So, for today’s thankful, it seems important to provide some back story. A lot of my friends know this story all too well, but thankfully, I have been making some new friends lately (a grateful for another day).
It took a long time to decide that I wanted to be a mom. As a couple, Jeph and I spent at least a decade in ambivalent discussion about whether we wanted to be parents or not. No time seemed right to really be serious about it, and even when we made “a plan,” it was mostly in jest.
Jeph likes to listen to documentaries while he works, and he has an uncanny gift for remembering details like no one I have ever known. One day, he came home from work talking about his concerns regarding the possible Mayan Apocalypse that was just on the horizon. My response? “If there is no apocalypse, we should stop using birth control and see what happens. We should have a baby.”
He was stunned, but didn’t argue. It was a playful answer to the serious uncertainty that we had felt about the issue for our entire marriage. I don’t know if the uncertainties about our careers, families, and place in the world had fed into our ambivalence, but it seemed that some mystical event, predicted by an ancient culture was going to decide our future.
When no apocalypse came, we had to decide for real, and somehow, we did. It was still very much a “let’s see what happens” approach. When we found ourselves pregnant six months later, we were shocked, but thrilled. It seemed that leaving our fate to the Mayans had been an okay decision.
Just a very short couple of weeks later, Jeph landed in the hospital with bilateral pulmonary embolisms. We ended up sharing our happy news earlier than we had planned. Within another week or two, I was realizing that something was wrong. And then, our happy news turned into sad news. There would be no apocalypse inspired baby after all.
The one thing that became certain was that we were no longer ambivalent about being parents. But for months, and months, things continued to go from bad to worse.
It would be a year before we would be successful again, and this time, our whole world actually did more closely resemble an apocalyptic nightmare than time for us to have a child. Jeph had just lost his job, I was struggling in mine, and we felt like we were lost at sea in so many ways. Everything was out of control.
But even in the midst of all of our chaos, I knew, somehow, that we were going to be all right.
Willow came to our lives right on time—and not just because she arrived on her due date. Even learning that she was on her way happened at just the right moment. We knew very little about what our future held, but one thing was right.
I had always imagined what it might be like to raise a girl. There might have been some pink involved. But now that it was actually going to happen, I desperately wanted to allow her to become whatever she was determined to be.
She is not an easy child. Seven months into our adventure, I was still only getting four or five hours of sleep a night. And now, at almost four years old, she is still flip-flopping in our bed, and I am surfing the edge. She walked instead of crawling, and dances anytime there is music. She doesn’t get mad—she rages. She climbs and jumps off of furniture. She shuns clothing. She has imagined herself to be a puppy most of the time for months. She wasn’t “kicked out” of preschool per se, but she wasn’t invited to return either. Potty training has been a year long nightmare all it’s own.
I know everyone struggles with their toddler. I know they are all hard.
I love her so much. She is doing exactly what she should be doing—creating her own identity. And she is doing something else. She is challenging me to look at my own, and how it impacts everything I do. She is challenging me to understand how my own history makes our struggles with her even harder.
We will manage these hard moments, because there were a thousand moments when I was sure that I would never have the opportunity to fight with my three-year-old. I know that there are so many couples who struggle with fertility issues, and suffer multiple devastating miscarriages. I know that our story is happier than so many others.
My little Willow is everything I ever hoped she would be. She’s strong-willed, healthy, stoccasionally kind, and filled with spirit. She’s not afraid to ask for—demand—What she wants. I know that she will go through many cycles of change, and “reinvention” as the years pass. Each stage will present new challenges to both her daddy and me. But at the end of the day, I am so grateful we get the opportunity to watch her grow into, and become the person she chooses to be.
She will have freedoms I never had, and she will get to make choices and mistakes that I didn’t get to make. And as I fight my own inner battles with how to be the mom she needs, I will grow and change, too.
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