A morning postscript

(Whenever I say, “posting will be light” something happens and I start posting compulsively).

Last night Daniel and I quarreled a bit about what had happened.  He says he’s troubled that I’m not “over it.”  Our emotional lives and rules are very different.

Sometime during the night, I realized the only way I can deal with the pregnancies and fertility of other people that make me sad (and it’s not all pregnancies and fertility, only a handful) is with abundant openness and love.

And this morning I woke up feeling physically worn out, like I’d been struggling all night, and I felt compelled to come here and write.

It feels strange to have done so much work and feel like I’m in a mostly different place, yet still be writing things I could have written a year ago.  I am sympathetic to Daniel’s wish that I be “over it” and his fear that I never will be.  I am 97.5 percent over it, which is really good.  But that 2.5 percent remainder is asserting itself really strongly right now.

Last night I dreamed I was going to marry a warm, somewhat older, very masculine man who was in the process of transitioning to be a woman.  I’m going to read that as a wish for someone who understands me completely.  Hell, even I don’t understand me completely!

Vows of silence

I am vexed with Daniel.  Very vexed.  I would say “unspeakably” vexed, but I’m going to speak about it right now.

Tonight was the end of session performance at Milo’s summer camp.  As we were watching the children move shyly and clumsily across the stage, Daniel whispered to me, “At times like this, I think it would have been really fun to have a little girl.”  I thought, “yeah, me too,” but didn’t give a visible response.  Daniel was already annoying me a bit.  He’s just come back from Bay City to see his mother, briefly, and he seemed jangled and flustered but wouldn’t admit it.

But this is not what vexed me.  I found it mildly sweet, even.

What hit me like tinfoil on a filling was when, a few minutes later, he demanded with the combination of pique and imperiousness that so often deploys: “Well, aren’t you going to say anything?”

I know what Daniel meant.  He wanted me to share a sweet moment with a zest of regret.  He wanted to show that his heart felt a tiny splinter, too.  And that is nice.  But he also wants to be in complete control of this conversation.  He wants to have his soul’s little sigh, his mensch-like admission, and be warmly rewarded for it by me.  I understand this.  I have the same yearning: I want to feel and be rewarded for the rightness and wonderfulness and exceptional quality of my feeling.

The rub is, Daniel doesn’t want to hear what I have to say about this.  What I have to say about this is, the thought of adoption flits around my mind like a fly in a closed room.  It’s sometimes dormant, but not reliably so.  Or it’s like the hum of the refrigerator compressor, sometimes loud, sometimes soft, always faintly there (is anyone counting how often I use that metaphor?  This is at least the third instance).  And being around families who have adopted children (there appear to be several at this camp) makes this hum all the louder.   I also find occasions to think of miracle pregnancies several times a month.  This is just the background noise in my head.  It’s not a conscious yearning, it doesn’t feel painful.  It’s just there.

Perhaps it’s a little painful: I studiously avoided a woman tonight who I happen to know is pregnant via sperm donor.  On vacation, we will visit a friend of Daniel’s, who is about his age, who has a new baby at home (3rd wife, 6th child), and I am simply dreading it.

Anyway, after ruminating a bit, I said, “You don’t want to hear what I have to say.”  Then I said, “Here’s what I have to say: If you find it unbearable, we can always talk about adoption.”  Which pissed him off.  How dare I?  How dare I 1) open this up again; 2) suggest that his feelings can lead to a cascade of consequences for me and for him; 3) disrupt his feeling of being the sympathetic good guy who can say something hard.  He grumbled that now he feels like he can’t say anything about this ever.

I would like to have a marriage in which we don’t feel silenced about things.  But I feel very silenced about this.  I would like to talk to Daniel about the past year.  I would like to say, “You know, a few weeks ago it was one year since the last treatment failed, and I have thought a lot about how this year has been,” and have him praise me for being so strong and good and thoughtful and relentless forward moving and resilient (oh yes, I am relentless about resilience).  But we aren’t able to have that conversation.  Because I’m not supposed to notice it’s been a year.  Or have needed to make an effort to overcome anything.  I am supposed to act more or less like nothing significant happened (that’s kind of funny because it’s true: the significant thing didn’t happen; in some deep and painful way, nothing happened).  Daniel can’t bear these things, so I can’t say them.

Daniel can say things — I truly didn’t mind when he made his first comment.  I minded when he demanded the right response immediately.  I feel that he’s in no position to demand the right response when he is not forthcoming with one himself.  That’s not generous but it’s true.  It would have been fine if he hadn’t been so affronted.  I’m sure his vexation had to do with the weather, the trip to Bay City, the unpleasant effect his family reliably has on him, and his understandable desire to be rewarded for bravery in broaching a difficult subject.  Perhaps he needs his own blog to work these things out, with wonderful readers and commenters like I have!

Now, some 3 hours later, Daniel seems fine, and I am pissy and defensive.  I am reminded of this quote: “Resentment is like taking poison and hoping the other person dies,” which is inconsistently attributed across the web (St. Augustine?  Really?  The same site also claims that the Talmud is the source for “Living well is the best revenge.”  Again, really?).

I do feel better for having written this.  If I take enough deep breaths and finish my beer, I’ll perhaps achieve equanimity.  I am so glad I have this space to come to.

Poem for Wednesday

Today I am thankful that this paragraph doesn’t end the way I thought it would.  I thought I would say “Today I am thankful that my inability to pull myself together at work doesn’t have terrible consequences — yet.”  I am still struggling under the weight of a complicated and high pressure work project, and finding new frontiers in avoidance behavior.  For example, after a disappointing meeting yesterday, I spent 30 minutes researching the Clarisonic facial brush.  Usually my avoidance behavior focuses on finding the perfect pair of black flats, but this week, the manifestation is all about adventures in aggressive skin care.   (I was absolutely compulsive about the Clarisonic.  Then I read this and gave it up.)  I also left work early today to get my hair cut and colored.  But tonight when I meant to sit down and write a blog post, I turned to my work email first, and one thing led to another and I got more than an hour of work done.  I feel much calmer, and much more capable of writing the 1000 words I need to write tomorrow for this project.

I have posted some of my old favorite Poems on the Underground before.   Here are two currently on display.  I adore the second one.

We’re going on vacation next week, so posting will be light or non-existent through Sunday, and then the blog will be napping till August 10th or so.

In which I repent

Today I am thankful that I am re-reading Mating, by Norman Rush.  What a superb book.  I read it when I was 23 and adored it.  I can only imagine how much more I will love it now.   I could devote the rest of the blog to wonderful passages:

One difference between women and men is that women really want paradise. Men say they do, but what they mean by it is absolute security, which they can obtain only through utter domination of the near and dear and the environment as far as the eye can see, how else? Most men.

I have been agitated all day waiting to get to the computer so I could write my recantation of certain lines in yesterday’s post.  I was being a brat.  God doesn’t need to explain to me, any more than He needs to explain why I was lucky enough to be born in this country, to people who loved me and were ready to be my parents, in a time when women could have jobs and money and education, in a body that so far is fantastically healthy and strong and satisfying to live in, etc.  There’s a point in the Catholic service in which the priest says to God, “Do not consider what we truly deserve, but…”  I was deeply wrong and ungrateful, even to the point of wickedness.  So I apologize, to God, mainly (does He read my blog?) for that particular bit of eschatalogical foot-stomping.  That was really uncalled for.

I woke up, almost, with that particular thought.  Perhaps God touched me in the night.  I don’t even mean that sarcastically. I am entirely open to that idea.  What I would like from God is a sense that it really will all be okay, that there is not some other, greater loss that is related to this waiting for me in the future.  There doesn’t have to be great benefit connected to this waiting for me in the future, some amazing thing that wouldn’t have been possible if I’d had all my children.  But just no compounding of the loss. I would like God to say to me, “I am really sorry this sad thing happened to you” — not sorry in the sense that He caused it, but sorry in the way a beloved friend might say it.  I want to feel that God knows, and he feels sad on my behalf.

I’m still trying to set the terms of the debate.  I’m still trying to dictate to God.  I drive past a Baptist church on the way to take Milo to school, and the messages on the marquee often make me smile.  The last one I remember is: “Many people want to speak to God — as an advisor.”  Indeed.

Having tasted a small and manageable loss, I should be clarified and grateful.

Maybe I’m scared to pray because I’m scared to tell God how sad and sorry I still am.  I’m scared to BE how sad and sorry I still am, sometimes, for that matter.  I’m certainly scared now to do it in synagogue all over again, although that’s very strange because I certainly felt free to do it before.  I sometimes wear a big floppy hat to synagogue (in our synagogue married women usually wear hats or scarves or some kind of head covering), and if do and I put the prayerbook right up to my face, I’m sufficiently disguised.  I also sit in the front, without people on either side, so I’m fairly hidden.  It’s an Orthodox synagogue, so Daniel, blessedly, sits elsewhere and Milo is usually with him.

I wonder if it’s because I have moved on in ways I can see and appreciate in the other realms of my life.  I am doing new and cool and exhausting and important things at work.  I see the improvement in yoga, in cooking, in buying and wearing clothes.  I see my life with Daniel going in some good directions.  But I don’t see any change in synagogue.  There, I haven’t moved on.  Maybe I should try.  Maybe I should focus on the prayers of thanks rather than petition.  Maybe I should stop taking all the references to bearing fruit so literally.

Updated: while I was mowing the lawn (I’m having one of those days in which physical exhaustion is a compelling drug.  I want to see how far I can push myself) while mosquitoes feasted on me, it occurred to me that there’s also some kind of shame thing going on here.  I don’t know what I mean by this, but I feel in some way ashamed before God. I feel ashamed that I was inadequate to pull this off.  I don’t notice that I feel ashamed in front of people.  In front of people I can point to all the things we did, all the obstacles I had to overcome just to get that far.  I can get defensive and haughty about people’s questions, or just shrug them off — “yes, it is a pity isn’t it?”  But in prayer, and before God, somehow I am feeling like I’ve failed.  Like I’m sorry to God, like he gave me all this stuff, and I didn’t do what I was supposed to do with it.  Like I failed Him.  If sweet Belette is reading this, she’s likely to say, “Um, Dorothea, for ‘Him’ read ‘your own dear self’ — yes you do have a big ego if you’re making yourself into God to deal with your issues.”  There was a good that I could have done, except I couldn’t in fact do it, if that makes sense.  I couldn’t convince Daniel, I couldn’t overcome enough obstacles, I couldn’t muster enough faith to in turn muster enough cash.  I didn’t leap ardently enough at the miracle.

My post lawn-mowing beer is clouding my thoughts just enough that I’m going to stop typing now.

In which I am strong enough to be sad again

So, today I got sad again.  I was digging through the shelves to find books for a friend of a friend who is converting.  I came to a book on Jewish prayer, and immediately felt both drawn to it and viscerally averse to it, scared of it, unwilling to engage with it.

I removed it from one inaccessible shelf, and put it on one of “my” shelves, saying I would read it later.  But I was still scared, so I just faced it and sat right down and read a chapter on my favorite prayer in the service.  Readers, I am very proud of myself.  I can hardly remember what I read, but I am very proud that I decided to open up and face the thing and cry while I was doing it.

Why did I cry? I cried because I feel like having only one child excludes me from important parts of communal Judaism.  My feeling is a fact, but it doesn’t correspond with actual facts.  I am not excluded from anything.  Still, I feel like less of a Jew, like I’m not doing my share.  Saturdays, Sabbaths, are still the days when the demons of infertility are most present, and not coincidentally, it’s the one day in which I am not frantically busy and in constant motion.  Today we didn’t even go to synagogue, so I didn’t have that useful distraction — people who know organized religion know it can be a distraction from the divine and ultimate as much as it can be a conduit for it.

I talked to Daniel about it, with some trepidation, because he believes the statute of limitations for sadness is up, has been up for about 364 days.  He also believes, although he doesn’t say, that I am spiritually lazy because I don’t engage with Judaism intellectually.  I go to synagogue, but not to The Books.  I follow some obscure customs, but I don’t learn (in Jewish culture, learning is a non-transitive verb.  The what is assumed: Talmud, Torah, Commentary.  “What’s Jacob doing?” “He’s learning.”  “Oh, who’s he learning with?” “With David and Jonathan and Adina.”)  He is ferociously against the Judaism that’s all about the children.  So he was not sympathetic, but he made an effort.

Me, I was heroic, if I do say so myself.  I told him I was sad, and that it may be irrational, but that it’s also the starting point, not the ending point. My reaction against the books, my feeling of being unsafe and unsettled is something I need to get into and think about and talk about.  I was, dear readers, quite brave to have this conversation.  Daniel gets very thunderous sometimes about Judaism and right behavior, and prickly about my sadness in any case, but especially This Sadness.  Things have been going very well for us this past week, and I was clearly upsetting the applecart.

I am scared of prayer. I prayed so intently for so long, even before we officially tried to conceive another child.  I prayed for Daniel’s heart to change.  I prayed for relief during some really rough times we had.  I prayed, probably incorrectly, but with great intensity.  I am scared to be intense again.  I am scared to beseech again and be told “no” again (although I have had some very nice, small but essential “yes”s of late).  I am scared of being so vulnerable before God, I really am.   I have been vulnerable before and was left to sort it out with earthly, rather than heavenly, resources.  (Some would say there was a heavenly hand behind the marshalling of those earthly resources.  Sister, that makes you and my other beloved commenters officially a chorus of angels.)  I don’t want to pray intensely and seriously and be reminded of how very little I understand about God, faith, providence, intervention, and theodicy.  I am at a permanent disadvantage with God, and I don’t like it.  I want to know the terms of the exchange, and know they are in my favor.

I want God to make the first move, dammit.  A wise teacher might say, “How is He going to talk to you, if you aren’t talking to Him?”  And petulant me would say, “That’s His problem.  He has a way of making Himself known as He chooses.”  I want Him to tell me 1) why my other child never came to be; 2) for what good; 3) how He’s going to make it come out beautifully in the end.  I can only stay out of compulsive comparisons, of the pursuit of “as if” for so long.  Each time is longer, but I find myself back here eventually.

Another thing about Jewish books and Jewish teachers: they’re all so very certain. With the exception of the sweet-but-not-very-intellectual Rabbi Kushner (yes, the guy who wrote, “When Bad Things Happen to Good People”) they aren’t really into the whole feeling business.  I need a book for the struggling, not the people who want to get it right, or be confirmed in their certainty.  When I ask Daniel about this, he gives me a lecture on the perils of customization, on how I always reject things if they aren’t precisely what I’m looking for, how I don’t give things a chance.  Is that helpful?  Who thinks that’s helpful?  (Daniel and I are good in a crisis, unless the crisis is happening to our spouse.)

No good ending, just the realization that this is another realm.  This is the project, perhaps, for the second year.

Poem for Wednesday

Today, I am thankful for this poem.  I am not entirely sure I understand it.  I almost skipped it for something less opaque.  I searched the poetry foundation website for poems about exhaustion and poems about work.  This came up under poems about work.  Obviously it’s about infertility — who knew Yeats was so prescient?

To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing

By William Butler Yeats

Now all the truth is out,

Be secret and take defeat

From any brazen throat,

For how can you compete,

Being honor bred, with one

Who were it proved he lies

Were neither shamed in his own

Nor in his neighbors’ eyes;

Bred to a harder thing

Than Triumph, turn away

And like a laughing string

Whereon mad fingers play

Amid a place of stone,

Be secret and exult,

Because of all things known

That is most difficult.

Source: Poetry (May 1914).

(A bit of) the Meaning of Life

Today I am thankful that I have discovered budokon, and that I spent several hours yesterday with a dear friend, both of which have inspired this post.

Since turning 40 and coming to the end of my childbearing years (or, understanding that I came to the end of childbearing a good while ago without knowing it),  I have experienced a fear of the future that was previously entirely foreign to me.  I spent my first 40 years of life sure that great things were ahead.  But now, I sometimes fear that there is nothing amazing ahead.  There is no change that will be a tremendous change for the better.  I’ve hit all my life’s marks, and now I’m just holding the line as long as I can before the inevitable losses pile up — losing people, losing energy, losing vitality, losing ability.  I don’t feel this way all the time, but I do feel it occasionally.  I tell myself it’s a failure of imagination.  I need an after-40 mentor, someone to tell me and show me the great things ahead.  Culture is little help here.  It tells women: “You get an education, you get a job, you get married, you get kids….” and then there’s a long lag till “you get grandkids.”  What we are told to look forward to is re-doing the kitchen, and finally upgrading the bathroom with a great Japanese soaking tub.  Maybe we’ll become great cooks.  Or perfect our backhand.  But society doesn’t know what to do with us, unless we are (re)producing or consuming.

I was in one of these moods yesterday when my dear friend came over, and I think I may have freaked her out by it.

But today I see it differently, and maybe I can capture it and remember it against the next time.  I had thought that all those things I listed above, the big milestones, were more important than the quiet, daily effort to love, tend, appreciate, and enjoy.  Nobody throws you a party and expects you to spend heaps of money on a dress because you really, truly did stop to smell the roses on your way to work.  Or you were kind, or spent 15 minutes scouring the sidewalk on your way to work because a woman lost an earring and you decided you were going to help find it, and then you found it when you stepped on it, and she was so happy she almost cried.  But that is what is important in my life now.  It seems quiet and unnoticed, but in the grand scheme of things, everything in my life is quiet and unnoticed.  My getting married made a big difference to me, but not to the woman who lost the earring — she cared only that I found her earring.

I have always been very, very externally oriented.  The tasks of the next decades, though, are internally oriented.  I need to learn to live well in the life I have built. I need to say yes to this thing, and not just to the next things (there is connection here to my shopping buzz, to always wanting the next, and ignoring the previous).  Oh this is hard, though.  I want someone else’s applause for me, not just my own.  I want people to tell me I’m doing it right.  I want to know that this is the good path or right path or what I am supposed to be doing.  But the tasks of these decades are to put that behind me.  I can’t borrow meaning from society.  I am in the business of making my own meaning from my own life.  (And then remembering that I am in that business, and if things seem meaningless, then I need to work harder.)

And the task of these decades is to be best supporting actress, not best actress.  I have an enormous ego.  I like to be the protagonist of the story.  In this way, I am like a child.  I was telling my friend yesterday that all the big events I see in my future will happen to other women (my niece, my daughter-in-law).  Their weddings, their babies.  (As if weddings and births are the only big events — I know that’s wrong, but that’s where my head is.)  I’ll be in the background.  So my task is to help the women (and men, too) in the foreground. My task is to teach them and take care of them and help them while they are there.  I need to be to them the mentor I am looking for for myself — the one who says, “Oh, it’s great after 40.  There is so much to do and learn, and no one tells you how great it truly is, but it’s just great.”

And of course, another task is to master budokon.  I took my first class today, and I am completely in love.  It’s a mix of yoga and martial arts, and it is exactly what I need in my life.  I am by nature very competitive and very aggressive, but I find it very hard and unsafe to express those aspects of myself — I’ve tried to suppress them for almost 20 years (maybe longer, actually.  Maybe since I was 11 and learned that being aggressively smart was socially disastrous for a girl where and when I grew up).  Budokon may be a safe place to experiment with my aggression.  Right now, my aggression tends to seep into my marriage in weird ways.  Maybe if I can deal with it, play with it, learn more about it in budokon, I can learn how to address it with Daniel.  I don’t want to get rid of it — I can’t (no one can).  I do want to face it and figure it out and have a place for it to run around some more.  Yoga is great for me in 1000 ways, it teaches me so much, but it lacks a charge of interactivity and force.  It’s too peaceful, in some ways.  I need something that matches the tumult that’s still in me, rather than trying to breathe it away.

I like this place.

Shopping to happiness

Today I am thankful that I took Milo and my nephew (technically Daniel’s nephew — his sister’s son), Jacob, to dinner at the local diner.  We had a lot of fun, and I haven’t had much fun or been much fun for several days.

I made a list of posts to write for this blogging anniversary week and “talk about June credit card spending binge” is next on the list.  I may have been trying to shop to happiness.  It may have been motivated by wanting to distract myself from this anniversary of unhappiness (but also courage, integrity, honesty, creativity, determination, and wit — I can’t overlook those).  It was certainly motivated by being fantastically stressed at work.

Here are the ingredients: 1) Ramit Sethi’s constant exhortations that people have a limited capacity for concentration and willpower (and therefore we should all automate our savings so that we don’t have to use concentration and willpower to save — it just happens.  I do that, but I also used this to justify too much spending); 2) This article in the New Republic online, which says essentially the same thing: “Resisting temptation, the researchers found, seemed to have “produced a ‘psychic cost.’”” (but puts it in a very serious context of approaches to reducing poverty) ; 3) the feeling that I’d been doing quite well with money; 4) my difficulties in buckling down and concentrating enough, and working hard enough, to make progress on this enormous project.

I read the New Republic article and thought, “I have been putting my willpower energy into constraining my spending, and resisting consumer temptations.  I need to shift it, to driving work performance, and letting the spending go for a while.”  It seemed like a win all around: buy more stuff, and be more productive at work.  And, I think, I was medicating in advance.  I was buying things that I couldn’t have bought if I’d had another baby.  (I’ve written about this before.)  I was distracting myself.

So now I have all that stuff.  I have a new dress (sold out, so no photo), that Daniel adores.  I have a crazy plastic tortoiseshell necklace that can best be described as “gansta prep” (all the young women at my office were shocked when I coined that phrase.  They can’t tell if I’m really a grown up or not.  I certainly don’t act like the other senior women in my office.  That is probably not a good thing for me, career-wise).  I have new sandals to wear on vacation.  I have a new scarf (sold out, but very similar to this one).  And they were all on sale, and nothing cost more than $50, but if you do that four times, it’s still close to $200.

And I want more.  I want this, for example.  I want more shoes.  I want more professional clothes for work (so I can at least dress more like a senior woman at work — who is younger than me chronologically but far ahead of me in career terms — she always looks completely professional).  I want lots of things.  There’s always the next thing to buy.  There’s always the next better thing, better than the thing you just got, better than anything you have.  And once you get it, it becomes less interesting than the next next thing.

Sal at Already Pretty talked about this in a recent post.  Notice that both she and I declare in our posts that even as we splurge, we are being very responsible.  We save!  It was on sale!  We express our ambivalence about spending even as we talk about overspending.  I can blog about all kinds of private things about my marriage and family, but I can’t bear to have you think of me as financially out of control, as a bad spender.  She’s out of her spiral.  I’m not sure I’m out of mine.

 

Poem for Wednesday

I had such grand plans for a week of reflection, introspection, emotional and writerly self care.  But life, specifically work life, and some acute (but temporary) unpleasantness right at the moment at home, has interfered.  I’m sure I will get to those reflections, or if not those, others, another time.

I’ve been thinking about Susannah McCorkle, and this song, for days.  I’ve never heard anyone perform it more beautifully, and it captures how I feel (at least right now) about the last year.

Anniversary week — post 1

Today I am thankful for this blog.

Today I have been conducting an experiment: if I stay in motion the entire day, will I escape the shadow of sadness and regret and “I still cannot believe this happened?” that I see out of the corner of my eye?  So far…yes, I think.   I am extraordinarily good at staying in motion.

Here is what I remember from a year ago.  (Actually a year and a day ago.  I started blogging on July 11, but the end of fertility treatments came on July 9, not the 10th.  I can’t quite trust either my memory or WordPress’s autodating feature):  I wore a green shirt, because green symbolizes hope and new beginnings.  I wore a necklace that Daniel had given me that he said (incorrectly, I see now) was a Roman symbol of motherhood.  (Actually, it’s an amulet given to Roman boys to protect them from evil spirits.  Maybe the amulet recognized a prospective sibling as a threat.  Damn — I should have left it at home.) I was standing in line waiting to order a burrito from a storefront, and my cellphone rang.  The nurse said the test was negative.  Then she said, “I understand you’re taking a break for a while.”   I said, “No, forever.  Okay.  Thanks. Goodbye.”

I ordered the burrito.  I went back to my office and ate it.  I read an email from a consultant I was working with.  I had sent her an email asking for guidance in making sure I was working well with a team on a particular project, since I was not a natural collaborator.

She replied: “I think you are a collaborator and don’t know it…”

Dear readers, those ten words made me feel like the world would not fall down around me.  I read that anodyne sentence, and felt like, even though a dream had been entirely obliterated, I could go on.  I was grasping at straws, and that was a fine straw.

I bought two skirts at a consignment store on the way home.  One was a splurge, and I thought, “Well, yes, it’s called for.”  (It’s this skirt.)  I went home and made Shabbat dinner for Daniel, Milo, and our nephew, Jacob, who was staying with us.  I remember that I held myself together, largely because I had to.  I have no memory of telling Daniel, or what he said.  I don’t even recall whether I cried or not.   So much crying had happened before, and so much would happen afterwards.

My posts from July 2010 read to me as if I’m writing not to understand my own feelings or work through them, but to make them intellectual and charming and fast-driving — too fast to really feel anything.  I was writing as if it was painful, but not entirely real.  I kept looking for the escape hatch.  In college essays,  I would write two pages delving into some point, only to realize it was wrong, and then I would go back to the top of that section and say, “The incautious reader may believe that….”  and at the end of that section, I would say “But in fact, a more careful reading reveals….”  That’s what I was doing.  I was writing what I hoped would be a false argument, just waiting for the miracle that would prove me wrong.  That’s why that writing now sounds kind of tinny to me, with so many pat conclusions.  I wasn’t writing for the long haul.  I was writing to be wrong.

Even now, I do hope for a miracle, but I’m not crushed when it doesn’t happen.  Based on my twins dream, a few twinges, and a completely inexplicable and unprecedented loss of interest in alcohol (I LOVE alcohol, I love drinking), I even thought last week that I might be pregnant — despite the fact that is biologically impossible (not just because we failed previously, there are other factors at work).  I am definitively not.

I’ve been in this chair for an hour, and no bad feelings have caught me.  They may later.