Touching heaven

As a lovely colleague has just revealed that she’s pregnant and due in January the English Club* has gotten rather preoccupied with talking about everything pertaining to motherhood during lunch. Of course the topic mostly centers around the pregnancy bit. (We’ll wait a little longer before we start scaring her silly with all our horrible birth stories, lol). “How to survive nausea” was the topic du jour.

How enthusiastic we all get! Full of good advice and sympathy. We recall our own journeys through pregnancy (ies) and birth(s) and share the good, the bad, and the ugly. You get pregnant and you’re instantly admitted into this “secret society” – because now you know!

Most men (I believe anyway) are quite thankful that they aren’t the ones who bring life into this world. They don’t quite get how women get so incredibly excited and engaged when speaking about pregnancy and birth. Realizing the topic at hand they steer far and clear of our table in the cafeteria. They don’t get it, and they never truly will. They can’t. Simply because they never have to have their body taken over by what their body considers a foreign entity. Their bodies will never know what it’s like to fight this intruder with nausea and exhaustion for at least 3 months until suddenly there’s a flutter inside. They will never know what what it feels like to suddenly realize that there is actually something in there, a real human being. To feel someone grow right underneath their heart, and find themselves reading everything they can about this miracle and what lies ahead. They’ll never know what its like to start nearing the end of the journey and find themselves in pain in places they didn’t know they had, feeling feet kick up into their stomach, or have a head resting on their bladder. They will never know what it’s like to be so full of baby that even something as simple as turning from one side to the other in bed becomes a gigantic feat. They’ll never know what it’s like to feel their stomach suddenly gain a life of its own… to feel their own muscles tighten and release without doing anything to make it happen…. to feel the pain increasing steadily as their body prepares to purge itself of that 9-month invasion. To feel the pain become blinding and overwhelming. To be powerless as nature wreaks the relentless and grueling havoc necessary to make a living human being be able to emerge in a way that even if you’ve seen it you can hardly believe is possible. They will never know the grandeur of the moment when their own child finally slips from their very being.

A man cannot experience that wretched pain or the natural high that follows. When the pain subsides all the adrenaline and endorphins that have been in high gear still linger. Exhausted and lightheaded elation descends as that child lies wrapped in your arms. It’s like touching heaven.

My first time touching heaven

*My awesome lunch companions at work! Mostly native English speakers, but we’re always welcoming to fun and heavily accented English speakers to our table setting 🙂 I’ll have to blog about my colleagues one day – cuz they ROCK 😀

Oh silence, how I hate you

There was a time when silence was my hiding place, a peaceful place where I could find rest for my weary soul.  But now Silence –  you’re my nemesis. You’re a plague. In your presence there is no place to hide. When you surround me, I stumble. When you touch me, I fall. You linger in the shadows. You hide in the hustle and bustle of my daily life. I know you’re there.

When day turns to night, the kids are tucked in, and I should sleep – there you are. When I get in my car and no one else is there – you appear.

Oh silence how I hate you. For in you I can’t escape the memories. I can’t escape the pain. You wrap yourself around me and I drown.I drown into the memories, those beautiful and special memories of that life well lived. Those arms that used to hold me. The hand that brushed my cheek. The heart that deeply loved me. The soul that made me seek.

When my eyelids close I see him. That glorious smile glitters. He hasn’t lost that sparkle in his eye. I smile, take a breath, and open my mouth to speak. The image fades. My heart breaks. I’m reminded once again. You’re not here.

Pain is inevitable, but misery is optional

I just love quotes and this quote made me smirk:

Life is easier than you think –
All you have to do is:
Accept the impossible,
Do without the indispensable,
Bear the intolerable,
And be able to smile at anything.

Life has a tendency to smack me around quite a bit, and these days I’m recovering from a rather heavy beat-down that is mostly stemming from having my seemingly pretty healthy father of 65yrs suddenly pass away, having a mother extremely ill with cancer, and my husband having a genetic mutation that means he can’t process fats (goes directly to his bloodstream) and whose fat content level is elevated at the moment which means he blacks out at times… just to name three of the current challenges.

I got a wonderful compliment yesterday – from someone I very much respect. It’s a fact that the weight of a compliment (at least for me) is linked to who said it. Anyway – what he said was that he was ‘extremely impressed with my ability to stand firm and calm in the midst of storms’. That ability hasn’t been acquired cheaply, but it truly is valuable. I no longer panic. I can calmly assess the crisis at hand and take it from there. When the crisis passes however I crack wide open, and fall apart crying. After ‘letting it out’ I pull myself together, stand up, and move on.

Good times and easy days are wonderful, but they don’t help you grow. I’ve come to realize that the challenges, pain, and unpredictability of my life builds character. Now it’s up to me to decide what kind of character I want to build. I can become a bitter, difficult, frustrated, broken, and depressed person, or I can choose to strive for something different. As the author Barbara Johnson quotes in a book: “Pain is inevitable, but misery is optional. Life is too short to spend it sunken in misery. My children deserve better, and frankly – so do I.

So here’s to taking lemons and making lemonade!! *cheers*