hope is a terrible thing

I heard this piece yesterday on NPR and the following lines hit me in a very deep way:

“Living in hope is a really terrible thing.  People speak about hope most of the time as a very positive thing, and I understand why…But if you stop and think about the state of living in hope,  it’s a very dispossessing thing, it’s a very difficult thing to live with. When you’ve been living in hope for a long time as I have, suddenly you realize that certainty is far more desirable than hope.”

Of course, I thought about my people in the ALI community.  And I thought about myself back when the ex and I were actively trying for a baby, back when that felt so possible I could think of little else, when my arms felt so empty, partly because it felt possible, yet just out of reach.

Hope gives us reason to get up in the morning, but it is also that Terrible Gray, that not-black-not-white space that won’t allow you to let go of the dream.  You’re left in the hospital waiting room indefinitely, never knowing, just hoping.

in the woods

Today my younger sister gave birth to her fourth daughter.  Yes, you read that right, girl number four.  (I posted about this last summer when I first learned of her pregnancy.)

I had complicated feelings about it back then, and though I’m excited and happy, there’s still a twinge of something there.

My sister and her husband have, if not more money than G-d, then they’re at least in the ballpark.  Partly because of this, I was at a loss about a gift for this new arrival.  In addition, as this one is the fourth girl, they have everything they need, and really don’t want very much more “stuff.”  I decided to do a cross stitch project (this is the crafty project I had mentioned before) to welcome my new niece, as the value isn’t really in the price-tag, and it’s not something they have already.  Now, as I decided to start on it rather late in the game (sometime last month, ahem), it’s not finished yet, and I’ve been spending every spare moment working on it.  This is what I’ve got so far:(The baby’s name and birth date are to go in the big blank spot above the bear.  Here’s what it should look like, more or less.)  In the middle of working on this I learned of Wiseguy’s loss.  The thought has kept returning to me throughout this project—what if the baby dies?  What do I do with all this stitching if something goes wrong?

Some would call this morbid.  The thought wouldn’t even occur to others.  Thanks to my own fertility struggles and to getting to know so many in the ALI world, I no longer take it for granted that pregnancies happen easily, that they all progress without incident, and that all babies who are born survive.

This does two things to me.  I stand in wonder sometimes that people get pregnant and have babies and nothing goes wrong.  I also stand in judgment, a bit, of those who still live in the world where nothing ever goes wrong, and the thought never occurs to them (at least it seems to me) that anything ever could.  I’m not especially proud of that last one, and I don’t feel it all the time, but it’s definitely there.

The main thing that all that knowledge leaves me with is a sense that we’re never quite out of the woods.  And, of course, we’re not.  Miscarriages happen, and babies die, and children die, and adults die and all of us get hurt and sick, some much worse than others.  It is a dangerous and unjust world we live in, but it is also a world of beauty and hope and love.

I am not proud of the part of me that gets haughty and self-righteous in the face of others’ blessings.  At the same time, I don’t want to live in that world where I am in ignorant bliss of others’ pain and loss.  What I want is to take this feeling of fragility and lead it in the direction of appreciation and thankfulness rather than anger and judgment.

wondering

(ICLW intro is down below—welcome to my rambling place.)

Something interesting about last week (other than Mr. X getting married and my sister’s worsening mental health, that is)—pregnancies.  No, not me, as if you even had to ask.

• Sunday I saw my younger sister (not the one with worsening mental health), and she announced to me and my parents that she is now 5 weeks pregnant with her fourth.  She told us that she was waiting to tell her daughters (ages 6, 4, and 1½), but apparently “waiting” meant “I’m telling them tonight,” because everyone knew by that evening.

• Monday, I learned that my oldest friend (and one of my dearest) had a miscarriage.  She has two living children, no other miscarriages.  She was 12 weeks.

• Tuesday, I learned on F-book that an acquaintance from grad school is pregnant with her third.  Her first was conceived via IVF, second was a shock to them and their doctors (and conceived while they were working toward an adoption), third was another shock to them, and conceived while they were parenting their two biological children and three foster-possibly -to-adopt kids.

I’ve been trying to write about this for a week, and have just come to the conclusion that I don’t have any great conclusions.

I just wonder…I wonder how my feelings about each of these situations would be different had I never experienced infertility.

Would I still feel like a failure when considering my sister’s fourth pregnancy in the face of my…nothing?  Would I be so judgmental about her telling her young children about her pregnancy so early?

Had I not spent so much time in the ALI blogosphere would I have said something really stupid to my friend when I found out about her miscarriage?

What meanings would I attach to my acquaintance’s pregnancy?  (Likely something along the lines of “see—just adopt and you’ll get pregnant!”)  I never went through IVF, we just got to the planning stages of that one, but I’m probably more familiar with it than the average person—what would I have thought about IVF had things gone differently for me?

I don’t have many any answers tonight…I’m just wondering.

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P.S. If you can, stop by and give Jo some love.  For her, I’m just feeling incredibly sad.

pretending

I just said goodbye to my niece, the oldest.  She’s twelve and the two of us have a pretty special relationship.  When she was little, she was just as close with her other aunt, my sister, but she now has kids of her own and a lot less time to play the doting aunt.

So the niece, who can be a bit of a Whirlwind (ADHD will do that), spent the night last night and we had a great time.

I realized, at some point, that when we’re together alone, I imagine what my life would be like if things were different, if she were my kid, not my niece.  And I ache a bit for that imaginary life, both for me and for her, as her needs fall through the cracks quite a bit in the real world.

At the same time, I know that raising a child is not the same as borrowing one for the weekend, and that with all my notions of how I could parent her better, I also know that there’s no way to know that—it is possible I could mess up way more than has been done so far in her life.

But Miss Famous and I sure loved having her around.

dream deferred

(ICLW stuff is in the previous post, or here.  Welcome!)

This is take three of this blog post.

I got back a couple of hours ago from a stressful afternoon at my parents’ house, and apparently am unable to be very eloquent about it.  (Everyone is fine, just chaotic and stressed, and there’s some extended family stuff, and plenty of babylust triggers for me.)  I trashed a couple of posts that I just stopped writing after a few paragraphs due to hating every word I wrote.

What I was trying to say is something about being a mom…right now there are few things that feel farther away, and few things that I want more.

At the same time, I greatly appreciate the freedom I have to just be a mess, to take this time to let myself heal from the awful divorce and even more awful marriage.  I appreciate the privilege of being able to focus on myself and no one else, to not have to take care of someone else when I don’t have the emotional energy to do so, and  to work on healing my stuff that got me into that marriage to begin with.  If I had a child now, well, that wouldn’t happen, or it would happen very poorly, and the result would be not the kind of parenting I hope to be able to do someday.

But that someday feels awfully far away sometimes.

to be honest…

I’ve kind of gotten sucked into watching a certain high-octane, high adrenaline show.  I watch it via streaming on Net.flix, which means that there’s ALWAYS another episode ready to watch.  This is not necessarily a good thing for my productivity, and it probably explains, at least in part, why posting has been so darn light.

And it’s a way for me to not be in my head, or maybe, be in my head and not in my body, to not be present.  Though, goodness knows I know no shortage of ways to avoid being present.  This is just one I can point to and name.

And, yes, Kristin, there is eye candy.

In other news, apparently Mother’s day was affecting me more than I thought.  I think I was just feeling an undercurrent of discontent about the whole day that mostly stayed below the surface.  Last night in group, however, I let out a rant about how I felt about the “holiday.”  (To be fair, we were in a conversation about how the day was for people, and I was not the only one displeased with Mother’s day in general.  Ahem.)  This piece by Anne Lamott (which Lavender Luz turned me on to) articulates my feelings about the topic much better than I ever could:

But Mother’s Day celebrates a huge lie about the value of women: that mothers are superior beings, that they have done more with their lives and chosen a more difficult path…I hate the way the holiday makes all non-mothers, and the daughters of dead mothers, and the mothers of dead or severely damaged children, feel the deepest kind of grief and failure.

Oddly enough, despite all that, I actually had a decent day on Sunday with my family.  I think it was more the constant reminders (F-book, commercials, etc. ad nauseum) coming from other places that connected with that place inside me that feels like a failure for not being a mother, and just served to highlight that feeling.

Of course, my conscious self doesn’t believe that I’m a failure.  It’s that pesky place inside that is so hard to reach, and yet so persistent that believes this (among other also problematic things).  Pulling these thoughts and feelings into consciousness is no work for cowards, however.

Which may be why I’ve been watching so much Prison Break.

rewriting my dictionary

Last week I posted about the deep-reaching nature of my healing process.  In that post I explained how perhaps the most difficult task for me is self-acceptance.

At the root of this struggle are some very rigid ideas about what it means to be successful, to be happy, to be good.

I first realized what my ideas about success and my beliefs about what a “good” life looks like were back when I was married to Mr. X and we were in the midst of dealing with infertility.  Suddenly, I realized that not only had I always thought I would be a mother, and not only that I had always thought that I should be a mother, but also that I must be a mother in order to have a meaning in my life.  It’s pretty heavy stuff to face the idea that you may never realize the path you thought was necessary for a meaningful life.

I don’t know how much I was actually able to challenge this belief of mine before the Great Escape and subsequent months of agony leading up to my divorce.  I do know that I realized somewhere in those months that I also had very harsh ideas about what it means to be divorced, and even what it means to be single past a certain age.  Ouch.  There is nothing more painful than being the object of your own rejection.

I don’t want to believe that I think a good life requires a (happy) marriage with children.  I don’t want to believe that being childless and divorced makes me somewhat pathetic.  I am becoming more and more aware all the time of the system of beliefs that under-girds much of my pain and want so badly to start over, to rewrite my dictionary of ideas, to release all that no longer serves me.*

I have a very difficult system set up for myself.  It’s a no-win way of living, and I’m tired of it.  It’s taken going through this last year (or thirty) of loss and angst to become cognizant of how much of my pain radiates from within, from my own worldview, and not from my circumstances.

More and more I am hopeful that I can change that worldview, that I can rewrite my internal dictionary, that I can learn a new way of being in the world.  It’s hard, but not as hard as not changing would be.

*Thanks to Lavender Luz for this phrasing.

unexpected (updated)

I just found out that a former friend is pregnant.  I say “former” because she and her husband were friends of mine and X’s, and since the split, I’ve heard nary a word from him, and received one short message from her, which I replied to in great detail, and then didn’t hear a thing.

I had somewhat made peace with the fact that these two would no longer be in my orbit.  I even understood a bit, as X was friends with the guy for a while before I entered the picture, and I know that feelings of loyalty can be complex.  Anyway…

So I found out on the face place this morning that she is pregnant (not sure how far along, but she’s showing and shopping for maternity clothes).  I was punched in the gut by feelings of jealousy, and this reaction surprised me greatly.

I’m not sure why her pregnancy affects me more than others’…maybe because I have this couple so strongly connected in my mind with my time with X.  Maybe because X and I married three years before they did, and yet there were no babies (or pregnancies even) for me.

I think that this has clarified for me that there are so many things about my life that are not as I would choose them to be.  There are so many things about my life that I would change.  I am finding it far to easy to idealize this couple’s life, and see them as the symbol of what might have been with X and me (had he not turned out to be an abusive raving lunatic).

I find myself wondering what I can do to change those parts of my life that I find unsatisfactory.  Clearly, some things are out of my control.  Some are not.

Today I am reminded that, though the intensity of it is usually kept well below my awareness, my deep dream of becoming a mother is alive and well.

*

*

P.S.  Please don’t tell me about all the ways that my dream may come true.  Today I just need to feel this, I don’t need anyone to “solve” my problem, or make it better for me.

Update: OK, upon further thought I realize that what is bothering me most, is not the actual jealousy, or sadness, or grief, or whatever you want to call it, it’s that I’m having those feelings at all.  Apparently a big part of me thinks that I should just be over this whole thing and that there is something wrong with me if I feel this way at all.  Which then snowballs and gets me feeling super crappy.  So I am working on telling myself that it’s OK to feel what I feel, that I’m OK, and more cheesy stuff like that.  Still not happy that I don’t have a baby and maybe never will (ahem, see: P.S., above), but am feeling better about myself.  Onward and upward.

green grass, brown grass

I read this post of Murgdan’s the other day, and for some reason, it got my brain a goin’.  Maybe because of some of the drama last week, and seeing how different people have responded to pain in their lives, how different people have responded even to the same kind of pain and come out on the other side very different kinds of people.  Maybe because I’m feeling my own brand of survivor’s guilt these days, having escaped X without any bodily harm and with comparatively few years wasted spent with him.

Murgdan talks in her post about how she realizes she had it worse than some, but so much easier than so many.  She’s pregnant now, after one failed IVF and one successful FET.

If you hang around the ALI blogworld very long (or hell, just around the world), you can always, always find someone “worse off” than you, in some way.  Someone who never got pregnant.  Someone who had an unbelievable number of miscarriages.  Someone who endured more loss than you could imagine surviving.

And then in great abundance, we all have, in our real worlds, those who seem to have it (whatever “it” may be) handed to them on the proverbial silver platter–pregnancy, babies, love, money.

If infertility and loss does nothing else, it cements for us the truth that life is unfair.  (Somehow we trick ourselves into forgetting, don’t we?)

We can always find greener or browner grass somewhere, be it in the realm of fertility or relationships or general life happiness. To paraphrase one of Murgdan’s commenters, life is not a pain Olympics, though we definitely make it that way at times.

Back when Mr. X and I were in the throes of the IF war, I remember talking with a friend about another person’s apparent lack of awareness that anything could go wrong with a pregnancy (she announced to EVERYONE including her two year old the minute she got the positive pee stick). I remember being totally stunned by her actions, knowing that pregnancy could be a such a delicate blessing, especially at that early stage.  I remember saying to my friend, “What world does she live in that it doesn’t occur to her that anything bad might happen?” and my (also IF veteran) friend said, “I wish I still lived in that world.”

It really took me aback when she said that, because, well, I didn’t and I don’t.  Unlike some innocences that I’ve lost, this is not one I’d take back.

I haven’t talked about IF very much on this blog.  But I’m in the club.  I have PCOS, though I’m not sure it would have kept me from getting pregnant (X’s low-morphology sperm were much more the barrier to that dream).  At the moment, it’s pretty much a moot point, as well, I am barely taking care of myself and Miss Famous.  Someday it may be relevant again.  The point is, I don’t live in “that” world anymore.  The one where there’s no possibility that nothing bad will happen.  You can be sure, after this year, if anyone doesn’t live in that world, it’s me.

But I’m not saying this to get a medal in the pain Olympics, but rather to come back to the idea of response.  Cait’s Mom wrote a lovely piece about pain and compassion that hit me right where I needed to learn something.  It’s very much worth a read.

What do we do with our pain?  Do we let it open us up, bring us awareness?  Or do we let it harden us, dull us to others’ pain?

little by little

In thinking about this post, I kept coming back to this certain image from a song I really like, and I really wanted to use this image to explain what I wanted to say.  One problem is that the song is not in English, another problem is that the only online translation I found doesn’t do a literal translation of the one line I wanted it to, but we can deal, right?

The song is “D.ime Que No” by Ricardo A.rjona.  The line I was thinking of is “dame esa sí como cuentagotas,” which literally means “give me that yes by an eyedropper,” but more figuratively (and how it makes more sense), “tell me yes little by little.”

The thing about this image that I like is the idea of the little by little, the bit by bit, the thing that can be so implausible, so unacceptable (this is me here, not the song) at one time can be perfectly acceptable later, or at least manageable, and the difference comes not in giant bursts, but little by little, bit by bit, drip by drip by drop by drop.

(Granted, I’ve taken this one image from the song and gone way into left field with it, but this is the way my mind works sometimes…ok, a lot.)

I remember back when I first had to see the fertility “specialist” at my ob/gyn’s way back in 2007.  I have PCOS, and in the initial stages of the infertility war that X and I fought, that’s “all” we thought we were dealing with.  Little did we know what was to come–severe male factor infertility, fibroids that would prevent our doing IVF (due to the insurance not covering the surgery–long story), other factors that would keep putting roadblocks in our path, one after another after another.*

I remember coming home after my HSG (yes, I went alone–stupid) and talking to my friend Cherry, who happened to have just gotten there for a visit, and to X.  Both of them were a little taken aback by how totally demoralized I was by the whole thing, and this was way at the beginning, and my doctor had been very hopeful, but I felt like I had been cut off at the knees.  (Now I know why, of course, is because I was holding on a little too hard to the idea of the magical pregnancy and the magical baby to make everything better.  Then, I just knew I was cut off at the knees.)

If you had told me then, in that moment, at the beginning, how long a path it would be, and that, in fact, I would not actually end up having any children with Mr. X, well, I don’t know what I would have done, but it wouldn’t have been good, and it wouldn’t have been healthy, and I might actually have just gone crazy.  But the truth came little by little, drop by drop (though at times it felt like a tsunami), and here I am today, certainly better and healthier than I was at that agonizing post-HSG moment.

Today I found out some X-related stuff that even a month ago I think would have had me scrambling and anxious and freaked the fuck out, not to mention bawling like one of those babies that I don’t have.  If I had found out this stuff two or three months ago?  Hell, the shaking probably would have started up again, and who knows when it would have stopped.

But I found it out today, after many, many, many days of bit by bit by bit of learning who he really is, so when I found out that he hasn’t been paying the mortgage since I left (though he has plenty of money to pay it ), I wasn’t so shocked.**  And I had already come to terms with the fact that there are so many things that are out of my control, and this in particular is one of them.  So I’m not freaked, which is strange for me, if you know me at all, but I like it and could really get used to this mode of interacting with the world.

But I probably shouldn’t have laughed at the customer service rep when she told me.

*Of course, now I see all of this as one of the greatest things that ever happened to me, and I do not say that lightly.  I cannot imagine trying to deal with him right now with a baby/child.  I probably wouldn’t have left, but that’s another post or ten.

**Well, either that, or the fact that I had just had one of Frank’s cookies to soothe my soul before finding all of this out.  Personally, I’m thinking they’re better than anti-anxiety meds.