Control FREAK

I am a control freak. I admit it, but I believe chances are you are too. From all the women I have been around my whole life, it seems to me that women are controlling. This is not a negative. It is very positive. In a family, each person is going to have a role to play.

Traditionally women have had the role of mistress of the house. The woman had to run her house like a well oiled machine. Things had to work in a certain way so that people had cloths to wear and food to eat and a clean place to live. These tasks seem menial.

A modern women can do whatever she wants. The world is our oyster, and we just expect ourselves to lead the way and for everyone else to fill in the gaps. That is until we become moms.

The working mother, generally speaking, does it all. She does the majority of the house work, the child rearing and adds to the income of the house hold. I contend that most women do this not because they have horrible spouses. No, it is, because she is a control FREAK.

I speak from experiance. My mother is a control freak. My sisters are control freaks. My sister-in-law is a control freak. I am a control freak. My friends moms in high school, all control freaks. Every time I talk to someone about her mother, I hear the same thing, control freak. The common denominator is that we are all moms.

I contend that all women and specifically mothers are controlling. This is by design. We need this to manage our house hold because if someone isn't making sure that everything flows, and every thing gets done, and that every child gets fed the right food at the right time, chaos ensues!

The controlling nature of a women is not good in the workplace. I say this because every female boss I have had I hated! They are controlling. I hate to be controlled, because I am controlling. This nature is perfect for the home, though I try not to control my husband to much.

It's so hard to be five!

I have a five year old boy. We are going through some crazy stuff right now.

I really never thought that I would have a child that was so defiant. When I was a teen, I had this vision of motherhood. I wanted to be just like June Cleaver, well with a little more personality. I thought I would keep house very well, wear the A line-skirt with a little gathered apron, make wonderful food, and look beautiful for my husband. I also thought that my kids would be obedient and almost perfect, with an occasional naughtiness here and there. Oh I had it all figured out.

Flash forward ten years. I have been married 6 years. Our house is messy more of the time than it is clean. My children act out more than they obey. I would also like to say, I have had more bad hair days since I've had kids, than I ever had before them, plus my clothes don't fit the way they should, because I still believe I'm 20 and not 26, 5 accumulative years postpartum. Please don't misunderstand. I love my life and I would make all the same choices again. I just did not expect the chaos and I'm using this to process it.

Also I have a 5 yr old boy. He has always been defiant. He was defiant as a newborn. I swear. He refused to open his big giant mouth. We would latch and re-latch a dozen times every time I tried to nurse him, and he insisted on latching his way, not the way I insisted. Believe what you want, but I was there.

He is coming to a whole new level of  defiance that I never expected from a 5 yr old. He talks back, He argues. He mimics me in a mocking tone. He blatantly disobeys. He hits his sister all the time, all the time. Some of the stuff is pretty funny, but I can't let him see me enjoy it, because that will just encourage it.

I am just hoping, this is a phase. We will deal with the issues as they arise and discipline as necessary. I am hoping to solve this before he reaches adolescence.

Loss

This post will be sad.

I am grieving the loss of my fourth baby. He was about 5 weeks past conception. When I found out I was pregnant, I was overjoyed. I was super excited, but I had these strange feelings. I first was wondering if I really read the test right. Then the test came up faint at the midwife's office. Not an unusual faintness, but unusual for me. My lines have always been blazing even though I took them really early. We ordered an HcG test, for my own comfort. So if the levels where normal it would put my mind at ease. I didn't get the test results when I expected them, which made me wonder, what they were. Did the midwife get them and could she not bring herself to tell me the results? I tried to put it out of my mind. Then on Monday June 6, after I got up from dinner I went to the bathroom and there was blood.

I panicked and called the midwife asked her for the test results. She said they were normal. So here is where I have conflict. The test that was supposed to reassure me came too late and later on made me really sad. I had only that initial blood, I stopped bleeding and my midwife said that wasn't enough blood for a full miscarriage. So hearing her, I grasped on and held firm to hope, because hope is only a virtue when things are hopeless. Perhaps the baby would be ok. I asked what the options where from here, and she said that I could go in for a vaginal ultrasound, but she told me that the only thing an ultra sound would do would tell me if my baby was alive or not, something I could figure out on my own in a matter of days. If I had stopped bleeding completely, I might have gone in because I wouldn't know for sure what had happened on Monday, but I did continue to bleed. And it was apparent to me, very soon, that my baby was no longer alive and now my body was bringing him out.

My baby is too small to see. I have been saving some things I have been passing, hoping my child's body is among them, so I can give him a dignified burial. He deserves it. He is human and he deserves the respect of any person, and to me much more, because he is my baby.

In my process of grief, I have accepted it as God's will. My midwife told me that 1 in 4 pregnancies end in miscarriage. The sad thing is we live in a fallen world, and in a fallen world, people die for seemingly no reason. The search for answers, the what ifs, can end up hurting us more and causing us to grieve longer rather than accepting what it is. Babies die. That's how it is. That may sound cold, it's not. My baby died. There is nothing I could have done to prevent it. I want my baby. I still think about my life when I was pregnant, how I wish I could still be there. I see left overs in the fridge from when I was still pregnant. I see the clothes I wore that day blood stained, the sheets on my bed. We just brought a bigger table into the dinning room to accommodate our growing family, that day.

So knowing that my baby was normal for the time of the test, allowed me hope; however, it has brought me more pain because occasionally I will think,
"My baby was normal. What did I do to hurt my baby?" Then I feel like the loss is my fault. That is a dangerous road. I am not going to do that to myself. I have 3 other children that I feel so lucky to have carried to term. I feel lucky that I got to feel them move, lucky I got to hear their heart beat, lucky to have delivered them. Yes, I feel lucky that I got to feel the pain of child birth, because it is a much nicer pain than the pain of miscarriage.

So please keep me in your prayers my friends.

Totally in love with my baby

I love my baby. She is 1. I find her to be so cute and so sweet. The funny thing is that I am perfectly content with my life right now. Meaning that I don't need time to rush forward to see the future. I am very happy with the current stride of life.

The reason I find it so strange to find myself so perfectly content, is usually I am very happy but I can't wait for the future. When I got engaged I couldn't wait for my wedding. My wedding day was great. It was one day. Then it was over and I was looking forward to when I would get pregnant. Then I got pregnant. I wanted desperately to have the baby. Then I had the baby, and I loved him so much, began to wonder what it would be like to have two babies. Then I wondered what it would be like to have three babies. Through out this process, I enjoyed life. I loved my kids. I love the point I was in my life, but I was still eager for it to move forward to see what the future would be like.

Now my life is like this: I'm married, living in a house. I have three awesome kids. And I am expecting my fourth. Some people might find this a little overwhelming. I get overwhelmed with laundry, dishes, toys, messy rooms, bathrooms, yard work add anything to the list of home management. But the children themselves have never overwhelmed me. I don't know why that is. I am not a special person. I don't have some great ability to control myself. Ask anyone. But how many children I have, having a child in the future, does not psyche me out.

This is the only way I can rationalize it. When I consider the children in my future, I can't think of how crazy they will act. What type of work they will cause me. I said I can't think of it. I don't have the ability. I actually try to psyche myself out so that I'm prepared for the future and I try to imagine changing poopy diapers and dealing with a child who intentionally knocks over every pile of laundry I just folded. And even though I try to think negatively about these things, all I can think is: that is one time or 5 times it doesn't last.

Children's lives are full of phases. Nothing with them last forever, except personality. I love my kids personalities. Even if it is stressful at times their personalities describe who they are as people. I think that they are pretty stubborn, obnoxious, outgoing, fun people.

What is important to me is that this journey that I live, means something. That what I do impacts my kids and impacts those people around me. If something were to happen to me, God forbid, my kids not only have dad, they have each other. They have their own little community. Thank God they have each other. Thank God I have them. They make my life meaningful.