Life is complex. Since the dawn of the written word writers have written about both the clouds and their silver linings. Is the cup half empty, or half full? What makes us happy? Driven to perfection? And what, when the odds are against us, makes each one of us the man in the dusty ring, who gets back up, and fights until we succeed.
The collision of T.R.’s dusty man in the ring and Leave It To Beaver can be found in OBGYN offices across D.C. and Northern Virginia. Women in their 30s and 40s who have spent years solidifying their careers and forging their own identities begin to desire a different balance. The condo becomes a small house on a postage stamp in Arlington (because, let’s face it, how many of us can afford McLean McMansions), the obsession with work politics becomes an obsession over schools districts, and then, the obsession over the baby. The Baby.
I believed I exchanged my years of work obsession with easy parenthood. I married young, got pregnant on my honeymoon without even trying and then got pregnant with a second son 7 months after the first was born. I had a sense of pride over being a healthy “producer” and urged those having issues to keep trying. I traded work in an office for work at home. The joy of parenthood was worth the effort.
But then came my own detour. Our perfect Leave It To Beaver plan was that when we moved to the farm, I would immediately get pregnant and we would have three kids within a year. I was at home, we wanted at least one more child, and our checked boxes seemed imminent. Month after month we tried. In early fall I missed my period but the test said no pregnancy. A month later I got my period- an obvious early miscarriage. Two months later, we were pregnant again. This time, positive test. Success.
I had no idea how much pressure I carried until that little pink plus sign appeared on the test. Somewhere deep inside I felt my identity, the control of my own body, and the pressure of leaving a great job to chose a family was dependent on this one pink plus sign. Failure to have another wasn’t just a blank box on our Grand Life Plan, it was the first REALLY BIG FAT FAILURE of my own ability to control my body and my future.
So the pregnancy progressed. I was so sick the first three months I begged off family events and happily slept away in my bed while my husband took the two boys. At week 13 my husband and I giddily went to the first sonogram. I had started to have a little dark blood a couple days before and for some reason, I felt like mentioning it to the technician and saying, “I just hope everything is OK.” As she put the monitor up, I looked up at the familiar screen, identified my uterus, and then froze. Where there should have been a little bean of a baby and a beating heartbeat was a small pea, at the bottom, dead. “There is no heartbeat, is there,” I stated. I didn’t need a response. My worst fears were confirmed and as I wept in my husbands arms I wept for the baby I couldn’t keep, for my children who wouldn’t understand, and for myself, for being such an utter failure.
Two days later I was at Sibley with some lovely nurses and my funny husband getting a D&C. The next day, I felt better than I had in weeks. A month later, I was running like the swimmer I am. But now, I move forward in life with some trepidation. My youthful bounce has become a more hesitant pace. I have acknowledged and semi- accepted that I may be young compared to some women seeking “assistance” getting pregnant, but I am not immune to age, nature, and God’s plan.
Yet like T.R.’s man in the ring, something in me just won’t be defeated. I understand now George Bush sky-diving, middle-aged men and women taking to the streets in Syria demanding rights to have more control over their lives, and my own sons needs to define themselves outside of their own perfect mother’s idea of what they should be doing. We all will face the challenges to our aging bodies, frustrations to our Big Life Plans, and pressures from others to be less than we know we can be. The question is, do you let the hurdles define you, or do you redefine the hurdles and dare to keep on dreaming of life’s possibilities?
candyhillfarm 