Get to Know El, the Voice Behind Profoundlyseth
Curious about the person writing this blog? Grab a seat. Fair warning: I ramble — a lot. I'm 28, grew up in Indiana, and I hold a deep, lasting grudge against cold weather. Snow looks lovely, but actually being cold? No thank you.
I was schooled in Fort Wayne, aside from a couple of high school years in Champaign, Illinois — a place I still recall with real affection. Sports were never my thing, with one exception: horseback riding. I was genuinely good at it. Growing up, the hunter/jumper circuit was my world and the barn was basically home. I always pictured myself competing and teaching professionally, and I did give lessons for a while after aging out of juniors, until life (five pregnancies, to be exact) took over.
In high school I was a band geek who didn't play an instrument — I was on color guard, which meant I dated drummers. Pretty much exclusively drummers. My best friend from those days could probably tell it better than I can.
I also belonged to a very fancy club called JELKS, an acronym built from the first initials of our names. Our activities involved teasing people while pretending we were joking, sneaking around at night (not to drink or do drugs, but to TP friends' houses, chalk their driveways, and decorate their cars), and eating at IHOP. We kept a top-secret notebook, dramatically named "The Notebook," that we passed back and forth, filling it with painfully melodramatic prose about breakups with soulmates and things we disapproved of. Boys kept trying to steal it to find out who we liked, so we invented code names. We also choreographed random dances we'd perform at red lights after jumping out of the car.
College, Retail Management, and How I Met My Husband
In college I tried to juggle school with a demanding job at Abercrombie and Fitch, with middling success. I was promoted to store manager fast, which was brutally hard at 18 or 19 while supervising managers much older than me. I had to be a complete jerk, honestly. And managing a bunch of 17-year-olds hired largely for their looks was its own adventure. It was the most entertaining and the hardest job I'd ever had, and I worked all the time. Literally.
I met my husband while running a group interview at Hollister. He basically followed me around until I agreed to date him. Maybe it was more romantic than that, but that's the gist. We had a great time together, and that was that. Soon we were married, moved to Florida, and welcomed our first baby, Ava. She rocked both our worlds in the best way, which may explain why five months later we found ourselves expecting again, very unexpectedly.
Our Kids: Ava, Jace, Eli, Seth, Vivi, and Coen
That's when things got tough. My water broke and Jace arrived prematurely. He caught pneumonia and couldn't breathe without a ventilator. At 23, John and I were completely blindsided. It had never crossed our minds that babies could be born unhealthy. Luckily, Jace recovered fully and came home a couple of weeks later with no issues. He's been keeping us running ever since.
I loved having two kids so close in age. I'd never known anything different, so it felt easy. My husband was great with them both, and it was a fun chapter. We had wonderful friends, loved getting out with the babies, and hosted dinner parties where all the kids went down in pack n plays while we decompressed together.
About a year after Jace was born, we started talking about a third baby. Apparently talking was all it took, because within weeks we were expecting number three. This time it was hard from the start. I went on bed rest at nineteen weeks due to pre-term labor and was admitted at 30 weeks for magnesium sulfate and other drugs to stop labor. We held things off until 35 weeks, when our son Eli died very unexpectedly after my water broke. Once again, my husband and I faced something we'd never realized happened in everyday life. Losing our son was the hardest thing I'd ever been through, until recently, and I spent months in a fog. All I wanted was another baby, not to replace Eli, but to fill my empty arms.
After several months of trying, we were expecting again. My pregnancy with Seth was the best I've ever had. We found a treatment plan that worked well for me, so there was no early labor at all, and I felt great the whole time. We were all surprised when my water broke at 34 weeks. Seth was born crying, and it was one of the best moments I can remember. Everyone in the room was crying, including my OB and random nurses, as we finally welcomed another living baby. Seth followed in Jace's footsteps and was soon in the NICU on a ventilator. He had about a million complications and lost his hearing due to a very strong antibiotic. When Seth was just a few weeks old, we learned he was profoundly deaf. That began our journey into learning about hearing loss and raising the money for our son's bilateral cochlear implant surgery, which he received at eight months old. For some reason I never doubted things would fall into place for Seth, and they did. Today he's a happy, mostly healthy boy who hears very, very well with the help of his "jetpacks," as his sister's friends call them.
Six Years of Babies, Health Scares, and a Fresh Start
For me, it's been six years of back-to-back pregnancy and nursing and babies and health issues and exhaustion. I think I dealt with postpartum depression multiple times, and in hindsight I'm amazed I was as functional as I was given how out of whack my emotions were. Once Seth's health issues were added to the mix, I became consumed with finding a way to help him. I wasn't going to fail him the way I felt I'd failed Eli by not delivering him safely. I thought I'd have time to focus on my marriage after Seth got older, got caught up, could hear. Unfortunately, that wasn't an option.
By the time Seth was turning one and finally turning a corner, my husband had already decided he was done waiting for me to pay attention to him, found someone who would, and moved out, regardless of the fact that I was expecting again. It was the single biggest wake-up call of my life, and the past five months without him have been both terrible and incredibly enlightening. There are lots of things I've learned about myself since my husband left that I wouldn't take back. There are many things I've done that I thought I'd never be able to do on my own, and I have. I'm proud of myself and the way I've handled things since he left. I never thought I would be here. I thought he was the person I'd be with forever, and I still have trouble wrapping my head around the fact that I'm a divorced single mom. I'm angry, and sad, and frustrated, and upset, and relieved, and happy to be with my kids, and I tend to vacillate through all those emotions daily, which is lots of fun, let me tell you! Luckily, as time goes on, I am also happy, and content, and thrilled to have my kids to get me through even the hardest days.
Browse the Blog
- Read El's original introduction
- The first six months
- Car seat safety
- A little backstory
- Exhaustion
- The hottest accessory of the season
- Profound sounds: a pictorial post
- A date you'll want to remember
- Activation day
- Technical mumbo jumbo
- Here's to transparency
- Self image
- Ergh
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From childhood in Indiana and the hunter/jumper circuit to raising a family and navigating hearing loss with Seth, this page is where El tells her story in her own words. Follow the links below to read more about car seat safety, the early months, and the milestones along the way.