Fearless

One of the unintended consequences I have experienced because of losing Jackson and the quick arrival of Dash caught me completely off guard.

When my husband and I were dating and for the first year of our marriage, he made it clear that he wanted to live overseas as a civil servant, to show any children we had the world outside of our country, and to enjoy the benefits of living as an American outside of America, and so many more hard-to-put-to-words experiences like those he had growing up. After our first year of marriage, he interned with the State Department and had an absolute blast, getting the overseas-bug even worse.

I was nervous. Scared. Petrified.  I don’t speak anything other than English and can follow the tiniest bit of conversational Spanish so how would I go grocery shopping? Make friends? How would my children learn the gospel if we attended a ward that was in a foreign language? What if my children could learn new languages easily but I couldn’t? Would I be taken advantage of?
What if I had to drive on the left?!?!??

Fear of the unknown ruled my decisions in those early years and because I was too scared, my husband gave up his dream and went to law school, a very expensive endeavor that caused our marriage a lot of strife because our stress levels were so high and our communication skills sucked and that decision continues to feel more like a financial burden than it ever should have.
Fast forward a few years and one economic collapse later and he’s working in the job he wanted all along.

And he’s happy. And I am happy.

The man that I fell in love with 16 years ago came back when he switched careers but he’s different. And while I am not comfortable talking about his personal changes in a public forum, I am comfortable saying that my fears almost ruined us because of the decisions that followed when he gave up on his dream 12 years ago.

Losing Jackson changed all that.

Everything.

I am no longer afraid of living outside my comfort zone

. . . of living in a foreign country

 . . . of learning a new language

. . . of cooking with new foods

. . . of attending church where I don’t understand what is being said

. . . of raising my children away from their peers

. . .of living in an area filled with poverty and civil unrest

. . .of being alone.

I am fearless.

Not only am I no longer afraid, but I am eager to leave the country I have known all my life in exchange for experiences that can continue to help me learn and grow and be a better me.

I want my children to grow up seeing the world through eyes that have seen and experienced differences in culture and to walk with feet that have trod near hallowed ground, and to use their hands to serve others.

I want them to walk and talk with children of God who look different than they do and to recognize that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is the same world-wide, even though the words we use to express our feelings are different.

It used to horrify me just a little that my husband didn’t know most of the primary songs because he so rarely attended primary in English but he knows the tunes and can attest that the Spirit can and will testify of the truth whether you understand the words or not. I want my children to feel that and I want to experience that myself.

I want my preconceived notions about freedom, equality, and economic stability challenged because I believe that living in a world outside my own will make me a better person.

I am ready for it. I crave it.

When you’ve lost your only son, and God reassures you repeatedly that everything will be okay, and you begin to see those changes all around, then it’s time to embrace the path you should have walked over a decade before but were unprepared for.

Losing my son prepared me for change and growth and I hope and pray that when I look back a decade from now at the current lull in my life, I’ll be able to smile and say, “Wow. Living overseas was everything I thought it would be and more.”

From a practical standpoint, it will be almost two years at the bare minimum before we move but we’ll have the assignment in a couple of months as long as everything continues to move in the direction it’s currently headed. During that time, we’ll probably give ourselves one last chance at growing our family. That’s one thing that we have discussed often in recent months but haven’t prayed about. We both really want another chance at having a son but also know that conception is very difficult for me and that my pregnancy would be high risk because of my clotting/auto immune disease and now my age.

I am getting old and even though I don’t really feel it physically, there’s no denying that my fertility is on the downslide. I was diagnosed with borderline Diminished Ovarian Reserve over 3 years ago. DOR is a fancy way of saying your eggs are old and there aren’t very many of them left.

But again, I’m not afraid.

Is that weird? Because it seems like after all I have been through, I should be a lot more apprehensive about giving pregnancy another shot. Instead, I feel a steady calm. I know my Father in Heaven has heard my prayers and that the next few years of my life have been very carefully placed before me. Whether that will include a child or not is yet to be seen but I’m excited for the adventure either way!