The other day, I was going through a long-ignored box in my office, when I discovered two old journals, those cloth-covered blank books that were all the rage a couple decades ago. From time to time, over the years, I’ve tried to capture my day-to-day life, much like in this blog, to get the thoughts out of my head in some kind of order, a way to move on mentally. During my most intense journaling periods, I found time in every day to record the good and the bad, to narrate my life so that the stresses and ambitions and problems would stop rolling around my head like little ball bearings.
One journal was dated 1989, my first year of law school. I think I had forgotten – or maybe suppressed – how much that first year sucked. I lived at home with my parents to save money, and worked as a waitress in a cheesy steak (not “cheese steak”) restaurant on weekends. My commute was miserable; I was completely intimidated by my classmates; and life was just so hard. I was twenty-two – what did I know of hardship? I had not yet struggled with infertility, buried any children, or received a cancer diagnosis.
That was the year I met Rev. Yes, when I met him, he was an intense and driven third year law student with his sights on corporate litigation. (Now he is a minister of the Gospel, with his roots firmly in the nonprofit world. Classic bait and switch, I know.) We began dating not long after he graduated, and we’ve been together ever since. How could I have known then, as I wrote about study groups and exams, difficult professors and opaque cases, that I was discussing these ultimately unimportant issues with the love of my life?
Then I read the second journal, from 1993 and 1994. We were engaged then, and those entries were all about finding just the right wedding gown and trying stay inside our tiny budget for the reception. I can look back and honestly say that I wasn’t a Bridezilla, exactly, but I had my moments. I guess I expected, in the abstract, that we would be married forever; at the same time, it astonishes and humbles me to know that he has been mine, and I have been his, for seventeen years. And he still sends me roses every Valentine’s Day and every anniversary, without fail, even though I am completely allergic to them, and even though that money could be more sensibly spent elsewhere. He sends them, extravagance though they may be, because, even though I can’t keep them in my office, he knows that deep down those deliveries make me happy; and I let him order them because I know it makes him happy.
Later journals would cover our adoption journey, and the total game changing event of actually coming home with our first child. Reading those entries, I was transported back to the days of wonder, exhaustion, frustration, and exhilaration that our oldest son brought. He was endlessly fascinating, and I spilled all my observations and hopes for him onto the lined pages.
From time to time, as I deal with him now, as a surly, obstinate, occasionally sweet teenager, I resolve to go back and re-read those pages.
I wrote about our struggles to have a biological child, about the hormonal adventures and outpatient procedures, the disappointments and thousand humilations of a modern medical culture that is convinced it can actually create life.
And that’s where the journals end. With the advent of the Internet, I took my daily thoughts to various discussion forums, telling my story in whatever context seemed appropriate and seeking answers there. I described the brief lives of our two baby daughters and grieved with warm, faceless women online. Protected by anonymity, I poured out my doubts about myself as a parent, as a wife, as a person. Even now, countless women I don’t know and will never meet walk beside me as I navigate this post-diagnosis road.
How could I have known, way back in those terrible law school days, that this lonely, intimidated young woman would find herself completed by a brilliant, committed, fiercely loyal man? That my love for the law would grow, yes, but would also be utterly eclipsed by my devotion to my family? That we would get the gift of children, not because of the brilliance of doctors, but because of God’s grace? How could I have known what “in sickness and health, til death do us part” really meant? Or, for that matter, how much capacity one person could have “to love and to cherish” another person? How in the world could I ever have known that?
It would be awesome to get another twenty years, to stumble across this blog someday and relive the feelings and impressions of the forty-three year old me, the me who struggles even to remember from day to day the events that make up my life now.
I don’t know if I’ll get those twenty years, but I have today, and I have this blog, and I can write it all down.
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