This week, 2 years ago, I had a miscarriage. I remember the exact date because it was the same weekend my good friend's baby was born. And I went to hold him in the hospital. And there was healing in that. However, there was a lot of frustration that followed. My very practical brain couldn't wrap itself around the concept of something like this happening, primarily because I firmly believed (and still do...) that God allows conception to happen. If He didn't allow it, it wouldn't happen. However, for some reason, I had been allowed to conceive, only to miscarry 6 weeks after conception. It just didn't seem logical. And that was frustrating to me. So frustrating, that I finally broke down and went back to Celebrate Recovery. I'd been resisting going back because I thought it was beneath me. I wasn't an alcoholic. I wasn't addicted to meth. I wasn't having sex with prostitutes. And in my mind, that's the type of person who needed "recovery." But I went anyway, though I was still having a bad attitude. After my first hour of group sharing in over two years, I had two or three women come up to me and say "I'm sorry about your baby." It didn't occur to me until then how touching it could be to have someone be straight-forward in their empathy. It also didn't occur to me how much I needed someone to acknowledge I'd lost a *baby*, not just a "pregnancy." So, here began my change of heart, surrounded by women who wanted to reach out and express sympathy to me, for no other reason than I was their sister in Christ who was hurting. Mind you, I'd had lots of family support leading up to this moment, so I wasn't on my own by any stretch, however there's something so humbling about realizing the people you once rejected due to incorrect assumptions are actually exactly what you need. As a side note, I feel it's important to point out, I didn't make assumptions about any of these women in particular prior to this experience, just what I thought CR was, as a very vague entity. Anyway, the humbling began.
I didn't go to CR consistently, because I was very sick in the first half of 2012. I had somehow acquired a blood-born virus called CMV (for short, I couldn't spell the whole name if I tried) along with mono. Having CMV is like having the flu all the time. And mono is miserable. Put the two together, you're gonna have a bad time. Nobody ever offered an explanation as to how I'd acquired it, except for one Doctor who said a ton of people get it and it lies dormant without affecting their health, but for some reason mine had turned into an infection. At the same time, my Dad was suffering from an array of health issues which put him in serious surgery for the second time in a period of a couple years. So there was the stress of that. ON TOP of all of that, I had just gotten ripped off by a "nutritionist" who sold me on a weight loss plan that was exclusive to her company, which was essentially just a starvation diet with a fancy name. Needless to say, it never worked, and I wasted a lot of money. I was attempting to complete the program anyway, just to not let the money we spent go to waste, but when she heard that I was sick, she detected a potential liability and told me I would be unable to complete the program. Oh, and that thing you signed back in December? Yeah you agreed to it being non refundable. Sorry! So there was that. Wasting money is infuriatingly depressing to me. Especially triple-digit amounts of money. In the end it was a lesson learned, but it still makes me mad to think about it. The CMV wasn't bad every day, I had good days and bad days but eventually the bad days started to become more common so I went back to the Dr to seek further treatment. He put me on a week's worth of AIDS medication. Which is bizarre now, I didn't really think about it when it was prescribed how intensive those meds must have been. Of course, these meds were not covered by insurance, but my wonderful husband just said "buy them. We need to get you better. Don't worry about the cost." Unfortunately, the meds made me sick. The Doctor had me handle being sick by being on bedrest and on, essentially, a carb-intensive diet (which doesn't make any sense now that I think about it) which resulted in a twenty pound weight gain on top of the fact that I was already overweight since the stupid diet scam I tried didn't work. I finished the round of meds and the symptoms started going away VERY slowly. It seriously took forever. Then, by the Spring, I started having loads of digestive issues which we later found out was IBS with stomach and intestinal ulcers. Awesome! And, what type of diet did my Dr recommend to help deal with the symptoms? Another carb-intensive diet and another twenty pounds. Cool.
By the Fall of 2012 I was 40 pounds heavier than I was when I gave birth to my son the prior year, and this was my heaviest weight yet. I can't totally blame it on the illnesses and the treatments, my eating habits had been terrible for quite some time, though the stress of being sick, my Dad being sick, and dealing with my first year of having 2 babies amplified all my eating issues. I had been binge eating out of spite for everything I was dealing with, and I'd gotten myself to a terrible place, health-wise. I developed asthma, started having reproductive issues and my blood tests showed that I was nearly pre-diabetic. I knew I had to do something.
Upon returning to CR in late November of 2012, I decided to take a big step forward and surrender my eating and love for food to God. This felt silly to me. I was met with a wave of support from the women in my group, every one of which said they had trouble with over-eating as well. It was interesting to me to see how quickly my perspective changed once I admitted something that was a huge weakness for me. I had to walk through all the stages of grief, as well. We'll call the entirety of 2012 my "denial" phase. Then came the anger. I was walking around carrying the evidence of my addiction (food) in the form of my weight. It was obvious to the world. I actually felt like I was at a disadvantage compared to the other addicts in CR, a lot of their issues could be hidden in their daily life, but not mine. I resented this. I realize now that in the end, it was a mercy to have it be this way, but I couldn't see that then. Then came bargaining; I said "OK, I'll exercise but I'm not going to change my diet." I didn't lose any weight. Then I said "OK, I'll cut some junk food out of my life, but not all of it. I still need _____" I didn't lose any weight. It wasn't until I just swallowed the big fat reality pill that I realized my entire life needed an overhaul. No more fast food. No more buying copious amounts of junk food. No more sitting on the couch all day. I started running. We cleaned up our diet for the most part. Not as clean as it should be, but it was a step in the right direction. By Spring of 2013 I'd lost 15 lbs. There were several times that I fell off the wagon, but in general, I could feel my general health improving, even if I wasn't losing much weight over the course of the year. I ran three 5K's in 2013, which wasn't as many as I wanted to do, but it was a step in the right direction: the beginning of a journey. When I returned to the Doctor at the beginning of Summer, everything had improved: my cholesterol was perfect, my blood sugar was more balanced and my blood pressure was healthy and stable again. The one thing holding me back was my thyroid was still severely off balanced (part of the reason I didn't lose MORE weight in 2013) and it took several weeks and several more blood tests to get it balanced out.
Then came my first step towards committing to adulthood. I say committing to, because even though my age and circumstances had put me there, I wasn't acting like a mature adult by any means. I was still bitter and resentful towards Ben for no good reason, I was blaming him for all the negativity I was still feeling, even though he really hadn't contributed to any of it. We had been fighting a lot (90% of which was due to my instigating and prompting) and I was getting frustrated and depressed internally. There seemed to be no solution. I realized in June (at least, I think it was June, or around that time) that I needed to surrender my bitter feelings towards him if there were any hope of moving forward successfully. I needed to stop blaming him for everything I felt was wrong with my life and accept that we were where we were for a reason, and be thankful that he'd been as supportive and patient as he'd been. I also surrendered my anxiety over having more children. For some reason I had been feeling extremely anxious about whether or not we'd have more kids at any point. For some reason, I had all these torn feelings about wanting our kids to be close in age, but not wanting to get pregnant right then, wanting our kids to have more siblings, and being bitter about the fact that our circumstances were what they were. It didn't make any sense and it was making me tired. So I surrendered that. Then we were called to our ministry in Tallahassee, almost in direct response to my surrender. This was extremely important to us, because it demanded that we work as a team and be a united front. We didn't have the option of just checking out or letting our personal preferences interfere, we were working together, for the first time maybe ever. It was important that we partake on this short journey, if only to move forward as a couple. By the time we walked into the supervisor's office on December 9th, fairly sure of what the outcome would be, I could honestly say "I'm with you. We're on the same team." and MEAN it. That was huge for us. Instead of getting depressed and placing blame on him, we accepted it and moved forward together. And that's made all the difference in the world. This is why I call this the first step towards accepting adulthood; learning to take responsibility for your own actions and feelings without projecting them on those closest to me. And learning to respect my husband - a huge and extremely necessary step.
All of that being said, the entirety of this journey has brought me to a place where I'm ready to launch into where I want to be. We are walking by faith and not by sight. 2013 was about discovering who I wanted to be; the best version of myself. 2014 will be about becoming that person.
No comments:
Post a Comment