magical dream wishcards

This is not a beat-up metal "purse" full of dud photos. These are magical dream wishcards.

I sometimes order prints willy-nilly. When they're a penny each, sometimes it's just easiest to order them all and figure it out later. That's what I did last month. I ordered a couple hundred prints from the last TWO YEARS and then sorted them for distribution when they arrived. (Side note: this is not a good way to handle this. My new process involves uploading just a few from each month that I actually want prints of. But I hadn't realized that when I was uploading photos in November of 2013. Oops.) 

Anyhow, I pulled a reasonable number of pictures I wanted to send to the handful of places I wanted to send them and was left with this huge stack of leftovers. They're still good pictures, but I have no plans for them, so when the girls asked if they could play with them, I just shrugged and said ok.

They came up with a number of fun and interesting things to do with them, but a few hours later, J started talking to me about "magical dream wishcards." I figured she was talking about the prints, but I wasn't sure what, exactly, I was supposed to do with them.

"Mom. I turn all these cards upside down. You pick one and look at it. Then you take it to bed with you and you try and dream about it! And if you start to dream about something else, you just... you push it out of your head with the right dream!"

And it hit me...

Any one of these couple hundred pictures would make a reasonable dream. 

I picked one where I was introducing the girls to their brother. But it could just as easily have been one of J and her dad at the zoo. Or K at the museum. Or that one time they were decorating cookies with a friend. Or their brother making a silly face. As far as my four-year-old is concerned, any one of these would make a great dream. Far better than some of the scary ones she deals with on occasion.

I know these photos represent a highlight real of sorts. Not that all of the pictures are of the big moments- most of them are downright mundane. (Lots of pictures of kids in high chairs. Because they're happy and they're sitting still.) But they're at least relatively happy- I don't tend to take a lot of shots of my kids in time-outs or throwing tantrums or sticking their faces in pubic toilets. Mostly because I'm too busy in those moments to bust out the big camera and document them, but also... who wants to relive that? 

But at the same time, what if my kids' memories work a little like that? 

What if your people's memories worked a bit like that?

Nostalgia can be a bit that way, right? So maybe it's not out of the question...

I tend to be pretty hard on myself, in general. All I can see is the times I spoke a bit too sharply or wasn't so present with my kiddos because I needed to check out from all the incessant words for a minute (or thirty.) So when I look at our life together as a whole, I sort of assume that that's what they'll remember, too. And this month has been a doozy... a miscarriage and all the ways that's affected my mothering in the weeks since. A car accident (everyone's fine, car's functional) and all the hours of insurance phone calls that the kids have had to wait through. I haven't been at my best.

But my firstborn's magical dream wishcards make me wonder... 

What if she sees our life that way? What if it's pretty much all the things that happy dreams are made of? What if she's gonna be ok and my shortcomings won't send her to years of therapy? I mean... not that I shouldn't call my sin what it is and walk toward holiness, but what if there's enough grace to cover my failings? 

What about you?

What things do you tend to be hard on yourself about? 

What if your people paid less attention to that than you did? What if they just see you? Showing up, loving them, doing what you do? 

What kinds of magical dream wish cards might they be carrying in their heads and hearts? (Snuggles? The way you sing in the car? When you remember their favorite thing and provide it at the right moment? The time you met them for lunch? That time you went on a field trip with them?) You love your people. They can tell. These little moments matter, probably more than we realize.

Give yourself a little bit of grace today, ok?

...in which we discuss that which is always kept quiet.

I'm in a really weird mood and I'm about to overshare in an obnoxious and rambling way. Please feel free to skip.

So... I joined a club this week, I guess. Unfortunately. It's not the club I wanted to join, and most of the members are silent. 

I had a miscarriage. (Am having a miscarriage? I'm not familiar enough with it to know exactly how the verb tense works with the timeline.) And I'm looking around, knowing the stats that say 10 to 20 percent of pregnancies end this way, and it's a weird and silent place to be in, knowing I'm not alone, but knowing very, very few of the others who have been here before.

Why is it so quiet? 

Where is everyone? 

I'm not judging my sisters who choose to deal with it privately. There are so, SO many reasons a woman wouldn't want to walk through this publicly... It hurts too much. There aren't words. There have been several and you just can't talk about it one. more. time. If that is you, I am so, so sorry. Please hear my heart here: if you need to work this out on your own with Jesus, please, please, don't feel any judgement from me.You don't owe me or anyone else any explanation at all.

But also... is everyone choosing to deal with it quietly, or are a lot of us just doing it because that's culturally how it's done? I feel like there's a weird veil of silence over the whole thing that's not just because so many of us want to process alone. 

I've kept three pregnancies (now four, I suppose) under wraps (sort of) until the magical mark of 12 weeks, because that's how it's done. 

Why? Well, in case it doesn't work out.

Ok, I totally don't want to announce a pregnancy at five weeks, lose it at six, then have people hearing about and congratulating me on my happy news while I'm trying to process the loss. One of my best friends walked that road and it was heartbreaking.

So I know why I choose to wait to share the news. But, now that loss has happened, why, again, do I feel I have to stay silent?

Culturally, it's no big deal, I suppose. "Just a lump of tissue." (It's only a baby after it reaches a certain size, perhaps. And only if the mom wants it. That makes sense, right?)

Nobody knows what to say.

It makes people uncomfortable.

Here's the deal. It happens. A lot. And not talking about it doesn't make it into something else, something more palatable, something that didn't happen at all. And this week, I have no bothers to give about the cultural norm that says "we just don't talk about it." 

I don't need your sympathy, but I suspect we would be better off if the people who wanted to share felt free to do so. So I'm going to.

So, sister, if you're out there, this is my story. You are not alone. Your story probably looks different than mine, and that's totally fine. Take the parts that are helpful and leave the rest.

I found out I was pregnant on a Saturday morning. It was a faint but unmistakable second line. 

It took me the whole day to even start wrapping my head around it.

A baby. I love babies. But I HAVE a baby. And he's still... a baby. So, [mental calculations] we're looking at end of April. So... 17 months and change between the youngest two. That's the same as the gap between the girls. So... that's insane. We. are. insane. Also? Four carseats will not fit in the Ridgeline. I'm going to have four children before the first even starts kindergarten. One-way ticket to crazy town. Wait. My due date is like a day after the Weekend to Remember. I'm going to drive to Anchorage and work really hard at 39 1/2 weeks. I had like a week and a half of increasingly convincing false labor with #3. That could be really disconcerting driving 360 miles, twice, in week 40. 

On and on it went, my brain doing a thousand different calculations to wrap my itself around this baby's place in my nearish future.

But, at the end of the day (and I do actually mean the literal end of that Saturday), I'd come to land squarely on gratitude for this gift and a sort of nervous excitement.

Tuesday, I decided to test again, hoping for a less faint second line, so I could tell a few family members about it. Negative. What? Negative again. Hmm... Chemical pregnancy? Early miscarriage? Highly unlikely false positive? Or slightly more likely false negatives? Later in the day, I took one for reasons I'm still not sure of, and it was positive. No, really. What?!? Obsessive as I am, this led to a weird ritual of testing a couple times every second or third day, with mixed results. I was very, very tired of holding emotional space open for either outcome. Come the following Tuesday, I was getting all negatives (including an officialish one at the birth center. Same technology, but administered by professionals, so I somehow have more faith in it. Not sure why.) It was over. I talked with a midwife about what to expect when I'm suddenly NOT expecting.

I carried a dead baby inside of me for at least several days. It was weird. Sad. Disturbing.

Thursday, ten days after I found out about the littlest, my body decided to let baby go. 

Somehow, that isn't better.

And I'm sad. It's not the soul-crushing grief that I expected, the grief I've experienced in empathy with friends over the years.

And that fact leads to a fair bit of guilt. (I firmly believe this baby is an actual human person, not just tissue. But apparently, emotionally, I've absorbed the cultural belief that it's not a person yet. What kind of Jesus-follower am I?!? A crappy one, that's what.) (I totally don't believe that. My head is a jerk and I wind up feeling irrational guilt over stuff like this sometimes.)

There's relief. Certainly NOT relief at the loss, but it was so very taxing to have to hold on to both "He gives" and "He takes away" in the same moment, for the same baby. So there was some relief just in knowing. {Insert more guilt.}

And I'm still living inside my crazy and beautiful life where my kids are running around half-naked, screaming like banshees about having crayon stuck in their teeth. (True story.) And that sort of helps. Rather than crushed, I'm numb, sad, distracted. And tired. So very, very tired. Thankful for the healthy babies I have. Thankful, somehow, that I knew about this one. (For various reasons, it would have been really easy for me to not know about the littlest one at all.) But also, this morning I was looking at my baby boy's toes, and realized that the little one we lost was just a little smaller than his pinkie toe, and I won't ever get to smooch his little sweet self. Somebody actually did die. 

And here's where I come to an abrupt and awkward end. 

Because that brings us more or less to now. 

I don't have anything neat to tie it up. I don't have any big perspective or any reason why this generally applies to you. It probably doesn't. I hope it doesn't.

Well, actually, it does apply to you, at least a little. Can we make a little room for this discussion? Be willing to hear and be a safe space for a friend? I'm thankful beyond words for the people in my life who have been that safe space for me for the last little bit. (I'm sure your job isn't over!) 

As far as my story goes, as always, there is grace enough.

There's grace enough for the relief and the sad and the numb and the distracted and the thankful. We're OK. God is big. He gives and takes away. Blessed be his name.