Once upon a time, I gleefully passed out Halloween candy as a wide eyed new homeowner.
This occurred for a couple of years before the friction between my envisioned future and actual reality started to grind. And it culminated amid my ttc efforts with hurriedly drawing the blinds down in the wake of an unexpected onslaught of trick or treaters in 2012, hardly 36 hours after hurricane Sandy left town. Seriously.
At the onset of my nervous system disorder four plus years ago, I became intimately connected with the spring phase of my gardens. It somehow served me to meander around and stick my face inches from the earth, securing ring side seats to nature’s first pokes back from dormancy. For the fifteen or twenty minutes that I could anyway. Dizziness, lightheadedness and light overwhelm would drag me back inside all too soon – where I would then be overwhelmed by the darker setting to which my body could barely readjust.
What I remember though was the awe at this phase of unfolding. Never again was I going to miss it, to dismiss it as subtle or to only turn my attention to plants once they became more “obvious”. I recall last early spring stumbling upon something I had forgotten I planted stridently spearing itself through the earth. “You came back!!” I literally gasped in wonder. It hadn’t owed me that, or anything else. But yet there it was.
Around four years ago, in the fourth year coming out of treatments, I found myself in a vehement phase of mourning.The pull towards expressing my love and losses through gardening continued to grow more fervent.It was then I created our candle and flower ritual to mark the conclusion of our final failed attempt – and to chauffeur me through winter in the absence of gardening.I was pulsing on a regular basis with the need for physical symbols that could mark, prove and memorialize. Read more →
The psychological trajectory of non parenthood is not a flatline
Over the past year plus now, I’ve been on an expedition with my body.I enlisted in physical therapy due to a shoulder injury, which then spanned, at my urging, to a fuller body physical therapy program to address scoliosis.Between that and osteopathic manipulation therapy sessions, I notice slow but steady improvements.It’s hard, consistent work.And even though my present musculoskeletal issues would likely qualify as minor, I’m choosing for now to keep trekking.
Characteristics that shaped my infertility experiences have resurfaced and this puts me on alert.My persistence, ability to commit, need to see what’s under every rock and general fire – the very things that screwed me in baby making land – have re-emerged within this plight.A scoliosis body carries with it a whiff of mystery, it’s conceptually akin to a Rubik’s cube that never quite gets solved.I remind myself that I am now also equipped with a much softened expectation of cause and effect, an awareness of persistence’s dark side and an honorary PhD in that which we don’t control.With all that, I think I’m ok to keep going.
I’ve gotten the idea along the way that I’m not your average patient.Much of this is due to my alignment based yoga practice and training, and the heightened body awareness that renders.But underneath the surface I feel there’s something else. Read more →
Strange things have been happening lately.When I’m out in the world now, something is different.
I find myself catching glimpses of someone I don’t fully recognize.She is emerging full force but I have yet to really see her.Life’s obstacles and hardships can serve as quite the blinders sometimes. Read more →
I adjusted and engaged my shoulders the best I could, inhaled a breath and raised my arms up into Warrior two to the unwelcome resonance of snapping and clicking.
Shrieking expletives soon filled the air of my cozy yoga space, along with yoga blocks boomeranging off the walls and a few crow poses raised in shoulder injury defiance.
This had never happened to me during a practice before.I’m all for working within my body’s limits and even find the excursion intriguing.But something else was going on.And so, as my likely wiser self hovered in the background gently whispering over and over, “Easy, tiger – don’t make it worse”, another aspect of my wiser self knew I needed to let it rip. Read more →
For the longest time, I have seen my children in other people’s children.For years, perhaps as many as seven, I have seen what I kept losing and then finally lost for good in other people’s children.There was no even imagining a day when this wouldn’t be.
And now, for the past couple of months, peculiar things have been happening.More and more, images of children seem to be computing as simply children instead of registering in every last cell as an unsolicited cannonball of all that I lost. Read more →
A settled chill hung in the air as we hurriedly pulled into the flower shop on our way to buy groceries.
“Why don’t we get them at Whole Foods? Whole Foods has flowers.” my husband pointed out irritably.
I slammed the car door without a word and stomped into the flower shop, disregulated autonomic nervous system and all.
I respectfully waited for the owner to take a funeral order as my autonomic nervous system failed miserably to adjust to the cold (which is typically hard on people with dysautonomia as well as other neuropathies). But knowing what it’s like to have a loss that is not societally regarded in any way, I was not about to impatiently huff and pout in the face of someone else’s moment of acknowledgement.
I ordered an arrangement of white flowers in a low, square vase as my lightheadedness ballooned and the room spun a bit, perhaps from both the cold and harsh reality. Read more →
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