I think May 30th is a calm sounding date; ceremonial, processional, well rounded. Maybe if Keith and I ever do a vow renewal ceremony, we'll choose this date.
His family has gone, almost as quickly as they came. Each time they visit, it's more and more enjoyable. My sister in law has evolved, slowly, from being a comfortable family member to a real friend. It helps that we have so much in common; the men we are married to are very similar in composition, though her man is a much more intense version than mine.
I like family meals. I like being the one preparing them. Keith and his brother were on the deck, grilling the chicken wing drummets, my niece and the dogs kept them company. I got to bustle around inside, making dinner rolls, corn on the cob and salad, setting the table. It was a delicious meal and full of summer flavor, right down to the pink lemon aide and the butter worn down in the middle from the corn being rolled in it.
Now the house is quiet and I have a lot of work waiting for me, piles of laundry, breakfast dishes, beds to be made. But guess what came in the mail on Saturday?
My documents! Both of them! I actually did get divorced in July. I did the mental equivalent of closing my eyes and putting my finger on the page in picking that date. Seeing the dates brought up a huge amount of memories that weren't as much images as they were feelings. I saw the wedding date in early June and remembered vividly the utter wretchedness of that May before. I remembered it like a sickness in my gut.
I remembered the livid colors of summer bright like a propaganda poster; smeared green of trees, road banks, lawns, hot blue sky, emptiness. My life then suffered under the burden of an all encompassing malaise, dropped too suddenly from a childhood that in no way prepared me for the real world or for even knowing who I actually was.
I needed my marriage to define myself, to jettison me out into adulthood. I married the first man I ever had a real conversation with, the first male coworker I ever shared a shift with. He was the bagel maker, I was the dough mixer, it was that simple.
In a way my marriage did define myself, but only in complete contrast to what I had chosen. I came away from it with two central truths about myself. My mistakes did not have the power of definition and I could be undone and be put back together better in the end.
Some things are lost forever though. But I don't think innocence is something a person is allowed to keep in life. It gets wrenched away one way or another and then replaced with faith and grit and a conscious choice to focus on what is beautiful even though a person is knee deep in the shit.
Anyway, I'm procrastinating. I know some of you are wondering if I was pregnant or not and the answer is not. For a gal who is usually comfortable being so open on this blog, I'm remarkably reluctant to talk about this. I feel completely disenchanted with the whole thing. Just done. Moving on.
Which tells me it must have hit hard, but I'm not feeling it. I feel merely a large, disinterested numbness. I'm feeling like I want to hate the whole thing, not just the process of getting pregnant, but having children, having a family. I want to not want it at all.
I've thought, in a passing sort of way, about what it would feel like if I didn't want children. Who would I be? I have no idea. It's beyond the reach of my imagination.
I'm also feeling like it's not at all real. It's all an illusion. I feel like the idea that an egg could implant and grow a child inside my womb is just a fairy tale, a bizarre fairy tale, like stories about creatures who are half fish, half human and breath water. Like, of course I can't get pregnant, it's just plain weird to think that I could, where did I get that strange idea from in the first place?
Other people get pregnant. Other people get launched into biological motherhood, other people carry on their genes and the human race and get transformed from who they were into this other person, this mother, this parent. They grow and deepen, their lives are challenged and enriched, they spread out, they're fertile, maternal.
But not me. I'm unnatural, static. I'm denied, a biological dead end. I'm looking through the glass wall and I'll never feel it, can't even imagine it. And I feel like I would be a terrible parent anyway. Who am I to think I could be a mother, a good mother? How dare I hope for it. I'm marked out, I'm marked to remain at shallow end of life's experience, forever oriented to self, going around and around the same little well trampled ground of experience, like a donkey at the mill stone.
I was talking to my mom a while ago and she said in passing, "I had your brother fifteen months after you, we planned it that way..." and I had to stop her.
"Wait, wait, wait, you planned it?" I asked. "You not only got pregnant, but you got pregnant on schedule?"
This was not the first time I'd heard this story, but my god, it struck me in this whole new, profound way. Some women not only get pregnant, but they get pregnant when they want to. Their body actually functions in rhythmic cycles that they can jump on or off and ride on through to the first or the next child. My own mother is one of them.
But not me. If I get pregnant it's not because it happened naturally. It's going to happen because I worked hard and paid a lot of money to manipulate my body. I'm going to soak my body in chemical hormones and have sex on schedule. I will have to wrest that experience out by force of will, directly through the intervention of science.
It's starting to sink in. At first I was all, hey, I could be one of those women. This is an interesting experience, I'll know what it feels like to be one of those women. But I'm not really one of them, I'll get pregnant of course I will.
But actually no. I really am one of those women in their thirties who want children desperately and can't get pregnant. And it's not so much interesting as it is awful. It's humiliating, it's emotional, it's way too real.
And this blog post is way too long and wow, did I dive on through the numbness, definitely feeling it now. But it's better to feel, to let it flow through.
It'll pass and I'll be left with what's true: an appointment with an OBGYN clinic, and my documents. And I will be a mother one way or another, it doesn't matter how. I'll have the family I was meant to have, the family that was always meant for me. I just have to move on through this space to get there.
