Surviving

What can I write on this last day of August? 

Well, I survived another summer. I appreciate all four seasons, but summer is my least favorite.
I really hate the heat.

But that's what we do, isn't it? Survive. And everything we've learned through our devastating experiences can serve us well as we navigate the unprecedented uncertainty of today's world.

Nobody is happy. The people who didn't vote for all of this aren't happy. Yet, the people who did vote for all of this aren't happy either. There is no making sense of any of it.

First, infertility. Then failed treatments and involuntary childlessness. Then a pandemic. And now massive changes to our social norms, policies, and institutions. We cannot count on anything.

But we already know that. As infertility survivors, we know life isn't fair. We know life doesn't go as planned. We know there are no guarantees even after a full life of working hard and being nice.

So what do we do? 

I highly recommend feeling your feelings. Don't deny them. Don't shove them down. Don't try to eat, drink, smoke, or spend your feelings away into nonexistence. It never works. You have to acknowledge them. You have to feel them. If not, I truly believe they get stuck and make you feel worse. So feel mad, sad, confused, frustrated, distraught, exhausted... Your feelings aren't your fault, but they are your responsibility to manage.

Just like with infertility, nobody can do it for us.

And just like with infertility, we can practice looking for the little things. The little moments of joy that we find in a good meal or a quiet moment. Appreciating the little things is not a solution to the world's problems, but it can be a personal salve. You deserve to feel good. But sometimes we have to dig really deep to find it. 

If you can't find a glimmer of joy in the moment, that's okay too. It's not your fault! That's how it is sometimes. I encourage you to dig in your heels so that you don't slide down deeper into the hole. Get out your mental pickaxe and thrust it into the wall you're clinging to. 

Hold on for better times.

💜

It's Incredibly Difficult to Recover

One of the many reasons why I grieved so hard and so long for my unrealized dream of raising children is the idea that parenting is so pervasive that it's the default way of thinking... It's hard enough to live amongst pronatalism when you didn't want to parent, but it feels nearly impossible to live in this suffocating world when you wanted to parent and didn't get to. 

Here's my most recent example.

I was talking to my mom and she was telling me about a family member that came to visit. He wants to move to a different country and has been working on the logistics for awhile. My mom is not in favor of this plan. Why she cares where he lives is beyond me. Personally, I'm excited for him. He's well traveled and knows the language. My mom thinks it's a terrible idea.

Mom: It's hard to move.

Me: Yeah, it's hard to move, but he wants to move. I think it's pretty cool.

Mom: He's moving away from his family. [This family member's parents are dead and he is not in communication with his siblings. He's not married, and he doesn't have kids.]

Me: Well, I'm sure it won't be any different. He's just living his life.

Mom: But it's even harder to move when you're our age. You can't meet people through your work or through your children.

Me: ... I haven't met anyone through my children...

Mom: Well, you know what I mean.

Me: And he hasn't ever met anyone through his children either...

Mom: Well, I guess not.

Me: He's probably just living his life like regular. I mean, this is his life. It's nothing new.

*****

I'm not mad at my mom, but I continue to be shocked at her blatant assumptions and inability to imagine life any other way than how it has gone for her. I even told her, "I understand that you're thinking about life with the normative transitions, but [our family member] and I don't live life like that and it changes everything."

And THAT is why it is so hard to grieve and recover from involuntary childlessness. Not only are you navigating traumatic loss and disenfranchised grief, you are encountering people's limited perspectives and constant judgment for what you are supposed to be doing instead.

Things Change

I have a new job! And, yes, I also have new job fatigue. But, I am very excited about this new job and, get this, it involves working with children at a school. Hahahaha. Two years after I gave away a hundred boxes full of kids books and educational materials. Oh well. 

I had to clear out the old stuff to make room for the new. And I will not be buying anything this time around. I no longer work for free, nor do I purchase my own supplies. Those days are over. In sooo many ways. I'm saving most of my resources for myself in the second half of my life. I'm lucky I didn't give myself away entirely during the first half! 

(There are a lot of metaphors in that previous paragraph.)

I wasn't looking for this job. The opportunity came my way, I decided to explore it, and the pay is really good. Unfortunately, it's just part-time so I will continue to piece together several jobs to make my monthly bills. However, because of my piecemeal situation, I am fortunate to be able to work with both children AND older and elderly adults. I love both populations so much.

So... New job... I go to my first day yesterday and a co-worker is showing me the documentation system. We are being conversational and totally getting along well, which is great because we will be working together closely this year. (Seriously, anything can happen, but I have never had such a great start to a new job before!) 

Then she asks me, "Do you have kids?" This is a typical question. We work at a school and she was just telling me about her kid. While it used to cut deeply, this question is just typical get-to-know-you banter among women working together in a school. So I just said, "No," because, well, I obviously do not have kids.

Her reply surprised me. She immediately said, "Lucky you!" 

Now I wasn't mad or hurt or offended or anything, but I also wasn't going to let that slide. To me, there is nothing lucky about my situation. So I said, "Well I wanted them badly but that didn't work out for me."

And, again, her reply surprised me. She immediately said, "Oh I get that. I wanted more but she was a traumatic birth and I had heart failure after her so the doctor told me if I had another baby I would die."

Oh. 

She went on, "And people say the dumbest things. People are always asking me why I didn't have more. And I'm like, well I don't want to die so I can't, but obviously they don't know that."

And I agreed. I said people don't get it and that they don't understand the pain of secondary infertility. Then we moved on to talking about other things. 

I didn't feel misjudged. I didn't feel dismissed. I didn't feel anything bad.

I felt like my new co-worker kinda got it. We didn't stay on the topic long and I doubt we'll really even talk about it. I didn't get the impression that either one of us were still in that hurt space.

It's so funny how things change over time. I used to feel so embarrassed by my infertility and ashamed of being childless not-by-choice. Not anymore. Not at all. I'm just living my life. And currently my life involves being excited for my new job working with kids!

When Decluttering Gets Heavy

I've been decluttering some more. I've written about it a lot: selling the house I bought for my children and dumping everything into a storage unit. Dealing with my stuff over time. Giving stuff away, throwing stuff away. And now, ten years later, it's so much better.

My latest achievement is getting my keepsakes down to one large tub. There is nothing wrong with keeping mementos, but I had way too many. It was weighing me down. And now I'm thankful that I have some things from growing up, as well as relieved because it's so much less.

Decluttering is good for us, but we have to go at our own pace. I mean, sometimes we don't get that opportunity. You have to evacuate so you grab what's within reach and go. Or, you trust your things with someone who doesn't take care of them and then you don't have them anymore. Or, you move a lot and things get lost. Any number of things can happen where people don't get to have keepsakes. They're a privilege, but they can be deadweight too.

I also decluttered my fabric stash. The details of that probably wouldn't be interesting to anyone other than other quilters, but it was a satisfying task to go through all of my yardage and scraps.

So one decluttering endeavor was very emotional and has taken me ten years. The other decluttering task was very practical and took me about a month. Both required time, energy, and the right mindset. I had to be able to commit to letting go and moving on.

*****

All of that to say, I came across and read my old dream journal. Not a journal where I wrote about the dreams I had at night. A journal where I wrote down different ideas I could do in the future. The first entry was in 2006. There are so many different ideas jotted down over the years, but I stopped in my tracks when I turned the page and saw a list of numbers.

My temperatures.

When I was trying to get pregnant, I recorded my temperature every morning before getting out of bed for two whole years. The things we forget... I mean, I knew I did that. I knew I took my temperature for that long, but I had forgotten I had done it in that journal. There was nothing like seeing all of those pages filled with those numbers. It felt like a sucker punch for a couple of seconds. Then I felt like I had to stop and honor the woman I was back then when I was doing that. I felt really, really bad for her. I shed a few tears, but mostly I just stopped what I was doing and really sat there. I breathed slowly and deeply. I knew I would never do that again. 

I don't have to, I don't want to, and I'm not going to. I will never try to get pregnant again. 

It's so easy to say something that used to be so hard.

*****

So did I stop reading that dream journal and call it a night? Oh no, my friends, I kept going. I knew there were only a couple of more entries left. What I didn't remember was that I had written an entry the day after I left my husband before I had told or talked to anyone. 

Oh wow.

I can't believe I wrote down what I was feeling in that moment. But it was so much and I was so alone. (I mean, literally. I was living in a new city in a new state without my husband after planning to move together for three years.) It was so much and it was all mine and I had to deal with it. Just like with infertility, nobody could go through that for me. Nobody could go through it with me. We walk the hardest paths by ourselves because they're ours and ours alone.

So yeah, it was crazy... One minute I was sorting through some old items and the next I'm staring at pages of my recorded temperatures followed by the most vulnerable thing I've ever written. 

You know, light reading.

*****

Decluttering can get heavy. There are a lot of reasons why there are so many articles about decluttering floating around in the pop culture ether. Decluttering is A Thing. It's tied to emotions and expectations and intentions and good stuff and painful stuff and reminders that we were there, that we did things, and it mattered.

Go at your own pace. There's a lot to it and you don't even have to understand it. 

Just one thing at time. One shelf one day, maybe a box the following month. 

Or, you can stack your boxes for now and cover them with pretty scarves and blankets for a better aesthetic. I've done that too. 😂💜