Dream New Dreams Read Free

the U-Haul truck with all my worldly possessions packed in the back and car in tow. Those feelings of fear and excitement bubble up when I remember Randy behind the wheel, looking at me, smiling, reaching over to hold my hand. After one failed marriage, it took courage to trust someone again. But Randy made it easy for me to believe in him and in us. I knew our marriage would never end in divorce. I knew it was “until death do us part”; I just didn’t know it would be so soon after uttering our vows. We were married on May 20, 2000, in Pittsburgh, under two large oak trees in a simple ceremony with just close family and a few friends in attendance.
    Even after Dylan, Logan, and Chloe came along, the magic continued. Randy loved being a father and wanted enough children “to pile into the car,” as he explained to me. I was thirty-four years old and Randy forty when we started our family. So there wasn’t a lot of time between children. Dylan was born at the end of 2001. Logan came along two and a half years later, and Chloe nineteen months after Logan. Three children in five years! Small children put a lot of stress on a marriage, and ours was no exception. When Dylan was born seven weeks premature at two pounds fifteen ounces, Randy and I were terrified of losing our first child. I remember Randy went into his problem-solving mode to create a working schedule wheremy mom, me, and he all took turns getting up with Dylan every three hours to feed and change him, and record his input and output so the pediatrician could measure his growth, even going so far as to describe the consistency and color of his stool and how he ate. (I believe I still have some of these charts in a file. Imagine describing infant poop at three a.m.!) The danger when he was small was that he was too weak to cry when he needed food, so we did this for about three months straight until Dylan gained enough weight that we could wait for him to cry out when he was hungry. Very exhausting. I don’t think Dylan ever slept through the night until he was about five years old and had learned to put on a story CD to listen to when he woke up in the middle of the night. We learned during this time that Randy did not do so well waking up in the middle of the night, for he couldn’t get back to sleep and would then be exhausted in the morning before going to work. Because I could stay home and nap during the day when the children napped, I took over the night shifts to relieve Randy and make his life a little easier. Give and take. That’s what we always did together to work through the tough times and to make our lives better together.
    As I threw myself more deeply and completely into taking care of Dylan, Randy saw I was in danger of losing all boundaries between my tiny infant and me. Always self-assured, he believed he knew what I needed when I wasn’t thinking straight because exhaustion and fear had colored my decision-making process. Seeing the rabbit hole I was down, he imposed time away from our baby and our house so that I would take a breath of air for myself. I did not like this arrangement at all but grudgingly left Dylan in his father’s care. I remember going to a park and sitting there trying to read, unable to concentrate on the words on the page. All I could see was red—anger that I wasn’t with Dylan. After a few more times, I learnedto extract myself from Mommy mode and use the couple of hours to pursue some interests of my own. That newfound sense of self-awareness and self-preservation served me well as our next two children were born soon after and close together. It might not have been what I wanted to hear or to see in myself, but Randy and I had such open and honest communication that we could share anything with each other. If one didn’t agree with the other’s point of view or suggestion, we would respectfully disagree or find a compromise that worked well enough for the both of us. I can remember only a few times when