Reprieve

When I was carrying Ian, I was looking forward to the moment of delivery, which I dreaded, and no further. I just needed to hold onto him long enough to get him safely out of my body so that he could live. Beyond that, I couldn’t see an inch. I held it as distinct possibility that I would give him up for adoption. The doctor on the psych ward I went to in California when I was 4 months pregnant said that there was NO WAY that I could possibly take care of a child. It was the “disorder of my reflexes,” which was a case of OCD and some other things like it, getting in too deep. I could barely eat or dress myself.

Then, we drove all the way back East, and when I saw him I didn’t want to give him up. My mother convinced Alex and my Father that I should keep him.

And here we are today.

So many of the things that I have worried about for so long turn out to have been miraculously the opposite of what I thought.

As I struggle with bringing myself back from starving on and off for weeks, I see how I need to eat things like Pop-tarts and gummie bears to ease a little energy into my system, where my husband would have forbidden it. Someone at the boarding home said “All food is food.” And I look back and remember Ian’s stomach problems as a child and some other things and realizing that the powdered donut breakfasts and the Doritos lunches might have been all his stomach could take. It was SUCH A RELIEF to see this. As a 6 months old, he had Projectile vomiting for months. The pediatrician called it reflux. If I had pressed him to look into it further, what would he have done? Alex and I were not stable enough to foster a surgery. That’s still on the books as far as I know. It continues to affect him at times, or did. But I have been so relieved to have a few of these major worries reprieved.

Through no fault of my own I was a danger to others in the neighborhood in Florida. All the kids came to swim in the pool, and I would sit in the kitchen by the door to the porch smoking cigarettes. But I was not supervising them. I was there to intervene in case of an emergency but not to prevent one. There was a young boy who was accident prone who bit his tongue and I saw him years later and he was having trouble talking and I wanted to know whether it was because of that accident. He also tried to drown my son once. There was another girl who used to love coming over to rollerblade in the driveway and she had an accident and I didn’t even know it until her father came down to tell me that she had gotten hurt.

It was a difficult time, but everybody survived.

Ian’s story is the worst.

I am praying for all the good that the Lord can give him.

Somewhere inside people thought that I had things together in some way that I didn’t.

And I know what it was, it was my mother and Alex convincing people that I was okay when I was not. I really was no longer a competent person. I was struggling with a horrible lower GI disorder, for one thing, that started in 2003 and still troubles me today. It had me completely paralyzed. It sounds like too much, all of this, everything, but it really is true. I have a 7 page list of the diagnoses that have been given and the ones that are true over the last 40 years. That is to say, diagnoses/ conditions/ descriptions, observations, et cetera, that no one person couldn’t possibly put together even in an old-fashioned, hour-long appointment.