The One About My Little Yellow Canary

Yellow is color of sunshine. I like yellow. When I was growing up, my bedroom was painted sunshine yellow. I can remember the sun streaming into my bedroom window and with the walls painted yellow too, I felt like I was in this little cocoon of sunshine all the time. I never wanted to leave my room because in there I felt safe in my yellow space. So, you see, I have always been drawn to the color yellow. What I didn't know then, was how important the color yellow would be to me many years later.

Baby No. 2 came crashing into the world on May 24, 2001. She was perfection. She looked just like my vision and she was the most beautiful baby I have ever seen. This child came into my life to teach me many lessons here on Earth and she is ultimately what saved me from myself. For fighting her battles became my new normal, my new purpose in life. You can read all about the life of Baby No. 2 throughout my blog (see autism). Her story is too long to include in this post. I just wanted to mention that Baby No. 2 came to save us all from ourselves. She speaks volumes every day. But sadly, people can't hear her beautiful song. We could all learn from her if we could just hear her sweet music. She didn't come alone though either. She came along with many friends from Heaven. One in every 50 children are little yellow canaries now. They are the canaries in the coalmine sent to warn us. And if we can't see them and we can't hear them, then we are headed for big, big trouble. My little yellow canary lets me know two things. One, that we have to stop and take a look at how toxic we have become and two, you have to do something about it. I am still waiting to see the outcome and the fruits of my labor where she is concerned. Not much survived me saving her. And I do considered her saved. I do consider her in remission from her disease. I do considered her healed and doing well.

The stress involved with raising a child with special needs can be tremendous and I have spoken openly here on my blog that I went through Hell and back here on Earth and that my marriage didn't survive the stress. Do I have regrets? Absolutely, I have some. Would I do it over again? Absolutely I would. Do I wish things would have turned out differently? Absolutely I do. But my path was layed out for me long before I walked on it and I just try to remember, that my life is in God's hands, not mine and the He knows where I am going. I try to have faith that things will work out as they are supposed to. But in the meantime, I ever start to feel doubtful, I just look at my beautiful little yellow canary and listen to her sweet melody and I know that life is good and I am right where God wants me to be right now.

My little Yellow Canary

The One When I Was Still Happy

So, I got my Little Bundle of Sunshine and I am living the dream with the Guy in the Zebra Striped Shoes and life is good. What could make our little family better than adding to it right? So, we decided to do just that and when I began officially trying to get pregnant, we didn't have to wait long. Baby Number 2 was on it's way within a month of trying! We were thrilled!! We were excited and couldn't wait to meet our new little package of Love. I didn't need to find out the sex of either baby, because just like in Pregnancy No. 1, I had a vision in Pregnancy No. 2 that predicted me a chubby little girl sitting in the bathtub. She has long dark wavy brown hair and a pudgy little belly sticking out. So, I was having another girl it seemed. That was fine with me since I already had all the girl stuff and already knew all the girl parts. Zebra shoes didn't mind either, as he seemed to like being surrounded by girls.

The very first few years of our lives together, were my most happiest ever. I tried really hard to make things perfect for the three of us. I tried really hard to be someone on the outside other than the person I felt like on the inside. I did a pretty good job at accomplishing both things. Without a doubt, I knew in my heart that my sole purpose in life was to be a mother. If I accomplished nothing else on Earth, I was perfectly ok with that because I was born to be a mother. I was never happier than when I was in my element doing the stay at home mom thing and surrounded by children. I must have either been around a lot of kids, was maybe a teacher or had a lot of children myself in a previous life, because I have always been drawn to kids of all ages from the time I was a little girl myself. I just love kids! And I could not wait to add to my family! Baby No. 2 was coming and I couldn't wait to meet her!

The One About My Sunshine

So, I am pregnant for the third time and wondering what to do with myself. I somehow made it through the first trimester, so I decided that quitting the bar might be a good idea. I didn't want to be pregnant and working in a bar. Yuck! So since I made it through the first trimester, I was starting to maybe have some hope that this time, the pregnancy would make it full term. But I couldn't be too hopeful, not yet anyway. I would not allow myself to look at baby name books, think of nursery themes or to be hopeful concerning anything related to this pregnancy. I just kept holding my breath waiting for the axe to fall. Because I knew it was GOING to fall...it was just a matter of WHEN and HOW it was going to fall. So this is how I went through months 1 through 6 of my pregnancy.

One night, I was about 7 mths pregnant and I was resting my painful back in a warm bath and I was getting kinda of drowsy and just relaxing and talking to the baby growing inside of my belly. All of a sudden, I got this vision from out of nowhere. It was of a little curly headed girl bouncing through a meadow of flowers with a basket in her hand which was full of flowers. I knew right then and there that I was seeing a vision of my unborn child. I was having a girl and she would live to be at least 3 or 4 because that is the age she appeared to be in my vision. That was a unusual experience for sure, but I knew that I was seeing my child. I kept that secret until she was born. On February 2, 1999 at exactly 4:20pm my daughter came bursting into the world at 5lbs and 12 oz. When I first held her, she didn't look ANYTHING like my vision, hahaha! She was teeny, tiny and looked so fragile. But she was beautiful and she was mine and she was like sunshine. I told her father the story of how I knew she was coming and that she would be a girl. We named our little sunshine Jade McKenna.

While in the hospital, holding her and looking at her, I knew that her father and I needed to do the right thing by her and get married. We needed to be her parents in every sense of the word. We needed to be her family. I mean she chose US to her her parents out of the all the people in this world, so we should do the respectful thing and be together as husband and wife for this sweet little piece of Sunshine. I owed that to her. I promised her I would do that for her. So the man with the zebra striped shoes and I began planning a wedding.....

By the way, check out this pitcure and see my little Sunshine for yourself at age 4.

The One With Zebra Striped Shoes

So, like I said earlier, God sends people into our lives at exactly the right moment for reasons beyond our current comprehension. We don't know it at the time, but we always figure it out later on down the road. Now, I can say that in looking back, God placed this roadblock in my life when I needed it most because I was on my way to either becoming a straight up alcoholic or dying in the process of becoming one. Nothing could stop the internal pain I was feeling except alcohol. I couldn't let myself feel for very long, so I pretty much stayed drunk to not have to cope with the pain. No very smart thing to do for someone that's a smart girl, just sayin'....

So enter the man with the zebra striped tennis shoes. One night, at work in the bar, I see this guy come in with these ridiculous looking Reebok's that were zebra striped. He was nice enough and I had seen him many times during my work shifts. We never spoke until that night. I mentioned to him that the guy he was playing pool with was a known cheater and to beware and watch him. He laughed at me and shrugged his shoulders and pretty much blew me off. After that day, we interacted quite a bit and slowly, we became friends. Next thing, I know, we are dating...kinda. He is SO NOT MY TYPE. But he seems to genuinely care about my well being and my state of mind at the time. I think I really latched onto him because my life was so out of control and he seemed to be like an flotation device that was being thrown my way to keep me from drowning. Whatever it was, it worked. I grabbed on for dear life. I had to be with this person. I needed to be with this person. He was the calm in the middle of my raging storm. He was the yin to my yang. I didn't have the will power to fight what was happening. I am not sure I even wanted to. I knew in my heart I was with this person for all the wrong reasons, but I couldn't stop myself from being with him and I couldn't stay away.

Next thing I know, we are having a baby. We are not married and we are having a baby. We have known each other all of 6mths and we are having a baby. Did I mention that we were having a baby? I was BEYOND thrilled with this news. I knew that this was just what I needed to get my life back on track. But, fate sometimes has a way of showing up in your life and let's just say that this pregnancy ended in a miscarriage. I was devastated...again. At this point I was pretty sure that I was being punished for something. But what? What did I do in my life to deserve these repeated blows I was getting? Just one after another, knocking me down every single time I got back up. Bam! So, I thought in my very sick mind that the only way to fill this ever growing Grand Canyon HOLE, was to get pregnant again and that is exactly what I did. Four months later, I am pregnant again. But much to my dismay and heartache, this pregnancy also ended in a miscarriage.

I can't even begin to tell you how broken I was at this point. But this man with the shoes was there. He was constant and protective and he was my life line. I couldn't let go or I would surely drown. I had to hang on. So we held on to each other. That's what we did. He gave me peace and order in my very chaotic life. I gave him excitement and entertainment. It worked. Back then, it really worked.  So many months later, I decided that getting pregnant was about the stupidest thing I could do at this point and went to see my doctor to go on the Pill. Routine testing is always performed before placing one on the Pill and when I was asked if there was a chance I was pregnant, I quickly dismissed that as not possible. But much to my surprise, I was in fact pregnant. Stunned would be a good word to describe how I felt that day. I had it all worked out in my head that God didn't intend for me to have children and this man with the shoes and I were surely not meant to have children together at all. I had accepted that and I had moved on. I mean I had SO moved on. So, why now? I didn't know how I felt about this pregnancy. I mean why even get excited about it when it was just going to end in another miscarriage? Right? That was my frame of mind. This pregnancy will not last. I am not going to get excited about ut because it will not last.

The One I Don't Want to Talk About

So...it's August of 1995. A good 6mths after the BREAK UP and I have decided that what I really need is a night off work and a GNO (girls night out). So, who you gonna call right? One of my oldest and bestest friends, Kellie...that's who! So we go out and have a cocktail or two and I decided that I needed to run to the store at the other end of the strip mall to get some gum or breath mints. So I am walking and approaching the grocery and as I near the entrance of the automatic door, I can see that a man and a very pregnant girl are heading out as I am heading in. Then I stop in my tracks. It's all happening so fast. It's him and he is holding hands with a very, very pregnant her.

I am frozen, I can't move. I am just standing there looking at him and he is looking at me and I am at a COMPLETE loss of words. I say nothing and he says, "Hi" and for a moment, he stalls. Then the girl is looking strangely at me as she walks by with him kinda like why are you standing there with your mouth hanging open staring at me? When I hear him kinda whisper to her, "that's Lisa, keep walking". So I am standing there looking stupid and really feeling like a dumb ass. I am sure my mouth is still hanging wide open and I am unable to form any words. But my mind is racing, it's doing flip flops! It's doing the math. August backwards to February...that's 6mths and that girl looks TEN months pregnant.

So I needed some answers obviously and so I called his mother. She hesitates to tell me but says I deserve to know the truth of the matter. The girl is someone he worked with and yes, she was due any day and yes it was obvious that she was pregnant when we were still together. And yes they were getting married. So not only was my FOUR YEAR relationship over, but he got a chick he worked with knocked up and was marrying her instead. This is really the part that put me over the edge. So he was cheating on me. THE. WHOLE. FOUR. YEARS. WITH. HER. And let me tell you, once this knowledge was shared with my close friends, they began to sing like songbirds on a bright sunny morning. Not only did he cheat with some girl he worked with, but he cheated with just about anyone that walked around and had two legs and had a vagina. I began hearing accounts of people he slept with the entire time we were together. Devastating. Completely devastating. You think that the person you love is one person and then find out it's all been one big fat lie. It was REALLY more than I could handle.

This is how the Grand Canyon was formed. And for the next year I would try to fill that hole back in with everything I could get my hands on that was bad for me. I already shared that I tried filling it with booze and men, and that it didn't work. I tried to fill it by befriending people that I knew were only using me, but I didn't care because I needed to feel accepted, even if it was by some complete loser. I needed to be liked and wanted and the only way I could feel good about myself was by starving myself, getting drunk to drown out the pain and surrounding myself with people that were using me on a daily basis. I couldn't stand to be alone and I would rather hang out with some total stranger that I just met, than to be alone. But, being alone meant I would have to deal with the pain and feel it and I couldn't allow myself to feel it. So I stayed away from the pain as much as I could by staying drunk.

Ironically how does a person that is drinking so much also have so much time to pray? I think deep down, we all have some kind of fundamental knowing inside that we are part of something greater than we and there is some kind of higher power that we all come from. Every night I was crying out to God asking Him to stop the pain and help me through this mess and that is when it happened one night. I was feeling an immense physical and emotional pain over all of this. I was about to fall asleep and I remember literally aching inside, like my heart was truly broken. My whole body was wracked with grief and feelings of deep sadness when all of a sudden, this beautiful pearly, glowing Angel appeared out of nowhere. She kissed me on the cheek and told me not to cry anymore that everything was going to be ok. I suddenly felt all warm and fuzzy inside for the first time in MONTHS. She was as real as could be and she was in my bedroom telling me I was going to be alright. That night was the first night I slept that good since my birthday.

I'd like to tell you that immediately, my life got better, but it didn't. But slowly it did get better and that was a relief. This is due to the fact that right about this time, enter another kind of Angel. Angel on Earth kind of Angel. I'd rather like to think of them as roadblocks. I really think God sends people into our lives at exactly the right time to change the course of our trip just ever so slightly. And that's exactly what He did for me. He sent an Angel to reassure me of His love and to let me know I would survive and then He sent someone into my life that would certainly change my life forever. That will be shared in the next post. Things are gonna pick up and not be so depressing. I promise!