Still here… for a little bit

Every year, the fall holidays seem to be the most intense that they have ever been.  Even so, 5771 is standing out.  The Rosh Hashanah meltdown, the salvation of the Yom Kippur flu, and now maximum Sukkot, which has encompassed a long visit from family and my birthday.  And there are two more holidays left, on Thursday and Friday!

The last five days have been delightful, but exhausting.  I’m not sleeping enough and I’m deeply behind at work, as you would be, too, if you hadn’t worked more than three days in a row since before Labor Day.   So, posting will be on the light side this week.  My life returns to something like normal (with a lot more work on nights and weekends) on Sunday.  I’ll try to think narratively in the meantime.

Better is also fleeting

Today is less better, also known as worse.  I knew my loosely held, zen-infused state wouldn’t last.

I am feeling some of the signs of ovulation, and the attendant, reflexive (Pavlovian, actually) urges, anxieties, and hopes.  Maybe, just maybe, I could maneuver for one last miracle.  Maybe, just maybe this time will be different.  It felt so good to be free of this itch, this irritation, this compulsion, yet I’m gravitating to it again, thinking in those same well-worn and unsatisfying grooves.  I so wish that the peaceful feeling had had longer to settle in before my body pushed me onto another track.   My body is a wonderful body, healthy, strong and reliable (well, except when it comes to getting pregnant), but it has not been a good partner with my mind and feelings lately.

I am tired of this.  I am tired of being tested.  I want to be done with this, but clearly my desire to be done feeling this way isn’t quite as strong as the leftover desires to feel exactly this way, to keep this broken-down vehicle creaking along.  One reason I blog is to record these feelings, so that the next time I feel this way, I’ll remember that I was tired of it before — maybe I’ll get sufficiently tired that I’ll stop it.

For now, though, I’m irritated and out of sorts.  Daniel is deeply preoccupied with the next public lecture he has to give, and pays little attention to me.  Shana and Gabby are on their way to our house for a five-day visit.  Milo is oppositional and pouty.

And with this chronicle of crankiness, I disappear into yet another Jewish holiday.

Better is… better

I had thought that being happy with my lot was a betrayal of my desires.  If I was content, didn’t that mean that I didn’t really want what I was striving for?  And even when things appeared to be over, wasn’t acceptance also a kind of denial of the intensity of desire?  How could I be happy if I didn’t get the thing that I’d been working for?  What the hell was the struggle for if I could be happy without obtaining the object?

That logic (is it logic, is it habit, is it culture?) still is superficially appealing to me — it makes sense.  But I’m finding that it is falsified by lived experience.  I can’t change the outcome.  Since I can’t change the outcome, and it is possible for me to be happy anyway, I should just be happy anyway.   Today, I felt happy anyway.  I felt the goodness of not striving, straining, trying to change the facts.

It’s scary to type that.  I fear that I’m inviting some other outcome in some other situation in which 1) I can’t change the outcome and 2) it isn’t possible for me to be happy anyway.  I expect myself to be punished for being happy with my lot — and this is weird because I think of myself as basically a happy person.  But maybe the only way I could tolerate being basically happy was to be dissatisfied with the specifics.  Or maybe it was a lie that I was basically happy.  I do tend to seek dissatisfaction more readily than satisfaction.  (By the way, I recognize that this post lacks a certain crispness.  I’m tired, I’m in a hurry, and I think I’m experimenting with posting without using the words “having another baby” ).

I also am unnerved by the relief I feel in not straining, trying, in not making heroic efforts to overcome circumstances.  Isn’t that what high-achieving people do?  (Yes, the rhetorical questions are at an all time high in this post — just go with it).  Who is ever celebrated for saying, “Yep, the status quo is fine with me”?

But that’s how I feel today.  Perhaps I’ve become a Buddhist in just two posts!

Better

IT WAS SO MUCH BETTER THAN I THOUGHT IT WOULD BE.  I mean, 25 hours without food or water is no one’s idea of a good time.  But I was okay.  I was calm.  I was safe.  I felt surrounded by goodness and support and people I love.

Family: Daniel and I had a wonderful moment of being present and honest with each other.  I felt my heart move to generosity and love, rather than resentment and frustration.  Spending the holiday just the three of us, not in Bay City, not with the rest of the family, helped us focus on the goodness of the three of us.  We are a family.  We are the family we have.  Daniel said that when he blessed Milo just before Yom Kippur, with a blessing that he had just found, he really felt that “the project” as we’d called it, was over.  But he meant it in a kinder way than he has in the past.   Over as in the sense of behind us.  Right now, at least, I am at peace with that same feeling.  I may not feel that way later, and that’s okay.  I know that we can get back to being lovely.

Theology: The physical strain of Yom Kippur always distracts me from the serious spiritual work that’s supposed to be done.  All I can think of is how I’m holding up, and, towards the end, exactly how many minutes until I can have a glass of water.   But to the extent I was able to pray and have a spiritual experience, I felt some relief that I wasn’t desperately praying that this would be the year for another baby.  When I read the prayers in which we ask for blessing and peace, I focused on the peace, rather than the request I’d put in for more blessing.

I’ll write more about this over the course of the week, I hope.  If I devoted four posts to a bad holiday, I should do at least two to a good one, right?  That may be optimistic.  The next holiday, the one that very few people have heard of, Sukkot, starts Wednesday night.  Shana and her daughter, Gabby, are coming.  I love Sukkot, but it’s a massive amount of work.  I am way, way behind at my paid job (my poor neglected paid job!) and need to tend to that as well.

But I am better, and I am grateful for that.

Sick, sad

I am sufficiently sick that we are not going to Bay City for Yom Kippur.   This is a very big deal.   We’ve never had Yom Kippur at home, so Daniel is scrambling to make arrangements for seats in synagogue, and I’m trying to figure out what to feed us before and after the fast.  Since my illness (something flu-like) is keeping us home, Daniel expects me to be bed-ridden for the next two days, while I am hoping that I rally and can go to services.  But if I’m well enough to go to synagogue, then why did we stay home?   This is hard for him.  He feels such entangling obligations to his family in Bay City.  He believes he has to manage Shana’s feelings, help her get through Yom Kippur with an almost-empty house, plus he has 1000 things to do here, and I’m sick and he won’t let me help.  He’s really in a tizzy.

As for me, the sadness of Rosh Hashanah — although not the psychological duress — has descended again.  When Milo was born, an artist friend whose work often deals with Jewish subjects gave us a drawing of Rebecca with Jacob and Esau in her belly.  The drawing hangs in a prominent place in our upstairs hallway.  I was so ardent, so eager to get pregnant again that in my mind I welcomed twins — it would have been such a huge victory over infertility, not one baby but two (twins would have sent Daniel right over the edge — in reality, it would not have been a good thing at all).  I’ve been seeing this drawing for years without feeling much about it, but today it pained me.  And it pains me that Daniel may not understand if I ask him to take it down — after all, it’s by a famous artist and friend, he’ll say.  It’s for Milo, he’ll say.  It’s not about you, he’ll say, you can’t go through life like this!  And on and on.

Really, Daniel is a good man.   Last night he said that he regretted how the emotional upheaval and holidays and crushing work schedules and sickness has kept us apart from each other for a week.  He missed me.  But on this point, as he’s said himself, his heart is stone.

Thinking and writing about how bad Rosh Hashanah was turns out to have been something of a distraction, a way of distancing myself by figuring out how to make it a story.  When I was writing, I was the heroine, I was acting on, arranging, defining my circumstances, controlling them in the narrative (if I did a word cloud of the blog, “narrative” would be prominent.)

But in real life, I’m not in control of the narrative.  I can’t make the happy ending I want.   I have reached the limits of much I can direct my life.  Yet even as I type this (and I’m adding this paragraph half an hour after writing and publishing the original post), I know that I can, and I have to, make a happy ending anyway.  I have lost enough time to unhappiness over this.  I can make a happy ending, with rich relationships, a better marriage, and a world that has a different balance of grown-up and child-centered pleasures than I intended.  Unhappiness about the child I don’t have can’t be the central story of my life.  I can’t lose that much.

And of course this makes me cry again, because it looks like so much work, and it’s all so unfair, and so hard.  I don’t want to be good and strong and brave and carve out this new kind of happiness.  I want standard-issue, off-the-shelf, family portrait, minivan happiness like everyone else seems to have.  (Okay, throwing “minivan” in there helps.  I admit to my sad, tired, cheated-and-beat-up-feeling self that minivan happiness may have its limitations.  I love my station wagon — my desire for the kind of station wagon I have started when I was 15 and was finally fulfilled at age 36.  But I don’t think I’d ever really and truly love a minivan.  And Daniel behind the wheel of a minivan?  I can more easily visualize him piloting a space ship or a submarine.)

Sadness is real, but it is also temporary.  I can do this.  Breath, sleep, be a Buddhist.

Unsweetened, part 4

Wow, part four.  I’m exhausted by the recitation of the worst holiday ever.  I hope that’s true, I hope I never ever have a worse on a holiday than this one.  That would be so great — to know that the very worst is behind me and I’m still standing.  Actually, I’m not exactly standing.  I’m honest-to-goodness sick — fever, chills, aches.  I spent most of the day in bed.

Anyway, to wrap up the triumvirate of doom: theology.  I think I can address this quickly.  First, the readings for Rosh Hashanah feature not one but two, two unexpected pregnancy stories.  The Torah reading features Sarah’s birthing Isaac, and for the extra twist of the knife, the Haftorah reading features Hannah praying, ardently, desperately, for a child and giving birth to Samuel.  Then she gloats at the end, and all the notes in the prayerbook explain that Hannah is the model for personal prayer.  Nice.

I had a Conservative prayerbook along with the Orthodox one, and I dabbled in the notes a bit.  The Conservative commentary notes that infertile couples might find these readings hard to take, but tries to make nice by saying that the Torah indicates that infertile women, and the children that they all subsequently seem to have, are favored by God.  Could I have another kind of favor, please?   Then, there was a note that suggested that infertile women should realize that the point the stories of Sarah and Hannah was not so much about having a child, but about being open to surprise, delight, and the adventure of what comes next.  This gem came from someone called Francine Klagsbrun.  I don’t know her, I’m not going to Google her right now, but I bet next month’s car payment that Francine Klagsbrun has as many children as she wants.  It’s real hard to get jazzed about all the nifty things that come next when you’re reading about two women who were favored by God and you haven’t been favored in this way, and it’s the only way you want at the moment.

And then there was the setting.  Infertile women should stay very far away from very religious women in their 20s and 30s — I think this applies across the religions.  Everywhere I saw babies, toddlers, streams and swarms of children, and pregnant women.   I was among a bunch of pregnant and/or triply or quadruply child-ed strangers.  I didn’t like it.

And finally, there was the sadness because I have always loved Rosh Hashanah.  I loved the start of school as a child, and  my birthday is in the fall, so I like this season anyway.  I became a Jew right around Rosh Hashanah.  I got pregnant with Milo just before Rosh Hashanah, and it was the first holiday I spent as a mother.  I love the feeling of new beginnings, multiplied by so many beautiful personal coincidences.  But Rosh Hashanah 5771 was about ending.  The end of the possibility of a miracle, the end of hoping.  The shift was terrible and abrupt.  I was finding pain and aloneness where I had found comfort and belonging.  It’s like laying your head on your favorite pillow and finding it’s turned to poisoned spikes.  I was Catholic before I was Jewish, but as a Catholic I was always focused more on God-the-Father than on Jesus, the Holy Spirit, or the saints (I am intensely attuned to hierarchy, and God seemed like the Big Boss — so why not focus on Him?).  Last week, for the first time, I understood why people would turn to Jesus and the saints.  I wanted an intercessor.  I wanted a fellow-sufferer.  God didn’t seem to have listened to me, so who else could I rally to my side?  I’m sure there is a patron saint of infertility.  I wanted her amplifying my prayers, making my case with special ardor.  But it was just me and my own prayers and, for five years, they haven’t been good enough.  (Yes, I know that’s not the theologically appropriate way to think about it, but this is my blog, not the Jewish Theological Seminary.)

So that’s it, in all its parts.  But I survived it.  It was temporary, and if Yom Kippur is bad, and Sukkot is bad, that will also be temporary and survivable.  I’m just going to breathe through it, and concentrate on the breaths and let the thoughts and emotions pass insofar as I can.  The only way I can survive the rest of the Jewish holidays is to pretend I’m a Buddhist.

Unsweetened, part 3

Blogging, like all forms of narrative, is all in the edit.  I need to figure out how to explain why I found being amidst Daniel’s family (or a fraction of it) so jarring and unsafe in as few words as possible (not least because, per my mother’s blessing, I have an excruciating back ache, a stomach ache, and the beginnings of a fever.  I think it’s exhaustion, so I’m putting myself on a strict time limit for blogging tonight).

So, Shana.  Where to begin?  Shana is a force of nature.  When she puts her mind to it, there is no one she cannot seduce, hypnotize, bend to her will. She gave up a fantastic and glamorous career to raise her (truly) lovely children.  She is a major force in her community.

When Shana was married (she’s in the process of divorcing), it was clear that her husband was always an outsider in the family.   Daniel has described his family’s notion of itself as “the four of us on a raft.”  (Six, I suppose, when Shana’s children came along.)  Shana’s husband was never on the raft.  Over Rosh Hashanah, I felt like I was falling off myself.

As I was struggling with grief, God, and biology, and as Daniel was struggling with me, Shana was lavishing Daniel with attention and affection.  She held his hand.  She was attentive to the movies he watched.  She cut his toenails and massaged his feet with lotion.  Bad wife, good sister.  Selfish, bitter, sad wife; loving, generous, patient sister. Even as I write this, I see how paranoid it sounds.   I felt like the woman in the movies — the one who tries to tell the visiting detective that something strange is happening, that the people around her aren’t normal, and who ends up being carted off because she’s so clearly mad (but vindicated in the end!!).

And Milo has no time for me when Shana is around.  Shana is magic, Shana lavishes him with gifts, Shana delights in his every word, unlike Mommy who says no, who imposes limits. And truly, Shana is more patient with Milo and more creative in dealing with his variable humors than I am.  But  Shana doesn’t always keep her promises to Milo, and it’s usually Mommy who has to explain that Shana can’t do what she promised, Mommy who relays Shana’s no.

Shana has been very good to me in many ways.  She has been an infinitely patient listener.  She has been materially very generous.  She has never ever given me grief, or even a sideways glance, about staying in the workforce and mothering, even though she believes that her children needed and still need her every second.  And Shana’s under stress herself — the divorce, the need to find a good paying job right now, her adored son’s year-long stay in Israel.

But something about her, her intensity, her attention to Daniel, what I felt were her intrusions on my territory, what I perceived as her hearty shoves off the raft while Daniel stood by, were too much for me to bear.  Maybe she felt she was just comforting Daniel during his own duress, since I clearly couldn’t.  But I wanted her to leave us both alone.

My blogging time is over, and I don’t know if I’ve managed to convey what I needed to.  The distance of some days has helped, and I will concede that my feelings were irrational, but they were real and intense, and now they are living in my body and trying to keep me from going back to Bay City on Friday.

Family, in the good sense

No time for a thorough disquisition on family (specifically, Daniel’s family and my place in it) tonight.  Daniel and I quarreled again last night after I made what I thought was sweetly rueful comment about adopting a baby from Ethiopia.  Y’know, in case it hadn’t occurred to him that we could adopt; in case somewhere in his heart he really would thrill to the idea, and I just needed to mention it to get it to resonate.  So we were difficultly engaged till almost 1am, and then I didn’t sleep well till probably 2 or so.

Tonight, in an effort to be a good wife, I went out to hear Daniel give a speech rather than staying home, getting some rest, doing the reading I need to do in preparation for a major meeting tomorrow at work, and of course blogging.  This was actually kind of big deal for me.   Daniel didn’t expect me to go.  I usually don’t go to these things (Daniel has a fair number of speaking engagements in our town).  But last week I realized that I need to do this.  It’s at this point more important that I spend time with Daniel or on Daniel than on Milo and the house and the housework.  So, a small step — two boards nailed together in the rebuilding.

But first, a note about my mother.  In my extreme duress last week, I called my mother, even though my religious strictures forbid using the phone on holidays and the Sabbath.  I am incompletely observant on this count in the best of times, but again, there’s that handy “matter of life and death” exception and I interpreted the exception quite broadly to include mental health.

My mother has spent decades as a high school and junior high school guidance counsellor.  She also grew up in a house with a lot of openly expressed marital disharmony and hostility — my grandparents weren’t nice to each other when I knew them, and I can’t imagine this was a late-in-life onset kind of thing.  (My grandmother used to pack up her four kids in the station wagon and drive by my grandfather’s store, shouting that she was taking the kids back to her home state, across the country.  My mom was the eldest, the perfect one, the one who needed to normalize all this.) I think these experiences — adult immersion in the world of hyped up, hormonal teenagers, and childhood immersion in the world of warring parents — contribute to her inability to really engage in high dramatic emotions.  She can listen, but she doesn’t seem to quite get it.  She’s not cold — far from it.  She is loving and warm, but when it comes to being in the presence of a meltdown, it’s as if she’s got some kind of colorblindness, or as if you’re speaking a language she can almost understand, but not quite.  She sees you on the ledge, but has no idea how you got up there, or why you’d want to be up there in the first place when the ground is so much more sensible.  She makes an effort, bless her heart, but she’s not feeling your pain.  Anyway, she did the best she could, as she always does, and calmed me down and made me feel loved.

Today she called to see how I was doing.  She asked if were were still planning to go to to Shana’s house in, let’s call it Bay City, on Friday before Yom Kippur.  We are, although I am unnerved by the prospect.  Her house feels like a really not safe place for me, and Shana feels like not a safe person for me (see forthcoming post on family in the bad sense).  But not going would cause all kinds of difficulties and repercussions and I need to just breathe through it, remember it’s temporary, and remember all the people who love me, and try to get outside as much as I can.   My sweet mother, trying to help in her own practical way, starts joking with me about all kinds of maladies that can keep us from going to Bay City.  A huge hurricane (we aren’t really in the hurricane zone, although it’s been known to happen), for example.  Or strep throat.  Or maybe I could sprain my ankle.  We had an elaborate plan to get me to sprain my ankle — well not so elaborate, just running in heels.  Then we figured I could throw my back out, too.  Tee hee!

That’s my weird family — my mother wishing, for my own good, that I hurt myself.  And me wishing it, too!  It felt good to laugh.  It felt good that she understood that I have to go back to Bay City, that I can’t right now make a stand against it.  It felt good to know that she’s got my back, in her own way.

One of the things that makes me sad about not having another child that I’m feeling really acutely now, since things are hard with Daniel, and Milo is so enchanted by Shana and at an age where mom=embarrassment (and he’s not a teenager yet — far from it), is that there won’t be anyone to love me, or not love me enough.  As I’ve written before, I’m not good at friendship.  I don’t trust relationships in general, I don’t trust people to love me and keep loving me for who I am, rather than for what I am doing for them at the moment.  But one good thing that’s emerging is that I’m learning — I’m forced — to depend on strong relationships with others, with my beloved friends who keep calling and emailing and commenting and answering their phones, even if they might roll their eyes first (thank you M, K, H, and my new friend Belette!  You are heroes).  And I’m learning that, whatever her limitations, her weird emotional colorblindness, I have my mom.

(Always disbelieve me when I say “no time for a long post” — I think this is my second longest post so far, definitely in the top 3.  And I still have to read pages and pages for work.  But this was worth it.)

Unsweetened, part 2

I just exhaled, deeply.  I am deeply glad that I have this blog, and my hearty tribe of readers.  Making a narrative of my feelings, thinking about blogging about them, helps them make sense to me.  It contains them.  It lets me do something with and about them.  Blogging is helping me restore my balance.

So, what happened?  There was a terrible trifecta of biology, family, and theology.  Tonight: biology

Infertility trains one to interpret every twinge, every swelling, every quirk of biology as an important sign that something did or didn’t happen.  This is especially acute with me, as the first infertility doctor I went to suggested that I was in fact conceiving, but that the embryo wasn’t implanting.  He gave me a list of signs that suggested conception and said that, from what I’d told him, I had these signs.  Essentially, his signs were typical signs of the onset of menstruation, just a week early.  I had these signs.  I also had a cycle that felt throughout like my cycles did when I was on clomid — kind of robust, like the hormones were kicking in really strongly, particularly in the second half of the cycle.  Why would they do that, unless…?  And then my period was late.  Days and days late.  I wasn’t 100 percent sure when it would start, but I estimated Saturday.  Nothing happened Saturday.  Nothing Sunday.   I told myself that if nothing happened on Monday, that would be… interesting.  Nothing Monday.  Nothing Tuesday.  Interesting.

Then, Wednesday, spotting.  Bad.  I decided it was over.  Either I hadn’t conceived, or I had, and it was all falling apart, pre-pregnancy loss, just like the first doctor diagnosed.  Daniel saw I was upset, so I explained it to him.  But of course I couldn’t really explain it.  He didn’t understand why I had thought pregnancy was possible in the first place.  He didn’t understand how unmanageable hope, uncontradicted by biology, could get (that biology point is so important to me: my body was complicit.  It was not a matter of noticing tenderness or bloating or mood swings.  I was not menstruating when I should have been.  I wasn’t making this up.  It wasn’t all in my head or subjective.)  He attempted sympathy, he really did, but I think in some way he felt betrayed.  This was supposed to be over over over over over.  Why the hell was I acting as if it weren’t?  Yes, that’s it.  He felt betrayed.  I tried to explain again and again that I was the victim of an exceptionally cruel trick of biology, but he wouldn’t hear me.  He felt like I’d gone back on something.  We weren’t supposed to be in this place ever ever again.  I was never supposed to hope I was pregnant or be crushed that I wasn’t.  Hadn’t he forbidden it?  And I had done both.

It got worse.  Comically worse.  The spotting was very, very light Wednesday and almost non-existent Thursday.  At midnight on Thursday I thought, “Wait, some women spot when they are pregnant.  What if I really am pregnant, but my progesterone is low [low progesterone has been a problem for me], and I just need progesterone as soon as possible?”  Seemed reasonable to me.  And again, I didn’t want to be haunted by the thought that I should have done something differently.  On Friday morning at 6:30 I snuck out of my sister in law’s house and walked to the drugstore.  By my religious standards, I can’t shop on holidays or Shabbat, but one can violate most religious laws for the sake of saving a life.  This seemed well within that exception.  So the minute the drugstore opened, I walked in, bought a test, then walked home.

And the door was locked.

I had forgotten to unlock it when I left, and didn’t have keys.  If this were an indie film, you can imagine the comic scene.  Me rattling door handles, eyeing windows, eventually deciding to squat in the corner of the yard and pee on a stick.  But my life is not an indie film.  What I should have done was wait for the housekeeper to wake up and open the door at 8 or so.  But what if she didn’t wake up, or hear me, or want to open the door?  I really needed to take that test.  I really needed to go the bathroom.

So I knocked.  And knocked.  And knocked.  And my sister in law came downstairs, bleary and befuddled, and let me in.  And then I made a huge mistake.  I should have said that I was feeling sick and went to get Pepto Bismol.  I should have said I went to do yoga al fresco.  I should have said I was out all night with my teenaged lover, or that I had just gone to score some cocaine and perhaps she’d like some.   Instead, I told her the truth.  Why? Because I didn’t want her to be pissed at me for getting her out of bed.  I will try to explain my feelings about my SIL, Shana, but later.

I took the test.  It was negative (DUH!).  I admit that I felt a whisper of relief.  Better never to have been pregnant at all than to be in the early stages of a miscarriage.  I told Shana it was negative and I was okay.

What I really didn’t want was for Daniel to know what I’d done, to know that I had kept hope going for 48 extra hours, that I’d ignored his commands that it was over, that it was impossible for us to conceive.  So, of course, Shana tells Daniel that she’s worried about me because I went to the drugstore and got a pregnancy test.

Nothing good ensued.  If Daniel didn’t understand my thwarted hopes on Wednesday, he really and truly did not understand what the hell I was up to on Friday.  Again, nothing I said could help.  He had no empathy in him, not a drop (more on that later, under “family”).  It was awful.  He was ice, stone.  It was supposed to be over, and to him, I was behaving like a madwoman, like someone who couldn’t let go.  He compared me to a drug addict continuing to do drugs after promising to stop.  That metaphor only works if the cocaine was airborne and the wind blew it into the addict’s nose.  But Daniel, being ignorant of biology and disgusted by ideas of miracles, was set in his disdain.

So not only was I not pregnant, I was not pregnant and not liked, not one bit, by Daniel.  I had no allies.  I was in hostile territory, and deeply alone.

Tomorrow: family

Rosh Hashanah, unsweetened

IT WAS SO MUCH WORSE THAN I HAD IMAGINED IT WOULD BE.  I don’t know where to start.  I am on a poky computer in full view of Daniel (if he averts his eyes from the Jimmy Cagney movie) and my sister in law, Shana, once she enters the room.  Those facts are keeping me from re-reading my old posts in an effort to grasp who I was, or that I was once a person who could type those things, who could be strong, who could write words like “progress” and “learning” and “happiness.”  Oh my dears, it was just awful.  The last three days (two for the holiday, one for Shabbat) have been among the worst in my life.  Now, on the one hand, that’s a sign that I haven’t had the world’s most awful days yet — during this time I was physically safe (emotionally very unsafe), surrounded by people who most of the time love me, with plenty to eat and drink, a warm bed to sleep in, and a yoga mat.  No one I love was dying (except me, inside).  I had novels to escape in, and Milo, who was a balm to my soul (except when he telling me to go away because he wanted Shana instead).   But they were awful days.  They have left me fragile and exhausted, completely unprepared to launch into a very challenging week of work and back-to-school for Milo.

I know it is possible that I will be happy and unwounded again.  I just can’t quite tell how to get from here to there.