This morning, my husband had brunch with the members of his “eating club”, as a farewell to the current Four Seasons breakfast before the hotel changes it’s location. He, my dad, my brousins, my dad’s best friend since high school and his sons have formed “The E-Street Supper Club” and do Four Seasons brunches, a yearly trip to Peter Luger’s in New York and steak feasts at the Capital Grille. It’s a very special ritual with a group of very special men.

Well, today we are two days shy of it being exactly two years since the cold winter morning when my husband went to the Four Seasons brunch with his guys, leaving me alone to secretly take a pregnancy test.

When he walked in the door from brunch that day, my daughter handed him a gift box and inside of it was a test with two clear lines. Just like that, we were going to have another baby. I will never forget that moment or that day. My husband and I were both shocked and excited and I swear that my belly popped out by that evening.

This morning, as you can imagine, I was a bit nostalgic; wistful; as I won’t ever get a chance to live that scene, or anything like it, ever again.

But,

I had something even better.

I was sitting on the Living Room couch, snuggling with both kids, when my son spotted my husband’s face through the glass window in our front door.

“Dada!” he squealed with excitement,

and he took off running.

So yes, things have changed, and the past will not be repeated, but oh my, the present,

it is so special, and for these moments I am so blessed.

Instead of two lines, I have two amazing children.

A pee stick ain’t got nothing on this.

The post Two years after two lines. appeared first on Mommy Ever After.

***

Part of me wishes that I could say, “I don’t know when it happened. It just crept up on me.” in talking about my depression, but that would be untrue. I know exactly when the turning point occurred, exactly where, exactly why and exactly how. It was March 17, 2013. St. Patrick’s Day. I have referenced this day before when I first opened up about my struggle with postpartum depression, but now I can tell you more, perhaps because I now know more. This may be the most vulnerable in my writing that I have ever been or will every be, but right now, at this moment, my heart is completely open, and so I am letting the feelings pour out of me, before my brain starts to compartmentalize things again, burying the painful, shielding me from the hard and forgetting the details.

On March 17, 2013 I was 6 weeks pregnant. I was at my parents’ house for Chinese food and when I went to the bathroom and saw a bit of blood. My entire body became paralyzed. I can’t remember whom I told first, my husband or my mom, but the thought of it now would bring me to my knees if I were not already seated. It is making me double over. I thought that I was losing my baby.

It was a Sunday night, so we had no option but to call the hospital’s emergency line. The doctor on call was brusque, and said to me, “Well, either you’re having a miscarriage or you are spotting so you can come in or you can just wait and see.”

I don’t understand how someone could be so callous in her line of work, but to me there was no choice. My husband and I went to the emergency room and I was more scared than I had ever been in my entire life.

From the moment that I found out that I was pregnant with my second child, I felt a tremendous sense of love and gratitude. I felt whole in a way that I had never felt before. I felt like our lives were about to change in a way so that we, as a family, would be complete.

I didn’t have to wait, that night, as I checked in to the Emergency Room. I was sent into the triage room immediately and then, we were given a bed in the hallway, as there was no room ready for us at that time. I remember some specific things about that time on the hallway hospital bed; I remember having my blood drawn there and then seeing blood on the sheet that covered the gurney; I remember talking to my husband about the thing–the possibility–that something was really wrong. How would we tell our daughter?; I remember when they wheeled me to the ultrasound room and how I had to endure an uncomfortable examination and the technician was not allowed to tell me anything. I had to sit there, as she watched my uterus, and I was not able to find out if, in fact, I had a baby with a beating heart inside.

We were moved into a room after an hour or so and our doctor was a young, tall, dark haired man who was more of a busy ER doctor than a hand-holder, if that makes sense. He told me that my blood levels looked good, that there were two definite structures in my uterus, the yolk sac and the embryo; and the embryo was my baby, with a strong beating heart. I am writing this with tears streaming down my face, for all that was, all that could have been, all that is and all that will never be.

I asked the doctor for an ultrasound photo, but apparently they don’t do that in the ER like at the OBGYN’s office, but he allowed us to look at the images on his computer and pointed out what he referred to as “a little cheerio”. That was our baby.

And then, my life changed.

There are details about this part of the story that are both too painful and too personal to share, but that was the night that I turned down the road from being the person I had always been towards the depressed person that I would become. As I have written before, I went completely numb to the baby growing inside of me. It sounds horrible and ungrateful, but really, it was my defense mechanism. I had been so scared that I couldn’t let myself feel. And I think that this also caused a rift in my marriage. While he was relieved and unfazed, I was everything and nothing.

I think of that night, often. I have shared details of it with my friends, some more than others, and it has haunted me for 22 months. This was when I started to feel that lonely feeling. I was not alone, not ever really, but I was lonely nonetheless.

I am mad at so many things about that night. That night was when I went from “A Happy Story” to “A Hard Story”.

And you know the rest.

The rest until yesterday.

***

My kids have been sick for over a week now. Fevers, ear infections, snot, coughing…the works.

We started Saturday morning on the later side, which was nice, and I spent most of the early hours on the computer trying to order things like new bedding for my daughter, birthday gifts for her friends and a present for my husband’s birthday next week. At 9:30 my husband brought our congested baby up into my bed with me and he napped next to me for two hours. My husband went climbing at the rock gym and my daughter played in her room and I can’t remember what I did. Truly. I don’t know if I slept or wrote on the computer. I feel you Adnan.

When my son stirred, I texted my husband to come up to our room, I wasn’t feeling quite right. My left arm was hurting and I was having some chest pain. We thought that maybe I was hungry and dehydrated so I sat with a bag of cinnamon raisin bread and just kept eating slice after slice and I drank a smoothie. But I did not feel any better. I started to feel lightheaded and so we took my blood pressure which was 90/58. My pulse, to me, felt unusually weak. My lips turned blue. We called my mom and she came to watch the kids while we went to the ER. On the way there my husband joked that we should have a punch card like they give out at the frozen yogurt store or the nail salon, as we seem to be incredibly frequent visitors. But the on the ride there I was also shaking uncontrollably and even though I wore a tank top, a cashmere turtleneck, a big cardigan and my winter coat, my husband covered me in his heavy Canada Goose jacket because I was so cold. When we got to the hospital I couldn’t even think straight to sign the forms, so my husband did it for me. They put on my wrist band and when I looked at it, I thought something looked odd, but I was feeling so lightheaded. “My name is not Tasha Williams*” I told the lady and she cut off the mislabeled bracelet and gave me a new one with my correct information. I was taken to triage immediately where they made me change into a gown, despite my uncontrollable trembling and gave me an EKG. Apparently the spasms made the reading look crazy. The nurse asked me for a list of medications that I take and also medicines that I am allergic to. I was still somewhat disoriented, but I heard my husband give her the list. I felt such warmth towards him at that moment. That feeling only grew when he wheeled me into the bathroom where he helped me to pee into a cup. I can’t even begin to imagine what search engine terms will now lead people to this site, but I am telling the full story, because I am trying to emphasize to you how lucky I feel to have a husband as wonderful as mine. And it was in the bathroom that I started to cry.

Earlier this week I wrote about having an emotional day, but those were spells of tears or wet-eyed smiles. The deluge I had been waiting for finally came. I sat in the wheelchair as my husband pushed me back into the waiting room and I sobbed and sobbed.

“I am so sorry,” he said.

“Do you know why I am crying?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said.

“There are two reasons,” I said.

“I know,” he said.

“What are they?” I asked, not meaning to quiz him, but just curious if he really understood.

“You’re sad because this is where you gave birth and you’re sad because this reminds you of being in the ER on St. Patrick’s day when we thought we were losing the baby.”

He knew exactly why I was in such pain at that moment and let me sob into his shoulder.

When the woman from radiology took me back for an x-ray I cried to her. “My babies were born here. And now I can’t have any more,” I cried.

“Aww honey,” she said. “Did they just tell you this today?”

I then explained that I had learned about this fourteen months ago, but I still whimpered my way through my x-ray nonetheless.

Now before we all let things get too heavy here, let me add some levity by painting the picture for you:

My husband and I both wore masks for the entire 5 hours that we spent in the ER, completely paranoid about (specifically flu) germs. But not only did we wear masks, we used hand sanitizer at least 20 times (my husband even rubbed it on the handrails of the chairs on which we were sitting) and every time someone would come within six feet of me I would hold my breath and turn away. (I read that the flu particles can travel as far as six feet.)

Because of the face masks, we could not whisper to each other, so we had to text when we wanted to speak privately.

For instance, a lady stood up near me and I was aghast, turning my head as far away as I could and breathing in as little air as possible.

And so, because I had undergone a series of tests (bloodwork, the EKG, a chest x-ray, etc) we had to wait to be seen by a doctor. But the hospital was so inundated that we could not wait in a room, as we usually would. We had to wait in the waiting room. For three hours.

These masks are the absolute PERFECT way for me to honor my rule of not showing the full faces of my family members; I should have thought to bring a stash home.

As time went on, I grew more and more impatient. My phone had died, my chest was hurting and I was simultaneously and equally scared of the germs that were clearly infiltrating my mask/the Carbon Dioxide poisoning I was likely getting by breathing solely through a mask for 5 hours.

There were a few bright spots during the endless wait.

At one point “Take the Money and Run” played in the waiting room, and my husband and I talked about the time about nine years ago when we went up to his dad’s farm house on a vineyard. We walked home about a mile from a wine tasting and sang all of The Steve Miller Band songs we knew, a little tipsy and a lot in love.

A miserable hour after that, one of us pointed out the fact that at least we were sitting, doing nothing, and not having to chase after kids. #thingsonlyparentswouldthink

Finally, appearing like a mirage in the desert, a nurse came out from behind the double doors and called my name.

So from the waiting room I was moved into a hospital bed in the hallway. No room. No privacy. Just a stretcher in the hallway.

It was just like where we sat on St. Patrick’s day, almost two years ago.

“How eerie is this?” I asked. “It is exactly the same.”

“This is incredibly weird.” he concurred.

I shuddered.

But, this time, things were different. They really were. We still had anxieties and concerns about my health and the unknown but somehow, we were in it together in a way that we had not been that night in March. We have grown so much as a couple in the past two years; We are so bonded and such a tight team.

Still, it was hard to be there.

And so I continued to wait, very impatiently, while a doctor gave me a Neurological exam, took more blood and I hounded the nurse for my test results. At one point I pulled her over (after the fifth time I asked her for a print out of my labs) and told her that I am on an anxiety medicine that I take four times a day. During my time at the hospital I had missed two doses.

“You really are anxious,” she said. “Why do you even have anxiety?”

Oh no she di’int.

“The reason why I am asking you for the anxiety medicine that is prescribed to me is because I suffered from severe postpartum depression after giving birth to my son in October of 2013. It was so severe that I ended up being hospitalized. I am still dealing with the after effects, both physical and emotional.”

“Oh,” she said. “And you have another kid too? That explains it.”

“I did not have postpartum depression because it was hard for me to handle having two children,” I began, but my husband looked at me and said, with his only his eyes, as the mask still covered his face, “calm down or they are going to throw us out of here!” and so I just looked up at her, still in my mask, and asked, “Were you my nurse before?” as she looked familiar. She couldn’t remember, but I knew that I had seen her before. When she told me that I needed a bag of IV fluids I told her that I would not be happy to get one (model patient, I know) because I have had more bags IV fluids in the past year than I can count (this is not a figure of speech).

Again, she asked, inappropriately, “Why have you needed so many IVs?”

And I rattled off my list of ER visits and then she stopped me when I mentioned the carbon monoxide poisoning. That jogged her memory; she had treated me and the kids back in May.

And then we waited, and waited, and waited some more, and I started to feel really defeated, like I had wasted our time. I felt guilty and confused.

And then something occurred to me.
“Maybe we were supposed to be here. Maybe we were supposed to come back to this place and make peace with it; this place that has haunted me for almost two years.” I have admitted before that I suffer from PTSD. That night, two years ago, is part of that diagnosis.

The tears started to flow, again.

“I think of this hospital as both the magical haven where our children were born and also the place where my life changed for the awful. This place holds my Happy Story and my Hard Story,”

I told my husband.

“Well,” he said, so wisely that it takes my breath away. “That’s what most hospitals do.”

And I realized that he was right.

Minutes later my doctor returned to tell me to rest, to take a medicine that I am allergic to and to follow up with my PCP on Monday. All in all it was an awesome visit.

But I only say that with partial sarcasm; because I do believe in things happening for a reason. I think I needed to sit in that hallway with my husband, again, and leave with him, hand in hand.

***

I couldn’t see his lips moving as we spoke in unison,

Baruch atah adonai

eloheinu melech ha’olam

shecheyanu

v’kiy’manu

v’higyanu

lazman hazeh.

A new beginning. A new year. A new version of us, one so much stronger than ever before.

Two years ago on March 17th I thought that I was losing so much; I was uncertain about the future health of our growing embryo, and the state of my marriage, and, really, I lost myself for awhile. And truly, when I think about it, the girl who walked into that hospital on that evening, is gone.

Since then, so much has changed. And for that, I feel so glad.

So I signed my discharge papers, these ones with the diagnosis of “Chest Pain” as opposed to “Possible Miscarriage” and my husband wrapped me in his warm coat and strong arms and we walked out together.

Into the future.

And I held my breath through my entire walk back out through the waiting room.

Amen.

*Name changed to protect the innocent. And to protect Mommy, Ever After from violating HIPAA.

The post In sickness and in health. appeared first on Mommy Ever After.

I don’t think I am particularly unique.

I do not have a tree in my house, nor do we celebrate in any religious way. My child attends a Jewish preschool at a Synagogue. But Christmas is just the best. It’s CHRISTMAS!

I have gotten to experience true Christmas twice in my life:

The first was centered around my sister. On Christmas of 1987, I sat on Santa’s lap at Disneyland and asked for a baby sister. A week shy of one year later and I got my present. My sister was born and we had a baby nurse taking care of her that insisted my parents let us celebrate the holiday. So, one time, I woke up Christmas morning in my own house and crept downstairs to find presents in the fireplace.

That was nice.

Do you know what was not nice? The next year, when my parents refused to continue celebrating Christmas, which was not easy for a five year old to understand. Not that I’m bitter or anything.

My next Christmas was the best Christmas. It was everything that you could dream of when thinking of the enchantment of the holidays. I wrote once before about my Christmas memories when I spent the holidays with my former boyfriend’s family in the Mid Hudson River Valley of New York. Christmas Eve was spent with his entire mom’s family, eating Italian food and then attending mass. I got to return home to a house decked out beyond belief; lights, carolers, Poinsettias, the works. We woke up Christmas morning and all gathered around the tree. It was my boyfriend’s parents, his two brothers and the two of us. I still remember everything, despite the fact that that Christmas was now over ten years ago. I remember every gift I received, how I had my own, most beautiful April Cornell stocking, and how we spent the day feasting on Christmas brunch and napping and playing board games and enjoying family. I write about this so fondly because my boyfriend’s mother and I are still great friends. I am so lucky. It is not just that she is incredibly kind, endlessly warm and the best baker of Christmas cookies ever ever ever; she and I have always shared a special bond. In fact, she just sent me this photo from their Christmas this year, where the stuffed Santa moose I brought to them is still used and I am thought of fondly. I feel very blessed.

But, alas, I have accepted the fact that I married another Member of the Tribe, we are dedicated to our religion and no longer get to celebrate Christmas.

Or so I thought.

Because as I have learned this year, there is not one right way of doing things. And this year, I decided to celebrate. Jesus was not involved. But it was cozy and warm and about family; the one we have created for ourselves.

On Christmas Day, we celebrated with longstanding plans with our dear friends. The four kids wore matching, holiday-themed pajamas and the older kids built and decorated gingerbread houses and, yes, we ordered Chinese Takeout. We exchanged gifts; I gave the 3.5 year old boy a Sofia the First Karaoke machine. I am the best. We had holiday music playing and a fake fire roaring on our flat screen. And all we kept saying was how nice it was to have something so special to do on Christmas; how we want to make it our tradition. So now, I get to celebrate Christmas again. I have Christmas to look forward to.

On Saturday, my group of childhood friends and I had our Pollyanna Cookie Party. Lord bless them, as I started planning this before Thanksgiving and I must have sent at least 50 emails about it. I was enthusiastic, ok?

So, the idea to do a Pollyanna was a fun one, but there was one fairly large problem: How would we choose the names when we all live apart and would not be together until the 27th?

Here is what I came up with:

I wrote down all of our names and put them in a hat (there are 8 of us). I then wrote a list of each person on a separate pad of paper. Then, I  had my brother in law draw the names and write down who got whom. My brother in law then texted a photo of the list to my sister, who knows all of my friends. She then sent out secret emails to each of us telling us who our secret person would be. I mean…pretty amazing, right? And the coolest part was that we really kept it secret. My husband and I truly had no one idea whom the other had (and frankly, I was really surprised by his recipient, as I had guessed it was someone else!)

But more than just exchanging gifts and eating cookies (that had sea salt and bacon, thank you very much), we all piled on my living room rug as a family, a group that has stuck together through (many of us through elementary, middle and high school, and) this last year and bonded like never before. We have had countless dinners and dates and we even welcomed a whole new member into our tribe. I became an aunt.

The sentiment that echoed among all of the the guests at the cookie party was the same; we have to do this again next year. 

My friends are all very busy; they have important jobs and hectic lives; doctors, lawyers, government workers, bankers, business owners, sales reps, accountants…and a writer, who is just trying to get her little old site off of the ground using all of her might and all of her feathers. But the fact that we could take a few hours to all be together, celebrating nothing but ourselves, was my greatest gift.

So this year wasn’t presents in the fireplace,

nor was it a cozy morning around the tree,

but it was ours.

And I will hold it and cherish it and never let it go.

(Not even to my secret santa.)

The post That which is ours. appeared first on Mommy Ever After.

T.S. Eliot

Welcome to www.MommyEverAfter.com.

It is so nice to have you.

Here, let me make you comfortable.

For the past four and a half years I have spent every day hanging out at a simple, static, steadfast site over on WordPress.

Mommy, Ever After started when I was the new mother of a two month old baby girl. I had always loved to read and write, but found myself, at that time, with no resources that were actually helpful when it came to being a new parent. Everything was either a tale of absolute enchantment OR a hyperbolic message board of terror.

So I took a leap of faith and somehow figured out how to make my very first post.

It didn’t even have a title. I used multi-colored text. Take a look:

and by the end of day one I seem to have gotten a bit more bold:

I did not know what I was doing or where I was going (or, to be completely honest, how to even define a “blog”) but I knew it felt good. And people, being voyeuristic by nature, started to read and I, being brutally honest by nature, shared it all; the good, the bad, the inane, the insane, the heavy and the hard.

I will soon be publishing a post that is a guide to this new site, because thanks to the incredible folks at Brand Revive, I have a real, big girl website now, with pages, categories, sections and more. I don’t want you to miss a thing.

But for now, I will either assume that you are an old friend, having traveled with me over here from .wordpress.com (thank you, by the way–so much) or you are new and can lose yourself in the hundreds of archived posts I have up there, neatly categorized, under “A Happy Story”.

And, I will say that the old Mommy, Ever After isn’t here anymore. That chapter has ended.

Welcome to a new beginning.

And what better way to start than with a prologue…

Emergency rooms 3 and 4 were connected, separated by a thin curtain that could easily be opened to make it a makeshift suite of sorts. In room 4, in a stretcher that appeared humongous, lay my son, 3 days shy of 2 months, hooked up to an IV, oxygen monitor and receiving O2 through a tube in his nose. In room 3, I lay, dizzy and disoriented, hooked up to an IV and receiving my third bag of fluids. A nurse handed me a yellow pill. Potassium. She told me that I was deficient and to swallow. We were in a suite in the Emergency Room of a hospital. He and I were together, but still so far apart, as we were each confined to our beds. He and I were ailing. He and I were both being poked and tested and medicated. He and I both needed help.

That snapshot is from exactly this week last year. It is also the prologue that I have written for my book proposal. Yes, I am writing a book (or at least I am trying), and at the rate I am going, the book is writing itself. I have a literary agent shopping my book to publishing houses, and I am hoping to find a good match. My story will be told in the way that it is presented above: “A Happy Story”, “A Hard Story”, and then, ultimately, “A Hopeful Story”.

When I say the book is writing itself, you can probably conjure examples that I have shared from the past year; the flood and subsequent CO poisoining; my hospitalization; the incredible closeness of my group of friends that has now become a family;

But what you do not know is that this past weekend, at the very time that we were supposed to be on a plane to St. John, we were back in the Emergency Room with my son.

Not only were we back in the same hospital, but we had the same nurse that he had had exactly the same day the year before. She wears a necklace with three charms symbolizing her three children and I remembered their names.

Being in the small triage room was surreal. How are we back here?

But, fortunately, we were not there for a feverish 8 week old with a terrible respiratory virus.

My son had an allergic reaction to Penicillin, swelled up, we called the paramedics (our besties!) and we took him to the closest hospital with the Peds department, which happens to be where we spent this week last year, as he was inpatient, on oxygen, as I was fighting for my life in my own way.

This is where the story gets kind of crazy. Before our planned trip to the Virgin Islands, I asked my Pediatrician if it would be safe to give my son a small dose of Benadryl in order to calm him during the flight (please don’t judge. This is the baby who slit his wrist on my coffee table 3 months ago). He approved, but suggested that we test out the drug on him before flying, as in rare cases it can have the opposite effect and actually make kids more wired and not at all sedated.

So, Sunday morning, I was being treated for my severe ear infection, my daughter for her own infection, and my son, prophylactically, as he was fussy, warm and pulling on his ears. Before his nap that morning I suggested giving him some acetaminophen. My husband chimed in and suggested Benadryl instead. At that point, we did not know whether our trip to St. John would be postponed or completely cancelled, so we thought a solid nap would do both of us good and it was the right time to experiment, so we dosed him up with the proper amount of the antihistamine.

But he didn’t sleep well. He was restless. And red. And, actually, my husband and I were laughing at him when we finally brought him downstairs, because he was acting–

forgive me for not being able to find a better way to say this–

high.

He stood, staring at the vacuum cleaner for 20 minutes. He doesn’t stand still for 20 seconds, ordinarily.

And we were cracking up. Evidently, he was in that small percentage of kids who have a paradoxical reaction to the drug.

But after his 20 minute date with the vacuum and some other strange behavior, I noticed that his eyes were swelling up. The redness on his cheeks had intensified and on his forehead there were big hives. His eyes swelled to near slits as I spoke to the 911 operator.

The problem was, he had not just been given one new medication in that 24 hours, he had been given two.

The police arrived immediately, before I could even change out of my pajamas, and the paramedics soon thereafter.

On the way to the Emergency Room, I just laughed. “This must be a joke, right? This year is just a joke.”

As it turns out, by the time we were seen by the Pediatrician in the ER, his swelling had gone down some. This lead them to believe that he had experienced an allergic reaction to his second dose of amoxicillin, and that the Benadryl, the coincidental, serendipitous drug, actually helped to start calm down the effects. Had we been on the plane to St. John, his allergic reaction would have happened at 30,000 feet.

The doctors and nurses were so nice. It was so much better than last year, when he had to be put on breathing tubes, given a spinal tap, a catheter and IVs, and when I was losing my mind.

But it was then that I did something that I rarely do these days; I started to cry.

I cried to the nice doctor in the dark blue scrubs and white coat.

“He has had so much happen to him in such a short life; he is only 13 months old and look what he has been through.”

But it was then that I remembered my recent epiphany;

My son has not only survived some crazy medical and safety situations, a crazy mother and an all around crazy first year, but he is huge and thriving. The doctor looked at me and told me to look at my son.

“He is a moose!” she said.

And she is right. He is so strong and resilient and now that he has had six emergency room visits, he is tougher than ever.

But,

But…

He may be a moose, he may be strong, but he is still my baby.

This is a hard time of year for me. It is the one year anniversary of when I was supposed to go to Brown’s postpartum unit,

when he got hospitalized,

when I was forced to wean him against my will,

when I had akesthesia as a reaction to Abilify,

and when things really started to crumble.

While my real support system became stronger than ever, some real, trusted people let me down, and it was a blow that was hard to handle when I was already in such a weak state.

This week last year, I truly did not know if I could go on. It is scary for me to admit that, but I would be doing you a disservice by being anything less than brutally honest. I was low, like many other people I know who have been or who currently are suffering.

And so, I have decided to do something about it.

I have already proclaimed that this will be the year of really living; of celebrating things big and small, by organizing parties and dates and by making an effort to tell the people around me how much they mean to me.

But there is something else.

This year I want to be a better person.

I want to let go of all that has weighed me down, not just for the past year, but for my entire life.

I want to be good to people. I want to go out of my way. I want to give back. I want to help. I want to be vocal and make a difference.

And that is why I decided to take yet another leap of faith, bigger than my intimidating first blog post back in June of 2010.

I have decided to put my all into Mommy, Ever After, in an effort to help others. When I have opened up about topics like postpartum, anxiety, depression, fear, doubt, self-worth and other hard things to touch upon, I have received an incredible outpouring of support and gratitude. Most of it you do not know about. Most of it has been private. Most of it has been me making emergency phone calls to friends in crisis, or driving to the hospital to hold a hand, or giving someone my phone number to use 24/7. And I do not say this in any way to applaud myself. I am humbled by the fact that there are people who trust me enough in order to confide in me their deepest of secrets and fears.

And so, in moving forward, I will have those “pity party” moments, but hopefully much less than the dance party moments.

I will continue to be an advocate, a voice, a friend.

I will strive to be the woman whom I have always dreamed of being; lighter, happier, and more content.

I will celebrate the big, of course, but also cherish the mundane.

Last night, before bed, my husband and I had just finished the last installment of the NPR Serial Podcast. We talked a little about our thoughts and then I asked him to tell me a bedtime story. I wanted him to tell me about the last few episodes of Homeland, a show that I haven’t watched in several seasons, but that I was curious about, based on all of the hype. He is the best at telling stories.

And he looked over at me and I was smiling, my full face in an enormous grin.

“What?” he asked with a tiny giggle.

“I get to go to sleep next to you,” I said. “I get to have a sleepover with my best friend every night.”

And with that, he kissed me and told me stories of Iranian leaders and CIA infiltrations until I was sound asleep.

That was how I ended my day. And then, as it does, the sun rose this morning, and there was a new beginning.

And today I did some things right, and other things still need work, but guess what?

It is the beginning. I put an end to something dear to me…

and from there, my friends, is where I shall start.

(Featured Image via Lindsay Dochtery Photography)

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She didn’t know that The Beach Boys concert with my family was my favorite concert ever. EVER.

She didn’t know that “God only knows what I’d be without you.” is the phrase that I use to describe how I feel about my husband.

She just knew that it was beautiful and that it featured a feather prominently.

And this brings me to tears; the friendship, the music, all of it.

I hope you enjoy.

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Eyes close in my arms;

Remembering your blue hat.

Always my boy, babe.

For her, at wake up.

Before the sun rose
you tiptoed into my arms;
Hearts beating in sync.

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Shel Silverstein

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