Family

Feeling Numb

December 10, 2015 by Vanessa Leave a Comment

December 9th, was the one year anniversary of the twins getting out of the NICU. Ever since having the twins I’ve been jotting down my thoughts here and there. They weren’t always coherent but they were me trying to figure out life and everything we were going through. The NICU was hard. Even if our kids were only “feeders/growers” it took me a really long time to wrap my head around the experience. And, honestly, I’m still not quite sure I’m there. Even months after we were out of there, that feeling I had in the NICU, that despair, that numbness, I just couldn’t shake it. But I want to start wading back into those memories and see if I can make some sense of them.

Here is something I wrote back in May:

It’s strange. I haven’t had a lot of breakdowns like I usually do after having a baby. It’s not because I am more put together or because I’ve got the hang of this. It’s that when you’re in crisis mode, you learn to stuff your feelings back down your throat and keep them there. I think I’m still in crisis mode. I’ve always been good at it. I’ve always been able to put on my brave face and get through hard things. But in actuality, I feel very small and scared and completely wrong for the job.

Since the babies have been born, I haven’t allowed myself a space to feel much of anything. Today I started watching “Call the Midwife” and I started just bawling during it. It is easier to cry about someone else’s pain or someone else’s problem than allow yourself to deal with your own. I constantly feel so overwhelmed and so much a mess that I have been on the verge of collapse or meltdown. And once or twice it would have been just fine. I was alone, the babies were asleep. I finally had time to freak out, to cry, to let it out. And I couldn’t. I couldn’t cry. La Lupe calls it desahogandose. Why? How weird. You forget how to feel.

My Kids Make Me Brave

December 7, 2015 by Vanessa Leave a Comment

I’m really into Zumba. I love it. Give me a good beat and some synchronized dancing and I’m there. It’s like going to a club without all the parts that suck about a club – creepy guys, being out late, having to dress up.

This is mostly what I look like at Zumba:

and this is about how cool I think I look:

But I love Zumba regardless and go to classes at the Y as often as I can.

It was just any ole’ regular day and I was in class when the teacher mentioned that anyone who wanted to participate in a big group of Zumba instructors and students dancing during the half-time of a UT basketball game could sign-up with her. My immediate response (in my head) was that I’d rather Zumba across hot coals than dance in front of hundreds of people.

But then I thought about our girls. Kids need to see their mom do non-mommy things sometimes. Something that is just for herself. And if it’s athletic, even better. I thought about how it’s important for them to see me doing things that require me to be brave. That make me uncomfortable. Really the combination of these things is super rare. When else would an opportunity like this come along again?

And so, on Friday night, I, along with my wonderful instructor and about a hundred other Zumba-lovers, ran out onto the UT basketball court and performed. It wasn’t perfect but, man, was it fun. And everyone was so excited and pumped up. Of course the video cut out about halfway through but you get the gist (I’m in the third row, in the middle):

When Kraft and I lead marriage prep, one of my favorite questions to ask our speakers is how does having kids strengthen them. Well, this is my answer. My kids make me brave. In small things like this Zumba thing, but in bigger things, too. Like actually dragging myself out of the house to attend a protest with my kids so they see it is important to stand up for the things we believe in. Or talking to the guy asking for money on the corner so that they see that we should all treat each other with dignity and love. Or advocating for my kids at school or at the doctor’s office so that they see we sometimes have to have uncomfortable discussions. I would have felt like this even if I had never had kids, but I would probably not have been spurred to action as much as I am now.

Kids grow up too quick to not make every moment possible a teachable one. Being a parent means you have decision overload. Too many decisions have to be made to not be intentional about how you are letting these decisions shape you as a person and shape the culture of your family. I screw up pretty regularly. I freak out and yell and scream and get annoyed and say the wrong thing and am too hard on my kids and expect too much. But I want them to have as many memories as possible of me doing the right thing as often as I can muster (which usually isn’t much but I try). Don’t get me wrong, I think them seeing me mess up and apologize can be just as instructive as me doing the right thing. But when I am put together enough to make a good choice and show them I can be brave in totally new and unexpected ways, well, hot damn.

The best part of the whole video is Teresa yelling “MAMA!” at the beginning.

Twins’ Birth Story: Part III

December 1, 2015 by Vanessa 1 Comment

Our twins just turned one year old. I guess it’s about time that I write down and process their birth and surrounding events. This is the next part in the series. Here is the link if you want to start at Part I or Part II. This part is a little more graphic than the rest. Fair warning.

It was about halfway through my pregnancy that my doctor started talking to me about delivering twins. Apparently really crazy things can go down. One can be born vaginally and then all of a sudden the second baby could be in trouble and need to be delivered through C-section. Sometimes, even if both babies are head down, the second baby can flip after the first is born because there is so much more room. In this case, my doctor said I shouldn’t worry because he could just reach in and turn the baby to get them head down again, or he could deliver the second one breech. Now I’m all for natural birth. I had both Lina and Teresa without any pain meds and Olivia I had with one dose of IV pain meds which didn’t do a darn thing. So I know the pros of natural child birth, but there was no freakin’ way he was going to “reach in and turn the baby” without me having an epidural.

Planning on having an epidural really changed my mindset throughout the whole labor. Labor with an epidural is still hard and is still work but it’s completely different. When you go in planning on a natural childbirth you basically are walking in ready to do war. Or at least that’s how I feel. You’ve got to be prepared mentally for the pain and you really have to bring your A game when it comes to concentration. It just takes a lot of getting yourself psyched up and ready.

I found I spent most of those first hours in the hospital wondering when I should get the epidural. I’m not in that much pain, should I do it now? Should I wait until I’m further along? What if I’m in too much pain to sit still when they’re putting it in?

I waited until I was about 6cm dilated. I asked the nurse to call the anesthesiologist. He was really great and friendly and put me at ease. I am terrified of needles so I told him under no circumstance whatsoever could he show me that needle. He laughed and complied. It wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be. It was strange feeling but it was fine. One leg pretty much went dead and I wouldn’t be able to lift it at all for the next 24 hours but the rest of me was numb enough. I could feel the contractions a little bit but no pain at all.

We probably still had about 4 more hours to go before the babies came and I found myself not knowing what to do. I may have slept a bit. I kept wondering if we should just turn on the tv to pass the time but that seemed wrong for some reason. Kraft and I started ordering all the things we needed on Amazon and he passed the time reading me things from Facebook. It almost felt like we were on a date sitting around talking after a meal or something. Except for the constant beeping of the monitors and the nurse coming in and out.

Because the twins were going to be born at 34 weeks and 5 days, this earned them a pass straight to the NICU. A NICU nurse had come down earlier to talk to us about what we should be ready for. I honestly can’t remember anything that woman said. I was still in denial that these babies were coming so early. Our nurse tried to gauge whether or not I understood what they were telling us but I didn’t want to talk about it. I just wanted to hold my babies. I didn’t want to think of them being taken away from me.

Every one of our kids has been born in 12 hours from the time my water breaks. My body is amazingly predictable in this way. Kraft says he remembers looking at the clock and thinking that 12 hours would be here in half an hour so he was sure it wasn’t going to happen with the twins. Wrong. I alerted the nurse that I was pretty sure I wanted to push. She said ok and started getting everything ready. I had to deliver in the OR so she let the surgical staff know I was coming. The doctor had been hanging around for the last couple hours knowing that when these babies came, they were going to come quick.

They wheeled my bed over to the OR. It was bright and scary. It was exactly like TV. Like in ER when they are shooting from the patient’s perspective. That is dead on. You’re blinded by the lights and everyone is moving around you fast and you don’t really know what is happening. Modesty is out the window because you have to be in a surgical gown and they have to scrub you down. At this point I couldn’t have cared less how many people were in that room, I was just getting more and more nervous. Kraft was standing by in scrubs squeezing my hand.

My doctor is one of the most gentle and kind souls I’ve ever met. Very patient and a good listener. I’d never seen the side of him I saw in that room. He was in control of that room. You could tell he took this very seriously and wanted to be ready for anything. It was really amazing to see him command the room. It made me feel safe and confident in his abilities. Not that I wasn’t before but I was scared and that made me less so.

Both babies were head down. Baby A came. One of the nurses told me when to push, or maybe it was my doctor. Someone did. And so I pushed and everyone was like, Whoa! Hey, slow down, not so fast. I guess delivering small babies doesn’t take as much pushing as an 8 lb baby. Ana was born after one push. I didn’t hear her cry. I don’t remember holding her. Both twins each had a full neonatal team in the room ready to check them out. Ana got whisked away to another room so they could check her vitals. It was only minutes between the babies being born but I remember I started to panic. Where is she? Why isn’t she crying? Why can’t I hear her? I can’t see her. I’m sure the doctor and nurses were reassuring but I was having a hard time concentrating. Then they told me to start pushing again. Baby B was still head down (thank God!). Again, I pushed too fast and when Dorothy came out she kicked the clamp off of Ana’s umbilical cord. The doctor delivered Dorothy and immediately placed her on my chest. She was covered in blood which did not seem right. I really started to panic and asked if she was ok. Why was there so much blood? For the few seconds it took them to figure out where the blood was coming from, everyone thought I was hemorrhaging. It was just the umbilical cord and everyone breathed a sigh of relief. Then Dorothy’s team took her away.

I know I was on the table for a while after that. I’m pretty sure they were telling me what was happening with the babies but I can’t remember much of it. They told me they were 5lbs and 5lbs 9oz. I could hear myself asking, begging really, if they could please just let the babies stay with me. They are 5lbs. That’s big. Please let them stay. Just let us try. If there are any problems then we can take them to the NICU. I’m sure I sounded crazy. The babbling of an exhausted mother but it seemed so logical to me at the time.

The whole time I was in labor I kept praying they would be at least 5lbs. I thought that it would be our golden ticket. They would for sure let us keep them in our postpartum room if they were just that big. I remember I kept telling my L&D nurse that and she kept telling me it wouldn’t happen. These kids are going to the NICU no matter what. It’s policy. Any baby born before 35 weeks is sent there immediately. But I was convinced I could reason with the neonatologists. I was sure they would see I was right.

Nope. The babies were taken straight to the NICU. Kraft got to go with them. I was wheeled back into my L&D room where I sat for hours. Apparently when you deliver twins there is a much greater likelihood of bleeding too much. My nurse was there with me, but like I said before, she wasn’t chatty and I had long since stopped trying to get her to chitchat. I asked a question every now and again but I was in shock that my babies were now in the NICU. I knew they were early and my whole labor was full of medical professionals trying to prep me for that reality but it didn’t sink in until I sat in that room alone knowing that even when I was taken to my postpartum room, I still wouldn’t be with my babies. I felt really numb. I was back in that surreal world I was in when we left our house. But I wouldn’t be able to stay there too long. Pretty soon I would have to jump into the postpartum world of NICU babies with all the pumping and talking to doctors and nurses that comes with it.

That is how Ana and Dorothy came into this world 3:32 and 3:37pm. I’ve read this over and over and tried to make it sound more happy and upbeat. Or at least draw some meaning from the sadness and numbness that overcame me for a good long while after the babies were born. But I can’t. That just wasn’t my experience. And while we never ever lost perspective and knew we were so so lucky to have babies that really were never in any danger and were really low-needs NICU patients, it was still hard. It was hard to wrap my mind around how different this was from my previous pregnancies and births.

My parents were superstars and took care of our three older girls for weeks while we were lucky enough to stay at Seton. Our friends were so lovely and supportive and brought us food and came to visit and keep us company. We had an amazing support network that I will always be eternally grateful for. But that’s another story for another day that I’ll write soon.

For now, I am grateful for the amazing care we received from the Seton staff and my OBGYN during labor and delivery. And I’m grateful for the year we’ve spent with our fiesty twins who, although on the small side and a little behind, amaze me everyday and add more joy to our life than I thought would ever be possible during those dark days we spent in the NICU.

Thanks for reading.

The Twins’ Birth Story: Part I

November 29, 2015 by Vanessa 1 Comment

Our twins just turned one year old. I guess it’s about time that I write down and process their birth and surrounding events.

I feel like I have to start this story way back from the beginning.

When we did the home pregnancy test and found out we were pregnant, my response (after the appropriate ‘oh sh*t’) was something like, “Well, this ain’t our first rodeo.” Of course we marveled at the miraculousness of new life and were excited but the idea of a new baby was a comfortable one. One that seemed within our control and within our ability to handle. Something safe. Another baby? Great! We’ve done this before. We’re old pros.

I went in to see my OBGYN to confirm the pregnancy. Kraft hadn’t been to an ultrasound with me since Olivia, so, as usual, I was alone at this ultrasound (6/4). The doctor was asking the standard questions and then the ultrasound started. This is pretty much verbatim how the conversation went:

Dr: Hmm, I think I see two.

Me: Two of what? (I was sure he meant ovaries or something)

Dr: Two babies.

Me: Shut up.

I immediately remembered our good friend, Desiree, had sent me an email just recently (5/24) that ended with:

“Also…what if you have twins???”

And even though it was surprising, it kinda wasn’t. It was like hearing a story you had heard as a child but forgotten and now were only able to recall the fuzzy outline of the memory. Which was a strange feeling.

Actually, D was the first person I called when I got in the car to tell her it was all her fault. She had spoken the words and, thus, had willed it. Then I called Kraft who really took some convincing. We spent at least ten minutes of me saying I was dead serious and him saying that I was joking.

At the ultrasound we found out that the kind of twins we had were mono/di and required pretty close monitoring. I had to get blood draws every two weeks to check hormone levels, and an ultrasound every month for a while, and then every two weeks, and then, at the end, every week. Not to mention the monthly checkups with the OB.

Everything went along perfectly. No problems. I mean, I don’t think I had ever been so hungry and exhausted in my whole life, but all tests were coming back that all of us were fine. They were due on January 5th but we were expecting them just shy of Christmas (twins usually come early) .

I felt well taken care of through my pregnancy but it was hard not to feel a little unsettled. I didn’t have the air of confidence I did when we had taken the home pregnancy test. Twins are scary. There are lots of risks. One twin can take more fluid than the other, you have to deliver in the OR (operating room) in case an emergency C-section has to happen, I had decided to get an epidural for the first time which was terrifying because I hate needles. While having so many ultrasounds was nice to confirm that everything was ok, it was also a constant reason for me to worry that something was not ok. It really was a whole new world in pregnancy that I had never experienced.

The babies were growing big. Our babies are usually in the 8 lb range and it seemed like both twins were on this trajectory. No one told them they were supposed to grow like twins, not singletons. (That’s the term. Weird, I know.) I didn’t at all realize the value of this at the time.

I went in for my 34 week checkup the week of Thanksgiving and I specifically remember asking the doctor, “So lots of twin moms have been telling me they delivered at 35 weeks. Am I going to have these babies next week??” And the doctor said something to the effect that no one ever really knows but looking at the twins’ progress there are no indications that they need to come early but you never know.

So, of course, I didn’t have the babies the next week, I had them that very same week on Saturday. But that’s for tomorrow.

Here’s Kraft’s take on this first part.

If you’d like to continue reading, here is Part II.

Issues With Our Mothers

January 31, 2014 by Vanessa Leave a Comment

At some point or another, we have issues with our mom. Maybe it is universal — men and women — but I know that for daughters, most of us have a period where we think our mom and maybe our grandmother, too, is wrong about everything and all we want to do is be different from them.

With the Lily Myers post from yesterday, I’ve been thinking a lot about the development of my relationship with my mother and my grandmother. I can remember for a time in my life pitying them. Thinking they weren’t strong women. Thinking they weren’t “liberated”. Thinking that I understood the world better. For me, as a woman, this phase was necessary. As a young child I grew up being obedient to them and not reflecting too much on what they did or taught and just taking it at face value. Then when I moved away to college, it gave me some distance. It gave me some time to look at the matriarchs in my family through the lens of the outside world. The pendulum had to swing the other way. I needed to see them with this hypercritical eye.

But for me, especially after I had kids, I understood La Lupe and my mother much better and understood the strength and the sacrifice necessary in motherhood. Those traits that I saw as weakness turned into love and dedication to their family. Of course, they’re not perfect, nor am I, but after becoming a mother, I see how much of our life has to change to grow a new life around us. How much our behavior, our goals, our desires have to change. And while we strive to support our husband and kids, we know that the line between sacrificing for the family and continually developing our own self and faith is a hard one to walk.

It reminded me of a time when I was taking a feminist theology class in college. Class had just started and a student walked in the door fuming. On her way to class she took a different route and passed a statue of Mary with baby Jesus sitting on her lap that she hadn’t seen before. The words “Seat of Wisdom” were engraved on it. “That’s all Mary is to the Church? Furniture. A chair!”

Even our Mother, the Mother of God, is not exempt from our growing pains. Mary’s seeming passivity and meekness makes her seem a very frail character. But being the Seat of Wisdom is anything but weak. In order for the Word of God to be born through her, Mary had to have unparalleled faith and wisdom to accept the Wisdom of God. She is the strongest of all humanity to be chosen. Being the seat of wisdom is being the seat of power. Not the power to force people to do what she wanted, but she was endowed with the power to do the most amazing thing of her whole life — accept God’s will and raise the Son of God.

Being a mother, I know to expect this kind of reaction from my daughters. I know one day they will think they know so much better than me, they’ll think they understand the world so much more, they’ll think I’m not doing or saying the right thing, they’ll think I’m weak and small-minded. Part of maturing is giving them the space to reject what they know and trust that they will come back around. Most of us do.

Recently during a homily, the priest told us that above all we must love our parents and respect our parents. We have no idea the kind of sacrifices they made for us.

It’s true. We don’t really know what is going on in our parents’ lives. Maybe they have some real struggles that we don’t know anything about. Just like this student and Mary, we may think we understand the big picture, but really only God does. And when we take closer look at our mother, we can probably see that most of what they do comes from a place of love and a place of strength.

Our Story: How We Met

January 20, 2014 by Vanessa Leave a Comment

In Oct 2013 we celebrated our five year anniversary. As we were driving back from Dallas this past Saturday from a work training, we spent most of the car ride trying to remember some of the details of our dating life. They are so fuzzy. We couldn’t even agree on when we had our first kiss. Goodness, we’ve only been married five years and we already can’t remember so many things that I hope to remember when we’re eighty. With that in mind, I decided I better get some of this down on paper because God knows what we will remember at our ten year anniversary. This is the story of how we met:

It was the summer of 2004. For the three years before that me and two of my best friends from high school had gone on a summer mission trip to a little Catholic school — St. Peter Indian Mission School . Our home parish would load up some vans full of our youth group and drive us over to Arizona, just outside of Phoenix. There we would put on Vacation Bible School for K-8. But in 2004, our church decided to add a high school retreat for the high schoolers that lived on the reservation we served. Me and C and S were the only ones in college so they asked us to put it together and see if we could get some college guys to come along. My friend, S, who went to UT (Austin), called up Kraft and asked him if he knew of any guys in the Catholic fraternity that might be interested. Two guys signed up immediately but instead of put effort into looking for anyone else Kraft thought, hmm, free trip to AZ, why not? and he signed up, too.

Fast forward to the day before we left for St. Peter’s. Kraft and his two friends drove in to S’s house and me and C went to go meet them. Kraft tells me at the time they had no idea they were going to see anyone except S. They were not expecting to meet any new girls yet; they just thought they were going to crash at S’s house until the morning when they had to leave. We could totally tell. When C and I walked into S’s kitchen, the looks on the guys’ faces was so classic deer in the headlights. Later Kraft told me he was so embarrassed. He said that if he knew he was going to meet some girls he would have not worn what he was wearing. But we quickly all hit it off and were cracking up over some Subway sandwiches.

We all got along so so well. I remember just laughing and laughing that whole week. I didn’t feel any feelings of romance toward Brandon but I liked him right away. I loved how much he loved his faith and he was funny. Oh yeah, and I thought he was such an endearingly dorky guy. All three of the guys would sit around and argue about liturgical things.

The retreat we ran that week went great but it was exhausting. All the kids stayed with us overnight all week so we never got a break and they never, ever slept. For the whole week.

Of course the kids being high schoolers, they were very interested in our love lives and decided to take it upon themselves to play matchmaker. They paired up my other two friends with the other two guys and then they paired up Brandon and I. At this point, I still didn’t have feelings for Kraft in that way but (he told me later) he was so excited that they paired us up. The kids spent the rest of the week pretending that we were married to each other.

At some point during the week I realized that Kraft liked me. He would just always find a reason to be around me (not that any of us could get very far from one another), but he would always end up sitting next to me at lunch or during Mass or on a bus ride. I didn’t like him like that but I also wasn’t weirded out by it. I was so comfortable around him and could say anything to him. It was nice to make such a good friend so quickly.

By the end of the week, other than being exhausted, the six of us all really loved each other — not in the romantic sense but a true sense of camaraderie, of being family. We flew back to Houston and I’m pretty sure that Brandon made a deal with the person who was sitting next to me to move it so he could sit next to me. We talked and laughed the whole trip home and right as the plane started its descent, he finally worked up the courage to ask me….

for my AOL instant messenger screename and email address. Omigoodness, he was/is such a dork! He couldn’t even ask for my number but it was so so cute. To this day I want to make and sell shirts that say: “Hey baby, what’s your email? Let’s IM sometime.”