August 27th, 2010
Darkness Falls Across the Land
Every morning, both of my children are in bed with me before I wake up. I can’t remember exactly when this started, but some time over the last few months, Jonas developed a habit of creeping into bed with us somewhere around 4 am. Julesy comes in at about 7 am when he wakes up for the day. We have a pretty solid routine of snuggling together and watching morning cartoons before I drag us all out of bed for breakfast. It’s actually quite cute. Julesy sits up in bed and says “Mommy, I wanna watch a liddle bit of TV.” And so we do. This morning, Jonas woke up and immediately started freaking out about wanting to watch one certain cartoon. He got lippy, the way he generally does these days, and I closed my eyes to breathe and think for a minute instead of getting frustrated with him.
Just prior to that, Julesy had been headbutting me in the leg – which is his “thing” – the headbutting. I told him to stop because it was really hurting, then I closed my eyes to gather myself. With my eyes closed, I started to think about a documentary we watched the other night which linked ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) with head injuries. I was in the middle of wondering if I’d get Lou Gehrig’s disease if Julesy decided me to headbutt me in the head, when the little fucker did exactly that.
For some reason, out of nowhere, Julesy threw his head backwards with the force of a freight train, smashing me straight down the middle of my face. He managed to hit everything from my forehead to my teeth, which felt like an absolute explosion of pain.
I sat up, stunned, but not numb. Every inch of my face was on fire. Violent anger washed over me and, god help me, I wanted that boy to be in as much pain as I was. Undoubtedly, he certainly was in as much pain because, after all, it was his head that hit my head. As he sobbed, I told myself I should comfort him because, duh, my child was hurt. But, the blinding pain of the knot forming between my eyes turned to blinding rage, and all I could feel toward him was hatred. Pure, unadulterated hatred.
And then, I hated myself for being a horrible mother who couldn’t look past her own pain to comfort her small child. As it was turning out, I realized I’m no different than my bio mom. She was fucked up, and now, so am I. I suppose the only difference between she and I is that I haven’t run away. Yet.
Then, like I’ve felt so many times before, my breath caught in my throat like a noose around my neck, and I started crying. No, crying isn’t the word. Sobbing might be right, but even that doesn’t explain it. I soaked the bed with the kind of tears reserved for the deepest grief. The kind of grief that leaves you begging the world to just make it stop for one minute so you can fill your lungs with air again.
But it didn’t stop, so I called my husband. He answered the phone and I wailed. Pretty quickly, I realized that the kind of wailing I was doing might have him thinking that one of our children was hurt, so I just told him “I can’t do this anymore.” And then I cried harder. He asked me what was wrong and I blubbered that Julesy had bashed me in the face and Jonas woke up yelling at me about the stupid remote and his stupid cartoons and I just couldn’t stand it, and I couldn’t do this anymore, and it wasn’t what I agreed to, and he’s never home, and please don’t make me do this anymore. Do what? I dunno. Suffer like this, I suppose. I was in an incredible amount of pain both from my face, and in my stomach where another knot was forming.
Then he asked to talk to Jonas, and Jonas blamed Julesy for making me cry, but Daddy made him say he was sorry about yelling at me over the remote. Then he wanted to talk to Julesy, who was, by then, completely over the incident and had begun pulling forbidden things off my desk (like the stapler) and laughing hysterically in his mischief. Typical.
I finally let my husband off the phone when I knew there was nothing else he could do. I didn’t feed the kids breakfast. I turned on the TV, pulled a pillow over my face, and went back to sleep. When their fighting became unbearable, I promised them we’d go to the kitchen. Just then, I heard the front door slam, and the kids ran to see who was there. I just figured it was the landlord coming in and out because he had been there all morning working on the basement, but once the kids yelled “Grandma!” I started crying hysterically again.
He had called his mother. He called her to come over and save me from my children, and save them from me. I didn’t want her seeing me like this, but I suppose somebody had to feed my kids. She sat on the bed while I soaked my pillow with ugly tears and squeaked out answers to her questions. Then she told me to sleep.
I couldn’t sleep though. I had to do homework. I got up, showered, and drove to school. I cried a little more anytime I thought nobody was looking. My head pounded. An hour before class started, I fell asleep in my chair for about 15 minutes. My face was swollen. I was a mess. Depression had a chokehold on me and I could hardly do anything but wallow in it. My whole body hurt. My whole life hurt.
I managed to drag myself into my classroom, and settle in to a seat, assuming I’d continue to feel like a pile of shit for the rest of the night. I’m happy to say that the class lifted my mood, as school usually does. Yes, I’m an authentic nerd, but this class was especially interesting to me because it was a Sociology class on Sex & Gender. Right up my alley. And the teacher was great. The kind of person who makes it impossible to be suicidally depressed in his presence.
I could blame today’s breakdown on pregnancy hormones, but the truth is I’ve been on the verge of full-on crying jag for quite some time. I’ve never really recovered from the PPD or PTSD I began suffering from four years ago, and every day is an exercise in trying to feel better.
Tomorrow, I suppose I’ll try a little harder. Today was an absolute bust.
August 18th, 2010
Guest Post: She’s Having a Baby
Guest Post by the Hyphenated Husband
It’s Friday night, August 7th and I’m at Arlene’s Grocery, a rock club in New York’s East Village. The weird thing is that I’m in a New York club to check out a Chicago band. It’s amazing that family life can be so hectic that it takes a trip all the way to NYC to see a home town artist. On top of that, I walk into the club to find out the doorman/bartender is a guy I used to play rock shows with back in Chicago years ago. It’s a small world and it’s even smaller if you spend any time involved in the arts. So this was clearly shaping up to be a fun and cheap night out.
So I give TFB a call to share my interesting news and she happens to be on the toilet at a bar. My timing tends to suck because every time I call her she’s in either the bathroom, or wiping up baby shit, or catching one of our crazy toddlers as they stage dive off the dining room table. So I try to make it quick call, and she tells me she is taking a pregnancy test. I think nothing of it since I’ve been bombing at my attempts to knock her up for 8 months now. The connection went to shit and I couldn’t understand what she said next so I figured it was nothing important and said “OK” to move the conversation along. I know, I miss a lot of information due to this bad habit. She then yells, “Did you hear what I said?!?!” and I said I didn’t because of the bad connection. “It’s Positive!!” she’s says. I can’t remember what I said next, but it somewhere along the lines of “NO WAY!” or “SHUT UP!” (in a positive tone of course).
I was blown away. This day and this entire trip to NYC could not have been any better. As it happens, she was just over in Soho with her bloggy friends at a private party. She did a little celebrating with the ladies with some help from Shirley temple shots while I caught the short set of my friend’s band. I would have snuck out of there immediately but I was the ONLY one there to see him. I’m not joking when I say I was the only one in there, even the bartender stepped out for opening duties.
However, as soon as I heard “Thank You, Good Night!” I was out the door and running full speed to Soho to meet my beautiful, pregnant wife. She was standing outside glowing and looking gorgeous. Just knowing she was pregnant reminded me how much I loved her and how attracted to her I am, and always will be. I love that she is going to give us another baby, and add to that the 8 months of anticipation, I was ecstatic! All I could do when I finally held her was hug her and tell her I loved her. Even that doesn’t effectively illustrate how I felt then, or how I still feel now.
Now this bring us to the next part — the far more exciting part — home birth. I can’t tell you how excited I am that we can finally prepare to welcome our child in the comfort of our home; in a peaceful environment without the intrusion of inept medical staff; without the pressure of the ticking clock. I’m so excited that TFB and I can share this experience together and place all our focus on the birth. No worries about fighting off nurses and doctors. No uncomfortable beds, no machines, no bright lights. This is the experience we’ve been hoping for, and it’s the experience TFB and this baby deserve. Am I at all scared about home birth? Of course. It would be odd if I wasn’t at least a little nervous. But there is no way I would subject my wife and child to a cold impersonal hospital again. We’ve done our homework and we are set to beef up even more with HypnoBirthing and Bradley classes. We’ll be ready. More so than most.
Finally… finally baby #3 is on the way. Thank you TFB — I love you.
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The Hyphenated Husband is Gina’s husband of nearly 5 years, and the father of her (soon to be three) children. He is a teaching student, an IHSA certified reffing official, and the World’s Biggest AC/DC fan. He is the only son of two Chicago Police Officers, one Mexican, one Irish, and considers himself a “recovering Catholic” after 13 years of parochial school. Soon, he hopes to turn high school sophomores into history lovers through his passion for teaching. One day he hopes to play guitar in a band again – but not until his kids are big enough to jam with him.
August 1st, 2010
The Birth of Two Babes, 4 Years Apart
Today was my first born son’s 4th Birthday. He’s currently obsessed with All Things Toy Story, so his aunt bought him the Buzz Lightyear costume that he had been begging for. There’s nothing that compares to seeing sheer joy on a child’s face when they are given exactly what their little heart desires. It melts me every time. I think Hyphenated Husband actually got high of watching his son’s smile grow wider as he enjoyed his 4th birthday party festivities. I cannot believe my baby is four. I grew that person in my body, and now look at him. What an amazing miracle.
Four years ago today I became a mother, and that experience changed everything about the way I see the world. Meeting my son was one of the two best things that has ever happened to me, but his birth left a scar on my womb and an ache in my heart that sent shock waves through every aspect of my life. It’s been a difficult journey, one that may never be complete, but I have come to accept that what happened to me made me the person I am today — an outspoken advocate for mothers and babies.
Today, exactly four years to the day after my cesarean surgery, I opened Birthing Babes Childbirth Education Studio to help women in my area avoid what happened to me on that day. We have full childbirth preparation courses, prenatal fitness, HypnoBirthing, breastfeeding classes, a walk-in breastfeeding clinic, plus babywearing, cloth diapering, and infant care classes too. We’re even hosting workshops for local doulas and educators to network and continue their learning.
Trust me when I say that opening the studio today most definitively felt like giving birth again. My husband and I spent 18 hours preparing the space yesterday, snuck in about 30 seconds of sleep, and went straight back at it this morning to host our grand opening. I am just as exhausted now as I was after my long labors, but it was all worth it. It was a huge success, I’d say. We had about 40-50 attendees with a great mix of expecting moms, seasoned parents, and birth professionals all engaged in wonderful conversations while birth videos played on a 6-foot screen. In a word — it was awesome.
Happy Birthday to my baby and my business.
July 26th, 2010
So… Our Basement Flooded… Awesome.
Thank you, Global Warming, for raining down 190 billion gallons of water on the Chicagoland area, backing up all the sewer systems, and flooding our basement for the first time in decades.
Saturday we had a Yard Sale planned. So Friday we took all the stuff we DIDN’T want, and put it in the upstairs living room so we could haul it out early in the AM on Saturday morning. All the stuff we DID want – you know, like our furniture, the kids favorite toys, the expensive ceramic heater, etc – all stayed in the finished basement.
At 8:00 am, the Hyphenated Husband woke me up screaming “WE’VE GOT WATER! THE BASEMENT IS FLOODED!!!”
I run downstairs with nary an item of clothing on, with slept-in-contact lenses blurring my vision, just in time to catch my husband barreling past me with his arms full of our guitars. The next thing he grabbed were the amplifiers. Funny where our priorities are even four years after we stopped being musicians.
I couldn’t do anything but stand there in shock. All I could do was stare at the water and hold my hands over my mouth. Instead of looking at my basement floor, I’m looking at half a foot of watery sewage. I rushed to get clothes on, but instead I paced in circles because I couldn’t concentrate long enough to remember where I keep my underwear. Then I dialed my dad’s number and bawled while I asked him to come help us do something… anything.
As if the sewer water wasn't bad enough, that's also the litter box freely floating in that sludge water.
Not really knowing what else to do exactly, I posted a desperate message on Facebook. Then I cried a little. Then my husband held me and said it was all gonna be okay. Somehow I found some clothes and threw those on. Then we called the landlord.
The landlord tells us to get a pump to get the water out, and that his insurance won’t cover anything. We call State Farm to find out if our renter’s insurance covers anything, but it won’t cover floods either. Everything on that floor is gone forever, with no way to replace it. Our $1000 entertainment center that we just finished paying off is trashed. The couches are gone. Electronics are done for.
Notice the keyboard submerged in water. Yeah - that doesn't work anymore.
We called to get a pump but there were none available in the area. Everyone was having the same problem we were, so they put us on a wait-list for one. In the meantime, all we could do was wait, so we decided to run and look at some new apartments. Our lease is up in August anyway, and I took this as a sign from the universe that it is time to downsize. When we moved into this house three years ago I was making nearly $50,000 a year. I left that job last fall, and I do NOT make that kind of money any more. Financially speaking, living here is just stupid anyway.
By the time we came home from apartment shopping, the water was pumped out, but left was a layer of sewage and debris. Awesome. I started cleaning up that night, and then Sunday, while I held the Yard Sale, HH and my dad pulled everything out of the basement and threw it all away.
So now… I don’t know what. All we can do is recover. Our neighbors got four FEET of water, so I should be thanking my lucky stars that it didn’t turn out any worse for us. The timing on this is as terrible as it could possibly be, as I explained last week, but is there EVER really a good time for this? I’m trying not to whine. Trying to remember that Americans have lost everything, including their lives, in some recent floods, so by comparison we got off scott-free.
I also have the benefit of knowing some amazing Mama-owned businesses who bought up a little advertising on my blog to help us recover from this small disaster. Thank you to MamaPear Designs, THING-A-MA-SLING, and Support for Special Needs for jumping in and helping a mother out. If that isn’t a good enough reason to support their businesses, then I don’t know what is.
If you or your business need some advertising, now is the time. I’m putting all ad placements on sale this week, BOGOF. Buy 1 month get one month free OR buy 3 months get 3 months free! That’s an awesome deal. I’m very nice to the businesses who advertise on my blog, and advertising (right now especially) is a really nice thing to do for me. See how that works out well for everyone? 
Ughgh. Floods. YOU SUCK.
June 20th, 2010
For the Hyphenated Husband, on Father’s Day…
No matter how much he drives me crazy, or the awful times we’ve been through (of which there have been far too many), I know that I won the Husband Lottery. I’m demanding, and petulant, and short-tempered, and imperfect – yet no matter what I do, this man loves me. Unconditionally, and thoroughly, loves me. I know that now.
Recently our marriage turned a major corner. I rarely discuss the full details of my relationship out in the open, but this is a time in our lives that I’d like to revel in the moment – because it’s a good one. Finally.
See…when we were dating, we were the type of couple that I thought other couples were jealous of. We were madly in love, treated each other like the center of the universe, and knew from Minute One that we were destined to be together. However, becoming parents less than 2 years after we began dating took a real toll on our relationship. We went from being ridiculously happy to being ridiculously unhappy in a matter of a few short months. Neither of us was emotionally equipped to deal with the new responsibilities of parenthood. Our marriage began sailing south less than 6 weeks after my first son’s birth, and it circled the drain for years. Yes, there were moments of calm during the storm – it wasn’t awful all the time – but I was never really as happy as I had once been, and feared that I’d never be that happy again. The Hyphenated Husband always insisted we’d be “fine,” but with my nomadic upbringing, my first instinct was to cut our losses and both move on before another minute was wasted. When HH said “I do” he meant “forever, till death do us part, and all that jazz.” But when I said “I do,” I meant “For now, ya know, unless it gets hard, and then I’m probably outta here because I wasn’t raised to put up with any nonsense.”
Because of my Cut ‘N’ Run attitude, I’ve threatened to leave more times than anyone could count. Every time he annoyed me, I was shopping for apartments on Craigslist. Then, I’d get too lazy to think about moving out, and we’d just go right back to living in a mediocre marriage. I know that’s not the adult way to handle things – I never said I was an expert at staying married – that’s just the only way I know how to handle difficult situations. Get out, Gina. Move on. Start anew while you’re still young enough to make a new life elsewhere. This is how I was raised, and it’s a hard habit to shake.
Exhibit A: A friend asked me to write a guest post on her site 6 months ago about how I managed to marry a feminist male, and every time I sat down to write that post, I felt like such a hypocrite for trying to wax poetic about my rocky marriage that I never ended up writing a single paragraph for her.
Exhibit B: When we were first invited to be on the Discovery show, one of the main reasons I turned it down was because I didn’t want to have to pretend on national television that we were a perfectly happy family when I felt like anything but. I didn’t want to feel like a fraud.
But HH has never given up on us. Oh, there have been times that He’s been pretty mad at me. Really, really mad at me. Mad enough to say and do things that are hurtful and mean and hard to take back. But he’s always remained convinced that we’d find a way to make it work – somehow. I, however, took a lot more convincing. I’m stubborn and emotionally lazy like that.
Finally, after a particularly heinous week last month, I came the conclusion that this marriage might actually end if we didn’t turn things around by the end of summer. No matter how many times I threatened to leave over the past 4 years, it never occurred to me, until this one particular week, that there could actually be a divorce in our near future. I don’t know what made me finally come to this realization, but something felt different this time. I suppose it just got so bad that I knew things couldn’t last another minute the way they were. And ultimately, I think I finally recognized that I’ve never taken much responsibility for trying to fix the mess that our marriage had become. One particularly heinous week made me see that if nothing changed – if I changed nothing – our kids would be living in two different houses pretty soon.
So, we talked. And this talk was different than any talk we’d had before. It was different than the failed therapy sessions we tried two years ago. It was different than all the other times we promised we’d try harder, but never did.
This time, we both got the message – loud and clear. We both recognized that now is the time to save this marriage, not tomorrow, or the day after that. Today.
And just like that, things began to turn around. All of the sudden, I fell back in love with my husband. I see him differently now. I’m attracted to him again. We kiss now – a lot… something we hadn’t really done in years. I’m kinder, and more understanding of him. I don’t get annoyed as easily, and when I lose my temper now, I actually apologize instead of acting as though it was justified. And he sends me love notes during the day… making sure I know that he’s thinking of me even when we aren’t together. We’re both treating love as a verb, and it’s paying off.
It’s good. For the first time in four years my marriage is really, really good. So, on this Father’s Day, I want my husband to know how much I appreciate him being the husband and father that he is. His wife and his children are very lucky to have him.
We all love you, Daddy. We really do. And Thank You for Sticking it Out with Us.
