell and how we want to tell them, I remember how others' pregnancy announcements landed. My sister-in-law's birth announcement came on the day I started my period after our first month of trying. Now I am embarrassed that I could even be so hopeful and expectant after just one month, but in that moment her happy news felt like an exclamation point on my empty womb. 

We learned of another friend's pregnancy just a month before we got out own first positive pregnancy test. She had been very careful about talking about it because she had had a miscarriage just a few months prior. I thought of her and so many other friends when we learned our baby had died--I was comforted in a small way by the knowledge of how common miscarriage is. There are many of us who have walked through this grief. 

I took a break from Instagram about a year ago because I felt so much guilt and anxiety about what I knew and didn't know about people's lives. I feel like I can enter a social interaction now and ask with sincerity, "Tell me what's been going on!" and not feel the temptation to pretend I know what's been going on since I saw it on the socials. 

I also feel that I can share the happy things and the sad things with more trust. It is lovely to receive affirmation and encouragement from strangers and acquaintances. But something like a pregnancy announcement, I know from my own reactions how fraught it can be. As much joy as I felt for my friends, I felt an equal proportion of sadness, loss, and maybe a little envy. And as much encouragement as I received from hearing my friends' struggles with fertility, I am not sure I have sufficiently processed my sadness to share such personal information for mass consumption. 

The people who love me can hold their happiness for my happiness in tension with their own complicated feelings on this topic. The people who love me can suspend judgment about my journey and engage with my dual grief and joy. The people who love me want to know these Big Life Updates. And I am so thankful to have people in my life who readily carry that mantle for me; I hope I can do the same for them.  

Loss

It is good to remember: 

This is common

This is not your fault

This is making life in a fall world

This is God's design for our bodies

This is painful--and you should not deny yourself the pain

It is good to grieve:

I hope you will not feel ashamed of your sadness

Or ashamed of your hopefulness which made this news such a surprise

The brevity of this life does not mean its loss is without consequence

And your hopefulness to try again does not dishonor the loss

Somehow it feels good to have the tender parts of your heart be tested

It was true before and it is true now: I have gifts all around me

30 Books

One of my goals for 2021 was to get back into reading. It's strange to me how reading used to be such a regular part of my life and an activity I defined my identity by back when. But mid-way through my twenties the punishing reading schedule of law school combined with the siren song of television stamped out any appetite I had for recreational reading. 

But in actuality, my mom had resolved to become "a reader" (although her delineation did puzzle me, since I have always considered my mom to be a reader) and in sharing her Audible password with me, she opened the door for many mini book discussions on my weekends home. Then, my sisters plus an honorary sister successfully launched a more formal book discussion group, which has successfully selected three titles in 2021. We are getting it done the way that works for us. 

For attribution purposes, many of these titles were recommended by the Modern Mrs. Darcy book club; this is not my own curation. 

It has been life-enriching to be consuming books again. Many selections have assisted me in considering certain topics anew. The Cold Millions, for example, read just before the George Floyd protests broke out, forced me to reexamine the role of direct action and peaceful protest. Codependent No More gifted me so much wisdom about why I struggle in certain ways in certain relationships. I listened to Americanah while I worked on a Nigerian asylum case and I listened to Sparks Like Stars while Kabbul fell to the Taliban.

I noticed when reviewing the ground I had covered this year was how each title evoked memories from when I had been reading that book. Even though the vast majority were consumed while driving, I remember those trips: stopping for Chick-fil-A in Virginia while listening to The Silver Chair; getting a speeding ticket in Roscoe while listening to The Other Black Girl; blushing through Beach Read on a flight back from Mexico; hunting for the Mercer Williams House in Savannah before starting Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Usually my memories feel very slippery to me, but sharing these books with other people (Peter, my mom, our book discussion group, our travel companions) has helped me hang onto not only the stories themselves, but also the slices of life that was happening while I encountered these stories. 

This is the full list of books I finished in 2021:

• Station Eleven by Emily Mandel
• Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann
• Silver Sparrow by Tayari Jones
• The Jane Austen Society by Natalie Jenner
• I'll Be Seeing You by Elizabeth Berg
• The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo
• The Great Sex Rescue by Sheila Wrap Gregorie
• The Cold Millions by Jess Walter
• This Tender Land by William Kent Krueger
• The Silver Chair by C.S. Lewis
• The Downstairs Girl by Stacey Lee
• The Making of Biblical Womanhood by Beth Allison Barr
• Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt
• Writers & Lovers by Lily King
• People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry
• Dream Big by Bob Goff
• Americanah by  Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
• Liturgy of the Ordinary by Tish Harrison Warren
• Sparks Like Stars by Nadia Hashimi
• The Other Black Girl by Zakiya Dalila Harris
• The River by Peter Heller
• Out of the Pocket by Kirk Herbstreit
• The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
• The Good House by Ann Leary
• Beach Read by Emily Henry
• Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler
• It's Better to Be Feared by Seth Wickersham
• Evicted by Matthew Desmond
• Codependent No More by Melody Beattie
• The Last Watchman of Old Cairo by Michael David Lucas