Dear Readers,
After all this time I’m finally able to offer you some yoga! Wanted to let you know about Afterward Honesty’s very first yoga offering this coming Sunday May 8 from 12:00 – 1:15 ET. Get the class description, sign up and other info when you click the image on the left. Hope to see you there and over at the blog on Afterward Honesty!
I’ve always been drawn to difference. Hailing from a quintessentially small white New England town, on the edge of my adolescence my restless soul began to grumble about the lack of human variety in which I was swimming. To which my Dad would chuckle something along the lines of, “How do you know anything about human variety? You haven’t been anywhere yet!”
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Hope to see you on board over on my new platform,
where I’m looking forward to supporting childless health and wellness through yoga offerings and webinars
Hop on over to…..
Why I Love Rudolph
My unexpected childless holiday tradition
For a long time, I could not have even conjured the possibility of sitting myself down and taking in a holiday tv special. These potentially glorious childhood throwbacks naturally reeked, for a good many years, of what should have been.
Revelations and Reflections On a Healing Trajectory
Photo credit: Geoff Colley/Shutterbug
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.
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#worldchildlessweek2021
Not even two months after my final failed fertility treatment, I had entered the adoption option’s funnel cloud. As harsh realities and impossibilities swirled from every direction on this front, I was also sharing myself with people as I tried to make my way out into the world again. I’ve noticed since this is something that other grieving people commonly and spontaneously tend to do.
After conveying some grief over my unfruitful attempts at trying to conceive I was told by an acquaintance I thought well of, “Well, you can ALWAYS foster or adopt…..”. Given that this was someone with a few healthy biological children of her own, I was thrown by her unyielding certitude.
Read moreAnd what precious little separates us
The day after the fierce flooding caused by Hurricane Ida here in the northeast United States, I had just so happened to have a consultation scheduled with a solar company. A sobering, “too little too late” synchronicity? Perhaps. But given the years – long absence of it in my trying to conceive and healing processes, I now revel in any remnant of synchronicity that comes my way!
As I took the virtual call, I was fumbling through assimilating the events that had occurred a mere thirty miles from my home while feeling mildly comforted in taking a step that would perhaps contribute a drop to leveling off the climate crisis.
Towards the end of the call I inquired about the benefit to the environment.
“You care?” The representative said in a facetiously caught off guard tone.
“It’s a quaint notion, but yeah, every now and then…” I shot back sarcastically.
As he went on to connect the dots between solar power and burning less fossil fuel, he also shared that almost no one ever asks about the environmental benefit when looking into going solar.
“Well, that’s strange,” I thought. I mean, of course people want to know the ways in which THEY will benefit, as did I. It’s only human. And, if infertility and childlessness have enlightened me to anything, it’s the human tendency to be disinterested in other people’s suffering. But what about one’s own potential suffering due to the climate crisis? Why would that not be of any concern?
And then I remembered – there’s also the human tendency to fail to see how easily other people’s suffering could (or could have) become their own. Or as I inwardly have been referring to it, the “It Can’t Happen To Me” mentality.
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Life is strange. Not that I had to tell any of you that. It’s an obvious truth that just needs to be plainly stated sometimes.
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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.
On questioning ritual and getting differentAround 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
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