Smarty Pants

 I was a bright kid with parents who valued education above most things, so I did well in school. I also talk too much, so other kids knew I knew the answers. This wasn't as much an issue in elementary school (though I did generally have more interactions with teachers and other adults than with peers) as in high school. Even in junior high, I was mostly grouped with the other nerdy kids, so I felt like I was part of that group. But moving between 9th and 10th grade meant that I joined a new high school already in progress.

Starting at that new high school was tough. Academic standards were significantly higher than my old school. But within a semester, I was back in the top 5 of my class. There were several comments from kids in my AP and Honors classes that it wasn't fair that I hadn't been there for all of high school, so my prior grades shouldn't have counted in my ranking. I was shunned for coming in and "stealing" a spot. Competitive much? I continued to work hard, befriended other students who moved in after me, and managed to graduate second in the class. I figure I earned it, but being told I hadn't proceeded to solidify my place outside.

Pastor's Kid

My dad was a pastor. I don't know how much other parents' jobs affect their kids, but being the pastor's kid meant people didn't want to be friends with me. Maybe it was because they thought I would tattle if they did something wrong, or maybe they thought I would be judgy as a result. Or maybe it had nothing to do with my dad, but there were definitely first dates in high school where faces visibly changed upon finding out and there were no second dates. Never invited to parties. I drew conclusions, but I still think they were accurate. It took going off to college to get out from under the thumb of my dad's role in the community.

Always the New Kid

 We moved a lot. Like A LOT. I was in two different kindergartens, five different second grades, moved during fifth grade, and between ninth and tenth. Between the moves and the different school districts breaking up elementary, middle, and high school differently, I was perpetually the new kid. 

Small towns don't do a very good job of embracing a new kid. So, I didn't make a lot of friends, and tended to be with the other kids that no one liked. This led to situations like the Halloween party that I got invited to as a joke in 4th grade, and the rumors my one friend (also new to school that year) and I were lesbians in 5th grade. And getting called an N-word lover for sitting on the bus with the one kid that no one would interact with in 7th grade. And creating The I'm Normal Other People Are Weird Society with my one friend in 8th grade.

I think it made me more aware of left out kids, and made me a champion of the underdog. But it has helped solidify me as kind of an outcast with difficulty finding my place in groups.

Living in the Philippines

 We moved to the Philippines when I was 5, and come back when I was 7-and-a-half. During the first 6-8 months, we were living in Quezon City, so we saw other Americans most of the time. We lived in an ex-pat area and I was young, so I didn't really understand that we were viewed as invaders and colonizers.

Then we moved out into the barrio, and lived there for two years. There, we were the only white people at all. Everyone else spoke Ilocano or Tagalog, had brown skin, and were Catholic. That last part was important, since my dad was a Lutheran missionary. So, while we learned Ilocano, we didn't speak it fluently, were white, and were protestant. "Other" in very obvious ways. I remember comments about how funny it was that we got sunburns. Or that they didn't realize American men could get pregnant.

I became acutely aware of my other-ness here. We didn't go to school with the kids in the barrio -- mom homeschooled us. We had two live-in helpers, a full-time gardener, a house with a foundation and a window AC unit in one room. I was aware, even at that young age, of our privilege, though I didn't understand that Americans were hated. I knew we left quickly. Decades later I understood that was due to death threats received by our family in the aftermath of political unrest that ousted most US presence from the country.

Six Eyes

 When I was three, it was determined that I could see almost nothing with my left eye. I was subsequently diagnosed with a birth defect in the lens that led to surgery at age 5 to remove it and start down a path of patching, contact lenses, and bifocals to try to get any functioning vision in that 20/2000 uncorrected eye. In the 80s, there was no concept of progressives, so the bifocal line and the patch I had to wear to force usage were very visible to other kids in my elementary years. 

Especially in 3rd and 4th grade, I remember a ton of playground teasing. "Arrrrrrrrr! Heather's a pirate!" was annoying, but "four eyes" was definitely the most frequent. Not willing to just accept criticism for something I had no control over needing, I trained myself to retort "No, I have six eyes -- two eyes, one contact lens, one regular glasses lens, and two halves of bifocal lenses." It seemed to work in that people teasing me. I assume they mostly rolled their eyes at so much explanation, but I felt like I was taking control of that situation.

Having glasses (or being a smarty-pants know-it-all) meant I didn't have many friends. Most people just ignored me when it came to kickball games or group projects or parties. I knew I was different, but I didn't know how to keep those differences from ostracizing me.

Being an Outsider

 In my last therapy session, she made a good point that I identify very hard with being an outsider. There is definitely some truth to this, and I do know that I really hate feeling like an outsider. Things like moving away and suddenly hearing nothing about what's going on with my friends. Or finding out about a block party where our invitation was lost and feeling left out. Working for a company where I have an influential role, but I don't live in the headquarters city. I hate inside jokes, etc. etc. etc.

So, I'm going to try to spend some time thinking about old stories from my past where I have been the outsider. There have been a lot of them, so I figured I'd just use this old space to hold these old stories as I pull them together. It will be a little chaotic and timeline jumpy, but I agree that this is an important exercise for me to do to figure out where the root of this comes from, so I can figure out how not to be quite so butt-hurt when these kinds of things inevitably happen.

Rambling Thoughts About Men in Powerful Positions

Just gonna write. I've been MIA for a long time -- raising two little boys, working, living life. Too much to cover in some sort of weird little catch-up post. But I have things I need to process and things I need to write about, so I'm going to use this spot. I haven't ever been much for journaling, and besides -- at this point in digital life, my hand cramps from writing 3-5 sentences in a Valentine's card. So hand-writing is out.

But I can type. Lord knows I can type. Oftentimes with emotion, mostly fury and seething righteousness, but certainly with a speed that can (mostly) match the insanity in my head. So that's my vehicle. Microblogging over on Twitter (@strangeHeatherr), and longer processing over here. And I have virtually no followers, so this is really just for me to see what I'm thinking on "paper" and use that to order my brain a little bit better.

Right now, I'm just trying to make sense of several big church scandals (namely the Hillsong mess with Carl Lentz, and the RZIM mess with Ravi Zacharias). And there's no sense to be made. Truly. Too much power, too much assumption of being untouchable, too much human-worship, and you end up with lots of sin and corruption.

But more than that, I'm thinking about my own abuse for years at the hands of my pastor-father, and the complicated things that play in there. He was no media darling, but I still felt some of those same feelings described by the victims in these scandals and that victims of abuse (especially sexual abuse) feel, regardless of perpetrator.

"If I came forward, how many people would be hurt? Lose their faith?"

"What would I accomplish anyway? He's bigger and more powerful than I am."

"I would be wrecking my family."

"No one would forgive me."

"There's probably nobody else being abused."

And so you convince yourself not to say anything. Deal with it quietly. Try to avoid public confrontation (though there was no choice but to confront within my family unit, and we did). Because it doesn't go well for the accuser. Anyone else still remember Christine Blasey Ford's treatment during her (very believable) accusations? Did anyone actually see that as Brett Kavanaugh being on trial versus her being on trial? Which of them had to move, hire security, go underground? Which of them got rewarded with the top prize of their profession? It certainly didn't go the way of the accuser.

So we victims stay quiet. What's the point of bothering? In my case, the only thing that justified talking about those abuses, was to protect my sisters living with the same man. One sister had one devastating experience. The other was saved from actual experience, but was brought into the fold of the family skeletons at much too young an age (12), in order to allow her to fend for herself while the other sisters had left the toxic nest. My mother, also, had to come to her own reckoning of those things that had happened under her roof, on her watch. And she missed the signs. When confronted, she asked her 19-year-old daughter for marital advice. I refused to play that role. That question was one they would have to wrestle with. I'm guessing they didn't, or at least kept those conversations incredibly well-concealed.

So, I guess that's the answer. That's why people come forward -- to prevent more people from being abused, traumatized. To prevent bad behavior from escalating into really scary stuff. And to try and make their experiences mean something -- that someone else doesn't get hurt like they did. Blech.

Starting to Discuss

The way we've decided to talk through the adoption process probably isn't the way other couples might do it. But, we do what we do, and I may as well put it out there.

We found an agency through my church, and downloaded their adoptive parents pre-questionnaire. The first pages are easy enough -- questions about us, our ethnicity, jobs, religion, health, age, etc. Then there are the pages about what kinds of children we would be interested in adopting. This is a really loaded part of the questionnaire, because who wouldn't want to adopt any child who needed them? But it's harder than that. This isn't a matter of pulling up to the drive-through at McDonalds and ordering up your perfect kid. But it is about what kinds of adoptive issues you're prepared to deal with. And going through these questions are helping us sort through our reasons for adopting and have good conversations about our fears and hopes for how this process may go. Anything that fosters honest conversation is a win in my book. It may take us a long time to work through that questionnaire, but at the end of it, I think we will have a much better idea of what we want to do next with it.

For example, the first question asks about the race of the child. We'd all like to believe we are colorblind and none of us are racists, only willing to adopt a child that looks like us. On the other hand, if we adopt a child of a different race, everyone knows we've adopted that child. Say we adopt a black child. We will get every manner of question from random strangers who might ask (right in front of the child, no less) whether we love Caleb more than our adopted child, or if we didn't believe that the black community would have been a better place for that child, or who knows what else. Do we need to be showy about the fact that we've adopted? Or would it be better not to attract the immediate attention of people around us because we're a "different" looking family? Would it be better for the child to be able to plausibly blend in rather than sticking out? Would we be lining them up to be rejected by their black peers for having a white family while also being rejected by their white peers for not being white? Or does this require everyone around us and them to have to figure out how to make the world a better place for people of all races? And as long as we're talking about "better," better for whom? Is it better for that child to grow up in foster care? Shuffled from family member to family member? Not having anyone to call "mom" and "dad"?

Ultimately, we decided there are only two options. Either we are only willing to adopt a white child, or race doesn't matter. We couldn't think of any reason we would be willing to adopt a black child but not an Asian child or a Native American/Hispanic child. So, we're either wanting to make it look to a stranger that we have a "natural" family, or we're okay with random people looking at us and knowing we have an adopted child. There were a lot of options on that list, but finally, we checked the "Any" box.

I don't think we have rose-colored glasses about what that could mean. We know it will be hard, and we will deal with rudeness. But the thought of rejecting a child from being part of our family simply because of the color of his or her skin just broke us down. We couldn't do that if we could provide them with a better life.

New Thoughts on Family Making

So, we've had a crazy month in my little family. Caleb turned one, had hand-foot-and-mouth disease, fell on his head and broke his collarbone. RB got a sinus infection. I had my first post-D&C period which became a suspected ectopic pregnancy. Too much. Really, just too much.

RB is doing better, Caleb is almost all healed up and nearly walking, and I survived my period. One thing I didn't expect, though, was that when we were looking the possibility of dead baby #3, I realized I'm not sure I can deal with that. Sure, I am not real excited about being pregnant again. But the risk that that abysmal pregnancy could turn into not a live baby that I can take home at the end of it is really still there. I have no reasons for my two miscarriages. I don't know if I can take the diagnosis of habitual aborter that comes with a third. Seriously. Who in the medical community thought that was a good name for people who have recurring miscarriages?

At the end of the day, between the likelihood that I would be sick for 9 months (or however long I manage to carry another baby) and the likelihood that I wouldn't be able to carry the baby long enough to get it to viability, we've started talking about other options.

I've always wanted to adopt. There are just too many babies out there who need good homes. And we could be one of them. I have never felt like I would have to be biologically connected to a child to love it and bond with it. We just didn't pursue it right off, since my initial research showed that having been married less than 2-5 years put us in an unlikely-to-be-considered camp. I've since found that to fall in the not-strictly-true camp, but that's what started us on trying to have a biological child. Faster, less red tape, and a smaller likelihood that we would deal with the emotional roller coaster that is adoption.

But now we're on an emotional roller coaster regardless. And we've been married the amount of time at which many of the agencies in our area will consider us. So, we're reconsidering the possibility.

I don't want to give the impression that adoption is easier or somehow a fall-back option or anything like that. It just wasn't an option for us before, and it is now. I'm not even entirely sure if this is what we want to do. Heck, there are days we aren't sure we should even add another child to our brand of crazy. But I want to think it through and make sure we don't have a defaulted decision by aging out or otherwise delaying until it's impractical. I'm still learning all the ways that I have to be delicate in talking about something like this, but I have to start putting pen to paper in order to process this decision.

Dark Can Be Funny, Right?

This pregnancy wasn't planned. We had started talking about the possibility of trying this summer to give Caleb a little sibling, but we hadn't entirely agreed on that timeline. No, we weren't preventing. But considering it took us months to get pregnant before, while actively charting, I didn't really think we were in the market for an Oops. And, yet, that's precisely what happened.

Pregnancy was so far off my radar that I was 10 days late before I even thought to test. Not 10 days past ovulation, but 10 days after I was supposed to get my period. And I'm one of those clockwork cycle ladies.

But we started to adjust to the idea of two under two, RB and I did. And we joked about Caleb's baby twin sisters, because three under two is even more funny. We figured out the baby would be due on New Years' Eve, and so we nervously laughed about our Halloween baby. The only thing funnier than three under two, apparently, is two babies in the NICU with a 15-month-old at home.

As we adjusted and warmed to the idea of trading the Mini Cooper for a minivan, we were starting to actually get excited about this little pickle we'd gotten ourselves into. We codenamed the baby "Inchworm" (Caleb was "Tadpole" until he was 4 days old), and we started to talk about room adjustments and carseat purchases and whether a third baby was in the cards for the future.

However, my progesterone numbers were falling. Not terribly surprisingly, yesterday afternoon the doctor couldn't find a heartbeat anywhere. At 8 weeks, it shouldn't be hard to find a heartbeat, so the pregnancy has been officially called non-viable. We have a D&C scheduled for next week, and then we'll let my body recover before diving into trying again.

In a world where a quarter of all pregnancies end in miscarriage, and a world where some people never have one, there are some of us doomed to have more. No one ever plans to be in the 3-pregnancies-1-child camp, but here I find myself. At least I do have that one child, and he is such a joy. I can't lose sight of that, even though times like this are hard.

So, now that my dark sense of humor is clear, and since I obviously cope oddly, I have to share this song whose slightly modified version is stuck in my head:

Go ahead and watch it. It's only about 2 minutes long. I'll wait.

And you're welcome. I can now virtually guarantee this song will be stuck in your head, too. Because, well, dead babies aren't much fun, either, but the song is catchy.

Why Being Pregnant Scares Me

So, yeah, still (probably) pregnant. Still in a bit of denial here.

Obviously, some of my nervousness comes from the fact that Caleb is so young. He still doesn't sleep through the night (well, maybe 1-2 nights a week he will), so I will go from no sleep while pregnant to no sleep while in the NICU to no sleep with a baby to no sleep while pregnant to no sleep with a baby (hoping to skip the NICU this time). That is a really long time to be sleep-deprived.

The other part of it is that I'm just straight up bad at being pregnant. If you don't want to know about the ugly side of being pregnant, you should skip the rest of this post. For real.

Don't say I didn't warn you.

I was so sick with Caleb that I lost weight while pregnant. People don't normally do that unless they are already pretty overweight to start with. I was probably 13-15 pounds overweight when I got pregnant, and after delivery I was 10 pounds underweight. I got a lot of comments about looking like a pregnant skeleton. The problem was I couldn't eat much of anything except salad and fish. You try gaining weight on that diet. Everything made me sick -- smells, textures, flavors. I threw up a lot. I threw up at work. I threw up in the shower. It was not fun. And then at 10 weeks, while trying desperately not to throw up in the trash can in the waiting room, I "got" to take the glucose drink test to diagnose gestational diabetes. Since I had GD, I was forbidden from the diet I would have preferred -- goldfish and Kraft macaroni and cheese -- and had to cut most of the carbs from my already limited diet. No dairy and very little fruit either.

Regardless of the fact that my body was quite sick with all the hormonal changes, I was not producing enough progesterone. Since I had had a previous miscarriage, it was determined that supplementing my already-crazy hormone levels with extra progesterone would be fun. Yay for twice-daily vaginal suppositories through week 12 that are amazingly nasty and guarantee nothing!

At 14 weeks, I gave into the nausea, and went on drugs. I was like a whole new person. It was amazing. I figured it would be short term (maybe I would be one of those women sick for -- gasp! -- 4 months instead of 3!), but every time I tried to wean myself off, I was right back to miserable and pukey. The last time I tried to stop taking them was (inadvertently) the week I ended up delivering. I took my pile of pills each night, including the anti-nauseal, and was usually able to make it through the day with just one dose. That week there was a day that I was sick all day, and figured I'd have to up my dose. Then I went to take my pills that night, and saw my cute little Zofran from the night before wedged in my little pill container, all sad that it had been missed. That's my proof the nausea wasn't psychosomatic, as some had suggested.

Zofran, while wonderful at controlling nausea, did terrible other things to my body. The constipation was so bad that I was consuming 40 grams of fiber in food each day, while taking psyllium husk supplements, and every couple of days I'd still have to take milk of magnesia to manage to do number two in 30-45 minutes. Truly miserable. For the silver lining, though, I figured I got an opportunity to practice my birthing visualizations and relaxing my pelvic floor and pushing out those enormous "butt babies." Seriously, they were so big I couldn't flush them.

My goal was a birthing center birth, so that meant I had to be "low risk". I was, however, automatically "high risk" because I'm over 35. And then I had GD, and found out that if I had to be medicated for it, that would move me up the risk ladder enough that the birth center would have to transfer me elsewhere. So, I controlled that GD with diet. It was hard, but I learned so much about what kinds of things made my body more resistant to insulin, so in addition to what I ate, I controlled my stress levels (through deep breathing, yoga, exercise, reduced hours at work, etc.). It was exhausting, but I was sure it would be worth it.

And then I up and delivered little Caleb at 32 weeks. No warnings from my body, just POP! goes the membranes, and out comes a baby, three hours later, leading to a lovely 40-day NICU stay. I could get all I-didn't-get-the-birth-experience-I-was-looking-for here, but that's not really it. It's just part of how bad I was and this whole pregnancy thing -- I couldn't even carry to close to term.

So, here I am, 8 weeks along, massively nauseous and hating my body for doing this to me. Again. I have some Zofran leftover from Caleb, so I've taken a few doses to keep from descending into the crappiness that I dealt with before. I've given up on any thought of a birthing center birth or a low-risk pregnancy. I'm hearing the same song and dance about low progesterone, and expect to be on the suppositories by week's end. But I'm hoping -- hoping!! -- that we'll see/hear a heartbeat on ultrasound later this week, and looking forward to starting to look forward to this little baby, even with all the ickiness and such that is certain to be my path for the next 5-7 months.

 And since no one has told me otherwise, I'm eating goldfish for an afternoon snack. I already had mac and cheese for lunch. So sue me. I'm going to survive pregnancy as well as I can until it becomes the miserable hell that I know is coming.