corijohnson

I was Republican when Republican wasn't cool. Also, I'm still not cool.

[Codie Sanchez @Codie_Sanchez]

This is for every woman who has struggled with or been shamed trying to get pregnant.

I'm pregnant and thrilled. AND YET I've been failing at it for years. You don't see the part where I'm on the floor with a syringe. You don't see the part where I miss the window or lose a pregnancy.

My mother had several miscarriages. I've had one too. Sadly, this is so very common you probably have no idea. It's a quiet killer for women.

For my mom, I will not put numbers on her grief because they are hers. I will tell you that I grew up knowing the word miscarriage the way other children grow up knowing the word garage. It was a household word.
I have had one of my own.

And before my baby, before my brother, and after me… there was Kristin.

Kristin was my sister.

She made it all the way. My mother carried her to term. She was born. She was alive. She came out, but she never left the hospital.

She did not stay with us. She lived a month. Maybe two.
Her heart had reversed valves.

I remember my father telling me about driving home from the hospital that cloudy day without his baby girl. He and my mother alone in the car when the song,

“My Love’s Leaving,” came on by Stevie Winwood.
“Can I cope with today?
My love is leavin' me
Still I'm hoping she'll stay
My love is leavin' me”

That song hangs heavy in our family.
Every year on Kristin's birthday I think about the tiny grave and the baby whose heart was too small, and I do the math of how old she would be now if she had stayed.

That is, weirdly, what I have been carrying for years while I was trying to have a baby.

If you have carried something like it, a sibling, a child, a pregnancy that ended on a bathroom floor, a name in a small graveyard with a date too close to itself, then you already know that what I am describing is not in the past. It is in the room. It is sitting on the bed during the test. It is in the car on the way to the appointment. It is the question every shot in the stomach is asking.
Will this one stay. Please.

That was the question my mother asked however many times.

It was the question my father had to put down on a highway with Stevie Winwood on the radio.

It is the question I am still asking, at 16 weeks, in the privacy of my own car, on the way to my own appointments, when the song comes on.

So I guess while I am THRILLED. I am still putting this on the page because nobody else does.

The world watches a woman like me and decides when she’s pregnant, she just gets lucky, and when she doesn’t she is just too busy or some heartless wench who only likes to work.

The comments come. They always come. People who do not know your name typing into a phone that none of this matters unless you are a mother, and you should spend more time being a mom than doing this, and you never prioritized family. F*cking A there is no winning.

I want to tell you what I was doing in the exact moment a stranger was typing that comment to me.

I was on a kitchen floor in a different time zone, doing math with a syringe. I was 5 years into not getting pregnant and blaming myself every seven seconds.

If you are reading this, and you have ever been told you should be doing more of the thing you were already, secretly, breaking yourself trying to do, please put the phone face down on the counter after this.

You are not lazy. You are not late. You are not failing. People just hate their lives in that moment and want you to feel worse than they do.

For me, the only answer was prayer.
I prayed.
I had not, until these three years, ever had a thing I needed badly enough to beg for it from something larger than me.

I begged.

I begged in cars. I begged in bathrooms. I begged at airports. I begged in clinics with the paper sheet under me. I begged while another woman in another room was getting the news I wanted and not getting it myself.
I pleaded when I had nothing left to give in return for the asking.

I think God gave us this baby. I do not know what else to call it. The other words I have tried do not fit.

And yet, I am also very afraid.

I have been around enough grief in this lineage to know that 16 weeks is not the finish line.

Kristin's heart was too small at term. I've had my own pregnancy lost too. My mother carried her grief. I am not going to pretend I am not still scared, because pretending is the part of this story I am tired of, and the part that almost made me not tell you any of it.

If you are reading this and you are scared too, you are allowed.

You are allowed to be happy and afraid in the same hour. You are allowed to want this baby and not yet believe in this baby. You are allowed to thank God and refresh the doctor's portal in the same minute.

If you are reading this in the parking lot at the clinic, I see you.
If you are reading this with the leftover medication in the drawer, I see you.

If you are like me who has not been able to ask her husband for what she needs, I have been you for years, and I am telling you now, he will sit on the edge of the bed and listen. They do not break the way you are afraid they will break. You can ask. You are allowed.

If you have a Kristin, I am sorry. I think about her so very often, and I never met her. I will think about yours.

If the comments in your life are louder than the truth in your body please stop listening to them. The body knows. Other people do not.

If this isn't you scroll past... but I heard enough negativity with my announcement and many other womens I thought maybe the haters just don't know how damn hard this all is. And if they did... they'd be a little kinder.

Xoxo - Codie

[corijohnson @yoopercori]

@HVNYrefugee Already done. D.

[corijohnson @yoopercori]

@ACrawley36075 @shagbark_hick @HVNYrefugee We keep it like that for a reason.

[corijohnson @yoopercori]

@instantlyrich @midwestern_ope It looks so good and reminds me of bierock, which I know from my Wisconsin German uncle.

[corijohnson @yoopercori]

@instantlyrich @midwestern_ope Is that bierock?

[corijohnson @yoopercori]

@Jcmcip @midwestern_ope U.P.?

[🕊️ @lichthauch]

I would only tell a man's daughter one thing, that most men are profoundly lost, frightened creatures who do not understand themselves, let alone you. they arrive with their needs poorly disguised as affection and they are so sturdily convinced of their own sincerity that they will fool you for months, sometimes years. and this is not because they are evil, it is because they are unfinished. and unfinished men do terribly stupid things to the women that love them and then stand there baffled at the wreckage, as if some other man inside them did it all. that so the one thing i would tell her is this, you will not be able to tell the unfinished ones from the finished ones by their words. you can only tell by what they do when they are angry, or tired, or scared. that is where you see what you are actually working with

[corijohnson @yoopercori]

Baby mouse eating a wolf spider. It's National Geographic here basically all the time.

[corijohnson @yoopercori]

@OldHollowTree So sad to read "fading June". It's true, of course, but it has been so cool and wet here in Michigan's Upper Peninsula that it feels like June has barely even begun.

[corijohnson @yoopercori]

@hjluks Thank you for writing this. I'm 48 and teach gymnastics, including adults. I've noticed how most people, as they age, stop moving much beyond sit, stand, lie down. God made our bodies to move in so many ways.

[Howard Luks MD @hjluks]

Don’t let your life 'narrow'.

I’ve been an orthopedic surgeon for 30 years. The thing I watch happen to people — more than any injury or surgery — is what I call the narrowing.

Most of my patients have no idea it’s happening. They think it’s just aging. It’s not...

[corijohnson @yoopercori]

@matt_wes_shep @owroot Okay, so he is in the Subway in Iron Mountain, which is my town. We have a Pizza Hut Classic and an old-style A&W, too. AND a Wendy's with a solarium!

[corijohnson @yoopercori]

@owroot @jardinopens That's my town!

[Retro Coast @RetroCoast]

When you see a family out for an evening walk together, you know you are in a high quality place.

This wonderful tradition has disappeared in most of America

But it still persists in some high quality enclaves.

[corijohnson @yoopercori]

@B1Gsad Is his name Gino?

[corijohnson @yoopercori]

@midwestern_ope B, but mainly because I already live in A.

[corijohnson @yoopercori]

The Italian side of my family sometimes has so many get-togethers with so few days in between that you don't have time to get your basic chores done for long stretches at a time. It's glorious.

[corijohnson @yoopercori]

@owroot Hope you have a great time up here! If you ever want tips on places, let me know.

[corijohnson @yoopercori]

@goinggodward I married at 38, babies at 40 and 42. I'm a 48 year old who does gymnastics three hours per week. My sister had her babies in her early 20s and died at age 38. You just never know.

[Dr. Ben Braddock @GraduatedBen]

I believe that many people get cancer and beat cancer without ever knowing it