You keep doing what you do, and I'll just do what I do.

So, it hasn't been my intent to turn The Sorcha Chronicles into a pregnancy blog, and I don't want today's post to divert my normal visitors. If you come along today, I think you'll find something meaningful even if you don't care, or know nothin' bout birthin' no babies.

Four months in, it started to occur to me that I don't know nothin' bout birthin' or raisin' no babies myself. In my spare time, which I find myself with a lot of these days, I peruse Pinterest a lot.

This last week, I found myself reading about the ideal breast-feeding scenario, and let me tell you, it scared the shit out of me. I totally believe it's the best thing to do, but it never dawned on me that it would basically be best if I just remain topless for at least the first month and a half of my baby's life. It also never dawned on me that it was recommended to breast feed even just a little bit until the little shark is about two years old--or however long she wants. Is anyone else scared by that besides me?

In addition to this Pin, I've read at least two others about developing birth plans and all the things that they normally do to your baby as soon as it's out. One of them discussed all the downsides to not going au naturale and let me tell you, as someone who thinks of herself as a moderate, I am now afraid that birthin' my baby will be like a scene from the original "Exorcist" because I know myself well enough to know that labor without an epidural is not an option for me. In the last year, I've had a couple of occasions to be in a great deal of pain, and on both of these occasions, the pain drove me to severe nausea. I don't want to be birthin' no baby while vomiting or even just doing a little dry heaving. So, since I am not down with skipping the epidural, I'm pretty sure that I am jeopardizing my woman card and my baby's health--or at least that's what some of these posters would have me believe.

Is this the alien within?

When they discuss the medical team swooping in and stealing my baby away within moments of birth, I'm pretty sure it's like the scene from "E.T." when the government comes in and wraps everything up in plastic and sets up flood lights and decides to do all kinds of scary and terrible experiments on him. Do I let them clamp the umbilical cord? Do I let them give a Vitamin K injection? Hell, I don't know. But I'm pretty sure if I do any of these things, my baby is going to end up at least five intelligence quotient points lower than she would have if I had just left her attached to her placenta until it fell off naturally, and had wild dogs lick her clean.

Yesterday, I happened upon a post on Facebook from CNN about a woman who is tired of being asked when she's going to have a second child. She is continually asked, and when she responds that she has no plans for additional children, she is essentially judged as a selfish person who is denying her son the joy of having a sibling, or people are simply flabbergasted that since she is such a great mom that she wouldn't want to do it all over again. It is beyond them to understand that one is enough for some people, just like none is the right option for others.

My husband and I will only have one child. I am nearly 42, and it wasn't the easiest thing in the world to get to this point. As thrilled as I am to have Willow on the way, I am not going to be one of those moms who waxes nostalgic about how wonderful it is to be pregnant. I am not enjoying the terrible smell and food aversion I am experiencing, or the days when I feel so sick, I just want to hole up on the couch all day long, cry, and do nothing. Some days, I'm not sure that I am not losing my mind. It will all be worth it in the end, but I can't imagine doing it again. 

A friend of mine recently started a blog that I am enjoying quite a bit. Christina Maki writes "Ruby Stilettos," and while she is at a different place in the mommy spectrum than I am, I have found her take on the judgement of others about how we mother to be a little bit of a relief. She freely waves her tree-hugging, earth mama flag, but she also talks about how others of her ilk sometimes judge without really considering the whole picture. I especially loved reading about her struggles with breast feeding right after the scary two-plus year of recommendations that I read prior. It made me feel like even if I try and fail, I won't be a horrible mother.

And that's the direction I want to go with this. Why do we do that to each other--about mothering or anything for that matter? I think most parents go into the situation with the intent that they want to do everything that's best for their child or children that they can. None of us embarks on this journey with the intent to harm or scar our children for life. So why are there people out there that think there's only one way to do everything?

I have a penchant for Edgar Allan Poe. For a fleeting moment I even entertained the idea of a Poe accented nursery. What non-Poe fans seem not to understand is that he didn't just write things like "The Tell Tale Heart" and the "Raven." Those are just the things he is most famous for. I have actually had people poo-poo this as an option, even though it would never occur to me to poo-poo someone's decision to do a pink room for a girl or a sports room for a boy, even though I so fervently believe that pigeon-holing your developing child into a gender-specific box like that potentially over-influences who they might choose to become.

I will add that I realize I'm not a child development specialist. I know there are theories that children assign these specific roles to themselves whether parents try to prevent it or not, but I at least want to give my child the freedom to draw whatever conclusion she chooses on her own. That's my belief. But my belief isn't better than anyone else's belief. How someone else decorates their child's nursery or room is fine by me, because it's a reflection of who they are as parents, and the wonder that they want to share with their child. Short of doing a "Dexter" kill room, I don't think there's any way you can really go wrong here.

If I'm fine with what you believe or how you live your existence, why can't you just be fine with the way I believe and live mine? I think that's the ultimate question. When I think of conflict, both personal and otherwise, every failure to meet each other half-way stems from our inability to accept that we believe and live differently.

Every horrible thing stems from this inability. Bullying at school. Conflict in the work place. Wars. We live in a world that claims to be moving in the direction of valuing the individual, but I don't believe that. I think that we are so bound to homogenization, in every form, that we will never value the individual as a society. If you don't think and do everything just like me, there must be something inherently wrong with you.

It's a ludicrous concept. There has to be a reason that the phrase "there's more than one way to skin a cat" developed. I haven't explored it, but I'll bet it's because there's more than one way to skin a cat.

There's more than one right way to do almost everything.

When we wave these judging attitudes around, we cause harm to each other. I probably should have developed some trepidation about motherhood before now, but frankly, for the last year and half, I was just so busy trying so hard to have the chance to be a mother, I didn't have time to learn everything about raising a child or to start yoga so I would be able to endure labor without drugs. I'm hoping that the fact I didn't have a well-developed timeline for everything (mostly because I wasn't even sure this would ever happen), won't put my child in harm's way.

I would imagine that like most things in my life, I will do the best I can. I will make mistakes along the way. I will have regrets. But I won't love my child any less if I fail at some things. I won't stunt my child's emotional growth if she has an Edgar Allan Poe onsie. I'm pretty sure that Willow will know that she is loved and cared for, even if I falter and feed her Chicken McNuggets once or twice.

And I also imagine that however you parent your child, or live your life, you will do the best you can too. And hopefully, nothing either one of us believes or does will interfere with each others' lives--because at the end of the day, it really doesn't have to be that way.

Communication--The Call

What do you do for a living?

So, I just came out of a time period during which I became acutely and painfully aware that I wasn't living my life in the way I wanted or hoped to be. It's only been a couple of weeks, and I wouldn't say that I've rebuilt my life yet, but I am at least aware of the fact that I have the freedom to do so--something that I've wanted for a very long time.

In the last few years as I have been blogging, I don't always get a lot of direct feedback. I often get the feedback I hear through the grapevine that there are others (especially women) who find themselves identifying with the same feelings I've been having, and that they equally don't know how to do anything about those feelings. I think it's unfortunate that so many of us are not living our lives in the way we wish to. And though I now find myself at the beginning of a new path, for which the way isn't even paved, I don't know what the answer is.

In my case, my life was changed at least in part by force.

I've written about the maelstrom of crazy events that have swirled around my husband and I over the last few years: the storm that blew through his home town, leaving him forever changed; the ebb and flow of unfulfilling careers; his bilateral pulmonary embolism last year; my miscarriage last year; the deep dark depression I fell into and couldn't find my way out of for many months; and the deep sense of failure we both felt when we considered where we thought we would be in our careers and in our lives.

We thought all of those things were enough. We thought all of those things should shake us into a place where we would start to seek out new ways to find peace and contentment in life. They weren't.

My husband had to suffer the blow of a ten-year career coming to an end on someone else's terms. And we had to find out that we were finally going to have a child at a time when celebration hardly seemed the right thing. We were still in the eye of the storm.

Maybe we had to have all of these things happen. Maybe they gave us the foundation for something we couldn't know we wished for. We found out who would stand by us, even when we were at our worst, and deserved friendship the least. We found out what we were made of, and sometimes, what we weren't. We found out who would tell us the truth, even when we didn't want to hear it. We found out who would push us toward our dreams, and what would push us to the brink. We had to break.

It's all still too close. I still feel I can only speculate.

My kind of mountain living. Wicklow, Ireland

In my new life as a nearly constantly nauseated, pregnant house frau who might throw makeup on once a week, I find myself needing to hang out on the couch a lot, just to keep the room from spinning too much. I've currently got a penchant for "American Pickers" on the History Channel--completely obsessed. I've become aware of another show I probably will never watch on this channel--"Mountain Men." I find the idea of this show intriguing because the commercials are very compelling, and my "people" are from the hills of southern Missouri (very similar mentality). One of the men firmly states in the current commercial: "What do I do for a living? I live."

It sounds like such a simple and straightforward thing. "I live." And yet, two weeks into having the freedom to recreate my life, I still know that for most of us who do not live out in the mountains, surviving on what we can hunt or fish, "living" is actually easier said than done.

We get caught up in what we think other people think we should be. We get caught up in what we think we should be. We get caught up in everything that we aren't. We constantly fail to see anything about who we are and what our true potential is in life.

I remember a time when I didn't know what to do with myself in my free time. On my days off, I would spend crazy time running around, questing to find "things" I was sure I needed--almost like there was some hole in my life that I couldn't fill. I found myself in therapy trying to understand what that hole was and why I was so compelled to keep trying to fill it. The answers were complicated, and though I think the time was well spent, I seldom find myself going to that place in my soul where my little Sammi goes to the center section of grass in the trailer park I grew up in to contemplate my safety there and what it is I am really looking for. I think not too differently than my agnosticism, I find it a little hard to think of little Sammi without looking around to see if anyone is watching and calling me crazy under their breath. The short answer is, I probably am crazy.

I think I started to accept that craziness, and to understand that the hole was a life I had created out of all the things in which I had gotten caught up. Somehow, I was inspired to write a poem--somewhere between discovering the band Muse and the release of the last U2 album--and though I didn't openly acknowledge it, a part of me understood that was at least part of the hole. I'd lost my voice, and I hadn't even mourned it.

Sometimes, life comes to us by force. Sometimes we don't get to choose when it starts, or even where. The reality is that while we continue to be at war with who we are instead of embracing and accepting who we are, we can never live without someone else holding most of the cards--and usually the ones with what we believe to be all of the power.

It's easy for me to wax eloquence about all of this, because to a large degree, my life has changed through external forces. I wasn't brave enough to choose life. My husband found a job in an area that made my easy ebb and flow (whether happy or not) less easy. We moved at a time I thought it would be kind of unfair to start something new, only to turn around and leave again due to looming motherhood. It was a push toward deciding to do what I had been afraid to do for years--stop doing what was easy.

And while it's easy for me to say all of this, I still also want to say, why should anything or anyone have more power over your life, who you choose to be, and how you want to live than your soul? And the people who love and care for you the most know when your soul isn't being fed and when you are dying because of it. So arguing that you have a responsibility to them and you have to be solid and grounded is actually a big lie to them as much as it is to yourself. I would argue that nothing and no one knows what your true path should be more than your soul, and everything you do to run away from that steals from all of those people who love and count on you the most. There is so little authenticity in being tied to things that don't truly matter to you. You cheat everyone in trying to make a go of such lies.

Many times in recent years, terrible things have happened in my life. I have chosen to get swept away in the darkness of those things and to turn away from the opportunities they presented. I have chosen to ignore the messages in those things, because I was afraid to choose my soul over comfort and expectation. We all do it, and we often don't even realize we are doing it. We think we are making the responsible choices. We think we are doing the right thing. I'm still speculating, but I am beginning to think that when we ignore those messages, our souls start desperately trying all the harder to communicate to us, and we are open to a siege on our existence. After three long years at war, I was forced to put my sling and arrows down, or else I may never have found the courage to do so.

I am being forced to live. I am being forced to choose what I do from moment to moment. I am being forced to rebuild my life. The ultimate tabula rasa, on which I can write anything I like, and I can bring with me any part of my former life I might choose.

What am I going to do for a living? I don't know for sure yet. Maybe I'll live.

Kite--U2

Certainty and Freedom--a burgeoning love affair

So, I've been thinking an awful lot about two things lately: certainty and freedom.

When I first started thinking about the two, I was convinced that one begets the other, but the more I consider everything, the more I think that certainty and freedom are like a dating couple--fiercely intertwined, but not always on the same page.

My initial thought about certainty and freedom centered around a certain ginger-haired three-year-old and the fact that without any prompting, she declared to her mother (one of my dearest friends) that the baby I am expecting would be a girl and she began to call her Willow. When the gender of our little one was recently confirmed, I really started thinking about Clare and her certainty about this child--earlier than we were even comfortable telling the rest of the world that she was on the way.

Clare isn't bogged down by experiences--bad or good. She isn't swayed by preconceived notions or the many things that I read as my husband and I desperately tried to conceive. She is a free-spirited little girl who just felt something in her heart--for whatever reason--and felt it with great certainty.

It occurred to me that freedom allows you to be certain.

But then I started to think about all the ways in which life can sometimes appear more like the other side of that coin. Sometimes our greatest certainties in life actually chip away at our sense of freedom in life.

Today marks the twelfth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a plane full of passengers who met a tragic, yet heroic fate in a field in Pennsylvania. I read a Facebook post by CNN about a family this morning, who lost a husband and father in one of the towers. For years they had taken cold comfort in the idea that their loved one probably died instantly due to his location in the building. After a decade, a final note, handwritten by their loved one, came to light. He was trying to let people on the ground know that he and others were alive and in need of help. While they now know that he had hope and was trying to save his own life and the lives of others, they also know that he certainly knew that he likely wouldn't make it out. I don't think any of us can imagine the kind of anguish he suffered. Being certain that he didn't suffer is a comfort his family can no longer hold onto, but if there is a bright side, they know he held onto hope.

We can choose to find the light, even when consumed by the dark. 

Sometimes the lines are blurred in respect to freedom and certainty. Sometimes pronouncements of certainty leave us with choices in life.

I'm spending more time at home now, and I find myself watching a little bit of television. Periodically throughout the day, I'll see commercials for those amazing cancer treatment centers that give people hope when they have been given the diagnosis of certain death. I imagine being told you're dying can have a couple of possible impacts: 1) It can prompt you to fight like hell, and live the rest of the time in the way you should already have been living anyway. 2) It can bring you to a dead halt because in that instant, the freedom of having a future has been taken away.

I had an amazing uncle who was diagnosed with Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma. He was a good man--probably one of the best I ever got to know. He wasn't given much hope, but he had a lot that he wanted to live for--a wife, a son and his family. He fought for more than ten years. He lived well beyond any certain pronouncement about how long he should hope to be around. During that time, he got to become a grandfather. He continued to be a rallying point of his family. He continued to be someone that I will always love and remember.

He chose not to let certainty steal his life or his future. He chose to freely live his life to the very last moment possible. He took back things that cancer was supposed to steal.

Not every one of us will be given a terminal diagnosis, but at some point, each one of us will face a moment that puts us at a cross-roads in life. That moment will paralyze us with fear or it will force us to choose the life we have already been pining for. We will have to make a choice.

There are moments of certainty that can force us to retake our freedom. The loss of a job. A relocation. Acknowledgment of our failures.

In the moment that my husband and I were so fortunate to get to see our little one playing on an ultrasound screen just a couple of weeks ago, the sonographer told us she was pretty sure that we had a little girl on our hands. She advised against running out to buy any pink clothing just yet, because she could be wrong. When I got the call from our genetic counselor to get the news that our little one appears to be healthy and normal, she also confirmed that the sonographer had been right.

Buying a pink outfit is nothing like choosing to live every last breath, or to accept the certainty of death, but it is an expression of a freedom that I never thought I would feel a year ago. The dream of any child seemed impossible.

The hope for that freedom sparkled through the words of certainty that a little three-year-old girl spoke to her mother just a short while ago. Through her open and free heart, she knew, somehow, who our little girl will be.

I still think freedom can allow us to be certain about things we have no way of truly knowing. But I also have come to believe that certainty allows us to make choices--to become free. We don't always walk through the right door. I think Neil Peart said it best when he wrote the lyric "If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice." We sometimes let fear of failure paralyze us, but at the end of the day, we can all choose to be free. And there is a certainty that freedom brings us that exceeds all of our expectations.

Freewill--Rush