My life in a long nutshell

Today I awoke to thunder, lightning, rain, sleet--pretty much every aspect of a "wintry mix." This is troubling as we have friends driving from Ohio today, so we will be nervous until they arrive tonight.

So it feels rather ego-centric and self-absorbing to start writing all about me...but oh well! When I read a blog, I like to know at least a little bit about the blogger at the beginning.

I'm 34 years old and married to my "high school sweetheart" (I hate that phrase) who will be known on the blog as J, or alternatively, depending on the day, "asshole," "dick," etc. We started dating when we were 15 (me) and 16 (him), got married after college. Struggled through crappy jobs and now trudge to our not-so-crappy but boring and low-paying jobs as an editor (me) and a personal banker (him). We live in a town that's large enough to have two (count 'em, TWO) WalMarts, one Target (not even a SuperTarget), an Olive Garden, a Red Lobster, and a huge mall, but not big enough to have suburbs, tall buildings or an opportunity to be anonymous. In the 12 years we've been married, we've been through a lot. J's parents died in the same week in 2000--his mother from brain cancer, his father four days later from a heart attack. Sibling estate battles ensued, and now we are estranged from most of his family. Pretty much throughout our marriage, I've been ill with something weird, like a pilonidal cyst on my butt, or a polyp in my ureter, or a cyst on my "unmentionables," etc., involving us in a near constant state for several years of surgery-recovery-depression-therapy-recurrence-surgery --you get the idea.

Then we decided we wanted a baby, and spent five or six or seven (we lost count) years trying to have one, thwarted by my body's inability to conceive one of J's admittedly numerous and healthy swimmers. After some drugs, some injections and an IUI (intrauterine insemination), we conceived our daughter. Then, at 21 weeks of pregnancy, in June 2003, I lost her unexpectedly after waking up bleeding in the middle of the night. Turns out I also have an incompetent cervix--a totally unrelated condition to the infertility. It was devastating, and something I will likely refer to on this board often. Grieving her was the hardest thing I've ever done....and I'm not done.

We tried another IUI and it failed, but in February 2004 it succeeded. I had a cerclage to hold the baby in and in September 2004 we had our son, six weeks early but healthy and beautiful...and way too much for me to handle. I had spent years and years creating this perfect little being in my mind, and when I got....A REAL BABY...wow, what a shock. To this end, I really recommend reading "Mother Shock: Loving Every (Other) Minute of It" by Andrea Buchanan.

I (of course) had post partum depression and still struggle with motherhood, motherhood after loss, motherhood after infertility...pretty much every motherhood issue except anything along the lines of "I just can't leave my baby for more than five minutes because I'm sooooooo happy and soooooooo blissful and even his cries make my heart sing with joy...." I have issues with the "Let's compare our babies!" game that a woman I know tries to engage me in every day, and whether or not I suck at parenting, and how my baby seems to love my husband more than me....oh, it will all come out later.

I can't end this entry without talking about my friends LilCherie and Tingle.

Lil Cherie has been my friend since 2nd grade and my "best" friend since about 6th. She is hilarious, warm-hearted, fun, serious when necessary, irreverent, eccentric, and is kind of a grounding force for me. She has a four-year-old son and struggles with many of the same motherhood issues I do, and it's been so helpful to me to know that it wasn't just me who felt that way after my son was born. She is a big part of why I'm even writing this blog. Just about every weekend we have a "Girls' Night" where we get together and just cut loose (by this I mean, we leave our children in the care of our husbands, get inebriated on various substances, and then laugh our asses off and write down the particularly funny bits for later hilarity). We sometimes do Tarot, sometimes make collages or draw or share journal entries...whatever we want! That's the beauty of it. It was during one of these Girls' Nights when we came up with "snicklesnackle," which led to our website, our message board, and now this blog. She's family to me.

Tingle has been my friend since February 2004. That may not sound like such a long time, but for us it really was like meeting a "soul mate." We met over the Internet on the SHARE website for parents (mostly women) who have experienced a pregnancy or infant loss. We gravitated toward each other's posts, and found that we have much in common. Like me, she struggled with infertility and sadly lost a son at about 21 weeks of pregnancy. We feel like our children really brought us together, and that our friendship is somewhat magical. We live 8 hours away from each other, but we talk almost every day. She was a large part of my healing process after losing our daughter. While Lil Cherie is like a counterpoint to me--mostly sane, level-headed, and calming, Tingle is like a mirror image of me, and we can relate to each other on the familiar plane of our shared personalities. Tingle is one of the most generous people I've ever met. She always looks for the good in people, but not so much that she can't make fun of people with me. She's also hilarious, an excellent poet, and the definition of what I would call "a good person." She's wonderful, involved, loving aunt to her nephew, and I hope so much that she and her husband, S, get the chance to be a parent to a living child.

And I hope they make it here safely from Ohio today, because I miss them!