I’ve never before been sad when the time rolls around for school to start. I’ve never been happy either, though. It’s never made any difference. This was the first summer – let’s be honest…the first period of time longer than a week-and-a-half or so of vacation – I spent with Ethan and Noah since they were almost four and barely one, respectively. I tried being a full-time mom once before. At that point, I had been working at the bank for about five years, having started there in August of 2001. Ethan was born in November of 2002, I took my maternity leave, and then went right back to work. And there I still was when Noah was born in February of 2006. I intended to get right back to it that time too, but he was breech and had the umbilical cord wrapped around his neck twice. An emergency c-section led to the discovery of what they thought was a cyst on my ovary. I only had one ovary left by that time, having lost the first one to ovarian cancer when I was seventeen years old. Well, I had horrible pregnancies (wonderful babies, horrible pregnancies) so Kelly and I had already decided we weren’t going to push our luck past two kids anyway, so I told them to just go ahead and remove the ovary while they were in there performing the c-section. The next day we learned that the supposed cyst was actually a cancerous tumor. After visits with an oncologist, it was determined that I would take a little time to recover from the first surgery, and then we’d go to Denver for a hysterectomy – just to be safe. So that’s what we did, in April of 2006. During that surgery, the doctor opted to remove my appendix, because it looked “a little off.” Yep. It was a little off. Appendix cancer. (Never heard of it? Neither had I.) The oncologist informed me that with everything I had gone through, the appendix cancer would have actually been the one to kill me. The tumor was still developing inside the appendix when he removed it, essentially on a hunch. He made it very clear that if it hadn’t been detected during the hysterectomy, it most likely would have caused no symptoms until it was too late. He estimated that I would have been dead within two years.
At that point, I wanted to be with my babies. Life is short. Life is uncertain. And I had given birth to miracles – including a newborn miracle whose birth had literally saved my life. So in July of 2006, I left the bank to stay home. Almost immediately I took on a part-time job. And then another. Yes, we needed the money, but truthfully, I just needed to get out of the house. I knew then that I wasn’t meant to be a full-time mother. I was going crazy, and I told myself I was a better mother if I wasn’t with them all the time. By August of 2007, I was back at the bank full-time. I’d been wooed back with a management position, but truthfully, I probably would have taken anything. I felt like a failure as a mother, but I brushed those feelings aside. After all, I was helping to provide for my family. They would be fine in daycare. And don’t get me wrong – they were. We have been blessed with amazing caregivers who love those two boys deeply. And the truth is, at that time in their lives – at that time in my life – my children were probably better off in daycare. I wasn’t ready for it. I don’t think I was a bad mom, but I really was better at it if it was my evening and weekend job. I’m not proud of that, but it’s the truth.
Of course, if you’ve been reading The Year of Blogging Faithfully, you know the rest. I kept moving up the ladder, which meant more power, more money, more responsibility, more hours at work, more stress, less of a relationship with my boys, less time to remember that life is short and life is uncertain. But by April 30, 2014, God had begun the process of changing my heart.
School starts tomorrow for Ethan, Wednesday for Noah, and I am so sad that the summer is over. This summer, I truly got to know my children, perhaps for the very first time. And I discovered that they are remarkable human beings. Absolutely remarkable. Noah possesses a keen intuitiveness which will literally take your breath away at times. I never really realized that before. If you are sad, or worried, or even just a tad out of sorts, he knows. And his instinct is to comfort and assist. And when I look at Ethan, I no longer see the kid who I always said was oil to my water. We bonded this summer, and now I realize that when he gets irritable and cranky with me, it’s usually just because he’s thinking at a higher level than I am, and he doesn’t understand why I don’t understand him. He seems airheaded quite often – and he is – but it’s only because he doesn’t see the point in wasting time on the little things which fill the minds of most of us day in and day out.
As I wrote those last few lines, I kept seeing in my mind the scene in The Sound of Music when Maria and the children get back to the villa after a day of climbing trees in play clothes made from the old curtains in Maria’s bedroom. The Baroness is there to meet the children, and the Captain is upset with Maria and embarrassed by his children. And Maria takes the opportunity to implore the Captain to get to know his children. And Friedrich, he’s a boy but he wants to be a man, but there’s no one to show him how, and then of course Maria’s impassioned plea, Oh, please Captain, love them. Love them all! You know the rest…the Captain fires Maria, but then he hears singing. They all sing “The Sound of Music,” the Captain realizes he didn’t know his children after all, Maria is asked to stay, and not even the Nazis can stand in the way of all of the love and happiness which soon ensues.
Yeah. That. That’s how my heart feels.
The Year of Blogging Faithfully 