How has it been 8 years?

So attending my first prenatal classes ever, after having 3 kids, has made me think a lot about my pregnancies.  Especially the first one.  Not many people knew me during that time, but it was a little crazy and wonderful and well, just like the rest of our lives, hey?

All Part of the Plan (More or Less)

When DH and I got married, he was 19 and I had just turned 20.  We moved into a 550 sq. foot PMQ with nicotine stains on the walls and asbestos in the ceiling.  After our rent was deducted, DH brought home $580 twice a month.   I had just graduated with a 2 year diploma in Social Work.  Finding a job that didn’t pay minimum wage proved difficult, so after a few months unemployed, that’s what I worked, making $7.50 an hour working as a Care Worker at a homeless shelter for women.  Working different shifts every few days, usually overnight.  Then 9/11 happened.  DH was put on 24 hour notice to move.  For a couple months we waited for the word of when, not if, he would be deployed on this new War on Terror.

Needless to say, we felt the responsible thing to do was wait to have kids.
We had a 5 year plan.

We figured in 5 years, we would be more financially stable.  We would own a house.  I would have a great job.  5 years.  Made perfect sense.

Deer in the Headlights

7 months after the wedding and 2 1/2 months after 9/11, we learn the plan is not to be.  DH doesn’t blink for days.  I am too sick to even really grasp what has happened, all my brain can process is the floor of the bathroom that I am lying on.  A month later we quickly buy the first house we see, the move in date set a month after my due date.  02/02/02, DH is deployed.  There is no estimated date of return.  Not even a ballpark guess.  We are told it could be 3 months and it could be 12.  All I know is I haven’t kept food down in weeks and my husband just got on a bus.

 A few days later I catch a glimpse of him on the news, boots on the ground in Kandahar.  A couple weeks later he is able to call and I can tell him I heard our baby’s heartbeat for the first time.

Not the 21st Birthday You See in the Movies

Time goes on.  I turn 21.  I remember buying my own gift in the mall the day Team Canada wins Gold at the Olympics that year.  My neighbors, who thankfully turn out to be amazing people who do much for me, take me out for dinner. Slowly the fog of sickness lets up a little.  I can finally grasp what’s going on.  We’re having a baby!  My ultrasound comes up and it’s very clear to the technician.  In fact she says “well there it is, you’re having a boy”  I send DH copies of the pictures.  It takes 2 1/2 months for him to get them.

I start to plan, prepare, let myself get a little excited.  But anyone who has known me pregnant knows I hate most things about it.  I am very short.  There is little room.  I carry painfully and I usually feel nauseous.  But the days when I hate everything, my dh for abandoning me in this city with no close friends or family and this parasite inside me sucking the life out of me……those days are few and far between.  Mostly.

The reality that your husband is living in the desert, under a tent, in the middle of a war is hard to grasp.  It’s harder when weeks pass without phone calls and while this makes me sound old, there was virtually no computers access and what there was, my dh certainly didn’t have access to.  I knew nothing of his reality and he knew nothing of mine.

He called one afternoon, it was 35some degrees.  Anyone who has an 8 year old remembers the heart wave in Edmonton that summer.  He asked what I was doing.  I said I just took a cold bath and was eating ice cream in front of the fan naked.  I got silence.  He then tells me it’s almost 60 degrees and he just walked several km with full gear on to the nearest satellite phone.  And you know what, I didn’t feel even a little bit sorry for him.

And The New Reality of a Military Wife Sets In

The first tour of this new war and I remember, 10 at night, getting a call from a friend wondering if I’ve heard from DH.  Something terrible has happened.  She is instantly guilt ridden when realizing I didn’t know.  The news on TV confirms it.  The army wasn’t ready for the speed of the media and the news tells me 4 soldiers have been killed in Kandahar, but there are no names released.  Panic sets in.  I call what is sadly the only support I know in Edmonton – the family support unit at my dh’s regiment.  I get a little hysterical.  Concerned for my well being (okay, maybe a lot hysterical) they pick me up and bring me in where I refuse to leave until they tell me DH is okay.  Hours pass before they can tell me that the soldiers killed were not from his Squadron.  And my heart instantly feels guilty for my relief when I think of the poor families who were not getting the same news.  And Pvt. Nathan Smith, Sgt. Marc Leger, Cpl. Ainsworth Dyer and Pvt. Richard Green are the first Canadian Casualties of the war in Afghanistan.

Finally Something To Strive For

There was some other stuff.  A hospital visit for dehydration.  An unltrasound on the fetus’s heart.  Turns out when an obstetrition studies, he doesn’t study the cardiologists stuff.  Understandable, he has enough to remember.  But when learning I had an ASD he apparently also didn’t check the wikipedia article either.  Neither did I.  Much to the annyance of the specialist who was brought in to check my fetus for a defect that does not develope until after birth.  Best part of the useless trip, the dirty looks the other people in the waiting room gave the poor Corporal who had been asked to drive me (again, I didn’t know anyone else and wasen’t supposed to drive home from this one) when he looked at his watch and asked if I knew how long I’d be so he could wait outside.  Probably should have clarified he was just my ride, not my husband 🙂

In the midst of it all are given a date of return.  It’s a month before my due date and I am elated.   But a few weeks before it a doctors appointment reveals I am very close to giving birth.  In fact, I am 3 cm and carrying so low I swear with every step he might fall out.  The doctor confirms this is unlikely, but that I should prepare for a delivery any time.  I calmly inform him I will not be delivering until my husband returns.  Incidentally, this would not be the last time I would tell this doctor the same thing.  In fact, I would do it for the next 2 pregnancies.

I Still Have That Banner

You will notice some ambiguity on when exactly stuff happened…. it’s been 8 years.  But sometime in the last half on the tour, apparently I am such a sad case that somehow, a MCpl over with DH hears of my pathetic and lonely existence and takes the time in one of the short, sat phone convos with his wife to mention that she should call me.  And the amazing woman does.  And I am introduced to a whole group of army wives who take this sad, busting at the seams pregnant 21 year old Troopers wife under their wing.  I spend the next month tying yellow ribbons on the base and painting a banner that is placed at the gate.

It Was The Methaquin, I Swear!

The day arrives!  In a bright red maternity dress holding a yellow rose I wait with the families of 600 other men at the building they are to arrive to.  My feet are 2.5 sizes bigger and I have gone from the “morning sickness caused weight loss almost 3 month pregnant” wife he left to the “swollen, ballooned, barely able to stand upright 8 month pregnant wife” he is to return to.  It’s been over 6 months and there’s been no leave or visit.  No email.  No pictures.  He has no idea what to expect except his wife, happy he’s home.

And in true ‘hurry up and wait’ fashion,  we wait 4 hours for them to arrive.  I am pretty sure I threatened the officer in charge that I would make him personally deliver my baby right there if he didn’t give me the CORRECT timing for their arrival.  Finally the bus pulls in.  And it’s a stampede.

DH had told me a friend of his was proposing to his girlfriend when he got off the bus, so I find her and  I wait with her with a disposable camera to catch the moment.  He proposes, I take a picture hand off the camera and look for my love.  I find another woman who is crying, she can’t find her husband in the crowd and she has a stroller with a brand new baby and sign that says ‘nice to meet you daddy’.  I crumble, take her by the hand and we find her husband.  I go off again, in search of MY man.  There is a TV camera following me, I must look like a good story all pregnant and such.  But I can’t find him.  Literally every other family has been reunited.  I start to get a little frantic.  What if he wasn’t on the bus?

Someone touches me from behind and I turn and look at my tanned, smiling husband who says to me…

“You’re Huge”

And I forgive him, because I am so incredibly happy he’s home. I even forgive him that he had walked right passed me, not recognizing me in my newly *ahem* larger, state.
And he holds me forever.  And he gets down on his knees and thanks the baby for waiting.  And the TV cameras have a field day.  Until he sees them and we make our exit.

Maybe I Would Have Learned That In Prenatal

That night we end up in the hospital as I have some contractions.  They amount to little and when the nurses find out my very tired looking husband just walked in the door from Afghanistan, they can’t NOT laugh at us. That particular cause for braxton hicks had never been an issue in the pregnancy before then.

Again with my limited understanding of Irony

Almost 2 weeks later I am induced as my blood pressure has gotten dangerously high.  I walk into my induction and sign the papers for the epidural before they even start me on the drip.  12 hours of walking and drugs before my water breaks, there’s vomiting, some physical shock induced convulsions, 3 hours of pushing, and when they tell me my baby’s face up I smile because again, I didn’t take the prenatal classes to know that’s not how it’s supposed to work.  But in the end, a 7lb 5oz baby is born.  And I say…

“Look at That”

I have my reasons.  I thought more effort would be needed before he was all out (the 18 hours before than not-withstanding).  And he was blue, cone headed and slimy.  I had specifically said no messy babies on my tummy, clean them up and THEN hand them over.  You have to understand, before that moment I hadn’t so much as held a baby, never changed one, bathed one, fed, one…
But of course, they plopped him down there and I stared for a moment while DH cut the cord.  And then the moment passed and I held on, cradled him and loved him to pieces from that very moment.  Because WE THINK he’s beautiful.

This is sadly not the case.

  The blindness that all new parents have towards their baby if it is ugly is well known to us.  Looking at photos now, Freckles was a weird looking newborn.  All smooshfaced and cone headed.  But we adored him.  And the coneheadedness wears away in a day or so.  And the swelling goes down and well, he turned out awful cute!  And we still adore him.

Though I wouldn’t even discuss doing it again for another 18 months.  Once the colic was over.

 Do I think I had it terribly bad?  Not even a little.  I had an almost term healthy baby boy who’s daddy was home to welcome him.  Many can’t say the same.  It was a challenge, and different than most people plan for, but it was something special.

So why do I look at this weird and unplanned pregnancy as I do?  Because it was a blessing.  Even not including the phenomenal child that came into this world, our lives were drawn to where we are now through it all.

I have always struggled with making good choices.  I am prone to be self-destructive and hurt myself and others in the process.  When God sent DH to Kandahar, He knew I needed a reason to make good choices.  A reason to look after myself and be strong.  And He gave me Freckles.  God didn’t give me Freckles when he did to make my pregnancy, or our first deployment harder.  He gave him to me so I would make very sure I made it through.  Because He knew He had so much more planned for us.  This was only the beginning of Him doing for me what I can’t do alone.

He knew we were to come to the town we live in, where we have called home for 8 years.  We would not have bought this house had we not been in a hurry.  Not that it wasn’t the perfect house for us, because it is, but because we wouldn’t have been looking to buy a house at all if we didn’t know we had a little one on the way.

He has given me a heart for Military Wives in the same spots I have been in.  And with my experiences I am able to understand a little of their heart when they have difficult times. We are all different, no one knows each experience except the one going through it, but I have a little window into it sometimes.   My heart breaks for them and that is an answer to prayer.  I have always prayed that God would break my heart for what breaks His.  And a woman doing life alone while her husband does what he’s been called to do – I feel that hurt in a way that forces me to reach out when I might otherwise feel awkward or unsure.  

Most of all, he has a purpose for Freckles.  For my incredibly sweet, loving, compassionate child who changed my life and I know will change others.  He started before he was even born.

Comments

comments

Related posts:

Thirteen Years of Choices