Sparkly Green Earrings Read online

  And then came the day in January when I drove to Austin to be with Gulley while she delivered the most beautiful red-haired baby boy I’d ever seen. It didn’t matter that her epidural didn’t work the way it was supposed to or that I heard her actually growl when her husband had the poor judgment to enjoy a stick of beef jerky while she worked through a contraction. All that mattered was the barrel-chested, impossibly pink little boy in the nursery who made all the other babies seem sickly by comparison. All I could think was, HOW CAN I GET ME ONE OF THOSE?

  But in spite of my fever for the babies, I knew we’d need to wait a little longer because we’d already committed to chaperone more than a hundred high school students on a spring break ski trip, and then we had plans to travel to Sicily with my parents so I could see the land of my ancestors. These are what you call first-world problems. Oh, we can’t have a baby right now because we have to go to Colorado and ski and then go to Italy to tour Saint Peter’s Basilica.

  Looking back, I think the funniest part of all this is that we were under the illusion we were in control. That a baby would happen on our timetable, like we were a couple of fertile magicians pulling a rabbit out of a hat.

  As it turned out, that wasn’t exactly what God had planned for us. Yes, we would become parents (otherwise this would be a short book), but our path to getting there was harder and filled with more heartache than we’d counted on. I guess in a way it became our first lesson in the realities of parenthood. Which is to say, it can make you feel like a monkey in a windstorm.

  Chapter 2

  Eight Pregnancy Tests Later . . .

  One day in April 2002 I began to suspect I might be pregnant. I wish I could tell you the exact day, but I’ve never been very good at math. I’m not sure how I knew precisely, because the symptoms were very similar to PMS: irritability, bouts of crying, and the occasional urge to throw a toaster oven through the kitchen window. But then came a morning when I tried to eat my standard breakfast of champions—Diet Coke with a side of Cocoa Puffs—and immediately felt like I needed to stick my entire head in the toilet.

  I can’t imagine why a baby would reject a breakfast chock-full of caffeine and synthetic chocolate puffs of sugar.

  With trembling hands, I grabbed my car keys and headed to the closest drugstore to buy a six-pack of pregnancy tests, because I knew myself well enough to be sure I’d never believe the first five. I am obsessive and have a tendency to overcompensate in all areas, so there was no reason pregnancy should be any different.

  The minute I got home, I ran to the bathroom to take the first test. Never mind that the instructions suggested it was best to use your first urine of the day.

  (Of course, I’ve always had a notoriously small bladder, so how would I ever know if my first urine of the day was when I got up to go to the bathroom at 1 a.m. or 3 a.m. or 6 a.m.?)

  (I’m not kidding. In college I used to drive Gulley crazy because I would go to the bathroom three times in about a ten-minute span before bed in the hope that my body would forgo the 3 a.m. bathroom wake-up call.)

  (It never worked.)

  Anyway, I tore open the test, figured out which end I was supposed to pee on, and then waited for the results. Within two minutes there was a very distinct double pink line indicating that I was, in fact, knocked up. And my first thought was, Oh my word, I am pregnant. Followed immediately by my second thought, which was, Oh my word, I am pregnant.

  And then I thought of that old joke about the difference between a pregnant woman and a lightbulb.

  (I’m sorry. But it’s true.)

  As I sat on the couch and waited for Perry to walk through the door, I felt an overwhelming sense of gratitude combined with a little anxiety. I thanked God for this new little life growing inside me and prayed that I wouldn’t mess it up. A baby. We were going to have a baby. And it had happened so fast. I never even got to use the little ovulating indicator kit I’d bought at the drugstore for $14.99. I guess my mom had been right all those times she’d warned me it only takes ONE TIME to get pregnant.

  Perry walked in a little while later and didn’t even have a chance to shut the back door before I jumped on him and yelled, “I’M PREGNANT!” We hugged, we cried, we called everyone we knew to tell them the news, as if we were the first people on earth who had ever conceived a child. It was like we’d invented fire. Or something equally significant, like a chain of coffeehouses poised for world domination.

  Several days later I went to the doctor’s office to get my blood drawn to confirm that the eight pregnancy tests I’d taken were accurate. Yes, I said eight. I’d purchased two more in addition to the original six because you can never be too sure. What if the seven prior tests were all defective?

  When I reached the eight-week mark, the doctor had me come in for an initial ultrasound, where they used something that looked like a curling iron gone wrong. Perry went with me, and we immediately saw a little bean with a beating heart on the screen. Dr. Hedges said everything looked good but asked us to come back the following week for a follow-up ultrasound just to make sure everything was okay.

  And here’s where I have to admit it never occurred to me that something might be wrong. I just thought this was standard procedure or maybe he really liked us and wanted to give us the chance to see our baby again because we were so excited. I think, based on this information, it’s safe to say I’m an optimist at heart.

  A week later we were back at the doctor’s office while he scanned the screen to find our baby. And then he scanned some more. And then some more. Perry held one of my hands, and suddenly I realized Dr. Hedges was taking my other hand. He looked at me with sad eyes and said, “I’m sorry. The baby is gone. There isn’t a heartbeat.”

  Well, that was not what I was expecting to hear.

  Heartbroken, I looked up at Perry and realized he’d turned completely white. The doctor noticed it too because he immediately pressed the intercom button and called for a nurse to help with “a big oak” that was about to go down. I will always remember that moment because even in the sadness, I thought it was odd that he’d just referred to my husband as a big oak.

  I sat there feeling numb and exposed, desperately wishing I was wearing more than a thin, backless hospital gown as Dr. Hedges began to talk to us about scheduling a D and C procedure and hospital check-in times and other logistics to remove this baby, our baby, who was no longer alive.

  All of a sudden I felt as if I couldn’t breathe. The reality started to fall in on me as I got dressed and walked through the waiting room full of pregnant women. I’d just been one of those smiling pregnant women a few minutes before. Now, in the span of one short ultrasound, I was fighting back tears and holding a slip of paper with a hospital appointment time. The grief settled in my chest, and I wanted to run away. But where do you go when the pain is coming from somewhere inside you?

  Perry and I walked robotically to the car with such a sense of loss over something we’d just now realized we wanted so much. Our baby was gone. Slowly, I picked up my cell phone and started making the hardest calls I’d ever made in my life.

  There was no easy way to tell our parents and close friends that we’d lost the baby, but I wanted to get it over with. My strategy was to face the pain head-on and put it behind us as soon as possible. Which is great, except pain doesn’t really work that way. It’s sneaky. It hits you in the middle of the night when things are quiet, and it whispers that it may never go away. As soon as I got my daddy on the phone and told him our news, the dam broke. The tears fell like they’d never stop, and my shoulders began to shake in that way they do when you’re headed straight for an ugly cry. This was going to be the first grandchild, and I felt like we’d let everybody down.

  We were hit with the sobering reality that this whole parenting gig might be a little harder than we’d originally thought back when we believed the most difficult part would be deciding on a name the kids on the playground couldn’t turn into an insult.

  Chapte
r 3

  The Worst Summer Ever

  Like most things in life, the miscarriage ended up being a lot more complicated than I’d originally thought. Perry and I were sad, but we figured we’d try again in a month or so. I went back for a routine follow-up visit to the doctor, and they had me take a pregnancy test to confirm everything had gone as planned with the D and C.

  The doctor didn’t seem concerned when the test came back positive. He just told me to wait one more week, take a test at home, and call his office if it came back positive. Which is exactly what happened. I was instructed to come in for a blood test so they could get a better reading on my hormone levels and try to figure out what was going on with my body.

  I was in Dallas on a business trip, trying to function like a normal person, not someone who wanted to stay in bed forever curled up from the sadness, when my doctor called me. (The doctor called me personally on my cell phone. Not his nurse. Not a staff member. The doctor. This couldn’t bode well.)

  He explained that there were some complications, and he used words like molar pregnancy, tumor, and cancer. Apparently my body didn’t realize I was no longer pregnant, and rogue cells had begun to congregate in my uterus like a band of terrorists plotting some sort of jihad. The conversation ended with his advice to “go home immediately.”

  This probably goes without saying, but I began to cry and couldn’t stop. I cried as I explained to my manager that I needed to get on the first flight out of Dallas, I cried when I called Perry to explain what was going on, and I cried until I hyperventilated when I talked to my daddy and heard the concern in his voice.

  I boarded my flight home to San Antonio and have no doubt I was one of those people who fellow passengers are deeply concerned about but are a little afraid to talk to lest they become emotionally unhinged.

  Perry picked me up from the airport, and I almost collapsed with relief when I saw him. He is always the voice of reason, the one who will balance my outstanding ability to go right to the worst-case scenario and set up a tent to camp there indefinitely. As I blurted out all the what-ifs and whys, he remained steady and reminded me that God was in control and we’d know more after our doctor’s appointment the next morning.

  As I lay in bed that night, after we’d asked God for wisdom and peace, I felt the fear and anxiety start to settle in again. But then I heard the voice of God as close to audible as anything I’d ever experienced: “It doesn’t matter what the doctors say. It only matters what I say. I am in control.”

  Peace washed over me, and I had a deep sense that everything was going to be okay, even if we were on a different road than I’d planned.

  The next morning I opened my Bible to Isaiah 55 and felt these words jump off the page:

  You will go out in joy

  and be led forth in peace;

  the mountains and hills

  will burst into song before you,

  and all the trees of the field

  will clap their hands.

  ISAIAH 55:12

  It felt like God’s promise to me that I would be brought back to a place of joy at some point in the future even if I couldn’t imagine it at the moment. And I held on to that promise with complete desperation.

  When we got the doctor’s report, it turned out that I hadn’t had a normal miscarriage—I’d had the deluxe version, thanks to a partial molar pregnancy. A version that required me to get my blood drawn every week to check hormone levels and do a bunch of other medical-jargon things that went over my head because all I wanted to know was, When can I have a baby?

  Perry and I refer to this time as The Worst Summer Ever.

  I wish I could say I spent this entire postmiscarriage season filled with peace, but that would be a lie. There are only so many times you can get stuck with a needle by an unsympathetic nurse and not get angry. Not to mention my hormone levels weren’t dropping like they were supposed to and my arms were beginning to have track marks, thanks to the aggressive blood draws. I knew I was in trouble when I cried during an old episode of Sanford and Son. Of course, the bigger question may be why I was watching this antiquated television show about a junk dealer and his son in the first place. I was in a dark hole.

  By September things still weren’t going as planned. I was told that I’d need to have powerful injections of some drug with a name that had a disproportionate number of consonants in it, and because of that drug, I’d need to wait three more months before I could try to get pregnant again.

  Yet only two months later, I felt pretty sure Perry and I might be poor candidates for any sort of “safe sex” campaign. I drove to the store to load up on pregnancy tests, and it took exactly five minutes to confirm that, yes, I was pregnant. Again. Ahead of schedule. And pretty confused about how exactly this had transpired. In fact, when I went to see my doctor the following week, I apologized, explaining, “I’m not sure how this happened.”

  He offered to buy me a book about the whole process.

  I think he was being sarcastic.

  So it all began again. Except this time I knew how fragile that little life inside me was, largely because I’d spent so much time on various pregnancy message boards on the Internet, which made it seem like the rarest exception of all when babies actually make it. I mean, have you read What to Expect When You’re Expecting? As if I couldn’t make up enough worst-case scenarios all by myself, now I was worrying about things I’d never even considered, like toxoplasmosis. Which apparently is some kind of blood infection you can get from a cat. And I didn’t even own a cat. I’d thought about owning a cat, though, and what if that counted?

  But at some point I realized I could spend this entire pregnancy in complete fear and paranoia about cats and other potential issues, or I could let go and trust that God was in control of this little person I was growing from scratch. I realize that technically it’s not from scratch so much as the merging of a sperm and an egg, but that’s pretty darn close to making something from nothing. You’re welcome for that free reproductive lesson.

  All I knew was that if this pregnancy was going to result in a real, live, human baby I would raise to adulthood, I didn’t want to look back and regret that I’d spent the entire nine months living in fear and dread about what might happen. I wanted to embrace all the mornings I spent with my head in a toilet and the midnight runs for six or eleven glazed donuts . . . for the baby. I wanted to look at books filled with baby names and throw out my suggestions to Perry while he sat on the couch and watched hunting shows starring Ted Nugent and tell him, “No way are we naming this baby Ted. Or Nugent.”

  The only guarantee I had was that God was in control. He was the one who knew the plans he had for me and this little baby and our family. And while I didn’t even pretend to understand his ways and still felt a little raw from the miscarriage and the heartbreak of the previous summer, I trusted him with the outcome. So I sat back and prepared to enjoy my pregnancy and prayed that God would bless us with a baby who would grow into a strong, fearless leader with a lot of personality.

  He hasn’t always answered my prayers in the ways I’ve expected—in fact, most of the time he answers in ways I never could have thought up. But, man, I think that time he was in heaven thinking, Just you wait. Because we got all those things and then some.

  Now we’re just holding on for the ride.

  Chapter 4

  In the Ghetto

  Growing up in Sunday school, I always heard that God gives everyone special gifts. Some people can sing like angels, others have the gift of encouragement, and a lucky few can get on the dance floor and dance in such a way that people will form a circle around them just to watch.

  Not one of those things is my gift. Even though there were times in college when I drank enough Zima to fancy myself quite the dancer.

  As for me, I possess the unique talent of making stressful situations even more tense by taking on more than any person with such limited organizational skills and a short attention span should. (Look! So
mething shiny!) This may explain why I convinced Perry it was a good idea for us to completely renovate our home during my pregnancy.

  Actually, we’d decided to start the project months earlier, and I didn’t really see a reason to postpone it just because I was having a baby. So we loaded up our truck and we moved to Beverly. (Hills, that is. Swimming pools, movie stars . . .)

  Except it wasn’t nearly as glamorous, nor were we nearly as sophisticated and prepared as the Clampetts. And it wasn’t Beverly Hills. Even so, we packed up our entire house and moved into a rental home a few miles away while we began a construction project that still remains the strongest evidence that our marriage will last forever. Because if we survived that, we can survive anything.

  There’s so much talk about the divorce rate in the United States, but I think all that could change if one of the requirements for getting a marriage license is that the couple must first complete some sort of home renovation project together. All those trips to Home Depot, the debates about budgets, decisions about paint colors, and the day your beloved tells you there will be no granite countertops—those are the tests of true love. That’s when you know if this is someone you want to be with for the long haul—or when you realize you’re already stuck with that person for a lifetime. A lifetime spent with laminate countertops instead of granite. But really, I’m over it.

  As for us, we took on this enormous construction project long after we’d said our vows and while I was simultaneously spending my days at Babies “R” Us obsessing over all the different bottle options and trying to determine whether a wipe warmer was something you actually needed in order to have a baby.

  (You don’t, by the way. That baby will be high maintenance enough without creating the expectation for a warm wet wipe.)

  And when I say that we took on the construction project, I mean that Perry contracted the entire job and worked tirelessly to make sure everything turned out the way we wanted while I cried every night because I was worried the house wouldn’t be ready on time and, oh my word, what if we had to bring our new baby girl home to a rental house instead of her new pink nursery?