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.
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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Reflections on what’s missing from a year of headlines
It was early on in the pandemic that talk of grandparents not being able to see their grandchildren started to become part of the daily swirl.
I was genuinely moved by the grandparent heartache at first. I could, all too well, relate to the plight of having something close to your heart to which you expect free access ripped from your existence. Even if only temporarily. I actually shed some tears on behalf of this not asked for angst.
At the time, I was six years out of multiple fertility treatments rendering no baby. Like most people who spend merciless stretches in the trenches of trying to conceive, or in other circumstances hoping for parenthood, I had formed surprisingly deep and influential bonds with my unborn.
By the time the pandemic hit I had come to a point in my grieving and healing process where I was able to hold some space for life’s more meager infractions. “Fertile world problems” I’ve come to refer to them as.
Fast forward one year, and past endless headlines blaring the pandemic discord and disturbance heaped upon the parented and grandparented world. Much of it entirely justified and important to air. It’s what has been missing from our conversation that stirs concern.
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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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