Finding Me - Part 3 of 4

June-December
Early Healing (continued)

My journal reminds me that I spent much of the first six months wondering why it was taking so long to heal. I was embarrassed that I was still in so much pain and surprised that I couldn't put it behind me. I see now that healing quickly was never part of God's plan for me, and I'm thankful for that today. These early months were colored with both pain and faith, and the result of their mixture was humility. It was in this humility that I learned many invaluable lessons that have since woven themselves into the foundation of my being:

*Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ are not only real, but they love me, personally. There is a specific feeling that comes along with knowing you’re special. Think, for a moment, of the glow in a child’s face on her fifth birthday. She feels special even in the middle of a busy subway because, even if no one else around her knows it’s her birthday, she knows.

I felt that same excitement for a few days after the Spirit touched my heart and let me taste a bit of the love that Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ have for me. They do know who I am! And they care about what I’m going through. And that love they feel for me? Nephi was right when he said the knowledge of that love “is the most desirable above all things.” (1 Nephi 11:22) I found myself wanting to tell the world that God loves me. Because, guess what? He does. And if He loves me so much then I believe it when I hear that He loves all his children.

*The sealing powers of the temple are real. Three months after I delivered Jess, Brian and I went to the temple to watch as a dear family was sealed together. It was so quiet, so peaceful, so clean. As the temple sealer was performing the ordinance, I noticed that Brian had tears in his eyes. He squeezed my leg and I felt an almost tangible bond between us…the same bond that will pull us into eternity together. I felt indebted to God for those personal sealing bonds, and when the temple workers brought in the children to be sealed to their newly sealed parents, my heart nearly burst in gratitude. It’s one thing to believe you are sealed to your children when they are right before your eyes; it’s an entirely different thing to believe when they are no longer with you. I laced my fingers through Brian’s as I listened to the Spirit warmly testifying of truth, and let the tears drip in my lap.

*My heart is capable of much more love than I originally thought. I was surprised to find that loving two children really does feel different than loving one. When we first found out I was pregnant with Jess I wondered, as many do, how I could possibly fit more love into my heart; McKenzie was already taking up the whole of it. I see now that it’s not a matter of sharing the limited space…it’s simply that the space itself grows.

I also found it interesting that the love I felt for those already in my life - my husband, my daughter, my parents – grew, too. It was deepened and strengthened to a point previously untouched. It does make me wonder about the limits of love… is there a limit? What must Heavenly Father, who has such a deep love for all of us, feel?

*I believe in my church. They say that every life has a purpose. Looking back on everything that has happened, I think Jess’s purpose was to solidify my conversion into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

*Not every child is normal and healthy. Of course I knew this before…but knowing it is quite a bit different than seeing it. I looked at McKenzie through new eyes and my appreciation for her normalness was overwhelming. I learned that a relationship can be greatly enriched by adding appreciation to love.

*Sometimes it’s important to filter your thoughts before you speak. And sometimes it’s necessary to guard a portion of yourself. This was a hard one for me to learn. In fact, I’m still learning it in many ways. Years ago my mother said to me, “You are an open book, Linds,” and in that she was right. In years past I had nothing to hide… no secrets to keep… no dark corners to conceal. I never thought much of filtering my thoughts; generally if it came into my head it wasn’t long before it came out of my mouth. I lived in a world in which my strengths and weaknesses were out in the open for others to see and judge as they would.

But it doesn’t work like this anymore. Not since Jess was born. I have learned that I can get stuck in awkward situations by sharing all of my thoughts. A lighthearted discussion about the woes of childbirth can unintentionally turn somber and heavy with one unguarded sentence.

For example, a few months after I had delivered Jess a group of friends and I were sitting at the park when the subject of childbirth came up. One of my friends had delivered her baby naturally and was talking about the pains of the contractions. Because I ended up delivering Jess without an epidural I added, “Oh, man! I know what you mean, those contractions are terrible!”
“I didn’t realize you delivered McKenzie naturally!” she said excitedly.
“No. I.... Uh….” Stuck. There was nothing to do at that point other than explain the situation – and it brought the mood down to an unrecoverable low.

After several similar instances I finally realized that Jess’s pregnancy and delivery were to be guarded. No matter how seemingly light my comment may seem to me, it still has strong potential to ruin a conversation. I started locking all experiences with him away behind safe walls in my heart and try to only let them out at appropriate times. I began to notice how often women actually talk about pregnancy, labor, and delivery, and my new filters took me out of many conversations. Out of conversations where people compared the differences between being pregnant with boys and girls, out of conversations about delivering at Our Hospital, out of conversations about being induced and, as illustrated in the example above, out of conversations that involved epidural absences or complications of any sort. It was strange to feel that, all of the sudden, I had a secret. And it added to my loneliness.

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It's true that some of these lessons could have, and probably would have, been learned through easier ways. But I think back to the blessing I received at the beginning in which I was told, 'There are lessons you will learn through this that you will not learn any other way.' Because of this, I know that the experience with Jess was necessary to me... whether because of these lessons, or because of the lessons I learned later in the healing process. I have to trust this, and it brings me peace.

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December 2005 – August 2006
Detour

Things changed drastically at the beginning of December. My journal reads:

“Well, I’m pregnant again
I guess I don’t really know how to punctuate that sentence. It’s what we wanted, so why not an exclamation point? Because I’m really scared. More scared than I thought I would be.”

The week we discovered my pregnancy, insomnia set in and I spent many nights carrying my pillow around the house, subconsciously trying to get away from my consciousness. For someone who unfailingly falls asleep within three minutes of touching her head to her pillow, this was quite significant. Each time I closed my eyes, my mind would ignite with memories of Jess. I would see his sweet face and spend time reliving the hospital visits, doctor appointments, and conversations. The memories replayed hundreds and thousands of times, night after night, until my days were tainted through soggy tears and my greatest desire was to get away from my own mind. Even when I slept, my dreams were vivid and frantic as I rushed through hospital halls with a sick son or unintentionally caused the death of one. I was never concerned about the well-being of my new, developing baby, for the genetic counselors we consulted with about Jess assured us that the genetic mishap with him was a "lightning strike" and the chances of the same thing happening again were almost nothing. But my heart bled and my mind ached with Jess’s memory. Guilt started seeping in, too. Was I somehow forgetting him now that I was continuing my family? Was I trying to replace him?

Morning sickness, afternoon sickness and evening sickness washed over me and I wept at the base of the toilet day after day. I stopped getting myself or McKenzie dressed in the mornings. I stopped answering my phone. I tried to walk the halls of church with my eyes down to discourage unwanted conversations. I was so preoccupied with trying to live through the next hour and then the next hour that I stopped reading my scriptures and eventually my prayers stopped, too. Brian seemed to be completely healed, and my jealousy was consuming. His work at the hospital intensified and he was working 80 or more hours a week. During those times I was alone with McKenzie (who could not hold anything more complicated than a two-year-old level conversation) and my thoughts. At some point in this, somewhere, I fell. It’s clear to me now, though I didn’t recognize it at the time, that I had sailed down into that deep, dark crater of depression. It’s interesting to me that, prior to slipping, I was so consciously aware of my closeness to it; but once I entered it, my mind became so fogged up with unhappiness that I could not separate myself from it to see the larger picture.

Things got worse as the pregnancy went on. My insomnia did not improve, and my pregnancy sickness lasted for five months. By the time the sickness subsided, my back was giving out on me, leaving me paralyzed with pain in a heap on my floor, sometimes for hours, and my sciatic nerve kept shooting pain down my leg. Through this all, Brian was not home much, and my loneliness was almost unbearable. My parents were asked to serve as mission presidents in Thailand, and even though they were already across the country, the thought of them living on the other side of the world left me feeling even more abandoned, and my heart broke further when I realized that they would leave six short weeks before my baby was due. I kept most of my feelings to myself and they festered inside me like an infected wound. Days passed slowly. Nights seemed frozen. Brian and I were not getting along, and I found myself often yelling at my two-year-old. It was a very dark time for our family. One that I care not to delve into further.

Somehow, little by little, the baby grew; I got bigger and bigger and more and more uncomfortable. Yet, almost imperceptibly, towards the end of the pregnancy things started to improve in small ways. I wasn’t quite as sick. I had a little more energy. And, ever so slightly, I was a little happier.

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Hot, tired, and eight months pregnant, I sat in sacrament meeting on the first Sunday in August. On the first Sunday of each month, after ward business is attended to and the sacrament is taken, the pulpit is open to anyone in the congregation who wants to get up and share their testimony. And, as the bishop turned the time over to the congregation that August Sunday, I felt my heart quicken. Uh-oh, I thought. Ever since I was a teenager, I have recognized a very specific set of feelings in my body when the Spirit starts prompting me to get up and share my testimony, and it always starts with a quickened heart. I ignored the feeling. My spirituality had been quite stagnant over the past eight months and my testimony felt indolent and dull. I was certainly in no spiritual state to share it.

Instead of going away, the feeling got stronger. Now my heart was not only beating quickly, but it was pounding in my ears as well. I hadn’t been reading my scriptures or saying my prayers for months! I had absolutely nothing to say. No, I said defiantly to Heavenly Father. I have nothing to say. I sat back in my bench and crossed my arms as a sort of signal of my feelings. I could not do it. After some time my palms started sweating and my heart felt as if it were burning. Not the same feeling as the comforting warmth I had felt previously, but a painful sting like when your hand gets a little too close to a candle’s flame. Still, I tried to ignore it while the minutes ticked on. When I felt about to explode, I bowed my head, closed my eyes and changed my stubbornness into pleading, I really don’t want to. I have nothing to say. The feeling persisted and it became clear that my own feelings were not going to change Heavenly Father’s. What? I asked, frustrated. What do you want me to say? The answer came almost as words being written in my mind.

Haven’t you been happier this past month?

My mind was led back to a conversation I had had with my mother just before she left for Thailand a month before. “The Lord has promised blessings to our family because we’ve been willing to serve,” she said.

Tears pricked my eyes; it was undeniably true…I had been a bit happier. But it was because of my parents’ missionary work? I had not, and probably never would have, drawn that conclusion on my own. It seems like a bit of a stretch, and left to my own interpretation of my feelings I would probably have just said that time had finally started to heal my heart. And that the timing of it happening alongside my parent’s departure was a coincidence (though a puzzling one – I missed them terribly, I was very emotional about them not being able to see the baby, and I was suffering through my last month of pregnancy during a miserable North Carolina summer). But, as it happened, I cannot say it was a coincidence – even a puzzling one, because I don’t believe that it was.

I don’t remember what I said as I bore my testimony that day. I’m sure it was short and cryptic and based on my tiny, brand new testimony of the blessings that come from service to the Lord. It was not well thought out, it was not exciting, I’m sure it was not very meaningful to an outside ear, but it was meaningful to me. Meaningful enough to be counted as one of the key experiences that has strengthened my testimony as a whole. God blesses us and our families when we are willing to serve, yes, but the greater lesson I learned that day was one on personal revelation. The Lord can speak with me; directly with me.

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Nine days later I sat working on a baby quilt that was lying across my 38-week pregnant belly. I had turned the lamp on beside me, and McKenzie and Brian were wrestling on the floor at my feet. McKenzie’s bursts of giggles sent Brian and I bouncing with laughter ourselves. And as I laughed the thought came, Go. Be with your family. I put aside the quilt and sank to the floor with my husband and daughter. I was filled with so much peace that night and I thought to myself, I’m ready. The baby wasn’t due for 13 more days, but I started suspecting that he was ready, too. No physical changes had taken place and all I had to go off of was a ‘feeling’ so I kept my suspicions to myself. Brian looked at me with an eyebrow raised when he saw me lugging the crib sheets and all the tiny new onesies to the washing machine at 10:00pm that night. It was very uncharacteristic of me, and all I could say was, “What if the baby comes tonight? He has nothing to wear and no clean sheets to sleep on.”

So it didn’t surprise me when, 13 hours after the wash was complete, the doctor laid that tiny, squirming bundle on my belly.

I was surprised at how immediately the pain disappeared. The last contraction felt as if it was going to rip me apart and seemed to last forever, but the moment Carson was born, even before he took his first breath, the pain vanished. More surprising still was the emotional pain that vanished with it. As unlikely as it seems, my depression disappeared in that moment. As they put that healthy baby on my belly, I felt a physical weight of darkness lift from my shoulders as a million tiny strands of love shot from my heart and wrapped themselves tightly around his. I couldn’t stop the tears from flowing as I held his face up to mine. My Carson. All it takes is one ray of light to extinguish darkness, and Carson was just that. I was happy that day – that moment. Happier than I had been in over a year and half, and the happiness stuck. I drank it in and for a while could notice little else. A real laugh! A happy thought! A genuine smile! They nourished my parched soul like water as I danced through the days.

After the initial phase of euphoria, however, I turned around to realize that there was still much, much healing to be done.