Heaven Help Me!

The weirdest part  about being pregnant is the delirium that can accompany it. This is one of the few things I argue with God about – that is – I tell him this aspect of pregnancy is a very, very bad idea.

Moms don’t talk about this much, but I have experienced this with all my pregnancies. (If you know what I mean, please leave a comment!) I describe it as “Mother Bear Syndrome”, with hormones thrown in. My experience tells me it is worst in the third trimester, when the mother’s body is “nesting” and planning for life after birth. There is much to secure, or keep secure. Primarily, it’s basic needs, such as food, shelter, and the means to get & keep them. It can also encompass the need for support, companionship and help after baby is born. When these needs are threatened, it can cause a visceral reaction in the mother as she feels the need to fight for her own and her “cub’s” survival and ultimate well-being.

If you’ve ever seen a mother bear protecting her babies from attack, you’ll know it’s not pretty…Intruders are not welcome and food is treated as though there is some impending famine.

Humans can become very animalistic under certain circumstances. My typical “c’est la vie” attitude toward life disappears in T-10 weeks before birth.

So, my apologies to all who have been unfortunate enough to have crossed my path in the past couple weeks and witnessed first-hand that I have morphed into some oddity that I usually am not.

I’ll be much nicer after birth. I promise.

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What’s this I wake up to? I may have woke up more overwhelmed than usual with the new baby kicking inside me reminding me that he’ll be arriving soon; I am not sure. But, within minutes my mind was racing with an unending list of things to do. Which resulted in tears. Not a fun way to wake up.  All this resulted in me turning to my husband and asking for my “emergency remedy”:  dark chocolate and a large glass of milk. After a little conversation with him, I realized something: I am lacking true joy. With all that I have, I can’t believe I feel sad. It is predictable that at the end of all my pregnancies, I tend to get down. I struggled through the morning, got my kids to their catechism classes at church on time, made it to a beautiful Mass, and smiled at friends. My spirits lifted after Mass when I had completed the most important tasks of the day.

Although I can now look back on the day with joy, there is a thought pervading my mind. Why has God blessed a woman like me with depressive tendencies with many children and all that I have? Why can’t some of those women who are immaculate housekeepers and gourmet cooks, chirpy and chipper in every way, albeit infertile, get the chance to do as I am doing? The answer came to me as we prayed the rosary on the way to church, “I am not the mother I want to be, but I am the mother God wants me to be”.

The remedy for this certain darkness? As St. John of the Cross says, “What is needed is hope”.

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I check my email after writing this to find a link sent by a dear friend entitled “A Mother’s Liturgy of the Hours” written by Danielle Bean. Hmmm…my life perfectly explained. Exactly what I HOPED to hear!

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I want to comment on Sandra Tsing Loh’s most recent article in the December 2009 edition of The Atlantic magazine, entitled “On Being  a Bad Mother – True Confessions”  (a follow-up to Ms. Loh’s article on the agony of her divorce in the July/August 2009 issue of The Atlantic, entitled “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off” which caused a near nationwide stir). In the latter, Ms. Loh relates from experience with her 20 year long marriage, that she believes she has failed as a wife and mother. But her reason for saying so is as follows:

“in this cluttered forest of my 40s, what I cannot authentically reconjure is the ancient dream of brides, even with the Oprah fluffery of weekly “date nights,” when gauzy candlelight obscures the messy house, child talk is nixed and silky lingerie donned, so the two of you can look into each other’s eyes and feel that “spark” again. Do you see? Given my staggering working mother’s to-do list, I cannot take on yet another arduous home- and self-improvement project, that of rekindling our romance. Sobered by this failure as a mother—which is to say, my failure as a wife—I’ve since begun a journey of reading, thinking, and listening to what’s going on in other 21st-century American families. And along the way, I’ve begun to wonder, what with all the abject and swallowed misery: Why do we still insist on marriage?”

Ms. Loh tells her story with sadness and regret.  It seems what she is saying is that if she weren’t so exhausted and overworked, as many of her literary & speaking counterparts were as she came to this conclusion, that she might still want to be married. She is not a failure; she is exhausted. But this, too, shall pass. If she were offered a different viewpoint, would she have chosen marriage instead of divorce? As I wrote in a previous post, I don’t believe anyone goes into marriage hoping for it to end. Such a thought would be lunacy. The question up for consideration is what makes or breaks a marriage? Is the decision to ‘call the whole thing off’ in part based on whether or not a woman is a “good mom” or a “good wife”?

In the article, Ms. Loh relates a confessional dinner meeting with two friends, both of whom state their disappointment with marriage also. One of the main reasons they cite is summed up in this statement:  ”To work, to parent, to housekeep, to be the ones who schedule “date night,” only to be reprimanded in the home by male kitchen bitches, and then, in the bedroom, to be ignored—it’s a bum deal. And then our women’s magazines exhort us to rekindle the romance. You rarely see men’s magazines exhorting men (to enkindle the romance).”

So, too much of women doing everything, and men doing nothing. Hasn’t this been what feminism has sought to change for years? This inequality? Has making men and women more equal in the home not been entirely successful? What makes it work and what doesn’t?

If I were a participant at the aforementioned dinner meeting, I agree hearing this would really stink. Especially since the woman married to the “kitchen bitch” seemed, from the outside, to be in an ideal situation:  The husband was reliably there to take the kitchen work off his wife’s hands. He was an active father participating heavily in the children’s lives. The problem was that he perceived her as “sloppy and inattentive”.  She made mistakes that he never would have – missing the window for booking a flight on Expedia and forgetting to deglaze the saucepan of all things. She could see herself as nothing more than “a failed mother,  depressed and chronically overworked at her $120,000-a-year job (which she must cling to for the benefits because husband freelances). At night, horny and sleepless, she paces the exquisite kitchen (her husband has created), gobbling mini Dove bars.”

These spouses are irritated, even angry, for each other’s personality quirks. They are also uptight and fragile, for what else do you get when overworked and stressed? And they have not shared true intimacy in years. How unfulfilling and sad.

Important to note is that even in the best of marriage, there are areas of difficulty. There are things to work out, and to keep working out for some 20 years or more. Although I realize it can be miserable, I realize that there may be no benefit to the spouse who “keeps trying”, I realize it must seem senseless and like there must be someone else out there, I believe that Ms. Loh and others have it within them to stand the test of time – until life is less demanding of them. Until the necessities of the children have moved to the background. Until everything they’re working so hard for is paid off and done. It takes that amount of time. I have seen marriages get much better after these things are through. But one who does not stay with it will never know the other side. Spouses need to hold hands through the chaos and practice 365 intimacy, like it or not. It is a choice.

Am I actually encouraging bored-to-tears, frustrated married couples to stay married? Yes. Because there really is no guarantee that the grass is greener on the other side.

(*Just an end note, which I hope is obvious…an abusive situation is serious, and I would first stress safety of all family members.)

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No one dreams of their marriage ending in divorce. It usually is something that “just happens” over time, right? Once the love is gone, that’s it. No so, says Laura A. Munson, author of an article on modern love in the August 2, 2009 edition of the New York Times, entitled, “Those Aren’t Fighting Words, Dear“.

Munson is a chain-saw swinging, horse-shovin’, Montana mountain girl who just won’t take “no” for an answer.  From her husband, that is.  One day, after being married for a satisfying twenty-some years, he wakes up in the morning, out-of the-blue says he doesn’t love her anymore and announces he wants out. Does she crumple up in a fetal position and cry, whine, and beg for him to stay? No.

Rather, as the article states, she calmly looks him in the eye and says to him, “I don’t buy it”.

She refuses to accept his wish and instead offers to give him whatever he needs to get through his “mid-life crisis”. A man-cave in the garage, maybe? A trek in Nepal, the drum set he always wanted – anything – to give him the distance he needs without hurting the rest of the family.  She calls it “responsible distance”.

Despite his initial wish to move out, he didn’t. He was present, however unreliably so. It was difficult. He stayed out later than usual after work and not call, blew off family parties and activities. He didn’t even wish her a Happy Birthday.

She continued to set the dinner table with a plate for him, continued to enjoy summer with the kids & invited him to join them, basically she went on as usual. She loved him from afar. Not to say she wasn’t angry…She was. She wanted to scream at him, but she didn’t.

She did all this because she knew his problem wasn’t hers to solve.  She knew she should get out of the way to help him solve it. Realizing that if she didn’t, he could turn his problems into “their” marital problems or “her” problems, which is exactly why she steered clear.

She acted in this counter-cultural way, much to the chagrin of her friends who urged her to “kick him out” and get a lawyer.

As she writes, “Although it may sound ridiculous to say, ‘Don’t take it personally’ when your husband tells you he no longer loves you, sometimes that’s exactly what you have to do.” She tried this for six months.

After six months, she looked outside one day to see her husband home early from work moving the lawn. Then making home repairs. Then making plans for keeping their family warm during the upcoming winter. A man doesn’t do these things if he’s not planning to stay. Then, finally, on Thanksgiving Day, he bowed his head humbly and said, “I am thankful for my family”.

Much psychology out there tells us what most of us already know – to be happy, you have to know happiness inside yourself. Relying on external factors for happiness  is like building your castle on shifting sand. Whether one’s achievements, accomplishments,  possessions, job, and/or spouse might enhance one’s happiness, it is not the same as knowing happiness from within. Her husband had bought the myth that happiness was due to external factors, and because of this, he lost hope & his pride. Fortunately for their family, he found his way out.

I believe the love that drew two people together in the first place remains, even when extinguished to a flicker by everyday stresses and occurrences which knock us around. It can be fanned back into raging bonfire.

It’s amazing that Ms. Munson was able to see this, and struggle, and suffer, and wait.

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I wrote an earlier post on our miscarriage experience which explained that part of our coming to peace with this is knowing that we might be able to help someone someday. We were contacted by a reporter who decided to publish our story in the Archdiocese of Chicago’s newspaper, The Catholic New World . A link to the article can be found here.

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The children and I went to visit the cemetery last Friday. St. Joseph’s Cemetery is just five minutes west of our home. My grandparents and my husband’s grandparents were buried there many years ago (before we chose to live so close to it). This day we went to visit Ignatius’ buried remains in his newly dug grave.

Ignatius is the name we gave our baby who was not born. He or she (we say he just for the sake of being less confusing, but we never knew if the baby was male or female) was gestationally only 11-12 weeks old. It is amazing, however, how significantly one unborn life can affect the world. It is true that God has a plan for every life, even the unborn. Part of God’s plan for Ignatius has been that through the circumstances which surrounded his short life and (too early, for us) death, more respect and dignity have been given to the unborn. Specifically how is another story, for another day.

So, I decided pretty spontaneously Friday morning that I was ready to go to the cemetery. I found his death, and the way I found out about it particularly unpleasant, so I have to admit that I just wanted to get it over with and move on. But I cannot move on. I have been unable to do so so easily. I sense the spirit in my baby in the warm summer breeze, the laughter of my children (is that him joining in?), and circumstances which make it impossible for me to forget that this happened to us.

I had a miscarriage during my twelfth week of pregnancy. I discovered my child had died five weeks ago. The memory of this event, still fresh in my mind, is urging me to not forget.

This was my child. He was the product of the blessing and love I share with my husband. He was the sibling, and possible brother to my living children. He is missed. All were sad. We wanted to hold him.

All of this was adequately expressed at our first trip to the cemetary. So, now when we go, along with praying for our other relatives, we pray for Ignatius – in whatever relationship he is to us – child, brother, sister, friend.

To honor him and his life, however short it may be, is the best memorial to him.

The tears that fell upon his grave that Friday afternoon were received into his hands. I was blessed to be able to carry him, and hold him closer than anyone else whose tears have fallen there. Within my very self.

The freshly dug earth was apparent to us. His was the newest one there. Soon, it will appear like the rest of the graves.  Pretty soon, new grass will have grown with time, the appearance will have aged and changed.

Changed, but not forgotten.

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