What I have been up to

Wow. That took a while to come back to.

It has been several years since I last shared but let me summarize what happened after my last post.

I got tired of commuting. I found a work location closer to our home in Portland. This resulted in a very simple equation of life:

Closer to home+more time to sleep = my wife got pregnant. Obviously.

Since my wife got pregnant I put in for a new position in Central Oregon and we left PDX and moved back. We wanted to give my daughter something we had more of growing up in Idaho and Vermont… space. 

The next few years were a blessing in a lot of ways with my daughter, she was beautiful and made me wonder how and what I was “so busy” with before. The first few months drunk on no sleep my wife and I had many late nights admiring the baby’s business haircut she came with and seeing past the colic she obviously had now looking back. 

Amidst all the beauty during those first years there was also a reality that life is not subtle. Our dogs… all three of them died over the next few years. I still miss them all. Even if they were assholes, they were still the best kind. 

I realized parenting was harder than I thought. The things I feared the most, the diapers and sleep deprivation were not the hardest afterall. The hardest parts were all the work you don’t do on yourself, the boundaries you don’t set with toxic relationships and the things your mind blocks out that have a way of surfacing when you relive those younger moments. More on that another time.

One of the best ways I can describe it was when I was in a recovery meeting and felt brave enough to share for the first time that I was an alcoholic even though the fact I recently quit drinking didn’t negate that. A woman there looked me in the eye when I was done and said “Welcome to your feelings.”

Quitting alcohol and having a family had that in common for me. I was welcomed by my feelings a lot during that time and realized despite all my training I was unable to suppress them. Kids are these little bundles of all things good in the world and are a constant reminder that we are meant to have some expression or emotion in our life. The void of emotions from my life has been a constant struggle that unfortunately has not come without hurt to others. 

Despite the challenges, joys and just life happening we kept moving and setting goals, we traveled throughout the northwest as much as we could, we got a border collie and we decided to have another kid. The wiser parents we were this time decided we were going to do it differently. We would ask for help. We would welcome people into our lives and celebrate those who wanted to be helpful.

Those were the years I was so amazed by how strong my wife was. She was ill for the first 3 months of her first pregnancy with hyperemesis gravidarum aka not being able to stop throwing up relying on Zofran every 4-6 hours. This pregnancy she would end up having it the whole 9 months. She believed so much in that pregnancy and I told her once we had the baby we would leave the house and the dark room she had to stay in to keep the migraines down. 

Our daughter was born in April of 2020 in the beginning of what we were told was a few week lockdown to suppress coronavirus.

We were happy to be parents again, our latest was a snuggly kid without colic so we continued to quarantine at home and wait. The pandemic would end to some extent and we would move one more time for work to the Columbia River Gorge where we are now.

You are caught up now. Mostly.