This Blessed Mess » lots and lots of kids

Jonny’s Birth Story (or) ‘The one where I pretend that I didn’t disappear for 7 months’

Mrs. Messiness — Sat, 25 Sep 2010 21:26:27 +0000

Um.. Well.

So, yeah. It’s been awhile.. Hmm.

*blush*

ANYWAYS.

Since we last spoke, this happened:

Very, very pregnant.

..and it went on like that for another 7 days.

On June 29th, I was having real, live contractions, but refused to believe in them due to the fact that I was 5 days over due and convinced that I would not, in fact, be giving birth at all. I went to bed figuring that if the contractions they really meant business, they would have to wake me up and convince me.

The next morning (June 30th) I woke up around 7am with what could only be described as shotgun-explosion-contractions but they only lasted about 15 seconds, so I dug my heels into my denial and sent J.D. to work, promising that I would call at the first “real” sign of “labor” (complete with the sarcastic finger-quotes).

At around 9am, I called my midwife to check in and tell her about the not-labor pains I was having and beg for another pep-talk; I was determined to have a natural labor but was quickly loosing faith that my body even worked that way. She’ been talking me off the please-for-the-love-of-God-just-break-my-water ledge on a daily basis. Fortunately, she is well trained in crazy-pregnant-woman and convinced me to drop by the birthing center “just to be sure”.

Since I was positive that I was not in labor and incredibly annoyed that anyone would have the nerve to think that I was (I am a *peach* when I’m 41 weeks pregnant), I left Billy in charge of the younger kids and had my mother drive me and Jack to the birthing center.

At 10am, Joan told me that she had a pretty good feeling that I would be having a baby that day, and that I should call J.D. – I disagreed and said I wanted to go back home. After much moaning and groaning, I finally compromised – mom and Jack and I would go walk around for an hour and come back – if there was any changes, I would stay and if not, I could go home. I called J.D. at work and told him to start meandering toward the birthing center, but not to hurry.

20 minutes into my hour of walking, my short, bursting contractions turned into real-live, HANG.ON.CAN’T.WALK.MIGHT.DIE contractions, so we started to make our way back to the center. Somewhere in there, I called J.D., and told him to go get the kids where they needed to be, (T & V would still have to go to their moms’ and but B & B would have to come to the center, where they and Jack would go to my moms) but still told him not to hurry.

Exhibit A: Red Light Camera... He hurried.

As soon as we got back to the center, Jean checked me and said I was at a 6 and that I wasn’t going anywhere.

This is where things really got moving.

Jean said I should go ahead and get into my comfortable clothes and start to try to do some relaxation breathing while mom went out to the car to bring in my stuff and called J.D. again.

I went from denial to ready-to-push in a matter of minutes – but I was still determined to wait for J.D. to get there. All I could think of was ‘he already almost missed this’ and I was getting panicky at the thought of doing it without him.

When Jean came back into the room, she knew by looking at me that we were out of time and moved the birthing ball to the bed – I draped my top half over it just as my water broke.

Just as Jean started telling me that I was going to have to stop trying to hold back the urge to push, J.D. came flying into the room yelling “I’M HERE-I’M HERE-IT’S-OK-I-MADE-IT-I’M-HERE!”

And (very) shortly after that, so was Jonny.

Jonathan Jude Darley - Born June 30th, 2010

All 10 pounds and 22 inches of him.

Everythings not about my boobs anymore.

Mrs. Messiness — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 21:54:10 +0000

Oh hai!

Um. I forgot I had a blog. It’ll never happen again. So ANYWAY.

Here, I’ll catch you up:

There was Halloween.

Bella & Veronica/Zombie Cheerleader & Cheeta Cat

Trevor & Billy/The Hobos

Jack/The Baby in Halloween Jammies

And then everyone in the house got disgustingly sick.

But Jack was the only one nice enough to let me take pictures of that part.

Then I got to go on a date with my husband, which happens like, once a year. Dinner and then to see Blue October play at Stubbs.. with NO KIDS which happens like, never.

We were sort of excited.

My handsome husband.

Fun was had by all *SQUEAL*

Then Jack turned one.

He's very good at cake.

Very very good.

We had Thanksgiving.. in which I did not have to cook anything because that’s how awesome my husband is.

Notice how you cannot see me anywhere near the food?

And then we found out we are expecting kid #6. Yes, 6. I’ll keep you updated on this one, I swear.

So now you know where the heck I’ve been. Where the heck have you been?

The incredible exploding family

Mrs. Messiness — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 19:16:41 +0000

So, we took Billy to the airport last week to send him off to his father for the yearly summer visit. After fighting with the ex all year over the visitation schedule, decision making authorities and who pays for what, it was a trip we weren’t sure he would be making. In the end, though, our strange lawyer turned out to me a super-hero and kicked some deadbeat-dad-ass; the ex pays for all transportation, cannot drink any alcohol while our son is in his possession, and only gets 30 days in the summer as opposed to the previous 80-90. We got all that we asked for, and (in true douche bag fashion) the ex threw in a “FINE – It’s just not worth it anyway!” at the end like a kid losing at hopscotch and not a man fighting to see his child. Whatever. Ass.

Either way, I still have to send my son on a plane to stay with that ‘man’ for his time and I still have to smile and pretend like I’m glad he’s having a great time playing Mature and Not Yet Rated video games and watching R and NC17 movies – not going to church and hearing his father get laughs all around for calling people ‘fagots’. Although the ass gets a sorry tale to tell about how his ex-wife screwed him (I didn’t) and how he lost everything (he didn’t), it still feels like a slap in the face to send my son to him at all.

We had to send Trevor & Veronica back the day before Billy left so they could spend their month with their mom; loosing all three at the same time feels like having your family explode and scatter all over the globe – needless to say, it makes me feel a bit shell shocked. Bella and Jack are left now, Bella ever-careful of not mentioning how she doesn’t get one of those vacations, and Jack still too little to care. Ironic, since he’s the only one that can truly enjoy never having been named in a divorce or custody battle.

Having kids is hard.

Stick families

Mrs. Messiness — Tue, 12 May 2009 19:54:26 +0000

I love Mother’s Day. I love the handmade, homemade cards with pictures of mommies with stick-person babies and round kids with too-long legs and too-short hair living in square houses and smiling half-circle smiles. I love the cards. I look forward to them every year and I save them all in a big jumbley stack.

Someday I will put them all in plastic notebook sleeves and even label them with kid-names and ages and put them all in order by kid, then year; but that day is far, far away because, well, I have kids. Lots and lots of kids.

When people ask me how many kids I have I say “We have five” without missing a beat. Every once in awhile, I will offer the explanation of how he had two and I had two and then we had another one, but that usually leads having to listen to all the reasons why they did or did not like Eight Is Enough and/or The Brady Bunch and inevitably, them saying “Hey! Now you just need one more so it can be two and two and two!!” because apparently families work best and are complete when they are mathematically balanced. More often than not, though, I say “We have five” and leave it at that.

I grew up in what felt like a giant pile of mismatched socks; people were always asking who belonged to whom, and why. I grew up with my mom and step-father, two older step-sisters and my adopted younger sister (whose biological mother was my oldest step-sister). My brother lived with my dad and I visited on the weekends. My step-sisters insisted that my mom and I lived in their house with their dad – that my brother and I were the ’other kids’. In conversations, I never ever let a ‘your dad’ go by uncorrected when used in reference to my step-father. I never let anyone call my step-sisters my ‘sisters’, but I insisted that no one ever call my little sister anything less that my sister. There was always separation and distinction. We identified ourselves with our differences; displayed our separateness before our similarities – and in the end, are in fact, all separate.

My mother and step-father have long since divorced and after an ugly custody battle; my step-father raised my sister and my mother left town. I never speak to the step-sisters or my step-father but my brother and sister and I are close. My sister is very close to her biological mother – my oldest step-sister – and calls her husband a step-dad. As you can imagine, I have a hard time mapping out this whole community when trying to tell childhood stories to my kids. To this day, I avoid “how many kids were in your family?” because it was just too confusing to recite all the rules.

I glow when asked how many kids I have. I beam. I swell. We have five. All five of them stack up perfectly. They all match. They’re made out of tiny pieces all of us and of each other and we’re all glued together (in our triangle dresses and orange yarn hair) and I thank God daily for every extra minute we get to share together.

Someday, I’ll sit with a giant, nicely-organized binder full of all my Construction Paper Mother’s Day cards in their pretty flat plastic sleeves (in order of kid and year, no less) and I’ll show them all off to all my hundreds of grandkids. I’ll pull each card out one by one and we will reattach each taped-on heart and glued-on button that didn’t make it through the years. I’ll tell them all the stories about their mommies and daddies that I promised never to tell and show them all the embarrassing haircut pictures that they think I threw away.

And eventually, I will make sure they all know how some families are built with construction paper and Elmer’s glue, and that even though our buttons might fall off and our yarn hair might get fuzzy – we absolutely must stay stuck to each other.

Happy late Mother’s Day, mommies – may your Popsicle sticks never be splintery.