I really don’t want to write today, but I think it’s bad to screw up on day 2 of Lent…so…here I am.
I’m sad today. I’m worried the baby is going to come early, and I want him to come early, and that makes me feel bad. I’m tired of the pressure and how my body feels. I’m tired of gestational diabetes, but most of all, I hate having to watch Mark through all this. Work is insane for him, and then he’s worried about me healthwise and when he walks in the door at 6:30 p.m., he finds me on the couch cringing because of contractions, has two kids who are starving and want nothing more than attention from daddy, and dogs that are starving and haven’t been outside since 12 p.m. (I was afraid to walk them because of the pressure I’ve been feeling this afternoon.) So yeah. He’s short in temper. And while we all are in love with this baby in my belly I wonder how we will manage a third in the mix.
On top of it all, another relative of mine is preparing to enter heaven (if she hasn’t already). My Aunt Mary, my dad’s sister-in-law, has battled Alzheimer’s and had a stroke, among other health issues. She was given her last rites this morning. She was always a very kind woman to me, although when I was little I felt like my aunts and uncles were so old. My cousin Mike’s facebook post tonight left the already emotionally-fragile me crying. I learned new things about my aunt that made me think she was so cool…he writes: “She took me to see then-Sen. John F Kennedy during his presidential campaign, if only from a distance as the motorcade zipped by, and when he won in 1960, she put a campaign poster in the front window with the words hooray made out of adhesive tape. When we vacationed in Florida some years later, she made us stop at civil rights sites on the way and drank out of the ‘colored’ water fountains.” I wish I had known that about her so I could have talked to her about it when I lived in North St. Louis at Claver House.
And I feel sad I can’t be there for this part of my family. They have had a super rough number of years. My cousin Sue died about six months after being diagnosed with melanoma. My cousin Tim has had a brain tumor and been fighting it. At the same time, Aunt Mary was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. I’ve been out of town for most of this (as is the life of a military spouse), but this is the family who all came to my dad’s nursing home to bid him goodbye. Almost everyone of my Uncle Jim’s kids who lived in town came to see dad on his last day. Being so much younger than my cousins, I’ve never had that traditional cousin experience, but on that day I really did feel like I had an amazing extended family.
I hate that I can’t be there for them. I can’t even travel at 36 weeks pregnant, but my heart hurts that I can’t be there for them the way they were for me. My cousin Mike also predicted that my Uncle Jim, whose health is OK, will follow Aunt Mary soon because of a broken heart. As my dad’s siblings die, I hurt…they are my link to him physically and are the keepers of so much knowledge about my dad that I want to know but never knew what or how to ask. It’s surreal…my dad had me when he was 53. Here, I think I am too old to have a kid at 37. He had so many lives before I was born. Every time I lose a piece of his generation, it’s like losing a bit of him again. Those stories about him disappear.
So, it’s been a crazy day. A morning of grading. An afternoon of meeting someone who I may entrust with my boys in eight to ten weeks. An afternoon nap. And an evening that has me feeling so many different emotions. Maybe I shouldn’t have decided to do this for Lent…this is hard.
