Birthday Math (why my baby should have been born yesterday!)

Well the 21st has come and gone and my baby is still in the belly. Not that yesterday was my due date or anything. In fact it would have been considered early. But I was determined the baby was coming yesterday. My logic: of all the possible birthdays surrounding my supposed due date, this was the one I found the most mathematically satisfying. 12-21-09. Just look at it. First of all the month and the day make a palindrome. Second of all, 1 and 2 (the month) and 2 and 1 (the day) add to 3 and then 3 times 3 is 9 (the year). It just looks so nice. I can't help it. I am always analyzing numbers in this way. I always loved the fact that my birthday (1-25) is two perfect squares. And amazingly enough, so is my husband's (1-16). Maybe baby wants to follow that pattern. I guess that would mean 1-4. That's two weeks away! I can't wait that long! Oh well, I am sure that no matter what day baby decides to be born, I will play with the numbers until I find something mathematically satisfying about it. I can't help it - tis my nature.

Three things I learned from pregnancy

As my pregnancy is (hopefully) coming to an end soon, I've been reflecting on all I have learned in the last 9 months. While there are many many things I could share, I'll share the three that stand out.

1) Prayer works! Yes this seems simple and is not a new lesson for me - but it kinda is. I always believed this as a child - "Ask anything in my name and it will be given to you" etc. Seemed simple enough. And for most of my life I was taught this and saw it in action. When miracles were prayed for, we often got them. Then in the past 5 years I had kinda lost faith in prayer. Maybe it was going to a church that is so wrapped up in Calvinism that they can't pray for you without adding the words "if it be Your will" before the request and after the request the words "and give her the grace to accept your will" as if they don't really expect God to do anything about your situation other than give you the strength to deal with it. Maybe it was because the things I was praying for the most in those 5 years were just not happening. Maybe it was simply because life is much harder than I expected. Whatever the reason, I was finding it harder and harder to pray with expectation. Then some women in my mom's church took over praying for me. They had seen so many miracles in the past year, it was easy for them to pray with faith and expectation. So I just gave my infertility woes to them and stopped praying for myself. But the story doesn't just end with me getting pregnant four months later (two weeks after they finally had the opportunity to lay hands on me). They continued to pray. And I continued to have an easy and uneventful pregnancy. Then at 32 weeks, we had a scare - a complication - a freak-out really. And they prayed. At 33 weeks, someone in the group got the fabulous idea of laying hands on a card since I couldn't be there. They prayed over the card, signed it and dropped it in the mail. When it arrived, Michael Paul rubbed the card all over my bare belly. Yes we felt a little silly, but hey, I wasn't doubting this time - these women are anointed. The next day the situation resolved itself and has remained resolved until now. Furthermore, all those things I had prayed for (things having nothing to do with me or pregnancy) for five years and never got an answer were answered one by one in the past nine months. It's like, when God finally sent the rain, it poured, and overflowed, and everything in my little world was answered. I hope I will always remember that no matter how long the dry spell, God will always answer the prayer eventually and the answer will always be better than what you even asked for.

2) "If you choose to..." is a phrase we should all learn to say a lot more. I am sure I am not the only pregnant person who has had to suffer through all the unsolicited advice and all the conversations that start "you ARE going to .... because if you .... then you (insert phrase that implies you are going to be a bad mother). I first heard the "if you choose to" phrase from my sister-in-law. I was asking her some questions about cloth diapering and she said, "oh that reminds me, if you choose to circumcise then you will need to ..." I don't even remember what she said after that because I was so taken aback by her saying "if you choose to." I sat there pondering it for the rest of our conversation. I felt so respected. I felt like she trusted me to make my own decisions as a mother. I felt at ease knowing she was confident enough in herself that if I chose to do something different from her she wouldn't feel threatened by me. I loved the fact that she didn't just assume that since my husband (her brother) is circumcised and every other male in the family is circumcised that I would surely do the same. I still had a choice! It was amazing. Then I realized I had never felt that way in one of these advice giving conversations before - especially all the ones I was having with my friends who were slightly ahead of me in childbearing. I pondered it for days. Such a simple phrase and so so powerful. It's one thing to claim I don't judge people. It's an entirely different thing to go out of my way to make another person not feel judged by me. I am committing myself to use this phrase as much as possible in my own conversations with friends in the future.

3) The best listeners are the people who A) have the same values/desires as you and B) have been through what you are going through. This seems so simple when I write it. But my tendency when needing to talk had always been to talk to Michael Paul, or call one of the same three people (mom, sister, best friend). And then many times I would feel worse after the conversation. There have been many times I have needed a good listener, or some good advice in the last nine months. And I have learned to stop first and actually think about who would be the best person to talk to. For example, when I learned a certain complication might make natural childbirth an impossibility, it did me no good to talk to someone for whom that was not important to them. They only made me feel silly for being so upset. Saying, "what's the big deal, lots of women have epidurals and c-sections" did NOT make me feel better. In fact, it pissed me off! On a lighter note, I also learned it is best not to talk about my passion for cloth diapering with someone who chooses not to or my interest in attachment parenting with some one who follows "Babywise" down to the letter or my desire for a homebirth with someone who thinks all women who choose that are selfish and crazy. (sooner or later someone is going to feel judged or annoyed and unheard). So many positives have come from this new commitment on my part to reach out beyond my circle of 4 people. I have talked to my sister-in-law more in the past few months than I had in the last 5 years combined. I was able to rekindle a friendship with my long-lost high-school best friend. I grew much closer to an older wiser woman in my church. I have to say, I am rather surprised at my introverted self. Pregnancy forced me to come out of my shell a bit more and I was definitely blessed for doing so.

Prego Art

OK I have to admit I totally got the idea to do this from my friend Summer. I loved her pregnant pictures. So while I hate having my picture taken, I knew I would regret it later if I didn't suck it up and take some. Thanks to Michael Paul who fought with the camera and lighting to get these perfect. He was very patient!

OCD

I'll admit it. I'm a little on the OCD side. So is my husband. So are some of my students (they're usually my favorites). Kenny is one of these students. He's absolutely hilarious too. Every time he turns a paper into me, he takes the stack, makes sure all the papers are facing the right direction, and stacks them together nice and neat before returning to his seat. I appreciate this more than he knows. Last week, Kenny picked up the stack of folders I was about to hand back and started arranging them so that the stack had the largest folders on the bottom leading up to the smallest on the top. Now a normal person would say that all the folders were the same size. But actually there are small millimeter differences depending on the particular brand. Anyway, I was quite enjoying watching this when another student said, "hey Kenny are you OCD or something?" To which Kenny replied straight faced, "no I'm CDO." "What's CDO?" I asked. Kenny: "Well, it's the same condition but the letters are alphabetical as they should be."

How I became a Mom

First, I have to go into my beliefs about time because my title to this post is already bothering me. Time is just an illusion and in the spiritual realm where my citizenship actually is (Phil 3:20) there is no time. God is above time and not constrained by time. C.S. Lewis puts it this way: If my friend asks me to pray for him during his 3:00 doctors appointment but I don't remember until 4:00, it doesn't matter in the slightest and I can go ahead and pray as if the appointment hasn't happened yet. God already heard the prayer before the appointment started because he is not constrained by the concept of time. I say all that so you can understand that I don't believe I "became" a mother when I conceived. I always was a mom because it has always been a part of God's plan even though in earthly time it didn't happen until now. This concept was one of the greatest sources of comfort to me during my journey.
OK, I'll try to save all my theology for future posts. Anyway, so I don't really know where to start but I like to start at the very very beginning - which for me would be the fact that as a child the only toys I ever really cared about were dolls and the only games I ever cared to play were pretend games in which I was a mom. When asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, the answer was "a mom." To say it is the only dream I ever really dreamt for my life would be an understatement. I was passionate about it. Sure I had other interests - the major one being mathematics - but that was just for fun - not a career. I was going to be a mom. I went to college to study math for fun - I never really saw myself as training for a job. What was the point? I was going to get married and then spend my life raising kids - lots of them!
So fast-forward. I did get married to a wonderful man who did want kids and even shared my passion for adoption. This was all going according to plan. We would have a few biological kids and then when I felt too old to do it again, we would adopt a couple more. Of course Michael Paul did tell me he was a 2 or 3 kids kinda person, but I didn't care - I was sure he would change his mind down the road and I would get my 4 or 5. (We still don't know what will be the end of that story!) After a year of marriage, I began to approach the topic. MP would have none of it. His attitude: We were just beginning to figure out marriage, why would I want to throw a kid in the mix and complicate things further? So I decided to sit back and learn patience - a very hard lesson and I'm glad I didn't know then just how long that lesson would be!
Fast-forward another year. Now we were both on the same page. MP was still a little nervous about the whole becoming a dad thing, but a wise man told him if he waited until he felt ready he would never do it because he would never feel ready. This was the logic that I think finally convinced him. So now we were trying ......and trying.......and trying. And at the exact moment we began trying, my body decided to flip out and stop working. I didn't get it. I was so healthy. We were young. I had never had any indication from my doctor that I wasn't completely normal. Although, I had always feared this would happen to me, and in a strange way I wasn't surprised. It seems to me when you want something really bad you don't get it - or at best you have to wait and be the last to get it.
After almost a year of trying, I finally decided to go to the doctor and start the long horrible road of fertility treatments. We knew the road would be a short one for us because ethically we did not feel comfortable with the more advanced treatments like artificial insemination and in-vitro fertilization (not that we could have afforded those anyway). So we got on the drugs. For me, being the anti-drug person that I am, this was very humbling. I don't even take advil for a headache. I treat everything with herbs and homeopathy and have always found it successful and am very skeptical of anything pharmaceutical. But I was desperate. I'll sum up this year by saying this: I had all the side effects and no pregnancy. I hated weekly doctor's appointments where they make you sit in a waiting room where half the people there are pregnant. Then when I finally saw the doctor, I felt more like a freak science project than a human being. My entire identity had become a bunch of lab results and prescriptions. And to top it off, our marriage was on the rocks. MP never really cared about me doing the fertility treatments. For him, it never really mattered where the child came from and he saw all this as a sign we should just adopt. I loved him and hated him for this attitude at the same time. It was a great comfort to know he would be all over adoption as soon as I called it quits. But I hated that when I was squalling over another negative pregnancy test, he seemed to think it was not a big deal. At some point I realized that if we continued, it would destroy our marriage. We stopped all treatments and started marriage counseling.
Fast-forward again. Counseling saved my life and our marriage. I grieved and worked through a whole bunch of junk. Our relationship became stronger than ever. By the end of three months, our counselor was trying to convince us we should counsel other couples. We kinda laughed at this but it was good to know at least someone thought we had it mostly together. On our summer road trip that year I felt something change inside me. The beauty of Glacier National Park and the closeness I felt to God there somehow enabled me to give it all up. On the drive home, we talked about adoption again.
That was summer. By November we had our adoption things together. We had a lawyer, our paperwork in place. We were just waiting on a phone call. I was excited again. We finally told a few close friends about our 3 hellish years and asked for prayer for a child. We started turning half our attic space into a spare room so our second bedroom could be a nursery. The fog had lifted. I started to dream again.
February 2009: Funny things began to happen. First of all, I was sure the Holy Spirit was telling me that we were about to receive a child. Every time I spent time with the Lord, I seemed to be led to reflect on Isaiah 54:1-3. Then I was led to focus only on verse 2. I felt crazy for feeling so sure God was giving me a direct command to finish the nursery. I didn't want to be disappointed. What if I was misunderstanding Him? I couldn't bear another let-down. In March I started getting confirmation - lots of it. Everything I read or received seemed to be saying I was a mother. I got random emails from people trying to sell stuff to moms or making an announcement that only applied to moms. This had never happened before. How did I get on this list? I had someone at church who I didn't know come up to me out of the blue to tell me I was going to be a great mom. A couple of people who knew our story asked me if we had received a call from our lawyer because they had had a feeling all week that we were about to get a child. It was weird and awesome. But I just treasured all these things in my heart and didn't tell anyone. I liked it being my little secret with God. In the mean time, I finished the nursery.
March: I went to visit my family during spring break. My mom had been dying for me to visit her prayer group because they had been praying for me and wanted to lay hands on me and pray. This was a wonderful experience and I had great peace knowing they were only praying for something that had already happened in Heaven. I guess I should point out here that all this time I was assuming we were about to get a phone call about a child up for adoption. Pregnancy was the farthest thing from my mind. After all, we had been told our chances were extremely low.
April: I finally decided to let Michael Paul in on all the stuff I had been experiencing. He was his usual skeptical self and didn't want me to get my hopes up. At the end of the month my sister, Julie and brother-in-law, Mark came to visit. Mark felt an overwhelming burden to pray for us and our future child. He even ran across two blocks to do so after we had already said our goodbyes. We were all quite out of our comfort zones - standing there praying on a sidewalk in the middle of downtown with people walking by and all. But the Holy Spirit was so thick - it was obvious this prayer had to take place. This was the first weird experience that MP and I shared as a couple. I remember he was speechless all the way home. I was hoping, at the least, that MP wouldn't think I was crazy now. I told him, "see, that is the kind of stuff that's been happening to me for a month; something is going on." What we didn't know then was that I was already pregnant.
It took us a while to figure it out. The typical signs that tell women they are expecting didn't mean anything to me because my hormones had been crazy for years. (And I had all the lab work to prove it.) So when MP, who caught on before I did, suggested we take a pregnancy test, I thought he was crazy. I was still sure adoption was how we would become parents. At the beginning of summer I decided maybe I should do it to put his mind at ease. And if the negative result sent me into a week of can't-get-out-of-bed depression, at least I didn't have to go to work because school was out. I did what I had to do (as I had so many times before) and gave it to MP. I at least wasn't going to look at it. He found me outside 3 minutes later to tell me we were having a baby.
This is already insanely long but I would love to go into all the things I learned throughout this journey - wonderful things and hard things - about myself, my husband, God, people in general. Hmmmmm - another day.

Adventures in a Mathematical Mess?

I suppose the first entry for a new blog should be an explanation of its title. So what is a mathematical mess? Well, basically that is how I see life. If you know me you know I am super passionate about math - (yes I realize how nerdy this makes me sound!) I try to find order in everything. I like things organized. I'm a bit OCD and yes, I'll admit, controlling. I like how mathematics is a nice axiomatic system of theorems and properties that are always true and build logically upon each other. I see math everywhere - in nature, in spirituality, even in relationships. Math is both my job and my hobby. Yes, I really do sit on the couch in the evenings and work math problems for fun. I can't help but see the world through mathematical eyes. So what's with the "mess"? Well, that's easy to explain. If you've lived long enough, you know life's a mess. I just like to think of it as a beautiful, organized, mathematical mess. Some of the most eloquent proofs in mathematical history were scribbled in the margins of some wrinkled up piece of paper. That's how I like to view myself. That's how I view life in general.