How Did We Get Here?

At the time I weaned my third child six months ago, I had been pregnant or nursing for over five years. I'm not bragging, I'm just saying it lends insight into my mental state. There are a lot of other circumstances that lend insight into my mental state, but I'll save those for another time, hehe.

Stay-at-home-mom (SAHM), housewife, homemaker. None of those terms is very sexy. The job is not sexy. The job I had before I was a mom was sexy. I was in inventory control in the buying office for Victoria's Secret Stores. Yes, I worked in an office where photos of half-naked women were everywhere, and to find a bra on my male bosses desk was commonplace. I was concerned with terms like "trend" and "stock-to-sales." I could spin a sales story with the best of them. I helped develop a fashion allocation system, and invented a process of sales projection utilizing historical sales by store/sku, which was unheardof at the time in the retail industry. I traveled to New York, California, and Miami regularly.

When I was 27, we decided it was good time to have a kid. Everyone else was doing it, we knew we didn't want to grow old kidless, so we decided to "try." Four years later we were still "trying." The turning point came one winter night when my spouse was in New York and I sat in my bedroom, needle grasped tightly in my fist, telling myself I would plunge the intra-muscular injection into my thigh at the count of three. I counted to three for three hours that night before actually stabbing myself. But a month later a little heartbeat was on the ultrasound. Our "little miracle" was on the way.

It was all downhill from there. Fertility was never an issue again, actually quite the opposite. My boys are each spaced 22 months apart. All three were born via c-section. #1 was an emergency because his heartrate dropped. So much for natural childbirth. I was told there was no reason to think there would be an issue the second time around, so we tried a VBAC. Atticus came out wounded and blue. Lowest APGAR scores a live birth can get. All's well that ends well, though. Obviously, Maxie was a scheduled c-section, and I was really hung up on the scheduled birthday. I just had them schedule it two weeks early. I went into labor the night before and the contractions were 3 mins apart two hours before the surgery was scheduled. So he picked his own birthday anyway. Like I said, all's well that ends well.