On Faith: Where Did Mine Go?

"Pure gold put in the fire comes out of it proved pure; genuine faith put through this suffering comes out proved genuine.  When Jesus wraps this all up, it's your faith, not your gold, that God will have on display as evidence of His victory."       

-- 1 Peter 1:7, The Message

On Grief: The Responses

I was talking with a friend recently about this advice column: 

In hard times, standard rules of friendship don’t necessarily apply

The Pros of NOT Being a Mom

Losing a child is devastating. And I don't even know how I got to a point where I'm writing a post on the positives of NOT being a mom. Because I want to be a mom some day. 

I don't want people to read the title of this post and think this is a post about the pros of having a miscarriage.  There are no pros to that. There is no silver lining. This is not one of those "everything worked out in the end" posts.  Miscarriages are terrible and traumatic and they do not happen for a reason.  

My first attempt at becoming a mom ended a little over six months ago.  Shortly after it happened, I figured I would just try to get pregnant again. But I was advised to wait about three months. Then I had a rejection episode in January.  I made the decision to go back on birth control so that I could focus on the health of my kidney transplant. 

That decision in January is kind of what has helped me discover some of the things I'm revealing in this post.  The first thing being, I'm actually OK with not being someone's mom. And here's why.

My Sort-Of Morning Routine

Lone deck chair at sunrise.

I've talked before about how I am NOT a morning person.  In the same way that "morning people" feel the day ahead of them brings new possibilities, I feel that way about night time. I even prefer dinner foods over breakfast foods.  But staying up late every night doesn't really jive with my work life or my personal life.  So slowly, very very slowly, I've gotten into the habit of *gasp* waking up early, and shaking a fist to the sky every time I do it.  

Some people have a morning routine.  Routines are comforting and give you some feeling of control over your day.  I have a couple of routines in my life, but a morning routine isn't one of them.  Sometimes I have events to go to for work that start really early. And sometimes I have doctor's appointments, or I have to get lab work done at the hospital.  As a sick person, you learn that things can go from good to bad to worse in just a few minutes. And all of sudden that routine you had turns into "that set of things I did really well in a timely fashion one morning back in November 2014."   

What I have now is a list of things that I have to do every morning, along with a list of things I want to do some mornings. So these are the things that get me up.  

Baby at 348 Months

I know, I know. My birthday was months ago.  But I've been doing birthday updates every year and I still wanted to do one for this year.

Recently, I became fascinated with those monthly baby updates that people share on social media. And I thought, "Why don't we continue to do that for every age?" So I did one.

The Power of Vacation

I ended 2015 with the attitude of, "F&*k it, I do what I want." After a year, of doing things to set myself up for a healthy pregnancy and future child, and then having that not happen, I commissioned 2016 as "Jewel's Year of Fun."  This is exactly what I told my transplant nephrologist when I told him I was taking my second vacation of the 2016 in March.  Yes, my second.