1 post from January 2007

But lessons learned. This year I learned that God will be there no matter how badly I think things are going to go.  I started this year on my face in anger and frustration. I had a plan to make things better for my kids, it all seemed so simple it had to work. I had hubby year before last pay our home insurance outright. We went through the year thinking that we would do this one more time and after that the insurance money would not be coming out of our escrow and they would not be collecting the extra money from us every month for said insurance.

 Without our escrow our house note would be 730 a month and we were paying 890 at the time which to me looked like more than a hundred a month that could be going to the children. I worked hard. I budgeted and scraped and saved everywhere I could for that year, while pregnant with my now infant son. Tax season came last year and it was all going to be right. Our insurance, after Katrina, went from 900 a year to nearly 1,800. I nearly died but fine we would pay it, get some money back from our escrow and all would be right with the world. Then they would evaluate our escrow, lower the amount we had to pay into it and, viola, our monthly payments would be less and our children would enjoy a few small luxuries thay hadn't had for a year, part of the money I scrimped and saved.

So we get our taxes ready and I start making calls to the insurance and to the lender to let them know we would be paying around Feburary the 8th, insurance being due on the 10th, and how we were going to manage everything. Well I got a surprise, the lender informed me that they had already paid the insurance and our escrow would be increasing by that amount. She estimated 980 a month, which in the end was more like 1020. I cried. I went into the bathroom and I begged God to explain to me why he wanted my childrens lives to be filled with hunger and misery. I asked him how I was to pay for the child I now carried. I begged and asked. I demanded He understand that I had worked hard and here my work was getting smashed to bits. I had suffered so that in the future years my kids could have it a little better and here I was grasping at the sands of effort pouring through my fingers and nothing I could do would stop it. Our efforts mean nothing, I'm sure He meant me to learn that but now was not the time.

Then something happened that made me recall another tragedy.

When my husband and I were living in apartments, we had lived in 3 different apartments together technically but my children have only known 3 neighborhoods including this house(we had a 2 BR and a 3 BR in the same complex 3 BR when we had 3rd baby) getting increasingly better as we moved, his grandmother died.  We decided to have a baby,  it actually took a while because I had been on depo for a year and lost a pregnancy while on it, and I started using NFP to try a bit harder. We concieved a girl, who was named before her conception, and I started the road to being a mother of 3. I had nightmares of losing her and I am sure I was not all there during the pregnancy as the loss of my other babies, the ones I can clearly see now I was trying to replace, had not been dealt with. I had been keeping in contact with my grandmother who was very ill and on dialisis, and I had to keep in contact with her directly because I had dropped my very dangerous mother as a part of my life. She said something that was horrible beyond words and that was it.

Well months passed this way and I was due to be induced on September 13th and had to be in the hospital at 6:30 in the morning. It was the 12th and I couldn't sleep, it wasn't excitment. I felt like every cell in my body was jumping. I felt like I wanted to crawl out my skin. I felt like something had grabbed me in the middle and started pulling and pulling till I couldn't breath or think. Then the phone rang. It was my oldest sister, who never really called me and certainly not at 11 at night. She said Josie sit down, I said I already was. "Grandma died  about 10 minutes ago. Aunt Laura was with her". And I cried. I hurt so bad I couldn't think straight. And when I realized how unbearable the pain really was I went into the bathroom and, through events I wont describe here, realized there was a bag and every time I was in pain a pain just between my pelvic bones got severe.

I tried to wake my husband and he told me to let him sleep, we were going to the hospital in a few hours. I was already dialated to 5 before I had the call from my sister, and had been that way for nearly 5 weeks, I was probably about 9cm now and we didn't have hours. I woke him again and once he was really awake he understood the gravity of the situation. The older 2 kids were sleeping on a pallet next to my bed and we, with me helping and in a big hurry, got the into our Chevy Cavalier and rushed to the hospital with me yelling and pulling myself up on the Oh Sh*t handle and panting..

We got to the hospital and triage was filled with woman who had been there for hours and would be going home soon, the nurses promised. So I was put on the premie floor and before too long they realized I wasn't like one of those woman up on the L&D floor, who had come just in case. They, in a panic, put me on a delivery bed the was meant for turning people upside down if absolutely neccisary and told me not to push, which was impossible because my body was doing it without me. I never pushed even once, there was a gush and then there was a baby. I cried with joy and I cried with sadness. We had picked the name Saoirse before she was concieved. It was her name and I wasn't changing it so I chose to give her the middle name Cathleen, after my Grandma Cathy. So here was this little girl meant to make up for the loss of twins and a beloved grandmother. Aweful big expectations don't ya know, especially for a 20 inch long 7lbs 3oz little girl who's biggest experiences up to now had been swimming, sucking her 2 middle fingers and, oh yeah, being born.

My grandmother was amazing. Some of my fondest memories of my horrid childhood are of being tossed off to her because of my mothers latest person who was more important than us. She had breast the size of a toddler bed that were more than often enough used for just that. Now this woman could hold you with one hand while you were sleeping and shop, clean or cook at the same time. One could get a full nap and wake in her arms to a cup of hot coco or juice, either with a biscut or cornbread and a piece of ribbon candy, and never know that they had been drivin to the store, gone shopping and cleaned the kitchen with her. For all the hell of my childhood she was the one source of grace and peace in my life. There weren't many Christians in my family so the idea of God was almost threatening to me.

OK so It's 2006, I have just gotten the news than I am going to be much poorer than I had been the year before, paying for the birth of my newest child was going to be impossible (ohh did I forget to mention that the insurance company had as of then not sent the midwife and estimate or a any type of confirmation that they would be paying my bills even though I had out of network coverage) and my life was about to get a lot harder. I am in the bathroom crying my oldest is beating on the door begging me "Mommy, whats wrong", hubby calls and just as I see my life being strangled into poverty, possibly homelessness, I tell him the news through sobbs of desperation and knowledge of impending doom for our family. Just then I hear and feel a pop. My water had never broken before till the baby was half out or nearly so but I said, still sobbing and feeling worse for this little precious we now had to feed, "my water just broke".

He called the midwife and I sat in the bathroom to finish crying.

When she got there, she did call me first, she tossed a little tab on the aborbant floor pad I was standing on, asked me to step on it and it turned green. I love the color green. Its my favorite, but this time I was less interested in the color because it was to test if I was continually peeing on myself of leaking water. Well it was the water from the amniotic sac, which we learned after the birth was ripped at the top due to my crying.

We had our little nearly one year old now child and a horrible year, but still, as I said I started the year on my face in anger and frustration, now lets add defeat because its true. We were going to starve, and this was before the magnificent sequence of disasters that you need only visit my husbands blog to know of. I asked myself where it all stopped.

 Well my insurance is a hundred more this year than it was last year and my state decided to raise my houses worth from 109,000 to 130,00 knowing I could never sell it for that, but hey whats a little lie when you have power and need a few hundred million more that you know the people of your state cannot afford to pay. I would say its going to be a horrible year but so it was also the prediction for last year.  Yet here I sit still in my house no thinner than last year(sans baby), having had every disaster solved(sometimes miraculously), having exchanged Christmas gifts with my husband when we hadn't been able to afford in our better years,  having had a "Christening party"  for my 7 and 5 year old for which 2 people I had never met came from another STATE  to God parent my children.  Its one thing to do this for a sister but I had only spoken to my childrens Godmother online and never to her husband, they came over we had a decent time. Heaven knows I want to be better than I am now next time I have company from out of state.

So I started my year in misery and ended on my face in gratefullness to God and all who were there to help. God is merciful. If not ending our suffering He is actually crawling into it with us, suffering the din of the hammers and piercing mysery of the nails, as He does through eternity with us and for us. Where we suffer He gives us life to help us bear it. Where we have loss and death of dreams and those we love He gives love, life and hope.

Wherever we let God in that place grows. We grow and those around us, through no effort of thier own, grow into people that we had not recognized them as before. A little girl, concieved to sooth the pain left by a lost grandmother in law and the loss of her older sisters, who are themselves delicate little porcaline and perfect examples of everything girlish(despite never having had to prove thier natures), born through tears for a loved Grandmother, begins to look like a little tumbler. Ready to climb trees, jump from high spots, tree branches and then have a spot of tea with cookies after she is done. A house that you would rather burn to the ground than deal with anymore, nevermind decorate, becomes a home with teacups hanging on the wall and a tiered shelf with cookie jars on it. A husband you felt a bit distant to becomes a sweetheart who gets the gifts right, without any prompting, misery or dissapointment because of a poorly chosen present. A newborn babe becomes the thing that takes your mind off the bills and doom that is sure to follow nearly every things you do. A friend, who herself has had a year not worth remembering, becomes an attendee to your first "Christmas party". Another grandmother who was abandoned due to meanness and cruelty to my oldest becomes a repentant, sorrowful woman who only wants to see the babies, with no sign of exasperation at hearing there are now six. I am almost certain that as she nears 81 and is reaching into the begginings of dementia, though she did remember my calling her Christmas, I heard joy in her voice when she said "six, really and I have only met the oldest 2".  She kept telling me that they had missed me so.  And it wasn't her usual uppityness. There was no hint of pride. Nothing to tell me she was being manipulative . These were words spoken though near tears, humbly asking and begging to make things right that had gone so wrong. Asking to have maybe a moment, where years had been laid to waste, to love children she knew she herself had pushed out of her life.

It was a hard year. But not a bad one. We struggled and very little has been had in the way of luxuries  but still I ask myself, how can God be so good? How could the death of God in mans form bring such joy? How can I forget, as we Catholics are still celebrating the birth of our King more than 2 thousand years ago, that a little babe, born at a bad time, headed for a horrible fate could bring me such joy?

I learned a few lessons. The first is God is merciful. The second is that if there are people to love troubles seems less disasterous, more like aggrivations to be overcome. The rest I will get into later, maybe. Ohh and I have learned that I don't write often but when I do it's nearly a book.