Do you ever feel like you don't want to be 'nice' anymore? Isn't it bad when you feel like you have to make an effort to be 'nice', and it doesn't just happen naturally anymore? I'm finding myself being 'snappy' lately, my usual 'its ok to think that, but not say it' filter seems to have been deactivated (hopefully temporarily). Its just one of the ways that I'm feeling kinda lost right now, just feeling that I'm not myself but struggling to figure out who 'myself' is now.
It's so odd, because when I'm at work.... the minute I walk in that door... I know who I am, I can answer any question that is asked of me and deal with any situation that is presented to me. I am instinctively intuitive and level-headed and 'nice' when I'm at work, I don't have to think about it. Work is where I want to be, because I know who I am when I'm there. I'm comfortable there.. I'm in control there... I have no doubts or insecurities when I'm there... because I have a purpose when I'm at work and I create purpose for others.... and to be completely honest... it is impossible to not be 'happy' at work... how can you not be happy to see the smile appear on a 2 years old's face just because they have seen you... to have a child that is only just walking almost trip over themselves because they are so excited to see you and they just want to get to you to give you a hug... to have a parent bring in their new baby, who might be just a few days old... and place that baby in your arms and tell you that they trust you with the most precious thing in the world to them and before we know it, they will be 6 months old and will be attending the service and you will get to see that child every day and you will get to know that child and you will become such a huge part of that child's life, but more than they know it - they become a huge part of yours.
People always ask me how I do what I do, does it not absolutely kill me to see all of these beautiful little children every day and know that I may never have one of my own. The answer is that it is not difficult for me. Sure - there are days when it is hard for me, of course it is... but those are the days when all I want to do is be surrounded by the small babies because I get so much happiness from them. There is never a time when I don't know what to do when I'm at work, no matter what the situation... I find that I just instinctively 'know' and I suppose... I trust my own judgement 100% when I'm there. I am 100% confident in everything that I do when I am at work... because I just 'know'.
I'm still not back to work full time, but have been spending an increasing amount of time in there every day (or at least - most days), and to be completely truthful... work is an escape for me right now. It is my haven... It is the place where I can be the person that I know I am.... The problem for me right now though, is that I don't know who I am when I'm not at work.
I have always known that I am not at my best when I am stagnant, when I'm not moving forward. Right now I feel like I am not moving at all though... and I don't know how to 'be' that person. I don't know how to not have a plan. I'm the person who plans, who makes lists, who always has a schedule, a goal, a point that I am going to reach and a deadline by which to reach it. I don't have a plan right now and that scares me. I don't know who I am without a plan. I have been a 'planner' forever. I have been pretty much physically unable to do anything without planning it first.... and now, I find myself lost in this plan-less limbo.
Everyone is telling me to just take a break and enjoy the break. Sure, we are taking a break from any kind of fertility treatment or any baby-making plans. It will be at least another year before we begin to look at going forward with that. Unfortunately, all of my 'plans' to date have been made with the assumption that we would have at least one child by now. I want to be planning a child-friendly Summer Holiday, I want to be part of the 'Mommy Club'. I want to have to plan my life around the needs of my baby. I want to be planning night feeds and nappy changes. I want to at least be able to plan for being able to plan these things in the not too distant future.... but unfortunately... all I can plan for is uncertainty... and I don't do well with uncertainty.
Uncertainty makes me anxious, it makes me uneasy. Up until recently... I have always 'known', or at least I thought I did, but now there is no knowing... there is just hoping and in many ways... Uncertainty is the best that we can hope for... and that just is not sitting well with me at all.
I find myself at home being uneasy and uncertain, finding it difficult to make even the simplest decisions., finding it hard to explain myself and even harder to realise that that the reason I can't explain it is because it is impossible to explain what you do not understand - which leads on to my unhappiness at not understanding and therein lies the vicious circle that I find myself both stuck in and surrounded by at the current time.
I really do feel quite 'lost' right now and I guess I'm hoping that I'll 'find myself' soon because I really don't like this feeling of being lost... or perhaps I will find a way to not feel so lost in this limbo of uncertainty but instead to appreciate the 'break' because what faces me has the potential to knock me harder than anything has ever knocked me before... I need to find a way to just be 'me'.
Sunday, February 23, 2014
Thursday, February 13, 2014
'Might' Is All We Have........
In the past 9 days, I have congratulated 17 people on the birth of their new baby. 17 new babies that have entered this world in just over a week. The first few were easy, its an amazing thing to welcome a new baby in to the world and I genuinely am happy for each and every one of them. As the days went on... I began to dread opening the social networking sites for fear of seeing yet another 'New Baby' post.
It's funny, because sometimes they don't bother me at all, but gosh - when there are so many in such a short space of time, you kinda do start to feel that the universe is trying to play games with you, trying to see how far it can push you before you actually crack.
I'm so conscious of writing a post like this because I know that most of those new mothers read this blog and I don't want to in any way take from their experience and joy.
I spoke to Gordon about this when he visited yesterday. It was in a different context and not at all relating to all of these new babies, but a different situation in which I had felt bad because I felt that one of my posts had perhaps taken part of an experience from someone else. He responded by telling me that it is in my nature to feel bad for others and while it is ok to feel bad for this other lady, I really shouldn't feel bad for writing about my true feelings. He told me that I need to realise that my feelings are just as important as the feelings of others and that it is important for me to write about what is true to me, even if it is not what others want to read. (He is oh so wise :-) )
Towards the end of last week, the new baby announcements were really starting to get to me, they were starting to bother me. Each one was a knife in my chest and as the days went by - those knives began to twist. So, what did I do? Well, I did what I always do... I tried to escape my own mind. I tried to keep myself so busy that I just would not be able to even think about it. Lulu, my beautiful bichon became the subject of my distraction, the sewing machine, my weapon of choice. I sat at that machine and I sewed and sewed and sewed. Let me put this into perspective... with the nature of the operation that I had and the location of the pain and soreness... sitting up is quite difficult for me... sitting hunched forward over a sewing machine is next to impossible. I had, earlier in that day, had a conversation with a friend about sewing and told her that I realistically could only manage 15-20 minutes of sewing at a time without really hurting myself.
After four and a half hours of sewing, Patrick arrives home from work to find me, a pathetic sight... hunched over the sewing machine with my foot on the pedal, tears running down my face and wincing in an attempt to ignore the absolute agony that my body was in. My body needed to stop, but my mind couldn't, because if it did... it would return to thoughts of all those beautiful new babies. It really was a case of mind over matter for me, and funnily enough - it was easier for me to ignore the physical pain in my body, than the mental and emotional pain that I was fighting so hard to escape from my mind and my heart. You can't escape it though, no matter how hard you try... because it will always materialise... one way or another.
That four and a half hour stint at my sewing machine resulted in me being in so much pain the following day that I was unable to get out of bed without help. My whole left side felt bruised and extremely painful, and this resulted in further frustration for me because I knew I had done it to myself.
On the up side though... Lulu now has the biggest selection of doggy coats ever...!!!!!!!
This is a dangerous time for me right now. I am not in as much pain as I had been so am a lot more mobile and am finding myself wanting to do more. Unfortunately - this causes me to do more than I really should and I end up hurting myself. I know that this is setting my recovery back and I need to rest as much as I possibly can until everything settles down properly inside of me - but gosh, I just cannot do nothing. I need to be doing things all the time and even more so at the minute because I am constantly fighting to distract myself from the inevitable thoughts of all of those beautiful new babies. One of my closest friends from the UK made the very logical point to me that pushing myself to the point of hurting myself because somebody else is where I want to be... does not actually help me to get where I want to be... in fact, it hinders my recovery and therefore hinders my progress, which in turn hinders my ability to achieve my ultimate goal. (Gotta love all of these straight-talking friends that I have!) That's the kind of logic that I just cannot argue with, but instead really made me think about the physically destructive cycle that I seem to follow when I'm struggling to deal with what is going on in my head or how external factors are really affecting me.
I got upset when I was talking to Gordon yesterday. I did something that I said I wouldn't do. I started to look at the big picture, I began to describe the process that I was facing and all of the steps that I will have to go through. Up until that point, I had promised myself that I was going to take this one step at a time and only focus on the current step and the next step at any one time. Yesterday we went through it step by step and I was hit by the realisation that the best case scenario that I can hope for is what most people would describe as a living nightmare. I began to look back at what I have been through to date on this journey, and even though that was a rougher journey than most people could ever imagine... it was actually simple, it was all so easy and straight-forward compared to the path that lies ahead of us.
I don't know where I am going to find the strength to go through all of what I have to go through. I am not even going to lay it out in detail in this post, but I most likely will in the near future. All I know is that I have to find the strength from somewhere, because I cannot look back in ten years and know that there was one more chance (however minute) and I didn't take it. I think the 'what ifs' would kill me.
It also only struck me yesterday that I had actually lost one of my tubes. I mean... I knew it had been removed... but the realisation that it was actually gone was quite stark. I know its for the best and will hopefully improve our chances whenever we do decide to go to the Czech Republic for treatment, but it is very much a feeling of being incomplete - or perhaps 'more incomplete'. I don't think any woman who has lost a baby (never mind 10) can ever truly feel 'complete', because there is always a part of her that is missing.... but unlike the pain of the tube removal which will hopefully subside in the foreseeable future.... the pain of losing your baby never will... you don't get used to it... it doesn't get easier... you just get better at hiding it and sometimes (like now) you find yourself so surrounded by what you so badly want, by what you should have, by what you have given your life to achieve but just can't... that you find yourself struggling to breathe... breathing hurts... everything hurts... and when you see picture after picture of ecstatic new mothers and proud new fathers with their beautiful new baby... a little part of your heart breaks further and you truly wonder if it will ever be your turn... but worse than that... you start to realise that it might never be your turn and you don't know how you will cope with that.
I think about the times that I lay in hospital, recovering from surgery after surgery or violently sick after Chemotherapy, with my family pleading with me to just stop this because it is going to kill me and all I can think is that it will be worth it when I finally hold my own baby. I've pictured it so many times... in the delivery suite... handing our baby to Patrick and knowing that finally, finally we are complete and knowing that every thing we had been through just served to make us love this little person even more.... and once we've had some time together, just the three of us.... we will call our families... and I will call Gordon and tell him and I'll want him to come in and hold this precious little being because I know in my heart that he/she would never have been here if it wasn't for Gordon... and Patrick will take a picture... the very first picture that will go on this blog... it will simply be a picture of my baby's hand curled around my finger and that picture alone will say more than every word in this entire blog has said... and everyone will just 'know'. We will probably have names picked but will change our minds as soon as we see him/her. I think we will share a lot of moments of silence just holding hands and looking at our beautiful baby... because there just will not be any words worthy of that moment... and then we will be..... we will just 'be'.
This is the picture that I need to keep in my head. I'm suddenly having flashbacks of my Undergrad Psychology Class as we studied Stephen Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective People - I am being reminded to 'Begin with the end in mind' (not to mention surprised that I've remembered that after all of these years...!!!) I know that I need to do everything that I possibly can to make that picture a reality. Even though I know there will be countless times when I am so afraid that something is going to go wrong and I know that at some point we will be sitting across the table from one of the Dr.s in the Clinic in the Czech Republic... about to be told whether or not any of our embryos are genetically viable... and while we need to be prepared for the fact that the answer may well be 'No'..... it also might be 'Yes'.
I know 'might' is not an awful lot to be hanging my hopes on..... but for the foreseeable future.... 'might' is all we have.
It's funny, because sometimes they don't bother me at all, but gosh - when there are so many in such a short space of time, you kinda do start to feel that the universe is trying to play games with you, trying to see how far it can push you before you actually crack.
I'm so conscious of writing a post like this because I know that most of those new mothers read this blog and I don't want to in any way take from their experience and joy.
I spoke to Gordon about this when he visited yesterday. It was in a different context and not at all relating to all of these new babies, but a different situation in which I had felt bad because I felt that one of my posts had perhaps taken part of an experience from someone else. He responded by telling me that it is in my nature to feel bad for others and while it is ok to feel bad for this other lady, I really shouldn't feel bad for writing about my true feelings. He told me that I need to realise that my feelings are just as important as the feelings of others and that it is important for me to write about what is true to me, even if it is not what others want to read. (He is oh so wise :-) )
Towards the end of last week, the new baby announcements were really starting to get to me, they were starting to bother me. Each one was a knife in my chest and as the days went by - those knives began to twist. So, what did I do? Well, I did what I always do... I tried to escape my own mind. I tried to keep myself so busy that I just would not be able to even think about it. Lulu, my beautiful bichon became the subject of my distraction, the sewing machine, my weapon of choice. I sat at that machine and I sewed and sewed and sewed. Let me put this into perspective... with the nature of the operation that I had and the location of the pain and soreness... sitting up is quite difficult for me... sitting hunched forward over a sewing machine is next to impossible. I had, earlier in that day, had a conversation with a friend about sewing and told her that I realistically could only manage 15-20 minutes of sewing at a time without really hurting myself.
After four and a half hours of sewing, Patrick arrives home from work to find me, a pathetic sight... hunched over the sewing machine with my foot on the pedal, tears running down my face and wincing in an attempt to ignore the absolute agony that my body was in. My body needed to stop, but my mind couldn't, because if it did... it would return to thoughts of all those beautiful new babies. It really was a case of mind over matter for me, and funnily enough - it was easier for me to ignore the physical pain in my body, than the mental and emotional pain that I was fighting so hard to escape from my mind and my heart. You can't escape it though, no matter how hard you try... because it will always materialise... one way or another.
That four and a half hour stint at my sewing machine resulted in me being in so much pain the following day that I was unable to get out of bed without help. My whole left side felt bruised and extremely painful, and this resulted in further frustration for me because I knew I had done it to myself.
On the up side though... Lulu now has the biggest selection of doggy coats ever...!!!!!!!
This is a dangerous time for me right now. I am not in as much pain as I had been so am a lot more mobile and am finding myself wanting to do more. Unfortunately - this causes me to do more than I really should and I end up hurting myself. I know that this is setting my recovery back and I need to rest as much as I possibly can until everything settles down properly inside of me - but gosh, I just cannot do nothing. I need to be doing things all the time and even more so at the minute because I am constantly fighting to distract myself from the inevitable thoughts of all of those beautiful new babies. One of my closest friends from the UK made the very logical point to me that pushing myself to the point of hurting myself because somebody else is where I want to be... does not actually help me to get where I want to be... in fact, it hinders my recovery and therefore hinders my progress, which in turn hinders my ability to achieve my ultimate goal. (Gotta love all of these straight-talking friends that I have!) That's the kind of logic that I just cannot argue with, but instead really made me think about the physically destructive cycle that I seem to follow when I'm struggling to deal with what is going on in my head or how external factors are really affecting me.
I got upset when I was talking to Gordon yesterday. I did something that I said I wouldn't do. I started to look at the big picture, I began to describe the process that I was facing and all of the steps that I will have to go through. Up until that point, I had promised myself that I was going to take this one step at a time and only focus on the current step and the next step at any one time. Yesterday we went through it step by step and I was hit by the realisation that the best case scenario that I can hope for is what most people would describe as a living nightmare. I began to look back at what I have been through to date on this journey, and even though that was a rougher journey than most people could ever imagine... it was actually simple, it was all so easy and straight-forward compared to the path that lies ahead of us.
I don't know where I am going to find the strength to go through all of what I have to go through. I am not even going to lay it out in detail in this post, but I most likely will in the near future. All I know is that I have to find the strength from somewhere, because I cannot look back in ten years and know that there was one more chance (however minute) and I didn't take it. I think the 'what ifs' would kill me.
It also only struck me yesterday that I had actually lost one of my tubes. I mean... I knew it had been removed... but the realisation that it was actually gone was quite stark. I know its for the best and will hopefully improve our chances whenever we do decide to go to the Czech Republic for treatment, but it is very much a feeling of being incomplete - or perhaps 'more incomplete'. I don't think any woman who has lost a baby (never mind 10) can ever truly feel 'complete', because there is always a part of her that is missing.... but unlike the pain of the tube removal which will hopefully subside in the foreseeable future.... the pain of losing your baby never will... you don't get used to it... it doesn't get easier... you just get better at hiding it and sometimes (like now) you find yourself so surrounded by what you so badly want, by what you should have, by what you have given your life to achieve but just can't... that you find yourself struggling to breathe... breathing hurts... everything hurts... and when you see picture after picture of ecstatic new mothers and proud new fathers with their beautiful new baby... a little part of your heart breaks further and you truly wonder if it will ever be your turn... but worse than that... you start to realise that it might never be your turn and you don't know how you will cope with that.
I think about the times that I lay in hospital, recovering from surgery after surgery or violently sick after Chemotherapy, with my family pleading with me to just stop this because it is going to kill me and all I can think is that it will be worth it when I finally hold my own baby. I've pictured it so many times... in the delivery suite... handing our baby to Patrick and knowing that finally, finally we are complete and knowing that every thing we had been through just served to make us love this little person even more.... and once we've had some time together, just the three of us.... we will call our families... and I will call Gordon and tell him and I'll want him to come in and hold this precious little being because I know in my heart that he/she would never have been here if it wasn't for Gordon... and Patrick will take a picture... the very first picture that will go on this blog... it will simply be a picture of my baby's hand curled around my finger and that picture alone will say more than every word in this entire blog has said... and everyone will just 'know'. We will probably have names picked but will change our minds as soon as we see him/her. I think we will share a lot of moments of silence just holding hands and looking at our beautiful baby... because there just will not be any words worthy of that moment... and then we will be..... we will just 'be'.
This is the picture that I need to keep in my head. I'm suddenly having flashbacks of my Undergrad Psychology Class as we studied Stephen Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective People - I am being reminded to 'Begin with the end in mind' (not to mention surprised that I've remembered that after all of these years...!!!) I know that I need to do everything that I possibly can to make that picture a reality. Even though I know there will be countless times when I am so afraid that something is going to go wrong and I know that at some point we will be sitting across the table from one of the Dr.s in the Clinic in the Czech Republic... about to be told whether or not any of our embryos are genetically viable... and while we need to be prepared for the fact that the answer may well be 'No'..... it also might be 'Yes'.
I know 'might' is not an awful lot to be hanging my hopes on..... but for the foreseeable future.... 'might' is all we have.
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