It has been a year since we landed back in the States.
It has been a heck of a year.
I can remember at our debriefing last June thinking the same thing. Thinking that while cultural transition would clearly be challenging, I expected going back “home” to eventually be easier than a year of rural Kenya.
I was wrong.
This past year was stressful.
We have had two funerals to attend. One death that came like a thief in the night, sudden, abrupt, shattering. A second death that was at first mercifully delayed and in the end long, painful, heart wrenching and at the end we were spent, exhausted and just so ready to feel something other than heartache and ready to be out of the funeral receiving line spotlight.
We have quit jobs, applied for jobs, graduated from jobs, waited on jobs, hoped for jobs, been so grateful for jobs and in general fretted about jobs. Jobs that were confusing, American, built on systems we felt like we should understand but for the life of us don’t…
We started a PhD, finished a master’s and a fellowship. We written a half dozen papers between us which have been rejected, accepted, submitted, revised and rewritten more times than we care to remember.
We have presented everything from photographs to stories to posters, to projects to issues to classes. We feel inadequate because while we now have the stump speech, we don’t have the answers, only more questions.
We quit church for six months. Well sort of. It is complicated. There were a lot of on call weekends and a lot of sudden trips to NC because of funerals or near funerals that basically kept us in a holding pattern far longer than we intended. Yet those six months let us come to grips with the fact that you can grow out of a church. You can love people and be friends with people and still realize that you need something different. That sometimes the only way to love a church is to leave it. We wrestled, our hearts ached, we are moving on…
We got pregnant. 12 days after we found out, I bled a gush of blood. We wept, I was rushed to the OB only to be told that in fact everything was fine. A benign membrane hemorrhage. The baby had a heart beat of a 110 beats per minute which for a 6 week gestation was good a prognostic sign. We told our families at Christmas, then there was a funeral and a flower for our tiny baby who would never know this person who loved him.
Then in between funerals there was an incredibly stressful rainy afternoon where we were told NOT EVERYTHING is ok with the baby but no one was really sure… The baby didn’t look like me but now that both terrified and comforted us… Thus we entered a cycle of ultrasounds which were horrible for everyone (including my poor OB colleagues) between funerals in which I finally played the doctor card and said FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS GOOD just give it to us straight. Only to be told after a long few months later just before our second funeral,”… your kid is either like you but even milder than you which seems progressively less likely or he is short like your husband’s family but on a normal growth curve…and completely fine which is more likely.”
Even if he does end up with my disease, he doesn’t have something truly awful that we fretted about for long tear streaked nights of an Ohio winter that seemed like it would not end. We started breathing and sleeping again that Spring day.
Joy. Redemption.
I’m 34 weeks and beyond the paranoia of my poor OB colleagues trying to diagnose or not diagnose my child prenatally with my rarer form of my already rare disease have had absolutely no issues. This went better than expected.
There has been much joyful celebration that has come after sorrow and in its own right this year.
We have had three and half weddings this year. My baby sister in a sunny mountain wedding last August. Two of Woody’s best friends/spiritual brothers one in a chilly but starry October night and the second in steamy, starry June one. Dances were danced, toasts were toasted, wine was drank, prayers were prayed, hands were lain and there was much feasting. Sisters and brothers were gained. In a few weeks we will celebrate the last of my sisters to get married.
There were holidays, gifts, food, family portraits, traditions and remembering. There were memories made that we didn’t think we would get to make before funerals.
Sweet times.
I ended up with a job after my graduation this month that has better hours for a new Mom than expected and still allows me to teach in the global health program. Woody was handed a dissertation project with data to analyze. Somehow despite the terrible year for his side of the family he completed his first year of PhD and more than half his required course work for the three year degree (thus ahead of schedule).
We celebrated an anniversary in Greece and a retreat to a mountain escape of my childhood. We savored togetherness, the sameness of having at least one consistent person in the midst of all our stress. Our fretful winter turned into a strangely peaceful Spring and a summer of joyful anticipation and gratitude.
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