……and, an homage to basics

During the eight years since my final failed fertility treatment, there are a lot of key life things within the depicted realm of being childless I HAVEN’T done if I’m to be quite honest.  

Now, I’m thankful we’re living in a time where involuntarily childless lives are being projected out in the world at ALL in any form.  

That said.  

Travel, entrepreneurship, an advanced degree or solidifying a new career have all been entirely out of reach.  Often times, so was even going to the grocery store.

Both deep and reverberant is my appreciation for where I live, but yet, I haven’t been able to move on to say, a cozy, romantic cabin in the woods.  Or a home of any kind that is NOT the one I bought to raise my children in.  

And with my husband in the restaurant business, I can assure you there are no weekends spent cuddling, walking arm in arm at the market and baking poppyseed muffins together.  Probably no one else does this either, but it felt good to write that for some reason.  Especially the poppyseed muffin part.  

Up until this point, the trumpeted “freedom” that is supposedly part of this life has only served as a cruel myth needing to be constantly batted out of my line of vision.

Heck, I’m only now formally (and gratefully, AND excitedly!!) embarking on “my next life”, or as I’ve only recently stopped calling it, “my new life I didn’t ask for”.  This is all due to multiple inhibitors, many of them stemming from infertility.  The protracted fallout from trauma is real.

I also don’t have any grand outdoor adventures on my resume and will assuredly not be the first official childless person in space (come on now, we all know that one’s coming).  Being that I’m still sporting immature autonomic nerve cells from a years long nervous system disorder, a spaceship is the last place I should be.  But I’ve digressed.

What I HAVE done is stuck to the basics.  

I’ve always been instinctively drawn to the basics, an odd character angle perhaps for someone who is also quite idealistic and outside of the box by nature.  In my youth, I’d seek help from my flute teacher even when I’d have to perform “simple” pieces; in my “past” adulthood life, I’d let my students know I practiced from the same tone development book I had them working in.  More recently, having had to backtrack a bit due to scoliosis related issues, I’ve been relishing gentle and beginner’s yoga classes.  

I refer to the eight years between the official losses of my children, parenthood and grandparenthood and the ignition of my “next life” as my “interim life”.  And for all I haven’t been able to do, my interim life has been rife with basics.

It has included using my voice and name on behalf of our community whenever I could, both on media outlets (thanks to cnbc trailblazers who came before me) and over at my first and now sister blog, Infertility Honesty.

It has necessitated the often fumbling practice of being better aware, inclusive of and compassionate towards all of my emotions and states of being.

Like the rest of you, I’ve had to relearn myself and the world. I’ve had to seek and study new subjects that have helped me to understand my experiences and appreciate them – and thus myself – more fully.  

Life has forced an intense, ongoing look at what is healthy versus what is toxic for me in relationships, and I’m attempting to renovate where necessary.

And, when circumstances have allowed, I’ve invested in that which lends a hand to my overall sustenance – be it writing, gardening, yoga and its related practices – or anything else that works.

When asked how he copes Michael J Fox once said (as I looked on in awe), “I don’t take things as any worse OR AS ANY BETTER than they really are”.  “Yes”, I thought.  “That’s exactly it.  That could very well be the ultimate definition of sanity.”  Either way, for me this basic concept has been a simultaneous rough road and ticket to wholeness – my afterward honesty.