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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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.
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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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.
And other pandemic deja vusWell folks, here we are. In a worldwide crisis with no known ending. A crisis that entails a major loss of control, an utter disruption of our normals and a smashed view of the future. We are dealing with a disease that was initially not taken too seriously, a condition whose effect on individuals is intensely swerving and has the capacity to leave major wreckage in its wake. And all in a situation where social isolation remains one of the few ways to lessen bad outcomes, where much time and energy is expended re-learning daily life basics.
We’re fumbling our way through a global pandemic. And for me and many like me, it all feels so familiar. 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
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
As an involuntarily childless infertility and IVF survivor, the best Mother’s Day gift I can offer my Mom is my own well beingI know it has been awhile, dear readers. More on my unexpected hiatus from blogging and the pieces above later.
For now, I‘m happy to report that I made it through my end of the week travels relatively unscathed by any Mother’s Day hoopla. A few people with whom I’m in regular contact even remembered to not bid me a “Happy Mother’s Day” and upgraded to the somewhat inaccurate but much more welcome “Have a nice weekend” instead.
Or at least I’d like to think so. I regularly check myself as I’ve been prone to fantasizing about people giving a shit over the past five or so years, often to find out they were not even dipping their big toenail into my shoes. But assuming it was intended, these seemingly micro considerations render a difference in one’s well being for the better. Read more
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