October 14, 2018 – Sunday
I had no intentions of taking this long of a break. Without any prior planning, I managed to post my last blog exactly four months ago, today. Life has gotten away from me a little bit, and there are quite a few things to talk about!
I guess it’s easiest to report in a chronological order, and that makes the first update the biggest, actually.
Two days after my last post, I found out I was pregnant! I wanted to immediately come and blog about it, but we really didn’t want to tell anyone that early. I waited until 16 weeks to drop the social media bomb, as it was. I struggled deeply in the beginning with what this would mean for our family, and I truly couldn’t have come here and talked about it. Although, looking back, I probably would have been better off if I had done exactly that!
I’ve been working out how to handle documenting this pregnancy. I have not made any videos lately, but did consider posting pregnancy updates with the VSG channel. Honestly, I had the surgery to get healthy enough to have another child. I just never thought it was going to happen. Sam and I had been on a strange acid trip of a romance for nearly a decade and this was seriously the last thing I considered. I also have noticed that there is an abundance of adorable, young, healthy, normal sized moms on YouTube who are documenting their pregnancies and family lives. I was newly 39 years old when I found out, raising 18 & 20-year old sons, dealing with a debilitating work injury, and trying desperately to re-lose 65 pounds of weight loss surgery re-gain, when I finally got pregnant! Not very traditional….
Still contemplating that road. The beginning was so wretched that there was no way I could’ve been on camera anyway. I had hyperemesis gravidarum and had to be medicated for it. I barely could sleep, couldn’t walk due to the injury, and found myself thrown mercilessly into the planning of a suddenly expedited wedding.
We had been planning on getting married October 13, 2018 (yesterday!) but hadn’t really started planning heavily, or completely committed to the shindig. Knowing that things were about to get frenetically real, we decided that we just didn’t want to plan a wedding but we did want to be married. We sat down with a calendar and picked a date that coincided with his pass days at work. With just about six weeks to plan and organize, we got married on August 8, 2018 – a Wednesday.
It’s been wild. I didn’t really believe I’d ever be anyone’s “other half” again, in a legal way. I struggled in the beginning with what it meant to my own identity, and what I could possibly bring to this agreement that I already wasn’t offering. I couldn’t even imagine the reality of having a new baby in less than a year. And now, a mere two months later, I find that everything changes in the most subtle and amazing ways.
Sam started working for the State in May, and this was simultaneously a godsend and a curse. His placement was wretched for him, and heartbreaking for me to witness. The entire facility is toxic, from the salted ground water, up. The reason we got married on a Wednesday, without an extra day off or even a honeymoon, was due to the selective amnesia of his then-boss regarding him telling HR at his hiring, that he was getting married in October and would need approximately a week off, maybe less – if it coincided with his pass days. They absolutely agreed and congratulated him. Once the baby became a factor, he tried confirming this fact and was outright denied the time off, stating lack of evidence of this agreement. Apparently email chains are not evidence of conversations, when dealing with despotic bosses with inferiority complexes. He didn’t want to rock the boat, so we just did it when we did. Fine. As the date moved closer, his boss felt bad and did let him switch pass days with a coworker so he could have the day after the wedding off.
And then… The deluge of trials…
Six days after our wedding, our neighborhood experienced one of the most catastrophic flash floods it had seen in over 20 years. The flow turned our house into a literal island. We lost two cars, a kayak, and everything out of our yard. The beach eroded into the lake and it is still fenced off to this day.
Governor Cuomo came to the area to survey the damage, but didn’t make it to our point because the roads were literally cut off. There was one other local area that got similar flooding, over near Seneca Lake. The flood patterns were mirrored. Very creepy.
I found out after the fact, that we live in a river basin. This was complete news to us. The “creek” that runs about 100 yards south of our back yard, is actually a dry river. Dry, I assume, because it trickles like a stream or creek, not anything close to a river. However, historically, there is a flood here every 25 years or so. I’m glad to say, we will not be here for the next.
We are still recovering, financially, from the flood. We had been nearly ready to buy a house before the flood. Several different options were firmly open and being considered, but now we have two new car loans on there and noticeably drained savings, so we have to rebuild again before we can actually make that happen.
However, there is one good thing about being forced to wait on the house. Sam actually was approved for a transfer to a prison closer to home, and has been there about three weeks. His work life is so much more fluid and he actually seems like a different person. Well, not different so much as back to normal, pre-Fall 2017-Sam. It’s an amazing transformation. It also means that we now know exactly where we want to buy. Before the transfer, we were sort of looking all over the place but this means we will stay in our county, at least. I’m completely OK with that!
The only other ghosts in the closet are health-related, but I’ll leave those to another post.
I hope you are having a fantastic day, wherever you find yourself today! 🙂
Surviving My Sleeve 