[fearless friday] JOURNEY

Note: I’m participating in a Blog Challenge with a group of ladies I’ve met through Making Things Happen. Check at the bottom for a link to a friend’s blog – she’ll be writing about the same topic.

CLICHE ALERT!

You never know what a person goes through until you’ve walked a mile in his shoes.

You can’t judge a book by its cover.

When it rains, it pours.

If wishes were fishes…

You get the idea. I, meanwhile, can’t remember why it was so important to toss out all of those cliches. Oh well. I can’t remember how to get an accent mark over letters. OH WELL.

Let’s start over:

Hi there..

My name is Megan. I’m a 26-year-old stay-at-home wife to Jonathan and mother to Quinn and Aiden. I do portrait and event photography. My family lives in a loft apartment in the oldest standing barn structure in our rural-Alabama county. I just looked out my back door and saw a couple of blue jays, a robin, a bird that darted fast enough I couldn’t tell what it was, and about eight turkey. Turkeys. Turkey.

Whatever.

Turns out there were NINE. That always blows me away. Did you know when you see turkey… turkeys… those birds… out in the open, you’re seeing males? Females don’t leave ground-cover. That may not actually be true, but it’s something my grandfather told me that I don’t think I’ll ever forget. Because for every turkey you see, there’s some crazy number of turkey…s… that you DON’T see. I guess I could google that and figure out the proper plural form of “turkey” AND I could fact-check Pop… OR I could get back to my point.

My point, really, is that life is a journey. You’ll look around yourself at some time and wonder how you got where you are. You’ll look behind you – maybe physically, maybe metaphorically – and you’ll trace the line of your path through life.

What do you see?

Honestly, along my life path I see a lot of “not on-purpose.” I see a lot of places where I was not where I wanted to be and I didn’t know what to do about it. I see a lot of crazy things that people shouldn’t have to go through that were just dumped on me or my family. I see choices that I wish I had made differently. I also see things that I did right. I see beautiful things. I see joy and contentment and the knowledge that, as Switchfoot says, “the shadow proves the sunshine.”

An important, bittersweet, shadow-and-sunshine element of the journey of my marriage is parenthood. As I type, Quinn is being rowdy – as usual. Aiden is stretched out on the floor, rolling around on a plush dog that’s bigger than he is, telling me all about something. He is growing, growing, growing… but I can remember a time, not too long ago, when I sat in the floor and wondered if Quinn would be an only child.

Jonathan and I were married in mid-August of 2006. Seventy-five days later we were confronted with the knowledge that he had a tumor and would need surgery to have the tumor removed. A week later he had out-patient surgery and the tumor was gone. Our options following the removal were 1) some kind of general radiation therapy or 2) retroperitoneal lymph node dissection. We went with more surgery (why not, right?) – the doctors did a very bad job of outlining benefits and risks. We magically (I say “magically” but there’s basic biology behind it, and not a little bit of God at work.) ended up pregnant, between surgeries. By our four-month anniversary, Jonathan was cancer-free, I was pregnant, and it looked like things would be back to normal.

Until that day in July, we felt like we had beat cancer. Not long before Quinn was born, I quit my job. I took the time to try to de-clutter our storage room/ office. Going through a box of random papers I found some of the material we had gotten from the American Cancer Society and had never bothered to look at. I remember laughing to myself about something – I don’t remember what, but I have this image of myself laughing and rubbing my hand over Quinn’s head or back or whatever was protruding at the time – and flipping the page to see a chart about long-term effects. That’s when I found out that patients who undergo the lymph node dissection are “almost always” infertile. It has to do with nerve damage. It means that the already-statistically-improbable process that is egg fertilization is oh-so-much-more statistically improbably. Amazingly, thirteen months later I was pregnant again.

It still makes me go, “Wow.”

The journey continues. Today I have two very rowdy, very funny, very horrible, very wonderful boys terrorizing my home. They make every day a crazy, magical challenge. They add a … I don’t even know what … to my life journey that I can’t imagine not having. I want to be the best me that I can be, so that they know to dream big and to chase those dreams. I want every day to be a crazy, magical adventure. I want to know that whether we see one, five, ten, fifty or NO turkey(s), we’ve had a good day.

As much as I love Quinn and Aiden, as happy as I am with how wonderful and rowdy they are, I would love to have more children. We’ll just have to see what happens. Adoption is something I’m very interested in, but we aren’t at a place on our journey where that’s an option. I’m excited to see what else we’ll discover as we continue on our path.

I’ve run out of steam! If you’ll trek over to the blog of the lovely Natasja, you’ll be a step farther along our blog challenge journey. Thanks so much for being a part of our adventure!