The Missing Woman

So, I have been trying to think of what to write.  Sometimes it's easier to pour out what I'm feeling than others, I suppose that's normal considering the subject matter of my blog.  I have felt pretty good all in all since realizing I wasn't pregnant.  It was more heartbreaking than usual this month because I had really, truly started to think I was.  But, the temperature dropped and the next day...well, you don't need all the details.  Let's just say I spent that day curled up on the couch, staring into my book or the mindless nothing that was on TV.  It was hard, harder because we had been starting to talk about how we would break the news to my parents and to his.  We were starting to dream out loud, a dangerous, wonderful thing.

I have a vivid memory from the those few days when I thought I was pregnant.  I had walked into the bathroom, and looked into the mirror.  I wasn't especially made up or wearing anything specifically pretty, but I had to catch my breath because there, staring back at me in the mirror was a woman I realized I had not seen in a very long time.  She was smiling, broad and unforced, her face glowing, her green eyes gleaming as if with a secret joy.  It was the me that had been missing for a long while; at least that's how it felt to me.  Don't get me wrong, I don't go around mopping all day long, I smile, I laugh, I joke, I do all those things. But this was different.  I realized in that moment that it was the smile of a woman unfettered by fear and sadness, who had just set down a burden she had been carrying for a very long time.  I had never realized until that moment, just what this process was doing to me, the life it had been leaching out of me.  

Yes, for all that I have been determined to view this positively, to find meaning in it, I also have felt like a road weary traveler who has been carrying a pack that is sometimes just too heavy.  I don't think it discredits all the meaning I have struggled to find in this, perhaps it makes it more powerful and precious.

It feels like a cruel joke in some ways, those few days of joy.  Like a starving man being ushered into a dinning hall, and being shown all the delicacies there for the taking, only to be tossed back outside with nothing in his belly.

I want that woman back, but I am struggling to find her in the midst of all this, the routine of fertility starting up again.  I have accepted with happiness the fact that my acupuncturist says the signs I was feeling is good, that it means the treatments are working.  I have steeled myself to see this next cycle as the "one", the time being ripe and ready.  And even as I believe that, and have found a measure of peace, I am plagued by tears the last few days.  Why?  I have no idea.

No one signed up for my life group at church, and maybe that's because they're scared, maybe there are half a dozen women there that know what I am feeling, that want to be in a group like this but are nervous to sign up.  Maybe.  But on the flip side of that I'm aggravated that they don't just call me, I won't publicize who they are for crying out loud!  It has made me feel even more isolated, more alone.  There is no one, absolutely NO ONE who knows what this feels like.  Who understands the way my mind goes back over everyday of my cycle when my temp drops, looking for the smallest thing that could have caused me not to conceive, and finding a dozen or so small, inconsequential things that don't mean anything in all reality, but that my mind and heart latch onto as a possible reason.  With that comes guilt, and a feeling of helplessness because in the end I realize that I don't know the why of it, that there is not one single thing I could point to that I could abstain from and it would make me pregnant.  I've cut out a lot, changed a lot, added a lot.  What more can I do?

I did run into an old friend and his wife at the mall this weekend, they had struggled for two years to conceive their adorable little boy.  It was a relief to talk with her, and for those fifteen minutes I felt I had a comrade, someone who had fought the battle and won.  The down side is they live over an hour away and are moving in a month.  But hey, it was something, right?

So for now, I do what I can. I meditate and pray, I try to be thankful for all the wonderful things in my life, I work on my novel, I work on film and TV projects, I take in the splendor of spring and hope our little one will make it's presence known soon so that the missing woman can come back again.