Keep Moving Forward

Since December, I've worked really hard on lifting above the fog, finding strength and concentrating on doing the things that bring me joy. It has worked well and I've been, dare I say, happy. However last night as I laid in bed, the sadness that I have been putting off began to wash over me. As I laid there, I realized that Hudson was with me for 33 weeks and it has now been 33 weeks that I have been without him. It is a hard and sad milestone to reach when you have to come to grips that the time without them has surpassed the time with them.

I have the day off today so after blood work this morning (CD21 to see what Progesterone levels are in hopes that clomid did it's job this month and I ovulated), I am catching up with some personal chores and came across the above quote from Martin Luther King, Jr.

All I have to say is yes to this. One-thousand times yes. 

For those needing a little inspiration today, I hope this warms your heart as it has mine. We are all in different places in our walk of life. For those grieving or in pain - run, walk or crawl. Do whatever you can do with the strength you have to keep moving forward. At some point, we will all fly out of it together.

Paleo Make a Meal: Maple-Pecan Crusted Salmon + Garlic-Chive Cauliflower Puree + Sweet and Spicy Roasted Brussel Sprouts

That may be the longest post title I'll ever have.

I don't know about you, but I always appreciate seeing a full meal put together so I'm not hunting and picking sides and mains. When it's a busy week and I have a lot on my plate (pun intended), I like to see the full picture of a meal for ease and convenience. Therefore, I wanted to present this to you in full.

We have a Soy-Mustard Glazed Salmon that is our go to almost every time we make fish because it is just that good. However, I needed something paleo-friendly and so I started hunting around for other salmon recipes. I found a few different variations of Maple-Pecan Crusted Salmon, which I thought would pair well with my cauliflower puree. Looking through those, I took what ingredients I liked and created my own blend. I had originally planned to make a kale salad as a final touch but saw an easy to make Brussels Sprouts pack at Whole Foods that were already seasoned in cayenne pepper and had a maple syrup drizzle. It all paired deliciously together!

Here is a full Make a Meal, with easy to follow steps that will make your prep and cook time no longer than 35 minutes. 

Ingredients:
For Salmon - yields 2 servings

• 2 salmon fillets
• 1 cup pecans
• 2 tbsp. pure maple syrup
• 1 tbsp. apple cider vinegar
• 1 tbsp. adobo sauce (if you don't have this, or can't find it, use red pepper flakes to give it some heat)
• 1 tsp. smoked paprika
• 1 tsp. garlic powder
• 1/2 tsp. onion powder

For Cauliflower - yields 4 servings

• 1 head of cauliflower
• 1 cup vegetable broth
• Salt
• Pepper
• 4 garlic cloves
• 1 tsp. chives, chopped

For Brussels Sprouts - yields 4 servings

• 20 Brussels Sprouts, halved
• Cayenne Pepper
• Salt
• Pepper
• 1/4 cup Maple Syrup

1. To begin, heat your oven to 425 degrees.

2. Next, place the cauliflower florets in a pot of water, then boil until softened.

3. Toss the BSprouts in the maple syrup and cayenne (or sub red pepper flakes if cayenne is too hot). Spread out on a roasting pan, atop aluminum foil. Roast in the oven for 25 minutes.

4. In a small food processor, combine your pecans, syrup, vinegar, adobo sauce, paprika, garlic and onion powder, pulsing until it has a similar consistency to chunky peanut butter.

5. Spread the pecan mixture over top the salmon and bake for 12 minutes. (I wait until the BSprouts have 12 minutes left to roast)

6. Once the cauliflower can be easily pierced with a fork, drain and place the cooked florets into a large food processor. Add the veggie stock and garlic cloves, season with salt and pepper to your preference. Grind the contents until smooth and creamy. Add the chives and pulse until well mixed throughout the puree. Taste test and add more salt, pepper or garlic if needed.

7. All of this should culminate around the same time. Remove the salmon and roasted BSprouts from the oven then plate your delicious and nutritious Paleo meal!

Paleo Pulled Pork Chili

I was meal planning this morning. After completing the grocery list and sending to Max via email, he came back inside the house after a quick walk with George to say - it's really cold, how about chili tonight? With the brisket chili recipe on my speed dial since November, I decided to change things up this time and revise our meals for the week.

After talking with both my doctor and acupuncturist about a hormonal imbalance (yep, acupuncture started this week. Interesting experience but I think I like it), then the suggestion from a fellow loss mama regarding her experience going Paleo and the link that has with hormones and fertility, I've started following some new Paleo bloggers to learn their ways. My friends Casey and Shelby have been my Yodas in answering all of my so wait, is this Paleo? questions. For this recipe, I took my brisket chili and removed everything from it that made it non-Paleo. Then, I compared the remaining parts of my recipe with PaleOMG's Pulled Pork Chili just to make sure I was safe with all my ingredients.

How does this recipe compare to my Brisket Chili? For starters, I swapped butternut squash for sweet potatoes. Gasp! I know. Not that anything would be wrong with butternut squash, I just opted for a change up. If you google "are sweet potatoes paleo?" you will see that some say yes, others are a hard no - they are in the grey area. I chose to use them because of the nutritional components I'm looking for. I removed the black beans, the beer and added more stock (used veggie instead of beef stock - it's what we already had) and water. PaleOMG had a fun technique with garlic, so I adopted that and used her recipe's suggested tomato sauce + hot sauce to thicken the base. I used all my same spices, and removed the brown sugar. Overall, I would say this is a decent hybrid between her pulled pork chili and my brisket chili with a special bonus, it's totes paleo y'all. I also made this in a dutch oven, rather than how she made it in the crock pot. Cooking times would vary, the crock pot taking 8 hours on low. This takes 4 hours in the oven which is perfect for a day you are home around the house. 

Enjoy!

Ingredients:

• 2 lb. pork shoulder roast, fat trimmed
• 3 cloves garlic
• 1/2 cup salsa 
• 1 onion, chopped
• 1.5 - 2 cups chopped sweet potato (small cubes)
• 1 can fire roasted tomatoes with green chiles 
• 1 red bell pepper, diced
• 2 tbsp. tomato paste
• 1/2 cup tomato sauce
• 1/2 cup water
• 1.5 cup veggie stock
• 3 tbsp. chili powder
• 1 tbsp. cumin
• 1/2 tsp. cayenne
• 1 tsp. garlic powder
• Green onion (optional garnish)
• Avocado (optional garnish)

To start, heat your oven to 275 degrees.

1) In a dutch oven, heat a smidge of coconut or avocado oil on medium high heat.
2) Using a knife, cut a slit in the top of the meet, making a circle, in three places. Then stick a clove of garlic in each hole.
3) Season the roast with salt, pepper. Set the roast in the dutch oven and cover with hot sauce. Continue to brown each side of the pork roast (carefully keeping the garlic inside the meat), above 2 minutes per side.
4) Remove the roast and move to a plate. Add the onions in, scrape up browned bits from the pork and move the onions around in the leftover salsa. Allow them to cook until translucent - about 10 minutes.
5) Place the roast back into the dutch oven, add the cubed sweet potatoes, red bell pepper and fire roasted tomatoes with green chiles and turn down heat to simmer.
6) In a separate bowl, mix the liquids and spices. Whisk until combined.
7) Pour the liquids in the dutch oven, covering the pork and veggies.
8) Set in the oven and cook for 5 hours, or until pork will shred with ease (it should be fall-apart-ready, if the meat is still tough, cook another 30 minutes then test again).
9) Ladle into bowls, garnish with your preferred fixings.

I Can Still Laugh

I work with an extraordinary woman who wrote a book with this title, using her personal and clinical experiences with individuals who reveal their personal struggles with Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia. Remarkably, every one of them finds ways to minimize the effects of their illness and continue to live exciting, active lives. Their mission is to make themselves – and everyone else around them – forget the notion that life ends with a diagnosis. The brave individuals of these stories are proving that life goes on and all is not lost because, in their words, “I can still laugh.”

In my professional life, I am in Development and Fundraising for a non-profit organization, a brain research center and its translational arm to provide research-based programs to the public. The print above is something I had made for one of my donors. It is for a family that has walked a road of grief after a mother and a wife had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. Because of that, this family has been instrumental in providing the funding to create a support group that our Center is able to offer to families who have experienced the diagnosis of Mild Cognitive Impairment and Alzheimer's. I grew up going to church with the precious young woman who made this for me, a teacher who has this calligraphy print business as well. She took the above picture of the print and posted it to social media on a day that I was weighing my options on my grief battle and could have chosen to stay in bed. Max was traveling, I had felt a little under the weather probably from our holiday travels coupled with the aftermath of hitting the seven month mark without Hudson. I had nothing that would require me to leave the house that day so I was laying in bed planning to surrender to my grief because sometimes you need to.

In the first few months following loss, getting out of bed wasn't the problem. I could wake up and start a new day, but as the day wore on, it became harder to function. Starting in the fall, that reversed and it became hard to want to get out of bed to start a new day. As I worked on lifting out of my grief, waking up in the morning presented me with a choice. I could lay there and have a pep talk with myself, to make the choice of having a good day or I could let my mood/emotions weigh me down. Those who understand grief or depression know what I'm talking about. You can choose to try to have a good day and that choice may prevail and it may not, but you've tried. Other days you are tired. You are exhausted from faking it, from camouflaging your true feelings and sometimes it is so much easier to succumb to the grief. When you surrender to it, you take on a mood that you don't care about what is going on around you, you don't want to make an effort at all. You can be unpleasant. If you don't have to leave the house, you don't. If you do have to be a functioning member of society that day, you go through the motions until you can be back in solitude and the comfort of home.

On this particular morning, I was having an internal debate about what kind of day I was going to have. I was leaning toward the surrender. I laid in bed on my phone, scrolling social media, torturing myself with pictures of little ones enjoying the holidays, and then I saw this picture.

I smiled.

My colleague's book title meant something new to me. There is a future with my firstborn, my son, that I will never have. An entire life that would have been different had he been in it. A life he didn't get to live, meaning a life we didn't get to experience in its rightful form. That is all taken from us, abruptly and without warning. There is an ever-present sadness inside because of it.

However, there's something you need to know. There are good days. Lately, there have been many more consecutive good days than bad. In fact, December was the first month since our loss that I didn't say at the end of it, okay, now I've hit rock bottom, this was my worst month. November was my worst month to date. After hitting the six month mark at the end of November, I knew December had the potential to be even worse because of all things Christmas and the memories from the year before as we started to share with people that we were pregnant, and now we didn't have a baby and we weren't pregnant again despite all attempts. We had a plan for December and I worked hard to lift out as much as I could while still doing what I felt comfortable with in the confines of my own grief, going back to grief counseling to work through the ugly feelings that won't go away. I still had some really tough times, but the good days have started to outnumber the bad.

The truth about my grief is that there has yet to be a day in the last 224 days that I have not cried. And I'm not talking about just a tear here or there, I mean a full-on-make-up-running-snot-everywhere-loud-sob-ugly-cry. But also, there has not been a day in the last 224 days that I have not laughed, or at the very least, smiled. The place I write from is the most vulnerable part of me, one that is always hurting, but it isn't the way I walk through life at all times. When I write, I tap into that for an expression of honesty and raw emotion from the heart of a grieving mother. However, our/my life is not always a state of loom and doom.
 
As I reflect on the previous year, I think about how just as 2015 started so did our second trimester. We spent last New Year's Eve in Ireland and I taught the bartenders to make a Shirley Temple (or Kiddie Cocktail) that I cheers'd to a new year with surrounded by dear friends. I remember Max and I walking home after the pub and talking about what this new year was going to be like for us, how much excitement we had as expecting parents. We were bracing ourselves for a big life change but this was not the change we had anticipated.

I spent the first half of 2015 happier than ever. It was exciting, it was new, it was hopeful, it was fun. I spent the second half of 2015 in a deep pit of despair.

Now we are in the first week of a new year. For those wrestling with loss, it is never a fresh start, a clean slate or a new beginning. It is just entering a new year of life phases without the one who is missing. New milestones you have to overcome, more hurdles to get over, more reminders of what is lost. Personally, I wasn't ready because I didn't want to leave Hudson behind in 2015. I wanted to leave the catastrophic aftermath of the loss there, the ugly parts of it, but not all of it. So this year I did something I have never done. For the first time that I can recall, I have no plans for the new year. No goals, no resolutions, no plans. We are going to finish what we started in December, the clomid, the testing. I'm on day 3 of an all Paleo diet because of how it is linked to balancing hormones and helping fertility. I am doing acupuncture and continuing with my grief counseling again. However, after this month, it is a blank page and I have no plans for what we will do next. It's not up to me, I am not in control. Coming to grips with that is almost painfully hard for me and against my DNA, but it's also a bit of a relief because I am exhausted of trying to control things that are so blatantly out of my control.

I will have an outlook though. I will have a mantra. I will generalize the way I feel about 2016 and that is that grief cannot take it all away. I can scream to the top of my lungs a big F you to the ugliness of grief, because here's the thing: I can still laugh and I intend to. Here's to making this year about laughter whether you are down in the trenches, crawling out of it, you have made it to the other side or you are watching as someone you love goes through it. I wish you all rich blessings and that you are able to seek happiness in all things, whenever you can, and wherever you are on your life journey.

Here's to making this a year of laughter, from my grieving heart to yours.

Seven Months

Hudder-Budder,

Merry Christmas sweet baby! This picture was one of the ways we announced that we were expecting you last Christmas to friends and family. It was such a joyful time in anticipation of what Christmas would look like with you this year.

A whole seven months have gone by without you. As Christmas came and went, I couldn't help but imagine what we should have with you. In my mind I could see you - a seven month version of you and in another daydream the five month version of you if you had come when you should have. You were there in each daydream, maybe sitting in a Bumbo or on a play pad, loving the boxes, tissue and wrapping paper. Your little eyes content with only that as we tried to shift your attention to the gifts "Santa" brought you. We've decorated this house for Christmas but never stayed up late to do Santa. We would laugh at ourselves for making this kind of fuss for you at such a young age but it was supposed to be your first Christmas so of course we would! After all the fuss we'd sit there and think, "maybe next year he'll be really into it."

In our actual reality, your Daddy and I did Christmas differently this year. We needed to distract ourselves from what wasn't there. We took a trip to get away and find peace in Montreal and Quebec. It was so beautiful, we were immersed in our own Winter Wonderland especially in Quebec City. Just like when we went to Vancouver and Victoria last summer, pieces of you were evident all around us. It was another "family trip" in a different kind of way.

On Christmas Eve we went to the most beautiful church service, a midnight mass at the Notre Dame Basilica. We were early enough to walk around and see the different saints and found a candle we could light for you. Tearfully, we stood there and prayed for you. A smile appeared on my face as I thought about how Jesus is the Reason for the Season and you were there in Heaven, with the reason for the season.

In the church Mommy grew up in, the church you are laid to rest, I sang in the choir. Every Christmas Eve service at the very end, the choir would line the walls with candles and sing Silent Night to the congregation. It was my favorite and what I looked forward to every year. Your great-grandfather also taught me that song in German when I was little. Hearing it in French consumed me with emotion as I listened to the beautiful choir from above us sing Douce Nuit! Sainte nuit!, while hearing in my mind my grandfather bellowing Stille Nacht! Heil'ge Nacht! from my childhood, and remembering the look of the sanctuary at home as I sang Silent Night! Holy Night! by candlelight. As this all spun around in my mind, I saw you.

Silent Night, Holy Night, all is calm, all is bright.
Round yon virgin mother and child,
Holy infant so tender and mild.
Sleep in heavenly peace, sleep in heavenly peace.

Tears just kept falling and all I could think about was you in my arms. The anticipation of you for eight and a half months, then finding out you would never experience this life with us. The wait in the hospital before you came, the feeling of seeing you the first time, of holding you and discovering every little thing we could about you. Then finally the hardest of all, saying goodbye to you. In these moments, I played the experience back in my mind and I missed you so much, I wanted you with us so bad. I didn't want to be 1700 miles away from home, I wanted to be at home spending our first Christmas with you.  

I wished you were in my arms, asleep as we sit by the tree as a little family of three with George laying on mine or Daddy's legs. I would hum Christmas carols to you and thank our Father for this blessing of you. But I don't have you and oh how I miss you. Today we are home so I rock in your rocker instead. I hold my special Hudson lamb as tears fall down my face. I think of what used to be my all-time favorite Christmas song and now it is my Christmas lullaby to you instead, my angel baby.

Sleep in heavenly peace.

All my love, forever and for always.

Mommy

All I Want for Christmas

The Christmas songs, decor and celebrations seem to start earlier and earlier each year. For those experiencing a season of grief during the holidays, it can feel like the most un-wonderful time of the year.

I had started writing this post on December 2. That was a day I felt consumed with his memory, a day all of my thoughts revolved around what we should be doing as a family at the holidays if he were here. How different our life would be. That week I had started receiving Christmas cards of happy families and while I'm very thankful and appreciative to the people who didn't take us off their mailing list or instead of the card they sent out to everyone else, they sent us a special card to let us know we were in their thoughts and prayers this year, I was saddened that we didn't have a picture as a family of three to reciprocate.

We did decorate the house for Christmas. I always feel that my house is most beautiful during this time of year, when it is decked in lights, holly and jolly. We added some new decorative pieces that read JOY so it would lift our spirits as needed. As we were hanging ornaments, we stopped to pause and Max said "our tree is beginning to tell a story." As I gaze at it, it is kind of like a scrapbook. We have ornaments received as wedding gifts from our December wedding three years ago. We have an ornament to represent different adventures we've shared together all over the world. We have ornaments from our respective Universities and things that depict where we came from like sports teams, jobs we've held and sorority symbols. This year we have received some very special ornaments in memory of Hudson. From a framed picture of his sweet face, angels and angel wings, a beautiful silver medallion with a fitting quote, and one monogrammed with his initials. That HJS that will always represent him and whatever future children we will hopefully be blessed with one day. Looking at it tells the story of our past, our present and of a future that we hope to have, and he is part of our story. The ornament with those initials is something that can help give me hope of those future babies when I feel very beat down this holiday season. It is so special to have these dear keepsakes to continue to tell our family's story on our tree.

I had a draft for this post that I wrote, deleted, re-wrote, re-worked, deleted again, etc. about five times. My original premise was my real life Christmas wish list but when I saw this article posted by Angela Miller in one of my favorite grief Facebook Groups, A Bed For My Heart, that I realized it was everything I was feeling and wanting to express.This is exactly what I want to share with those grieving this Christmas and for those looking to understand.

Angela's full article is in the link above. This is a paraphrased excerpt from her full post with some of my own additional commentary and shared feelings that I feel best applies to me and our Hudson. Her original words are in bold.

-----

I had a hard time creating a Christmas list this year. Simply because there just was not much that anyone could give me that would help fill the void for what I truly want. Ever since you were taken from us, certain things in life, like Christmas, just doesn’t have the same excitement and joy as it once did.

No offense to baby Jesus. In fact, I quite love him– a lot– but the sight of Him in the manger makes me ache for you, my own “baby,” beyond any words, in any language. Beyond any ache I ever knew was humanly possible to survive. The birth of Jesus completed the Holy Family. The contrast of that next to mine, a family forever incomplete, is too much for me to handle most Christmases as a bereaved mom. Every time I hear "Mary Did You Know" or "Little Drummer Boy" and even the non-secular favorite "Where Are You Christmas" my eyes swell with tears.

Grief, Christmas and rooms overflowing with predominantly non-grieving people mix about as well as oil and water. I wish more people could really, truly get that.  As in, get it without being bereaved, or grieved, or any of that. Just get it, period.

For every holiday picture taken, meal eaten, carols sung, families gathered, trees  decorated, Christmas morning presents opened, are always those achingly incomplete. The joy of the season and the ache of the ever missing you taunt me like a cruel, unending joke. Our family will be forever incomplete. And there’s nothing that could make that broken circle close the way it should– like a kiss beneath the mistletoe gone horribly wrong, two lips never meeting as one– the edges of our family circle are permanently broken, never again will we be a family complete.

Sigh.

I don't want to have to “celebrate” the season this way, wishing for impossibilities that can never be, longing for what is no longer.

Some moments are surprisingly survivable, sometimes even filled with unexpected moments of laughter and joy. Others are barely bearable– a land mine of grief explosions grinchingly waiting for me around every corner.

Oh. my. heart.  

This is what Christmas without you looks like. Every step holds the very real possibility of getting pulled totally and completely under– of being over my head, gasping for air in a whirlpool of holiday induced grief. Drowning in a thick sea of Eggnog and misjudgments. If I don’t show up, it’s mistaken as, “Oh, she doesn’t care.” If I do show up, with tears and the real sound of my own heart breaking, it’s “Ohhhh, she mustn’t be OVER it yet,” or “Clearly she’s not doing (hush-hush, voice lowered) very well.”

If only it could be understood that it is exactly because of the holidays– the gatherings, the pressure to be merrily on, the exaggerated empty chair that is often unrecognized and not spoken of in a room overflowing with a family otherwise glaringly complete– that leaves a grieving parent spinning in the holy-daze of grief. Just when I think I’m doing ‘ok’, a half cup of tears unexpectedly floods my perfectly measured Christmas cookie batter, and drowns me right along with it– a not so ironic analogy indicative of an entire season filled with far too much salt in a bereaved parent’s wounds. Or, if things have been feeling slightly jolly and even joy-filled, I’ll find myself perpetually holding my breath, shoulders up to my ears, cautiously waiting for the other shoe to drop without even realizing it. Or with the anxiety of a mother scanning the crowd for her lost child, one might find me relentlessly surveying every holiday gathering for mine, while also making note of every blessed Kleenex box, bathroom location, the quickest escape routes and nearest exists that will lead to a corner where I can safely let my tears for you endlessly fall.

If one were to ask me what I really want, I’d sob that all I really want for Christmas is this:
(edited and adapted from the writer's list, some are her shared words, others reflect my own wishes)

1)  A normal life, one with you in it, growing bigger and older every day instead of this tidal wave of grief washing over me at times I want more than anything to be happy and enjoy the sights and sounds of the season. To feel truly alive again, instead of trying to survive underneath the weight of life and death I feel in every single breath.

2)  A Christmas card with all three of us and Georgie pup. One complete with your cheeky and gummy grin, maybe snapped as we turn toward you and smile brighter or laugh. A family that is knowing of true joy, not this pain and emptiness.

3) To celebrate a Christmas with all of our family this year with you. A holiday that started with you last Christmas, as we shared the news you were coming with our loved ones. With my side of the family, you would be the only grandbaby and it would have been an exciting first for us all. On your daddy's side of the family, you would be joining Brooks as the second boy cousin with Olivia and now Kiley as the two girls. You and Kiley would be having your first Christmases together, cousins around the same age. How fun it would have been to watch you grow together.

4)  The untainted joy of Christmas, the birth of possibility, of dreams untainted by the broken, jagged, shattered pieces of our missing puzzle piece, our missing you.

5)  To be expecting new life again, carrying your little brother or sister. How badly we want to fill our home with little ones, as Mommy and Daddy to you in Heaven and to children on this Earth.

6)  The space at our table, full with a high chair, that would later become a booster seat, and then a chair once you are big enough to sit in one. You would be there, full of life, full of laughter, full of every amazing part of you.

7)  A circle of loving hearts who could understand that although I carry both the ache and the joy of the season in me all at once, the ache often times feels stronger and more overwhelming, because the joy of the season is jollying everywhere, greeting my broken places with a slap in the face, and a swift punch to the gut with every photo of a child on Santa's lap, every pregnancy announcement, gender reveal and baby born. If only the world could understand that for me, the holidays feel more like an emotional war zone, than an exciting season of Yuletide cheer.

There you have it. One wish for every month you have been gone and should have been with us instead.

The thing is, I don’t care about what kind of tree we have– real or fake, sparkly ornaments or dull. I don’t care about what kind of food we eat, or if we decide to put lights on the outside of the house or nowhere at all. I don’t care if anyone gets me a present. I don’t care about holiday fruitcake, or gingerbread houses or where so-and-so gets to vacation for Christmas this year.

All I care about is that we’re together as a family, creating priceless memories that money can’t buy and death can’t steal.

Oh yes, and one last thing. I hope to figure out how to keep your light on inside my heart bright enough to make my pores glow with the light of you all year long. That’s my Christmas wish.

If it happens, I figure that’s the closest I’ll ever get to having all I really want for Christmas–
 
Our precious, perfect, wonderful You.

Ten Seconds

The other night I had some quiet time to myself. I needed something mindless so I took to Netflix and found myself watching the Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. This is not at all a terrible show, in case you were wondering but then again, how can something by Tina Fey be terrible? I kind of love it. 

As I sat there watching the first episode, the affable Ellie Kemper (Kimmie Schmidt) gives brilliant and beautiful advice. “Do you think you can handle this for 10 more seconds?” she asks at one point. “You can handle anything for 10 seconds. Then, you just start a new 10 seconds.”

I sat there and was almost put out that this silly show caused me to stop and think. It made me reflect on the way I've tried to manage my triggers by avoiding them as much as possible. The way I can feel the pain coming on sometimes without cause and then I'm flooded in it.

That night in particular, I was exhausted from the day but other than that, I had been in relatively high spirits. In the past couples weeks, I felt I had hit a break through in my grief, having learned to start channeling it ways that brought me comfort and peace, but also made me feel constructive and productive - that is a post for another time. Max and I had a plan for the holidays so my anxiety had been lifted but there was still a looming sadness that would hit with certain Christmas songs or store window displays around town reminding me what Christmas with a child should be like. 

Though I had been experiencing some very good days (consecutively, which is a big deal) today however, I spiraled down again after receiving some tough news from my doctor. As I had shared with you at the end of November, without any difficulties in conceiving Hudson, trying to get pregnant again has proved to be challenging. After the last 5 months of trying, I finally asked my doctor what we could do because I needed hope. I was ready to do anything to be that much closer to having a baby in our arms. Though I did have a pregnancy and made it into my eighth month, my child is gone. It feels as though we've been trying all this time, essentially for 14 months. This month I went on Clomid. I went in for blood work this week to check my progesterone levels. Though I've had positive ovulation tests since I started charting in September, that doesn't necessarily mean I am releasing an egg. The blood screening would check my progesterone levels which would be high if I had released an egg or if I had conceived. After 9 days of positive ovulation tests - which is not normal but they said Clomid could cause that - I had positive thoughts. My body was definitely releasing the surge of Luteinizing Hormone (LH) which precedes an egg release. However, my blood work showed a low progesterone level of a 2, meaning I had not ovulated meaning I had not conceived.

I feel consumed with anger, frustration, sadness, and confusion. I lack understanding and the ability to stay graceful towards others. After hearing from my doctor, I didn't want to go to work, I didn't want to function, I didn't want to do all the things I needed to do, the things people were counting on me to do. I wanted to allow myself to dwell in all those emotions because sometimes, you just want to. Then I remember the many other people in my life that are coming to terms with their own grief for one reason or another or those having fertility issues as well. I'm not the only one, so today I counted to ten. I can do anything for ten seconds, even if it is painful and hard. Even if it is the last thing I want to do because I'd rather surrender to my grief. I count to ten, then if my heart and head are still screaming, I'll count to ten again, and again, and again until the inner turmoil ceases or can at least chill for a little while.

For those battling grief or a difficult season of life, let's just take it ten seconds at a time. As Christmas draws closer, and all the ugly feelings start to stir, I'll be counting to ten with you.

We can do this.
Ten seconds at a time.

Thanks Kimmy Schmidt.