12. Whose behavior merited celebration?

Without a doubt, Ishi. By the time mid-November rolled around, I had several large writing assignments looming on the horizon and the end of the semester was approaching at the speed of light and sound combined. I was a physical and emotional wreck. Fractious, impossible to please, and panicky. But also strangely unresponsive to the pressing concerns around me. Instead of working or doing anything remotely productive, I would spend hours trimming the split ends off my hair, or playing some ridiculous online game. Then something would set me off, like, oh I don’t know, the sound Ishi’s feet made as he walked into the room? It really didn’t take much. And then I would snap at him, and sometimes cry. I frightened myself.

Ishi was an absolute rock. The kind you cling to in the middle of a raging river. The kind you pray for when you’re hiking and you slip on a particularly steep grade. The kind that gets up at 4:00 in the morning and makes a Timmy’s run for the double-double that will keep you out of bed as you struggle to get just one more page written. The kind who does the laundry, the shopping, and the spontaneous rubbing of tight, aching necks and shoulders.

The kind who holds you when you’re sobbing so hard you’re gasping, convinced you’ve gone as far as you can go and it’s all over, and tells you how proud he is of you. That you make him want to find the money to send you to this school as long as you want. That everything you see as a failure, he sees as an achievement and as another reason to love and respect you.

He outdid himself. It was nothing short of the absolute best he has ever done when it comes to loving his wife as Christ loved the church. He had his own stress and exhaustion to deal with and yet during those crushing weeks, he never uttered one complaint to me. I felt utterly borne up and sheltered, and the love I feel for him now as a result is tremendous in its weight and depth.

Even better, we both felt a hot and intense deepening of our love for God, as though we were being bathed in it. It suddenly felt very easy and natural to pray out loud together, and we’ve started doing even more praying than before. Truly, when husband or wife loves well, the effect is powerful and delightful. No wonder God loves marriage!

2. Did you keep your new year’s resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
I don’t do resolutions as most people know them. Instead, I prefer to renew my commitment to several core principles, most of which seem to fall right in line with the Shema (Deuteronomy 6:4-9). Especially the part which says, “love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.” Some other core principles I intend to focus on this coming year are the finer points of being a wife who honours her husband, and the idea of giving my expectations to God. Dreaming and planning are wonderful, but I need to be more comfortable with things not going how I expect. Instead, I resolve to focus on my reactions being in line with trusting in God.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?
No, but we conceived for the second time ever, in October of this year.

4. Did anyone close to you die?
Yes… the baby stopped growing and we lost her at almost 6 weeks.

5. What countries did you visit?
Just the US this year. Texas is better than most places I’ve been!

6. What would you like to have in 2010 that you lacked in 2009?
Money! No, I’m just saying that because we’re so skint right now. It’s been a rough couple of years. In 2010, I would love some stability and peace. I would love some of my exuberance and passion back too, please. I felt strangely numb for most of 2009 and I would really rather not get too comfortable with that state of being.

7. What dates from 2009 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?
January 11 ~ For the first time in my life, I simply could not rally and do what needed to be done, at enormous professional and personal cost. For the first time, I truly gave up and did not even try. For me, it was necessary to know what giving up would do to me. It gave me the impetus to try again later in the year.

March 9 ~ I had surgery to remove an “irregularity” in my uterine lining that was supposed to be the answer to all my reproductive woes. I woke up from that surgery absolutely euphoric.

March 10, 11, 12 ~ Instead of taking time to recover from that surgery, I was forced to clean house and open my door and/or watch as they strolled right in without knocking multiple times a day because the landlords put the house on the market. Watching people traipse through my apartment while I sat in pain on the couch in a blanket was just awful.

June 30 ~ I finished HKIN 190 at TWU and got my first post-secondary A+ ever!

September 16 ~ Two words. Dry. Sockets.

October 21 ~ two days after the one-year anniversary of losing Nathaniel, I got a BFP. I very nearly fainted with shock and joy.

November 2 ~ The doctor called me as we were driving to class. The third beta-HCG fell instead of doubling. The baby is not going to make it. For a little while, I wasn’t sure I would, either.

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
All my achievements this year were amazing to me: I quit my 4-or-5-cans-a-day Diet Coke habit, I quit eating several pounds of chocolate a week (yes, that’s pounds… pounds of chocolate), I kicked caffeine for two months and can do it again, I created and followed a menu plan full of healthy meals for 8 whole weeks, and I got pregnant for the second time^[1]. But I think the two that are vying for the top spot are these:

1. I had a major turnaround regarding a huge issue in my marriage. We were absolutely stonewalled and in a very bad place because Ishi wanted to start a business and I didn’t want him to. I simply didn’t trust he would be able to succeed and I wanted him to stay at his job (which has awesome benefits and which was slowly draining him of the will to live). During the few glorious weeks of my pregnancy, I suddenly realized that the little girl^[2] growing inside me was going to have Ishi for a father. That she and her potential siblings would learn about life and living from Ishi and that the way in which he provides for his family would be a fundamental example of a lot of life’s lessons for them. All of a sudden, the penny dropped and I realized I wanted them to not be afraid to strike out and try new things. I never, ever wanted them to trade little pieces of their souls for a job they hated but which was comfortable and paid well. And yet what was I asking Ishi to do? So after almost a year of stalemate and bitterness, I did a complete one-eighty and told Ishi he had my support for the business he wants to start.

2. I managed to stay in school, and stay engaged with my courses, my professor and God despite a horrific experience getting two wisdom teeth extracted which resulted in two dry sockets, and the second miscarriage in a year. I will always believe God carries us when we just can’t go on, because I have no idea how I kept going. In each of the two courses I took, I earned an A-.

9. What was your biggest failure?
You know, I’m honestly not sure. All I can think of are the typical failings I have: forgetting to trust God, refusing to believe in myself, and giving up too easily. However, I made such tangible progress in even those areas that I can’t help but feel I failed a lot less this year than ever before.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?
See above. Dry sockets, miscarriage, and then just when I thought 2009 was done kicking my ass, I fell in the shower yesterday. I have a bruise that goes from my ass to my knee and many other injuries that don’t show until I try to walk. But not a single cold, and no swine flu!

11. What was the best thing you bought?
Hmmmmmm… we bought lots and lots of stuff early in the year. Mostly furniture, and a notebook for Ishi which he very generously shared with me for school. I would be hard-pressed to come up with the one single best thing, though. Oh! Our car. There you go. We bought our little 1993 Chevy in January and it is awesome.

Oof. I really wanted to finish this tonight, but I am not the night owl I used to be and my jammies are calling. I usually feel like it’s bad luck to spend any time on New Year’s Day looking back, but what the hell. All of my other notions have been turned on their heads; why not this one? So, until tomorrow… bonsoir!

1. You have to realize: this was the second pregnancy in less than 18 months when we have been trying for 9 years!
2. We were absolutely convinced this one was a girl, but it was far too early to ever know for sure.

And there’s nothing wrong with any of that, to a degree. However, I just read over the last couple of weeks of posts and I don’t feel that they do even a passable job of what I created this blog to do.

I’m here because I’m lonely. I’m here because people who are lonely the way I am lonely have a very hard time finding each other. I’m here because I have spent many a three o’clock in the morning typing in one search phrase after another, hoping to find someone else who is fighting some of the same fights I am. I’m here because I found so many strong women, beautiful women, hurting women, bravely writing down the nitty gritty details of their struggles and these stories helped sustain me. I’m here because I hope that I might sustain someone else even as I myself am still supported by the words of the people I have found who will share such private battles with the lonely souls still awake at three o’clock in the morning.

Being hearing impaired is lonely.
Having bipolar disorder is lonely.
Being an undergraduate student in your mid-thirties is lonely.
Being a Biblical Studies major is lonely.
Being infertile is lonely.

And even though it shouldn’t be, being desperately in love with God is sometimes the loneliest feeling there is.

So there it is. I’m dropping any attempt to be slick or intellectual or one of the cool kids. I’m just here to share the things I struggle with, the things I’m trying to understand and the things I am learning.

And I am actually learning more than usual these days, now that my HK!N 190 class has started! I love being back on campus. Love it. I am a little unsure of how I feel about summer courses, though – tomorrow is the end of the first week and we’re having our midterm exam. Whoa! It really does feel like being on fast forward. I’m very much looking forward to the weekend. I wonder if it will feel longer than usual or if it will fly by like the week did?

The problem is, I took a semester off from school to recoup after the loss of a pregnancy that we’d waited eight years for, and the loss of my Nana in the same week. I thought I would write more about my grief, but it’s been too hard to expose most of those thoughts and feelings. In the nature of my totem animal, the rabbit, my instinct is to sit very still and hope I remain unnoticed by my predators.

Without school to write about, and with very little happening in my life besides my obsession with all things TTC and healing my poor broken heart, I fear this blog has gotten off to a fairly boring and pointless start.

God has blessed me tremendously with the opportunity to take a summer course at TWU which begins on Monday. Instead of writing about it or even thinking about it, I’m allowing myself to be endlessly distracted by a parade of things that honestly have nothing to do with anything.

I’m not sure if I’m depressed, or…

…relaxed.

The women, anyway. The men are more likely to resurrect tired old racist jokes and laugh uproariously. This despite the fact our family stopped being 100% white in 2005 and is well on its way to becoming even less white!

So race came up, as it will these days. My Mom has a unique vantage point of being Canadian, white, and living in Houston, Texas. She’s also lived overseas multiple times, in countries where to be white was to be one of the visible minority. For her, it was a tremendous adjustment to live in a city where it is an actual issue. Canadians tend not to predict how an encounter will go based on what ethnicity the other person is. At the very least, I don’t. For me and some other Canadians I know, I wait until the person starts speaking before I make my snap judgments and steretypical assumptions.

Because for many of us, it’s not the people who don’t look a certain way that bother us… it’s the people who aren’t like us at all. It’s the people who leave India or China because of the lack of human rights or the atrocities of honour killings – and then bring those foul ideas with them. The people who want to enjoy our incredible freedom, our luxuries, our peaceful way of life, while arranging the hitmen who will hunt down and kill their daughter who is dating the wrong boy. It’s the people who leave because their wealth will go farther here, and allow their kids to go to the clubs packing weapons, or turning our streets into their own personal racing strips where our citizens are maimed or killed.

We concluded that for Americans and Canadians, the issues are indeed very different. I don’t care what a person looks like, I only ask that he embrace the values that make this country the greatest one on earth. Canada is the only country I know about who is expected to just accept every single cultural difference as being a legitimate and valid one, simply because it is Canada. We watch Australians announce that certain cultural ideas are simply not welcome in Australia and we wonder how on earth they get away with it. What we should be wondering is how on earth we became the only country in the world who can’t? I, for one, refuse to accept that being Canadian means being a pushover, or accepting any value or tradition at all simply because it is someone else’s. I am one of the few Canadians around who can say that my ancestors actually built this country and they established a long family line whose tradition I refuse to abandon simply because there are others around me who don’t agree. The Canadian I was raised to be accepts a variety of physical features, dress, food, languages, and any religion which doesn’t directly oppose Christian values. I don’t care if you believe in Jesus, that’s between you and God. But I will not support any religion that espouses or even condones killing for “honour” or censoring our papers from saying anything that is “disrespectful” to a religious figure. I’ll say what I want about who I want, and those who don’t like it can go back to the countries where they can cut a tongue out for that kind of thing. Why do they think we’re doing so well over here? I’m going to bet it’s partly because we don’t cut out tongues for expressing dissenting opinions!

From what I’ve seen, Americans have completely different issues. They get upset about having to press 1 for English… I wonder what they would make of having to look for English in a drop-down menu with four or five other languages… on a government website! There is a strange homogeneity in many areas of many states and cities… like oil and water, they slide past each other with some interaction and a great deal of friction. In San Antonio, Texas last May, I noticed an Asian man on a balcony on the River Walk and realized, with a start, that he was the first Asian (East, South or otherwise!) I had seen since I’d gotten off the plane some three weeks earlier. And yet I had felt a constant “us-and-them” feeling the entire time. It was puzzling how it never looked to me like there were “foreigners”, and yet my American friends would purse their lips and shake their heads at “those people” time and time again. I was reminded each time that I was a member of a camp. Straying over the line earned me strange looks and frowns. I became very stressed out, feeling like I didn’t know who was friend or foe, until I toed the line and simply stayed within the circle that had been drawn by Americans centuries ago. My parents lived in a very predominantly black community and were truly perplexed by the reactions they garnered when they went for walks, or to the pool, or even just grocery shopping. In Canada, a Wal-Mart in Richmond is exactly the same as a Wal-Mart in Langley or Calgary. I mean right down to the aisle number the bath mats are in. In Houston, the Wal-Mart in one community is dirty, unkempt, poorly (and differently) stocked, than the one in a much better (dare I say, whiter) neighbourhood. My parents were determined not to conform and stayed in the black community for two years. Eventually, they decided that they weren’t going to change the world at their ages and got tired of carjackings in their building’s parking lot, and moved. My Mom says life in the “race-appropriate” (white, again) community is like being in another city. Different issues indeed.

Five minutes after I hung up, I opened my e-mail and saw this:

So funny and so close to true, Mom!

I just sat on my big butt and talked to my mother on the phone.

For four and a half hours.

Heh.

Dear Jason,

My beloved nephew. Four years ago today, I sat in the late-night darkness in my living room, chewing on the nails of one hand while the other clutched the phone. I was barely able to breathe past the tightness in my chest. And I whispered the first of what would be many, many urgent prayers for your health and your safety over the next four years.

Your mother was in the hospital and your Gran had just called me to let me know you were on your way – your Mom was going to have a C-section within the hour. Gran sounded nervous. She was undoubtedly thinking about how your Dad had been born the exact same way. Little did we know that would just be one way you were so much like your Dad!

I prayed and waited for the phone call that would let your Canadian family know you had finally arrived safe and sound. When it did, the joy we felt was incredible. You filled the lives around you with amazement, and people half a world away fell in love with you the instant we saw your perfect little face.

I used to check my e-mail constantly for the next photos your Dad would send. He was working so many hours and was as exhausted like all new daddies are, but he couldn’t wait to see you at the end of the day and I have so many wonderful pictures and short videos that show how much he loved being with you.

Four years later, your life is very different from what we all thought it would be. Life is like that, darling boy. We don’t always get to do what we want to do the most. I still haven’t even met you and it’s been an agonizing two years since your Dad left Thailand to come back to Canada to work.

But on this, your fourth birthday, I am writing this letter so that someday you might be able to know that we love you always, always, always and we miss you every single day. You are talked about and prayed for every day. Your Mom sends photos to Gran and Grandpa in Houston and they send them to me and Jason, we can’t get enough of your amazing grin and heartbreakingly beautiful brown eyes! As much as we miss you and pray that we can all be closer someday soon, we know we are so lucky to know where you are and to see that you are healthy and happy and going to school.

We are grateful for every second of your life. There aren’t enough words in English or Thai to describe how much we love you. To tell you how precious you are to us.

We just pray that someday soon, we can show you.

With all the love in my heart,
Your Auntie S.

I am so homesick today. Looking through old photos of the last few years just makes me feel worse. I don’t know where I want to be… I just want to be back there somewhere. I want to be that person again, and save myself from all the mistakes I was about to make.

And to save everyone else from theirs.

It’s not depression. I’ve been depressed before, I know how it feels. Or maybe it is depression but I don’t buy into brain chemistry and the need for drugs. The medication doesn’t prevent these episodes, so it’s not the answer. Fighting it is the answer. If only it wasn’t so tiring.

So, efforts. Paying bills, sweeping the floors, doing even just one, exhausting load of laundry. Sticking to a promise to cook healthy meals at home instead of constantly ordering out – even tonight. Even tonight when it was so hard to drag myself to the kitchen and stand over the stove. Perhaps especially tonight. Handmade turkey burgers with guacamole and Monterey Jack cheese with a side of triumphant exhaustion!

Take that, $%@#$ greyness.