Taking a deep breath

I should be packing or something, but I wanted to come back here one more time, to my safest space.  I had a small meltdown this morning.  When I finally got to my yoga mat, around noon, I started to cry.  I realized that I was (or am — the feeling is less present now, but that may be temporary) petrified about going to Bay City for Passover.  Bay City is where I feel particularly abandoned by God.  Last year at Passover, I had what I thought was a very hopeful sign about a second pregnancy — this was before we had started our IUI cycles, so I could still be very hopeful about them.   My boss and Daniel grew up in the same neighborhood in Bay City, just a few blocks away from each other.  In his office, my boss has a childhood memento that has his old address.  On the way home from synagogue last Passover, I decided to walk past his old house.  I saw a huge butterfly when I was there.   I’ve described my notion about butterflies as signs that things will be okay, as little pats on the head from heaven.  I got that idea one day when I was feeling hopeless and lonely, before I knew about infertility.  I was outside and saw a butterfly and decided to believe that this butterfly was a sign from God that the things I feared the most were not true, and things would be okay.

I saw the same kind of butterfly outside my boss’s old house, and stared at it for 15 minutes.  The coincidences seemed very promising to me.  And I wasn’t wrong, I see now, I just wasn’t right in the way I wanted to be right.  Things are okay, and they will be okay.  Just not the okay I had hoped for.

And I’m not looking forward to the drama of Bay City.  In my own family, love is like the background refrigerator hum.  In Daniel’s family, it’s opera blaring from every window.  I want a refuge from that intensity, from the child-worship, from the way everything is in BOLD and ITALICS and ALL CAPS.   I should be so much more generous.  Shanna is about to start a new job, her first in 20 years.  She has a boyfriend, who is a truly lovely man.  Her life has been completely revised since last Passover.  She has shown such strength and resourcefulness and steadiness.  I don’t know that I could have done all that she has done in the last year.  And she has been very gracious and dear to me through infertility.  I should admire her.  But honest to goodness, I just don’t want to be in the furnace blast of her intensity and anxiety, her certainty that she knows what’s best for Daniel, her inquiries, her recommendations, her certainty upon certainty, upon certainty.   And, honest to badness, I may be feeling a little bit of nasty, bitchy pique that she’s landed so completely on her feet, with a job that pays as much as mine, with a prosperous boyfriend in the wings.   I want to erase that, but I need to be honest.  It feeds that ugly self pity I have that the blot on my otherwise blotless life is absolutely permanent.  Shanna will have love and money again.  I will never have what I lost.

Oh wouldn’t it be nice if that was the last time I typed that?  I was a little bit bulimic in high school and early in college.  When I stopped being bulimic, I talked about it freely, almost compulsively.  But there came a time when the bulimic self I was describing didn’t exactly feel like the self I was anymore.  I hope that this particular kind of self-pity will become like bulimia — something I was but am not anymore.

I really don’t like this post.  I think I am okay now about going to Bay City.  I did yoga, I read an entire novel this afternoon (Blame, by Michelle Huneven, exactly fit for my purposes).  Daniel was sweet in ways that mattered a lot.  This post feels ugly and irrelevant.  But I was there this morning.  I think the bad feelings are just sleeping, and I need to lay the foundation for the posts I will write when they wake up.

Okay, wish me luck.