Boring and crazy.

Life for me as of late has consisted mainly of mundane days that blend in to one another with such ease that it's hard for me to recall which day is which, or even what I had for breakfast this morning. Winter arrived in one fell swoop (a blizzard, that is), and with it came these freezing temperatures that make it so painstakingly difficult for me to muster up the energy to bundle up and go anywhere. 

I'm still riding this colossal wave of hormones following my miscarriage. Certain days go by where it feels like all I really managed to accomplish was to quell the nearly insatiable desire in my heart to set fire to the universe and flush myself down the toilet. Needless to say, I'm waiting rather impatiently for my body and my hormones to regulate - and in the meantime, I'm crying over Christmas music and yelling at the boots sitting in my front foyer. 

Margot is growing up. I know this isn't news to anybody - least of all to me - but I'm really noticing it lately. She's sweet, she's beautiful, she's funny, she's curious, and she's all sorts of maddening, but she's this incredible person with ideas and opinions all her own.

She's starting to wean from breastfeeding. This is something that I knew would come one day, and probably someday soon, and my plan all along was for her to lead the way; but now that she is - oh, my heart... I'm sad about it. Just this morning I tried offering to nurse her, but "No, thank you," she said. 

"Are you sure?" I replied, as I sat down with her in my lap.

But instead of latching on, she again said, "No thank you," and then proceeded to push and shove my boob out of her face, saying, "Put it away. Put it away." 

...Oh. Okay, hilarious human being. Did you just turn into an embarrassed teenager overnight? 

Speaking of overnight, she's sleeping through the night. With this statement comes a wild and exaggerated dance number that I bust out every time I say it. Because SHE'S SLEEPING THROUGH THE NIGHT. You heard that, right? It only took almost two years... no biggie! 

I think in this picture you can see exactly how weary I am, how stupid-happy I am, and how in love with this girl I am. 

And the one thing you can't really see is the sweet little shiner I'm sporting on my right eye since Margot head-butted me last week. You know when something hurts so bad that you just instantly and uncontrollably burst into tears? That. My first black eye! 

Sprouting little wings

If I haven't said it before, I'll say it now: not a day goes by that I don't acknowledge how grateful I am that Daryl and I have never had to send Margot off to daycare; how blessed we are that our employers give us enough freedom to stretch and bend our work schedules in order that she can spend her days at home with us instead of at a daycare facility. Our schedules are arranged in such a way that when one of us is at work, the other one is home with her; and in spite of how maddeningly frustrating it can be to operate this way when it means never having a day in the week where we're all together, it is, above all, a gift.

Cutting and pasting our work schedules, though, was obviously a direct result of bringing Margot into our lives; before she was born, my schedule was standard Monday-Friday, 9-5. So making all of this work meant putting my work hours on the chopping block - which, in turn, did the same thing to my paycheck. This isn't to say that we aren't making ends meet, but only to say that we've had to make adjustments where we can. And this past summer, after realizing our financial situation was altogether too uncomfortable (it's hard to say no to Chipotle) I decided to pick up an extra day at work. Well, this meant we were short on childcare one day a week; but by stroke of luck / divine blessing, everything worked out perfectly when Daryl's mom offered to come to our house every Wednesday to look after Margot. And as far as Margot is concerned, her Nana is one of the most magically wonderful people on the planet.

I digress, though. Nana works in the school system, so when the summer came to an end, so did our outsourced childcare services. Enter Marcia: one of my nearest and dearest and most beautifully talented and lovely friends (seriously, you guys: she's the mastermind behind t i b b e n l i t t l e s. You'll fall in love.) Marcia swooped in and offered to watch Margot when we needed her.  And yesterday just happened to be the first day that we had to bring Margot over there.

I was nervous. Not because Marce didn't have every ounce of my faith and adoration, but because I didn't put enough stock in my own little girl. My mind kept reeling, thinking surely we'd drop her off and say goodbye, wrenching ourselves out of her little arms, while tears poured down her face and she begged us to stay, calling out our names in despair.

It sounds dramatic. I know. But it's where my mind went. I know if you're a parent, yours has probably gone there, too.

I spent a lot of Tuesday evening telling her and re-telling her what the next day was going to look like; that Dada was going to drop her off over there, where she'd get to play aaaallll daaaayyyy loooonnnngggg with her favorite friend Wendy. I told her she'd get to play games, ride on Wendy's rocking horse, maybe go to the park, and anything else I could think of that'd help her (me) feel pumped up about dropping her off at someone else's house and leaving for the day. This was totally new territory for me.

And as it turns out, obviously, Margot was fine. Better than fine! Daryl told me that she was more interested in Wendy's feet than she was in saying goodbye to him.

"Wendy feet! Bye-bye, Dada. Wendy feet!" (Poke, poke.)

I've had Margot's independence on my brain so much lately. When hanging out with our next-door neighbors last week as we sat around a fire in their backyard, they talked about how big and scary the world has started to feel now that their son is five and they've had to start teaching him how to operate in the world without them. They've had to teach him how to navigate getting home on the school bus, how to watch out for cars on the street, and make sure he knows his address and his parents' contact information, and a plethora of other such considerations that just don't exist while our kids are young enough to constantly remain under our care. It's all just so much. I drive past kids waiting for the bus before school on my way to work every morning and my brain instantly zaps to their parents, thinking about how each and every one of them managed to come to terms with sending their kids off into the world on their own. How much trust they've all mustered up and put into their kids - not because they want to, but because they have to. Because kids grow up. Because we can't cradle them in our arms forever.

But it's terrifying. It's overwhelming. And it just boggled my brain yesterday when, after we were all home and went for a walk to the park down the street, I was asking Daryl and Margot each about their days. Realizing how odd it was that the three of us had days and experiences independent from one another.

Because...what? When did Margot get so big? Did I not just give birth to her last week? How has she gotten old enough to have her own experiences outside of our house and outside of our care? It doesn't make sense to me. It's amazing and beautiful and completely bewildering watching her grow so quickly.

And so last night, there was no bigger sigh of relief than while I was giving her a bath, and asking her about her day, and she just kept yelling, "Wendy house! SO FUN!"

My girl, when did you become your own person with your own little ideas?

Scaling mountains

I have a stepsister.

As it happens, I have a stepbrother as well, but for the purpose of this post, that's neither here nor there.

So again, I say: I have a stepsister. I don't know if I can quite convey to you how weighty this statement is, how deeply affected I am by this, or how long it took me to ever be able to say that out loud. What she was, up until about a year ago, was my dad's wife's daughter.

I mentioned in a previous post that some years ago, I lost my dad; not to death, but to another family – another life, another wife, another set of grown children.

My childhood was, for lack of a better term, pure magic. I grew up under the wings of my strong and lovely mother, and my gentle and completely hilarious father, and floated through the years next to my two beautiful sisters. Of course, our family did not lack in the yelling, fighting or griping departments – but rare was it that we didn’t sit down together as a family of five for dinner each evening.

I am blessed to be able to say that nothing bad – really really bad – had ever happened to me. Tragedy was a stranger to me, and I didn’t know any better than to float through my life blissfully ignorant about so many of life’s big and little things.

Follow me to the winter of 2006, though; I’d been married for six months, was held tightly within an amazing community, and had almost every soul dear to me within walking distance. One Sunday evening in February, my world fell to pieces when my sisters and I were gathered together and told over the phone that our dad had left our mom – he’d just packed up half of their belongings, and moved out. And that was that.

I vividly remember fruitlessly begging him to change his mind, to come home, to work on this; I pleaded for answers – why? What happened? How could you do this to us? What about our family? And all for nothing – I was told this didn’t have anything to do with us girls, that I needed to trust him, and that this was something I wouldn’t be able to understand. And still, I begged, I cried, I despaired. I was a twenty-three-year-old girl who suddenly felt six, and so very alone.

All this, though, was just a month or two before I learned who my father really was; that outside of the gentle and utterly hilarious, present and wonderful dad that I’d grown up with laid a chronically unfaithful husband who I’d known nothing about. Needless to say, I experienced a shift – where once was sorrow suddenly laid grief mixed with fire – pure anger, resentment, and the feeling that I’d been cheated out of my entire life thus far. And yet, the sorrow remained.

And at that, our relationship ended. In one blink, I lost my dad.

There came a day when my father remarried. I got up all the guts I could muster, and left a letter under the windshield of his car, which was parked outside the church he was in, vowing his love and his life to a stranger. In it, I talked about how not a day had passed that I had not been broken; that just as a piece of me died on the day he left, I was broken and re-broken, strangled and smothered throughout each day of my existence. I told him that each day that he is gone, I clamber through mud and rain, dragging my fingers through wet soil, just to keep from slipping into the depths of the earth. I said that that he had shredded my veil of hope, and torn down my foundations of love.

After I drove away, I waited for a response. Years passed, and I never received one.

For each prayer I prayed asking for my father to be returned to me, there existed one in which I begged God to let him suffer; I realized from the experience that I had yet to understand what forgiveness truly is. I prayed that peace and beauty would not acknowledge him. And I prayed that there would come a day when I might rise above this and experience joy again – a day when I might accept that he did not exist – that my father, as I knew him, never was.

____________

Six years went by before we communicated. Granted, I would receive the odd e-mail over Christmas, or on a birthday here or there, but I never found it in me to reply to him. Instead, I’d keep my reactions to myself – or I’d gripe or grieve to my husband and sisters over how angry I was – particularly when I started receiving correspondence asking me to get over this already, to quit ignoring him and put this behind us. As if he had a right to put his foot down and put me in my place. I spent those years angry, resentful and sad. In those six years, I couldn't even say words about what had happened without breaking down into tears. And at night, my dreams were flooded with scenes of him chasing me down – strongly commanding my name, backing me into a corner. Some nights I’d cower in fear, others I’d yell and scream so loudly that my throat swelled. I’d wake up acknowledging that not only was I deeply angry, but I was terrified of this man I once called father.

Something eventually changed in me, though. I’m not sure exactly when it was that I decided to change the way I was living; but I started to realize that I needed to move past this – or even just step into it, and over it – in order to get anywhere further in my life. It was occurring to me that my silence – the bitterness and anger I was harboring – was only destructive to me; that I was being pushed downward, and for what? I was tired of having misplaced all my hope; I wanted my light and my life back. In order to reclaim what was mine, I needed to address this.

So one afternoon, I wrote out a long, thoughtful and emotionally charged e-mail to my father. I didn’t know where to begin, at first; so I started with the basics. I told him about who I am today, what I do, what I’ve accomplished, and what I love.

And then, I told him what he’d done to me. I said that he has hurt me and our family immeasurably; and that while I hoped for years that he was suffering every single day – wishing that he’d never know peace – that I had more recently come to a place where I know that harboring my hatred for him is only destructive to me. I needed him to know that at my very core, I am changed – from the moment he left, I was shattered into a thousand pieces, and left hopelessly to gather up what I could, and keep muddling through my days.

And amazingly, whether this was completely shocking or sadly exactly what I should have expected, he didn’t get it. Somehow, he didn’t understand. I fought tooth and nail for about a week or two, trying to get him to see what he’d done, but to no avail. Sure, he offered an apology eventually – he said he was sorry for everything he’d done to hurt me, but it didn’t offer me the solace or the resolution I’d been looking for, because I realized I was throwing my feelings at a wall. And in the end, I decided to be okay with that; not only because I needed to be, but because surely my resolution needed to come from elsewhere anyway.

So I dusted off my knees, packed my feelings carefully back into my heart, and moved along; one foot in front of the other. And today, I am okay.

What I set out to talk about, though, was my stepsister. My dad's wife's daughter. A year ago, she had a baby – I found out because my dad sent me an email letting me know, and mentioned that she had noticed that our babies had the exact same birth weight; cute, I thought! He sent me her e-mail address, in the event that I might want to write to her.

And I did. Because if pregnancy, childbirth and hatching out of my shell as a brand new parent had taught me anything, it was that mothers – new ones, especially – need all the help, hope and support they can get; and not a bone in my body cared to shut this girl out when she was no more of an instigator of this mess than I was; we were both just children, floating in little bubbles above it all. I needed to stop thinking of her as someone who lived in the enemy camp.

As it turns out, today she's one of my favorite people to correspond with. She and I write emails to each other back and forth all the time, and is one of the most understanding and easygoing people I've ever had the pleasure of meeting. And part of me – no, actually, most of me – looks back at this and can't believe that I've come this far. The months and years leading up to all this were all about scaling mountains; they were about forgiveness, enlightenment, and blessing. They were about discovering what strength laid within me, they were about my strong capacity for resilience, and about the power of forgiveness, with respect to myself and to those around me. They were about what fundamental importance lies in not judging others, and in giving people a chance.

It has sparked within me a great motivation to teach Margot the importance of all this. She's this little person running alongside me, looking up to me for help, support and an endless supply of love. At this exact moment, she's sitting on my lap sucking her thumb as I type. I know I'll always be on a steady incline when it comes to my dad and what he did to our family, but I can't help but feel like I owe a debt of gratitude to Margot; her very existence challenges, motivates and urges me on to be a better and whole person. I will set the bar high when teaching her just what capacity the human heart has to love, grieve and forgive.