Work

In the past year, I've lived three separate and distinct lives.  Until February 19th, I lived the happy life of a young wife, working full time, ready to start a family, and living independently in a house with her husband.  From February 19th to October 6th, I lived the life of a pregnant widow, living back at home with her parents, still working full time, trying everything to have a healthy pregnancy while also dealing with the extreme grief and emotional stress of losing a spouse.  Since October 6th, I've been living the life of a new single mother, very much dependent on her family, still living at home with her parents, learning to be the provider and caretaker for her daughter all hours of the day while on maternity leave.  At the end of this month, yet another new life will start for me- one in which I return to work.  I have been dreading this day for many months now, but the closer the day gets the more I begin to panic.

I think most new mothers struggle with this time - after weeks of being at home with a beautiful new baby, the thought of being away from that child for forty plus hours a week is tough.  Most women who plan to be mothers venture into motherhood with a plan - either they choose to become working mothers or stay at home mothers, and there are passionate feelings connected with that decision.  I always expected that I would be a working mom, for many reasons.  As a young woman, the idea of staying at home with kids all week never appealed to me.  I always expected I would be too career-minded to be a full time mother, and that I'd have a job that I loved and wouldn't want to leave behind.  By the time having children became a reality for me though, my opinion had changed a bit.  I like my job, but I can't say I love it enough to be desperate to go back.  When Ryan and I started planning to have children, I started to see the drawbacks of working in my current situation.  I work 8:30-5:00 every day, some Saturdays, some evenings, depending on workload.  Ryan definitely would have been home with the kids more than me, and I worried about him having the chance to get closer to them than I would.  I've often wished that my job had more flexibility, or the opportunity to work from home, but it just doesn't work like that.

With all of that in mind, Ryan and I discussed our options frequently.  My own mother was a working mom, so that was my model.  Ryan's, however, was a stay at home mom, and he thought that was the best thing for a family.  His preference was that we not put our kids in day care, that I stay home, and that he provide for us.  But, he recognized that financially that might not have been possible.  For my part, the more I thought about it, the more staying home sounded like a good idea - I could use the time to reassess my own career and future, and maybe take some online classes.  We never really made a firm decision about what we were going to do.  I remember us having a conversation about it around a year ago, before I was pregnant, and Ryan said that once I got pregnant we'd have nine months to figure it out.  Not having a more specific plan gave me all kinds of anxiety.  When I did get pregnant, in the little bit of time we had to talk about it, we thought that I would take all of the time off I was allowed, and then see how I felt about returning.  I could have even gone back to work for a month, then decided it wasn't for me and changed course.  It was all very fluid, and I felt that I had options and support in my decisions.  Ryan told me over and over again how he would support whatever choice I made, and that whatever I did, we would make it work.

Now though, I feel as though I have no choices, no options, and I feel trapped by my circumstances.  I felt this for months before Sophie came, as the reality of my situation sank in.  Any option that I had to be a stay at home mom has evaporated.  If I want to regain my independence, and for Sophie and I to one day have a place of our own, I absolutely need to work full time.  Even if I wanted to stay living with my parents, I probably would still need to work full time for healthcare alone.  In one way, I know am very lucky- many single mothers would need to be concerned about the cost of childcare, and the difficulty of leaving their child with a stranger.  I have the best childcare that money can't buy- two loving grandmothers who probably wouldn't allow me to use daycare even if money wasn't a concern.  I have the fortune to be able to leave Sophie with people who know her, love her, and will give her what is probably better care than I could provide if I were at home, since they both have many years of experience.  But, I do have to leave her.  I have to commute many miles, work all day five days a week, lose valuable bonding time, and miss milestones.  Though I very likely would have done this even if Ryan were here,  the difference is that I would have been making a conscious decision to do so.  Now I am doing so out of necessity.  My lack of options is disheartening, and it's very difficult for me to see a bright spot on the horizon.  All I can see right now is how bright the horizon would have been in my old life.

How on earth am I going to manage being a single working mother?  When Sophie keeps me up late at night, I pace the floor and struggle to imagine how I would manage if I had to be at work the next day.  In the first few weeks of Sophie's life, the "how am I going to do this" was only a distant worry; I had twelve weeks to work it out.  Now though, I'm down to three weeks.  I don't know how I'll be able to work an eight hour day, with a twenty mile commute each way, on three hours of sleep.  I already can see how stressed out I'll get in the middle of the night when she's not sleeping, and I know my chance to sleep is ticking away.  I'll do this middle of the night stuff alone.  I don't have a husband to hand her off to so that I can sleep a couple of hours.  I do have my mother, who has been my savior, but I can't help feeling bad waking her.  I also don't have Ryan to offer support when I'm losing my mind that I'm feeding Sophie for the third time in two hours, or to commiserate with when we are both dead tired in the morning and both have to face a day of work.  It's not that I have no support; it's that I don't have the support I need.

I'm worried about plenty of other things too.  When I leave her, will she start to become closer to her grandparents than she is to me?  Everyone tells me no, but I can't help thinking about it.  Will I miss the first time she rolls over, or crawls, or walks?  I'm bound to miss something, but then, I suppose most mothers do, even  stay at home moms.  How will I manage everything I have to do in the few hours I'll have to do it?  I already have a tough time getting things done in a day, things like laundry, paying my bills, running errands, everything seems to take forever to get done right now.  On top of that, I'm trying to clean out my house, sell it, and find a home for Ryan's possessions.  I have a hard time imagining, once I add in a forty hour work week, how I will get done everything I have to do, plus spend quality time with Sophie.  That's all not to mention finding time for other pleasures: hobbies, a social life, exercise, relaxation.  It's daunting on my best days, insurmountable on my worst.

I'm admittedly a worrier, and I always have been.  Hopefully things won't be as bad as I'm afraid they will be.  It's undeniable though that I face a lot of challenges, challenges that I wouldn't face or that would be easier to face if I had a partner.  And knowing that, what I've lost, what I'm missing, sometimes it's so oppressive that I feel like I can't even lift my head up, I just want to lie in bed and cry.  That, of course, is not an option (not a viable one at least), so I have to talk myself into believing that there is a light, if not on the horizon, then over it somewhere, that will eventually come into view.

Things I Wish I Was Thankful For

When I woke up this morning around 5 a.m. to feed Sophie, the news was covering the preparations for the Thanksgiving Day parade.  Sitting in my bed at my parents' house, alone with Sophie, I was abruptly reminded that today is my first Thanksgiving without Ryan.  Anyone grieving will tell you that holidays are hard.  This is such a common statement, that "holiday grief" might as well be added as one of the stages of grief.  It's only because it's the holiday I'm dealing with now, but Thanksgiving seems to me like a particularly tough one, because there's so much tradition attached to it.  Ryan and I did something a little different for Christmas every year, but Thanksgiving was always the same.

I have a job that gets very demanding in November and December, and I've always had to work all of Thanksgiving week, often extra hours, with the exception of the day itself.  Ryan's schedule teaching was always much freer.  Thanksgiving week was an exciting week for me, knowing that I'd have a whole day off that Thursday.  And also, I love Thanksgiving - I always have.  It's the perfect holiday, a celebration of food.  This is exactly why Ryan was not thrilled with the day - he was the world's pickiest eater, and Thanksgiving dinner was not on his approved list of foods.  If there could have been a holiday where everyone ate sausages and potato chips with onion dip, that's one he could have gotten on board with.

What he did love about Thanksgiving was visiting with family, which, with his family, started the day before.  Every year his aunt, uncle, and young cousins would come into town, often his grandmothers, and sometimes other famly members too.  Halfway through the day I'd always get a phone call at work telling me to come over to his family's house right after work and have dinner and hang out with the whole family.  He was always in such a great mood when I got there, very festive and relaxed, and attentive to me, knowing how tired I would be after work.  I remember last year I had had a particularly rough day and was on my feet a lot, running around, and I did something to my toe.  When I finally got to Ryan's parents' house, I told him that I thought I had broken my toe.  He was so concerned, he wanted his sister, who is a doctor, to look at it and wouldn't let me stand anymore.  It was ridiculous, it was just a toe, but his concern made me feel so cared for, so loved.

On Thanksgiving morning, I always slept in.  For the record, I love sleeping in, it's the greatest.  My job requires me to wake up extra early on Black Friday morning, so I would always take advantage of not having to be anywhere right away on Thanksgiving itself.  Ryan and I would sit in bed and watch the Philadelphia Thanksgiving Day parade.  I grew up watching it, so it's always been tradition for me, but Ryan thought it was pretty ridiculous.  He watched parts of it with me anyway though, just to spend time with me.  This morning when the parade started, I ached to be at my house in my bed with Ryan watching the parade and drinking our morning coffee.

After our long morning in, we'd go over to Ryan's parents' house and eat ourselves silly.  Correction:  I would eat myself silly.  Ryan would eat a lot of cheese and crackers, but then come to the dinner table with a plate of green beans and bread.  No turkey, no cranberries, no stuffing.  It was Thanksgiving blasphemy, but that was Ryan.  The day's saving grace for him was the football, which he could sit and watch with his family for hours on end, regardless of who was playing.  

After the long day of eating and football, Ryan was usually anxious to get home.  I always managed to persuade him though to make a stop at my parents' house to see my family, and maybe play a few games.  We were very lucky to have both of our families nearby, and we could spend time with both of them every holiday.  It was the perfect situation for when we had a family of our own - we knew we'd never have to disappoint either side.  When we finished at my parents' house, we'd go home before too late so I could get to bed - I had to be ready to wake up early for a Black Friday work marathon, a day when I have to work twelve hours or more.  

The great thing about this year is that I'm on maternity leave, so for the first time ever, I don't have to work on Black Friday, nor did I have the crazy hours leading up to Thanksgiving.  I've been able to spend the week at home, relaxing with Sophie, and spending time with Ryan's family and my own.  The bad news is, of course, that Ryan isn't able to enjoy it with me.  When we found out about my pregnancy, and when I would be due, Ryan was incredibly excited that I would be able to be home for the holidays, and not have to work.  In the ten days that we had before Ryan died in which we knew I was pregnant, we fantasized about Thanksgiving week in particular, knowing that I would be able to enjoy the whole holiday without thinking about work.  Like so many other things, it's a fantasy that is left in my mind, never actualized.

Today, I know that I'll feel what I've felt so many times this year - extreme loneliness.  Being around people makes the loneliness somehow both better and worse.  Ryan's absence is felt every minute of every day, but it's often worse when I look around and see the rest of my family with their partners, and I no longer have mine.  I'll spend my day today with my parents, my sister and her husband, and my nephew and his fiancee.  They'll put their arms around each, hold hands, have little couples' spats, smile at each other, and at the end of the day go to bed next to each other.  I won't be able to stop thinking about how much I want to be able to do the same with Ryan.  I'll be missing him being glued to the couch watching football, I'll be missing his pathetic Thanksgiving plate, I'll be missing his arm on the back of my chair at dinner.  

Our family has never been much for the tradition of taking turns saying what we're thankful for, but I know many people feel that's what the day is for- being thankful.  While I'm of course thankful for my beautiful and healthy daughter, I'm having a difficult time being thankful for much else.  I'm still awfully angry, still feeling very much like my chance at happiness was stolen from me.  I feel it worse when the loneliness comes on strong.  I know I'll be feeling it a lot in the next month, and there's not much I can do to stop it.  I don't feel that I should avoid the holidays, because I want Sophie to enjoy them and start to have holiday traditions of her own.  Over the years it will become less difficult, but this year I'm just stuck with a lot of things I wish I still had to be thankful for.

I Had a Baby

On October 5th, 2013, my family and I were working on the Herculean task of packing up and removing Ryan's things from our house.  After a physically and emotionally exhausting day, we went to dinner and then returned to the house to pick up a few last things.  Then, 10 days ahead of schedule, my water broke.  For the second time in a year, I found myself in the midst of a life changing event while at that house.  This time though, the result was much happier.

Sophie Elizabeth was born the next morning, at 5:23, and she is the new love of my life.  I could go into a lot of detail about the labor and the emotions I went through, but a lot of that seems unnecessary to tell.  There was pain, there was excitement and anticipation, and there was a person missing from the room.  Like most mothers, I think I'll always remember every little detail.  At the end, the doctor and nurses put Sophie up on my chest, and these beautiful blue eyes looked up at me, and I don't even have words for that feeling.  It's not what people said it would be, partly because I'd wager they didn't have the proper words for it either.  It also, thankfully, wasn't what I feared it would be in my last post.  It was something all its own, something I will probably never feel again.

It was tough in the labor and delivery room without Ryan, but most of the time I was able to focus on getting Sophie here.  My sister and Mom held my hands, they calmed me through contractions and coached me through pushes.  I felt waves of sadness, but they came and went.  I was mostly excited, full of anticipation.  In the first couple of days after she was born, I was the most purely happy I'd been since the day before Ryan died.  Not completely happy - there was, and is, still such a hole in my heart and in my life.  And I knew, right away, that despite how happy I felt looking at her and holding her, that I should be even happier.  If Ryan were alive, and we'd just gone through all of those weeks of pregnancy and the hours of labor together, and then held each others' hands while holding our new baby together, the joy I would have felt would have been pure and unadulterated.  Thinking of what that might have felt like infuriates me.  I feel like I had a right to that perfect day, and it was taken from me, just like everything else.  But, at least for a while, I could hold off those thoughts and focus on the happiness that I was able to feel.  Joy was an emotion I didn't remember anymore.  All of these months of waiting for her, living for the abstract notion of her, she's arrived- a perfect, fully formed human, created from a tiny little cell from me and a tiny little cell from Ryan.

It's completely incomprehensible for me to think of that - Ryan and I made her, and Ryan isn't here to know her.  In a way they feel like two completely distinct and separate parts of my life, with very little in common.  There is nothing about my current lifestyle that has any semblance to my old lifestyle, the life I live with Ryan.  There's no overlap or shared experiences.  Of course though, without him, there would be no her.  Since she's been here, I've felt a little like Ryan is even farther away from me.  Everybody says how your life changes when you have a baby.  Some people have even told me that I wouldn't remember what my life was like before a baby.  I can say that the day she was born, my world did change.  I hope the second part isn't true though- I don't want to ever forget what my life was like before her, because those were some of the happiest times of my life.  I'm desperately sad that they can't overlap.  Why do I only get to have one?  I want Ryan and Sophie at the same time.  I had eight happy years with Ryan.  Then, 8 months of misery.  Now, I'll have many years with Sophie, hopefully happy years.  It is cruel that fate made it so that I can't have them both at the same time.  Most people say that the birth of their children is the happiest day of their lives.  As joyful as I was that morning, I can't really say that.  I have two happiest days - the day of her birth, which was happy, but marked with such sadness since Ryan wasn't there, and my wedding day, which was a perfect day but I have a hard time thinking about now without crying.

For the time being, I am able to mainly think about my life with her.  I didn't want a new life, but she makes it worth living.  She is the most beautiful little thing on the planet, born a petite 7 pounds, 0 ounces, and 19 inches long, and with a head full of dark hair.  She has perfect little facial features and is full of adorable little expressions and gestures.  I love her more than anything in this world.  In a movie, this would be the ending, a happy resolution to a sad story.  In reality, things don't tie up so neatly.  My story, for better and worse, goes on, and it will often be very difficult.  With Sophie here though, I can see a little more of what that future might look like.