Sarah With An E

I’ve been burying myself in Netflix a lot this month trying to ignore that the 15th was approaching like a bullet train. The ostrich approach has never really been my thing, but being home with five kids doesn’t give you much time to lay in a dark room and think. So Netflix it is. Anne with an E, to be precise. If you’ve not seen it, I highly recommend the series. It’s based on a book series by L.M Montgomery and set in late 1800’s Canada. It’s about an orphan named Anne Shirley who is adopted by spinster brother and sister Matthew & Marilla and how all of them change through the process. The original miniseries of the show came out when I was a teen and I loved that version, too.

Anne is a drama queen – there’s no other way to put it. She is all about diving into her emotions and unapologetically paddling around in them like a swimming hole. There’s no grey area – she’s either blissfully enraptured or in the depths of despair. She hates her red hair and her freckles and she either loves or hates people with wild abandon. And she does it all very loudly, unabashedly, for everyone around her to see.

Here’s the thing: I suck at that. Sure, I can do loud and unabashed about happy emotions. I can bring you all along with me when I’m blissfully enraptured. But taking you down to the depths of despair? Showing the world the flaws and scars and wounded spots? That’s not as easy. I recognize them and know where they are. But I don’t like to stand there long enough to examine them, and I certainly don’t want you to, either. Yuck.

My babies turn two today and I am miles away from ok. I’ve had a lot of dark days in the last two years – truth be told I spent the entire first year praying every night that God would just let me die in my sleep – but today is the first day I’ve actually thrown up the white flag and asked Melissa to leave work because I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t pretend well enough to take care of my kids. I couldn’t even get out of bed. I’m still in here, in the dark, under my weighted blanket. My biggest accomplishment of the day was putting together a casserole for dinner at 9am and showering. And it’s embarrassing and humbling and weak but I honestly couldn’t not do it. I have nothing left to give.

When you have premature babies, doctors use their actual due date to measure age-appropriate milestones versus their birthdate. Pook & Boogie are two today, but they were 2 months early so their corrected age is 22 months. I think the same thing happens in reverse to the mother, because premature birth and traumatic labor both carry a tremendous weight. You simply aren’t the same person that you were before. You grieve the death of your hopes and dreams. You mourn for the way your tiny loves struggle. You are simultaneously poured full of abundant love, fierce protectiveness and absolute terror. I’m 41 chronologically, but my corrected age is at least a hundred years beyond that.

Melissa asked me last night if I thought every baby birthday would be this way for me. The short answer is: man, I hope not. But the deeper dive – the Anne Dive, if you will – involves recognizing that a piece of all of us died the day they were born. The piece filled with naive optimism. The piece that believed nothing could happen in life that we wouldn’t be able to handle. The piece knew how to live without fear. I am afraid now in a way I’d never experienced until Pook & Boogie arrived. I am afraid of everything. I feel an insatiable need to prove my own worth by doing. I push myself until I’m physically ill. I find ways to blame myself for things that I neither own nor need to own. I can’t sleep. I cry all the darn time. I don’t want to be around people and I struggle to leave the house.

“Tomorrow will be better” has become my mantra. Even if it’s not, I lived through today and will probably live through tomorrow. Even if I don’t want to, even if I’d rather not, even if I’d rather be alone in a dark room for the rest of my life. But Anne says that “nightmares aren’t so scary without the protection of the dark”, so maybe shining a light on my own personal darkness can chase away the monsters.

My babies are two. Two years ago, a whole lot of bad things happened, but we also lived. I endured more physical pain than I’ve ever experienced, but I lived. Avery’s heart stopped, but he lived. Addie wasn’t supposed to make it out of the hospital at all, but she lived. My most fervent hope is that when my babies turn three, the living can feel bigger than the almost-dying and that I can find a way to celebrate that living rather than living in terror of the almost-dying.

As Anne says, “Isn’t it amazing how every day can be an adventure?” Tomorrow will be better.