Birthday celebrations...post-kid style

I am writing under pressure tonight as I set this personal goal to blog once a week. I thought that seemed fairly reasonable, but as it turns out…it is damn hard - made especially hard by our annual trip to Spew Central this week (which requires its own post)!

Anyway, my personal deadline passed yesterday and now I’m all antsy about missing the deadline when there really is no deadline at all.

So rather than wait to write a piece of moderate quality - I thought I’d rush and produce a piece of crap – just to meet my personal deadline.

What I should be doing is writing the piece my therapist asked me to write on guilt and sabotage (why I do it to myself, not others), which is due in two days, and which I am feeling increasingly guilty about not completing.

Is it any surprise I am seeing a therapist?

The other reason I wanted to rush this one is because today is Pineman’s birthday and we celebrated post-kid style.

Celebrating a birthday post-kid style is like waking up and celebrating a Monday. There was really nothing different about awakening today except the four squishy hands prising apart our eyelids were also thrusting presents enthusiastically at Pineman – oh, and no one was vomiting.

We washed and fed people and fed ourselves and packed lunches and packed bags and dropped kids at respective care centres and I forgot to take my lunch to work and Pineman had to drop it in and then he was home alone – on his birthday – watching a James Bond flick on DVD and eating takeaway for lunch. And then he picked up kids from care arrangements and I came home from work early – with a cake – to surprise him and he was standing at the front door, drinking mocha, and looking every one of his forty four years.  

He told me the highlight of his day was realising that Octopussy was not about a girl with eight vaginas. He later changed his highlight to witnessing my top falling down when I was dancing in the kitchen – his highlight, not mine.

He washed more people while I cooked pork chops and carrot and potato and frozen peas and corn for dinner.

 The Ranga had a tantrum because he wanted to wear the pyjamas with the robots and the tractors and the monsters.  The Ranga threw his water on the floor because he wanted the Lightning McQueen cup and not the Batman cup. The Ranga threw his pork on the floor because…well because he has issues with food and certain cups and pyjamas and etiquette. Miss C started whingeing about peas and pork, and I got worked up and started using my OUTSIDE VOICE!

Pineman asked the kids if they cared about his birthday or just the cake, to which they replied in unison, “just the cake”.

They redeemed themselves momentarily with a round of apologies and a rollicking rendition of Happy Birthday to You.  

The Ranga pulled apart his cake and squished it between his fingers because he doesn’t like cream or jam or small servings of cake.

Pineman got ready for a nightshift at work and walked out the door indicating that he might play his “birthday privileges card” when he gets home after midnight.

Well, it’s now 1:18am, no sign of Pineman – birthday privileges revoked!

Good night.

When life hands you lemons…

Sometimes life hands you lemons. Sometimes it hands you the whole friggin’ orchard!

Seven years ago today we lost our first baby at fifteen weeks gestation to a congenital birth abnormality. It was a little boy. And when he died, a piece of me died too.

His condition was called Megacystis, which in simple terms meant he had an enlarged bladder. In reality, it meant death was inevitable. We made an impossible choice.

At the time I felt like a spectator watching a car spiralling out of control and slamming into a tree. Except I wasn’t a spectator, I was driving the car.

I tried desperately to crawl out of the wreck, grasping at anything that could help me escape my situation, but when pregnancy number two (another son) ended abruptly at fourteen and a half weeks gestation for an unrelated chromosome abnormality, I was emotionally spent.

It must have been some overwhelming instinctual desire that took over after that, because there was no good intellectual reason for trying again – the odds were certainly not in our favour. In that time I juiced thousands of lemons.

My third pregnancy was different from the beginning, but the vice-like grip around my chest never really allowed me to believe it. My focus was always on the finish line, and when I found out the due date was three days before today’s date, I knew my baby would be born late.

As I laboured through the night, I realised my prophecy was coming true - my first living child was going to be born on the second anniversary of my first son’s death.  I felt the planets align that morning.

Five years ago today I gave birth to a daughter. She was my daughter and she was tiny and pink and breathing, and when I held her to my chest, she urinated down the front of me just to let me know that her little bladder was working.

And now she is five, and she is one of the sweetest, most complicated little people I know. When I look at her I see myself, which both delights and terrifies me.  She is creative and inquisitive and caring, and at the core of her being is someone who loves with her whole heart – and I love her with all of mine.

Five years ago today, with the scars from the squeezing indelibly etched, I learnt how to make lemonade.