Patience

I am not a patient person.  I like to masquerade as one, though.  I like the thought of being patient so much that I sometimes I forget that it's really not a trait I possess very well.  And then I am put in a place of waiting, and I am (shockingly) shocked at my reaction, at the grrrowl that emerges from my soul and the frenetic busy do-ing that ensues.  "But I am so patient", I think.  "Why am I being this way?"  Ha.  Right.  I was BORN this way.  I have always been bad at waiting.

And yet, it does such good things in me. It doesn't make me like it or make it easier, but it's undeniable that so many of the parts of me that I love have appeared while I've been in the waiting room.  And over the years, I've spent a lot of time waiting.  That sentence hits with a jolt as I read it back; a good deal of my life has gone by while I'm zoned in on waiting for something else.  John Lennon was right - life is what happens to you when you're busy making other plans.  Wishing away the wait can equal wishing away your life.

Sometimes, though, I don't mind.  Sometimes the waiting is so painful that I'd exchange a few hours / a day / even more, maybe, just to make it end.  Other times, though, the wait is defined, and it's clearly too much life to give up in exchange.  Like, medical training, for instance.  Waiting for life to begin until I'm done with it would mean a giving up an entire decade.

Today I'm trying to be patient, trying to really live and enjoy the days of waiting in between where I am now and where I want to be.  Where I am now = in truckloads of school debt, watching every penny, renting a too-small stained-carpet duplex, trying to get pregnant again while trying to lose the few pounds of miscarried-baby weight that are still keeping me out of my normal clothes.  Where I want to be = pregnant, done with fellowship and making actual money, moving into a house that we own (finally, please, soon?), being able to afford a babysitter on a regular basis so the hubster and I can have marriage-enriching toddler-free time more than once a millennium.

But let's re-define this, shall we?  Where I am now = married to a caring, patient, gorgeous husband, raising a happy and healthy little girl who laughs all the time, spending every night and weekend of my call-free fellowship with my family in a duplex with a yard (!) and a dishwasher (!) and a garbage disposal (!!).  Luxuries, all.  I may be not patient, but I'll be damned if I'm not grateful for all these blessings that are running out my ears.  Maybe I'm just focused on the wrong parts of the story again.  Thank you, God, for these perfect things my hands are full of at this very moment.  Help me to keep my eyes on today.

lessons

do you ever wonder what you will think of these days when you look back on them?  i do.  i've been loving this song called blessings by laura story.  i hear it on the radio every now and then on my way to work.  and in the dark, in my car, still not quite awake enough to have my defenses fully armed, i cry.  life can be hard, and these years have been surprising, both in what they have brought to us and in what they have taken away.

the ironic thing is that i frequently look back on other times in my life that have been awful to walk through, and i feel this warm reverence towards them.  it's amazing to watch yourself change and grow and thrive, although these things can only be really appreciated in retrospect.  sometimes it's the weirdest, hardest, most unassuming moments that i end up looking back on this way.

i get the sense that this is one of those times for us, a time of teaching and strengthening and longing that i'll never want to walk through again...and yet, that i'll almost miss.

too bad you can't enjoy the lessons learned while you're walking through the cold and dry patches that get you there.

Keeping the rhythm

The adult in me has watched the best parts of the year occasionally get overrun by the disruption and exhaustion that life can bring. This year, the loss of a 12-week-along pregnancy and a D&C four days before Christmas meant that we rode through the holidays taking the days as they came, grieving for our lost baby, and not being overly purposeful with our time. Sometimes just surviving is a success.

I remember a half-dozen of these type of holidays as a teenager, when my brother or sister was sick and in the hospital. I remember a Christmas dinner at the Olive Garden. A New Year's Eve alone painting the kitchen. A Thanksgiving I spent sitting on a bench in a dark park while my house erupted in chaos from a 911 call. Add that to the natural rhythm of a home where both parents work in the medical field; someone is always working on the holiday. The joke in my parents house has become that our main tradition is that we HAVE no tradition.

It bothers my little sister, who thrives on ritual. I've heard myself telling my mom that having rituals is important to "kids". Having the same kind of green beans every year. Opening presents on Christmas...or Christmas Eve...but just pick one, so we can look forward to it. Mom didn't seem to get this, that in our heads she was the matriarch, the one who was supposed to keep the rhythm of our lives even as everything was out of sync.

Back to the present, where I watch myself losing the rhythm for my own family and telling myself that it's not all that important. But there's this little nagging emptiness this year, more than just the loss of Super-Smalls. This sense that we need to do these things anyway, to keep our own new family's traditions, because they are too important to be pushed aside even in times of exhaustion or grief or chaos. We win and we lose, but we keep the rhythm of life together.

I'm sitting here, drumming up a list of good rituals for the year, some that we already do and some that we should start. I hope, no matter what life brings us, that my own family learns to thrive with the rise and fall of the seasons and the way we honor and celebrate them together. I hope to be the rhythm-keeper. Let it start this new year.

goodbye, lucy

we said goodbye to our chorkie today.

babies and dogs, man, they're a notorious pairing.  we had a lot of advice about how to introduce them when the baby first came home, letting lucy sniff her blanket and making sure she still felt loved even though there was a new family member around.  the problem was that even before we were pregnant, we already knew the truth: lucy does NOT like kids.  never has.  i guess we hoped ali would somehow be seen as a 'part of the pack' and escape being categorized as a kid in lucy's head, but as soon as she got a little bit mobile, the growling began, and then a snap.  to make things more complicated, ali totally loves the dog and does her little franken-toddle after it at all possible moments, making it impossible to do anything when one of them is not napping except attempt to keep them separated.

lucy then decided it was high time she start peeing and pooping on ali's play rug to show her just what she thought of her.  our whole house has become a yard where puddles and tootsie rolls were becoming the norm despite our best attempts at re-crate training her.  so this morning, after spending a half-hour cleaning and disinfecting the floor when i should have been studying for my boards because the dog mashed poop into the carpet and tracked it through the kitchen, i texted d that she needs a new home. like, immediately.

so my dear husband, who loves this dog as if he had given birth to her himself, found her a new home and spent the day laying in bed mourning.  i did that thing i always do when trying to end a bad relationship: remembering all the good times, asking myself if i'm over-reacting, trying to rationalize that maybe we didn't try hard enough and could have another go at crate training.  but, who am i kidding?  we've got a whole lot on our plates at the moment with d starting his own business and me still in fellowship and an 11-month-old who is always in motion.  if i take it back now, i'll just be here again in a few days, feeling crazy that i keep hearing myself say the same things over and over again.

sigh.  i love her too, i do.  i just love my ali more, and don't have the energy or money or time or consistency to hire a dog trainer and try again.  i feel like the bad guy, hard core, but i always say that you have to deal with things as they are, not things as they should be.  and life as it is just doesn't have the space for a baby-hating, pee-on-the-rug kind of dog.

so, in the aftermath, i'm sitting here in the quiet, at our desk upstairs, looking out the window.  i have my board exam on friday, but i'm distracted by the quiet and not studying well.  in a few minutes d will be back sans dog / crate / food / various cleaning remedies to get doggie mess out of carpet / leashes / collars / toys / treats... and we'll sit and be sad that we lost our puppy today.  and ali will run around and there will be no growling and no eating dog food and no naps ended by incessant barking and no constant redirecting her away from lucy's crate, and we will still be sad, but maybe a little less overwhelmed.

we miss you, puppy.  maybe when our little girl isn't so little you can come back home.

the right thing

having a kid makes you do the right thing more often.  i'm pretty sure this is the reason that God gives them to us.  you swear and swear you'll never be one of those adults who forgets how to play and thinks life is really serious, and then one day you realize that you can't remember the last time you really, truly cut loose.

tonight, d is away and instead of catching up on sleep or getting extra work done, ali and i went to my friend tim's house to play with his wife and their fifteen-month-old son ethan.  play instead of work?  when was the last time i made that choice the right way?  but having ali makes me remember that play is very important, and must be prioritized.

i could go on, about how we are starting to eat more balanced meals, watch less scary tv, use better words, and make time to see family.  you can do all of these things without having a baby, but we didn't do them, not as well as we're learning to do them now.

life is better with an ali.

thirty

wow.  a new decade.  i haven't seen the start of one of these since i was..um...nineteen-turning-twenty.  let me say again, wow.  a lot has changed since then.

as previously mentioned in my lamenting about the mayhem that was my graduation from residency (read: partially ruined by missing camera, crashed car, and no get-pretty prep time), i like to take these moments to pause.  i think we don't spend enough time really evaluating where we are now, how we got here, and where we want to be.  so today, before the day gets away from me, i want to pause and remember the decade that i just finished.  you only get, what, seven...eight...nine if you're lucky?  here's my third decade in a nutshell: the good, the hard, and the miraculous.

the good: i graduated college after spending a year learning that it's really ok to skip classes sometimes and that the journaling and running and musing-in-secret-spots version of me is a nice counterpart to the focused, driven, scientific version of me.  i met and dated and later got engaged to a deep, loving, insightful man in a crazy, end-of-the-year relationship that shouldn't have worked for three long-distance years. i moved to philadelphia and got my first apartment, where i started and completed medical school.  in what has been one of the best days of my life, i married the best guy i know, and we drove away beneath exploding fireworks and israel kamakawiwo'ole's 'what a wonderful world'.

the hard: first and foremost - residency.  i survived, but sometimes i didn't think i would make it.  those four years following the highs of getting married and graduating medical school were a blur of sleepless nights and missed celebrations.  through it, i learned what it means to be a doctor.  it was hard, but i'll always wear it like a badge of honor. and second - depression.  d and i truly learned what it means to be 'burned out', a lesson purchased by our lack of boundaries in full-time ministry and the unending needs of our students that we were not equipped to fill.  he went through almost a year of gray, thick, awful depression, and we took to the task of just surviving for a while.  we learned that even through our marriage has more love and support and laughter than we know what to do with, we are not exempt from having to take the "for worse" along with the "for better".  we learned, thankfully, that we have what it takes to stick together when things aren't easy.
the miraculous: i had a daughter!  the experience of being pregnant and meeting this beautiful little person who is mine to love and nurture and teach has changed everything about me.  i have never experienced such a fierce love for anything in my life. i'm pretty sure i could kill tigers with my bare hands and outrun cheetahs on the savannah if they were after her.  i used to hear the word 'mom' and think about older women in bad jeans; now i hear a sobbing 'mama' coming from our tiny nursery and feel lucky beyond belief that my bubbly blonde smarty is awake and wants to play with me.

this is me at thirty, rounding the final bend of training, ready to sign on to a practice and get my first 'real job', about to watch my daughter barrel through her own first decade of life.  sigh.  i love it.  i'm lucky.  i'm looking forward to tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.

mere mortals

so, i asked.

i was nervous, but i asked.  apparently all i had to do was ask.  he chuckled and shook his head and told me the way i wanted to do things was just fine.  the wild thing is that, had i not asked, i'd be struggling and paying and hurting to do this thing that in the end, was totally negotiable.  and i felt...free.  so free.  free to finally have just a year left, and to be able to say "by this time next year..." and have it be a place that includes a real salary and an office and some autonomy: incredible.  after eight years of postgrad training, the last countdown has begun.

even better than that, though, was what happened next.  we had a department pool party & bbq at our chairman's home this weekend.  after hours of agonizing about what sort of a apparel is appropriate for such an event, i got my husband and daughter and a few bags of diapers / pool toys / clothing changes together, and headed across town to see the home of the man i revere the most at work.  he seems to know everything.  everyone loves him.  i am terrified, in light of his complete awesomeness and my obvious inexperience, that he'll fire me before he's even fully hired me since we're working more closely together this year than ever before.  i anticipated his home to be completely perfect, his children brilliant and articulate, his wife model-esque.  what i learned is that he has a nice home, with normal kids, a kind wife, and seventeen cats. 

lo and behold, the man is just...a man.  i am relieved to realize that if, in the end, my mentor is just another human with his own quirks and flaws, then he probably won't be mortally disappointed when he discovers that i'm a human too, as quirky and flawed as i am.

moral of the story: it pays to ask for what you want, and even the most successful of men may have to share their homes with a large cohort of cats. how funny.

get some

being a good resident is easy.  you just do what you're told, when you're told, and you pretend it was easy.  if accomplishing those things means that you have to stay up all night for three days in a row and sell your firstborn child in the process, then you do, and moreover, you don't mention it.  read and repeat for several years in a row, and as long as you're reasonably intelligent, you'll graduate.

being a good attending is a bit stickier, at least for me right now.  for one thing, i'm in a fellowship, which is this amalgam of training + attendingship.  no call, no weekends, and no holidays means my schedule is even better than the schedule of most attendings.  but i'm still making pennies while my loans are in forbearance, and i'm still doing as i'm told, although what i'm told is much less imposing than it used to be.  most confusing for me right now is my position as a future employee of the same institution where i did my training.  i'm still waiting for my contact to be drafted, to do the obligatory once-over with a lawyer to make sure it's all square, but i know the men i'm working for, and they're like fathers to me.  they've been mentoring me for years now.

and therein lies the problem.  my future senior colleagues are just men, and although i respect them infinitely, it's my responsibility now to ask for what i want.  inevitably, this will mean that sometimes i'll want something that conflicts with what they want.  in fact, this is happening right now.  i find myself, three short weeks out from the 'yes sir, yes sir, i'll get it done' phase of my training, trying to grow some balls and tell these guys what i want.

so, balls.  i need to get some and speak up this week.  and....here we go.

five years + bird poop

yesterday was our five year anniversary.  i came home from work to find flowers, a pristine kitchen floor, our wedding cd playing, and a newly framed picture of one of his favorite moments - us on our "cheap" florida vacation three years ago, d. wearing a mexican blanket wrapped around his waist and cowboy hat and me in his arms grinning like a fool.  the picture wasn't great but the memory, the look of unequivocal joy on our faces - perfect.  this has been a hard few years, but our life together has been amazing.

we went out to dinner at a white-tableclothed restaurant and sat outside in a beautiful city courtyard; we ordered things from waiters with thick accents and enjoyed our baby-free state...and then a bird pooped on my husband.

twice.

but such is life, right?  the perfect moments juxtaposed with the a-bird-pooped-on-me moments.  in honesty, the poop will make a memory that sticks in a way that an uneventful dinner would not have.  these years are showing me that he and i, together, we are tough shit (pardon the pun...and the profanity).  we may not have a perfect life, but we have a darn good time together, and these years of loved ones falling off roofs, addictions, babies, depression, sleepless nights of residency, and eating endless amounts of cheap frozen fish - these are years that we'll remember precisely for how hard, beautiful, and hilarious they have been.

here we are again

i am a bit of a connoisseur of graduations, being that i've graduated at least four times - more than that if you count things like kindergarten graduation (during which i vaguely remember someone making us sit indian-style, hold hands, and listen to rod stewart singing 'forever young'.  and by the way, you don't want to be forever young when you're five.)  graduations make lives feel a little more like movies, sealing off a four-year space of time with a ceremonius ending, with pomp and circumstance.  graduations make sure you don't miss the meaning you started out with, even if you forgot it along the way.

i was looking forward to this graduation for all of those reasons.  but instead of the special ritual of going home early, taking an extra shower, getting into a special dress, showing up fresh and ready to cherish the moment with pictures...i showed up late, in a freshly wrecked car (we're ok - don't worry), with a cranky dirty-faced baby.  instead of reflecting on the accomplishment, i was reflecting on the fresh news that my dad's leg is broken again, that this means he'll likely need surgery again and thus lose his job, throwing my family back into the tailspin that started last fall when he fell off the roof and all hell broke loose.

sigh.

i'll spend some time reflecting on residency this weekend, when d. is away and the baby is asleep.  for now, though, i'm struggling through the sticky feeling that life is hard and that the past few years have just been this way: amazing victories in the shadows of huge obstacles.  births and deaths, doctorates and money problems, adventures and setbacks.  this is life, and i want to drink it up, weighing the good as more important than the bad. sometimes, though, you just want to have your little graduation ritual and instead you get into an accident and your mind is somewhere else.

the good news is that i'm learning how to let the bad go and still soak up the goodness of these moments in spite of their imperfection.  the even better news is that (insert half-groan) i still have another graduation to go, since i'm transitioning into fellowship instead of going directly out into the real world.  next year, for graduation number five, i'll make sure not to answer my phone and not to drive if it's raining, and hopefully get the chance to celebrate the conclusion of my medical training with unadulterated ritualistic nostalgia.  but for now, here we are again, celebrating in the face of the crazy unpredictability that is life.

the straw man

a straw man is one of the classic logical fallacies in debate.  the basic idea is that one side of the argument sets up an enemy that is easy to defeat (the "straw man") while the actual enemy is much more complicated and less easy.  the straw man is defeated and victory is declared...but not based upon truth.  the straw man is para-truth.  in loose terms, my straw man is pittsburgh.

see, i've "hated" it here for a long time.  it IS in the rust belt, after all.  an old industrial town nowhere near the ocean, where the sun hides for cold, long months at a time.  i moved here for residency because my husband already had a job here, and the deal was made from the outset: after residency, we move.  we move and i get to pick where we move, as payment for living for four years in the rust belt.

after years of this mantra, d. bought into it as well.  it helps that these have been dog-hard years, struggling through sleepless nights of residency and weekends spent at the hospital, lots of school debt and little income, criticism, family crises... i could go on.  you get the idea.  anyway, we started pouring over maps last year, dreaming of the day we'd pack up and leave this town in the dust.  we'd live by the sea, take life slower, and stop fighting the battles we're currently exhausted by.  it has been a grand plan.

oh, how life can surprise us.

i'm being offered a faculty position that i'd be a fool to refuse at the hospital where i currently work.  in pittsburgh.  i wish i was joking, but i'm not.  so now i've been doing the work of opening my eyes to this city and asking the hard question: have i been wrong?  can i thrive here, so far from where i'd be? 

the answer, i think, is yes.  in fact, many of the things i hate about pittsburgh are true of everywhere.  bad weather isn't confined to this area, and i'd truly miss the rhythm of the seasons if we moved too far south.  and family, though.  much of pittsburgh is old and dingy, but hey, it's not like you can eat off the sidewalks in other cities.  in fact, as i've been processing what it would look like to stay here, i'm noticing all the festivals, the family-friendly-ness, the way you can spend $200,000 on a house that would cost you three times as much anywhere else. 

maybe we can buy a beach house somewhere with the money we'd spend.  who knows.  but for now, i'm packing up my little family and heading to oakland for the children's festival, because they have stuff like that here.  fun.  and not so bad, after all.

the power of words

a two girl parade

we spent our first mother's day at a nursery, picking out the world's tallest flowers and then planting them in our tiny slip of a garden, in hopes that they'll bring us both joy and a bit of privacy from the EPN (the ever[- present neighbor) whose chairs constantly face our yard.  it was a wonderful, dirty day.  now one day later, out my window are several tall, bright blue delphineums that hold their heads proudly to the sky, surrounded by seeds that will grow into hollyhocks and gladiolous and sugar snap peas.  i have discovered how much i love spring, and mothering, and gardens.

i also love movies that remind us that life is incredible, and so also in honor of mother's day we rented voyage of the dawn treader.  ali and i walked it back to the redbox down the street today as the sun was getting low in the sky.  the world is coming alive, and this is her first time to see it.  first squirrel, first cardinal, first earthworm wriggling on the ground.  even though she won't remember all these moments, i am reveling in them.  every perfect second of the smell of the new earth, the bright flash of fuscia geranium petals on freshly-planted dirt, the soft smoothness of young maple leaves fluttering in the spring breeze. it's not easy to get your fingers around a moving target when you're seven months old, but ali held an open hand out with patience and precision, the way she seems to do most things so far, until a huge maple leaf fluttered into her grasp.  and once she had it, man, she was not about to let it go. she pumped her fist, squeezing the tiny stem of her maple leaf up and down as we marched down the street together, a two girl spring parade.

i love this girl.

a happy thought

there are a dozen modern fables i can only remember half of that i went googling to find this morning.  minimal luck - perhaps i remember less than half :)  there's one about an elephant and a chain, how after being chained down for a while the zookeeper can unfasten one end of the chain and the elephant will still stay put, now so accustomed to having no freedom that she's stopped trying to break free.

another story is something about people in a terrible situation who are then released but never actually leave.  the point was that while the actual oppression had ended, it lived on in their minds and still controlled their lives.

mmhmm.  i get it.

there's pretty much no way to get through four years of college, four years of medical school, and four more years of residency without learning how to delay gratification.  heck, i am an expert on delayed gratification (as i'm about to start and additional year of fellowship training in electroencephalography).  the problem is that at some point, you have to stop delaying life and live it, because it's the only one you get.  here i am, about to round the corner of 30 years old, feeling myself holding back until i finish residency - no, fellowship - no, until i get settled into my first job - no, until my school debt (gulp) is paid off.  lemme tell you now, that last one may not happen in my lifetime.

my schedule is much lighter now than it was three or four years ago, but i'm still living tight-fisted with my nights and weekends.  i'm unwilling to give time in places where i'm not assured of a payoff in stress-reduction.  i'm still hesitant to 'spend myself' anywhere but the hospital because God knows it's taken all that is in me to get where i am... but where i am now is semi-checked out of life and without a whole lot of people who actually know me, in a city where (shock of all shocks) we may end up staying.

last night we went roller rink for a friend's birthday, and i could feel the strain of wanting to let go but being so unaccustomed to doing it that i felt rusty, like an old gear that's been left out in the rain.  at the same time, my heart jumped out of my chest for a few seconds.  here, in pittsburgh, a community of vibrant people who have welcomed us in, waiting for us to decide to be present. 

maybe the life i've been waiting to start has been waiting for me here the whole time.  it's a happy thought.

last. call. ever.

so, blogging has become interesting since i've become a physician.  suddenly, the lines between what is private and what is public aren't so clear to me, and i'm hesitant to write here lately.  i don't like that, and i'm not sure what i'm going to do about it. 

what i have missed most about writing more regularly is the ability to look back on the moments recorded here, big and small, and remember them.  this is life, the small parts you'll never remember just as much as the big parts you never forget.  i tend to remember things in huge blurs (ie my memories of my first three years of college consist of one big break-up interspersed with a lot of studying) except for the little details i write down.  each entry here is a monument for me, a place to go back and remember.

so i must leave a monument here, this last night in my call room on the 10th floor where i have endured the most exquisite of torture over the last 4 years.  these exhausted, bleary eyes have spent night after night being yanked open again and again by the wailing alert of my pager.  these walls have heard all kinds of plea-bargaining with God for just an hour of sleep, just a few minutes of quiet, just a release from a pounding headache.  let's be honest - i think there were nights when it took years off my life trying to survive here, alone, exhausted, sometimes sick, but caring for those who were sicker than me.

but now, tonight, this is my very last call.

when i say i never believed it would come...well, i still don't believe it. 

so let's commit this to memory, shall we?  i'm sitting on a tiny cot with a sheet and two big waffle blankets i stowed away this morning lest the nurses station run out.  beside me is a computer, a phone, and my pager - my three companions for the night - and my patient list, currently about 35 patients long, plus the three new patients i've already admitted tonight.  two strokes and a guy with cellulitis who can't (or won't) move his left leg.  everyone is tucked in and i'm all caught up and the night is daring me to lay down and flick off the switch, which is a sure sign that my pager will go off immediately.  i've heard it said that there are no atheists in the call room, that's for sure.  please, God, sleep? tonight? but the difference is that tonight, no matter how bad things get, i'll be humming my theme song of the night ("i love when it’s all too much / 5am turn the radio up / where’s the rock and roll?") and getting dancey in the elevator. 

:) g'night.

another one to remember

in honor of D.'s 30th birthday, we headed north for a weekend in a snowed-in cabin with a hot tub.  ali, going through a massive growth spurt, had been waking up in the middle of the night for the past 4 days.  ugh - back to prisoner-of-war mode.  we were planning to take her with us anyway, but the bad sleeping lately sealed the deal.  so when it was hot tub time, it was hot tub time for all three of us.

we sat in the gloriousness of the bubbly, warm water until our feet were so pruny it hurt.  ali splashed and kicked and had a seriously good time, and then got very quiet and let out the largest underwater fart known to baby-kind.  except, it wasn't just a fart. 

yep.  baby poop.  in a hot tub.

it was the funniest, grossest moment of my month, and i hope never to forget it.

ke$ha in the nursery

the moments pass so fast.  i have forgotten thousands of them... but this one i want to make sure we remember.

we are in ali's room, with her tall rice paper lamp softly glowing against pale pink and brown walls. i am in the rocking chair, and he is laying on his back on the floor beside the crib, and she is crying and crying until her little cheeks are pink and there are actual tears collecting in the corners of her eyes.  she is fed and changed and warm and smells baby-good, and who knows what's wrong?  we exchange glances over her distraught head - i guess we've all had bad days for no good reason. 

but then, his eyes light up and he rolls over and dashes down the stairs, returning a moment later with his macbook.  'she loves this,' he says with certainty.  'this'll do the trick.'  suddenly, ridiculously loud terrible pop music is blaring from the changing table and my husband is dancing like a fool, arms in the air, singing along. 

my daughter is now...quiet.  done crying.  and in a second i am up, too, holding her and gyrating and cracking myself up.  the song ends, ali wimpers, and lady gaga starts it up again and we are going crazy, bumping into each other in the tiny soft space of her room.  before the second song is over, baby girl is asleep and we are both smiling. 

it was beautiful and ridiculous, and i hope i remember it forever,

and suddenly, everything changes.

we have a baby girl!  a healthy, beautiful, blessing of a baby girl.  the world stopped for a few days while family and friends flooded first our hospital room and then our home.  the gifts and meals are still coming, almost 3 weeks later.  i can hardly believe she's here.

and suddenly, everything changes.  i'm on maternity leave, so the change is amplified for me - both a loss of my normal routine and my normal daily interactions, and the constant hungry presence of a new little life that can't yet tell me what exactly she needs.  it is a beautiful, exhausting, perfect time of learning how to deconstruct the meaning of a good day into successful breast feeding, a solid burp, a diaper change that didn't require a full room cleaning.  i'm not good at it yet, but i'm getting better every day.  and in the moments when i feel less like a mommy and more like a babysitter with a serious case of PMS, my amazing husband picks up our little lady and makes her smile like the sun, and i'm in love again. 

so this is me, no makeup, living in yoga pants, smelling like baby spit-up, falling in love with a little girl that is half of me and half of him.  we are smitten.  she has changed everything, and all change is stressful, but this stress is so, so good.

...a reminder to stay soft

“I have come to believe that by and large the human family all has the same secrets, which are both very telling and very important to tell. They are telling in the sense that they tell what is perhaps the central paradox of our condition- that what we hunger for perhaps more than anything else is to be known in our full humanness, and yet that is often just what we also fear more than anything else.
It is important to tell at least from time to time the secret of who we truly and fully are- even if we tell it only to ourselves- because otherwise we run the risk of losing track of who we truly and fully are and little by little come to accept instead the highly edited version which we put forth in hope that the world will find it more acceptable than the real thing."

-Fredrick Buechner, Telling Secrets

rain

in the year since i've written last, a million important and insignificant things have happened, including this:  i now have a garden.  not a big garden, or an organized garden, or a front-yard-appropriate garden (as the cilantro takes over the pathway to our front door), but a garden nonetheless.  today, driving in to work, i noticed the flat-bottomed clouds sliding out over the gray sky, and silently thanked God for the possibility of rain. 

then, shocked at my own thankfulness for the thing about this city i like the least, i paused.  thankful for a gray, rainy pittsburgh day?  me?

yes.  turns out when rain is what you're given, a garden is what you need. 

planning

my heart is full of plans, and it's wonderful to have things to plan for that are NOT stressful, work-related things. like, for instance, planning vacation. d and i have talked forever about heading to cinqua terra and drinking wine and watching italian sunsets...and now is the time to think about it for real. when? how? oh, the fun of planning the logistics of a dream and making it bit by bit into a reality. even if it never happens, it is seriously fun. planning is going on all over the place, and i'm not sure i can say all the plans out loud, except to say that they are all very good and very fun to think about. after a few years of worrying about learning all of neurology, and too many days spent planning when i can fit in enough sleep to function, i am taking a break to enjoy some italian sunset planning time.

unsettling

i've been uncomfortable a lot lately. there have been so many changes; all of them good. any kind of change requires an adjustment, though, and most adjustments are not without their uncomfortable parts. or maybe all adjustments, when it comes to me, a girl of rhythm and ritual. change is never easy for me.

so what could be unsettling about a lighter schedule, a bit less responsibility, a bit more sleep? i keep asking myself what i used to do with all this extra time before i started residency. answer: i used to pray and think and run, to work through my own unexpected reactions to things, to know my own heart. in some ways, being so busy has protected me from having to think about where i am going with my life. it's also saved me from noticing some things i now find unsettling. for instance, very few people in the city where i currently live actually know me very well. it's unnerving, actually, to go out with my husband's friends as an awake, alert person, and find that i'm so used to being a sleep-deprived zombie that i'm not sure how to interact with them in this new state. it's weird to be so un-myself...or is this me, now? who am i when i'm not at the hospital? i found it hard to remember for the first few weeks. now, as i'm starting to settle in, i'm starting to appreciate the chance to start over.

there's a mysterious freedom in not having things figured out yet. after being on auto-pilot for a few years now, it's good to have the chance to take a deep breath and look around. once i'm well-rested and well-fed and given the chance to be alone with God for a few minutes, i really do love being alive. i love careless afternoons and staying up late talking about wine and politics. i love it when time doesn't matter because there is enough of it to be used in un-economical ways.

i was starting to think i was someone else, someone i didn't like. now, i'm just enjoying the wastefulness of spending time on things that make me feel alive rather than on things that keep other people alive. it's unsettling, and joyous, and i'm thankful.

whatever that means

the hope was always there that God’s will would bring us together. it might not be that, i knew, and i realized that the deepest spiritual lessons are not learned by His letting us have our way in the end, but by His making us wait, bearing with us in love and patience until we are able honestly to pray what He taught His disciples to pray: thy will be done. acceptance of whatever that means is the great victory of faith that overcomes the world. -elisabeth elliot (passion and purity)

an old journal (that i can't find) has more of this quote copied into it, from the days when i poured over e.e.'s every words, hoping to find the mysterious confidence she had in a God who had both made her wait desperately to marry the man she loved...and then allowed him to be killed just a few years later.

the point is never the circumstances of our obedience, the point is that we obey. that He bears with us as we squirm and hold our breath and are too afraid to let go is a mystery and a miracle in itself, but He does. the rest of the mystery lies in this paradox: what i want is often the thing that would wreck me if i ever had it.

thy will be done, whatever that means.