Walking into my first social outing since a virus attacked my autonomic nervous system 5.5 months ago, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Though much less than a few months ago, my nervous system still tends to over assimilate sound and does not adjust smoothly to darkness. Not to mention I’m still dealing with a slowly waning level of dizziness and lightheadedness. And then there’s the fertile world whose presence is, of course, immeasurable. (more…)
I was missing you on the day things crumbled. My cart seemed so bare two days before Christmas as I struggled to procure the few things your Dad and I needed, trying to make the best of our holiday for two we felt no urge to celebrate.
I didn’t know then why Fairway Market was spinning and going black or why my heart was flailing about or why the vision of the woman cuddling her toddler in the cheese line suddenly felt no less barbaric than the act of trying to exist.
All I knew then was that I missed you. What I know now is that the towering experience of missing you was layered with a malfunctioning nervous system and I think back on that space in time with sorrow. And with a pointed acknowledgement of human fallibility. That space in time when I sat in my car and in my body spinning out of control trying to fathom your absence. An impossible feat under normal circumstances, an utterly defeating experience in the presence of unregulated blood pressure and minimal blood flow to the brain.
I dialed 911 as my heart relentlessly beat out of my chest. (more…)
Things have felt……peculiar lately.
I’ve been feeling that half here, half not here feeling. But not the pulverized half here half not here feeling of a year ago, this one is different. I’ve been feeling unsettled. A bit disconnected. Pain, my long time reliable compass, no longer rules my existence. (more…)
The morning after last week’s election I lay on my couch, practically immobile. As it did with many, the election results struck me sideways. First, I felt all of it. Confusion. Anger. Sadness. Sadness for people on both sides of the aisle who don’t feel seen and heard by our society and are not having their needs met by this country. Disheartened that things crumbled to the point where someone who I truly believe is not an intelligent, decent well-meaning human being could be elected. Upheaval. Concern for the future – mine and everyone else’s. Numb. Violated. Discombobulated.
Wishing deep in my heart of hearts that Trump does a good job is much like wishing for a pregnancy on the heels of multiple failed fertility treatments; you want it more than anything but know on a level it’s probably not going to happen. Most of all, I was shocked that I was shocked. When one loses their children to infertility after years of trying and doing everything right only to walk out into a sea of indifference (please read the “you can have mine”, “you’re lucky”, “you can always foster or adopt” “it wasn’t meant to be” and “at least you can travel now” minimizations), one’s list of what will shock them in life from that day forward becomes severely truncated. (more…)
I had gotten through Father’s Day without much flinching. These milestones, or non-milestones, depending upon how you look at it seem to, in me lately, provoke the question: Does it get easier, or am I getting stronger? (more…)
Wrestling with the feeling that the other shoe is always about to drop was unavoidable – my subconscious associates anything infertility with the reasonable becoming a debacle, things going wrong when you do everything right and, most of all, deprivation. I was concerned that my flights weren’t real, that my boarding passes wouldn’t print and anything else non – sensical you can think of. (more…)
It was three days after Easter. I awoke with a slow bleed into consciousness. I know there are those dramatic shoot up from the pillow in the still of the night bursts – this was not that. But something was…..wrong, amiss somehow. (more…)
