We got a phone call from one of Steve's old friends from Cleveland last night. One of his old gang from high school became a dad two months ago to identical twins. One of the boys was diagnosed with leukemia. The poor baby is going to be tortured with eight months of chemotherapy and still only has a 25 percent shot at survival.
When we were getting ready to get married, Father Ashley had us fill out a questionnaire about our future plans and goals. It was part of the precanna process to make sure that we had similar priorities. One of the questions was where do you expect to be five years from now. Steve and I were both writing our dissertation proposals at the time, so we wrote that in five years, we expected to both have tenure track jobs somewhere.
That was twelve years ago. Now, Steve is putting in twelve hour days on Wall Street and I'm making sure the kids know how to spell "monotonous" and "sprawl" for the next day's spelling test.
When I was pregnant with Jonah, my aunt the midwife had me practice all those breathing exercises in her brown basement. I read volumes and volumes of books about natural childbirth. Nine months later, I got an emergency C-section, and my kid arrived with gouges on his head from the forceps. The C-section chapter was at the end of all those birthing books, and I hadn't read that far.
The parenting magazines and books showed pictures of lovely, smiley, golden-haired children listening attentively to their parents, who had miraculously shrunk back to their pre-pregnancy weight within weeks of giving birth. There weren't any pictures of miserable, speechless toddlers with unkempt moms.
One of the lessons that we've had to learn since we've had kids is to give up control. We don't know what will happen when all that DNA is mixed together. I have smart friends, but their kids struggle in school. I have friends that hoped for girls and got four boys in a row. I have friends that were shocked by their infertility. Our own lives have also taken many surprising twists since we filled out that questionnaire for Father Ashley. Ah, what babies we were at that time.
It's hard for us for us to let go of events and let them unfold on their own, especially when we've been so successful and so sheltered by protective families. I think it would be better for us if we had been prepared for randomness and the messiness of life. At too old of an age, I had to learn how to appreciate the unplanned, to brace myself for tragedy, and to treasure imperfection.
My heart is in Cleveland this morning.
Apt. 11d 
“The C-section chapter was at the end of all those birthing books, and I hadn’t read that far.”
My first arrived at 37.5 weeks, which isn’t super early, but was unexpected (the books all tell you to expect that pregnancy will drag on into the 41st and 42nd week). Anyway, although I had taken a birthing course and a breastfeeding course, I was terribly in arrears with my reading of “What to Expect” at that point, and I had only the haziest notions of the contents of the final chapters of “What to Expect When You Are Expecting”. It took me until C was 5 months old for my reading to catch up to her.
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My thoughts are with your friend. Our friend is going through something very similar.
I did precanna as well. What would have been far more helpful, would have been to listen to couples talk who were struggling. Couples deep in debt and trying to get out. People who couldn’t keep up with monthly bills. People struggling with infertility or miscarriage, or bad daycare/school experiences or special needs. People who were in couples counseling.
I think we do too much to show the how happy marriage is. We should get a glimpse into the not-so-happy, too.
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I think it would be better for us if we had been prepared for randomness and the messiness of life. At too old of an age, I had to learn how to appreciate the unplanned, to brace myself for tragedy, and to treasure imperfection.
Beautifully said, Laura–and don’t be too hard on yourself. I think all of us–with a few blessed and/or lucky exceptions–are always in the process of trying to learn (and re-learn!) “how to appreciate the unplanned”: that is, to learn how to roll with the punches, accept fate, take the time to smell the roses, give no thought for the morrow, etc. I know I am. Melissa’s and my whole existence, it sometimes seems, is a constant re-commitment to being responsible for our kids and lives just one day at time, accepting the tragedies we can’t control, and dealing with just how much is in God’s (or nobodies’!) hands, rather than our own.
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I’m sorry for Steve’s friend. š¦
My first child was planned. My second, unplanned. I call him my 9/11 baby. I was so upset after 9/11 that I forgot to renew my BC pills. I got pregnant the next month.
E was an object lesson in lack of control. I had not controlled getting pregnant. I was involved in a major Buffy fandom thing that got way out of control. I was in a car accident and the car was totalled. I pulled muscles during childbirth and couldn’t walk for 2 weeks. We were evicted because our landlord sold the house, and we had to move a month after I gave birth.
So when he was diagnosed with asthma and nut allergies, I was able to pretty much shrug. And the Asperger’s diagnosis? Whatever. He is my child of unpredictability. Nothing surprises me any more.
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Yes, beautifully said. That poor family and baby.
I don’t want to hijack the comments and turn this into a childbirth-wars thread, but did you attempt a VBAC with Ian? I had a planned c-section with Henry because he was breech and opted for a repeat planned c-s with Clara. Both went very smoothly, and I’m satisfied with my decision.
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I think we as Americans hear a lot of “luck favors the prepared”, which translates rapidly into “plan everything”, and finally ends with “I have no time for the serendipitous”. And you’re right — recognizing the moment to just roll with it really is a skill.
Also, I come from a very religious family, and from them I hear a form of combining planning with surprise. They will say, “Everything happens for a reason. God has a plan for me and I have to accept this latest turn of events.” (I have always found this to be a particularly blissful combination of the security of planning and the reality of surprise. I wish I had the faith to embrace this.)
Put it all together and the unplanned sometimes makes you feel like a panicked failure. In retrospect, however, I often find that the unplanned stuff worked out the best. I wish I could be more open to it.
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No, I couldn’t do VBAC w/Ian, because the C-section was the least of my problems. During the C-Section, the doctor had sliced and diced my bladder. It had to be completely reconstructed and it is no longer in its original position in my body. MY OBGYN didn’t want to risk another emergency C-Section. She wanted to take her time to figure out where my body parts are.
But, you know, my bladder healed completely. I don’t have a permanent pee bag. And that’s another life lesson that I’ve had to embrace. Really appreciate the blessings in life.
Ian may have a disability, but all things considered, it is very minor. Thanks to Ian, I’ve met hundreds of other parents of kids with special needs and our problems are relatively minor. He’s happy. He’s smart. He completely loves his family and is constantly hugging us. We’re better off than many parents with typical kids.
Beyond the disability issue, we have a roof over our head, we’re not in danger of foreclosure, we have health insurance, we have healthy, extended families, we have fun together. We are just so incredibly lucky.
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“I did precanna as well. What would have been far more helpful, would have been to listen to couples talk who were struggling. Couples deep in debt and trying to get out.”
I have a little bit too much going on to get out and save the world as much as I would like, but one of my plans is that sometime in the next couple of years, I’d like to talk to the Catholic campus chaplaincy and run the 13-week Financial Peace University video course that Dave Ramsey does on financial life. It’s very much a couples’ course, and I think it would be very helpful to teach it to people who haven’t had time to make a lot of mistakes yet.
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Isn’t it Pre-Cana, like the Marriage at Cana?
Birth is a good preparation for the unpredictability of parenthood, I suppose. I too ended up with unexpected c-sections. The women I knew who were most unhappy with their births were the ones who studied the Bradley method and then didn’t get a natural birth. I guess at 37 I was expecting things to maybe get weird, anyway.
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Isn’t it Pre-Cana, like the Marriage at Cana?
Yes, except for the total sobriety and complete lack of anybody Jewish.
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Off-topic, but I really like the part about the Marriage of Cana painting in Robertson Davies’ What’s Bred in the Bone.
laura, I forgot to say how sorry I am about your friends’ baby. That should never happen.
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Sometimes, when I look back at my life, it feels like one reaction after another. It’s not that I didn’t try to make plans. I did. But I didn’t revise them very well. I didn’t say, “Oh, now this is happened, so we can’t do Y. Let’s make a new plan.” I got really bad at long-term planning when there were other people involved. But, you know, nothing major has happened. Maybe I’m not exactly where I wanted to be career wise. Maybe we should have thought a little harder about *where* we wanted to live, both at a macro and a micro level. But my kids are happy, healthy, and have so many advantages compared to other kids. Ditto for us as parents.
Too often, I look at the forest and see all the fallen trees instead of recognizing the way they nourish the forest as a whole and make it beautiful. Thanks for reminding me to step back and look at the whole picture.
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I think it would be better for us if we had been prepared for randomness and the messiness of life.
Well put.
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I’m so sorry. How awful for Steve’s friend, his son, and their family.
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