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The Highway

Every day we would hit the bump in the highway with increasing velocity and increasing hopes that today would be the day when we momentarily took flight. 

A year, felt a long time to travel the same stretch of highway, every day — an introduction to the drudgery of regular routine and we celebrated the break in monotony by attempting to launch ourselves into the air, with no regard for consequence.

I met my dear friend in a Math for Elementary Teachers course. I didn’t know she would become my friend just yet. I did know, she needed help, and while I was adept in math I didn’t realize I was in need of a lot of loud laughter and support for many years to come. Five years and a few courses later, we were thrilled to have been accepted into the same teacher program and we made immediate plans to carpool.

Excitement grew when winter came and the bump grew under the freezing conditions like only a newly settling freshly twinned highway over a wetlands could bend a highway. We wondered how much more the road could endure before crumbling completely under the intensifying conditions — but her integrity remained intact. Everyday we hit the bump speeding, and for just a moment before we returned home each afternoon, we were weightless. 

A professor we deeply admired, encouraged us when feeling uncertain, to plant our feet firmly on the ground connecting ourselves with the earth. Unsurprisingly, when you envision the entire earth beneath your feet, supporting you, you begin to feel calm. (Whether this worked because of a true connection or a distraction method, the results were the same.) This technique became invaluable as we interviewed for teaching positions and beginning our career. We planted ourselves in the interview seats and became fixed in positions that required even more routine and regularity than student life allowed.

As we became fixed in our new phase of life, my dear friend moved away and the highway folks “fixed” the blacktop on our beloved stretch of pavement — taking her defiant beauty. 

Every now and then I come hurtling down nostalgia highway and more often, the regular highway. While her playful, unruly ascent no longer remains, she still bends a little, fondly reminiscing of the time she sent us soaring — an enthusiastic accomplice in our escape from the usual.

Thank you, dear highway, for always taking us to where we needed to be. 

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A Midsummer Cold — Patience Level: Zero

Our home was hit with a cold. Not the wipe-you-off-your-feet-putting-you-on-the-couch-with-a-box-of-Kleenex-eyes-barely-open-as-you-listen-to-your-favourite-TV-show-hovering-somewhere-between-consciousness-and-completely-asleep type, but the one that just barely messes with your wellness and majorly depletes your patience level. It interrupts your children’s sleep as the virus hits their little bodies a little harder, rendering you and everyone in the house in a state of utter exhaustion.

In this particular circumstance the croup cough resulting in a midnight ambulance call might not have helped things. But when your three year old wakes you up with a terrifying, panicky, wheeze hack and manages to say that she swallowed a rock and the hubby is on an out of town shift, and there’s two other kids still sleeping, you call. A false alarm, thank goodness, but then we were all awake, still stunned and on edge. Eventually the hum of the fan, the uneven snores of a croupy three year-old and the claws of an eight month-old baby, on my face, lulled me back to sleep.

They’re bickering before I even lift my head from the pillow, like really bickering complete with neck punches. I am in a fog that no amount of espresso can lift. I find myself losing my patience and then apologizing, on repeat. All. Day. Long. “I shouldn’t have yelled. I’m sorry.” None of us are our best selves, physically, mentally or emotionally and we are all simultaneously both imploding and exploding. All. Over. The. Place.

Our five year-old, while not obviously sick, seems to have the same level of irritability as myself amplified by the heat, and is antagonizing her sister and me at every turn. She pushes allllll the buttons. “Get ready!” I yell, “It’s time to go!”

I bend over to help our three year-old put on her swimsuit, she refused to take off her shoes. I’m dizzy and I feel myself slipping into another moment of unnecessary exaggerated frustration as I try to jam uncooperative shoes through a seemingly invisible leg hole. As I take a deep breath, I catch a glimpse of her footwear. Her paw patrol socks are stretched up to her perpetually scratched knees, and her mismatched shoes on the wrong feet. I take a minute to remind myself that she’s three, and she’s not feeling well either. There’s a thin layer of snot across her entire face, and wisps of her hair are booger glued to her face, I attempt a crunchy pair of pigtails.

They’re not buckling their car seats and yet for some reason the three year-old still feels the need to scream “I do it my own self!” When I reach in to help, she swats at my hands and stiffens her body — an angry, snotty, piece of defiant plywood. The harder I push, the harder she resists and it takes everything I have to stand back and watch her struggle with her badly twisted straps as her baby sister, in desperate need of a car nap, begins to loudly complain.

Somehow we made it through the day, good friends who don’t mind some venting and help to keep my kids happily occupied, helped for sure. We made it and I head to bed optimistic that tomorrow is a new day.

The baby has it now and her clogged nose makes it impossible for her to keep her beloved soother in place. All night booger sucking, bum pats and quiet shushing mean that again I got very interrupted sleep — a recipe for disaster.

Unwilling to waste even one warm summers morning I prepare them for an outing. My head is stuck in a “seize the moment” mentality and I overly ambitiously decide it is very important we head out early to beat the heat of the day. My head is spacey as I shuffle three kids, two dogs, enough snacks, water bottles, extra clothes and a blanket into my car.

Then, “Crunch!” I backed my car into our mostly opened garage door. Tiny pieces of styrofoam shoot out from the now very curved garage door and I let out a frustrated cry. My good-hearted neighbour reminded me it was an accident, a fixable one and my husband graciously laughed as I delivered my news via FaceTime.

We should’ve just stayed home, embraced a sick day and watched a movie, but the edges of wellness are deceptive and I really thought we could do it. Summer provides so much time for relaxing and yet counterintuitively adds a sort of pressure to get out there and provide our kids with opportunities to have fun, lest we waste the day. I’ve been keeping a mental summer to-do list — the last summer before our five year-old enters kindergarten — of all the great things I remember enjoying when I was young.

I often tell my kids that we all make mistakes, but it’s important that we learn something from them, to hopefully avoid repeating it. I learned it’s ok beneficial to waste use a warm summers day for rest and repair when our bodies and minds require it. The next kinda unwell day, I’m calling it, right from the get go, couch and cuddles, no matter the weather and perceived pressure to have fun.

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When Internet Friends Become Real Friends

Photo by Cristina Cerda

We lost our first baby. He was born at 35 weeks 2 days pregnant, it was both shocking and devastating, to say the very least.

The hospital social worker warned us that internet groups could be dark places and to be wary of them.  Armed with a handful of bereavement pamphlets, a memory box and this information, we left the hospital.

Still reeling, I couldn’t handle the obnoxiously happy weekly pregnancy updates infiltrating my inbox. I tentatively logged on to the website to delete my account. My vision made blurry from constant tear swiping, I navigated my way to the “delete account” page — a nearly impossible feat. The site, like most sites, claimed to be very genuinely sad to see me go. They begged to know why I would ever want to leave their very informative and useful site, and provided a multiple choice click option. And for once in my life, I was grateful to have to explain my reasons to a computer, because there it was beside one of the tiny check boxes: miscarriage/baby loss. The site expressed its sincerest condolences and listed several forums I might find comfort in. 

But wait, the social worker had warned me about these dark corners of the internet, where grieving people wallow in their sorrows amongst the internet cobwebs — often never heard from again.

Too late — before I knew it, I was the newest member in all three of the loss groups the site had recommended for me.  

I have “real life” friends, great ones, family too, they were so so good to us after our loss, but my soul longed for a kindred connection with other souls, also still reeling from the overwhelming trauma, that is baby loss.

I spent hours poring over every single post. I made posts. I commented on posts. I marked comments with a tiny heart, just to let someone, somewhere, know they had been heard. It was a safe space where I could say whatever sad or disturbing thing I wanted and I was completely understood. Some nights, long after pre-loss me would have been sleeping, I lay in bed, clinging to my phone, the screen illuminated the darkness, as I refreshed my feed, over and over again. I didn’t want to miss anything.

There was a specific group of us, that had all lost babies within a few months of each other (three of us had babies born on the same day — including our son). We frequently commented on each others posts and passed private messages back and forth. Then one of them made a Facebook group. I was hesitant to lose my anonymity by linking these two worlds, matching screen names with real names, but I’m so glad I did. 

We celebrate with each other. We cry with each other. We talk each other through some of the scariest moments of our lives. We lift each other up. We talk each other down. We’ve watched each other’s families grow both in size and in experiences. But most importantly, we remember together.

When the entire world feels like it is entirely too much, we make jokes about buying a castle together, or a tropical island and escaping it all — quite possibly forever. 

I was so lucky to meet one of my friends, after almost three years of chatting online. She generously invited my family to stay with hers in her home in the Dominican Republic. It was awkward for exactly one minute before we dove deep into conversation, right where our last chat had left off. We visited her sweet baby in the cemetery and celebrated her rainbow daughter’s first birthday, alongside her family and friends. We holidayed together and watched both of our daughters playing in the sand under the palm trees. We marvelled at this exhaustingly beautiful stage of life, while reminiscing about our journey here. How lucky we were to have found each other.

I casually talk about my Internet friends and I’m often asked how I met them, because they are scattered about the United States, another in Canada and my dear friend in the Dominican Republic. “Oh,” people always respond, flatly, and I quickly feel the need to legitimize our friendship, but maybe it’s not something you fully understand, until you have internet friends, who regularly check in on you.

My soul found what it needed there, in that dark little corner of the internet, I found them, or maybe they found me, all of us a little broken, all of us in need of an understanding ear, all of us connected by a life-altering, world up-ending event.

Seven years, several miscarriages, many heart breaks, personal and family traumas, countless laughs and 27 rainbow babies (another on its way), we all remain friends.