Battle Sc(OUR)s

The scars and scours which have refined us. Also a look book of our hair styles (or lack thereof) over the years.

If we still celebrated dating anniversaries, next week would mark our 14th. Following a date to Chilis in an ice storm, he dropped me off at my sorority house so I could squeak in just in time for our chapter meeting. (If that sentence doesn’t scream southern college relationship, I don’t know what does).

As we pulled into the circle drive he ventured, “so, I know we’ve gone out on a few dates and have been talking for a little bit, would you want to be my girlfriend?” To which I responded, “does this mean we’re Facebook official? (If that reply doesn’t scream 2010 relationship, I don’t know what does).

That question cemented our relationship status for the remainder of our college careers. For the next seven semesters we dated long distance while attending rival schools. Although we were only an hour and a half apart, for broke college kids who could barely afford gas money, we may as well have been oceans away from each other.

Our relationship subsisted on late night phone calls, texts, and the occasional weekend visit. In the summers we returned to the same home town, but between travel and jobs and school commitments, we still longed to be a “normal” couple. A couple who didn’t have to say goodbye on Sundays. A couple whose schedules aligned. A couple who had a comfortable place to hang out that wasn’t a sorority or fraternity house. A couple whose time together wasn’t dictated by our parents. We thought distance would be our toughest battle.

Then all of my friends started getting married. In hindsight, I can see how truly young we all were at the time. But back then, our lack of an engagement was basically a sentence into spinsterhood and a harbinger of the state of our love. “I need to graduate and make money first”, he said. “We can live on love”, I said. I thought not getting married would be our toughest battle.

Then the time came for us to finally get married at the decrepit age of 24. While we were still but burgeoning adults, we had been together for 5 years, which was a significant amount of time. He had a job. I had two degrees. We were on our way to becoming established married grown ups. And part of being an established married grown up is moving to wherever your husband’s job is located because it turns out you cannot, in fact, live on love. So after we returned from our honeymoon, I hugged my parents goodbye and headed where the wind comes sweeping down the plains.

Now to be fair, our home in Oklahoma was only three hours from our hometown, but getting married, moving states, and starting a new job in the span of six weeks is a bit of an adjustment. While we were in newlywed bliss and so much happier together than apart, I had a lot of growing up to do in a short period of time. I hated my job, I missed my friends and family, and I was learning how to be a wife. I thought transitioning into this new life stage would be our toughest battle.

But adjust we did and after the initial growing pains, we lived blissfully in Oklahoma for nearly two years before we relocated again. While this move brought us back to Texas, we would be living even further away from our friends and family than before. Residing back in our home state brought relief, but making a new life in Houston felt daunting since it was an area where neither one of us was familiar.

We settled into an apartment (contract signed sight unseen) and into our new lives. I found a new job I quickly hated and began to wonder if all the time and money invested in my education had been a gigantic waste. We rode out Hurricane Harvey and questioned where in the world we had found ourselves.

What had been promised to be a camaraderie of coworkers at his new job proved otherwise and my ache for the familiarity of home intensified. My friends who had gotten married all those years before began having babies and I lamented the prospect of those babies growing up not knowing me, and me not knowing them, the way we all should. I mourned the fact that my body was not keeping up with theirs. What was so easy for them to conceive on a drunken night or even through well planned timing was not happening for us. We thought this new city would be our toughest battle.

Despite our misgivings of Houston, though, there were enough positives to make us stay. Living away from our “people” forced us to cling to each other ways we wouldn’t have if we were propped up by others. We learned to rely on one another and felt a sense of pride in navigating a new life in a new city on our own.

Slowly (and I mean slowly) but surely, friends were made. A church was found. A house was purchased. A new job (for me) was procured. We could see a new life beginning to take shape, both in this city and in my belly, until one day, that life stopped taking shape.

Two days after the bleeding started, we hosted a crawfish boil for his coworkers in our backyard. Our foray into building stronger connections with his work team was tempered by my running into the house to cry. I resented these strangers being in our home when all I wanted to do was curl up and die. I resented my husband for allowing them to be here. This resentment started there and grew, on both ends, as the days turned to weeks turned to months with still no answers.

Not only had my body let me down, but my husband, in his inability to take the hurt away, had as well. In my all consuming pain I was unable to see outside myself and he was left to handle everything relating to our day to day lives on his own. A chasm begin to form in our hearts and marriage. We thought miscarriage would be our toughest battle.

Through lots of prayer, time, forgiveness, and a pathway forward through fertility intervention, the void between us that had once felt so wide began to shrink. Instead of making each other the enemy, we joined forces to face a common adversary- infertility (and the gate keepers to said intervention). We oscillated between praying this problem was treatable, planning these long sought after treatments, bemoaning the fact that treatment was required in the first place, and fighting to receive said treatment.

At times we would both be on the phone, me with insurance, him with my doctor’s office, pressing them for answers about how my case had fallen through the cracks. We fought tooth and nail for every test, medication, procedure, and diagnosis. Through our pain, emotional and physical, we joined forces to fight for the family we wanted. We thought infertility would be our toughest battle.

Though infertility was nearly all consuming, for reasons we all are familiar, 2020 gave us the gift of time. With every house project completed, every cocktail concocted, every recipe prepared, every Tiger King episode binged— we found ourselves in a holding pattern. Fertility intervention was elective, so appointments were unpredictable. In this new quiet, a desire we had held together for so long made its way to the surface.

Fostering was a mission to which we both felt called, but the timing had never been quite right. But now, here we were with nothing but time. We had attempted the training classes once before, but the 40 minute drive multiple times a week after work had proved unsustainable. Now with the classes offered online and our time completely freed up, our previous excuses were feeble.

While we still wanted a baby of our own, we also wanted to give a child a home for however long they needed one —the two were not mutually exclusive. So we agreed to keep walking through both doors until one closed.

We got the text sometime after 10:00 pm one late October night. A 4 month old baby boy needed a home, could we open ours? After the briefest of deliberations, we accepted. Three and a half hours later, we were left alone with an infant. Ten days after that, I began the process of administering shots to myself to prepare for an IVF egg retrieval.

November of 2020 was a blur. We were learning how to be parents to a baby on the spot, with no real training to prepare us. Sure, we had gone through all the courses required to become certified foster parents, but as our age range was 0-3, there was only so much we could plot out beforehand.

At the same time I was learning about wake windows and tummy time, I was also coordinating case worker drop ins and court dates and parental visits. On top of that, I was injecting myself with a cocktail of hormones that would drive any woman mad, let alone the instant mom to the cutest, but worst sleeping, 4 month old.

All the while, we were both working and keeping the plates of every day life spinning. Once again, we lost sight of our common enemy and began to turn on each other. We thought fostering while going through IVF would be our toughest battle.

But as all parents learn to do, we adjusted. The shots and hormones were temporary and resulted in a healthy baby girl growing in my belly. The other baby relaxed into his new environment and became a great sleeper. His easy going demeanor and gummy smile, along with the reassuring kicks happening inside me (and full nights of rest), were enough to mend the wounds of the previous months.

We learned to parent as a team. While we didn’t know where our baby boy would end up, it was never hard to love him as our own. We fell into an easy day to day rhythm and soaked in every moment.

The cherry on top of our blissful state was the arrival of our long awaited trip to Hawaii. What had originally been planned as a five year anniversary trip the year prior had been postponed and rescheduled several times and was now rebranded as our baby moon. With the powers that be in the foster world notified and the properly certified childcare procured, we jetted off to Maui to decompress from the last year and gear up for what lay ahead.

On the morning of our third day in paradise, I awoke early to a text from our case worker. The next court date was not for another two weeks, so when I read “call me when you get a chance”, I knew in my gut what news she was about to deliver. Our boy was going to be reunified with his family the day after we arrived home. I hung up the phone and wailed. We had never felt more helpless than being 4000 miles away from this child we loved so much, knowing the countdown to goodbye had already started.

While I sat on the bed unable to do anything but cry, my husband sprung into action calling Southwest to get us on the first flight out that day. We knew we wouldn’t be able to enjoy our trip since every day we stayed was one more we were missing with him.

We flew home in silence. There was nothing to say, no way to speed up our travels. While we knew reunification was the goal, we never expected it to happen while we were gone. We wanted him to end up with his family if that was the best place for him, but it didn’t lessen the sting.

We spent the remainder of that week soaking up all the precious time with him we could. We memorized his laugh, his curls, the way his face lit up at the sight of us. When his case worker came to pick him up, we loaded her car with all the clothes and books we could manage.

“Don’t you want to keep this stuff? I’m sure you guys will get another baby soon enough.”

“It’s not about getting another baby. All this stuff is his, we want him to have it.”

We buckled our boy into his car seat, kissed him goodbye one last time, and watched as they drove away. As soon as we walked through the door, we held each other and sobbed. We thought saying goodbye to this child we loved as our own would be our toughest battle.

Not even a full week after he left, my husband’s company asked if he would be interested in interviewing for a job in Dallas. While we weren’t in the most solid emotional state to make big decisions, the ache to be close to family and friends had only intensified over the last few months. Less than a month after saying yes to the interview, our house was sold and we were unpacking boxes in our new home.

The next few months consisted of a new job that required going into the office five days a week after working from home for the last year, a new house, me quitting my job, and having a baby. While these were all positive circumstances, the speed at which they happened, on top of our grief and lo, even more sleepless nights, left us reeling. We thought rapidly changing our family dynamic several times over would be our toughest battle.

In the the two and a half years since these big changes, we have settled into our lives little by little. We have looked back at our toughest battles over the years and they have served as Ebenezers for how far we’ve come. Each struggle serves as a reminder for what once felt so insurmountable but here we are, on the other side.

We don’t have a perfect marriage, but I’m proud of the people we have become through our relationship. There is no one else I’d rather have fought these battles with— we have strengthened each other and made each other better over the years.

As we walk through our current battle of secondary infertility, while it has been challenging, it has also been encouraging. We have fought for each other, not against each other, and for that, I am thankful. I’m grateful for the ways our battle scars have bonded us together. These trials have scoured us, purging and washing away our imperfections through pain, and producing something more beautiful than we ever could have imagined 14 years ago.

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Dinner

A few years ago, I made this meatballs and rice recipe a staple in our meal rotation. After cooking it so often I started to burn myself out, which was a real bummer because it was so easy. But tonight I tried this sausage and orzo dish and it reminded me of an elevated version of my meatballs and rice. The original recipe calls for chicken sausage, but I subbed venison sausage and it turned out great. This is a versatile one-pot delight you need to put on your meal plan ASAP!

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Rave

Last week a new drink stop called Swig opened near me. If the orzo and sausage dish is an elevated meatballs and rice, then Swig is an elevated Sonic. They offer tons of drink varieties, with options like Just Peachy (Coke Zero + pineapple + peach puree + fresh lime + coconut cream), Buttery Beer (root beer + butterscotch + vanilla creme), and Pretty in Pink (still/sparkling water + guava + grapefruit + fresh orange).

My current favorite is the Spring Fling (Dr. Pepper + vanilla + strawberry puree + coconut cream). With spring approaching, I foresee many visits to this new establishment in my future…

This post is part of a blog hop with Exhale—an online community of women pursuing creativity alongside motherhood, led by the writing team behind Coffee + Crumbs. Click here to view the next post in the series "Ours".