Oakley's Birth (Pt. 3) Goodness and Grief

If you missed part 1, find it here

All tears dried and a holy quiet settled over me. Dave whispered in my hair, “You did it Carrie. That was amazing. We have a son!”

Nurses draped warm towels over us and begin discussing logistics of getting us out, but I was again in my own world. This one of total bliss. The fact that 5 minutes ago and for the last 20 hours I’d been consumed by pain was already an impossibly distant memory.

It was as if a breeze had rustled heaven’s curtain. For a moment, I was not seeing hospital walls but a glimpse into paradise.

“Let’s get you out before either of you get cold,” Kim said. Gentle hands supported me while others carefully held the baby against me, his cord still attached. My biggest concern with a water birth was having to stand up so shortly after delivery. But I felt no faint or nauseous twinge. I walked the path of white towels they’d laid from the tub to the bed like it was a royal carpet.

Then I was in bed, a mountain of heated blankets around us. Dave was cutting the cord. Mom was kissing my forehead and slipping out to get some rest.

 Kim said I had a second degree tear that she would fix up. The final big fear. I registered about as much concern as if I’d been told I needed a stitch on my elbow.

Dave switched the music to the Labor Love playlist.

Morning light filtered through tinted windows.

Stevie Wonder sang.

A baby that smelled of heaven nuzzled against my chest.

I was enraptured.

 “At some point we need to name him.” I grinned up at Dave. I never dreamed I’d be the person birthing a baby that didn’t have a name. But here I was, and it added to the charm.

Dave called in an order for breakfast.

“What sounds good that we can we get you right now?” the nurses asked, listing off options of drinks and snacks.

“Apple juice!” I announced.

Never have I savored a drink more than the sweet, icy juice. Never have I felt so satisfied as when the crisp flavor filled my mouth and finally quenched my thirst.

John Denver sang You Fill Up My Senses. 

Eventually a bit of humanity crept into my euphoria. I polished off the juice and waited for our tardy breakfast delivery. Around 10 am. an ultra-perky lactation consultant arrived, pretty stoked to get us up-to-date on all things breast-feeding. Except, baby had just made the journey of his life, and mommy had not fully slept for 32 hours. As Ms. Consultant, with her freshly curled hair, chatted at high volumes about latches and football holds, baby slept slack-jawed, not even slightly interested in sucking. I attempted to smile but instead nodded into the pile of warm blankets. My eyes crossed when I tried to study diagrams of milk ducts.  

But it wasn’t nap time yet. Triage rooms were filling up and it was time for us to vacate the delivery room.

We gathered bags and I moved slow but with less misery than I ever imagined. Baby was weighed and measured and diapered and then nestled back against my skin in our new room and finally it was just us. Smelling and kissing and staring at his wrinkled fingers and wisps of long hair.

 JohnnySwim sang, “You’re my Hallelujah.”

 “Oakley?” Dave said. We said a few other names, but every time we said “Oakley” we smiled. I had debated hardest on a middle name, wanting a connection to the girls and the special way our family had been built.

“Alexander?” I offered. “He can honor the uncle who cared for his nieces and meant so much to us all in Ethiopia.”

“Oakley Alexander.” Dave said.

We called our girls and tried not to cry as we described their baby brother and listened to their delight.

Finally. Baby named. Phone calls made. Oatmeal eaten. It was time to sleep. But I kept needing one more look. One more kiss.  

“You’ve got me touching heaven

Got me touching heaven”

I could feel it, a roaring river of tears beneath the surface that would break through over the coming days. The magnitude of this experience was going to be a mess of emotions to work through. All of my fears hadn’t come true. All kinds of good things I could have never even imagined happened instead. It was going to be a process to accept the favor offered me while some of my dearest carried stories of tremendous disappointment, suffering, and loss. I was the most undeserving, and it would take months for me to accept that goodness, like grief, wasn’t something to make sense of, but rather something to simply receive and experience.

I could have never willed myself to create all my body and emotions had accomplished in the last 24 hours. It was an expression written in my DNA and triggered by such a complex sequence of events, and I would have to make peace with the fact that these feelings were not mine to manipulate. That when the body, mind, and soul all find a synchrony within instinct, there are incredible feelings that serve a purpose of nourishment and nurture and survival. Instincts can be triggered and love summoned, but without the perfect participation of hormones, the emotions may not cooperate.

I was born into motherhood without birth, and I would have to grieve what my girls and I never shared. I’d missed it before, but now it throbbed through my body. I would mourn as I fed Oakley, his body instinctually finding mine. I would promise myself to tell them about what a woman’s body can do, what their first mommy had done to give them life and start them on a journey of love. To weep with them again at each stage of awareness over what they lost with her and never shared with me. And someday, to tell them how, while I was a muddle of hormonal infatuation and fear and frustration, when they cried over a scraped knee or disappointing day, the sound of their sorrow would trigger a surge of milk. Death, adoption, and depression had robbed them of too much. Still, my body sought to comfort and nourish them just the same.

The tears would fall another day, the sleep would fall another year. For now, I might as well live fully while I was awake. I lifted my baby back onto my chest.

NeedtoBreathe sang,

“Oh, it’s so clear

Come a little closer

All of my love is right here”

Oakley’s eyes found mine, a little clearer now, and gazed steadily, us memorizing every detail of the one we’d known for months and finally seen face to face.

The Monday That Changed The World (as we knew it)

It was an ordinary Monday. They make the best memories.

I was wearing a faded Invisible Children shirt, doing paperwork from the couch on my old laptop, listening to Yanni. Sunlight was streaming in through the blinds making patterns on the wood floor from the layers of leaves. The house smelled like air-conditioned summer.

I finished paperwork and called Dave. He was harvesting wheat. “We’re going to run the rest of this field, so I won’t be home for a little while”, he said. In between my questions about his plans, my phone beeped an incoming call. I glanced at the screen to see who it was, and suddenly our entire lives changed.

The strange thing about this day, June 25th, 2012, (yeah I’m a day late, but it’s a Monday memory most of all) that I can go back and entirely relive 5 years later, is that it holds pain and sadness as well as excitement and joy.                                                    

I was aware of the paradox in those first moments. I’ve become far more in tune with it as I try to consider the world from my daughters’ angle, see the anniversaries and memories and holidays through their eyes, framed by their loss.

For a while, I felt the sorrowful side of these anniversaries so heavily I hardly mentioned them, almost ashamed of the joy that was also there.

As I anticipated this date and felt conflicted emotions with its memory, I realized I was doing it again. Trying to fit life into an either/or category, when the human existence is mostly always a both/and.

The story of June 25th is the girls’ birth story into this family, after all, and they should get to hear it.  What child doesn’t love to hear her parents fondly reminisce about the day they found out, the sheer joy of finally seeing the face of their precious child? This one is theirs, and there is no lack of sheer joy.

So this year, I tell them the story with enthusiasm, about the call that changed our whole world. They laugh when I demonstrate how I had to sit on the floor because my knees were shaking so hard. I tell how the dog raced around the house, not knowing why I was crying and gasping and laughing and laying on the floor. How their Daddy had to make Uncle Kendall drive the combine because he was shaking so much from the call. How he cut his harvesting short and I ran barefoot until my feet nearly bled to meet him down the street so we could come home and open the pictures for the first time together. How we stayed up late that night, reading everything we could about their story, practicing saying their names, dreaming of meeting them for the first time.

And they grin but their eyes glisten with emotion when I describe how we sat side-by-side, looking into photos of their tiny faces, and wept. Overcome at the unimaginable fear they’d experienced, at the privilege of becoming their parents, at the loss from which our family was being born.

Then it’s our turn to listen as they ask questions, stare at pictures of their own little faces and giggle at the sight of themselves, and then begin to reminisce. Quickly stories of their homecoming surface. Cy tries to remember the first time she saw a photo of us, but gets sidetracked with details of friends and caretakers. “Not to be disrespectful”, she prefaces, “but the blankets they gave us in Ethiopia were TERRIBLY itchy!”. Not to be left out, S chimes in with her own “memories” of eating applesauce and learning to crawl.

They’re full of animation tonight, and I’m stern with myself about not getting all up in my mommy-stalgic feelings as we look back at photos of this day over the past 5 years. After more reminiscing with Cy, S wants her turn at the mic again. I’ve watched her emotions building just below the chatty surface. She wants to tell something she remembers, but it’s from last night. It starts out as a dream about a monster, but quickly turns into a sincere telling of her awaking last night thinking Mommy and Daddy were lost. She tries to tell it nonchalant, but one big tear escapes on the final word. She climbs into my lap and wraps her body around mine, and I’m in full on comfort mode until she asks to hear “her song”. (Each girl has a special song I sing to them.) Midway through John Denver’s croon of I’ll cling to the warmth of your tiny hand, my emotions stage a revolt.

I manage to regain territory before she sees my tears. She relaxes in my arms, and when the next song is Thank God I’m a Country Boy, we all end up in a kitchen dance-off, seeing who can come up with the weirdest country moves. Laughing and crying, Laughing and crying. We’re learning the both/and dance too.

The human heart is capable of honoring both the joy and the heartache.  

Maybe some years they’ll be desperate to see and hear and revisit every single detail like they were tonight. Maybe some years they won’t want to go there at all, and we’ll let June 25th pass for an ordinary summer Monday.

But I’ll treasure it always in my heart, the day that held the biggest surprise. The highest anticipation. The fiercest love. The gravest responsibility. The scariest lack of qualification. The heaviest sadness. The sharpest juxtaposition.

The best both/and day of my life.  

I'll walk in the rain by your side

I'll cling to the warmth of your tiny hand

I'll do anything to help you understand

And I'll love you more than anybody can

~John Denver

Can I Kiss Your Feet?

The evening after I'd finished writing this story, I sat down on the couch and showed it to Cypress. She's fascinated with this writing hobby of mine, and was thrilled to participate in the process a bit. I read it aloud to her, using every effort not to cry and make her sad, watching out of the corner of my eye as she nodded and grinned.

"I remember that day!" She proclaimed when I finished. "I love this story, Mom!"

"Me too, sweetheart, it's one of my favorites." I said. After we'd discussed a few words she didn't understand, whether she thought any details needed changed, and what editing meant, I asked, "Do you think we should keep this as a special family story, or is it one we should share for other people to read who might be figuring out how to communicate and love each other better like we are?"

"We should share it." She said with confidence.

So, here's a little story, with love, from Carrie and Cypress:

I personally have never been one for footsie or foot rubs or really any foot affection. It’s not that I find feet revolting; I’m a barefoot girl with callouses and flip flop tan lines as many months as Ohio will refrain from frostbiting. it’s just that I’ve noticed a tendency for feet to either be damp with sweat or resembling refrigerated meat, and I’m uncomfortable with both. It’s also an area most likely to get skipped in grooming routines, and I’m not eager to come in contact with untamed areas, nor do I wish for others to encounter mine. But for all the dirt-collecting and grime feet may present, my daughters haven’t acquired my aloof feelings. In fact, quite the opposite.

...When Cypress, my eldest, reminisces about her life and family in Ethiopia, she often tells of how she liked to kiss her momma’s feet. It is touching to envision her, tiny child that she was, participating in a cultural tradition and even in her limited comprehension, attaching emotion to it.

One day she and I were having a particularly rough time. We were doing our classic battle. Her: a quiet altercation. Me: a loud correction. Her: stoic and response-less. Me: producing enough emotion to compensate for her lack plus three others. Her: unable, unwilling, or too uncomfortable to respond. Me: unable to comprehend how one can have no responses, and determined to conjure up appropriate emotion in her. This was the vicious un-merry-go-round we rode time after time...

Click HERE to read the rest of the story published by Coffee and Crumbs