A Year Later

I have been meaning to write.  I swear I have.  I just logged in and realised that,well, it's been a full year without posts.  One year and three days to be precise.  Even better?  My last post was a promise to post more.

This one is not a promise to post more - I know better than to say that I will.  I will continue to post as the mood strikes, but I am now hopeful that the mood will strike more often.  This may seem unlikely given I am busier than ever with coursework, church, marriage, friends and all of that, but I also have a lot more energy and focus. I have learned that I have at the very least a gluten intolerance, and at the most, Celiac's disease.  I will go in for further testing soon, after a two week period of self-torture in which I eat gluten again.  Even if the test for Celiac's is negative though, I am sticking with my gluten free diet which seems to leave me will a whole host of benefits, not the least of which is energy to be awake more than ten hours a day, and productive a good lot of it.

I have completed one semester at seminary, and it has been the most wonderful experience.  Don't get me wrong.  This is a Master's degree.  It's tough.  The expectations and the workload are high, but at the same time, I am enjoying it.  Admittedly, this semester has not gotten off to quite as delightfully organised a start as the last one, but I am going to blame that on medical tests and the like.  I've spent more time learning about my own body and health (rather than simply trying to care for it) than I did last semester, and my time management has adjusted itself around that, and not in productive ways.

Tonight I still need to read more for school, work on a couple of journal entries for one course, a poetic analysis for another, and maybe even get some reading done for a Book Club I will be hosting starting February 7th.  fortunately, I still have time.

Unexpected

As quickly as my pregnancy changed my life, and my entire orientation, no longer being pregnant hasn't.  I miscarried earlier this work.  I suppose in a sense it has as well, changed my life and my viewpoint as everything shifts around me, and my hormones play pinball with my emotions, but at the same time, the shift from no-children to children hasn't been shaken.  The same is true of my husband.  As he put it, he had adjusted to the idea of life with little one, and saw no reason to adjust back.

We will try again, sometime after my body has had a chance to recover of course.  We had both accepted this, and both wanted it, this I suppose just gives us more time to prepare.

The hard part is this: how do you grieve for someone who wasn't even really alive yet?  Outside of the abortion debate, the truth was this was a piece of parasitical tissue abut the size of my thumb, if that.  There was no heartbeat, no movement, nothing I could feel or sense, or associate with a living, breathing, conscious creature.  I had never held them in my arms, or even felt them alive in my belly, yet I loved them, and deeply.

I could give you the practical things that have changed, a laundry list of things done.  I have withdrawn from school.  Now is not the time to be an intensive program of study that holds little to no interest to me really anymore, because, let's face it, my mind isn't there.  I have cut my hair, and let it go darker, though still blonde since that's what I was born with, just because I wanted a change and a break from my apartment.  I have begun to lose myself in cookbooks and the market because it's a place I find solace in the smells of simmering stews, and the steady beat of my electric mixer, or the chopping of vegetables for salads.  I went to a yoga class, rather than just practicing at home since I wanted to be around people, but not people who knew.  These are just things, things to do to occupy time and offer some tangible bit of comfort or tactile distraction.

I would tell you all that I am praying, but largely I am not.  I have no idea what to say even though I know that God knows what I intend wordless or otherwise, and understands infinitely more than I do.  Yet this is proving even mor challenging than normal.  I can continue to read my Bible, to pray or editate over text, but this, this I'm having a hard time giving over to God.  I'm just not ready to let go and say goodbye quite yet.

Maybe tomorrow will be different.

An explanation for the Absence

I know, I'm a terrible person.  I have learned, over the last 27 years to accept this fact.  I have made peace with my own horribleness, and make no apologies for my long absence.  I will however offer you (as in you three people who occasionally read this) an explanation.  Just before I was going to post something the second week of December, I found out something.  I found out something huge. And by "huge" I mean ginormous, gargantuan, of such immense scale that I cannot in fact quantify it in a single sentence, or even twenty thousand. 

I am pregnant.

Despite all efforts to the contrary, I am now expecting a child late August, early September.  It's still very early, and things could happen.  The chance of miscarriage at this point is still up around 20-25 percent.  Nonetheless, I have not posted anything because I have had a one track mind.  Everything has changed.  My goals, and my hopes, well they are still there, my plans though?  Torn to shreds.  And I didn't want to say anything here until after we had told our families, which we did, while visiting them all in Edmonton over New Year's.

I'll be honest, I am petrified.  I am also though very excited, very being the operative word there.  This is a good thing, it's an absolute blessing, and already I feel so much for Lou (Little One in my Uterus.)  It's frightening to think though that Eric and I are having a child.  He's still in Law School.  I am going to need to go back to school to take a couple of courses a semester a year after they are born to complete my own program.  I still want to study theology, but now that's more an eventually.  Did I mention my husband is still in Law School???   Did I mention I am still in school???

On a positive note: Think of all the delightful things I now get to knit!