My Season of Ugly ... Year Eight

Last night as I was asked why I was so crabby lately, by my then cranky hubby… I was reminded again that yes… I am full sprint into my season of ugly as I call it. Well, full sprint in at a very slow sloth’s pace.

Eight years ago on the Friday of this exact weekend, we were hours into the nightmare that lay ahead of us after hearing those dreaded words… “I am so sorry… but there is no heartbeat.”

We knew it was coming, we just didn’t know when. I was convinced I was going to die during childbirth, while birthing a child that had already died. I had been rushed into an emergency c-section after 48 hours of labor with my first child, and had hemorrhaged after my first miscarriage (both nearly two decades earlier in my life) so I had no hope or faith in my body, and frankly, there were multiple times if I’m honest, I just wished it would happen already and just be done and over with. The living while waiting on the dying is … I don’t even know, I don’t have any words for it.

On that Friday afternoon eight years ago… we were arriving at the specialty hospital an hour and a half away, to be induced, to deliver a baby we had diligently and desperately prayed for for years and years. That prayer just wasn’t exactly answered in the way we had hoped for, or quite in the time frame we had imagined.

But, God did answer our prayer for a child, He just waited until I was turning forty, and then He decided that He would rather have her with Him in heaven, than with us down here. And honestly deep inside I know that this a blessing, a gift… but it just doesn’t always quite feel that way in my heart, while I'm still the one standing here on earth. Yes, she was spared the sin and anguish of this earth, but oh the anguish that has left on us some days is overwhelming.

I’m currently reading a book called The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Van Der Kolk. That’s a lie. I have the book and I have been looking at it and telling myself to read it since this summer. I took it from the amazon box and placed it on my nightstand in the reading room. And not long ago I did pick it up and move it to the nightstand in my bedroom. I believe I looked at the first paragraph on the first page, but I remember nothing of what it said.

However, I know the premises of the book. Our bodies hold on to our traumas, our hurts, our past moments of sin, shame, and anguish. And deep within us, even when we are not aware, it is affecting us, all parts of us from inside out. It silently hums and yearns and turns and pokes and prods at us from inside, causing us angst with ourselves, which then leaks onto those around us.

The My Season of Ugly – neatly written and published and packaged in a book written by someone else, quietly sitting on my nightstand, just waiting for me.

Yes, I am traveling through my parallel timeline of hurt and remembrance. I was sick at Thanksgiving and Christmas and didn’t know I was pregnant. I would find out days before Valentine’s Day. I would travel through Lent, my 40th birthday, our anniversary knowing and silently dealing. It was the Friday of Palm Sunday weekend the year she was born, and the waving of palm branches will never be the same again. A year later it was Easter Sunday on the day of her first birth day.

It's here, I’m there… right here and right now. It’s real, it’s raw, it’s hard, it hurts.

Part of me knows that it merely is what it is, while another part of me fights inside wanting to know why… why I can’t just be over all this… why even when I think I’m doing really well… that out of the blue it will strike me down again, every year.

Here's something funny... just a few weeks ago, as I was coming home from my Run Disney princess half marathon trip - I actually found myself saying the words... "This year it has been really good. I have been busy training and thinking about the disney trip, and then we were away together and actually doing the trip and the races, and I found I just wasn't thinking about everything as I parallel traveled the timeline this year...  Perhaps this race has even brought me healing over it all."

I now sit back and chuckle at myself.  If only.

It quickly returned, pulling me back into bed every day, all day long. I drag myself out – only to either climb back in, or fight myself all day long to not to. The dishes and the laundry are absolutely killing me. Killing me. Church, public, people... so hard. I’m irritable and irrational, and I'm sure the people I live and work with are beyond ready for me to dig myself back out of this hole yet again.

And I will. I will. And I know it’s ok to not be ok in the interim. I do. It’s just… these are the days of my hard, my ugly and I’m aware. And yes, I’m on meds and I see a therapist. I meditate and do devotions, and all the things… I'm not looking for or wanting suggestions or quick fixes. Just grant me a little more grace to get me through.

Right now, the world is full of hard, and ugly. The weather and wars and shootings and sickness and violence and death… It’s everywhere, all the time. Surrounding, suffocating, saddening with it’s venom and snake-like squish of every day life squeezing the life out of us. Out of all of us.

I think we are all stumbling along in our states of inner ugly right now. We are all dealing with hard things and we are all needing heaping doses of grace – both to ourselves and to everyone around us.

Grace.
One step. One day. One smile. One hug. One act of strength and kindness.
Grace to ourselves. Grace to everyone.

Grace.

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The Geese Flying Overhead

I have been hearing the geese fly overhead again the past few days/weeks (time is all a blur right now, so I’m not exactly sure the specific time frame) … Every time I hear them honk and flutter above, I am instantly reminded of our first trip to the Round Lake campground.

March of 2015.

I was sick. I was pregnant. We knew it was a girl. We knew she had Trisomy 18. We knew she would not come home with us. We knew we needed to be within ten miles of a hospital.

And the thought of having to hide at home all summer was absolutely killing us.

We had been trying to find an option for a permanent weekend place on a lake. A lake. Any lake. As long as there was a hospital nearby. The first place we looked at we knew was just not going to work for us, with our always running away then seven year old, with water directly surrounding us on basically all four sides. The concept was great, the location however was not.

A few weeks later we found a campground with a few open permanent sights still available for the coming summer. We decided to drive down after work one Monday and check it out. We left the running away seven year old home with my parents and took along the teenager. We drove the sixty minutes north, and as I sat in silence looking out the window – my mind in its accustomed near lunacy amid our current reality… there were geese flying overhead, and there was much talk and excitement about the coming water foul hunting season.

It was cold and windy that afternoon and early evening. There was still some snow on the ground and some ice on the lake. We met the campground owners and got a tour, asked all our questions, and in the end, we chose a spot, and stepped into their house to fill out a contract and leave our deposit.

We drove away having met two new friends that day, and we also had somewhat of a plan for the summer – with a hospital within ten miles, if needed.

And now eight years have passed. Eight summers we have lived and loved and thrived at that campground. The running away seven year old is now a teenager that can even drive us there every weekend, and the then teenager is now married and visiting with his own family. In all those years between then and now, the runner has continued to do a lot of running, but has also been able to grow immensely and enjoy an amazing amount of grace and love and freedom and friendships while doing all his running.

This lake is a place we have found some healing from our pain and loss of Faith. It’s a place we have found love and grace all over new in our marriage and family. It’s a place of so many new friendships and memories and laughter.

There really aren’t words to describe it all. There are photos of sunsets and sunrises, there are garmin trackers of miles and miles I have put on training and running there. There are record size fish caught there that now hang on the walls. There are scrapbooks filled with a million photographs of our time spent there.

And it is again another March, and the geese are again honking above. The memories of that first afternoon there, again playing in my mind. The baby that was still alive within, the reality we knew we were inevitably and blindly moving (or should I more accurately say “catapulting”) towards, with a timeframe all so unknown and unwelcome and unwanted.

She was born, and she was buried, and we continued on… and have continued on… and are continuing on every day… every week… every month… every season. And it’s just hard to believe we are almost at the start of yet another season at the lake. Soon we will be on that route that will take us from our house driveway in Iowa to our camper driveway in Minnesota. We will open up the camper and we will start a new season of adventure at the lake.

And while I write this… I can’t help but think of some of the loss that has come, and will be coming, to some of the campground families as well this past year. We said goodbye to a long time friend this January. I’m not even sure how many years he and his family have been a part of the campground family – but it’s been a lot. From pop up, to 5th wheels, to the cabin… He was the one I give sole credit to for getting us there. His daily stops in the office where I was working – always talking about the lake… and would later give my hubby the name and contact info of the campground owners, who we would contact and soon meet, and would also become our new friends as well.

We said goodbye to Gene this winter… and now we are getting ready to have to say goodbye to one of those dear friends he shared with us when he gave us the campground contact info. Mike’s health has been hard over the last few years, and now we recently learned they are trying to get him back from their Arizona winter house to the lake for his final days.

Our loss brought us to that same lake so many years ago. It gave us time to rest, time to mourn, time to heal, time to grow, time to create a whole new family of friends. It’s given us so much in our journey, when so much has been also taken. And I can’t help but smile a little smile through my tears every time I hear those honking geese flap and fly overhead, as they too are on their way back to their same lakes for another season.

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