Good Things and Hard Things

(Note: This post was started in November 2015. I've sat on it for months trying to work out how to say what I meant, but I've decided to just publish it as-is.)



This last week (the first week of November 2015) has been full of good things and it has been full of hard things. It's been a rollercoaster of a week -- partially because there were actual, physical rollercoasters involved, but also because I've been trying to sort through my emotions and understand better why, even when I'm surrounded by good things, I occasionally just feel the need to cry. So bear with me as I try to dump words on a page to make sense of the jumble in my brain.

I tend to think of things in boxes, and the boxes don't touch. (If you're unfamiliar with Mark Gungor's "Men's brains vs. Women's brains" spiel, go give it a listen. It's pretty entertaining.) Events and things happen in their own little boxes, and once I'm done with a box and pack it neatly away, I don't usually expect it to leak into other boxes -- especially not into boxes that are figuratively across the room. So when these emotional leaks happen (and happen they do), it takes me some time to sort out where all the extra emotion is coming from. Which brings me back to this week.

We went to Disneyland! It was really fun and exhausting and we got to see Mickey and talk with Mary Poppins and ride the Mark Twain steam ship and eat delicious food and it was all fantastic. The wonderful company I work for sent Darren and I (and several other families from the office) to Disneyland Resort in California for a week, and it was a great vacation. I planned and organized the whole trip, so I've been looking forward to it for months.

When I first booked the trip, I was about 6 weeks pregnant. I did the math, and figured I'd be about 20 weeks by the time we visited Mickey Mouse. "Perfect!" I thought. "We should be able to find out the sex of the baby before we go, and we can get fun baby souvenirs. I've always loved the little tiny Mickey ears!" Then, a few weeks after booking the trip, I miscarried. Even with how much peace and love and support I felt going through the miscarriage, I knew there would be rough days (and weeks, and maybe months) ahead. But overall I felt okay; I felt fairly calm and like perhaps I had dealt with that particular grief and could move forward in faith and positivity. In fact, there were days where I didn't think about the miscarriage at all -- I was handling it much better than I expected to, all things considered.

In the week or so before our trip, there were a few moments where I felt sad as I realized a milestone I had been looking forward to -- finding out the sex of the baby -- wasn't going to happen. Disneyland is supposed to be "the happiest place on Earth" and we were "supposed" to be going there with some of the happiest news of our lives, but instead we were going without.


(This is where the original post left off. From what I can remember, I started crying while writing and had to walk away. I never could figure out how to finish this post, so I'll just leave you with this: Disneyland was wonderful, and it was hard, and that's okay. It wasn't nearly as bad as I worried it might have been, and I'm glad we took the opportunity to go & make happy memories together.)