More and less

Today I am thankful for returning to this blog, however sporadically.  There is so much I could write about.  We have just returned from an amazing, amazing vacation, and vacations are always very refreshing for my relationship with Daniel.  For the first time in a long time, I didn’t perceive a chasm between the person I am on vacation and the person I am at home.  It was lovely not to feel the anxiety of wondering how I would incorporate the vacation me into the daily life me once I got back.  Of course there are small behaviors from vacation that I would like to carry over, but I didn’t feel as divided as I usually do.  I am very, very pleased about that.  I am deeply grateful that I am in a position to feel more myself to myself more of the time.  I feel generally like I am growing back into my capacities and optimism.  I’ve signed up for a language class — the kind of thing I never would have done a few months ago.  I would have deemed it impossible.  Now it seems not only possible but logical.

I’ve also started a new meditation practice in the morning, per the recommendations in June’s Yoga Journal magazine (no link, sadly. YJ is pretty protective of its content).  As always when I start some new form of meditation, a lot of anxiety comes up, but I’d rather know about it and face it than not (most of the time).

What brought me back to the blog was the itch of awareness that the anniversary week is coming up.  And the follow-on awareness that some of my anxiety is tied to that — this memory that comes to my body and psyche before it comes to my consciousness.  Yesterday, Daniel and I were talking and he was reflecting on some excellent and much longed-for developments that have happened in his professional life — a very big improvement that he’s been waiting for and fighting for for a decade.  And as he was sharing his happiness with me, I found myself feeling resentful and withdrawing.  I was upset that he’s getting what he has so longed for, that his life is approaching the possible perfection (that is the perfection that is possible in a life — the closest realization of the ideal that an imperfect world permits) while I feel mine never will.  There will always be this absence, this hole.

Later, during yoga class (restoratives — always a place where stuff will come up), I felt the purest and most intense sadness I’ve felt yet. Thankfully, it was very short, but it was unadulterated.  It wasn’t mixed with envy at what other women have, or resentment at Daniel, or unforgiveness, or comparisons.  It was just a deep sadness, and deep longing.  I was so sad that my second baby wasn’t here for all this good stuff.  I had wanted her to be born because I knew we would get to this good stuff — Daniel never had that faith.  Of course, one could argue, with the wisdom gained from several Star Trek episodes, that there’s no universe in which both this good stuff and that second baby exist simultaneously.  Changing one thing changes everything else.  But at that moment, I just missed that baby so damn much.  I just missed her.

So, in most ways, almost two years out, the pain of what didn’t happen, the pain of non-gain-that-feels-like-loss is much less, and the joy and fullness and depth of appreciation and human experience from what I have learned from this experience is huge.  But in other blessedly infrequent ways, it hurts even more. I am sad not only for what I am missing (and Daniel and Milo, too).  I am so very sad for what that baby who never was is missing.

(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.

 

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.