grief's recursive movement

I was on a good spell in the last several weeks. Christmas is not at all my favourite time of year, but felt I weathered it well this year. Before that there was the due date, and I felt I also did well with that. The trip to Washington made me feel very alive, a hard-to-come-by feeling for the last while. For the last 2 sessions, my therapist has made a point of skillfully observing that I seem to be doing better.

As things tend to go with matters of working through grief, there is so much to visit, and revisit, and revisit once again...with feeling. At least that's my experience with grief. I'm not that patient with myself (although more patient with others), so it may be that I want to have worked through this already, I want to stop feeling so mind numbingly depressed, and feeling so 'out of life' and holed up in my house where I don't have to deal with anyone. It's the anhedonia that kills me in grief/depression. I hate the rest of it, but it's always the sense of  'losing the capacity of experiencing pleasure in activities previously enjoyed' that pushes me over the edge and makes me angry and wanting to tear my hair out.

It started last Friday. I might be outing myself to some readers here, but our city just recently got a commuter train and Mr. A, the transit aficionado that he is, discovered how I could get to work via transit. He even accompanied me to work that morning because he was so excited about the transit route and wanted to experience it himself. Let's agree on this: my husband is a freak. When we got off the commuter train, we looked at the tracks and determined that I would be waiting on platform X when it was time to return home at the end of the day. In the evening, it had gotten very cold and I waited in a small indoor waiting area on platform X. I didn't see it arrive because I was still indoors, but the train came in on time. Except that it arrived on platform Y. By the time I realized this and tried to take the underground walkway and ran back up the stairs (swimming through commuters) to get to platform Y, well, the train had pulled out already.

Missing the train is not a big deal. I was angry for about 6 minutes, and then, I figured out another plan to get home and sat down and read my book in the warm station, waiting for another train. But the day had brought its challenges already. A co-worker had announced he was going off on sick leave the day before, to fight against a stage 4 cancer. That morning, a female colleague came into my office to debrief this terrible news, and also to announce that she is pregnant. Second baby, perfectly timed. I weathered it well in the moment, as is usual for me. It's always after that it hits. I work in an agency with an over-representation of women, which is wonderful, but also means that I am immersed in pregnant bellies and baby showers.

Anyway, on my walk home from the train station, it hit me that missing the train had the same flavour as this very striking dream I had in June, shortly after the m/c. I have a pretty intense relationship with my dreams. I may be an unhatched Jungian for all I know. The dream went like this. I was on a train, heading home to Pleasantville. In the dream, I am only one or two stops away from our station. I step off the train as it makes a longer stop in a station. When I return, the train's doors close in front of me and the train rolls out of the station. In order to return home, I am told I need to take the train back to a station that is about 600km away from home, and catch another train heading back towards Pleasantville. I felt that this dream really expressed my feelings of dejection around the m/c. The doors closed in front of my face, and the only way back was one that would require an insane detour. I was so close to home, so close to a baby.

So, Friday night sucked really big. I ate my dinner silently and shed tears on my cat, while Mr. A watched and said nothing (what was there to say?). I couldn't really recover after that, and felt very sad and out of it the entire weekend, and all of Monday. Some stuff happened at work on Monday and I had to go into the bathroom and cry. I felt a little pathetic because it wasn't a huge deal what had happened at work. I was just feeling so vulnerable.

I am weary, folks. I feel like it's time to get out of this negative spiral. And I will. But revisiting this place over and over again just tires the hell out of me. It's probably the case that overall, I am emerging from the intense grief I have felt since the m/c, and since October 2009 when I found out that my ovaries were not going to produce eggs. I think these last few days are just an instance of the recursive pattern that grief takes, where one revisits the grief from a slightly different place, multiple times. Does that happen for you as well? I'd be interested in knowing you've also felt this pattern.

As always, thank you for reading and leaving me sweet notes. Or just for reading. You are amazing women and I feel very, very blessed to have your support.

love in the time of cholera, or infertility

Mr. August and I are not having a good run of it. Not at all. This infertility business keeps driving a wedge between us and it just keeps getting deeper and deeper. Sometimes, it is more manageable, sometimes it is unbearable. This week, we're in the unbearable stage.

I feel really heartened to read the accounts of other women blogers who have talked about feeling very much in tune and supported by their partners. I know what the studies say about the stress of infertility and its impact on couples. I find it astounding that some of you have gone through hell and back, with years of IF procedures, and still feel very much a team with your partner. I know you are grateful for that. I can read it in each of your sentences, and in-between all your words.

Mr. August is VERY supportive, wonderful, loving and warm. It is actually mostly my fault that it is driving a wedge between us. We've struggled with the disparity in our feelings over the last year. When our fertility treatments failed in October, I was crushed beyond words. For Mr. August, he was sad to see my reaction, but not really sad about not having biological children. For him, he had always dreamed of adopting children.

How perfect is that! The man who dreams of adopting marries the woman with no eggs.

It sounds so simple when I write it like that. It sounds like it could work out so well. But it's not, at least for now. And maybe it's just a matter of me coming to a different place with my grief. But in the mean time, I'm having a hard time feeling like we are on the same team, even if I *know* we are.

If any of you also feel the dividing effects of infertility between you and your beloved, please comment. I'd love to hear from you.

tears

I still can't say it without crying. Here, let me try: "The fertility treatments have failed". Yep, misty in the old eye region. I had to say it to an old friend on the phone last night, and I choked on the words. I'm finding myself unable to share this terrible news without experiencing the grief afresh. It feels like the words coming out of my mouth make this more real, I suspect much like when people have to tell others that their loved one has died. Not that I'm comparing types of grief here.

I suspect this will become easier, or perhaps, less relevant over time. That I will be able to tell people (or even write it on my blog) without the tragic reification of the facts. People are ready to hear our plans for adoption and I think that's very appropriate for them to be asking. I think I'm just in a stupor about it, a bit hopeless and not back from the underworld yet. Maybe again it's akin to being asked when you're going to start dating after your spouse has died. Our loved ones want us to move forward and I want this as well.

Except that rushing through grief is not all that useful. I treat people who've tried that. Grief is even more painful it seems when you have to unpack it from behind all that you've put over it to block it's presence. So it seems I will be required to continue with my tears, so long as I think going through this is a better idea than going around it.

the saturday preggers

I suspects it's truly delightful for expectant mothers to announce to their friends and acquaintances that they are pregnant. I've imagined this myself many times; how great it would feel to let those precious words out, how excited everyone would be, how much I would feel the baby wanted by us and by our community. I've watched many pregnant mamas make their announcement and it really does seem like a great moment. Because it is great. The whole thing. It really is great.

Yet, diametrically opposed to this warm and wonderful sharing of great news is the pain felt by infertile women during the pregnancy announcement at a dinner party. Both women attend dinner parties. Both sit there side by side in the same room: the soon-to-be mother and the 'unsuccessful' woman. Both delight and despair are on the menu. The absolute perfect joy of life growing inside one woman and the loud echo of the absence of such life in the other. Everyone has come to dinner. God knows what else is in the room: heartaches, jealousy, boredom, worries, grocery lists and unfinished work projects. But most of it is under the surface, kept under the lock of people's private thoughts or saved for people's blog postings.

Last Saturday, we were out with friends who at the very end of dinner decided to announce their pregnancy (yes, because that's how modern couples say it. They say "we're pregnant"). Tonight it was at a potluck that a couple announced their pregnancy, although that one was far along enough not to require an announcement. The week that our fertility treatments came to a crash, there were four baby announcements and two pregnancy announcements in my circle. The cosmic giggle, I thought.

And yet, as I walked home tonight on my own, I thought about one of my teachers who says that our suffering isn't personal. It feels like that when in the crushing grips of sorrow, but it really isn't. Everyone suffers in one way or another. It's not personal or isn't coming at you because you did something wrong. One is not being punished. I haven't done anything to cause this to happen. My body just can't produce eggs and I can't make a baby. And others can.