Another reason to write every day

I haven’t been able to write this week because I’ve been traveling for work and busy with other obligations.  It’s been a great week.  I’ve seen three of my best friends, who all live in other cities.  I had a wonderful dinner with Daniel in our favorite restaurant for our anniversary, and we had the best conversation we’ve had in such a long time.

But not writing every day has a subtle cost.  It makes it much harder to start writing again.  I surfed sites I normally don’t go on, I decided I absolutely had to buy a new pair of tights, I did all kinds of things to delay writing this post.  I started worrying about having nothing to say.  I subscribe to a personal finance newsletter, written by a guy with a very strong personality who likes to upend conventional wisdom.   He doesn’t think much of blogging, and says that you should only blog if you have something to say, and that one killer 4000 word post is better — much better — than 10 400 word posts.  And he’s right, for him.  His blog is for his audience.  He’s a salesman.

But my blog is mostly for me (kisses, as always to my readers, or reader — page views are back in the single digits, which is what I get for not posting.)  And I only have what to say once I start writing.  And when I’m not writing, here, I stop thinking of myself as a writer.  And when I stop thinking of myself as a writer, my life gets a little cramped and flattened, even if I’m writing a lot at work (which I have been, and which I’ve enjoyed a lot).

It was interesting and unexpected to learn that — that my sense of possibility dims a little when I’m not writing.  It’s possible it’s just the exhaustion of a couple of intense days of work and friends in another city, or the copious amounts of alcohol consumed with those friends and then later with Daniel (I adore drinking, the aesthetics of it, the taste, the aura, but boy it wears me out.  My body has to work too hard to undo the effects.   This is among the clearest and least welcome signs of getting older).  But it’s also possible that writing is a practice for me that’s as important to my wellbeing as my yoga practice.  That’s important to know, right?  And that makes me think that I’m on the right path when I start thinking of myself as a writer, and arranging my life and self-concept around it.

(Oh dear.  I have written down that I am thinking of myself as a writer and that’s a good thing.  Now I have to own it.  Okay, here I go.)

At work, for example, I write and I do a lot of other things.  For a long time I thought I really wanted to do those other things most — manage, go to meetings, run something.  But I am happiest when I’m writing.  When I think of myself as a writer at work, I feel most secure.  I know what that means.  It doesn’t mean I shouldn’t stretch myself and do those other things, too.  But I’m experimenting with defining myself to myself, professionally, as mainly a writer.  Maybe that will mean that I need to change my job, in terms of duties, not in terms of workplace.   I’m exploring that.

And (here, just go ahead and completely fill in that blogger cliche bingo card — it’s a total blackout, all the beans) I’m thinking of writing a novel.  Like the blog, it will be a venue for working out certain problems.  When I wasn’t writing the blog, I wasn’t having ideas about what could go in the novel, and what could happen with a character, and whether a certain expression would fit.  So blogging is moving me towards the novel.

(After not getting messages about having another baby, God or the universe or whatever seems to be all for this novel.  A day or two after I jotted down some notes, and really started thinking that this was a do-able thing, a colleague came into my office and after almost no preface started telling me about a book that coaches you through writing a novel in 30 days, and about the novel she wants to write, and how November is “write your novel in a month” month. )

I have written so much about my marriage, my feelings about Daniel, Milo, life, God, Shana, and everything else — but writing about writing and sending out into the world the idea that I am a writer and I might even write a novel is among the most confessional and vulnerability inducing things I’ve written.  Which is why it’s very convenient that Milo and his adorable friend Noah are practically sitting on my forearms, waiting for me to get off the computer so they can do some computer game.  And I’m going to let them.

 

The Dream: I gave the baby back

I should be working now, instead of posting, and will likely be working late all week, instead of posting.  But I realized I almost forgot about this, and it’s important, and I want desperately to forget about it and bury it and pretend it didn’t happen, so of course I need to do the opposite: I need to write it so it’s real.

Last night I dreamed I was in possession of a baby, a gorgeous fat baby, and the most important thing for me to do was to give that baby back.

The details are fuzzy (which my dreams usually aren’t — usually my dreams stay with me), but I was in a lobby or something of an office building  (the World Bank, to which I’ve never been).  Somehow, I came to be in possession of a baby,  (never knew the gender) maybe because I found him/her in a stroller.  I walked around with him/her, and then realized that I needed to give the baby back to its mother.  I realized or learned that the mother worked in another building (the U.N., as it happened, which was then next building over, separated by a plaza, and also to which I’ve never been).  I went into that lobby and explained that the baby needed to be with its mother, and the mother appeared, and she was kind of ditzy and frazzled — not hysterical like a mother who had lost her baby, but flustered like a woman who had lost her keys and her iPhone.  And then I left.

When I woke up, my first thought was “I gave the baby back. ”  I didn’t try to keep the baby.  I wasn’t even very interested in the baby, I didn’t feel particularly attached to the baby.  I needed to be a good steward and get the baby where it belonged.  It didn’t belong with me.

This thought gave me a sense of relief and resignation.  Yesterday I thought about opening up the fertility conversation again with Daniel.  It seemed really important to do so and my reasons for doing so seemed really good, but at the same time, it would be really destructive.  We were at a bar mitzvah dinner yesterday evening, and I prayed the evening service, or appeared to, but I was really intently asking God for a sign, a sign of what to do, a sign about whether I should start the conversation again or just stay on the path I’m on now.  When we were praying after the meal (the kind of Jews I associate with pray a lot.  A whole lot.  So much it’s not even like praying.  It’s like washing your hands or tying your shoes or having a glass of water.  It’s surround-sound), I saw a different translation of one of the prayers.  It said, “may the Sabbath be calm.”  A conversation about more fertility treatments would create the opposite of calm on the Sabbath.  One sign to keep quiet.

Then the dream.  That’s as explicit a sign as I’m going to get — well, unless you count not getting pregnant repeatedly as a sign that God is not backing this particular project.

I asked for signs, but I don’t want signs that say “no means no, my sweet Dorothea.  Go on about your business and don’t turn back.”  I was frustrated and restless and discontent all morning at synagogue, then exhausted all day since.  I had almost forgotten this dream.  I spent much of the day fighting the feeling of relief or resignation (same thing at this point) that it brought.

What part of me wants to keep carrying on?  My body says I’m done.  My subconscious says I’m done.  Who is the rebel that keeps me stirred up, that won’t let go?

Seeing what will happen

Regular readers (hello half-dozen of you — kisses to you all) will know that I have a think about Penelope Trunk.   Actually, I mistyped that.  I meant to say I have a thing about Penelope Trunk, but I find myself thinking a lot about her lately, so maybe both are right.

When I wasn’t blogging, and was in the middle of infertility, and was flailing at work, I would read her blog obsessively for a while, but then stop because I was creeped out by her hyper-confessional style (that links to just a few examples).   Clearly, telling all is part of her brand, and it works for her.   Now that I’m working my own stuff out on this blog, I don’t have the same negative reaction to her personal stories.   I read her partly for career advice, but also because some of her posts are blueprints for working things out as you write.

Today’s post works like that.  She starts out in a place of despair and lost-ness, then comes back around to something that lifts it up.  She writes her way into a place of found-ness, and it’s almost certainly temporary, but for that moment she has created, she has willed, she has brought into being through words a solution that will get her through. (Actually, she’s created herself through blogging — brand, persona, name, life.  Sometimes I wonder if the whole Penelope Trunk story is an elaborate experiment about the boundaries between reality and the internet to show that there aren’t boundaries anymore.  Sometimes her whole story feels to me like performance art.)

That’s why I write when I don’t think I have anything to say, which is another way of saying, that’s why I write almost every day, and that’s why I write and publish, rather than writing, polishing, and waiting, then posting.   “Writing, if it is nothing else, is a way of clarifying one’s thoughts,” says this essay that I love.   (Although the essay could be read as a statement against blogging, against publicity, but my wee blog is hardly mass market.  This is mainly for me, although I’m very happy to have some of you along for the ride.)  I am experimenting with the power of writing — and finding that it’s hugely powerful — so that I am less scared about writing.  I write all the time at work.  I write easily and very, very quickly — it’s one of the huge benefits my bosses and colleagues get from hiring me.  But I don’t write enough under my own (real) name.  I haven’t figure out why I’m hiding, but I think writing here will help me move towards writing in the world.  I’m thinking of a novel plot, for example.  (That’s at least two squares on the blogger bingo card — the unwritten novel or novel in progress.)

So anyway, I write without direction because I want to see where I start and where I finish.  Sometimes I work things out, and sometimes I go nowhere.   And sometimes I am a little bit wicked and throw in lots of links to a famous blogger to see if she’ll notice!

Poem for Wednesday

One of my dearest friends sent this to me when I needed it.  I don’t quite trust it.  I keep looking for the yes after the final no.  If there is a yes, it’s a yes to a different question than the one I was asking.  Still, I suppose I should be voracious about all the yeses that come to me.

The Well Dressed Man with a Beard

After the final no there comes a yes

And on that yes the future world depends.

No was the night. Yes is this present sun.

If the rejected things, the things denied,

Slid over the western cataract, yet one,

One only, one thing that was firm, even

No greater than a cricket’s horn, no more

Than a thought to be rehearsed all day, a speech

Of the self that must sustain itself on speech,

One thing remaining, infallible, would be

Enough. Ah! douce campagna of that thing!

Ah! douce campagna, honey in the heart,

Green in the body, out of a petty phrase,

Out of a thing believed, a thing affirmed:

The form on the pillow humming while one sleeps,

The aureole above the humming house…

It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.

–Wallace Stevens

 

Thanks

Today is better, and I am deeply grateful for that.  I’m sure I’ll get sad again, and be rattled by the sadness, and not even be able to understand posts like this that say “I’m better, for now.”  This kind of grief — maybe every kind of grief — makes one like a pebble in a slingshot.  You fall back, you fly, you crash — but not even in that order all the time.  I wonder if it’s because I can only stand so much sadness at a time.  My psyche is titrating it so I don’t collapse.

I am too tired to write more than thanks.  Thanks to Belette and Susan for their comments, and thanks to the anonymous people who put my page views into the double-digits.

And one more thing: whatever you are sad about, if you are sad, you aren’t alone in being sad, and you aren’t alone about being sad about that thing.   Even if you can’t see it, even if you secretly wish for bad things to happen to other people (including people you really really love) so you won’t be the only sad person, so you will have someone else to feel bad with, or someone who you can feel better than, you already have a companionship of sadness.  Whatever else you are, you aren’t alone.

 

 

Re-runs

I’ve started and erased several paragraphs now.  Truth be told (and this blog is certainly for truth-telling), I’m feeling so sad and empty right now, too sad and too empty to write, or to feel like I have anything worth writing.   I’m disappointed in my life.  I believe I will always be disappointed in my life.  And then I’m meta-disappointed in myself because my life is really good.  How can I say I’m disappointed in a life that has Milo in it?  And yet, right now, I am. And I believe all the heartened, healthy, strong things I ever wrote on this blog are lies.

Perhaps, perhaps this is still the after-effect of my reaching out for help at work, and getting serious about work and writing.  This is perhaps my way of saying good-bye, forever and for real, to those other dreams.  This is the final walk through before selling the beloved home.  Maybe that’s why the emotions are so overwhelming.  This is the crying I didn’t do four months ago.   Deciding to write (I think that’s what the decision is — the decision to do what I’ve wanted to do since I was a child, but have been very good at not doing and very very good at finding reasons for not doing) is deciding to do something else, something not compatible, for me at least, with having another child.

When I was in therapy (blogger bingo cards at the ready!), sometimes I would cry like this when I realized that I could have the thing I wanted all along, or that I could let go of something that I needed to let go of — there was no external obstacle, I just needed to reorient my own self.  I would cry partly from relief, partly to release all the energy that had been spent blocking my way , and partly because I was mourning all the time I lost when I was convincing myself I couldn’t have what I wanted or wanted the thing I needed to release.  I so hope that some of these tears I’m crying now are also those tears.  I so hope that they are tears about the future as much as about the past.

I would so love to have a mentor here.  I would love to have someone who has been in exactly this same situation, but found her way through and is at peace.  (Belette is that to some extent.)  I want someone to tell me what steps to take.  I am full of regret about my past decisions, some of them significant and irreversible ones.  I want to be sure that my next steps are exactly right.  I can’t take any more failure.  But because I’m human, there will be more failure, lots of it.

I am either on the verge of a colossal depression or a great breakthrough.

Another thing that I would very much like is for folks who read this post to leave a comment.  That would be really nice.  Just say “hi, I’m here,” if you don’t mind.  It may make me feel a little less vulnerable, and I’m feeling awfully vulnerable right now.

 

Truth

Moments of loveliness, but mostly a crum-bum day, in which a combination of truths and useless imaginings pushed me into an ugly corner.  And I had a stupid tiff with Daniel, stupid on both our parts, too stupid to describe.

Truth #1: All those babies that I want to care for, especially the babies that I hope Milo will have, come with their own mothers.  And their mothers already take excellent care of them.  And will want for themselves the experience of mothering.  I can’t step into their shoes.  I went to see my beloved friend and her new baby again today.  She is a better mother at 10 days than I am several years into the endeavor.  She doesn’t need me to mother her or her baby (her own mother is in town, too).  Any mothering of anyone but Milo that I ever will do is going to be once-removed and temporary.   Over is over.

Truth #2: I can’t escape the requirement that I make my own life for my own self.  Let’s say my wish to be the Mary Poppins of Milo’s household comes true; my daughter-in-law loves me, welcomes the help, and we all live in a groovy, well-cared-for multigenerational  fantasy.  Those beautiful children will then grow up and not need me.  And I will be thrown back on my own resources.  If I take care of anyone in the future, it will be my parents, or Daniel.  That will be a good, rich thing, although at this moment, in the wake of our self-inflicted wounds (papercuts, or splinters, nothing serious, just stupid), I’m not sure Daniel or I thinks I’ll do a particularly good job of it.

Useless imagining #1: I could have done something different and Daniel and I could have had the child I want years ago.  I need to be vague here, but I had an inkling something wasn’t right, and it turned out to be true.  It may not have made a difference in fertility, but it could have saved us a lot of very difficult months, maybe years.  But it would have required Daniel to believe me and act on it.  I raised it once, and was shouted down, literally.  Could I have pushed?  Could I have not let it go?  I think I have the strength to do that now, but I didn’t then.  This particular poisonous thought popped into my head for the first time today.  It’s unwelcome.  It breaks my heart.

Truth #3. I did the best I could at the time, under the circumstances.  I am a different person now and so is he.  I did the best I could at the time, under the circumstances.  I so wish I could have been stronger and more confident, but I wasn’t, and I can’t go back and change it.  And all my pressing might not have made a difference.  There is a limit to what one person can force another person to do, and with Daniel and me, that limit is very, very, very low.

Useless imagining #2: All would be well if there were four of us.  With this unhappiness out of the way, I would be patient, good, and kind.  I would love Daniel more openly and easily, and would give him the attention he needs when he needs it.  I would be more patient with Milo and with his sibling.   The money for lessons, clothes, doctors, babysitters and Jewish day school tuition would appear.  I would be fulfilled and complete — after all, that’s what I see around me.

Truth #4: All of the above is profoundly false.  I am not sufficiently creative or patient with Milo — why would someone else demanding computer time, a popsicle, a story, dinner, chewing gum, my attention, time from my sleep, time from myself make anything about me better?  Daniel and I don’t do well without a lot of attention from the other person, and having another child would require us to spend more time apart or occupied.  I want to pretend this isn’t the case, but it is, period.  And the money question is inescapable.  It would take a 50% increase in my take-home pay or a 30% increase in Daniel’s just to cover daycare in the first year.  Yes, we could live differently.  But it would be very, very differently, and that change would have costs for all of us.

Having one child makes me happy, but it’s a complicated, uneven, complex happiness.  A second child might not make me happier.  I hate typing that, I really do.  I don’t believe it.   But I need to confront it.  This last set of truths should comfort me, but it actually is among the hardest.  Maybe we didn’t have another child, not because we couldn’t conceive, but because we just couldn’t handle having another person in the family.  I feel like such a failure in my relationships right now, that sounds like the right answer.   (I know, I’m not, not really, I may even be a good mom.  I am not feeling great about how I am as wife, though, although I can’t figure out how to change it without erasing myself, which itself is a huge problem –surely there’s a middle path between inadequate and erased, I just can’t see it now).

Truth #5: I have been spared so many kinds of pain.  I am fantastically lucky and loved and I need to just go with that.  My unhappiness about the past, present, and the projected unhappiness of the future is putting distance between me and Daniel, me and Milo, me and the goodness in my life.  I am the one who has to close that distance.

Okay, I’m just making myself sob right now, and I need to go try that good, patient, attentive wife thing.  Maybe tomorrow will be better.

Worm-holes on the Interstate

I thought my recovery from secondary infertility would be like a long, slow drive up a long interstate highway or turnpike.  I knew it might be a long way to my destination.  I knew that sometimes I would be stuck in terrible traffic and move forward an inch at a time, if that.  I knew that sometimes I would even have to pull over and let all the other cars pass me because I just couldn’t propel myself forward no matter what.

What I didn’t know was that I’d be moving along just fine, counting off the exits in neat numerical order, 7, 8, 9 and then suddenly I’d be back at exit 2, without knowing why.  And I’d keep driving, and then the next exit would still be 2.  Or it would be 5, and then 2 again.  The non-linearity of it, the feeling of falling backwards in time and being in an emotional space I thought I had left behind weeks ago,  is unpleasant, exhausting, undermining.

Since Wednesday, I’ve just been sad.  It’s improved a bit today.  But I am longing for the child who won’t ever be here.  I was watching a movie with Milo, and imagining how lovely it would be if the not-ever-here 4-year-old were here.  In every sweetness, I see her shadow — wouldn’t it be sweeter with her?  This yearning is actually more intense than the yearning for a new baby.  I am realistic enough to know that a new baby would be exhausting, destabilizing, too much of a rift in life as we know it.   But if I had that 4-year-old now, it would seem normal.  I would be normal.  My life would be normal, it would look normal, like all the other families.

No wonder I have a headache.  I am banging my head against an unyielding wall of impossibility.  If it’s impossible to have another baby now, it’s super-especially impossible to have had one four years ago.

I thought I was closer to fine (does anyone else remember the Indigo Girls?).  This makes me disbelieve, in advance, in all the progress I’ll make in the future.  Sure, I’ll make it all the way to exit 13, but exit 2 could always be the next one up.  And it’s exhausting to move ahead — more as if I’m pushing the car (and I have big damn station wagon) than driving.  So all that ground gets lost and all that work is ahead of me again, and and again.

But, really, what’s the alternative?  Every moment further ahead is better than not being there.  So put the car back in drive and go on.  I am really glad I have this blog so I can remember that I was farther ahead once.  Every good blog post, in which I say I’m okay, is like a postcard from the future, not the past.  It tells me I can maybe get there again.  Right?  Why can’t exit 13, or 16, or 28, be the recurring exit?   As the Buddhists say, fall, get up, fall, get up, fall, get up, fall, get up.

This dropping back in emotional time and space coincided with, and was probably precipitated by, my being sick.   For me, happiness is inextricable from energy and physical vitality, and I’m lacking it now.   (The word “exhausting” has appeared three times in this post so far.) I can do all the things I must do, but I can’t do more — no walking to work, no good yoga.  This doesn’t exactly bode well for aging, does it?

But there’s another bit of psychological trickery going on, too.  On Friday morning, I had a conversation with a career coach who I might start to work with.  She’s a friend, although not a close friend.  She was so lovely and warm in our conversation.  She’s not taking new clients, but she will make an exception for me, and she’ll charge me less than her normal rate.  She assured me that if I choose to work with a different coach, she’ll be very happy for me, and I believe her.  I believe she wants good things for me. I think working with her will change my life in exactly the way it needs to change.

So after that really nice conversation, that incredibly affirming step forward for me, into my own life, into making my work and my non-family desires a focus of my energy… I was practically debilitated for the rest of the day.  I didn’t concentrate at work.  I frittered away the hours, agitated and upset and swamped with sadness.  And I think I wanted to be.  I wanted to be back there at exit 2.  I was freaked out all to hell that I said, “Okay, I’m going to devote myself to me and do amazing things as I am.”  I wanted to tell myself no no no no no.  So I went back to this permanent no.  I am scared to be empowered about my own life.  So I went back to this deep and rattling disempowerment.  I wanted to submerge my own ambition and potential into family life, so I pushed myself back into sadness at the inadequacy of the family I’ve created.  I needed to get back to exit 2 and stay there.  I made my own worm-hole.

I know this is long, and me and my infection should have been in bed two hours ago.  But I had to write it down for myself — all of it.  I have to see it here so I can’t evade it again.  I have to be a woman who stepped up.

“It is never too late to be what you might have been.”  George Eliot

And, from Belette,

“Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness. It is far better to take things as they come along with patience and equanimity.” C.G. Jung

(i am stalling on hitting publish.  I rarely edit, or even re-read, my posts, and I’ve noodled with this one for the last 15 minutes.  This is big stuff I’ve stumbled on, and I am not sure I want to be honest about it.  What if it doesn’t work?  What if the coach doesn’t work?  What if it’s infertility all over again?  What if it’s not?  I am scrambled because I don’t know if I can tolerate not getting OR getting what I want.)

Addendum

It’s possible that readers of the previous post will think that Daniel, with his triumphant feelings, his happy glow of victorious paternity, is a real jerk.  He’s not (well, sometimes he is, but this isn’t a relevant instance).  His pride in Milo has a lovely aura of wonderment about it.  He can’t believe his luck.  He doesn’t believe that Milo is his creation and the reflection of his greatness.  Milo is too obstinately self-creating for that.  Daniel does believe in his own goodness as a father, which is correct.

I know that Daniel’s attitude is the right one: what we have is not to be taken for granted.   Our life is not a cut-rate version of what it should be, a downsized family.  We were not cheated, we were blessed, this is crazy good luck, this is a surfeit of every good thing.  Daniel was raised not to assume normal life.  Infertility taught me the same, and sometimes I can hang onto this lesson.  But not often enough.

Experiments in melancholy

More accurately, experiments in exiting melancholy.  I should be preparing dinner, but I want to see if I can first write this post that’s been a rock in my heart all night and all day.  Maybe if I write about the melancholy, it will fade away.  This strategy has worked before.

Last night was Back to School Night (BTSN) at Milo’s school.  During the  acute infertility process, school events would reliably precipitate tears and bad feelings.  So many families with three children, let alone two.  So few families like ours — and if the family did have one child, it was often a fractured family (the only other only children in Milo’s grade have parents who split up years ago).  So many pregnant mothers, pregnant teachers, little siblings, big siblings.  It was a destabilizing environment.

I’d weathered a few events recently without emotional upheaval (you would have read about it).  But last night it was all back again.  I looked at all the families with all their lovely children and thought, “Why not us?”  And I had a feeling of not having earned the right to more children, as if my only-childness was a cosmic judgment on our ability to manage more than one.   So why could they run two-job, three-kid families, and I never got a chance?

You’ll note the use of the singular pronoun, I, not “we.”  There’s no we on this question, not even now.  For Daniel, every visit to the school is a vindication.  He is the brilliant father of a brilliant child.  He chose the best school for our son (that’s true — the school and Milo are a perfect fit), and he works hard to pay for it, and for him, it’s all gravy.  It’s what he never expected in life but pulled off late and beautifully.  It is the stage for his most durable and least expected triumph.  For me, sometimes, it’s a reminder that I got less than I hoped for.  It’s the place where my maternal incompletion is most vivid.

In Milo’s school, the classrooms for the smallest children are on the first floor.  We walked through the first floor corridor last night, and Daniel made sweet sounds about missing it, missing kindergarten, missing Parparim and Dagim (the first grade class names).  But Daniel misses Milo’s youth like he misses his own –it’s gone, gone forever, wasn’t it lovely.  I miss Milo’s youth and the lost second chance.  Milo’s youth is a double reminder of what’s not there.  I don’t so much want a baby right now (although would not refuse one if offered!).  I want a four-year-old.  I want to erase the whole infertility experience.  I want that life that I see around me.

At home I told Daniel I wish we’d had more kids.  This should not surprise him, given how we spent the last few years.  But he said, “Are you nuts?  How could we possibly manage?”  He’s not wrong — I kept myself awake for an hour trying to solve the moot puzzle of how to manage another one, who doesn’t and never will exist.  But I come back to my childish (I’m childish about being insufficiently childed) plaint: “Everyone else does it.”  Yes, I would jump off a bridge if everyone else did.  I wanted to.  For me, the bridge was closed, it collapsed, I couldn’t find it, I took the wrong turn and jumped off a bus instead.

I have friends whose lives in their early and mid 30s took scary turns that looked to be irrecoverable, un-rightable.  One friend had a flat out, full-on nervous breakdown.  She was briefly hospitalized, couldn’t work, had a psychopharmacologist, and was asked to consider shock treatments.  Now, she’s effortlessly pregnant with her second child.   Why is my life disappointment, my glitch, the one that I can’t ever undo, rewind, reverse or repair (well, I can repair, right?  That’s why I’m here)?  The finality of it always galls me.  .

So now I am obsessing about making my eventual daughter-in-law love me, so that I can be the nanny-housekeeper for Matthew’s family (3 kids, please!).  My friends find this weird and vaguely appalling.  But they all have more than one kid, more than one bet on the future.  I am also reviewing all the wrong turns, roads not taken, opportunities foregone, and in this mood, I see thousands.  I regret not pursuing a particular job in 1998 (not that it was offered, not that one was even available it was an abstraction) because I was scared of the hours required.  I was scared of not being available for Daniel — and we weren’t even married then.   Maybe my projections in the future and my choices in the past are of a piece: I don’t want my own time.  I want to give it to the people I love.  It’s a gift that costs me more than it benefits them.  (Attention therapists: this is the point of this post, this blog, my difficulties in life.)

I have been here before.  This feeling won’t last, although it will recur.  The feeling is temporary, the breath is permanent.  Daniel and Milo are home now, so I have to stop.  My experiment failed, but there’s hope in domestic demands, which are to feelings (high and low) like water is to stones.