Author: jr

This weekend was weird. Louise has just started declaring that things are weird. She says it with this cute little pronunciation – wee-erd. She uses it when things act unexpected, its a nice synonym to silly – si-wee – in her vocabulary.

We spent Friday and Saturday night at the Lake of the Ozarks to celebrate Maggie’s birthday. I’m really proud of Lou for how kind she was to Maggie while we were there. She never seemed to get jealous of her even when Kyle or I gave her attention or when she was getting gifts and lots of attention at her birthday party. She didn’t do anything unkind, accidentally or otherwise. Exceeded expectations.

Speaking of expectations, it was my first time at the Lake of the Ozarks. It has that strangely familiar feel, even when you’ve never been there. Sort of like Times Square. It was exactly as I expected it to be.

We learned at the lake that Suzi is expecting their second baby. They’re only five weeks along, so he or she will hopefully be here in late June. I had a weird surge of emotions about it. I currently have an IUD and I use an app to track my cycle so that we can avoid my most fertile days, but we lost a little track of it this month. I’m not late yet and all signs point to my not being pregnant, but I have been off and on anxious that this is a similar scenario to when my IUD failed before. Yesterday, I felt some of that anxiety, coupled with a lot of jealousy that Suzi is pregnant. These are contradictory emotions, right? And likely could only be held in the head of someone with something hormonal like PMS going on. But, man, I just couldn’t shake my bad mood yesterday.

Add to all that being around Suzi’s family who are all somewhere between loose acquaintances and strangers at the lake house and having trouble keeping Louise inside of the house during the birthday party, and I was completely overwhelmed.

It reached a head when Louise dropped her fishing pole in the lake and Kyle decided to go in after it. It turns out going in after it was only wading to about chest deep, but someone thought the dock was out at a depth of about 10 ft., plus the water was cold and the air was colder. I was nervous about him going in, Louise kept trying to get closer to the dock to see what was going on. When he recovered it, we went down to the dock to get it and she saw him swimming in the water with his clothes on so she started to leap off to join him.

Thank God that I am so closely observant and saw what she was doing before she was committed, and I caught her in the air before her feet were even over the water. It was too much though. She started crying immediately because she didn’t get to go in, and I started crying immediately because it was terrifying. It’s hard to feel like everyone is seeing you be a terrible parent, even when they’re mostly inside and close to unaware about what is happening or how many times your child has escaped through one of SIX exterior doors during a birthday party.

Sometimes I feel overwhelmed by the idea of having another baby. I’ll admit that Louise is so adventurous and brave and interested in the world around her – plus stubborn – that she can be hard to parent sometimes. Harder to parent. But, it’s hard not to feel like I’m failing her. It probably doesn’t help that I used to be pretty weak-willed when it came to saying no and enforcing rules or what not. I read a book called No and why children of all ages need to hear it back in April that helped my parenting so, so much. I am almost 100% positive that Kyle hasn’t criticized my parenting since I read it. It has been transformative.

So even though I know my parenting has improved, parenting is hard on the hard days. And yesterday was a hard day as a parent and as a person (as the card Cara sent me this mother’s day would say).

When I put Lou down for bed tonight, I was thinking about all of the feelings of yesterday and how great today was. They were almost opposite days. Today, I woke up with her at 7:15, we were out “fishing” off the dock by 8, on the road back to KC by 10, home by 1:30. We went grocery shopping as a family and watched the Sporting game. I made a yummy dinner that we all ate well and appreciated. So I was reflecting on my day and felt like the thing that was making all of my feelings so powerful in my head is that I want to try to have another baby ourselves.

I don’t know how Kyle will feel about it, but it feels like maybe it’s time to put the idea out there in the world. We’re so much more together than we ever have been, even if that means that we’re paying down debt aggressively and don’t have piles of extra cash to spend.

I went to Joe’s wedding last night. It was great to see and catch up with his family again and I hope that the wedding video I shot comes out okay. I’m always worried about audio quality, but it was mostly out of my control and what I have seems to be mostly okay. I’m excited to see what I can string together, even if I’m dreading actually doing all the work of editing it. It’s good to get an idea of what someone would need to pay me to be able to do it.

The whole day was beautiful. I find it funny how nice of a wedding Joe had. I’m not sure how that sounds (or how it’s supposed to sound?). But it was just out of character nice with a good attention to detail. I think it probably shows how much he loves Anna and that she’ll compliment him nicely by helping him pay attention to those details.

I feel like this is the first real relationship he’s had with a Catholic whose faith rivals his own. He dated a few bad Catholics, he helped me convert (into a bad Catholic), and he converted a good Christian into a Catholic in Jacquelyn, but I can tell that Anna’s whole family background in so deeply rooted in Catholicism, as is his, and I think that will be good for him.

His wedding toast (12.5 minutes!) made it clear how truly he feels called to be her husband. It reminded me that one of the things I know to be most true about him is that when he feels discord about a decision in his heart, he is basically insufferable. I hope that he remains free of doubt about her. Seems like she deserves that.

Because of his wedding and my realizations about the night before I met him, I’ve been thinking a fair amount about our relationship. It really required so much work on my part to recover from it. He was often cruel and manipulative. In my rereading of my journals, I recently reread a chat I had with his ex-girlfriend when I was still with Steve but they were no longer together. It made me realize that a lot of those things that happened at the end of our relationship had also happened at the end of theirs – misleading people or misconstruing their statements in a way they would not have agreed to and trying to isolate her the way he did me.

Twelve years is a long time, and, surely he has matured. But how much is our twenty-one-year-old-self an indicator of who we will become?

I feel like the average reader would find it odd that I’m still friends with him, but I think that once someone is meaningful to me, I’ll continue to have concern for them as we age. I speculate that our friendship is my way of controlling the narrative of our relationship, or was at one time. I will not give someone the satisfaction of seeing me too weak to speak to them. I’ll admit that it’s a weird character trait, but I feel like it paid off this weekend.

I joked when he told me that he was going to seminary that I always knew he’d be a bad husband, but last night, I could see how he could be good to Anna. And I hope that for them both.

And finally – yikes, not writing longform journals for years and years has meant that I’m not the best writer in this form. Hopefully, my voice will be refined in the habit of writing more regularly.