Hey everyone, remember when my OBGYN office used to be like my own personal "Cheers"? When I would fill up this blog's pages with plucky anecdotes about how I was on a first name basis with all the receptionists, how I would kiki with the lady who drew my blood on a weekly basis, and how and how they embroidered my name into a personalized pair of stirrup covers (ok, fine, the last one isn't true)? Well, for the last month I've been doing that thing where I transfer "make OBGYN appointment" from week to week in my planner without ever actually checking it off. 

Look, it's not that i'm afraid of coming face to face with the fact that my  gynecological VIP status has expired  (what do you MEAN "last name"?! It's me! Becca!! Remember? Life hands her a wonky uterus and she makes lemonade?), but there is certainly something causing a great deal of resistance to walking through those doors again. I'm sure there is some level of low-grade PTSD associated with the place where so many life-altering moments occurred, but that's not all of it. And sure, there's the fact that I'll find myself once again in a waiting room full of women comfortably resting hands on successfully swelling pregnant bellies, but I suppose I can handle that as well at this point. I think this resistance falls most closely in line with my current desire to revolt against reproductive convention. There are certain questions I don't want to have to answer, other questions I don't know how to answer, and there are answers I don't want to know. And then there are the questions I am most afraid of : the ones that have no answers like : did the surgery work? is my body going to do what it is supposed to do when called up to do so ? Will I have to become a regular here again? and if I take longer than a few more years to decide what's what in that department am I going to be slapped with that ridiculous scarlet A for "Advanced Maternal Age"? 

The truth of the matter is, it's just a darn annual exam, ya know? Get in, perhaps feel awkward for a few seconds, get out. We all know the drill. But for me (and for so many of us), that space is charged with so much more. I can never go back to being the version of me who came in for an exam purely as a formality. Now I have levels that need to be reassessed, I have new uterine architecture to be surveyed, and I have to come face to face with my obstetric failings in an unemotional, clinical way.  I've separated myself from this experience in many ways, and I guess this is just one of those things that unavoidably closes that distance I've been working to build. There are so many moments in our journeys forward where we need to continue to take steps even when they feel crunchy and unsteady, this is one of those moments. Time to pick up the phone... 

At this time last year all I could think about was babies. They seemed to be taunting me from within strollers, popping out from around corners, and parking themselves next to me in cafes to gloat constantly. Their tiny, smug, powder-scented selves were perpetually pitying me, judging me, and being just generally insensitive to my plight. Somewhere between then and now so much has shifted. Babies are no longer jerks to me I'm happy to report (if you're a baby reading this, thank you, much appreciated), but the shift runs much deeper too.

The other day I was walking down the street with Jeremy and I heard myself saying, "I don't think I'm going to have a baby until my late 30s". I think this statement seemed like a joke to him after the pregnancy mania that he has been forced to co-endure over the last year, but as I heard myself speak that future projection, I realized, I don't know if that's 100% true, but I also truly don't have a pregnancy plan at the moment. I always thought that we would "get right back on the horse" (that phrase feels unattractive for this scenario, but you know what I mean), but I feel like whether it was entirely conscious decision or not, somewhere along the way I decided to take a little time out from baby fever. 

Miscarriage has a way of consuming you. The fact that it has effects on your body, your mind, your spirit, sometimes tricks you into thinking that it is everything. For a long time it felt like everything. For ages the only key out of the maze of pain, of surgery, of blood level monitoring, of longing seemed to be having a solid plan regarding when we could try again. "When will we be able to try again?" I asked my doctor every step of the way and after each new medical intervention. "When will you be able to try again?" asked every person ever (regardless of whether it was any of their business) as if that was the universally accepted next logical step. I think for many people that is the next logical step, and that's wonderful if it is, but for whatever reason, I have needed the time to take stock of my life post-apocalyptically.  

Miscarriage creates a tidal wave that I at first thought I would ride directly back into Babytown, but for me it has turned out to be different. It is taking me longer than I expected to repair my relationship with the babies of the world, but not necessarily in a bad way. My distance from breeder-mania gave me the time to look at the things I want in my life outside of a successful pregnancy. My miscarriage was a radical pause in the momentum I had been swept along with for my whole life. What resulted was a period of time which I am currently in where I have been able to start to take stock of what is what. I see this time as a gift even though it came along with the worst heartbreak I've ever felt. 

I still cry when I see anyone give birth in a movie or at that recent commercial where little kids have to identify their mommies with a blindfold on (that one snuck up on me, but sob I sure did, i'm such a sucker), so I know in my heart that I still very much ache to be a mother, but now I know I want it in a much more intentional kind of a way. Was it worth the excruciating pain and resulting falling-out with the High Counsel of Tiny Babies? Who's to say. And actually, I don't think it matters. It's just like everything in life, we can't put a judgement of "worth it" or "not worth it" on the paths that got us to where we are. We can only look at where we are in the present moment, accept it, and make choices from there. 

I sat down to write my blog yesterday and I was struck with a serious acute febrile affliction known as Spring Fever. It was finally warm, it smelled like sun warmed hyacinth and fresh air, the sky was bright blue, and my head was completely consumed with lust for iced coffees, road trips, sundresses, and blissfully prolonged daylight hours. I crawled out onto my fire escape to soak in and be inspired to write by the glorious weather, but instead I came up short. I tried to look at things from all angles, but I was left feeling unfocused like all my internal stabilizers were on the fritz and crusted over with new-Spring pollen. So today, I opened up my trusty (and blank) blog draft from yesterday and although today the day is gray and rainy and still, I still am feeling lost for words. 

I'm deciding to call a spade a spade here and just acknowledge that sometimes on the Ever Forward journey you take a little detour that trips you up and you don't know how to put it into words. Spring Fever is also very much a disease of transition. I'm staring out my window at a line of trees. Some have burst forth into green buds, and some are still stark and bare like a relic of winter all alien and misplaced in the newly warm air. Right now I'm one of those bare trees. Energy, hard-earned life lessons, and passion pulse within me but it's not clear yet what direction it's heading. This is just one of those weeks where I feel less capable of making sense of this particularly strange season in Ever Forwardland. If you happen to be feeling that way too, lets just give ourselves a pass for now and trust that new life will spring up from the dormant soils oh so very soon, huh?

Please accept this in place of more lengthy heartfelt insights this week : 

This week is one of my very favorite holidays : Passover. All the holidays around this time of year have a distinctly "Ever Forward" vibe -- freedom, redemption, Spring, etc. However at the seder I participated in on Friday, I was particularly struck by a vital part of both the Passover story and my personal Ever Forward Movement alike--the importance of looking back to look forward. 

It is no mystery why I am so drawn to Judaism, theatre, and drama therapy--they all have the common thread of valuing storytelling as a way of healing and making us who we are. They also all use metaphor to help us understand ourselves, our worlds, our sense of wholeness and spirituality. In Judaism, we pass stories from generation to generation lest we forget and become doomed to repeat suffering. Anything physical can be taken from us, but what can never be taken is our sense of community connection, our shared history, our minds, our stories and collective memories. What's more, we don't only tell the stories as they happened to our ancestors, we tell the stories from a personal perspective as if they happened to us personally. This way we give ourselves less distance from the lessons of the narrative (very drama therapeutic!). So, the Exodus out of Egypt story is not just about when my great great great great great great (etc) Uncle Moshe came out of Egypt (kvetching the whole way, I'm sure, if he's truly a relative of mine), it's about moving out of whatever my own personal "Egypt" is. I've been thinking a lot about looking at my history so I can assess the things I am still a slave to and which of those are of my own making. 

I can honestly say that I am no longer enslaved by my reproductive disfunction. It took me a long time to be able to genuinely say that. It doesn't mean that I never think about it, or get stressed about all the unknowns pertaining to that mysterious abyss known as my uterus, but it does mean that it is not controlling me by occupying the majority of my mental and emotional space (possibly because the free-for-all that is my new normal keeps me perpetually on the verge of a mild nervous breakdown which is actually quite consuming of my mental capacities if you can believe that). Even though I have moved into a new phase, I have still been re-visiting the story of the past year and the years that preceded it as a means to taking stock of where I am and where I want to go. 

Up until a certain point, my life moved smoothly(ish) along a set, steady track. My inner insane perfectionist saw to that. I  definitely still find myself enslaved by how life is "supposed to" look or how I always thought things would go for me. In this season of rebirth and regrowth, I am trying to make my peace with the fact that just because my life followed a pretty linear path up until The Great Crashing & Burning, doesn't mean that things have to continue that way in order to be "right". I've been telling myself my own personal history lest I forget, lest I am doomed to repeat the thought patterns that lead me to have such stringent expectations of the way my life was meant to go. My miscarriage was always going to hurt like a B, no way around that, but that pain was intensified by the marked shattering of my oh-so-lofty expectations. In a way, that was one of the gifts that the trauma gave me, it shook me up and forced me to look at the things I want for my life in an intentional way and not just because they were next up on the docket of "To Do's". I still have a ways to go out of this particular enslavement, but seeing the shackles and the way they are restricting me (although scary and jarring to see) seems to be the first step. Buckle up your sandals, y'all!