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.
Well Dear Readers, look what December dragged in –
Meet my new and expanded platform,
I’m happy to share that, coming in 2022, I’m going to start offering yoga workshops, yoga classes and webinars for the purpose of exploring and supporting the experiences surrounding involuntary childlessness. Along with the occasional sassy blog post you’ve all come to know and…..well, I’ll let you fill in the rest!
We’ll be kicking off with a Your Breath As a Resource Workshop coming this spring.
So what can you do right now? A few things:
It’s been a long road to get to this point, a road that has involved a pile of obstacles followed by soul searching and intense descision making – both practically and existentially. I feel good though that I’ve assembled something that accurately reflects what I have to offer and what I hold near and dear.
So what’s going to happen to Infertility Honesty?
I’ll be posting one or two more pieces this month, at which point I’ll be tenderly packing things up and exiting formal writing and posting on this space. I will however, be keeping this site up for your viewing pleasure – or pain – or entertainment, or whatever the case is for you. I mean really, who am I to judge??
While this is not quite yet goodbye to this spot, I just want to take this moment to say that Infertility Honesty saved me. And that includes you, Dear Readers. For that I’ll be forever grateful.
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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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
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
“Sarah, This Is Sarah”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
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