The Last Decade: 2001

As I look back on my life over the past decade, I don’t recognize the woman I was 10 years ago: scared, unconscious, trapped. The past decade contained a series of events and mini-awakenings that have led me here. I know I am not fully conscious … yet. But unlike 10 years ago, I can imagine the fulfilled, happy, awakened woman I will be at the turn of the next decade. In an exercise that is almost purely selfish, in the next several posts I’ll be taking a snapshot-heavy look back and where I was each year during the past 10 years, and what my major achievements and losses were. It’s the losses, I believe, that move us forward the most.

2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004-1, 2004-2, 2004-3, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009

2001: Death and Birth

January

I finally went to the dermatologist to remove an ugly, fast-growing, black, pencil-eraser-sized mole that had grown on my forearm the previous spring. Right around Christmas, it had gone from dark brown to black and a red, itchy ring appeared around it. I thought nothing of it, nor of the dermatologist’s inquiry about a family history of melanoma. I was pregnant. Happily so.

February

On Feb. 7 I cried hysterically in the dermatologist’s office as she delivered my melanoma diagnosis. For the next eight weeks, I was not sure if I–or my baby–would survive. My oncologist told me I had a 70% chance of dying, based upon my tumor size. He warned that I might have to make a very difficult choice: terminating my pregnancy at about 25 weeks because if the melanoma had spread, it would be my life or hers. (The treatment is too toxic for a fetus to survive.) I told him that I’d risk letting the cancer spread for an additional month so that she would be closer to viability.

The thought of going through immunotherapy while having a premie in the ICU was almost enough to kill me via stress. I found myself meditating, visioning my immune system as an army of microscopic soldiers fiercely battling the melanoma cells. I believe that this intense meditation practice saved my life.

On Feb. 10, I found out that the baby was a girl, and we named her Lauren Mae. I had always wanted to name my daughter after my favorite author, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and both of my grandmothers, who each had Mae in their names. After debate, her dad and I compromised with the name Lauren.

On Feb. 14, I received a phone call from my confidential intermediary that changed my world. She’d found Laura, my birthmother. I didn’t learn her name for several months, as we exchanged letters through the intermediary. I was shocked when I found out how close I’d come to naming our daughter after my birthmother. And in the nick of time–for the first time in my life–I had my real medical history from one side of my family.

March

In March, during an ultrasound to learn if placenta previa discovered at my 20-week check in had resolved, the tech found a small mass in my baby’s abdomen. I went from being a low-risk mother seeking natural, doula and midwife-led childbirth to a high-risk patient. We later learned that the mass was not a tumor but rather an ovarian cyst growing inside the baby.

I started taking prenatal yoga to help me calm the hell down and wound up falling in love with my body for the first time in my life. It was a short love affair, but one I’d return to again and again as I sought to stop hating the vessel my soul rides around in. I stopped working, unable to concentrate on anything but keeping my baby safe and alive. Me too. I withdrew, cried, meditated. I wondered–became certain–that I was paying the price of my infidelity, of my not being able to fully love my husband, or even myself, because of what remained unresolved around Dan.

I had a wide area excision of my melanoma tumor alongside a sentinel lymph node biopsy during March’s first week at the hospital across the street from the cheap motel where, on one single occasion 7 months earlier, I made love with the man I’d loved since the moment I saw him in 1988. Somehow, it seemed like justice to be going through this experience with that place in plane view. The last sound I heard as I went under general anesthesia and the first sound I heard upon waking was my daughter’s heartbeat, broadcast through a monitor. To me, it was the sound of god.

Two excruciatingly long weeks later, I learned that the cancer had not spread. I would require no further treatment, but at least 10 years of twice-annual followup, including chest X-rays and liver tests to make sure there was no internal recurrence. I also learned who my real friends were: Kristin and her mother, who started a prayer circle for me. Helen, who gave me a card that said “The world is conspiring in your favor,” which I still have today. Stacey, a former coworker, who brought me meals as I recovered. Jenny, who did the same.Jennifer, Andrea. My sister Kate. They are all still my friends. I sent Suzanne, the friend who dumped me over my affair, an email about my situation. She never replied.

April

In April, we sold our latest fix-and-flip–we were as good at doing projects as we were traveling together–and bought our dream house. It was big. It was expensive. It was gorgeous, and in an excellent school district. The community had a pool, even. Very suburban–what I thought I wanted, needed, to feel like a real woman, wife, mother. Family. Besides, it was as big as my husband’s sister’s, so we were keeping up with our main competitors. I wrote poetry, and sewed Lauren’s entire suite of bedding and curtains for her new nursery with the bay window. I hand-painted flowers around the frames. I nested.

May

By May, the cyst growing inside of Lauren had reached the size of an apple. By that time, I had undergone nearly a dozen ultrasounds, when I had only planned to have the first one to learn the sex of our baby at my husband’s urging. My low-tech, natural pregnancy was fraught with trips to the perinatologist and risk of intervention. I was concerned about all the radiation and sound waves and unnatural crap we were both being exposed to. My midwife and specialist started talking about c-section, about early induction. I was so sad to be losing my birth plan.

Lauren was due July 14. By my 32nd birthday in June, her belly was measuring 44 weeks of gestation. The specialist wasn’t concerned about the cyst rupturing, but rather whether I could actually pass her out of my body safely, if at all. I still refused to think about a c-section until it was absolutely necessary, which got the specialist to think creatively.

June

On the day Lauren was 37-weeks cooked, I was admitted to the hospital. The specialist, using a sonogram for guidance, inserted a 12-inch amniocentesis needle through my belly, my uterus, the placenta and into the cyst in Lauren’s belly. Carefully, he drew out 250cc of yellow-green liquid. The cyst was about the size of a medium grapefruit. With the cyst deflated, vaginal birth was back on the table. However, given how fast and big the cyst had grown, the specialist and midwife agreed that labor should be induced that day. A test showed her lungs were mature, and given that I was huge–my belly measured 49 inches around–and so hot–Denver seemed to be in a permanent 95-degree-plus state in early June–I was ready.

Just 16 hours later, after only 20 minutes of pushing and nary a drug in my system, Lauren sprang into the world and into our hearts 3 weeks premature. She weighed 9 pounds, 1 ounce and was 22 inches long. Had she been fully cooked, she would have easily been a 10-pound baby. It was June 21, the summer solstice. The longest, best day of the year. Of my life. I felt confident, like I could do this thing called motherhood. I could be a good mom.

On the way home from the hospital, as the temperature reached 100 degrees, we got a flat tire. My husband planted me and our two-day-old daughter in the cool corner of Starbucks–the barista, empathetic, did not charge me for my decaf iced coffee–and changed the tire. He was always–and still is–the reliable guy. The guy who knows how to change a tire, and use a hammer, and fix the sink when it clogs. He was not, however, the guy who knew how to handle me, with my emotions, and my dreams, and the things that stopped me.

Summer

Over the next several months, my husband and I learned that we had very different parenting styles: He thought I sucked as a mother, that I could do nothing right, that he was better at comforting my daughter than I would ever be. Slowly, self-doubt became my constant companion. I read every parenting book, put Lauren on a schedule, off a schedule, and finally figured out that, like me, she prefers a schedule with some flexibility.

I thought he was a good dad. He tackled diapers and feeding like he tackled putting up crown molding in the dining room: competently, with great ardor. I breastfed–my favorite times with Lauren. I produced enough milk for quadruplets, thick, creamy stuff that made my fat baby even fatter. She grew, she grinned. She was an amazing baby. Yet I struggled with understanding what she wanted, and with my own emotions. I called my mother, a long-time pediatric nurse, endlessly and over the smallest things. It was such a relief to have someone who knew what was normal (and everything was).

Fall

September 11 happened, and our cat Hangar was killed by a car that same day. Tough to grieve a cat on a day when the nation went to hell.

The malaise I felt during Lauren’s first few weeks turned to full-fledged postpartum depression that made me rageful and led to lots of drywall patching, because I tended to kick holes in walls. My husband was not empathetic, blamed me, did not try to get me help. It smoldered.

I went to the grocery store, Lauren’s car seat plugged into the child seat of the cart, to escape. We took the dogs–our golden retrievers Sunny and first-child Duncan, who we’d raised from a puppy–to the dog open space. We visited my parents often, saw movies, repainted all the rooms.

The Wednesday before Thanksgiving, I found myself in a chain restaurant bar knocking back a double Jack Daniels, neat, to quell the butterflies. Thirty minutes later, I saw her: Laura. The woman who made me. We spent three hours talking, tentatively. I so wanted her to like me. To love me. To regret, as well, but mostly, to love me. It was the beginning of what we have now, an undefinable relationship.

To my relief, just before Thanksgiving, I was offered a part-time temporary writing gig with my previous employer. I was not a good full-time stay-at-home mom, and I welcomed the opportunity to go back to work. I shut down my near-dead freelance company (the post-9/11 economy had killed most of my business anyway) and stared working two days a week, just like my mom did during my childhood. I missed Lauren’s first roll-over with regret, but loved that she would grow up loving and knowing her grandparents, who watched her during the day.

The depression I felt not only reflected the state of my mothering, but the state of my marriage. With one exception, we did not have sex again until January 2004. I began thinking I was frigid, or a lesbian. Unhappiness was our constant companion. But we smiled and went to church at Mile Hi and pretended. We pretended so well.

On New Year’s Day, 2002, my last grandparent died. Our entire family, including Lauren, flew to Lake Charles for the funeral. I looked around the house where I’d spent so many summers, knowing it was likely the last time I’d ever set foot inside. My grandparents were the glue that held my dad and sister, me and my siblings and my cousins, together.

I remember looking at my family and wondering if this was it. This–all of us, not talking, pretending to be close but not really knowing each other–was not what I’d always imagined. I did not know intimacy. I swore that Lauren would know different.