What I was doing 25 years ago today

Yep – having a baby. Our baby, who is now 25 years old, in the Army Reserves, living in Georgia with her husband.

When I had Lauren, our life was pretty rough. Earlier that same year, Larry had broken his knee [again] in a motorcycle accident and he had been out of work ever since. We were leaving the house we had planned to buy and scrambling to find something else. We weren’t being evicted, but it was only a matter of time, so we decided to take the initiative ourselves. The owners were not being real reasonable with us anyway, raising the price [it was worth more because of work we had done on it] and the interest rate among other things. And we owed them a couple grand in back rent, because not only had Larry been out of work, but the tenants had moved out owing us a couple months of their rent and utilities. It was a mess and we never did pay them back what we owed them, something I will always feel badly about.

We found a trailer that we could afford and moved it over here, on the farm, where 25 years later, we still live, though in a much bigger house than we had back then.

The point of all that is to say that life was very stressful right about then. My pregnancy had been a horror show of illness and feeling so terrible that I was sure they would find out I had a fatal condition and that I would die moments after giving birth. Two weeks after she was born, we moved into the new place with no running water, until the following April. [Larry’s Mom, bless her crazy mother-in-law heart, came down twice every week and got all of my laundry, which she took home, washed, dried, folded and returned all neatly sorted by person.] The only thing that felt sane to me were moments like the one in this picture, when I was holding my girls, playing with them or feeding Lauren in the middle of the night. The middle of the night feedings were always a favorite time for me with both girls – quiet, dark, peaceful.

Matters improved as the months went by – we got things squared away in the new place, Larry went back to work, I got everything put where it belonged and finally, we got the well dug and the water turned on. I had to do my own laundry again. I thought about pretending that we still didn’t have running water, but a well digging rig in your yard is not easy to hide.

25 years ago today, I was a Mom for the 2nd time.