In which I discover that gender disappointment is diagnosable and has a name

When we found out Squishy (the Duke) was a boy, I was totally thrown by how gutted I was.  The (distinct) impression I was basing my life on since 2009 was one of 4 boys and 2 girls.  Still outnumbered, but still a mother of girls.  It felt like a compromise and I shook mental/spiritual hands with it and moved forward.

It meant about 4 more pregnancies than I really wanted to live through, but I learned after Sir O was born that it was possible to feel like it was worth it, once it was over.  And at the point I got pregnant with Squishy (the Duke) (pregnancy #5) I had 3 boys and 1 girl, so if I was 'expecting' one more of each, it didn't much matter which, right?  Only every time you have more of one gender/sex, your actual statistical odds of having more of that gender/sex increase.  So to find out I was having a boy then meant the chance of that last girl coming got slimmer.  So I struggled. I floundered, I surprised myself at how unnerved I was.

(I will interrupt myself here to aside that I am fully aware that being capable of birthing healthy children is a blessing.  Like really, really, really, shamefully aware.  It's a thought that beats me up about every 5 minutes of my life like a playground bully and threatens to punch me in the face every time I have a less-than-grateful feeling (over which I have really very little control.) Like so many things in life, it is possible to live with seemingly contradictory truths here.  Cognitive dissonance is my permanent roommate.  For life.  Get comfy with it. I cannot find a way around it.)

I have been saying since before this pregnancy that it REALLY needs to be my last one.  As much as I've become a pro at rolling with punches and lowering the bar, the bar is at rock bottom.  For the sake of my older children, I really need to be able to step up and parent more whole-heartedly.  Which is nigh unto impossible to do when one is mired in the pseudo-food-poisoning knockout known as the first half of my pregnancies, or the depressed and anemic quagmire known as the second half of my pregnancies.  Despite my apparent fertility, I am not a seamless baby making machine.  Every pregnancy kills me a little, in the very most literal sense. By my estimation it takes me 2 years postpartum to recover fully, which means I have recovered fully all of 1 time in the midst of 6 pregnancies.  My body and my mind are quite literally worn out, and to keep doing this would without a doubt shorten my lifespan significantly, to say nothing of the implications for my quality of life.

SO it has been, and has felt like a very real, very valid and valuable sacrifice on my behalf to try to live up to that 6 child impression from 8 years ago.  I felt like I was expressing my faith by cooperating with it when it was so hard for me.

Today ultrasound # 6 showed boy #5.  Not only that, but the ultrasound tech said, "that's a boy all day long..." just to let me know that there was not an iota of room for doubt.

Remembering how the rug had been pulled out from under me last time, I had been trying to prepare for this possibility for months.  I had never once allowed myself a verbal expression of a hope for a girl.  Despite the dozens of inquiries about my preference (because what else do you talk about with a sick pregnant lady?) I had firmly stuck to my "you can't have a baby because you want a boy or a girl, you have to just want a baby" mantra.

But the truth of the matter is that the moment Squishy was revealed to be a boy, the words that popped into my head were "well, I guess the girl will have to come next."  As hard as that day was (and it was hard, and I cried then too), there was still an open, if unlikely door.

Today, as hard as I tried to avoid repeating that struggle, the door appears to have actually closed.  And it's totally eclipsed the struggle I had last time.  This time, it actually feels like someone died.

Do you have any idea how much shame lies inherent in feeling like you've miscarried when you're actually carrying a perfectly healthy baby?  To be swallowed by these huge and awful and unexpected feelings and to be shocked and horrified by them?  The compounding, complex awful emotions that swallow you whole, and you rock violently from one to the other?

So today has been a relentless ride on waves and undertows of sorrow.

That daughter, that I hoped would give me the peace of mind that my journey through rough pregnancies was an acceptable and complete offering to God, is gone.  She doesn't exist.

That impression of my completed family, on which I based my willingness to go through the most excruciating months (accumulating to years) of my life, is shattered, is false.

My faith in God is stout enough that I'm not totally thrown overboard, but I'm shaken.  This is the 3rd such experience in 4 years that has left me totally upended regarding my relationship to and interpretation of divine influence in my life.  Today I totally get the idolic interpretations of deity as capricious characters willing to play cruel games with men and women's lives.  (Looking at you, Aries) In the thick of it, as things are happening that just can't be made to not hurt, it's the only easy way to make sense of the pain.  God has betrayed me, made a fool of me, let me make a fool of myself.  I know all those feelings will sort out over time, and that it's even possible that I'll arrive at a place where having only one daughter will make sense to me.  You know, before I die.  But today I'm not banking on it.

So today, as I quickly realized that Mr Renn is good for many things, but he's not much good for emotions so complicated that you can't even talk about them out loud because you cry so hard, I found through the wonder of the internet, that I am not the first person to ride in this horrid boat.  It's so common that it has a name and is considered a consistent and relatively common factor in postpartum and antenatal depression.  Gender disappointment is common enough to be shortened to an acronym: GD.

Unfortunately for me, the majority of discussions around it revolve around parents of only a single gender (i.e. mothers of all boys) and don't address the huge heaviness I feel about my failure to give Bunny a sister.

I know it was pinning all my hopes on the agency of others, but I had hoped to give all of my children, through siblings close enough in age, a support system of people who'd be going through similar stages of life through adolescence, adulthood, and hopefully to sustain them once I'm gone someday.  While Bunny can still have a great relationship with her brothers, they will experience life and the world differently than she will.  While I have hope that the world will continue to treat women better in her lifetime, there will be a difference.  She may have stellar relationships with sisters-in-law someday, but she may not.  She will not have a sister who will have shared the quirky family background and know her from the ground up.  It's something I would have given blood and guts to have provided for her.  And I tried.  But it's not happening.  It's a huge, heavy thing to grieve.  She may be fine, this may not be something that even matters to her.  But I've been lonely for a sister my entire life.  ( I got a sister when I was 13, we lived in the same household less than 5 years, and we've never yet been in similar stages of life, so we'll see if we get closer as we age).  Having someone to reach out to who was already permanently invested in me would have made a world of difference in my life thus far, and I'm not charismatic enough to have filled that void with friends or mentors. So this is a grief I feel for Bunny's future that is far heavier than my own personal disappointment in not getting to have a group of girls to do girly things with.  (Though that's real too.)

So yes, there's this nonexistent girl who's lived in my head for 8 years, who was going to signify so many things for me.  My girls were going to take care of each other.  My family was going to feel peacefully complete.  I was going to get to have "girls" and amidst the ferality of our wild boy house, we were going to put on plays and have high tea and wear aprons and watch foreign films .  Poof.  Gone.

So yeah, nobody died, but it's a grief like someone did.

It's not like there's nothing to salvage here.  I have to start the really painful process of peeling off charred skin and evaluating the carnage beneath to evaluate what can be saved.  What's actually not necessarily incompatible with my real life?  Where can I graft?

I tried to look up ways to enjoy being a mother of boys, and I didn't get the kind of answers I was hoping for.  The advice this kind of search gets you is to find the beauty in their wild, forgiving, fiercely alive ways.  And I've been playing that game for years now.  I've got to figure out which of my "girls" daydreams can be transplanted into my real life where there's a "strong-willed girl surrounded by a grundle of boys with wildly different temperaments".  There can still be baking, and if I can get my health and stamina under me, there could still be plays (probably with more gore), and I can share Hedgehog in the Fog with all of them.  It will just take more work than I was planning on.  And I will have to learn to go with the flow of their personalities and interests, which is a fact of parenting regardless of boys or girls.

I have never properly bonded with any of my babies before birth, and sometimes even then it's taken a day or two.  The ultrasound has always helped though, to make them seem more human to me.  I was alarmed when that didn't happen today.  This boy baby didn't feel any more a person for having seen him and his parts move.  I'm attributing that to the ultrasound tech showing and announcing his boy-ness before even sharing his profile with me.  I had to put up my "I'm totally cool with this" guard right off the bat, which stifled my vulnerability and bonding mojo.




The other clincher is the weird, societal anathema of being pestered to make a public announcement of some sort of "gender reveal."  This would have been easy if it'd been a girl.  Tada!  Our family is complete and makes sense and everyone is excited and happy and aren't we cute?  Pop a confetti-filled balloon and call it a day.

But this is my real life and nothing in my real life lends itself to being cute or making sense.

So instead I have confused children who thankfully didn't take it too hard, but aren't the least bit excited, and a self/pregnant lady whose hormones aren't helping her out as she hasn't been able to talk without weeping bitterly for 16 hours now.  And Mr Renn, trying to manage us all and trying to minimize my ocean of emotions into a single palatable sentence so he doesn't have to think about it too long, and wishing to God that his wife could just function again because he's so tired of living that second shift that every working mother knows but never gets to chuck.   We are not the stuff of viral instagram feeds.

And here I am (it's 3 am now), sitting forlorn at the bottom of the barrel, hoping that when the sun comes up tomorrow I am able to function better than today (despite not sleeping) and that I can find some bootstraps.

I am absolutely certain that I will get over this, but I'm also certain that it will take me some time.  This is why we did this today.  I knew that I would need time to adjust, and the kids would need time to adjust and that we needed to get that adjusting out of the way before there was an actual baby in our faces.  This because I locked myself in the bathroom and cried for hours when my 3rd brother in a row was born (when I was 8) and I didn't want my kids having that experience on what I hope is a very happy day for our family.

Anyway, where is the value in writing this all down and posting it in a public-ish place?  Well #1: I need to be work things out in my own head and #2: It would have been valuable for me to find a post like this today.  I found a few that helped a bit, but felt like most of what I found excluded the possibility of a mother who already had children of each sex/gender experiencing this intense whiplashing ride. And most people who mentioned religion/God at all seemed oblivious to the possibility of feeling a little abandoned by/peeved at Him.

Thankfully my best preparation for today was reading (and almost finishing) ReReading Job years ago, wherein I discovered that A) extolling the patience of Job totally misses the point and that B) God would rather have my honest messy struggle than my pious martyrdom.  So I'm comfortable talking to God about how I honestly feel today.  I have trust that those feelings aren't permanent.  I feel comfortable being honest that I felt them.  My identity isn't every emotion I experience.  I can recognize them, try to honor and learn from them, and then let them go.

I am not a horrible person or a bad mother because I am dealing with grief today.  I have lots to be thankful for and I know it and I know that will be the long shot take away from this stage in my life.  But at this apogee, we have grief to deal with and expectations to adjust and that takes time and work.  We will do the work and the time will pass and I will outlast pregnancy and life will take on color and buoyancy again.  I will adore my untamed children and I will find renewed energy for teaching them how to stay fully alive in a world that expects manners and conformity.  I will feed and teach and cloth them and read to them and pray for them.

And God will laugh, as He does.

retching rumination from the tired lady in the corner

(There are photos and happy thoughts at the bottom of this post.... if you need those and not my self-assessing teleology)

My go-to phrase this summer has been "holy smack" - which is code for "I keep discovering new levels of physical overwhelm."  There is a lot going on, most of it less than thrilling, and some of it downright awful.  Plus not-writing is not good for my mental health.  (Kind of like how not-sleeping isn't working out for my mental health either.)

It's hard to write though when I'm feeling so negative.  I get in a place mentally where everything that actually expresses my experienced reality sounds whiney, but if I try to write more positively it lacks any semblance of authenticity.  Living with imperfect mental health is such fun.

It's summer break, I have all 5 (5!) of my kids home all day, in a house full of unfinished projects and homeless things waiting for their homes to be built.  I cannot even begin to stay abreast of the clutter, I am swimming and drowning in clutter in that slow-mo dream chase scene sense. It makes me grumpy.

Between my parents trying to get their house ready to sell (and my dad having already moved ahead to Chicago, and that's it own whole story but it's not my story) and my sister about to get married - lots of extended family upheaval.  Thankfully nothing tragic, but just disruptive (to our efforts to make headway in the chaos at home... every weekend is spoken for the rest of summer.)

You know what is my pet-peeviest peeve?  The thing that gets under my skin and makes me absolutely nuts?  Things that go missing inexplicably.  So currently that's my prescription sunglasses, though the list has been much longer at previous points this week.  The craziest stuff sprouts legs and walks away at my house and it makes me bonkers. My children embrace irrational behavior with wild abandon.  There's a constant soundtrack looping in my head asking "why? why? why? why? why?"

With all of that on my perma-front-burner, I have to manage my emotional energy pretty carefully. Which pretty much means that Facebook is always a bad idea.  I have to be hopeful that true digital natives will be smarter about how they engage in rhetoric on social media than my generation is.  I know it's human nature to seek echo chambers and content that reinforces existing biases, but hopefully kids will eventually figure out that the things they put out on the interwebs are more like giving a speech at graduation than they are like speaking to a room of like-minded friends.  But really, the safest bet is never to assume anyone you speak to is 'like-minded,' because at some point in your opinions or experience, you're going to differ.  So, the rule-of-thumb 'seek first to understand, then to be understood' - it's sound and seldom minded. Let's just collectively recommit to doing better, ok?
(I guess I can promote that behavior because I'm not afraid of being wrong, as many are.  I do still have the socially conditioned irrational fear of being rejected though, so I'm sympathetic to all socially conditioned irrational fears.  I get how hard it is to be perfectly logical, and get to practice being sympathetic to intense irrationality at least 12 hours a day.)

Mostly though, at this point I would just really like to devote an hour or two each day to doing things that make life more pleasant or joyful for myself, and being the kind of introverted, aesthetically sensitive nerd that I am, that would probably look something like fixing myself a cup of tea and perusing a gardening catalogue IN A CLEAN, WELL-LIT ROOM. BEFORE MIDNIGHT. WITHOUT SPENDING 2 HOURS CLEANING IT FIRST. Maybe while listening to some moody Billie Holiday.

Mostly I'm just saying that Virginia Wolf was on to something.

There are lots of funny moments in this phase of my life, and I suppose I will feel a bit lonely when things slow down someday. But I will also, I hope, be sleeping more regularly by then which means I will be infinitely better equipped to handle that sentimentality than I am to handle my current intensity. It's just... really intense. Constantly having short people hanging from my body.....

In my efforts to live vertically by my bootstraps, I turn in a lot of spare moments to beautiful or exceptional stimuli (well, that and emotional compulsive eating...)  A lot of things that are beautiful feel kind of flimsy or cloyingly indulgent next to my reality, and unfortunately all the best beautiful things are openly wrestling with the complexity of humanity, which I'm also not well-equipped to deal with in my state of running on vapors.  I vacillate between the two impulses and can't spend much time with either one before I start to get emotionally seasick.

So yes, the takeaway is that I'm perpetually just barely hanging in there... yet again.  The perpetual part being what makes it exceptional.  I wish I had the emotional turgor to be more springy, optimistic, ambitious; to just be a bigger personality than I am.  Bigger than my kids - that I could influence their choices and behavior without having to do behavioral gymnastics (which are exhausting) to try to convince them that what I want/need them to do was their idea in the first place. I need charisma and I could not be further from charismatic right now.  I'm constantly leaning into my most insecure mind, trying to tip it toward more rational and level-headed thoughts and away from a pessimism and insecurity so deep and wide that I fear it would take me years and miles to dig myself out if I let my guard down. Maybe half of that phenomenon is mental health, and the other half is just what all women deal with in a culture that is emotionally brutal towards women and caretakers.

But hey - there is a fair amount of delight thrown in this mix. There's Bunny's Margot Tenenbaum face at her first ballet recital (dress rehearsal).

(Which, she surprised me and was delightful and obedient for her actual performance.  With a low-grade fever no less.)

There's all my kids being madly in love with swimming lessons, and the ease with which I can hand them over to their teachers and then sit in the shade with the baby for half an hour.

There's the odd set of circumstances that had us dog-sitting for two weeks, and my kids finally learning how to fall in love with a dog.  (Mr Renn remains unconverted, feel free to proselytize)

The Captain's sentiments about my parents' impending move: 

And Sir O, that tricky devil, managing to nearly never be in the photos I manage to take. He's about to turn 10 folks. (To which I say to myself: "Holy Smack" yet again.) You know that line in Hamilton, "Hamilton is a host unto himself, as long as he can hold a pen he's a threat." 

Sir O doesn't need a pen. 

stick a fork in me

More and always more of hanging in there, but only just.  Pretty much my status quo.  The confounded move got me behind on my thesis prospectus deadlines, and my stress levels have been high enough to make my behavior ugly and my memory poor.

In my brain, I've given myself this halfway-imaginary deadline.  I just have to make it through my comprehensive exams in December, and then I will do a giant New-Years priority shuffle and try to start thinking more than a week ahead.  Right now I can only think from one assignment/test/paper to the next.  I've gotten infinitely better over the last year at learning how to not try to do homework all day long with kids underfoot, and to just be as present with them as I can be while double-timing the housework so that my evenings are free.  Then I head to class or the library, or lock myself in my room while little fingers slip under the door and plead with me to read them a bedtime story. I am so popular....

Our snug Bantam Hill is coming along, we are doing lots of settling - both kinds.  I can't make paint decisions while I'm working on my thesis, (brain..can't) so the mid- 90's color scheme and cows are staying for a while.  The crumbly rock facade on the fireplace, the tired carpet, all of it is just going to sit tight for a bit.  We have a lot of work to do on the house that is neither fun nor glamorous before any designing can begin in earnest.  The only decent-sized tree on the property (cottonwood) is coming down tomorrow (because... cottonwood), and if we want to finish the basement we need to first dig a french drain along the back of the house (which... we are scratching our heads over why that wasn't done when the house was built).  Mr Renn has to finish building shelves in our storage room so we can clear boxes and bins out of our garage... that kind of thing.

But hey - I think we did a decent job at minimizing the period of super-tumult involved in the move.  We transitioned from a quasi-normal to a quasi-normal pretty quickly.  The kids are all still acting out (coloring on walls and furniture, regression with potty training), but I have to (need to) believe we did something right.  Kind of like how I have to believe that life will somehow feel more manageable after my comps.  It's the "don't tell me if I'm wrong" kind of floundering belief.

So... the moral of the story: don't move while in the middle of grad school, if it can be helped.  Which, why would any sane person even need that advice?  Regardless, soldiering on....

Remarrying at 85

I completed this project for my most recent production course, and also because I wanted to.  I struggled unreasonably with technical production issues (i.e., not a single shot is 100% in focus, le sigh), but I'm still pretty happy with how the storytelling came together, and that part was incredibly tricky and time-consuming to do.  So, here's one of the more anomalous parts of my summer:




Because of her rather agoraphobic nature, my Grandma has never figured very prominently in my own life, but I've always known that she hadn't always been that way, and I've always felt an inordinate fondness for the fuller, larger being I had only heard stories about.  Seeing her change so much from the person she's been for the entirety of my own life has been surreal for me.  But happy surreal.  I'll take it.

Because I couldn't find a way to include enough detail of the chronology without doubling the length of the film: My grandfather was a fighter pilot in the Vietnam War, was shot down and taken prisoner in 1967, and was released in 1973.  For at least 2 years of that time he was MIA.  That experience seems to have catalyzed a lot of the problems, anxieties, depressions, and events that followed. If there are any other unclear details, I'm happy to iron them out.

Surviving Summer

We are on our toes around here.  Being accountable for 4 restless short people all the day long, with class 4 nights a week, swimming lessons 4 mornings a week, and plenty of homework thrown in, it's not dull.



It is, however, exhausting, and as my first term of the summer wraps up I find myself alarmingly sleep-deprived. All told I'm functioning on about 8% most days, and it shows.



So, my house is a constant turnstile of unacceptable messes, I get those crazy-eyes when any of my kids start to whine. (Especially our Gentleman.  What is it with 3-year-olds and the inability to speak in a non-whiney voice?)  And I find I am bouncing around putting out fires, and unable to do much prophylactically. Nobody has clean underwear?  I guess I'll do laundry today.  We're completely out of peanut butter?  Someone will make a grocery run.  All the kids are coated in mud and grass clippings?  Time for a bath.  Someone dumped salt on the carpet?  Today is the day I vacuum.



Project due in two days?  I guess I will edit instead of sleep until then.

You know the drill.


So, while I'm missing the break in my stewardship over some of my more phenomenally creative mess-makers, I'm staying too busy to think about it much.  I'm determined to not have them remember this as  the summer mom was in school so we didn't do anything.  So we make it to the library every week and I fill up Fridays (when there is no school and no swimming lessons) with things that will hopefully become memories.



And I forgive myself for all the failing parts, because dwelling on them doesn't help.

And that's how summer is going so far.

Double Posting from my school blog - Documentary Observation Exercise.

(Because this almost served as a look at a day in my life - minus most of the housework and homework I do)



8am - this is my weekday ritual of wrestling my 7-year-old out of bed and into his clothes.  This child needs something like 13 hours of sleep to function well, so morning always comes too soon. His reticence and petulance are most evident at this time of day. Check out that body language. It's also the time of day when I rediscover, over and over again, how long and lithe this body has become that I once built inside of my body.



9:30am - my younger two boys have been told that they cannot play video games unless they can agree on what to play in advance.  That proved too difficult, so they resorted to pretending the laundry baskets are rocket ships again.  (Which may have been my plan all along.) My 3-year-old is potty training, so he only wears pants when he leaves the house. His little legs have lost most of their baby fat, but he's still got it in his cheeks.  And he still fits in a laundry basket.



We call her Bunny, and despite being only 18-months-old, she has developed a radar for portable electronic devices.  And she gets laser-beam-intent on figuring out how to navigate them.  While sitting on the kitchen floor.  Such a digital native. Also - this captures the conundrum of her hair really well.  She won't hold still enough to do a real braid, so we go through a dozen disposable hair elastics every day, and it takes up to 20 minutes to wrestle them all into her hair.



Dishes - one of the tasks I tackle multiple, multiple times every day.  Because I didn't want to try to find beauty in cleaning my boys' bathroom.  Poetry in the Prosaic. Emily in the reflection.



I did a lot of gardening in the late morning, mostly preparing beds and soil for planting that should have happened last week.  But the light outside was too harsh for a good photo.  So right as I was finishing I dropped my gloves and trowel on the rug in my garage and grabbed the camera.  I finally managed a photo with enough depth of field to have something in focus. I am a visual texture junkie, and so these lambskin gloves make me happy to look at.



My 7-year-old came home from school with his April writing journal.  This is an entry about how he was kind when he let his younger brothers play with his plush snakes while he was at school, (he would never think to share when it was inconvenient for him - the turkey) but I love it because it captures a lot of things about our mornings.  My son has drawn himself with his red and blue star backpack and his scooter, and his friend that comes and waits in our front room every morning while my son drags his feet brushing his teeth and getting his jacket on is standing outside the front door.  He even drew his 5-year-old brother wearing his favorite color, green.



Bob left this behind after class.  Everybody stayed a few moments after the film ended to process and decompress, and I think this poor stem is a pretty apt metaphor for how emotionally barren we all felt.




The carpet and rug at the top of the East Stairs of the D-Wing of the HFAC.  Mostly because I love all the texture going on there.  The patterns in both carpets, and the difference in frieze between the two fibers, and that nubby little strip of rubber between them.



As soon as I got home from class, this girl was ready for bed.  She is a thumb-sucker of the first order.  She also has a blankie that she has attached herself to. (See the fabric between her fist and her neck? It's also under her pointer finger as she manages to simultaneously suck that thumb and rub her sweet spot on the blanket)  I also kind of love that shine in her hair, because thank-heaven my babysitter bathed everyone and got them into pajamas for me.  And the way her hair falls in her eyes is maddening in real life, but adds a lot of interest to this photo. Also - taking this photo while holding her was a trick.



My 5-year-old, and his joy-face, upside down, hair still wet from his bath. Chewing on his shirt, and his scar on his cheek from the stitches he had to get after splitting his face open in preschool a while back.  All reminders of his apraxia. I don't see the scar when I look at him anymore, but I see it when I'm looking at photos. And yes - those are Boba Fett pajamas, and they are compounding his joy.



While my boys were doing gymnastics in the living room, I looked out the front window and noticed that the setting sun was backlighting these pansies so they sort of glowed.  I had to set the camera on the ground, back it up for focus and zoom in to get a shot, but I think it captures some of the luminescence that was happening.




And while I was in the front yard, I also got a shot of my tree peonies, because they are gorgeous, but they last about 3 days. Fleeting, fleeting ruffley things, in the most electric shade of pink.

The horror of almost forgetting to document something as important as our first broken bone.

You guys (all two of you who still read this).  I am having over-sized mom guilt about how everything is going undocumented these days.  At least over here, in a searchable-long-after-the-fact way.  I know there are people who "say" they are posting things to platforms like Facebook so that they can "reference it later," but in my experience, finding anything over three weeks old on Facebook is an exercise in frustration.



And, on that note, I'm finally resolving to begin the painfully expensive process of printing off photobooks of all these thousands of family photos that only exist in pixel form.  Slow and steady, and no scrapbooking.

But sadly, really, what I've failed at most is documenting the emergence of Bunny's personality and all the complications involved in that.  Because she is complicated.  (Duh, she's a girl, I know.) But as of late her primary characteristic is a strong blend of delight (everything is so amusing!) and strong-will-ed-ness.  It is possible, I grant you, that she is learning to act as spoiled as she is.  Sometimes.  The girl's just got so many fanboys who say "how high?" when she says "jump."

So - an obstinate streak.  Currently streaking. What do you do with that in an 18 month old?

Which is relevant because her obstinacy is largely what landed her with a broken leg a month ago.  She had sneaked into the laundry room (with its cement floor) and when Mr Renn was picking her up to remove her, she squirmed and arched in just such an unanticipated way as to cause Mr Renn to lose his hold on her and she fell. Less than 2 feet, but on a cement floor, landing in just the wrong way, and we had the minor-est of fracture types on our hands (or legs).



Four weeks and several thousand dollars later, it's quick becoming a distant memory.  But for a while I dealt with being kicked by a cast (ouch) on a regular basis and hearing the peg-legged sound of Bunny's funny little casted gait.


She adjusted to the cast in a matter of minutes and it didn't seem to slow her down one iota.  She's sort of full-speed ahead every waking moment these days, and hasn't the time to give consideration to inconveniences like broken bones.



Her comprehensible vocabulary is still very limited, but her communication skills are grand.  She signs "more" dolefully, asks for "mamamamama" over and over and over again whenever she wants anything.  Says "Daddy" with joy when Mr Renn comes home, and says "Ousch"while pointing with gusto which means "Outside" about 6,000 times every day.  Man, I wish she didn't have such a magnetic relationship with the middle of the road.  Or that I had a fence.  When she is allowed outside she has to be watched like a hawk, which is rather incompatible with my lengthy to-do lists.  We manage every day for at least a short spell, but the girl wants to live out there. Preferably smack-dab in the middle of our street.



So - first broken bone of my parenting career is under my belt.  For what it was (expensive) it was relatively un-traumatic.  No limbs dangling at contorted angles, no blood, no blood curdling screams.  Just lots of wimpering, refusal to put weight on it, and a long afternoon and evening of hospital hopping. The cast itself was a dry-cast, so we could bathe her normally, and it only restricted her ankle mobility, so she was able to walk almost normally. Quite low-maintenance for what it was.  After they removed the cast the most traumatic part of the whole thing seemed to be the surge of itchiness she suddenly experienced.  Before we could intervene she had clawed herself so badly her leg looked like it'd been mauled by a cat.  But a week later it is almost completely healed.

And frankly, we have our hands full preventing her next broken bone.  This age is so incredibly fun, and yet so much work!

Spring Break - Grad School edition

This week, I'm honing my mettle.



I'm also patting myself on the back the tiniest wee bit.  Because if I'd been ask to live this week a year ago I would have found it utterly unbearable.  But now, I'm mostly managing to roll with it.

The kids are out of school all week, which means there is no break whatsoever from the entropy of Sir O.  My home will constantly be falling apart all around me.  On top of which it is my last full week of class for the semester and I have a major paper due Friday, and finals and another giant paper due next week.

Plus the regular rigamarole of reading lots of things that require every iota of available brainpower to make sense of.

And a baby with a broken leg.  And a penchant for re-injuring it.

And a 3 year old who's potty-training in earnest (which means he's naked most of the time).

It's just really a lot.  A full plate.  A fairly large amount of stress.  Not earth-shattering stress, but mess-up-your-biological-rhythms stress.

And while it's certainly not pretty and never what I'd call "ideal," I'm essentially keeping myself held together.

This morning, to get out of the house, and to keep Sir O contained in a seat-belt-sized space, I packed all the kids out to go see the progress on the new Provo Temple.  The angel was placed on top a few days ago, and I thought it might be a nice outing.  Free and close and short. Only the Gentleman seemed to agree with me though, nobody else wanted to get out of the car.  This is why God gave me this child.



So, two days in and my head is still above water.  I am growing up, aren't I?

stretch marks

Why yes, I did just accidentally go a month without blogging one word.
It's lunacy - my life.
But it's nice to be able to say I haven't blogged for a month because I've been too busy doing things.  In the past when I've gone a month or two with mostly radio silence it's been because I've been essentially depressed and overcome with unhealthy apathy.
So sure, the effect of my absence is the same either way, but I prefer a more buoyant excuse.



The month of November ... the blur... I have no temporal details for you just now.

But things floating to the top of my brain include:

We are becoming genuinely concerned about Sir O's intense anti-social habits.  It is becoming apparent that the kid sets himself up to get picked on; he makes enemies easily.  He's intensely defensive and likes to lord over people when he can get away with it.  He also goes to ridiculous legths to avoid dealing with new people or new experiences.  Altogether not a super-loveable pile of characteristics.  Lucky for him we love him anyway, but I can't take away the social awkwardness he faces.

Conversely, my 3 other kids make friends wherever they go.  The Captain, despite his physical awkwardness, is often the center of socialness because he's so dang delightful.  And Bunny flirts with most strangers (though only from the safety of her parent's arms.)

Bunny also plays with her tongue all day long.  And on her it's darling.  But her brothers have started copying her, and a 3,5,or 7 year old blowing excessive raspberries at you is not cute.  It's just rude.

Mr Renn has been picking up a lot of slack for me this holiday season.  He's taken ownership of all of our holiday baking, gingerbread building, neighborhood gifts, and contributions to family parties.  In other words, he is a lifesaver.

I've realized that despite my proclivity for it, I have a rather pathetic collection of holiday decorations (for every/any holiday).  I may never arrive at that place where I feel I can give myself permission to spend time or money toward that end.  Over the years thousands of items have been put in carts, only to be removed before purchase.

Mr Renn claims we can start looking into buying a house of our own in earnest come February.  You cannot grasp the weight of this promise - but I'm posting it here to hold him accountable.  10 years of "I don't want to bother with that until it's our own house/I don't want to have to move that" have taken a toll.

Sir O has developed an intensely irritating habit of discarding and losing expensive articles of clothing.  He never loses the cheap stuff, only the newer and most expensive things.  If I had a dollar for every time that kid has lost or destroyed an article of clothing the first time he wore it - I'd have at least $50.

My first grad school finals are December 17th, and I am a mess until then.

I am not getting nearly enough sleep to function properly.  Hence my sluggish responses and reflexes.  And yes - this blatantly affects my performance in class. Vicious cycle.

Our gentleman began potty training and then quickly lost interest.  Time for plan D.

Bunny is standing often, and her brothers are the best cheering section a girl could ask for.  But when they cheer too loudly she realizes she's standing and quickly gets herself back down.  She's only taken 1 step, and she's still mad at me for tricking her into that one.

She's also terribly fond of playing peekaboo, and while her favorite is to hide in the curtains, she'll also hide her eyes with the backs of her hands, and make a squished up face that is beyond charming.

She still loves her dad more than anything or anyone in all the world.

I bought Sir O some sketchbooks, and I love what he comes up with.  Today in church we got 5 pages of clone trooper helmets.  We've also gotten a lot of dinosaurs, volcanoes, trucks, tall buildings, and mountainsides (with either a U or a Y emblazoned on them).

Our Gentleman's tongue thrust shows no sign of letting up.  I watch him talk and all I see is his tongue hanging out.  Speech therapy forever more, because that's how we love to spend all that extra time of ours....

Our Christmas cards are running late this year.  Hopefully they will arrive this week and we can create a super-sonic assembly line to get them back out in the mail without eating up too much study time.

Because yes, finals at Christmas time is utterly brutal for moms who are students.  I cannot speak for moms who are teachers or professors, but in a great many households Christmas is a production put on by mom behind the scenes.  When mom's time, focus, and energy is at a crazy premium, things get hairy.  Let's just say we're going to be flexible with celebrating St. Nicholas day this year.  Like - almost a week late flexible.  Same goes for St. Lucia.  I am giving myself a year off, and hopefully next year Bunny will be old enough to be the center of that celebration.

I only bought 2 new Christmas albums this year.  So far that's a record low.  But when you have over 1200 Christmas songs on your playlist, it becomes increasingly difficult to justify new additions.  Still really loving Joshua James, Sleeping At Last, Sufjan Stevens and Bebo Norman.

So, there's some catchup of the random-crap variety.  I hope I don't prove this spotty for the entirety of grad school, I still want to document life outside of film responses.  But you know, I'm dropping balls all over this place.  I'll try not to leave this one lolling on the floor for too long at a time.

Doggie Pile on me

This summer.  Oh, my.

I have never in my life been so consistently overwhelmed.  All my kids all the time with so very few experiences that could be categorized as "breaks."  Let's just say that at this moment 4 kids feels like a larger amount than it sounds like.  I need 3 of me even more than usual.  I could keep one of me more than busy just keeping tabs on the kids.  Another one could clean and clean and clean, (because kids are gross) and maybe cook, and the third one can think more than 10 minutes ahead and plan and record and think clearly and be gracious and funny and get enough sleep.

But despite the bulldozer aspect of the majority of my summer, there have been some shiny moments.



The boys all had a few days of heaven during our bi-annual family reunion in Hanna.  (Bunny however had a cold, so neither she nor I got any sleep and the two of us were grumpy the whole time).



I'm pretty sure I've aged 2 or 3 years this summer from sheer sleep deprivation.  My kids appear to be on a rotating schedule for illness and night terrors and bed-wetting.  It is always somebody's turn.  Last night the Captain came knocking at my door at 1 am, complaining that he was tired.  I do not joke, my sleep losses are not funny to me at this point.

Bunny has nearly exploded with teeth in the past few weeks.  She has also become fully mobile.  She's a cute, slobbery, wiggly mess and nothing is safe with her around.   Everybody who sees me in action says my hands are full, and it seems to become more true every passing day.



Somehow though, in the midst of sheer exhaustion, I can see how I would miss all this craziness some day.  There is a lot of vibrance in the mess.  There is always something to do.  There is something endearing about all this neediness from all these oblivious short people.  They are physically exhausting but they are also transparent.  The stakes are still low.  The drama is still over snacks and losing a game and not wanting to wear pants.  They will all still hold my hand and sit on my lap when they are pouty.  They will grow up, they will need less from me for their health and well-being.  The things they'll need from me will get infinitely more spindly to navigate.  It will get harder to tell how I'm doing and where I'm failing.  So this straightforward exhausting bit will look pretty sweet in retrospect.

Somehow I've just got to wrestle my way through the remaining two weeks of summer vacation.  Sir O starts back and then (gulp) I start back a couple of weeks later.  Things are destined to get more intense, and not less.  But there is hope that with the older boys in school on a regular basis I will occasionally find a moment to come to the surface for air before diving back in.  It's truly amazing what a difference realistic expectations make when one is attempting ambitious lunacy.  I can see how wild it's going to be and how intensely tightly I'll have to budget my time.  I can also see how relatively short of a time the whole endeavor will be.  I suppose it's a sign of some sort of old age when I find myself saying "I can do anything for only 2 years...."

Adventures in none of my business

The last weekend in June we visited Mr Renn's grandparents in Flaming Gorge.  At the end of the 3 going on 4 hour drive, we turned onto the dirt road subdivision and pulled up.  Renn saw the startlingly bereft state of the lawn and knew right away things were not going well.  His grandparents have owned the property for his entire life, and lived there for most of that time.  The yard was his grandpa's domain and in a tinkering fashion his pride and joy.  It was apparent he hadn't been able to devote one iota of himself to it in quite some time. The typically tidy lawn was nearly entirely dead, with weeds growing a foot or more high in the areas they'd managed enough water to take hold.  It was a rather ominous introduction to our weekend.



Renn's Grandpa had hardly left the house at all in quite a few months.  From what we can conjecture, he'd probably had a heart attack the weekend before we visited, and had another one two nights after we left.  He's been in a state of congestive heart failure for as long as I've known him, and has survived more heart attacks than I can shake a stick at. But he looked so much more consumed by it all than he had last year.  He was not sleeping at all and was requiring huge quantities of nitroglycerin to keep his blood vessels dilated enough to make the pain he was in bearable.  We didn't quite know any of this heading into the weekend. So instead of visiting the Dam or seeing sights, we ran errands to the pharmacy and picked up a new recliner for Renn's grandparents.  They live well over an hour from the nearest city. I think Renn's sweet grandmother has been pushing her self-sufficiency to its limit, trying to be the full-time always available nurse when her health isn't flawless either.



So there I stood, and as the daughter of a hospice guru, I felt like all of this pain and muddling through was not actually necessary.  I gather that several other people had tried to suggest hospice but had met a lot of stigma-based resistance.  I plowed right on by that and in one of the bossiest streaks of my life I researched available hospices (not many for such a remote location, but some!) chose one with Mr Renn and made him call them immediately.  I pushed a lot of people pretty far outside of their comfort zones to try to get him admitted as soon as possible, and when we left for home on Sunday afternoon I was under the impression that the hospice would be contacting them the next morning and everything would be appropriately expedited.



I was constantly bugging Mr Renn on Monday to see if he'd heard any updates, and finally made him call his grandmother that evening.  My heart dropped to realize they'd missed the call and nothing had proceeded that day.  Feeling mightily compelled I called the hospice myself that night and spent 45 minutes talking with the director about the particulars of their situation.  I finally felt like things were likely to be expedited and was able to sleep that night.

Unfortunately, that night was when the second heart attack hit, and despite his determination to never stay in a hospital again, pain rued the day and I woke up to find that Renn's grandparents were in the hospital in Vernal.  I spent the morning making another series of phone calls to make sure that the hospice and the hospital could work together to get things squared away.  It's all been very tricky for me, I feel responsible for this ball I tried to get rolling, but I also feel like it's none of my business since I am "just" the wife of a grandson.  There are lots (lots!) of people who are better suited to taking ownership of this.  It's just that I was there at the moment and did what I felt compelled to do, and feel the need to see it through.

The entire ordeal did consume most of my emotional energy this past week, and every day I've been constantly asking Mr Renn if he's gotten any more updates.  His nonchalance is never so irritating as when I am more anxious than him about something he ought to be more anxious than me about.  But since nonchalance is one of his crowning characteristics and anxiety is one of mine, it's an inevitable irritation.

I'm hoping with baited breath that hospice can be the miracle for them that I've heard so many stories of it being for other people.  That Mr Renn's grandpa can be made comfortable and that his grandma's burden can be lightened.  If not I'll feel personally responsible for the failure, despite my non-culpability.  I don't know when I've been so anxious for positive feedback about someone else's performance.

An interesting week, all told.  I'm hoping for less drama in the next one.
Renn thinks I'm crazy is always right when he thinks that, isn't he?

as for my passive aggressive posting habits

I have a very good reason for disappearing lately.  I have been uncomfortably busy trying to pull off large and intimidating things.  If things go well, which they very well might, I'll be able to let you in on it soon.

But while I've been even more on my toes than usual, life has kept on. And regretfully life has not included pulling out the "real" camera.  Every one of these is an instagram.  Sigh, and soldier on.

Bunny continues to catch my heart in my chest several times every day.  Almost 5 months old and I'm still pinching myself every single day that I have a daughter and that she is a delight.









The boys, collectively, have their own brand of delight.  It's a bit harder for me to stay on board with in a moment-to-moment way, but they still regularly make me happy with their particular quirks.







And, in an effort to make his mother feel old, Sir O has been losing teeth about as rampantly as I've been losing my post-partum hair.



As a sort of parenting bonus - Sir O has a mortal fear of the tooth fairy.  So she doesn't visit at our house.  We just ceremoniously pack teeth up in a pouch I bought on etsy, and call it good.

In other news - my settee made the rounds and came back to me - not as I'd envisioned (or instructed), but still a nice little addition to the front room. There is apparently a quota of irony I must meet regarding my expectations every month or so.  This catches me up.



My baby sister brought the world to tears with her thoughtful portrayal of Mary, as the lead in A Family Portrait, a suppositional story about the family of Christ.  I am so proud of this girl.

And, my little brother got married this past weekend.  I shopped the cooler and pulled together a bouquet for them the day before.  Koch roses, spray roses, waxflower, and stock, with salal and some myrtle. After a really brutal year, we are all rooting for him to have some happy days ahead.





That accounts for some of what we've been up to.  Just add cleaning the bathroom, preparing meals nobody wants to eat, doing laundry and cleaning the kitchen floor an infinite number of times (each) and you've got a pretty good picture of my present tense.