My Life – Page 10 – Her Green Life

Lost in hell

After cleaning and some airing-out time, we decided that the second-hand smoke contaminated refrigerator we bought in April just wasn’t going to cut it. I reposted it to Craigslist, and we sold it at a small loss (actually $5 more than the $80 we paid for the fridge, but we also paid $20 for delivery). I was just happy to have it gone (just in time to put Roadrunner in the garage!).

Of course, the fact that it didn’t work out meant that the search continued. I hunted through CL adds over the weekend, and found a promising option in South County. Last night, I headed down to check it out, knowing that if it was a go, we’d have to return another time with a rental truck (despite the extra trip, we didn’t want to rent the truck not knowing if we’d buy it).

I had the address and looked up directions ahead of time, but my notes and small, rough sketched map were no match for the suburban subdivisions. When I reached a fork in the road, I chose the left (and ultimately correct) fork, but, after driving about a mile on a hilly and curvy road, not seeing my turn-off, I decided that I should have chosen the right fork, so I turned around and back-tracked.

I repeated the hilly, curvy mile thing on the right fork, and came to a dead end. I partially retraced my path on that road, then pulled over and called the seller. After she figured out where I was, she told me that I needed to go back to the road that forked to the left (yes, the one I started out on), and go just a bit farther than I had initially. Grr!

At that point, I just wanted to be done. I didn’t want to retrace my route, and I most certainly didn’t want to return another time with a truck. I called Matthew, teary eyed, and told him he needed to talk me out of just throwing in the towel and heading home without even seeing the fridge.

I finally decided that even though it was annoying as heck, I’d already gone most of the way to this house, so I may as well see the stupid fridge.

The entire time I was driving around this place, I couldn’t imagine who in their right mind would want to live in a place like this: no connectivity, ugly McMansions, cars required to go anywhere. Ick. Blech. Blah.

I was also amused by the yard signs reading “No cell phone towers in my neighborhood.” People, the picture above is not a “neighborhood,” and, if you hadn’t chosen to live out here, you might not need a cell phone tower.

Anyhow, I finally found the correct road and arrived at my destination (my gas light was starting to flicker at this point, not helping my mood any). I took a quick look at the fridge (including sticking a thermometer in to make sure it was, in fact, cold), and told the seller we’d think about it and get back to her.

I was never so glad to leave that subdivision behind, and, later, when I crossed back into city limits, I almost cried tears of joy and relief. The River de Poo never looked so good!

Once home, I informed Matthew that if he wanted to rent a truck and go back out there to get the refrigerator, that was fine, but I wasn’t going near that place again!

*Purchase is pending negotiations with the seller. If Matthew does go to get it, I’ll give him very good directions — I’m actually fairly decent with directions (and quite good with nice, normal grid systems), and now that I’ve done it correctly once, I know I can do it again, I just have no desire to return to hell.

One for the now

This is a post that has been on my mind for a long time. I’m finally writing after reading some other posts this week by Kim Simon (AKA Mama by the Bay): first, this beautiful tribute to doulas and fighting PPD, then the story of becoming a family of four, and finally, this. Talk about tugging my heart strings!

Kim’s story with her first child seemed so like mine, in many ways, and it was SO easy to get caught up in the healing she found with her second child. Her writing had me in tears; it was, in many ways, beautiful and uplifting, but it sent me on a downward spiral, because, in my heart of hearts, I don’t think her story will be my story, and that was depressing.

THIS is my story. Maybe it is your story, too.

My little boy will turn three in just over a month. In the past ten months, it seems like everyone I know with a similar-age first child has either had a baby or announced a pregnancy — both real-life and virtual friends. So now it’s just me.

I guess because I made it clear fairly early on that G would most likely not have a sibling, I’ve avoided a lot of the, “So, when are you guys going to have another one?” questions, but that doesn’t mean it’s not on my mind.

Most of the time, I’m over 90% sure that one is a really good number. But sometimes I get caught up in wondering: the chance to grow and nurture another life; a re-do of our first year; a shot at another (different?) birth story.

It’s tempting to look at my peers and think, “Everyone’s doing it, so I should, too.”

But my story is my own, and when I really think about it, I can’t think of any really good reasons to have a second child. At least nothing that overrides my looooong list of reasons why, for me, for our family, one is a really good number.

My one child is awesome (and exhausting and sometimes frustrating). Could I handle another one? Could we make it work? Yes. Maybe. Probably . . . . but why? (No, I don’t really want answers to that last question.)

It’s hard to find closure on this when I wonder if I’ll regret it later. And these are still “early days,” in many respects — will I feel differently when G is 4? Or 5? Or 10?

As he gets older — more independent; less needy; more fun, new stages — I’m afraid the temptation toward a second child will only grow, especially when couple with increasing time and distance from those challenging first months and years.

The best answer I can come up with is to live in the present, challenging though that may be for this “have it all planned out” gal. For NOW, one is a really good number (except those times when it still feels like too much — I’m a mommy wimp!). For NOW, I have a sweet, healthy, smart, adorable little boy, and I love seeing the world through is eyes. For now (and, yes, quite possible forever), one is enough.

If I am still living in the present when I am 40, 50, 60 . . ., I won’t look back and regret. The real tragedy would be getting so caught up in the worry and what-if that I miss the amazing, wonderful NOW.

Ruminations on Sir’s birth

Earlier this year, I finally caved to spousal pressure and started reading Robert Jordan’s epic fantasy series, The Wheel of Time. Relatively early in the series, the main character, Rand al’Thor receives a wound that, at least as of the sixth book, never heals. A wound that never quite heals often feels like an apt descriptor of the emotional and mental scar I carry from Sir’s unplanned cesarean birth.*

Sunday will mark my third year of celebrating Mother’s Day as a mother. Time — to process, to grieve, to heal — has helped, but there’s still something there, a nagging thing that won’t quite go away. Usually, I don’t allow myself to go down the “what-if” path, because “what-if” is not what was, or what is. But I do believe in learning from the past, and I’m intrigued by the whole birth process.

I covered the whole “should have had an ultrasound to determine baby’s position with certainty” / “could have tried any number of methods to turn him if I’d known he was breech” thing pretty well in the above-linked post. That is certainly the crux of the matter, but I’ve had a couple of other thoughts recently.

First, when my water broke at 39+1, we (me, Matthew, and my midwife) all assumed that I was going into labor. However, given what transpired in the next 24-hours, I rather suspect I had premature rupture of membranes (PROM), meaning that, yes, my water had broken, but neither my body nor my baby were really ready for labor: weak, erratic “contractions,” that really felt mostly like unpleasant cramps; never dilating past 2-3cm; and, in general, a complete lack of signs of active labor.

Second, and I would have to do more research on this, I wonder if we could have tried some of the methods for turning a baby after my water broke. I’ve read a couple of stories about breech babies flipping to head down during labor, which makes me think it might have been possible, though maybe that was before the membranes ruptured (?). At any rate, I don’t really remember even exploring this with the midwife once we were at the hospital.

Finally, I’m a bit conflicted about the whole idea of a birth plan. On the one hand, if you want to have a natural birth, in this day and age of over-medicalized, intervention-heavy births, you have to research and plan. On the other hand, all of the planning and visualizing my “ideal” birth were, at least in part, what made it so hard when things took a 180° turn.

I’m glad that I was informed and knew about my birth options, but how much did that contribute to the aftermath — the weeks and months of grieving my planned homebirth and the post-partum depression that lingered long enough to probably not really count as “post-partum” anymore?

That said, were I not rather set on sticking to having just one child, I would almost certainly be researching and planning a VBAC (and perhaps an HBAC), and I often give in to the temptation to read the wonderful VBAC birth stories shared by the International Cesarean Awareness Network (ICAN).

*Writing can often be cathartic and healing, but I wonder if this writing is more like picking at a scab.

Maintaining our old car

It’s been all bike, bike, bike here lately, which is great, but the good ol’ Corolla is feeling a bit neglected. Since my car commute job ended, we’ve been back to pretty low mileage, which is also great, but using it less frequently also makes it easier to neglect . . .*

. . . which is how we ended up going over a year between oil changes. Now, I’m completely on board with stretching the old “every three months or three thousand miles” to every six months or six thousand miles, but this was rather extreme, even for me, and it really doesn’t demonstrate good stewardship.

When we moved [almost] two years ago, the distance to our regular mechanic increased quite a bit. I could no longer drop it off in the morning, walk or jog home, and return later when they called to say it was ready. But finding a new, trusted mechanic? Ugh! Definitely a barrier to regular preventive maintenance.

I finally sucked it up and tried a new mechanic, one very close to our current location. I warned them that it had been quite a while since my last oil change, then jogged the three blocks home to await their call.

Fortunately, everything looked good on our 12-year-old, 150k mile car! Very good news, because I really dread the thought of finding a replacement — I’m hoping that day is a loooong way off. (We’ll have more data later, as she’s due for her registration renewal in a couple of months, which means she’ll have to pass the safety and emissions inspections.)

The shop owner said the most important thing with an older car was checking the oil level regularly, and, if we do that, he’s not worried about us going six months between oil changes. Score!

There WAS a slight hitch a few days after the oil change. I was cleaning and loading the car for our camping trip, and, remembering my mom’s story of driving home from an oil change and discovering the mechanics had forgotten to put the plug back in the place where the oil goes (see, I know all about cars!), leaving her driving around with no oil, I decided I should go ahead and check the oil level.

All was well, until I attempted to close the hood, only to have it refuse to latch. This has happened before, the result of an old and sticky latch/spring mechanism, and it usually requires just a bit of WD-40. This time, I tried both WD-40 and lubricant with no luck.

I called my new mechanic and explained the situation. He tried to help me troubleshoot over the phone, since he really didn’t want me driving to the shop with the hood unlatched, but no joy.

I drove to the shop very carefully (I wasn’t worried about covering the short distance at very low speeds), and one of the mechanics made time to look at it immediately. In the end, it just needed more WD-40, a bit of a firmer hand, and some industrial grade lubricant. In less than ten minutes, our car was once again highway-worthy, and they didn’t charge me for the work! (I stopped by later to drop off a thank-you note and some cookies.)

In an average week, we make at least one trip to my MIL’s (~25 miles RT). Some weeks (the “good” weeks), that is the only* car trip we make. Other weeks we end up making that trip twice, or maybe a trip to my FIL’s, or some other miscellaneous outing. Even with an occasional road trip to Iowa thrown into the mix, that still leaves us at well under six thousand miles per year, and well under the ~12k miles/year U.S. average.

Spring cleaning for cash

As of Saturday afternoon, we have a bicycle trailer-size space in our garage. After about six weeks on Craigslist (felt like longer!), with me questioning all along rather I really wanted to sell it, Sir’s Chariot found a new home.

Given that we’ve probably used the trailer to transport Gabriel all of ten times in the two-and-a-half years we’ve owned it, letting it go was certainly the logical thing to do. But of course there was that little voice saying, “What if you need it?” Once you have something, it’s much easier to default to keeping it, just in case.

That, and the fact that the trailer was a really exciting purchase — a great product for a great price (we got a very good condition, high end trailer for about 1/3 retail value) — and the culmination of months of searching CL, for the item that would allow me to use my preferred form of transportation, with an infant (at the time, I did not know about the wonder of front-mount infant seats).

Ironically, as hard as it was to find a used Chariot (now Thule Chariot) trailer in the fall of 2011, by the time I decided to put the trailer on CL this spring, they were everywhere. It both made me despair of ever selling ours, and feel a bit better about the decision to sell, knowing that if, for some reason, we decided we really wanted a child trailer again, we might have an easier time finding one.

The sale/cleaning also included the Yepp Maxi standard rear seat that I bought in error (we needed the Yepp Maxi Easyfit for the Edgerunner). We debated keeping the standard seat as well, as a back-up child transport option, but instead we have a plan in the works to retrofit one of our existing bikes to work with the Easyfit seat (more on that later).

I’m also planning on making a rain/weather cover for the Yepp seat (having something to keep Sir dry was one of the main arguments in favor of keeping the trailer).

On a side note, the CL sale was cash (the only thing I’ll accept as a CL seller). After selling Matthew’s bike in July, I commented that I wanted one of those counterfeit-bill detector markers for future big-ticket sales. I didn’t get around to getting one, of course, and then the trailer buyer prefaces handing me five hundred-dollar bills by asking, “Have you seen the ones that look like this before?”

Of course, since I don’t walk around carrying c-notes, I had, in fact, not seen the “new” hundreds (actually dated 2009), and I was more than a bit wary. I’m pretty sure they’re legit, but I wrote down the guy’s license plate number, just in case (he seemed like a nice guy, but you never know).

In the end, the hardest part was negotiating a price with the buyer (done by email and text before we ever met), when all along I had the little voice questioning the decision to sell in the first place. Twenty-four hours post-sale, I’m feeling rather good about the decision, which is a good sign. No seller’s remorse, so far.

Given the recent [temporary] addition of the refrigerator, garage space is still going to be tight when we bring the Edgerunner home this week (!), but having the trailer gone will certainly help!

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*Writing can often be cathartic and healing, but I wonder if this writing is more like picking at a scab.

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