The not so brief story of rainbows, unicorns and New York City!

 

June 14, 2013 was the most magical day of my life. Kim Kardashian and Kanye West welcomed their illegitimate love child, North, into the world. It was also the day Luke proposed to me. One of the many reasons I love Luke is that he lives in the land of unicorns, rainbows, lollipops and puppies. Life is grand and everything is perfect and there is no reason to think otherwise, well until you fall in love with me. I wouldn’t say that I’m a total pessimist but maybe more of a realist but I definitely over analyze everything. However, on that day when he told me the most romantic things I’ve ever heard and placed the most magnificent rock of a ring on my hand I gladly took his hand and saddled up beside him on his unicorn. Our engagement set off a whirlwind year of events that had me at the highest highs of life is perfectness. Seriously, though, the year between our engagement and wedding was filled with nothing but champagne, presents, pretty dresses and endless amounts of love and support that we never saw coming. Presents started showing up at our doorstep in February and continued until long after our wedding in May. There were engagement parties, engagement pictures, bridals showers and bachelorette parties that all required extensive planning, shopping and pampering. Then there was wedding planning that was enjoyable for me because I knew exactly what I wanted and didn’t have to justify my thug to anyone, not even Luke. I just got what I wanted and it was glorious. Our wedding day was perfection. I got to marry my lobster in front of everyone we loved on a perfect Tucson day. Everything fell into place and everyone showed up to party. It was everything I pictured and more. Then to top it off, Luke and I ran off to a beach front villa in Mexico for a week to seal the deal. We came back from Mexico in the middle of June and by Luke’s birthday on the 24^th I was pregnant. Another thing I love about that man is his efficiency. Could life get any better? Could we ever come off this high? It wasn’t looking like it.

So obviously my personal life was at an all-time high but I also have a career on the side. A career that is demanding and relentless and redundant. Regardless, I’ve put a lot of time, energy and effort into being the best little number crunching CPA possible. Around the time my mom was getting lap dances from gay guys in Vegas at my bachelorette party I found out my company was being bought by a Fortune 500 publicly held company based out of California.  Going through a merger & acquisition is the March madness of accounting. You work your ass off in the early rounds and pray to make it beyond the sweet sixteen to gain all sorts of experience you would otherwise never gain on a day to day basis. The first round of due diligence lasted up until the wedding, I took two weeks off for wedding activities and was back in time for the second and final round of due diligence where you’re basically proving your company’s worth on a daily basis. In the end the shareholders get rich and you return to your much more complianced life as a number crunching nerd. But hey! You got experience for your resume so you’re indebted to the company that just worked you to the bone with no thank you for the last 6 months of your life. Oh and now you’re doing the work of an accounting department that’s usually 5 people deeper than your current department. The silver lining in all of this is that a lot of the work was being done out of New York and I have always dreamed of living and working in New York. I read an article in a magazine on a plane when I was a teenager about traders on Wall Street whose main job was to entertain clients by getting them high-end prostitutes and pure Columbian cocaine all in an effort to bring business to the firm. To me that sounded like a dream job, trade stocks by day and “entertain” by night. Then life happened. I was getting ready to put in for a transfer to New York when I was working for EY but I met Luke and he made me fall in love with him. My dreams changed a little when I all I could think about was locking him down and having his babies.

Our deal was announced on July 23^rd and I was scheduled to fly to New York on July 30^th for an operations meeting. My career dreams were coming true and I was so excited. I just had to make a quick stop by the doctor’s office for my first visit as a pregnant lady and then I was going to catch the red eye to New York that night. Luke and I were elated. We had names and cribs and everything picked out. We couldn’t contain our excitement and told our parents and brothers and sisters. My sister in law was 4 months along at the time and our babies were going to be only a few months apart, we were ecstatic. The doctor ran through the spiel and then I jumped up onto the bed to get the first peak of our baby. Then nothing. The doctor went from being talkative to silent and kept pressing harder and harder on my stomach. Nothing showed up on the screen. No heartbeat. No fetus. Nothing but a little egg yolk looking sack. When she teared up and grabbed my hand, I lost it. Luke was stunned and silent. We were beside ourselves. In a matter of seconds my world came crashing down. I had been thrown from my unicorn and was flailing on the ground gasping for air. It was the worst day of my entire life. To top it off, I had to call my boss and explain why I wouldn’t be meeting them at the airport. When she answered I couldn’t speak so I handed the phone to Luke. He began to talk and struggled to get the words out. We both burst into tears and had to send a text message to finish the conversation. I crawled into bed and didn’t ever want to leave. I had to call my mom and tell her the news and then my dad. Telling my dad was the worst, I could hear the pain in his voice and his helplessness that he couldn’t protect his little girl from this pain.  The doctor told me I could either wait for my body to “take care of it on its own” or I could expedite the process and take pills to facilitate everything. Nothing sounded worse to me than being pregnant but not really. I opted for the pills and then I waited. I waited for the doctor’s office to call and schedule me for the procedure. That weekend the doctor had 8 deliveries in 4 days and had no time for me. I found out about my circumstances on a Wednesday and had to wait until the following Tuesday to get in with the doctor. You don’t get special treatment at the doctor’s office when your pregnancy fails, you get to sit in the waiting room with perfectly plump pregnant ladies wondering what you did wrong and why their lives are so easy compared to yours. It’s torture. Luckily, the people I work with and for are wonderful. My boss told me to take as much time off as I needed and to let them know how they could help. Time off sounded wonderful considering how much I had been working, however, without work I had nothing to think about but my circumstances and that sucked even more than working 12 hour days. I went back to work the day after, closed my office door and worked for 6 hours straight. I didn’t talk to anyone or even make eye contact because I knew I wouldn’t be able to hold it together. Zoning out in excel and other people’s first world month end consolidation problems was the only alleviation from my personal problems.

Throwing myself into work was the only way I knew how to deal with it without actually dealing with anything. If I could work then I didn’t have to go to baby showers or celebrations of any sort. I didn’t want to make a scene at a friend’s party because I knew I would inevitably find myself in the bathroom crying and taking attention away from my friend.  Being unable to be happy for my friends brought on so much guilt. I couldn’t be a friend or a sister or a wife because nobody’s problems were as a big as mine and I had no sympathy for anyone else because all of their issues failed in comparison. I didn’t even tell my best friend about it until a month after it had happened because she just had a baby and I didn’t think she could relate to someone whose baby was taken from them. I resented her for her healthy child. So I just shut down. And worked.  I didn’t feel like talking about it helped. It felt like such a personal experience, my own problem that there was nothing to talk out or anyone to relate to. Luke was broken too but I couldn’t even validate his sadness because he wasn’t carrying our child, his body didn’t fail us. Lucky for me, he loved me regardless. He held me when I couldn’t hold it in anymore and he loved me more because of it. My sister in law had her baby shower about 3 months after our loss. It took every ounce of me to drive to Tucson to participate. I love my brother and Sydney more than anything in the world but there was nothing I wanted to do less than go to that baby shower. I couldn’t even drink my blues away at the shower because I had to freaking drive home. Toward the end of October my cousin and his wife gave birth to the first grandchild on the Prudence side. That weekend all the Prudences happened to be together at my house. We were hosting a pumpkin carving party and l took my brother to his first Eagles game. The morning of the game we all got the text message about Scotty. Everyone was ecstatic. I locked myself in my room and cried for an hour. I almost cancelled on the game. The guilt of not being able to be the person my loved ones were accustomed to almost weighed as heavily on me as the loss itself. It was horrible.

At the end of October we had completed our first year-end audit as a public company and it looked like things were going to finally slow down a little. The day after we filed with the SEC I found out I was pregnant. Again. I was not happy. I was terrified. I’m thankful Luke was still able to be excited. We swore each other to secrecy and promised we wouldn’t tell a soul until we were in the clear. I held my breath until our first appointment. For whatever reason, Luke and I drove separately to our appointment. I cried the entire way. I’m actually surprised I made it there. Luke had to pull me from my car and drag me to the office, I sobbed the whole time. I couldn’t go through that again, I wasn’t strong enough and couldn’t fathom how I would try to put myself back together if we got more bad news. The doctor didn’t even bother with the spiel, we went straight to the ultrasound. I closed my eyes and held my breath. There was silence again but not because there was nothing but because there were two. Two little peanuts at the size and heart rate to be expected at 9 weeks along. I exhaled for the first time in months.

I started my blog when everything came back clear at the 12 week appointment. I put aside healing from the miscarriage and channeled my energy into having a healthy twin pregnancy. I happily documented my journey on the blog but always felt a little guilty about the perfect picture I was putting out there. I started this post so many times but I couldn’t think through the right words to convey my feelings. I usually think about my posts while I’m driving to and from work and there were too many times I would cry the entire way thinking about writing this post. I probably just wasn’t ready.

I made the decision to go part-time after the boys arrived. I had been working my ass off through the merger and was honestly a little burnt out. I knew I couldn’t carry on at the rate I was going and still be the mother I planned on being. It was a really hard and bittersweet decision. We were finally getting the hang of operating as a public company and I knew there were projects in the works and opportunities to work in New York but with the boys pending arrival and my change to part-time I knew it wasn’t the right time for big career moves. I was so excited about the boys that I didn’t even think twice about the loss of my career.

The boys came and my life changed completely. Work wasn’t as important and I was happy for the balance I was getting by working only two days a week. The first 3 months of parenthood have their dark and scary moments for entirely different reasons but when I came out of that darkness I was the happiest I have ever been in my life. I settled into my routine and loved every second I was home with the boys but also found happiness in keeping a pulse in my career. Luke was home every night because he was working from the office and we found ourselves loving the simplicity and pace of raising babies. Naturally, I got a little bored. Not with my boys but with work. When I was struggling with figuring out how to be a mom I easily shut off any extra noise at work. I only did what I was assigned and didn’t take on more than my 20 hours a week could handle. But then I started to hear about and involving myself in issues we were having with another company our parent company purchased. We were tasked with their integration into public company madness and this little company had its entirely unique set of issues. Around that time Luke was getting the itch to get into the field and build something and got himself sent to Texas. At first, I was a little pissed but then I realized I was jealous. I was jealous of his adventure and that I was stuck at home. So my ears perked up a little more at work and that opportunistic side of me reared its pretty head.  On a whim I volunteered to go to NYC where the company is located and be the point person on the ground to help fully integrate them. My only condition was that I would be able to bring my boys with me and that I would be done around the time Luke finished in Texas. To my surprise, my boss was totally on board with the idea and pitched it to her boss. He thought I was crazy and said I could do the work from Scottsdale but I told him I wanted to be in NYC. He took the weekend to think about and told me to pack my bags on the following Monday!

From Luke to Texas to me to NYC was a matter of a week. Here I am sitting on a plane flying home from my second week in NYC and I can’t help but think I’ve come full circle. This Sunday my mom and boys will be flying to NYC where we’ll be living in an apartment in midtown Manhattan for the next couple of months while I work on the most exciting accounting project yet. Luke will fly to NYC from Texas on the weekends and we are going to get broke and fat exploring every square inch of the city. When the apartment I found was reminiscent of the brownstone Carrie Bradshaw lived in I couldn’t help but think the unicorn I fell from found me in Manhattan. I think I’m ready to hop back on.

….so that was written nearly two months ago and I am now wrapping up my time here in NYC. I cannot believe the experience we’ve had and I promise to blog about it all but I figured I should probably get this one posted first.