Oakley's Birth (Pt. 3) Goodness and Grief

If you missed part 1, find it here

All tears dried and a holy quiet settled over me. Dave whispered in my hair, “You did it Carrie. That was amazing. We have a son!”

Nurses draped warm towels over us and begin discussing logistics of getting us out, but I was again in my own world. This one of total bliss. The fact that 5 minutes ago and for the last 20 hours I’d been consumed by pain was already an impossibly distant memory.

It was as if a breeze had rustled heaven’s curtain. For a moment, I was not seeing hospital walls but a glimpse into paradise.

“Let’s get you out before either of you get cold,” Kim said. Gentle hands supported me while others carefully held the baby against me, his cord still attached. My biggest concern with a water birth was having to stand up so shortly after delivery. But I felt no faint or nauseous twinge. I walked the path of white towels they’d laid from the tub to the bed like it was a royal carpet.

Then I was in bed, a mountain of heated blankets around us. Dave was cutting the cord. Mom was kissing my forehead and slipping out to get some rest.

 Kim said I had a second degree tear that she would fix up. The final big fear. I registered about as much concern as if I’d been told I needed a stitch on my elbow.

Dave switched the music to the Labor Love playlist.

Morning light filtered through tinted windows.

Stevie Wonder sang.

A baby that smelled of heaven nuzzled against my chest.

I was enraptured.

 “At some point we need to name him.” I grinned up at Dave. I never dreamed I’d be the person birthing a baby that didn’t have a name. But here I was, and it added to the charm.

Dave called in an order for breakfast.

“What sounds good that we can we get you right now?” the nurses asked, listing off options of drinks and snacks.

“Apple juice!” I announced.

Never have I savored a drink more than the sweet, icy juice. Never have I felt so satisfied as when the crisp flavor filled my mouth and finally quenched my thirst.

John Denver sang You Fill Up My Senses. 

Eventually a bit of humanity crept into my euphoria. I polished off the juice and waited for our tardy breakfast delivery. Around 10 am. an ultra-perky lactation consultant arrived, pretty stoked to get us up-to-date on all things breast-feeding. Except, baby had just made the journey of his life, and mommy had not fully slept for 32 hours. As Ms. Consultant, with her freshly curled hair, chatted at high volumes about latches and football holds, baby slept slack-jawed, not even slightly interested in sucking. I attempted to smile but instead nodded into the pile of warm blankets. My eyes crossed when I tried to study diagrams of milk ducts.  

But it wasn’t nap time yet. Triage rooms were filling up and it was time for us to vacate the delivery room.

We gathered bags and I moved slow but with less misery than I ever imagined. Baby was weighed and measured and diapered and then nestled back against my skin in our new room and finally it was just us. Smelling and kissing and staring at his wrinkled fingers and wisps of long hair.

 JohnnySwim sang, “You’re my Hallelujah.”

 “Oakley?” Dave said. We said a few other names, but every time we said “Oakley” we smiled. I had debated hardest on a middle name, wanting a connection to the girls and the special way our family had been built.

“Alexander?” I offered. “He can honor the uncle who cared for his nieces and meant so much to us all in Ethiopia.”

“Oakley Alexander.” Dave said.

We called our girls and tried not to cry as we described their baby brother and listened to their delight.

Finally. Baby named. Phone calls made. Oatmeal eaten. It was time to sleep. But I kept needing one more look. One more kiss.  

“You’ve got me touching heaven

Got me touching heaven”

I could feel it, a roaring river of tears beneath the surface that would break through over the coming days. The magnitude of this experience was going to be a mess of emotions to work through. All of my fears hadn’t come true. All kinds of good things I could have never even imagined happened instead. It was going to be a process to accept the favor offered me while some of my dearest carried stories of tremendous disappointment, suffering, and loss. I was the most undeserving, and it would take months for me to accept that goodness, like grief, wasn’t something to make sense of, but rather something to simply receive and experience.

I could have never willed myself to create all my body and emotions had accomplished in the last 24 hours. It was an expression written in my DNA and triggered by such a complex sequence of events, and I would have to make peace with the fact that these feelings were not mine to manipulate. That when the body, mind, and soul all find a synchrony within instinct, there are incredible feelings that serve a purpose of nourishment and nurture and survival. Instincts can be triggered and love summoned, but without the perfect participation of hormones, the emotions may not cooperate.

I was born into motherhood without birth, and I would have to grieve what my girls and I never shared. I’d missed it before, but now it throbbed through my body. I would mourn as I fed Oakley, his body instinctually finding mine. I would promise myself to tell them about what a woman’s body can do, what their first mommy had done to give them life and start them on a journey of love. To weep with them again at each stage of awareness over what they lost with her and never shared with me. And someday, to tell them how, while I was a muddle of hormonal infatuation and fear and frustration, when they cried over a scraped knee or disappointing day, the sound of their sorrow would trigger a surge of milk. Death, adoption, and depression had robbed them of too much. Still, my body sought to comfort and nourish them just the same.

The tears would fall another day, the sleep would fall another year. For now, I might as well live fully while I was awake. I lifted my baby back onto my chest.

NeedtoBreathe sang,

“Oh, it’s so clear

Come a little closer

All of my love is right here”

Oakley’s eyes found mine, a little clearer now, and gazed steadily, us memorizing every detail of the one we’d known for months and finally seen face to face.

Long Distance Love- When You Won't All Be Home For Christmas

I’m the oldest of six spunky, more-sensitive-than-we-like-to-admit kids, raised by the best parents you’ll ever come across. Our family landscape has changed drastically in a handful of years, going from a passel of siblings arguing over the last of the Lucky Charms and playing backyard soccer between two five gallon buckets, to graduations and weddings and new babies in a nanosecond. Currently, the family of eight has multiplied to eighteen.

We grew up in an old brick house, riding bikes on country roads to our grandma’s, and then home to eat dinner around the table. We were used to togetherness.

I got married first, and cried of loneliness for months even though I was only a few miles away. Then my sister Meg got married and moved over an hour away, and we all cried and wondered how we would survive not seeing her every week. A few years later, Jan got married. She moved clear across the country.

Having adult siblings for friends is one of the greatest delights. Adding long distance to our love is one of the hardest adjustments. Seasons change, holidays pass, hard and happy days go by, new babies arrive, and we’re no longer experiencing it side by side.

Jan’s first baby arrived a few years ago in the shadow of the Cascade mountains, right after Thanksgiving. A few hours post-delivery, Jan and Jordan left one hospital and drove to another where the baby had been transferred to.

 We all waited by our phones, counting back the time difference from Ohio to Washington. When I finally heard her voice, soft with exhaustion, smiling as she told me her daughter’s beautiful name, then breaking when she said, “I just really want to hold my baby”, I wept bitter tears over the miles between the Yakima hospital room and I.

A week later they left the hospital, healthy and happy. But the plans to come home for Christmas were disrupted by unanticipated medical bills.

We couldn’t bear the thought of Christmas with Jan’s seat empty, without the new baby to cuddle. We all slipped some cash in an envelope and told them if it was possible, we’d do anything to get them home.

Weeks later, we made a ruckus in the Indianapolis airport, running in through the snow and sweeping Jan up, kissing the little blond head peeking out of her carrier. We spent the short days in a flurry of presents and photos and laughing in the kitchen over french toast and lefse and endless pots of coffee.

 In a flash, the airport greetings faded to watery eyes and avoidant small talk, prolonging the inevitable goodbye.

As darkness settled on our last night together, we kissed baby faces and sibling’s cheeks and tried to laugh instead of cry. Then it was time and we exited fast, one more “love you so much” called around the porch.

When I’d put the last box of Christmas gifts in the car and fastened my daughters’ seatbelts and then my own, the tears I’d been holding back all day broke loose. I sobbed into my coat for the too fast days and the too many miles.

We drove around the house, and I looked up through my tears into the warmly lit windows of home, glowing out into the sleeting night. I saw my parents standing in the dining room, strong and quiet, looking on in affection as they cradled the baby a few remaining minutes. I saw my brother Jesse by his soon to be wife. His eyes had been dark with un-shed tears when I told him goodbye. They were standing in close, soaking up the last moments. Jes motioned big and Jan threw her head back, shoulders shaking in silent laughter. But my ears had already memorized the sound, and knew it to be the most contagious and free bursts of pure happiness. Jordan gestured in vivid animation as only he can do, and all four sets of shoulders dipped and bounced, inaudible joy flung through the windows and straight to my heart.                                                        

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Jan has another baby now, and it doesn’t look like they’ll be home for Christmas this year.

 I don’t know how to keep long distance relationships close, with babies and time zones and the fact that I tend to forget my phone can actually be used to make calls. For those of us whose emotions run on high power, whose introversion craves deep connections, whose love expression lives and breathes on quality time, but who’s dearest and best people are far away, relationships can become confusing.

Even when we are together, the connection isn’t always like I imagine it to be. Life, with its needy children and moods and exhaustion keeps rolling, and we are still our flawed selves. We struggle to keep up on the current events of our people, fall asleep at 9:30 on what could have been an all-night catch-up, and fear the shrinking in-commonness we sometimes feel with the ones we used to share everything with.

I tend to be all or none. If I can’t have it all, why have any? It hurts to stay present in the distance. To disengage seems a relief. I’d rather not look too closely at the packages wrapped with postage stamps instead of bows, because if I sit in the ache of that empty seat, traced the swirly handwriting on the mailing label, I might spend the happiest season of all sobbing.

I want to resent the miles, the changes, the days flying by like geese overhead.

But when we vacation in the Rocky Mountains, all of us driving in from the east and west to meet in the middle, or spend a few days together celebrating a wedding, I am ever more aware of moments.

I watch and memorize how Trav roams the kitchen bleary-eyed first thing in the morning, carefully selecting his daughter’s favorite cereal. How Dad’s eyes linger on each face when we’re all around the dinner table. How Adayah’s voice has a little whisper in it. How my baby brother is so close to being taller than all of us, but still has a little boy grin. How mom still folds our laundry when we aren’t looking.

Instead of wishing for what could be, what used to be, I want to get better at savoring what is: eighteen imperfect, delightful, funny, passionate people I get to call my family.

The window scene that cold, Christmas night delivered a gift given by the dreaded miles. The gift of not holding back. The miles are teaching us to say what we feel, to give another kiss, to laugh a little louder. Without them, the baby’s hair wouldn’t be inhaled so slowly, the deepest words of love wouldn’t roll off the tongue as freely. They are teaching me that these people are worth staying present for. That even in the pain of distance, love spans any space, trumps any change.

Here’s to savoring the moments and holding our precious people close this Christmas, even if it is across the miles.

MVP Award

Education is probably in the top 3 most debated/emotionally charged parenting topics. I’m figuring out these issues are hot because of the sweaty insecurity that lives in all of us who are making life shaping decisions on behalf of these little humans in our care.

I’ve doubted and second-guessed and done my fair share of sweating over school. I’ve eyed the greener grass of big city options with diverse populations and learning models, and easy access to the arts and community engagement, and ogled hard core. I’ve wondered if we were off our rocker to be sending our kiddo into the unavoidable chaos of a class full of first graders when we already have huge social hurdles. I’ve wondered if we were reckless to be writing tuition checks on top of a stack of daunting bills. I’ve wondered if we would end up riddled with regret sending her into a school where she was a major minority. I don’t have a single one of those concerns resolved.

But this week I watched Miss G speak a character award-turned-prayer over Cy. I thought about the number of emails she’s read and responded to from me; angsty, emotional deals that couldn’t have been pleasant reads. I thought about the times she’s paused while I’ve choked out words over yet another phone call, the way she put her arm around me when I all-out bawled during parent-teacher conference. I wondered how many prayers were sent up in those alphabet-covered walls the past 9 months on behalf of, or with, Cy. She has taught truth with tenacity. She has called out gifts and potential when as yet they were not manifest, in both Cy and me. She has told us over and over, “God has good plans. He’s going to use these hard things and turn them into something beautiful, just watch! He knew exactly what he was doing when He brought you all together in this family.”

We stuck a flower in her car and Cypress handed over one more marker colored note, and she wrapped us both in a hug and said, “Now you listen. Cypress is moving on to second grade, but I’m not going anywhere. I’m still in the same place, ready to talk to you ANY TIME. I won’t stop praying, and I’m here for you, no matter what. I’m still on your team.”

As my mom assures me so often, we only decide what is best for right now. Tomorrow or next year there may be a new option, a better fit, a change to be made. For right now, I’m realizing what we need above arts and culture and the most creative learning models, is fierce and loyal love. People who are knees-on-the-floor, crying out for God’s healing and wisdom and grace on our behalf, filling in when we are out of words or strength. Miss G has been that.

We all have gifts and incredible good to offer the world, but a gift can’t be given if there’s no recipient. She’s been pouring out her love through education for many more years than I’ve even been alive, and with tears she says she’s incredibly grateful every year that she’s entrusted with our children and gets to come back and do it again.

Miss G is another reminder that I wasn’t created to do this alone. She, at least for a season, has been a vital component to our family, our team, our village. She has offered Cy a gift I could never have given.

Look around for the people in your corner, the ones who have gifts to give, and open your hands and breathe a sigh of relief and receive them. It’s what we’re all here for.