(I know; I wrote these a while ago and didn't publish them. Actually, I've written a ton of posts lately that I haven't published. The thing is, if I write them in the morning and then don't finish them to my standards, I never go back to them at all, even though I tell myself that I will. So they just add up. But here's two, released!)
February 9th
I investigated the long list of blogs I follow and found a lot of them are dead and gone.
It's a funny thing; blogging. I don't know those people from Adam, but I've followed along in their lives, some of them for over a year. When I don't hear from them, I miss them. I wonder, did their husband get the job, how did the move go, how did reintegration go?
Others I do get to know a little better and its amazing how much of an encouragement and positive impact they have on my life. Those women have walked though and continue to walk through some very difficult things and they not only continue to choose life, but they write it out, with honesty and grace.
Speaking of women, in a few weeks I'm heading down to North Carolina to meet up with my mom, her best friend and her daughter, who just happens to be my very best friend from childhood, in what we are calling the Great Ya Ya Meet up of 2010.
I'm a little nervous because I haven't seen my friend in years and she has three absolutely beautiful children. I always have this feeling of awe when I see the offspring of my childhood friends running about and laughing and doing their adorable childhood things.
Not having had children myself, I wonder how it happened; how they presented the world with living, breathing pieces of themselves. I mean, I know how it happened, but it's such a strange and marvelous thing.
February 13th
Valentine's Day tomorrow: cue desperation for a large percent of the male population who only today are going to scramble to procure the necessary articles.
The sky is grey and sneezing snow; the house behind me is in shambles, but that's only because for the first time in two weeks or more, my husband has the day off. He's upstairs watching some kind of action movie with thunderous sound affects that echo down through the ceiling.
This month I didn't get my period at all. At about the tenth, I decided that I had better take a pregnancy test, since naturally I thought it likely that I was pregnant. I wasn't.
(In fact, the pregnancy test said "-no." Not just "no" but a negative no. I was less than not pregnant. Great.)
Actually, about fifteen minutes later on the couch the tears spilled over and I sat watching the Barefoot Contessa and feeling all the savor of life gone. I don't exaggerate. I wanted nothing more than to sink forever into the embrace of the couch, limpid, mildewed.
Then I was deeply ashamed of myself. The grief and the shame of what I felt to be the disproportionate nature of the grief lived side by side in me for about twenty four hours.
My internal conversations at the time were acutely miserable: I was a selfish, shallow person with no sense of perspective; other people suffer far, far worse things with much more strength. I was little in soul and lost in envy for other people's lives and therefor abandoning my own. I wasn't grateful for what God gave me. I was so stressed out about getting pregnant that I was literally going backward, my own body was shutting up on me. Serves me right.
The amount of self loathing behind these thoughts was disturbing. I called my dad.
"I feel humiliated by the envy," I confessed. "I have a great life, why can't I just enjoy my life?"
"Envy isn't a sin," Dad said, "it's an emotion. You can be happy you're feeling emotion, it's an indication that you're emotionally alive. You're a thirty two year old woman who wants a baby and envy is perfectly appropriate."
I was so relieved I wept. Envy wasn't a moral discrepancy.
"I have to take the intensity of getting pregnant away," I continued. "The intensity itself is hindering getting pregnant, but I have no idea what that internal conversation would sound like."
"Well," said Dad, just warming up, because I'm speaking his language now, "it requires two things. One is altitude and the other is neutrality."
"What does that mean?" I asked, lost but hopeful.
Altitude, it turns out, is perspective above the experience; it's the ability to observe oneself and one's emotions. Neutrality is the ability to do this without judgement, without labeling something as good or bad. The easiest way to reach this perspective is to notice what is happening, usually through a journal.
I'm going to do so on my blog. So here are some things I've noticed about myself.
I frequently hold myself to a rigid moral standard and allow myself very little mercy. This is partially because I fear that chaos would happen if I didn't have a clear, black and white grid on which to chart my character. It pairs nicely with this internal image I had as a teenager; of myself on a cliff, clinging desperately to the rock wall of Godly behavior as if my life depended on it, while below me the safety net of God's grace waited. But I felt it would be weak to let myself fall into it, it would be...cheap grace, that utter degredation of God's salvation, the use of it purely out of sloth or selfishness. So I forced myself to go on clinging, hoping this would gain me God's favor.
This is a very old way of thinking; I no longer believe God's grace is a safety net, I think of it more as the very air I breathe. But from time to time the past grips me and I have to remind myself to let my aching fingers loose and fall back. God's not afraid of chaos, after all, in fact, it's the stuff with which He created everything in the first place.
I also noticed that I was living in a very narrow framework: I had to get pregnant now, time was slipping away. I had to penny pinch and couldn't buy this or that....or else what? The reality is, I'm going to have a family one way or another, in the natural course of time. The resources are there; if we don't get pregnant naturally, we have access to other venues if we should choose those. If we don't, or if that doesn't work, we'll adopt.
So one way or another, quite naturally, I will have a family. In the meantime, I can just relax and enjoy my life as it is right now.
After the phone call, liberated, I got dressed and went out. I went to the library, finally, and what did I find but "The Scent of Water," which I'd been wanting to read for a while and "A Tree Grows in Brooklynn," which is one of the most beautifully descriptive books I've read in a long time.
I went to the dry goods store and bought stuff, because the resources are there. I don't have to use stained, falling apart oven mitts. My husband makes more than enough for me to buy new ones, of my own choosing. Also, a new sheet set so I can have a well stocked linen closet, a vision of mine from old. I bought my husband a John Deere shelf for Valentine's Day and a Snicker's bar because that is his love language.
Last, and certainly not least, I just picked up a call from the young Army wife who's been over with her husband a few times. I didn't want to, I wanted to avoid the call, because she'd invited us to go bowling with her and some friends, about six people, and I knew I'd be miserable if I went, but I felt guilty about saying no.
But I picked it up! And I went with the jaw dropping truth. I said cheerfully that I was a terribly shy person and I would simply be a complete dork in a large group of people I didn't know, but that it was so nice of her to invite us, and did she want to meet up, just the two of us to go shopping on Sunday instead?
She did! And everything was fine, amazing how that happens so often.
