Beauty in the Dirt

A Perfect Mom. What kind of picture pops up in your head when you hear that phrase? When it’s 4pm and I’m still in my pajamas, I look around my painfully disorganized house, with a sink full of unwashed dishes, toys still strewn all over the floor, and about a hundred piles of baby clothes that have been sitting out for about a week when I got the brilliant idea that I would organize my house with two kids under four and a husband who is gone to another country for two weeks, I have a pretty clear picture of what DOESN’T pop into my mind when I think of “perfect mom” status. … Or maybe when I’ve heard “why?” for the hundredth time in thirty minutes and I snap at my son for no other reason than I’m tired and overwhelmed by the fact that I’ve done nothing but answer his questions all day and maybe change a couple diapers. … Or maybe when I take my three-year-old son out to play in the rain and I’m scolded over and over by countless well-meaning Chinese grandparent

We left Canada 23 hours earlier. Our last meal was Tim Hortons sandwiches and doughnuts, that we had barely made it on the plane to buy. We got off the plane at 2am. All eight of our bags safely arrived, and I breathed an audible sigh of relief. We walked out of the baggage claim and were immediately swarmed by “black” (unlicensed) cab drivers yelling “Bus! Bus!” and “Where you going?” and talking amongst themselves about how we must not understand since we weren’t responding. There was no interim. No shallow end. One moment we were eating sandwiches, and the next we had dove in headfirst into this swirling, strange, familiar place that we called home. We were back in China. Jet lag came crashing in, and 3am “Frozen” and “Kung Fu Panda” parties commenced (life with a three-year-old). Tim Hortons doughnuts that didn’t take a second thought, only hours ago, suddenly bombarded my brain, and taunted me tirelessly. Just twenty-four hours ago they were a five-minute-walk away

I posted this on facebook, but here it is for anyone else who wants to see it. PART ONE: MY VBAC JOURNEY “Hours past as we were left alone all night to watch our baby’s heart rate rise and fall…” My first birth experience was a traumatic one. We were in a foreign country where we didn’t speak the language. My baby was in distress. We were alone. Nurses came in and out throughout the night, but only long enough to tell us that our baby was not ok, and then left us alone to process what that could possibly mean. Labour ended after 12 hours in an emergency C-section where I was put to sleep and didn’t see my son until hours after he was born. And after it all ended, the doctor told me, “I really don’t think you are big enough to have children naturally.” I was so very grateful for God’s protection and presence with me during that scary night, but what I wasn’t prepared for was the depression that came afterward. I didn’t pinpoint I had experienced postpartum depression until this year wh

I decided to start blogging again. I had another blog, and can't access the password anymore, so here I am starting from scratch, haha! This post will just contain the old posts from my other blog. Wednesday, February 22, 2012 Aaron Ezekiel Fraser Around eleven months ago I found myself again trying to convince my husband that we were capable enough to have a baby... reminding him that everyone is scared, and that someday, when the time is right, and I had finished studying Chinese, and we had more money, and we had time, and we couldn't think of anymore reasons not to have a baby we could think about getting pregnant (so, never?). Of course the conversation ended with us deciding that we'd talk about it more when the time came... I have this thing with thinking about things way too far in advance... Little did I know... About a week later, I had a dream that I had a baby. There was more to the dream, but that's all that's really important right now.