God's Plans

Mark and I are fanatical about Christmas, and we are joyfully raising Sadie in this tradition. I personally don't have a problem with Christmas decorations up in department stores in October, and I start listening to my Christmas music just before Halloween. I certainly respect others who may have a contrary practice themselves. But Mark and I, we are living examples of the refrain "We need a little Christmas, right this very minute..."  Sadie had a funny retort when a teacher once told her that it was a little bit early for her Santa shirt in October by saying "It is never too early to be thankful for Jesus' birthday." 

My own celebration of the Christmas season from October through December is not about commercialization -- rather, it is my celebration of the central tenant of my own sense of Christianity: the celebration of encounters with friends and family, creation of special moments together, snuggling and cuddling, singing and storytelling, decorating... enjoying each other and the time we have right now. The Christmas season has reminds me to be grateful for what I have. So honestly, no... I don't get sick of that prevailing spirit in my own life by the time December 25th comes around. Sure I get overwhelmed at times, and there is some exhaustion thrown in the mix (as well as sugar highs and lows). But I am more aware of the meaning of my life and the happiness in it during my extended Christmas season. I am thankful that Jesus gives me a few months to remember that.

No surprise, we have more than a dozen nativity scenes in our house. My mother started each Misage child with our own after we graduated from college, giving us just one piece a year. Mark had several, and we have gotten a few special ones since we got married. We got a wonderful wooden Haba one Sadie could play with when she was nearly two, and last year at nearly four, we let her touch some of our fragile ones. This year, she and Tyler made one from scratch.

Almost every single night since Halloween, we spend an hour "Playing Manger" in our house. Sometimes I get the role of the angel and Mark often gets to play the wise men. Sadie is nearly always Mary... and honestly, Joseph doesn't say much so Sadie just moves him along (and lets him tend to Mary, like she knows a good husband should).

Sadie is also the chief narrator, and the plot changes depending on how much time we have (and how much of a dictator she feels like being). Sometimes the wise men go to the wrong town first and the angel has to remind them to "FOLLOW THE BIG STAR" and go back to the fork in the road to find Bethlehem. Sometimes the animals are the ones to show Mary and Joseph where the best stable is instead of them going to the Inn and being turned away first. Sometimes the shepherd and the sheep beat Mary and Joseph there in the first place, and other times they have to race and cut ahead of the wise men. The wise men bring non-traditional gifts (they always have a mobile and a bowl of cherries though). The animals tend to talk more than the people in our versions. And Mary always starts by telling Joseph "I feel a little weird today" (taken from me telling Sadie the story of her own birth and me waking up the say before she was born and saying to Mark "I feel a little weird today" myself). And Sadie always makes sure that the angel always says "FEAR NOT!" in quite a loud voice (my side of the family's contribution to Sadie's physical being). She is very reassuring, in a dictatorial way.

Sadie asked me the other day "Did you pray to God every day to give you a baby before you got pregnant with me?" and I started to answer her honestly... that yes, I probably prayed to God many times every day since for over two years to get pregnant. But I stopped myself, because I need to be careful to not mislead Sadie to believe that praying for something tangible, such as another sibling, will mean it will automatically come true. So instead I told her that I prayed a lot for a baby, but I also prayed for God's will, whatever that was. And then I reminded her that we have very close friends and family members who may not have a husband, or may not have a child, but that doesn't mean that God wasn't planning something very special for them. And that it was better to not pray for the specific outcome, but instead to pray that God will show his plan to you.

Heavy lesson for a child, but our Sadie is a deep thinker.

"I wonder what God's plan is for me?" she said after a minute. I was overcome by it all, and we just looked at each other for a bit. Then she said "I bet his plan is that I will have a baby girl, and you will come take care of her for me and we will take her to lunch at Starbucks."  I grinned. The heavy moment had passed, and I said "Yes, I hope that is God's plan for you."

We have a friend that lost a child today, not yet two years old. What we thought initially was normal infant reflux turned out to be something far worse, and we have watched this family struggle for many months. In the meantime, they brought into the world another child,  but today, their first baby left them.

Gosh, it is hard to understand God's will during these times. It is really hard to look at parents burying a baby and have any comprehension of how horrific it is.

It is also hard to understand why some women get no babies, some get only one, and some get more than ten. I have read the books about why bad things happen to good people and I always conclude that God gives those that have lost something a some deeper sense of faith or strength or something, so that somehow, it doesn't hurt as much as it looks like it would. That's what I hope, at least.

On a smaller scale, that is what happened to me. I know that we have friends who look at us and think "poor Webbs, they only got to have one child" or "poor Sadie, no siblings for her."  And yet, I feel like the luckiest person in the world most nights just by having her and Mark and Daisy all in my kitchen with me.  Taking aside a few tantrums here and there, and I can tell you that I pause after conversations with Sadie daily and see how blessed I am. I lay with her every night and watch her eyes close and her dreams creep in. I would have loved more children, but I truly see how blessed I am with just one. I want for nothing except more time to enjoy her. My friend Megan gave me the best compliment that I have ever received when she wrote to me "Not a better mother with more love for her child do I know! ... your sheer delight in your precious daughter point me back to what matters. Sadie has one special mother."  (It could have only been made better by commenting that my ass was shrinking in every picture she saw of me!)

Motherhood is challenging, and it is exhausting. It is like my extended Christmas season in many ways, with its own sugar highs and lows. But I can think of nothing more rewarding than what I am doing now.  It is so clear to me that my path which once focused heavily hours and hours given to the practice of law is so better balanced now that it is driven by a commitment to my daughter, my husband, our family and friends, and myself.  While I wish that I had seen this path a little clearer in my 20's, I am glad that God didn't wait until my 60s to show it to me. Our cup, indeed, runs over.

What Makes You Special

A dear friend of mine from high school is just finishing up her maternity leave, having had her fourth daughter. This daughter was much sought after (and I am not suggesting that other children are not) since my friend is recently remarried and her other girls are tween-or-teenagers. She and I have exchanged emails about fun topics like which is the best vacuum cleaner to buy and how to get a three month old to sleep through the night.  I seem to read these emails right before I am going to sleep (note to friend, she needs to go to bed earlier herself) and this has brought back memories and reflection on our first few months of Sadie's life. She was a glorious sleeper then... we were very lucky. She was a horrid sleeper from age six months until... sometime very recently?? But yet, as I reflect on this, we are still so very lucky. I thank my friend for reminding me how special the little moments are with our children, even if they come in the middle of the night.

As we struggled with little things like when she would sleep uninterrupted (fingers crossed, she does that now), when she would walk without holding on to my finger (14 months but never even stumbled thereafter), adjusting to new nannies (we even survived a practicing witch), how she would test for kindergarten, etc., all of these challenges look so silly and small in hindsight.  Somehow in my own mind I have reconciled both my Tiger Mom and Helicopter Mom tendencies, and feel like I am a blend of each (a tiger on a helicopter, perhaps). I believe that it is my job to prepare Sadie by giving her a firm foundation and belief in herself and her skills to face the challenges of her little world, but to let her face them with her own developed skills. Thereafter I just watch in the wings and love her as hard as I can. Learning to swim was important to me, but being a star on the soccer team doesn't mean much. I tell her a million times how much we love her but I try not to tell her that she is perfect, or that we are perfect, because we aren't.

We are now at the point for deciding what to do about Sadie's birthmark.

I will never forget the moment that a nurse named Faith handed me my beautiful baby daughter after performing a C-section and said how perfect she was, then pointing to her cheek and saying "and that's probably a hemangioma strawberry birthmark, right there."  It was a little halo, almost invisible with the tears of joy streaming from my eyes. Within four weeks, it had grown to the size of a dime and was probably a quarter size and bright red by the time she started seeing a dermatologist at 10 weeks. We saw several doctors in person when she was a baby and consulted doctors over the Internet, participated in reputable website chat rooms of parents with kids who had far worse hemangiomas than we had.  We had laser treatments which did very little.  The first year of dealing with this was stressful for me at best.  People asked about it incessantly... even now I can recall so many of their comments. Parents and kids alike would ask what it was.  Sadie's hemangioma has a deep and a surface component, so at its largest it looked like she might be holding a golf-ball in her cheek. And as luck would have it, that was how it looked when she smiled for the camera.  And we all like to smile.

I firmly believe that God gave us a reminder to chill out about it when Sadie was just over a year and she met the girl who became her best friend, Bella.  They met in McDonald's of all places, with their nannies (neither of which are their nannies now, but their nannies now are close close friends as well). They were born two days apart in the same hospital, so both girls like to say how they actually met in the hospital nursery. And they both have hemangiomas on their same left cheeks. They aren't identical in size or type, but they certainly make them a unique duo.

And through the gift of friendship with this girl and her family, along with the passage of time and my growing confidence as a mother, and the growth of Sadie's vibrant personality, the birthmark has shrank both literally and figuratively. This family has become so much more than the family of another child with a birthmark, but it was how we met because the girls as babies really were identical.

We saw our dermatologist twice a year and saw a plastic surgeon every other year or so over the years. And everyone agreed to just watch to see how it would fade. Hemangiomas are supposed to go away on their own, about 10% a year, so 10% of kids lose them by 1 year of age, 20% by 2 years of age, 30% by 3 years of age and so on. Some doctors say to have them surgically removed on infants especially when they are large or on the face, others say to wait it out and see what happens after a few years. There are pros and cons to operating early or later, or not at all, all too complex for this blog.  Suffice it to say that our dermatologist and surgeon have said that Sadie's will never fully disappear and both recommend surgery. And our pediatrician (as well as our ENT, who we didn't ask for his thoughts but he volunteered them anyway last summer) have said "kids will be cruel" and we should get it removed before she starts kindergarten.

So yesterday we saw the plastic surgeon for a check up and he recommended removal in the early spring. Simple outpatient procedure he calls it, under anesthesia for about an hour, stitches and a scar. He will debulk the bump underneath and take off the birthmark on the top.  All of this was said, for the first time, in front of Sadie.

Last night at bedtime, Sadie asked for me to promise that she didn't have to have the surgery. Surgery is scary, it will hurt, I don't want to have to go to sleep. All of these I can deal with. We drive over a scary bridge down a the river, but it is worth it when we eat at our favorite hamburger place. I can promise that it won't hurt, I can promise that I will be there with her when she goes to sleep and when she wakes up. All of these things are matter-of-facts, and I can deal with them.

But you said that I was beautiful and special with my birthmark. I don't want it to go away. I want it to stay forever, or at least let it go away slowly on its own. You told me I was special!

Oh, you so are!

This is not an easy choice for Mom and Dad, but I don't tell her that.  I just tell her that she is beautiful and special and that Mommy and Daddy will think about it for awhile and we will do the right thing, whatever it is. Because that is our job, as her parents, and it isn't her job as the child.

How I wish the world was accepting of birthmarks on faces but frankly, they aren't. We flew in first class down to Disneyworld last spring on a 6 am flight and the first words out of our flight attendant to us was "What happened to her face?" So much for a great kickoff to our first flight and the world of magic and wonder. It just doesn't work that way. Sadie is a social confident outgoing girl. If anyone could handle a birthmark on her life, she could. But do I want her to be subject to the questions and comments when we can easily make it easier for her?  Is it truly easy surgery?  Our surgeon is confident. But could I live with myself if I chose this cosmetic option and something went wrong?

Interestingly, both Mark and I have a niece (on my side) and a nephew (on Mark's side) who have had a birthmark removed from their faces. One was a hemangioma that wouldn't stop ulcerating so they had it removed when she was under 2 years. One was a true mole that was large and they had it removed when he was 5 or 6.  I don't think either of their parents regret the surgeries they had for their children. But it doesn't make the late night questions and answers easier.  I can't protect her from everything in this world, nor should I. But my job is to build her foundation and belief in herself. I feel like I have contradicted myself in what I said to her, and I hate that.

So I ask for your prayers. There is no right or wrong answer.

Fast Forward... Now Slow Down

August and September blew by this year without any posts. Daisy seems to have gotten past her bout with mortality and is living each day to the fullest.  Sticking to her wheat-free-hypo-allergenic dog food has been relatively easy for us. We made her grass fed beef and rice mini-meatloaves shaped into dog-paw shapes for her 10th birthday on September 11 and all of us ate them for dinner!  We know that we are on some borrowed time with her - as whatever it was that caused the dramatic increase in pancreatic enzymes and the enlarged adenoid is still there. But we are grateful for each day and hopeful that she will be with us a few more years.  She makes her way up to Sadie's room every night for stories at 7:30 and often will stay there, asleep next to Sadie's bed, until Daisy may wander into our room when we go to bed. There is nothing like the feeling that one gets when you crack the door to check on your little human at 10:30 at night, and you can see her pet companion raise her own head, as if to say "All is fine, you don't need to check on us... I will guard her" just with her own bloodshot and tired eyes.  Daisy has lived up to her birthright as she was born on September 11, 2011. She is indeed a very special dog.

We survived an earthquake and a hurricane in Richmond VA. And we squeezed in a last trip to the beach and stayed with Mark's brother and his family who were just a block from our dear friends, the Littles, so Sadie enjoyed beach days with her best friend Isabella. Watching these girls who were born just two days apart, both with identical birthmarks, grow up has been remarkable. They have been each other's constant companions for so many years -- and now have turned into these little ladies with plenty of sass!  The Littles are God's answer to Mark and I not being able to give Sadie a family of many siblings. She loves the hectic chaos that is in their house, and yet appreciates coming home to our peace and quiet at the end of the day. And we love them for it!

Sadie's last year at First Baptist started in early September and we have been rolling through the weeks with a whole new set of rules with Pre-K. She is loving all the new responsibility that comes with being one of the "Pre-K Kids", including crossing the street to go to a new playground, having her lunch at school, carrying her own tote bag, and writing a ton more.  Every day there is some new discovery. She is a reporter, always full of details on what happened during the day during dinnertime with Mark and me. She has a keen sense of humor. She's a list maker --- I am constantly spelling words for her so she can write them down. She makes us laugh. And she makes us grateful. Four and a half is my favorite age ever (but I will admit at saying that at a lot of other ages too).

And now we are upon our favorite time of the year. Sadie has joined me in a true love of the lead-time for Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas. We are fully into reading holiday books and listening to Christmas music whenever we can. We have great plans to decorate this year. Our house on Monument Avenue will shine with lights of every sort and every color as Sadie has designed new specs for lots of decorations. And we are new owners of a small pad in Urbanna, Virginia where we will hopefully stash some decorations to use for the holidays too. It is all so exciting and thrilling!

We visited with my parents this weekend and we are anticipating my mom's 70th birthday on Halloween. It was a great visit, full of laughter. And all of the Misage kids and grandkids will be together for Thanksgiving this year.  We are lucky to have my parents doing so well. Unfortunately, we continue to be saddened by Mark's mother's battle with Alzheimer's and, added to that, the dramatic decisions that his father makes in his own sort of vacuum.  The stress of the latter has been unlike any I have ever known. We continue to pray for some resolution there, and try to preserve our marriage and our nuclear family in the meantime.  I never expected how hard it would be to balance giving so much to your own child and to also watch horrible things happening to your spouse's parents.  Mark's mother has been a saint. I realize how good my own marriage is, probably in large part due to the sense of consideration and understanding with which she raised my husband, her son. We try to pass along who she was to Sadie, and shield her from all the ugliness that is happening at present. As she gets older, that is getting harder and harder.

And so, we focus on the holidays. This little girl that we waited for so impatiently in our marriage... she now is developing at lightening speed.  She greets the days and the seasons with joyful anticipation. I try to learn from her and have her optimism.  We will enjoy the last quarter of 2011 and try not to worry about all that we can't control.

Noises in the Night

I was lying awake at 1 a.m. last night listening to the noises around me.

At the foot of our bed in her sleeping bag was Sadie. She comes in every night to sleep in our room. She used to come into our bed, a habit that grew much more common this summer. Someone gave me the idea to insist that she sleep in a sleeping bag, thinking that sleeping on the floor would lose its appeal soon enough and she would be back to her wonderful bed in no time. It has had the opposite effect, and now she wonders down around 9:30 pm. She doesn't want to be alone, she says, when the rest of her family sleeps in one room.

Next to Mark's side of the bed was Daisy on her dog bed. For much of the summer, Daisy had not been coming to sleep in our room where she traditionally slept. I would find her on the bathroom floor most of the time and thought that she must have chosen that place because she was hot. More and more often the last few weeks she wouldn't make it up the stairs at all and would sleep down in the den. But after our scary brush with death last week, she has been coming up to our room the last two nights and taken her old place in her dog bed next to us.  She is acting younger and healthier just the last two days. Like our old dog again. But this is making us realize that she really was different this summer.  Except for  our week at the beach, Daisy grew much older this summer.

So there we are, a family of four in a 5200 square foot house, all sleeping in a 7 foot by 7 foot square.

And then, all of the sudden, Sadie started laughing in her sleep. Giggling away. I sat up and peered over at her but her eyes were still closed, and she tightly held her blankie and bunny that have been her companions for life. But her face was lit up in happiness.  What was she dreaming, I wondered. It went on for more than a minute. She was so joyful.

I looked over at Daisy then, and she too was awake watching this. My ever present companion, she has always woken with me in the middle of the night. When Sadie was an infant, Daisy woke up for every feeding with me, coming downstairs to make the bottles and then up again with me to give them to her. Guarding us from what? Loneliness maybe? Solitude? Fear?  There is a reason why the yellow lab is the most popular dog in America. She has never chosen her own needs over the needs of her family. She is ever devoted to Sadie, Mark and me. She watched the laughter, and looked at me for a few minutes. She waited until I laid back down before she resettled herself. Now her head was facing Sadie's body. I bet she watched for longer like that.

Today, we don't know what the future holds for Daisy. The past two days, she has acted almost completely normal with us, full of smiles and tail wagging. But this morning she had a bit more blood in her poop. And she wanted to lay outside instead of coming in to eat. Could she sense that we were out of ground beef and she would only get chicken breast with her rice?  Of course not Daisy girl, we will just need to defrost some more for tonight. You will have steak, I told her!  She eventually came in.  We have a vet appointment on Friday for some more tests. Perhaps I should bring her in today with the appearance of more blood, I think my discharge instructions say to do so. But she hated the vet. She needs a break I rationalize. She will be fine at home with us for a few more days.

Sadie said to me this morning over breakfast, matter-of-factly "Daisy knows she is going to die soon."  I feel my heart breaking. We don't know that, I want to say --  we will get some treatment, she may be fine, she is only ten, if she has Cushing's, she might be able to have treatment and live another 3-4 years, I want to say. Then I see that Sadie has gotten down from her chair and is laying on the floor next to Daisy and Daisy gives her a lick on her cheek. I start packing my lunch and can see out of the corner of my eye that Sadie is sneaking Daisy cheerios from her bowl one by one. "Don't tell Mommy" she whispers. I just look away. Surely Cheerios don't violate the bland diet instruction.

We will make it. Tonight I will lay awake longer and thank God again for my blessings, all right beside me in the small space together. We will make it. Mark and I raise good caring loving beings, one human and one furry. We will make it.

Good Enough.

Last night, I started a book that I truly believe is going to be fabulous. Just 50 pages into it and I was trying to wake up my sleeping husband with by gleeful revelation that finally I have discovered it is OK to feel the way I do.  He didn't really seem too excited, and continued falling asleep. So this morning when we both woke up, I immediately tried to explain the main concepts of the book as I understood them. The problem was that I could not, at 6:30 am, remember the names of the two groups into which the authors had divided mothers who are working professionally outside the home. I grabbed the book to find the terms, but despite the bright light in our bedroom and me locating the correct page, I could not read the words on the page!!  Another added bonus of motherhood in my 40s -- I can't read fine print for the first 20 minutes of waking up. I couldn't even find the reading glasses.

Now several hours later, I can recall the two groups... it is something like the Always Perfects and the Good Enoughs. They did a study and determined that the Always Perfects are pretty miserable and the Good Enoughs are pretty darn happy.

Like a lot of the women featured in the book, I used to be a classic Always Perfect. I fundamentally believe that the private practice of law in large firms grooms women to be this way - it is likely in the drinking water.  As a transactional attorney, we were expected to work through the night when a deal so dictated, and fight for the smallest detailed points, such as where a comma goes in a a document. I laugh now when I think back to a several hour debate that we once were embroiled in at the printer over the use of the words presently and currently (for the curious among you, they don't mean the same thing). I was the perfect keeper of every last detail. It isn't like our profession lacked times of fun and laughter too, but the expectation was pure and absolute dedication, whatever time the day or night a client needed you.

When I first had Sadie, I tried to continue my Always Perfect personality at work. And I attempted to bring it home too. And slowly but surely, I kept falling short.

I couldn't fix Sadie's birthmark on her face over my maternity leave, notwithstanding that I researched the issue for hours upon hours a day. I couldn't fix projectile vomiting problem either, notwithstanding that I stood in line outside the Babies R Us before it opened after determining that perhaps the slow flow nipple was too slow and the fast flow nipple was too fast and thus that very moment I needed to find and buy some medium flow nipples to solve this issue. I couldn't fix her sleep issues that began at six months notwithstanding that I have bought every sleep book (and even bought a few of them twice, having thrown away the first copy one night when my kid was crying it out and I was having an emotional breakdown).  While I personally thought mothers who made their own baby food were obsessed and had too much time on their hands,  there were several times when I went ballistic on Mark for buying Sadie's diapers at the grocery store instead of the Target across town which had them $0.50 cheaper with the coupon that I had cut out. 

The more I tried to control everything around me at home, the more everything was falling out of my control. And the more I tried to get back on the train of being the super-star girl lawyer that I had been to as a partner at the firm, the more I felt like I was failing Sadie.  Great - I was a failure at home and at work.  Now what?

It seemed so obvious when I read about it in this book last night!

As opposed to the Always Perfects, there is a breed of much happier working professional mothers that are the Good Enoughs. And a year after I have moved firms and gone part-time, I think in this group is where I finally am located.  (Though I will admit, this morning when I begged for verification from Mark "I am in the Good Enough group, right? Listen to me Mark. Right? Right? That is me now, Right??" So I might still have some obsessive tendencies).

The Good Enoughs, have re-set their own bars measuring success so they can actually meet them. It isn't about settling for less than you want, it is about adjusting your wants so you will succeed and be happy with yourself.

Sadie slept in her bed all night last night (instead of the sleeping bag in our room where she has been since we returned from vacation). Big milestone for my girl, who has been in and out of our bed 95% of the nights for the last 2 years. So quickly I run to the shelf in our laundry closet where I keep a stash of presents for birthday parties, new coloring books, etc. for these moments, and I pull out a set of unopened Brain Quest for 4-5 year olds. Sadie was never crazy about the set we used a year ago (3-4 year olds perhaps) but honestly, our gift shelf is pretty depleted right now. So they were waiting for her at breakfast.

She ate a microwaved leftover pancake for breakfast that I had folded into a sandwich and filled with peanut butter. Success for my quest to get some protein into her, since they don't give morning snacks at her camps and fun at camp is wholly dependent, we have learned, on her eating a solid breakfast. Breakfast ended, time for Mommy to go take a shower.

But she wanted to do the Brain Quest cards.

Sure we have time for a few, and a few we did. No, she wanted to do them all. And she was good at them. How much harm can this be? I said to myself. I am not with her all day, and all she is asking is for a little more time with her mother. My hair is longer now, it doesn't need to be washed every day. And I haven't put on a stitch of make-up other than daily lipstick since I got married 7 years ago I think (how sad is that). So my getting ready routine can be shortened.

So we sat there and played with the cards until we had exactly 12 minutes for both of us to get dressed and get our bags packed to leave for camp, and then me for work thereafter. We made it. I took a speedy shower and Sadie did her own hair. It was good enough.

After I dropped Sadie at camp, I hit the newly remodeled Kroger to grab a few things we were out of and something for dinner. While I was there, I got an email from one of my co-workers saying "Before I come up to meet with you this morning, I wanted to tell you I was wearing my Talbot's green skirt in case you were wearing yours too."  I didn't respond.  The Almost Perfect in me would have felt guilty that here she was working while I was at the grocery store, and would have responded that indeed I wasn't wearing the green skirt, but did we have a meeting scheduled? The Good Enough in me was 90% sure we had nothing scheduled, and was 100% happy that I could grab something from Kroger this morning instead of fighting the traffic this direction to get there tonight after work but before dinner. It was 8:45. I happily went on my way, and my refrigerated groceries are in their bag down in the firm's refrigerator on 2 now, from which I will grab them and head home tonight. We didn't have a meeting, she just had a question. Which I answered 90 minutes after she emailed.  It feels good enough.

There are so many things in life that I can't control right now. Sadie's birthmark and whether or not we should operate. Mark's parents' health and the demands of time that is taken from him to deal with way too many issues.  Where Sadie will get into kindergarten, and if several places, which one would be best suited for her.  The real estate market in Richmond, which governs where we live right now.  My lack of friends at my new office. And my inability to effectively carve out time for most of my old friends.

But if I open my eyes and look, there are far more things that are given to me as opportunities for success. An ability to walk with Daisy after Sadie has gone to sleep and feel the cold front coming in after a few scorching days.  Time to play games with Sadie in the morning.  Not washing my hair and having ten extra minutes. Grocery shopping on the way to work. Exercising every day during lunch.  Those things I am wildly successful at. I have exceeded my wildest expectation on how to make do, fly by the seat of my pants, get what matters done. Those are my successes these days.

Sadie has the Misage family genes for anxiety and I sense that she will go through an Always Perfect phase. While she loves to hear the story of her birth, a few weeks ago she got very upset upon thinking of having a baby cut out of her tummy one day. Last week she told me right before she fell asleep "I wish I was a boy."  Oooh, gender identification issues already at 4, I wondered.  But when I asked why, her answer was "Because boys don't have to have babies, and I don't want to have babies. "You don't have to have any babies if you don't want to... You have many years to decide... That is not going to happen for a long long time."  "Like 100 years?" she asked me. "Close to that," I told her, "Why are you worried about it now?"  "Because I don't want the doctor to have to cut the baby out of me" she responded. "By the time you have a baby, in 100 years or so Sadie, the doctors will have invented a new way to get babies out of their mommies that don't hurt at all, so there is no use worrying about it now." I told her.

She was quiet for a few minutes and said "You mean like... out of my hand like this?" and she motioned her hand as if to be sprinkling something out of it. "Just like magic fairy dust?" she asked. "Yes" I said, "they will probably figure out a way that a doctor can help you sprinkle the baby out of your hand just like you sprinkle the magic fairy dust!" I told her.

Maybe an exaggeration, but good enough.

Perfection

What a wonderful time we had at the beach this year.

Going to Duck, NC is something that Mark and I have done since we started dating. He went to Southern Shores just south of Duck as a young child with his family, and I spent a week at the Outer Banks every year with friends from college too. So our dedication runs deep. There is a particular sensation that we get just driving across the Wright Brother Bridge onto the island that I can close my eyes and imagine, even in the dead of winter.  It is our happy place.  It centers us.

We took Sadie when she was just 6 months old, and she loved it of course... she learned to sit up in the soft sand and even more so, the Bermuda grass in our front yard (something we don't have living on Monument Avenue in Richmond). Mark and I missed the relaxation that we had counted on for all of our previous trips, the long bike rides on the trail, the dinners out at Blue Point, walks up and down the beach whenever we wanted.  But we took Sadie again, of course, when she was 18 months old and she dug and dug for hours... happy to entertain herself with the monotony of this experience and allow us some peace too. And we went again when she was nearly 2 and a half. This time, she needed closer supervision as she ran in the waves and threw ball to Daisy for hours on end. It was still relaxing for us though, as we had lots of family members and friends who came with us. And then we went last year when she was 3 and a half.  She loved the pool and the beach, but was far from a swimmer in her water wings. She dug sand holes and filled buckets but counted on Mark and me to actually construct the castles.  We never complained.

This year was different even still. Our near 4 and a half year old is entirely self sufficient in a pool and has no fear of the ocean at all. She builds her own castles, and even perfected Mark's famous "drippy sand castles" technique after 30 minutes of watching him and spent hours upon hours making them. I could sit in my beach chair and converse with my sisters and our friends, while Mark was kayaking and know that Sadie was having fun. She was thrilled to play with her older cousins and older friends and she no longer me hovering over her to protect her from anything.  She would call "Watch this Mom!" 1,000 times a day.

We ate lots of seafood dip from Dockside in Duck and boxes of Wheat Thins every night. Mark made lizard drinks with the blender lots of nights. We drank lots of wine. We grilled out and ate dinner at 6:45 instead of 5:45, and bedtime was never a struggle. We woke with the sun and had coffee and Duck Donuts or eggs and leftover shrimp every day. We watched the dolphins from our living room window. We collected shells and walked along the beach for long stretches. I was able to run five days on the sand in low tide, it was amazing. We just enjoyed every moment.

It was perfect this year.

So perfect that being back just sucks. Sadie's having a tough time readjusting to camp. And I am having a tough time readjusting to life. Just walking Daisy at night around the Fan is unbearable when I compare it in my mind to our walks at dusk up and down our street at the beach, no leash in hand, no alleys and trash and broken glass that abounds in our Fan life.  The drama of Mark's "sandwich generation" life is in full force again and the phone rings incessantly at night. Hurtful emails. Division. Work is busy.

I love vacation. But taking one does make it harder to come back.

Donuts and Diving Boards

Twice in the past couple of weeks I have been stricken by the realization that my daughter doesn't know all of me. It bewilders me that I could birth this being and give her 100% of my emotions, and probably 97% of my body's energy since she was conceived, and have moments where I realize that she doesn't know me equally as well as I know her. After all, I know all of her, I know every crevice of her 43 inch body... to the point of knowing which of her teeth will be easier to floss because of the different size of the gaps between them. I can tell by just glancing at her if her expression is saying "I am starting to get an ear infection" or "my feelings are hurt" or "I need some protein for energy" or "I need to go tinkle."  I feel like I wake up often an instant before she does, as if my umbilical chord is still there, I still can sense her.  When she went to camp yesterday, even without a quiver of her lip, I could tell by the look in her eyes that she was scared to be there without a friend. And when she got out of the car today, I could tell from her eyes that she was confident and ready to try it again and hopefully have a good day.

But it does strike me me when we discover that there are things that she doesn't know about me. Sometimes it is reference to people, such as the family friends that I grew up with, and Sadie will say "who is that?" And I am shocked that she lives a life not knowing exactly how formative my best friends from growing up in Mt. Vernon were, my first crush at Mansion House, the friendships with the priests at Good Shepherd Church, people like my aunts and uncles, or my brother Scott because he doesn't visit ever (hint hint), or so many other people that I knew and cherish in my heart but don't see now.

Surely a child can't learn everything about a parent's past, especially at the age of 4. But it is the things in the present that tickle me even more. Sometimes she will say things that confirm in my mind that 4 year olds are truly highly egotistical creatures who think that if they didn't see their mother do something, then it just didn't happen.

A humorous recent example involved Krispy Kreme donuts, an institution here in Richmond, and in Winston-Salem where I went to law school, and in Mt. Vernon where I grew up. I am thinking I would be hard pressed to find a friend, coworker, or acquaintance who knows me in real life who would not know how much I love to eat sweets. That I have been battling the same 10 lbs since I was about 14 (OK, those that knew me in high school or immediately past birth will know that it was more than 10 lbs.) -- and the obvious reason why I can easily run seven miles, or work out every day during lunch, or train for marathons, and yet still not be able to lose those 10 lbs is that I love to eat. And I am not talking about vegetables.

A friend of mine was talking to me at the pool last weekend and we were saying how much we love going down to Captain Franks in Nags Head when we are vacationing at the Outer Banks, and she said "The trouble with that place is, I eat my hot dog and I find it very hard to stop at one dog... I always really want to order a second one but I don't."  That's the difference between her and me. Mark who heard the conversation laughed... because when he and I got to Captain Franks, I order two hot dogs off the bat and then casually ask him if I worked out enough to deserve a third that day (to which he is mortified, and says "Please don't eat more hot dogs than me in front of all of these people.")  I love their hot dogs. But I love desserts more. And I love Krispy Kreme donuts a lot.

My breakfasts at home are Greek yogurt with toasted oats sprinkled on top. Every day of Sadie's life, I think, I have had this breakfast. When naming my favorite food, Sadie will say it is oats. How pathetic is that? But she believes it to be true.

She and Mark have a Saturday morning routine that they call Daddy Daughter [and often Daisy] Donut Date. They head  out at the same time I leave for my long run, and they hit Krispy Kreme. I don't go with them. And I don't ask what they order. Somehow 90 minutes passes, they get Daisy exercised at some park along the way, and I get my run and shower accomplished, and then our day carries on. I don't ask, and they don't volunteer any of the details -- it is just their thing.  And I like that they have their thing. I have never asked to join, as donuts are much easier to avoid when you don't see them.

One day a couple of weeks ago, Mark needed to spend the morning with his dad again in Williamsburg. So he got up at 6 am or something like that, and he went to get hot donuts and have them at home by the time Sadie awakened. She was ecstatic to discover this, and they happily munched on their warm donuts as I was getting ready to leave for my run. There were two donuts left in the box that I noticed as I was getting ready to throw the box away. Sadie suggested "Mommy, those are for you, you should have those donuts."  I was ready to decline. In fact, I was declining loudly in my head. But they were still warm. And they smelled so good.

So on a whim of sorts, I said "OK, I will." and I sat down with a donut and my daughter and her Daddy to eat it. I took one bite and Sadie grinned and said to me "Do you like it Mommy? This is the first time you have ever had a donut!"  Mark and I almost choked at this. I almost responded with "Sadie, Mommy has probably had 500 of these donuts over the years" but I don't think she would have believed it. It just makes me laugh... that anyone who spends as much time with me as she does actually believes that I had never had a donut before.  I did manage to throw the second donut away, by the way.

Another funny occurrence was last weekend at the pool. Sadie loves to watch the kids go off the two low diving boards that are there. They do regular jumps, or flips, or cannon-balls, and she just loves watching them. She has begun to ask when she will be old enough to go off the boards, but then she answers her own question with "When I am 10. Then I will be able to do it."  She is scared, and while some of her four year old friends do it, she can't imagine that she will be ready for many years. As we were having this conversation (rather, as she was having this conversation out loud with herself)... she said to me "Well I can't go off the board Mommy, because you can't go off of a diving board either, and we can only do the same things."

This is her logic for why Mark can eat hot sauce ("Mommy and I don't like hot sauce, do we Mommy?") and many other things these days. More evidence of Team Mommy and Sadie.

But I couldn't let that one rest. "Mommy can go off the diving board", I told her "I did it all the time when I was younger."  She was stunned. Visibly, like mouth opened stunned. Not like an "I dare you Mommy" grin, but she honestly did not believe this could be true.

So I had to show her.

Out of the three feet I climbed and I walked around to the 10 feet. Up the ladder and I walked down the long board. It wobbled and shook. Two thoughts crossed my mind instantly as I stood there. The first was that I didn't think I had been on any sort of diving board in about 24 years- the summer I turned 18 and stopped spending every minute at Mansion House pool. The second was remembering walking on the high-diving board at Mansion House one time when I was about 6, with my brother behind me on the ladder, as I begged him to let me get off and climb back down the ladder. I remember vividly the images of the other kids waiting on the ladder stairs or in the line and wanting so badly to be down there instead of up top. I must have jumped into the water from there, as I know that my brother would not have let me chicken out. I don't recall the jump at all, I just remember looking down the ladder and wishing that I wasn't where I was.

The same feeling, amazingly, came over me on the low diving board at Willow Oaks. There were a host of other boys and girls, all somewhere between 5-10 like I had been, waiting in line behind me. And I thought "this is silly, I can just climb down the stairs and not go now" as I was on the board at 42. But I could look out to the three feet and even with my recent nearsightedness, I could see Sadie and Mark watching me, cheering for me. And I thought "What kind of signal would I send to this child of mine if I chickened out?"  I would do it of course. Because, after all, she thought that I couldn't do it. And she needed to be reminded that she, like me, could do anything she wanted to.

So I jumped off the diving board. 25 plus years after I had done it last, off of some measly low diving board, I overcame my silly fear and jumped. And the water rushed in my head... it was like my ears had just opened up and I could feel all the water pressure in there. And I did what I did as a kid and went all the way to the bottom and touched it with my feet and then pushed back up.  I felt both very young and very old at the same time. It was very momentous.

Being a mom to a newborn was physically hard. My life immediately had become someone else's and not my own, and that was physically exhausting.

But now, the challenges of being a mom to a four year old are also difficult. I should be able to decline having donuts and have whatever I want to eat for breakfast, for goodness sake. But I want to send a signal to her that no foods are off limits, that everything is OK in moderation, that I have self control and so does she, and that I work hard enough to have treats every once in awhile for goodness sake. I want to prove to her that she doesn't know everything, and that just because she didn't see it happen doesn't mean it isn't true. I want to teach her faith. I want to teach her that her mother can jump off a diving board, just like I can go to a meeting and she can go to a new camp where she has no friends and still make friends. I want to teach her what it is like to fail and to succeed. To try and to decline. That there are some times that you can chicken out and that's OK.

And that there are some times that you need to just jump.