Promises

I think what Mr. T was trying to say was that I was entitled to whine. I bet (although Mr. T wouldn't, and that's another story). He's fine at communicating, but I'm perhaps not always good at listening. And he's probably not wrong. But I think I'm too good at whining as it is.

I whined a lot this weekend. About how my back hurt, a headache, how I was doing something for others and no one was doing anything for me. I whined about what we didn't get done, I whined about a meeting, I just whined. Nothing was good.

I whined about everything but what I don't want to whine about.

What's the point? Really. Whining is not going to change anything. It won't make any difference. What is, is. And perhaps more than that, it hurts to poke that area. It hurts that I keep losing what I want so much. It hurts that other women get pregnant and stay pregnant. It hurts that babies are born addicted to drugs. It's hard to find God in this place. He just doesn't seem to be here.

He settles the barren woman in her home as a happy mother of children.

I'll save you the trouble, I've looked it up in about 15 different translations. They all more or less say the same thing. Psalm 113, verse 9 says that God is going to make me the happy mother of children. (I'm the mother of a child, but I'm not exactly happy about how that turned out.)

Now, I know I've read that psalm before. I've read it a lot, I suspect. I've read the psalms a lot in the last 2 or so years. Somehow, I've never seen that verse. I read it, caught my breath, read it again, and marked it. For the next few weeks, I kept finding myself returning to it. For someone as terrible at remembering the chapter and verse of well, anything, I remember it.

And for a little bit, I thought I understood the meaning. And then, all at once, I was back to walking by faith, and not by sight. This is hard. For every woman who waited for her baby, I can find another who waited, and never did get her child. I can hold up women who waited and lost, or waited and never did get a child. For every Sarah, for every Rachel, there is another woman, who 'chose' to live without children. I am not so foolish as to blindly believe that eventually a baby will turn up in the midst of the tomato patch (Mrs. Spit really hates cabbage). I know that some stories don't ever have a happy ending.

I'll read the verse again tonight, tomorrow night, other nights. And I'll hold it up. I want to believe it. I really do. I want to believe that somehow, in all this mess, this blood, this fear and hurt and anger, somehow another baby will find its way not just to my uterus, but home in our arms as well.

And I half-way do. Half of the time I totally believe it, and half of the time I do not believe it at all. And maybe that's ok. There's a verse for that too.
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And thank you for reaching out. Thanks for telling me that you were with me. In the end, the bleeding has mostly stopped, I am feeling better, if a bit sad and a bit angry and a bit confused. I will manage for a while, and then I will thrive.

Sit and be Human

"How far along were you dear? Are you sure? This has happened before? Was the pregnancy confirmed? What's the longest you've carried?"

I had to go to the hospital on Friday, when suddenly I started bleeding a whole bunch more. I stood in a crowded waiting room, explaining my sorry and pathetic obstetrical history. It's not that I'm bleeding, it's that there's so much, and I don't even know if you need to see me, but I know I'm in pain and I'm frightened and I'm all alone because there was no one to go with me, and I just want to sit in the corner and cry. I don't want to be brave and grown up.

And I looked up at the last question and sighed. 26 weeks, I developed pre-eclampsia. He died shortly after he was born.

And there was this look in her eyes. This horrible, awful look. You can differentiate pity.

There is pity that lets you stay with a person. When you accept and understand that you don't know what its like to be someone, but you can imagine they might need compassion and mercy. You can sit a while with them. Abide. You don't poke and prod, question, you do what needs to be done, and you let the other person be human.

And then there's the other kind. I get a lot of the other kind. I get a lot of "I can't imagine" and "I couldn't cope" and they run away. Without ever moving their body, I can feel their mind withdraw. I can feel them flee.

The first kind of pity is what makes us so wonderfully human. It builds bridges, it is mercy and compassion. It is the bedrock of humanity. It is goodness and care and solace. It builds up, allows us to connect, expand, absorb. We become better, larger, more generous. Jesus tells me that the Kingdom of God is something like this.

The second kind makes me want to cringe. Standing at this horrible counter, with everyone around me, losing another baby, and I'm trying to explain. I don't want to be called dear, I don't want to be told to keep my chin up, and I don't want to answer questions about what is or is not being done for me. I just want to know. This blood and this pain, can you do anything for it? Is it ok? Is there a problem? Do I need tests? Can I go home?

I know I'll sit in this damn waiting room, for hours, bleeding. I know I'll be alone, knitting a sock, crying a little bit, occasionally. And you can't change that, and I don't want you to try. I know what I'm facing, I've been here before. What I need is simple. . .

Just sit with me, this place is lonely and frightening. Just sit and be human with me.

Saturday Quotes

For I know that my Redeemer lives, and that in the end he will stand upon the earth. And after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God. I myself will see him with my own eyes—I, and not another. How my heart yearns within me!

Job 19: 25-27

Amen.

Paper

I went to Audrey's, our local book store, last night, to buy a copy of Sense and Sensibility. I am only buying this book because I bought Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, and I started reading that, and I realized that I don't think I've read Sense and Sensibility, and I think, in the entire spirit of parody, you should read one before the other. (Also, this explanation for Mr. Spit, who gets very nervous when I go into bookstores. It's ok dear. I took the store credit we had and spent that on the other 2 books I bought. It wasn't very expensive, as far as Audrey's trips go. In fact, I may modestly say it wasn't that expensive, period.)

But, my flimsy household accounting (and even flimsier excuses to my husband) aren't particularly what this entry is about. It has been, as you might have noticed, a shit week here at the Spits. (and I'm using that word because my mother told me I was having a shit week, and if she says it, surely. . .)

And while I was at Audrey's, there were day planners for 2010. And I realized, that I have not had a dayplanner in a few years. I tried using my Palm, and these electronic bingley-beep dealies are not for me. These dayplanners were Moleskin, which strikes me as the sort of thing I would like to use. Ernest Hemmingway used Moleskin, and I think I might be more like Hemmingway if I could use Moleskin. I would derive a visceral pleasure in using the same sort of thing he used. It would be traditional and historical, and every good kind of thing. It would be a connection to the past, unlike the new-fangled bingley-beeping things.

Every so often, Mr. Spit indicates that I should get a Kindle. And don't get me wrong, I think the Kindle is great, nifty and cool. But. . .

It's not paper. It's not ink on paper. You can't turn pages, you can't leave it open at a paragraph, underline something that speaks to you. And you certainly can't throw it across the room when a line makes you very angry. There's nothing permanent about a Kindle, or an electronic bingley-beepy thing.

A kindle is a device, and I like books. I like paper. I like the feel of a perfect pen in my hand. I like ink. I like a good pen. I like blue ink on paper, the feel of it as it leaves the pen. The slight indentation a good Cross fountain pen puts on nice cotton paper. I like the heft ink gives to words. I think about these things, I like permanence.

And all of this is a particular way of saying that I've had enough of this week. This week has been a soul sucking morass. I've written it down, and I'm glad that some of you commented to share it with me, and all of you read it. I'm glad that I have words, and I can turn my thoughts into them. And like all books, all things with permanence, I've had enough of this chapter, for now. I'm turning the page, to see a new title, and new events.

And were it not for a book, I would likely have lost my perspective on optimism entirely.

I picked up Madeline L'Engle's Wrinkle in Time Quintet two nights ago. And in typical Madeline form, she reminded me of the power of permanence:

There are still stars which move in ordered and beautiful rhythm. There are still people in the world who keep promises. . . That's enough to keep my heart optimistic, no matter how pessimistic my mind. [And you and] I have good enough minds to know how very limited and finite they really are. The naked intellect is an extraordinarily inaccurate instrument.

Madeline L'Engle, A Wind in the Door.

It is not

It is not the sheer physicality of another miscarriage that's distressing me. It's not all this damn blood and the wincing pain and the hormone induced emotional crash. I cry, but tears of frustration and rage as much as sorrow. Probably, if I am honest, more frustration and rage. All of this is but a nuisance. It's not pleasant and I could do without it, but that's not the thing of it, at least for me.

Perhaps another way.

There were many deaths in Gabriel's death. There was the death of the child we called Gabriel. There was a little boy with ten fingers and ten toes, a head full of hair, and the crooked Pearce ring finger on his left hand, he was here, on this earth, with us, and then he was gone. And that was sudden and shocking and horrible.

And there was the death of children, which came all at once and slowly. It came all at once with the diagnosis of pre-eclampsia and all of those wretched stats, and it has come slowly, as we have had failed cycle after failed cycle. As we have been pregnant enough to know, but never pregnant for long enough to tell anyone. Death as the inevitable comes screeching into present day. Another dead baby. Five if you were counting.

On Sunday I was vomiting in the Safeway parking lot, pleased as punch, because this is normal for me. I was, excited, happy, hopeful. And now, I am angry and embarrassed. Furious with myself, that I allowed my hopes to be raised, frustrated that I came up with a stupid little plan to tell people I was pregnant, and now I am only slightly crazy, wondering if my body deceived me. I was so sure, had such a sense that this was going to go well, and now, it was all for naught. I have caught myself, since waking up in the puddle of blood, telling myself that I am not pregnant anymore. I was, and I am not. In the same way that Auden told us to stop all the clocks, I cancel appointment plans, waving that nothing came to anything anymore.

It is not, for a moment that the rug was pulled out from me. This is more fundamental than that. It is questions of what I can trust, what I can believe. What is real and true. Was there ever a rug?

It seems to me it is perhaps this: Gabriel's death was a knife buried in our back. It was a sudden, horrific accident. Pain like that is fast and rare. Another miscarriage is another slice in my arm, a fourth gash in a year and a half. It drips blood to be sure, but slowly. It's easily bandaged up. It is a wholly different thing than a traumatic accident. I bleed, I get over it. It is not a large thing, and I tell people that I am fine, except.

Eventually, you lose the same amount of blood, either way.

Even Now.

There are times, even now, that I have to stop myself. I have to stop myself from typing Anna's name into Outlook, stop myself from picking up my work phone and calling her. We have an instant message client at work now, and I can imagine sending her random smilies.

There are times, even now, when I wonder what she thinks about something, and I am so very close to asking her, that I can almost hear her voice.

There are times, even now, when I form the words pulmonary embolism, and 36 in my mind, and my mind explores around them, and I cannot fathom them. I cannot reconcile Anna dead and gone.

I look at the note from her on my cabinet at work, and I cannot believe it wasn't just sent yesterday.

And I see the pictures of Emma's birthday party, and I cannot believe that Anna wasn't there.

And there are times, even now, when I am about to do something else, and I stop in at Facebook, and I see the odd shot, amidst all of them that her husband posted tonight, and I cannot stop. My eyes fill with tears and my hands come to my mouth.

And even now, I cannot believe how much I miss her, and how much this hurts.

Go to Nait and be a Plumber.

Anyway, the story starts with a grumpy faculty chair and ends with a furnace dying on Easter.

As I talked about a while back, I stumbled my way through University, from start to finish. Maybe by 3rd year I had made some friends, and I knew and was known by my prof's. I had certainly established that 8 am classes were of the devil, and that existentialist philosophers had way too much time on their hands, but that was the sum total of my knowledge at the ripe old age of 21.

I wrote what must have been a thrilling essay for a poli sci class (John Stuart Mill and female circumcision) and the prof teaching the class recommended that I enter the honours program. As we have already established, I am not so much a process person as a project person. The end of the matter is better than it's beginning(1).

And I went to go and see the chair of the program, and at the end of it, I tentatively asked what one might do with a degree in poli sci, even you know, with an honours stamp on your degree.

Now, perhaps it is important that I tell you, Dr. L is now retired, but he was somewhat famous for 3 things:
1. An esoteric specialty, that should have guaranteed him lots of media time, but because of reasons 2 and 3 didn't.
2. His astonishingly bad dress sense
3. His tirades about the strangest things.

I hadn't ever taken a class from Dr. L, but his reputation, as they say, preceded him. Which leaves us back where we started, in a tiny office on the 11th floor of the Tory Building, looking out over the river valley, with me in an upright chair, and Dr. L about to blast me.

"If you want a job, go to NAIT and be a plumber"

I graduated, years after I started, with a degree in Poli Sci. Effectively a double major with economics (excepting the problems with econometrics).

And I did the only thing I could do. I got a job as a receptionist. 4 years later I was an Executive Assistant, and then a Policy Analyst.

Which takes me to the Easter weekend of 2005, in which our furnace died. Now, Mr. Spit and I are pretty well educated folk. And the furnace wasn't working. We looked at it. We phoned my uncle the plumber. We poked at it some more. Still not working. 2000 books in our house, and the furnace wasn't working. Either of us could converse earnestly and with great knowledge on the properties of structural steel or price elasticity of demand, but the only use the darn books were going to be was if we burned them to stay warm.

I was talking to someone else last week, and she remarked that after she bought her house, she looked around at her friends, friends that were doctors, lawyers, accountants, and thought that none of them were of any use.

Perhaps, perhaps just Dr. L had something.

(Yesterday was not the most spectacular day at the office, I'm just saying)