I obviously haven’t been good about writing the past month. I don’t know if it’s the pregnancy exhaustion, low grade depression, or the fact that I’ve been feeling guilty about the idea of typing something that isn’t for work. I’ll try to hit the high points relatively quickly. May 6th my son had his First Communion. It was a beautiful mass and I was really touched by how many of our family members showed up to support him. He was really excited about the whole experience.

On our way home that night my oldest son told me his friend’s mom had two weeks left to live. I knew she had cancer, but I think I assumed since she was young it would be treatable. That hit me really hard. I think part of it was guilt that I hadn’t tried to do more to help the family in the five months that I had known she had cancer; and part of it was the empathy of knowing how hard my father’s death hit me and I’m not a teenager. This boy’s parents were divorced, so the assumption is he’ll go live with his father now and have to start over at a new school. As hard as it’s been to lose my father, I didn’t really need him and my life didn’t really have to change drastically. 

I didn’t sleep well that night because I just felt awful about that whole situation. The next morning a friend texted me early in the morning, saying she was thinking about me and wanted to check in. I told her I had a rough night worry about this other family. She told me when it’s hardest to pray is when we need to pray the most. That definitely felt like a God thing, to send me a message from a friend when I really needed it.

My son’s friend got a tattoo of his mother’s handwriting a few days before she passed and I thought that was really sweet. I don’t know yet if he’ll be able to go to school with my son in the fall (he had been living with his grandparents and mother, but his father lives in a different school district). Maybe starting over somewhere new would be better. I think I really struggle with things I cannot control, even as it relates to people I barely know. I’ve just been praying for the family and I guess that’s all I can really do. 

The friend who reached out to me that morning I really needed it received an award at our state capitol a few days after that. I rode up there with a friend to attend the ceremony. We had a fun time. We didn’t want to stay at the hotel where the ceremony was being held. We had both stayed there before and didn’t like it. So, we used my Hilton rewards and stayed at the tallest building in the city (not saying much – it was 13 floors). The friend I rode with is also a wonderful human who has been so sweet to me. She’s wanting to bring me lunch at work one day because she knows how overwhelmed I’ve been, but I just almost never get to take a lunch break.

Two of my children have birthdays in May. My youngest son turned five and my daughter turned twelve. Their birthdays are only two days apart, but we try to do separate celebrations. I think they both had good celebrations this year. My daughter has started a tradition of buying crazy clothes at thrift stores with her friends then going bowling and out of chicken wings. It was a good time. The day of her birthday she played her last two soccer games of the season, one of my sons had a soccer game, and my oldest son had his football combine. It was a packed day and I was exhausted at the end, but everything went smoothly. My daughter won both her soccer games, my son won his game, and my oldest did great at his football combine. 

My mother turned sixty the next weekend. Several of our family and friends all came together to celebrate her. I’m sure it was incredibly difficult to have her first birthday without my father, but we went out with some family and friends to a brewery on Saturday that weekend and then my mother and I went to a concert fundraiser with some of my friends from church. The next day we went to the lake and went out on my uncle’s boat. It was a fun weekend, but jam-packed with stuff. Once again, I was exhausted. 

I started crying talking to my uncle about work that day. I felt so stupid crying, but he was so sweet. He owned a business with his parents, but his father went on disability and his mother (my Nana) died of cancer shortly after that. So, he knows what it’s like to be stuck managing a business all by yourself. He ended up merging with a larger business and said having a smaller piece of a big pie was much better for him than having the whole smaller pie. My husband is really worried about me giving up the independence, but after talking to my uncle I felt better about trying to merge the firm.

Memorial Day weekend was everything I ever wanted, in that I got to take lots of naps. The week leading up to it was a bit stressful because my husband is having a lot of pain in his foot that we thought was gout, but it isn’t going away when he controls his diet and the tests showed only a slight elevation in uric acid. We’re going to try to get him back in for more testing. He abused opiates for over a decade and I don’t think we really have a clear picture of the long-term effects of opiate use. I mentioned this to my husband today and he said, “I know the long-term effects. It fucks up your insides.” It’s a little scary, but I’m trying not to really panic until we know what we’re dealing with. 

When I mentioned the gout possibility to my mother she said she thinks gout is a symptom of more system issues. My father had two close friends and a brother who had gout. The two close friends both died before my father, one had cancer, the other I think was liver failure. My uncle is still alive, but he had to have open heart surgery, had a stroke, and required dialysis for several months. 

Speaking of my husband, he had a couple anger outbursts over the last month that really have me worried too. One night he went on a tangent about how much he resented me and then threw our vacuum at the TV, obviously destroying the TV. As he was trying to calm himself down, he was trying to say he’s just stressed about having another baby. I felt like he’s trying to project his mental health issues on this baby and I really don’t think that’s fair. The next morning he backed into one of our cars with his work truck. It’s not really significant damage, it was just a lot in a short amount of time. He had another night shortly after that where it really seemed like he was losing his shit. I told him I thought he needed to go to therapy and I had told myself if he pushed back on that I was going to start talking to him about separating. He didn’t argue at all and said if I could find him someone he will go. I reached out to my therapist and she’s looking into it. He’s been acting much better the last few weeks and seems much less negative about the new baby.

I had to cancel my last therapy session because I had a meeting with another law firm I’m hoping to merge with. Work has been incredibly overwhelming this month. I am in Court almost every single day, and when I’m not in Court it seems like I have client appointments every minute. So, I have no time during the work day to do drafting. I’ve been trying to stay late at work one night per week. That helps, but its not enough. The first meeting with the other firm seemed to go well. They’re very interested and are willing to let me keep the things I want and take over the other things for me so that there’s less on my plate. 

The associate attorney my father and I hired turned out to be basically useless. I didn’t really want to face the confrontation of firing him. I was hoping he would quit when I restructured his pay, but I found some disturbing stuff about him on Instagram one night and decided to fire him the next day. My staff are all thrilled that he’s gone. Apparently, he had opened another law firm in another state and spent the time he was working for me filing a lawsuit against the federal government. Luckily, he filed that pro se and did not mention our firm (I have’t read the 189 page pleading, but a friend of mine did). Also, I dodged a bullet by never adding him to our firm’s website. His pleading and law firm advertisement kind of blew up on Twitter, which was amusing to read after I had separated myself from all the craziness. 

I had the first ultrasound for the baby on the two month anniversary of my father’s death. The baby was moving around a lot, which was cute, but it still looked kind of like a bean. I told myself I was going to get through it without crying. I had court before and after the appointment and I got through all of that, but that evening was our GriefShare group and I had a breakdown telling the group about it. I still am struggling with my father not being here for this baby. I was also really worried the baby wouldn’t have a heartbeat or something would look wrong.  

We haven’t done a social media pregnancy announcement. I don’t know if I will. We’ve told most of the people we know in person at this point. My mother had told me my former partner, who is helping me work out this merger, wanted me to keep it quiet so I didn’t look desperate. My husband and I felt a little odd about keeping it a secret though because it felt sort of dishonest; and I worked at that law firm when I had my first two children so they know I work through my pregnancy and get back to work relatively quickly. When we had our initial meeting they already knew I was pregnant though. I suspect my former partner probably decided to tell them because I don’t think anyone who would have known them knew I was pregnant. They didn’t seem the least bit concerned about it. I didn’t really think they would have any problems with it. Now that all that’s out in the open, I still haven’t felt like making a social media announcement. I’m still worried about the possibility of miscarrying. I don’t feel like I was very healthy when I got pregnant and this has been a really stressful season. So, if we do a social media announcement I suspect I’ll wait until after the anatomy ultrasound.

I’m going to go through midwives this time. My younger two kids are really excited. My youngest keeps saying, “My baby sister is in your stomach.” He’s also said, “I’m naming my baby sister Penny,” to which my middle son said, “We are not naming our baby after currency!” It’s been really cute how the younger two keep talking about “our baby” and “our pregnancy” and “our due date.” I know some women resent that type of talk, but I think it’s a family event for us and I’m glad the kids are embracing it. My older two children are less excited, but they don’t get excited about much of anything anymore. My oldest did make the comment, “Why didn’t Dad just use a condom?”

Two days ago, I had my first trial with an interpreter. It was an Arabic interpreter, which for our area of the world is really unusual. There is only one “court-certified” Arabic interpreter for our entire state, so we scheduled this trial months ago to accommodate her schedule. Then, she got in a car accident the morning of our trial, so we couldn’t use her. Luckily, one of the attorney’s involved found a “court-qualified” interpreter out of Colorado that was available. She had a couple other hearings we had to take breaks to accommodate, but we got it all done. It was really interesting, but took all day because of the delays and breaks. I don’t feel like I learned much, but it was an interesting experience and I probably know more Arabic now than I did a few days ago. I did make the comment that “yes” and “no” sounded the same to me. Another attorney involved said, “no wonder there are so many rapes in the Middle East.” I’m sure that is culturally insensitive, but I hadn’t eaten anything all day and was exhausted and laughed a lot.  

Yesterday, I went on a float trip with my mother, my uncles, and some of my father’s friends. It was a nice day to be on the river, but there were a ton of people on the water and, again, I get worn out quickly. This growing a human stuff is exhausting. I’m glad I went though. I had some great conversations with some of my father’s friends and they cooked some really good food at the end of the float trip. 

One Friday in May (can’t remember which one), I actually left the office at 2:00pm. Our office closes at 2:00pm on Fridays, but I rarely get to leave at 2:00pm. I usually stay to work on something, or have to schedule clients later in the day, or have Court. This day, I actually went home when we closed though. I felt really crummy that day because I ate ice cream the night before. I know ice cream makes me feel sick, but it tastes so good. I threw up that night and felt like death all the next day. So, when I got home, I decided to sit on the couch and watch Thor: Love and Thunder. In that movie, Jane has cancer, and at one point her and Thor are having a conversation about how he wants her to live longer and she said something along the lines of, “why would I want to live longer, living like this?” That scene made me cry because that was exactly the calculation my father made. He wanted to have the best quality of life with the time he had left, instead of trying to squeeze a few more months in all while getting debilitating treatments in the hospital. It also felt touching to see that sentiment coming from a Hollywood movie. My father had the same type of bravery as a comic book hero.