Mittelschmerz: The Good, the Bad, the Exceedingly Whiny

Warning: If you are inclined to blush over words like “ovulation,” you may want to skip this one. Also, if you want the short version, skip down to the recap in the last paragraph.

When in doubt, add a cute picture of your child in a box.

Several months after I gave birth to Addra, I started noticing weird cramping—weird because it kept convincing me that my period was coming, but then nothing would happen for another two weeks. This went on for several months before I realized this probably meant something. It was another several months before I realized it had a name: mittelschmerz, for middle pain. It’s a pain like menstrual cramping that comes around ovulation time. Apparently it’s normal for many women, and according to the Googoracle, it lasts up to two days.

Or in my case, three.

And then, in July, six. Only on and off, but six days did seem a little excessive.

I have a family history of trouble with all those “female parts.” Ovarian cysts, endometriosis, and fibroids, oh my! So I figured it was about time I get things checked out. An appointment with my doctor (who, in the midst of the ever-lovely pap smear, said everything seemed fine) led to an ultrasound just in case.

Which is where the real whining in this post starts. Also, as I have mentioned before, perhaps you think I talk too much about pee? If so, you should just skip this paragraph. … (Go ahead, skip it.) … Are you aware that one hour before getting this sort of ultrasound, you’re supposed to drink 32 ounces of water and not pee? Good golly, I probably don’t even drink 32 ounces in a day (and I don’t need any posts commenting that dehydration is probably exactly what’s wrong with me, thank you very much). I knew it was going to be bad, but I had no idea how bad. We’re talking I’m-driving-to-the-appointment-approaching-tears-because-I’m-going-to-explode-and-I-don’t-think-I’ve-peed-my-pants-since-elementary-but-I-might-break-that-streak-today kind of bad. The receptionist blandly declared that she’d never had any problems with drinking this much water for an ultrasound, but she knew other people sometimes did. And then, noticing that her statement was not comforting and I was still looking at the clock every 15 seconds, she took pity on me and said I could pee a little tiny bit if I thought I could manage it. Oh yes, believe me, I was going to find a way to manage it. That was almost worse (almost, but not quite) because I had to start and then stop. Do you have any idea how hard that is? The self-control! The angst! Ah, but afterward, so. much. better. I still couldn’t sit, though, and I was still pacing a bit. This had led me to a conclusion that I have often suspected (see here for evidence). My bladder really is itsy bitsy. It’s just a fact.

So, moving on. Got an ultrasound, external and internal (fun times!). Got the results. Little tiny fibroid, but nothing else (and little fibroids are quite common and not a cause for concern). Soooo…. (drum roll, please!) … There’s nothing wrong with my physical health as far as we can tell. (Snide remarks about my mental health are unnecessary.)

And here’s where I do some more whining and recognize that it’s incredibly super-duper lame-o-rific whining. First of all, I really am very grateful there’s nothing seriously wrong and nothing I need to get surgery for; given my family history, it was a real concern. But. I also really wish I understood why my body has decided to go all spazzy on me. Or rather, I really wish my body wouldn’t decide to go all spazzy on me. And I feel whiny about it because, of course, pleeeeenty of people have it far worse than I do. (Just ask, for example, my middle sister. Egad is all I have to say on that subject.) So I should really just buck up and be happy and deal with it, you know. Which is mostly what I do. But I still really wanted to whine about it a bit.

Plus, being whiny improved the title of my blog post. It wouldn’t have felt right as “Mittelschmerz: The Good, the Bad.” … Something’s just missing there. And I certainly wouldn’t want to ruin my blog post’s title by having a good attitude! Ah, the suffering I do for my craft.

So, the recap: I appear to be reasonably healthy. (Ish. But maybe I should start drinking more water?) I do still have annoying cramps, but since they’re not completely debilitating, I’m mostly quite grateful. Except for occasional bouts of extreme whininess.

The End.

Hands on the Altar

A couple months ago, Brice and I were kneeling in the temple performing sealings for the dead.* As part of the ordinance, we hold hands, and sometimes another individual joins in to take the part of a child being sealed to his/her parents. I am drawn to those other hands. They are always unique. Men tend to have shorter, rougher nails—and for some reason, flatter ones too. The women often wear jewelry, have their nails manicured. Some hands are old and covered in soft wrinkled folds, dark spots sprinkling their skin. Some are young, firm, waiting for age to change them. All are beautiful in different ways. I always imagine the stories those hands tell, but I never have the chance to know them. Where did he get that scar? Who gave her the ring she wears? Is he a violinist or a pianist? I like to imagine who these people might be, based on their hands.

This time, though, it was Brice’s hand I studied. I knew some of its story. I remember the first time I saw him when he’d returned from his mission. We’d written the whole time, usually about once a week (I’ve never, before or since, been such a faithful correspondent). No promises were exchanged; no future plans were made. We just wrote. And I waited and wondered and hoped. I remember arriving at his house after he’d returned from the airport. I remember walking into his kitchen, full of nervous excitement. He was not yet released from his calling, and the moment was beyond awkward. I remember… a handshake. It was just a handshake, but for me the earth shook too. I wanted to keep holding on until my heart stopped quaking, which would take approximately forever.

I knew the stories of our dating years too. I remember the first time he held my hand, how it seemed to act of its own volition, tightening around his fingers in a perfect instinctive response. And then how I proceeded to sweat and tremble nervously until the natural was taken from my grasp and all that was left was the awkward. But still we held on. I remember the way, years later, his hand fumbled in his trench coat pocket, searching for a ring box. My heart raced, knowing what was coming, as he knelt in the drizzling rain. I remember how, seven years ago, we were kneeling across from each other to be sealed and how silly-giddy I felt when afterward I couldn’t fit his wedding band over the knuckle of his left forefinger; he had to do it himself.

And here we were again, and his hands are just as marvelous as they were then. A little different, though. On his left hand is still that wedding band, but it sports a killer tan line beneath it. His right holds my hand, steadier, more confident. I’ve seen now that it is gentle enough to pat a screaming child into happiness. Strong enough to pick up another screaming child and hold her close. It has a few new, assorted patches of vitiligo. Maybe a little more tan. A pea-sized scar on his pinkie where he scraped off a chunk of skin during the installation of a stove in our first condo. Invisible things like the countless baby diapers he’s changed or the efforts spent in clipping little baby fingernails or the times he stroked my hair while I cried.

I could read our history together on those hands.

What will they be like ten years from now? Fifteen, twenty, forty? What stories will they tell? I am sure they will say more of service and love and generosity than I could ever put into words. I hope they will speak more of joy and my love for him. I know they will still fit perfectly with mine.

Happy anniversary, love!

*Sealings are an ordinance that members of the The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints perform in their holy temples. We can be sealed into an eternal marriage and family when we are married, and we also perform this work for the dead to give people who have already died the same opportunity. If you have other questions, see http://mormon.org/church.

Harelips!

I have discovered another eight-letter word that uses each finger exactly once when typed on a QWERTY keyboard. Oh happy days.

Photos 1500–1588*

It turns out that very few unusual things happened over the course of pictures 1500–1588. 

 Coriel eating her dinner (actually, that’s not all that usual).**

Coriel painting my toenails.

And treating her unicorn like the family pet (and yes, in case those of you who read my Facebook post are wondering, this is the unicorn that apparently has been cooking Coriel her dinner).  

Addra playing in a very organizational manner. She has a pretty amazing cleaning streak that must have come from some seriously mutated genes.

Singing and dancing awesomeness.

And of course, amazing accessories. No day at the Stay household is complete without accessories. The more, the better.

Pretty much the only thing out of the ordinary was the making of some fabulous peach melba—poached peaches and raspberry ice cream (usually it’s vanilla ice cream and raspberry sauce, but we decided to take a walk on the wild side). You are now permitted to be jealous. 

*Can I mention that I am jazzed that I got my blog to do an en dash?

**(It should also be mentioned that she doesn’t always show it off to us in such a charming fashion.)

Photos 1200-1300. Woot.

Well, I have reached a new, random point in trying to post photos. Since I never ever remember to do it and am completely daunted every time I even think about it, I’ve decided to take a random chunk of file numbers and post the good ones from that time period. So it may take months before I ever post any pics of my awesome bro and his wife and son coming to visit from New Zealand. Or pics from our trip to New York a couple months back. Or our fish party. Or the time Brice’s brother came to visit before he headed off to grad school. Or our trip to Myrtle Beach. Or anything else we’ve done lately that makes us seem really, really, really (did I mention really?) cool and exciting and fabulous.

Instead you’re going to get the best of images 1200 to 1300. Whatever they happen to be. And probably minus most of my usual sparkling brilliance. I know, you may not survive. But if you do, you’ll get to look forward to the best of some other random set of photos again soon. So enjoy (or at least survive, please).

Here you get to witness scenes from the Stay family dance party and movie night. Part of Coriel's requirements for a party is that it be fancy--hence Brice wearing a necklace.

Addra loves to wear jackets, but she gets very upset when she discovers that the jacket she's wearing doesn't have a hood. This works relatively well, though, in cases where she's wearing my jacket and I can just pull it up over her head for her.

On this particular super-cool day we found a spider in a spiderweb outside. Then we brought an ant over and fed it to the spider. This was actually really pretty cool. We dropped the ant in the web, and the spider was over there--zoom!--so fast, wrapping it up and making sure it couldn't get away. We thought it was so nifty that when we went inside we looked up the different types of spiderwebs and decided to build some. Here's Coriel in the middle of our tangle spiderweb.

Here's an orb (or spiral) spiderweb. If you look close, you can see our yellow and white spider in the middle and a wrapped-up toy cookie hanging at the bottom. A spider's got to have something to eat, you know. Also, I think it only fair to add a dose of realism to this post before you start thinking, "Wow, that Jeanna--she's so awesome, doing all that stuff with her kids." You know what we did the day before this? Sat around pretty much all day. We may have even eaten fast food. And the day after? Probably about the same.

This is really how I caught my husband.

Just cute.

Doing one of her best movie star dance moves.

Dressed up as a pirate and Toph.

*Love.*

Meaning and the Post-It Note, part 2*

A post-it note has been following me around my house. I’ll think I’ve set it somewhere to scan and save for later, and then I find it somewhere else. I completely forget about it, and then it pops up. Even though I’ve finally found a place for it and kept it in its place, it still pops up in my mind occasionally. I am grateful that it keeps reappearing. Its message was important for me when it was written, and I think it is perhaps even more vital now.

What is this piece of paper, you ask?** It contains Brice’s scrawled record of my contractions during the last couple hours of labor when I gave birth to Addra.*** I see you scratching your head. I hear you thinking, This was your all-important post-it? I thought for sure it held your checking account number or your safety deposit box lock code or at least your childhood shot record. Nope. Just a list of times and durations of contractions.

So why its importance? I shall tell you. For those of you who don’t know, labor with Coriel was… hard. (Har har, hard labor, har har.) But truly, it was difficult and painful and I struggled to make meaning of it. I felt like I had made the right decision for our family (birth center, no medication, la di da), but I lingered over it. I felt like I had failed at something that was immensely important to me. It wasn’t the labor or the pain—it was how I had dealt with it that made me unsatisfied. So when it came to Addra’s birth, I was trying to do everything I could to make this experience different.

Bottom line: My emotional memory of my first labor was essentially unending pain, and that was the story that my heart told the rest of me.

But let’s have a reality check here. There were periods through which I dozed. Hours, even. There was a time sitting in a tub with Brice reading Ella Enchanted to me (nice, light labor reading, by the way) that I can barely remember because I was mostly or completely asleep. There was at least a minute or two break between contractions for almost the entire labor. This was not 16 hours of ongoing pain. You don’t sleep or rest through 16 hours of pain.

So while intellectually I knew that I had really experienced small bouts of difficulty with at least equal bouts of rest, all I could see was the pain.

Fast forward: I didn’t want to look back on my second labor the same way. I wanted pain to take its proper place in the experience (present but not all encompassing). So I told Brice that one of his most important jobs was to keep a log of my contractions that I could look back on and see that they were really just small moments.

When Addra was born, something miraculous happened to me. I remembered the pain, but I also remembered that it wasn’t always there. In the end I didn’t actually need the record (although it was fun to look back at, and I think that requesting it was an important part of the process for me). And most amazing of all was that the pain of the previous labor was washed away. I knew that I had been miserable about it, but I didn’t feel it anymore. It was gone.

And now this post-it note reminds me that between periods of pain or sadness or ugliness, there are plenty of times of joy and laughter and goodness. No, this is not exactly a new sentiment, but the bad stuff really is pretty small most of the time. But when you only focus on the contractions, all you see is pain. When you only see the things you’ve done wrong or the suffering you’ve endured, the meaning of life is suffering. But when you see something else, when you see the in-between times, the meaning of life is joy.****

*I bet you thought I’d completely forgotten to follow up on part 1, huh?

**Incidentally, I’m always trying to decide how to punctuate that particular type of sentence. “What is this piece of paper? you ask.” “What is this piece of paper, you ask?” “What is this piece of paper, you ask.” I’m sure my Chicago Manual of Style would tell me, but I’d have to drag it down from the attic to find out. So I’ll have to continue angsting over it instead.

***Please note: Despite my obsession with mentioning pregnancy and labor (and despite the tiny bladder of the previous post), no, I am really not pregnant.

****(Or, okay, let’s be honest—it’s at least a lot better than constant suffering, even if it’s not always joy.)

Road Trip

I’m not sure why, but the moment I get in a car for a long trip, my bladder becomes the size of a teaspoon.

We have stopped for more bathroom trips for me than for Coriel (only two so far, but I’m sure there will be more). Just now, in fact, we stopped in a very nice pharmacy somewhere in North Carolina with a lovely bathroom. (I have long and boring thoughts on the subject of different grades of rest stop bathrooms; suffice it to say this was the kind that doesn’t make you wish for a hazmat suit.) The décor in the bathroom was interesting. Framed artwork featuring… medication. (I would really like to post a pic, but since I took the pic from my phone and I am completely inept at using that technology, I cannot figure out how to get it from phone to compy to blog. I am sure you will survive your devastation at missing this fine artwork.)

We’re on the road again, and we just passed a gas station called the “Three-Way Food Mart.” We couldn’t help but wonder: Three ways of what? My theory was there were three ways their food could enter or exit your body. Brice suggested maybe it was served three ways. Hot, cold, and in a wrap? Canned, boxed, or bagged? Alas, we have long since passed it (by now, since I’ve been typing for a couple minutes), and we shall never know.

We also stopped for breakfast in the city of Emporia. We did not, however, witness a large number of variety stores.

We shall have to see what happens next...

(12:20 p.m.)

Did I mention that at our first stop, I had to pee twice?

Now lunch has come and gone, and so has pee #5.* At what point have you talked too much about peeing in one blog post?** We might find out today.

Were you aware that you can now order avocado at Subway? Avocado! What a wonderful world we live in.

Other notable towns we’ve passed through on this trip: Micro and Gore.

Happily, Addra is napping again and Coriel is occupied by movie #3 (hey, don’t judge; portable DVD players are a boon of modern society). And just now, Brice pointed out the window to the right and said, “I believe that those are tobacco plants.” And I said, “Neat.” And the miles keep rolling by…

(2:53 p.m.)

Ooh, I just remembered! There was this exciting moment earlier when we had stopped because Addra was having a screaming fit. Brice got out of the car with her, and I opened my door a bit. Then when they came back and we started going again, pealing out of this empty parking lot in a nice tight u-turn, my door flew open and my Kindle jumped out. Fortunately neither the computer in my lap nor I jumped out with it.

(2:59, although the incident was sort of around 10:30ish)

Brice is sitting beside me with an unopened stick of Orbit gum hanging out of his mouth like he’s a lawless tough from some surrealist spaghetti western. He has just informed our GPS, “I’ll never follow your instructions, tyrant!”

We’re almost there.

(3:27 p.m.)

We made it. Stay tuned someday for more about our trip!

*I should also point out, definitively, to those of you who are wondering: No, I am not pregnant.

**If you are sister K or my Dad you already think I have talked about it too much. But I think we still have a while to go.